by Jean Lorrain
Evil survives the annihilation of everything else.
I have never breathed the perfume of the little blue flower of sentiment, which even little working-girls – apprentice milliners and plasterer’s labourers – have in their hearts at sixteen years of age. More than that: rancour has always led me to scoff at it, to jeer at that adolescent perfume when it found a home in the hearts of others. I have never had a true friend and I have never had a true mistress. I have only known birds of passage: one-night stands or month-long caprices; all the girls that ever had the honour of my breath and my lips were girls that I paid – generously – in the morning; they must always have known that I did not love them.
Women have never been anything to me but flesh to be experienced – not even a pleasure! Avid for sensations and analytical by temperament, I have studied myself in association with them as if they were so many anatomical models. Not one ever provided me with the anticipated thrill – and rightly so, because I watched out for that thrill as if I were hidden in a bush, lying nervously in wait for it. It is not to be discovered by knowing sensuality, but rather in unconscious and wholesome joy. I have spoiled all the pleasure in my life by making an instrument of it, instead of living it. The quest for refinement and the careful research of the unusual are fatal; they lead to decomposition and to annihilation.
That moment of abandon which the meanest of streetwalkers, once her day’s work is complete, gives to her pimp, I have never obtained for myself. God only knows if I have squandered all the money I have paid out to such women! Everyone, man and woman alike, senses that I am a being somehow set outside nature: an automaton galvanised into some simulacrum of life by covetous desires, but an automaton – that is to say, a dead man – nevertheless. My cadaverous eyes make people afraid.
Today, however, those cadaverous eyes are full of tears.
One day you will perhaps realise
The value of a heart which understands you.
The good which is found in knowing it
And what is suffered in losing it.
Paris, 25 March 1899
I re-read my journal yesterday. What stupidity! A pretty thing, the sentimental crisis of the Duc de Fréneuse! I have been tenderised by de Musset, and behold – I have the soul of a milliner now!
Why did I weep? Today, I understand the reason.
It was that conversation heard by chance through the partition-wall in that hotel-room where I ended up the other night. It was the two or three phrases exchanged between my neighbours which turned me upside-down. From the miry depths of my shaken being an old regret has climbed to the surface of the bog – and, watered by a tear, has flourished.
That flophouse in the Rue des Abbesses, with its sign lit throughout the night and rooms for one franc inscribed in transparent letters on the frosted glass of its lantern, that semi-slum to which I know the way, which had seen me so many times before …
On a moonless evening, two together,
Sending my pain to sleep on a hazardous bed.
(I now quote Baudelaire to excuse my worst failings …)
It was in that sixth-rate fleapit, where I had failed to find my road to Damascus, that I thought I heard the words of redemption.
Is that sufficiently ridiculous?
I went there with a girl who was neither ugly nor pretty, gathered up in I know not what dive, motivated far less by desire for her depraved appearance than by that craving for strong sensation which has been a bitter and mordant taste in my mouth ever since I first drank that foul wine. The setting and the atmosphere of adventure which surrounds these escapades interests me far more than the partner I select, for I have a mad hunger for danger, an addiction to low and louche locales.
Oh, the beauty of sinister promiscuity and equivocal companionship; the atrocious risks of unexpected encounters in those banal dens of vice and vagabondage, of cozenage and crime.
Anyhow, scarcely had we crossed the threshold than the girl displeased me. I paid her off – she was so very listless even in her haggling – and, laid low by fatigue, I went to bed. I lay there listening; the thin partitions between the rooms of such hotels are always replete with unforeseen lessons. Sure enough, less than ten minutes had gone by when whispering commenced in the room next door. A couple who had fallen silent when they heard us come in now resumed their discussion. A young voice whose freshness astonished me merrily burst through the rustlings of the bed-linen and the creaking of the mattress. With turtledove cooings, in the half-fainting manner of a happy lover, the woman spoke in a thick Parisian accent.
‘You feel so good … you feel like ripe corn. I love you! You are as fair as corn too … I am so hungry for you!’ I could imagine the way she was lying, the gestures of her hands: the image imposed itself on my closed eyes. The little voice, thoroughly suburban but as murmurous as a spring, was smothered by a cascade of kisses.
The couple were in love.
What manner of man was it to whom a sixteen-year-old voice spoke such intoxicating things?
‘You feel like ripe corn … you are as fair as corn … I am so hungry for you …’
Never had such things been said to me.
That night, the couple loved one another very much. The man remained silent, and it was not until first light that I heard his voice, saying: ‘How bright your eyes are, Mimi!’
My overexcited imagination once again imposed on me a vision of the gestures and smiles of awakening lovers. The girl, in her voice like a bubbling stream, replied with delectable mischievousness: ‘Are my eyes bright? It is because you have looked at me, monsieur.’
Their games and their kisses resumed, extending through the room. Bare feet pursued one another hither and yon. The girl had jumped out of the bed and the boy tried to fetch her back.
