Chasing the Dream

by Liane De Pougy

  Oh, my dear Jean, it was so repellent! He had just this very minute been deceiving me, here in our bedroom, with the chambermaid.

  You will tell me, my friend, that a woman like Josiane de Valneige must expect everything, that she has no right to judge the behaviour of others or to be offended.

  Whatever you like, perhaps you’re right. But nevertheless the truth of the matter is that, just like some bourgeois housewife, or a duchess of unblemished virtue, the vomit rose in my throat.

  Poor girl! Good God, no, it isn’t her I’m angry at. But to think of him, though – him! – with that chambermaid, a piece of nothing! And in that very instant, the man standing there, the person who had done this to me, toppled from his lofty place in my heart, dropped completely out of it.

  It was like a guillotine falling, my dear: something I couldn’t do anything about, a thing that happened inside me, as if in spite of myself.

  Him! Fleurignac! The only man, according to the authors he introduced me to, with a heart big enough to understand their work! My Fleurignac, the man of grand passions, love, art! Yes, it came down to this. What a collapse!

  Pitifully, he tried to explain it away.

  At one point, he even passed it off as a joke.

  As for me, my dear, stupid to confess, I sobbed my heart out.

  But it wasn’t only my Fleurignac I wept for. It was everything I was losing in thus losing my love for him. If all Fleurignac’s tenderness only led to this, and if it was through things like this that I was supposed to view the artistry that had so seduced me, it was over: no, no, a hundred times no!

  True enough, another man – any other man – would have been free to behave the way Fleurignac did. The men I’ve felt nothing for, the ones whose functions were mainly to be useful and only secondarily a source of pleasure, they are and remain perfectly independent as far as I am concerned. But it is not the same when I have believed, when I have dreamed of loving someone, and when I have given some of myself.

  So, my Jean, I remained a woman of ice, mute before the entreaties and the admirable scenes he acted out. He said the most amazing things, he found new heights of eloquence, none of which could overcome my pride or repair my wounded heart.

  In my inner being, it was broken.

  And that evening, dear friend, the Paris express received me on board again, this time alone.

  I settled in my corner. A regional paper that I had unthinkingly bought was talking about Fleurignac’s performance. For a long minute I stared at this sheet, thoughts in a whirl, then I screwed it into a ball and threw it out of the window…

  And with every turn of the wheel carrying me forward I seemed to feel the ditch of the past being dug ever deeper.

  When I arrived home, I found my maid asleep in her bed. Ah, what an honest girl!

  XI

  Jean Leblois to Josiane de Valneige

  Well, no, my dearest of friends, I won’t say you were wrong!

  And if you want to know what I really feel, that’s the way I prefer you.

  If you are suffering, if you are close to despair, console yourself with the thought that there are not many of you in town who suffer for such causes and who think the same way as you.

  It is what distinguishes you from the Louise Martins and the Suzanne de Colognes.

  I am sure that if they felt the urge to relate their own stories, there would be no place for details like yours – although, if people looked properly, they would find that inside every woman is a little secret which, if it was known, would show that she was worth a great deal more than those people might suppose.

  What is this? Is your friend from the Touraine turning sanctimonious? He sounds like just the sort of man who’d know that celebrated line about fallen women.

  Don’t be cross with him, and don’t laugh at him: it may be the very reason why you trust him.

  But seriously, Josiane, is it going to go on like this?

  Will you never write me a letter to say you are happy, totally happy? That you have once and for all found love, and happiness in love?

  It would be so right for you! And I may add that if there is any justice, you are owed it.

  With all my heart I wish you a dazzling comeback. Do not let yourself, while waiting, be overwhelmed by sadness and discouragement. Let’s bury Fleurignac deep in the ground and make space for the new. I don’t like to think of the beautiful Josiane being melancholy, and I hope it will not be so.

  Whatever else, you can always count on my old friendship.

  It cannot claim to replace everything, it is not so foolish as that. But it can serve a purpose: draw on it at any time. We’ll be in touch soon, then, yes?

