Monsieur Venus (Decadence from Dedalus)

by Rachilde;Liz Heron

  In reality, the architect's head was no surer than that of the painter, but he possessed the inimitable aplomb of all those demolition men who have some notion of how to rebuild.

  Baron de Raittolbe shook his hand, avoiding that of the architect's friend.

  "Messieurs, delighted to see you, I shall take care of the introductions . . .-

  And he led them up to Raoule.

  "Mademoiselle," he said, loudly enough to be heard by the group of leading guests, "I present Monsieur Martin Durand, the architect, to whom the capital is indebted for certain fine monuments, and Monsieur Jacques Silvert."

  The outcome of this curt introduction was that no one took any further notice of the monument, since there was nothing more to know about his capacities. Monocles were aimed more readily at him who bore nothing but an unknown name. Jacques still did not move, his eyes on those of Raoule, whom he had not seen since that baleful night.

  He gave a shudder like a man startled out of sleep.

  His flesh quivered, he became once more the body subdued by the hellish spirit standing there before him, garbed in gold armour like some emblem of protection.

  All at once he remembered that before her he was complete, that once more he was her joy just as she was his torment. His earlier intoxication evaporated and gave way to the servile love of a grateful animal. Wounds closed at the memory of caresses. His lovely mouth blossomed into an expression that was simultaneously joyful and resigned. With no thought for the attention he drew upon himself, Jacques murmured:

  "God, why did you have me come here, I who am nothing and who is not even thought worthy of your tortures?"

  Raoule reddened slightly; she answered haltingly:

  "But, Monsieur, it seems that when my aunt admired your works she concluded that you were very ..."

  "I thank you Madame," Jacques added, turning towards the canoness, who was amazed to see how smart he looked in his formal clothes; "I thank you, but alas you are better than Mademoiselle Raoule!"

  "Ali but of course!" the saint said airily, without a clue as to his meaning and accustomed by her milieu to answering without listening.

  But Raittolbe, the Marquis of Sauvares, cousin Rene and Martin Durand were all ears.

  "Better than Mademoiselle Raoule ...! huh?" said Rene with a supercilious grimace. "He's a common fellow this Jacques Silvert. Better ... Don't know what that means ...!"

  "Nor I," mumbled the old marquis. "Smell a rat ...! Who knows! Eh! Eh ...! An Adonis. Upon my word, an Adonis!"

  Martin Durand was pulling at his pretty beard.

  "I'll be blowed!" he said to himself, "the young chap's smitten and they're all acting as if they know something; what a body, what a caryatid, fellows!"

  Raittolbe, stunned by the sudden poise of this low-class debauchee, allowed that all the same this was almost in his favour. Women went up to Jacques, and the duchess of Armonville, gazing upon the wondrous features of this redhead rendered fair as a Titian Venus by the starry whiteness of the lighting, swayed the waverers with a mannish exclamation which became her ravishingly, for she had short curly hair:

  "Upon my word, mesdames, I'm thunderstruck!"

  At that moment, the orchestra, hidden away on a platform high above the room, struck up the prelude to a waltz whose notes came tumbling down from the cornices; couples began to move onto the floor, and Raoule took advantage of the stir to move away from her aunt, with admirers in tow. Jacques bent close to her.

  "You are very lovely ..." he quipped sarcastically, "but I'm sure your gown will get in the way when you dance!"

  "Hush Jacques!" begged Mademoiselle de Venerande, at her wits'end, "hush! I thought I had taught you how to conduct yourself as a man of the world!"

  "I am not a man! I am not of the world!" retorted Jacques, trembling with impotent fury; "I am the beaten animal who comes back to lick your hands! I am the slave who loves while he is your plaything! You taught me to speak so that I could say here that I belong to you ...! Marrying me would be pointless Raoule; you do not marry a mistress, it is not done in your circle ...

  "How you frighten me ...! Now, Jacques! Is this what you see as revenge? Could Marie be dead? Might ours cease to be an accursed love? Have I not seen your blood flow? And might we relive the follies of our happiness? No! Speak no more! Your balmy breath of young love makes me feverish ...!"

  Raittolbe, who was closest to them, whispered:

  "Be careful, people are listening ...

