The Angels of Perversity

by Remy de Gourmont

  When it was all over, Patrice said: “Adelaide, your sister was a wretch …”

  “No,” Adelaide interrupted him. “She was simply jealous. She became determined to love Lord Romsdale as soon as she realised that he loved me; and when you fell in love with me, she was equally determined to love you – and to hate me. No one ever realised it. If her secret has not died with her, it is only because her last act has declared all her passion, love, hate and jealousy, because death demands truth at last … Yes, death demands truth, and Sylvie has met that demand.”

  “Instead of modifying souls, death affirms them,” agreed Patrice. “Sylvie was a dissimulator and a liar. I have no reproach to make to you. You were but a child. …”

  “Oh yes, Patrice,” she cried, rising from her seat and throwing herself, sobbing, into the arms of her husband, “I was a child, a child, a child …!”

  That evening their love was reignited. The calm tenderness into which they had fallen discovered a new incentive for excitement, and they went to the seaside, to stay in an old cottage near the beach, black and bare, where they tasted all the sensual delights. They had no obligations but to be together, and being together was sufficient reason to live. They enjoyed an ideal month of renewal, better even than the first flow of their love, for they now had a more profound understanding of themselves, and a fuller knowledge of the value of pleasure.

  Eventually, though, their mutual adoration became too much, and Adelaide became listless.

  “No more emotional excitement!” the doctor commanded.

  “All very well, doctor,” said Patrice, “but how can one live without emotion?”

  They had reached the limit. The last roses had bloomed and a single gust of wind would clear the flowerbed. Patrice thought his wife’s weakness was a transitory crisis, but Adelaide could not bring herself out of it, except to die.

  But before she died, the sister – Sylvie’s sister indeed! – drew the ear of her husband close to her lips, and in a whisper which might have come from the infernal depths – a whisper which trembled with the force of her supreme deception – said: “Patrice, I die loving Romsdale!”

  THE OTHER

  She went to bed as obediently as a child, promising to be thoroughly sensible, to sleep and not to daydream. In order to soothe the fever of her sick headache, and make her more tranquil, she had been assured that it would soon be over: the vile sickness would be conquered and dispatched, and would not be the death of her.

  Her illness took the form of a crippling lassitude; it drained all her strength and sapped all the power of her life and will. She sank into it as though into an over-warm and overly-prolonged bath, enervated to the point of discomfort but troubled by a restlessness which would not allow her to be entirely still. Her mind was similarly afflicted by the combination of dullness and agitation. She was beset by desire but found nothing to appease it; she wept over her distress, and tried in vain to console herself with the fancies of her impuissant imagination. One thing only could excite her heart with passion: the entrance of her husband immediately caused her to lift her head; one tender word from him, and her eyes lighted up; at his caress, her entire being thrilled, momentarily galvanised. In the presence of her husband, a slight pinkness animated her cheeks; her hands recovered the power to make graceful gestures; her lips had the strength, if only for a second, to meet his adored lips.

  Her body seemed to her to be quite translucent, like an abandoned seashell which, if placed in the sun, would be penetrated by its light and made iridescent, like a pearl mislaid in the sand. To the melancholy eyes which contemplated her, she thought, she must resemble a precious jewel-case which had no more glory left than its intricately-carved wood, its brasswork tracery, its ornamental lock, its vermilion inlay and its nails; all the interior treasure had vanished, alas.

  So she went to bed – and at first, as she had promised, she made an earnest effort to sleep profoundly. Soon, however, as time went by, her dreams drifted up towards consciousness as though they came to float on the surface of a lake, like some heavy log of wood which had in the end to submit to the law of nature, consenting to float and follow the tide. Her reawakened mind sailed away, inexorably drawn by a secret current which left the surface of the water undisturbed. She sailed on, and dreamed with closed eyes, without making a movement, without in the least disturbing the rhythm of her breathing, so that any observer might believe that she still slumbered at the bottom of the lake – thus ensuring that the observer would be pleased with her, and that she would not be scolded.

