"Ni vers, ni prose; points de grands mots,point de brillans, point de rimes: un ton naïfm'accomode mieux; en un mot, un récits sansfaçon et comme on parle."Madame d'Aulnay,l'Adroite Princesse.
Once upon a time there was a nobleman who took to himself a second wife who had as wicked a heart as you could imagine. They had a daughter who resembled her mother, and it was not long before the two were tyrants of the house, for this nobleman loved them and humored all their whims. Especially did the daughter take advantage of it to inflict a thousand miseries upon her step-sister, whose birthright seemed to her a theft of her rights as a spoiled child. One was called Marcelle and the other, Marceline. The wicked Marcelle hated her sister, but the good Marceline returned good for evil. And as her father, through very goodness of soul, and to have peace in the house, always took the part of Marcelle, Marceline learned to suffer.
Marcelle was as pretty as a bouquet of roses. Taught to smile by the smiles she had received at the cradle and while she played, she knew how to be radiant, and every one considered her a very amiable person. Tall and shapely, she had a white and delicate skin, red lips and long blond hair.
Marceline was ugly, small, with dark hair and complexion; in truth, she had very lively eyes, but they had a somber color and lacked any tender expression. She was mistaken for her sister's governess, and sometimes for her maid, for though no one was cruel enough to refuse her whatever dresses she desired, she affected a taste for simple clothes.
Marcelle had already refused more than one eligible suitor, when a young lord named Lélian moved her heart by his good manners, his title, that of a marquis, and his fortune.
The marriage day was fixed, Lélian courted in a most gallant fashion, and the only thing left was the arranging of the festivities that would signalize such a great way.
Marceline took great pains not to show any spite because the younger daughter was getting married first. On the contrary, she was as amiable as ever. With an unwonted good grace she welcomed the young marquis destined for her sister; this everybody appreciated and people began to find her less ugly and less displeasing. Marcelle, amid her joy, always kept the haughty air belonging to a well-born girl. Lélian felt more admiration than love for her and he was not displeased to talk a little with Marceline. The "little one," as she was contemptuously called, soon seemed to him more intelligent and pleasant than her sister. She spoke of all things with spirit, her good humor took no offense at any teasing, and when, by chance, she was alone with Lélian, a strange flame of an almost mysterious charm, shone in her somber eyes. By gazing at them long, Lélian discovered that her dark brown eyes had a perfectly nuanced gamut of expression: they were eloquent. From that time, and during the moments he was not paying court to Marcelle, he strove to spell out the words that lay in Marceline's eyes.
He thought of them as much as any man, on the eve of marriage, can think of eyes which do not belong to the woman he is about to wed, when Marceline, suddenly unwell, took to her room for three days. This was decisive: the dark eyes recovered their language so clearly that there was no mistaking them.
It was the very morning of the marriage day. Quite recovered, but still a trifle pale, Marceline strolled through the garden, touching the flowers without gathering a single one. Lélian, on his side, was walking about to conceal his impatience. They met.
What passed between them while they strolled, through the walks, silently and slowly? What did they say in the garden walks? Lélian, without astonishment, heard these words which Marceline, as she suddenly left him, threw like an arrow:
"And take care not to mistake the door this evening, for my sister and I have adjoining rooms!"
After the return from church, there was a great repast that continued far into the evening; then came dances and games in the illuminated rooms; then a magnificent supper was served, followed by more dances and games. The peasants, under a specially erected tent, took part in the rejoicings; they sang songs, discharged guns, danced, kissed one another, and drank to the bride's health.
While the ball was at its height, Marcelle disappeared without anyone taking notice, except the men among themselves and the women behind their fans; several young girls blushed; others thoughtfully followed the retreating train of white silk with their eyes. The bride's dress, her attitude, the least little word she had spoken in a quite distracted voice since the ceremony, her tears, her smiles, her kisses—all were passed in review. The old women, fearing ridicule, dissimulated the emotion brought up by distant memories; the young women sought the glances of their husbands in the throng.
Lélian mounted the stairs with a firm and rapid step. He saw the two adjacent doors. One was shut; the other was ajar. This one he pushed and entered. Without a sound, and with diabolic skill, Marceline turned the key and bolted the door.
Before the house was astir, Lélian led Marcelle away, as had been arranged. A coach, spanned and ready, awaited them.
After the honeymoon trip, which was brief, because of the quite natural impatience of the newly married couple to settle in their home, they dwelt in Lélian's château.
As the two domains touched each other, so to speak, Marcelle was able to find some happiness near her parents and her sister whom she had ceased to hate. Unhappiness softens certain prideful souls and Marcelle, who had promised herself many numberless joys, found herself, as happens, the most unfortunate woman in the world.
Taught by experience, Marceline refused to marry. When any one speaks to her of the miserable condition of an old maid, she smiles and asks:
"Come, are you so sure that I am an old maid?"
And it must be agreed that a sort of beauty flowered in the dark Marceline and that the white Marcelle grew almost ugly.
I believe that Marceline is a fairy, but this is not quite certain.
"In laying down his Cogito ergo sum as theonly certainty, and in considering the world'sexistence as problematical, Descartes foundthe essential departing point of all philosophy."Schopenhauer:The World as Idea.
Entragues rose early and penholder in hand, turning over his papers while he drank tea and smoked cigarettes, he began the day.
Monsieur Dubois, through an administrative memorandum, had the goodness to inform him about his affairs. There had been postal supplications and telegraphic pardons. Madame du Boys was returning. The envelope contained the letter and the copy of the dispatch. Entragues appreciated this attention which would permit him to follow, without fatigue, the developments of the oratorio.
The letter, dated from Geneva, was a reply. The secretary, among indistinct phrases, had doubtless let fall the seed of hope, for Madame du Boys seemed to accept at the same time that she implored. Though standing on her dignity, she was not displeased with this rope flung in the midst of her muddled situation. She joyfully clutched it, with the naïve and vainglorious pleasure of being able to say: "It is he who is taking the first step! How anxious he is to have me! Ah! the poor man, I do not want to make him suffer any more." This could be read all around the pages, on all the margins, even on the envelope, which had been addressed with a poised hand. Too, there flowered a boredom from this international paper: "I enjoy myself more even in Paris, by the side of a stupid and solemn husband, than on the banks of Lake Geneva, where I am alone with my maid from nine in the morning till six at night—without counting the days when business delaysMonsieur le comte—and where, to fall asleep, I drink, in theRevue des Treize Cantons, lymphatic emanations on the course of life and the meaning of death!"
"P. S. Say that I am passing a season in Switzerland for my health."
She arrives, lets fall her little bundles, opens her arms, and Monsieur Dubois, very agitated, falls into them.
"Ah! my poor friend, so I find you again! What trials!"
She has pardoned.
Monsieur Dubois dries his eyes, not knowing what to say; his flown discourse leaves him speechless.
