Having a warm sensation beneath her dermis, she goes into the nearby bathroom, hung with bright satinette whose marble tiles appear between the rugs, and the water sings, pouring from the crystal ewer. Fresh perfumes expand, mingling with the heady odor of a splendidly young, blonde-haired body, the pure contours of rosy flesh: alabaster tinted by the dawn. Simone d’Armez is naked again, her tresses loose, a kingdom of living gold over her shoulders.
At the moment, however, when, bending over, her legs flexed, refreshing the nervous secrets of her white and pink flesh, she feels once again, on her shoulder and her neck, a warm breath.
Feverishly, the young woman has turned round. Again, nothing, no one! For the second time, she perhaps hoped that her husband had come in stealthily and, wanting to surprise her pleasantly, had hidden behind the floating door-curtain.
Reassured, while rebuking herself for her childish renewed fear, the Comtesse goes back to bed, extending her lovely body in the conjugal bed, and switches off the electricity…in order that the dream might return.
And, falling back into semi-sleep, abandoning herself to the libertine dream, she no longer attempts to react against the extraordinary pleasure, to which her shuddering body, legs parting, surrenders itself entirely.
She no longer makes a movement and resolves not to think any longer, and yet, someone is stroking her all over, searching gently. Enervated and feverish, she has thrown back the blankets and sheets, and remains there, prostrate, penetrated by a delicious vampiric tongue. Sometimes inanimate, then vibrant with ecstatic terror, she swoons, gripped, finally, adorably, in that conjugal intercourse, unknown to her until now, coaxing, sometimes relenting, and then resuming at the gallop, and fluttering, in a fantasia of interminable lust, which has already caused her to expire of pleasure twice.
Is she dreaming? Is she, on the contrary, living an incredible reality? Once again, she opens her eyes, and only perceives vague whitenesses. Then, quickly, she closes her eyelids again. Immediately, the more rapid stroking becomes vivid, more real, and she utters a long sigh of ineffable contentment.
But the bed yields a soft sound, revealing the presence of a sliding body, and Simone wants to cry out. The strength is lacking; she is caught. A form has suddenly seized her, is pressing upon her, dominating her with its force, in a mysterious and profound contact. Upon her parted lips an Erotic cyclone descends: another mouth, willful and penetrating, takes her mouth prisoner and an incomprehensible enigma glides over her, a double and supreme frisson, in which her last energy is exhausted. At moments, she thinks that she can see, gleaming in the darkness, the satanic eyes glimpsed in the mirror.
Dream? Reality? How can it be determined?
She weakens again under the unknown caresses, and her entire body capsizes in a voluptuous ecstasy, which shakes her spasmodically, and draws puerile squeals from her, gasps in which loving words are mingled, alternately or simultaneously, which declare her pleasure—and also another pleasure. It is the cry of a man upon her mouth, while the supernatural grip makes her vibrant corolla the sheath of a powerful and artful lingam, the spouse of an unknown flesh. In an utterly moist agony, she faints.
For a long time she remains in that state of prostration, which makes her as white as a corpse, a masterpiece of alabaster, Aphrodite lying on a confused bed, her long hair scattered, her visage ecstatic. Then, slowly, she raises her eyelids and smiles at her dream.
Immediately, though, she sits up, haggard. In the quasi-darkness, the strange eyes glimpsed in the mirror are shining: the Eyes of Marc Vanel, the fascinating Eyes of the man that she had nicknamed that afternoon “Dr. Satan.”
She straightens up, frightened by the reality of her dream. The memory of demonic minutes imposes itself brutally on her thoughts; she is suddenly conscious of the fact that she was not asleep.
In the dazzle of an abrupt dawn, an intense glare descends from the ceiling; Simone has flicked the light switch. But every detail is in place within the room. The doors and windows are closed, the hangings do not display any bulge of a dissimulated body.
So?
“But no one could have gotten in here,” she murmurs. “There’s no one here. Dr. Vanel, a god made man, isn’t here; it could only have been the thought of him, the memory, and the radium of his unforgettable Eyes.”
