by Jean Lorrain
And the enchanter is dead of his enchantment…
And I have saved myself…
I acted out of fear too, from the instinct of legitimate self-defence. I have killed him in order that I might not be killed – for it is to suicide and perhaps worse that this Ethal was guiding me – and in excusing myself I demand the respect of others…
But when I smashed the frightful emerald against his teeth I was not thinking of others; I was only thinking of myself. So I am only a common murderer – not even an impassioned assassin, who kills for the pleasure of killing, let alone the assassin of sensuality that I might have been able to become – no better than the bewildered bourgeois who tremulously shoots the burglar denounced by falling furniture.
I have killed Ethal! How could I do such a thing? I detested him, to be sure, but I was no longer afraid of him. I am still trying to collect my thoughts, here in the glow of these two candelabras in the silence of the sleeping household, and I am not afraid! I am not afraid! Words and images run into one another in my poor empty head, where that dolourous thing which is my liquefied and mortified brain stirs restlessly; my temples are buzzing; my skin is dry and I have a bitter taste in my mouth. Behind the closed shutters, it is already broad daylight.
No one has seen me re-enter my apartments; I did not ask the concierge to let me in; I opened the door myself, with my own key, and slipped through the shadows like a thief… no, like an assassin.
Welcome also has killed, according to Ethal. We are two of a kind now. Yes, we can clasp one another by the hand. I remember that he said to me that I would kill one day, when I came to it. Did he know, then? If I were sure that he suspected me, I should do away with him too; I do not want to be known as an assassin – not I, not the Duc de Fréneuse!
If I could only sleep! I need, before doing anything else, to relive that moment – to write a minute-by-minute account of how I did it, and how I was led … Oh, I am ill! … Let it go … An injection of morphine, and I shall fall into sleep as if into a hole …
I will regain possession of myself tomorrow.
Same day, ten o’clock in the morning
It happened very simply. He said to me: ‘Come at seven o’clock‘; at seven o’clock I was with him. He greeted me with an enthusiastic and vigorous handshake; his embrace was vice-like. He was wearing all his rings: the monstrous livid pearls like pustules of nacre and – on the middle finger – the glaucous gem clasped by a silver claw, the ring of Philip II himself, modelled on the one in the Escorial. It was to that green gleam that my gaze immediately went as I entered his home last evening.
‘The ball of victims!’ he cried, recalling the odious pleasantry of his letter. ‘It has all gone well. Make yourself at home, my dear Duc – you seem a little younger. Let’s go – come and see how pretty they are.’
What a showman! His studio was full of amaryllids and huge lilies, mounted high and low. All the white and heady flowers with which he had poisoned the sittings of his models Ethal now wanted to set around the portraits, perhaps in order to make clearer their hidden resemblance to those women, or – who can say? – to make a greater impression on me and bind me more tightly to him. He knew perfectly well that I could not be ignorant of the legend attached to the portraits.
That Ethal! He read me like an open book.
‘How about this for a wake for dead women?’ he joked, indicating the flowers. ‘Are they not three beautiful lilies themselves: three delectably tormented lilies; three great white lilies in the process of withering away?
‘A strange and heart-rending grace
‘Is in the white mortality of lilies.
‘The Duchess of Searley: complete nobility deserves all honour. There is nothing metaphorical about that case: the duchess is really dead. I’m not here for nothing you know – my sole purpose is to cultivate a legend, in both London and Paris: it’s the only way one can obtain due recognition of one’s genius.
‘She loved flowers too much, that is what has killed her.’
His lips were drawn back in a carnivorous smile, which displayed all his strong teeth.
‘See how virginal she seems!’ he continued. ‘One would not think she had had as many as three lovers. Look at that frankness – and those eyes especially: the great blue eyes, of such a liquid purity in the shadow of the eyelashes … and the delicacy of the nose. You can almost feel the nostrils vibrating, can’t you? She was mother of pearl incarnate … and yet it’s only a sketch!’
