“You remember the passion that Bernardino Luini’s Hérodiade inspired in me.10 I told you that she was one of my feminine types. The ferocious placidity that she expressed attracted me by repelling me. I found her odious but ravishing, that Hérodiade; I languished before her in a culpable admiration. I begged her to condescend to love me, even though she was a truly damnable soul.
“Alas, from the canvas on which Luini represented her, she did not listen to me any more than she would have listed to me in Antipas’ court if I had been her contemporary. There was only one advantage in declaring my passion to her at a distance of centuries, which was that in the anticipated case of a rejection, the formidable capricious woman was no longer able to have me beheaded for having wanted to please her, as she had had John the Baptist beheaded for not having feared to displease her. Every day, for a month, I went to contemplate her in the Louvre. Wasted effort!
“She was not occupied with me. Her vague and floating gaze, entirely given over to the interior intoxication of a long-desired possession, did not encounter mine. That was, to tell the truth, Luini’s fault. He could have put into Hérodiade’s eyes the line of sight that goes directly to the spectator. I became discouraged by loving at a total loss, without the object of my amour even darting a glance of pity at me.
“So, reawakening pride within me, by a supreme effort, I ceased to go and sing my laments beneath Luini’s splendid painting. It’s the everyday story of unrequited love; it grows weary and turns in another direction.
“Mine turned as soon as it could toward the female skeleton, and with her, it received full satisfaction.
“I dare to assure you, my friend, that she loved me even more than I loved her during the artificial life that she owed to me for more than five months, and that her extravagant passion alone forced me to take her out.
“All the phases through which two lovers are accustomed to pass, we passed through.
“To begin with, when I gazed at her fixedly, her countenance seemed to me to be gauche, timid and fearful; but when I peered at her from the corner of my eye in passing, I surprised in her eyes an infinite softness in my regard.
“Then I came to take her poor body hand, which became animated and plump n mine; then I held her from time to time to emerge from her box, sit down on the sofa next to me and chat. She always spoke in a low, very low voice, which did not prevent me from hearing her marvelously, inasmuch as the play of hr physiognomy brightened her slightest speeches. A day came when, very emotionally, I became bold enough to kiss her on the forehead, exactly on top of the portrait. Thus I inaugurated between us and eternal betrothal that marriage did not take long to crown.
“Paris seemed to me to be too noisy an abode for fiancés like us, who liked to meditate on our happiness. In addition, although there was scarcely sagacity in it, I was importuned there more than I counted on being elsewhere by a sort of jealousy against Monsieur Onfroy, who had known while perfectly alive the woman I had come to revivify as best I could.
“It was then that I went to establish myself in Montivilliers. A month had sufficed to reduce me to that insane vision of a skeleton that had become a woman again, and a woman as loving as beloved.
“I have already told you, my friend, that I was to some extent a voluntary insensate, for to anyone who had contested seriously that pretended metamorphosis, I would have replied: ‘Are you making fun of me? Is such a miracle possible? You can clearly see that I’m the dupe of an illusion that I’m not stupid enough to want to impose on you. There’s nothing there but bones and a few colors on the forehead arranged in a portrait.’
“However, incessantly attracted to my box, I had scarcely opened the door than, instead of the skeleton that I knew it positively to be, I saw with a sensation of indescribable joy the graciously rounded forms of a young fiancée, especially her admirable head.
“Perhaps, if I had commanded my organs, I would have observed through them, as I did through my reason, what there was in the box; but I carefully refrained. I preferred to see what was not there. I found myself as well as could be in those moments of hallucination behind which the empty and vulgar moments of real life faded away. Alas, I did not know what terrible punishment was reserved for me, what a frightful awakening I was to have. It’s necessary to believe my friend, that a superior power really is occupied in equilibrating our penalties with our sins.
“The grave sin that I committed was that of giving myself complaisantly to that transmutation of a skeleton into a woman, and attempting a work that God himself would not have been able to accomplish.”
“You’re forgetting,” I said, that the resurrection of the flesh is a Christian dogma.”
“In fact, you’re right,” he said, with a melancholy smile; “well, in what happened to me I see a rude lesson of the Holy Trinity, justly irritated because I anticipated in part the labor of the end of the world...unless it was all simply a magnetic phenomenon...
“But no,” he added, as if talking to himself, “if it were a pure magnetic phenomenon, why was the spell that had tenderly protected me until then against the horror of my amour vanish precisely when that horror was to strike me hardest?”
“What happened to you, then, my poor friend? Come on, you’re not mad. At the time, I let your illusion regarding Hérodiade pass; I assumed that it wouldn’t go any further. As for your story of the skeleton, it’s absurd. It’s not a case of an insensate dreamer, it’s that of a veritable idiot. That the portrait should have impressed you deeply, I can conceive; that it engendered in you an admiration confining I know not what mystical tenderness, all well and good again…but to treat as a living woman the skeleton of a woman is...”
“Yes, yes, you said it, it’s a case of veritably idiocy. So that’s what I was; and yet, I’ve pointed out to you that, in that regard, my sensation alone had deviated; my reason remained straight.”
