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One of Cleopatra's Nights and Other Fantastic Romances

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Title: One of Cleopatra's Nights and Other Fantastic Romances

Author: Théophile Gautier

Translator: Lafcadio Hearn


        
Release date: April 7, 2012 [eBook #39397]
                Most recently updated: June 27, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39397

Credits: Marc D’Hooghe


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ONE OF CLEOPATRA'S NIGHTS AND OTHER FANTASTIC ROMANCES ***




ONE OF CLEOPATRA'S NIGHTS

And Other Fantastic Romances

by

THEOPHILE GAUTIER







Published by Brentano's
at Union Square. New York
1900



TRANSLATED BY LAFCADIO HEARN



     _The love that caught strange light from death's own eyes,_
     _And filled death's lips with fiery words and sighs,_
       _And, half asleep, let feed from veins of his_
     _Her close, red, warm snake's-mouth, Egyptian-wise:_

     _And that great night of love more strange than this,_
     _When she that made the whole world's bale and bliss_
       _Made king of the whole world's desire a slave_
     _And killed him in mid-kingdom with a kiss._

                                                         SWINBURNE.

"_Memorial verses on the death of Théophile Gautier_."




TO THE READER


The stories composing this volume have been selected for translation
from the two volumes of romances and tales by Théophile Gautier
respectively entitled _Nouvelles_ and _Romans et Contes_. They afford in
the original many excellent examples of that peculiar beauty of fancy
and power of painting with words which made Gautier the most brilliant
literary artist of his time. No doubt their warmth of coloring has been
impoverished and their fantastic enchantment weakened by the process of
transformation into a less voluptuous tongue; yet enough of the original
charm remains, we trust, to convey a just idea of the French author's
rich imaginative power and ornate luxuriance of style.

The verses of Swinburne referring to the witchery of the novelette which
opens the volume, and to the peculiarly sweet and strange romance which
follows, sufficiently indicate the extraordinary art of these tales. At
least three of the stories we have attempted to translate rank among the
most remarkable literary productions of the century.

These little romances are characterized, however, by merits other than
those of mere literary workmanship; they are further remarkable for a
wealth of erudition--picturesque learning, we might say--which often
lends them an actual archæologic value, like the paintings of some
scholarly artist, some Alma Tadema, who with fair magic of
color-blending evokes for us eidolons of ages vanished and civilizations
passed away.

Thus one finds in the delightful fantasy of _Arria Marcella_ not only a
dream of "Pompeiian Days," pictured with an idealistic brilliancy beyond
the art of Coomans, but a rich knowledge, likewise, of all that
fascinating lore gleaned by antiquarian research amid the ashes of the
sepultured city--a knowledge enriched in no small degree by local study,
and presented with a descriptive power finely strengthened by personal
observation. It is something more than the charming imagination of a
poetic dreamer which paints for us the blue sea "unrolling its long
volutes of foam" upon a beach as black and smooth as sifted charcoal;
the fissured summit of Vesuvius, out-pouring white threads of smoke from
its crannies "as from the orifices of a perfuming pan;" and the
far-purple hills "with outlines voluptuously undulating, like the hips
of a woman."

And throughout these romances one finds the same evidences of
archæologic study, of artistic observation, of imagination fostered by
picturesque fact. The glory of the Greek kings of Lydia glows goldenly
again in the pages of _Le Roi Candaule_; the massive gloom and
melancholy weirdness of ancient Egypt is reflected as in a necromancer's
mirror throughout _Une Nuit de Cléopâtre_. It is in the Egyptian
fantasies, perhaps, that the author's peculiar descriptive skill appears
to most advantage; the still fresh hues of the hierophantic paintings,
the pictured sarcophagi, and the mummy-gilding seem to meet the reader's
eye with the gratification of their bright contrasts; a faint perfume
of unknown balm seems to hover over the open pages; and mysterious
sphinxes appear to look on "with that undefinable rose-granite smile
that mocks our modern wisdom."

Excepting _Omphale_ and _La Morte Amoureuse,_ the stories selected for
translation are mostly antique in composition and coloring; the former
being Louis-Quinze, the latter mediæval rather than aught else. But all
alike frame some exquisite delineation of young love-fancies; some
admirable picture of what Gautier in the _Histoire du Romantisme_ has
prettily termed "the graceful _succubi_ that haunt the happy slumbers of
youth."

And what dreamful student of the Beautiful has not been once enamoured
of an Arria Marcella, and worshipped on the altar of his heart those
ancient gods "who loved life and youth and beauty and pleasure"? How
many a lover of mediæval legend has in fancy gladly bartered the blood
of his veins for some phantom Clarimonde? What true artist has not at
some time been haunted by the image of a Nyssia, fairer than all
daughters of men, lovelier than all fantasies realized in stone--a
Pygmalion-wrought marble transmuted by divine alchemy to a being of
opalescent flesh and ichor-throbbing veins?

Gautier was an artist in the common acceptation of the term, as well as
a poet and a writer of romance; and in those pleasant fragments of
autobiography scattered through the _Histoire du Romantisme_ we find his
averment that at the commencement of the Romantic movement of 1830 he
was yet undecided whether to adopt literature or art as a profession;
but, finding it "easier to paint with words than with colors," he
finally decided upon the pen as his weapon in the new warfare against
"the hydra of classicism with its hundred peruked heads." As a writer,
however, he remained the artist still. His pages were pictures, his
sentences touches of color; he learned, indeed, to "paint with words" as
no other writer of the century has done; and created a powerful
impression, not only upon the literature of his day, but even, it may be
said, upon the language of his nation.

Possessed of an almost matchless imaginative power, and a sense of
beauty as refined as that of an antique sculptor, Gautier so perfects
his work as to leave nothing for the imagination of his readers to
desire. He insists that they should behold the author's fancy precisely
as the author himself fancied it with all its details; the position of
objects, the effects of light, the disposition of shadow, the material
of garments, the texture of stuffs, the interstices of stonework, the
gleam of a lamp upon sharp angles of furniture, the whispering sound of
trailing silk, the tone of a voice, the expression of a face--all is
visible, audible, tangible. You can find nothing in one of his
picturesque scenes which has not been treated with a studied accuracy of
minute detail that leaves no vacancy for the eye to light upon, no
hiatus for the imagination to supply. This is the art of painting
carried to the highest perfection in literature. It is not wonderful
that such a man should at times sacrifice style to description; and he
has himself acknowledged an occasional abuse of violent coloring.

Naturally, a writer of this kind pays small regard to the demands of
prudery. His work being that of the artist, he claims the privilege of
the sculptor and the painter in delineations of the beautiful. A perfect
human body is to him the most beautiful of objects. He does not seek to
veil its loveliness with cumbrous drapery; he delights to behold it and
depict it in its "divine nudity;" he views it with the eyes of the
Corinthian statuary or the Pompeiian fresco-painter; he idealizes even
the ideal of beauty: under his treatment flesh becomes diaphanous, eyes
are transformed to orbs of prismatic light, features take tints of
celestial loveliness. Like the Hellenic sculptor, he is not satisfied
with beauty of form alone, but must add a vital glow of delicate
coloring to the white limbs and snowy bosom of marble.

It is the artist, therefore, who must judge of Gautier's creations. To
the lovers of the loveliness of the antique world, the lovers of
physical beauty and artistic truth, of the charm of youthful dreams and
young passion in its blossoming, of poetic ambitions and the sweet
pantheism that finds all Nature vitalized by the Spirit of the
Beautiful--to such the first English version of these graceful fantasies
is offered in the hope that it may not be found wholly unworthy of the
original.

L.H.

NEW ORLEANS, 1882.






ONE OF CLEOPATRA'S NIGHTS




CHAPTER I


Nineteen hundred years ago from the date of this writing, a
magnificently gilded and painted cangia was descending the Nile as
rapidly as fifty long, flat oars, which seemed to crawl over the
furrowed water like the legs of a gigantic scarabæus, could impel it.

This cangia was narrow, long, elevated at both ends in the form of a new
moon, elegantly proportioned, and admirably built for speed; the figure
of a ram's head, surmounted by a golden globe, armed the point of the
prow, showing that the vessel belonged to some personage of royal
blood.

In the centre of the vessel arose a flat-roofed cabin--a sort of _naos_,
or tent of honor--colored and gilded, ornamented with palm-leaf
mouldings, and lighted by four little square windows.

Two chambers, both decorated with hieroglyphic paintings, occupied the
horns of the crescent. One of them, the larger, had a second story of
lesser height built upon it, like the _châteaux gaillards_ of those
fantastic galleys of the sixteenth century drawn by Della-Bella; the
other and smaller chamber, which also served as a pilot-house, was
surmounted with a triangular pediment.

In lieu of a rudder, two immense oars, adjusted upon stakes decorated
with stripes of paint, which served in place of our modern row-locks,
extended into the water in rear of the vessel like the webbed feet of a
swan; heads crowned with _pshents_, and bearing the allegorical horn
upon their chins, were sculptured upon the handles of these huge oars,
which were manœuvred by the pilot as he stood upon the deck of the
cabin above.

He was a swarthy man, tawny as new bronze, with bluish surface gleams
playing over his dark skin; long oblique eyes, hair deeply black and
all plaited into little cords, full lips, high cheek-bones, ears
standing out from the skull--the Egyptian type in all its purity. A
narrow strip of cotton about his loins, together with five or six
strings of glass beads and a few amulets, comprised his whole costume.

He appeared to be the only one on board the cangia; for the rowers
bending over their oars, and concealed from view by the gunwales, made
their presence known only through the symmetrical movements of the oars
themselves, which spread open alternately on either side of the vessel,
like the ribs of a fan, and fell regularly back into the water after a
short pause.

Not a breath of air was stirring; and the great triangular sail of the
cangia, tied up and bound to the lowered mast with a silken cord,
testified that all hope of the wind rising had been abandoned.

The noonday sun shot his arrows perpendicularly from above; the
ashen-hued slime of the river banks reflected the fiery glow; a raw
light, glaring and blinding in its intensity, poured down in torrents
of flame; the azure of the sky whitened in the heat as a metal whitens
in the furnace; an ardent and lurid fog smoked in the horizon. Not a
cloud appeared in the sky--a sky mournful and changeless as Eternity.

The water of the Nile, sluggish and wan, seemed to slumber in its
course, and slowly extend itself in sheets of molten tin. No breath of
air wrinkled its surface, or bowed down upon their stalks the cups of
the lotus-flowers, as rigidly motionless as though sculptured; at long
intervals the leap of a bechir or fabaka expanding its belly scarcely
caused a silvery gleam upon the current; and the oars of the cangia
seemed with difficulty to tear their way through the fuliginous film of
that curdled water. The banks were desolate, a solemn and mighty sadness
weighed upon this land, which was never aught else than a vast tomb, and
in which the living appeared to be solely occupied in the work of
burying the dead. It was an arid sadness, dry as pumice stone, without
melancholy, without reverie, without one pearly gray cloud to follow
toward the horizon, one secret spring wherein to lave one's dusty feet;
the sadness of a sphinx weary of eternally gazing upon the desert, and
unable to detach herself from the granite socle upon which she has
sharpened her claws for twenty centuries.

So profound was the silence that it seemed as though the world had
become dumb, or that the air had lost all power of conveying sound. The
only noises which could be heard at intervals were the whisperings and
stifled "chuckling" of the crocodiles, which, enfeebled by the heat,
were wallowing among the bullrushes by the river banks; or the sound
made by some ibis, which, tired of standing with one leg doubled up
against its stomach, and its head sunk between its shoulders, suddenly
abandoned its motionless attitude, and, brusquely whipping the blue air
with its white wings, flew off to perch upon an obelisk or a palm-tree.
The cangia flew like, an arrow over the smooth river-water, leaving
behind it a silvery wake which soon disappeared; and only a few
foam-bubbles rising to break at the surface of the stream bore testimony
to the passage of the vessel, then already out of sight.

The ochre-hued or salmon-colored banks unrolled themselves rapidly, like
scrolls of papyrus, between the double azure of water and sky so similar
in tint that the slender tongue of earth which separated them seemed
like a causeway stretching over an immense lake, and that it would have
been difficult to determine whether the Nile reflected the sky, or
whether the sky reflected the Nile.

The scene continually changed. At one moment were visible gigantic
propylæa, whose sloping walls, painted with large panels of fantastic
figures, were mirrored in the river; pylons with broad-bulging capitals;
stairways guarded by huge crouching sphinxes, wearing caps with lappets
of many folds, and crossing their paws of black basalt below their
sharply projecting breasts; palaces, immeasurably vast, projecting
against the horizon the severe horizontal lines of their entablatures,
where the emblematic globe unfolded its mysterious wings like an eagle's
vast-extending pinions; temples with enormous columns thick as towers,
on which were limned processions of hieroglyphic figures against a
background of brilliant white--all the monstrosities of that Titanic
architecture. Again the eye beheld only land-scapes of desolate
aridity--hills formed of stony fragments from excavations and building
works, crumbs of that gigantic debauch of granite which lasted for more
than thirty centuries; mountains exfoliated by heat, and mangled and
striped with black lines which seemed like the cauterizations of a
conflagration; hillocks humped and deformed, squatting like the
criocephalus of the tombs, and projecting the outlines of their
misshapen attitude against the sky-line; expanses of greenish clay,
reddle, flour-white tufa; and from time to time some steep cliff of dry,
rose-colored granite, where yawned the black mouths of the stone
quarries.

This aridity was wholly unrelieved; no oasis of foliage refreshed the
eye; green seemed to be a color unknown to that nature; only some meagre
palm-tree, like a vegetable crab, appeared from time to time in the
horizon; or a thorny fig-tree brandished its tempered leaves like sword
blades of bronze; or a carthamus-plant, which had found a little
moisture to live upon in the shadow of some fragment of a broken column,
relieved the general uniformity with a speck of crimson.

After this rapid glance at the aspect of the landscape, let us return to
the cangia with its fifty rowers, and, without announcing ourselves,
enter boldly into the _naos_ of honor.

The interior was painted white with green arabesques, bands of
vermilion, and gilt flowers fantastically shaped; an exceedingly fine
rush matting covered the floor; at the further end stood a little bed,
supported upon griffin's feet, having a back resembling that of a modern
lounge or sofa; a stool with four steps to enable one to climb into bed;
and (rather an odd luxury according to our ideas of comfort) a sort of
hemicycle of cedar wood, supported upon a single leg, and designed to
fit the nape of the neck so as to support the head of the person
reclining.

Upon this strange pillow reposed a most charming head, one look of
which once caused the loss of half a world; an adorable, a divine head;
the head of the most perfect woman that ever lived; the most womanly and
most queenly of all women; an admirable type of beauty which the
imagination of poets could never invest with any new grace, and which
dreamers will find forever in the depths of their dreams--it is not
necessary to name Cleopatra.

Beside her stood her favorite slave Charmion, waving a large fan of ibis
feathers; and a young girl was moistening with scented water the little
reed blinds attached to the windows of the _naos_, so that the air might
only enter impregnated with fresh odors.

Near the bed of repose, in a striped vase of alabaster with a slender
neck and a peculiarly elegant, tapering shape, vaguely recalling the
form of a heron, was placed a bouquet of lotus-flowers, some of a
celestial blue, others of a tender rose-color, like the finger-tips of
Isis the great goddess.

Either from caprice or policy, Cleopatra did not wear the Greek dress
that day. She had just attended a panegyris,[1] and was returning to
her summer palace still clad in the Egyptian costume she had worn at the
festival.

Perhaps our fair readers will feel curious to know how Queen Cleopatra
was attired on her return from the Mammisi of Hermonthis whereat were
worshipped the holy triad of the god Mandou, the goddess Ritho, and
their son, Harphra; luckily we are able to satisfy them in this regard.

For headdress Queen Cleopatra wore a kind of very light helmet of beaten
gold, fashioned in the form of the body and wings of the sacred
partridge. The wings, opening downward like fans, covered the temples,
and extending below, almost to the neck, left exposed on either side,
through a small aperture, an ear rosier and more delicately curled than
the shell whence arose that Venus whom the Egyptians named Athor; the
tail of the bird occupied that place where our women wear their
chignons; its body, covered with imbricated feathers, and painted in
variegated enamel, concealed the upper part of the head; and its neck,
gracefully curving forward over the forehead of the wearer, formed
together with its little head a kind of horn-shaped ornament, all
sparkling with precious stones; a symbolic crest, designed like a tower,
completed this odd but elegant headdress. Hair dark as a starless night
flowed from beneath this helmet, and streamed in long tresses over the
fair shoulders whereof the commencement only, alas! was left exposed by
a collarette, or gorget, adorned with many rows of serpentine stones,
azodrachs, and chrysoberyls; a linen robe diagonally cut--a mist of
material, of woven air, _ventus textilis_ as Petronius says, undulated
in vapory whiteness about a lovely body whose outlines it scarcely
shaded with the softest shading. This robe had half-sleeves, tight at
the shoulder, but widening toward the elbows like our _manches-à-sabot_,
and permitting a glimpse of an adorable arm and a perfect hand, the arm
being clasped by six golden bracelets, and the hand adorned with a ring
representing the sacred scarabæus. A girdle, whose knotted ends hung
down in front, confined this free-floating tunic at the waist; a short
cloak adorned with fringing completed the costume; and, if a few
barbarous words will not frighten Parisian ears, we might add that the
robe was called _schenti,_ and the short cloak, _calisiris_.

Finally, we may observe that Queen Cleopatra wore very thin, light
sandals, turned up at the toes, and fastened over the instep, like the
_Souliers-à-la-poulaine_ of the mediæval _chatelaines_.

But Queen Cleopatra did not wear that air of satisfaction which becomes
a woman conscious of being perfectly beautiful and perfectly well
dressed. She tossed and turned in her little bed, and her sudden
movements momentarily disarranged the folds of her gauzy _conopeum_,
which Charmion as often rearranged with inexhaustible patience, and
without ceasing to wave her fan.

"This room is stifling," said Cleopatra; "even if Pthah the God of Fire
established his forges in here, he could not make it hotter; the air is
like the breath of a furnace!" And she moistened her lips with the tip
of her little tongue, and stretched out her hand like a feverish patient
seeking an absent cup.

Charmion, ever attentive, at once clapped her hands. A black slave
clothed in a short tunic hanging in folds like an Albanian petticoat,
and a panther-skin thrown over his shoulders, entered with the
suddenness of an apparition; with his left hand balancing a tray laden
with cups, and slices of watermelon, and carrying in his right a long
vase with a spout like a modern teapot.

The slave filled one of these cups, pouring the liquor into it from a
considerable height with marvellous dexterity, and placed it before the
queen. Cleopatra merely touched the beverage with her lips, laid the cup
down beside her, and turning upon Charmion her beautiful liquid black
eyes, lustrous with living light, exclaimed:

"O Charmion, I am weary unto death!"


[1] _Panegyris_; pl., _panegyreis_,--from the Greek [], --signifies the
meeting of a whole people to worship at a common sanctuary or
participate in a national religious festival. The assemblies at the
Olympic, Pythian, Nemean, or Isthmian games were in this sense
_panegyreis_. See Smith's Dict. Antiq.--(Trans.)




CHAPTER II


Charmion, at once anticipating a confidence, assumed a look of pained
sympathy, and drew nearer to her mistress.

"I am horribly weary!" continued Cleopatra, letting her arms fall like
one utterly discouraged. "This Egypt crushes, annihilates me; this sky
with its implacable azure is sadder than the deep night of Erebus; never
a cloud, never a shadow, and always that red, sanguine sun, which glares
down upon you like the eye of a Cyclops. Ah, Charmion, I would give a
pearl for one drop of rain! From the inflamed pupil of that sky of
bronze no tear has ever yet fallen upon the desolation of this land; it
is only a vast covering for a tomb--the dome of a necropolis; a sky dead
and dried up like the mummies it hangs over; it weighs upon my shoulders
like an over-heavy mantle; it constrains and terrifies me; it seems to
me that I could not stand up erect without striking my forehead against
it. And, moreover, this land is truly an awful land; all things in it
are gloomy, enigmatic, incomprehensible. Imagination has produced in it
only monstrous chimeras and monuments immeasurable; this architecture
and this art fill me with fear; those colossi, whose stone-entangled
limbs compel them to remain eternally sitting with their hands upon
their knees, weary me with their stupid immobility; they trouble my eyes
and my horizon. When, indeed, shall the giant come who is to take them
by the hand and relieve them from their long watch of twenty centuries?
For even granite itself must grow weary at last! Of what master, then,
do they await the coming, to leave their mountain-seats and rise in
token of respect? Of what invisible flock are those huge sphinxes the
guardians, crouching like dogs on the watch, that they never close their
eyelids, and forever extend their claws in readiness to seize? Why are
their stony eyes so obstinately fixed upon eternity and infinity? What
weird secret do their firmly locked lips retain within their breasts? On
the right hand, on the left, whithersoever one turns, only frightful
monsters are visible--dogs with the heads of men; men with the heads of
dogs; chimeras begotten of hideous couplings in the shadowy depths of
the labyrinths; figures of Anubis, Typhon, Osiris; partridges with great
yellow eyes that seem to pierce through you with their inquisitorial
gaze, and see beyond and behind you things which one dare not speak
of--a family of animals and horrible gods with scaly wings, hooked
beaks, trenchant claws, ever ready to seize and devour you should you
venture to cross the threshold of the temple, or lift a corner of the
veil.

