Translation of Le rideau cramoisi, from the story collection Les diaboliques.

Release date is 2025-12-18

Tuula Temonen

"Punainen akkunaverho" by J. Barbey d'Aurevilly is a short story written in the late 19th century. It presents a decadent, confessional tale of clandestine passion framed by a chance night journey, as the Vicomte de Brassard recalls a youthful affair with his hosts’ enigmatic daughter, Albertine, under the ominous sign of a red-curtained window. The mood blends military bravado with fatalistic desire and moral unease.

The opening of the story follows an unnamed narrator traveling by post coach through western France, sharing a compartment with the striking Vicomte de Brassard, a famed royalist officer known for courage, insubordination, and prodigious drinking. Passing through a dark, sleeping town, a single lit window with red curtains startles Brassard and draws from him a promise to tell what it means. Before his confession, the narrator sketches Brassard’s past: his glory and wounds from the July days, his charisma with troops, and his flamboyant excesses. Brassard then begins his tale of being a 17-year-old sub-lieutenant billeted with a respectable elderly couple in a dead, provincial town, where their newly returned daughter, Albertine—cool, poised, and unreadable—slowly unsettles him. The opening culminates in a charged dinner scene where, without a word and in full view of her unsuspecting parents, Albertine secretly seizes his hand and presses his leg under the table, igniting the forbidden story to come. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Pori: Otto Andersinin Kustannusliike, 1919