He drew back the Chinese screen to reveal a table laid and flanked by two ice buckets.
"Heavens!" he said. "I even want to make you drunk!"
"Well now! Mademoiselle the hostess!"
At that moment there was a thud on the other side of the door curtain.
"Who's there?" asked Jacques, very put out.
"Me!" snapped Marie.
And when the door was unlocked she entered, looking very pale, with her mantilla torn off and a spot of blood on her cheek.
"God in heaven! What is wrong ...?" Jacques exclaimed.
"Little enough," the girl said hoarsely. "Madame wellnigh killed me."
"Killed you!"
"Do be calm!" said Raoule disdainfully. "There must be a doctor hereabouts, have him sent for by the concierge or Monsieur de Raittolbe, if he is still here."
"I am here," said the latter, appearing with a bow of his head to Raoule, who did not move.
"Tell me what happened," murmured Jacques, pouring a glass of champagne for his sister and seating her in an armchair.
"Well, little one. This whore you love arsy-varsy landed me a whopper, with the excuse I was plying for trade at her door - as if this was no home of ours, you'd think ...! Just a circus for her every night, see! She goes and meddles in the affairs of poor girls whose tastes are different from hers. She sets herself up as the guardian of public morals, lays down the law and knocks me flat into the bargain. But, for all Monsieur here is an honest gentleman (and she pointed to the baron, who was still signalling despairingly at Raoule) I'm of a mind to settle her hash right now. I don't give a damn about your squalid love affair and seeing as we're all scum together we can have a good old go before we hop it, eh!"
As her words rattled across the sumptuous room like rifle fire, the girl rolled up her sleeves and left the armchair to plant herself in front of Raoule.
She was blind drunk. When her breath hit Mademoiselle de Venerande in the face it felt as if a bottle of liquor was being poured over her.
"Wretch," roared Raoule, fumbling in the pockets of her jacket for the dagger which was always with her.
Raittolbe thrust himself between them, while Jacques restrained his sister.
"Enough!" said Raittolbe, who wished himself a thousand leagues away from boulevard Montparnasse. "You are an ingrate, Mademoiselle Silvert, and what is more you are out of your mind. Take yourself off]"
"No!" screamed Marie, totally beside herself, "I want to finish off the hussy before I hop it. She disgusts me I tell you!"
Jacques, in alarm, was trying to shove her outside.
"You too," she railed, "deny your sister, rotten b ..."
Jacques turned pale as a corpse; slowly, without a word, he went to his bedroom and let the curtain fall behind him. Then Raittolbe, his patience exhausted, took Marie off to her room, despite her struggles and screams of fury, and locked her in. Then he went back to Raoule.
"My dear," he said, loath to look her in the face, "I think that this scene is not to be taken lightly; debased though she is, that creature strikes me as very dangerous ... take care! If you throw her out, within days the whole of Paris society could be acquainted with the story of Jacques Silvert."
"Will you help me instead to crush her," Raoule answered, livid with rage.
"My poor child! Little do you know the true female. For her no alteration is possible. I can promise to pacify her, that is all!"
"By what means?" Raoule enquired, knitting her brow.
"That is my secret; but I assure you that your friend will spare himself nothing."
Raoule flinched; she had understood.
"One does what one can," retorted Raittolbe.
And he left, with great dignity.
"Since we are all scum together!" Marie Silvert had said ... For the rest of the night this phrase kept Raoule from love's caresses. All recall of the Greek splendours with which she surrounded her present-day idol was suddenly swept aside, like a veil blown in the wind, and the daughter of the Venerandes perceived base things whose existence she had not even suspected. A chain is riven between all women who love ...
... At the moment when she gives herself to her honest husband, the honest wife is in the same position as the prostitute in the moment of her surrender to her lover.
Nature made these victims naked, and society has merely clothed them. Without their garments nothing stands between them, the only difference is that of physical beauty; so sometimes the victor is the prostitute.
Christian philosophers have spoken of purity of intention, but they have never disputed this point during a love struggle ... At least we do not think so! They would have found it too distracting.
