by Jean Lorrain
All souls in his eyes…
But this man is a poet; he creates that which he sees, and what a mockery these souls are! Where there is nothing but instinct, nervous tics and the batting of eyelashes he has seen regrets born of dreams and desires. There is nothing to be found in human eyes, and that is their terrifying and dolorous enigma, their abominable and delusive charm. There is nothing but that which we put there ourselves. That is why honest gazes are only to be found in portraits.
The faded and weary eyes of martyrs, expressions tortured by ecstasy, imploring and suffering eyes, some resigned, others desperate … the gazes of saints, mendicants and princesses in exile, with pardoning smiles … the gazes of the possessed, the chosen and the hysterical … and sometimes of little girls, the eyes of Ophelia and Canidia, the eyes of virgins and witches … as you live in the museums, what eternal life, dolorous and intense, shines out of you! Like precious stones enshrined between the painted eyelids of masterpieces, you disturb us across time and across space, receivers of the dream which created you!
You have souls, but they are those of the artists who wished you into being, and I am delivered to despair and mortification because I have drunk the draught of poison congealed in the irises of your eyes.
The eyes of portraits ought to be plucked out.
November 1896
There are also eyes in the transparency of gems, antique gems above all: the turbid and milky cabochons which decorate certain sacred caskets and the reliquaries of embalmed saints, such as one sees among the treasures of cathedrals in Sicily and Germany.
And the treasure of St Mark’s in Venice. That includes, as I remember it, the goblet of some Doge, entirely embossed in translucent enamel, from whose depths the centuries watch you.
13 November 1896
Eyes! There is such beauty in them! There are blues like mountain lakes, greens like ocean waves; they can capture the milkiness of absinthe, all the greys of agate and all the clarities of water. I have even found some in Provence so profoundly warm and calm that they recalled an August night at sea … but none that human eyes had ever looked upon.
The prettiest eyes I ever saw were those of Willie Stephenson, the mime-artist of the Atheneum, who is nowadays in the theatre. They were flowery eyes – ‘flowery’ is exactly the right word – so very fresh and gentle, and so restless, they were like two blue flowers floating on water. She was a strange and captivating girl – or so, at least, I believed. She was certainly very expensive. It usually required four or five men to keep her, but the fancy took me of having her all to myself for a while. She was so delicately white, like the white of a sword-lily, with her spindly arms, her narrow hips, her flat belly and her little pert breasts. It was the anatomy of a mere child, belied by a very fine face: the perfectly-shaped angelic oval of a peeress where two huge, candid, disquieting, wild eyes trembled like two luminous flowers. They were modest, frightened eyes – the eyes of a bitch at bay …
And the adorable dark circles around those eyes! The pastel blue of their silky eyelids! How well those eyes suited that frail and perennially weary body! In truth, I believe that I have loved no others. They were beseeching during the transports of the bed, and in the extremity of passion … and then too, the wonderful slenderness of that neck, so beautifully designed for the axe! Anne Boleyn must have had such a lean and satined nape beneath the smoky gold of her tresses.
Hers was a beauty of the scaffold whose fragility called forth the viol and violence: a bruised beauty which awoke murderous instincts in me. Lying beside her, I dreamed at times of those anaemic and gentle figures – gentle and perhaps impertinent – who were the victims of the Revolution: those tall and handsome aristocratic women that the Carriers and the Fouquier-Tinvilles transported, still all atremble with lust, to the drowning-pool or to the guillotine.
Willie re-emphasized that frail end-of-the-eighteenth-century beauty by means of her instinctive feel for costume and finery. In gauzes and buckrams, muslin shawls and long sheaths of striped Pekin, shimmering dresses of tea-rose or straw-coloured watered silk, that blonde fragility ripened again: ‘The English school or the Trianon?’ her pout enquired as I entered her room.
