Revived by this thought, the Frenchman whacked down several clusters of ripe dates whose weight seemed to bend the date palm’s branches, and as he sampled this unanticipated manna he was certain that the grotto’s inhabitant had cultivated the palm trees. The delicious, cool flesh of the date provided clear evidence of his predecessor’s labors. The man from Provence shifted unthinkingly from dark despair to an almost mad joy. He climbed back up to the top of the hill and busied himself for the rest of the day cutting down one of the infertile palm trees that had provided him with a roof the previous night. A vague memory made him think of the animals of the desert, and foreseeing that they might come to drink at the watering hole lost in the sands that appeared at the base of the rocky outcropping, he resolved to guard against their visits by putting a barrier at the door of his hermitage. Despite his enthusiasm, despite the strength he drew from his fear of being devoured as he slept, he found it impossible to cut the palm tree into several pieces in the course of the day, but he succeeded in felling it.
When toward evening this king of the desert finally fell, the noise of its collapse echoed in the distance, like a groan uttered by the solitude. The soldier shivered as if he had heard some voice announcing disaster. But like an heir who does not grieve for long at a parent’s death, he stripped the fine tree of the long, broad green leaves that define its poetic decoration and used them to repair the mat on which he would sleep. Worn out by the heat and his labors, he slept under the red walls of his damp grotto.
In the middle of the night his sleep was disturbed by an extraordinary noise. He sat up, and in the deep silence he recognized the sound of something breathing with a savage energy that could not belong to a human creature. A deep fear made even greater by the darkness, by the silence, and by the fancies of his sudden awakening chilled his heart. He barely even felt his scalp crawl when his dilated pupils glimpsed in the darkness two faint yellow beams. At first he attributed these lights to some reflection of his own eyes, but soon the vivid brightness of the night helped him by degrees to distinguish objects within the grotto, and he perceived an enormous animal lying two steps away from him. Was it a lion, a tiger, or a crocodile? The man from Provence did not have enough education to know in what subspecies to place his enemy, but his fright was all the more violent since his ignorance caused him to assume all these disasters at once. He endured the cruel torture of hearing, of grasping the irregularities of this breathing without losing any of its nuances, and without daring to make the slightest movement. An odor as strong as a fox’s breath but more penetrating, more serious, we might say, filled the grotto, and when the man from Provence had taken it in with his nose, his terror was at its height, but he could no longer doubt the existence of the terrifying companion whose royal lair served as his bivouac.
Soon the rays of the moon sailing toward the horizon lit up the den and the subtly gleaming skin of a spotted panther. This royal Egyptian beast was sleeping rolled over like a large dog, peaceful possessor of a sumptuous nook at the door of a grand house. Its eyes opened for a moment, then closed again. It had its face turned toward the Frenchman. A thousand jumbled thoughts passed through the soul of the panther’s prisoner. At first he wanted to kill it with a rifle shot, but he saw that there was not enough space between them to aim properly—the barrel would have extended beyond the animal. And what if he were to wake it up? This hypothesis stopped him in his tracks. Listening to the beating of his heart in the silence, he cursed the pounding pulsations of his blood, dreading to disturb the sleep that allowed him to find a solution to his advantage. He put his hand twice on his scimitar, planning to cut off his enemy’s head, but the difficulty of cutting through such a tough hide forced him to give up his bold project. “Fail to kill it? Surely that would be a death sentence,” he thought. He preferred the odds of combat and resolved to wait for daylight. And daylight was not long in coming. The Frenchman then was able to examine the panther; its muzzle was tinged with blood. “She’s had a good meal!” he thought, without worrying whether the feast had been one of human flesh. “She won’t be hungry when she wakes up.”
It was a female. The fur of the white belly and thighs glimmered. Several little velvety spots formed pretty bracelets around the paws. The muscular tail was also white but tipped with black rings. The upper part of the coat, yellow as matte gold but very smooth and soft, bore those characteristic spots shaped like roses that distinguished panthers from other kinds of Felis. This calm and formidable hostess purred in a pose as graceful as that of a cat reclining on the cushion of an ottoman. Her bloody paws, twitching and well armed, lay beneath her head, whose sparse, straight whiskers protruded like silver wires. If she had been in a cage, the man from Provence would surely have admired the grace of this beast and the vigorous contrasts of strong colors that gave her simarre an imperial splendor, but just now he felt his viewing disturbed by its ominous aspect.
The panther’s presence, even asleep, made him experience the effect produced by the hypnotic eyes of a snake on, they say, a nightingale. The soldier’s courage failed for a moment before this danger, although he would surely have been exalted facing cannon spewing a hail of shot. However, an intrepid thought blossomed in his soul and halted at its source the cold sweat running down his forehead. Acting like men whom misfortune has pushed to the end of their rope, challenging death to do its worst, he saw a tragedy in this adventure without being conscious of it, and resolved to play his role with honor, even to the final scene.
