French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (26 page)

One sunny morning I was strolling through Paris, high-spirited and light of step, looking through shop windows with the vague interest of the
flâneur
.
*
Suddenly I spotted in the window of an antique-seller’s an Italian piece from the seventeenth century. It was very fine, and very rare. I attributed it to Vitelli, a Venetian craftsman who was famous at the time.

Then I walked on.

But for some reason the memory of this piece haunted me, so much so that I turned back. I stopped in front of the shop to have another look. I felt it was tempting me on.

Temptation is a strange thing! You look at an object, and little by little it seduces you, disturbs and invades you, much as a woman’s face can. Its charm enters into you, a strange charm that comes from its form, its colour, and the way it looks; you already love it, you desire it, you must have it. You are invaded by the need to possess, a mild, almost shy need to begin with, but one that grows, until it is fierce and overweening.

And shopkeepers seem able to read that gleam in the eye, and note the secret, growing desire it betrays.

I bought the desk and had it taken home immediately. I placed it in my bedroom.

How I pity those who know nothing of that honeymoon period, spent between a collector and his latest find! You caress it with eye and hand; as if it were living flesh; you keep passing close to it and it remains in your thoughts, wherever you are, and whatever you do. The sweet thought of it goes with you, out walking or in company. And the first thing you do on getting home, before even removing your hat and gloves, is to go and look at it with a lover’s tenderness.

I truly did adore this desk. For eight days I could not stop myself from opening its drawers and little doors; I kept handling it, delightedly, enjoying the full extent of possession.

One evening, as I was testing the thickness of a wooden panel, I realized there must be a secret place behind it. It set my heart beating, and I spent the night trying without success to find the secret mechanism.

But I did succeed the next morning, by inserting a blade into the woodwork. A panel slid back, and there I saw, lying on black velvet, a wonderful mane of hair!

Yes, a whole mane of woman’s hair, a thick plait of reddish-blonde tresses, which must have been cut off at the scalp. It was bound together with a golden ribbon.

I stood aghast, moved and trembling. An almost imperceptible scent, so old it seemed to be the ghost of a scent, rose from the mysterious drawer with its singular relic.

I took hold of it gently, religiously almost, and drew it forth from its hiding-place. Instantly it unfurled, a thick, light, supple golden stream that reached to the floor, shining like a comet’s tail.

A strange emotion seized me: what did this mean? When? How? Why had the hair been hidden in the desk? What affair, what tragedy, lay concealed in this relic?

Who had cut the hair? A lover on the day of separation? Or was it a husband’s act of vengeance? Or did she to whom the hair belonged shear it off herself, in a moment of desperation?

Did she hide this treasure, like a love-token left for the living, on the day she entered the nunnery? Or did the beauty die young, and did her lover take this from her before the coffin was nailed up, as the sole thing not destined to rot, the sole thing he could still love and caress, and smother with kisses in the spasms of his grief?

And was it not strange to think that her hair had lain there all this time, while nothing at all remained of her body?

It ran through my fingers, and tickled my skin, with a peculiar caressing feel, a caress from the dead. My heart dilated with tenderness, and I was close to tears.

I held it for a long, long time in my hands, until it seemed to stir, as if a trace of the soul it belonged to remained lodged within it. Then I laid it back on the faded velvet, shut the drawer, locked the desk, and went out to walk the streets and think.

I walked in a daze, full of sadness, and with the kind of emotion that lingers in the heart, after a loving kiss has been bestowed on one. I felt I had lived before, and that I must have known this woman.

Like a stifled sob, Villon’s lines rose to my lips:

Dictes-moy où, ne en quel pays
Est Flora, la belle Romaine
,
Archipiada, ne Thaïs
,
Qui fut sa cousine germaine?
Echo parlant quand bruyt on maine
Dessus rivière, ou sus estan;
Qui beauté eut plus que humaine?
Mais où sont le neiges d’antan?

* * * * *

La royne blanche comme un lys
Qui chantoit à voix de sereine
,
Berthe au grand pied, Bietris, Allys
,
Harembouges qui tint le Mayne
,
Et Jehanne la bonne Lorraine
Que Anglais bruslèrent à Rouen?
Où sont-ils, Vierge souveraine?
Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?
*

When I got home, something compelled me to have another look at my strange discovery; I took it out again and felt, as I handled it, a long shudder pass through my limbs.