Simone gets up; momentarily, she contemplates the large bed, reminiscent of a battlefield in which singular ardors have clashed, and she shivers from head to toe. She looks at herself again in the full-length mirror; she is naked, her chemise lying on the floor amid her vaporous lingerie. It seemed to her that her body retains, almost everywhere, the trace of passionate kisses, and her flesh the emotion of a faunesque and profound intercourse, an intimate straddling, an unknown lubricous fantasia. And the evident stains of her sins, in the dream of a spring night, cause her to blush and to weaken.
Quickly, she hastens into the bathroom and the contact of cool water soon restores a little calm to her being.
“What a dream!” she murmurs. “But perhaps it wasn’t only a dream, it’s necessary for me to confess. I’m as tired, exhausted, bruised and ashamed as if I really had committed an incomparable adultery...”
Anxious, tremulous and fearful, she wanders around the bedroom now, clad in a white Byzantine dalmatic embroidered with gold and ornamented with roses. The examination recommences; for a long time she goes back and forth, troubled and unquiet, examining the furniture, the drapes, sensing a king of presence.
Having lain down again, however, Comtesse Simone d’Armez succumbs to amorous fatigue, and goes to sleep immediately, heavily, still evoking—why?—the intense gaze, the magnificent Eyes, of Dr. Vanel, and the singular apparition of the two emerald pupils, the satanic eyes in the depths of the mirror.
A profound sleep, like that of a baby, her lips closed in a blissful moue, removes her from life, from the remorse of her involuntary and fatal sin, inexplicable and so deliciously real.
Homo-Deus, the Invisible Satyr, had fled, taking insomnia away.
VII. The Eternal Declaration
After the departure of Marc Vanel and his friend, Jeanne Fortin had remained in the high belvedere, contemplating the beautiful sky and the placid landscape. She was thinking about Marc’s ambiguous words and his singular attitude. What fantastic surprise did he have in store for her?
Dr. Fortin came in. “Jeanne,” he said, “do you know what Père Garnier asked me this evening?”
“Yes—for my hand for his son. What did you reply?”
“That you weren’t thinking of quitting your father or your work. Was I wrong not to consult you?”
“Oh, you don’t know your daughter if you could suppose that love could disturb me. The two of us have better things to do. Let’s say no more about it.”
They both fell silent, and remained for several minutes—a long time—in mute contemplation of the splendid spectacle of the magnificent May night.
Between Fortin and his daughter, sentiments existed that bore little similarity to those that parents and children habitually possess for one another. No excessive sentimentality was mingled there, even though sensibility was not absent; the tenderness was a trifle rude, although frank and sincere. Those two individuals, so curious, were essentially comrades, united by a serious and powerful amity, cemented by common endeavors, shared joys and difficulties, by the same desire to penetrate the arcane of a science that gave them new emotions every day.
Jeanne’s allures, in any case, were not those of a young woman. Neither in her speech, nor the intonations of her voice, nor her gestures, nor her gaze, was her sex evident. In an adorable envelope, dazzling in its beauty, was the masculine soul of an Apollo, which had a wild passion for the most forbidding toil. She manipulated the most improbable mixtures like an old laboratory scientist, deciphered the text of the densest works, and neatly dissected the flesh and limbs of a human body with the expertise of the most skillful surgeon.
She spoke to assistants and comrades wit
h a verbal rudeness that astonished them, and the liberties of language that men sometimes employed in her presence did not shock her any more than they seduced her. Absolutely indifferent to the game of love and passion, moonlit reveries were time lost to work, and novels—those that she had read before launching herself into scientific research—only left her with the memory of uninteresting futilities. Since she had been a little girl, having only devoted herself to sport and study, she had not even perceived that she had feelings. She relegated the act of love to a natural function, of which she only knew the scientific causes and effects, without any suspicion of its attraction, much less its delirious sensuality.
