Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny
SARRASINE
By Honore de Balzac
Translated by Clara Bell and others
DEDICATION
To Monsieur Charles Bernard du Grail.
SARRASINE
I was buried in one of those profound reveries to which everybody,
even a frivolous man, is subject in the midst of the most uproarious
festivities. The clock on the Elysee-Bourbon had just struck midnight.
Seated in a window recess and concealed behind the undulating folds of
a curtain of watered silk, I was able to contemplate at my leisure the
garden of the mansion at which I was passing the evening. The trees,
being partly covered with snow, were outlined indistinctly against the
grayish background formed by a cloudy sky, barely whitened by the moon.
Seen through the medium of that strange atmosphere, they bore a vague
resemblance to spectres carelessly enveloped in their shrouds, a
gigantic image of the famous _Dance of Death_. Then, turning in the
other direction, I could gaze admiringly upon the dance of the living!
a magnificent salon, with walls of silver and gold, with gleaming
chandeliers, and bright with the light of many candles. There the
loveliest, the wealthiest women in Paris, bearers of the proudest
titles, moved hither and thither, fluttered from room to room in swarms,
stately and gorgeous, dazzling with diamonds; flowers on their heads
and breasts, in their hair, scattered over their dresses or lying
in garlands at their feet. Light quiverings of the body, voluptuous
movements, made the laces and gauzes and silks swirl about their
graceful figures. Sparkling glances here and there eclipsed the lights
and the blaze of the diamonds, and fanned the flame of hearts already
burning too brightly. I detected also significant nods of the head for
lovers and repellent attitudes for husbands. The exclamation of the
card-players at every unexpected _coup_, the jingle of gold, mingled
with music and the murmur of conversation; and to put the finishing
touch to the vertigo of that multitude, intoxicated by all the
seductions the world can offer, a perfume-laden atmosphere and general
exaltation acted upon their over-wrought imaginations. Thus, at my
right was the depressing, silent image of death; at my left the decorous
bacchanalia of life; on the one side nature, cold and gloomy, and in
mourning garb; on the other side, man on pleasure bent. And, standing
on the borderland of those two incongruous pictures, which repeated
thousands of times in diverse ways, make Paris the most entertaining and
most philosophical city in the world, I played a mental _macedoine_[*],
half jesting, half funereal. With my left foot I kept time to the music,
and the other felt as if it were in a tomb. My leg was, in fact, frozen
by one of those draughts which congeal one half of the body while the
other suffers from the intense heat of the salons--a state of things not
unusual at balls.
[*] _Macedoine_, in the sense in which it is here used, is a
game, or rather a series of games, of cards, each player,
when it is his turn to deal, selecting the game to be
played.
“Monsieur de Lanty has not owned this house very long, has he?”
“Oh, yes! It is nearly ten years since the Marechal de Carigliano sold
it to him.”
“Ah!”
“These people must have an enormous fortune.”
“They surely must.”
“What a magnificent party! It is almost insolent in its splendor.”
“Do you imagine they are as rich as Monsieur de Nucingen or Monsieur de
Gondreville?”
“Why, don’t you know?”
I leaned forward and recognized the two persons who were talking
as members of that inquisitive genus which, in Paris, busies itself
exclusively with the _Whys_ and _Hows_. _Where does he come from? Who
are they? What’s the matter with him? What has she done?_ They lowered
their voices and walked away in order to talk more at their ease on
some retired couch. Never was a more promising mine laid open to seekers
after mysteries. No one knew from what country the Lanty family came,
nor to what source--commerce, extortion, piracy, or inheritance--they
owed a fortune estimated at several millions. All the members of
the family spoke Italian, French, Spanish, English, and German, with
sufficient fluency to lead one to suppose that they had lived long among
those different peoples. Were they gypsies? were they buccaneers?
“Suppose they’re the devil himself,” said divers young politicians,
“they entertain mighty well.”
“The Comte de Lanty may have plundered some _Casbah_ for all I care; I
would like to marry his daughter!” cried a philosopher.
Who would not have married Marianina, a girl of sixteen, whose beauty
realized the fabulous conceptions of Oriental poets! Like the Sultan’s
daughter in the tale of the _Wonderful Lamp_, she should have remained
always veiled. Her singing obscured the imperfect talents of the
Malibrans, the Sontags, and the Fodors, in whom some one dominant
quality always mars the perfection of the whole; whereas Marianina
combined in equal degree purity of tone, exquisite feeling, accuracy of
time and intonation, science, soul, and delicacy. She was the type of
that hidden poesy, the link which connects all the arts and which always
eludes those who seek it. Modest, sweet, well-informed, and clever, none
could eclipse Marianina unless it was her mother.
