At that troubled moment in the child's life when her character is taking shape, a mother would have had grave concern for her future. This wilful little girl would break any reason that opposed her with an answering unconstrained hedonism. To the fulfilment of her every whim she brought a frightening tenacity and would charm her teachers with the lucid explanations she gave of her foolhardiness. Her father had been one of those exhausted libertines whom the works of the Marquis de Sade cause to blush, but for reasons other than indecency. Her mother, a provincial lady of great vitality and very robust constitution, had had the most natural and ardent of appetites. She had died of a flux of blood in the wake of, her confinement. It might be that her husband followed her to the grave a victim by his own hand, for one of his old retainers said that as he expired he blamed himself for his wife's early death.
Madame Elisabeth, a canoness ignorant of the life of materialists, busied herself with fostering mystical aspirations in Raoule; she gave her leave to reason, spoke to her often and in carefully chosen terms of her disdain for filthy humanity, and kept her in the most utter solitude until her fifteenth year.
At the moment of Raoule's sensual initiation, the canoness, Aunt Elisabeth, could never have understood that her prudish kisses were no longer enough for the secret ardours of the virgin entrusted to her pious care.
One day, as Raoule wandered through the attics of the mansion, she discovered a book; idly, she read. Her eyes came upon an engraving, and were lowered, but she took the book away with her ... It was around this time that the young girl experienced a radical change. Her features altered, her speech became scant, her pupils blushed fire, she wept and laughed all at once. Troubled, fearing a serious illness, Madame Elisabeth called the physicians. Her niece refused them admission. Yet one of them, young and witty, who cut an elegant figure, was adroit enough to have the capricious invalid permit him entrance. She requested his return, while at the same time there was no improvement in her condition.
Elisabeth had recourse to the wisdom of her confessors. A precise remedy was counselled:
"Find her a husband!" was the answer.
Raoule's fury exploded when her aunt broached the subject of marriage.
On the evening of that day, at teatime, the young doctor spoke of Raoule as he conversed with an old friend of the family in the embrasure of a window casement:
"A special case, Monsieur. A few more years and this pretty creature whom you cherish so much will, I wager, have known as many men as there are beads in her aunt's rosary, without ever loving any of them. No middle way! Nun, or monster! The bosom of God or of luxuriance! It might be best to lock her in a convent, for do we not lock hysterical women in the Salpetriere! She knows not vice, but she invents it!"
That was ten years since, at the moment where this story begins ... And Raoule was no nun ...
In the week that followed her visit to Silvert, Mademoiselle de Venerande made frequent expeditions, to no other end but the realisation of a project formed en route from rue de la Lune to her mansion. She had confided in her aunt, and the latter, after faltering objections, had referred the matter, as always, to heaven. In every detail Raoule described to her the wretchedness of the artist. Who possessing pity would remain unmoved at the sight of Jacques' hovel? How could he work there, with his sister well-nigh an invalid? Then Elisabeth had promised to recommend them to the Society of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul and to send them charitable ladies as benevolent as they were nobly born.
"Let us open our purse, Aunt," Raoule had exclaimed, excited by her own boldness. "Let us be royally generous, but let it be dignified! Let us place this painter with such talent (here Raoule had smiled) in a setting that is truly artistic. Let him earn his bread without the shame of dependency on us. Let us assure his future here and now. Later, who knows, he may well give it back to us hundredfold!"
There was fervour in Raoule's words.
"My niece must have found much to impress upon her in these poor wretches for such commotions to be stirred in her" Aunt Elisabeth reflected, "... one so cold. Maybe it is thus she will be led to feel compassion ...
For Aunt Elisabeth was not unaware that her nephew, as she often called Raoule when she saw her take her fencing or her painting lessons, entirely lacked the faith which leads to saintly destinies. Only, for her part, the canoness had too much patrician gentility, too much breeding, too much lineage in her character to cast a moment's doubt on the physical and moral purity of her descendant. A Venerande could only be a virgin. There were legendary Venerandes who had preserved this attribute throughout several honeymoons. Albeit not hereditary, nobility of this kind within the family was thus an inalienable obligation for the young woman.