"Upon the walls, upon the columns, on the ceilings, on the floors, upon
palaces and temples, in the long passages and the deepest pits of the
necropoli, even within the bowels of the earth where light never comes,
and where the flames of the torches die for want of air, forever and
everywhere are sculptured and painted interminable hieroglyphics,
telling in language unintelligible of things which are no longer known,
and which belong, doubtless, to the vanished creations of the
past--prodigious buried works wherein a whole nation was sacrificed to
write the epitaph of one king! Mystery and granite--this is Egypt! Truly
a fair land for a young woman, and a young queen.

"Menacing and funereal symbols alone meet the eye--the emblems of the
_pedum,_ the _tau_, allegorical globes, coiling serpents, and the scales
in which souls are weighed--the Unknown, death, nothingness. In the
place of any vegetation only _stelæ_ limned with weird characters;
instead of avenues of trees, avenues of granite obelisks; in lieu of
soil, vast pavements of granite for which whole mountains could each
furnish but one slab; in place of a sky, ceilings of granite--eternity
made palpable, a bitter and everlasting sarcasm upon the frailty and
brevity of life--stairways built only for the limbs of Titans, which the
human foot cannot ascend save by the aid of ladders; columns that a
hundred arms cannot encircle; labyrinths in which one might travel for
years without discovering the termination--the vertigo of enormity, the
drunkenness of the gigantic, the reckless efforts of that pride which
would at any cost engrave its name deeply upon the face of the world.

"And, moreover, Charmion, I tell you a thought haunts me which terrifies
me. In other lands of the earth, corpses are burned, and their ashes
soon mingle with the soil. Here, it is said that the living have no
other occupation than that of preserving the dead. Potent balms save
them from destruction; the remains endure after the soul has evaporated.
Beneath this people lie twenty peoples; each city stands upon twenty
layers of necropoli; each generation which passes away leaves a
population of mummies to a shadowy city. Beneath the father you find the
grandfather and the great-grandfather in their gilded and painted boxes,
even as they were during life; and should you dig down forever, forever
you would still find the underlying dead.

"When I think upon those bandage-swathed myriads--those multitudes of
parched spectres who fill the sepulchral pits, and who have been there
for two thousand years face to face in their own silence, which nothing
ever breaks, not even the noise which the graveworms make in crawling,
and who will be found intact after yet another two thousand years, with
their crocodiles, their cats, their ibises, and all things that lived in
their lifetime--then terrors seize me, and I feel my flesh creep. What
do they mutter to each other? For they still have lips, and every ghost
would find its body in the same state as when it quitted it, if they
should all take the fancy to return.

"Ah, truly is Egypt a sinister kingdom and little suited to me, the
laughter-loving and merry one. Everything in it encloses a mummy; that
is the heart and the kernel of all things. After a thousand turns you
must always end there; the Pyramids themselves hide sarcophagi. What
nothingness and madness is this! Disembowel the sky with gigantic
triangles of stone--you cannot thereby lengthen your corpse an inch. How
can one rejoice and live in a land like this, where the only perfume you
can respire is the acrid odor of the naphtha and bitumen which boil in
the caldrons of the embalmers, where the very flooring of your chamber
sounds hollow because the corridors of the hypogea and the mortuary pits
extend even under your alcove? To be the queen of mummies, to have none
to converse with but statues in constrained and rigid attitudes--this
is, in truth, a cheerful lot. Again, if I only had some heartfelt
passion to relieve this melancholy, some interest in life; if I could
but love somebody or something; if I were even loved; but I am not.

"This is why I am weary, Charmion. With love, this grim and arid Egypt
would seem to me fairer than even Greece with her ivory gods, her
temples of snowy marble, her groves of laurel, and fountains of living
water. There I should never dream of the weird face of Anubis and the
ghastly terrors of the cities underground."

Charmion smiled incredulously. "That ought not, surely, to be a source
of much grief to you, O queen; for every glance of your eyes
transpierces hearts, like the golden arrows of Eros himself."

"Can a queen," answered Cleopatra, "ever know whether it is her face or
her diadem that is loved? The rays of her starry crown dazzle the eyes
and the heart. Were I to descend from the height of my throne, would I
even have the celebrity or the popularity of Bacchis or Archianassa, of
the first courtesan from Athens or Miletus? A queen is something so far
removed from men, so elevated, so widely separated from them, so
impossible for them to reach! What presumption dare flatter itself in
such an enterprise? It is not simply a woman, it is an august and sacred
being that has no sex, and that is worshipped kneeling without being
loved. Who was ever really enamoured of Hera the snowy-armed or Pallas
of the sea-green eyes? Who ever sought to kiss the silver feet of Thetis
or the rosy fingers of Aurora? What lover of the divine beauties ever
took unto himself wings that he might soar to the golden palaces of
heaven? Respect and fear chill hearts in our presence, and in order to
obtain the love of our equals, one must descend into those necropoli of
which I have just been speaking."

Although she offered no further objection to the arguments of her
mistress, a vague smile which played about the lips of the handsome
Greek slave showed that she had little faith in the inviolability of the
royal person.

"Ah," continued Cleopatra, "I wish that something would happen to me,
some strange, unexpected adventure. The songs of the poets; the dances
of the Syrian slaves; the banquets, rose garlanded, and prolonged into
the dawn; the nocturnal races; the Laconian dogs; the tame lions; the
hump-backed dwarfs; the brotherhood of the Inimitables; the combats of
the arena; the new dresses; the byssus robes; the clusters of pearls;
the perfumes from Asia; the most exquisite of luxuries; the wildest of
splendors--nothing any longer gives me pleasure. Everything has become
indifferent to me, everything is insupportable to me."

"It is easily to be seen," muttered Charmion to herself, "that the queen
has not had a lover nor had anyone killed for a whole month."

Fatigued with so lengthy a tirade, Cleopatra once more took the cup
placed beside her, moistened her lips with it, and putting her head
beneath her arm, like a dove putting its head under its wing, composed
herself for slumber as best she could. Charmion unfastened her sandals
and commenced to gently tickle the soles of her feet with a peacock's
feather, and Sleep soon sprinkled his golden dust upon the beautiful
eyes of Ptolemy's sister.

While Cleopatra sleeps, let us ascend upon deck and enjoy the glorious
sunset view. A broad band of violet color, warmed deeply with ruddy
tints toward the west, occupies all the lower portion of the sky;
encountering the zone of azure above, the violet shade melts into a
clear lilac, and fades off through half-rosy tints into the blue
beyond; afar, where the sun, red as a buckler fallen from the furnace
of Vulcan, casts his burning reflection, the deeper shades turn to pale
citron hues, and glow with turquoise tints. The water, rippling under
an oblique beam of light, shines with the dull gleam of the
quicksilvered side of a mirror, or like a damascened blade. The
sinuosities of the bank, the reeds, and all objects along the shore are
brought out in sharp black relief against the bright glow. By the aid
of this crepuscular light you may perceive afar off, like a grain of
dust floating upon quicksilver, a little brown speck trembling in the
network of luminous ripples. Is it a teal diving, a tortoise lazily
drifting with the current, a crocodile raising the tip of his scaly
snout above the water to breathe the cooler air of evening, the belly
of a hippopotamus gleaming amidstream, or perhaps a rock left bare by
the falling of the river? For the ancient Opi-Mou, Father of Waters,
sadly needs to replenish his dry urn from the solstitial rains of the
Mountains of the Moon.

It is none of these. By the atoms of Osiris so deftly resewn together,
it is a man, who seems to walk, to skate, upon the water! Now the frail
bark which sustains him becomes visible, a very nutshell of a boat, a
hollow fish; three strips of bark fitted together (one for the bottom
and two for the sides), and strongly fastened at either end by cord well
smeared with bitumen. The man stands erect, with one foot on either side
of this fragile vessel, which he impels with a single oar that also
serves the purpose of a rudder; and although the royal cangia moves
rapidly under the efforts of the fifty rowers, the little black bark
visibly gains upon it.

Cleopatra desired some strange adventure, something wholly unexpected.
This little bark which moves so mysteriously seems to us to be conveying
an adventure, or, at least, an adventurer. Perhaps it contains the hero
of our story; the thing is not impossible.

At any rate he was a handsome youth of twenty, with hair so black that
it seemed to own a tinge of blue, a skin blonde as gold, and a form so
perfectly proportioned that he might have been taken for a bronze statue
by Lysippus. Although he had been rowing for a very long time he
betrayed no sign of fatigue, and not a single drop of sweat bedewed his
forehead.

The sun half sank below the horizon, and against his broken disk figured
the dark silhouette of a far distant city, which the eye could not have
distinguished but for this accidental effect of light. His radiance soon
faded altogether away, and the stars, fair night-flowers of heaven,
opened their chalices of gold in the azure of the firmament. The royal
cangia, closely followed by the little bark, stopped before a huge
marble stairway, whereof each step supported one of those sphinxes that
Cleopatra so much detested. This was the landing-place of the summer
palace.

Cleopatra, leaning upon Charmion, passed swiftly, like a gleaming
vision, between a double line of lantern-bearing slaves.

The youth took from the bottom of his little boat a great lion-skin,
threw it across his shoulders, drew the tiny shell upon the beach, and
wended his way toward the palace.




CHAPTER III


Who is this young man, balancing himself upon a fragment of bark, who
dares follow the royal cangia, and is able to contend in a race of speed
against fifty strong rowers from the land of Kush, all naked to to the
waist, and anointed with palm-oil? What secret motive urges him to this
swift pursuit? That, indeed, is one of the many things we are obliged to
know in our character of the intuition-gifted poet, for whose benefit
all men, and even all women (a much more difficult matter), must have
in their breasts that little window which Momus of old demanded.

It is not a very easy thing to find out precisely what a young man from
the land of Kemi, who followed the barge of Cleopatra, queen and goddess
Evergetes, on her return from the Mammisi of Hermonthis two thousand
years ago, was then thinking of. But we shall make the effort
notwithstanding.

Meïamoun, son of Mandouschopsh, was a youth of strange character;
nothing by which ordinary minds are affected made any impression upon
him. He seemed to belong to some loftier race, and might well have been
regarded as the offspring of some divine adultery. His glance had the
steady brilliancy of a falcon's gaze, and a serene majesty sat on his
brow as upon a pedestal of marble; a noble pride curled his upper lip,
and expanded his nostrils like those of a fiery horse. Although owning a
grace of form almost maidenly in its delicacy, and though the bosom of
the fair and effeminate god Dionysos was not more softly rounded or
smoother than his, yet beneath this soft exterior were hidden sinews of
steel and the strength of Hercules--a strange privilege of certain
antique natures to unite in themselves the beauty of woman with the
strength of man.

As for his complexion, we must acknowledge that it was of a tawny orange
color, a hue little in accordance with our white-and-rose ideas of
beauty; but which did not prevent him from being a very charming young
man, much sought after by all kinds of women--yellow, red,
copper-colored, sooty-black, or golden skinned, and even by one fair,
white Greek.

Do not suppose from this that Meïamoun's lot was altogether enviable.
The ashes of aged Priam, the very snows of Hippolytus, were not more
insensible or more frigid; the young white-robed neophyte preparing for
the initiation into the mysteries of Isis led no chaster life; the young
maiden benumbed by the icy shadow of her mother was not more shyly pure.

Nevertheless, for so coy a youth, the pleasures of Meïamoun were
certainly of a singular nature. He would go forth quietly some morning
with his little buckler of hippopotamus hide, his _harpe_ or curved
sword, a triangular bow, and a snake-skin quiver filled with barbed
arrows; then he would ride at a gallop far into the desert, upon his
slender-limbed, small-headed, wild-maned mare, until he could find some
lion-tracks. He especially delighted in taking the little lion-cubs from
underneath the belly of their mother. In all things he loved the
perilous or the unachievable. He preferred to walk where it seemed
impossible for any human being to obtain a foothold, or to swim in a
raging torrent, and he had accordingly chosen the neighborhood of the
cataracts for his bathing place in the Nile. The Abyss called him!

Such was Meïamoun, son of Mandouschopsh.

For some time his humors had been growing more savage than ever. During
whole months he buried himself in the Ocean of Sands, returning only at
long intervals. Vainly would his uneasy mother lean from her terrace and
gaze anxiously down the long road with tireless eyes. At last, after
weary waiting, a little whirling cloud of dust would become visible in
the horizon, and finally the cloud would open to allow a full view of
Meïamoun, all covered with dust, riding upon a mare gaunt as a wolf,
with red and bloodshot eyes, nostrils trembling, and huge scars along
her flanks--scars which certainly were not made by spurs.

After having hung up in his room some hyena or lion skin, he would start
off again.

And yet no one might have been happier than Meïamoun. He was beloved by
Nephthe, daughter of the priest Afomouthis, and the loveliest woman of
the Nome Arsinoïtes. Only such a being as Meïamoun could have failed to
see that Nephthe had the most charmingly oblique and indescribably
voluptuous eyes, a mouth sweetly illuminated by ruddy smiles, little
teeth of wondrous whiteness and transparency, arms exquisitely round,
and feet more perfect than the jasper feet of the statue of Isis.
Assuredly there was not a smaller hand nor longer hair than hers in all
Egypt. The charms of Nephthe could have been eclipsed only by those of
Cleopatra. But who could dare to dream of loving Cleopatra? Ixion,
enamoured of Juno, strained only a cloud to his bosom, and must forever
roll the wheel of his punishment in hell.

It was Cleopatra whom Meïamoun loved.

He had at first striven to tame this wild passion; he had wrestled
fiercely with it; but love cannot be strangled even as a lion is
strangled, and the strong skill of the mightiest athlete avails nothing
in such a contest. The arrow had remained in the wound, and he carried
it with him everywhere. The radiant and splendid image of Cleopatra,
with her golden-pointed diadem and her imperial purple, standing above a
nation on their knees, illumined his nightly dreams and his waking
thoughts. Like some imprudent man who has dared to look at the sun and
forever thereafter beholds an impalpable blot floating before his eyes,
so Meïamoun ever beheld Cleopatra. Eagles may gaze undazzled at the sun,
but what diamond eye can with impunity fix itself upon a beautiful
woman, a beautiful queen?

He commenced at last to spend his life in wandering about the
neighborhood of the royal dwelling, that he might at least breathe the
same air as Cleopatra, that he might sometimes kiss the almost
imperceptible print of her foot upon the sand (a happiness, alas! rare
indeed). He attended the sacred festivals and _panegyreis_, striving to
obtain one beaming glance of her eyes, to catch in passing one stealthy
glimpse of her loveliness in some of its thousand varied aspects. At
other moments, filled with sudden shame of this mad life, he gave
himself up to the chase with redoubled ardor, and sought by fatigue to
tame the ardor of his blood and the impetuosity of his desires.

He had gone to the panegyris of Hermonthis, and, in the vague hope of
beholding the queen again for an instant as she disembarked at the
summer palace, had followed her cangia in his boat--little heeding the
sharp stings of the sun--through a heat intense enough to make the
panting sphinxes melt in lava-sweat upon their reddened pedestals.

And then he felt that the supreme moment was nigh, that the decisive
instant of his life was at hand, and that he could not die with his
secret in his breast.

It is a strange situation truly to find one-self enamoured of a queen.
It is as though one loved a star; yet she, the star, comes forth nightly
to sparkle in her place in heaven. It is a kind of mysterious
rendezvous. You may find her again, you may see her; she is not offended
at your gaze. Oh, misery! to be poor, unknown, obscure, seated at the
very foot of the ladder, and to feel one's heart breaking with love for
something glittering, solemn, and magnificent--for a woman whose meanest
female attendant would scorn you!--to gaze fixedly and fatefully upon
one who never sees you, who never will see you; one to whom you are
no more than a ripple on the sea of humanity, in nowise differing
from the other ripples, and who might a hundred times encounter you
without once recognizing you; to have no reason to offer should an
opportunity for addressing her present itself in excuse for such mad
audacity--neither poetical talent, nor great genius, nor any superhuman
qualification--nothing but love; and to be able to offer in exchange
for beauty, nobility, power, and all imaginable splendor only one's
passion and one's youth--rare offerings, forsooth!

Such were the thoughts which overwhelmed Meïamoun. Lying upon the sand,
supporting his chin on his palms, he permitted himself to be lifted and
borne away by the inexhaustible current of reverie; he sketched out a
thousand projects, each madder than the last. He felt convinced that he
was seeking after the unattainable, but he lacked the courage to frankly
renounce his undertaking, and a perfidious hope came to whisper some
lying promises in his ear.

"Athor, mighty goddess," he murmured in a deep voice, "what evil have I
done against thee that I should be made thus miserable? Art thou
avenging thyself for my disdain of Nephthe, daughter of the priest
Afomouthis? Hast thou afflicted me thus for having rejected the love of
Lamia, the Athenian hetaira, or of Flora, the Roman courtesan? Is it my
fault that my heart should be sensible only to the matchless beauty of
thy rival, Cleopatra? Why hast thou wounded my soul with the envenomed
arrow of unattainable love? What sacrifice, what offerings dost thou
desire? Must I erect to thee a chapel of the rosy marble of Syene with
columns crowned by gilded capitals, a ceiling all of one block, and
hieroglyphics deeply sculptured by the best workmen of Memphis and of
Thebes? Answer me."

Like all gods or goddesses thus invoked, Athor answered not a word, and
Meïamoun resolved upon a desperate expedient.

Cleopatra, on her part, likewise invoked the goddess Athor. She prayed
for a new pleasure, for some fresh sensation. As she languidly reclined
upon her couch she thought to herself that the number of the senses was
sadly limited, that the most exquisite refinements of delight soon
yielded to satiety, and that it was really no small task for a queen to
find means of occupying her time. To test new poisons upon slaves; to
make men fight with tigers, or gladiators with each other; to drink
pearls dissolved; to swallow the wealth of a whole province all these
things had become commonplace! and insipid.

Charmion was fairly at her wit's end, and knew not what to do for her
mistress.

Suddenly a whistling sound was heard, and an arrow buried itself,
quivering, in the cedar wainscoting of the wall.

Cleopatra well-nigh fainted with terror. Charmion ran to the window,
leaned out, and beheld only a flake of foam on the surface of the river.
A scroll of papyrus encircled the wood of the arrow. It bore only these
words, written in Phœnician characters, "I love you!"




CHAPTER IV


"I love you," repeated Cleopatra, making the serpent-coiling strip of
papyrus writhe between her delicate white fingers. "Those, are the words
I longed for. What intelligent spirit, what invisible genius has thus so
fully comprehended my desire?"

And thoroughly aroused from her languid torpor, she sprang out of bed
with the agility of a cat which has scented a mouse, placed her little
ivory feet in her embroidered _tatbebs_, threw a byssus tunic over her
shoulders, and ran to the window from which Charmion was still gazing.

The night was clear and calm. The risen moon outlined with huge angles
of light and shadow the architectural masses of the palace, which stood
out in strong relief against a background of bluish transparency; and
the waters of the river, wherein her reflection lengthened into a
shining column, were frosted with silvery ripples. A gentle breeze, such
as might have been mistaken for the respiration of the slumbering
sphinxes, quivered among the reeds and shook the azure bells of the
lotus flowers; the cables of the vessels moored to the Nile's banks
groaned feebly, and the rippling tide moaned upon the shore like a dove
lamenting for its mate. A vague perfume of vegetation, sweeter than that
of the aromatics burned in the _anschir_ of the priests of Anubis,
floated into the chamber. It was one of those enchanted nights of the
Orient, which are more splendid than our fairest days; for our sun can
ill compare with that Oriental moon.

"Do you not see far over there, almost in the middle of the river, the
head of a man swimming? See, he crosses that track of light, and passes
into the shadow beyond! He is already out of sight!" And, supporting
herself upon Charmion's shoulder, she leaned out, with half of her fair
body beyond the sill of the window, in the effort to catch another
glimpse of the mysterious swimmer; but a grove of Nile acacias,
dhoum-palms, and sayals flung its deep shadow upon the river in that
direction, and protected the flight of the daring fugitive. If Meïamoun
had but had the courtesy to look back, he might have beheld Cleopatra,
the sidereal queen, eagerly seeking him through the night gloom--he, the
poor obscure Egyptian, the miserable lion-hunter.

"Charmion, Charmion, send hither Phrehipephbour, the chief of the
rowers, and have two boats despatched in pursuit of that man!" cried
Cleopatra, whose curiosity was excited to the highest pitch.

Phrehipephbour appeared, a man of the race of Nahasi, with large hands
and muscular arms, wearing a red cap not unlike a Phrygian helmet in
form, and clad only in a pair of narrow drawers diagonally striped with
white and blue. His huge torso, entirely nude, black and polished like a
globe of jet, shone under the lamplight. He received the commands of the
queen and instantly retired to execute them.

