"Good lord no! Indeed she would drive you to this hellish union. Jacques, you must resist!"
"Of course Monsieur, it is the last thing in the world that I want."
"Swear to me that ..."
The last words choked in the gullet of the ex-officer of hussars. How could he demand an oath from this monster. He took hold of Jacques' arm. When the latter took a sudden step away from him and the sleeve loosely sheathing that arm slid back, Raittolbe could feel the pearly skin beneath his fingers.
"You must promise me ..."
But Silvert stepped further away:
"I forbid you to touch me Monsieur," he said coldly, "Raoule does not wish it."
The indignant Raittolbe kicked over a chair, leapt on the cursed creature whose velvet robe now seemed to hold the tenebral depths of an abyss, and pulling off the handrest of an easel, he struck until the stick was in pieces.
"Now you will find out what a real man is, scum ...!" Raittolbe screamed, in the grip of a blind rage whose violence somewhat bewildered him. When he saw Jacques collapse, bruised all over, he added:
"And she will find out, depraved as she is, that to my mind there is one way alone of touching wretches of your kind ...!"
When the baron had gone, Jacques opened his eyes dismally in the night and saw on one of the studio's walls what appeared to be a fat firefly settling in the midst of the hangings.
So as to see and hear what went on in her brother's apartment, Marie Silvert had contrived to make a hole in the wall of her room adjoining the studio.
The firefly whose glimmering Jacques saw in the darkness was this hole, lit up by a lamp.
Raittolbe found the girl in bed, drinking a cup of rum which she had just heated on a small apparatus that was still alight beside the bed.
This chamber bore no resemblance to the rest of the apartment furnished with Raoule de Venerande's attentions. Against somewhat mildewed striped wallpaper stood a heavy mirrored wardrobe in reddish mahogany; the curtainless bed was of the same mahogany, but a lighter shade; four chairs, covered in cerise percale, stood in disarray around a table whose white wood was blackened here and there by the marks of a saucepan; to the left of the door, on the stove, where lay a jumble of dishes, a bonnet crowned with feathers sat with a string dipped in a soup terrine full of melted butter.
Marie Silvert was rosy-cheeked as she supped her rum with smackings of the lips. While she drank, she cast a fond eye over a jacket thrown onto the nearest of the four chairs and on which was pinned the red-ribbon of the Legion of Honour.
"What an imbecile I am," muttered Raittolbe, arms folded as he stood before a couch which he could not stop himself from comparing with that of Jacques.
"You, my lad, an imbecile!" Marie said, as though appalled.
Sdeath!" continued the ex-officer, "I have just behaved like a savage, not a just man."
"What have you done?" the girl asked, setting down her cup.
"I've, I've, a thousand devils take me! I've given a thrashing to Mademoiselle your brother, and without even thinking twice about it, I'd been so much longing to for weeks."
"You beat him?"
"Punished him and no mistake!"
"Why?"
"Well, that's what I don't really know, I think he insulted me, and yet I'm not very sure."
Marie, smothered in her sheets, was growing like a cat that got the cream.
"You got worked up ..." she sighed, "love often does that; I should have suspected you were going to thrash him ...!"
"Let that be the end of it! If Raoule complains, refer her to me ... Goodnight! I was certainly wrong to involve myself in your affairs. It is too much for the brain of an honest man."
"Are you angry with me too?" the girl asked, getting up in alarm.
"Pah ...!"
And Raittolbe finished dressing, without another word.
Out on the boulevard the baron was lulled by the fresh morning air, but an almost painfully obsessive thought remained embedded in his mind like a knife blade in the forehead: he had struck Silvert who had put up no defence, Silvert naked beneath his velvety robe, Silvert whose limbs had hung flaccid with nervous exhaustion.
Why did he, a man of character, need to preach to a poor ridiculous creature? A pretty piece of work, upon my soul! Perhaps if he'd done it the very first day, but no! First he had become the lover of a most vile prostitute ...
He walked to the rue d'Antin where he had a mezzanine apartment. Settled in his smoking room, he locked the door and wrote to Mademoiselle de Venerande.
