Down There (Là-Bas)

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  "You mean…?"

  "That I have only to desire them, to desire you, before I go to sleep…"

  "And?"

  "And you would be inferior to my chimera, to the Durtal I adore, whose caresses make my nights delirious!"

  He looked at her in stupefaction. She had that dolent, troubled look in her eyes. She even seemed not to see him, but to be looking into space. He hesitated… In a sudden flash of thought he saw the scenes of incubacy of which Gévingey had spoken. "We shall untangle all this later," he thought within himself, "meanwhile-" He took her gently by the arms, drew her to him and abruptly kissed her mouth.

  She rebounded as if she had had an electric shock. She struggled to rise. He strained her to him and embraced her furiously, then with a strange gurgling cry she threw her head back and caught his leg between both of hers.

  He emitted a howl of rage, for he felt her haunches move. He understood now-or thought he understood! She wanted a miserly pleasure, a sort of solitary vice…

  He pushed her away. She remained there, quite pale, choking, her eyes closed, her hands outstretched like those of a frightened child. Then Durtal's wrath vanished. With a little cry he came up to her and caught her again, but she struggled, crying, "No! I beseech you, let me go."

  He held her crushed against his body and attempted to make her yield.

  "I implore you, let me go."

  Her accent was so despairing that he relinquished her. Then he debated with himself whether to throw her brutally on the floor and violate her. But her bewildered eyes frightened him.

  She was panting and her arms hung limp at her sides as she leaned, very pale, against the bookcase.

  "Ah!" he said, marching up and down, knocking into the furniture, "I must really love you, if in spite of your supplications and refusals-"

  She joined her hands to keep him away.

  "Good God!" he said, exasperated, "what are you made of?"

  She came to herself, and, offended, she said to him, "Monsieur, I too suffer. Spare me," and pell-mell she spoke of her husband, of her confessor, and became so incoherent that Durtal was frightened. She was silent, then in a singing voice she said, "Tell me, you will come to my house tomorrow night, won't you?"

  "But I suffer too!"

  She seemed not to hear him. In her smoky eyes, far, far back, there seemed to be a twinkle of feeble light. She murmured, in the cadence of a canticle, "Tell me, dear, you will come tomorrow night, won't you?"

  "Yes," he said at last.

  Then she readjusted herself and without saying a word quitted the room. In silence he accompanied her to the entrance. She opened the door, turned around, took his hand and very lightly brushed it with her lips.

  He stood there stupidly, not knowing what to make of her behaviour.

  "What does she mean?" he exclaimed, returning to the room, putting the furniture back in place and smoothing the disordered carpet. "Heavens, I wish I could as easily restore order to my brain. Let me think, if I can. What is she after? Because, of course, she has something in view. She does not want our relation to culminate in the act itself. Does she really fear disillusion, as she claims? Is she really thinking how grotesque the amorous somersaults are? Or is she, as I believe, a melancholy and terrible player-around-the-edges, thinking only of herself? Well, her obscene selfishness is one of those complicated sins that have to be shriven by the very highest confessor. She's a plain teaser!

  "I don't know. Incubacy enters into this. She admits-so placidly!-that in dream she cohabits at will with dead or living beings. Is she Satanizing, and is this some of the work of Canon Docre? He's a friend of hers.

  "So many riddles impossible to solve. What is the meaning of this unexpected invitation for tomorrow night? Does she wish to yield nowhere except in her own home? Does she feel more at ease there, or does she think the propinquity of her husband will render the sin more piquant? Does she loathe Chantelouve, and is this a meditated vengeance, or does she count on the fear of danger to spur our senses?

  "After all, I think it is probably a final coquetry, an appetizer before the repast. And women are so funny anyway! She probably thinks these delays and subterfuges are necessary to differentiate her from a cocotte. Or perhaps there is a physical necessity for stalling me off another day."

  He sought other reasons but could find none.

  "Deep down in my heart," he said, vexed in spite of himself by this rebuff, "I know I have been an imbecile. I ought to have acted the cave man and paid no attention to her supplications and lies. I ought to have taken violent possession of her lips and breast. Then it would be finished, whereas now I must begin at the beginning again, and God damn her! I have other things to do.