Thus Raoule saw herself on the same level as the age old scarlet woman ... And if her advantage was that of beauty, it was not that of pleasure: this she gave, but did not receive.
All monsters have a moment when they weary; she was wearied ... Jacques wept.
At dawn she left the studio, took a hansom cab and returned to her mansion.
While waiting for luncheon, she had a fencing bout with one of her cousins, a cretinous fop but adept with weapons, then she discussed a planned journey with her aunt. Departure had to be immediate, before the onset of wet weather. At this the canoness demurred over charitable visits to be completed, bills to be settled, a cook to be replaced. Wealth is truly bothersome at times, society too tedious, the ways of the world thoroughly trying.
Yet the new Sappho could not yet make the leap from Leucas. A throbbing pain from the deepest recesses of her flesh warned her that her gaiety was ever attached to a mortal being. Like inventors impeded by an obstacle as they put the final touches to their work, she hoped, despite the mire, to see in Jacques' shining eyes another patch of her sky that she would people once more with chimeras.
Three days passed. Jacques did not write. Marie did not come. As for Raittolbe, he maintained an absolute neutrality. Raoule, who had no patience with uncertainty, one evening donned her masculine attire and sped to boulevard Montparnasse. As she entered she met Marie Silvert. The latter greeted her with an obsequious smile and withdrew, without any hint in her demeanour of what had passed between them. Jacques was at work on decorative monograms on writing paper. It was a commission Raoule had paid for in advance with extremely warm kisses.
An exquisite calm pervaded the studio, and the light of the lamp, whose shade was lowered, illuminated only the adorable countenance of Jacques. Nay, these were not the features of an abject individual; everything in the lines of his face exuded something akin to the candour of a boy virgin whose thoughts are on the priesthood. Somewhat concerned at seeing Raoule, he set down his pencil and rose.
"Jacques, you are a coward, my friend!" Raoule spoke calmly. Jacques fell back into his armchair, an even pallor spreading from his brow to his neck.
"Your sister's language the other night was coarse but just."
He grew even paler.
"You are kept by a woman, you work only to divert yourself and you accept an ignoble situation without the smallest protest."
He contemplated her fearfully.
"I believe," Raoule continued, "that it is not Marie who should be despatched as some base creature."
Jacques clenched his fingers on his chest, for he was suffering.
"You are going to leave this place," Raoule went on in a voice that remained cold, "you will go and seek work with an engraver. I shall help you be received, then you will return to living a garret and you will try to rediscover some manly dignity!"
Jacques straightened up.
"Yes," he said, his voice broken, "I shall obey you Mademoiselle, you are right."
"Under these conditions," Raoule whispered more softly, "I promise you a reward such as you have never dreamed of."
"Which is, Mademoiselle?" he asked, now arranging his work tools on the covering of his rosewood desk.
"I shall make you my husband."
Jacques stepped back, arms raised.
"Yo
ur husband?"
"Of course, I have ruined you, I shall rehabilitate you. What could be more straightforward! Our love is nothing more than a degrading torture undergone by you because I pay you. Well I give you back your freedom. It is my hope that you be able to use it to win me back ... If you love me."
Jacques leant on the bedside table behind him.
"I refuse," he said bitterly.
"I don't believe it! You refuse to marry me?"
"I refuse to be rehabilitated, even at that price."
"Why?"
"Because I love you, as you have taught me to love you ... My cowardice, my baseness and the torture of which you speak are now my life. I shall go back to a garret; if you demand it I shall be poor again, I shall work, but when you want me I shall still be your slave, he whom you call: my wife!"
A thunderbolt fallen at Raoule's feet could not have stunned her more.
"Jacques! Jacques! Have you forgotten your straitened past? Think of it! For you, the once poverty-stricken workman, to be my husband is to be a king!"
"But!" Jacques murmured with two fat tears standing in his eyes, "it is no fault of mine if I no longer have the strength!"
