He would normally have replied “Yes, in the Rue Ballu,” if my fears were well-founded, or pronounced the name of a different street.
He pretended not to have heard, and said, as if it were a matter of reanimating a conversation that was almost extinct: “Is it a long time since you’ve seen the Saint-Aygulfs?”
I almost called to the waiter to bring me a Tout-Paris in order to search it ostentatiously for his address. I contented myself with saying that I had seen Laurence that day. He did not ask me whether it was in the morning or the evening. I had said Laurence by design, while watching for a movement of his eyelids. They did not flutter any more rapidly.
He ordered another wine-glass, sipped it, and I saw that he was increasingly uninterested in what I might say. He was following a private train of thought, and from time to time, with a gesture of his astonishingly white hand and well-manicured hand, which he waved in my direction, he deigned to allow me to participate in the conversation that he was having with himself.
“Conform one’s life with one’s ideas! Yes, one should. But it’s difficult. Everyone would like the existence of another, but is too cowardly to obtain it for himself.”
And he darted a glance at me that went from my hat to my shoes, as if I synthesized the host of those cowardly and exigent men.
“There are people who would be indignant if they saw me on the terrace of a café after midnight. And yet the search for wisdom does not deprive us of desire.” After a pause, in a toneless voice, he added: “And the desire is sometimes all the greater the further one goes in pursuit of spirituality.”
Those words appeared to me to be insupportable. Since we had been sitting face to face I had reviewed certain attitudes of Kotzebue’s in Laurence’s presence. The prestige with which he was surrounded authorized familiarities that would have appeared extraordinary in another I remembered that he had once held the young woman’s hand in his for a rather long time, repeating: “my dear child,” with an ecclesiastical unction.
And abruptly, I also remembered certain gazes, accompanied by a moistness of his thick lips, in Eveline’s presence. All that had not struck me at the time because I believed, like everyone else, that Michael Kotzebue was uniquely occupied with occult research, orientated exclusively toward spiritual joys. I suddenly understood that it was nothing of the sort, and a violent indignation gripped me at the thought that he dared to pursue the two sisters with an equal desire—a desire that, as he had just declared, was greater than that of others. I might perhaps have allowed that indignation to explode if I had not suddenly thought that he was simply in the same condition as me.
Yes, but older, much older! cried the interior voice of my jealousy. In fact, how much older? Perhaps the age difference that separated us was not so great.
“How old are you?” I asked. And I prepared a phrase to tell him that the age is question ought to suffice to temper his passions.
Kotzebue did not attach any importance to that insignificant question.
“I sometimes wonder whether there are not individuals who have an innate predisposition to evil, who are touched by a reverse grace. They are filled with good intentions, they make just and elevated speeches, they aspire with all their hearts to rise, but it seems that a will that perhaps exterior to them organizes their existence for evil. And by evil I mean, naturally”—he made a gesture that seemed to sweep away all narrow conceptions of evil—“the retrograde force that diminishes the spirit. How, then, can that initial fatality be remedied? What should those predestined individuals do?”
He interrogated me with an oblique gaze, but I did not want the humiliation of a reply that would not be heard. He made a noise with his amethyst against the marble to the table and went on: “Perhaps the passions are creative. But it is necessary to know how to give oneself to them. They are like the fire that is useful and warms if one circumscribes it in the hearth. Perhaps we ought to allow ourselves to indulge our sensuality with the objective of engendering a sublime and hidden force.”
He leaned toward me and he said, as if it were a confidence: “I’ve always thought that the physical act of amour was a magical rite of which humans had lost the secret. The man who rediscovers the ceremonial grandeur of dual pleasure, who renders it its character as a mystical mass, who makes a man and a woman lying together into priests coming closer to God would be more useful to humankind than Gutenberg or Christopher Columbus.”
He touched me with a fingertip, perhaps to ask for my opinion. My thoughts were focused on the time that Laurence had spent in the Rue Ballu: scarcely half an hour. I hung on to the brevity of that visit like a shipwreck victim to a plank. Amour, especially if it is conceived as a magical rite, must demand infinitely more time.
There was a silence between us and I wondered why the great man of the Essenes was making me confidences that would have scandalized those who believed in him, if they could hear him.
I did not formulate that question. But undoubtedly, Kotzebue was only responding that night to questions that had not been asked. He started sniggering, and while looking me in the face, which he very rarely did, he said: “You’re wondering why I’m telling you this? It’s because there is something in common between us, because you, strictly speaking”—he shrugged his shoulders slightly, scornfully—“might be able to understand me, or at least try.”
I suddenly saw what he was getting at, and I remained indifferent in order to deceive myself, but my heart beat faster.
“You remember the pact? We made a pact together. We never talk about it, but we haven’t forgotten it.”
I started to laugh. I put on a semblance of hilarity. “Oh yes,” I said, as if I were suddenly remembering for the first time something long-forgotten. “The joke of the pact. What can have become of Lévy since that epoch?”
I didn’t care about Lévy; I wanted to change the subject. It was in vain.
“It wasn’t a joke,” said Kotzebue. “We believed it at first. But either way, we accomplished the prescriptions, followed the rituals minutely. Lévy understood that. We did everything that was necessary to render the pact valid.”
