BOOK V

I. The Supreme Night

II. Dust Returns to Earth

III. Chrysis Immortal

IV. Pity

V. Piety

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

The very ruins of the Greek world instruct us how our modern

life might be made supportable.

Richard Wagner

The learned Prodicos of Ceos, who flourished towards the end of the

fifth century before our era, is the author of the celebrated apologue

that Saint Basil recommended to the meditations of the Christians:

_Heracles between Virtue and Pleasure_. We know that Heracles chose the

former and was therefore permitted to commit a certain number of crimes

against the Arcadian Stag, the Amazons, the Golden Apples, and the

Giants.

Had Prodicos gone no further than this, he would simply have written a

fable marked by a certain cheap Symbolism; but he was a good

philosopher, and his collection of tales, _The Hours_, in three parts,

presented the moral truths under the various aspects that befit them,

according to the three ages of life. To little children he complacently

held up the example of the austere choice of Heracles; to young men.

doubtless, he related the voluptuous choice of Paris, and I imagine that

to full-grown men he addressed himself somewhat as follows:

"One day Odysseus was roaming about the foot of the mountains of Delphi,

hunting, when he fell in with two maidens holding one another by the

hand. One of them had glossy, black hair, clear eyes, and a grave look.

She said to him: 'I am Arete.' The other had drooping eyelids, delicate

hands, and tender breasts. She said: 'I am 'Tryphe.' And both exclaimed:

'Choose between us.' But the subtile Odysseus answered sagely. 'How

should I choose? You are inseparable. The eyes that have seen you pass

by separately have witnessed but a barren shadow. Just as sincere virtue

does not repel the eternal joys that pleasure offers it, in like manner

self-indulgence would be in evil plight without a certain nobility of

spirit. I will follow both of you. Show me the way.' No sooner had he

finished speaking than the two visions were merged in one another, and

Odysseus knew that he had been talking with the great golden Aphrodite."

The principal character of the novel which the reader is about to have

under his eyes is a woman, a courtesan of antiquity; but let him take

heart of grace: she will not be converted in the end.

She will be loved neither by a saint, nor by a prophet, nor by a god. In

the literature of to-day this is a novelty.

A courtesan, she will be a courtesan with the frankness, the ardour, and

also the conscious pride of every human being who has a vocation and has

freely chosen the place he occupies in society; she will aspire to rise

to the highest point; the idea that her life demands excuse or mystery

will not even cross her mind. This point requires elucidation.

Hitherto, the modern writers who have appealed to a public less

prejudiced than that of young girls and upper-form boys have resorted to

a laborious stratagem the hypocrisy of which is displeasing to me. "I

have painted pleasure as it really is," they say, "in order to exalt

virtue." In commencing a novel which has Alexandria for its scene, I

refuse absolutely to perpetuate this anachronism.

Love, with all that it implies, was, for the Greeks, the most virtuous

of sentiments and the most prolific in greatness. They never attached to

it the ideas of lewdness and immodesty which the Jewish tradition has

handed down to us with the Christian doctrine. Herodotos (I. 10) tells

us in the most natural manner possible, "Amongst certain barbarous

peoples it is considered disgraceful to appear in public naked." When

the Greeks or the Latins wished to insult a man who frequented women of

pleasure, they called him [Greek: moichos] or _moechus_, which simply

means adulterer. A man and a woman who, without being bound by any tie,

formed a union with one another, whether it were in public or not, and

whatever their youth might be, were regarded as injuring no one and were

left in peace.

It is obvious that the life of the ancients cannot be judged according

to the ideas of morality which we owe to Geneva.

For my part, I have written this book with the same simplicity as an

Athenian narrating the same adventures. I hope that it will be read in

the same spirit.

In order to continue to judge of the ancient Greeks according to ideas

at present in vogue, it is necessary that _not a single_ exact translation

of their great writers should fall in the hands of a fifth-form

schoolboy. If M. Mounet--Sully were to play his part of OEdipus without

making any omissions, the police would suspend the performance. Had not

M. Leconte de Lisle expurgated Theocritos, from prudent motives, his

book would have been seized the very day it was put on sale.

Aristophanes is regarded as exceptional! But we possess important

fragments of fourteen hundred and forty comedies, due to one hundred and

thirty-two Greek poets, some of whom, such as Alexis, Philetairos,

Strattis, Euboulos, Cratinos, have left us admirable lines, and nobody

has yet dared to translate this immodest and charming collection.

With the object of defending Greek morals, it is the custom to quote the

teaching of certain philosophers who reproved sexual pleasures. But

there exists a confusion in this matter. These rare moralists blamed the

excesses of all the senses without distinction, without setting up any

difference between the debauch of the bed and that of the table. A man

who orders a solitary dinner which costs him six louis, at a modern

Paris restaurant, would have been judged by them to be as guilty, and no

less guilty, than a man who should make a rendez-vous of too intimate a

nature in the public street and should be condemned therefore to a

year's imprisonment by the existing laws. Moreover, these austere

philosophers were generally regarded by ancient society as dangerous

madmen; they were scoffed at in every theatre; they received thrashings

in the street; the tyrants chose them for their court jesters, and the

citizens of free States sent them into exile, when they did not deem

them worthy of capital punishment.

It is, then, by a conscious and voluntary fraud, that modern educators,

from the Renaissance to the present day, have represented the ancient

code of morality as the inspiring source of their narrow virtues. If

this code was great, if it deserves to be chosen for a model and to be

obeyed, it is precisely because none other has more successfully

distinguished the just from the unjust according to a criterion of

beauty; proclaimed the right of all men to find their individual

happiness within the bounds to which it is limited by the corresponding

right of others, and declared that there is nothing under heaven more

sacred than physical love, nothing more beautiful than the human body.

Such were the ethics of the nation that built the Acropolis; and if I

add that they are still those of all great minds, I shall merely attest

the value of a common-place. It is abundantly proved that the higher

intelligences of artists, writers, warriors, or statesmen have never

regarded the majestic toleration of ancient morals as illegitimate.

Aristotle began life by wasting his patrimony in the society of riotous

women; Sappho has given her name to a special vice; Cæsar was the

_moechus calvus_; nor can we imagine Racine shunning the stage-women nor

Napoleon practicing abstinence. Mirabeau's novels, Chénier's Greek

verses, Diderot's correspondence, and Montesquieu's minor works are as

daring as the writings of Catullus himself. And the most austere,

saintly, and laborious of all French authors, Button, would you know his

maxim of advice in the case of sentimental intrigues? "Love! why art

thou the happiness of all beings and man's misfortune? Because only the

_physical part_ of this passion is good, and the rest is worth nothing."

Whence is this? And how comes it that in spite of the ruin of the

ancient system of thought, the grand sensuality of the Greeks has

remained like a ray of light upon the foreheads of the highest?

It is because sensuality is the mysterious but necessary and creative

condition of intellectual development. Those who have not felt the

exigencies of the flesh to the uttermost, whether for love or hatred,

are incapable of understanding the full range of the exigencies of the

mind. Just as the beauty of the soul illumines the whole face, in like

manner virility of the body is an indispensable condition of a fruitful

brain. The worst insult that Delacroix could address to men, the insult

that he hurled without distinction against the decriers of Rubens and

the detractors of Ingres, was the terrible word: eunuchs.

But furthermore, it would seem that the genius of peoples, like that of

individuals, is above all sensual. All the cities that have reigned over

the world, Babylon, Alexandria, Athens, Rome, Venice, Paris, have by a

general law been as licentious as they were powerful, as if their

dissoluteness was necessary to their splendour. The cities where the

legislator has attempted to implant a narrow, unproductive, and

artificial virtue have seen themselves condemned to utter death from the

very first day. It was so with Lacedæmon, which, in the centre of the

most prodigious intellectual development that the human spirit has ever

witnessed, between Corinth and Alexandria, between Syracuse and Miletus,

has bequeathed us neither a poet, nor a painter, nor a philosopher, nor

an historian, nor a savant, barely the popular renown of a sort of

Bobillot who got killed in a mountain defile with three hundred men

without even succeeding in gaining the victory. And it is for this

reason that after two thousand years we are able to gauge the

nothingness of Spartan virtue, and declare, following Renan's

exhortation, that we "curse the soil that bred this mistress of sombre

errors, and insult it because it exists no longer."

Shall we see the return of the days of Ephesus and Cyrene? Alas! the

modern world is succumbing to an invasion of ugliness. Civilization is

marching to the north, is entering into mist, cold, mud. What night! A

people clothed in black fills the mean streets. What is it thinking of?

We know not, but our twenty-five years shiver at being banished to a

land of old men.

But let those who will ever regret not to have known that rapturous

youth of the earth which we call ancient life, be allowed to live again,

by a fecund illusion, in the days when human nudity the most perfect

form that we can know and even conceive of, since we believe it to be in

God's image, could unveil itself under the features of a sacred

courtesan, before the twenty thousand pilgrims who covered the strands

of Eleusis; when the most sensual love, the divine love of which we are

born, was without sin: let them be allowed to forget eighteen barbarous,

hypocritical, and hideous centuries.

Leave the quagmire for the pure spring, piously return to original

beauty, rebuild the great temple to the sound of enchanted flutes, and

consecrate with enthusiasm their hearts, ever charmed by the immortal

Aphrodite, to the sanctuaries of the true faith.

Pierre Louÿs.

[Illustration]

BOOK THE FIRST

I

Chrysis

She lay upon her bosom, with her elbows in front of her, her legs wide

apart and her cheek resting on her hand, pricking, with a long golden

pin, small symmetrical holes in a pillow of green linen.

Languid with too much sleep, she had remained alone upon the disordered

bed ever since she had awakened, two hours after mid-day.

The great waves of her hair, her only garment, covered one of her sides.

This hair was resplendently opaque, soft as fur, longer than a bird's

wing, supple, uncountable, full of life and warmth. It covered half her

back, flowed under her naked belly, glittered under her knees in thick,

curling clusters. The young woman was enwrapped in this precious fleece.

It glinted with a russet sheen, almost metallic, and had procured her

the name of Chrysis, given her by the courtesans of Alexandria.

It was not the sleek hair of the court-woman from Syria, or the dyed

hair of the Asiatics, or the black and brown hair of the daughters of

Egypt. It was the hair of an Aryan race, the Galilæans across the

sands.

Chrysis. She loved the name. The young men who came to see her called

her Chryse like Aphrodite, in the verses they laid at her door, with

rose-garlands, in the morning. She did not believe in Aphrodite, but she

liked to be compared to the goddess, and she went to the temple

sometimes, in order to give her, as to a friend, boxes of perfumes and

blue veils.

She was born upon the borders of Lake Gennesaret, in a country of sun

and shade, overgrown by laurel roses. Her mother used to go out in the

evening upon the Jerusalem road, and wait for the travelers and

merchants. She gave herself to them in the grass, in the midst of the

silence of the fields. This woman was greatly loved in Galilee. The

priests did not turn aside from her door, for she was charitable and

pious. She always paid for the sacrificial lambs, and the blessing of

the Eternal abode upon her house. Now when she became with child, her

pregnancy being a scandal (for she had no husband), a man celebrated for

his gift of prophecy told her that she would give birth to a maiden who

should one day carry "the riches and faith of a people" around her neck.

She did not well understand how that might be, but she named the child

Sarah, that is to say princess in Hebrew. And that closed the mouth of

slander.

Chrysis had always remained in ignorance of this incident, the seer

having told her mother how dangerous it is to reveal to people the

prophecies of which they are the object. She knew nothing of her future.

That is why she often thought about it. She remembered her childhood but

little, and did not like to speak about it. The only vivid sensation she

had retained was the fear and disgust caused her by the anxious

surveillance of her mother, who, on the approach of her time for going

forth upon the road, shut her up alone in her chamber for interminable

hours. She also remembered the round window through which she saw the

waters of the lake, the blue-tinted fields, the transparent sky, the

blithe air of Galilee. The house was covered with tamarisks and

rose-coloured flax. Thorny caper-bushes reared their green heads in wild

confusion, over-topping the fine mist of the grasses. The little girls

bathed in a limpid brook, where they found red shells under the tufts of

flowering laurels; and there were flowers upon the water and flowers

over all the mead and great lilies upon the mountains.

She was twelve years old when she escaped from home to follow a troop of

young horsemen who were on their way to Tyre to sell ivory. She fell in

with them before a cistern. They were adorning their long-tailed horses

with multi-coloured tufts. She well remembered how she was carried off,

pale with joy upon their horses, and how they stopped a second time

during the night, a night so clear that the stars were invisible.