“What does it matter? Since in you, reason does not prevail over sensation? That’s where your disdain for simple living women led you, and your frantic quest for the ideal…it’s lugubrious.”
“What! You, my Synnoëte, don’t understand,” said Melanski, “how seductive and profound an amour like mine might be? Founded on death, it has no fear of it. One the other hand, it cannot provide grounds for treason or even for jealousy, like others. Finally, everything being at the discretion of the sole actor who plays the double role of lover and mistress, it isn’t susceptible of engendering lassitude. Thus, it is ineradicable.”
“So scantly that it has been vanquished—at least, that’s what you gave given me to understand, and for the sake of the amity I have for you, my dear Melanski, I’m very glad that you’re liberated from that unhealthy sentiment. Come on, tell me about that. What happened to you, then?”
“Oh, my friend, you’d refuse to believe it; you’d claim that I’d mistaken a dream for a reality. You’d say harsh things to me, as you did a little while ago. Haven’t you jeered at me already because, with telling you anything precise, I judged it possible that a certain amorous impulsion could be communicated to inanimate beings that inspires amour, and, contrary to all natural laws, sets them in motion and attracts hem? Now, that’s exactly what happened to me, to my great misfortune.”
IX
“One day,” Melanski continued, “two months after I had settled in Montivilliers, and consequently three months ago—it was the twelfth of May, a Monday morning; I could live a hundred years without ever forgetting that date—I felt something resistant in my bed, alongside my body. I felt it without being able to determined what it was. I opened my eyes. Horrible spectacle! My skeleton had come to lie beside me; our limbs were overlapping, its head was resting on my left shoulder, while my left arm was wrapped round it entirely, folded over its ribs.
“I uttered a cry. I leapt out of bed in order to escape that sinister proximity, for—take note of this bizarrerie—it was at the moment when the motion of my skeleton appeared bound to plunge me further into the illusi
on that it had given me that I reduced those few prepared bones to their veritable significance.
“In addition, even when that illusion was at its height, and had produced scenes of tenderness between my skeleton and me, it had never gone far as to give me the desire for a monstrous possession. I respected her as my fiancée, that ex-woman, but in sum, I loved her ardently...
“On the morning of which I’m speaking, disillusioned as I was, and although I judged the skeleton for what it was—which is to say, absolutely inert and insensible matter—I couldn’t suppose that anyone had carried it into my bed in order to play a practical joke, given that no one but me slept in the house. In truth, Pélagie had a key to the door to the street, but that key, which she used during the day, would not have been any use to her at night, because I bolted the door on the inside every evening before going to bed. Then again, Pélagie, whom I had only recently taken into my service, did not even know that I had a skeleton, and even if she had known, would not have been capable of playing a trick on me.
“What, then, ought I to admit? I admit, and will continue to admit until I have found a more satisfactory explanation, that in my intimacy with the skeleton I had, so to speak, electrified it, unknown to myself; that my will had poured its motivating force into it by some means, and that it had come to me drawn by the fraction of my life that it had absorbed and which was returning to me. That is stupid, from the viewpoint of our vulgar axioms, or the official science of locomotion, but perhaps the phenomenon will be verified one day by a new science, still occult today: the science that table-turning implies—which, in parentheses, is a much less rational phenomenon.”
The reader would have been able, as I was at the time, to give Melanski the more satisfactory explanation for which he was waiting, of the skeleton’s supposed visit. So I was tempted to say to him: My poor friend, you’re a sleepwalker, and it’s you who, at half past one in the morning, go in search of your skeleton and have carried it to your bed.
I feared, however, that the rectification might be worse than the error, all the more so as Melanski had testified to me that he considered it a great misfortune to be a somnambulist. It was better, I thought, to leave him in ignorance of his condition, since, by informing him of it, without taking away the old pretext for his black moods, I would be offering him a new one. To know that every night, he came to exercise in effigy the abduction of his skeleton, and not to have any means of freeing himself from that mania—that might be enough to cause is already-tottering reason to collapse. I loved the unfortunate fellow too much to run such a risk; so I limited myself to replying that in thinking that he had seen the skeleton in his bed he was probably the victim of an illusion analogous to and consequent upon the one that had shown him the skeleton in the form of a beautiful young woman.
Naturally, he did not want to concede the point. He protested his clear-sightedness at the moment of his awakening on that Monday the twelfth of May. He added:
“And the proof that I wasn’t hallucinating is that when I took the skeleton out of my bed, I saw very clearly, with an increasing horror, that it had three broken ribs, which you can still verify. Confused by the realization of the enormities to which a reprehensible excitement had taken me, indignant with myself and disgusted with the skeleton, I resolved to finish with those false appetites of the heart, and above all to take precautions against any further whim the skeleton might have to come in search of me. I thought that the best means was to break its harmonic entity, which established attraction between us.
“It was early. I had time in hand before Pélagie arrived. I employed it in committing the crime whose traces you discovered this evening. It was a matter of expelling the spirit that haunted the skeleton and had transported it in such a miraculous fashion to my bed. Now, to achieve that, what could I do? Kill…kill my skeleton! I plunged a scalpel into its forehead and by drawing it along carefully in for straight lines, forming a square, I removed the portrait. I could have left it there, for, in losing the portrait, the skeleton had lost its artificial existence, it really was dead. But, not believing that I was sufficiently secure as yet, I disarticulated the limbs and lodged them in a box, which I nailed shut and buried in the garden, due to an excess of pusillanimity.
