Nora, The Ape-Woman

by Félicien Champsaur

  Then the orangutan purr of pleasure raged within her throat, she felt herself penetrated to the very depths of her being, and, drunk on voluptuousness, she gave herself again, frenziedly.

  She was obliged to remain there for a long time, as if overwhelmed by a sweet fatigue, sleeping off, so to speak, an orgy of lustful stupor.

  She came to her senses again when she heard the door open, and the chambermaid came in.

  At the sight of the devastated room, she took a step back; then she perceived her mistress, naked, looking at her with a wild expression.

  “Good God!” cried Berthe, alarmed. “Help! Someone has tried to murder Madame! Help! Murder!”

  “Shut up, Berthe! Since no harm has come to me, there’s no point rousing the whole house.”

  “But Madame...” With a gesture, the chambermaid indicated the chaos. Precipitate footsteps sounded, and Jules Ducon appeared on the threshold.

  “Nora! Nora! What’s wrong? What’s been done to you?”

  Nora passed her hands over her face. Did I dream that adventure, she thought, or am I mad?

  Jules Ducon had picked up one of the lacerated curtains. Already, he was wrapping the young dancer in it.

  “I don’t know,” she said, by way of apology and explanation. “I was alone, tranquil…suddenly…I don’t know any more…I must have had a moment of dementia…I no longer remember anything...”

  “Are you subject to such fits?” the millionaire asked, suddenly anxious.

  “No, it’s the first time. It’s frightful! I had the sensation that a man was here, that he tried to grab me…I struggled, I fought, and then...”

  She had slid a hand beneath the curtain that veiled her. And yet, she said to herself, feeling an abnormal dampness beneath her fingers, it wasn’t entirely a dream, but a reality...

  “But Monsieur, Madame,” said Berthe, “you’re not alone here! There…there’s a…a…kind of man!”

  Ducon turned round, suffocating.

  “What! In the name of God, what’s that?”

  The individual he had addressed took two paces forward. “Excuse me. I was just coming to your house when cries of ‘Help!’ caused me to hurry, and I came in behind Monsieur. That’s how I got this far.” He added: “I came to give you this on behalf of Master Ernest Paris, whose secretary I am.”

  And Narcisse held out a long, flat package.

  Ducon could not say anything more. He was petrified.

  Nora, meanwhile, had recognized the orangutan, and was studying him with an increasing anxiety.

  What if it were him? she thought, still haunted by the idea of enchantment. He ought, therefore, to resume his appearance as a young and handsome lord.

  But the thick stature of the great ape, his long arms and short legs reassured her. No, it wasn’t him. But in that case, who was it?

  She reached out and took the package. “Thank you, Monsieur,” she said. “Please express my thanks to the dear Master, but don’t tell him in what state you’ve discovered me. I’ve just had a nervous crisis that I can’t yet explain; I hope that it won’t have any consequences—I feel much better already.”

  “Will you permit me to return to obtain news of your health, on the Master’s behalf?”

  “Yes, if you wish,” Nora replied, indifferently, “but for the moment, what I need above all is rest.”

  Narcisse bowed profoundly and withdrew.

  “But...but…that’s an ape!” stammered Jules Ducon.

  “Yes, I know him—I saw him at Eze, in the home of Doctor...” She was about to add Goldry, but remembered that that name was also her own and said instead: “Jean Fortin. He’s an ape who can talk.”

  “And you seem to find that quite natural. However...”

  “The ape is the work of four scientists, who seem to me to be four rather fantastic individuals. I’ll tell you the whole story another time.”

  “And that orangutan is Ernest Paris’s secretary? At least he’s not risking going unperceived. So, our national genius is continuing to pay court to you?”

  “Yes, he’s come three times since my return. You know that I met him at Eze?”

  “Yes, I know, and I even approve of your receiving him; it will make the reputation of your salon. What’s that he’s sent you?”

  “Doubtless the inscribed book he promised me—a luxury specimen,31 probably. Open the package.”

