French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (11 page)

‘ “I listened to the old priest of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and I scarcely need describe the mixture of astonishment and anguish his words caused me! Like him, and even more than him, I was convinced of the innocence of my daughter; but often the innocent fall, even through their own innocence… And what she had said to her confessor was not impossible!… She was only thirteen, but she had become a woman, and her precocity had in fact frightened me… I was seized with an access of curiosity.

‘ “ ‘I want to know and I shall know everything!’ I burst out to the poor old man, who stood before me, patting his hat, speechless with embarrasment.—‘Leave me now, Father. She would not speak to you. But I am sure she will tell me everything… I shall drag everything out of her, and then we shall understand what is at present beyond our understanding!’

‘ “Upon which the priest left—and no sooner had he gone than I went up to my daughter’s room, too impatient to ask her to come down and wait for her.

‘ “I found her before the crucifix above her bed, not kneeling, but prostrated, and pale as death. Her eyes were dry, but red, like eyes that have been crying heavily. I took her in my arms, sat her down next to me, then on my knee, and I told her that I could not believe what her confessor had just told me.

‘ “But she interrupted me to assure me, with anguish in her voice and expression, that what he had said was indeed true. And then, increasingly alarmed and amazed, I asked her for the name of the man who…

‘ “I did not finish… What a terrible moment! She buried her head and face in my shoulder… but I could see the back of her neck, which was burning scarlet, and I could feel her shuddering. And then she became stubbornly silent, as she had with the priest. It was a wall.

‘ “ ‘It must be someone very unworthy of you, since you seem so ashamed?’ I said, trying to provoke her into speaking, since I knew her to be proud.

‘ “But she stayed silent, her head buried in my shoulder. This went on for what seemed like an eternity, when she said suddenly, without changing position: ‘Promise me that you’ll forgive me, mother.’

‘ “I swore that I would, at the risk of perjuring myself a hundred times over; not that I cared a whit! I was boiling over with
impatience… I thought my brain was going to come bursting out of my head…

‘ “ ‘In that case, it was Monsieur de Ravila!’ she whispered, and stayed where she was, in my arms.

‘ “Oh, when she said that name, Amédée! I felt I had been punished with a single blow to the heart, for the great misdemeanour of my life. You are a man so terrible where women are concerned, and rack me with so many jealousies, that the horrible ‘and why not?’—when one comes to doubt the man one loves—arose in me… But I had the strength to hide my feelings from the cruel child, who must have sensed that her mother was in love.

‘ “ ‘Monsieur de Ravila!’ I exclaimed, with a voice that I felt must betray me completely—‘but you never even speak to him!—You avoid him’—I was about to add, my anger rising, I could feel it… ‘So you have both betrayed me!’—But I repressed that… Did I not have to pry out, one by one, every detail of this horrible seduction?… And so I asked her for them, with a gentleness that nearly killed me, when she herself released me from the vice-like grip, this torture, by saying quite ingenuously:

‘ “ ‘It was one evening, mother. He was in the big armchair in the corner by the fire, opposite the sofa. He stayed there a long while, then he got up, and I had the misfortune to go and sit in the armchair he had just left. Oh, mother!… I felt I had fallen into fire. I wanted to get up, but I couldn’t… I didn’t have the strength! And I felt… here, mother, feel here!… that what I had… was a child!… ’ ”’

The Marquise had laughed, said Ravila, when she told him the story; but not one of the twelve women seated round that table dreamed of laughing—and nor did Ravila.

‘So there you have it, Ladies, believe it or not,’ he added, by way of conclusion, ‘the crowning love, the most beautiful I have ever inspired in my life!’

He fell silent, and so did his listeners. They were pensive… had they understood him?

When Joseph was bound a slave to Potiphar’s wife, he was so handsome, says the Koran, that the women he served at table cut their fingers with their knives from looking at him. But the age of Joseph is past, and our preoccupations over dessert are less beguiling.