  "Who knows whether she isn't laughing at me this very moment? Perhaps she wanted me to be more violent and bold-but no, her soul-sick voice was not feigned, her poor eyes did not simulate bewilderment, and then what would she have meant by that respectful kiss-for there was an impalpable shade of respect and gratitude in that kiss which she planted on my hand!"

  She was too much for him. "Meanwhile, in this hurly-burly I have forgotten my refreshments. Suppose I take off my shoes, now that I am alone, for my feet are swollen from parading up and down the room. Suppose I do better yet and go to bed, for I am incapable of working or reading," and he drew back the covers.

  "Decidedly, nothing happens the way one foresees it, yet my plan of attack wasn't badly thought out," he said, crawling in. With a sigh he blew out the lamp, and the cat, reassured, passed over him, lighter than a breath, and curled up without a sound.

  CHAPTER XI

  Contrary to his expectations, he slept all night, with clenched fists, and woke next morning quite calm, even gay. The scene of the night before, which ought to have exacerbated his senses, produced exactly the opposite effect. The truth is that Durtal was not of those who are attracted by difficulties. He always made one hardy effort to surmount them, then when that failed he would withdraw, with no desire to renew the combat. If Mme. Chantelouve thought to entice him by delays, she had miscalculated. This morning, already, he was weary of the comedy.

  His reflections began to be slightly tinged with bitterness. He was angry at the woman for having wished to keep him in suspense, and he was angry at himself for having permitted her to make a fool of him. Then certain expressions, the impertinence of which had not struck him at first, chilled him now. "Her nervous trick of laughing, which sometimes caught her in public places," then her declaration that she did not need his permission, nor even his person, in order to possess him, seemed to him unbecoming, to say the least, and uncalled for, as he had not run after her nor indeed made any advances to her at all.

  "I will fix you," he said, "when I get some hold over you."

  But in the calm awakening of this morning the spell of the woman had relaxed. Resolutely he thought, "Keep two dates with her. This one tonight at her house. It won't count, because nothing can be done. For I intend neither to allow myself to be assaulted nor to attempt an assault. I certainly have no desire to be caught by Chantelouve in flagrante delicto, and probably get into a shooting scrape and be haled into police court. Have her here once. If she does not yield then, why, the matter is closed. She can go and tickle somebody else."

  And he made a hearty breakfast, and sat down to his writing table and ran over the scattered notes for his book.

  "I had got," he said, glancing at his last chapter, "to where the alchemic experiments and diabolic evocations have proved unavailing. Prelati, Blanchet, all the sorcerers and sorcerers' helpers whom the Marshal has about him, admit that to bring Satan to him Gilles must make over his soul and body to the Devil or commit crimes.

  "Gilles refuses to alienate his existence and sell his soul, but he contemplates murder without any horror. This man, so brave on the battlefield, so courageous when he accompanied Jeanne d'Arc, trembles before the Devil and is afraid when he thinks of eternity and of Christ. The same is true of his accomplices. He has mad
e them swear on the Testament to keep the secret of the confounding turpitudes which the château conceals, and he can be sure that not one will violate the oath, for, in the Middle Ages, the most reckless of freebooters would not commit the inexpiable sin of deceiving God.

  "At the same time that his alchemists abandon their unfruitful furnaces, Gilles begins a course of systematic gluttony, and his flesh, set on fire by the essences of inordinate potations and spiced dishes, seethes in tumultuous eruption.

  "Now, there are no women in the château. Gilles appears to have despised the sex ever since leaving the court. After experience of the ribalds of the camps and frequentation, with Xaintrailles and La Hire, of the prostitutes of Charles VII, it seems that a dislike for the feminine form came over him. Like others whose ideal of concupiscence is deteriorated and deviated, he certainly comes to be disgusted by the delicacy of the grain of the skin of women and by that odour of femininity which all sodomists abhor.

  "He depraves the choir boys who are under his authority. He chose them in the first place, these little psaltry ministrants, for their beauty, and 'beautiful as angels' they are. They are the only ones he loves, the only ones he spares in his murderous transports.

