“Why’s that?... You’ve seen her in that state she gets into, when she refuses to eat anything with an obstinacy that is usually only found among hunger strikers!... Saib Khan is the only one who can persuade her to eat!”
“How does he do that?”
“He hypnotises her... You know how his system works… there has been enough talk about it of late… Work on the mind to cure the matter..! It isn’t anything new; in India, they have practised therapeutic techniques for healing the mind for many centuries... In comparison with them, the science of our modern doctors is like the bawling of a new-born baby... Of course, when Saib Khan treats a patient as difficult as the Marchioness…a patient who refuses to be treated… he is forced to act with a certain psychic brutality, the very thought of which completely destroys the poor woman’s resistance beforehand... You can understand that her moments of madness make me feel very sad... but why should I encourage the poor madwoman? That’s why I tell her ‘it’s for your own good!’... and all this because she imagines herself to be married to a... a...”
Christine looked at me with a fixed expression.
“Married to a what..? Tell me exactly what you’re thinking,” I insisted, “very well then, she imagines she’s married to a phenomenon that is stronger than death… is that it?”
She nodded her head in a fashion that only half satisfied me:
“That doesn’t make sense… she could imagine that as much as she wants and still not try to starve herself to death!”
“What do you want me to say?... What do you want me to say?”
I resumed, after pausing for a moment:
“If I understand you correctly, Saib Khan can only cure her for the duration of a few weeks…”
Without looking at me, Christine answered:
“Alas! It is a strange thing to see how, in a movement as regular as a pendulum, the Marchioness slides from life to death and mounts again from death to life and back again! After some time in that state, the idea comes back to her that only death can cure her... The Marquis’ only hope is now with Saib Khan.”
“But in all other respects, apart from this idea, is she quite lucid?”
“Completely lucid; she’s sane and remarkably intelligent.”
“Then does it seem unimaginable to you that they would even lay a finger upon this absurd idea?... When I say lay a finger upon it... I mean, after all, the Coulterays (from Louis-Jean-Marie-Chrysostome up to the present Georges-Marie-Vincent) must have all had proper birth and death certificates... surely they’ve all got authentic documents?”
“Not all of them! This is what makes the Marquis unhappy. There were two Coulterays who died abroad, in mysterious circumstances… you know that they have always been great travellers, who went abroad in search of adventure. Others were born in foreign lands, and it is true that certain papers are not completely authentic. But you know that in the last two centuries it was commonplace, here in France, for births, marriages, and deaths to be proved, especially in the large aristocratic families, more by the testimonies of their contemporaries than by documents that they either failed to procure or that they got rid of during the Revolution… The Marchioness is aware of this peculiarity… But they do not prove either the births or deaths of the Coulterays in a manner satisfactory to her... it’s a mere formality in his eyes... she has confided all these things to me... and, for his part, the Marquis has put all the documents he can find at my disposal... and there you have it... It’s unbelievable...”
“But in the end, if she was indeed of sound mind… how could such an idea have come to her in the first place?...”
“In the first place… such an idea… oh, my God! My dear Monsieur Masson, I can’t tell you… I don’t know anything about that…”
There was hesitancy in her response… Without a doubt I had, without knowing it, alluded to a certain other thing about which she still had no right to speak to me... still she told me nothing, it was just one of a number of great misfortunes that the Marquis did not care to share with everyone and in which, moreover, she appeared to find comfort...
In the final moments of this conversation, Christine’s head had been bent over a delicate piece of chasing; she seemed totally absorbed in the lines that her stylus cut, with a singular fluency, into the surface of the plaque she was preparing. I leaned over her to take a look at it.
“I’m making this for you,” she said, in a harmonious and calming voice, “so you can set it in your binding for the Socratic Dialogues…”
I recognized a certain Apollonian profile; the eyes, fissures of almond; the shape of the mouth; the perfect oval curves of an image which may have been that of Alcibiades, or some other disciple who walked in the shaded groves of the god Akademos: but it also resembled Gabriel, as much as one drop of water resembles another…
IX
Dorga
8th June. – Christine was right once more. I have seen the Marchioness again. She was unrecognizable.
Three days is all it has taken for this complete transformation to take effect. Now she is a living person once more. In any case, she seems to have regained her appetite for life.
She goes out… or rather they take her out in an open, horse-drawn carriage... It would seem that she adores horses… She returns from her outings to the park with cheeks aglow... the look on her face is still sad and anxious, but at least blood flows through her veins once more… The mind is still sick, but the body has healed…
She goes out with her English lady in waiting. Sangor drives. Sing-Sing sits there behind him… She never receives visitors… Christine tells me that it is, in fact, she who does not want to see anyone… She refuses to go out into society… And society has not insisted… A rumour has begun to spread that the poor young woman has a weak brain… Her silences, her weird peculiarities and her ever-more distant, aloof air have, little-by-little, detached her from the social circle of the Marquis. In the first months following his return to France, the Marquis gave several parties in his mansion; but all these festivities, that for a moment resuscitated life on the Béthune quays, came to an abrupt end. And now they all pitied Georges-Marie-Vincent. Nevertheless, his friends congratulated him for his ability to rise above his domestic misfortunes.
