Priscilla of Alexandria

by Maurice Magre

  Her first thought is to take a dagger that she has in a chest and to strike him with it, to punish him for having become so ugly and not having warned her about it. But she does not yield to it, and the comical aspect of the situation appears to her. She laughs. She laughs until she weeps.

  And when she has laughed a great deal before the stupefied cook, she tells herself that it is in the logic of her character and her life always to go on to the end of things, to attain the goal that she has fixed.

  She opens the curtains of the bed brutally and orders the cook to undress and lie down. She speaks as a Sultana and his refusal would certainly cost him his life. He obeys. She lies down beside him and shuts her eyes.

  She sends him away in the morning, paid and content.

  She will have him beaten some time after, because he has boasted about his adventure. She quits Genoa and goes to install herself in Rome, and then Naples.

  She has lovers. She becomes famous because the story of her captivity and her escape has spread. She has been nicknamed the Sultana, and also the Immodest, because she has the custom of receiving her lovers naked—to cut short the preliminaries, she says. She has had Moorish baths constructed in her palace. Her servants are Arab converts to Christianity. The Inquisition watches her because of the perfume of Islam that hovers around her.

  Khair Eddin Barbarossa has not forgotten her. Several times he has messages transmitted to her by prisoners that he ends back without ransom for that purpose. He begs her to come back. Sultan Soliman has invested him with the title of Captain Pacha and he is, according to him, the most powerful individual in the Barbary States, with which François I of France has just made an alliance.

  But she rejects his propositions with disdain. She finds that one dies too abruptly and too easily out there. The principal reason that keeps her away from Algiers, she says, is that one cannot spend a single night with a young man there without exposing him either to castration or impalement.

  She has a liking for young men. She has been obliged to quit Rome because she had seduced and received in her bedroom at the same time the two young nephews of Cardinal Campanella.

  In Naples she organized nocturnal feasts where there were only adolescents, and to which she succeeded in making a young woman of great beauty come, who had a reputation for virtue that, naturally, she lost.

  It was her love of young men that were to cause, by turns, Lorenza’s salvation and doom.

  She went to install herself in Fondi, because at that moment Giulia de Gonzague lived there, who was married to Vespasio Colonna, and the renown of whose beauty had caused her umbrage. There, she made the acquaintance of Colonna’s young brother, who was only fourteen, and was smitten with him. Giulia and her husband talked about having her expelled from the city. In order to get her revenge she left Fondi one evening, taking the boy with her, and returned to Naples.

  In the meantime, Khair Eddin Barbarossa was ravaging the Italian coasts with his ships. He learned that Lorenza was in Fondi. He resolved to recapture her by force. At the same time he would take possession of the celebrated Giulia, of whom he intended to make a gift to Sultan Soliman.

  He disembarked secretly by night some distance from Fondi and had the city surrounded by his troops, who were able to advance without being seen under cover of orange and olive groves. It was only when they set up ladders on the ramparts that the alarm was raised. Khair Eddin’s janissaries began the pillage of the city, but they searched for Lorenza in vain; she had left that very morning.

  Giulia, woken up from her sleep, only had time to leap on to a horse in her night-dress and, conducted by a young squire of her husband’s household, was able to flee. The Algerian cavaliers pursued them for a long time. They were able to lose them in the Abruzzi, where they knew the roads.

  Giulia’s troubles were not over. She camped with the young squire under the trees of a forest, but she was only clad in a light linen chemise, which had been torn during the journey. Either because he had desired her for a long time, because he thought that he merited that recompense or because of the disturbance that combats cause, he was unable to resist the sight of a woman of such great beauty almost naked, the young squire threw himself upon her and raped her.

  She had him killed in arrival in Rome and he claimed as he died that she had been “consenting and very willing.”

  Vespasio Colonna had been able to escape the massacre in Fondi but his palace had burned and his fortune was lost. In Rome, he learned simultaneously about his wife’s rape and Lorenza’s abduction of his brother. All his enemies were laughing about it loudly. He became furious, and set out with four servants for Naples in order to look for his brother there and take his revenge.