The fashion in which she had been brought up explained her character to some extent. She had lost her mother at an early age, when she was only six years old, and had retained the somewhat blurred image of an elegant, vaporous and rustling individual, perfumed like a flower, always in a hurry, never in the house, scarcely finding time to give her hasty kisses devoid of real tenderness, two or three times a day.
She was a kind of pretty little bird, light-headed, who did her best to squander Jean Fortin’s money, while the scientist, stunned by her chatter, her sparrow-like fluttering and her futilities, locked himself in his study in order not to suffer the spectacle of that charming nullity. He did not detest her, but she exasperated him.
They only had really serious quarrels about money. Dr. Fortin made a great deal of it, but Madame Fortin dressed herself from the Rue de Paix and needed a car of her own to run around between her hairdresser, her shoemaker, her couturiers and her afternoon teas from five to seven, where she found smart individuals of her own species. Then, every time the scientist permitted himself a large expenditure to purchase an item of apparatus or for the construction of the instruments necessary to his research, she screamed and stamped her feet in rage, because it represented clothes, hats, furs of jewels that she would never have. It seemed to her that her husband was stealing a part of her happiness in that fashion, and she wanted him to sacrifice the sums that became dynamos or retorts, instead of changing into sparkling fripperies—and horns.13
She had died suddenly of pleurisy following an excursion by car in a light flesh-colored dress, of the kind then in fashion, which were worn without any underwear at all, even in the depths of winter. In losing her, Dr. Forbin had experienced neither bitter grief nor slight joy—he had been indifferent to her for a long time—but he had thought, not without pleasure that he would finally be able to devote considerable sums of money to his studies.
Little Jeanne had thus grown up in an atmosphere of egotism, which slowly numbed in her the treasures of tenderness that she might have concealed. As she enjoyed an unbridled liberty for the development of her intelligence, however, she grew in the fashion of wild plants, in accordance with her instincts.
At twelve years of age, her father perceived, to his amazement, that she existed—and existed in a rather unexpected manner. She rode a bicycle and a horse and climbed trees in the garden—for at that time, Forbin lived in a small town house near the Porte d’Auteuil with a park. She swung, trapeze-fashion, like a boy, and sometimes fought with the urchins of the neighborhood, unembarrassed about going out onto the Boulevard de Montmorency when a comrade of her old age challenged her through the gate.
What was more amazing, however, and which troubled her father delightfully, was to learn that she had, since the epoch when a vague instructress had been charged with teaching her to read, read a great number of the science books in his library. To be sure, she had not understood very much of the majority of the works she had deciphered, but she had found enough in her reading to impassion her. When she told her flabbergasted father that her greatest pleasure was to plunge into Haeckel’s clear and simple Histoire de la Création,14 the doctor wondered where that bizarre little phenomenon, to which he had previously paid no attention, had come from. Not for a second had he imagined that his scatterbrained wife could have given him an interesting child.
And when he had suddenly recognized the fact that his own somewhat primitive instincts, independent nature and prodigious intelligence had been revealed in his daughter, he experienced an immense joy, in which there was pride—perhaps the first he had ever experienced.
From that day on, he occupied himself with Jeanne. He put a brake on her escapades in the street, her free-and-easy behavior and her perilous gymnastics, and orientated her, without roughness, toward the sciences accessible to her mind. Understanding that it was first necessary to give her an education, he enrolled her in a school whose director, Madame Berton, was a first-rate educator, and took her back when her studies were concluded in order to teach her the great problems that he and his colleagues had been deciphering relentlessly for a long time.
In the interim, he had bought the vast property in Saint-Cloud, because the house in Auteuil was much too small and the owner, in any case, wanted to demolish it in order to build an apartment block on the site.
In the new dwelling, the father and daughter collaborated usefully and joyfully; and the life that they spent deciphering redoubtable enigmas and piercing thick darkness appeared to them to be ideal, for the work maintained in them the continuous appetite for the struggle and the desire for discovery in which they found the most complete and easeful satisfaction. They had learned to love one another, and that tenderness was no less real and profound for being exempt from banality, in conformity with their original hearts and their exceptional souls.
