With Pythie and Théa I went, at dusk, through the low and wide portal of the place, into a vestibule in iron and silver mosaic. Indicative gestures separated us for the bath that precedes every important action in this hygienic land. A Chinaman introduced me into a circular chamber in which a meter and a half of warm water covered the blue faience of the floor-tiles. Soaped and massaged, hair and beard equalized by scissors and doused in perfumes, I was also crowned, like an effigy of Caesar, with red headbands and a double palm. The servitor fitted me with boots of supple red silk laced all the way to mid-thigh and put over me a kind of blue chlamys with black stripes, which a brocade belt secured to my figure. Forewarned by my companions, I was not astonished by that festival costume.
A few moments later, I was on the threshold of an edifice higher than the largest Gothic cathedrals. The rows of long columns sustained on the palms of their capitals five cupolas of orange glass. The voice of invisible orchestras rose up from the ground. A cheerful light expanded through pink and green canopies, tinting a crowd dressed like me in chlamydes in various fabrics, long red boots with thin and muffled soles, each member coiffed as I was in a double imperial palm, perfumed like me with delicate and penetrating odors.
The bare beasts of Théa and Pythie, and a thousand other women, trembled as they walked beneath the transparency of the fabric. One sensed flesh close to flesh, odor within odor. Enervating music was perpetuated, covering the sound of water-jets falling into the pools of fountains between the columns. Divans covered with furs, colored woolen carpets and silk cushions welcomed all attitudes. With pretty cries, a hundred free-flying birds moved through the nave, fluttering among verdure bristling on the walls. A murmur of joy rippled through the audience. The eyes of women responded to one another. Many lay down, entwined, their lips joined; and then, in front of us, a fresco representing the cortege of Bacchus sank beneath the turquoise floor-tiles. The stage appeared.
Its scenery prolonged agrarian perspectives extending toward a landscape of gilded mountains, a marine line of violet waters, evoking a pleasant beach of Hellas. Laburnums bordered a stream. Goats were browsing laurier-roses. A satyr with silvery fur was blowing into a panpipe a melody that repeated the laughter of the stream, the whisper of the wind and the quarreling of warblers.
He was an old faun. His curly beard was as gray as his wooly hair, pierced by two golden horns, and the pelt of his belly was a little blacker. An extraordinary virtuoso, he was blowing into his seven-holed flute the song of total nature. Delighted sighs around me revealed the satisfaction of the auditorium.
We made a long voyage with him; we confronted the tempest on the mountain; we descended beside the cascade, by means of a path of sonorous pebbles. We encountered beasts, the rustle of their flight through the bushes, the gallop of herds. Eagles cried over our heads; then there were more familiar voices, those of finches and cuckoos, the caresses of the breeze in the light foliage, the trotting of horses, and the running of humans. Later, the water of the river splashed against the banks, the cries of infants appealed; then the confused voices of virgins, young women. Matrons, old women... Silence again; the fall of an apple into the grass; the flight of doves...
At that moment, the timidity of a nymph parts the bushes. She inspects the scene, but does not perceive the faun, who is crouching down treacherously behind the laurier. A ballerina, the nymph enters cautiously, listening. The flute resumes the quarreling of warblers. A second nymph comes through the bushes, a third…five…twenty…and there they are, listening to the dispute of the birds.
I shall not retrace the phases of the spectacle for you, my dear friend. Imagine that immense stage, gradually foiled by the quadrilles of the dancing girls in leotards clinging to their nudity. The cortege traces marvelous figures. The faun resumes on his flute the symphony of the overture, amplified by all the means of a powerful invisible orchestra, with a savant artistry, the dancers become themselves the natural forces that he is singing. They fly like clouds before the wind; they unite and imitate water, with the swell of their hips and breasts. They are the cascade and the river; then the hinds of the frightened herd, then the children, the girls, the women, the voices on the bank of the river.
