Next morning Durtal woke later than usual. Before he opened his eyes
there was a sudden flash of light in his brain, and troops of demon
worshippers, like the societies of which Des Hermies had spoken, went
defiling past him, dancing a saraband. "A swarm of lady acrobats hanging
head downward from trapezes and praying with joined feet!" he said,
yawning. He looked at the window. The panes were flowered with crystal
fleurs de lys and frost ferns. Then he quickly drew his arms back under
the covers and snuggled up luxuriously.
"A fine day to stay at home and work," he said. "I will get up and light
a fire. Come now, a little courage--" and--instead of tossing the covers
aside he drew them up around his chin.
"Ah, I know that you are not pleased to see me taking a morning off," he
said, addressing his cat, which was hunched up on the counterpane at his
feet, gazing at him fixedly, its eyes very black.
This beast, though affectionate and fond of being caressed, was crabbed
and set in its ways. It would tolerate no whims, no departures from the
regular course of things. It understood that there was a fixed hour for
rising and for going to bed, and when it was displeased it allowed a
shade of annoyance to pass into its eyes, the sense of which its master
could not mistake.
If he returned before eleven at night, the cat was waiting for him in
the vestibule, scratching the wood of the door, miaouing, even before
Durtal was in the hall; then it rolled its languorous green-golden eyes
at him, rubbed against his trouser leg, stood up on its hind feet like
a tiny rearing horse and affectionately wagged its head at him as he
approached. If eleven o'clock had passed it did not run along in front
of him, but would only, very grudgingly, rise when he came up, and then
it would arch its back and suffer no caresses. When he came later yet,
it would not budge, and would complain and groan if he took the liberty
of stroking its head or scratching its throat.
This morning it had no patience with Durtal's laziness. It squatted on
its hunkers, and swelled up, then it approached stealthily and sat down
two steps away from its master's face, staring at him with an
atrociously false eye, signifying that the time had come for him to
abdicate and leave the warm place for a cold cat.
Amused by its manoeuvres, Durtal did not move, but returned its stare.
The cat was enormous, common, and yet bizarre with its rusty coat
yellowish like old coke ashes and grey as the fuzz on a new broom, with
little white tufts like the fleece which flies up from the burnt-out
faggot. It was a genuine gutter cat, long-legged, with a wild-beast
head. It was regularly striped with waving lines of ebony, its paws were
encircled by black bracelets and its eyes lengthened by two great
zigzags of ink.
"In spite of your kill-joy character and your single track mind you
testy, old bachelor, you are a very nice cat," said Durtal, in an
insinuating, wheedling tone. "Then too, for many years now, I have told
you what one tells no man. You are the drain pipe of my soul, you
inattentive and indulgent confessor. Never shocked, you vaguely approve
the mental misdeeds which I confess to you. You let me relieve myself
and you don't charge me anything for the service. Frankly, that is what
you are here for. I spoil you with care and attentions because you are
the spiritual vent of solitude and celibacy, but that doesn't prevent
you, with your spiteful way of looking at me, from being insufferable at
times, as you are today, for instance!"
The cat continued to stare at him, its ears sticking straight up as if
they would catch the sense of his words from the inflections of his
voice. It understood, doubtless, that Durtal was not disposed to jump
out of bed, for it went back to its old place, but now turned its back
full on him.
"Oh come," said Durtal, discouraged, looking at his watch, "I've simply
got to get up and go to work on Gilles de Rais," and with a bound he
sprang into his trousers. The cat, rising suddenly, galloped across the
counterpane and rolled itself up into the warm covers, without waiting
an instant longer.
"How cold it is!" and Durtal slipped on a knit jacket and went into the
other room to start a fire. "I shall freeze!" he murmured.
Fortunately his apartment was easy to heat. It consisted simply of a
hall, a tiny sitting-room, a minute bedroom, and a large enough
bathroom. It was on the fifth floor, facing a sufficiently airy court.
Rent, eight hundred francs.
