French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (27 page)

Some force was propelling me onwards, so I kept walking. I went as far as the Bastille. And it was there I realized that I had never seen a night so dark, I could scarcely make out the Column, and the golden Hermes was concealed by an impenetrable darkness. A vault of clouds, thick as immensity itself, had engulfed the stars, and seemed to be bearing down upon the earth as if to destroy it.

I turned back. Now there was no one near me. Except, at the Place du Château d’Eau, a drunk nearly careered into me, and then vanished. For a moment I could still hear his loud, unsteady footsteps. I kept on. At the junction with the Faubourg Montmartre a carriage went by, heading down towards the Seine. I hailed it. The driver
didn’t respond. A woman was hanging about near the rue Drouot: ‘Please Monsieur, listen to me.’ I quickened my pace to avoid her outstretched hand. Then nothing again. In front of the Vaudeville a rag-picker was working the gutter. His little lamp was held at ground level. I called out: ‘What time is it, good fellow?’

He growled back: ‘How should I know. Don’t ’ave a watch.’

Then I noticed that the gas-jets had gone out. I knew that they were put out early in this season, to economize; but daybreak was still a long way off, a very long way off.

‘I’ll go to Les Halles,’ I thought, ‘there’s bound to be people there.’

I set off, but I could hardly see where I was going. I moved forward carefully, as if I were in a thick wood, counting off the streets.

A dog growled at me in front of the Crédit Lyonnais. I turned up the rue de Grammont, and then got lost. I wandered on, and recognized the Bourse by the iron railings surrounding it. A cab went by in the distance, a single hansom, perhaps the one that had passed me a little while ago. I tried to catch up with it, heading towards the noise of its wheels, plunging through the lonely streets, that were black, black as death.

I got lost again. Where was I? What folly to cut off the gas so soon! Not a single pedestrian, not a single straggler, not a rodent, not even the scream of a cat in heat. Nothing.

Where were the town constables? I thought: ‘I shall shout, then they’ll come.’ I gave a shout. No one answered.

I shouted louder. My voice faded out, and gave no echo—weak, stifled, crushed by the impenetrable night.

I screamed: ‘Help! Help! Help!’

But my desperate call found no answer. What time was it now? I pulled out my watch, but had no matches. I listened to the light ticking of the clockwork with a strange, intense joy. It seemed to be alive. I felt less alone. It was all a mystery! I started off again, tapping the walls with my stick, like a blind man, and I raised my eyes continually to the sky, hoping for the first trace of daybreak; but the space up there was black, blacker even than the city.

What time could it possibly be? I felt as though I had been walking for an eternity; my legs trembled under me, my chest was heaving, and I felt a terrible hunger.

I resolved to ring at the next doorway. I pulled on the copper bell, and it rang throughout the house, but strangely, as if it were the only
sound in the whole house. I rang again, and waited some more—still nothing!

I was frightened now. I ran to the next house, and twenty times pulled on the bell in the dark corridor where the concierge should be sleeping. But he did not wake—so I went on, tugging on every bell-pull I could find, kicking and beating with my cane on doors that remained stubbornly closed.

Suddenly, I realized that I had come to Les Halles. Les Halles was empty: there was not a sound, not a movement, not a single coach, or man, not a stick of celery or a single bunch of flowers.—The place was empty, motionless, abandoned, dead!

Terror seized me. What was going on? My God! What was happening?

I started off again. But what was the time? Who would tell me the time? The bells in the clock-towers and monuments had fallen silent. I thought: ‘I shall open the glass front of my watch and feel for the hands with my fingers…’ But it had stopped. There was nothing now, nothing at all, not the slightest gleam, not the whisper of a sound in the air. Nothing! Not even the sound of a cab passing in the distance—nothing at all.

I had reached the quay, and a glacial chill rose from the river.

Was the Seine still flowing?

I wanted to find out, so I found the steps, and went down… there was no sound of water flowing fast under the arches of the bridge… More steps… now sand… and mud… now water… it was flowing, but cold… cold… so cold… almost frozen… almost stopped… almost dead.

And I knew then that I would never have the strength to climb back up… and that I would die there… I would die—of hunger—of exhaustion—of cold.

T
HROUGHOUT
the engagement, the preparations, and the day itself, when the young woman formally contracted to marry the young sculptor, she had a fairly clear idea of the uncommon existence that she would lead from then on. As a young
débutante
, she had moved easily in the brilliant world of fashion, with all its excitements, and in the literary and artistic milieu that contained the principal actors of Parisian social life. It was the sort of milieu in which everything can be said, or at least suggested, in the malicious, gossipy,
blasé
conversations that are its very being. Some girls understand little—others know exactly what is going on. Some can live through the most scandalous times, and hear the most scabrous things, and still lose nothing of their flower-like freshness, their virginal candour, their childlike naivety. Then there are those who seem to grasp everything straightaway, in a manner that is as mysterious to others as it is to themselves, and they come into possession of the finest keys that open the most secret locks. This latter type is no more to be censured than the former is to be praised, and the difference can only be laid at the door of physiological chance and the mystery of the instincts.

The young woman in question belonged to the latter type, and when she moved from girlhood into womanhood she believed that she would be able not only to order her existence and her future in accordance with the desires of her heart and mind, but would be able also to foresee any obstacle that might arise, and by turning it to her advantage, secure her lasting happiness.

And it was precisely here, in her pragmatism, that her romanticism appeared, and the qualities one might have thought suppressed—virginal candour, childlike naivety—came into play.

