“Welcome, pretty singer!”
“Her voice is as sweet as the voice of the nightingale, but she has no need to hide in the foliage like her, for where would one find a more charming girl than Lorette?”
Such were the words of the boatmen, for that strange race, in giving the Flemish language the poetic accentuation of the Midi has also given it numerous metaphors and almost the same exaggeration. In our day still they make use of impassioned images to express what they feel, and their gestures, like their words, reveal a southern origin transmitted purely during so many centuries and among people of a wholly opposed organization.
Lorette, pert in the middle of that adulatory group, without paying any heed to the honeyed tributes lavished upon her, in a fashion that proved that she was accustomed to such tributes, went to mingle with the young women, where her cheerful pleasantries soon excited a noisy merriment. All the young men drew nearer and were greeted with epigrams, to which the responded with the same playfulness.
Asrael, a witness to that scene, in which Lorette was playing the central role, could not help smiling in spite of his sadness, and vaguely envying the lot of the boatmen. Then he conceived the fantasy of living their life for a while, and trying to forget, for a few months, the Heaven he had lost and the Hell that had claimed him.
While he was indulging in such thoughts, his piercing gaze, that of a Spirit, perceived the cadaver of a young man some distance away, on the bed of the river. A few hours before, that young man had deliberately broken his head against a rock. Falling into the river he had been suddenly swallowed by the waves.
At the beginning of the evening someone had asked whether Mamert Delveau was there. “By God,” someone had replied, “Mamert isn’t a fellow like the rest, and you know his black humor. For a week he hasn’t said a word to a single Christian.”
Asrael immediately took on the features of Mamert Delveau, put on his costume and showed himself on the bank, imitating the cry with which the boatmen call to their comrades. A plank was rapidly thrown from the boat to the shore and Asrael sat down among the boatmen, who formed a circle again in order to listen to another story.
XI.
A few days thereafter, Lorette’s boat was moored on a solitary stretch of the Escaut’s bank. The young woman had climbed up from her little bedroom to the deck of the boat. She went back, and forth, tormented by a lack of occupation that she did not know how to employ. A review of the long, flat boat with no mast, a few reproaches to her two conductors and a ballad that she started to sing and interrupted in the middle of the second or third couplet did not calm her agitation. Then she went back down to her cabin, opened and closed the chest that contained her garments, took them out one by one, examined them, folded them up and put them back. Then she undid her hair, spread it out over her shoulders with a shake of the head and, putting it up again, arranged it with expertise. Then she gave the same care to the rest of her attire, washed her hands and feet in fresh water, went back on to the deck of the boat, and looked all around, as far as she could.
Still the most complete solitude.
Lorette folded her arms over her chest with the fatigue of ennui; her head gradually tilted forward, and her staring but sightless eyes betrayed the profound reverie into which the pretty young woman drifted. Pretty? Truly, for no boatwoman had ever worn the long corset and heavy silver earrings with more grace; no bilander had ever outlined the delicate proportions of such a dainty foot on its black planks.
Suddenly, an almost imperceptible sound extracted Lorette from her reverie. She raised her head, listened, and did not take long to distinguish an indecisive object on the river in the distance, and, in spite of the uncertain moonlight, she soon recognized it as a boat. That sudden apparition caused her features to expand.
Not that she knew either where that boat was coming from or who was steering it; but no matter, it was a boat; she would find a new face there; she would be able to exchange a few words, even indifferent ones; her emptiness and her ennui would cease, and that was sufficient...
In the meantime, the boat advanced and came to moor next to Lorette’s boat. Then she was able to see Mamert Delveau standing near the poop. With one bound, the young man crossed the distance that separated the two bilanders and accosted the boatwoman with an ease and an urgency that she had never noticed in the taciturn boatman, for he lived in complete isolation, and a thousand various rumors ran around in his regard.