Neither had she forgotten how they entered Tyre: she in front, seated

upon the panniers of a pack-horse, holding on to its mane with her

fists, and proudly dangling her naked calves, to show the women of the

town that she had pure blood coursing in her well-shaped legs. They left

for Egypt that same evening. She followed the ivory-sellers as far as

the market of Alexandria.

[Illustration: Greek harlots from the isles told her the legend of

Iphis.]

And it was there, in a little white house with a terrace and tapering

columns, that they left her two months afterwards, with her bronze

mirror, carpets, new cushions, and a beautiful Hindoo slave who was

learned in the dressing of courtesans' hair. Others came on the evening

of their departure, and others on the morrow.

As she lived at the extreme east of the town, a quarter disdained by

the young Greeks of Brouchion, she was long before she made the

acquaintance of aught but travellers and merchants, like her mother. Yet

she inspired interminable passions. Caravan-masters were known to sell

their merchandise dirt cheap in order to stay with her, and ruin

themselves in a few nights. With these men's fortune she bought jewels,

bed-cushions, rare perfumes, flowered robes, and four slaves.

She gained a knowledge of many foreign languages, and knew the tales of

all countries. Assyrians told her the loves of Douzi and Ishtar;

Phoenicians those of Ashtaroth and Adonis. Greek harlots from the isles

told her the legend of Iphis, and taught her strange caresses which

surprised her at first, but afterwards enchanted her so much that she

could not do without them for a whole day. She also knew the loves of

Atalanta, and how, like her, flute-girls, while yet virgins, may tire

out the strongest men. Finally, her Hindoo slave had taught her

patiently, during seven years, the minutest details of the complex and

voluptuous art of the courtesans of Palibothra.

For love is an art, like music. It gives emotions of the same order,

equally delicate, equally thrilling, sometimes perhaps more intense; and

Chrysis, who knew all its rhythms and all its subtilities, regarded

herself, with good reason, as a greater artist than Plango herself. Yet

Plango was a musician of the temple.

Seven years she lived thus, without dreaming of a life happier or more

varied. But shortly before her twentieth year, when she emerged from

girlhood to womanhood and saw the first charming line of nascent

maturity take form under her breasts, she suddenly conceived other

ambitions.

And one morning, waking up two hours alter mid-day, languid with too

much sleep, she turned over upon her breast, threw out her legs, leaned

her cheek upon her hand, and with a long golden pin, pricked little

symmetrical holes upon her pillow of green linen.

Her reflexions were profound.

First it was four little pricks which made a square, with a prick in the

centre. Then four other pricks to make a bigger square. Then she tried

to make a circle. But it was a little difficult. Then, she pricked away

aimlessly and began to call:

"Djala! Djala!"

Djala was her Hindoo slave, and was called Djalantachtchandratchapala,

which means: "Mobile as the image of the moon upon the water." Chrysis

was too lazy to say the whole name.

The slave entered and stood near the door, without entirely closing it.

"Who came yesterday, Djala?"

"You do not know?"

"No, I did not look. He was handsome? I think I slept all the time; I

was tired. I remember nothing at all about it. At what time did he go

away? This morning early?"

"At sunrise, he said--"

"What did he leave me? Is it much? No, don't tell me. It's all the same

to me. What did he say? Has no one been since? Will he come back again?

Give me my bracelets."

The slave brought a casket, but Chrysis did not look at it, and, raising

her arm as high as she could:

"Ah! Djala," she said, "ah! Djala! I long for extraordinary adventures."

"Everything is extraordinary," said Djala, "or nought. The days resemble

one another."

"No, no. Formerly it was not like that. In all the countries of the

world gods came down to earth and loved mortal women. Ah! on what beds

await them, in what forest search for them that are a little more than

men? What prayers shall I put up for the coming of them that will teach

me something new or oblivion of all things? And if the gods will no

longer come down, if they are dead or too old, Djala, shall I too die

without seeing a man capable of putting tragic events into my life?"

She turned over upon her back and interlocked her fingers.

"If somebody adored me, I think it would give me such joy to make him

suffer till he died. Those who come here are not worthy to weep. And

then, it is my fault as well: it is I who summon them; how should they

love me?"

"What bracelet to-day?"

"I shall put them all on. But leave me. I need no one. Go to the steps

before the door, and if anyone comes, say that I am with my lover, a

black slave whom I pay. Go."

"You are not going out?"

"Yes, I shall go out alone. I shall dress myself alone. I shall not

return. Off with you! Off with you!"

She let one leg drop upon the carpet and stretched herself into a

standing posture. Djala had gone away noiselessly.

She walked very slowly about the room, with her hands crossed behind her

neck, entirely absorbed in the luxury of cooling the sweat of her naked

feet by stepping about on the tiles. Then she entered her bath.

It was a delight to her to look at herself through the water. She saw

herself like a great pearl-shell lying open on a rock. Her skin became

smooth and perfect; the lines of her legs tapered away into blue light;

her whole form was more supple; her hands were transfigured. The

lightness of her body was such that she raised herself on two fingers

and allowed herself to float for a little and fall gently back on the

marble, causing the water to ripple softly against her chin. The water

entered her ears with the provocation of a kiss.

It was when taking her bath that Chrysis began to adore herself. Every

part of her body became separately the object of tender admiration and

the motive of a caress. She played a thousand charming pranks with her

hair and her breasts. Sometimes, even, she accorded a more direct

satisfaction to her perpetual desires, and no place of repose seemed to

her more propitious for the minute slowness of this delicate solace.

The day was waning. She sat up in the piscina, stepped out of the water,

and walked to the door. Her foot-marks shone upon the stones. Tottering,

and as if exhausted, she opened the door wide and stopped, holding the

latch at arm's length; then entered, and, standing upright near her bed,

and dripping with water, said to the slave:

"Dry me."

The Malabar woman took a large sponge and passed it over Chrysis's

golden hair, which, being heavily charged with water, dripped streams

down her back. She dried it, smoothed it out, waved it gently to and

fro, and, dipping the sponge into a jar of oil, she caressed her

mistress with it even to the neck. She then rubbed her down with a rough

towel which brought the colour to her supple skin.

Chrysis sank quivering into the coolness of a marble chair and murmured:

"Dress my hair."

In the level rays of evening her hair, still heavy and humid, shone like

rain illuminated by the sun: The slave took it in handfuls and entwined

it. She rolled it into a spiral and picked it out with slim golden pins,

like a great metal serpent bristling with arrows. She wound the whole

around a triple fillet of green in order that its reflections might be

heightened by the silk.

Chrysis held a mirror of polished copper at arm's length. She watched

the slave's darting hands with a distracted eye, as she passed them

through the heavy hair, rounded off the clusters, captured the stray

locks, and built up her head-dress like a spiral rhytium of clay. When

all was finished, Djala knelt down on her knees before her mistress and

shaved her rounded flesh to the skin, in order that she might have the

nudity of a statue in her lovers' eyes.

[Illustration]

Chrysis became graver and said in a low voice:

"Paint me."

A little pink box from the island of Dioscoris contained cosmetics of

all colours. With a camel-hair brush, the slave took a little of a

certain black paste which she laid upon the long curves of the beautiful

eye-lashes, in order to heighten the blueness of the eyes. Two firm

lines put on with a pencil imparted increased length and softness to

them; a bluish powder tinted the eye-lids the colour of lead; two

touches of bright vermilion accentuated the tear-corners. In order to

fix the cosmetics, it was necessary to anoint the face and breast with

fresh cerate. With a soft feather dipped in ceruse, Djala painted trails

of white along the arms and on the neck; with a little brush swollen

with carmine she reddened the mouth and touched up the nipples of the

breasts; with her fingers she spread a fine layer of red powder over the

cheeks, marked three deep lines between the waist and the belly, and in

the rounded haunches two dimples that sometimes moved; then with a plug

of leather dipped in cosmetics she gave a indefinable tint to the elbows

and polished up the ten nails. The toilette was finished.

The Chrysis began to smile, and said to the Hindoo woman:

"Sing to me."

She sat erect in her marble chair. Her pins gleamed with a golden glint

behind her head. Her painted finger-nails, pressed to her neck from

shoulder to shoulder, broke the red line of her necklace, and her white

feet rested close together upon the stone.

Huddled against the wall, Djala bethought her of the love-songs of

India.

"Chrysis . . ."

She sang in a monotonous chant.

"Chrysis, thy hair is like a swarm of bees hanging on a tree.

The hot wind of the south penetrates it with the dew of

love-battles and the wet perfume of night-flowers."

The young woman alternated, in a softer, lower voice:

"My hair is like an endless river in the plain when the

flame-lit evening fades."

And they sang, one after the other:

"Thine eyes are like blue water-lilies without stalks,

motionless upon the pools."

"Mine eyes rest in the shadow of my lashes like deep lakes under

dark branches."

* * * * *

"Thy lips are two delicate flowers stained with the blood of a

roe."

"My lips are the edges of a burning wound."

* * * * *

"Thy tongue is the bloody dagger that has made the wound of thy mouth."

"My tongue is inlaid with precious stones. It is red with the

sheen of my lips."

* * * * *

"Thine arms are tapering as two ivory tusks, and thy armpits are

two mouths."

"Mine arms are tapering as two lily-stalks and my fingers hang

therefrom like five petals."

"Thy thighs are two white elephants' trunks. They bear thy feet

like two red flowers."

"My feet are two nenuphar-leaves upon the water: My thighs are

two bursting nenuphar buds."

* * * * *

"Thy breasts are two silver bucklers with cusps steeped in blood."

"My breasts are the moon and the reflection of the moon and the water."

[Illustration: Huddled against the wall, Djala bethought herself

of the love-songs of India.]

* * * * *

"Thy navel is a deep pit in a desert of red sand, and thy belly

a young kid lying on its mother's breast."

"My navel is a round pearl on an inverted cup, and the curve of

my belly is the clear crescent of Phoebe in the forests."

* * * * *

There was a silence. The slave raised her hands and bowed to the ground.

The courtesan proceeded:

"It is like a purple flower, full of perfumes and honey."

"It is like a sea-serpent, soft and living, open at night."

"It is the humid grotto, the ever-warm lodging, the Refuge where

man reposes from his march to death."

The prostrate one murmured very low:

"It is appalling. It is the face of Medusa."

* * * * *

Chrysis planted her foot upon the slave's neck and said with trembling:

"Djala."

The night had come on little by little, but the moon was so luminous

that the room was filled with blue light.

Chrysis looked at the motionless reflections of her naked body where the

shadows fell very black.

She rose brusquely:

"Djala, what are we thinking of? It is night, and I have not yet gone

out. There will be nothing left upon the heptastadion but sleeping

sailors. Tell me, Djala, I am beautiful?"

"Tell me, Djala, I am more beautiful than ever to-night? I am the most

beautiful of the Alexandrian women, and you know it? Will not he who

shall presently pass within the sidelong glance of my eyes follow me

like a dog? Shall I not perform my pleasure upon him, and make a slave

of him according to my whim, and can I not expect the most abject

obedience from the first man whom I shall meet? Dress me, Djala."

Djala twined two silver serpents about her arms. On her feet she fixed

sandals and attached them to her brown legs with crossed leather straps.

Over her warm belly Chrysis herself buckled a maiden's girdle, which

sloped down from the upper part of the loins along the hollow line of

the groins; in her ears she hung great circular rings, on her neck three

golden phallus-bracelets enchased at Paphos by the hierodules. She

contemplated herself for some time, standing naked in her jewels; then,

drawing from the coffer in which she had folded it, a vast transparent

stuff of yellow linen, she twisted it about her and draped herself in it

to the ground. Diagonal folds intersected the little that one saw of her

body through the light tissue; one of her elbows stood out under the

light tunic, and the other arm, which she had left bare, carried the

long train high out of reach of the dust.

She took her feather fan in her hand, and carelessly sauntered forth.

Standing upon the steps of the threshold, with her hand leaning on the

white wall, Djala watched the courtesan's retreating form.

She walked slowly past the houses, in the deserted street bathed in

moonlight. A little flickering shadow danced behind her.

II

ON THE QUAY AT ALEXANDRIA

On the quay at Alexandria a singing-girl was standing singing. By her

side were two flute-girls, seated on the white parapet.

I

The satyrs pursue in the woods

The light-Footed oreads.

They chase the nymphs upon the mountains,

They fill their eyes with affright,

They seize their hair in the wind,

They grasp their breasts in the chase,

And throw their warm bodies backwards

Upon the green dew-covered moss,

And the beautiful bodies, their beautiful bodies

half divine,

Writhe with the agony . . .