Playful candour and aristocratic authority; Willie was the last of the royal courtesans – but she got drunk like a stable-lad and hung around with prostitutes in the drinking-dens of Montmartre. That pink mouth cursed and swore like a coachman’s. Once, when she thought I was in London, although a resurgence of my sickness had set me to prowling in the suburbs, I surprised her at the Point-du-Jour. Yes, in a cheap dance-hall, ensconced in the company of some red-faced dancer from the Moulin-Rouge, buying rounds of warm wine for a gang of pimps.
Oh, the cynical and muted alcohol-blue flame of Willie’s eyes that day – her face suddenly aged by twenty years! The cynical and streetwise mask of the whore appeared in the suddenly crapulous crease of the mouth and the depravity of those beggar’s eyes! Her very soul had risen to her face. But as the imprudent creature had around her neck a pearl necklace, worth forty thousand francs at the lowest estimate – the spolia opima of Berlin and St Petersburg – and given that the night falls quickly in winter, that we were in December, and that there was no one around, I took pity on her. Knowing the dangers which threatened her in that dive, I intervened in order to assist her departure.
Who knows? – perhaps I diverted the course of her destiny! That pearl necklace around the courtesan’s neck invited and demanded the hands of a strangler …
As I was useful to Willie to the tune of ten thousand francs a month she became apologetic when I showed up, admitted to a sudden whim born of curiosity, and—suddenly wheedling— recovered the eyes of a little girl. But I had seen those whore’s eyes. The spell was broken; I had the key to that particular puzzle. The fright that I relished in her eyes – their anguish and their disquiet – was the memory of the slums.
Cut-throats and burglars have similarly restless gazes.
Naples, 3 March 1897
These eyes undiscoverable beneath human eyelids, why do I see them in statues?
This morning, in the hall of the museum devoted to the excavations of Herculaneum, this blue and green thing from which I suffer – the plaintive and pale emerald which obsesses me – was clearly apparent to me in eyes of metal, in the burnished silver eyes of great bronze statues blackened by lava, which had been rendered into the semblance of infernal goddesses. There is, among others, a mounted Nero whose blind eyes are terrifying – but it is not in their orbits that I have rediscovered the gaze. Ranged against the walls there were huge Venuses draped in Greek skirts, like funereal Muses: huge Venuses of bronze, leprously calcined in places, whose eyes were fulgurant, splendidly empty, in their masks of black metal.
It was in the dizziness of those vacant and fixed pupils that I suddenly caught sight of the gaze.
30 April 1897
The eyes of listening men. It is the same with those who speak, most of all when they speak solicitously. They are all watchful, forever on the lookout, but they have no expression at all.
The man of today is no longer a believer, and that is why he no longer has any expression.
In the final analysis, I have to agree with the priest. Modern eyes? There is no more soul in them; they no longer look up to Heaven. Even the best are preoccupied with the immediate. Base covetousness, petty self-interest, cupidity, vanity, prejudice, loose appetites and muted envy: these are the abominations crawling in today’s expressions. We have the souls of notaries and cooks. There is nothing beneath our eyelids but the reflections of balance-sheets and the minutes of meetings; we no longer even have the yellow gleam of the old weighers of gold. That is the reason why the eyes of portraits in museums are so hallucinatory, they reflect prayers and tortures, regret and remorse. The eyes are the source of tears, but when the source is tainted the eyes are leaden; only the Faith can make them live, but its dead ashes cannot be reignited. We march with our eyes fixed on our shoes; our expressi
ons are the colour of mud. When eyes appear beautiful to us, it is because they harbour the splendour of deception, because they recall to mind some portrait, some gaze glimpsed in the museum, or because they regret the Past.
Willie had a knowing gaze: the eyes of women always lie.
May 1897
Jacques Tramsel was just leaving my apartment.
‘Have you seen the new dancer at the Folies?’ he said to me.
‘No.’
‘Well, you must go to see her.’
‘Oh! What kind of girl is she?’
‘A Greek.’
‘From Lesbos?’