Two long, narrow boats, so light that the least inattention to
equilibrium would capsize them, were soon cleaving the waters of the
Nile with hissing rapidity under the efforts of the twenty vigorous
rowers, but the pursuit was all in vain. After searching the river banks
in every direction, and carefully exploring every patch of reeds,
Phrehipephbour returned to the palace, having only succeeded in putting
to flight some solitary heron which had been sleeping on one leg, or in
troubling the digestion of some terrified crocodile.

So intense was the vexation of Cleopatra at being thus foiled, that she
felt a strong inclination to condemn Phrehipephbour either to the wild
beasts or to the hardest labor at the grindstone. Happily, Charmion
interceded for the trembling unfortunate, who turned pale with fear,
despite his black skin. It was the first time in Cleopatra's life that
one of her desires had not been gratified as soon as expressed, and she
experienced, in consequence, a kind of uneasy surprise; a first doubt,
as it were, of her own omnipotence.

She, Cleopatra, wife and sister of Ptolemy--she who had been proclaimed
goddess Evergetes, living queen of the regions Above and Below, Eye of
Light, Chosen of the Sun (as may still be read within the cartouches
sculptured on the walls of the temples)--she to find an obstacle in her
path, to have wished aught that failed of accomplishment, to have spoken
and not been obeyed! As well be the wife of some wretched Paraschistes,
some corpse-cutter, and melt natron in a caldron! It was monstrous,
preposterous! and none but the most gentle and clement of queens could
have refrained from crucifying that miserable Phrehipephbour.

You wished for some adventure, something strange and unexpected. Your
wish has been gratified. You find that your kingdom is not so dead as
you deemed it. It was not the stony arm of a statue which shot that
arrow; it was not from a mummy's heart that came those three words which
have moved even you--you who smilingly watched your poisoned slaves
dashing their heads and beating their feet upon your beautiful mosaic
and porphyry pavements in the convulsions of death-agony; you who even
applauded the tiger which boldly buried its muzzle in the flank of some
vanquished gladiator.

You could obtain all else you might wish for--chariots of silver,
starred with emeralds; griffin-quadrigeræ; tunics of purple
thrice-dyed; mirrors of molten steel, so clear that you might find the
charms of your loveliness faithfully copied in them; robes from the land
of Serica, so fine and subtly light that they could be drawn through the
ring worn upon your little finger; Orient pearls of wondrous color; cups
wrought by Myron or Lysippus; Indian paroquets that speak like
poets--all things else you could obtain, even should you ask for the
Cestus of Venus or the _pshent_ of Isis, but most certainly you cannot
this night capture the man who shot the arrow which still quivers in
the cedar wood of your couch.

The task of the slaves who must dress you to-morrow will not be a
grateful one. They will hardly escape with blows. The bosom of the
unskilful waiting-maid will be apt to prove a cushion for the golden
pins of the toilette, and the poor hairdresser will run great risk of
being suspended by her feet from the ceiling.

"Who could have had the audacity to send me this avowal upon the shaft
of an arrow? Could it have been the Nomarch Amoun-Ra who fancies himself
handsomer than the Apollo of the Greeks? What think you, Charmion? Or
perhaps Cheâpsiro, commander of Hermothybia, who is so boastful of his
conquests in the land of Kush? Or is it not more likely to have been
young Sextus, that Roman debauchee who paints his face, lisps in
speaking, and wears sleeves in the fashion of the Persians?"

"Queen, it was none of those. Though you are indeed the fairest of
women, those men only natter you; they do not love you. The Nomarch
Amoun-Ra has chosen himself an idol to which he will be forever
faithful, and that is his own person. The warrior Cheâpsiro thinks of
nothing save the pleasure of recounting his victories. As for Sextus, he
is so seriously occupied with the preparation of a new cosmetic that he
cannot dream of anything else. Besides, he had just purchased some
Laconian dresses, a number of yellow tunics embroidered with gold, and
some Asiatic children which absorb all his time. Not one of those fine
lords would risk his head in so daring and dangerous an undertaking;
they do not love you well enough for that.

"Yesterday, in your cangia, you said that men dared not fix their
dazzled eyes upon you; that they knew only how to turn pale in your
presence, to fall at your feet and supplicate your mercy; and that your
sole remaining resource would be to awake some ancient, bitumen-perfumed
Pharaoh from his gilded coffin. Now here is an ardent and youthful heart
that loves you. What will you do with it?"

Cleopatra that night sought slumber in vain. She tossed feverishly upon
her couch, and long and vainly invoked Morpheus, the brother of Death.
She incessantly repeated that she was the most unhappy of queens, that
every one sought to persecute her, and that her life had become
insupportable; woeful lamentations which had little effect upon
Charmion, although she pretended to sympathize with them.

Let us for a while leave Cleopatra to seek fugitive sleep, and direct
her suspicions successively upon each noble of the court. Let us return
to Meïamoun, and as we are much more sagacious than Phrehipephbour,
chief of the rowers, we shall have no difficulty in finding him.

Terrified at his own hardihood, Meïamoun had thrown himself into the
Nile, and had succeeded in swimming the current and gaining the little
grove of dhoum-palms before Phrehipephbour had even launched the two
boats in pursuit of him.

When he had recovered breath, and brushed back his long black locks, all
damp with river foam, behind his ears, he began to feel more at ease,
more inwardly calm. Cleopatra possessed something which had come from
him; some sort of communication was now established between them.
Cleopatra was thinking of him, Meïamoun. Perhaps that thought might be
one of wrath; but then he had at least been able to awake some feeling
within her, whether of fear, anger, or pity. He had forced her to the
consciousness of his existence. It was true that he had forgotten to
inscribe his name upon the papyrus scroll, but what more of him could
the queen have learned from the inscription, _Meïamoun, Son of
Mandouschopsh_? In her eyes the slave and the monarch were equal. A
goddess in choosing a peasant for her lover stoops no lower than in
choosing a patrician or a king. The Immortals from a height so lofty can
behold only love in the man of their choice.

The thought which had weighed upon his breast like the knee of a
colossus of brass had at last departed. It had traversed the air; it had
even reached the queen herself, the apex of the triangle, the
inaccessible summit. It had aroused curiosity in that impassive heart; a
prodigious advance, truly, toward success.

Meïamoun, indeed, never suspected that he had so thoroughly succeeded in
this wise, but he felt more tranquil; for he had sworn unto himself by
that mystic Bari who guides the souls of the dead to Amenthi, by the
sacred birds Bermou and Ghenghen, by Typhon and by Osiris, and by all
things awful in Egyptian mythology, that he should be the accepted lover
of Cleopatra, though it were but for a single night, though for only a
single hour, though it should cost him his life and even his very soul.

If we must explain how he had fallen so deeply in love with a woman whom
he had beheld only from afar off, and to whom he had hardly dared to
raise his eyes--even he who was wont to gaze fearlessly into the yellow
eyes of the lion--or how the tiny seed of love, chance-fallen upon his
heart, had grown there so rapidly and extended its roots so deeply, we
can answer only that it is a mystery which we are unable to explain. We
have already said of Meïamoun,--The Abyss called him.

Once assured that Phrehipephbour had returned with his rowers, he again
threw himself into the current and once more swam toward the palace of
Cleopatra, whose lamp still shone through the window curtains like a
painted star. Never did Leander swim with more courage and vigor toward
the tower of Sestos; yet for Meïamoun no Hero was waiting, ready to pour
vials of perfume upon his head to dissipate the briny odors of the sea
and banish the sharp kisses of the storm.

A strong blow from some keen lance or _harpe_ was certainly the worst he
had to fear, and in truth he had but little fear of such things.

He swam close under the walls of the palace, which bathed its marble
feet in the river's depths, and paused an instant before a submerged
archway into which the water rushed downward in eddying whirls. Twice,
thrice he plunged into the vortex unsuccessfully. At last, with better
luck, he found the opening and disappeared.

This archway was the opening to a vaulted canal which conducted the
waters of the Nile into the baths of Cleopatra.




CHAPTER V


Cleopatra found no rest until morning, at the hour when wandering dreams
reenter the Ivory Gate. Amid the illusions of sleep she beheld all kinds
of lovers swimming rivers and scaling walls in order to come to her,
and, through the vague souvenirs of the night before, her dreams
appeared fairly riddled with arrows bearing declarations of love.
Starting nervously from time to time in her troubled slumbers, she
struck her little feet unconsciously against the bosom of Charmion, who
lay across the foot of the bed to serve her as a cushion.

When she awoke, a merry sunbeam was playing through the window curtain,
whose woof it penetrated with a thousand tiny points of light, and
thence came familiarly to the bed, flitting like a golden butterfly over
her lovely shoulders, which it lightly touched in passing by with a
luminous kiss. Happy sunbeam, which the gods might well have envied.

In a faint voice, like that of a sick child, Cleopatra asked to be
lifted out of bed. Two of her women raised her in their arms and gently
laid her on a tiger-skin stretched upon the floor, of which the eyes
were formed of carbuncles and the claws of gold. Charmion wrapped her in
_calasiris_ of linen whiter than milk, confined her hair in a net of
woven silver threads, tied to her little feet cork _tatbebs_ upon the
soles of which were painted, in token of contempt, two grotesque
figures, representing two men of the races of Nahasi and Nahmou, bound
hand and foot, so that Cleopatra literally deserved the epithet,
"Conculcatrix of Nations,"[1] which the royal cartouche inscriptions
bestow upon her.

It was the hour for the bath. Cleopatra went to bathe, accompanied by
her women.

The baths of Cleopatra were built in the midst of immense gardens filled
with mimosas, aloes, carob-trees, citron-trees, and Persian apple-trees,
whose luxuriant freshness afforded a delicious contrast to the arid
appearance of the neighboring vegetation. There, too, vast terraces
uplifted masses of verdant foliage, and enabled flowers to climb almost
to the very sky upon gigantic stairways of rose-colored granite; vases
of Pentelic marble bloomed at the end of each step like huge
lily-flowers, and the plants they contained seemed only their pistils;
chimeras caressed into form by the chisels of the most skilful Greek
sculptors, and less stern of aspect than the Egyptian sphinxes, with
their grim mien and moody attitudes, softly extended their limbs upon
the flower-strewn turf, like shapely white leverettes upon a
drawing-room carpet. These were charming feminine figures, with finely
chiselled nostrils, smooth brows, small mouths, delicately dimpled arms,
breasts fair-rounded and daintily formed; wearing earrings, necklaces,
and all the trinkets suggested by adorable caprice; whose bodies
terminated in bifurcated fishes' tails, like the women described by
Horace, or extended into birds' wings, or rounded into lions' haunches,
or blended into volutes of foliage, according to the fancies of the
artist or in conformity to the architectural position chosen. A double
row of these delightful monsters lined the alley which led from the
palace to the bathing halls.

At the end of this alley was a huge fountain-basin, approached by four
porphyry stairways. Through the transparent depths of the diamond-clear
water the steps could be seen descending to the bottom of the basin,
which was strewn with gold-dust in lieu of sand. Here figures of women
terminating in pedestals like Caryatides[2] spurted from their breasts
slender jets of perfumed water, which fell into the basin in silvery
dew, pitting the clear watery mirror with wrinkle-creating drops. In
addition to this task these Caryatides had likewise that of supporting
upon their heads an entablature decorated with Nereids and Tritons in
bas-relief, and furnished with rings of bronze to which the silken cords
of a velarium might be attached. From the portico was visible an
extending expanse of freshly humid, bluish-green verdure and cool shade,
a fragment of the Vale of Tempe transported to Egypt. The famous gardens
of Semiramis would not have borne comparison with these.

We will not pause to describe the seven or eight other halls of various
temperature, with their hot and cold vapors, perfume boxes, cosmetics,
oils, pumice stone, gloves of woven horsehair, and all the refinements
of the antique balneatory art brought to the highest pitch of voluptuous
perfection.

Hither came Cleopatra, leaning with one hand upon the shoulder of
Charmion. She had taken at least thirty steps all by herself. Mighty
effort, enormous fatigue! A tender tint of rose commenced to suffuse the
transparent skin of her cheeks, refreshing their passionate pallor; a
blue network of veins relieved the amber blondness of her temples; her
marble forehead, low like the antique foreheads, but full and perfect in
form, united by one faultless line with a straight nose, finely
chiselled as a cameo, with rosy nostrils which the least emotion made
palpitate like the nostrils of an amorous tigress; the lips of her
small, rounded mouth, slightly separated from the nose, wore a
disdainful curve; but an unbridled voluptuousness, an indescribable
vital warmth, glowed in the brilliant crimson and humid lustre of the
under lip. Her eyes were shaded by level eyelids, and eyebrows slightly
arched and delicately outlined. We cannot attempt by description to
convey an idea of their brilliancy. It was a fire, a languor, a
sparkling limpidity which might have made even the dog-headed Anubis
giddy. Every glance of her eyes was in itself a poem richer than aught
of Homer or Mimnermus. An imperial chin, replete with force and power to
command, worthily completed this charming profile.

She stood erect upon the upper step of the basin, in an attitude full of
proud grace; her figure slightly thrown back, and one foot in suspense,
like a goddess about to leave her pedestal, whose eyes still linger on
heaven. Her robe fell in two superb folds from the peaks of her bosom to
her feet in unbroken lines. Had Cleomenes been her contemporary and
enjoyed the happiness of beholding her thus, he would have broken his
Venus in despair.

Before entering the water she bade Charmion, for a new caprice, to
change her silver hair-net; she preferred to be crowned with reeds and
lotos-flowers, like a water divinity. Charmion obeyed, and her liberated
hair fell in black cascades over her shoulders, and shadowed her
beautiful cheeks in rich bunches, like ripening grapes.

Then the linen tunic, which had been confined only by one golden clasp,
glided down over her marble body, and fell in a white cloud at her feet,
like the swan at the feet of Leda....

And Meïamoun, where was he?

Oh cruel lot, that so many insensible objects should enjoy the favors
which would ravish a lover with delight! The wind which toys with a
wealth of perfumed hair, or kisses beautiful lips with kisses which it
is unable to appreciate; the water which envelops an adorably beautiful
body in one universal kiss, and is yet, notwithstanding, indifferent to
that exquisite pleasure; the mirror which reflects so many charming
images; the buskin or _tatbeb_ which clasps a divine little foot--oh,
what happiness lost!

Cleopatra dipped her pink heel in the water and descended a few steps.
The quivering flood made a silver belt about her waist, and silver
bracelets about her arms, and rolled in pearls like a broken necklace
over her bosom and shoulders; her wealth of hair, lifted by the water,
extended behind her like a royal mantle; even in the bath she was a
queen. She swam to and fro, dived, and brought up handfuls of gold-dust
with which she laughingly pelted some of her women. Again, she clung
suspended to the balustrade of the basin, concealing or exposing her
treasures of loveliness--now permitting only her lustrous and polished
back to be seen, now showing her whole figure, like Venus Anadyomene,
and incessantly varying the aspects of her beauty.

Suddenly she uttered a cry as shrill as that of Diana surprised by
Actæon. She had seen gleaming through the neighboring foliage a burning
eye, yellow and phosphoric as the eye of a crocodile or lion.

It was Meïamoun, who, crouching behind a tuft of leaves, and trembling
like a fawn in a field of wheat, was intoxicating himself with the
dangerous pleasure of beholding the queen in her bath. Though brave even
to temerity, the cry of Cleopatra passed through his heart, coldly
piercing as the blade of a sword. A death-like sweat covered his whole
body; his arteries hissed through his temples with a sharp sound; the
iron hand of anxious fear had seized him by the throat and was
strangling him.

The eunuchs rushed forward, lance in hand. Cleopatra pointed out to them
the group of trees, where they found Meïamoun crouching in concealment.
Defence was out of the question. He attempted none, and suffered himself
to be captured. They prepared to kill him with that cruel and stupid
impassibility characteristic of eunuchs; but Cleopatra, who, in the
interim, had covered herself with her _calasiris_, made signs to them to
stop, and bring the prisoner before her.

Meïamoun could only fall upon his knees and stretch forth suppliant
hands to her, as to the altars of the gods.

"Are you some assassin bribed by Rome, or for what purpose have you
entered these sacred precincts from which all men are excluded?"
demanded Cleopatra with an imperious gesture of interrogation.

"May my soul be found light in the balance of Amenti, and may Tmeï,
daughter of the Sun and goddess of Truth, punish me if I have ever
entertained a thought of evil against you, O queen!" answered Meïamoun,
still upon his knees.

Sincerity and loyalty were written upon his countenance in characters so
transparent that Cleopatra immediately banished her suspicions, and
looked upon the young Egyptian with a look less stern and wrathful. She
saw that he was beautiful.

"Then what motive could have prompted you to enter a place where you
could only expect to meet death?"

"I love you!" murmured Meïamoun in a low, but distinct voice; for his
courage had returned, as in every desperate situation when the odds
against him could be no worse.

"Ah!" cried Cleopatra, bending toward him, and seizing his arm with a
sudden brusque movement, "so, then, it was you who shot that arrow with
the papyrus scroll! By Oms, the Dog of Hell, you are a very foolhardy
wretch!... I now recognize you. I long observed you wandering like a
complaining Shade about the places where I dwell.... You were at the
Procession of Isis, at the Panegyris of Hermonthis. You followed the
royal cangia. Ah! you must have a queen?... You have no mean ambitions.
You expect, without doubt, to be well paid in return.... Assuredly I am
going to love you.... Why not?"

"Queen," returned Meïamoun with a look of deep melancholy, "do not rail.
I am mad, it is true. I have deserved death; that is also true. Be
humane; bid them kill me."

"No; I have taken the whim to be clement to-day. I will give you your
life."

"What would you that I should do with life? I love you!"

"Well, then, you shall be satisfied; you shall die," answered Cleopatra.
"You have indulged yourself in wild and extravagant dreams; in fancy
your desires have crossed an impassable threshold. You imagined yourself
to be Cæsar or Mark Antony. You loved the queen. In some moment of
delirium you have been able to believe that, under some condition of
things which takes place but once in a thousand years, Cleopatra might
some day love you. Well, what you thought impossible is actually about
to happen. I will transform your dream into a reality. It pleases me,
for once, to secure the accomplishment of a mad hope. I am willing to
inundate you with glories and splendors and lightnings. I intend that
your good fortune shall be dazzling in its brilliancy. You were at the
bottom of the ladder. I am about to lift you to the summit, abruptly,
suddenly, without a transition. I take you out of nothingness, I make
you the equal of a god, and I plunge you back again into nothingness;
that is all. But do not presume to call me cruel or to invoke my pity;
do not weaken when the hour comes. I am good to you. I lend myself to
your folly. I have the right to order you to be killed at once; but
since you tell me that you love me, I will have you killed to-morrow
instead. Your life belongs to me for one night. I am generous. I will
buy it from you; I could take it from you. But what are you doing on
your knees at my feet? Rise, and give me your arm, that we may return to
the palace."


[1] _Conculcatrice des peuples_. From the Latin _conculcare,_ to trample
under foot: therefore, the epithet literally signifies the "Trampler of
nations." (Trans.)

[2] The Greeks and Romans usually termed such figures Hermæ or Termini.
Caryatides were, strictly, entire figures of women.--(Trans.)




CHAPTER VI


Our world of to-day is puny indeed beside the antique world. Our
banquets are mean, niggardly, compared with the appalling sumptuousness
of the Roman patricians and the princes of ancient Asia. Their ordinary
repasts would in these days be regarded as frenzied orgies, and a whole
modern city could subsist for eight days upon the leavings of one supper
given by Lucullus to a few intimate friends. With our miserable habits
we find it difficult to conceive of those enormous existences, realizing
everything vast, strange, and most monstrously impossible that
imagination could devise. Our palaces are mere stables, in which
Caligula would not quarter his horse. The retinue of our wealthiest
constitutional king is as nothing compared with that of a petty satrap
or a Roman proconsul. The radiant suns which once shone upon the earth
are forever extinguished in the nothingness of uniformity. Above the
dark swarm of men no longer tower those Titanic colossi who bestrode the
world in three paces, like the steeds of Homer; no more towers of
Lylacq; no giant Babel scaling the sky with its infinity of spirals; no
temples immeasurable, builded with the fragments of quarried mountains;
no kingly terraces for which successive ages and generations could each
erect but one step, and from whence some dreamfully reclining prince
might gaze on the face of the world as upon a map unfolded; no more of
those extravagantly vast cities of cyclopæan edifices, inextricably
piled upon one another, with their mighty circumvallations, their
circuses roaring night and day, their reservoirs filled with ocean brine
and peopled with whales and leviathans, their colossal stairways, their
super-imposition of terraces, their tower-summits bathed in clouds,
their giant palaces, their aqueducts, their multitude-vomiting gates,
their shadowy necropoli. Alas! henceforth only plaster hives upon
chessboard pavements.

