French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics)

by Unknown

  ‘Encountering the same sullenness every time, which seemed to spring from hostility, I eventually ignored the little marigold-coloured exotic, that would close up if I so much as stroked her hair… I no longer even spoke to her! “She senses that you are taking me from her,” the Marquise would say. “Instinctively, she knows you are depriving her of part of her mother’s love.” And sometimes, truthful as she was, she would add: “The child is my conscience, and her jealousy, my remorse.”

  ‘One day, trying to broach the subject of her aloofness towards me, the Marquise received nothing but the broken, stubborn, facetious answers one extracts painfully, like teeth, from a child who refuses to be drawn—“There’s nothing wrong… I don’t know”—and noting the hardness of the little bronze figure, she stopped asking, and out of lassitude dropped the subject…

  ‘I have forgotten to mention that this strange child was very devout, with a kind of Spanish, medieval devotion, dark and superstitious. She would wrap all sorts of scapulars around her skinny body, and plastered over her perfectly flat chest and hung around her sallow neck were stacks of crosses, Blessed Virgins, and Holy Ghosts! “Alas, you are an ungodly soul,” the Marquise remarked to me, “and you might have scandalized her by something you said. I beg you to watch your tongue when she is present. Don’t magnify my faults in the eyes of the child, I already feel so guilty about her!” And when the child’s conduct did not alter or soften in any way: “You’ll end up hating her,” said the Marquise, worried now. “And I shouldn’t blame you.” But she was mistaken: I felt merely indifference toward the sulky little thing, when she didn’t actively irritate me.

  ‘I had become polite with her, as adults do when they dislike each other. I treated her with exaggerated formality, addressing her as “Mademoiselle”, to which she would return a glacial “Monsieur”. She refused point-blank to do anything to make herself amiable, or to put herself out in the slightest way for me… Her mother never succeeded in getting her to show me her drawings, or to play the piano for me. Sometimes I would surprise her, practising a piece with intense concentration, and she would leave off immediately, rise from the piano-stool, and play no more…

  ‘Only once, at her mother’s insistence (there were guests present), did she sit down at the open instrument, with one of her martyred expressions which, I assure you, had nothing gentle about it. She started to play through some piece or other, stumbling horribly, all fingers and thumbs. I was standing in front of the fire, looking at her from an oblique angle. Her back was turned towards me, and with no mirror in front of her she had no way of telling that I was looking at her… Suddenly her back (normally she sat with it curved, so that her mother would often say, “If you keep sitting like that, you’ll end up with a weak chest”)—her back straightened up, as if by gazing at her I had put a bullet through her spine and broken it. Slamming down the piano-lid, which made a fearful racket in falling, she fled the room… People went to fetch her back; but that evening no one could induce her to return.

  ‘Well, it appears that the obtusest of men can never be obtuse enough, for there was nothing in the conduct of this sombre child, who interested me so little, to lead me to dwell on the nature of her feelings towards me. Neither did her mother. The latter, who was jealous of every other woman in her salon, was no more jealous of her daughter than I was obtuse about her. The girl’s feelings were revealed when the Marquise, who was expansiveness itself in private, and still pale from terror at what she had felt, and now laughing hard at herself for having been so, was imprudent enough to impart to me the cause of it all.’

  Like a clever actor, the Comte laid just the right stress on the word imprudent, knowing that the entire interest of the story must hang upon that word!

  And it worked, apparently, for these twelve beautiful women’s faces lit up again with a feeling as intense as that reflected in the faces of cherubim before the throne of God. Is not the curiosity of women as intense as the adoration of the angels?… He looked at them, then, with their cherubic faces, shoulders, and so on down—and finding them all ready for what he had to tell them, he resumed quickly and did not stop again:

  ‘Yes indeed, the mere thought of it sent the Marquise into fits of laughter!—as she reported when she told me about it all a little while later; but she had not always found it funny!—“Imagine the scene,” she said to me (I am trying to remember her exact words)—“I was sitting where we are now.”

  ‘(It was one of those double-backed couches, known as a dos-à-dos,* a perfectly designed item of furniture on which to quarrel and make up without moving.)