  "Then let us waltz!" said Raoule, suddenly carried away by the savage force of a voluptuousness that surged anew and greater in the presence of the tempter. Without the formality of a by-your-leave, Jacques clasped Raoule, who bent like a reed beneath his embrace, and the circle opened.

  "This is a kidnapping, what!" said the Marquis of Sauvares, "this Jacques Silvert latches onto our goddess as if she were a mere mortal ...!"

  "The caryatid has feet!" sighed Martin Durand, heartbroken to have witnessed a metamorphosis so profane.

  Rene tried to laugh:

  "Amusing! Very amusing! Excessively droll. My cousin is taming him the better to eat him up! One more ... When we get to a hundred we shall make a cross! Very amusing ...!"

  With dreamy eyes Raittolbe watched them waltz. The bumpkin waltzed well, and his supple body with its feminine undulations seemed made for this graceful movement. He did not contrive to support his partner, but with her he was but a single form, a single figure, a single being. Seeing them close, turning and melting into an embrace where flesh, clothes notwithstanding, joined flesh, one could imagine the single godhead of love within two entities, the complete individual spoken of in the fabulous tales of the Brahmins, two distinct sexes in a single monster.

  "Yes, flesh!" he thought, "young flesh, the sovereign power in the world. That perverted creature is right! Should Jacques possess the greatest nobility, the greatest knowledge, the greatest talent, the greatest courage, had his skin not the purity of roses, we would not now be watching him with stupefied eyes!"

  "Jacques!" Raoule said his name again, yielding to intoxication ... "Jacques, I shall marry you, not because I fear your sister's threats, but because I wish to have you in the light of day, having had you in our nights of mystery. You will be my beloved wife just as you have been my adored mistress!"

  "And you will then reproach me for selling myself, will you not?"

  "Never!"

  "You know that I have not healed ...! That I am ugly! What good can I be to you ...! Jaja is spoiled ...! Jaja is frightful!" he persisted, in a wheedling voice, holding her closer.

  "I swear I'll make you forget everything! It would be so sweet to be your husband! To call you Madame de Venerande in secret ...! For it will be my name that I give to you ...!

  "That is right! I have no name!"

  "There! Your sister has been fateful for us! She made me make a promise which I'll not withdraw ... My angel! My god! My dream of all dreams!"

  When they stopped dancing they forgot they were not in the boulevard Montparnasse studio and smiled at one another, exchanging one last vow.

  "You know that the lion of the evening is Monsieur Jacques Silvert?" declared Sauvares at the centre of a group of scandalised sporting types.

  "Whence comes this Antinous?" asked the pleasure seekers, eager to garner some sinister chronicle of this new favourite.

  "From Mademoiselle de Venerande's fine pleasure," answered the marquis, and his bon mot stood him in good stead.

  But Jacques' abrupt arrival inadvertently disturbed their scornful reflections and reduced them to silence. They were about to step back en masse to show their scorn for this obscure dauber of forget-me-nots when at that moment they became aware of an extraordinary commotion which rooted them to the spot. Jacques' head was thrown back, still with its lovelorn maiden's smile; his parted lips displayed his pearly teeth, and his eyes, enlarged by a bluish ring, still kept their moist shine. Beneath his thick head of hair could be seen his small ears, that bloome
d like purple flowers. The same inexplicable shiver went through them all. Jacques passed by without noticing them, a curved hip beneath the black suit momentarily brushing against them ... And all of them together clenched their now clammy fists.

  When he had gone, the marquis uttered these banal words:

  "It's very hot, gentlemen. Upon my soul, it's unbearable ...!"

  All echoed him in unison:

  "It's unbearable ...! Upon my soul, it's too hot!"

  "Come now, my lad! Come now, dammit! Tighten your grip ... You're a man not a statue! In your shoes by now I would be in a rage at this steel so close to my skin. Imagine me as a mortal enemy, a gentleman deserving of the blade's most violent thrusts. I have stolen a woman you adored, I have thrown ten cards in your face, I have called you coward or thief, as you will. Dammit! Respond!"

  And Raittolbe, the teacher, impatient with Jacques Silvert, the pupil, lashed out fiercely.

  "You have no patience, Baron!" murmured Raoule, who presided at the lesson dressed in elegant fencing clothes. "I permit him to rest; enough for today!"

