“What do you mean by my crime? Do you imagine, perchance, that I’ve killed someone?”
“Or hidden the evidence of a murder committed by someone else, which comes to the same thing. Don’t you perceive, then, wretch, that for fear of dooming you, I’m almost becoming your accomplice? You’re putting me in a fine situation, you know.”
“Shh!” said Melanski, for Pélagie was coming to tell us that the soup was on the table.
“I’ll leave this evening,” I said, as soon as Pélagie had gone away. “It’s impossible for me to stay any longer under the roof of a…friend like you.”
“You won’t leave,” said Melanski, to whom, remarkably, calm had returned as it had abandoned me. “You won’t abandon an unfortunate whose only crime is to have a soul in turmoil. What is it you’re claiming, then? That I’ve concealed the evidence of a murder? Either you’re crazier than I am, or you haven’t examined those bones. If I didn’t fear that Pélagie would come and stick her nose in what we’re doing. I’d open the box in front of you immediately, in my turn, and I’d show you the ridiculous injustice of your suspicions.”
“Monsieur, Monsieur, you’re talking too much; the soup will no longer be edible,” shouted Pélagie, rendered impatient by her own impatience, or the solicitude of a cook.
VII
While walking toward the house in order to obey Pélagie’s injunction, Melanski said to me: “It seems to me, however, that the symmetrical section in the cranium”—and he gestured toward his own forehead—“ought to have leapt to your eyes.”
“Indeed,” I replied. “I wondered for what reason it had been carried out. One might think that the piece had been removed by a stamp.”
We sat down at table. He went on: “And the copper attachments?”
“What?” I said, although I had heard him quite clearly, the last words having taken me by surprise.
“He did not reply because of Pélagie, who planted herself in front of us throughout the dinner, somewhat indiscreetly, the dear woman. Both too preoccupied to say anything outside of our subject, we let Pélagie give tongue as she pleased, and even had the benevolence to pretend to be listening to her.
Immediately after dinner he asked me to accompany him to his room. I followed him there, not interrogating him but impatient to learn something that would permit me to restitute all my esteem to a man whose affinities with me were so great.
He opened his writing-desk, took out a small box from one of the drawers, and took out a miniature from the box, which he handed to me.
“Go over to the window,” he said then. “Dusk is falling; you don’t have enough light to see clearly.”
The miniature represented a woman whose original beauty caused me a kind of interior dazzle: a delightful and gripping beauty, but completely indefinable.
In fact, no sort of beauty related to the physiognomy can ever be defined or explained even by the most skillful writer. In order to comprehend it, it is necessary to see it, and even then, one can see it without comprehending it. Why? Because extralinear beauty is nothing but a relationship, that of the spectacle to the beholder.
So the miniature of the woman that delighted me would, I’m convinced, have left many others cold.: all the more reason for me not to attempt to describe its charms, for that procedure, by its futility, seems to me to be unworthy of both the reader and myself.
I had been holding the miniature for a minute or two when Melanski, who had not taken his eyes off me, said: “Well, what do you observe?”
“What I observe first of all,” I said, is that the model for this portrait is one of those women, very rare nowadays, who exercise an absolute fascination upon me.”
Melanski shook my hand with a feverish affection. “You feel as I do,” he said. “I expected it, moreover. Is it not our habit, many times over? Then again, what do you observe about the painting itself?”
“I observe that it must be the work of an exact and sagacious portraitist, rather than the work of a man adroit in the manipulation of colors. It seems that the brush-strokes are a trifle gross for a miniature.”
“But don’t you see that the fault is in the rough substance on which it is painted?”
“In fact, what is it painted on?” I said. “One might think it was wood, but which has the artist chosen a convex surface?”
“Look at the back.”
I turned the miniature upside-down.
“Is it possible?” I cried. “Yes, God forgive me…that’s a terrifying bizarrerie! It’s the fragment missing from the skull…yes, yes, of course! I’m not mistaken?” I added, interrogating Melanski, although I was certain that I was not wrong.