In a tall frame of polished oak, there was a large unbleached canvas, of which only the middle seemed alive. From a cascade of muslin and buckram, such as one sees in portraits by Reynolds, emerged the frail figure of a young woman – hardly more than a girl – tenderly haloed in golden light. How had Ethal achieved the chiaroscuro effect of that enveloping aura?
The face and the throat of the young duchess seemed to be emanating like some kind of a perfume from the monotonous grey-brown background of the scarcely-prepared canvas. It was, so to speak, a psychic painting – for the fragility of that figure beneath the flight of the buckram, and the narrowed oval of that face, seemed more like the image of a soul than a flower.
The Duchess of Searley! She had the slimness of a stem and the transparence of a white iris bathed in soft light: an unreal creature, graceful and aristocratic; already distant, like an apparition, irredeemably consecrated to death. Oh, the astonishing profundity of her great eyes, fresh as a mountain spring! I could never grow weary of looking at her. To the extent that an English noblewoman could resemble a courtesan, Claudius’s sketch reminded me painfully of Willie Stephenson. There was, to be sure, the same frail and white neck, crying out for strangulation or the axe: a nape of snow and amber, made for the scaffold. Hers was the kind of beauty, formulated by luxury and ancestry, whose delicacy dazzles and exasperates: an atavistic challenge; one of those rare and precious specimens of humanity which attracts emotion, lightning, and death.
‘Charmante, n’est ce pas?’ said Ethal, in a heavy mock-Parisian accent. ‘A Caligula would have had her raped in the circus, to the rapturous applause of the entire Roman rabble. As I told you, a true lily.
‘Suffering makes them divine:
‘Their elegance and their pallor
‘In the great Venetian vase
‘A seeming martyr among flowers.
‘Better than charming: touching. Now, that little angel had her own income of three hundred thousand francs, and Tommy Sternett – the great sleeping partner in the firm of Humphrey & Son – settled all her racecourse wagers for the year, which included the follies of Epsom on Derby Day … a trifle of eighty thousand pounds sterling at the lowest estimate; the girl loved a flutter. That granted Sternett access to her table and her bed. Yes, that very same ideal … And he was not the only one, my dear Fréneuse – there were two others. If I can remember them, I’ll tell you their names …’
The man with the rings on his hands continued to drool over the lilies.
THE MURDER
It was the turn of the others now.
The Marchioness of Beacoscome was rendered in pastel, but there was a singular energy in the portrait, as if some kind of frenzy had crushed and done violence to the colours. Her full bosom sprung forth in brief and jerky strokes, zebra-stripes of grey and white indicating fragments of material: the dappled folds of a satin dress. Ethal must have painted it in haste, and in a fever: glistening pearls, outlined as if in chalk, flowed in the folds. It was a proud and confident product, almost slapdash in the disdain of its details, like an Antonio Moro or a Goya.
Antonio Moro! I could not refrain from glancing stealthily at Claudius. He was certainly the frightening double of the cowled gnome of the Flemish master. Beneath the disguise of his dinner-jacket – we were supposed to be dining together – his likeness to my memory of the portrait in the Louvre was crying out. It was all there: the enormous head; the thickened neck; the trunk which was too long on the legs which were too short; all the crooke
dness and obliqueness that Antonio Moro had put into his dwarf. Those bushy eyebrows and that sniffling nose were those of the Duc D’Albe’s jester, and above all else there was the jester’s malice, lying in ambush beneath the heavy eyelids. I am sure that it was that malice, attentive to my examination, which made him adopt the same pose as the portrait – stiffly upright, powerful and pretentious, with his fist on his hip – while he detailed the beauties of the Marchioness of Beacoscome, pointing them out to me with his horrible hand.
