In the course of his voyage to the Orient, he recounted, he had searched in Palestine and Syria for traces of the ancient Essenes. In order to do that he had stayed in various monasteries, notably that of Baruth, built on the remains of an ancient maritime fortress of the Templars. There he had rummaged in a library buried under dust and neglected by the ignorant monks. He had discovered forgotten manuscripts and obtained knowledge of lost secrets.
Simon Magus, the ancient grandmaster of the Gnostics, had been an Essene. He had spent several years in the monastery of Baruth, on his return from his voyage along the Mediterranean coast, which had taken him as far as Spain and Morocco. The goal of that sage had been to purify the barbaric people of the Occident, to spread among them the true divine wisdom. He employed for that a method of his own, which was also practiced by Apollonius of Tyana. He magnetized objects powerfully, made talismans of them impregnated with a great spiritual force, and buried them in certain places chosen by him. Those talismans could act across the centuries. They ought to remind future humans of their true destiny. When evil forces were on the point of triumphing, when the love of matter covered the earth, they would be the reserve of spirit, and the task was incumbent upon the Essenes of finding them and utilizing them for good.
The Essenes had been dispersed for centuries, and their tradition had been lost, as well as the secrets of Simon Magus, but Kotzebue had been able to reconstitute their sacred group; it had been given to him, in the library of Baruth, to follow the bearer of talismans step by step in his voyage around the Mediterranean.
A tempest had thrown Simon on to one of the Lérin islands facing Cannes. From there he had regained the mainland and had marched along the seas shore on the Roman road hollowed out in the mountain-sides that is now the Corniche. He had stopped in the villa of a rich patrician named Lavinius, who had been the procurator of Judea and was a former initiate into the mysteries. In those days the Côte d’Azur had been full of flourishing villas and everything seemed to promise that it would eventually become one of the centers of Mediterranean civilization. It was in the earth of Lavinius’ garden, the earth that conserves the force of magnetized objects, that Simon Magus hid one of his talismans, in order to fecundate the future.
Kotzebue had been able to determine the location of Lavinius’ gardens by means of searching the archives of the Mairie of Fréjus. They were facing Saint-Tropez, and Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf had bought, on his indications, the domain that extended along the slopes of Les Maures and was prolonged by vast pine forests.
Searches had thus far been vain, but now the Essenes were united. Several among them had gifts of clairvoyance and it was the beginning of September, when, by virtue of an unknown astrological law, that gift arrived at its apogee. Kotzebue was counting on the unusual intuition of a sensitive, by means of the passage of a subtle current, for the discovery of the talisman. His conviction was so certain that he was carrying a spade over his shoulder, in order to begin digging without losing a moment in the place that would be indicated to him. A chant of his composition, a kind of litany that concluded with the cry “Alleluia!” would dispose the Essenes toward clairvoyance.
They set forth cheerfully. An indisputable faith animated them, and before the gravity of visages, the profundity of gazes and the palpitation of hands extended toward the earth in order to collect the spiritual essences susceptible of being disengaged therefrom. I was ashamed to be dominated by the sentiment of ridicule and the cavils of my reason.
Exactly what was known about Simon Magus? Renan said that he was a thaumaturge who had elaborated a Samaritan counterfeit of the work of Jesus Christ. A professor at the University of Strasbourg denied his existence in an absolute fashion. It required a complete faith in Kotzebue, and belief in the monastery of Baruth and its mysterious library, to think that after two thousand years a talisman charged with sublime powers was buried in that sunlit ground.
And what about the pact? I was revived in my memory in a gripping fashion. Could the man who was to render to the world the doctrine of the perfect Essenes possibly have signed a Luciferian pact in his blood, even without attaching any importance to it?
I considered Eveline’s face. It was radiant with the purity of which she made her ideal. She was walking with her eyes lowered, and her delight in participating in such a research was so great that she did not give the impression of placing her feet on the ground on which she trod. Was it the effect of the malediction that I had assumed, was it because of a demonic force multiplied by my curiosity, that I measured while walking the distance between her knee and the curve of her hip, and posed myself the problem of the dimension of her breasts, while imagining Eveline naked?
I attempted to evade that thought, but on the contrary, I only made the obsession more precise, to the extent that I would not have seen her more naked, simpler and more perfectly human if she had been walking beside me without the vain adornment of her dress.
The search had lasted for a long time; we were now descending the sunken road along the road that served as the border of the convent. The sun was about to set.
“Alleluia!” sang the Essenes, in voices that fatigue was beginning to weaken.
Eveline looked in my direction, as if she had sensed my thoughts weighing upon her.
And suddenly, a clamor rose up behind the wall of the convent.
“Alleluia!” howled voice with a hoarse accent of fury and folly.
I turned in the direction from which the sound was coming, and I saw once again the head, the same head that an imagination of reverie had lent for an instant to Eveline, but it was now haggard, hateful and, at the extremity of its mobile neck, it was moving along the wall of the convent. Marie with the long neck must have been running through the convent garden, shouting as she ran, and her head gave the impression of not belonging to anybody. The terrifying, extra-human alleluia that she was clamoring, expressed by means of the strangeness of its syllables a horrible dementia, and it was followed by imprecations, and obscene words with precise meanings.
