“Don’t worry,” said Vanel. “However much I might desire to please Jeanne, I wouldn’t immolate a victim to bring to her—but I, too, have made my discovery, the power of which will permit me to satisfy her.”
“Marc!” Jeanne exclaimed. “I was sure that you, too, had not remained inactive.”
“I have only told my secret to my friend Tchitcherine, offering him the support of that force, because he’s leaving for Moscow tomorrow.”
In a grave voice, the Russian said: “It’s a prodigious discovery.”
“Really? I’d like to know what it is,” said Jeanne.
“Not yet. Any revelation brings a responsibility. Fortin juggles with souls, you reanimate cadavers, and I possess a power whose range is incalculable. Well, frankly, Jeanne, Master, do you believe that it’s appropriate to put our discoveries in the public domain?”
Fortin expressed his opinion. “That would be frightful. We don’t have the right. The world would be modified; its harmony would become a terrible anarchy; the earth would quickly resemble an immense battlefield, more violent and savage. You’re right, Vanel; I shan’t reveal my secret; Jeanne won’t confide hers to you; and we won’t ask you to tell us yours. Only your friend Tchitcherine has told us what he wants: the fundamental transformation, from top to bottom. From the social point of view, of a country that is vaster than Europe in itself, far out there beyond the Urals, straddling Europe and Asia.”
The mover of men said: “No, very close and very small: an atom of dust”—he pointed up at the stars—“in the infinity of the heavens.”
Gravely, impressed, all four were absorbed in contemplation of the firmament indicated by the Russian’s gesture. Through the open windows, in the divided panes of the glass cage of the high belvedere, they perceived the immensity around them, all the way to the horizon fused with the darkness. At the bottom of the hill on which they were situated, a thick curtain of mist indicated the valley, the sinuous course of the tranquil Seine. Further away, there was the somber mass of the Bois de Boulogne, and a kind of fantastic giraffe, with the neck and head like a steeple: the Eiffel Tower. Then, something low, widespread, squat, specked with innumerable blinking eyes and dominated by a luminous white dust, a Milky Way in suspension over a monstrous darkness: Paris! That gigantic accumulation was displayed down below, close by, imprecise in the blackness, like an abyssal chaos. From the symbolic height where the belvedere was profiled, one could only see a form reminiscent of the tentacles of an immense octopus on the seabed, reflecting the glimmer of stars.
No sound came from the City, but the people gazing at the luminous anthill in the plain pictured nevertheless its troubling nocturnal life. They thought about all the things that might be happening in the chaos glimpsed during that moment of silence.
Marc Vanel, the misanthrope, evoked the dramas, the dirty deeds, the hypocrisies, visions of interiors and intimacies delivered from all constraint. He went, in thought, through the streets swarming with society, the amused crowds, where anonymous dolor was indistinguishable. He penetrated into the luxurious houses of aristocratic quarters, and witnessed conventional happiness, the manifestations of vain or improper amours. He perceived, amplified, the gasps and the lusts, the cries of love and hatred, the caressant or deceptive murmurs, the fits of anger, the threats, the tears, the triumphs and the sighs: all the verity, the horror, the joy, the pleasure, the despair, the celebration and the divinity of life.12
Marc Vanel also thought, suddenly: She’s very pretty, Comtesse Simone d’Armez, whom I met again this afternoon at the Académie des Science. Oh, how delicately blonde and white she is, like a beautiful fruit of sensuality! What is she doing now? Eleven-thirty. She’s still at the Opéra; her husband is gambling at the club, as he does every evening. He’ll come home late—very late—and won’t pay any heed to her. The imbecile! Am I in love with her? No, but I think about her and I desire her. Am I indifferent to her? Why did hazard place me beside her this afternoon? Why did she seem glad to see me? Why did I find her pretty, and tell her so? Why didn’t she say the words to me that dispel all hope? And yet, she’s indisputably honest and faithful.... What if I were her lover, tonight?
A strange, enigmatic smile wanders over Marc Vanel’s lips, while his eyes fix upon a light that is shining more brightly than all the rest in the somber and brilliant mass of Paris.
