another nature to my own; no one ever had less success. Whatever I may
do, other men are little more than phantoms to me and I do not feel
their existence; but it is not the desire to understand their lives and
share in them that I lack. It is the power or the want of real sympathy
with anything on earth. The existence or non-existence of a person or
thing does not interest me enough to affect me in a perceptible and
convincing way. The sight of a man or a woman who appears before me
in flesh and blood leaves on my mind no more definite trace than the
fanciful vision of a dream: a pale world of shadows and of apparitions,
false or true, hovers about me, murmuring low, and in the midst of
them I feel as utterly alone as possible, for not one of them has any
effect upon me for good or evil, and they seem to me to be of a nature
altogether different from mine. If I speak to them and they make what
seems a sensible reply, I am as surprised as if my dog or my cat should
suddenly open his mouth and take part in the conversation: the sound
of their voices always astonishes me and I could easily believe that
they are only fleeting apparitions and I the mirror in which they are
reflected. Inferior or superior, I certainly am not of their kind.
There are moments when I recognize none but God above me, and others
when I deem myself hardly the equal of the earthworm under its stone or
the mollusk on its sand-bank; but whatever my frame of mind, exalted or
humble, I have never been able to persuade myself that men were really
my fellows. When any one calls me _monsieur_, or, in speaking of me,
refers to me as _that man_, it always seems strange to me. My very name
seems to me but an empty one and not my real name; and yet, no matter
how low it may be uttered, amid the loudest noise, I turn suddenly with
a convulsive and peevish eagerness which I have never been able to
explain.--Is it the dread of finding in the man who knows my name, and
to whom I am no longer simply one of the common herd, an antagonist or
an enemy?
It is when I have been living with a woman that I feel most strongly
how utterly my nature repels every sort of alliance and mixture. I am
like a drop of oil in a glass of water. No matter how much you turn it
and shake it, the oil will never mix with the water; it will separate
into a hundred thousand little globules which will unite again and
rise to the surface the instant it becomes calm: the drop of oil and
the glass of water epitomize my history. Even lust--that diamond chain
that binds all human beings together, that consuming fire that melts
the stone and metal of the heart and causes them to fall in tears as
material fire melts iron and granite--all powerful as it is, has never
been able to subdue or move me. And yet my senses are very sharp; but
my heart is a hostile sister to my body, and the ill-mated couple, like
every possible couple, lawfully or unlawfully united, lives in a state
of constant warfare.--A woman's arms, the strongest of all earthly
bonds, so it is said, are to me very weak fetters, and I have never
been farther from my mistress than when she was straining me to her
heart.--I was stifled, that's the whole story.
How many times have I been angry with myself! What superhuman efforts
have I made to be different! How I have exhorted myself to be
affectionate, lover-like, passionate! how often I have taken my heart
by the hair and dragged it to my lips in the middle of a kiss! Whatever
I do, it always recoils, wiping the kiss away, as soon as I release my
hold. What torture for that poor heart to look on at the orgies of my
body and to be constantly compelled to sit through banquets at which it
has nothing to eat!
It was when I was with Rosette that I determined, once for all, to
ascertain if I am not hopelessly unsociable, and if I can take enough
interest in another person's existence to believe in it. I exhausted
the whole category of experiments, and I have not succeeded in solving
my doubts to any great extent. With her my pleasure is so keen that my
heart often finds itself diverted at least, if not touched, a state of
things that impairs the accuracy of observations. After all, I have
discovered that it didn't go below the skin and that my enjoyment
was confined to the epidermis, the heart participating only through
curiosity. I have pleasure because I am young and ardent; but the
pleasures came from myself and not from another. Its source was in
myself rather than in Rosette.
It is of no use for me to struggle, I cannot go out of myself for a
single moment. I am still what I was, that is to say, a very tired,
very tiresome creature, who disgusts me exceedingly. I have failed
utterly to introduce into my brain the idea of another human being,
into my heart, another's emotion, into my body, another's pain or
pleasure. I am a prisoner in myself and all escape is impossible: the
prisoner longs to escape, the walls ask nothing better than to crumble,
and the doors to open before him; but some inexplicable fatality keeps
every stone immovable in its place, every bolt in its groove; it is as
impossible for me to admit any one to my quarters as to go myself to
others; I cannot make or receive calls, and I live in the most absolute
solitude amid the multitude: my bed may not be widowed, but my heart
always is.
