The juggler

by Rachilde, 1860-1953

  "Madame Eliante, I'm very ill.

  "No; all the same, I'm not as ill as all that. I eat and drink, I light cigarettes. I go to the amphitheatre. I read big books. I set, yesterday, a fractured ankle, and, if it isn't en-

  tirely woman's importance, I looked at that theatre girl's leg with relative interest. A little dancer, a walk-on at the Gaite Montparnasse who broke her foot jumping on the set. You hear! I have her address. Ah! but, no, I don't want to go mad! Moreover, she's very pretty, quite young, much younger than you. Now, she uses funny language . . .

  "Probably, the habit I'm acquiring of making someone of your acquaintance tell me stories makes me difficult on the choice of subjects. I'm becoming as idiotic as a high-society man, and I'm shocked by a grammar mistake. Having scarcely skimmed you, I come away from my reading with my brain scrambled, my back burning, swearing no one will catch me at it again, and the moment I come across simpler stories, I declare them to be very boring, bland as the fillers in the local newspaper. I remember that one of my friends, a great lover of new poetry, used to say to me: 'Between ourselves, I'll admit I don't understand a thing of what those poets write . . . only, after the symbolists, I can no longer read the others, it seems to me they are the ones who make grammar mistakes!'

  "My own case is more serious. After the fruit of the islands, I can't stand the acidulation of apples. These good Norman women have a disastrous moral effect on me. Can it be I'm finally on the road to wisdom?

  "... Let's chat a little mouth to mouth, what do you say, Eliante? You really should read certain serious authors, not at all meant for women, certain terrifying chapters about nuns. . . . Medically, persons of your sex who allow themselves the luxury of a supernatural physicality—and it's clear that you live as you come—end up with illnesses of which the least horrible is St. Vitus's dance ... if they aren't already suffering complete paralysis. If you care about the pretty suppleness of your limbs, beware, and try to sin like everyone else.

  "I would even go further, if your servant doesn't please you, or if he should communicate his own concern at not

  pleasing, look for another who responds better to your aspirations . . . worldly or theatrical.

  "What the devil, I'll undertake to look for him for you willingly! I even prefer this last alternative, I'll choose with the greatest discernment! There's the memory of your husband? If you think they're all like him! No! All men are not crippled. Your husband (if he wasn't already dead, poor man, I would go and wring his neck with pleasure) needed to supplement the insufficiency of his . . . plastic with an overflowing of passion which I would dare qualify as criminal, despite my great distrust of big words. They are rudely depraved, his little wax Eliantes . . . and their elder sister is much too chaste. He has unbalanced the character of a loving woman, he has killed the taste for happiness in you, to replace it with an appetite for renunciation. Unless . . .

  "I love you! You're right. You're right slowly, little by little, the way a bird builds its nest . . .

  "And you are making your nest in my reason, I feel you pulling off a piece of wool here, a thread of silk there, one of my hairs further on. . . . You will pull everything off! Soon I'll be a little child naked in the strong winter wind . . . and no woman, ugly or beautiful, will want to warm me up in the folds of her skirt!

  "You are right because what we ask of the mistresses of our twenty-two years is a little more than sexual appeasement. If you had given yourself the first evening, the next day I would have had the sadness of thinking that ... it was all the same, at the same time having the normal desire to start all over again . . . to be finished faster. At present, everything went well with others . . . the only one I want is you, not for one night, but for the only night of unique love, the one that covers the whole earth with one beat of its black wing. I don't know if I love you really, but I would like to die in your arms

  to be quite certain to remain there. . . . (For example, no coffin for three, all right? May that nefarious husband no longer take up half my place. Free translation! Give me a concession in perpetuity . . . but in a cemetery where I forbid him to stick his nose.) Have you thought about this: your husband's skeleton looks like every other skeleton, and the wound on his face disappears beneath the same patina of horror? Go into this idea thoroughly for me! He has a skeleton like anyone else's! I don't want to offend you with my medical student jokes, my beautiful beloved. I have difficulty swallowing what 1 prescribe for myself . . . without sugar! You, you have a bed like an easter egg, full of surprises, you can change embroidered cushions, you can vary the lace of your sheets, and you sleep in there like those spoiled children who find again in the morning yesterday's candy, the only difference being there's more of it. Me, I go to sleep my mouth salty with sorrow. It's no good smiling at it and devouring it silently all day long ... all night. . . . In the morning, it's the same . . . the only difference being there's more of it, like your candy, minus the sugar!

  "Eliante, my beloved, you are walking in the autumn of a world . . . and I am arriving for the dawn of the other world! In the name of art, of the love of forms, of colors, of all the silent or speaking graces, turn around, do not go down the stairway of rotten dead leaves . . . give me a sign. The young men of tomorrow want to remember you! I beg you to choose me as an interpreter. I come to ask you for my share of pleasure to affirm to them, later, in front of the dissection tables, the fertilizing joy of dream . . . when I will have stopped dreaming.

