The professor now mused that such a work would particularly impress a barbarian eye unacquainted with any of the artifices of painting; at the sight of it, some Sudanese girl who had emerged victorious after a thousand agonies from the frightful annual ordeal would experience, by reaction, a sudden terror capable of inducing a phenomenon of violent horripilation at the right moment.
Considering any reproduction inadequate, Canterel enquired after the original, which was on sale at the gallery of a big dealer, who came to an arrangement with him, assuring him of its temporary possession for an indefinite period to come.
Through an explicit correspondence with the French consul at Bornu he learnt of the existence of the dancing girl Sileis, who had brought off the terrifying feat five years running, with ever-increasing fear. On the sixth occasion, she had fallen into such convulsions right at the start that she had had to be excused for ever from the comminatory dance. Since then, Sileis had been exceedingly impressionable and used to make a detour to avoid the place set aside for the dance of the fruit — for she was unable to endure even the sight of it, as being too haunted for her by tormenting memories.
Furnished by Canterel with urgent instructions as well as unlimited funds, the consul refrained from divulging any anticipatory information which might have been prejudicial to the future intensity of the expected mental shock, and persuaded Sileis, tempting her with a large gratuity, to leave for Locus Solus under the kind aegis of a cotton trader who was just about to leave Bornu for Paris.
After Sileis’s arrival, the professor, with an eye to making a fascinating report of it with numerous signatures, resolved to do his best to make the experiment noteworthy, for it was based on an unrepeatable effect of surprise and illusion, and would necessarily be unique. It was important that the gunpowder, in order to act in a striking manner, should blow up some lump of rock after having been taken from the underlying parts of the black skin before witnesses, without any intermediate preparation capable of endowing it with the power of explosion.
Counting on our testimony and signatures, Canterel had chosen the vicinity of a river with rocky banks, and made everything ready for the end of a performance given us by Felicité; she had been instructed to select, at the appropriate moment, from among various tarot cards, the one whose emerald seemed most suitable, judging by the liveliness of their spontaneous music. A naked musical rectangle would have been inconvenient for collecting the globules. The task of briskly unveiling Vollon’s canvas, when commanded to do so, fell to Luc.
∗ ∗ ∗
Canterel had speeded up his delivery a moment before, seeing that the fuse was burning to its end. The flame had already reached the inside of the blast hole, when he fell silent.
After an anxious wait the hoped-for explosion was produced, loud and echoing; it dislodged the rock, whose splinters were hurled in all directions, proclaiming the experiment quite conclusively successful.
Using a writing case provided by Felicité, the professor rapidly drafted an accurate account of the event on a large sheet of paper, stressing the incontrovertible identity of the globules which had been transferred, right before our eyes, from the depths of the gaping skin to the rock hollow, without substitution or chemical preparation. We all signed it at his request.
Sileis’s arm, to which Canterel drew our attention, was reacting to the placet and beginning to secrete the pseudo-remedy for cutaneous disorders.
* * *
* Lazare Hoche (1768–97) was a famous general in the French Revolutionary army.—Tr.
† A composing machine.
7
The professor now turned his back on the stream and led us to the edge of a magnificent thick wood, beneath the shade of which we followed him.
Soon we came to a vast and romantic glade where a sunburned youth was sauntering, poorly clad in a rather eye-catching way, like those who want to draw attention to themselves and collect a crowd, in order to provide entertainment in the street. Canterel introduced him to us as a fortune-teller named Noël, who had been frequenting the district of late. Having got wind of Felicité’s presence at Locus Solus, Noël had presented himself the previous evening, in a spirit of emulation, to give the professor a very curious display. The latter, gladly seizing this excellent opportunity of letting us compare the gifts of these two strolling fortune-tellers so diverse in age and sex, had begged him to exercise his art before us today in this enchanting glade.
