The Project Gutenberg eBook, Very Woman, by Remy de Gourmont, Translated by J. L. Barrets

 

 

Note:

Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/verywomansixtine00gouriala

 

---

 

VERY WOMAN

(SIXTINE)

A CEREBRAL NOVEL

BY

REMY DE GOURMONT

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH

by J. L. Barrets

 

 

 

NICHOLAS L. BROWN

NEW YORK

MCMXXII

---

CONTENTS

---

CHAPTER I

THE DEAD LEAVES

---

"When Nature produces these masterpieces,
she rarely offers them to the man who could
best appreciate and be worthy of possessing
them."
Kant: Essay on the Beautiful.

---

They walked side by side, under the gloomy old firs whose heavy branches leaned towards the yellowing lawn.

Countess Aubry, with her charm of a negotiator of worldly loves, had just hastily brought them together, as though they were predestined for each other.

They were slightly acquainted already. They remembered having met during the past winter in the Marigny Avenue Salon, that haunt of miscarried glories, and, during the past week that they had been staying at the Château de Rabodanges (among several invalids of distinction) they had succeeded in exchanging a few vaguely suggestive words, a few affected witticisms, not without disdain for such a vain communion.

The one knew that Madame Sixtine Magne, a widow, had never held out her neck towards a new necklace—and believed it. The other knew that Hubert d'Entragues had dedicated himself, by inclination rather than by necessity, to the imperious craft of a man of letters. Her first impulse had been to consider him a cavalry captain, but the name captivated her, that name faded in history, so far as a pretty woman was concerned, and which a young man restored to all its freshness, under her eyes. Amorous and royal reminiscences whose auricular remembrance had remained in her head like a viol sound, like ripplings on fading silks, and suddenly with rustlings of steel—an admission with which her preciosity amused itself, perhaps, for she was very artful, through pride.

Entragues, on his side, was at the point of confessing to the young woman that she dazzled his imagination, but he would have had to tell her at the same time the origin—too fantastic not to be futile—of this wound, and he feared to have the air of inventing a tale.

"Then," he reflected, "her mind would work, she would try to please me, forcing herself to deliberate charms. The experiment would be warped. I want to know what is in her; I want to penetrate coldly into the mysterious brambles of this sacred wood."

A man and a woman, at the age of useful deceits, are never cold or truthful, face to face. Hubert judged himself capable of acting naturally, but where does the natural begin with a being endowed with several spare souls? Sixtine was but half duped and, from the first words, let it be perceived.

"Are you familiar with all the emotions of a return?" asked Entragues. "It is delicious and torturing. You enter, agitated and unbalanced and, in the confusion of brief thoughts, you say to yourself: 'Can she be there! No, she is not there!' The fear of a sudden grief has anticipated the deception: can it be that such joys are attained outside of dreams? 'She is not there. There is no danger. What? No double lock? A night lamp? Is she there?' Yes, she was there, asleep in her rose-colored morning-gown; she had risen at the sound of the key and, with bare feet and disheveled hair, pale with emotion, kissed your face, whatever her eyes fell upon—lips, brow, nose, beard—one arm gently entwining itself about your neck, the other trembling at first with the hesitancy of not knowing where to rest. She cried, meanwhile, like a hallucinated person: 'It is you! It is you!' Then she stepped back to gaze at you, seemed to doubt, saying: 'Is it really you?' And she coyly gave herself to you, resting on your shoulder, gave herself again with an 'I am yours, still yours, as before!' You are thrilled with happiness. To depart leaving tears, to find a smile upon your return, a being transported by your presence—that is a real pleasure, mingled somewhat with that necessary vanity of feeling yourself indispensable to some one. A special vanity in which the male experiences a despotic satisfaction."

"Are you thus expected?" asked Sixtine.

"Who? I? No, but it might happen, and you see that I have felt it while talking to you. The slightest impulse diverts me from the present, the very tone of a voice rouses in me an inner activity and every possibility of life opens before me."

"You must be wonderful at pretending!"

"Ah, Madame," answered Entragues, "imagination does not destroy sincerity: it clothes sincerity with brocatels and rubies, places a diadem on it, but the same body of a woman is under the royal cloak, just as it is under tatters. To adorn truth is to respect it. This makes me recall those old evangelistaries that are so covered with illuminations that profane eyes seek the holy text in vain."

"There are difficult writings," said Sixtine.

"Divination is necessary when one cannot decipher. Have not women, the illiterates of love, all the intuitions of ignorance? Now then! if I said to you; 'The heart feels the heart's beating,' you would agree. We are still taken in by some old aphorisms."

"Nothing is so good as to let oneself be taken!"

Instantly astonished by a boldness of speech, whose precise meaning Entragues sought in her eyes, she laughed.

This purely voluntary laughter whose essence he notwithstanding penetrated, troubled him. A careful writer always on the quest for the exact word, new or old, rare or common, but of exact meaning, he imagined that everybody spoke as he himself wrote, when he wrote well. It was in good faith that he stubbornly persisted in reflecting, suddenly arrested by a disquietude in the presence of such words of conversation, habiliments of pure vanity. The knowledge of this eccentricity had never cured him of it, nor was he helped by the punishments of repeating this mea culpa after each mistake, taken from Goethe and composed for his personal use: "When he hears words, Entragues always believes there is a thought behind them."

This greatly complicated his life and his talks, inducing considerable hesitations in his replies, but he was concerned only with literary anatomy and he loved to encounter complex minds upon whose momentary intricacies he would later throw light, by deduction.

Since the nut might be empty, he threw a pebble at the tree so as to cause several others to fall.

"It is preferable to give than to be robbed."

"Oh!" Sixtine replied, "the sensation is quite different. First of all, not every one who wishes it, can be robbed. It is not even enough to let one's door ajar, Monsieur d'Entragues."

He felt that she had pronounced those last words in an insidious voice, but why? While waiting to understand, he responded:

"That itself would be quite a childish system. One usually places sentinels to guard the treasure chests and one provides locks for odd boxes. The spice in the pleasure of robbing lies in forcing, breaking, or taking a thing to pieces. True artists are repelled when there is nothing to do except thrust out the hand. But this is the most elementary ethics: no pleasure without effort."

"You are speaking of robbers, I of persons who are robbed. You can belong only to the one, I to the other class, the class that is at the mercy of an eventual rifling. I wanted to explain that it requires more than that the door should be ajar or, in fine, easy to open, for if one perfects the fastenings too thoroughly, the risk is taken of being assured a truly uncivil security. Well, more than all this, it is needful that there be visible or suspected objects to steal; it is needful that, by appearances, by external and attractive promises, the thief be tempted."

"You have anticipated me, Madame, in awarding yourself this personal compliment. I was about to make it. But you know, better than I do, your gifts and all that might draw curious and thievish hands to the dreamed of coffer."

"Too much frankness and irony, Monsieur d'Entragues. You were not born a thief."

"Alas! I have no hiding place secure enough for such larceny. My left hand would not know what to do with what my right hand pilfered."

The somewhat brutal candor of this disinterestedness did not seem to wound her. On the contrary, she thought:

"He is no fool. Another would have thrown himself at my imprudence, would instantly have urged me to let myself be taken!"

For his part, Hubert, seeing that the nuts were decidely meaty and not too tasteless, reflected:

"I will amuse myself again with throwing a few stones at the branches."

Sixtine forestalled him:

"What end are you aiming at? Love is too fleeting for your stability, let us admit. In that case, where does your life lead? Ah! poet, to success?"

"I am not a poet. I do not know how to cut my thoughts into little morsels that may be equal or unequal, according to the chance of the chopping knife. My prose gets its rhythm only through my breath. Only the pin thrusts of sensation mark its accents and the royal puerility of rich rhymes passes my understanding...."