Tchitcherine, for his part, is thinking about the millions of people who are living under the yoke of liberty out there in Russia, and the starry octopus that is extending its tentacles over the plain reminds him of that immense country over which the red wave is breaking.
All four of them contemplate the monster, over which a luminous halo is floating, and, proud of feeling that they are above Paris and its miseries high up in the pure atmosphere, they raise their eyes toward the sky, which has no secrets for them. They recognize, as familiar image, the splendid constellations and the distant planets, where they divine another life. Then, the names of the star formations they have identified sing within them. Over there is Leo, Regulus, the Great Bear...then Coma Berenices…further away, Cygnus, Lyra, Aquila...and lower down, the quadrilateral of Orion with the Three Kings in the middle, and, in one corner, the scintillating and mysteriously colored dot of the splendid Andromeda.
In spite of everything, they are moved. Down below, there are turpitudes, battles, passions, hatreds, villainies, thefts, prostitutions and crimes. But they, themselves, are in this illuminated belvedere, which one sees from Paris as a star like the others, a point of light scintillating in the sky, lost among the others in the dark blue, dotted with gold, swarming with stars, lost in the myriad of heavenly bodies that pursue their immutable and rhythmic course around them.
Further away…very far away…higher up…much higher…in all directions…everywhere…in infinity…appear and move, in accordance with the eternal laws, thousands and thousands of fiery globes, each traveling with its escort of worlds and satellites following orbits of which they are the center, like our Sun. There are thousands of suns like ours.
Dr. Fortin, his daughter Jeanne, Marc Vanel and his friend are no longer terrestrials but superhumans, and they are experiencing at that moment the sensation that it might not be chance that has brought them together in that spot. They are there by virtue of the obscure power of destiny, which, without the absurdity of a Myth—the Creator—regulates human existences; the force that, outside of any religion, impersonal and unconscious, manifests itself upon them, beneath them, to the North, the South, the East and the West, in the brilliant night, in pursuit of a hectic course of which they know the goal and the mathematical tempo, being the equals of the One who, if he existed, would have ignited the stars and set them in motion, since they understand and can explain the infinite.
The true gods are the great men, Homer, Caesar, Jesus, Attila, Molière, Voltaire, Napoléon, Hugo, Edison, Fortin and Vanel.
Was there, perhaps, at that moment, on one of the inhabited worlds of our solar system or one of the stars scintillating in that spring night, another belvedere in which were gathered four individuals as superior—different, no doubt, but as worthy to represent, with the synthesis of four magnificent brains, the intellectual center of the world, its thought, its consciousness: to depict, so to speak, the eyes and divine face of the Universe?
Soon, the four individuals went downstairs and parted, each one returning to their task, their ideal, their destiny. They would not see Tchitcherine again, and for that reason, Fortin and his daughter made their farewells more profound.
Finally, Jeanne approached Marc Vanel. “You’ll come back soon, won’t you?”
“Yes, because your work interests me, and I’m avid to know whether you’ll succeed...”
“Stay, then; I’ll be working tonight.”
Vanel appeared to reflect in response to an intimate thought. “I have another rendezvous tonight.” Then, as if talking to himself, he added: “Yes, a rendezvous I’ve arranged with myself.”
With those words, he left in the company of Tchitcherine. The luxurious automobile that had brought them was waiting in front of the perron. Vanel climbed into it with his friend, and the limousine, in accordance with an order given to its chauffeur in a bizarre language, sped way toward Paris.
While chatting to the Russian revolutionary, Vanel, if he had a few of the privileges of God or Satan, was thinking, on that ideal spring night, about being only human.
First, Marc Vanel took Tchitcherine back to his hotel. Afterwards, he said to the chauffeur: “Rue de Varenne.”
VI. The Invisible Satyr
Half past midnight. Comtesse Simone d’Armez is coming home from the Opéra. How pretty she is this evening, and how troubling! Her theater dress ornaments her with a sumptuousness that gives her charm a more precise and more aristocratic savor. Delicate white fabrics, into which gold puts a joyous note, mold her adorable contours, the fresh flesh of an impeccable and splendid patrician.
