The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait

by Gabriel de Lautrec

  Everyone laughed, most amused by this bleak game in which their thoughts were undulating like fingers on black ivory piano-keys, and the philosopher, nodding his head gravely, explained:

  “I don’t think that a shadow has the consciousness of being alive. We are sitting on the edge of the river, and our shadow is a reflection. While very young, Stella, you must, in the vast dark grounds of your inexplicable sadness, which you dare not explain, have leaned anxiously over clear pools in which the trees, colonnades and clouds appear to you, inverted. You were afraid of that chimerical world, into which vertigo threatened to tip you, but you knew that it was a chimera, and that made you love your fear. So you leaned over toward our shadow and toward the river of life—the fear that it inspires in us is a game we like; we know that it is our shadow, but it is surely unaware that we are its reality. Its thoughts, if it thinks, are those that the slightest sunlight causes to vanish. It is, therefore, in its true role, and must set its footsteps in ours, knowing nothing of the route, unable to guide itself to the starlight or the sunlight. And the shadow, and ourselves, and that of which we are the shadow, only have the reality of vague forms dancing on the wall of the room, which will disappear when the fire has gone.”

  “Personally,” said Stella, in a sad voice, “I believe that the world is comparable to the explosion of a beautiful furnace—the suns are red sparks, the earths on which we live grains of ash; the servitude of worlds bows down before fire. Life is hot. The legends of the inferno are the proof of the terrible respect that only the absolute inspires in us. Light, mobile water, forms captive in earth, yellow amber, are the masks of Monos,43 whose face is fire. Sparks are luminous, and then die, and that is true everywhere. The passage of ardent life to the oblivion of ash is the same. On cold earths appear the monuments of human thought, the temples, the triumphant arches, the palaces, with their silky and emotional life, and crystallizations are produced on the surface of infinitesimal molecules in the dust of an apartment; they are the same phenomenon at different levels of infinity.”

  “If the world is infinite,” said the poet, “and if every form encloses every other form to infinity, on what horizon of the voyage will we encounter the gods?”

  The philosopher ventured:

  “All the gods and all the demons in which humans have believed, traverse the magical château of or thoughts every night. There is a god named Pan, in an obscure pathway, with patches of sunlight filtered through the braches overhead on his viny hands. And in the forest stands Isis, standing on a marble slab, in a gesture of silence. They are the greatest. Mystery is the supple veil of Life. After them, Buddha, Zeus and all the gods of light, and the gods of darkness, the god Lucifer seen in the form of a handsome child, and Beelzebub, with a fiery headscarf.”

  “The gods of darkness,” said the poet, are the only ones that are able to love; they are good. We see them in their obscure faces, and hardly know them.”

  “A necessary comparison,” continued the philosopher, “born of familiar images. Suppose, O Stella, a people of inferior form, too small for our gaze, one of those which live below us, and for whom we are gods. A race of mandrakes, black and sad, would be an example that would make you smile. But to remove the possibility of an objection from your eyes, and safeguard the poor unexpected device, I shall take as a symbol a population of scarabs, brothers of Isis, inhabiting a shivering corner of the mute forest.

  “A stray voyager passes by. He crushes two or three scarabs underfoot. They for amusement, he takes one of them between his delicate fingers, whose color pleases him. He caresses it, lifts it up, and makes it fly into the air, toward the sunlit leaves. The scarab-people would fear that mysterious being, drawn away without showing his face, because of the dead, and would implore his anger liturgically, while dressing in praise the one that he raised toward him. That one would be regarded as a prophet, who rose up into the superior world.

  “Via the lips of the elect, they name the being that passed by, and call him a god. Those whom he wounded speak of him with anger, and make use of the term demon—and that is how gods are created.

  “Other scarabs, in their march through the great forest, encounter other stray humans, and worship them under various names. They have, in the eternal course, encountered different gods. But all the gods are true in whom someone believes. They are furtive apparitions of misunderstood and feared beings. Thus, in the sphere superior to ours, lives a population of gods who are only gods to us, who are enveloped by another sphere, haunted by others, who serve them as gods in their turn.

