The juggler

by Rachilde, 1860-1953

  dreaming for all the world, really, of debasing you by making myself your mistress. As you have had the courage to declare to me: there is no shortage of girls in the form of alabaster jugs in the Latin Quarter . . . and one must drink when one is thirsty.

  "You will not drink at my house. I am the sealed fountain of which the Scriptures speak, sir.

  "A flirt? No! Depraved? I don't know .... Coquettish? .... I'm above all indifferent to worldly successes of that sort, my dear friend, and soul-searching conversations on either side of a Parisian fireplace leave me disgusted with every kind of conversation. ... I know too well the things that make men turn pale, young or old, to need to blush behind a fan when I feel the approach of desire in black clothes.

  "I prefer it completely naked.

  "And it's because you have shown it to me almost completely naked that I am sure it's the messenger of Eros! You came on behalf of the god. Enter in, then, and abandon all hope of anything besides love. I'll allow you even to say out loud: 'I know her, she has a mark on her right hip!' What does it matter, since you'll never know for sure! I alone shall know that, face to face with my shadow, you dare not distinguish it from the rest of the night . . .

  "You are sad and you are trying to appear jovial, crude, repeating phrases from fashionable romance. You are struggling against the need, the thirst for the supernatural that you have, and you don't believe in it, the great supernatural, you don't believe in it, you would be so happy to believe in it! You pinched my leg like a shop-assistant at the Louvre would have pinched my little finger in smoothing on a pair of new gloves, it's the base pleasure of humiliating the grand lady of love passing by chance on the market of love, I couldn't cry out in front of a girl (Missie is a virgin), and I didn't want to give you the false joy of my painful emotion, / was out. When I'm

  not receiving guests, I don't need to say that I'm at home. Now, I have a bruise above my garter. Yesterday, it was black, today it's blue, tomorrow it will be yellow . . . then it will go away. . . . It's merely an erosion . . . from an employee of Eros!

  "You should be Eros himself, sir.

  "You're not afraid of much if the story of the oriental vase, which is a legend, exasperates you. I don't only love an oriental vase, I love you too; you are handsome because no one, I do believe, has yet seen you. You have over your eyes a blue veil, of the same blue as the bruise you gave me above the garter: that is the curtain of the temple. Happy, my dear friend, she who draws it aside to read in you! You are not taller than my dear objet d'art, standing next to each other, you could be two very white brothers. Only my alabaster vase seems more harmonious to me, less savage in its attitude, immobilized in the loveliest human position, the sexless position.

  . . . No, don't make those eyes at me, with the bluish veil drawn aside! I know what you're thinking. When I say: sexless, that doesn't mean I want to castrate anyone. My Tunisian urn is by turns a 'he' or a 'she,' for that's the way it likes it. She isn't forced to give an opinion, to prolong her satisfaction at feeling me caress her or to split with joy when I contemplate her. She is chaste, and I leave her chaste. You, I would like you to be a man.

  "Go and see the wenches, my friend! Go and see the wenches!

  "Now, let's talk more seriously.

  "You are twenty-two years old, you are an orphan, and you will be a doctor of medicine soon. Instead of wasting your body in dangerous exercises, do you want to get married idiotically, but with intelligence?

  "I'm not like those old mistresses who give their daughter to a lover who has cooled off. I'm more direct than that in

