PRIDE
"... Voire mesme que si un de nos confraires
se monstroit attaché à quelque chose,
qu'il en soit aussistost privé...."
_Règle de S. Benoist_, ch. xxxviii.
When Azélia presented herself the next morning, her face bearing the
marks of tears and trouble, for "she was now sure that Madame had been
murdered; never had Madame gone away so long without notifying her,"
Entragues was able to reassure her:
"Madame is at Nice, in the Grand Hôtel des Deux-Mondes. She arrived
there yesterday evening, is in splendid health and finds that the
sea is blue, so blue! And the palms and the flowers! Everything is
fragrant. Never before has she felt how sweet life is!"
"So Monsieur has received a telegram. Ah! good. But to leave without
telling me! If Madame writes, I shall communicate with Monsieur, for
Madame loves Monsieur very much."
"Yes, we are, as they say, a pair of friends."
A day passed, then another, and Hubert grew really bored. It was the
sensation of emptiness usually felt by all sensitive creatures in like
occurrences.
The light had fled from him; he moved in deserts of dark expanses.
No distraction is possible, since the only being from whom pleasure
could come has withdrawn from the visual field, since the generating
soul of all joy has fled, since the beams have perished, since the
night of absence reigns.
He could have lived near her, removed by a distance of several streets,
without any great need of visiting. The possibility of a meeting, the
certainty of a welcome sufficed for the vitality of his desires. Here
rises the tyranny of the Spirit of Contradiction and its immutable
disdain for the present hour. Moralists have always quarreled with man
on this matter: "You do not know how to enjoy the fugitive minute."
No, but how go about it, since it would be necessary that the fugitive
minute suspend its flight, it would be necessary that it exist. Now, it
is a vulgar idea that only the past or the future has an appearance of
objectivity: the moment never comes to pass.
Hubert had not even the liberty for such elementary deductions. He
suffered like an exile, a pure suffering and with a fixed idea.
Jealousy in no way troubled its undulations: it was the unique
sensation of the lost object. His joy, fallen into the sea, was lying
under moving waves; with each wave the diamond was engulfed in the
sands more deeply, and he could not yet anticipate the tempest which
would throw it on the surface, tossing it to the strand among the
eternal pebbles.
Ah! the solitary dream house among the dunes had indeed fallen to his
lot suddenly and too soon. He had not had time to arrange his parcels,
to bring the least illusion--more bare of spiritual comfort than a
hermit in the desert--of lust.
Such a state of soul brought about this reaction: "I am perhaps
deceived in the value of these coincidences. Well, I must not despair."
He delighted in this self-contempt for several hours, inhaling his
baseness and wallowing in it as in warm mire. Yet there were instants
of respite, and in the evening he walked tranquilly, with a normal
step, towards the dwelling of the absent one, but restless as a man who
is expected.
Azélia opened the door before he rang.
"Monsieur! ah! just look!"
And she drew a letter from her dress.
"Madame has written me, and this is for you."
The white envelope with the oblique water-marks bore no writing.
"This is prudence!"
At the pressure of his fingers, he felt a very thin English onion-skin
paper within.
"She has written me a volume here. Ah! Prolixity! Would a word not have
sufficed?--Adieu!"
Hubert was very calm as he received this sentence of death, and his
indifference, perfectly acted, although for himself, scandalized the
good Azélia.
She believed in kisses, thought that he would press the object to his
heart, ejaculating some words of tenderness, as in the romances and
chromos, which are painted romances.
With a "thank you!" he placed the letter in his pocket and, pushing a
door open, entered the little room in whose corners his dying illusions
still played, like ironic dryads, careless of the approaching agony.
"_Moriuntur ridendo._"
A light voiceless laugh came from him:
"These are the ruins of Carthage. They are well preserved and yet how
many centuries is it since we left them, already in the state of ruins.
Within me generations have succeeded; the same essence of humanity
reigns, the man is another man. Ah! how far away all this is!