‘The most beautiful of the three!’ declared the painter, indicating the hauteur of her lips with the nacreous pallor of his enormous rings. ‘Look at the splendour of that flesh! It is the triumph of a healthy complexion, the parvenu flesh which cannot acquire the impoverishment of a decadent ancestral line: the soft, purplish-blue and greenish tones as dear to Van Dyck as Velasquez. The blood of fur-trappers and virile seamen still flourishes under the skin of the millionairess – but she had such a devout desire and determination to fall, to recapture by her own efforts the lost aristocracy of her remotest ancestors! Snobbery was her vocation. She was as enthusiastic for ether, morphine and long insomniac nights as others are for the produce of their couturiers. I had persuaded her that a nacreous tint refined and exquisitely faded the cheeks and the eyes, and she yearned with all her heart to lose her freshness. What a fool! She was cold enough to make a Parisian’s fingers tingle in August, but she would have made love to the ugliest Irish dock-worker as calmly as the most handsome of horse-guards. She took me for the ultimate arbiter of elegance, and her whole apartments in Piccadilly reeked of amaryllids and lilies, because she had seen them in my house. She was totally stupid. Oh, the heavy hours of those sittings when she came to pose! I always hoped that she would end up ill and becoming feeble in that studio crammed with flowers, but she had the constitution of a horse. Nothing became pale but her eyes; her complexion stubbornly remained that shade of pink, like the petals of camellias. Ah, she bored me so! It was her doctors who forbade her my studio. As you can see, though, devoid of mystery and charm as they may be, her eyes are a rather beautiful violet colour. She is a big pearl without orient, which only achieves purity as she approaches death. She is a superb lily grown out in the open, in a world which only loves the produce of the hothouse.
‘To think that she is now boring the Chinese!
‘Ah, she had not the attractiveness of this little bust!’
Negligently, he placed his dry and claw-like hand upon the waxen face of Angelotto, whose bust he had brought out of its recess, and which I had not previously noticed.
Angelotto was his pride and his triumph. There was an ultimate agony in that work. He had sculpted it with a knowingly prolonged pleasure in slow suffering and frightful terror. Beneath his fingers, tearful with enormous pearls, the pain-filled face of the little consumptive model seemed to screw itself up and become paler still.
‘This one is another thing altogether,’ said Ethal, decisively taking back his hand. ‘What do you think of this physiognomy?’
It was a tall, slender canvas framed in silver, like certain pictures to be found in Potsdam and the royal museums of Germany. The setting gave the impression of being overrun by shadows whose gloom was alleviated by the light of some invisible vent, like the interior of a crypt or funereal bedroom. Seated on a stretched couch of ice-blue satin, encased in a satin sheath the colour of honesty, was the enigmatic figure of a woman. She was like the Empress Josephine in her First Empire robe, her hair gathered in a chignon, starred with turquoises. She sat perfectly still, and the bare flesh of arms and shoulders had the morbid and cold brilliancy of a water-lily. An enamelled collar supported the high throat and her hair was brown; her stiff and ecstatic face was illuminated by two large and radiant eyes whose immense irises were a liquid and dark blue. This woman of the night had the exquisite oval face of a nymph, the inspired pallor of a sybil and the magnified gaze of a priestess who sees God.
Oh, the wondrous harmony of that pose, with the two widely-spaced arms resting their hands on the couch; the hallucinated anguish of that whole attentive figure; the slender design of her fingers and the slow curve, like that of a swan’s neck, of her frail arms; the strange hypnotic character of that little Diana of the Consulate!
‘Isn’t she delectably lunary and nocturnal in all that blue luminosity?’ whispered a fervent voice close beside me. ‘It’s certainly the setting she requires – pompous and icy at the same time, not sinister, but funereal. A little nymph of Erebus! Have you noticed the curve of her mouth? Well, this Hecate of the three faces, this little priestess of Artemis of the Taurians, this Iphigenia of Glück’s operas, is the sister of Thomas Welcome, the Marchioness Eddy in person. Do you not see the resemblance? Look at her eyes.’
