"I thank you on behalf of these gentlemen," he said, twiddling his moustache, "I thank you; Jacques Silvert is a charming companion, Martin Durand an accomplished man of the world; opening your salon to them, Mesdames, anticipates their future fame!"
"Well," sighed Madame Elisabeth, "you set my mind at rest, but they have dreadful names. I shall scarcely become accustomed."
They talked of racing awhile, Raoule debating the odds for the different stables with Raittolbe, then, when the latter wished to take his leave, she called out very playfully:
"By the way Baron, do you know the new Devisme pistol?"
"No."
"A masterpiece!"
"You have one?" answered the baron, unwilling to leave.
"Let us take ourselves to the shooting gallery," she answered, also rising, "I want you to try it."
At this moment there entered an elderly lady dressed in purple with a mother-of-pearl cross on the outside of her overcoat. Lady Elisabeth, quite delighted to drop the subject of the two plebeians with the flesh-creeping names, went to greet her.
"Madame de Chailly, I am so pleased, worthy pre'sidente. We have so much to talk about: just think that Father Stephane de Leoni is on his way; he is coming to preach at our autumn retreat!"
She spoke with the bustling volubility of pious ladies of leisure.
"All the better!" Raoule said with sarcastic finality, dropping the door curtain and disappearing, with the baron at her heels.
In a more feverish state than he would have wished to be apparent, the latter maintained total silence as they passed through the gloomy corridors of the mansion.
The shooting gallery was a kind of vaulted terrace which Mademoiselle de Venerande, the true mistress of the house, had had converted to this use.
Once they were there, the baron made a show of inspecting the trophies, then breaking the ominous silence, he ventured:
"I do not see the famous pistol?"
Raoule answered by indicating a seat; then, very pale, but betraying no anger in her voice:
"We must talk ...
"Talk ... about Messieurs the artists?"
"Yes, Martin Durand must vouch for Jacques Silvert. Eight days hence they have to have met. Take care of this matter, I have no time."
"Ali ...! That is what is called a delicate mission, Raoule; if I undertake it, shall I not induce your aunt's reproaches?"
"There was a time when my aunt did not rely on you, Raittolbe."
"The devil! But at the time of which you speak, Raoule, I hoped to become the husband of the niece!"
"Now you are an intimate of hers. All allow that you have been treated by my aunt with the freedom of a frequent guest. You are moreover the mentor of my cousin Rene. These young people are of an age with him, introduce them ... Come now, see to it."
"It shall be done," Raittolbe replied with a bow.
For a whole minute the two friends regarded one another like two enemies before battle.
It was apparent to Raittolbe that Raoule was hiding something from him; it was apparent to Raoule that Raittolbe felt guilty.
"Have you seen Jacques?" the baron finally asked, with a show of complete indifference.
Mademoiselle de Venerande was toying with a powderloaded pistol, and it was with something less than complete indifference that she took aim at the ex-officer's heart and fired. A cloud of smoke came between them.
"Very well," he said, without turning a hair: "If you had mistaken your weapon I was a dead man."
"Yes, for I scored a bull's-eye. It is besides perhaps a foretaste of the real thing; don't you see your fate, dear chap, as death by firearms?"
"Hem! An officer resigned from his commission, unlikely!"
Despite all his self-possession, it was with difficulty that Raittolbe repressed a nervous shudder. Those words: by firearms! troubled him.
"I have seen Jacques," Mademoiselle de Venerande went on, "he is ... indisposed. Marie is nursing him, and I think that when he has recovered the `little bore' will marry."
"What!" cried the baron, "without your permission?"
"Mademoiselle Silvert is marrying Monsieur Raoule de Venerande, does that surprise you? Why such bewilderment?"
"Oh Raoule! Raoule . . . It can't be true! It is monstrous! It is ... it is, nay, disgusting! You! Marrying that wretch? Come now!"
Raoule fixed her fiery pupils on the aghast baron:
"If only to have the right to defend himself against you, Monsieur!" she exclaimed, unable to contain her lionesslike fury.
"Against me!"