  “An emerald is enclosed in a perfumed bag, and that bag in an exceptional casket, and the casket in the great hall of a palace, and the walls of the palace retreat to the horizon, which other horizons complete and delimit eternally.”

  The poet, who was playing with Stella’s hair, got up then and said to her:

  “Another day, we shall speak of real things, and perhaps find the secret. Alternative ideas are vain; only the form is to be implored; you are, by one of your gestures, the most divine recantation. Renewing the evenings with torches, in a fine fever, you will come….”

  “I consent,” she said, “but”—and her hand made a slow gesture of rejection—“we shall not welcome to the feast either the lord of the flies or the king of diamonds.”

  “The satans left on the threshold, I shall not speak as a poet to shadows, but to you.”

  “All is but shadow,” said Stella.

  The Mourners

  They were living on a solitary island on the far side of the great Sea. And they lived there, separated from other men by fear. They were called the Mourners, and whenever they chanced to descend toward a town, with their long beards and their heads partly shaven, as if in mourning, as they passed by, the people traced the cabalistic signs that were used to chase away evil spirits.

  The people of that distant epoch lived on Death. When one of them was about to expire, the body, placed on a deep raft, was sent to the isle of the Mourners, to the accompaniment of violas, violins and drums, and yellow candles burned with pale flames beneath the Sun and on the ea.

  For it was the Mourners to whom the lugubrious care of the dead had been consigned. They were the priests of a melancholy and definitive Cythera, save for the fact that, unlike that other embarkation by Watteau,44 the passengers bound for the happy isle were not heading for Love but for Death. In great sumptuous palaces with profound mirrors, the bodies were laid out and subjected from then on, to the ceremonial ritual. Before transforming the human remains, the priests wanted to ensure the absolute freedom therefrom of the delicate soul, still anxious at the gates of the body, and their religion was primarily composed of powerful chanted formulae that disengaged the immaterial. Then there were aromatic pyres on which the bodies were burned—and the ashes were reserved for the communion of the living.

  They actually ate the ashes of the dead, and their lives was perpetuated thus, in a sad and lofty symbolism, by which the souls of their ancestors found a definitive transformation in them. They were ignorant of any other nourishment, and their souls of any other poetry. Love did not exist yet, and humans reproduced without joy. Their only mystery, perhaps of a grandeur that they did not suspect, was that of a human race living on the problem of its own death. And their soul, haunted by the fear of, and also the desire for, the Mourners, was like a lunar landscape in which there would have been no forms, no music and no perfumes.

  One day, among the bodies transported on a daily basis to the island, that of a little child was found, so melancholy and so delicate that the Mourners wept, in an emotion never felt before. His white wings, soiled by every kind of mud, were those of a vagabond, but his dead eyes had a gaze whose malicious and arrogant pride was that of a god.

  The body was dispersed according to custom, and soon the fragile lines from which that subtle flower of beauty were born were broken and lost forever. And the people ate the bitter and unsuspected ashes that were to give them an endless reg
ret for the Beauty that was real for a single moment of the past. Oh, what white-clad seraphim would recover the lost lines of the Form too dolorously beloved!

  For, as soon as the unknown child as dead and his ashes dispersed, I believe that Fear in its most charming and palest form descended into that universe. A terrible sickness fell upon the cities. Those who ate the divine ashes were poisoned forever. Their eyes lit up. Prey to an intense fever, they ran into the country, the daylight dying on the fragile stems of flowers and the night mingling the mystery of alcoves with the voluptuousness of blue stars. They conceived mysterious affections for the trees, the clouds and motionless nature; then, like the Chaldean shepherds of ancient times, they saw rising in the eyes of women the midnight sun of Love.

  And for the first time, they knew that eternal thing, love, and that painful and nostalgically personal thing, the frisson of beloved flesh.