Have you ever met one of those women whose startling beauty defies the
assaults of time, and who seem at thirty-six more desirable than they
could have been fifteen years earlier? Their faces are impassioned
souls; they fairly sparkle; each feature gleams with intelligence;
each possesses a brilliancy of its own, especially in the light. Their
captivating eyes attract or repel, speak or are silent; their gait is
artlessly seductive; their voices unfold the melodious treasures of the
most coquettishly sweet and tender tones. Praise of their beauty, based
upon comparisons, flatters the most sensitive self-esteem. A movement of
their eyebrows, the slightest play of the eye, the curling of the lip,
instils a sort of terror in those whose lives and happiness depend upon
their favor. A maiden inexperienced in love and easily moved by words
may allow herself to be seduced; but in dealing with women of this sort,
a man must be able, like M. de Jaucourt, to refrain from crying out
when, in hiding him in a closet, the lady’s maid crushes two of his
fingers in the crack of a door. To love one of these omnipotent sirens
is to stake one’s life, is it not? And that, perhaps, is why we love
them so passionately! Such was the Comtesse de Lanty.
Filippo, Marianina’s brother, inherited, as did his sister, the
Countess’ marvelous beauty. To tell the whole story in a word, that
young man was a living image of Antinous, with somewhat slighter
proportions. But how well such a slender and delicate figure accords
with youth, when an olive complexion, heavy eyebrows, and the gleam of
a velvety eye promise virile passions, noble ideas for the future! If
Filippo remained in the hearts of young women as a type of manly beauty,
he likewise remained in the memory of all mothers as the best match in
France.
The beauty, the great wealth, the intellectual qualities, of these
two children came entirely from their mother. The Comte de Lanty was a
short, thin, ugly little man, as dismal as a Spaniard, as great a bore
as a banker. He was looked upon, however, as a profound politician,
perhaps because he rarely laughed, and was always quoting M. de
Metternich or Wellington.
This mysterious family had all the attractiveness of a poem by Lord
Byron, whose difficult passages were translated differently by each
person in fashionable society; a poem that grew more obscure and more
sublime from strophe to strophe. The reserve which Monsieur and Madame
de Lanty maintained concerning their origin, their past lives, and their
relations with the four quarters of the globe would not, of itself, have
been for long a subject of wonderment in Paris. In no other country,
perhaps, is Vespasian’s maxim more thoroughly understood. Here gold
pieces, even when stained with blood or mud, betray nothing, and
represent everything. Provided that good society knows the amount of
your fortune, you are classed among those figures which equal yours, and
no one asks to see your credentials, because everybody knows how little
they cost. In a city where social problems are solved by algebraic
equations, adventurers have many chances in their favor. Even if this
family were of gypsy extraction, it was so wealthy, so attractive, that
fashionable society could well afford to overlook its little mysteries.
But, unfortunately, the enigmatical history of the Lanty family offered
a perpetual subject of curiosity, not unlike that aroused by the novels
of Anne Radcliffe.
People of an observing turn, of the sort who are bent upon finding out
where you buy your candelabra, or who ask you what rent you pay when
they are pleased with your apartments, had noticed, from time to time,
the appearance of an extraordinary personage at the fetes, concerts,
balls, and routs given by the countess. It was a man. The first time
that he was seen in the house was at a concert, when he seemed to have
been drawn to the salon by Marianina’s enchanting voice.
“I have been cold for the last minute or two,” said a lady near the door
to her neighbor.
The stranger, who was standing near the speaker, moved away.
“This is very strange! now I am warm,” she said, after his departure.
“Perhaps you will call me mad, but I cannot help thinking that my
neighbor, the gentleman in black who just walked away, was the cause of
my feeling cold.”
Ere long the exaggeration to which people in society are naturally
inclined, produced a large and growing crop of the most amusing ideas,
the most curious expressions, the most absurd fables concerning this
mysterious individual. Without being precisely a vampire, a ghoul, a
fictitious man, a sort of Faust or Robin des Bois, he partook of the
nature of all these anthropomorphic conceptions, according to those
persons who were addicted to the fantastic. Occasionally some
German would take for realities these ingenious jests of Parisian
evil-speaking. The stranger was simply _an old man_. Some young men, who
were accustomed to decide the future of Europe every morning in a few
fashionable phrases, chose to see in the stranger some great criminal,
the possessor of enormous wealth. Novelists described the old man’s life
and gave some really interesting details of the atrocities committed by
him while he was in the service of the Prince of Mysore. Bankers, men of
a more positive nature, devised a specious fable.
“Bah!” they would say, shrugging their broad shoulders pityingly, “that
little old fellow’s a _Genoese head_!”
“If it is not an impertinent question, monsieur, would you have the
kindness to tell me what you mean by a Genoese head?”
“I mean, monsieur, that he is a man upon whose life enormous sums
depend, and whose good health is undoubtedly essential to the
continuance of this family’s income. I remember that I once heard a
mesmerist, at Madame d’Espard’s, undertake to prove by very specious
historical deductions, that this old man, if put under the magnifying
glass, would turn out to be the famous Balsamo, otherwise called
Cagliostro. According to this modern alchemist, the Sicilian had escaped
death, and amused himself making gold for his grandchildren. And the
Bailli of Ferette declared that he recognized in this extraordinary
personage the Comte de Saint-Germain.”
Such nonsense as this, put forth with the assumption of superior
cleverness, with the air of raillery, which in our day characterize
a society devoid of faith, kept alive vague suspicions concerning the
Lanty family. At last, by a strange combination of circumstances, the
members of that family justified the conjectures of society by adopting
a decidedly mysterious course of conduct with this old man, whose life
was, in a certain sense, kept hidden from all investigations.