"Tomorrow" Raoule at last concluded, "I shall begin scouring Paris to set up a studio. The furniture will be installed tomorrow night; it is no use bringing ourselves into the matter, any sign of ostentatiousness would be a crime, and on Tuesday, when he comes with my trimmings for the ball, all will be ready ... Ah, Aunt! It is such opportunities as these that make our riches interesting ...!"
"I leave to you alone, my dearest, the heavenly reward for your charities!" declared Aunt Elisabeth. "Spare nothing: as you shall sow on earth, so shall you reap above!"
"Amen!" replied Raoule, and she of the hard heart cast a wicked angel's glance towards the ecstatic canoness.
Eight days later Mademoiselle de Venerande made her sensational entrance at the duchess d'Armonville's ball, a beauty, her beauty excessively original beneath her costume as a water nymph. Flavien X, the fashionable journalist, remarked discreetly on this strange costume, and although Raoule had no close friends, she discovered some that night, who begged her to tell them where her clever florist lived.
Raoule refused.
Jacques Silvert was in the studio; he let himself collapse onto a divan, in a state of total stupefaction. He had the aspect of a small child bewildered by a thunderstorm. There he was, ensconced in what had become his, with brushes and paints, carpets and drapes, furniture and velvets, much gilt and much lace ... His arms hung by his side as he gazed on each thing, wondering whether it might not melt away and bring back a deep night. His sister, who still could not bring herself to believe it, sat on the suitcase that contained their wretched garments. Her thin back was curved, her hands held together, as, in the grip of adulation, she intoned:
"The noble creature! The noble creature!"
Nor did she forget her perpetual cough, a cough like the creaking of a badly-oiled axle, a theatrical cough contriving to draw up its final notes from the chest.
"Still, we should unpack and put some things away," she added, rising to her feet in a very decisive manner.
She opened the trunk, took out the painting of the sheep against a clear sky and went to hang it up in a corner of the room. Then Jacques, a-quiver with a tenderness beyond understanding, went over to the painting and embraced it in tears.
"See sister, I had always thought that my talent would bring us happiness. Yet you would tell me better I should seek out girls than scratch charcoal on walls.'
Marie gave a mocking laugh, so that her short little spine sank inside her hunched shoulders.
11 Well I never! As if your looks were no better than your rotten sheep!"
He laughed in spite of himself, when his tears dried he said quietly:
"You are mad! Mademoiselle de Venerande is an artist, that is all! She feels for artists; she is kind, she is just ... Ali! The poor workers would make fewer revolutions if they better knew ladies of quality!"
Marie made a nasty face. She kept her counsel. When she thought of this lady of quality all the scenes of her own depravity came clouding evilly into her head, and then she saw the whole world as low and mean as had been her prostitute's bed when her last lover had left.
As he discoursed philosophically, in a somewhat slower voice desirous to compel the listener, Jacques moved back and forth, scattering the weapons that had not yet been affixed on the wall p
anoplies. He set all the armchairs back against the walls, persisting in his need for space to parade his pride as a new-made man of property.
The easels of wood of the Indies were aligned in the corner where a Venus de Milo stood resplendent on a bronze plinth. He wanted to count the busts, and brought them to the feet of the goddess, just as men place pots of mignonette on a grisette's doorstep. Every so often he would release a little cry of pleasure as he caressed the majolica urns and the gleaming palm leaves that sprayed out from a pouffe in the centre of the studio. He even tried out the footstools scattered here and there on the carpet, giving them punches or throwing them in the air.
