Théophile Gautier

Mademoiselle de Maupin

Part III: Chapters 5 to 9

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Chapter 5: D’Albert to Silvio.
Chapter 6: The Story Continued.
Chapter 7: The Story Continued.
Chapter 8: D’Albert to Silvio.
Chapter 9: D’Albert to Silvio.

Chapter 5: D’Albert to Silvio

I was mistaken. My wicked heart, incapable of love, had found a reason to free itself from the weight of a gratitude it does not wish to bear; I joyfully seized on the idea in order to excuse myself to myself; I became attached to it, but nothing in the world is falser. Rosette was not playing a role, and if ever a woman is true, it is she. Well! I almost resent the sincerity of her passion which is an additional bond and which makes severance more difficult and less excusable; I would prefer her false and fickle. What a singular position I maintain! One would like to leave, and yet one stays; one would like to say: ‘I hate you’, and yet one says: ‘I love you’; the past drives one on, and prevents one turning around or quitting. One is faithful yet regrets being so. I know not what kind of shame prevents one from giving oneself to other acquaintances, and coming to terms with oneself. We give a single person all we deny to others, only to save appearances. The time and opportunities to see each other that once presented themselves so naturally are now found only with difficulty. We begin to recall that we have important affairs to see to. The situation, full of tension, is most painful, but it is not yet as much so as the one in which I find myself. When it is a new friendship that draws you away from the old one, it is easier to extricate yourself. Hope smiles at you gently from the threshold of the house that contained your early love. A fairer and rosier illusion flutters with its white wings over the barely closed tomb of its sister who has died; another flower, more blooming and more fragrant, in which trembles a heavenly tear, has sprouted suddenly from amidst the withered calyxes of the old bouquet; beautiful azure perspectives open before you; moist paths framed by discreet hornbeams extend to the horizon; gardens with a few pale statues or a bench against a wall clothed with ivy; lawns starry with daisies; narrow balconies on which one leans to gaze at the moon; shadows broken by furtive gleams; days of some drawing room stifled under ample curtains; all the darkness and isolation that love seeks when it dares show itself. It is as if one gained youth afresh. One experiences, moreover, a change of place, habits, people; one feels a kind of remorse; but the desire that hovers and buzzes about your head, like a bee in spring, prevents you from hearing the voice of that remorse; the emptiness of your heart is filled, and your memories fade beneath fresh impressions. But it is not the same with me: I love no one, and it is only out of weariness and boredom, due rather to myself than her, that I would like to be able to break with Rosette.

My old ideas, which slumbered, have awakened wilder than ever. I am, as before, tormented by the desire to possess a mistress, and, as before, in Rosette’s very arms, I doubt ever having had one. I see, once more, the beautiful lady at her window, in that park of the time of Louis XIII, and the huntress, on her white horse, traverses the forest avenue at the gallop. My ideal beauty smiles at me from the height of her nest of clouds, I think I recognize her voice in the song of the birds, in the murmur of the leaves; it seems to me I am summoned on all sides, and that the daughters of the air brush my face with the fringe of their invisible scarves. As in the days of my first agitation, I imagine that, if I were to leave at once and go somewhere, very far, very quickly, I would arrive in some place in which things are being done that concern myself, and where my destiny is being decided. I feel I am awaited, impatiently, in some corner of the earth, I know not which. A suffering soul calls to me, ardently, and dreams of me yet cannot seek me; this is the cause of my anxiety, and is what prevents me from being able to remain here; I am violently drawn away from my inner centre. My nature is not one of those to which others are led, one of those fixed stars around which planets gravitate; I must wander the field of the heavens, like a stray meteor, until I encounter the planet of which I must be a satellite, the Saturn to which I must add a ring. Oh, when will that marriage take place? Until then I cannot hope for rest or stability, and I must imitate the directionless, wavering needle of a compass seeking the pole.

The Swing (1767) - Jean-Honoré Fragonard (French, 1732-1806)

The Swing (1767)
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (French, 1732-1806)
Artvee

I allowed my wings to be caught in treacherous lime, hoping to lose only a feather there, believing I could fly whenever I wanted: yet nothing could be more difficult; I find myself covered by an imperceptible net, more difficult to break than that forged by Vulcan, its mesh so fine and tightly woven there is no way to escape. The net, however, is spacious, and one can move about with an appearance of freedom; it is scarcely tangible, except when one tries to break through it; then it resists and becomes as solid as a wall of bronze.

How much time I have wasted, my ideal, without making the slightest effort to render you real! How cowardly I have been in giving myself over to the voluptuousness of a night! And how little I deserve to find you!

Sometimes I think of forming some other connection; but have no one in mind: more often I resolve, should I succeed in breaking free, never to engage in such ties again, and yet nothing justifies my resolution: for this affair has been to all intents and purposes, highly successful, and I have not the least complaint to make regarding Rosette. She has always been good to me, and behaved herself as well as she could; she has been exemplary in her loyalty, and never given rise to even a suspicion: the most active, and restless jealousy would have nothing to say, and would be obliged to slumber once more. I could be jealous of her past; and, it is true, I would have ample reason to be so. But fortunately, jealousy of that sort rarely afflicts me, since I own to quite enough in the present, without rummaging amidst the ruins of her former affairs, extracting vials of poison and cups of gall. What woman could one ever love, if one thought of such? One is vaguely aware that the woman has had several lovers before one; but one says to oneself, a man’s pride being capable of so many turns and twists, that one is the first she has truly loved, and that it was through some combination of fateful circumstances that she found herself tied to people unworthy of her, or else that some vague desire in her heart sought to satisfy itself, which was quenched because it had not done so.

Perhaps one can only truly love a virgin; one who is virgin, that is, in body and mind, a frail bud that has not yet been caressed by the zephyr and whose closed heart has received neither a drop of rain nor a pearl of dew, a chaste flower that unfolds its white robes for you alone, a beautiful lily in a silver urn that has drunk of no desire, and has been gilded only by your sun, swayed only by your breath, watered only by your hand. The radiance of noon cannot match the divine pallor of dawn, and all the ardour of a soul that has experienced life yields to the heavenly innocence of a young heart awakening to love. Ah! What a bitter and shameful thought it is that one wipes away the kisses of some other, that there is perhaps not a single place on that brow, those lips, that throat, those shoulders, on that whole body, now yours, which has not been reddened and marked by alien lips; that those divine murmurs, which come to the aid of a tongue which no longer has words, have been heard before; that these senses, aroused anew, have not learned their ecstasy, their delirium from you, and that deep, deep, in one of those recesses of the soul which are seldom visited, an inexorable memory lurks, leading the soul to compare the pleasures of the past to those of today!

Although my natural indifference leads me to prefer the highway to untrodden paths, and public watering holes to a mountain spring, I must yet seek out and love, absolutely, some virginal creature as white as snow, as trembling as a sensitive plant, one who knows only how to blush and lower her eyes: perhaps, from that limpid pool into which no diver has yet plunged, I will gather a pearl of the finest water, worthy of being a counterpart to that of Cleopatra’s earring; but to do so, I would first have to break the bond that binds me to Rosette, for in all probability it is not with her that I may realise this desire, and in truth I feel I lack the strength to do so.

And then, I confess, there is deep within me a mute and shameful motive that dares not reveal itself, which I must nonetheless divulge, since I have promised to hide nothing; and, for a confession to be meritorious, it must be entire; a motive that has a great deal to do with my uncertainty. If I break with Rosette, it will necessarily be some time before she can be replaced, however easy the woman may be whom I make her successor, and then I have acquired with Rosette habits, regarding pleasure, that it will be painful for me to break. It is true that one may have recourse to courtesans; I enjoyed them enough in the past, and never failed to do so in a like situation; but today they disgust me utterly, and the though renders me nauseous. So, there is no point in considering it. I’m so softened by pleasure; the poison has sunk so deeply into my marrow; that I can no longer bear the idea of existing for a month or two without a woman. It is selfishness, of the basest kind; yet I believe that, if they wished to be frank, the most virtuous of men could confess to similar things.

Here is where I am stuck, and most firmly, and, were it not for this, Rosette and I would have long since fallen out irrevocably. And then, in truth, it is such a mortally tedious thing to court a woman whose feelings I cannot yet be certain of. To say again all the charming nonsensical phrases I have said so many times before, to play the game of adoration again, to write notes and reply, to escort some beauty, in the evening, miles from home; to catch cold, on frozen feet, before the window, while spying on a beloved shadow; to calculate, on a sofa, how many layers of fabric separate you from your goddess; to carry bouquets, and run to balls to remain where I am already! Is it worth it? One may as well keep to one’s rut. To rise from it only to fall back into another, exactly the same, after a lot of fuss and bother, what’s the point? If I were in love, the thing would go forward by itself, and all would seem ravishing to me; but I am not, though I have the strongest of desires so to be; for, after all, there is only the power of love in this world; and, if pleasure which is only its shadow has so many attractions for us, what must the reality not bring? In what floods of ineffable ecstasy, in what lakes of pure delight, must swim those whom Amor has struck to the heart with his gold-tipped arrows, and who burn with the loving ardour of a mutual flame!

I experience, when beside Rosette, that flat calm, a kind of lazy well-being, which results from the satisfaction of the senses, but nothing more; and that is insufficient. Often that voluptuous numbness turns to torpor, and tranquility to ennui; and then I seek out aimless distractions, and fall into I know not what insipid daydreams, which weary me and exasperate me. It is a state from which I must escape at all costs.

Oh, if I could but be like some of my friends who kiss an old glove in their intoxication, who are happy to receive a handshake, who would not exchange for a Sultana’s casket a few crumpled flowers obtained slyly at the ball, who cover with tears and sew into their shirt, over their heart, a note written in poor style, stupid enough to have been copied from ‘The Perfect Secretary’ (compiled by Paul Jacob, first edition 1646), and who adore women with large feet and justify it on the grounds that they have beautiful souls! If I could but follow, trembling, the train of a dress; or wait for a door to open to glimpse a dear, white, apparition pass by me in a flood of light; if a word spoken in a whisper could make me change colour; if I had the ability to forgo dinner in order to arrive earlier at a tryst; if I were capable of stabbing a rival, or fighting a duel with a husband; if, by heaven’s special grace, I were capable of finding ugly women witty, and those who are both ugly and foolish good; if I could bring myself to dance a minuet, or listen attentively to a sonata played by a young lady on the harpsichord or the harp; if I had a capacity for learning card-games like Ombre and Reversis; or, finally, if I were a mere man and not a poet, I would certainly be much happier than I am; I would be less bored and less boring.

I ask only one thing of women: beauty. I will willingly do without wit and soul. For me, a woman who is beautiful also possesses wit; she has the wit to be beautiful, and that is worth everything. A host of brilliant phrases and scintillating bon mots is worth less than the gleam of a lovely eye. I prefer pretty lips to a pretty word, and a finely-modelled shoulder to any virtue, even a theological one; I would give fifty souls for a well-turned foot, and all of poetry, and all the poets, for Joanna of Aragon’s hand (see the Raphael portrait, 1518, in the Louvre) or the brow of the ‘Madonna di Foligno’ (see Raphael’s painting, 1511/12, in the Vatican). above all things, I adore the beauty of form; beauty is for me the divine made visible, it is palpable happiness, it is heaven descended to earth. There are certain undulations of contour, certain delicately-shaped lips, certain curves of the eyelids, certain inclinations of the head, certain elongations of the face, which delight me beyond all expression, and absorb me for hours on end.

Beauty; the only thing that cannot be acquired, forever inaccessible to those who do not already possess it; an ephemeral, fragile flower that grows without being sown, the pure gift of heaven! O Beauty, the most radiant diadem with which chance can crown a brow, you are admirable and precious like everything that is beyond the reach of mankind, like the azure hue of the firmament, like the golden light of the sun, like the perfume of the seraphic lily! One can exchange one’s chair for a throne; one can conquer the world, and many have done so; but who would not kneel before you, pure personification of divine thought?

I ask only for beauty, it is true; yet so perfect a beauty that I will probably never encounter it, on this Earth. I have, indeed, seen admirable portions of it here and there, in various women, parts of a mediocre whole, and loved them for what they possessed, ignoring the rest; it is, however, a somewhat arduous task, a painful operation, to suppress half of one’s mistress thus, and mentally amputate from her what is ugly or commonplace, by limiting one's eyes to her finer aspects. Beauty? It requires harmony; such that a person equally ugly overall is often less disagreeable to view than a woman only partially beautiful. Nothing hurts my eyes like an unfinished masterpiece, or like beauty that lacks something; an oil stain is less shocking on coarse sackcloth than on some rich fabric.

Rosette is very passable; she may even be considered beautiful, but she is far from realising my ideal; she is like a statue several parts of which have been carved to perfection. Other parts are less cleanly cut from the block; some are marked by great finesse and charm, some executed in a freer and less careful manner. To the untrained eye, the statue appears entirely finished, and wholly beautiful; but the more attentive observer soon discovers areas where the execution is not thorough enough, contours which, to attain the purity proper to them, need the sculptor’s file to pass over their surface a host of times; love must polish the marble and render the work complete; which is enough to say that it will not be I who will see it finished.

And then, beauty is not circumscribed by this or that sinuous line. For me, air, gesture, gait, breath, colour, sound, scent, everything that is life enters into the composition of beauty; everything that perfumes, sings, or radiates belongs to it by right. I love rich brocades, and other splendid fabrics with wide, ample folds; I love large vases of flowers, the transparency of running water, the glittering brightness of fine weapons, purebred horses, and large white dogs like those in the paintings of Paolo Veronese. I am a true pagan in that respect, unable to worship any ill-formed god: though at heart I am not exactly what one calls irreligious, no one is in fact a worse Christian. I do not understand the mortification of matter at the heart of Christianity. I deem it a sacrilegious act to strike at divine creation, and cannot believe that the flesh is evil, since God himself kneaded it with his fingers, and in his image. I little approve those long, dark-coloured robes from which only a head and two hands emerge, and those canvases where everything is drowned in shadow except for a gleaming forehead. I want the sun to enter everywhere, for there to be as much light and as little shadow as possible, for colour to sparkle, the line to meander, for nakedness to be displayed proudly, and matter not to hide its existence, since, as well as the spirit, it is an eternal hymn in praise of God.

I understand, wholly, the ancient Greeks’ intense enthusiasm for beauty; and, for my part, find nothing absurd in that law which obliged judges to hear lawyers’ pleas in a darkened room, for fear that their good looks, and graceful gestures and attitudes, might produce too favourable an impression, and tip the scales of justice.

I would not buy anything from an ugly shopkeeper; I give more willingly to beggars whose rags and leanness render them picturesque. I know a feverish little Italian, green as an unripe lemon, his eyes, with large black pupils and prominent whites, occupying half his face; he looks like a Murillo or an Espagnolet (Jusepe de Ribera) painting without a frame, that some second-hand dealer has propped against a post: he always receives two sous more than the others. I would never strike a fine horse or dog, and prefer a friend or a servant to possess a pleasant exterior. It is a real torment for me to view ugly things or people. Architecture in bad taste, and badly-designed furniture prevent my taking pleasure in a house, however comfortable and attractive it may be. The finest wine in a badly-made glass seems to me no better than a mediocre one, and I confess I would prefer the most Spartan meal on a rustic-ware platter by Bernard Palissy to the finest game served on an earthenware plate. Externals have always affected me strongly, and that is why I avoid the company of old men; it saddens me and affects me disagreeably, because they are wrinkled and deformed, though some have a particular beauty; and, mingled with the pity I have for them, there is also a deal of disgust: of all the ruins in the world, the ruin of man is assuredly the saddest to contemplate.

