Lucifer

by Maurice Magre

  I knew that before devoting himself to communication with the spirits, Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf’s life had been orientated toward money and the most vulgar desire for women. I had had many examples of his ferocious egotism and his limited respect for the rules of society. It was difficult for me to believe that his guides, leaning over human beings in order to direct them, would have chosen that old man among all of them to be their spokesman. I murmured the confused words of approval that I owed to the father of Eveline and Laurence.

  But he took me by the arm in a familiar fashion. He had to talk to me about another subject. His daughter Laurence was very anxious and had been for a long time. He had done so much for her! His venerated wife, whose name he could not pronounce without emotion, had also sacrificed herself for a child who had always returned evil for good. A great problem, that of children, and what a mystery was that of heredity!

  He had just had very grave scenes with his daughter. Had she not taken it into her head to want to return to Paris? She had gone so far as to threaten to go without authorization if he did not take her back. And just at the moment when such fine things were happening here, of such an elevated moral order! And what were these stories of negroes with which she had been breaking his head for days? Eveline could not do anything with her sister. No one had any influence over her. She was a rebel. Perhaps his saintly wife had been right when she predicted that Laurence would turn out badly. He was conscious of having done all his duty. Oh, the ideal thing would be to marry her off as soon as possible, but there too it was necessary to reach an understanding. Sacrifices have a limit. He held to what everyone knows—he did not say, of course, “what I know”—and he hastened to add that he was speaking in a general fashion and because that came into the conversation.

  He had done all he could for Laurence. She would have almost nothing on marrying. It was just that everyone imagined that he was richer than he was. The duty of a man who has a role to play is not to dispossess himself for his children. He had read King Lear and that reading had impressed him. Thank God that his daughter Eveline had decided not to marry!

  “You understand me, don’t you?” he said, by way of conclusion.

  I responded ingenuously that I understood him perfectly, and he shook my hand more forcefully than usual.

  When I came to Monsieur Saint-Aygulf’s house after dinner, Laurence had already retired to her room. I had the impression that the atmosphere retained traces of a recent argument, but as several other people arrived at the same time as me, I was unable to analyze that impression.

  Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf and Eveline were ready to leave.

  “It’s only half an hour’s walk,” someone said

  I saw that several lanterns had been prepared; I learned that Kotzebue, who had dined at Monsieur Althon’s house, was to have preceded us with the latter.

  On a hill, facing the sea, in the midst of trees, in the heart of nature, it had been decided that a sort of mystical mass would be celebrated. The ritual had been prepared a long time ago by Kotzebue. He believed firmly in the power of ceremonies and he had resolved, in accord with Monsieur Althon, to celebrate it by moonlight, on the ground that retained the influence of their master Simon.

  Several winding roads headed toward the hill to which we were going. Those zigzags were rather steep and our group—there were about fifteen of us—was strung out along the hillside. The night was clear and warm, and a storm not very far away charged the air with electricity. Sometimes one of those bearing a lantern stopped and swung it, as a sign to the laggards to hurry up. A red glow was visible on the other side of the hill, which had to be leading Monsieur Althon’s group.

  The atmosphere poured a strange overexcitement into the nerves. Not all the conversations had the meditative tone that had been agreed. Madame Vigerie, who was joking and leaning on young Charlie’s arm, sometimes uttered a burst of laughter whose musical quality took on an unexpected value and fell into the silence like a metallic cascade. The two young Swedish women were holding one another so tightly as they walked that they seemed to belong to a single form. The Levantine dance-teacher stuck tightly to Mademoiselle Longève. As if obedient to a law, everyone was proceeding in couples.

  I was following the zigzags alongside Eveline, but we only exchanged a few words. She had put on a shawl, but had taken it off again and was carrying it over her arm. The fabric of her dress was light and allowed the ease of her body to be seen. The moonlight falling on the milky whiteness of her neck and arms and the human breath that came from her gave me the sentiment of advancing beside a warm and living statue.