The window overlooked the most open spot on the boulevard Montparnasse, opposite Notre-Dame-des- Champs. It was draped by a canopy of grey satin trimmed with gold-embroidered black velvet. All the hangings took up echoes of these hues and the brightly coloured Egyptian door curtains with their foreign motifs had a marvellous brilliance against this grey of springtime clouds.
One hour later the studio was well-nigh reminiscent of the attic in the rue de la Lune, save the grease stains and the rickety chairs; but one could sense the arrival of these supplementary accoutrements to be imminent. Marie decided that they would place two iron cots in the models' dressing room, for the studio had a semicircular area amply curtained and ornamentally enclosed by a pink and blue lacquered Japanese screen. Once the toilette had been per formed as best it could, the two cages could be rolled under the screen. She even had the notion of using a large spittoon of chased copper as a rubbish pail. It did not enter their heads to draw back the door curtains, in their assumption that these were a part of the overall decoration, along with the old weapon trophies.
"We shall wash those stew pots," said Marie, consumed by the matter in hand, "to save the expense of cooking pans. I adore cuisine a l'ftoufffe" - she waved a hand at the Roman helmets her brother would pick up and try on for size.
"Yes, yes," answered Jacques, planting himself in front of the mirror, which offered him manifold reflections of all the splendours of his paradise. "Do what you want, but don't tire yourself. It would be foolish to fall ill again with fever here ... We have other fish to fry. Make yourself at home, do whatever pleases you, don't stand on ceremony. I am the master, am I not? But we shall have to get to work. The flowers have left my fingers out of practice; I must flex my painter's hands again. And then ... the aunt's portrait, the portrait of her servants, if she sets such store by them. I am not ungrateful ... I think I would lay down my life for this woman. If there is a God, she it is who embodies him. By the bye, our clock is going to strike, listen!"
The clock, which represented a lighthouse mounted on a luminous orb, struck six and, suddenly, the orb caught fire, an opaline fire which illumined all around it in a gorgeous shadow light.
"I don't believe it," Jacques exclaimed, dumbfounded by this new metamorphosis, "this is the hour when the lights are lit and the light comes on of its own accord. I begin to think we have a room in the Chatelet."
"It wants for debauchery!" Marie Silvert muttered in response to his ribald notions.
"The clock?" Jacques retorted with childlike naivety.
But the light did not go out, and as for debauchery, it ticked with the pendulum. The draperies were drenched in a faint iridescence, redolent of charming mysteries. The eye took note of grotesque Chinese figures who raised their fabric-bloated legs; the terracotta nymphs cavorted in a kind of floating vapour, always out of reach, their rounded flesh was that of living arms, the smiles they flashed were human, and the contorted figures turned gestures of violent intent towards the chaste tunic of the imperial Venus.
"Listen, I still have forty sous. I'm going to fetch a litre and some Italian cheese. Will that do?"
"Lord, I am starved!"
In his eagerness, Jacques pushed her towards the door and soon the girl's footsteps faded down the stairs.
Once more he threw himself upon the big divan, behind the clock. In the last minute his whole body had begun to itch with desire for silk, that silk heavy as a fleece which covered well-nigh every piece of furniture in the studio. He wallowed in it, kissing the tassels and the quiltings, hugging the upholstery, rubbing his brow against the cushions, and tracing a finger on their Arab patterns, wild with the wildness of an affianced bride amid her feminine trousseau. He even licked the floor castors, through the many coloured fringes.
He would have lost all thought of dinner had a stern hand not come down upon his frenzied happiness and shaken him hard. He started, flinching at the expected shrill sarcasms of that perpetual malcontent, Marie. Then he saw it was Mademoiselle de Venerande. She had entered noiselessly, doubtless expecting to come upon the artist in admiring contemplation at the pedestal-foot of a statue. She could even have imagined that the paintbrush would be ready dipped, the canvas wet, the composition set in place ... What she found was a child engrossed in the antics of a clown upon a brand new springboard. Her first reaction was dismay ... Then she laughed, and next avowed that it was just as it should be.