If I were a painter (and I have always regretted not being one), I would only want to populate my canvases with goddesses, nymphs, madonnas, cherubs and cupids. To devote one’s brushes to portraiture, unless the paintings are of beautiful people, seems to me a crime against art; and, far from wanting to duplicate ugly or ignoble figures, insignificant or vulgar heads, I would rather see them excised from the original. Caligula’s ferocity, diverted to that task, would have seemed to me almost praiseworthy.

I consistently envy only handsome people. By handsome I mean as handsome as Paris or Apollo. To lack deformity, to possess more or less regular features, that is to say, to have a nose in the centre of one’s face, to be neither snub-nosed nor hooked-nosed, to possess eyes that are neither reddened nor veined, and a suitably-shaped mouth, that is not to be handsome: if that were true, I myself would be so, and I find myself as far removed from the ideal I have formed of virile beauty as if I were one of those Jacquemart statues that strike the hour on church towers. I am as close to being handsome as if had a hump between my shoulders, the crooked legs of a basset-hound, and the nose and muzzle of a monkey. Many a time, I gaze at myself in the mirror for hours on end, with unimaginable fixity and attention, to search for some improvement in my features; I hope for their lines to alter, to straighten or round themselves with greater finesse and purity, for my eyes to brighten, and bathe in more lively fluid, for the arc that separates my forehead from my nose to become fuller, and for my profile to take on the calmness and simplicity possessed by a Greek statue, and am always very surprised when that fails to occur. I dream that someday or other I will shed the form I inhabit, as a snake sheds its former skin. Why, it would take so little for me to be beautiful, though I never shall be! What is needed! A tenth of an inch, I think, or a hundredth, or a thousandth or less, added in one place or another, a little less flesh on this bone, a little more on that; a painter, or a sculptor could adjust all in half an hour. Why did the atoms that compose me arrange themselves in this particular way? Why does this contour protrude here and retreat there. What chance determined that I should be formed this way and not otherwise? In truth, if I could grip Fortune by the forelock, I believe I would strangle her. Because it pleased those miserable particles of I know not what to distribute themselves I know not how, and coagulate dumbly to produce the awkward figure that is myself, must I be eternally unhappy! Is it not the most foolish and miserable thing in the world? How is it that my soul, full of ardent desire, cannot abandon the poor carcass that it causes to stand on two feet, and instead animate one of the statues whose exquisite beauty both saddens and ravishes it? There are two or three people any one of whom I could cheerfully assassinate, taking care not to bruise or spoil their exterior, if I only possessed the spell that allows souls to transmigrate from one body to another. It has always seemed to me that, in order to achieve what I wish (scarcely knowing what I wish), I need great and perfect beauty of form, and I imagine that, if I possessed it, my life, which is so tattered and tangled, would be neat and orderly.

In paintings, one sees so many beautiful figures! Why is not one of them mine? So many charming heads are fading beneath the dust and smoke of time, in the depths of old galleries! Would it not be better if one quit its frame and rested on my shoulders? Would Raphael’s reputation suffer greatly if one of those angels who fly in swarms over the ultramarine of his canvases were to lend its face to me for thirty years? So many of the finest of his frescoes, in so many locations, have peeled and disintegrated from old age, no one would notice! What beauty is silently affixed to those walls, on which people scarcely bestow a distracted glance, and why does God or chance not have the wit to do what an artist can do with a few animal hairs at the end of a stick, and various blobs of colour set on a board?

My first sensation before one of those wondrous heads, whose painted gaze seems to pass through you and extend to infinity, is amazement, accompanied by a feeling of admiration not free of terror: my eyes fill, my heart beats; then, as I become more familiar with it, and enter more deeply into the secret of its beauty, I tacitly compare it to my own; jealousy, in the depths of my soul, twists in knots more tangled than a viper’s, and I find it takes all my strength not to hurl myself at the canvas, and tear it to pieces.

To be beautiful, that is to say, to possess a charm which makes all smile at you and welcome you; which, before you have even spoken, already prejudices everyone in your favour and renders them disposed to accept your opinion; which only requires you to pass by in the street, or show yourself on a balcony, to attract friends or mistresses to you from the crowd; that obviates the need to be lovable or be loved; and that exempts you from all the mental effort and compromise which ugliness demands; and from those thousand moral qualities which one needs in order to compensate for a lack of bodily beauty; what a splendid and magnificent gift!

And he who could join supreme beauty to supreme strength, who, beneath the skin of Antinous, could possess the muscles of Hercules, what more could he desire? I am sure that with these two attributes, and the soul within me, before three years were out, I would be emperor of the world! One more thing I desire, almost as much as beauty and strength, is the gift of transporting myself, as swiftly as thought, from one place to another. The beauty of an angel, the strength of a tiger, and the wings of an eagle, and I might deem the world not so badly organised as I first thought. A beautiful face to fascinate and seduce the prey, wings to swoop down and bear it away, and nails to tear it; as long as I lack those, I shall be less than happy.

All the passions and tastes I have displayed only served to mask that triple desire. I loved weapons, horses, and women: weapons, to replace the nerve I lacked; horses, to serve as wings; and women, so as to possess, in one at least, the beauty I myself lack. By preference, I sought the most ingenious and deadly weapons, the wounds from which are incurable. I have never found an opportunity to use any of those kriss or yatagans: nonetheless, I like to have them near me; I draw them from their scabbards with an inexpressible sense of strength and security. I fence with them, at random, most energetically, and, if by chance I happen to catch the reflection of my face in the mirror, I am astonished by its ferocious expression. As for the horses, I overwork them so much that they must die or I shall know why not. If I hadn’t left off riding Ferragus, he would have died long ago, and that would be a shame, for he is a brave creature. What Arabian ever had legs as swift and as agile as I desire? In women I have only sought the external, and since, so far, those I have seen are far from corresponding to the idea I have formed of beauty, I have relied on paintings and statues; which, after all, are a rather pitiful resource when one has senses as keen as mine. Yet, there is something fine and noble in loving a statue, in that such love is so perfectly disinterested that one fears neither satiety nor the disgust that follows conquest, while not expecting, in all reason, a second prodigy like that of the Pygmalion myth. Impossibility always reassures and pleases me.

Is it not strange that I, who am still in the prime of youth, who, far from having abused it, have not even employed it in the simplest of ways, have attained this degree of jadedness, of no longer being moved except by the strange or difficult?

Satiety follows pleasure; that is a natural and wholly understandable law. No actions are easier to explain than those of a man who having eaten from every dish at the feast, and in vast quantity, is no longer hungry, and seeks to waken his idle palate with a thousand piercing spices, or rousing wines; but that a man who only sits down at table, and who has barely tasted the first few dishes, should be seized already by overwhelming disgust, and is only able to touch without vomiting strongly flavoured dishes, and favours gamey meat, blue-veined cheese, truffles, and wines that smell of gunflint, is a phenomenon that can only result from a particular internal organisation; it is as if a six-month-old child found his nurse’s milk insipid, and cried for brandy. I am as weary as if I had performed all Sardanapalus’ prodigious deeds, and yet my life has been very chaste and tranquil outwardly: it is a mistake to believe that indulgence is the only path that leads to satiety. One may, also, arrive at it through desire alone, and abstinence is more exhausting than excess. A desire such as mine is something far more wearisome than possession. Its gaze searches and penetrates the object of its desire, an object that forever shines beyond it, and more brightly than if it were near at hand: what more could possession teach? What experience could equal the constant, passionate act of contemplation?

I have experienced so much, though I have travelled so little, that only the steepest peaks tempt me. I am attacked by that disease which grips nations and powerful men in their old age: the impossible. All that I can do has lost its attraction for me. Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, great Romans of the Empire, O you, whom one so misunderstood, you whom the pack of rhetoricians pursues with its yapping, I suffer from your illness, and I pity you with all the pity remaining in me! I too would like to build a bridge over the sea, and pave the waves; I too have dreamed of burning cities to illuminate my festivities; I too have wished to be a woman to know new pleasures. Your Golden House, Nero, was merely a muddy stable beside the palace I have built for myself; My wardrobe is better arranged than yours, Heliogabalus, and far more splendid. My Circuses are louder and bloodier than yours, my perfumes more pungent and penetrating, my slaves more numerous and better-built; I too have harnessed naked courtesans to my chariot, I too have trodden men under my heel, as disdainfully as you. Colossi of the ancient world, there beats, beneath my weak side, a heart as great as yours, and what you did I would have done in your place, and perhaps more. How many Babels have I not piled one upon the other to reach the sky, to strike the stars, and from there spit on all Creation! Why then am I not God, since I cannot be man?

Oh, I believe I will need a hundred thousand centuries of nothingness to rest from the fatigue of these twenty years of life. God in heaven, what stone will you roll above me? Into what shadow will you plunge me? From which Lethe will you have me drink? Beneath what mountain will you bury the Titan? Am I destined to breathe a volcano’s flames from my mouth, and cause earthquakes in turning from side to side?

When I think, that I was born of so gentle and resigned a mother, with such simple tastes and manners, I am astonished I did not burst from her womb while she carried me. How is it that none of her calm, pure thoughts have passed into my body with the blood she transmitted? Why must I be a son only of her flesh and not her spirit? The dove bore a tiger that seeks the whole of creation for its prey.

I was raised in the calmest and most chaste of surroundings. It would be difficult to dream of an existence more purely sheltered than mine. My years passed in the shadow of my mother’s chair, with my little sisters, and the family dog. I saw around me only the good, quiet, gentle, faces of aged servants, the colour of whose hair had faded to white in a service seemingly inherited; grave and sententious friends and relatives, dressed in black, who set down their gloves one after the other on the brim of their doffed hats; a few aunts of a certain age, plump, clean, and discreet, with dazzling linen, grey skirts, netted mittens, their hands on their belts like religious folk; furniture severe to the point of bareness, raw oak woodwork, leather hangings, interiors wholly of a sober, muted colour, such as certain Flemish masters painted. The garden was always damp and dark; the boxwood that outlined its rectangles, the ivy that covered the walls, and a few fir trees with naked arms were intended to provide greenery and succeeded rather poorly; the brick house, with a high roof, though spacious and well-maintained, had something of a gloomy somnolent air about it. Certainly, nothing was more suited to an isolated, austere, and melancholy life than such a dwelling. It seemed impossible for the children raised in such a house not to end by becoming priests or nuns. Well, in that atmosphere of purity and rest, in that meditative shade, I rotted little by little, without it showing, like a medlar in straw. In the bosom of my honest, pious, holy family, I acquired a dreadful degree of depravity. It was not through contact with the world, since I had not viewed it; nor the fire of passion, since as yet I was shivering, bathed in the icy sweat that oozed from those brave walls. The worm had not crawled from the heart of some other medlar to mine. It had hatched of its own accord, in the very depths of my flesh, which it gnawed and furrowed through and through: nothing appeared, outwardly, to warn of my being spoiled. I showed neither blemish nor puncture; yet I was utterly hollow inside, and all that was left was the thin, brightly-coloured outer rind, which the slightest shock could have burst. Is it not an inexplicable thing that a child born of virtuous parents, raised with care and discretion, kept far from all evil, should so pervert himself, as to arrive where I have arrived? I am sure that if I traced my lineage back six generations, I would fail to find in my ancestors a single atom akin to those of which I am formed. I am not born of my family, I am not a branch of its noble trunk, but a poisonous mushroom raised in some stormy night, between its mossy roots; and yet none has felt a greater aspiration, a stronger impulse, towards the beautiful than I, none has tried more stubbornly to spread his wings; but each attempt brought only a steeper fall, and that which was supposed to save only ensured I was lost.

Man Handing a Letter to a Woman in the Entrance Hall of a House (1670) - Pieter de Hooch (Dutch, 1629-1684)

Man Handing a Letter to a Woman in the Entrance Hall of a House (1670)
Pieter de Hooch (Dutch, 1629-1684)
Artvee

Solitude is worse for my spirit than society, though I desire the former more than the latter. Everything that draws me out of myself is salutary where I am concerned: people bore me, but drag me away, of necessity, from this empty reverie, whose spirals I ascend and descend, head bowed, arms outstretched. Also, since Rosette’s and my tête-à-tête is now interrupted, and there are others here before whom I am forced to restrain myself somewhat, I am less prone to yield to my dark moods, and am less exercised by those extreme desires which descend on my heart like a flock of vultures as soon as I am unoccupied for a moment. There are a few rather pretty women here, and one or two young men who are quite amiable, and full of gaiety; but, amidst this provincial swarm, I am most charmed by a young cavalier who arrived a few days ago; his appearance instantly pleased me. I took a liking to him, on merely seeing him dismount from his horse. It would be impossible to display more grace; he is not very tall, but is slender and well-built; he has something soft and undulating in his gait and gestures, which could not be more pleasing; many women would envy his hands and feet. His only fault is that of being too handsome, with features almost too delicate for a man. He is equipped with a pair of the finest and darkest eyes in the world, which have an indefinable expression and whose gaze is difficult to endure; but, as he is young and has no sign of a beard, the softness and perfection of the lower part of his face somewhat tempers the vivacity of his aquiline eyes; his brown, glossy hair floats on his neck in large curls, and grants his head a particular character. So here at last is one of those types of beauty I dreamed of realising, alive before me! What a pity he is a man, what a pity I am not a woman! This Adonis, who to his handsome face joins a very full and lively mind, further enjoys the privilege of having, at the service of his witticisms and jests, a voice of a clear and silvery timbre, that it is hard to listen to without being stirred. He is truly perfect. It seems that he shares my taste for beautiful things, for his clothes are of a richness much sought after, his horse is a dashing thoroughbred; and, so that everything might seem complete and of a match, behind him, mounted on a little horse, came a page of fourteen or fifteen years old, blond, pink, pretty as a seraph, who was half-asleep, so tired from the journey he had just completed that his master was obliged to lift him from his saddle, and carry him in his arms to his room. Rosette gave the former a warm welcome, and I think that she has formed the design of employing him to rouse my jealousy and so waken the little flame of nigh-extinguished passion, still lingering beneath my ashes. However formidable such a rival may be, I am little disposed to be jealous, rather I feel so drawn towards him that I would quite willingly abandon my love to win his friendship.

Chapter 6: The Story Continued

At this point, if the good reader will allow me, I will abandon to his reveries, for a while, the worthy character who, until now, has alone occupied the stage while soliloquising, and return to the usual form of the novel, without however prohibiting myself from subsequently adopting the dramatic style, if necessary, and while reserving for myself the right to draw again on the kind of epistolary confession that the aforementioned young man addressed to his friend, persuaded that, however penetrating and full of sagacity I may be, I must, of necessity, know less about it all than he himself does.

The little page was so exhausted that he slept in his master’s arms, his dishevelled little head swaying back and forth as if he were a corpse. It was quite a distance from the steps to the room that had been assigned to the newcomer, and the servant who preceded him offered to carry the child himself; but the young cavalier, for whom, moreover, his burden seemed light as a feather, thanked him and would not part with the lad: he placed him on a sofa very gently, taking a thousand precautions not to wake him; a mother could not have been gentler. When the servant had withdrawn, and the door was closed, he knelt before him, and tried to pull off his boots; but the lad’s little swollen, aching feet made the operation rather difficult, and the pretty sleeper uttered from time to time a few vague and inarticulate sighs, like a person about to wake. Then the young rider would pause, and wait for sleep to overtake him. The boots finally yielded, that was the essential thing; the stockings offered little resistance. This operation completed, the master returned the child’s feet to the velvet of the sofa; side by side, they were truly the two most adorable feet in the world, small, and white as new ivory, though a little pink now from the pressure of the shoes in which they had been imprisoned for seventeen hours, feet too small for a girl, and which seemed never to have walked; what one saw of each leg was round, plump, polished, transparent and veined, and of the most exquisite delicacy; a leg worthy of its foot.

