Her Lover (Belle de Seigneur)

by Albert Cohen

  'The worship of power is universal. Note how underlings bask in the sun of their leader, observe the doting way they look upon their chief, see them ever ready with a smile. And when he utters some inane pleasantry, just listen to the chorus of their sincere laughter. Yes, sincere. That's the most awful part of it. For underneath the self-interested love your husband has for me exists another, perfectly genuine and selfless love: the abject love of power, a reverence for the power to destroy. Oh that fixed and captivated grin of his, the obsequious civilities, the deferential curve of his backside as I talked to him. The moment the dominant adult male baboon steps into the cage, the younger, smaller, adolescent males get down on all fours, assuming the welcoming, receptive position of females, adopting the position of voluptuous vassalage, paying sexual homage to the power of destruction and death, the moment the dominant fearsome adult male baboon steps into the cage. Read up on apes and you will see that what I say is true.

  'Baboonery is everywhere. The worship of the military, custodians of the power to kill: baboonery and the animal reverence for strength. The thrill of respect when the heavy tanks roll by: baboonery. The crowd which cheers the boxer who is about to demolish his opponent: baboonery. The crowd urging him on to the kill, "Go on, flatten him!": baboonery. And when he has knocked his man out, they are proud to touch him and slap him on the back: "It's what sport's all about!" they yell. The adulation given to the stars of cycle racing: baboonery. And the transformation brought about in the bully trounced by Jack London who, because he has been well and truly thrashed, forgets his hate and from that day forth venerates the man who bested him: more baboonery.

  'Baboonery is everywhere. The crowds who cry out to be enslaved, who shake in orgasmic ecstasy when the square-jawed dictator, custodian of the power to kill, makes his appearance: baboonery. Their hands reaching out to touch the sanctifying hand of their leader: baboonery. Discreet, ecclesiastical, ministry baboons who stand behind their minister as he is about to sign the treaty and rush forward bearing blotting-paper and feel honoured as they beatifically dry his signature: such loyal little baboons! The gushing smiles of the ministers and ambassadors as they gather round the queen as she kisses the little girl who offers her a bouquet of flowers: baboonery. Baboonish too Benedetti's smile the other day at the Sixth Committee while old Cheyne read out his speech. The swine had on his fat face a smile which the thrill of veneration made, so to speak, pure, virginal and delicate. But that smile also signified that in loving the supreme chief he was really loving himself, for he felt that in some way he was part of the adorable Greatness which stood there droning on and on.

  'Baboons, the morons who call on the Italian dictator and then come and tell me rapturously about the brute's charming smile, "such a warm smile underneath," they all say in female surrender to the strong. Baboons, the people who swoon over some small act of charity attributed to Napoleon, the same Napoleon who said: "What are five hundred thousand dead to me?" They all have a weakness for strong men, and the smallest crumb of sweetness that falls from the table of the mighty is balm to their souls and they are bewitched. In the theatre, their eyes moisten as they watch some stiff old martinet of a colonel unbend and turn unexpectedly into a kindly old party. Oh the slaves! On the other hand, the really good man is always treated as though he is not quite right in the head. In plays, the villain is never ridiculed, but the good man often is and audiences laugh at him. And is there not more than a hint of contempt in the words "there's a good chap" or "he's a good sort"? And surely it's a dead give-away that earthly possessions are called "goods".

  'Baboonish worshippers of power, those American girls who stormed the railway carriage in which the Prince of Wales was travelling, kissed the cushions on which he had parked his behind, and gave him a pair of pyjamas to which each had contributed a few stitches. They did: it's a fact. The baboonery of the gale of laughter which convulsed the Assembly the other day when the British Prime Minister made a joke and the Chairman almost choked himself to death, on it. It was a silly joke, but the reception given to jokes is in direct proportion to the standing of the teller, and the laughter is no more than the acknowledgement of power.