Ah! to be unable to increase one's size by a single line, by a single
atom; to be unable to admit others' blood into one's veins; to see
always with one's own eyes, never clearer, never farther, never
otherwise; to hear sounds with the same ears and the same sensation;
to touch with the same fingers; to perceive changing objects with
an unchangeable organ; to be doomed to the same tone of voice, the
repetition of the same sounds, the same phrases, the same words, and
not to be able to fly, to escape one's self, to take refuge in some
corner where no one can follow; to be compelled to keep always to one's
self, to dine and lie alone--to be the same man to twenty different
women; to play, throughout the most complicated situations of the drama
of your life, a part that is forced upon you, whose lines you know
by heart; to think the same things, to have the same dreams:--what
torture, what ennui!
I have longed for the horn of the Tangut brothers, for Fortunatus's
hat, Abaris's bâton, Gygès's ring; I would have sold my soul to
snatch the magic wand from a fairy's hand, but I have never longed so
intensely for anything as to meet on the mountain, like Tiresias the
soothsayer, those serpents who can change the sex of mortals, and what
I most envy in the strange, monstrous gods of the Indies are their
constant incarnations and innumerable transformations.
I began by longing to be another man; then, as I reflected that I
could, by analogy, foresee almost exactly what I should feel and
therefore not experience the change and the surprise I expected, I
concluded that I would prefer to be a woman; that idea always occurred
to me when I had a mistress who was not ugly; for an ugly woman is like
a man to me, and in my moments of enjoyment I would gladly have changed
my rôle, for it is very annoying to know nothing about the effect one
produces and to judge of others' pleasure only by one's own. Such
reflections and many others have often given me, at moments when it
was most inappropriate, a meditative, dreamy air, which has caused me
to be accused most unjustly of coldness and infidelity.
Rosette, who, very luckily, doesn't know all this, believes me to
be the most amorous man on earth; she takes that impotent _frenzy_
for a frenzy of passion, and she does her utmost to humor all the
experimental caprices that pass through my brain.
I have done all that I possibly could to convince myself that she
belongs to me. I have tried to go down into her heart, but I have
always stopped on the first step of the staircase, at her flesh or her
mouth. Despite the intimacy of our corporeal relations, I feel that we
have nothing in common. Never has an idea of the same tenor as mine
spread its wings in that youthful, smiling head; never has that heart,
overflowing with life and fire, whose palpitations cause that firm,
white breast to rise and fall, beaten in unison with my heart. My soul
has never coalesced with hers. Cupid, the god with the hawk's wings,
has not kissed Psyche on her fair ivory brow. No!--that woman is not my
mistress.
If you know all that I have done to compel my heart to share the
love of my body! with what frenzy I have glued my mouth to hers
and wound my arms in her hair, and how tightly I have embraced her
rounded, supple figure. Like Salmacis of old, enamored of the young
Hermaphrodite, I have tried to melt her body and mine together; I have
drunk her breath and her warm tears that bliss forced from the brimming
chalice of her eyes. The more inextricably our bodies were intertwined,
the closer our embrace, the less I loved her. My heart, sitting sadly
by, looked on with a pitying air at that deplorable union to which it
was not bidden, or veiled its face in disgust and wept silently behind
the skirt of its cloak. All this is attributable perhaps to the fact
that I do not really love Rosette, worthy to be loved though she be,
and anxious as I am to love her.
To rid myself of the idea that I was myself, I transported myself to
most unusual surroundings, where it was altogether unlikely that I
should meet myself, and being unable to cast my individuality to the
dogs, I tried to expatriate it so that it would no longer recognize
itself. I have had but moderate success therein, for that devil of
a myself follows me persistently; there is no way of getting rid of
him; I haven't the resource of sending word to him, as I do to other
uncomfortable callers, that I am not at home or that I have gone into
the country.
I have had my mistress in the bath and I have played the Triton as
best I could.--The sea was a huge marble tub. As for the Nereid, what
she showed accused the water, transparent though it was, of not being
sufficiently so for the exquisite beauty of what it concealed.--I have
had her at night, by moonlight, in a gondola with music.