  “Damn!” said Jules Ducon. “It’s one of his masterpieces, Phryné.32 On Japanese paper, three states and an original drawing by Chimot. Let’s see the dedication: ‘To the loveliest of beauties from the most fervent of her admirers, Ernest Paris.’ This is a regal gift, you know, my love?” I have a great many things to tell you, but I can see that you’re extremely tired. Lie down... Until tomorrow...”

  XII. Homo-Deus, the Invisible Satyr

  1. Animal Triste, Post-Coïtum33

  On emerging from the dancer’s house, the orangutan had leapt into a superb limousine that was parked outside the front door.

  “Ah, there you are! Good!” said the voice of Marc Vanel, Homo-Deus. Addressing his chauffeur, he added: “Home, Mardruk.”

  Narcisse was doubtless accustomed to the doctor’s invisibility, for he did not manifest any astonishment

  “You gave the book, Phryné, to Nora, then?” the voice continued.

  “You made a fine mess in the drawing room! The poor girl!”

  “Excuse me, my friend—I’d forgotten that Nora pleases you.”

  “I can’t be jealous of you—but I love her!”

  “Let’s see! Let’s explain ourselves. You love her, you say. Is that with your senses or with your brain?”

  “In two fashions: as an ape and as a human. Like much else, I’m trying to understand amour more fully.”

  “You won’t understand anything at all. A lot of white paper has been dirtied on that subject. There are as many different amours as there are human mentalities. Thus, I’m a sensualist, a satyr, seeing nothing in women but the personal pleasure I can extract from them. I have, however, known true love.”

  “And how did you experience it?”

  “In a totally unexpected fashion. I could easily have possessed the woman I loved, but I respected her, because it was necessary for me to wait until she gave herself to me, under pain of being an object of scorn for her.”

  “And Mademoiselle Jeanne Fortin loved you?”

  Marc Vanel smiled in a strange fashion that the orangutan could not appreciate—and with reason—but when the invisible man resumed speaking, the orangutan sensed, in the sound of his voice, that he had touched a sensitive fiber, ever ready to vibrate in Homo-Deus’ heart.

  “She’s never ceased to love me, Narcisse. Although our bodies remained estranged, our souls have melted into one another, and that’s the most sublime sentiment that the human beast can know.”

  “I don’t understand you very well, but it’s thus that I love—that I’d like to love—Nora.”

  “Your Nora can’t be compared to Jeanne Fortin.”

  “You’re a man of the same race as her; why haven’t you sought to make yourself cherished by her?”

  “Because I don’t have the time, and because Nora...”

  “What about Nora? Finish your thought.”

  “I’ll tell you that, one day…the day when Nora loves you.”

  “That dancer will never love me; I’m only an ape,” said Narcisse, bitterly.

  “Patience, my friend. Trust me when I tell you that she’ll love you—perhaps precisely because you’re an ape.”

  “Oh, I beg you, tell me how I can win that woman. Tell me how you, Homo-Deus, have experienced love. Was the woman who triumphed over a genius such as you as beautiful as Nora?”

  “You’re burning to know how Marc Vanel could allow himself, like an ordinary man, to be influence by that sentiment... Listen, then, and may you obtain some profit from my story.”

  It was an exceedingly strange spectacle: the ape attentive to the voice of
an invisible being.

  “Love,” Marc Vanel went on, “can’t really be defined, because it’s as various as individuality, and everyone has his own way of comprehending it. For some it’s simply called pleasure. In that case, it’s renewed with every woman possessed, and the sensation is so brief that, in order to prolong it, the man uses artifices into which he puts all his senses, but always coming back, in the end, to the primal act: copulation.

