by Jean Lorrain
There followed a turbulent race through space. I soared, grasped by the hair by an invisible hand of will: an icy and powerful hand, in which I felt the hardness of precious stones, and which I sensed to be the hand of Ethal. Dizziness was piled upon dizziness in that flight to the abyss, under skies the colour of camphor and salt, skies whose nocturnal brilliance had a terrible limpidity. I was spun around and around, in bewildering confusion, above deserts and rivers. Great expanses of sand stretched into the distance, mottled here and there by monumental shadows. At times we would pass over cities: sleeping cities with obelisks and cupolas shining milk-white in the moonlight, between metallic palm-trees. In the extreme distance, amid bamboos and flowering mangroves, luminous millennial pagodas descended towards the water on stepped terraces.
Herds of elephants were on sentry duty, using the tips of their soft trunks to gather blue lotuses from the lakes for the gods. This was the India of Vedic legend, far beyond mysterious Egypt. At times, when we were passing overhead, strange idols stood guard upon the banks of rivers and pools. Some were angular, some cut by hatchet-blows out of solid granite; they were seated, with their hands on their knees, their petrified watchdog heads staring down into the water. Quadruple rows of teats covered the torsoes of others. Some had a glitter and radiance about them, as if they were all newly forged; others seemed covered in leprous sores, so old that they no longer had faces. One had a nest of interwoven serpents crawling under the armpit; another, so beautiful that it seemed musical, had a brow gemmed with stars.
Among these idols, at prayer by the light of the moon, were the kneeling faithful; among these worshippers there were beasts as well as men.
Three matrons with heavy hips and ripe breasts were washing their linen at the foot of a Sphinx. Their hands were wringing out and beating the mysterious laundry, and the water trickling out of it was stained with blood.
One of these laundrywomen resembled Princess Olga, another the Marquise Naydorff; I did not recognise the third. An opossum, at prayer in the shadow of a Buddha, appeared to be the ghost of Mein Herr Schappman: like Ethal’s friend from Berlin, his careful paws were picking over a string of opal beads…
And a whole procession of storks, perched on a high wall beside a Turkish cemetery and silhouetted by the night, looked up as I passed overhead, and mocked me with their beaks.
Now we were flying over marshlands. All of a sudden, the hand which was carrying me released me.
Sticky walls … greasy ground … a choking and insipid darkness…
I was in a crypt whose vaults were oozing, lying in a strangely moving mire, which rose up in places and plunged into depths in others. It was like a warm tide, dreadfully thick and fluid, in which my rocking body was bogged down. There were silky murmurs, light rasping sounds … I know not what unnamable things brushed against me, an obscure crawling sensation extended from my legs to my back, vile warm breath scarified my flesh … and then, under my groping hands, I felt the horror of little fat and hairy bodies, all of them shifting, wriggling under and over me …
For a few moments, flaccid wings fluttered against my face; then frightful kisses from little pointed mouths, whose teeth were tangible, settled on my neck, on my hands, and on my face. I was a captive of hopeful caresses, my entire being tortured with cunning little bites until I lost my strength. From top to toe I was prey to innumerable blood-suckers: fetid beasts shared my body between them, insidiously violating the entirety of my naked form.
Suddenly, in the gloom which had become greenish, I saw the singularly bloated faces of the two Javanese servants, laughing mockingly. They floated in mid-air, disembodied, like two transparent varnished bladders, whitely diademmed. Percolating from their half-closed eyes, as if shining through two slots, was a dead and greasy gaze. The two bladders laughed, while four hands without arms came towards my face: four soft and cadaverous hands, menacing my eyes with their sharp fingernails, splayed like claws at the ends of long golden cigar-cases.