O women! Eros makes your lips cry aloud

With dolorous, sweet Desire.

* * * * *

The flute-players repeated:

"Eros!

Eros!"

and wailed in their twin reeds.

II

Cybele pursues across the plain

Attys, beautiful as Apollo.

Eros has smitten her to the heart, and for him,

O Totoi! but not him for her,

Instead of love, cruel god, wicked Eros,

Thou counsellest but hatred . . .

Across the meads, the vast distant plains,

Cybele chases Attys;

And because she adores the scorned,

She infuses into his veins

The great cold breath, the breath of death.

O dolorous, sweet Desire!

* * * * *

"Eros!

Eros!"

Shrill wailings poured from the flutes.

III

The Goat-foot pursues to the river

Syrinx, the daughter of the fountain;

Pale Eros, that loves the taste of tears,

Kissed her as she ran, check to cheek;

And the frail shadow of the drowned maiden

Shivers, reeds, upon the waters.

But Eros kings it over the world and the gods.

He kings it over death itself.

On the watery tomb he gathered for us

All the reeds, and with them made the flute,

'Tis a dead soul that weeps here, women,

Dolorous, sweet Desire.

* * * * *

Whilst the flute prolonged the slow chant of the last line, the singer

held out her hand to the passers-by standing around her in a circle, and

collected four obols, which she slipped into her shoe.

[Illustration: Groups formed in places, and women wandered amongst them]

The crowd gradually melted away, innumerable, curious of itself and

watching its own movements. The noise of footsteps and voices drowned

even the sound of the sea. Sailors hauled their boats upon the quay with

bowed shoulders. Fruit-sellers passed to and fro with teeming baskets

upon their arms. Beggars begged for alms with trembling hand. Asses,

laden with leathern bottles, trotted in front of the goads of their

drivers. But it was the hour of sunset; and the crowd of idlers, more

numerous than the crowd bent on affairs, covered the quay. Groups formed

in places, and women wandered amongst them. The names of well-known

characters passed from mouth to mouth. The young men looked at the

philosophers, and the philosophers looked at the courtesans.

The latter were of every kind and condition, from the most celebrated,

dressed in fine silks and wearing shoes of gilded leather, to the most

miserable, who walked barefooted. The poor ones were no less beautiful

than the others, but less fortunate only, and the attention of the sages

was fixed by preference upon those whose natural grace was not

disfigured by the artifice of girdles and weighty jewels. As it was the

day before the Aphrodisiæ, these women had every license to choose the

dress which suited them the best, and some of the youngest had even

ventured to wear nothing at all. But their nudity shocked nobody, for

they would not thus have exposed all the details of their bodies to the

sun if they had possessed the slightest defect which might have rendered

them the laughing-stock of the married women.

"Tryphera! Tryphera!"

And a young courtesan of joyful mien elbowed her way through the crowd

to join a friend of whom she had just caught sight.

"Tryphera! are you invited?"

"Where, Seso?"

"To Bacchis's."

"Not yet. She is giving a dinner?"

"A dinner? A banquet, my dear. She is to liberate her most beautiful

slave, Aphrodisia, on the second day of the feast."

"At last! She has perceived at last that people came to see her only for

the sake of her slave."

"I think she has seen nothing. It is a whim of old Cheres, the

ship-owner on the quay. He wanted to buy the girl for ten minæ. Bacchis

refused. Twenty minæ; she refused again."

"She must be crazy."

"Why, pray? It was her ambition to have a freed-woman. Besides, she was

quite right to bargain. Cheres will give thirty-five minæ, and at that

price the girl becomes a freed-woman."

"Thirty-five minæ? Three thousand five hundred drachmæ? Three thousand

five hundred drachmæ for a negress?"

"She is a white man's daughter."

"But her mother is black."

"Bacchis declared that she would not part with her for less, and old

Cheres is so amorous that he consented."

"I hope he is invited at any rate."

"No! Aphrodisia is to be served up at the banquet as the last dish,

after the fruit. Everybody will taste of it at pleasure, and it is only

on the morrow that she is to be handed over to Cheres; but I am much

afraid she will be tired . . ."

"Don't pity her. With him she will have time to recover. I know him,

Seso. I have watched him sleep."

They laughed together at Cheres. Then they complimented one another. "You

have a pretty robe," said Seso. "Did you have it trimmed at home?"

[Illustration]

Tryphera's robe was of fine sea-green stuff entirely trimmed with

flowering iris. A carbuncle set in gold gathered it up into a

spindle-shaped pleat over the left shoulder; the robe fell slantingly

between the two breasts, leaving the entire right side of her body naked

down to the metal girdle; a narrow slit, that opened and closed at every

step, alone revealed the whiteness of the leg.

"Seso!" said another voice. "Seso and Tryphera, come with me if you

don't know what to do. I am going to the Ceramic Wall to see whether my

name is written up."

"Mousarion! Where have you come from, my dear?"

"From Pharos. There is nobody there."

"What do you mean? There is nothing to do but fish, it is so full."

"No turbots for me. I am off to the wall. Come."

On the way, Seso told them about the projected banquet at Bacchis's over

again.

"Ah! at Bacchis's!" cried Mousarion. "You remember the last dinner,

Tryphera, and all the stories about Chrysis?"

"You must not repeat them. Seso is her friend."

Mousarion bit her lips; but Seso had already taken the alarm.

"What did they say about her?"

"Oh! various ill-natured things."

"Let people talk," declared Seso. "We three together are not worth

Chrysis. The day she decides to leave her quarter and shew herself at

Brouchion, I know of some of our lovers whom we shall never see again."

"Oh! Oh!"

"Certainly. I would commit any folly for that woman. Be sure that there

is none here more beautiful than she."

The three girls had now arrived in front of the Ceramic Wall.

Inscriptions written in black succeeded one another along the whole

length of its immense white surface. When a lover desired to present

himself to a courtesan, he had merely to write up their two names, with

the price he offered; if the man and the money were approved of, the

woman remained standing under the notice until the lover re-appeared.

"Look, Seso," said Tryphera, laughing.

"Who is the practical joker who has written that?"

And they read in huge letters:

BACCHIS

THERSIES

2 OBOLS

"It ought not to be allowed to make fun of the women like that. If I

were the rhymarch, I should already have held an enquiry."

But further on, Seso stopped before an inscription more to the point:

SESO OF CNIDOS

TIMON THE SON OF LYSIAS

1 MINA

She turned slightly pale.

"I stay," she said.

And she leaned her back against the wall under the envious glances of

the women that passed by.

A few steps further on Mousarion found an acceptable offer, if not as

generous an one. Tryphera returned to the quay alone.

As the hour was advanced, the crowd had become less compact. But the

three musicians were still singing and playing the flute.

Catching sight of a stranger whose clothes and rotundity were slightly

ridiculous, Tryphera tapped him on the shoulder.

"I say! Papa! I wager that you are not an Alexandrian, eh?"

"No indeed, my girl," answered the honest fellow. "And you have guessed

rightly. I am quite astounded at the town and the people."

"You are from Boubastis?"

"No. From Cabasa. I came here to sell grain, and I am going back again

to-morrow, richer by fifty-two minæ. Thanks be to the gods! it has been

a good year."

Tryphera suddenly began to take an great interest in this merchant.

"My child," he resumed timidly, "you can give me a great joy. I don't

want to return to Cabasa to-morrow without being able to tell my wife

and three daughters that I have seen some celebrated men, You probably

know some celebrated men?"

"Some few," she said, laughing.

"Good. Name them to me when they pass. I am sure that during the last

two days I have met the most influential functionaries. I am in despair

at not knowing them by sight."

[Illustration]

"You shall have your wish. This is Naucrates."

"Who is Naucrates?"

"A philosopher."

"And what does he teach?"

"Silence."

"By Zeus, that is a doctrine that does not require much genius, and this

philosopher does not please me at all."

"That is Phrasilas."

"Who is Phrasilas?"

"A fool."

"Then why do you mention him?"

"Because others consider him to be eminent."

"And what does he say?"

"He says everything with a smile, and that enables him to pass off his

errors as international and common-places as subtile. He has all the

advantage. People have allowed themselves to be duped."

"All this is beyond me, and I don't quite understand. Besides, the face

of this Phrasilas is marked by hypocrisy."

"This is Philodemos."

"The strategist?"

"No. A Latin poet who writes in Greek."

"My dear, he is an enemy. I am sorry to have seen him."

At this point a flutter of excitement ran through the crowd and a murmur

of voices pronounced the same name:

"Demetrios . . . Demetrios . . ."

Tryphera mounted upon a street post, and she too said to the merchant:

"Demetrios . . . That is Demetrios. You were anxious to see celebrated

men."

[Illustration: Tryphera mounted upon a street post.]

"Demetrios? the Queen's lover? Is it possible?"

"Yes, you are in luck. He never leaves his house. This is the first time

I have seen him on the quay since I have been at Alexandria."

"Where is he?"

"That's he, bending over to look at the harbour."

"There are two men leaning over."

"It is the one in blue."

"I cannot see him very well. His back is turned to me."

"Know you not? he is the sculptor to whom the queen offered herself for

a model when he carved the Aphrodite in the temple."

"They say he is the royal lover. They say he is the master of Egypt."

"And he is as beautiful as Apollo."

"Ah! he has turned round. I am very glad that I came. I shall say that I

have seen him. I have heard so much about him. It seems that no woman

has ever resisted him. He has had many love adventures, has he not? How

is it that the queen has not heard of them?"

"The queen knows of them as well as we do. She loves him too much to

speak of them. She is afraid of his returning to Rhodes, to his master,

Pherecrates. He is as powerful as she is, and it is she who desired

him."

"He does not look happy. Why does he look so sad? I think I should be

happy if I were in his place. I should like to be he, were it only for

an evening."

The sun had set. The women gazed at this man, their common dream. He,

without appearing to be conscious of the stir he created, remained

leaning over the parapet, listening to the flute-girls.

The little musicians made another collection; then, they softly threw

their light flutes over their backs. The singing-girl placed her arms

round their necks and all three returned to the town.

At night-fall, the other women went back into immense Alexandria in

little groups, and the herd of men followed them; but all turned round

as they walked, and looked at Demetrios.

The last girl who passed softly cast her yellow flowers at him, and

laughed.

Night fell upon the quays.

III

DEMETRIOS

Demetrios remained alone, leaning on his elbow, at the spot vacated by

the flute-girls. He listened to the murmur of the sea, to the slow

creaking of the ships, to the wind passing beneath the stars.

The town was illumined by a dazzling little cloud which lingered upon

the moon, and the sky was bathed in soft light.

The young man looked around him. The flute-girls' tunics had left two

marks in the dust. He remembered their faces: they were two Ephesians.

He had thought the elder one pretty; but the younger was without charm,

and, as ugliness was a torture to him, he avoided thinking about her.

An ivory object gleamed at his feet. He picked it up: it was a

writing-tablet, with a silver style attached to it. The wax was almost

worn away and it had been necessary to go over the words several times

in order to make them legible. They were even scratched into the ivory.

There were only these words:

Myrtis Loves Rhodocleia

and he did not know to which of the two women this belonged, and whether

the other was the loved one, or whether it was some unknown girl left

behind in Ephesos. Then he thought for a moment of overtaking the two

musicians in order to restore them what was perhaps the souvenir of a

cherished dead friend; but he could not have found them without

difficulty, and as he was already beginning to lose interest in them, he

turned round languidly and threw the little object into the sea.

It fell rapidly, with a gliding motion like a white bird, and he heard

the splash it made away out in the black water. This little noise

enhanced the immense silence of the harbour. Leaning against the cold

parapet, he tried to drive away all thought, and began to look at the

things around him.

He had a horror of life. He only left his house when the life of the day

was dying down, and he returned home when the dawn began to draw the

fishermen and market-gardeners to the town. The pleasure of seeing

nought in the world but the ghost of the town and his own stature had

become a voluptuous passion with him, and he did not remember having

seen the mid-day sun for months.

He was wearied. The queen was tedious.

He could hardly understand, that night, the joy and pride that had

possessed him three years before, when the queen, bewitched perhaps by

the stories of his beauty and genius, had sent for him to the palace,

and had heralded him to the Evening Gate with the sound of the silver

salpinx.

His arrival at the palace sometimes lighted up his memory with one of

those souvenirs which, through excess of sweetness, become gradually

embittered in the soul and then intolerable . . . The queen had received

him alone, in her private apartments, consisting of three rooms of

incomparable luxury, where every sound was muffled by cushions. She lay

upon her left side, embedded, at it were, in a litter of greenish silks

which, by reflection, bathed the black locks of her hair in purple. Her

youthful body was arrayed in a daring open-worked costume which she had

had made before her eyes by a Phrygian courtesan, and which exposed the

twenty-two places where caresses are irresistible. One had no need to

take off that costume during a whole night, even though one exhausted

one's amorous imagination beyond the most extravagant dreams.

