CHRISTUS PATIENS
"Elle ne jugeait pas, ayant d'autres pensées."
Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, _Isis_.
"In this so lightly tilled field, where the corn has been so hurriedly
sown," Entragues told himself, "I reap nothing but problems, tares,
weeds, ridiculous rank grasses! For three days I have had only the
worry of a mathematician intent upon insoluble _x's_."
SERIES OF _X's_.
_xa._--It was poison.
_xb._--History of the portrait chamber.
_xc._--S. M. to S. M.
_xa_
"I believed I could find the solution. In truth, the problem was
buried; it sprang up again, evoked by the two others."
_xb_
"Is it a history in which she is implicated? Is a page of her life
written in this mysterious chamber where innocent travelers are
favored with such astonishing visions? Must this second _x_ be joined
to the first one? A crime might have been committed there."
_xc_
"There is no doubting, if heaven has endowed me with some divining
sense, that one of the mono-grams signifies Sixtine Magne and perhaps
both resolved themselves into the identical syllables: a homage of
the present to the pact, of the Sixtine of to-day to the Sixtine of
yesterday: a portrait of the lover or husband, since she was married.
Ah! I have it! Her husband had a Christian name commencing with S. It
is a question of finding an engraver with the name of S---- Magne and
that may easily be ascertained at some print dealer's shop; or else, in
the case of a lover, S---- M----. Upon what do I base this deduction?
On nothing. The twice-repeated initials of the woman I love ought
to torment me, else I would not love her. Perhaps they only conceal
names of no interest to me, but the 'perhaps' suffices to justify my
uneasiness. The past? Enough of that. The present? Ah! the unknown
enemy which one divines in smiles, in incomplete phrases, in gestures,
and even in the little intimacies of the woman who lets herself be
loved! A pleasant sensation and one which I still have not experienced!
The jealousy without cause, the jealousy that nothing can cure--not
even possession!... I must put down that remark, it is true."
He wrote several lines in his note-book: "Does a woman's supreme
abandon prove her love? No, for this may be due to the occasion, to
ennui, to the need of deceiving, to vengeance, to the perversity which
throws her into your arms. To feel yourself loved, it is necessary
to believe; love is a religion. You must have faith, you must love
yourself. Love yourself? Yes, that is the means of being the more
easily deceived. First to strip yourself of reason, then to plunge
towards the truth! Absurd. Faith, then? Yes, to have faith, and is
truth itself any thing except faith? Truth, faith--two aspects of one
entity--the mystery of a God in two persons. Ah! if I believed that I
was loved by Sixtine, she would love me, I would have peace, the joy
of union. It can be done. How? Perhaps merely by not reflecting. To
embark on the light skiff and go down with the current of water....
Towards the Ocean, yes, towards the ineluctable abyss? Evidently, but
this detail is insignificant. The thing is to embark and not to pass
your life in watching others depart for the exquisite unknown. But you
return from it! Then what is the good? If the current is a circuit,
it is just as well to remain at home and read the _Divine Comedy_.
Alighieri himself returned! There is only death. But one never returns
from death, and it is of little avail to another; but it has its
answer ready and whispers it in the ear when it is so inclined. Bitter
is life, more bitter is death."
A church stood near him. He recognized the humble _Saint-Médard_,
entered and fell on his knees:
"O God of the Cross, Christus patiens, eternally suffering Christ,
hearken to me! I seek joy, I seek love, I seek grief, and I find only a
dreary void. I can neither enjoy myself, nor love, nor suffer. Take me
by the hand and lead me as a mother leads her child. Must not one first
suffer with thee? Then will come love, like rain in the desert, and joy
will dawn, the joy of loving, the joy of having suffered...."
"I presume to pray," said Entragues to himself, lifting his head,
"and I am giving vent to rhetoric. This prayer is welcome, and if I
can remember it, I will use it. It would be blasphemous to take my
note-book and write it down! Why not! One must profit from inspiration,
for it can not be recovered."
He made a note of his ejaculation, with very slight variations.
"I stopped myself in time. The unconscious comedy would have made me
blush in the end. Do I pray seriously and am I a Christian? Yes, I
wish to be a Christian, and to partake of the most mystic and abstract
Catholicism, when this would serve only to separate me from the abject
mob, renouncing like a vile freedman the religion which drew it from
slavery. It is quite evident that in my very heart I believe in the
divinity of Jesus rather than in that of Sakya-Mouni and that I laugh
at the vanity of an unconscious creator!...
