The Angel of Lust

by Maurice Magre

  Although he neglected all affairs of State, he remained sensitive to fear. That was what Messalina exploited.

  Valerius Asiaticus had woven a conspiracy against him. It was an established fact. He was about to depart for Germany and he was going to raise an army, making use of the relatives he had out there. He was an intelligent and audacious man, whom the legionaries loved. Furthermore, in the name of justice, he had participated in the murder of Caligula. The honest Suilius knew his accomplices and had collected their confessions.

  The faithful Narcissus also begged Claudius to take measures for his safety. Finally, Lucius Vitellius himself, who had been Valerius’ intimate friend and companion in Syria, denounced him as a traitor to the Emperor. It was necessary to strike him without delay and include in the punishment his mistress Poppea, who added to the crime of treason that of dishonoring her husband by a scandalous life.

  It was morning, when Claudius awoke. He felt the assassin’s daggers in his breast, suffered the terrors of translation, and was agitated by the convulsions of poison. He thought about being precipitated from the height of the Tarpeian Rock. He was bathed in sweat and full of uncertainty. He was persuaded that the danger was so pressing that it was necessary to act immediately and by surprise. Soldiers went to find Valerius, bound his hands and took him before the Emperor.

  Claudius was half-lying on his bed. He was holding a page of the history of the Carthaginians, lifting it toward the sky from time to time. Messalina was beside him.

  Valerius knew what a wretched individual Suilius was. He would have had little difficulty disculpating himself if evidence and good faith had counted for anything. He thought about maintaining a scornful silence in the midst of the baseness by which he was surrounded, but he thought about Poppea and wanted to save her. He therefore spoke. He reminded Claudius of their old friendship, the services he had rendered him, and he did so with so much eloquence, put so much sincerity into his voice, that Messalina felt tears rising to her eyes and was obliged to go out in order to stifle the sobs that were shaking her.

  Meanwhile, Claudius allowed himself to be persuaded. He was seized by the imperious need for justice that he often had. Then it happened that the bonds tying Valerius’ hands came undone. The latter, continuing to speak, sensing that his right hand was free, made a gesture to support his speech. That gesture, perhaps a trifle abrupt, gave Claudius the sensation that Valerius was throwing a javelin dissimulated in his garments. He held out the page of the history of the Carthaginians like a shield, and ducked. He perceived his error a second later, but the emotion he had suffered had caused his taste for justice to fly away. He asked Vitellius for his advice, saying that he would rely upon a man so sage and so devoted.

  And Vitellius, forgetful of former amity, squeezing Messalina’s brodequin, which he carried beneath his toga, in order to steel himself against his treason, declared with an apparent emotion that he certainly took account of what Valerius had done for Rome, what was owed to his courage and years of fidelity, and that it was appropriate to leave to him the choice of his genre of death.

  The case was heard. Valerius turned his face way. He was already looking toward the country where the injustice of men only appears as the effect of a known cause, and not the power to cause suffering.

  On the afternoon of the same day, Valerius Asiaticus had a pyre built in his garden of branches of sandalwood, which he had recently brought from the Orient in large quantity. For he knew that the perfume of that wood favors, after death, the separation of the double from a man and from the matter of his burned body.

  He made is adieux to a few friends and his servants. Then, shortly before dusk fell, he walked through the pathways of his garden for a mute adieu to his other silent friends, the trees. It was the middle of autumn and the leaves were falling of their own accord, seemingly coming toward him.

  As the sun began to disappear, he lay down on his ivory bed, which had been carried on to the terrace. But he got up immediately on perceiving that his pyre, which would be ignited to burn his body, would damage with its flames the vault of cedars under which it was placed.

  The slaves began it again, a little further away, in an uncovered place that he indicated to them. Then he lay down again and one of his freedmen opened his veins rapidly with a razor. He extended his wrists over a golden vase placed to his right in order that the blood would not spread over him. He had asked everyone to go back into the house in order not to be troubled by a last adieu or the sound of a sob.

  There was no longer anything more than the slight murmur of his blood dripping on to the gold. He filled his eyes with the vision of immense, moving, profound, amicable gardens that were clad in a majesty greater than the ordinary. He sensed his soul diminishing with the loss of his life, as if it were drawn by an unknown attraction. The sun poured a great crimson wave over the foliage and the motionless trunks, and Valerius verified then that, as the Asian sage had once told him, there is no greater wisdom than the one taught by the mystery of germination, and that it is from the birth of plants that the most beautiful and the most tranquil road emerges that leads a man to death.

  Messalina terrified Poppea by having her told that Claudius had decided to reestablish for her the ancient punishment for adultery, long fallen into disuse. The adulterous woman was exposed naked on the straw in a prison with a small window to the street. The people were summoned by the public crier at sunrise. All the dregs of the outlying districts came running. Until nightfall she would belong to all the men who wanted her and who penetrated into the prison, in turn, after having received a number. The crowd had sometimes been drawn in greater numbers than by the circus games.

  Poppea preferred to poison herself than submit to that torture. Cornelius Scipio wept for her bitterly, but his old age and his natural timidity gave him the courage to survive her and removed that of avenging her.