  ‘ “Happily you weren’t there when a visitor was announced… can you guess who?… You’ll never guess… the priest of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Do you know him?… No, of course you don’t, you never go to mass, which is very wicked of you… How could you know that this poor old priest is actually a saint, who never sets foot in a lady’s house except to beg alms for the poor of the parish or for the church? I thought at first this was why he had come.

  ‘ “He prepared my daughter for her First Communion; since that time she communicates regularly, and she has kept him as her confessor. Which is why, since then, I have invited him many times to dinner—all to no avail… When he came in, he was extremely agitated. Seeing his features, that were normally so serene, working with such great and undisguised distress, I realized it was not just his shyness, and I could not prevent myself from this unceremonious greeting:

  ‘ “ ‘In heaven’s name, what is the matter, Father?’

  ‘ “ ‘What is wrong, Madame,’ he replied, ‘is that you see before you the most embarrassed man in all the world. I have been in holy orders for more than fifty years, and I have never been charged with such a delicate mission, or one that I understand less, as this one which concerns you…’

  ‘ “He sat down, and asked me to make sure that no one interrupted us for as long as our interview lasted. You know how much such formalities tend to frighten me… This he noticed.

  ‘ “ ‘Madame, do not upset yourself so, you will need all your self-control to hear what I have to say and then explain to me this extraordinary thing, which in truth I cannot bring myself to believe… Mademoiselle your daughter, from whom I have just come, is an angel of purity and piety—you know this as well as I. I know her soul. I have held it in my hands since her seventh year, and I am certain that she is mistaken… perhaps because of her innocence… But this morning she came to tell me in confession that she was—you are not going to believe this any more than I do, Madame, but I must say the word… pregnant!’

  ‘ “I let out a gasp…

  ‘ “ ‘I gasped just like you, in my confessional this morning,’ resumed the priest, ‘at this declaration, which she made accompanied by all the signs of the sincerest and most dreadful despair! I know this child through and through. She knows nothing of the world or of sin… Of all the girls in my confession, she is certainly the one I would vouch for most readily before God. That is all I can tell you! We priests are the doctors of the soul, and we are charged to deliver them of all their burdens with hands that neither wound nor stain. And so, proceeding with the utmost caution, I asked her, I questioned her, I pressed her, but once the despairing child had uttered the word, and confessed her fault, which she calls a hellish crime (the poor girl thinks she is damned!)—she said nothing more and retreated into a stubborn silence which she would not break except to beg me to come and see you, Madame, to tell you of her crime—“for my mother will have to know,” she said, “and I will never have the strength to tell her!”’

  ‘ “I listened to the old priest of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and I scarcely need describe the mixture of astonishment and anguish his words caused me! Like him, and even more than him, I was convinced of the innocence of my daughter; but often the innocent fall, even through their own innocence… And what she had said to her confessor was not impossible!… She was only thirteen, but she had become a woman, and her precocity
had in fact frightened me… I was seized with an access of curiosity.

  ‘ “ ‘I want to know and I shall know everything!’ I burst out to the poor old man, who stood before me, patting his hat, speechless with embarrasment.—‘Leave me now, Father. She would not speak to you. But I am sure she will tell me everything… I shall drag everything out of her, and then we shall understand what is at present beyond our understanding!’

  ‘ “Upon which the priest left—and no sooner had he gone than I went up to my daughter’s room, too impatient to ask her to come down and wait for her.

  ‘ “I found her before the crucifix above her bed, not kneeling, but prostrated, and pale as death. Her eyes were dry, but red, like eyes that have been crying heavily. I took her in my arms, sat her down next to me, then on my knee, and I told her that I could not believe what her confessor had just told me.

  ‘ “But she interrupted me to assure me, with anguish in her voice and expression, that what he had said was indeed true. And then, increasingly alarmed and amazed, I asked her for the name of the man who…

  ‘ “I did not finish… What a terrible moment! She buried her head and face in my shoulder… but I could see the back of her neck, which was burning scarlet, and I could feel her shuddering. And then she became stubbornly silent, as she had with the priest. It was a wall.

  ‘ “ ‘It must be someone very unworthy of you, since you seem so ashamed?’ I said, trying to provoke her into speaking, since I knew her to be proud.