The young man, still kneeling, contemplated those two little feet with attentive and loving admiration; he bent down, took the left one and kissed it, then the right one and kissed that too; and then, from kiss to kiss, he moved up the leg to where the material began. The page lifted his eyelid a little, and gave his master a kindly and drowsy look, in which no surprise showed. ‘My belt is bothering me’, he said, passing his finger under the ribbon, and fell asleep again. The master unbuckled the belt, placed a cushion beneath the page’s head to raise it, and carefully wrapping the lad’s feet, which were a little cold, after the heat they had experienced, in his cloak, he drew up an armchair, and seated himself as close as he could to the sofa. Two hours passed in this way, the young man watching the child sleep, observing the shadows of dreams that furrowed his forehead. The only sound heard from the room was his steady breathing, and the tick of the clock.

It was certainly a very graceful picture. Here was the contrast between two forms of beauty, an effect which a skilled painter might have made good use of. The master was as beautiful as a woman, the page as beautiful as a young girl. The latter’s rounded, rosy face, framed by the hair, had the appearance of a peach beneath its leaves; it possessed the same freshness and velvety softness, though the fatigue of the journey had robbed it of some of its usual brilliance; his half-open mouth revealed small milk-white teeth, and his full and shining temples were crisscrossed by a network of azure veins; the eyelashes of his eyes, like those golden threads which bloom in missals around virginal heads, reached almost to his cheeks; his long, silken hair was both gold and silver, gold in the shadows, silver in the light; his neck was at the same time full and frail, betraying nothing of the gender indicated by his clothes; two or three buttons of his jerkin, undone to facilitate breathing, allowed one to glimpse, through the gap in his shirt of fine Holland cloth, an area of plump, rounded flesh of an admirable whiteness, and the beginning of certain curvatures hard to explain on the chest of a young boy; on closer inspection, one might also have found that the hips were a little too developed. My readers may think what they will; these are simply conjectures I offer: I know no more about it than they, but hope to learn more in time, and promise to keep them faithfully informed of my discoveries. Let the reader, with better eyesight than mine, look beneath the lace of the chemise, and decide in all conscience whether the contours seem too prominent or not sufficiently so; but be warned that the curtains are drawn, and there is only a half-light, in the room, most unfavourable to this kind of investigation.

The horseman, his master, was pale, but of a golden pallor, full of strength and life; his pupils were a moist crystalline blue; his straight, thin nose endowed his profile with wondrously proud vigour, and the flesh was so delicate that, at the edge of its contours, light gleamed; his mouth had the sweetest smile at certain moments, but was mostly curved only at its corners, as in some of those faces one sees in the paintings of the old Italian masters, rather reserved than outgoing; which endowed him with an adorable expression of disdain, a smorfia that could not be more piquant, an air of childlike sulkiness and ill-humour most singular and charming.

What were the ties that joined master to page, and page to master? Assuredly there was more between them than the affection that may exist between master and servant. Were they friends or brothers? Then why the pretence? It would have been difficult, indeed, for anyone who witnessed the scene I have just described, to believe that these two personages were in truth only what they appeared to be.

‘The dear angel, how he sleeps!’ the young man whispered to himself. ‘I think he has never travelled so far in his life. Fifty miles on horseback, he who is so delicate! I am afraid he’s ill with fatigue. But no, it won’t come to aught; tomorrow he’ll not be the worse; he’ll have regained his fine colour, and be fresher than a rose after the rain. Does he not look handsome, so! Were I not afraid of waking him, I’d devour him with kisses. What an adorable dimple he has on his chin! How fine and white his skin! Sleep well, my treasure. Oh! I’m truly jealous of your mother, and wish I had made you. He’s not ill? No; his breathing is regular, and he’s quiet. But I think I hear someone at the door…’

In fact, someone had tapped as gently as possible on the door-panel, twice. The young man rose to his feet, and, thinking he was in error, waited till there was another knock before opening the door. Two more taps, a little louder, were heard, and a soft, female voice said, in a very low tone: ‘Théodore, it’s me.’

Théodore allowed her to enter, but with less vivacity than a young man might show when opening his door to a woman with a sweet voice who tapped mysteriously at his door at nightfall. The half-open door gave way, to guess whom? To the mistress of our perplexed D’Albert, to Princess Rosette herself, rosier even than her name, her breathing as tremulous as ever a woman displayed on entering a handsome gentleman’s room at eve. — ‘Théodore!’ said Rosette.

Théodore raised his finger, placed it on his lips like the statue of silence, and, pointing to the sleeping child, led her into the next room.

‘Théodore,’ resumed Rosette, who seemed to find a singular sweetness in repeating the name, and at the same time sought to rally her ideas, ‘Théodore,’ she continued without letting go of the hand which the young man had offered so as to guide her to an armchair, ‘you’ve returned, at last? Where have you been? What have you been doing all this time? Do you know it’s nearly six months since I saw you? Ah! Théodore, it’s not right; we owe people who love us, even when we do not love them, a little consideration and pity.’

Théodore. — ‘Where have I been, what have I been doing? I know not. I’ve left and returned; I’ve slept and watched, I’ve sung and cried, I’ve hungered and thirsted; I’ve been too hot and too cold; I’ve been bored; I’ve less wealth, and aged six months, I’ve lived, that’s all. And you, what have you been doing?’

Rosette. — ‘Thinking of you, with love.’

Théodore. — ‘And that’s all?’

Rosette. — ‘Yes, indeed. I’ve spent my time ill, have I not?’

Théodore. — ‘You might have employed it better, my poor Rosette; for example, in loving someone who could return your love.’

Rosette. — ‘I’m as disinterested in love, as in all else. I never lend love at interest; it’s purely a gift, which I grant.’

Théodore. — ‘You display a rare virtue then, one that can only arise in select souls. I’ve often wished to possess the power to love you, at least as you would like me to; but there’s an insurmountable obstacle between us, one that I cannot speak of. Have you taken another lover since I left?’

Rosette. — ‘One that I still have.’

Théodore. — ‘And what kind of man is he?’

Rosette. — ‘A poet’.

Théodore. — ‘The Devil! Who is this poet, and what has he penned?

Rosette. — ‘I know not, a kind of volume no one has heard of, that I tried to read one evening.’

Théodore. — ‘So, you’ve an unknown poet for a lover. That must be intriguing. Does he have holes at his elbows, dirty linen, and wrinkled stockings?’

Rosette. — ‘No; he dresses quite well, washes his hands, and lacks an ink stain on the end of his nose. He’s a friend of De C***; I met him at Madame de Thémines’; you know, that tall woman who acts in an innocent childlike manner, and gives herself little airs.’

Théodore. — ‘And may I know the name of this glorious personage?’

Rosette. — ‘Oh! Lord, yes! He’s called the Chevalier d’Albert!’

Théodore. — ‘The Chevalier d’Albert! I think he is the young man who was standing on the balcony, as I dismounted.’

Rosette. — ‘Precisely.’

Théodore. — ‘And who gazed at me so attentively.’

Rosette. — ‘Himself.’

Théodore. — ‘He’s fine enough. Has he caused me to be forgotten?’

Rosette. — ‘No. You are unfortunately not a person one can forget.’

Théodore. — ‘He loves you very much, no doubt?’

Rosette. — ‘In truth, I know not. There are times when one might think he loves me deeply; but at heart he does not; he’s near to hating me; he resents me because he’s unable to love me. He did as do many others more experienced than he; he mistook a lively taste for passion, and found himself quite surprised and disappointed once his desire was sated. It’s a mistake to think that, because one has slept with someone, one must adore them.’

Théodore. — ‘And how do you intend to treat this aforementioned lover, who is nevertheless not one?’

Rosette. — ‘How one treats past weeks, or last year’s fashions. He is not strong enough to quit me before I quit him, and, though he does not love me in the true sense of the word, he clings to me through pleasurable habit, and such habits are the most difficult to break. If I do not aid him, he is quite capable of being studiously bored beside me, till the Day of Judgment, and beyond; for he has the germ within him of every noble quality; and the flower of his soul only asks to bloom in the light of eternal love. Truly, I am sorry not to have shone for him. Of all my lovers I scarcely loved, he’s the one I love the most; and, if I were not as kind as I am, I’d refuse him his freedom, and keep him yet. That I will not do; I am at this moment completing the process of wearing him down.’

Théodore. — ‘How long will it take?’

Rosette. — ‘A fortnight, three weeks perhaps, but certainly less than it would have taken if you’d not arrived. I know I’ll never be your mistress. There is, you say, a hidden reason for it, which I might concede if you were allowed to reveal it. So, all hope in that direction must be forbidden me. Yet I cannot resolve to be another’s mistress now you are here: it would seem a profanation, and that I no longer had the right to love you.’

Théodore. — ‘Keep him, for my sake.’

Rosette. — ‘If it pleases you, I will. Ah! If you could only have been mine, how different my life would have been from what it has been! The world has a false idea of me, indeed, and I shall die without anyone suspecting what I was, except you, Théodore, the only one who has ever understood me, though you have been cruel to me. I have never desired anyone but you for a lover, and yet have failed to win you. Oh, if only you had loved me, Théodore, I would have been virtuous and chaste, I would have been worthy of you: instead of that, I shall leave (if I am remembered) the reputation of a gallant woman, that of a courtesan of sorts who differed from those of the gutter only in rank and fortune. I was born with the noblest of inclinations; but nothing depraves like being unloved. Many despise me who know not what I had to suffer to arrive where I am. Being sure of never belonging to the one I preferred above all, I let myself float with the stream, I neglected to take the trouble to defend this body that could not be yours. As for my heart, no one has possessed it and never can. It is yours, though you’ve broken it; and, unlike most women who think themselves honest if they’ve not drifted from one bed to another, though I’ve prostituted my flesh, I have always been faithful, in heart and soul, to my dreams of you. At least, I shall have rendered a few people happy, I will have made a white-robed phantom dance round a few bedsides. I’ve deceived, in all innocence, more than one noble heart. I was so miserable at being repelled by you I was always terrified at the thought of forcing another to undergo such torture. That is the sole motive for many an adventure that has been attributed to a pure spirit of licentiousness! I! Licentious! O world! If you knew, Théodore, how deeply painful it is to feel one has missed out on life, on happiness; to find that everyone misunderstands you, and that it’s impossible to alter the opinion that others have of you; that your finest qualities are deemed faults, your purest essence a fatal poison; that only the ill in you has breathed from your lips; to have found the door always open to your vices, and forever closed to your virtues; and to have failed to bring good, among so many hemlocks and aconites, to a single lily or a single rose! This you have not known, Théodore.’

Théodore. — ‘Alas! Alas! That tale, Rosette, is everyone’s story; the best part of us is that which remains within, and which we cannot display. Poets know that same. Their most beautiful poem is the one they have not yet written; and they bear more poems away in the coffin than they leave in the library.’

Rosette. — ‘I will bear away my poem with me.’.

Théodore. — ‘And I, mine. Who has not composed one in their life? Who is so happy or unhappy as not to have created theirs in their mind, or heart? Perhaps even executioners have dreamed poems moistened by the sweetest most sensitive tears; perhaps the poets have fashioned some suitable even for executioners, crimson and monstrous’

Rosette. — ‘Yes. White roses should be placed on my grave. I have had ten lovers, but am a virgin still, and will die a virgin. Many virgins, on whose graves jasmine and orange perpetually snow their blossoms, were in truth Messalinas.’

Théodore. — ‘I know your worth, Rosette.’

Rosette. — ‘You alone in the world have perceived what I am; for you have seen me in the light of a love that is deep and true, since hope is absent; and he who has not seen a woman when she’s in love cannot say what she is; that is what consoles me in my bitterness.’

Théodore. — ‘And what does this young man think of you, who, in the eyes of the world, is now your lover?’

Rosette. — ‘A lover’s thoughts are a chasm deeper than the Bay of Portugal, and it’s hard indeed to say what lies in the depths of a man’s mind; a sounding line could be fixed to a rope a hundred thousand fathoms long, and it would be uncoiled to the end, and paid out, without encountering anything solid. However, I have sometimes touched the bed of this one of mine in a few places, and the lead has sometimes returned me mud, sometimes lovely sea-shells, but most often mud and bits of coral mixed together. As for his opinion of me, it has varied greatly; he began where others end, by despising me; young people with lively imaginations are subject to such a thing. There is always a violent stumble at the first step they take; their passage from fantasy to reality cannot be undertaken without a jolt.

He despised me, while I amused him; now he esteems me, and I bore him. In the early days, he saw only my banal side, and I think the certainty of not meeting with resistance had much to do with his determination. He seemed immensely eager for an affair, and I thought it at first one of those outpourings from a heart which only seeks to overflow, one of those vague loves one has in one’s youth, in the month of May, and which in the absence of a woman lead a lad to clasp the trunks of trees in his arms, and kiss the grass and the flowers of the meadow. But it was not that; he only travelled via myself, to arrive at something else. I was a path for him, not his goal.

Beneath the fresh look of his twenty years, beneath the first down of adolescence, hid a deep corruption. He was stung to the heart; here was a fruit full of nothing but ashes. In that young and vigorous body stirred a soul as old as Saturn’s, a soul as incurably unhappy as ever has been. I confess to you, Théodore, I was frightened and almost dizzied as I bent over those dark living depths. Your pain and mine are nothing compared to that. If I had loved him more intensely still, I might have killed him. Something not of this world nor in this world attracts him, calls to him irresistibly, and he can find no rest day or night; and, like a heliotrope in a cavern, he twists and turns towards the hidden sun. He is one of those men whose soul was not dipped enough in the waters of Lethe before being bound to his body, and who retains from the heaven from which he came reminiscences of eternal beauty which work in him and torment him; one who remembers that he once had wings, and now has only feet. If I were God, I would deprive of poetry, for all eternity, the angel guilty of such negligence. Instead of requiring a castle of brightly coloured cards to be built to house a fair young product of fantasy for a single Spring, a ziggurat higher than the eight-stepped temple of Belus needed to be raised. I was not strong enough, I feigned not to have understood him, and I let him crawl on his wings, and seek a summit from which he could launch himself into the immense void.

He thinks I saw none of this, because I lent myself to all his whims without seeming to divine their purpose.

Not being able to cure him, for which I expect one day to be held accountable before God, I wished to give him at least the happiness of believing that he was passionately loved. The pity and interest he aroused in me was enough to allow me to adopt a ready tone and manner tender enough to deceive him. I played my part like a consummate actress; I was teasing, melancholic, sensitive, voluptuous; I feigned anxiety and jealousy; I shed false tears, and summoned to my lips a host of artificial smiles. I adorned the mannequin of love I made of myself, with the most brilliant fabrics; I had it walk the paths of my parks; I invited all my birds to sing as it passed, and all my flowers, my dahlias and nightshades, to bow their heads; I had it cross my lake on the silver back of my beloved swan; I hid myself within, and lent it my voice, my wit, my beauty, my youth, and gave it an appearance so seductive that the reality was inferior to the illusion. When the time comes to smash the hollow statue to pieces, I will do it in such a way that he will believe all the fault on my side, and so spare him the remorse. It is I who must burst the balloon and let the air escape. Is this not holy prostitution, and an honourable deception? I keep, in a crystal urn, liquid tears, caught at the very moment they were about to fall. Here is the urn, these are my diamonds, and I will present them to the angel who will gather me to God’.