“You’re not mistaken,” he replied, phlegmatically. “The portrait you see there has been made on the frontal bone of its model.”
“On the frontal bone of its model?” I repeated. “What does that mean?”
“It means that the bone belonged to the skull of the person whose portrait it is.”
“I’m damned if I understand!”
“You really don’t understand?”
“No.”
“Well, imagine that you died and your cranium as carefully stripped, and a painter who knew you took it into his head to draw your portrait thereon.”
“But that’s the most absurd thing in the world. With what objective, pray?”
“It’s not a matter of the objective, although I could offer you one that your philosophical humor would easily admit.”
“Yes, doubtless, there’s a kind of profound facetiousness in our fibers.”
“It’s a matter of what happened to that miniature of a woman. And pray to Heaven that such an idea didn’t occur to the artist, for that’s positively what has driven me mad.”
“Ah!” I murmured, like a man trying to grasp something. “But how is it that you have this miniature?”
“Because I have the skeleton on the skull of which it was painted.”
“Good,” I said. “It was painted on the skull, and it’s you who have extracted it. But how is it that you have the skeleton of the woman represented here?”
“How? Oh, that’s very naïve. After what I’ve told you, you haven’t guessed?”
“No, in truth.”
“Well, it’s because those bones made up a ready-made skeleton that I had the misfortune to buy from Monsieur Guérin, the skillful naturalist of the Rue Racine.”
“Has anyone ever taken it into his head,” I asked him, “to hide underground a ready-made skeleton, since there’s no risk in exhibiting it and it is even constructed for exhibition? One only has an interest in hiding the skeleton of a former victim.”
“In principle, you’re right,” said Melanski. “When one isn’t mad, your argument is incontestable. But when one is mad…! Anyway, I have a good response to make to you. If I show you the little ring fixed to the occiput of the skeleton, designed to suspend it; if I show you the glue that reconnects the ribs, and the copper wires serving as articulations for the limbs, you’d be forced to believe that the skeleton has been prepared, that it cannot be that of a former victim, but simply that of someone who died in hospital.
“The miniature alone,” he added “ought to have sufficed, by virtue of its relationship with the skull, to edify you against the idea that there had been a murder. That is why I began by presenting it to you, not yet having the strength to tell you the mystery of my madness in all its details.”
It would have been impossible to see a madman endowed with more solid logic. The odious suspicions engendered within me vanished.
“My dear Melanski,” I said to him, taking his hand, “I believe you. Forget, I beg you, that on the basis of superficial appearances, I was momentarily able to suppose you the author of an abominable act; but it’s necessary to admit that the excessive disturbance that took possession of you when I told you that I had dug up the plot of land where the box was, was furiously accusatory.”
“I admit it,” replied Melanski, squeezing m
y hand. “What do you expect? It was the surprise that you were on the trail of my secret, the chagrin of being forced to answer your questions, the shame of showing you the pusillanimous traverses to which I have been subject. Now, I’ve changed my mind, and I’m not averse to humiliating myself before you; so I shall tell you everything.”
VIII
Melanski continued in these terms:
“Two days after I sustained my thesis, less than a week after our departure, I was passing along the Rue Racine and I stopped in front the shop-window of Monsieur Guérin, the naturalist, in which a number of comic scenes were represented by frogs. I noticed two of them that pleased me, and I went in to buy them. In the first there was a female frog with a rose in her paw, posing very modestly, while a painter-frog was sketching her portrait, not forgetting the rose. In the second, there were the same two characters, but the model, no longer posing, was allowing herself to be embraced tenderly by the painter, and the rose had fallen to the floor. Nothing was more droll than that fable in action.
“There was a crowd in Monsieur Guérin’s shop. While waiting for my turn to come to ask the employee the price of the two caricatures, I was darting distracted glances to the right and left.