  ‘ “But she stayed silent, her head buried in my shoulder. This went on for what seemed like an eternity, when she said suddenly, without changing position: ‘Promise me that you’ll forgive me, mother.’

  ‘ “I swore that I would, at the risk of perjuring myself a hundred times over; not that I cared a whit! I was boiling over with impatience… I thought my brain was going to come bursting out of my head…

  ‘ “ ‘In that case, it was Monsieur de Ravila!’ she whispered, and stayed where she was, in my arms.

  ‘ “Oh, when she said that name, Amédée! I felt I had been punished with a single blow to the heart, for the great misdemeanour of my life. You are a man so terrible where women are concerned, and rack me with so many jealousies, that the horrible ‘and why not?’—when one comes to doubt the man one loves—arose in me… But I had the strength to hide my feelings from the cruel child, who must have sensed that her mother was in love.

  ‘ “ ‘Monsieur de Ravila!’ I exclaimed, with a voice that I felt must betray me completely—‘but you never even speak to him!—You avoid him’—I was about to add, my anger rising, I could feel it… ‘So you have both betrayed me!’—But I repressed that… Did I not have to pry out, one by one, every detail of this horrible seduction?… And so I asked her for them, with a gentleness that nearly killed me, when she herself released me from the vice-like grip, this torture, by saying quite ingenuously:

  ‘ “ ‘It was one evening, mother. He was in the big armchair in the corner by the fire, opposite the sofa. He stayed there a long while, then he got up, and I had the misfortune to go and sit in the armchair he had just left. Oh, mother!… I felt I had fallen into fire. I wanted to get up, but I couldn’t… I didn’t have the strength! And I felt… here, mother, feel here!… that what I had… was a child!… ’ ”’

  The Marquise had laughed, said Ravila, when she told him the story; but not one of the twelve women seated round that table dreamed of laughing—and nor did Ravila.

  ‘So there you have it, Ladies, believe it or not,’ he added, by way of conclusion, ‘the crowning love, the most beautiful I have ever inspired in my life!’

  He fell silent, and so did his listeners. They were pensive… had they understood him?

  When Joseph was bound a slave to Potiphar’s wife, he was so handsome, says the Koran, that the women he served at table cut their fingers with their knives from looking at him. But the age of Joseph is past, and our preoccupations over dessert are less beguiling.

  ‘What a great ninny that Marquise of yours is, for all her wit, to have told you such a thing!’ said the Duchesse, who decided to be cynical, but who still had her golden knife in her hand, and had not used it to cut anything at all.

  The Comtesse de Chiffrevas gazed deep into her glass of Rhenish wine, an emerald crystal glass, as mysterious as her reverie.

  ‘And Little Mask?’ she inquired.

  ‘Oh, she got married to someone in the provinces—and then she died, very young, before her mother told me this story,’ said Ravila.

  ‘That, too…’ said the Duchesse thoughtfully.

  VILLIERS DE L’ISLE-ADAM

  The Presentiment

  Attende, homo, quid fuisti ante ortum et quod eris usque ad occasum. Profecto fuit quod non eras. Postea, de vili materia factus, in utero matris de sanguine menstruali nutritus, tunica tua fuit pellis secundina. Deinde, in vilissimo panno involutus, progressus es ad nos, - sic indutus et ornatus! Et non memor es quae sit origo tua. Nibil est aliud homo quam sperma foetidum, saccus stercorum, cibus vermium. Scientia, sapientia, ratio, sine Deo sicut nubes transeunt.

  Post hominem vermis; post vermem foetor et horror. Sic, in non hominem, vertitur omnis homo.

  Cur carnem tuam adornas et impinguas quam, post paucos dies, vermes devoraturi sunt in sepulchro, animam, vero, tuam non adornas, - quae Deo et Angelis ejus praesentenda est in coelis!

  (Saint Bernard, Meditations)

  ONE winter evening over tea, a group of us, who had in common a taste for metaphysical enquiry, were gathered round a good fire at the home of one of our friends, Baron Xavier de la V*** (a pale young man, whose lengthy spells of military service in Africa, while still just a youth, had exacerbated a singularly moody and rugged temperament). The conversation came round to a most sombre subject: the nature of those extraordinary, stupefying, and mysterious coincidences that arise in the lives of some people.

