The valances of the studio were lowered. The noise of the omnibuses and the carriages that passed in the street was muffled through the double glass; all that could be heard was a dull rumbling like the rumbling of an express train. Beside the great bed against which Raoule had thrown Jacques was a shadow-lit alcove, and the cushions piled up behind them formed a shape like the plush upholstery of a first class compartment ... They were alone, in a vertiginous transport which fearsomely altered everything ... They ran towards abysses, believing themselves safe in one another's arms.
"Jacques," Raoule answered, "I have made of our love a god. Our love shall be eternal ... My caresses shall never weary ...!"
"Is it true then that you find me handsome? That you find me worthy of you, the most beautiful of women ...?"
"You are so handsome, darling creature, that you are more beautiful than I! See in that mirror hanging there your pink and white neck like a child's ...! See your wonderful mouth, like the bruise in a sun-ripened fruit! See in your deep pure eyes a light translucent as the livelong day . . . See ...!"
She had raised him slightly as, with feverish fingers, she pulled back his garments from his chest.
"Do you not know, Jacques, do you not know that fresh healthy flesh is the only power in the world ...
He shuddered. His manliness was abruptly stirred by the sweetness of these softly spoken words.
She was not striking him now, she was not buying him, she was flattering him, and man, however abject as he be, can still possess in a moment of revolt, that erstwhile virility that we call self-conceit.
"You have proved to me," he said, smiling boldly as he held her by the waist, "you have proved to me that indeed I had no cause to blush before you. Raoule, the blue bed awaits us, come ...!"
A cloud fell from Raoule's hair onto her furrowed brow.
"Yes, but on one condition Jacques? You shall not be my lover ..."
He began to laugh, unrestrainedly, as he would have laughed in an encounter of a certain kind with an unwilling girl.
"I shall dream no more. This is doubtless what you wish me to see, wicked one ...!" he said, moving away with the grace of a faun released to run free.
"You shall be my slave Jacques, if the name of slavery can be given to the delicious abandon to which your body will surrender."
Jacques wanted to pull her to him but she resisted.
"Do you swear it ...?" she demanded in a now imperious voice.
"What ...? You are mad ...!"
"Am I the master, yes or no?" screamed Raoule, suddenly rearing up, stern-eyed and nostrils flaring.
Jacques drew right back as far as the easel.
"I shall leave .. I shall leave ...!" he reiterated in despair, no longer understanding the desires of his master and himself desiring nothing more.
"You shall not leave, Jacques. You surrender, you cannot take that back! Do you forget that we love one another ...?"
This love was now almost a threat, so he turned his back on her, sulking.
But she came now and with both arms lewdly enfolded him.
"Forgive me!" she murmured, "I was forgetting that you are a capricious little woman who in her little room has the right to torture me. Now then ...! I shall do what you wish ..."
They reached the blue chamber, he stunned by the obsessive fury with which she demanded the impossible; she cold-eyed, her teeth sunk into her fine lower lip. It was she who undressed him, refusing all his advances, roughly jerking him this way and that ... Without the least coquetry she removed her dress and her corset, then she drew the bed curtains, denying him the ecstatic sight of her Amazon splendour. When he embraced her it seemed to him that a body made of marble slid between the sheets; it felt unpleasantly as if some dead animal were brushing along his warm limbs.
"Raoule," he begged, "cease to call me woman, it humiliates me ... And you well see that I can only be your lover. .."
Amid the pillows, she of the hard heart gave a tiny shrug, a movement that betrayed her complete indifference.
"Raoule," Jacques repeated, with furious kisses trying to excite the mouth of she he believed to be his mistress that had burned such little time before. "Raoule! Do not despise me, I beseech you ... We love one another, you have said so yourself ... Oh! I am going mad ... Death is upon me ... There are things I shall never do ... Never ... Before I have you all completely to myselfl"
Raoule's eyes closed. She knew that game, she knew word for word what nature would say through the voice ofJacques...
