THE CARNAL HOUR
"And a thousand others, who never knew
what it was to have a soul...; yet, sir,
these men adorned society."
Poe: _Bon-Bon._
Once in the street, Hubert saw the ardent eyes of an invisible spectre
glaring at him through the gloom--two terrible, imperious and inciting
eyes. He recognized them and an oppressiveness crushed him. They were
the eyes of Lust.
"For women, the prowling phantom is called Sin--it is a male; for men
it is the female Lust. Ah! yes, I recognize her. She is a companion of
childhood. She is ingenious, She used to strum ballads to the moon on
my adolescent nerves. Today, she drums the roundelay of the Lupanars on
the back of my neck. With one stroke she wishes to degrade the lover
and the love. I will betake myself to vile titillations and she whom I
love will be the cause."
He reflected: a voluptuous dream brought on, from earliest adolescence,
by the contemplation of the madonna's eyes; since that time, the
association had been constant, often inexorable: he had to obey or
suffer absolute insomnia, or else race like a noctambulist towards a
retreating prey. In the last case, the winning talks at street corners
little by little dissolved desire in the slow fire of disgust. But
how terrible these nights when the shame of his obscene vagabondage
overwhelmed him with horror!
Yet he did not want to go and knock, like an obsessed bourgeois, like
clerks on paydays, at the latticed door of some sordid house, leading
his idealism to promiscuous divans and submitting his body to the least
withered bidder! He hesitated between a quite proper harem nearby, and
the semblances of soothing intrigue: he did not despise a reciprocal
choice that had the appearance of being voluntary, the excuse of
a desire that fixed on this one rather than on the other, public
preliminaries which are cleansed of all shame by the complicity of the
environment--the Bal Bullier, for example, or the Folies-Bergère. By
making a rapid decision and calling a carriage, he could reach one of
those slave markets before closing time. Upon reflection, he abandoned
the Bullier: the jades of this place were enjoying a rest. As for the
other exhibition, it was quite far away.
Undecided, he grew composed. For a moment he hoped to have freed
himself cheaply, but the eyes, the implacable eyes reappeared--obscene
stars that would cease and vanish only at the clandestine house.
It was in a little street near the Saint-Sulpice market.
There, lived a woman whose eyes, adequate for his youthful dreams, had
formerly captivated him--formerly, when he was about twenty--and no
reasoned disgust dulled the senses. Each time his carnal obsessions
evoked this pleasant memory he believed, with an animal waywardness,
that he would find the same woman and the same contentment.
Since she did not surrender to the first importunate caller, having
the coquetry of a certain amorous fastidiousness, one often found her
either alone or able, under the pretext of a jealous protector, to turn
out the guest of the evening, if the newcomer pleased her more.
"So this," reflected Entragues, "is the end? Honest women know quite
well to what promiscuities they are exposed by their refusals; they
should yield for the sake of dignity, at least. They should be taught
this: it would be one of the useful chapters in the courses of love
which old women could teach so well! But if they should yield, then
farewell to the pleasant duels of vanity."
Without suspecting how futile and mischievous his reflections were, he
followed the star.
"Now then, what is going to happen? Oh! I know in advance. None the
less, I am going in!"
He knocked in a certain way.
"To think that I remember all this! Yet it is long since I came here.
I have been spared these sudden and irremissible tortures for years.
Years! She must be changed, old and ugly. All the better, it will be
the necessary douche, and perhaps in a half-hour I shall be laughing
at myself instead of crying. Perhaps she will be absent, or asleep, or
engaged. Engaged! Like a school boy, I have a mind to run away before
the door opens. One, two ... I am going to leave."
No, he knocked a second time.
"Who is it?"
"........"
"Toi!"
"She addresses me so familiarly, it is frightful."
"........"
"Yours forever!"
"Again! After all, I please her. It is less vile than indifference."
Now, whisperings reached him, interrupted by the opening and closing
of doors. He had the sensation of conversations of nuns coming through
a wooden partition. This sordid place had the mysteries of a convent;
the approach of women and their movements always give man similar
impressions, different though the surroundings be. She was debating
with somebody; at last the bolt was unfastened, the key turned: another
wait, but shorter, in a dark antechamber: the sounds of a second
outside door, of steps descending the stairs: he had left.
She was dressed, a hat on her head, and gloved.
"Anyway, she has not just come from some one else's arms."
She had not aged. She was a warmly-blown summer which the breath of
mutual happy moments had not withered. Women can withstand anything;
neither vigils, nor fastings, nor repeated surrenders blight them;
quite the contrary, in order to bloom, they cannot have too much care.
She showed her joy in little exclamations and tiny unruly words;
Entragues thought it just as well to seize the present hour and attempt
an amiable libertinism.
She thought him handsome and made for kisses; he let her go on, rather
content with this impression and conscious of giving this woman, who
was superior to her companions, a moment of sincere pleasure.