Bending towards one of the little parcels which she lifts, Madame du Boys, serpentine and coy, murmurs:
"I have thought of you, dear one, I bring you a box of cigars."
Entragues was greatly amused by this unforseen denouement. He was just finishing the draught of a sketch when the bell rang; it was a letter with a handwriting unknown to him. The wording was brief:
"Monsieur d'Entragues is expected this evening to give a commentary on hisDream. Only auditors: the four walls and Sixtine Magne."
Two joyful tidings already, and it was not yet midday. It was only at this hour that his scanty correspondence was brought him, for the precious mornings could not be troubled by the intrusion of the external problematical world. Even amid a quite feverish contentment, he did not regret the instructions he had given once for all; Sixtine's letter came at a moment when he could think at leisure and without remorse. His pleasure was manifested by a vivacity of movement altogether juvenile; a semblance of adolescence surged from his precocious maturity. Though he generally was incapable of giving a clear account of his impressions, he felt himself rejuvenated, and this astonished him. He walked about with lively quick movements.
Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs was almost gay.
A reddish brown made the sun-bathed Luxembourg, through which he strolled, resplendent. It was full of pretty children and flashing ribbons. Towards the Odéon he ceased to be aware of the things around him—a beaming cloud enveloped him. In the afternoon, having breakfasted, though he could not have stated how or where, he found himself on the Pont-Neuf, and collected his thoughts. Presence of mind returned to him and, dissipating with a last breath his cloud, he began consciously to revel in his happiness. The moment was brief: leaning on his elbows, looking at the unchanging water, he felt the premonitory thrill he so well knew; the frozen aura of spleen whistled in his ears and, bounding the horizon like a wall, the black Idea reared itself before him. An infinite distress overwhelmed him and, far from wishing the burden removed, he bent his shoulders, letting himself be crushed even to suicide. He closed his eyes with suffering, he trembled with cold, and a flicker of reason deep within him warned him of the absurdity of such a sudden and causeless grief. Yet he persisted, now lying under the avalanche of gloom, immobile, experiencing the garrot of solitary death, the slow excoriation of moral agony. This lasted an hour, during which he suffered weeks of real and profound pains, the cruelest pains ever invented by unjust human imagination, hopeless pains, infernal pains. He ached when he resumed his normal state and unsteadily went on his way.
The distraction of book hunting proved a great relief. The mummies, ranged in dozens in their tombs, awaited a momentary resurrection. He rescued several,les Promenadesby Stendhal, which he did not possess, an old breviary embellished with armorial bearings, and a Venetian lexicon. He regretted having purchased the Stendhal. It was a subject of sadness and in the unhealthy state in which his crisis had left him, the mere material contact of these artless but bitter little notes might be dangerous. Bitter! For him alone, perhaps, for he found such desolation in it: "This Rome of the Popes, this womb of the ideal, this Ninevah of the purple, this Babylon of the cross, this Sodom of mysticism, this ark of sadistic dreams, this incunabulum of sacred follies, this generator of the new passion, this Rome, I never again shall see!" A tiny kingdom had openly stolen its traditional capital and the modern baseness had ratified the theft.
His sadness turned to anger. Entragues smiled at this quixotism, but the violence of even a fugitive indignation ended by making him sound again, and, recovering full consciousness, he breathed.
In the street, Entragues did not sympathize with the rumbling consciousness dispersed among the human fluid emanating from the throngs. The passersby seemed phantoms to him, he was not aware of them, considering them as inconsistent as the vignettes of an illustrated book. The most tragic public event only elicited from him an acquiescence or repulsion of the artist: to shrug the shoulders and cry: Bravo, Chance! A very scornful observer and thoroughly persuaded in advance that nothing new can be produced by the encounters of individuals with one another or against things, since the elaborating brains partake eternally of a fundamental identity and their visible differences are but the right and reverse sides of an untearable material embroidered with a durable and everlasting embroidery; conscious of the uselessness of leaving his house to enter another house which is just the same, Entragues loved the proximity of books that demonstrated to him the probability of his philosophy. He never tired of admiring the courageous perserverance of men who invariably repeated the same thing. All that had been written since the Bible could be resumed in three words; fired in a fantastic crucible, the totality of books would give this for a chemical residuum: cogito, ergo sum. Descartes was the only man who had ever expressed a necessary idea, and thirteen letters had sufficed for it. He would have wished to see them engraved on the front of monuments.
Outside of these three words, nothing indubitably existed except art; for it alone, endowed with the critical faculty, has the power of evoking life. It alone, without remarking the warp and woof, however, can variegate the embroidery of the stuff, because it embroiders safe from contingencies. The existence of Marie-Antoinette is problematical; that of Antigone is certain. The queen who died on the scaffold is at the mercy of deductions and negations; Antigone is as eternal as the family love she symbolizes, and the falling stars will not hush the piteous and charming confession of her feminine heart murmuring across the centuries: "I am born to love and not to hate." The symbol is as imperishable as the idea whose transcendental form it is and becomes necessary to it as soon as it clothes the idea. When you persecute Galileo, it is a man who suffers; when you separate Romeo from Juliette, it is the entire species that feels their anguish.
Having placed art above and even in the place of life, Entragues still doubted. Was art not an illusion as well? If the external world consists of phantoms only, could he create aught but phantoms, unless he confined himself to the eternal reproduction of the eternal ego? But at its highest degree of personality, individual consciousness contains all forms, and just as, by a necessary objectivity, it projects externally the silhouettes on the transparent curtain of time, which is life, it can project them outside of time, which is art.
The ant in distress swam boldly towards the last straw, withstanding the cruel waves; it did not founder in the hollows of the rivulet—which are for it larger than the ocean—and it saw safety when the motion of the waves raised it to the pinnacle.
His meditations were suddenly troubled, like the water of a pool into which a swan plunges. The jovial, merry instinct recovered its toy. There was now no means of arguing upon the illusion of suffering: the lashes of presentiment cut his back so keenly and severely that it was clear the hand could not be wheedled by any reasoning.
The child was amusing itself too well. "And yet! and yet!" All was vain and it was true. Entragues, upon returning to his quarters, found this mortal note, mortal in the state of exaltation in which he had lived since the morning, a damper that truly resembled death.
"Inpromptu dinner with the countess who has come on some business. Regrets. Let tomorrow take the place of to-day. S. M."
As he sat reading these lines, his head in his hands, without having removed his hat, gloves, overcoat and cane, he had the misfortune to wish to seek the secret causes; he passed, without stirring, two or three very painful hours. His reasoning went thus: in writing the first letter to me yesterday, she evidently knew how matters stood. He then asked himself why she was playing with him. He employed the whole evening in resolving this difficult question. Finally, after having followed several diverse solutions, he concluded: "Perhaps, as she said, it really was a simple accident." As aching as a victim of the inquisition, after his seance of torture, he fell asleep cursing hope, that torture more subtle than the wooden horse, needles and spiders, a sketch but lately illuminated by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam.
