It was not because Laurence had gone by night to run around Montmartre and had spent half an hour in Kotzebue’s house. Half an hour was too little. In any case, the latter’s sadness, the absence of proud satisfaction and the nature of the things he had said to me set aside he hypothesis of a rendezvous in which amour had counted for anything. There was a mystery there. I would succeed in clarifying it.
My depression came from the memory resuscitated by Kotzebue.
“Lucifer!” I repeated, several times. And I summoned to my aid all my philosophical knowledge.
The Devil did not exist. He was a puerile imagination born of human terror and ignorance. So? A pact with nothing could not have a frightening character, under any pretext. Why, in that case, was a man like Kotzebue preoccupied in that fashion. His erudition in theology was very great, and if he was anxious in that subject, I could not neglect that anxiety.
I remembered having read or heard it said that even in the Middle Ages, many sorcerers did not believe in the person of the Devil in the ridiculous form ordinarily given to him. They already thought that it was only one of two currents of life, the one contrary to the orientation of the universe. They believed that certain symbolic actions could react upon us and push us henceforth in a retrograde direction. We discover so many things every day! Perhaps there is a law there that escapes us. If good, which is called God, is identical to love, Lucifer would then be hatred, and I, without any reason, by the caprice of a certain Lévy, had vowed myself to hatred.
I recapitulated the years that had gone by, and I saw a direction of hatred in all the actions of my life. Shortly after the evening of the pact, I had lost my mother and inherited her fortune. Had it not been me who had killed her by means of a demonic projection? Had not my friends and my mistresses been struck, without my intention, by sequences of ill luck, by misfortunes of which I was the cause without knowing it?
I told myself that when one makes a pact, there is an exchange. If I had renounced the growth of my perfectible soul, what had I received for that divine gift? And I believed that I saw then a kind of malign and organized protection that had extended over me over the years and had accorded me advantages that I would not otherwise have had. I argued with myself about that intervention, without being able to affirm whether it was real or not.
Money worries had abruptly disappeared. That came from my mother’s death and her heritage. But had that abrupt death not had a singular character? I had not had any malady. The natural case of that was my good health. Yes, but before the pact, I had suffered from petty ailments, neuralgias, the commencement of rheumatisms, which had not developed. It would have been more logical that my health had declined, while its excellence seemed to have improved over time.
I had desired women, and Lévy had even specified that the desire in question expressed Lucifer within me most particularly. Well, there had been women who had abandoned themselves to me with a facility that I had never been able to comprehend. I found, on reflection, that my personal seduction was not sufficient to explain it. One of my friends, a professional Don Juan named Leubas, of whom I was scornful because of his donjuanesque conception of life, claimed to emit a fluid that forced all women to run after him. Certainly, I did not think I had possessed such a fluid; but it seemed to me that for a period of my existence, which began almost at the moment of the pact, women had changed their attitude in my regard.
It is true that that period had been the one in which my Latin Quarter poverty had changed into ease and an apartment near the Place Péreire had replaced my lodgings. Now, the quality of one’s abode, the magnificence of apartments, has a great influence on the amours of women. On the other hand, the fact of desiring Laurence and Eveline without possessing them was also an argument. A man who, by means of a demonic pact, has acquired powers over creatures, is not obliged to go and prowl around furtively by night, launch himself into taxis, and make miserable stations at the corner of the Square Vintimille and the Rue Ballu.
And my life, the precious life of my body, how had it been so strangely protected during the war? It is true that, from the start, I had not solicited precipitate departures for the front. I had had some remorse about that. But I had said: Let’s let Destiny do its work. Let’s not intervene personally. Let the mysterious laws that dictated this war retain all the responsibility for the life and death with whom I only have a poor unity. I had confided myself to what it pleased me to call my lucky star. Had that lucky star perhaps been an evil star?
Why had I been sent to Morocco, where no antecedent colonial order had summoned me? What was the futile pretext of a license in law that the military administration had seized in order to make me a reporter to the Council of War? But on the other hand, was not that situation a glaring sign that I had been allied with the good against the evil, the defender of justice in everything that it has of the most sacred?
That thought dissipated by anxieties and I uttered a sigh of relief. Yes, for several months I had accomplished in Morocco the functions of a judge—a military judge, but in sum, a judge. If that war had taken place several centuries earlier I would have had witches burned. I remembered how I had taken my role seriously and that in a room with a niche in the wall where there was a Christ I had spoken with severity against deserters and criminals, not hesitating to make the end of my sentences resound, in order to obtain the most severe penalties, with the words justice, fatherland and God, above all God. In Morocco, therefore, I had been the representative of God, and a few old officers full of gravity united in tribunal had considered me as such. So? Could a Luciferian individual have played that role, allied with the Christ in his niche, having the true instruments of Satan condemned?
The sigh that I had uttered had not yet quit my breast when an interior voice spoke to me, and I recognized its tone of verity.
