Then he drove to see another collegiate assessor, that is, a major like himself. This major was a biting wit, and, parrying his digs, Kovalev would often say to him:
“Oh, I see through you clearly, you needier!”
On his way there, Kovalev thought: “Now, if the major does not split his sides with laughter when he sees me, that will be a sure sign that whatever I may have is sitting in its proper place.”
And when the other collegiate assessor showed no signs of hilarity, Kovalev thought:
“Fine! It feels good, it feels good, dammit!”
In the street he met Mrs. Podtochina and her daughter and was greeted with joyful exclamations which went to show that they did not find he was missing anything. He had a very long talk with them and, on purpose, took out his snuff-box and filled his nose with great deliberation, through both orifices, muttering under his breath:
“Here, look and admire, you hens! But still, I won’t marry the daughter, just par amour as they say, but nothing more ….”
And from then on, Major Kovalev could be seen on Nevsky Avenue, in theatres, everywhere. And the nose was there, sitting on his face, as though nothing had happened. And after that, Major Kovalev was always in good spirits, smiling, pursuing absolutely every pretty lady without exception and even stopping one day in front of a small shop and purchasing some sort of ribbon for his lapel, although his reason for doing so remained a mystery because he had never been made a knight of any order.
So that’s what happened in the northern capital of our vast country. Only now, on further thought, do we see that there is much that is improbable in it. Without even mentioning the strangeness of such a supernatural severance of the nose and its appearance in various places in the form of a state councilor, how could Kovalev have failed to understand that he could not go and advertise about a nose in the press? I don’t mean that I think that an advertisement would have cost too much, that would be nonsense and I’m not stingy; but it’s not decent, it’s not clever, and it’s not proper! And then too, how could the nose have got into the roll of bread, and how could Ivan Yakovlevich himself? … Now, that I cannot understand. It’s absolutely beyond me. But strangest of all, the most incomprehensible thing, is that there are authors who can choose such subjects to write about. This, I confess, is completely inexplicable, it’s like … no, no, I can’t understand it at all. In the first place, there is absolutely no advantage in it for our mother country. Secondly … well, what advantage is there in it at all? I simply cannot understand what it is ….
However, when all is said and done, and although, of course, we conceive the possibility, one and the other, and maybe even … Well, but then what exists without inconsistencies? And still, if you give it a thought, there is something to it. Whatever you may say, such things do happen—seldom, but they do.
THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
The Beautiful Vampire
(La morte amoureuse, 1836)
Aside from being the celebrated master of high Romanticism and the first phase of Parnassianism, Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) was Hoffmann’s first follower in France. Among his numerous fantastic stories, “La morte amoureuse” is the most famous and most perfect (too perfect perhaps, as is Gautier’s habit), a work conceived and carried out following all the rules. The theme of the living dead and vampires (a female vampire in this case) is found here in a realization of the highest quality, one that deserved Baudelaire’s praises.
The temptation of Romuald, the newly ordained priest who meets the beautiful Clarimonde; the vision of the city from the towers above, with the palace of the courtesans illuminated by the sun; the life of penitence in the distant parish until a servant on horseback summons Romuald to give Clarimonde the last rites; love with the dead woman; the uncertainty as to whether the dream is his days as a poor priest or his nights in Renaissance orgies; the discovery that Clarimonde is a vampire who drinks her lovers blood: there are so many great passages that create a tradition. A tradition as well in second-class literature and film: for instance, the exhumation of Clarimonde’s cadaver, intact in its coffin and with blood on its lips, that suddenly turns into a skeleton.
YOU ASK ME, brother, if I have loved; yes. It is a strange and terrible story, and although I am sixty-six years old, I scarcely dare to stir the ashes of that memory. I am reluctant to refuse any request of yours, but I would not tell such a story to any soul less tempered by experience.
