"Ως ἧν έν άεχἥ"Greek Liturgy."Man, meditate on the syllable Om."The Khandogya Upanishad.
Hubert wrote two notes, and the evening of the second day knocked at Sixtine's door. Absence. A third note and another visit were likewise in vain.
"She is sulking," he thought. "So much the better. Her anger will exhaust itself against my shadow and, when she condescends to receive me, her beautiful face will be free of all vexation."
He was too assured of virtual possession even to suppose an attempt to fly from his hands. By imaginary advances, realized in desire, the union was established for ever. All scorn was impossible: she had breathed the fragrance of the philter.
Far from grieving, he congratulated himself; far from languishing, he breathed more deeply the invigorating breezes of certitude. Having achieved peace with himself, having thrown his pride overboard, his lightened bark now moving spiritedly towards the haven of golden sands, he would enter at the propitious hour.
The morning of the fourth day, he received news in this form:
"Please do not forget the soirée of the Countess on Wednesday next. This on her behalf.
"On my own behalf, I am sorry for having been too unwell and too busy either to receive you or to reply.
"But have we not eternity? S. M."
Entragues saw no disquieting bitterness in this raillery—and another day passed.
"The catalogue of obscene joys is brief, but it suffices, on certain days, to give the desire of purifying oneself for this world and the other. Solange had some rather just views before his malady: it is distressing that the chastity of devotees should be defiled in the hour when they regain their solitary oratories. I shall do well to read Tertullian and some consoling pages before retiring, for I fear the power of words. No, I shall dream of Sixtine. Dear creature of my desire, I trust in your magic: what wanton importunities will not yield to the grace of your gestures? Abode of my will, retreat of my illusions of love, appear to me and protect me!"
They were standing, interlaced. She kissed him lightly and repeatedly on the corner of his eyes, while having him breathe a rose. It could not last, he was becoming too languid.
Silvery moonlight, clouds, strident peals which usher in lightning, silvery moonlight.
The storm hovers in the velvety sky, the turbulent clouds pass, rifts pour out silvery moonlight.
It has thundered, indeed. Far away it rumbles, it rumbles! Another flash! Ah! it lightens, long! Again! He is dead.
Hubert awoke, roused by the terrible rumbling.
"Ah! Desecration! It was Sixtine. Ah! the plague of imbecile nerves!"
All during the storm, he remained up in his bed, haggard and shivering. The confusion of his sensations stunned him: he could not understand how this carnal hallucination had developed parallel with the beginning of the storm in a moonlight night. At last, when the dream's absurdity was evident to him, he grew calm and, benumbed by the cold, fell again between his covers.
"This day will be horrible. After all, it is worse than Guido, worse than Valentine! Such a retrogression is degrading. And I think I am master of myself, master of the external world, master of this universe—a woman—when I cannot even regulate the order the logical sequence of my impressions! The human mechanism should be known to me, and if consequences are unconquerable, at least the causes should submit to my will. The saints, with the aid of God, had this power; but God has deserted us and because of the modern Celsus' has left us, without bucklers, exposed to the arrows of Sin. Henceforth, all hours are its hour and we all belong to it: it has conquered time, space and number."
Hubert had never felt, as in those moments, the misfortune of being a man and of being nothing else. His pride, ruined by his passion, collapsed like an old wall, and, lying on the ruins bemoaned himself. This attraction, reasoned and combatted with the logical weapons of his character, became the stronger, dominated him consciously and unconsciously. He had come to a state where he no longer thought; his mind no longer functioned save in brief deductions, and the need of security distracted him from exact observation. During those decisive days, in which Sixtine had taken a part, without a doubt, he limited his tactics to brief recalls of presence, instead of obtruding himself point-blank and barring the road to every other unforeseen arrival. It was easy to avoid the nocturnal visitation, by going himself to the fair visitor: if a magnetic and super-reasonable force had thrust Sixtine in his arms while asleep, this same force, according to the most elementary directions, had, on occasion, very, surely joined their realities, as it had joined their phantasms. He lost knowledge of his philosophy, revealed himself capable of nothing but theories—a critic and not a creator of life.
Whether this encounter in unconsciousness was the result of a wholly personal hallucination, or whether both had been, in their sleep, summoned towards each other by the power of desire, and whether, while she visited him, he, in turn, had gone to her—all this he could not unravel.
Yet he knew the import and the frequency of these mutual evocations and his soul was a battlefield where mysticism had instantly vanquished incredulity.
He went to stroll along the quais. The winter sun smiled, the wind had abated, sparrows chirped on the leafless trees, a warm humidity vaporized the mild air.
Books, first, passed before his eyes as far off and inaccessible things; then a binding tempted his hand, an unknown title, his attention. He felt the first titillations of fever, and gave himself up.
Now, one by one, he touched them, opened them, to acquire the certainty of the nothingness within; he grieved that a pleasant golden binding enclosed the gallant nonsense of little shivering verses of indigence, or the philosophism of a Diderot, or the worthless manuals of Jansenistic piety.
For a few sous he had just bought a treatise on simony and haggled eagerly with a rogue of a vendor for some Neo-Parnassian collections—recently received and already depreciated by the universal indifference—when a familiar hand was placed on his shoulder.
With a twisting movement, with a natural but sure insolence, he freed himself, then turned his head.
It was Marguerin, the theosophist, whose friends excused his licentious folly as a malady of the cerebellum. His play of features, strangely promising, seduced women in search of debasement: he was rich and subsidized an angelical review. This day, a fixed idea, which he confided to Entragues, gave his face an imbecile appearance.
"Dead! Perhaps you remember that blond girl, Maia!"
"His present phantasy," thought Hubert, "does not incite any repugnance. Have I not had the madness of eyes, and am I cured of it? Has not the vision of two large eyes ever been necessary to complete my happiness? It is strange that there should be this constant union of two sensations so different in kind, namely, visual sensation and spasm. Sick, ah! an innate and uncurable sickness!"
