Great French Short Stories

by Paul Negri

  Afterward, preceded by the Commander-of-a-Thousand-Trifles, the Tetrarch and his entourage did what they could to show their guests the honors of the palace, of the titanic, gloomy palace streaked with pallor.

  Their first stop would be at the panorama of the Islands, as seen from the Observatory; afterward they would descend from one story to the next, through the Park, the Menagerie, and the Aquarium, all the way down to the vaults.

  Hoisted to the heights (and pneumatically at that), the procession hastily crossed, on tiptoe, the apartments that Salomé occupied, to an accompaniment of countless slamming doors into which disappeared two or three Negresses’ backs, with vertebrae of oiled bronze. What was more, in the exact center of a room tapestried with majolicas (so very yellow!) they found an abandoned and enormous ivory basin, a good-sized white sponge, some moist satins, a pair of pink sandals (so very pink!). Then, a room filled with books; next, another crammed with metallotherapeutic equipment; a spiral staircase; and finally they breathed the upper air of the platform—ah! just in time to see the disappearance of a young girl, harmoniously bemuslined in spidery jonquil with dots, who was manipulating the pulleys so as to let herself glide into space, down toward the lower stories . . . !

  The princes were already falling all over themselves with gallant salaams about their intruding, but they quieted down altogether when they saw a ring of astonished eyes, full of the apparent confession: “Well, well, after all, nothing up here is any of our business.”

  And then a promenade in the open air, with terse expressions of stifled appreciation, around the Observatory Dome, which contained a huge equatorial telescope fifty-four feet long, a movable dome, decorated with waterproof frescoes, whose bulk of one hundred tons was balanced on fourteen steel bars in a vat of magnesium chloride and could rotate in two minutes, the story ran, under a single pressure from Salomé’s hand.

  Come to think of it, suppose these exotic freaks should dream up the idea of pitching us over the edge, these two princes thought, with a simultaneous shudder. . . . But they were ten times more vigorous, the two of them in their skin-tight uniforms, than this whole dozen of nobles, all pale, hairless, their fingers laden with rings, wrapped up like priests in their shining gilt brocades. And they diverted themselves by singling out their galley, down below in the harbor, like a coleopteron with a thorax of rubbed sheet-iron.

  And they listened to an enumeration of the islands, an archipelago of natural cloisters, each one with its own caste, etc.

  They descended through a chamber of Perfumes where the Arbiter of Elegance made a note of the gifts which Their Highnesses would like to take along, all of them secretly sabotaged by Salomé: make-up without carbonate of lead, powder without white lead or bismuth, rejuvenators without cantharis, lustral waters without mercurial protochloride, depilatories without arsenic sulphide, milk without corrosive sublimate or hydrated lead oxide, genuinely vegetable dyes without silver nitrate, hypo-sulphide of soda, copper sulphate, sodium sulphide, potassium cyanide, acetate of lead (can such things be!) and two demijohns containing perfume bouquets for spring and for autumn.

  At the end of a dank, interminable corridor with a smell of ambush about it, the Commander opened a door that was green with moss, covered with fungi as sumptuous as jewels, and they were surprised to find themselves in the midst of the vast silence of that famous Hanging Park—ah, just in time to see, around the bend of a path, the disappearance of a svelte young form, hermetically bemuslined in spidery jonquil with black dots, escorted by molossine bats and greyhounds, whose playful barking, almost sobbing for sheer loyalty, gradually faded away into distant echoes.

  Oh, everywhere, echoes from unknown passages, filling that austere green solitude, kilometrically deep, sprinkled with patches of light, furnished exclusively with an army of rigid pines, whose bare trunks of a salmon-flesh tint spread, far above, far above, their dusty horizontal parasols. The bars of sunlight lay down between these tree trunks with the same gentle calm they might have between the pillars of some claustral chapel with grillwork vents. A sea breeze tried to penetrate this lofty timber, with a strange distant murmur, like an express train in the night. Then the high-altitude silence took shape again and made itself at home. Nearby, oh, somewhere, a bulbul discharged some rewarding remarks; from a great distance another answered; just as if this were their home, their century-old dynastic aviary. And the group moved on, hazarding guesses as to the thickness of this artificial soil, with its thick felt of dead leaves and pine-needle cushions left by a thousand yesteryears, forming a comfortable lodging for the roots of those pines, so patriarchal! Next were vast gulfs of lawn, grassy slopes like dreams about a faun’s kermis; and stagnant sheets of water where swans that wore earrings far too heavy for their spindle necks were immersed in ennui and old age; and endless decamerons of polychromatic statues with fractured pedestals, but posing with surprising—nobility.