The events are so strange that I cannot believe that they ever happened to me. For more than three years I was the victim of an extraordinary, diabolical obsession. I, a poor country priest, led every night in a dream (pray God it was a dream!) the life of a lost soul, a voluptuary, a Sardanapalus. One single glance thrown at a woman nearly cost me the loss of my soul; but in the end, with the help of God and my patron saint, I was able to drive out the malignant spirit that possessed me. My life was complicated with a nocturnal existence of quite a different nature. During the day I was a priest of the Lord, chaste, occupied in prayer and holy works; at night, from the moment I closed my eyes, I became a young nobleman, a connoisseur of women, dogs and horses, dicing, drinking, blaspheming; and when I awoke at daybreak, it seemed as if I fell asleep and dreamed I was a priest.
Of that nocturnal life I have preserved memories of things and of words which I cannot banish from my mind; and although I have never left the walls of my presbytery, one would say, to hear me talk, that I was a man who had tasted every experience and turned his back on the world, one who had sought refuge in religion and desired to end his troubled days in the bosom of the Church, rather than a humble priest grown old in an obscure parish in the depths of a wood, wholly cut off from the life of the day.
Yes, I have loved as no one in the world has loved, with a mad furi ous passion, so violent that I wonder it did not burst my heart. Ah! what nights! what nights!
From my earliest childhood I felt that the priesthood was my vocation; all my studies were therefore directed to that end, and my life up to the age of twenty-four was nothing but a long novitiate. Having finished my theological training, I took all the minor orders in turn, and my superiors thought me fit, despite my youth, to receive the last and most serious degree. The day of my ordination was appointed for Easter-week.
I had never gone into society; for me the world was bounded by the limits of college and seminary. I knew vaguely that there was something which was called woman, but I gave no thought to it; I was perfectly innocent. I saw my old and infirm mother twice a year only. That was the only link I had with the outside world.
I felt no regret, not the slightest hesitation, in face of this irrevocable pledge; I was full of joy and impatience. Never did a young bridegroom count the hours with more feverish eagerness; I could not sleep for thinking of it; I dreamt that I was saying mass. To be a priest seemed to me to be the most wonderful thing in the world; I would have refused to be a king or a poet. My ambition knew no higher flight.
I am telling you this to show you that I was the last person in the world to whom such a thing should have happened, and of what inexplicable fascination I was the victim.
When the great day came, I walked to the church with so light a step that I seemed to tread on air or to have wings on my shoulders. I felt as if I were an angel, and I was astonished at the serious and preoccupied faces of my companions; for there were several of us. I had passed the night in prayer and was in a frame of mind that bordered on ecstasy. The bishop, a venerable old man, seemed to be God the Father contemplating His eternity, and I saw heaven through the vaulted roof of the sacred building.
You know the details of the ceremony: the benediction, the communion, the anointing of the palms of the hands with the oil of the catechumens, and lastly the holy sacrifice offered together with the bishop. I will not dwell upon this. Oh! how right Job is when he says that the man is imprudent who does not close a bargain with his eyes!
I chanced to raise my head, which till then I had held bowed down, an
d saw before me—so near that I could have touched her, although in reality she was some distance away and on the other side of the railing—I saw, I say, a young woman of rare beauty and dressed with regal splendour. It was as though scales had fallen from my eyes. I experienced the sensation of a blind man who suddenly recovers his sight. The bishop, so radiant a moment before, faded out all of a sudden; the tapers grew pale in their gold sconces like the stars at daybreak, and the whole church became quite dark. The lovely creature stood out against the background of shadow like an angelic vision; she seemed to be illuminated of herself, to create rather than to receive light.
I lowered my eye-lids, firmly resolved not to lift them again, so as to be free from the influence of external objects; for my thoughts wandered more and more, and I hardly knew what I was doing.
A minute later I opened my eyes again, for through my lashes I saw her, glittering with all the colours of the prism, and in a roseate twilight, as when one looks at the sun.
Oh! how beautiful she was! The greatest painters, searching for ideal beauty in heaven and bringing down to earth the divine portrait of the Madonna, do not approach this fabulous reality. Neither poet’s verse nor painter’s palette can give an idea of it.