(While sipping absinthe:)
"Intoxication is a very noble passion, and I would like to acquire it.... Intoxication, one should rather say drunkenness, but philanthropists, have brought the word down to the humanitarian mud of their Anglican dissertations.... Alcoholism has been contaminated, no less.... Intoxication suffices. This absinthe is comforting. The blond Maia was perhaps loved by that wretch. She was lovely and here is what is left of it: a pathological regret. Why disdain intoxication? It is the most intellectual of passions; it does not depress like gambling; it does not weaken like love. Ah! what a godsend! Absinthe is not at all hurtful; it is green and concentrated wine. Is it not ideal to be able to arrive at intoxication with a single glass of liquid? The Orientals have opium, but for that is needed the Oriental sky. And then, to each one his own system. The important thing is that it remove you far from the world: everything that draws us away from ourselves is divine. How many times nevertheless, have I been drunk with pure contemplation! yes, that too is a method. All are salutary. I hate myself, I wish to live another life, I wish to correct ideally the infirmities inherent in my carnal state, I wish to deliver my soul from the miseries of my body ... I should love her from afar, as Guido loves his madonna. Contact is a destroyer of dreams. You will not know the book of love where I have beatified you, for it will disappear with desire, burned by the flames of your first kiss. The pyre that will open heaven for you will consume my forces: you will ascend upward through space and I will fall like Satan, I will fall into the infernal hells for eternity.... A singular declamation and quite difficult to justify! All this for some pleasure mutually shared by two beings who adore each other. The consequences of the union of the sexes are not at all so tragic, ordinarily ... I am very much upset. It is quite urgent that the denouement restores security to one of the actors. To bring things back to their true state: she will be troubled and I will be calmed—a very desirable result.
"For the aim of an intelligent life is not to live with the Princess of Trebizond, but to explain oneself in one's motives of action by deeds or by gestures. Writing reveals the inward act; it is much less important to feel than to know the order of sensation, and this is the mind's revenge on the body: nothing exists save through the Word. As well say that the Word alone exists. Saint John, the evangelist, knew it, and the Rajah Ramohun Roy knew it, and others: Om and Logos: it is the only science; when that is known everything is known. I will realize myself, accordingly, through the Word.... And you? What shall I do with you and your soul! Ah! Sixtine, your soul I shall drink, little by little, in nightly and daily celebrations, diluted in the saliva of your kisses,—like holy portions: you will have no existence save in me, and you will fortify me like a spiritual elixir. We shall be hermaphrodites. Thus will unity be brought about: and I shall have renounced, without renouncing you, the chimerical pursuit of a love external to myself. Ah! unity will not be ternary—sin against the rites! For I do not want carnal posterity. May my flesh be sterile and my mind fruitful! We shall beget dreams and with our thoughts we shall people the night of space. We shall talk, and our speech, diffused beyond the stars, will make the gloomy eternity of the ether vibrate eternally. We shall have gestures of love, and the signs of our love will be reflected in the innumerable mirrors of the molecules of light. Yes, we shall amuse ourselves with this illusion, in overturning Laws, by our phantasy, for we are not ignorant of the fact that the world dies of the caducity of thought which creates it and that the stars, as well as the nail of our little finger, will perish when death closes the eyes of the last man.
"Ah! I mount very high, I go very far. Like a bomb my head is filled with explosives and the lucidity of my mind grows extremely bright.... Then the novel will be vanquished: a new form of analysis will have been demonstrated. The identity of character will be affirmed by its very contradictions and something Hegelian will relieve the gloomy simplicity of ordinary creatures clothed in the rigidity of a material style. The novel of hearts, the novel of souls, the novel of bodies, the novel of all the sensibilities: after this must come the novel of minds. As I understand it, the word 'soul' represents the quintessence of heart; mind, that is to say pure intelligence in conflict with carnal inconveniences, was disdained, without doubt, as uninteresting. Always, and nothing but this, conjunctions of sexes and joy. Oh! well! quite natural! 'to possess the woman one loves.' But at last there are modern Antonies who have proposed other pur-poses to themselves, who have reduced all duties to a single duty—to conform one's life to one's dream. Passersby who jostle you proceed dreaming of the universal idealism as seriously as you of the surprises of perfected corsets. And some of them, if the beast asks for oats will answer: 'Death's white horse did not eat any of it.' And do you not suppose that if humiliating forces curve their refractory knees before a woman, they will not have, very often, recourse to the consolation of inward irony? In fine, I affirm the cerebral life—and all the rest was written in manuals of psychology.
"Irony is but a momentary protest, a mental destruction and a pledge against the excess of sensual satisfaction; it is not a certain way of liberation. From this halting-place one gradually mounts to a dominating position by pride or by contemplation, by art or by mysticism. These methods, known in their principle, are denied, like fairy-like childishness: in the novel they must be given the importance they have in daily life: As an animal, man thought only of perfecting his animalism; and Christianity was, one thinks, a notable spiritual advance. It endowed simple humanity with a complex soul. When Flaubert wroteSalammbô, he instinctively made the young priestess a Carmelite rather than a Vestal, for the Vestal obeys an order and the Carmelite a love; one is attached to her position through habit, the other through love. The idyl, the satire of customs, the picaresque romance, the tragic and fatal passion, the patriotic epic, the amorous plaint,—the ancients had no other literature: the first histories of a soul, the first analytical novel was spontaneously born in the new genius of a Christianized mind and it was Saint Augustine who wrote it. Modern literature commences with theConfessions.
"We must return to it. Zola and others may continue to catalogue their inferior animals, they have no interest for us: they are crude creatures about to acquire light, chrysalid intelligences: we are little concerned with the quality of the food with which they gorge themselves, or with their pruriencies. Whatever is not intellectual is foreign to us.
"What a disconcerting irony that in this century which drinks the blue democratic wine from the Chalice, no original prose writer was revealed who was not Christian by instinct or belief, desire or necessity, love or disgust,—from Chateaubriand to Villiers and Huysmans, and no true poet, from Vigny to Baudelaire and Verlaine!
"Comte has not touched, with his heavy stones, the souls he wanted to overwhelm,—no more than an infant who hurls tiny pebbles from the strand at the inaccessible flight of gulls! And this very age, which claims to admit only the force that is mathematically proved, will be extinguished by verbal idealism. People will no longer believe in things, but in the mere ideas we have of them; and, as the obscurity of the idea is clarified only by speech, nothing more of things will exist than the words describing them and the final destruction of matter will end with the judgment of this axiom: The universe is the sign of the word...."
"But," reflected Hubert again, as he left thecafé, "this, and my scorn of a derisive reality and illusive truth, does not imply laziness in art, or cowardice, or the approximate. Nor has the idealism I profess anything in common with the vague intuitions of those spinners of psychological ribbons,—it is a documented idealism, solidly erected, like the ornamented portal of a cathedral, upon the foundations of accuracy...."
"En résumé, la fête me paraissait un balde fantômes."Villiers de l'Isle-Adam,l'Amour suprême.
Hubert gladly mingled in the conversations, dances, scandals, the many (rather charming) frivolities which took place from eleven o'clock in the evening until six o'clock in the morning at the home of the Countess Aubry.
Flowers, music, vocal screeches and caresses, shoulders, diamonds, bedizened uniforms, for the countess had connections with foreign diplomacy.
Sixtine, an augural apparition, appeared through the clinking Japanese portiere; one of her hands played with her multicolored pearls.
