"Elle ne jugeait pas, ayant d'autres pensées."Villiers de l'Isle-Adam,Isis.
"In this so lightly tilled field, where the corn has been so hurriedly sown," Entragues told himself, "I reap nothing but problems, tares, weeds, ridiculous rank grasses! For three days I have had only the worry of a mathematician intent upon insolublex's."
SERIES OFX's.
xa.—It was poison.xb.—History of the portrait chamber.xc.—S. M. to S. M.
xa
"I believed I could find the solution. In truth, the problem was buried; it sprang up again, evoked by the two others."
xb
"Is it a history in which she is implicated? Is a page of her life written in this mysterious chamber where innocent travelers are favored with such astonishing visions? Must this secondxbe joined to the first one? A crime might have been committed there."
xc
"There is no doubting, if heaven has endowed me with some divining sense, that one of the mono-grams signifies Sixtine Magne and perhaps both resolved themselves into the identical syllables: a homage of the present to the pact, of the Sixtine of to-day to the Sixtine of yesterday: a portrait of the lover or husband, since she was married. Ah! I have it! Her husband had a Christian name commencing with S. It is a question of finding an engraver with the name of S—— Magne and that may easily be ascertained at some print dealer's shop; or else, in the case of a lover, S—— M——. Upon what do I base this deduction? On nothing. The twice-repeated initials of the woman I love ought to torment me, else I would not love her. Perhaps they only conceal names of no interest to me, but the 'perhaps' suffices to justify my uneasiness. The past? Enough of that. The present? Ah! the unknown enemy which one divines in smiles, in incomplete phrases, in gestures, and even in the little intimacies of the woman who lets herself be loved! A pleasant sensation and one which I still have not experienced! The jealousy without cause, the jealousy that nothing can cure—not even possession!... I must put down that remark, it is true."
He wrote several lines in his note-book: "Does a woman's supreme abandon prove her love? No, for this may be due to the occasion, to ennui, to the need of deceiving, to vengeance, to the perversity which throws her into your arms. To feel yourself loved, it is necessary to believe; love is a religion. You must have faith, you must love yourself. Love yourself? Yes, that is the means of being the more easily deceived. First to strip yourself of reason, then to plunge towards the truth! Absurd. Faith, then? Yes, to have faith, and is truth itself any thing except faith? Truth, faith—two aspects of one entity—the mystery of a God in two persons. Ah! if I believed that I was loved by Sixtine, she would love me, I would have peace, the joy of union. It can be done. How? Perhaps merely by not reflecting. To embark on the light skiff and go down with the current of water.... Towards the Ocean, yes, towards the ineluctable abyss? Evidently, but this detail is insignificant. The thing is to embark and not to pass your life in watching others depart for the exquisite unknown. But you return from it! Then what is the good? If the current is a circuit, it is just as well to remain at home and read theDivine Comedy. Alighieri himself returned! There is only death. But one never returns from death, and it is of little avail to another; but it has its answer ready and whispers it in the ear when it is so inclined. Bitter is life, more bitter is death."
A church stood near him. He recognized the humbleSaint-Médard, entered and fell on his knees:
"O God of the Cross, Christus patiens, eternally suffering Christ, hearken to me! I seek joy, I seek love, I seek grief, and I find only a dreary void. I can neither enjoy myself, nor love, nor suffer. Take me by the hand and lead me as a mother leads her child. Must not one first suffer with thee? Then will come love, like rain in the desert, and joy will dawn, the joy of loving, the joy of having suffered...."
"I presume to pray," said Entragues to himself, lifting his head, "and I am giving vent to rhetoric. This prayer is welcome, and if I can remember it, I will use it. It would be blasphemous to take my note-book and write it down! Why not! One must profit from inspiration, for it can not be recovered."
He made a note of his ejaculation, with very slight variations.
"I stopped myself in time. The unconscious comedy would have made me blush in the end. Do I pray seriously and am I a Christian? Yes, I wish to be a Christian, and to partake of the most mystic and abstract Catholicism, when this would serve only to separate me from the abject mob, renouncing like a vile freedman the religion which drew it from slavery. It is quite evident that in my very heart I believe in the divinity of Jesus rather than in that of Sakya-Mouni and that I laugh at the vanity of an unconscious creator!...
"Ah! how enervating are these solitary rounds!"
Then, suddenly:
"I must see her, I must see her! Ah! provided it isn't Wednesday?"
The newspapers spread on the stand of a little bookshop told him that to-day was Friday, October 27. So ten days had already passed, ten irrevocable days since that dismal Wednesday when his love had collapsed. Collapsed! well, it could be rebuilt. But it really was too much, literally, to love at a distance. Sixtine did not, like himself, occupy her hours in analyzing everything and nothing: to have oneself loved, one must be seen. Henceforth, he would seek every occasion, he would follow her like a hunter, pressing her pitilessly to the very quarry of kisses. He would cease reflecting, and would think only of the end, counting obstacles as naught. He would commence from this evening.
His feet, already, obeyed, following this mental activity. He quickly ascended a popular street full of children, little democratic dauphins, brats of the modern sovereign. At this moment the inventor of popular suffrage seemed to him the most execrable monster produced by humanity and Nero and Attila, recast in a single model, compared to this unknown dastard, were creatures worthy of the genuflection. No one had abased the Idea to this point, no one had tried to make of the world such a desolate stable, where the kicking, respected Houyhnhms would have the ascendancy. He was a Pharisee and did himself justice for never having eaten the bitter hay of this royal rack: at the age of reason he had renounced, with disgust, his part in the sovereignty and never had a ballot soil his aristocratic fingers. This was due less to his early education than to subsequent and personal reflections, for modern degeneration accepts accomplished facts, and all that is left are single, inward and useless protests.
As he descended the Boulevard Saint-Michel, his step fell into an idle rhythm with the pace of the strollers. He looked around him and judged that no superior essence emanated from this other environment: here was the same evaporation of unconsciousness. Below, just as alongside and above, by devious ways people sought happiness, without suspecting, according to Pastor Manders, that it is open rebellion to seek happiness in this life. The social right was another political illusion equally chimerical. On this subject Herbert decided to read some Hobbes, at the first opportunity.
But did he himself, for example, consider himself above or only on a level with humanity? Ah! there is the intimate thought of each of the noble copies of baked clay which a God formerly modeled on the shores of the Tigris: I and the others, I and men, I and the rest, etc. It is thanks to this process that one judges, that one writes the novel or the story, that one rails in comedies or in shorter pleasantries. Judging is the universal and the particular, it is everything, it is life. Is not the famous tribunal, the tribunal of consciousness, with egoism for presiding judge and vices for assessors? And Hubert judged too: in defiance of all reason, he weighed the imponderable and fathomed the impenetrable, that is to say, the thoughts of others, without reflecting that one can know nothing outside of oneself and that to judge men, in short, is to judge the idea we have of men. Like the first of these prisoners, he had let himself be caught in the snare of reality: scoffing at those who sought happiness, he scoffed at himself, for what had he done since his birth in this world of sensibility except to consume the best part of his force in this quest? Vain and vainer than ever now that he was straying towards the external clouds. To what did he pretend, in loving Sixtine, and the yielding clouds dispersed, would he enjoy himself just as well with the fundamental night? When he broke the dear head between two stones, would he see what was within? One can doubtless use more human means and, for example, inoffensive fascination.