  I take your little hands in mine and press them warmly.

  P.S. Allow me, my friend, to present you with an opportunity for a little distraction amid all the dark swirls that such memories must cast round you.

  You would be acting as the most delightful of friends if you were to slip down to the Louvre and take the trouble to have them send here a dozen pairs of gloves, tan, size 7 ¾, for riding.

  XII

  Josiane de Valneige to Jean Leblois

  Alas, my friend, you were a very poor prophet when you hoped ‘it would not be so’. My adventure with Fleurignac made a lasting impression.

  I emerged from it entirely stripped of any faith in the future, in myself, in love, in anything at all. Very well, if that was the case, why keep trying? Since it has been proved that I am not made for happiness, or that happiness does not exist, it would be mere folly. Let’s do the same as everyone else, then: forward march, eyes closed!

  What’s the point in hankering after midday at two in the afternoon? It’s a fool’s game, so three cheers for those who take life as it comes!

  But that is just making arguments for the sake of it.

  However much I wanted to act on them, convince myself, stifle my thoughts, this latest experience lay deep in my bones and provoked as much revolt as genuine affliction.

  I remained crushed by this blow for months. What was the matter with Josiane de Valneige? People were taking notice, I can tell you!

  Some asserted that my boredom, my disgust were the result of having enjoyed life too greedily – imbeciles! Others swore I had turned to morphine, to ether, a host of poisons currently much in favour and utterly wonderful, apparently.

  Just between the two of us, I did think about it. But morphine, whose delights I’d heard so much about, was just another fanciful joke.

  Blisters, itching under the skin, that’s all. It seems I’m not cut out for that either. It’s annoying!

  One day a friend of mine sent me her doctor, Doctor Tardenot.

  Tardenot is very well known, he specialises in our fin de siècle ailments. The best way he could think of to cure me of what he called, by a horrible name incidentally: neurasthenia – yes, imagine that, I was a neurasthenic! – was for me to take him as my lover.

  Ah, wasn’t that handy for him, the excellent Tardenot.

  No! No more lovers! Peace: peace in the company of steady friends who would ask little of me and of whom I would not ask more than they could give.

  But what a strange destiny! To be ready for love, to live only for love, to have demeaned myself in its pursuit, and never to find it! My dear, you are my witness: have I, yes or no, done everything I could to encounter it, to hold on to it? And you, after all, know more about me on that score than anyone!

  But the whole business had been a torture, I had become the Tantalus of the human heart!

  The moment I thought I had it in my grasp, bliss escaped me.

  Sometimes everything suddenly went cold in me, at other times it was the other party who cast me back into the void, through letting me down or through turning out to be an inferior person.

  Some women manage to be happy, so what is their trick? They don’t have a heart, that’s what. All the easier for them… perhaps it’s better not to have one…

  No, don’t believe
that, I’m lying. I’m not giving up on mine, for all the pain it has brought me. And I’m proud to be the way I am.

  Be that as it may, I was apparently in the most lamentable state.

  They tried to bring about a reconciliation between me and Fleurignac: if he had been some ordinary sort of lover, I would have forgiven him; but I had invested too much in him and I couldn’t.

  So then it was a question of who would look after me. It’s a funny thing how keen people are to sympathise with a woman’s troubles if those troubles happen to provide a boost for their own self-esteem!

  ‘Come to the country with us, my dear friend! We shall console you.’

  ‘Oh, you must come to us… you know there’s always a room for you. We’ll have such fun, boredom just isn’t possible in my house…! Silly goose!’

  I put a swift end to that kind of thing, and one morning I simply left, on my own account, without telling a soul.

  I didn’t need to lift a finger: the angelic Gérard organised everything, and all I had to do was come, bringing with me a weariness of Paris, of human beings and of material things.

  Ah, this time, when I saw a railway station again, it was wonderful, and I leapt into the train as if I was fleeing from hell.