Théodore. — ‘They are the most beautiful that a woman’s neck can bear. A queen’s glittering finery is not their equal. For my part, I think that what the Magdalene poured over Christ’s feet were the ancient tears of those she had consoled, and that the road to Compostela is moistened with such, and not, as has been claimed, with drops of Juno’s milk (The mythical origin of the Milky Way, for which El Camino de Santiago, the pilgrim route to Compostela de Santiago, is the Spanish name). Who will do for you, what you have done for him?’

Rosette. — ‘No one, alas, since you cannot!’

Théodore. — Oh. my dear! If only I could! But do not lose hope. You are still young and beautiful. You have many an avenue of lime trees and flowering acacias to traverse before you reach that muddy road, lined with box-hedges and leafless trees, which leads from the porphyry tomb in which your lovely past years will rest, to the tomb of rough stone, coated with moss, in which they will hasten to bury the remains of all that was you, along with the days that comprised your wrinkled, tottering old age. You still have much of the mountain of life to climb, and it will be long before you reach the snow-covered zone. You are merely in the region of aromatic plants, of limpid waterfalls over each of which the tricoloured arch of a rainbow is suspended, of beautiful holm-oaks and fragrant larch-trees. Climb a little higher, and, amidst the wider scene unfolding at your feet, you may see bluish smoke rising above the roof of that house where he, who is destined to love you, dwells. We should not despair of life too soon since fate may reveal a perspective we failed to anticipate. I have often thought the life of a human being is akin to ascending the spiral staircase inside a Gothic tower. The long granite serpent twists its coils amidst the darkness, of which each scale is a step. After a few convolutions, the little daylight that shone from the doorway fails. The shadows of those houses whose height you have not yet surpassed prevent the air-vents admitting the sun’s rays: the walls are blackened, oozing damp; you seem rather to be descending to a dungeon from which you can never emerge than climbing the turret which, from below, seemed so tall and slender, adorned with stone lace-work as if it were about to leave for the ball. You hesitate whether to ascend higher, the moist darkness weighs on your brow so heavily. The staircase winds again, rising step by step, and windows trace their golden trefoils on the opposite wall more frequently. You view the jagged house-gables, the entablatures’ sculptures, the curious shapes of chimneys; a few steps more, and your gaze overlooks the entire town; a forest of needles, spires, and towers bristling on all sides, indented, pierced, perforated, hollow, the daylight shining through their thousand openings. The domes and cupolas are curved like the breasts of a giantess, or the skull of a Titan. The isles of houses and palaces rise in shadowy or luminous levels. A few more steps, and you reach the platform; there you can see, beyond the city walls, the green of crops, blue hills, and white sails on the river’s moiré ribbon. Dazzling sunlight bathes you, as the swallows fly to and fro around you, uttering their joyous cries. The distant sound of the city rises, like a friendly murmur or a beehive’s buzzing; while all the bell-towers scatter their peals of echoing pearls in the air; the wind brings you the scents of the neighbouring forest and mountain flowers: all is light, harmony, perfume. If your legs had wearied, or discouragement taken you, had you remained seated on a lower step, or descended once more, this spectacle would have been lost to you. Sometimes, however, the tower has only a single opening in the middle or at the summit. The tower of your life is constructed so; well then, it demands a more courageous stubbornness, perseverance armed with fingers equipped to cling, in the shadow, to its projecting stones, so as to reach the shining clover-leaf opening through which sight can escape, and view the landscape below; if every loophole has been filled, or none have been pierced at all, then one must ascend to the summit; and the higher one has risen without glimpsing the view, the more immense the horizon will seem, and the greater your pleasure, and surprise.’

Rosette. — ‘Oh Théodore, God grant that I may soon reach that window! I’ve been climbing that spiral stair in the depths of night for a long while now, but I fear that the opening has been walled up, and I must climb to the summit; and what if the stair with its innumerable steps only ends at a blocked door, or a vault of hewn stone?’

Théodore. — ‘Don’t say that, Rosette; don’t think it. What architect would build a staircase leading nowhere? Why suppose the silent architect of the world more stupid and improvident than an ordinary one? God never errs, and He forgets nothing. One cannot believe He would have amused Himself, to thwart you, by imprisoning you in a long stone stair without exit or opening. Do you expect Him to dispute with poor insects like ourselves our wretched transient happiness on the imperceptible grain, called Earth, that is ours in this vast creation? He would have to possess the ferocity of a tiger or the most severe of judges; and, if we displease Him so much, he need only direct a comet from its course a little, and smother us all in its tail. Think you that God amuses Himself by threading us one by one on a golden pin, as the Emperor Domitian threaded flies? God is no doorkeeper or churchwarden, and, though He is ancient, He is not yet in His dotage. All such petty nastiness is beneath him, and He is not so foolish as to exercise his wit on us, or play tricks to baffle us. Courage, Rosette, courage! If you are hard pressed, stop a moment, and catch your breath, and then continue your climb: there may be but twenty steps left before reaching the portal from which you shall view your happiness.’

Rosette. — ‘Never! Oh, never! If I reach the summit of the tower, it will be but to throw myself down.’

Théodore. — ‘My poor afflicted one, chase away those sinister ideas which flutter around your head like bats, and cast on your beautiful brow the opaque shade of their wings. If you would have me love you, be happy, don’t weep.’ (He draws her gently to him and kisses her on the eyes.)

Rosette. — ‘What a misfortune for me to have known you! And yet, if I had to live it all over again, I would still desire to have done so. Your restraint has been sweeter to me than others’ passion; and, though you have made me suffer greatly, all the pleasure I have had has derived from you; through you, I have glimpsed what I might have been. You have been a ray of light in the night, you have illuminated many a dark place in my soul; you have opened fresh perspectives on my life. To you I owe the knowledge of love; love, that is true, and there is even a profound and melancholy charm in loving without being loved, and a beauty in remembering those who seem to forget us. It is already a happiness to love even when that love is unrequited. Many will die without finding it, and those who love are as often as not those who should be most pitied.’

Théodore. — ‘They suffer and feel their wounds, but at least they live. They hold to something; they have a star around which they gravitate, a pole towards which they may ardently move. They have something to wish for; they can say to themselves: “If I reach it, if I win it, I’ll be happy.” They experience dreadful agony, but in dying they can at least say to themselves: “I died for that.” To die so is to be reborn. The only truly and irreparably unhappy wretches are those who madly embrace the universe entire, those who wish for everything yet desire nothing, those whom the angel or fey, if one descended suddenly and said to them: “Wish for one thing, and you shall have it” would find embarrassed and speechless.’

Rosette. — ‘If the fey arrived, I know very well what I would ask her.’

Théodore. — ‘You do, Rosette, and that is why you are happier than I, for I do not. Many vague desires stir within me, which merge and give birth to others which devour them. My desires are like a flock of birds whirling and fluttering aimlessly; your desire is an eagle with its gaze fixed on the sun, which only the lack of air prevents from rising on outstretched wings. Ah! If I could but know what I need; if the ideal which ever haunts me emerged, clear and exact, from the fog which surrounds it; if the favourable or fateful star appeared in the depths of my sky; if the light which I should follow only shone in the night, whether treacherous will-o’-the-wisp or friendly beacon; if a column of fire marched before me, even though it were through a desert devoid of manna, bare of oases; if I knew where I was going, even if my path ended only at a precipice! I would prefer a senseless, accursed chase through quagmire and thicket, to this absurd, monotonous traipsing. To live like this is to exist like those blindfolded horses, doomed to turn some well-wheel or other, and plod thousands of miles without seeing anything new, or changing place. I’ve been plodding so long the barrel should have surfaced by now.’

Rosette. — ‘You and D’Albert have many points of resemblance, and, when you speak, it sometimes seems to me that it is he who is speaking. I have no doubt, when you know him better, you will become very attached to him; you cannot fail to agree. He is stirred, like you, by aimless impulses; he loves immensely without knowing what, he would like to climb the heavens, for the Earth seems to him a platform scarcely fit to support his feet, and possesses more pride than Lucifer before his fall.’

Théodore. — ‘I was afraid, at first, that he was one of those poets, like so many who have driven poetry from the world, a threader of strings of false pearls who sees in this world only the last syllables of words, and who, once he has rhymed ‘night’ with ‘flight’, ‘soul’ with ‘whole’, and ‘God’ with ‘rod’, conscientiously crosses his arms and legs, and allows the spheres to complete their revolutions.’

Rosette. — ‘He is not one of those. His verses are less than he is, and fail to contain him. One would gain a very false idea of his person from his work so far; his true poem is himself, and I know not if he will ever write another.

He has deep within his soul a seraglio of beautiful ideas, which he surrounds with a triple wall, and of which he is more jealous than ever a Sultan was of his odalisques. He only employs in his verse those which he cares little for, or which he is repelled by; it is the exit through which he ejects them, and the world sees only what he no longer desires.’

Théodore. — ‘I understand both the jealousy and the modesty. Similarly, many people only admit the love they once possessed when they no longer possess it, and their mistresses only once the latter are dead.’

Rosette. — ‘It is so difficult to keep something one’s own in this world! Every flame attracts so many moths, every treasure so many thieves! I love those silent folk who bear their thoughts to their grave, not wishing to deliver them to the foul embrace and shameless handling of the crowd. I prefer those lovers who fail to carve the name of their mistress on trees, or confide it to the air, and who are pursued by the fear that, asleep, some dream will make them pronounce it. I am one of their number; I have not spoken my thoughts, and no one will know of my love… But now it is almost eleven, my dear Théodore, and I’m preventing you from taking the rest you must need. When I’m obliged to leave you, I always feel a pain in my heart, as if I’ll not see you again. I linger as long as I can; but must leave in the end. Come now, farewell; I am afraid that D’Albert will seek me; farewell, my friend.’

Théodore put his arm round her waist, and led her to the door: there he halted, following her for a long time with his eyes; the corridor was pierced here and there with small windows with narrow panes, through which the moon shone, enchantingly, creating alternating patches of light and shade. As she passed each window, Rosette’s clear white form gleamed like a silvery phantom; then faded away to reappear less brightly a little further on; finally, it disappeared entirely.

Théodore, as if lost in deep thought, remained motionless for a few minutes with his arms crossed, then he passed his hand over his forehead, and tossed his hair back with a movement of his head, re-entered the room, and retired to bed after kissing the page, who was still asleep, on the brow.

Chapter 7: The Story Continued

As soon as it was light, D’Albert announced himself at Rosette’s with unusual eagerness. — ‘Here you are,’ cried Rosette, ‘And very early, I may say, for one who never arrives early. To reward you for your gallantry, I give you my hand to kiss.’ And she proffered, from beneath the Flanders sheet trimmed with lace, the prettiest little hand ever seen at the end of a smooth, round arm.

D’Albert kissed her without compunction: — ‘And the other, its sister, shall I not kiss that too?’ — ‘Lord, yes! Nothing’s denied you. I’m in my Sunday mood today; look.’ And she proffered her other hand tapping him lightly on the mouth: ‘Am I not the most accommodating woman in the world?’

— ‘You are grace itself, and white marble temples should be built to you amidst groves of myrtle. Truly, I fear that what happened to Psyche will happen to you; Venus will become jealous,’ said D’Albert, joining her two lovely hands and raising them together to his lips.

— ‘You uttered all that in a single breath, as if it were a phrase you’d learned by heart,’ said Rosette, with a delightful little pout.

— ‘Not at all: you are well worth a phrase being turned expressly for you, and were made to gather virgin roses to the sound of madrigals,’ replied D’Albert.

— ‘Oh, really! What has roused you today? Are you ill, that you appear so gallant? I fear you’re dying. Surely you know that when someone suddenly changes character for no apparent reason, it’s a dark omen? Now, it is noted, by all the women who have taken the trouble to love you, that you’re usually very gloomy, while it’s no less certain that you are extremely charming at this moment, and quite inexplicably amiable. There, truly, I find you pale, my poor D’Albert: give me your wrist, so I can feel your pulse,’ and she rolled up his sleeve, and counted the pulses with comic gravity. ‘No, you are fine, without the slightest symptom of fever. So, I must be madly pretty this morning! Go and fetch my mirror, so I can see whether your gallantry is in error or no.’

D’Albert retrieved a small mirror from her dressing-table and placed it on the bed.

— ‘In fact,’ said Rosette, ‘you are not entirely wrong. Why don’t you write a sonnet about my eyes, Sir Poet? You’ve no reason not to. See, how unhappy I am! To possess eyes like these, and a poet like you, and lack sonnets, as if one squinted and had a mere porter for a lover! You don’t love me, sir; you’ve never even written an acrostic sonnet to me. And my mouth, how do you like it? Yet I’ve kissed you with this mouth, and perhaps will kiss you again, my dark and handsome one; though in truth it’s a favour of which you’re hardly worthy. I do not mean today however; today you’re fit for everything and, not to always talk of myself, you appear, this morning, to be of unparalleled beauty and freshness, you have the air of a brother of Aurora; and, though it’s barely day, are already festooned and adorned as if for a ball. Do you have designs on me, perchance? Are you plotting an attack on my virtue? Would you like to possess me? But I forget: you have and all that’s ancient history.’

— ‘Rosette, don’t tease like that; you know very well I love you.’

— ‘That’s as may be. I’m not sure of it; are you?’

— ‘Perfectly, and to such an extent that if you’d be so kind as to defend the door, I’ll seek to demonstrate it to you, and, I dare to flatter myself, in a winning manner.’

— ‘As for that, no: however much I might need to be convinced, the door shall stay open; I’m too pretty to be shut behind closed doors; the sun shines for all, and my beauty will shine like the sun, if that sits well with you.’

— ‘Upon my honour, it sits ill indeed; yet I’ll act as if I found it excellent. I’m your most humble slave, and I lay my wishes at your feet.’

— ‘So much the better; hold to that sentiment, and leave the key in the door of your room this evening.’

The large round face of a smiling African servant, appeared, suddenly, in the doorway: ‘Madame, the Chevalier Théodore de Sérannes, asks to pay his respects, and begs you deign to receive him.’ ‘Let the Chevalier enter,’ said Rosette, pulling the sheet up to her chin.

Théodore went first to Rosette, to whom he made the deepest and most graceful bow, which she returned with a friendly gesture, and then he turned to D’Albert, whom he greeted with a free and courteous air.

— ‘What were you speaking of?’ asked Théodore. ‘Forgive my interrupting your conversation; on a subject of some interest no doubt: please continue, and allow me to participate.’ — ‘No, no!’ replied Rosette with a mischievous smile, ‘We were merely talking business.’

Théodore sat at the foot of Rosette’s bed, since D’Albert had taken his place at her bedside, by right of being the first to have arrived; the pleasant, witty, and most lively conversation meandered for some time from subject to subject, and thus I shall give no account of it; it would lose too much in the transcription. The air, the tone, the fire of the words and gestures, the thousand ways of pronouncing a word, the wittiness, like bubbling foam on a glass of Champagne that sparkles and evaporates on the spot, are things impossible to capture and reproduce. I leave my readers, who will acquit themselves better than I, to fill the gap; let them imagine, here, five or six pages filled with all that is finest and most capriciously, whimsically, interesting, elegant and effervescent. I am more than aware that my ploy is somewhat reminiscent of that of the artist Timanthes, who, despairing of being able to render the figure of Agamemnon to his satisfaction, threw a sheet over its head; but I prefer to be timid rather than imprudent.