Raoule rushed to him with open arms:
"Oh! I love you," she cried, in an ecstasy of sensuality, "yes! I am mad, I think even that I have come to ask of you a thing against nature ... Pretty darling ... Forget this, you are better than I could imagine."
She pulled him onto the couch and, as it often pleased her to do, sat him on her lap. They seemed like two brothers reconciled.
"Truly, I would look lovely dressed in white with a bride's veil modestly over my face ... I who am terrified of ridicule ... But let us see, what you would have is a serious matter, little pet, you are not of a mind at all ...?"
Jacques was sobbing, his head buried in the curve of Raoule's arm.
"No! I assure you, it's all over, I shall take what you wish to give me, and if things were ever to be different I should refuse. But if you knew how I love you, you would not insult me, instead you would pity me greatly. I am very wretched."
She enfolded him and rocked him in her arms, soothing him the way swaddled babes are soothed. She was intoxicated anew by this triumph, a victory despite the promptings of her conscience. The girl's coarse remarks no longer rang in her ears. Once again, memories of Greece surrounded her idol in a cloud of incense. She was now loved for love of vice; Jacques became a god.
She dried his cheeks and asked about his sister.
"Ah! I know not what life she leads," he answered, petulantly; "she is always abroad, and at night always expecting someone. I fancy it is Monsieur the baron that you introduced to me one day."
"Impossible!" Raoule exclaimed, in an outburst of laughter . . . "Raittolbe to sink so low ...! After all, she is free, he too, but I forbid you to concern yourself with it."
"You forgive her the scene she made. You know she was drunk ..."
"I forgive her everything, since indirectly she is the cause of how things stand between us now. I should descend into hell if I knew I were to find there the proof of your true love, little Jacques!"
He lay down at her feet and kissed them with passionate humility ... Then he sighed:
"I am sleepy" - and he placed the sharp heels of Raoule's shoes on his forehead.
She rose, having understood.
That night Raoule, who the next day had to join a hunting party at the chateau of the duchess of Armonville, near Fontainbleau, departed around one, leaving Jacques soundly asleep.
She was still on her way down the stairs when Jacques' door was tentatively opened. A man in his shirtsleeves burst into the blue bedchamber, around which he cast his eyes.
"Monsieur Silvert," he said, when satisfied that Jacques and he were truly alone in the room. "Monsieur Silvert, I wish to speak with you; get up. Let us go into the studio."
It was the baron de Raittolbe; his careless toilette suggested that he had left the other half of his clothes not far away. He seemed somewhat discomfited to find himself there, but a firmness of resolve shone beneath his heavy black brow. He had finally been revolted by all that he had heard and seen. In these sad circumstances, he thought that his influence as a truly manly man had to be affirmed. Since he had placed a finger in the works, he would use it at least to prevent any faster movement.
"Jacques!" he repeated loudly as he approached the bed.
The night-light's gleam slid over the rounded shoulders of the sleeper and flowed caressingly down to the tips of his toes.
He had fallen back naked and overwhelmed by exhaustion onto the rumpled curtain whose blue satin brightened the glow of his redhead's complexion. His head lay cradled in a folded arm so white that it was tinged with mother of pearl. A golden shadow in the hollow of his back accentuated the gorgeous swell of his rump, and one of his legs, slightly parted from the other, twitched in the manner of over-sensitive women after prolonged excitation of the senses. On his wrists two golden circlets arched with gems sparkled on the azure drapery which lay upon him, and a flask of attar of roses, tucked in the pillow, spread a fragrance heady as the loves of all the Orient.
Standing before this disordered couch, baron de Raittolbe experienced a strange hallucination. The ex-officer of the hussars, the bold duellist, the pleasure-seeker who held in equal esteem a pretty girl and an enemy bullet, wavered for a fraction of a second; the blue that he saw all around him turned to red, his moustache bristled, his teeth clenched, his whole body shivered, then a clammy sweat drenched his skin. He was almost afraid.
"Well I'll be truly damned," he muttered, "if it isn't Eros himself, I'll vouch to have him decorated for the public good."
And, with the sometime interested eye of a military man on medical inspection, his eyes traced the sculpted lines of this flesh that emanated the heat of voluptuousness.
