"To take you as my lover, my dear; you will not be the first and I am an honest man ...!"
"I knew it," Raittolbe answered tranquilly. "I think that at this moment I adore you!"
That evening the young officer dined at the Venerande mansion. For Aunt Elisabeth he was the most perfect of gentlemen. He constructed a tirade on the devoutness which blinds woman to human wretchedness and raises her above the impure earth. Aunt Elisabeth allowed that hussars were fine specimens of youth. As he took his leave, Raittolbe whispered a word in Raoule's ear.
"I shall be waiting ..."
"Tomorrow," she murmured, "at the Continental Hotel. My brown Brougham will enter by the left gate around ten in the morning."
"That will do."
And the pleasure-seeker made his exit reassured.
The next morning the brown Brougham was ordered around ten o'clock and Raoule fell into the carriage with febrile gaiety. Indeed, it would be so, she had sworn it to herself and since he, not withstanding, was better than the rest, he would perhaps amuse her further. An error of the senses is not the blossoming of a soul, and the beauty of a human form cannot inspire a desire to be attached to it for an eternity of madness.
She sang as she buttoned her gloves. The mirror in the Brougham gave her back her image, the fineness of her bosom rustling with lace. She had a pleasure in feeling womanly.
"Does Mademoiselle wish to go inside?" said the coachman, leaning towards the window at the end of a rapid drive.
"No! Stop, when I get out you will enter by the left gate and wait for me there until evening ...!"
Raoule's voice had begun to hiss. She got out, waved a waiting cab and hurled herself inside it.
"Notre-Dame-des-Champs, boulevard Montparnasse!" she said as the other carriage, now empty, approached the gate on the left, as she had ordered.
Throughout the whole of the journey she had given it no thought; now faced with the sacrifice, the body that was no longer hers had felt revulsion. Raoule had surrendered without a protest.
When she arrived the studio in boulevard Montparnasse struck her as lugubrious, but at the far end there lay open the bedroom all blue as a patch of sky. Marie Silvert withdrew as soon as Raoule had crossed the threshold.
"Well, we shall settle our little piece of business after lunch. It will be a hot one, I'll tell you that, hussy!"
For the sake of privacy, Mademoiselle de Venerande pulled the two heavy door curtains.
"Jacques!" she called harshly.
He buried his face in the bolster, unwilling to believe this inordinate vileness.
"I did not write the letter!" he exclaimed, "I promise you, I should not have dared. Besides, I wish to go away, I am ill. I am made ill to make me stay in this bed ... Marie is capable of anything, I know her! You ...! I cannot stand you ...!„
His energies exhausted, he slipped back into the depths of the bedcovers, curling up like a beaten animal.
Is that true?" Raoule asked, a shiver of delight causing her to start.
"Yes, absolutely true!"
His tousled head re-emerged, and the praiseworthy fair complexion took on a shade of pink.
"Then, why let this letter be sent?"
"I did not know! Marie insisted that I had a fever, her fever. She drugged me and every night I was delirious; she said it was quinine. I would gladly have pushed it away, but my hand was too weak. Ali! You can do what you like with your wretched studio! God in heaven ...!"
Out of breath, he tried to sit up, which made Raoule notice something strange: he was wearing a woman's nightgown, a nightgown with a scalloped trim.
And is she the one who puts you in this attire?" said Raoule, touching the scallop at his neck.
"Do you imagine that I have linen? My rags are long since gone. I was cold, she wrapped me in that ... Am I to know it is a woman's nightgown ...!"
"Yes, it is Jacques!"
They stared at one another for a moment, wondering whether the story called for laughter.
Marie shouted from the far end of the studio:
"I am to set two places, is that-not-so ...?"
Then, conceding everything for the sake of peace in the shame that began to make her head reel, Raoule de Venerande locked the door while Jacques made up his mind to laugh heartily. Then, haltingly, she went back towards the bed. He had a child's laugh that was very sweet and ravishingly silly, a provocative laugh full of grace, that made you shiver. She did not try to make sense of why this silliness radiated such power; she let herself be lapped within it as the drowned man by the wave when after ceasing to struggle he surrenders for always to the current. She drew back the blue draperies a little so as to reveal the young man's head.