It might not be out of place to inquire into the reason for D’Albert having risen so early, and what had spurred him on to arrive at Rosette’s room so promptly, much as if he had still been in love with her. It seems likely he was driven to do so by a pang of hidden, and unacknowledged, jealousy. Assuredly, he now cared little for Rosette, and would even have been glad to be rid of her, but he wished to leave her, and not be left, the latter being something which always wounds a man’s pride deeply, however close to extinction his prior affection might be. Théodore was so fine a gentleman that D’Albert found it hard to witness his appearance without fearing what had, indeed, occurred many times before, that is to say, that all eyes would turn in Théodore’s direction, and hearts would follow eyes. Strangely enough, though the latter had won many a woman over, none of their lovers had retained that enduring sense of resentment one usually feels against someone by whom one has been supplanted. There was, in his every manner, such a winning charm, such natural grace, something so sweet and yet so proud that even men were sensitive to it.

D’Albert, who had arrived at Rosette’s with the desire to speak most sharply to Théodore, if he were to meet him there, was surprised not to feel the least twitch of anger in his presence, and to have yielded so easily to the advances the latter made. At the end of half an hour, you’d have thought them childhood friends, and yet D’Albert was inwardly convinced that, if ever Rosette was to fall in love, it would be with this man, and he had every reason to be jealous, as regards the future at least, since he suspected nothing at present. What would he have thought if he had seen the fair one in her white dressing gown slip, like a moth in a moonbeam, into the handsome young man’s room, and not leave till three or four hours later while taking many a precaution? He might, in truth, have believed himself more unhappy than he was, for one rarely finds a pretty and amorous woman leaving the room of a no less handsome gentleman exactly as she has entered it.

Rosette listened to Théodore with great attention, as one listens to one’s beloved; yet what he said was so amusing and varied that her degree of attention was wholly natural and readily explicable. So D’Albert took no offense. Théodore’s tone toward Rosette was polite and friendly, but nothing more.

—’ What shall we do today, Théodore?’ said Rosette. Shall we go for a sail? What think you? Or shall we go hunting?’ — ‘Let’s hunt,’ she replied, ‘that’s less melancholy than gliding over the water side by side with some idle swan, parting the water lilies to left and right. Do you not agree, D’Albert?’ — ‘I’d rather lounge in a boat on the river,’ D’Albert answered her ‘than gallop madly in pursuit of some poor wild creature; but wherever you go, I’ll go. It’s simply a matter of permitting Madame Rosette to leave her bed, now, and attire herself in suitable style.’ Rosette nodded her assent, and rang for someone to help her dress, while the other two went off arm in arm. One might have rightly conjectured, seeing them so well matched, that one was the titular lover and the other the beloved, of the same woman.

Soon all was ready. D’Albert and Théodore were already seated on horseback in the inner courtyard, when Rosette, dressed as an Amazon, appeared on the top step of the porch. In hunting costume, she displayed a light-hearted, deliberate air that could not have suited her better: she mounted with her usual agility, and gave her horse a tap with the whip-handle that seemed like a caress. D’Albert spurred forward, and soon was beside her. Théodore let them advance a little, being sure to catch up as soon as he wished. He seemed to be waiting for something, and often turned towards the castle. — ‘Théodore! Théodore! Hasten! Is that steed of yours made of wood?’ Rosette cried.

Théodore put his mount to the gallop for a while, and reduced the distance between them, without however closing the gap. He looked again towards the castle, which would soon be lost from sight; a small whirlwind of dust, in which something barely discernible was stirring vigorously, appeared at the end of the track. In a few moments the whirlwind was beside Théodore, and revealed, on settling, like the classical clouds in the Iliad, the fresh and rosy face of the mysterious page. — ‘Théodore, hasten!’ cried Rosette a second time, ‘Spur your tortoise a little, and ride beside us.’

Théodore’s mount was pawing and rearing impatiently. He loosened the reins, and in a short while had overtaken Albert and Rosette by several yards. ‘Whoever loves me, follow me,’ cried Théodore, and attempted a four feet high fence. ‘What, Sir Poet,’ he called, once he was over, ‘won’t you leap? Poets’ mounts are winged, they say.’ — ‘Well, I myself would rather go round,’ replied D’Albert, smiling; I’ve only one head to break, after all. If I’d several, I’d try.’

— ‘No one loves me, then, since no one follows,’ said Théodore, the curved corners of his mouth tightening even more than usual. The little page raised his large blue eyes, regarded him with a reproachful air, and clapped his two heels to his horse’s belly. The horse made a prodigious leap. — ‘Yes!’ cried Théodore, ‘Up and over!’ Rosette cast a strange look at the lad and blushed to the eyes; then, giving her mare a furious blow of the whip, she leapt the apple-green wooden fence which barred the path. — ‘And I, Théodore, think you I don’t love you, now?’

The page gave her a surreptitious sideways glance, and drew close to Théodore. D’Albert who was already in the depths of the ride, saw none of this; indeed, since time immemorial, fathers, husbands and lovers have possessed the privilege of seeing nothing.

— ‘Isnabel (the name of the page, and an anagram of the epithet ‘Lesbian’),’ cried Théodore, ‘you are a madman, and you, Rosette, a madwoman! ‘Isnabel, you took too few strides, and you, Rosette, you almost caught your dress on the post. You could have killed yourself.’ ‘What matter?’ replied Rosette, in a tone of voice so sad and melancholy that Isnabel forgave her for having jumped the barrier too.

They rode at walking pace for some time, and arrived at a circle, where the pack and the huntsmen were to be found. Six branched archways, piercing the dense trees, led to a small hexagonal stone tower on each of which was engraved the name of the track that ended there. The trees were so tall they seemed as if carding the patches of woolly cloud that a fairly brisk breeze floated above their crowns, while dense high grass, and well-nigh impenetrable bushes offered prey a retreat and defence, such that the hunt promised of success. It was a true forest of times past, with ancient oaks far more than a century old, such as one no longer sees, now that trees are rarely planted, and people lack the patience to wait for those that are planted to grow; a hereditary forest, established by great-grandfathers for their great-grandsons, and maintained by them for their great-grandsons in turn, with alleys of prodigious width, an obelisk surmounted by a ball, a fountain bordered by rocks, and an obligatory pond; one guarded in far-off days by men in powdered wigs, leather breeches of yellow hue, and sky-blue coats; one of those dense, dark forests against which the satiny white rumps of those great horses Philips Wouwerman painted stand out admirably, and the broad covers of those hunting-horns à la Dampierre (designed by Marc-Antoine de Dampierre, c1723), which Joseph Parrocel loves to delineate on huntsmen’s backs. A multitude of curving hounds’ tails, like crescents or billhooks, were wagging in a dusty cloud. The signal was given, the hounds, straining at their leads as if they would strangle each other, were freed, and the hunt began. I will not describe the deer’s twists and turns through the forest precisely; I am even unsure whether or not it was a stag of ten points, and, despite the information I’ve gathered, am still uncertain, which is truly distressing. Nonetheless, I think that in such a noble, ancient, and shadowy forest, there can only be ten-tined stags, and see no reason why the one after which the four principal characters of my illustrious romance galloped, on horses of different colours, and unequal pace, should not have been one.

The stag ran true, while the fifty hounds at its heels were no small spur to its natural speed. The race was so swift that only a few rare yelps were heard.

View of the château de Vincennes or The Departure of Louis XIV for the hunt - Adam-François van der Meulen

View of the château de Vincennes or The Departure of Louis XIV for the hunt
Adam-François van der Meulen
Artvee

Théodore, as the best mounted and the finer horseman, spurred hot on the heels of the pack with incredible ardour. D’Albert followed close behind him. Rosette and the little page, Isnabel, followed, separated by a gap that increased by the minute, which was soon large enough that there was no hope of the group reforming.

— ‘Shall we halt for a moment,’ asked Rosette, ‘to let the horses breathe? The hunt is heading towards the pond, and I know an alley by which we can arrive at the same time as they do.’

Isnabel tugged on the bridle of his little mountain pony, which lowered its head, shaking its fulsome mane over its eyes, and began to paw the sand with its hooves. The little horse formed the most perfect contrast with Rosette’s; the former was black as night, the latter satin white: the one was all shaggy and dishevelled; the other’s mane was plaited with blue ribbon, and its tail was combed and curled. The latter looked like a unicorn, and the former like an untrimmed poodle.

The same antithetical difference was as noticeable in the riders as in their mounts. Rosette’s hair was as black as Isnabel’s was blonde; her eyebrows were clearly marked and apparent; those of the page had little more colour than his skin, and resembled the down of a peach. Rosette’s complexion was bright and clear as the light of noon; the complexion of the other had the blush and transparency of the breaking dawn.

— ‘Shall we try to overtake the rest?’ said Isnabel to Rosette, ‘The horses have had time to catch their breath.’

— ‘On, then!’ replied the pretty Amazon, and they galloped down a narrow side-alley that led to the pond; the two mounts ran abreast, occupying well-nigh the whole width.

On Isnabel’s side, a twisted and gnarled tree thrust out a thick branch like an arm, seeming to shake its fist at the riders. The lad failed to see it. — ‘Take care!’ cried Rosette, ‘Lie flat! You’ll be unseated.’

Her warning was uttered too late; the branch struck Isnabel in the middle of his body. The violence of the blow made him lose his stirrups, and, given his horse continued to gallop and the branch was unbending, he found himself lifted from the saddle, and hurled backward fiercely. The lad fainted instantly. Rosette, fearful, threw herself from her horse, and ran to the page, who showed no sign of life.

His hat had flown off, and his beautiful blond hair streamed everywhere, scattering over the sand. His small unclenched hands seemed as if made of wax, they were so pale: Rosette knelt beside him and tried to revive him. She had neither smelling-salts nor water-flask with her, and her embarrassment was great. Finally, she noticed a deep rut in which clear rainwater had collected; she dipped her fingers, to the great fright of a little frog, the naiad of this runnel, and shook a few drops onto the young page’s bluish temples. He seemed not to feel them, and beads of water rolled down his white cheeks like a sylph’s tears down a lily leaf. Rosette, thinking his clothes might be bothering him, unbuckled his belt, undid the buttons of his jerkin, and opened his shirt so that he might breathe more freely. What she then found, would have surprised a man most agreeably, but seemed to give her little pleasure, for her eyebrows drew together, and her upper lip trembled slightly, that is to say, she had revealed a pure white throat and breasts, still barely rounded, but with admirable promise, and already offering much; smooth, rounded, ‘ivory’ breasts, to speak like one of Ronsard’s disciples, delightful to view, and yet more delightful to kiss. ‘A girl!’ she cried, ‘A girl! Oh! Théodore!’

Isnabel, for I retain that name for her, though it was not her own, began to breathe a little, and raised her long eyelids languidly; she was not injured in any way, but only dazed. She soon sat straight, and, with Rosette’s help, was able to rise to her feet and remount her horse, which had stopped as soon as it no longer felt the weight of its rider.

They walked on slowly to the pond, where the pair found the rest of the hunt. Rosette told Théodore, in a few words, what had happened. Théodore changed colour several times during Rosette’s story, and all the rest of the way rode his mount beside Isnabel’s.

They returned to the château early! The day, which had begun so joyfully, ended rather sadly. Rosette was dreamy, and D’Albert also seemed deep in thought. The reader will soon learn the reason why.

Chapter 8: D’Albert to Silvio

No, my dear Silvio, no, I have not forgotten you. I am not one of those who pass through life without ever looking back; my past remains with me, and encroaches on my present, and well-nigh my future too. Your friendship is one of the sunlit spaces that stand forth most clearly on the already darkening horizon of my latter years; often, from the heights where I stand, I turn to contemplate our friendship with a feeling of ineffable melancholy. Oh, how beautiful the weather was, then! How angelically pure we were! Our feet scarcely touched the earth; we had as it were wings on our shoulders, our passions lifted us, and the spring breeze set trembling the fine halos of adolescence about our brows.

Do you remember that little island planted with poplars at that point where the river branches? To reach it, one was obliged to traverse a long narrow plank, which bent fearfully in the middle; a real goats’ bridge, which in fact was hardly used by any other creatures: it was delightful. A dense lawn of short grasses, where blue forget-me-nots opened their pretty little yellow, dark-pupiled eyes; a straw-coloured path like a strip of nankeen, providing a belt for the island’s green dress and cinching its waist; and the ever-changing shadows of the aspens and poplars were not the least charms of that paradise. Large pieces of linen which the local women sold were spread there to whiten in the dew; they were like squares of snow. And that little girl, brown and tanned, her large wild eyes shining with such lively brilliance beneath her long tresses, who chased after the goats, scolding them and waving her willow-wand, when they tried to cross the linen in her care. Do you remember her? And those sulphur-yellow butterflies, with their faltering, tremulous flight, and the kingfisher we tried to catch so many times, whose burrow was between the roots of those alders? And those slopes to the river with their rough-cut steps, their posts and stakes all green at the base, and almost always covered by a tangle of plants and branches? How limpid and shimmering the water was! How golden the gravel bed it revealed! And what pleasure we found, seated on the river-bank, feet dangling! The water lilies, their gilded flowers gracefully unfurling, looked like green tresses flowing over the agate-patterned back of a bathing nymph. The sky gazed at itself in that mirror. Its smiling azures and transparent pearly greys could not have been more ravishing; and, at all hours of the day it displayed sheets of turquoise, clouds like cotton-wool or rippling seascapes, in inexhaustible variety. How I loved the squadrons of mallards with emerald heads and necks, sailing incessantly from one shore to the other, wrinkling the pure and ice-cold surface!

How well suited we were to figure in that landscape! How we fled to Nature, so gentle and restful, and how easily we felt ourselves in harmony with her! Spring without, youth within, light on the lawns, smiles on our lips, snowy flowers on every bush, white phantoms blossoming in our souls, modest blushes on our cheeks and on the sweetbriars, poetry alive in our hearts, songbirds chirping amongst the bright leaves, pigeons cooing, scents rising, a thousand confused murmurs, our hearts beating, water stirring the pebbles, blades of grass flickering, thoughts stirring, a droplet rolling from some flowery chalice, a tear overflowing an eyelid, a sigh of friendship, a rustling of leaves... what evenings we spent there walking slowly, so close to the shore that often we walked with one foot on shore and the other in the flow.

Alas! That scene failed to last, at least for me. As for you, in acquiring mature knowledge, you yet knew how to retain a child’s candour. The germ of corruption within me developed swiftly, and its gangrene mercilessly consumed all that was pure and healthy. The only good thing that remained was our friendship.

I am accustomed to hiding nothing from you, neither actions nor thoughts. I have laid bare the most secret fibres of my heart; however strange, however ridiculous, however eccentric the movements of my soul, I describe them to you; but, in truth, those I have been experiencing, for a while now, are of such strangeness that I hardly dare admit to them myself. I have told you, somewhere, that I was afraid, by dint of seeking the beautiful and of struggling to realise it, of falling in the end into the unachievable or the monstrous. I have almost reached that point. When will I escape from these fierce conflicting currents that drag me left and right? When will my vessel cease to shudder beneath my feet, driven on, as it is, by the stormy waves? Where shall I find harbour, drop anchor, and attain an unshakeable shore beyond the reach of the waves, where I can dry my body, and wring the foam from my hair?