From the outset his hand slackened on the pen. Loyalty prevented him from concealing the cause of his brutality; on the other hand, he told himself, by what right can I intervene in the mutual degradation of these two lovers? If Raoule wished to marry Silvert, the scandal concerned her alone; duty did not compel him to safeguard the honour of this woman.
He had already torn up three attempts at starting the letter when he suddenly recalled the hole Marie had bored in the wall that separated the wide world from the love pair, half of which he had just flogged, and felt so guilty that he repudiated any thought of accusation.
He made do then with revealing to Raoule the precise location of this invasion of her private life, and swore that to calm the dangerous humours of Mademoiselle Silvert he had thought it necessary to yield to her fancies, and that since her admiration for his own person was increasing in alarming proportions, he was resolved to send her a banknote by way of farewell and never more to set foot inside the studio of boulevard Montparnasse.
He concluded by deploring the high spirits of which Jacques had been the victim.
Raoule would not stay long with the Duchess of Armonville; her absences from Paris were but short, and the summer sojourns prescribed by the ways of society were given up for the sake of her love affairs. Yet the baron did not neglect to note upon his letter: "Please forward". Then, his mind at rest, he returned to normal life.
Jacques did not know Raoule's address, but it did not occur to him to complain. He merely took a bath and avoided explanations with his sister. Jacques, whose body was a poem, knew that this poem would always be read with more attention than any letter from such a rough hand as his. This singular creature had acquired all feminine wisdom through his contact with a woman he loved.
Despite his silence Marie was amazed to notice a gash on his cheek.
"It seems you overdid your strutting," she said jeeringly. "So Monsieur de Raittolbe showed some lack of respect."
The girl gave a cruelly sarcastic emphasis to her words, for she did indeed find that her brother was going a mile too far in doing the bidding of the woman who paid the bills.
"No! He wished to forbid me from marrying," Jacques replied bitterly.
"I declare!" she muttered, "that is not what he promised me to say to you. So! He wanted to forbid you that ... Well, tell him to go ... Upon my word! Your Raoule is too smitten not to legalise the fun you have one of these days. I advise you to encourage it; I've got something in mind."
"What?"
Marie planted herself in front of her brother and raised herself on tiptoe:
"If you marry Mademoiselle de Venerande, a society girl, a millionairess, I'm your sister, so I could easily settle down, as they say, and become Madame Baroness de Raittolbe."
Jacques was lost in contemplation of a small shell box filled with green paste.
"You think so ...!"
"I'm sure of it; and then we'd forget the bad days for sure, we'd all be fine society types."
Jacques' eyes gleamed and his delicate complexion was suddenly flushed.
"When I have the right to be respectable I can punish her former lovers ...!"
"Of course! But Raittolbe was never her lover, idiot! He has too much of a taste for real women, I can tell you that."
"Huh! Why did he beat me so much?" the young man protested, as a hot tear rose to his eyes.
Marie merely shrugged, as if to suggest that whippings were Jacques
' natural lot.
Raoule despatched word the following day that she would come that night.
In truth, around eight in the evening, the Venerande mansion was in an uproar because of Mademoiselle's abrupt return. Imagining a catastrophe, Aunt Elisabeth ran to meet her.
"Why are you back so soon, my pretty!" she exclaimed, "when we are all suffocating here and the air is so good in the woodlands ...!"
"Yes, I'm back, dear Aunt. Our friend the Duchess is frightfully agitated because Baron de Raittolbe won't be there to sound the hunting horn. The poor baron has mysterious passions which keep him far from us."
"Now Raoule, do not speak ill of others," the canoness gasped, flinching.
Raoule retired very early on the pretext of great fatigue. At midnight she was in a hansom cab bound for the left bank.
Jacques was waiting for her, sure of the vengeance she brought, for her note had said: "I know everything".
Without asking himself how she came to know everything, Jacques was counting on a fearsome outburst towards the man he accused of having had the happiness to be her lover.
In reckless haste, Raoule dashed into the studio, whose chandeliers and candelabra were brilliantly lit up in celebration.
