To Maurice Spronck

            Spadones! They were crouching on slabs of rock, with knees held together, and rubbing the toes of their slippers with silver handled canes. Their saffron colored robes spread out around them, and an odor of cinnamon wafted from their skin. They reclined like this, sweating among the sauna boys, men dressed in scarlet plush who came around the baths with nets full of green playing balls, young people in red tunics with cherry colored belts, high tights, and long hair, and collared runners bearing the palanquins, where matrons with twisted hair and pumiced skin returned the greetings of the passersby.

The top of the sky was warmly blue, curtained by streaks of pink, and melted by degrees at the horizon into a transparent yellow, a very pale turquoise blue, and a delicate and trembling green. There were still criers in the street, offering up their snow water: aqua nivata, nivata! Curly haired Ethiopians sprinkled water all about with tiny pierced goatskins, like the women who pound the arena’s red powder, in the amphitheater.

Now, in the buzzing air, the eunuchs began to dream of the country whence they had come, of burning Syria, and of Iberia in the silver mines. At fifteen, they had run through pastures high and sparse with the sheep and billy goats, churning the milk, and pressing the hard white cheeses through which they ran sprigs of broom shrubs. They had loved little girls in big straw hats. They would watch out for them between the bunches of golden flowers when they were supposed to come around, and carve them whistles of elderwood. Often they carried chickpeas, which they had stolen from the barns. In those days, one would dig a hole with his bare hands and toss in dry leaves and twigs. The little girl would go find a burning ember in the nearest hearth; she would place it in her flat clog, which she shook constantly while running, to keep the coal from going out. Then, sitting gravely across from each other, they would roast their chickpeas on the end of pointy sticks. Or they would play king and queen. They would make a throne by piling up stones, somewhere in the shade. The queen would sit herself down there, as the king went off on an expedition to oversee his sheep. The queen, after listening to the cicadas, would sleep upon her throne. Then, when he had returned, the king would make her a pillow of moss, and lay her gently down upon it.

In the evening, the shadows were growing long, and the sheep were being led back down the trails edged with blackberry bramble. The bats were taking flight from the bushes. From the grass came a rustling of a snake in search off its hole; the cricket sang in the last golden flames of the dying day; the rocks were turning gray and the first chill of the night was shaking the leaves in the trees. A cool wind puffed up the coat and grazed the sheep’s wool; the dog, with its nose in the air, sniffed at the fragrant breeze, and the broom shrubs, swinging their yellow heads, rolled like the waves of the sea. Further down, rabbits scurried into the scrub and darkness piled up around the old oak trees. It was not far to the hut, the mother in the doorway, with a wooden spoon in her hand.

Where were they, Lords of the sky, these Spanish shrubs and the mountain hut, and the loving herd? They had come, the hardened Italiotes, with their heads shaved and their lips closed tight; they had burned the hut and eaten the herd.

They had taken the children in the highlands, near Osca. Along the Cinca the soldiers had marched down and crossed the plain of Sordau to take them to Ilerda. And from Ilerda to Tarraco, through the black mountains of Iakketa and Ilercao. In Tarraco, merchants had them drink a poppy tea, to mutilate them without pain. They had been loaded into ships like livestock and sold in the ports of call in Populonia, Cosa or Alsium. Others had come to Rome, by way of Ostia.

Traders dealing in flesh had purchased them, powdered their feet with chalk, covered their heads in caps of white fleece. Someone had rubbed them with turpentine, epilated their bodies with lamp and tong, curled their hair with irons. Someone had put them on display upon scaffolds, with labels. They had white teeth and black eyes, spoke Latin with throaty accents and high-pitched voices. Their buyers exposed them to gagate smoke, before paying, to see if they would not collapse from epilepsy.

And now, among the sail raisers in the ports, the conservators of silver dish ware, the bathers, the perfumers, the cooks, the trainers, the waiters, the tasters, the cupbearers, the green vested gatekeepers, the muleteers in revealing tunics, the water bearers, the chair slaves, the fan and parasol bearers, all were eunuchs, subdued by pitchfork, whip, or public torture at the Porta Esquilina. Their mistresses made them puff up their cheeks to slap them, and the intendants jabbed their necks with needles.

And unavoidably they went down Vicus Tuscus, where the depraved walk, to purchase fabric and ask after amphorae of nard, sealed with gypsum, from the pigment chemists, who sell hemlock, monkshood, mandrake, and blister beetles. They sang in the atrium, during the first course, bits of the Iliad and Odyssey, and, for dessert, some verses from the Book of Elephantis. They gazed achingly at paintings where Atalanta could be seen with Meleager. Some guests would kiss them as they passed, and this brought them suffering. Despite their fringed laticlaves, their golden rings with stars of iron, their ivory bracelets inlaid with metals, they watched the thick-lipped Libyan men, naked and black, with envy. They played nonchalantly with painted crystal pebbles on tablets of terebinth wood. They scarcely ate the fatty ortolan in moats of peppered egg yolk. Nothing could take their minds off their feeble dejection, not the caprices of their masters, nor those of their mistresses.

