← catalogue

Very woman (Sixtine)

by Remy de Gourmont · English · Gutenberg #45920 · 419,930 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Very woman (Sixtine)
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Very woman (Sixtine)
        a cerebral novel

Author: Remy de Gourmont

Translator: J. L. Barrets


        
Release date: June 9, 2014 [eBook #45920]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45920

Credits: E-text prepared by Marc D'Hooghe (http://www.freeliterature.org) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VERY WOMAN (SIXTINE) ***

Note: Images of the original pages are available through
      Internet Archive. See
      https://archive.org/details/verywomansixtine00gouriala




VERY WOMAN

(Sixtine)

A Cerebral Novel

by

REMY DE GOURMONT

Translated from the French by J. L. Barrets







Nicholas L. Brown
New York  MCMXXII




CONTENTS


     I The Dead Leaves               XXI The Mystic Bark
    II Madame Du Boys               XXII The Simoniac
   III Travel Notes                XXIII The Adorer
    IV Reflections                  XXIV The Color of Marriage
     V More Travel Notes             XXV Departure
    VI Dream Figure                 XXVI The Adorer
   VII Marcelle and Marceline      XXVII The Education of Maidens
  VIII The Transparent Curtain    XXVIII The Esthetic Thrill
       of Time
    IX The Promenade of Sin         XXIX Pantomime
     X The Unleavened Dough          XXX The Man and the Pretty Beast
    XI Diamond Dust                 XXXI The Infamy of Being Happy
   XII The Adorer                  XXXII Intoxication
  XIII Christus Patiens           XXXIII An Evening in Society
   XIV The Faun                    XXXIV Poetic Rapture
    XV The Carnal Hour              XXXV The Adorer
   XVI The Ideal Bees              XXXVI Anger
  XVII The Adorer                 XXXVII The Adorer
 XVIII A Complete Woman          XXXVIII Pride
   XIX New Suggestions             XXXIX The Key to the Coffer
    XX The Twenty-eighth of           XL Ultimate Peace
       December




CHAPTER I

THE DEAD LEAVES


    "When Nature produces these masterpieces,
    she rarely offers them to the man who
    could best appreciate and be worthy of possessing
    them."
                           Kant: _Essay on the Beautiful_.


They walked side by side, under the gloomy old firs whose heavy
branches leaned towards the yellowing lawn.

Countess Aubry, with her charm of a negotiator of worldly loves, had
just hastily brought them together, as though they were predestined for
each other.

They were slightly acquainted already. They remembered having met
during the past winter in the Marigny Avenue Salon, that haunt of
miscarried glories, and, during the past week that they had been
staying at the Château de Rabodanges (among several invalids of
distinction) they had succeeded in exchanging a few vaguely suggestive
words, a few affected witticisms, not without disdain for such a vain
communion.

The one knew that Madame Sixtine Magne, a widow, had never held out
her neck towards a new necklace--and believed it. The other knew that
Hubert d'Entragues had dedicated himself, by inclination rather than
by necessity, to the imperious craft of a man of letters. Her first
impulse had been to consider him a cavalry captain, but the name
captivated her, that name faded in history, so far as a pretty woman
was concerned, and which a young man restored to all its freshness,
under her eyes. Amorous and royal reminiscences whose auricular
remembrance had remained in her head like a viol sound, like ripplings
on fading silks, and suddenly with rustlings of steel--an admission
with which her preciosity amused itself, perhaps, for she was very
artful, through pride.

Entragues, on his side, was at the point of confessing to the young
woman that she dazzled his imagination, but he would have had to tell
her at the same time the origin--too fantastic not to be futile--of
this wound, and he feared to have the air of _inventing_ a tale.

"Then," he reflected, "her mind would work, she would try to _please_
me, forcing herself to deliberate charms. The experiment would be
warped. I want to know what is in her; I want to penetrate coldly into
the mysterious brambles of this sacred wood."

A man and a woman, at the age of useful deceits, are never cold or
truthful, face to face. Hubert judged himself capable of acting
naturally, but where does the natural begin with a being endowed with
several spare souls? Sixtine was but half duped and, from the first
words, let it be perceived.

"Are you familiar with all the emotions of a return?" asked Entragues.
"It is delicious and torturing. You enter, agitated and unbalanced
and, in the confusion of brief thoughts, you say to yourself: 'Can
she be there! No, she is not there!' The fear of a sudden grief has
anticipated the deception: can it be that such joys are attained
outside of dreams? 'She is not there. _There is no danger_. What? No
double lock? A night lamp? Is she there?' Yes, she was there, asleep
in her rose-colored morning-gown; she had risen at the sound of the
key and, with bare feet and disheveled hair, pale with emotion, kissed
your face, whatever her eyes fell upon--lips, brow, nose, beard--one
arm gently entwining itself about your neck, the other trembling at
first with the hesitancy of not knowing where to rest. She cried,
meanwhile, like a hallucinated person: 'It is you! It is you!' Then she
stepped back to gaze at you, seemed to doubt, saying: 'Is it really
you?' And she coyly gave herself to you, resting on your shoulder,
gave herself again with an 'I am yours, still yours, as before!' You
are thrilled with happiness. To depart leaving tears, to find a smile
upon your return, a being transported by your presence--that is a
real pleasure, mingled somewhat with that necessary vanity of feeling
yourself indispensable to some one. A special vanity in which the male
experiences a despotic satisfaction."

"Are you thus expected?" asked Sixtine.

"Who? I? No, but it might happen, and you see that I have felt it while
talking to you. The slightest impulse diverts me from the present,
the very tone of a voice rouses in me an inner activity and every
possibility of life opens before me."

"You must be wonderful at pretending!"

"Ah, Madame," answered Entragues, "imagination does not destroy
sincerity: it clothes sincerity with brocatels and rubies, places a
diadem on it, but the same body of a woman is under the royal cloak,
just as it is under tatters. To adorn truth is to respect it. This
makes me recall those old evangelistaries that are so covered with
illuminations that profane eyes seek the holy text in vain."

"There are difficult writings," said Sixtine.

"Divination is necessary when one cannot decipher. Have not women, the
illiterates of love, all the intuitions of ignorance? Now then! if I
said to you; 'The heart feels the heart's beating,' you would agree. We
are still taken in by some old aphorisms."

"Nothing is so good as to let oneself be taken!"

Instantly astonished by a boldness of speech, whose precise meaning
Entragues sought in her eyes, she laughed.

This purely voluntary laughter whose essence he notwithstanding
penetrated, troubled him. A careful writer always on the quest for
the exact word, new or old, rare or common, but of exact meaning,
he imagined that everybody spoke as he himself wrote, when he wrote
well. It was in good faith that he stubbornly persisted in reflecting,
suddenly arrested by a disquietude in the presence of such words
of conversation, habiliments of pure vanity. The knowledge of this
eccentricity had never cured him of it, nor was he helped by the
punishments of repeating this _mea culpa_ after each mistake, taken
from Goethe and composed for his personal use: "When he hears words,
Entragues always believes there is a thought behind them."

This greatly complicated his life and his talks, inducing considerable
hesitations in his replies, but he was concerned only with literary
anatomy and he loved to encounter complex minds upon whose momentary
intricacies he would later throw light, by deduction.

Since the nut might be empty, he threw a pebble at the tree so as to
cause several others to fall.

"It is preferable to give than to be robbed."

"Oh!" Sixtine replied, "the sensation is quite different. First of all,
not every one who wishes it, can be robbed. It is not even enough to
let one's door ajar, Monsieur d'Entragues."

He felt that she had pronounced those last words in an insidious voice,
but why? While waiting to understand, he responded:

"That itself would be quite a childish system. One usually places
sentinels to guard the treasure chests and one provides locks for odd
boxes. The spice in the pleasure of robbing lies in forcing, breaking,
or taking a thing to pieces. True artists are repelled when there
is nothing to do except thrust out the hand. But this is the most
elementary ethics: no pleasure without effort."

"You are speaking of robbers, I of persons who are robbed. You can
belong only to the one, I to the other class, the class that is at the
mercy of an eventual rifling. I wanted to explain that it requires
more than that the door should be ajar or, in fine, easy to open, for
if one perfects the fastenings too thoroughly, the risk is taken of
being assured a truly uncivil security. Well, more than all this, it
is needful that there be visible or suspected objects to steal; it is
needful that, by appearances, by external and attractive promises, the
thief be tempted."

"You have anticipated me, Madame, in awarding yourself this personal
compliment. I was about to make it. But you know, better than I do,
your gifts and all that might draw curious and thievish hands to the
dreamed of coffer."

"Too much frankness and irony, Monsieur d'Entragues. You were not born
a thief."

"Alas! I have no hiding place secure enough for such larceny. My left
hand would not know what to do with what my right hand pilfered."

The somewhat brutal candor of this disinterestedness did not seem to
wound her. On the contrary, she thought:

"He is no fool. Another would have thrown himself at my imprudence,
would instantly have urged me _to let myself be taken!_"

For his part, Hubert, seeing that the nuts were decidely meaty and not
too tasteless, reflected:

"I will amuse myself again with throwing a few stones at the branches."

Sixtine forestalled him:

"What end are you aiming at? Love is too fleeting for your stability,
let us admit. In that case, where does your life lead? Ah! poet, to
success?"

"I am not a poet. I do not know how to cut my thoughts into little
morsels that may be equal or unequal, according to the chance of the
chopping knife. My prose gets its rhythm only through my breath. Only
the pin thrusts of sensation mark its accents and the royal puerility
of rich rhymes passes my understanding...."

The _vlouement_ of a crow's wings agitated the air above the trees.
Hubert remained silent, listening. Then:

"_Vlouement_, that's it, vlouement of wings, with the v v v. Is it the
v v v or the f f f? The filement of wings? No, vlouement is better.
Once more, crow!"

Sixtine, a trifle bewildered, stared at him open-mouthed.

"Those damned crow wings--one cannot describe them! Oh! success! Does
the apple tree solicit applause for having borne fruit? From this one
could construct quasi-evangelical parables. If I am not my own judge,
and if I displease myself, what matter though I please others? Who
are the others? Is there in the world an existence outside of myself?
Possibly there is, but I am not aware of it. The world is myself, it
owes me its existence, I have created it with my senses; it is my slave
and no one else has any power over it. If we were thoroughly certain of
the fact that nothing exists outside of ourselves, how prompt would be
the cure of our vanities, how quickly our pleasures would be purged of
it! Vanity is the fictive bond which links us to an imaginary exterior
world. A little effort breaks it and we are free! Free, but lonely,
lonely in the frightful solitude where we are born, where we live and
die."

"What a sad philosophy, but what a proud one!"

"It contains less pride than sadness, and I would give much of its
arrogance so as never to feel its bitterness."

"Who led you to it?" she queried, interested in these matters which
seemed sufficiently new to her mind.

"But it is natural. How conceive a life different from what it clearly
appears to eyes that can see? Yes! perhaps a certain illusion is
possible.... What a pity, doubtless, what a pity for me that I did not
meet you earlier--years ago. I would have loved you, and then...."

"What would have befallen your destiny, as a result?"

"You would have deluded me about life's value, Madame," Hubert
continued, with a poetic enthusiasm that bordered on persiflage. "I
would have drunk, like an external absinthe, the fluid illusion of your
sea-green eyes and would have chained myself to life by the golden
chain of your blond hair."

She veiled herself with indifference lightly embroidered with irony
and, believing herself sheltered from a too inquisitive glance,
ingenuously replied:

"It is really but three years since I was twenty-seven. It is now the
thirtieth year, or almost."

He looked at her from head to foot, but without insolence.

"What frankness! But you have no need to lie." His eyes returned to her
figure, which was a little full, he thought.

"Yes, esthetic, isn't it?" hazarded Sixtine, negligently lifting her
arms to fasten some pin to her coiffure.

The gesture was fine and instrumental in making her bust more delicate
in line.

He prudently replied:

"Esthetic? Oh, no! It seems good and with no treacheries."

A smile, quickly banished, attested the woman's contentment and was the
most feminine efflorescence of the old human perversities. In a slow,
undeceived voice, she said:

"It is lost time to wish to love me."

"See," Hubert returned, "you breathe on my bubbles and my sole and last
chance of illusion vanishes, for in placing my desires in the past, I
secretly constructed a bridge spanning the present. Ah! Madame, what
transcendental cruelty!"

She was conscious of having taken a wretched crossroad, and of having
become bemired there.

They spoke no more.

The shadow diffused itself in swift waves. Slightly nervous, Sixtine
walked towards the light of a nearby glade, at the foot of the avenue.
There, the oaks and beeches, whose foliage was already brightened by
the setting sun, were grouped in a narrow grove. The wind passed,
stirring the dry leaves. A low and heavy branch bent down with the
sound of a rustling of stuffs. Like a drop of rain, a leaf, then many
leaves, descended with a slow moaning sound.

"They follow me! They pursue me!" she cried, caught in the vortex she
vainly fled.

And swept away, like a leaf in the circular flight of wind, she drew
near Entragues, distracted, panting, crying all the time:

"The leaves pursue me, the dead leaves pursue me!"

"What is the matter," Hubert asked, surprised by such a strange crisis.

While, still frantic and trembling, she seized his arm and leaned
against it, he coldly added:

"Have you ever committed a crime in your life?"

This ironic interrogation changed the nature of the fever, like
scalding water on a stone.

"Perhaps!" she answered, suddenly pale.

"Then you become altogether interesting."

It was beyond her strength to retort to this impertinence. With a
trembling of all her little muscles, and without knowing why she did
it, she tried to pull off her gloves. When one of her hands was free,
she shook it, pulled it, cracked its joints.

"Excuse me," Entragues continued. He took a malicious pleasure in
making the untuned instrument vibrate. "But is there not a stain on the
little finger?"

"No, it was the poison."

This came from her lips with the calmness of a meditated confession.

His eyes sincerely troubled, Hubert watched the monster who disengaged
herself and fled, throwing these words to him as an adieu:

"I am leaving tomorrow, come to see me."




CHAPTER II

MADAME DU BOYS


    "... Quid agunt in corpore casto Cerussa
    et minium, centumque venena colorum?
    Mentis honor morumque decus sunt vincula
    Conjugii...."
        (Sancti Claudius Marius Victor, _De perversis_
                               _suae aetatis moribus_)

Hubert had left Rabodanges a few days after Sixtine's departure. The
unvaried green of the fields saddened him and, despite the ingenuity of
the countess, deprived of the company of the young woman who puzzled
him to the utmost, the château seemed to him as though plunged in a
funereal widowhood.

He did not even execute his plans of visiting the Mortagne Trappists,
but took the train and entered Paris one evening in a state of real
satisfaction.

For him, Paris was neither the streets nor the boulevards and theaters.
Paris, for Entragues, was confined within the somewhat narrow bounds
of his study, peopled with pleasant phantoms of his imagination.
There, sad and vague beings, pensive and formless, stirred restlessly,
imploring existence, Entragues lived with them in an almost disquieting
familiarity. He beheld them, heard them, repaired with them to
whatever sphere their activity necessitated. In short, he underwent the
keenest phenomena of hallucination.

Thus it was that, on the morrow of his return, Madame du Boys came to
occupy him with her adventures. It was a matter of reconciling her
in a logical way with her husband whom she had abandoned, to follow
to Geneva a Polish count, retired there after sundry nihilistic
adventures. Artémise du Boys was how she spelled her name after her
adulterous lark, the while her husband, secretary-cashier of the
_Union de la Bonne-Science_, the simple Monsieur Dubois, bewailed his
irreparable misfortune.

He groaned and Madame du Boys grew bored, an excellent occasion for
once more renewing the bond and putting into practice several verses
from the Gospels. Irreparable? And the pardon? One was on the point of
agreeing to ask it, the other waited for her to force his hand.

"Ah! Madame du Boys," mused Entragues, gazing upon his fair visitor,
"You do not know your husband. Write to him again. Just say: 'I was
a little lark of a woman and I was lured away!' Repeat this simple
idea through four beautiful pages in a tiny slanting handwriting that
trembles and is steeped in tears (Oh! but true tears, scientific tears,
acidulated and proportioned with the desired salt of grief),--do this,
O my love, and you will see."

Without awaiting her reply, and while Madame du Boys meditated, a
modest and very agreeable sinner, Entragues went to comfort the
secretary of the _Bonne-Science_. A simple and quite suitable office:
journals, brochures, registers, a general list of the founding members,
patrons, donors, residents, foreigners, honorary members, orders
depending on the results of preliminary payments, sums deposited, sums
due, and different titles.

"You are sad? Yes, a broken life. But, Monsieur Dubois, all lives are
broken, just as all sticks thrown in the water are broken. Existence
bends souls, we are not made for life. A deception gives it to us,
trickery conserves it for us. Ah! I know that philosophy is not your
forte; neither founder nor patron, nothing but an appointed secretary.
If you are not a philosopher, why did you marry such a pretty woman as
Madame du Boys? Only a philosopher could be justified in committing
such imprudences, for he knows how to make an abstraction at the proper
time. Figures have taught you other duties. Everything is calculated on
the register page, and what is absent is called memory. Isn't it the
pure truth, stripped of all symbols, that you still love her? Act as a
Christian, not as a coward enslaved to habits. So! you have charge of
this weak soul and you should, like the Good Shepherd, bear her on your
shoulders and save her from the devouring lion. But why do you not go
after her, since she has lost her way? Pride chains you to your books.
You think you are a Christian, but you are a stoic. Monsieur Dubois,
modern Good Shepherds use railroads and telegraphs without shame. Go!
Ah! the donors? Well, telegraph! No, it is at least necessary that the
sinful sheep go half way, that the sinner behave like a Magdalene and
weep. Well, I will bring her to you. Thus, your wife left you to follow
her pleasure; she returns somewhat atremble, but confident, and you
will pardon her? Will you open your door to her, your arms, your bed?
Will you write 'Memory' in the debit side of past days, under days of
marital solitude, meaning, in this instance, oblivion. And will the
first repast together be a holiday feast, and the first night together
a night of happiness? You will do all this, Monsieur Dubois, because
you are a Christian and not a stoic. I slandered you. And you will
tell me of the interview, of the noble pardon, in low tones for my
personal edification, and I will be able to narrate it, aloud, for the
edification of the age?"

Having ended these reveries, Entragues, to amuse himself, recopied in
ink the note book leaves on which he had scribbled while on the train,
during evenings, in his bed, during mornings, or in the solitude of the
avenues.




CHAPTER III

TRAVEL NOTES


    Rai-Aube

    "And when you will be thus formed, when
    you will be imbued with this truth, 'there
    is no truth, nothing truly existent for you
    except what your fertile mind gives,' observe
    the general course of the world and, letting
    it follow its own way, associate with the
    minority."
                               Goethe: _Testament_.


_Dreux_.--To see trains pass by--to see life pass by--never to go within
save to strike cushions.

_A little farther_.--Trains have a destination; life has none.
But life's originality lies precisely in having no destination. I
occasionally find in it, as in old lace, the same charm of uselessness.

_A little farther_.--I viewed the landscape as far as Dreux.
The unconsciousness of the vegetable kingdom is a decidedly too
melancholy void. To become interested in it, one must make it live
by incorporating oneself with the trees and grass, transferring the
sentient soul of a man into the oak's trunk. I am an oak, I am a
holly-tree, I am a wild poppy, but I realize it, while the oak, the
holly-tree, the wild poppy do not: for this reason they do not exist.
Pantheists are very fine fellows.

_Nonancourt_.--These syllables shouted through the train evoke a pretty
convent of nuns, rather dissolute before the reform of Borromée;
afterwards, it was devoted to God until the revolutionary dispersal.
Now the house, henceforth plebeian, serves as a barn, stable and
pigsty. As the notary who last sold it said: "It will serve as a farm."
Cows now ruminate where women once prayed--a notable advance.

_Tillières_.--A ravine cuts this plain in two, a dastardly act, life.

_Verneuil_.--I was alone since leaving Paris. A man enters, opens
his newspaper and expands into a _gauloiserie_. If it were evening,
near his better half, or if, in my place, some obliging girl revealed
a part of her foot! These flights of animalism are truly painful to
a calm man. The flower-like opening contracts; the joyous flame of
eyes brightens into a waxing ferocity; cruel lust opens its mouth and
shows its teeth. Awaking: a searching glance: the mimicry by degrees
is extinguished and there remains the disappointed ennui of a vain
excitement. No, I do not care to serve as an aphrodisiac to citizens.
To think of this would compel you towards a monachal literature, hard
and contemptuous of vile lust.