The Essenes stopped, suddenly filled with fear. Under the impact of the words, Eveline was like a statue.
Other voices responded in the convent. Appeals were heard, and scandalized exclamations mingled with hysterical howls. First, a very white hand appeared above the wall; then everyone realized that a person of small stature was climbing on to something with difficulty, in order to appear and express herself decently.
From the frizzed and desolate face of a rotund nun these words fell slowly: “My God, I beg you, please excuse her. It’s a crisis. She’s subject to crises. It’s necessary to forgive her. She’s an excellent person apart from her crises.”
The apparition vanished; there was no longer anything but the sound of doors closing on someone who was struggling, and words of an incomprehensible vulgarity dying away in the distance, in the silence of courtyards, between the whiteness of edifices.
I went down the path with long strides. I was almost running. Thus, the same chant that elevated the spirit on one side of the wall lowered it on the other. What vocal inflexions, in which Eveline’s voice was mingled, in reaching that miserable creature, had caused to rise up again in the obscurity of her soul a dormant bed of ugliness and ordure? And her genuflection that morning! The sign that she had distinguished on my forehead! Had she not saluted in me a sort of priest of lubricity, a kind of demonic saint?
Did Eveline and Laurence love me in the secrecy of their hearts? Did I play any role in their veritable life, the one that unrolls beyond the senses, which the facial features do not express, and which is the sole life of the human being? How would I ever know? The possession of the body signifies nothing, for a woman can abandon herself with savage cries of pleasure and hysterical laughter and yet reserve the gift of herself. The scorn that she affects has no more significance. So stupid is the instruction that is given to young women regarding their so-called duties that they sometimes lower their eyes modestly, and draw away like
offended priestesses, when they have a desire to fall into arms and receive caresses.
Nothing of what happened is a proof in one direction or the other. I do not know whether I was loved by Eveline or by Laurence. I do not know whether I am rich or poor. For what one is able to receive of amour along one’s route is, in sum, the only wealth that one preserves when one arrives at the place where the road turns.
I got up that morning feeling so well, however, with ideas so clear, my blood circulating so harmoniously, that I had the sentiment of being loved not only by the two sisters, but also by all the women I knew, and perhaps also by those I did not know, and whom a secret intuition was to push toward me.
Nothing is more agreeable than such a perception of the amour that is floating around you. The opinion I had of myself was greatly fortified by it; all of life appeared to me to be singularly beautiful. I was born under a good star. Everything was smiling upon me. I ought not to occupy myself with nonsensical ideas, and take advantage of what life offered me with its untiring generosity.
The sky was milder than usual. There was a light wind that was stirring the pines; I went down toward the sea at a rapid pace.
The first silhouette that struck my eyes was that of Laurence. I perceived her from behind in conversation with Kotzebue, along the shingle. They both seemed to be arguing with vivacity; I thought I saw Kotzebue show Laurence a letter. The morning was not far advanced; it was probable that Kotzebue had already quit his hotel and crossed the few hundred meters that separated it from that part of the beach, that he had a rendezvous with Laurence. But my benevolence for all things was so great that I reassured myself on that subject by persuading myself that only an insignificant motive had provoked that rendezvous.
As events generally harmonize with fortune states of the soul, I saw Kotzebue quit Laurence, and noticed in him the lassitude that one experiences in quitting someone to whose ill-humor one has been subjected. He went up toward the road and drew away. I found myself face to face with Laurence on the narrow strip of sand that serves as a beach on that part of the coast.
Laurence had just finished Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and it was only possible for her to talk about that. Reading it had uplifted her. But she looked at it from a strange point of view. It was her own history that she had read in the history of the negroes of America. She established an unusual relationship between certain classes of women and slaves.
“Would you believe,” she said to me in an aggressive fashion, “that here in France, money or social position creates barriers among us as insurmountable as those which exist over there between blacks and whites?”
“Indeed,” said, complaisantly, in order to avoid any argument. And I put my arm gently around her waist.
“One doesn’t receive lashes of the whip, one isn’t chained up two by two, but the greatest tortures are not caused by blows. When I was a child, there was no greater joy for me than drawing no matter what, with a pencil and pieces of paper, and anything I found.”
I made a movement of surprise, which I manifested by a slight pressure on her arm.
“Oh,” Laurence went on, “Don’t think that I’m claiming ever to have had the slightest shadow of any talent. I’m not even sure of having possessed the dispositions for drawing that one observes in so many children, and which disappear as they grow older. But in sum, I see as the happiest days of my life those when I could, in all liberty, invent landscapes, people, or even completely incomprehensible scenes, and reproduce them as I liked. I didn’t eat every day. I was sitting on the floor in a room in a furnished hotel, in which the bed wasn’t made until the end of the day, because my mother got up late, and there was a great happiness that came to me from the disorder and uncertainty of life.”
We had quit the edge of the sea and were nimbly going up a little path on the hillside. In the harmony that I found in the world, Laurence’s confidences had their place; they had been made neither too early nor too late, but exactly at the right time.