  Raoule took a sword, put Raittolbe en garde, and as if to revenge Silvert, charged the ex-officer in a wildly reckless manner.

  "The devil," he cried, thrice struck in rapid succession, "your haste is excessive my dear, I fancy to you I have said none of the things I have just told poor Jacques!"

  At that very moment luncheon was announced: cousin Rene and several intimates entered; the champions were being congratulated when a servant approached Jacques discreetly and whispered a word in his ear. Raoule, who had not yet cooled down, did not observe the young man blanch and slip away into a smoking-room beside the fencing-room.

  Jacques had at last won from canoness Elisabeth the right to come and go; for a month now he had been officially affianced to Raoule. After the racing ball, when all the scandalmongers had been shocked by young Silvert's introduction, Raoule, crazed like those medieval women possessed by demons and whose actions were not theirs to control, had abruptly made her announcement one morning by the bedside of the hapless pious aunt. It was a very cold, leadenly gloomy morning. Beneath her escutcheoned blankets, the canoness dreamt of hair shirts and ice-cold floors; she was awakened by the booming voice of her nephew ordering the chambermaid to light a roaring fire.

  "Why a fire? It is my day for self-mortification, dear child," said the aunt, opening translucent lids as ghastly pale as the sacred host.

  "Because, dear aunt, I have come to talk to you about serious matters, and these serious matters will be ample mortification in themselves!"

  Laughing an unpleasant laugh, the young woman sat in an armchair, and stretched the ermine-lined hem of her dressing gown over her chilly feet.

  "At this hour? Heavens above! You woke up early indeed, dearest! Come, I'm listening."

  And the canoness propped herself up on her bolster, startled and wide-eyed.

  "I wish to marry, Aunt Elisabeth!"

  "Marry! Oh, you have been inspired by Saint Philip of Gonzago, to whom I make novenas with this intention. Marry! Raoule! Then I can realise my dearest wish, to leave this world of vanities and withdraw to the Visitandines, where I have my veil waiting. Blessed be the Lord! Doubtless" she added, "your choice is the Baron de Raittolbe?"

  And she smiled somewhat mischievously.

  "No Aunt, it isn't Raittolbe! I warn you that I have no thought to enhance my nobility. Frightful names please me more greatly than all the titles on our useless parchments. I wish to marry the painter Jacques Silvert!"

  The canoness leapt from her bed, raised her virginal arms above her chaste head and exclaimed:

  "The painter Jacques Silvert? Did I hear right? That pretty-faced boy without a penny to his name who took your charity ...?"

  For a moment dumbfoundment froze her tongue; deflated, she went on:

  "You will make me die of shame, Raoule!"

  "The shame perhaps would be in not marrying him, Aunt!" said the indomitable daughter of the Venerandes.

  "Explain yourself!" Madame Elisabeth groaned, despairingly.

  "Out of respect for you, Aunt, do not compel me to it, you have loved with too much saintliness to ..."

  "I represent your mother Raoule . . ." the canoness interrupted with dignity, "it is my duty to hear all."

  "Then, I am his mistress!" answered Raoule with terrifying calm.

  Her aunt turned as pale as the spotless sheets which enshrouded her. In the uncertain depths of her pupils there appeared the only gleam that must have shone throughout her pious life; she spoke in a hollow voice:

  "Let God's will be done ... Marry beneath yourself, niece. I shall have tears enough to cry that your crime be effaced ... I shall enter the convent the day after your marriage ...!"

  And after that cold morning when, though a roaring fire had blazed in the canoness's hearth, she had yet been mortified to the marrow, Raoule had acted as she pleased. The fiance had been introduced to family and intimates; and without raising a single objection to this outlandish whim, each had bowed ceremoniously before Jacques. The marquis de Sauvares had pronounced him "not bad". Cousin Rene as "amusing, excessively amusing"! The duchess of Armonville had given a mysterious little laugh, and, all in all, once, by the timely death of a distant uncle, the beauteous dauber came to possess a fortune of three hundred thousand francs, he became slightly less ridiculous.

  This fortune had simply been handed over by Raoule to the man of her choice.

  In the servants' hall, the staff of the mansion said he was a foundling.

