French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (24 page)

But she refused to allow him even this consolation. When, in tears, he would ask her if this rival really existed, and when, abjectly, he offered to proclaim the guilty party innocent, she would turn on her heel and murmur:

‘Pft! Pft!’

So he suffered all the agonies of jealousy and despair. He began to harbour murderous ideas. These he did not hide, and threatened to put the blame for them on her.

‘Yes,’ he screamed, ‘I shall kill this rival that you flay me with!’

She would just shake her head, indicating that she didn’t believe a word of his bloodthirsty plan; and then she added:

‘And in any case, it would all be too pft! pft!’

Driven to distraction, the sage proved even more of a brute than the brute who was loved. One evening he ambushed him, cut his throat, slashed him to pieces, and tore the heart out of his breast; and he flung this horrible trophy, still beating, at the feet of the woman.

This time she really was horrified, somewhat. But catching a gleam of triumph in the eye of the murderer, she refused him this victory. Mastering her horror, she gazed quite calmly upon the hideous morsel of red meat, prodded it with the point of her parasol, and with a winning pout went:

‘Pft! Pft!’

‘Oh! The monster, the monster!’ shrieked the learned man. ‘I shall kill you too! Yes, I shall kill you too. I want to know if you actually have a heart, and if so, what is in it. And I shall know. I shall, I shall!’

He looked wildly, and his hands trembled.

‘What is in my heart?’ she answered placidly. ‘I shall tell you what there is. It’s quite simple. It is this:

‘Pft! Pft!’

At this he took leave of his wits completely. With both hands he seized the woman’s neck, and closing his fingers upon it, upon the smooth white neck that he adored, he throttled her long and hard, and showed no pity.

She did not have the strength to scream. She scarcely struggled, like a strangled bird. But with her dying breath, exhaled like a final answer, came an almost imperceptible sigh:

‘Pft! Pft!’

‘At last,’ roared the sage, once she was well and truly dead. ‘At last! There’ll be no more of your damnable
pft! pft!
You shall mock at my love no longer, nor at my learning. And since I studied you when you were living, valiantly shall I study you dead.’

And he set about dissecting her in his mind, hoping to find the
nothing
that she was, and he became convinced that she really was that
nothing
, for in no part of her did he find the soul whose existence he denied.

This made him joyful.

To perpetuate his joy, and to keep a proof of his victory always near at hand, the implacable sage started to scheme. Or, to put it another way, the inconsolable lover conceived the fantastic idea of
embalming
the mysterious woman to re-endow her with a living form.

He was still in love with her!

Indeed, once he had had the horrible corpse tanned, he loved her more than ever. In the perversity of his adoration he found her beautiful, and kneeling before her, he implored her forgiveness.

Of what is madness not capable?

Deeply deranged and lost, desire rose in him once more for this mannikin filled with air. In an access of lust he flung himself upon the horror to possess it.

Suddenly, as his amorous arms pressed the thing hard against him, and as he bit into it with his kisses, there was a tearing sound, and from the monstrous lips, in a long whistle, horribly against his face in posthumous irony came:

‘Pft! Pft!’

H
E
was dying, after the fashion of the tubercular. Every day, at around two o’clock, I would see him sit down beneath the windows of the hotel, facing the calm sea, on a bench along the promenade. For a while he would remain quite still, in the heat of the sun, and contemplate the Mediterranean with a forlorn expression. From time to time he would glance up at the high mountain with its cloudy summit, that surrounds Menton; then, very slowly, he would cross his long legs, so thin they resembled two bones, with the ample trouser cloth draped over them, and he would open a book, which was always the same.

And then he would move no more; he read, he read with utter concentration; his whole wretched, dying body seemed to be reading, he read with his whole soul, that seemed to sink and disappear into this book, until the air which had cooled made him cough lightly. Then he would get up and go in.

He was a tall, light-bearded German, who took lunch and dinner in his room, and spoke to no one.

A vague curiosity drew me to him. One day I sat down next to him, and so as to appear occupied, I brought with me a volume of Musset’s poetry.

And I started to flick through ‘Rolla’.
*

Suddenly my neighbour addressed me, in good French:

‘Can you speak German, Monsieur?’

‘Not a word, Monsieur.’

‘A pity. Since chance has placed us side by side, I would have lent you, I would have shown you, something of inestimable worth—the book I have here.’

‘What is it?’

‘It is a volume by my master, Schopenhauer, annotated in his own hand.’

I took the book into my hands with care, and contemplated its words that were to me incomprehensible, but which revealed the
immortal thought of the greatest debunker of dreams that ever walked the earth.

And these lines of Musset came to me:

Do you sleep content, Voltaire, and does your hideous smile
Hover still above your fleshless bones?

Involuntarily, I compared the childish sarcasm of Voltaire towards religion to the irresistible irony of the German philosopher, whose influence from now on will never be eradicated.

One can protest or get angry, one can deplore or rejoice, the fact is that Schopenhauer has branded humanity with the iron of his disdain and his disenchantment.

Disabused joker, he has overturned hopes, poetries, chimeras, he has destroyed aspirations, ravaged trusting souls, killed love, cast down the cult of the idealized woman, punctured the hopes of hearts, and generally carried through the most gigantic labour of scepticism ever attempted. Nothing has escaped his mockery, he has emptied everything out. And today, even those who loathe him seem to bear within their minds some vestiges of his thought.
*

‘So you knew Schopenhauer personally?’ I asked the German.

‘Until the day he died, Monsieur.’

And he started to tell me about him, he described the almost supernatural effect this strange being had on all those who frequented him.