And by the light of the two ghostly faces, I saw what a frightful enemy it was that had conquered my flesh. A whole army of enormous bats – the heavy and fat bats of the Tropics, of some vampiric species – was kissing my body and sucking my blood. The caress persisted, sometimes so precisely that I was forced to quiver with atrocious pleasure. Enfeebled, close to some climactic spasm, I stiffened in order to shake off the pullulation of that collective kiss – and as I did so something hairy, flaccid and cold entered into my mouth. Instinctively, I bit down on it, and it filled my throat with a sudden spurt of blood: the taste of some dead animal was bitter on my tongue; a tepid gruel adhered to my teeth.
It caused me to wake up … at last!
An alkaline burn was pricking my nostrils; a hand clapped a refreshing wad of damp linen to my temples; there was hurried movement all around me, and the half-sleep from which I was slowly emerging was penetrated by the noise of comings and goings, of voices … and I opened my eyes.
Ethal was kneeling beside me. Into the disorder of the studio, invaded by the morning light, came a draught of cold air from an open bay-window. It revived me. One of my hands was between those of Sir Thomas Welcome, who was slapping my palm, The anxious eyes of Maud White watched me considerately over the shoulder of her brother.
‘He ought never to have smoked,’ opined Sir Thomas.
In the sullenness of the sad and dusty studio, the first light of dawn was the last gasp of the orgy. In the morning light the tapestry had faded to the colour of piss, the busts were cadaverous, the flower-petals were a stain upon the carpet, and all along the chandeliers wax had clotted into green stalactites.
Everyone was preparing to leave. The English, brought to their feet by the negro, retired stiffly, with closed and sinister faces; they almost had to be inserted by force into their overcoats. Maud, reassured, wrapped herself in a long pelisse of straw-coloured silk. Set upright on my cushions, I sipped the water tinted with arnica which Sir Thomas gave me. What pity there was in those huge bright eyes looking down at me!
‘Let’s go,’ said the Irishman, offering me his hand. ‘We can leave now.’ Monsieur White also offered a supportive hand. While we were saying our goodbyes I saw that Maud had a ring on her finger set with two big black pearls surmounted by a ruby: an enormous trefoil of gems, which I had seen on Althorneyshare’s finger before the smoking-session began … and Maud’s eyes were as fresh as water, the pallor of youth restored to them!
The Duchess was leaving Ethal’s rooms at that very moment. Trailing waves of cerise silk, rustling with gold lace, bundled up to her ears, and recently patched up. Powdered and freshly replastered, her old satyr’s face was smiling in the midst of a cloud of white lace. ‘Time to go,’ she said – and left, leading away the brother and the sister.
‘We must do the same,’ insisted Thomas Welcome. ‘The morning air will make you feel better. Do you want me to take you home?’
‘The Duc de Fréneuse has his coupe,’ Ethal put in, brusquely.
An open carriage would be better. I won’t take you along the Bois – we’ll take the quays, following the Seine.’ As Claudius made a careless gesture, he added: ‘Monsieur de Fréneuse lives in the Rue de Varenne and I am at the Hotel du Palais.’
THE SPHINX
9 November 1898
Thomas Welcome has just left me. I am still under his spell and yet, at the same time, I feel fearful.
Thomas Welcome took a risk in coming to me. His visit was most unexpected and disconcerting, and yet most amicable. What driving force caused him to take such a step, given that he hardly knows me? I only met him for the first time three days ago, at that horrible opium party organised by Ethal. What can have moved him to take me into his confidence, and to make that sort of life-saving attempt on behalf of one who is a stranger to him, whose fate ought to be a matter of complete indifference?
I hunt for an explanation but cannot find one.
Was it some irrational and spontaneous feeling of sympathy? I ca
nnot believe it. My appearance is a deterrent; at first sight I am disquieting and frightening. In addition, there are the things which are said about me. I am withdrawn; the word ‘likeable’ has never been applied to me – and if it ever were applied to me, I would make every effort to disassociate myself from its implications. A ‘likeable’ person is one of those who aproaches people around and about the Loggia; it is a word to apply to the interpreters in Florentine hotels and the rogues of the gallery Umberto in Naples. Such a notion would be unworthy of Sir Thomas Welcome and myself.
