The Angels of Perversity

by Remy de Gourmont

  Madame de Laneuil was still laughing as she explained her idea. …

  The excitation which had briefly taken hold of me abandoned me again, defeated by circumstance, and an all-too-familiar sense of desolation swept over me. But then I realised that Edith was still staring at me – and had never ceased to stare at me. Undoubtedly, Edith was staring at me.

  I met her eyes with my own. My gaze was steady now. Within the space of a single instant I had contrived to replace the flare of powerful desire with a simulation of indifference, but it was too late. She understood – everything! There was a moment of mutual comprehension, which seemed to last forever, as she confessed with a flicker of her eyelids that her thoughts were in perfect harmony with. …

  Madame de Laneuil was questioning me. “Now then, what do you think? Give us the benefit of your advice.”

  I took hold of myself, suppressing the unexpectedly joyous illumination which had taken hold of me as a result of my awkward discovery – but my reaction must have been visible, for she noticed the change in my attitude although she mistook its cause.

  “Ah!” she exclaimed. “It has dawned on him that we are here to celebrate a wedding, not a funeral!”

  Edith smiled sadly.

  “Let us see what needs to be done,” I said, in the businesslike fashion which the women clearly expected of me. “But if we are to make a sensible judgment, Edith must put the dress on.”

  “Of course! Edith, you must put the dress on.”

  It was my turn now to hide my eyes. I turned away discreetly, and looked out through the window-pane. …

  The moon was high now, and the shadow of the house lay darkly upon the lawn … but that scene was displaced in my imagination by a very different vision which I built from the sounds I overheard: the rustling of fabric, the clicking of buttons and hooks. In my mind’s eye I followed all the phases of the metamorphosis which was accomplished behind me. The sounds were instantly transposed into images by the alchemy of the senses, and I saw – literally saw – my loved one’s throat laid bare as her deft hands pulled down her shoulder-straps. The movement of her sleeveless arms as she shrugged off her clothing released a perfume which seemed to me as sharp as the scent of the lilacs, and the curve of her breasts raised by the upper rim of her corset … oh, the heady scent of the lilacs! …

  The white dress fell like an avalanche into my dream, drowning the images. …

  Edith smiled sadly.

  I hastened to play my appointed role, as couturier. I proffered my advice, and my judgment was promptly accepted. I instructed Rosa where to place her pins, and how to repair the seams, and she accepted my orders respectfully.

  Before I left the room – preceded by Madame de Laneuil, who had undertaken to show me to my bedroom – I exchanged good wishes with the young bride-to-be. We were in perfect accord, discreetly concealing the secret which we shared. Her eyes followed me as I departed … the clear blue eyes which were the windows of her soul. …

  The blackbirds had long since greeted the dawn from the leaf-laden crowns of the chestnut trees when Alberic came into my room. We talked as old friends should, about the times we had shared. Like any man about to be married he was tormented by a few lingering doubts, which he confessed to me without the slightest inhibition, taking it for granted that I would be sympathetic and supportive. I let him do it, and felt as if he were speaking on my own behalf. As proverbial wisdom tells us, it is necessary when one is in a state of desolation to take careful note of the miseries of others, that in comforting them one might find consolation for oneself.

  But oh, how I yearned for the holy sacrament of a kiss from her lips!

  Another vision, born of murmurous sound: Edith made her entrance into the morning-room, while the portraits of her ancestors looked down from the walls. Her eyes declared that she had not wept, but neither had she slept; there was a hint of hollowness beneath the pale sapphires.

  Her virginal body was swathed by the bridal dress whose imperfections I had helped to correct; her face was hidden by a great white veil.

  She moved slowly and self-consciously past the choir, the cynosure of all eyes, to the place where her grandfather awaited her. The old man seemed almost overcome by emotion. She passed close by me, and with only the slightest movement of her lips, her eyes lowered to signify the hopelessness of our sudden mutual realisation, she conveyed to me the briefest of messages:

  “It is too late!”

  I, too, lowered my eyes, hiding in the depths of my being the echoes of that joy which had flared up so urgently only to be damned.

  She permitted the old man the favour of a kiss; with her hands resting on his shoulders she smiled at him.

  Edith smiled – sadly.

  I was very close to them. The edge of the great veil touched my head when it was momentarily inflated by the draught from an open window. It seemed to me then that a breath of passion had caught us and lifted us up, Edith and myself … Edith the pale; Edith the fair; and me … towards the unattainable paradise of betrayed and perjured lovers.

  As she returned to her mother’s side, her sad eyes lingered for a moment upon me; then, abruptly, she withdrew into the enveloping folds of the veil. She departed – forever!

  The sharp and cruelly ironic scent of the lilacs drifted in through the window.

  She went to be married.

  During the ceremony, I responded in the silence of my heart to the priest’s ritual interrogation: I do! I bowed my head when he extended his hands to receive and sanctify, in the name of Almighty God, the sacred oath of the two newlyweds.