  As the road turned, Eveline moved aside a mimosa branch that extended in front of her. I was right beside her, and we saw at the same time two forms stationary a few paces away from us. It was Madame Vigerie and her companion. She had fainted in his arms and her head was tipped back beneath his. She was sucking the young man’s lips, savoring a kiss whose sensuality seemed all the greater because it was furtive and hasty.

  That lasted a few seconds. The sigh they uttered as they unlaced was followed by a laugh of pleasure.

  I had grasped Eveline’s arm and I squeezed it with a pressure that increased for as long as the embrace I had before my eyes lasted. Still holding the mimosa branch she had moved aside with her right hand. Eveline leaned toward me. The moon illuminated the bright oval of her face and I stared into her eyes. They were profound, blue and indefinite. I could not divine their expression. There was an interrogation, perhaps an anguish. The light of purity that I was accustomed to see there was mingled with a slightly anxious element. My face drew nearer to hers, not by virtue of a definite determination on my part, but by the attraction exercised by the profundity of the gaze, which seemed to hide, very far away, the solution to an enigma of the soul.

  Eveline doubtless thought that I was trying to kiss her lips. She pulled her arm away from my hand with an abrupt gesture and the movement of the head of someone collecting herself. The mimosa branch struck me in the face like a slap. At the same time, while she went on ahead of me, I heard a little insulting laugh, and I saw her looking at me over her shoulder, measuring the distance that separated us, as if she were afraid that I might throw myself upon her and as if that action were the most repugnant one that her brain could conceive. I wanted to follow her, but, nimbler than me, she outdistanced me, and I saw her almost running, desirous of escaping my presence.

  I continued climbing, alone, invaded by a strange sentiment of muted anger.

  The paths died away among clumps of pines and cork-oaks, wild cacti and abandoned vine ceps. A lantern was placed on the ground to guide the new arrivals; a little further on there were others hanging on the cypresses. I saw that the cypresses were seven in number and that, planted in a circular fashion, they designed vaguely the form of a crescent.

  The bushes were full of whispers; even though they could not be numerous, I had the sensation of being surrounded by an agitated and mysterious crowd.

  I recognized the Russian accent of Monsieur Althon; I perceived him next to Kotzebue and a tall, pale woman who had a necklace of large pearls around her neck and whose haughty beauty impressed me. I thought that she must be the Swedenborgian. I overheard phrases that I knew, but which took on a new value in Kotzebue’s mouth because of the landscape and the night.

  “Collect the power of the moon...! The spirit of Helen will descend...but don’t neglect the flesh..... Perhaps you’ll be conducted toward the spirit by a supernatural frisson of a physical nature and the torture of enjoyment...”

  I saw silhouettes in the shadows that were adopting poses of adoration. A nocturnal bird frightened by the noise flew away with a heavy wing-beat. One of the Swedes, separated momentarily from her friend, extended her tapering hands toward her and, in seizing her, almost caused her to fall against her. It seemed to me that a breath came from the distant forests that surrounded us, as grandiose as religion, and as terrible as fear.

  I did not have time
to be astonished. The ceremony had commenced. Kotzebue, standing in the middle of the circle of cypresses, pronounced a ritual invocation. I could not make out what he was saying at first, but I measured his sincerity by the tremor of his voice, its contained emotion. A few words carried as far as me:

  “Thought of God! Sister of the Word! By the fire of amour nature is renewed. O you, who have descended into the flesh...you who are Helen...”

  Behind the cypresses, women’s voices intoned a litany. The voices were not very numerous; there cannot have been more than three women singing. It was not, in any case, a chant but a slightly modulated prayer.

  “We are three and we are one... The three are only one... I am exiled from the Pleroma... Let us commune with you, O Sophia Achamoth...!”6

  And suddenly, I felt alone. I found myself in a solitude whose perfection filled me with an exalted delight. Alone on the summit of a mountain, with the sea blue-tinted in the distance before me, among the motionless brothers that were oaks, fig-trees and pines! I was the central point of the world, its cause and its end, and I enjoyed the comprehension of it for the first time.

  “Let us commune with you, O Sophia Achamoth!” repeated voices that came from nowhere.

