These charming and loosely-linked stories stories first appeared in Harper’s Monthly in the years 1908-1912. Inspector Joly, the detective, does not appear until the fourth story, where he plays a minor role, and he is absent from several of the remaining ones.
“The Defense of Diane,” the only first-person story here, is narrated by Diane de Wimpffen, “a soldier’s wife and a soldier’s daughter,” a Frenchwoman whose husband is at Tonkin, where she goes at the end of the story. Diane is staying with friends, among whom is a Monsieur de Sade”—“every one fears him, but he is indispensable,” and he insults her (“since the days of King David,” he says, “it is dangerous to separate wives and husbands”), she slaps him with her glove with all her strength, and then bests him in a sword fight, which he concedes. (1 in what I am guessing is the chronological order of the stories' events)
“The Confession of the Countess Anne” comes as she is about to die, having lived at the Château de Freyr above the village of Freyr on the Meuse for 35 years. Dr. Leroux knows she has a heart condition, and when the time comes tells the Abbé d’Arlot, to whom Anne confesses that she has always known he loved her, and that she loves him. He dies of joy. (7)
In “The Way of Diane,” Diane and Raoul are on the terrace of the Hôtel d’Italie et d’Angleterre talking about the Minister’s summoning him to Paris. When he leaves, she discovers the Abbé d’Arlot, who knew her as a girl in her convent, and that the Countess Anne knew General Texier, who often spoke of Diane’s father, also a general? She invites Diane to stay until her husband’s return. Raoul writes with some background about Anne, and Diane realizes she is the wife of the man shot through the lungs, whom she attended as a nurse in Africa. She tells Anne what her husband was doing and saying as he died. (6)
The Countess Anne permits the strange man known in Freyr only as Le Vieux to occupy the ruined hut near the old disused ferry on the Meuse, in “The Three Experiences of Le Vieux.” Le Vieux saves the Police Commissaire’s daughter from drowning. The Commissaire discovers that Le Vieux was imprisoned for a murder, and escaped after serving fifteen of a twenty-year sentence. He goes to the Countess, who occupies a peculiar position in the Freyr social order, somewhere between the law and the church. She writes to the Prefecture and they send an inspector, M. Joly, to arrest Le Vieux, but she also writes to her friend General Texier, who appeals to the Minister of Justice and sends a pardon. Meanwhile Le Vieux comes to steal the Countess’s strongbox, but she is there and greets him by name: “Come in, Monsieur Garat….” She makes him her head gardener. (2)
“The Twelve Green Russian Garnets” begins so:
It was called the “Hotel d’Italie et d’Angleterre.” Why? Neither Italians nor Englishmen frequented it. Nor had M. Achille, its proprietor, ever visited these countries except in imagination. Why not “Peking and Timbuctoo?”
With such brushstrokes Hardy creates a believable village he calls Freyr. Its police commissaire, its reverend abbot—secretly in love with its chateau owner, Countess Anne, its fiercely rationalist doctor, its mysterious recluse, and the countess’s donkey Balafre, all inhabit a village on the Meuse, with a steep path up to the chateau, the river with its long-abandoned ferry replaced by a bridge, its hotel with a terrace overlooking the river, its Café de la Regence, its bakery, and its fountain by Girardon. (3)
Inspector Joly is “clean-shaven, with round, rosy cheeks,” has a cardinal principle not to form an opinion prematurely” and a belief “that his best thoughts came, not logically from established facts, but from God knows where—motherless and fatherless offspring.” When Le Vieux’s pardon cheats him out of his purpose in coming to Freyr, he talks with the countess long enough to be profoundly impressed by her, spends the night in the village, and then, as he walks toward the station, notices in the shop window of “Perrin—Antiquaire” a rectangular Japanese gold coin surrounded by twelve green Russian garnets. It recalls to him a case he investigated in Paris, a Madame Raymonde who died in a house in the Impasse Bertrand of what were ruled natural causes, but her neighbor insisted that it was not an accident, that Madame Raymonde had given her such a garnet-surrounded coin locket and begged her, if something happened to her, to take the note inside to a man in the Rue Saint-Denis. When Joly returns to Paris he goes to the Rue Saint-Denis and captures a man who has been sent by Russian revolutionaries to murder an official of the Czar. This man attempts unsuccessfully to kill himself with cyanide, and Joly then discovers that Madame Raymonde, on a similar errand in Paris, had successfully killed herself with cyanide when she was accosted by a member of the Russian police, who then disappeared.
“Aurelie” is the name of his beloved, says the toy soldier Countess Anne gave Antoine, in the stories the soldier tells the boy at night. When his cold guardian trades the toy soldier for a statue of the Virgin, the boy goes looking in a storm for the statuette-seller, catches a fatal chill, and dies with the toy soldier clutched to his breast, just as the toy soldier clutches within his coat a miniature of Aurelie. (8)
Vicomtesse de Caraman has acceded, in her sleep, to a suggestion by M. de Sade that she put her cloak and her collar of diamonds, “Célimène’s Diamonds,” on a statue in the garden to see if the marble figure will come alive and react. Diane describes the overheard taunt in her letter to Countess Anne where she doubtless also described the dinner at General Texier’s she attended the night before with her husband Raoul, M. de Sade, and the Vicomtesse. Inspector Joly confronts Madame de Caraman with what she did in her dream, including breaking the blue candle shade in the salon on her return. Did Joly and Célimène find the diamond collar on the neck of the Venus when he took her out into the garden? We are not told. (4)
“The Real Birthday of Dorante” coincides with the twentieth anniversary dinner of Inspector and Madame Joly, at a restaurant other than their regular yearly one—he and his team have received a message to pick up some counterfeiters at the Restaurant des Tournelles. But the Jolys also pick up Dorante, an eight-year-old orphan whom they adopt. (5)
The Jolys have retired at their suburban Monrepos, not quite a castle in Spain, and somewhat anticlimactic for the inspector. Diane comes to visit. Pichon has searched the de Wimpffen’s apartment in the Boulevard Hausmann and deliberately left his silver pencil amongst Diane’s lingerie. He wants Raoul, now a Colonel and in General Texier’s office in the War Ministry, to panic and somehow show that he has stolen the mobilization plans missing from the general’s safe. Joly comes briefly out of retirement to discover that the colonel’s clerk, who has a hearing magnifying device in his desk, used it to crack the safe, remove the plans, make a copy, and then return the plans to the safe.(9)
Without the knowledge of Inspector Joly, though Madame Joly comes to know it and tells him, Dorante and the neighbor’s son fall in love. They soon marry, and that is “How Dorante Crossed the Rubicon.” (10)
When the mother of a roué and a gambler asks Raoul and Diane for the hand of their daughter Anne (she insisted on being called Anne instead of Diane after getting to know and love Countess Anne, who has also promised her a dower), M. de Sade elects himself “The Ambassador” to go to the ne’er-do-well’s mistress and extract from her two notes, one renouncing him and the other vowing to keep him. De Sade lets Diane decide which of the notes to show Anne. Whichever it was, and neither De Sade nor the reader learns, it did the trick. (11)
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