This came to an end with a commotion in the bathtub.
"Enough of this!" he pronounced, suddenly uneasy with the shame of being in debt to her for even the cleanness of his body.
He reached for a towel and stood there dripping, his arms akimbo. He fancied someone brushed against the curtain.
"You know, Monsieur de Venerande," he said sulkily, "even between men it is unseemly ... You are looking! I ask you, would you be happy in my place?"
And he thought this woman longed for nothing more than that he have his way with her.
"She will get more than she bargains for" he added, in the worst of tempers, his senses now entirely dampened by the cold bath; and he put on a robe.
Prone on the floor, behind the curtain, Mademoiselle de Venerande could see him without troubling herself in the least. The taper's softly gleaming light grazed his blond skin that was downy all over like the skin of a peach. He was facing away from the door as he played the leading role in a drama by Voltaire, as told in detail by a courtesan named Ruby-Lips.
The small of the back, where the spine's curve is drawn into a voluptuous smoothness that then rises in two adorably firm, plump contours akin to the marble of Paros with its amber transparencies, was worthy of a Venus Callipyge. The thighs, though somewhat less robust than those of a woman, had yet a solid rotundity that belied their sex. The calves were set high, seeming to give the torso a jutting impertinence that was all the more piquant in a body that seemed unaware of itself. The well-turned heel was so rounded that its tapering line was scarcely perceptible.
There were pink dimples in the elbows of the outstretched arms. From the armpit to a point much further down unruly golden curls stood out. Jacques Silvert had spoken in truth; he had them all over. But he would have erred had he claimed them as sole proof of his virility.
Mademoiselle de Venerande stepped backwards towards the bed. Her hands clutched nervously at the sheets; she groaned as does the panther whom the trainer's springing whip has newly lashed.
"Oh, terrifying poetry of human nakedness, have I only now understood, I who tremble for the first time as I try to read you with indifferent eyes. Man! That is man! Not Socrates and the grandeur of his wisdom, not Christ and the majesty of martyrdom, not Raphael and the glow of genius, but a poor creature stripped of his rags, the flesh of a guttersnipe. He has beauty; I fear it. He is indifferent; I tremble. He is contemptible; I admire him! And he who is there, like an infant in swaddling clothes borrowed for but a moment, in the midst of baubles that my whim will soon take back from him, I shall make him my master and he will twist my soul beneath his body. I have bought him, to him I belong. It is I who have sold myself. Oh my senses, you give me a heart! Oh! Demon of love, you have taken me prisoner, unloosing my chains and leaving me more free than my jailor is. I thought to take him, he has made me his. I laughed at the thunderbolt and I am struck by it ... When did Raoule de Venerande, she so cold an orgy cannot warm her, when did she feel the scalding of her being before a man so weak as a young girl?"
She repeated these words: a young girl!
Ina frenzy, she rushed back to the bathroom door.
"A young girl ...! No, no ... Possession without delay, violence, wanton intoxication and oblivion ... No, no, lest my unfeeling heart be a party to this sacrifice! He repelled me before he pleased me! Let him be what the rest have been, an instrument to be shattered before I become the echo of its resonance!"
She drew back the hanging with an imperious gesture. Jacques Silvert had not quite finished towelling his body.
"Child, do you know you are splendid?" she said with a cynical candour.
The youth let out a cry of amazement and pulled his robe around him. Then, woebegone and ashen from the shame of it, he let it slip loose, for the wretched creature understood. Did his sister not rear up from a corner, sneering. (Ha! Go on with you, fool, you who imagined yourself an artist. Go on with you, illicit plaything, go on with you, you bedroom toy, do your job.)
This woman had plucked him from his wreaths of artificial flowers, as a strange insect might be plucked from real flowers to be set like a jewel on a necklace.
"Go on with you, creature of the swamp! You are no playmate to a girl of noble birth. Depraved women know their own mind ...!"
It seemed to him he heard all these insults clamour in his blushing ears, and his virginal pallor took on the same tint, such that the button tips of his breasts, quickened by the water, stood out like two Bengal flares.