  matters! I'm proposing to you the only shameful bargain worthy of our mutual pride. Missie, Marie Chamerot, is really an honest child, having studied useless questions, but a good and docile instrument of maternity, if not to conceive love. She will become pretty if you want it. With a little love flesh on top of her virgin's flesh, she will round out her angles and take on more gracious looks. She isn't stupid, nor cruel, oh! no, she finishes off the little cats she steps on, so as not to see them suffer; she is incapable of any perceived bad action. She can become a very amusing companion merely by the alternation of her unconscious consciences. What's more, she speaks two languages properly: English and Italian, and she knows even better enough Parisian slang to distract a man's revery. Her hair is heavy. Her brain is heavy, but she must be taught to style her mind. She expects everything from a husband and has prepared nothing for him. I think I have explained my phrase: "I tried to make her a beautiful and witty courtesan." I must have scandalized you in telling you all this. I believe only in love, and I try to relate all my acts and all my words to it. She has understood nothing, if not that her very real honesty was moved to the point of turning for a moment towards ridiculous manifestations. She nearly loved me because . . . they will always love me who see me preach in the temple. I closed the sanctuary before the irreparable; if she hadn't remained an ignorant virgin, she would have fallen into a terrible bestiality, and no man would ever have been able to bring her out of the mire. I talked to her about religion as a mystic, she responded as ... a medical student and that did not suit my truly amorous temperament. She would have wanted to help me, unconsciously, me the chosen one, to receive my god. ... I don't need her. My god doesn't like girls like that, he needs priestesses who have seen no one but him. ... As for me, I have no idea how to skim through books on modern medicine, I have skimmed through men. ... 1 repeat: Missie is innocent, she

  spends her time making herself old through study and young through an affected childishness, which ages her even more. She has a small disappointment: a gentleman, absolutely ordinary, having obtained permission to court her, ended up asking me to marry him. She didn't love him, but, the day I threw the man out of the house, she cried. From that fateful day when a virgin glimpsed that love is perhaps a science one must know above all other sciences, and that it's not enough to be young to please, she has become an actress, awkwardly, alas! she copies me. And she has become, a terrible thing for a young girl, the caricature of an old woman. Now, she is no more jealous of me than 1 can be jealous of her, but she trembles, quite naturally, to think that she will lose everything . . . that I will always get everything before her.

  "I wouldn't be the great criminal I am if I weren't absolutely loyal. I propose then that you marry Missie. I will give her, whatever happens, a very appropriate dowry, and she will be my beneficiary if she marries you. A serious doctor (you will surely become a serious doctor) is not obligated to his wife when she brings him a fortune. The man who works seriously, in a couple, even if he didn't earn a cent, is always the protector of his companion and owes her nothing.

  "Don't imagine I'm setting a trap for you or that I want to put you to the test. It's more serious.

  "If you please me, I want to preserve you like the Tunisian vase, and I have to put you in the shadows of happiness. Happiness is me, and Missie is the curtain. She will screen you . . . from my light! besides, you can easily refuse my offer, only, watch out! Don't try, later on, to obtain through personal intrigues what you have been offered wholeheartedly and loyally, reasonably. I don't forgive tricks that are vulgar.

  "Next, don't think that I'm trying to marry off the girl with a stain.

  "I want to keep you as long as possible, that's all, and give some happiness back to the one who can teproach me with being myself.

  "Now, just as I had to use intetmediaries to obtain an alabastet vase with a rare exptession of form, I am obliged to . . . act as go-between to give you the chance to stay close to me, to both be happy through me.

  "And I want to settle the deal before any othet kind of transaction. Generally, women with expetience don't have such lucidity, pronounced loyalty, in matters of love.

  "Think about it! Bills of exchange of this kind should be signed in our blood. I warned you I didn't know how to write, but I know how to sign. I'm not being funny, I'm saying what is, what I think, everything I want. But you are free to not come back.r />
  "I'll expect you on Sunday, around noon, at my rooms, come via the garden. We'll have lunch together.

  "Depending on your answer, / remain your servant for life, and this phrase is not banal coming from my pen, o my little love friend."

  Eliante Donalger

  (By return post)

  "No! I'm splitting my sides! . . . One would think them the revelations of a clairvoyant:

  " 'You will be a serious doctor . . . you will be the husband of an ugly young person, but rich . . . you will be . . .

  "I'll be your lover and that's all there is to it, eh! or I'll teach you what stuff women like you are made of! If I had beaten you that night of our big sport, in front of the pot, you would love me without so much fuss!"

