The juggler

by Rachilde, 1860-1953

  "Alas! I returned, from these illustrious salons, sickened, ill, all sentimentality more than withered, attacked by an exotic —to put it politely—fever, and swearing I would never be caught there again ... so far as one can ever swear! ... At your home, madam and friend, I met a strange creature who acted out for me with the prettiest of style and gestures, a monstrous, well-known love story, tiring mainly for the spectators, entitled, in the sort of salons where people do not chat, The MaidofNanterre. I dare to spell out this title to you in full because you will grasp its real beauty; however, it would be useless to ask for it at your bookstore. The good man might take you for an ingenue ... or get angry. I have too much respect, madam, for your severe inconsolable widow's dress to tell you what happened between this strange creature and me during one terrible night of pouring rain. The next day, then, aching all over, very indignant at exoticism, I went for a walk in the various places one can meet consolable widows . . . no, plaster vases, carefully stuccoed, stamped, never crumbling during numerous washes and full of compliance, if not of rosy

  sentiment. I made the acquaintance of a charming . . . jug from Montmartre, blond, plump, white—she has precisely that appetising fold of marble that you had the goodness to bring to my attention—and she talks absolutely . . . like a jug! Let me be frank: she can scarcely utter a single word, always the same, one which will remind you no doubt of Tunisian caravans. She says: Camel, 2 and she says it ineffably (when she burns herself tasting soup!) What do you expect? exoticism has perverted my senses to the point that the little person from Montmartre seems to me to have fallen from Mohammed's paradise, a receptacle of pure form, a celestial amphora, the veritable chosen vessel! The first night after you know which, the unforgettable one, everything came off (if you will excuse the expression) prodigiously. In the morning, I found myself once again gay, well-disposed, light-headed and -hearted, the proof being that the mere appearance of one of your black, taloned gloves in my home would have had the same effect on me as a "Bless you" after a copious series of sneezes. The second night of debauchery, also spent analyzing the charms of my personal amphora (expensive, though hardly unique on the market), I began to feel a slight palpitation under my left breast. I rarely go in for heartache in society. I dread it greatly in the arms of a pretty girl, no, the handles of a pretty Parisian jug, and since I am in a bad mood when I feel these palpitations, I thought it best to get up and consult, in my shirt, my Dieulafoy. 3 Very salutory, the study of medicine, O madam, in these sad circumstances! It is surprising how much light is shed on the most obscure problems! The delicious child, woken by the untimely manifestation of my austerity, began suddenly to cry. (What better to do than overflow when one is a vase full ... of candor?) She declared that in a dream I had uttered a name other than hers, a woman's name, and that I was deceiving her with one of her best friends whom she calls: the Normandy Sole. I tried in vain to explain to

  her that the sweet name of Eliante (so ridiculous between you and me), was not a woman's name, that it could at most be used to label one of the two chastity belts in the Cluny Museum; my personal jug didn't want to let it go. Alas! worldly vase or naive jug, it's amazing how subtle women are. Normandy Sole Eliante Solol It's all the same to them. I had to submit, then, to the flow of a torrent of insults, to hear myself called as many names as the caravan animal which transported, long ago, across the immensity of the desert, the most beautiful ornament in your salon, madam. And that made me really furious: I do not have the patience of those guardians of the harem where they unearth, to please your pretty eyes, the sacred carafe of love which satisfies your thirst. After letting all the camels go by me, I ended up flicking off the alabaster fold of my young friend of forty-eight hours, and she deigned to respond with a slap capable of bringing a dromedary to its knees. That hurt a lot. I kept the caravan but returned the slap. A regular set to, O madam and dear teacher! Broken furniture, my Dieulafoy torn, a large book which was very useful, and a petticoat of lace . . . (imitation Valenciennes) reduced to shreds! You'll admit that it's a lot of noise for just one name and which name? (That's a real 1830, that one!) I had to leave my personal jug; for it was impossible to pour anything into it except gold coins: so much for the real tears, so much for the imitation Valenciennes lace and so much for the flicks and scratches, having damaged the little tobacco jar of my dreams. I keep only the dromedaries as small comfort. It's not much.