One marvels that men did not revolt against such confiscation of all
riches and all living forces for the benefit of a few privileged ones,
and that such exorbitant fantasies should not have encountered any
opposition on their bloody way. It was because those prodigious lives
were the realizations by day of the dreams which haunted each man by
night, the personifications of the common ideal which the nations beheld
living symbolized under one of those meteoric names that flame
inextinguishably through the night of ages. To-day, deprived of such
dazzling spectacles of omnipotent will, of the lofty contemplation of
some human mind whose least wish makes itself visible in actions
unparalleled, in enormities of granite and brass, the world becomes
irredeemably and hopelessly dull. Man is no longer represented in the
realization of his imperial fancy.

The story which we are writing, and the great name of Cleopatra which
appears in it, have prompted us to these reflections, so ill-sounding,
doubtless, to modern ears. But the spectacle of the antique world is
something so crushingly discouraging, even to those imaginations which
deem themselves exhaustless, and those minds which fancy themselves to
have conceived the utmost limits of fairy magnificence, that we cannot
here forbear recording our regret and lamentation that we were not
cotemporaries of Sardanapalus; of Teglathphalazar; of Cleopatra, queen
of Egypt; or even of Elagabalus, emperor of Rome and priest of the Sun.

It is our task to describe a supreme orgie--a banquet compared with
which the splendors of Belshazzar's feast must pale--one of Cleopatra's
nights. How can we picture forth in this French tongue, so chaste, so
icily prudish, that unbounded transport of passions, that huge and
mighty debauch which feared not to mingle the double purple of wine and
blood, those furious outbursts of insatiate pleasure, madly leaping
toward the Impossible with all the wild ardor of senses as yet untamed
by the long fast of Christianity?

The promised night should well have been a splendid one, for all the
joys and pleasures possible in a human lifetime were to be concentrated
into the space of a few hours. It was necessary that the life of
Meïamoun should be converted into a powerful elixir which he could
imbibe at a single draught. Cleopatra desired to dazzle her voluntary
victim, and plunge him into a whirlpool of dizzy pleasures; to
intoxicate and madden him with the wine of orgie, so that death, though
freely accepted, might come invisibly and unawares.

Let us transport our readers to the banquet-hall.

Our existing architecture offers few points for comparison with those
vast edifices whose very ruins resemble the crumblings of mountains
rather than the remains of buildings. It needed all the exaggeration of
the antique life to animate and fill those prodigious palaces, whose
halls were too lofty and vast to allow of any ceiling save the sky
itself--a magnificent ceiling, and well worthy of such mighty
architecture.

The banquet-hall was of enormous and Babylonian dimensions; the eye
could not penetrate its immeasurable depth. Monstrous columns--short,
thick, and solid enough to sustain the pole itself--heavily expanded
their broad-swelling shafts upon socles variegated with hieroglyphics,
and sustained upon their bulging capitals gigantic arcades of granite
rising by successive tiers, like vast stairways reversed. Between each
two pillars a colossal sphinx of basalt, crowned with the _pshent_, bent
forward her oblique-eyed face and horned chin, and gazed into the hall
with a fixed and mysterious look. The columns of the second tier,
receding from the first, were more elegantly formed, and crowned in lieu
of capitals with four female heads addorsed, wearing caps of many folds
and all the intricacies of the Egyptian headdress. Instead of sphinxes,
bull-headed idols--impassive spectators of nocturnal frenzy and the
furies of orgie--were seated upon thrones of stone, like patient hosts
awaiting the opening of the banquet.

A third story, constructed in a yet different style of architecture,
with elephants of bronze spouting perfume from their trunks, crowned the
edifice; above, the sky yawned like a blue gulf, and the curious stars
leaned over the frieze.[1]

Prodigious stairways of porphyry, so highly polished that they reflected
the human body like a mirror, ascended and descended on every hand, and
bound together these huge masses of architecture.

We can only make a very rapid sketch here, in order to convey some idea
of this awful structure, proportioned out of all human measurements. It
would require the pencil of Martin,[2] the great painter of enormities
passed away, and we can present only a weak pen-picture in lieu of the
Apocalyptic depth of his gloomy style; but imagination may supply our
deficiencies. Less fortunate than the painter and the musician, we can
only present objects and ideas separately in slow succession. We have as
yet spoken of the banquet-hall only, without referring to the guests,
and yet we have but barely indicated its character. Cleopatra and
Meïamoun are waiting for us. We see them drawing near....

Meïamoun was clad in a linen tunic constellated with stars, and a purple
mantle, and wore a fillet about his locks, like an Oriental king.
Cleopatra was apparelled in a robe of pale green, open at either side,
and clasped with golden bees. Two bracelets of immense pearls gleamed
around her naked arms; upon her head glimmered the golden-pointed
diadem. Despite the smile on her lips, a slight cloud of preoccupation
shadowed her fair forehead, and from time to time her brows became
knitted in a feverish manner. What thoughts could trouble the great
queen? As for Meïamoun, his face wore the ardent and luminous look of
one in ecstasy or vision; light beamed and radiated from his brow and
temples, surrounding his head with a golden nimbus, like one of the
twelve great gods of Olympus.

A deep, heartfelt joy illumined his every feature. He had embraced his
restless-winged chimera, and it had not flown from him; he had reached
the goal of his life. Though he were to live to the age of Nestor or
Priam, though he should behold his veined temples hoary with locks
whiter than those of the high priest of Ammon, he could never know
another new experience, never feel another new pleasure. His maddest
hopes had been so much more than realized that there was nothing in the
world left for him to desire.

Cleopatra seated him beside her upon a throne with golden griffins on
either side, and clapped her little hands together. Instantly lines of
fire, bands of sparkling light, outlined all the projections of the
architecture--the eyes of the sphinxes flamed with phosphoric
lightnings; the bull-headed idols breathed flame; the elephants, in lieu
of perfumed water, spouted aloft bright columns of crimson fire; arms of
bronze, each bearing a torch, started from the walls, and blazing
aigrettes bloomed in the sculptured hearts of the lotos flowers.

Huge blue flames palpitated in tripods of brass; giant candelabras shook
their dishevelled light in the midst of ardent vapors; everything
sparkled, glittered, beamed. Prismatic irises crossed and shattered each
other in the air. The facets of the cups, the angles of the marbles and
jaspers, the chiselling of the vases--all caught a sparkle, a gleam, or
a flash as of lightning. Radiance streamed in torrents and leaped from
step to step like a cascade, over the porphyry-stairways. It seemed the
reflection of a conflagration on some broad river. Had the Queen of
Sheba ascended thither she would have caught up the folds of her robe,
and believed herself walking in water, as when she stepped upon the
crystal pavements of Solomon. Viewed through that burning haze, the
monstrous figures of the colossi, the animals, the hieroglyphics, seemed
to become animated and to live with a factitious life; the black marble
rams bleated ironically, and clashed their gilded horns; the idols
breathed harshly through their panting nostrils.

The orgie was at its height: the dishes of phenicopters' tongues, and
the livers of scarus fish; the eels fattened upon human flesh, and
cooked in brine; the dishes of peacock's brains; the boars stuffed with
living birds; and all the marvels of the antique banquets were heaped
upon the three table-surfaces of the gigantic triclinium. The wines of
Crete, of Massicus, and of Falernus foamed up in cratera wreathed with
roses, and filled by Asiatic pages whose beautiful flowing hair served
the guests to wipe their hands upon. Musicians playing upon the sistrum,
the tympanum, the sambuke, and the harp with one-and-twenty strings
filled all the upper galleries, and mingled their harmonies with the
tempest of sound that hovered over the feast. Even the deep-voiced
thunder could not have made itself heard there.

Meïamoun, whose head was lying on Cleopatra's shoulder, felt as though
his reason were leaving him. The banquet-hall whirled around him like a
vast architectural nightmare; through the dizzy glare he beheld
perspectives and colonnades without end; new zones of porticoes seemed
to uprear themselves upon the real fabric, and bury their summits in
heights of sky to which Babel never rose. Had he not felt within his
hand the soft, cool hand of Cleopatra, he would have believed himself
transported into an enchanted world by some witch of Thessaly or Magian
of Persia.

Toward the close of the repast hump-backed dwarfs and mummers engaged
in grotesque dances and combats; then young Egyptian and Greek maidens,
representing the black and white Hours, danced with inimitable grace a
voluptuous dance after the Ionian manner.

Cleopatra herself arose from her throne, threw aside her royal mantle,
replaced her starry diadem with a garland of flowers, attached golden
_crotali_[3] to her alabaster hands, and began to dance before Meïamoun,
who was ravished with delight. Her beautiful arms, rounded like the
handles of an alabaster vase, shook out bunches of sparkling notes, and
her _crotali_ prattled with ever-increasing volubility. Poised on the
pink tips of her little feet, she approached swiftly to graze the
forehead of Meïamoun with a kiss; then she recommenced her wondrous art,
and flitted around him, now backward-leaning, with head reversed, eyes
half closed, arms lifelessly relaxed, locks uncurled and loose-hanging
like a Bacchante of Mount Mænalus; now again, active, animated,
laughing, fluttering, more tireless and capricious in her movements than
the pilfering bee. Heart-consuming love, sensual pleasure, burning
passion, youth inexhaustible and ever-fresh, the promise of bliss to
come--she expressed all....

The modest stars had ceased to contemplate the scene; their golden eyes
could not endure such a spectacle; the heaven itself was blotted out,
and a dome of flaming vapor covered the hall.

Cleopatra seated herself once more by Meïamoun. Night advanced; the last
of the black Hours was about to take flight; a faint blue glow entered
with bewildered aspect into the tumult of ruddy light as a moonbeam
falls into a furnace; the upper arcades became suffused with pale azure
tints--day was breaking.

Meïamoun took the horn vase which an Ethiopian slave of sinister
countenance presented to him, and which contained a poison so violent
that it would have caused any other vase to burst asunder. Flinging his
whole life to his mistress in one last look, he lifted to his lips the
fatal cup in which the envenomed liquor boiled up, hissing.

Cleopatra turned pale, and laid her hand on Meïamoun's arm to stay the
act. His courage touched her. She was about to say, "Live to love me
yet, I desire it!..." when the sound of a clarion was heard. Four
heralds-at-arms entered the banquet-hall on horseback; they were
officers of Mark Antony, and rode but a short distance in advance of
their master. Cleopatra silently loosened the arm of Meïamoun. A long
ray of sunlight suddenly played upon her forehead, as though trying to
replace her absent diadem.

"You see the moment has come; it is daybreak, it is the hour when happy
dreams take flight," said Meïamoun. Then he emptied the fatal vessel at
a draught, and fell as though struck by lightning. Cleopatra bent her
head, and one burning tear--the only one she had ever shed--fell into
her cup to mingle with the molten pearl.

"By Hercules, my fair queen! I made all speed in vain. I see I have come
too late," cried Mark Antony, entering the banquet-hall, "the supper is
over. But what signifies this corpse upon the pavement?"

"Oh, nothing!" returned Cleopatra, with a smile; "only a poison I was
testing with the idea of using it upon myself should Augustus take me
prisoner. My dear Lord, will you not please to take a seat beside me,
and watch those Greek buffoons dance?"


[1] Does not this suggest the lines which DeQuincey so much admired?--

     "A wilderness of building, sinking far,
     And self-withdrawn into a wondrous depth
     Far sinking into splendor, without end.
     Fabric it seemed of diamond, and of gold,
     With alabaster domes and silver spires,
     And blazing terrace upon terrace, high
     Uplifted. Here serene pavilions bright,
     In avenues disposed; their towers begirt
     With _battlements that on their restless fronts
     Bore stars_."


[2] John Martin, the English painter, whose creations were unparalleled
in breadth and depth of composition. His pictures seem to have made a
powerful impression upon the highly imaginative author of these
Romances. There is something in these descriptions of antique
architecture that suggests the influence of such pictured fantasies as
Martin's "Seventh Plague;" "The Heavenly City;" and perhaps, especially,
the famous "Pandemonium," with its infernal splendor, in Martin's
illustrations to "Paradise Lost."--(Trans.)

[3] Antique castanets.--(Trans.)




CLARIMONDE[1]


Brother, you ask me if I have ever loved. Yes. My story is a strange and
terrible one; and though I am sixty-six years of age, I scarcely dare
even now to disturb the ashes of that memory. To you I can refuse
nothing; but I should not relate such a tale to any less experienced
mind. So strange were the circumstances of my story, that I can scarcely
believe myself to have ever actually been a party to them. For more than
three years I remained the victim of a most singular and diabolical
illusion. Poor country priest though I was, I led every night in a
dream--would to God it had been all a dream!--a most worldly life, a
damning life, a life of Sardanapalus. One single look too freely cast
upon a woman well-nigh caused me to lose my soul; but finally by the
grace of God and the assistance of my patron saint, I succeeded in
casting out the evil spirit that possessed me. My daily life was long
interwoven with a nocturnal life of a totally different character. By
day I was a priest of the Lord, occupied with prayer and sacred things;
by night, from the instant that I closed my eyes I became a young
nobleman, a fine connoisseur in women, dogs, and horses; gambling,
drinking, and blaspheming, and when I awoke at early daybreak, it seemed
to me, on the other hand, that I had been sleeping, and had only dreamed
that I was a priest. Of this somnambulistic life there now remains to me
only the recollection of certain scenes and words which I cannot banish
from my memory; but although I never actually left the walls of my
presbytery, one would think to hear me speak that I were a man who,
weary of all worldly pleasures, had become a religious, seeking to end a
tempestuous life in the service of God, rather than an humble seminarist
who has grown old in this obscure curacy, situated in the depths of the
woods and even isolated from the life of the century.

Yes, I have loved as none in the world ever loved--with an insensate and
furious passion--so violent that I am astonished it did not cause my
heart to burst asunder. Ah, what nights--what nights!

From my earliest childhood I had felt a vocation to the priesthood, so
that all my studies were directed with that idea in view. Up to the age
of twenty-four my life had been only a prolonged novitiate. Having
completed my course of theology I successively received all the minor
orders, and my superiors judged me worthy, despite my youth, to pass the
last awful degree. My ordination was fixed for Easter week.

I had never gone into the world. My world was confined by the walls of
the college and the seminary. I knew in a vague sort of a way that there
was something called Woman, but I never permitted my thoughts to dwell
on such a subject, and I lived in a state of perfect innocence. Twice a
year only I saw my infirm and aged mother, and in those visits were
comprised my sole relations with the outer world.

I regretted nothing; I felt not the least hesitation at taking the last
irrevocable step; I was filled with joy and impatience. Never did a
betrothed lover count the slow hours with more feverish ardor; I slept
only to dream that I was saying mass; I believed there could be nothing
in the world more delightful than to be a priest; I would have refused
to be a king or a poet in preference. My ambition could conceive of no
loftier aim.

I tell you this in order to show you that what happened to me could not
have happened in the natural order of things, and to enable you to
understand that I was the victim of an inexplicable fascination.

At last the great day came. I walked to the church with a step so light
that I fancied myself sustained in air, or that I had wings upon my
shoulders. I believed myself an angel, and wondered at the sombre and
thoughtful faces of my companions, for there were several of us. I had
passed all the night in prayer, and was in a condition well-nigh
bordering on ecstasy. The bishop, a venerable old man, seemed to me God
the Father leaning over his Eternity, and I beheld Heaven through the
vault of the temple.

You well know the details of that ceremony--the benediction, the
communion under both forms, the anointing of the palms of the hands with
the Oil of Catechumens, and then the holy sacrifice offered in concert
with the bishop.

Ah, truly spake Job when he declared that the imprudent man is one who
hath not made a covenant with his eyes! I accidentally lifted my head,
which until then I had kept down, and beheld before me, so close that it
seemed that I could have touched her--although she was actually a
considerable distance from me and on the further side of the sanctuary
railing--a young woman of extraordinary beauty, and attired with royal
magnificence. It seemed as though scales had suddenly fallen from my
eyes. I felt like a blind man who unexpectedly recovers his sight. The
bishop, so radiantly glorious but an instant before, suddenly vanished
away, the tapers paled upon their golden candlesticks like stars in the
dawn, and a vast darkness seemed to fill the whole church. The charming
creature appeared in bright relief against the background of that
darkness, like some angelic revelation. She seemed herself radiant, and
radiating light rather than receiving it.

I lowered my eyelids, firmly resolved not to again open them, that I
might not be influenced by external objects, for distraction had
gradually taken possession of me until I hardly knew what I was doing.

In another minute, nevertheless, I reopened my eyes, for through my
eyelashes I still beheld her, all sparkling with prismatic colors, and
surrounded with such a purple penumbra as one beholds in gazing at the
sun.

Oh, how beautiful she was! The greatest painters, who followed ideal
beauty into heaven itself, and thence brought back to earth the true
portrait of the Madonna, never in their delineations even approached
that wildly beautiful reality which I saw before me. Neither the verses
of the poet nor the palette of the artist could convey any conception
of her. She was rather tall, with a form and bearing of a goddess. Her
hair, of a soft blonde hue, was parted in the midst and flowed back over
her temples in two rivers of rippling gold; she seemed a diademed queen.
Her forehead, bluish-white in its transparency, extended its calm
breadth above the arches of her eyebrows, which by a strange singularity
were almost black, and admirably relieved the effect of sea-green eyes
of unsustainable vivacity and brilliancy. What eyes! With a single flash
they could have decided a man's destiny. They had a life, a limpidity,
an ardor, a humid light which I have never seen in human eyes; they shot
forth rays like arrows, which I could distinctly _see_ enter my heart. I
know not if the fire which illumined them came from heaven or from hell,
but assuredly it came from one or the other. That woman was either an
angel or a demon, perhaps both. Assuredly she never sprang from the
flank of Eve, our common mother. Teeth of the most lustrous pearl
gleamed in her ruddy smile, and at every inflection of her lips little
dimples appeared in the satiny rose of her adorable cheeks. There was a
delicacy and pride in the regal outline of her nostrils bespeaking noble
blood. Agate gleams played over the smooth lustrous skin of her
half-bare shoulders, and strings of great blonde pearls--almost equal to
her neck in beauty of color--descended upon her bosom. From time to time
she elevated her head with the undulating grace of a startled serpent or
peacock, thereby imparting a quivering motion to the high lace ruff
which surrounded it like a silver trellis-work.

She wore a robe of orange-red velvet, and from her wide ermine-lined
sleeves there peeped forth patrician hands of infinite delicacy, and so
ideally transparent that, like the fingers of Aurora, they permitted the
light to shine through them.

All these details I can recollect at this moment as plainly as though
they were of yesterday, for notwithstanding I was greatly troubled at
the time, nothing escaped me; the faintest touch of shading, the little
dark speck at the point of the chin, the imperceptible down at the
corners of the lips, the velvety floss upon the brow, the quivering
shadows of the eyelashes upon the cheeks, I could notice everything with
astonishing lucidity of perception.

And gazing I felt opening within me gates that had until then remained
closed; vents long obstructed became all clear, permitting glimpses of
unfamiliar perspectives within; life suddenly made itself visible to me
under a totally novel aspect. I felt as though I had just been born into
a new world and a new order of things. A frightful anguish commenced to
torture my heart as with red-hot pincers. Every successive minute seemed
to me at once but a second and yet a century. Meanwhile the ceremony was
proceeding, and I shortly found myself transported far from that world
of which my newly-born desires were furiously besieging the entrance.
Nevertheless I answered "Yes" when I wished to say "No," though all
within me protested against the violence done to my soul by my tongue.
Some occult power seemed to force the words from my throat against my
will. Thus it is, perhaps, that so many young girls walk to the altar
firmly resolved to refuse in a startling manner the husband imposed
upon them, and that yet not one ever fulfils her intention. Thus it is,
doubtless, that so many poor novices take the veil, though they have
resolved to tear it into shreds at the moment when called upon to utter
the vows. One dares not thus cause so great a scandal to all present,
nor deceive the expectation of so many people. All those eyes, all those
wills seem to weigh down upon you like a cope of lead; and, moreover,
measures have been so well taken, everything has been so thoroughly
arranged beforehand and after a fashion so evidently irrevocable, that
the will yields to the weight of circumstances and utterly breaks down.

As the ceremony proceeded the features of the fair unknown changed their
expression. Her look had at first been one of caressing tenderness; it
changed to an air of disdain and of mortification, as though at not
having been able to make itself understood.

With an effort of will sufficient to have uprooted a mountain, I strove
to cry out that I would not be a priest, but I could not speak; my
tongue seemed nailed to my palate, and I found it impossible to express
my will by the least syllable of negation. Though fully awake, I felt
like one under the influence of a nightmare, who vainly strives to
shriek out the one word upon which life depends.

She seemed conscious of the martyrdom I was undergoing, and, as though
to encourage me, she gave me a look replete with divinest promise. Her
eyes were a poem; their every glance was a song.

She said to me:

"If thou wilt be mine, I shall make thee happier than God Himself in His
paradise. The angels themselves will be jealous of thee. Tear off that
funeral shroud in which thou art about to wrap thyself. I am Beauty, I
am Youth, I am Life. Come to me! Together we shall be Love. Can Jehovah
offer thee aught in exchange? Our lives will flow on like a dream, in
one eternal kiss.

"Fling forth the wine of that chalice, and thou art free. I will conduct
thee to the Unknown Isles. Thou shalt sleep in my bosom upon a bed of
massy gold under a silver pavilion, for I love thee and would take thee
away from thy God, before whom so many noble hearts pour forth floods of
love which never reach even the steps of His throne!"