He fell asleep, living again the pages of the master in a terrifying nightmare, and only in the morning did rest come.
Upon arising, he was another person, and certitude, pure and clear certitude did not abandon him an instant until evening. At half past eight, the hour chosen and fixed by her, he would see her. Until then he walked with closed eyes, almost like a blind man, all the powers of his mind, all his faculties of idealisation, together with his scorn and skepticism, drowned in that drop of water—Sixtine. He did not even have enough strength for astonishment: a rising moon, a dawning love dominated his horizon. This unique contemplation, by gentle degrees, isolated him in a trance.
"This curl of hair belongs to a daughter ofRa-Hor-Xuti, who has in her every essenceof divinity."Orbiney Papyrus, Pl.xi. 4.
A prisoner in her abbatial seat, she had quite the air of a fourteenth century person. Dressed in red, her feet rested on a black cushion; her fingers, lit with garnets and opals, perhaps with cassidony, and with agates, played with the white girdle which tied a robe with heavy purple undulations; her head, a pale flower, leaned against the carved wainscot; the shadow of the ogive framed the blonde aureole.
Altogether nonplussed by the attitude which seemed to demand the genuflexion of a worshiper, instead of the cordial greeting of a friend, he remained standing near the door, seeking some word to begin. For a few seconds Sixtine enjoyed the astonishment she had anticipated, then skilfully rose and, with a trace of lingering vanity, offered her hand. He took it coldly, seeing that she had tried to deceive him with amise en scène.
The thread broke and all the pearls of the embroidery fell one after the other; it was the work of this evening to fill the silken thread, to put the scattered jewels back into their design.
Both busied themselves with good will over the task and Sixtine, who felt the peril of having travestied, even with a worthy attire, the primitive image remaining in the eyes of Entragues, quickly became again the simple and sincerely strange woman of the first hour. At least Hubert, at the sight of some gestures, at the sound of some words, so recreated her; he gradually recovered his ease and renewed with Sixtine the chat commenced in the country place.
The heavy branches of the firs drooped above their heads; a stag passed, hounds passed, Diana, on a golden crescent, passed.
Sixtine threw a veil of green silk over the rose-colored shade. She remarked:
"Diana provides her own light. The hunt will continue by moonlight. Is it dreamlike enough, thus?"
"It is in such a light that I beheld you one night, a surprising night of revery or vision:E par chie sia una cosa venuta...."
"Da cielo in terro," continued Sixtine. "My mother was Venetian; she made me read a few Italian poets. Some scraps of it have remained; she did not even give me her hair, for I am blond like my father, a pale blond that is my despair, for I have not a blond soul."
"Do you think that the soul and the hair are always of the same color, almost to the nuance? It is true that nuances are of consequence. The feminine hair assumes more than thirty tints that are entirely different and can be depicted by precise words, half of which are daily used, but at random. These tints blend and intermingle to infinity and the very eye can hardly define them by immediate comparison. This is so true that, as you know, you can never match hair. Would it not be amusing to make a classification of feminine characters according to the terms of the nuances of their hair? It would suffice to determine the exact tone so as to be able to pronounce upon the character, the passional faculties, the inclination towards friendship or love, the sentiment of duty, the maternal tenderness, and the like. Thosesomnambulistswho make use of this principle without method and without preliminary studies, occasionally reach curious revelations. In five or six years, this science will be perfected, and those who possess it to perfection will be able to determine a man's character through a lock of hair, and will know what to do in order to take advantage of him. But fools and the ignorant always escape the power of intelligence; they will acquire the facile ruse of shaving their skulls, and this will once more prove the futility of all knowledge and the vanity of mind."
"Apply to me the science of to-morrow. What is the color of my soul?" asked Sixtine, wishing to make use, like all women, of the least general idea.
"A changing blond, a flame blond, or if you wish to decompose the nuance, tawny, ash and gold. Tawny is savagery, ash is nonchalance, gold is passion. Your horoscope will be like this: a woman fluctuating between the desire to be enchained to tenderness and her love of independence, but who will resign herself to the choice which circumstances make for her; as indolence is a bad body guard, it is probable that she will be won...."
"Taken!" cried Sixtine, "taken! I told you so. I await the robber!"
"Indeed, it amounts to the same thing. Won or taken by some one she perhaps will not love, but who will have been finer and stronger than the others. Conclusion: the final acquiescence of her nonchalance."
"No! not that. The robber must please me. But why the future? Perhaps the destinies are already accomplished? What do you know of that?"
"Oh! nothing," said Entragues, somewhat troubled. "Only, men always dream in a woman's presence of the morrow, never of the day before. It seems that the morrow belongs to them, as a necessary consequence of the present moment, and when they cannot regulate it for their personal profit, vanity, at least, will not be displeased to adapt it somewhat by insinuation. The most foolish among them believes himself born to be the director of conscience; and, in fact, since they cannot govern themselves, it is perhaps their true vocation."
"It is certain," Sixtine answered, "that women are not happier for having won the liberty of the bridle on their necks. They generally want too many things at one time to wish seriously for any one thing, and it is rendering them a service to fix the road where their desires can gallop more at ease. Unfortunately, tyranny is neighbor to good counsel; one cannot always distinguish one from the other. That is why we have revolted. Then it is a great temptation to a man to legislate upon all things, as soon as a woman has accepted some of his advice; orders follow, despotism commences, and insurrection is justified."
"You speak, Madame, like a statesman, and I am astonished that you are not somewhat of an Egeria!"
"I was and I wearied of the rôle. So your jest is not to the purpose. It is perhaps amusing to lead women, but not men. The Egeria they want holds in leash a tiny plump creature with drooping ears; Rops has designed it, and while I do not frequent the private museums, I have seen it. An Egeria by day, and it is always the same one, whose soul becomes visible to their spirituality under the most secret and revealing hair. It is there they go to seek the soul's color."
Sixtine had spoken with a juvenile warmth which discouraged Entragues. It was the indignation of a woman whose intelligence has been disdained and who, considering herself a political collaborator, has seen her rôle reduced to that of a carnal instrument. He pretended to have only remarked the lively side of her talk, and replied:
"I did not dare, in my theory of the science of hair, to put all the possible harmonies in line. The clothes, moreover, make a further research altogether puerile, partaking of a sickly curiosity. Yet, though the agreement of tones is far from being perfect always, one must take account of it. Confess, too, Madame, that if it is not the palace and residence of Psyche, it is at least her country house."
"Well," said Sixtine, laughing good-naturedly, "I pardon you for that last word, but do not begin again."
"But it was you...."