  Lorenza’s palace was on the road to Vesuvius. He entered it by violence and almost without resistance. A single servant received a sword-thrust. For the second time in her life Lorenza was surprised in the arms of her lover by a man avid for vengeance. They were both naked and there was nothing over their bodies but a large crimson silk sheet, under which they appeared in the light of a torch when the door opened. They must have gone to sleep on one another’s shoulder, and in their surprise, they remained in that attitude.

  Vespasio ran toward Lorenza calling her a bitch and an infidel, and dealt her a mighty blow with his sword that traversed her heart, after which he seized her by the hair and dragged her cross the floor, while stamping on her. But she was dead. A great flood of blood had sprung forth, entirely inundating the young man, who was still clinging to Lorenza’s body and started howling and calling to her by name.

  It was necessary for two of Vespasio’s servants to tear him away by force and take him to the road. He was tied up, as he was, on a horse, and they departed, for it was in the destiny of that family to ride without garments along the roads. The local inhabitants, woken up, saw with amazement cavaliers passing in a whirlwind, with a naked adolescent in their midst who was screaming incessantly: “Lorenza!”

  As she had given great riches to churches when she was alive, Lorenza was buried with great pomp. An artist engraved on her tombstone a Venetian stiletto, a rose and a turban with a Moorish fastening.

  Bagawali

  with the lotus-blue eyes

  Bagawali with the lotus-blue eye was born of a woman of the Carnatic province named Gubrukh and the god Vishnu himself. That sublime parentage is an established fact. Gubrukh made no secret of the circumstances in which she had known that marvelous connection. She did not take any vanity from it, any more than her husband, the vaisya Lakkha. Both were simple and modest. Lakkha was a man of feeble temperament who never went any further than the field that he cultivated with two sudras. Gubrukh was sterile and wanted to have a child. She therefore went to the temple of Tirupati where, by virtue of the sanctity of the Brahmins and the efficacy of their prayers, the god did not disdain to engender.

  She had come at the time of the annual festival, in which the statue of Vengatta Souara is paraded through the streets.9 She had been noticed by the Brahmin Farhad while she was at prayer. He had approached her and had touched her shoulder. What did she want of the god? A child? He would give her the means to have her prayer granted.

  At nightfall, in accordance with the Brahmin’s indications, she had come to a little square in the depths of the city. There she had found herself before a wall of sparkling whiteness where there was a minuscule ogival door surrounded by floral faiences. That door gave access to the temple gardens. She had gone in, had traversed the garden and penetrated into the temple. As the Brahmin had told her to do, she had taken off her sari and uncovered her legs and belly completely, leaving little bells in her hair, which she agitated at intervals.

  Guided by the sound, the god had come, groping in the darkness. Gubrukh had felt him on top of her, and his caress, she said, was exactly similar to that of men, just as brief and perhaps a little more brutal.

  Bagawali was born within a year.

  Out of gratitude, her mother often took h
er when she was young to the temple of Tirupati. The Brahmin Farhad saw her, noticed her beauty and appreciated it. He told the simple Gubrukh that a new favor was reserved for her. He recognized in Bagawali a predestined child who ought to be consecrated to the divinity. He had no difficulty in obtaining that she became a priestess of Siva and entered the school of sacred dancers.

  According to the story of Bagawali’s life that we have via the letters of Dupleix’s secretary,10 she had always had an aversion for the Brahmin Farhad. He raped her on the third day of her entry into the temple, and to succeed in that he had been obliged to lock her up and deprive her of nourishment. It was him who tattooed the image of a lingam on her thigh, as was customary with girls consecrated to Siva, and, she said, he prolonged that operation in such a fashion that she suffered more than the others in undergoing it. He whipped her often and when she refused to give herself to him he threatened to imprison her in a sandalwood pagoda in which the serpents of Vengatta Souara were kept, where, he told her, she would have to endure caresses more penetrating than those of men.

  Eventually, he attempted to restore, for her, a practice whose cruelty was so great that the Brahmins of Siva had renounced it long before. In fact, in more ancient times, every young girl who entered the college of Siva had to receive in her body an emblem of the god in the wood of the Sisu tree, of proportions so enormous that many died after that possession. Would Bagawali with the lotus-blue eyes spare herself that ordeal?