If some could be believed, the victim of a spell, he had never been permitted thus far either to be loved by a woman or become a father or bring a lucrative voyage to a successful conclusion. Some accursed witch had cast that abominable spell upon him.
Others said, in low voices, that such a sadness had to conceal a secret crime. When scarcely adolescent, Mamert had loved a young woman who disappeared one day, without anything ever being known of her fate. Perhaps Mamert’s dagger had been the cause of that disappearance.
Finally, the third version, and the most accredited, consisted of a romance no less extraordinary than the first two: it was claimed that Mamert, by virtue of an unparalleled jealousy, kept that young woman imprisoned on his boat, and never let anyone see her.
The fact is that Mamert was quite simply afflicted by a malady of consumption, and that the romantic prestige with which his sadness had been adorned existed solely in the imagination of gossips and the curious.
Nevertheless, that romantic prestige had given Mamert an importance in the eyes of his comrades, and the young women took the same interest in him that a story recounted in the evening caused them to experience. Many a time, one of the former had tried to surprise Mamert’s secret; many a time, one of the latter had been furtively to visit Mamert’s boat while he was absent; but none of them had discovered anything, because there was nothing to discover.
With his fine curly hair, his elegant figure, his pale face, and perhaps by the very fact that he did not share the urgency of the others in Lorette’s regard, Mamert preoccupied the young woman’s imagination greatly. Twenty times over she had put to work the most provocative enticements to attract the attention of the mysterious Mamert, and nothing had ever worked. Such disdain, the chagrin of her offended self-esteem and the ardent blood that ran in her veins had ended up inspiring in her a romantic passion for Mamert, a passion that knew no bounds, to which the boldest advances had attested many times over.
On recognizing Mamert’s boat, on seeing the young man who had thus far been s cold and indifferent toward her come aboard with so much urgency, Lorette experienced a great disturbance that she tried to disguise by addressing a few insignificant words to Mamert. But she was trembling, and could scarcely articulate those words.
“In truth, I thought I would spend my entire evening here alone, without finding a Christian to talk to.”
“And imagine my joy, Lorette, on finding you here when I expected to encounter nothing but solitude.”
“I’m not sure whether you’re telling the truth, for you like solitude; you like it more than the society of your comrades, and especially the society of young women.”
“All of them, with only one exception.”
“And what is her name?” asked Lorette, delighted to hear Mamert speak of amour, and sure that the boatman was about to speak her name.
“Her name is…but why tell you my secret?”
“Speak quickly! Speak, then! I want it...I beg you, Mamert.”
Mamert continued to hesitate.
Poor fellow! Lorette thought. How timid he is! Oh, it no longer astonishes me that he has kept silent for so long and has not dared to confess his love to me.
“Well, Mamert, her name?”
“No, I can’t say it; I want to keep my secret.”
“You love her very much, then?”
“Judge for yourself, since I only live for her and by her; since, in order to receive the mysterious visits she makes me from time to time, I condemn myself to pass my life in the most complete isolation.
”
Lorette experienced a great disappointment on seeing all the illusions of her vanity and her amour dissolve and vanish.
“I have half your secret, Mamert,” she said, finally and painfully, “and I’ll have the other whether you like it or not.”
“Oh, I don’t believe so; I even defy you. Judge how scantly redoubtable your threat is; I have no fear of telling you that my mistress is coming to visit me this evening.”
“And no one in the world can prevent you from being faithful to that rendezvous?” she demanded, while her lips laughed and her gaze attached itself to Mamert, full of disturbance and jealousy.
“No one,” he replied, in a voice in which Lorette thought she could divine an imperceptible hesitation.
“You are a lover such as there has never been and never will be. You are linked to this woman, then, like death to a cadaver. But what if another loved you? What if she loved you as much, or more than your mysterious unknown woman?”
Mamert shook his head and smiled to signify doubt.
“What proof of such great love has she given you? Is her beauty perfect, then? What if another loved you, Mamert, if you read it in her eyes, if she even confessed it to you…?”
