Lucifer

by Maurice Magre

  But I stopped, open-mouthed. It was not one panther—the panther with which Lord Portman had threatened me—it was two panthers that had been set on sentry duty for me, which were watching the entrance to the tunnel, standing to the right and left of its entrance, in a frightful immobility.

  I held my breath, and, through my mind, with a vertiginous rapidity, all the horrible stories ran that I had hard since my arrival in India of men surprised and devoured by wild beasts,. Nothing had ever terrified me as much as the thought of dying between the paws of one of those giant cats with fetid breath, Lord Portman’s kiss was better. But did I have the choice?

  I heard a noise of breaking glass at the end of the corridor, which made me suppose that Lord Portman, after having broken down the door, was in the process of discovering the opening of the tunnel.

  I had held my breath, but it was necessary for me to respire a little air. I remarked then that the panthers were not breathing; and I also remarked that they were much larger than panthers; they were tigers, and tigers larger than natural. They were not breathing because they were made of stone, because I only had before me one of the thousand reproductions of animals with which the Hindu religion populates its temples.

  I slipped between them and, with an infinite satisfaction, I gave one of the inoffensive muzzles a little pat. At that same moment, footsteps resounded at the other end of the tunnel.

  I launched myself at hazard alongside the pool. I had no idea how to direct myself within that formidable succession of gopurams, holy places, courts and porticos. On reflection I ought not to fear the panther. It had only been a threat to prevent me from fleeing. One does not leave a panther, even domesticated, at liberty in a place where there are a large number of servants. English law is rigorous on that subject, even for rich lords. We were no longer in the times of Cammatatchi. But where could I go? Ought I to try to find the place where the Rajah and the Prince were doubtless smoking peacefully? They now inspired me with a horror almost as great as Lord Portman.

  “It’s much more than it’s worth,” Vanini had said.

  My arrival in my bayadere’s costume, in the midst of musicians and sleeping servants, appeared to me to be the ultimate in ridicule.

  My only hope was to be able to get out of the enclosure of Chillambaram, reach the village and obtain hospitality in a Hindu house, What welcome would be reserved for me there? How could I explain myself, given that I did not know the local language, or English?

  All those difficulties appeared to me while I was running, and I could not see any practical way out of my situation. But I ran, because the essential thing, first of all, was to escape Lord Portman’s embrace.

  I had quit the edge of the pool, crossed an enclosure planted with coconut palms, and was going past the colonnades of a temple. The opium and the terrors I had experiencing might have been acting on my imagination, but I thought I saw in passing the coconut palms begin to move and the columns running by my side, with their capitals on their thin shoulders.

  A singular life took possession of things. An enormous solitary Buddha sitting under a cylindrical dome stood up ceremoniously as I passed and bowed as if to salute me. A tower performed a pirouette in front of me and I thought that it was about to deposit at my feet a bizarre ball covered with ornaments, which surmounted it. On the threshold of a door less temple all sorts of divinities with several heads and numerous arms came to watch me pass by. I saw Brahma, I saw Vishnu, I saw Siva. I saw many others whose names I did not know.

  I emerged in front of the chapel of the sacred bull and fell at the foot of one of its four pillars, unable to do any more, indifferent to the movements of the pillars and the strange coming and going of the bull’s head.

  I seemed to hear a voice in the distance calling me. It was the abhorred voice of Lord Portman. Was he exhorting me to come back? Was he threatening me with the panther again? The thought of his fat lips, his empty eyes and his hateful face sufficed to render me the courage necessary to flee.

  I had recognized the pagoda of the sacred bull, which I had visited on my arrival. There could not be many of them. The only difference between the pagoda that I saw in the moonlight and the one I had seen at dusk was that the latter was motionless, with a stone bull solidly fixed to its pedestal, while this one was agitating feverishly and sheltering an animate bull that never ceased moving its head to the right and the left. And I was possessed by a bizarre agitation myself.

  I recalled that, by going around the enormous monument that was to the right—which was the temple containing the Holy of Holies, on the altar of which the ineffable deity reposes, which is above the universe and the gods—I would find the boundary wall. I slid along the wall, plastering myself against it, making myself as small as possible. I darted a timid glance inside as I passed before the entrance to the temple. I had once gazed without dread, and had even smiled when I was told that the supreme divinity of the Hindu religion is worshiped on an empty altar. Now, scarcely a glance in passing, and I shivered on glimpsing, in the uncertain light, a great black stone on which nothing was set.

  The enclosing wall was enormous. We had come through it by the western portal, but I knew from Vanini’s discourse that there were four portals. I knew that in India, everything is dilapidation and ruins, and that doors that fall often remain for centuries without being replaced.

  I went along the wall, and I perceived that I was not mistaken. I was at the eastern portal, the portal of serpents, framed by a tangle of sculpted serpents, coiled, suspended and intermingled—and the door was no longer anything but a few worm-eaten planks held together by lianas.

  All the serpents—at least, I had the illusion of it—were stirring, advancing their flat heads and their bespectacled eyed, stretching toward me. But I was beginning to get used to that universal movement. I thought, with a good deal of reason, that there was more to fear from a tiny invisible snake living in the grass that the entire swarm of the snakes of the immense portico.