He returned to his preceding revery and the circle was closed; decidedly he must not reflect, he must act.
He found himself in excellent humor and quite ready, this time, to count without boredom the quarter hours on the clocks of the streets. He would even have willingly laughed with some chance companion, or considered the toddling of women, or strolled past diverting pictures. The Louvre, which he perceived from the other side of the stream, tempted him: he went to see once more the striking Clytemnestra so drolly illuminated with a torch and he was soon amusing himself in this room which, in previous days, he would have called a corner of shame. It did not equal, for comic intensity, the terrible Hogarths and the distressing Daumiers, but David and his school, nevertheless, had ridiculed antiquity successfully. The sober Flaxman had never succeeded in delineating personages so completely stupefied at having been cut out by a punch.
Entragues had once said that to make place for this foreign exhibition the paintings of the masters of an immoral nudity had been hidden in closets: it was the secret cabinet of the guards of the People's paintings. There remained to determine if bad paintings has not its own immorality and if theSerment des Horacesshould not be put under key as well as theAtalante et Méléagre, the Parrhasius, perhaps a little exciting, in which Tiberius delighted?
From the arbitrary stupidity of the Neo-Romans Entragues went to the powdered heads of those enemies of the Nation and Humanity which David had designed, finally stripped of their paint, but so scornful that, one might say, he had lowered their eyes. The Pierrot gallery was charming and made you understand the Revolution, the envy of the People and its hate for graces so high and remote.
While leaving, and under the portices of the rue de Rivoli, he began to follow a woman whose restless gait, from the Cour du Louvre, excited his curiosity. She was not at all bad; she wore a rather original dress with black lace that fell in waves; but nothing striking. A brown pigment covered her eyes and served as a background, but there was no magical attraction: she was somewhat tall, slender, dark, very pale and the two sides of her face seemed unequal, because of the unequal droop of the corners of her mouth, the unequal lifting of her brows above heavy eye-lashes, one quite distended, the other in little contracted waves.
Nothing of caricature, but the sustained impression was painful.
The flat basket of an orange seller, at the corner of the rue de Marengo, and the sundry encumbrances of boxes and little wagons under the three arcades, seemed to exasperate her; she hastened forward, brushed against the fourth pillar, then against the fifth, then against the others, but sedately now, like a person who walks unconcernedly. If a group of persons collected around a pillar, she waited, brushed against it, and left; if the distraction of shop-windows had drawn her towards the other side of the walk, she quickly returned, as if with remorse at having passed one of the steps of her sorrowful path. Strict obedience to her impulse did not present her from noticing the curiosity of the passerby, but she had acquired such a skill, through long practice doubtless, such a deceptive gait, that no one noticed her.
She crossed the Palais-Royal Square, gained the Avenue de l'Opéra, all the time touching the gas lamps, trees and columns. There, she recommenced her maneuver with this variation: she touched each shop-door with her knee. One of them was opened; she waited, as before a precipice, gazing at the curtains of red plush of a milliner of ill-repute; she had such an unfortunate air that Entragues, with a discreet bow, accosted her:
"You seem troubled, Madame, can I be of any service?"
She looked at him, and not observing anything unpleasant in his tone or gestures, replied:
"Yes, you can save me, if you have any magnetism. Call a carriage, get in with me and take me back. I live at the Avenue de Clichy and am going there on foot without being able ... without being able to do otherwise.... You have seen me? As soon as I go out by myself, I walk, I walk ... and when I return, I faint with fatigue and shame."
Entragues had already, with his lifted cane, signaled a coachman, who drew near the pavement.
"You are merely a little nervous and need rest. Come, here is the carriage."
He took her arm; she resisted, saying, for the abyss had closed:
"Always this, nothing but this, the last one!"
She had set off again, turning her head supplicatingly, but without will-power.
"Well!" Entragues thought, "if I use force, the passerby will be attracted. As for magnetism, I can't see myself making passes at four o'clock in the afternoon, here in the Avenue de l'Opéra. It requires a severe glance and a commanding voice. What an odd adventure and what a queer hysterical person!"
Nevertheless he went and overtook her.
"Come," he roughly said, "the carriage is waiting. Come."
She lifted her eyes and, under his steady gaze, let herself be led.
Once in the carriage, she grew amiable, very amiable in fact; she told him secrets, spoke of her husband, of her little girl, her only child who was so dark and pretty, so capricious and wilful, breaking the heads of her dolls to punish them, throwing live coal on rugs to smell the burning odor, only liking salads, oranges and raw carrots, and not yet eight years old!
"Stop the carriage there," she said as they arrived at Clichy Square. "I am so grateful to you and you must come to see me. Would you like to be my doctor? Be my doctor. I will obey you implicitly."
"But...."
"You are no doctor, but what does it matter? So long as my husband believes it. He leaves at ten o'clock each morning. He is a stupid, functionary.... Ah! I am not understood!"
Her eyes, lit like embers, betokened an approaching danger. Entragues, who was concerned with quite other matters than the consoling of hysterical women, stopped the carriage, got out and said:
"A bientôt. I understand you."
She smiled, with a quick toss of her head. The carriage departed.
"She is at a crisis," mused Entragues. "Some one else will profit by it, for she is not ugly and should have, at certain moments, a sort of Maenad beauty. But I love Sixtine and feel incapable of loving other women. But why is it that so many women whom you pay no heed to, throw themselves at you, while the only one you desire shuns you?"
"Sancte pater, sic transit gloria mundi."Le Pontifical romain.
No sooner was he in Sixtine's presence than Hubert felt his pleasure spoiled by the questionings which an algebraic schema had laid down but had not solved. So his will to act weakened under the weight of the present. First he must decipher the puzzle.
He coldly advanced, with a calm smile, kissing the hand she gave him; this contact quieted his need of knowledge. Then, he asked himself whether the interlaced foliage of two or three problems would not form the necessary aureola around this fair head.
"And when I should reach the precise explanations, would I have added more beauty to this body full of beauties? As for the soul, I know that it is a secret coffer to which no one—not even she herself—has the key. And what could I do with it, and what could she do with it? So my anxiety is quite futile. What if I took her merely with plausible words, as the bird-call, by its mechanical song, captures the free birds?"
They spoke of different things, particularly of the falling leaves, and Hubert skilfully led, under the same stimulus, his revery and the conversation.
A Ziem, at the end of the room, cleverly illuminated by hidden lights, a resplendent Italian road-stead, with purple-tinted sails, many colored clouds in the sky, and over all a deep transparency, a sense of great distance, a brilliancy of atmosphere full of the magic of unfailing blue:
"Naples, a Naples I have never seen! Ah! that is because I scarcely look towards the gulf, for the Novella is my heaven and my ocean."
"Monsieur d'Entragues, why have you such a distracted air?"
This brought him back to the truth: he was not Della Preda, she had just pronounced his correct name, and Naples disappeared; after a few minute's absence, he found himself in Paris again, near Madame Sixtine Magne and before a quite good view of Venice.