"Antinous was one of your ancestors, I imagine?" murmured Raoule as she threw her arms around his neck, compelled by her height to lean on his shoulders.
"I have never met him!" replied the humbled conqueror, bowing his head.
Ali! The wood chopped for rich houses. The crusts of bread picked up from the gutters, all his poverty valiantly borne despite the treacherous counsels of his sister ...! The role of hardworking woman she played so artfully, those absurd little implements whose dogged persistence became wearisome to fate, where was it all gone? And how much better it all was! Honesty did not stifle him, but he could have gone on being decent, been allowed his illusions and the time to create riches and pay her back some day ...
"Will you love me Jacques?" Raoule asked, thrilling as she touched this naked body that was chilled to the marrow by the horror of perdition.
Jacques knelt on the train of her dress. His teeth chattered. Then he burst into sobs.
Jacques was the son of a drunkard and a whore. His honour knew naught but tears.
Mademoiselle de Venerande raised his head; she saw the burning tears flow, felt them fall one by one on her heart, that heart she had wished to deny. All at once it seemed to her the room was filled with the dawn, she felt she breathed exquisite fragrances, of a sudden released into the enchanted air. Her being expanded, immense, together embracing all earthly sensations, all celestial aspirations, and Raoule, conquered and made proud, exclaimed:
"On your feet Jacques, on your feet! I love you!"
She pulled him away from her dress and ran to the door of the studio, saying over and over:
"I love him! I love him!"
She turned again:
"Jacques, you are the master here ... I am leaving! Farewell for ever. You will see me no more! Your tears have made me pure and my love deserves your pardon."
She fled, mad with a dreadful joy more voluptuous than the voluptuousness of the carnal, more painful than unappeased desire, but more complete than pleasure fulfilled; mad with that joy called heartfelt first love.
"Well," observed Marie Silvert once she had gone," it looks as though the fish has taken the bait ... It will go like clockwork, God be praised!"
Marie had the letter in her pocket. She was now quite convinced that this madwoman would weaken, and she would come back to them more docile, more beneficent, to put it crudely, more of a mind to fork out; what riches would be showered on them then. Christ's blood! The kid wouldn't be able to move for money, like a meat pie in aspic. He would wear morning dress every day; she, in her evil-smelling kitchens, would flaunt gowns of watered silk. He would be sir, she would be madam!
The letter was short but it said a good deal and made no bones about it:
"Come", she had written in blue ink and bad spelling. "Come! Woman so dear to your little Jacques ... I am pining without you ... We have finished the three hundred francs and I have been compelled to have Marie sell a pot with a serpent on it. It is sad to taste heaven and then see oneself so soon abandoned ... You understand me, do you not? I think I shall fall ill. As for my sister, her coughing persists.
Your ever-thirsting love,
Jacques."
After finishing this masterpiece, for all her brother's distressed mien, Marie left for the Champs-Elysee. That idiot could never take his role seriously. It was lucky that he could draw on her own wide knowledge of the human body; she knew, when it mattered, how to administer a tickle under the left breast of an enamoured one.
; That day it was raining, a steady March downpour; traffic packed all the thoroughfares of the avenue. Marie had wished to spare the expense of a carriage, so in no time she was spattered from head to the toe of her ankle boots.
Once outside the mansion, a grand sombre-looking building, she wondered whether she might not be thrown out as soon as she made her appearance in the vestibule. At the top of the front steps she encountered a large man in Swiss livery and a small dog. The former took the letter, the latter growled.
"Do you wish to see Mademoiselle or Madame?"
"Mademoiselle."
"Hey! Pierrot, somebody here who wants to mop the stairs in style," the Swiss called out to a diminutive groom who was on his way through the vestibule.
In truth it was very funny; but the groom, one of Mademoiselle's personal staff, grimaced like a man of experience who is unperturbed by nothing, even on a wet day.
"Very well, I'll go and see. Wait here."