“Against the wall at the back of the shop, partly in shadow, three human skeletons of unequal size were placed. One of them attracted my attention more particularly, because I perceived something on the frontal bone that looked, from a distance, like a stain, but so harmonious in its ensemble, so well-denied in its lines and so odd, that it was worth taking a closer look at it.
“The so-called stain was the admirable portrait of the woman that you’re holding. Judge my amazement by yours. It was even more vehement, the object being there before me, gripping me, so to speak, suddenly imposing itself on my divination by virtue of the contrast between a fictitious living being grafted on to the last vestiges of a consummate dead one.
“Imagine the effect of that gaze and that singular smile, which render the portrait so animated. Imagine their effect above the hollow orbits, a nasal cavity, fleshless jaws and the summary scaffolding of the bones.
“At first, I had a sort of vertigo; then, capable of reflection, I admired the fantasy that the author of the portrait had had. Yes, in accordance with the Byronic poetics that are so dear to us, my poor friend, a similar fantasy had to procure me a lugubrious joy, the sole species of joy that you and I experience.
“I recalled that Lord Byron, so Stendhal recounts, was very impressed one day by the sight of a painting by Daniel Crespi representing the following scene: Inside a church, the mass for the dead is being sung around a bier; suddenly, the deceased, who was a canon, raises the mortuary sheet, emerges from his coffin and cries: ‘It is by just entitlement that I am damned!’9
“Why that memory came back to me while I was face to face with the skeleton bearing the portrait I cannot say, for there was only a very distant analogy between the two—what I call an analogy of tendency.
“I assumed that the skeleton must have come from a sale made after the decease of an artist who, dominated by the maxim ‘All is vanity,’ had found it both sinister and humorous to paint his mistress.
“I was so absorbed in the contemplation of my skeleton that the shop gradually emptied, without my perceiving it, of all those who had business there.
“Monsieur Guérin’s employee, seeing that I had prolonged my wait beyond the necessary time, came toward me and said, with a slightly ironic politeness: ‘What does Monsieur desire? Monsieur is a physician, no doubt?’
“‘Freshly cast,’ I replied, ‘for I’ve only just passed my doctoral thesis.’
“‘Well, Monsieur,’ the employee said, ‘you’ll need a skeleton, for when bones are presented that are in need of resetting, it’s useful to be able to palpate the skeleton first in the corresponding places. Simple plates in a book cannot enlighten osteological studies like the sight of a skeleton. Is it a skeleton that Monsieur desires?’
“‘Yes,’ I said, completely forgetting that I had come in for the frogs.. ‘This one, for example.’
“‘Because of the portrait, Monsieur’ said the employee, smiling, “you’re not the only one whose caprice has fallen upon that little skeleton. It’s already been sold to several times. The portrait aside, though, it’s a pretty framework, very well-prepared, as you can see, and furthermore, that of a pretty woman.’
“I had not even noticed that it was the ‘framework’ of a woman, because my attention had been concentrated more on the skull than the iliac bones, but how did the employee know that the woman had been pretty? I expressed my surprise to him..
“‘Well, Monsieur, you can judge it as well as me from her portrait.’
“‘What! That miniature…?’
“Like you, just now, I had not wanted to believe that there was any other relationship between the skeleton and the miniature than that between a canvas and paint. I had not imagined that it might be, in a sense, the fictitious flesh of the deceased individual, covering at a given spot her own bones. The more I thought about that assertion, the more I contested it.
“‘There’s scarcely any way of admitting,’ I told him, ‘that such a remarkable painting hasn’t been made according to nature; but if it were the portrait of the woman reduced to the state of a skeleton, it would obviously have to have been made from memory.’
“‘Oh, permit me: from memory or from a copy,’ said the employee, swiftly. ‘Nothing prevented, in fact, the artist from having made a portrait of that woman on canvas or enamel while she was still alive, and copying it subsequently on to the very skull of the model, dead and dissected. Now, that’s exactly what happened. We obtained it from the author in person, who sold us the skeleton of the unfortunate woman, whom he had cared for and painted while ill, and whom he dissected and painted again when dead. But you must know him; it’s Monsieur Onfroy, interned at Lariboisière.’
