Lucifer

by Maurice Magre

  Among other things, Eveline said: “To be pure, absolutely pure: that’s the supreme ideal. It seems to me that every morning, there’s a tissue of desires and needs over me, a material robe that it’s necessary to remove. And it always has to be begun again.”

  My gaze met that of Laurence, who smiled slightly, in a manner that seemed to say: Fortunately, I’m only a poor impure girl...

  Eveline also said: “The movement of the body when it’s in rapport with the movement of the soul can, in certain cases, communicate the exaltation of the spirit that is the end-point of purity. The priests of the ancient mysteries knew that. That’s what I’m trying to render.”

  “Oh,” I said, “no one is sure whether or not the sacred dances at Eleusis might have been, on the contrary, a vulgar representation of physical amour.”

  I said that in order to shock her. I wanted to make her blush. But she looked at me with her immobile and icy eyes, with sadness, as one might look at someone who is drowning, and it is impossible to save.

  When she stood up thereafter, as I saw the movement of her legs beneath her summer dress, and the kind of noble lightness in her gait, I was astonished that she could, with a soul so deprived of matter, emit so much sensuality with her body.

  And again I said to myself: Which of the two?

  The Levantine dance-teacher began to clap his hands to announce to the guests dispersed in the garden that Eveline was about to dance. They emerged gradually from the shadows and came to sit down in front of the terrace. They were all crackpots animated by an ardent faith in the marvelous, and that faith, in spite of contradictory beliefs and different religions, bound them together in a credulous and always astonished fraternity.

  I overheard Madame Labatut, who was saying, while simpering: “I’m sure of it. It’s my spirit guide who told me so.”

  She had an extravagant hat and frills, and she was huffing and laughing. She was the matriarch of occultism. She was a member of all the groups and all the societies, provided that they were secret. She carried a large notebook under her arm in which she wrote down instructive remarks heard during conversations and phrases that she loved to quote, reading them out in a loud voice. The beautiful citations in her notebook alternated with addresses, for she willingly made marriages, or even simple unions. She sowed discord joyfully by spreading, under the seal of secrecy, a thousand items of gossip that she did not hesitate to attribute to her spirit guides.

  Beside her there was a professor of philosophy, a graduate of the university, who repeated frequently: “A little science distances God, a lot brings him closer.” There was also a pale young man, with a gold chain around his ankle, whose principal concern was to uncover it from beneath his silk sock by tugging his trousers negligently, and two young Swedish women who smiled while holding hands and whose astonishingly round heads were reminiscent of two marvelous apples suspended from a single branch.

  A little further away I saw Madame Vigerie make a sign to young Charlie to come and sit beside her one the armchair into which she had just allowed her thin and quivering body to fall. She was peering ahead of her with myopic and passionate eyes. Everything interested her. She told herself that she was in search of new sensations; her secret ideal was to be a femme fatale. She had lovers, but only under the title of experience; amour left her hostile and unassuaged. The intoxication of ether, turning tables and the adoration of a naked adolescent in a chamber hung in violet were vaguely confused in her mind. And she dreamed about black masses, celebrations with the perfumes of incense, and all the unknown pleasures of which she had read depictions in novels.

  Mademoiselle Longève, small and rotund, was placed to one side and took a few steps back if anyone came toward her. That was because she attributed to herself a fluidic power so active at certain hours that anyone approaching her might be inconvenienced by it. She was good, and did not want the projection of her fluid to cause the slightest damage.

  It was the man we had nicknamed “Poor Jacques” who was the last to arrive. He was barefoot, and clad in a frayed costume devoid of a shirt. He was reputed to have given everything he possessed to the poor. Two years before he had become a Buddhist, had quit Paris and had taken up residence by the sea shore, a few kilometers away. He had built himself a wooden cabin in the midst of the pines and lived there as an anchorite; he had tamed a grass snake and a mole, from which he claimed to receive touching marks of affection. He was very young, but the naivety of his features gave him an infantile appearance. His dominant characteristic was modesty. He would have liked to have been formless in order to efface himself. Michel Kotzebue had told him that by means of magic, once could do that, but he did not believe him, and strove to walk without making any sound, drawing away if anyone looked at him for too long. He had not dared to refuse the room that Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf had offered him, but either because the judged himself unworthy of it or because the open air was indispensable to him, he went to sleep outside, near a cypress behind the convent.

  I had stood up in order to join him, but I met the gaze of Laurence, who was coming out of the house after having helped her sister to get dressed. She came to sit down beside me. Eveline was already advancing to dance, amid an admiring murmur and a rustle of wicker chairs on the gravel.

  She came down the three steps of the perron without seeing anyone, as if her eyes were fixed on the interior of her soul, and, stepping lightly, she reached an Oriental carpet under a centenarian fig-tree. A dragonfly, like a floating emerald, emerged from the shadow of the fig-tree and seemed to be giving a signal. An orchestra disposed behind a clump of bushes began to play. I noticed local people stopping on the road behind the park in order to watch. Their naïve or stupid faces were covered with the bewilderment that music gives simple souls.