  'Snobbery, which is the desire to be sucked into the ambit of the powerful, is baboonery and reverence for power. If the Prince of Wales forgets to do up the bottom button of his waistcoat, or if, because it's raining, he turns up the bottoms of his trousers, or if, because he has a boil under his arm, he raises his elbow when he shakes hands, the baboons fall over themselves to leave their bottom waistcoat buttons undone, order turn-ups for their trousers, and give overarm handshakes. And this fascination for the idiotic love-affairs of princesses: more baboonery. If a queen has a baby, all the ladies simply can't wait to find out how much the brat weighs and what his official title will be. But the real depths of baboonism are plumbed by the dim-witted dying soldier who asks to see the queen of his heart before he breathes his last.

  'The feminine urge to follow fashion, which simply means aping the powerful and wanting to be counted in the ranks of the strong, is baboonery. The habit of the great and the good, kings, generals, diplomats and even members of the French Academy, of wearing a sword which is the badge of the killer: baboonery. But the height of baboonery is the way people express their respect for He who is respectable above all things and their love for He who is Love, for they dare to say that He is Almighty: this is an abomination and an acknowledgement of their odious veneration of Might, which is nothing more nor less than the power to inflict hurt and, in the final analysis, the power to kill.

  'It is worship of the lowest, animal kind, and its vocabulary shows it for what it is. Words associated with Might are rooted in respect. A "great" writer, a "powerful" book, "elevated" sentiments, "lofty" inspiration. And behind them lurks the eternal image of the doughty, strapping war-dog and potential killer. On the other hand, adjectives denoting weakness are invariably expressive of contempt. A "small" mind, "low" sentiments, a "feeble" book. And why should "noble" and "chivalrous" be terms of praise? They are a hangover from the Middle Ages. Then only nobles and knights exercised real power, by force of arms, and they were doers of harm and killers of men and therefore respectable and admirable. Humanity caught napping! To express their admiration, the best the little people could come up with was two epithets redolent of feudal society in which war, that is murder, was the goal and supreme honour in the life of man! In medieval sagas, nobles and knights do little else but slaughter and butcher, and around them guts spill out of bellies, skulls crack open and ooze brains, and horsemen are cleft in twain, right down the middle. How noble! How chivalrous! Oh yes, the baboons were caught napping! For they linked moral beauty to physical might and the power to kill!

  'All they love and revere is Strength. To occupy a high position in society is strength. Courage is strength. Money is strength. Character is strength. Fame is strength. Beauty, the outward show and guarantee of health, is strength. Youth is strength. But old age, which is weakness, they loathe. In primitive tribes, the old are clubbed to death. When good middle-class girls cannot find a husband, they advertise in the newspapers and in their adverts they always make a point of stating that they have direct Expectations soon to be realized, which means that their mummies and daddies will soon drop dead, thank God. And I myself am repelled by old women who always insist on sitting next to me on trains. It never fails. Whenever some bearded old hag heaves herself into my compartment, she always makes a beeline for me, attaches herself to me like a limpet, while I hate her in silence and try to put as much space as I can between myself and her repulsive person which is soon to die. And when I stand up I do my level best to step on her corns, unintentionally of course.

  'What they call original sin is nothing more than the vague, shameful awareness we have of our baboonish nature and its disgusting affects. Just one out of countless examples of this base nature: smiling. Smiling mimics animal behaviour which we have inherited from our ancestors the primates. When o
ne homuncule smiles at another, he is signalling that he comes in peace and will not bite, and to prove it he bares his teeth inoffensively for him to see. For us descendants of the brutish beasts of the Stone Age, showing our teeth without using them to attack has become a peaceful greeting, a sign of meekness.

  'But enough. Why am I bothering with all this? I shall now begin the seduction. It's child's play. In addition to the two basic requirements, the physical and the social, all we need now are the right tactics. A matter of playing the right cards. At one in the morning, you in love. Come twenty to two, you and I off to station, off our heads, off to sun and sea, and maybe at last moment you left in lurch on station platform, to pay you back for the old man. Do you remember the old man? Sometimes at night I wear his long robe, dress myself up as my ideal Jew, with beard and poignant ritual ringlets and fur hat, dragging my feet, bending my back, artlessly waving my umbrella, an aged Jewman, noble since the start of time, O love of my life, transmitter of the Law, O redeeming Israel!, and I walk through the streets at night, to be mocked, proud to be mocked by them. But now: tactics.