How many times had she not heard those cries, some screaming, others sighing, the clever ones with their fine polite speeches, the timid with their groping overtures ...? And when they had all clamoured enough, when they had all finally attained the fulfilment of their dearest wishes, in the words of the sempiternal phrase, they all became each as vulgar as the other in the complacent satiety of satisfying the senses.
"Raoule," stammered Jacques, collapsing in desperate abandonment to sensuality, "do with me what you will now, I realise that depraved women cannot love ...!"
When she heard the harrowing plea of this man who was but a child before her evil mastery, the young woman's body coursed with racking shivers from head to toe. In a single leap, she cast herself upon him, covering him with her loins that were now inflamed with a savage passion.
"I cannot love ... I ... Raoule de Venerande ...! .. . You are not to say that, for I know how to wait ...!"
For Raoule de Venerande there began a strange life, from the fatal moment when Jacques Silvert, ceding to her his virility as a man in love, became her thing, a kind of inert being who allowed himself to be loved because he himself loved in a powerless manner. For Jacques loved Raoule with a true woman's heart. He loved her out of gratitude, out of submission, out of an underlying need for a sensuality hitherto unexperienced. This passion he had for her was like a passion for hashish, but now he preferred her a deal more than the green paste. The degradations to which she made him accustomed became for him a natural necessity.
They saw one another nearly every day, as far as was possible within the confines of the social world to which Raoule belonged.
When she had neither calls to make, nor soirees, nor studies, she threw herself into a hansom cab and arrived at boulevard Montparnasse, with the key to the studio in her hand. To Marie she issued a few curt orders and often a generously full purse, then locked herself in their room, in their temple, cut off from the rest of the world. Jacques seldom asked leave to go out. He worked when she did not come, and read all kinds of books, science or literature willy nilly, with which Raoule furnished him to keep his childlike mind in her thrall.
His was the idle existence of oriental women immured in their seraglio, knowing nothing outside love and making of love the centre of everything.
There were sometimes scenes between him and his sister on the matter of his quiescence. She would have had him live in style, with other mistresses and happily squandering the reprobate woman's riches. But he, ever serene, declared that she could not know, that she would never know.
Besides, the door curtains made it impossible for her to look through the keyhole. She was therefore compelled to remain a stranger to the mysteries of the blue chamber. Raoule came and went, giving orders, acting like a man to whom love affairs are nothing new, although love itself is. She made Jacques wallow in his passive happiness like a pearl in its lustre. The more he ceased to remember his sex, the more she multiplied around him opportunities to be womanly, and so as not to frighten overmuch the male she desired to stifle in him, at first she would treat as if in jest some demeaning notion only later to have him accept it in earnest. It was thus that she sent him one morning by her footman a huge bouquet of white flowers, together with this note: "For you I picked these fragrant blooms in my conservatory. Do not scold me, my kisses have flowers in their stead. A fiance can do no more than that ...!"
When he received this bouquet Jacques blushed terribly, then gravely he arrang
ed the flowers in the vases there were in the studio, playing out the role for himself, taking on the part of a woman for the sake of artifice.
At the start of their liaison he would feel outlandish. He would go downstairs with the excuse of taking a breath of fresh air and go to the nearby tavern to have a beer in the company of little sales clerks or casual labourers.
When she saw how her bouquet had been arranged, Raoule immediately realised the alteration she had brought about in this malleable character, and every morning it was her footman's task to deliver pure white flowers to Jacques' concierge.
Why white, why pure white?
This Jacques did not ask.
One day, late in May, Raoule ordered a covered landau and went to fetch Jacques at the hour when people go to the Bois.
He was as happy as a schoolboy on holiday, but this strange treat was to be enjoyed with discretion. He sat all the while in the back of the carriage, close against her with his head drooping on her shoulder, talking nothing but that adorable nonsense that made his beauty all the more provocative.
With an extended forefinger, through the open window Raoule pointed out the most important personages going by. She explained to him the high society terms she used, acquainting him with a world whose doors seemed barred to him, a hapless and unconscionable freak.