He pointed to a bench. Marie remained standing; she spoke rudely:
"I won't be kept waiting outside, not me. What do you take me for, monkey face, some old doorkeeper?"
The groom turned on his heels, astonished, then, like a well-trained servant, he murmured:
"Someone with influence! For dress matters less and less now that we are living under a republic."
Mademoiselle was in a boudoir adjoining her chamber. When Madame Elisabeth went out, Raoule received whoever came along, of either sex. This boudoir opened onto a conservatory which she had made her workroom. Just as the groom burst in, a man was hurriedly pacing the conservatory, while Mademoiselle de Venerande, reclining on a Creole sofa, was rocking with laughter.
"You damn me, Raoule," the man repeated; he was still young, his Slavic-looking features dark complexioned but brightened by a vivacity that was altogether Parisian. "Yes! You damn me, by allowing that I may yet have deserved paradise ... Laughter is no answer ... I aver that a woman does not live without love, and you know that what I mean by love is the union of souls in the union of beings. I am frank. I never twist judicious words with pretty trifles, like a bitter pill coated in preserves ... I get straight to the point, hussar that I am; when I see the ditch in front of me I waste no time shaking the daisies from the turf. Yoicks! I spur on my horse and charge straight ahead; Raoule de Venerande, my dear friend! If you will, do not marry! But take a lover: it is essential for your health."
"Well done, Monsieur de Raittolbe! I wager even that my health will not be truly in the pink unless the lover be an officer of the hussars, dark complexioned, forthright in speech, brazen faced and stern of voice?"
"Upon my soul, I confess, I'll go further ... I propose the hussar in question as a husband ... Take your pick, seniority or exceptional services! There are five of us who for the last three years have been paying you court in immoderate fashion. The music lover, Prince Otto, has taken leave of his senses and it seems has placed your full length portrait in a mortuary chapel, where yellow wax tapers burn around a bed of rest ... And there, he sighs away from dawn to dusk. Flavien, the journalist, clutches at his hair with shaking hands whenever he hears your name. After your aunt's thorough dismissal of him, Hector de Servage has gone to Norway to try out refrigeration. Your fencing master came close to jamming one of his best swords through his own ribs. So, your humble servant being the only one left ... and the one who is honoured to hold your stirrup for rides in the Bois, I fancy you might regard him with a more favourable eye, and he presents his candidature. Raoule, would you that we sheltered our friendship in a conjugal nook? It would be warmer there ..."
Raoule rose to join Monsieur de Raittolbe just as the groom entered.
"Mademoiselle, here is an urgent letter."
She turned.
"Give me it."
"Will you excuse me?" she added, now addressing the hussar, who was smashing a Japanese plant into tiny pieces in an attempt to stem his fury. Enraged, he turned his back without replying. It was the thousandth time that this conversation had been broken off just at the most interesting point.
Monsieur de Raittolbe, a man of little patience, lit a cigar on the sly, and smoked out a whole azalea row as he swore that he would never again come near this hysteric - for, by his lights, a failure to observe common custom could mean nothing but hysteria.
Raoule had turned pale as she read.
"Good God!" she murmured, "He wants money; I am in a quagmire!"
"Show this poor creature in," she went on in a voice that betrayed nothing, "I would give her what she wishes straight away."
"And refuse me the explanation I request," grumbled the exasperated officer.
Unperturbed, Raoule closed the conservatory door on him and sat down again, pale as death. Her brow sank forward and she dug her long nails into the paper that was awash with blue ink.
"Money! Ali no! I shall contain myself! I shall send him what he wants rather than go there and kill him ...! Is he to blame? Must the man of the people not be abject just because he is handsome? Come! It was right that this chalice be given to me: I shall not reject it ... Instead, I shall draw from it a new life."
The guttural cough of Marie Silvert made Raoule raise her head. In a flash she was on her feet, as menacing and haughty as a goddess speaking from the heights of the Empyrean.
"How much?" she said, sweeping behind her the immense train of her velvet gown.