"Ah! how enervating are these solitary rounds!"
Then, suddenly:
"I must see her, I must see her! Ah! provided it isn't Wednesday?"
The newspapers spread on the stand of a little bookshop told him
that to-day was Friday, October 27. So ten days had already passed,
ten irrevocable days since that dismal Wednesday when his love had
collapsed. Collapsed! well, it could be rebuilt. But it really was too
much, literally, to love at a distance. Sixtine did not, like himself,
occupy her hours in analyzing everything and nothing: to have oneself
loved, one must be seen. Henceforth, he would seek every occasion, he
would follow her like a hunter, pressing her pitilessly to the very
quarry of kisses. He would cease reflecting, and would think only of
the end, counting obstacles as naught. He would commence from this
evening.
His feet, already, obeyed, following this mental activity. He quickly
ascended a popular street full of children, little democratic dauphins,
brats of the modern sovereign. At this moment the inventor of popular
suffrage seemed to him the most execrable monster produced by humanity
and Nero and Attila, recast in a single model, compared to this unknown
dastard, were creatures worthy of the genuflection. No one had abased
the Idea to this point, no one had tried to make of the world such
a desolate stable, where the kicking, respected Houyhnhms would have
the ascendancy. He was a Pharisee and did himself justice for never
having eaten the bitter hay of this royal rack: at the age of reason
he had renounced, with disgust, his part in the sovereignty and never
had a ballot soil his aristocratic fingers. This was due less to his
early education than to subsequent and personal reflections, for modern
degeneration accepts accomplished facts, and all that is left are
single, inward and useless protests.
As he descended the Boulevard Saint-Michel, his step fell into an
idle rhythm with the pace of the strollers. He looked around him and
judged that no superior essence emanated from this other environment:
here was the same evaporation of unconsciousness. Below, just as
alongside and above, by devious ways people sought happiness, without
suspecting, according to Pastor Manders, that it is open rebellion to
seek happiness in this life. The social right was another political
illusion equally chimerical. On this subject Herbert decided to read
some Hobbes, at the first opportunity.
But did he himself, for example, consider himself above or only on a
level with humanity? Ah! there is the intimate thought of each of the
noble copies of baked clay which a God formerly modeled on the shores
of the Tigris: I and the others, I and men, I and the rest, etc. It
is thanks to this process that one judges, that one writes the novel
or the story, that one rails in comedies or in shorter pleasantries.
Judging is the universal and the particular, it is everything, it
is life. Is not the famous tribunal, the tribunal of consciousness,
with egoism for presiding judge and vices for assessors? And Hubert
judged too: in defiance of all reason, he weighed the imponderable and
fathomed the impenetrable, that is to say, the thoughts of others,
without reflecting that one can know nothing outside of oneself and
that to judge men, in short, is to judge the idea we have of men.
Like the first of these prisoners, he had let himself be caught in
the snare of reality: scoffing at those who sought happiness, he
scoffed at himself, for what had he done since his birth in this world
of sensibility except to consume the best part of his force in this
quest? Vain and vainer than ever now that he was straying towards the
external clouds. To what did he pretend, in loving Sixtine, and the
yielding clouds dispersed, would he enjoy himself just as well with
the fundamental night? When he broke the dear head between two stones,
would he see what was within? One can doubtless use more human means
and, for example, inoffensive fascination.
He returned to his preceding revery and the circle was closed;
decidedly he must not reflect, he must act.
He found himself in excellent humor and quite ready, this time, to
count without boredom the quarter hours on the clocks of the streets.
He would even have willingly laughed with some chance companion, or
considered the toddling of women, or strolled past diverting pictures.
The Louvre, which he perceived from the other side of the stream,
tempted him: he went to see once more the striking Clytemnestra so
drolly illuminated with a torch and he was soon amusing himself in
this room which, in previous days, he would have called a corner of
shame. It did not equal, for comic intensity, the terrible Hogarths and
the distressing Daumiers, but David and his school, nevertheless, had
ridiculed antiquity successfully. The sober Flaxman had never succeeded
in delineating personages so completely stupefied at having been cut
out by a punch.
Entragues had once said that to make place for this foreign exhibition
the paintings of the masters of an immoral nudity had been hidden
in closets: it was the secret cabinet of the guards of the People's
paintings. There remained to determine if bad paintings has not its own
immorality and if the _Serment des Horaces_ should not be put under key
as well as the _Atalante et Méléagre_, the Parrhasius, perhaps a little
exciting, in which Tiberius delighted?