“The day before yesterday, perhaps the Arabs would have killed me,” he said to himself. Considering himself a dead man already, he bravely waited with restless curiosity for his enemy to awake. When the sun appeared, the panther silently opened her eyes; then she violently extended her paws, as if to loosen them up and dissipate any cramps. At last she yawned, displaying the fearsome array of her teeth and her grooved tongue, as hard as a grater. “She’s like a little mistress!” thought the Frenchman, seeing her rolling around and making the gentlest, most flirtatious movements. She licked the blood that stained her paws, wiped her muzzle, and scratched her head with repeated gestures full of delicacy. “Good! Make your toilette,” the Frenchman thought to himself, recovering his cheer by summoning courage. “We’ll wish each other good morning.” And he grabbed the short dagger he had taken from the Maghrebis.
Just then the panther turned her head toward the Frenchman and stared at him without moving. The rigidity of those metallic eyes and their unbearable clarity made the man from Provence shiver, especially when the beast walked toward him. But he gazed at her caressingly and steadily, as if attempting to exert his own animal magnetism, and let her come near him; then, with a movement as gentle, as amorous as if he had wanted to caress the prettiest woman, he passed his hand over her entire body, from head to tail, using his nails to scratch the flexible vertebrae that ran the length of the panther’s yellow back. The beast voluptuously raised her tail, her eyes softened, and when the Frenchman completed this self-interested petting for the third time, she made one of those purring noises by which our cats express their pleasure. But this murmur came from a gullet so powerful and so deep that it sounded in the grotto like the last drones of a church organ. The man from Provence, understanding the importance of his caresses, redoubled his efforts to stun and stupefy this imperious courtesan. When he felt certain of extinguishing his capricious companion’s ferocity, remembering that her hunger had been so fortunately satisfied the evening before, he rose to leave the grotto. The panther let him go, but when he had climbed the hill, she leaped with the lightness of monkeys jumping from branch to branch and came to rub herself against the soldier’s legs, curving her back like a cat. Then, looking at her guest with an eye whose brightness had become less rigid, she uttered a wild call, which naturalists compare to the noise of a saw.
“How demanding she is!” cried the Frenchman, smiling. He tried to play with her ears, caress her belly, and scratch her head hard with his nails. And seeing hi
s success, he tickled her skull with the point of his dagger, looking for the moment to kill her. But the hardness of the bones made him tremble at the possibility of failure.
The sultana of the desert noted with approval her slave’s talents by raising her head, stretching out her neck, marking her intoxication by her repose. The Frenchman suddenly thought that in order to kill this savage princess in one blow, he would have to stab her in the throat, and he raised his blade just as the panther, no doubt sated with this play, lay down graciously at his feet, giving him looks now and then which, despite an inborn rigidity, displayed something like benevolence. The poor man from Provence ate his dates, leaning against one of the palm trees, but he glanced inquiringly at the surrounding desert in every direction, searching for liberators, and at his terrifying mate, keeping an eye on her uncertain clemency. The panther looked at the place where the date pits were falling every time he threw one of them, and then her eyes expressed a skeptic’s suspicion. She examined the Frenchman with a calculating caution that concluded in his favor, for when he had finished his meager meal she licked the soles of his shoes, and with her rough, strong tongue miraculously cleaned the encrusted dust from their creases.
“But when she gets hungry?” thought the Provençal soldier. Although this idea caused him a shiver of fear, he began out of curiosity to measure the proportions of the panther, certainly one of the most beautiful examples of the species, for she was three feet high and four feet long, not counting her tail. This powerful weapon, thick around as a gourd, was nearly three feet long. Her head, as large as the head of a lioness, was distinguished by a rare expression of refinement; a tiger’s cold cruelty was dominant, of course, but there was also a vague resemblance to the facial features of a cunning woman. Just now the face of this solitary queen revealed something like Nero’s drunken gaiety: She had quenched her thirst for blood and wanted to play. The soldier tried to come and go, and the panther let him move freely, content to follow him with her eyes, less like a faithful dog than like a large angora cat made restless by everything, even her master’s movements. When he returned, he noticed the remains of his horse next to the fountain, where the panther had dragged the cadaver. Around two-thirds of it had been devoured. This spectacle reassured the Frenchman. It was easy to explain the panther’s absence and the respect she had shown him while he slept.
This first happiness emboldened him to attempt the future: He conceived the mad hope of getting on well with the panther all that day, engaging every means to win her over and ingratiate himself. He came near her once more and had the inexpressible happiness of seeing her wave her tail with a subtle movement. So he sat near her without fear and they began to play together. He took her paws, her muzzle, he twisted her ears, rolled her onto her back, and scratched her warm, silky flanks hard. She participated willingly, and when the soldier tried to smooth the fur of her paws, she carefully retracted her claws, curved like steel blades. The Frenchman, who kept one hand on his dagger, was still of a mind to plunge it into the overly trusting belly of the panther, but he was afraid of being instantly strangled in her last wild convulsion. And besides, his heart filled with a kind of remorse that begged him to respect a harmless creature. He felt he had found a friend in this boundless desert. Unbidden thoughts came to him of his first mistress, whom he had called ironically by the nickname “Mignonne” because she was so violently jealous that as long as their passion lasted, he was afraid of the knife with which she used to threaten him. This memory of his youth prompted him to try and impose the name on the young pantheress, whose agility, grace, and softness he now admired less fearfully.