  "Here I am once again alone, austere, bothered because austere, splenetic, ready to haunt high society with a pale face, black eyes, a pronounced taste for exoticism, that is to say for rest after victory.

  "Hum! Victory? ... I most certainly don't want to brag! It's a paltry victory that is won ... by decanting.

  The Juggler

  3*

  "I am not sending you flowers. (Do you like tuberoses?) And I will not pay a digestive call. (Which day can one find you at home without the niece of the innocent sleep, deaf bfother-in-law or servant on a spring?) But ... I do want to see you again.

  "Besides, you know, I will break your colorless pot, I will knock it over, your hypocritical widow's funeral urn! Yes, yes, I will strangle that bottle neck stinking of alchemy! Do I have the right to ask for, to demand, the explanation of a Chinese juggling act? I do not love you, and it is very unlikely that I shall end up becoming jealous of a Tunisian jug, only, I swear to you that on Saturday, at around three o'clock, I am going to see if at your house there is any man besides a dotard or a valet.

  "Answer me. I am waiting ..."

  Leon Reille

  "Sir and dear lover,

  "I am at home on Fridays." 4

  Eliante Donalger

  "Sir and . . . deaf lover!" murmured Leon Reille confused by the little frosted card. "This woman is mad! What if I didn't go?"

  H,

  E arrived at around five o'clock the following Friday, to be mote ptopet, mote part of her world, and he found, at net house, a surprisingly bourgeois salon. He had entered by a door other than the one in the little garden, it was obvious at once.' An ordinary house, green plants with ordinary appearances, ordinary curtains from the Louvre, a maid who retained her country accent, and, in this salon, on the second floor, nondescript people; an old man with white whiskers who resembled a casino diplomat, two very fat ladies, one of them haloed by a hat decorated with an owl, a young girl of twenty trying to pass for ten and dressed in a choirboy's smock, her braided hair thumping against her back, finally Madame Donalger. That is to say Eliante, visiting Madame Donalger.

  He no longer recognized this woman at all. She was wearing a tailored suit, black, of course, but ordinary and stained by an awful violet tie with white polka dots. Her hair was done in a very fashionable little fluffy puff, and she had a yellow complexion, without makeup, the ivory complexion of a woman who is suffering ... or who has had too much fun.

  People chatted.

  The old diplomat represented the deaf brother-in-law. He talked loudly, was not aware of anything that was going on, solemnly discussed the health of the President of the Republic with the woman with the owl halo. As for the girl, she was presented imposingly like a collection plate at church:

  "Here, Monsieur Reille, this is my niece, Missie, who has a cold. Since you are a bit of a doctor, giwe her a sermon. She insists on wearing a low-cut dress to go to the theatre tonight. And it's not even a premiere! A second performance at the Odeon ... in your neighborhood ..."

  He had to sit down on a very hard Recamier couch, with this somewhat boney young lady, a girl with big tibias, holding her elbows like pick handles, and beautiful with that overly facile diabolical beauty which seduces only the apoplectic.

  "My dear aunt told me you were at the ball for tubercular children, sir? Was there dancing?"

  And she looked at him furtively, her physiognomy suitably malevolent, her eyes shining, trying to stick the point of her burgeoning simpletons wit into the bluish depths of the eyes of the passionate young man.

  He grumbled:


  "Of course not, mademoiselle, you can't dance when you cough, it's forbidden, and it would be an even greater imprudence for you to wear a low-cut dress . . . from what I've seen."

  "So you've never seen my aunt dance, have you! She puts everything into it, once she gets going. It's true she dances . . . in a dress with a high collar."

  If he had seen her dance? Oh! yes, and a whirlwind went by in a dream. A black waltzing woman whose skirts flew up like dark acanthus leaves around the beautiful forbidden fruit, with a smooth and supple body, which one imagined whiter,

  smoother and more supple because it was veiled in mourning. Mourning for whom? Mourning for what? A terrible mourning planned in advance, to arouse the interest of pierrots whose imagination, soured early on, had scratched around in Baudelaire's dungheap, on rainy days. Damn it all! . . .

