by Jean Lorrain
But how was I to explain the luminous sphinx, the intense glow which had gently and harmoniously animated the roseate stone, and the superhuman beauty of the figure sleeping in its shadow? I felt that I had passed through an enchanted moment, that for a few seconds I had dwelt in a miraculous and divine realm which was nevertheless wholly deceptive.
Ethal also assured me that I had been dreaming – Ethal, inevitably, was aboard, exasperating my sensitivity, exercising the power of suggestion over my morbid dreams.
So you see, Monsieur, that you have nothing to envy me. There was a time when I was a miserable wretch, tortured exactly as you are now.’
SIR THOMAS WELCOME
‘To depart towards the sun and the sea, to go to heal oneself – no, to rediscover oneself- in lands which are both new and very old, where faith still endures, and which have not been tamed by our bleak civilization; steeping oneself in the tradition, the virility and the health of uncorrupted peoples; to live in India and the Far East, bathed in the brightness of the sky and the sea; to disperse oneself in nature, the only thing which never deceives us; to liberate oneself from all those conventions, futile attachments, relations and prejudices that are so many burdens weighing us down, and so many dreadful prison walls erected between ourselves and the reality of the universe; to live at last the life of the soul and the instincts, far from the artificial, overheated and hysterical existence of Paris and London: far from the whole of Europe …
‘And yet, there is in Italy and Spain, and certain Mediterranean islands: Sicily, Corsica … there are the light mornings of Ajaccio when the blue of the open sea is revealed between cypresses and pines … there are the almond-tress in flower on the slopes of Taormina, and the giant shadow of Etna over the antique dream of Greek theatre … there are the ancient isles of the Archipelago, certain tiny Adriatic ports, the unknown Venices of the coasts of Istria, more forgotten and even more ruinous in their sunbathed silence than the city of the Doges and the palaces … and there is the sleepy and profound charm of Turkish towns, the narcotic of the shadow of palm-trees … Yes, far from the realms of Baedeker and Thomas Cook, there are still corners where one may spend hours in the intimacy and complete sensuality of one’s own company …
‘What am I saying? The spirit which knows how to find solitude can claim its bounty in Tunis, or even in Malta, despite that it is nowadays infested wih Englishmen …
‘Oh, the complex and wholesome intoxication of removal! To put the sea – league upon league of the shifting and changing sea – between oneself and one’s ancient hurts, between one’s own life and those of intruders! But to achieve this end, one must no longer know anybody. One cannot even love a dog, if one has to leave it behind; a departure is a little death. Invisible bonds hold on to us too well. Only the adventurous, multifarious and splendid world will heal all our wounds: those atrocious little wounds inflicted on the modern soul by education, comfort and civilization …
‘There is a healing power in long sea-crossings, beneath constellations one has never seen before; in the cruel and nostalgic joy of brief encounters, those without tomorrows because the packet-boat which brought you both to Corfu will also take you away while she is bound for Alexandria; in the doubly-lived moments when the pulse is quickened by foreknowledge of departure and the sense of the irreparable; in the souls drunk in a kiss, the hearts given in a brusque embrace, the entire existence relinquished with a grip of the hand …
‘That is the secret of life as it ought to be lived: impassioned, inviting, taken, given, then carried away into the unknown and the beyond, without taking heed of conventions, and prejudices of caste or race …
‘The marvellous secret of life as it ought to be, in thought and action alike, is glowing in the great sad eyes of voyagers and the clear eyes of sailors, set against the scenery of some ancient Islamic port, in the shadow of some arabesque mountain, their lungs dilated by the brisk trade-wind of the Eastern seas, their hearts seized by all the delicious oppression of life … !
‘The secret of life is to be a voyager! To be a voyager, one must love skies and countries; one must be able to fall in love with a city or a race, and to detach oneself entirely from individuals.
‘The cure, the secret of good fortune is this: love the universe in all its changing aspects, in its marvellous antithesis and still-more-marvellous analogy. The external world will then become for us a source of unalterable joys, so much more perfect because our being is only their mirror. Shocks and injuries are only visited upon us by individuals. Avoid people; avoid Ethal; study races. You will find in one of them the gaze that you seek and you will find your soul therein: your crippled, dislocated and feverish soul. We all have within ourselves an atavism, which binds us to one of the ancestral races, and each of us can rediscover his true fatherland hundreds of leagues from his birthplace.