  "For there are, aren't there, women who don't kill the chimera? One can hope, can't one, that there is something besides the eternal disappointment of the morning? If your mouth is perfumed like an unknown fruit, your saliva is bitter

  like tears I know . . . and I forbid you, I, a doctor, to take your secret with you."

  Leon Reille

  (White card, azure watermarks.)

  "Madame Eliante Donalger begs Monsieur Leon Reille to do her the honor of attending the matinee dance to be held at her home on the 5 th of January.

  "Juggling to the piano."

  E.D.

  eon, in black evening dress and a white satin waistcoat, since the affair was a ball for girls, had arrived early, hoping to see her a while before the ceremonious entries, but he found only Mademoiselle Marie Chamerot already sur-' rounded by an extremely active group.

  "There you are, my dear," said Missie, in the tone of a young girl welcoming a newcomer for a game of croquet. "Good! Stand over there, be good and admire me. Eh? I have the performance of a first communicant. What a figure!"

  She turned on one heel, her skirt of illusory tulle covering a white silk dress, a bouquet of primroses at the waist, another in her hair, well curled with the curling iron and wearing such a low-cut dress that the ribbon shoulder straps fell down over her thin arms. She seemed very happy to meet her friends at home and talked to them about forthcoming delights like someone who is not very well informed.

  "Yes, my dears, we're hoping to see Lidot, the big comic singer, he promised, I think, to come as Harlequin to amuse us and then we'll have lunch at small tables, some champagne,

  the very depths of my aunt's cellar, an indigestible return from the islands."

  "We're going to get drunk, then!" said an adorable little person in muslin, without silk underskirts because it's purer and simply wearing a Mechlin lace bib, because it's more babyish.

  There were about fifteen of them all in white, classmates, school friends, patrons of public nurseries, cyclists, a swarm of butterflies the color of snow, delicious snowflakes, some pretty, others less so, some downright ugly, with circles under their eyes, layers of yellow on each side of their nose, rather running to seed, with a decided air to become exceptional women, if no one married them, all armed with diplomas and affecting vulgar language, for grand sentences are a drag, and, between ourselves, one can forget all about Professor Whatshisname; all good girls who like to laugh, little plump bourgeoises or pale offspring, too well nourished, or sickly, madly keen to find
a husband without the signs of a large dowry on their costume and resolved to take him honestly by storm.

  This swarm of modern butterflies (the old ones, those of the open fields, are of a different white) moved into a large salon where Eliante must have walked an hour or two after the caterers had stopped by. It smelled of island fruit. The large white drapes covering the walls were held back by thick garlands of natural mistletoe, and these garlands made an imaginary clicking of fine pearls run throughout the room, in the brightness of electric bulbs. On the ceiling, Algerian silk, white with satiny stripes, was quilted with tufts of mistletoe, scattering on the cloth which glossed the carpet, green as a trimmed lawn, with other fine pearls which the young people picked up carefully, fearing untimely slips.

  Green palms and sprigs of mistletoe alternated in tall crystal vases, and, along the benches of striped Algerian cloth,

  fabulous fans with white plumes put wings on the decor. The men, all very young, fell into it one by one like beetles into cream, took on the awkward airs of insects whose feet are stuck, and copied Leon Reille, sucking their hats in despair.

  The young girls had come alone, dropped off by their mothers or chamber maids on the front steps of the mansion, and they had an open physiognomy. The young men continued to look like they were at a funeral, seemed accompanied by the fear of a possible mother-in-law.

  It was Missie who received, keeping Monsieur Donalger the deaf diplomat on her right, and she rapidly took care of her visitors:

  "Well, is it really you, my dear Noriac? Oh! how kind. . . . You were tired out, you were saying, the other evening at Mathilde's ball? I see things are going better! Well, Monsieur Colmans l You will be expressly forbidden to put mustard in the champagne today, we will watch you."

  Leon was in torment. He was no longer paddling in cream. It was like quicklime cooling around his feet, chaining him to the floor, turning him into an automaton, obliging him to speak, in a neutral voice, to say bloodless things, to dare only evasive gestures. And he would watch the others dance since he didn't know how or didn't wish to dance.

  He ended up running across Missie, asked her quietly if Madame Donalger was ill . . . exactly . . .

  "Her? Never in her life! She is too good a mistress of the house. She is preparing surprises for us. Perhaps Lidot hasn't kept his word, and she's sending out for something to replace him . . . perhaps . . . her juggler. . . . She must be practicing at the moment. Heavens! You know, she treats us to that highlight once ... in a blue moon, and it's quite natural she should be busy with it. . . . One is always very afraid . . .

  "What? It's she who will . . . juggle to the piano?"

  Missie made an appropriate face:

  "Oh, my dear sir, what can you be thinking! Do you take her for a clown! You'll see . . . what you'll see."

  And she turned, disappeared, cutting through the wave of young white girls with all the brutality of a worthy young milkmaid in her dairy.