  Although still motionless, Eveline was already dancing. Beneath her transparent veils, an unsuspectable beauty was ornamented by the moon. A quiver ran through her, a delicate vibration, which was the harmonious thought by which she was possessed, and which she communicated by degrees to her body. That thought animated her form, lifted her small breasts, descended along her hips all the way to her feet, which were shod in sandals so brightly silver that they had the appearance of two fragments of supple and silent crystal.

  Eveline’s dance suddenly enabled me to understand the relationship between the human form and the mind. I glimpsed a dolor behind the harmony of the lines. The young woman put her hands together, raising her arms, and in that gesture there was the entire poem of the human soul avid to escape the bonds of desire, to attain another, purer world.

  Her body, vibrant with the life of all the muscles that dancing provides, was visible beneath the taut silk of her veil, but neither the impetus of the hands not the undulation of the midriff, nor the perfect curve of the legs, evoked a sensual image. There was a spiritual principle in her that was reminiscent of a rising flame, some unknown offering to the heaven. The human form, at its most accomplished, had been subjugated to the aims of the spirit, and had become beauty in motion.

  Sometimes, Eveline’s head tilted back and I saw the moonlight flowing in her bright eyes, being absorbed and lost there, like precious water in a sapphire well. At other times she beat the air with her immaterial hands, and I felt that those almost transparent hands were not made for caresses, but for the gift of an invisible treasure that she seemed to be drawing negligently from the gilded atmosphere.

  When the final note of the music resonated, the world around the young woman seemed struck with immobility. The members of the audience looked at one another in astonishment, all having the sentiment of having witnessed a spectacle of extraordinary quality. They seemed surprised to have been plunged into such an elevated reverie.

  The noise of a fountain that the orchestra had prevented from being heard became perceptible again in the silence. Fresh, odorous gusts were coming from the nearby basin through the mimosas and the rosemary. Eveline was already going back into the house.

&n
bsp; Then, not far from me, there was a frightful cry, a kind of gasp in which there was both rage and despair. The cry caused me to stand up. I had a clear sensation that it affected everyone’s nerves as painfully as mine. I turned round and saw that it had been uttered by an old man.

  He was thin and quite tall. He wore the kind of moustache that might have made one think that he was a former cavalry officer. I did not recognize him as one of Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf’s guests. I thought that he was a stroller that hazard had brought on to the road and who had stopped when the orchestra began to play.

  He was clutching his cane in his right hand, and with the left he was separating the branches of the hedge that cloistered the garden, as if he were going to launch himself forward. He was staring at Eveline, who was crossing the terrace; his face expressed anger, and also an inexplicable disgust.

  But I did not have to run forward to bar his path. He appeared to change his mind and collect himself. I even surprised in his face the pinch of the lips that expresses reflection after a stupidity that one has just committed. He shrugged his shoulders in order to turn his own anger to derision, and then he strode away in the direction of the sea.

  “Who cried out? What’s happened?” people were asking to the right and left; but the thin old man’s movement had been so rapid that I thought at first that I was the only one who had seen it. Then I perceived that Kotzebue had also witnessed the scene.

  I was about to ask him what his opinion on that subject was when I observed that he was not in his normal state. I thought at first that he was prey to a kind of exaltation caused by Eveline’s dance, but far from it: he was afraid, a panic fear that had almost made him flee.

  I approached him and questioned him. “Did you see that bizarre individual? Do you know him?”

  At first, he did not reply. He was gazing in the direction in which the man had disappeared. He seemed fearful that he might come back; his terror was so great that it communicated a sort of overexcitement, of painful anxiety, to me.

  I persisted, wanting to know who the old man was. Then Kotzebue took a few steps with me in the garden—but he turned round frequently, looking in every direction, and I could not help doing the same myself.

  The moon was now low on the horizon. It had changed color as it traversed the sky, becoming increasingly brighter, as if it wanted to dissolve in the calm blue of the night. Its rays, which came obliquely through the trees, had something supernatural about them.

  “I don’t know him,” Kotzebue said, finally, “but I know who he is. He once tried to enter into communication with me. He’s a very learned man. He lives in the big house that one can see on the right, behind a row of cypresses, when one goes in the direction of Saint-Pons.”

  He attempted to talk about something else. He had recovered from his terror, but I was too disappointed not to interrogate him again.

  “To what can you attribute that cry and that sudden anger?”

  Kotzebue reflected. He gave the impression of deciding to speak.

  “I don’t know, exactly. He was probably passing by chance. There are certain natures that are impressed by ugliness to the point of suffering. In the same way, there are people who cannot bear the sight of beauty. It has happened to me, before certain spectacles, to hesitate between knowing whether I ought to hate and destroy or fall to my knees and admire. There are men who have deliberately chosen one path. Don’t you remember something Lévy said, once? Lévy had already understood it, but I didn’t believe it then.”

  I had started at the name of Lévy. I asked what remark he meant.