For a few months my state of mind remained normal, even if the thought of the mane of hair remained active, and never left me.

Whenever I returned home I had to get it out and handle it. I would turn the key in the lock with the same emotion one might turn the doorhandle leading to the loved one, for lodged in my hands and my heart was a confused, peculiar, sustained, and sensual need to dip my fingers into that lovely stream of dead hair.

And when I had finished caressing it, and closed up the desk, I still felt its presence, as if it were a living being, but sealed up like a prisoner. I felt it and I desired it once more, and the same imperious need to take it and feel it came over me, to feel against me that cold, slippery, irritating, maddening, delicious thing, until I almost fainted away from nervous excitement.

I continued like this for a month or two, I no longer recall exactly. The hair obsessed and haunted me. I was in that state of blissful and torturing anticipation known to lovers, after the avowals and before consummation.

I would shut myself away with it, so as to feel it on my skin, to
plunge my lips into it, to kiss and bite it. I rolled it over my face, I drank it in, I covered my eyes with its gilded wave so the world was fair when I looked through it.

I was in love with it! Yes, I loved it. I could no longer be without it, not even for a single hour.

And I waited… and I waited… what for? Did I not know?—For her.

One night I woke with a start, persuaded that I was not alone in my room.

I was alone, however. As I was unable to fall asleep again, and a feverish insomnia had taken hold of me, I got up to go and touch the hair. It seemed to me to be softer than usual, and more animated. Do the dead return? The kisses I bestowed upon it made me faint with happiness; I took it with me into bed, where I lay with it, pressing my lips against it, as if it were a mistress, before the act of love.

The dead do return! She came to me. Yes, I have seen her, I have held her, I have possessed her, as she was, tall, blonde, voluptuous, with cold breasts and haunches shaped like a lyre; I have run my lips the full length of that divine and wavy line that runs from her throat to her feet, and followed every curve of her flesh.

Yes, I had her, every day, and every night. She came back to me, the Dead Lady, the beautiful Dead Lady, the Strange, Mysterious, Adorable one, she was with me every night.

So great was my happiness, I could not hide it. With her I felt superhuman delights, and the deep, inexpressible joy of possessing the Impalpable, the Invisible, the Dead! No lover has ever tasted such keen and terrible pleasures.

I could not conceal my happiness. I loved her so much I could not leave her. I took her with me everywhere. I walked about with her in town as though she were my wife; I took her to the theatre with me, and sat with her in a closed box, as though she were my mistress… But people saw her… they guessed… and they seized me… And they cast me into prison like a criminal. And they took her away from me… Oh misery!…

The manuscript ended at this point. And as I raised my horrified eyes to the doctor, a dreadful cry, a scream of impotent fury and longing, sounded through the asylum.

‘Listen to him,’ said the doctor. ‘We have to stick him under the
shower at least five times a day, the filthy lunatic. It isn’t only Sergeant Bertrand
*
who loved the dead.

Beside myself with shock and horror and pity, I stammered out:

‘But… the hair… did it really exist?’

The doctor got up, opened a cupboard full of instruments and flasks, and tossed in my direction, across his consulting-room, a long tress of blonde hair that flew towards me like a golden bird.

I shivered as the light, caressing thing landed in my hands. My heart was beating with disgust and desire, the disgust associated with criminal exhibits, the desire to probe deeper into something vile and strange.

With a shrug of his shoulders, the doctor went on:

‘The mind of man is capable of anything.’

I
LOVE
the night with a passion. I love it as one loves one’s country, or one’s mistress, with an instinctive, deep, invincible love. I love it with all my senses, with my eyes that can see it, with my sense of smell that can breathe it, with my ears attentive to its silence, with my whole body, caressed by its darkness. Larks sing in the sun, in the warm air, in the light air of fine mornings. The owl plunges into the night, a black form crossing the blackness, and delighted, intoxicated by the black immensity, he gives his resonant and sinister hoot.