"Are you ill?" she said mechanically.
"No longer, now that I see you ...!" he answered with the air of a conqueror.
"Will you do something that will please me, Jacques?"
"Everything, Mademoiselle!"
"Well then' Be quiet. I do not come here to listen to you.
He was silent, but was somewhat vexed, telling himself that his compliment had doubtless not seemed a new one to this fastidious creature. Society women are awkward in intimacy, and he was aware of being out of his depth at the start.
"I am going to sleep!" he suddenly declared, pulling his sheet up as far as his nose.
"There we are! Sleep," murmured Mademoiselle de Venerande. On tiptoe, she stepped across to slip the blinds down, then she lit a night light that clouded the air through its dulled crystal.
Now and then, Jacques would lift his lashes, whereupon these things so discreetly executed by this svelte, black-clad woman bred in him a dreadful confusion.
Finally, she went over to him with a little shell box in her hands.
"I have brought you a remedy that is very different from your sister's quinine," she said, smiling maternally. "Take it and you will go straight to sleep ...!"
She put her arm around his head and set a silver gilt spoon to his mouth.
"We must be good ...!" she said, her eyes burrowing gravely into his.
"I don't want it!" he declared angrily.
He now remembered how one day, it was a holiday, on the Seine embankment he had bought a wicked book for twenty-five centimes whose title was The Exploits of Madame Brinvilliers, and that whenever he thought of the love affairs of great ladies it was poisoning that came into his head. His somewhat weakened mind immediately went back over the criminal actions of a velvet-hooded lady towards a gentleman in a state of undress. He could see the gentleman's frantic gesture as he pushed the cup away. Raoule undoubtedly wanted to be rid of him; there are creatures who will stop at nothing when they believe themselves compromised! Jacques too put out a fist, ready to crush any move she might make to harm him. Raoule merely responded by taking the spoon between her teeth.
"I am not an infant!" he exclaimed, perplexed now. "I don't need my food chewed for me!"
And without turning a hair he swallowed this greenish remedy that tasted of honey. Raoule sat on the edge of the bed holding both his hands and smiling at him with a smile at once happy and rueful.
"My love," she murmured, in a voice so low that Jacques heard it as if from the depths of a pit. "We shall belong to each other in a strange country of which you know nothing. This is the land of the mad, though not of the ugly ... I am here to strip you of your coarser senses and give you others that are more subtle and refined. You will see with my eyes, taste with my lips. In this land people dream, and these dreams suffice for existence. You will dream and then you will understand when you see me again in this mystery all that you do not understand when I speak to you here! Go! I shall hold you no longer but shall join my heart to your pleasures ..
Jacques' head fell back as he tried to take hold of her hand again. He felt himself gradually rolling in a falling mass of feathers. The curtains began to undulate and the multiplying mirrors in the room showed him a thousand times the huge dark silhouette of a woman hovering like a
vapourised genie flung down from the highest heaven. His every muscle tensed, his limbs all stiffened in his will to return, despite himself, into the coarse skin of which he had been stripped, but he plunged deeper and deeper away. The bed had disappeared, his body likewise. He whirled in the blueness, he became transformed into a being akin to the hovering genie. At first he had had the sensation of falling, now instead he found himself far above the world. Inexplicably, he felt the pride of Satan who, after his fall from Paradise, still has earthly sovereignty, with, at one and the same time, his brow beneath the feet of God and his feet upon the brow of men!
It seemed to him that he had lived thus for long centuries, resplendent in his shimmering nakedness, with the dark woman.
He heard the hushed song of a strange love neither male nor female but from which sprang all voluptuousness. He loved with the fearsome power and heat of a burning sun. He was loved with terrifying transports of intoxication and a mastery so exquisite that delight was reborn in the moment of its extinction.
Before them space opened to infinity, ever blue, ever sparkling ... And there, in the distance, an animal of some sort lay prone, gravely regarding them ...
