When she had finished, she came and curled up next to me again, slipping between the sheets with a quiver of pleasure; she was shivering, and huddled up to me like a child; eventually she went to sleep, leaving her head cradled on my chest.
Each time I drew breath, I could feel the weight of that sleeping head rising on my heart. In what intimate communion did I thus find myself with this unknown creature? We had been hitherto unaware of each other, but now chance had brought us together, we were there in the same bed, linked together by a nameless force; we were going to separate and never see one another again; the atoms that turn and float through the air have longer encounters than those enjoyed on earth by loving hearts; at night, no doubt, solitary desires arise and dreams start to seek out other dreams, and one person will maybe yearn for the unknown soul that yearns for it in turn in another hemisphere, beneath other skies.
What were the dreams that now were passing through this head? Was she dreaming of her family, of her first lover, of society, of men, of some rich life glittering with opulence, of some longed-for love? Of me, perhaps! My eye fixed on her pale forehead, I watched attentively over her sleep, and tried to discover a meaning in the strident noise emerging from her nostrils.
It was raining; I listened to the rain falling and Marie sleeping; the lights, about to go out, sputtered in the glass sconces. The day dawned, and a yellow line rose swiftly into the sky, lengthened horizontally and, assuming ever more golden, ruby hues, filled the apartment with a faint wan light, with a pale purple sheen, which continued to tussle playfully with the night and the gleam of the dying candles, reflected in the window.
Marie, lying across me, thus had some parts of her body in the light, and others in the shade; she had changed position a little, her head was lower than her breasts; her right arm, the arm with her bracelet on, was hanging out of the bed and almost touching the floor; on the night table was a bouquet of violets in a vase of water; I reached out and took it, breaking the thread with my teeth and breathing in the odour. The heat of the day before, perhaps, or the long time that had passed since they were gathered, had withered them; I found they had an exquisite and quite particular scent, and I breathed in the fragrance of each flower one by one; as they were dripping with water, I applied them to my eyes to cool myself down, since my blood was on fire, and my weary limbs felt as if they burnt on contact with the sheets. Then, not knowing what to do and not wishing to awaken her, since I took a strange pleasure in seeing her sleeping, I gently placed all the violets on Marie’s breast; she was soon covered all over by them, and those lovely withered flowers, under which she lay sleeping, symbolized her in my mind. And like those flowers, in spite of their vanished freshness, or perhaps because of it, she wafted towards me a sharper and more acrid odour; misfortune, which must have passed through her life, made her beautiful with the bitterness that her mouth preserved, even as she slept, beautiful with the two wrinkles at the back of her neck, which in the daytime she no doubt concealed beneath her hair. Seeing this woman, so melancholy in pleasure, whose embraces themselves had a lugubrious joy to them, I guessed at the countless terrible passions that must have left their furrows on her like a thunderbolt, to judge from the remaining traces; what a pleasure it would have been to hear her relate her life to me, as I was seeking all that was resounding and vibrant in human existence, the world of great passions and lovely tears.
Just then she awoke, all the violets fell from her, and she smiled, her eyes still half-closed; at the same time, she stretched her arms round my neck and embraced me with a long morning kiss, the kiss of an awakening dove.
When I asked her to tell me her story, she said:
“Yes, I can tell it to you. Other women would lie and would begin by telling you that they haven’t always been what they are now; they’d tell you fairy stories about their families and their love affairs, but I don’t want to deceive you or pass myself off as a princess; listen, you’ll see whether I was happy! Do you know I’ve often felt like killing myself? Once they reached my room when I was already half asphyxiated. Oh, if I weren’t afraid of hell, it would have been all over long ago. I’m afraid of dying, too, it frightens me to think I have to go through that, and yet I long to be dead!