From the arbitrary stupidity of the Neo-Romans Entragues went to the
powdered heads of those enemies of the Nation and Humanity which
David had designed, finally stripped of their paint, but so scornful
that, one might say, he had lowered their eyes. The Pierrot gallery
was charming and made you understand the Revolution, the envy of the
People and its hate for graces so high and remote.
While leaving, and under the portices of the rue de Rivoli, he began to
follow a woman whose restless gait, from the Cour du Louvre, excited
his curiosity. She was not at all bad; she wore a rather original dress
with black lace that fell in waves; but nothing striking. A brown
pigment covered her eyes and served as a background, but there was no
magical attraction: she was somewhat tall, slender, dark, very pale and
the two sides of her face seemed unequal, because of the unequal droop
of the corners of her mouth, the unequal lifting of her brows above
heavy eye-lashes, one quite distended, the other in little contracted
waves.
Nothing of caricature, but the sustained impression was painful.
The flat basket of an orange seller, at the corner of the rue de
Marengo, and the sundry encumbrances of boxes and little wagons under
the three arcades, seemed to exasperate her; she hastened forward,
brushed against the fourth pillar, then against the fifth, then against
the others, but sedately now, like a person who walks unconcernedly.
If a group of persons collected around a pillar, she waited, brushed
against it, and left; if the distraction of shop-windows had drawn
her towards the other side of the walk, she quickly returned, as if
with remorse at having passed one of the steps of her sorrowful path.
Strict obedience to her impulse did not present her from noticing the
curiosity of the passerby, but she had acquired such a skill, through
long practice doubtless, such a deceptive gait, that no one noticed
her.
She crossed the Palais-Royal Square, gained the Avenue de l'Opéra,
all the time touching the gas lamps, trees and columns. There, she
recommenced her maneuver with this variation: she touched each
shop-door with her knee. One of them was opened; she waited, as before
a precipice, gazing at the curtains of red plush of a milliner of
ill-repute; she had such an unfortunate air that Entragues, with a
discreet bow, accosted her:
"You seem troubled, Madame, can I be of any service?"
She looked at him, and not observing anything unpleasant in his tone or
gestures, replied:
"Yes, you can save me, if you have any magnetism. Call a carriage, get
in with me and take me back. I live at the Avenue de Clichy and am
going there on foot without being able ... without being able to do
otherwise.... You have seen me? As soon as I go out by myself, I walk,
I walk ... and when I return, I faint with fatigue and shame."
Entragues had already, with his lifted cane, signaled a coachman, who
drew near the pavement.
"You are merely a little nervous and need rest. Come, here is the
carriage."
He took her arm; she resisted, saying, for the abyss had closed:
"Always this, nothing but this, the last one!"
She had set off again, turning her head supplicatingly, but without
will-power.
"Well!" Entragues thought, "if I use force, the passerby will be
attracted. As for magnetism, I can't see myself making passes at four
o'clock in the afternoon, here in the Avenue de l'Opéra. It requires a
severe glance and a commanding voice. What an odd adventure and what a
queer hysterical person!"
Nevertheless he went and overtook her.
"Come," he roughly said, "the carriage is waiting. Come."
She lifted her eyes and, under his steady gaze, let herself be led.
Once in the carriage, she grew amiable, very amiable in fact; she told
him secrets, spoke of her husband, of her little girl, her only child
who was so dark and pretty, so capricious and wilful, breaking the
heads of her dolls to punish them, throwing live coal on rugs to smell
the burning odor, only liking salads, oranges and raw carrots, and not
yet eight years old!
"Stop the carriage there," she said as they arrived at Clichy Square.
"I am so grateful to you and you must come to see me. Would you like to
be my doctor? Be my doctor. I will obey you implicitly."
"But...."
"You are no doctor, but what does it matter? So long as my husband
believes it. He leaves at ten o'clock each morning. He is a stupid,
functionary.... Ah! I am not understood!"
Her eyes, lit like embers, betokened an approaching danger. Entragues,
who was concerned with quite other matters than the consoling of
hysterical women, stopped the carriage, got out and said:
"_A bientôt_. I understand you."
She smiled, with a quick toss of her head. The carriage departed.
"She is at a crisis," mused Entragues. "Some one else will profit by
it, for she is not ugly and should have, at certain moments, a sort of
Maenad beauty. But I love Sixtine and feel incapable of loving other
women. But why is it that so many women whom you pay no heed to, throw
themselves at you, while the only one you desire shuns you?"