Demetrios fell respectfully on his knees, and took Queen Berenice's

naked little foot in his hand, in order to kiss it, as one kisses an

object delicate and rare.

Then she rose.

Simply, like a beautiful slave posing, she undid her corselet, her

bandelettes, her open drawers, took off the very bracelets from her

arms, the rings from her ankles, and stood up erect, with her hands open

before her shoulders, her head slightly thrown back, and her coral coif

trembling upon her cheeks.

She was the daughter of a Ptolemy and a Syrian princess descended from

all the gods, through Astarte, whom the Greeks call Aphrodite. Demetrios

knew this, and that she was proud of her Olympian lineage. Accordingly

he was not disconcerted when the queen said to him without moving: "I am

Astarte. Take a block of marble and your chisel and reveal me to the men

of Egypt. I desire them to worship my image."

[Illustration: "I am Astarte. Take a block of marble and your chisel and

reveal me to the men of Egypt. I desire them to worship my image."]

Demetrios looked at her, and divined, unerringly, the artless, novel

sensuality with which this young girls body was animated. He said, "I am

the first to worship it," and he took her in his arms. The queen was not

angry at this brusquerie, but stepped back a pace and asked, "You think

yourself Adonis, that you dare to lay hands on the goddess?" He

answered, "Yes." She looked at him, smiled a little, and concluded.

"You are right."

Thus was why he became insupportable, and his best friends left him; but

he ravished the hearts of all women.

When he entered one of the apartments of the palace, the women of the

court ceased talking, and the other women listened to him too, for the

sound of his voice was an ecstasy. If he took refuge with the queen,

their persecution followed him even there, under pretexts ever new. Did

he wander through the streets, the folds of his tunic became filled with

little papyri on which the women wrote their names with words of

anguish. But he crumpled them up without reading them. He was tired of

all that. When his handiwork was set up in the temple of Aphrodite, the

sacred enclosure was invaded at every hour of the night by the crowd of

his feminine adorers, who came to read his name chiselled in the stone

and offer a wealth of doves and roses to their living god.

His house was soon encumbered with gifts, which he accepted at first

out of negligence, but ended by refusing all, when he understood what

was desired of him, and that he was being treated like a prostitute. His

very slave-women offered themselves. He had them whipped, and sold them

to the little porneion at Rhacotis. Then his men-slaves, seduced by

presents, opened his door to unknown women whom he found at his bed-side

when he came home, and whose attitude left no doubt as to their

passionate intentions. The trinkets of his toilet-table disappeared one

after the other; more than one of the women of the town had a sandal or

a belt of his, a cup from which he had drunk, even the stones of the

fruit he had eaten. If he dropped a flower as he walked, he did not find

it again. The women would have picked up the very dust upon which his

shoes had trampled.

In addition to the fact that this persecution was becoming dangerous and

threatened to kill all his sensibility, he had reached the stage of

manhood at which a thinking man perceives the urgency of dividing his

life into two parts, and of ceasing to confound the things of the

intellect with the exigencies of the senses. The statue of Aphrodite was

for him the sublime pretext of this moral conversion. The highest

realization of the queen's beauty, all the idealism it was possible to

read into the supple lines of her body, Demetrios had evoked it all from

the marble, and from that day onward he imagined that no other woman on

earth would ever attain to the level of his dream. His statue became the

object of his passion. He adored it only, and madly divorced from the

flesh the supreme idea of the goddess, all the more immaterial because

he had attached it to life.

When he again saw the queen herself, she seemed to him destitute of

everything which had constituted her charm. She served for a certain

time to hoodwink his aimless desires, but she was at once too different

from the Other, and too like her. When she sank down in exhaustion after

his embraces, and incontinently went to sleep, he looked at her as if

she were an intruder who had adopted the semblance of the beloved one

and usurped her place in his bed. The arms of the Other were more

slender, her breast more finely cut, her hips narrower than those of the

Real one. The latter did not possess the three furrows of the groins,

thin as lines, that he had graved upon the marble. He finally wearied of

her.

His feminine adorers were aware of it, and though he continued his daily

visits it was known that he ceased to be amorous of Berenice. And the

enthusiasm on his account doubled. He paid no attention to it. In point

of fact, he had need of a change of quite other importance.

It often happens that in the interval between two mistresses a man is

tempted and satisfied by vulgar dissipation. Demetrios succumbed to it.

When the necessity of going to the palace was more distasteful to him

than usual, he went off at night to the garden of the sacred courtesans.

This garden surrounded the temple on every side.

The women who frequented it did not know him. Moreover, they were so

wearied by the superfluity of their loves that they had neither

exclamations nor tears, and the satisfaction he was in search of was not

dashed, in that quarter at least, by those frenzied cat-cries with which

the queen exasperated him.

His conversation with these fair, self-possessed ladies was idle and

unaffected. The day's visitors, the probable weather on the morrow, the

softness of the grass, the mildness of the night-these were the charming

topics. They did not beg him to express his theories in statuary, and

they did not give their opinion upon the Achilleus of Scopas. If it

befell that they dismissed the lover who had chosen them, and that they

thought him handsome and told him so, he was quite at liberty not to

believe in their disinterestedness.

When freed from the embrace of their religious arms, he mounted the

temple steps and fell to an ecstatic contemplation of the statue.

Between the slim columns crowned with Ionian volutes, the goddess stood

instinct with life upon a pedestal of rose-coloured stone laden with

rich votive offerings. She was naked and fully sexed, tinted vaguely and

like a woman. In one hand she held her mirror, the handle of which was a

priapus, and with the other she adorned her beauty with a pearl necklace

of seven strings. A pearl larger than the others, long and silvery,

gleamed between her two breasts, like the moon's crescent between two

round clouds.

Demetrios contemplated her tenderly, and would fain have believed, like

the common people, that they were real sacred pearls, born of the drops

of water which had rolled in the shell of Anadyomene.

"O divine sister!" he would say. "O flowered one! O transfigured one!

You are no longer the little Asiatic woman whom I made your unworthy

model. You are her immortal Idea, the terrestrial soul of Astarte, the

mother of her race. You shone in her blazing eyes, you burned in her

sombre lips, you swooned in her soft hands, you gaped in her great

breasts, you strained in entwining legs, long ago, before your birth;

and the food which the daughter of a sinner hungers for is your tyrant

also, you, a goddess, the mother of gods and men, the joy and anguish of

the world. But I have seen you, evolved you, caught you, O marvelous

Cytherea! It is not to your image, it is to yourself that I have given

your mirror, and yourself that I have covered with pearls, as on the day

when you were born of the fiery heaven and the laughing foam of the sea.

like the dew-steeped dawn, and escorted with acclamations by blue

tritons to the shores of Cyprus."

He had been adoring her alter this fashion when he entered the quay, at

the hour when the crowd was melting away, and he heard the anguish and

tears of the flute-girls' chant.

[Illustration]

But he had spurned the courtesans of the temple that evening, because a

glimpse of a couple beneath the branches had stirred him with disgust

and revolted him to the soul.

The kindly influence of the night penetrated him little by little. He

turned his face of the wind, the wind that had passed over the sea and

seemed to carry to Egypt the lingering scent of the sweet-smelling roses

of Amathus.

Beautiful feminine forms took shape in his brain. He had been asked for

a group of the three Charites, enclasping one another, for the garden of

the goddess, but it was distasteful to his youthful genius to copy

conventions, and he dreamed of bringing together on the same block of

marble the three graceful motions of woman. Two of the Charites were to

be dressed, one holding a fan and half closing her eyelids to the

gently-swaying feathers; the other dancing in the folds of her robe. The

third should be standing naked behind her sisters, and, with her

uplifted arms, would be twisting the thick mass of her hair upon her

neck.

His mind conceived still other projects, as, for example, to erect, upon

the rocks of Pharos, an Andromeda of black marble confronting the

tumultuous monster of the sea, or to enclose the agora of Brouchion

between the four horses of the rising sun, like wrathful Pegasi; and

what was not his exultant rapture at the idea, which began to germinate

within him, of a Zagreus terror-stricken by the approaching Titans? Ah!

how beauty had once more taken him for its own! how he was escaping from

the clutches of love! how he was separating from the flesh the supreme

idea of the goddess! In a word, how free he felt!

Now, he turned his head towards the quays, and, in the distance, saw the

yellow shimmer of a woman's veil.

IV

THE PASSER-BY

She carried slowly along the deserted quay, which was bathed in

moonlight. Her head leaned over one shoulder. A little shadow danced and

flickered before her footsteps.

Demetrios watched her as she drew near.

Diagonal folds intersected the little one saw of her body through the

thin tissue; one of her elbows stood out in relief under the tight

tunic, and the other arm, which she had left bare, carried the long

train, holding it high out of the dust.

He recognised by her jewels that she was a courtesan. In order to avoid

her salutation he crossed the road rapidly.

He did not want to look at her. He obstinately centered his thoughts

upon the rough plan of his Zagreus. Nevertheless his eyes turned in the

direction of the passer-by.

Then he saw that she did not stop, that she paid no attention to him,

that she did not even affect to look at the sea, or to raise the front

of her veil, or to absorb herself in her reflections; but that she was

merely taking a walk by herself and was in search of nothing but the

freshness of the breeze, solitude, abandonment, the subtle thrill of

silence.

Demetrios did not take his eyes off her, and fell into a singular

astonishment.

She continued to walk like a yellow shadow in the distance, nonchalant,

and preceded by the little black shadow.

He heard at each step the slight creak of her shoe in the dust.

She walked on as far as the island of Pharos and went up into the rocks.

Suddenly, and as if he had loved this unknown woman for a long time,

Demetrios ran after her, then stopped, retraced his steps, trembled, got

angry with himself, tried to leave the quay; but he had never utilised

his will except in the service of his pleasure, and when it was time to

set it in motion for the salvation of his character and the ordering of

his life, he felt completely powerless and nailed to the spot on which

he stood.

As he could not throw off the thought of this woman, he tried to find

excuses in his own eyes for the preoccupation which was so violently

distracting him. He imagined that his admiration for the graceful

apparition was due to a purely æsthetic sentiment, and he said to

himself that she would make at perfect model for the Charis with the fan

which he intended to design on the morrow.

[Illustration]

Then, suddenly, all his thoughts became confused, and a crowd of anxious

questions surged up into his mind about this woman in yellow.

What was she doing in the island at this hour of the night? Why, for

whom had she left home so late? Why had she not addressed him? She had

seen him, certainly she had seen him while he was crossing the quay. Why

had she gone her way without a word of salutation? It was rumoured that

certain women sometimes chose the fresh hours before the dawn to bathe

in the sea. But there was no bathing at Pharos. The sea was too deep.

Besides, how unlikely that a woman would be covered with all those

jewels for no other object than to go bathing! Then what took her so far

from Rhacotis? A rendezvous perhaps? Some young rake, avid of variety,

who had chosen for a temporary bed the great rocks polished by the

waves?

Demetrios wished to be certain. But the young woman was already

returning, with the same calm and indolent step. The sluggish radiance

of the moon shone full upon her face as she advanced, brushing the dust

of the parapet with the end of her fan.

V

THE MIRROR, THE COMB, AND THE NECKLACE

She had a special beauty of her own. Her hair seemed two masses of gold,

but it was too abundant, and it padded her low forehead with two heavy

waves charged with amber, which swallowed up the ears and twisted

themselves into a seven-fold coil upon the nape of the neck. The nose

was delicate, with expressive nostrils which palpitated sometimes,

surmounting a thick and painted mouth, with rounded mobile corners. The

supple line of the body undulated at every stop, receiving animation

from the harmonious motion of her unfettered breasts, or from the swing

of the beautiful hips that supported her lissom waist.

When she was within ten paces of the young man, she turned her eyes upon

him. Demetrios was seized with trembling. They were extraordinary eyes;

blue, but deep and brilliant at the same time, humid, weary, bathed in

tears and flashing fire, almost closed under the weight of the eyelids

and eyelashes. The glance of these eves was like the siren's song.

Whosoever crossed their path was inevitably a captive. She knew it well,

and cunningly she used their virtue; but she counted still more upon

affected indifference as a weapon of attack against the man whom so much

sincere love had been incapable of touching deeply.