"That is not the same thing. I did not insist. Hush! you will spoil for me all the verses in which tresses are mentioned, and even those of Berenice will become suspect. You have seen me 'under the ephemeral moon.' I would like to know just when."
"Seen? Yes! I have particular faculties of vision and sometimes I evoked you near me by magic. The object I strongly think about is incorporated before my eyes in a visible form and often becomes palpable to the touch. I have felt presences of persons who were actually quite remote from me. And this does not at all astonish me, for regular sensation is only a true hallucination. For me, it is a matter of indifference whether it be true or false. I hardly worry about it."
"Then all women are at your mercy? If a woman you loved shunned your entreaties, would imagination ... would imagination suffice?"
"No, that would be the vilest of sins, the most sacrilegious, and the most useless. Of what avail is an unshared carnal pleasure? No, such acts as those are only too dismal. I am not the unchaste passerby of the poet, I do not delight in ridiculous, incomplete and dull profanations. No more am I a Jean-Jacques. The Most High has not favored me with a gift that would be fatal to the women of my time."
"Do you believe that these hallucinations would be so disagreeable to them? For when one wishes to please, one wishes to please in everything."
"There are feminine perversities," Entragues returned, "that are sufficiently frightful to content one with the metaphysics of pleasure. But I see beyond. Parallel dreams strive, at the same moment, towards the same end. Result: mutual possession at a distance. What a triumph for love! What a resource for separated lovers!"
"It is not for you to speak of our perversity, you who are endowed with such a perverse imagination."
She gasped a little for breath and fanned herself, oh! without fear, the feeble sex, and with a firm head.
A short silence followed.
This unusual costume which had first broken Entragues chain of sensation, now delighted him. He was thankful to Sixtine for not having appeared in a house robe of the latest style, for this would have swerved the talk to the vulgar stupidity of Parisian gossip or of a dialogue in modern comedy. A somewhat different intimacy with Sixtine seemed extremely desirable; a second and identical bifurcation led his sentiment, starting from curiosity, to desire.
"Introduce me to your history." He repeated to himself the first measure of the symphonic sonnet, and the very affright, in its recall, pursued the heels of the desire.
She reflectively watched him, not without little impatient movements of her fingers.
"She who would make him her slave, would doubtless make him wise."
"Yes, doubtless."
Sixtine pronounced these few words gravely, in a cordial manner.
Under the green of the old tapestry that hung from the ceiling and covered a whole side of the wall, in the still and cool room, a warmth of spring was diffused in golden waves; it was suddenly wafted from the vaporized intimacy.
Uttering the appropriate trifles, to which Entragues lightly replied, Sixtine rose, lit a blue flame under the copper kettle, opened a box of cigarettes, moved about in such an adorable setting that he smiled with joy to see her go and come, lavishing pretty movements and beautifully arched gestures.
She poured tea.
"Now recollect. You owe me my commentary. What is that vision in which I appeared with 'the brow studded with stars?'"
He told of the astonishing apparition, adding that there was a story which Monsieur de B——. knew.
Sixtine interrupted him and pronounced the already familiar words:
"If you wish, I shall tell you the story of the portrait chamber."
Entragues started and grew pale. This exceeded the bounds of probability. With a weak voice, he answered:
"I really would like to hear it."
Sixtine began:
HISTORY OF THE PORTRAIT CHAMBER
"It is a tragic and rather strange story...." She stopped, seeming to summon her memory. Then:
"No, I should indeed prefer not to tell you it."
"Oh! please," urged Entragues, like a child who opens two wide, curious eyes.
"No, sometime later, perhaps. If you had asked it down there, before those verses, before a coincidence which I guess and which disturbs me! I cannot just now. When you learn it, you will understand, and this very reticence will seem clear to you.... It is said that it has never lied.... Well, listen: 'The Château de Rabodange at one time was the hereditary domain....' It is too much for me.... Childishness? Don't say that!"
"But I said nothing. The emotion I see you in does not suggest such words to me. Let us forget the story...."
"Well," replied Sixtine, "try to guess it. You can. I give you permission. Perhaps you will tell it to me. Let us talk no more of it and please go. I get up early and I must sleep. You see that I treat you like a friend."
She had such a nervous air that Hubert asked for nothing better than to obey her, not wishing to spoil his evening by the blunder of a reserve which henceforth might be necessary before the woman who no longer seemed mistress of herself. It was the moment for retreat or the moment for a bold stroke. He pursued the first course, the second not having entered his mind. When it was a matter of other persons, or when he reflected at leisure on his own sentimental adventures, Entragues possessed a remarkable lucidity of mind; before the cause itself—the cause in person, throbbing and eloquent—he was confused, like a school-boy, and obeyed, unaware of his stupidity, those false insinuations of women who ask for a violet so as to get a rose. He therefore made ready to leave, saying:
"I would not wish to oppose such good habits."
"Is it not written," she responded in the same light tone, "'flee all occasions of sinning?'"
"And even Saint Bernard, in hisMeditations, considers the contemplated sin as serious as the perpetrated one. Not to flee the occasion is to anticipate the offense and render it inexcusable. But I do not see how early rising specially agrees with this precept. On the contrary, it seems to me that the longer the day, the more numerous are the stones on the road. Then, can it be that you want to travel along the road of perfection?"
"I am anxious not to soil my life with any chance entanglement. Are not evil connections less to be feared from seven o'clock until noon, than from seven o'clock until midnight? The most elementary reasoning would easily demonstrate this, I fancy."
"Ah!" Hubert said, feeling the need of a mischievous air. "You know the hours when Sin promenades, and have you encountered Sin?"
"Often," Sixtine jestingly responded, "often and Her Highness always favors me with a smile. She is not proud and she willingly offers her hand; you can see that she loves men in a friendly rather than in a princely way; between them is an old familiarity. Daily she returned with joy to the legitimate bed fallen to her lot. By an astonishing multiplicity of faces, statures, gestures, voices, Sin courts women, clothing herself in the dreamed-of form, and that is why I would rather bring to an end my promenade before she commences hers. But, I pray you, please go. Yes, come occasionally, at the same hour.A bientôt."
"......................."Vauvenargues"La beauté c'est la forme que l'amourdonne aux choses."Ernest Hello."Flaubert, pas de sentiment.... S'il l'avait,cela, il aurait tout."Conversationsde Villiers de l'Isle-Adam.
Smoking, strolling about, making paradoxes—there were a half dozen of them under the distracted presidency of Fortier, who was correcting proofs for his first number of the new series.
"Good day, Entragues. You received my note and you are bringing me some copy. Now that we come out every fortnight, I am going to be very hungry, I warn you."
"Did you ever see a review lack copy—a review which pays?" Hubert answered. "Print Constance. You owe it to your subscribers. 'Every woman would like to read this new study of youthful psychology. The originality of the thought, the pure relief of the style, together with the profound knowledge of all the mysteries of the feminine heart, make it an exquisite masterpiece of the analysis of passion. Please insert.'"