  I remembered, as I did so, the theological argument which says that in all the sacraments there is both matter and form, essence and method. I realised that in the marriage ceremony the ritual is only the form and not the matter, and that a marriage is made not by the benediction of the officiating priest but by the mutual consent of those who are espoused – that consent, and that alone, is the matter and essence of a marriage.

  “Go then,” I said to her, silently. “Be the wife of another, in the eyes of the world. I am refused the joy of possessing you in any sense that the world would call possession, but in truth you belong to me. Almighty God knows our mutual will, our mutual consent, and that is all that matters. It must suffice.”

  And so it was that I felt a certain bitter joy when the priest said: “Whom God has joined together, let no man put asunder. …”

  I slipped away as stealthily as an artful thief.

  The blackbirds sang no more in the leaf-laden crowns of the chestnut trees, and the sharply-scented lilac-blossoms were fading at last – were as faded now as memories of the lost passions of youth. …

  DON JUAN’S SECRET

  Devoid of soul and avid in the flesh, Don Juan prepared himself from earliest adolescence for the vocation that would make his name legendary. His cunning foresight had revealed to him the shape of things to come, and he entered upon his career armed and armoured by the motto: To please yourself, you must take what you please from she who pleases you.

  From one of his fair-haired conquests he took a deft gesture of the hand, which echoed the painful beating of an empty heart;

  From another he took an ironic fall of the eyelid, which conveyed an illusion of impertinence and which was certainly no mere reflex of a feeble eye before the light;

  From another, he took the petulant stamp of her pretty and impatient foot;

  From another, soft and pure, he took a smile in which he had previously seen, as if in a magical mirror, the contentment of satisfaction; and afterwards, the pleased renewal of desire;

  From another, not so pure and without softness, but ever vibrantly alive and as nervous as a kitten, he took a very different smile: the kind of smile which remembered kisses strong enough to stir the heart of a virgin;

  From another, he took a sigh: a deep, tremulous and timid sigh; a sigh like the hectically fluttering wings of a frightened bird in flight;

  From another
he took the slow and unsteady gait of one overwhelmed by an excess of love;

  From another, he took the loving voice whose whispered endearments were like the weeping of angels.

  From all of them he took the expressions which showed upon their faces: the gentle, the imperious, the docile, the astonished, the combative, the envious, the lovely, the trusting, the devouring, the thunderous, and all the rest; and he built these one by one into a great garland of fascinating appearances. But the most beautiful of all expressions to Don Juan – a precious stone among countless beads of glass – was the expression of a ravished girl, hunted and caught and mortified by love and despair. That look he found so poignant that it became the motive force of his eternal search for more and more of the same wild gratification; it was the secret inspiration of his great carnal quest.

  Time and time again, Don Juan triumphed over the female heart. He won hearts ingenuous and trusting, hearts tender and righteous, hearts which did not know their own secrets, hearts empty of innate desire, hearts deliciously naive; gentle seductresses and ardent seductresses all came alike to him, and were likewise beguiled.

  The pattern of his seductions was always the same: his gentle touch, excused by a hint of laughter in the eye and a pleasant smile; her slow entrancement by his steady gaze; the first deep and fractured sigh wrung from his breast, accompanied by a subtly impatient tap of his foot, as if to say: “You have wounded my heart; that will not prevent me from loving you, but I am angry.” Then, he would see the precious look of the hunted beast upon her face; then, he would touch her playfully with his little finger.

  After a pause, he would whisper, lovingly: “How beautiful it is tonight!” – and the young lady would instantly respond: “It is my heart and soul that you want, Don Juan! So be it! Take them, I give them to you freely.”

  Don Juan would accept the delicious offering, and would savour all the feminine charms of the new lover: her skin; her hair; her teeth; all of her beauty and all the perfumes of her secret places – and, having enjoyed to the full the fruits of her newly-awakened love, would then depart.

  Around his own heart he built an inviolable shell, in which it was as comfortably encased as if it had been enshrouded in white velvet – and with that armour to protect him, bolder than any giant-killer, more revered than the holiest of relics, he increased the number of his conquests vastly.

  He took all of them: all those who might provide a new hint of pleasure, a delicate nuance of joy; he took all that he was allowed to take by those whose sisters had already given him all that he desired. His reputation went before him, and as it increased the women became all the more ready to bow down before him and kiss his hands submissively, overcome by the mere approach of their conqueror.

  In the end, women competed with one another to be the first to submit to him, or to be the one who would surrender most; intoxicated by the mere thought of their impending enslavement, they would begin to die for love of him before they had even tasted his love.

  Through all the towns and all the châteaux, to the remotest parts of the land, there spread the cry of the fatally enamoured: “O my love! O desire of my flesh! He is irresistible.”

  But the time came, as it had to do, when Don Juan grew old. His strength was sapped by his luxurious indulgence and his appetites dried up. As is the inevitable way of things, he became a shadow of his former self.

  To the last flowers of summer, Don Juan had given up the last grain of his pollen; there was not a drop of sap left in him. He had loved, but now would love no more – and he lay down on his bed to await the arrival of the one who was destined to claim him.

