French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics)

by Unknown

  Witty, noble, and while remaining impeccably Faubourg Saint-Germain in tone, so daring were the women that evening they were like the king’s pages, when there was a king with pages; they were brilliantly animated, full of incomparable repartee and brio. They felt more invincible than they had ever felt, even at their most triumphant. They experienced an unfamiliar power which came from the very core of their beings, and whose existence, until that moment, they had never suspected.

  The happiness occasioned by this discovery was a feeling that tripled their sense of being alive; added to this, there was the physical ambience, which always has a decisive impact on the nervous system, the brilliance of the lights, the heady perfume of all the flowers that swooned in the close atmosphere heated by these beautiful creatures, the stirring effect of the wines, the very idea of the supper which had about it a sulphurous piquancy, of the kind the Neapolitan required of his sorbet to make it perfect; add to this the intoxicating thought of being accomplices in this risqué little supper—a supper that never descended into the vulgarity of the Regency period;* indeed, it remained throughout very much a nineteenth-century, Faubourg Saint-Germain supper, and nothing came loose or undone in those adorable décolletées, pressed against hearts that had felt the fire and desired to stoke it even more. In a word, all these things acted together, and strung to the utmost degree the mysterious harp contained within each of these wondrous organisms, as tight as it was possible to string without its breaking, so it produced ineffable octaves and harmonies… It must have been extraordinary, don’t you agree? One of the most vibrant pages of Ravila’s memoirs, if he ever gets round to writing them?… I ask the question, but he alone can write it… As I explained to the Marquise Guy de Ruy, I was not present at the supper, and if I give these details, and recount the story he told at the end, I am only repeating what de Ravila told me himself; for true to the tradition of the Juan clan, he is indiscreet, and he went to the trouble one evening of telling me everything.

  III

  BY now it was late—or rather, early! It was dawn. Against the ceiling, and concentrated at a certain spot on the pink silk curtains of the boudoir, which were drawn tight closed, an opal-tinted droplet started to grow, like a widening eye, curious to see what was going on in this fiery boudoir. A certain languor had begun to invade these valiant dame Knights of the Round Table, these carousers, who had been so lively only a moment before. It was that moment, familiar at any dinner-party, when the fatigue which comes with the emotion of the evening just passed begins to show, in the chignons coming slightly loose, in the burning cheeks, flushed or grown paler, in the wearied looks from dark-rimmed eyes, and even in the thousand flaring and guttering lights in the candelabra, which are like bouquets of flame whose stalks are sculpted in bronze and gold.

  The conversation, which had been carried on in a general and lively fashion, a game of shuttlecock in which everyone had batted back and forth, had become fragmented, and nothing distinct could now be heard above the harmonious hubbub made by all these voices, with their aristocratic accents, warbling together like the dawn chorus at the edge of a wood… when one of these voices—a clarion voice—imperious and almost impertinent, just as the voice of a duchess should be—made itself heard above the others, and addressed the following words to the Comte de Ravila, which must have been the logical conclusion to a quiet conversation she had been having with him, and which none of the other chattering ladies had heard:

  ‘Since you are reputed to be the Don Juan of our time, you ought to tell us the story of your greatest conquest, the one that most flattered your pride as a lover of women, and which you consider, in the light of this present moment, to be the crowning love of your life…’

  This challenge, as much as the voice that delivered it, cut through all the other conversations, and a sudden silence fell.

  The voice belonged to the Duchesse de ***—I shall leave her disguised behind the asterisks; but some of you may recognize her, when I say that she has the palest of pale hair and complexions, and the blackest eyes beneath her golden brows, in all of the Faubourg Saint Germain.—She was seated, like one of the just at the right hand of God, directly to the right of the Comte de Ravila, god of this feast, who had left off using his enemies as a footstool; slim and ethereal as an arabesque, she was fairylike in her green velvet dress with its silvery reflections, whose long train wound around her chair, not unlike the serpent’s tail that prolonged the charming posterior of Melusina the sea-nymph.*

  ‘Now there’s an idea!’ said the Comtesse de Chiffrevas, eager in her role as hostess to second the motion the Duchesse had put forward. ‘Yes, the love you place above all the others, whether inspired, or felt—the one, were it possible, you should most like to live through again.’

