French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (9 page)

The man for whom they draped and enveloped themselves in this final flame was worth more, in their eyes, than all of Asia in the eyes of Sardanapalus. They were more deliciously flirtatious with him than women had ever been with any man, or even with a drawing room full of men; and this flirtatiousness they spiced up with the jealousy which is hidden in society, and which they had no need to hide, for they all knew that this man had been with each one of them, and a shameful secret shared is one no longer… The only rivalry
between them now was, whose epitaph would be graven most deeply upon his heart.

That evening he had the sensuous, sovereign, nonchalant, fastidious manner of a confessor to nuns, or of a sultan. Seated like a king—or the master—at the centre of the table, directly opposite the Comtesse de Chiffrevas, in her peach-tinted boudoir of forbidden fruits, the Comte de Ravila turned his hell-blue eyes—eyes that so many poor creatures had mistaken for the blue of the sky—blazing upon this gorgeous circle of twelve women. Their elegance was touched with genius, and where they sat, around this table loaded with crystal, lighted candles, and flowers, they spread before him, from the scarlet of the full rose to the softened amber glow of the grape cluster, every nuance of maturity.

Excluded from this company were the green young things that Byron
*
abhorred, the little misses who smell of tartlet and whose figures are still wispy; here were resplendent and delicious summers, voluptuous autumns, lavish and full-bodied, their dazzling breasts at the full, overflowing the corsetry, with shoulders and arms of every plumpness, but powerful too, with biceps worthy of the Sabines who fought off the Romans, and who were ready to intertwine themselves between the spokes of the chariot of life, and stop it dead.

I spoke of pretty ideas. Among the most charming at this supper was to have it served by chambermaids, so nothing could be said to have interrupted the harmony of a feast at which women were the undisputed sovereigns, since they also served… His lordship Don Juan—of the Ravila line—could thus plunge his ferocious gaze into a sea of luminous and living flesh, of the kind Rubens plies in his formidable paintings; but he could also plunge his pride into the elixir—be it clear or cloudy—of these hearts. Because at bottom, despite all indications to the contrary, Don Juan is a masterly psychologist! Like the demon himself, he loves souls more even than bodies, and like the infernal slaver that he is, would rather traffic in the former than the latter!

Witty, noble, and while remaining impeccably Faubourg Saint-Germain in tone, so daring were the women that evening they were like the king’s pages, when there was a king with pages; they were brilliantly animated, full of incomparable repartee and
brio
. They felt more invincible than they had ever felt, even at their most triumphant. They experienced an unfamiliar power which came from the
very core of their beings, and whose existence, until that moment, they had never suspected.

The happiness occasioned by this discovery was a feeling that tripled their sense of being alive; added to this, there was the physical ambience, which always has a decisive impact on the nervous system, the brilliance of the lights, the heady perfume of all the flowers that swooned in the close atmosphere heated by these beautiful creatures, the stirring effect of the wines, the very idea of the supper which had about it a sulphurous piquancy, of the kind the Neapolitan required of his sorbet to make it perfect; add to this the intoxicating thought of being accomplices in this
risqué
little supper—a supper that never descended into the vulgarity of the Regency period;
*
indeed, it remained throughout very much a nineteenth-century, Faubourg Saint-Germain supper, and nothing came loose or undone in those adorable
décolletées
, pressed against hearts that had felt the fire and desired to stoke it even more. In a word, all these things acted together, and strung to the utmost degree the mysterious harp contained within each of these wondrous organisms, as tight as it was possible to string without its breaking, so it produced ineffable octaves and harmonies… It must have been extraordinary, don’t you agree? One of the most vibrant pages of Ravila’s memoirs, if he ever gets round to writing them?… I ask the question, but he alone can write it… As I explained to the Marquise Guy de Ruy, I was not present at the supper, and if I give these details, and recount the story he told at the end, I am only repeating what de Ravila told me himself; for true to the tradition of the Juan clan, he is indiscreet, and he went to the trouble one evening of telling me everything.