  Finally, the gazelle enclosure acted as a transition—it didn’t pretend to be anything else—between the orchards on one extreme, the Menagerie and the Aquarium on the other.

  The deer hardly condescended to raise their eyelids; the elephants shifted their weight to the tune of a harsh crack-crack of plaster, but their thoughts were elsewhere; the giraffes were dressed modestly in soft coffee-and-cream, but they had exaggerated mannerisms and stubbornly stared over the heads of this brilliant court; the monkeys never for a moment interrupted the domestic scenes of their phalanstery; the aviaries’ glitter was deafening; the reptiles, for nearly a week, had been endlessly shedding skin; and the stables just happened to be deprived of their finest animals, stallions, mares, and zebras, which had been lent to the municipality for a special cavalcade in honor of the day.

  The Aquarium! Ah! That is it, the Aquarium! We’ll stop here. How silently it gyrates . . . !

  Labyrinth of grottoes, corridors to the right, to the left, each compartment revealing through glass luminous vistas of undersea nations.

  Their moors, everywhere dolmens studded with viscous gems, arenas with graded basalt seats, where crabs wallow together in couples, stubborn and fumbling in their after-dinner good spirits, their small eyes roguish and hard-bitten.

  Their plains, plains of fine sand, so fine that it sometimes lifts in the breeze after the waving tail of some flat fish just arrived from far away, fluttering like a liberty banner, scrutinized, as he passes and leaves us behind and goes his way, by large eyes that dot the sand in spots and have no other interest in life.

  And the desolation of their steppes, housing only one blasted and petrified tree, colonized by trembling clusters of sea horses . . .

  And, crossed by natural bridges, their mossy hollows, where the slated carapaces of king crabs with rattails ruminate, wallowing, some capsized and flailing, but no doubt intentionally, so as to exercise . . .

  And, below the chaotic ruins of their arches of triumph, the sea needles moving along like frivolous ribbons; and the haphazard navigations of hairy nuclei, a tuft of bristles around the matrix, which can fan itself thus when traveling becomes tedious . . .

  And their fields of sponges, sponges like lung remains; thickets of truffles, all in orange velvet; and a great cemetery for pearly molluscs; and those plantations of asparagus, tumefied and pickled in the alcohol of Silence . . .

  And, as far as the eye can see, their prairies, prairies dotted with white anemones, fat and healthy onions, bulbs of violet mucus, bits of intestine that got lost and, indeed, began existing again, stumps with antennae that blink at a coral reef nearby, a thousand aimless warts; an entire flora, fetal, claustral, vibratile, fermenting that eternal dream, of someday achieving a mutual whisper of congratulations among themselves about their condition . . .

  Oh, just look, that high plateau: hanging on like a leech, a polyp keeps its vigil, the area’s gross and glabrous minotaur . . . !

  Before departing the Pope of Snow turns to the halted procession and speaks, as if reciting an ancient lesson:

&nbs
p; “No day, no night, my friends, no winter, nor spring, nor summer, nor autumn, nor any other weathercocks. Loving, dreaming, without a change of position, in the cool repose of the imperturbably blind. O world of contentment, yours is a sightless, supreme beatitude, while we, we are being dehydrated by other-worldly hunger pangs. And why are our antennae, our own senses, not bounded by the Blind, the Opaque, the Silent, why do they follow a scent that leads outside of our realm? And why are we so incapable of curling up in our own little corner and sleeping off the drunken stupor of our sad little Self?

  “But, O submarine villegiatures, we do have two feasts to glut our other-worldly hunger pangs that are worthy of you: the face of the too-beloved, shut up tight on the pillow, a flattened headband glued down by the final sweat, an agonized mouth opening on pallid teeth in an aquarium ray of the Moon (oh, pluck not, pluck not!)—and the Moon herself, a sunflower, yellow, crushed, desiccated by agnosticism. (Oh! Try, try to pluck her!)”