Suddenly, the faun surges forth; the nymphs flee, come back, surround him. A dialogue is engaged. He shows the power of his art as best he can, blind and without mobility, but visiting, by means of suggestion, the most beautiful aspects of the world. Now he extracts from his flute the sound of a kiss. They laugh; they quiver. They represent to him that he is too old, too ugly. He tries to embrace one. The others extract her from that desire. Then he takes up his flute again and draws therefrom the imitation of all that amour has of resounding kisses, murmurs, nervous laughter, sighs, gasps, hiccups and cries.
On hearing that, the nymphs mock him at first, then are astonished, and then become exasperated. One embraces another, and another phase of the ballet begins, in which bodies embrace and writhe, in which passions is slaked in postures. Other fauns come running, the priapic folly takes hold, full of cheerful speech, witty and delicate repartee. Those nymphs and those fauns know the rationale of the world. They foresee the ridiculous effort of the peoples who will succeed them on the terrain of Hellas. From their amours, humans will be born, who will abandon the joy of nature in order to dominate or serve...
The second act presents a ring of rocks, the wild man, the chief of the horde, who returns home brings his prisoners, the weak: adolescents, women, old men. With his bloody ax, he obliges the old men to repair his weapons, the women to satisfy his lusts, the adolescents to build for him. He founds the family, killing those who resist, and when he leaves, having taken away the tree that serves as a bridge to cross the abyss, a chorus of lamentations weeps.
The third act shows the lair of the hero, at the summit of a hill that serfs in rags are laboring. Clad in his armor, the faun, the man, is sitting under the oak of justice, leaning on his sword. On his knees, the vanquished renders him homage, and to seal the peace gives him his daughter in marriage, gold, horses and silver reliquaries, arms, dowry and booty. Enslaved, the woman lies, deceives. The serf sins with the chatelaine.
In the following acts, all the avatars of amour are represented, from epoch to epoch, race to race. Oedipus wanders, Othello strangles Desdemona, Romeo and Juliet cherish one another, Antony stabs. Armed with religion and the law, the husband replaces the chief of the horde, the wild man, but with no less ferocity.
Thus the spectacle continues, traversing the series of the centuries. The relevant scenes of amour are mimed every time, all the way to the most humble of the denouement; and it finishes with the return of the faun and his cortege of nymphs. He takes up his flute again. He recalls the cries heard in the pangs of eternal passion. He represents the actions of the world unfurling and unraveling around the divine Phallus, and the ballet recommences, the living tableaux completing it with a magical eroticism.
Other performances that I have seen summarize thus passion through the ages. That justifies marvelous and various settings, from act to act, multiple fashions of dialogue, heterogeneous studies of mores. A drama unfolding, as among us, in accordance with the unities of time and place, would not please. The far more synthetic intelligence of the crowd likes that negation of time, that search for the transformation of an idea, an instinct, in the course of successive societies, and that content of enchantment, lyrical drama, sentimental comedy, farce, priapism and sumptuous dances.
It was after one of those spectacles that I observed the strength of my inclination with regard to Pythie. As the members of the audience stirred, looked at one another and greeted one another in the glare of a thousand electric flowers that suddenly lit up on the trees of iron that formed the fabulous vegetation of the columns, a man approached her, a smile in his beard. She recognized him, they held out their hands to one another. She made him take his place alongside her on the fur of the divan. They did not take long to start laughing and whispering, and it wa
s necessary to anticipate, from the kisses they prolonged with closed eyes, imminent intimacies.
Doubtless the alteration of my face alerted Théa to my pain. She told me to go with her into the basements, where the celebrations were continuing. I obeyed, not without turning round again, before going down, to savor the dolor of seeing the gilded beard of the intruder against Pythie’s face, his crown of palms united with her crown of palms, and his powerful musculature imprinted on the softness of her undulating lines. A physical anguish afflicted my body. I had difficulty breathing. My hand became limp in Théa’s. The veins in my temples swelled. Very slowly, I recovered my energy, which had fled.