  That communion was accomplished. There was a great cloud that made a design in the sky and threatened to cover the moon, but I directed my will at it and steered it to the right. I was myself the contours of the cloud, the very essence of the cloud. At my feet I saw the mass of the hotel with its illuminated windows and the steeples of its lightning-conductors. I was the rooms of the hotel, the automobile circling around in arriving at its perron, I was the manager in the smoking jacket, and I could have read all the thoughts inscribed in his brain. The consciousness of that magnification of my being procured me a joy as serene as my clairvoyance, as immense as my pride.

  “O Ennoia, divine spirit in the body of Helen...!”

  There was a quiver around me of a life so unlimited that I experienced a need to make contact with it. In the same way that on awakening after certain dreams one touches one’s body in order to make sure that one is really oneself, I wanted to touch the wood of a tree trunk, the terrestrial matter that was beneath me. I fell to my knees and I extended my hands forward, with the consequence that I was on all fours in an animal posture. But that did not embarrass me, for astonishing faculties were revealed within me.

  I was nyctalopic.7 There was no more darkness. I distinguished the cicadas sleeping on the trunks of the pines, even those a great distance away. I saw the suckers with which they were absorbing the resin, their short antennae, their hyaline wings, their faceted triangular eyes. I enjoyed the peace of their slumber. At the same time I enjoyed the movement of the night-birds, the nocturnal activity of all the sylvan creatures. After having carried a thousand wisps of straw into the anthill, I rested with the thousands of ants. A nocturnal voyager, I accompanied the rabbits along the vineyards, and wallowed in muddy potholes with the badgers. I loved them all because they were part of me and they permitted me to grow. For I grew incessantly with the life of animals, I raised myself in the branches of trees and the flight of birds, and it was the moon, the dead planet, that was my goal.

  “Helen, Ennoia,” repeated whispering voices, “penetrate the substance of our flesh with your kiss!”

  I had the notion that my immeasurably increased body was made of a putrescence vivified by the lunar light, but I was glad of that, and that artificial life filled me, provided that it was always multiplied. And on four feet, like the animals, I waited for the promised kiss of that Helen, to be burned by her mouth, inundated by her sap, transported by her ardor.

  My face was turned in the direction of the sea and I received the kiss. There is no sensation, in dream or in reality that is experienced such as one had imagined it. No carnal lip brushed me, and yet a warm, damp and simultaneously sad kiss was deposited on my mouth. In the semi consciousness that subsisted within me, I identified the lips that gave me that kiss with those of Laurence and with those of Eveline simultaneously, the lips that I had had and those that had drawn away from me with disgust.

  Ennoia, immaterial ideal beauty that I incarnated in two young women, had you emerged from the night and the moon, by virtue of the magic of incantations, in order to touch me with the ember of desire?

  The cloud that I had previously steered in its course, abandoned to itself, returned to cover the moon. Obscurity returned me to myself.

  A stone bruised my right hand. I was curved by my bestial posture. The lanterns were lifted from the cypresses. I heard stifled sighs. I saw recumbent forms. A naked breast emerged from a ripped corsage and a hand caressed it. It was rosy, marbled, larger than nature, as if charged with a milky putrescence. It made me think of a kind of unhealthy beast that an excessively forceful caress might cause to burst.

  I took a few steps. All the living beings had dissolved, had disappeared. The hill seemed deserted.

  A panic took possession of me. I started running, I went downhill at hazard. I bumped into trees. Dogs barked. I went alongside a farm of whose existence I was unaware at that location, and which seemed to me to have sprung up by magic. I finally reached the road and went on to the sea, for I needed to contemplate the unlimited water. Thank God! The excessively mysterious whiteness of Saint-Tropez was imperceptible.

  Never had the waves and the night seemed so menacing. There was in nature the same aspect of mystery as in the human soul. What vanity to pore over that shadow and interrogate it! And I remembered the words of I no longer remember what ancient author:

  They will adventure over the sea of darkness in order to discover the unknown there, and they will never come back...

  I made a sign to the driver to stop and I got out of the vehicle.