"Jaja? Where is Jaja?" she shouted, feverish with impatience.
Jaja advanced smiling, his lips held out.
She took hold of his hands and her tight grip made him stop.
"Tell me at once ... What happened? Monsieur de Raittolbe writes to tell me he is sorry for having argued with you on a matter of impropriety ... These are his very words. You will give me the details, huh?"
She leaned over him, her flashing eyes devouring him.
"Goodness! What's that on your cheek ... that great streak of blue ...?"
"I have others aplenty, come into our chamber and you'll see."
He led her inside, taking care to close the curtains after them. Marie was still sneering, but she was worried; she withdrew to her room to put her ear to the hole in the wall.
One by one Jacques slipped off his clothes and then Raoule cried out like the she-wolf who finds her young slaughtered.
Her idol's fine skin was criss-crossed all over with long bluish scars.
Between clenched teeth, the young woman screamed "He has been disfigured for me!"
"A little, it is true," said Jacques, sitting on the edge of his bed to make an unhurried inspection of the new colourations of his injuries. "Your friend Raittolbe has a firm hand."
"It was Raittolbe who did this to you?"
"He does not want me to marry you. That man loves you!"
Nothing can describe the tone in which Jacques spoke these words.
On her knees, Raoule counted the brutal marks of the stick.
"I shall tear his heart out you know! He came in here ... Answer me. Keep nothing from me!"
"I was asleep. He came from my sister's room. We had a discussion about marriage ... Then he took hold of me to persuade me ... I moved away because you forbade me to let myself be touched, remember? I even told him why I did not like to feel his hand on my arm ..
"Enough," Raoule roared, her fury beyond bounds. "He saw you! That is enough. I can guess the rest. He wanted you and you resisted."
Jacques reacted with laughter:
"Are you mad, Raoule? I obeyed you and refused to let him touch me, but that is not to suppose that he ... Oh Raoule! What you dare imagine is very ugly; he struck me out of jealousy, that is all."
"Come now! My senses tell me well enough what a man might feel, decent though he be, when he stands before Jacques Silvert ..."
"But, Raoule..
"But ... I tell you I have heard enough."
She made him lie down immediately, fetched a phial of arnica and tended his wounds, as if he had been an infant in the cradle.
"You neglected yourself, poor love; you should have called a doctor!" she said when she had finished.
"I didn't want anyone to see me ...! The only remedy I took was hashish!"
For a moment Raoule stood in mute adoration, then she suddenly hurled herself upon him, forgetting the blue bruise marks, in a frenzied access of dizziness, in an overwhelming desire to take him with caresses as that butcher had taken him with blows. She held Jacques so tight that he cried out in pain.
"You're hurting me!"
"Good," she growled. "My lips must efface every single scar or I shall always see you naked before him ..."
"You are making no sense," he groaned softly, "and you will make me cry!"
"Cry! No matter, he saw you smile!"
"Ah! You become crueller than his cruellest insult. He himself will tell you that I was asleep ... I could not smile at him ... Then I put on my robe!"
Jacques' naive explanations were but oil cast on the fire.
"God!" thought the young woman, "who knows but that this creature, whom I believe subdued to my will, has not long since been cunning and depraved!"
Once the doubt had entered her mind Raoule could not control herself. Violently, she tore off the bandages which she had wound about the sacred body of her ephebe, she bit his marbled flesh, pressed her hands upon it and scratched it with her sharpened nails. It was a total deflowering of that splendid beauty which before had made her ecstatic with mystical joy.
Jacques twisted and turned, losing blood through the gashes which Raoule re-opened with refined sadistic pleasure. All the rages of human nature, which she had tried to reduce to nothing in her metamorphosed being, reawakened together, and the thirst for the blood that flowed over twisted limbs now replaced all the pleasures of her ferocious love ...
... Motionless, her ear still glued to the wall of her room, Marie Silvert tried to hear what was happening; suddenly she caught a heart-rending cry.
"Help! I am hurt! Help, Marie!"
She was chilled to the marrow, and since she was what Raittolbe called a true woman, she did not hesitate to dash towards the bloodbath ...
