Chasing the Dream

by Liane De Pougy

  To love someone, love someone, love someone!

  All of a sudden I discovered this inner need just when I imagined I was perfectly content; and the most dangerous thing was that this need had nothing to latch on to, nowhere to go.

  To love… but who was the man? Oh, if only I’d known! But no. I was burning with a fever that never went away, that couldn’t be overcome, and whose cure was unknown.

  I looked in Gaston’s direction, I tried to kindle my imagination in his favour, I could even see detailed reasons why he deserved to be loved, but I felt nothing. The correctness of his conduct under the severest test, the kindness and decency of our behaviour with each other, the satisfaction he gave me, no, that was not it. And the less I loved Gaston, the more I felt how wonderful loving someone would be, how good, how comforting!

  So then I looked around me, casting an eye over the people I knew. I was dreaming about things that seemed far removed, when perhaps happiness already lay close at hand. Come along, which of these men might make me feel something and be worthy of receiving all the tenderness I felt I had in me? It was the tenderness – not to be scorned, I can assure you – of a woman who now grew misty-eyed in her box at the theatre whenever the orchestra struck up a wistful tune and who read up all the stories of lovers’ suicides in the papers.

  But in my circle, nothing, no one. And I consulted – don’t mock – a clairvoyant in the rue des Martyrs.

  ‘Shall I ever be able to love? Or find someone to love?’

  I don’t know if she was unusually far-sighted, but she was polite enough to tell me there was no doubt about it… I will love someone.

  She also saw, examining my palm, the line of fortune. Fortune! I didn’t care a jot about that just then, it was happiness I wanted. And who should I turn to for that? Where to seek relief from this undefinable disquiet – which was, I admit, a sensation I cherished?

  Love, love, oh, I made it all the time. But how different it must feel when you love and your heart is in it!

  The heart, yes, my friend; the unexpected protagonist in this sad state of affairs was my heart. And when I saw that I had one and that all it asked was to beat powerfully for a whole array of good things, everything suddenly altered within me.

  For example, I would have experienced a definite sense of pain, previously, if anyone had told me Gaston would eventually break off with me. He did break off – oh, in the most gentlemanly fashion – and not only was I not for a second angry with him, I very nearly flung my arms round his neck.

  He disappeared from my life one morning, leaving me well provided-for, mistress of my own future and, despite all I had learned, an innocent still in one matter, my heart.

  And oh, how long was this virginity of mine to last? What did fate have in store for it?

  You will not mind waiting a little to know the answer, my friend, and I have read too many novels not to write with perfect naturalness at this point: To be continued next time.

  IV

  To the Same

  I had not yet acquired Gaston’s successor when something happened that could have had serious consequences. It will give you a good idea of the state I was in at the time.

  One evening, we had been dining at Madrid, round a table, with friends.

  Ah, what a marvellous summer evening it was, my dear! People who don’t look up at the Paris sky don’t know what they’re missing; it’s unique.

  Over our heads was a cloth of blue, with stars too numerous to count, and a cool breeze wafting through the chestnut trees.

  I don’t know if you are familiar with Madrid, in the Bois; it’s a spot I like very much because you get the full bustle of street life at the same time as something quite intimate and hidden away. Over in one corner are the horses from our carriages, stamping their hooves, and voices calling to the coachmen, Ernest, Auguste, from the rue Blanche; but around all the noise and activity there’s this mysterious greenery and a very soothing sense of calm.

  Unfortunately for me, orchestras and bands are all the rage just now; they are everywhere; you can’t drink or eat any more except to music. The appeal of the universal Exhibitions may have passed me by but one result of them at least has been to leave in their wake hordes of fiddlers of various descriptions forever buzzing round you like flies.

  But I have nothing bad to say about the orchestra at Madrid. I even owe it a minor debt of gratitude for what nearly happened because of it. And look, even as I write I can see him again, my splendid gipsy violinist, erect there in his blue trousers and frogged scarlet tunic!

