Lucifer

by Maurice Magre

  “Perhaps, my child, perhaps I’ll be able to give you absolution today.”

  It was the first time that Père Théodore had called me “my child” and it was the first time that a certain mildness had insinuated itself into his voice.

  “Kneel down,” he said, in the same tone.

  But I remained motionless, standing.

  “Kneel down!”

  He thought that I had not understood, and with a commanding voice he said: “On your knees!”

  I shook my head. I was plunged in uncertainty and astonished by my rebellion. I was still standing, my head raised, and then a light dawned within me.

  Forgiveness was not here. It could not be given to me by that man devoid of generosity. I did not know where it was. Perhaps it was outside, in the little garden, with the acacia, the box and the geranium, perhaps it was elsewhere, far away in another country, and perhaps nowhere. Perhaps it was not necessary that it should be given to me, because I had not committed any sin, and was still as innocent—me, the fornicator and the heretic—as a new-born child. Perhaps the desire for forgiveness was sufficient to receive forgiveness. But if I were the prey of the spirit of evil, if the concluded pact linked me to it, no divine functionary had the power to break that bond. No, I did not want to hear the words written in the exorcist’s book, the age-old invocations, the formulae of prayer by which souls became slaves. I did not want to forge new chains for myself, to sign a new pact. Faith is not conferred by a ceremony. I only needed love. No holy water, no recited prayer, cold confer that love upon me, the miracle of which did not come from the Church.

  I emerged from the area comprised by the four candles and uttered a sigh of relief.

  “Decidedly, I give up,” I said to Père Théodore, who was considering me with amazement. “I prefer to remain damned.”

  He uttered a cry and made a gesture to order me to resume my place.

  Not knowing how to reach the door decently, I added: “Please excuse me.”

  But Père Théodore blocked my path. His eyes were blazing. He must, for a moment, have formed the hypothesis of a trick. He rejected it and thought of a case of unusual unconsciousness or a loss of reason, perhaps a manifestation of the Evil One.

  He raised his cross, and our gazes met. He had made a sign to the Spanish peasant, who has advanced to lend him reinforcement. And in that sign he had summoned absent Inquisitors, soldiers with halberds, hooded executioners. I was living a scene from the fifteenth century.

  I was only thinking about getting out. I had the bizarre sensation that if I had had to struggle against the two men facing me, I would have encountered the same lack of resistance, the same sensation of nothingness, as when I had shaken Kotzebue in my apartment.

  I did not have to make the experiment. I don’t know whether I passed through Père Théodore or whether he stood aside abruptly in order not to be touched by the accursed one, but I reached the door and found myself in the garden. An extraordinary beauty of colors reigned there, animated by a terrestrial breath.

  I traversed the apartment with a single surge and reached the sunlit street. I went at a slow pace as far as the Avenue de Maine, looking at the shops and the merchants who were pushing barrows full of vegetables in front of them. I was not delivered from Lucifer, but I was delivered from God.

  I only felt a slight sadness, because it had never been given to me, as I had dreamed in a puerile fashion, to dine with the excellent Abbé Durand.

  What to do? Where to go? Peace might be in another dwelling than that of the Catholic God.

  I took a taxi, and then commenced an interminable course across Paris. I went to the Rue Vergniaud, where the temple of the Antoinist sect is.10 The bizarre black bonnet of an adept who seemed to be waiting for me on the threshold caused me to leave again. I went to the vicinity of the Jardin des Plantes, to the house of the Quakers; one could hear the distant roar of lions there, and I thought that a bad augury. The house of the Theosophists in the Square Rapp appeared to me to be too white and too vast, and there were too many magical signs on the façade.

  I had lunch in the company of the driver at a vegetarian restaurant adjacent to the house of which a greave in the address, in Bourg-la-Reine, of the last worshiper of the stars, the Sabean priest of the Aquarian Church. The church was closed and the priest absent. But I remembered that the planet Venus plays an important role in the cult of the stars and I remembered at the same time a passage from the prophecies of Isaiah in which the planet Venus is a synonym of Lucifer.