Daytime wearies and bores me. It is noisy and brutal. I find it hard to get up, I dress wearily, go out regretfully, and each step, each movement, each action, each word, each thought wearies me, as if I were under the burden of a crushing load.

But when the sun starts to sink, my whole body comes alive with an intense joy. I wake up, I come alive. As the shadows lengthen I feel a different person, younger, stronger, more alert, and happier. And I watch it, the great soft shadow falling from the sky, I watch it growing thicker: it drowns the city, like a thick and immaterial wave; and it hides, blots out, destroys colour and form; houses, beings, and monuments are smothered under its lightest of light caresses.

It is then that I want to utter a shriek of pleasure like the owls, and
bound from roof to roof like the cats; and an imperious desire for love starts running through my veins.

So I set off, walking vigorously; either in the darkened suburbs or in the woods adjoining Paris, where I can hear my sisters the creatures, and my brothers the poachers.

What you love too violently finishes by killing you. But how can I explain what has happened to me? How can I plausibly even relate this story? I do not know, I do not know, all I know is that this is how it is.—That’s all there is to it.

So, yesterday—was it yesterday?—yes, no doubt it was, unless it were before that, a different day, a different month, a different year—how should I know? But it must be yesterday, because day has not come since, the sun never reappeared. But how long has the night lasted? Since what time?… Who can say? Who will ever know?

So, yesterday—I went out as I do every evening, after dinner. It was very fine, very mild, very warm. As I walked down to the boulevards I looked at the black, star-filled river above my head, cut into sections by the rooftops which, in a way resembling a veritable river, turned and guided this rolling stream of stars.

Everything stood out clear in the light air, from the planets to the gas-jets. With so many fires burning up there, and down below in the city, the darkness itself seemed luminous. Such brilliant nights are more joyous than long sunny days.

Café lights were blazing along the boulevard; there was laughter, conviviality, drink. I stopped by a theatre for a few moments, which one I no longer recall. But it was so bright in there I found it oppressive, and I came out rather cast down by the brutal glare of the naked light striking the gilded balcony, the false brilliance of the enormous chandelier, the footlights, and the melancholy at the heart of all this superficial and showy glister. I reached the Champs-Élysées, where the café-concerts seemed like fires seen through the foliage. The chestnuts, refulgent with yellow light, were like painted, phosphorescent trees. The electric globes, like pale and glinting moons, or moon-eggs fallen to earth, or monstrous, living pearls, projected a whiter light through their nacre shells, turning the gas-jets, the dirty gas-jets into something royal and full of mystery, and brightening the garlands of coloured glass.

I stopped beneath the Arc de Triomphe to gaze down the avenue, the splendid starry avenue that heads into central Paris, with its twin
streams of lights, under the stars! The remote, distant stars in the heavens, the unknown stars cast randomly in the galaxy where they form the strange patterns that set men dreaming and wondering.

I went into the Bois de Boulogne, and stayed there for a long, long time. A strange excitement had taken possession of me, a powerful and unexpected emotion, an exaltation of thought which bordered on madness.

I kept walking, on and on and on. Then I turned back.

What time was it when once again I passed under the Arc de Triomphe? I do not know. The city was going to sleep, and clouds, great black clouds, were streaming slowly over the whole sky.

Then, for the first time, I felt that something new and strange was about to happen. It seemed cold suddenly, and the air was thickening, my own beloved night came to weigh upon my heart. The avenue was by now deserted. Only two city constables were patrolling past a line of stationary carriages, while on the road, now barely lit by the gas-jets, which seemed to be running low, was a line of vehicles loaded with vegetables heading for Les Halles.
*
They were moving slowly, loaded with carrots, cabbages, and turnips. The drivers were sleeping and invisible, and the horses moved steadily, following the coach in front, silent on the wooden surface. As they passed under each lamp on the pavement, the carrots lit up red, the turnips white, and the cabbages green: and they moved one behind the other, these coaches, red as fire, and white as polished silver, and green as emerald. I followed them, then turned up the rue Royale, and rejoined the boulevards. There was not a soul about, no lighted cafés, just a few late stragglers, hurrying home. I had never seen Paris so dead or so empty. I pulled out my watch. It was two o’clock.