  But when that one arrived, Don Juan – still unready to accept his fate – offered to him anything that he cared to take, out of all that had been so carefully stolen from those with whom the great lover had taken his pleasure.

  “I offer to you the rewards of all my seductions,” said Don Juan. “To you, O Ugly One, I offer all my gestures, all my looks, all my smiles, all my divers sights – all of that, and the armour which encases my soul: take it and go! I wish to relive my life in memory, knowing as I do now that memory is the true life.”

  “Relive your life if you wish,” said Death. “I will see you again.”

  And Death departed, but left behind him a host of phantoms which he had raised from the shadows.

  These phantoms wore the forms of young and beautiful women, all of them naked and all incapable of speech, moving restlessly as though there were something which they were desperate to obtain. They arranged themselves in a great spiral around Don Juan’s bed, and although the first of them was close enough to take his hand and place it on her breast, the last was so far away that she seemed as distant as the stars.

  She who had placed his hand on her breast took back from him a deft gesture of the hand which echoed the anguish of an empty heart;

  Another took back from him the ironic fall of a white eyelid;

  Another took back from him the petulant stamp of her foot;

  Another took back from him the subtle smile which spoke of satisfaction obtained and the renewal of desire;

  Another took back from him a different smile, which reflected the pleasure of secret delights;

  Another took back from him a sigh like the flutter of a frightened bird;

  And then there approached another, who moved with the slow and unsteady gait of one overwhelmed by an excess of love; and another whose sad and loving whispers were like the weeping of angels; and the great garland of the expressions which he had gathered one by one – the imperious and the thunderous, the astonished and the trusting, the gentle and beguiled – all were retaken from him; and every one of those whom he had carefully violated came in her turn to take back from him her illimitably precious and fugitive expression of love and despair.

  Another, finally, took from him his own heart, whose delicious innocence he had so carefully preserved within its cloak of white velvet; and then he was no longer the great Don Juan, but only a senseless phantom.

  Like a rich man robbed of his wealth, or a flyer without wings, he was the merest echo of a human being, reduced to elementary truth, without his inspiration, without his secret!

  THE FUGITIVES

  Leave the street to those whose souls are troubled.

  Albert Samain.

  “And why one,” said he to himself, “when there are the others? What primitive commandment makes this one my destiny, instead of that one? I will not be the slave of a single flesh; I wish my desire to be expansive, I wish to release it to the pursuit of unknowns by routes unknown.…”

  His diseased imagination experienced a very real suffering by virtue of the multiplicity of women. Sometimes a brain-fever of eroticism excited him to the point where he would cry out, helplessly: “There are too many of them! There are too many of them!”

  He would have liked to summarise in the draught of a kiss upon a chosen set of lips the entire essence of Femininity, but the accomplishment of that Neroesque desire would have killed Desire just as surely as roses are killed by cutting down a rose-bush, just as surely as a smile is killed by cutting off a head.

  As well might one hope to draw in by a single inhalation the ultimate breath of Love, the ultimate perfume of Life and all its fecundity; to master the ultimate volition of the soul and its ultimate sensuality.

  These crises of unreason sometimes laid him prostrate; at such times he would laugh at his fantasy so as not to be frightened by his folly, and his licentiousness would be calmed for a while by innocent dreams. He would conclude that his lover of the moment was decidedly adorable, and that she would be the only one, the one who would be set above all others – and he would confirm it by praising to the limit, albeit with an indecisive smile, her mysterious and delicious absence of promise:

  “Your magnificent stupidity,” he would say to her, “makes you one with the Infinite; you fraternise with the Absolute, and the nullity which mortifies itself within your eyes, like the
light of a dead star, proves to me that it is possible both to be and not to be, at one and the same time.…

  And Nothingness has made me a soul like yours.

  “…But understand what this means: in being nothing, you are everything – and everyone.”

  The poor lover in question would willingly have fled out the door, but she was invariably in awe of him, and he would profit by her fear to pluck her from the rosary of the fugitives.

  This was the second stage of his madness.

  He would say:

  “Ah! I will tell you the stories of all of those who are within you. I have seen them, I have captured them, I have placed them within you: they are the women of the street, the women who pass by, the unknowns which go by – who knows where? – who go about their business by unknown paths. They are within you, but you know nothing about them; and for myself, I know only this: were I to touch you they would free themselves from you and revert to their mysterious selves. Those who are within you are not really there: they are but a dream within a dream – but I have told you this, my darling, only out of politeness, so that there can be no legitimate excuse for you to be jealous.

  “Frankly, you are actually too tiny to contain so many dreams and so many desires. Those whom I love are innumerable; I will tell you their stories:

  “One has the precise and muscular gait of a huntress – what fine straight legs! She has exactly the kind of flesh necessary to preserve the harmony of her form, as supple as the branch of an ash-tree. When she swoons, as love dawns in her, at the foot of some ancient comforting oak, in some remote forest which the sun does not dare to disturb, I am not there! I never will be there! Oh, I am mortified by desire!