French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (34 page)

He came near, adorned in all his seductions, the grieving attitude attenuated by an ironic gleam in the eye and a certain joy playing over
the lips; his movements slow, as of one sated by love but corrected with a proud lift of the head; and the first long, broken sigh that escaped his breast was accompanied by a subtly impatient tapping of his foot—which said: ‘You have wounded my heart, but I cannot help myself from loving you, and yet I feel some anger.’ Next, he put on the gaze of the cornered animal; and then, he played at observing his little finger.

After a short silence, he lisped lovingly, ‘It’s a beautiful evening’—and it was then the young woman answered: ‘It is my soul you are after, Don Juan! Have it then, I give it you!’

Don Juan accepted this soul so deliciously naive, and so feminine, that the instantly subjugated had offered him along with her skin, her hair, her teeth, every one of her beauties and the fragrance of all her concealments: and having had his fill of her, he went his ways.

Out of this soul he fashioned a limpid and invincible cape in which he draped himself, as though in folds of white velvet. Equipped with such a soul, and more triumphant than a Moorish killer, more adored than a pilgrim from Compostella or a crusader returned from Palestine, he multiplied his conquests to the number of a thousand and three.

All of them! All who might give a new pleasure, a new frisson of joy, all were seduced by what he had taken that pleased them about their sisters. They passed before him, they kissed his hands, they bowed before him, a whole lovesick people already vanquished by the approaching conqueror.

Soon they fought among themselves as to who should be the first to fall, and who the most subjugated. Drunk on their slavery, they would die of love before having tasted it.

In the towns and in the castles, and even in the cottages, their cry went up: ‘O my dearest! O my deepest! He is irresistible!’

B
UT
Don Juan started to fade.The sap which had bloomed in luxuriant force fell back down in a rain of dry leaves, and though it still stood tall, the tree was no more than a shadow.

Don Juan expended, from a few late flowers, the last of his pollen; as long as there was a trace of seed in his blood, he loved—and finally,
no longer able to love, he lay down to wait for what must come, the only one he had not yet conquered.

And when she arrived, Don Juan set out to seduce her, offering all that pleases, all that he had taken from the pleasers.

‘I offer you the power of seduction,’ said Don Juan, ‘I offer you, O ugly one, my attitudes, my looks, my smiles, my various voices, everything, even my coat which is made from a soul: take all this and go! I want to relive my life in memory, for now I know that the true life consists in remembering.’

‘Live your life over again,’ said Death. ‘I shall return.’

Death vanished and the Simulacra rose up in crowds from out of the shadow.

They were young and beautiful women, all of them naked and all of them silent, and anxious, like beings who were seeking for something they lacked. They were arranged in a spiral around Don Juan, and while the first of them placed her hand on his breast, the last was so remote that she was mingled with the stars.

She who put her hand on his breast took back from him the action of holding in the emotion from an absent heart;

Another took back from him the ironic fluttering of his white eyelids;

Another took back from him the grace involved in examining the nail of his little finger;

Another took back from him the impatience of his tapping feet;

Another took back from him the complex smile of satisfaction before and of desire after;

Another took back from him the smile that, as in an alcove, leads to a swooning;

Another took back from him the sigh of a fearful bird.

And then he was stripped of his languid movement as of one who has been sated with love; and of his loving way of saying ‘It’s raining’, as if it were raining angels; and from the rosary of gazes, one after the other: the imperious like the astonished, the docile and the fascinating were taken back from him;—and the gentle one he raped came in her turn and took back from him the gaze of the cornered animal, the gaze of love and of despair.

And finally another took back from him her soul, that deliciously ingenuous soul from which he had fashioned a cape in white velvet; and of Don Juan there remained nothing but a hollow ghost, a rich
man with no money, a thief without arms, a dreary human grub reduced to its reality, and giving up its secret!

