Evening arrived, with a feast followed by a ball. Dieudonat, who had never yet seen anything of that sort, was astonished by the young couples who did not fear embracing one another in front of everyone. He coupled, like everyone else. He did not regret it; he took pleasure in flexing supple waists in the circle of his arms, in clasping sympathetic roundnesses to his torso. In the vertigo of quadrilles, pretty mouths murmured close to his ear: “I love you.” The more audacious said tu rather than vous.
He replied: “Me too.”
And, in fact, he loved everyone, as befits happy people.
“Handsome nephew,” said Queen Gaude, “hold tight, and know that you please me very much.”
“Good cousin,” said Princess Aude, “make me dance, I beg you.” And when they were spinning: “Would you like me, handsome cousin, to love you like a sister or a cousin?”
The One-Eyed watched from a distance.
The celebrations lasted long into the night. When the elect of the women returned to his palace there were his twenty-one chambermaids, who were waiting for him in various poses but with equal impatience; they greeted his return with cries of joy. At the same time, he was presented, on thirteen silver trays, with thirteen piles of letters imploring his amour.
“God! This is a country where people love one another! I shall definitely fix my residence here; the mores are mild, the souls benevolent, and the women give of their person.”
“If Milord would care to take my advice,” said Cleanthis, “he will content himself with the happiness he finds in his domicile. Let Milord count those trays, the number of which is a bad augury; and let him also count his maidservants, the total of whom is three times seven, a blessed number that ought to content his fantasy.”
“It might be,” said Dieudonat, thinking about Princes Aude.
He thought about many others and had no need to go in quest of them. The following day they came in a multitude; the day after, even more came; they were seen prowling around the palace or slipping through the darkness. In order to reach him they bribed the chief eunuch; he found them everywhere, at every hour of every day, some heavily veiled, others devoid of veils. Of all statures, all forms, all complexions, blondes, brunettes, redheads, gracile youth and ample maturity, the sentimental and the laughing, the modestly passionate and the violently exasperated, those who were burning and those who pretended to be, all dissimilar and yet all parallel, they succeeded one another, filling the house with a cooing of turtle-doves, and the radiant neophyte did not find that music monotonous.
“Oh,” said the chief eunuch, “Milord won’t be bored.”
“In no fashion, my friend.”
The weeks passed. Without changing location, Dieudonat made a tour of the world. That incessant travel had made him slightly thinner, even though he had not been fat, but his beauty did not lose anything by it. His figure was slimmer, his gesture more agile, and his eyes shinier.
“Oh,” said the chief eunuch, “I’ve been serving for forty years, and I’m rich, but I’d give all my wealth in exchange for yours.”
“You have, in fact, been subjected to a great wrong, my friend.”
He was firmly convinced of that, and considered his purveyor the most unfortunate of men, just as he was the most enviable if them all.
Anoure was holding a ledger.
“I shall have the honor this evening of presenting Milord with the last of the eighth quartile.”9
Toward the middle of the second trimester, the Prince thought he perceived that perhaps, more than perhaps, his pleasure was beginning to attenuate, and that the perpetual unexpected lacked, in sum, the unexpected.
“Am I getting blasé already? Oh Lord preserve me from that ingratitude towards you, and toward them!”
He was obliged to recognize, however, in the sixth month, that his curiosity was fading. However, as he became less and less interested in that perpetual novelty, he observed that the most recent elect testified an intense joy, much more vivid than the first ones.
“That’s quite bizarre.”
One day, when one of those women, weeping, threw herself over his bosom, he questioned her. “Why are you weeping, beautiful cousin?”
“I thought that minute would never arrive! O dear beloved, my beloved, for six months, I’ve wanted it so much, that minute!”
And her eyes expressed an infinite ecstasy.
That day, he understood.
“There are too many of them, and I don’t have time to love them; they come too quickly, and I don’t have the leisure to summon them. They concentrate on me the wishes that I scatter among them. While I forget them after having seen them, they’re exasperated waiting for me, accumulating desire and hoarding hope. Every day, their patience collaborates with the future joy, and when, at the end of their tether, they come here, they bring me the ripe fruit, swollen with sap and gilded by long sunlight. They give me more than I can render them, and that’s why, Lord, you accord them more than me.”
He shook his head. “I wanted love too much, and I’m only making the gestures of it.”
Slightly perplexed, he went down into the gardens; as usual, he encountered timid women there, who lowered their heads, blushing, and who, having come there in order to see him, dared not look him in the face.
“Who are these?”
“Stupid women who love you platonically, Milord, and who are only soliciting a glance.”
He smiled at them, out of the goodness of his heart, and deigned to speak to a few; they went home delighted. But the eunuch mocked those futile creatures who baulked at the true happiness.
“Are you sure, my friend, that one happiness is truer than another?”
“I only know of one on earth!”
“The one that you don’t know?”
“The very same, Milord, and that one alone.”
“Oho!” said Dieudonat. “We’re approaching the truth. A lady informed me just now that realizations obtain value by the intensity of the desire; now a eunuch is informing me that the intensity of desire is in inverse proportion to possibilities...”