The navigators who have sailed over the purple seas, beyond the Ganges,

relate that they have seen, beneath the water, rocks of magnetic stone.

When ships pass near them, the nails and iron fittings are wrenched down

to the submarine cliff and remain fixed to it for ever. And what was

once a swift craft, a habitation, a living being, becomes nought but a

flotsam of planks, scattered by the winds, tossed by the waves. Thus did

Demetrios, in the presence of the spell of two great eyes, lose his very

self, and all his strength ebbed away.

She lowered her eyes and passed by close to him. He could have shouted

with impatience. He clenched his fists. He was afraid of not being able

to recover a calm attitude, for speak to her he must. Nevertheless he

approached her with the formula of convention.

"I salute you," said he.

[Illustration: "I salute you," said he. "I salute you also," answered

the woman]

"I salute you also," answered the woman.

Demetrios continued:

"Where are you going to in so leisurely a fashion?"

"I am going home."

"Alone?"

"Alone."

And she made a movement as if to resume her walk.

Then Demetrios thought that perhaps he had made a mistake in taking her

for a courtesan. For some time past, the wives of the magistrates and

functionaries had taken to dressing and painting themselves like the

women of pleasure. She was probably a woman of honourable reputation,

and it was not without irony that he finished his question thus:

"To your husband?"

She put her two hands to her sides and began to laugh.

"I haven't one this evening."

Demetrios bit his lip and suggested, almost timidly:

"Don't look for one. You have set to work too late. There is no one

about now."

"Who told you that I was looking for one? I am taking a walk by myself,

and am looking for nothing."

"Where have you come from then? You certainly have not put on all those

jewels for your own pleasure, and that silken veil. . ."

"Would you have me go out naked, or dressed in wool like a slave-woman?

I dress for my own benefit. I like to know that I am beautiful, and I

look at my fingers as I walk in order to recognise all my rings . . ."

"You ought to have a mirror in your hand and look at nothing but your

eyes. Those eyes did not see the light at Alexandria. You are a Jewess.

I recognise it by your voice, which is softer than ours."

"No, I am not a Jewess. I am a Galilæn."

"What is your name, Miriam or Noëmi?"

"My Syriac name you shall not know. It is a royal name which is not home

here. My friends call me Chrysis, and it is a compliment that you might

have paid me."

He put his hand on her arm.

"Oh! no, no," she said mockingly. "It is much too late for this kind of

trifling. Let me go home quickly. I have been up for nearly three hours.

I am dying of hunger."

Bending down, she took her foot in her hand:

[Illustration: Bending down, she took her foot in her hand.]

"See how my little thongs hurt me. They are too tightly strapped. If I

do not loose them in a moment, I shall have a mark on my foot, and that

will be a pretty object to kiss. Leave me quickly. Ah! what an ado! If I

had known, I would not have stopped. My yellow veil is all crumpled at

the waist, look."

Demetrios passed his hand over his forehead; then, with the careless air

of a man who condescends to make his choice, he murmured:

"Show me the way."

"I shall do nothing of the kind," said Chrysis with a stupefied air.

"You do not even ask me whether it is my pleasure.

"Show me the way! Listen to him! Do you take me for a porneion-girl, who

puts herself on her back for three obols without looking to see who is

possessing her? Do you even know whether I am free? Do you know what

appointments I may have? Have you followed me in the street? Have you

noted the doors that open for me? Have you counted the men who think

they are loved by Chrysis? Show me the way! I shall not show it you, if

you please. Stay here or go away, but you shall not go home with me!"

"You do not know who I am."

"You? Of course I do! You are Demetrios of Sais; you made the statue of

my goddess; you are the lover of my queen and the lord of my town. But

for me you are nothing but a handsome slave, because you have seen me

and you love me."

She came a little nearer to him, and went on in a caressing voice:

"Yes, you love me. Oh! don't interrupt me. I know what you are going to

say: you love no one, you are loved. You are the Well-beloved, the

Darling, the Idol. You refused Glycera, who had refused Antiochus.

Demonassa the Lesbian, who had sworn to die a virgin, entered your bed

during your sleep, and would have taken you by force if your two Lybian

slaves had not put her naked into the street. Callistion, the

well-named, despairing of approaching you, has bought the house opposite

yours, and shows herself at the open window in the morning, as scantily

dressed as Artemis in the bath. You think that I do not know all that?

But we courtesans hear of everything. I heard of you the night of your

arrival at Alexandria; and since then not a single day has passed

without your name being mentioned. I even know things you have

forgotten. I even know things that you do not yet know yourself. Poor

little Phyllis hanged herself the day before yesterday on your

door-post, did she not? well, the fashion is catching. Lyde has done

like Phyllis: I saw her this evening as I passed, she was quite blue,

but the tears were not yet dry upon her cheeks. You don't know who Lyde

is? a child, a little fifteen-year-old courtesan whom her mother sold

last month to a Samian shipwright who was passing the night at

Alexandria before going up the river to Thebes. She came to see me. I

gave her some advice; she knew absolutely nothing, not even how to play

at dice. I often took her in my bed, because, when she had no lover, she

did not know where to sleep. And she loved you! If you had seen her hug

me to her and call me by your name. She wanted to write to you. Do you

understand? I told her it was not worth while. . ."

[Illustration]

Demetrios gazed at her without understanding.

"Yes, all that is a pure matter of indifference to you, is it not?"

continued Chrysis. "You did not love her. It is I that you love. You

have not even listened to what I have just told you. I am sure you could

not repeat a single word. You are absorbed in wondering how my eyelids

are made up, speculating on the sweetness of my mouth, on the softness

of my hair. Ah! how many others know all this! All who have desired me

have had their pleasure upon me: men, young men, old men, children,

women, young girls. I have refused nobody, do you understand? For seven

years, Demetrios, I have only slept alone three nights. Count how many

lovers that makes. Two thousand five hundred and more. I do not include

those that came in the daytime. Last year I danced naked before twenty

thousand persons, and I know that you were not one of them. Do you think

that I hide myself? Ah! for what, pray? All the women have seen me in

the bath. All the men have seen me in bed. You alone, you shall never

see me. I refuse you. I refuse you. You shall never know anything of

what I am, of what I feel, of my beauty, of my love! You are an

abominable man, fatuous, cruel, insensible, cowardly! I don't know why

one of us has not had enough hatred to kill you both in one another's

arms, first you, and afterwards the queen."

Demetrios quietly took her by the two arms, and, without answering a

word, bent her backwards with violence.

She had a moment's anguish; but suddenly she stiffened her knees,

stiffened her elbows, backed a little, and said in a low voice:

"Ah! I am not afraid of that, Demetrios! you shall never take me by

force, were I as feeble as an amorous virgin and you as strong as a son

of Atlas. You desire not only the satisfaction of your own senses, but

chiefly of mine. Moreover, you want to see me from head to foot, because

you believe that I am beautiful, and I am beautiful indeed. Now the moon

gives less light than my twelve waxen torches. It is almost dark here.

And then it is not customary to undress upon the quay. I could not dress

myself again without the help of my slave. Let me free, you hurt my

arms."

They were silent for a few minutes; then Demetrios answered:

"We must have done with this, Chrysis. You know well that I shall not

force you. But let me follow you. However proud you are, you would pay

dearly for the glory of refusing Demetrios."

Chrysis still kept silence. He continued more gently:

"What are you afraid of?"

"You are accustomed to the love of others. Do you know what ought to be

given to a courtesan who does not love?"

He became impatient.

"I do not ask you to love me. I am tired of being loved. I do not want

to be loved. I ask you to abandon yourself. For that, I will give you

all the gold in the world. I have it in Egypt."

"I have it in my hair. I am tired of gold. I don't want gold. I want but

three things. Will you give them to me?"

Demetrios felt that she was going to ask for the impossible. He looked

at her anxiously. But she began to smile, and said in slow tones:

"I want a silver mirror to gaze at my eyes within my eyes."

"You shall have it. What else do you want? Quickly."

"I want a carved ivory comb to plunge into my hair like a net into water

that sparkles in the sun."

"And then?"

"You will give me my comb?"

"Yes, yes. Go on."

"I want a pearl necklace to hang on my breast, when I dance you the

nuptial dances of my country in my chamber."

He raised his eyebrows;

"Is that all?"

"You will give me my necklace?"

"Any you please."

Her voice became very tender.

"Any I please? Ah! that is exactly what I wanted to ask you. Will you

let me choose my presents?"

"Of course."

"You swear?"

"I swear."

"What oath will you swear?"

"Dictate it to me."

"By the Aphrodite you carved."

"I swear by the Aphrodite. But why these precautions?"

"Ah! . . . I was uneasy; but now I am reassured".

She raised her head.

"I have chosen my presents."

Demetrios suddenly became anxious and asked:

"Already?"

"Yes. Do you think I shall accept any sort of silver mirror, bought of a

merchant of Smyrna, or some stray courtesan. I want the mirror of my

friend Bacchis, who stole a lover from me last week and jeered at me

spitefully in a little orgie she had with Tryphera, Mousarion, and some

young fools who repeated everything to me. It is a mirror she prizes

greatly because it belonged to Ithodopis, who was fellow-slave with

Æsop and was redeemed by Sappho's brother. You know that she is a very

celebrated courtesan. Her mirror is magnificent. It is said that Sappho

used it, and it is for this reason that Bacchis lays store on it. She

has nothing more precious in the world; but I know where you will find

it. She told me one night, when she was intoxicated. It is under the

third stone of the altar. She puts it there every evening when she

leaves her house at sunset. Go to-morrow to her house at that hour and

fear nothing: she takes her slaves with her."

"This is pure madness," cried Demetrios. "Do you expect me to steal?"

"Do you not love me? I thought that you loved me. And then, have you not

sworn? I thought you had sworn. If I am mistaken, let us say no more

about it."

He understood that she was ruining him, but he yielded without a

struggle, almost willingly.

"I will do what you say," he answered.

"Oh! I know well that you will. But you hesitate at first. I understand

that. It is not an ordinary present. I would not ask it of a

philosopher. I ask you for it. I know well that you will give it me."

She toyed a moment with the peacock feathers of her round fan, and

suddenly:

"Ah! . . . Neither do I wish for a common ivory comb bought at a

tradesman's in the town. You told me I might choose, did you not? Well,

I want . . . I want the carved ivory comb in the hair of the wife of the

high priest. It is much more valuable than the mirror of Rhodopis. It

came from a queen of Egypt who lived a long time ago, and whose name is

so difficult that I cannot pronounce it. Consequently the ivory is very

old, and as yellow as if it were gilded. It has a carved figure of a

young girl walking in a lotus-marsh. The lotus is higher than she is,

and she is stepping on tiptoe in order not to get wet . . . It is really

a beautiful comb. I am glad you are going to give it to me. I have also

some little grievances against its present possessor. I had offered a

blue veil to Aphrodite last month; I saw it on this woman's head next

day. It was a little hasty, and I bore her a grudge for it. Her comb

will avenge me for my veil."

"And how am I to get it?" asked Demetrios.

"Ah! that will be a little more difficult. She is an Egyptian, you know,

and she makes up her two hundred plaits only once a year, like the other

women of her race. But I want my comb to-morrow, and you must kill her

to get it. You have sworn an oath."

She pouted at Demetrios, who was looking on the ground. Then she

concluded very quickly:

"I have chosen my necklace also. I want the seven-stringed pearl

necklace on the neck of Aphrodite."

Demetrios started violently.

"Ah! this time, it is too much! You shall not have the laugh of me to

the end! Nothing, do you understand? neither the mirror, nor the comb,

nor the collar."

But she closed his mouth with her hand and resumed her caressing tone:

[Illustration: But she closed his mouth with her hand.]

"Don't say that. You know well that you will give me this too. I am sure

of it. I shall have the three gifts. You will come to see me to-morrow

evening, and the day after to-morrow if you like, and every evening. I

shall be at home at any hour, in the costume you prefer, painted

according to your taste, with my hair dressed after your pleasure, ready

for your most extravagant caprices, If you desire but tender love, I

will cherish you like a child. If you thirst after rare sensations, I

will not refuse you the most agonising. If you wish for silence, I will

hold my peace, when you want me to sing, ah! you will see, Well-Beloved!