A
T
the Chateau de la Fourche, everything was melancholy and grandiose: the gallows name,
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to begin with, redolent of a more severe and primitive justice, meted out in seigneurial times; the four dark avenues whose lamentations sounded like an ocean; the moats in which black swans swam amongst the broken reeds, the threatening hemlocks, the multitude of blooming yellow flowers, that were like so many dead suns; the chateau, with its storm-coloured walls, its roof undulating like furrows of ploughland, its narrow, ogived, trefoiled windows, its broken tower swarmed over by ivy so thick it seemed as perennial as life itself.

Having mounted the steps and crossed the threshold, one entered a series of huge, cold, and lofty rooms, hung with greensward on which one gazed once more at the slanting reeds of the moat, the melancholic flowers and the hemlock, sheltering in their shade the royal procession of mourning swans. Simple straw matting was all there was in the way of carpeting; everywhere were sleeping dogs, muzzles between their paws, and a strange, spectral vision (which I could never get used to): moving from room to room, snapping its beak every time a door was opened, was a tame heron. This funereal creature went everywhere; it followed us at mealtimes, pecking at a large pan that contained its feed; at regular intervals the bird would make a noise like a loose tile clacking in the wind against an old wall. It was called the Missionary, because of its resemblance, with its benevolent, sidelong look, to a Capuchin monk who had come to preach at La Fourche. The death of the monk, a few days after, coincided with the appearance of the bird, which had been shot and wounded, and was found on the moat by a gamekeeper.

When, on my first evening at La Fourche, I heard this story, I had been amused, even though my host told it without a glimmer of humour. The next day, however, I started to find the Missionary unsettling, less for its ugliness than for the absolute assurance with which the creature had taken sovereign possession of the place; as if
it really were there to accomplish some supernatural design. No one ever shooed it away or shut it in; as soon as its beak clacked against a door, someone would get up to let it enter, and if it left a room with us, it would always go first, walking gravely, with the expression, not of some Capuchin, but of an old, incorruptible, and gently implacable judge.

The Missionary: privately, I had already rechristened it, Remorse.

One evening, when we had risen from table, having dined on venison in juniper-flavoured cider, I nearly tripped over the bird near the door, and in my annoyance I rather hissed at it:

‘Well go on through, Remorse!’

‘Why did you not call it Missionary?’ the Marquis de la Hogue asked me sharply, seizing my arm and looking at me with eyes alive, not with anger as I had first thought, but with terror.

He went on in a strangled voice, hardly able to get the words out:

‘How did you know its name is Remorse? Who told you?’

‘You did!’

By risking this, which was a shot in the dark, for I was almost as disturbed as Monsieur de la Hogue, I had made myself privy to more confidences.

When we entered the room reserved for our nightly conversations, the bird was there in front of the fireplace where huge logs were flaming, standing on one leg, its beak under its wing. Hoping our conversation would continue, I enquired casually, as I sat down in one of the wooden armchairs that resembled a stall in a cathedral:

‘Is it asleep?’

‘It never sleeps!’ replied Monsieur de la Hogue—and sure enough, at that moment, in a brighter light cast by the fire, I saw the cold, ironical eye of the old judge, fixing me with the muddied gleam of a star reflected in a frog-pond—the incorruptible and gently implacable eye.

‘It never sleeps,’ went on Monsieur de la Hogue, ‘and neither do I. My heart never sleeps. I know sleep, but I know nothing of the unconscious. My dreams are a seamless continuation of my evening thoughts, and come morning, I join my dreams with equally seamless logic to my thoughts. It seems to me that I have swum for a single hour in full intellectual clarity, for thirty-odd years. And what is it I dream about during the endless hours of my life? Of nothing, or rather, of negations—what I have not done, what I shall not do, what
I should not do, even if my youth were granted me a second time. For that is who I am, I am the man who has never acted, who has never lifted a finger to further the fulfilment of a desire, or a duty. I am the lake no wind has ever ruffled, the forest that has never soughed, the sky untroubled by any clouds of action.’

After uttering these rather solemn, even lapidary, phrases he was silent for a few seconds, and then:

‘Do you know about my life? No, you are too young, and in any case what people say about me is not me. I have never told my story, and if you had not, by chance—or by some providential perspicuity—uttered a word—a name!—that (I confess) fills me with dread—then you should not have heard my confession either.