  Leon Reille

  (The same day, express letter)

  "I offer my apologies for a rather short letter, sent this morning, which will reach you, I hope, after this one. I told you that you sounded like a clairvoyant. It's not quite right. Those women are sometimes poor devils who lure the naive, because they need to make a living. You! It's better or worse. You try to corrupt the imagination for nothing, simply to defile or ... to amuse yourself even more, with the little hussy who is looking over your shoulder at this very minute, my future fiancee I'll enter your house neither by door nor by window, I'll not write to you any more. I don't like actresses, procurers even less.

  "I need more direct relations. I was ashamed of myself, having to satisfy my hunger for you with a wench. Now, I've lost my appetite. Your servant."

  (Same day, telegram)

  "Yes, Sunday at noon. As arranged."

  L.R.

  EON Reille, pushing open the little garden gate, felt his resolve weaken.

  It was a fine winter day, a Christmas day. All over the immense town, bells could be heard ringing, mad bells which beat the air with their sonorous wings like robust birds. And it was the whole earth, this poor little garden full of mysterious shadow, this poor frozen earth, flowering with frost after having flowered basketfuls of rare beauty. But the sun shone on the frost, the bells hummed in an atmosphere of hope, they beat joyfully on the man's brain making his reason take flight, scattering it to the four corners of the earth. Christmas! Christmas! . . . Just when one hopes no more, one hopes still.

  Leon had bought, for this holiday, a very elegant overcoat and a hat without a spring, a more fashionable hat. He did not want to appear a beggar for love, but the master, the one who would talk very loudly.

  "After all, what am I doing here?" he mused, while his nervous step made the gravel crunch and he resolutely climbed the three steps to the entrance.

  He lifted his head, caught sight of Eliante, standing,

  her hands outstretched, in the gteen dining room, that room of silvery willow green where he had already dined one night. Eliante came forwatd to meet him, as white as an angel, she came toward him hospitably, as a maternal woman who knows perfectly well why net love ftiend has come on this holy day of Christmas, while the bells of deliverance ring madly, the robust bells of human folly! And, behind her, a good fire blazed, the table was set.

  "Madam," he said, in a very cold tone he had been preparing since the doorstep, "I won't offet you my homage, I've come to get angry, so I think it's pointless to cover you with reproaches." (He added, shuddering a little): "Heavens! you're wearing white? It's strange. I thought you were an inconsolable widow? My compliments, moreover, white suits you very well."

  Eliante was wearing a long dressing-gown of ivory velvet, decorated with reddish lace, net ballroom hairstyle, the bonnet of smooth hair twisted into a low helmet, topped by a large coral pin of curious workmanship. Without much makeup, Eliante's complexion seemed even whiter from the reflections of old ivory she wore around her, and net impeccable bust stood out clearly, without a fold, under the velvet of the bodice draped seamlessly.

  "I believe a child is born to us this night, isn't it," she said, laughing a calm laugh, "for neither one of us has the look of people who have stayed up all night."

  "You are mistaken, madam," replied Leon, in his same ceremonious tone. "On the conttary I have just come from a night of prolonged debauchery, which led me to find myself in the street at this hour and in your neighborhood. What child are we talking about?"

  She closed the door, let fall the green silken folds which screened such a tender day the color of spring water.

  Leon threw his hat and his overcoat onto a chair, with a gesture of rage.

  "I meant that we have both conceived tonight, perhaps without knowing it, you amidst a student revelry 7 , I dreaming in my bed, a god other than the one mortals are ordinarily concerned with. Now, don't answer right away. It's disastrous to get angry on an empty stomach! Sit down there, in Iront of the fire which is not too hot, I assure you, warm yourself up and let me serve you, we shall be free, in spite of all the servile attitudes it may suit us to take, for we are quite alone, at this moment, in the world. Missie has gone to the inauguration of a public nursery, and my brother-in-law is accompanying her. As for me, I was expecting you."