She advanced, Moscowitch behind her, his eyes fixed on her pure shoulders. His huge stature dominated the young woman by a whole head; he walked after her and Sixtine, faltering, seemed a very little girl kept in leading-strings by a giant. Hubert, with a bow of impertinent familiarity, passed between them and offered Sixtine his arm towards a chair. The Russian, resigned, joined a group of men and watched the talkers.
"You looked as though you were under the guardianship of that strong man, and I wanted to deliver you."
She began to laugh, quite an enigmatical laugh:
"No, he doubtless followed me for pleasure, wanting to have me under his eyes. Can a woman at a ball do anything better than let herself be seen?"
"And is it not a keen pleasure," returned Hubert, "to reveal one's arms, shoulders and neck?..."
"Very keen, no, but really the desires one evokes murmur in the ears like a flight of vernal butterflies and the rustling of their wings is sometimes soothing to the skin. You cannot understand, it is too feminine."
"Yes," murmured Hubert with a tender but undeniable irony. "Woman is a religion full of mysteries. I wish merely to adore without understanding, to kneel in the gloom, my eyes unraised towards the symbolic little red lamp: joyous mysteries and sad mysteries, to contemplate them alternatively, to know them never, perhaps, in their secret essence, and to love the dear creature whose emanation they are."
She raised her saddened eyes towards him, then, with a little anger:
"Poet and lying poetry! Tenderness is on your lips and not in your heart. Do you remember our first meeting, under the drooping branches of the old sacred firs, down there, in the gloomy avenue? You declared that nothing exists except through an evoking will. I remember it, and since then your words, often meditated, have acquired a terrible and clear meaning. You love a dream creature which you have incarnated under a semblance which is mine; you do not love me as I am, but as you have made me. You do not love a woman, but a heroine of a romance, and everything for you is but a romance.... I will tell you about this at greater length some other time, if I have leisure. Ah! my friend, there often is much charm in you, ah! if you wished and if you knew!... Do something to make me love you sufficiently to resign myself to be loved as the moving shadow of a dream. Do this ... but what do I know? To-morrow, I shall perhaps give you merely a brief no. Perhaps it will be too late to-morrow. Trust no woman, even the sincerest. Their flight is as capricious as the flight of a swallow; this one flies, that one.... They go whither their caprice takes them and then ... and then they follow the sun and kisses are fascinating beams.... Do you find that I seem to be giving you a course in seduction, according to my practice. Ah! perhaps it would be better were you contented with the dream. You could shape it according to your desire, while I, for example, will I not be malleable in vain, if I revolt against your candor? Good-by, the countess has beckoned to me and you know that I am her right hand on all grand occasions.... Good-by, Hubert, oh! we shall doubtless meet once or twice in the course of the evening.... Why not? We have so many things to say to each other.... Give me your arm."
"Strange creature, yet you belong to me! Inextricable problem, I shall decipher you by force of love, for love is the golden key which opens all women's hearts. You have the evangelical good will, you wish to love, you will love, and whom could you love except me? I shall have the curiosity to admit all your phantasies, even those which make me suffer; I do not dislike torture: this helps one to reflect on the inconveniences of being a man."
"Are you enjoying yourself?"
It was Calixte, satisfied to exhale his ennui with this simple interrogation.
"I am not bored, first, for secret reasons, then, there are some pretty dresses. It would be pleasant perhaps to imagine the nude; it is quite another matter to contemplate it: not one woman in ten gives the slighest desire to see more of her. One can be diverted for an hour or two in phonographing some fragments of the conversations in one's memory. But it is too early; this becomes somewhat eccentric only around two o'clock in the morning.
"And also," said Calixte, "to trouble some naive hearts with burning avowals."
"Ah!" answered Hubert, "are you become a dilettante? Yes, this is quite a sadistic pleasure...."
"Nevertheless...."
"Oh!" continued Hubert, "the casuists, whom fools scorn, were profound analysts of human nature. They gave concessions to love which the modern Malthusians find extreme, the hypocrites! And in this is manifest their wisdom and a marvellous intuition about physiological needs. There is not a kiss which the disdainful boldness of Ligouri does not concede to the sadness of flesh; nothing astonishes him and he condemns the most complex satiations as only venial, provided the dignity of the act be consecrated by the supreme finality."
Calixte was too spontaneous to like casuistry.
"Destiny," he told Hubert, "should have made you a monk in a Spanish monastery of the sixteenth century."
"Ah!" acquiesced Hubert, "with the grace of God I should have written fine folios."
"But you are living in the world, in an age little given to procreation, and if you put your theories to practice...."
"You well know," interrupted Hubert, "that I am, practically, abstemious, and one need not take account of accidents. Ho! I should not dislike to have some progeniture. If life were better, it would be justifiable; if it were good, it would be a strict commandment. But I have the consciousness of my wretchedness and this will spare existence to the generations who might have issued from me. Do you know my principle? It is short, strict, and I would wish it universal: No children."
Renaudeau and André de Passavant approached.
"Oh!" continued Hubert, "practically, it would be absurd and terrible, but, the principle admitted, its too numerous violations would suffice for an always excessive peopling. I should accept this cross, if it were necessary. My children would bear life as I bear it, without joy but without despair. The transcendent rascal has not killed all the swans!"
"Not yet, but he will kill them all," said André. "The lakes will be deserted and the forests silent, for they no longer will have souls to people the lakes with dreams and the forests with ideal music. Then fire will lay waste the terrestrial marsh...."
"And we shall begin again at the beginning," interrupted Renaudeau.
He disappeared without adding anything further, and Passavant, who followed him with his eyes, explained this sudden flight by seeing him glide swiftly towards Madame Aubry, who was smiling at him:
"They claim that he has already succeeded in undermining Fortier and that he is going to replace him in the review, if it is not already effected—and elsewhere, naturally."
"It was to be foreseen," said Hubert. "But as for myself, I shall not submit to his impertinences. If a few friends wished to follow me, I should sacrifice whatever sums were necessary to start a magazine that will be stricter in its choosing."
"And slightly theological?" added Passavant.
"Mystic theology in fine style...."
"Yes, yes," responded Hubert, suddenly absent-minded.
He instantly recalled that the present imposed other thoughts upon him. For the first time in his life, perhaps, he escaped the exclusive domination of art. Sixtine arose before his vision of the world like a gigantic tree whose boughs and shadows conceal the thick woods stretching behind it.
"What! Baillot here!" said Passavant, shocked.
"What has he done to you?" asked Calixte.
"Do you not remember that he denounced Desnoyers, the architect of Mont Saint-Michel, as a clerical?"