Could it be some resentment against Ethal, a suddenly-conceived hatred for the painter? The step he has taken might be reckoned a disservice to Claudius. But Ethal has told me that Welcome is his best friend – and then again, I have a definite feeling that there is some kind of complicity, some obscure and unbreakable bond between the two men.
From pity, then? Pity for me! I would not like to think so.
What if this is the latest stratagem of Ethal’s, calculated to disturb me and increase my distress? Might it be designed to precipitate the kind of enveloping madness by which I feel myself to be gripped, suffocating me in its meshes like that frightful hand: the purposeful raptorial talon of that sinister Englishman, decorated with horrid rings? What if these two men are acting in concert to delude me and – by means of suspicion and terror – to push me ever closer to the brink of the abyss into which Claudius wants me to fall?
I no longer know what I am doing. I am no longer in control of myself. I am turned upside down and bumped about, and I feel that I am staggering into an ambush, into terror…
Since that last soiree in Ethal’s studio, the nightmare figures and hallucinations of that appalling night…
I have not recovered my soul!
15 of the same month
I have thought long and hard about the visit of Sir Thomas Welcome. No, that man does not wish me any harm; the impulse which brought him to me was sincere. It is impossible to lie when one has eyes like those; they are bathed in such sadness! Pity abides there, and I felt the immense kindness of his expression embracing me. I recall the anguished tone which shaded his question: ‘Have you known Ethal for a long time?’. And I recall the kind of solace that filled his face in response to my reply: ‘For five months!’ It was the expression of pleasure which illuminates a doctor’s face as he realises that the illness of his patient is of recent provenance, and still curable. It was as if hope had been renewed in his eyes when he said to me: ‘For five months!’
Without too much insistence in his words, without pressing too hard on the wound, he made me understand with a few well-chosen phrases that he knew and pitied my sickness, from which he himself had suffered. He told me how dangerous Ethal had formerly been to him, and in what peril I now stood.
‘He is a great – a very great – artist. He has an inquiring mind and is a very firm friend. But his bizarrerie – and, worse than mere bizarrerie, his love of the bizarre, the abnormal and the exotic – might be fatal to a sensitive and imaginative being. One such would surely be led astray were he to fall under Ethal’s influence. Not that I place any faith in the rumours regarding Claudius which circulate here and in London – rather less credited in London than in Paris; your fellow Frenchmen have a mania for hawking around rumours and anecdotes – but it is nevertheless true that my friend Claudius has strange interests. The horrible attracts him, sickness too. Moral perversity and physical affliction, mental and emotional distress, constitute for him a field of distracting and intoxicating experiences: a source of complex and guilty pleasures, which thrills him like no other. He has more than a dilettante interest in vice and aberration; his is an innate predilection – a kind of fervent and passionate vocation.
‘Like certain great doctors and philosophers, he is fascinated by various rare and little-known maladies; he approaches such cases with a cerebral fascination. He watches out for them, researches them and selects them; he is a collector of the flowers of evil. You saw what a divine collection of orchids he carefully brought together the other evening. You may be certain that that great exhibition of cosmopolitan depravity, pent up all night in his studio, was one of the most delectable evenings of his life. He has the flair of an Indian tracker for the discovery of such beings; he is drawn to vice like a hog to truffles, and he snorts them up with avid pleasure. The scent of decadence intoxicates him; he understands his specimens fully, and he has a complicated and profound love for them. He is, as you say in France, a voyeur of unsavoury souls. Voyeur is undoubtedly the word!
‘Ethal cultivates and develops these flowers of criminality, much as he is accused in London of cultivating pallor, anaemia, languor and consumption in his models because of his artistic affection for certain pearly flesh-tints and darkly-ringed eyes. Not that I lend any credence to those unfortunate rumours; certain expressions and smiles transform suffering into beauty by the particular tightening of the mouth and the delicate fading of eyelids and complexions, but we must not lend Ethal’s fantasies a tragic grandeur that they do not have.