The vlouement of a crow's wings agitated the air above the trees. Hubert remained silent, listening. Then:

"Vlouement, that's it, vlouement of wings, with the v v v. Is it the v v v or the f f f? The filement of wings? No, vlouement is better. Once more, crow!"

Sixtine, a trifle bewildered, stared at him open-mouthed.

"Those damned crow wings—one cannot describe them! Oh! success! Does the apple tree solicit applause for having borne fruit? From this one could construct quasi-evangelical parables. If I am not my own judge, and if I displease myself, what matter though I please others? Who are the others? Is there in the world an existence outside of myself? Possibly there is, but I am not aware of it. The world is myself, it owes me its existence, I have created it with my senses; it is my slave and no one else has any power over it. If we were thoroughly certain of the fact that nothing exists outside of ourselves, how prompt would be the cure of our vanities, how quickly our pleasures would be purged of it! Vanity is the fictive bond which links us to an imaginary exterior world. A little effort breaks it and we are free! Free, but lonely, lonely in the frightful solitude where we are born, where we live and die."

"What a sad philosophy, but what a proud one!"

"It contains less pride than sadness, and I would give much of its arrogance so as never to feel its bitterness."

"Who led you to it?" she queried, interested in these matters which seemed sufficiently new to her mind.

"But it is natural. How conceive a life different from what it clearly appears to eyes that can see? Yes! perhaps a certain illusion is possible.... What a pity, doubtless, what a pity for me that I did not meet you earlier—years ago. I would have loved you, and then...."

"What would have befallen your destiny, as a result?"

"You would have deluded me about life's value, Madame," Hubert continued, with a poetic enthusiasm that bordered on persiflage. "I would have drunk, like an external absinthe, the fluid illusion of your sea-green eyes and would have chained myself to life by the golden chain of your blond hair."

She veiled herself with indifference lightly embroidered with irony and, believing herself sheltered from a too inquisitive glance, ingenuously replied:

"It is really but three years since I was twenty-seven. It is now the thirtieth year, or almost."

He looked at her from head to foot, but without insolence.

"What frankness! But you have no need to lie." His eyes returned to her figure, which was a little full, he thought.

"Yes, esthetic, isn't it?" hazarded Sixtine, negligently lifting her arms to fasten some pin to her coiffure.

The gesture was fine and instrumental in making her bust more delicate in line.

He prudently replied:

"Esthetic? Oh, no! It seems good and with no treacheries."

A smile, quickly banished, attested the woman's contentment and was the most feminine efflorescence of the old human perversities. In a slow, undeceived voice, she said:

"It is lost time to wish to love me."

"See," Hubert returned, "you breathe on my bubbles and my sole and last chance of illusion vanishes, for in placing my desires in the past, I secretly constructed a bridge spanning the present. Ah! Madame, what transcendental cruelty!"

She was conscious of having taken a wretched crossroad, and of having become bemired there.

They spoke no more.

The shadow diffused itself in swift waves. Slightly nervous, Sixtine walked towards the light of a nearby glade, at the foot of the avenue. There, the oaks and beeches, whose foliage was already brightened by the setting sun, were grouped in a narrow grove. The wind passed, stirring the dry leaves. A low and heavy branch bent down with the sound of a rustling of stuffs. Like a drop of rain, a leaf, then many leaves, descended with a slow moaning sound.

"They follow me! They pursue me!" she cried, caught in the vortex she vainly fled.

And swept away, like a leaf in the circular flight of wind, she drew near Entragues, distracted, panting, crying all the time:

"The leaves pursue me, the dead leaves pursue me!"

"What is the matter," Hubert asked, surprised by such a strange crisis.

While, still frantic and trembling, she seized his arm and leaned against it, he coldly added:

"Have you ever committed a crime in your life?"

This ironic interrogation changed the nature of the fever, like scalding water on a stone.

"Perhaps!" she answered, suddenly pale.

"Then you become altogether interesting."

It was beyond her strength to retort to this impertinence. With a trembling of all her little muscles, and without knowing why she did it, she tried to pull off her gloves. When one of her hands was free, she shook it, pulled it, cracked its joints.

"Excuse me," Entragues continued. He took a malicious pleasure in making the untuned instrument vibrate. "But is there not a stain on the little finger?"

"No, it was the poison."

This came from her lips with the calmness of a meditated confession.

His eyes sincerely troubled, Hubert watched the monster who disengaged herself and fled, throwing these words to him as an adieu:

"I am leaving tomorrow, come to see me."

---

CHAPTER II

MADAME DU BOYS

---

"... Quid agunt in corpore casto Cerussa
et minium, centumque venena colorum?
Mentis honor morumque decus sunt vincula
Conjugii...."
(Sancti Claudius Marius Victor,
De perversis suae aetatis moribus)

---

Hubert had left Rabodanges a few days after Sixtine's departure. The unvaried green of the fields saddened him and, despite the ingenuity of the countess, deprived of the company of the young woman who puzzled him to the utmost, the château seemed to him as though plunged in a funereal widowhood.

He did not even execute his plans of visiting the Mortagne Trappists, but took the train and entered Paris one evening in a state of real satisfaction.

For him, Paris was neither the streets nor the boulevards and theaters. Paris, for Entragues, was confined within the somewhat narrow bounds of his study, peopled with pleasant phantoms of his imagination. There, sad and vague beings, pensive and formless, stirred restlessly, imploring existence, Entragues lived with them in an almost disquieting familiarity. He beheld them, heard them, repaired with them to whatever sphere their activity necessitated. In short, he underwent the keenest phenomena of hallucination.

Thus it was that, on the morrow of his return, Madame du Boys came to occupy him with her adventures. It was a matter of reconciling her in a logical way with her husband whom she had abandoned, to follow to Geneva a Polish count, retired there after sundry nihilistic adventures. Artémise du Boys was how she spelled her name after her adulterous lark, the while her husband, secretary-cashier of the Union de la Bonne-Science, the simple Monsieur Dubois, bewailed his irreparable misfortune.

He groaned and Madame du Boys grew bored, an excellent occasion for once more renewing the bond and putting into practice several verses from the Gospels. Irreparable? And the pardon? One was on the point of agreeing to ask it, the other waited for her to force his hand.

"Ah! Madame du Boys," mused Entragues, gazing upon his fair visitor, "You do not know your husband. Write to him again. Just say: 'I was a little lark of a woman and I was lured away!' Repeat this simple idea through four beautiful pages in a tiny slanting handwriting that trembles and is steeped in tears (Oh! but true tears, scientific tears, acidulated and proportioned with the desired salt of grief),—do this, O my love, and you will see."

Without awaiting her reply, and while Madame du Boys meditated, a modest and very agreeable sinner, Entragues went to comfort the secretary of the Bonne-Science. A simple and quite suitable office: journals, brochures, registers, a general list of the founding members, patrons, donors, residents, foreigners, honorary members, orders depending on the results of preliminary payments, sums deposited, sums due, and different titles.

"You are sad? Yes, a broken life. But, Monsieur Dubois, all lives are broken, just as all sticks thrown in the water are broken. Existence bends souls, we are not made for life. A deception gives it to us, trickery conserves it for us. Ah! I know that philosophy is not your forte; neither founder nor patron, nothing but an appointed secretary. If you are not a philosopher, why did you marry such a pretty woman as Madame du Boys? Only a philosopher could be justified in committing such imprudences, for he knows how to make an abstraction at the proper time. Figures have taught you other duties. Everything is calculated on the register page, and what is absent is called memory. Isn't it the pure truth, stripped of all symbols, that you still love her? Act as a Christian, not as a coward enslaved to habits. So! you have charge of this weak soul and you should, like the Good Shepherd, bear her on your shoulders and save her from the devouring lion. But why do you not go after her, since she has lost her way? Pride chains you to your books. You think you are a Christian, but you are a stoic. Monsieur Dubois, modern Good Shepherds use railroads and telegraphs without shame. Go! Ah! the donors? Well, telegraph! No, it is at least necessary that the sinful sheep go half way, that the sinner behave like a Magdalene and weep. Well, I will bring her to you. Thus, your wife left you to follow her pleasure; she returns somewhat atremble, but confident, and you will pardon her? Will you open your door to her, your arms, your bed? Will you write 'Memory' in the debit side of past days, under days of marital solitude, meaning, in this instance, oblivion. And will the first repast together be a holiday feast, and the first night together a night of happiness? You will do all this, Monsieur Dubois, because you are a Christian and not a stoic. I slandered you. And you will tell me of the interview, of the noble pardon, in low tones for my personal edification, and I will be able to narrate it, aloud, for the edification of the age?"