These words seemed to float to my ears in a rhythm of infinite
sweetness, for her look was actually sonorous, and the utterances of her
eyes were reechoed in the depths of my heart as though living lips had
breathed them into my life. I felt myself willing to renounce God, and
yet my tongue mechanically fulfilled all the formalities of the
ceremony. The fair one gave me another look, so beseeching, so
despairing that keen blades seemed to pierce my heart, and I felt my
bosom transfixed by more swords than those of Our Lady of Sorrows.

All was consummated; I had become a priest.

Never was deeper anguish painted on human face than upon hers. The
maiden who beholds her affianced lover suddenly fall dead at her side,
the mother bending over the empty cradle of her child, Eve seated at
the threshold of the gate of Paradise, the miser who finds a stone
substituted for his stolen treasure, the poet who accidentally permits
the only manuscript of his finest work to fall into the fire, could not
wear a look so despairing, so inconsolable. All the blood had abandoned
her charming face, leaving it whiter than marble; her beautiful arms
hung lifelessly on either side of her body as though their muscles had
suddenly relaxed, and she sought the support of a pillar, for her
yielding limbs almost betrayed her. As for myself, I staggered toward
the door of the church, livid as death, my forehead bathed with a sweat
bloodier than that of Calvary; I felt as though I were being strangled;
the vault seemed to have flattened down upon my shoulders, and it seemed
to me that my head alone sustained the whole weight of the dome.

As I was about to cross the threshold a hand suddenly caught mine--a
woman's hand! I had never till then touched the hand of any woman. It
was cold as a serpent's skin, and yet its impress remained upon my
wrist, burnt there as though branded by a glowing iron. It was she.
"Unhappy man! Unhappy man! What hast thou done?" she exclaimed in a low
voice, and immediately disappeared in the crowd.

The aged bishop passed by. He cast a severe and scrutinizing look upon
me. My face presented the wildest aspect imaginable; I blushed and
turned pale alternately; dazzling lights flashed before my eyes. A
companion took pity on me. He seized my arm and led me out. I could not
possibly have found my way back to the seminary unassisted. At the
corner of a street, while the young priest's attention was momentarily
turned in another direction, a negro page, fantastically garbed,
approached me, and without pausing on his way slipped into my hand a
little pocket-book with gold-embroidered corners, at the same time
giving me a sign to hide it. I concealed it in my sleeve, and there kept
it until I found myself alone in my cell. Then I opened the clasp. There
were only two leaves within, bearing the words, "Clarimonde. At the
Concini Palace." So little acquainted was I at that time with the
things of this world that I had never heard of Clarimonde, celebrated as
she was, and I had no idea as to where the Concini Palace was situated.
I hazarded a thousand conjectures, each more extravagant than the last;
but, in truth, I cared little whether she were a great lady or a
courtesan, so that I could but see her once more.

My love, although the growth of a single hour, had taken imperishable
root. I did not even dream of attempting to tear it up, so fully was I
convinced such a thing would be impossible. That woman had completely
taken possession of me. One look from her had sufficed to change my very
nature. She had breathed her will into my life, and I no longer lived in
myself, but in her and for her. I gave myself up to a thousand
extravagancies. I kissed the place upon my hand which she had touched,
and I repeated her name over and over again for hours in succession. I
only needed to close my eyes in order to see her distinctly as though
she were actually present; and I reiterated to myself the words she had
uttered in my ear at the church porch: "Unhappy man! Unhappy man! What
hast thou done?" I comprehended at last the full horror of my situation,
and the funereal and awful restraints of the state into which I had just
entered became clearly revealed to me. To be a priest!--that is, to be
chaste, to never love, to observe no distinction of sex or age, to turn
from the sight of all beauty, to put out one's own eyes, to hide forever
crouching in the chill shadows of some church or cloister, to visit none
but the dying, to watch by unknown corpses, and ever bear about with one
the black soutane as a garb of mourning for one's self, so that your
very dress might serve as a pall for your coffin.

And I felt life rising within me like a subterranean lake, expanding and
overflowing; my blood leaped fiercely through my arteries; my
long-restrained youth suddenly burst into active being, like the aloe
which blooms but once in a hundred years, and then bursts into blossom
with a clap of thunder.

What could I do in order to see Clarimonde once more? I had no pretext
to offer for desiring to leave the seminary, not knowing any person in
the city. I would not even be able to remain there but a short time, and
was only waiting my assignment to the curacy which I must thereafter
occupy. I tried to remove the bars of the window; but it was at a
fearful height from the ground, and I found that as I had no ladder it
would be useless to think of escaping thus. And, furthermore, I could
descend thence only by night in any event, and afterward how should I be
able to find my way through the inextricable labyrinth of streets? All
these difficulties, which to many would have appeared altogether
insignificant, were gigantic to me, a poor seminarist who had fallen in
love only the day before for the first time, without experience, without
money, without attire.

"Ah!" cried I to myself in my blindness, "were I not a priest I could
have seen her every day; I might have been her lover, her spouse.
Instead of being wrapped in this dismal shroud of mine I would have had
garments of silk and velvet, golden chains, a sword, and fair plumes
like other handsome young cavaliers. My hair, instead of being
dishonored by the tonsure, would flow down upon my neck in waving curls;
I would have a fine waxed mustache; I would be a gallant." But one hour
passed before an altar, a few hastily articulated words, had forever cut
me off from the number of the living, and I had myself sealed down the
stone of my own tomb; I had with my own hand bolted the gate of my
prison! I went to the window. The sky was beautifully blue; the trees
had donned their spring robes; nature seemed to be making parade of an
ironical joy. The _Place_ was filled with people, some going, others
coming; young beaux and young beauties were sauntering in couples toward
the groves and gardens; merry youths passed by, cheerily trolling
refrains of drinking songs--it was all a picture of vivacity, life,
animation, gayety, which formed a bitter contrast with my mourning and
my solitude. On the steps of the gate sat a young mother playing with
her child. She kissed its little rosy mouth still impearled with drops
of milk, and performed, in order to amuse it, a thousand divine little
puerilities such as only mothers know how to invent. The father standing
at a little distance smiled gently upon the charming group, and with
folded arms seemed to hug his joy to his heart. I could not endure that
spectacle. I closed the window with violence, and flung myself on my
bed, my heart filled with frightful hate and jealousy, and gnawed my
fingers and my bedcovers like a tiger that has passed ten days without
food.

I know not how long I remained in this condition, but at last, while
writhing on the bed in a fit of spasmodic fury, I suddenly perceived the
Abbé Sérapion, who was standing erect in the centre of the room,
watching me attentively. Filled with shame of myself, I let my head fall
upon my breast and covered my face with my hands.

"Romuald, my friend, something very extraordinary is transpiring within
you," observed Sérapion, after a few moments' silence; "your conduct is
altogether inexplicable. You--always so quiet, so pious, so gentle--you
to rage in your cell like a wild beast! Take heed, brother--do not
listen to the suggestions of the devil. The Evil Spirit, furious that
you have consecrated yourself forever to the Lord, is prowling around
you like a ravening wolf and making a last effort to obtain possession
of you. Instead of allowing yourself to be conquered, my dear Romuald,
make to yourself a cuirass of prayers, a buckler of mortifications, and
combat the enemy like a valiant man; you will then assuredly overcome
him. Virtue must be proved by temptation, and gold comes forth purer
from the hands of the assayer. Fear not. Never allow yourself to become
discouraged. The most watchful and steadfast souls are at moments liable
to such temptation. Pray, fast, meditate, and the Evil Spirit will
depart from you."

The words of the Abbé Sérapion restored me to myself, and I became a
little more calm. "I came," he continued, "to tell you that you have
been appointed to the curacy of C----. The priest who had charge of it
has just died, and Monseigneur the Bishop has ordered me to have you
installed there at once. Be ready, therefore, to start to-morrow." I
responded with an inclination of the head, and the Abbé retired. I
opened my missal and commenced reading some prayers, but the letters
became confused and blurred under my eyes, the thread of the ideas
entangled itself hopelessly in my brain, and the volume at last fell
from my hands without my being aware of it.

To leave to-morrow without having been able to see her again, to add yet
another barrier to the many already interposed between us, to lose
forever all hope of being able to meet her, except, indeed, through a
miracle! Even to write her, alas! would be impossible, for by whom could
I despatch my letter? With my sacred character of priest, to whom could
I dare unbosom myself, in whom could I confide? I became a prey to the
bitterest anxiety.

Then suddenly recurred to me the words of the Abbé Sérapion regarding
the artifices of the devil; and the strange character of the adventure,
the supernatural beauty of Clarimonde, the phosphoric light of her eyes,
the burning imprint of her hand, the agony into which she had thrown me,
the sudden change wrought within me when all my piety vanished in a
single instant--these and other things clearly testified to the work of
the Evil One, and perhaps that satiny hand was but the glove which
concealed his claws. Filled with terror at these fancies, I again picked
up the missal which had slipped from my knees and fallen upon the floor,
and once more gave myself up to prayer. Next morning Sérapion came to
take me away. Two mules freighted with our miserable valises awaited us
at the gate. He mounted one, and I the other as well as I knew how.

As we passed along the streets of the city, I gazed attentively at all
the windows and balconies in the hope of seeing Clarimonde, but it was
yet early in the morning, and the city had hardly opened its eyes. Mine
sought to penetrate the blinds and window-curtains of all the palaces
before which we were passing. Sérapion doubtless attributed this
curiosity to my admiration of the architecture, for he slackened the
pace of his animal in order to give me time to look around me. At last
we passed the city gates and commenced to mount the hill beyond. When
we arrived at its summit I turned to take a last look at the place where
Clarimonde dwelt. The shadow of a great cloud hung over all the city;
the contrasting colors of its blue and red roofs were lost in the
uniform half-tint, through which here and there floated upward, like
white flakes of foam, the smoke of freshly kindled fires. By a singular
optical effect one edifice, which surpassed in height all the
neighboring buildings that were still dimly veiled by the vapors,
towered up, fair and lustrous with the gilding of a solitary beam of
sunlight--although actually more than a league away it seemed quite
near. The smallest details of its architecture were plainly
distinguishable--the turrets, the platforms, the window-casements, and
even the swallow-tailed weather vanes.

"What is that palace I see over there, all lighted up by the sun?" I
asked Sérapion. He shaded his eyes with his hand, and having looked in
the direction indicated, replied: "It is the ancient palace which the
Prince Concini has given to the courtesan Clarimonde. Awful things are
done there!"

At that instant, I know not yet whether it was a reality or an illusion,
I fancied I saw gliding along the terrace a shapely white figure, which
gleamed for a moment in passing and as quickly vanished. It was
Clarimonde.

Oh, did she know that at that very hour, all feverish and restless--from
the height of the rugged road which separated me from her and which,
alas! I could never more descend--I was directing my eyes upon the
palace where she dwelt, and which a mocking beam of sunlight seemed to
bring nigh to me, as though inviting me to enter therein as its lord?
Undoubtedly she must have known it, for her soul was too sympathetically
united with mine not to have felt its least emotional thrill, and that
subtle sympathy it must have been which prompted her to climb--although
clad only in her night-dress--to the summit of the terrace, amid the icy
dews of the morning.

The shadow gained the palace, and the scene became to the eye only a
motionless ocean of roofs and gables, amid which one mountainous
undulation was distinctly visible. Sérapion urged his mule forward, my
own at once followed at the same gait, and a sharp angle in the road at
last hid the city of S---- forever from my eyes, as I was destined never
to return thither. At the close of a weary three-days' journey through
dismal country fields, we caught sight of the cock upon the steeple of
the church which I was to take charge of, peeping above the trees, and
after having followed some winding roads fringed with thatched cottages
and little gardens, we found ourselves in front of the façade, which
certainly possessed few features of magnificence. A porch ornamented
with some mouldings, and two or three pillars rudely hewn from
sandstone; a tiled roof with counterforts of the same sandstone as the
pillars, that was all. To the left lay the cemetery, overgrown with high
weeds, and having a great iron cross rising up in its centre; to the
right stood the presbytery, under the shadow of the church. It was a
house of the most extreme simplicity and frigid cleanliness. We entered
the enclosure. A few chickens were picking up some oats scattered upon
the ground; accustomed, seemingly, to the black habit of ecclesiastics,
they showed no fear of our presence and scarcely troubled themselves to
get out of our way. A hoarse, wheezy barking fell upon our ears, and we
saw an aged dog running toward us.

It was my predecessor's dog. He had dull bleared eyes, grizzled hair,
and every mark of the greatest age to which a dog can possibly attain. I
patted him gently, and he proceeded at once to march along beside me
with an air of satisfaction unspeakable. A very old woman, who had been
the housekeeper of the former curé, also came to meet us, and after
having invited me into a little back parlor, asked whether I intended to
retain her. I replied that I would take care of her, and the dog, and
the chickens, and all the furniture her master had bequeathed her at his
death. At this she became fairly transported with joy, and the Abbé
Sérapion at once paid her the price which she asked for her little
property.

As soon as my installation was over, the Abbé Sérapion returned to the
seminary. I was, therefore, left alone, with no one but myself to look
to for aid or counsel. The thought of Clarimonde again began to haunt
me, and in spite of all my endeavors to banish it, I always found it
present in my meditations. One evening, while promenading in my little
garden along the walks bordered with box-plants, I fancied that I saw
through the elm-trees the figure of a woman, who followed my every
movement, and that I beheld two sea-green eyes gleaming through the
foliage; but it was only an illusion, and on going round to the other
side of the garden, I could find nothing except a footprint on the
sanded walk--a footprint so small that it seemed to have been made by
the foot of a child. The garden was enclosed by very high walls. I
searched every nook and corner of it, but could discover no one there. I
have never succeeded in fully accounting for this circumstance, which,
after all, was nothing compared with the strange things which happened
to me afterward.

For a whole year I lived thus, filling all the duties of my calling with
the most scrupulous exactitude, praying and fasting, exhorting and
lending ghostly aid to the sick, and bestowing alms even to the extent
of frequently depriving myself of the very necessaries of life. But I
felt a great aridness within me, and the sources of grace seemed closed
against me. I never found that happiness which should spring from the
fulfilment of a holy mission; my thoughts were far away, and the words
of Clarimonde were ever upon my lips like an involuntary refrain. Oh,
brother, meditate well on this! Through having but once lifted my eyes
to look upon a woman, through one fault apparently so venial, I have for
years remained a victim to the most miserable agonies, and the happiness
of my life has been destroyed forever.

I will not longer dwell upon those defeats, or on those inward victories
invariably followed by yet more terrible falls, but will at once proceed
to the facts of my story. One night my door-bell was long and violently
rung. The aged housekeeper arose and opened to the stranger, and the
figure of a man, whose complexion was deeply bronzed, and who was
richly clad in a foreign costume, with a poniard at his girdle, appeared
under the rays of Barbara's lantern. Her first impulse was one of
terror, but the stranger reassured her, and stated that he desired to
see me at once on matters relating to my holy calling. Barbara invited
him upstairs, where I was on the point of retiring. The stranger told me
that his mistress, a very noble lady, was lying at the point of death,
and desired to see a priest. I replied that I was prepared to follow
him, took with me the sacred articles necessary for extreme unction, and
descended in all haste. Two horses black as the night itself stood
without the gate, pawing the ground with impatience, and veiling their
chests with long streams of smoky vapor exhaled from their nostrils. He
held the stirrup and aided me to mount upon one; then, merely laying his
hand upon the pummel of the saddle, he vaulted on the other, pressed the
animal's sides with his knees, and loosened rein. The horse bounded
forward with the velocity of an arrow. Mine, of which the stranger held
the bridle, also started off at a swift gallop, keeping up with his
companion. We devoured the road. The ground flowed backward beneath us
in a long streaked line of pale gray, and the black silhouettes of the
trees seemed fleeing by us on either side like an army in rout. We
passed through a forest so profoundly gloomy that I felt my flesh creep
in the chill darkness with superstitious fear. The showers of bright
sparks which flew from the stony road under the ironshod feet of our
horses, remained glowing in our wake like a fiery trail; and had anyone
at that hour of the night beheld us both--my guide and myself--he must
have taken us for two spectres riding upon nightmares. Witch-fires ever
and anon flitted across the road before us, and the night-birds shrieked
fearsomely in the depth of the woods beyond, where we beheld at
intervals glow the phosphorescent eyes of wildcats. The manes of the
horses became more and more dishevelled, the sweat streamed over their
flanks, and their breath came through their nostrils hard and fast. But
when he found them slacking pace, the guide reanimated them by uttering
a strange, guttural, unearthly cry, and the gallop recommenced with
fury. At last the whirlwind race ceased; a huge black mass pierced
through with many bright points of light suddenly rose before us, the
hoofs of our horses echoed louder upon a strong wooden draw-bridge, and
we rode under a great vaulted archway which darkly yawned between two
enormous towers. Some great excitement evidently reigned in the castle.
Servants with torches were crossing the courtyard in every direction,
and above lights were ascending and descending from landing to landing.
I obtained a confused glimpse of vast masses of architecture--columns,
arcades, flights of steps, stairways--a royal voluptuousness and elfin
magnificence of construction worthy of fairyland. A negro page--the same
who had before brought me the tablet from Clarimonde, and whom I
instantly recognized--approached to aid me in dismounting, and the
major-domo, attired in black velvet with a gold chain about his neck,
advanced to meet me, supporting himself upon an ivory cane. Large tears
were falling from his eyes and streaming over his cheeks and white
beard. "Too late!" he cried, sorrowfully shaking his venerable head.
"Too late, sir priest! But if you have not been able to save the soul,
come at least to watch by the poor body."

He took my arm and conducted me to the death chamber. I wept not less
bitterly than he, for I had learned that the dead one was none other
than that Clarimonde whom I had so deeply and so wildly loved. A
_prie-dieu_ stood at the foot of the bed; a bluish flame flickering in a
bronze patera filled all the room with a wan, deceptive light, here and
there bringing out in the darkness at intervals some projection of
furniture or cornice. In a chiselled urn upon the table there was a
faded white rose, whose leaves--excepting one that still held--had all
fallen, like odorous tears, to the foot of the vase. A broken black
mask, a fan, and disguises of every variety, which were lying on the
arm-chairs, bore witness that death had entered suddenly and unannounced
into that sumptuous dwelling. Without daring to cast my eyes upon the
bed, I knelt down and commenced to repeat the Psalms for the Dead, with
exceeding fervor, thanking God that he had placed the tomb between me
and the memory of this woman, so that I might thereafter be able to
utter her name in my prayers as a name forever sanctified by death. But
my fervor gradually weakened, and I fell insensibly into a reverie. That
chamber bore no semblance to a chamber of death. In lieu of the fœtid
and cadaverous odors which I had been accustomed to breathe during such
funereal vigils, a languorous vapor of Oriental perfume--I know not what
amorous odor of woman--softly floated through the tepid air. That pale
light seemed rather a twilight gloom contrived for voluptuous pleasure,
than a substitute for the yellow-flickering watch-tapers which shine by
the side of corpses. I thought upon the strange destiny which enabled me
to meet Clarimonde again at the very moment when she was lost to me
forever, and a sigh of regretful anguish escaped from my breast. Then it
seemed to me that some one behind me had also sighed, and I turned round
to look. It was only an echo. But in that moment my eyes fell upon the
bed of death which they had till then avoided. The red damask curtains,
decorated with large flowers worked in embroidery, and looped up with
gold bullion, permitted me to behold the fair dead, lying at full
length, with hands joined upon her bosom. She was covered with a linen
wrapping of dazzling whiteness, which formed a strong contrast with the
gloomy purple of the hangings, and was of so fine a texture that it
concealed nothing of her body's charming form, and allowed the eye to
follow those beautiful outlines--undulating like the neck of a
swan--which even death had not robbed of their supple grace. She seemed
an alabaster statue executed by some skilful sculptor to place upon the
tomb of a queen, or rather, perhaps, like a slumbering maiden over whom
the silent snow had woven a spotless veil.

I could no longer maintain my constrained attitude of prayer. The air of
the alcove intoxicated me, that febrile perfume of half-faded roses
penetrated my very brain, and I commenced to pace restlessly up and
down the chamber, pausing at each turn before the bier to contemplate
the graceful corpse lying beneath the transparency of its shroud. Wild
fancies came thronging to my brain. I thought to myself that she might
not, perhaps, be really dead; that she might only have feigned death for
the purpose of bringing me to her castle, and then declaring her love.
At one time I even thought I saw her foot move under the whiteness of
the coverings, and slightly disarrange the long, straight folds of the
winding sheet.

