The juggler

by Rachilde, 1860-1953

  He softened.

  "I think you're a good person. At first you frightened me. Now I'm not afraid . . . except of your dress. You should take it off, it's too black."

  "I never take off dresses, sir."

  "Do you sleep in them?"

  Disdainfully, she offered him the two creams: one green, one pink.

  "Pistachio or raspberry, dear sir? You have my permission to mix them as I intend to do myself, and then here is powdered vanilla, ginger, Indian pepper and grated spices. What would you like? It's a Chinese system."

  She fiddled with some small silver utensils, microscopic salt cellars decorated with precious cabochons, that gleamed under her pale fingers, and she scooped out powders as dark as ashes.

  "I'll try everything, of course. Only it's terrible, your Chinese system. Vanilla, ginger, Indian pepper! That's enough to set a harem ablaze . . . including the eunuchs! And you claim that you're only a woman? Indeed!"

  "Here, a little of this brown liqueur . . . three drops. It's essence of tea, which unifies all the other flavors, adds just a hint of bitterness. Do you like that?"

  Leon Reille made a grimace of willingness.

  "Have to get used to it ... I would prefer ..." (He stared at the Turkish crescent, her glass, which she was raising to her mouth.) "... the three drops of what is left in your

  glass. It's so strange, that receptacle. It must be difficult to drink out of."

  She held it out to him graciously.

  So he turned pale.

  "Do you really mind?"

  "What's to risk? My glass is full of pure water."

  "Oh, really," he growled, thickly.

  "I'm telling the truth. 7 Drink it, it will clear your chest."

  He seized the glass, a small vessel with a twisted stem and a disc-shaped bowl, and tried to adjust his lips to it.

  "Not there," cried Madame Donalger, gaily. "The other side. No! No! Not in the middle. As if you were drinking oil from an ancient lamp, a wick-lamp! oh, how clumsy!"

  Leon Reille had just smashed the glass by knocking it against his furious teeth.

  "My apologies," he said, wiping his bleeding lower lip.

  "I don't know how to go about it. So it's your fault, you should have helped me."

  She laughed very innocently.

  "There! I warned you, dear sir . . . pure water, and it's not good, with the Chinese system."

  "Oh! You are exasperating, you are, above your black dress!"

  And suddenly he was standing behind her chair.

  "I beg you, take it off, that dress, Madame Eliante . . . or throw me out of the house immediately. Loosen it, just a little. Unfasten the neck, it seems as though you are suffocating. Anyone would think you were living inside a snakeskin. Personally, it gives me the chills . . . as for you, it must make you too hot."

  With a quick gesture, she wrapped herself up in her big oriental stole.

  "But I'm an old woman, and I'm afraid of catching a cold in the head, dear sir."

  She laughed, unperturbed, as she continued to measure out nice little mixtures, vanilla, ginger, pepper, taspberty cream and pistachio cream, she stirred the pungent powders, tasting them on dainty little gold spatulas.

  Leon Reille watched her anxiously. Gradually, his eyebrows met in a frown. She was making fun of him, that was becoming clear.

  "Listen here, you insolent woman," he muttered, taking her nervously by the shoulders. "I don't think I love you, because I have no desire to coo like smitten lovers are supposed to. I want you, that's all. I will have you, that's for sure . . . as sure as you are an odious flirt ... or a madwoman. I've been following you for three months, sometimes through salons where I twiddle my thumbs and get so bored I could scream, other times in the street, when you go out on foot . . . in other words not very often. I've been honorably discreet, I tried to chat this evening, after our solemn introduction at the buffet, back there. I have nothing to say to you, socially speaking. I'm not good at lying . . . and I think I'm your equal. Give me what I want and then throw me out, that will be fine with me. I probably will not come back. But don't poison me any more with your pretty little systems. You'll end up making me drink crushed glass. Thank you very much, but I'm not in a Chinese mood, and this kind of torture is getting on my nerves for nothing. I warn you that I'm not an agreeable young man. I'm not asking if you love me. Don't give me your heart, sick or healthy, my proud, beautiful madame, politeness aside, I would forget it between the pages of my medicine book, I would crush it. I have a hatred for all women, for I suspect they are malicious. A bit of luck, isn't it, when you meet one who isn't totally stupid! I like you, you like me . . . so why all the faces? You picked me up on the street in the most absolute sense . . . yes, madame, the way a prostitute picks up a trick. What do you want, in exchange for what I'm ask-

  ing? The evening when I stole one of your cards right in front of you, to find out your name finally, you should have forbidden me to follow you . . . Eliante! What a strange name! It's crazy to be called that!"

