The Angels of Perversity

by Remy de Gourmont

  “And in the sacred images, I shall be seen, standing to one side, with sad Jerusalem at my feet, displaying for the astonishment of the Jews the inestimable imprint, while the condemned climbs towards the summit of the world, his eyes reflecting all his suffering. He is murdered, while I still dwell on earth, arms extended so that what I carry might be venerated, and my attitude preserved until the day of resurrection – for I am the sixth Station of the Cross!”

  I replied with disconcerting irony: “Is that what you want? To be a historical figure, so that you might appear in a fresco painted by Fra Angelico, and have your name written on a streamer and repeated, in some apocryphal and indulgent paean, by the angels which accompany you to the Heavenly sphere?”

  “Indeed yes!” she replied, blushing. “You would then have picked me out from the work of the great painters instead of the ranks of actual women, and would you not have loved me every bit as much?”

  “Every bit.”

  “Perhaps more?”

  “Perhaps more.”

  “And I would then have revealed to your contemplation nothing but my manner of expression, always the same: a soul more agreeable and certainly less discordant; easier to satisfy and less embarrassed; sure of always pleasing you and never scared at all, as I constantly am. To tell you the truth, Damase, I understand nothing: not you, nor life, nor myself, nor anything else.”

  “Hyacinthe,” I said, “the vainglory of wishing to understand is dangerous, immoral and, above all, old-fashioned. The modern way – perhaps the final way – is to say: Go forward, without knowing why, as quickly as possible, towards an unknown goal! To act and to think are opposites which identify one only in the Absolute. To accomplish all one’s movements – of the head, the arms, the legs – without ever quite attaining the status of a puppet, but with a certainty that gives one a feeling of rightness: that is what is nowadays held up as the ideal. Be citizens of universal activity! Forget to be conscious of ourselves! The blind horse gallops without hesitation, not knowing where it is going, not caring where it has been: so let us put out our eyes!”

  “You’re too impatient, Damase. It isn’t necessary to be so sarcastic that it hurts me.”

  “The more you come to know, the more you will suffer. The Absolute has suffered absolutely, and perhaps suffers still! An infinite sadness has spread itself over the world – whence came it, if not from on high? Think of the pain which Christ suffered, after the vanity of his atonement, as vain as the vanity which he redeemed! The sacrifice was unappreciated, save only by a few – whose inheritors are numbered today only among the obscure, the imbecile and the defenceless.”

  “Let us think of ourselves,” said Hyacinthe.

  “Yes, let us be egotists, and perhaps we will be saved. Salvation is personal. Let’s put ourselves first, and unburden of all useless brotherly love the flight of that chimera which carries us away to the stars.”

  “Shouldn’t we love others?”

  “We shouldn’t love those who choose to do evil; they, by definition, are beyond the bounds of love. But it isn’t necessary to hate them, nor to despise them.”

  “I would like,” said Hyacinthe, “to love them just the same – a little.”

  “No, it’s a contradiction in terms: it would be to love the evil that they symbolise.”

  “But I love brute beasts.”

  “Brute beasts are innocent.”

  “Oh, we’re becoming such Pharisees!”

  That remark stopped me in my tracks. Hyacinthe had reason on her side – to a certain degree. Being practical, like all women, she did not want to close the argument without any hope of a solution; it was necessary to her to retain the possibility of the Brotherhood of Man. I conceded her that desire, lest we should become nothing to one another but sachets of poison.

  All the same, I replied: “In all religion, even in that which we practise – and words may render people more disreputable in their own eyes, more permanently, than acts – there is an esotericism: a mystery which, once penetrated, renders all intermediate charity dispensible. Having no relations other than with the Infinite, one abstracts oneself from Creation, and regards one’s brothers, bad or good, without any sort of love, effective or theoretical. That is the state of indifference; the night of the will; one of the stages of that dark night of the soul which understands both sensual and intellectual annihilation – the prologue to life in God; the penultimate state before the beatific vision.”