  So they talked of tuberculosis patients being completely cured without, for all that, the slightest reduction in cases of lung disease, and he spat out the phrases of a serious man who possesses a fixed judgement on every issue. Even if he was only twenty-two, he knew the different ways of being politely stupid.

  Disheartened by his useless visit, Leon Reille turned to the niece to try and learn a little about this house.

  Mademoiselle Marie Chamerot, known as Missie, the daughter of a dead sister of this Monsieur Donalger, the naval officer destined never to return, fortunately, was a tall person, taller than Eliante. She seemed endowed with perpetual motion, and she ingenuously broke the china saucers. Every second, she would stand up, pick up an object, a spoon, some sugar, a cup, move the furniture, and one would hear a shattering laugh, as sharp as verjuice, or shattering porcelain. She sneezed from time to time. She shivered with fever and cold under her choirboy's smock, and her braid, thumping against her back, a braid of light chestnut hair, gave her a comic ani-malness, since she was called Missie. She reminded one a bit of a thin, shivering greyhound with its tail between its legs. The worst of it is that she sat down at the piano, without having to be asked, and she sang, in spite of her cold, repeating that she was going to copy Yvette, 2 by sniffing at the end of each couplet. She emphasized all the smutty parts, and, returning to the Recamier couch from the piano, she lit a cigarette and crossed her legs:

  "Do you smoke, dear sir? It's excellent for colds, you know."

  Leon Reille was flabbergasted. He was well aware that the upbringing of the day tolerated these tomboyish mannerisms, but he imagined that such a huge she-devil of an idiot must get in the way terribly in Eliante's salon. Mademoiselle Missie did not seem bad-tempered, she stuck to crass looks at the most, and she could have become pretty, if she had understood how natural, or artificial, grace colors with illusion the body of a woman, young or old.

  "No, 1 don't smoke ... at least not in front of girls!" he replied phlegmatically.

  He reflected too that the night with the Eliante of love had slipped by completely without him, a cigarette smoker, having regretted for an instant that he had not dared light a single one.

  He looked at Eliante, the Eliante visiting Madame Don-alger. Deep in a big armchair, completely black, completely hermetic, she neither smiled nor moved, her closed eyes outlined by a brush stroke on her white ivory face like the eyes of a doll. Her modish little hairstyle did not suit her, she was proper and Parisian in a dignified way, but she kept her eyes to herself and for the evenings when she went to paint the town red, when it is permissible to caterwaul certain things . . . hardly French. The only thing which could be seen to emerge from her bizarre, exciting and magical charm were the little feet like mouse snouts which she put on a Pompadour footstool, the color of rose cream.

  "Your niece is charming!" ventured Leon, who had stood up during the hubbub of the piano and who came and positioned himself behind the big armchair.

  "Isn't she," sighed Madame Donalger in all seriousness. "She's an excellent girl, very knowledgeable, she has diplomas, and she could, if necessary, translate your . . . Dieulafoy. If she enjoys playing the child, it's because she's convinced it suits her type of beauty better."

  Leon Reille choked back a violent urge to laugh:

  "Translate my Dieulafoy? You think, do you, that we learn everything in Latin ..."

  "I don't know, I don't know anything. ... I don't want to know anything."

  And she clenched her little mouse feet on the Pompadour footstool. 3

  "There is, however, one thing that I want you to know, Madame Eliante," he murmured very quietly, as some noisy chords were struck, for Mademoiselle Missie had just returned to Yvette's ballads. "/ will break the jug!"

  "I beg you, be quiet, sir. My brother-in-law is watching us."

  "Bah! Since he's deaf."

  Monsieur Donalger, the brother-in-law, exclaimed:

  "Ah! the Latin Quarter, young man! My old Latin Quarter, it hasn't changed, I assure you."

  Armed with an extremely rudimentary diplomacy, the good man could not imagine that a medical student, introduced for the first time, should talk of anything but his environment.

  "Goodness! you weren't lying ..." added Leon. "He really is deaf. . . . Like the famous virgin pot." (He continued, louder.) "No, the Latin Quarter will never change, it is still inhabited by ruffians and blockheads who still hum the same tunes, they hiss at or follow . . . women! Ah! what a good time, sir, is had in the old Latin Quarter!" And he disguised a yawn of very real fatigue.