"Come now," she said in the peremptory tone of the lady of the house giving an order; "come now, try to be sensible, my poor Silvert; I am here to help you, you have no objection I trust."
She inspected him.
"So this is your working attire? I was hoping you would manage to make yourself presentable on your own."
"Ali! Mademoiselle, my dear benefactress," now on his feet and smoothing back his hair, the young man began as Marie had advised. "This is a day of the gravest importance for my life; it is to you I will owe fame, fortune, the ..
He stopped short, cowed by Raoule's superbly flashing black eyes.
"Monsieur Silvert" - her mimicry preserved his own theatricality of speech - "you are a buffoon, that is my opinion ... You owe me nothing whatsoever ... But you have not a grain of commonsense, and I fear your fate shall be naught but lifeless little sheep on over-lush prairies. I am a year older than you, I can daub a presentable nude study in the time it takes you to twist a peony. I can allow myself, therefore, some harsh criticisms of your works."
She seized him by the shoulder and guided him around the studio.
"Is this your notion of tidiness? So what has become of that aesthetic sense of yours, tell me? Answer me ... I am of amind to strangle you."
She cast her overcoat onto an armchair and stood, slim in a black broadcloth sheath dress whose bunched back panel was elaborately trimmed with fogging, her hair twisted back into a prominent chignon. On this occasion there sparkled no jewel to brighten her almost masculine attire. Nothing but a cameo signet ring, mounted on two lion claws, on the third finger of her left hand.
When she gripped Jacques' hand again she scratched him. He could not stop himself from feeling horror-struck. This creature was a fiend.
Everything there she treated with sweeping gestures of the utmost cynicism. The outraged Jacques assumed a scowling expression!... The nymphs leant back against the Chinese satyrs, the helmets were perched atop the busts, the mirrors were turned up to reflect the ceiling, the pouffes rolled among the spindle legs of the trestles and the trophies took on a swashbuckling mien.
"We are lost," thought the florist from the rue de la Lune.
"Come now; you must dress, and I am sure you have a talent for it."
Raoule laughed mockingly, reflecting that nothing could be done with this heavy-fleshed boy.
A door curtain was drawn back. Jacques let out a little cry.
"Oh! I see, the notion of a bedroom is too much for you: too taxing for your little brain."
She lit one of the wax tapers held in the candelabra and led the way into a room hung in pale blue. There was a fourposter bed whose Venetian draperies, their solid hue set against silver, were brocaded with Flanders lace. Raoule had merely given the decorators the cast-offs from the summer trappings of her own chamber. There was an adjoining bathroom with a red marble tub.
"Go in . . . We shall talk through the curtain."
They did indeed talk, either side of the bathroom curtain; he splashing in the water, which he found to be cold, the bath having been drawn before their arrival; she laughing at his gaucheries.
"You must bear in mind that I am a boy," she said, "an artist whom my aunt calls her nephew ... And that I treat Jacques Silvert as a childhood friend . . . There, have you finished? You'll find some Lubin under the bathtub, a comb beside it. What a funny little fellow? Goodness, isn't he amusing ...?"
Jacques was at a loss. After all, high society must be freer than what he was used to.
Then, emboldened, he uttered some teasing observations, asking her whether she was looking, for that of course would embarrass him ...
He confided in her, telling her how his poor father had died in some complicated business at Lille, where he was born, one day when he had drunk a glass too many; how his mother had thrown them out to live in sin with another man. They had been very young when he and his sister had left for Paris ... That beggarwoman of a sister knew better than he did! They had had to earn their wretched bread, stale as it was ... He said nothing of Marie's depravities, but he made a jest of them so as to banish a mournful languor that choked his breast. Money was given to them ... How could he know? Alas! It was all too humiliating, and as he gazed upon the claw mark of the signet ring under the water's shimmer, he forgot how Marie had urged debauchery upon him.
Monsieur Venus (Decadence from Dedalus) Page 3