Naturally, I related all of these details to Christine. She seemed resigned to the whole thing.
“The Coulteray bloodline is the strongest of them all!” she told me. “They have outlived most others..! A petty bourgeois would be crushed by his misfortunes. Sure, he takes mistresses; and he would like to have added me to his collection… but he has not succeeded. He’s over that now, or at least I hope he is. I am not, I cannot be, anything more than a friend to him and to the Marchioness... they need me as a go-between. There you have the secret of my situation in this house.”
In the meantime, the Marquis had entered, with a decanter and silver goblets in his hand. His eyes were gleaming.
“You simply must taste this,” he said, “this is what Saib Khan has prescribed for the Marchioness. She has tried it. She has declared it to be excellent! It is some cocktail, believe you me! And have you any idea what’s in it? It’s a mixture of horse blood, of haemoglobin, and other things that I cannot identify..! Have a taste of it with me, I say! There’s nothing nauseating about it… quite the contrary… it sits warmly in the stomach, like a vintage Armagnac! It would awaken the dead! And it gives you such an appetite!” We drank. It was, indeed, everything that the Marquis had said.
“With some of this, my little Christine, we’ll have her back on her feet in fifteen days!”
He turned towards me: “You were there when they came to take her to the doctor, were you not..? Christine told you about it, I presume?... You are a true friend… The poor girl! If only it were in our power to save her!... Bah! When the body is working, the head will be better in good time!”
He tapped his forehead and went away with his decanter and his goblets; he was delighted, radiant, glowing…
> “It’s always the same,” Christine said to me, “every time he imagines that his wife has been saved! Then, in the meantime, he will go out this evening to meet his Dorga!”
“His Dorga..?”
“Yes, Dorga – she’s a famous Indian dancer!...”
“Decidedly, he ought to stay here in Paris – the man shouldn’t go all the way to India!”
“He brought her over at the same time as his wife…”
“You were telling me how much he adored the Marchioness!”
“Aren’t you the innocent one... a Coulteray is capable of loving his wife and having ten mistresses at the same time… and this one truly does him proud… Half of Paris chases after her...”
9th June. – I have seen Dorga… yes, even though I never go out in the evening more than ten times a year, I was curious enough to see the dance act of this beautiful Hindu goddess for myself… I went to the music hall. There she had, as they say in the jargon of theatrical reviews, ‘a brilliant audience.’
I had expected to see a half-naked little dancing girl, with a few bits of jewellery covering her flesh, a couple of discs over her breasts, a metal belt and heavy bracelets around her ankles; I had expected a few lewd rhythmic movements of the hips in the setting of some kind of pagoda scene, in the usual tedious, ‘generic’ style that was introduced to Europe after the last Great Exhibition. But what actually appeared was a magnificent, beautiful creature, with a pale amber complexion, wearing a stunning gown of the latest fashion.
My, my, the Marquis is certainly fond of contrasts! The Marchioness and Dorga, they’re like day and night: here a pale day, sinking into inevitable decline, its last rays fading out in an anaemic crepuscule in the northern sky; and there a sultry evening, burning, fabulous and flaming with all the fires of the Orient; but I noticed that the dazzling jewels that ornamented her were outshone by the light in her cruel, voluptuous eyes – eyes that outshone the sudden flame that lights an iron furnace.
The Orient adorned in a dress from the Rue de la Paix, the limbs of the goddess Kali in silk stockings; she danced a shimmy while an intense silence descended over those who watched.
After her last dance, when the room was once again able to breathe, a deafening round of applause attested to the satisfaction of the spectators, who wanted an encore: but the beautiful dancer had disappeared, quite scornfully, and did not return…
The lights came back on over the faces of the crowd, pale or flushed according to temperament, and I noticed the Marquis, scarlet-faced, coming out of a box with Saib Khan…
He condescended to recognize me:
“You saw her?” he called out to me… “You saw her, eh?... What a marvel she is!”
Then, to my complete stupefaction, he took me by the arm:
“Let’s go and congratulate her..!”
I allowed myself to be swept along. We were soon at her dressing room door, which was under siege, and was opened for no-one but us… There she stood, half-naked and surrounded by flowers.
The Marquis introduced me:
“Benedict Masson, a great poet!”
I did not protest… I would have been incapable of saying a word. I looked at her furtively, shamefaced, and with an indifferent expression… which is a posture that I often adopt around women in order to mask my timidity. But she just threw a scornful glance at me in her mirror and didn’t even turn around. Then she spoke few indifferent words of politeness. She must have thought me to be extremely badly dressed. She called for champagne, then she passed behind a screen; and I ran out of there, my head hot, my ears ringing.