B
Y
now it was late—or rather, early! It was dawn. Against the ceiling, and concentrated at a certain spot on the pink silk curtains of the boudoir, which were drawn tight closed, an opal-tinted droplet started to grow, like a widening eye, curious to see what was going on in this fiery boudoir. A certain languor had begun to invade these valiant dame Knights of the Round Table, these carousers, who had been so lively only a moment before. It was that moment, familiar at any dinner-party, when the fatigue which comes with the emotion of the
evening just passed begins to show, in the chignons coming slightly loose, in the burning cheeks, flushed or grown paler, in the wearied looks from dark-rimmed eyes, and even in the thousand flaring and guttering lights in the candelabra, which are like bouquets of flame whose stalks are sculpted in bronze and gold.

The conversation, which had been carried on in a general and lively fashion, a game of shuttlecock in which everyone had batted back and forth, had become fragmented, and nothing distinct could now be heard above the harmonious hubbub made by all these voices, with their aristocratic accents, warbling together like the dawn chorus at the edge of a wood… when one of these voices—a clarion voice—imperious and almost impertinent, just as the voice of a duchess should be—made itself heard above the others, and addressed the following words to the Comte de Ravila, which must have been the logical conclusion to a quiet conversation she had been having with him, and which none of the other chattering ladies had heard:

‘Since you are reputed to be the Don Juan of our time, you ought to tell us the story of your greatest conquest, the one that most flattered your pride as a lover of women, and which you consider, in the light of this present moment, to be the crowning love of your life…’

This challenge, as much as the voice that delivered it, cut through all the other conversations, and a sudden silence fell.

The voice belonged to the Duchesse de ***—I shall leave her disguised behind the asterisks; but some of you may recognize her, when I say that she has the palest of pale hair and complexions, and the blackest eyes beneath her golden brows, in all of the Faubourg Saint Germain.—She was seated, like one of the just at the right hand of God, directly to the right of the Comte de Ravila, god of this feast, who had left off using his enemies as a footstool; slim and ethereal as an arabesque, she was fairylike in her green velvet dress with its silvery reflections, whose long train wound around her chair, not unlike the serpent’s tail that prolonged the charming posterior of Melusina the sea-nymph.
*

‘Now there’s an idea!’ said the Comtesse de Chiffrevas, eager in her role as hostess to second the motion the Duchesse had put forward. ‘Yes, the love you place above all the others, whether inspired, or felt—the one, were it possible, you should most like to live through again.’

‘Oh! I should like to live through them all again!’ answered Ravila with the unflagging appetite of a Roman emperor, or other replete monsters of the type. And he raised his champagne glass, which was not the crude and pagan cup they have replaced it with, but the tall, thin vessel used by our ancestors, known as the
flûte
, perhaps because of the heavenly melodies it pours into our hearts!—Then, looking round the table, he embraced with his eyes every woman in that magnetic chain. ‘And yet,’ he went on, setting down his glass before him with a melancholy astonishing for a Nebuchadnezzar like him, who had not yet eaten grass except in the tarragon salads of the Café Anglais
*
—‘and yet it is true, there is
one
feeling one has experienced in all one’s life, which shines more strongly in the memory than others, as life advances, and for which one would give up the rest!’

‘The diamond in the set,’ said the Comtesse de Chiffrevas, dreamily, possibly contemplating the facets of her own.

‘… And as legend has it in my country’, chimed in the Princesse Jable… ‘which lies at the foot of the Ural Mountains, there is the famous and fabulous diamond that starts off pink, and then turns black, while remaining a diamond, and still more brilliant black than pink…’ She said that with all the strange charm that she has, this Bohemian! For she is a true Bohemian, married for love to the finest prince among the Polish exiles, and as much a princess in her bearing as any born in the palace of the Jagellons.
*

This was followed by a veritable explosion… ‘Yes!’ they all exclaimed. ‘Do tell us about it, Comte!’ they added with warmth, begging him now, all trembling with curiosity down to the curls at the nape of their necks, and bunching up together shoulder to shoulder, some with cheek in hand, an elbow propped on the table, others leaning back in their chairs, fans in front of their mouths; they challenged him with wide, inquisitive eyes.