Having ended these reveries, Entragues, to amuse himself, recopied in ink the note book leaves on which he had scribbled while on the train, during evenings, in his bed, during mornings, or in the solitude of the avenues.

---

CHAPTER III

TRAVEL NOTES

---

Rai-Aube

"And when you will be thus formed, when
you will be imbued with this truth, 'there
is no truth, nothing truly existent for you
except what your fertile mind gives,' observe
the general course of the world and, letting
it follow its own way, associate with the
minority."
Goethe: Testament.

---

Dreux.—To see trains pass by—to see life pass by—never to go within save to strike cushions.

A little farther.—Trains have a destination; life has none. But life's originality lies precisely in having no destination. I occasionally find in it, as in old lace, the same charm of uselessness.

A little farther.—I viewed the landscape as far as Dreux. The unconsciousness of the vegetable kingdom is a decidedly too melancholy void. To become interested in it, one must make it live by incorporating oneself with the trees and grass, transferring the sentient soul of a man into the oak's trunk. I am an oak, I am a holly-tree, I am a wild poppy, but I realize it, while the oak, the holly-tree, the wild poppy do not: for this reason they do not exist. Pantheists are very fine fellows.

Nonancourt.—These syllables shouted through the train evoke a pretty convent of nuns, rather dissolute before the reform of Borromée; afterwards, it was devoted to God until the revolutionary dispersal. Now the house, henceforth plebeian, serves as a barn, stable and pigsty. As the notary who last sold it said: "It will serve as a farm." Cows now ruminate where women once prayed—a notable advance.

Tillières.—A ravine cuts this plain in two, a dastardly act, life.

Verneuil.—I was alone since leaving Paris. A man enters, opens his newspaper and expands into a gauloiserie. If it were evening, near his better half, or if, in my place, some obliging girl revealed a part of her foot! These flights of animalism are truly painful to a calm man. The flower-like opening contracts; the joyous flame of eyes brightens into a waxing ferocity; cruel lust opens its mouth and shows its teeth. Awaking: a searching glance: the mimicry by degrees is extinguished and there remains the disappointed ennui of a vain excitement. No, I do not care to serve as an aphrodisiac to citizens. To think of this would compel you towards a monachal literature, hard and contemptuous of vile lust.

Bourth or nearby.—The man speaks. It was inevitable. He speaks of himself, full of a need of making himself known, of introducing the passerby into his little universe. He travels for a bookseller of religious books. He goes from parsonage to parsonage, well received by the curés, who ask him to dinner. A good clientele and good payers. His center is Verneuil; thence he radiates, like an apostle. Usually a horse and carriage, rented for the season, conducts him from church to church; having some business to transact at Laigle, he took a train to amuse himself; to amuse himself he climbed into a first-class apartment with a second-class ticket. (There is no inspection at such hours.) "Verneuil's a fine town. A rare thing for the province (isn't it so, between ourselves), that this big borough has a well-kept inn, quite renovated." He is a free-thinker, but tolerant, enveloping with the same sympathetic pity, children, women, priests, devout souls—more stupid than ill-meaning, he assures you. As for himself, if a God exists he will go straight to Heaven, never having hurt a fly. Sound instruction will gradually cure us of religion. He has no fear on this score and, his conscience quite tranquil, places his Corneille de la Pierre for the best. Unmarried, but desiring a marriage so as to have sturdy little republicans, strong defenders of la Patrie: Alsace and Lorraine, Gambetta, and so forth.

Laigle.—He offers me something. I politely decline, he withdraws. Throughout the world, this matter interests the millions of similarly constituted minds: for whom do you work, poor unconscious bees? The species? But does the intelligence of a few balance the universal stupidity?

Rai-Aube.—A village I never again shall see, a village with such a pretty name, with such a fine combination of radiant words—aurora and ray—an alliance of syllables married by a morning smile; grasses watered by the freshness of dew, transparent springs, murmuring fluidity of waters flowing under the abundant rushes: all this, Rai-Aube, and oblivion, and the ineffable, palpitates in the white letters of your name, alluring and fugitive rebus hung on the gable of the station! Remembrance rather than vision: in my youth I lived among these vernal delights and steeped myself in them. I do not belong to towns and a built-up plot of ground does not incite me to excessive joys. All that was created by youthful eyes remains young, and for me the country-side often has the sex of its spelling, even under the surplice of snow. That alone remains of my earliest years: all is dead, whether by real death or the death of memory. The tenderness of vague figures bending towards my precocious orphanhood, is the farthest removed; of school, the horror is still painful to remember; a Dantesque and futile horror inflicted upon my pitiful childhood. But already, due a little to my will, the world retreated from me and by a slow or sudden recreation, I reformed for myself a life more harmonious with my intimate sense. But already, in arrogant moments, I scorned everything external to me, everything that had not been reformed and reground by the machine ceaselessly in motion in my head. Excepting the unknowable principle, I have fashioned everything anew; at least, for scepticism even gnaws at one's personality, such is the allusion in which I have confined myself.

With such a fixed determination, with this Kantian system which can be called transcendental egoism, my life has marched with a relatively light pace. Of all the griefs which my will has not succeeded in putting aside, the heaviest to bear is my very solitude. Never having surrendered to its deceits, I know not if hope be aught but a bleeding spur, driving man towards a future nothingness. I know not if the wound opened without respite and the sight of the spilled blood be not powerful stimulants necessary for the functioning of the human mechanism. I have never experienced them. I only believe in the final charnel-house, but without coveting it. Life does not yet displease me sufficiently. Without this, having no philosophical principles to converge with a possible practice, I would be consistent with my disgust and would give it my sanction. Like Crantor, I will die "without being astonished;" if my organs are still sound when death comes, perhaps regretfully. As for survival, on this point I have no such tranquilizing ideas as has the traveling salesman of Dreux. Perhaps the delightful Unconscious reserves some of its good tricks for the truly supreme, last moment of corporeal decomposition! This relative fear doubtless comes to me from my Christian youth, and I repudiate neither the one nor the other; Catholicism is an aristocracy. I do not know how this positive religion can come to be allied in me with subjective idealism; it is an obscure amalgam, like all heresies. Theology always procured me the most agreeable reading; from Augustine I can go to Claudius Mamertinus; there the joys are not less because of the curiosity. How I would have loved to be a bishop in some less modern Rome, or a cardinal! If I dwelt on this rather sterile desire, a sensation of a deficient life would clutch my throat, a vulgar sensation that my pride contemptuously repels. And then, have I not of my own accord tasted the mystic happiness and the celestial anguishes of episcopacy? Have I not clothed myself with the violet robe lifted at the bottom, or trailing up the stairs of the altar? Have I not ascended, mitre on head, the steps of the presidial chair? What then would reality serve me, when I have the dream and the faculty of changing myself like Proteus, the faculty of successively possessing all forms of life, all states of soul which man diversifies himself.