‘No. Joking apart, she says that she comes from a good Greek family. I believe her to be an Oriental Jewess, a Levantine for certain, but she has an admirable body, a suppleness … she is a great living flower which dances, perhaps a little monstrous in her anatomy but not in a way which will displease you. Honestly, she is two girls in one: her torso is that of an acrobat, supple, lean and muscular, but her hips and buttocks are quite extraordinary. She is the Callipygian Venus herself – Venus Anadyomene, if you prefer. Octave Uzanne – for she has fascinated literary men – has even described her as a Venus of the reign of Alcibiades. The thing is that she is at one and the same time Aphrodite and Ganymede, Astarté and Hylas.’
‘Astarté! And her eyes, what are her eyes like?’
‘Very beautiful – eyes which have looked long upon the sea.’
Eyes which have looked long upon the sea! Oh, the clear and distant eyes of sailors: the salt-water eyes of Bretons; the still-water eyes of mariners; the well-water eyes of Celts; the dreaming and infinitely transparent eyes of those who dwell beside rivers and lakes; the eyes which one sometimes rediscovers in the mountains, in the Tyrol and in the Pyrenees … eyes in which there are skies, vast expanses, dawns and twilights contemplated at length upon the open seas, the mountains or the plains … eyes into which have passed, and in which remain, so many horizons! Have I not encountered such eyes already, in my dreams?
I now understand the reason for my long, leisurely walks along the quays and in the harbours.
Eyes which have looked long upon the sea! I must go to see this girl dance.
IZÉ KRANILE
June 1897
A great flower which dances…
Tramsel was right: the girl is a tall calyx of flesh moving strangely on bulging casket-like hips – for I have been to see this Izé Kranile dance. (Izé Kranile is a very pretty name, if it is her own – one never knows with these creatures!)
In spite of her beautiful torso and the distracting curve of her breast, this Izé is certainly very stupid and very impudent, more maladroit in her flirtations than any girl I have seen in the corps de ballet. I am sorely annoyed with her, for no one in whom I have taken an interest has ever put her foot in it so comprehensively – and yet she had everything she needed to please me!
She was both straight and crooked. It as as if her bust was seated upon a heavy divided rump, like a ripe fruit: a guilty outcrop of lust. Her legs were slender, the knees round. Her form seemed abnormal, unexpected, almost arabesque in the perennial advancement of her taut and bulging breasts, sprung forth from her body as though to meet desire. In the contortions of her hips and the abrupt reversals of her whole torso she seemed suddenly darkened, like a huge flower in the rain. This Kranile, with the sharp oval of her flattened face, her stormy eyes and her triangular smile, was surely that creature of perdition execrated by the prophets: the eternally impure beast; the little girl wickedly and unconsciously perverse, who could crush the marrow of men and stir up desire in decrepit monarchs – Salomé!
Salomé! It was the immortal image of the Salomé of Gustave Moreau and Gustave Flaubert that was immediately evoked in me, the night when Kranile sprang forth upon the stage, thrown forward like a ball and rebounding likewise, the nudity of her bewitching body aggravated by her black veils.
Against a set of desolate scenery, amid spectral crags and livid mountains of ash, beneath the funereal daylight of slopes illuminated in blue, she personified the spirit of the witches’ sabbat. Morbid and voluptuous, sometimes with extenuated grace and infinite lassitude, she seemed to carry the burden of a criminal beauty, a beauty charged with all the sins of the multitude. She fell again and again upon her pliant legs, and as she outlined the symbolic gestures of her two beautiful dead arms she seemed to be towing them behind her. Then, the vertigo of the abyss took hold of her again, and like one possessed she stood on point, holding herself fully erect from top to toe, like a spike of flesh and shadows. Her arms, weighed down just a few moments earlier, became menacing, demoniac, and audacious. Twisting like a screw, she whirled around, like a winnowing-machine – no, like a great lily stirred by a storm-wind. Clownish and macabre, a nacreous gleam showed between her lips … oh, that cruel and sardonic smile, and the two deep pools of her terrible eyes!
Izé Kranile!
The curtain had hardly been lowered before I was in her. dressing-room. I was introduced to her by Pierre Forie, the impressionist painter who produces a new portrait every year, and has virtually appointed himself a public showman of such women.
With a rare immodesty, Izé received us while she was still fuming with powder and perspiration.