  She had become so childish since being stricken by her malady, like a little girl before her first communion, so very docile! Not long ago she had been imperious and forceful, a woman whose advice was heeded – even, on occasion, a tyrannical mistess. Now she was as mild as a desireless virgin. The only joy left to her was to shut her eyes, to be surrounded by silence, and to dream.

  She usually dreamed of old times: of the first kisses which had revealed to her the commanding power of love and taught her how agreeable contact with that dangerous creature man could be. She would dwell indefatigably among memories of her initiation, taking care to recall every single word and every single gesture of her lover, and the precise colour and the exact perfume of the first flowers which he had placed at her feet. When she arrived again, in due course, at the supreme and adorable night, she sometimes let loose a faint cry which disturbed the house – but anyone who came in would find her hypocritically calm, making believe that she was asleep despite that her respiration would be a little hasty, and that an unwonted redness would lie upon her pale cheeks.

  On this particular evening she slept unusually well, but her dreams were bad.

  This time, her memories were not extended in a rationally ordered fashion. Her imagination was overpowered, and the images which she conjured up for herself vanished in an instant, to leave her with nothing but a haunting and grotesque vision of a woman whose face was veiled by a handkerchief, and whose dress was lifted up by a brutal hand. All night, that ignominious vision danced beneath her eyelids, and the spectacle filled her, simultaneously, with a profound disgust and an impotent anger. These emotions exhausted her, overwhelming her fragile vitality.

  Next morning, the dream vanished, but all through the day she was irritable and morose, oppressed by the memory of the awful night. There was no further manifestation of the obsessive image; the obscene phantoms had descended again into the abyss. But the unfortunate vision seemed to have given new strength to the secret labour of Death, and diminished accordingly the feeble flame of Life. The dwindling of her energies became frightening. The casket without treasures was no longer merely empty; the carved wood was worm-ridden now, almost reduced to dust, devoured by some obscure army of termites; the lock hung loose; the lid was thrown back on its hinges.

  Soon, this work was finished, lacking only the final blow which would crush and annihilate the wretched creature. The room took on the injured and almost funereal aspect of a sickroom; worthless flasks containing impotent tinctures were strewn over the furniture, and all conversations held within it were rendered horrid by their sepulchral tone.

  The clock chimed the critical hour. It was in the evening. The doctor had gone, muttering uselessly to himself. After hovering over the bed for a while, asking vain questions of the poor mute whose voice had already been stifled by impending death, the priest had pronounced the dubious formulas of absolution and sat down to wait for any possible confidences which might emerge in the respite of the penultimate minute. A nun was standing alongside, her eyes fixed upon the moribund woman, on the lookout for some gesture which might signal the desire for one last drink of water, watching that veiled expression in case its veil might suddenly tear to release a supreme smile.

  The veil did tear. It did so when the dying woman sensed that her beloved was there, that the head which now leaned over her own agonising head was the adored head of her husband. The veil tore, and a gentle gleam of love il
luminated the sad eyes which would soon turn their gaze towards the other side of life.

  There followed, between these two beings, a macabre mute conversation – mute, because one could not speak and the other did not wish to speak, perhaps fearing to spew forth the turpitudes which swarmed in his heart. While the almost-deceased comforted herself with the illusion of a little more life, declaring with her expression and with the extremely feeble movement of her fingers the absolute truth of her invincible affection, the man whom she adored even in her agony could find no response save for a smile whose compassion scarcely served to moderate its indifference.

  Having become weary at last of his dumbness, and of the pretence imposed upon him by circumstance, he opened his mouth to proffer abominable banalities and expressions of hope which were more wounding than injuries. He even talked about a journey into the country, assuring her of the benefits of travel, of the good results that might be obtained by a sojourn in the mountains of Algeria.

  “We will think about all this later,” he told her. Then, without any change of tone, he said: “Your sister is here. Would you like to see her?”