I had often thought, in the course of my life, about the evening spent with Kotzebue and that Lévy, and I had always concluded hypocritically: A farce of the twentieth year! A happy time in the Latin Quarter when one could still find a comrade naïve enough to believe in the Devil!
However, I knew full well that Lévy was not naïve and that the pact had exceeded the range of a farce.
I had met Lévy with Kotzebue in a little restaurant in the Rue Monge. None of us had any money, but there are degrees in poverty even when it is very great, and Lévy was the most wretched of the three of us. Short and ugly, intelligent and hostile to everyone, he spent his days in libraries. Possessed of an extraordinary erudition with regard to occultism and religious questions, he mocked my ignorance incessantly. I took my revenge to turning to derision his belief in the Devil, for he believed in the real existence of the Evil Spirit, the one that had borne the name by turns of Ahriman, Iblis and Satan. Sometimes we walked together after dinner, accompanying one another, in such a way as to avoid the expense of coffee and thus attain the reasonable hour when one can go to bed without shame.
Naturally, Lévy did not have the crude conception of the Devil such as the witch-trials of the Middle Ages represented him to us. He believed, even so, in a force opposed to good, active and conscious, susceptible of materializing and with which one could make a pact. He went so far as to claim that, in the same way that there are associations of monks coming together to pray to God and to do good, there are secret groups of egotistical men who augment their power by their union and strive ardently toward evil.
“It’s logical,” he added. “One cannot imagine a coin without a reverse side. Light only exists by virtue of its relationship with darkness.”
That stimulated our bursts of laughter.
One day, we were talking about the ancient pacts that linked sorcerer
s with demons. Lévy firmly believed in them. According to him, humankind entire might have been damned with an extreme rapidity and had only been retained by the ignorance of a few details necessary to the formation of the pact and the ceremony by which it had to be surrounded. He, Lévy, knew those details of the ceremonial ritual.
Kotzebue and I protested. Why did he not emerge from poverty by making an alliance with the Devil? He replied that poverty was unimportant, but that he was thinking seriously about acquiring by means of a pact something much more precious than wealth. We immediately declared that we were ready to sell our future life in exchange for an immediate material advantage.
It was winter, I had a rather thin overcoat and I believe I said that I would gladly sign the pact in exchange for a hot toddy. Lévy was not astonished by the low price at which I evaluated my soul and said that he was delighted by our declaration. I remember that when he quit us, Kotzebue and I were astonished for a long time by a credulity greater in him than we had supposed.
A few days later he came into the restaurant where we were dining with a certain solemnity in his manner. He placed a little packet tied with string beside him and asked us whether we had the same intentions. We didn’t understand immediately what he was talking about. Waitresses were running around us shouting in loud voices to invisible cooks to announce the requested half-portions. He raised his voice in order to make himself heard and hazard determined that the conversation fell silent just as he said: “It’s a matter of the Devil.”
Our joy—Kotzebue’s and mine—was immense. We affected a gravity analogous to Lévy’s and we followed him urgently after diner. It was in my lodgings that the thing took place.
Lévy made us remark that the moon was full, which was an essential condition. We lit three candles that were contained in the packet he had brought, along with a piece of charcoal, which he did not use, and the utility of which I only learned years later.
He told us that there was no need to thank him—which we were not thinking of doing—for it was for himself alone that he was acting, the power of pacts being in direct proportion to the number of those who made them.
“Three is a Luciferian figure, of which the Kabbalists are usually unaware,” he added, gravely.
Kotzebue said to me then in a low voice that he was in the process of playing a trick on us. However, when we saw him unroll a large sheet of parchment, we exchanged a glance, deeming that it was not worth the expense of that parchment for a joke. He also called our attention to the fact that the name of God was written backwards in Hebrew characters on the parchment. That is always slightly impressive. I wondered why Hebrew rather than another language. He shrugged his shoulders slightly.
We almost declared that it was all a ridiculous comedy to which we would no longer lend ourselves when a slight prick was required, because the signature had to be traced in blood; but Kotzebue and I had a false shame in regard to one another. The three candles cast a sinister light and Lévy, in the middle, was prey to an emotion that the tremor of his lip betrayed. Whichever of us recoiled would have confessed by that action that he had the belief in the non-existent Devil that he had been mocking in Lévy for several days.
What the pact said we had scarcely asked. We did not know either what we had promised or what we engaged to pay, since it was only a matter of laughing. But in truth, we were no longer laughing. We signed as best we could by dipping a golden—or perhaps merely gilded—quill in a droplet of blood parsimoniously shed.
Lévy then set fire to the parchment and he blew out the three candles successively. The room was then only illuminated by the parchment, which crackled, and was consumed with difficulty; the minute during which its combustion lasted seemed very long to me.
Kotzebue touched me on the elbow and said: “Poor Lévy!” in order to try to dissimulate the sinister impression that he had, as I also had. Finally the ashes, carefully collected by Lévy in a napkin, were reduced to dust in the obscurity. He approached the window, opened it and threw them as high as he could in the direction of the moon, which was visible over the rooftops.