  'First tactic: give the subject notice that she is about to be seduced. It's an excellent way of stopping her walking out on you. She stays because it's a challenge, because she wants to see pride take a fall. Tactic number two: demolish the husband. That's in the bag. Tactic number three: wheel out the poetic gambit. Behave like a haughty aristocrat, a romantic spirit unhampered by social convention, and back it up with sumptuous dressing-gown, sandalwood beads, black monocle, a suite at the Ritz, and attacks of liverishness, carefully disguised. All of which is designed to allow the little fool to work it out for herself that I belong to the miraculous race of Lovers, the antidote to a husband who takes laxatives, and the Gateway to Life Sublime. The husband, poor devil, cannot hope to be poetic. No one can keep up the pretence twenty-four hours a day. Constantly on view, he is forced to be himself, his pathetic self. All men are pathetic, including seducers when they are alone and not play-acting for the benefit of some stupid, starry-eyed female. Pathetic, the lot of them, and I most pathetic of all!

  'When she gets home, she will compare her husband with her supplier of poems and she will despise him. Every little thing will generate contempt, even her husband's dirty washing. As if Don Juan didn't put his dirty shirts in the laundry basket! But the stupid little fool, who only ever sees him when he is on stage, performing, always at his best, freshly bathed and elegantly spruced, imagines that here is a hero whose shirts never get dirty, who never has to go to the dentist. But he goes to the dentist, of course he does, just like any husband. But he never admits it. Don Juan is an actor who is never off stage, he is camouflaged, he disguises any physical shortcomings and does in secret everything a husband does openly and unaffectedly. But because he does these things in secret, and because she has no imagination whatsoever, he appears to her to be some sort of demigod. Oh the filthy, nostalgic look in the eye of the soon-to-be-unfaithful little fool! Oh her mouth gaping to catch the noble words of her Prince Charming, who has intestines ten metres long like everyone else! Oh the little numskull who fills her head, which is in the clouds, with thoughts of magic and lies. Everything about her husband irritates her. His radio and his harmless custom of listening to the news three times a day, poor sweet man, his slippers, his rheumatism, the way he whistles in the bathroom, the noises he makes when he cleans his teeth, his innocent mania for calling her by tender, baby names, like pet and petal or plain darling at every possible opportunity, a habit which has lost its charm and turns the knife in the wound. What Madame requires is an endless supply of sublimity.

  'So she arrives home. Brief moments ago the seducer had hung garlands upon her, called her the goddess of the forest and Diana returned in human form, and here she is with a husband who turns her into a pet, and this makes her feel cross. Brief moments ago, sweet and captivated, she had listened eagerly as her seducer filled her head with elevated topics of conversation — painting, sculpture, literature, culture, nature — and she had responded with delight: in other words a couple of bad actors hamming it up. Whereas now the poor husband asks her in all innocence what she makes of the behaviour of the Boulissons, who came to dinner two months ago, since when, silence, not a peep out of them, nor invited back either. "And to cap it all, I've just been told they've had the Bourrassuses round to their place! You realize they only got to know the Bourrassuses through us! In my opinion we shouldn't have anything more to do with them. What do you think?" And so on and so forth, including the touching "You know, petal, everything was just fine and dandy with the boss, he calls me by my Christian name." In short, not many sublime moments with her husband, no pretentious exchanges of shared tastes for Kafka, and it dawns on the little fool that she is ruining her life with her snoring clod of a spouse, that her humdrum existence is not worthy of her. For she is as stupid as she is vain.