_Bourth or nearby_.--The man speaks. It was inevitable. He speaks of
himself, full of a need of making himself known, of introducing the
passerby into his little universe. He travels for a bookseller of
religious books. He goes from parsonage to parsonage, well received by
the _curés_, who ask him to dinner. A good clientele and good payers.
His center is Verneuil; thence he radiates, like an apostle. Usually a
horse and carriage, rented for the season, conducts him from church to
church; having some business to transact at Laigle, he took a train to
amuse himself; to amuse himself he climbed into a first-class apartment
with a second-class ticket. (There is no inspection at such hours.)
"Verneuil's a fine town. A rare thing for the province (isn't it so,
between ourselves), that this big borough has a well-kept inn, quite
renovated." He is a free-thinker, but tolerant, enveloping with the
same sympathetic pity, children, women, priests, devout souls--more
stupid than ill-meaning, he assures you. As for himself, if a God
exists he will go straight to Heaven, never having hurt a fly. Sound
instruction will gradually cure us of religion. He has no fear on this
score and, his conscience quite tranquil, places his _Corneille de la
Pierre_ for the best. Unmarried, but desiring a marriage so as to have
sturdy little republicans, strong defenders of _la Patrie_: Alsace and
Lorraine, Gambetta, and so forth.

_Laigle_.--He offers me _something_. I politely decline, he withdraws.
Throughout the world, this matter interests the millions of similarly
constituted minds: for whom do you work, poor unconscious bees? The
species? But does the intelligence of a few balance the universal
stupidity?

_Rai-Aube_.--A village I never again shall see, a village with such
a pretty name, with such a fine combination of radiant words--aurora
and ray--an alliance of syllables married by a morning smile; grasses
watered by the freshness of dew, transparent springs, murmuring
fluidity of waters flowing under the abundant rushes: all this,
Rai-Aube, and oblivion, and the ineffable, palpitates in the white
letters of your name, alluring and fugitive rebus hung on the gable of
the station! Remembrance rather than vision: in my youth I lived among
these vernal delights and steeped myself in them. I do not belong to
towns and a built-up plot of ground does not incite me to excessive
joys. All that was created by youthful eyes remains young, and for me
the country-side often has the sex of its spelling, even under the
surplice of snow. That alone remains of my earliest years: all is
dead, whether by real death or the death of memory. The tenderness
of vague figures bending towards my precocious orphanhood, is the
farthest removed; of school, the horror is still painful to remember;
a Dantesque and futile horror inflicted upon my pitiful childhood. But
already, due a little to my will, the world retreated from me and by a
slow or sudden recreation, I reformed for myself a life more harmonious
with my intimate sense. But already, in arrogant moments, I scorned
everything external to me, everything that had not been reformed and
reground by the machine ceaselessly in motion in my head. Excepting the
unknowable principle, I have fashioned everything anew; at least, for
scepticism even gnaws at one's personality, such is the allusion in
which I have confined myself.

With such a fixed determination, with this Kantian system which can be
called transcendental egoism, my life has marched with a relatively
light pace. Of all the griefs which my will has not succeeded in
putting aside, the heaviest to bear is my very solitude. Never having
surrendered to its deceits, I know not if hope be aught but a bleeding
spur, driving man towards a future nothingness. I know not if the
wound opened without respite and the sight of the spilled blood be
not powerful stimulants necessary for the functioning of the human
mechanism. I have never experienced them. I only believe in the final
charnel-house, but without coveting it. Life does not yet displease
me sufficiently. Without this, having no philosophical principles
to converge with a possible practice, I would be consistent with
my disgust and would give it my sanction. Like Crantor, I will die
"without being astonished;" if my organs are still sound when death
comes, perhaps regretfully. As for survival, on this point I have
no such tranquilizing ideas as has the traveling salesman of Dreux.
Perhaps the delightful Unconscious reserves some of its good tricks
for the truly supreme, last moment of corporeal decomposition! This
relative fear doubtless comes to me from my Christian youth, and I
repudiate neither the one nor the other; Catholicism is an aristocracy.
I do not know how this positive religion can come to be allied in me
with subjective idealism; it is an obscure amalgam, like all heresies.
Theology always procured me the most agreeable reading; from Augustine
I can go to Claudius Mamertinus; there the joys are not less because
of the curiosity. How I would have loved to be a bishop in some less
modern Rome, or a cardinal! If I dwelt on this rather sterile desire,
a sensation of a deficient life would clutch my throat, a vulgar
sensation that my pride contemptuously repels. And then, have I not of
my own accord tasted the mystic happiness and the celestial anguishes
of episcopacy? Have I not clothed myself with the violet robe lifted
at the bottom, or trailing up the stairs of the altar? Have I not
ascended, mitre on head, the steps of the presidial chair? What then
would reality serve me, when I have the dream and the faculty of
changing myself like Proteus, the faculty of successively possessing
all forms of life, all states of soul which man diversifies himself.

_Surdon_.--Curled feathers bob up and plunge into the window. Seeing
me alone, the female traveler hesitates, but the whistle has blown,
a guard shoves her inside. She sits down opposite me, fallen there
somewhat out of breath; she is uneasy although she is not blushing.
The hesitation came from the fear of appearing to have expressly
chosen the compartment in which sat one man. I try to reassure her
with very polished phrases, but I succeed imperfectly. I am quite
certain that some good proverb would amuse and pique her. I end
with: "Occasion makes the thief." In the province, proverbs, that
grammatical archæology, are still the current coin of conversation;
they permit the saying of nothing at all while appearing to say a
great deal. She appreciated my adage and complained of the habitual
grossness of men. I answer her: "That is because women always desire
what is not offered them and scorn what is offered them. A delicate
man, by indefinable signs, lets his fancy be guessed, and does not
commit himself to a decisive movement until the exact moment when
he sees that it is shared." She smiles: "How does one feel this?" I
answer: "The acquiescences are diverse, but there is a special flicker
of the eye-lashes, very slow, which it is difficult to mistake." She
looks at me with astonishment. A very honest woman, amused at this
scabrous conversation, but inexperienced. Her youth and the rosiness
of her complexion bespeak a recent marriage and little maternity:
openly curious, having an eternity of ten years before her, to learn
the secret. Otherwise pretty, and with much distinction, that modern
name for grace; between blonde and brunette; clear, rather large eyes,
the lower part of her face having no hint of brutishness. The trip
from Surdon to Argentan takes sixteen minutes; our several questions
and replies have exhausted them. The brake is put on, we slow up.
Before I could anticipate her movement, she opens the carriage door
until the train comes to a stop, holds the door back, and there I am,
surprised to receive, at the same time, an equivocal bow and a glance
of surprising intensity.

Is it an invitation to run after her? I believe it is and I hasten
out, but I cannot find her. I had rapidly taken my light hand baggage,
valise, rug, overcoat, etc. I am not forced to return to my railway
carriage and I leave the station to seek the carriage bearing the
arms of the countess. She is waiting for me and, thank heaven! I am
the only one expected to-day. I will travel _tête-à-tête_ with my
disappointment. The coachman said the trip would take an hour, I have
an hour in which to school myself with such a useless emotion. We
start off; here is the Orne with its two adjacent bridges and, along
the stream embanked with walls, an amusing house with balustrades and
balconies on the water; an umbrella shop with a strolling singer's
good-looking red parasol for an emblem; not a carriage in the peaceful
streets, and thus one leads to doors of men and women, but not
children; the birdless cage, the childless home: it was a prophecy.
The school, the college, the barracks, the office, the study: the
French revolution has perfected slavery, it is unanimous. A half-Gothic
church, some old gables and less uniform façades amuse me; but we go
quickly, despite the climb; then the sorry outskirts, the flat road,
the stretch of grey level grass, race-grounds and wheels, some poplars.




CHAPTER IV

REFLECTIONS


    "In carne enim ambulantes non secundum
    carnem militamus."
               Saint Paul, _Cor._, II, 10, 3.


Entragues wrote only in the morning, but often extended his work of the
forenoon into the afternoon. When he did not feel lucid enough for the
logic of prose, he amused himself. Poetry, a simple music admitting
neither passion nor analysis, is only intended to suggest vague
sentiments and confused sensations; a half-consciousness suffices for
it. In imitation of Saint Notker, he composed obscure sequences full of
alliterations and interior assonances. Walt Whitman, with his intuitive
genius, unconsciously restored this lost poetic form. Entragues, at
certain hours, delighted in it. This literature of about the tenth
century, usually judged as the puerile distraction of barbarous monks,
seemed to him on the contrary full of an ingenuous freshness and of an
ingenious refinement. Notker charmed him, besides, by the red-blooded
boldness of his metaphors, charmed and terrified him while throwing him
on his knees before this God for whom prayer is a bleeding holocaust,
and who demands, like a slaughtering of lambs, "immolated praise."
He also took pleasure in a short and delicate sequence of Godeschalk,
where Saint Mary Magdalene "covers with kisses" the feet of Jesus
"which she has washed with her tears." A monk of the eleventh century
had written a work entitled: _The Nothingness in the Darkness_.
Entragues could find no trace of it beyond the mention of the title. It
was one of the unknown books he would have liked to read.

Apart from two or three scorners of actual life, a strict logician of
criticism, an extreme and absolute dreamer, an extraordinary creator
of phrases and shaper of images, and several modern poets, he now
hardly ever opened anything but antique theologies and dictionaries. He
had a mania for lexicons, tools which seemed to him, generally, more
interesting than works, and he spent over such instruments, often quite
useless, many an idle hour. Thus ended the first day of his return.

On the morrow, after a night in which he had relived some of the
most characteristic minutes passed with Sixtine at the château de
Rabodanges, Hubert suspected that his life was about to change in
orientation, that an inevitable crisis threatened him. It was a
propitious occasion for meditation. In several weeks perhaps--oh!
only perhaps!--he will have undergone obvious modifications. It was
necessary--in order to make a reckoning of it later--to note certain
dominant traits of the state of his actual mind, to proceed to a
summary examination of consciousness. His travel note book already
containing some sufficiently precise remarks on this subject, he
restricted himself to completing them with the following reflections:

"I am ashamed to admit it, so banal is this malady: I am bored. I have
excruciating awakenings. I believe in nothing and I do not love. My
calling is a sad one. It is to experiment with all the griefs and all
the horrors of the human soul, so that men may recognize themselves in
my work and say: 'Well roared, lion'! Yet, I am free: without nightly
obligations, neither a parasite nor a worldling, nor a dramatic critic,
I retire early, when I please. Having reached my thirtieth year with
hardly any social relations, having enough revenue to be independent,
I act in everything as I desire, heedless of general customs and
satisfied, for example, to testify my scorn for the civilization of
gas, by burning my lamp for ten hours. I am free, I have neither wife
nor mistress. I fear mistresses for the confusion in which they throw
the regularity of my work; but with sensitive beings a large lagoon is
hollowed from principles to acts. When I am with some one, I desire
solitude; alone, I feel the disquietudes of the void.

"When the commandment of the flesh hurls me to lustful adorations, I
blush at such a servitude and at the earliest lucid moment I treat
myself with contempt. When I have long stored the concentrated poison
of vain seeds, hammer strokes drum on me, my organism gives way and my
brain becomes troubled. Never having been kept upright by hair-cloth,
iron tacks, wounds freshened by perpetual excoriations, pitiless
fasts, privation of sleep, nor any of the mystic and Franciscan
maneuvers, I subdue my flesh by leading it to pasture, but with no
more sin in my intention than an invalid who breaks his abstinence to
procure a remedy. Although pleasure follows, it is an obedience to the
ineluctable commands governing animated life. Though I accept it, it is
a human weakness. To love so much that one wishes to die--that test I
have had in adolescence, and the reasonable insensibility of the woman
I adored has never shed any bitterness on that far off remembrance. I
do not smile pityingly on these days of umbrageous follies. After ten
or eleven years, I am as sure as I was at the first hour of having been
deprived of the greatest happiness put within reach of my hands by the
Decrees, and in moments of emotion this regret can still throw a gloom
over my revery. Since then, nothing but transitory pluckings; barely,
now and then, an attempt at the band broken at the first touch.

"Far from being the aim of my life, sensation is its accident: I
reserve my voluntary strength for the tales I tell my contemporaries.
They have been found cold and ironic, but I have neither the quality
to be an enthusiast of my age, nor to take it too seriously. Another
motive removes me from emotional researches: without being a pessimist,
without denying the possibility of satisfaction, without even denying
happiness, I scorn it. I do not seek to aggravate my miseries by
meditations on the universal misery, to which my egoism, moreover,
makes me almost indifferent. A state of perfect peace of mind agrees
with me. It is possible for me to regret an unhatched joy, but I wish
neither to provoke nor to lie in wait for the hatching. In fine, there
is no doubt that I do not know how to live. A perpetual celebration, my
existence is the very negation of ordinary life, which is composed of
ordinary loves. I have no tendency towards the altruisms demanded by
society. If ever I could be drawn from myself, for the benefit of some
creation, it would be in the manner of an imaginative person, at all
points re-creating the object of my passion, minutely scrutinizing the
mechanism of my impressions. Such is my character: it is obvious that
I have not applied myself to elude the knowledge of myself; and yet no
one knows better than I do to what point this knowledge is puerile and
unhealthy."




CHAPTER V

MORE TRAVEL NOTES

The Pale and Green Moon

    "In hac hora anima ebria videtur,
    Ut amoris stimulis magis perforetur."
                Saint Bonaventure, Philomena.


_Château de Rabodanges, in the portrait chamber, September 12_.--Upon
arriving, I was received by Henri de Fortier, director of _la Revue
spéculative_, and Michel Paysant, whose novels, full of swelling
busts and caressing glances, charm families which mistake impotence
for chastity. Fortier mentions the names of the guests to me. None
of my acquaintances are here. Separated from the general, her
husband, Countess Aubry brings to the country, at the summer end,
her cosmopolitan salon which is frequented by the grand courtiers of
academic or worldly literature. It is rumored that Fortier succeeds,
in her gallant nights, the Bonapartist deputy who recently died
and with whom she had an open liaison. Fortier assumes the modest
airs of a host. At the dinner, several aristocrats who live in the
vicinity mention the fact that the hunting season has opened. The only
interesting face to see is that of a young fair woman, with sparkling
eyes, who is either silent or speaks to Madame Aubry alone. A stroll
in the moonlight follows, then the neighbors call for their carriages.
Fortier disappears with the countess. Paysant takes my arm and prattles.

He groans over his vexations as a chief clerk of literature. Just now
he would like to rest, even to loaf, but a week does not pass without
some publisher, old or young, coming to entreat of him a volume to
restore his business or launch his bookshop. Accordingly, his repressed
Gallic nature would freely awake and he would write several jolly
stories. But the unity of his work! That would no longer turn out to
be Paysant, and the Academy would perhaps knit its brow. He attempts a
laugh, but one feels an apprehensive reverence within the depths of his
deferential brain. A silence, and he greedily describes the young woman
I had noticed. The technique of the patrician gives to his eloquence a
disinterested tone, but one divines the wet mouth and the hand, with
kneading gestures, caressing the absent forms. I maintain that women
are neither beautiful nor ugly, and that their whole charm radiates
from their sex: desire sketches beauty and love completes it. A certain
ugly creature, in the vulgar sense of the word, has been able to assume
an ideal beauty, while another woman, by all judged admirable, has not
passed beyond the limbo of a rough draught, never having been loved.
Paysant shouts this paradox: feminine beauty is real and independent of
sentiment. She is capable of feeling, yes? Doubtless, that is a special
pleasure, yes, a special one. By adroitly goading him, one could make
him confess his tastes of a fondler, of a senile love of touching, but
I know not why, I am afraid lest his pathology take up Madame Sixtine
as a subject of demonstration.

We return to the château. Everybody has surrendered to the rare
pleasure of retiring early. Only Fortier awaits us, to conduct me to my
room. It seems that a friend of the countess is enthusiastic about the
_Revue spéculative_ and is going to espouse it under a dotal system,
making it an allowance of fifty thousand francs, which it lacks. This
Fortier has a mania for offering incomprehensible metaphors.

"Some one is going to put fifty thousand francs into the _Revue_!"

"Precisely."

"And you will become?"

"Editor in chief instead of director."

"And the director?"

"A pseudonym." I know Fortier; he will not take offense.

"Now, confess that it is the countess." He smiles and immediately
gallops across the faded fields of the dithyramb:

"She is charming, generous, devoted to art, and without personal
ambition."

"Except to be loved?"

"I charge myself with that."

This unconstraint interests my natural curiosity, and with little
contradictions powdered with some skepticism, I excite him to the
point where he tells me everything. He was presented by Malaval, who
remarked that his elegance of a clipped dog would turn the head of
the countess. It was an embarrassing introduction, but Fortier showed
wit--so he claims. There followed allurements, sly winks, the habit of
quarreling with each other, an absence, several letters wherein a light
tenderness fluttered. She was alone when he returned. Without speech,
their arms outstretched--there they were, trembling and lovers. Fortier
is incapable of inventing and, perhaps, of lying. He even has the air
of finding this natural and fatal. It had to happen.

"Is it not so?"

"Doubtless."

I take leave of him. Before departing, he asks me to furnish some
pages for the first number of _la Spéculative_, new series. This line
finished, I go to sleep, but why is this room called the portrait
chamber?

_September 13, morning_.--I have dreamed of this portrait and I seek
it in every corner, in every section of the walls. The room is quite
remarkably bare: a uniform gray paper; above the Empire fireplace, a
looking glass which reaches to the ceiling; the bed occupies one of the
sides of the floor; to the right of the door, a bookcase contains some
old books; to the left is a chest of drawers topped with a new mirror;
opposite are two windows; between the two windows, a dressing table and
another glass. Nothing else.

_September 14, evening_.--We took an excursion to Roches-Noires.
Monsieur B----, who was our guide, killed a snake with a few blows of
a little stick. Then, Madame Magne took the reptile and in an instant
made a bracelet of the still moving creature. The countess uttered a
cry, the viper had to be thrown into a hole, and I reflected upon the
biblical and singular sympathy between women and serpents, for the
countess cried without sincerity and Madame de B----. pitied the poor
creature of the good Lord.

_September 14, morning_.--I have seen the portrait. The pale and green
moon soared into my room. I had just awakened, and obscure and ophidian
visions still haunted me. With feverish eyes I distrustfully gazed
around me, while logical and absurd reasonings multiplied in my head,
their fugacity leaving me with a doubt as to the precise place of my
actual existence. Was I in the midst of the brambles and precipices of
Roches-Noire? No. Was I in my room, and in my bed, far from the vipers
and grimacing stones? Perhaps. See! above the mantlepiece the mirror
slowly changes its tint: its lunar green, its green of transparent
waters underneath beeches, brightens and grows golden. One would say
that in the center of the glimmering, as on the moon's very face,
shadows with human features project, while above the vague figure there
winds a luminous undulation like loosened and floating blond hair.
Without being able to analyze the rest of the sudden transformation, I
see it, in the twinkling of an eye, completed. Clear and animate, the
portrait gazes on me; it is, feature for feature, that of the woman
with the reptile. For several moments, long and unforgettable moments,
the vision grew resplendent, then it vanished, as though by a breath.

_September 15, morning_.--I awoke at the same hour, but the mirror
remained green and I did not see the portrait again. I think of nothing
but this. All day yesterday, while Madame Sixtine Magne was with us, I
looked at her; when she was no longer there, I evoked her.

_September 15, evening_.--The countess quickly questioned me, while we
were on the bank of the Orne: "By the way, did you see the portrait?
No, for you would have said so. Besides, to see it one must now, it
seems, be endowed with a certain mystery. It is a trick sometimes
played upon easily troubled imaginations. There is a history. Monsieur
de B----. tells it very well. Make him discuss this chapter after
dinner." I could not find a word to answer. I have seen the portrait,
but how proceed to boast of that privilege? The angling for crawfish
continues; I am asked to take part in it. In a frame of leaves, under
the silvered alders, the young woman, who henceforth has rights to
interest me, seems passionately absorbed in a book whose pages she cuts
with her finger. Monsieur de B----. could not remain for dinner and no
one has spoken again of the portrait chamber. So much the better....

(End of the Travel Notes).--There, in fact, ended the scribbled pages,
Hubert having betaken himself to dream of his impressions instead of
transcribing them. He did not wish to write them down too late, without
some necessary preliminary moments, so as not to take the risk of
confounding the chronology of the little things whose logical order
is of prime importance. The remainder of the notebook was white. Yet
when he perused them later, he perceived a sheet of loose paper where
could be traced some intentions of poetry. This more narrowly fixed his
thoughts upon Sixtine: it was truly with her that he was concerned in
his prose, in his verses, in his life.




CHAPTER VI

DREAM FIGURE


    "O Créateur de l'universel monde,
    Ma pauvre âme est troublée grandement!"
                    Heures _à l'usaige de Paris_, 1488.


Sixtine was far from him, and yet he believed that he saw her nearby.

All afternoon he preserved the illusion of walking in her company. She
suddenly appeared in a dress of changing colors: the cloth, a light and
pale green silk, had golden clasps. Her shoes made no sound; her smile,
instead of speech, and diverse inflexions of her muscles, expressed her
thoughts; nevertheless, but only once, he positively heard the sound
of her voice. "So you would like me to tell you the history of the
portrait chamber?" Preoccupied in establishing the fundamental sound of
the recovered sequence which for an instant tyrannized him, Entragues
listened to the question without immediately perceiving its sense. He
was going to reply and agree, but Sixtine, under the parasol which she
had opened, was reading and he dared not disturb her. The parasol,
too, by its oddness, caused his mind to wander. It was of such limpid
and transparent yellow that through it he beheld, barely shaded by a
luminous shadow, the shoulders of Sixtine and her head bent upon the
book.