"He promised me a novel."
"With an alluring title," interrupted a voice.
Entragues turned his head. A young man, with a correct and cold air, was looking at him. Fortier introduced them to each other. He was a friend of the countess. They surely must have met at the Marigny Avenue home? Entragues acquiesced in this insinuation, thinking: Tomorrow, or the day after, my poor Fortier, the countess andla Revue spéculativewill belong to Lucien Renaudeau.
"The title?"
"Alluring," repeated Renaudeau; "it is called: 'Pure as Fire.'"
"This florist of souls quite pleases me," said Jean Chrétien, in a slow and rich voice. "I am looking over, among his books, 'The Wisdom of the Nations.' It is full of incontestable truths. One walks here in a friendly garden: all the aphorisms of Stendhal and Balzac frequently crop forth. But if we wish to start a seriously symbolistic review, it is necessary to tempt culture with less familiar animals."
Sylvestre entered with a cloudy air and Renaudeau instantly addressed him in a harsh tone:
"Now tell us who is that counterfeit of old George Sand who came here yesterday with your recommendation?"
"With a dog under each arm?"
"A black and a blond one. She offered us copy, patrons, loans, her experience, romantic souvenirs, the last boots of Alexander Dumas, cards of the chief of police, the address of a photographer and three copyists, an interview with Bouvier, the right to reprint the complete works of her late husband, tickets for the coming Elysée ball and for women, too, I think, but that was a bit vague."
"Oh!" Sylvestre gently answered, "she is old and poor, she must make a living."
"I do not see the necessity," Renaudeau said.
"A fine silhouette for a 'Parisian' novel," Fortier said.
"Doubtless, because it would be true?" asked Jean Chrétien, a poet who professed Buddhism. "Would you become a modernist?"
"A naturalist," said Fortier, laughing, "I want to make money."
"I fancy you will want to a little later," said Entragues. "The original cavern is empty. Do you take Huysmans for a naturalist? But hisA Reboursis the most insolent mockery of this very school, when he simply replies to Zola's "naturiste" and democratic enthusiasm:
"Nature has had its day!"
"That is a book!"
"A disheartening book," Entragues continued, "one which has confessed in advance, and for long, our tastes and distastes."
"Yes," Chrétien agreed, "but I am speaking of others, of the naive souls who believe that because an object moves it must exist. Nature! but it is the artist who creates nature, and art is only the faculty of objectifying in an image the individual representation of the world.
"And," Passavant put in, "man himself is only the image of the idea."
"In that case," Chrétien answered, "far from attaining the absolute truth, as those ninnies boast of doing, art is but a reflected image—the image of an image. It is no longer the will which acts directly, but only a will already fixed in the individual, subjected to intelligence, weakened by division, in short, limited to whims."
"Such writers," Entragues remarked, "are, like the generality of men, almost the whole humanity, victims of an optical illusion. They imagine that the external world acts outside of them; this is a transcendental stupidity, but which is not necessarily produced by their special esthetics. The world is the idea I have of it, and the special modulations of my brain determine this idea. They have ugly brains, that is all. One could make amusing sketches in this way: the world as seen by a crab, the world as seen by a pig, the world as seen by a helminth. We describe ourselves, we can describe only that; an artist's creation is the slow and daily reaction of intelligence and will on a certain mass of individual cells."
"It would then be necessary," Renaudeau said, "to accept them as they are! Not quite. One can recreate oneself, cleanse one's low nature, take it to the Turkish bath, sponge it, rub it until the blood circulates. You are too indulgent, Monsieur Entragues."
"Entragues," said Calixte Heliot, who just then entered, "loves nothing but art and interests himself only in style."
"A novelty, indeed!" Entragues replied. "Unfortunately, art is not sufficient to produce style; a gift is necessary. Without that thing which Vauvenargues calls heart, Villiers sentiment, Hello love, literature is an unleavened dough. Look at Flaubert; he is a peremptory and sovereign artist who congenitally lacked love. Do you think that Villiers, by the most diligent labor, could have effaced from his work the stamp of his proud personality! CompareBouvard et Pécuchetwith theContes cruels; there you have the patient genius and the spontaneous genius, resigned scorn and indignant scorn, a hurt intellect and a wounded soul...."
"Are you bringing me your poem, Heliot?" Fortier asked. "Just put it in the closet with the masterpieces."
"Thank you," Calixte said, simply, as he opened a huge portfolio.
From it he drew his manuscript, where could be read, on the first page, the author's name, Calixte Heliot, in a very beautiful flowing handwriting. He was proud of his Christian name. Then he brought out a small case and slowly untied its strings.
"Here is a masterpiece for you. Eh! What does Van Baël think of it?"
The art critic took the little yellow paper, a delicate etching, and pronounced:
"Good, very good, a little dark, too deeply bitten. From afar," and he stretched out his hand, "from afar it turns to aquatint."
"By whom is it? There is an S and an M interlaced at the left-hand corner."
"S M, S M," repeated Van Baël. "I cannot guess. It is a portrait. I see more letters after the monogram. Strange, strange ... It reads: S. M. to S. M. A laconic dedication of the author to himself, or else a strange coincidence of initials."
Nobody, not even Entragues who studied it intently, could find the key to the monogram.
Hubert and Calixte were old friends who owed each other valuable services. Calixte observed Hubert's insistance: a fatidical attraction, rather than curiosity, fascinated his eyes, keeping them glued to the engraving.
"You can have it if you wish, my dear Entragues."
"I accept it," Entragues replied, "but with the permission of being able to return it to you or else to throw it into the fire."
"Chino la fronte e con lo sguardo a terraL'amoroso Pensier rode se stesso."Cav. Marino,l'Adone, VIII, 12.
More than two weeks had passed since the feverish and mysterious evening which Sixtine granted to Entragues. Three times he had tried to see her, three times he had failed: irritated, exasperated, cast down, such were his three successive states of mind.
After the door had closed on him, by the gleam of an instantaneous if tardy clairvoyance, he had seen and deciphered Sixtine's final irony: "You do not take me? Yet I am at your mercy. I have the air of thinking, of listening, of speaking, but I do not think, I do not listen, I do not speak—I merely pretend to do all these things and I await. Yet another half-hour, another ten minutes, five, one, the last one, nothing! Go! you make me lose my patience!"
"Now," Entragues told himself, "it is quite well reorganized, I must not lose it." And going by the longest route to his home, meditatively he recomposed the scene, wrote it in his mind. How Would it go at the theater? He planned the play. While the man in love explains the tenderness of his sentiments, the woman disrobes. He shrugged his shoulders: this would not be understood, he would be charged with coarseness. And yet the comic Plato had already done it, then Andronicus, then several Destouches, several Picards and several Augiers.