‘Like you, I have been obsessed with death and the horrible. The hallucinatory masks which haunt you took the specific form in me of a severed head. Oh, how I suffered from that malady, that disequilibrating obsession! I saw it everywhere; on every side that rictus of decapitation was railing at me, taunting me. The hallucination haunted me most intensively in the suburbs, in that sinister wilderness of byways which extends beyond the old city walls. As my sickness caused me to fall in love with my own malady, I knew exactly where and how to give birth to the torturing and evil vision.
‘Oh, the moonlit nights … the mad carriage-races from the toll-gate on the Boulevard Bineau to the banks of Billancourt… the slow evocative walks along roads ringed with palisades and a few widely-space villas with closed shutters. How easily the vision emerged and ascended in those poor and leprous regions, from the suggestion of crime, the flowering of evil, that Claudius loved in me! How well that stony province of prowlers played host to contemporary nightmares, and how complaisantly the deceptive Astarté – who so obstinately refuses to display herself in the enchanted towns of Islam – condescends to reveal herself in all her ghoulish finery at the borders of vacant sports-grounds and neglected pleasure gardens…
And always with Ethal, who appointed himself as my guide. I came to know, as you will, the byways of the Revolution, the race-courses of Montrouge and the kilns of the plain of Malakoff… all the sinister Parisian suburbs which constitute the empire of the mocking Astarté of the slums, extending from the Bièvre to the wilds of Gennevilliers.
‘What misery! To be in Gennevilliers, Malakoffor Montrouge when there is the triangular forum of Pompeii, the receding hills of Sorrento and Castellamare, all the enchantment of ancient Campania, the Bay of Naples and the Concha d’Oro, the arabesque epic of Mount Pellegrino, at Palermo, the temples of Agrigento and the race-courses of Syracuse, the splendour of their sunken arenas, funereal and yet so white, where footfalls stir the dust of centuries and of tombs … Syracuse! Taormina, Agrigento, Catania: all the blue memories of the grandeur of Greece, still sleeping beneath the olive-trees and the green oaks of Sicily!
‘There is your only cure. To allow the universe to enter into yourself, thus to take slow and voluptuous possession of the whole world; that is the breviary of the voyager. To be a wise and conscious wax which takes the impressions of nature and art; to find in the shade of a sky, the line of a mountain, the attractive eyes of a portrait, the profile of an ancient bust or the silhouette of a temple, the intellectual and yet sensual coitus by means of which the refreshing and fecund idea is born …
‘The life and physiognomy of a city – have you never dreamed of that? To wed a city as one would wed a wife, taking possession of it and enjoying it at length, keeping one’s troubles to oneself; to be the conscious awakener of one’s own sensuality, and with each analysis to take a step towards the sublime synthesis, which is the joy which comes when one knows life.
‘Cities, especially ancient and populous cities, with a past rich in adventures and stories, are as tasty as ripe fruit, luscious with the mystery of such existences as were once lived there, luscious with a
ll the striving for profit and for love that still goes on within them. Coastal towns, especially: Marseilles, Genoa, Barcelona … all the happy ports of the Mediterranean, with the hustle and bustle of their harbours, the sun-drenched reverie of their old docks and that tantalising fanfare of ‘elsewhere’, of unknown lands and distant shores, that sounds in the rigging, the sails, the halyards and the masts of so many outward bound ships.
‘That is where you must go, to ripen your spleen in the sun and to breathe in the taste of conquest and action which the sea wind carries.
‘Ports! Seamen are a childish and cynical race. The gaiety of their manly instincts pours forth when they are on the spree, and their innocent eyes are always dreaming: those eyes of water and of sky which one is always surprised to find in the rude tanned faces of buccaneers.