I know songs of all countries. I know some that are soft as the murmur

of springs, others that are terrible as the coming of thunder. I know

some so simple and fresh that a young girl might sing them to her

mother; and I know some that could not be sung at Lampsacos. I know some

that Elephantis would have blushed to hear, and that I dare not sing

above a whisper. The nights you want me to dance, I will dance till

morning. I will dance fully dressed, with my trailing tunic, or in a

transparent veil, or in open drawers and a corselet with two openings to

allow the breasts to peep through. But have I promised you to dance

naked? I will dance naked if you prefer. Naked and with flowers on my

head, or naked with my hair loose, painted like a divine image. I can

balance my hands, circle my arms, vibrate my breast, heave my belly,

contort my croup, you will see! I dance on the tips of my toes or lying

down in the carpets. I know all the dances of Aphrodite, that are danced

before Ourania, and those that are danced before Astarte. I even know

some they dare not dance. I will dance you all the loves. When this is

finished we shall be only at the beginning. You will see! The queen is

richer than I am, but there is not in all the palace a chamber as

amorous as mine. I don't tell you what you will find there. There are

things too beautiful for me to be able to give you an idea of them, and

others so strange that I do not know the words to describe them. And

then, do you know what you will see, something which transcends all the

rest? You will see Chrysis whom you love, and whom you do not yet know.

Yes, you have only seen my face, you do not know how beautiful I am. Ah!

Ah! . . . Ah! Ah! You will have surprises. Ah! how you will play with my

nipples, how you will bend my little waist as it lies upon your arm, how

you will tremble in the grasp of my knees, how you will faint away on my

moving body! And how excellent my mouth! Ah! my kisses!"

Demetrios looked at her with a frenzied eye.

She continued tenderly:

"What! You will not give me a poor old silver mirror when you may have

all my hair like a golden forest in your hands?"

Demetrios tried to touch it . . . She recoiled and said:

"To-morrow!"

"You shall have it," he murmured.

"And you will not take for me a little ivory comb which pleases me, When

you can have my two arms like two branches of ivory around your neck?"

He tried to stroke them. She drew them behind her back and repeated:

"To-morrow!"

"I will bring it," he said very low. "Ah! I knew it!" cried the

courtesan; "and you will also give me the seven-stringed necklace of

pearls on the neck of Aphrodite, and for that I will sell you all my

body, which is like a half-opened shell of mother-of-pearl, and more

kisses in your mouth than there are pearls in the sea!"

[Illustration]

Demetrios held out his head, supplicatingly.

She shot him a brilliant glance and gave him her sensual lips . . .

When he opened his eyes she was already afar off. A little pale shadow

danced before her floating veil.

He returned vaguely towards the town, with his forehead bent under the

weight of an inexpressible shame.

VI

THE VIRGINS

The dim dawn rose on the sea. All things were tinted with lilac. The

furnace blazing on the summit of the tower of Pharos died down with the

moon. Fugitive yellow gleams appeared in the violet waves like sirens'

faces under the hair of purple sea-weed. Daylight came all at once.

The quay was deserted. The town was dead. It was the grey light before

the first day blush that illumines the world's sleep and brings the

feverish dreams of morning.

Nothing existed, except silence.

The long boats anchored in line near the quays, with their rows of

parallel oars hanging in the water, looked like sleeping birds. The

perspective of the architectural line of the streets was unbroken by

vehicle, horse, or slave. Alexandria was but a solitude, the unreal

phantom of some antique city abandoned for centuries.

But the sound of light footsteps fell tremulously upon the ground, and

two young girls appeared, one dressed in yellow, the other in blue.

They both wore maidens' girdles, which circled round the hips and

buckled low down upon the body below the navel. They were the musicians

of the night, the singing-girl and one of the flute-girls.

The flute-girl was younger and prettier than her friend. Her eyes smiled

faintly, pale as the blue of her robe, half hidden under her eyelids.

Her two slender flutes hung dangling from her flowered shoulder-knot

along her back. A double iris-garland, fastened to the ankles by two

silver anklets, undulated beneath the gauzy robe and encircled the

rounded legs.

She said:

"Myrtocleia, do not be sad because you have lost our tablets. Would you

ever have forgotten that you possess the love of Rhodis, and can you

think, naughty girl, you would ever have read in solitude the line

written by my hand? Am I one of those faithless friends who engrave

their bed-sister's name upon their nail and unite themselves to another

girl as soon as the nail has grown to the limit? Do you need a souvenir

of me when you have my living body? I am barely of nubile age, and yet I

was not half so old on the day I saw you for the first time. You

remember it well. It was at the bath. Our mothers took us in their arms

and held us towards one another. We played for a long time on the marble

before putting on our clothes again. We have never left one another

since that day, and, five years afterward, we loved each other."

Myrtocleia answered:

"There is another first day, Rhodis, and you know it. It is the day you

linked our two names together in writing upon the tablets. That was the

first day! It will never come back again. But never mind. Each day is

new for me, and when you awake towards evening, it is as if I saw you

for the first time, You are not a girl at all: you are a little Arcadian

nymph that has left her forests because Phoibos has dried up her

fountain. Your body is supple as an olive branch, your skin is soft as

water in summer, the iris circles about your legs, and you wear the

lotus-flower like Astarte the open fig. In what wood haunted by

immortals did your mother betake her to sleep before your

thrice-blessed birth? and what roaming ægipan, or what river-god united

himself with her in the grass? When we have left this terrible African

soil, you shall take me to your fountain, far beyond Psophis and

Phenens, to vast shady forests where, upon the soft earth, one may see

the double footprints of satyrs and light-treading nymphs. There you

shall search out a smooth rock, and you shall engrave upon the stone the

words you wrote upon the wax: the words that are our joy. Listen,

listen, Rhodis! By the girdle of Aphrodite upon which all desires are

embroidered, all desires are unknown to me; for you are more than my

dream! By the horn of Amaltheia whence flow all the good things of the

world, the world is a matter of indifference to me; for you are the only

good I have found in it! When I look at you and when I see myself, I

know not why you love me in return. Your hair is as fair as ears of

corn; mine is black as a ram's fleece. Your skin is as white as

shepherd's cheese; mine is brown as the sand upon the beach. Your tender

breast is as flowered as the orange tree in autumn; mine is meagre and

barren as the rock pine. If my face has gained in beauty, it is because

I have loved you. O Rhodis! well you know that my singular virginity is

like the lips of Pan eating a sprig of myrtle; yours is the colour of

roses, and dainty as the mouth of a little child. I do not know why you

love me; but if you ceased to love me for a day; if, like your sister

Theano who plays the flute by your side, you ever stayed to sleep in the

houses that employ us, then I should never even think of sleeping alone

in our bed, and when you came in you would find me strangled with my

girdle."

The very idea was so wild and cruel that Rhodis's long eyes filled with

smiles and tears. She placed her foot upon a street-post:

"My flowers between my legs hamper me. Undo them, adored Myrto. I have

finished dancing for to-night."

The singing-girl started.

[Illustration]

"Oh! it is true. I had already forgotten them, those men and women. They

made both of you dance, you in this Cossian robe, transparent as water,

and your sister naked with you. If I had not protected you, they would

have possessed you like a prostitute, as they did your sister before our

eyes in the same room. Oh, what an abomination! Did you hear her cries

and wailings? How dolorous is the love of man!"

She knelt down beside Rhodis and unclasped the two garlands, and then

the three higher up, imprinting a kiss on the place of each. When she

rose to her feet, the child took her by the neck and swooned under her

mouth.

"Myrto, you are not jealous of all those debauchees? What does it matter

that they should have seen me? Theano suffices them, and I have

relinquished her to them. They shall not have me, darling Myrto. Do not

be jealous of them."

"Jealous! I am jealous of everything that approaches you. In order that

your robes may not have you alone, I put them on when you have worn

them. In order that the flowers in your hair may not remain amorous of

you, I give them to mean courtesans who will defile them in their

orgies. I have given you nothing, in order that nothing may possess you.

I am afraid of everything you touch, and I hate everything you look at.

I should like to pass my whole life between the four walls of a prison

alone with myself and you, and unite myself with you so profoundly, hide

you so well between my arms, that no eye would suspect your presence. I

would I were the fruit that you eat, the perfume that delights you, the

sleep that glides beneath your eyelids, the love that strains your

limbs. I am jealous of the happiness I give you, and I would I could

give you the very happiness I derive from you. That is what I am jealous

of; but I do not fear your mistresses of a night when they help me to

satisfy your girlish desires. As for lovers, I know well that you will

never be theirs; I know well that you cannot love man, intermittent and

brutal man."

Rhodis exclaimed with conviction:

"I would rather go, like Nausithoe, and sacrifice my virginity to the

god Priapos adored at Thasos. But not this morning, darling. I have

danced a long time, and I am very tired. I wish I were at home, sleeping

on your arm."

She smiled, and continued:

"We must tell Theano that our bed is no longer hers. We will make her up

another one beside the door. After what I have seen this night I cannot

embrace her again. Myrto, it is really horrible. Is it possible to love

like that? Is that what they call love?"

"Yes, it is that."

"They deceive themselves, Myrto. They do not know."

Myrtocleia took her in her arms, and both kept silence together.

The wind mingled their hair.

VII

CHRYSIS'S HAIR

"Look." said Rhodis, "look! I see some one."

The singing-girl looked. A woman, in the distance, was walking rapidly

along the quay.

"I recognise her." resumed the child.

"It is Chrysis. She is wearing her yellow robe."

"What! is she dressed already?"

"I can't understand it. Usually she does not go out before mid-day, and

the sun is hardly up. Something must have happened to her: something

fortunate no doubt: she is so lucky."

They advanced to meet her, and said:

"Hail, Chrysis."

"Hail. How long have you been here?"

"I don't know. It was daylight when we arrived."

"There was nobody on the quay?"

[Illustration: "It is Chrysis. She is wearing her yellow robe."]

"Nobody."

"Not a man! are you sure?"

"Oh, quite sure. Why do you ask?"

Chrysis did not answer. Rhodis went on:

"You wanted to see somebody?"

"Yes . . . perhaps . . . I think perhaps it is as well I have not seen him.

Yes, it is as well. I was wrong to come back; I could not restrain

myself."

"But what is the matter? Do tell us, Chrysis."

"Oh, no."

"Not even us? Not even us, your little friends!"

"You shall know later on, together with the whole town."

"It is very amiable of you."

"You shall know a little before, if you really want to; but this morning

it is impossible. Extraordinary things are happening, my dears. I am

dying to tell you, but I must hold my tongue. You were going home? Come

and sleep with me, I am quite alone."

"Oh, Chrysis, Chrysidion, we are so tired! We are going home certainly,

but to have a good sleep."

"Well, you can sleep afterwards. To-day is the eve of the Aphrodisiæ.

Is it a day for rest? If you want the goddess to protect you and to make

you happy next year you must enter her temple with eyelids dark as

violets and cheeks white as lilies. We will see to that; come with me."

She put her arms round their waists, and closing her caressing hands

upon their little half naked breasts, bore them hurriedly off.

Rhodis, however, remained preoccupied.

"And when we are in your bed," she said, "will you not tell us what is

happening; what you expect?"

"I will tell you many things, everything you please; but about that

subject I shall say nothing."

"Even when we are in your arms, naked, with the lamp extinguished?"

"Do not insist, Rhodis: you shall know to-morrow. Wait till to-morrow."

"You are going to be very happy? or very powerful?"

"Very powerful."

Rhodis opened her eyes wide and exclaimed:

"You are going to sleep with the queen!"

"No," said Chrysis laughing; "but I am going to be as powerful as she

is. Do you desire anything?"

"Oh, yes."

And the little girl became thoughtful.

"Well, what is it?" asked Chrysis.

"It is something impossible. Why should I ask?"

Myrtocleia spoke for her:

"At Ephesos, in our country, when two virgins of nubile age like Rhodis

and me love one another, the law allows them to be united in marriage.

They both go to the temple of Athena and sacrifice their double girdle;

thence to the sanctuary of Iphinoë, where they offer a lock of their

hair, interwined; and finally to the peristyle of Dionysios, where the

more male of the two receives a little knife of sharp-edged gold, and a

white linen cloth to stanch the blood. In the evening, the "fiancee" is

conducted to her new home in a flowered chariot between her husband and

the paranymph, escorted by torch-bearers and flute-girls. And

thenceforth they have the rights of married people; they may adopt

little girls and associate them in their intimate life. They are

respected. They have a family. That is the dream of Rhodis. But it is

not the custom here."

"We will change the law." said Chrysis.

"But leave it to me, you shall marry one another."

"Oh, is it true?" cried the little girl, flushing with joy.

"Yes; and I don't ask which of you is to be the husband. I know that

Myrto possesses everything necessary to create that illusion. You are

fortunate, Rhodis, to have such a friend. They are rare, whatever people

say."

They reached the door, where Djala was sitting on the steps weaving a

towel of flax. The slave-woman rose to allow them to pass, and then

followed them.

