that I was familiar with. The branches of the trees, all laden with
dew, lashed me and wet my face; you would have said that the old trees
were putting out their arms to detain me and keep me for love of their
chatelaine.--If I had been in any other frame of mind, or in the least
degree superstitious, it would have been easy for me to believe that
they were ghosts trying to seize me and shaking their fists at me.
But the truth is that I had no idea at all, neither that nor any
other; a leaden stupor, so heavy that I was hardly conscious of it,
was pressing on my brain, like a helmet that was too small; but I had
a vague feeling that I had killed some one and that that was why I was
going away. I had an intense longing to sleep, whether because it was
so late or because the violent emotions of the night had reacted on me
physically and wearied my body.
I reached a small postern gate, which opened into the fields by a
secret spring that Rosette had shown me during our rides. I dismounted,
touched the button and opened the gate: after leading, my horse
through, I remounted and galloped as far as the high road to C----, where
I arrived at daybreak.
This is a true and circumstantial account of my first love-affair and
my first duel.
XV
It was five o'clock in the morning when I rode into the town.--The
houses were beginning to put their noses out of the window; the worthy
natives showed their benignant faces behind the glass, surmounted
by pyramidal nightcaps.--At the clatter of my horse's shoes ringing
on the uneven, stony pavement, the curiously red faces and the
matutinally uncovered breasts of the Venuses of the town issued from
their respective casements, while their owners exhausted themselves in
conjectures concerning the unusual apparition of a traveller in C----
at such an hour and in such a rig, for I was very scantily dressed,
and in a costume that was suspicious, to say the least. I inquired the
way to an inn, of a little rascal with hair over his eyes, who cocked
up his little spaniel's nose to look at me at his ease; I gave him a
few sous for his trouble, and a conscientious rap with my crop which
sent him away squeaking like a jay plucked alive. I threw myself on a
bed and fell into a sound sleep. When I awoke, it was three o'clock in
the afternoon, and even that was hardly enough to rest me completely.
Indeed, it was none too much for a sleepless night, an intrigue, a
duel, and a very rapid, although triumphant, flight.
I was very anxious about Alcibiades's wound; but a few days later
my mind was set at rest, for I learned that it had had no serious
consequences and that he was convalescent. That knowledge relieved me
of a heavy weight, for the idea that I had killed a man troubled me
strangely, although it was strictly in self-defence and against my own
wish. I had not yet attained that sublime indifference to the life of
my fellow-men at which I have since arrived.
[Illustration: Chapter XV--_It was five o'clock in the morning when I
rode into the town.--The houses were beginning to put their noses out of
the window--* * * I inquired the way to an inn, of a little rascal with
hair over his eyes, who cocked up his little spaniel's nose to look at
me at his ease; I gave him a few sous for his trouble._]
I found at C---- several of the young men with whom we had previously
journeyed, and I was very glad; I became very intimate with them, and
they introduced me into several pleasant houses.--I was perfectly
accustomed to my clothes, and the rough, active life I had led, the
violent exercises to which I had devoted much time, had made me
twice as robust as I was before. I went everywhere with those young
scatterbrains: I rode and hunted and drank with them, for I had
gradually accustomed myself to the bottle; without attaining the
genuine Teutonic capacity of some of them, I could empty two or three
bottles for my share without getting too tipsy--very satisfactory
progress. I made verse in great abundance like a god and kissed all
the maid-servants in due form.--In short, I became an accomplished
young gentleman, conforming in every respect to the latest fashionable
pattern.--I cast off certain provincial ideas that I had concerning
virtue and other nonsense of that kind; on the other hand, I became
so prodigiously punctilious on points of honor, that I fought a duel
almost every day: indeed, it became a necessity to me, a sort of
indispensable exercise, without which I should have felt ill all day.
And so, when no one had stared at me or trodden on my foot, when I had
no excuse for fighting, rather than remain idle and fold my hands, I
acted as second for my comrades, or even for people whom I did not know
by name.
I soon had a tremendous reputation for courage, and nothing less than
that would have sufficed to check the jocose remarks which my beardless
face and effeminate manner would infallibly have called forth. But by
dint of opening three or four extra buttonholes in doublets, and very
delicately puncturing some recalcitrant skins, I came to be generally
considered as having a more virile air than Mars himself or Priapus,
and you might have found men who would have sworn that they had been
godfathers to my bastards.
Throughout all this apparent dissipation, in this reckless, disorderly
life, I did not cease to follow out my original idea,--that is to say,
the conscientious study of man and the solution of the great problem of
a perfect lover, a problem rather more difficult of solution than that
of the philosopher's stone.
It is the same with certain ideas as with the horizon, which certainly
exists because you see it in front of you in whatever direction you
turn, but which obstinately eludes you and is always just so far away,
whether you walk or gallop toward it; for a certain fixed distance
is an indispensable condition of its manifestation; it vanishes as
you go toward it to take shape again farther away with its fleeting,
intangible azure, and you try in vain to stop it by grasping at the hem
of its waving cloak.
The farther I advanced in knowledge of the animal, the more plainly I
saw how impossible was the realization of my desire and how certain
it was that what I sought in order to love happily was outside the
conditions of its nature.--I became convinced that the man who was
most sincerely in love with me would find a way, although with the
best will in the world, to make me the most miserable of women, and
yet I had already laid aside many of the requirements that as a girl I
had thought essential.--I had descended from the sublime clouds, not
exactly into the street and the gutter, but to the top of a hill of
moderate height, accessible, although a little steep.
The ascent was decidedly rough, it is true; but I was conceited enough
to believe that I was worth the trouble of making the effort, and that
I should be a sufficient reward for the labor of reaching me.--I could
never have made up my mind to take a step forward; I waited patiently,
perched upon my hilltop.
This was my plan:--in my masculine attire I would make the acquaintance
of some young man whose exterior attracted me; I would live on familiar
terms with him; by shrewd questions and false confidences which would
call forth true ones, I would soon obtain full knowledge of his
thoughts and his sentiments; and if I found him to be the kind of man I
wanted, I would pretend that I had to make a journey, and would remain
away from him three or four months to give him a little time to forget
my features; then I would return dressed as a woman, I would furnish
luxuriously a little house in some retired suburb, buried among trees
and flowers; I would arrange matters so that he would meet me and pay
court to me; and if he showed that he loved me truly and faithfully, I
would give myself to him without reserve and without precaution--the
title of his mistress would seem to me an honorable one and I would ask
for no other.
But that plan is certain never to be carried out, for it is a
peculiarity of the plans we make that they are not carried out, and
therein the weakness of man's will and his pure nullity are principally
apparent.--The proverb--what woman wills, God wills--is no truer than
any other proverb, which is equivalent to saying that it is not true at
all.
So long as I saw them only at a distance and through the veil of my
desire, men seemed noble creatures to me, and my eyes created an
illusion.--Now I find that they are horrible to the last degree, and I
do not understand how a woman can take one of them into her bed.
As for myself, my gorge would rise and I could not make up my mind to
it.
How coarse and mean and unrefined their features are! what broken,
ungraceful curves! what rough, black, furrowed skin!--Some are as dark
as if they had been hanged six months ago, sallow, bony, hairy, with
violin-strings on their hands, great sprawling feet, a filthy moustache
always full of food and turned up toward the ears like hooks, hair as
coarse as a horse's tail, a chin ending in a wild-boar's jowl, lips
chapped and hardened by strong liquors, eyes surrounded by four or five
black circles, a neck all twisted veins, huge muscles and protruding
cartilage.--Others are enveloped in red flesh, and carry in front of
them paunches that their belts will hardly go around; they wink their
little sea-green eyes inflamed with lust and look more like hippopotami
in breeches than human beings. They always smell of wine or brandy or
tobacco or their own natural odor, which is far worse than all the
others.--As for those whose exterior is a little less disgusting, they
resemble ill-made women.--That's the whole story.
I had not noticed all this. I was living in a cloud, as it were, and my
feet hardly touched the ground.--The smell of the roses and lilacs in
the spring went to my head like a too powerful perfume. I dreamed only
of accomplished heroes, faithful and respectful lovers, passions worthy
of the altar, marvellous devotion and self-sacrifice, and I should
have expected to find them all in the first blackguard who bade me
good-morning.--However, that first, vulgar intoxication lasted only a
short time; strange suspicions entered my mind, and I had no rest until
I had investigated them.
In the beginning, my horror of men was carried to the last degree
of exaggeration and I looked upon them as horrible monstrosities.
Their ways of thinking, their bearing, and their carelessly cynical
language, their brutal manners and their contempt for women, offended
and revolted me beyond endurance, the idea that I had conceived of
them corresponded so little with the reality.--They are not monsters,
if you choose, but far worse than that, on my word! they are excellent
fellows of most jovial disposition, who drink and eat heartily, who
will do you all sorts of favors, clever and brave, good painters and
good musicians, adapted for a thousand things, but not for the one for
which they were created, which is to serve as male to the animal called
woman, with whom they have not the slightest connection, moral or
physical.