And then I asked myself: "Is this indeed Clarimonde? What proof have I
that it is she? Might not that black page have passed into the service
of some other lady? Surely, I must be going mad to torture and afflict
myself thus!" But my heart answered with a fierce throbbing: "It is she;
it is she indeed!" I approached the bed again, and fixed my eyes with
redoubled attention upon the object of my incertitude. Ah, must I
confess it? That exquisite perfection of bodily form, although purified
and made sacred by the shadow of death, affected me more voluptuously
than it should have done, and that repose so closely resembled slumber
that one might well have mistaken it for such. I forgot that I had come
there to perform a funeral ceremony; I fancied myself a young bridegroom
entering the chamber of the bride, who all modestly hides her fair face,
and through coyness seeks to keep herself wholly veiled. Heartbroken
with grief, yet wild with hope, shuddering at once with fear and
pleasure, I bent over her and grasped the corner of the sheet. I lifted
it back, holding my breath all the while through fear of waking her. My
arteries throbbed with such violence that I felt them hiss through my
temples, and the sweat poured from my forehead in streams, as though I
had lifted a mighty slab of marble. There, indeed, lay Clarimonde, even
as I had seen her at the church on the day of my ordination. She was not
less charming than then. With her, death seemed but a last coquetry. The
pallor of her cheeks, the less brilliant carnation of her lips, her long
eyelashes lowered and relieving their dark fringe against that white
skin, lent her an unspeakably seductive aspect of melancholy chastity
and mental suffering; her long loose hair, still intertwined with some
little blue flowers, made a shining pillow for her head, and veiled the
nudity of her shoulders with its thick ringlets; her beautiful hands,
purer, more diaphanous than the Host, were crossed on her bosom in an
attitude of pious rest and silent prayer, which served to counteract all
that might have proven otherwise too alluring--even after death--in the
exquisite roundness and ivory polish of her bare arms from which the
pearl bracelets had not yet been removed. I remained long in mute
contemplation, and the more I gazed, the less could I persuade myself
that life had really abandoned that beautiful body forever. I do not
know whether it was an illusion or a reflection of the lamplight, but it
seemed to me that the blood was again commencing to circulate under that
lifeless pallor, although she remained all motionless. I laid my hand
lightly on her arm; it was cold, but not colder than her hand on the day
when it touched mine at the portals of the church. I resumed my
position, bending my face above her, and bathing her cheeks with the
warm dew of my tears. Ah, what bitter feelings of despair and
helplessness, what agonies unutterable did I endure in that long watch!
Vainly did I wish that I could have gathered all my life into one mass
that I might give it all to her, and breathe into her chill remains the
flame which devoured me. The night advanced, and feeling the moment of
eternal separation approach, I could not deny myself the last sad sweet
pleasure of imprinting a kiss upon the dead lips of her who had been my
only love.... Oh, miracle! A faint breath mingled itself with my breath,
and the mouth of Clarimonde responded to the passionate pressure of
mine. Her eyes unclosed, and lighted up with something of their former
brilliancy; she uttered a long sigh, and uncrossing her arms, passed
them around my neck with a look of ineffable delight. "Ah, it is thou,
Romuald!" she murmured in a voice languishingly sweet as the last
vibrations of a harp. "What ailed thee, dearest? I waited so long for
thee that I am dead; but we are now betrothed; I can see thee and visit
thee. Adieu, Romuald, adieu! I love thee. That is all I wished to tell
thee, and I give thee back the life which thy kiss for a moment
recalled. We shall soon meet again."

Her head fell back, but her arms yet encircled me, as though to retain
me still. A furious whirlwind suddenly burst in the window, and entered
the chamber. The last remaining leaf of the white rose for a moment
palpitated at the extremity of the stalk like a butterfly's wing, then
it detached itself and flew forth through the open casement, bearing
with it the soul of Clarimonde. The lamp was extinguished, and I fell
insensible upon the bosom of the beautiful dead.

When I came to myself again I was lying on the bed in my little room at
the presbytery, and the old dog of the former curé was licking my hand
which had been hanging down outside of the covers. Barbara, all
trembling with age and anxiety, was busying herself about the room,
opening and shutting drawers, and emptying powders into glasses. On
seeing me open my eyes, the old woman uttered a cry of joy, the dog
yelped and wagged his tail, but I was still so weak that I could not
speak a single word or make the slightest motion. Afterward I learned
that I had lain thus for three days, giving no evidence of life beyond
the faintest respiration. Those three days do not reckon in my life, nor
could I ever imagine whither my spirit had departed during those three
days; I have no recollection of aught relating to them. Barbara told me
that the same coppery-complexioned man who came to seek me on the night
of my departure from the presbytery, had brought me back the next
morning in a close litter, and departed immediately afterward. When I
became able to collect my scattered thoughts, I reviewed within my mind
all the circumstances of that fateful night. At first I thought I had
been the victim of some magical illusion, but ere long the recollection
of other circumstances, real and palpable in themselves, came to forbid
that supposition. I could not believe that I had been dreaming, since
Barbara as well as myself had seen the strange man with his two black
horses, and described with exactness every detail of his figure and
apparel. Nevertheless it appeared that none knew of any castle in the
neighborhood answering to the description of that in which I had again
found Clarimonde.

One morning I found the Abbé Sérapion in my room. Barbara had advised
him that I was ill, and he had come with all speed to see me. Although
this haste on his part testified to an affectionate interest in me, yet
his visit did not cause me the pleasure which it should have done. The
Abbé Sérapion had something penetrating and inquisitorial in his gaze
which made me feel very ill at ease. His presence filled me with
embarrassment and a sense of guilt. At the first glance he divined my
interior trouble, and I hated him for his clairvoyance.

While he inquired after my health in hypocritically honeyed accents, he
constantly kept his two great _yellow_ lion-eyes fixed upon me, and
plunged his look into my soul like a sounding lead. Then he asked me how
I directed my parish, if I was happy in it, how I passed the leisure
hours allowed me in the intervals of pastoral duty, whether I had become
acquainted with many of the inhabitants of the place, what was my
favorite reading, and a thousand other such questions. I answered these
inquiries as briefly as possible, and he, without ever waiting for my
answers, passed rapidly from one subject of query to another. That
conversation had evidently no connection with what he actually wished to
say. At last, without any premonition, but as though repeating a piece
of news which he had recalled on the instant, and feared might otherwise
be forgotten subsequently, he suddenly said, in a clear vibrant voice,
which rang in my ears like the trumpets of the Last Judgment:

"The great courtesan Clarimonde died a few days ago, at the close of an
orgie which lasted eight days and eight nights. It was something
infernally splendid. The abominations of the banquets of Belshazzar and
Cleopatra were reënacted there. Good God, what age are we living in? The
guests were served by swarthy slaves who spoke an unknown tongue, and
who seemed to me to be veritable demons. The livery of the very least
among them would have served for the gala-dress of an emperor. There
have always been very strange stories told of this Clarimonde, and all
her lovers came to a violent or miserable end. They used to say that she
was a ghoul, a female vampire; but I believe she was none other than
Beelzebub himself."

He ceased to speak and commenced to regard me more attentively than
ever, as though to observe the effect of his words on me. I could not
refrain from starting when I heard him utter the name of Clarimonde, and
this news of her death, in addition to the pain it caused me by reason
of its coincidence with the nocturnal scenes I had witnessed, filled me
with an agony and terror which my face betrayed, despite my utmost
endeavors to appear composed. Sérapion fixed an anxious and severe look
upon me, and then observed: "My son, I must warn you that you are
standing with foot raised upon the brink of an abyss; take heed lest you
fall therein. Satan's claws are long, and tombs are not always true to
their trust. The tombstone of Clarimonde should be sealed down with a
triple seal, for, if report be true, it is not the first time she has
died. May God watch over you, Romuald!"

And with these words the Abbé walked slowly to the door. I did not see
him again at that time, for he left for S---- almost immediately.

I became completely restored to health and resumed my accustomed duties.
The memory of Clarimonde and the words of the old Abbé were constantly
in my mind; nevertheless no extraordinary event had occurred to verify
the funereal predictions of Sérapion, and I had commenced to believe
that his fears and my own terrors were over-exaggerated, when one night
I had a strange dream. I had hardly fallen asleep when I heard my
bed-curtains drawn apart, as their rings slided back upon the curtain
rod with a sharp sound. I rose up quickly upon my elbow, and beheld the
shadow of a woman standing erect before me. I recognized Clarimonde
immediately. She bore in her hand a little lamp, shaped like those which
are placed in tombs, and its light lent her fingers a rosy transparency,
which extended itself by lessening degrees even to the opaque and milky
whiteness of her bare arm. Her only garment was the linen winding-sheet
which had shrouded her when lying upon the bed of death. She sought to
gather its folds over her bosom as though ashamed of being so scantily
clad, but her little hand was not equal to the task. She was so white
that the color of the drapery blended with that of her flesh under the
pallid rays of the lamp. Enveloped with this subtle tissue which
betrayed all the contour of her body, she seemed rather the marble
statue of some fair antique bather than a woman endowed with life. But
dead or living, statue or woman, shadow or body, her beauty was still
the same, only that the green light of her eyes was less brilliant, and
her mouth, once so warmly crimson, was only tinted with a faint tender
rosiness, like that of her cheeks. The little blue flowers which I had
noticed entwined in her hair were withered and dry, and had lost nearly
all their leaves, but this did not prevent her from being charming--so
charming that notwithstanding the strange character of the adventure,
and the unexplainable manner in which she had entered my room, I felt
not even for a moment the least fear.

She placed the lamp on the table and seated herself at the foot of my
bed; then bending toward me, she said, in that voice at once silvery
clear and yet velvety in its sweet softness, such as I never heard from
any lips save hers:

"I have kept thee long in waiting, dear Romuald, and it must have seemed
to thee that I had forgotten thee. But I come from afar off, very far
off, and from a land whence no other has ever yet returned. There is
neither sun nor moon in that land whence I come: all is but space and
shadow; there is neither road nor pathway: no earth for the foot, no air
for the wing; and nevertheless behold me here, for Love is stronger than
Death and must conquer him in the end. Oh what sad faces and fearful
things I have seen on my way hither! What difficulty my soul, returned
to earth through the power of will alone, has had in finding its body
and reinstating itself therein! What terrible efforts I had to make ere
I could lift the ponderous slab with which they had covered me! See,
the palms of my poor hands are all bruised! Kiss them, sweet love, that
they may be healed!" She laid the cold palms of her hands upon my mouth,
one after the other. I kissed them, indeed, many times, and she the
while watched me with a smile of ineffable affection.

I confess to my shame that I had entirely forgotten the advice of the
Abbé Sérapion and the sacred office wherewith I had been invested. I had
fallen without resistance, and at the first assault. I had not even made
the least effort to repel the tempter. The fresh coolness of
Clarimonde's skin penetrated my own, and I felt voluptuous tremors pass
over my whole body. Poor child! in spite of all I saw afterward, I can
hardly yet believe she was a demon; at least she had no appearance of
being such, and never did Satan so skilfully conceal his claws and
horns. She had drawn her feet up beneath her, and squatted down on the
edge of the couch in an attitude full of negligent coquetry. From time
to time she passed her little hand through my hair and twisted it into
curls, as though trying how a new style of wearing it would become my
face. _I_ abandoned myself to her hands with the most guilty pleasure,
while she accompanied her gentle play with the prettiest prattle. The
most remarkable fact was that I felt no astonishment whatever at so
extraordinary an adventure, and as in dreams one finds no difficulty in
accepting the most fantastic events as simple facts, so all these
circumstances seemed to me perfectly natural in themselves.

"I loved thee long ere I saw thee, dear Romuald, and sought thee
everywhere. Thou wast my dream, and I first saw thee in the church at
the fatal moment. I said at once, 'It is he!' I gave thee a look into
which I threw all the love I ever had, all the love I now have, all the
love I shall ever have for thee--a look that would have damned a
cardinal or brought a king to his knees at my feet in view of all his
court. Thou remainedst unmoved, preferring thy God to me!

"Ah, how jealous I am of that God whom thou didst love and still lovest
more than me!

"Woe is me, unhappy one that I am! I can never have thy heart all to
myself, I whom thou didst recall to life with a kiss--dead Clarimonde,
who for thy sake bursts asunder the gates of the tomb, and comes to
consecrate to thee a life which she has resumed only to make thee
happy!"

All her words were accompanied with the most impassioned caresses, which
bewildered my sense and my reason to such an extent, that I did not fear
to utter a frightful blasphemy for the sake of consoling her, and to
declare that I loved her as much as God.

Her eyes rekindled and shone like chrysoprases. "In truth?--in very
truth?--as much as God!" she cried, flinging her beautiful arms around
me. "Since it is so, thou wilt come with me; thou wilt follow me
whithersoever I desire. Thou wilt cast away thy ugly black habit. Thou
shalt be the proudest and most envied of cavaliers; thou shalt be my
lover! To be the acknowledged lover of Clarimonde, who has refused even
a Pope, that will be something to feel proud of! Ah, the fair,
unspeakably happy existence, the beautiful golden life we shall live
together! And when shall we depart, my fair sir?"

"To-morrow! To-morrow!" I cried in my delirium.

"To-morrow, then, so let it be!" she answered. "In the meanwhile I shall
have opportunity to change my toilet, for this is a little too light and
in nowise suited for a voyage. I must also forthwith notify all my
friends who believe me dead, and mourn for me as deeply as they are
capable of doing. The money, the dresses, the carriages--all will be
ready. I shall call for thee at this same hour. Adieu, dear heart!" And
she lightly touched my forehead with her lips. The lamp went out, the
curtains closed again, and all became dark; a leaden, dreamless sleep
fell on me and held me unconscious until the morning following.

I awoke later than usual, and the recollection of this singular
adventure troubled me during the whole day. I finally persuaded myself
that it was a mere vapor of my heated imagination. Nevertheless its
sensations had been so vivid that it was difficult to persuade myself
that they were not real, and it was not without some presentiment of
what was going to happen that I got into bed at last, after having
prayed God to drive far from me all thoughts of evil, and to protect the
chastity of my slumber.

I soon fell into a deep sleep, and my dream was continued. The curtains
again parted, and I beheld Clarimonde, not as on the former occasion,
pale in her pale winding-sheet, with the violets of death upon her
cheeks, but gay, sprightly, jaunty, in a superb travelling dress of
green velvet, trimmed with gold lace, and looped up on either side to
allow a glimpse of satin petticoat. Her blond hair escaped in thick
ringlets from beneath a broad black felt hat, decorated with white
feathers whimsically twisted into various shapes. In one hand she held a
little riding whip terminated by a golden whistle. She tapped me lightly
with it, and exclaimed: "Well, my fine sleeper, is this the way you make
your preparations? I thought I would find you up and dressed. Arise
quickly, we have no time to lose."

I leaped out of bed at once.

"Come, dress yourself, and let us go," she continued, pointing to a
little package she had brought with her. "The horses are becoming
impatient of delay and champing their bits at the door. We ought to have
been by this time at least ten leagues distant from here."

I dressed myself hurriedly, and she handed me the articles of apparel
herself one by one, bursting into laughter from time to time at my
awkwardness, as she explained to me the use of a garment when I had made
a mistake. She hurriedly arranged my hair, and this done, held up before
me a little pocket mirror of Venetian crystal, rimmed with silver
filigree-work, and playfully asked: "How dost find thyself now? Wilt
engage me for thy valet de chambre?"

I was no longer the same person, and I could not even recognize myself.
I resembled my former self no more than a finished statue resembles a
block of stone. My old face seemed but a coarse daub of the one
reflected in the mirror. I was handsome, and my vanity was sensibly
tickled by the metamorphosis. That elegant apparel, that richly
embroidered vest had made of me a totally different personage, and I
marvelled at the power of transformation owned by a few yards of cloth
cut after a certain pattern. The spirit of my costume penetrated my very
skin, and within ten minutes more I had become something of a coxcomb.

In order to feel more at ease in my new attire, I took several turns up
and down the room. Clarimonde watched me with an air of maternal
pleasure, and appeared well satisfied with her work. "Come, enough of
this child's-play! Let us start, Romuald, dear. We have far to go, and
we may not get there in time." She took my hand and led me forth. All
the doors opened before her at a touch, and we passed by the dog without
awaking him.

At the gate we found Margheritone waiting, the same swarthy groom who
had once before been my escort. He held the bridles of three horses, all
black like those which bore us to the castle--one for me, one for him,
one for Clarimonde. Those horses must have been Spanish genets born of
mares fecundated by a zephyr, for they were fleet as the wind itself,
and the moon, which had just risen at our departure to light us on the
way, rolled over the sky like a wheel detached from her own chariot. We
beheld her on the right leaping from tree to tree, and putting herself
out of breath in the effort to keep up with us. Soon we came upon a
level plain where, hard by a clump of trees, a carriage with four
vigorous horses awaited us. We entered it, and the postilions urged
their animals into a mad gallop. I had one arm around Clarimonde's
waist, and one of her hands clasped in mine; her head leaned upon my
shoulder, and I felt her bosom, half bare, lightly pressing against my
arm. I had never known such intense happiness. In that hour I had
forgotten everything, and I no more remembered having ever been a priest
than I remembered what I had been doing in my mother's womb, so great
was the fascination which the evil spirit exerted upon me. From that
night my nature seemed in some sort to have become halved, and there
were two men within me, neither of whom knew the other. At one moment I
believed myself a priest who dreamed nightly that he was a gentleman,
at another that I was a gentleman who dreamed he was a priest. I could
no longer distinguish the dream from the reality, nor could I discover
where the reality began or where ended the dream. The exquisite young
lord and libertine railed at the priest, the priest loathed the
dissolute habits of the young lord. Two spirals entangled and confounded
the one with the other, yet never touching, would afford a fair
representation of this bicephalic life which I lived. Despite the
strange character of my condition, I do not believe that I ever
inclined, even for a moment, to madness. I always retained with extreme
vividness all the perceptions of my two lives. Only there was one absurd
fact which I could not explain to myself--namely, that the consciousness
of the same individuality existed in two men so opposite in character.
It was an anomaly for which I could not account--whether I believed
myself to be the curé of the little village of C----, or _Il Signor
Romualdo_, the titled lover of Clarimonde.

Be that as it may, I lived, at least I believed that I lived, in Venice.
I have never been able to discover rightly how much of illusion and how
much of reality there was in this fantastic adventure. We dwelt in a
great palace on the Canaleio, filled with frescoes and statues, and
containing two Titians in the noblest style of the great master, which
were hung in Clarimonde's chamber. It was a palace well worthy of a
king. We had each our gondola, our _barcarolli_ in family livery, our
music hall, and our special poet. Clarimonde always lived upon a
magnificent scale; there was something of Cleopatra in her nature. As
for me, I had the retinue of a prince's son, and I was regarded with as
much reverential respect as though I had been of the family of one of
the twelve Apostles or the four Evangelists of the Most Serene Republic.
I would not have turned aside to allow even the Doge to pass, and I do
not believe that since Satan fell from heaven, any creature was ever
prouder or more insolent than I. I went to the Ridotto, and played with
a luck which seemed absolutely infernal. I received the best of all
society--the sons of ruined families, women of the theatre, shrewd
knaves, parasites, hectoring swashbucklers. But notwithstanding the
dissipation of such a life, I always remained faithful to Clarimonde. I
loved her wildly. She would have excited satiety itself, and chained
inconstancy. To have Clarimonde was to have twenty mistresses; aye, to
possess all women: so mobile, so varied of aspect, so fresh in new
charms was she all in herself--a very chameleon of a woman, in sooth.
She made you commit with her the infidelity you would have committed
with another, by donning to perfection the character, the attraction,
the style of beauty of the woman who appeared to please you. She
returned my love a hundred-fold, and it was in vain that the young
patricians and even the Ancients of the Council of Ten made her the most
magnificent proposals. A Foscari even went so far as to offer to espouse
her. She rejected all his overtures. Of gold she had enough. She wished
no longer for anything but love--a love youthful, pure, evoked by
herself, and which should be a first and last passion. I would have been
perfectly happy but for a cursed nightmare which recurred every night,
and in which I believed myself to be a poor village curé, practising
mortification and penance for my excesses during the day. Reassured by
my constant association with her, I never thought further of the strange
manner in which I had become acquainted with Clarimonde. But the words
of the Abbé Sérapion concerning her recurred often to my memory, and
never ceased to cause me uneasiness.

For some time the health of Clarimonde had not been so good as usual;
her complexion grew paler day by day. The physicians who were summoned
could not comprehend the nature of her malady and knew not how to treat
it. They all prescribed some insignificant remedies, and never called a
second time. Her paleness, nevertheless, visibly increased, and she
became colder and colder, until she seemed almost as white and dead as
upon that memorable night in the unknown castle. I grieved with anguish
unspeakable to behold her thus slowly perishing; and she, touched by my
agony, smiled upon me sweetly and sadly with the fateful smile of those
who feel that they must die.

One morning I was seated at her bedside, and breakfasting from a little
table placed close at hand, so that I might not be obliged to leave her
for a single instant. In the act of cutting some fruit I accidentally
inflicted rather a deep gash on my finger. The blood immediately gushed
forth in a little purple jet, and a few drops spurted upon Clarimonde.
Her eyes flashed, her face suddenly assumed an expression of savage and
ferocious joy such as I had never before observed in her. She leaped out
of her bed with animal agility--the agility, as it were, of an ape or a
cat--and sprang upon my wound, which she commenced to suck with an air
of unutterable pleasure. She swallowed the blood in little mouthfuls,
slowly and carefully, like a connoisseur tasting a wine from Xeres or
Syracuse. Gradually her eyelids half closed, and the pupils of her green
eyes became oblong instead of round. From time to time she paused in
order to kiss my hand, then she would recommence to press her lips to
the lips of the wound in order to coax forth a few more ruddy drops.
When she found that the blood would no longer come, she arose with eyes
liquid and brilliant, rosier than a May dawn; her face full and fresh,
her hand warm and moist--in fine, more beautiful than ever, and in the
most perfect health.