  Their dull eyes, their burning lips and their halting respiration permitted them to recognize themselves in one another; with love, too, came forms, music and perfumes.

  Now, those who ate the eyes of the Child would have love in their eyes for all eternity; those who ate his lips would have it in their lips; those who drank his blood would have the blood of a god eternally in their veins. And they were beloved for their lips, their blood or their eyes.

  Others would have his harmonious voice, and knew the secret of making people weep by means of music and words.

  They were seen going along the streets, isolated from everyone else, fearful of their strange appearance and seemingly-immeasurable dolor. Disdained and disdainful, they lived in one of those worlds parallel to the real one, which are the worlds of dreams, mirrors or madness. They invented measure and rhythm, according to the new intonations that their words had taken since the coming of the Child. With the vague memory of the divine reality that had once existed, they knew their role as mysterious reflections. Sometimes, on contemplating the dolorous face of beloved individuals who loved them for the tender frisson of their eyes, they saw a line appear there, a smile, a gaze, a lost fragment of the Form, and fixed in their poems, like a streak of luminous gold, that sparse laughter of the Absolute. They were men of genius, those who made manifest by means of the pen, the word or the brush.

  And the remembrance of the strange event slowly disappeared from memories. And the lovesick lived on, forever incurable; to console them, they had the delicate caresses of the stars, of wings, of pupils, and in one supreme moment, in every life, the suffering and advent of the Kiss. For the kiss was born after Love, a thing more amorous than Amour. The children descended from them, sadder and more beautiful than humans, sang beneath balconies for their daughters. And more mournful than the Mourners themselves, they bore on the forehead from then the mysterious sign that drives women mad, and also makes them afraid of love. And it is since then that the incurable suffering of immortal poems has been born.

  This happened on a very distant epoch. The funeral organs of eternity had scarcely fallen silent to listen to the tremulous prayer of the first new-born world.

  Thus was born the race that suffers from lovesickness.

  SELECTIONS FROM STORIES OF TOM JOE

  The Haunted Château or, The Adulterous Virgin

  A Great Passionate and Meteorological Romance45

  I. The Bloody Pipe

  Five to midnight chimed in the belfry.

  The lugubrious wind was blowing through the trees so strongly that it would have uprooted all Maurice Barrès’ heroes in a trice.46

  Large clouds were racing across the sky, succeeding one another without interruption. The rain was furious. The weather was as grey as a Pole.47

  By the side of the road was an ancient oak, from the low branches of which a hanged man was swaying ominously.

  An automobile stopped at the top of the slope. A man dressed in a cloak the color of a wall and a hooded lantern came down; with a distracted hand he caressed the fuming rump of the steam-horses and gave them a few sugar-lumps. Then he took a massive gold watch from his fob-pocket and checked the time.

  “Five to midnight,” he murmured. “I have time. The train doesn’t leave for three days.”

  He was an old man. He might have been forty-six or forty-seven years old. A few white threads were beginning to silver his beautiful black hair. Precocious wrinkles creased his forehead, which was furrowed in a bitter rictus. A profound suffering, stoically borne, was legible in his thin face. Beneath his rather frail appearance, however, Baron Jehan des Entournures48—our readers will already have recognized him—concealed a will of iron combined with an indomitable courage. One sensed that the man was made to combat destiny.

  A flash of lightning streaked the sky and cut out of the darkness, in jagged ridges, the profile of the high mountains of Estremadura. The Baron made a despairing gesture and got back into the automobile. He pronounced a few words into the acoustic tube. The black chauffeur in the driving-seat started trembling in every limb, but not one of his facial muscles stirred. Following the orders he had received, he launched the automobile forward in eleventh gear.

  The road was on the edge of a ravine devoid of any parapet. The rock-face fell steeply away. Three or four hundred meters lower down, sordid huts were perceptible inhabited by wreck-looters. The car bounded toward death. Just as it was about to cross the fatal breach, the Baron leapt out of the door and landed on the road, safe and sound.

