The day was long and hard to kill. Waking at dawn, full of thoughts of Mme. Chantelouve, he could not stay in one place, and kept inventing excuses for going out. He had no cakes, bonbons, and exotic liqueurs, and one must not be without all the little essentials when expecting a visit from a woman. He went by the longest route to the avenue de l’Opera to buy fine essences of cedar and of that alkermes which makes the person tasting it think he is in an Oriental pharmaceutic laboratory. "The idea is," he said, "not so much to treat Hyacinthe as to astound her by giving her a sip of an unknown elixir."
He came back laden with packages, then went out again, and in the street was assailed by an immense ennui. After an interminable tour of the quays he finally tumbled into a beer hall. He fell on a bench and opened a newspaper.
What was he thinking as he sat, not reading but just looking at the police news? Nothing, not even of hen From having revolved the same matter over and over again and again his mind had reached a deadlock and refused to function. Durtal merely found himself very tired, very drowsy, as one in a warm bath after a night of travel.
"I must go home pretty soon," he said when he could collect himself a little, "for père Rateau certainly has not cleaned house in the thorough fashion which I commanded, and of course I don’t want the furniture to be covered with dust. Six o’clock. Suppose I dine, after a fashion, in some not too unreliable place."
He remembered a nearby restaurant where he had eaten before without a great deal of dread. He chewed his way laboriously through an extremely dead fish, then through a piece of meat, flabby and cold; then he found a very few lentils, stiff with insecticide, beneath a great deal of sauce; finally he savoured some ancient prunes, whose juice smelt of mould and was at the same time aquatic and sepulchral.
Back in his apartment, he lighted fires in his bedroom and in his study, then he inspected everything. He was not mistaken. The concierge had upset the place with the same brutality, the same haste, as customarily. However, he must have tried to wash the windows, because the glass was streaked with finger marks.
Durtal effaced the imprints with a damp cloth, smoothed out the folds in the carpet, drew the curtains, and put the bookcases in order after dusting them with a napkin. Everywhere he found grains of tobacco, trodden cigarette ashes, pencil sharpenings, pen points eaten with rust. He also found cocoons of cat fur and crumpled bits of rough draft manuscript which had been whirled into all corners by the furious sweeping.
He finally could not help asking himself why he had so long tolerated the fuzzy filth which obscured and incrusted his household. While tie dusted, his indignation against Rateau increased mightily. "Look at that," he said, perceiving his wax candles grown as yellow as tallow ones. He changed them. "That’s better." He arranged his desk into studied disarray. Notebooks, and books with paper-cutters in them for book-marks, he laid in careful disorder. "Symbol of work," he said, smiling, as he placed an old folio, open, on a chair. Then he passed into his bedroom. With a wet sponge he freshened up the marble of the dresser, then he smoothed the bed cover, straightened his photographs and engravings, and went into the bathroom. Here he paused, disheartened. In a bamboo rack over the wash-bowl there was a chaos of phials; Resolutely he grabbed the perfume bottles, scoured the bottoms and necks with emery, rubbed the labels with gum elastic and bread crumbs, then he soaped the tub, dipped the combs and brushes in an ammoniac solution, got his vaporiser to working and sprayed the room with Persian lilac, washed the linoleum, and scoured the seat and the pipes. Seized with a mania for cleanliness, he polished, scrubbed, scraped, moistened, and dried, with great sweeping strokes of the arm. He was no longer vexed at the concierge; he was even sorry the old villain had not left him more to do.
Then he shaved, touched up his moustache, and proceeded to make an elaborate toilet, asking himself, as he dressed, whether he had better wear button shoes or slippers. He decided that shoes were less familiar and more dignified but resolved to wear a flowing tie and a blouse, thinking that this artistic negligee would please a woman.
"All ready," he said, after a last stroke of the brush. He made the turn of the other rooms, poked the fires, and fed the cat, which was running about in alarm, sniffing all the cleaned objects and doubtless thinking that those he rubbed against every day without paying any attention to them had been replaced by new ones.
"Oh, the ’little essentials’ I am forgetting!" Durtal put the teakettle on the hob and placed cups, teapot, sugar bowl, cakes, bonbons, and tiny liqueur glasses on an old lacquered waiter so as to have everything on hand when it was time to serve.
"Now I’m through. I’ve given the place a thorough cleaning. Let her come," he said to himself, realigning some books whose backs stuck out further than the others on the
shelve.. "Everything in good shape. Except the chimney of the lamp. Where it bulges, there are caramel specks and blobs of soot, but I can’t get the thing out; I don’t want to burn my fingers; and anyway, with the shade lowered a bit she won’t notice.
"Well, how shall I proceed when she does come?" he asked himself, sinking into an armchair. "She enters. Good. I take her hands. I kiss them. Then I bring her into this room. I have her sit down beside the fire, in this chair. I station myself, facing her, on thick stool. Advancing a little, touching her knees, I can seize her. I make her bend over, I am supporting her whole weight. I bring her lips to mine and I am saved!
"— Or rather lost. For then the bother begins. I can’t bear to think of getting her into the bedroom. Undressing and going to bed! That part is appalling unless you know each other very well. And when you are just becoming acquainted! The nice way is to have a cosy little supper for two. The wine has an ungodly kick to it. She immediately passes out, and when she comes to she is lying in bed under a shower of kisses. As we can’t do it that way we shall have to avoid mutual embarrassment by making a show of passion. If I speed up the tempo and pretend to be in a frenzy perhaps we shall not have time to think about the miserable details. So I must possess her here, in this very spot, and she must think I have lost my head when she succumbs.
"It’s hard to arrange in this room, because there isn’t any divan. The best way would be to throw her down on the carpet. She can put her hands over her eyes, as they always do. I shall take good care to turn down the lamp before she rises.
"Well, I had better prepare a cushion for her head." He found one and slid it under the chair. "And I had better not wear suspenders, for they often cause ridiculous delays." He took them off and put on a belt. "But then there is that damned question of the skirts! I admire the novelists who can get a virgin unharnessed from her corsets and deflowered in the winking of an eye — as if it were possible! How annoying to have to fight one’s way through all those starched entanglements! I do hope Mme. Chantelouve will be considerate and avoid those ridiculous difficulties as much as possible — for her own sake."
He consulted his watch. "Half-past eight. I mustn’t expect her for nearly an hour, because, like all women, she will come late. What kind of an excuse will she make to Chantelouve, to get away tonight? Well, that is none of my business. Hmmm. This water heater beside the fire looks like the invitation to the toilet, but no, the tea things handy banish any gross idea."
And if Hyacinthe did not come?
"She will come," he said to himself, suddenly moved. "What motive would she have for staying away? She knows that she cannot inflame me more than I am inflamed." Then, jumping from phase to phase of the same old question, "This will turn out badly, of course," he decided. "Once I am satisfied, disenchantment is inevitable. Oh, well, so much the better, for with this romance going on I cannot work."
"Miserable me! relapsing — only in mind, alas! — to the age of twenty. I am waiting for a woman. I who have scorned the doings of lovers for years and years. I look at my watch every five minutes, and I listen, in spite of myself, thinking it is her step I hear on the stair.
"No, there is no getting around it. The little blue flower, the perennial of the soul, is difficult to extirpate, and it keeps growing up again. It does not show itself for twenty years, and then all of a sudden, you know not why nor how, it sprouts, and then forth comes a burst of blossoms. My God! I am getting foolish."