Surdon.—Curled feathers bob up and plunge into the window. Seeing me alone, the female traveler hesitates, but the whistle has blown, a guard shoves her inside. She sits down opposite me, fallen there somewhat out of breath; she is uneasy although she is not blushing. The hesitation came from the fear of appearing to have expressly chosen the compartment in which sat one man. I try to reassure her with very polished phrases, but I succeed imperfectly. I am quite certain that some good proverb would amuse and pique her. I end with: "Occasion makes the thief." In the province, proverbs, that grammatical archæology, are still the current coin of conversation; they permit the saying of nothing at all while appearing to say a great deal. She appreciated my adage and complained of the habitual grossness of men. I answer her: "That is because women always desire what is not offered them and scorn what is offered them. A delicate man, by indefinable signs, lets his fancy be guessed, and does not commit himself to a decisive movement until the exact moment when he sees that it is shared." She smiles: "How does one feel this?" I answer: "The acquiescences are diverse, but there is a special flicker of the eye-lashes, very slow, which it is difficult to mistake." She looks at me with astonishment. A very honest woman, amused at this scabrous conversation, but inexperienced. Her youth and the rosiness of her complexion bespeak a recent marriage and little maternity: openly curious, having an eternity of ten years before her, to learn the secret. Otherwise pretty, and with much distinction, that modern name for grace; between blonde and brunette; clear, rather large eyes, the lower part of her face having no hint of brutishness. The trip from Surdon to Argentan takes sixteen minutes; our several questions and replies have exhausted them. The brake is put on, we slow up. Before I could anticipate her movement, she opens the carriage door until the train comes to a stop, holds the door back, and there I am, surprised to receive, at the same time, an equivocal bow and a glance of surprising intensity.

Is it an invitation to run after her? I believe it is and I hasten out, but I cannot find her. I had rapidly taken my light hand baggage, valise, rug, overcoat, etc. I am not forced to return to my railway carriage and I leave the station to seek the carriage bearing the arms of the countess. She is waiting for me and, thank heaven! I am the only one expected to-day. I will travel tête-à-tête with my disappointment. The coachman said the trip would take an hour, I have an hour in which to school myself with such a useless emotion. We start off; here is the Orne with its two adjacent bridges and, along the stream embanked with walls, an amusing house with balustrades and balconies on the water; an umbrella shop with a strolling singer's good-looking red parasol for an emblem; not a carriage in the peaceful streets, and thus one leads to doors of men and women, but not children; the birdless cage, the childless home: it was a prophecy. The school, the college, the barracks, the office, the study: the French revolution has perfected slavery, it is unanimous. A half-Gothic church, some old gables and less uniform façades amuse me; but we go quickly, despite the climb; then the sorry outskirts, the flat road, the stretch of grey level grass, race-grounds and wheels, some poplars.

---

CHAPTER IV

REFLECTIONS

---

"In carne enim ambulantes non secundum
carnem militamus."
Saint Paul, Cor., II, 10, 3.

---

Entragues wrote only in the morning, but often extended his work of the forenoon into the afternoon. When he did not feel lucid enough for the logic of prose, he amused himself. Poetry, a simple music admitting neither passion nor analysis, is only intended to suggest vague sentiments and confused sensations; a half-consciousness suffices for it. In imitation of Saint Notker, he composed obscure sequences full of alliterations and interior assonances. Walt Whitman, with his intuitive genius, unconsciously restored this lost poetic form. Entragues, at certain hours, delighted in it. This literature of about the tenth century, usually judged as the puerile distraction of barbarous monks, seemed to him on the contrary full of an ingenuous freshness and of an ingenious refinement. Notker charmed him, besides, by the red-blooded boldness of his metaphors, charmed and terrified him while throwing him on his knees before this God for whom prayer is a bleeding holocaust, and who demands, like a slaughtering of lambs, "immolated praise." He also took pleasure in a short and delicate sequence of Godeschalk, where Saint Mary Magdalene "covers with kisses" the feet of Jesus "which she has washed with her tears." A monk of the eleventh century had written a work entitled: The Nothingness in the Darkness. Entragues could find no trace of it beyond the mention of the title. It was one of the unknown books he would have liked to read.

Apart from two or three scorners of actual life, a strict logician of criticism, an extreme and absolute dreamer, an extraordinary creator of phrases and shaper of images, and several modern poets, he now hardly ever opened anything but antique theologies and dictionaries. He had a mania for lexicons, tools which seemed to him, generally, more interesting than works, and he spent over such instruments, often quite useless, many an idle hour. Thus ended the first day of his return.

On the morrow, after a night in which he had relived some of the most characteristic minutes passed with Sixtine at the château de Rabodanges, Hubert suspected that his life was about to change in orientation, that an inevitable crisis threatened him. It was a propitious occasion for meditation. In several weeks perhaps—oh! only perhaps!—he will have undergone obvious modifications. It was necessary—in order to make a reckoning of it later—to note certain dominant traits of the state of his actual mind, to proceed to a summary examination of consciousness. His travel note book already containing some sufficiently precise remarks on this subject, he restricted himself to completing them with the following reflections:

"I am ashamed to admit it, so banal is this malady: I am bored. I have excruciating awakenings. I believe in nothing and I do not love. My calling is a sad one. It is to experiment with all the griefs and all the horrors of the human soul, so that men may recognize themselves in my work and say: 'Well roared, lion'! Yet, I am free: without nightly obligations, neither a parasite nor a worldling, nor a dramatic critic, I retire early, when I please. Having reached my thirtieth year with hardly any social relations, having enough revenue to be independent, I act in everything as I desire, heedless of general customs and satisfied, for example, to testify my scorn for the civilization of gas, by burning my lamp for ten hours. I am free, I have neither wife nor mistress. I fear mistresses for the confusion in which they throw the regularity of my work; but with sensitive beings a large lagoon is hollowed from principles to acts. When I am with some one, I desire solitude; alone, I feel the disquietudes of the void.

"When the commandment of the flesh hurls me to lustful adorations, I blush at such a servitude and at the earliest lucid moment I treat myself with contempt. When I have long stored the concentrated poison of vain seeds, hammer strokes drum on me, my organism gives way and my brain becomes troubled. Never having been kept upright by hair-cloth, iron tacks, wounds freshened by perpetual excoriations, pitiless fasts, privation of sleep, nor any of the mystic and Franciscan maneuvers, I subdue my flesh by leading it to pasture, but with no more sin in my intention than an invalid who breaks his abstinence to procure a remedy. Although pleasure follows, it is an obedience to the ineluctable commands governing animated life. Though I accept it, it is a human weakness. To love so much that one wishes to die—that test I have had in adolescence, and the reasonable insensibility of the woman I adored has never shed any bitterness on that far off remembrance. I do not smile pityingly on these days of umbrageous follies. After ten or eleven years, I am as sure as I was at the first hour of having been deprived of the greatest happiness put within reach of my hands by the Decrees, and in moments of emotion this regret can still throw a gloom over my revery. Since then, nothing but transitory pluckings; barely, now and then, an attempt at the band broken at the first touch.

"Far from being the aim of my life, sensation is its accident: I reserve my voluntary strength for the tales I tell my contemporaries. They have been found cold and ironic, but I have neither the quality to be an enthusiast of my age, nor to take it too seriously. Another motive removes me from emotional researches: without being a pessimist, without denying the possibility of satisfaction, without even denying happiness, I scorn it. I do not seek to aggravate my miseries by meditations on the universal misery, to which my egoism, moreover, makes me almost indifferent. A state of perfect peace of mind agrees with me. It is possible for me to regret an unhatched joy, but I wish neither to provoke nor to lie in wait for the hatching. In fine, there is no doubt that I do not know how to live. A perpetual celebration, my existence is the very negation of ordinary life, which is composed of ordinary loves. I have no tendency towards the altruisms demanded by society. If ever I could be drawn from myself, for the benefit of some creation, it would be in the manner of an imaginative person, at all points re-creating the object of my passion, minutely scrutinizing the mechanism of my impressions. Such is my character: it is obvious that I have not applied myself to elude the knowledge of myself; and yet no one knows better than I do to what point this knowledge is puerile and unhealthy."