At that moment, my friend, I remembered what you had said to me in Biarritz about passionate torture. Yes, the dolor of seeing oneself abandoned causes physical distress. It is not only our pride that weeps; it is our fibers, our bones, and our blood. I sensed it then, and was frightened by my condition.
The contemplation of the subterranean rooms settled me somewhat. Their mirrored walls seemed illuminated by multicolored flowers, whose pistils were luminous flames. I saw without pleasure women and men clinging together in the depths of dark lodges, over the openings of which the folds of painted curtains fell back. I tested with insipid lips the golden beverages that Chinese children poured into cups. The sprightly delirium of music struck my ears with futile sounds. Although I had consented to those sensualities, the caresses, by turns bestial, light and nervous, of a woman with firm breasts and clenched fingers, although they shook my body with unexpected spasms and caused my mouth to cry out, did not efface the image of Pythie in the other’s arms, nor the anger that her indifference left me. In vain Théa made me drink the lips of a serpentine Malay woman and the breasts of a fleshy Chinese woman; in vain she enveloped my loins with the embrace of a blonde with the scent of warm milk. I acquired bodily fatigue therein without obtaining the lassitude of my anguish.
We quit the mattress of violet silk that garnished the lodge and remained under the raised curtain. Behind us, in the glimmer of the red night-light, the blonde, exhausted by pleasure, was asleep. The octagonal rooms converged, with their mirrored walls, on the intersection where we were.
Intoxicated by the golden liquor we had drunk, obviously aphrodisiac, women were running in a farandole, breasts trembling, naked to the girdle that retained their loosened clamydes. Toward the signs of men, too few in number, they slid under the door-curtains of the open lodges in the corners of the octagonal rooms. Mirrors multiplied the vermilion laughter of their mouths, the brightness of their teeth, the white or brown gestures of their arms, the rhythmic dancing of their legs in scarlet stockings. Ten ventilators were blowing out gusts of perfume over the murmur of the excited crowd.
Momentarily, one admired the science of a dancer who was reanimating the vigor of men by miming with the spasms of her belly a rage of desires. Later, a group of women, white and brown, entwined themselves together; sighs swelled the ivory of bosoms; the mauve and pink tips of breasts kissed. Slender girls swung on trapezes, rotating, offering to the eyes the taut lines of their arid haunches.
Moaning, howling, furious and joyful, women crushed one another, knocked one another down and raised themselves up to reach the loins of a ephebe mounted on a stool, who promised himself to the most alert. For a second, it seemed to me that I saw Pythie among them, her ripe breasts, her hairy armpits, her broad rump. But Théa covered my face with her face, and pushed me back into our lodge, letting the painted curtain fall back over the light of the blazing flowers.
We found ourselves back in the red penumbra, on our knees on the silk of the cushions. Other women had slipped in there, gasping. An odor of burning flesh, a perfume of ether and roses, choked me. Hands took possession of me. Mouths were stuck to my skin. I fell into arms. Embraces were sealed.
There was black fire in eyes, breath, the crawling of velvet skin, the clawing of cruel hands, the biting of dry mouths, the ebb and flow of flesh against my flesh, the suction of cupping lips, soft breasts flattened against my hands, extraordinary kisses, the friction of tresses.
Strangled by dolor or joy, a female voice was moaning lamentably. Warm women were drowning me. I was choking. My body was bent like a bow. I was afraid of dying; I struggled; I pushed that vermicular mass of bacchantes away; I extracted my body from hands, arms legs; I reached the curtain and drew it aside.
Everywhere, the lust of shapeless couples was groaning, and in front of me, a child stuck to a mirror misted all over by her warmth, was sobbing voluptuously against her image.
I completed her dream with my strength.
Up above, in the hall with the cupolas, one rediscovers the beat of the music, laden tables, and fortifying beverages. One grasps the measure of things again. One calms down before the architectural harmony of the infinite naves, before the colors of the glass flowers in which electricity shines.
Ceremonies of that sort take place once a week.