In her bedroom, into which she has entered—her bedroom, with its familiar antique furniture, its blue fabrics of a soft, attenuated shade—her pure beauty, a piquant sprig, blooms like a beautiful flower of France. She takes off her evening mantle, a long supple fur that terminates, at the bottom, in fine overlapping fringes, and she appears in the bright radiation of her aristocratic and mutinous youth, in which is mingled a spice of discreet sensuality. Her shoulders are bare and white, delicately designed and attractive; her neckline, slightly audacious, betrays the ideal form of her firm breasts, uplifted by a vague emotion.
For Simone d’Armez is dreaming, and sighing. She sees her beauty in a full-length mirror, capable of troubling an artist; she also sees the smile of caressant and velvety eyes, profound yes in which resides the disquieting mystery of a timid voluptuousness, and she glimpses, in the faithful glass, the adorable arc of her amorous mouth, as red as the mouth of a lover who has bitten recklessly into the heart of her beloved.
Now the large cherry-colored mantle, laid out on the bed, resembles a spray of violet flowers. Alone, having sent away her chambermaid, Simone undresses herself. One by one, the delicate veils fall, the soft and impalpable tissues, precious leaves of a jewel case that slowly opens. And now, here is the splendid jewel of flesh, the warm and sensitive gem, a complex and living jewel, harmonious in its details, its innumerable delicacies discovered in every corner of the rosy, satiny, delightfully emotional skin.
Lovely but forlorn, the Comtesse thinks about the husband who does not know her. Oh, the imbecile! Stupid preoccupations deflect him from a duty that would, for any other man, be a deliciously pagan worship, a paradise of incredible, burning and refined joys.
Where is her husband? At his club, naturally, gambling and losing his income, and hers. Then the Comte d’Armez will go on to the abode of his mistress, a thin and provocative cabaret singer with short-cropped hair and a shaven nape. But she, so delicately lovely this evening in her semi-nudity quivering with desire and fervent aspirations, is all alone, like a flower awaiting a butterfly.
In the bathroom with marbles covered with small thick rugs, where the water sings in the white bath, the choice perfumes mingle with the healthy odor of a young body whose nudity has disappeared, for the moment, into the bath water, resembling a splendid alabaster tinted by the light of dawn.
Suddenly, Simone d’Armez shudders. In the movement that she is sketching in order to step out of the bath, she remains motionless for an instant. It seems to her that a warm draught, like a breath, has the strange warmth of approaching kisses that cause a frisson before one feels the contact of lips; something—nothing—has caressed the back of her neck. Feverishly, she stops and turns round.
Nothing! God, how nervous and sensitive she is! Her imagination is stirring. Did she not believe—only for a second—that her husband might have returned, stealthily, and that he wanted to surprise her in her troubling intimacy? No, nothing. She lifts the curtain of the bedroom: her husband is not hiding there. She was dreaming, then; she was dreaming, because her desires have eventually become exasperated in being unsatisfied.
Now, her body appeased by the caress of the water, she returns to her bedroom and looks at herself again in the full-length mirror before enclouding herself in the delicate short chemise of lacy batiste, the nightdress in which her beauty nests for sleep—for sleep, and nothing more.
“I’m beautiful, though,” she murmurs. “And that skeletal bitch of the revues and operettas is taking the pleasure that ought to be reserved for me! If I were beside her, I’d eclipse her, and anyone but my husband would choose me without hesitation. Why does he prefer her to me?”
She falls silent and looks at herself for a long time.
“Oh my God!” she cries, abruptly. She had thrown herself backwards, frightened. There were, in the mirror, two eyes, irises shining like emeralds.
Trembling, her expression haggard, she retreats to the bed. Then, modestly, she envelops herself in a peignoir and makes the sign of the cross. And the emerald irises fade away, melting into the pure water of the mirror. Fearfully, the young woman looks around; there is nothing in the room, nothing but scattered vaporous whiteness: her lingerie, scattered like morning mists, and, on the coverlet of the bed, the shade of old ivory, the huge red mantle, like a spray of red flowers, a magical product of the hothouse.