  He stood slightly forward of the others, chin bent over his violin, in the pose of a god.

  He made such a handsome sight, how could anyone have been unaffected? Never in my life have I seen a more profoundly expressive head: the dark hair swept back with masculine vigour, the features too, noble and sharply drawn as the light fell on his even complexion, had a forceful and bold character.

  All this, however, was softened by the eyes and lips.

  Big brown eyes, shimmering and changing like velvet, now staring, now melting into something like a caress; and the ardent red mouth, quivering, stretching, offering itself and showing, when it half-opened as if for a kiss, a glimpse of dazzling white teeth.

  And it was the sway his own music held over him that made his expressions change: he looked quite transported, intoxicated by the sounds he drew from that violin and the melodies he sent swirling over us.

  Their voluptuousness, their agonies of love! Where did such depth of feeling come from? At times he seemed to leave his own body altogether, gazing up into the sky, the stars, seeking inspiration or perhaps refuge there. It was super-human, frightening, and not a single part of me remained unaffected.

  Of course this was not the first time I’d been made aware of the strange charm, the kind of spell these people can cast. They have caused some well-known disturbances in Parisian life, and you will readily recall the case of Mlle P***, much discussed, the multi-millionaire’s daughter who every evening rushed off to wherever they were playing, sat as close as humanly possible and was last to leave at the end, dragging herself away half-fainting…

  For my part, I had never been ‘hooked’ like that. Why was it I couldn’t resist on this particular evening? That violin so shook my nerves it very nearly stripped them bare. And that man literally had total control of me from his platform.

  Oh, my goodness, they’re wicked, and they recognise the signs! When they notice that somewhere in the audience the effect is working on some woman or other, they’re not slow to pull the strings.

  Mine, for me, played a waltz, and then another. A waltz, my dear, means nothing at all in the ordinary run of things. It sends a little tingling up our legs, sets off a little fizz of pleasure in our brain, and that’s all there is to it. You do a twirl, you point your toe, you dip your waist a little, nothing special has happened, it’s just one more Waltz of the Roses.

  But those sorts of waltzes, they’re a whole world of their own. They contain everything: love even: all of it, before, during and after.

  And the gipsy, from a distance, was keeping an eye on me. He made it clear it was me he was playing for, me alone, never shifting his gaze, swaying his body to the rhythm and he aimed, he fired, his notes straight between my shoulder blades… it felt as if he was coming nearer and nearer, he was going to play right in my ear.

  For heaven’s sake, one does not put a woman into this sort of state! Or rather, yes, one must do exactly that, and here’s to the men who know how to keep her in it a good long time!

  I was still shaking when a voice close to us said: ‘Kindly don’t forget… ladies… gentlemen…’

  My gipsy was there holding out a plate on which a napkin had been folded in four, and giving his most gracious smile, he tossed the coins on it into the air.

  When he stood in front of me, his brown eyes at once took on their lovely magical shadings of colour and, still holding the plate out, he was now murmuring somethin
g incomprehensible in their special soliciting manner.

  And I gave him a twenty francs piece.

  What a strange thing to do, giving twenty francs to a man!

  He calmly went back to his place, as if nothing had happened, and picked up his instrument.

  I too put the horrid interlude out of my mind; and while at all the tables nearby people were chattering and laughing loudly, I slipped back into my thoughts and, in spite of myself, focussed my full attention on my musician.

  He had turned for my pleasure to music of a melancholy strain now. Conducting the others as he played, he drew from the orchestra harmonies of indescribable richness. And this after the waltzes! After the excitement, my dear, and the sensual whirlwind!

  It was a song from their own country, slow, grave, swollen with sighs and tears, a love song, but of a kind unknown to Parisians like us.

  It struck me like a blow to the heart. Yes, this time it was the heart that reacted.

  I would have liked to sigh and weep also.