If he crossed the threshold of the apartment he was supposed to occupy
in the Lanty mansion, his appearance always caused a great sensation in
the family. One would have supposed that it was an event of the greatest
importance. Only Filippo, Marianina, Madame de Lanty, and an old servant
enjoyed the privilege of assisting the unknown to walk, to rise, to sit
down. Each one of them kept a close watch on his slightest movements. It
seemed as if he were some enchanted person upon whom the happiness, the
life, or the fortune of all depended. Was it fear or affection? Society
could discover no indication which enabled them to solve this problem.
Concealed for months at a time in the depths of an unknown sanctuary,
this familiar spirit suddenly emerged, furtively as it were,
unexpectedly, and appeared in the salons like the fairies of old, who
alighted from their winged dragons to disturb festivities to which they
had not been invited. Only the most experienced observers could divine
the anxiety, at such times, of the masters of the house, who were
peculiarly skilful in concealing their feelings. But sometimes, while
dancing a quadrille, the too ingenuous Marianina would cast a terrified
glance at the old man, whom she watched closely from the circle of
dancers. Or perhaps Filippo would leave his place and glide through
the crowd to where he stood, and remain beside him, affectionate and
watchful, as if the touch of man, or the faintest breath, would shatter
that extraordinary creature. The countess would try to draw nearer to
him without apparently intending to join him; then, assuming a manner
and an expression in which servility and affection, submissiveness and
tyranny, were equally noticeable, she would say two or three words, to
which the old man almost always deferred; and he would disappear, led,
or I might better say carried away, by her. If Madame de Lanty were not
present, the Count would employ a thousand ruses to reach his side; but
it always seemed as if he found difficulty in inducing him to listen,
and he treated him like a spoiled child, whose mother gratifies his
whims and at the same time suspects mutiny. Some prying persons having
ventured to question the Comte de Lanty indiscreetly, that cold and
reserved individual seemed not to understand their questions. And so,
after many attempts, which the circumspection of all the members of the
family rendered fruitless, no one sought to discover a secret so well
guarded. Society spies, triflers, and politicians, weary of the strife,
ended by ceasing to concern themselves about the mystery.
But at that moment, it may be, there were in those gorgeous salons
philosophers who said to themselves, as they discussed an ice or a
sherbet, or placed their empty punch glasses on a tray:
“I should not be surprised to learn that these people are knaves. That
old fellow who keeps out of sight and appears only at the equinoxes or
solstices, looks to me exactly like an assassin.”
“Or a bankrupt.”
“There’s very little difference. To destroy a man’s fortune is worse
than to kill the man himself.”
“I bet twenty louis, monsieur; there are forty due me.”
“Faith, monsieur; there are only thirty left on the cloth.”
“Just see what a mixed company there is! One can’t play cards in peace.”
“Very true. But it’s almost six months since we saw the Spirit. Do you
think he’s a living being?”
“Well, barely.”
These last remarks were made in my neighborhood by persons whom I did
not know, and who passed out of hearing just as I was summarizing in one
last thought my reflections, in which black and white, life and death,
were inextricably mingled. My wandering imagination, like my eyes,
contemplated alternately the festivities, which had now reached the
climax of their splendor, and the gloomy picture presented by the
gardens. I have no idea how long I meditated upon those two faces of
the human medal; but I was suddenly aroused by the stifled laughter of
a young woman. I was stupefied at the picture presented to my eyes.
By virtue of one of the strangest of nature’s freaks, the thought half
draped in black, which was tossing about in my brain, emerged from it
and stood before me personified, living; it had come forth like Minerva
from Jupiter’s brain, tall and strong; it was at once a hundred years
old and twenty-two; it was alive and dead. Escaped from his chamber,
like a madman from his cell, the little old man had evidently crept
behind a long line of people who were listening attentively to
Marianina’s voice as she finished the cavatina from _Tancred_. He seemed
to have come up through the floor, impelled by some stage mechanism. He
stood for a moment motionless and sombre, watching the festivities, a
murmur of which had perhaps reached his ears. His almost somnambulistic
preoccupation was so concentrated upon things that, although he was
in the midst of many people, he saw nobody. He had taken his place
unceremoniously beside one of the most fascinating women in Paris, a
young and graceful dancer, with slender figure, a face as fresh as a
child’s, all pink and white, and so fragile, so transparent, that it
seemed that a man’s glance must pass through her as the sun’s rays pass
through flawless glass. They stood there before me, side by side, so
close together, that the stranger rubbed against the gauze dress, and
the wreaths of flowers, and the hair, slightly crimped, and the floating
ends of the sash.
I had brought that young woman to Madame de Lanty’s ball. As it was
her first visit to that house, I forgave her her stifled laugh; but I
hastily made an imperious sign which abashed her and inspired respect
for her neighbor. She sat down beside me. The old man did not choose
to leave the charming creature, to whom he clung capriciously with the
silent and apparently causeless obstinacy to which very old persons are
subject, and which makes them resemble children. In order to sit down
beside the young lady he needed a folding-chair. His slightest movements
were marked by the inert heaviness, the stupid hesitancy, which
characterize the movements of a paralytic. He sat slowly down upon
his chair with great caution, mumbling some unintelligible words. His
cracked voice resembled the noise made by a stone falling into a well.