I can well understand how, compared with such lusts, the petty stupidities of sentiment appear negligible. Go talk about moonlight, eternal passion and twin souls to women sated like that once a week. They look at you as they would a silly child. But it reduces passionate dramas to a minimum. The communism of erotic sensations destroys the desire for property over the lover. One remains free to offer kisses to whomever one likes, without a first connivance creating any obligation to future connivance.
Amour does not occupy, here, the place that it occupies in the old world. And yet, I assure you, one is better able to profit from the pleasures it involves.
Thus, sentimental novels do not attract anyone’s attention. Women as well as men seek in libraries works on history, linguistics, geography and science—hence the extreme intelligence of everyone. No longer having to equip themselves for the combats necessitated among us by the conquest of amour and bread, the peoples of Jérôme the Founder spend their leisure time fortifying their souls with knowledge. They talk about problems of science as Europeans gamblers talk about problems of baccarat, chess or écarté. They amuse themselves by competing in knowledge.
You can easily imagine that in the wake of the weekly orgies that exhaust their sexual instincts in the theaters, neither men nor women plan rendezvous in the intervals between those fêtes. If they grant favors, it isn’t with fever, but out of politeness.
You will not hear anyone here taking pleasure in narrating the details of those common adventures, just as you never hear anyone in Europe harping on the menus of their meals. There is, in this country of Malaisie, a people with sated instincts who no longer have any covetousness, except for intelligence.
In a future missive, I shall tell you about the education received by children; you will see with what artistry the instructresses and the professors give them the taste and avidity to know more.
LETTER IV
Jupiter, October 1896,
Palais des Hôtes.
…I remember you telling me about someone who, during the school vacations, persisted in spoiling the hours by the number of his questions relative to the problem of three fountains, or the encounter of two locomotives departing at different times and traveling at different speeds. He tested your knowledge with interrogations about the longitudes and latitudes of islands, or the classification off insects. Like that relative, the people here only distribute pedantic propositions. The beauty of natural scenery only excites them to quantify the value of pigments, the curvature of lines, the radiation of heat and light.
A cloud passes over. If I say: “There’s a cloud.” Someone replies to me by estimating the approximate density of its vapor and calculating its velocity. Someone else overbids him, communicating a hypothesis regarding the formation of winds. Five or six theories overlap. There is an outcry. Someone resolves the problem by means of algebra. Texts are cited. The shrill voices of women pierce the quotation of figures. I remain bewildered by my ignorance amid that racket of contradictory methods.
Their scientific
institutions do not, any more than their political institutions, establish perfect accord between their souls. In the city of Diane, I am assured, a group of female workers avid to know astronomy has commenced by proving that the Earth and the Sun remain motionless, and movement in general is only an illusion of the senses. You can imagine that I shall not report in this letter the reasons advanced by the young women, but they seem to have rapidly conquered a multitude of believers. Oh, that poor planet! Before Galileo, it was the Sun that bounded above her, from Orient to Occident; since Galileo, it is she who waltzes around the star. Tomorrow it will be demonstrated that neither one of them dances, and that by the practical adepts of the positive philosophy that basis itself on the immutability of knowledge.
Thus, here as in Europe, struggles, competition, rivalries, acrimony and hatred are not hidden by the scruple of history. Only the motive has varied. People do not tear one another apart for the conquest of women, for lust, nor for ambition, but the intellectual need for certainty acts as harshly on covetousness as our material needs. The government falls when a new discovery belies by its evidence the theoretical assertions it sustained.
In this city of Power, Jupiter, oligarchies succeeded one another quite rapidly. Their average duration is less than a year. Less the cruelty, their fashion of ruling the State recalls that employed by the Council of Ten in Venice. As soon as an invention, a book or a work of art gives prominence to a group of creators, that group becomes, without asking to be or being able to avoid the duty, a candidate for the succession of the reigning Oligarchy, which hopes to resign. For, of all social service, that of government is reckoned the least agreeable. No honor is rendered to those supreme “clerks.” Their task is considerable. It demands work much harder than other métiers, without any compensating advantage.
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