I uttered a sigh and finally relit the lamp, no longer having any ardent desire other than to see Lévy go away. He was significantly downcast. He fell into a chair saying that he was exhausted. He hoped that he had succeeded, he said—which is to say that he had succeeded in communicating with Lucifer—but he was not sure. He was astonished not to have obtained an immediate response, for which I secretly congratulated myself.
He explained to us at length that the pact was only a material sign to channel the force of thought. Perhaps the number three was insufficient. He regretted the great assemblies of the Middle Ages, the Sabbat and the entire crowds gathered to participate in the current of the power that animates the world. One could call him Lucifer if one wished; he had other names. The simple represented him with horns, hairy and holding a pitchfork. Everyone could give him another image, according to taste. Lucifer mighty be a bald philosopher, a young woman naked on a bed, or an officer emerging from Saint-Cyr.
He finally got up to leave. He was sad. Not as much as me, however. He looked carefully to see whether there was any fragment of ash on the floor that had escaped him. As was his habit, he wanted to say something disagreeable as he left.
“For you, Lucifer is a naked woman,” he said to me, “beautiful but above all stupid. For Kotzebue he’s an individual in religious costume—no matter which, provided that he has a chasuble and burns incense. Unfortunate beings both of you1”
In the following days I ceased to go to the restaurant in the Rue Monge. I only rain into Kotzebue at rare intervals. As for Lévy, I only saw him once more. He came to borrow ten francs from me. I thought privately that a pact with the Devil doesn’t enrich its man. I gave them to him gladly, for I knew already that, however small a sum lent may be, it hollows out a ditch between the creditor and the debtor that no amity is able to fill in.
And now that scene, which the tide of memory had sometimes brought back to the edge of my soul, and which I had determinedly rejected, was revived in the presence of one of its actors. I associated with it for the first time the design that had once appeared on the window of a railway carriage and that I had subsequently given to the diabolical image that Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf’s house had figured for me that very evening.
“I don’t suppose you attach any importance to that story?” I said.
Faithful to his habit of not responding directly, he raised an excessively white and slightly plump hand and said: “How can I explain why I always wear my amethyst on my left hand? I can’t do otherwise. The amethyst, in Christian symbolism, is the sign of humility, but on the right hand. Do you know what the amethyst signifies on the left hand?”
I did not know, and I thought that one could always put a ring on one’s right or one’s left hand, as one pleased.
Kotzebue went on: “How can I explain, also, that I tremble and enter into a kind of trance, every time I penetrate into a room where there is a host? Evidently, Lévy might have nothing to do with it. But if I told you about the Essenes...”
It was claimed that Kotzebue had received communications from invisible sages, whose last authentic representatives were reputed to live in certain Palestinian solitudes. He was normally excessively reserved on that subject. I lent an ear avidly. He stopped.
“And you—I don’t ask you to admit it, but be sincere with yourself. Haven’t you remarked something particular in your life since that evening with Lévy? Oh, almost nothing... First of all, no one knows what Lucifer is, exactly. Scarcely a nuance, and one is in his claws—except that one doesn’t know it; the claws are velvet. Personally, I called Lucifer egotism.”
He got up abruptly after those words, throwing on to the table, to pay for the drinks, a hundred franc bill, for which he neglected to collect the change.
I wanted to make the remark that it was me who had invited him, but he was already crossing the Place Blanche with long strides and I
was obliged to run after him to catch up with him.
He headed toward the café into which I had seen Laurence go. There were now very few people in it. Kotzebue remained on the threshold and inspected the tables with a circular glance. Then he walked along the boulevard a little way, looking at a few people sitting on the terraces. Then he retraced his steps, almost exactly as Laurence had done.
We found ourselves not far from the terrace of the Brasserie Romano, where we had been a few minutes before. A woman was curled up on a pile of unsold newspapers. A bartender in uniform hailed a taxi importantly. A fresh breath of wind that appeared to be coming from the Place Clichy, as a stroller might have done, brushed us in passing.
Kotzebue murmured, in a lugubrious tone: “I’m bored.” Then he added: “I’m going home.”
It was not to me that he addressed those syllables but to himself, as if to notify himself of his own decision. I started to walk alongside him and I murmured: “I’ll go with you.”
“I live close by, in the Rue Ballu,” he said eventually, wearily.
I have heard it said that men wounded by a revolver shot or a shell-burst sometimes see their wound close up and heal without it having been possible to extract the bullet or piece of shrapnel. They live for many years in perfect quietude, with the illusion of health. And then, without any apparent reason, their organism enters into a strange battle with that foreign matter, which it had supported until then without complaint. It tries to reject it. The wound reopens and becomes a larger and more corrupt wound than the initial injury. Thus, after having buried the evening of the pact beneath a layer of indifference, my soul began to suffer from its existence, and to want to annihilate it.
When I woke up the day after the one when I had followed Laurence and met Kotzebue, I had the sensation that a misfortune had befallen me the previous day and that its consequences were about to modify my way of life. I sat up on my bed with the appetite for recapitulation that one often has when one awakens. It was as warm as the previous day, but it was raining. I took my head in my hands. I felt overwhelmed.
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