Then, losing his temper, Raittolbe advanced on the terrifying creature:
"Mademoiselle, with your insults you forget that you cannot treat me like Jacques Silvert, blood is called for to efface your words ... What satisfaction will you offer me?"
She smiled disdainfully:
"Nothing! Nothing, Monsieur ... except, I will bring to your notice that you accuse yourself before I think to do so myself."
"By heaven!" the baron exploded, beside himself and forgetting he was in the presence of a woman, "you retract."
"I said, Monsieur," Raoule retorted, "that I shall defend him against you. You do not deny, I trust, that you struck him?"
"No! I do not deny it ... Did he tell you why?"
"You laid a hand on him. . . -
"Could this young good-for-nothing be made of spunsugar? Can the hand of a decent man placed on his arm as a friendly gesture to back up kind words make such an impression that he falls into a fainting fit! Ah! Am I the madman and he the sane one in this case?"
"Marry him I shall," Mademoiselle de Venerande insisted.
"Do so! Why should I oppose it after all? Marry him, Raoule, marry him."
And Raittolbe, as if brought to his knees from the shame of having been drawn into such intrigues, let himself fall back onto his chair.
"Ali, had you but a father or a brother," he stammered, bending the blade of a foil in his hands.
The foil broke in two and one of the pieces struck Raoule on the wrist. Beneath the lace a bead of blood stood out:
"Honour is satisfied," pronounced Mademoiselle de Venerande with a hollow laugh.
"Nay, I begin to think," the baron parried forthrightly, "that honour has nothing to do with our actions. I leave the field, Mademoiselle," he added, "and discharge myself in favour of whoever would hazard the task of introducing the Antinous of boulevard Montparnasse in this house."
Raoule inclined her head:
"Are you afraid to do so?"
"Hush ... Instead of thinking of how you might sully others, rather pity yourself and him ...
"Well, Monsieur de Raittolbe, I nonetheless demand that you obey me!"
"Your reason?"
"I wish to see you both face to face in my salon; it is imperative, or else I shall never be rid of a suspicion."
"Thrice mad ...! I shall not obey ..."
Raoule held up her hands as if in prayer, their translucent skin stained slightly with blood:
"Raittolbe, the creature whom you struck like the lowest of animals, knowing him to be a flaccid coward, I tore at with my nails; I so much tortured his wretched body, where each of your blows had gouged its lacerations, that he cried out ... His sister came, and I, Raoule, was forced to yield before her indignation. Jacques is but a wound, our own work; will you not help me to make amends for this crime!"
The baron was shaken to his inmost being. Raoule was capable of anything, he knew without a moment's doubt that-such transports could be hers.
"This is horrible! Horrible," he murmured, "we are unworthy of humanity ... Whether it be cowardice or love that caused Jacques' paralysis, thinking natures such as ours should not have gone so far. We should have seen him but as a creature who could not answer for himself."
Raoule could not contain a gesture of fury.
"You will come," she said, "I wish it! But remember that I hate you and that in future I forbid you to look upon him as a friend."
/> The baron did not remark this allusion, which perhaps required another drop of blood.
"Is your aunt privy to this marriage?" he enquired more calmly.
"No," Raoule replied, "I rely on your counsels to accomplish that; whatever, it will take place ... Marie Silvert demands it."
Then with a devastating bitterness:
"I confess to you the immensity of my fall, do not abuse this confession, Monsieur de Raittolbe."
"Raoule, is there something I can do about the sister? Do you wish me to report her to the police?" added Raittolbe, gentlemanly to the end.
"No, nothing, nothing ... Scandal is inevitable, this creature is the tiny stone upon which the massive wheel comes to grief. I humiliated her, she is taking revenge ... Alas! I believed that for a prostitute money was everything, but I realised that, like the scion of the Venerandes, she had the right to love."
"To love! God! Raoule, you make my blood run cold."
"There is no need to tell you who, is there?"
They were silent, their souls rent apart.
They saw themselves brought down, feeling the foot of an invisible enemy weigh upon their suffocating breasts.
