French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (10 page)

‘She had the sable locks of Night,’ went on Ravila, ‘but they framed the face of Dawn itself, a face that shone with a rare and radiant freshness that had lost nothing of its bloom despite exposure to years of Parisian night-life, which burns up so many roses in its candelabra. Hers seemed merely to have been kissed, the pink in her cheeks and lips remaining bright to the point of luminosity. The twofold flush
also went well with the ruby frontlet she usually wore—this was the time women did their hair
en ferronnière
,
*
after Leonardo. With her flashing eyes, whose colour was obscured by the flame that issued from them, they made a triangle whose tips were rubies! Slim, but strong, majestic even, she was built to be the wife of a colonel of dragoons—her husband was at that time merely a squadron-leader in the light cavalry—and she enjoyed, despite her pedigree, the rude health of a peasant-girl who drinks in the sun through her skin. She had the ardour that goes with it, too—she imbibed the sun into her soul as well as her veins, she was always present, and always ready… But here’s the strange thing! This powerful and unaffected creature, whose pure, passionate nature was like the blood that fed her beautiful cheeks and gave a pink flush to her arms, was… would you credit it? awkward in a man’s arms…’

At this some of his listeners lowered their eyes, but raised them again, mischievously…

‘As awkward in love as she was rash in life,’ went on Ravila, who did not linger on the tidbit he had just dropped. ‘And the man who loved her had repeatedly to instruct her in two things she seemed not to have learned… never to lose control in a world always hostile and always implacable, and in private, to learn the greatest art of love, which is that of keeping it alive. She loved, certainly; but the art of love was lacking in her… In this she was unlike the majority of women, who possess merely the art! Now, to understand and apply the strategies of
The Prince
, you must first be a Borgia. Borgia comes before Machiavelli.
*
One is the poet, the other is the critic. She possessed nothing of the Borgia. She was a good woman, very much in love; and despite her monumental beauty, she remained naive, like the little girl in one of those motifs above a door who, being thirsty, thrusts her hand impulsively into the fountain and stands there abashed, when all the water pours through her fingers…

‘The co-existence of this awkwardness and shame with the grand woman of passion was actually rather endearing. Few who observed her in society had any inkling of it—they would have seen someone who had love, and even happiness, but they would not suspect that she lacked the art to return it in kind. Only I was not then sufficiently detached to be able to content myself with observing the
artistic effect
, and sometimes this made her anxious, jealous, violent—as one is when in love, and she was that!—But her anxiety, jealousy, and
violence simply died away in the inexhaustible goodness of her heart, the instant she had, or thought that she had, hurt one—she was as inept at causing pain as she was at giving pleasure. Strange lioness, indeed! She thought she possessed claws, but when she tried to bare them, nothing emerged from her magnificent velvet paws. Her scratches were of velvet!’

‘Where is all this leading?’ said the Comtesse de Chiffrevas to her neighbour—for this couldn’t, surely, be the crowning love of Don Juan…

None of those sophisticates could conceive of such simplicity!

‘And so we enjoyed an intimacy that was sometimes stormy, but never tortured, and in the provincial town known as Paris, it was a mystery to no one… The Marquise… she was a Marquise…’

There were three of them sitting at that table, and they were all brunettes. But they didn’t blink. They knew full well he wasn’t talking of them… The only velvet they shared between them was the down that one of them had on her upper lip—a beautifully modelled lip which at that moment, I could swear, was curled in some disdain.

‘… And a Marquise three times over, just as pashas can have three tails!’
*
went on Ravila, who was getting into his stride. ‘The Marquise was one of those women who cannot hide anything, however they might wish to. Even her daughter, a girl of thirteen, innocent as she was, recognized only too well the feelings her mother had for me. I wonder, has any poet fathomed what these daughters feel about us, their mothers’ lovers? The question goes deep! It is one I pondered frequently, when I caught the little girl looking at me out of her huge, dark eyes, a black, spying look, fraught with menace. She was shy, like a wild animal, and usually left the drawing room the moment I entered it, or sat as far away from me as possible, if she was forced to stay… she had an almost compulsive horror of my person, that she would try and hide, but it ran so strong in her she could not help herself… It came out in tiny details, but I noticed them all. Even the Marquise, who was usually quite unobservant, kept saying: “Take care, my friend. I think my daughter is jealous of you…”

‘And I did take care, much more so than she.