  By now he was holding her wrists, her thin wrists where fine, little vipers of an almost violet blue, could be seen twisting under her tender, white flesh.

  "Eliante?"

  She stood up, letting slip the multicolored shawl, her flag of adventure, and seemed blacker, taller:

  "Now it's my turn, listen to me, my . . . dear child . . . and don't hurt me for nothing. I'm free to choose the time and even to not want to at all. I'm capricious, bored, in enough pain to fear an increase of physical or moral suffering. I seek only peace and oblivion. You have come to keep me company thus far . . . honorably. You will return . . . without me. Such things happen in the best of worlds. One has supper and retires. I find it absurd that a man cannot have an intimate chat with a woman . . . even one he loves. I receive you as my guest in fact because I like you ... so what?"

  "An actress!" he sneered. "I know the farce I am supposed to act; throw myself on my knees and swear that I'm happy! Never. I can't. I'm drawn to you by a different curiosity from the one that draws little snobs. I'm not amused by the manners of high society where one is bored. Here, Eliante, I'm going to confess to you my real curiosity, the idea of a future doctor of medicine. I think you have leprosy, I'm taking exact note of your malady, heart or head, and now I'll retire very properly."

  He was trying to joke, but he was beginning to want to bite her.

  Her resistance was too absurd. What did she want from him?

  "Give me your arm, and let's go into the salon," she said, starting to smile.

  He obeyed mechanically because he was wearing a suit; if he had been in an ordinary jacket, he would undoubtedly have raped her.

  The French, those of true French blood, have these sudden moments of respect for the clothes they are wearing and are very sorry for it later.

  Eliante moved aside a green drapery that slipped through her hands like moving foliage.

  They went into the salon.

  It was a boudoir hung in old rose crepe, a soft material, garlanded with Bengal lights of Venetian glass which lit up as soon as they crossed the threshold. The furniture seemed fragile, also of crystal. Among the strange knickknacks of Japanese complication or Chinese tortuousness, there was one admirable objet d'art placed in the middle of the room on a pedestal of old rose velvet, like an altar; an alabaster vase the height of a man, so slim, so slender, so deliciously troubling with its ephebe's hips, with such a human appearance, even though it retained the traditional shape of an amphora, that the viewer remained somewhat speechless. The foot, very narrow, like a spear of hyacinth, surged up from a flat and oval base, narrowed as it rose, swelled, at mid-height, to the size of two beautiful young thighs hermetically joined and tapered off towards the neck where, in the hollow of the throat, an alabaster collar shone like a fold of plump flesh, and, higher up, it opened out, spreading into a corolla of white, pure, pale con-vulvulus, almost aromatic since the white, smooth material with its milky transparence had such
lifelike sincerity. This neck spreading into a corolla made one think of an absent head, a head cut off or carried on shoulders other than those of the amphora.

  "What a marvel!" cried Leon, completely seduced by this apparition of the adorable chastity of line.