  And this was the Aquarium: but could those foreign princes have understood?

  And, in single file, speedily and cautiously, they moved down the main corridor of the Gynecium, with its paintings of callipedic scenes and the rotten melancholy of its feminine odors: all they heard was the trickle of a waterspout—to the left? to the right?—whose freshness moistened the thin thread of a cantilena, unforgettably oppressed, miserable and sterile.

  And lest their ignorance of the fertility rites might lead them to commit some fatal error, the princes continued at the same discreet pace across the tetrarchic necropolis: two rows of cupboards, masked by life-size portraits, containing urns and thousands of realistic relics, but only affecting to the family, you know what I mean.

  But, look here, what they absolutely insisted upon, was seeing their old friend Iokanaan again!

  So they followed an official with a key embroidered at right angles to his spine, who stopped at the end of an old sewer that smelled of niter, and, pointing out a grating, lowered it to waist height with a mechanism ; and they could approach and perceive, inside a small cell, that unfortunate European, who was getting to his feet, having been interrupted as he lay flat on his stomach, his nose in a mess of ragged papers.

  Hearing two voices wish him a polite good-morning in his native tongue, Iokanaan stood erect and straightened his thick spectacles, which had been patched up with wire.

  Oh, good Lord, his princes had come! How many dirty winter nights, with his clogs soaking up the muddy snow, he had been at the head of all the paupers going home after a day of wage-earning, and, pausing for a moment there, while tyrannical policemen on horseback restrained the crowd, he had watched these two dismount, covered with plumes, from their heavy, pompous coaches, and climb between two banks of drawn sabers up the great staircase of their palace, that palace with a giorno windows at which, as he moved on, he shook his fist, muttering every time that an “era” had to come! And now, it had come, that era! In his own country, the long-promised revolution was a fact! And its poor old prophet, Iokanaan, was a belated god! And this personalized royal measure, this far-flung heroic expedition his princes had undertaken to deliver him, was certainly the moving ceremony the people had demanded in confirmation of the advent of this Universal Easter Day!

  At first he automatically doubled up in a bow, in the manner of his own country, having to think of a speech that would be memorable, historic, fraternal of course, but dignified as well. . . .

  Illico, his words were cut off short by the northern satrap’s nephew, an apoplectically bald army veteran, who insisted on mumbling irrelevantly to everyone that, following the example of Napoleon I, he detested “ideologists”: “Ah, ha! Look at you, an ideologist, a scribbler, a dishonorable discharge, a bastard of Jean Jacques Rousseau. So this is where you finally decided to be hanged, you classless pamphleteer! Good riddance! I hope your grimy pate is quick about finding your colleagues from the Bas-Bois at the bottom of a guillotine basket! Yes, I mean the Bas-Bois conspiracy, yesterday’s fresh heads.”

  Oh, the brutes, the indestructible brutes! And the Bas-Bois plotting had failed! His brothers, assassinated! And there was no one to give him the affecting details of the affair. Finished, finished; nothing left but to be ground, like his brothers, under the Constitutional Heel. The wretched publicist resolved to stick to a rigid silence, waiting for the upper classes to leave so that he could accept death in his corner; two long white tears flowed out under his spectacles along his emaciated cheeks toward the meager beard. And suddenly they saw him raise himself to his bare feet, stretching his hands after an apparition, to which he gurgled some of the softest diminutives of his mother tongue. They turned around—ah!—just in time to see the disappearance, in a tinkling of keys, through the lambency of that in pace, a young form unmistakably bemuslined in spidery jonquil with black dots. . . .

  And Iokanaan once again fell flat on his stomach among his litter, and, noticing that he had upset the inkwell into his stack of papers, he began blotting the ink, tenderly, like a child.

  The procession climbed away, without comment; the northern satrap’s nephew fingered the stickpin of his military collar and chewed over his principles.

  III

  In a mode uniting joy and fatalism an orchestra of ivory instruments was improvising a unanimous miniature overture.