He jumped from his chair. There was a gentle ring. "Not nine o’clock yet. It isn’t she," he murmured, opening the door.
He squeezed her hands and thanked her for being so punctual.
She said she was not feeling well. "I came only because I didn’t want to keep you waiting in vain."
His heart sank.
"I have a fearful headache," she said, passing her gloved hands over her forehead.
He took her furs and motioned her to the armchair. Prepared to follow his plan of attack, he sat down on the stool, but she refused the armchair and took a seat beside the table. Rising, he bent over her and caught hold of her fingers.
"Your hand is burning," she said.
"Yes, a bit of fever, because I get so little sleep. If you knew how much I have thought about you! Now I have you here, all to myself," and he spoke of that persistent odour of cinnamon, faint, distant, expiring amid the less definite odours which her gloves exhaled, "well," and he sniffed her fingers, "you will leave some of yourself here when you go away."
She rose, sighing. "I see you have a cat. What is his name?"
"Mouche."
She called to the cat, which fled precipitately.
"Mouche! Mouche!" Durtal called, but Mouche took refuge under the bed and refused to come out. "You see he is rather bashful. He has never seen a woman."
"Oh, would you try to make me think you have never received a woman here?"
He swore that he never had, that she was the first.
"And you were not really anxious that this — first — should come?"
He blushed. "Why do you say that?"
She made a vague gesture. "I want to tease you," she said, sitting down in the armchair. "To tell you the truth, I do not know why I like to ask you such presumptuous questions."
He had sat down in front of her. So now, at last, the scene was set as he wished and he must begin the attack. His knee touched hers.
"You know," he said, "that you cannot presume here. You have claims on -"
"No, I haven’t and I want none."
"Why?"
"Because... Listen," and her voice became grave and firm. "The more I reflect, the more inclined I am to ask you, for heaven’s sake, not to destroy our dream. And then.
Do you ’want me to be frank, so frank that I shall doubt-less seem a monster of selfishness? Well, personally, I do not wish to spoil the--the-what shall I say ?-the extreme happiness our relation gives me. I know I explain badly and confusedly, but this is the way it is: I possess you when and how I please, just as, for a long time, I have possessed Byron, Baudelaire, Gerard de Nerval, those I love -"
"You mean...?"
"That I have only to desire them, to desire you, before I go to sleep.
"And?"
"And you would be inferior to my chimera, to the Durtal I adore, whose caresses make my nights delirious!"
He looked at her in stupefaction. She had that dolent, troubled look in her eyes. She even seemed not to see him, but to be looking into space. He hesitated... In a sudden flash of thought he saw the scenes of incubacy of which Gevingey had spoken. "We shall untangle all this later," he thought within himself, "meanwhile -" He took her gently by the arms, drew her to him and abruptly kissed her mouth.
She rebounded as if she had had an electric shock She struggled to rise. He strained her to him and embraced her furiously, then with a strange gurgling cry she threw her head back and caught his leg between both of hers.
He emitted a howl of rage, for he felt her haunches move. He understood now — or thought he understood! She wanted a miserly pleasure, a sort of solitary vice. .
He pushed her away. She remained there, quite pale, choking, her eyes closed, her hands outstretched like those of a frightened child. Then Durtal’s wrath vanished. With a little cry he came up to her and caught her again, but she struggled, crying, "No ! I beseech you, let me go."
He held her crushed against his body and attempted to make her yield.
"I implore you, let me go."
Her accent was so despairing that he relinquished her. Then he debated with himself whether to throw her brutally on the floor and violate her. But her bewildered eyes frightened him.
She was panting and her arms hung limp at her sides as she leaned, very pale, against the bookcase.
"Ah!" he said, marching up and down, knocking into the furniture, "I must really love you, if in spite of your supplications and refusal -"
She joined her hands to keep him away.
"Good God!" he said, exasperated, "what are you made of?"
She came to herself, and, offended, she said to him, "Monsieur, I too suffer. Spare me," and pell-mell she spoke of her husband, of her confessor, and became so incoherent that Durtal was frightened. She was silent, then in a singing voice she said, "Tell me, you will come to my house tomorrow night, won’t you?"
"But I suffer too!"
She seemed not to hear him. In her smoky eyes, far, far back, there seemed to be a twinkle of feeble light. She murmured, in the cadence of a canticle, "Tell me, dear, you will come tomorrow night, won’t you?"
"Yes," he said at last.
Then she readjusted herself and without saying a word quitted the room. In silence he accompanied her to the entrance. She opened the door, turned around, took his hand and very lightly brushed it with her lips.
He stood there stupidly, not knowing what to make of her behaviour.
"What does she mean?" he exclaimed, returning to the room, putting the furniture back in place and smoothing the disordered carpet. "Heavens, I wish I could as easily restore order to my brain. Let me think, if I can. What is she after? Because, of course, she has something in view She does not want our relation to culminate in the act itself. Does she really fear disillusion, as she claims? Is she really thinking how grotesque the amorous somersaults are? Or is she, as I believe, a melancholy and terrible player-around-the-edges, thinking only of herself? Well, her obscene selfishness is one of those complicated sins that have to be shriven by the very highest confessor. She’s a plain teaser!
"I don’t know. Incubacy enters into this. She admits — so placidly! — that in dream she cohabits at will with dead or living beings. Is she Satanizing, and is this some of the work of Canon Docre? He’s a friend of hers.
"So many riddles impossible to solve. What is the meaning of this unexpected invitation for tomorrow night? Does she wish to yield nowhere except in her own home? Does she feel more at ease there, or does she think the propinquity of her husband will render the sin more Piquant? Does she loathe Chantelouve, and is this a meditated — or does she count on the fear of danger to spur our senses?
"After all, I think it is probably a final coquetry, an appetiser before the repast. And women are so funny anyway I She probably thinks these delays and subterfuges are necessary to differentiate her from a cocotte. Or perhaps there is a physical necessity for stalling me off another day."
He sought other reasons but could find none.
"Deep down in my heart," he said, vexed in spite of himself by this rebuff, "I know I have been an imbecile. I ought to have acted the cave man and paid no attention to her supplications and lies. I ought to have taken violent possession of her lips and breast. Then it would be finished, whereas now I must begin at the beginning again, and God damn her! I have other. things to do.
"Who knows whether she isn’t laughing at me this very moment? Perhaps she wanted me to be more violent and bold — but no, her soul-sick voice was not feigned, her poor eyes — did not simulate bewilderment, and then what would she have meant by that respectful kiss — for there was an impalpable shade of respect and gratitude in that kiss which she planted on my hand !"
She was too much for him. "Meanwhile, in this hurly-burly I have forgotten my refreshments. Suppose I take off my shoes, now that I am alone, for my feet are swollen from parading up and down the room. Suppose I do better yet and go to bed, for I am incapable of working or reading," and he drew back the covers.
"Decidedly, nothing happens the way one foresees it, yet my plan of attack wasn’t badly thought out," he said, crawling in. With a sigh he blew out the lamp, and the cat, reassured, passed over him, lighter than a breath, and curled up without a sound.
CHAPTER XI
Contrary to his expectations, he slept all night, with clenched fists, and woke next morning quite calm, even gay. The scene of the night before, which ought to have exacerbated his senses, produced exactly the opposite effect. The truth is that Durtal was not of those who are attracted by difficulties. He always made one hardy effort to surmount them, then when that failed he would withdraw, with no desire to renew the combat. If Mme. Chantelouve thought to entice him by delays, she had miscalculated. This morning, already, he was weary of the comedy.