It was furnished without luxury. The little sitting-room Durtal had
converted into a study, hiding the walls behind black wood bookcases
crammed with books. In front of the window were a great table, a leather
armchair, and a few straight chairs. He had removed the glass from the
mantelpiece, and in the panel, just over the mantelshelf, which was
covered with an old fabric, he had nailed an antique painting on wood,
representing a hermit kneeling beside a cardinal's hat and purple cloak,
beneath a hut of boughs. The colours of the landscape background had
faded, the blues to grey, the whites to russet, the greens to black, and
time had darkened the shadows to a burnt-onion hue. Along the edges of
the picture, almost against the black oak frame, a continuous narrative
unfolded in unintelligible episodes, intruding one upon the other,
portraying Lilliputian figures, in houses of dwarfs. Here the Saint,
whose name Durtal had sought in vain, crossed a curly, wooden sea in a
sailboat; there he marched through a village as big as a fingernail;
then he disappeared into the shadows of the painting and was discovered
higher up in a grotto in the Orient, surrounded by dromedaries and
bales of merchandise; again he was lost from sight, and after another
game of hide-and-seek he emerged, smaller than ever, quite alone, with a
staff in his hand and a knapsack on his back, mounting toward a strange,
unfinished cathedral.
It was a picture by an unknown painter, an old Dutchman, who had perhaps
visited certain of the Italian masters, for he had appropriated colours
and processes peculiar to them.
The bedroom contained a big bed, a chest of drawers waist-high, and some
easy chairs. On the mantel were an antique clock and copper
candlesticks. On the wall there was a fine photograph of a Botticelli in
the Berlin museum, representing a plump and penitent Virgin who was like
a housewife in tears. She was surrounded by gentleman-, lady-, and
little-boy-angels. The languishing young men held spliced wax tapers
that were like bits of rope; the coquettish hoydens had flowers stuck in
their long hair; and the mischievous cherub-pages looked rapturously at
the infant Jesus, who stood beside the Virgin and held out his hands in
benediction.
Then there was a print of Breughel, engraved by Cock, "The wise and the
foolish virgins": a little panel, cut in the middle by a corkscrew cloud
which was flanked at each side by angels with their sleeves rolled up
and their cheeks puffed out, sounding the trumpet, while in the middle
of the cloud another angel, bizarre and sacerdotal, with his navel
indicated beneath his languorously flowing robe, unrolled a banderole on
which was written the verse of the Gospel, "_Ecce sponsus venit, exite
obviam ei_."
Beneath the cloud, at one side, sat the wise virgins, good Flemings,
with their lighted lamps, and sang canticles as they turned the spinning
wheel. At the other side were the foolish virgins with their empty
lamps. Four joyous gossips were holding hands and dancing in a ring on
the greensward, while the fifth played the bagpipe and beat time with
her foot. Above the cloud the five wise virgins, slender and ethereal
now, naked and charming, brandished flaming tapers and mounted toward a
Gothic church where Christ stood to welcome them; while on the other
side the foolish virgins, imperfectly draped, beat vainly on a closed
door with their dead torches.
The blessed naïveté of the Primitives, the homely touches in the scenes
of earth and of heaven! Durtal loved this old engraving. He saw in it a
union of the art of an Ostade purified and that of a Thierry Bouts.
Waiting for his grate, in which the charcoal was crackling and peeling
and running like frying grease, to become red, he sat down in front of
his desk and ran over his notes.
"Let's see," he said to himself, rolling a cigarette, "we had come to
the time when that excellent Gilles de Rais begins the quest of the
'great work.' It is easy to figure what knowledge he possessed about the
method of transmuting metals into gold.
"Alchemy was already highly developed a century before he was born. The
writings of Albertus Magnus, Arnaud de Villeneuve, and Raymond Lully
were in the hands of the hermetics. The manuscripts of Nicolas Flamel
circulated, and there is no doubt that Gilles had acquired them, for he
was an avid collector of the rare. Let us add that at that epoch the
edict of Charles interdicting spagyric labours under pain of prison and
hanging, and the bull, _Spondent pariter quas non exhibent_, which Pope
John XXII fulminated against the alchemists, were still in vigour. These
treatises were, then, forbidden, and in consequence desirable. It is
certain that Gilles had long studied them, but from that to
understanding them is a far cry.
"For they were written in an impossible jargon of allegories, twisted
and obscure metaphors, incoherent symbols, ambiguous parables, enigmas,
and ciphers. And here is an example." He took from one of the shelves of
the library a manuscript which was none other than the Asch-Mezareph,
the book of the Jew Abraham and of Nicolas Flamel, restored, translated,
and annotated by Eliphas Levi. This manuscript had been lent him by Des
Hermies, who had discovered it one day among some old papers.
