It was forbidden for prostitutes to have images in their rooms of any religion whatsoever. Those who infringed that prohibition could be whipped and a heavy fine imposed on the brothel-keeper, but in fact, the presence of gods above beds of pleasure was tolerated; it was sufficient that a little curtain should hide them from sight.
Priscilla had placed on her wall, behind a piece of black silk bought for that purpose, a little wooden cross. Perhaps, during hours of conversation in the afternoon, she was subject to the influence of the pagan Seso. Perhaps it was the deceived hope of martyrdom, the observation that human joy was replacing divine joy, that caused such a profound revolution in her soul. What is certain is that when a judge visited Priscilla’s room after the crime she committed, he found behind the little black curtain not a cross, but a statuette representing the goddess Isis.
And the crime was this.
A new collector of taxes, followed by two soldiers who made his demands respected by force, penetrated one evening in the common room of Spartacus’ house. He demanded the register in which the names of the women were inscribed, with their ages and the date of their entry to the house, in accordance with which the sum to be paid for the chrysargirus tax would be determined. Then the collector, who had already drunk a great deal in other places, drank more. He perceived Priscilla and declared that he would make a better calculation if he were allowed to enjoy that girl right away.
Priscilla, who had her back turned, felt her shoulder seized by a strong hand. She looked around and, open-mouthed with amazement, she recognized Peter. It was him, even more monstrous than before, the man who had caused the death of Hypatia.
She often thought of him with horror, as often as she remembered the scene forever engraved in her memory of the chariot, the threshold of the church and the stone thrown by the little girl without sin; and that memory came back every day. Spartacus had no need to give her an order. Everyone knew what was due to a tax collector. She got up meekly and preceded him upstairs, helping him to climb up, because he was unsteady on his feet.
Did Peter recognize her? Undoubtedly, because, before she was able to decide anything in her mind, without waiting for her to turn the placard on the door round, he had hurled himself upon her, thrown her down on the bed and possessed her by force. Then she ceased struggling and became hypocritically complaisant, for the thought of punishment had just appeared in her mind. And what she wanted to punish was not the possession of her body, soiled so many times over; it was the old crime, the great crime.
She therefore caressed the individual that she hated, she took off all his clothes, and she did it so effectively that, at length, he fell asleep.
She had a weapon in her room, a large knife forgotten by a man passing through. She only dealt him a single blow, which caused him to die immediately. She regretted not having made him suffer, but it was necessary that he did not utter a single cry, for she wanted to have the chance, albeit slim, of escaping. The blow was so violent, in the throat, that the head was almost entirely severed. As the blood flowed abundantly and might have passed through the crack under the door, she had the presence of mind to staunch it with one of her garments.
When they had no more water for ablutions, the women sometimes went down with their pitcher to go and fetch it from the fountain in the street. She did so noisily and ostentatiously, and went back upstairs with her full pitcher. It was only then that she watched out for the opportunity to get out without being seen by anyone. She succeeded, and lost herself in the immensity of Byzantium. She was not found, in spite of active searches. Perhaps she hid in the home of a street-porter who came every week and paid Spartacus dear in order to spend all night with her.
She had jewelry and money, but above all the love of life that she had acquired, and which gave her ingenuity and courage. It was doubtless her love of life that ensured that no more mention was ever heard in Byzantium of the prostitute Fabrilla, who cut the throat of the tax collector of her quarter one night for no reason, after having given herself to him for a long time.
Priscilla surfaces again in Corinth, a city that Christianity had not yet submerged. Those who remained attached to the old gods were more numerous there than elsewhere, and they had conserved their temples there.
She is rich, she represents herself overtly as a courtesan, and the elite society of Corinth aspire to the honor of being invited to her house She has as a titular lover the poet Caius Aurelius, then at the apogee of his glory, and she sometimes deceives him with other young men, if accomplishing an action with the assent of the person who is being deceived, and sometimes in his presence, can be called deception.
She is no longer a Christian. She goes every day to the altar of a temple raised to Minerva, she places her forehead on the stone and she asks the goddess to grant her intelligence. Is it really of the goddess that she is requesting it? Priscilla is well versed in philosophy. She says that she is a neoplatonist, she has read Porphyry and Plotinus, and it is doubtless toward the great universal thought, the pure logos of ideas, that she raises her spirit. She strives to penetrate the more abstract writings of Hypatia: the commentaries on the astronomical canon of Ptolemy and that on the conic sections of Apollonius of Perga.
She has acquired everything related to Hypatia’s works and to her. She talks about her with admiration. But among those who know her, no one dares ask whether she knew or saw her when she was a child in Alexandria, for then her face is veiled by a sadness that is only dissipated with difficulty.
But the poet Caius Aurelius was found dead in his bed one morning beside a drunken adolescent. Priscilla scarcely regretted him. A short time afterwards she learned of the death of her father Diodorus and she decided to return to Alexandria to collect his vast fortune.
She found her brother there, whose intelligence seemed to her to have diminished further and ears to grown longer, and who had complete confidence in devotion. He welcomed her joyfully, in spite of what he might have been told about her life, because he still desired her.