  “Others create for themselves an artificial love, by the force of the imagination; they ought to be the most favored individuals, because for them, the image of the beloved individual, being in the mind, can be varied at will. The woman is no longer a female animal but an idea being, whom they decorate will all graces and all beauties. They’re the Pygmalions of love; they’ve created a magnificent statue, which they strive to animate. But disappointment follows: the statue, idol, angel, divinity—the designation varies—can’t compete with the unbreakable laws of nature, and the seeker of the ideal is annihilated in sexual intercourse. For all the amorous imaginations of poets, all the heroines of amour, garlanded with the roses of passion, the Laures, the Béatrices, the Dona Sols, the Mireilles, the Marquisettes and so many others, end up with an ignoble act...

  “Oh well, in spite of my cognizance of defects and virtues, I once fell in love like the common run of mortals—which is to say, stupidly, and without knowing why, and I’ve suffered all the more for it because I’m intelligent. That amour, in which I, handsome, ardent and poetic, invested all my life, was odiously betrayed by a hussy. I suffered from it, it’s true, but today I rejoice in it, since it’s to that unfortunate passion that I owe being what I am today. If that adored woman had responded to what she inspired in me, I would have married her, I would have striven, in order that she wouldn’t suffer in life, to make a great deal of money, and I would have become a physician like the rest, making rich men endure, and not caring much about the poor.

  “That chagrin deflected me from a deplorable goal and caused me to flee society. I traveled; I acquired extraordinary knowledge; I sought and I found invisibility; and then I returned to France. It was in Paris, at the Red Nest, that I encountered love—the only veritable love, the one I desire—but which could never be the desire to have a Nora!”

  “But the one that haunted you at twenty…?”

  “My first romance was merely the effect of an exuberant youth, something instinctive, the first appeal of nature to the great law of the conversation of the species. Humans, in their vanity of believing that everything belongs to them, wanted that law—which all beings obey—to be an exceptional law for them, and they invented amour, which is a word that makes no sense if one tries to define it, but which has its justification if one abandons on abandons oneself to it stupidly, animalistically, and takes it for what it ought to be…for what it is, however one tries to disguise it. Thus, that kind of amour I’ve known, and like the common run of mortals, I’ve suffered from it, because, by virtue of a false education, I too had wanted to create an amour in accordance with my fantasy.

  “What I felt for Jeanne Fortin, however, was of another essence altogether—which is to say that I loved her with my senses and my brain as well. If Jeanne had responded to the appeal of my senses, perhaps I would have cherished her less, for a man has the peculiarity that nothing ever satisfies him. Only that which is refused him has attraction for him; in reality, one submits to the present, but only loves the future. The past lives on in memory, but, as one is bound to pass judgment on it, one finds flaws in that which, from our viewpoint, was not lived as it ought to have been. In sum, the present doesn’t exist, since, from one moment to the next, it has changed.

  “You want a woman for a week; during that lapse of time, she is for you the most beautiful and the most perfect being. The present arrives, the moment when you possess her—it would be more accurate to say ‘when she possesses you’ because it’s the man who gives and the woman who receives, but let’s allow the convention to stand—and the man, satisfied if he doesn’t have the hypocrisy of vanity, turns his back on his ideal, like any animal in creation. The act accomplished, nature demands no more. But a man, out of laziness, contents himself with the same female, with whom he finds his pleasure without fatigue and carelessly—unless he makes the further illusion—and that’s the basis of marriage. But I’m straying from what’s truly interesting, the story of my true my unique amour. I’ll get back to it...”

  “I’m listening, Master.”

  “I had exhausted all the genres of amour, and at first I desired Jeanne Fortin as I’d desired all the pretty or beautiful women I’d met. Thanks to invisibility, which spared me time needlessly wasted in more or less long flirtation, I really was the invisible satyr, who can satisfy all his desires without fear of being driven away. But with Jeanne Fortin I understood that, this time, the satyr couldn’t meet his expenses. With any other, I wouldn’t have cared whether I was loved or not; the habitual coitus satisfied me—but I wanted Jeanne to love me; and, in fact, she did love me. But Jeanne, Jean Fortin’s daughter, was above humanity...