I felt myself in the grip of a violent hatred for the Marquis… and for all these other rich men, who have only to debase and ruin themselves financially in order to pick up women like her.
But I... What could I ever have?... Only the image of Christine inside my head… that charming and delicate effigy!...
Oh, Lord God! I feel as though I ought to tattoo my skin like a native… like a “happy” man… with a heart pierced by an arrow and around it the words:
“I love Christine...” Perhaps if I could look at myself in the mirror, I might believe that it has happened!...
X
The Other Thing
10th June. – The spectacle presented by Dorga had prevented me from paying the slightest attention to the Indian physician, the famous Saib Khan, who was sitting in the same box as the Marquis. I found it difficult to remember those womanly eyes; the deep, black eyes of a houri set in a bearded mask. But today, the Marquis came down to the library with Saib Khan and I was able to watch him closely and completely at my leisure.
Saib Khan has rather a lot of what one might call Afghan traits about him. He is handsome. They are all very handsome in that land. He is not quite as bronzed as the Indian princes from the palaces on the banks of the Ganges. His severe face is framed by a well-groomed beard, which ends in a point. Like Sangor, he has a powerful physique, broad shoulders and a fine posture. He is smartly dressed and shod: he has a simple elegance, he is impeccable. I can understand his power over women and the disorders he inspires. He appears to be so sure of himself that it is almost impossible not to be agitated by some kind of disturbance in the presence of this double mystery, with the soft eyes of a woman and that carnal, carnivorous mouth.
All of this led me to wonder... Where had I seen that dangerous smile and those tiger’s teeth before? Of course, it was in the portraits… especially in the picture of Louis-Jean-Marie-Chrysostome, the first of the four...and that smile, always a little ferocious, if not quite as powerful, from time to time, strays across the face of our bon vivant, Georges-Marie-Vincent!
The two of them interest themselves in my work which consists, for the moment, of making a catalogue of the rarest documents, the most precious of which I had found lying in a pile in a corner of the library. I am allowed to classify and collect them according to my own liking and tastes...
The Marquis is by no means a brute. I do not find him to be an ‘informed’ collector, because this collection owes little or nothing to any effort on his part, but he is highly erudite, and well-informed about the literary movements of the last two centuries: this I cannot deny, I cannot deny... he is a man that, on his travels, has always interested himself in libraries... We have had a long discussion about the one in Florence, and about the Longus manuscript, and about the famous ink spot of Paul-Louis Courier... [6] He did not defend Paul-Louis for making light of such a crime... I did not realize that the Marquis was such a lover of Daphnis and Chloë. But, then again, that’s all just literature... the reality is Dorga..!
While these things passed through my mind, there can be little doubt that Saib Khan was thinking about the same things, because his sinister smile widened across his jaw with all the gleaming menace of a wild animal...
They must have left the house as soon as they had left the library, because I heard the sound of an automobile being driven out of the courtyard...
Almost immediately, the door which led into the small vestibule opened and the Marchioness appeared: “Where do you suppose he learned all that,” she hissed, “where do you think?... Can you tell me? Georges-Marie-Vincent almost completely neglected his education...or, at least, that is what he told me. He could never even remember the name of his teacher... So? ...”
She had been listening at the door... So it had all been in vain! Although she was better physically, that idea of hers was always there...that absurd idea that made me look at her with an infinite sadness... She was not mistaken in noticing this in my manner:
“I make you unhappy, isn’t it true? Christine has excited your pity for me!”
Then she said, in a deeper voice:
“Isn’t Christine still here?”
“No, she has gone home!”
“Oh, that’s good,” she continued, “now we can talk... She will have told you, no doubt, about the idea... They all think that I’m insane here... There are moments when I wish that I was dead..
. dead, I tell you!... But at the same time, I am afraid of death... and I’ll tell you why, one of these days, if you haven’t already fathomed it for yourself... I am afraid of death; I am afraid of life; I am afraid of Saib Khan!... He is all-powerful... He can do anything that it is possible to do... If he had been able to extract my idea from my body as one would extract a tooth, he would have done so long ago... I knew him back in India... No mere idea can resist him!... So why has he not been successful in my case?... It is because, in my case, it is not just an idea – it is the reflection of a reality... Do you understand?... It is not a primitive imagination over which a man like Saib Khan can prevail... it is a living and natural truth... against which he can do nothing. If Saib Khan was to command a mountain to disappear, it would not make the Himalayas any more movable from their base, would it?... Well, then, neither does he have it in his power to disperse my idea of an inseparable, indestructible bloc... or, at least, not until today, at any rate... the Coulteray bloc... do you understand me? Do you understand me?”
The Bloody Doll Page 8