Did she give herself to him? It is not certain, but if she did, it was rarely. It seems likely, however, that it is only by means of the pleasure of the senses that she could have gained an empire as absolute as the one she had over her brother. She gradually dismissed all the servants and only took into her service idolatrous negroes. She expelled the priests and monks who came incessantly to extort sums of money and she replaced the images of Christ and the Virgin with a statue of Hypatia.
She always had a whip in her bedroom beside her bed, for her brother made the same attempts at night as he had when he was a child, but did not allow himself to be sent away as meekly, either because of his age or because she now granted him, albeit at rare intervals, a few favors. He showed the traces of the whip on his body and his face without any shame, and even laughed and them, saying with a certain pride that it was his sister who had struck him. In spite of his lack of intelligence, with the authority that the name of Diodorus gave him, he permitted Pricilla to establish herself in Alexandria without scandal. A few years later he had a fall from a horse that nearly killed him instantly. When someone came to pick him up he spoke his sister’s name, and died immediately.
Once only, Priscilla wanted to see Hypatia’s house again. Alone, she went down the narrow street that she had descended as a child in the midst of the Christians’ ferocious cries. A tree had grown above the wall of the narrow garden since then and its foliage extended over the street; and Priscilla remarked that it was a laurel. Behind it there were turpentine trees and maples, which exhaled a breath of spring.
She knocked on the door. In the marble vestibule, ornamented by mosaics, she found herself in the presence of a woman with gray hair and a visage desiccated by solitude. It was Hypatia’s sister, who was welcoming to the admirers who sometimes came to visit the martyr’s house.
There was a courtyard behind it, with colonnades of porphyry and a fountain from which no jet of water rose up.
“Here,�
� she said, “are the bronze busts of the philosophers that she loved. This is the courtyard where she strolled, the basin in which she watched the goldfish and the jet of water. Now I no longer maintain either the goldfish or the water jet. What would be the point?”
And she told Priscilla the story of her sister’s death, which she doubtless must have done a thousand times. She had just gone out and was standing on her chariot...
Oh, Priscilla knew all that!
But when, at one point in her story, she said: “Someone demanded that someone who had never sinned should throw the first stone; there was a little girl of fifteen there named Priscilla…,” Priscilla interrupted her, thanked her, and left.
And it was from that day on that she thought incessantly about Bishop Cyril, who was the first cause of the crime in which she had participated, and who still lived, unpunished and glorious.
Patriarch of Alexandria, vanquisher of the heresy of Nestorius, whom he had had condemned at the Council of Ephesus, Cyril had just expelled forty thousand Jews by violence and stripped of their property, to the scorn of all justice and all humanity. He was growing old in an increasing perfume of sanctity, the renown of which flew all the way to the boundaries of the two Empires.
From one of her negro slaves Priscilla heard mention of a sorceress who lived in the Rhacotis quarter. There the dregs of the port swarmed, prostitutes and thieves, all that the villages of the Nile and the African deserts had cast up as debris in the great city. Guided by her slave and clad in a poor costume, she ventured into the labyrinth of the back streets of Rhacotis one night.
The slave held on to her with one hand and agitated a stout stick in the other, and yet she heard many propositions, and hands palpated her breasts and legs. They reached a red-painted door that gave access to a triangular chamber. There was an old woman with a pale face, braided white hair and a fat belly. She was cutting up a slice of pressed dates that made a paste in a wooden spoon. There was a straw mattress beside her and heaps of rubbish. Nothing was suggestive of magic except, perhaps, a few pieces of wood painted black and crudely representing a vague human form.
When Priscilla had explained what she wanted and the sum of money was fixed, she said: “I’m a sorceress of Bubastis, but my tradition doesn’t come from Phoenicia or Thessaly like that of the other witches of the city. So it isn’t Eshmun to whom I pray to summon the power hidden round us that is death. I know secrets that come from the South, from places where all the men are born black, like the sacred races that preceded us. There the Nile appears, less broad than the palms of my hands, and there are mountains so high that the stars touch the stones there. There lives a negro king wiser and more knowledgeable than the Solomon that Arab magicians invoke. I have no need of philters, charms or incantations; the rhythm of the seven syllables and the harmony of the seven movements are sufficient for me. Nevertheless, to strike a living man as you desire it’s necessary that you bring me an object that has touched his body directly, and that you come back to see me seven times.”
Priscilla saw a great difficulty there. She never saw Cyril. It was only out of regard for her father that he had done nothing against her.
She remembered, however, that once, when she was a child, he had given her a little golden cross that he had worn on his chest, a venerable champion of the faith. But where was that cross? Twenty years had passed. She turned the house upside down and finally found it in the little ebony casket where she had once placed it herself. It was a flat cross, with the sign of the crucified Christ, similarly flat, sculpted on it.
She ran to the sorceress that evening. A smile lit up the latter’s toothless face. With a long nail she traversed the metal cross; then she took a piece of black wood in human form and, after hesitating for a second, nailed the golden cross on to the simulacrum of the head. Having put that in the middle of the room she asked Priscilla to “concentrate her life” on the piece of wood.