  Without waiting for any sign of acquiescence, he left the room, and came back immediately, accompanied by a very beautiful girl in the full bloom of youth, whose passionately sensual attitude clearly denied her virginity.

  The sisters had never loved one another, and the elder of the two – the one who now entered, radiant and insolent beneath her attitude of condolence – had never forgiven the younger, who was now laid prostrate, her precocious marriage.

  By virtue of a sudden divinatory gift, the dying woman understood what had passed between her sister and her husband. They had the attitude of accomplices, both of them – and in the kind of glances they exchanged there was an indefinable intimacy which seemed invisibly to unite them.

  The obsessive and obscene vision passed once more, in all its awful clarity, before her affrighted eyes. Paralysed by terror, she expired with the horror of having seen, standing before her, the Other.

  THE DEATH ONE CANNOT MOURN

  He was in mourning for one he was not allowed to mourn, unable to acknowledge his sorrow, for the one whose death had devastated him belonged in name and in memory to another. He, perhaps, suffered more than any other, and yet he was forced to smile, to listen to the anecdotes which were bandied back and forth – and even to tell them himself, sparing neither implications nor insinuations nor perfidies, because he wished to keep his secret.

  He mourned, but he shed his tears within his throat and not upon his cheeks. Like one of Dante’s damned, he drank from a poisonous and inexhaustible river of misery. Twice or thrice, intending to contrive a delicate and discreet grimace of surprise, he felt his face become contorted, and his gorge rise – and it required a superhuman effort, born of love, to prevent sobs from bursting forth to stain the solemn ceremony with scandal and ridicule.

  The subdued company followed the coffined corpse along a desolate little path bordered with appropriately dismal firs. One by one they passed into the cemetery, and the conversation dwindled away, hushed like the noises of a forest at the approach of a storm, or the murmur of a flock at the door of the abattoir. Disquiet imposed silence by gradual degrees as the members of the crowd entered the house of the dead, each oppressed by the fearful awareness that one day he would enter such a place and not leave it.

  In spite of his inner anguish, he sustained his pretence of indifference throughout. He pretended attentively to read the vain inscriptions imposed upon the insensibility of the marble slabs. The aspirations graven there revolted him by their frankness and their hypocrisy. The doctrine of the eternal survival of souls could not stir in him any leavening of desire; he did not believe in it, and he did not want to.

  When all the formalities were complete, the assembled throng, delivered from their solemnity, made their way back up the staircase. Once outside, he took care to present himself, as propriety and amity demanded, to the husband of the deceased, the marquis de V –. He clasped the old man’s hand, and proffered some conventional banalities:

  “I have been waiting for you, my friend,” said Monsieur de V –. “You are the one who must give me your arm and escort me home. Come, I beg of you, save me from all these tiresome people.”

  Making a vague gesture of farewell, M. de V – withdrew with the companion in sorrow to whose care he had chosen to confide himself.

  “Let us go,” the old marquis continued. “Lend me your support, I beg of you. I am broken. I feel as if I were a hundred years old! All that remained to me of my strength and my life has been nailed up in a coffin. I suppose you think that it should have been she who buried me, she who should have closed my eyes and consoled my cold temples with a last kiss, like a dutiful daughter? Ah, my friend! You at least are with me – say that you will not abandon me! You are not so rotten. I know that you cannot do it, for I am the only one to whom you are permitted to speak of her, the only one in whose company you will be able to mourn her. There is nothing I do not know, you see; not only have I supported everything that has come to pass, but I have engineered it, and mark my words: my wife’s adultery has been the salvation of my marriage!