  “Lévy claimed that there are around us, without our suspecting it, great invisible combats between good and evil forces. Certain men turn their will toward good, but others, with the same ardor, develop in a different direction. Study and wisdom can lead equally to one solution or the other. There will thus be evil conspiracies, men associated in order consciously to do evil. Lévy often repeated that to me, and I have perceived that he saw many things clearly.”

  We were heading back toward the house. Kotzebue quit me. A few people were shaking Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf’s hand. Automobiles were slowly descending between the two rows of eucalypti.

  I left on foot. The little house that I had rented was less than ten minutes’ walk in the direction of Saint-Pons. I kept to the middle of the road and looked attentively to the right and the left at the borders of cacti, vines and pines, motionless in the increasingly oblique moonlight.

  Someone was ahead of me, and turned right. I took a few more rapid steps in order to see who it was. I uttered a sigh of relief on recognizing the silhouette of Poor Jacques. He was going back to a tree in open country propitious to his innocent slumber. Even alone and in the shadow his march was timid. He pushed aside the branches delicately, as if he were afraid of brutalizing them.

  And I was astonished, if there really were the combats between forces of which Lévy had spoken, that good was not always vanquished and had not disappeared from the world a long time ago.

  I have often wondered whether it was at that exact moment that the transformation that took place among the members of the Essene group began.

  I have always had a tendency to attribute natural events to occult causes, and that tendency has only become more pronounced. I dare not affirm, therefore, that Monsieur Althon, the man with the physique of a former cavalry officer, had anything to do with what followed. I cannot say so in a certain fashion. If I question myself frankly, I respond that I don’t believe it—and yet, a voice in the utmost depths of my beings affirms that he was the cause of everything.

  This was the precursory sign.

  On the hill that overlooks the bay of Saint-Tropez, among the pines and the vines, there was a convent, which was a convent for repentant prostitutes. A benefactress had once endowed it in order that the most miserable of women could be gathered there. They lived there without ever going out, submissive, it was said, to a rigorous discipline that made the convent resemble a prison. The edifice was an ancient building, never replastered, cracked by the sun and labored by time, like the faded inmates that it sheltered.

  Every morning a maidservant of the nuns emerged from the convent and went down a steep path as far as the road, in order to wait there for the grocer’s automobile and to receive provisions therefrom. In order to do that she went past my door. It was always the same servant, a creature of indeterminate age known in the neighborhood as “Marie with the long neck,” who was by turns a doorkeeper, maid-of-all-work and a gardener, and seemed to be somewhat fallen into senility.

  From my garden I saw her pass by almost every day. She interested me because of her abnormally long neck, and her mask of plaster dappled with red streaks, which she had conserved from her former profession as a whore. Although devoid of make-up and having become a peasant woman again, she bore the stigmata of the past, but they were covered by the purity that idiocy gives to certain faces.

  That morning, as usual, she began to laugh in the distance a soon as she saw me, but when she came closer she stopped, and gazed respectfully at my forehead and the space surrounding my head, as if I had an aureole. Then she bent her knees, sketched the gesture of prostrating herself before me, and departed at a run. I stood there, uncertain as to whether I ought to be proud, ashamed, or not attach any importance to the action of a madwoman. But is there any action on earth, any image glimpsed, any sign, no matter how small, that is not a revelation, by virtue of unknown correspondences, of things to come?

  I remained obsessed by the wan face and the flexion of the knees of Marie with the long neck, and it was almost mechanically that, in the course of the afternoon, I put Uncle Tom’s Cabin under my arm and went to Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf’s house.

  Laurence hardly ever read. It was necessary, for her to pick up a book, that she was racked by ennui. The day before she had made the remark that all those who find reading redoubtable make: “I have nothing to read at the moment.”

  I had
just discovered Mrs. Beecher Stowe’s novel in a cupboard. I had said to myself: “That’s exactly the kind of literature that would suit Laurence. There was a little intellectual scorn on my part in that opinion.

  When I gave the book to Laurence I said: “Here’s a novel that impassioned our grandmothers and has impassioned me.” I was lying, for I had never managed to read it all the way through. I did not know the extent to which it was going to interest Laurence, and to have a great influence on her.

  Perhaps, in the events that followed, there was no magic, Lucifer played no role therein, and only Uncle Tom’s Cabin acted upon Laurence’s mind. There would then only be a responsibility for the tenant prior to me who had forgotten the book at the back of a cupboard. Perhaps a superior will veiled the tenant’s memory at the moment of his departure in order that the book that had a role to play would be left behind and could produce the events whose succession will soon be seen. Perhaps it is necessary to take the responsibility all the way back to Mrs. Beecher Stowe herself. But who will ever explain the mystery of causes and events?

  All the Essenes had gathered, at the instigation of Kotzebue, and they were ready to follow him into the terrain covered with pines and vines situated behind the house. They formed a vague cortege under his direction and that of Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf.

  This was the reason for it:

  Two years before, on the advice of Kotzebue and by his intermediation, Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf had bought all the land situated at the extremity of the Bay of Saint-Tropez. I have not ascertained whether Kotzebue, in pushing him to make that purchase, had an objective of a marvelous character in view or whether he wanted to collect a large commission. Perhaps he was both sincere and interested.