His reflections began to be slightly tinged with bitterness. He was angry at the woman for having wished to keep him in suspense, and he was angry at himself for having permitted her to make a fool of him. Then certain expressions, the impertinence of which had not struck him at first, chilled him now. "Her nervous trick of laughing, which sometimes caught her in public places," then her declaration that she did not need his permission, nor even his person, in order to possess him, seemed to him unbecoming, to say the least, and uncalled for, as he had not run after her nor indeed made any advances to her at all.
"I will fix you," he said, "when I get some hold over you."
But in the calm awakening of this morning the spell of the woman had relaxed. Resolutely he thought, "Keep two dates with her. This one tonight at her house. It won’t count, because nothing can be done. For I intend neither to allow myself to be assaulted nor to attempt an assault. I certainly have no desire to be caught by Chantelouve in flagrante delicto, and probably get into a shooting scrape and be haled into police court. Have her here once. If she does not yield then, why, the matter is closed. She can go and tickle somebody else."
And he made a hearty breakfast, and sat down to his writing table and ran over the scattered notes for his book.
"I had got," he said, glancing at his last chapter, "to where the alchemic experiments and diabolic evocations have proved unavailing. Prelati, Blanchet, all the sorcerers and sorcerers’ helpers whom the Marshal has about him, admit that to bring Satan to him Gilles must make over his soul and body to the Devil or commit crimes.
"Gilles refuses to alienate his existence and sell his soul, but he contemplates murder without any horror. This man, so brave on the battlefield, so courageous when he accompanied Jeanne d’Arc, trembles before the Devil and is afraid when he thinks of eternity and of Christ. The same is true of his accomplices. He has made them swear on the Testament to keep the secret of the confounding turpitude: which the chateau conceals, and he can be sure that not one will violate the Oath, for, in the Middle Ages, the most reckless of freebooters would not commit the inexpiable sin of deceiving God.
"At the same time that his alchemists abandon their unfruitful furnaces, Gilles begins a course of systematic’ gluttony, and his flesh, set on fire by the essences of inordinate potations and spiced dishes, seethes in tumultuous eruption.
"Now, there are no women in the chateau. Gilles appears to have despised the sex ever since leaving the court. After experience of the ribalds of the camps and frequentation, with Xaintrailles and La Hire, of the prostitutes of Charles VII, it seems that a dislike for the feminine form came over him. Like others whose ideal of concupiscence is deteriorated and deviated, he certainly comes to be disgusted by the delicacy of the grain of the skin of women and by that odour of femininity which all sodomists abhor.
"He depraves the choir boys who are under his authority. He chose them in the first place, these little psaltery ministrants, for their beauty, and ’beautiful as angels’ they are. They are the only ones he loves, the only ones he spares in his murderous transports.
"But soon infantile pollution seems to him an insipid delicacy. The law of Satanism which demands that the elect of Evil, once started, must go the whole way, is once more fulfilled. Gilles’s soul must become thoroughly cankered, a red tabernacle, that in it the Very Low may dwell at ease.
"The litanies of lust arise in an atmosphere that is like the wind over a slaughter house. The first victim is a very small boy whose name we do not know. Gilles disembowels him, and, cutting off the hands and tearing out the eyes and heart, carries these members into Prelati’s chamber. The two men offer them, with passionate objurgations, to the Devil, who holds his peace. Gilles, confounded, flees. Prelati rolls up the poor remains in linen and, trembling, goes out at night to bury them in consecrated ground beside a chapel dedicated to Saint Vincent.
"Gilles preserves the blood of this child to write formulas of evocation and conjurements. It manures a horrible crop. Not long afterward the Marshal reaps the most abundant harvest of crimes that has ever been sown.
"From 1432 to 1440, that is to say during the eight years between the Marshal’s retreat and his death, the inhabitant: of Anjou, Poitu, and Brittany walk the highways wringing their hands. All the children disappear. Shepherd boys are abducted from the fields. Little girls coming out of school, little boys who have gone to play ball in the lanes or at the edge of the wood, return no more.
"In the course of an investigation ordered by the duke of Brittany, the scribes of Jean Touscheronde, duke’s commissioner in these matters, compile interminable lists of lost children.
"Lost, at la Rochebernart, the child of the woman Peronne, ’a child who did go to school and who did apply himself to his book with exceeding diligence.’
"Lost, at Saint Etienne de Montluc, the son of Guillaume Brice, ’and this was a poor man and sought alms.’
"Lost, at Machecoul, the son of Georget le Barbier, ’who was seen, a certain day, knocking apples from a tree behind the hotel Rondeau, and who since bath not been seen.’
"Lost, at Thonaye, the child of Mathelin Thouars, ’and he had been heard to cry and lament and the said child was about twelve years of age.’
"At Machecoul, again, the day of Pentecost, mother and father Sergent leave their eight-year-old boy at home, and when they return from the fields ’they did not find the said child of eight years of age, wherefore they marvelled and were exceeding grieved.’
"At Chantelou, it is Pierre Badieu, mercer of the parish, who says that a year or thereabouts ago, he saw, in the domain de Rais, ’two little children of the age of nine who were brothers and the children of Robin Pavot of the aforesaid place, and since that time neither have they been seen neither doth any know what hath become of them.’
"At Nantes, it is Jeanne Darel who deposes that ’on the day of the feast of the Holy Father, her true’ child named Olivier did stray from her, being of the age of seven and eight years, and since the day of the feast of the Holy Father neither did she see him nor hear tidings.’
"And the account of the investigation goes on, revealing hundreds of names, describing the grief of the mothers who interrogate passersby on the highway, and telling of the keening of the families from whose very homes children have been spirited away when the elders went to the fields to hoe or to sow the hemp. These phrases, like a desolate refrain, recur again and again, at the end of every deposition: ’They were seen complaining dolorously,’ ’Exceedingly they did lament.’ Wherever the bloodthirsty Gilles dwells the women weep.
"At first the frantic people tell themselves that evil fairies and malicious genii are dispersing the generation, hut little by little terrible suspicions are aroused. As soon as the Marshal quits a place, as he goes from the chateau de Tiffauges to the chateau de Champtoce, and from there to the castle of La Suze or to Nantes he leaves behind him a wake of tears. He traverses a countryside and in the morning children are missing. Trembling, the peasant realises also that wherever Prelati, Roger de Bricqueville, Gilles de Sille’, any of the Marshal’s intimates, have shown themselves, little boys have disappeared. Finally, the peasant learns to look with horror upon an old woman, Perrine Martin, who wanders around, clad in grey, her face covered — as is that of Gilles de Sille — with a black stamin. She accosts children, and her speech is so seductive, her face, when she raises her veil, so benign, that all follow her to the edge of a wood, where men carry them off, gagged, in sacks. And the frightened people call this purveyor of flesh, this ogress, ’La Meffraye,’ from the name of a bird of prey.
"These emissaries spread out, covering all the villages and hamlets, tracking the children down at the orders of the Chief Huntsman, the sire de Bricqueville. Not content with these beaters, Gilles takes to standing at a window of the chateau, and when young mendicants, attracted by the renown of his bounty, ask an alms, he runs an appraising eye over them, has any who excite his lust brought in and thrown into an underground prison and kept there until, being in appetite, he is pleased to order a carnal supper.