  “When I took her for my wife six years ago I was already no more than the shadow of a man. I knew that I was quite impotent to provide her with the expected pleasures of marriage, and thus I condemned her to a kind of hideous and humiliating widowhood – humiliating because, in her ignorance, she might believe herself scorned; hideous because, although I could not take full possession of the virgin who had been delivered unto me, I was not incapable of lust, or of such amusements which an old man might derive from an innocent and docile creature. However, once I was wed, and at the threshold of the nuptial chamber, I became ashamed of the abjection of my desires. I went in to my wife, and took abundant sensual pleasure simply from momentarily caressing her soft and beautiful blonde hair, as a mother might have fondled her daughter. She was undoubtedly surprised – and more astonished still later on, when she came to understand the intimate secret with which I could not acquaint her. That acquaintance she received from you – and I could tell you the day on which it happened, perhaps even the hour, if you have by any chance forgotten them! You must remember the tenderness of the welcome I gave you on that particular day, and you must remember your embarrassment, your lies and your blushes? Children, children! Admit that you were afraid, and acknowledge that at the same time, you enjoyed the most delicious sensations!

  “I was so little the dupe, my dear friend, that I would arrange your rendezvous myself, always taking good care to provide you with advance notice of my absences and my returns. Sometimes, in order to maintain the intensity of your love and desire, I thwarted your planned meetings by remaining for an entire week within the house, without stirring from my bed – requiring by my simulated illness the constant attendance of the unhappy Antoinette. Oh, I have been so very paternal, and you ought now to recognise the fact. Without my ruses, you might easily have tired of one another at the end of three months, and without my foresight, you would not have found that charming hunting-lodge on the far side of the estate, to which everyone believed that I retired on certain afternoons, and where I permitted you such tranquil intervals on so many beautiful summer nights!

  “My duty as a husband was to afford my wife the most elementary pleasures of life; being incapable of doing so myself, I delegated the task to one who seemed to me worthy of the role. You have filled that role admirably. She loved you until the very last, unknowingly whispering your name in the agony of her delirium.

  “You both conducted yourselves honourably. Your discretion was perfect, and I am certain that the Marquise de V – died with an unsullied reputation as a heroic and faithful spouse. Yes, heroic – because she always presented a cheerful face to me, yielded to my will, and catered to the idiosyncrasies of an old man. And faithful – because only one man ever kissed her lips.”

  We arrived at Monsieur d
e V – ’s home, and immediately went up to the marquise’s room.

  “I repeat,” Monsieur de V – continued, “that I could do nothing more for her than an indulgent father. I have lost a daughter; it is you who mourns your wife.

  “What the world might think of me, if this curious adventure became known, I can readily imagine. They would despise me. If that is what you are thinking yourself, I do not blame you. What does it matter to me? I have always regarded myself as a liberated man – liberated from prejudice and from duties of omission. There are men who have risen through the ranks of society by the strict observance of social convention; as for me, I have descended.

  “That degree of conventional immorality which an honest fool would discover in my conduct I myself take leave to adjudge a high and absolute morality – and I am able, proudly and painfully, to embrace in the privacy of my dead wife’s room the man who I myself appointed as her lover.

  “Mourn, mourn, my friend! Rejoice in all the delicious afflictions of grief! Mourn the loss of one whom you are not allowed to mourn, anywhere but here.

  “Take what you will of her jewels, her lacework, her shoes, her dresses. Among her dresses, there is but one lacking: her wedding-dress; the one which she wore the day she was given to you. That one is buried with her; she wears it in her tomb!”

  THE MAGNOLIA

  The two sisters, Arabella the beautiful and Bibiane the plain, came out of the house together. Arabella’s beauty emphasised her youthfulness, while Bibiane seemed older by virtue of her plainness, so they seemed more like daughter and mother than orphan sisters.

  They came out of the house which had been touched by grief and paused beneath the magnolia: the magical tree which had been planted by no one and which bloomed so magnificently even in the grounds of the desolate mansion.

  The magnolia came to life twice in every year, after the fashion of its kind: first in the spring, when it pushed forth the green spears which would become its leaves; then again in early autumn, before the tired leaves began to wither. In autumn, as in spring, the proud display of the enchanted tree put forth huge flowers which were like those of the sacred lotus, each snow-white corolla cradling a tiny red spot as though it were a shroud marked with a single drop of life’s blood.