“I did not know Monsieur Onfroy, whose promotion was doubtless very recent and dated after the moment when my withdrawal from the Internat had been obligatory. Perhaps, however, a month after that, I had encountered the name Onfroy among those of our successors, although it had not made any other impact on me.
“That was what I replied to Monsieur Guérin’s employee in expressing to him how astonished I was that Monsieur Onfroy had not kept such an original work for himself, and in which I, personally, saw even more heart than mind.
“‘What do you expect?’ said the employee. He needed money. You know…a young man, and an artist more than any other, is argentivorous. In any case, I don’t presume that he put into the execution of that portrait the sentiment that you think…he was playing a game, nothing more.’
“‘Let’s go!’ I said to the employee, who had no need of sales talk to convince me. ‘I’ll buy your skeleton. If you want to send it to me with a settled invoice a few hours from now, I’ll receive it myself and pay the commissionaire.’
“Having left my address, I went out. An hour later, I had my skeleton, but the poor two hundred francs that were awaited to settled the bill had bled my writing-desk dry. No matter! I no longer cared about the comical frogs. I had my skeleton. I possessed it. I was free to contemplate, as much as I wished, the strange object that had apprehended my soul, a liberty as deadly as all those one abuses!
“Instead of amusing myself, as I had the right to do, during the few days following the one on which I had sustained my thesis, I remained constantly in the house, not to work, but because—what became frightening subsequently began by being ridiculous—because my skeleton was there beside me, and we were keeping one another company. Perhaps you’ve noticed that large glazed box that is in the room where you’re sleeping?”
“Yes, I replied, with an excited curiosity. “Well?”
“Well,” he continued, “I opened the curtain and, sometimes walking around the room, sometimes standing still, furtively, in front of it, I gazed incessantly at the skeleton and the portrait.”
/> “Oh my God!” I cried, alarmed. “So your skeleton occupied that glazed box? Oh, my God, what are you telling me?”
The reader, while judging my perspicacity severely lacking for not having already sensed the mysterious relationship between the big glazed box and the skeleton, will nevertheless understand the reason for that maladroit exclamation, which Melanski could not imagine, unconscious as he was of his somnambulistic life.
Thus, he replied to me, slightly astonished: “There’s nothing in that to warrant a cry of ‘Oh my God,” as you’ve just done, my dear friend. Of course, it’s not very easy to see that the glazed box in my study is a skeleton box…but that doesn’t enter into consideration. Wait a while and you’ll have reason to be seriously astonished.”
I bit my lips at having interrupted Melanski. He went on:
“Initially out of simple curiosity, a vague application of our chronic sadness, a pretext for I know not what sentimental irony worthy of Heinrich Heine, that spectacle soon interested my heart. My gaze no longer went alternately from the portrait to the skeleton; it embraced them simultaneously. By virtue of one of the phenomena that the imagination has the gift of producing, the portrait gained ground over the skeleton—which is to say that the tender and incomparable face, on the frontal bone by which it was circumscribed, extended before by charmed eyes, covering the entire death’s-head like living flesh, and then the rest of the bony framework was closed as gracefully as any in the world.
“Thanks to the important gift I had of the features of her face, I reconstituted the dead woman around her own remains: an envelope certainly more vaporous, but doubtless also more perfect than her primitive envelope. An alchemist of a superior species, I had made a woman hatch from a few colors and a few bones, under the constant incubation of enthusiasm. And it was precisely the physical woman that I wanted.
“Fundamentally, I did not doubt that that pretended resurrection was vain and deceptive, but I allowed myself to begin to believe it, and abused my senses voluntarily—to such a point, my friend, that I fell in love with my skeleton, translated into a beautiful body by an imagination a hundred times too irritable.
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