The young woman nervously pressed my hand, as if she were trying to
avoid a precipice, and shivered when that man, at whom she happened to
be looking, turned upon her two lifeless, sea-green eyes, which could be
compared to nothing save tarnished mother-of-pearl.
“I am afraid,” she said, putting her lips to my ear.
“You can speak,” I replied; “he hears with great difficulty.”
“You know him, then?”
“Yes.”
Thereupon she summoned courage to scrutinize for a moment that creature
for which no human language has a name, form without substance, a being
without life, or life without action. She was under the spell of that
timid curiosity which impels women to seek perilous excitement, to gaze
at chained tigers and boa-constrictors, shuddering all the while because
the barriers between them are so weak. Although the little old man’s
back was bent like a day-laborer’s, it was easy to see that he must
formerly have been of medium height. His excessive thinness, the
slenderness of his limbs, proved that he had always been of slight
build. He wore black silk breeches which hung about his fleshless thighs
in folds, like a lowered veil. An anatomist would instinctively have
recognized the symptoms of consumption in its advanced stages, at sight
of the tiny legs which served to support that strange frame. You would
have said that they were a pair of cross-bones on a gravestone. A
feeling of profound horror seized the heart when a close scrutiny
revealed the marks made by decrepitude upon that frail machine.
He wore a white waistcoat embroidered with gold, in the old style, and
his linen was of dazzling whiteness. A shirt-frill of English lace,
yellow with age, the magnificence of which a queen might have envied,
formed a series of yellow ruffles on his breast; but upon him the lace
seemed rather a worthless rag than an ornament. In the centre of
the frill a diamond of inestimable value gleamed like a sun. That
superannuated splendor, that display of treasure, of great intrinsic
worth, but utterly without taste, served to bring out in still bolder
relief the strange creature’s face. The frame was worthy of the
portrait. That dark face was full of angles and furrowed deep in every
direction; the chin was furrowed; there were great hollows at the
temples; the eyes were sunken in yellow orbits. The maxillary bones,
which his indescribable gauntness caused to protrude, formed deep
cavities in the centre of both cheeks. These protuberances, as the
light fell upon them, caused curious effects of light and shadow which
deprived that face of its last vestige of resemblance to the human
countenance. And then, too, the lapse of years had drawn the fine,
yellow skin so close to the bones that it described a multitude of
wrinkles everywhere, either circular like the ripples in the water
caused by a stone which a child throws in, or star-shaped like a pane of
glass cracked by a blow; but everywhere very deep, and as close together
as the leaves of a closed book. We often see more hideous old men; but
what contributed more than aught else to give to the spectre that rose
before us the aspect of an artificial creation was the red and white
paint with which he glistened. The eyebrows shone in the light with a
lustre which disclosed a very well executed bit of painting. Luckily
for the eye, saddened by such a mass of ruins, his corpse-like skull was
concealed beneath a light wig, with innumerable curls which
indicated extraordinary pretensions to elegance. Indeed, the feminine
coquettishness of this fantastic apparition was emphatically asserted
by the gold ear-rings which hung at his ears, by the rings containing
stones of marvelous beauty which sparkled on his fingers, like the
brilliants in a river of gems around a woman’s neck. Lastly, this
species of Japanese idol had constantly upon his blue lips, a fixed,
unchanging smile, the shadow of an implacable and sneering laugh, like
that of a death’s head. As silent and motionless as a statue, he exhaled
the musk-like odor of the old dresses which a duchess’ heirs exhume from
her wardrobe during the inventory. If the old man turned his eyes toward
the company, it seemed that the movements of those globes, no
longer capable of reflecting a gleam, were accomplished by an almost
imperceptible effort; and, when the eyes stopped, he who was watching
them was not certain finally that they had moved at all. As I saw,
beside that human ruin, a young woman whose bare neck and arms and
breast were white as snow; whose figure was well-rounded and beautiful
in its youthful grace; whose hair, charmingly arranged above an
alabaster forehead, inspired love; whose eyes did not receive but gave
forth light, who was sweet and fresh, and whose fluffy curls, whose
fragrant breath, seemed too heavy, too harsh, too overpowering for that
shadow, for that man of dust--ah! the thought that came into my mind
was of death and life, an imaginary arabesque, a half-hideous chimera,
divinely feminine from the waist up.
“And yet such marriages are often made in society!” I said to myself.
“He smells of the cemetery!” cried the terrified young woman, grasping
my arm as if to make sure of my protection, and moving about in a
restless, excited way, which convinced me that she was very much
frightened. “It’s a horrible vision,” she continued; “I cannot stay here
any longer. If I look at him again I shall believe that Death himself
has come in search of me. But is he alive?”
She placed her hand on the phenomenon, with the boldness which women
derive from the violence of their wishes, but a cold sweat burst from
her pores, for, the instant she touched the old man, she heard a cry
like the noise made by a rattle. That shrill voice, if indeed it were
a voice, escaped from a throat almost entirely dry. It was at once
succeeded by a convulsive little cough like a child’s, of a peculiar
resonance. At that sound, Marianina, Filippo, and Madame de Lanty looked
toward us, and their glances were like lightning flashes. The young
woman wished that she were at the bottom of the Seine. She took my arm
and pulled me away toward a boudoir. Everybody, men and women, made
room for us to pass. Having reached the further end of the suite of
reception-rooms, we entered a small semi-circular cabinet. My companion
threw herself on a divan, breathing fast with terror, not knowing where
she was.
