Les frères ennemis

The Enemy Brothers

Jerome and Jean Tharaud

Post tenebras lux

Messer Guido Moroni, a Paduan banker, came to settle in Geneva in the early years of the sixteenth century. His wife having died in childbirth after bringing a boy into the world, he carried the newborn beyond the city walls and told no one what he had done with the child. A few months later, he married in second nuptials the daughter of a burgher of Fribourg, who gave him another boy. And this time too, as soon as his wife was delivered, he ordered his horse saddled, and, his son warmly rolled in his cloak, he left the city.

One may imagine the despair of the young mother when Messer Guido returned home without bringing back the child. She wept, groaned, overwhelmed her husband with questions and reproaches. The banker, impassive, assured her that his son was in good hands and refused to explain further.

As if having been dispossessed of her son had dried up within her the source of life, the Paduan’s wife bore no more children. Meanwhile the banker made frequent journeys away from Geneva, and when he returned home, he rarely failed to say:

“Barbe, I have seen your son: he is handsome and sturdy. You could not see a finer child.”

With an insatiable curiosity she inquired about the color of his eyes, and whether he resembled a child of Fribourg or of Padua.

“He resembles an angel,” Messer Guido would reply.

But he noticed not without sadness that she never asked about the boy he had had by his first wife.

Often she begged her husband to take her along on one of his journeys; he always refused, alleging the insecurity of the roads, dangerous even for the posts of the king of France.

Now, one morning when Guido Moroni was overseeing the harnessing of his horse, he said to his wife:

“Barbe, you will have a great joy this evening.”

At these words she rejoiced greatly, for she no longer doubted that she was about to see her son, and the whole rest of the day she occupied her thoughts and her hands preparing the child’s room.

Messer Guido returned at nightfall. Two little boys accompanied him. With what a look Barbe Moroni took them both in! Which was her son? They resembled each other and the Paduan, and one might have thought them born of the same woman. She questioned her husband with her eyes, and he merely smiled.

“Thank you,” she said, “for having kept your promise; but, I beg you, which of these fine boys is mine?”

“I am surprised,” replied the banker, “that you have not yet guessed the reasons for my conduct. If I deprived you of your son, it was neither cruelty nor whim, but rather prudence and kindness. Do you know anything sadder than a childhood without caresses? I did not wish that the firstborn of my sons should be ignorant of the sweetness of a mother’s kisses. Therefore, your love, if you please, shall not distinguish between our two children. They are, equally, yours.”

Barbe Moroni stood speechless for several minutes.

“Ah!” she cried at last, “you are barbarous! At his birth, you took my son from me. I bore him in pain, and I did not enjoy him. You announce to me at last that you are going to return him to me! And you push two strangers into my arms and you tell me: ‘Choose!’”

“I am not telling you to choose. I am asking you to love them equally, both of them.”

“My son! Tell me which is my son!”

She had seized her husband by the collar of his cloak and was begging him fiercely.

The banker took her hands and replied, in the tone in which he discussed with the merchants:

“Leave off these cries, my good woman. I have kept more than my word. I had promised to bring you back one child. I am bringing you back two. What are you complaining about?”

For some time, Barbe Moroni hoped that the voice of blood would cry out to her which one was the flesh of her flesh. But nature was mute. In vain she sought a revelation in the words, the eyes, the gestures of the children. One day, she thought she recognized her own gaze in that of Jean-Baptiste; a movement of Ami’s immediately gave her a contrary certainty. That is why the tenderness with which she enveloped the boys was changeable and sudden like her thoughts. She never ceased tormenting the Paduan to make him surrender his secret, but he remained impenetrable. For a time, his affairs declined; he restored them by an excess of labor that compromised his health; Barbe took advantage of this weakness and, sitting down, one evening, at the head of his bed:

“My very good, my very sweet lord, four years have already passed since you presented us our boys. God bless you for the joy you gave me! I cherish them, upon my soul, as much the one as the other, and you will do me this justice that I have always divided between them, in equal halves, the brioche. Will you not finally do me the grace of telling me which, of Jean-Baptiste or of Ami, is my son? I swear to you, by my eternal salvation, that I shall continue not to distinguish between them in my heart.”

Messer Guido fixed upon his wife his clear-sighted gaze.

“Since you never tire,” he told her, “of tormenting me night and day, you are about to be satisfied.”

At that moment the door opened and Jean-Baptiste appeared.

“Here is your son,” said Messer Guido.

She threw herself upon the child, devoured him with kisses. How had she not seen that Jean-Baptiste was her living image? Did he not have her disdains, her silent angers, that native love of prayers, meditations and things of the soul? Ami was the son of the foreigner; he took after the other woman — his violence, his lightness, his taste for rich and brilliant objects, that Italian sensuality that already blazed in his eyes. Jean-Baptiste had all her soul, all her thoughts, all her heart.

In appearance, Barbe Moroni had the same cares for the children; a stranger might have believed that she did not distinguish between them, but the banker felt an infinite difference in the kisses she gave her sons. Ami suffered from no longer being loved; he was a clinging temperament, dominated by the signs of Saturn and Venus; he was like a flower that folds in upon itself when night comes. The instinctive antipathy that divided the two brothers was increased in the one by the pride of being the more loved, in the other by jealousy and disappointment, to such an extent that the Paduan could no longer bear his wife’s injustice.

“You wished to know your child,” he told her, “I made a test. It was not favorable to you. When you begged me so ardently, the other evening, to name your son, we heard footsteps in the corridor and I said to myself: ‘Whichever child comes to open the door, I shall say: This child is yours.’ Now it was Jean-Baptiste who opened the door and I said to you: ‘Here is your son.’ But the real truth, you do not know it.”

Barbe bowed her head and wept. She took to cherishing Ami again with a passion all the more vivid because, in depriving him for a time of her tenderness, she feared she had robbed herself. However, despite the equity of maternal kisses, the children continued to detest each other and, as they grew, their contrary instincts were fortified by precise reasons for hatred.

They lived freely in the streets of a Geneva that was joyous, libertine and warlike. It was the time when the first Heralds of the Reformation were appearing in the city, merry and bold messengers. Charm of all springtimes! Dawn of liberty! Holy liberation of the soul! Spiritual intoxication that mingled in the sons of the Paduan with the first ferments of youth.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR, on sale at the cahiers bookshop:

Jerome and Jean Tharaud — The Feeble Porter: the Scaffolding, the Marvel, on the roads, the Distress, two francs

— The Light: the ship, the magician, Timor, the darkness, one franc

— Dingley, the Illustrious Writer, one franc

— The Legend of the Virgin, in the first Christmas Cahier; five tales: of the monk who wished to see Our Lady; the image; the three roses of Our Lady Saint Mary; of the candle that came to rest on the viol of Pierre de Syglar; of the cleric who prayed to Our Lady for his lust, one franc

Henri Lebeau, Jerome and Jean Tharaud — Monks of Athos, two francs

Jerome and Jean Tharaud — the squireens — a true story; and three announcements of editions from Pelletan, one franc

— Tales of the Virgin, in the second Christmas Cahier, where the thirty reproductions of works are: Renaud struggles with the evil angels; the Virgin with doves — or the Virgin enemy of proud virtue; the three ducats; the Virgin with thieves; the Virgin with birds; the one who made the rose weep; the jongleuse who was in danger of being drowned; the statue of Dionysos, twenty francs