“What’s the matter with me this evening?” she sighs. “Am I becoming timorous? It seems to me that an invisible faun is prowling around me…coveting me everywhere...
Then, the Comtesse d’Armez thinks about the afternoon session at the Académie des Sciences. She shivers at the memory of the striking experiment carried out by the illustrious and eccentric Dr. Fortin, and explains her astonishing impressionability.
Women ought not to witness such spectacles, that’s all, she concludes. Our minds take fright in confrontation with phenomena reminiscent of sorcery. And because I’ve seen souls wandering from one body to another, I’m imagining that a soul has come to spy on me, threatening to violate my brain, and even my...
She goes to bed very quickly, but as if pursued by a suggestion of caresses, desiring and fearful of something unknown.
My nerves are exacerbated; something non-existent is making me vibrate like a harpstring. I’m crazy! And yet, what if those green irises reflected in the mirror were the eyes of a soul?
She blames Fortin, the celebrated scientist, for having put her into such a state that afternoon, in the astonishing session at the Académie des Sciences. Immediately, however, by an association of facts that imposes itself on her memory, she thinks about her neighbor on the bench while Fortin was devoting himself to that prestidigitation of experimental psychology.
What a strange man that Dr. Vanel is! Already, when I was a little girl, when I met him in the Marquise de Virmile’s house, he made an impression on me. He had a profound, magnetic gaze that caused a singular disturbance to pass through me. Why did he disappear from Paris like that, for years? People thought he had died a long time ago, and then I meet him again at that session, curiously changed but as handsome as a god! And his gaze is even more profound and magnetic! He has satanic eyes, magnificent and adorable!
She utters a long sigh, and, as if she were ashamed of having thought about Marc Vanel, she blushes, and, confused, after having switched off the electricity, hides her head in the hemstitched embroideries of the batiste sheets to try to go to sleep.
However, Comtesse Simon d’Armez does not fall asleep. She spells out all the troubling words that Marc Vanel dared to say to her a few hours ago—to her, so profoundly honest; to her, whom he was seeing for the first time as a woman after having known her as a child. Why did she not have the strength to take offense? She can still see the doctor’s smile, that diabolical smile, and his Eyes, full of warm gleams, caressant and willful…the Eyes of a voluptuous tyrant.
Her thought frozen under the mastery of that image, her flesh moist with anxiety, a strange warmth now infiltrates Simone’s body.
Gentle and slow caresses travel over her flesh: invisible, expert, insistent caresses of bold fingers, and then, fluttering, returning again and again in light touches, furtive and suddenly skillfully precipitate. Something breathes on her lips, like the ardent exhalation of a faun.
Simone swoons. She is doubtless asleep, she is dreaming, and, a faithful spouse until then, she submits to an ineffable dream, without having the consciousness and responsibility of the sensations she is experiencing, nor sufficient will power to be troubled by the emotion that agitates her…until the burning sensation of two avid lips wakes her up entirely.
She sits up, supporting herself, breathlessly, on her elbow, her wide-open eyes gazing into the blackness. Nothing, still nothing—except that it seems to her that she can hear the beating of a heart. Married, what caress, what legitimate comfort of tenderness could she expect? Her husband? Perhaps, if the grace of love touched him...
She would certainly have welcomed that: sincere kisses would have stoked up the old ardor and reignited the embers beneath the ashes. But there were a great many ashes, such a mass that, in raking the depths of her being, Simone could no longer find a glimmer.
What hazard, what mysterious dream, had resuscitated joy in her? For Simon d’Armez, however, hazard was named God—a Man-God.
Now, she took a book from a shelf and read:
Poor creature who believes yourself to be alone, seek the invisible companion of your route through the world; invoke his help in the depths of your soul; he will manifest himself in you and in things. First of all, the believer ought not to imagine herself alone: a powerful gaze follows her actions, the gaze of the invisible...
Those words, from a book of devotion, those usually consoling words, evoke the words of that bizarre scientist Marc Vanel. The sarcastic eyes, mocking as well as tender, light up in her mind. She pictures them there, dwelling on her every gesture.
“Stupid!” she says, aloud, to criticize and to reassure herself.
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