  What happened out in the countryside? Friend, you will soon discover. But it won’t all fit in one letter, or even several.

  I know that just from reading the brief accounts I have put before you, haphazard and unconnected, you do not envy me my fate. How will it be when you know the rest of what I have to tell you, the most important part of all, the part that is both the most marvellous and most painful of my entire life?

  The day you came to visit me and when I promised to write you regular letters, you found me in very low spirits, do you remember, my dear Jean, and in a frame of mind rare for one of those women whose paths are reputed to be strewn with roses. I was still reeling from a terrible emotional shock, and haunted by the grief and troubles of the story that had just come to an end.

  Today, in order to keep my promise, it is necessary to plunge back into it!

  So be it; perhaps the exercise will do me good; perhaps, underlying so many hard moments that I must revisit, there may be for me some small sweetness to rediscover.

  I am going to tell the story from the very beginning, as it unfolded day by day, hour by hour, as if I was back in that time. My memory has retained every last detail; and besides, I have only to turn to the journal I kept at the time for comfort, to record my impressions as they swung between elation and misery, moment by moment.

  I tremble, and yet I am already a little happier just to be taking these fading pages and living through it all again with you.

  You will see whether your Josiane is blessed by fortune, whether she is wrong when she swears that all is myth and chimera; and whether it wouldn’t have been entirely forgivable if she had been a hundred times worse than she is!

  XIII

  To the Same

  Here I am, surrounded by fields, communing with… me. I’m sure you catch my drift: with myself alone. The angelic Gérard, my little dog and my pet monkey and that’s it, yes that’s all there is.

  A surfeit of other people, a need for solitude, whatever you like to call it. It sounds so unlikely when we’re talking about Josiane de Valneige, but that’s how it is. We all have our own little peccadillos. Mine is to be always in search of the thing I haven’t yet found, as you well know… in love with love, that poor Josiane.

  Rue de Prony, with its constant luxury, its shallow infatuations that don’t engage the heart, and its repeated disappointments made me dream, as I mentioned in a letter, of a little retreat in the woods. I found it at Brunoy.

  Do you know of Brunoy? A little green oasis an hour from Paris, quite far enough, I promise you, to keep me from returning too often.

  The house? A good, honest place, peacefully set among green lawns and a garden as white as a giant bridal bouquet.

  Inside? Comfortable, good atmosphere, lifted especially by my indispensable bits and pieces which add artistic and feminine notes to offset all this bourgeois mahogany and red velvet. For example, my washstand is wholly me! Could I live without my Sèvres basins, my gold and ivory brushes, my bottles and my mirrors?

  This sanctuary for self-pampering has a wide window looking on to the countryside, and in the mornings – bless me, as soon as the sun rises – I’m a changed woman, as you see – I have been leaning on the window sill in the cool of the morning and – shall I admit it? – I have been enjoying myself very much.

  Watching the neighbourhood wake up, gates opening, and windows, blinds being raised, gardeners coming and going, milkmen, I don’t know what: all this was absolutely new to me. Among others here, just next to me, surrounded by vast meadows full of superb cows grazing in bovine content, is a magisterial manor house, home to the inflated pride of a prince of the Parisian goldsmith’s trade and sponsor, naturally, of the new church bell.

  A little further off, scattered in a sea of greenery, are smiling gardens and pretty villas which disgorge, from eight in the morning, making for the Paris train like an army of flustered crows, office workers, bankers, ministry clerks who then, from nightfall to morning, return to forget their desk-bound lives amid the freshness of the fields. And amongst all the good Parisians, who would feel lost if they couldn’t come and enjoy some country air in the summer, there are some very amusing types, and I am inventing little background stories for each of them. Dealers in household goods who have forgotten where they started from – doubtless lighting the gas lamps for their bosses – and have adopted the manners of clubmen, waddle along with their soft grey hats tipped over one ear. Great ladies… of the grocery world, on the arm of their paunchy and beribboned husbands, coming here to consume the profits from their sugar and their coffee. It makes you squirm with laughter, my dear!