From the sound of their comings and goings I deduced that they were now getting dressed. She was not a whore, nor he a pimp, for they did not intend to linger in bed all morning. They were a couple of honest lovers: he, some workman in a hurry to go to work; she, some apprentice who had to lie to her parents in order that she might spend the whole night with her lover. She must have invented an excuse: some vitally important piece of work to do at the shop, which required an all-night session …
They were probably both young.
I was curious to see their faces. I got up and stood behind the Venetian blinds, with my bare feet on the tiles, undressed at the open window, keeping watch on the entrance of the hotel…
He came out first, wearing a beige overcoat and a bowler hat. He was tall and lean, of insignificant apearance – evidently some petty bureaucrat or an employee in a department store, no more than twenty-two years old. She, for the sake of prudence, did not venture out until two minutes later, but he waited for her at the end of the street.
She was charming – blonde, like him, with her hair in crazy curls, untidily gathered beneath a little black hat, which she had decorated herself with bluebells and poppies. She had a little collar of black cloth, and a thin dress of blue foulard completed her outfit. She trotted lithely away on the toes of her yellow ankle-boots. Love had made her lithe, and a little pale and hollow-eyed too. But her youthful little figure was so happy that she embodied all the joys of spring.
They had not forty years between them.
The wine-merchants and the greengrocers were beginning to put back their shutters. She rejoined him at the street-corner and there, once again, they embraced for a long time.
I spied on them from my window.
At last, they separated. After taking ten paces, she returned yet again for one last goodbye, but it was too late. He had turned the corner. She accelerated her pace, with her shoulders suddenly bowed, as if weighed down by a profound sadness, she disappeared.
Adieu: I sense that in this life
I shall never see you again!
………………………………………………………
In losing you, I feel that I love you.
I wen
t back to bed and promptly fell into a drunken sleep. It was a troubled sleep, shot through with incoherent and contradictory images: Thomas Welcome, Ethal’s wax doll and various figures observed in the slums filed past my bedhead in turn … and then yet more faces: faces from my early youth, even from my chidhood; faces that I thought I had forgotten. Among others, there was the face of Jean Destreux, a farm-hand who had been run over on our estate one evening at harvest-time, after falling from a cart laden with corn. I was only eleven years old at the time.
Why has that figure reappeared to me now? I have never seen it since the accident. Thomas Welcome resembles him a little, but I was not previously aware of the resemblance. Is it the apparition of Thomas which has brought back that of Jean Destreux, or has the phantom of my childhood arisen of its own accord from my past?
I awoke with the sun shining directly on my bed, to the sound of an organ playing under the window. It was after eleven.
Outside, there was the most beautiful blue sky. It was one of those March mornings which seem more like May, which sometimes greet the Paris spring with glorious azure. On the boulevards there were barrows fully-laden with gillyflowers and tea-roses, yellow tulips and sweet and heady narcissi, all pushed along by ambulant merchants. Housekeepers standing at the edges of the pavements were buying them; working girls were putting them in their buttonholes as they passed by. Paris had already been at work for five hours and people were leaving their workplaces to swarm around a seller of fried potatoes. There was a whole flock of young and bare-headed female burnishers in black smocks, amusing themselves.
I happened upon this volume of de Musset after returning from the hotel, and my fingers began turning the pages mechanically – and, in the empty and luxurious living death of my womanless existence, discovered these verses full of tenderness and loving distress:
One day you will perhaps realise
The value of a heart which understands you.
I know now why I wept.
THE REFUGE
Paris, 28 March.
Jean Destreux has returned to me in a dream, and all my childhood with him: the childhood I spent at Fréneuse in rich and rainy Normandy.
I remember watching him working on the farm. I used to escape from the chateau in order to go to play with him. I had only to go through the little birch-wood on the far side of the lawn, near the entrance of the park, and open the gate to the orchard; the lazy and grassy orchard.
The farm!
The rooms at Fréneuse were so vast and high, and so very bright with their large French windows and the gleam of their polished parquet floors – but it was a sad brightness. All the melancholy of the sky, the open country and the changing seasons entered the house by way of those windows. Oh, the dry austerity of their little white curtains! How lonely I felt there; how hostile the things around me seemed to be!
There were huge pieces of furniture, in a heavy and sullen style, surmounted by the heads of lions and rams and other Imperial insignia. I was always bumping into their corners; contact with them was cold and sickening. I did not like them in the least. Nor was I any fonder of the massive mahogany chairs which seemed to be squatting in front of the wall-hangings … and what hangings! They were glossy, full of great eagles and golden laurels – captives, one might have thought, in the dull green or crimson depths. The waxed parquets, where diamond-shaped pieces alternated with rosettes, were like an ice-field, like satin to the touch and slippery underfoot.
The great halls of Fréneuse! I shivered there even in midsummer. And the tops of the trees in the park, visible in the clear glass of the transoms, eternally agitated – as if they were filling up my childish soul with distress!
How infinitely preferable to the cold luxury of those vast empty rooms were the dairy, the barns and the byre: the endless dripping of the dairy; the dusty and odourous shadows of the barns; the suffocating tepidity of the byre where the cows were so comfortable!