"It is that picture," continued Sixtine. "It pleases me, but do not observe it too closely, for you will be forced to admit that it is mediocre, but charged with some power of illusion for imaginative minds."
While cursory words were being exchanged about painters and their paintings, there reawakened in Hubert, without any determinable cause, one of the most significant impressions of his adolescence. Feeling the impossibility of evading it and fearing a fit of abstractions, he repeated it aloud. The word "madonna" uttered by Sixtine furnished the pretext:
"Summer and a stormy evening. I had been restless all day; sudden languors made me prostrate; my nerves vibrated like harp-strings with each clap of thunder. My grandmother's harp rested in a corner of the room and when any one touched a door, it echoed. I compared myself to this mysterious instrument which I had once seen out of its rose silk case. I listened to the interior murmurings of my overexcited life, sounds welled within me, made me ill, and slowly went to a death of which it seemed I should die. Then the fears, the sweet fears of seeing, among the branches, a strange woman who would smile to me. Then the indiscreet titillations of pubescence which passed, played, breathed like a warm wind upon my skin. It was vacation time in the country: they had left me to my own devices and I rolled on the grass and ate it; I cut switches and shoots and instantly abandoned them; I climbed up trees and, half way, let myself slip with lax muscles. Obscene, vaguely understood couplets returned to me. Alexis and Corydon preoccupied me and I fancied that for the first time I understood the dim ardors of the poets. My desires were altogether formless. I had still another anguish: what was this malady which gripped me? Life would not be endurable, if I had to live thus. The night quieted me somewhat. As I annoyed everybody, that is to say my great-aunt Sophie, Aunt Azélia, an old maid, and the two house cats, dear and precious creatures, I was given pictures to look at, with instructions not to stir. They belonged to different parts of books given to quiet noisy children. Suddenly, as I was reading, I stopped, having found my childish ideal: the Madonna de Masolino da Panicale. Later in life I came upon that name under a quite different lithograph, alas! although it represented the same picture and the same madonna. I felt myself grow pale with emotion and confusion. The half-opened eyes gazed on me tenderly and the inflection of the head was so coy and amorous that my heart pounded. But the eyes soon preoccupied me above all the rest: I made a rampart of one of the leaves, I pretended to read attentively, I was alone with the divine eyes and gazed upon them. An hour perhaps had passed in this way but it seemed that I had hardly looked at them when the inflexible Azélia uttered the daily phrase: 'The curfew has rung.' Nothing rang in the house with its very old-fashioned clocks; so it was a metaphor; she always repeated it and I usually did not even smile at its mention. That evening I flew into a passion and I bantered the old maid so much that she sent me to bed 'without a candle, as cats go to the loft.' I fell asleep and slept as one sleeps at thirteen, but, in the night, the eyes of the Madonna visited me and I have since felt an inexplicable pleasure when gazing upon eyes that resemble the eyes of the Madonna de Masolino da Panicale."
As he finished, Entragues perceived that Sixtine had them, the very eyes; he knelt down and said:
"That is why I love you, Sixtine, and why I shall always love you!"
"Please, rise and let go my hands!"
"Let me keep them, let me love you. Ah! you are not indifferent, it is not possible."
"But," returned Sixtine, "I am surprised.... You tell me a very curious and interesting anecdote to which I listen without distrust, and it ends with a declaration.... It is very unexpected ... Come, sit down and let us talk peacefully.... I do not wish to discourage you, and I really want to be sincere.... If I loved you I would say so, it would even be a fitting occasion.... Frankly, I have not felt that little emotion, that tiny nothing.... Then how say it, I am very inexperienced ... It perhaps will come another time. Come, you will recommence and it will merely be a deferred pleasure.... I am quite willing to love.... My soul yearns for something.... It may be won, but you must conquer it.... How? That is your affair.... And then, you know that if I loved it would be for eternity.... There can be no casualness where such bonds are concerned. It is necessary to know each other, to estimate each other, to tell something of one's past life, to fathom characters, to analyze tastes. We are not children.... All this...."
"Ah! I am a fool," Sixtine was saying to herself during the pauses of her speech. "But I do not withdraw my hand, I only seem to ... So stirred, I would not wish to admit how delicious it has been.... No, it is an avowal.... Unexpected? I was waiting for it and would have been pained and surprised had it not come.... He is there, at my knees, at my knees: Oh! remain thus.... If I were he I should speak quite differently, but I like these doubts, these supplications. He is going to implore me again, again, again.... Do I love him? I am able to love him, at least I am not far from it, I feel that a certain word, a certain gesture ... and I would be in his arms, but will he say the word? Will he make the gesture?... Oh! yes! I have experienced something undefinable.... Yes, but I am not at such a point of ignorance.... Can all this be recovered, such moments?... Believe me, it is true, true, true, I want to love.... Well, take it, but be sure to take it. The word is too hard. My God, perhaps I am discouraging him. So much the worse, it will be the test.... Oh! to be fixed, to be bound forever! To him? I do not know, but if he wished it!... He is quite proper, but a little cold, and then, I already know him; he is capable of a profound sentiment.... What! he is rising, he abandons my hand, he goes to sit down on that chair, so far, so far from me.... Well, it is finished, and I am deceived. Let us wait."
"I believe I was wrong," replied Entragues, "to let you speak so long. You have recovered possession of your natural calm and now you are unattainable."
"I also think so," said Sixtine, wounded by this clumsy reply. "But I can assure you that I do not lose my head so easily. I have resisted more dangerous assaults and my virtue came out of them all untouched. If you expected to conquer me by surprise, you deceived yourself. Very strong muscles might succeed, perhaps, but the conquest would be quite precarious."
"You are mistaken, Madame, I love you too sincerely to count on the occasion and a mere physical possession, gained through the strength of one or the lassitude of the other. This is not at all my purpose. I wished only to obtain an avowal in return for an avowal...."
"There are mute women," Sixtine interrupted.
Entragues did not pursue the matter further. He contemplated the magnificent eyes which anxiously watched him, and he wondered how he could make them tender, how make them speak, for eyes speak without knowing that they do so, and are not masters of their language, like lips. Finally he answered, with the bitterness of deception:
"It is necessary to lose one's head."
"It is necessary, it is necessary: that is easily said. If he who proffers this aphorism first lost his head, it would be a different matter. Be indulgent to a very banal allusion: Whoever wishes to make others weep must be the first to weep."
"There are rebels and the spirit of contradiction makes great ravages in proud souls."
"I confess to a little pride. Without it there would be no dignity, but am I moved by the spirit of contradiction? I do not think so. If it were given you to penetrate into my inmost recesses, you would see, on the other hand, an infinitely malleable soul, a soul without definite form—a lump of clay which awaits the divine shaper; a woman's soul, in fine. But men judge women as inferior men; just as men, to women, generally are other women armed with superior strength. In truth, they are two beings as distinct as a dog and a cat, and it is always their unhappy fate not to understand one another, just like a dog and cat. What a distressing fatality, for one only exists through the other. Are they, perhaps, truly complete beings only in the fleeting moment when they are joined together? But it should be the labor of civilization and intelligence to perpetuate that moment by spiritual bonds, strong and supple ties whose physical meetings would be the consolidating knots. No, there is nothing more than actual desire and when that has fled, unassuaged, and one is well-bred, one has recourse to irony."