"I have seen," said Hubert, "his restorations, and they are admirable. When the years will have covered the too fresh richness with its patina, they will be masterpieces marvelously harmonizing with the architectural creations of ancient time. But I believe that it is just because he is a believer that he was able to reconstitute, as much by love as by science, such superb testimonies of a Christian epoch. What would you, a Maecenas was needed and they got a pedant!"
At this moment, Moscowitch found himself face to face with Entragues. The Russian knitted his eyebrows, but a smile, at the same instant, extenuated it:
"My dear, for the moment I renounce my dramatic projects. This damp winter is unfavorable to me, and I am going to pass a few months in the south. Thanks for all your excellent advice. They have helped me beyond your hopes."
This tone of haughty irony displeased Entragues, who answered:
"Take care, Monsieur. Are you so sure of being at such a stage where absence cannot injure you? Do you leave with the certainty of receiving letters of recall? Think that more than another I am interested in a denouement to which I have not been a stranger. Calixte, my friend, give Monsieur Moscowitch a commentary of the thirty-fourth chapter of Stendhal. Madame Magne, I think, has a word to tell me, and I am going to her."
He had perceived Sixtine visibly bored by some fool's compliments.
"At least," he thought, "she will be thankful to me for having delivered her."
Moscowitch patiently listened to Calixte whose amusing discourse on discretion yet seemed to him a contrived raillery. During this torture, Hubert sought to resume his interrupted talk with Sixtine. But she was distracted and almost meditative. Hubert related to her the poetry of his desire and she gazed at him, without having the air of understanding. Playing with her dance card, she said:
"You have not even had the idea of putting your name here and I am no longer free. Those who have requested to dance with me will come, each in proper turn, to claim the promised minutes, and, you see, it is full."
Hubert took the little card and read the inscribed names:
"Well, sacrifice one of these persons for me, the Russian for example. That would be specially agreeable."
"No," said Sixtine, "that is not possible."
"I see that you take to the man, even more than to his portrait."
"What portrait?"
"That one signed with initials which belongs to your name, and which was dedicated, still in abbreviation, to Monsieur Sabas Moscowitch...."
"Ah! that amusement of a rainy afternoon?... Is my past not sacred to you, then?"
"It dismays me. What I do not know bewilders me ... I want to know."
"But what do you gain by tormenting me thus? And by what right do you ask such questions? You are wicked to make me suffer in my soul and flesh. Leave me, or I shall tell you cruel things ..."
"I can listen to them."
"No, really, I am tired, ah! how tired I am!"
And her eyes repeated the avowal of her lips.
"But," she continued, "let us have a truce, I want to amuse myself, I want to forget, in purely nervous excitements, the struggle I am engaged with. Leave me to my partners and come to-morrow. I am very much disturbed. Come with confidence: no one has as many privileges with me as you have, Hubert, but think of all that can happen in a second, a single brief second. Here is Monsieur de Fortier come to claim me....A demain!"
Then, instead of rejoining his friends, he strolled about, insinuating himself into groups, watching, listening.
A young girl, thin and ugly, despite large dark eyes, was languidly dreaming in a chair. The fancy seized him to amuse this child. He bowed to her and the young girl, heedless of etiquette, let herself be lifted into these strange arms. The waltz made her little heart beat, her pale cheeks grew rosy, she pressed Entragues hand and in the boldness of pleasure let her bent and radiant head fall on his shoulder. He made her chat, treated her as a woman, conducted her to the refreshment-room, made her tipsy with a little champagne and a few compliments: he was thanked with a smile, which expressed the gift of a life.
In bringing her back to her place, he was almost as happy as she was and he thought that the only happiness lies in giving happiness without demanding a return.
Towards two o'clock, he resisted Calixte Heliot who discreetly tried to draw him away. Later, he saw Moscowitch, after consulting his watch, disappear into the antechamber. Sixtine brushed past him at the same instant; she turned around, chattering, on the arm of Renaudeau, who seemed to be telling her something malicious. For an hour, perhaps more, he remained in the same place, alone and motionless, watching her pass from hand to hand, carefree and smiling. He watched with an empty brain, rendered anaemic by the late hour, fuddled by the incessant bustle. Finally the rooms began to thin. While he was hesitating to offer himself to Sixtine as an escort, she vanished, flying, without turning her head, like a woman quite decided to refuse or to accept only with boredom and bad grace the arm of a man.
He suffered her to leave, went to compliment the countess, bowed to the young girl who gave him her hand, drank a last glass of punch, so as to be less affected by the morning chill, then departed in his turn and returned on foot to his dwelling.
"Quand le monde fait peur, quand la foule fatigue.Quand le coeur n' a qu'un cri:—Te voir, te voir, te voir!"Mme. Desbordes-Valmore.
He rose late, enjoying, through the window whose curtains were lifted, the wintry charm of a pale noon sun, and delighting in the state of half-consciousness which follows, after an irregular night, an extremely physical fatigue. His anaemia of a transplanted plant, combatted and almost vanquished by a regime that was country-like, returned on such mornings. He felt the languor of the consumptive and the melancholia of the adolescent.
The substantial breakfast arranged by his maid was less a comfort to his fatigued organs than an intoxication. The smoking of a single cigarette turned his head: he acquired, without having sought it, an exquisite beatitude. It was like a new condition of animated matter: the dissolving state—a special enjoyment reserved for lazy sleepers and late breakfasters. Brief, like all delights, it was not long in waning, but it was transformed gradually into an agreeable sensation of peace.
Then, stretching an arm towards his Gothic Bible, he removed the copper clasp and read, in a cloud of blue smoke, drinking strong coffee in little sips, the aphorisms of Ecclesiastes.
A reading decidedly proper to lift a wise man far above other men, a cup where one drinks sheer emptiness as surely as in a cupule of lotus, ah! ideal banalities, written, without a doubt, for the days that follow festivals.
FORTITUDE
"Poverty, labor, bodily miseries, bleeding heart wounds, bitterness of bread and wine,
"Repose, suppleness, flowerings, embraces, warmth of joyous repasts,
"And all, and all vibrations.
"The cerebral enlightenment:
"All this indifferent to us, from the commencement to the end,
"For there is a commencement and an end, and, thank God, the soothing void is made for all.
"We have confidence in the transcendental goodness of the Creator: he will not prolong, beyond the human term, our pains or joys.
"And not even a shrugging of shoulders, for we are too witty to rage against the eternal laws; besides, we have the sentiment of decorum."
He was tired, as tired as Sixtine, of this dim passion. The night of their hearts truly needed some flashes of lightning. For a week she had retired within herself, but like a flower which, at the approach of a storm, draws together its trembling petals above the sacred pistils; the danger over, they return to their former state and joyously receive the fugitive caress of the passing pollen.