‘What a great ninny that Marquise of yours is, for all her wit, to have told you such a thing!’ said the Duchesse, who decided to be
cynical, but who still had her golden knife in her hand, and had not used it to cut anything at all.

The Comtesse de Chiffrevas gazed deep into her glass of Rhenish wine, an emerald crystal glass, as mysterious as her reverie.

‘And Little Mask?’ she inquired.

‘Oh, she got married to someone in the provinces—and then she died, very young, before her mother told me this story,’ said Ravila.

‘That, too…’ said the Duchesse thoughtfully.

Attende, homo, quid fuisti ante ortum et quod eris usque ad occasum. Profecto fuit quod non eras. Postea, de vili materia factus, in utero matris de sanguine menstruali nutritus, tunica tua fuit pellis secundina. Deinde, in vilissimo panno involutus, progressus es ad nos, - sic indutus et ornatus! Et non memor es quae sit origo tua. Nibil est aliud homo quam sperma foetidum, saccus stercorum, cibus vermium. Scientia, sapientia, ratio, sine Deo sicut nubes transeunt.

Post hominem vermis; post vermem foetor et horror. Sic, in non hominem, vertitur omnis homo.

Cur carnem tuam adornas et impinguas quam, post paucos dies, vermes devoraturi sunt in sepulchro, animam, vero, tuam non adornas, - quae Deo et Angelis ejus praesentenda est in coelis!

(Saint Bernard,
Meditations
)

O
NE
winter evening over tea, a group of us, who had in common a taste for metaphysical enquiry, were gathered round a good fire at the home of one of our friends, Baron Xavier de la V*** (a pale young man, whose lengthy spells of military service in Africa, while still just a youth, had exacerbated a singularly moody and rugged temperament). The conversation came round to a most sombre subject: the
nature
of those extraordinary, stupefying, and mysterious coincidences that arise in the lives of some people.

‘This is a story,’ he told us, ‘that I shall tell without further comment. It is true. You may find it striking.’

We lit our cigarettes and settled back to listen to the following narrative:

‘In 1876, at the Autumn solstice,
*
around the time when the ever-growing number of shallow burials—expedited far too hurriedly, in actual fact—began to revolt the Parisian bourgeoisie and set alarm-bells ringing, one evening, at eight o’clock, after a most extraordinary spiritualist seance, I went home feeling overcome by that hereditary
spleen I am a prey to, whose black obsessiveness undoes and reduces to nothing any effort of the Will.

‘I have, on doctor’s orders, frequently but vainly dosed myself on Avicenna’s cassia brew,
*
or imbibed under every preparation extracts of iron, and trampling on all my pleasures, like a second Robert d’Arbrissel,
*
I have cooled the fiery edge of my passions down to Siberian temperatures, but nothing works!—So be it! It does indeed appear that I’m a person of morose and taciturn temperament! And yet, beneath my excitable surface, I must be made of sterner stuff, as they say, since despite this battery of treatments, I can still, equably enough, contemplate the stars.

‘On the evening in question I was back in my room, lighting a cigar by the candles on the mirror, when I noticed that I was mortally pale! So I flung myself into my great armchair, an antique done out in deep red padded velvet, in which the passage of time, during my long reveries, seems to weigh less heavily. My dejection of spirits came on oppressively, until I became almost ill. Judging it impossible to shake myself free of the shadows by going out—especially when the capital was itself assailed by dreadful problems—I resolved to try and get away from Paris altogether, into the fresh air of the country, and lose myself in vigorous exercise, like some good days hunting, to change my mood.

‘No sooner had the thought come to me, indeed
at the very instant
*
I had decided on that plan of action, than there came into my mind the name of an old friend, whom I had not seen for many years, the Abbé Maucombe.

‘ “Abbé Maucombe!…” I murmured to myself.

‘My last meeting with the learned priest dated back to just before he left on a long pilgrimage to Palestine. I had since had news of his return. He lived in a humble presbytery in a little village in central Brittany.