‘Ports! Their industrious, enigmatic and cosmopolitan population displays in the sordid setting of their streets the quaint rags of galley-slaves and corsairs. Base prostitution – which is all mire and squalor, hunger and misery in our cold lands of the north – there borrows some mysterious beauty from the sun; the girls crudely offering themselves have something luminous, gaudy and Oriental in their accoutrement. Their cheeks are spattered with powder, their eyes are blackened, and their tinselled mops of hair make them exact replicas of one another, as if they were so many eternal dolls stamped from a template, destined to overflow with lust and dedicated to the comfort of men. In such places there is something animal about sex, which excites and relaxes at the same time the brains of intellectuals…
‘Oh, the continual hazard of adventure which prowls and shines in the eyes of passers-by, the visions of attacks by armed hands, of rapes and knife-blows which haunt the corners of certain shady steets: the streets of Tunis, for example, and those of old Genoa and Toulon, and those of Villefranche, close to Nice, and of old Nice itself. And in the stink of their markets, in the midst of the detritus of fruits and vegetables, and there alone, Astarté will appear to you in some beautiful human flower, robust and oozing health, too rosy and russet, with mysterious animal eyes … like the butcher’s wife with the profile of Herodias who was glimpsed by the Goncourts in the market of the Récollets in Bordeaux. You would agree with me that the originals of certain portraits in museums – the very same ones which disturb you – flourish only in the masses. At Venice, the dogeresses of the Academy and the ‘St Ursula’ of Carpaccio are easily encountered in the Merceria and the little canals of Murano. La Cavalieri has sold oranges in Naples, and Caroline Otero in Cadiz; and those are probably the two most beautiful girls to be found in Paris.
‘You, who are tortured by the malady of beauty and oppressed by the unanimous ugliness of modern cities, whose palaces are banks and whose churches are factories, must flee from anaemia and chlorosis and from that depravity which is the pitiful invention of souls in distress, in connivance with hunger. Flee from all the refined filth of alcoholic London and wretched Paris; leave them, go to live your life elsewhere. Tomorrow I depart once again for the Indies. Would you like to go with me? I shall take you! I no longer have obsessions or nightmares since I have begun to live my own life. To live your own life, that is the final aim; but what a wealth of self-knowledge must be acquired before arriving there! No one lights our way; friends cheat us of our own instincts, and experience alone can help us discover it. Ranged against us we have our education, our family and our entire milieu – and that is not to mention all the prejudices of the world and the legislation of our fellow-men. On top of all that, we encounter everywhere an Ethal. When that happens, it is too late to live the authentic existence, the only one for which we are born – and yet, in the same hour, the way is shown to us.
‘Too late, too late … such is the vulgar cawing of fate in response to the sad lesson of experience. Nevermore! Never-more!
‘I saw you, the day before yesterday, during that opium-smoking session, the floundering prey of horrible visions. It was not opium, by the way, but hashish: opium does not vaporise in that fashion, and I easily recognised Ethal’s hand in that deception. I saw you becoming pale, sweating profusely, rattling and choking with gestures and incoherent words: an entire pantomime of agony in which I rediscovered some frightful memories of my own – and a great pity took hold of me, the pity of a sick man cured for another man overtaken by the same sickness. A deeply personal sympathy impelled me towards you. Having divined that we share the same tastes, affinities and sufferings, I have come spontaneously to see you. As I am your elder, if not in years, at least in experience, I have come to lend you my torch and cry out a warning as you teeter on the brink of the precipice.
‘You can still avoid the fall.’
I drank in his words as though I were taking medicine.
ANOTHER TRACK
16 November 1898
I am still here! The rain is falling; the trees in the avenues stand up lamentably against the flour-paste sky; amid the puddles of black water, one must suffer the horror of cabstands and the ceaseless scrimmaging of umbrellas. This is the Paris of November, the Paris of spleen and mud – and Sir Thomas Welcome is making haste towards the sun. Some mail-carrying packet-boat is bearing him off to the distant and odorous Indies: the Indies of bamboo forests, sacred pools and temples …
One word from Ethal, a single hour of conversation with the Englishman, a single evening spent with him in a restaurant, was sufficient to hold me back.