He described the interview between the great dismantler and a French politician, a convinced republican, who sought out this man and found him in a crowded bar, sitting in the midst of his disciples, dry, wrinkled, laughing his unforgettable laugh, tearing and biting through ideas in a single phrase, as a dog will tear the cloth he’s worrying with his teeth.

He repeated to me what the horrified Frenchman had exclaimed on leaving:

‘It was like spending an hour with the devil.’

Then my German companion went on:

‘He did indeed have a dreadful smile that frightened us, even after his death. There is an almost unknown anecdote concerning this that I could recount if you like.’

And he began, with a weary voice, broken from time to time by fits of coughing:

‘Schopenhauer had just died, and it was decided that we should watch over the body in pairs, in turn, until morning came.

‘He was laid out in a large room that was austere, cavernous, and dark. Two candles burned on the bedside table.

‘Our turn to watch came at midnight; the two friends left, and my companion and I took up our places at the foot of the bed.

‘The face had not changed at all. It was laughing. The wrinkle we knew so well furrowed the corner of his lips, and he seemed about to open his eyes, stir himself, and talk. His thought, or rather his thoughts, enveloped us; more than ever we felt ourselves in the atmosphere of his genius, invaded and possessed by it. His mastery seemed if anything even more Olympian now he was dead. There was mystery mixed in with the power of that incomparable mind.

‘The bodies of such men may disappear, but they themselves remain; and in the night their heart stops beating, I can tell you, Monsieur, they are terrifying.

‘In a whisper we spoke of him, recalling his phrases, his sayings, his startling maxims which, in so few words, seemed to throw forward rays of light into the darkness of the unknown Life.

‘ “I think he’s about to speak,” said my companion. And with an anxiety bordering on fear, we looked at that motionless face with its rictus of laughter.

‘In a little while we felt ill at ease, oppressed, almost faint. I muttered:

‘ “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I assure you I am ill.”

‘And then we realized that the corpse smelled bad.

‘So my companion suggested we remove to the neighbouring room, leaving the door open; to this I agreed.

‘I took one of the candles that was burning on his bedside table, leaving the second where it was, and we went to sit at the far end of the other room, so that we could see, from where we sat, the bed and the corpse, fully lit.

‘But we were still transfixed; it was as though his immaterial being, disengaged, free, dominating, and all-powerful stalked around us. And sometimes we caught the vile whiff of the decomposed body, penetrating, nauseating, indeterminate.

‘Suddenly, a shudder passed through us to the marrow: a noise, a small noise reached us from the dead man’s room. Our eyes were instantly riveted on the corpse, and we saw, yes, Monsieur, we both
saw, clearly, with our own eyes, something white run over the bed, drop down to the carpet, and disappear under an armchair.

‘We were on our feet in a trice, in terror, minds empty, and ready to flee. Then we looked at each other. We were both horribly pale. Our hearts were beating fit to lift our clothes. I spoke first.

‘ “Did you see?…”

‘ “Yes, I saw.”

‘ “Does that mean he’s not dead?”

‘ “But hasn’t he started to decompose?”

‘ “What should we do?”

‘My companion replied falteringly:

‘ “We must go and see.”

‘I took our candle and went in first, my eyes darting into every black corner of the room. All was still; then I went up to the bed. But I stopped in my tracks, shocked and horrified: Schopenhauer was smiling no longer! He was grimacing in a most dreadful way, his mouth puckered, his cheeks deep hollowed. I stammered:

‘ “He isn’t dead!”

‘But the dreadful smell assailed my nostrils, and sickened me. I stayed where I was, staring in horror at the figure on the bed, as if before a ghost.

‘Meanwhile my friend, who had taken the other candle, bent down. Then he touched my arm without a word. I followed his gaze and there, on the ground, under the armchair next to the bed, all white on the dark carpet, open as if ready to bite—Schopenhauer’s false teeth.

‘The rot setting in had loosened his jaws, and they had sprung from his mouth.

‘I had a real fright that night, Monsieur.’

And as the sun neared the glittering sea, the tubercular German bade me good evening, and returned to the hotel.

W
HEN
old Leras, bookkeeper with Labuze & Co., left the shop, he was momentarily blinded by the brilliance of the setting sun. He had worked all day under the yellow gas in the back office, which gave
onto a courtyard as narrow and as deep as a well. The little room in which he had spent the best part of forty years was so dark, even at the height of summer, it had to be lit artificially throughout the day, except on occasion between eleven and three.

It was perpetually cold and humid in there; and through the window, which gave onto a kind of gutter, came the smell of damp and the nauseating whiff of drains.

For forty years Monsieur Leras had arrived in this prison at eight in the morning and worked until seven in the evening; bent over his books, he wrote away sedulously like the model employee that he was.
*

He was now earning three thousand francs a year, having begun at fifteen hundred. He had remained single, since his modest emoluments would not allow him to take a wife. And because he had never much enjoyed anything, there was very little he desired. From time to time, however, weary of this monotonous and unceasing toil, he allowed himself a secret wish: ‘Lordy, if I had five thousand in rents, I would take it easy.’

But he had never taken it easy, having never earned more than his monthly salary.

His life had passed without event, without emotion, almost without hope. The capacity to dream, which we all carry within us, had scarcely developed within the banality of his ambitions.

He was twenty-one when he had gone to work for Labuze & Co. He had never left.

In 1856 his father died, and then he lost his mother in 1859. Since then he had moved lodgings once, in 1868, when his landlord raised the rent.

Every day his alarm clock woke him, at six o’clock on the dot, its dreadful noise of a dragged chain making him jump out of bed.