"Ali!" he would say, pressing himself to her anxiously, you will marry some day and leave me!"
This matched his blond freshness with the softening grace of a young girl seduced, who glimpses the prospect of being forgotten.
"No, I shall not marry!" Raoule asserted. "No, I shall not leave you, Jaja, and if you are good you will always be mine ...
They both laughed, but they were more and more united by a common thought: the destruction of their sex.
Yet Jaja had his whims, whims that could be satisfied. He made his sister heartsick, with her hopes of greater things than the studio awash with fancy rags. He had asked for a pretty dressing-gown of blue velvet with a lining of the same colour and it was with his heels catching in the hem of this long garment that he appeared on the threshold before Raoule. She arrived once, around midnight dressed in a man's suit, with a gardenia in the buttonhole, her hair disguised by a coiffure of curls, the top hat, her riding hat, pulled forward over her brow. Jacques was asleep, he had read for a long time as he waited for her, and in the end the book had slid from his hand. The night-light gave a mysterious glow to the silk-brocaded bed with its Venetian-lace trimmings. His tousled head reposed against the fine lawn of the sheet with a slackness that was charming. His shirt was fastened at the neck, allowing none to guess at his manhood, and his rounded arm, no down upon it, lay exposed, like a fine piece of marble, all along the satin curtain.
Raoule gazed upon him for some moments, wondering with a kind of superstitious terror whether she had not, in the manner of God, created a being in her own image. She touched him with a glove tip. Jacques woke, babbling a name; but as soon as he perceived this young man standing by his bedside table, he leapt up in fright, with a shout:
"Who are you? What do you want ...
Raoule doffed her hat with a gesture of courtesy.
"Madame has before her the humblest of her worshippers," she said bending one knee.
For a moment he was uncertain, his eyes aghast as they moved from her patent boots to her short dark curls.
"Raoule ...! Raoule ...! Can it be? You are risking arrest ...!"
"Come now! Silly girl! Because I enter your apartment without ringing the doorbell?"
He held out his arms to her and she covered him in passionate kisses, ceasing only once she saw him enraptured, overwhelmed, begging for the fulfilment of those unnatural delights which he underwent as much from the needs of his senses as from love for the sinister lady wooer.
He became accustomed to this nocturnal masquerade, with no thought that Raoul de Venerande had need of a gown.
With the vaguest idea of high society, as his sister's much used expression would have it, he had no idea of the strategems Raoule had to contrive in order to leave the principal courtyard of her mansion unnoticed.
Aunt Elisabeth was in bed by eight o'clock on those evenings when no guests were received, but on Saturday, after tea, the servants were all toing and froing between the vestibule and the salon. Such that Raoule, in order to escape from her chamber by the service staircase, had to take the most minute precautions. Once though, when the great chandelier in the salon had just been extinguished, on her way down Raoule encountered a man lighting his cigar. To turn back would be an opportunity wasted, and to go on was to risk discovery ... She advanced, passing next to the man, who touched the brim of his hat, as he did so giving her close scrutiny.
"A word, monsieur," whispered the late visitor with a hand on her shoulder. "Can you give me a light?"
Raoule had recognised Raittolbe.
"I say," she said, with supercilious emphasis, "are you not in the chambermaid's quarters, dear chap?"
"And you?" the ex-officer retorted with great discomfiture.
"I deem that no business of yours."
"Not so, monsieur, for by this way one can also reach the apartments of a woman for whom I have infinite respect. Mademoiselle de Venerande has her chamber above us, I believe. I shall therefore supply my own explanations while awaiting yours. It is Mademoiselle Jeanne's pretty face that has brought me here. A piece of foolishness, but a true one ... And you?"
"How impertinent," said Raoule, stifling her desire to laugh.
In one very swift movement, Raittolbe flung his calling card and his cigar in Raoule's face, and she, despite the danger, burst out laughing. She revealed herself, turning her beautiful face towards her interlocutor.
