The Coffeepot
Theophile Gautier

Although too few small horror magazines make an effort to present tales in translation, the more general small presses have been issuing such fine collections of weird tales as Wolfgang Hildesheimer's Collected Stories (Ecco Press), Jean Muno's Glove of Passion, Voice of Blood (Owl Creek Press), Merce Rodereda's My Christina and Other Stories (Greywolf), and Ryunosuke Akutagawa's Cogwheels and Other Stories (Mosaic Press, Canada). I can't help but repeat my criticism of the specifically supernatural-oriented small magazines failing to feature similarly important works of other nations. In editing Fantasy Macabre, I've tried to live up to my ideal and feature stories from France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy. One such inclusion was by France's great Romanticist, Theophile Gautier, whose "The Coffeepot" had never been translated into English until Phyllis Ann Karr tackled the job.

Last year a young fellow artist invited the three of us -- Arrigo Cohic, Pedrino Borgnioli, and me -- to spend a few days at his family estate in the heart of Normandy.
The weather, which had beamed with fair promises at our departure, took the notion for a sudden change, and rain made rushing riverbeds of the sunken roads we traveled. We sank to our knees in mud, while thick cushions of slime gathered on the soles of our boots to weigh down our steps. We did not stagger in until an hour after sunset.
Our host, observing our efforts to stifle our yawns and hold our eyes open, had us conducted to our separate chambers immediately after supper.
My chamber was vast. On entering it I felt something like a fever-chill, for it seemed to me that I was entering a new world.
The Four Seasons as Boucher had left them painted above the door, the furniture overburdened with rococo ornamentation in the worst of taste, the heavily sculptured wall panels... all combined to make me feel that I had been transported back to the early eighteenth century of Philippe d'Orleans.
Nothing was out of place. The dressing table with its boxes, combs, and powder puffs might have been used yesterday. Two or three gowns in fabrics that changed color with the changing light, and a fan embroidered with silver spangles, lay strewn on the well-waxed parquet. To my considerable astonishment, a tortoiseshell snuffbox sitting open on the mantle piece was full of snuff, still fresh.
I noticed these only after the servant, leaving his candlestick on the bedside table, had wished me goodnight and departed. Then, I confess, I began to shake like a leaf. Undressing quickly, I lay down, and, to be done with these fears, shut my eyes and turned to the wall without delay.
But I found rest impossible. My eyelids kept snapping open as the bed surged like a wave beneath me, compelling me to roll over and look.
The fire cast its red-orange reflections from the fireplace into the chamber, pricking out the tapestry figures and brightening the age-darkened portraits of knights lapped in iron plate, periwigged counselors, and beautiful ladies with rouged faces, powdered hair, and rose in hand -- our host's ancestors.
All at once the fire made a strange shift. A pale glimmer lit the room, and I saw clearly that what I had taken for painted likenesses were living people. Their eyes moved, giving off a curious twinkle. Their lips parted and pursed as if they were speaking, though I heard only the tick-lock of the timepiece and the soft whisper of the autumn wind.
Stark terror caught me in its grip, the hair rose up on my head, my teeth chattered nearly to breaking, and cold sweat bathed my whole body.
The clock tolled eleven. The reverberation of the final stroke was a long time dying, and when it had faded completely away at last...
Oh, no, I dare not tell what happened then! Nobody would believe me. Everyone would take me for a madman.
Nevertheless: the candles flamed up unaided. The bellows, wheezing like an asthmatic old man, blew at the fire with no visible hands to work them, while the tongs poked among the embers and the shovel picked up the ashes.
Next, a coffeepot hopped from the table on which it had been sitting and made its way, clip-clop, across the floor to the fireplace, where it settled down on the embers. A few minutes later, the armchairs bestirred themselves and, clumping to their delicately carven legs to surprising effect, waddled into place around the hearth.