It is as if he sees clearly into the depths of my soul! Nothing can be hidden from that man! I can still see him, in the lounge of that restaurant, between the high mirrors bright with electric light, amid the dazzle of lustrous crystal, with the ‘public’ all around us: men in black suits and their female companions. The dining-tables were tiny. The girls were all alike in their low-cut dresses glittering with ersatz jewellery and their pastel make-up; all svelte, amenable, with overlarge and overmobile eyes set in oval faces, and all of them with their carefully-styled hair doing their utmost to evoke the image of Willie Stephenson: that vaporous and sharp stereotype of the end of the eightenth century first made fashionable by dealers in cheapjack trinkets and small-time stock-market gamblers, which ended up imposing itself on the world of high society. In the aisles between the tables there was a continual coming and going as customers arrived and took their leave: a riot of sumptuous evening-cloaks, shimmering silks and gauzes, ‘hellos’ and ‘good evenings’ cried from one table to another with affected voices, and the little winks of satisfaction of calculatedly cool and bored men, playing all their gestures for the gallery … all the costumed comedy of that menagerie of lust which is a late-night restaurant.
Why did Claudius, who knows my hatred of politeness and the world, steer me to that restaurant? Exasperated by all those affectations, all those powdered leers and all those brothel smiles, how could I help but recapitulate, by way of contrast, my conversation of the previous evening: the idea of the great escape into the free and wholesome life, of the intoxication of the instincts, of cultures still uncorrupted, of the blue of the sky and the sea, of all the health and vigour of life in the tropics? I poured out before him the entire philtre of energy that had been gifted to me the day before by the enthusiasm of Welcome.
‘Yes, I know the old song,’ Claudius interrupted, with a sneer. ‘Bilbao, Marseilles and Barcelona … the bright eyes of seamen … the secret of life … the love of action apprehended in the wide eyes of voyagers… and doubtless in the argot of hauliers on the docks. I know dear Thomas all too well.
‘But he has not told you everything.
‘Be forewarned that alongside the beings of instict and passion to which the dockyards and harbours of a great coastal town give birth, there are creatures of lust and perversity too: frightful products of cosmopolitan lust and the ennui of civilization, much like the bejewelled ghouls whose presence here you find so oppressive.
‘Sir Thomas has not spoken to you about those. More than that, he is neglectful of your needs in sketching this portrait, for
he has become part of a company: the company of the surfeited, the seekers of the impossible. One finds them everywhere, in Bahia as in Marseilles, in Tangier as in Cadiz, in Toulon as in Brest, in Le Havre as in Cairo, rolling the dregs of their closed and filthy minds around the opium dens just as their counterparts do in the music-halls and the ‘American Stars’.
‘Would you like me to describe them to you? Women with androgynous silhouettes, dressed in the blue cloth of seamen; English millionaires with cooked complexions the colour of port wine, their necks tanned and fierce, their expressions sharp and pale; all the proprietors of big yachts and all their passengers; a perverse and drunken army of Wandering Jews, which you must know as well as I do, given that you have been to Algiers and to Cairo … all of those who, being idle or crippled, or having come down in the world, go forth to parade upon the restless seas the fever of their worn out feelings or the embarrassing renown of their defectiveness.
‘Oh, Sir Thomas Welcome pretends to be cured – he told you that, didn’t he? Well, he’s a liar. He has deceived you, like the possessed wretch that he is. Neither in the climbing streets of the casbah, nor those surrounding the mosques of Cairo, nor in the bright-dark of the souks of Tunis, nor in the mud and reed huts of the villages of the Nile, has he ever encountered those liquid green eyes whose distant and captivating promise has made him abandon everything. He has told me so himself. To me, he does not lie; he cannot lie to me. From the deadening backstreets of Constantinople to the Moorish cafes of Biskra, that intoxicating phantom of the Orient, the Syrian goddess Astarté has always disappointed him, always cheated and deceived him —just as he deceives himself, so enamoured is he of the deception which he pursues.
‘I have travelled with him for years, but we have chased them long enough: these women of the Tropical lands, parcelled up in silks and veils; arab and moorish women taking themselves off to the mosque or the baths, tottering as they descend the steps of back-streets steeped in shadow. Their long, languid and ecstatic eyes, uniformly smeared with kohl, are as imploring as those of gazelles, but when one looks more closely at them, they are as hard and as brilliant as the flashing eyes of birds: cold and empty eyes of jet. All eyes are black beneath those lapis lazuli skies, and none of the creatures encountered in such regions – whether they be Ouled-Nail or donkey-boys, found in the shadow of the great pyramid of Cheops or in the stony wilderness of Petra – will keep the promise of Astarté.