You know with what ardour I have sought physical beauty, what importance I attach to outward form, and how deep a love I feel for the visible world: it must be that I am too corrupt, too jaded, to believe in moral beauty, or pursue it with any consistency. I have lost all knowledge of good and evil, utterly, and, in my depravity, have well-nigh returned to the state of ignorance of a savage or a child. In truth, nothing appears praiseworthy or blameworthy to me, and the strangest actions surprise me but little. My conscience is deaf and mute. Adultery seems to me the most innocent thing in the world; I find it unsurprising that a young girl should prostitute herself; it seems to me I could betray my friends without the least remorse, and possess not the slightest scruple about pushing whoever troubles me from the cliff, if I were walking with them along its brink. I could watch the most atrocious murders in cold blood, and there is even something in the sufferings and misfortunes of humanity that does not displease me. I feel, when I see some calamity fall upon the world, the same feeling of bitter and acrid pleasure that one feels when one finally takes revenge for an old insult.

O world, what have you done to me that I hate you so? What has roused me so against you? What did I expect of you that I should bear such resentment for your having deceived me? What high hope have you dashed? What eagle’s wings of mine have you clipped? What doors are you supposed to have opened that remain closed, and which of us has failed the other?

Nothing touches me, nothing moves me. I no longer feel, on hearing the tale of heroic deeds, those sublime tremors which formerly coursed through me from head to foot. All that even seems somewhat foolish to me. No voice is profound enough to tighten the slackened fibres of my heart, and make them quiver. I see human tears flow with the same casual air as I observe the rain, unless that is they appear beautiful, the light is reflected from them in a picturesque manner, and they run down a lovely cheek. It is only the animal kingdom for which I have a small remnant of pity. I would happily let a peasant or a servant be beaten, yet could not, with any degree of patience, endure the same being done to a horse or a dog, in my presence; and yet I am not wicked, I have not harmed a single person in the world, and likely never will; rather I put it down to the indifference, the sovereign contempt, I feel for all who displease me, which prevents my caring about their fate, and would even allow me to harm them. I abhor people en masse, yet, amidst the crowd, I judge only one or two worthy of being especially hated. To hate someone is to concern oneself about them almost as much as if one loved them; it is to distinguish them, to isolate them, from the throng; it is to be aroused because of them; it is to think about them by day, and dream about them by night; it is to bite one’s pillow and grind one’s teeth at the thought that they exist; what more does one do if one is in love? Would one take as many pains, exercise as much effort, to please a mistress as one does to destroy an enemy? I doubt it; to hate someone profoundly, one must love another deeply. Every great hatred serves to counterbalance a a great love: then whom should I hate, I who love nothing?

My hatred is like my love a confused, general feeling that seeks to grasp something and cannot; I have within me a wealth of love and hatred I know not what to do with, and that weighs me down horribly. If I cannot find a way to pour forth one or the other, or both, I shall burst, like a bag so overstuffed with money it bursts at the seams. Oh! If I could but abhor someone; if one of these stupid dolts among whom I live could only insult me in such a way as to make the ancient viper’s blood boil in my icy veins, and stir me from this gloomy drowsiness in which I stagnate; if, only, old witch with quivering head, you would bite me on the cheek with your rat’s teeth, and transmit to me your venom and your rage; if only the death of another could grant me life; if only the last heartbeat of some enemy writhing beneath my foot, could send its delicious tremor through my hair, and the smell of his blood seem sweeter to my nostrils than the aroma of flowers; oh, how willingly I would renounce love, and how happy I would think myself!

A deadly embrace, the jaws of a tiger, the grip of a boa-constrictor, the foot of an elephant shattering and compressing a human chest, the pointed tail of a scorpion, the irritant milky juice of the euphorbia, a wavy Javan kriss, a blade that gleams in the night, and bathes in blood, it is you that will replace for me the rose petals, moist kisses, and embraces of love!

I said that I love nothing. Alas! I am afraid now of loving someone. It would be a hundred thousand times better to hate than to love like this! The type of beauty I have dreamed of for so long, I have encountered. I have found the bodily incarnation of my ghost; I have seen it, it has addressed me; I have touched its hand, it exists; it is no chimera. I knew I could not be mistaken, and that my presentiments were never false. Yes, Silvio, I am close to the dream of my life: my room is here, my ideal’s is there. From mine, I see those window-curtains and the tremulous light of the lamp. A shadow passed across the curtains but now: in an hour we will dine together.

Those beautiful Turkish eyelids, that clear, deep gaze, that warm pale amber complexion, long lustrous black hair, that proud and refined nose, those delightful slender fingers in the manner of Parmigianino (Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola), those delicate contours, that pure oval of a face, which grants a head such elegance and nobility, all that I wished for, all that I would have been happy to find scattered among five or six women, I find united in a single person!

What I adore most of all things in the world is a lovely hand. If you could see those! What perfection! How perfectly white! What softness of skin! How warm and moist! How admirably tapered the fingertips! How clearly outlined the fingernails! What polish; what brilliance! They look like the inner petals of a rose. The hands of Anne of Austria, so praised, so celebrated, compared to these, were only those of a goose-girl, or a washerwoman. And then what grace, what art, the slightest movements of that hand reveal! How delightfully the little finger bends and stands a little apart from its longer companions! The thought of that hand drives me mad, and makes my lips shudder and burn. I close my eyes so as to see it no more, but, with the tips of those delicate fingers, it seizes my eyelashes and opens my eyelids, causing a thousand visions of ivory and snow to pass before me.

Ah! Doubtless Satan’s claw has gloved itself in that satin skin and some mocking demon toys with me; there is enchantment here. It is all too monstrously impossible.

That hand... I shall travel to Italy to view the paintings of the great masters, to study, compare, draw, and become an artist in the end, so as to be able to render that hand as it is, as I see it, feel it; perhaps it will be a way to rid myself of my species of obsession.

I desired beauty; I knew not for what I asked. Such a desire seeks to look full gaze at the sun, to touch its fire. I suffer horribly. Not being able to assimilate such perfection, not being able to sink within it, and feel it pass into myself, having no means of rendering or touching it! When I see something beautiful, I long to clasp it with all of myself, everywhere, at the same instant. I would like to sing and paint it, sculpt it, and write of it, and be loved by it as I love; I long for what cannot be, and could never be.

Your letter did me ill, a great ill, if I say so myself. All the peace and happiness you enjoy, those walks in the autumnal woods, these long conversations, so tender and intimate, that end with a chaste kiss on the forehead; that serene and secluded life; those days so quickly passed that night seems to draw towards you, make the inward agitation, with which I live, seem even more tempestuous. Then, you are to be married in two months; all obstacles are removed, you are sure now of belonging to each other forever. Your present happiness is increased by the thought of happiness to come. You are happy, and certain of soon being happier still. What a destiny is yours! Your friend is beautiful, but what you love in her is not a dead, palpable beauty, a merely material beauty, it is invisible and eternal beauty, the beauty that does not age, a beauty of the soul. She is full of grace and candour; she loves you as such souls know how to love. You do not seek to know if the gold of her hair is close in tone to that painted by Rubens or Giorgione; it pleases you, because it is hers. I would wager, happy lover that you are, that you are even unaware of whether your mistress is of the Greek or Asiatic, English or Italian type. Oh, Silvio! How rare are those hearts content with love pure and simple, who desire neither a hermitage in the depths of some forest, nor a garden on an isle in Lake Maggiore.

Had I the courage to tear myself away from here, I would visit, and spend a month with you; perhaps I might purify my spirit amidst the air you breathe, perhaps the shadows over your paths would with their freshness ease my burning brow a little; but no, yours is a paradise in which I must not set foot. I should scarcely be allowed to gaze from afar, over its wall, at the two beautiful angels walking hand in hand there, eyes locked together. The Devil may only enter Eden in serpent form, and, dear Adam of mine, for all the happiness of heaven, I would not want to play serpent to your Eve.

What terrible thoughts have been passing through my mind these last days? What has turned my blood to venom? Monstrous thoughts, spreading your pale green branches, and your hemlock flowers, amidst the icy shadows about my heart, what poisonous wind has deposited there the germ from which you hatched! So, this was the fate reserved for me, this is where all those so desperately-attempted paths were doomed to end! O destiny, how you mock us! All those eagle-like flights towards the sun, those pure heavenly flames of aspiration, this divine melancholy, this deeply-contained love, this worship of beauty, these curious and elegant fancies, the inexhaustible endlessly-welling flow from the inner fountain, this ecstasy with ever-open wings, this reverie blossoming more fully than hawthorns in May? All the poetry of my youth, all my gifts so fine and rare, served only, it seems, to place me in the lowest ranks of mankind!

I sought to love. I ran about like a madman summoning and invoking love; I writhed with rage at my feelings of impotence, my blood inflamed; I dragged my body through the mires of pleasure; I pressed against my arid heart, to the point of suffocation, a woman who was young and beautiful, and who loved me; I chased the passion that fled from me. I prostituted myself, like a virgin haunting some den in the hope of finding a lover among those whom debauchery has driven there, instead of waiting, patiently, in discreet and silent shadow, for the angel, whom God had reserved for me, to appear in a radiant half-light, with a heavenly flower in her hand. All the years I have wasted in childish agitation, running here and there, trying to take Nature and Time by force, I should have spent in solitude and meditation, in seeking to make myself worthy of being loved; that would, indeed, have been wise; but scales were over my eyes, and I walking straight towards the precipice. One foot is already dangling over the void, and I believe that it will soon be joined by the other. I have resisted, in vain, I feel; I must plunge into the depths of this fresh abyss that has opened within me.

Yes, this is indeed how I imagined love to be. I feel, now, all I have dreamed. Yes, here indeed occur the delightful yet terrible passages of insomnia amidst which roses seem thistles, and thistles roses; here indeed are the sweet pain and wretched happiness, the ineffable tremors, that surround you with a golden cloud, and make the form of objects tremble as if you were intoxicated; that buzzing in the ears in which the last syllable of the beloved name ever sounds, the pallor, the blushes, the sudden frissons, the burning and icy sweat: this is love indeed; the poets do not lie.

When I am about to enter the drawing-room where we usually meet, my heart beats with such violence that one can almost see it through my clothes, and I am obliged to compress it with both hands, for fear it might escape. If I see him at the end of a path, in the park, the distance between us vanishes, and I know not whither the path leads: the Devil must bring us closer, or I must have wings. Nothing can distract me from him: I read, and his image interposes itself between the book and my eyes; I mount my horse, I course at full gallop, thinking I feel in the whirlwind his long hair always mingling with mine, and hear his hurried breathing and his warm breath brushing my cheek. His image obsesses me and follows me everywhere, and I never see it more than when I do not.

You pitied me for not loving, now pity me for doing so, and especially for loving whom I love. What misfortune, what a blow of the axe against one whose life is already so fragmented! What insane, odious, and guilty passion has seized me! The blush of shame will never fade from my brow. This is the most deplorable of all my aberrations. I can make nothing of it, I understand nothing, everything in me is confused and overturned; I no longer know who I am, or what others are. I even doubt whether I am male or female. I feel horror at myself. I experience singular, inexplicable agitations, and there are moments when it seems my reason is leaving me, and the feeling that I exist deserts me completely. I lost faith, a while ago, in my surroundings. I listened to myself and observed myself attentively. I sought to unravel the confused skein that entangled my soul. At last, I discovered the awful truth, behind all the veils that concealed it... Silvio, I love... Oh, I cannot speak the words. I love…. a man!

Chapter 9: D’Albert to Silvio

It is true. I love a man, Silvio. I have long sought to delude myself, given a different name to the feeling I experience, clothed it in the garb of a pure and disinterested friendship, and believed it no more than the admiration I feel for all beautiful people and things. For several days I have wandered the treacherous and smiling paths which thread their way about every nascent passion; but I recognise now what a profound and fearful course I have embarked upon. There is no hiding the matter. I have reflected thoroughly; I have weighed all the circumstances coolly; I have accounted for the smallest detail; I have searched my soul in every aspect with the confidence which the habit of studying oneself gives. I blush to think of and write the words; but the thing, alas, is only too certain, I love this young man, not in mere friendship, but with love… yes, love.

You whom I love so much, O Silvio, my good, my only comrade, you have never made me feel anything akin to this, and yet, if there was ever under heaven a close and lively friendship, if ever two souls, though different, understood each other perfectly, our friendship was so, and our two souls thus. What winged hours we have spent together! What endless conversations, ever too soon ended! How many things we confided to each other, that none have before! We each opened to the other that ‘window’ Momus would have liked to see opened in the human heart (see ‘Aesop’s Fables’, Perry 100, ‘Zeus, Prometheus, Athena and Momus’) How proud I was to be your friend, I, younger than you, I so mad, you so rational!

What I feel for this young man is unbelievable: never have thoughts of any woman troubled me so singularly. The sound of his voice, so silvery and so clear, agitates my nerves, and arouses me in a strange way; my soul hangs on his lips, like a bee on a flower, to drink the honey of his words. I cannot brush him in passing without shivering from head to toe, and in the evening when, on leaving us, he extends to me his adorable hand so soft and satiny, my life-blood races to the place he has touched, and an hour later I feel the pressure of his fingers, still.

This morning, I observed him for quite a long time without him seeing me. I was hidden behind my curtain. He was at his window, which is exactly opposite mine. That part of the castle was built at the end of Henri IV’s reign; it is half brick, half stone, according to the custom of the time; the window is long and narrow, with a lintel and a stone balcony. Théodore, for you have doubtless already guessed that he is the person in question, was leaning in a melancholy fashion against the balustrade, and seemed to be deep in thought. A half-raised drapery of red damask, with large flowers, fell in broad folds behind him, and served as a backcloth. How handsome he looked, and how marvellously his pale brown head was highlighted against its purple hue! Two large locks of hair, black and glossy, like the bunches of grapes in the myth of Erigone, hung, gracefully, down his cheeks, and framed, charmingly, the fine and correct oval of his lovely face. His neck, round and full, was entirely bare, and he wore a kind of dressing-gown with wide sleeves, almost like a woman’s dress. He held a yellow tulip in his hand the petals of which he tore at mercilessly in his reverie, and the pieces of which he threw to the breeze.

The light from an angle of wall, illuminated by the sun, was cast across the balcony, and the scene took on a warm, translucent tone that might have made one envy the most light-filled of Giorgione’s paintings.

His long hair gently stirred by the breeze, his marble neck uncovered thus, his long robe drawn tightly about his waist, and those beautiful hands, each emerging from its sleeve like the pistil of a flower from amidst the petals, gave him the air not of the most handsome of men, but of the loveliest of women, and I said to myself in my heart: ‘It is a woman, oh, a woman!’ Then I remembered suddenly that half-foolish thing I wrote to you long ago, as you will recall, regarding my ideal, and the manner in which I would, assuredly, meet her: the lovely lady, in a park of the days of Louis XIII, the red and white château, the grand terrace, the avenues of ancient chestnut trees, and the encounter at the window. I described all the details to you. Here it was, in reality; for the scene was a precise realisation of my dream. Here, the architecture was indeed in that very same style, and the effects of light, the nature of its beauty, its colour and character, all that I had wished for; it lacked nothing, except that the woman was, instead, a man; but I confess to you that at that moment I entirely forgot the fact.