  I removed one of the planks without much difficulty, slipped through the opening and, with a great sigh of relief, emerged from the enclosure of Chillambaram.

  In the moonlight, I saw that all around the gate, in a large open space, disposed in a semicircle, there was an entire cavalcade of stone elephants and horses, with their riders. They were marvelously white and I would have admired their form and the harmony of their disposition if I had not been wandering anxiously in which direction the village might lie and what was going to become of me in the night.

  Beyond that mute army, I thought I could see the while line of a road between the coconut palms, coming from I know not where to end at the eastern portal. I thought that the best thing for me to do was to take that road.

  I took a few steps in the moonlight and behind me, the serpents of the portal, and the high and somber wall, agitated. In front of me the elephants were waddling, shifting their trunks, and the stone cavaliers leaned over in their saddles. I even heard the whinnying of a horse. But had I not seen the columns running, the sacred bull stirring between its four pillars, and astonishing idols appearing on the thresholds of temples? The effects of the opium were familiar to me now and their phantasmagoria could not stop me.

  I advanced with a firm tread between the elephants and the cavaliers. There was one that was not wearing the same costume as the others and not standing in the same alignment. He leaned over to the point of falling, and I thought I was about to hear the sound that a block of marble makes when it breaks.

  How surprised was I when he uttered a cry of joy with a human throat, when he enlaced me in his warm arms and deposited me, palpitating, in his saddle, against his young man’s breast!

  The Return to Pondicherry

  Having lifted me from the ground, Mir did not replace me on the ground for explanations. It was only afterwards that I told him about my adventure in the pagoda of Chillambaram, and how he had been able to find me in the threshold of the eastern portal in that unexpected costum
e. I took care, in any case, to transform the truth slightly in order not to make his father play the odious role that I left exclusively to Lord Portman.

  It was only afterwards that he explained his providential appearance to me. The day before, he had received a laconic note enjoining him depart without delay for Chillambaram, where I was in danger. He had only found the note in the afternoon and had spent the night en route.

  For the moment, I did not seek to discover who had written that letter, as well as the one that I had received, who the protector was who had watched over me and was endowed with sufficient penetration to judge Mir capable of crossing forty-nine miles at a single stretch solely on the indication of a danger threatening me. In fact, I never knew for certain. But when I learned that a liaison of sorts had been created between Vanini and Juliette Romano, I supposed that the latter had received from Vanini the confidence of the Chillambaram project.

  Vanini must have believed that Juliette Romano hated me and that he would give her pleasure by describing the trap that had been set for me, and my imminent humiliation. Vanini knew the admiration that Mir had for me and the latter, in spite of his reserved nature, might perhaps have confessed his sentiments to him. Juliette Romano must have experienced to a high degree—at least, I supposed so—the patriotism of the weaker sex that sometimes urges women to unreflective revolts and impels them to aid one another against the egotism and bestiality of men.

  She had only warned me by means of an anonymous note, not wanting to quarrel with anyone, but she had also warned Mir, whom she must have supposed to be my lover. In formulating the last hypotheses she was, in any case, only mistaken by a matter of hours.

  But while Mir carried me away along the road to Pondicherry, there was certainly no question of all that. There was only a question of the thirst that was devouring both of us—or even all three, for the forty-nine miles crossed by night had exhausted the horse on which Mir was hugging me with more timidity than desire.

  The night ended and a light pallor spread over the spread over the landscape, outlining the clumps of palm-trees, the bare hills and the monotonous alignment of rice-fields. Muir remembered that after Gondelour he had passed over a bridge and had had the sensation that the bridge was extended over a flowing stream and not a dried-up bed, as is often the case.

  We traveled a long distance in the hope of that bridge. One of Mir’s hands maintained me in the saddle, wrapped around my midriff, which was the part of my body not covered by any garment.

  We finally reached the promised stream, dismounted, drank several draughts and enabled the horse to drink. When our thirst was slaked we used the pretext of the water we had spilled, he over his neck and I between my breasts, to laugh together for a long time, because of the joy we were each secretly experiencing in finding ourselves together in a solitary landscape, bathed by the delightful freshness of the morning.

  The horrible danger that I had run, and the difficulty of getting back to Pondicherry without scandal, were effaced from my mind at the same time, to give way to a puerile, almost sportive pleasure, the kind one experiences when one departs early for an excursion, and the unconscious elements of which are the wealth of one’s own health and a odor of damp earth.

  We started walking along the river; a great insouciance was in us. We agreed that the wisest thing to do was for me not to show myself during the day in my bayadere costume, which would not have failed to pique the curiosity of anyone who saw me. The best course of action was to find a refuge for the day, and only go back by night. By going back late we had every change of not encountering anyone. We immediately adopted that plan, which had the advantage of permitting us to remain together for quite a long time.