"How many children did he disembowel after deflowering them? He himself did not know, so many were the rapes he had consummated and the murders he had committed. The texts of the times enumerate between seven and eight hundred, but the estimate is inaccurate and seems over-conservative. Entire regions were devastated. The hamlet of Tiffauges had no more young men. La Suze was without male posterity. At Champtoce the whole foundation room of a tower was filled with corpses. A witness cited in the inquest, Guillaume Hylairet, declared also, "that one hight Du Jardin hath heard say that there was found in the said castle a wine pipe full of dead little children.’
"Even today traces of these assassinations linger. Two years ago at Tiffauges a physician discovered an oublitte and brought forth piles of skulls and hones.
"Gilles confessed to frightful holocausts, and his friends confirmed the atrocious details.
"At dusk, when their senses are phosphorescent’, enkindled by inflammatory spiced beverages and by ’high’ venison, Gilles and his friends retire to a distant chamber of the chateau. The little boys are brought from their cellar prisons to this room. They are disrobed and gagged. The Marshal fondles them and forces them. Then he hacks them to pieces with a dagger, taking great pleasure in slowly dismembering them. At other times be slashes the boy’s chest and drinks the breath from the lungs; sometimes he opens the stomach also, smells it, enlarges the incision with his hands, and seats himself in it. Then while he macerates the warm entrails in mud, he turns half around and looks over his shoulder to contemplate the supreme convulsions, the last spasms. He himself says afterwards, ’I was happier in the enjoyment of tortures, tears, fright, and blood, than in any other pleasure.’
"Then he becomes weary of these faecal joys. An unpublished passage in his trial proceedings informs us that ’The said sire heated himself with little boys, sometimes also with little girls, with whom he had congress in the belly, saying that he had more pleasure and less pain than acting in nature.’ After which, he slowly saws their throats, cuts them to pieces, and the corpses, the linen and the clothing, are put in the fireplace, where a smudge fire of logs and leaves is burning, and the ashes are thrown into the latrine, or scattered to the winds from the top of a tower, or buried in the moats and mounds.
"Soon his furies become aggravated. Until now he has appeased the rage of his senses with living or moribund beings. He wearies of stuprating palpitant flesh and becomes a lover of the dead. A passionate artist, he kisses, with cries of enthusiasm, the well-made limbs of his victims. He establishes sepulchral beauty contests, and whichever of the truncated heads receives the prize he raises by the hair and passionately kisses the cold lips.
"Vampirism satisfies him for months. He pollutes dead children, appeasing the fever of his desires in the blood smeared chill of the tomb. He even goes so far — one day when his supply of children is exhausted — as to disembowel a pregnant woman and sport with the foetus. After these excesses he falls into horrible states of coma, similar to those heavy lethargies which overpowered Sergeant Bertrand after his violations of the grave. But if that leaden sleep is one of the known phases of ordinary vampirism, if Gilles de Rais was merely a sexual pervert, we must admit that he distinguished himself from the most delirious sadists, the most exquisite virtuosi in pain and murder, by a detail which seems extrahuman, it is so horrible.
"As these terrifying atrocities, these monstrous outrages, no longer suffice him, he corrodes them with the essence of a rare sin. It is no longer the resolute, sagacious cruelty of the wild beast playing with the body of a victim. His ferocity does not remain merely carnal; it becomes spiritual. He wishes to make the child suffer both in body and soul. By a thoroughly Satanic cheat he deceives gratitude, dupes affection, and desecrates love. At a leap he passes the bounds of human infamy and lands plump in the darkest depth of Evil.
"He contrives this: One of the unfortunate children is brought into his chamber, and hanged, by Bricqueville, Prelati, and de Sille, to a hook fixed into the wall. Just at the moment when the child is suffocating, Gilles orders him to be taken down and the rope untied. With some precaution, he takes the child on his knees, revives him, caresses him, rocks him, dries his tears, and pointing to the accomplices, says, ’These men are bad, but you see they obey me. Do not be afraid. I will save your life and take you back to your mother,’ and while the little one, wild with joy, kisses him and at that moment loves him, Gilles gently makes an incision in the back of the neck, rendering the child ’languishing,’ to follow Gilles’s own expression, and when the head, not quite detached, bows, Gilles kneads the body, turns it about, and violates it, bellowing.
"After these abominable pastimes he may well believe that the art of the charnalist has beneath his fingers expressed its last drop of pus, and in a vaunting cry he says to his troop of parasites, "There is no man on earth who dare do as I have done.’
"But if in Love and Well-doing the infinite is approachable for certain souls, the out-of-the-world possibilities of Evil are limited. In his excesses of stupration and murder the Marshal cannot go beyond a fixed point. In vain he may dream of unique violations, of more ingenious slow tortures, but human imagination has a limit and he has already reached it-even passed it, with diabolic aid. Insatiable he seethe there is nothing material in which to express his ideal. He can verify that axiom of demonographers, that the Evil One dupes all persons who give themselves, or are willing to give themselves, to him.
"As he can descend no further, he tries returning on the way by which he has come, but now remorse overtakes him, overwhelms him, and wrenches him without respite. His nights are nights of expiation. Besieged by phantoms, he howls like a wounded beast. He is found rushing along the solitary corridors of the chateau. He weeps, throws him-self on his knees, swears to God that he will do penance. He promises to found pious institutions. He does establish, at Machecoul, a boys’ academy in honour of the Holy Innocents. He speaks of shutting himself up in a cloister, of going to Jerusalem, begging his bread on the way.
"But in this fickle and aberrated mind ideas superpose themselves on each other, then pass away, and those which disappear leave their shadow on those which follow. Abruptly, even while weeping with distress, he precipitates himself into new debauches and, raving with delirium, hurls himself upon the child brought to him, gouges out the eyes, runs his— finger around the bloody, milky socket, then he seizes a spiked club and crushes the skull. And while the gurgling blood runs over him, he stands, smeared with spattered brains, and grinds his teeth and laughs. Like a hunted beast he flees into the wood, while his henchmen remove the crimson stains from the ground and dispose prudently of the corpse and the reeking garments.
"He wanders in the forests surrounding Tiffauges, dark, impenetrable forests like those which Brittany still can show at Carnoet. He sobs as he walks along. He attempts to thrust aside the phantoms which accost him. Then he looks about him and beholds obscenity in the shapes of the aged trees. It seems that nature perverts itself before him, that his very presence depraves it. For the first time he understands the motionless lubricity of trees. He discovers priapi in the branches.
"Here a tree appears to him as a living being, standing on its root-tressed head, its limbs waving in the air and spread wide apart, subdivided and resubdivided into haunches, which again are divided and resubdivided. Here between two limbs another branch is jammed, in a stationary fornication which is reproduced in diminished scale from bough to twig to the top of the tree. There it seems the trunk is a phallus which mounts and disappears into a skirt of leaves or which, on the contrary, issues from a green clout and plunges into the glossy belly of the earth.
"Frightful images rise before him. He sees the skin of little boys, the lucid white skin, vellum-like, in the pale, smooth bark of the slender beeches. He recognizes the pachydermatous skin of the beggar boys in the dark and wrinkled envelope of the old oaks. Beside the bifurcations of the branches there are yawning holes, puckered orifices in the bark, simulating ernunctdria, or the protruding anus of a beast. In the joints of the branches there are other visions, elbows, armpits furred with grey lichens. Even in the trunks there are incisions which spread out into great lips beneath tufts of brown, velvety moss.