"These objects were once familiar to me: I knew them. I was a little
their master. They have escaped my hands. Well! I abandon the rest. Let
all things be transitory. How this breathes of death! It is my heart
that is becoming decomposed....
"Why read the letter? She laughs at me or pities me, and never have I
tolerated the one or the other."
He carried it through the streets.
"I believe myself," he thought, "stronger and more logical. Have I
denied my old philosophy to such a point? The punishment for laughing
at the external world is to fall in the first snare laid by the
innocent Maia, as the theosophist expresses it. Could there be, then,
an invincible human nature more stable in its versatility than the
architecture of thought? Invincible, no, since haughty contemptuous
things have conquered it. It is because I lack method. Spiritual
training is required. As an elementary precaution, it will first be
necessary to place attentive sentinels at the door of the senses, ready
to halt every suspected sensation, to admit no one unless stripped of
its cloak of deceit....
"Ah! I have no lucidity and I am bored. No remedy, the nervous crisis
will accomplish its cycle. It would be somewhat diverting to go to Nice
and pierce them with my ironies, but afterwards? Then, the vulgarity of
this conduct would be repugnant and hardly fit for a fourth act: then,
the case of pistols, the denouement which death hardly saves from a
ridiculousness which is bourgeois as well as theatrical....
"Shall I read this letter? I am sure it is full of things which will no
longer interest me...."
He stopped and struck the ground with a savage thump of his heel.
"Shame! Enough. No, for me there are neither Circes nor Delilahs. My
mind at least is above all wiles and lusts. They who fall into the
toils of the swine-breeders, those who are caught in the snares of
elegant vampires--they fulfill their destiny. Mine is different. I
shall be cowardly neither in facing grief, nor in facing pleasure,
nor in facing ennui. You will not make me suffer beyond my will;
and neither you, nor any one like you, can tempt me to other
disobediences. Even though I be the dupe of my pride, I prefer this to
being the dupe of my sensitiveness, and I shall disdain even the memory
of the unconscious murderess who might have overwhelmed me."
He entered a café and, developing his brutal bravado to its extreme,
wrote, so as to laugh at himself until the blood ran, strange and
purposely false verses, which Egyptian readings had suggested to him.
HIÉROGLYPHES
O pourpiers de mon frère, pourpiers d'or fleur d'Anhour
Mon corps en joie frissonne quand tu m' as fait l'amour,
Puis je m'endors paisible au pied des tournesols.
Je veux resplendir telle que les flèches de Hor:
Viens, le kupi embaume les secrets de mon corps,
Le hesteb teint mes ongles, mes yeux out le kohol.
O maître de mon coeur, qu'elle est belle, mon heure!
C'est de l'eternité quand baiser m'effleure,
Mon coeur, mon coeur s'élève, ah! si haut qu'il s' envole.
Armoises de mon frère, ô floraisons sanglantes,
Viens, je suis lAmm où croît toute plante odorante,
La vue de ton amour me rend trois fois plus belle.
Je suis le champ royal où ta faveur moissonne,
Viens vers les acacias, vers les palmiers dAmmonn:
Je veux t'aimer à l'ombre bleue de leurs flabelles.
Je vieux encore t'aimer sous les yeux roux de Phrâ
Et boire les délices du vin pur de ta voix,
Car ta voix rafraîchît et grise comme Elel.
O marjolaines de mon frère, ô marjolaines,
Quand ta main comme un oiseau sacre se promène,
En mon jardin paré de lys et de sesnis,
Quand tu manges le miel doré de mes mamelles,
Quand ta bouche bourdonne ainsi qu'un vol d'abeilles
Et se pose et se tait sur mon ventre fleuri,
Ah! je meurs, je m'en vais, je m'effuse en tes bras
Comme une source vive pleine de nymphéas,
Armoises, marjolaines, pourpiers, fleurs de ma vie!
Following this, Hubert returned to his room, verified some
terminologies, and retired.
Tranquilly, by the light of a little lamp, he read Sixtine's letter.