  The day had concluded and the bad omens of the day before were no longer exerting their action. I was certain that, if I had looked into the sky, I would have seen white birds flying from right to left, that it would have been impossible for me to discover the smallest spider in the longest grass, and that if I had leaned over the pebbles of the stream, I would immediately have seen a minuscule pink stone shaped in the form of a heart by gods desirous of informing a favored creature, by means of a sign, that amour is close at hand.

  But I did not have the leisure to gaze at the sky, the grass and the pebbles; I was too fully occupied with the silence that had just suddenly fallen on Mir and me, and by the thousands of words with which we were communicating silently.

  Finally, a cabin was offered to our eyes. It had no door, and was composed of badly-jointed planks. It must have served as a shelter for peasants when they came to work in the nearby rice-field. We decided to rest for a while there, and go on later.

  Mir tied up his horse to one side and examined the grass-covered ground of the cabin carefully, in order to get rid of the snakes if there were any.

  We lay down side by side. Mir’s timidity led him to leave rather a large gap between us, but the chill of the morning, further augmented by the proximity of the water, had gripped us since we had dismounted from the horse. I shivered, and instinctively put both hands over my bosom, with the movement that one gives to one’s shoulders to narrow them when one is cold. I think, to be sincere, that I was deliberately exaggerating my sensation of cold. Mir was also shivering, perhaps also with exaggeration.

  I do not know whether it was him that made the first gesture of drawing together. I believe that it was me, and that I legitimated it immediately by shivering again. But the sun was rising rapidly; it warmed up the planks of the cabin very quickly, and if we had needed a pretext to be close to one another that of cold would no longer have been valid. But we had no need of a pretext.

  Late at night, a bayadere whom a young man was holding tight on the saddle of his horse passed through the mute streets of Pondicherry. She was very weary, half-asleep, but she was smiling at her strange adventure, especially in thinking that the most marvelous intoxication of her life she did not owe either to opium or hashish, but to a day spent fasting in a wretched cabin of planks, on the bare ground.

  Notes

  1 The reference is presumably to Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier (1718-1790), a staunch defender of Catholic dogma against the skepticism of the philosophes, and co-author of an oft-reprinted dictionary of dogmatic theology. The dictionary does include credulous mention of diabolical pacts, but Bergier had no special expertise in the subject, and the employment of that dictionary and Larousse implies that the narrator’s research must have been rather superficial.

  2 This wordplay does not translate. The Latin title of the notorious grimoire whose title is usually translated into English as The Great Key of Solomon is Clavicula Salomonis Regis, the first word being the root of the English and French words for the clavicle or collar bone.

  3 The original has “ématille stone,” which is term only found in occult sources, but it is generally though to refer to the gemstone otherwise known as heliotrope or bloodstone, which is green with red spots, supposedly resembling spots of blood.

  4 Jacques Collin de Plancy, in whose Dictionnaire infernal Magre probably found the legend of Duncanius of Liebenthal, attributes its coinage to the German writers Heinrich Zschokke (1771-1848), presumably following an earlier attribution in the Musée des Familles in 1833.

  5 The notion that Helen, the consort of Simon Magus, was a prostitute from Tyre, following a long series of previous incarnations of the original female principle, Ennoia, which had included Helen of Troy, appears to have been originated by the Christian apologist Irenaeus in his refutation of Gnostism, written circa 180 A.D. Magre elaborates the myth somewhat to suit his own text.

  6 Sophia [wisdom] is the principle whose fall into the world is represented in Gnosticism as Ennoia, incarnated, according to the myth of Simon and Helen, in the latter; one of the alleged schools of Gnosticism divides Sophia into two, of which one aspect—the one associated with Ennoia—is Sophia Achamoth

  7 The word nyctalopique [nyctalopic] which ought to refer to night-blindness, is sometimes
used in French to signify the opposite--i.e., an ability to see in the dark.

  8 The zaimph, or veil of Tanit, was familiar to French readers because of the crucial symbolic role that it plays in Gustave Flaubert’s classic Salammbô (1862), in a scene of profanation to which this paragraph is a direct reference.

  9 The periodical to which the narrator is referring is presumably the Sunday weekly that began publication in November 1891 and existed until 1906, although it recycled the title of a mid-nineteenth century periodical. Magre would have been familiar with it while still living with his parents in Toulouse.

  10 Antoinism, founded in Belgium in 1910 by Louis-Joseph Antoine, was a doctrine that attempted to fuse Spiritism—the French version of what English-language speaker call Spiritualism—with Catholic doctrine and a belief in reincarnation.

  11 Le Diable à Paris [The Devil in Paris] was the title of a series of satirical texts subtitled Paris et les parisiens published by Pierre-Jules Hetzel in the mid-1840s, supplied with material by the leading figures of the Romantic Movement, which might well have been on display in the window of a second-hand bookshop, although its significance here is purely sarcastic.

  12 “Cammatatchi, a Dancer,” is an oft-reproduced print, still easily available. It is credited to the Orientalist Eugène Burnouf (1801-1852) because it was used as an illustration in one of his books, but he is unlikely to be the artist. The portrait does not show its subject dancing, nor is her costume provocative; the author only seems to have borrowed the name.

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