"Everywhere obscene forms rise from the ground and spring, disordered, into a firmament which satanizes. The clouds swell into breasts, divide into buttocks, bulge as if with fecundity, scattering a train of spawn through space. They accord with the sombre bulging of the foliage, in which now there are only images of giant or dwarf hips, feminine triangles, great V’s, mouths of Sodom, glowing cicatrices, humid vents. This landscape of abomination changes. Gilles now sees on the trunks frightful cancers and horrible wens. He observes exostoses and ulcers, membranous sores, tubercular chancres, atrocious caries. It is an arboreal lazaret, a venereal clinic.
"And there, at a detour of the forest aisle, stands a mottled red beech.
"Amid the sanguinary falling leaves he feels that he has been spattered by a shower of blood. He goes into a rage. He conceives the delusion that beneath the bark lives a wood nymph, and he would feel with his hands the palpitant flesh of the goddess, he would trucidate the Dryad, violate her in a place unknown to the follies of men.
"He is jealous of the woodsman who can murder, can massacre, the trees, and he raves. Tensely he listens and hears — in the soughing wind a response to his cries of desire. Overwhelmed, he resumes his walk, weeping, until he arrives at the chateau and sinks to his bed exhausted, an inert mass.
"The phantoms take more definite shape, now that he sleeps. The lubric enlacements of the branches, dilated crevices and cleft mosses, the coupling of the diverse beings of the wood, disappear; the tears of the leaves whipped by the wind are dried; the white abscesses of the clouds are resorbed into the grey of the sky; and-in an awful silence-the incubi and succubi pass.
"The corpses of his victims, reduced to ashes and scattered, return to the larva state and attack his lower parts. He writhes, with the blood bursting his veins. He rebounds in a somersault, then he crawls to the crucifix, like a wolf, on all fours, and howling, strains his lips to the feet of the Christ.
"A sudden reaction overwhelms him. He trembles before the image whose convulsed face looks down on him. He adjures Christ to have pity, supplicates Him to spare a sinner, and sobs and weeps, and when, incapable of further effort, he whimpers, he hears, terrified, in his own voice, the lamentations of the children crying for their mothers and pleading for mercy."
. . . . . .
And Durtal, coming slowly out of the vision he had conjured up, closed his notebook and remarked, "Rather petty, my own spiritual conflict regarding a woman whose sin — like my own, to be sure — is commonplace and bourgeois."
CHAPTER XII
"Easy to find an excuse for this visit, though it will seem strange to Chantelouve, whom I have neglected for months," said Durtal on his way toward the rue Bagneux. "Supposing he is home this evening-and he probably isn’t, because surely Hyacinthe will have seen to that-I can tell him that I have learned of his illness through Des Hermies and that I have come to see how he is getting along."
He paused on the stoop of the building in which Chantelouve lived. At each side and over the door were these antique lamps with reflectors, surmounted by a sort of casque of sheet iron painted green. There was an old iron balustrade, very wide, and the steps, with wooden sides, were paved with red tile. About this house there was a sepulchral and also clerical odour, yet there was also something homelike-though a little too imposing — about it such as is not to be found in the cardboard houses they build nowadays. You could see at a glance that it did not harbour the apartment house promiscuities: decent, respectable couples with kept women for neighbours. The house pleased him, and he considered Hyacinthe the more desirable for her substantial environment.
He rang at a first-floor apartment. A maid led ’him through a long hall into a sitting-room. He noticed, at a glance, that nothing had changed since his last visit. It was the same vast, high-ceilinged room with windows reaching to heaven. There was the huge fireplace; on the mantelpiece the same reproduction, reduced, in bronze, of Fremiet’s Jeanne d’Arc, between the two globe lamps of Japanese porcelain. He recognised the grand piano, the table loaded with albums, the divan the chairs in the style of Louis XV with tapestried covers. In front of every window there were imitation Chinese vases, mounted on tripods of imitation ebony and containing sickly palms. On the walls were religious pictures, without expression, and a portrait of Chantelouve in his youth, three-quarter length, his hand resting on a pile of his works. An ancient Russian icon in nielloed silver and one of these Christs in carved wood, executed in the seventeenth century by Bogard de Nancy, in an antique frame of gilded wood backed with velvet, were the only things that slightly relieved the banality of the decoration. The rest of the furniture looked like that of a bourgeois household fixed up for Lent, or for a charity dance or for a visit from the priest. A great fire blazed on the hearth. The room was lighted by a very high lamp with a wide shade of pink lace.
"Stinks of the sacristy!" Durtal was saying to himself at the moment the door opened.
Mme. Chantelouve entered, the lines of her figure advantageously displayed by a wrapper of white swanskin, which gave off a fragrance of frangipane. She pressed Durtal’s hand and sat down facing him, and he perceived under the wrap her indigo silk stockings in little patent leather bootines with straps across the insteps.
They talked about the weather. She complained of the way the winter hung on, and declared that although the furnace seemed to be working all right she was always shivering, was always frozen to death. She told him to feel her hands, which indeed were cold, then she seemed worried about his health.
"You look pale," she said.
"You might at least say that I am pale," he replied.
She did not answer immediately, then, "Yesterday I saw how much you desire me," she said. "But why, why, want to go so far?"
He made a gesture, indicating vague annoyance.
"How funny you are !" she went on. "I was rereading one of your books today, and I noticed this phrase, "The only women you can continue to love are those you lose.’ Now admit that you were right when you wrote that."
"It all depends. I wasn’t in love then."
She shrugged her shoulders. "Well," she said, "I must tell my husband you are here."
Durtal remained silent, wondering what rile Chantelouve actually played in this triangle.
Chantelouve returned with his wife. He was in his dressing-gown and had a pen in his mouth. He took it out and put it on the table, and after assuring Durtal that his health was completely restored, he complained of overwhelming labours. "I have had to quit giving dinners and receptions," he said, "I can’t even go visiting. I am in harness every day at my desk."
And when Durtal asked him the nature of these labours, he confessed to a whole series of unsigned volumes on the lives of the saints, to be turned out by the gross by a Tours firm for exportation.
"Yes," said his wife, laughing, "and these are sadly neglected saints whose biographies he is preparing."
And as Durtal looked at him inquiringly, Chantelouve, also laughing, said, "It was their persons that were sadly neglected. The subjects are chosen for me, and it does seem as if the publisher enjoyed making me eulogise frowziness. I have to describe Blessed Saints most of whom were deplorably unkempt: Labre, who was so lousy and ill-smelling as to disgust the beasts in the stables; Saint Cunegonde who ’through humility’ neglected her body; Saint Oportune who never used water and who washed her bed only with her tears; Saint Silvia who never removed the grime from her face; Saint Radegonde who never changed her hair shirt and who slept on a cinder pile; and how many others, around whose heads I must draw a golden halo !"
"There are worse than those," said Durtal. "Read the life of Marie Alacoque. You will see that she, to mortify herself, licked up with her tongue the dejections of one sick person and sucked an abscess from the toe of another."
"I know, but I must admit that I am less touched than revolted by these tales."
"I prefer Saint Lucius the martyr," said Mme. Chantelouve. "His body was so transparent that he could see through his chest the vileness of his heart. His kind of ’vileness’ at least we can stand. But I must admit that this utter disregard of cleanliness makes me suspicious of the monasteries and renders your beloved Middle Ages odious to me."