  ‘Oh! I should like to live through them all again!’ answered Ravila with the unflagging appetite of a Roman emperor, or other replete monsters of the type. And he raised his champagne glass, which was not the crude and pagan cup they have replaced it with, but the tall, thin vessel used by our ancestors, known as the flûte, perhaps because of the heavenly melodies it pours into our hearts!—Then, looking round the table, he embraced with his eyes every woman in that magnetic chain. ‘And yet,’ he went on, setting down his glass before him with a melancholy astonishing for a Nebuchadnezzar like him, who had not yet eaten grass except in the tarragon salads of the Café Anglais*—‘and yet it is true, there is one feeling one has experienced in all one’s life, which shines more strongly in the memory than others, as life advances, and for which one would give up the rest!’

  ‘The diamond in the set,’ said the Comtesse de Chiffrevas, dreamily, possibly contemplating the facets of her own.

  ‘… And as legend has it in my country’, chimed in the Princesse Jable… ‘which lies at the foot of the Ural Mountains, there is the famous and fabulous diamond that starts off pink, and then turns black, while remaining a diamond, and still more brilliant black than pink…’ She said that with all the strange charm that she has, this Bohemian! For she is a true Bohemian, married for love to the finest prince among the Polish exiles, and as much a princess in her bearing as any born in the palace of the Jagellons.*

  This was followed by a veritable explosion… ‘Yes!’ they all exclaimed. ‘Do tell us about it, Comte!’ they added with warmth, begging him now, all trembling with curiosity down to the curls at the nape of their necks, and bunching up together shoulder to shoulder, some with cheek in hand, an elbow propped on the table, others leaning back in their chairs, fans in front of their mouths; they challenged him with wide, inquisitive eyes.

  ‘If you absolutely insist…’ said the Comte, with the nonchalance of a man who knows how much delay exacerbates desire.

  ‘We do, absolutely!’ said the Duchesse, fixing—much as a Turkish despot might the blade of his sword—the golden prongs of her dessert fork.

  ‘Then listen,’ he concluded, still casually.

  They became as one, staring at him with rapt attention. They drank him and devoured him with their eyes. Women always like a love story—but who knows? Perhaps the particular charm here was that the story he was to tell would be their very own… They knew he was too well bred and too well versed in social etiquette to name names, and that he would omit certain details that were too compromising; and knowing this made them even more impatient to hear the story. They more than desired to hear it, they placed their hopes in it.

  In their vanity, they found themselves rivalling each other, to be the most beautiful memory in the life of a man who must have had so many of them. The old Sultan was once more to throw down the handkerchief… that no one would pick up—but the one for whom he threw it down would assuredly receive it silently into her heart…

  And now, in the light of their expectations, this is the little thunderbolt he unleashed on their attentive heads:

  IV

  ‘I HAVE often heard it said by the moralists, who are fine connoisseurs of life,’ began the Comte de
Ravila, ‘that our greatest love is not the first, nor the last, as many think, but the second. But in matters of love, everything is true, and everything is false, and in any case, it was not so with me… What you have asked of me tonight, ladies, and what I am about to relate dates back to the proudest moment of my youth. I was no longer exactly what they call a ‘young man’, but I was young, and as an old uncle of mine—a Knight of Malta—used to say of this stage in life, ‘I had sown my wild oats’.* In my prime, then, I was in full relations, as the Italians put it so charmingly, with a woman who is known to you all and whom you have all admired…’

  And here, the look which all these women—who were drinking up the words of the old serpent—then exchanged with each other had to be seen to be believed—it was truly indescribable.