“You are mad, madame,” I said to her.
“But,” she rejoined, after a moment’s silence, during which I gazed
at her in admiration, “is it my fault? Why does Madame de Lanty allow
ghosts to wander round her house?”
“Nonsense,” I replied; “you are doing just what fools do. You mistake a
little old man for a spectre.”
“Hush,” she retorted, with the imposing, yet mocking, air which all
women are so well able to assume when they are determined to put
themselves in the right. “Oh! what a sweet boudoir!” she cried, looking
about her. “Blue satin hangings always produce an admirable effect. How
cool it is! Ah! the lovely picture!” she added, rising and standing in
front of a magnificently framed painting.
We stood for a moment gazing at that marvel of art, which seemed
the work of some supernatural brush. The picture represented Adonis
stretched out on a lion’s skin. The lamp, in an alabaster vase, hanging
in the centre of the boudoir, cast upon the canvas a soft light which
enabled us to grasp all the beauties of the picture.
“Does such a perfect creature exist?” she asked me, after examining
attentively, and not without a sweet smile of satisfaction, the
exquisite grace of the outlines, the attitude, the color, the hair, in
fact everything.
“He is too beautiful for a man,” she added, after such a scrutiny as she
would have bestowed upon a rival.
Ah! how sharply I felt at that moment those pangs of jealousy in which
a poet had tried in vain to make me believe! the jealousy of engravings,
of pictures, of statues, wherein artists exaggerate human beauty, as a
result of the doctrine which leads them to idealize everything.
“It is a portrait,” I replied. “It is a product of Vien’s genius. But
that great painter never saw the original, and your admiration will be
modified somewhat perhaps, when I tell you that this study was made from
a statue of a woman.”
“But who is it?”
I hesitated.
“I insist upon knowing,” she added earnestly.
“I believe,” I said, “that this _Adonis_ represents a--a relative of
Madame de Lanty.”
I had the chagrin of seeing that she was lost in contemplation of that
figure. She sat down in silence, and I seated myself beside her and
took her hand without her noticing it. Forgotten for a portrait! At that
moment we heard in the silence a woman’s footstep and the faint rustling
of a dress. We saw the youthful Marianina enter the boudoir, even
more resplendent by reason of her grace and her fresh costume; she
was walking slowly and leading with motherly care, with a daughter’s
solicitude, the spectre in human attire, who had driven us from the
music-room; as she led him, she watched with some anxiety the slow
movement of his feeble feet. They walked painfully across the boudoir
to a door hidden in the hangings. Marianina knocked softly. Instantly
a tall, thin man, a sort of familiar spirit, appeared as if by magic.
Before entrusting the old man to this mysterious guardian, the lovely
child, with deep veneration, kissed the ambulatory corpse, and her
chaste caress was not without a touch of that graceful playfulness, the
secret of which only a few privileged women possess.
“_Addio, addio!_” she said, with the sweetest inflection of her young
voice.
She added to the last syllable a wonderfully executed trill, in a very
low tone, as if to depict the overflowing affection of her heart by
a poetic expression. The old man, suddenly arrested by some memory,
remained on the threshold of that secret retreat. In the profound
silence we heard the sigh that came forth form his breast; he removed
the most beautiful of the rings with which his skeleton fingers were
laden, and placed it in Marianina’s bosom. The young madcap laughed,
plucked out the ring, slipped it on one of her fingers over her glove,
and ran hastily back toward the salon, where the orchestra were, at that
moment, beginning the prelude of a contra-dance.
She spied us.
“Ah! were you here?” she said, blushing.
After a searching glance at us as if to question us, she ran away to her
partner with the careless petulance of her years.
“What does this mean?” queried my young partner. “Is he her husband? I
believe I am dreaming. Where am I?”
“You!” I retorted, “you, madame, who are easily excited, and who,
understanding so well the most imperceptible emotions, are able to
cultivate in a man’s heart the most delicate of sentiments, without
crushing it, without shattering it at the very outset, you who have
compassion for the tortures of the heart, and who, with the wit of the
Parisian, combine a passionate temperament worthy of Spain or Italy----”
She realized that my words were heavily charged with bitter irony; and,
thereupon, without seeming to notice it, she interrupted me to say:
“Oh! you describe me to suit your own taste. A strange kind of tyranny!
You wish me not to be _myself_!”
“Oh! I wish nothing,” I cried, alarmed by the severity of her manner.
“At all events, it is true, is it not, that you like to hear stories of
the fierce passions, kindled in our heart by the enchanting women of the
South?”
“Yes. And then?”
“Why, I will come to your house about nine o’clock to-morrow evening,
and elucidate this mystery for you.”
“No,” she replied, with a pout; “I wish it done now.”
“You have not yet given me the right to obey you when you say, ‘I wish
it.’”
“At this moment,” she said, with an exhibition of coquetry of the sort
that drives men to despair, “I have a most violent desire to know this
secret. To-morrow it may be that I will not listen to you.”