"Pardon me, my dear," said her husband, "you are greatly mistaken.’ The Middle Ages were not, as you believe, an epoch of uncleanliness. People frequented the baths assiduously. At Paris, for example, where these establishments were numerous, the ’stove-keepers’ went about the city announcing that the water was hot. It is not until the Renaissance that uncleanliness becomes rife in France. When you think that that delicious Reine Margot kept her body macerated with perfumes but as grimy as the inside of a stovepipe I and that Henri Quatre plumed himself on having ’reeking feet and a fine armpit.’
"My dear, for heaven’s sake," said madame, "spare us the details."
While Chantelouve was speaking, Durtal was watching him. He was small and rotund, with a bay window which his arms would not have gone around. He had rubicund cheeks, long hair very much pomaded, trailing in the back and drawn up in crescents along his temples. He had pink cotton in his ears. He was smooth shaven and looked like a pious but convivial notary. But his quick, calculating eye belied his jovial and sugary mien. One divined in his look the cool, unscrupulous man of affairs, capable, for all his honeyed ways, of doing one a bad turn.
"He must be aching to throw me into the street," said Durtal to himself, "because he certainly knows all about his wife’s goings-on."
But if Chantelouve wished to be rid of his guest he did not show it. With his legs crossed and his hands folded one over the other, in the attitude of a priest, he appeared to be mighty interested in Durtal’s work. Inclining a little, listening as if in a theatre, he said, "Yes, I know the material on the subject. I read a book some time ago about Gilles de Rais which seemed to me well handled. It was by abbé Bossard."
"It is the most complete and reliable of the biographies of the Marshal."
"But," Chantelouve went on, "there is one point which I never have been able to understand. I have never been able to explain to myself why the name Bluebeard should have been attached to the Marshal, whose history certainly has no relation to the tale of the good Perrault."
"As a matter of fact the real Bluebeard was not Gilles de Rais, but probably a Breton king, Comor, a fragment of whose castle, dating from the sixth century, is still standing, on the confines of the forest of Carnoet. The legend is simple. The king asked Guerock, count of Vannes, for the hand of his daughter, Triphine. Guerock refused, because he had heard that the king maintained himself in a constant state of widowerhood by cutting his wives’ throats. Finally Saint Gildas promised Guerock to return his daughter to him safe and sound when he should reclaim her, and the union was celebrated.
"Some months later Triphirie learned that Comor did indeed kill his consorts as soon as they became pregnant. She was big with child, so she fled, but her husband pursued her and cut her throat. The weeping father commanded Saint Gildas to keep his promise, and the Saint resuscitated Triphine.
"As you see, this legend comes much nearer than the history of our Bluebeard to the told tale arranged by the ingenious Perrault. Now, why and how the name Bluebeard passed from King Comor to the Marshal de Rais, I cannot tell. You know what pranks oral tradition can play."
"But with your Gilles de Rais you must have to plunge into Satanism right up to the hilt," said Chantelouve after a silence.
"Yes, and it would really be more interesting if these scenes were not so remote. What would have a timely appeal would be a study of the Diabolism of the present day."
"No doubt," said Chantelouve, pleasantly.
"For," Durtal went on, looking at him intently, "unheard-of things are going on right now. I have heard tell of sacrilegious priests, of a certain canon who has revived the sabbats of the Middle Ages."
Chantelouve did not betray himself by so much as a flicker of the eyelids. Calmly he uncrossed his legs and looking up at the ceiling he said, "Alas, certain scabby wethers succeed in stealing into the fold, but they are so rare as hardly to be worth thinking about." And he deftly changed the subject by speaking of a book he had just read about the Fronde.
Durtal, somewhat embarrassed, said nothing. He understood that Chantelouve refused to speak of his relations with Canon Docre.
"My dear," said Mme. Chantelouve, addressing her husband, "you have forgotten to turn up your lamp wick. It is smoking. I can smell it from here, even through the closed door."
She was most evidently conveying him a dismissal. Chantelouve rose and, with a vaguely malicious smile, excused himself as being obliged to continue his work. He shook hands with Durtal, begged him not to stay away so long in future, and gathering up the skirts of his dressing-gown he left the room.
She followed him with her eyes, then rose, in her turn, ran to the door, assured herself with a glance that it was closed, then returned to Durtal, who was leaning against the mantel. Without a word she took his head between her hands, pressed her lips to his mouth and opened it.
He grunted furiously.
She looked at him with indolent and filmy eyes, and he saw sparks of silver dart to their surface. He held her in his arms. She was swooning but vigilantly listening. Gently she disengaged herself, sighing, while he, embarrassed, sat down at a little distance from her, clenching and unclenching his hands.
They spoke of banal things: she boasting of her maid, who would go through fire for her, he responding only by gestures of approbation and surprise.
Then suddenly she passed her hands over her forehead. "Ah!" she said, "I suffer cruelly when I think that he is there working. No, it would cost me too much remorse. What I say is foolish, but if he were a different man, a man who went out more and made conquests, it would not be so bad."
He was irritated by the inconsequentiality of her plaints. Finally, feeling completely safe, he came closer to her and said, "You spoke of remorse, but whether we embark or whether we stand on the bank, isn’t our guilt exactly the same?"
"Yes, I know. My confessor talks to me like that — only more severely — but I think you are both wrong."
He could not help laughing, and he said to himself, "Remorse is perhaps the condiment which keeps passion from being too unappetizing to the blast." Then aloud he jestingly, "Speaking of confessors, if I were a casuist it seems to me I would try to invent new sins. I am not a casuist, and yet, having looked about a bit, I believe I have found a new sin."
"You?" she said, laughing in turn. "Can I commit it?" He scrutinised her features. She had the expression of a greedy child.
"You alone can answer that. Now I must admit that the sin is not absolutely new, for it fits into the known category of lust. But it has been neglected since pagan days, and was never well defined in any case."
"Do not keep me in suspense. What is this sin?"
"It isn’t easy to explain. Nevertheless I will try. Lust, I believe, can be classified into: ordinary sin, sin against nature, bestiality, and let us add demoniality and sacrilege. Well, there is, in addition to these, what I shall call Pygmalionism, which embraces at the same time cerebral onanism and incest.
"Imagine an artist falling in love with his child, his creation: with an Herodiade, a Judith, a Helen, a Jeanne d’Arc, whom he has either described or painted, and evoking her, and finally possessing her in dream.
"Well, this love is worse than normal incest. In the latter sin the guilty one commits only a half-offence, because his daughter is not born solely of his substance, but also of the flesh of another. Thus, logically, in incest there is a quasi-natural side, almost licit, because part of another per-son has entered into the engendering of the corpus delicti; while in Pygmalionism the father violates the child of his soul, of that which alone is purely and really his, which alone he can impregnate without the aid of another. The offence is, then, entire and complete. Now, is there not also disdain of nature, of the work of God, since the subject of the sin is no longer — as even in bestiality — a palpable and living creature, but an unreal being created by a projection of the desecrated talent, a being almost celestial, since, by genius, by artistry, it often becomes immortal?
"Let us go further, if you wish. Suppose that an artist depicts a saint and becomes enamoured of her. Thus we have complications of crime against nature and of sacrilege. An enormity!"