  “And what,” said Hyacinthe, “is the mystery to be penetrated?”

  “Scarcely a mystery, Hyacinthe, although it is as entitled as anything else to a name more prostituted than the conscience of a bishop. It is simply the end-product of reductionist science, more readily acquired by an act of faith than by a logical deduction – although its acquisition is the ultimate goal of logic itself. But what you said is true; it would be Pharisaic to believe that we have achieved that final understanding!”

  “Why so, Damase?”

  “Are we not different sexes?”

  “Yes, yes!” she cried to me. “Yes. I can grasp that: yours and mine. That is all I understand – almost! – and that still saddens me.”

  “I know that, adorable little liar. You have told me before. It saddens you – afterwards! You pretend to listen to me and all the while you think of love-making. You’re like all the others – nothing but a sheath!”

  “Couldn’t I be that and the other thing at one and the same time? I’m a sheath for your ideas, too – even though they’re as rough, sometimes, as a bad dream.”

  “You’re not what you seem to be!”

  “Isn’t that what you want, Damase? What do you require of me, except to be an illusion?”

  When we left the room and the house behind we were received with the deference due to aristocrats by the ancient avenue of respectful and solemn beeches. Suitably grateful to these noble trees we would walk with processional slowness, in harmony with the bending of the large branches which the wind inclined towards our heads, one by one. The great organ made its music: we would listen, our practised ears able to distinguish the sounds of the high and low leaves, the various voices of the surrounding beeches, poplars, pines and oaks. The avenue provided the dominant notes and, to the precipitous accompaniment of the poplars and the lamenting complaint of the pines, the beeches echoed the grave sonority of a male voice.

  All these sounds were pacified by the fall of night; they seemed to descend to earth, re-entering the grass which rustled now beneath our feet.

  “In the end,” said Hyacinthe, “where do we want to arrive?”

  “It seems to me,” I replied, “that a strict and positive belief – in ourselves, for example – in our absolute and mystical utility, liberates our logic from a wealth of inconsequences. I fear that we are a little inclined to play. Have you ever stopped, at some time, in a garden in Paris, to watch little creatures, with their hair down and bare-legged, playing with rackets? And have you appreciated the profound seriousness with which, beneath the pleasant appearances, these yapping, sensual animalcules are making shuttlecocks of their souls?”

  At the end of the avenue two or three points of light appeared, looming like lanterns above the immobile sea of things. Silently we came to a stop, testing the uncertainties of the unforeseen. Then we imagined the untroubled, predictable lives which were being lived behind the windows of the houses; the comforts of shelter and repose enjoyed by those who were delivered from care of thought, content with a gentle vegetable existence, of slow gestures and few words. Oh, how green the grass is on the other side of the hill!

  The church was still open. No one was praying there and the interior gloom slumbered beneath the eternal lamp.

  Our knees bumped into the organ which accompanied the choir. I lifted the heavy oak cover from the keys; and Hyacinthe’s fingers sang the sad glory of life in the essential and undeniable obscurity. Without rancour against the extinct lights, against the blackness of the sky, they pleaded
very humbly that our souls might be granted a glimmer oh, no more! – a mere syllable of pale flame. As her fingers moved in the half-light, the jewels set in her rings sparkled a little, as confused as true thoughts: there was nothing there but verity, intermittent and vague, but certain!

  And so I lifted myself to the summits of metaphysical desire, all the while caressing Hyacinthe’s curls, and following the contours of her ears with an inattentive hand. There was a truth of which one could not harbour the least doubt, of whose authenticity one could be frankly certain! Her tresses were as soft as confessions; they surrendered to my fingers and entwined about them so naively, with such an honest desire to please me. Her ear was so disquieting in its sinuosity, but at the same time so docile to my playful manipulation; and Hyacinthe was so completely tremulous and so perfectly in harmony with the gallop of my pulse … that the organ suddenly fell silent.

  Mindful of the respect due to the spirit of the place, we united ourselves with as much modesty as is compatible with the motions of physical love.