‘But had the little girl been the devil in person, I would still have defied her to see through my game… the thing was, her mother’s game was perfectly transparent. That flushed face, so often troubled,
mirrored her every feeling. Judging by her daughter’s hatred of me, I could not help thinking she must have sensed her mother’s emotion by catching some look of uncommon tenderness in her expression towards me. The girl was, I might add, a skinny little waif, quite unworthy of the resplendent mould she issued from—even her mother agreed she was ugly, for which she loved her all the more; she was a small, scorched topaz… or a little bronze mannikin, but with those black eyes… sheer sorcery! And after that, she…’

At this hiatus he stopped short… as if seeking to erase his last remark, as though he had said too much… His listeners, however, woke up again; anticipation could be read on all their eager faces, and the Comtesse even hissed between her teeth, expressing their collective relief: ‘At last!’

‘I
N
the early days of my relationship with her mother,’ the Comte de Ravila resumed, ‘I lavished the kind of fond attention on the girl that we reserve for any child… I would bring her bags of sweets, I called her my “little mask”,
*
and frequently when I was talking to her mother I would stroke the plait of hair at her temple, a plait of black, lank hair, with reddish gleams. But “little mask”, who had a wide smile for everybody, recoiled from me, frowningly extinguished her smile, and became truly a “little mask” from screwing up her face, the wrinkled mask of some humiliated caryatid that seemed indeed to bear the contact of my stroking hand as if she were suffering the weight of a stone cornice.

‘Encountering the same sullenness every time, which seemed to spring from hostility, I eventually ignored the little marigold-coloured exotic, that would close up if I so much as stroked her hair… I no longer even spoke to her! “She senses that you are taking me from her,” the Marquise would say. “Instinctively, she knows you are depriving her of part of her mother’s love.” And sometimes, truthful as she was, she would add: “The child is my conscience, and her jealousy, my remorse.”

‘One day, trying to broach the subject of her aloofness towards me, the Marquise received nothing but the broken, stubborn, facetious answers one extracts painfully, like teeth, from a child who refuses to
be drawn—“There’s nothing wrong… I don’t know”—and noting the hardness of the little bronze figure, she stopped asking, and out of lassitude dropped the subject…

‘I have forgotten to mention that this strange child was very devout, with a kind of Spanish, medieval devotion, dark and superstitious. She would wrap all sorts of scapulars around her skinny body, and plastered over her perfectly flat chest and hung around her sallow neck were stacks of crosses, Blessed Virgins, and Holy Ghosts! “Alas, you are an ungodly soul,” the Marquise remarked to me, “and you might have scandalized her by something you said. I beg you to watch your tongue when she is present. Don’t magnify my faults in the eyes of the child, I already feel so guilty about her!” And when the child’s conduct did not alter or soften in any way: “You’ll end up hating her,” said the Marquise, worried now. “And I shouldn’t blame you.” But she was mistaken: I felt merely indifference toward the sulky little thing, when she didn’t actively irritate me.

‘I had become polite with her, as adults do when they dislike each other. I treated her with exaggerated formality, addressing her as “Mademoiselle”, to which she would return a glacial “Monsieur”. She refused point-blank to do anything to make herself amiable, or to put herself out in the slightest way for me… Her mother never succeeded in getting her to show me her drawings, or to play the piano for me. Sometimes I would surprise her, practising a piece with intense concentration, and she would leave off immediately, rise from the piano-stool, and play no more…

‘Only once, at her mother’s insistence (there were guests present), did she sit down at the open instrument, with one of her
martyred
expressions which, I assure you, had nothing gentle about it. She started to play through some piece or other, stumbling horribly, all fingers and thumbs. I was standing in front of the fire, looking at her from an oblique angle. Her back was turned towards me, and with no mirror in front of her she had no way of telling that I was looking at her… Suddenly her back (normally she sat with it curved, so that her mother would often say, “If you keep sitting like that, you’ll end up with a weak chest”)—her back straightened up, as if by gazing at her I had put a bullet through her spine and broken it. Slamming down the piano-lid, which made a fearful racket in falling, she fled the room… People went to fetch her back; but that evening no one could induce her to return.