  “One night, being invisible, I got into the bathroom where she was naked; she told me, frankly, without blushing, that on the day she surrendered to a man, it would be uniquely for the sake of curiosity for the sensation to be experienced, not to yield to a sentiment that she didn’t understand. And the admirable virgin didn’t understand amour, because she had studied it and dissected it, and knew all its defects, and was scornful of the act as a mere satisfaction of the senses. She judged it indecent, and a sensation too brief to be worth the trouble of desiring it.”

  “So, Monsieur Vanel?”

  “I spoke to Jeanne Fortin eloquently. I strove to awaken desire in her; I described the pleasures of the flesh, reinforced by imagination and fantasy. She laughed in my face, patronizingly, and said to me: ‘Marc, you’re wasting time here that you could use more pleasurably. I’m a virgin bodily, but not mentally. You believe that you love me; you don’t love me—you want me, and that’s all. By contrast, I love you, and my love is the height of my intelligence. You could be a frightful monster that I would love just as much, because what I love in you isn’t the conjunction of our sexual organs, it’s your mind, your intelligence; and if I resist that attraction of bodies, it’s because I have the certainty that the sexual act would kill the love. I love you ardently for your mind, but I disdain your body. If, one day, having nothing to do, or—one never knows what natural law will impose upon us—I feel the need to be a mother, I swear that I won’t seek out any other man than you...’”

  Marc Vanel, invisible, remained silent for a few moments. Then his voice resumed, but the habitually mocking voice became majestically grave:

  “What do you think of that love, Narcisse? You see, She didn’t have any of the weaknesses and hypocrisies of her sex. So I understood, and inclined before her will. We continued to live side by side in a sublime communion, that of science, and desire never—never, you hear—came between us. But a fatal day came, and Jeanne Fortin, expiring in my arms, told me again that she loved me, with a love more human, since, having refused me her body, a transmutable form, she gave me her soul, an immortal fluid. Thanks to her father, Jean Fortin, that transmission of the soul was accomplished. Is not that magnificent gift, that union of two elite intelligences, the most beautiful amour that can exist?”

  Another pause; after a few moments, Marc Vanel’s voice recommenced its speech, but in a tone of ironic gaiety: “The beast isn’t dead; the invisible satyr obeys the appeals of the flesh, all the more so as all our sensations report to the brain. I can say that I live, now, the sensations of both sexes, masculine and feminine, and that I experience a double sensual pleasure in the act of amour.”

  “I understand, Master,” said the ape, pensively. If, one day—and the day will surely come, since my intelligence has not yet reached its apogee—it’s necessary for me, too, to double my soul with its sister soul…but where shall I find a secon
d Jeanne Fortin?”

  “There is none. I’ll give you my own double mentality, when I judge that the moment has come.”

  “Oh, Master—you’d do that for me…an ape?”

  “Not for the ape, Narcisse, but for the superhuman. In any case, isn’t that, for me, the sole means of not dying?”

  2. The Man in the God

  In the portrait that Marc Vanel had made of himself for Narcisse, he had not completely dissected—if one might put it thus—his amorous mentality. Not only was the man, as he had said, multiple in his amours but materially, he was submissive to a slavery from which, in spite of his intelligence, he could not abstract himself: a slavery of instinct, a kind of irresistible physical flaw that overcame his reason.

  Thus, accomplished and apparently normal married men can be seen devoting themselves to onanism in spite of the fact that they have alongside them the means of satisfying the natural desire to copulate. Others indulge in acts contrary to nature, and what might be called veritable tortures. Certainly, degenerates are more inclined to that than others, but great intellectuals are not excluded from it; it is, above all, in remarkable intelligences that sensual exasperation shows itself most actively, for in them, the imagination leads all passions and all vices to exaggeration. A certain elite is subject to the law that Edgar Poe called “the imp of the perverse.” For want of finding a justification for the accomplished act, the intellectual knows perfectly well that he is committing a stupidity, but he gives in to it anyway, because it is independent of his will. Perhaps it is madness, since reason cannot dominate it; if so, there must be a seed of madness on everyone, which only requires to germinate and bloom.