Noël, with a haversack on his shoulders like a soldier, was surveying a lively cock, which he addressed in a gentle voice as “Mopsus.” This cock walked by his side carrying its personal effects in a tiny pannier attached by two thongs which encircled its neck and its tail feathers respectively. The sides of this object, whose slightly curved frame matched the shape of the bird’s body, were delicately constructed of a very elastic netting distended by the mass of objects it contained, which glinted here and there with metallic reflections of the moon.
Noël stood the cock on a light folding table which he had just set up on the ground at our approach; then, removing its pannier, he offered to cast our horoscopes.
Faustine stepped forward and answered the youth’s questions about the year of her birth, specifying the exact day and hour.
Noël removed the contents of the pannier and arranged them on the table, at the same time assuring us that, in all his manipulations, he would rely entirely upon this particular reserve. He then found in the pile a small book of ephemerides, which he consulted, establishing that the constellation of Hercules had been in the ascendant along with Saturn when the girl had first drawn breath.
Next he offered a long, smooth, pointed steel rod to Mopsus, who took it in his beak. On reaching the center of the table, the cock lay on his back, not without some ruffling of its plumage, then seized the thick end of the rod in his right claw and pointed its tip vertically toward the sky. Glancing upward continually, Noël gave the diminutive lance a slight inclination to aim it straight at Saturn, a dazzling star standing almost at the zenith. Thereupon the bird, placed by the steel in magnetic communication with the planet, became clairvoyant in order to read Faustine’s destiny.
Lying quite still, Mopsus bent his left claw and brought the steel rod to rest, bathed in moonbeams, upon the center of his body, where he held it unwaveringly in a fixed position. With evident conviction, he spent a long time impregnating himself with the initiatory effluvia emanating from the star at which he aimed.
At last the cock arose and, having nipped the rod once more in his beak, laid it among the reserve of objects. From this supply he took a rosary which he spread before Faustine, clearly meaning that she should recite an ave. When Noël told her that this was Mopsus’s way of urging her to avert some forthcoming misfortune by means of a pious invocation, Faustine, being superstitious and visibly upset by the bird’s behavior, took the beads in her fingers and murmured the prescribed prayer.
Among the chattels in the pannier was a long glass box containing a supply of straws, made spongy, we were told, by some skillful preparation; beside it glittered a small crystal sphere almost full of a bright red liquid, which was provided with a thin straight tube of the same material by way of a neck. Noël opened the box and took a straw, which he gently inserted into the end of the tube, leaving no clearance, in place of the slender cork he had just removed.
Mopsus inclined his head to grasp the tube in his mandibles and offered it to Faustine, who, at the young man’s bidding, took it in her open hand. Through the action of the heat the liquid boiled and mounted up the tube — then into the straw which, at its contact, gradually became impregnated with red up to two thirds of its height. When it had stopped rising, the cock took the object back and returned it to Noël, who, after waiting a moment for the rapidly cooling liquid to descend, removed the straw and replaced the cork.
The youth then invited Faustine to think, in the form
of a question, of some auspicious or ill-fated event connected with her past, present or future life, which, even if it had already happened, suggested to her some agonizing uncertainty. But, confessing herself still rather in the dark, she desired further explanation in the form of examples — which she received. As an example of a happy event in the past she might choose: “Was my love in a certain quarter sincerely returned, as I believe?” — and as a happening that boded ill: “Did a certain heart attached to mine harbour silent reproaches toward me on a certain occasion, as I fear?” The present allowed analogous enquiries and the future presented an unlimited field of interrogation.
After a moment’s reflection, Faustine said that she had formulated the question in her mind.
Between two fingers the boy took an old ivory die, which he tossed almost at once into the air; it rose, spinning, then fell back onto the middle of the table. The face that was uppermost bore in bright red the figure 1, together with the short phrase “Was it?” traced in delicate letters apparently formed by veins in the ivory.