I did not know what to make of what I was seeing, but what remained for me to see was more extraordinary still.
The most ancient portrait of all, a fat and chubby-cheeked graybeard who looked exactly like my mental image of Sir John Falstaff, pulled a face and poked his head out of the picture frame. Managing, after valiant efforts, to squeeze his shoulders and ample girth through the frame's narrow boundaries, he jumped heavily to the floor.
Hardly stopping to catch his breath, he drew from his doublet pocket a tiny little key, blew into it to make sure the shank was clear, and applied it to all the other picture frames, each in turn. And all the other frames widened until the figures they enclosed could come out with ease.
Spruce little abbes; sere, withered dowagers; solemn magistrates weighed down by voluminous black robes; dandies in silk stockings and prunella breeches, who minced forth twirling their swords point in air -- all these personages presented so quaint a spectacle that I could not help laughing in spite of my fear.
The company took their seats around the fireplace, and the coffeepot leaped up lightly onto the table. A crowd of Japanese porcelain cups in blue "and white, each with its lump of sugar and dainty silver spoon, bustled forward from the shelves of a desk, and the worthy assemblage drank coffee.
After it was drunk, cups, spoons, and coffeepot cleared themselves away in a twinkling, and conversation began -- surely the most curious colloquy I ever witnessed, for none of these bizarre conversationalists glanced at one another: the whole time they chatted together, they watched the clock.
I could not keep my own eyes from turning in its direction, nor stop myself from watching the hand that advanced step by minute step toward twelve o'clock.
Midnight sounded at last, and with it a voice announced, in exactly the same timbre as the clock tones:
"The hour has come to dance."
All the people stood. The armchairs retreated of their own accord, and each gallant took a lady by the hand, while the same voice went on:
"Now let the music play!"
Of the two tapestries hanging on opposite walls, one depicted an Italian concert and the other a stag hunt with several attendant hornsmen. The musicians and hunters, who had shown no sign of life until this moment, now nodded in unison. Lifting his baton, the maestro signaled a harmony of dance music that burst forth from both ends of the room at once.
The dancers began doing a minuet, but its sedate bows and courtesies were out of time with the musicians' giddy allegro, and in a few minutes every last couple was spinning round the floor like a musical top. The ladies' silken gowns, whipped about in this whirl of dancing, gave off a rustle which made me think of the sound of wings of a flight of pigeons. The wind that rushed underfoot billowed their skirts until they looked like swinging bells.
The violinists passed their bows so rapidly over the strings that electric sparks showered forth, the flutists' fingers bounced up and down as if they were quicksilver, the hornsmen's cheeks puffed out like balloons, and it all flowed together to form a torrent of notes and trills so vivace, ascending and descending scales so marvelously capriccioso, that the very imps of hell could not have kept up with it for two minutes together.
And all these dancing portraits -- it was piteous to behold their efforts at catching up with the cadence! They hopped, capered, executed pirouettes, ballet leaps, and entrechats three feet high. The sweat rolled down their faces to wash away their rouge and beauty patches. But their efforts were in vain -- the orchestra always stayed three or four notes ahead.
When the clock struck one, they paused. Then I first saw her: the woman who had not been dancing.
She sat in a wing chair in the shadow of the fireplace, and did not appear to be taking the slightest part in what went on around her.
Never, not even in my dreams, had I gazed on such perfection! Radiant white skin, silvery blond hair, long lashes shading blue eyes so pure, so transparent, that through them I glimpsed her soul as clearly as one can see a pebble at the bottom of a clean brook.
And I sensed that, if ever it would be given me to love anyone, this was she. Bounding up from the bed where I had huddled motionless until now, I hurried toward her -- borne along by some impulse I could not analyze -- and found myself courting her ardently, holding one of her hands in both of mine and talking with her as if we had known each other for twenty years.
But, curiously, all the while we conversed, my head kept nodding in time to the music (which had never stopped playing), and even though I was at the height of happiness simply talking with such a woman, my feet burned to dance with her.
And yet I dared not ask her!
She seemed to understand without words. Using one of the fingers I was not pressing between my own, she pointed at the clock arid told me: "When its hand reaches there, dear Theodore, and then we'll see."
Somehow I felt no surprise when she called me by name, and we chatted on.
The appointed hour sounded at last, the silver-bell voice rang once more through the chamber: "Dance with him if you please, Angela, but you know what will come of it."
"That makes no difference," Angela replied in a sulky tone, and passed her ivory arm around my shoulders.
"Prestissimo!'' cried the voice.
And we began to waltz. Her bosom touched my chest, her velvet cheek grazed mine, and her soft breath brushed my lips.
Never before in my life had I undergone anything like this! My nerves thrilled as if they were steel springs, my blood was a torrent of lava surging through my arteries, and my heart might have been a ticking watch suspended from my ears.
Yet there was nothing painful in my plight. Joy ineffable buoyed me along, and I could have wished to go on this way forever. Although the orchestra had trebled its tempo, we glided effortlessly in time with the music.
The onlookers, standing in awe of our liveliness, cheered and clapped with all their might -- without, however, making a sound.
All at once Angela seemed exhausted. After dancing so long with marvelous vitality and grace, suddenly she dragged on my shoulder as if her legs had given way. Her tiny toes, which had appeared scarcely to tickle the parquet a moment before, now pulled up from it as slowly as if her slippers were weighted with lead.
"Angela," I said, "you're worn out. Let's rest a while."
"1 would like that very much," she replied, wiping her forehead with her handkerchief. "But while we've been dancing, everyone else has sat down. There's only one free armchair, and two of us."
"Where's the problem, my angel? You shall sit on my lap."