"Another less metaphorical reflection: the Russian has certainly made positive advances and in his plaints the magic word of marriage must, like an echo, have returned and reverberated. Magic he considers it. I do not know. She must wish to preserve a certain liberty of behavior and the personal home of a woman unaccustomed to share the ambient air with another. Moreover, I have never surprised, in the implications of her phrases, the least allusion to a matrimonial desire. I do not believe that she would wish to close with such a banal epilogue the indefinite avenue of our common dreams. We cannot erect this barrier in the midst of our life, dividing in two adverbs—before, after—the perspective of our desires, that sphinx rising towards the horizontal profundities of the sky!
"Ah! I regret that this is not the stone on which her foot has stumbled, for I should understand at least.
"After all, she was only to answer me. I think that I have been sufficiently precise and if acts rather than words were needed, have I not given myself up to acts?
"A quite unfortunate tentative!...
"Ah! I am weary, as weary as she is weary.
"If you do not wish to drink the dew I offer to your lips in the hollow of my hand, some beast, bolder or wiser, will pass, that will refresh itself with this drink of love.
"Come while it is morning and while animal life sleeps in the woods!
"Come to roam among the wet herbs: I will shake off the rain of pearls and the snow flakes of diamonds from your blond hair!
"Come and you will exult with joy, come, the train of your robe, among the mosses, will make a wake of light, and the rising sun will kiss, in its candor, the smile of your purple lips!
"Come, you will be as a white-browed queen among green branches, and the tame butterflies will rest on your ears.
"You will subdue nature and at the call of your mouth, my soul, wild as a fawn, will bound towards you."
Analyses and dithyrambs formulated the same slavery. He wished to make this woman happy, to see her eyes drawn back and her lips, by the oppression of an emotion, opened. The evocation was suddenly effected, not, it is true, under the direct visual form, but in a far away vaporous and voluptuous world. Kneeling near her, after the last evolutions of the embrace, he contemplated her.
"Truly my life is transferred into this woman as under the attraction of a magnet, and truly the center of my forces is in that heart!
"Those blond lashes of her blue eyes are the chains of my days, and the blond shadow of her hair is the halo of bright moons whose splendor illumines my nights."
He would have proceeded at greater length, for his words were unleased, but the vision vanished.
"Presage: Ah! pretty beast! ah! pretty beast!"
Then he reflected again:
"All this has been badly managed. I should have designed, as Calixte suggested, this woman in the pure rôle of a Beatrice exempt from carnal affairs,—but being a woman, she would not have understood: Beatrice, who lent herself to this sublime play, was a dream creature, obeying the poet and the very symbol of his thought. This one had to fall into my arms, or other arms would have snatched her.
"Remain on your pedestal. It is on my knees that I wish to adore you, my hands outstretched to you, eternally.
"No, I grow weary, up there. Adorer, adore nearer, adore with kisses.
"Well! at least we shall have some moments of pleasant intimacy and since it is necessary to make an object of pleasure out of the object of worship, let the sacrilege be complete and the voluptuousness decisive.
"Ah! I shall abandon myself to your body of illusions. Excellent and noble substance, you will be kneaded according to the most transcendental phantasies!"
"Vous qui parlez d'un ton si douxEn m'annoncant de bonnes choses,Ma Dame, qui donc êtes-vous?Verlaine,Sagesse.
"Yes, beloved Guido, I am the Queen of Angels, the Archangelic Virgin, the Morning Star, the Tower of David, the Golden House, I am...."
"Oh! no, you are the Novella, do not frighten me, I need all my presence of mind."
"Well, whatever you wish, but I love you. Close your eyes, I am inviolate and I feel myself blush. What will you think of me? Alas! it is really true that no one has ever implored me in vain. I cannot resist love's invocations, and when I am called with faith, I open the portal of heaven, and an angel lifts me on his wings."
"Adored Madonna," murmured Guido, kissing feet that were pure as the dew, "I am unworthy of your favors and see, my kisses are full of tears. Virgin of all love, my love was but a drop of water, and you have taken it in the holy lily of your heart. Be blessed for your goodness."
The Novella stooped towards the prisoner and touched his face with her lips.
She removed her crown of stars: the stars took wings to the roof and made a firmament of it. The buckle of her girdle hung in the air like a sun and the clasp of her cloak became a moon of white nights.
She sighed deeply, and from her lips was born a cloud that veiled the beaming glory of the stars with a vague charm. Then she said:
"Guido, you have doubted, look and die of love!"
She blossomed into a mystic rose that exhaled an adorable perfume.
And Guido's heart was filled with sweetness.
Then she became a pure mirror in which flamed a sword.
And Guido's heart was filled with justice.
Then she became a throne of cedar where graven sentences could be read.
And Guido's heart was filled with wisdom.
Then a vase appeared which was of bronze, then of silver, then of gold; from it issued clouds of incense of cinnamon and of myrrh.
And Guido's heart was filled with adorations.
Then uprose a tower of ivory and other visions, then a resplendent portal which Guido recognized as the portal of heaven, and he commenced to wonder whether this adventure would not finish as speciously as his adventure with Pavona.
Yet his heart was filled with joy.
"No, no, no. I belong to the angels. Die, become an angel, throw off this flesh which would soil me, assume the celestial form, and we shall see, Guido. Remember that I am inviolate. I repeat, I belong to the angels.... You have seen this!"
And with this last irony, the Most Prudent Virgin disappeared, as she had come, through the lock.
An aromatic odor filled the cell. Guido delightedly inhaled these virginal remains, then told himself:
"She is right, I must die. Besides, I owe her a visit."
"Lui ne vous connait plus. Vous l' Ombre déjà vueVous qu' il avait couchée en son ciel tout nue,Quand il était un Dieu...."Tristan Corbière,les Amours jaunes.
It was the maid who made inquiries. She knew nothing, did not understand. Madame had certainly returned, but the bed had not been used, only rumpled, as if she had lain upon it fully dressed. The closet was open and the dressing table in an unwonted disorder, for Madame had never failed to place all her little belongings carefully.
"I should say," she continued, "that Madame has left for a trip on the go, as you might say, but I have not found the ball dress. No one goes far in a ball dress! When I came down at seven o'clock, things were as I have told you and since then I have been waiting, very uneasy, I assure you. And does Monsieur know nothing?"
"Nothing," answered Entragues. "She must have returned about half past four, or at five o'clock at the most. But come, if she had left for a trip, at least a street dress would be missing, a hat, some necessary objects, and especially a traveling bag, a valise."