"In this is what claims to be the recipe for the philosopher's stone,
for the grand quintessential and tinctural essence. The figures are not
precisely clear," he said to himself, as he ran his eye over the pen
drawings, retouched in colour, representing, under the title of "_The
chemical coitus_" various bottles and flasks each containing a liquid
and imprisoning an allegorical creature. A green lion, with a crescent
moon over him, hung head downward. Doves were trying to fly out through
the neck of the bottle or to peck a way through the bottom. The liquid
was black and undulated with waves of carmine and gold, or white and
granulated with dots of ink, which sometimes took the shape of a frog or
a star. Sometimes the liquid was milky and troubled, sometimes flames
rose from it as if there were a film of alcohol over the surface.
Eliphas Levi explained the symbolism of these bottled volatiles as fully
as he cared to, but abstained from giving the famous recipe for the
grand magisterium. He was keeping up the pleasantry of his other books,
in which, beginning with an air of solemnity, he affirmed his intention
of unveiling the old arcana, and, when the time came to fulfil his
promise, begged the question, alleging the excuse that he would perish
if he betrayed such burning secrets. The same excuse, which had done
duty through the ages, served in masking the perfect ignorance of the
cheap occultists of the present day.
"As a matter of fact, the 'great work' is simple," said Durtal to
himself, folding up the manuscript of Nicolas Flamel. "The hermetic
philosophers discovered--and modern science, after long evading the
issue, no longer denies--that the metals are compounds, and that their
components are identical. They vary from each other according to the
different proportions of their elements. With the aid of an agent which
will displace these proportions one may transmute mercury, for example,
into silver, and lead into gold.
"And this agent is the philosopher's stone: mercury--not the vulgar
mercury, which to the alchemists was but an aborted metallic sperm--but
the philosophers' mercury, called also the green lion, the serpent, the
milk of the Virgin, the pontic water.
"Only the recipe for this mercury, or stone of the sages, has ever been
revealed--and it is this that the philosophers of the Middle Ages, the
Renaissance, all centuries, including our own, have sought so
frantically.
"And in what has it not been sought?" said Durtal, thumbing his notes.
"In arsenic, in ordinary mercury, tin, salts of vitriol, saltpetre and
nitre; in the juices of spurge, poppy, and purslane; in the bellies of
starved toads; in human urine, in the menstrual fluid and the milk of
women."
Now Gilles de Rais must have been completely baffled. Alone at
Tiffauges, without the aid of initiates, he was incapable of making
fruitful experiments. At that time Paris was the centre of the hermetic
science in France. The alchemists gathered under the vaults of Notre
Dame and studied the hieroglyphics which Nicolas Flamel, before he died,
had written on the walls of the charnal Des Innocents and on the portal
of Saint Jacques de la Boucherie, describing cabalistically the
preparation of the famous stone.
The Marshal could not go to Paris because the English soldiers barred
the roads. There was only one thing to do. He wrote to the most
celebrated of the southern transmuters, and had them brought to
Tiffauges at great expense.
"From documents which we posses we can see his supervising the
construction of the athanor, or alchemists' furnace, buying pelicans,
crucibles, and retorts. He turned one of the wings of his château into a
laboratory and shut himself up in it with Antonio di Palermo, François
Lombard, and 'Jean Petit, goldsmith of Paris,' all of whom busied
themselves night and day with the concoction of the 'great work.'"
They were completely unsuccessful. At the end of their resources, these
hermetists disappeared, and there ensued at Tiffauges an incredible
coming-and-going of adepts and their helpers. They arrived from all
parts of Brittany, Poitou, and Maine, alone or escorted by promoters and
sorcerers. Gilles de Sillé and Roger de Bricqueville, cousins and
friends of the Marshal, scurried about the country, beating up the game
and driving it in to Gilles de Rais, while a priest of his chapel,
Eustache Blanchet, went to Italy where workers in metals were legion.
While waiting, Gilles de Rais, not to be discouraged, continued his
experiments, all of which missed fire. He finally came to believe that
the magicians were right after all, and that no discovery was possible
without the aid of Satan.
And one night, with a sorcerer newly arrived from Poitiers, Jean de la
Rivière, he betakes himself to a forest in the vicinity of the château
de Tiffauges. With his servitors Henriet and Poitou, he remains on the
verge of the wood into which the sorcerer penetrates. The night is heavy
and there is no moon. Gilles becomes nervous, scrutinizing the shadows,
listening to the muted sounds of the nocturnal landscape; his
companions, terrified, huddle close together, trembling and whispering
at the slightest stirring of the air. Suddenly a cry of anguish is
raised. They hesitate, then they advance, groping in the darkness. In a
sudden flare of light they perceive de la Rivière trembling and deathly
pale, clutching the handle of his lantern convulsively. In a low voice
he recounts how the Devil has risen in the form of a leopard and rushed
past without looking at the evocator, without saying a word.