"It is a consolation," Entragues replied, "but I am refused it. I have never had enough presence of mind to juggle with my chagrin and divert myself by letting my eye follow the play of glass balls. Is my nature, perhaps, excessively complicated? Sincerity, like a diamond, has more than one facet...."
"Then," Sixtine interrupted, "it is a decomposed sincerity. Labor is needed to assist it to the state of pure light and all this psychological physics is too difficult a maneuver for my simplicity. If you only knew how simple I am, how simple all women are, dreadfully simple, my friend! In truth, one has but to take them by the hand!"
"Like the woman of a little while ago," Entragues thought. "Those whom one supposes strange are only more feminine women, thrust by their nerves to the extreme of feminity. It is true: to dominate the others, one must study them specially. Did not Ribot find the laws of memory and will in mental pathology? It would be excellent to make analogous studies of hysteria, but if the matter does not attempt it, who is capable of doing it? After all, the very subjects of the experiment have today given me two valuable lessons. Unfortunately, it is to be feared that they will avail me little in practical life. I am in a mood to live and I do not know how. Come, I will provoke her a little and guide myself by her replies. Women may be simple, but they appear artful and we can only act in their presence according to received impressions. Simple as a deciphered dispatch, simple when you have the key. What was she saying to me? I must answer. She is looking at me. Those beautiful large eyes! Ah! I truly love her!"
"Have me!" he exclaimed, falling on his knees. "I love you, I can say no more."
Her restless studded fingers clasped her knees that were covered with a red robe. Hubert embraced the knees and kissed the fingers. It was the same as happens with little serpents in skins of old silver found under withered ferns, in the sunlight; as soon as one touches them, they stiffen and become as brittle as glass. Sixtine, at this brusque contact, grew rigid as a lady of stone in her emblazoned seat, and Hubert felt that the least insistence would shatter that soul. It was too late. As Sixtine had so well conjectured, the startled occasion had fled. The very woman who, an instant before,—something Hubert did not suspect—would have surrendered for the present and for eternity to the first kiss, this same woman resented a new attempt at intimacy as an attempt at violation.
He obeyed and rose, but this time with more anger than embarrassment, for physical desire held him in its iron grip. Its nostrils held tight by a subduing apparatus, the bull occasionally resists under the stress of its anguish, routs its tormentor and rears itself, ready for vain accomplishments.
Before leaving, restraining his brutal unchained forces by a violent effort of will, he endeavored to reassure Sixtine by a playful amiability. Without returning to sow foolish explanations along the path he had traveled and which a wall, suddenly up-sprung, had confined, he smoothly indulged in metaphors and generalities upon love, made a dusky poetry gleam, paused at the scintillations of lyrical enthusiasm and succeeded in making the young uneasy woman smile, amused and perhaps moved by his good will.
He really felt that this evening had been somewhat unfortunate, but despair did not touch him. In short, nothing is irreparable. Then, too, he had acted and he believed that this was a great point.
"And a thousand others, who never knewwhat it was to have a soul...; yet, sir,these men adorned society."Poe:Bon-Bon.
Once in the street, Hubert saw the ardent eyes of an invisible spectre glaring at him through the gloom—two terrible, imperious and inciting eyes. He recognized them and an oppressiveness crushed him. They were the eyes of Lust.
"For women, the prowling phantom is called Sin—it is a male; for men it is the female Lust. Ah! yes, I recognize her. She is a companion of childhood. She is ingenious, She used to strum ballads to the moon on my adolescent nerves. Today, she drums the roundelay of the Lupanars on the back of my neck. With one stroke she wishes to degrade the lover and the love. I will betake myself to vile titillations and she whom I love will be the cause."
He reflected: a voluptuous dream brought on, from earliest adolescence, by the contemplation of the madonna's eyes; since that time, the association had been constant, often inexorable: he had to obey or suffer absolute insomnia, or else race like a noctambulist towards a retreating prey. In the last case, the winning talks at street corners little by little dissolved desire in the slow fire of disgust. But how terrible these nights when the shame of his obscene vagabondage overwhelmed him with horror!
Yet he did not want to go and knock, like an obsessed bourgeois, like clerks on paydays, at the latticed door of some sordid house, leading his idealism to promiscuous divans and submitting his body to the least withered bidder! He hesitated between a quite proper harem nearby, and the semblances of soothing intrigue: he did not despise a reciprocal choice that had the appearance of being voluntary, the excuse of a desire that fixed on this one rather than on the other, public preliminaries which are cleansed of all shame by the complicity of the environment—the Bal Bullier, for example, or the Folies-Bergère. By making a rapid decision and calling a carriage, he could reach one of those slave markets before closing time. Upon reflection, he abandoned the Bullier: the jades of this place were enjoying a rest. As for the other exhibition, it was quite far away.
Undecided, he grew composed. For a moment he hoped to have freed himself cheaply, but the eyes, the implacable eyes reappeared—obscene stars that would cease and vanish only at the clandestine house.
It was in a little street near the Saint-Sulpice market.
There, lived a woman whose eyes, adequate for his youthful dreams, had formerly captivated him—formerly, when he was about twenty—and no reasoned disgust dulled the senses. Each time his carnal obsessions evoked this pleasant memory he believed, with an animal waywardness, that he would find the same woman and the same contentment.
Since she did not surrender to the first importunate caller, having the coquetry of a certain amorous fastidiousness, one often found her either alone or able, under the pretext of a jealous protector, to turn out the guest of the evening, if the newcomer pleased her more.
"So this," reflected Entragues, "is the end? Honest women know quite well to what promiscuities they are exposed by their refusals; they should yield for the sake of dignity, at least. They should be taught this: it would be one of the useful chapters in the courses of love which old women could teach so well! But if they should yield, then farewell to the pleasant duels of vanity."
Without suspecting how futile and mischievous his reflections were, he followed the star.
"Now then, what is going to happen? Oh! I know in advance. None the less, I am going in!"
He knocked in a certain way.
"To think that I remember all this! Yet it is long since I came here. I have been spared these sudden and irremissible tortures for years. Years! She must be changed, old and ugly. All the better, it will be the necessary douche, and perhaps in a half-hour I shall be laughing at myself instead of crying. Perhaps she will be absent, or asleep, or engaged. Engaged! Like a school boy, I have a mind to run away before the door opens. One, two ... I am going to leave."
No, he knocked a second time.
"Who is it?"
"........"
"Toi!"
"She addresses me so familiarly, it is frightful."
"........"
"Yours forever!"
"Again! After all, I please her. It is less vile than indifference."
Now, whisperings reached him, interrupted by the opening and closing of doors. He had the sensation of conversations of nuns coming through a wooden partition. This sordid place had the mysteries of a convent; the approach of women and their movements always give man similar impressions, different though the surroundings be. She was debating with somebody; at last the bolt was unfastened, the key turned: another wait, but shorter, in a dark antechamber: the sounds of a second outside door, of steps descending the stairs: he had left.
