The murderer is a flower for the courtesan. The prostitute is the Clytia
of the assassin sun. The eye of the woman damned languourously seeks
Satan among the myrtles.
What is this phenomenon? It is the need of the ideal. A sublime and
awful need.
A terrible thing, I say.
Is it a disease? Is it a remedy? Both. This noble yearning is at
the same time and for the same beings a chastisement and a reward; a
voluptuousness full of expiation; a chastisement for faults committed,
a recompense for sorrows borne! None may escape it. It is a hunger of
angels felt by demons. Saint Theresa experiences it, Messalina also.
This need of the immaterial is the most deeply rooted of all needs. One
must have bread; but before bread, one must have the ideal. One is a
thief, one is a street-walker--all the more reason. The more one drinks
of the darkness of night the more is one thirsty for the light of dawn.
Schinderhannes becomes a cornflower, Poulailler a violet. Hence these
sinisterly ideal weddings.
And then, what happens?
What I have just said.
Cloaca, but abyss. Here the human heart opens partly, disclosing
unimaginable depths. Astarte becomes platonic. The miracle of the
transformation of monsters by love is being accomplished. Hell is being
gilded. The vulture is being metamorphosed into a bluebird. Horror
ends in the pastoral. You think you are at Vouglans’s and
Parent-Duchâtelet’s; you are at Longus’s. Another step and you will
stumble into Berquin’s. Strange indeed is it to encounter Daphnis and
Chloe in the Forest of Bondy!
The dark Saint Martin Canal, into which the footpad pushes the passer-by
with his elbow as he snatches his victim’s watch, traverses the Tender
and empties itself into the Lignon. Poulmann begs a ribbon bow; one is
tempted to present a shepherdess’s crook to Papavoine. Through the straw
of the sabot one sees gossamer wings appearing on horrible heels. The
miracle of the roses is performed for Goton. All fatalities combined
have for result a flower. A vague Rambouillet Palace is superposed upon
the forbidding silhouette of the Salpêtrière. The leprous wall of evil,
suddenly covered with blossoms, affords a pendant to the wreath of
Juliet. The sonnets of Petrarch, that flight of the ideal which soars in
the shadow of souls, venture through the twilight towards this abjection
and suffering, attracted by one knows not what obscure affinity, even
as a swarm of bees is sometimes seen humming over a dungheap from which
arises, perceptible to the bees alone and mingling with the miasms, the
perfume of a hidden flower. The gemoniae are Elysian. The chimerical
thread of celestial unions floats ‘neath the darkest vault of the human
Erebus and binds despairing hearts to hearts that are monstrous. Manon
through the infinite sends to Cartouche a smile ineffable as that with
which Everallin entranced Fingal. From one pole of misery to the other,
from one gehenna to another, from the galleys to the brothel, tenebrous
mouths wildly exchange the kiss of azure.
It is night. The monstrous ditch of Clamart opens. From it arises a
miasm, a phosphorescent glow. It shines and flickers in two separate
tarts; it takes shape, the head rejoins the body, it is a phantom; the
phantom gazes into the darkness with wild, baleful eyes, rises, grows
bigger and blue, hovers for an instant and then speeds away to the
zenith to open the door of the palace of the sun where butterflies flit
from flower to flower and angels flit from star to star.
In all these strange, concordant phenomena appears the inadmissibility
of the principle that is all of man. The mysterious marriage which we
have just related, marriage of servitude with captivity, exaggerates the
ideal from the very fact that it is weighed down by all the most hideous
burdens of destiny. A frightful combination! It is the From it rises a
miasm, a phosphorescent glow. It shines meeting of these two redoubtable
words in which human existence is summed up: enjoy and suffer.
Alas! And how can we prevent this cry from escaping us? For these
hapless ones, enjoy, laugh, sing, please, and love exist, persist; but
there is a death-rattle in sing, a grating sound in laugh, putrefaction
in enjoy, there are ashes in please, there is night in love. All these
joys are attached to their destiny by coffin-nails.
What does that matter? They thirst for these lugubrious, chimerical
glimpses of light that are full of dreams.
What is tobacco, that is so precious and so dear to the prisoner? It
is a dream. “Put me in the dungeon,” said a convict, “but give me some
tobacco.” In other words: “Throw me into a pit, but give me a palace.”
Press the prostitute and the bandit, mix Tartarus and Avernus, stir the
fatal vat of social mire, pile all the deformities of matter together,
and what issues therefrom? The immaterial.
The ideal is the Greek fire of the gutter. It burns there. Its
brightness in the impure water dazzles the thinker and touches his
heart. Nini Lassive stirs and brightens with Fiesehi’s bilets-doux that
sombre lamp of Vesta which is in the heart of every woman, and which
is as inextinguishable in that of the courtesan as in that of the
Carmelite. This is what explains the word “virgin,” accorded by the
Bible equally to the foolish virgin and to the wise virgin.
That was so yesterday, it is so to-day. Here again the surface has
changed, the bottom remains the same. The frank harshness of the Middle
Ages has been somewhat softened in our times. Ribald is pronounced
light o’ love; Toinon answers to the name of Olympia or Imperia;
Thomasse-la-Maraude is called Mme. de Saint Alphonse. The caterpillar
was real, the butterfly is false; that is the only change. Clout has
become chiffon.
Regnier used to say “sows “; we say “fillies.”
Other fashions; same manners.
The foolish virgin is lugubriously immutable.