“I would try not to understand her.”
“But if she took your hand in hers, if she looked at you with eyes full of tears, finally, if the emotion she experienced were so keen that the words could scarcely emerge from her lips…tell me, Mamert, what would you do?”
“Then...”
“Then, Mamert,” she said, taking his hand in hers and making him shiver under her moist gaze. Well? Then…?”
“Oh, I think I would flee.”
She let go of Mamert’s hand, turned her head and wiped away a furtive tear.
“The love of which you speak is impossible,” added Mamert, taking Lorette’s hand again. “Who could love me, then? Me, with my sadness and my poverty?”
“Mamert!” cried the young woman, while this time, tears flowed abundantly from her eyes, and her hand squeezed the boatman’s hand convulsively...
The next day, at dawn, Lorette, with her arm passed around Mamert’s neck, asked him, with a malicious tenderness: “What about your rendezvous, Mamert?”
XII. Delights
Lorette could not detach herself from Mamert’s side for a moment. If it was necessary to get down on the bank to hasten and direct the horses that were dragging the bilanders, she got down with him, marched arm in arm with him, her lover, and spoke words of love or considered him with a passionate gaze. If he went to make purchases in a nearby village, she took a veil to cover her face, put shoes on her habitually bare feet, and accompanied him.
“Oh, you don’t know,” she repeated to him incessantly, “you don’t know how much I love you. Before loving you, I didn’t exist, I was asleep. Now I’m awake, now I’m alive, for you’re my life, you’re my soul. Oh, Mamert, when you quit me, even for a moment, it immediately creates a profound solitude around me. If you knew how my blood freezes, how my ideas tarnish, when your hand is no longer in mine, when your voice is no longer intoxicating me! I’m cold; I feel ill; I’m desirous without knowing what it is that I desire; everything discontents me, and angry words contract my lips for no reason.
“On the contrary, when you’re there, my sweet love, my ideas blossom; tears of joy fill my eyes; nothing matters, nothing can upset me or move me; I have you beside me, what can the rest matter!
“You’ll love me forever, won’t you? You’ll never think with pleasure of anyone else but me? You’ll never love anyone else? You, love another! What a horrible thought! How ill it makes me feel! It’s impossible, for you love me so much. Well, only in thinking about it, see, my hands clench, my eyes light up, rage swells my heart and blood rushes to my face! No longer to be loved by you would mean: It’s another he loves, it’s no longer Lorette; he’s disdained her, he’s cast her aside. Oh, you see, you see, that can never be! Rather my death! Rather yours, yes yours! For I don’t love, myself, like all those women who only love in part; me, I would rather kill you with my own hand than let a rival have you! Yes, with my own hand. And it wouldn’t be with poison, it wouldn’t be an obscure murder. No, in broad daylight, a dagger that one plunges slowly, and allows the enjoyment of the terrors sand tortures of the infidel; a dagger that one twists in the wound, a dagger that cannot be stopped by prayers, by tears or by screams.
“And if ever I come to that, nothing in the world would prevent me from avenging myself. You might be a man, young and strong; I, whose arm is so frail compared with yours—look, it is only half as thick—if I have said I will kill you, it’s necessary that you are killed. But where am I going? Where am I being carried by the fear of a woe that can never arrive, since you love me? Oh, forgive me, forgive my delirium! It’s because I love you so much. It’s because there’s something so frightful in the idea of losing Mamert’s love.”
Asrael experienced an indescribable joy on listening to Lorette’s discourse. He had found in her and with her a fanatical passion, not the chaste and ineffable amour of Heaven but an amour that at least occupied all the faculties of his soul, an amour that filled the insupportable void left in him by the eternal absence of Nephta.
“And me?” he replied. “And me? Do you believe that I love you with less force than you love me? Am I happy anywhere but in your arms? Have our boats not become for me a world, a fatherland, a family? When we approach a shore that is not solitary, do you not see me seize the tiller and shout to the conductor of the horses: ‘March, march more rapidly!’ Are not you, and you alone, my pleasure, my joy, my happiness?”