  "Isn't it beautiful! Isn't he beautiful," continued Eliante feverishly. "Oh, he is unique. It's impossible to think of anything more charming. You would think, when the light penetrates it obliquely, that it's inhabited by a soul, that a heart burns in this alabaster urn! You were telling me about pleasure? This is another thing entirely! This is the power of love in an unknown material, the madness of silent delight. He will never say anything. He is very old, centuries old, he has stayed young because he has never cried his secret to anyone." (She came and wrapped her black arms around the amphora's neck.) "Look closely, and try to see for a moment . . . through my eyes! Come and touch. I give you permission. . . . Go very gently, too firm a caress would tarnish it." (She seized the young man's hand and moved it carefully over the innocent whiteness of the vase, its virgin's flanks.) "Feel, can't you, that hopeless softness of the curve finally delineated? It won't go any further, for it has reached perfection. It will neither grow nor diminish, it is beauty immutable. Ah, I really want you to know, for at least five minutes, how to be in ecstasy, the right way and over something immortal. You're not laughing any more? It makes you afraid, it makes you ashamed! Oh! I knew quite well you were very intelligent . . . because pleasure turns you pale. This miraculous vase is pale with the pleasure of being itself! It has no history. I obtained it through the usual intermediaries, I was going to say procurers 1 . Someone sold it to me in Tunis the way they would have sold a slave. It had been discovered in the excavations. . . . Which excavations? I don't know . . . and it was broken, but I had it . . . taken care of, the old wound is invisible. It doesn't have a handle. It would be horrible to think his arms had been immobilized forever. And it has no jewel, no inscription, no little dog collar, coral beads or gold Greek bands. I love it for its total innocence. . . . And the things he has seen, good heavens? Terrifying things, no doubt, underground, plunged into darkness,

  for centuries! He will never tell, but he knows . . . this charming body in which life has been replaced by perfume, by wine ... or by blood! .... —Perhaps they just pickled olives in it, after all!—I paid very little for it, considering its unique beauty. He is mine. I had this little chapel built for him, but it's too modern. Nothing here reminds him that he was ever anything but a statue ... I regret it. I would have liked to surround him with sacred objects. I want him to be protected from the sun's gaze, 1 screen him from the daylight so that he can dream in the darkness and silence to his hermetic heart's content. Do you understand, I love him!" (She bent her head over the open neck, and, inhaling with all her might, she appeared, suddenly, to become the living head of the insensate body.) "I pour in rare essences, rose leaves, I threw a ring in there. Sometimes I amuse myself by adorning him with my diamonds, or putting a chain of fresh violets around him . . . and I kiss him, and imagine he's happy. Perhaps he's offended? Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you?"

  Leon Reille looked at her with superstitious admiration. He was gaining, for this woman, the respect of a young savant already in love with forms, colors, everything that recalled the power of the grace and principal beauty of his life: art, its transposition into the eternal. Yes, certainly, he found that more interesting than the society woman's cackling. If she loved pretty objects to this extent, it was because she had a very highly developed artistic sense; but, as she continued to caress the hips of the alabaster vase, having released the hand of the sensual man, the man madly sensual, to the point of being shy, he winced.

  "Leave that alone," he said to her softly. "You're a wretched fanatic, worshipping yourself in what is, in the end, a base material. Alabaster is a product of the earth which, without the men who sculpt it, would remain . . . earth. . . .

  It would be more charitable to pay attention to your best friend of one evening and give him the favors you ate giving to this senseless character. Believe me, my dear, one is in love only with oneself . . . that's why more than two can never love decently. Let's not waste time flattering marble. Eliante! My word, your hands are clammy! You are livening up and you seem to be living in honor of . . . this pot?"

  The young woman, her eyes half closed, clung more tightly to the neck of the amphora. She pressed both arms around the collar of the stone flesh, and leaned over the corolla of the opening, kissing the void:

  "No! No! You don't understand me at all . . . but I like you enough to explain. I am truly in love with everything that is beautiful, good, that seems absolute, the very definition of pleasure. But pleasure is not the goal; it's a way of being. Me, I'm always . . . happy. I wanted to bring you here to show you that I don't need a human caress to reach orgasm. . . . It's enough for me to be . . .—don't squeeze my arm like that—for I carry within myself the secret of all knowledge by knowing simply how to love. I'm disgusted by union, which destroys my strength, I find no delightful plenitude in it. For my flesh to be roused and to conceive the infinity of pleasure, I don't need to look for a sex organ in the object of my love! I am humiliated because an intelligent man immediately thinks of . . . sleeping with me. . . . Tomorrow you would love me no longer ... if you love me as little as that. Indeed, you don't love me, sir. So what do you claim to be offering me? What confidence can one have in this man who is just passing through? You won't pass through my house ... or you will stay. A thrill? That is not much for someone who is one living thrill! A flame? That is too little for someone who is a whole furnace! My malady? I admit it: I'm dying of love and, like the phoenix, I am reborn, after burning up, with love! Quite simply. It's no more surprising than that, even though it sur-

  prises all the doctors. No, I never take off my dress . . . only look at me . . . I'm dying!"