"The bags, valises and trunks are above a dark closet, near my room. She would have to pass through my room to get to it. As for dresses and the rest, the wardrobe is locked with a key and I do not know where the keys are. But Madame always carries them with her."
Entragues asked:
"Are you sure that she returned?"
"She did return. After Madame's departure, yesterday, I put everything in order, I even smoothed the bed in which she had thrown herself for a moment after dinner. It is Madame's habit when she goes to a ball. And this morning the bed was disordered. Yet Madame is not heavy, and usually, when she sleeps, one can hardly see the mark of her body."
"Well," said Entragues, giving his address and a few coins to the maid, "if you learn anything, come and tell me. I am as uneasy as you are, Azélia. Come to-morrow morning, at any rate, perhaps I shall have news."
He departed. In the street, his calm grew agitated.
"I am deceived," he cried, "scandalously deceived!"
He opened his umbrella so violently that the silk snapped; then he smashed it against the edge of the sidewalk, threw it into the gutter, and, under the heavy and frigid fog, reached the end of the boulevard Saint-Germain, near the quai Saint-Bernard.
There, in a blind alley, amid huts, stood a little furnished house, patronized by Russian students and having the name of the Hôtel de Moscow.
"Monsieur Moscowitch."
"Monsieur Moscowitch left this morning for Nice. Does Monsieur wish his address? Grand Hôtel des Deux-Mondes."
"Thank you."
"The hotel is good, well situated. I spent a pleasant week there, the other winter. If I had known of your decision, Madame, I should have recommended the room I occupied, for the view through its sunny windows is delightful. Ah! just a year ago from to-day. I am becoming tranquil!"
He slowly walked as far as the boulevard Saint-Michel, under the pitiless rain which now fell in fine and penetrating needles.
"This Russian was imprudent in giving his address in advance! For I might go to trouble the first peace of this improvised honey-moon by a duel. So, at midnight she gives me a rendezvous for the next evening at her home, and at five o'clock in the morning she yields to Moscowitch in her own home, in her ball dress, and at about seven o'clock the two lovers take the express for Nice. Either it was well planned, and she decoyed me shamefully or, as I think, it is a matter of an impromptu affair and she held her modesty of soul in contempt so as to repel me. It is evident that Moscowitch waited for her at the door of the Aubry mansion, in a carriage, and that she let herself be carried off. Ah! he is a clever rascal. I am quite anxious to have some details. If he really followed my ironic advice, if the plan I gave him was good, I am ... I am truly below the most naive school boy. Well! there still remains for me the satisfaction of a dilettante: I have not myself won the battle, but like a staff-chief major general, I have directed the victory's course. Yes, in short, I am the organizer of my own defeat.... Now, it is a matter of producing a strict reasoning and not to lose myself in the by-ways of analysis. A proof? There is none, or not yet. I should, to the very end, respect the dignity of my sentiment. Coincidences, probabilities, but in the end she will give me an explanation. Then I shall judge. What reproaches? She has followed her pleasure."
He entered a café where warm drinks comforted him. At this moment he perceived that he was pierced with cold and that his hands were shivering. It was not only with cold that, he trembled, but his pride would not admit it and haughtily clothed itself in the cloak of irony. He did not even admit that his heart could bleed under a real wound; the griefs where he condescended to quench his original thirst were divine, voluntary, and not the work of a human hand. He possessed to a high degree the art of crucifying and stigmatizing himself, like a visionary, of leading his wounded heart to frightful tortures, to a slow agony; he had the art of being his own executioner. He had voluntarily sweated with anguish, but that the gentle thrust of a woman's delicate gauntlet should drive the crown of thorns into his skull, no, no, no! "For after all, complicity is essential to suffering and it must be voluntary; and that is a favor no creature will ever obtain from me."
Quite honestly, he reflected:
"At least it was brief and the commencement, middle and end took three months. There are many days to revive in this trilogy of zodiacs. Thus, that first meeting which she, the traitress, recalled herself, yesterday evening. Residual sensations still vibrate in my nerves and I hear "the wind pass, stirring the dry leaves." May they sound in your ears, too, Sixtine, and may the sound of their pursuit sadden, like the tattoo of a rattle-snake, the "delicate landscape" where moves your captive soul! You asked to be plundered, treasure: well! now you are a prisoner of the flesh, adore your prison, your chains, and your jailer.
"This journey was for me the occasion of a return to my youth: these renewals are anthologies, but what if it were necessary to re-read the entire book, letter by letter! Oh! no, oh! no. And no more than the vendor ofalmanachs de Leopardi, will I give my consent: 'Oh! no! but another, monsieur, one quite new!' Ah! oxydized hearts aspiring after the virginity of a new stamp, you will fall into the crucible! Ah! patience, we shall enjoy the devouring liquefaction: and our molecules will return into the matrix and other coins of divinity will continue our broken circulation,—other coins eternally the same!
"Wretched logic: these three months of my life are dominated by an absurdity which will decide its disposition, like a lunar play in an old, used mirror.
"Sixtine, it will be good of you to tell me that legend, now that you no longer need reserve the charm of mysteries, this one and the other, you know which one, that of the poison!—Ah! to think that I shall never know it,—no more than the color of your eyes when they open to the morning light.
"When I returned to 'my enlarged room,' it was finished, you possessed me. But know that it was not without inward struggles and that many affections, already old, divided a large and profound heart. Also learn that at that time Madame du Boys was not without attractions for me, in her so ingenuously perverse naivete,—and had you not come, I should have made perhaps another little trip with her to Switzerland. Ah! but you have aped her! Sixtine, has your dignity consented to a surreptitious abduction? Send me a bouquet of violets by post!... I should have taught you the play of transcendental pleasantries, and you would have liked it. You are too serious, you really effect too much! You mistake accident for destiny; it is only a fragment. Shake off, then, the dust of eternity which illusion has sprinkled on your wings! Have you taken at least a return ticket? It is economical and gives a value to the landscape, for, without this precaution, one would never think of looking at it. 'We have plenty of time!'"
"If we had left together, we should first of all not have left at all, for what is the good of moving, since in every place one remains the same to himself. Then, as I know what to do about carnal values I should have spared you many irritating surprises. Finally ... ah! well, but is it not within my right to believe that I alone could have played the rôle?
"Before I found you, in your gestures, in the tacit consent of your good will—a consent quite momentary, it appears—my love had already found a parallel, incarnate in Guido della Preda. At this hour, his fate disquiets me seriously. Sixtine, you have a murder on your conscience (that will make two), for if I do not die it will be because Guido's death has spared my life.... Yes, he must die in my place....