  'But the funniest part of it all is that she resents her husband, not only because he is not poetic but also and especially because she cannot behave poetically with him. She might not know it, but she blames him because he is witness to the petty indignities which she suffers daily: her sour breath first thing in the morning, her rumpled hair which would not look out of place on a circus clown or some drink-sodden old hag, and all the rest of it, not forgetting perhaps her evening dose of liquid paraffin or her prunes. Living cheek by jowl with toothbrushes and slippers, she feels that she has been knocked off her pedestal and she lays the blame squarely at the door of the poor unfortunate husband who soon reaches the end of his tether. But come five in the afternoon, behold her process in triumph when, freshly laundered, with hair set and dandruff-free, more exultant and not less proud than the winged Victory of Samothrace, she goes forth with lively step to meet her noble, secret stomach-churner, and as she goes she sings Bach chorales, glorying in the knowledge that soon she will be performing sublime and beautiful things for her knotter-of-intestines, and that she will in consequence feel as immaculate as a princess in her hair-do which has really turned out most awfully well.

  'On the day they married, Jewish women strict in the faith used to shave their heads and wear a wig. I like that. An end to beauty, thanks be to God! But take, on the other hand, the most glamorous star of the silver screen. She believes she is irresistible. She offers herself in alluring poses, which invariably feature her rump. Now because she is no more than the sum of her beauty, that devil's claw, all I have to do to punish her for her looks is to imagine that she has been given a strong enema and has the squits, and she immediately loses her charm and any hold she had over me! She can live in the lavatory for all I care! But a Jewess in a wig never loses her aura, for she has chosen to live on a level where no physical imperfection can undermine her. I've lost my thread. What was I saying about the little fool?'

  'She realizes she's ruining her life.'

  'Bless you,' he said, and with thumb and forefinger sharpened his aristocratic scimitar of a nose as though to sharpen his thoughts, and then his expression melted. 'Yes, there is nothing so noble as holy matrimony, the union of two human beings who come together not through passion, which is carnality, animal ruse and transience, but in tenderness, which is the image of God. Yes, a union of two miserable creatures doomed to sickness and death who seek the sweet joy of growing old together and being the only family each of them knows. "Brother and sister shalt thou call thy wife," says the Talmud. (He suddenly realized he had made up the quotation and went on more warily.) Verily, verily, I say unto you, the action of a wife who squeezes her husband's boils and tenderly drains the pus therefrom weighs more heavily and is finer by far than all the bucking and fishy writhings of Anna Karenina. So praise to the Talmud and shame upon adulterous women, for they have an animal itch and are only too ready to rush off, off their heads, off to the sea. Yes, animal. For Anna is in love with the body of that oaf Vronsky, that's the simple truth of it, and all her fine words are a smokescreen which hangs like lace over his meat. Do I hear v
oices accusing me of interpreting existence from the viewpoint of the materialist? But if some malfunction of the glands had made Vronsky fat and put thirty kilos of flab on his belly, the equivalent of three hundred packets of butter each weighing a hundred grams, would she have fallen in love with him the moment they met? Meat rules. There's no more to be said.

  'Tactic number four: the strong-man ploy. Seduction is a game that's played dirty! The cock cockadoodles to let her know that he's a thug, the gorilla beats his chest, boom-boom, and soldiers have it made. "Die Offiziere kommen!" cry the young women of Vienna, and it's out with the comb. Strength is their obsession, and they miss nothing which seems to signal its presence. If he stares unblinkingly into her eyes, she feels deliciously stirred, her legs turn weak at the gorgeous threat he represents. If he settles back authoritatively in his armchair, she reveres him. If he's the laconic, English-explorer type who takes his pipe out of his mouth to say "Yes", she reads hidden depths in this "Yes" and admires the way he bites on the stem of his pipe and the disgusting noise the dottle makes in the bowl. It's virile and it thrills her. The seducer may talk rubbish, but if he talks self-confidently, in a manly voice, deep-throated and husky, she will gaze at him with eyes wide and moist, as though he had invented a new kind of relativity of even wider ramifications. She picks up everything: his walk, say, or that way he has of suddenly turning round, from which she deduces from deep inside her pretty little head that he is aggressive and dangerous, thank God. And to cap it all, to attract her, I am required to dominate and humiliate her husband, though it makes me feel shame for me and pity for him. Yes, I was ashamed when I had him on the phone just now, ashamed of the nauseating tone of superiority I put on for your benefit, which is indispensable if you want to do the husband down and ruin his credibility in the eyes of the little fool.