“Yes, pusillanimity! That is exactly what determined my confusion when you told me about your discovery. I felt ridiculous for having raised that last unnecessary obstacle to the frightfully tender demonstrations of the skeleton.
“As for the portrait, I did not have the courage to separate myself from it. I kept it in my writing-desk and looked at it frequently. In any case, its isolation rendered it inoffensive. It would not contribute any longer to representing a living woman; it simulated within me the memory of a woman I had known while she was alive.
“However, I was not absolutely rid of my infernal amour. It continued to obsess me during my sleep. I dreamed that the skeleton quit its box and came to me... I dreamed that again last night, alas, and every morning for the last there months, when I’ve awakened, thinking that I see the skeleton by my side, I’ve started with the horror that escapes me. Vain fear! The bones are really in the box, and the box is in the garden, and I really am alone in my bed. That persecution is no less ferocious for being a nightmare that vanishes with the coming of day, and, I fear that it is insurmountable. I summoned you here, my friend, in the hope that your company would rid me of the phantom, to which I am prey. It will be necessary for you to stay with me for a long time,” he added, smiling, “if you want to break that spell.”
“What, my poor friend?” I said to him, a trifle naively, “you can’t prevent yourself dreaming about that wretched skeleton?”
“A fine question! If I could, I wouldn’t have failed to do so, I assure you.”
“You’re right, but I don’t have the leisure to stay with you forever, and besides which, I’m no great remedy. It’s absolutely necessary or you to get away from here, to return to Paris or travel—in sum, to distract yourself.”
“How can you expect me, who only have a meager patrimony, to quit a position already very advantageous? The life of pleasure in Paris is costly; nomadic life costs even more. My tiny revenues wouldn’t be sufficient. Then again, how do you know that would cure me?”
“In that case, my friend, you only have one recourse. I only indicate it to you tremulously, because I know your opinion in that regard, and that’s to marry. When you’re in control of a pretty living woman, very much in love with you, as her duty obliges her to be, you’ll soon forget your skeleton. Try, damn it, try.”
“Never. I know your pretty living women, very much in love, and it’s because I’ve made the experiment that I don’t want to do it again, ever.”
“But, obstinate as you are, you don’t know the woman who will be your wife. She’ll be very different from others, believe me.”
“Yes, there’ll be the difference that, instead of being insupportable to me for a day, a month or a year, it will be for a lifetime, according to the authority of Monsieur le Maire. The prettiest living woman you could find would only give me, on average, five minutes of pleasure a day and twenty-three hours fifty-five minutes of ennui. Thanks. Whatever it costs me, I prefer to do without the five minutes rather than subject myself to the twenty-three hours fifty-five minutes. That’s relative wisdom.”
“It’s a pure joke,” I cried, “and if I once laughed on hearing you say things like that, it causes me pain now that a real and serious amour might be the only thing that can extract you from your detestable mental situation.”
“A real and serious amour! That, my friend, can be put with living skeletons. Pretty living women, as you call them, are as incapable of feeling it as they are of inspiring it.”
I responded nevertheless: “And your skeleton, what does she feel, then, poor dreamer?”
“Nothing any longer,” he said, “but once, everything that pleased me and only what pleased me. Do you know anything about homoeopathic medicine and the f
ashion in which its medicaments are obtained?”
“Very little. Why?”
“One takes, does one not, a grain of the medicinal substance, which one mixes with ninety-nine grains of milk sugar, and then one grain of the mixture, which one mixes again with ninety-nine grains of sugar, and so on. By means of repeating the dilution of the mixtures thirty times over, the dose of the medicinal substance is infinitely small; it does not even equal a quadrillionth or a quintillionth of a grain...”
“What relationship has that with what we’re talking about?”
“A very great one. There is in almost every young and beautiful woman one delightful grain. It is exactly that grain that renders the woman so desirable. Now, in living women, by virtue of passing through different mixtures from vices into faults, and from faults into imperfections, the virtue of the grain ends up disappearing, whereas, thanks to my imagination, my skeleton offers me the delightful grain—which is to say, amour pure of any diminishing dilution. Do you understand?”
“I believe so, yes, but what if that diminishing dilution is necessary? What if the delightful grain, to employ your term, is only appropriate to our human temperament when it is reduced by a successive passage from vices into faults, and from faults into imperfections? If God thinks that we ought to follow with regard to our sex, which is no more irreproachable than the other, the methods of homoeopathic physicians with their patients? For example, how do you know that the unattenuated love of a woman would not be too much for you? For, after all, admit that it’s a ridiculous pretention to demand of women what we are incapable of rendering to them. We don’t contain any more of the ideal than they do, and what we can contain is as extended as theirs in stupid discourse and evil deeds. Beside a moral beauty such as you imagine, your soul would scarcely be beautiful; near to that giant of virtue, you’d be tiny.”
Singular Amours Page 7