"Raoule," Raittolbe murmured gently, "if you really wished, we could escape the abyss, you by ceasing to see Jacques and I by never addressing another word to Marie. One hour of madness is not the whole of life; we are united by our follies, we could be so again by our rehabilitation. Raoule, believe me, come back to your senses ... You are a woman, you are beautiful, you are young. Raoule, the sacred laws of nature have it that to be happy the only thing you lack is never to have known this Jacques Silvert: let us forget him."
Raittolbe said nothing of Marie; he said: let us forget him. Raoule, downcast, made a gesture of despair:
"I am still helplessly in love" she spoke slowly; "whether this passion ends in heaven or in hell, I have no wish to ignore it. As for you, Raittolbe, you have seen my idol too intimately for me to forgive you: I hate you!"
"Farewell Raoule," said the baron, holding out his ample hand. "Farewell! I pity you."
She did not stir. Then he took her wrist and clasped it with genuine affection; but on leaving the fencing room, as he sheathed his fingers in his gloves he saw across them a faint trace of blood.
Though he now remembered the broken fencing foil, he was gripped by a superstitious dread: the officer of the hussars shuddered uncontrollably.
Martin Durand was a decent fellow of the kind who asks only to make his way through all possible worlds. After an hour of conversation with Jacques Silvert he had taken him under his wing and begun to address him with familiarity. In his opinion only architect's drawing board could take a man far. Flowers, however wonderfully they were arranged, had but the value of useless knick-knacks paid for dearly once in a while and the artist ruined by their quantities. Buildings are built all year long, but flowers are needed but rarely.
"Witness," he cried, "the masses of roses, the barrowloads of violets, the mountains of tulips which decorate your wainscot. Oh dear chap, too many flowers!" I feel myself suffocating just by looking at them!"
Thereupon he lit a cigar to combat the imaginary fragrance of the painted bouquets.
Jacques, become taciturn like all those who bear the weight of some great shame in their hearts, answered Martin Durand's tirade with only monosyllables. And when the latter, amazed at the opulence of the studio, asked him if his uncle was a Nabob, he felt himself quake before his new friend as he would have trembled before a new executioner.
"Well!" bellowed Martin Durand, a true devil-may-care plebeian, all exuberance and pride in having come this far with a bit of pushing and shoving, "we're going to be launched together, dear chap! Raittolbe told me. An aristocratic salon, wealthy patrons and pretty women ... I'm dizzy at the thought of it! Upon my word! Madame de Venerande has the finest mansion in all of Paris. Renaissance style, with window capitals and iron balconies from one of Louis XV's palaces. I know not whether she pays well for studies of forget-me-nots, but the devil take me if she does not commission me to demolish a pavilion and rebuild a tower. We can help one another out ... You tell her that I am the architect in fashion. I shall disclose that the president of the Republic has ordered a spray of peonies from you."
Jacques smiled painfully. This expansive fellow was happy, he earned his living in a struggle with stone, he was strong, he was respectable, to his every witticism he added a sigh apropros of his lovely cousin, daughter of the manager of one of the biggest department stores in the capital. Nobility, love, money, would all go to him at his command, because he was a man.
Having made close acquaintance, Martin Durand announced that he would collect Jacques on the day of the ball; when he saw his friend Raittolbe, whom he knew at least as well as his friend Silvert, he told him delightedly:
"The little chap is the most perfect artist's model I have ever come across; besides, he has not an ounce of talent ... but I shall get him into shape."
More often than not artists are obsessed with desiring society to fall admiringly not before their merits but before their bad manners: their greatest tendency to form a school and set a fashion is when they wish to teach what they do not know.
Martin Durand patted his dark beard and went on:
"Yes, yes I shall get him into shape; he is twenty-three, he can mend his ways, I wager I'll surprise him handsomely at the Venerandes, when all the noble quarters of those people are in Egyptian granite."
Could Jacques Silvert still be surprised? Raittolbe did not answer.
