by Jean Lorrain
20 August 1898.
I have just left Claudius.
Early this morning an express letter brought me news of his return: The Leyden marvel is mine and I have it here. Come to see it. We both arrived last night.
The Leyden marvel! Ethal had realised his desire. The incomparable curio – the museum-piece which had kept him fifteen days in Holland – was finally in his possession and I had been invited to come and admire the object…
I have seen the marvel, and the marvel has left me cold. And yet, what preparations and what ingenious staging Claudius employed in doing me the honour of displaying it!
One by one, Ethal threw back the draperies with which the showcase was veiled. It was as if he took pleasure in testing my patience – but at last, imprisoned within four fine panels of plate-glass, secured in place by copper rods, the Doll was revealed to me.
For it is a Doll, or rather a mannequin: a full-sized mannequin of wax, representing a little girl about thirteen years old, dressed in heavy clothes decorated with embroidery, silk arabesques and rosettes of pearls. She is eminently comparable to the Valois Doll that was exhibited for three months in the Georges Petit gallery in the Rue de Sèze.
Standing in her glass case, the Valois Doll had the air of a little princess of the Amboise court, captive in a block of ice. It is likewise an Infanta that Ethal has brought from Leyden: an Infanta with tresses of pale silk, almost silver, rather stiffly corsetted in crimson velvet glittering with aglets; an Infanta who might have stepped out of the frame of a Velasquez, with that suggestion of the embalmed dead which all wax figures have.
Ethal’s eye, singularly lit up, caressed and brooded over the livid translucencies and tarnished pinks of that artificial flesh. To me, though, its yellow pallor, its drawn and hardened lips, and the purplish rings around the vitrified eyes were tormenting and terrifying. The fluid spareness of the little hands, almost as if they were molten, struck me with horror; to me the Doll smacked of the morbidity and dampness of crypts. The only thing which I liked about it was the sumptuousness of its clothing, which had taken on the colour of leather and tinder, discoloured and at the same time gilded by the passage of centuries. The silken embroideries lived again in the wildness of the velvet. These embroideries and their pearls held my gaze, but not by virtue of the richness that persisted in them so much as a determination to avoid the mannequin’s dreadful immobile eyes.
Ethal and I looked on in silence. I felt that he was watching me, and that he regarded my apparent indifference as a deception. He had expected ecstasy – a flood of admiring and enthusiastic words – and my coldness was disturbing and distressing him.
‘You are not yet ready for this kind of art,’ he concluded, replacing the pieces of green serge around the showcase. ‘I thought that you would appreciate the delicacy of the model, and the infinite nuances of the decomposition of that body. Think of that Doll as a portrait – better than that, as a statue: a painted statue, a precise and delectable effigy which, more profoundly than a canvas or a marble, has been imbued by the modeller’s fingers with the exquisite and tragic soul of centuries …
‘For my own part, I am mad about these wax figures. I worship them. I find them much superior to portraits. I wonder if you might like these a little better?’
He opened a little door, and brusquely pushed me into an obscure annexe adjoining his studio. It was very high and very narrow, giving me the impression of a mine-shaft – more of a large cupboard than a room. It was lined with shelves like a library, but more spacious ones than would have been needed to house books; and in the shadows of the spaces between the shelves I saw the vitreous eyes and faded lips of more than twenty death-masks: twenty waxen images with historic and historiated hairstyles modelled in in colourless silk. Among these heads – all of which were women or adolescent males – I recognised renowned and classical images from the museums: one from the museum of Lille, resignedly gentle; the unknown woman and the mystery of her thin smile; and the historic profiles of Marguerite de Valois, Agnes Sorel, Mary Stuart and Elisabeth de Vaudemont. There was, in fact, a whole harem of dead womem in that lugubrious display of simulacra.
Claudius reached for one of the busts and offered it to me, turning it slightly towards the light, so that I might admire it.