  ‘This is a story,’ he told us, ‘that I shall tell without further comment. It is true. You may find it striking.’

  We lit our cigarettes and settled back to listen to the following narrative:

  ‘In 1876, at the Autumn solstice,* around the time when the ever-growing number of shallow burials—expedited far too hurriedly, in actual fact—began to revolt the Parisian bourgeoisie and set alarm-bells ringing, one evening, at eight o’clock, after a most extraordinary spiritualist seance, I went home feeling overcome by that hereditary spleen I am a prey to, whose black obsessiveness undoes and reduces to nothing any effort of the Will.

  ‘I have, on doctor’s orders, frequently but vainly dosed myself on Avicenna’s cassia brew,* or imbibed under every preparation extracts of iron, and trampling on all my pleasures, like a second Robert d’Arbrissel,* I have cooled the fiery edge of my passions down to Siberian temperatures, but nothing works!—So be it! It does indeed appear that I’m a person of morose and taciturn temperament! And yet, beneath my excitable surface, I must be made of sterner stuff, as they say, since despite this battery of treatments, I can still, equably enough, contemplate the stars.

  ‘On the evening in question I was back in my room, lighting a cigar by the candles on the mirror, when I noticed that I was mortally pale! So I flung myself into my great armchair, an antique done out in deep red padded velvet, in which the passage of time, during my long reveries, seems to weigh less heavily. My dejection of spirits came on oppressively, until I became almost ill. Judging it impossible to shake myself free of the shadows by going out—especially when the capital was itself assailed by dreadful problems—I resolved to try and get away from Paris altogether, into the fresh air of the country, and lose myself in vigorous exercise, like some good days hunting, to change my mood.

  ‘No sooner had the thought come to me, indeed at the very instant* I had decided on that plan of action, than there came into my mind the name of an old friend, whom I had not seen for many years, the Abbé Maucombe.

  ‘ “Abbé Maucombe!…” I murmured to myself.

&nbs
p; ‘My last meeting with the learned priest dated back to just before he left on a long pilgrimage to Palestine. I had since had news of his return. He lived in a humble presbytery in a little village in central Brittany.

  ‘Surely Maucombe disposed of a spare room or an outhouse of some kind?—Surely he must have gathered, on his travels, some ancient tomes… some curiosities from the Lebanon, perhaps? And I would lay a wager that the country houses in the neighbourhood had wild duck on their lakes… What could be more opportune!… And if I were to make the most of the last fortnight of the magical month of October, among the reddened rocks, before the cold set in; if I really wanted to see the long and resplendent autumn evenings on the wooded heights, then I would have to make haste!

  ‘Nine o’clock chimed.

  ‘I got up; I knocked the ash from my cigar. Then, like a man of purpose, I took my hat, my greatcoat, and my gloves; I took my suitcase and my shotgun; I blew the candles and went out—taking elaborate care and turning the key three times in the secret keyhole that is the pride of my door.

  ‘Three-quarters of an hour later, the Brittany express was transporting me towards the little village of Saint-Maur, where the Abbé Maucombe had his living; I had even found the time, at the station, to post a hastily scribbled letter in which I advised the Reverend Father of my arrival.

  ‘The next morning I was at R***, which is no more than around five miles from Saint-Maur.

  ‘Anxious to get a good night’s sleep (I wanted to be out with my shotgun at first light the following day), and judging that a siesta after lunch could possibly affect adversely my chances of getting an unbroken night’s rest, to keep me awake despite my tiredness, I spent the day visiting old schoolfriends.—At around five-thirty in the evening, having acquitted myself of these duty-calls, I had them saddle up a horse at the Soleil d’Or, where I had got off, and as twilight fell I arrived within sight of a hamlet.

  ‘As I rode towards it, I brought to mind the priest at whose home I had the intention of stopping for a few days. The lapse of time since our last meeting, the journeys and all the other events of life, in addition to his own reclusiveness, must have changed his appearance and his character. His hair would be greying. But I recalled the astringent conversation of the learned rector—and I allowed myself to anticipate with pleasure the long evenings I would be spending in his company.