Noël told Faustine that, according to the revelation of the die, her question had related to a beneficial circumstance in the past. The young woman bent her head in assent, then, with anxiety and disappointment, vainly demanded the answer from the youth — an answer he had never promised to give her. Since the intimate nature of the question arising in the subject’s mind was of deep significance, as we were to discover shortly, the only object of the die (which Noël claimed was essentially magical) was to penetrate the thought in question surely and infallibly — without leaving the field open, as direct information would have done, to some teasing fib deliberately intended to baffle the operator’s calculations.
As he spoke, Noël placed the die before our eyes. The six faces, which seemed as though veined by the letters, were numbered in one corner from 1 to 6 and showed the three phrases “Was it?,” “Is it?” and “Will it be?” separately, once in red and once in black, with the formulas that corresponded to one another on opposite sides. Whether the incident chosen was fortunate or otherwise was revealed to the young man by the presence of a red or black inscription on the winning face — the chronological aspect of the information being dependent on the tense of the verb. In each case the number was the same color as the phrase.
Noël opened a tall, thin volume in a luxurious, though old and worn, blue binding; it was a kind of kabbalistic code whose secret he explained to us. The entire book was divided up into groups of six pages (each of them referring to a certain constellation) which afforded only short, independent paragraphs, their few lines enclosing a human fate in the form of a more or less obscure parable. Each of these equal chapters had its own individual pagination.
The youth skimmed rapidly through the book, which was made of magnificent vellum now as worn and dirty as the binding. On every third leaf, to the right, the name of a constellation was inscribed slantwise in the top exterior corner, its huge capitals contrasting with the text itself, which was prodigiously fine. Reading through these titles, Noël stopped at HERCULES — whose stars, according to his previous investigations, had presided with Saturn over Faustine’s birth — and declared that of the six pages in this particular chapter, only the first could contain the sentence sought — according to the die, which, by its indication due to the side marked 1 winning, fulfilled its function by providing an extremely accurate method of enquiry. Serious examination of the book would actually have shown that six different mental types respectively governed the corresponding pages of each chapter; all the page ones were therefore related to one another by a striking correspondence of ideas; similarly, the page twos formed a sort of homogenous family throughout the work, and it was the same with all the sets up to the page sixes. By preferring to direct his secret enquiry toward the past, the present or the future, the person threw valuable light on his inmost character, which was rounded out by his choice of a favorable or unfavorable event. Optimism, timidity, hypochondria, suspicion, temerity, scrupulousness or foresight were subtly apparent in the mental question which the unerring magic of the die divined. Deep study of these various feelings had provided the basis for the kabbalistic text’s composition, while the sixfold groups of pages had been rendered necessary by the method of investigation adopted. Once the chapter had been designated by the stars, the winning number on the ivory face determined that of the folio to be scrutinized.
Noël laid the straw, lately reddened up to two thirds of its height by the sensitive liquid in the crystal sphere, in a line bisecting page 1 of the chapter on Hercules. The ends of the thin straw, which was exactly the same height as the printed portion of the page, just touched the upper and lower margins without encroaching on them; the red part of it ended toward the middle of a paragraph, upon which the boy placed his finger. Therein lay Faustine’s destiny.
Here again the method of indication had a rational basis. The prophetic paragraph was designated by the tidal mark of the red liquid, the height of its ascent up the fresh straw dependent on the subject’s vitality and temperament. Now the composition of the paragraphs involved a steady crescendo in the degree of artistic, patriotic or amorous exaltation contained in the parables. That is why, in his investigatory operation, Noël placed the red part of the straw at the top. After each session the young man used to pour back into the sphere the number of drops of red liquid required to replace the amount taken up by the straw — without which the next enquiry would have been falsified.