"Ah, but I fancy this is the time now for a riding crop," he went on, trying to dissipate his admiration.
"Jacques!" he roared, loud enough to set the chamber vibrating sky-high.
Jacques sat up; but though his awakening had been abrupt, he proved no less graceful in his drowsiness; he stretched out his arms, braced his torso, and was superb, unselfconscious as an antique marble.
"Who dares enter without knocking?" he said.
"I do," the baron snapped cholerically, "I do, my funny little fellow, because I wish to make you privy to some interesting things. I knew you were alone and crossed the threshold of the sanctuary. I give you a minute to make yourself decent."
He left as Jacques leapt to the foot of the bed and reached for his dressing gown with shaking hands.
The air was heavy that night, it was August and a storm was gathering. Raittolbe opened the studio window and leaned out into an atmosphere even warmer than that of Jacques' bed. It felt like breathing fire.
"It is at least a natural heat," he thought.
When he turned around the young painter was awaiting him, wrapped in the long folds of an almost feminine garment; in the shadows his pale countenance gave the impression of a statue.
"Jacques." The baron spoke thickly. "Is it true that Raoule wishes to marry you?"
"Yes Monsieur, how do you know?"
"Do not concern yourself! Suffice it that I know; I even know why you refuse. Your refusal is very noble, Monsieur Silvert (Raittolbe laughed scornfully), but this praiseworthy bid for dignity should have led you to remove yourself from Mademoiselle de Venerande's sun."
The exhausted Jacques was wondering what the sun had to do with his intoxicated night and what this unpleasant man could want from him.
"But sir," he murmured, "by what right?"
"Upon my sabre!" the baron exclaimed. "By the right of any man of honour, knowing what I know and face to face with a scoundrel of your stamp. Raoule is crazed, her madness will pass. But if she married you before it does so, you would not pass ...! It would be altogether loathsome. I have done what is possible to keep the scandal from our circle, you
must do more than is possible in order for the scandal to end. Things cannot be kept between these walls forever. Your sister might have another drinking bout, and, upon my word, I can no longer answer for it. This evening you have behaved with a certain propriety. Well, who is to prevent you from leaving this apartment tomorrow, going to the garret in question, seeking work and forgetting her ... her mistake. A good thought means that you are not yet done for! Upon my soul, try to pull yourself together again Jacques!"
You were listening," said the latter dully.
"Huh! No! Someone was listening for me, alas, and then who are you to question me."
"Are you Marie's lover?" Jacques persisted, with a gently ironic smile.
The ex-officer clenched his fists.
"If you had a drop of blood in your veins!" He snarled, eyes flashing.
"Then, Monsieur the baron, since your affairs are no concern of mine, let mine be no concern of yours," Jacques went on. "No! I shall not marry Mademoiselle de Venerande, but I shall love wherever I please: here, there, in a salon, in a garret and however it pleases me. I am answerable only to her; if I am base, that is my business; if she loves me thus, that is her business."
"Upon my sword! That hysteric will marry you in the end, despite all, I know her."
"Just as Marie Silvert has become your mistress despite all: one can never answer for oneself."
Jacques' calm, gentle tone disconcerted Raittolbe. Could it be that this gigolo was speaking the truth? Could it be that beauty was no longer a requirement for the fulfilment of physical pleasures? He, the elegant pleasure-seeker, had let himself sink into filth for the sake of devotion, then, unexpectedly, the cynicism of the gutter sensualist had pierced his most secret fibres, the welter of corruption that a moralist carries always deep within him had risen to his outer membrane. Willingly he had returned to Marie Silvert, he too wishing to inspire an unhealthy passion, and this intelligent couple, Raittolbe and Raoule, had fallen prey almost simultaneously to a twin perversion.
"The heavens will not tumble" said the Baron, shaking his fist at the storm.
Jacques moved beside him.
"Is it my sister who does not wish me to marry her?" he asked, still with his magical smile.
Monsieur Venus (Decadence from Dedalus) Page 8