Have you not had remorse for your wretched judicial function? Do you recall the scorn you had for the members of the Council of War, for their professional faith, their incapacity to see the two sides of anything, their absence of pity? You had people condemned, but you had pity in the depths of your being. You were merely a coward. You knew what excuses those almost savage men had for not believing in a fatherland that was not their own. On which side was love and on which hatred? Do you remember the twenty-year-old Arab whose gaze was so sad that you dared not look at him in case your voice broke? Perhaps it was the Evil One, the principle of Evil that gave you that eloquence admired by the old career officers.
I leapt out of bed and I got dressed in haste. The rain had made a thousand designs, a thousand figures, on the window panes, but I drew the curtains in order not to see the strange imaginations of chance.
Ten years before, I had bought a vast library of works treating religions, their mysteries and the questions of occultism that interested me. I never touched any of those volumes, but I was reassured by their mass. I incessantly put off reading them, tell myself, by way of excuse, that intuition is superior to the study of books.
In the demi-obscurity of my room, I started searching feverishly for the authors who had dealt with pacts with the Devil. A certain Bergier had a great authority in such matters.1 The secret of pacts was contained, according to him, in the Great Keys of Solomon. But what were those Keys? The great Larousse, to whom I referred, only spoke about “a long bone that joins the head of the humerus to the upper part of the sternum.”2 The eminent theologian Bergier, with an impressive sincerity, believed in the effect of those pacts. According to him, a wand of almond-wood cut at the precise moment of the first ray of dawn was necessary. It was also necessary to find an intersection of three roads, shed the blood of a chicken and trace a triangle with a bloodstone.3 I could not discover what that stone was, which is not mentioned in the dictionary.
Lévy had made the pact, neglecting a part of the conditions judged indispensable by the learned Bergier. The pact was therefore not valid. On reflection, however, I estimated that Lévy might have been more knowledgeable
than Bergier, who seemed to add faith to the worst stupidities. Lévy, a modern in the matter of the pact, had employed more scientific methods, and hence more efficacious.
I remained perplexed. The day passed in research of that kind. In the evening, I had the naivety to go to the Rue des Feuillantines, to the furnished hotel where Lévy once lived. It had been demolished and there was a modern building in its place.
A palace has replaced the hovel; that’s logical, I thought. It’s seen all the time in tales where here’s mention of the Devil.
Yes, but the accursed fellow had not profited from that transformation. The concierge I interrogated did not know Lévy.
I dined no matter where. I went back to Montmartre and I went to sit down near the Place Blanche, in the drug-dealers’ café into which I had see Laurence penetrate the previous evening.
I had only been sitting there for five minutes when I saw a heavily made-up woman come in whose skirt was too short and whose corsage allowed the birth of the shoulders to be seen. She came in swaying and looking to the right and left as Laurence had done the previous evening.
Almost immediately, I recognized that it was Irma Pascaud, or, rather, the caricature of Irma Pascaud. She perceived me; her face took on a joyful expression and she came to sit beside me. We exchanged the banal phrases that people exchange who have not seen one another for a long time and our affectionate conversation was a caricature of our former conversations.
“Well, I didn’t expect to see you here,” she said.
“I’m glad to see you,” I repeated, for my part, coldly, as a hand was placed on my wrist and shoulder in order to pull the wool over my eyes and stimulate a familiar delight.
And around us wandered joyless waiters; a pipe-smoker’s smoke made spirals; groups grimaced; mirrors reflected emptiness; and everything contributed to make me relive a caricaturish scene from the past. It is a singular law of life that, after an interval of a few years, reproduces what has been, blurring the lines, scoring the faces, deforming the images as if cinematic plates, worn away by usage, had an obligation to pass over it, in order to spoil the image.
Irma Pascaud caught my gaze and said: “It’s like the old days. Do you remember? We hardly ever saw one another, except in cafés.”
It is, indeed, in cafés that the joy and sadness of the amours of youth unfold. But I thought that the beer had a more delicate color then, the marble of the tables had been more delicately veined and the air reeking of tobacco had been easier to respire.
When I thought about Irma Pascaud, I said to myself: Perhaps she’s the only woman who really loved me.
Her conquest had not been difficult and I had not attached any importance to it. I had been attracted to her because of her regularly pretty face and because of a mysterious chagrin that she had just experienced, which caused her to weep from time to time and which she never wanted to explain. Before me, Irma Pascaud had been the mistress of two or three comrades in the same Left Bank cafés, but that had not created a false situation between us. People said “How is she with you? With me, she was like this”—and we laughed about it. I had called her “the woman with no soul,” and the nickname had been generally adopted.
Irma Pascaud claimed that she loved me much more than all the others and that with me “it was something else.” I made a semblance of not believing her, but deep down I believed it, and I said to myself: Well, nothing is more natural.
I had announced to her one morning, quite simply, that we were soon going to part. She wept, but was resigned. “When?” she asked. It was decided that it would be in three days, and three days later, I declared solemnly to the café in front of a group of friends that the evening was that of our divorce.
“Who’ll replace him?” people asked her. She declared, with dry eyes, that it was all the same to her and that since we were playing cards, she would go home that evening with the winner.