Marie finished her coughing fit ... She had not expected these words so soon ... The devil! It was going wrong ... Things could have begun in a nicer way with some feeling, tender enquiries ... These fancies have to simmer like a stew, with the pepper put in at the very end.
"You know how it is? The kid is bored," she announced with a smile full of grubby innuendos.
"How much?" Raoule repeated, in the grip of blind rage, and scanning the room for a knife.
"Do not be angered, Mademoiselle, money is a manner of speaking in his letter; what he wanted most was to see you, the child ... He is a baby who wants his own way, and he cries at the slightest thing! He has got it into his head that your fancy for him is all over, so he's to hop it? Whatever I say is a waste of breath. I've a terrible fear that if he doesn't see you again he'll do away with himself. This morning he looked into his glass and told me he would soon be tasting poison. Poor mite! It's soul-destroying! At his age. And that blond hair! That fair skin! You know him yourself, don't you? Well, I put on my Sunday best ... You can't stand there and let your brother die, I said to myself. And here I am! As for the money, we're poor, but proud. We'll talk about that later ...!"
She rubbed one foot on the boudoir rug, experiencing a secret joy in this little act of soiling high society, and she shook out her unfurled umbrella, with which she had not wished to part.
Raoule walked straight over to Miss Glad Tidings standing opposite her. With the back of one hand, she waved the girl aside just as one might casually brush away a strand of hair when it falls across the face.
"I have one thousand francs here ... I shall send you one thousand more this evening ... But do not stay a moment longer ... I do not know your brother ... I do not know where he lives . . . You ... I do not know your name. Take it and leave!"
She placed the notes on an armchair, motioning her to take them. Then she rang .. .
"Jeanne," she told the chambermaid, "see Madame out."
"Ah! But ..." muttered the dumbfounded florist.
She was led out, almost at arm's length, by Jeanne. A Swiss-liveried fist thrust her into the avenue, and the little dog came down the steps to lend support with a few shrill howls.
"Are you getting bored, Raittolbe?" Raoule enquired, stepping back into the conservatory with a smile.
"Mademoiselle," retorted Raittolbe, at a pitch of exasperation, "you are a pleasing monster, but the study of wild beasts only has real charm in Algeria ... So this evening I bid you adieu. Tomorrow morning I set sail for Constantine. Whoever wishes may hold your stirrup for you. I, however, no longer wish to do so."
"Ali! Ah! Yet it seemed to me that just a little while ago you were offering me your name ...!"
Raittolbe clenched his fists.
"To think that I resigned my commission for a tiger hunt!" he went on, paying her no heed.
That you plainly asked for my hand in legal marriage ...!"
For a tiger hunt in the Venerande park, a tiger dressed up as an Amazon ..."
... With no regard for my aunt or the laws of etiquette, Monsieur!"
I find myself absurd, Mademoiselle!"
"As do I," Raoule added philosophically.
Baron Raittolbe stopped short. They looked at one another for a moment, then burst out laughing.
Emboldened, the young man took the young woman by the hand and they went and sat down on a divan in the conservatory, with a magnolia behind them.
"Listen to me, true love can never be absurd. I do truly love you, Raoule."
He leaned forward. His somewhat teasing eyes misted over, not from the tenderness which he wished to convey, but from the simple effort of controlling the muscles in his face; then he kissed her fingers one by one, stopping between each caress to look upon her.
"Raoule ... I have yielded my heart to you ... I shall not be leaving without taking it back again and since I have placed it very near your own, I hope you will mistake it ... two young men's hearts, two hussars' hearts must be of the same red ... Give me yours in return ... Keep mine ... In one month from now, together we shall hunt real lions in the true Africa."
"I accept!" Raoule answered.
And in her sombre gaze, which knew not how to cry, there was a bleak sadness.
"You accept, what ...?" As Raittolbe spoke his chest tightened.
With supreme dignity the young woman pushed back his outstretched hands.
Monsieur Venus (Decadence from Dedalus) Page 4