Dr. Fortin was the first to break the silence.
“We have to work to do, you know, Jeanne.”
“Yes, Father, but I’d rather stay here for a while, reflecting on my own.”
He did not insist; when his daughter thought in that fashion, the result of her meditations was always translated into astonishing research or discoveries.
“Well,” he said, “I’m going down to the basement. You can join me there when you wish.”
And he went.
Soon, however, Georges Garnier came into the belvedere.
The young woman turned round. “There you are, Georges. I have a reproach to address to you. For the sake of an inconsequence, you’ve brought disturbance into our amity, and into our work—that ideal collaboration whose charm I appreciated. You’ve sent your father to ask for my hand. You now, however, that I can’t, in any circumstances, marry...”
“Jeanne,” he stammered, “I didn’t ask my father to take that step, the inanity of which I knew in advance. The worthy man decided to do it on his own, knowing that I’m madly in love. Forgive me for that. But why, though, forbid yourself so harshly sentiments in conformity with the eternal law of existence. Love governs humankind.”
“Because, my poor Georges, we are beings outside humankind—I am, at least. The law of which you speak is not for the refractory individuals who have voluntarily withdrawn from the banal society in which others move. I belong to science, to my work.”
“Never, then?”
“If, one day, nature and life no longer have any secrets for me, perhaps I would look at amour with other eyes, since it would then be the only mystery that I had yet to penetrate—but it’s doubtful, my poor boy, that my lifetime will suffice to complete the studies that occupy me, and you wouldn’t want to embrace me when I’m old and ugly, would you?”
“Oh, Jeanne, my passion for our intelligence and your beauty can only die with me, and time, I swear to you, will not diminish its sincere ardor. But we would have spoiled our best years, our youth. To love, Jeanne, it’s necessary not to wait for the twilight of life. You don’t know what felicities you’re rejecting and, without suspecting it, what happiness you’re scorning...”
She was leaning her elbows on the wrought iron rail that made a circuit of the belvedere, contemplating the tranquil beauty of the night. One might have thought that she was no longer listening to the young man.
After a few minutes, she said: “My dear Georges, I’d like you to understand fully that
if I refuse to be your wife, it’s not because you displease me. You’re young, handsome, healthy and good. But love doesn’t tempt me. I don’t understand it. While you’re pale, emotional, prey to violent emotions that betray the state of your heart, I remain cold, insensitive, distant and astonished. No, Georges, I don’t experience anything, anything at all, except for a slight annoyance at causing you distress.
“It’s necessary not to hold it against me if I’m like that, and above all, not to accuse me of cruelty. I don’t ask whether I’m right or wrong, whether I ought to suffer or rejoice in my physical impassivity; it suits me very well. At the mere idea of marriage, I sense something bizarre in which there is perhaps repulsion, for I see the coupling of creatures, the act of reproduction as a rather unappetizing operation. I therefore have no merit, my poor friend, in promising you never to be anyone else’s wife. And, having said that, as these conversations cannot lead to anything, and are time stolen from science, allow us to leave the matter there, so that I can go to work.”
She was about to go downstairs when he blocked her way and took her hands.
“No,” he said, “stay here and listen to me. It cannot be that a woman as dazzling as you, that a virginal splendor so perfectly made for love, is deaf to the singing voice of spring in fête, in joy, of all the rising sap and all the lusts of everything that crawls, walks, runs, flies, swims and respires in the meadows, the woods, the waters and the sky as all the solicitations of nature are renewed.”
Gently, he led her on to the platform, at the very edge of the belvedere. Down below there was the immense park with its vigorous trees covered in leaves, from which did indeed rise up, in the gloom, a kind of intoxication of saps, continuing the work of universal fecundity.
Further away, the sleeping countryside extended, and the dome of the sky, above the spring, resembled an inverted goblet carved in precious stone, with a clear and splendid transparency, the bottom of which was encrusted with diamonds.
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