It was the head of an adolescent with a blunt nose, the chin creased by a dimple, with a knowing expression of energy in the bulge of the forehead and the pre-eminence of eyebrows arched over sunken eyes. It was the dolorous, suffering face of a tragic child: a stubborn and defiant head, handsome by virtue of the silence of thin and pouting lips. The greenish pallor of the worn and emaciated but nevertheless angular face further accentuated the bitterness of the mouth. Underneath, on a coat of arms, were pearly tears: the three pilules of the Medicis.
THE EYE OF EBOLI
‘Almost a Lorenzo de Medici, isn’t it? But intense in a different fashion, wouldn’t you say, with the sunkenness of the staring eyes and the stubborn defiance of that mouth? What energy and what rancour there are in the sweep of the jawline and the abrupt chin! One gets the definite impression that such a child, in the midst of Florentine riots and intrigues, ought to have furthered the course of tragic events. In truth, he has the expression of hatred and amazement of one who might have been seen violating his own mother.’
Ethal offered these judgments while complacently handling the bust. ‘And yet,’ he added, ‘this wax figure is entirely my own work. I didn’t find it in some little town of Umbria or some Tuscan village. That violent expression and that forehead furrowed by mulish and morbid thought are products of my own imagination. It was a little Italian boy who posed for me – a miserable little model afflicted with consumption. I encountered him one day loafing about on in the Boulevard de Clichy when I had a studio in the Place Pigalle.
‘He was fifteen years old then. A little Neapolitan from the Place Maubert come to die, far from the sun, beneath the cold and gloomy Parisian sky. He had a heart-rending cough, poor thing! All a-shiver beneath the torn rags of his Roman costume, he was still prowling around the painters’ studios, not daring to go home for fear of being beaten. He had already been wandering in the November fog for two days, timid and terrified, caught between embarrassment and fear at the prospect of offering himself at yet another studio. No one wanted him any longer; he was considered too thin. Scarcely had he lifted his shirt than he was politely shown the door by the daubers. When I picked him up he hadn’t eaten for two days. There are many such starvelings in Paris.
‘His thinness interested me immediately, and the peculiar cast of his features – that expression of ardent languor which idealises every consumptive face, furnishing them with such artistry. To cut a long story short, I approached Angelotto, confessed my interest and led him away to my lair …
‘Poor mite! I ought to have used him more sparingly rather than requiring him to repay my hospitality so quickly, but I sensed that he was living on borrowed time and might easily slip through my fingers. The very next day I made him pose … What could I do? It isn’t every day that one has the opportunity to make a masterpiece. It was terrible, I know, but I was besotted with the wild look in his huge suffering eyes. Angelotto posed, resignedly, for hours on end. That hateful stupor – in which I sometimes thought I read a hint of reproach – never left his eyes, and his mouth was sealed by such mute defiance!
‘I worked unceasingly on the wax effigy, with a barbarous joy and a plenitude of sensuality that I have never found again, for I felt that I was moulding a soul which had passed utterly beyond the reach of misery and suffering. Every blow of the chisel contributed to the synthesis of that indignant and obstinate soul, whose rebellious surges animated my fingers with their electricity. His coughing grew worse and worse in spite of infusions, fumigations of tar and a warm bed placed next to the stove. I had to summon a doctor in the end, but I knew it was a lost cause.
‘I took care of him as best I could between sittings. He never thanked me, b
ut did exactly as he was told without saying a word. He died in my arms after twenty days. He passed away one morning in December – I remember that it was Christmas Day – with some little Neapolitan models of the Holy Family on his bed, which I had found by chance in a second-hand dealer’s in the Rue des Abbesses and bought for him. Poor Angelotto! He had posed, the night before, from midnight to four o’clock; I would never have believed that he could slip away so quickly.
‘It all became then a terrible nuisance: informing the parents, for whom I had to search and make provision; the official registration of the death; but these Italians…
‘The whole affair cost me three thousand, without including the plot in the cemetery at Montmartre. Whenever I am in Paris for All Saint’s Day I take flowers to the grave … but you must admit that I have a masterpiece here!’