  Some time after that, Claudius having finished his history of the Carthaginians, and gather his friends at supper in order to celebrate that event. He invited Cornelius Scipio and, as he was very distracted, he was sincerely astonished, when the latter appeared, not to see him accompanied by Poppea.

  “Destiny has disposed of her,” said the fearful old man, with melancholy.

  XI. The Mystery of the Gardens

  Behind the hill that the gardens covered, within the high wall, there was a small door of solid bronze, which served the friend of flowers and trees to leave home secretly. Messalina, who knew of its existence, had the key brought to her on the same day as the condemnation of Valerius Asiaticus.

  She could not longer put off the pleasure of walking in the inviolate solitudes, of penetrating the mystery of the gardens, to which Valerius attributed a spiritual force. She mounted a chariot, accompanied solely by the negro slave Ahmes, and reached the little door at the same time as the slaves were placing the sandalwood branches on top of one another on the other side.

  When the bronze had swung, she was penetrated by a sensation of freshness that came from the thick vault of very old and very tall oaks that grew there. She would never have thought that there could be trees with trunks as thick, with a form so majestic, and she was astonished that the garden, which she had believed to be perfectly cultivated in all its parts, had a wild aspect in that one.

  She advanced deliberately, desirous of seeing the marvels that legend reported. She walked for a long time over thick moss, until the clumps of bushes gave the impression of being grouped in an orderly manner and she was treading on the gravel of raked paths.

  The disposition of a few cypresses attracted her attention. She went past them and arrived at a small mausoleum of great simplicity. It was borne by four columns and surmounted by a roof like a temple. One reached it via two marble steps. In the middle was an altar where there was a place for an urn, dominated by a stele on which there was only a single ornament, which was a golden lotus engraved with a single inscription: The Friend of Flowers and Trees.

  Messal
ina understood that it was in that place that Valerius had wanted his ashes to be placed. She recoiled. She knew very well that the mausoleum was still empty. If Valerius had killed himself during the day it would have been necessary to rub his body with perfumes that ought to hasten the combustion of the flesh on the pyre and, after the destruction of the flame, to seek the bones in order to deposit them in the bronze urn, with milk, roses and aromatics. In any case, she had not heard the sitines that were made to resonate as the concluding act of funerals.

  She was impressed by the simple gravity of that little monument in the middle of the trees and by the golden lotus engraved on the stone of the stele. She drew away rapidly.

  She had taken a path to the right that, she thought, ought to take her back in the direction from which she had come. But the places she traversed changed aspect. There were white statues shining in the arbors. Some clumps of bushes were reddened by the autumn, others had remained a bright green, and there were some that, with their leaves, black on one side and white on the other, presented the image of a noisy chessboard.

  She dared not follow one narrow path because of two sphinxes that were positioned to either side of the entrance, and she had the sensation that a frisson had run along their ocher-stained stone backs.

  She suddenly emerged into a clearing and her heart leapt in her breast because she was walking in blood. A red light seemed to fall from a dark garnet cupola, from which something like a pebble fell at intervals. Carobs were sadly flamboyant in the last rays of the sun. She crossed the clearing in a few bounds, instinctively lifting up her tunic in order not to be soiled.

  Without turning round, sensing her soul weakening, she advanced very rapidly. A procession of young women, very tall and slender, appeared to be coming to meet her. She counted a dozen. She was about to make them a sign but she saw that their floating robes were only the white trunks of a clump of birches.

  She stopped and looked round. The sun was declining further and further. There was no sound, and everything continued to be motionless. She was struck by the sadness that surrounded her. Trees collapsed in on themselves appeared to be twisting the knots of their wood and hiding desperate faces beneath their bark. Untiring tears wept in the foliage of high branches. There were smaller ones that slid over the trunks of spruces, rounded in white globules of resin, others that made pearls along fig-trees. Pines, like candlesticks, extended their thousands of needles, illuminated by the sunset for a funeral ceremony.

  Messalina understood that she was walking through a mute mourning, a crepuscular festival of death, which the vegetables were celebrating silently.

  She wanted to flee, and took a path between gray rosemary and tall box-trees. The path intersected with others, and turned back on itself, forming one of those labyrinths that incessantly lead the person following them back to the same place. She ran there for a long time, with the desire to cry out in fear, and when she finally found the issue, she allowed herself to fall on the grass.

  She was at the foot of a strange statue, which was that of the goddess Pacht, who was venerated at Bubastis. She was remarkable for the thickness of her beasts. She had the head of a lioness and was holding an ansate cross in her hand, the symbol of divine life for the Egyptians.

  Messalina did not know that foreign divinity. Because of the leonine head, however, combined with the very evident femininity, she thought she saw her own image therein. Her courage returned. She stood up and perceived that she had arrived at a place in the garden where the trees were sparser and where there were flower-beds. A little further away, she perceived a row of colonnades with a portico.

  A rage overtook her at the terror she had experienced. As she marched through the xyste, she seized with both hands, at random, the flowers in the borders. She crushed them and threw them over her shoulder. On the pathway powdered with violet and she left a wake of periwinkles, anemones and roses.