  ‘She was a fine woman,’ went on Ravila, ‘and utterly distinguished, in every sense of the word. She was young, rich, of noble extraction; she was beautiful and spirited, with a broad-minded, artistic intelligence; and she was unaffected—in a way your milieu can produce, when it does… In any case, all she desired then was to please me, to play the role of the tenderest of mistresses, and the dearest of friends.

  ‘I was not, I think, the first man she had loved… She had been in love before, but not with her husband; this was of the virtuous, platonic, utopian type—the kind of love that exercises the heart rather than fills it; the kind that strengthens the heart for the love that almost always follows soon after—the trial run, so to speak, like the white mass, said by young priests practising for when they come to celebrate the true, consecrated mass… When I came into her life she was still at the white mass. I was her first true mass, and she celebrated it sumptuously and with full ceremony, like a cardinal.’

  At this remark, the prettiest of pretty smiles went round that table of beautiful expectant mouths, like a concentric ring on the limpid surface of a lake… It was swift, but ravishing!

  ‘She was a rare pearl!’ the Comte went on. ‘Rarely have I seen such genuine goodness, such tender-heartedness, such good instinctive feeling, intact even in passion, which as you know, is not always good… I have never encountered less calculation, less prudery and coquettishness—two things often to be found mingled in women, like some material marked with a cat’s claw… there was nothing of the cat in her… Hers was what those blasted scribblers who poison our lives by their style call a simple nature, ornamented by civilization; but she was in possession of all the luxuries, and not one of the little vices that come to seem even more charming than the luxuries…’

  ‘Was she brunette?’ the Duchesse broke in point-blank, who was growing bored with all this metaphysics.

  ‘Ah! you don’t look deep enough!’ said Ravila cleverly. ‘Yes, she was brunette, brunette to the point of being black as jet, the most luxuriant mirror of ebony I have ever seen shining on the voluptuous curve of a woman’s head, but she was fair-complexioned—and it is by the complexion, and not the hair, that you have to judge if a woman is blonde or brunette’—added the great observer, who had not studied women just to paint their portraits.—‘She was a blonde with black hair…’

  All the lovely heads around the table who were blonde of hair only, stirred imperceptibly. For them, clearly, the story had already lost something of its interest.

  ‘She had the sable locks of Night,’ went on Ravila, ‘but they framed the face of Dawn itself, a face that shone with a rare and radiant freshness that had lost nothing of its bloom despite exposure to years of Parisian night-life, which burns up so many roses in its candelabra. Hers seemed merely to have been kissed, the pink in her cheeks and lips remaining bright to the point of luminosity. The twofold flush also went well with the ruby frontlet she usually wore—this was the time women did their hair en ferronnière,* after Leonardo. With her flashing eyes, whose colour was obscured by the flame that issued from them, they made a triangle whose tips were rubies! Slim, but strong, majestic even, she was built to be the wife of a colonel of dragoons—her husband was at that time merely a squadron-leader in the light cavalry—and she enjoyed, despite her pedigree, the rude health of a peasant-girl who drinks in the sun through her skin. She had the ardour that goes with it, too—she imbibed the sun into her soul as well as her veins, she was always present, and always ready… But here’s the strange thing! This powerful and unaffected creature, whose pure, passionate nature was like the blood that fed her beautiful cheeks and gave a pink flush to her arms, was… would you credit it? awkward in a man’s arms…’

  At this some of his listeners lowered their eyes, but raised them again, mischievously…

  ‘As awkward in love as she was rash in life,’ went on Ravila, who did not linger on the tidbit he had just dropped. ‘And the man who loved her had repeatedly to instruct her in two things she seemed not to have learned… never to lose control in a world always hostile and always implacable, and in private, to learn the greatest art of love, which is that of keeping it alive. She loved, certainly; but the art of love was lacking in her… In this she was unlike the majority of women, who possess merely the art! Now, to understand and apply the strategies of The Prince, you must first be a Borgia. Borgia comes before Machiavelli.* One is the poet, the other is the critic. She possessed nothing of the Borgia. She was a good woman, very much in love; and despite her monumental beauty, she remained naive, like the little girl in one of those motifs above a door who, being thirsty, thrusts her hand impulsively into the fountain and stands there abashed, when all the water pours through her fingers…