Ethal’s monologue was singularly animated, as though he were intoxicated by his own words, but for several minutes I had been listening without taking it in. Utterly captivated, I watched the enormous hand with hairy knuckles which he clenched like a claw about the heavy tresses of the bust. It was a truly vice-like grip, like the talon of some bird of prey. Its ferocious and animal qualities were further enhanced by three exotic rings, one on the thumb, one on the middle finger and the last on the ring-finger; these three huge pearls, irregular and misshapen, were like nacreous pustules on the dry and granular hand of the painter, exaggerating the impression which his fingers gave of a claw seen from the side.
By means of some bizarre retrospective hallucination, I saw that vulturine claw wringing the last gasp out of the little Italian model. Ethal’s fingers, will and cruel sensuality had, beyond the shadow of a doubt, hastened the death of that child.
That Ethal! He smiled as though in ecstasy. I felt myself grow wrathful with the hatred of all the evil which that horrible hand had already done, and would do in time to come. Tairamond’s tales came back into my mind. What sinister compound might be contained in those hideous and ghastly pearls raised like malignant blisters upon his fingers?
A sudden insolence moved my lips. I pointed to his rings, and said: ‘Are those things poisoned?’
Ethal had replaced the wax figure on the shelf, and he promptly turned his attention to the strange jewels. ‘Ah! Someone has told you!’ He punctuated his remark with a light smile, and added: ‘No, not these. But if such things interest you … or if the idea worries you … I can show you an extremely curious ring. Come on, then – let’s leave the wax for now, shall we?’
Pausing only to seat me on the sleeping-couch in his vast studio, Ethal disappeared through a little door whose presence in the wall I had not previously suspected. He reappeared in due course and came to stand beside me, with a rather bizarre ring delicately held between his thumb and index-finger.
‘Look at this!’
It was a square-cut emerald cabochon of a rather pale green – the milky green of chrysoprase – within which some herbal juice seemed to glisten and tremble. Two steel claws inlaid with gold, of rather crude workmanship, embraced it: two hawkish talons clenched upon the glaucous water-drop of the gem.
I felt the pressure of Ethal’s gaze upon my own.
‘You have never seen anything like it, even though you have visited Spain? Have you not seen such a ring in the Escorial, in the private apartments of Philip II, among the treasures falsely attributed to Charles the Fifth? A great green tear, said to be poisonous, gathered in the claws of an invisible bird of prey? There is a rather beautiful legend attached to it which, if it is not actually true, is a fine invention: the legend of the Eye of Eboli; the tragic story of a lovely princess.
‘Philip II, it seems, was not an easy master to serve. He was a fervent burner of heretics, as jealous as a tiger, with manners more than a little like those of a wild beast. Poor Sarah Perez was his only favourite and royal mistress – what a scandal, that such a devout Catholic should fall in love with a Jewess! It was Israel’s revenge: a Jewess in the bed of the King of Spain, the inamorata of a Hapsburg! Do you really not know the story? It is surely apocryphal, but it is framed so well by the mournful splendour of the Escorial and it reflects so perfectly the black heart of the father of Don Carlos!
‘For what it may be worth, for your education and edification, this is what is whispered in those parts. This Sarah Perez had the most beautiful eyes in the world, those green eyes spangled with gold that you love so much: the eyes of Antinous. In Rome, such eyes would have made her a concubine of Adrian; in Madrid they helped her become the princess of Eboli ensconced in the bed of the king. But Philip II was extremely jealous of those wonderful emerald eyes and their delicate transparency, and the princess – who was bored with the funereal palace and the even more funereal society of the king – had the fancy and the misfortune to cast her admirable gaze upon the Marquis de Posa while she was leaving church one day. It was on the threshold of the chapel, and the princess believed herself to be alone with her camarera mayor, but the vigilance of the clergy was equal to the challenge. She was betrayed, and that very evening, in the intimacy of their bedroom, in the course of some violent argument or tempestuous tussle, Philip threw his mistress to the floor. Blind with rage he leapt upon her, tore out her eye and devoured it in a single gulp.