Every year on the occasion of the Grand Prix, the Venerande mansion gave a party, to which, besides the close family circle, there were invited some new acquaintances.
Gathering the untitled and the artistic around the canoness Elisabeth, this party was perhaps less formal than the soirees where the guests merely took tea.
Ever since Raoule's return from her visit to the duchess of Armonville, she was never free of gloom and sadness, as if in one of the last storms that had fallen on Paris, a dreadful disturbance had beset her mind; yet, as the ball approached, she gradually emerged from her torpor. Her careworn demeanour had not gone unnoticed by her aunt, though she sought no explanation; firstly because the understanding of Raoule's moods had no place in her daily pieties, then because she was counting on the party, which was always very lively, to distract the altered temper of her nephew.
Indeed, Mademoiselle de Venerande deigned to oversee and direct the preparations. She pronounced that the central salon should be opened, as well as the room adjoining the conservatory, where exotic blooms would be shown off in all their truly varied splendour by the dazzle of magnesium light. Raoule could not allow that a ball could be given for the sole and featureless pleasure of assembling many people. She needed some additional attraction of a certain originality to offer to her guests.
Opposite the conservatory, in the picture gallery, a buffet raised on crystal colonnettes would offer an inexhaustible fountain, such as that of Count Roederer, to those horsemen whom the dusty track of Longchamp had made the thirstiest.
When Raoule submitted the invitations to her aunt, she mentioned casually:
"I shall present my pupil to you, you know? The one who drew the bouquet of forget-me-nots. Such courage he has, this little florist, that he must be rewarded. Moreover, we shall receive an architect Raittolbe is bringing; it is the done thing now, artists are welcomed in the best society, otherwise we would be overrun by the bourgeois, who are much worse!"
"Oh! Raoule!" Lady Elisabeth murmured in consternation. "This is
but a pupil, a stranger."
"But, dear Aunt, that is why we must invite this young man; the greatest talents would never have made their way if they had not been helped to make themselves known."
"It's true; yet ... he seemed to me to be of the lowest class, surely without an upbringing ..."
"Do you find my cousin Rene well brought up, Aunt?"
"No; he is quite intolerable with his backstage stories and his actors" talk, but ... he is your cousin!"
"Well at least this other will not be one of my family, so we shall have no responsibility for his bad upbringing, were it to be supposed, Aunt, that the youth did not know how to behave in our milieu."
"Raoule, I am not reassured ... ' the canoness persisted, the son of a workman!"
"Who draws as if he were the son of Raphael."
"And will he be suitably dressed?"
"In this respect I can vouch for him," Mademoiselle de Venerande declared with a sardomic grimace; then, remedying the words insofar as they might have been puzzling:
"Does he not earn his living handsomely!"
"Well, I defer to your experience, dear Raoule," Aunt Elisabeth concluded generously.
Baron de Raittolbe, who, since Raoule's return had not set foot in the mansion, called on that day. He was very solemn and reserved when he placed in the aunt's hands the entrance cards for the enclosure, while not for a moment did he meet the eyes of her niece. Raoule abandoned the new novel she was reading and, holding out a lovely hand, said:
"Baron, I have obtained from our dear canoness a proper invitation for your architect. You know, Monsieur Martin Durand."
"My architect ...? Oh yes, . . . the one I met at an artists" circle ... a lad with a future ... an honourable mention in the competition for the last universal Exhibition ... But Mademoiselle, I asked for nothing ..."
"I know you did not insist," Raoule broke in curtly, "nonetheless I saw to it ... your friend (she emphasised the your) will be among our guests with Monsieur Jacques Silvert, the painter we saw together at boulevard Montparnasse."
Had the goddesses whose figures adorned the ceiling come down from there Raittolbe could not have appeared more surprised. He now looked at Raoule and Raoule perforce looked at him - two lightning bolts were exchanged. Failing to understand why the young woman had not answered his letter, nor why Jacques was going to be "officially" among them, the baron had a presentiment of catastrophe.
Monsieur Venus (Decadence from Dedalus) Page 9