She smiled and we parted, she still as proud and as cruel, I as
ridiculous, as ever. She had the audacity to waltz with a young
aide-de-camp, and I was by turns angry, sulky, admiring, loving, and
jealous.
“Until to-morrow,” she said to me, as she left the ball about two
o’clock in the morning.
“I won’t go,” I thought. “I give up. You are a thousand times more
capricious, more fanciful, than--my imagination.”
The next evening we were seated in front of a bright fire in a dainty
little salon, she on a couch, I on cushions almost at her feet, looking
up into her face. The street was silent. The lamp shed a soft light. It
was one of those evenings which delight the soul, one of those moments
which are never forgotten, one of those hours passed in peace and
longing, whose charm is always in later years a source of regret, even
when we are happier. What can efface the deep imprint of the first
solicitations of love?
“Go on,” she said. “I am listening.”
“But I dare not begin. There are passages in the story which are
dangerous to the narrator. If I become excited, you will make me hold my
peace.”
“Speak.”
“I obey.
“Ernest-Jean Sarrasine was the only son of a prosecuting attorney of
Franche-Comte,” I began after a pause. “His father had, by faithful
work, amassed a fortune which yielded an income of six to eight thousand
francs, then considered a colossal fortune for an attorney in the
provinces. Old Maitre Sarrasine, having but one child, determined to
give him a thorough education; he hoped to make a magistrate of him,
and to live long enough to see, in his old age, the grandson of Mathieu
Sarrasine, a ploughman in the Saint-Die country, seated on the lilies,
and dozing through the sessions for the greater glory of the Parliament;
but Heaven had not that joy in store for the attorney. Young Sarrasine,
entrusted to the care of the Jesuits at an early age, gave indications
of an extraordinarily unruly disposition. His was the childhood of a man
of talent. He would not study except as his inclination led him, often
rebelled, and sometimes remained for whole hours at a time buried in
tangled meditations, engaged now in watching his comrades at play, now
in forming mental pictures of Homer’s heroes. And, when he did choose to
amuse himself, he displayed extraordinary ardor in his games. Whenever
there was a contest of any sort between a comrade and himself, it rarely
ended without bloodshed. If he were the weaker, he would use his
teeth. Active and passive by turns, either lacking in aptitude, or too
intelligent, his abnormal temperament caused him to distrust his masters
as much as his schoolmates. Instead of learning the elements of the
Greek language, he drew a picture of the reverend father who was
interpreting a passage of Thucydides, sketched the teacher of
mathematics, the prefect, the assistants, the man who administered
punishment, and smeared all the walls with shapeless figures. Instead of
singing the praises of the Lord in the chapel, he amused himself, during
the services, by notching a bench; or, when he had stolen a piece of
wood, he would carve the figure of some saint. If he had no wood or
stone or pencil, he worked out his ideas with bread. Whether he copied
the figures in the pictures which adorned the choir, or improvised, he
always left at this seat rough sketches, whose obscene character drove
the young fathers to despair; and the evil-tongued alleged that
the Jesuits smiled at them. At last, if we are to believe college
traditions, he was expelled because, while awaiting his turn to go to
the confessional one Good Friday, he carved a figure of the Christ from
a stick of wood. The impiety evidenced by that figure was too flagrant
not to draw down chastisement on the artist. He had actually had the
hardihood to place that decidedly cynical image on the top of the
tabernacle!
“Sarrasine came to Paris to seek a refuge against the threats of a
father’s malediction. Having one of those strong wills which know no
obstacles, he obeyed the behests of his genius and entered Bouchardon’s
studio. He worked all day and went about at night begging for
subsistence. Bouchardon, marveling at the young artist’s intelligence
and rapid progress, soon divined his pupil’s destitute condition; he
assisted him, became attached to him, and treated him like his own
child. Then, when Sarrasine’s genius stood revealed in one of those
works wherein future talent contends with the effervescence of youth,
the generous Bouchardon tried to restore him to the old attorney’s good
graces. The paternal wrath subsided in face of the famous sculptor’s
authority. All Besancon congratulated itself on having brought forth a
future great man. In the first outburst of delight due to his flattered
vanity, the miserly attorney supplied his son with the means to appear
to advantage in society. The long and laborious study demanded by the
sculptor’s profession subdued for a long time Sarrasine’s impetuous
temperament and unruly genius. Bouchardon, foreseeing how violently the
passions would some day rage in that youthful heart, as highly tempered
perhaps as Michelangelo’s, smothered its vehemence with constant
toil. He succeeded in restraining within reasonable bounds Sarrasine’s
extraordinary impetuosity, by forbidding him to work, by proposing
diversions when he saw that he was on the point of plunging into
dissipation. But with that passionate nature, gentleness was always
the most powerful of all weapons, and the master did not acquire great
influence over his pupil until he had aroused his gratitude by fatherly
kindness.