  "But soon infantile pollution seems to him an insipid delicacy. The law of Satanism which demands that the elect of Evil, once started, must go the whole way, is once more fulfilled. Gilles's soul must become thoroughly cankered, a red tabernacle, that in it the Very Low may dwell at ease.

  "The litanies of lust arise in an atmosphere that is like the wind over a slaughter house. The first victim is a very small boy whose name we do not know. Gilles disembowels him, and, cutting off the hands and tearing out the eyes and heart, carries these members into Prelati's chamber. The two men offer them, with passionate objurgations, to the Devil, who holds his peace. Gilles, confounded, flees. Prelati rolls up the poor remains in linen and, trembling, goes out at night to bury them in consecrated ground beside a chapel dedicated to Saint Vincent.

  "Gilles preserves the blood of this child to write formulas of evocation and conjurements. It manures a horrible crop. Not long afterward the Marshal reaps the most abundant harvest of crimes that has ever been sown.

  "From 1432 to 1440, that is to say during the eight years between the Marshal's retreat and his death, the inhabitants of Anjou, Poitou, and Brittany walk the highways wringing their hands. All the children disappear. Shepherd boys are abducted from the fields. Little girls coming out of school, little boys who have gone to play ball in the lanes or at the edge of the wood, return no more.

  "In the course of an investigation ordered by the duke of Brittany, the scribes of Jean Touscheronde, duke's commissioner in these matters, compile interminable lists of lost children.

  "Lost, at la Rochebernart, the child of the woman Péronne, 'a child who did go to school and who did apply himself to his book with exceeding diligence.'

  "Lost, at Saint Etienne de Montluc, the son of Guillaume Brice, 'and this was a poor man and sought alms.'

  "Lost, at Mâchecoul, the son of Georget le Barbier, 'who was seen, a certain day, knocking apples from a tree behind the hôtel Rondeau, and who since hath not been seen.'

  "Lost, at Thonaye, the child of Mathelin Thouars, 'and he had been heard to cry and lament and the said child was about twelve years of age.'

  "At Mâchecoul, again, the day of Pentecost, mother and father Sergent leave their eight-year-old boy at home, and when they return from the fields 'they did not find the said child of eight years of age, wherefore they marvelled and were exceeding grieved.'

  "At Chantelou, it is Pierre Badieu, mercer of the parish, who says that a year or thereabouts ago, he saw, in the domain de Rais, 'two little children of the age of nine who were brothers and the children of Robin Pavot of the aforesaid place, and since that time neither have they been seen neither doth any know what hath become of them.'

  "At Nantes, it is Jeanne Darel who deposes that 'on the day of the feast of the Holy Father, her true child named Olivier did stray from her, being of the age of seven and eight years, and since the day of the feast of the Holy Father neither did she see him nor hear tidings.'

  "And the account of the investigation goes on, revealing hundreds of names, describing the grief of the mothers who interrogate passersby on the highway, and telling of the keening of the families from whose very homes children have been spirited away when the elders went to the fields to hoe or to sow the hemp. These phrases, like a desolate refrain, recur again and again, at the end of every deposition: 'They were seen complaining dolorously,' 'Exceedingly they did lament.' Wherever the bloodthirsty Gilles dwells the women weep.

  "At first the frantic people tell themselves that evil fairies and malicious genii are dispersing the generation, but little by little terrible suspicions are aroused. As soon as the Marshal quits a place, as he goes from the château de Tiffauges to the château de Champtocé, and from there to the castle of La Suze or to Nantes, he leaves behind him a wake of tears. He traverses a countryside and in the morning children are missing. Trembling, the peasant realizes also that wherever Prelati, Roger de Bricqueville, Gilles de Sillé, any of the Marshal's intimates, have shown themselves, little boys have disappeared. Finally, the peasant learns to look with horror upon an old woman, Perrine Martin, who wanders around, clad in grey, her face covered-as is that of Gilles de Sillé-with a black stamin. She accosts children, and her speech is so seductive, her face, when she raises her veil, so benign, that all follow her to the edge of a wood, where men carry them off, gagged, in sacks. And the frightened people call this purveyor of flesh, this ogress, ' La Mefrraye,' from the name of a bird of prey.