  "Bad subject!" the deaf man threw at him, with a special laugh, for he had applied himself well in his simple deductions.

  The two ladies took their leave, recommending to Missie a new score of Manon, a deluxe edition which everyone should own because of its binding.

  "It makes a very nice New Year's gift," declared the one with the owl halo.

  "And it looks good on the cornet of the piano," agteed the second, who pataded only a modest half a dove.

  When the two women had left, Missie exclaimed, between two sneezes:

  "What botes! they nevet say anything funny, and they'te aftaid of music-hall songs!"

  Eliante added quietly, with a half-smile of complicity:

  "It's because of theit hats."

  Leon smiled too, and the btothet-in-law declated pet-emptotily:

  "... But they wete wtong to put thtough the Boule-vatd Saint-Michel, because it joins the two banks of the tivet, and people don't stay in theit own place."

  This time evetyone began to laugh openly.

  "A cup of tea?" asked Eliante, turning to the old man, with a sudden defetence, as if she wanted to desttoy the tidicu-lous effect, to indicate that she would allow one outbutst of laughtet, but no mote.

  "With pleasute, only I don't have my cakes. Missie fotgot them, you know, my apticot cakes?"

  Missie, with the gestute of a Bouillon Duval waittess, 4 said:

  "Ah, what a fuss!"

  She tan anyway to fetch the cakes in question, because Eliante, with a slight nod, had motioned to the doot.

  So, satisfied in smug anticipation, the old glutton cutled up by the fireplace to poke a big piece of glowing wood.

  "Yes, I shall bteak the jug, Madame Eliante," tepeated Leon, sitting down beside net, on the same Recamiet couch which seemed softet.

  A ttansfotmation took place. Eliante opened net eyes. She was beautiful.

  "Why do you want to hurt me?" she said, pulling back her dress with the sudden movement of a schoolgirl who is ftightened . . . ot having fun. "I haven't broken anything of yours, have I, sir."

  "Ah! You haven't broken anything of mine? You have just ruined my life for a week, I went on a binge at exactly that point in the book where 1 was supposed to study, and I began reading at exactly that point where the most elementary prudence recommends on the contrary that you have a thoroughly good time. . . . Nothing broken! What about my furniture! And my Dieulafoy! and my personal amphora? You call that nothing, do you!" (He furtively slid his hand onto her knee, and squeezed it, passionately.) "And I have debased myself into the bargain, because it is
debasing to give the name of the woman you want to the one you don't desire. Moreover, just from the hygienic point of view, it's deplorable. Eliante, why do you write letters beginning with that colossal sentence: Sir and dear lover If you think I'm going to give it back to you! . . . Hum! You have really compromised yourself, madam. I'm going to show that, I assure you, to all my friends in the Latin Quarter. Don't worry, I don't have many. Sir and dear lover? I am at home on Fridays! Your letter may not be long, but the devil take me if I can make out what you mean. You aren't my mistress ..."

  She was playing with a little spoon, affectedly stirring a mixture of tea, rum and lemon.

  "You thought of giving it back, then," she asked, half smiling, a little perfumed smile in which there was a lemon drop of banter.

  "Here it is!" admitted the young man simply, and he held out to her the frosted card which had been burning his skin for two days above his heart.

  "No, sir, I never take back what I give." (She exclaimed, slightly surprised.) "Oh! How hot it is, is that how hot you

  are inside your chest? No, no, keep my letter . . . ot burn it, but I think you already have."

  "All right, I'll keep it . . . like a marriage vow. You have seduced me, I am the gentleman victim. I am entitled to reparation."

  "Certainly! Marry my niece, since you find her charming?"

  "Oh! no, I don't like women whose arms and legs are like prison bars. Thank you very much. Besides, raised by you, she must have unusual ideas about stock pots."

  "Raised by me, sir, she would have been, I am convinced, either a beautiful and decent wife, or a great and witty courtesan. But Monsieur Donalger sent her to school. She will only be a clever monkey, ignorant of the art of being a woman . . . you are perhaps wise not to marry her. You are too . . . young."