She was removing her costume. The bundle of black satin trimmed with tulle and jet which had, five minutes before, made her into a flower with petals of shadow, now lay like a mere rag on a chair. With her throat bare, all warm and moist, Kranile sat like a boy and spread out her arms so that her dresser, kneeling before her, might laboriously slide off the silk mesh that had stuck to the skin …
The time Forie required to pronounce my name was sufficient for the dancer to throw a shawl over her shoulders. Without getting up, she turned her damp and narrow face towards me.
‘I shan’t offer you my hand,’ she said, ‘I’m too wet. Sit down, messieurs, if you wish.’ And, with a smile just for me: ‘I know your name, monsieur; you’re the man with the precious stones, the collector of rare gems. I’ve always wanted to see them – it’s been my ambition ever since I arrived in Paris. Is it possible?’
She turned towards me the head of a depraved urchin: a witch’s head, which had once again become cynical and Levantine. But gleaming beneath her heavy eyelids were two sharp grey eyes: two eyes of audacious agate, full of promises and caresses; two eyes which had certainly never looked long upon the sea, no matter what Tramsel had said, but two unexpected eyes of a kind I had never encountered elsewhere!
The heady odour of the dressing-room was almost suffocating: the odour of sex, of make-up, of sweat, of velveteen, and of a wild beast too! Izé Kranile was not free that evening; she coquettishly declined my invitation to supper and – with a whole heap of promises in her eye and her smile – escorted us to the door of her dressing-room, dabbing at her breasts with a towel…
Her eyes! It was her eyes that had been described to me. It was that description that had brought me to her, but it was not her eyes which haunted me that night; it was the acrid odour of her eau de toilette and her moist flesh, and the rusty stains in her armpits – the same bronze-hard rustred as the hair on her head.
Izé Kranile!
Who knows? – perhaps she could have healed me, that one, if only she had wanted to. For a whole day – what am I saying? for forty-eight hours, the two full days of waiting before the evening fixed by her to dine with me – my obsession with eyes, the obsession which had been killing me for two years, consented to grant me a respite. I lived through those two days bound up in a unique desire to see again the little pink triangle of Izé’s mouth, the flower of her delicate flesh immodestly opened over the short little teeth, the delicious design of her lips drawn back from a gleam of enamel … and the odour, that strident and complex odour which emanated from her. Its persistence was almost a sickness, which nearly made me faint, but I delighted in it for two whole days: two days of glad escape from the persecution of the eyes; two days of liberation,
at last, from the oppression of the dream, won by means of the imperious suggestion of that odour …
But she did not want to heal me. She showed up that first evening so heavily made up, so gauchely dressed … poor girl!
Since then, I have discovered a certain compassion for her, in thinking about the hopelessness of her ruses and of the pains which she must have taken in constructing the comedy of that awful evening. My god, what schemes and what stratagems! And with what result? I was annoyed with her for a whole month. She had so brutally squashed my embryonic desire! And the snare she tried to lay was so gross. To appeal to the jealousy of a man the moment one believes oneself to be desired is the strategy of a chorus girl in the music-hall – and yet IDE had danced at La Scala in Milan and at the Opera in Vienna. What pitiful lovers she must have entertained there!
What a lamentable adventure that dinner was! I cannot help smiling when I think of it. The comical figure of Forie, with his woeful eyes and his frightened manner, suffering the ballerina’s unexpected fits of tenderness. Poor chap! She had hit upon the notion of feigning desperate love for Forie, in order to excite and arouse the great man. I was a great man, of course, because I owned the rare stones and had the income: that famous income, the well-known fortune, somewhat exaggerated and enlarged by fools and gossips; that ball-and-chain fortune which poisons my life wherever I am known; that fortune which I avoid – or, rather, whose legend I avoid – in travelling incognito in foreign lands for months on end. The Greek had conceived the idea of throwing herself at the head of poor Forie, of making much of him, of rubbing up against him like an amorous she-cat, and of stuffing him with kisses and caresses in my presence, beneath my very eyes. Her aim was to inflame me, to quicken and aggravate my desire.