“I come from the countryside, our father was a farmer. Until my first communion, they used to send me out every morning to look after the cows in the fields; all day long I stayed there by myself, sitting on the edge of a ditch and going to sleep, or else I went into the wood to go bird’s-nesting; I could climb trees like a boy, and my clothes were always torn; I often got a beating for stealing apples, or allowing the animals to wander into the neighbours’ fields. When it was harvest, we’d all dance in a ring in the farmyards at evening time, and I heard songs being sung in which there were things I didn’t understand; the boys would kiss the girls, there’d be gales of laughter; this made me sad and dreamy. Sometimes, on the road home, I would ask if I could get up into a hay wagon; the man would take me with him, telling me to sit on the bales of alfalfa. Would you believe it? I eventually felt an inexpressible pleasure feeling myself being lifted up off the ground by the strong, robust hands of a vigorous fellow whose face was burnt by the sun and whose chest was streaming with sweat. Usually his sleeves were rolled right up to his armpits; I liked to touch his muscles that made bumps and hollows with each movement of his hand, and I enjoyed being embraced by him, and feeling his beard rasping against my cheek. At the bottom of the meadow where I went every day there was a narrow stream between two rows of poplars, along which all kinds of flowers grew; I would weave bouquets, wreaths and chains of them; with the seeds of sorb trees I would make necklaces for myself; this became an obsession, my apron was always full of them, so that my father would scold me, telling me I would never be anything but a coquette. I’d put some in my little bedroom too; sometimes all these many odours intoxicated me, and I would doze off, my head heavy, but revelling in this sickly sensation. The odour of mown hay, for example, of warm fermented hay, has always struck me as quite delicious; as a result, on Sundays I would shut myself away in the barn, spending my entire afternoon watching the spiders spinning their webs in the lintels, and listening to the flies buzzing. I lived like a lazy girl, but I was growing into a fine lass all the same, strong and healthy. Often I would be seized by a kind of madness, and I would start running and running until I dropped, or else I would sing at the top of my voice, or talk to myself for ages; strange desires possessed me, I constantly gazed at the pigeons, there in their dovecote, making love to one another – some of them would come right up beneath my window to frolic in the sunshine and play around in the vine branches. At night, I could still hear the beating of their wings, and their cooings which seemed so soft and gentle that I would have liked to be a pigeon like them, and twist and turn my neck in the same way that they did when they embraced. “What can they be saying to each other,” I thought, “that makes them seem so happy?” And I also remembered the proud gallop of the steeds chasing the mares, and how their nostrils flared wide open; I remembered the joy with which the wool on the ewe’s back would quiver at the approach of the ram, and the murmur of the bees when they hung in clusters from the trees in the orchard. I would often slip between the animals in the cowshed to smell the odour given off by their limbs, the steam of life that I breathed in with full lungs; and I would furtively contemplate their nudity, to which a dizzy longing always attracted my troubled eyes. At other times, at the edge of a wood, especially at dusk, the trees themselves would assume strange shapes: sometimes they were arms rising heavenwards, or else the trunk would twist and turn like a body being bent by the wind. At night, when I woke up and the moon and the stars were out, I would see in the sky things that filled me simultaneously with dread and longing. I remember that once, one Christmas Eve, I saw a great naked woman, standing erect, with rolling eyes; she must have been a hundred feet high, but along she drifted, growing ever longer and ever thinner, and finally fell apart, each limb remain
ing separate, with the head floating away first as the rest of her body continued to waver. Or else I would dream; already at the age of ten I had feverish nights, nights filled with lust. Wasn’t it lust that shone in my eyes, coursed through my blood, and made my heart leap whenever my limbs grazed against each other? It was lust that sang into my ear never-ending canticles of pleasure; in my visions, flesh shone like gold, and unknown shapes ran here and there, like spilt quicksilver.
“In church I would gaze at the man spread naked on the cross, and I would lift up his head, fill in the wounds in his side, colour all his limbs, and open his eyes for him; I would fabricate an alluring man for myself, one with a burning gaze; I would detach him from the cross and bring him down to me, on the altar, where he was swathed in incense; he would come towards me through the smoke, and my skin would prickle with a sensual shudder.