I was one of the five players. Hazard determined that I was the winner. A medical student named Méricant, whose head was posed on his shoulders without the intermediary of a neck and who had rectangular hands, was profoundly disappointed. On the other hand, I saw Irma’s charming features suddenly light up. She thought that one final night might be susceptible of prolonging our liaison, because the hearts of men are subject to change. I turned my eyes away in order not to see that childish hope, and I was pitiless.
“I give my right to Méricant,” I said.
The illumination of the visage was extinguished. Irma Pascaud went away with a coarse hand holding her arm, and I went home alone, with the sensation that I had just failed a happiness, unexpected for me and for a woman who loved me, that was perhaps the most precious thing in the world.
I don’t think I had ever seen Irma Pascaud again since that epoch.
And now I was hypnotized by her puffy eyes, the extraordinary thickness her arms had on emerging from the shoulder, the weight of the once-light breasts glimpsed beneath the corsage, the maturity all the more visible because its possessor affected to be unaware of it. I thought of the number of lovers she must have had since me and Méricant, fixed an approximate figure, and felt sorry for her.
“And that great chagrin?” I said, in order to get a grip on a memory that was not dolorous for me. “It must have flown away with time, I suppose?”
She shook her head, apparently saying no.
She remained silent, and then became nervous and distracted. She gave me the impression of being irritated. She allowed it to be seen that she wanted to leave. I was vexed by that, as if I had hoped that her sentiments had not changed in my regard, in spite of the years. She stood up.
“I beg your pardon for leaving you so quickly. You understand...”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, in a tone that was almost disagreeable.
“We’ll see one another again, I hope,” she said. “Where are you living now?”
And I saw from her inattention, when I replied to her, that she had only asked me that out of politeness.
I thought, for the same reason, that I ought to ask her the same question, I regretted it, because she hesitated, and appeared to be embarrassed to tell me that she was staying temporarily in a hotel at the top of the Rue Lepic.
I would have liked to be able to do something for her, but I dared not offer her money.
Abruptly, she made a gesture of adieu and drew away rapidly.
It was as if a veil fell and life suddenly seemed to me to be infinitely sad.
I followed her with my eyes along the boulevard, and I suddenly had the sensation that that encounter had taken its place in the chain of causes and events, and that Irma Pascaud, without my being able to know how, was about to become involved with my life again.
The human soul is so made that the leveling of days effaces the most profound anxieties. Laurence and Eveline became the two poles of my preoccupations again. A month went by. Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf departed with his daughters for the property he had bought the year before in the Midi, facing Saint-Tropez. I rented a small house not far away, surrounded by pines. Michel Kotzebue was installed in a large hotel nearby, and a few of the faithful members if the group of Essenes had joined him there. Their collective presence was to permit him to realize mystical experiments that he wanted to attempt, and of which he kept the secret.
Personally, those experiments left me indifferent. I no longer cared about anything but the two sisters. When I had tried to raise the matter of the pact with Kotzebue he had changed the subject; I had not talked to him about it again since the evening when I had witnessed his terror and that terror had been communicated to me, with all the more force because it had no apparent cause.
A marble moonlight was immobilized on the silent hills whose unfurling was visible from the terrace where we were sitting. The landscape was one of those of which one says admiringly: “One might things it were a stage-set in a theater.” Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf’s house was some distance from the sea, but its scintillations
were visible in the distance through the tangle of branches, like specks of gold moving over the waters.
To the left, the property was only separated from the road by a few clumps of mimosas. A little further on, above it, there was a convent with high walls, with a quadrilateral of cypresses and a bizarre Arab loggia above an iron portal.
In front of us, in the garden, detached eucalyptus leaves were falling with a mysterious regularity, like silvery drops of rain. The garden was profound and compact, heavy with vegetal aromas and terrestrial essences. The paths were narrow, forming vaults, and could only be distinguished by the patches of laurier-roses bordering them.
To the right, an immense avenue of centenarian eucalypti descended toward the highway and toward the sea. Those trees were so straight and so parallel that they were reminiscent of a cortege of old men in procession. In the course of my walks with Laurence I had nicknamed them “the Essenes” in order to show the young woman my lack of respect for those sages.
Eveline was to perform an Orphic dance like one that was danced, it appears, in the celebration of the Eleusinian mysteries by a female myste. It would have been puerile to enquire how that ancient dance had been transmitted to a Levantine dance-teacher who had been working with Mademoiselle de Saint-Aygulf for two years. Kotzebue had met that dance-teacher in the course of his voyage to the Orient, and guaranteed the Orphic character of his teaching.
That evening was the first time that Eveline was to dance before an audience. There were only friends and guests present, but in spite of that, Eveline had been nervous and emotional all day. I had come in the afternoon and had talked to her for quite a long time about her dance and the conception she had of it.
That conversation had irritated me slightly. I found Eveline’s tone pretentious when she talked about beauty in general and the moralizing influence that beauty ought to have. I knew that she had a perfect consciousness of her own beauty. Her mother had flattered her excessively, as much out of love as to humiliate Laurence. While we talked, Laurence was working on a slight modification to the costume that her sister would wear that evening. She had no jealousy. She gave the impression of living in another, more vulgar domain, in which one sewed and one was unaware of sacred dances, and was satisfied with that.
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