Drunk on pink wine, they would run past than the butcher stalls with the bloody, myrtle-garnished sheep, beyond the “popinæ” of roasters who sell fried walnuts and honeyed beets, and the taverns where enchained bottles dangle, toward the central darkness of the vaulted rooms where, amidst the chambers labeled with signs, naked women wander darkly. But the patron of the vaulted stone rooms recognized their saffron colored robes; and the bed straps would remain without mattress, for these men, drunk on pink wine, crouching upon the slabs of rock, rubbing the toes of their slippers with silver handled canes, were madmen—spadones.

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Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was a French symbolist author, remembered for his numerous and varied short stories, literary monographs, newspaper chronicles of fin-de-siècle Paris, and linguistic tracts on medieval slang, much of which sprang from his fabled devotion to archival research. While his work has fallen into relative obscurity, it was hailed in his day by writers as various as Colette, Remy de Gourmont, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and the personal influence of his writing has been noted and explored by a number of modern luminaries, including Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Fleur Jaeggy. Wakefield Press recently published his 1895 work, The Book of Monelle, in a new translation by Kit Schulter.

As a translator, Kit Schluter has brought into English works by Pierre Alferi, Amandine André, Ghérasim Luca, Jaime Saenz, Alice Sant’Anna, and Marcel Schwob, among others. Recent personal writing of his can be found in Boston Review, BOMB, and the forthcoming Incident Codex from Inpatient Press. The two stories presented here figure into his translation of Marcel Schwob’s 1892 collection, The King in the Golden Mask, forthcoming from Wakefield Press.

Never before translated in its entirety, The King in the Golden Mask (French edition pictured above) was Marcel Schwob’s second book of fiction, and offers a full display of his mastery of the short story and the depth of his erudition: twenty-one tales of murder and suicide, royal leprosy and medieval witchcraft, with eunuchs, Libyan embalming women, and Milesian virgins, all set in a variety of historical periods, from the Ice Age to the years of the Plague.

The author in his library, c. 1900.

To Auguste Bréal

CCCI e mille l’an corant

Nella città di Trento Rè Rupert

Volle lo scudo mio esser copert

De l’arme suo Lion d’oro rampant

CRONICA DEL PITTI

I, Bonacorso de Neri de Pitti, son of Bonacorso, gonfaloniere of justice in the commune of Florence, of which the coat of arms was dressed, in the year fourteen-hundred-and-one, by an order of King Rupert, in the city of Trento, with the golden rampant lion, I want to recount for my ennobled descendents what happened to me when I began to roam the land in search of adventure.

In the year MCCCLXXIV, being a young man without money, I ran from Florence on the great highways, with Matteo for companion. For the plague was devastating the city. The sickness was swift, and attacked in the streets. Your eyes would burn and grow red, your throat grew sore; your stomach distended. Then little pockets of irritating water covered your mouth and your tongue. Thirst possessed you. A dry cough would shake the sick for hours. Then your limbs would stiffen at the joints, your skin piebald with swollen red pocks that some have dubbed bubons. And the faces of the dead ended up swollen and white, with bloody contusions and mouths open like horns. The public fountains, almost dried up from the heat, were surrounded by men, hunched over and thin, trying to dunk their heads. Many dove right in, and those ones were pulled out by chain hooks, black with scum and with skulls cracked. The browning corpses littered the middle of the lanes down which stream, in season, the torrents of rain; the smell was intolerable, and the fear was terrible.

But Matteo loved to roll the dice, and we had quite a time right at the exit of the city, and we drank, at the first inn, some mixed wine for our health in mortality. There were merchants there from Genoa and Pavia; and we challenged them with dice cup in hand, and Matteo won twelve ducats. As for me, I invited them to a game of tables, and had the good fortune of walking away with a gain of twenty gold florins, and with these ducats we purchased mules and a load of wool, and Matteo, who had decided to go to Prussia, picked up a provision of saffron.

We roamed the paths from Padua to Verona, we came back to Verona to furnish ourselves more amply with wool, and we traveled to Venice. From there, passing the sea, we went into Sclavonia, and visited the good cities up to the Croatian border. In Buda, I fell sick with fever, and Matteo left me alone at the inn, with twelve ducats, returning to Florence, where certain business was calling him, and where I was supposed to join him again. I lay in a dry and dusty room, on a bag of straw, with no doctor, but a door that opened directly to the drinking room. On the night of Saint Martin, there came a company of fifers and flautists, with some fifteen or sixteen Venetian and Teuton soldiers. After draining many a flask, crushing the pewter mugs and breaking the jugs against the wall, they began to dance to the sound of the fife. They peeked their ugly red mugs through the door, and seeing me laid out on my back, started to pull me into the other room, crying, “You drink, or you sink!” then made a fool of me, and finished by dumping me in the straw in the bag, which they stitched shut around my neck.