One could pass on a little note to the eminent professors who lecture on dramatic history (that vast science in three hundred thousandfeuilletons): Note.—Cf.:Plato com. Frag. ed. Brulend.§3;—Andron. ap. Taschend.t.XXXVII; etc. In the matter of books, criticism buries you, in the matter of the theater, it overwhelms you. To write for one's sole pleasure, with an absolute disdain for present opinions. Yes, but if they are just, that is to say favorable, one glories in it. Isolation is difficult, vanity ceaselessly and indefatigably solders the cable one has cut. Vanity! Fatuity! And in everything. Thus this monologue lends itself to Sixtine. I reason like a male; and she feels like a female and I shall never know what she felt at a certain moment, because, even taking for granted a confession and the wish to be sincere, she would lie by nature. The truth is what one thinks it; when one no longer thinks of anything—all is reduced to nothing! There remains sensation, but analyzed sensation—diamond dust!
He went to bed feeling miserable, and as he was dozing off with the consciousness of his moral powerlessness he was seized with a fit of despondency comparable to that of impotent men when in the presence of the desired woman. Incapable of loving, incapable of tearing from his heart the parasitic science whose tentacles strangled him, it seemed to him as if he had swallowed plaster, as if muddy blood stagnated in his veins; or rather as if his arteries slowly carried a curare which gradually benumbed his muscles. His mind obstructed with the most contradictory metaphors, he tried them one after the other, vaguely disgusted with their absurdity. Finally, with a rush of vitality, he somewhat reconquered his logic and ceased to hold himself in contempt: "I suffer, hence I love!" This thought, though he ironically perceived its mild naïveté, comforted him, a very long and decisive breathing reëstablished the haematosis, and he was able to sleep peacefully.
Painful doubts of this sort came to torture him on more than one evening. He was only delivered from them by anger—the first time that he knocked at Sixtine's door without getting a response. Certain deceptions on certain days determined this action, when strong desire had a precise end. At this moment it was to see Sixtine, merely to see her, merely the pleasure of the eyes.
The effect was the same after the second check, but accentuated to a sort of rage, a hardly dangerous crisis whose very lashes were salutary.
The last mockery of fortune, on the other hand, threw him into a resigned dejection. "She does not want to see me; I have displeased her, but how? Yet I love her." Thus displaced from the subject to the object, doubt was supportable as an imposed pain which one accepts without having any responsibility: "It is not my fault."
So he paced the streets or visited his friends and theRevue spéculative, a pale melancholy upon him like the vegetation of a cave. Under the shadow of a strong habit which no disturbance could uproot, he still worked in the mornings, but he shortened the hours, impatient for his distracting strolls. His imagination no longer accompanied him. It seemed that in ever projecting his thought towards an external creature, he had proportionately diminished the intensity of his evocative faculty.
As he was leaving theRevue, after Fortier had told him that the countess, now installed in her home because of affairs, was receiving some friends on a certain evening, at nine o'clock, he discovered that the present day was Wednesday, the day in question.
"Perhaps I will find Sixtine there?"
This quite natural reflection guided his somnambulism towards Marigny Avenue. In the interval he had dressed and dined with a perfect unconsciousness. A system of newly organized revery relieved the slow and rude friction of transitions; furnished with a problem of metaphysics, commerce, art, politics, it mattered not what so long as it required shrewd deductions, he used to be so perfectly absorbed in them that the hours vainly pricked him with their pins, the minutes. He walked through the streets insentient, inexistent. But, involuntarily, this action of his mind which shut him in between the walls of the fixed idea was a grievous imprisonment against which his will rebelled; on the other hand, chosen and brought about in entire freedom, this incarceration saved him, without the tax of suffering, from the ennui of expectation. Nothing was so painful to him as changes of rhythm. He wished them to be abrupt or imperceptible, partaking of a sudden brutality or of an infinitesimal gentleness, the unity of force sustained with all its initial violence or decomposed into the infinity of its diminishing fractions. Leibnitz had taught him the arithmetical method of reducing the sensation of time to an evanescent progression: he applied the method to life. To live and not to be aware of living was an ideal to which his senses, deceivers, but unrelenting, too often barred the road. Today the obstacle had been surmounted.
In the small modern room on the ground floor there were many people: some raised their heads when his name was announced; the usual movements and whisperings:
"An Entragues?"
"Which Entragues?"
"Oh! some stray stem of an Entragues! The name is quite common in the South."
"Yet he carries himself well."
"The countess will tell us about him." As soon as he was freed from the ceremonial of introduction, Entragues sought the eyes of some friend with whom he could be at ease. He found Sixtine's eyes: a gesture beckoned him.
He obeyed without astonishment, for he had seen a chair near her, guarded by a fan.
"I noticed you. How criminal I consider myself towards your friendliness and insistence.... Do you want me to number your visiting cards? Why did you not write to me?"
"But I wanted to see you."
"Yes, but writing has a witchery unknown to printed forms. Instead of seeking me, you should have called me. And you have sought so badly!"
"No, since I find you at last."
"By chance! Are you satisfied? You wished to see me, well, look at me."
"That is what I am doing," Hubert responded, "and with pleasure. I would never grow tired of it, Madame."
"I supposed it was quite the other way," Sixtine rejoined, "and that a secret or very inconsiderate presentiment informed you of my absences. How one blames one's friends! For the past three weeks, I left three times, in the evening, to come here, and naturally on the Wednesday of each week. Admit that it was odd for me to find your card, each Wednesday that I returned home."
"I am lost if you suppose I did it purposely," Hubert answered, "for every explanation is too simple to seem probable. I will give you the best one, although it may not perhaps be the true one. The first evening in which I passed a few minutes at your home was a Wednesday. A latent force must have led me to your door on the following Wednesdays, and this without any participation of my will. This periodical return, like the regular culmination of a feverish condition, is after all quite natural."
"These are the reasonings," Sixtine replied, "of an automaton who would be hard put to explain why he always plays the same tune on the flute, at the same hour. But you have come to the countess, instead of knocking at my door. Did no one wind you up this morning? On whom does this task devolve?"
"It would be yours, Madame, if you consented."
Each of them, ill at ease, felt the same desire to be silent and to go away. Sixtine, not yet calmed after the old ill-humor that had finally exploded, feared to hurt Hubert, feared to bleed him with too many prickings. Hubert, who feigned a sad politeness, endured suffocating agony. So he had been judged and Sixtine had pronounced sentence, with what aggravations for the unhappy man! Incapable, perhaps, of loving; certainly incapable of sharing his love. Would no mirage, then, be able to deceive him persistently, with sufficient certitude to give him courage to lead across the desert, towards the oasis, a phantom of love vivified by desire? She scoffed him and he surrendered; she fled and he watched her flee.