‘Surely Maucombe disposed of a spare room or an outhouse of some kind?—Surely he must have gathered, on his travels, some ancient tomes… some curiosities from the Lebanon, perhaps? And I would lay a wager that the country houses in the neighbourhood had wild duck on their lakes… What could be more opportune!… And if I were to make the most of the last fortnight of the magical month of October, among the reddened rocks, before the cold set in; if I really wanted to see the long and resplendent autumn evenings on the wooded heights, then I would have to make haste!

‘Nine o’clock chimed.

‘I got up; I knocked the ash from my cigar. Then, like a man of purpose, I took my hat, my greatcoat, and my gloves; I took my suitcase and my shotgun; I blew the candles and went out—taking elaborate care and turning the key three times in the secret keyhole that is the pride of my door.

‘Three-quarters of an hour later, the Brittany express was transporting me towards the little village of Saint-Maur, where the Abbé Maucombe had his living; I had even found the time, at the station, to post a hastily scribbled letter in which I advised the Reverend Father of my arrival.

‘The next morning I was at R***, which is no more than around five miles from Saint-Maur.

‘Anxious to get a good night’s sleep (I wanted to be out with my shotgun at first light the following day), and judging that a siesta after lunch could possibly affect adversely my chances of getting an unbroken night’s rest, to keep me awake despite my tiredness, I spent the day visiting old schoolfriends.—At around five-thirty in the evening, having acquitted myself of these duty-calls, I had them saddle up a horse at the Soleil d’Or, where I had got off, and as twilight fell I arrived within sight of a hamlet.

‘As I rode towards it, I brought to mind the priest at whose home I had the intention of stopping for a few days. The lapse of time since our last meeting, the journeys and all the other events of life, in addition to his own reclusiveness, must have changed his appearance and his character. His hair would be greying. But I recalled the astringent conversation of the learned rector—and I allowed myself to anticipate with pleasure the long evenings I would be spending in his company.

‘ “Abbé Maucombe!” I kept murmuring to myself. “Excellent idea!”

‘Enquiring of the old folk pasturing their animals by the path as to the whereabouts of his house, I was convinced of the affection that the priest—as the perfect evangelist of God’s pity—was held in by his flock; and when I had been fully apprised of my direction, some way past the hovels and cottages that made up Saint-Maur, I went on my way.

‘At last I arrived.

‘The rustic aspect of the house, the windows with their green shutters, the three stone steps, the ivy, the clematis and the climbing roses
growing entwined on the walls up to the roof, where a little cloud of smoke escaped from the chimney-stack, filled me with ideas of calm, wholesomeness, and deep peace. Through a trellis gate I could see the trees in a nearby orchard, their leaves showing the rusting of the late season. The two windows of the single storey were burning with the late western light, and between them some saint stood in a niche that was set into the wall. Silently, I dismounted: I tethered my horse to the shutter and raised the door-knocker, casting a look, as travellers will, at the horizon now behind me.

‘The horizon was shining brightly on the distant oak-forests and on the wild pines, above which the last birds were flying through the evening, and on the waters of a reed-covered lake, in the far distance, in which the sky was solemnly reflected; and nature herself looked so beautiful in this deserted landscape, in this becalmed moment when silence falls, that I remained—with the knocker still raised—dumbfounded.

‘You, I thought, who find no refuge in your dreams, and for whom the land of Canaan, with its palm trees and flowing streams, never appears at dawn, though you have come so far under the hard stars, traveller so light-hearted at the start but now so sombre—O heart made for other exiles than those whose bitterness you share with your bad brothers—look! Here one can sit down on the stone of melancholy!—Here your dead dreams stir to life again, in advance of the moment of death! If you want in truth to experience the desire for death, draw near: here the sight of the sky exalts to the point of oblivion.

‘The lassitude I experienced then was of the kind in which the nerves, being so fraught, jangle at the slightest disturbance. A leaf fell close to me; its furtive rustle made me start. And the magic horizon in this place came in through my eyes! Quite alone, I sat down on the doorstep.