He stopped abruptly, as if a crocodile had appeared in the pathway.
“But…what I’ve discovered there, Lord, I already knew! Thirteen years ago, I explained to the worthy Onesime: ‘The man whose desires are all realized is a man deprived of desires.’ Am I a dupe, then? And I’m a simpleton too, since I haven’t even suspected what I told others, and one emotion sufficed to render me ignorant of everything and of myself!”
At a slow pace, with his head bowed, as if he were carrying a burden, he returned to the palace. For the first time since his arrival, he decided to sleep alone, and when the maidservants protested on the threshold of his bedroom, he sent them away, saying: “Beautiful young women, go to sleep; all happiness is in the idea.”
XXI. Whereon the inconveniences of futility
become evident
That night, the Prince did not sleep, and although it was the softest suavity, he found it singularly desolating, by reason of its very sweetness. Leaning on his window sill, he watched the stars rotating, and amused himself sadly calling them by their names.
“I give you names but I don’t know you, any more than you know the names I give you: I enjoy your beauty as you pass by, without knowing anything of what constitutes it, for the aspects that I suppose of it don’t resemble you; I imagine you in my own way without any precise information about you, O beautiful stars, and while, via you, I delight myself with your splendor, we remain strangers to one another, mysterious stars so similar to women!”
Never had he felt isolated to the degree that he did now, either in his cell in the monastery or in the hermitage on the mountain; only now did he discover that there are two solitudes: that of the body, which is the desert, and that of the mind, which is among people.
Facing him, the planet Mars blazed red.
“I have seen you rotate all night, dissimilar heavenly body, and now you are about to reenter the horiz
on, like the others, you who have nothing in common with the others, poor planet, child of the sun, who make a semblance of being a sun. For a long time I thought you were larger than any, uniquely because you are smaller, like me, and closer to me; I admire you for shining so brightly, when you do not even shine, paltry mirror that you are, decorated prince whose adornment only sparkles by virtue of reflections. Are you alive or already dead? Even that is unknown! I resemble you.”
In sum, he was traversing the crisis of a melancholy neatly specified by the medico-moral adage that begins with the words “Omne animal...”10 Ignorant of the causes of his malaise, he let his fatigued soul drift, with the complaisance that we put into dying in part, and he was chagrined to see the first light appear of the dawn that was about to rid him of his pain by rinsing him in light.
“In only loving a single woman I would doubtless have been less alone.”
He set about searching for which one, without noticing that he was searching the number of the unexplored. He threw out names at hazard: “Gaude? Married... Aude? Engaged...” They were all eliminated for one reason or another, and yet one among them might perhaps ensure him of paradise.
“You who might offer me a lasting felicity, come to me!”
Immediately, he heard light footsteps behind him.
That’s my wish being realized...already!
He dared not turn his head, for fear of finding himself face to face with the definitive elect on whom his destiny depended.
Who is she? What is she?
He gathered his courage and turned round, sure that he was about to see the Unique. It was the eunuch.
“Why have you come and who are you? Anoure, are you yourself or a symbol? Are you appearing like a counsel, Anoure, at the moment when I an invoking the form of supreme happiness”
“I don’t understand what Milord is saying. I’ve become because it’s my duty, having seen Milord all alone and wanting to ask for his orders.”
“I have none to give you.”
“Milord is bored? Would Milord want to see my files, with the lists and portraits of the ladies? My account has presently reached the figure five hundred and forty-nine. And if I count those it was necessary for us to refuse...”
“You’ve refused some of them, then?”
“Is Milord forgetting that he has formally forbidden adultery, and that I was obliged, in consequence, to send away many amorous women stained by marriage?”
The butler neglected to add that in many circumstances, when the clients were particularly pretty, when they remunerated him with a few liberties or a few ducats, he had taken care to denounce his master’s scruples to them; the alerted wives had then declared themselves to be damsels or widows. He smiled as he thought about that, while Dieudonat returned to graver thoughts. Anoure heard him sigh.
“Milord is discontented?”
“I was saying to myself, my friend, that women are truly futile.”
“I believe so, Milord.”
“Have you ever thought of the etymology of that word? Futere, futilis, what is susceptible of being, what must be. How shall I put it? Which exists to be…futita!”11
“I don’t understand Latin, Milord.”
“That’s a great pity, for you’d understand that one is wrong to speak of ‘futile things.’ There are no futile things, my friend, but only people; and you would recognize that, by definition, futility is the distinctive prerogative of the female sex.”
But the eunuch was scarcely listening; he was looking out of the window, anxiously, and he started abruptly, exclaiming fearfully: “There, Milord, in the patch of mist, that woman who is coming, look Milord!”
“I do perceive one, in fact.
“The Queen, Milord! Queen Gaude, who is as determined as the others! I recognize her under her veil.”
Anoure ran away.
The Prince received the Queen with an excessive respect; affecting not to understand the gracious intentions of the matinal visit, he talked about his gratitude for the paternal generosity of his host, the King. In the shelter of that gratitude he felt that he was safe, but the Queen disabused him.