  ‘The co-existence of this awkwardness and shame with the grand woman of passion was actually rather endearing. Few who observed her in society had any inkling of it—they would have seen someone who had love, and even happiness, but they would not suspect that she lacked the art to return it in kind. Only I was not then sufficiently detached to be able to content myself with observing the artistic effect, and sometimes this made her anxious, jealous, violent—as one is when in love, and she was that!—But her anxiety, jealousy, and violence simply died away in the inexhaustible goodness of her heart, the instant she had, or thought that she had, hurt one—she was as inept at causing pain as she was at giving pleasure. Strange lioness, indeed! She thought she possessed claws, but when she tried to bare them, nothing emerged from her magnificent velvet paws. Her scratches were of velvet!’

  ‘Where is all this leading?’ said the Comtesse de Chiffrevas to her neighbour—for this couldn’t, surely, be the crowning love of Don Juan…

  None of those sophisticates could conceive of such simplicity!

  ‘And so we enjoyed an intimacy that was sometimes stormy, but never tortured, and in the provincial town known as Paris, it was a mystery to no one… The Marquise… she was a Marquise…’

  There were three of them sitting at that table, and they were all brunettes. But they didn’t blink. They knew full well he wasn’t talking of them… The only velvet they shared between them was the down that one of them had on her upper lip—a beautifully modelled lip which at that moment, I could swear, was curled in some disdain.

  ‘… And a Marquise three times over, just as pashas can have three tails!’* went on Ravila, who was getting into his stride. ‘The Marquise was one of those women who cannot hide anything, however they might wish to. Even her daughter, a girl of thirteen, innocent as she was, recognized only too well the feelings her mother had for me. I wonder, has any poet fathomed what these daughters feel about us, their mothers’ lovers? The question goes deep! It is one I pondered frequently, when I caught the little girl looking at me out of her huge, dark eyes, a black, spying look, fraught with menace. She was shy, like a wild animal, and usually left the drawing room the moment I entered it, or sat as far away from me as possible, if she was forced to stay… she had an almost compulsive horror of my person, that she would try and hide, but it ran so strong in her she could not help herself… It came out in tiny details, but I noticed them all. Even the Marquise, who was usually quite unobser
vant, kept saying: “Take care, my friend. I think my daughter is jealous of you…”

  ‘And I did take care, much more so than she.

  ‘But had the little girl been the devil in person, I would still have defied her to see through my game… the thing was, her mother’s game was perfectly transparent. That flushed face, so often troubled, mirrored her every feeling. Judging by her daughter’s hatred of me, I could not help thinking she must have sensed her mother’s emotion by catching some look of uncommon tenderness in her expression towards me. The girl was, I might add, a skinny little waif, quite unworthy of the resplendent mould she issued from—even her mother agreed she was ugly, for which she loved her all the more; she was a small, scorched topaz… or a little bronze mannikin, but with those black eyes… sheer sorcery! And after that, she…’

  At this hiatus he stopped short… as if seeking to erase his last remark, as though he had said too much… His listeners, however, woke up again; anticipation could be read on all their eager faces, and the Comtesse even hissed between her teeth, expressing their collective relief: ‘At last!’

  V

  ‘IN the early days of my relationship with her mother,’ the Comte de Ravila resumed, ‘I lavished the kind of fond attention on the girl that we reserve for any child… I would bring her bags of sweets, I called her my “little mask”,* and frequently when I was talking to her mother I would stroke the plait of hair at her temple, a plait of black, lank hair, with reddish gleams. But “little mask”, who had a wide smile for everybody, recoiled from me, frowningly extinguished her smile, and became truly a “little mask” from screwing up her face, the wrinkled mask of some humiliated caryatid that seemed indeed to bear the contact of my stroking hand as if she were suffering the weight of a stone cornice.