"I saw you once again. The evening clothed itself in a charming minute, unique diamond whose resplendence has not left my night. It was when ... no, that is bitter. Ah! in the opening of that stone was an orient of psychic phantasmagories. It was full of softness and mildness and languor. Such moments have no morrow; also, it were better never to have lived in them. One pursues their sisters who stroll on the dial-plate, and this can lead far, to the very depths of the hells where gloomy victims lament over thenessum maggior dolore.
"In subsequent conversations, you appeared to me as a proud, intelligent and sensual amazon. Sensuality is the ferment of feminine nature: without this decisive gift, there might be angels, there would be no women. But it is quite true that I have not known how to awaken its might and my magnetism struck sudden neutralities. You are not a woman of good-will: your very pride leads you to inopportune resistance where force alone could be right! It is there that one is the dupe of one's intelligence! One must have the strength to throw it off, at certain hours, like a cloak or like the chemise of the Roman woman. For it was not the modesty which visits only extreme youth or the first ignorance: no, it was rather the intelligence. You wished to understand and feel at the same time, and for this you took pains to keep your presence of mind. See how this coincided: I, on my side, made the same effort, with less pain perhaps. Both of us knew well what we wished, and our wills, lacking a little salutary unconsciousness were destroyed in their immobile efficacy.
"Nothing more. This is sufficient enlightenment."
(This was an infraction against his habits,—but a need of personal security forced him to hurl half of himself through the window, so as to preserve the integrity of the rest: in four hours of the night he reached the final point of what he now called "a foolish anecdote.")
"Memorare, pia Virgo, non esse audituma saeculo quemquam ad tau currentempraesidia, tua implorantem auxilia, tuapetentem suffragia, a te esse derelictum."Saint Bernard.
"My lord, my lord, hush! listen!" exclaimed Veltro during the ascent of the tower's staircase. "But do not betray me! I believe they are interceding for you, for the affair was infamous, if I know aught about it. To-morrow, my lord, to-morrow, you understand, I know that the order will come to open the door for you, but hush!"
"What?" Guido, atremble, questioned, "I shall be free to-morrow?"
"Yes, my lord, but that is enough on this subject. Only, I believe that your lordship owes a present to our holy madonna. She has rewarded your devotion, she has interceded; it is she, I am sure it is she...."
"Thank you, Veltro, you are a good man. The first ducats that are returned to me will be for the Novella, the second for you."
He hastened to the accustomed vision, but his limbs gave way, his hands glanced over the rope-support, his heart beat like the eternal clock; he required the effort of supreme will-power to overcome dizziness, to pass the last steps, to fall on his knees near the balustrade.
There, full of anguish, made giddy by the sudden rolling that shook the tower, like a ship amid storm, he felt himself fainting, then his eyes dimmed and he wept.
Indifferent as a madonna, the Novella watched him weep.
Then, without transition, he felt in his soul the rage that dismissed lovers feel.
"What have I done to you? Do you find that I did not love you with a sufficiently insatiable love? Come, you know well that I belong to you: do you recall the pact? Do you wish me to call you perjurer? Are you a woman, after all? Woman, but madonna, and I have no insults metaphysical enough to injure you. Yet, do not abuse your virginity, you will force yourself to say disagreeable things. Well, we are going to come to terms: take me as an orphan. Afterwards, we shall see."
Indifferent as a madonna, the Novella still watched him.
"Ah!" Guido thought, "she is inflexible. Her heart is an eternal decree. I rail at her who was before Time, how stupid! And I sink into blasphemous sarcasms which her son one day will charge me with. Passion leads me into error, but passion above all else!"
"Novella! adored madonna, listen to me. There have been times when you were more clement. I implore you, speak to me, give me a smile. No? Nothing? Ah! I am deserted! Think—I have but you. The white town straggling under your divine feet, the blue sea, your immortally dying sister, the firmament less pure than your inviolate soul, the roses which are the perfume of your most chaste thought, all that is charming in nature, I love as your emanation, as a perpetual Month of Mary. Ah! I shall recite to you the rosary of my griefs, and in the end I shall crucify myself to please you! You should at least be grateful for my reserve: was I not proper when you came to see me? Yet, you loved me that day, and what if I had really insisted, O permanent Virgin?...
"How beautiful you are! Ah! wonder-working beauty, sacred beauty! Ah! it is not in vain that the Infinite has dwelt in your bosom: your smile is impregnated with it forever. But you no longer wish to smile....
"Comfort me, through pity, since it is written in your anthems. Are you now going to encourage scepticism? If you truly are the consoler of afflicted souls, prove it, for I am full of affliction. Yes, I feel that it is a wretched reasoning: you do what you wish and your auxilliary grace has devolved only on those of good will. I reason too much. It is not thus that one touches the heart of a woman, O woman of women, am I not right?
"Yet I would like, before dying, once again to recall this to you: 'Recollect that you have never been implored in vain!' If you have no condescension for my love, have some for my madness. Do you not perceive that I ramble incoherently, and to what point. What would you, it is thus when one loves!
"So, we are going to separate....
"Ah! virginal purples! star-like dawns! Ah! early mornings and late tendernesses! Illusive universe, begone, shameful Satan repulsing my caresses! She has smiled! Again, again! She opens her arms to me! Ah! God! is it possible? Yes, I knew it. Ah! of words, nothing is closed to verbal incantations. On what does happiness depend?
"She opens her arms to me, she loves me. Here I am, here! How I am going to adore you, how I am going to recite lovely litanies to you, and all the essential orisons. Nothing separated me from you but your will, and your will accepts me, finally cleansed of human defilement by the baptism of blood. Joy more indefinable than the immaculate conception, the virgin of virgins opens to the sinner the ivory portals of pure love...."
Dreaming of such things, Guido leaped over the balustrade, precipitantly towards the madonna who awaited him, laughing and with outstretched arms.—Ave, Rosa speciosa!
"... Voire mesme que si un de nos confrairesse monstroit attaché à quelque chose,qu'il en soit aussistost privé...."Règle de S. Benoist, ch. xxxviii.
When Azélia presented herself the next morning, her face bearing the marks of tears and trouble, for "she was now sure that Madame had been murdered; never had Madame gone away so long without notifying her," Entragues was able to reassure her:
"Madame is at Nice, in the Grand Hôtel des Deux-Mondes. She arrived there yesterday evening, is in splendid health and finds that the sea is blue, so blue! And the palms and the flowers! Everything is fragrant. Never before has she felt how sweet life is!"
"So Monsieur has received a telegram. Ah! good. But to leave without telling me! If Madame writes, I shall communicate with Monsieur, for Madame loves Monsieur very much."
"Yes, we are, as they say, a pair of friends."
A day passed, then another, and Hubert grew really bored. It was the sensation of emptiness usually felt by all sensitive creatures in like occurrences.