  Oh, how far I was from my friends, far from my life, far from everything! I was in my gipsy’s country, a beautiful country it must be if they created things like this and felt them too. I was in a state of rapture, and I wondered if fate had not led me to this spot tonight on purpose.

  When the music stopped, something seemed to stop in me too.

  I was torn apart inside, and yet overwhelmed by a feeling of infinite sweetness.

  Oh, what a profound sense of languor, of tenderness, what a trembling in my soul! Don’t laugh. After all, if the man could play like that, must he not have had something in his heart that moved him? Who knows, a lover, a fiancée left behind in his home country! Yes, to stir me like that in the very fibres of my being, he must know such emotions himself. And what he had just made me feel he could surely make me feel again, and go on doing so for ever.

  For a long while I sat there, deep in thought, not really there at all, unaware of my surroundings. Then, strangely full of emotion, I looked round for him…

  He had vanished!

  As if in the power of some invisible force, I rose to my feet. Where was he?

  I wanted to see him whatever it cost; I had to; I had a wild desire to speak to this man, to give him a kiss, to offer him all the brimming emotion he had filled my heart with, begging him at the same time not to leave me like this but to restore the life to and in fact take over my entire being.

  I began to search for him, on the darker side of the garden, I looked behind the shrubbery and over by the stables.

  Meanwhile, in his absence, the orchestra carried on playing. At last, at last, in a kind of arbour reserved for the serving staff, I caught sight of him…

  Bent over a rickety table, illuminated by a candle stuck in a bottle, his handsome red tunic unbuttoned and hanging loose, he was – lumpishly, gluttonously – he was eating, and his thick fingers were scrabbling at a greasy paper packet and spilling fragments all over the place.

  Oh, my friend! I tried to tell myself that even on the banks of the blue Danube it is normal to feel hungry and to eat, but it was a truly repulsive discovery.

  I would have given anything not to have come upon my ideal, my god, almost my true-love in that posture, filling his face in such a horrible fashion…!

  No, it was impossible. This was not the same man as a minute before… I was the hapless victim of a wicked deception…

  A victim, indeed, of my heart, of my need to believe and to belong.

  And while my gipsy, intent on the joys of the stomach, carried on chewing, uttering little grunts of animal satisfaction, I retired in good order.

  My dear Jean, I can see your face from here as you read the tale of my mishap.

  That poor Josiane, you are thinking, hasn’t got enough to fill her time, and you are not entirely sure of the quality of my brain. Only someone with her mind a little askew could get carried away like that!

  But what do you expect? You’re going to have to resign yourself to hearing plenty more along similar lines. Besides, if I only told you stories of unadulterated happiness and occasions when everything went swimmingly, you wouldn’t find it greatly entertaining.

  I could tell you stories like my gipsy’s by the dozen, every shift from hope to disappointment, from scaling the heights to coming down with a bump, that’s my whole case history. I have a season ticket for the switchback!

  You can see that today I take the cheerful view: it won’t perhaps be that way all the time!

  V

  To the Same

  It is not my intention, dear friend, to give you a list of names here.

  I would not have the courage, and in any case there would be no pleasure in it.

  What do they matter to you, the men I have had? And what do they matter to me? They were passers-by, and nothing is left of them but a few trinkets. Some of them had so small a part to play in my story that not even their names have stayed in my memory.

  What I promised you is something more interesting: to put on stage the ones who were candidates in my quest for love, and describe what transpired.

  So let us leave in peace what I call the serious men, long-standing friends: the old senator whom I knew in the same way as the others and whose velvet skull-cap lived at my house; the magistrate, please your worship, who studied Madeleine Chamberon’s trial papers on my chaise longue; that nice M. B*** who used to tell me all about his stock lists and ask my advice about setting up his daughters; old N*** from the Cosmopolitan Bank who squashed some of my fanciful ideas and simply told me, tapping my cheek: ‘My child, you will never come to anything!’

  Come to anything? Come to what, I ask you? Do I harbour some great ambition?