  He had time to attach a long green beard, evidently false, to his naturally beardless chin, and to put on rose-colored glasses. Thus disguised, the Baron could go anywhere unnoticed. He stood pensively for a moment on the edge of the ravine, listening to the noise of the car bouncing off the projection of the rock as it plunged into the valley. The chauffeur’s cadaver must have been little more than a salty pulp.

  The satanic rictus reappeared on the Baron’s face. “Another one,” he sneered. “Number seventy-four tomorrow morning.”

  Wrapping himself in his cloak, he headed for the village visible a few hundred meters away. After a few steps, however, he paused. His feverish hand rummaged in his clothes. Soon, he drew out of an interior pocket of his doublet an object carefully wrapped in a blue headscarf, which he unfolded with devout gestures. It was a pipe made of Boulogne wood, admirably carved. There were bloodstains on the bowl. The Baron kissed it piously and felt stronger. He folded it up in his handkerchief, set it next to his heart again, and then, now sure of triumph, he strode off rapidly on the road that was leading him into the unknown.

  II. A Love Story

  The life of the Baron des Entournures was a veritable romance.

  Born in the Spanish mountains, he had grown up with his father, an old fanatic and Huguenot. At the age of twenty, however, he felt the blood of his audacious ancestors, the conquistadors, seething in his veins. The calm life of the château became odious to him. His father was obliged to consent to his departure.

  An old friend of the family took responsibility for him. The Captain of a long-haul vessel, he was going to Tierra de Fuego carrying a cargo of ice, intended to combat the effects of that country’s torrid temperature.

  Young Jehan quickly revealed himself to be a courageous and enterprising fellow. Scarcely had the cargo been unloaded, still streaming with melted ice, than he went in search of a means of utilizing his activity. A friend of the captain, who had settled in the region some years earlier, offered him employment in his sugar-cane plantations. It was there that he met the woman who was to become his wife. Her name was Flora.

  She was a young woman of Brazilian origin, whose beauty was perfect. Very well-educated, she had passed all her examinations.

  Unfortunately, as the adoptive daughter of a black man brutalized by alcohol, she had allowed herself to be carried away by that deadly passion. A day rarely passed when she did not get drunk two or three times.

  The Baron’s love saved her.

  On the eve of the marriage, just as she was about to retire to the nuptial chamber with he
r happy spouse, before the assembled relatives and friends, she demanded a cup of monstrous dimensions, poured into it the contents of four bottles of rum, and emptied the cup without hesitation in a single draught.

  Then, turning to her husband with an angelic smile, she said: “From now on, I shall no longer drink anything but water.”

  Incredible as the fact appears, for a woman, she kept her word.

  Every month, a ship charted for that exclusive purpose brought a barrel full of Seine water to Tierra de Fuego. The beautiful Flora knew no other beverage.

  So, life went on happily. But grim destiny was lying in wait.

  The arrival of Baron Jehan had, in fact, stirred up terrible jealousies in that cosmopolitan society. Young women were scarce, especially those whose beauty was as perfect as Flora’s.

  There was a black man who worked in the house of her adoptive father, who was madly in love with her. He was about thirty and had already been married. His name was Ripolin.49 His first wife, Dolores, was a white woman of very pure race. He had therefore become a mulatto by marriage.

  She died, unfortunately, after three years of a cloudless union.

  As a widower, Ripolin had become black again. Perhaps blacker, because of his mourning-dress.

  With the courage that draws its energy from profound conviction, he used every possible means to whiten himself again. Every day he took a number of Pink Pills for Pale People50—but the result was insignificant. He continued, however, partly out of vague hope but much more for reasons of snobbery.

  In seeing the young Flora grow up alongside him, a mad desire gnawed at his heart. He dreamed of being loved by her. As soon as she reached her twelfth birthday, he asked for her hand in marriage—but she adored Jehan and rejected the black suitor disdainfully.