They walked along the quay, from the rue du Bac, where he had begun to
feel her presence, to the Saint-Michel Square. The charming, shining
Seine was iridescent with the play of oblique rays striking against its
current; sparkling foam fell on the prows; the fringe of the bank was
dotted with sails on which a keen wind played; the canvas crackled like
flames; the lines of anchored boats here and there rumbled under the
shock; the multicolored parapets retreated.

Entragues bought no lexicon; he looked at the serried backs of books,
without even reading the black or golden titles.

In a deserted spot, along the wooden balustrade, and as the first gas
light flickered in a _café_, he was accosted by a young man who passed
as a poet, perhaps because of the rare beauty of his face.

"How singular! You are alone, yet one would swear that an invisible
person accompanied you."

"I am now alone, my dear Sanglade."

Sixtine, in fact, had just disappeared from Entragues sight and
Sanglade had the impression of having awkwardly interrupted a
_tête-à-tête_, an impression that was quite metaphorical, for with an
air of bantering timidity, he added:

"You are seeking rhymes. I will give you some, I have them all at my
command. Without this gift, I would not be a poet."

"Yes, without this you _would_ be a poet."

"In prose, perhaps," answered Sanglade, "but in verse?"

Entragues purposely let him run on, having no mind for esthetic
tournaments. They went up the boulevard. At the Luxembourg, Sanglade,
tired of discoursing in monologue, took advantage of a passing friend
and returned. Entragues made for a quiet _café_, protected with
carpets, where his horror of sound could readily be satisfied.

Since his return, save for a brief interview on the first morning,
he had been able to abstract Sixtine from his immediate thoughts. It
was with a perfect coldness that he had recopied into good French his
brief travel notes where, towards the end, the name of this woman,
hardly known, recurred with each verse, like an amen. But, and here he
recognized the occult power of words, the material transcription of
those syllables had acted violently on his imagination. He had lived
whole hours with her, and now that the mystic power of the vision was
spent, he still thought of the absent one.

"She must have gone to Bagnoles for one of those imaginary illnesses
which women never think of treating save in their periods of boredom.
Restless or bored: she had these two states in almost equal doses. Then
if her head is troubled with love, she will not experience it until
the time when one questions oneself: uncertain questions, uncertain
answers! And boredom? To explain it, you must admit that the advance
or recoil of this dawning caprice has nothing to do with her will
and that she may be unconscious of her own sentiment. That is it: she
loves, therefore the uneasiness; but she does not know it, therefore
the ennui. It is necessary to note this. Could she have returned?"

Hubert believed himself merely touched by a simple analytical fever.
Often, for the sole pleasure of taking stock with himself, he had
followed, in their psychic evolutions, many interesting subjects; of
women, particularly, but deceived by a consideration of the inscrutable
motive, they had divined another one and had begun to simper at the
investigator. Thus it used to end, whether Entragues digressed, or
whether a series led him into a secret laboratory experiment.

Even in this last case, it was short, for he had hardly ever tried his
tests except upon vile souls often belonging to prostituted organisms.

Sixtine was of the caste numbered one or two, coming from an
aristocratic convent and from an idle leisurely family.

Nothing certain at the first approach, because of the modern confusion
and personal reclassification, but fallen rather than parvenu,
belonging at least to those who cultivate a relative leisure in an
avowed independence. As for certain other problems which puzzled him,
he would amuse himself in resolving them gradually, at her home, with
the aid of subtle questions, for he meant to accept her invitation and
would go to see her.

Such a minute revery denoted a certain possession. Entragues did
not yet suspect, or perhaps did not wish to condescend to admit to
himself that the agreeable and feminine form of mystery acted on his
imagination more than on his curiosity.

Sixtine was graceful and her contours corresponded with the harmony
requisite to evoke the word of beauty. Blond her hair, and a golden
green, her eyes; violent the mouth and exquisitely white, her teeth!
Ah! the violent mouth broke the harmony, a cold esthetician would have
said, but, and this was the proof that Hubert already was a prey to
desire, he loved its destructive violence, seeing it in but a more
assured promise of pleasure. Just then Entragues gave such a sharp
start that the gamblers close to him held the dice-box sus-about to
make. The dice rattled in the copper box pended in air, and suppressed
the bets they were and Entragues reflected on his nerves.

"It was because of the ambiguity, that was the cause, my soul! The
ambiguity threw the poison."

"Oh! was he going to take as a serious confession idle words playfully
uttered on the wings of a causerie. This time, was it not really the
old malady of chimerical fancies? He smiled at himself, and almost
grew out of patience. Ah! the thing was not to accuse her because
of a confession, not to reveal himself as devoid of criticism as a
public accuser, but not to deny her criminal potentiality. What a doll
full of bran instead of blood, seamed with threads instead of nerves,
is a woman incapable of crime! As well say that she is incapable
of passion! Our cowardly civilization, itself, absolves the bloody
consequences of love, sparing such women the futile expiation of an
inevitable act. The equivocation he had read on Sixtine's face was the
mark of election, the sign of possible passion, the proof that she was
a woman."

This deduction reassured Entragues. Henceforth, instead of trembling
before the word crime, he would have to qualify it. A preliminary
distinction would have spared him the start which had frightened the
dice players. Now he willingly accepted a Sixtine who was a neighbor to
crime, and even a criminal Sixtine. In the latter case it meant, for
example, that she loved, that she was deceived, that she had poisoned
the deceiver. Ah! there are luckless poisoned ones whose fate may
trouble sensibilities after the deed. But if, instead of defending
herself, Sixtine had died, what sort of person would the assassin have
been?

This crime, at first so disturbing, insensibly gained some
considerations of attraction. An old desire, like an old viper,
stirred in his head. Ah! to kiss hands that had used poison! To caress
the flesh of a murderess! Through contempt of all morality, to give
pleasure to the woman who had provoked, for her peace, frightful
agonies!... And perhaps there truly was nothing in it at all! Oh! she
had, with a single word, confessed too thoroughly not to go, some day,
to the end of the avowal: he would know how to win her confidence.
For the time being, as it was impossible to penetrate further, lacking
sufficient enlightenment, Entragues abandoned all analysis and dined.

Afterwards, he recopied the sequence which, in his revery, had been
dimly refashioned. The desired words took their assigned place, the
rhythm polished the breaks that appeared too rude, the imperfections
were effaced.

It went thus:

DREAM FIGURE

    Séquence

    La très chère aux yeux clairs apparaît sous la lune,
    Sous la lune éphémère et mère des beaux rêves.
    La lumière bleuie par les brumes cendrait
    D'une poussière aérienne
    Son front fleuri d'etoiles, et sa légère chevelure
    Flottait dans l'air derrière ses pas légers:
    La chimère dormait au fond de ses prunelles.
    Sur la chair nue et frêle de son cou,
    Les stellaires sourires d'un rosaire de perles
    Etageaient les reflets de leurs pâle éclairs. Ses poignets
    Avaient des bracelets tout pareils; et sa tête,
    La couronne incrustée des sept pierres mystiques
    Dont les flammes transpercent le coeur comme des glaives
    Sous la lune éphémère et mère des beaux rêves.

He signed his name and the date, adding farther down, as an envoy "To
Madame Sixtine Magne." To spare himself reflections of this sort:
"Shall I send it to her, shall I not send it to her?" he addressed an
envelope, affixed a stamp, and immediately carried it to the mailbox.

Then, to divert himself by gaining an hour of rest, he repeated the
story with which Monsieur de B----. had amused them, one evening, at
the home of the countess--a quite unadorned story, as becomes such a
trifle--just such a thing as could be written by those whose occasional
simplicity is not due to a poverty of language or to an imaginative
sterility.




CHAPTER VII

MARCELLE AND MARCELINE

A story in the style of "Cinderella," but more modern.

    "Ni vers, ni prose; points de grands mots,
    point de brillans, point de rimes: un ton naïf
    m'accomode mieux; en un mot, un récits sans
    façon et comme on parle."
          Madame d'Aulnay, _l'Adroite Princesse_.


Once upon a time there was a nobleman who took to himself a second wife
who had as wicked a heart as you could imagine. They had a daughter who
resembled her mother, and it was not long before the two were tyrants
of the house, for this nobleman loved them and humored all their
whims. Especially did the daughter take advantage of it to inflict a
thousand miseries upon her step-sister, whose birthright seemed to her
a theft of her rights as a spoiled child. One was called Marcelle and
the other, Marceline. The wicked Marcelle hated her sister, but the
good Marceline returned good for evil. And as her father, through very
goodness of soul, and to have peace in the house, always took the part
of Marcelle, Marceline learned to suffer.

Marcelle was as pretty as a bouquet of roses. Taught to smile by the
smiles she had received at the cradle and while she played, she knew
how to be radiant, and every one considered her a very amiable person.
Tall and shapely, she had a white and delicate skin, red lips and long
blond hair.

Marceline was ugly, small, with dark hair and complexion; in truth, she
had very lively eyes, but they had a somber color and lacked any tender
expression. She was mistaken for her sister's governess, and sometimes
for her maid, for though no one was cruel enough to refuse her whatever
dresses she desired, she affected a taste for simple clothes.

Marcelle had already refused more than one eligible suitor, when a
young lord named Lélian moved her heart by his good manners, his title,
that of a marquis, and his fortune.

The marriage day was fixed, Lélian courted in a most gallant fashion,
and the only thing left was the arranging of the festivities that would
signalize such a great way.

Marceline took great pains not to show any spite because the younger
daughter was getting married first. On the contrary, she was as amiable
as ever. With an unwonted good grace she welcomed the young marquis
destined for her sister; this everybody appreciated and people began to
find her less ugly and less displeasing. Marcelle, amid her joy, always
kept the haughty air belonging to a well-born girl. Lélian felt more
admiration than love for her and he was not displeased to talk a little
with Marceline. The "little one," as she was contemptuously called,
soon seemed to him more intelligent and pleasant than her sister. She
spoke of all things with spirit, her good humor took no offense at any
teasing, and when, by chance, she was alone with Lélian, a strange
flame of an almost mysterious charm, shone in her somber eyes. By
gazing at them long, Lélian discovered that her dark brown eyes had a
perfectly nuanced gamut of expression: they were eloquent. From that
time, and during the moments he was not paying court to Marcelle, he
strove to spell out the words that lay in Marceline's eyes.

He thought of them as much as any man, on the eve of marriage, can
think of eyes which do not belong to the woman he is about to wed, when
Marceline, suddenly unwell, took to her room for three days. This was
decisive: the dark eyes recovered their language so clearly that there
was no mistaking them.

It was the very morning of the marriage day. Quite recovered, but
still a trifle pale, Marceline strolled through the garden, touching
the flowers without gathering a single one. Lélian, on his side, was
walking about to conceal his impatience. They met.

What passed between them while they strolled, through the walks,
silently and slowly? What did they say in the garden walks? Lélian,
without astonishment, heard these words which Marceline, as she
suddenly left him, threw like an arrow:

"And take care not to mistake the door this evening, for my sister and
I have adjoining rooms!"

After the return from church, there was a great repast that continued
far into the evening; then came dances and games in the illuminated
rooms; then a magnificent supper was served, followed by more dances
and games. The peasants, under a specially erected tent, took part in
the rejoicings; they sang songs, discharged guns, danced, kissed one
another, and drank to the bride's health.

While the ball was at its height, Marcelle disappeared without anyone
taking notice, except the men among themselves and the women behind
their fans; several young girls blushed; others thoughtfully followed
the retreating train of white silk with their eyes. The bride's
dress, her attitude, the least little word she had spoken in a quite
distracted voice since the ceremony, her tears, her smiles, her
kisses--all were passed in review. The old women, fearing ridicule,
dissimulated the emotion brought up by distant memories; the young
women sought the glances of their husbands in the throng.

Lélian mounted the stairs with a firm and rapid step. He saw the two
adjacent doors. One was shut; the other was ajar. This one he pushed
and entered. Without a sound, and with diabolic skill, Marceline turned
the key and bolted the door.

Before the house was astir, Lélian led Marcelle away, as had been
arranged. A coach, spanned and ready, awaited them.

After the honeymoon trip, which was brief, because of the quite natural
impatience of the newly married couple to settle in their home, they
dwelt in Lélian's château.

As the two domains touched each other, so to speak, Marcelle was
able to find some happiness near her parents and her sister whom she
had ceased to hate. Unhappiness softens certain prideful souls and
Marcelle, who had promised herself many numberless joys, found herself,
as happens, the most unfortunate woman in the world.

Taught by experience, Marceline refused to marry. When any one speaks
to her of the miserable condition of an old maid, she smiles and asks:

"Come, are you so sure that I am an old maid?"

And it must be agreed that a sort of beauty flowered in the dark
Marceline and that the white Marcelle grew almost ugly.

I believe that Marceline is a fairy, but this is not quite certain.




CHAPTER VIII

THE TRANSPARENT CURTAIN OF TIME


    "In laying down his Cogito ergo sum as the
    only certainty, and in considering the world's
    existence as problematical, Descartes found
    the essential departing point of all philosophy."
                 Schopenhauer: _The World as Idea_.


Entragues rose early and penholder in hand, turning over his papers
while he drank tea and smoked cigarettes, he began the day.

Monsieur Dubois, through an administrative memorandum, had the goodness
to inform him about his affairs. There had been postal supplications
and telegraphic pardons. Madame du Boys was returning. The envelope
contained the letter and the copy of the dispatch. Entragues
appreciated this attention which would permit him to follow, without
fatigue, the developments of the oratorio.

The letter, dated from Geneva, was a reply. The secretary, among
indistinct phrases, had doubtless let fall the seed of hope, for Madame
du Boys seemed to accept at the same time that she implored. Though
standing on her dignity, she was not displeased with this rope flung
in the midst of her muddled situation. She joyfully clutched it, with
the naïve and vainglorious pleasure of being able to say: "It is he who
is taking the first step! How anxious he is to have me! Ah! the poor
man, I do not want to make him suffer any more." This could be read
all around the pages, on all the margins, even on the envelope, which
had been addressed with a poised hand. Too, there flowered a boredom
from this international paper: "I enjoy myself more even in Paris, by
the side of a stupid and solemn husband, than on the banks of Lake
Geneva, where I am alone with my maid from nine in the morning till six
at night--without counting the days when business delays _Monsieur le
comte_--and where, to fall asleep, I drink, in the _Revue des Treize
Cantons_, lymphatic emanations on the course of life and the meaning of
death!"

"P. S. Say that I am passing a season in Switzerland for my health."

She arrives, lets fall her little bundles, opens her arms, and Monsieur
Dubois, very agitated, falls into them.

"Ah! my poor friend, so I find you again! What trials!"

She has pardoned.

Monsieur Dubois dries his eyes, not knowing what to say; his flown
discourse leaves him speechless.

Bending towards one of the little parcels which she lifts, Madame du
Boys, serpentine and coy, murmurs:

"I have thought of you, dear one, I bring you a box of cigars."

Entragues was greatly amused by this unforseen denouement. He was just
finishing the draught of a sketch when the bell rang; it was a letter
with a handwriting unknown to him. The wording was brief:

"Monsieur d'Entragues is expected this evening to give a commentary on
his _Dream_. Only auditors: the four walls and Sixtine Magne."

Two joyful tidings already, and it was not yet midday. It was only
at this hour that his scanty correspondence was brought him, for
the precious mornings could not be troubled by the intrusion of the
external problematical world. Even amid a quite feverish contentment,
he did not regret the instructions he had given once for all; Sixtine's
letter came at a moment when he could think at leisure and without
remorse. His pleasure was manifested by a vivacity of movement
altogether juvenile; a semblance of adolescence surged from his
precocious maturity. Though he generally was incapable of giving a
clear account of his impressions, he felt himself rejuvenated, and this
astonished him. He walked about with lively quick movements.

Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs was almost gay.

A reddish brown made the sun-bathed Luxembourg, through which he
strolled, resplendent. It was full of pretty children and flashing
ribbons. Towards the Odéon he ceased to be aware of the things
around him--a beaming cloud enveloped him. In the afternoon, having
breakfasted, though he could not have stated how or where, he found
himself on the Pont-Neuf, and collected his thoughts. Presence of mind
returned to him and, dissipating with a last breath his cloud, he began
consciously to revel in his happiness. The moment was brief: leaning on
his elbows, looking at the unchanging water, he felt the premonitory
thrill he so well knew; the frozen aura of spleen whistled in his
ears and, bounding the horizon like a wall, the black Idea reared
itself before him. An infinite distress overwhelmed him and, far from
wishing the burden removed, he bent his shoulders, letting himself be
crushed even to suicide. He closed his eyes with suffering, he trembled
with cold, and a flicker of reason deep within him warned him of the
absurdity of such a sudden and causeless grief. Yet he persisted, now
lying under the avalanche of gloom, immobile, experiencing the garrot
of solitary death, the slow excoriation of moral agony. This lasted
an hour, during which he suffered weeks of real and profound pains,
the cruelest pains ever invented by unjust human imagination, hopeless
pains, infernal pains. He ached when he resumed his normal state and
unsteadily went on his way.

The distraction of book hunting proved a great relief. The mummies,
ranged in dozens in their tombs, awaited a momentary resurrection.
He rescued several, _les Promenades_ by Stendhal, which he did not
possess, an old breviary embellished with armorial bearings, and a
Venetian lexicon. He regretted having purchased the Stendhal. It was a
subject of sadness and in the unhealthy state in which his crisis had
left him, the mere material contact of these artless but bitter little
notes might be dangerous. Bitter! For him alone, perhaps, for he found
such desolation in it: "This Rome of the Popes, this womb of the ideal,
this Ninevah of the purple, this Babylon of the cross, this Sodom of
mysticism, this ark of sadistic dreams, this incunabulum of sacred
follies, this generator of the new passion, this Rome, I never again
shall see!" A tiny kingdom had openly stolen its traditional capital
and the modern baseness had ratified the theft.

His sadness turned to anger. Entragues smiled at this quixotism, but
the violence of even a fugitive indignation ended by making him sound
again, and, recovering full consciousness, he breathed.

In the street, Entragues did not sympathize with the rumbling
consciousness dispersed among the human fluid emanating from the
throngs. The passersby seemed phantoms to him, he was not aware
of them, considering them as inconsistent as the vignettes of an
illustrated book. The most tragic public event only elicited from him
an acquiescence or repulsion of the artist: to shrug the shoulders and
cry: Bravo, Chance! A very scornful observer and thoroughly persuaded
in advance that nothing new can be produced by the encounters of
individuals with one another or against things, since the elaborating
brains partake eternally of a fundamental identity and their visible
differences are but the right and reverse sides of an untearable
material embroidered with a durable and everlasting embroidery;
conscious of the uselessness of leaving his house to enter another
house which is just the same, Entragues loved the proximity of books
that demonstrated to him the probability of his philosophy. He never
tired of admiring the courageous perserverance of men who invariably
repeated the same thing. All that had been written since the Bible
could be resumed in three words; fired in a fantastic crucible, the
totality of books would give this for a chemical residuum: cogito, ergo
sum. Descartes was the only man who had ever expressed a necessary
idea, and thirteen letters had sufficed for it. He would have wished to
see them engraved on the front of monuments.

Outside of these three words, nothing indubitably existed except art;
for it alone, endowed with the critical faculty, has the power of
evoking life. It alone, without remarking the warp and woof, however,
can variegate the embroidery of the stuff, because it embroiders safe
from contingencies. The existence of Marie-Antoinette is problematical;
that of Antigone is certain. The queen who died on the scaffold is at
the mercy of deductions and negations; Antigone is as eternal as the
family love she symbolizes, and the falling stars will not hush the
piteous and charming confession of her feminine heart murmuring across
the centuries: "I am born to love and not to hate." The symbol is as
imperishable as the idea whose transcendental form it is and becomes
necessary to it as soon as it clothes the idea. When you persecute
Galileo, it is a man who suffers; when you separate Romeo from
Juliette, it is the entire species that feels their anguish.

Having placed art above and even in the place of life, Entragues
still doubted. Was art not an illusion as well? If the external world
consists of phantoms only, could he create aught but phantoms, unless
he confined himself to the eternal reproduction of the eternal ego? But
at its highest degree of personality, individual consciousness contains
all forms, and just as, by a necessary objectivity, it projects
externally the silhouettes on the transparent curtain of time, which is
life, it can project them outside of time, which is art.

The ant in distress swam boldly towards the last straw, withstanding
the cruel waves; it did not founder in the hollows of the
rivulet--which are for it larger than the ocean--and it saw safety when
the motion of the waves raised it to the pinnacle.

His meditations were suddenly troubled, like the water of a pool into
which a swan plunges. The jovial, merry instinct recovered its toy.
There was now no means of arguing upon the illusion of suffering: the
lashes of presentiment cut his back so keenly and severely that it was
clear the hand could not be wheedled by any reasoning.