‘If you absolutely insist…’ said the Comte, with the nonchalance of a man who knows how much delay exacerbates desire.

‘We do, absolutely!’ said the Duchesse, fixing—much as a Turkish despot might the blade of his sword—the golden prongs of her dessert fork.

‘Then listen,’ he concluded, still casually.

They became as one, staring at him with rapt attention. They drank him and devoured him with their eyes. Women always like a love story—but who knows? Perhaps the particular charm here was
that the story he was to tell would be their very own… They knew he was too well bred and too well versed in social etiquette to name names, and that he would omit certain details that were too compromising; and knowing this made them even more impatient to hear the story. They more than desired to hear it, they placed their hopes in it.

In their vanity, they found themselves rivalling each other, to be the most beautiful memory in the life of a man who must have had so many of them. The old Sultan was once more to throw down the handkerchief… that no one would pick up—but the one for whom he threw it down would assuredly receive it silently into her heart…

And now, in the light of their expectations, this is the little thunderbolt he unleashed on their attentive heads:

‘I
HAVE
often heard it said by the moralists, who are fine connoisseurs of life,’ began the Comte de Ravila, ‘that our greatest love is not the first, nor the last, as many think, but the second. But in matters of love, everything is true, and everything is false, and in any case, it was not so with me… What you have asked of me tonight, ladies, and what I am about to relate dates back to the proudest moment of my youth. I was no longer exactly what they call a ‘young man’, but I was young, and as an old uncle of mine—a Knight of Malta—used to say of this stage in life, ‘I had sown my wild oats’.
*
In my prime, then, I was in full relations, as the Italians put it so charmingly, with a woman who is known to you all and whom you have all admired…’

And here, the look which all these women—who were drinking up the words of the old serpent—then exchanged with each other had to be seen to be believed—it was truly indescribable.

‘She was a fine woman,’ went on Ravila, ‘and utterly distinguished, in every sense of the word. She was young, rich, of noble extraction; she was beautiful and spirited, with a broad-minded, artistic intelligence; and she was unaffected—in a way your milieu can produce, when it does… In any case, all she desired then was to please me, to play the role of the tenderest of mistresses, and the dearest of friends.

‘I was not, I think, the first man she had loved… She had been in love before, but not with her husband; this was of the virtuous, platonic, utopian type—the kind of love that exercises the heart rather
than fills it; the kind that strengthens the heart for the love that almost always follows soon after—the trial run, so to speak, like the white mass, said by young priests practising for when they come to celebrate the true, consecrated mass… When I came into her life she was still at the white mass. I was her first true mass, and she celebrated it sumptuously and with full ceremony, like a cardinal.’

At this remark, the prettiest of pretty smiles went round that table of beautiful expectant mouths, like a concentric ring on the limpid surface of a lake… It was swift, but ravishing!

‘She was a rare pearl!’ the Comte went on. ‘Rarely have I seen such genuine goodness, such tender-heartedness, such good instinctive feeling, intact even in passion, which as you know, is not always good… I have never encountered less calculation, less prudery and coquettishness—two things often to be found mingled in women, like some material marked with a cat’s claw… there was nothing of the cat in her… Hers was what those blasted scribblers who poison our lives by their style call a simple nature, ornamented by civilization; but she was in possession of all the luxuries, and not one of the little vices that come to seem even more charming than the luxuries…’

‘Was she brunette?’ the Duchesse broke in point-blank, who was growing bored with all this metaphysics.

‘Ah! you don’t look deep enough!’ said Ravila cleverly. ‘Yes, she was brunette, brunette to the point of being black as jet, the most luxuriant mirror of ebony I have ever seen shining on the voluptuous curve of a woman’s head, but she was fair-complexioned—and it is by the complexion, and not the hair, that you have to judge if a woman is blonde or brunette’—added the great observer, who had not studied women just to paint their portraits.—‘She was a blonde with black hair…’

All the lovely heads around the table who were blonde of hair only, stirred imperceptibly. For them, clearly, the story had already lost something of its interest.