Jacques Silvert never knew how, in that moment of well-nigh divine happiness, he was able to get up. When he came to, he was already on his feet, a heel gingerly set on the head of the large bearskin that served as his bedside rug. His eyes were lost in a Venetian mirror and the room was very silent. From behind the door curtains a voice enquired:
"Will you dine, Mademoiselle?"
Jacques could have sworn it was less than a minute since the question had been: Will you have lunch ...?
He dressed hastily, moistened his temples with a sponge soaked in vinegar cologne and stammered:
"Where is she? I don't want her to go away!"
"Here I am, Jacques!" came the answer. "I did not leave you, for you were still in delirium."
Raoule appeared, lifting the draperies that concealed the bathroom. She was still slender and very dark. Her fingers were fastening a necklace at her throat.
"It cannot be true?" screamed Jacques. He was shaking. "I was not in delirium. I was not dreaming. Why do you lie to me Raoule?"
Raoule took him by the shoulders and pushed him down with an imperiously firm hand.
"Why does Jacques Silvert address me thus, in speech of such unbridled intimacy. Have I given him my permission to do so?"
"Oh! I am done for!" uttered Jacques repeatedly as he tried to get up again. "A man should not be ridiculed like this when he is ill, Raoule! I shall not address you thus again as an equal ... Raoule! I love you ...! Oh, I think I am going to die ...
In this raving and distracted state, he took refuge in Raoule's arms.
"Is it over?" he continued in tears. "Is it all over ...?"
"I tell you again that you were ... dreaming. That is all."
And she thrust him away, betaking herself into the studio in her wish to hear no more.
"Mademoiselle is served!" announced Marie Silvert, dropping a curtsey as if there were nothing that could discountenance her. Raoule moved to the table, where a steaming dish was laid, and, next to a rolled up serviette, set a pile of gold coins.
This is his place, am I not right?" she said, in an even voice, looking at Marie, who did not bat an eyelash.
"Yes, I placed you facing one another."
"Good," Raoule replied in the same indifferent tones, "I very much wish you both bon appetit!"
And she left, pulling on a glove.
Just when Raittolbe had finally realised that Mademoiselle de Venerande had merely sent an empty carriage to the rendezvous at the Continental and was on the point of withdrawing after an infuriating wait of nine hours, a cab roared in through the right-hand gate. Raoule alighted; her hat veil was drawn over her face and she was somewhat preoccupied, intent on seeing without being seen.
The baron rushed towards her, astounded by her audacity.
"You!" he exclaimed, "this is too much! A yellow carriage instead of a brown carriage, through the right gate instead of the left one. What do you mean by these subterfuges?"
"Since I am a woman nothing should amaze you," Raoule answered with a nervous laugh. "I do everything to the contrary of what I promised. What could be more natural?"
"Yes indeed, what could be more natural! You torture a poor suitor, leaving him to imagine dreadful things that might have happened, like an accident, a betrayal, a lastminute change of heart, a family argument or sudden death, then you tell him calmly: what could be more natural? Raoule, you ought to be locked up. It was I who imagined that Mademoiselle de Venerande was the very soul of loyalty! Oh, I am furious!"
"You are going to take me home," said the young woman, her smile intact. "We shall dine without my aunt, who is entirely engaged in a great round of evening devotions at this time; I shall explain while we dine ..
"Good lord! You have made a fool of me. I am sure of it."
"First step inside, I swear all shall be clear later, for my loyal reputation is well deserved, my dear. I could conceal the situation from you, but I shall conceal nothing. Who is to know! (And her look was so bitter that Raittolbe was appeased.) Who is to know whether my story might not make up for what you missed today!"
He got inside the brown Brougham, sulking greatly, his moustache bristling, and wide-eyed as an animal-tamer fearful before his charge.
Throughout the journey he broached no conversation; the story even seemed to him superfluous now that he was going to dine under Raoule's roof. He knew - and he was not the only one to know it - that in her home Madame Elisabeth's niece lived as an unassailable virgin, a kind of goddess holding sway atop a pedestal that no one would dare pull down. He went therefore to his ordeal without the least eagerness. Through half-closed eyelids Raoule dreamed, seeing, across the night she made around herself, a snow white thing whose every outline was that of a human body.