  A foundling who would leave the mark of mourning on the scarlet escutcheon of the house of Venerande!

  Often, on these melancholy autumn nights, there could be heard hard by the locked chamber of Madame Elisabeth the sound of heavy sobbing; it could almost have been the wind whistling over the bare expanse where the carriages turned in the central courtyard ...

  Raoule's swordplay continued, Raittolbe was compelled to break. Then abruptly a sharp discordant sound reached their ears. They stopped simultaneously. They had recognised the voice of Marie Silvert.

  Mademoiselle de Venerande pleaded a touch of fatigue, and ignoring both the baron and her admirers, she went to the smoking-room door. Raittolbe did likewise.

  "Seconds," said Raoule flatly, "go in to the reconciliation luncheon. We shall repair our toilettes and be with you in a few minutes."

  The gentlemen left discussing the fencing match.

  "Why have you come?" said Jacques, on the other side of the boudoir door, "to make a scene?"

  "I'm not such a fool, I'd be thrown out!"

  "Well then!" said Jacques impatiently, "behave yourself."

  "Behave myself? So that's it ... You have the right to be as pure as driven snow in among the gentry's coats of arms, while I, your sister, go on being a whore, like before?"

  "What are you getting at?"

  "What am I getting at? I want you to tell Raoule that her conditions are not mine. I care less for the scrap of paper she sent me than I do for my first set of rags. It seems I embarrass you, my turtle doves? We're ashamed of Marie Silvert; I have to make myself scarce, take myself off to the country, out of sight; well, I don't want to! We've eaten stale bread together, you'll have plenty of money for roast chicken now and I want my share or else I'll be fouling your little nest. Oh, monsieur struts about from morning till night, all decked out like a tart, nothing too good for him! But his sister's supposed to dress up in rags with tatters in her hair and only a crust to eat. Have you done! You thought you could button my mouth with your six hundred franc pension, but I'm not so easily had; Marie Silvert doesn't want your idler's money, that would besmirch her!"

  Thereupon Mademoiselle de Venerande entered, fol lowed by Raittolbe. "That need not worry you, lose no sleep over it, you shall have nothing!"

  Raoule had spoken coldly, her words falling one by one and, for a moment or two seeming to impress themselves upon the girl like so many drops of cold water.


  "Well," she said, biting her lip and regretting the fact that she had lost the chance of bringing the subject back gently to the six hundred francs: then her fingers gripped the back of a chair: "Indeed, I prefer it so, you disgust me - not you, Monsieur," she said, trying to smile at Raittolbe, who had retreated behind Raoule, sorry that he had followed her; "yet you're the one who is behind it all."

  "Huh! What are you saying?" said Raittolbe, advancing.

  "It's obvious: you well know that Mademoiselle and Monsieur have never forgiven me for being your mistress. It gave them the needle!"

  "Enough," the baron cut in; "do not make our liaison an excuse for more of your insults. You plied your trade and I paid you: we are quits."

  "It's true," Marie replied, suddenly calmer; "I even have still the hundred francs you sent me; I haven't touched them yet. It upset me when I received them. Stupid maybe, but that's how it is."

  She spoke in a subdued voice, fixing almost supplicating eyes on Raittolbe.

  "Listen, monsieur," she went on, taking no further notice of her brother or Raoule, `just because I'm a poor street girl, that doesn't stop me from having a heart. You say I plied my trade with you, you well know I did not! I loved you, I still love you, and at one sign from you, I would do anything to ...

  "Enough!" Raittolbe interrupted, furious at being made to look absurd before Raoule, "your departure would be quite enough."

  Although she had been genuinely moved a moment before, the girl felt her anger re-aroused. She exploded:

  "Very well! I shall leave, but I'll spill your dirty secrets! It's all very well for you people to sneer, but I haven't finished, put that in your pipes and smoke it. That's a laugh, isn't it? That's very funny," she sneered, hideously. "Pleased now, aren't you? You didn't like me taking a fancy to him, and there he's gone and sent me packing, by Christ, are they the only ones to get a laugh? Since I can't find a man who'll have me, more like I'll pay for them all - little ones, it'll be an honour for you, your future sisterin-law coming to announce her entry to the b ...