  Eliante, at present standing over the neck of the white amphora, became taut as a bow from head to foot. She was not offering herself to the man; she was giving herself to the alabaster vase, the one insentient person on the scene. Without a single indecent gesture, arms chastely crossed on this slender form, neither girl nor boy, she clenched her fingers a little, remaining silent, then, the man saw her closed eyelids flutter, her lips half open, and it seemed that starlight fell from the whites of her eyes, from the enamel of her teeth; a slight shudder traversed her body—or rather a squall lifted the mysterious wave of her dress—and she gave a small groan of imperceptible joy, the very breath of orgasm.

  Either it was the supreme, the splendid manifestation of love, the god actually descending to the temple, or the spectator had in front of him the most extraordinary actress, an artist transcending the limits of possibility in art.

  He was dazzled, delighted, indignant.

  "It's scandalous! Right there ... in front of me . . . without me? No, it's horrible!"

  He threw himself on her, intoxicated by a mad fury.

  "Actress! Horrible actress!"

  She roused herself gently, very calm, smiling, her lips only a little paler under their artificial carmine.

  "Leave me alone, then. . . . I am very content, you could add nothing better. Why are you making those ferocious animal eyes at me? Believe me, it's not because of virtue that I forbid you to touch my dress . . . it's because . . . it's over . . . I have given you what I can show a man of love."

  Leon Reille was positively forgetting that he was wearing a suit, but she pulled away, and laughed openly.

  "Ah! A man who doesn't know how to watch love is so silly. You really needed a lesson. Now, run along quickly. . . .

  Thejuggler

  I can hear my coachman getting impatient in front of the gate."

  And as he didn't move . . . she quickly pressed a bell.

  A servant entered, half asleep:

  "Tell Jean to drive the gentleman home, it's raining too hard for me to let him leave on foot."

  Leon Reil
le was obliged to take his leave, in spite of himself.

  "The curtain falls!" he thought.

  D

  EAR madam and . . . friend,

  "Thank you for the very spiritual lesson you gave me, exactly one week ago, and I am writing to apologize for not having sent the customary bunch of flowers, or having attempted the pious digestive visit, but that exquisite lesson has led, for your humble servant, to such disagreable things that I judge it more necessary to become completely . . . the lowest of boors!

  "Yes, dear madam, I feel so little enthusiasm for ancient vases in the form of a girl that I resolved, the very day after my expedition to the impossible, to cure myself of their burning memory by a little trip to the land of vulgar reality. (Please understand that I have thrown myself, prostrate, into the most dissolute debauchery!)

  "I, madam, am playing, in the midst of the comedy of life, the role of the poor, austere boy, bothered because austere, barely going out except to hang around hospital rooms where he probes every human filth capable of smothering the ideal, which forces him to remain a very wretched materialist.

  "I scarcely have the time to see a dream approach, before

  I already have the urge ... to rid my brain of it by every means debated by morality, but tolerated by the police.

  "I live on the fifth floor, near the roof, and I have almost a nervous terror of hearing certain tomcats caterwauling, on cat carnival nights, the example, invisible though it may be, seems to me to be so contagious.

  "However, I feel equally the nervous terror of evenings in the beer hall, not smoking a pipe, and Bullier dances, 1 not knowing how to dance at all as I think I already told you. (It was, goodness knows, a little for these various reasons that I sought to distract myself in salons where people chat, these being sometimes more hospitable than any other establishment and maintaining, despite the heavy closed curtains, an appearance of decency which sufficiently excites your sentimental side!)