The two flute-girls took off their simple clothing in an instant. They

performed minute ablutions upon each other in a green marble bowl

communicating with the bath. Then they rolled upon the bed.

Chrysis looked at them without seeing them. The words spoken by

Demetrios, even the most trivial, ran in her memory unceasingly. She was

not conscious of the presence of Djala, who silently untied and unwound

her long saffron veil, unbuckled the girdle, took off the rings, the

seals, the armlets, the silver serpents, the golden pins; but the gentle

titillation of her hair falling over her shoulders woke her vaguely.

She asked for her mirror.

[Illustration: She was not conscious of the presence of Djala, who

silently untied and unwound her long saffron veil.]

Was she beginning to feel afraid that she was not beautiful enough to

keep this new lover--for keep him she must--after the mad exploits she

had demanded of him? Or was it that, by a detailed examination of each

one of her physical beauties, she wanted to calm her alarms and justify

her confidence?

She brought the mirror close to every part of her body, touching each in

succession. She appraised the whiteness of her skin, estimated its

softness by long caresses, its warmth by embraces. She tested the

fullness of her breasts, the firmness of her belly, the tension of her

flesh. She measured her hair and considered its glossiness. She tried

the strength of her regard, the expression of her mouth, the fire of her

breath; and she bestowed a long, slow kiss along her naked arm from the

region of the armpit down to the bend of the elbow.

[Illustration]

An extraordinary emotion, compounded of astonishment and pride, of

certainty and impatience, took possession of her at this contact with

her own lips. She turned round as if she were looking for somebody; but

catching sight of the two forgotten Ephesian girls upon her bed, she

leaped into their midst, separated them, hugged them with at sort of

amorous fury, and her long golden hair enveloped the three young heads.

Book II

I

THE GARDENS OF THE GODDESS

The temple of Aphrodite-Astarte stood outside the gates of the town, in

an immense park, full of flowers and shade. The Nile water, conveyed by

seven aqueducts, induced an extraordinary verdure all the year round.

This flowering forest on the sea's verge, these deep streams, these

lakes, these darkling meadows, had been created in the desert more than

two centuries previously by the first of the Ptolemies. Since then, the

sycamores planted by his orders had grown to gigantic size; under the

influence of the fertilising waters, the lawns had grown into meads, the

basins had widened into ponds, nature had turned a park into a

champaign.

The gardens were more than a valley, more than a country; they were a

complete world enclosed by bounds of stone and governed by a goddess,

the soul and centre of this universe. All around it stood a circular

terrace, eighty stades long and thirty-two feet high. This was not a

wall, it was a colossal "cite," composed of fourteen hundred houses. A

corresponding number of prostitutes inhabited this sacred town, and in

this unique spot were represented seventy different nationalities.

The plan of the sacred houses was uniform and as follows: the door, of

red copper (a metal consecrated to the goddess), bore a phallos-shaped

knocker which fell upon a receiving-plate in relief, the image of the

eteis; and beneath was graved the courtesan's name, with the initials of

the usual formula:

[Greek: Ô.X.E

KOCHLIS

P.P.P]

Two rooms contrived like shops opened out on either side of the door,

that is to say, there was no wall on the side facing the gardens. The

one on the right, the "chambre exposée," was the place where the

courtesan sat bedecked with her adornments upon a lofty cathedra at the

hour when the men arrived. The one on the left was at the disposal of

suitors who wished to pass the night in the open air, without, however,

sleeping on the grass.

When the door was opened, a corridor gave access to a vast court-yard

paved with marble, the centre of which was occupied by an oval basin. A

peristyle cast a circle of shadow round this patch of light, and

interposed a zone of coolness between it and the entries to the seven

chambers of the house. At the further end rose the altar of red granite.

Each woman had brought a little idol of the goddess from her native

country, and each adored it in her own tongue, as it stood upon the

altar, without understanding the other women. Lakshmi, Ashtaroth, Venus,

Ishtar, Freia, Mylitta, Cypris, such were the religious names of their

deified VOLUPTAS. Some venerated her under a symbolic form: a red

pebble, a conical stone, a great knotted shell. Most of them had a

little statuette on a pedestal of green wood, usually a rudely-carved

figure with thin arms, heavy breasts, and excessive hips. The hand

pointed to the delta-shaped locks of the belly. They laid a

myrtle-branch at its feet, scattered the altar with rose leaves, and

burned a little grain of incense for every prayer granted. It was the

confidant of all their troubles, the witness of all their undertakings,

the supposed cause of all their pleasures. At their death, it was placed

in their fragile little coffin, to watch over their sepulture.

The most beautiful of these women came from the kingdoms of Asia. Every

year, the vessels which carried the presents of the tributaries or

allies to Alexandria landed, together with the bales and leathern

bottles, a cargo of a hundred virgins chosen by the priests for the

service of the sacred garden. They were Mysians and Jewesses, Phrygians

and Cretans, daughters of Ecbatana and Babylon, maidens from the Bay of

Pearls and from the sacred banks of the Ganges. Some were white-skinned

with medallion-like faces and inflexible bosoms; others, brown as the

earth under rain, wore silver rings in their noses. Their hair fell short

and dark upon their shoulders.

Some came from a still greater distance: dainty, deliberate little

beings, whose language nobody understood, and who resembled yellow

monkeys.

Their long eyes pointed towards their temples; they dressed their

straight black hair in the quaintest fashion. These girls remained all

their lives as timid as strayed animals. They knew the movements of

love, but refused the kiss upon the mouth. Between two passing unions

they were to be seen sitting on their little feet, and playing with one

another, and amusing themselves like infants.

[Illustration]

In a solitary meadow, the pink and pale daughters of the North lived

together, lying upon the grass. They were Sarmatians with triple

tresses, robust legs, square shoulders, who made garlands for themselves

with the branches of trees, and wrestled for a pastime. There were

big-breasted, flat-nosed, hairy Scythians, who paired in the attitude of

beasts; gigantic Teutons who terrified the Egyptians with their hair

pale as that of old men and their flesh softer than that of children;

Gauls, sandy-hued like cows, and who laughed without a motive; young

Celts with sea-green eyes, who never went out naked.

Elsewhere, the brown-breasted Iberians assembled together during the

day. They had heavy hair that they dressed with extreme care, and

nervous bellies which they did not depilate. Their firm skins and

powerful croups were held in great esteem by the Alexandrians. They were

chosen for dancing-girls as often as for mistresses. Under the large

shadow of the palm-trees lived the daughters of Africa: Numidians veiled

in white, Carthaginians appareled in black gauze, Negresses enveloped

in many-coloured costumes.

They were fourteen hundred.

When once a woman had entered the garden, she never left it till the

first day of her old age. She gave the half of her gains to the temple,

and the remainder went to defray the cost of her meals and perfumes.

[Illustration: The poorer tradesman . . . preferred to address themselves

to the women who slept thus in the open air.]

They were not slaves, and each was the real owner of one of the houses

of the Terrace; but all were not equally beloved, and the most fortunate

often found the opportunity of buying the neighbouring houses, which

their owners were willing to sell in order to escape the ravages of

hunger. These girls carried off their obscene statuettes to the park and

searched out a flat stone to serve as an altar, in a corner which

henceforth they did not leave. The poorer tradesmen were aware of this.

and preferred to address themselves to the women who slept thus in the

open air upon the moss near their sanctuaries; but occasionally even

these suitors were not forthcoming, and then the poor creatures took to

themselves a partner in distress. These passionate friendships developed

almost into conjugal love. The couple shared everything down to the last

scrap of wool. They consoled one another for their long periods of

chastity by alternate complaisances.

Those who had no girl friends offered themselves of their own accord as

slaves to their more prosperous colleagues.

The latter were forbidden to have more than a dozen of these poor

creatures in their service; but twenty-two courtesans were quoted as

having attained the maximum. These had chosen a motley staff of

domestics from all the nationalities.

If, in the course of their stray amours, they conceived a son, he was

brought up in the temple-enclosure in the contemplation of the perfect

form and in the service of its divinity. If they were brought to bed of

a daughter, the child was consecrated to the goddess.

On the first day of its life, they celebrated its symbolic marriage with

the son of Dionysos, and the Hierophant deflowered it herself with a

little golden knife; for virginity is displeasing to Aphrodite. Later

on, the little girl entered the Didascalion, a great monumental school

situated behind the temple, and where the theory and practice of all the

erotic arts were taught in seven stages: the use of the eyes, the

embrace, the motions of the body, the secrets of the bite, of the kiss,

and of glottism.

The pupil chose the day of her first experiment at her own good

pleasure, because desire is ordained by the goddess, whose will must be

obeyed. On that day, she was allotted one of the houses of the Terrace,

and some of these children, who were not even nubile, counted amongst

the most zealous and the most esteemed.

The interior of the Didascalion, the seven class-rooms, the little

theatre, and the peristyle of the court, were decorated with ninety-two

frescoes designed to sum up the whole of amatory teaching. It was the

life-work of one man. Cleochares of Alexandria, the natural son and

disciple of Apelles, had terminated them on the eve of his death.

Recently, Queen Berenice, who was greatly interested in the celebrated

school and sent her young sisters to it, had ordered a series of marble

groups from Demetrios in order to complete the decoration; but as yet

only one of them had been erected, in the children's class-room.

At the end of each year, in the presence of the entire body of

courtesans, a great competition took place, which excited an

extraordinary emulation amongst this crowd of women, for the twelve

prizes which were offered conferred the right to the most exalted glory

it was possible to dream of: the right to enter the Cotytteion.

This last monument was shrouded in so much mystery, that it is

impossible for us to give a detailed description of it. We know merely

that it was comprised in the peribola and that it had the form of a

triangle of which the base was a temple of the goddess Cotytto, in whose

name fearful unknown debauches took place. The other two sides of the

monument were composed of eighteen houses; they were inhabited by

thirty-six courtesans, so sought after by rich lovers that they did not

give themselves for less than two minæ: they were the Baptes of

Alexandria. Once a month, at full moon, they assembled in the temple

enclosure, maddened by aphrodisiacs, and girt with the canonical

phallos. The oldest of the thirty-six was required to take a mortal dose

of the terrible erotogenous philter. The certainty of a speedy death

impelled her to attempt without hesitation all the dangerous feats of

sensual passion before which the living recoil. Her body, covered with

foam, became the centre and model of the whirling orgie; in the midst of

prolonged shriekings, cries, tears, and dances, the other naked women

embraced her with frenzy, bathed their hair in her sweat, fastened on

her burning flesh, and drew fresh ardors from the uninterrupted spasm of

this furious agony. Three years these women lived thus, and such was the

wild madness of their end at the close of the thirty-sixth month.

Other less venerated sanctuaries had been erected by the women, in

honour of the other names of the multiform Aphrodite. There was an altar

sacred to the Ouranian Aphrodite, which received the chaste vows of

sentimental courtesans: another to the Apostrophian Aphrodite, who

granted forgetfulness of unrequited loves; another to the Chrysean

Aphrodite, who attracted rich lovers; another to Genetyllis, the patron

goddess of women in child-birth; another to Aphrodite of Colias, who

presided over gross passions, for everything which related to love fell

within the pious cult of the goddess. But these special altars possessed

no efficacy or virtue except in the case of unimportant desires. Their

service was haphazard, their favours were a matter of daily occurrence,

and their votaries were on terms of familiarity with them. Suppliants

whose prayers had been granted made simple offerings of flowers; those

who were not content defiled them with their excrements. They were

neither consecrated nor kept up by the priests, and their profanation

incurred no punishment.

Far different was the discipline of the temple.

The temple, the Great Temple of the Great Goddess, the most sacred spot

in all Egypt, the inviolable Astarteion, was a colossal edifice one

hundred and thirty six feet in length, standing on the summit of the

gardens and approached on all sides by seventeen steps. The golden gates

were guarded by twelve hermaphrodite hierodules; symbolising the two

objects of love and the twelve hours of the night.

[Illustration]

The entrance did not face towards the east, but in the direction of

Paphos, that is to say, towards the north-east. The sun's rays never

penetrated directly into the sanctuary of the Great Goddess of the

Night. Eighty-six columns upheld the architrave: they were tinted purple

as far as their mid-height, and all the upper part stood out from these

gaudy trappings with an unspeakable whiteness, like the busts of

standing women.