“My mother once made me a gift of a box of paints—a very modest box, but in which there were several brushes. Nothing thereafter ever gave me a conception of luxury and abundance as high as the number of those brushes. I daubed without stopping for several days. I had begun a large picture on a large piece of Ingres paper that had been given to me in surplus. I had painted a large face with a white beard, with big red eyes, which gave me an impression of infinite sadness and which frightened me, its creator. It was a portrait of God. When I think about it, that image represented God as well as the pedantic speeches I heard on his subject.”
I was about to say something general about God, but Laurence slipped on some pine needles. I felt her arm hand cling on to my wrist to prevent herself from falling. At the same time, she started laughing, showing her teeth, and I respired her breath. It was impossible for me to say anything about God.
“I don’t know why I loved that portrait. I had kept it. When, to my misfortune”—Laurence emphasized the word misfortune—“it was decided that I was to live with my father, in making an inventory of my wretched effects, Madame de Saint-Aygulf found it and tore it up, in spite of my pleas. Yes, she destroyed, while smiling, the conception that I had of God. That was my first great chagrin, but many others were reserved for me.
“I’m getting to the comparison I made just now. Slaves are no more unfortunate than I was. Among us, too, fiancés are separated from fiancées, mothers from children, and the masters are as pitiless. I believe, in any case, that no greater hatred exists than that of the strong for the weak, especially when the strong believe that they represent justice, good and virtue. Madame de Saint-Aygulf had understood immediately that the little girl who had been separated from the only person who loved her had no other consolation than drawing.
“I did, in fact, draw faces to which I tried to give the resemblance of my mother, No one, evidently, could know that, because evidently, as portraits, they weren’t very accurate. I suspect, however, that that Madame de Saint-Aygulf had divined it. She could simply have prevented me from drawing, but no. She let me sketch my designs, making a semblance of to seeing me or having a sudden tolerance. And when I had finished some image, a formless figure in which my imagination recognized the adored features, then only did she take it off me and rent my heart by saying: ‘That child is incorrigible!’ or ‘That’s what comes of having a bad example before one’s eyes for years!’ A bad example! When I remember the hotel, sticky with damp, the putrid staircase, the numbered rooms like prisoners’ cells, the shady men without collars, the girls with their trailing clogs, and I compare all that with what my subsequent life was, with rich parents who didn’t love me, I find in the bad example a heart-rending beauty about which I can’t think without weeping.”
We had descended a little valley and climbed up another slope, and we had arrived at a house abandoned after a fire that had consumed several pine woods a few years previously, Nothing remained but the skeleton of the house and a few trees spared by the whim of the fire, From the place where we were, we could see clumps of cork-oaks around us, a cypress posted on a hilltop, and vines hanging on to the stones. In the distance, the sea made a blue circle. The September light was soft and gilded.
I told Laurence that she was loved more than she thought, firstly by her parents, and perhaps other people. I emphasized the last words.
But she shrugged her shoulders. She knew, she told me, what was what on that subject. Behind the honorable décor of the family, unsuspected hatreds hid, and also indifferences even more redoubtable. Madame de Saint-Aygulf, until the eve of her death, had applied herself to making her suffer. Doubtless she had understood that the sole happiness of a child without a mother, which was susceptible of raising her in her own eyes, was the possibility of expressing herself by drawing a caricature of the ideal. Madame de Saint-Aygulf had never weakened once; she had always forbidden her to draw what she called monstrosities, the product of an immoral imagination. Laurence thought that if she were n
ot dead now, she would have hurled herself upon her before leaving, she would have bitten her, she would have raised up her flat hair with blows of her fist.
“You said ‘before leaving,’” I said. “What do you mean by that?”
We were sitting on the stone bench of the house and I was measuring with an interior satisfaction how confidences bring people closer together, even without them being aware of it, especially if the voice that is making them is speaking in limpid air before a beautiful landscape.
“Do you believe, by chance,” said Laurence, “that I can stay any longer under the icy guardianship of my father? Look, there’s a tale told to children about a little swan gone astray among ducks and brought up with their vulgar mores. I’ve often thought that one might write about me a tale of a vile duck raised among swans. It would depict the duck as sad because of its excessively garish plumage, excessively clear pools of water alongside excessively flowery parks. And one day, it would open its heavy wings in order to rediscover the natal marsh where good and ugly ducks live, where the mud is warm.”
I protested against such a comparison, but Laurence shook her head. She was looking straight ahead.
The time has come, I said to myself, internally.
“Eveline despises me, and it’s really not her fault. She’s always heard it said that her beauty is so great, that she has an ideal so perfect, that she is so perfect in every respect. And of all that is familiar to her intelligence, I understand so little! As for my father, perhaps he’d experience a certain satisfaction of seeing me married, to no matter whom. The essential thing would be to be rid of me. But in the course of so many scenes he’s told me so often that I would turn out badly, that deep down, he wouldn’t be sorry to see his predictions realized. I represent ‘the errors of his youth,’ which have unfortunately grown up, just as Eveline represents the best of him. He has such a desire to efface all trace of sin from his existence, that merely to give him satisfaction, I’ve often been tempted go off with the first man to come along.”
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