Angela made not the least objection, but sat, circling me with her arms as with a white sash and resting her head on my heart to warm herself again, for she had become cold as marble.
How long we remained like this, I do not know. Entirely absorbed in contemplating this rare and wondrous being in my arms, I lost all idea of the place and the hour. The real world no longer existed for me, and all the ties, which bound me to it, were dissolved. My soul, disentangled from its prison of clay, swam among the potentials of the infinite, and I understood what no human can understand. Angela's thoughts came to me without her needing to speak, for her soul glowed in her body as in an alabaster lamp, and the rays that shone from her breast penetrated mine through and through.
A lark sang.
Pale gray light played upon the curtains.
The instant Angela saw it, she started up and darted away with a farewell wave. But after a few steps she gave a cry and fell full length.
Thunderstruck, I sprang forward to help her...
Merely to remember it makes my blood run cold. I found nothing but the coffeepot, broken into a thousand pieces.
The sight filled me with such horror that, convinced I had been the butt of some diabolic joke, I fainted dead away.

I awoke on my bed, with Arrigo Cohio and Pedrino Borgnioli hovering beside my pillow. As soon as I opened my eyes, Arrigo exclaimed,
"Well, well, good morning! I've stood here almost an hour rubbing your temples with cologne water. What the devil were you doing last night? When you didn't come down this morning, I came up and found you laid out flat on the floor, tricked up in full evening dress, hugging a piece of broken porcelain as if it had been a pretty young woman."
"Good heavens, he's wearing my grandfather's wedding suit!" Heaving into my line of sight, our host lifted a coattail of rose-colored silk dotted with floral sprigs in green. "Yes, here are those rhinestone and filigree buttons Grandfather always used to brag about."
"Our friend must have found it tucked away somewhere and taken a fancy to try it on," said Borgnioli. Then, turning to me, "But why in the world did you faint, Theodore? That's a trick of your white-shouldered social butterfly -- undo her laces, take off her necklaces, and loosen her sash, and there you both have a fine chance not to stand on too much ceremony."
I answered dryly, "It was a simple touch of vertigo. I am subject to such fits."
I got up, changed my ridiculous costume, and we went down to breakfast.
My three companions ate a good deal and drank still more.
As for me, with memories of the night just past flurrying through my head, I ate almost nothing.
The rain, which was falling in torrents, kept us indoors after breakfast. We filled our time as best we could. Borgnioli tapped out military marches on the windowpanes. Arrigo and our host played checkers. I took a sheet of vellum paper from my portfolio and started to doodle.
With no conscious thought or intention of mine, the lines my pencil traced so lightly on the paper flowed into the most uncannily accurate sketch of the coffeepot that had played such an important part in the scenes of the previous night.
Our host had finished his game and come to look over my shoulder. "It's astonishing," he remarked, "how much like my sister Angela that looks."
I stared at my drawing. What I had seen a moment before as a coffeepot was in fact the beautiful, wistful profile of the lady with whom I had danced, the lady who had rested on my lap.
"By all the saints in heaven!!" I cried, my voice shaking as if my life depended on the reply. "Is she living or dead?"
"Dead. She took a chill two years ago, after a ball, and died of pneumonia."
"Oh." Sadly blinking back a tear, I put the drawing away in my portfolio.
I had just received my sentence. There would be no more happiness for me upon this earth!