  Having reached the portico at the end of the path she found herself before the aviaries that were disposed in a gallery on three sides, surrounding two oblong pools. The aviaries were very numerous and multicolored. All the species of birds in the world that flap their wings were gathered there, from the northern fetish-bird that has a circular golden crown like a king to the blue bird of India, whose azure tail opens and closes like the fan of a princess.

  All the birds were agitating, spreading their tails and deploying their wings, and that palpitation, in all the cages, mingled together, and an immense frisson of plumage rose up therefrom.

  Slowly, animated by the same desire that had driven her to tear up the flowers, Messalina, as she passed before the cages, opened their doors with a rapid gesture. And in the same way that the blood of the roses and the snow of the periwinkles had fallen over her shoulder on to the violet path, behind her steps, birds with wings variegated by all the colors of the rainbow, flew over the great streaks of crimson of the sky, which was about to darken.

  At first there was an extraordinary confusion around the cages between species from different regions, which had never encountered one another on the celestial routes before. The kingfisher ran into the murderous fieldfare, the marsh-sparrow with its black cap brushed the demoiselle crane with its beak. Parrots called to one another with human cries. Pelicans dragged their goiters toward the nearest grass. Barn owls and long-eared owls, seeing the realm of darkness familiar to them about to descend, were the first to take flight in a direction opposite to that of the setting sun.

  Abruptly, there was a great upsurge of birds toward the heavens. The falcons and eagles brushed the turtle-doves and grouse. The tanager competed for speed against the impaled dove to stain the azure, one with its red, the other with its bleeding heart. The catbird uttered a screech like a mewl. The booby launched into a disorderly dance. The anhinga undulated, the avis venatica struck itself with its beak. The hummingbirds gave the impression of droplets of light floating in the dusk.

  And when all of that winged life had dispersed, Messalina felt as weary as if she had flown with all the birds herself. Seeing the stone of a pool glimmer not far away she dragged herself there in order to rest. She sat down on the water’s edge and dipped her fingertips in it. A large domesticated swan that glided toward her, impelled over the surface through the nenuphar lilies, came very close, and, as she did not move, posed its dazzlingly white neck on her bare arm. There was such a mysterious tenderness in that movement that tears moistened Messalina’s eyes. She maintained her immobility in order to prolong the amicable caress.

  Then, an evening breeze that had risen made the nearby sycamores rustle and brought a tenuous, almost invisible loud into the air. On the snowy plumage of the swan, on the marble arms of the woman and on the linen of her garment, a little bizarre dust fell, gray and sad. Messalina looked in the direction from which it was coming and perceived a dying redness. And, frozen, she remained there with the swan in her arms, receiving upon her, in the ash of the pyre, a little of the ash of the man she had loved.

  XII. The Malediction

  It is alleged that Simon Magus had the faculty of rising into the air after he had entered into a profound meditation, with his legs crossed and his head tilted forward. Fewer instances are cited of his power to transport himself distantly. However, he had that power and he made use of it several times, notably to save his disciple Palladus, condemned to death in Corinth, and also in the following circumstances.

  “I want you to explain why he always looked at me without seeing me.”

  Messalina was before him. She had had the great surprise of seeing Simon open the door of his house to her himself. No porter, no servants. In the atrium, the statues of the gods had disappeared. Nothing any longer remained but the stone pedestals. One sensed that the house had been recently abandoned.

  Messalina had followed Simon into the black marble corridor as far as the square room open to the sky, to which she had come a few years before. The hangings had been removed; there was no tripod or phosphorescent powd
ers. Broken bottles were left in a corner.

  Simon’s face was closed and severe. He did not have the desire to please that normally characterized him. From his small eyes, beneath a forehead that seemed more monstrous, an irritated gleam emerged.

  “Valerius Asiaticus doubtless never saw you,” he said, “because the spirit, when it has attained a certain purity, traverses matter without being impressed by it. Once, in this same room, I told you that there was a golden lotus above your head. You have stifled it, instead of enabling it to flourish. You have fed the beast within you endlessly. You have misunderstood the elementary wisdom of equilibrium that wants us to arrive at perfection by developing the two principles that animate us equally.

  “Woe betide the individual who causes one to predominate over the other! Woe betide the ascetic in the desert who has confined too narrowly the furious bull of the flesh, but above all, woe betide the creature in whom there triumphant flesh has killed the spirit. You are soiled by the ineffaceable crime, the one that is never forgiven, that of having killed your own soul. Woe betide you!

  “You will move backwards in the human scale. In your next lives you will be a wretched whore, uniquely preoccupied with the warmth of your belly, a beast receiving men. As for the sage that your lies have killed, while awaiting reincarnation in a more perfect being, he is wandering in gardens more beautiful than those of Lucullus: the miraculous gardens of his thought, which are forever inaccessible to you.”

  Messalina, pale, her lips trembling, had recoiled all the way to the door. In the street, her chariot was waiting, driven by the negro Ahmes, escorted by a few soldiers of the Emperor’s guard.

  “I’ll have your skin torn off in pieces, and red-hot iron needles plunged under all your fingernails,” she said, and ran outside.