---

CHAPTER V

MORE TRAVEL NOTES

---

The Pale and Green Moon

"In hac hora anima ebria videtur,
Ut amoris stimulis magis perforetur."
Saint Bonaventure, Philomena.

---

Château de Rabodanges, in the portrait chamber, September 12.—Upon arriving, I was received by Henri de Fortier, director of la Revue spéculative, and Michel Paysant, whose novels, full of swelling busts and caressing glances, charm families which mistake impotence for chastity. Fortier mentions the names of the guests to me. None of my acquaintances are here. Separated from the general, her husband, Countess Aubry brings to the country, at the summer end, her cosmopolitan salon which is frequented by the grand courtiers of academic or worldly literature. It is rumored that Fortier succeeds, in her gallant nights, the Bonapartist deputy who recently died and with whom she had an open liaison. Fortier assumes the modest airs of a host. At the dinner, several aristocrats who live in the vicinity mention the fact that the hunting season has opened. The only interesting face to see is that of a young fair woman, with sparkling eyes, who is either silent or speaks to Madame Aubry alone. A stroll in the moonlight follows, then the neighbors call for their carriages. Fortier disappears with the countess. Paysant takes my arm and prattles.

He groans over his vexations as a chief clerk of literature. Just now he would like to rest, even to loaf, but a week does not pass without some publisher, old or young, coming to entreat of him a volume to restore his business or launch his bookshop. Accordingly, his repressed Gallic nature would freely awake and he would write several jolly stories. But the unity of his work! That would no longer turn out to be Paysant, and the Academy would perhaps knit its brow. He attempts a laugh, but one feels an apprehensive reverence within the depths of his deferential brain. A silence, and he greedily describes the young woman I had noticed. The technique of the patrician gives to his eloquence a disinterested tone, but one divines the wet mouth and the hand, with kneading gestures, caressing the absent forms. I maintain that women are neither beautiful nor ugly, and that their whole charm radiates from their sex: desire sketches beauty and love completes it. A certain ugly creature, in the vulgar sense of the word, has been able to assume an ideal beauty, while another woman, by all judged admirable, has not passed beyond the limbo of a rough draught, never having been loved. Paysant shouts this paradox: feminine beauty is real and independent of sentiment. She is capable of feeling, yes? Doubtless, that is a special pleasure, yes, a special one. By adroitly goading him, one could make him confess his tastes of a fondler, of a senile love of touching, but I know not why, I am afraid lest his pathology take up Madame Sixtine as a subject of demonstration.

We return to the château. Everybody has surrendered to the rare pleasure of retiring early. Only Fortier awaits us, to conduct me to my room. It seems that a friend of the countess is enthusiastic about the Revue spéculative and is going to espouse it under a dotal system, making it an allowance of fifty thousand francs, which it lacks. This Fortier has a mania for offering incomprehensible metaphors.

"Some one is going to put fifty thousand francs into the Revue!"

"Precisely."

"And you will become?"

"Editor in chief instead of director."

"And the director?"

"A pseudonym." I know Fortier; he will not take offense.

"Now, confess that it is the countess." He smiles and immediately gallops across the faded fields of the dithyramb:

"She is charming, generous, devoted to art, and without personal ambition."

"Except to be loved?"

"I charge myself with that."

This unconstraint interests my natural curiosity, and with little contradictions powdered with some skepticism, I excite him to the point where he tells me everything. He was presented by Malaval, who remarked that his elegance of a clipped dog would turn the head of the countess. It was an embarrassing introduction, but Fortier showed wit—so he claims. There followed allurements, sly winks, the habit of quarreling with each other, an absence, several letters wherein a light tenderness fluttered. She was alone when he returned. Without speech, their arms outstretched—there they were, trembling and lovers. Fortier is incapable of inventing and, perhaps, of lying. He even has the air of finding this natural and fatal. It had to happen.

"Is it not so?"

"Doubtless."

I take leave of him. Before departing, he asks me to furnish some pages for the first number of la Spéculative, new series. This line finished, I go to sleep, but why is this room called the portrait chamber?

September 13, morning.—I have dreamed of this portrait and I seek it in every corner, in every section of the walls. The room is quite remarkably bare: a uniform gray paper; above the Empire fireplace, a looking glass which reaches to the ceiling; the bed occupies one of the sides of the floor; to the right of the door, a bookcase contains some old books; to the left is a chest of drawers topped with a new mirror; opposite are two windows; between the two windows, a dressing table and another glass. Nothing else.

September 14, evening.—We took an excursion to Roches-Noires. Monsieur B——, who was our guide, killed a snake with a few blows of a little stick. Then, Madame Magne took the reptile and in an instant made a bracelet of the still moving creature. The countess uttered a cry, the viper had to be thrown into a hole, and I reflected upon the biblical and singular sympathy between women and serpents, for the countess cried without sincerity and Madame de B——. pitied the poor creature of the good Lord.

September 14, morning.—I have seen the portrait. The pale and green moon soared into my room. I had just awakened, and obscure and ophidian visions still haunted me. With feverish eyes I distrustfully gazed around me, while logical and absurd reasonings multiplied in my head, their fugacity leaving me with a doubt as to the precise place of my actual existence. Was I in the midst of the brambles and precipices of Roches-Noire? No. Was I in my room, and in my bed, far from the vipers and grimacing stones? Perhaps. See! above the mantlepiece the mirror slowly changes its tint: its lunar green, its green of transparent waters underneath beeches, brightens and grows golden. One would say that in the center of the glimmering, as on the moon's very face, shadows with human features project, while above the vague figure there winds a luminous undulation like loosened and floating blond hair. Without being able to analyze the rest of the sudden transformation, I see it, in the twinkling of an eye, completed. Clear and animate, the portrait gazes on me; it is, feature for feature, that of the woman with the reptile. For several moments, long and unforgettable moments, the vision grew resplendent, then it vanished, as though by a breath.

September 15, morning.—I awoke at the same hour, but the mirror remained green and I did not see the portrait again. I think of nothing but this. All day yesterday, while Madame Sixtine Magne was with us, I looked at her; when she was no longer there, I evoked her.

September 15, evening.—The countess quickly questioned me, while we were on the bank of the Orne: "By the way, did you see the portrait? No, for you would have said so. Besides, to see it one must now, it seems, be endowed with a certain mystery. It is a trick sometimes played upon easily troubled imaginations. There is a history. Monsieur de B——. tells it very well. Make him discuss this chapter after dinner." I could not find a word to answer. I have seen the portrait, but how proceed to boast of that privilege? The angling for crawfish continues; I am asked to take part in it. In a frame of leaves, under the silvered alders, the young woman, who henceforth has rights to interest me, seems passionately absorbed in a book whose pages she cuts with her finger. Monsieur de B——. could not remain for dinner and no one has spoken again of the portrait chamber. So much the better....

(End of the Travel Notes).—There, in fact, ended the scribbled pages, Hubert having betaken himself to dream of his impressions instead of transcribing them. He did not wish to write them down too late, without some necessary preliminary moments, so as not to take the risk of confounding the chronology of the little things whose logical order is of prime importance. The remainder of the notebook was white. Yet when he perused them later, he perceived a sheet of loose paper where could be traced some intentions of poetry. This more narrowly fixed his thoughts upon Sixtine: it was truly with her that he was concerned in his prose, in his verses, in his life.

---

CHAPTER VI

DREAM FIGURE

---

"O Créateur de l'universel monde,
Ma pauvre âme est troublée grandement!"
Heures à l'usaige de Paris, 1488.

---

Sixtine was far from him, and yet he believed that he saw her nearby.