The next day the sorcerer vanished, but another arrived. This was a
bungler named Du Mesnil. He required Gilles to sign with blood a deed
binding him to give the Devil all the Devil asked of him "except his
life and soul," but, although to aid the conjurements Gilles consented
to have the Office of the Damned sung in his chapel on All Saints' Day,
Satan did not appear.
The Marshal was beginning to doubt the powers of his magicians, when
the outcome of a new endeavor convinced him that frequently the Devil
does appear.
An evocator whose name has been lost held a séance with Gilles and de
Sillé in a chamber at Tiffauges.
On the ground he traces a great circle and commands his two companions
to step inside it. Sillé refuses. Gripped by a terror which he cannot
explain, he begins to tremble all over. He goes to the window, opens it,
and stands ready for flight, murmuring exorcisms under his breath.
Gilles, bolder, stands in the middle of the circle, but at the first
conjurgations he too trembles and tries to make the sign of the cross.
The sorcerer orders him not to budge. At one moment he feels something
seize him by the neck. Panic-stricken, he vacillates, supplicating Our
Lady to save him. The evocator, furious, throws him out of the circle.
Gilles precipitates himself through the door, de Sillé jumps out of the
window, they meet below and stand aghast. Howls are heard in the chamber
where the magician is operating. There is "a sound as of sword strokes
raining on a wooden billet," then groans, cries of distress, the appeals
of a man being assassinated.
They stand rooted to the spot. When the clamour ceases they venture to
open the door and find the sorcerer lying; in pools of blood, his
forehead caved in, his body horribly mangled.
They carry him out. Gilles, smitten with remorse, gives the man his own
bed, bandages him, and has him confessed. For several days the sorcerer
hovers between life and death but finally recovers and flees from the
castle.
Gilles was despairing of obtaining from the Devil the recipe for the
sovereign magisterium, when Eustache Blanchet's return from Italy was
announced. Eustache brought the master of Florentine magic, the
irresistible evoker of demons and larvæ, Francesco Prelati.
This man struck awe into Gilles. Barely twenty-three years old, he was
one of the wittiest, the most erudite, and the most polished men of the
time. What had he done before he came to install himself at Tiffauges,
there to begin, with Gilles, the most frightful series of sins against
the Holy Ghost that has ever been known? His testimony in the criminal
trial of Gilles does not furnish us any very detailed information on his
own score. He was born in the diocese of Lucca, at Pistoia, and had been
ordained a priest by the Bishop of Arezzo. Some time after his entrance
into the priesthood, he had become the pupil of a thaumaturge of
Florence, Jean de Fontenelle, and had signed a pact with a demon named
Barron. From that moment onward, this insinuating and persuasive,
learned and charming abbé, must have given himself over to the most
abominable of sacrileges and the most murderous practices of black
magic.
At any rate Gilles came completely under the influence of this man. The
extinguished furnaces were relighted, and that Stone of the Sages, which
Prelati had seen, flexible, frail, red and smelling of calcinated marine
salt, they sought together furiously, invoking Hell.
Their incantations were all in vain. Gilles, disconsolate, redoubled
them, but they finally produced a dreadful result and Prelati narrowly
escaped with his life.
One afternoon Eustache Blanchet, in a gallery of the château, perceives
the Marshal weeping bitterly. Plaints of supplication are heard through
the door of a chamber in which Prelati has been evoking the Devil.
"The Demon is in there beating my poor Francis. I implore you, go in!"
cries Gilles, but Blanchet, frightened, refuses. Then Gilles makes up
his mind, in spite of his fear. He is advancing to force the door, when
it opens and Prelati staggers out and falls, bleeding, into his arms.
Prelati is able, with the support of his friends, to gain the chamber of
the Marshal, where he is put to bed, but he has sustained so merciless a
thrashing that he goes into delirium and his fever keeps mounting.
Gilles, in despair, stays beside him, cares for him, has him confessed,
and weeps for joy when Prelati is out of danger.
"The fate of the unknown sorcerer and of Prelati, both getting
dangerously wounded in an empty room, under identical circumstances--I
tell you, it's a remarkable coincidence," said Durtal to himself.
"And the documents which relate these facts are authentic. They are,
indeed, excerpts from the procedure in Gilles's trial. The confessions
of the accused and the depositions of the witnesses agree, and it is
impossible to think that Gilles and Prelati lied, for in confessing
these Satanic evocations they condemned themselves, by their own words,
to be burned alive.