Toward the end of the day, he had become used to his perilous situation, and he almost enjoyed its anguish. His companion had become used to looking at him when he called in a falsetto voice: “Mignonne.” By sunset, Mignonne uttered a deep and melancholy cry several times.
“She is well brought up!” thought the cheerful soldier. “She is saying her prayers!” But this unspoken pleasantry came to him only when he had noticed his companion’s peaceful attitude. “Go on, my little blonde, I will let you go to bed first,” he said to her, counting heavily on escaping by foot as quickly as possible while she slept and finding another shelter for the night. The soldier waited impatiently for the moment of his getaway, and when it came, he walked vigorously in the direction of the Nile, but scarcely had he gone a quarter of a league in the sands than he heard the panther leaping behind him, periodically uttering a harsh cry, still more terrifying than the heavy sound of her leaps.
“Come now!” he said to himself. “She’s taken a shine to me . . . Perhaps this young panther never met anyone before, it is flattering to have won her first love!” At this moment the Frenchmen fell into one of those quicksand traps travelers so dread and from which it is impossible to extricate yourself. Feeling caught, he let out a cry of alarm, and the panther grabbed him by the collar with her teeth. And jumping powerfully backward, she pulled him from the abyss, as if by magic. “Ah, Mignonne,” cried the soldier, caressing her enthusiastically. “We’re bound to each other now in life and death. But no practical jokes, all right?” And he retraced his steps.
From then on the desert seemed populated. It held one being to whom the Frenchman could talk and whose ferocity was softened for him, although he could not grasp the reason for this unbelievable friendship. However powerful the soldier’s desire to remain standing and on the alert, he slept. Upon waking, he could not see Mignonne; he climbed the hill, and in the distance he glimpsed her moving by leaps and bounds according to the habit of those animals for whom running is out of the question because of the extreme flexibility of their spinal column. Mignonne arrived with her chops bloodied and received the necessary caresses from her companion, testifying by several deep purrs how happy she was with him. Her eyes turned with even more sweetness than the evening before on the man from Provence, who spoke to her as to a domestic animal.
“Ah, ah, mademoiselle, such a respectable girl you are, aren’t you? Do you see that? We love to be cuddled. Aren’t you ashamed? Perhaps you’ve eaten some Maghrebi? Well, well! They’re animals like you! But at least don’t go deceiving a Frenchman . . . or I will not love you anymore!”
She played the way a young dog plays with his master, rolling, sparring, patting each other by turns, and sometimes she aroused the soldier by putting her paw on him with a solicitous gesture.
Several days passed this way. Her company allowed the man from Provence to admire the sublime beauties of the desert. From the moment he found there alternating hours of fear and tranquillity, provisions, and a creature who occupied his thoughts, his soul was buffeted by contrasts . . . It was a life full of opposites. Solitude revealed all its secrets to him, wrapped him in its charms. In the sunrise and sunset he discovered unfamiliar dramas. A shiver went down his spine when he heard the soft whistling of a bird’s wings above his head—a rare passing creature—and saw the clouds merge together, multihued, ever-changing travelers! During the night he studied the effects of the moon on the oceans of sands where the simoon produced waves, undulations, and rapid changes. He lived the Orient’s day, he admired its marvelous pomp, and often, after enjoying the terrifying spectacle of a hurricane on that plain where the rising sands produced dry, red mists, fatal clouds, he saw the night come on with delight, followed by the life-giving coolness of the stars. He listened to the imaginary music of the spheres.
Then solitude taught him to savor the treasure of daydreams. He spent whole hours remembering trivia, comparing his past life to his life in the present. Finally, he was fascinated by his panther, for he had a need for love. Whether his will, powerfully projected, had modified his companion’s character, or she found abundant nourishment thanks to the combat unleashed in these deserts, she respected the life of the Frenchman, who no longer mistrusted her, seeing her so well tamed. He spent the greater part of his time sleeping, but he was forced to keep watch, like a spider in the middle of his web, so a
s not to miss the moment of his deliverance if someone should pass in the sphere bounded by the horizon. He had sacrificed his shirt to make a flag, hung on the top of a palm tree stripped of its foliage. Instructed by necessity, he knew how to find the means of keeping it flying by holding it out with sticks, for the wind might not have moved it at the very moment when the anticipated traveler would be looking in the desert.
It was during the long hours when hope abandoned him that he amused himself with the panther. He had come to know the different inflections of her voice, the expression in her eyes, had studied the caprices of all the spots that moderated the gold of her robe. Mignonne no longer growled even when he took her by the tuft at the end of her formidable tail in order to count the graceful decoration of black and white rings that shone in the sun like precious stones. He took pleasure in contemplating the supple, delicate lines of her contours, the whiteness of her belly, the grace of her head. But it was especially when she frisked about that he took such pleasure in watching her, and the agility, the youth of her movements always surprised him. He admired her suppleness when she began to leap, crawl, glide, burrow, cling, roll over, flatten herself, dash forward in every direction. She was lightning fast in passion, a block of granite slipping forward, and she froze at the word “Mignonne.”
The Human Comedy: Selected Stories Page 18