Here it is:

‘I was eight years old, when my mother brought home from her far-flung travels a little girl of about my own age, our cousin, at least by name, whom the death of her parents had left as vulnerably alone in the world as a lamb lost at night in a wood. This adorable little thing instantly became the spoiled child, and an ideal sister, or even a future fiancée for me, an angel fallen from the heavens for my eternal consolation. At twelve, I was a precocious, stout-hearted lad, grown up in the country; even then I loved Nigelle infinitely, and in consequence, until the day I lost her, my love was such that it could neither grow nor decrease. She loved me in return, with the same ardour; I knew it, too, and her dying confession taught me nothing I didn’t know, except my own wickedness.

‘As soon as the first glimmer of reasoning inhabited my infant brain, I had arrived at a singular conception of life, which I now feel to be criminal. Having, one hot noon, picked a rose whose scent exasperated and whose purple smile made me want to possess it, I wandered about the garden paths with my rose forgotten between my fingers; I noticed that within an hour it was all crumpled and wilted, wounded by the arrows of the sun. And I thought, it is permissible to desire roses, but one must not pick them.

‘And I thought, when Nigelle came up to me, one can desire women, but one must not pick them.

‘Following on from this primordial discovery, I was besieged by a host of thoughts, and slowly I came to elaborate a whole philosophy of the negative, a religion of nirvana took root in my proud and
shallow mind. One day, I summed the whole thing up in a phrase:

‘ “Man must remain on the threshold.”

‘A few books came to my assistance, ascetic treatises, a summary of Plato, some fragments of the German metaphysicals,
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but to all practical intents and purposes the doctrine was my own. I was very proud of it, and I plunged resolutely into the darknesses of inaction.

‘I applied myself to accomplishing only the simplest of acts, and certainly only those which, while procuring me no great pleasure, could never lead to my experiencing any disappointment.

‘I had violent desires, and I enjoyed them, I wallowed in them, I got drunk on them. My heart expanded, until it contained the world. Wanting everything, I had everything, but not in the way you hold something between your two small, trembling hands. I took everything, but nothing of its own accord gave itself to me; I had everything—but lovelessly!

‘It was only later, at a particularly solemn moment, that I understood the existence of love. Until that time, my pride had sustained my illusion, and my days passed happily; I was proud of having escaped from the disenchantment consequent upon any action when carried through.

‘Even today, and now that I know, now that suffering has made me wise, I would still be unable to pick the rose. What purpose would it serve? This is the terrible refrain that runs perpetually through my head, and it has never been so imperative as now.

‘For twenty years Nigelle and I lived side by side: she became shyer and sadder by the day, overawed by my fortune, while she, poor thing, possessed only the treasure of her blonde hair. For my part, I became increasingly proud, and formidably uncommunicative.

‘I loved her as much as it is possible to love, but I loved her only as far as the threshold.

‘And I never did cross that threshold, and nor did my shadow; and not so much as the shadow of my heart ever walked about in that palace of love.

‘Tender and welcoming, the door had been open always, but I turned aside my head, when I passed in front of it, to contemplate my own desire, to commune with my own desire, to confide to my desire the dreams I sought never to realize.

‘To cross the threshold? And what then? That palace was possibly
a palace like any other—but the palace of my dreams was unique, and no one will ever see its like again.

‘She died for love of me, I who loved her, and I say it again, with infinite love. She died with these words: “I love you!” And I replied nothing.’

The heron changed leg, snapped its beak, and this time buried it under its left wing: now the mournful, ironic eye was fixed upon Monsieur de la Hogue.

‘I think that this bird’, went on my host, ‘seems to you ugly and ridiculous, doesn’t it?’

‘Above all, grim.’

‘Ridiculous and grim. I endure it as a punishment. It frightens me, it pains me, and I wish it thus. You do understand, of course, that if I wanted I could wring its neck in no time at all!’