She was fairly tall, with the figure and carriage of a goddess. Her soft fair hair was parted and flowed over her temples like two waves of gold; a queen with her diadem, one might fancy; her forehead of a bluish, transparent whiteness, spread broad and serene over almost brown eyebrows, a peculiarity which still further enhanced the effect of sea-green eyes that shone with a sparkle and brilliance that were unbearable. What eyes! With one flash they decided the fate of a man; they had a life, a limpidity, a liquid brightness, which I have never seen in a human eye; rays like arrows darted from them straight to the heart. I know not whether the flame that illuminated them came from heaven or hell, but of a surety it came from one or the other. This woman was an angel or a demon, perhaps both: certainly she did not spring from the womb of Eve, the common mother. Teeth of purest Orient pearl gleamed through the red of her smiling lips, and at each movement of her mouth little dimples showed in the roseate softness of her adorable cheeks. The nose was well cut and of truly royal pride, and betokened the most noble descent. Bright agates wantoned on the smooth, shining skin of her half-revealed shoulders, and rows of large pearls, nearly as white as her neck, fell on her breast. From time to time she raised her head with the undulating motion of a snake or of a bridling peacock, which sent a movement through the high open-work ruff that encircled her throat like a silver trellis.
She wore a dress of red velvet, and from the broad erminetrimmed sleeves emerged patrician hands of infinite delicacy, with long rounded fingers, so translucent that the light shone through them, like those of Aurora.
All these details are still as present to my eyes as if they dated from yesterday, for though my mind was extremely troubled, nothing escaped me: the minutest details, the tiny black spot on the side of the chin, the scarcely perceptible down at the corners of the lips, the velvet softness of the brow, the quivering shadow of the eyelashes on the cheeks—I took everything in with an astonishing clearness.
As I looked at her, I felt doors which hitherto had been closed open within me: it was as if little windows were unshuttered in every direction to open up unknown vistas; life appeared to me in a wholly new aspect. I had just been born into another world of thought and feeling. A frightful anguish gripped my heart; each minute that passed seemed a second and an age.
Meanwhile, the ceremony proceeded, and carried me far away from the world the entrance to which my growing desires were furiously besieging. I said yes when I wanted to say no, while everything in me revolted and protested against the wrong my tongue was doing to my soul: in spite of myself, some mysterious power tore the words from my throat. Thus it is, perhaps, that so many young women go to the altar with the fixed intention of refusing emphatically the husbands forced upon them, and not one carries out her project. It is thus, doubtless, that poor novices take the veil, for all their determination to tear it in shreds at the moment of uttering their vows. One dares not cause such a scandal in public, or disappoint the expectations of so many people; the wishes of all, the looks of all, seem to weigh on one like a casque of lead; and then the procedure has been so well arranged, everything so completely regulated in advance, in a manner so manifestly irrevocable, that thought yields to the weight of facts and becomes completely impotent.
The gaze of the beautiful stranger changed its expression as the ceremony proceeded. Tender and caressing at first, it took the air of disdain and dissatisfaction of one misunderstood.
I made an effort, violent enough to uproot a mountain, to cry out that I did not wish to be a priest; but I could not do it; my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth, and I could not translate my desire into the faintest movement of refusal. Wide awake, I was in a condition like that of nightmare, when you want to utter the word upon which your life depends, and cannot do it.
She seemed to be aware of the torture I was suffering, and, as if to give me courage, cast upon me a look full of divine promise. Her eyes were a poem, of which each look was a verse. They said:
“If you will be mine, I will make you happier than God Himself in His paradise; the angels will envy you. Tear off that funeral winding-sheet in which you are about to wrap yourself. I am Beauty, I am Youth, I am Life; come to me, and we will be Love. What could Jehovah offer you in exchange for that? Our life will glide by like a dream, and be but a kiss prolonged to eternity.
“Dash that cup from your lips, and you are free. I will transport you to unknown isles; you shall sleep upon my breast in a bed of pure gold under a canopy of silver. For I love you, and would take you from your God, before Whom so many noble hearts melt into floods of love that reach Him not.”