She was dressed, a hat on her head, and gloved.
"Anyway, she has not just come from some one else's arms."
She had not aged. She was a warmly-blown summer which the breath of mutual happy moments had not withered. Women can withstand anything; neither vigils, nor fastings, nor repeated surrenders blight them; quite the contrary, in order to bloom, they cannot have too much care.
She showed her joy in little exclamations and tiny unruly words; Entragues thought it just as well to seize the present hour and attempt an amiable libertinism.
She thought him handsome and made for kisses; he let her go on, rather content with this impression and conscious of giving this woman, who was superior to her companions, a moment of sincere pleasure.
"These women, after all," he thought, "are not so repulsive as the adulterous ones; they lack, it is true, the aureole of deceit, but they are neither more nor less guilty: what is the difference between having two men at the same time, and having ten? With the second, vice commences; and if the latter must be scorned, the same scorn should be meted out to the former. Doubtless, since they are transgressing a stricter law and breaking a definitive vow, the adulteresses should enjoy a keener abandon, for hell-fire is already present in their kisses, if they have been favored with a Christian education; but how many of them are capable of so exquisite an enjoyment, of savoring in love the irremediable damnation incurred for the pleasure of him they love? One must grant them another possible superiority—that is, if there are children—for while the offspring of the unmarried have no father, adulterous offspring have two, a wise precaution against orphan-hood."
Meanwhile, Valentine had brought cakes and a bottle of that Aumalian wine which gives people the illusion of a princely treat. Then she grew tender towards Entragues, her eyes beamed forth cajolery, allurement, and promises.
She watched him dip his lips into the glass and wanted to drink after him, seemingly intoxicated with desire and genuine love, consoling herself in one evening, with this unexpected pilgrim, for some years perhaps, of exactions in which she took no pleasure.
A blasphemous comparison had made him liken her to a Magdalene suddenly seized with adoration, her soul just surrendered to a revealed God, lovely with inner and useless supplications, so persuaded to love above herself that a gesture of acquiescence would overwhelm her with joy.
This quite surprising spectacle charmed Entragues, but he felt his fault aggravated by this prolonged titillation. It had ceased to be the simple shock necessary to re-establish his composure, and had inexcusably become a pleasure in itself.
She kissed his hand prettily, the last traces of remorse fled—their emotions became identical.
They talked of trifles and he, employing those bagatelles which please women, made her laugh: she seemed, at times, astonished at her own delight, as if the cold air around her had suddenly and magically evaporated in effervescent perfumes.
The weak and ravaged Entragues seemed beautiful to her: blond hair, thinner and whiter at the temples, beard becoming a brown at the cheeks and ending in two long points as in old Venetian portraits; the brow high, the skin very pale but rosy in moments of animation, a curveless nose, a heavy mouth, eyelashes and eyebrows almost black over eyes gilded like certain feline eyes, but gentle. He had ordinary muscles and frame, carried his head erect, and seemed to be gazing at mirages, his eyes at once distant and steady, as if in a trance.
Valentine chiefly watched his lips. He perceived the fact and gave them. She was neither powdered nor painted, but her authentic self.
Entragues gazed at her with pleasure but without agitation, for the nude, especially in a woman's chamber, is not particularly sensuous; it is such a natural state, so simple, so free of provocation, so little suggestive by its absence of mystery, that a foot glimpsed in the street, a bodice cleverly arranged, a rustling of petticoats, an ungloved hand, a smile behind a fan, a certain air, a certain gesture, a certain glance, even with a wholly chaste intention, are much more rousing. A quite banal observation, but Entragues, pardonable in pausing to note it as a directly experienced impression, still sought to fathom its cause.
Now, he experienced a great discouragement: "I shall not have this beauty which pleases me, which I desire and which is mine. I can take her in my arms, I can press her against me, but I cannot have her. When I kiss her with as many kisses as deceit has tongues, still I shall not have her. And all the kinds of possession I can dream of are vain; even were I able to surround her like a wave, I should still not have her. The impulsion of love is unreal and it is only the illusion of desire which makes me believe in its possible accomplishment. I know it is error, I know that disillusion awaits me. I shall be punished by a frightful disappointment for having sought self-oblivion outside of myself, for having betrayed idealism, and yet it is unavoidable, for the senses are imperative and I have not merited the supernatural gift of grace."
Entragues had a prompter disillusion than he would have desired.
The adorable woman surrendered to his kisses; the carnal dream made them unconscious of good and evil; they advanced, eagerly and with swimming heads, ready to place their feet on the bark that sails towards the Isle of Delights, seeking to ascertain how the sails were shifting and the condition of the rudder. Entragues suddenly got up, pale; ghostly behind the window curtains, terrible in her red robe, Sixtine had revealed herself.
"Ah!" he vaguely thought, terrified, but his own self again, "this is reality. The illusions are reaped, the hay is brought in, the field is bare. This had to happen. The images which one voluntarily evokes come to acquire mischievous habits and evoke themselves independently. This one is impatient. So much the worse tor her; I did not invite her."
The bed curtains had to be closed and the lights put out. Sixtine spared them by not moving and by disdaining the stratagem of phosphorescence.
The candles, when after a while they were lit again, showed Entragues an empty room: Sixtine had departed. But departed also where the desires and all the unacknowledged pleasure of a delightful night of debauchery.
He dared not go out, fearing a solitude that might be peopled against his will. To fatigue the body is to fatigue the intelligence: he had enfeebled himself as a person stupefies himself with laudanum.
"Afin de réduire le Ternaire, par le moyendu Quaternaire, à la simplicité de l'unité."Le R. P. Esprit Sabathier,l'Ombre idéale de la sagesse universelle.
"Ah! yes," mused Hubert, as he replaced the book in the corner restricted to philosophers, "the pages of Ribot's positive and disenchanting psychology make good reading at a moment, not of spleen, but of stark boredom. This penetrating dialectician clearly proves to me that my personality is a fragile chord which a single false note in the keyboard can destroy. It is all the same to me: a madness caused by a fixed idea must greatly assist in supporting life. Thus, collectors are to be envied, those who gather and classify old copper buttons, or old secret locks, or all that has been written against women, or the figurines of Sèvres porcelain, or the articles of M. Lemaître, or the slippers of historic balls. One need not be fastidious in choosing a mania: to be good it has only to be inexhaustible. As for the more distinguished follies, many excellent ones can be noted and, in general, none of those which are termed mild manias should be scorned: the people once knew this well, for they respected, in the persons of fools, the state of mind never attained by men of sense: happiness."
He continued thus for a long time, stretched back on his armchair, smoking cigarettes, wearied from his night and still enfeebled by a protracted bath. At bottom, he was deeply ashamed of himself, as after every similar defilement, and not at all reassured as to the metaphysical consequences of this sin. No reasoning, brutal though his unbelief might be, could efface such an impression. The being endowed with human intelligence and will always regulates himself by some rule, a mental guide that is often unconscious, but whose existence is immediately and with certitude revealed by the transgression. There is no common moral conscience outside of a religion that is strict and observed in all its commandments, the laws of society, and the special regulations belonging to a certain group: morality is a personal talent. Thus, Entragues felt himself soiled by an immersion in pleasure where others would still have enjoyed, even repletion, the gratification of a ruminant.