  He told himself he was an idiot. Eliante was an eccentric society woman but too concerned with proper behavior to allow herself such an exercise in public. He went back to gnawing the edge of his hat, while he examined the back of the room, where a harmony group had just appeared. Midway between a platform still veiled in large Algerian curtains, stood a harp all in gold flowering with lily of the valley, forming a question mark on the ramp of an improvised theatre. A girl, an artist, that much could be guessed just from the way she dressed: a white wool peplum, a poor dress, yet so gracious, sat near the harp on an X of green velvet, and on either side of the girl two little boys chubby and curly, one brown-haired one blond, stood respectfully—two angels in front of the madonna—holding tiny tambourines. There was a piano which couldn't been seen, Eliante having long ago condemned the disastrous effect produced by the official presence of this box with its heavy right angles like a station buffet.

  "How well she understands feasts of innocence!" thought Leon, marvelling at the exquisite art extending to the slightest details.

  And when there fell onto him, from the Algerian ceiling, one of these fine pearls, after which the young dancers ran, he shuddered in spite of himself, as though his hair were wet from a teardrop.

  A servant, in white satin livery, which made him look like a very great lord in the midst of other men in black, came and set out chairs, preparing a semi-circle, facing the theatre.

  At this signal, the orchestra preluded lightly, gaily, then the great curtains opened onto a decor of snow of a pretty, refreshing artificiality, white hills, Christmas trees, a carpet of crystalline frost, and, suddenly, the enchantment of a tender pink light lit up Polichinelle, the comic singer Lidot monstrously humpbacked and joyously multicolored. He was given a warm welcome. The young men brightened up, the girls guffawed like children at the Punch and Judy show at the Tuileries.

  Lidot sang the most admissible couplets in his repertory, recited some absurd monologues. He was applauded for everything, and called back.

  The lords in white satin passed around champagne glasses. Lidot disappeared under the closed curtains. There was an intermission.

  During this intermission, Mademoiselle Marie Chamerot played practical jokes, sent around a rumor that, very indisposed, the awaited juggler would not appear.

  In one group, they proposed dancing.

  "How distressing," the old deaf diplomat began again, accompanying his niece everywhere and supporting her with his gestures of disappointment, "if she let us down. . . . We couldn't replace her, not her! ..."

  Leon felt the approach of disappointment, and, curious as a child, he hoped all the same for something better than a comic singer in a hurry to get his social obligation out of the way.

  From group to group, he collected only vague pieces of gossip, for he hardly knew this world of young people, rich or poor, dowry seekers, not missing a white ball, where generally one drinks well, the parents of these girls having every interest in taking care of the good matches.

  "Hush, hush! . . . It's her!"

  The curtains opened on the pretty decor of snow somewhat changed. There was a table in the center, a table covered with the traditional striped cloth of the magician.

  More feverish, the waltz grew stronger, a jet of light sprang, the color of sulphur, a stormy flash of lightning, and the juggler appeared immediately, greeted by a thunder of the most obligatory applause, since it was indeed, this time, the mistress of the house who came to entertain, in person, all these children! . . .

  Eliante Donalger wore the tight-fitting leotard of the acrobat, a very high-necked leotard of black silk, ending at the neck in the corolla of a dark flower. Only her arms were bare. A belt of black velvet embroidered with diamond stars encircled her thighs, and she was wearing a little white wig, powdered, a clown's wig, ending in a crest under a diamond butterfly. For her modesty, she had put on a velvet mask, and of her skin one could really only see her mouth, very red, her mouth between parentheses ... on a black and white page!

  It smiled, this mouth. That emphasized her dimples. Missie pranced, threw the primroses of her bouquet, and the men, standing, behind her chair, felt seized by the little thrill that takes all men in front of the form undisguised despite the disguise.

  "Very nice!" murmured someone.

  "Be quiet!" shouted Leon Reille, quivering with an anxiety impossible to disguise, that one.

  Missie gave him a malicious tap with her fan. Eliante came forward on the side with the table, bowed, and everyone fell silent, because the gesture was serious like the bow of a swashbuckler. There were boys and girls there, scarcely two or three serious men, but you could have heard, now, a fly expire in the milky draperies.

  Madame Donalger held herself straight from head to toe like a statue, her breasts swelling the leotard but little, her

  hips attached high, allowing, without a false movement, an almost masculine appearance.

  Leon admired her to the point of suffering. Was she going to torture everyone at once? It would be intole
rable! He would go and snatch off her mask to prove to them all that she looked like the little wax dolls, the little ivory dolls? Was she going to juggle with that in front of them? No! he would not allow it! . . .

  She picked up, on the table, a dagger with an ebony handle, threw it in the air and let it fall to the ground, where it stuck, still quivering, its steel blade casting blue reflections, then she took another one, made it fly, caught it again, tried its point on her index finger.

  So the waltz murmured, in the background, letting the single amorous harp vibrate. Eliante seized all the knives, threw them with a measured movement, caught them in flight successively, making them turn higher, in a diadem of blue flames, above her forehead. She juggled very simply, but really, with heavy knives, quite sharp, and, what would have been ordinary for an artiste at the Folies-Bergere or Olympia, seemed amazing for a society woman.