Priscilla did not know what that meant but, at hazard, she fixed her thought on the object, imagining Cyril dead, for the sorceress repeated to her: “See! See!”
Then the old woman, in spite of her paunch, started dancing, or rather, miming attitudes, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly. While doing that she uttered guttural and rhythmic cries that did not appear to have any meaning.
That took a long time, which seemed interminable to Priscilla. In the end, droplets of sweat were running down the witch’s face and her body was trembling. She fell to the ground. She made a sign to Priscilla to come back the next day.
Patiently, for seven days in succession, Priscilla returned to the witch’s house and the same rites were accomplished; the seven syllables were chanted with the same interminable dance around the wooden simulacrum whose forehead bore the nailed cross.
On the seventh day, the weary Priscilla had ceased to believe; she regretted the time wasted and the comedy played.
When the sorceress fell, she said to her: “It’s done. Now, he’s dead. There are thirty-nine ways to make a man perish without touching him, but this one is the surest. Go. You have no need to come back to tell me that I’ve succeeded, for I have the proof of his death.”
It was not until the next morning that Priscilla learned that the Patriarch of Alexandria had died the previous evening, at the same hour when she had been in the home of the sorceress of Bubastis.
After the evening meal he had wanted to accompany the Bishop of Ephesus, who was his guest. He was on the threshold of his palace when he had suddenly fainted. The Bishop of Ephesus had tried to catch him but had not been able to prevent him from falling heavily on his nose, which was slightly crushed. He was transported to his bed, but he was already dead. The physicians attributed his unexpected death to the abruptness of his fall. There was a little red swelling at the back of the head, almost at the nape.
With the death of Bishop Cyril it seemed to Priscilla that a sort of hidden goal of her existence had been attained. She was happier. She was scarcely forty years old. She was still beautiful. She had desires but she was not in love. It was claimed that she went to Rhacotis by night in order to prostitute herself to slaves in hovels.
It is known from her letters that she had the curiosity of seeing again the Quintus Moschus whose kiss perfumed with honey and acacia had troubled her childhood. She sought him out and invited him to come to see her.
There are men, she wrote, who have grown old before their time for lack of taking care of themselves. He had a beard and rotten teeth. I kissed him on the lips because of the memory I had of his old kiss. Instead of the breath of spring of which I had thought so often, there was a taste of decomposition, and the odor that one senses near cadavers on hot days.
One day, feeling ill, Priscilla had herself carried in a litter to a villa she had on the edge of the sea. Children who were sitting by the roadside uttered cries as she went by. She raised herself up slightly and looked at them. Either in play or because they were Christians and had recognized her, they threw stones in her direction. One stone, thrown by a little girl, struck her on the temple.
Pricilla uttered a cry of joy and fell back. When she arrived at her villa, with blood on her cheek, it was as if her face were illuminated. She did not want the wound to be bandaged. Her fever increased and she became delirious during the night. But she had calmed down in the morning. She had herself carried to the sea shore, under a clump of centenarian pines whose needles rained down on her scattered hair. She asked for tablets and wrote before dying the words that she wanted engraved on her tombstone:
I thank you, O goddess, for having permitted me to be punished in this life for the bad actions I have accomplished therein. Thus, in my next existence, good or bad, I shall arrive virgin of sin and will not bear any burden of the past on my shoulders. And in that way, I shall be among the true elect, those who, having been able to throw far away the black stone of chagrin and the red stone of evil, are susceptible of perfection.
Jeanne the Lascivious
This i
s the story of the daughter of a ferryman, almost exactly as it is told in an old chronicle of Provence.
Jeanne the lascivious lived with her father and her two brothers in a miserable hut on the bank of the Rhône, in a place where there had once been a bridge but whether there was now nothing but a broad, flat boat to take travelers over. When she was very small she wrapped the rope round the post when the boat reached the shore; when she was fourteen she helped her brothers strike the water with an oar, or push against the river-bed with the gaff.
As far as her memory could recall, she had had a flame in the body that drove her to lie down beside men and to have pleasure with them. In the evening she escaped, ran along the river bank and made signs to boatmen descending the river to come and find her among the reeds and the vegetation. Then she gave herself to them all in turn, and her joy was all the greater the more numerous they were.
The hut of beaten earth in which the ferrymen lived was closed by a wooden door, and only had one room, like the huts of the very poor. There they put the provisions that travelers gave them in exchange for the passage; there, they armed themselves; there, they got drunk when they had wine; there they slept, one on top of another. And Jeanne the lascivious was, according to the hazard of the night, the wife of her father or her brothers.
When she approached her twentieth year, she complained of sharp pains in the groin. An old woman from a nearby village, who was renowned for her knowledge of plants, prepared her a cataplasm, which did not cure her. But with time, her malady attenuated, and her face acquired a singular beauty that it had not had before. Her eyes became more profound, her complexion paler, and her hair grew with an unusual abundance.
Priscilla of Alexandria Page 5