Between the epistyle and the coronis, the long belt-shaped Zophora

unfolded its bestial sculptures, erotic and fabulous. There were

centauresses mounted by stallions, goats tumbled by meagre satyrs,

virgins severed by monstrous bulls, naiads covered by stags, bacchantes

loved by tigers, lionesses seized by griffins. All this great wallowing

multitude of beings was exalted by the irresistible divine passion. The

male strained, the female opened, and the fusion of the creative forces

produced the first thrill of life. The crowd of obscure couples

sometimes, by chance, left a clear space round some immortal scene:

Europa on hands and knees bearing the weight of the glorious Olympian

beast; Leda guiding the hardy swan between her beautiful arched thighs.

Farther on, the insatiable Siren exhausting expiring Glaucos; the god

Pan standing upright and possessing an hamadryad with flying hair; the

Sphinx raising her croup to the level of the horse Pegasos. At the end

of the frieze, the sculptor had carved a figure of himself facing the

goddess Aphrodite. He stood there modelling the contours of a perfect

cteis in soft wax, with the goddess herself as his model, as if his

whole ideal of beauty, joy, and virtue had long since taken refuge in

this precious fragile flower.

II

MELITTA

"Purify thyself, stranger."

"I shall enter pure," said Demetrios.

Dipping the end of her hair in water, the young gate-keeper moistened

first his eyelids, then his lips and fingers, in order that his glance

might be sanctified, as also the kiss of his mouth and the caress of his

hands.

And then he pressed forward into the wood of Aphrodite.

Through the dark branches, he perceived a setting sun of sombre purple,

powerless to dazzle the eyes. It was the evening of the day on which his

life had been convulsed by the meeting with Chrysis.

The feminine soul is of a simplicity incredible to men. Where there is

nothing but a straight line, they obstinately search for the complexity

of a web; they find emptiness and go astray in it. Thus it was that the

soul of Chrysis, limpid as a little child's, appeared to Demetrios more

mysterious than a problem in metaphysics. After leaving this woman upon

the quay, he went back to his house like a man in a dream, incapable of

answering all the questions which tormented him. What did she want with

these three gifts? It was impossible for her either to wear or to sell a

celebrated mirror, acquired by theft, the comb of an assassinated woman,

the pearl necklace of the goddess. If she kept them at home, she would

expose herself every day to the possibility of a fatal discovery. Then

why ask for them? To destroy them? He knew only too well that women are

incapable of enjoying things in secret and that good fortune brings them

happiness only as soon as it is noised abroad. And then, what

divination, what profound clairvoyance had led her to judge him capable

of accomplishing three such extraordinary actions for her sake?

Assuredly, if he had liked, he might have carried off Chrysis from her

home, held her at his mercy, and made her his mistress, his wife, or his

slave, at choice. He had even the right to do away with her, simply.

Former revolutions had accustomed the citizens to violent deaths, and no

one would have troubled about the disappearance of a courtesan. Chrysis

must know this, and yet she had dared . . .

[Illustration: The young gate-keeper moistened first his eyelids]

The more he thought about her, the more grateful he was to her for

having varied the usual routine of bargaining in so charming a manner.

How many women of equal worth with Chrysis had offered themselves

clumsily! But what did this one ask for? Neither love, nor gold, nor

jewels, but three unheard-of crimes! She interested him keenly. He had

offered her all the treasures of Egypt; he felt distinctly, now, that if

she had accepted them she would not have received two obols, and that he

would have tired of her even before knowing her. Three crimes were

certainly an unusual salary: but she was worthy to receive it since she

was a woman capable of exacting it, and he promised himself to go on

with the adventure.

In order not to give himself the time to repent of his firm resolve, he

went the very same day to the house of Bacchis, found the house empty,

took the silver mirror and went off to the gardens.

Was it necessary to make a direct call on Chrysis's second victim?

Demetrios thought not. The priestess Touni, who owned the famous ivory

comb, was so charming and so weak that he was afraid of repenting if he

went straight to her house without any preliminary precautions, He

retraced his steps and went along the Grand Terrace.

The courtesans were on show in their "chambres exposée" like flowers in

a shop window.

Their altitudes and their costumes had no less diversity than their

ages, types, and races. The most beautiful, according to the tradition

of Phryne, leaving exposed nothing but the oval of their laces, sat

enveloped from head to foot in their great garment of fine wool. Others

had adopted the fashion of transparent robes, under which one

distinguished their beauties mysteriously, just as, through limpid

water, one discerns the green mosses lying in splashes of shade upon the

bottom. Those whose sole charm consisted in their youthfulness sat naked

to the waist, stiffening out their busts in order to display to the best

advantage the firmness of their breasts. But the most mature, knowing

that the features of the feminine visage age more quickly than the skin

of the body, sat quite naked, holding their breasts in their hands, and

stretching their clumsy thighs apart, as if they wished to prove that

they were still women.

[Illustration: Demetrios passed slowly before them.]

Demetrios passed slowly before them, with unflagging admiration. He had

never yet succeeded in contemplating a woman's nudity without intense

emotion. He understood neither disgust before the corpse of a young

woman nor insensibility to the body of a little girl. That evening any

woman could have charmed him. Provided she remained silent and did not

display more ardour than the minimum required by the etiquette of the

bed, he was quite ready to forgive her for her lack of beauty. And what

is more, he even preferred that she should have a coarse body, for the

more his intelligence considered faultless forms, the less room was

there for his sensual desires. The agitation which he felt upon contact

with living beauty was due to a sensualism exclusively cerebral, which

annihilated mere sexual excitation. He remembered with anguish having

remained all night as impotent as an old man, by the side of the most

admirable woman he had ever held in his arms. And since that night he

had learnt to choose mistresses of less purity.

"Friend," said a voice, "you don't recognise me?"

He turned round with a negative sign, and went on his way, for he never

undressed the same woman twice. It was the principle that guided his

visits to the gardens. A woman one has not yet possessed retains

something of the virgin; but what good result, what surprise can one

expect from a second rendez-vous? It is almost marriage. Demetrios did

not expose himself to the illusions of the second night. Queen Berenice

sufficed for his rare conjugal impulses, and with that exception he was

careful to choose a new accomplice for every evening's indispensable

adultery.

"Clonarion!

Gnatene!

Plango!

Mnais!

Crobyle!

Ioessa."

They cried their names as he passed, and some added protestations of

their ardent natures or proposed an abnormal vice. Demetrios followed

the road. He was preparing to choose at a venture, according to his

habit, when a little girl entirely dressed in blue leaned her head upon

her shoulder and said to him softly, without rising:

"Is it quite out of the question?"

The novelty of this mode of address made him smile. He stopped.

"Open the door," he said. "I choose you."

The little girl gleefully jumped to her feet and gave two raps with the

phallus-shaped knocker. The door was opened by an old slave woman.

"Gorgo," said the little girl, "I have got somebody; quickly, get some

cakes and Cretan wine, and make the bed."

She turned round to Demetrios.

"You don't want any satyrion?"

"No," said the young man laughing. "You have some?"

"I have to keep it," said the child. "I am asked for it oftener than you

think. Come this way; be careful of the steps, one of them is worn. Go

into my room. I shall be back in a moment."

The room was quite simple, like those of the novices. A great bed, a

couch, a few seats and carpets composed all the scanty furniture; but

through a large open bay there was a view over the gardens, the sea, the

double harbour of Alexandria. Demetrios remained standing and looked at

the distant city.

Suns setting behind harbours! Incomparable glories of maritime cities,

calm skies, purple waters! Upon what soul vociferous with joy or sorrow

would you not cast a shroud of silence? What feet have not halted, what

passions have not withered, what voices have not died away before you?

. . . Demetrios looked; a swell of torrential flame seemed to issue from

the sun, half dipping into the sea, and to flow straight to the left

bend of the wood of Aphrodite. From horizon to horizon, the

Mediterranean was flooded by the sumptuous purple spectrum which lay in

sharply-defined hands of colour, golden red and dull violet side by

side. Between this ever-shifting splendour and the peaty mirror of Lake

Mareotis, stood the white mass of the town, bathed in red and violet

reflexions. Its twenty thousand flat houses spreading in different

directions picked it out marvellously with twenty thousand dashes of

colour that underwent a perpetual metamorphosis according to the various

phases of the setting luminary. The flaming sun shot forth rapid shafts,

then was swallowed up, almost suddenly, in the sea, and with the first

reflux of the night, there floated over the whole earth a thrill, a

muffled breeze, uniform and transparent.

"Here are figs, cakes, a piece of honeycomb, wine, a woman. Eat the figs

while it is daylight and the woman when it is dark."

It was the little girl, laughing as she entered. She bade the young man

sit down, mounted astride on his knees, and stretching her two arms

behind her head, made fast a rose which was on the point of slipping

down from her auburn hair.

In spite of himself Demetrios could not restrain an exclamation of

surprise. She was completely naked, and when divested of her ample robe,

her little body was seen to be so young, so infantine in the breast, so

narrow at the hips, so visibly immature, that Demetrios felt a sense of

pity, like a horseman on the point of throwing his man's weight upon an

over-delicate mare.

"But you are not a woman!" he exclaimed.

"I am not a woman! By the two goddesses, what am I, then? A Thracian, a

porter, or an old philosopher?"

"How old are you?"

"Ten and a half. Eleven. One may say eleven. I was born in the gardens.

My mother is a Milesian. She is called Pythias, but she goes by the name

of 'The Goat.' Shall I send for her, if you think me too little? Her

house is not far from mine."

"You have been to the Didascalion?"

"I am still there in the sixth class. I shall have finished next year;

and not too soon either."

"Aren't you happy?"

"Ah! if only you knew how difficult the mistresses are to please! They

make you recommence the same lesson twenty times! Things perfectly

useless that men never ask for. And then one is tired out, all for

nothing. I don't like that at all. Come, take a fig; not that one, it is

not ripe. I will show you a new way to eat. Look!"

"I know it. It is longer and no better than the other way. I see that

you are a good pupil."

"Oh! I have learnt everything I know by myself. The mistresses would

have us believe that they are cleverer than we are. They have more

style, that may be, but they have invented nothing."

"You have many lovers?"

"They are all too old: it is inevitable. Young men are so foolish! They

only like women forty years old. Now and again I see young men pretty as

Eros pass by, and if you were to see what they choose! Hippopotami! It

is enough to make one turn pale. I hope sincerely that I shall never

reach these women's age: I should be too ashamed to undress. I am so

glad to be still quite young. The breasts always develop too soon. I

think that the first month I see my blood flow I shall feel ready to

die. Let me give you a kiss. I like you very much."

Here the conversation took a less serious if not a more silent turn, and

Demetrios rapidly perceived that his scruples were beside the mark in

the case of so expert a young lady. She seemed to realise that she was

somewhat meagre pasturage for a young man's appetite, and she battled

her lover by a prodigious activity of furtive finger-touches, which he

could neither foresee nor elude, nor direct, and which never left him

the leisure for a loving embrace. She multiplied her agile, firm little

body around him, offered herself, refused herself, slipped and turned

and struggled. Finally they grasped one another. But this half hour was

merely a long game.

She jumped out of bed the first, dipped her finger in the honey-bowl and

moistened her lips; then, making a thousand efforts not to laugh, she

bent over Demetrios and rubbed her mouth against his. Her round curls

danced on either side of their cheeks. The young man smiled and leaned

upon his elbow.

"What is your name?" he asked.

"Melitta. Did you not see my name upon the door?"

"I did not look."

"You can see it in my room. They have written it all over the walls. I

shall soon be forced to have them repainted."

Demetrios raised his head: the four panels of the chamber were covered

with inscriptions.

"That is very curious, indeed?" said he. "May one read?"

"Oh, if you like. I have no secrets."

He read. Melitta's name was there several times repeated, coupled with

various men's names and barbaric drawings. Tender, obscene, or comic

sentences jostled oddly with one another. Lovers boasted of their

vigour, or detailed the charms of the little courtesan, or poked fun at

her girl-friends. All this was interesting merely as a written proof of

a general degradation. But, looking towards the bottom of the right-hand

panel, Demetrios gave a start.

"What is that? What is that? Speak!"

"Who? What? Where?" said the child. "What is the matter with you?"

"Here. That name. Who wrote that?"

And his finger stopped under this double

line.

[Greek: MELITTA .L. CHRYSIDA

CHRYSIS .L. MELITTAN]

"Ah!" she answered, "that's me. I wrote that."

"Who is she, Chrysis?"

"My great friend."

"I dare say. That is not what I ask you. Which Chrysis? There are many."

"Mine, the most beautiful. Chrysis of Galilee."

"You know her! you know her! But speak, speak! Where does she come from?

Where does she live? who is her lover? Tell me everything!"

He sat down upon the couch and took the little girl upon his knees.

"You are in love, then?" she said.