All afternoon he preserved the illusion of walking in her company. She suddenly appeared in a dress of changing colors: the cloth, a light and pale green silk, had golden clasps. Her shoes made no sound; her smile, instead of speech, and diverse inflexions of her muscles, expressed her thoughts; nevertheless, but only once, he positively heard the sound of her voice. "So you would like me to tell you the history of the portrait chamber?" Preoccupied in establishing the fundamental sound of the recovered sequence which for an instant tyrannized him, Entragues listened to the question without immediately perceiving its sense. He was going to reply and agree, but Sixtine, under the parasol which she had opened, was reading and he dared not disturb her. The parasol, too, by its oddness, caused his mind to wander. It was of such limpid and transparent yellow that through it he beheld, barely shaded by a luminous shadow, the shoulders of Sixtine and her head bent upon the book.

They walked along the quay, from the rue du Bac, where he had begun to feel her presence, to the Saint-Michel Square. The charming, shining Seine was iridescent with the play of oblique rays striking against its current; sparkling foam fell on the prows; the fringe of the bank was dotted with sails on which a keen wind played; the canvas crackled like flames; the lines of anchored boats here and there rumbled under the shock; the multicolored parapets retreated.

Entragues bought no lexicon; he looked at the serried backs of books, without even reading the black or golden titles.

In a deserted spot, along the wooden balustrade, and as the first gas light flickered in a café, he was accosted by a young man who passed as a poet, perhaps because of the rare beauty of his face.

"How singular! You are alone, yet one would swear that an invisible person accompanied you."

"I am now alone, my dear Sanglade."

Sixtine, in fact, had just disappeared from Entragues sight and Sanglade had the impression of having awkwardly interrupted a tête-à-tête, an impression that was quite metaphorical, for with an air of bantering timidity, he added:

"You are seeking rhymes. I will give you some, I have them all at my command. Without this gift, I would not be a poet."

"Yes, without this you would be a poet."

"In prose, perhaps," answered Sanglade, "but in verse?"

Entragues purposely let him run on, having no mind for esthetic tournaments. They went up the boulevard. At the Luxembourg, Sanglade, tired of discoursing in monologue, took advantage of a passing friend and returned. Entragues made for a quiet café, protected with carpets, where his horror of sound could readily be satisfied.

Since his return, save for a brief interview on the first morning, he had been able to abstract Sixtine from his immediate thoughts. It was with a perfect coldness that he had recopied into good French his brief travel notes where, towards the end, the name of this woman, hardly known, recurred with each verse, like an amen. But, and here he recognized the occult power of words, the material transcription of those syllables had acted violently on his imagination. He had lived whole hours with her, and now that the mystic power of the vision was spent, he still thought of the absent one.

"She must have gone to Bagnoles for one of those imaginary illnesses which women never think of treating save in their periods of boredom. Restless or bored: she had these two states in almost equal doses. Then if her head is troubled with love, she will not experience it until the time when one questions oneself: uncertain questions, uncertain answers! And boredom? To explain it, you must admit that the advance or recoil of this dawning caprice has nothing to do with her will and that she may be unconscious of her own sentiment. That is it: she loves, therefore the uneasiness; but she does not know it, therefore the ennui. It is necessary to note this. Could she have returned?"

Hubert believed himself merely touched by a simple analytical fever. Often, for the sole pleasure of taking stock with himself, he had followed, in their psychic evolutions, many interesting subjects; of women, particularly, but deceived by a consideration of the inscrutable motive, they had divined another one and had begun to simper at the investigator. Thus it used to end, whether Entragues digressed, or whether a series led him into a secret laboratory experiment.

Even in this last case, it was short, for he had hardly ever tried his tests except upon vile souls often belonging to prostituted organisms.

Sixtine was of the caste numbered one or two, coming from an aristocratic convent and from an idle leisurely family.

Nothing certain at the first approach, because of the modern confusion and personal reclassification, but fallen rather than parvenu, belonging at least to those who cultivate a relative leisure in an avowed independence. As for certain other problems which puzzled him, he would amuse himself in resolving them gradually, at her home, with the aid of subtle questions, for he meant to accept her invitation and would go to see her.

Such a minute revery denoted a certain possession. Entragues did not yet suspect, or perhaps did not wish to condescend to admit to himself that the agreeable and feminine form of mystery acted on his imagination more than on his curiosity.

Sixtine was graceful and her contours corresponded with the harmony requisite to evoke the word of beauty. Blond her hair, and a golden green, her eyes; violent the mouth and exquisitely white, her teeth! Ah! the violent mouth broke the harmony, a cold esthetician would have said, but, and this was the proof that Hubert already was a prey to desire, he loved its destructive violence, seeing it in but a more assured promise of pleasure. Just then Entragues gave such a sharp start that the gamblers close to him held the dice-box sus-about to make. The dice rattled in the copper box pended in air, and suppressed the bets they were and Entragues reflected on his nerves.

"It was because of the ambiguity, that was the cause, my soul! The ambiguity threw the poison."

"Oh! was he going to take as a serious confession idle words playfully uttered on the wings of a causerie. This time, was it not really the old malady of chimerical fancies? He smiled at himself, and almost grew out of patience. Ah! the thing was not to accuse her because of a confession, not to reveal himself as devoid of criticism as a public accuser, but not to deny her criminal potentiality. What a doll full of bran instead of blood, seamed with threads instead of nerves, is a woman incapable of crime! As well say that she is incapable of passion! Our cowardly civilization, itself, absolves the bloody consequences of love, sparing such women the futile expiation of an inevitable act. The equivocation he had read on Sixtine's face was the mark of election, the sign of possible passion, the proof that she was a woman."

This deduction reassured Entragues. Henceforth, instead of trembling before the word crime, he would have to qualify it. A preliminary distinction would have spared him the start which had frightened the dice players. Now he willingly accepted a Sixtine who was a neighbor to crime, and even a criminal Sixtine. In the latter case it meant, for example, that she loved, that she was deceived, that she had poisoned the deceiver. Ah! there are luckless poisoned ones whose fate may trouble sensibilities after the deed. But if, instead of defending herself, Sixtine had died, what sort of person would the assassin have been?

This crime, at first so disturbing, insensibly gained some considerations of attraction. An old desire, like an old viper, stirred in his head. Ah! to kiss hands that had used poison! To caress the flesh of a murderess! Through contempt of all morality, to give pleasure to the woman who had provoked, for her peace, frightful agonies!... And perhaps there truly was nothing in it at all! Oh! she had, with a single word, confessed too thoroughly not to go, some day, to the end of the avowal: he would know how to win her confidence. For the time being, as it was impossible to penetrate further, lacking sufficient enlightenment, Entragues abandoned all analysis and dined.

Afterwards, he recopied the sequence which, in his revery, had been dimly refashioned. The desired words took their assigned place, the rhythm polished the breaks that appeared too rude, the imperfections were effaced.

It went thus:

DREAM FIGURE

Séquence

La très chère aux yeux clairs apparaît sous la lune,
Sous la lune éphémère et mère des beaux rêves.
La lumière bleuie par les brumes cendrait
D'une poussière aérienne
Son front fleuri d'etoiles, et sa légère chevelure
Flottait dans l'air derrière ses pas légers:
La chimère dormait au fond de ses prunelles.
Sur la chair nue et frêle de son cou,
Les stellaires sourires d'un rosaire de perles
Etageaient les reflets de leurs pâle éclairs. Ses poignets
Avaient des bracelets tout pareils; et sa tête,
La couronne incrustée des sept pierres mystiques
Dont les flammes transpercent le coeur comme des glaives
Sous la lune éphémère et mère des beaux rêves.

He signed his name and the date, adding farther down, as an envoy "To Madame Sixtine Magne." To spare himself reflections of this sort: "Shall I send it to her, shall I not send it to her?" he addressed an envelope, affixed a stamp, and immediately carried it to the mailbox.