  The court came in and was hailed by a lush hullabaloo from two hundred luxurious guests who raised themselves on their fine couches. A brief halt was made before a pyramid of shelves containing presents offered to the Tetrarch on this occasion. The two northern princes nudged each other with their elbows and excitedly took from around their necks the Necklace of the Iron Fleece, which they bestowed on their host. But neither one dared to put it around his neck. The aesthetic mediocrity of that necklace was glaring enough, especially here. And as for its honorific value, they felt, not having observed anything similar around them, that the explanations required to make it clear definitely risked falling flat, or at best merely achieving a polite success.

  Everyone took his place; Emerald-Archetypas introduced his son and his grandson, two magnificent specimens (magnificent, that is, of course, from the esoteric, white point of view), emblematically attired.

  And then, in that windy hall strewn with rushes as yellow as jonquils, those deafening aviaries intoning on all sides, while in the center a fountain sprang up and at its height pierced a gaudy velarium of India rubber, on which the water could be heard falling back in a fine rain, icy and pelting; there were all told, paralleling the semicircular tables, ten rows of couches, each decorated with an eye to the guests’ specialities—and, facing them, an Alcazar stage, amazingly deep, where the cream of the mountebanks, jugglers, beauties, and virtuosi of the Islands would come to be tasted.

  A wily breeze scuttled along the velarium, but weighted down in spite of itself by that incessant downpour from the fountain.

  And the aviaries, overjoyed by the clashing colors, regretfully stopped their noise when the music began to accompany everyone’s supper.

  The poor Tetrarch! This assortment of music, this audience of sumptuous effusion on this pompous occasion grieved him in his heart. He barely nibbled at that ingenious sequence of sweetmeats, pecking at them with spatulas of hardened snow, his attention wandering like a child’s, gaping at the bizarre circus frieze that was evolving on the Alcazar stage.

  On the Alcazar stage there appeared:

  The serpent girl, thin, viscous scales of blue, green, and yellow, her bosom and belly soft pink: she undulated and twisted, never tiring of her own touch, and lisped that hymn that begins, “Biblis, Sister Biblis, you, yes, you have changed into a wellspring!”

  Next a parade of costumes, all sacramentally curtailed, each one symbolizing a separate human desire. The refinement of all this!

  Next the entr’actes, presenting horizontal cyclones of electrified flowers, and a horizontal waterspout of berserk bouquets . . . !

  Next came musical clowns, wearing over their hearts t
heir insignia, the crank of a genuine hand organ, which they turned with the look of Messiahs who refuse to be influenced and will go to any lengths to follow their apostleship.

  And other clowns took the roles of the Idea, the Will, and the Unconscious. The Idea rattled on about everything, the Will beat his head against the scenery, and the Unconscious made big, mysterious gestures, like a person who is sure of being far better informed than he can express in words as yet. Moreover, this trinity had one single, unchanging refrain:

  Our Canaan, I guess,

  Is nothing less

  Than good old Nothingness.

  Non-being, I mean,

  The Meca far-seen

  Toward which libraries lean.

  It obtained a howling success.

  Next virtuosi of the flying trapeze, describing nearly sidereal ellipses . . . !

  Next, a rink of natural ice was brought in, and there emerged an adolescent skater, his arms crossed over those Brandenburg trimmings in white Astrakhan fur on his chest, only stopping after he had described every combination of all the known curves; then he waltzed on his points, like a ballerina; then he etched on the ice a flamboyant Gothic cathedral, not omitting one rose window or grill! Then he designed a three-part fugue, and ended with a labyrinthine twirl, like that of a fakir possessed del diavolo, finally leaving the stage, his feet in the air, skating on his steel fingernails . . . !

  And it was all concluded by a batch of living pictures, nudities as chaste as vegetables, symbols becoming ever more eurhythmic, by means of a Crucifixion of the Aesthetic.

  The calumets had been carted in; the conversation moved into the general; Iokanaan, who could hardly have been amused at hearing this festival going on over his head, was the chief staple of news. The northern princes spoke in favor of armed authority, the supreme religion, that guardian of repose, of bread, and of international competition, but they lost the thread and tried to make an end by quoting this distich, as a kind of epiphonema: