Cynthia, you are fair; make haste. Who knows if you will be

MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN

_VOLUME TWO_

BY

THÉOPHILE GAUTIER

THE REALISTS

PRINTED BY

GEORGE BARRIE & SONS, PHILADELPHIA

1897

[Illustration: Chapter XII--_Her supple, yielding body shaped itself

to mine like wax and took its whole exterior outline as exactly as

possible:--water would not have found its way more scrupulously into

every irregularity in the line.--Thus glued to my side, she produced

the effect of the double stroke that painters give to the shadow side

of their picture in laying on their color._]

THIS EDITION OF

MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN

HAS BEEN COMPLETELY TRANSLATED

BY

I. G. BURNHAM

THE ETCHINGS ARE BY

FRANÇOIS-XAVIER LE SUEUR

AND DRAWINGS BY

ÉDOUARD TOUDOUZE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN--VOLUME II

IN THE RUSTIC CABIN Fronts.

D'ALBERT WATCHES THÉODORE

AT THE HOTEL DU LION-ROUGE

BEFORE THE REHEARSAL

AN EMBARRASSING SITUATION

AT THE WINDOW OF THE CHATEAU

THE DUEL

ARRIVAL IN THE TOWN OF C----

D'ALBERT'S SURPRISE

THE REALIZATION

IX

That is the fact.--I love a man, Silvio.--I tried for a long while to

deceive myself; I gave a different name to the sentiment I felt, I

clothed it in the guise of pure, disinterested friendship; I believed

that it was nothing more than the admiration I have for all beautiful

persons and all beautiful things; I walked for several days through the

deceitful, laughing paths that wander about every new-born passion;

but I realize now in what a deep and terrible slough I have become

involved. There is no way of concealing the truth from myself longer;

I have examined myself carefully, I have coolly considered all the

circumstances; I have gone to the bottom of the most trivial details;

I have searched every corner of my heart with the assurance due to the

habit of studying one's self; I blush to think it and to write it; but

the fact, alas! is only too certain.--I love this young man, not with

the affection of a friend, but with love;--yes, with love.

You, whom I have loved so dearly, Silvio, my dear, my only friend

and companion, have never made me feel anything of the sort, and

yet, if there ever was under heaven a close, warm friendship, if

ever two hearts, although utterly different, understood each other

perfectly, ours was that friendship and ours those two hearts. How

many swiftly-flying hours have we passed together! what endless

conversations, always too soon ended! how many things we have said to

each other that no one ever said before!--We had, each in the other's

heart, the window that Momus would have opened in man's side. How proud

I was to be your friend, although younger than you--I so foolish, you

so sensible!

My feeling for this young man is really incredible; no woman ever

disturbed my peace of mind so strangely. The sound of his clear,

silvery voice acts upon my nerves and excites me in a most peculiar

way; my soul hangs upon his lips, like a bee upon a flower, to drink

the honey of his words.--I cannot brush against him as we pass without

shivering from head to foot, and in the evening, when the time comes

to say good-night and he gives me his soft, satiny hand, my whole life

rushes to the place he has touched and I can feel the pressure of his

fingers an hour after.

This morning I looked at him for a long while without his seeing

me.--I was hidden behind my curtain.--He was at his window which is

exactly opposite mine.--This part of the chateau was built toward the

close of the reign of Henri IV.; it is half of brick, half of unhewn

stone, according to the custom of the time; the window is long and

narrow, with stone lintel and a stone balcony.--Théodore--for you have

already guessed of course that he is the young man in question--was

leaning in a melancholy attitude on the rail, and seemed to be deep in

meditation.--Draperies of red damask with large flowers, half drawn

aside, fell in broad folds behind him and served as a background.--How

beautiful he was, and what a marvellous effect his dark, sallow face

produced against the dark red! Two great bunches of hair, black and

glossy, like the grape clusters of Erigone of old, fell gracefully

along his cheeks and made a charming frame for the pure and delicate

oval of his beautiful face. His round, plump neck was entirely bare

and he wore a sort of dressing-gown with flowing sleeves not unlike a

woman's robe. He held in his hand a yellow tulip, at which he plucked

pitilessly in his reverie, throwing the pieces to the wind.

[Illustration: Chapter IX--_This morning I looked at him for a long

while without his seeing me.--I was hidden behind my curtain.--He was

at his window which is exactly opposite mine.--* * *Théodore--for

you have already guessed of course that he is the young man in

question--was leaning in a melancholy attitude on the rail, and

seemed to be deep in meditation. One of the shafts of light that the

sun projected on the wall cast its reflection on the window, and

the picture took on a warm golden tone that the most chatoyant of

Giorgione's canvases might have envied._]

With that long hair waving gently in the wind, that marble neck thus

uncovered, that ample robe enveloping the form, those lovely hands

protruding from the sleeves like the pistils of a flower peeping

from among their petals, he seemed not the handsomest of men but the

loveliest of women,--and I said to myself in my heart: "He is a woman,

oh! he is a woman!"--Then I suddenly remembered an absurd thing I

wrote to you long ago, you know, about my ideal and the way in which

I was surely destined to meet her; the beautiful dame in the Louis

XIII. park, the red and white chateau, the terrace, the avenues of old

chestnuts and the interview at the window; I gave you all the details

before.--And there it was--what I saw was the exact realization of

my dream.--There was the style of architecture, the effect of light,

the type of beauty, the coloring and the character I had longed

for;--nothing was lacking, except that the lady was a man;--but I

confess that at that moment I had entirely forgotten that.

It must be that Théodore is a woman in disguise; it cannot be

otherwise. His excessive beauty, excessive even for a woman, is not the

beauty of a man, were he Antinous, the friend of Adrian, or Alexis, the

friend of Virgil.--He is a woman, _parbleu_! and I am a fool to have

tormented myself so. In that way everything is explained as naturally

as possible, and I am not such a monster as I thought.

Does God put such long, dark, silky fringes upon a man's coarse

eyelids? Would he tinge our vile, thick-lipped, hairy mouths with

that bright, delicate carmine? Our bones, hewn with reaping-hooks and

roughly jointed, do not deserve to be swathed in flesh so white and

delicate; our battered skulls were not made to be bathed in waves of

such lovely hair.

O beauty! we are made only to love thee and adore thee on our knees,

if we have found thee--to seek thee incessantly throughout the world,

if that happiness has not been vouchsafed us; but to possess thee,

to be thou ourselves, is possible only for angels and women. Lovers,

poets, painters and sculptors, we all seek to erect an altar to thee,

the lover in his mistress, the poet in his song, the painter in his

canvas, the sculptor in his marble; but the source of everlasting

despair is the inability to give tangible form to the beauty one feels,

and to be enveloped by a body which does not realize the idea of the

body you understand to be yours.

I once saw a young man who had stolen the bodily form I ought to have

had. The villain was just what I would have liked to be. He had the

beauty of my ugliness, and beside him I looked like a rough drawing of

him. He was of my height, but stronger and more slender; his figure

resembled mine, but possessed a refinement and dignity that I have not.

His eyes were of the same shade as mine, but they had a sparkle and an

animation that mine will never have. His nose had been cast in the same

mould as mine, but it seemed to have been retouched by the chisel of

a skilful sculptor; the nostrils were more open and more passionate,

the flat surfaces more sharply defined, and it had a heroic cast of

which that respectable part of my countenance is entirely devoid. You

would have said that nature had tried first to make that perfected

myself in my person.--I seemed to be the blotted and unsightly rough

draft of the thought of which he was the copy in fine type. When I

saw him walk, stop, salute the ladies, sit down and lie down with the

perfect grace that results from beautiful proportions, I was seized

with such horrible melancholy and jealousy as the clay model must feel

as it dries up and cracks in obscurity in a corner of the studio,

while the haughty marble statue, which would not exist but for it,

stands proudly erect on its carved pedestal and attracts the notice

and the enthusiastic praise of visitors. For after all that rascal was

simply myself cast a little more successfully and with less unruly

bronze that worked itself more carefully into the hollow places of

the mould.--I consider him very insolent to strut about thus with my

form, and to play the braggart as if he were an original type; at the

best, he is simply a plagiarist from me, for I was born before him,

and except for me nature would never have had the idea of making him

as he is.--When women lauded his good manners and the charms of his

person, I had a most intense longing to rise and say to them: "Fools

that you are, praise me directly, for this gentleman is myself, and it

is a useless circumlocution to send him what comes back to me."--At

other times my fingers itched to strangle him and to turn his soul

out of that body that belonged to me, and I hovered about him with

clenched fists and compressed lips, like a nobleman hovering around his

palace, in which a family of beggars have taken up their abode during

his absence, perplexed as to the best means of casting them out.--The

young man is a stupid creature, by the way, and succeeds so much the

better on that account.--And sometimes I envy him his stupidity more

than his beauty.--The dictum of the Gospel as to the poor in spirit is

not complete: they shall inherit the kingdom of Heaven; I know nothing

about that, nor do I care; but there is no doubt that they inherit the

kingdom of earth--they have money and fair women, that is to say, the

only two desirable things in the world.--Do you know a man of spirit

who is rich, or a youth of courage and of any sort of merit who has a

passable mistress?--Although Théodore is very beautiful, I have never

desired his beauty, and I prefer that he should have it, rather than I.

Those strange passions of which the elegies of the ancient poets are

full, which used to surprise us so and which we could not conceive, are

therefore possible, nay, probable. In the translations we made of them,

we used to substitute names of women for the names we found. Juventius

was changed to Juventia, Alexis became Ianthe. The comely youths

became lovely maidens, and thus we reconstituted the unnatural seraglio

of Catullus, Tibullus, Martial, and the gentle Virgil. It was a very

gallant occupation, which proved simply how little we understood the

genius of the ancients.

I am a man of the Homeric days;--the world in which I live is not mine,

and I have no comprehension of the society that surrounds me. Christ

did not come to earth for me; I am as great a pagan as Alcibiades and

Phidias.--I have never been to Golgotha to pluck the passion-flowers,

and the deep stream that flows from the side of the Crucified One and

forms a red girdle around the world has not bathed me in its waves;--my

rebellious body refuses to recognize the supremacy of the soul, and

my flesh does not understand why it should be mortified.--To me the

earth is as fair as heaven, and I think that the correction of physical

form is virtue. Spiritual matters are not my forte, I like a statue

better than a phantom and high noon better than twilight. Three things

delight my soul: gold, marble, and purple,--brilliancy, solidity,

color. My dreams are made of those, and all the palaces I build for

my chimeras are constructed with those materials.--Sometimes I have

other dreams--of long cavalcades of snow-white horses, without saddle

or bridle, ridden by handsome, naked young men, who pass upon a band

of deep blue as on the friezes of the Parthenon; or deputations of

maidens crowned with fillets, with tunics with straight folds and ivory

citterns, who seem to wind about an enormous vase.--There is never any

mist or haze, anything indistinct or uncertain. My sky has no clouds,

or, if it has any, they are solid clouds, carved with the sculptor's

chisel, made from blocks of marble that have fallen from the statue

of Jupiter. Mountains with sharply-outlined peaks rise abruptly along

its edges, and the sun, leaning on one of the highest summits, opens

wide its yellow lion's eye with the golden eyelids.--The grasshopper

chirps and sings, and the corn bursts its sheath; the vanquished

shadow, unable to withstand the heat, musters its platoons and takes

refuge at the foot of the trees; everything is radiant and glowing

and resplendent. The slightest detail acquires substance and becomes

boldly accentuated; every object assumes robust shape and color. There

is no place for the tameness and reverie of Christian art.--That world

is mine.--The brooks in my landscapes fall in carved streams from a

carved urn; between those tall, green reeds, as resonant as those

of Eurotas, you see the gleam of the rounded, silvery hip of some

naiad with sea-green hair. In yonder dark oak forest Diana passes,

her quiver on her back, with her flying scarf and her buskins with

interlaced bands. She is followed by her pack and her nymphs with the

melodious names.--My pictures are painted in four tones like those of

the primitive painters, and often they are only colored bas-reliefs;

for I love to put my finger on what I have seen and to follow the curve

of the contours into its deepest recesses; I consider everything from

every point of view and walk around it with a light in my hand.--I have

contemplated love in the old-fashioned light, as a bit of sculpture

more or less perfect. How is the arm? Not bad.--The hands do not lack

delicacy.--What think you of that foot? I think that the ankle has no

nobility, and that the heel is commonplace. But the neck is well placed

and well shaped, the curved lines are wavy enough, the shoulders are

plump and well modelled.--The woman would make a passable model and

several portions of her would bear to be cast.--Let us love her.

I have always been like this. For women I have the glance of a

sculptor, not that of a lover. I have been anxious all my life about

the shape of the decanter, never about the quality of its contents.

If I had had Pandora's box in my hands, I believe I never should have

opened it. I said just now that Christ did not come to earth for me;

nor did Mary, the star of the modern Heaven, the gentle mother of the

glorious Babe.

Often and long have I stood beneath the stone foliage of cathedrals,

in the uncertain light from the stained-glass windows, at the hour

when the organ moaned of itself, when an invisible finger was placed

upon the keys and the wind blew through the pipes,--and I have buried

my eyes deep in the pale azure of the Madonna's sorrowful eyes. I have

followed piously the emaciated outline of her face, the faintly-marked

arch of her eyebrows; I have admired her smooth, luminous forehead,

her chastely transparent temples, her cheek bones tinged with a dark,

maidenly flush, more delicate than the peach bloom; I have counted one

by one the lovely golden lashes that cast their trembling shadow on her

cheeks; I have distinguished, in the half-light in which she is bathed,

the fleeting outlines of her slender, modestly bent neck; I have even,

with audacious hand, raised the folds of her tunic and seen without a

veil that virgin bosom, swollen with milk, that was never pressed by

any save divine lips; I have followed the tiny blue veins in their most

imperceptible ramifications, I have placed my finger upon them to force

the celestial fluid to gush forth in white threads; I have brushed with

my lips the bud of the mystic rose.

Ah well! I confess that all that immaterial beauty, so fleet-winged

and so vaporous that one feels that it will soon take flight, made a

very slight impression on me.--I like the Venus Anadyomene better, a

thousand times better.--The antique eyes, turned up at the comers, the

pure, sharply-cut lip, so amorous and so well adapted to be kissed, the

full, low forehead, the hair, wavy as the sea, and knotted carelessly

behind the head, the firm, lustrous shoulders, the back with its

thousand charming sinuosities, the small, closely-united breasts, all

the rounded, tense outlines, the broad hips, the delicate strength, the

evident superhuman vigor in a body so adorably feminine, delight me and

enchant me to a degree of which you, the Christian and the virtuous

man, can form no idea.

Mary, despite the humble air that she affects, is much too haughty

for me; the tip of her toes, swathed in white bands, hardly rests

upon the globe, already turning blue in the distance, on which the

ancient dragon writhes.--Her eyes are the loveliest on earth, but they

are always looking up toward the sky or down at her feet; they never

look you in the face,--they have never served as a mirror to a human

form.--And then, I do not like the clouds of smiling cherubs who circle

about her head in a light vapor. I am jealous of those tall virile

angels, with floating hair and robes, who so amorously crowd about

her in the pictures of the Assumption; the hands clasped together to

support her, the wings fluttering to fan her, displease and annoy me.

Those dandies of heaven, coquettish, over-bearing youngsters, in tunics

of light and wigs of gold thread, with their beautiful blue and green

feathers, seem to me too gallant by far, and if I were God, I would be

careful how I gave my mistress such pages.

Venus comes forth from the sea to visit the world--as befits a divinity

who loves men--alone and naked.--She prefers the earth to Olympus, and

has more men than gods for lovers; she does not envelop herself in the

languorous veils of mysticism; she stands, her dauphin behind her,

her foot upon her shell of mother-of-pearl; the sun strikes upon her

gleaming breast, and with her white hand, she holds in the air the

wavy masses of her lovely hair, in which old father Ocean has scattered

his most perfect pearls.--You can see her; she conceals nothing, for

modesty was invented only for the ugly, it is a modern invention, the

offspring of Christian contempt for form and matter.

O old world! all that thou didst revere is despised; thy idols are

overthrown in the dust; emaciated anchorites, dressed in rags and

tatters, bleeding martyrs, their shoulders torn by the tigers of

thy circuses, have perched upon the pedestals of thy beautiful,

charming gods;--Christ has enveloped the world in His shroud. Beauty

must needs blush for itself and put on a winding-sheet.--Ye comely

youths with your limbs rubbed in oil, who struggle in the lyceum or

the gymnasium, under the brilliant sky, in the sunlight of Attica,

before the marvelling crowd; ye maidens of Sparta who dance the

_bibase_, and who run naked to the summit of Taygetus, resume your

tunics and chlamydes;--your reign is past. And ye, moulders of marble,

Prometheuses in bronze, break your chisels:--there will be no more

sculptors.--The palpable world is dead. A dark, lugubrious thought

alone fills the immense void.--Cleomenes is going to the weavers'

shops to see what folds the cloth or linen takes.

Virginity, thou bitter weed, born in soil drenched with blood, whose

blanched and sickly flower blossoms painfully in the damp shade of

cloisters, beneath a cold shower of lustral water;--thou rose without

perfume, bristling with thorns, thou hast replaced for us the lovely,

joyous roses, bathed in spikenard and Falernian, of the dancing girls

of Sybaris!

The ancient world knew naught of thee, unfruitful flower; thou didst

never form a part of its wreaths whose perfume intoxicated;--in

that lusty, healthy society thou wouldst have been disdainfully

trodden under foot.--Virginity, mysticism, melancholy--three unknown

words--three new diseases, brought to earth by Christ.--Ye pallid

spectres, who inundate our world with your frozen tears, and who, with

your elbows on a cloud and your hands on your breasts, can say nothing

but "O death! O death!" ye could never have stepped foot upon that

earth, peopled with indulgent, madcap gods!

I look upon woman, after the ancient fashion, as a beautiful slave

destined to minister to our pleasures.--Christianity has not

rehabilitated her in my eyes. To me she is still something dissimilar

and inferior to us, whom we adore and with whom we toy, a plaything

more intelligent than if it were made of ivory or gold, and having the

power to pick itself up if it is dropped on the ground.--I have been

told, because of that, that I have a low opinion of women; it seems to

me, on the contrary, to show that I have a very high opinion of them.

Upon my word I cannot see why women are so eager to be looked upon as

men.--I can understand that they might long to be boa-constrictors,

lions or elephants, but that they should long to be men passes my

comprehension. If I had been at the Council of Trent when this

important question was discussed, namely, whether woman is a man, I

should most certainly have given my opinion in the negative.

I have in the course of my life written some amorous verses, or at all

events some that claimed to be so considered.--I have just read over

a part of them. The modern idea of love is absolutely lacking.--If

they were written in Latin distiches instead of in French rhymes, they

might be taken for the work of a wretched poet of Augustus's time. And

I am amazed that the women, for whom they were written, did not take

serious offence at them instead of being charmed with them.--To be

sure, women understand no more about poetry than cabbages and roses,

which is very natural and simple, they being themselves poetry, or

at least the best instruments of poetry: the flute does not hear or

understand the tune that you play upon it.

In these poems I speak of nothing but golden or ebon locks, the

miraculous fineness of the skin, the roundness of the arm, the small

size of the feet and the refined shape of the hand, and they all end

with an humble entreaty to the divinity to accord as speedily as

possible the enjoyment of all those beautiful things.--In the finest

passages, there is naught but garlands suspended at the door, showers

of roses, incense, a succession of Catullian kisses, delicious,

sleepless nights, quarrels with Aurora coupled with injunctions to the

aforesaid Aurora to withdraw behind old Tithonus's saffron-colored

curtains;--there is splendor without heat, resonance without

vibration.--They are rhythmical, polished, written with sustained

interest; but, through all the refinements and veils of expression, you

can feel the sharp, stern voice of the master trying to assume a softer

tone in speaking to the slave.--Not, as in the erotic poems written

since the Christian era, does a heart ask another heart to love it,

because it loves; there is no smiling, azure lake inviting a brook

to plunge into its bosom that they may reflect together the stars of

heaven; no pair of doves spreading their wings at the same time to fly

to the same nest.

Cynthia, you are fair; make haste. Who knows if you will be alive

to-morrow?--Your hair is blacker than the lustrous flesh of an

Ethiopian maiden. Make haste; in a few years slender silvery threads

will glide in among its dense masses;--these roses smell sweet to-day,

to-morrow they will have the odor of death and will be only the dead

bodies of roses.--Let us inhale your roses so long as they resemble

your cheeks; let us kiss your cheeks so long as they resemble your

roses.--When you are old, Cynthia, no one will care aught for you,

not even the lictor's assistants if you should pay them, and you will

run after me whom you repulse to-day. Wait until Saturn has furrowed

with his nail that pure and gleaming brow, and you will see how your

threshold, now so besieged, so implored, so covered with flowers and

so wet with tears, will be avoided, accursed and covered with weeds

and nettles.--Make haste, Cynthia; the smallest wrinkle may serve as a

grave for the greatest love.

That brutal, imperious formula summarizes the ancient elegy; it

constantly comes back to that; that is its main argument, the

strongest, the Achilles of its arguments. After that it hasn't

very much to say, and when it has promised a robe of byssus of two

colors and a string of pearls of equal size, it is at the end of its

tether.--It also includes almost all of what I find most conclusive

under such circumstances.--I do not, however, always confine myself to

this somewhat restricted programme, and I embroider my poor canvas with

a few threads of silk of different colors, picked up here and there.

But these threads are short or knotted together twenty times and do not

cling firmly to the woof. I speak politely of love because I have read

many beautiful things on the subject. Only an actor's talent is needed

for that. With many women this external appearance is enough; the habit

of writing and using the imagination prevents me from falling short in

such matters, and every mind at all experienced, by applying itself to

the task, can readily attain that result; but I do not feel a word of

what I say, and I keep repeating, in an undertone, with the poet of

old: "Cynthia, make haste."

I have often been accused of being a knave and a pretender.--No one

on earth would like so well as I to speak freely and to empty his

heart!--but as I have no idea or sentiment in common with the people

about me,--as there would be a hurrah and a general hue and cry at

the first true word I spoke, I have preferred to keep silent, or, if

I speak, to give utterance only to idiotic remarks that are received

everywhere and entitled to privilege of citizenship.--I should receive

a warm welcome if I said to women such things as I have just written to

you! I fancy that they wouldn't much relish my way of looking at things

or the view I take of love.--As for the men, I cannot tell them to

their faces that they are wrong not to walk on four legs; and in truth

I have a more favorable opinion of them.--I have no desire to quarrel

at every word. What difference does it make after all what I think or

what I don't think? that I am sad when I seem cheerful, cheerful when I

have an air of melancholy! No-body is inclined to cry out at me because

I don't go about naked; may I not dress my face as well as my body? Why

should a mask be more reprehensible than a pair of breeches, and a lie

than a corset?

Alas! the earth revolves about the sun, roasted on one side, frozen on

the other. There is a battle in which six hundred thousand men cut and

slash at one another; it is the loveliest day imaginable; the flowers

are coquettish beyond words and boldly throw open their gorgeous

breasts even under the horses' feet. To-day a fabulous number of worthy

deeds are done; it rains in torrents, there is snow and thunder and

lightning and hail; one would say that the world was coming to an end.

The benefactors of humanity are covered with mud up to their middle

like dogs, unless they have a carriage. Creation mocks pitilessly at

the creature and lets fly stinging sarcasms at every turn. Everybody

is indifferent to everybody else, and everything lives or vegetates

according to its own law. Whether I do this or that, whether I live or

die, whether I suffer or enjoy, whether I dissemble or speak frankly,

what matters it to the sun or the turnips or even to mankind? A wisp

of straw fell on an ant and broke his third leg at the second joint;

a rock fell upon a village and crushed it; I do not believe that one

of those disasters brings more tears than the other to the golden eyes

of the stars. You are my best friend, if that word is not as hollow

as a bell; if I should die, it is perfectly certain that, however

distressed you might be, you wouldn't go without your dinner even for

two days, and that, notwithstanding that terrible catastrophe, you

would continue to enjoy your game of backgammon.--Who of my friends,

who of my mistresses will remember my names and baptismal names twenty

years hence, and who would recognize me in the street, if I should pass

by with a coat that was out at the elbows?--Oblivion and annihilation,

that is the end of man.

I feel as utterly alone as possible, and all the threads that lead

from me to external things and from them to me have broken one by one.

There have been few instances where a man who has retained the power to

judge his impulses has reached such a degree of brutishness. I resemble

a decanter of liquor which has been left uncorked and from which the

spirit has evaporated completely. The liquid has the same appearance

and the same color; taste it, you will find it as insipid as water.

When I think of it I stand aghast at the rapidity of this

decomposition; if this continues I must pickle myself or I shall

inevitably rot, and the worms will attack me, as I no longer have

a soul, and that alone marks the distinction between a body and a

corpse.--Not more than a year ago I still had something human about

me;--I moved about and sought enlightenment. I had one thought that I

cherished more than all the rest, a sort of goal, an ideal; I longed

to be loved, I dreamed the dreams common to youths of that age,--less

vague, less chaste, to be sure, than those of ordinary young men,

but contained nevertheless within reasonable bounds. Gradually all

the incorporeal part of me became detached and faded away and naught

remained at the bottom but a thick layer of coarse slime. The dream

became a nightmare and the chimera a succubus;--the world of the soul

closed its ivory doors in my face; I no longer understand anything

except what I touch with my hands; I have dreams of stone; everything

condenses and hardens about me, nothing wavers, nothing vacillates,

there is no air or breath; matter weighs me down, takes possession

of me, crushes me; I am like a pilgrim who should fall asleep on a

summer's day with his feet in the water, and wake in winter with his

legs caught and embedded in the ice. I no longer desire the love or

friendship of any one; even glory, that resplendent halo that I so

craved for my brow, no longer arouses the slightest desire in my mind.

There is but one thing, alas! that stirs my pulses now, and that is the

horrible desire that draws me toward Théodore.--This is the sum of all

my moral notions. Whatever is physically beautiful is good, whatever

is ugly is bad.--If I should see a lovely woman whom I knew to be the

wickedest creature on earth, adulteress and poisoner, I confess that it

would make no difference to me and would in no wise interfere with my

taking delight in her, if I found the shape of her nose what it should

be.

This is my idea of supreme happiness:--A large square building with no

outside windows: a large court-yard, surrounded by a colonnade of white

marble, a crystal fountain in the centre with a jet of quicksilver

after the Arabian fashion, orange-trees and pomegranates in boxes,

arranged alternately; overhead a deep blue sky and a bright yellow

sun;--tall greyhounds with pointed muzzles would lie sleeping here and

there; from time to time barefooted negroes with gold ringlets about

their legs, and beautiful, slender white maid-servants, dressed in rich

and fanciful costumes, would pass in and out under the arches, baskets

on their arms or jugs on their heads. And I should be seated, silent

and motionless, beneath a magnificent canopy, surrounded by piles of

cushions, a great tame lion under my elbow, the bare breast of a young

female slave under my foot by way of hassock, and smoking opium in a

long jade pipe.

I cannot imagine paradise in any other form; and if God wills that I

shall go there after my death, he will build me a little kiosk on that

plan in the corner of some star.--Paradise as it is commonly described

seems to me far too musical, and I confess in all humility that I am

absolutely incapable of sitting through a sonata that should last only

ten thousand years.

You see what my Eldorado is, my promised land; it is as good a dream as

another; but it has this special peculiarity, that I never introduce

any known face into it; that no one of my friends ever crossed the

threshold of that imaginary palace; that no one of the women I have

had has ever been seated beside me on the velvet cushions: I am always

alone there in the midst of apparitions. I have never had an idea of

loving all the female figures, all the lovely shades of young girls

with which I people it; I have never fancied one of them in love

with me.--In that seraglio of my fantasy, I have created no favorite

sultana. There are negresses there, mulattresses, Jewesses with blue

skin and red hair, Greeks and Circassians, Spaniards and Englishwomen;

but they are to me simply symbols of coloring and feature, and I have

them as one has all sorts of wine in his cellar and all species of

humming-birds in his collection. They are pleasure machines, pictures

that need no frame, statues that come to you when you have a fancy

to look at them nearer at hand and call them. A woman has this

incontestable advantage over a statue, that she turns of herself in

whatever direction you choose, whereas you must make the circuit of the

statue and station yourself where the best view is to be had--which is

tiresome.

You must see that with such ideas I cannot remain in these times or in

this world; for one cannot exist thus without regard to time and space.

I must find something else.

Such a conclusion is the simple and logical result of such

thoughts.--When one seeks only the gratification of the eye, symmetry

of figure and purity of feature, one accepts them wherever he finds

them. This explains the extraordinary aberrations of love among the

ancients.

Since the days of Christ there has not been a single statue of man in

which youthful beauty was idealized and reproduced with the care that

characterizes the ancient sculptors.--Woman has become the symbol of

moral and physical beauty: man has really been dethroned since the day

the child was born at Bethlehem. Woman is the queen of creation; the

stars join to form a crown for her head, the crescent moon deems it an

honor to form a cradle for her foot, the sun gives her his purest gold

to make trinkets, painters who wish to flatter the angels give them the

features of women, and far be it from me to blame them for it.--Before

the coming of the sweet-tempered, courteous dealer in parables, it

was very different; men did not feminize the gods or heroes whom they

wished to make seductive; they had their type, at once sturdy and

delicate, but always masculine, however amorous the outlines, however

smooth and devoid of muscles and veins the workmen may have made their

divine legs and arms. They readily made the special beauties of women

consistent with this type. They broadened the shoulders, they lessened

the size of the hips, they gave more prominence to the breast, they

accentuated more strongly the joints of the arms and thighs.--There

is almost no difference between Paris and Helen. Wherefore the

hermaphrodite was one of the most ardently-cherished chimeras of the

ancient idolatry.

That son of Hermes and Aphrodite is, in very truth, one of the most

attractive creations of pagan genius. It is impossible to imagine

anything more ravishingly beautiful than those two bodies, both

perfect, harmoniously melted together, those two types of beauty, so

equal yet so different, which unite to form one that is superior to

either, because they mutually soften each other and bring out each the

other's good points: to one who adores form exclusively, can there be

a more pleasing uncertainty than that due to the sight of that back,

those doubtful loins, those legs, so strong and slender that you are

in doubt whether they should be attributed to Mercury on the point of

taking flight or Diana coming from the bath? The trunk is a combination

of the most charming singularities; above the full round chest of the

lusty youth rises with strange grace the swelling breast of a young

virgin. Beneath the sides, well wrapped in flesh and feminine in their

softness, you divine the muscles and the ribs, as in the sides of a

young man; the stomach is a little flat for a woman, a little round

for a man, and there is something vague and indecisive about the whole

character of the body, which it is impossible to describe and which

has a charm all its own.--Théodore would surely be a most excellent

model of that kind of beauty; it seems to me, however, that in him the

feminine element carries the day and that he has retained more of

Salmacis than the Hermaphrodite of the Metamorphoses.

The strange part of it all is that I hardly think of his sex now, and

that I love him with a sense of perfect security. Sometimes I try to

persuade myself that this love is an abomination, and I tell myself so

in the harshest possible way; but it comes only from the lips, it is

an argument that I urge upon myself and fail to appreciate; it really

seems to me that it is the simplest thing in the world and that any

other in my place would do the same.

I look at him, I listen to him talk or sing--for he sings

admirably--and I take an indescribable pleasure in it.--He seems to

me so much like a woman that one day, in the heat of conversation, I

called him madame inadvertently, whereat he laughed, and it seemed to

me a decidedly forced laugh.

But if he is a woman, what can be his motive for masquerading thus? I

cannot answer the question in any way. That a very young, very handsome

and perfectly beardless youth should disguise himself as a woman

might be conceived; in that way he would open a thousand doors that

would otherwise remain obstinately closed to him, and the jest might

lead him into a complication of adventures thoroughly Dædalian and

enjoyable. In that way one can gain access to a woman who is closely

guarded or carry a citadel by storm under cover of a surprise. But I

cannot understand what advantage can accrue to a young and beautiful

woman from travelling around the country in male attire: she can only

lose by it. A woman is not likely to renounce thus the pleasure of

being courted, flattered and adored; she would renounce life rather,

and she would do wisely, for what is a woman's life without all

that?--Nothing--or something worse than death. And I always wonder that

women who are thirty years old, or have the small-pox, don't jump from

the top of a steeple.

Notwithstanding all that, something stronger than all arguments cries

out to me that he is a woman, and that she is the woman I have dreamed

of, whom alone I am to love, and who is to love me alone;--yes, it is

she, the goddess with the eagle glance, with the fair royal hands, who

smiled condescendingly upon me from her seat on her throne of clouds.

She has presented herself to me in this disguise to put me to the test,

to see if I would recognize her, if my amorous gaze would penetrate the

veils in which she has enveloped herself, as in the marvellous tales

where fairies appear at first in the guise of beggars, then suddenly

stand forth resplendent in gold and jewels.

I have recognized you, oh! my love! At sight of you my heart leaped in

my breast as Saint-Jean leaped in the breast of Sainte-Anne, when she

was visited by the Virgin; the air was filled with a blaze of light;

I smelt the odor of divine ambrosia; I saw the train of fire at your

feet, and I understood at once that you were not an ordinary mortal.

The melodious notes of Sainte-Cecilia's viol, to which the angels

listened with delight, are hoarse and discordant compared with the

pearly cadences that issue from your ruby lips; the youthful, smiling

Graces dance incessantly about you; the birds, when you pass through

the woods, murmur as they bend their little feathered heads in order

to see you more clearly, and whistle their sweetest refrains to you;

the amorous moon rises earlier to kiss you with her pale silver lips,

for she has abandoned her shepherd for you; the wind is careful not

to efface the delicate print of your dainty foot upon the sand; the

fountain, when you lean over it, becomes smoother than crystal, for

fear of wrinkling and disturbing the reflection of your celestial

face; even the modest violets open their little hearts to you, and

play countless little coquettish tricks from before you; the jealous

strawberry is stung to emulation and strives to equal the divine

carnation of your lips; the infinitesimal gnat hums joyously and

applauds you by flapping his wings;--all nature loves and admires you,

its loveliest work!

Ah! now I live!--hitherto I had been no better than a dead man: now I

have thrown off my shroud, and I stretch out my two thin hands from the

grave toward the sun; my blue spectre-like color has left me. My blood

flows swiftly through my veins. The ghastly silence that reigned about

me is broken at last. The black, opaque arch that weighed upon my brow

is lighted up. A thousand mysterious voices whisper in my ear; lovely

stars sparkle above me and carpet the windings of my path with their

gold spangles; the marguerites smile sweetly on me and the bells tinkle

my name with their little twisted tongues. I understand a multitude

of things that I used not to understand, I discover marvellous

affinities and sympathies, I know the language of the roses and the

nightingales, and I can read fluently the book I could not even spell.

I have discovered that I have a friend in yonder respectable old

oak, covered with mistletoe and parasitic plants, and that the frail

and languorous periwinkle, whose great blue eye is always overflowing

with tears, has long cherished a secret, discreet passion for me:--it

is love, it is love that has unsealed my eyes and given me the key to

the enigma.--Love descended into the depths of the cavern where my

cowering, drowsy soul was freezing to death; he took it by the hand and

led it up the steep and narrow stairway to the outer world. All the

doors of the prison were burst open and for the first time the poor

Psyche came forth from the me in which she was confined.

Another life has become mine. I breathe through another's lungs, and

the blow that should wound him would kill me.--Before this happy day I

was like those stupid Japanese idols who are forever looking at their

stomach. I was the spectator of myself, the pit at the comedy. I was

acting; I watched myself live and listened to the beating of my heart

as to the oscillations of a pendulum. That is the whole story. Images

were reproduced in my distraught eyes; sounds fell upon my unheeding

ear, but nothing from the outer world reached my soul. Nobody's

existence was essential to me; indeed I doubted if there were any

other existence than mine, nor was I quite sure even of that. It seemed

to me that I was alone in the midst of the universe, and that all the

rest was only smoke, images, vain illusions, fleeting apparitions

destined to people that void.--What a difference!

And yet, what if my presentiment had misled me, if Théodore should

prove to be in truth a man, as everybody believes him to be! Such

marvellous beauty has sometimes been seen in man; extreme youth may

assist the illusion.--It is something I will not think about, for it

would drive me mad; the grain that fell yesterday into my sterile

heart has already penetrated it, in every direction, with its thousand

filaments; it has taken a strong hold there and it would be impossible

for me to tear it out. It has already become a green and flourishing

tree and its knotted roots have struck deep.--If I should be convinced

beyond a doubt that Théodore is not a woman, alas! I cannot say that I

should not love him still.

X

You were very wise, my sweet friend, to try and dissuade me from

the plan I had conceived of seeing men near at hand, of studying

them closely, before giving my heart to any one of them.--I have

extinguished love, yes, even the possibility of love, within me forever.

What poor creatures we girls are; brought up with so much

care, surrounded by a triple wall of virginal precautions and

reticence;--allowed to hear nothing, to suspect nothing, our principal

knowledge being to know nothing, in what strange misconceptions do we

pass our lives and what deceitful chimeras lull us to sleep in their

arms!

Ah! Graciosa, thrice accursed be the moment when the idea of this

travesty first occurred to me; what horrors, what infamous vulgarity

I have been compelled to witness or to listen to! what a treasure of

chaste and priceless ignorance I have squandered in a short time!

It was a lovely moonlight night, do you remember? when we walked

together at the foot of the garden, in that gloomy, unfrequented path,

terminated at one end by a statue of a Faun playing the flute, a Faun

without a nose and covered with a thick leprosy of greenish-black

moss--and at the other end by an imitation vista drawn on the wall and

half washed away by the rain.--Through the still sparse foliage of

the elms we could see the twinkling stars and the curve of the silver

sickle. The odor of young shoots and fresh flowers came to our nostrils

from the flower-beds, borne upon the languid breath of a faint breeze;

an invisible bird warbled a strange, languorous tune; we, like true

girls, talked of love and lovers, of the handsome cavalier we had seen

at mass; we shared the few notions of the world and of things that we

had in our heads; we twisted and turned in a hundred ways a phrase we

had heard by chance, the meaning of which seemed to us obscure and

strange; we asked each other a thousand of the silly questions that the

most perfect innocence alone can imagine.--What primitive poesy, what

adorable nonsense in those furtive interviews of two little fools fresh

from boarding-school!

You wanted for your lover a gallant, proud young man, with black hair

and moustaches, long spurs, long plumes, and a long sword--a sort of

amorous Hector--and you were all for the heroic and triumphant; you

dreamed of nothing but duels and escalades, and marvellous devotion,

and you would readily have thrown your glove in among the lions so that

your Esplandian might go and pick it up. It was very comical to see a

little girl as you were then, fair-haired and blushing, bending in the

slightest breeze, declaim those noble tirades without taking breath,

and with the most martial air imaginable.

I, although I was only six months older than you, was six years less

romantic; the thing that interested me most was to know what men said

among themselves and what they did when they went away from salons

and theatres:--I felt that there were many dark, unsavory corners in

their lives, carefully concealed from our eyes, which it was most

important for us to know about. Sometimes, hiding behind a curtain,

I watched from a distance the young gentlemen who came to the house,

and it seemed to me at such times that I could detect something

cynical and mean in their bearing, vulgar indifference or discourteous

preoccupation which I no longer noticed when they had been admitted,

and which they seemed to lay aside as if by enchantment at the

threshold of the salon. All of them, young and old alike, seemed to me

to have adopted a uniform conventional mask, conventional sentiments,

and a conventional mode of speech, when they were in the presence of

women.--From the corner of the salon where I sat up straight as a doll,

my back not touching the back of my chair, pulling my bouquet to pieces

in my fingers, I looked and listened; my eyes were cast down, and yet

I saw everything to right and left, before and behind me:--like the

fabulous eyes of the lynx, my eyes looked through walls, and I could

have told what was taking place in the adjoining room.