“Have no illusions, handsome cousin; it’s gold that is expected of you, my friend…don’t interrupt your Queen. In the hope of that gold. Gaifer calls you his son, and he’ll call you his son-in-law as well, if the role is acceptable to you.”
“I venerate Princess Aude, but I know that she is engaged to Archduke Galeas...”
“Whom she detests, who execrates you, and of whom sausages will be made if that is your desire, on the sole condition that you provide what is expected of you; and since a gesture of your little finger would suffice...”
“Never again will I make gold, never again! I’ve sworn it. I know the work of that metal too well, deadly because it engenders misfortune, deadly because it procures death. Never again, never again.”
“There, there! Don’t excite yourself thus and reserve your forces for the moment. In addition, I don’t care to see you marrying that little fool. I have something better in reserve for you, my friend, since I’m taking you for myself.”
The clarity of that speech no longer permitted any misunderstanding regarding the sovereign’s intentions; her eyes were shining and her mouth was very red; all her teeth were visible, gleaming. And her mobile lips were muttering a silence even more explicit than her words. Then she uttered a great sigh, as if the double weight of her breasts had crushed her lungs, and, with her two fists resting on the cushions of the divan, she went on:
“I have acquired an intense liking for your person, my friend, and did so from the very first moment. I wanted to see whether it would pass, and I even resisted, for I’m an honest wife. It persists; so, I’m yielding, and I’m taking you for myself, as I told you just now. But you’ll find it good that it will be for me alone, and that I don’t admit any sharing. I won’t impose any on you either; I’m delivering myself entirely, and I demand everything. You’ll learn in my arms, cousin, that there is only felicity in amour in the total gift of oneself, and your entire past will seem insipid by comparison with our erudite passion.
“There is no need to add, after that, that I’m renouncing the King, who isn’t worth very much anyway. We’ll depose him; everything is ready; my agents have worked on public opinion; the people, knowing the favors with which you gratify your subjects, will applaud enthusiastically; we’ll suppress taxes, we’ll found hospices, we’ll open free theaters; our two names will be blessed and our initials, enlaced like our arms, will decorate monuments. That’s the plan, Dieudonat the First. Choose between the throne I’m offering you or the prison that your good friend Gaifer is reserving for you.”
The Prince did his best to hide his horror of such wicked perfidies and a Majesty so devoid of moral sense; the Court usages that he had been practicing for six months had sufficed to teach him that an honest man must put on a good face to the dishonest ones he encounters. That is why, while affirming that he was very touched by an excessively flattering distinction, he confessed that his respect for the sacrament of marriage would deprive him of the pleasure with which he would have had in the honor of being Her Majesty’s very humble and obedient servant.
His response was poorly welcomed.
“You’re making me yawn, my fear, with your semblance of scruples and your belated morality. Marriage! Are its duties more rigorous for me than for others and are you asking us to believe that so many legitimate spouses come here in the hope of hearing a Lenten sermon?”
Dieudonat learned with amazement that for six months he had been committing adultery left, right and center; the sincerity of his surprise was so evident that Queen Gaude became less wrathful in order to stifle her laughter; she rolled on the divan like an ordinary person, without being able to articulate a word. That undulation gave generous value to her natural advantages, and she was conscious of it. But the perpetual lover was in a state of mind only to be able to contemplate the horizontal temptations fearfully, and
he suffered from a hilarity that seemed to him to be out of season.
Finally, the beautiful Gaude drew breath.
“O great simpleton, handsome simpleton, it’s true, then, that you’ve been made to swallow these lies? Have you been assured, while they were here, that we’re all virgins and remained virgins while awaiting your arrival?”
“What! Not one of the outraged husbands has come to break my head!”
“They had too much to do looking out for their own, impaired as it was, and the King was looking out for yours. Do you think he would have tolerated any attempt whatsoever against his goose that lays golden eggs? The fortunes of the country repose on your existence, maker of money, and your life is as sacred as the fatherland itself. The hope of the fatherland, that’s you, my friend. To touch you, or to try to, or even to think about it, is a crime of high treason meriting the gallows or the ax, and the entire nation shares the sage sentiments of the King on that score. Let’s take advantage of it. Everything is praiseworthy for you, dear heart! I’ve told you so, no longer doubt it, and come and sit down beside me.”
“My conscience is crushed with shame by the universal debasement that I create without knowing it!”
“There, there! What pompous words! Universal debasement? If that idea offends you, scratch it out; you can: the exceptions have proved the rule.”
“Husbands are irritated?”
“And fiancés, father and brothers not to mention a few sons.”
“So?”
“So they’ve been put in the shade to refresh their ideas.”
“No one has lost his life?”
“Very few; the King takes care of it; the King isn’t malevolent, but respect for just laws is only obtained by examples.”
“Horror!”
“Bah! The jealous men in prison compensate the jealous men who imprison their wives, and if it has seemed necessary to send a few convicts to the gallows, I don’t see that they’re any more to be lamented than the unfortunate women expedited to the other world by the anger of their husbands.”
Dieudonat Page 15