At the foot of the stairs which she had rapidly descended, remorse seized Sixtine by the flap of her cloak; she turned her head and waited for several seconds. Then, lifting her skirts, she hurried to the carriage which a watchful gamin, upon noticing her at the sidewalk, had motioned with mock gestures of obsequiousness. Profiting by the new indecision, remorse tried to seduce her with these insinuations:
"The air is very pleasant, the sky is clear, it would be nice to return on foot, chatting on the way. This poor Hubert would appreciate it, and I have really been a bit severe with him: he asks so little! But what can he be doing?"
She listened: no sound of a person issuing from the house. "What is this! You seem to be waiting for him! What an attitude for a woman!" the thin and whispering voice of feminine vanity breathed to her. She gave the driver her address and climbed into the carriage.
Hubert had slowly walked down the stairs stopping at each step. He staggered under a fit of contempt. His whole person, the very necessary movement of his limbs seemed to him an insult to life. His reflection, perceived in the mirrors, gave him a horror of effectual futility. This careful attire—what a pretentious obedience to vanity I How ugly he was with his pale cheeks and empty gaze! Ah! dust compressed into a human form, what prevents thee from returning to thy natural state, where thou couldst humbly blend thyself, as would be fitting, with the bruised and scorned sand crying beneath thy phantom feet?
He reached the gate; a carriage, detaching itself from the file, departed: "Perhaps it was she? No, she must be far away, by now. The air is very pleasant, the sky clear, it would have been nice to return on foot, chatting. This pleasure was not made for me, and it is ridiculous even to dream of it. Yet, would she have refused me, if I had asked? Eh! there I reason as if this woman had the slightest liking for me. Shall I, then, never cure myself of the stupid presumption with which I so grievously delude myself? What is the good of my philosophy? Everything is useless. Ah! I suffer less! The futility of my life is not unique; it is confounded with the universal nothingness. Yes, but all the same I can only consider myself, only myself, since I know nothing outside of my consciousness. Well, then! I remain alone, indemnified and invulnerable. What is that cloud, called Sixtine, which comes to trouble my royal indifference and to conceal my sun—death? I do not want to go to sleep in the shadow of her beauty. What is the good of loving, when the awakening is certain. Ah! if eternity were given me! Indispensable eternity, without you life is only a quite despicable thoroughfare. Does the present hour exist for the condemned person who knows that the next hour will not belong to him? And this life is less than an hour for whomsoever knows the worth of what he has been deprived of in being robbed of eternity." How he would have sacrificed his genius to be a Christian and no longer a dilettante of Christianity, believing, not in the unique beauty, but in the truth of religion, assured not alone of his social necessity, but of his immutable, absolute and solar truth!
He issued from his metaphysical cloud near the Pont-Royal, and fell back into his actual misery. The woman he loved did not love him and would never love him. In vain he scorned himself, in vain he accused himself of emotional impotence, the man deep in him protested and repeated: "I must love, since I suffer."
But, with Entragues, the man never pronounced the final aphorism. After the troubled divagations of the lover came the romancer, an artist or ditch-digger who gathered impressions together, clothed them in words as with a shroud of chatoyant folds, and laid them to rest, with care, respect and tenderness, in the vault whose portal bears the words written in letters of gold:LITERATURE.
He went to sleep, dreaming of the embryo of a romance which a more disinterested person would find in this new adventure. But perhaps he would some day acquire that necessary disinterestedness! At first the idea was outrageous, then he grew accustomed to it; he mentally sketched a first chapter—that of the encounter. He transported the scene to Naples, at the end of the fifteenth century, and the personages became pure symbols. The Man, a prisoner, typified the idea of the soul imprisoned in the jail of the flesh, quite ignorant of the external world, refashioning the vague vision transmitted by the senses. The Woman, a madonna, was a statue which the prisoner's love endowed with life and feeling, becoming as really existent to him as a creature of God. And on this theme could be developed all the divagations of love, dream and madness.
On the morning of the next day, he commenced this story which was closely based upon his actual state of mind, and in which he would take delight in transposing, in a manner of logical extravagance, the drama he was naively playing with Sixtine.
This madonna was the new woman,la Madonna Novella, and what name should be given to the prisoner, a prey to his own imagination, if not that ofDella Preda, since we are in Italy.Veltrofits the indispensable turnkey, and for title—The Adorer.
"Ave rosa speciosa!"Innocent III.
I. Blood Red
Sainte Napolitaine aux mains pleines de feux,Rose au coeur violet, fleur de sainte Gudule,As-tu trouvé ta croix dans le désert des cieux?Gérard de Nerval,les Chimères.
The night entered through the loophole—the end of a day of horror. He had been forgotten; he had not been given his daily walk. Perhaps he was going to perish here, without seeing the Novella again.
Morning, noon or evening, according to the arabesques of his fancy. Veltro, his jailor, opened the door with a violent turn of the key: "To the tower!" Delia Preda obediently climbed the few steps of the narrow and dim stairway; he climbed slowly, as if to perform a duty to which no exception could be taken, for he knew that these daily moments of apparent liberty in the open air were given to intensify the horrors of his cell and to prevent him from losing the notion of time and the duration of his torment. It is to reach this end rationally, without doubt, that the modern, rigid philanthropists instituted strict regulations in the new prisons. In 1489 the chief constables of Naples already knew the means of preventing these abuses of confidence by which the condemned person transmutes his punishment into an evil dream; but this was reserved for the prisoners of distinction. Guido della Preda, Count of Santa-Maria, was accused of having conspired, some said against the security of the State, others against the queen's honor. Because he was a gentleman, they had not hanged him; they had not beheaded him because he was innocent; a special punishment had fallen to his lot, for in a royal jail a difference must be established between prisoners who are guilty and those who are not.
He was in solitary confinement; the consciousness of the injustice he suffered might have led him into attempts at escape or revolt, and his intelligence would have made him the chief of the rascals sprawling all together on the straw of the common dungeon; and it is not fitting that a prisoner leave the prison through the window or that a jailer be strangled in a scuffle: it sets a very bad example and is liable to discredit prisons. There was yet another reason for this refinement, a privilege discussed and accorded by the State Council at the request of the Holy Office (for Della Preda was one of the thirteen peers of royalty): "Our Guido is innocent according to laws of this world, but who can boast of being so according to eternal laws? Let him, then, suffer in advance the punishment which God reserves for him upon his entry into the other life! Let him suffer more than the others, since he is less guilty! Let each hour of his mortal life be a painful preparatory measure leading to liberating death, through which eternity opens! Ah! What a good fortune for him to have been implicated in this action!"
The nineteenth hour sounded, seven o'clock according to our mode of reckoning time; by habit, Della Preda lifted his eyes towards the space framed by the high walls, and then towards the beginning of the arch, but he only beheld the night. This clock indicated the time for him by ringings violent as trumpets, and truly the pious desires of the Holy Office were being accomplished: the mortal hours of his mortal life fell one by one on his head, like leaden balls.