"I shall not die! I shall not die!" she cried, clinging to my neck, half
mad with joy. "I can love thee yet for a long time. My life is thine,
and all that is of me comes from thee. A few drops of thy rich and noble
blood, more precious and more potent than all the elixirs of the earth,
have given me back life."

This scene long haunted my memory, and inspired me with strange doubts
in regard to Clarimonde; and the same evening, when slumber had
transported me to my presbytery, I beheld the Abbé Sérapion, graver and
more anxious of aspect than ever. He gazed attentively at me, and
sorrowfully exclaimed: "Not content with losing your soul, you now
desire also to lose your body. Wretched young man, into how terrible a
plight have you fallen!" The tone in which he uttered these words
powerfully affected me, but in spite of its vividness even that
impression was soon dissipated, and a thousand other cares erased it
from my mind. At last one evening, while looking into a mirror whose
traitorous position she had not taken into account, I saw Clarimonde in
the act of emptying a powder into the cup of spiced wine which she had
long been in the habit of preparing after our repasts. I took the cup,
feigned to carry it to my lips, and then placed it on the nearest
article of furniture as though intending to finish it at my leisure.
Taking advantage of a moment when the fair one's back was turned, I
threw the contents under the table, after which I retired to my chamber
and went to bed, fully resolved not to sleep, but to watch and discover
what should come of all this mystery. I did not have to wait long.
Clarimonde entered in her night-dress, and having removed her apparel,
crept into bed and lay down beside me. When she felt assured that I was
asleep, she bared my arm, and drawing a gold pin from her hair,
commenced to murmur in a low voice:

"One drop, only one drop! One ruby at the end of my needle.... Since
thou lovest me yet, I must not die!... Ah, poor love! His beautiful
blood, so brightly purple, I must drink it. Sleep, my only treasure!
Sleep, my god, my child! I will do thee no harm; I will only take of thy
life what I must to keep my own from being forever extinguished. But
that I love thee so much, I could well resolve to have other lovers
whose veins I could drain; but since I have known thee all other men
have become hateful to me.... Ah, the beautiful arm! How round it is!
How white it is! How shall I ever dare to prick this pretty blue vein!"
And while thus murmuring to herself she wept, and I felt her tears
raining on my arm as she clasped it with her hands. At last she took the
resolve, slightly punctured me with her pin, and commenced to suck up
the blood which oozed from the place. Although she swallowed only a few
drops, the fear of weakening me soon seized her, and she carefully tied
a little band around my arm, afterward rubbing the wound with an unguent
which immediately cicatrized it.

Further doubts were impossible. The Abbé Sérapion was right.
Notwithstanding this positive knowledge, however, I could not cease to
love Clarimonde, and I would gladly of my own accord have given her all
the blood she required to sustain her factitious life. Moreover, I felt
but little fear of her. The woman seemed to plead with me for the
vampire, and what I had already heard and seen sufficed to reassure me
completely. In those days I had plenteous veins, which would not have
been so easily exhausted as at present; and I would not have thought of
bargaining for my blood, drop by drop. I would rather have opened myself
the veins of my arm and said to her: "Drink, and may my love infiltrate
itself throughout thy body together with my blood!" I carefully avoided
ever making the least reference to the narcotic drink she had prepared
for me, or to the incident of the pin, and we lived in the most perfect
harmony.

Yet my priestly scruples commenced to torment me more than ever, and I
was at a loss to imagine what new penance I could invent in order to
mortify and subdue my flesh. Although these visions were involuntary,
and though I did not actually participate in anything relating to them,
I could not dare to touch the body of Christ with hands so impure and a
mind defiled by such debauches whether real or imaginary. In the effort
to avoid falling under the influence of these wearisome hallucinations,
I strove to prevent myself from being overcome by sleep. I held my
eyelids open with my fingers, and stood for hours together leaning
upright against the wall, fighting sleep with all my might; but the dust
of drowsiness invariably gathered upon my eyes at last, and finding all
resistance useless, I would have to let my arms fall in the extremity of
despairing weariness, and the current of slumber would again bear me
away to the perfidious shores. Sérapion addressed me with the most
vehement exhortations, severely reproaching me for my softness and want
of fervor. Finally, one day when I was more wretched than usual, he said
to me: "There is but one way by which you can obtain relief from this
continual torment, and though it is an extreme measure it must be made
use of; violent diseases require violent remedies. I know where
Clarimonde is buried. It is necessary that we shall disinter her
remains, and that you shall behold in how pitiable a state the object of
your love is. Then you will no longer be tempted to lose your soul for
the sake of an unclean corpse devoured by worms, and ready to crumble
into dust. That will assuredly restore you to yourself." For my part, I
was so tired of this double life that I at once consented, desiring to
ascertain beyond a doubt whether a priest or a gentleman had been the
victim of delusion. I had become fully resolved either to kill one of
the two men within me for the benefit of the other, or else to kill
both, for so terrible an existence could not last long and be endured.
The Abbé Sérapion provided himself with a mattock, a lever, and a
lantern, and at midnight we wended our way to the cemetery of ----, the
location and place of which were perfectly familiar to him. After having
directed the rays of the dark lantern upon the inscriptions of several
tombs, we came at last upon a great slab, half concealed by huge weeds
and devoured by mosses and parasitic plants, whereupon we deciphered the
opening lines of the epitaph:

     Here lies Clarimonde
     Who was famed in her life-time
     As the fairest of women.[2]

"It is here without a doubt," muttered Sérapion, and placing his lantern
on the ground, he forced the point of the lever under the edge of the
stone and commenced to raise it. The stone yielded, and he proceeded to
work with the mattock. Darker and more silent than the night itself, I
stood by and watched him do it, while he, bending over his dismal toil,
streamed with sweat, panted, and his hard-coming breath seemed to have
the harsh tone of a death rattle. It was a weird scene, and had any
persons from without beheld us, they would assuredly have taken us
rather for profane wretches and shroud-stealers than for priests of God.
There was something grim and fierce in Sérapion's zeal which lent him
the air of a demon rather than of an apostle or an angel, and his great
aquiline face, with all its stern features brought out in strong relief
by the lantern-light, had something fearsome in it which enhanced the
unpleasant fancy. I felt an icy sweat come out upon my forehead in huge
beads, and my hair stood up with a hideous fear. Within the depths of my
own heart I felt that the act of the austere Sérapion was an abominable
sacrilege; and I could have prayed that a triangle of fire would issue
from the entrails of the dark clouds, heavily rolling above us, to
reduce him to cinders. The owls which had been nestling in the
cypress-trees, startled by the gleam of the lantern, flew against it
from time to time, striking their dusty wings against its panes, and
uttering plaintive cries of lamentation; wild foxes yelped in the far
darkness, and a thousand sinister noises detached themselves from the
silence. At last Sérapion's mattock struck the coffin itself, making
its planks reëcho with a deep sonorous sound, with that terrible sound
nothingness utters when stricken. He wrenched apart and tore up the lid,
and I beheld Clarimonde, pallid as a figure of marble, with hands
joined; her white winding-sheet made but one fold from her head to her
feet. A little crimson drop sparkled like a speck of dew at one corner
of her colorless mouth. Sérapion, at this spectacle, burst into fury:
"Ah, thou art here, demon! Impure courtesan! Drinker of blood and gold!"
And he flung holy water upon the corpse and the coffin, over which he
traced the sign of the cross with his sprinkler. Poor Clarimonde had no
sooner been touched by the blessed spray than her beautiful body
crumbled into dust, and became only a shapeless and frightful mass of
cinders and half-calcined bones.

"Behold your mistress, my Lord Romuald!" cried the inexorable priest, as
he pointed to these sad remains. "Will you be easily tempted after this
to promenade on the Lido or at Fusina with your beauty?"

I covered my face with my hands, a vast ruin had taken place within me.
I returned to my presbytery, and the noble Lord Romuald, the lover of
Clarimonde, separated himself from the poor priest with whom he had kept
such strange company so long. But once only, the following night, I saw
Clarimonde. She said to me, as she had said the first time at the
portals of the church: "Unhappy man! Unhappy man! What hast thou done?
Wherefore have hearkened to that imbecile priest? Wert thou not happy?
And what harm had I ever done thee that thou shouldst violate my poor
tomb, and lay bare the miseries of my nothingness? All communication
between our souls and our bodies is henceforth forever broken. Adieu!
Thou wilt yet regret me!" She vanished in air as smoke, and I never saw
her more.

Alas! she spoke truly indeed. I have regretted her more than once, and I
regret her still. My soul's peace has been very dearly bought. The love
of God was not too much to replace such a love as hers. And this,
brother, is the story of my youth. Never gaze upon a woman, and walk
abroad only with eyes ever fixed upon the ground; for however chaste and
watchful one may be, the error of a single moment is enough to make one
lose eternity.


[1] "_La Morte Amoureuse._"

[2]

     Ici gît Clarimonde
     Qui fut de son vivant
     La plus belle du monde.

The broken beauty of the lines is unavoidably lost in the translation.




ARRIA MARCELLA

A SOUVENIR OF POMPEII


Three young friends, who had under-taken an Italian tour together last
year, visited the Studii Museum at Naples, where the various antique
objects exhumed from the ashes of Pompeii and Herculaneum have been
collected.

They scattered through the halls, inspecting the mosaics, the bronzes,
the frescoes detached from the walls of the dead city, each following
the promptings of his own particular taste in such matters; and whenever
one of the party encountered something especially curious, he summoned
his comrades with cries of delight, much to the scandal of the taciturn
English visitors, and the staid _bourgeois_ who studiously thumbed
their catalogues.

But the youngest of the three, who had paused before a glass case,
appeared wholly deaf to the exclamations of his comrades, so deeply had
he become absorbed in contemplation. The object that he seemed to be
examining with so much interest was a black mass of coagulated cinders,
bearing a hollow imprint. One might easily have mistaken it for the
fragment of some statue-mould, broken in the casting. The trained eye of
an artist would have readily therein recognized the impression of a
perfect bosom and a flank as faultless in its outlines as a Greek
statue. It is well known, indeed the commonest traveller's guide will
tell you, that this lava, in cooling about the body of a woman,
preserved its charming contours. Thanks to the caprice of the eruption
that destroyed four cities, that noble form, though crumbled to dust
nearly two thousand years ago, has come down to us; the rounded
loveliness of a throat has lived through the centuries in which so many
empires perished without even leaving the traces of their existence;
chance-imprinted upon the volcanic scoriæ, that seal of beauty remains
unobliterated.

Finding that he still remained absorbed in contemplation, Octavian's
friends returned to where he stood; and Max, touching his shoulder,
caused him to start like one surprised in a secret. Evidently Octavian
had not been aware of the approach of Max or Fabio.

"Come, Octavian," exclaimed Max, "do not stay lingering whole hours
before every cabinet, else we shall get late for the train and miss
seeing Pompeii to-day."

"What is our comrade looking at?" asked Fabio, drawing near. "Ah, the
imprint found in the house of Arrius Diomedes!" And he turned a
peculiar, quick glance upon Octavian.

Octavian slightly blushed, took Max's arm, and the visit terminated
without further incident. On leaving the Studii Museum, the three
friends entered a _corricolo,_ and were driven to the railway station.
The _corricolo_, with its great red wheels, its tracket seat studded
with brass nails, and its thin, spirited horse harnessed like a Spanish
mule, and galloping at full speed over the great slabs of lava pavement,
is too familiar to need description here, especially as we are not
recording impressions of a trip to Naples, but the simple narrative of
an adventure which, although true, may seem both fantastic and
incredible in the extreme.

The railroad by which Pompeii is reached runs for almost its entire
length by the sea, whose long volutes of foam advance to unroll
themselves upon a beach of blackish sand resembling sifted charcoal.
This beach has actually been formed by lava-streams and volcanic
cinders, and its deep tone forms a strong contrast with the blue of the
sky and the blue of the waters. The earth alone, in that sunny
brightness, seems able to retain a shadow.

The villages bordered or traversed by the railway--Portici, celebrated
in one of Auber's operas; Resina, Torre del Græco, Torre dell'
Annunziata, whose dwellings with their arcades and terraced roofs
attract the traveller's gaze--have, notwithstanding the intensity of the
sunlight and the southern love for whitewashing, something of a
Plutonian and ferruginous character like Birmingham or Manchester. The
very dust is black there. An impalpable soot clings to everything. One
feels that the mighty forge of Vesuvius is panting and smoking only a
few paces off.

The three friends left the station at Pompeii, laughing among themselves
at the odd commingling of antique and modern ideas suggested by the
sign, "Pompeii Station"--a Græco-Roman city and a railway depot!

They crossed the cotton-field, with its fluttering white bolls, between
the railway and the disinterred city, and at the inn which has been
built just without the ancient rampart they took a guide, or, more
correctly speaking, the guide took them, a calamity which is not easily
avoided in Italy.

It was one of those delightful days so common in Naples, when the
brilliancy of the sunlight and the transparency of the air cause objects
to take such hues as in the North would be deemed fabulous, and appear
indeed to belong to the world of dreams rather than to that of
realities. The Northern visitor who has once looked upon that glow of
azure and gold is apt to carry back with him into the depths of his
native fogs an incurable nostalgia.

Having shaken off a corner of her cinder shroud, the resurrected city
again rose with her thousand details under a dazzling day. The cone of
Vesuvius, furrowed with striæ of blue, rosy, and violet-hued lavas,
ruddily bronzed by the sun, towered sharply defined in the background. A
thin haze, almost imperceptible in the sunlight, hooded the blunt crest
of the mountain. At first sight it might have been taken for one of
those clouds which shadow the brows of lofty peaks on the fairest days.
Upon a nearer view, slender threads of white vapor could be perceived
rising from the mountain-summit, as from the orifices of a perfuming
pan, to reunite above in a light cloud. The volcano, being that day in a
good humor, smoked his pipe very peacefully; and but for the example of
Pompeii, buried at his feet, no one would ever have suspected him of
being by nature any more ferocious than Montmartre. On the other side
fair hills, with outlines voluptuously undulating like the hips of a
woman, barred the horizon; and, further yet, the sea, that in other days
bore biremes and triremes under the ramparts of the city, extended its
azure boundary.

Of all spectacles, the sight of Pompeii is one of the most surprising.
This sudden backward leap of nineteen centuries astonishes even the
least comprehensive and most prosaic natures. Two paces lead you from
the antique life to the life of to-day, and from Christianity to
paganism. Thus, when the three friends beheld those streets wherein the
forms of a vanished past are preserved yet intact, they were strangely
and profoundly affected, however well prepared by the study of books and
drawings they might have been. Octavian, above all, seemed stricken with
stupefaction, and like a man walking in his sleep, mechanically followed
the guide, without hearing the monotonous nomenclature that the varlet
had learned by heart and recited like a lesson.

He gazed wildly on those ruts hollowed out in the cyclopean pavements of
the streets by the chariot wheels, and which seem to be of yesterday,
so fresh do they appear; those inscriptions in red letters skilfully
traced upon the surfaces of the walls by rapid strokes of the brush
(theatrical advertisements, notices of houses to let, votive formulas,
signs, announcements of all descriptions, not less curious than a
freshly discovered fragment of the walls of Paris, with advertising
bills and placards attached, would prove a thousand years hence for the
unknown people of the future); those houses, whose shattered roofs
permit one to penetrate at a glance into all those interior mysteries,
all those domestic details which historians invariably neglect, and
whereof the secrets die with dying civilizations; those fountains that
even now seem scarcely dried up; that forum whose restoration was
interrupted by the great catastrophe, and whose architraves and columns,
all ready cut and sculptured, still seem waiting in their purity of
angle to be lifted into place; those temples, consecrated, in that
mythologic age when atheists were yet unknown, to gods that have long
ceased to be; those shops wherein the merchant only is missing; that
public tavern where may still be seen the circular stain of the drinking
cups upon the marble; that barracks with its ochre and minium-painted
columns, on which the soldiers scratched grotesque caricatures of
battle, and those juxtaposed double theatres of song and drama which
might even now resume their entertainments, were not the companies who
performed in them turned long since to clay, and at present occupied
perchance in closing the bunghole of a cask or stopping a crevice in the
wall, after the fashion of Alexander's ashes or Cæsar's dust, according
to the melancholy reflections of Hamlet!

Fabio mounted upon the thymele of the tragic theatre while Max and
Octavian climbed to the upper benches; and there, with extravagant
gestures, he commenced to recite whatever poetical fragments came to his
memory, much to the terror of the lizards, who fled, vibrating their
tails, and hid themselves in the joints of the ruined stonework.
Although the brazen or earthen vessels formerly used to reverberate
sounds no longer existed, Fabio's voice sounded none the less full and
vibrant.

The guide then conducted them across the open fields which overlie those
portions of Pompeii still buried, to the amphitheatre situated at the
other end of the city. They passed under those trees whose roots plunge
down through the roofs of the edifices interred, displacing tiles,
cleaving ceilings asunder, and disjointing columns; and they traversed
the farms where vulgar vegetables sprout above wonders of art--material
images of that oblivion wherewith time covers all things.

The amphitheatre caused them little surprise. They had seen that of
Verona, vaster and equally well preserved; besides, the arrangement of
such antique arenas was as familiar to them as that of those in which
bull-fights are held in Spain, and which they much resemble save in
solidity of construction and beauty of material.

Accordingly they soon retraced their footsteps and gained the Street of
Fortune by a cross-path, listening half-distractedly to the _cicerone_,
who named each house they passed by the name which had been given it
immediately upon its discovery, owing to some characteristic
peculiarity--the House of the Brazen Bull, the House of the Faun, the
House of the Ship, the Temple of Fortune, the House of Meleager, the
Tavern of Fortune, at the angle of the Consular Road (Via Consularia),
the Academy of Music, the Public Market, the Pharmacy, the Surgeon's
Shop, the Custom House, the House of the Vestals, the Inn of Albinus,
the Thermopolium, and so on--until they came to that gate which leads to
the Street of the Tombs.

Within the interior arch of this brick-built gate, once adorned with
statues which have long since disappeared, may be noticed two deep
grooves designed to receive a sliding portcullis, after the style of a
mediæval donjon, to which era, indeed, one might have supposed such a
defence peculiar.

"Who," exclaimed Max to his friends, "could have dreamed of finding in
Pompeii, the Græco-Latin city, a gate so romantically Gothic? Fancy
some belated Roman knight blowing his horn before this entrance,
summoning them to raise the portcullis, like a page of the fifteenth
century!"

"There is nothing new under the sun," replied Fabio; "and the aphorism
itself is not new, inasmuch as it was formulated by Solomon."

"Perhaps there may be something new under the moon," observed Octavian,
with a smile of melancholy irony.

"My dear Octavian," cried Max, who during this little conversation had
paused before an inscription traced in rubric upon the outer wall, "wilt
behold the combats of the gladiators? See the advertisement! Combat and
chase on the 5th day of the nones of April; the masts of the velarium
will be rigged; twenty pairs of gladiators will fight during the nones;
if you fear for the delicacy of your complexion, be assured that the
awnings will be spread; and as you might in any case prefer to visit the
amphitheatre early, these men will cut each other's throats in the
morning--_matutini erunt._ Nothing could be more considerate."

Thus chatting, the three friends followed that sepulchre-fringed road
which, according to our modern ideas, would be a lugubrious avenue for
any city, but which had no sad significations for the ancients, whose
tombs contained in lieu of hideous corpses only a pinch of
dust--abstract idea of death! Art beautified these last resting-places,
and, as Goethe says, the pagan decorated sarcophagi and funeral urns
with the images of life.

It was therefore, doubtless, that Fabio and Max could visit, with a
lively curiosity and a joyous sense of being, such as they could not
have felt in any Christian cemetery, those funeral monuments, all gayly
gilded by the sun, which, as they stood by the wayside, seemed still
trying to cling to life, and inspired none of those chill feelings of
repulsion, none of those fantastic terrors evoked by our modern dismal
places of sepulture. They paused before the tomb of Mammia, the public
priestess, near which a tree (either a cypress or a willow) is growing;
they seated themselves in the hemicycle of the triclinium, where the
funeral feasts were held, laughing like fortunate heirs; they read with
mock solemnity the epitaphs of Navoleia, Labeon, and the Arria family,
silently followed by Octavian, who seemed more deeply touched than his
careless companions by the fate of those dead of two thousand years ago.

Thus they came to the villa of Arrius Diomedes, one of the finest
residences in Pompeii. It is approached by a flight of brick steps, and
after entering the door-way, which is flanked by two small lateral
columns, one finds himself in a court resembling the _patio_ which
occupies the centre of Spanish and Moorish dwellings, and which the
ancients termed _impluvium_ or _cavædium._ Fourteen columns of brick,
overlaid with stucco, once supported on four sides a portico or covered
peristyle, not unlike a convent cloister, and beneath which one could
walk secure from the rain. This courtyard is paved in mosaic with brick
and white marble, which presents a subdued and pleasing effect of color.
In its centre a quadrilateral marble basin, which still exists, formerly
caught the rain-water that dripped from the roof of the portico. It was
a strange experience, entering thus into the life of the antique world,
and treading with well-blacked boots upon the marbles worn smooth by the
sandals and buskins of the contemporaries of Augustus and Tiberius.

The cicerone led them through the _exedra_ or summer parlor, which
opened to the sea, to receive its cooling breezes. It was there that the
family received company, and took their siesta during those burning
hours when prevailed the mighty zephyr of Africa, laden with languors
and storms. He brought them into the basilica, a long open gallery which
lighted the various apartments, and in which clients and visitors erst
awaited the call of the Nomenclator. Then he conducted them to the white
marble terrace, whence extended a broad view of verdant gardens and blue
sea. Then he showed them the _Nymphæum_, or Hall of Baths, with its
yellow-painted walls, its stucco columns, its mosaic pavement, and its
marble bathing-basin which had contained so many of the lovely bodies
that have long since passed away like shadows; the _cubiculum_, where
flitted so many dreams from the Ivory Gate, and whose alcoves contrived
in the wall were once closed by a _conopeum_ or curtain, of which the
bronze rings still lie upon the floor; the _tetrastyle_, or Hall of
Recreation; the Chapel of the Lares; the Cabinet of Archives; the
Library; the Museum of Paintings; the _gynæceum_ or women's apartment,
comprising a suite of small chambers, now half fallen into ruin, but
whose walls yet bear traces of paintings and arabesques, like fair
cheeks from which the rouge has been but half wiped off.

Having fully inspected all these, they descended to the lower floor, for
the ground is much lower on the garden side than it is on the side of
the Street of the Tombs. They traversed eight halls painted in antique
red, whereof one has its walls hollowed with architectural niches, after
that style of which we have to-day a good example in the vestibule of
the Hall of the Ambassadors at the Alhambra, and finally they came to a
sort of cave or cellar, whose purpose was clearly indicated by eight
earthen amphoræ propped up against the wall, and once perfumed,
doubtless, like the odes of Horace with the wines of Crete, Falernia, or
Massica.

One solitary bright ray of sunshine streamed through a narrow aperture
above, half choked by nettles, whose light-traversed leaves it
transformed into emeralds and topazes, and this gay natural detail
seemed to smile opportunely through the sadness of the place.

"It was here," observed the cicerone, in his customary indifferent tone,
"that among seventeen others was found the skeleton of the lady whose
mould is exhibited at the Naples Museum. She wore gold rings, and the
shreds of her fine tunic still clung to the mass of cinders which have
preserved her shape."

The guide's commonplace phrases deeply affected Octavian. He made the
man point out to him the exact spot where the precious remains had been
discovered, and had it not been for the restraining presence of his
friends, he would have abandoned himself to some extravagant lyrism. His
chest heaved, his eyes glistened with a furtive moisture. Though blotted
out by twenty centuries of oblivion, that catastrophe touched him like a
recent misfortune. Not even the death of a mistress or a friend could
have affected him more profoundly; and while Max and Fabio had their
backs turned, a tear, two thousand years late, fell upon the spot where
that woman, with whom he felt he had fallen retrospectively in love, had
perished, suffocated by the hot cinders of the volcano.

"Enough of this archæology," cried Fabio. "We do not propose to write
dissertations upon an ancient jug or a tile of the age of Julius Cæsar
in order to obtain memberships in some provincial academy. These classic
souvenirs give me the stomachache. Let us go to dinner--if such a thing
be possible--in that picturesque hostelry, where I fear we shall be
served with fossil beefsteaks and fresh eggs laid prior to the death of
Pliny."

"I will not exclaim with Boileau:

     'Un sot, quelquefois, ouvre un avis important,'"

exclaimed Max, with a laugh. "That would be ill-mannered, but your idea
is a good one. Still, I think it would have been pleasant to banquet
here, on some triclinium, reclining after the antique fashion, and
waited upon by slaves according to the style of Lucullus or Trimalchio.
It is true that I see no oysters from Lake Lucrinus, the turbots and
mullets from the Adriatic are wanting, the Apuleian boar cannot be had
in market, and the loaves and honey-cakes on exhibition in the Naples
Museum lie, hard as stones, beside their green-gray moulds. Even raw
macaroni sprinkled with _cacciacavallo,_ detestable as it may be, is
certainly better than nothing. What does friend Octavian think about
it?"

Octavian, who was deeply regretting that he had not happened to be in
Pompeii on the day of the eruption, so that he might have saved the lady
of the gold rings, and thereby merited her love, had not heard a
syllable of this gastronomic conversation. Only the last two words
uttered by Max had fallen upon his ears, and feeling no desire to broach
a discussion, he gave a random nod of assent, upon which the amicable
party retraced the road along the ramparts to the inn.

The table was placed under a sort of open porch which served as a
vestibule to the hostelry, whose rough cast walls were decorated with
various daubs that the host entitled "Salvator Rosa," "Espagnolet,"
"Cavalier Massimo," and other celebrated names of the Neapolitan School,
which he deemed himself bound to extol.

"Venerable host," cried Fabio, "do not waste your eloquence to no
purpose. We are not Englishmen, and we prefer young women to old
canvases. Better send us your wine-list by that handsome brunette with
the velvety eyes whom I just now perceived on the stairway."

Finding that his guests did not belong to the mystifiable class of
Philistines and _bourgeois_, the _palforio_ ceased to vaunt his gallery
in order to glorify his cellar. To begin with, he had all the best
vintages: Château Margaux, Grand Lafitte which had been twice to the
Indies, Sillery de Moët, Hochmeyer, scarlet wine, port and porter, ale
and ginger beer, white and red Lachryma-Christi, Caprian, and Falernian.

"What, you have Falernian wine, _animal!_ And put it at the end of your
list! And you dare to subject us to an unendurable œnological litany!"
cried Max, leaping at the inn-keeper's throat with burlesque fury. "Why,
you have no sentiment of local color. You are unworthy to live in this
antique neighborhood. Is it even good, this Falernian wine of yours? Was
it put in amphoræ under the Consul Plancus--_Consule Planco?_"

"I know nothing about the Consul Plancus, and my wine is not put in
amphoræ, but it is good, and worth ten carlins a bottle," answered the
inn-keeper.

Day had faded away and the night came, a serene, transparent night,
clearer, assuredly, than full midday in London. The earth had tints of
azure, and the sky silvery reflections of inconceivable sweetness. The
air was so still that the flames of the candles on the table did not
oscillate.

A young boy, playing a flute, approached the table, and standing there,
with his eyes fixed upon the three guests, performed upon his sweet and
melodious instrument, one of those popular airs in a minor key which
have a penetrating charm.

Perhaps that lad was a direct descendant of the flute-player who marched
before Duilius.

"Our repast is assuming quite an antique aspect. We only need some
Gaditanian dancing women and ivy garlands," exclaimed Max, as he helped
himself to a great bumper of Falernian wine.

"I feel myself in the humor for making Latin quotations like a
_feuilleton_ in the _Débats_. Stanzas of odes come back to my memory,"
added Max.

"Keep them to yourself!" cried Fabio and Octavian, justly alarmed.
"Nothing is so indigestible as Latin at dinner."

Among young men with cigars in their mouths and elbows on the table, who
find themselves contemplating a certain number of empty flagons,
especially when the wine has been capitally good, conversation never
fails to turn upon women. Each explained his own system, whereof the
following is a fair summary:

Fabio cared only for youth and beauty. Voluptuous and positive, he found
no pleasure in illusions, and had no preferences in love. A peasant
girl would have pleased his fancy as well as a princess, provided she
were beautiful. The body rather than its apparel attracted him. He
laughed much at certain of his friends who were enamored of so many
yards of lace and silk, and he declared it were more rational to fall in
love with the stock of a fashionable _marchand des nouveautés_. These
opinions, which were rational enough in the main, and which he made no
attempt to conceal, caused him to pass for an eccentric.

Max, less of an artist than Fabio, cared only for difficult
undertakings, complicated intrigues. He sought resistances to vanquish,
virtues to seduce, and played at love as at a game of chess, with
long-premeditated moves, reserved ambuscades, and stratagems worthy of
Polybius. In a drawing-room he would always choose the woman who seemed
least in sympathy with him for the object of attack. To make her pass by
skilful transition from aversion to love afforded him delicious
pleasure. To impose himself upon characters which strove to repel him,
and master wills that rebelled against his influence, seemed to him the
sweetest of all triumphs. Like those hunters who, through rain,
sunshine, or snow, through fields and woods, and over plains, pursue
with excessive fatigue and unconquerable ardor some miserable quarry
which in three cases out of four they would not deign to eat, so Max,
having once captured his prey, troubled himself no further about it, and
at once started off on another chase.

As for Octavian, he confessed that reality itself had little charm for
him, not because he indulged in student-dreams, all moulded of lilies
and roses like one of Demoustier's madrigals, but because there were too
many prosaic and repulsive details surrounding all beauty, too many
doting and decorated fathers, coquettish mothers who wore natural
flowers in false hair, ruddy-faced cousins meditating proposals,
ridiculous aunts in love with little dogs. An acquatinta engraving after
Horace Vernet or Delaroche, hung up in a woman's room, would have been
sufficient to check a growing passion within him. More poetical even
than amorous, he wanted a terrace on Isola-Bella, in Lake Maggiore,
under the light of a full moon to frame a rendezvous. He would have
wished to elevate his love above the midst of common life, and transport
its scenes to the stars. Thus he had by turns fallen fruitlessly and
madly in love with all the grand feminine types preserved by history or
art. Like Faust, he had loved Helen, and would have wished that the
undulations of the ages might bear to him one of those sublime
personifications of human desires and dreams, whose forms, to mortal
eyes invisible, live immortally beyond Space and Time. He had created
for himself an ideal seraglio, with Semiramis, Aspasia, Cleopatra, Diana
of Poitiers, Jane of Arragon. At times also he had fallen in love with
statues, and one day, passing before the Venus of Milo in the Museum, he
cried out passionately: "Oh, who will restore thy arms that thou may'st
crush me upon thy marble bosom!" At Rome, the sight of a matted mass of
long thick human hair, exhumed from an antique tomb, had thrown him into
a fantastic delirium. He had attempted, through the medium of a few of
those hairs, obtained by a golden bribe from the custodian, and placed
in the hands of a clairvoyant of great power, to evoke the shade and
form of the dead; but the conducting fluid--the subtle odyle--had
evaporated during the lapse of so many years, and the apparition could
no more come forth out of the eternal night.

As Fabio had divined before the glass cabinet in the Studii Museum, the
imprint discovered in the cellar at the villa of Arrius Diomedes had
excited in Octavian wild impulses toward a retrospective ideal. He
longed to soar beyond Life and Time and transport himself in spirit to
the age of Titus.

       *       *       *       *       *

Max and Fabio retired to their room, and being somewhat heavy-headed
from the classic fumes of the Falernian, were soon sound asleep.
Octavian, who had more than once suffered the full glass to remain
before him untasted, not wishing to disturb by a grosser intoxication
the poetic drunkenness which boiled in his brain, felt from the
agitation of his nerves that sleep would not come to him, and left the
hostelry on tiptoe that he might cool his brow and calm his thoughts in
the night air.

His feet bore him unawares to the entrance which leads into the dead
city. He removed the wooden bar that closed it, and wandered into the
ruins beyond.

The moon illuminated the pale houses with her white beams, dividing the
streets into double-edged lines of silvery white and bluish shadow. This
nocturnal day, with its subdued tints, disguised the degradation of the
buildings. The mutilated columns, the façades streaked with fugitive
lizards, the roofs crumbled in by the eruption, were less noticeable
than when beheld under the clear, raw light of the sun. The lost parts
were completed by the half-tint of shadow, and here and there one
brusque beam of light, like a touch of sentiment in a picture-sketch,
marked where a whole edifice had crumbled away. The silent genii of the
night seemed to have repaired the fossil city for some representation of
fantastic life.

At times Octavian fancied that he saw vague human forms in the shadow,
but they vanished the moment they approached the edge of the lighted
portion of the street. A low whispering, an indefinite hum, floated
through the silence. Our promenader at first attributed them to a
fluttering in his eyes, to a buzzing in his ears; it might even, he
thought, be merely an optical delusion, coupled with the sighing of the
sea-breezes, or the flight of some snake or lizard through the nettles,
for in nature all things live, even death; all things make themselves
heard, even silence. Nevertheless he felt a kind of involuntary terror,
a slight trembling, that might have been caused by the cold night air,
but which made his flesh creep. Could it be that his comrades, actuated
by the same impulses as himself, were seeking him among the ruins? Those
dimly seen forms and those indistinct sounds of footsteps! Might it not
have been only Max and Fabio walking and chatting together, who had just
disappeared round the corner of a cross-road? But Octavian felt to his
dismay that this very natural explanation could not be true, and the
arguments which he made to himself in favor of it were the reverse of
convincing. The solitude and the shadow were peopled with invisible
beings whom he was disturbing. He had fallen into the midst of a
mystery, and it seemed that they were awaiting his departure in order to
commence again. Such were the extravagant ideas that floated through his
brain, and obtained no little verisimilitude from the hour, the place,
and the thousand alarming details which those can well understand who
have ever found themselves alone by night in the midst of some vast
ruin.

Passing before a house which he had attentively observed during the day,
and which the moon shone fully upon, he beheld in perfect integrity a
certain portico whereof he had vainly attempted to restore the design in
fancy. Four Ionic columns--fluted for half their height and their shafts
purple-robed with minium tints--sustained a cymatium adorned with
polychromatic ornaments that the artist seemed only to have completed
the day before. Upon one side wall of the entrance a Laconian molossus,
painted in encaustic, and accompanied by the warning inscription "_Cave
canem_" barked at the moon and the visitor with pictured fury. On the
mosaic threshold the word HAVE, in Oscan and Latin characters, saluted
the guest with its friendly syllables. The outer surfaces of the walls,
tinted with ochre and rubric, were unmarred by a single crack. The house
had grown a story higher; and the tiled roof, now surmounted by a bronze
acroterium, projected an intact outline against the light blue of the
sky, where a few stars were growing pale.

This strange restoration effected between afternoon and evening by some
unknown architect greatly puzzled Octavian, who felt certain of having
the same day seen that very house in a lamentable state of ruin. The
mysterious reconstructor had labored with great despatch, for all the
neighboring dwellings had the same fresh, new look; all the pillars were
coiffed with their capitals; not a single stone, a brick, a pellicle of
stucco or a scale of paint was wanting upon the shining surfaces of the
façades; and through the intervals of the peristyles surrounding the
marble basin of the cavædium one could catch glimpses of white laurels
and bayroses, myrtles and pomegranates. Surely all the historians were
mistaken; the eruption had never taken place, or else the needle of Time
had moved backward twenty secular hours upon the dial of Eternity!

In the climax of his astonishment, Octavian commenced to wonder whether
he might not actually be sleeping upon his feet, and walking in a dream.
He even seriously asked himself whether madness might not be parading
its hallucinations before his eyes; but he soon felt himself compelled
to admit that he was neither asleep nor mad.

A singular change had taken place in the atmosphere. Vague rose-tints
were blending through brightening shades of violet with the faintly
azure tints of moonlight; the sky commenced to glow brightly along its
borders; daylight seemed about to dawn. Octavian took out his watch: it
marked the hour of midnight. Fearing that it might have stopped, he
pressed the spring of the repeating mechanism. It struck twelve times.
It was midnight beyond a doubt, and yet the brightness ever increased.
The moon sank through the azure which became momentarily more and more
luminous. The sun rose!

Then Octavian, to whom all ideas of time had become hopelessly confused,
was able to convince himself that he was walking, not through a dead
Pompeii, the chill corpse of a city half-shrouded, but through a living,
youthful, intact Pompeii over which the torrents of burning mud from
Vesuvius had never flowed.

An inconceivable prodigy had transported him, a Frenchman of the
nineteenth century, back to the age of Titus, not in spirit only, but in
reality; or else had called up before him from the depths of the past a
desolated city with its vanished inhabitants, for a man clothed in the
antique fashion had just passed out of a neighboring house.

This man wore his hair short, and his face was closely shaven; he was
dressed in a brown tunic and a grayish mantle, the ends of which were
well tucked up so as not to impede his movements. He walked at a rapid
gait, bordering upon a run, and passed by Octavian without perceiving
him. He carried on his arm a basket made of Spanish broom, and
proceeded toward the Forum Nundinarium. He was evidently a slave, some
Davus, going to market beyond a doubt.

The noise of wheels became audible, and an antique wagon, drawn by white
oxen and loaded with vegetables, came along the street. Beside the team
walked a peasant--with legs bare and sunburnt, and feet
sandal-shod--who was clad in a sort of canvas shirt puffed out about the
waist; a conical straw hat hanging at his shoulders, and depending from
his neck by the chin-band, left his face exposed to view--a type of face
unknown in these days--a forehead low and traversed by salient, knotty
lines, hair black and curly, eyes tranquil as those of his oxen, and a
neck like that of the rustic Hercules. As he gravely pricked his animals
with the goad, his statuesque attitudes would have thrown Ingres into
ecstasy.

The peasant perceived Octavian and appeared surprised, but he proceeded
on his way without being able, doubtless, to find any explanation for
the appearance of this strange-looking personage, and in his rustic
simplicity willingly leaving the solution of the enigma to those wiser
than himself.

Campanian peasants also appeared on the scene, driving before them asses
laden with skins of wine, and ringing their brazen bells. Their
physiognomies differed from those of the modern peasants as a medallion
differs from a son.

Gradually the city became peopled, like one of those panoramic pictures
at first desolate, but which by a sudden change of light become animated
with personages previously invisible.

Octavian's feelings had undergone a change. Only a short time before,
amid the deceitful shadows of the night, he had fallen a prey to that
uneasiness from which the bravest are not exempt amid such disquieting
and fantastic surroundings as reason cannot explain. His vague terror
had ultimately yielded to a profound stupefaction. The distinctness of
his perceptions forbade him to doubt the testimony of his senses, yet
what he beheld seemed altogether contrary to reason. Feeling still but
half convinced, he sought by the authentication of minor actual details
to assure himself that he was not the victim of hallucination. Those
figures which passed before his eyes could not be phantoms, for the
living sun shone upon them with unmistakable reality, and their shadows,
elongated in the morning light, fell upon the pavement and the walls.

Without the faintest understanding of what had befallen him, Octavian,
ravished with delight to find one of his most cherished dreams realized,
no longer attempted to resist the fate of his adventure. He abandoned
himself to the mystery of these marvels without any further attempt to
explain them; he averred to himself that since he had been permitted, by
virtue of some mysterious power, to live for a few hours in a vanished
age, he would not waste time in efforts to solve an incomprehensible
problem, and he proceeded fearlessly gazing to right and left upon this
scene at once so old and yet so new to him. But to what epoch of
Pompeiian life had he been transported? An ædile inscription engraved
upon a wall showed him by the names of public personages there recorded,
that it was about the commencement of the reign of Titus, or in the
year 79 of our own era. A sudden thought flashed across Octavian's mind.
The woman whose mould he had seen in the museum at Naples must be
living, inasmuch as the eruption of Vesuvius by which she had perished
took place on the 24th of August in this very year: he might therefore
discover her, behold her, speak to her!... The mad longing which had
seized him at the sight of that mass of cinders moulded upon a divinely
perfect form, was perhaps about to be fully satisfied, for surely naught
could be impossible to a love which had had the strength to make Time
itself recoil, and the same hour to pass twice through the sand-glass of
Eternity!

While Octavian was abandoning himself to these reflections, beautiful
young girls were passing by on their way to the fountains, all balancing
urns upon their heads with their white finger-tips, and patricians clad
in white togas bordered with purple bands were proceeding toward the
Forum, each followed by an escort of clients. The buyers commenced to
throng about the booths, which were all designated by sculptured or
pictured signs, and recalled by reason of their shape and small
dimensions the moresque booths of Algiers. Over most of them a glorious
phallus of baked and painted clay, together with the inscription, _Hic
habitat Felicitas_, testified to superstitious precautions against the
evil eye. Octavian also noticed an amulet shop, whose shelves were
stocked with horns, bifurcated branches of coral, and little figures of
Priapus in gold, like those worn in Naples even at this day as a
safeguard against the _jettatura_, and he thought to himself that a
superstition often outlives a religion.

       *       *       *       *       *

Following the sidewalk which borders each street in Pompeii (and
deprives the English of all claim to this invention), Octavian suddenly
found himself face to face with a beautiful young man of about his own
age, clad in a saffron-colored tunic, and a mantle of snowy linen as
supple as cashmere. The sight of Octavian in his frightful modern hat,
girthed about with a scanty black frock-coat, his legs confined in
pantaloons

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