I seemed to hear these words in a rhythm of infinite sweetness; for her look all but had sound, and the sentences her eyes sent to me echoed in the depths of my heart as if invisible lips had breathed them into my soul. I felt myself ready to renounce God, yet my lips went mechanically through the formalities of the ceremony. The beautiful one flung me a second glance so beseeching, so despairing, that steel blades went through my heart, and I felt more darts in my breast than the Mother of Sorrows.
It was done; I was a priest.
Never did human countenance portray such poignant anguish. The girl who sees her betrothed die suddenly at her side, the mother beside the empty cradle of her child, Eve sitting on the threshold of Paradise, the miser who finds a stone in the place of his treasure, the poet who has dropped into the fire the only manuscript of his finest work—none of these could seem more prostrated by grief, more inconsolable. The blood fled from her lovely cheek and she became as white as marble; her beautiful arms fell beside her body, as though the muscles had lost their power, and she leaned against a pillar as if her legs were weakening and slipping from under her.
As for me—livid, my forehead bathed in a bloodier sweat than that of Calvary, I tottered to the door of the church; I was suffocated; it seemed as if the vaulted roof above was falling upon my shoulders and that my head alone was supporting the whole weight of the dome.
As I was about to cross the threshold a hand suddenly grasped mine—a woman’s hand! I had never touched one. It was cold as a snake’s skin, and its impress remained, burning into my flesh like the brand of a red-hot iron. It was she. “Unhappy man! unhappy man! what have you done?” she said to me in a low voice; then she disappeared in the crowd.
The old bishop passed by; he looked at me with a severe expression. My demeanour must have been strange; I paled, I flushed, my vision was clouded. One of my companions took compassion on me and led me away; alone, I could not have found my way back to the seminary. At a turn of a street, while the young priest’s head was turned another way, a Negro page, fantastically dressed, came towards me and handed me, without stopping, a little pocket-book with gilt-edged corners, signing to me
to hide it.
I slipped it into my sleeve and kept it there until I was alone in my cell. I undid the clasp. There were but two leaves with the words: “Clarimonde, Concini Palace.” I was then so little conversant with life that I had never heard of Clarimonde, in spite of her celebrity, and had no idea where the Concini Palace was. I made a thousand conjectures, each one more extravagant than the last, but to tell the truth, provided I could see her again, I cared little what she might be, great lady or courtesan.
This love, just born, had taken root imperishably; I did not even think of attempting to eradicate it, I felt so strongly that it was impossible. This woman had taken complete possession of me; one look had sufficed to work the change in me; she had breathed her will into me; my life was no more my own, but hers, drawing its breath from her. I committed a thousand extravagances; I kissed the place on my hand which she had touched, and repeated her name for hours together. I had only to close my eyes to see her as clearly as if she had really been present, and I kept repeating the words she had spoken at the church door: “Unhappy man! unhappy man! what have you done?”
I realized all the horror of the situation, and the funereal and dreadful aspects of the state into which I had just been initiated were clearly revealed to me. To be a priest! That is to say, to be chaste, not to love, to make no distinction of sex or age, to turn aside from all beauty, to cower beneath the icy shadow of a monastery or a church, to see only the dying, to keep watch beside unknown corpses, to wear your own mourning in the shape of your black cassock, until at last your priests robe shall be your own coffin-cloth!
And I felt life rising within me like an underground lake that fills and overflows; my blood throbbed violently in my arteries; my youth, so long repressed, burst out all at once like the aloe that takes a hundred years to flower and blossoms with a clap of thunder. What should I do to see Clarimonde again? I had no pretext for leaving the seminary, knowing no one in the town; I was not even to remain there, was only waiting until the parish which was to be under my charge should be allotted to me. I tried to loosen the bars of the window; but it was a fearful height, and descent without a ladder was not to be dreamed of. Besides, it could only be made at night; and how find my way in the intricate maze of the streets? All these difficulties, which would have been nothing to others, were immense to me, a poor seminarist, a lover without experience, without money, without clothes.
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