"If in addition they had declared that the Evil One had appeared to
them, that they had been visited by succubi; if they had affirmed that
they had heard voices, smelled odours, even touched a body; we might
conclude that they had had hallucinations similar to those of certain
Bicêtre subjects, but as it was there could have been no misfunctioning
of the senses, no morbid visions, because the wounds, the marks of the
blows, the material fact, visible and tangible, are present for
testimony.
"Imagine how thoroughly convinced of the reality of the Devil a mystic
like Gilles de Rais must have been after witnessing such scenes!
"In spite of his discomfitures, he could not doubt--and Prelati,
half-killed, must have doubted even less--that if Satan pleased, they
should finally find this powder which would load them with riches and
even render them almost immortal--for at that epoch the philosopher's
stone passed not only for an agent in the transmutation of base metals,
such as tin, lead, copper, into noble metals like silver and gold, but
also for a panacea curing all ailments and prolonging life, without
infirmities, beyond the limits formerly assigned to the patriarchs.
"Singular science," ruminated Durtal, raising the fender of his
fireplace and warming his feet, "in spite of the railleries of this
time, which, in the matter of discoveries but exhumes lost things, the
hermetic philosophy was not wholly vain.
"The master of contemporary science, Dumas, recognizes, under the name
of isomery, the theories of the alchemists, and Berthelot declares, 'No
one can affirm _a priori_ that the fabrication of bodies reputed to be
simple is impossible.' Then there have been verified and certified
achievements. Besides Nicolas Flamel, who really seems to have succeeded
in the 'great work,' the chemist Van Helmont, in the eighteenth century,
received from an unknown man a quarter of a grain of philosopher's stone
and with it transformed eight ounces of mercury into gold.
"At the same epoch, Helvetius, who combated the dogma of the spagyrics,
received from another unknown a powder of projection with which he
converted an ingot of lead into gold. Helvetius was not precisely a
charlatan, neither was Spinoza, who verified the experiment, a credulous
simpleton.
"And what is to be thought of that mysterious man Alexander Sethon who,
under the name of the Cosmopolite, went all over Europe, operating
before princes, in public, transforming all metals into gold? This
alchemist, who seems to have had a sincere disdain for riches, as he
never kept the gold which he created, but lived in poverty and prayer,
was imprisoned by Christian II, Elector of Saxony, and endured martyrdom
like a saint. He suffered himself to be beaten with rods and pierced
with pointed stakes, and he refused to give up a secret which he
claimed, like Nicolas Flamel, to have received from God.
"And to think that these researches are being carried on at the present
time! Only, most of the hermetics now deny medical and divine virtues to
the famous stone. They think simply that the grand magisterium is a
ferment, which, thrown into metals in fusion, produces a molecular
transformation similar to that which organic matter undergoes when
fermented with the aid of a leaven.
"Des Hermies, who is well acquainted with the underworld of science,
maintains that more than forty alchemic furnaces are now alight in
France, and that in Hanover and Bavaria the adepts are more numerous
yet.
"Have they rediscovered the incomparable secret of antiquity? In spite
of certain affirmations, it is hardly probable. Nobody need manufacture
artificially a metal whose origins are so unaccountable that a deposit
is likely to be found anywhere. For instance, in a law suit which took
place at Paris in the month of November, 1886, between M. Popp,
constructor of pneumatic city clocks, and financiers who had been
backing him, certain engineers and chemists of the School of Mines
declared that gold could be extracted from common silex, so that the
very walls sheltering us might be placers, and the mansards might be
loaded with nuggets!
"At any rate," he continued, smiling, "these sciences are not
propitious."
He was thinking of an old man who had installed an alchemic laboratory
on the fifth floor of a house in the rue Saint Jacques. This man, named
Auguste Redoutez, went every afternoon to the Bibliothèque Nationale and
pored over the works of Nicolas Flamel. Morning and evening he pursued
the quest of the "great work" in front of his furnace.
The 16th of March the year before, he came out of the Bibliothèque with
a man who had been sitting at the same table with him, and as they
walked along together Redoutez declared that he was finally in
possession of the famous secret. Arriving in his laboratory, he threw
pieces of iron into a retort, made a projection, and obtained crystals
the colour of blood. The other examined the salts and made a flippant
remark. The alchemist, furious, threw himself upon him, struck him with
a hammer, and had to be overpowered and carried in a strait-jacket to
Saint Anne, pending investigation.