“Whenever a man spoke to me, I would examine his eye and the beam darting from it; I especially liked the men whose eyelids are always moving, showing the whites of their eyes and then hiding them, fluttering like the wing beat of a moth; through their clothes I tried to sense the secrets of their sex, and I would ask my girlfriends for information about this topic; I would spy on the kisses exchanged between my father and mother, and at night I listened to the noises they made in bed.
“At the age of twelve I took my first communion; a lovely white dress was ordered and sent to me from town, and we all had blue belts; I would have liked them to arrange my hair in curl papers, like a lady. Before setting off to church, I gazed at myself in the mirror; I was as pretty as a cherub, and almost fell in love with myself – I wished I really could! It was about the time of Corpus Christi; the nuns had filled the church with flowers and fragrances; I too had been working with the others for three days, decking with jasmine the little table on which you make your vows. The altar was covered with hyacinths, the chancel steps covered with carpets; we were all wearing white gloves and holding candles; I was filled with happiness, I felt I was made for this ceremony; throughout the mass, my feet caressed the carpet, since there wasn’t one in my father’s house; I longed to lie down on it, in my lovely dress, and stay there all alone in the church, in the midst of the gleaming candles; my heart was beating with a new hope, I awaited the host with anxiety, having heard that first communion changed your life, and I thought that, after taking the sacrament, I would find that all my desires calmed down. Far from it! Returning to my seat, I found I was still in my furnace; I’d noticed people looking at me as I went up to the priest, admiring me; I strutted, reflected how beautiful I was, and took an undefined pride in all the delights hidden within me, of which I was as yet unaware.
“On coming out of the mass, we all processed in a line, through the cemetery; the parents and idle onlookers were standing on either side in the grass, watching us go by; I walked at the head of the others, being the tallest. During the dinner I ate nothing, my heart felt heavy and oppressed; my mother, who had wept during the service, was still red-eyed; some of our neighbours came over to congratulate me and effusively hugged me, but their embrace filled me with revulsion. In the evening, at vespers, there were even more people than there had been in the morning. Opposite us, the boys were seated; they gazed at us avidly, especially at me; even when I kept my eyes lowered, I could still sense their gaze. Their hair had been curled, and they were all dressed up, like us. When we had sung the first two lines of a canticle, they would continue with the next two, and their voices made my soul soar; and when they faded away, my rapture would die too, only to take new flight when they resumed. I made my vows; the only thing I remember about them is that I spoke of a white dress and of innocence.”
Marie paused here, no doubt absorbed in the touching memory which she feared might overwhelm her; then she continued, with a despairing laugh:
“Ah, the white dress! It’s been threadbare for a long time! And innocence with it! Where are the other girls now? Some are dead, others are married with children; I don’t see any of them any more, I don’t know anyone. Every New Year’s Day, I still want to write to my mother, but I daren’t, and anyway – who cares, all those feelings are plain silly!”
She struggled to master her emotion, and then continued:
“The next day, which was another holiday, a friend came to play with me. My mother said, ‘Now you’re a big girl, you shouldn’t go around with boys any more,’ and she separated us. That was all I needed to make me fall in love with the boy in question; I sought him out and courted him, I longed to run away from home with him, he was going to marry me when I was old enough, I called him my husband, my lover… but he didn’t dare. One day we were alone, coming back together from the wood where we’d gone to pick strawberries; we were passing by a hayrick when I jumped on him, covering him with my whole body and kissing him on the mouth; I started to shout, ‘Go on, love me, let’s get married, let’s get married!’ He pulled away from under me and ran off.
“From that time on, I shunned society and no longer left the farm; I lived all alone in my desires, as others do in their pleasures. If I heard people talking about such-and-such a lad who’d made off with a girl they had refused to let him have, I imagined being his mistress, fleeing with him on the back of his horse, across the fields, holding him tight in my arms; if there was talk of a wedding, I would quickly lie down in the white bed, and just like the new bride I would tremble with fear and pleasure; I even envied the plaintive lowing of the cattle when they are calving; dreaming of the cause, I was jealous of their pain.
“At that time my father died, and my mother took me to the town with her; my brother left to join the army, where he has since become a captain. I was sixteen when we left the house.