  We quit Bourg-la-Reine at top speed in order to reach the slopes of Mont Valérien and the house of the Sufis. We were about to reach the first habitations when I saw a tree whose foliage forms a strangely regular globe that rendered it similar to the tree of good and evil at the foot of which, in primitive paintings, the serpent offers the poisoned fruit. I seized the driver’s arm, just as we were about to pass under the shadow of the tree and we set off again.

  The concierge of the Modernists of Israel resembled one of the Easter Island statues, that of the Martinists a Tibetan devil, and before Christian Science a tall woman with a masculine appearance was pacing who had oblique eyebrows so curiously disposed that she made me think of an Irish Mephistopheles. I fled without looking back.

  A cloud abruptly veiled he sun when I arrived at the base of the Spiritualists; I slipped and fell on the stairway of the Swedenborgians, and when I pulled the antique bell-cord of the representative of the Millenarians no sound emerged, by virtue of the effect of a significant prestige. In the bookshop in the Rue Joseph-Dijon, the headquarters of the Divinist sect, I saw in the sparkling window, like an indicative beacon, book entitled Le Diable à Paris and I didn’t even get out of the taxi.11 A traffic jam in the Rue de Rennes present me from getting as far as the offices of the Salvation Army, and when I arrived in the Rue Féron in order to speak to the disciples of Zoroaster, a thunderclap rang out, rain began to fall, and I ordered the taxi to turn round.

  “Where are we going?” the driver asked me.

  “Drive at random,” I relied, in order to have time to reflect.

  We wandered around Paris. Night fell. The rain became heavier. Sometimes the vehicle stopped. It was in front of a sanitarium of a modern bank. The driver had seen me make so many stops before assorted monuments since the morning that he thought he was obeying a fortunate initiative in stopping of his own accord outside anything that might resemble a temple in the dim light. We even made a long pause in front of some scaffolding where a cross-beam in the center of a square of planks had the appearance of a hieroglyphic sign.

  And I wondered in the meantime where it might not be better to treat evil with evil. If there were organized Luciferians in Paris, why not seek them out? Why should I not attain that mountain Djebel Makloub where the Yezidees were? Why should I not go to the Antilles, in order to dance by night in the middle of a forest of coconut palms with the Voodoo cultists? Why should I not take the trans-siberian railway and reach the mysterious suburb of Shanghai where the disciples of Zi-Ka were, the sectarians of the San-ho-hoei, in order to aspire with them the juice of the necromantic poppy and worship the jade Dragon with the five golden claws? Would it not be better to discover by the Dead Sea, in the midst of calcareous cliffs, the monastery of the perverse Essenes, in order to profane with them the landscape where Jesus walked, until I had made myself a soul resembling their nothingness?

  The taxi was climbing the slopes of Montmartre.

  “Where are we going?” said the driver again.

  “The Place Blanche,” I replied, mechanically.

  I saw the driver peering in all directions, looking for a church. I showed him the Brasserie Romano.

  And he was disappointed when I paid him, not because of the tip, but because, having considered me all day as a kind of saint uniquely in quest of religious edifices, he saw me becomes again a vulgar customer of an ill-famed brasserie.

  There was a confused mass alongside the table where I h
ad sat down. That mass rose up at regular intervals and I perceived that it was formed by the junction of a human back and a curbed head. I was in the process of examining it curiously when I saw the head straighten up and a face appear.

  Over that face, of which I could only see the profile, tears were running. I retained a cry of surprise, for I thought I recognized Laurence—but a Laurence so transformed and aged that I could not add faith to the testimony of my eyes. Was it possible that in such a short time, her slim form could have thickened, that bags could have weighed down her eyelids, that her hair could have changed color?

  That Laurence with a double chin turned toward me, and I recognized Irma Pascaud.

  Thus one can stay for months, I thought, without remarking something that leapt immediately to the eyes: Laurence resembled Irma Pascaud.