Moreover, he was not impious: having seen remorse rear its head before him, now that the hour of the bravado had passed, he trembled at the memory of the reproachful phantom. That night cut a phase of his life in two, and he saw himself equal to those whom physical existence confines beneath its claws: brother of the first comer and thrown back among the vulgar elements, he ceased to be himself. Ah! he had judged! Now he could be judged.
In this state of mind, nothing could interest him; since the principle of all interest vanished. Opium-like dreams benumbed him and all the texts on the vanity of things which he had gathered here and there in his readings, played under his skull, like the bell of a rattle.
Love, strangled by his hand, barred his path: to advance, it was necessary to leap over the dead thing: no! he would remain on this side, unless a miraculous and quite questionable resurrection occurred.
Glory! the bell has been melted so that little bells could be made. And as for the brass of the bells, does one ever know the right of the metal to the claim? One dies and the cracked sounds make the bell-ringers laugh.
He recited the proud and yet disheartening verses of old Dante:
La mondaine rumeur n'est rien qu'un souffleDe vent qui vient d'ici, qui vient de là,Et, changeant d'aire, change aussi de nom.
Having put these three lines in French syllables, Hubert observed how difficult it was to clothe Dante in a fitting foreign garb. He pardoned the well-intentioned persons who had attempted it in scandalous translations: one could do no better than to adopt an exact, if disfiguring, metaphor: the precision of the original becomes loose, its clearness shadowy, for it is necessary to employ certain short words whose true sense is lost, and others which are no longer read except in glossaries. Finally, he laid down this aphorism: it is impossible to translate into an old and refined language a work belonging to the youth of a kindred language.
These technical notations, the reading of some verse, trips from his table to his library, had somewhat revived him. Although he felt that the depression might last all day and doubtless many more days, he recovered courage and believed himself fit for some light work. Hubert was not a poet, no more than many others who pretend to the poetic gift. His impressions translated themselves into little notes of analytical prose, not into fixed and exact rhythms; but he had learned the craft, knew the most modern secrets of versification, and in happy hours could, without illusion, fabricate an interesting piece according to the rules.
This morning, he succeeded in giving the final details to a diptych whose appearance had heretofore not satisfied him. It was heavy and the hammer beat had shaped it, directed by a hand that was more strong than adroit, but it seemed to him that the metal was good and without cracks.
MORITURADans la serre torride, une plante exotiquePenchante, résignée: éclos hors de saisonDeux boutons fléchissaient, l'air grave et mystique;La sève n'était plus pour elle qu'un poison.Et je sentais pourtant de la fleur accabléeS'évaporer l'effluve âcre d'un parfum lourd,Mes artères battaient, ma poitrine troubléeHaletait, mon regard se voilait, j'étais sourdDans la chambre, autre fleur, une femme très pale,Les mains lasses, la tête appuyée aux coussins:Elle s'abandonnait: un insensible râleSoulevait tristement la langueur de ses seins.Mais ses cheveux tombant en innombrables bouclesOndulaient sinueux comme un large flot noirEt ses grands yeux brillaient du feu des escarbouclesComme un double fanal dans la brume du soir.Les cheveux m'envoyaient des odeurs énervantes,Pareilles à l'éther qu'aspire un patient,Je perdais peu à peu de mes forces vivantesEt les yeux transperçaient mon coeur inconscient.
The afternoon vanished, a very calm night conquered, he found himself astonished at the sudden return of vigor and of capacity for work. Three days after, he had completed "Peacock Plumes" and "The Twenty-Eighth of December;" he reread them, not without suffering from a sense of inmost shame, for although the conception of this last study was anterior to the luckless night, he had not been able, so identically did the situations present themselves, to develop his old idea except by borrowing from his recent adventure.
It had often happened to him that his revery intervened in the active series and broke its determination; such a result, certainly, no longer filled him with childish astonishments, but this time there was a truly marvelous subordination of the fact to the idea. This was the theme: faithless to a beloved Dead, A desires another woman, who yields and gives herself to him; but, at the moment of possession, the beloved Dead woman appears to him, in certain conditions to be developed, and the old love vanquishes the new. This outline, with some linear modifications, could symbolically have characterized the unexpected events of his night with Valentine. Presentiment and coincidence did not explain such an occurrence and, moreover, such an occurrence was the hundredth he had observed. Hence the conception of a possible event had brought it into his life, conditioned by the intervention of an external will, adapted to the vital limits of time and space, but recognizable in its constituent and original elements. It was worth reflecting upon: it was a whole corner of the yet unknown psychology, a whole order of phenomena as curious, for example, as the fact of suggestion so bungled by official hypnotizers, who lack philosophic understanding. This could even be classed under the chapter of suggestions; but if, in things of this kind, one knew the suggester, the person to whom a thing was suggested would escape. Nor was it a matter of a will dimly or even unconsciously domineered by another will; there was rather, as a point of departure, a will seeking to bring about the wholly ideal and wholly subjective accomplishment of a thing. But how could this will act upon the immutable order of things? Since the suggester found himself, in the case of the person subject to his will, in the second state, was it not merely a case of auto-suggestion? Then, too, it was necessary to explain how the subjected person could bring over, into his orb, wills and facts external to himself and how, in sustaining an order suggested by his mental activity, he could make it submit to all its relationships of things and beings. Idealism unveiled these dim arcana for him. Assuredly the thinking person dominates those who do not think, and the man who wills, though unwittingly, the realization, though ideal, of a group of facts, dominates all wills which, unwarned, are not on guard, finding themselves unprepared to oppose will with will. The material and unconscious world lives and moves only in the intelligence which perceives and recreates it anew according to personal forms; there is as much of the thinking world as a superior intelligence unites and fashions to his wish. The conflict is only among superiorities, and the rest, the herd, follows the masters, willy-nilly: ah! revolt is quite useless.
Entragues consequently found himself arrived at that point of intellectuality where one commences to make himself obeyed: order, apparently incoercible, yielded to his dream. It was now a question of mastering the dream and will. This was quite different: never having cultivated that faculty, he only possessed it to a rudimentary degree. The method was clear, he should have known how to make use of it; he could not and the world, without a doubt, would escape him. His regret was moderate: his desires did not exceed potentiality. The ideal world, as he held it, sufficed for his activity which was entirely mental and too unarmed for the struggle.
He had chosen the best part: should he be mad enough to consent to a disastrous exchange? Everything belonged to him in the sphere where he revolved: under logic's eye, he was the absolute master of a transcendent reality whose joyous domination did not give him leisure for a vulgar life and human preoccupations. To will? To will what? Ah! how much more interesting it is to watch oneself think: what spectacle equals that of the human brain, that marvelous hive where the ideal bees, in their nest of cells, distil thought: a fleeting activity, but which at least gives the illusion of duration. Ah! merely illusion, for only the eternal exists.
At this point in his revery Entragues was bitten by a serpent: the external, disdained and almost disowned world was evoked in the image of Sixtine. It was necessary to admit it: he had interests in this part of the perceptible world.