"Upon my word!" Raittolbe protested. "I did not expect a masquerade that went so far!"
"So much the worse for you; I shall take you with me!" Raoule retorted.
They reached the Tilbury waiting in the avenue. Raittolbe gave vent to complaints about depraved women who spoil the best things. He declared that her little Jacques had the same effect upon him as a parcel of rotting flesh. As for the sister, she had good reason to be fond of pretty boys. Good lord! At least she was upholding the honour of her profession. And cursing and swearing all the while he directed the horse towards boulevard Montparnasse, while Raoule collapsed behind him, laughing unrestrainedly. They arrived very late.
Under a street lamp opposite Notre-Dame-des-Champs, a woman stood silently, as if awaiting them.
There were scarcely any people in the street at such an hour and it was to be supposed that she was a prostitute.
"Pstt ...! Want to come upstairs with me? The gentle man with the medal. I'm as nice as any girl you'll find, you know," said the girl, accosting Raittolbe.
She was dressed in silk and wore a Spanish mantilla pinned with a coral comb. Her eyes gleamed invitingly, but her words were interrupted by a hollow cough.
"You ...!" exclaimed Mademoiselle de Venerande, lifting her cane with one hand and seizing the girl's arm with the other.
Seeing herself recognised by the master of the house, Marie Silvert attempted retreat.
"Excuse me," she stammered, "I mistook you for someone of my acquaintance; you know, do not think ill of me, I know plenty of high society folk."
Without thinking, Raoule struck the girl on the temple, and since the cane had an agate knob, Marie Silvert fell on the pavement in a faint.
"What the hell!" Raittolbe snapped in exasperation. "You could have contained your indignation, young fellow; we'll be on our way to the police station, no less! You are illogical to boot. If you lower yourself, this girl rises ... The punishment was pointless!"
Raoule shuddered.
"Be quiet Raittolbe! My passion has no business with this low-class female. I should have shown her the door long since."
"I advise you not to try ...!" the ex-officer of the hussars drily retorted.
He picked Marie up and slung her on his shoulder, then,
before the constable could appear on the scene, they had the street door opened to them.
Raoule, unconcerned by the turn their outing had taken for Raittolbe, left him to enter the sister's apartment while she made her way to the brother. Jacques was not in bed, he had even heard the commotion in the street.
He ran to Raoule and hung on her neck, just as an anxious wife might have done.
"Jaja not happy," he affirmed, in a voice whose childishness contrasted with his impudent smile.
"Why is that, my darling treasure?"
And Raoule carried him well-nigh to the nearest armchair.
"Goodness, I thought you were being arrested; there was an argument I think, below my window."
"No, nothing of the kind! By the way, you did not tell me that your worthy sister was not content with the means I put at her disposal. She solicits passers-by on the boulevard an hour after midnight."
"Oh!" Jacques was shocked.
"She took me for someone else just now, she had the temerity ..."
Three months before, such an idea would have amused the florist; this evening it outraged him ...
"The wretch," he said.
"You will allow me to be rid of Mademoiselle Silvert, will you not?"
"You have every right! Provoking you ...?" he added in a jealous voice.
"I have, it is apparent, the aspect of a gentleman ... of note, as these young ladies say!"
Then, with a very masculine insouciance, Raoule set down her overcoat.
"Yet," sighed Jacques, "there is something you will always lack!"
She sat at his feet on a low stool in an ecstasy of mute adoration. His velvet robe was tied at the waist with a cord, and his embroidered shirt front had just enough of a collar not to be a woman's linen. His hands, of which he took great care, were snow white like the hands of an idle woman; he had powdered his copper coloured hair.
"You are divine ...!" said Raoule. "Have I ever seen you look so pretty?"
"I've done it all as a surprise for you ... We are to have supper ...! I ordered champagne and made up my mind to be saucy!"
"Truly?"
Monsieur Venus (Decadence from Dedalus) Page 7