She had wanted to be an artist; she frequented museums and enrolled in the painting schools. She had also wanted to be a writer; she read a great deal and contrived to converse with men of letters. In the end,
she gave up on the idea of producing art herself, and curbed her ambition, which was now to become wife to an artist.

This she achieved. She was wife to a fashionable sculptor, who was busy all day with official commissions and producing busts for the Salon; he was much in demand, and liked to receive guests himself, in his sumptuous house near the Parc Monceau.
*
And besides all this, he was intelligent; he knew that his work was a little glib and superficial—but he was curious, he was likeable, and he was in love.

Jeanne was in love too, and very attached to this husband of hers; her passion would flare up easily, and she was jealous. With her head full of novels and memories, determined that her future should continue as idyllic as her present, the first change she implemented concerned the role of the female model in the work of the artist.

How many novels and stories had she not read in which the model played a role in the lives of painters and sculptors—one that was detrimental to the tenderness of the husband and the security of the wife! That is not how things would be in her marriage, and she intended to start where stories of the printed variety usually ended. In the course of romantic days, and the passionate nights that follow upon marriage, she had no trouble in obtaining from her spouse a promise that no other woman should cross the threshold of his studio. The studio itself would become as intimate and sacred as the boudoir, because the legitimate spouse herself, sovereign to this artist and his art, would come there to undress, and pose for him on the dais.

The sculptor willingly agreed to her loving involvement. It was an amiable arrangement, having his wife there all the time, always ready to pose, in addition to which she was superior in grace and expression to the models he had used before.

He did not tire her, either, by overwork. He made ample use of photographs and etchings, he referred to the art of Antiquity and the Renaissance, and sought inspiration in the immense storehouse of the past, as he had been enjoined to do by his teachers at the Beaux Arts and the Villa Médicis.
*
He purchased plaster casts that he believed showed the truth in its fugitive passage. And he would ask his wife to pose for a few minutes, just to verify a particular angle or a fall of drapery, or to get a view of the whole arrangement.

She fulfilled her chosen role to perfection. She posed, draped or nude, standing, reclining, seated. She accepted every incarnation, just as her husband accepted every commission. She saw herself at the Salon, in the aisles, where white statuary alternates with decorative green pot-plants. She contemplated her own form as a Greek mythological divinity in the Luxembourg Museum, and in the gardens and squares as a naiad drenched by a fountain or a nymph running over the green lawn. She saw herself as Fame, placing laurels on the heads of great men, at the centre of public squares. She encountered her likeness in provincial cemeteries and cathedrals, a muse to adorn the tombs of the rich and famous. She played her role in representing France, at an exhibition in St Petersburg; she was even cast in bronze for a huge commercial and industrial fair in Chicago.

And so the years went by until, suddenly, this life underwent a change.

The sculptor became troubled. The artist, who was prosperous, productive, contented, became prey to a desire. He was shaken by some glories that appeared, rose above the horizon, and invaded the artistic heavens, where they shone like tranquil suns. The sculptor, acknowledged for his commercial success, prizewinning medallist, honoured, tipped for the Institut, now experienced a vast emptiness. He surveyed his life so far, as he approached forty; and in a minute of dreadful clarity he saw the legions of his puerile statues, the hollowness of his artistic conception, the nullity of his work.

He stopped working for a while, crushed and undecided. His placid forehead became lined with thought, and his hair slightly silvered.

With a nervous excitement that was mingled with melancholy, he informed his wife he had new projects for his work; he confided to her his ambitions and his hopes, and won her approval.

And so it was he withdrew from society, left the fashionable quarter, and moved into a provincial-style house on a silent road, the other side of the river. Now his fellow sculptors were of the type that live like working men, who take their meals in the little bistrots on the Boulevard Montparnasse and on the Boulevard de Vaugirard, who promenade their great beards in melancholy comings and goings, between the studio and the ministry. He frequented the artistic communes, with their houses full of studios, like cells in a monastery or a barracks. He listened to their confidences and their theories.

Then he shut himself up in his studio, and set out to be a realist.

His wife continued to support him, until the day she became aware that a very singular and unexpected torture had begun for her.

The sculptor did become realist, and with a vengeance. He laboured over the motif, drawn direct from nature.
*
He wanted to render everything, to express everything, and transform his vague vision of former days into an imperious, near-sighted scrutiny.

Now the posing sessions went on until exhaustion set in. Worldliness was a thing of the past, official approval was withdrawn. A new existence replaced the old one. And it seemed to Jeanne that another woman had been substituted for her, and had taken her place in her husband’s work. And yet there was no mistaking, it was he who sculpted, and she who posed. So how come no trace remained of Fame, or of the nymph and the naiad, in these creatures that were sculpted with such violent application?

She no longer recognized herself in this graceless stranger, with its plumpness, its slightly sagging breasts, its prominent stomach.

‘I sculpt what I see,’ came the reply to her first shy, tentative objections.

Another time she found herself really too fat, her body too ample and uncorseted:

‘What can I do, my dear friend, the body continually changes. I must sculpt what I see before me.’

So this was it, the new line! Alas! Why had he not conceived of it before, in the days of her dazzling youth? Perhaps, if he had, he would be less concentrated than he was today, and so much the better. Life was unbearable, if it had to be lived under the magnifying glass and then exhibited in the public place, bearing all the stigmata of the years, all the blemishes of age.