  “I don’t think we’ll have to wait for long,” I said, to reassure him. But he belonged to the species of men of the Midi for whom the notion of time does not count, and who find it as well to be in one place as another. He made a broad gesture to signify that nothing has importance.

  I looked at my watch. It was midnight. As the headlights made a large circle of light on the road I had him switch them off and I started pacing up and down. Laurence could not be long delayed.

  “Ha ha!” I said to myself, internally. “It’s an elopement.” And I savored the romantic character that the action takes on, if one gives it the name of elopement rather than that of departure. I strove to expel from my mind the thought of the annoyances that might crop up. I knew that all the agreeable hours of life, those that one takes pleasure in retracing later in telling the embellished story, were always spoiled at the time by petty preoccupations.

  My conscience was tranquil. Laurence had not said that she loved me. I had enough confidence in myself to believe that it was only a lack of impetus, and that amour would come later if it had not already come. There had not been any question of marriage between us. Laurence had set aside swiftly, several times, the vague allusions that I had been able to make on that subject. She had declared frankly that it was for her merely a narrower form of the slavery of young women. I was delivering her from her present slavery and permitting her to quit a family by whom she was not loved and whom she did not love.

  I did not make myself any reproach. In any case, I knew that my fortune was sufficiently large to compensate generously what Laurence might lose from the material viewpoint in leaving her father. That subject had not been raised between us, and I wondered whether Laurence, absorbed by considerations of slavery and liberty, had even thought about it for a single instant. The sequence of events made me think not. People sometimes act neither out of amour nor personal interest, but by virtue of an obscure movement of their nature, which they would be quite incapable of defining themselves.

  As Laurence did not arrive I decided to advance toward the house in such a fashion as to see whether or not her bedroom window was illuminated. Suddenly, however, in the depths of the night, there was the sound of a little bell
and a moving light coming from the road turned right and drew away along the sunken road.

  To my great surprise I saw a choirboy swinging a lantern with one hand and holding a cross in the other. He was preceding a priest. I distinguished the arched, willfully solemn back of the latter, and the whiteness of his surplice. His elbows were tight against the body and he was carrying an object veiled by a cloth in both hands.

  “The Holy Sacrament!” I murmured.

  The priest was heading toward the convent, to which he had doubtless been called by someone who was about to die. He was moving rapidly, and I ran to follow him.

  Nothing could have filled me with more ease that that encounter. It was an occult advertisement, a favorable sign. I marched behind the symbolic representation of God. The act that I was accomplishing participated in a kind of benediction. I had examined it from every angle. I did not consider it as reprehensible, according to my personal morality. But not only was it not reprehensible, it was good, in the elevated sense of the word, it was divine since the Holy Sacrament was preceding me at the moment when I was about to accomplish it. I believed for a second, in my delight, that I glimpsed beneath the inclined mimosas, as if no priest were carrying it and no veil hid it, the radiant circle of the pyx with golden leaves, gliding on its own to show me the way.

  The contradiction between my absolute lack of Catholic faith and that intervention in my favor tried to traverse my mind, but I rejected it immediately.

  I stopped at the place where the road approached the house. A window was illuminated. It was that of the room that Laurence shared with her sister. During the first part of their sojourn they had each had their own room, but when Monsieur de Saint-Aygulf’s guests had been filled the house Laurence had been obliged to abandon hers and share her sister’s.

  The day before, when she and I had calculated the difficulties we would have to overcome in order to leave without being disturbed, the question of the shared bedroom had been considered as the sole cause of possible hitches. In order to leave, Laurence had to wait until her sister was asleep. Ordinarily, without having exchanged any words, they each read on their own side. Laurence had become drowsy first and insisted that the electric light be switched off. For two or three evenings Uncle Tom’s Cabin had caused a truce in that argument. Eveline, who was reading at that moment Saint Teresa’s Interior Castle, had take advantage of it to mock her sister for the mediocrity of her reading. But Uncle Tom’s Cabin was concluded. Laurence had promised to simulate fatigue that evening and oblige her sister to interrupt The Interior Castle. She counted on getting up in the dark, dressing silently and being able to leave the room without awakening Eveline, who would only perceive her departure the next day.