Ethal’s words echoed loudly in my soul. It was my own thought that he was articulating. Now that he had formally introduced me to the portrait, what infamies would he relate to me concerning the sitter? I recalled the hallucinatory opium-smoking session held in that same studio, and the frightful stories complaisantly and droolingly told about all those invited to that memorable evening. Not one of them had found favour; from the incense of Maud White to the venal past of the Duchess of Althorneyshare, all their ignominies and all their lusts had been slowly stirred by the abominable Englishman, as he spattered them one by one: the Marquise Naydorff; the Princess of Seiryman-Frileuse; Olga Myrianinska …
From the women encountered in his home that evening, he had let loose so many frightening silhouettes: the almost genial caricatures of a visionary observer. And at a given moment, in the middle of a congregation of ghouls and larvae conjured up by his own imagination, he had been able – without overmuch risk of disbelief, so certain was he of the nightmarish atmosphere – to breathe into my ear: ‘We are at the Sabbat!’
That evening at Ethal’s, the males had been evaluated just as the females were, and found equally wanting. The herd of Freddy Schappman and the well-scrubbed gardenia-sporting Englishmen, all more-or-less refugees from London, had nothing to envy the trio of foreign grandés dames in terms of reputation. The Comte de Muzarett and the Princess of Frileuse were able to offer their hands to one another. On that evening, however, the odious whispers had been justified by the demeanour of the people and the notoriety of their defects. Were it not for their names and high social standing – the titles of some and the fortunes of others – a police raid on Ethal’s establishment would have been entirely appropriate. What guests! I had only needed to look at them to understand how accurately Claudius had spoken when he invited me to come and see some monsters. In any case, he must have whispered in their ears, according to the same formula, some such account of me: I was part of the collection myself. We were all old acquaintances; or, worse, were destined to make one another’s acquaintance within the dizzy and – alas! – so narrow heights of our cycle of infamy.
But all the members of the menagerie which Claudius brought together that night were well able to defend themselves with beak and claw. I know well enough that civilization is the taming of wild beasts by fear or by self-interest, that human faces don masks of hypocrisy as the mouths of dogs are muzzled; that night, vanity might have cast off their shackles and muzzles, and left them free to bite, had their tamer not been so close at hand. I had tolerated Ethal in the role of animal-trainer then, for those monsters were alive.
It was to contemplate the images of phantoms that Claudius had invited me now, in the fluid gold light of the end of a beautiful day in May: three portraits of women; almost three portraits of dead women, given that one was already defunct and another dying. The setting was the same, and in that studio illuminated by white flowers, Ethal recommenced and continued his work of destruction. He soiled and defiled as he pleased the memory and the reputation of those women! With an iconoclastic joy, he muddied their future by piling up the mire of their past. It was as if the litter of the streets were being shovelled on to a bed of lilies; as if blows of a pick-axe were rained do
wn on precious fragile things, impeccable and white; as if each act of speech shattered, polluted, crumbled to dust…
Oh, that massacrer of souls and flowers, that revealer of defects, that killer of dreams, that sower of doubts, that agitator of despairs … what would he say to me about Lady Kerneby? With what stigmata would he mark that gentle and fatal face, whose large eyes reminded me so painfully of those of Thomas Welcome?
Such was my dread of hearing something irreparable that I said to myself, imploringly: ‘Not that one! No, for the love of God, let that one alone!’
He had kept her for last, like some choice morsel of prey. Sure of his effect, an artist accommodating and preparing his public, he sat down on a sofa, signalling to me to take my place beside him. His manner was businesslike, and there was a pause before he began.
‘That one,’ he said, in a measured voice, his words echoing strangely in the silence, as though they were being stamped out, ‘is the worthy sister of our dear friend Welcome.’
Beneath the heavy eyelids his little eyes shone, laughing with a ferocious joy. He sensed that he was making me ill, and the whole of his gnome-like face was lit up. He savoured my anguish and paused again before continuing.