Théodore must be a woman in disguise; otherwise, the thing is impossible. Such beauty, excessive even for a woman, is not that of a man, were he Antinous, Hadrian’s companion, or Alexis, Corydon’s beloved in Virgil’s Eclogues (see ‘Eclogue’ 2). Théodore is a woman, and I am mad to have tormented myself thus. In this manner all is explained in the most natural way in the world, and I am not such a ‘monster’ as I believed.

Would God grant such long, brown silken fringes to male eyelids? Would he dye an ugly, hairy, limp male mouth with such a vivid, tender carmine hue? Our masculine bones, carved with billhooks, and rudely jointed, are not worthy of being encased in such delicate white flesh; our lumpy skulls are not made to be bathed by waves of such admirable hair.

Oh, Beauty! We were created only to love you, and to adore you on our knees when we find you, or to seek you eternally, throughout this world, if that happiness is not granted us. But to possess you, to embody you ourselves, is possible only to angels and women. Lovers, poets, painters and sculptors, all seek to raise an altar to you: the lover the form of his mistress, the poet his song, the painter his canvas, the sculptor his work in marble; but eternal despair is the lot of those unable to render palpable the beauty they feel, and to be encased in a body that fails to realise the ideal they believe theirs.

I once saw a young man who had stolen from me the form I should have possessed. This scoundrel was made exactly as I would like to have been. He had the beauty I lacked, rendering me ugly, and beside him I seemed a mere sketch. He was my height, but slimmer and stronger; his figure resembled mine, but with an elegance and nobility not mine. His eyes were of a like shade to my own but with a look and a brilliance mine will never own. His nose had been cast from the same mould as mine, except that it seemed to have been retouched by a skilled sculptor’s chisel; the nostrils being more open and more passionate, the planes more clearly marked; and had something of a heroic form, which that respectable part of my being is totally devoid of: one would have said that Nature had tried in my person to create that self-perfection, but that I was the shapeless, half-erased, rough draft of that thought of hers, of which he was the copy in beautifully-formed script. When I saw him walk, stop to greet the ladies, sit or lie down with that perfect grace which results from beauty of proportion, I felt a dreadful sadness and pang of jealousy, such as a clay model might feel, cracked and drying obscurely in a corner of the studio, while the proud marble statue, which without it would not exist, stands proudly on its sculpted pedestal, and attracts the attention and praise of visitors. For after all, this fellow is only myself, a little more accomplished, and cast in a less rebellious bronze, which has insinuated itself more precisely into the mould’s hollows. I consider him bold in the extreme, strutting about like that in my shape, and acting with insolence, as if he were an original type: he is, in the end, a mere plagiarist of my form, for I was born before him, and without me Nature would never have thought of creating him as he is. When women praise his good manners and the charms of his person, I wish nothing more than to rise and say: ‘You fools, praise me now, for this gentleman is myself, and it was but a detour to transmit to him what was mine by right. At other times I feel the itch to strangle him, and cast his soul from the body that should belong to myself, and I prowl around with tight lips, and clenched fists, like a lord in his palace in which a family of beggars has settled in his absence, and who knows not how to eject them. This young man, moreover, is stupid, yet he succeeds all the more. And there are times when I envy his stupidity more than his beauty. The prophecy in the Gospel (see Matthew 5:3) regarding the poor in spirit is not, as it stands, complete: ‘theirs is the kingdom of heaven’, though of that I know nothing, and it’s all the same to me; but assuredly they possess the kingdom of earth, for they possess wealth and lovely women, the only two desirable things, that is to say, in the world. Do you know of a man of any intelligence who is rich, or a lad owning only his heart and a degree of merit who has a passable mistress? So, though Théodore is handsome indeed, I do not seek his beauty, and prefer that he possesses it, rather than myself.

Those amours, strange to us, of which the elegies of the ancient poets are full, which surprised us so much and which we could not ourselves conceive of, are therefore quite likely and possible. In the translations we have done, women’s names replace those which are there in the original text. Juventius has changed his ending and become Juventia, Alexis has become Ianthe. The handsome boys have become beautiful girls, and thus we recompose the monstrous seraglios of Catullus, Tibullus, Martial, and noble Virgil. A gallant occupation which only proves how little we have understood ancient genius.

I am a man of Homeric times; the world in which I live is not my own, and I understand nothing of the society that surrounds me. Christ, to me, has not been born; I am as pagan as Alcibiades or Phidias. I have not sought to gather the flowers of passion on Golgotha, nor has the deep river that flows from the side of the crucified one, and forms a red cincture about the world, bathed me with its wave: my rebellious body refuses to recognise the supremacy of the soul, nor will my flesh accept its mortification. I find the Earth as beautiful as the heavens, and I think virtue to be perfection of form. Spirituality is not my choice, I prefer statues to phantoms, and noon to twilight. Three things please me: gold, marble, and purple, that is: brilliance, solidity, colour. My dreams are formed from them, and all the palaces I build for my chimeras are constructed of such materials.

Sometimes my dreams are otherwise. They are of long cavalcades of pure-white horses, free of harness or bridle, ridden by beautiful naked young men, who parade across a ribbon of dark blue as on the Parthenon frieze, or of choirs of young girls adorned with ribbons, clad in straight-pleated tunics, and shaking ivory sistra, who wind it seems around the body of an immense vase. I never dream then of mist or fog, never of anything uncertain and wavering. My sky is free of clouds, or, if a few float there, they are solid ones carved with a chisel, formed from shards of marble cut from some statue of Jupiter. Mountains with peaks, and sharp contours, rise, abruptly, on the horizon, and the sun, over one of the highest spires, opens wide its yellow leonine eye, with golden eyelids. The cicadas buzz and sing, sound clicks in my ear; the shadows, defeated, unable to bear the heat, curl up, and gather at the foot of the trees: all is radiant, shines, and gleams. The smallest detail is accentuated, seeming bold and solid; every object takes on robust form and colour. No room here for the softness and reflection of Christian art. The Classical world is mine. The founts in my landscape fall in sculpted floods, from sculpted urns; and amidst the tall green reeds, as sonorous as those of the River Eurotas, one glimpses the rounded, silvery hip of some naiad with glaucous hair. In the dark oak forest, Diana passes by with her weapons at her back, her scarf flying, clad in boots tied with intertwined bands. She is followed by her pack of hounds, and her nymphs with harmonious names. My pictures are painted in only four tones, like those of primitive artists, and often are only coloured bas-reliefs; for I like to touch with my finger what I have seen, and pursue its rounded contours even in the most fleeting folds; I consider each object from every angle, moving around it, lamp in hand. I consider a lover, in antiquity’s light, as a piece of more or less perfect sculpture. How are the arms formed? Rather well. The hands are not lacking in delicacy. What do I think of this foot? I consider the ankle noble, while the heel is commonplace. But the throat is well set, and its shape is good, the serpentine line undulates, the shoulders are full, and beautifully formed. The woman would make a passable model, and one could cast several parts of her. Then, let me love her.

Diana the Huntress - Guillaume Seignac (French, 1870-1924)

Diana the Huntress
Guillaume Seignac (French, 1870-1924)
Artvee

You understand; you were once the same. I have a sculptor’s, not a lover’s, eye for a woman. All my life I have worried about the flask’s exterior, and not the quality of its contents. If I had Pandora’s box in my hands, I think I would have kept it shut. A moment ago, I said that Christ, to me, has not been born; nor Mary, the star of our modern heaven, sweet mother of the glorious babe.

Long, and often, have I paused beneath the stone foliage of some cathedral, in the trembling light of its stained-glass windows, at the hour when the organ groans of its own accord, as an invisible finger rests on the keys and the wind blows through the instrument’s pipes, and have gazed deeply into the pale azure of the Madonna’s long-lidded eyes. I have followed, piously, the contours of her thin, oval face, and the barely indicated arches of her eyebrows, I have admired her smooth, luminous forehead, her chastely translucent temples, her cheekbones shaded in a sober and virginal hue, more tender than peach blossom; I have counted one by one the beautiful golden eyelashes which cast their quivering shadow upon them; I have unravelled, amidst the half-tones which bathe her, the receding lines of her frail, and modestly-inclined, neck; I have even, with daring hand, raised the folds of her tunic and contemplated a virgin breast, unveiled and swollen with milk, which has never been pressed except by divine lips; I have followed the thin blue veins to their most imperceptible ramifications; I have placed my fingers there to make the celestial ambrosia gush forth in streams of white; I have touched with my mouth the bud of the mystical rose.

Yet, I confess, that all that immaterial beauty, so winged and vaporous that one feels it about to take flight, has affected me only a little. I admire a Venus Anadyomene (see the paintings by Botticelli, Titian et al), a thousand times more. Those ancient eyes turned up at the corners; those lips so pure, so firmly outlined, so amorously seeking to be kissed; that low, full forehead; that hair tied carelessly behind the head and wavy as the surface of the sea,; those firm, glossy shoulders; that back with a thousand charming sinuosities; that slender neck, lightly curved; all those round, taut contours; that width of hip; that delicate strength; that air of superhuman vigour in a body so adorably feminine; all those features ravish and enchant me to a degree of which you, Christian and wise, can form no idea.

Mary, despite the humble air she affects, seems far too proud to me; the tip of her foot, surrounded by white bandages, barely touches the already darkening globe about which the ancient dragon writhes (see Rubens, ‘The Immaculate Conception’, in the Prado). Her eyes are the most beautiful in the world, but they are always turned towards the sky, or lowered; they never look straight ahead, they have never served as a mirror for the human form. And then, I dislike like those halos of smiling cherubs, which often surround her head in a golden mist. I am jealous of those mighty angels, ephebes with flowing hair and robes, who flit about so lovingly in her Assumptions. Those hands which intertwine to support her, those wings which flutter to fan her, displease and annoy me. And those little cherubic masters of the sky, so coquettish and so triumphant, in tunics formed of light, in wigs of golden thread, with their beautiful blue and green feathers, seem to me much too gallant, and, if I were God, I would be careful not to allow my mistress such pages.

Venus rises from the sea to draw close to the world, as befits a divinity who loves humankind, completely naked, and alone. She prefers the Earth to Olympus and has more men than gods for lovers: she does not wrap herself in the languid veils of mysticism; she stands upright, her dolphin behind her, her foot on her mother-of-pearl conch; the sun beats on her gleaming belly, and with her white hand she holds the tresses of her beautiful hair in the air, in which old Ocean has sown his most perfect pearls. One can view her complete: she hides nothing, for modesty is made only to clothe the ugly, and is a modern invention, daughter of the Christian contempt for form and matter.

O ancient world! Thus, all that you have revered is despised; your idols are hurled to the dust; lean anchorites dressed in torn rags; martyrs, bloodied, their shoulders lacerated by the lions of your Circuses perch on the pedestals of your beautiful and charming gods. Christ has wrapped the world in his shroud. Beauty itself must blush, and take the veil. Lovely young men, limbs gleaming with oil, who wrestled in the Lyceum or the Gymnasium, beneath the bright sky, at Attica’s full noon, before the wondering crowd; young Spartan girls who danced the Bibasis, or raced naked to the summit of Taygetus, take back your tunics and your chlamys: your reign is past. And you, carvers of marble, Promethean chasers of bronze, break your chisels: there shall be no more sculptors. The palpable world is dead. Dark and gloomy mind alone fills the immensity of the void. Cleomenes (sculptor of the Venus de’Medici), would have had to visit the weavers, discover how linen folds and drapes forms, and clothe his sculptures.

Virginity, you bitter plant, born in a soil soaked in blood, and whose etiolated and sickly flower strives to open in the damp shade of cloisters, beneath a cold lustral rain; scentless rose bristling with thorns, for us you have replaced the beautiful, joyful roses, bathed in nard and Falernian wine, of the dancers of Sybaris!

The ancient world knew you not, unfruitful flower; you were never part of its garlands, full of intoxicating odours; in that sane and vigorous society, you would have been trampled underfoot, disdainfully. Virginity, Mysticism, Melancholy, three names unknown, three new plagues, brought by Christ, pale spectres drowning our world in icy tears, each, elbow on cloud, hand on brow, crying only: ‘Death! Death!’, you should not have set foot on this Earth peopled so happily, till then, by playful, indulgent gods!

I consider Woman, in the ancient manner, as a lovely slave destined to serve our pleasures. Christianity has not altered her in my eyes. She is still, to me, something alien and inferior that one adores and plays with, a child’s toy rattle more intelligent than one made of ivory or gold, which rises again by itself if one lets it fall to the ground. I have been told, because of my views, that I think badly of women; I claim, on the contrary, that holding such an opinion is to think highly of them.

I know not, in truth, why women are so keen to be treated as men. I understand that one might wish to be a boa-constrictor, lion, or elephant; but that one might wish to be a man, that is quite beyond me. If I had been at the Council of Trent (1545-1563) when this important question was being discussed, namely, whether women were to be regarded highly, as men, I would certainly have voted in the negative.

I have written in my life a few love poems, or at least that had the pretension of passing for such. I have recently reread some. The feeling for modern love is completely lacking in them. If they were written in Latin couplets instead of in French rhymes, one might take them for the work of an inferior poet of Augustus’ reign. And I am astonished that the women, for whom they were written, instead of being charmed by them, were not deeply angered. It is true that women understand poetry no more than cabbages or roses do, which is unsurprising and extremely logical, they being themselves poetry, or at least the finest instruments of poetry: the flute neither hears nor understands the air that is played upon it.

In my poems, only the gold or ebony of hair, the miraculous smoothness of skin, the roundness of arms, the smallness of feet, the delicate shape of hands are spoken of, and my verses end with a humble supplication to the divinity to grant us as soon as possible the enjoyment of all those beautiful things. In the elevated passages, there are garlands over the threshold, scatterings of flowers, burnt perfumes, a Catullian addition of kisses (see Catullus ‘Poems’ 5), pale and enchanting nights, quarrels with Aurora, and injunctions to the aforesaid Aurora to return and hide behind old Tithonus’ (her husband’s) saffron curtains; they reveal a brightness without heat, a sonority lacking vibrancy. They are exact, polished, created to provide a matching level of interest; but, in all their refinement and veiled expressiveness, one divines the curt, harsh voice of a master trying to soften his speech while addressing a slave. They are wholly unlike those erotic poems written since the Christian era commenced, in which one soul asks another for love, because it loves; here are no azure, smiling lakes, inviting the stream to merge with its waters so as to jointly reflect the stars above; here are no pairs of doves opening their wings at the same instant to seek the same nest.

‘Cynthia (the name of Propertius’ mistress), you are beautiful; make haste. Who knows if you will still be alive tomorrow? Your hair is blacker than the lustrous skin of an Ethiopian virgin. Make haste. In a few years’ time, thin silver threads will thread these dense tresses; these roses perfumed today, tomorrow will bear the scent of death and be nothing but wrinkled corpses. Let me breathe the roses’ scent while they yet resemble your cheeks; let me kiss your cheeks while they yet resemble the roses. When you are old, Cynthia, no one will desire you, not even the lictor’s servants though you offer to pay them; you will seek the praise you now reject. Wait till Saturn has scored that pure, shining brow with his nails, and you will find your threshold, so besieged now by supplicants, so warm now with tears, and so flowery, avoided, cursed, and covered by weeds and brambles. Make haste, Cynthia; the slightest wrinkle often serves as a grave for the deepest love.’ This brutal, imperious formula displays the essence of all ancient elegy: the formula to which it forever returns; it is its greatest and most significant theme, it is the Achilles of the elegiac host. Other than this it has little to say, and, once it has promised a robe of twice-dyed byssus (silk) and a necklace of matched pearls, it has exhausted its resources. Which is well-nigh all that I find in conclusion to such efforts. I do not myself, however, always follow that rather strict regime. I embroider my meagre canvas with a few silk threads of different colours pricked out here and there. But these strands are short in length, or knotted a score of times, and do not mix with the threads of the weft too well. I speak quite elegantly of love, because I have read many fine things on the subject. To do so, only an actor’s talent is required. With many a woman, the mere appearance is enough. Regularly exercising my pen and my imagination means I have plenty to say on these matters, and any mind, by applying itself even minimally, may easily achieve the same result; but I feel not a word of what I say, and repeat quietly, a poet of ancient times: ‘Cynthia, make haste.’