I liked the dairy best of all: overpowering afternoons in the July heat; the odour of curdled milk, seemingly fresher than fresh, with its particular acidity; the musty scent of slightly-soured cream fermenting in the air currents streaming through the open casements. What a strange and powerful sense of wellbeing I had as I drank in all of that! And the red hands of the farmer on the bloated udders of the cows, the heavy fall of cow-dung in the straw …
And I liked the hasty search for eggs laid in hiding-places: eggs which we sometimes found in the corners of the racks when we furtively stole, on tip-toe, into the deserted stables … and all the mad adventures, when I galloped through the timber-framed barns with the farmer’s children!
Yes, I liked all that far better than the bleak days spent in the house: the hours of study in the library, under the tuition of the abbé. I even liked it better than the few minutes of conversation I had with my mother, who was always extended on her chaise longue when I went up to greet her, every morning and every night!
My mother’s room! It was always decorated with white lilacs, and there was always a fire, even in midsummer. It was scented with ether and creosote, and another odour which, as I detected it at the threshold, lifted up my heart. My mother! I can still see her long hands, heavy with rings: her diaphanous and carefully-manicured hands, where the blue of the veins stood out beneath the surface. They were gentle, caressing and sweetly-scented; they lingered upon my head, tousling my hair, digressing for a moment to straighten my tie, then lifting once again to my lips, to claim a kiss.
They were soft and delicate hands, impregnated by the finest scents: the pale, slow hands of a woman condemned to die young. And yet I hesitated to touch them. Oh, how I preferred the sweaty bodies of the farmer’s children! They radiated health and strength. All that lost health, the fruits of the earth, the odour of wheat and moist leaves, haunts me still; it has brought back to me the spectre of Jean Destreux.
29 March 1899
Jean Destreux!
There was a great deal of work to be done out in the fields. On autumn evenings, when the furrows fumed in the mist and the tired horses plodded slowly back to the stables. I would slip away from the chateau and race madly to the edge of the little wood. There, heart hammering, I watched out for the return of the horses to the farm. I watched out especially for his return. He was so merry, so good to all of us – all the little children. His good spirits animated the whole farm. It was as if the very air of the place had been transformed since he had returned from his military service.
He had served in Africa. He still wore his spahi’s cap while he worked. Africa! He had brought back from the Arab lands a great fund of stories, which he would act out theatrically, with laughter bubbling upon his lips and joy in his eyes. The irises of his eyes were so blue that it was as if the profundity of the sky were smiling in his ruddy face. He was tall, lean and muscular; his hair was the colour of ripe rye; the desert sun had tanned, dried and burnished him. With his bright head of hair and the fluffy moustache superimposed on his baked brown complexion, he was like a great vine-shoot ablaze in the warmth of the August days. He was indefatigable in his work, and his good example, his buffoonery and his devil-may-care attitude, motivated the other harvesters, driving out their natural indolence.
On winter evenings, when the labourers gathered together to entertain themselves, he would sometimes don his military uniform and inspect a parade of his bewildered fellow farm-hands.
As for myself, I loved him for the frankness of his great bright eyes, for his insuppressible gaiety, for the stories that he told, and for his unfailing gentleness towards us. Then again, he taught me how to handle a sabre for my amusement: ‘Parry! Thrust!’ And he knew such diverting songs: stirring and vigorous marching songs; the irreverent and indecent refrains of the guard-house; and yet others, chanted so monotonously and so sadly that tears would come whenever we heard them. Those, he had learned far away, in the distant countries of Africa where he had served in the army.
On Sunday, while the other farm-
hands were either at the tavern or at vespers, he would stay behind to read old almanacs in the barn. Then, I would go to find him relaxing in the hay. The farmer’s children would already be there. Muffled laughter would greet my arrival. Jean Destreux would read out prose and verse from the old periodicals. He had heaps of them.
The vivifying odour of the hay and the harvest; the shadowed frames of the sheds; the luminous rays falling from a skylight; scintillating dust-motes dancing in the warm air; the play of light arid shadow in the granaries; the meadow-grasses gathered in; all the heavy thatched roofs … and Jean Destreux, with his shirt of khaki linen open at the neck, was the living incarnation of all of that.
I took little or no account of it all. I was incapable, then, of appreciating the colours, the perfumes and the forms. I experienced them powerfully, unconsciously, with an undeveloped soul, dark and burning – so happy in all my sensations as sometimes to wish that I might die – but without analysing their rewards. It was all of a piece, synthesized into a whole by the force of ignorance. That kind of ignorance is fortunate, isn’t it?
Oh, the heavy labour in the open fields, and the furrows fuming in the first chilly mists of October, when men and horses came so wearily home! Every evening intoxicated me, as if I were smelling the odour of earth for the first time. I loved to sit behind an embankment, at the edge of a field, among the dead leaves, and listen delightedly to the sound of voices dying in the distance: the voices of exhausted labourers riding on a cart. I loved the odour of raked leaves too, the freshness of rain and wet branches, and my soul would lose all its strength as I watched the sun sinking towards the horizon where it would set.