Then, to divert himself by gaining an hour of rest, he repeated the story with which Monsieur de B——. had amused them, one evening, at the home of the countess—a quite unadorned story, as becomes such a trifle—just such a thing as could be written by those whose occasional simplicity is not due to a poverty of language or to an imaginative sterility.

---

CHAPTER VII

MARCELLE AND MARCELINE

---

A story in the style of "Cinderella," but more modern.

"Ni vers, ni prose; points de grands mots,
point de brillans, point de rimes: un ton naïf
m'accomode mieux; en un mot, un récits sans
façon et comme on parle."
Madame d'Aulnay, l'Adroite Princesse.

---

Once upon a time there was a nobleman who took to himself a second wife who had as wicked a heart as you could imagine. They had a daughter who resembled her mother, and it was not long before the two were tyrants of the house, for this nobleman loved them and humored all their whims. Especially did the daughter take advantage of it to inflict a thousand miseries upon her step-sister, whose birthright seemed to her a theft of her rights as a spoiled child. One was called Marcelle and the other, Marceline. The wicked Marcelle hated her sister, but the good Marceline returned good for evil. And as her father, through very goodness of soul, and to have peace in the house, always took the part of Marcelle, Marceline learned to suffer.

Marcelle was as pretty as a bouquet of roses. Taught to smile by the smiles she had received at the cradle and while she played, she knew how to be radiant, and every one considered her a very amiable person. Tall and shapely, she had a white and delicate skin, red lips and long blond hair.

Marceline was ugly, small, with dark hair and complexion; in truth, she had very lively eyes, but they had a somber color and lacked any tender expression. She was mistaken for her sister's governess, and sometimes for her maid, for though no one was cruel enough to refuse her whatever dresses she desired, she affected a taste for simple clothes.

Marcelle had already refused more than one eligible suitor, when a young lord named Lélian moved her heart by his good manners, his title, that of a marquis, and his fortune.

The marriage day was fixed, Lélian courted in a most gallant fashion, and the only thing left was the arranging of the festivities that would signalize such a great way.

Marceline took great pains not to show any spite because the younger daughter was getting married first. On the contrary, she was as amiable as ever. With an unwonted good grace she welcomed the young marquis destined for her sister; this everybody appreciated and people began to find her less ugly and less displeasing. Marcelle, amid her joy, always kept the haughty air belonging to a well-born girl. Lélian felt more admiration than love for her and he was not displeased to talk a little with Marceline. The "little one," as she was contemptuously called, soon seemed to him more intelligent and pleasant than her sister. She spoke of all things with spirit, her good humor took no offense at any teasing, and when, by chance, she was alone with Lélian, a strange flame of an almost mysterious charm, shone in her somber eyes. By gazing at them long, Lélian discovered that her dark brown eyes had a perfectly nuanced gamut of expression: they were eloquent. From that time, and during the moments he was not paying court to Marcelle, he strove to spell out the words that lay in Marceline's eyes.

He thought of them as much as any man, on the eve of marriage, can think of eyes which do not belong to the woman he is about to wed, when Marceline, suddenly unwell, took to her room for three days. This was decisive: the dark eyes recovered their language so clearly that there was no mistaking them.

It was the very morning of the marriage day. Quite recovered, but still a trifle pale, Marceline strolled through the garden, touching the flowers without gathering a single one. Lélian, on his side, was walking about to conceal his impatience. They met.

What passed between them while they strolled, through the walks, silently and slowly? What did they say in the garden walks? Lélian, without astonishment, heard these words which Marceline, as she suddenly left him, threw like an arrow:

"And take care not to mistake the door this evening, for my sister and I have adjoining rooms!"

After the return from church, there was a great repast that continued far into the evening; then came dances and games in the illuminated rooms; then a magnificent supper was served, followed by more dances and games. The peasants, under a specially erected tent, took part in the rejoicings; they sang songs, discharged guns, danced, kissed one another, and drank to the bride's health.

While the ball was at its height, Marcelle disappeared without anyone taking notice, except the men among themselves and the women behind their fans; several young girls blushed; others thoughtfully followed the retreating train of white silk with their eyes. The bride's dress, her attitude, the least little word she had spoken in a quite distracted voice since the ceremony, her tears, her smiles, her kisses—all were passed in review. The old women, fearing ridicule, dissimulated the emotion brought up by distant memories; the young women sought the glances of their husbands in the throng.

Lélian mounted the stairs with a firm and rapid step. He saw the two adjacent doors. One was shut; the other was ajar. This one he pushed and entered. Without a sound, and with diabolic skill, Marceline turned the key and bolted the door.

Before the house was astir, Lélian led Marcelle away, as had been arranged. A coach, spanned and ready, awaited them.

After the honeymoon trip, which was brief, because of the quite natural impatience of the newly married couple to settle in their home, they dwelt in Lélian's château.

As the two domains touched each other, so to speak, Marcelle was able to find some happiness near her parents and her sister whom she had ceased to hate. Unhappiness softens certain prideful souls and Marcelle, who had promised herself many numberless joys, found herself, as happens, the most unfortunate woman in the world.

Taught by experience, Marceline refused to marry. When any one speaks to her of the miserable condition of an old maid, she smiles and asks:

"Come, are you so sure that I am an old maid?"

And it must be agreed that a sort of beauty flowered in the dark Marceline and that the white Marcelle grew almost ugly.

I believe that Marceline is a fairy, but this is not quite certain.

---

CHAPTER VIII

THE TRANSPARENT CURTAIN OF TIME

---

"In laying down his Cogito ergo sum as the
only certainty, and in considering the world's
existence as problematical, Descartes found
the essential departing point of all philosophy."
Schopenhauer: The World as Idea.

---

Entragues rose early and penholder in hand, turning over his papers while he drank tea and smoked cigarettes, he began the day.

Monsieur Dubois, through an administrative memorandum, had the goodness to inform him about his affairs. There had been postal supplications and telegraphic pardons. Madame du Boys was returning. The envelope contained the letter and the copy of the dispatch. Entragues appreciated this attention which would permit him to follow, without fatigue, the developments of the oratorio.

The letter, dated from Geneva, was a reply. The secretary, among indistinct phrases, had doubtless let fall the seed of hope, for Madame du Boys seemed to accept at the same time that she implored. Though standing on her dignity, she was not displeased with this rope flung in the midst of her muddled situation. She joyfully clutched it, with the naïve and vainglorious pleasure of being able to say: "It is he who is taking the first step! How anxious he is to have me! Ah! the poor man, I do not want to make him suffer any more." This could be read all around the pages, on all the margins, even on the envelope, which had been addressed with a poised hand. Too, there flowered a boredom from this international paper: "I enjoy myself more even in Paris, by the side of a stupid and solemn husband, than on the banks of Lake Geneva, where I am alone with my maid from nine in the morning till six at night—without counting the days when business delays Monsieur le comte—and where, to fall asleep, I drink, in the Revue des Treize Cantons, lymphatic emanations on the course of life and the meaning of death!"

"P. S. Say that I am passing a season in Switzerland for my health."

She arrives, lets fall her little bundles, opens her arms, and Monsieur Dubois, very agitated, falls into them.

"Ah! my poor friend, so I find you again! What trials!"

She has pardoned.

Monsieur Dubois dries his eyes, not knowing what to say; his flown discourse leaves him speechless.

Bending towards one of the little parcels which she lifts, Madame du Boys, serpentine and coy, murmurs:

"I have thought of you, dear one, I bring you a box of cigars."

Entragues was greatly amused by this unforseen denouement. He was just finishing the draught of a sketch when the bell rang; it was a letter with a handwriting unknown to him. The wording was brief:

"Monsieur d'Entragues is expected this evening to give a commentary on his Dream. Only auditors: the four walls and Sixtine Magne."