  There are, I must say, some handsome carriages to be seen as well, passing up and down the roads of this peaceful spot. But not as smart as mine, which means I shall still make my effect, alas, and I shall still be a topic of gossip.

  None of this is very thrilling, as you can tell, and I’m sure the only distraction from my boredom will be taking walks. But perhaps I shall thereby escape the grief that undermines me and at the same time weighs me down; and then I do so need to forget the Plantesols, the Fleurignacs and Co., all the puppets, all the dummies at whose side I have never found what my heart is mad enough to insist on looking for!

  XIV

  To the Same

  Sick at heart, weary, seized by both a sense that she has had enough of herself and the need to start living again, eager for powerful emotions and sensations, for refined pleasures, for love’s sweet fragrance, see how Josiane now yields to the indefinable charms of nature.

  It seems to me that the breath of the new season is refreshing my thirsting heart; it seems to me that in every smiling flower a promise is hidden, that the murmuring stream and the whispering trees are transmitting messages of love, and that this renewal of nature is forcing a rejuvenated sap through my scorched veins.

  I am a woman who has run the gamut, done it all, yet I feel within me these virgin-like aspirations, this longing for innocence, this thirst for pure air. I day-dream like a young girl, and as I swim in this exciting sea of ideals my old desires sink and drown, my ineffectual and unhealthy infatuations, my past and my tawdry fame.

  To love!!! To love! Oh, yes, the problem that never goes away! To see my weary heart mirrored in the limpid gaze of another! To tremble with unfeigned happiness in the embrace of another! To let fall on my cheeks a tear that is real! To have my emotions shudder, for once, with the same pleasure my body knows, and to feel that I have not just lent my flesh but given my heart.

  Forgive me, dear friend… but did you not encourage me to write to you without artifice and to say anything?

  I am going to tell you therefore that one day, walking with no particular purpose along one of the many shady footp
aths, I ran into a couple, a man and a woman, who looked very interesting.

  A mother and son, probably, and both of them in full mourning. The widow – I say widow because I noticed the white band round her black crepe hat – was a distinguished-looking woman and still very beautiful in spite of her rather tired features. She was looking up at this son with much tenderness and pride while he spoke to her in an adorably confiding manner. Two exceptional people!

  He was handsome, in an unusual way. Well now, I’d like to picture him for you, since you must already be intrigued.

  Tall, slender, with something sad about the way he carries himself. There is something delicate, too, about his pale face, and whatever passions may be contained in his large, soft eyes are hinted at only by their dark gleam. With his thick, slightly wavy hair framing a twenty-year-old’s unlined forehead, his whole aura is indefinably alluring. Can I put it this way, he resembles a Florentine poet from the great days of Lorenzo de’ Medici, as portrayed in a statuette I have at home? Perhaps, and if you are willing, that’s what we shall call him.

  As you might imagine, they made a distinct impression on me, and I stood watching them until they were out of sight. Who were they? I would dearly have liked to know.

  Another encounter, which I found less charming, was with that fat Baron de Raincourt!

  Fortunately, I only saw him from behind, and that awful hair-style of his with its exaggerated parting running right down to the nape of his neck. If I hadn’t spotted that, and if he had turned and seen me, goodbye to peace and quiet!

  So to avoid him I went back home in something of a rush.

  ‘Goodness!’ the angelic Gérard exclaimed. ‘You look all of a tizzy, madame. What’s happened?’

  ‘Happened…? What’s happened is that imbecile Baron de Raincourt has taken it into his head to come to Brunoy and he’s disturbing my peace. The old fool completely ruined my walk, because I have to say, since I tell you everything, dear Gérard, that I was miles away at the time. Before that old woodenhead came along, I’d just seen an amazingly beautiful young man. Try to find out for me who he is. He’s tall, he’s youthful, he had his mother on his arm, she was wearing mourning, the pair of them were out walking, in the direction of the forest. I don’t know any more than that. See what you can find out…’