  She affirmed that she would.

  In September 1746, when the French fleet commanded by La Bourdonnais11 took possession of Madras, the most celebrated person in the Carnatic province was the dancer Bagawali. The priestesses of Siva were then in India what those of Dionysus and Aphrodite had been in Greece. The pleasure of amour and veneration for the gods were mingled in the honors rendered to them. Simple individuals watched their dances and had them afterwards in the temples. The richest men had them come to their homes. The sum to pay was fixed, and collected by the Brahmins.

  Offers for Bagawali arrived from all over southern India. She was obliged to refuse the greater number of them. Some desired her for her beauty, others for the perfection she brought to the art of dancing, others for her knowledge of all caresses and her manner of practicing them. Every new moon, the Nabob of Arcata, a singular man who never showed himself to anyone, sent a cortege of a dozen elephants caparisoned in silver in search of her, whose mahouts, golden robe, were seated under vermilion parasols.

  “The renown of such a beauty had wakened my curiosity greatly,” recounted the Chevalier Pierre de Landrecy to Monsieur Tilloy, who was Dupleix’s secretary. “Not a day went by when I did not go on horseback in the direction of the temple, which had been pointed out to me, in spite of the extreme danger, posed by snakes as much as men. My comrades preferred to savor mediocre pleasures in Madras. I thought that he contemplation of the natural beauties that it had been given to me to see while seeking human beauty was a sufficient satisfaction. I could not help having the certainty that I would encounter Bagawali, and that was an obsession.”

  Pierre de Landrecy, an officer on the Phénix in La Bourdonnais’ fleet, was to encounter Bagawali.

  He had been riding through the forest for a long time. It was March. There was such an outburst of verdure and flowers, with perfumes so heavy, that it made him dizzy. The hooves of his horse disappeared in the profusion of petals. He arrived in a place where the great trees gave way to spinneys and he found himself among crimson asokas in such great number that nature seemed to have been stained by blood.

  As he continued on his way he suddenly perceived a kind of perfectly round pagoda, constructed in red wood, almost the same color as the asokas, with a blue dome. At the sound he made, a woman appeared in the doorway and stood there, motionless. Instinctively, he leapt down from his horse and advanced toward her.

  A conversation was engaged. He only spoke French, which she did not understand. In consequence, they only expressed very simple things, by gestures. At hazard, however, he pronounced the name of Bagawali, indicating her. Then Bagawali, for it was her, let an infantile joy burst forth. The idea that her celebrity had even reached the French, the masters of Madras, intoxicated her. She picked up her cymbals and started to dance, to Pierre de Landrecy’s great surprise, while he sat down familiarly on the mat of the pagoda.

  She danced with her breasts and hips more than with her legs. Sometimes she braced herself and fell backwards, and then spun, bent down and crawled. Sometimes she raised her arms toward the heavens, in a pose of invocation, as if to take invisible powers as her witness. She gradually became excited. A sensual frenzy seemed to take possession of her body. In the end, she fell to the ground and remained there, with a breathlessness that caused her to shake.

  Pierre de Landrecy gazed at her in admiration. But he perceived that she raised her head and that there was a hint of surprise in her lotus-blue eyes, which became a hint of disappointment. He did not know that the dance was the one that the bayaderes perform to prepare themselves for amour and that, when they fall down at the end, that is the precise moment when they have brought their bodies, by means of the rhythm, to the highest degree of desire. Their fall is only a fashion of offering themselves to the man for whom they are dancing.

  Pierre de Landrecy did not know that, but the solitude, the perfume and the color of the crimson flowers, and the beauty of the woman contributed to informing him of it. In a matter of seconds, he had understood, and he remained in Bagawali’s arms until the evening.

  He acquired the habit of coming back at the same time every day, and every day he found her again. They made love in the pagoda of red wood, in the sunlight of the clearing, and at dusk, when the crimson asoka flowers rain down more abundantly and have a more powerful perfume. And that lasted until the time when all the flowers had fallen and were strewn so abundantly on the ground that Bagawali did not hear the hoofbeats of her friend’s horse on the path when he arrived.

