The Sire de Malétroit’s Door (1878)

by Robert Louis Stevenson

I came to this story through the Universal film, The Strange Door, starring Charles Laughton and Boris Karloff. But before I let the hacks on Universal’s writing staff ruin the story for me forever, I wanted to read the original. “The Sire de Malétroit’s Door” was first published in 1878 in Temple Bar, a British literary magazine that also published stories by Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Arthur Conan Doyle and E.F. Benson. The story was later collected in Stevenson’s first book of short stories, New Arabian Nights in 1882. While the first section of the book was devoted to modern stories that owed a stylistic debt to The Arabian Nights, there were also four unrelated stories at the end of which “Malétroit’s Door” was one. This is one of the few stories in which Stevenson would use his numerous trips to France, designed at first to improve his health, as background for his tales rather than his native England. This collection of stories is considered by some critics to mark the real beginnings of short fiction in England.

The story concerns young Denis de Beaulieu who is traveling in Burgundy during the Hundred Years War. A veteran of the army who believes himself quite fine indeed, he has a note of safe passage but it will do him little good alone on the street in the dark if he should run into troops. After dining he sets out to visit a friend and on the way back becomes lost in the dark. At the top of a hill he reaches a dead end that looks out over the village, but on his way back hears soldiers and retreats into an alcove. Behind him is a door that is ajar and he takes refuge inside, but the door locks closed on him and, even after the soldiers leave, he is unable to open the door. The room is pitch black and Denis is certain that there are others waiting nearby to cause him bodily harm. As his eyes adjust he sees some light at the top of the stairs and follows it into an opulent but sparsely appointed room. There he meets an old man, The Sire de Malétroit. The old man greets Denis like a friend. Denis tries to tell him that he is mistaken, no doubt expecting someone else, but the old man intimates that the young man’s presence there is not an accident. Finally Denis has had enough, but when he declares his intentions to leave, he is angrily informed that he will not be leaving. “‘Do you mean I am a prisoner?’ demanded Denis. ‘I state the facts,’ replied the other. ‘I would rather leave the conclusion to yourself.’”

Then Malétroit tells Denis about his niece, Blanche, and when he calls the young man “nephew” it is clear that he wants him to marry his niece and stay there voluntarily. A priest then comes into the room to discuss the niece with Malétroit, and the three then proceed into a small chapel that is connected to the house. There Denis meets the young woman, dressed for a wedding and visibly upset, “‘That is not the man!’ she cried.” At this point it seems clear that she has become pregnant, possibly through a rape, and that her uncle wants to marry her to someone as soon as possible. Though Blanche makes it clear that she would prefer death to continued existence, the Sire shouts her down, telling her that if she cannot seduce Denis in the next two hours her next choice of grooms may not be as appealing. Left alone, she tells Denis the story of meeting a young captain at church, and her rendezvous with him. After the story is finished, Denis politely brings her into the drawing room and tells Malétroit that he declines the offer of marriage. But the old man is amused. “‘I am afraid,’ he said, ‘that you do not perfectly understand the choice I have to offer you.’”

The choice, it seems, is marriage or death. Denis naturally begins to draw his sword when a door is opened by the priest, revealing several soldiers ready to fight at Malétroit’s bidding. When the old man leaves, Blanche rushes to Denis saying that she will of course marry him, but Denis is not so eager, saying, “What you may be too generous to refuse, I may be too proud to accept.” The fact is, he finds her beautiful, but resents being forced into the thing, and eventually becomes resigned to death at the hands of Malétroit. At this point the two are able to talk freely, Denis of his own arrogance in youth and Blanche of her desperate desire to be loved. But she, too, has scruples and declares to him, “I too have a pride of my own: and I declare before the Holy Mother of God, if you should now go back from your word already given, I would no more marry you than I would marry my uncle’s groom.” The two then spend the rest of their time together waiting for the dawn and their sentence of death, and it’s here that Stevenson gives the story a not unexpected, but still satisfying, twist at the end.

In some ways, the story is reminiscent of the short works of Rafael Sabatini, though Stevenson lacks the joie de vivre to pull it off. But Stevenson’s tales are far different in intent than the swashbucklers of the former. One of the things Stevenson does so well in the opening of the story is to isolate Denis de Beaulieu in the narrative. Though he arrives at a public house and dines first, it is mentioned merely in passing. The leaf-blown streets, empty in the night, are the real setting of the story. Even his visit to a friend is glossed over to get to the nightmare journey back through the dark streets. “The night was as black as the grave . . . It is an eerie and mysterious position to be thus submerged in opaque blackness in an almost unknown town.” But once inside the door the blackness is even more complete. “The darkness began to weigh upon him . . . Since he had begun to suspect that he was not alone, his heart had continued to beat with smothering violence, and an intolerable desire for action of any sort had possessed itself of his spirit. He was in deadly peril, he believed.” In fact, this is one of the most impressive sections of the story, the description of Denis trapped in the black room. But nearly all of his lengthy descriptions are impressive, including the one of Malétroit himself, or this one from his entrance into the small adjoining chapel.

          The windows were imperfectly glazed, so that the night air circulated freely in the chapel. The tapers,
          of which there must have been half a hundred burning on the altar, were unmercifully blown about;
          and the light went through many different phases of brilliancy and semi-eclipse. On the steps in front
          of the altar knelt a young girl richly attired as a bride. A chill settled over Denis as he observed her
          costume; he fought with desperate energy against the conclusion that was being thrust upon his mind.

The other noticeable aspect of the story is the way that it deals with the idea of fate. In the opening paragraph the narrator states that the visit to his friend, “was not a very wise proceeding on the young man’s part. He would have done better to remain beside the fire or go decently to bed.” In this respect there is the sense that Denis is charging headlong into his fate without realizing it, or that only the intercession of chance could have changed his destiny. When he meets Malétroit and realizes he is a prisoner he thinks to himself, “What absurd or tragical adventure had befallen him?” And then shortly after, the narrator informs that “Denis had resigned himself with a good grace—all he desired was to know the worst of it as speedily as possible.” The interesting thing is how the two characters, the strong-willed young nobleman Denis de Beaulieu and the hapless beauty Blanche de Malétroit, find themselves in the same predicament, both of them powerless to control their fates save acquiescing to death. “‘I feel your position cruelly,’ he went on. ‘The world has been bitter hard on you. Your uncle is a disgrace to mankind. Believe me, madam, there is no young gentleman in all France but would be glad of my opportunity, to die in doing you a momentary service.’” And when Denis is talking to Blanche just before dawn he speaks at length about the irony of his misunderstood youth.

          Life is a little vapor that passeth away, as we are told by those in holy orders. When a man is in a fair
          way and sees all life open in front of him, he seems to himself to make a very important figure in the
          world . . . It is not wonderful if his head is turned for a time. But once he is dead, were he as brave as
          Hercules or as wise as Solomon, he is soon forgotten . . . Death is a dark and dusty corner, where a
          man gets into his tomb and has the door shut after him till the judgment day. I have few friends just
          now, and once I am dead I shall have none.

It’s not a lengthy tale, and not a terribly inventive one, but it does engage the reader with all of Stevenson’s talents of description and character. Atmosphere is everything in “The Sire de Malétroit’s Door” and makes it well worth reading.