  "This really is the limit," grumbled Leon, removing his gloves from his feverish hands. You were expecting me, dear madam? You might well have received a last telegram without flowers. At this student revelry, there was no shortage of women, I assure you!"

  Oh!" exclaimed Madame Donalger gaily, 'four telegrams, including one letter, to confirm your single visit, would have been a lot, my dear friend, since you would have arrived on time anyway. As for the flowers, thank you. I just happen to have on my mantelpiece some superb Christmas roses which one of your friends, carousing with you probably. Monsieur Leon Reille, sent me around midnight ..."

  Leon Reille bit his lips. Since he had no mustache, one could easily pick out the smile rising in the cruelty of the bite. Yet, he suffered, his eyes showed glimmers of a storm, he clenched his naked hands.

  "I've come. ... I must explain ... I don't want anything to eat, you understand! Madam, you really must take me for a pot for sale? . . . Eliante! Tell me, aren't you ashamed?"

  She remained calm, graciously worldly:

  "I'm not at all ashamed to love, better than the vain grimaces of a vulgar love, a man who dares . . . without wotrying about the possible consequences. You didn't know me when you followed me through the streets of my obscure neighbor-hood before following me through ballrooms? And you sought me discreetly, keenly, as one seeks supreme joy. You didn't know me when you said to a girl who had to disappear under the power of words, that . . . you preferred me. Faith begins thus . . . one follows blindly, and one finds. . . . Dear Leon of love, you will marry my niece."

  She burst out laughing.

  "No, I'll marry nothing at all! Give me something to drink, I'm choking! And I'm afraid to insult you too loudly! come on, Eliante! I reread your letter carefully before coming. What is this new comedy, and what symbol, black or white, is she hiding?"

  "No symbol, I neither can nor do I want to marry you, so I'm offering you eternity in another form . . . since you're always mixing people up ... "

  "Let's not joke any more! Do you love me, do you, Eliante? Do-you-love-me?"

  He put his elbows on the set table and stared at her, forcing himself to stay calm.

  Surrounded by the nuptial enchantment of her robe, she seemed very young, and her arms could be seen in the wide sleeves of the gown, her arms whiter against the lining of yellow silk. They were small like those of a child, neither thin, nor chubby, only small, giving rise to a feeling of childishness, and her small powerful hands ran, like separate individuals, carrying skirts trimmed with lace, rummaging around objects, creatures always in a state of agitation. Leon's pupils gradually dilated as he watched her hands dancing, so timidly, always fleeing, and the cruel irony of his mouth melted, 1 in the end, into a real smile of hope.

  "Eliante, look at me, instead of uncorking that bottle? No, your poisons will inebriate me no longer; I really thought about it last night. You must belong t
o me first . . . we'll talk afterwards. Those are my conditions. As for the rest, I don't care."

  She poured some amber wine for him in his glass and chose some water for herself.

  "Don't hurt me needlessly," she said, removing her hand from his. "We aren't in the carriage now! Yes, I'm looking at you, yes, you are a very attractive boy, with a serious mask, pure features, you don't make faces easily, with eyes veiled as though they are about to cry, and you never cry, do you, you are too proud? My ambition would be to see you cry with love ..."

  She withstood the blow of his fixed pupils without any apparent embarrassment and seemed to be staring at something inside him, something other than himself.

  "I'm tired," he said in a very low voice, his eyelids suddenly closed, "I don't want to die of sorrow, but I'm sleepy, you don't scare me, since you still attract me, you just humiliate me, Eliante, I have nothing to give you but myself, take me and don't keep on giving me charity. I'm really suffering, they are much too long, these preambles, I never cry, as you say . . . you won't have that pleasure. I can't understand how a woman can stay like this with no sign of physical emotion in front of a man who wants her. . . . You are horrible, if not ridiculous."

  When he opened his eyes, Eliante was on her knees before him and the train of her white skirt burned with all the reflections of the fire like a huge opal. She really was on both knees, her two small hands joined.