That would be very commonplace at Venice, but here it is anything but
that.--In her carriage, with the horses going at a gallop, amid the
rattling of the wheels, the leaping and jolting, sometimes by the
light of lanterns, sometimes in the densest darkness.--That doesn't
lack a certain stimulating interest and I advise you to try it: but I
forget that you are a venerable patriarch, and that you don't indulge
in such refinements.--I have climbed in at her window when I had the
key to the door in my pocket.--I have made her come to my apartments
in broad daylight, in fact, I have compromised her so thoroughly that
no one--myself excepted, be it understood--now doubts that she is my
mistress.
By reason of all these inventions which, if I were not so young, would
resemble the expedients of a blasé old rake, Rosette adores me far
and away above all others. She sees therein the ardor of a teasing
passion that nothing can restrain, and that is always the same despite
the changes of time and place. She sees therein the constantly renewed
effect of her charms and the triumph of her beauty, and, in truth, I
would that she were right, and it is neither my fault nor hers--I must
be just--that she is not.
The only wrong I have done her consists in being myself. If I told her
that, the child would reply at once that that is my greatest merit in
her eyes; which would be more courteous than sensible.
Once--it was in the beginning of our liaison--I believed that I had
gained my end, for a moment I believed that I loved her--I did love
her.--O my friend, I have never lived except during that moment, and
if it had lasted an hour I should have become a god. We had ridden out
together in the saddle, I on my dear Ferragus, she on a snow-white mare
that looks like a unicorn, her feet are so delicate and her body so
slender. We rode along a broad avenue of elms of prodigious height; the
sun poured down upon us, bright and warm, sifting through the serrated
foliage; ultra-marine patches showed here and there amid the fleecy
clouds, broad bands of pale blue lay along the horizon, changing to a
most delicate apple-green when they encountered the golden rays of the
setting sun. The appearance of the sky was unusual and fascinating; the
breeze wafted to our nostrils an indefinable perfume of wild flowers
delicious beyond words. From time to time a bird rose in front of us
and flew singing along the avenue. The church-bell of an invisible
village softly rang the Angelus, and the silvery notes, which came
but faintly to our ears because of the distance, were inexpressibly
sweet. Our horses were going at a foot pace, and they walked side by
side in such perfect step that neither of them was an inch ahead of the
other.--My heart dilated and my soul overflowed upon my body. I had
never been so happy. I did not speak, nor did Rosette, and yet we never
understood each other so perfectly. We were so close together that my
leg touched her horse's side. I leaned toward her and put my arm about
her waist; she made a similar movement and rested her head against my
shoulder. Our mouths met; O such a chaste, delicious kiss! Our horses
walked on, the reins lying on their necks. I felt Rosette's arms relax
and her body yield more and more. I knew that my own strength was
failing me, and I was near fainting.--Ah! I promise you that at that
moment I cared but little whether I was myself or somebody else. We
rode in that way to the end of the avenue, where the sound of footsteps
caused us abruptly to resume our natural positions; some of our
acquaintances, also in the saddle, rode up and spoke to us. If I had
had my pistols, I believe I should have fired at them.
I glared at them with a fierce, lowering expression that must have
seemed very strange to them. After all, I was wrong to be so angry
with them, for they had unwittingly done me the service of cutting
my pleasure short at the moment when, by its very intensity, it
was certain to become pain or to sink under its violence. The
science of stopping in time is not regarded with all the respect
it deserves.--Sometimes, as you lie with a woman, you put your arm
under her waist: at first it is a most blissful sensation to feel the
pleasant warmth of her body, the soft, velvety flesh of her sides, the
polished ivory of her hips, and to press your hand against her breast
which throbs and quivers. The fair one falls asleep in that voluptuous,
charming posture; the curve of her loins becomes less pronounced,
the agitation of her bosom is calmed, her sides rise and fall with
the freer, more regular respiration of sleep, her muscles relax, her
face is hidden by her hair.--Meanwhile the weight upon your arm grows
heavier, you begin to observe that she is a woman, not a sylph; but you
would not remove your arm for anything on earth. There are many reasons
for that: the first is that it is dangerous to wake a woman with whom
one is lying; one must be prepared to substitute for the blissful dream
she is probably dreaming, a more blissful reality; the second is that,
if you ask her to raise herself so that you can take away your arm,
you tell her indirectly that she is heavy and discommodes you--which
is not polite--or else you give her to understand that you are feeble
and overdone--an extremely humiliating admission for you and likely
to lower you greatly in her mind; the third is that, as you have had
pleasure in that position, you think that if you retain the position
the pleasure may be renewed, wherein you are mistaken. The poor arm is
caught under the mass that crushes it, the blood is checked, the nerves
are distended and numbness pricks you with its countless needles: you
are a sort of Milo of Crotona on a small scale, and the mattress and
the back of your divinity are a sufficiently accurate representation
of the two parts of the tree that have reunited. Day comes at last to
deliver you from your martyrdom and you leap out of that instrument
of torture more eagerly than ever husband descended from the nuptial
scaffold.