“At the age of twenty-two Sarrasine was forcibly removed from the
salutary influence which Bouchardon exercised over his morals and his
habits. He paid the penalty of his genius by winning the prize for
sculpture founded by the Marquis de Marigny, Madame de Pompadour’s
brother, who did so much for art. Diderot praised Bouchardon’s pupil’s
statue as a masterpiece. Not without profound sorrow did the king’s
sculptor witness the departure for Italy of a young man whose profound
ignorance of the things of life he had, as a matter of principle,
refrained from enlightening. Sarrasine was Bouchardon’s guest for six
years. Fanatically devoted to his art, as Canova was at a later day, he
rose at dawn and went to the studio, there to remain until night, and
lived with his muse alone. If he went to the Comedie-Francaise, he was
dragged thither by his master. He was so bored at Madame Geoffrin’s, and
in the fashionable society to which Bouchardon tried to introduce him,
that he preferred to remain alone, and held aloof from the pleasures
of that licentious age. He had no other mistresses than sculpture and
Clotilde, one of the celebrities of the Opera. Even that intrigue was of
brief duration. Sarrasine was decidedly ugly, always badly dressed, and
naturally so independent, so irregular in his private life, that the
illustrious nymph, dreading some catastrophe, soon remitted the sculptor
to love of the arts. Sophie Arnould made some witty remark on the
subject. She was surprised, I think, that her colleague was able to
triumph over statues.
“Sarrasine started for Italy in 1758. On the journey his ardent
imagination took fire beneath a sky of copper and at the sight of the
marvelous monuments with which the fatherland of the arts is strewn.
He admired the statues, the frescoes, the pictures; and, fired with a
spirit of emulation, he went on to Rome, burning to inscribe his name
between the names of Michelangelo and Bouchardon. At first, therefore,
he divided his time between his studio work and examination of the works
of art which abound in Rome. He had already passed a fortnight in the
ecstatic state into which all youthful imaginations fall at the sight of
the queen of ruins, when he happened one evening to enter the Argentina
theatre, in front of which there was an enormous crowd. He inquired the
reasons for the presence of so great a throng, and every one answered by
two names:
“‘Zambinella! Jomelli!’
“He entered and took a seat in the pit, crowded between two
unconscionably stout _abbati_; but luckily he was quite near the stage.
The curtain rose. For the first time in his life he heard the music
whose charms Monsieur Jean-Jacques Rousseau had extolled so eloquently
at one of Baron d’Holbach’s evening parties. The young sculptor’s senses
were lubricated, so to speak, by Jomelli’s harmonious strains. The
languorous peculiarities of those skilfully blended Italian voices
plunged him in an ecstasy of delight. He sat there, mute and motionless,
not even conscious of the crowding of the two priests. His soul poured
out through his ears and his eyes. He seemed to be listening with
every one of his pores. Suddenly a whirlwind of applause greeted the
appearance of the prima donna. She came forward coquettishly to the
footlights and curtsied to the audience with infinite grace. The
brilliant light, the enthusiasm of a vast multitude, the illusion of the
stage, the glamour of a costume which was most attractive for the
time, all conspired in that woman’s favor. Sarrasine cried aloud with
pleasure. He saw before him at that moment the ideal beauty whose
perfections he had hitherto sought here and there in nature, taking from
one model, often of humble rank, the rounded outline of a shapely
leg, from another the contour of the breast; from another her white
shoulders; stealing the neck of that young girl, the hands of this
woman, and the polished knees of yonder child, but never able to find
beneath the cold skies of Paris the rich and satisfying creations of
ancient Greece. La Zambinella displayed in her single person, intensely
alive and delicate beyond words, all those exquisite proportions of the
female form which he had so ardently longed to behold, and of which a
sculptor is the most severe and at the same time the most passionate
judge. She had an expressive mouth, eyes instinct with love, flesh of
dazzling whiteness. And add to these details, which would have filled
a painter’s soul with rapture, all the marvelous charms of the Venuses
worshiped and copied by the chisel of the Greeks. The artist did not
tire of admiring the inimitable grace with which the arms were attached
to the body, the wonderful roundness of the throat, the graceful curves
described by the eyebrows and the nose, and the perfect oval of the
face, the purity of its clean-cut lines, and the effect of the thick,
drooping lashes which bordered the large and voluptuous eyelids. She was
more than a woman; she was a masterpiece! In that unhoped-for creation
there was love enough to enrapture all mankind, and beauties calculated
to satisfy the most exacting critic.
“Sarrasine devoured with his eyes what seemed to him Pygmalion’s statue
descended from its pedestal. When La Zambinella sang, he was beside
himself. He was cold; then suddenly he felt a fire burning in the secret
depths of his being, in what, for lack of a better word, we call the
heart. He did not applaud, he said nothing; he felt a mad impulse, a
sort of frenzy of the sort that seizes us only at the age when there is
a something indefinably terrible and infernal in our desires. Sarrasine
longed to rush upon the stage and seize that woman. His strength,
increased a hundredfold by a moral depression impossible to
describe,--for such phenomena take place in a sphere inaccessible to
human observation,--insisted upon manifesting itself with deplorable
violence. Looking at him, you would have said that he was a cold, dull
man. Renown, science, future, life, prizes, all vanished.
“‘To win her love or die!’ Such was the sentence Sarrasine pronounced
upon himself.