  "These emissaries spread out, covering all the villages and hamlets, tracking the children down at the orders of the Chief Huntsman, the sire de Bricqueville. Not content with these beaters, Gilles takes to standing at a window of the château, and when young mendicants, attracted by the renown of his bounty, ask an alms, he runs an appraising eye over them, has any who excite his lust brought in and thrown into an underground prison and kept there until, being in appetite, he is pleased to order a carnal supper.

  "How many children did he disembowel after deflowering them? He himself did not know, so many were the rapes he had consummated and the murders he had committed. The texts of the times enumerate between, seven and eight hundred, but the estimate is inaccurate and seems overconservative. Entire regions were devastated. The hamlet of Tiffauges had no more young men. La Suze was without male posterity. At Champtocé the whole foundation room of a tower was filled with corpses. A witness cited in the inquest, Guillaume Hylairet, declared also, "that one hight Du Jardin hath heard say that there was found in the said castle a wine pipe full of dead little children.'

  "Even today traces of these assassinations linger. Two years ago at Tiffauges a physician discovered an oubliette and brought forth piles of skulls and bones.

  "Gilles confessed to frightful holocausts, and his friends confirmed the atrocious details.

  "At dusk, when their senses are phosphorescent, enkindled by inflammatory spiced beverages and by 'high' venison, Gilles and his friends retire to a distant chamber of the château. The little boys are brought from their cellar prisons to this room. They are disrobed and gagged. The Marshal fondles them and forces them. Then he hacks them to pieces with a dagger, taking great pleasure in slowly dismembering them. At other times he slashes the boy's chest and drinks the breath from the lungs; sometimes he opens the stomach also, smells it, enlarges the incision with his hands, and seats himself in it. Then while he macerates the warm entrails in mud, he turns half around and looks over his shoulder to contemplate the supreme convulsions, the last spasms. He himself says afterwards, 'I was happier in the enjoyment of tortures, tears, fright, and blood, than in any other pleasure.'

  "Then he becomes weary of these fecal joys. An unpublished passage in his trial proceedings informs us that 'The said sire heated himself with little boys, sometimes also with littl
e girls, with whom he had congress in the belly, saying that he had more pleasure and less pain than acting in nature.' After which, he slowly saws their throats, cuts them to pieces, and the corpses, the linen and the clothing, are put in the fireplace, where a smudge fire of logs and leaves is burning, and the ashes are thrown into the latrine, or scattered to the winds from the top of a tower, or buried in the moats and mounds.

  "Soon his furies become aggravated. Until now he has appeased the rage of his senses with living or moribund beings. He wearies of stuprating palpitant flesh and becomes a lover of the dead. A passionate artist, he kisses, with cries of enthusiasm, the well-made limbs of his victims. He establishes sepulchral beauty contests, and whichever of the truncated heads receives the prize he raises by the hair and passionately kisses the cold lips.

  "Vampirism satisfies him for months. He pollutes dead children, appeasing the fever of his desires in the blood smeared chill of the tomb. He even goes so far-one day when his supply of children is exhausted-as to disembowel a pregnant woman and sport with the fœtus. After these excesses he falls into horrible states of coma, similar to those heavy lethargies which overpowered Sergeant Bertrand after his violations of the grave. But if that leaden sleep is one of the known phases of ordinary vampirism, if Gilles de Rais was merely a sexual pervert, we must admit that he distinguished himself from the most delirious sadists, the most exquisite virtuosi in pain and murder, by a detail which seems extrahuman, it is so horrible.

  "As these terrifying atrocities, these monstrous outrages, no longer suffice him, he corrodes them with the essence of a rare sin. It is no longer the resolute, sagacious cruelty of the wild beast playing with the body of a victim. His ferocity does not remain merely carnal; it becomes spiritual. He wishes to make the child suffer both in body and soul. By a thoroughly Satanic cheat he deceives gratitude, dupes affection, and desecrates love. At a leap he passes the bounds of human infamy and lands plump in the darkest depth of Evil.