The child was amusing itself too well. "And yet! and yet!" All was
vain and it was true. Entragues, upon returning to his quarters, found
this mortal note, mortal in the state of exaltation in which he had
lived since the morning, a damper that truly resembled death.

"Inpromptu dinner with the countess who has come on some business.
Regrets. Let tomorrow take the place of to-day. S. M."

As he sat reading these lines, his head in his hands, without having
removed his hat, gloves, overcoat and cane, he had the misfortune to
wish to seek the secret causes; he passed, without stirring, two or
three very painful hours. His reasoning went thus: in writing the
first letter to me yesterday, she evidently knew how matters stood. He
then asked himself why she was playing with him. He employed the whole
evening in resolving this difficult question. Finally, after having
followed several diverse solutions, he concluded: "Perhaps, as she
said, it really was a simple accident." As aching as a victim of the
inquisition, after his seance of torture, he fell asleep cursing hope,
that torture more subtle than the wooden horse, needles and spiders, a
sketch but lately illuminated by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam.

He fell asleep, living again the pages of the master in a terrifying
nightmare, and only in the morning did rest come.

Upon arising, he was another person, and certitude, pure and clear
certitude did not abandon him an instant until evening. At half past
eight, the hour chosen and fixed by her, he would see her. Until then
he walked with closed eyes, almost like a blind man, all the powers of
his mind, all his faculties of idealisation, together with his scorn
and skepticism, drowned in that drop of water--Sixtine. He did not even
have enough strength for astonishment: a rising moon, a dawning love
dominated his horizon. This unique contemplation, by gentle degrees,
isolated him in a trance.




CHAPTER IX

THE PROMENADE OF SIN


    "This curl of hair belongs to a daughter of
    Ra-Hor-Xuti, who has in her every essence
    of divinity."
               _ Orbiney Papyrus, Pl._ xi. 4.


A prisoner in her abbatial seat, she had quite the air of a fourteenth
century person. Dressed in red, her feet rested on a black cushion;
her fingers, lit with garnets and opals, perhaps with cassidony, and
with agates, played with the white girdle which tied a robe with heavy
purple undulations; her head, a pale flower, leaned against the carved
wainscot; the shadow of the ogive framed the blonde aureole.

Altogether nonplussed by the attitude which seemed to demand the
genuflexion of a worshiper, instead of the cordial greeting of a
friend, he remained standing near the door, seeking some word to begin.
For a few seconds Sixtine enjoyed the astonishment she had anticipated,
then skilfully rose and, with a trace of lingering vanity, offered her
hand. He took it coldly, seeing that she had tried to deceive him with
a _mise en scène_.

The thread broke and all the pearls of the embroidery fell one after
the other; it was the work of this evening to fill the silken thread,
to put the scattered jewels back into their design.

Both busied themselves with good will over the task and Sixtine, who
felt the peril of having travestied, even with a worthy attire, the
primitive image remaining in the eyes of Entragues, quickly became
again the simple and sincerely strange woman of the first hour. At
least Hubert, at the sight of some gestures, at the sound of some
words, so recreated her; he gradually recovered his ease and renewed
with Sixtine the chat commenced in the country place.

The heavy branches of the firs drooped above their heads; a stag
passed, hounds passed, Diana, on a golden crescent, passed.

Sixtine threw a veil of green silk over the rose-colored shade. She
remarked:

"Diana provides her own light. The hunt will continue by moonlight. Is
it dreamlike enough, thus?"

"It is in such a light that I beheld you one night, a surprising night
of revery or vision: _E par chie sia una cosa venuta_...."

"_Da cielo in terro_," continued Sixtine. "My mother was Venetian; she
made me read a few Italian poets. Some scraps of it have remained; she
did not even give me her hair, for I am blond like my father, a pale
blond that is my despair, for I have not a blond soul."

"Do you think that the soul and the hair are always of the same color,
almost to the nuance? It is true that nuances are of consequence.
The feminine hair assumes more than thirty tints that are entirely
different and can be depicted by precise words, half of which are daily
used, but at random. These tints blend and intermingle to infinity and
the very eye can hardly define them by immediate comparison. This is
so true that, as you know, you can never match hair. Would it not be
amusing to make a classification of feminine characters according to
the terms of the nuances of their hair? It would suffice to determine
the exact tone so as to be able to pronounce upon the character, the
passional faculties, the inclination towards friendship or love,
the sentiment of duty, the maternal tenderness, and the like. Those
_somnambulists_ who make use of this principle without method and
without preliminary studies, occasionally reach curious revelations.
In five or six years, this science will be perfected, and those who
possess it to perfection will be able to determine a man's character
through a lock of hair, and will know what to do in order to take
advantage of him. But fools and the ignorant always escape the power
of intelligence; they will acquire the facile ruse of shaving their
skulls, and this will once more prove the futility of all knowledge and
the vanity of mind."

"Apply to me the science of to-morrow. What is the color of my soul?"
asked Sixtine, wishing to make use, like all women, of the least
general idea.

"A changing blond, a flame blond, or if you wish to decompose the
nuance, tawny, ash and gold. Tawny is savagery, ash is nonchalance,
gold is passion. Your horoscope will be like this: a woman fluctuating
between the desire to be enchained to tenderness and her love of
independence, but who will resign herself to the choice which
circumstances make for her; as indolence is a bad body guard, it is
probable that she will be won...."

"Taken!" cried Sixtine, "taken! I told you so. I await the robber!"

"Indeed, it amounts to the same thing. Won or taken by some one she
perhaps will not love, but who will have been finer and stronger than
the others. Conclusion: the final acquiescence of her nonchalance."

"No! not that. The robber must please me. But why the future? Perhaps
the destinies are already accomplished? What do you know of that?"

"Oh! nothing," said Entragues, somewhat troubled. "Only, men always
dream in a woman's presence of the morrow, never of the day before. It
seems that the morrow belongs to them, as a necessary consequence of
the present moment, and when they cannot regulate it for their personal
profit, vanity, at least, will not be displeased to adapt it somewhat
by insinuation. The most foolish among them believes himself born to
be the director of conscience; and, in fact, since they cannot govern
themselves, it is perhaps their true vocation."

"It is certain," Sixtine answered, "that women are not happier for
having won the liberty of the bridle on their necks. They generally
want too many things at one time to wish seriously for any one thing,
and it is rendering them a service to fix the road where their desires
can gallop more at ease. Unfortunately, tyranny is neighbor to good
counsel; one cannot always distinguish one from the other. That is why
we have revolted. Then it is a great temptation to a man to legislate
upon all things, as soon as a woman has accepted some of his advice;
orders follow, despotism commences, and insurrection is justified."

"You speak, Madame, like a statesman, and I am astonished that you are
not somewhat of an Egeria!"

"I was and I wearied of the rôle. So your jest is not to the purpose.
It is perhaps amusing to lead women, but not men. The Egeria they
want holds in leash a tiny plump creature with drooping ears; Rops
has designed it, and while I do not frequent the private museums, I
have seen it. An Egeria by day, and it is always the same one, whose
soul becomes visible to their spirituality under the most secret and
revealing hair. It is there they go to seek the soul's color."

Sixtine had spoken with a juvenile warmth which discouraged Entragues.
It was the indignation of a woman whose intelligence has been disdained
and who, considering herself a political collaborator, has seen her
rôle reduced to that of a carnal instrument. He pretended to have only
remarked the lively side of her talk, and replied:

"I did not dare, in my theory of the science of hair, to put all the
possible harmonies in line. The clothes, moreover, make a further
research altogether puerile, partaking of a sickly curiosity. Yet,
though the agreement of tones is far from being perfect always, one
must take account of it. Confess, too, Madame, that if it is not the
palace and residence of Psyche, it is at least her country house."

"Well," said Sixtine, laughing good-naturedly, "I pardon you for that
last word, but do not begin again."

"But it was you...."

"That is not the same thing. I did not insist. Hush! you will spoil
for me all the verses in which tresses are mentioned, and even those
of Berenice will become suspect. You have seen me 'under the ephemeral
moon.' I would like to know just when."

"Seen? Yes! I have particular faculties of vision and sometimes I
evoked you near me by magic. The object I strongly think about is
incorporated before my eyes in a visible form and often becomes
palpable to the touch. I have felt presences of persons who were
actually quite remote from me. And this does not at all astonish me,
for regular sensation is only a true hallucination. For me, it is a
matter of indifference whether it be true or false. I hardly worry
about it."

"Then all women are at your mercy? If a woman you loved shunned your
entreaties, would imagination ... would imagination suffice?"

"No, that would be the vilest of sins, the most sacrilegious, and
the most useless. Of what avail is an unshared carnal pleasure?
No, such acts as those are only too dismal. I am not the unchaste
passerby of the poet, I do not delight in ridiculous, incomplete and
dull profanations. No more am I a Jean-Jacques. The Most High has not
favored me with a gift that would be fatal to the women of my time."

"Do you believe that these hallucinations would be so disagreeable
to them? For when one wishes to please, one wishes to please in
everything."

"There are feminine perversities," Entragues returned, "that are
sufficiently frightful to content one with the metaphysics of pleasure.
But I see beyond. Parallel dreams strive, at the same moment, towards
the same end. Result: mutual possession at a distance. What a triumph
for love! What a resource for separated lovers!"

"It is not for you to speak of our perversity, you who are endowed with
such a perverse imagination."

She gasped a little for breath and fanned herself, oh! without fear,
the feeble sex, and with a firm head.

A short silence followed.

This unusual costume which had first broken Entragues chain of
sensation, now delighted him. He was thankful to Sixtine for not having
appeared in a house robe of the latest style, for this would have
swerved the talk to the vulgar stupidity of Parisian gossip or of a
dialogue in modern comedy. A somewhat different intimacy with Sixtine
seemed extremely desirable; a second and identical bifurcation led his
sentiment, starting from curiosity, to desire.

"Introduce me to your history." He repeated to himself the first
measure of the symphonic sonnet, and the very affright, in its recall,
pursued the heels of the desire.

She reflectively watched him, not without little impatient movements of
her fingers.

"She who would make him her slave, would doubtless make him wise."

"Yes, doubtless."

Sixtine pronounced these few words gravely, in a cordial manner.

Under the green of the old tapestry that hung from the ceiling and
covered a whole side of the wall, in the still and cool room, a warmth
of spring was diffused in golden waves; it was suddenly wafted from the
vaporized intimacy.

Uttering the appropriate trifles, to which Entragues lightly replied,
Sixtine rose, lit a blue flame under the copper kettle, opened a box of
cigarettes, moved about in such an adorable setting that he smiled with
joy to see her go and come, lavishing pretty movements and beautifully
arched gestures.

She poured tea.

"Now recollect. You owe me my commentary. What is that vision in which
I appeared with 'the brow studded with stars?'"

He told of the astonishing apparition, adding that there was a story
which Monsieur de B----. knew.

Sixtine interrupted him and pronounced the already familiar words:

"If you wish, I shall tell you the story of the portrait chamber."

Entragues started and grew pale. This exceeded the bounds of
probability. With a weak voice, he answered:

"I really would like to hear it."

Sixtine began:


HISTORY OF THE PORTRAIT CHAMBER

"It is a tragic and rather strange story...." She stopped, seeming to
summon her memory. Then:

"No, I should indeed prefer not to tell you it."

"Oh! please," urged Entragues, like a child who opens two wide, curious
eyes.

"No, sometime later, perhaps. If you had asked it down there, before
those verses, before a coincidence which I guess and which disturbs me!
I cannot just now. When you learn it, you will understand, and this
very reticence will seem clear to you.... It is said that it has never
lied.... Well, listen: 'The Château de Rabodange at one time was the
hereditary domain....' It is too much for me.... Childishness? Don't
say that!"

"But I said nothing. The emotion I see you in does not suggest such
words to me. Let us forget the story...."

"Well," replied Sixtine, "try to guess it. You can. I give you
permission. Perhaps you will tell it to me. Let us talk no more of it
and please go. I get up early and I must sleep. You see that I treat
you like a friend."

She had such a nervous air that Hubert asked for nothing better than
to obey her, not wishing to spoil his evening by the blunder of a
reserve which henceforth might be necessary before the woman who no
longer seemed mistress of herself. It was the moment for retreat or
the moment for a bold stroke. He pursued the first course, the second
not having entered his mind. When it was a matter of other persons,
or when he reflected at leisure on his own sentimental adventures,
Entragues possessed a remarkable lucidity of mind; before the cause
itself--the cause in person, throbbing and eloquent--he was confused,
like a school-boy, and obeyed, unaware of his stupidity, those false
insinuations of women who ask for a violet so as to get a rose. He
therefore made ready to leave, saying:

"I would not wish to oppose such good habits."

"Is it not written," she responded in the same light tone, "'flee all
occasions of sinning?'"

"And even Saint Bernard, in his _Meditations_, considers the
contemplated sin as serious as the perpetrated one. Not to flee the
occasion is to anticipate the offense and render it inexcusable. But I
do not see how early rising specially agrees with this precept. On the
contrary, it seems to me that the longer the day, the more numerous are
the stones on the road. Then, can it be that you want to travel along
the road of perfection?"

"I am anxious not to soil my life with any chance entanglement. Are not
evil connections less to be feared from seven o'clock until noon, than
from seven o'clock until midnight? The most elementary reasoning would
easily demonstrate this, I fancy."

"Ah!" Hubert said, feeling the need of a mischievous air. "You know the
hours when Sin promenades, and have you encountered Sin?"

"Often," Sixtine jestingly responded, "often and Her Highness always
favors me with a smile. She is not proud and she willingly offers her
hand; you can see that she loves men in a friendly rather than in a
princely way; between them is an old familiarity. Daily she returned
with joy to the legitimate bed fallen to her lot. By an astonishing
multiplicity of faces, statures, gestures, voices, Sin courts women,
clothing herself in the dreamed-of form, and that is why I would rather
bring to an end my promenade before she commences hers. But, I pray
you, please go. Yes, come occasionally, at the same hour. _A bientôt_."




CHAPTER X

THE UNLEAVENED DOUGH


    "......"
                            Vauvenargues
    "La beauté c'est la forme que l'amour
    donne aux choses."
                            Ernest Hello.
    "Flaubert, pas de sentiment.... S'il l'avait,
    cela, il aurait tout."
         _Conversations_ de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam.


Smoking, strolling about, making paradoxes--there were a half dozen of
them under the distracted presidency of Fortier, who was correcting
proofs for his first number of the new series.

"Good day, Entragues. You received my note and you are bringing me
some copy. Now that we come out every fortnight, I am going to be very
hungry, I warn you."

"Did you ever see a review lack copy--a review which pays?" Hubert
answered. "Print Constance. You owe it to your subscribers. 'Every
woman would like to read this new study of youthful psychology. The
originality of the thought, the pure relief of the style, together with
the profound knowledge of all the mysteries of the feminine heart,
make it an exquisite masterpiece of the analysis of passion. Please
insert.'"

"He promised me a novel."

"With an alluring title," interrupted a voice.

Entragues turned his head. A young man, with a correct and cold air,
was looking at him. Fortier introduced them to each other. He was a
friend of the countess. They surely must have met at the Marigny Avenue
home? Entragues acquiesced in this insinuation, thinking: Tomorrow, or
the day after, my poor Fortier, the countess and _la Revue spéculative_
will belong to Lucien Renaudeau.

"The title?"

"Alluring," repeated Renaudeau; "it is called: 'Pure as Fire.'"

"This florist of souls quite pleases me," said Jean Chrétien, in a slow
and rich voice. "I am looking over, among his books, 'The Wisdom of
the Nations.' It is full of incontestable truths. One walks here in a
friendly garden: all the aphorisms of Stendhal and Balzac frequently
crop forth. But if we wish to start a seriously symbolistic review, it
is necessary to tempt culture with less familiar animals."

Sylvestre entered with a cloudy air and Renaudeau instantly addressed
him in a harsh tone:

"Now tell us who is that counterfeit of old George Sand who came here
yesterday with your recommendation?"

"With a dog under each arm?"

"A black and a blond one. She offered us copy, patrons, loans, her
experience, romantic souvenirs, the last boots of Alexander Dumas,
cards of the chief of police, the address of a photographer and three
copyists, an interview with Bouvier, the right to reprint the complete
works of her late husband, tickets for the coming Elysée ball and for
women, too, I think, but that was a bit vague."

"Oh!" Sylvestre gently answered, "she is old and poor, she must make a
living."

"I do not see the necessity," Renaudeau said.

"A fine silhouette for a 'Parisian' novel," Fortier said.

"Doubtless, because it would be true?" asked Jean Chrétien, a poet who
professed Buddhism. "Would you become a modernist?"

"A naturalist," said Fortier, laughing, "I want to make money."

"I fancy you will want to a little later," said Entragues. "The
original cavern is empty. Do you take Huysmans for a naturalist? But
his _A Rebours_ is the most insolent mockery of this very school, when
he simply replies to Zola's "_naturiste_" and democratic enthusiasm:

"Nature has had its day!"

"That is a book!"

"A disheartening book," Entragues continued, "one which has confessed
in advance, and for long, our tastes and distastes."

"Yes," Chrétien agreed, "but I am speaking of others, of the naive
souls who believe that because an object moves it must exist. Nature!
but it is the artist who creates nature, and art is only the faculty
of objectifying in an image the individual representation of the world.

"And," Passavant put in, "man himself is only the image of the idea."

"In that case," Chrétien answered, "far from attaining the absolute
truth, as those ninnies boast of doing, art is but a reflected
image--the image of an image. It is no longer the will which acts
directly, but only a will already fixed in the individual, subjected to
intelligence, weakened by division, in short, limited to whims."

"Such writers," Entragues remarked, "are, like the generality of men,
almost the whole humanity, victims of an optical illusion. They imagine
that the external world acts outside of them; this is a transcendental
stupidity, but which is not necessarily produced by their special
esthetics. The world is the idea I have of it, and the special
modulations of my brain determine this idea. They have ugly brains,
that is all. One could make amusing sketches in this way: the world
as seen by a crab, the world as seen by a pig, the world as seen by a
helminth. We describe ourselves, we can describe only that; an artist's
creation is the slow and daily reaction of intelligence and will on a
certain mass of individual cells."

"It would then be necessary," Renaudeau said, "to accept them as they
are! Not quite. One can recreate oneself, cleanse one's low nature,
take it to the Turkish bath, sponge it, rub it until the blood
circulates. You are too indulgent, Monsieur Entragues."

"Entragues," said Calixte Heliot, who just then entered, "loves nothing
but art and interests himself only in style."

"A novelty, indeed!" Entragues replied. "Unfortunately, art is not
sufficient to produce style; a gift is necessary. Without that
thing which Vauvenargues calls heart, Villiers sentiment, Hello
love, literature is an unleavened dough. Look at Flaubert; he is a
peremptory and sovereign artist who congenitally lacked love. Do you
think that Villiers, by the most diligent labor, could have effaced
from his work the stamp of his proud personality! Compare _Bouvard et
Pécuchet_ with the _Contes cruels_; there you have the patient genius
and the spontaneous genius, resigned scorn and indignant scorn, a hurt
intellect and a wounded soul...."

"Are you bringing me your poem, Heliot?" Fortier asked. "Just put it in
the closet with the masterpieces."

"Thank you," Calixte said, simply, as he opened a huge portfolio.

From it he drew his manuscript, where could be read, on the first
page, the author's name, Calixte Heliot, in a very beautiful flowing
handwriting. He was proud of his Christian name. Then he brought out a
small case and slowly untied its strings.

"Here is a masterpiece for you. Eh! What does Van Baël think of it?"

The art critic took the little yellow paper, a delicate etching, and
pronounced:

"Good, very good, a little dark, too deeply bitten. From afar," and he
stretched out his hand, "from afar it turns to aquatint."

"By whom is it? There is an S and an M interlaced at the left-hand
corner."

"S M, S M," repeated Van Baël. "I cannot guess. It is a portrait. I
see more letters after the monogram. Strange, strange ... It reads: S.
M. to S. M. A laconic dedication of the author to himself, or else a
strange coincidence of initials."

Nobody, not even Entragues who studied it intently, could find the key
to the monogram.

Hubert and Calixte were old friends who owed each other valuable
services. Calixte observed Hubert's insistance: a fatidical attraction,
rather than curiosity, fascinated his eyes, keeping them glued to the
engraving.

"You can have it if you wish, my dear Entragues."

"I accept it," Entragues replied, "but with the permission of being
able to return it to you or else to throw it into the fire."




CHAPTER XI

DIAMOND DUST


    "Chino la fronte e con lo sguardo a terra
    L'amoroso Pensier rode se stesso."
               Cav. Marino, _l'Adone_, VIII, 12.


More than two weeks had passed since the feverish and mysterious
evening which Sixtine granted to Entragues. Three times he had tried to
see her, three times he had failed: irritated, exasperated, cast down,
such were his three successive states of mind.

After the door had closed on him, by the gleam of an instantaneous
if tardy clairvoyance, he had seen and deciphered Sixtine's final
irony: "You do not take me? Yet I am at your mercy. I have the air
of thinking, of listening, of speaking, but I do not think, I do not
listen, I do not speak--I merely pretend to do all these things and I
await. Yet another half-hour, another ten minutes, five, one, the last
one, nothing! Go! you make me lose my patience!"

"Now," Entragues told himself, "it is quite well reorganized, I must
not lose it." And going by the longest route to his home, meditatively
he recomposed the scene, wrote it in his mind. How Would it go at
the theater? He planned the play. While the man in love explains
the tenderness of his sentiments, the woman disrobes. He shrugged
his shoulders: this would not be understood, he would be charged
with coarseness. And yet the comic Plato had already done it, then
Andronicus, then several Destouches, several Picards and several
Augiers.

One could pass on a little note to the eminent professors who
lecture on dramatic history (that vast science in three hundred
thousand _feuilletons_): Note.--Cf.: _Plato com. Frag. ed. Brulend._
§3;--_Andron. ap. Taschend._ t. XXXVII; etc. In the matter of books,
criticism buries you, in the matter of the theater, it overwhelms
you. To write for one's sole pleasure, with an absolute disdain for
present opinions. Yes, but if they are just, that is to say favorable,
one glories in it. Isolation is difficult, vanity ceaselessly and
indefatigably solders the cable one has cut. Vanity! Fatuity! And in
everything. Thus this monologue lends itself to Sixtine. I reason like
a male; and she feels like a female and I shall never know what she
felt at a certain moment, because, even taking for granted a confession
and the wish to be sincere, she would lie by nature. The truth is what
one thinks it; when one no longer thinks of anything--all is reduced to
nothing! There remains sensation, but analyzed sensation--diamond dust!

He went to bed feeling miserable, and as he was dozing off with the
consciousness of his moral powerlessness he was seized with a fit of
despondency comparable to that of impotent men when in the presence of
the desired woman. Incapable of loving, incapable of tearing from his
heart the parasitic science whose tentacles strangled him, it seemed
to him as if he had swallowed plaster, as if muddy blood stagnated in
his veins; or rather as if his arteries slowly carried a curare which
gradually benumbed his muscles. His mind obstructed with the most
contradictory metaphors, he tried them one after the other, vaguely
disgusted with their absurdity. Finally, with a rush of vitality, he
somewhat reconquered his logic and ceased to hold himself in contempt:
"I suffer, hence I love!" This thought, though he ironically perceived
its mild naïveté, comforted him, a very long and decisive breathing
reëstablished the haematosis, and he was able to sleep peacefully.

Painful doubts of this sort came to torture him on more than one
evening. He was only delivered from them by anger--the first time
that he knocked at Sixtine's door without getting a response. Certain
deceptions on certain days determined this action, when strong desire
had a precise end. At this moment it was to see Sixtine, merely to see
her, merely the pleasure of the eyes.

The effect was the same after the second check, but accentuated to a
sort of rage, a hardly dangerous crisis whose very lashes were salutary.

The last mockery of fortune, on the other hand, threw him into a
resigned dejection. "She does not want to see me; I have displeased
her, but how? Yet I love her." Thus displaced from the subject to the
object, doubt was supportable as an imposed pain which one accepts
without having any responsibility: "It is not my fault."

So he paced the streets or visited his friends and the _Revue
spéculative_, a pale melancholy upon him like the vegetation of a cave.
Under the shadow of a strong habit which no disturbance could uproot,
he still worked in the mornings, but he shortened the hours, impatient
for his distracting strolls. His imagination no longer accompanied
him. It seemed that in ever projecting his thought towards an external
creature, he had proportionately diminished the intensity of his
evocative faculty.

As he was leaving the _Revue_, after Fortier had told him that the
countess, now installed in her home because of affairs, was receiving
some friends on a certain evening, at nine o'clock, he discovered that
the present day was Wednesday, the day in question.

"Perhaps I will find Sixtine there?"

This quite natural reflection guided his somnambulism towards Marigny
Avenue. In the interval he had dressed and dined with a perfect
unconsciousness. A system of newly organized revery relieved the
slow and rude friction of transitions; furnished with a problem of
metaphysics, commerce, art, politics, it mattered not what so long as
it required shrewd deductions, he used to be so perfectly absorbed in
them that the hours vainly pricked him with their pins, the minutes. He
walked through the streets insentient, inexistent. But, involuntarily,
this action of his mind which shut him in between the walls of the
fixed idea was a grievous imprisonment against which his will rebelled;
on the other hand, chosen and brought about in entire freedom, this
incarceration saved him, without the tax of suffering, from the ennui
of expectation. Nothing was so painful to him as changes of rhythm.
He wished them to be abrupt or imperceptible, partaking of a sudden
brutality or of an infinitesimal gentleness, the unity of force
sustained with all its initial violence or decomposed into the infinity
of its diminishing fractions. Leibnitz had taught him the arithmetical
method of reducing the sensation of time to an evanescent progression:
he applied the method to life. To live and not to be aware of living
was an ideal to which his senses, deceivers, but unrelenting, too often
barred the road. Today the obstacle had been surmounted.

In the small modern room on the ground floor there were many people:
some raised their heads when his name was announced; the usual
movements and whisperings:

"An Entragues?"

"Which Entragues?"

"Oh! some stray stem of an Entragues! The name is quite common in the
South."

"Yet he carries himself well."

"The countess will tell us about him." As soon as he was freed from the
ceremonial of introduction, Entragues sought the eyes of some friend
with whom he could be at ease. He found Sixtine's eyes: a gesture
beckoned him.

He obeyed without astonishment, for he had seen a chair near her,
guarded by a fan.

"I noticed you. How criminal I consider myself towards your
friendliness and insistence.... Do you want me to number your visiting
cards? Why did you not write to me?"

"But I wanted to see you."

"Yes, but writing has a witchery unknown to printed forms. Instead of
seeking me, you should have called me. And you have sought so badly!"

"No, since I find you at last."

"By chance! Are you satisfied? You wished to see me, well, look at me."

"That is what I am doing," Hubert responded, "and with pleasure. I
would never grow tired of it, Madame."

"I supposed it was quite the other way," Sixtine rejoined, "and that a
secret or very inconsiderate presentiment informed you of my absences.
How one blames one's friends! For the past three weeks, I left three
times, in the evening, to come here, and naturally on the Wednesday
of each week. Admit that it was odd for me to find your card, each
Wednesday that I returned home."

"I am lost if you suppose I did it purposely," Hubert answered,
"for every explanation is too simple to seem probable. I will give
you the best one, although it may not perhaps be the true one. The
first evening in which I passed a few minutes at your home was
a Wednesday. A latent force must have led me to your door on the
following Wednesdays, and this without any participation of my will.
This periodical return, like the regular culmination of a feverish
condition, is after all quite natural."

"These are the reasonings," Sixtine replied, "of an automaton who
would be hard put to explain why he always plays the same tune on the
flute, at the same hour. But you have come to the countess, instead of
knocking at my door. Did no one wind you up this morning? On whom does
this task devolve?"

"It would be yours, Madame, if you consented."

Each of them, ill at ease, felt the same desire to be silent and to go
away. Sixtine, not yet calmed after the old ill-humor that had finally
exploded, feared to hurt Hubert, feared to bleed him with too many
prickings. Hubert, who feigned a sad politeness, endured suffocating
agony. So he had been judged and Sixtine had pronounced sentence, with
what aggravations for the unhappy man! Incapable, perhaps, of loving;
certainly incapable of sharing his love. Would no mirage, then, be able
to deceive him persistently, with sufficient certitude to give him
courage to lead across the desert, towards the oasis, a phantom of love
vivified by desire? She scoffed him and he surrendered; she fled and he
watched her flee.

At the foot of the stairs which she had rapidly descended, remorse
seized Sixtine by the flap of her cloak; she turned her head and
waited for several seconds. Then, lifting her skirts, she hurried to
the carriage which a watchful gamin, upon noticing her at the sidewalk,
had motioned with mock gestures of obsequiousness. Profiting by the new
indecision, remorse tried to seduce her with these insinuations:

"The air is very pleasant, the sky is clear, it would be nice to return
on foot, chatting on the way. This poor Hubert would appreciate it, and
I have really been a bit severe with him: he asks so little! But what
can he be doing?"

She listened: no sound of a person issuing from the house. "What is
this! You seem to be waiting for him! What an attitude for a woman!"
the thin and whispering voice of feminine vanity breathed to her. She
gave the driver her address and climbed into the carriage.

Hubert had slowly walked down the stairs stopping at each step. He
staggered under a fit of contempt. His whole person, the very necessary
movement of his limbs seemed to him an insult to life. His reflection,
perceived in the mirrors, gave him a horror of effectual futility.
This careful attire--what a pretentious obedience to vanity I How ugly
he was with his pale cheeks and empty gaze! Ah! dust compressed into
a human form, what prevents thee from returning to thy natural state,
where thou couldst humbly blend thyself, as would be fitting, with the
bruised and scorned sand crying beneath thy phantom feet?

He reached the gate; a carriage, detaching itself from the file,
departed: "Perhaps it was she? No, she must be far away, by now.
The air is very pleasant, the sky clear, it would have been nice to
return on foot, chatting. This pleasure was not made for me, and it is
ridiculous even to dream of it. Yet, would she have refused me, if I
had asked? Eh! there I reason as if this woman had the slightest liking
for me. Shall I, then, never cure myself of the stupid presumption
with which I so grievously delude myself? What is the good of my
philosophy? Everything is useless. Ah! I suffer less! The futility of
my life is not unique; it is confounded with the universal nothingness.
Yes, but all the same I can only consider myself, only myself, since I
know nothing outside of my consciousness. Well, then! I remain alone,
indemnified and invulnerable. What is that cloud, called Sixtine, which
comes to trouble my royal indifference and to conceal my sun--death?
I do not want to go to sleep in the shadow of her beauty. What is the
good of loving, when the awakening is certain. Ah! if eternity were
given me! Indispensable eternity, without you life is only a quite
despicable thoroughfare. Does the present hour exist for the condemned
person who knows that the next hour will not belong to him? And this
life is less than an hour for whomsoever knows the worth of what he
has been deprived of in being robbed of eternity." How he would have
sacrificed his genius to be a Christian and no longer a dilettante of
Christianity, believing, not in the unique beauty, but in the truth
of religion, assured not alone of his social necessity, but of his
immutable, absolute and solar truth!

He issued from his metaphysical cloud near the Pont-Royal, and fell
back into his actual misery. The woman he loved did not love him and
would never love him. In vain he scorned himself, in vain he accused
himself of emotional impotence, the man deep in him protested and
repeated: "I must love, since I suffer."

But, with Entragues, the man never pronounced the final aphorism. After
the troubled divagations of the lover came the romancer, an artist or
ditch-digger who gathered impressions together, clothed them in words
as with a shroud of chatoyant folds, and laid them to rest, with care,
respect and tenderness, in the vault whose portal bears the words
written in letters of gold: LITERATURE.

He went to sleep, dreaming of the embryo of a romance which a more
disinterested person would find in this new adventure. But perhaps
he would some day acquire that necessary disinterestedness! At first
the idea was outrageous, then he grew accustomed to it; he mentally
sketched a first chapter--that of the encounter. He transported
the scene to Naples, at the end of the fifteenth century, and the
personages became pure symbols. The Man, a prisoner, typified the
idea of the soul imprisoned in the jail of the flesh, quite ignorant
of the external world, refashioning the vague vision transmitted by
the senses. The Woman, a madonna, was a statue which the prisoner's
love endowed with life and feeling, becoming as really existent to him
as a creature of God. And on this theme could be developed all the
divagations of love, dream and madness.

On the morning of the next day, he commenced this story which was
closely based upon his actual state of mind, and in which he would take
delight in transposing, in a manner of logical extravagance, the drama
he was naively playing with Sixtine.

This madonna was the new woman, _la Madonna Novella_, and what name
should be given to the prisoner, a prey to his own imagination, if
not that of _Della Preda_, since we are in Italy. _Veltro_ fits the
indispensable turnkey, and for title--_The Adorer_.




CHAPTER XII

THE ADORER


    "_Ave rosa speciosa!_"
                        Innocent III.


I. Blood Red

           Sainte Napolitaine aux mains pleines de feux,
           Rose au coeur violet, fleur de sainte Gudule,
           As-tu trouvé ta croix dans le désert des cieux?
                   Gérard de Nerval, _les Chimères_.


The night entered through the loophole--the end of a day of horror. He
had been forgotten; he had not been given his daily walk. Perhaps he
was going to perish here, without seeing the Novella again.

Morning, noon or evening, according to the arabesques of his fancy.
Veltro, his jailor, opened the door with a violent turn of the key:
"To the tower!" Delia Preda obediently climbed the few steps of the
narrow and dim stairway; he climbed slowly, as if to perform a duty
to which no exception could be taken, for he knew that these daily
moments of apparent liberty in the open air were given to intensify the
horrors of his cell and to prevent him from losing the notion of time
and the duration of his torment. It is to reach this end rationally,
without doubt, that the modern, rigid philanthropists instituted
strict regulations in the new prisons. In 1489 the chief constables of
Naples already knew the means of preventing these abuses of confidence
by which the condemned person transmutes his punishment into an evil
dream; but this was reserved for the prisoners of distinction. Guido
della Preda, Count of Santa-Maria, was accused of having conspired,
some said against the security of the State, others against the queen's
honor. Because he was a gentleman, they had not hanged him; they had
not beheaded him because he was innocent; a special punishment had
fallen to his lot, for in a royal jail a difference must be established
between prisoners who are guilty and those who are not.

He was in solitary confinement; the consciousness of the injustice he
suffered might have led him into attempts at escape or revolt, and his
intelligence would have made him the chief of the rascals sprawling
all together on the straw of the common dungeon; and it is not fitting
that a prisoner leave the prison through the window or that a jailer
be strangled in a scuffle: it sets a very bad example and is liable to
discredit prisons. There was yet another reason for this refinement, a
privilege discussed and accorded by the State Council at the request
of the Holy Office (for Della Preda was one of the thirteen peers of
royalty): "Our Guido is innocent according to laws of this world, but
who can boast of being so according to eternal laws? Let him, then,
suffer in advance the punishment which God reserves for him upon
his entry into the other life! Let him suffer more than the others,
since he is less guilty! Let each hour of his mortal life be a painful
preparatory measure leading to liberating death, through which eternity
opens! Ah! What a good fortune for him to have been implicated in this
action!"

The nineteenth hour sounded, seven o'clock according to our mode of
reckoning time; by habit, Della Preda lifted his eyes towards the space
framed by the high walls, and then towards the beginning of the arch,
but he only beheld the night. This clock indicated the time for him by
ringings violent as trumpets, and truly the pious desires of the Holy
Office were being accomplished: the mortal hours of his mortal life
fell one by one on his head, like leaden balls.

But all had not been foreseen! What holy monk could divine that within
himself the prisoner would find joys and torments which not even the
venomous Parthenope could have aroused in any heart.

The Tower of the Cross (_Torre della Croce_), so called at that time
and for the past four hundred years the Tower of the Prey (_Torre
della Preda_), dominates with its battlements all the vulgar quarters
of Naples. It rears itself at the extreme end of a mass of old ruins
still serving as a prison, through custom, and to which the people have
given the name of Prison of the Blood-Hound (_Carcer delle Veltro_).
At the end of the fifteenth century, these ruins, of a somewhat recent
reconstruction, had the appearance of a fortress, and a space of a
hundred and fifty feet was free between the walls, flanked by moats,
and the first low houses of the outskirts.

At the center of the platform where Della Preda was daily led, a guard
house was built which divided it in two, save for narrow passages, and
limited the view on the side of the country. As he placed his foot on
the last step, the prisoner had opposite him, to his left, the town
which stood out in the distance, full of square belfries and domes; to
the right was the blue gulf.

A church with flying buttresses, heavy and in ruins, first draws the
unaccustomed glance and fixes it by the splendor of its brilliantly
ornamented madonna. When the setting sun sank to the end of the pointed
niche and bathed her with rays, the rubies and chrysolites of her
tiara, the lepidolites and topazes of her starred aureola reflected the
brilliance of luminaries and the faced adorned with diamond eyes looked
rapturous.

The first time that Guido climbed to the tower was an evening when
the sun was setting. He saw neither the flashing town with its green
terraces, nor the blue bay with its white sails; but, uttering a cry,
he asked:

"Down there! Down there! Who is that lady?"

"That lady? What lady?" repeated Veltro, with an astonished, already
uneasy eye.

"Yes, that lady in front of the church of the Orphans?"

"Ah! you mean above the portal? That's the Novella, my lord," Veltro
replied, baring his head as he pronounced the name, "a blessed and
benevolent madonna. You can hardly see her well from below, the street
is too narrow, but everybody knows that she is there, and that is
enough."

"What an agreeable woman!" answered Guido. "O Novella! Protect me and
love me!"

He knelt, bending his head, and when he stood up, after the last words
of his supplicating _ave_, the _Novella_ was smiling, full of grace and
tenderness.

"So you accept my prayer? Thanks, madonna! Deign to receive me as your
worshiper, let my breathing be a praise to your immaculate tenderness,
to your sovereign grace. Open your goodness to the irrevocable gift of
my life. Let me be to you as the pupil to the eye which moves it as it
wills. Trample me with the blessed weight of the adorable feet which
crushed the serpent! Let my flesh, for love of you, be withered, my
bones broken, my blood shed. Ah! I love you, I Novella, blessed and
benevolent madonna!"

The madonna accepted the pact: a sign denoted her wish, her choice and
her pleasure. Three times her eyelids drooped over her eyes and three
times they were raised. Then night fell and it seemed to Guido that a
most notable miracle had suspended, for several instants, the sun at
the horizon's edge.

"He is guilty, quite guilty," Veltro reflected, "but he has piety, he
regrets his crimes. May the madonna listen to him!"

"Listen to me, my lord," added the jailor, "and know that there is no
better recourse in the world than to implore the _Novella_. You see
it is not for nothing that she is called the Madonna of the Orphans!
Her arms always are open and she does not carry a babe because all
God's creatures are her children. She is the only one, at least to my
knowledge. _Santa Madonna degli Orfani, ora pro nobis_."

During the two months that the Novella had been Guido's mistress, she
had given him only happiness, charming and adorable happiness. He
loved her and she smiled upon his love, except on certain days when a
light cloud made ashen the pure face or the clear eyes of the beloved.
He loved and, absorbed in his worship, felt himself loved. At first
apprehensive, his tenderness now grew daring. The gentle but eternal
smile no longer sufficed. The lover felt passion's boldness grow in his
heart, like an imprisoned rose impelled by its sap to throw the living
treasure of its purple to the broad day-light. The hour was approaching
when the timid adorer would demand some tokens from the silent adored
one, oh! the merest tokens of an adoration that was shared; the hour
was approaching, the hour of communion, the spiritual hour which takes
its sister by the hand, the hour of serious and tender eyes, the hour
of strong caresses--the carnal hour.

The dark day which he passed under the hammer strokes of the pitiless
clock was all the more painful to Guido since he had chosen it for
definite questionings. Like all others, like lovers, he wished to know
how matters stood, when it is simple to direct one's own questions and
answers: but that is perhaps what he did, and why do anything else?

Veltro explained. It had been the fête of San Gaetano, the country
his wife came from, about two leagues from Naples. He had received
permission, had left, like a mad-cap, without informing the valet
charged with his duties. "Would his lord the prisoner be good enough to
forgive him?"

"Yes, Veltro, I pardon you. You are not bad and I believe you will not
let it occur again, when I tell you that I have suffered greatly."

He slowly mounted, as to a certain joy, half shutting his eyes under
the prolonged caresses of desire, counting the steps, trembling at the
approach of the last and thirty-third.

A sudden alarm arrested his customary transport as he reached the
battlements: he advanced hesitatingly, with gestures of astonishment
and deception.

"Yet it is she, it is really she, and I do not recognize her."

"Set your mind at rest, my lord, there is nothing the matter, quite the
contrary. They have put on her summer robe, that's all. The Novella
changes her attire each season. And then there was a holiday, as well.
Ah! if I had known! But how beautiful she is! She is beautiful as a
queen."

Yes, she was beautiful. But Guido paused a moment before admitting
this transmutation in which he had not at all participated. He sadly
regarded the new Woman, sadly and with reproachful eyes:

"Are there seasons for my love? Are there days, are there hours? I
loved the sky-colored robe which you had put on for our first meeting?
Why then have you doffed it? Was it intended for me, at least? Did you
wish to surprise me with a richer vesture that would more nobly become
your serene beauty? Ah! queen, this too comely cloak does not bring my
heart nearer to your heart, nor your lips to my lips; then, to what
avail? You were blue like the sky and the sea, blue like the dream,
blue like love--why this bleeding purple? In what stream of blood have
you dipped your grace? Had I not offered you the torrent of my veins?
Queen, you have betrayed me! You still smile at me, but your smile is
cruel, you scoff, you scorn! An unfriendly day was that one in which,
far from my tears, you permitted barbarous hands to profane the limbs I
adore! It was I who should have divested you, it was I who should have
covered you, divine and nude, in the sacred cloak of my effusions! Ah!
you make me weep, Novella! What! you too weep, dear Passion, so you
do yet love me? Oh! weep not! Pardon, pardon, I am the wicked one, I
am the inclement one, and, moreover, I was mad. It is conceivable: I
thought I had lost you. But no, it is not so? You are mine, more than
ever, only mine! Let me be truly happy! No? Heed me, I love you! Not
yet? It is true, I did doubt you; it is necessary to suffer, I wish to
suffer."




CHAPTER XIII

CHRISTUS PATIENS


    "Elle ne jugeait pas, ayant d'autres pensées."
                        Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, _Isis_.


"In this so lightly tilled field, where the corn has been so hurriedly
sown," Entragues told himself, "I reap nothing but problems, tares,
weeds, ridiculous rank grasses! For three days I have had only the
worry of a mathematician intent upon insoluble _x's_."


SERIES OF _X's_.

    _xa._--It was poison.
    _xb._--History of the portrait chamber.
    _xc._--S. M. to S. M.

_xa_

"I believed I could find the solution. In truth, the problem was
buried; it sprang up again, evoked by the two others."

_xb_

"Is it a history in which she is implicated? Is a page of her life
written in this mysterious chamber where innocent travelers are
favored with such astonishing visions? Must this second _x_ be joined
to the first one? A crime might have been committed there."

_xc_

"There is no doubting, if heaven has endowed me with some divining
sense, that one of the mono-grams signifies Sixtine Magne and perhaps
both resolved themselves into the identical syllables: a homage of
the present to the pact, of the Sixtine of to-day to the Sixtine of
yesterday: a portrait of the lover or husband, since she was married.
Ah! I have it! Her husband had a Christian name commencing with S. It
is a question of finding an engraver with the name of S---- Magne and
that may easily be ascertained at some print dealer's shop; or else, in
the case of a lover, S---- M----. Upon what do I base this deduction?
On nothing. The twice-repeated initials of the woman I love ought
to torment me, else I would not love her. Perhaps they only conceal
names of no interest to me, but the 'perhaps' suffices to justify my
uneasiness. The past? Enough of that. The present? Ah! the unknown
enemy which one divines in smiles, in incomplete phrases, in gestures,
and even in the little intimacies of the woman who lets herself be
loved! A pleasant sensation and one which I still have not experienced!
The jealousy without cause, the jealousy that nothing can cure--not
even possession!... I must put down that remark, it is true."

He wrote several lines in his note-book: "Does a woman's supreme
abandon prove her love? No, for this may be due to the occasion, to
ennui, to the need of deceiving, to vengeance, to the perversity which
throws her into your arms. To feel yourself loved, it is necessary
to believe; love is a religion. You must have faith, you must love
yourself. Love yourself? Yes, that is the means of being the more
easily deceived. First to strip yourself of reason, then to plunge
towards the truth! Absurd. Faith, then? Yes, to have faith, and is
truth itself any thing except faith? Truth, faith--two aspects of one
entity--the mystery of a God in two persons. Ah! if I believed that I
was loved by Sixtine, she would love me, I would have peace, the joy
of union. It can be done. How? Perhaps merely by not reflecting. To
embark on the light skiff and go down with the current of water....
Towards the Ocean, yes, towards the ineluctable abyss? Evidently, but
this detail is insignificant. The thing is to embark and not to pass
your life in watching others depart for the exquisite unknown. But you
return from it! Then what is the good? If the current is a circuit,
it is just as well to remain at home and read the _Divine Comedy_.
Alighieri himself returned! There is only death. But one never returns
from death, and it is of little avail to another; but it has its
answer ready and whispers it in the ear when it is so inclined. Bitter
is life, more bitter is death."

A church stood near him. He recognized the humble _Saint-Médard_,
entered and fell on his knees:

"O God of the Cross, Christus patiens, eternally suffering Christ,
hearken to me! I seek joy, I seek love, I seek grief, and I find only a
dreary void. I can neither enjoy myself, nor love, nor suffer. Take me
by the hand and lead me as a mother leads her child. Must not one first
suffer with thee? Then will come love, like rain in the desert, and joy
will dawn, the joy of loving, the joy of having suffered...."

"I presume to pray," said Entragues to himself, lifting his head,
"and I am giving vent to rhetoric. This prayer is welcome, and if I
can remember it, I will use it. It would be blasphemous to take my
note-book and write it down! Why not! One must profit from inspiration,
for it can not be recovered."

He made a note of his ejaculation, with very slight variations.

"I stopped myself in time. The unconscious comedy would have made me
blush in the end. Do I pray seriously and am I a Christian? Yes, I
wish to be a Christian, and to partake of the most mystic and abstract
Catholicism, when this would serve only to separate me from the abject
mob, renouncing like a vile freedman the religion which drew it from
slavery. It is quite evident that in my very heart I believe in the
divinity of Jesus rather than in that of Sakya-Mouni and that I laugh
at the vanity of an unconscious creator!...

"Ah! how enervating are these solitary rounds!"

Then, suddenly:

"I must see her, I must see her! Ah! provided it isn't Wednesday?"

The newspapers spread on the stand of a little bookshop told him
that to-day was Friday, October 27. So ten days had already passed,
ten irrevocable days since that dismal Wednesday when his love had
collapsed. Collapsed! well, it could be rebuilt. But it really was too
much, literally, to love at a distance. Sixtine did not, like himself,
occupy her hours in analyzing everything and nothing: to have oneself
loved, one must be seen. Henceforth, he would seek every occasion, he
would follow her like a hunter, pressing her pitilessly to the very
quarry of kisses. He would cease reflecting, and would think only of
the end, counting obstacles as naught. He would commence from this
evening.

His feet, already, obeyed, following this mental activity. He quickly
ascended a popular street full of children, little democratic dauphins,
brats of the modern sovereign. At this moment the inventor of popular
suffrage seemed to him the most execrable monster produced by humanity
and Nero and Attila, recast in a single model, compared to this unknown
dastard, were creatures worthy of the genuflection. No one had abased
the Idea to this point, no one had tried to make of the world such
a desolate stable, where the kicking, respected Houyhnhms would have
the ascendancy. He was a Pharisee and did himself justice for never
having eaten the bitter hay of this royal rack: at the age of reason
he had renounced, with disgust, his part in the sovereignty and never
had a ballot soil his aristocratic fingers. This was due less to his
early education than to subsequent and personal reflections, for modern
degeneration accepts accomplished facts, and all that is left are
single, inward and useless protests.

As he descended the Boulevard Saint-Michel, his step fell into an
idle rhythm with the pace of the strollers. He looked around him and
judged that no superior essence emanated from this other environment:
here was the same evaporation of unconsciousness. Below, just as
alongside and above, by devious ways people sought happiness, without
suspecting, according to Pastor Manders, that it is open rebellion to
seek happiness in this life. The social right was another political
illusion equally chimerical. On this subject Herbert decided to read
some Hobbes, at the first opportunity.

But did he himself, for example, consider himself above or only on a
level with humanity? Ah! there is the intimate thought of each of the
noble copies of baked clay which a God formerly modeled on the shores
of the Tigris: I and the others, I and men, I and the rest, etc. It
is thanks to this process that one judges, that one writes the novel
or the story, that one rails in comedies or in shorter pleasantries.
Judging is the universal and the particular, it is everything, it
is life. Is not the famous tribunal, the tribunal of consciousness,
with egoism for presiding judge and vices for assessors? And Hubert
judged too: in defiance of all reason, he weighed the imponderable and
fathomed the impenetrable, that is to say, the thoughts of others,
without reflecting that one can know nothing outside of oneself and
that to judge men, in short, is to judge the idea we have of men.
Like the first of these prisoners, he had let himself be caught in
the snare of reality: scoffing at those who sought happiness, he
scoffed at himself, for what had he done since his birth in this world
of sensibility except to consume the best part of his force in this
quest? Vain and vainer than ever now that he was straying towards the
external clouds. To what did he pretend, in loving Sixtine, and the
yielding clouds dispersed, would he enjoy himself just as well with
the fundamental night? When he broke the dear head between two stones,
would he see what was within? One can doubtless use more human means
and, for example, inoffensive fascination.

He returned to his preceding revery and the circle was closed;
decidedly he must not reflect, he must act.

He found himself in excellent humor and quite ready, this time, to
count without boredom the quarter hours on the clocks of the streets.
He would even have willingly laughed with some chance companion, or
considered the toddling of women, or strolled past diverting pictures.
The Louvre, which he perceived from the other side of the stream,
tempted him: he went to see once more the striking Clytemnestra so
drolly illuminated with a torch and he was soon amusing himself in
this room which, in previous days, he would have called a corner of
shame. It did not equal, for comic intensity, the terrible Hogarths and
the distressing Daumiers, but David and his school, nevertheless, had
ridiculed antiquity successfully. The sober Flaxman had never succeeded
in delineating personages so completely stupefied at having been cut
out by a punch.

Entragues had once said that to make place for this foreign exhibition
the paintings of the masters of an immoral nudity had been hidden
in closets: it was the secret cabinet of the guards of the People's
paintings. There remained to determine if bad paintings has not its own
immorality and if the _Serment des Horaces_ should not be put under key
as well as the _Atalante et Méléagre_, the Parrhasius, perhaps a little
exciting, in which Tiberius delighted?

From the arbitrary stupidity of the Neo-Romans Entragues went to the
powdered heads of those enemies of the Nation and Humanity which
David had designed, finally stripped of their paint, but so scornful
that, one might say, he had lowered their eyes. The Pierrot gallery
was charming and made you understand the Revolution, the envy of the
People and its hate for graces so high and remote.

While leaving, and under the portices of the rue de Rivoli, he began to
follow a woman whose restless gait, from the Cour du Louvre, excited
his curiosity. She was not at all bad; she wore a rather original dress
with black lace that fell in waves; but nothing striking. A brown
pigment covered her eyes and served as a background, but there was no
magical attraction: she was somewhat tall, slender, dark, very pale and
the two sides of her face seemed unequal, because of the unequal droop
of the corners of her mouth, the unequal lifting of her brows above
heavy eye-lashes, one quite distended, the other in little contracted
waves.

Nothing of caricature, but the sustained impression was painful.

The flat basket of an orange seller, at the corner of the rue de
Marengo, and the sundry encumbrances of boxes and little wagons under
the three arcades, seemed to exasperate her; she hastened forward,
brushed against the fourth pillar, then against the fifth, then against
the others, but sedately now, like a person who walks unconcernedly.
If a group of persons collected around a pillar, she waited, brushed
against it, and left; if the distraction of shop-windows had drawn
her towards the other side of the walk, she quickly returned, as if
with remorse at having passed one of the steps of her sorrowful path.
Strict obedience to her impulse did not present her from noticing the
curiosity of the passerby, but she had acquired such a skill, through
long practice doubtless, such a deceptive gait, that no one noticed
her.

She crossed the Palais-Royal Square, gained the Avenue de l'Opéra,
all the time touching the gas lamps, trees and columns. There, she
recommenced her maneuver with this variation: she touched each
shop-door with her knee. One of them was opened; she waited, as before
a precipice, gazing at the curtains of red plush of a milliner of
ill-repute; she had such an unfortunate air that Entragues, with a
discreet bow, accosted her:

"You seem troubled, Madame, can I be of any service?"

She looked at him, and not observing anything unpleasant in his tone or
gestures, replied:

"Yes, you can save me, if you have any magnetism. Call a carriage, get
in with me and take me back. I live at the Avenue de Clichy and am
going there on foot without being able ... without being able to do
otherwise.... You have seen me? As soon as I go out by myself, I walk,
I walk ... and when I return, I faint with fatigue and shame."

Entragues had already, with his lifted cane, signaled a coachman, who
drew near the pavement.

"You are merely a little nervous and need rest. Come, here is the
carriage."

He took her arm; she resisted, saying, for the abyss had closed:

"Always this, nothing but this, the last one!"

She had set off again, turning her head supplicatingly, but without
will-power.

"Well!" Entragues thought, "if I use force, the passerby will be
attracted. As for magnetism, I can't see myself making passes at four
o'clock in the afternoon, here in the Avenue de l'Opéra. It requires a
severe glance and a commanding voice. What an odd adventure and what a
queer hysterical person!"

Nevertheless he went and overtook her.

"Come," he roughly said, "the carriage is waiting. Come."

She lifted her eyes and, under his steady gaze, let herself be led.

Once in the carriage, she grew amiable, very amiable in fact; she told
him secrets, spoke of her husband, of her little girl, her only child
who was so dark and pretty, so capricious and wilful, breaking the
heads of her dolls to punish them, throwing live coal on rugs to smell
the burning odor, only liking salads, oranges and raw carrots, and not
yet eight years old!

"Stop the carriage there," she said as they arrived at Clichy Square.
"I am so grateful to you and you must come to see me. Would you like to
be my doctor? Be my doctor. I will obey you implicitly."

"But...."

"You are no doctor, but what does it matter? So long as my husband
believes it. He leaves at ten o'clock each morning. He is a stupid,
functionary.... Ah! I am not understood!"

Her eyes, lit like embers, betokened an approaching danger. Entragues,
who was concerned with quite other matters than the consoling of
hysterical women, stopped the carriage, got out and said:

"_A bientôt_. I understand you."

She smiled, with a quick toss of her head. The carriage departed.

"She is at a crisis," mused Entragues. "Some one else will profit by
it, for she is not ugly and should have, at certain moments, a sort of
Maenad beauty. But I love Sixtine and feel incapable of loving other
women. But why is it that so many women whom you pay no heed to, throw
themselves at you, while the only one you desire shuns you?"




CHAPTER XIV

THE FAUN


    "Sancte pater, sic transit gloria mundi."
                              _Le Pontifical romain_.


No sooner was he in Sixtine's presence than Hubert felt his pleasure
spoiled by the questionings which an algebraic schema had laid down but
had not solved. So his will to act weakened under the weight of the
present. First he must decipher the puzzle.

He coldly advanced, with a calm smile, kissing the hand she gave him;
this contact quieted his need of knowledge. Then, he asked himself
whether the interlaced foliage of two or three problems would not form
the necessary aureola around this fair head.

"And when I should reach the precise explanations, would I have added
more beauty to this body full of beauties? As for the soul, I know that
it is a secret coffer to which no one--not even she herself--has the
key. And what could I do with it, and what could she do with it? So
my anxiety is quite futile. What if I took her merely with plausible
words, as the bird-call, by its mechanical song, captures the free
birds?"

They spoke of different things, particularly of the falling leaves,
and Hubert skilfully led, under the same stimulus, his revery and the
conversation.

A Ziem, at the end of the room, cleverly illuminated by hidden lights,
a resplendent Italian road-stead, with purple-tinted sails, many
colored clouds in the sky, and over all a deep transparency, a sense
of great distance, a brilliancy of atmosphere full of the magic of
unfailing blue:

"Naples, a Naples I have never seen! Ah! that is because I scarcely
look towards the gulf, for the Novella is my heaven and my ocean."

"Monsieur d'Entragues, why have you such a distracted air?"

This brought him back to the truth: he was not Della Preda, she had
just pronounced his correct name, and Naples disappeared; after a few
minute's absence, he found himself in Paris again, near Madame Sixtine
Magne and before a quite good view of Venice.

"It is that picture," continued Sixtine. "It pleases me, but do not
observe it too closely, for you will be forced to admit that it is
mediocre, but charged with some power of illusion for imaginative
minds."

While cursory words were being exchanged about painters and their
paintings, there reawakened in Hubert, without any determinable cause,
one of the most significant impressions of his adolescence. Feeling
the impossibility of evading it and fearing a fit of abstractions, he
repeated it aloud. The word "madonna" uttered by Sixtine furnished the
pretext:

"Summer and a stormy evening. I had been restless all day; sudden
languors made me prostrate; my nerves vibrated like harp-strings with
each clap of thunder. My grandmother's harp rested in a corner of the
room and when any one touched a door, it echoed. I compared myself
to this mysterious instrument which I had once seen out of its rose
silk case. I listened to the interior murmurings of my overexcited
life, sounds welled within me, made me ill, and slowly went to a death
of which it seemed I should die. Then the fears, the sweet fears of
seeing, among the branches, a strange woman who would smile to me.
Then the indiscreet titillations of pubescence which passed, played,
breathed like a warm wind upon my skin. It was vacation time in the
country: they had left me to my own devices and I rolled on the grass
and ate it; I cut switches and shoots and instantly abandoned them;
I climbed up trees and, half way, let myself slip with lax muscles.
Obscene, vaguely understood couplets returned to me. Alexis and Corydon
preoccupied me and I fancied that for the first time I understood the
dim ardors of the poets. My desires were altogether formless. I had
still another anguish: what was this malady which gripped me? Life
would not be endurable, if I had to live thus. The night quieted me
somewhat. As I annoyed everybody, that is to say my great-aunt Sophie,
Aunt Azélia, an old maid, and the two house cats, dear and precious
creatures, I was given pictures to look at, with instructions not to
stir. They belonged to different parts of books given to quiet noisy
children. Suddenly, as I was reading, I stopped, having found my
childish ideal: the Madonna de Masolino da Panicale. Later in life I
came upon that name under a quite different lithograph, alas! although
it represented the same picture and the same madonna. I felt myself
grow pale with emotion and confusion. The half-opened eyes gazed on me
tenderly and the inflection of the head was so coy and amorous that my
heart pounded. But the eyes soon preoccupied me above all the rest: I
made a rampart of one of the leaves, I pretended to read attentively, I
was alone with the divine eyes and gazed upon them. An hour perhaps had
passed in this way but it seemed that I had hardly looked at them when
the inflexible Azélia uttered the daily phrase: 'The curfew has rung.'
Nothing rang in the house with its very old-fashioned clocks; so it was
a metaphor; she always repeated it and I usually did not even smile at
its mention. That evening I flew into a passion and I bantered the old
maid so much that she sent me to bed 'without a candle, as cats go to
the loft.' I fell asleep and slept as one sleeps at thirteen, but, in
the night, the eyes of the Madonna visited me and I have since felt an
inexplicable pleasure when gazing upon eyes that resemble the eyes of
the Madonna de Masolino da Panicale."

As he finished, Entragues perceived that Sixtine had them, the very
eyes; he knelt down and said:

"That is why I love you, Sixtine, and why I shall always love you!"

"Please, rise and let go my hands!"

"Let me keep them, let me love you. Ah! you are not indifferent, it is
not possible."

"But," returned Sixtine, "I am surprised.... You tell me a very curious
and interesting anecdote to which I listen without distrust, and it
ends with a declaration.... It is very unexpected ... Come, sit down
and let us talk peacefully.... I do not wish to discourage you, and I
really want to be sincere.... If I loved you I would say so, it would
even be a fitting occasion.... Frankly, I have not felt that little
emotion, that tiny nothing.... Then how say it, I am very inexperienced
... It perhaps will come another time. Come, you will recommence and it
will merely be a deferred pleasure.... I am quite willing to love....
My soul yearns for something.... It may be won, but you must conquer
it.... How? That is your affair.... And then, you know that if I loved
it would be for eternity.... There can be no casualness where such
bonds are concerned. It is necessary to know each other, to estimate
each other, to tell something of one's past life, to fathom characters,
to analyze tastes. We are not children.... All this...."

"Ah! I am a fool," Sixtine was saying to herself during the pauses
of her speech. "But I do not withdraw my hand, I only seem to ... So
stirred, I would not wish to admit how delicious it has been....
No, it is an avowal.... Unexpected? I was waiting for it and would
have been pained and surprised had it not come.... He is there, at my
knees, at my knees: Oh! remain thus.... If I were he I should speak
quite differently, but I like these doubts, these supplications. He
is going to implore me again, again, again.... Do I love him? I am
able to love him, at least I am not far from it, I feel that a certain
word, a certain gesture ... and I would be in his arms, but will he
say the word? Will he make the gesture?... Oh! yes! I have experienced
something undefinable.... Yes, but I am not at such a point of
ignorance.... Can all this be recovered, such moments?... Believe me,
it is true, true, true, I want to love.... Well, take it, but be sure
to take it. The word is too hard. My God, perhaps I am discouraging
him. So much the worse, it will be the test.... Oh! to be fixed, to be
bound forever! To him? I do not know, but if he wished it!... He is
quite proper, but a little cold, and then, I already know him; he is
capable of a profound sentiment.... What! he is rising, he abandons my
hand, he goes to sit down on that chair, so far, so far from me....
Well, it is finished, and I am deceived. Let us wait."

"I believe I was wrong," replied Entragues, "to let you speak so long.
You have recovered possession of your natural calm and now you are
unattainable."

"I also think so," said Sixtine, wounded by this clumsy reply. "But I
can assure you that I do not lose my head so easily. I have resisted
more dangerous assaults and my virtue came out of them all untouched.
If you expected to conquer me by surprise, you deceived yourself. Very
strong muscles might succeed, perhaps, but the conquest would be quite
precarious."

"You are mistaken, Madame, I love you too sincerely to count on the
occasion and a mere physical possession, gained through the strength
of one or the lassitude of the other. This is not at all my purpose. I
wished only to obtain an avowal in return for an avowal...."

"There are mute women," Sixtine interrupted.

Entragues did not pursue the matter further. He contemplated the
magnificent eyes which anxiously watched him, and he wondered how he
could make them tender, how make them speak, for eyes speak without
knowing that they do so, and are not masters of their language, like
lips. Finally he answered, with the bitterness of deception:

"It is necessary to lose one's head."

"It is necessary, it is necessary: that is easily said. If he who
proffers this aphorism first lost his head, it would be a different
matter. Be indulgent to a very banal allusion: Whoever wishes to make
others weep must be the first to weep."

"There are rebels and the spirit of contradiction makes great ravages
in proud souls."

"I confess to a little pride. Without it there would be no dignity, but
am I moved by the spirit of contradiction? I do not think so. If it
were given you to penetrate into my inmost recesses, you would see, on
the other hand, an infinitely malleable soul, a soul without definite
form--a lump of clay which awaits the divine shaper; a woman's soul,
in fine. But men judge women as inferior men; just as men, to women,
generally are other women armed with superior strength. In truth, they
are two beings as distinct as a dog and a cat, and it is always their
unhappy fate not to understand one another, just like a dog and cat.
What a distressing fatality, for one only exists through the other. Are
they, perhaps, truly complete beings only in the fleeting moment when
they are joined together? But it should be the labor of civilization
and intelligence to perpetuate that moment by spiritual bonds, strong
and supple ties whose physical meetings would be the consolidating
knots. No, there is nothing more than actual desire and when that has
fled, unassuaged, and one is well-bred, one has recourse to irony."

"It is a consolation," Entragues replied, "but I am refused it. I have
never had enough presence of mind to juggle with my chagrin and divert
myself by letting my eye follow the play of glass balls. Is my nature,
perhaps, excessively complicated? Sincerity, like a diamond, has more
than one facet...."

"Then," Sixtine interrupted, "it is a decomposed sincerity. Labor
is needed to assist it to the state of pure light and all this
psychological physics is too difficult a maneuver for my simplicity. If
you only knew how simple I am, how simple all women are, dreadfully
simple, my friend! In truth, one has but to take them by the hand!"

"Like the woman of a little while ago," Entragues thought. "Those whom
one supposes strange are only more feminine women, thrust by their
nerves to the extreme of feminity. It is true: to dominate the others,
one must study them specially. Did not Ribot find the laws of memory
and will in mental pathology? It would be excellent to make analogous
studies of hysteria, but if the matter does not attempt it, who is
capable of doing it? After all, the very subjects of the experiment
have today given me two valuable lessons. Unfortunately, it is to be
feared that they will avail me little in practical life. I am in a
mood to live and I do not know how. Come, I will provoke her a little
and guide myself by her replies. Women may be simple, but they appear
artful and we can only act in their presence according to received
impressions. Simple as a deciphered dispatch, simple when you have the
key. What was she saying to me? I must answer. She is looking at me.
Those beautiful large eyes! Ah! I truly love her!"

"Have me!" he exclaimed, falling on his knees. "I love you, I can say
no more."

Her restless studded fingers clasped her knees that were covered with
a red robe. Hubert embraced the knees and kissed the fingers. It was
the same as happens with little serpents in skins of old silver found
under withered ferns, in the sunlight; as soon as one touches them,
they stiffen and become as brittle as glass. Sixtine, at this brusque
contact, grew rigid as a lady of stone in her emblazoned seat, and
Hubert felt that the least insistence would shatter that soul. It was
too late. As Sixtine had so well conjectured, the startled occasion had
fled. The very woman who, an instant before,--something Hubert did not
suspect--would have surrendered for the present and for eternity to the
first kiss, this same woman resented a new attempt at intimacy as an
attempt at violation.

He obeyed and rose, but this time with more anger than embarrassment,
for physical desire held him in its iron grip. Its nostrils held tight
by a subduing apparatus, the bull occasionally resists under the stress
of its anguish, routs its tormentor and rears itself, ready for vain
accomplishments.

Before leaving, restraining his brutal unchained forces by a violent
effort of will, he endeavored to reassure Sixtine by a playful
amiability. Without returning to sow foolish explanations along
the path he had traveled and which a wall, suddenly up-sprung, had
confined, he smoothly indulged in metaphors and generalities upon love,
made a dusky poetry gleam, paused at the scintillations of lyrical
enthusiasm and succeeded in making the young uneasy woman smile, amused
and perhaps moved by his good will.

He really felt that this evening had been somewhat unfortunate, but
despair did not touch him. In short, nothing is irreparable. Then, too,
he had acted and he believed that this was a great point.




CHAPTER XV

THE CARNAL HOUR

    "And a thousand others, who never knew
    what it was to have a soul...; yet, sir,
    these men adorned society."
                              Poe: _Bon-Bon._


Once in the street, Hubert saw the ardent eyes of an invisible spectre
glaring at him through the gloom--two terrible, imperious and inciting
eyes. He recognized them and an oppressiveness crushed him. They were
the eyes of Lust.

"For women, the prowling phantom is called Sin--it is a male; for men
it is the female Lust. Ah! yes, I recognize her. She is a companion of
childhood. She is ingenious, She used to strum ballads to the moon on
my adolescent nerves. Today, she drums the roundelay of the Lupanars on
the back of my neck. With one stroke she wishes to degrade the lover
and the love. I will betake myself to vile titillations and she whom I
love will be the cause."

He reflected: a voluptuous dream brought on, from earliest adolescence,
by the contemplation of the madonna's eyes; since that time, the
association had been constant, often inexorable: he had to obey or
suffer absolute insomnia, or else race like a noctambulist towards a
retreating prey. In the last case, the winning talks at street corners
little by little dissolved desire in the slow fire of disgust. But
how terrible these nights when the shame of his obscene vagabondage
overwhelmed him with horror!

Yet he did not want to go and knock, like an obsessed bourgeois, like
clerks on paydays, at the latticed door of some sordid house, leading
his idealism to promiscuous divans and submitting his body to the least
withered bidder! He hesitated between a quite proper harem nearby, and
the semblances of soothing intrigue: he did not despise a reciprocal
choice that had the appearance of being voluntary, the excuse of
a desire that fixed on this one rather than on the other, public
preliminaries which are cleansed of all shame by the complicity of the
environment--the Bal Bullier, for example, or the Folies-Bergère. By
making a rapid decision and calling a carriage, he could reach one of
those slave markets before closing time. Upon reflection, he abandoned
the Bullier: the jades of this place were enjoying a rest. As for the
other exhibition, it was quite far away.

Undecided, he grew composed. For a moment he hoped to have freed
himself cheaply, but the eyes, the implacable eyes reappeared--obscene
stars that would cease and vanish only at the clandestine house.

It was in a little street near the Saint-Sulpice market.

There, lived a woman whose eyes, adequate for his youthful dreams, had
formerly captivated him--formerly, when he was about twenty--and no
reasoned disgust dulled the senses. Each time his carnal obsessions
evoked this pleasant memory he believed, with an animal waywardness,
that he would find the same woman and the same contentment.

Since she did not surrender to the first importunate caller, having
the coquetry of a certain amorous fastidiousness, one often found her
either alone or able, under the pretext of a jealous protector, to turn
out the guest of the evening, if the newcomer pleased her more.

"So this," reflected Entragues, "is the end? Honest women know quite
well to what promiscuities they are exposed by their refusals; they
should yield for the sake of dignity, at least. They should be taught
this: it would be one of the useful chapters in the courses of love
which old women could teach so well! But if they should yield, then
farewell to the pleasant duels of vanity."

Without suspecting how futile and mischievous his reflections were, he
followed the star.

"Now then, what is going to happen? Oh! I know in advance. None the
less, I am going in!"

He knocked in a certain way.

"To think that I remember all this! Yet it is long since I came here.
I have been spared these sudden and irremissible tortures for years.
Years! She must be changed, old and ugly. All the better, it will be
the necessary douche, and perhaps in a half-hour I shall be laughing
at myself instead of crying. Perhaps she will be absent, or asleep, or
engaged. Engaged! Like a school boy, I have a mind to run away before
the door opens. One, two ... I am going to leave."

No, he knocked a second time.

"Who is it?"

"........"

"Toi!"

"She addresses me so familiarly, it is frightful."

"........"

"Yours forever!"

"Again! After all, I please her. It is less vile than indifference."

Now, whisperings reached him, interrupted by the opening and closing
of doors. He had the sensation of conversations of nuns coming through
a wooden partition. This sordid place had the mysteries of a convent;
the approach of women and their movements always give man similar
impressions, different though the surroundings be. She was debating
with somebody; at last the bolt was unfastened, the key turned: another
wait, but shorter, in a dark antechamber: the sounds of a second
outside door, of steps descending the stairs: he had left.

She was dressed, a hat on her head, and gloved.

"Anyway, she has not just come from some one else's arms."

She had not aged. She was a warmly-blown summer which the breath of
mutual happy moments had not withered. Women can withstand anything;
neither vigils, nor fastings, nor repeated surrenders blight them;
quite the contrary, in order to bloom, they cannot have too much care.

She showed her joy in little exclamations and tiny unruly words;
Entragues thought it just as well to seize the present hour and attempt
an amiable libertinism.

She thought him handsome and made for kisses; he let her go on, rather
content with this impression and conscious of giving this woman, who
was superior to her companions, a moment of sincere pleasure.

"These women, after all," he thought, "are not so repulsive as the
adulterous ones; they lack, it is true, the aureole of deceit, but
they are neither more nor less guilty: what is the difference between
having two men at the same time, and having ten? With the second, vice
commences; and if the latter must be scorned, the same scorn should
be meted out to the former. Doubtless, since they are transgressing a
stricter law and breaking a definitive vow, the adulteresses should
enjoy a keener abandon, for hell-fire is already present in their
kisses, if they have been favored with a Christian education; but how
many of them are capable of so exquisite an enjoyment, of savoring in
love the irremediable damnation incurred for the pleasure of him they
love? One must grant them another possible superiority--that is, if
there are children--for while the offspring of the unmarried have
no father, adulterous offspring have two, a wise precaution against
orphan-hood."

Meanwhile, Valentine had brought cakes and a bottle of that Aumalian
wine which gives people the illusion of a princely treat. Then she grew
tender towards Entragues, her eyes beamed forth cajolery, allurement,
and promises.

She watched him dip his lips into the glass and wanted to drink after
him, seemingly intoxicated with desire and genuine love, consoling
herself in one evening, with this unexpected pilgrim, for some years
perhaps, of exactions in which she took no pleasure.

A blasphemous comparison had made him liken her to a Magdalene suddenly
seized with adoration, her soul just surrendered to a revealed God,
lovely with inner and useless supplications, so persuaded to love above
herself that a gesture of acquiescence would overwhelm her with joy.

This quite surprising spectacle charmed Entragues, but he felt his
fault aggravated by this prolonged titillation. It had ceased to be
the simple shock necessary to re-establish his composure, and had
inexcusably become a pleasure in itself.

She kissed his hand prettily, the last traces of remorse fled--their
emotions became identical.

They talked of trifles and he, employing those bagatelles which please
women, made her laugh: she seemed, at times, astonished at her own
delight, as if the cold air around her had suddenly and magically
evaporated in effervescent perfumes.

The weak and ravaged Entragues seemed beautiful to her: blond hair,
thinner and whiter at the temples, beard becoming a brown at the cheeks
and ending in two long points as in old Venetian portraits; the brow
high, the skin very pale but rosy in moments of animation, a curveless
nose, a heavy mouth, eyelashes and eyebrows almost black over eyes
gilded like certain feline eyes, but gentle. He had ordinary muscles
and frame, carried his head erect, and seemed to be gazing at mirages,
his eyes at once distant and steady, as if in a trance.

Valentine chiefly watched his lips. He perceived the fact and gave
them. She was neither powdered nor painted, but her authentic self.

Entragues gazed at her with pleasure but without agitation, for the
nude, especially in a woman's chamber, is not particularly sensuous;
it is such a natural state, so simple, so free of provocation, so
little suggestive by its absence of mystery, that a foot glimpsed in
the street, a bodice cleverly arranged, a rustling of petticoats, an
ungloved hand, a smile behind a fan, a certain air, a certain gesture,
a certain glance, even with a wholly chaste intention, are much more
rousing. A quite banal observation, but Entragues, pardonable in
pausing to note it as a directly experienced impression, still sought
to fathom its cause.

Now, he experienced a great discouragement: "I shall not have this
beauty which pleases me, which I desire and which is mine. I can take
her in my arms, I can press her against me, but I cannot have her. When
I kiss her with as many kisses as deceit has tongues, still I shall
not have her. And all the kinds of possession I can dream of are vain;
even were I able to surround her like a wave, I should still not have
her. The impulsion of love is unreal and it is only the illusion of
desire which makes me believe in its possible accomplishment. I know
it is error, I know that disillusion awaits me. I shall be punished by
a frightful disappointment for having sought self-oblivion outside of
myself, for having betrayed idealism, and yet it is unavoidable, for
the senses are imperative and I have not merited the supernatural gift
of grace."

Entragues had a prompter disillusion than he would have desired.

The adorable woman surrendered to his kisses; the carnal dream made
them unconscious of good and evil; they advanced, eagerly and with
swimming heads, ready to place their feet on the bark that sails
towards the Isle of Delights, seeking to ascertain how the sails were
shifting and the condition of the rudder. Entragues suddenly got up,
pale; ghostly behind the window curtains, terrible in her red robe,
Sixtine had revealed herself.

"Ah!" he vaguely thought, terrified, but his own self again, "this is
reality. The illusions are reaped, the hay is brought in, the field is
bare. This had to happen. The images which one voluntarily evokes come
to acquire mischievous habits and evoke themselves independently. This
one is impatient. So much the worse tor her; I did not invite her."

The bed curtains had to be closed and the lights put out. Sixtine
spared them by not moving and by disdaining the stratagem of
phosphorescence.

The candles, when after a while they were lit again, showed Entragues
an empty room: Sixtine had departed. But departed also where the
desires and all the unacknowledged pleasure of a delightful night of
debauchery.

He dared not go out, fearing a solitude that might be peopled against
his will. To fatigue the body is to fatigue the intelligence: he had
enfeebled himself as a person stupefies himself with laudanum.




CHAPTER XVI

THE IDEAL BEES


    "Afin de réduire le Ternaire, par le moyen
    du Quaternaire, à la simplicité de l'unité."
            Le R. P. Esprit Sabathier, _l'Ombre_
               _idéale de la sagesse universelle._


"Ah! yes," mused Hubert, as he replaced the book in the corner
restricted to philosophers, "the pages of Ribot's positive and
disenchanting psychology make good reading at a moment, not of spleen,
but of stark boredom. This penetrating dialectician clearly proves to
me that my personality is a fragile chord which a single false note in
the keyboard can destroy. It is all the same to me: a madness caused by
a fixed idea must greatly assist in supporting life. Thus, collectors
are to be envied, those who gather and classify old copper buttons,
or old secret locks, or all that has been written against women, or
the figurines of Sèvres porcelain, or the articles of M. Lemaître, or
the slippers of historic balls. One need not be fastidious in choosing
a mania: to be good it has only to be inexhaustible. As for the more
distinguished follies, many excellent ones can be noted and, in
general, none of those which are termed mild manias should be scorned:
the people once knew this well, for they respected, in the persons of
fools, the state of mind never attained by men of sense: happiness."

He continued thus for a long time, stretched back on his armchair,
smoking cigarettes, wearied from his night and still enfeebled by
a protracted bath. At bottom, he was deeply ashamed of himself, as
after every similar defilement, and not at all reassured as to the
metaphysical consequences of this sin. No reasoning, brutal though his
unbelief might be, could efface such an impression. The being endowed
with human intelligence and will always regulates himself by some
rule, a mental guide that is often unconscious, but whose existence
is immediately and with certitude revealed by the transgression.
There is no common moral conscience outside of a religion that is
strict and observed in all its commandments, the laws of society, and
the special regulations belonging to a certain group: morality is a
personal talent. Thus, Entragues felt himself soiled by an immersion
in pleasure where others would still have enjoyed, even repletion, the
gratification of a ruminant.

Moreover, he was not impious: having seen remorse rear its head before
him, now that the hour of the bravado had passed, he trembled at the
memory of the reproachful phantom. That night cut a phase of his life
in two, and he saw himself equal to those whom physical existence
confines beneath its claws: brother of the first comer and thrown back
among the vulgar elements, he ceased to be himself. Ah! he had judged!
Now he could be judged.

In this state of mind, nothing could interest him; since the principle
of all interest vanished. Opium-like dreams benumbed him and all the
texts on the vanity of things which he had gathered here and there in
his readings, played under his skull, like the bell of a rattle.

Love, strangled by his hand, barred his path: to advance, it was
necessary to leap over the dead thing: no! he would remain on this
side, unless a miraculous and quite questionable resurrection occurred.

Glory! the bell has been melted so that little bells could be made.
And as for the brass of the bells, does one ever know the right of
the metal to the claim? One dies and the cracked sounds make the
bell-ringers laugh.

He recited the proud and yet disheartening verses of old Dante:

    La mondaine rumeur n'est rien qu'un souffle
    De vent qui vient d'ici, qui vient de là,
    Et, changeant d'aire, change aussi de nom.

Having put these three lines in French syllables, Hubert observed how
difficult it was to clothe Dante in a fitting foreign garb. He pardoned
the well-intentioned persons who had attempted it in scandalous
translations: one could do no better than to adopt an exact, if
disfiguring, metaphor: the precision of the original becomes loose, its
clearness shadowy, for it is necessary to employ certain short words
whose true sense is lost, and others which are no longer read except
in glossaries. Finally, he laid down this aphorism: it is impossible
to translate into an old and refined language a work belonging to the
youth of a kindred language.

These technical notations, the reading of some verse, trips from his
table to his library, had somewhat revived him. Although he felt that
the depression might last all day and doubtless many more days, he
recovered courage and believed himself fit for some light work. Hubert
was not a poet, no more than many others who pretend to the poetic
gift. His impressions translated themselves into little notes of
analytical prose, not into fixed and exact rhythms; but he had learned
the craft, knew the most modern secrets of versification, and in happy
hours could, without illusion, fabricate an interesting piece according
to the rules.

This morning, he succeeded in giving the final details to a diptych
whose appearance had heretofore not satisfied him. It was heavy and the
hammer beat had shaped it, directed by a hand that was more strong than
adroit, but it seemed to him that the metal was good and without cracks.

    MORITURA

    Dans la serre torride, une plante exotique
    Penchante, résignée: éclos hors de saison
    Deux boutons fléchissaient, l'air grave et mystique;
    La sève n'était plus pour elle qu'un poison.

    Et je sentais pourtant de la fleur accablée
    S'évaporer l'effluve âcre d'un parfum lourd,
    Mes artères battaient, ma poitrine troublée
    Haletait, mon regard se voilait, j'étais sourd

    Dans la chambre, autre fleur, une femme très pale,
    Les mains lasses, la tête appuyée aux coussins:
    Elle s'abandonnait: un insensible râle
    Soulevait tristement la langueur de ses seins.

    Mais ses cheveux tombant en innombrables boucles
    Ondulaient sinueux comme un large flot noir
    Et ses grands yeux brillaient du feu des escarboucles
    Comme un double fanal dans la brume du soir.

    Les cheveux m'envoyaient des odeurs énervantes,
    Pareilles à l'éther qu'aspire un patient,
    Je perdais peu à peu de mes forces vivantes
    Et les yeux transperçaient mon coeur inconscient.

The afternoon vanished, a very calm night conquered, he found
himself astonished at the sudden return of vigor and of capacity for
work. Three days after, he had completed "Peacock Plumes" and "The
Twenty-Eighth of December;" he reread them, not without suffering from
a sense of inmost shame, for although the conception of this last
study was anterior to the luckless night, he had not been able, so
identically did the situations present themselves, to develop his old
idea except by borrowing from his recent adventure.

It had often happened to him that his revery intervened in the active
series and broke its determination; such a result, certainly, no longer
filled him with childish astonishments, but this time there was a truly
marvelous subordination of the fact to the idea. This was the theme:
faithless to a beloved Dead, A desires another woman, who yields and
gives herself to him; but, at the moment of possession, the beloved
Dead woman appears to him, in certain conditions to be developed,
and the old love vanquishes the new. This outline, with some linear
modifications, could symbolically have characterized the unexpected
events of his night with Valentine. Presentiment and coincidence did
not explain such an occurrence and, moreover, such an occurrence was
the hundredth he had observed. Hence the conception of a possible
event had brought it into his life, conditioned by the intervention of
an external will, adapted to the vital limits of time and space, but
recognizable in its constituent and original elements. It was worth
reflecting upon: it was a whole corner of the yet unknown psychology,
a whole order of phenomena as curious, for example, as the fact of
suggestion so bungled by official hypnotizers, who lack philosophic
understanding. This could even be classed under the chapter of
suggestions; but if, in things of this kind, one knew the suggester,
the person to whom a thing was suggested would escape. Nor was it a
matter of a will dimly or even unconsciously domineered by another
will; there was rather, as a point of departure, a will seeking to
bring about the wholly ideal and wholly subjective accomplishment
of a thing. But how could this will act upon the immutable order of
things? Since the suggester found himself, in the case of the person
subject to his will, in the second state, was it not merely a case
of auto-suggestion? Then, too, it was necessary to explain how the
subjected person could bring over, into his orb, wills and facts
external to himself and how, in sustaining an order suggested by his
mental activity, he could make it submit to all its relationships
of things and beings. Idealism unveiled these dim arcana for him.
Assuredly the thinking person dominates those who do not think, and the
man who wills, though unwittingly, the realization, though ideal, of a
group of facts, dominates all wills which, unwarned, are not on guard,
finding themselves unprepared to oppose will with will. The material
and unconscious world lives and moves only in the intelligence which
perceives and recreates it anew according to personal forms; there is
as much of the thinking world as a superior intelligence unites and
fashions to his wish. The conflict is only among superiorities, and the
rest, the herd, follows the masters, willy-nilly: ah! revolt is quite
useless.

