A Surfeit of Mirrors by Henri de Regnier

Author:Henri de Regnier [Regnier, Henri de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Coat Press
Published: 2012-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

The memory of that visit and the petty disappointment it recalled, soon faded from my mind. I relegated the correspondence that had attracted my attention to the beautiful Comtesse de Nailly to the bottom of a drawer. In any case, other subject preoccupied me. It was at that time, in fact, that I undertook, as a consequence of circumstances that it would be tedious to relate, the work that I eventually published under the title Some Obscure Points in the Memoirs of Saint-Simon.

I therefore found it easy to forget Nailly and it pavilion, its Sinologist and its epic librarian. The latter in spite of his promise, did not send me news of his epic, nor of himself, and three years went past thus, until the day when I read the newspaper article about the displacement of the Marquis de Lauturières to the waters at Neyrol-les-Bains, from which I concluded—without, as I have said, watching any further importance to it—that the Marquis would have to be very ill to make the decision to renounce, even temporarily, his habitual seclusion. After making that reflection, I had given the matter no further thought, when, a few days later, I received this bizarre letter:

The Comtesse de Nailly will be happy to receive you in her pavilion. Take the 9-18 a.m. train on Thursday and get off at Taillebois station. A carriage will be waiting for you. Exactitude and discretion.

I recognized Destieux’s handwriting. My first impulse was to shrug my shoulders. By means of this stratagem, the fellow doubtless wanted to inflict on me the reading of a few thousand alexandrines of his Alexandriad, and had found a fine means of getting me to come. It was a bad time. I was working hard and I didn’t want to interrupt myself to listen to his nonsense. On the other hand, as it was the height of summer and I felt rather tired, the prospect of a vacation trip and the idea of seeing once again the winged Victories, the gilded gate, the gardens with the silent waters and the noble architecture of the Château de Nailly was not unattractive, even if I had to pay for the pleasure with the imposition of listening to a lecture. In brief, the thought of the brief excursion seduced me, to the extent that on the way to the Bibliothèque Nationale I stopped at the telegraph office at the Bourse to send Destieux a telegram of acceptance.

Having sent the dispatch, I asked myself certain questions about Destieux’s missive. To begin with, why instruct me to get off at Taillebois station instead of Nailly? Then again, why was he returning to the subject of the forbidden pavilion? It was scarcely probable that Monsieur de Lauturières’ restrictions on that subject had changed. The most plausible hypothesis was that, the Marquis being absent, bored with perishing in his seigneurial solitude, he had thought of me as a means of distraction—which was, all in all, rather flattering.

Anyway, it was too late for me to change my mind, and I would go to Nailly on the twelfth of August.

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