With the aid of a magnifying glass, Noël read us the mysterious passage, to which Mopsus seemed to listen attentively:
“In the courtyard of her palace at Byzantium, the courtesan Chrysomallo had her retainers lift her onto Barsymes, her proud black horse, who pawed the ground impatiently in his regal trappings. Then she issued radiantly forth to gallop at will through plains and forests. Toward evening, as she was about to turn her horse’s head again toward her dwelling, she felt her spur, of its own accord, urgently pricking the flank of her mount at regular intervals. Barsymes launched himself into a gallop that she was quite powerless to halt. When night fell the way was lit by a greenish glow which followed the amazon wherever she went. In attempting to discover the source of these sparkling fires, Chrysomallo glimpsed her spur shining with a sea-green luster that illuminated the surroundings, while still it compelled her unwilling foot to plough ever deeper into the horse’s bleeding wound. The mad flight lengthened into years. The spur, ceaselessly striking, preserved by day its lambent brightness, which the night made dazzling. And in Byzantium, Chrysomallo was never seen again.”
The youth provided a clear interpretation of the story.
Like Chrysomallo setting out gaily on her ride, Faustine would joyfully embark on a liaison full of promise for the future. But her love which, even to her, would at first seem frivolous and superficial would soon become stubborn, tyrannical and shot through with the torments of jealousy. This love which, for all her attempts to curb it, was to pursue her, urging its victims for ever along unknown, disastrous paths, was symbolized by the spur, whose sea-green radiance lighting the night-time road prefigured the tragic and penetrating light which a grand passion sheds, in spite of everything, over the sombre pages of a person’s life.
Many a folly committed by Faustine in the past, in the course of her notorious affairs — for she was famed for the lightness of her morals — made this prediction seem singularly apposite.
Swayed by her fiery temperament, the young woman was much impressed, and ecstatically welcomed the idea of being wholly monopolized by the single mighty passion which, even at the cost of the multitude of torments foreshadowed by the spur, was to cast its brightness over her existence.
Noël could not help laughing at the sight of the cock insistently offering Faustine, with comical motions of its beak, a sage flower taken from a little branch originating from the pannier. The latter accepted the talisman which, according to the youth, was destined
to alleviate slightly the unhappy consequences of her future inclination. Pronouncing Faustine’s name clearly for the benefit of the cock, the boy stood a frail metal easel on the table, then placed a tall, thin leaf of ivory on it like a canvas. Mopsus positioned himself in front of it a short distance away and, developing a strange tic, made several sharp movements with his head, which twisted and inflamed his neck. After remaining motionless for a moment, he opened his beak wide, and, by coughing violently and deliberately, projected a minute quantity of blood forward from the back of his throat, which hit the left-hand corner of the ivory plaque, where a small red capital F appeared.
By coughing deliberately once again, but aiming lower, the cock wrote an A just beneath the F with a second jet of blood. The letters, emerging fully formed from his throat, were printed instantly. The same trick repeated six more times produced more capital letters below the first one, until at last the name FAUSTINE was inscribed vertically down the left-hand margin of the ivory leaf.
Noël then proceeded to satisfy the curiosity that had evidently been aroused in us.
Impressed by the intelligence of his clever cock, which he had spent a long time educating, it occurred to the boy that if only Mopsus had some means of expressing himself, deliberate and thoughtful sentences might have been obtained, instead of the purely mechanical utterances usual with parrots.
However, since the creature lacked the special anatomical peculiarity with which talking birds are provided, it had remained impervious to all instruction in the art of speech, and when Noël, as a last resort, had considered writing, his claw had proved incapable of wielding the pencil. So the youth had abandoned his project — when a chance event showed him a singular way to succeed.
One morning, during an interlude in his perpetual wanderings, Noël was eating his lunch in silence at a village inn, while Mopsus was wandering about nearby. Suddenly two small boys, the innkeeper’s sons, burst into the room laughing and chasing one another, passionately absorbed in their game. As the first ran by he knocked violently against the table, upsetting a cruet stand with two compartments that was standing on the very edge. While the salt cascaded to the floor, the pepper, being more tenuous, formed a light cloud beside it which drifted down, enveloping the head of Mopsus, who was at once shaken by a violent fit of coughing. When the worried youth left his seat to lavish attention on the cock, he found that it was throwing up small quantities of blood at every spasm, which tinged the floor with strange geometrical designs, each one different from the next.
Locus Solus Page 25