Upon their arrival, she had a dinner table brought into her library, and as an Etruscan lamp was set in the hands of a bronze slave, she sat down on a couch, praying the baron to draw up an upholstered armchair for himself, in a manner so gracious that Raittolbe felt he might well be able to strangle his Amphitryon before starting on the soup.
Once the courses had been set on two butlers' trays with chafing-dishes, Raoule announced that they had no more need of a serving man.
"We shall stand in his stead, shall we not?" she said.
"As you wish!" snapped the baron in a hollow voice.
A fire blazed in the hearth of the escutcheoned chimneypiece and in this room hung everywhere with figured tapestries, host and guest were taken back some centuries, to the days when the king's supper would rise up from the floor as soon as he struck it with the hilt of his sword. One panel represented Henri III handing out flowers to his favourites. Beside Raoule there stood a bust of Antinous crowned with vine leaves; his enamelled eyes glittered with desire.
In their hundreds books stood along the shelves, the names of profane authors flitting across their dark bindings: Parny, Piron, Voltaire, Boccaccio, Brantome, and in the midst of the works that could be owned to, there sat a cabinet whose ivory-encrusted doors were open to reveal, upon its lined shelves of purple velvet, the works that could not be owned to.
Raoule took a ewer and poured herself a goblet of clear water.
"My friend," she said in a voice that trembled all at once with forced gaiety and contained passion, "I warn you I shall become drunk, because my tale cannot be told in the accents of reason, you would not understand it!"
"Ali! Very well!" muttered Raittolbe, "Then I shall contrive to keep my own head!"
Then he emptied a flagon of sauterne into an ornately chased drinking-cup. They considered one another for a moment. To prevent himself from losing his temper, Raittolbe was compelled to acknowledge that Mademoiselle de Venerande resembled Diana the huntress in her most beautiful of aspects.
As for Raoule, she did not see the man who sat
opposite her. The intoxications of which she spoke brimmed already in her eyes with their gold pierced pupils.
"My dear," she said abruptly, "I am a man in love!"
Raittolbe leapt up, set down his drinking-cup and replied in strangled tones:
"Sappho ...! Well now," he went on with an ironic wave of the hand, "I suspected as much. Continue, Monsieur de Venerande, continue my dear chap!"
The corner of Raoule's mouth creased in contempt!
"You are wrong, Monsieur de Raittolbe; to be Sapphic would be like everyone! My upbringing forbids me the crime of the boarding school girl or the prostitute's foibles. I fancy you place me above the level of vulgar amours. How can you imagine me capable of such weaknesses? You may speak freely ... I am in my own home."
The ex-officer of the hussars was trying to twist his fork. He could see well enough that he had fallen head first into the sphinx's lair. He bowed gravely.
"What the devil was I thinking? Ah! Mademoiselle. I was forgetting Terence's Homo sum!"
"You can be sure, Monsieur," Raoule went on with a shrug, "that I have had lovers. Lovers in my life as I have books in my library, for knowledge, for study ... But I have never had passion, I have never written my own book! I have always found myself alone whenever I was coupled. There is no weakness when you are always master of yourself in the midst of the most besotting voluptuousness. If I were to present my psychological theme on a day that were more ... Louis XV, I shall say that after reading much, and studying much, I became persuaded of a lack of profundity in my authors, classical or otherwise! For now my heart, that proud savant, would be a little Faust ... Wishing to rejuvenate not its blood but that old thing which people name love!"
"Well done!" Raittolbe cheered, convinced he was about to hear magic words and see a witch jump out of the mysterious cabinet. "Well done! I shall help you if I can! At your service, as you know! I too am weary of the same old words that go with the same old ways. My little Faust, I drink to a new invention and ask only that my money pay the patent. Good lord! A brand new love! That's the kind of love for me! But Faust, if I may observe ... it seems to me that when it's her first time, every woman must think she has just created love, because love is only old for us philosophers? But not yet for virgins! Eh? Let us be logical!"
Monsieur Venus (Decadence from Dedalus) Page 5