On the evening of the Grand Prix, by ten o'clock the central salon and the conservatory of exotic plants were adazzle with rays of magnesium light, a white fluid light, brighter and yet less blinding than electricity, in which every relief of the statues and every fold of the draperies stood out as if daylight itself had wished to take part in the Venerandes' fete.
From their frames high above, the ancestors in their doublets, the ancestresses in their Medici ruffs, whether with sword or fan, seemed to point out to one another those examples of the Parisian hoi polloi they saw pass by at their feet.
This sporting party had certainly mingled all of them together; those who descended from Adam and those who descended from the crusades. The architect Martin Durand and the duchess of Armonville, the canoness Madame Elisabeth and the gigolo Jacques Silvert. With the miraculous cordiality of those who wish to make merry, each according to his means, at another's cost, all exchanged the most gracious smiles of welcome. Standing beside her aunt's monumental armchair, Mademoiselle de Venerande received them with that somewhat haughty grace that held more of the nobleman of yesteryear than of the merely coquettish woman.
She was a strange creature. When she left the realm of passion and ceased to run too far ahead of her century, she went back all the way to the time when chatelaines refused to lower the portcullis for bedraggled troubadours.
That evening Raoule wore a gown of misty white gauze, with a formal train, but with neither a jewel nor a flower. A strange whim had made her deck her almost bare shoulders in a breastplate of gold chainmail, its mesh so fine that it was as if her bosom had been cast in liquid metal.
Picking out the line that separated flesh and fabric, there twisted a strand of gems, and her dark hair, sculpted as a Greek helmet, was pinned with a diamond crescent whose phosphorescent tips were like moonbeams.
As for the canoness, she was modestly enveloped in a lace shroud which covered a pansy-coloured gown. Her sweet little withered face with its eyes of pale sky-blue lurked beneath the chair's high coat of arms, whereas the coat of arms appeared to crack under the powerful pressure of Raoule's arm.
On their right there gathered cousin Rene, a rare specimen of the smart sporting fraternity, who was explaining to whoever would listen, how Simbad had won by a length and why the gold silk tunic was this year's divinest of garments ... Raittolbe, impassive beneath the slavic mask of his severe features, thought of the ancient Gorgon whenever
he looked at Mademoiselle de Venerande. Then the old Marquis of Sauvares, hopping about like some great night-bird blinded by the raw light, while his lustreless eyes, animated only by the occasional lewd gleam, leered at the well-turned shoulders of his god-daughter Raoule.
Around them rustled a swarm of exquisitely dressed women, who talked non-stop, to the men's annoyance, about the exploits of John Mare, the winning jockey.
In the crowd, one could discern the artistic types by their perpetual progress alongside trains of tulle or lace, a gradual advance whose goal was to approach this or that acknowledged star.
As for the real artists, they advanced in a similar fashion but in inverse direction, so that from one moment to the next the salon would become another racecourse, though more sedate. During one of these fluctuations, Raoule, whose gaze nothing escaped, signalled to Raittolbe. The latter gave a shudder, then looked in the direction of the young woman's almost imperceptibly pointing finger. He was there, Martin Durand was pushing him forcefully:
"Go on! Go on wretch ...!" he muttered, "you must engage her in conversation, one way or another, while I study that torso. The devil take the nobility ...! She's the only one to model your caryatids on. What a contour, lads. What a bosom, what shoulders, what arms! I can see her already holding up the balcony of the restored Louvre. Just a tilt of the hip and she has your blood hotting up ... Go on, I'm right behind you. . ."
Jacques refused to go forward; stunned by the waves of magical light in this splendid salon, treading on the trailing gowns, intoxicated by the heady perfumes that wafted from gem-studded coiffures, the former florist believed himself again in the grip of the raptures induced by hashish fumes.
"What a fool you are, my little painter!" said Martin Durand, extremely vexed to witness such timidity in a friend. "Heavens above, a little self-assurance! Look the women in the face, push the men, see, like me ... Are two fellows of our sort afraid of the limelight? Ali! There's Monsieur de Raittolbe; we are saved."
Monsieur Venus (Decadence from Dedalus) Page 10