Then returned the same lamentations: fear, hope, doubt: love, composed of these three terms, ever arose, leading the trinity to unity and it was a circle, imperious as a circle. He lived a whole day in this prison, then towards evening a quite sharp sensation of indignity struck his heart and this obsession, poisoned by the arrow, inflamed the wound: "I am going to see Sixtine, I want to see her, but if she yields to my entreaty, the idea that she surprised me with another woman will make me fancy that only jealousy inclines her to unshared desires, and I will be paralyzed. I should do better to return to my home." But the image was stronger: he obeyed the suggestion.
"Ah!" he told himself, always capable of strict reasoning, "I am afraid I looked at the work of the ideal bees from too near a view, I well know that I think, but I no longer know what I think."
"Aria Serena, guand'apar l'alboreE bianca neve scender senza vento ...Ció passa la beltate ...De la mia donna ...... Non po' 'maginareCh'om d'esto monde l'ardisca amirare ...Ed i' s'i' la sguardasse, ne morira."Guido Cavalcanti.
It rained peacock plumes,Pan, pan, pan,The multicolored door glowed with flames.The sky of the bed trembled towards an oarystis,It rained peacock plumes,Plumes of a white peacock.
The tower waved gracefully like a felucca undulating in the evening sea breeze. And it was truly raining peacock plumes: Guido was astonished and blew at them. He caught one in flight: it was white, with an orange eye and luminous spaces. Ah! they all seemed to be looking at him: they paused in front of him, they smiled, they fell, they died. As they neared the earth, the wind spun them around a little, some dust floated, then they disappeared; the passersby did not even raise their heads.
The tower leaned over until it touched the ground: Guido leaped into the street. He was not deceived. The peacock plumes had disappeared: from below they could no longer be seen. It was a pity, for they were pretty. He continued to walk in full liberty, his head high, full of joy, watching the women. He passed under the madonna without emotion, threw a glance towards the portal of the church, which he found as ugly as a wagoner's gate, and of the Novella he only saw a madonna in trappings, wholly devoid of attractions. Nevertheless he bowed to her.
The door was gay with oriental robes: a negro in white was ordering some women into a curtained carriage; the women were caged like the Carmelites of Saint-Augustine when they go to get food. One was in blue, one in red, one in green, one in violet, and one in yellow. The first four climbed into the carriage, laughing like children and uttering rapid strange words. Guido, who had approached, saw that each one bore, pinned to her monkish cloak, a label behind her head. He deciphered the writing on the violet woman who was gesticulating a little less than the others:All eccellentissimo e nobilissimo signor Ricardo Caraccioli. So they had a certain destination! They were not to be let free in the country among the grass, the bluebottles, the poppies and crocuses? But what would theseigneurCaraccioli do with such flowerets? Guido knew him: he was a gentleman of exemplary habits, the son of a cardinal, and nephew of the late pope. What would he do with that young girl? A dialogue informed him:
"Are they all for the same most excellentseigneur?" asked a subordinate officer who held a large book in his hand.
"All for the same man," the negro answered, "at least they are all bound for the same name. Does it surprise you? But he will share them with his friends. His only fear is that they will seek to quarrel with him."
"Where are they from?"
"The devil only knows! We captured them off Algiers. A fine galley, all gilded, with flowers, feathers and perfumes. The captain towed it to Palerma, where he was able to dispose of it at a good price: that's his privilege. These women were on it; three old women and eleven men, a pasha, his equipage, keepers. No time was wasted: the men were thrown, bound and bleeding, into the sea. What a crew of bandits, eh? Eleven less and the old women thrown into the bargain."
"Five Turkish women," the other returned. "That's fifty ducats for the king and a flask of wine for me...."
"Good, let us drink."
"... In women," continued thedoganiere, "and in specie."
The negro paid. They drank at a nearby tavern, their eyes never straying from their merchandise.
Guido understood that they were slaves destined for the harem of the most illustrious Caraccioli. At Venice, where he had lived, it was customary, since the Turks were pirating, to return the compliment. If this was becoming popular in Naples, so much the better; he would gather, into a little house, some Oriental women for his pleasure. Guido was neither sufficiently naive nor spiteful to believe that the most excellent hypocrite was carrying on the trade of fair eyes for his friends. Well! he could do likewise: arm a vessel, dispatch it on long cruises to the Barbary coasts, nourish the enlisted bandits with salty provisions and the captive beauties with blancmange.... Ah! he suddenly remembered: all his wealth had been confiscated by the crown! Not even a ducat in his hose; not a sword, not a pistol to procure money on the highway, and bareheaded as a Lazarite!
He would have to attend to this penury.
The office of the royal customs-house was opened and the overseer was drinking to the fiscal ransom of the Algerian women: he entered. The arrant employees of His Majesty were drowsing pen in hand, of course. He pushed another door, though perceived: a third one, and the treasure. From a very fine collection of garments, hose, cloaks, swords, pistols and French hats, he provided himself with a quite gallant outfit, added a remarkable piece of Alençon silk, a little string for the women, and some rope for the silent strangulation of the cashier. It was a small matter to pass through the three doors where pleasant dreams were stirring, and he found him a little farther away. His sleep was hardly broken: a little movement of the hands, nothing more. Without being very rich, the royal coffer was still interesting. He placed it in his pockets, untied the rope, returned it to its place, and strolled out.
On the threshold, thedoganieresaluted him:
"Does Your Excellency deign to be pleased?"
"Yes, yes," Guido replied. "These gentlemen are polite. Here," he added, taking out a ducat, "go and drink with this."
The negro counted his women: one, two, three, four.... "All's well. No, I should have five. Let us count them: one, two, three, four, five."
The carriage departed.
"I love you, my lord, let us go!"
The yellow Algerian, appearing before him like a radiant caprice, had taken him by the hand.
"As soon as I saw you," she continued, "I hid myself so as not to be led away with the others, for I belong to you, I am your slave. My name is Pavona."
"But," asked Guido, "how were you able to see me with your closed eyes, for I know that, under your hood, your eyes are closed!"
"It is true," said Pavona. "You know me then?"
"Yes, I know you, you are she who was destined me to vanquish the Novella's disdain. When I beseeched her love, the consent of her passion, so many times confessed and yet never decisive, she closed her eyes, she said: 'No.' And I said: 'Well, I will love other eyes so that the eyes of the Novella might weep and be merciful to me.' Then her eyelashes lifted and I grew pale with fright: instead of the blue and gentle irises, I saw strange eyes like those designed on the plumes of a peacock, a white peacock."
"I do not understand anything of this," said Pavona. "I never open my eyes, for a very simple reason. I cannot. But I shall love you well all the same, you see!"
"You have never tried!"
"To open my eyes? No, and for what purpose, since I have none. Wait, I remember an oracle sung to me by the Bohemian woman, formerly, when I was very little. It had this refrain:
But when some one to you will say'I love you!' sight will come your way."
Guido found this very natural.
They stopped at a rich tavern, dazzling as a palace, and they were received like princely persons.
Preceded by a servant, they climbed, climbed, climbed, as though to the sky.
"Carry me, Guido, or I will be quite tired," said Pavona.