"In the sixteenth century, in Luxemburg, initiates were roasted in iron
cages. The following century, in Germany, they were clothed in rags and
hanged on gilded gibbets. Now that they are tolerated and left in peace
they go mad. Decidedly, fate is against them," Durtal concluded.
He rose and went to answer a ring at the door. He came back with a
letter which the concierge had brought. He opened it.
"Why, what is this?" he exclaimed. His astonishment grew as he read:
"Monsieur,
"I am neither an adventuress nor a seeker of adventures, nor am
I a society woman grown weary of drawing-room conversation. Even
less am I moved by the vulgar curiosity to find out whether an
author is the same in the flesh as he is in his books. Indeed I
am none of the things which you may think I am, from my writing
to you this way. The fact is that I have just finished reading
your last book,"
"She has taken her time," murmured Durtal, "it appeared a year ago."
"melancholy as an imprisoned soul vainly beating its wings
against the bars of its cage."
"Oh, hell! What a compliment. Anyway, it rings false, like all of them."
"And now, Monsieur, though I am convinced that it is always
folly and madness to try to realize a desire, will you permit
that a sister in lassitude meet you some evening in a place
which you shall designate, after which we shall return, each of
us, into our own interior, the interior of persons destined to
fall because they are out of line with their 'fellows'? Adieu,
Monsieur, be assured that I consider you a somebody in a century
of nobodies.
"Not knowing whether this note will elicit a reply, I abstain
from making myself known. This evening a maid will call upon
your concierge and ask him if there is a letter for Mme.
Maubel."
"Hmm!" said Durtal, folding up the letter. "I know her. She must be one
of these withered dames who are always trying to cash outlawed
kiss-tickets and soul-warrants in the lottery of love. Forty-five years
old at least. Her _clientele_ is composed of boys, who are always
satisfied if they don't have to pay, and men of letters, who are yet
more easily satisfied--for the ugliness of authors' mistresses is
proverbial. Unless this is simply a practical joke. But who would be
playing one on me--I don't know anybody--and why?"
In any case, he would simply not reply.
But in spite of himself he reopened the letter.
"Well now, what do I risk? If this woman wants to sell me an over-ripe
heart, there is nothing forcing me to purchase it. I don't commit myself
to anything by going to an assignation. But where shall I meet her?
Here? No! Once she gets into my apartment complications arise, for it is
much more difficult to throw a woman out of your house than simply to
walk off and leave her at a street corner. Suppose I designated the
corner of the rue de Sèvres and the rue de la Chaise, under the wall of
the Abbaye-au-Bois. It is solitary, and then, too, it is only a minute's
walk from here. Or no, I will begin vaguely, naming no meeting-place at
all. I shall solve that problem later, when I get her reply."
He wrote a letter in which he spoke of his own spiritual lassitude and
declared that no good could come of an interview, for he no longer
sought happiness on earth.
"I will add that I am in poor health. That is always a good one, and it
excuses a man from 'being a man' if necessary," he said to himself,
rolling a cigarette.
"Well, that's done, and she won't get much encouragement out of it. Oh,
wait. I omitted something. To keep from giving her a hold on me I shall
do well to let her know that a serious and sustained liaison with me is
impossible 'for family reasons.' And that's enough for one time."
He folded the letter and scrawled the address.
Then he held the sealed envelope in his hand and reflected.
"Of course I am a fool to answer her. Who knows what situations a thing
like this is going to lead to? I am well aware that whoever she be, a
woman is an incubator of sorrow and annoyance. If she is good she is
probably stupid, or perhaps she is an invalid, or perhaps she is so
disastrously fecund that she gets pregnant if you look at her. If she is
bad, one may expect to be dragged through every disgusting kind of
degradation. Oh, whatever you do, you're in for it."
He regurgitated the memories of his youthful amours. Deception.
Disenchantment. How pitilessly base a woman is while she is young!
" ... To be thinking of things like that now at my age! As if I had any
need of a woman now!"
But in spite of all, his pseudonymous correspondent interested him.
"Who knows? Perhaps she is good-looking, or at least not very
ill-looking. It doesn't cost me anything to find out."
He re-read her letter. No misspelling. The handwriting not commercial.
Her ideas about his book were mediocre enough, but who would expect her
to be a critic? "Discreet scent of heliotrope," he added, sniffing the
envelope.
"Oh, well, let's have our little fling."
And as he went out to get some breakfast he left his reply with the
concierge.