The light had fled from him; he moved in deserts of dark expanses.
No distraction is possible, since the only being from whom pleasure could come has withdrawn from the visual field, since the generating soul of all joy has fled, since the beams have perished, since the night of absence reigns.
He could have lived near her, removed by a distance of several streets, without any great need of visiting. The possibility of a meeting, the certainty of a welcome sufficed for the vitality of his desires. Here rises the tyranny of the Spirit of Contradiction and its immutable disdain for the present hour. Moralists have always quarreled with man on this matter: "You do not know how to enjoy the fugitive minute." No, but how go about it, since it would be necessary that the fugitive minute suspend its flight, it would be necessary that it exist. Now, it is a vulgar idea that only the past or the future has an appearance of objectivity: the moment never comes to pass.
Hubert had not even the liberty for such elementary deductions. He suffered like an exile, a pure suffering and with a fixed idea. Jealousy in no way troubled its undulations: it was the unique sensation of the lost object. His joy, fallen into the sea, was lying under moving waves; with each wave the diamond was engulfed in the sands more deeply, and he could not yet anticipate the tempest which would throw it on the surface, tossing it to the strand among the eternal pebbles.
Ah! the solitary dream house among the dunes had indeed fallen to his lot suddenly and too soon. He had not had time to arrange his parcels, to bring the least illusion—more bare of spiritual comfort than a hermit in the desert—of lust.
Such a state of soul brought about this reaction: "I am perhaps deceived in the value of these coincidences. Well, I must not despair."
He delighted in this self-contempt for several hours, inhaling his baseness and wallowing in it as in warm mire. Yet there were instants of respite, and in the evening he walked tranquilly, with a normal step, towards the dwelling of the absent one, but restless as a man who is expected.
Azélia opened the door before he rang.
"Monsieur! ah! just look!"
And she drew a letter from her dress.
"Madame has written me, and this is for you."
The white envelope with the oblique water-marks bore no writing.
"This is prudence!"
At the pressure of his fingers, he felt a very thin English onion-skin paper within.
"She has written me a volume here. Ah! Prolixity! Would a word not have sufficed?—Adieu!"
Hubert was very calm as he received this sentence of death, and his indifference, perfectly acted, although for himself, scandalized the good Azélia.
She believed in kisses, thought that he would press the object to his heart, ejaculating some words of tenderness, as in the romances and chromos, which are painted romances.
With a "thank you!" he placed the letter in his pocket and, pushing a door open, entered the little room in whose corners his dying illusions still played, like ironic dryads, careless of the approaching agony.
"Moriuntur ridendo."
A light voiceless laugh came from him:
"These are the ruins of Carthage. They are well preserved and yet how many centuries is it since we left them, already in the state of ruins. Within me generations have succeeded; the same essence of humanity reigns, the man is another man. Ah! how far away all this is!
"These objects were once familiar to me: I knew them. I was a little their master. They have escaped my hands. Well! I abandon the rest. Let all things be transitory. How this breathes of death! It is my heart that is becoming decomposed....
"Why read the letter? She laughs at me or pities me, and never have I tolerated the one or the other."
He carried it through the streets.
"I believe myself," he thought, "stronger and more logical. Have I denied my old philosophy to such a point? The punishment for laughing at the external world is to fall in the first snare laid by the innocent Maia, as the theosophist expresses it. Could there be, then, an invincible human nature more stable in its versatility than the architecture of thought? Invincible, no, since haughty contemptuous things have conquered it. It is because I lack method. Spiritual training is required. As an elementary precaution, it will first be necessary to place attentive sentinels at the door of the senses, ready to halt every suspected sensation, to admit no one unless stripped of its cloak of deceit....
"Ah! I have no lucidity and I am bored. No remedy, the nervous crisis will accomplish its cycle. It would be somewhat diverting to go to Nice and pierce them with my ironies, but afterwards? Then, the vulgarity of this conduct would be repugnant and hardly fit for a fourth act: then, the case of pistols, the denouement which death hardly saves from a ridiculousness which is bourgeois as well as theatrical....
"Shall I read this letter? I am sure it is full of things which will no longer interest me...."
He stopped and struck the ground with a savage thump of his heel.
"Shame! Enough. No, for me there are neither Circes nor Delilahs. My mind at least is above all wiles and lusts. They who fall into the toils of the swine-breeders, those who are caught in the snares of elegant vampires—they fulfill their destiny. Mine is different. I shall be cowardly neither in facing grief, nor in facing pleasure, nor in facing ennui. You will not make me suffer beyond my will; and neither you, nor any one like you, can tempt me to other disobediences. Even though I be the dupe of my pride, I prefer this to being the dupe of my sensitiveness, and I shall disdain even the memory of the unconscious murderess who might have overwhelmed me."
He entered a café and, developing his brutal bravado to its extreme, wrote, so as to laugh at himself until the blood ran, strange and purposely false verses, which Egyptian readings had suggested to him.
HIÉROGLYPHES
O pourpiers de mon frère, pourpiers d'or fleur d'AnhourMon corps en joie frissonne quand tu m' as fait l'amour,Puis je m'endors paisible au pied des tournesols.Je veux resplendir telle que les flèches de Hor:Viens, le kupi embaume les secrets de mon corps,Le hesteb teint mes ongles, mes yeux out le kohol.O maître de mon coeur, qu'elle est belle, mon heure!C'est de l'eternité quand baiser m'effleure,Mon coeur, mon coeur s'élève, ah! si haut qu'il s' envole.Armoises de mon frère, ô floraisons sanglantes,Viens, je suis lAmm où croît toute plante odorante,La vue de ton amour me rend trois fois plus belle.Je suis le champ royal où ta faveur moissonne,Viens vers les acacias, vers les palmiers dAmmonn:Je veux t'aimer à l'ombre bleue de leurs flabelles.Je vieux encore t'aimer sous les yeux roux de PhrâEt boire les délices du vin pur de ta voix,Car ta voix rafraîchît et grise comme Elel.O marjolaines de mon frère, ô marjolaines,Quand ta main comme un oiseau sacre se promène,En mon jardin paré de lys et de sesnis,Quand tu manges le miel doré de mes mamelles,Quand ta bouche bourdonne ainsi qu'un vol d'abeillesEt se pose et se tait sur mon ventre fleuri,Ah! je meurs, je m'en vais, je m'effuse en tes brasComme une source vive pleine de nymphéas,Armoises, marjolaines, pourpiers, fleurs de ma vie!
Following this, Hubert returned to his room, verified some terminologies, and retired.
Tranquilly, by the light of a little lamp, he read Sixtine's letter.