I sweated copiously, and this no doubt lowered my temperature, whereas my anger soared. They had tangled up my arms and taken away my basilar, otherwise I would have made a break for it, thorny with straw, amid the soldiers. But I carried on my belt, under my stockings, a short and sheathed blade; I succeeded in slipping my hand to it, and with its help, I broke open the fabric of the sack.

Perhaps the fever was still causing my brain to swell; but the memory of the plague we had left behind in Florence, and which had since spread to Sclavonia, mixed in my mind with a sort of image I had formed of the face of Sulla, dictator of the Latins, of whom the great Cicero speaks. He resembled, the Athenians said, a blackberry powdered with flour. I decided to terrify the Venetian and Teuton gendarmes; and when I found myself in the nook where the innkeeper locked up his provisions and the conserved fruits, I quickly slashed a bag full of cornflour. I rubbed my face with this dust; and once I had taken on a complexion neither yellow nor white, I gave my arm a good scratch with my blade, from which I drew enough blood to unevenly blotch the coating. Then I got back into the sack, and I waited for the drunken reprobates. They came in, laughing and staggering: hardly had they seen my white and bloody face before they started to crash into each other, crying, “The plague! The plague!”

I hadn’t even picked up my weapons, before the inn had emptied out. Feeling recovered, from the sweat these goons had forced out of me, I set out on the road for Florence, to join back up with Matteo.

⁂

I found my companion Matteo wandering through the Florentine countryside, and quite under the weather. He hadn’t dared go into the city because of the plague that continued to rage there. We turned back and made our way, on a quest for wealth, toward the states of Pope Gregory. Heading up toward Avignon, we ran into bands of armed men, carrying lances, pikes, and voulges. For the citizens of Bologna had just risen up against the pope, by request of those of Florence (which we didn’t know). We played joyous games of this and that sort with the people there, as many games of tables as of dice, so well that we won upwards of three-hundred ducats and four-score gold florins.

The city of Bologna was almost entirely devoid of people, and we were received in the bath houses with cries of jubilation. The chambers there are not covered with straw as in many Lombard cities; the filthy beds are not lacking there, although the straps are for the most part broken. Matteo ran into a Florentine girl he knew, Monna Giovanna; as for me, who didn’t think of asking the name of my girl, I was happy with her.

We drank in abundance there; of chewy wine from the region and of bitter beer, and we ate jams and tartlets. Matteo, whom I had told of my adventure, feigning to step out, went down into the kitchens, and came back disguised as a plague victim. The sauna girls ran away on all sides, letting out high pitched squeals, then reassured themselves, and came to touch, still afraid, Matteo’s face. Monna Giovanna did not want to come back with him, and stayed, trembling in a corner, claiming his forehead was warm with fever. Nevertheless, Matteo, drunk, lay his head down among the pots, on the table, which his snores caused to shake, and he looked like one of those colorful wooden faces street performers use on the sidewalk stage.

At last we left Bologna, and after diverse adventures, we came near Avignon, where we learned that the pope was having all the Florentines put in prison, and burning them, them and their books, to avenge their rebellion. But we were alerted too late; for the sergeants of the pope’s marshals surprised us in the night, and threw us in the prison of Avignon.

Before our interrogation, we were examined by a judge and provisionally put in the oubliette, until information, with dry bread and water, as is customary in ecclesiastical justice. I nevertheless succeeded in hiding under my robe our burlap sack, which contained a bit of polenta and some olives.

The floor of the dungeon was swampy; and we had no air, save through a grilled window that opened out to the level of the courtyard’s ground. Our feet had been passed through the holes of very heavy wooden yokes, our hands bound with fairly loose chains, in such a way that our bodies touched from shoulder to knee. The bailiff of the dungeon did us the kindness of telling us that we were under suspicion of poison, for the pope had found out through certain ambassadors that the gonfalonieres of the commune of Florence were entertaining a plot for his death.

We were thus in the blackness of the prison, hearing no noise, not knowing the hour of day or night, in great danger of being burned alive. I remembered then our strategy; and the idea came to us that the papal justice, by fear of our illness, would have us thrown outside. I waited painfully with my polenta, and it was agreed that Matteo would smear his face with it and would blotch his face with blood, while I would cry out to draw in the lackeys. Matteo made up his mask, and the raspy howls began, as if his throat were constricted. I invoked Our Lady, rattling my chains. But the dungeon was deep, the door thick, and it was night. For several hours we pleaded uselessly. I stopped my cries: Matteo, however, continued to moan. I nudged him with my elbow, that he might rest until the morning: his moans only grew louder. I touched him in the darkness: my hands felt nothing but his belly, which seemed swollen to me like a goatskin. And as he cried in a hoarse voice, “A drink! A drink!” until I seemed to be hearing the desperate calls of an unleashed dog pack, the pale disc of the rising daylight fell in from the little window. And then a cold sweat streamed down my limbs; for, under his powdery mask, under the blotches of dried blood, I saw that he was deathly pale, and I recognized the white scabs and the red oozing of the plague of Florence.

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