‘Thus was the princess covered in blood – a good title for a conte cruel, that, which Villiers de l’lsle Adam has somehow omitted to write! The princess was henceforth one-eyed: the royal pet had a gaping hole in her face. Philip II, who had the Jewess in his blood, could not cleave so closely to a princess who had only one eye. He made amends to her with some new titles and estates in the provinces and – regretful of the beautiful green eye that he had spoiled – he caused to be inserted into the empty and bloody orbit a superb emerald enshrined in silver, upon which surgeons then inscribed the semblance of a gaze. Oculists have made progress since then; the Princess of Eboli, already hurt by the ruination of her eye, died some little time afterwards, of the effects of the operation. The ways of love and surgery were equally barbarous in the time of Philip II!
‘Philip, the inconsolable lover, gave the order to remove the emerald from the face of the dead princess before she was laid in the tomb, and had it mounted in a ring. He wore it about his finger, and would never take it off, even when he went to sleep – and when he died in his turn, he had the ring bearing the green tear clasped in his right hand.
‘The ring which you are holding, my friend, is identical to that one. I had it cut according to the model of the king’s ring, and damascened in Spain. The original is still in the Escorial; it would have been pleasant to steal it, for I easily acquire the instincts of a thief when I am in a museum, and I always find objects which have a history – especially a tragic history – uniquely attractive. I am not an Englishman for nothing – but that which is easily enough accomplished in France is not at all practical in Spain: the museums there are very secure.
‘I had, therefore, to resign myself to commissioning a duplicate from a jeweller in Madrid. They did the work very nicely. The claws are curiously shaped, but the true marvel is the stone; it is so very limpid and weighs many carats, but notice also how it is hollowed out! You see that drop of green oil which takes the place of the internal tear? It is a drop of poison, an Indian toxin which strikes so rapidly and so corrosively that it only requires to come into momentary contact with one of a man’s mucous membranes to rob him of his senses and induce rigour mortis.
‘It is instant death, certain but painless suicide, that I carry in this emerald. One bite’ – and Ethal made as of to raise the ring to his lips – ‘and with a single bound one has quit the mundane world of base instincts and crude works, to enter eternity.
‘Look upon the truest of friends: a deus ex machina which defies public opinion and cheats the police of their prey …’
He laughed briefly. ‘After all, we live in difficult times, and today’s magistrates are so very meticulous. Salute as I do, my dear friend, the poison which saves
and delivers. It is at your service, if ever the day should come when you are weary of life!’
THE THOUGHT-READER
Look upon the truest of friends: a deus ex machina which defies public opinion and cheats the police of their prey … After all, we live in difficult times, and today’s magistrates are so very meticulous. Salute as I do, my dear friend, the poison which saves and delivers.
September 1898
‘It is at your service, if ever the day should come when you are weary of life.’ How strangely Ethal spoke those words to me! One might almost have thought that…
For a moment I saw red. I think I might have leapt at his throat.
What does he take me for? Is it by chance that he has gathered me into that company of sadists and child-molesters which comprises nearly all of his compatriots? Those English puritans with faces flushed by port and gin, gorged on red meat spiced with pickles, who seek by night to soothe their overheated senses in the employment bureaux where Irish servant-girls can be acquired … that tribute of poor pre-puberal girls with large flowery eyes, which wretched Dublin despatches every month to the Minotaur of London!
Oh, the stiff and cruel sensuality of the English: the brutality of the race, its taste for blood, its instinct for oppression and its dastardliness in the face of weakness. All of that had flared up in Ethal’s eyes while he lingered, with feline delight, over the tale of the agonising death visited upon his little model!
Angelotto, the little Italian consumptive of the Place Maubert!
I felt a mute hatred rising within me. With what cynicism he had laid out before me the pus of his moral wound – and yet it had oozed out of him with such horrible charm! The more I studied that dolorous head, the more I admired its tragic stupor and its air of defiance, the more I regretted not having known the wretched child. Myself, I would have snatched him away from the murderous grasp of the painter. My aversion for Ethal festered alongside a strange rancour. I wanted not so much to have killed the monster as to have understood him.