Entragues consequently found himself arrived at that point of
intellectuality where one commences to make himself obeyed: order,
apparently incoercible, yielded to his dream. It was now a question of
mastering the dream and will. This was quite different: never having
cultivated that faculty, he only possessed it to a rudimentary degree.
The method was clear, he should have known how to make use of it; he
could not and the world, without a doubt, would escape him. His regret
was moderate: his desires did not exceed potentiality. The ideal world,
as he held it, sufficed for his activity which was entirely mental and
too unarmed for the struggle.

He had chosen the best part: should he be mad enough to consent to a
disastrous exchange? Everything belonged to him in the sphere where
he revolved: under logic's eye, he was the absolute master of a
transcendent reality whose joyous domination did not give him leisure
for a vulgar life and human preoccupations. To will? To will what? Ah!
how much more interesting it is to watch oneself think: what spectacle
equals that of the human brain, that marvelous hive where the ideal
bees, in their nest of cells, distil thought: a fleeting activity, but
which at least gives the illusion of duration. Ah! merely illusion, for
only the eternal exists.

At this point in his revery Entragues was bitten by a serpent: the
external, disdained and almost disowned world was evoked in the image
of Sixtine. It was necessary to admit it: he had interests in this part
of the perceptible world.

Then returned the same lamentations: fear, hope, doubt: love, composed
of these three terms, ever arose, leading the trinity to unity and
it was a circle, imperious as a circle. He lived a whole day in this
prison, then towards evening a quite sharp sensation of indignity
struck his heart and this obsession, poisoned by the arrow, inflamed
the wound: "I am going to see Sixtine, I want to see her, but if she
yields to my entreaty, the idea that she surprised me with another
woman will make me fancy that only jealousy inclines her to unshared
desires, and I will be paralyzed. I should do better to return to my
home." But the image was stronger: he obeyed the suggestion.

"Ah!" he told himself, always capable of strict reasoning, "I am afraid
I looked at the work of the ideal bees from too near a view, I well
know that I think, but I no longer know what I think."




CHAPTER XVII

THE ADORER


II. Peacock Plumes



    "Aria Serena, guand'apar l'albore
    E bianca neve scender senza vento ...
    Ció passa la beltate ...
    De la mia donna ...
    ... Non po' 'maginare
    Ch'om d'esto monde l'ardisca amirare ...
    Ed i' s'i' la sguardasse, ne morira."
                           Guido Cavalcanti.



    It rained peacock plumes,
    Pan, pan, pan,
    The multicolored door glowed with flames.

    The sky of the bed trembled towards an oarystis,
    It rained peacock plumes,
    Plumes of a white peacock.



The tower waved gracefully like a felucca undulating in the evening sea
breeze. And it was truly raining peacock plumes: Guido was astonished
and blew at them. He caught one in flight: it was white, with an orange
eye and luminous spaces. Ah! they all seemed to be looking at him:
they paused in front of him, they smiled, they fell, they died. As
they neared the earth, the wind spun them around a little, some dust
floated, then they disappeared; the passersby did not even raise their
heads.

The tower leaned over until it touched the ground: Guido leaped into
the street. He was not deceived. The peacock plumes had disappeared:
from below they could no longer be seen. It was a pity, for they were
pretty. He continued to walk in full liberty, his head high, full of
joy, watching the women. He passed under the madonna without emotion,
threw a glance towards the portal of the church, which he found as
ugly as a wagoner's gate, and of the Novella he only saw a madonna in
trappings, wholly devoid of attractions. Nevertheless he bowed to her.

The door was gay with oriental robes: a negro in white was ordering
some women into a curtained carriage; the women were caged like the
Carmelites of Saint-Augustine when they go to get food. One was in
blue, one in red, one in green, one in violet, and one in yellow.
The first four climbed into the carriage, laughing like children and
uttering rapid strange words. Guido, who had approached, saw that
each one bore, pinned to her monkish cloak, a label behind her head.
He deciphered the writing on the violet woman who was gesticulating a
little less than the others: _All eccellentissimo e nobilissimo signor
Ricardo Caraccioli_. So they had a certain destination! They were not
to be let free in the country among the grass, the bluebottles, the
poppies and crocuses? But what would the _seigneur_ Caraccioli do
with such flowerets? Guido knew him: he was a gentleman of exemplary
habits, the son of a cardinal, and nephew of the late pope. What would
he do with that young girl? A dialogue informed him:

"Are they all for the same most excellent _seigneur_?" asked a
subordinate officer who held a large book in his hand.

"All for the same man," the negro answered, "at least they are all
bound for the same name. Does it surprise you? But he will share them
with his friends. His only fear is that they will seek to quarrel with
him."

"Where are they from?"

"The devil only knows! We captured them off Algiers. A fine galley, all
gilded, with flowers, feathers and perfumes. The captain towed it to
Palerma, where he was able to dispose of it at a good price: that's his
privilege. These women were on it; three old women and eleven men, a
pasha, his equipage, keepers. No time was wasted: the men were thrown,
bound and bleeding, into the sea. What a crew of bandits, eh? Eleven
less and the old women thrown into the bargain."

"Five Turkish women," the other returned. "That's fifty ducats for the
king and a flask of wine for me...."

"Good, let us drink."

"... In women," continued the _doganiere_, "and in specie."

The negro paid. They drank at a nearby tavern, their eyes never
straying from their merchandise.

Guido understood that they were slaves destined for the harem of the
most illustrious Caraccioli. At Venice, where he had lived, it was
customary, since the Turks were pirating, to return the compliment.
If this was becoming popular in Naples, so much the better; he would
gather, into a little house, some Oriental women for his pleasure.
Guido was neither sufficiently naive nor spiteful to believe that the
most excellent hypocrite was carrying on the trade of fair eyes for his
friends. Well! he could do likewise: arm a vessel, dispatch it on long
cruises to the Barbary coasts, nourish the enlisted bandits with salty
provisions and the captive beauties with blancmange.... Ah! he suddenly
remembered: all his wealth had been confiscated by the crown! Not even
a ducat in his hose; not a sword, not a pistol to procure money on the
highway, and bareheaded as a Lazarite!

He would have to attend to this penury.

The office of the royal customs-house was opened and the overseer
was drinking to the fiscal ransom of the Algerian women: he entered.
The arrant employees of His Majesty were drowsing pen in hand, of
course. He pushed another door, though perceived: a third one, and
the treasure. From a very fine collection of garments, hose, cloaks,
swords, pistols and French hats, he provided himself with a quite
gallant outfit, added a remarkable piece of Alençon silk, a little
string for the women, and some rope for the silent strangulation of the
cashier. It was a small matter to pass through the three doors where
pleasant dreams were stirring, and he found him a little farther away.
His sleep was hardly broken: a little movement of the hands, nothing
more. Without being very rich, the royal coffer was still interesting.
He placed it in his pockets, untied the rope, returned it to its place,
and strolled out.

On the threshold, the _doganiere_ saluted him:

"Does Your Excellency deign to be pleased?"

"Yes, yes," Guido replied. "These gentlemen are polite. Here," he
added, taking out a ducat, "go and drink with this."

The negro counted his women: one, two, three, four.... "All's well. No,
I should have five. Let us count them: one, two, three, four, five."

The carriage departed.

"I love you, my lord, let us go!"

The yellow Algerian, appearing before him like a radiant caprice, had
taken him by the hand.

"As soon as I saw you," she continued, "I hid myself so as not to be
led away with the others, for I belong to you, I am your slave. My name
is Pavona."

"But," asked Guido, "how were you able to see me with your closed eyes,
for I know that, under your hood, your eyes are closed!"

"It is true," said Pavona. "You know me then?"

"Yes, I know you, you are she who was destined me to vanquish the
Novella's disdain. When I beseeched her love, the consent of her
passion, so many times confessed and yet never decisive, she closed
her eyes, she said: 'No.' And I said: 'Well, I will love other eyes so
that the eyes of the Novella might weep and be merciful to me.' Then
her eyelashes lifted and I grew pale with fright: instead of the blue
and gentle irises, I saw strange eyes like those designed on the plumes
of a peacock, a white peacock."

"I do not understand anything of this," said Pavona. "I never open my
eyes, for a very simple reason. I cannot. But I shall love you well all
the same, you see!"

"You have never tried!"

"To open my eyes? No, and for what purpose, since I have none. Wait, I
remember an oracle sung to me by the Bohemian woman, formerly, when I
was very little. It had this refrain:

    But when some one to you will say
    'I love you!' sight will come your way."

Guido found this very natural.

They stopped at a rich tavern, dazzling as a palace, and they were
received like princely persons.

Preceded by a servant, they climbed, climbed, climbed, as though to the
sky.

"Carry me, Guido, or I will be quite tired," said Pavona.

Guido took her in his arms. They climbed, climbed, as though towards
the sky.

"Kiss me, Guido, or I shall grow quite bored," said Pavona.

Guido kissed the closed eyelashes. They climbed, climbed, climbed, as
though towards the sky.

"Here," said the servant at last, "is the apartment of Your Highnesses."

The multicolored door truly glowed with flames, for it was of silver
and studded with diamonds.

"It is heaven's door," said Pavona. "I wish to open it myself."

She entered first, holding Guido by the hand.

There was a very agreeable blue dimness in the chamber: the couch, at
the end, defined itself under heavy draperies.

Fondlings and caressings: Guido felt himself burn with desire, and
Pavona, quite determined, returned his kisses, ardor for ardor.

"I love you," Guido cried.

Pavona opened her eyes.

They were fearful. They were like the eyes designed on the plumes of a
peacock, a white peacock.

Guido swooned and awoke in his cell, an assassin, a thief, a perjurer.

"I am a wretch," he thought, after a moment, "a wretch unworthy of his
own pity. The crimes one commits in dreaming, one is really capable of
committing. What occurs in the dream lay dormant in the caves of the
will, or rather, they are prophecies and the celestial admonition of
an irrevocable predestination. Ah! rather to have been criminal than
to live in the certitude of a future crime. I accept the weight of my
mortal sins: by degrees penitence will dissolve them like a sack of
salt by the rain, and my shoulders will straighten again, delivered.
Pardon me, most holy madonna, and punish me."

    Ah! l'amour est terrible et je souffre d'aimer!
    Comment bénir encore tes adorables pieds?
    Comment, d'un front souille par des lèvres de femme,
    Recevoir le divin sourire où joue ton âme?
    Comment bénir encore tes adorables pieds?




CHAPTER XVIII

A COMPLETE WOMAN


    "Feminine to her inmost heart, and feminine
       to her tender feet.
    Very woman of very woman, nurse of ailing
       body and mind."
                  Tennyson, _Locksley Hall Sixty_
                                   _Years After_.


He had a fair skin and a savage mustache, his beard cut like the
Austrians, an animal jaw, beatified eyes; the air of needing plenty of
meat and plenty of tenderness. His skull seemed to be straight, under
his closely-cut hair and his ears, too long, seemed endowed with a
special motility. His gestures revealed the uneasy deference of the
stranger, but on occasion there appeared the sudden hauteur of the
gentleman; he lacked an easy bearing, but there was some vivacity and a
rude charm in him.

Hubert, examining this intruder, assumed a reserve which masked his
curiosity. He thought he perceived that for Sixtine this was more than
a chance visitor, and the name awakened a discouraging association of
ideas, for it strictly agreed with the initials, although this person,
it seemed to him, had no connection with the portrait, so far as the
figure was concerned. His name was Sabas Moscowitch.

Sixtine spelled out the syllables with complacency and, after uttering
a few banalities, narrated some pages of the history of Monsieur Sabas.
A life not unlike Tolstoy's, without the final mysticism: a period of
living in the Caucasus and then at his manor, in his domains which were
disorganized by the recent freedom; he had a reformative turn of mind
in sympathy with modern trends, and had won successes at the theatre
with dramas of conflicts which had displeased the czar; then, and this
was the interesting side of Monsieur Sabas, he had come to France
to have his dramas played. As he knew French from childhood, he was
translating them himself. Yet some advice would be profitable to him:
he likewise had need of some support in the literary world. She boldly
anticipated the kindness of Hubert.

"M. d'Entragues could be very useful to you."

Entragues, in a very guarded tone, offered his services. To read his
dramas, present the author to the _Revue spéculative_, give the cue to
Van Baël, who knew everybody, win over Fortier--all this was possible.
Besides, Fortier was seeking new things: it would be a good idea, after
the novels, to attempt the publication of a Russian drama. One of them
would appear in the _Revue_ with a great hubbub, and the road would be
prepared for the others.

Sixtine seemed enchanted with the plan: Moscowitch had a vision of
the glory he would gain; Entragues said to himself: "Either they are
making a fool of me, and I have nothing to lose in being amiable to
this Russian, or else she is only interesting herself in him through
vanity, and the more I do, the more she will be grateful to me. No, I
shall certainly be a dupe and without reward; there are old relations
between them: the S. M. proves it. Oh! how anxious I am to mock gently
before being mocked myself by the facts. That would mean to lose all.
Ah! but I am implicated in odd intrigues! I must examine my acts
carefully and weigh my words: it is painful. Ah! how I should like to
leave! How I wish that I had never known this woman who holds me here
and compares me with the other! I see it quite well: she is analyzing
us, in so far as a woman is capable of doing it; she measures and
weighs us; she asks herself which of the two would give her the greater
pleasure. And perhaps she is embarrassed, for if one of us, and it is
I, should attract her by the physical and intellectual affinities of
race, the other has for her the magic of newness, of the unexpected,
of the different. For she is perverted: without this, she would have a
husband or a lover. Women who wait, who want to choose, who desire the
utmost possible, are capable of deciding suddenly under the pressure
of an unaccustomed sensation. But is it the first time she has seen
this Moscowitch? Oh, no! but as long as the veil has not been lifted,
the mystery remains untouched and still tempting. The exportation to
France of Russian novels should be an enterprise for the Don Juans
of the Neva: one must be, at this hour, a Russian to please. Oh! it
is quite immaterial whether we shall be Russianized to-day or in a
century, since we will be so, eventually: Tolstoy is the ensign-bearer
and Dostoevsky the trumpet of the vanguard. _Amen!_ I open the door to
Moscowitch. If they play his dramas in place of mine and if he takes
the woman I desire, well and good, for deprived of all, I shall perhaps
enjoy peace."

Having finished this inward monologue, hardly interrupted by the
nodding of the head and the vague syllables thrown by him as replies in
the conversation, Entragues, with a sudden movement, arose.

"You are leaving?"

There was such an accent of reproach in these three words that
Entragues was stricken with remorse. It was a foolish act: he soon saw
its consequence, for Moscowitch instantly stood up to his full height,
ready to follow him.

"Since it is too late, and since the pleasure of a tête-à-tête eludes
me, we will leave together. I wouldn't mind talking a little with this
Russian and, if he must be my rival, learning his quality; at least I
shall know to whom I yield my place."

He was a child.

"Isn't she truly charming and adorable?"

"Ah! confidences?" Entragues told himself. "This is excellent. He
belongs to those whose heart overflows with sentiment as a brook under
a heavy rain, and he is going to tell me his life. Perfect. I am
conscious of a mischievous curiosity. How I will enjoy it!"

A slight quiver of joy coursed through him, and his fingers twisted
through nervousness.

"Isn't she?"

"Are you speaking of Madame Magne? I have known her only a short while.
She is an intelligent woman."

"It is evident," Moscowitch rejoined, "that her beauty, her charm, and
her grace have not made a strong impression on you. It is surprising."

"Why so? The sympathies of any group do not necessarily go to the same
woman, though she have intelligence and an Aspasian beauty. The charm
that has captivated you does not exist for me, or exists only in a less
degree."

"Ah! you reason like a very sensible Frenchman. As for myself, I
believe I am incapable of reasoning on this point."

"This does not prevent me," Entragues returned, "from doing justice to
her qualities. She is, to put it simply, a complete woman. This word,
which implies everything and specifies nothing, is appropriate, for I
believe her to be very flexible, and made to pattern herself, like the
ivy, on the oak to which she will cling."

"I hope," Entragues reflected, "that I speak clearly and with an
abundance of commonplaces, for I wish to be understood."

After a brief silence, Moscowitch slowly uttered these words which he
seemed to be repeating to himself:

"Yes, I think I will be happy with her."

Entragues controlled his emotions and asked in a calm voice:

"Are you going to marry her?"

"Yes, if she consents. That is my intention and my dearest wish. She
says neither no nor yes. I don't know what to do about it."

"You don't displease her?"

"You think not?"

"I mean," Entragues answered, "that you please her. But she herself
does not know it and you must teach her to read her own heart.
Recall the words of Madame Récamier to Benjamin Constant: 'Dare, my
friend, dare!' You perhaps don't know the French women, but trust
to my experience. A little force doesn't displease them. I don't
say violence, I say force. The iron hand gloved in velvet can play
a decisive rôle in love; nothing more enlightens a woman about her
own sentiments than a kiss which goes further than kisses. Then she
knows what she wishes and nine times out of ten she will love, through
gratitude, the bold man who has drawn her from indecision. Note this
well: she runs after her modesty as one runs after one's gold."

Moscowitch, very interested, drew nearer to Entragues and, as if to
appropriate him to himself, passed his arm under Entragues', saying:

"May I?"

"The great liberty? Ah! you know your authors! I believe we are going
to become friends, for I felt a great sympathy towards you from the
very first.... It is just like in the trenches, before Sebastopol....
See, my dear Moscowitch, I who usually am good for nothing, who am
endowed with only a modest activity, I wish, in the name of this common
friend, who will be more than a friend for you, to help your noble
ambitions, like a brother. You must attain everything: love and glory
must crown your genius."

Moscowitch breathed deeply.

"Ah! how happy I am to have met you!"

"Why," Entragues modestly returned, "I think you will not have to
repent it. There are so few people capable of understanding; one
usually finds only envy, jealousy, stupidity, conceit, and indifference
when one is born under a very favorable star. Come, where shall we
begin? You know that I can in no way directly intervene to further your
marriage. Just acquaint me with what takes place and I will give you
advice on the conduct to be followed. You will come to see me; we shall
deliberate like a counsel of war; we shall examine the condition of the
place; we shall make plans; we shall leave nothing to chance, and we
will be victors. Have no doubts upon this. Do you know her long?"

"Since last winter. Some Russian friends gave me a letter of
introduction to Madame la comtesse d'Aubry, who introduced me one
evening to Madame Magne. I suddenly felt that my life had found its
goal."

"It was a sort of thunderbolt?"

"I know that word, thunderbolt," Moscowitch complacently remarked. "No,
a sudden attraction, rather. I saw her and loved her--that is all."

"And you did not confess your love till long after?"

"Later, two or three months afterwards. But I believe she had already
perceived my sentiments, for she was not surprised to hear me express
them."

"The fact that one loves a woman never astonishes her; it is the
contrary that surprises her."

"Yes, she had divined my state of mind."

"Oh! they always divine, and that is why confessions always find them
so calm. So she allowed you to come to see her?"

"Yes, and I did; but one finds her so rarely! We met quite often at
the home of the countess and I spent a delightful fortnight, oh!
very delightful, at the château de Rabodanges, during the month of
July. I was to have returned there in September and she, too, was to
have returned there, but I had to leave for Russia. I am here only a
week. I met her again for the first time this evening. I confess, my
dear Monsieur d'Entragues, that your entrance in the room was very
disagreeable to me. I repent having had this wicked sentiment, but I
could not guess that I had before me a friend so ... so...."

"So useful," Entragues finished. "Friends should be useful. That is
their purpose. Then, at Rabodanges?"

"It was delightful. I cannot find another word. It was there she did
my portrait. It is quite good, only there is no resemblance. I think
she was making sport of me that day, for why should she give me a
pointed beard instead of this national cut of which I am proud, and
which I shall certainly never change. Besides, thanks to retouchings,
the very features do not belong to me. She began by copying my figure
and ended by designing a dream."

"Was it a sketch?" Entragues asked, amused at this cruel feminine irony.

"Yes, but she etched it the following day, for you know she has a real
talent in that direction. She made two copies in my presence, gave
me out and then used the same copper plat

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/45920