I have often been accused of being secretive and deceitful. Yet none in all the world desires as much as I to speak frankly and pour out all their heart! But, since I lack the ideas and feelings of those around me, since, at the first true word I uttered, there would be catcalls, and a general outcry, I prefer to remain silent, or, if I speak, to spew forth only accepted nonsense with the aplomb the bourgeoisie show. I would be welcomed, indeed, if I spoke to the ladies as I have written to you! I think they would fail to appreciate my manner of viewing, and regarding, love. As for men, I dare not tell them, to their faces, that they should rightly go on all fours; yet, in truth, that is what I think most appropriate for them. I do not wish to start a quarrel at every word. What does it matter, in the end, what I do or do not think; if I am sad when I seem happy, joyful when I appear melancholic? No one finds fault with my not going naked: cannot I veil my face, then, like my body? Why should a mask be more reprehensible than a pair of breeches, or a lie than a corset?

The Earth revolves around the sun, alas; roasted on one side, and frozen on the other! A battle is taking place this hour in which six hundred thousand men are tearing each other to pieces; the weather is the most beautiful in the world; the flowers are of an unparalleled coquettishness, opening their luxuriant throats, brazenly, even beneath the horses’ hooves. Today a fabulous number of good deeds have been committed; it is pouring with rain, it snows and thunders, there are flashes of lightning and showers of hail; it seems as if the world is about to end. The benefactors of humanity are up to their bellies in the mire, and covered in mud like dogs, unless they possess a carriage. Creation mocks the creature mercilessly; bloodily and sarcastically at every moment. Everything is indifferent to the actions of everything else, and lives or vegetates by its own law. Whether I do this or that, whether I live or die, whether I suffer or feel pleasure, whether I dissemble or tell the truth, what does it matter to the sun or the weeds, or even humankind? A straw falls on an ant, and breaks a third leg, at the second joint; a hillside falls on a village and crushes it: I fail to believe that either misfortune wrings more tears from the glittering eyes of the stars than the other. You are my closest friend, if that word does not ring hollow as a bell; were I to die, it is clear that however tearful you might be, you would not go without your dinner for more than a day, and despite the dreadful catastrophe, you would continue, nonetheless, to play backgammon most cheerfully. Which of my friends, which of my mistresses would recall my name, and surname, twenty years from now, or deign now to acknowledge me in the street, if I happened to pass by with a hole in the elbow of my coat? Oblivion and nothingness, that is the sum of mankind.

I feel utterly alone, and all the threads that connected me to things, and they to me, have been snapped, one by one. There are few better examples of a man who, aware of the change that has taken place within him, has reached such a degree of stupefaction. I resemble a bottle of uncorked liqueur, from which the alcohol has completely evaporated. The contents have the same appearance and the same colour; but taste, and you will find only insipid liquid.

When I reflect, I am frightened by the rapidity of decomposition; if it continues thus, I will have to salt myself, or inevitably rot and the worms consume me, since I now lack a soul, and that alone makes the difference between a body and a corpse. A year ago, no more, I was still somewhat human; I was restless, I was searching. One thought I cherished above all others, an aim of sorts, an ideal; I desired to be loved, I experienced the dreams one has at that age, less misty, less chaste, it is true, than those of ordinary youths, but nevertheless contained within proper limits. Little by little, what was incorporeal became detached and dissipated and, in my depths, there remained only a thick layer of coarse silt. The dream became a nightmare; the chimera a succubus; the world of the soul closed its ivory doors to me. I understand only what I touch with my hands. I have stony dreams; everything condenses and hardens around me, nothing floats, nothing hovers, there is not a breath of air; matter presses upon me, invades me and crushes me. I am like a traveller who falls asleep, one summer day, with his feet in the water, and wakes in winter with his legs trapped and encased in ice. I no longer desire love or friendship from any. Even glory, that dazzling halo I so desired to crown my brow, no longer rouses the slightest passion in me. There is, alas, only one thing that throbs within me, and that is the dreadful desire that draws me towards Théodore. This is what all my moral notions have been reduced to. What is physically beautiful is good, everything ugly is evil. If I saw a beautiful woman, whom I knew to have the most wicked soul in the world, both an adulteress and a poisoner, I admit that her character would be a matter of perfect indifference to me, nor would it prevent me from enjoying her, if I found the shape of her nose acceptable.

This is how I conceive of supreme happiness: it presents itself as a large square building with no external windows; the large inner courtyard is surrounded by a colonnade of white marble, and at its centre stands a crystal fountain in the Arab style, with a quicksilver jet of water; there are orange trees and pomegranates in alternately-placed tubs; above, is an intensely blue sky and an intensely yellow sun; and large greyhounds with pike-like snouts, are asleep here and there. From time to time, barefoot African servant-girls, with gold bracelets on their legs, or beautiful white and slender ones, dressed in rich and fanciful garments, pass between the hollowed arches, each with a basket on their arm, or an amphora on their head. As for me, I lie there, motionless, silent, beneath a magnificent canopy, surrounded by heaped cushions, smoking opium in a large jade pipe, a large tame lion propping up my elbow, the bared chest of a young slave acting as my foot-stool.

I cannot imagine any other kind of paradise; and if God wills that I arrive in heaven after my death, he will have me build in the corner of some planet a little kiosk on that plan. Paradise as it is often described, seems to me much too musical, and I confess, in all humility, that I am utterly incapable of enduring a sonata even one a mere ten thousand years in duration.

Such, you see, is my Eldorado, my Promised Land: a dream like any other, but with this special feature, that I never introduce to it any figure I have known; not one of my friends has crossed the threshold of that imaginary palace; none of the women I have possessed has seated herself beside me on the velvet cushions: I am alone there in the midst of phantoms. All those female figures, all those graceful shadows of young girls with whom I people it, never prompt me to love them; I have never supposed one of them in love with me. I have created no favourite Sultana for myself, in this fabulous seraglio. There are dark-skinned women, mulattoes, pale-skinned, red-haired Jews, Greeks, Circassians, Spanish and English women; but they only represent, to me, symbols of varying colour and form, and I possess them as one possesses all the varieties of wine in one’s cellar, or all the species of hummingbird in one’s aviary. They are engines of pleasure, paintings that require no frame, statues that come when you call, whenever you wish to examine them closely. A woman has this incontestable advantage over a statue that she turns, by herself, in the direction you want, instead of you yourself having to circle the statue, and select a viewpoint; which is tiring.

You can see that gripped by such ideas I can no longer remain of this age, or on this planet; for one cannot subsist so, beyond one’s own time and space. I must find a more substantial object.

Given all this, it is quite simple and logical that one should arrive at the point at which I have arrived. Since I seek only the satisfaction of the eye, the refinement of form, and a purity of lineament, I accept them wherever I find them. Which explains the singular aberrant objects of ancient amours.

Since the beginning of the Christian era, not a single male statue has been created in which adolescent beauty has been idealised, or rendered with the care that characterised ancient sculpture. Woman has become the symbol of moral and physical beauty. Man fell, finally, on the day that little child was born in Bethlehem. Woman is the queen of creation; the stars unite to crown her head, the crescent moon is a glorious orb rounded beneath her feet, the sun yields its purest gold from which her jewels are made, painters who want to flatter the angels give them the shapes of women, and certainly I am not one who will blame them for doing so. Before the arrival of that gentle and gallant teller of parables, it was quite the opposite; gods or heroes were not feminised when they were required to appear seductive. They took their own form, vigorous and delicate at the same time, but always male, however amorous the contours, however polished, and devoid of muscles and veins the worker wished their divine legs and arms to be. The particular beauty of women was assimilated, all the more readily, to the type. Shoulders were broadened, hips attenuated, the throat protruded a little, the joints of the arms and thighs were more robustly accentuated. There is almost no difference between a sculpted Paris and a Helen. Thus, Hermaphroditus is one of the most ardently cherished ideals of idolatrous antiquity.

That son of Hermes and Aphrodite is indeed one of the most subtle creations of pagan genius. Nothing more ravishing can be imagined in this world than those two perfect bodies, harmoniously blended together; those two beauties so well-matched and yet so different, forming a single person superior to both, because they modify yet enhance each other, reciprocally. For an exclusive worshipper of form, is there a more delightful feeling of uncertainty than that which stirs within one at the sight of that back, those ambiguous loins, and those legs so slender and yet so strong that one knows not whether to attribute them to a Mercury about to take flight, or a Diana emerging from her bath? The torso is a composite of the most charming contrasts: on the plump and full breast of the ephebe is set the oddly graceful neck and throat of a young virgin. Beneath the ample flanks, of a most feminine softness, one can discern muscles and ribs like those beneath the flanks of a young boy; the belly is a little too flat for a woman, a little too rounded for a man, and the whole form of the body has something vague and indecisive about it, that is impossible to render, and the attractiveness of which is unique. Théodore would certainly be an excellent model for this kind of beauty; however, I find that the feminine portion prevails in him, and that more of Salmacis remains than of the Hermaphroditus of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

What is singular is that I hardly think of his gender anymore, and love him with perfect assurance. Sometimes I try to persuade myself that such love is abominable, and tell myself so with the greatest possible severity; yet my censure is only on my lips, it is a statement I myself offer up, but do not feel: it really seems to me that to love him is the simplest thing in the world, and that anyone else in my place would do the same.

I see him, I listen to him speak or sing, for he sings admirably, and I take indescribable pleasure in doing so. He seems so much like a woman to me that, one day, in the heat of conversation, I let slip the word ‘Madame’ in addressing him, which made him laugh, though it seemed to me rather a forced laugh.

If Théodore is a woman, however, what would be her motive for disguising herself in this manner? I cannot explain that in any way. For a young, handsome, perfectly beardless young gentleman to disguise himself as a woman is understandable; he thus opens a thousand doors that would else have remained stubbornly closed to him, and the deceit may involve him in a tangle of adventures quite Labyrinthian, and delightful. One can attain the presence of a closely-guarded woman in this way, or suddenly initiate an affair by taking advantage of the surprise it can cause. But I know of little advantage a beautiful young woman could gain, by running about the country in men’s clothes: she can only lose by that same. A woman should not thus renounce the pleasure of being courted, ‘madrigalised’, and adored; she might as well renounce life, and rightly so, for what is a woman’s life without all such? Nothing, or something worse than death. And I am always surprised that women who attain the age of thirty, or are pitted by smallpox, do not throw themselves from the top of the nearest bell-tower.

Despite all this, something stronger than reason cries out to me that ‘he’ is a woman, and that ‘she’ is the one of whom I have dreamed, she whom alone I must love, and who will love only myself: yes, it is she, the goddess of the aquiline gaze, and the lovely, regal hands; she who smiled at me condescendingly from the height of her cloudy throne. She has presented herself to me in this guise to try me, to see whether I would recognise her, whether my loving gaze would penetrate her covering veil, as in those marvellous tales where feys appear at first in the guise of beggars, then suddenly rise up resplendently dressed, adorned with gold and precious stones.

I have recognised you, my love! Oh, at the sight of you, my heart leapt in my breast as Saint John leapt in the womb of Saint Anne, when she was visited by the Virgin. A blaze of light spread through the air and I discerned something like the odour of divine ambrosia. I saw the trail of fire beneath your feet, and understood at once that you were no simple mortal.

The melodious sounds of Saint Cecilia’s viol, to which the angels listen with rapture, are hoarse and discordant in comparison with the pearly cadences which fly from your ruby-red mouth: the young and smiling Graces dance about you, in a perpetual round; the birds, when you pass by in the woods, incline their little decorative heads, and twitter, seeking a better view of your form, and whistle their prettiest refrains for you; the amorous moon rises earlier to kiss you with her pale silver lips, for she has abandoned her shepherd-lad for you; the wind takes care not to erase the delicate imprint of your adorable foot in the sand; the fountain, when you lean above it, becomes smoother than crystal, for fear of wrinkling and distorting the reflection of your heavenly face; the modest violets open their little hearts to you, and perform a thousand coquetries; strawberries jealously stirs themselves to emulation, and strive to match the divine crimson of your mouth; the slightest midge buzzes joyfully, and applauds you by beating its wings: all Nature loves and admires you, oh you, her most beautiful work!

Ah! I live again; till now I have been no better than a dead man: here I am free of the shroud, and stretch my thin arms from the grave towards the sun; my blue spectral colour has left me. The blood circulates more rapidly in my veins. The frightful silence that reigned around me is finally broken. The opaque and black vault that weighed on my brow is filled with light. A thousand mysterious voices whisper in my ear; delightful stars twinkle above me, and scatter their golden gleams along my path; the daisies smile at me sweetly, and the harebells murmur my name on their little twisting tongues: I understand a multitude of things that I failed to, before; I discover marvellous affinities and sympathies; I comprehend the language of the roses, and that of the nightingale, and I read fluently in that book where before I failed to spell a single word. I recognized that I have a friend in that respectable old oak tree, covered with mistletoe and parasitic plants, and that the periwinkle, so languid and frail, whose large blue eye always overflows with tears, has long nourished a discreet and restrained passion for me: it is love, love that has opened my eyes and granted me the answer to the riddle. Love has descended to the deep vault where my crouched and somnolent spirit lay captive; love took me by hand and made my soul climb the steep and narrow staircase that led to the outside air. All the doors of the prison were locked, yet this poor Psyche emerged for the first time from the self in which she was imprisoned.

Another life is mine. I breathe with another’s breast, and a blow that wounded him would kill me. Before this happy day, I was like those gloomy Japanese idols who perpetually gaze at their bellies. I was a spectator of myself, a member of the audience gazing at the comedy in which I acted; I merely watched myself live, listening to the oscillations of my heart as if to the ticking of a clock. That was my lot. Images filled my distracted eyes; sounds struck my inattentive ears, but nothing of the outside world reached my soul. The existence of others went unheeded; I even doubted all existences other than my own, of which I was still unsure. It seemed to me that I was alone amidst the universe, and that all was but vapour, phantoms, vain illusions, fleeting apparitions destined to people the void. How different it all is, now!

Yet, what if my presentiment has deceived me, what if Théodore is really a man, as everyone else believes! One has sometimes seen wondrous male beauty; indeed, youthfulness lends itself to such illusions. It is something I wish not to think on; something which might, truly, drive me mad. The seed which fell yesterday onto the sterile rock of my heart has already penetrated the stone in every direction with a thousand filaments; the plant born of it clings there robustly, and now would be impossible to tear out. It is, already, a tree, leafing and flowering, and twining its muscular roots deeper. If I found that Théodore was male beyond doubt, alas, I know not if I would love him still.

The End of Part III of Gautier’s ‘Mademoiselle de Maupin’

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