I had difficulty at first in concealing the contempt they inspired
in me, but gradually I became accustomed to their manner of life. I
felt no more annoyed at the mocking remarks they made concerning
women than if I had myself been of their sex.--On the contrary, I made
some very amusing ones myself, and their success greatly flattered my
pride; indeed, none of my comrades went so far as I in the matter of
sarcasm and jests upon that subject. My perfect familiarity with the
ground gave me a great advantage, and aside from such piquant meaning
as they might have, my epigrams excelled in the matter of accuracy,
which theirs often lacked.--For, although all the evil things they say
of women have some foundation in fact, it is difficult, nevertheless,
for men to preserve the necessary self-possession to make sport of them
successfully, for there is often much love in their invectives.
I noticed that the most tenderly-inclined men and those who thought
most of women were the ones who abused them worse than all the others
and who returned to the subject with particular persistency, as if they
were mortally aggrieved with them for not being such as they would like
them to be, and thus falsifying the good opinion they had formed of
them at first.
What I wanted before everything was not physical beauty, but beauty
of the heart, love; but love as I understand it may not be within the
bounds of human possibilities.--And yet it seems to me that I could
love so and that I would give more than I demand.
What magnificent folly! what sublime prodigality!
To deliver yourself absolutely, keeping nothing at all of yourself, to
renounce control of yourself and your free-will, to place your will in
another's hands, to see only with his eyes, to hear only with his ears,
to be but one in two bodies, to mingle and blend your hearts in such
a way that you do not know whether you are yourself or the other, to
absorb and radiate continually, to be now the moon and now the sun, to
see the whole world and all creation in a single being, to displace the
centre of life, to be ready, at any moment, for the greatest sacrifices
and the most absolute self-abnegation; to suffer the pangs of your
beloved as if they were your own; O prodigy! to make yourself double by
giving yourself away;--that is love as I understand it.
The fidelity of ivy, the twining of a young vine, the cooing of the
turtle-dove, all those go without saying, they are the first and
simplest conditions.
If I had remained at home, in the costume of my own sex, listlessly
turning my spinning-wheel or making tapestry in a window recess behind
the glass, this thing that I have sought the world over would perhaps
have found me out unaided. Love is like fortune, it does not like to
be run after. It visits by preference those who sleep on well-curbs,
and the kisses of queens and goddesses often descend upon closed
eyes.--It blinds and deceives you to think that all adventures and
all good fortune exist only in the places where you are not, and it
is a bad plan to order your horse saddled or to post off in search of
your ideal. Many people have made that mistake, many more will make
it.--The horizon is always of the loveliest azure, although, when you
arrive there, the hills that compose it are usually only bare, seamed,
rain-swept fields of yellow clay.
I fancied that the world was full of adorable young men, and that I
should meet on the roads whole tribes of Esplandians, Amadises and
Launcelots of the Lake in search of their Dulcineas, and I was greatly
amazed to find that the world paid but little heed to that sublime
search and was content to lie with the first strumpet that came to
hand; I am severely punished for my curiosity and my suspicion. I am
the most horribly _blasé_ creature in the world without ever having
enjoyed anything. In my case, knowledge has gone before experience;
there is nothing worse than such premature knowledge which is not the
fruit of action.--The most absolute ignorance would be a hundred
thousand times better, it would at least make you do many foolish
things which would serve to instruct you and rectify your ideas;
for, under this disgust of which I spoke just now, there is always
an active, rebellious element which produces the most extraordinary
confusion; the mind is convinced, the body is not, and will not
subscribe to this superb disdain. The young and robust body plunges and
rears under the mind like a lusty stallion ridden by a feeble old man
whom he cannot unseat, for the nose-band holds his head and the bit
tears his mouth.
Since I have lived with men, I have seen so many women shamefully
betrayed, so many secret _liaisons_ imprudently divulged, the purest
passions recklessly dragged in the wind, young men hurrying off to
vile harlots from the arms of the most charming mistresses, the most
firmly-established intrigues broken off suddenly and for no plausible
reason, that it is no longer possible for me to make up my mind to take
a lover.--It would be like throwing myself into a bottomless abyss in
broad daylight with my eyes open.--However, it is still the secret
longing of my heart to have one. The voice of nature stifles the voice
of reason.--I feel sure that I shall never be happy if I do not love
and am not loved; but the unfortunate part of it is that I can have
none but a man for a lover, and if men are not devils altogether, they
are certainly very far from being angels. It would not avail them to
glue wings to their shoulder-blades and put crowns of gold paper on
their heads; I know them too well to allow myself to be deceived.--All
the fine speeches they might make me would do no good. I know in
advance what they will say and I could finish them by myself. I have
seen them study their rôles and read them over before going on the
stage; I know all their principal harangues for effect and the passages
they rely upon.--Neither the pallor of the face nor the distortion
of the features would convince me. I know that those things prove
nothing.--A night's debauch, a few bottles of wine and two or three
girls are enough to make up the face very nicely. I have seen that
cunning trick played by a young marquis, naturally very fresh and rosy,
with whom it worked exceedingly well, and who owed to that touching
pallor, so worthily earned, the crowning of his flame.--I also know
how the most lackadaisical Celadons console themselves for the cruelty
of their Astreas and find a way to possess their souls in patience,
awaiting their hour of bliss.--I have seen the drabs who acted as
understudies for modest Ariadnes.