‘It is still the case that our friend Claudius has the fully-developed mind of a poisoner, and one who poisons for pleasure. This is a psychological refinement, but not one of the few which are nowadays permitted by law. He has this in his favour, though: he confines his operations to people who are already sick and only finishes off those whose are condemned to die. Slaves were once put to death by poisoners in front of Roman emperors desirous of admiring their skills, but Ethal is Caesar and poisoner at the same time; it is for his own edification that he contrives marvelous spectacles. He will collaborate wholeheartedly with a man’s vices, in order to see how far that man will carry the torch of depravity. One day, one of his subjects will go as far as murder – but it is not necessary that the Duc de Fréneuse should be the one.
Sir Thomas was ready for my reaction. ‘I might have been the one myself,’ he said, swiftly. ‘Like you, I have been possessed by the dream; it has taken hold of me. Beset by hallucinations, conscienceless, with no other will but that of the extending dream itself … numbed, annihilated, for years on end, I have lived a wretched waking nightmare. In those days, I was compelled to spend every winter in Algiers, or Cairo, or Tunis, like a captive: captive of a gaze, an undiscoverable gaze. It was the gaze of the same Goddess who disturbs and haunts the sleep of your own nights…
‘For ten years I travelled through the Orient in search of an obsessive and delirious vision which came to me one ecstatic and insomniac evening. But the Goddess – the Goddess who will likewise appear to you, one evening or one day, if you do not fight your dream – has always deceived me!
‘A lover of phantoms, that is what I have been these last ten years – and that is what you are, Monsieur, and will become irredeemably, if you cannot restore yourself to good order. For the gaze is undiscoverable, and Astarté is a witch, whose very essence is deception. That which has lied before will lie always!
‘That gaze! And yet, one winter, I really believed …
‘Four years ago, one moonless night on the Nile, when the crew of the dahabeah were asleep at last, we were slowly … oh, so slowly! … sailing down the stagnant stream of the river. I can still see the profound blue of night descending upon the immense Egyptian landscape, extending to the distant horizon: infinitely flat; infinitely red; scarcely shaded …
‘On that particular night, I fully believed that Astarté would appear to me – that the Goddess would reveal herself at last!
‘We were drifting down the Nile …
‘For an hour, I watched a strange black dot curiously rising up and growing larger, at a still-distant bend of the river. I thought it might be the entablature of some ancient temple or merely a half-submerged rock looming up from the water. The dahabeah slid through the water, slowly and heavily, without rocking, as if in a dream. In the silence of the starless night, the shadow which intrigued me approached by slow degrees. As it took form and became distinct, it revealed the rump of an enorm
ous sphinx of roseate stone whose outline had been worn away by the centuries.
Everyone aboard was asleep: a truly disconcerting slumber had plunged the entire crew into a leaden torpor. The movement of the craft, approaching the immobile beast, filled me with an increasing terror – for the sphinx, now, appeared to me to be luminous. It was as if a vaporous glow emanated from its rump. In the hollow of its shoulder a human figure became visible, standing up but dormant, with its head tipped back.
It was a young and slender figure, dressed like a donkey- driver, in a thin blue robe, with rings of gold at the ankles. It was an adolescent male, but I could not tell whether he was a prince or a slave, for the attitude of the sleeper seemed both royal and servile, embodying royal confidence, servile complaisance and conscious abandon.
The robe was open at the neck, exposing a flat chest, as white as ivory – but there was a gaping bloody gash across the neck: a huge scar or an open wound! As regards the face, I found it quite delectable, with the sole exception of the narrowed oval of the chin – but it was all steeped in shadow, by virtue of the figure being supported from behind.
Terror-stricken, I called out loudly, but I was unable to awaken anyone; the native crew and the English servants were all overwhelmed by magical sleep. They did not wake until dawn, by which time the sphinx had disappeared into the distance.
When I recounted my adventure next day, the dragoman responded by saying that it must have been some donkey-boy whose throat had been cut by the arab bandits which abounded in these parts. He suggested that the cadaver of the murdered child had been placed as a warning to travellers – an ironic and salutary lesson!