  IMAGES

  Consider pious images, representations of saints whose wan and emaciated faces are haloed in gold: the beloved released by forgetfulness from all earthly disquiet; those who made their bodies to bleed, who took madness to their hearts. …

  “Do you believe,” Hyacinthe asked me, “that they experienced a purer pleasure than the one we sinners obtain in our sin? Our sin wasn’t very pure, was it?”

  “Hyacinthe, you are talking nonsense.”

  “Not at all, Damase, I am becoming real. I am giving substance to my phantom, re-embedding it in the cement of remembered sensation. At one time there was, afterwards, a persistence of sensuality: the permanence of a caress which, going against the grain, had attained my soul and had sensitised it, perhaps forever!”

  “Dear spoiled child, it must have been the sin itself!”

  “Oh, that is your view. I have no mind of my own, since I made you the gift of my free will, and you accepted it.”

  “And if I lead you away into the outer darkness?”

  “I would follow you, my love, certain of my well-being wherever I were, if I were with you.”

  That deserved a kiss, which I gave to her; afterwards I said: “It was not a deadly sin.”

  “Oh, really?”

  She mocked me with her incredulity. It was necessary to consult authorities, to prove to her by means of texts the veniality of our abandon. She was irritable in the meantime, but her conceit was mere pretence. I never construed it as authentic perversity, merely as an appropriate determination to move me and spark a contradictory argument.

  “A deadly sin,” I told her, “is always mediocre. It is, in itself, an incomplete act, limited by its own nature, which only elaborates a worthless pretence. Although contrary to divine thought, it is held half-way to contradiction, since the absolute in evil is impossible, and inconceivable.”

  “For myself,” said Hyacinthe, “I don’t seek the absolute – only, even if they be incomplete, the sensations which might bring me to life. I would be content if they were in vain, if their vanity were gentle to me. You remember how disappointed I was by my initiation, and that afterwards such experiences saddened me, and yet the light of yesterday still lingers in the heart of this mediocre sinner, dear Damase. Why is that?”

  “Because irony is one of the elements of pleasure, and because it has become manifest in you irrespective of your swooning beneath the watchtower of the Tabernacle. But there are divine indulgences for these distractions; it is nothing but a failure of etiquette. As for the rest, it’s in your imagination.”

  “And what difference is there, in your view, between the imaginary and the real?”

  “Subjectively, none at all, Hyacinthe – as you know very well. All the same, these two kinds of actions, initially differentiated verbally, do not mark the soul with the same kind of scar: thought is denied by thought, action by action. You must not forget that a sin is committed in three distinct modes: in thought, in word, in action. …”

  “And you really believe that I think?”

  “Perhaps without knowing it! Having closely studied women, Schopenhauer was able to establish his theory of the Unconscious: he had come to the conclusion that intelligence can coincide with automatism. His World-Spirit is a woman raised to the Infinite – a most dangerous kind of God under whose government one must expect all kinds of cataclysms; a God unknowable for humanity and unknowable to itself. As for you, little ironic God, I wish I could steep myself in your spirituality – but I cannot. You flee beneath the cutting edge of my intelligence like mad sea-grass beneath the blade of a scythe. …”

  Hyacinthe seemed inattentive to these images …

  Scholastica, carrying upon her fist that mystical sparrow-hawk the Holy Spirit, symbolised as a tamed bird, wings spread like a double shield over the breasts of a saint elect.

  At the pulpit, gloved hands seize the monstrance and clear eyes weep supernatural tears.

  Ida the white, crowned with thorns; and Colette, lamb butchered by love.

  On the cross where Catherine was crucified, lilies have deigned to flourish.

  Christine, great wings thrust out at her shoulders from her lacerated garments, and the stigmatic wounds in her bare feet bloodying the flagstones of the abbey.

  “Well then, understand me,” Hyacinthe declared, writhing sinuously upon my knees in such a fashion that she was soon divested of her garments.

  The green cushions of the divan became our mediator.