That is the history of many passions. It is the history of all
pleasures.
However that may be--despite the interruption or because of the
interruption--never had such a blissful sensation fallen to my lot: I
felt that I was really somebody else. Rosette's soul in its entirety
had entered into my body. My soul had left me and filled her heart
as hers had filled mine. They had met, no doubt, during that long
equestrian kiss, as Rosette dubbed it afterward--to my annoyance by the
way--and had penetrated and mingled as inextricably as the souls of two
mortal creatures can upon a morsel of perishable clay.
Angels surely must kiss like that, and the real paradise is not in
heaven but on the lips of the woman we love.
I have waited in vain for such a moment and have tried unsuccessfully
to lead up to a repetition of it. We have often ridden together
through the avenue of elms at sunset on lovely evenings; the trees had
the same verdure, the birds sang the same song, but to us the sun
seemed dull, the foliage withered: the song of the birds had a harsh,
discordant sound, we were no longer in harmony with it all. We brought
our horses to a walk and we tried the same kiss.--Alas! only our lips
met and it was only the spectre of the former kiss.--The beautiful,
the sublime, the divine, the only real kiss I have given and received
in my whole life had flown away forever. Since that day I have always
had an inexpressibly sad feeling on returning from the forest. Rosette,
light-hearted madcap that she naturally is, cannot avoid the feeling
and her reverie betrays itself by a sweet little pout, which is at
least as attractive as a smile.
Scarcely anything but the fumes of wine and a great blaze of candles
enable me to shake off these fits of depression. We both drink like
men condemned to death, silently and glass after glass, until we have
swallowed the necessary amount; then we begin to laugh and mock most
heartily at what we call our sentimentality.
We laugh--because we cannot weep. Ah! who will succeed in sowing a tear
in my parched eye?
Why did I enjoy that evening so? It would be very hard for me to say.
I was the same man, Rosette the same woman. It was not my first
experience on horse-back, nor hers; we had already watched the sun set
and the spectacle had touched us no more than a picture, which one
admires or not according as the colors are more or less brilliant.
There is more than one avenue of elms and chestnuts in the world, and
that was not the first one we had ridden through; what then caused us
to find such a sovereign fascination there, what metamorphosed the dead
leaves into topazes, the green leaves into emeralds, gilded all those
whirling atoms and changed into pearls all the drops of water scattered
over the greensward, what imparted such sweet melody to the tones of
a bell that was usually discordant and to the twittering of countless
young birds?--There must have been a very penetrating flavor of poesy
in the air, as even our horses seemed to catch the scent of it.
And yet nothing in the world could be more pastoral and more simple:
a few trees, a few clouds, five or six clumps of wild thyme, a woman,
and a sunbeam over all like a gold chevron on a coat of arms.--There
was neither surprise nor bewilderment in my sensations. I knew
perfectly well where I was. I had never been to that precise spot, but
I remembered perfectly the shape of the trees and the position of the
clouds, the white dove that flew across the sky I had seen flying in
the same direction; the little silvery bell, which I then heard for
the first time, had often tinkled in my ears, and its voice seemed
to me like the voice of a friend; although I had never been there,
I had many times passed through that avenue with princesses mounted
on unicorns; my most voluptuous dreams rode there every evening and
my desires had exchanged kisses absolutely like the one exchanged by
myself and Rosette.--There was nothing new to me in that kiss; but it
was as I had thought it would be. It was perhaps the only time in my
life that I have not been disappointed and that the real has seemed to
me as beautiful as the ideal.--If I could find a woman, a landscape,
a building, anything that corresponded as closely to my desires as
that moment corresponded to the moment I had dreamed of, I should have
no reason to envy the gods, and I would gladly renounce my box in
paradise.--But, in truth, I do not believe that any man of flesh and
blood could have an hour of such exquisite enjoyment; two kisses like
that would pump a whole life dry and leave a complete void in a heart
and a body.--But no such consideration as that would stop me; for, not
being able to prolong my life indefinitely, I am ready to die, and I
should prefer to die of pleasure rather than of old age or ennui.