Then they recalled the slightest details of their amours; they made one another long confidences of their thoughts and their sensations before they knew one another. They consecrated their memories thus, they caused them to be reborn; they embellished the present with them; they exchanged and made one another a gift of their previous existence.
One summer evening, after one of those stifling days that precede and prepare a storm, Lorette and her lover were sitting under a light tent formed by a sail suspended with the aid of a few stakes. It had been necessary for them to quit the interior of the boat, for the heat that had been concentrated there and the lack of air rendered its habitation impossible. Leaning against the tall unique mast of the bilander—a mast that can be erected or folded up according to the boatman’s caprice, and seems more like a luxury ornament than an object of real utility—Lorette supported her fatigued lover’s head on her knees.
Parodying the tender cares of a mother for a son still very small, she invited Mamert to sleep by means of those naïve words, imprinted with an inexpressible grace, which cannot be proffered by any other mouth than a maternal one; for their charm does not reside in the thought they express, not only in the inflection of the voice that pronounces them, the emotional gaze and the caressant gestures that accompany them. Amour, as if by a tacit confession of the superiority of maternal tenderness over the other affections of the soul, amour, in its most naïve and truest phases, only borrows those delicious words.
Lorette balanced Asrael’s head softly, passing her fingers through his black hair, and said to him, in a child-like voice:
“Go on, my child, sleep; for you ought to be so comfortable, lying as you are upon my bosom. Sleep, I want you to; sleep, for the storm is coming; sleep, and during the storm, your mother will watch over you; sleep, you have nothing to fear from the demons that take little children, especially little children who are not good.”
Asrael smiled at Lorette as a child smiles at his mother, and there was in the abandon of their childish frolics a magic, a pure joy, a complete forgetfulness of everything, as one experiences at the happy age that they were feigning in their lovers’ caprices.
“Oh, you don’t want to go to sleep, bad boy, you don’t want to! I’ve threatened you with my finger, I’ve said to you: ‘Sleep, sleep!’ but you don’t do it. Far from it, you’re raising yourself up to gi
ve me a kiss.” Go on, be good, and then go to sleep. Go to sleep, and to put you to sleep—for I want you to sleep—I’ll sing you one of my most beautiful ballads: a ballad that I don’t sing every day, at least. Be good, put your head on my knees; listen, my child, for I’m going to sing the ballad of Simon Brade-vie.
I
Who wants to hear, who wants to know, the adventures of Monseigneur Simon Brade-vie?31
He was a brave knight, a knight such as Flanders counts in large numbers, a night at whom ladies smiled and before whose strong lance the bravest warriors fled.
Who wants to hear, who wants to know, the adventures of Monseigneur Simon Brade-vie?
II
He had taken part in seventy battles and received a hundred and twenty-two wounds, but he never received a single one in the heart, for he was as faithful to his lady as to honor, and his lady was the beautiful Agnès de Saveuse.
Who wants to hear, who wants to know, the adventures of Monseigneur Simon Brade-vie?
III
One day, the brave sire encountered a weeping damsel, who was lamenting with her hair in the wind and her white shoulders half-naked, for in her dolor she had forgotten to adjust her mantle and her gorget. Now, her shoulders were white and beautiful, and her hair was as long as the cloak of a queen.
Who wants to hear, who wants to know, the adventures of Monseigneur Simon Brade-vie?
IV
“Handsome sire,” she said. “Help me, handsome sire. A felon knight, if he is still permitted to give himself the holy title of knight, a coward, after having stolen my litter as I was returning to my father’s château, has left me in the road like this, and gone away repeating that he has had the grace of my amour.
Who wants to hear, who wants to know, the adventures of Monseigneur Simon Brade-vie?
V
The Angel Asrael Page 25