Two joyful tidings already, and it was not yet midday. It was only at this hour that his scanty correspondence was brought him, for the precious mornings could not be troubled by the intrusion of the external problematical world. Even amid a quite feverish contentment, he did not regret the instructions he had given once for all; Sixtine's letter came at a moment when he could think at leisure and without remorse. His pleasure was manifested by a vivacity of movement altogether juvenile; a semblance of adolescence surged from his precocious maturity. Though he generally was incapable of giving a clear account of his impressions, he felt himself rejuvenated, and this astonished him. He walked about with lively quick movements.

Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs was almost gay.

A reddish brown made the sun-bathed Luxembourg, through which he strolled, resplendent. It was full of pretty children and flashing ribbons. Towards the Odéon he ceased to be aware of the things around him—a beaming cloud enveloped him. In the afternoon, having breakfasted, though he could not have stated how or where, he found himself on the Pont-Neuf, and collected his thoughts. Presence of mind returned to him and, dissipating with a last breath his cloud, he began consciously to revel in his happiness. The moment was brief: leaning on his elbows, looking at the unchanging water, he felt the premonitory thrill he so well knew; the frozen aura of spleen whistled in his ears and, bounding the horizon like a wall, the black Idea reared itself before him. An infinite distress overwhelmed him and, far from wishing the burden removed, he bent his shoulders, letting himself be crushed even to suicide. He closed his eyes with suffering, he trembled with cold, and a flicker of reason deep within him warned him of the absurdity of such a sudden and causeless grief. Yet he persisted, now lying under the avalanche of gloom, immobile, experiencing the garrot of solitary death, the slow excoriation of moral agony. This lasted an hour, during which he suffered weeks of real and profound pains, the cruelest pains ever invented by unjust human imagination, hopeless pains, infernal pains. He ached when he resumed his normal state and unsteadily went on his way.

The distraction of book hunting proved a great relief. The mummies, ranged in dozens in their tombs, awaited a momentary resurrection. He rescued several, les Promenades by Stendhal, which he did not possess, an old breviary embellished with armorial bearings, and a Venetian lexicon. He regretted having purchased the Stendhal. It was a subject of sadness and in the unhealthy state in which his crisis had left him, the mere material contact of these artless but bitter little notes might be dangerous. Bitter! For him alone, perhaps, for he found such desolation in it: "This Rome of the Popes, this womb of the ideal, this Ninevah of the purple, this Babylon of the cross, this Sodom of mysticism, this ark of sadistic dreams, this incunabulum of sacred follies, this generator of the new passion, this Rome, I never again shall see!" A tiny kingdom had openly stolen its traditional capital and the modern baseness had ratified the theft.

His sadness turned to anger. Entragues smiled at this quixotism, but the violence of even a fugitive indignation ended by making him sound again, and, recovering full consciousness, he breathed.

In the street, Entragues did not sympathize with the rumbling consciousness dispersed among the human fluid emanating from the throngs. The passersby seemed phantoms to him, he was not aware of them, considering them as inconsistent as the vignettes of an illustrated book. The most tragic public event only elicited from him an acquiescence or repulsion of the artist: to shrug the shoulders and cry: Bravo, Chance! A very scornful observer and thoroughly persuaded in advance that nothing new can be produced by the encounters of individuals with one another or against things, since the elaborating brains partake eternally of a fundamental identity and their visible differences are but the right and reverse sides of an untearable material embroidered with a durable and everlasting embroidery; conscious of the uselessness of leaving his house to enter another house which is just the same, Entragues loved the proximity of books that demonstrated to him the probability of his philosophy. He never tired of admiring the courageous perserverance of men who invariably repeated the same thing. All that had been written since the Bible could be resumed in three words; fired in a fantastic crucible, the totality of books would give this for a chemical residuum: cogito, ergo sum. Descartes was the only man who had ever expressed a necessary idea, and thirteen letters had sufficed for it. He would have wished to see them engraved on the front of monuments.

Outside of these three words, nothing indubitably existed except art; for it alone, endowed with the critical faculty, has the power of evoking life. It alone, without remarking the warp and woof, however, can variegate the embroidery of the stuff, because it embroiders safe from contingencies. The existence of Marie-Antoinette is problematical; that of Antigone is certain. The queen who died on the scaffold is at the mercy of deductions and negations; Antigone is as eternal as the family love she symbolizes, and the falling stars will not hush the piteous and charming confession of her feminine heart murmuring across the centuries: "I am born to love and not to hate." The symbol is as imperishable as the idea whose transcendental form it is and becomes necessary to it as soon as it clothes the idea. When you persecute Galileo, it is a man who suffers; when you separate Romeo from Juliette, it is the entire species that feels their anguish.

Having placed art above and even in the place of life, Entragues still doubted. Was art not an illusion as well? If the external world consists of phantoms only, could he create aught but phantoms, unless he confined himself to the eternal reproduction of the eternal ego? But at its highest degree of personality, individual consciousness contains all forms, and just as, by a necessary objectivity, it projects externally the silhouettes on the transparent curtain of time, which is life, it can project them outside of time, which is art.

The ant in distress swam boldly towards the last straw, withstanding the cruel waves; it did not founder in the hollows of the rivulet—which are for it larger than the ocean—and it saw safety when the motion of the waves raised it to the pinnacle.

His meditations were suddenly troubled, like the water of a pool into which a swan plunges. The jovial, merry instinct recovered its toy. There was now no means of arguing upon the illusion of suffering: the lashes of presentiment cut his back so keenly and severely that it was clear the hand could not be wheedled by any reasoning.

The child was amusing itself too well. "And yet! and yet!" All was vain and it was true. Entragues, upon returning to his quarters, found this mortal note, mortal in the state of exaltation in which he had lived since the morning, a damper that truly resembled death.

"Inpromptu dinner with the countess who has come on some business. Regrets. Let tomorrow take the place of to-day. S. M."

As he sat reading these lines, his head in his hands, without having removed his hat, gloves, overcoat and cane, he had the misfortune to wish to seek the secret causes; he passed, without stirring, two or three very painful hours. His reasoning went thus: in writing the first letter to me yesterday, she evidently knew how matters stood. He then asked himself why she was playing with him. He employed the whole evening in resolving this difficult question. Finally, after having followed several diverse solutions, he concluded: "Perhaps, as she said, it really was a simple accident." As aching as a victim of the inquisition, after his seance of torture, he fell asleep cursing hope, that torture more subtle than the wooden horse, needles and spiders, a sketch but lately illuminated by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam.

He fell asleep, living again the pages of the master in a terrifying nightmare, and only in the morning did rest come.

Upon arising, he was another person, and certitude, pure and clear certitude did not abandon him an instant until evening. At half past eight, the hour chosen and fixed by her, he would see her. Until then he walked with closed eyes, almost like a blind man, all the powers of his mind, all his faculties of idealisation, together with his scorn and skepticism, drowned in that drop of water—Sixtine. He did not even have enough strength for astonishment: a rising moon, a dawning love dominated his horizon. This unique contemplation, by gentle degrees, isolated him in a trance.

---

CHAPTER IX

---

THE PROMENADE OF SIN

"This curl of hair belongs to a daughter of
Ra-Hor-Xuti, who has in her every essence
of divinity."
Orbiney Papyrus, Pl. xi. 4.

---

A prisoner in her abbatial seat, she had quite the air of a fourteenth century person. Dressed in red, her feet rested on a black cushion; her fingers, lit with garnets and opals, perhaps with cassidony, and with agates, played with the white girdle which tied a robe with heavy purple undulations; her head, a pale flower, leaned against the carved wainscot; the shadow of the ogive framed the blonde aureole.

Altogether nonplussed by the attitude which seemed to demand the genuflexion of a worshiper, instead of the cordial greeting of a friend, he remained standing near the door, seeking some word to begin. For a few seconds Sixtine enjoyed the astonishment she had anticipated, then skilfully rose and, with a trace of lingering vanity, offered her hand. He took it coldly, seeing that she had tried to deceive him with a mise en scène.