In truth, after that, man does not tempt me much; for he hasn't beauty
like woman--beauty, that magnificent garment which so well conceals the
imperfections of the soul, that divine drapery which God has cast over
the nudity of the world, and which in some sort makes one excusable for
loving the vilest courtesan in the gutter, if she possesses that royal,
magnificent gift.
In default of mental virtues, I would like to have at least the
exquisite perfection of form, the satiny flesh, the roundness of
outline, the graceful curves, the fine texture of the skin, everything
that tends to make women charming.--Since I cannot have love, I would
at least have sensual pleasure, and fill the brother's place with
the sister as far as possible.--But all the men I have seen seem to
me horribly ugly. My horse is a hundred times handsomer, and I could
kiss him with less repugnance than some dandies who deem themselves
extremely fascinating. Certain it is that the genus fop, as I know
it, would be by no means a brilliant theme for me to embroider with
variations of pleasure.--A man of the sword would suit me no better;
soldiers have something mechanical in their gait, and bestial in their
faces, which causes me to consider them as something less than human
beings; nor do men of the robe attract me much more, for they are
dirty, greasy, unkempt, threadbare creatures, with a green eye and a
mouth without lips; they smell terribly of must and mould, and I should
not enjoy putting my face against their wolf's or badger's muzzle. As
for poets, they have no thought for anything on earth except the ends
of words, they go back no farther than the penultimate, and it is no
exaggeration to say that it is hard to put them to any suitable use;
they are greater bores than the others, and they are quite as ugly too,
and have not the least distinction or refinement in their manners or
their clothes, which is really strange enough:--people who think all
day of nothing but form and beauty do not notice that their boots are
ill-made and their hats absurd! They look like country apothecaries
or exhibitors of trained dogs out of work, and would disgust you with
poesy and poetry for several eternities.
As for painters, they are tremendously stupid; they see nothing outside
of the seven colors.--One of them, with whom I passed several days at
R--, when he was asked what he thought of me, made this ingenious
reply: "He's of a decidedly warm tone, and in the shaded parts, I
should have to use, instead of white, pure Naples yellow with a
little Cassel earth and some red-brown."--That was his opinion, and,
furthermore, his nose was crooked and his eyes were like his nose,
which did not improve his case.--Whom shall I take? a soldier with
swelling chest, a round-shouldered limb of the law, a poet or painter
who looks frightened to death, or a little thin-flanked, hollow-chested
popinjay? Which cage shall I choose in that menagerie? I have no idea
at all, and I feel no more inclined in one direction than another, for
they are as equal as possible in stupidity and ugliness.
After that, if there still remained anything for me to do, it would be
to take some one I loved, whether it were a porter or a horse-jockey;
but I do not love even a porter. O wretched heroine that I am! an
unmated turtle-dove, condemned to coo forever in elegiacs!
Oh! how many times I have longed to be really a man as I seemed
to be! How many women there are with whom I could have come to an
understanding, whose hearts would have understood my heart!--how
perfectly happy the refined pleasures of love, the noble outbursts
of pure passion to which I could have responded, would have made me!
What bliss, what ecstasy! how freely all the sensitive chords of my
heart could have relaxed without being constantly obliged to contract
and close under coarse handling! What a charming harvest of invisible
flowers that will never open, whose mysterious fragrance would have
filled the fraternal union of our hearts with sweet perfume! It seems
to me that that would have been a life of enchantment, of infinite
ecstasy on wings always open; walking with hands inseparably clasped,
through avenues of golden gravel, through thickets of ever-smiling
rose-bushes, through parks with many ponds over which swans glide
gently, with alabaster urns standing out in sharp relief against the
foliage.
If I had been a young man, how I would have loved Rosette! what
adoration I would have poured out upon her! Our hearts were really made
for each other, two pearls destined to be melted together and to make
but a single one! How perfectly I would have realized the ideas she
had formed of love! Her disposition suited me exactly, and her type of
beauty pleased me. It is a pity that our love was absolutely condemned
to inevitable platonism!
I had an adventure recently.