"These women, after all," he thought, "are not so repulsive as the
adulterous ones; they lack, it is true, the aureole of deceit, but
they are neither more nor less guilty: what is the difference between
having two men at the same time, and having ten? With the second, vice
commences; and if the latter must be scorned, the same scorn should
be meted out to the former. Doubtless, since they are transgressing a
stricter law and breaking a definitive vow, the adulteresses should
enjoy a keener abandon, for hell-fire is already present in their
kisses, if they have been favored with a Christian education; but how
many of them are capable of so exquisite an enjoyment, of savoring in
love the irremediable damnation incurred for the pleasure of him they
love? One must grant them another possible superiority--that is, if
there are children--for while the offspring of the unmarried have
no father, adulterous offspring have two, a wise precaution against
orphan-hood."
Meanwhile, Valentine had brought cakes and a bottle of that Aumalian
wine which gives people the illusion of a princely treat. Then she grew
tender towards Entragues, her eyes beamed forth cajolery, allurement,
and promises.
She watched him dip his lips into the glass and wanted to drink after
him, seemingly intoxicated with desire and genuine love, consoling
herself in one evening, with this unexpected pilgrim, for some years
perhaps, of exactions in which she took no pleasure.
A blasphemous comparison had made him liken her to a Magdalene suddenly
seized with adoration, her soul just surrendered to a revealed God,
lovely with inner and useless supplications, so persuaded to love above
herself that a gesture of acquiescence would overwhelm her with joy.
This quite surprising spectacle charmed Entragues, but he felt his
fault aggravated by this prolonged titillation. It had ceased to be
the simple shock necessary to re-establish his composure, and had
inexcusably become a pleasure in itself.
She kissed his hand prettily, the last traces of remorse fled--their
emotions became identical.
They talked of trifles and he, employing those bagatelles which please
women, made her laugh: she seemed, at times, astonished at her own
delight, as if the cold air around her had suddenly and magically
evaporated in effervescent perfumes.
The weak and ravaged Entragues seemed beautiful to her: blond hair,
thinner and whiter at the temples, beard becoming a brown at the cheeks
and ending in two long points as in old Venetian portraits; the brow
high, the skin very pale but rosy in moments of animation, a curveless
nose, a heavy mouth, eyelashes and eyebrows almost black over eyes
gilded like certain feline eyes, but gentle. He had ordinary muscles
and frame, carried his head erect, and seemed to be gazing at mirages,
his eyes at once distant and steady, as if in a trance.
Valentine chiefly watched his lips. He perceived the fact and gave
them. She was neither powdered nor painted, but her authentic self.
Entragues gazed at her with pleasure but without agitation, for the
nude, especially in a woman's chamber, is not particularly sensuous;
it is such a natural state, so simple, so free of provocation, so
little suggestive by its absence of mystery, that a foot glimpsed in
the street, a bodice cleverly arranged, a rustling of petticoats, an
ungloved hand, a smile behind a fan, a certain air, a certain gesture,
a certain glance, even with a wholly chaste intention, are much more
rousing. A quite banal observation, but Entragues, pardonable in
pausing to note it as a directly experienced impression, still sought
to fathom its cause.
Now, he experienced a great discouragement: "I shall not have this
beauty which pleases me, which I desire and which is mine. I can take
her in my arms, I can press her against me, but I cannot have her. When
I kiss her with as many kisses as deceit has tongues, still I shall
not have her. And all the kinds of possession I can dream of are vain;
even were I able to surround her like a wave, I should still not have
her. The impulsion of love is unreal and it is only the illusion of
desire which makes me believe in its possible accomplishment. I know
it is error, I know that disillusion awaits me. I shall be punished by
a frightful disappointment for having sought self-oblivion outside of
myself, for having betrayed idealism, and yet it is unavoidable, for
the senses are imperative and I have not merited the supernatural gift
of grace."
Entragues had a prompter disillusion than he would have desired.
The adorable woman surrendered to his kisses; the carnal dream made
them unconscious of good and evil; they advanced, eagerly and with
swimming heads, ready to place their feet on the bark that sails
towards the Isle of Delights, seeking to ascertain how the sails were
shifting and the condition of the rudder. Entragues suddenly got up,
pale; ghostly behind the window curtains, terrible in her red robe,
Sixtine had revealed herself.
"Ah!" he vaguely thought, terrified, but his own self again, "this is
reality. The illusions are reaped, the hay is brought in, the field is
bare. This had to happen. The images which one voluntarily evokes come
to acquire mischievous habits and evoke themselves independently. This
one is impatient. So much the worse tor her; I did not invite her."
The bed curtains had to be closed and the lights put out. Sixtine
spared them by not moving and by disdaining the stratagem of
phosphorescence.
The candles, when after a while they were lit again, showed Entragues
an empty room: Sixtine had departed. But departed also where the
desires and all the unacknowledged pleasure of a delightful night of
debauchery.
He dared not go out, fearing a solitude that might be peopled against
his will. To fatigue the body is to fatigue the intelligence: he had
enfeebled himself as a person stupefies himself with laudanum.