  I don’t dream of riches that will set everyone talking. I think all those châteaux in Seine-et-Oise are a joke!

  My castle, if I have one, my dear, is a castle in Spain. It is where, one beautiful moonlit evening, love would enter in, or even one afternoon in bright sunlight.

  So I am going to tell you about some of the situations which offered hope in my search for happiness, and how I felt about them. It is a trail strewn with misadventures and perhaps you will be touched by the fate of a woman who has done everything she can to find love in an age when it is claimed loving is no longer a thing anyone desires!

  …Since I must dare tell you even the worst, I shall begin by telling you what I found attractive about little Duluc. It was his bad reputation.

  Bad in terms of morality, which frankly bothered me very little, but excellent in terms of a particular kind of loving.

  The whole of Paris knows little Duluc: he is the life and soul of all the clubs he belongs to, he is a star of the polo-playing set, he has single-handedly compromised the reputations of a hundred women, the best in society amongst them, he is the idol of both the smart set and the rakish; the little man is a real charmer.

  He sports a stylish pencil moustache more elegantly than anyone you’ve seen, his eyes have a special twinkle, and his smile… oh, little Duluc’s smile! You seize on it like an invitation to a party.

  And indeed, that’s what it is, an invitation; to love each other, to try it out, see where things might lead.

  It must be acknowledged, alas, that we women are tempted to love a man largely for his potential faults, or even, let’s say, between ourselves, his vices.

  With little Duluc, it was said, one was embarrassed for choice!

  Several of my women friends, or friends of my friends, had brief liaisons with him, for it seems that no one ever has one that counts, and the way they talked about him could make one truly envious.

  ‘Little Duluc,’ said Louise Martin, ‘the way he talks to women, my dear, you’ve no idea…! There’s no one else like him… it’s like being lightly spanked with a riding crop… it’s quite wonderful.’

  ‘Ah, my dear!’ murmured Suzanne de Cologne, ‘a woman doesn’t get bored in his company…! He’s a true artist… until you’ve had this little fellow you haven’t
lived!’

  Why then would I have denied myself a treat coming with such high recommendations? One evening little Duluc was brought to one of my dinner parties. Gallex the painter was there, an embassy attaché, Doctor Miron and some friends.

  So, was the diminutive figure really as irresistible as all that; and if love were lacking, would I at least feel desire?

  Well, there are no two ways about it, this Duluc is positively exhilarating. Written into his every gesture, every feature, his whole bearing is the message that this is a man who knows his way around, and there is only one expression that would describe my feelings…

  And goodness me, it’s too bad, I’ll say it, I’m not sending you the impressions of an innocent maiden after all! Little Duluc, just the look of him is enough to be sure – some people are privileged in this way – he’s the business!

  After dinner, we had coffee served in the conservatory.

  It’s the place I like best in my whole house, a fantastic creation of plants and fabrics.

  And also, I always feel especially attractive in that setting.

  Little Duluc was very animated and eager to please, but he didn’t need to be. We talked, we had music, Tibert made us laugh with his impersonations and sketches of Parisian life, and when at one point I found myself in my Venetian loggia, sitting on a divan beside little Duluc, he took my hands in his.

  Well now, Jean, if anyone buried in that provincial fastness of yours – which is mine too as it happens – were to read this letter (anyone but you, that is), a letter describing an evening at Josiane de Valneige’s, I’m sure their imagination would conjure up a very false picture!

  An evening at the home of a woman like me must surely be, mustn’t it, a scene of hilarity, silly behaviour, risqué manoeuvrings and general commotion with an orgy to finish! Well, things do not happen like that at all, the legend is dead, it’s old hat.

  Nowhere are people so well-behaved or observant of good manners, of what the English, I believe, call ‘tone’. To put it plainly, this disordered, anything-goes lifestyle we are supposed to lead is punctiliously correct in every way and the strictest arbiter in questions of education, dignity and high style would find nothing to criticise.