But that woman doesn't exist.--Yes, she does exist; it may be that only
a wall separates us.--Perhaps I jostled her in the street yesterday or
to-day.
In what does Rosette fall short of being that woman? In this, that I do
not believe she is. By what fatality do I always have for mistresses,
women that I do not love? Her neck is smooth enough to set off the
most beautifully-wrought necklaces; her fingers are taper enough to do
honor to the loveliest and richest rings; the ruby would blush with
pleasure to gleam on the pink lobe of her delicate ear; the cestus of
Venus would fit her waist; but Love alone has the secret of tying his
mother's scarf.
All Rosette's merit is in herself, I have attributed nothing to
her that she has not. I have not cast over her beauty the veil of
perfection with which love envelops the loved one;--the veil of Isis is
transparent beside that veil. Naught but satiety can raise the corner
of it.
I do not love Rosette; at least my love for her, if I have any, does
not resemble the ideal I have formed of love. It may be that my ideal
is not a just one, I do not dare to say. Certain it is that it makes me
insensible to the merits of other women, and I have desired no other
with any consistency since I have had her. If she has any reason to be
jealous, it is of phantoms only, about which she worries very little,
and yet her most formidable rival is my imagination; that is something
which, with all her shrewdness, she will probably never discover.
If women only knew!--How many infidelities the least fickle lover is
guilty of to the most adored mistress!--It is to be presumed that they
pay us back in full and more; but they do as we do and say nothing.
A mistress is a necessary subject, who ordinarily disappears under
flourishes and embroidery. Very often the kisses you give her are not
for her; you embrace the idea of another woman in her person, and she
profits not infrequently--if it can be called profiting--by the desires
aroused by another. Ah! my poor Rosette, how many times you have served
as a body to my dreams and given reality to your rivals; to how many
infidelities have you unwittingly been accessory! If you could have
imagined, at times when my arms clasped you so tightly, when my mouth
was most closely united to yours, that your beauty and your love had
nothing to do with my passion, that the thought of you was a hundred
leagues from my mind; what if some one had told you that those eyes,
veiled with amorous languor, were cast down simply in order not to look
at you and not to banish the illusion that you served only to complete,
and that, instead of being a mistress, you were simply an instrument of
lust, a means of assuaging a desire impossible of realization!
O divine creatures, ye lovely virgins, slender and diaphanous,
who lower your periwinkle eyes and clasp your lily hand in the
pictures with golden backgrounds of the old German masters, ye
stained-glass saints, ye missal martyrs who smile so sweetly amid
the convolutions of the arabesques, and come forth so fresh and fair
from the flower-bells!--O ye lovely courtesans lying all naked in
your hair on beds strewn with roses, beneath great purple curtains,
with your bracelets and necklaces of huge pearls, your fan and your
mirrors, gleaming in the shadow in the fiery rays of the setting
sun!--ye dark-skinned maidens of Titian, who display so wantonly your
undulating hips, your firm, round thighs, your polished breasts and
your supple and muscular loins!--ye antique goddesses, who rear your
white phantoms in the shady corners of gardens!--ye are a part of my
seraglio; I have possessed you all in turn.--Sainte Ursule, I have
kissed your hands on the fair hands of Rosette; I have toyed with the
black hair of the Muranese and Rosette never had such a hard task to
rearrange her hair: I have been with you more than Acteon was, O virgin
Diana, and I have not been changed to a stag: it was I who replaced
your handsome Endymion!--What a multitude of rivals whom she does not
suspect and upon whom she cannot be revenged! yet they are not all
painted or carved!