“He was so completely intoxicated that he no longer saw theatre,
audience, or actors, no longer heard the music. Nay, more, there was no
space between him and La Zambinella; he possessed her; his eyes, fixed
steadfastly upon her, took possession of her. An almost diabolical power
enabled him to feel the breath of that voice, to inhale the fragrant
powder with which her hair was covered, to see the slightest
inequalities of her face, to count the blue veins which threaded their
way beneath the satiny skin. And that fresh, brisk voice of silvery
_timbre_, flexible as a thread to which the faintest breath of air gives
form, which it rolls and unrolls, tangles and blows away, that voice
attacked his heart so fiercely that he more than once uttered an
involuntary exclamation, extorted by the convulsive ecstasy too rarely
evoked by human passions. He was soon obliged to leave the theatre. His
trembling legs almost refused to bear him. He was prostrated, weak, like
a nervous man who has given way to a terrible burst of anger. He had had
such exquisite pleasure, or perhaps had suffered so, that his life had
flowed away like water from an overturned vessel. He felt a void
within him, a sense of goneness like the utter lack of strength which
discourages a convalescent just recovering from a serious sickness.
Overwhelmed by inexplicable melancholy, he sat down on the steps of a
church. There, with his back resting against a pillar, he lost himself
in a fit of meditation as confused as a dream. Passion had dealt him a
crushing blow. On his return to his apartments he was seized by one
of those paroxysms of activity which reveal to us the presence of new
principles in our existence. A prey to that first fever of love which
resembles pain as much as pleasure, he sought to defeat his impatience
and his frenzy by sketching La Zambinella from memory. It was a sort of
material meditation. Upon one leaf La Zambinella appeared in that pose,
apparently calm and cold, affected by Raphael, Georgione, and all
the great painters. On another, she was coyly turning her head as she
finished a roulade, and seemed to be listening to herself. Sarrasine
drew his mistress in all poses: he drew her unveiled, seated, standing,
reclining, chaste, and amorous--interpreting, thanks to the delirious
activity of his pencil, all the fanciful ideas which beset our
imagination when our thoughts are completely engrossed by a mistress.
But his frantic thoughts outran his pencil. He met La Zambinella, spoke
to her, entreated her, exhausted a thousand years of life and happiness
with her, placing her in all imaginable situations, trying the future
with her, so to speak. The next day he sent his servant to hire a
box near the stage for the whole season. Then, like all young men of
powerful feelings, he exaggerated the difficulties of his undertaking,
and gave his passion, for its first pasturage, the joy of being able
to admire his mistress without obstacle. The golden age of love, during
which we enjoy our own sentiments, and in which we are almost as happy
by ourselves, was not likely to last long with Sarrasine. However,
events surprised him when he was still under the spell of that
springtime hallucination, as naive as it was voluptuous. In a week he
lived a whole lifetime, occupied through the day in molding the clay
with which he succeeded in copying La Zambinella, notwithstanding the
veils, the skirts, the waists, and the bows of ribbon which concealed
her from him. In the evening, installed at an early hour in his box,
alone, reclining on a sofa, he made for himself, like a Turk drunk with
opium, a happiness as fruitful, as lavish, as he wished. First of all,
he familiarized himself gradually with the too intense emotions which
his mistress’ singing caused him; then he taught his eyes to look at
her, and was finally able to contemplate her at his leisure without
fearing an explosion of concealed frenzy, like that which had seized
him the first day. His passion became more profound as it became more
tranquil. But the unsociable sculptor would not allow his solitude,
peopled as it was with images, adorned with the fanciful creations of
hope, and full of happiness, to be disturbed by his comrades. His love
was so intense and so ingenuous, that he had to undergo the innocent
scruples with which we are assailed when we love for the first time. As
he began to realize that he would soon be required to bestir himself, to
intrigue, to ask where La Zambinella lived, to ascertain whether she had
a mother, an uncle, a guardian, a family,--in a word, as he reflected
upon the methods of seeing her, of speaking to her, he felt that his
heart was so swollen with such ambitious ideas, that he postponed those
cares until the following day, as happy in his physical sufferings as in
his intellectual pleasures.”
“But,” said Madame de Rochefide, interrupting me, “I see nothing of
Marianina or her little old man in all this.”
“You see nothing but him!” I cried, as vexed as an author for whom some
one has spoiled the effect of a _coup de theatre_.
“For some days,” I resumed after a pause, “Sarrasine had been so
faithful in attendance in his box, and his glances expressed such
passionate love, that his passion for La Zambinella’s voice would have
been the town-talk of Paris, if the episode had happened here; but in
Italy, madame, every one goes to the theatre for his own enjoyment,
with all his own passions, with a heartfelt interest which precludes all
thought of espionage with opera-glasses. However, the sculptor’s frantic
admiration could not long escape the notice of the performers, male and
female. One evening the Frenchman noticed that they were laughing at
him in the wings. It is hard to say what violent measures he might
have resorted to, had not La Zambinella come on the stage. She cast at
Sarrasine one of those eloquent glances which often say more than women
intend. That glance was a complete revelation in itself. Sarrasine was
beloved!
“‘If it is a mere caprice,’ he thought, already accusing his mistress of
too great ardor, ‘she does not know the sort of domination to which she
is about to become subject. Her caprice will last, I trust, as long as
my life.’
“At that moment, three light taps on the door of his box attracted the
artist’s attention. He opened the door. An old woman entered with an air
of mystery.