  Afterwards, she held me on top of her for a moment, saying to me: “This is how I can be known, and in no other way!”

  TEARS

  While indulging imaginary sensations and equivalent visions, the impulse came upon me to torment Hyacinthe, very cruelly. I had made her a promise, but an innate goodness of soul and the quest for novelty in our amorous occupations blinded me and pressed me to the naive indulgence of inquisitorial duty.

  To administer to souls the one and only drug which can purge them – pain – is assuredly the paramount charity; but how difficult it is to exercise towards the creatures one loves! Innocent victims do not appreciate the value of unmerited martyrdom, and what courage it requires to hear upon the lips one adores the accusation: executioner!

  Would Hyacinthe receive my hands as lovers, when they set alight the faggots at the stake; or would she bite them, with teeth poisoned by revulsion?

  But it was necessary, and I had another motive too. Tears always bring forth a little revelation of the inner essence – of the perfume enclosed in the secret flask.

  “Hyacinthe,” I said, shaking my arms villainously, one evening when we had ventured forth yet again to walk in the streets where dry leaves were already weeping, “you are very dull!”

  “Oh! What are you talking about?”

  That was her usual response, when she was indignant or surprised.

  “Stupid, my dear, or perhaps weighted down. Are you tired?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of following me around, like a shadow!”

  She perceived the mischief in my mood, and became sad.

  “Like a shadow! But isn’t that my duty and my pleasure? When you brought me to life – I know not how – it was in order to follow you, or so it seems to me: to replicate your ideas and arguments according to the best of my ability, in order that I might eventually materialise in my very substance your counterpart of the opposite sex. Isn’t that my role – yes, or no? Why, then, do you reproach me, and why do you make me weep. Am I not the mirror image of your thought?”

  “You are as dull, sometimes, as ennui itself – and you have become all too substantial.”

  “I am that which you wanted me to be,” replied Hyacinthe, “and I belong to you to such an extent that when you censure me, it is yourself that you offend.”

  “She has never realised, the adorable Hyacinthe,” I said, my words heavy with atrocious ironic implications, “that that which has begun has also to
end.”

  “I no longer know when it was that I began to love you – which is to say, to live,” said Hyacinthe, trembling, “but I do not want it to finish.”

  ”Imbecila pluma est velle sine subsidio Dei*. Will only exists to conform to the highest logic. If you belong to me, you cannot want. Can a phantom rebel?”

  She became bitter.

  “I still have a soul of my own.”

  “One also speaks of the soul of a violin, or the soul of a bellows – but I concede it to you, Hyacinthe: the immortal soul of a woman, immortally futile and immortally denying. It is that which cramps me, whose emanations rise up like smoke around me, obscuring my vision of infinity. If only you could become as lively as lamplight, O charcoal without flame! But you remain black beneath my breath, and you infest with charnel odours the laboratory of my pure desires.”

  “Annihilate me, Damase, pulverise the uninflammable charcoal – but be quiet while you do it, so that while I die I will still be able to adore your mute lips!”

  “Why do I love you, and say it aloud, since you damn me, and I know it?”

  “At least, Damase, don’t separate me from your damnation. Let’s go together – to Hell itself!”

  “You’ve said all that before. Oh, the stupidity of excessive love! ‘My God, I accept damnation, provided only that I may love you!’ – isn’t that it? But this is mere childishness, more irrational than the broken trajectory of a madman’s idea. Damned, you would hate me. Hell is nothing but hatred, and no gleam of phosphorescent joy can ever irradiate pupils consecrated to eternal gloom, even if it originates in the dead eyes of one of the damned who suffers side by side with one for whom she formerly opened the inestimable fountain of her sacrificed heart.”

  “You’re scaring me. You’re scaring me!”

  Hyacinthe threw herself, dying, into the arms of her torturer. Against all reason, she clung to him in her fright. She kissed the hand which caused her pain; raised up those talons which would rend her breasts; threw herself upon the rack which would break her vertebrae.