"Which, perhaps, is exquisite!"
He was taken aback by the word she had used. She rose, opened tile door, and called her husband.
"Dear," she said, "Durtal has discovered a new sin!"
"Surely not," said Chantelouve, his figure framed in the doorway. "The book of sins is an edition ne varietur. New sins cannot be invented, but old ones may be kept from falling into oblivion. Well, what is this sin of his?"
Durtal explained the theory.
"But it is simply a refined expression of succubacy. The consort is not one’s work become animate, but a succubus which by night takes that form."
"Admit, at any rate, that this cerebral hermaphrodism, self-fecundation, is a distinguished vice at least — being the privilege of the artist — a vice reserved for the elect, inaccessible to the mob."
"If you like exclusive obscenity -" laughed Chantelouve. "But I must get back to the lives of the saints; the atmosphere is fresher and more benign. So excuse me, Durtal. I leave it to my wife to continue this Marivaux conversation about Satanism with you."
He said it in the simplest, most debonair fashion to be imagined, but with just the slightest trace of irony.
Which Durtal perceived. "It must be quite late," he thought, when the door closed after Chantelouve. He consulted his watch. Nearly eleven. He rose to take leave.
"When shall I see you?" he murmured, very low.
"Your apartment tomorrow night at nine."
He looked at her with beseeching eyes. She understood, but wished to tease him. She kissed him maternally on the forehead, then consulted his eyes again. The expression of supplication must have remained unchanged, for she responded to their imploration by a long kiss which closed them, then came down to his lips, drinking their dolorous emotion.
Then she rang and told her maid to light Durtal through the hall. He descended, satisfied that she had engaged herself to yield tomorrow night.
CHAPTER XIII
He began again, as on the other evening, to clean house and establish a methodical disorder. He slipped a cushion under the false disarray of the armchair, then he made roaring fires to have the rooms good and warm when she came.
But he was without impatience. That silent promise which he had obtained, that Mme. Chantelouve would not leave him panting this night, moderated him. Now that his uncertainty was at an end, he no longer vibrated with the almost painful acuity which hitherto her malignant delays had provoked. He soothed himself by poking the fire. His mind was still full of her, but plethoric, content. When his thoughts stirred at all it was, at the very most, to revolve the question, "How shall I go about it, when the time comes, so as not to be ridiculous?" This question, which had so harassed him the other night, left him troubled but inert. He did not try to solve it, but decided to leave every-thing to chance, since the best planned strategy was almost always abortive.
Then he revolted against himself, accused himself of stagnation, and walked up and down to shake himself out of a torpor which might have been attributed to the hot fire. Well, well, was it because he had had to wait so long that his desires had left him, or at least quit bothering him — no, they had not, why, he was yearning now for the moment when he might crush that woman I He thought he had the explanation of his lack of enthusiasm in the stage fright inseparable from any beginning. "It will not be really exquisite tonight until after the newness wears off and the grotesque with it. After I know her I shall be able to consort with her again without feeling solicitous about her and conscious of myself. I wish we were on that happy basis now."
The cat, sitting on the table, cocked up its ears, gazed at the door with its black eyes, and fled. The bell rang and Durtal went to let her in.
Her costume pleased him. He took off her furs. Her skirt was of a plum colour so dark that it was almost black, the material thick and supple, outlining her figure, squeezing her arms, making an hourglass of her waist, accentuating the curve of her hips and the bulge of her corset.
"You are charming," he said, kissing her wrists, and he was pleased to find that his lips had accelerated her pulse. She did not speak, could hardly breathe. She was agitated and very pale.
He sat down facing her. She looked at him with her mysterious, half sleepy eyes. He felt that he was falling in love all over again. He forgot his reasonings and his fears, and took acute pleasure in penetrating the mystery of these eyes and studying the vague smile of this dolorous mouth.
He enlaced her fingers in his, and for the first time, in a low voice, he called her Hyacinthe.
She listened, her breast heaving, her hands in a fever. Then in a supplicating voice, "I implore you," she said, "let us have none of that. Only desire is good. Oh, I am rational, I mean what I say. I thought it all out on the way here. I left him very sad tonight. If you knew how I feel — I went to church today and was afraid and hid myself when I saw my confessor -
These plaints he had heard before, and he said to himself, "You may sing whatever tune you want to, but you shall dance tonight." Aloud he answered in monosyllables as he continued to take possession of her.
He rose, thinking she would do the same, or that if she remained seated he could better reach her lips by bending over her.
"Your lips, your lips — the kiss you gave me last night -" he murmured, as his face came close to hers. She put up her lips and stood, and they embraced, but as his hands went seeking she recoiled.
"Think how ridiculous it all is," she said in a low voice, "to undress, put on night clothes — and that silly scene, getting into bed!"
He avoided declaring, but attempted, by an embrace which bent her over backward, to make her understand that she could spare herself those embarrassments. Tacitly, in his own turn, feeling her body stiffen under his fingers, he understood that she absolutely would not give herself in the room here, in front of the fire.
"Oh well," she said, disengaging herself, "if you will have it!"
He made way to allow her to go into the other room, and seeing that she desired to be alone he drew the portiere.
Sitting before the fire he reflected. Perhaps he ought to have pulled down the bed covers, and not left her the task, but without doubt the action would have been too direct, too obvious a hint. Ah! and that water heater! He took it and, keeping away from the bedroom door, went to the bathroom, placed the heater on the toilet table, and then, swiftly, he set out the rice powder box, the perfumes, the combs, and, returning into his study, he listened.
She was making as little noise as possible, walking on tiptoe as if in the presence of the dead. She blew out the candles, doubtless wishing no more light than the rosy glow of the hearth.
He felt positively annihilated. The irritating impression of the lips and eyes of Hyacinthe was far from him now. She was nothing but a woman, like any other, undressing in a man’s room. Memories of similar scenes overwhelmed him. He remembered girls who like her had crept about — on the carpet so as not to be heard, and who had stopped short, ashamed, for a whole second, if they bumped against the water pitcher. And then, what good was this going to do him? Now that she was yielding he no longer desired her! Disillusion had come even before possession, not waiting, as usual, till afterward. He was distressed to the point of tears.
The frightened cat glided under the curtain, ran from one room to the other, and finally came back to his master and jumped onto his knees. Caressing him, Durtal said to himself, "Decidedly, she was right when she refused. It will he grotesque, atrocious. I was wrong to insist, but no, it’s her fault, too. She must have wanted to do this or she wouldn’t have come. What a fool to think she could aggravate passion by delay. She is fearfully clumsy. A moment ago when I was embracing her and really was aroused, it would perhaps have been delicious, but now I And what do I look like? A young bridegroom waiting — or a green country boy. Oh God, how stupid! Well," he said, straining his ears and hearing no sound from the other room, "she’s in bed. I must go in.
"I suppose it took her all this time to unharness herself from her corset. She was a fool to wear one," he concluded, when, drawing the curtain, he stepped into the other room.
Mme. Chantelouve was buried under the thick coverlet, her mouth half-open and her eyes closed; but he saw that she was peering at him through the fringe of her blonde eyelashes. He sat down on the edge of the bed. She huddled up, drawing the cover over her chin.
"Cold, dear?"
"No," and she opened wide her eyes, which flashed sparks.