‘Well, it appears that the obtusest of men can never be obtuse enough, for there was nothing in the conduct of this sombre child, who interested me so little, to lead me to dwell on the nature of her feelings towards me. Neither did her mother. The latter, who was jealous of every other woman in her salon, was no more jealous of her daughter than I was obtuse about her. The girl’s feelings were revealed when the Marquise, who was expansiveness itself in private, and still pale from terror at what she had felt, and now laughing hard at herself for having been so, was imprudent enough to impart to me the cause of it all.’

Like a clever actor, the Comte laid just the right stress on the word
imprudent
, knowing that the entire interest of the story must hang upon that word!

And it worked, apparently, for these twelve beautiful women’s faces lit up again with a feeling as intense as that reflected in the faces of cherubim before the throne of God. Is not the curiosity of women as intense as the adoration of the angels?… He looked at them, then, with their cherubic faces, shoulders, and so on down—and finding them all ready for what he had to tell them, he resumed quickly and did not stop again:

‘Yes indeed, the mere thought of it sent the Marquise into fits of laughter!—as she reported when she told me about it all a little while later; but she had not always found it funny!—“Imagine the scene,” she said to me (I am trying to remember her exact words)—“I was sitting where we are now.”

‘(It was one of those double-backed couches, known as a
dos-à-dos
,
*
a perfectly designed item of furniture on which to quarrel and make up without moving.)

‘ “Happily you weren’t there when a visitor was announced… can you guess who?… You’ll never guess… the priest of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Do you know him?… No, of course you don’t, you never go to mass, which is very wicked of you… How could you know that this poor old priest is actually a saint, who never sets foot in a lady’s house except to beg alms for the poor of the parish or for the church? I thought at first this was why he had come.

‘ “He prepared my daughter for her First Communion; since that time she communicates regularly, and she has kept him as her confessor. Which is why, since then, I have invited him many times to dinner—all to no avail… When he came in, he was extremely agitated.
Seeing his features, that were normally so serene, working with such great and undisguised distress, I realized it was not just his shyness, and I could not prevent myself from this unceremonious greeting:

‘ “ ‘In heaven’s name, what is the matter, Father?’

‘ “ ‘What is wrong, Madame,’ he replied, ‘is that you see before you the most embarrassed man in all the world. I have been in holy orders for more than fifty years, and I have never been charged with such a delicate mission, or one that I understand less, as this one which concerns you…’

‘ “He sat down, and asked me to make sure that no one interrupted us for as long as our interview lasted. You know how much such formalities tend to frighten me… This he noticed.

‘ “ ‘Madame, do not upset yourself so, you will need all your self-control to hear what I have to say and then explain to me this extraordinary thing, which in truth I cannot bring myself to believe… Mademoiselle your daughter, from whom I have just come, is an angel of purity and piety—you know this as well as I. I know her soul. I have held it in my hands since her seventh year, and I am certain that she is mistaken… perhaps because of her innocence… But this morning she came to tell me in confession that she was—you are not going to believe this any more than I do, Madame, but I must say the word… pregnant!’

‘ “I let out a gasp…

‘ “ ‘I gasped just like you, in my confessional this morning,’ resumed the priest, ‘at this declaration, which she made accompanied by all the signs of the sincerest and most dreadful despair! I know this child through and through. She knows nothing of the world or of sin… Of all the girls in my confession, she is certainly the one I would vouch for most readily before God. That is all I can tell you! We priests are the doctors of the soul, and we are charged to deliver them of all their burdens with hands that neither wound nor stain. And so, proceeding with the utmost caution, I asked her, I questioned her, I pressed her, but once the despairing child had uttered the word, and confessed her fault, which she calls a hellish crime (the poor girl thinks she is damned!)—she said nothing more and retreated into a stubborn silence which she would not break except to beg me to come and see you, Madame, to tell you of her crime—“for my mother will have to know,” she said, “and I will never have the strength to tell her!”’