  Then, one morning, Pierre de Landrecy was sent by La Bourdonnais to Pondicherry to carry a message to Dupleix, the Governor General of the French establishments in Hindustan. Perhaps La Bourdonnais had been informed of de Landrecy’s amours, feared for his life, like his friends, and wanted to force a separation. He left without having been able to warn Bagawali.

  For a long time the latter waited in vain on the path that led to Madras. A month had not gone by when she fell into an extreme despair and renounced the hope of seeing her lover again.

  Doubtless the other temple dancers, Farhad and the Brahmins had penetrated the mystery of those amours, had been indignant in consequence, and prepared ambushes against the foreigner. To the sound of tambourines, flutes and trumpets, the twelve silver elephants with their gold-clad mahouts had traversed the villages and had returned to Arcata without bringing the nabob the desired dancer. What a loss for the temple revenues! The perpetual languor in which Bagawali lived threatened the Brahmins with poverty.

  Doubtless they took advantage of her dolor to force her to make an oath to renounce an ingrate and to participate, as a guarantee of that oath, in the mystery of the goddess Shakti, in the same place where she had given herself to the foreigner. There is no doubt that Bagawali loved Pierre de Landrecy with a great and faithful amour, even though she had not been able to exchange any comprehensible words with him. Great amours are not based on words.

  It is only by the intervention of the Brahmins, and by the mystery of the goddess Shakti, that the scene can be explained of which Pierre de Landrecy was the witness when he finally returned at nightfall, on the very day of his return to Madras, to the pagoda where he had made love to Bagawali so often under the asokas the color of coral.

  Having tethered his horse to a tree, he walked over the putrescence of vegetation and fallen flowers that the nascent summer decomposes. A slow, plaintive, heart-rending music stopped him. He crouched down among the clumps of asokas and watched anxiously.

  In the twilight, i
n front of the red pagoda, there were a great many men and women, at least thirty, perhaps fifty—he could not count them. Some were sitting, other standing; almost all were naked.

  A few had the instruments he had heard, which were unknown to him. There must have been tambourines and flutes, and sometimes strange sounds resounded the like of which he had never heard before. Many of the people he saw were delivering themselves to contortions, punctuated with guttural cries, and took an ocher paste from jars with which they rubbed their bodies. He guessed, on seeing the parts of the bodies that they rubbed for preference and the effects that resulted therefrom, that the paste must be an aphrodisiac. There were others who were drinking something similar from a large bowl that was passed from hand to hand.

  A terrible curiosity animated Landrecy. He was seized by vertigo. The asokas seemed to him to be bleeding in a sinister fashion. In his eyes they took on the color of blood, and the entire landscape was a landscape of death.

  A circle had formed now and a human form was dancing in the middle of the watchers, themselves agitated by intoxication, quivering in a kind of hysteria. With horror, Landrecy recognized Bagawali. She appeared to be prey to a furious delirium. Next to her, a naked old man with long braided hair, was howling a sort of incantation.

  Suddenly, Bagawali lay down on the ground, arms open, in the pose of a woman offering herself. Leaning forward between the bushes, Landrecy saw her trembling with desire. The naked old man extended his hands, appeared to be making a kind of consecration over her belly, and with a cry resembling the wail of a jackal, threw himself upon her. Some of the watchers did likewise. The others embraced one another.

  Pierre de Landrecy often expressed regret at not having gone away silently, at not having remounted his horse and come back to Madras with no thought of returning. But he was a man of extreme violence, who did not know how to master his first impulses. It is also necessary to remember that he was strongly attached to Bagawali, that he had acquired the habit of thinking of her as physically his, that he had been traveling for a month while evoking the image of the pleasure that awaited him on his return. It is necessary, finally, to imagine what that young and ardent man might have felt on seeing the woman he desired prey to so many men. It was only later that he was to learn that the scene was the celebration, on the fourteenth day of the month of April, of the orgiastic rite of Shakti, simultaneously obscene and sacred. That knowledge, in any case, would not have diminished his dolor, his rage, or his imprudence.