  A halting conversation began, and for the sake of politeness I asked Irma why she was weeping. I remembered that in her youth she had also had crises of chagrin, but she did not reply to me when I asked her the cause. I hoped internally that she was going to keep the same discretion, for, hypnotized by my obsession, I was only interested in myself.

  But she talked. At first it was in incoherent and general phrases.

  “There’s no justice! There’s nothing to hope for from anyone, and if one wants to do something good, one might as well go and throw oneself in the Seine right away.”

  I said “No, no,” gently and I made a sign to Irma that I was ordering a port for her.

  “There’s no more reason for me to hide it,” she said, “And why did I hide it anyway? Do you remember the time when I loved you, when we were young, in the Latin Quarter?” She had a bitter smile, and she went on, swiftly: “No, you don’t remember it. Me neither, or hardly. You said, to make fun of me, that I had no soul. You were right. I didn’t have one anymore. I didn’t have one anymore because it had been taken from me.”

  I made a movement of alarm. Irma Pascaud reassured me.

  “You had nothing to do with it. It was the men, all the men. There’s a law that makes sure that one’s punished when one tries to do something good. You weren’t much occupied with me then, but you might have noticed that I had a secret. I was hiding something that made me weep when I was all alone. I remember that you asked me questions and I kept silent. You didn’t insist, anyway. When I knew you, I had a daughter that I loved more than anything. I had no soul but she, that girl, was my soul. And I loved her all the more because I wasn’t absolutely sure that her father was really her father. I could have confessed that to you, couldn’t I? There are men who don’t ever want to believe that they’re the father and others, on the contrary, whose self-esteem...well, the one I told believed it, He was already at least forty at that time. His name was Saint-Aygulf.”

  I didn’t make any movement because I had glimpsed the truth while Irma Pascaud was speaking.

  “You know her, you’ve been in her home, according to what I’ve been told, you’ve seen my daughter. The world seems very great, and yet it’s exactly as if it wasn’t, in that some people find one another incessantly. I never talked about Laurence before, but you can’t imagine how much I loved her. I loved her so much that I consented to be separated from her forever, and never see her again.

  “Her father came to find me, after years. He had remorse. He wanted to take his daughter with him, not because he loved her, but because of certain moral principles that people of his kind have. He would bring her up, he said to me, and make her a rich young woman, whom he could marry suitably, on condition that I would renounce her completely, that I never made any effort to find her. I don’t know what someone else would have done in my place. I asked myself the question. You know how I lived. Hotel rooms, cheap eating-places, Bohemia...

  “That was the way my daughter was going to live, since she would grow up with the sole example of her mother’s infatuations before her. I imagined her whole life, a model for painters, a girl-mother at the hospital, and the sweat of poverty that she was bound to shed. So I accepted—and it’s incredible, I even accepted joyfully, because I thought it was for Laurence’s good. And for fifteen years I can say that when I thought about her, and I thought about her every day, I didn’t even suffer, because I knew that what I was, she wouldn’t be, that she would share in things that I couldn’t reach, that she’d be better than me, better educated, that she’d have a soul, she...”

  Irma Pascaud’s eyes were dry and she was looking straight ahead. I wondered whether I ought to flee or beg her pardon. She resumed speaking, but in a low voice.

  Wasn’t it you who told me once that happiness isn’t the goal of life, but something else? To become more intelligent, to elevate oneself?”

  I made a sign that I might indeed have said something analogous.

  “Well, what happened isn’t anyone else’s fault, it’s mine, and I’ve been punished for having believed that a child can be brought up better with money than beside her wretched mother. Laurence lives in Montmartre now, as I’ve lived here and as I still live here. Perhaps she lives in the same street as me and perhaps tomorrow she’ll come to install herself in the same hotel. According to what I’ve been told, she goes with anyone, just like that, because she’d had enough of her kind of life and her mother’s blood was running in her veins. You’re doubtless wondering how I know that. It’s by chance...while talking...