“I said a last farewell to the woods, and the meadow with my stream; farewell to the porch of the church, where I had spent such happy hours playing in the sunshine, and farewell to my poor little bedroom; I’ve never seen any of those things since. Some of the local ladies of easy virtue became my friends and showed me their lovers; I’d go to parties with them, see how they loved each other, and drink in the spectacle at my leisure. Every day I found some new pretext for taking off; my mother noticed, and at first she was cross, but in the end she left me alone.
“Finally, one day, an old woman whom I had known for a while proposed that I make my fortune, telling me she had found a really wealthy lover for me. All I needed to do was to go out as if I were delivering work to some address in a different part of town, and she’d take me there.
“Over the following twenty-four hours, I kept thinking I would go mad; as the hour approached, the time arranged grew more distant; the only words in my head were ‘A lover! A lover!’ – I was going to have a lover, I was going to be loved, so I was going to love! I first put on my slenderest shoes, then, seeing that my feet seemed splayed in them, I took some ankle boots; in addition, I arranged my hair in a hundred different ways – in coils, then parted down the middle, then in curl papers, then in plaits; the more I gazed at myself in the mirror, the more beautiful I seemed, but I still wasn’t beautiful enough, my clothes were perfectly ordinary, and I blushed with shame. Why wasn’t I one of those women all white in their velvet, abundantly decked out with lace, giving off an odour of amber and rose, with a rustle of silk, and servants covered from head to foot in gold braid! I cursed my mother, my past life, and I fled, driven by all the Devil’s temptations, and savouring them all in advance.
“At a street corner a fiacre was waiting for us, and we climbed into it; an hour later, it dropped us off at the gate of a country park. We wandered about there for a while, and then I realized that the old woman had left, and I continued walking along the broad alleys alone. The trees were tall, covered all over with leaves, and wide strips of lawn surrounded the flower beds; I had never seen such a beautiful garden – there was a river flowing through the middle, and stones artfully arranged here and there formed little waterfalls; swans were playing on the water and, with swelling wings, allowed
themselves to drift with the current. I also took pleasure at the aviary, where birds of every kind were chirruping and swinging on their rings; they displayed their gaudy tail feathers and strutted in front of one another: it was a dazzling sight. Two statues of white marble, at the foot of the flight of steps, gazed at one another in charming poses; the great pool opposite gleamed gold in the light of the setting sun and made you long to swim in it. I thought of the unknown lover who lived there; at any moment I expected to see emerging from behind a clump of trees some handsome man striding proudly along like an Apollo. After dinner, when the bustle from the chateau, which had been audible for some time, was finally stilled, my master appeared. He was an old man, pale and skinny, whose clothes were too tight and clung to him; he was wearing the cross of the Legion of Honour on his lapel, and he had trouser straps that prevented him from bending his knees; he had a big nose, and small green eyes with a malicious gleam in them. He came up to me with a smile; he had lost all his teeth. When a person smiles, he should have little pink lips like yours, with the shadow of a moustache at either side, don’t you think, my darling?
“We sat down together on a bench, he took my hands, he thought them so pretty that he kissed each finger in turn; he told me that if I wished to be his mistress, to be a good girl and stay with him, I’d be very rich, I’d have my own servants to look after me, and beautiful dresses every day; I’d go out riding on horses and in carriages; but in return for all that, he said, I had to love him. I promised him that I would love him.
“And yet I now felt none of those burning inner flames that had previously set my belly on fire at the approach of men; simply by sitting next to him and telling myself that this was the man whose mistress I was going to be, I finally started to feel desire. When he told me to go indoors with him, I jumped to my feet; he was delighted, the old chap – trembling with joy! We crossed a splendid salon, where the furniture was all gilded, he led me to my room and tried to undress me himself; he started by taking off my bonnet, but when he then attempted to take off my shoes, he had difficulty in bending down and told me, ‘I’m an old man, my child’; he was on his knees, gazing imploringly at me; he added, clasping his hands together, ‘You are so pretty!’ – and I was afraid of what was going to follow.
Memoirs of a Madman and November Page 15