Guido took her in his arms. They climbed, climbed, as though towards the sky.
"Kiss me, Guido, or I shall grow quite bored," said Pavona.
Guido kissed the closed eyelashes. They climbed, climbed, climbed, as though towards the sky.
"Here," said the servant at last, "is the apartment of Your Highnesses."
The multicolored door truly glowed with flames, for it was of silver and studded with diamonds.
"It is heaven's door," said Pavona. "I wish to open it myself."
She entered first, holding Guido by the hand.
There was a very agreeable blue dimness in the chamber: the couch, at the end, defined itself under heavy draperies.
Fondlings and caressings: Guido felt himself burn with desire, and Pavona, quite determined, returned his kisses, ardor for ardor.
"I love you," Guido cried.
Pavona opened her eyes.
They were fearful. They were like the eyes designed on the plumes of a peacock, a white peacock.
Guido swooned and awoke in his cell, an assassin, a thief, a perjurer.
"I am a wretch," he thought, after a moment, "a wretch unworthy of his own pity. The crimes one commits in dreaming, one is really capable of committing. What occurs in the dream lay dormant in the caves of the will, or rather, they are prophecies and the celestial admonition of an irrevocable predestination. Ah! rather to have been criminal than to live in the certitude of a future crime. I accept the weight of my mortal sins: by degrees penitence will dissolve them like a sack of salt by the rain, and my shoulders will straighten again, delivered. Pardon me, most holy madonna, and punish me."
Ah! l'amour est terrible et je souffre d'aimer!Comment bénir encore tes adorables pieds?Comment, d'un front souille par des lèvres de femme,Recevoir le divin sourire où joue ton âme?Comment bénir encore tes adorables pieds?
"Feminine to her inmost heart, and feminineto her tender feet.Very woman of very woman, nurse of ailingbody and mind."Tennyson,Locksley HallSixty Years After
He had a fair skin and a savage mustache, his beard cut like the Austrians, an animal jaw, beatified eyes; the air of needing plenty of meat and plenty of tenderness. His skull seemed to be straight, under his closely-cut hair and his ears, too long, seemed endowed with a special motility. His gestures revealed the uneasy deference of the stranger, but on occasion there appeared the sudden hauteur of the gentleman; he lacked an easy bearing, but there was some vivacity and a rude charm in him.
Hubert, examining this intruder, assumed a reserve which masked his curiosity. He thought he perceived that for Sixtine this was more than a chance visitor, and the name awakened a discouraging association of ideas, for it strictly agreed with the initials, although this person, it seemed to him, had no connection with the portrait, so far as the figure was concerned. His name was Sabas Moscowitch.
Sixtine spelled out the syllables with complacency and, after uttering a few banalities, narrated some pages of the history of Monsieur Sabas. A life not unlike Tolstoy's, without the final mysticism: a period of living in the Caucasus and then at his manor, in his domains which were disorganized by the recent freedom; he had a reformative turn of mind in sympathy with modern trends, and had won successes at the theatre with dramas of conflicts which had displeased the czar; then, and this was the interesting side of Monsieur Sabas, he had come to France to have his dramas played. As he knew French from childhood, he was translating them himself. Yet some advice would be profitable to him: he likewise had need of some support in the literary world. She boldly anticipated the kindness of Hubert.
"M. d'Entragues could be very useful to you."
Entragues, in a very guarded tone, offered his services. To read his dramas, present the author to theRevue spéculative, give the cue to Van Baël, who knew everybody, win over Fortier—all this was possible. Besides, Fortier was seeking new things: it would be a good idea, after the novels, to attempt the publication of a Russian drama. One of them would appear in theRevuewith a great hubbub, and the road would be prepared for the others.
Sixtine seemed enchanted with the plan: Moscowitch had a vision of the glory he would gain; Entragues said to himself: "Either they are making a fool of me, and I have nothing to lose in being amiable to this Russian, or else she is only interesting herself in him through vanity, and the more I do, the more she will be grateful to me. No, I shall certainly be a dupe and without reward; there are old relations between them: the S. M. proves it. Oh! how anxious I am to mock gently before being mocked myself by the facts. That would mean to lose all. Ah! but I am implicated in odd intrigues! I must examine my acts carefully and weigh my words: it is painful. Ah! how I should like to leave! How I wish that I had never known this woman who holds me here and compares me with the other! I see it quite well: she is analyzing us, in so far as a woman is capable of doing it; she measures and weighs us; she asks herself which of the two would give her the greater pleasure. And perhaps she is embarrassed, for if one of us, and it is I, should attract her by the physical and intellectual affinities of race, the other has for her the magic of newness, of the unexpected, of the different. For she is perverted: without this, she would have a husband or a lover. Women who wait, who want to choose, who desire the utmost possible, are capable of deciding suddenly under the pressure of an unaccustomed sensation. But is it the first time she has seen this Moscowitch? Oh, no! but as long as the veil has not been lifted, the mystery remains untouched and still tempting. The exportation to France of Russian novels should be an enterprise for the Don Juans of the Neva: one must be, at this hour, a Russian to please. Oh! it is quite immaterial whether we shall be Russianized to-day or in a century, since we will be so, eventually: Tolstoy is the ensign-bearer and Dostoevsky the trumpet of the vanguard.Amen!I open the door to Moscowitch. If they play his dramas in place of mine and if he takes the woman I desire, well and good, for deprived of all, I shall perhaps enjoy peace."
Having finished this inward monologue, hardly interrupted by the nodding of the head and the vague syllables thrown by him as replies in the conversation, Entragues, with a sudden movement, arose.
"You are leaving?"
There was such an accent of reproach in these three words that Entragues was stricken with remorse. It was a foolish act: he soon saw its consequence, for Moscowitch instantly stood up to his full height, ready to follow him.
"Since it is too late, and since the pleasure of a tête-à-tête eludes me, we will leave together. I wouldn't mind talking a little with this Russian and, if he must be my rival, learning his quality; at least I shall know to whom I yield my place."
He was a child.
"Isn't she truly charming and adorable?"
"Ah! confidences?" Entragues told himself. "This is excellent. He belongs to those whose heart overflows with sentiment as a brook under a heavy rain, and he is going to tell me his life. Perfect. I am conscious of a mischievous curiosity. How I will enjoy it!"
A slight quiver of joy coursed through him, and his fingers twisted through nervousness.
"Isn't she?"
"Are you speaking of Madame Magne? I have known her only a short while. She is an intelligent woman."
"It is evident," Moscowitch rejoined, "that her beauty, her charm, and her grace have not made a strong impression on you. It is surprising."
"Why so? The sympathies of any group do not necessarily go to the same woman, though she have intelligence and an Aspasian beauty. The charm that has captivated you does not exist for me, or exists only in a less degree."
"Ah! you reason like a very sensible Frenchman. As for myself, I believe I am incapable of reasoning on this point."
"This does not prevent me," Entragues returned, "from doing justice to her qualities. She is, to put it simply, a complete woman. This word, which implies everything and specifies nothing, is appropriate, for I believe her to be very flexible, and made to pattern herself, like the ivy, on the oak to which she will cling."