But all had not been foreseen! What holy monk could divine that within himself the prisoner would find joys and torments which not even the venomous Parthenope could have aroused in any heart.
The Tower of the Cross (Torre della Croce), so called at that time and for the past four hundred years the Tower of the Prey (Torre della Preda), dominates with its battlements all the vulgar quarters of Naples. It rears itself at the extreme end of a mass of old ruins still serving as a prison, through custom, and to which the people have given the name of Prison of the Blood-Hound (Carcer delle Veltro). At the end of the fifteenth century, these ruins, of a somewhat recent reconstruction, had the appearance of a fortress, and a space of a hundred and fifty feet was free between the walls, flanked by moats, and the first low houses of the outskirts.
At the center of the platform where Della Preda was daily led, a guard house was built which divided it in two, save for narrow passages, and limited the view on the side of the country. As he placed his foot on the last step, the prisoner had opposite him, to his left, the town which stood out in the distance, full of square belfries and domes; to the right was the blue gulf.
A church with flying buttresses, heavy and in ruins, first draws the unaccustomed glance and fixes it by the splendor of its brilliantly ornamented madonna. When the setting sun sank to the end of the pointed niche and bathed her with rays, the rubies and chrysolites of her tiara, the lepidolites and topazes of her starred aureola reflected the brilliance of luminaries and the faced adorned with diamond eyes looked rapturous.
The first time that Guido climbed to the tower was an evening when the sun was setting. He saw neither the flashing town with its green terraces, nor the blue bay with its white sails; but, uttering a cry, he asked:
"Down there! Down there! Who is that lady?"
"That lady? What lady?" repeated Veltro, with an astonished, already uneasy eye.
"Yes, that lady in front of the church of the Orphans?"
"Ah! you mean above the portal? That's the Novella, my lord," Veltro replied, baring his head as he pronounced the name, "a blessed and benevolent madonna. You can hardly see her well from below, the street is too narrow, but everybody knows that she is there, and that is enough."
"What an agreeable woman!" answered Guido. "O Novella! Protect me and love me!"
He knelt, bending his head, and when he stood up, after the last words of his supplicatingave, theNovellawas smiling, full of grace and tenderness.
"So you accept my prayer? Thanks, madonna! Deign to receive me as your worshiper, let my breathing be a praise to your immaculate tenderness, to your sovereign grace. Open your goodness to the irrevocable gift of my life. Let me be to you as the pupil to the eye which moves it as it wills. Trample me with the blessed weight of the adorable feet which crushed the serpent! Let my flesh, for love of you, be withered, my bones broken, my blood shed. Ah! I love you, I Novella, blessed and benevolent madonna!"
The madonna accepted the pact: a sign denoted her wish, her choice and her pleasure. Three times her eyelids drooped over her eyes and three times they were raised. Then night fell and it seemed to Guido that a most notable miracle had suspended, for several instants, the sun at the horizon's edge.
"He is guilty, quite guilty," Veltro reflected, "but he has piety, he regrets his crimes. May the madonna listen to him!"
"Listen to me, my lord," added the jailor, "and know that there is no better recourse in the world than to implore theNovella. You see it is not for nothing that she is called the Madonna of the Orphans! Her arms always are open and she does not carry a babe because all God's creatures are her children. She is the only one, at least to my knowledge.Santa Madonna degli Orfani, ora pro nobis."
During the two months that the Novella had been Guido's mistress, she had given him only happiness, charming and adorable happiness. He loved her and she smiled upon his love, except on certain days when a light cloud made ashen the pure face or the clear eyes of the beloved. He loved and, absorbed in his worship, felt himself loved. At first apprehensive, his tenderness now grew daring. The gentle but eternal smile no longer sufficed. The lover felt passion's boldness grow in his heart, like an imprisoned rose impelled by its sap to throw the living treasure of its purple to the broad day-light. The hour was approaching when the timid adorer would demand some tokens from the silent adored one, oh! the merest tokens of an adoration that was shared; the hour was approaching, the hour of communion, the spiritual hour which takes its sister by the hand, the hour of serious and tender eyes, the hour of strong caresses—the carnal hour.
The dark day which he passed under the hammer strokes of the pitiless clock was all the more painful to Guido since he had chosen it for definite questionings. Like all others, like lovers, he wished to know how matters stood, when it is simple to direct one's own questions and answers: but that is perhaps what he did, and why do anything else?
Veltro explained. It had been the fête of San Gaetano, the country his wife came from, about two leagues from Naples. He had received permission, had left, like a mad-cap, without informing the valet charged with his duties. "Would his lord the prisoner be good enough to forgive him?"
"Yes, Veltro, I pardon you. You are not bad and I believe you will not let it occur again, when I tell you that I have suffered greatly."
He slowly mounted, as to a certain joy, half shutting his eyes under the prolonged caresses of desire, counting the steps, trembling at the approach of the last and thirty-third.
A sudden alarm arrested his customary transport as he reached the battlements: he advanced hesitatingly, with gestures of astonishment and deception.
"Yet it is she, it is really she, and I do not recognize her."
"Set your mind at rest, my lord, there is nothing the matter, quite the contrary. They have put on her summer robe, that's all. The Novella changes her attire each season. And then there was a holiday, as well. Ah! if I had known! But how beautiful she is! She is beautiful as a queen."
Yes, she was beautiful. But Guido paused a moment before admitting this transmutation in which he had not at all participated. He sadly regarded the new Woman, sadly and with reproachful eyes:
"Are there seasons for my love? Are there days, are there hours? I loved the sky-colored robe which you had put on for our first meeting? Why then have you doffed it? Was it intended for me, at least? Did you wish to surprise me with a richer vesture that would more nobly become your serene beauty? Ah! queen, this too comely cloak does not bring my heart nearer to your heart, nor your lips to my lips; then, to what avail? You were blue like the sky and the sea, blue like the dream, blue like love—why this bleeding purple? In what stream of blood have you dipped your grace? Had I not offered you the torrent of my veins? Queen, you have betrayed me! You still smile at me, but your smile is cruel, you scoff, you scorn! An unfriendly day was that one in which, far from my tears, you permitted barbarous hands to profane the limbs I adore! It was I who should have divested you, it was I who should have covered you, divine and nude, in the sacred cloak of my effusions! Ah! you make me weep, Novella! What! you too weep, dear Passion, so you do yet love me? Oh! weep not! Pardon, pardon, I am the wicked one, I am the inclement one, and, moreover, I was mad. It is conceivable: I thought I had lost you. But no, it is not so? You are mine, more than ever, only mine! Let me be truly happy! No? Heed me, I love you! Not yet? It is true, I did doubt you; it is necessary to suffer, I wish to suffer."