  “One evening, Laurence made confidences to a woman, Henriette, that I’ve known for a long time. I’d often mentioned by daughter to Henriette. So she made connections. She understood everything. Laurence told her how she had left her father, she even told her with whom, but Henriette didn’t remember the name. Well, she left him, not because she didn’t love him enough, and not because she loved him too much, but because she wanted to lead the same life as her mother. And she’s leading it. It appears that she’s been with one, then another. Many people say that it’s by vice, for the desire to have men, but I’ve passed through it, and I know that it isn’t that.”

  Irma fell silent. I interrogated her with my eyes. Her power of explanation must have had a limit, for she sketched two or three phrases and then stopped. Then another thought came to her and she turned toward a clock on the wall.

  “Is that the time?” she asked me.

  I looked at my watch and confirmed that it was quarter to seven.

  “I need to leave you,” said Irma, and she hastily pulled on gloves that had an odor of turpentine. But she had something else to say. She raised her head and I saw her features crumpled by an extraordinary expression of joy; the bags of her eyes, the pleats of her mouth and the rice-powder dissolving in streaks suddenly made a kind of ecstatic sun, and Irma Pascaud suddenly had the air of a saint contemplating an apparition of the Virgin.

  “You won’t believe it,” she said, “but Laurence has never ceased to love me. She’s always thought about me and she tried to see me. I don’t know how Kotzebue had guessed that I was her mother, but he tried to find me. He had seen me in a café in the Place Blanche and he had told her, and it appears that Laurence slipped out of the house when she could to prowl around here, in the hope of meeting me. Eh? All the same, if we’d found ourselves face to face, do you think that the voice of the blood would have caused us to recognize one another?”

  I didn’t have time to respond, because Irma Pascaud had stood up, and anything I might say no longer had the slightest importance.

  “I’ll know her at seven o’clock. I’m going to meet Laurence at Lucienne’s. She asked for the meeting and I believe that it will be the most beautiful moment of my life.”

  “Why were you weeping then?”

  “Because of what you said once about me. You said that I had no soul. So I thought that I wasn’t worthy to embrace my daughter.”

  I would have liked to drop to my knees to kiss the hem of her dress and beg her pardon a thousand times over.

  But she headed for the door and I saw her draw away rapidly,

  I walked rapidly.
It was raining and I had taken off my hat in order for the rain to refresh my forehead. I was intoxicated, not because of the port I’d drunk but by virtue of an interior alcohol that the flux of my thoughts distilled.

  The sound that the shutters over shop windows make as they fall was audible. Automobile horns resounded. People under umbrellas were running. The sky was so low that seemed to be touching the roofs of the houses. I wandered beneath a tenebrous lid that was only illuminated by a single light, that of the love of Irma Pascaud for her daughter. That light had just shone for me, and it was extinct, but I knew that it existed. There was a light that was love.

  I went past the widow of a jeweler’s shop, and behind the fake diamonds, the Japanese pearls and the streams of imitation pearls, in the middle of electric flames, I perceived Mammon, the Hebrew demon of wealth. He was standing up in a correct jacket and holding up, with the smile of a conjuror, before a young blonde woman, a green emerald like a drop of absinthe or the eye of a corpse. I stuck my face to the window and I perceived the ravishing features of the young woman, which seemed to be decomposed under the effect of desire. A pact similar to mine was about to be concluded there, and I was tempted to run into the shop and force the young woman to listen to my story.

  Perhaps I would have done so if, as I stepped back on the sidewalk, I had not collided with an individual with gold-rimmed spectacles and golden rings on his bony fingers. He was thin, his face affected geometric forms, and in the lines of his arms, their relationships with the angles of his legs and feet, there were complicated problems of trigonometry, like those I had been able to solve when I was preparing for my baccalaureate. He was similar to Astaroth, the genius of the science of numbers and measures, such as he is represented in books of demonology.

  Behind him, mouth painted and cheekbones powdered with raindrops like scales on the plaster of his forehead, a rose in his buttonhole and his hips swaying, advanced an equivocal young man, who licked his lips on seeing me and in whom I recognized Belial, who had a statue in Sidon and had been adored in Sodom as a god.