He undressed, casting a rapid glance at Hyacinthe’s face. It was hidden in the darkness, but was sometimes revealed by a flare of the red hot fire, as a stick, half consumed and smoldering, would suddenly burst into flame. Swiftly he slipped between the covers. He clasped a corpse; a body so cold that it froze him, but the woman’s lips were burning as she silently gnawed his features. He lay stupefied in the grip of this body wound around his own, supple as the... .and hard! He could not move; he could not speak for the shower of kisses travelling over his face. Finally, he succeeded in disengaging himself, and, with his free arm he sought her; then suddenly, while she devoured his lips he felt a nervous inhibition, and, naturally, without profit, he withdrew.
"I detest you!" she exclaimed.
"Why?"
"I detest you!"
He wanted to cry out, "And I you!" He was exasperated, and would have given all he owned to get her to dress and go home.
The fire was burning low, unflickering. Appeased, now, he sat up and looked into the darkness. He would have liked to get up and find another nightshirt, because the one he had on was tearing and getting in his way. But Hyacinthe was lying on top of it — then he reflected that the bed was deranged and the thought affected him, because he liked to be snug in winter, and knowing himself incapable of respreading the covers, he foresaw a cold night.
Once more, he was enlaced; the gripe of the woman’s on his own was renewed; rational, this time, he attended to her and crushed her with mighty caresses. In a changed voice, lower, more guttural, she uttered ignoble things and silly cries which gave him pain — My dear I — oh, hon! — oh I can’t stand it -" aroused nevertheless, he took this body which creaked as it writhed, and he experienced the extraordinary sensation of a spasmodic burning within a swaddle of ice-packs.
He finally jumped over her, out of bed, and lighted the candles. On the dresser the cat sat motionless, considering Durtal and Mme. Chantelouve alternately. Durtal saw an inexpressible mockery in those black eyes and, irritated, chased the beast away.
He put some more wood on the fire, dressed, and started to leave the room. Hyacinthe called him gently, in her usual voice. He approached the bed. She threw her arms around his neck and hung then kissing him hungrily. Then sinking back and putting her arms under the cover, she said, "The deed is done. Now trill you love me any better?"
He did not have the heart to answer. Ah yes, his disillusion was complete. The satiety following justified his lack of appetite preceding. She revolted him, horrified him Was it possible to have so desired a woman, only to come to — that? He had idealised her in his transports, he had dreamed in her eyes — he knew not what! He had wished to exalt himself with her, to rise higher than the delirious ravenings of the senses, to soar out of the world into joys supernal and unexplored. And his dream had been shattered. He remained fettered to earth. Was there no means of escaping out of one’s self, out of earthly limitations, and attaining an upper ether where the soul, ravished, would glory in its giddy flight?
Ah, the lesson was hard and decisive. For having one time hoped so much, what regrets, what a tumble! Decidedly, Reality does not pardon him who despises her; she avenges herself by shattering the dream and trampling it and casting the fragments into a cesspool.
’Don’t be vexed, dear, because it is taking me so long," said Mme. Chantelouve behind the curtain.
He thought crudely, "I wish you would get to hell out of here," and aloud he asked politely if she had need of his services.
"She was so mysterious, so enticing," he resumed to himself. "Her eyes, remote, deep as space, and reflecting cemeteries and festivals at the same time. And she has shown herself up for all she is, within an hour. I have seen a new Hyacinthe, talking like a silly little milliner in heat. All the nastinesses of women unite in her to exasperate me."
After a thoughtful silence he concluded, "I must be young indeed to have lost my head the way I did."
As if echoing his thought, Mme. Chantelouve, coming out through the portiere, laughed nervously and said, "A woman of my age doing a mad thing like that!" She looked at him, and though he forced a smile she understood.
"You will sleep tonight," she said, sadly, alluding to Durtal’s former complaints of sleeplessness on her account.
He begged her to sit down and warm herself, but she said she was not cold.
"Why, in spite of the warmth of the room you were cold as ice!"
"Oh, I am always that way. Winter and summer my flesh is chilly."
He thought that in August this frigid body might be agreeable, but now!
He offered her some bonbons, which she refused, then she said she would take a sip of the alkermes, which he poured into a tiny silver goblet. She took just a drop, and amicably they discussed the taste of this preparation, in which she recognised an aroma of clove, tempered by flower of cinnamon moistened with distillate of rose water.
Then he became silent.
"My poor dear," she said, "how I should love him if he were more confiding and not always on his guard."
He asked her to explain herself.
"Why, I mean that you can’t forget yourself and simply let yourself be loved. Alas, you were reasoning all the time — "I was not!" She kissed him tenderly. "You see I love you, anyway."
And he was surprised to see how sad and moved she looked, and lie observed a sort of frightened gratitude in her eyes.
"She is easily satisfied," he said to himself.
"What are you thinking about?" "You!"
She sighed. Then, "What time is it?" "Half past ten."
"I must go. He is waiting for me. No, don’t say anything -"
She passed her hands over her cheeks. He seized her gently by the waist and kissed her, holding her thus enlaced until they were at the door.
"You will come again soon, won’t you?"
"Yes...Yes."
He returned to the fireside.
"Oof! it’s done," he thought, in a whirl of confused emotions. His vanity was satisfied, his self-esteem was no longer bleeding, he had attained his ends and possessed this woman. Moreover, her spell over him had lost its force. He was regaining his entire liberty of mind, but who could tell what trouble this liaison had yet in store for him? Then, in spite of everything, he softened.
After all, what could he reproach her with? She loved as well as she could. She was, indeed, ardent and plaintive. Even this dualism of a mistress who was a low cocotte in bed and a fine lady when dressed — or no, too intelligent to be called a fine lady — was a delectable pimento. Her carnal appetites were excessive and bizarre. What, then, was the matter with him?
And at last he quite justly accused himself. It was his own fault if everything was spoiled. He lacked appetite. He was not really tormented except by a cerebral erethism. He was used up in body, filed away in soul, inept at love, weary of tendernesses even before he received them and disgusted when he had. His heart was dead and could not be revived. And his mania for thinking, thinking! Previsualizing an incident so vividly that actual enactment was an anticlimax — but probably would not be if his mind would leave him alone and not be always jeering at his efforts. For a man in his state of spiritual impoverishment all, save art, was but a recreation more or less boring, a diversion more or less vain. "Ah; poor woman, I am afraid she is going to get pretty sick of me. If only she would consent to come no more! But no, she doesn’t deserve to be treated in that fashion," and, seized by pity, he swore to himself that the next time she visited him he would caress her and try to persuade her that the disillusion which he had so ill concealed did not exist.
He tried to spread up the bed, get the tousled blankets together, and plump the pillows, then he lay down.
He put out his lamp. In the darkness his distress increased. With death in his heart he said to himself, "Yes, I was right in declaring that the only women you can continue to love are those you lose.
"To learn, three years later, when the woman is inaccessible, chaste and married, dead, perhaps, or out of France — to learn that she loved you, though you had not dared believe it while she was near you, ah, that’s the dream! These real and intangible loves, these loves made up of melancholy and distant regrets, are the only ones that count. Because there is no flesh in them, no earthly leaven.
"To love at a distance and without hope; never to possess; to dream chastely of pale charms and impossible kisses extinguished on the waxen brow of death: ah, that is something like it. A delicious straying away from the world, and never the return. As only the unreal is not ignoble and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable. Yes, imagination is the only good thing which heaven vouchsafes to the sceptic and pessimist, alarmed by the eternal abjectness of life."