CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY THIS BOOK IS ONE OF A COLLECTION MADE BY BENNO LOEWY 1854-1919 AND BEQUEATHED TO CORNELL UNIVERSITY DATE DUE ^ [--r^ ; ' 1 -, mx ^^^^ ..-„....., CAVLORO PRINTEDINU.S.A. Cornell University Library PQ 2258. A9 1902 Avatar. 3 1924 027 375 900 The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027375900 THE WORKS OF rHEOPHILE GAUriER IN TWENTY-FOUR VOLUMES LIMITED EDITION LIMITED, FOR SALE IN AMERICA, J TO ONE THOUSAND NUMBERED AND REGISTERED SETS, OF WHICH THIS IS NUMBER....£.?.ZZ? . ^■k'k±'k-k-k-kit:-k-kit^^^is^^:k^'k'k^^ •!« #A^ 0^ «sj^ #£« •«« 9^ •Jm vAv ffj^ •M^Jl* «!>• •/!>• •>!>• «^ Jp0 wm MM «•«• VfU «Sb WlW «|W ^ THE WORKS OF ^ ± THEOPHILE i I GAUriER % A VOLVME FIFTEEN k Jfw JIU Translated AND Edited by PROFESSOR F. C. DE SUMICHRAST Department of French, Har'vard University t AVATAR ^5 ]|^ JETTATURA. T/^^ ^ I WATER PAVILION » A /iriV;& an Introduction by the Editor A MM Mto •^ aib •«• ' •*• ^ NEW YORK ■ Published for Subscribers only ^ t*^ iy GEORGE D. SPROUL • MD CCCCII "a •lU ff^ CSM #\£« mU •«• Cs^ •vtf* M^ »!/« Vg^ «^ Wi>« yv» Mv A/lv* ariv* viv* ttv* *iw* Mv* «ivt M« «|b .tiUvHSM- S; f: ft Y Copyright, igo2, by George D. Sproul A- 611-71^- ^ M" UNIVERSITY PHESS • JOHN WILSON AND SON . CAMBRIDGE, V. S. A. I'll-MK.) ibdb ^ :!: tl; ^ :i? ^ db :l^ i?^i;tlrdb:b:i;d:db:l;db db dbd!; Contents INTRODUCTION Page 3 AVATAR «' 13 JETTATURA "185 THE WATER PAVILION "353 List of Illustrations " ' The sunshade was closed, and there burst on our sight a woman of incomparable beauty '" . Frontispiece ^ photogravure from a painting by y. Van Seers, " 'I studied the symbolical carving in the inner chamber of pagodas ' " Page 6 1 j4 photogravure from a painting by R. Ernst, " Paul's anxious gaze saw Alicia growing paler" . " 216 j^ photogravure from a painting by L. Doucet, " ' Good-bye till to-morrow, Paul. You will be sure to come, will you not ?' " . . . . " 288 A photogravure from a painting by L. Doucet. Introduction A FA TA R Introduction THE mysterious, the weird, the ghostly, the occult are conspicuously absent from the works of the Classicists, especially of those who furnished fiction to the gene- ration to which the earlier Romanticists belonged. Partly for this reason, partly because the adherents of the new school were resolved to do in all things the very opposite of what was done by their adversaries and contemners, and largely because of the influence of German and English literature upon minds already prepared for the reception of novelties, however start- ling and unusual, most of the writers of the Romanti- cist school indulged freely in stories of mystery and awe, Victor Hugo had written " Han d'Islande," a gruesome and melodramatic tale, the hero of which, a dwarf, of course, drank the blood of his foes out of their own skulls. He had introduced another ghastly AVATAR personage of the same family in his " Notre-Dame ; " and in his " Rhine," a series of letters of travel, he had inserted a legend constructed upon the most ap- proved mediaeval principles, and intended to make the blood of the reader run cold and his hair stand up straight upon his head, — an effect that was undoubtedly attained in the case of thousands of admirers of the author, and of countless readers who knew him by name only. As it was found to be comparatively easy, in those days of vigorous Romanticism, to move by such means, all the apparatus employed by Shakespeare and by the Germans was turned to account by the enthu- siastic French writers of the marvellous. If it be recollected that all this fable and legend and mystery had the further advantage of leaving a perfectly clear field to the imagination of the writer, it will readily be understood how this particular form of fiction came to be so generally adopted by the Romanticists, one of whose cardinal principles it was that art must be abso- lutely free, or, in other words, that the writer, whether poet, novelist, or dramatist, should be absolutely un- fettered both in the choice of his subject and in the manner in which he chose to treat it. INTRODUCTION Again, the passion for local colour was often respon- sible for extraordinary tales and marvellously fantastic poems. An instance of this is found in the second tale included in this volume. " Jettatura " is in great part the result of Gautier's desire to render the super- stition of the South in all its vigour and all its con- sequences; to present it as it strikes a stranger, previously unacquainted with it, but who, through the force of circumstances, soon gets to believe what those around him believe. And it must be owned, even by prejudiced readers, that this result had been fully at- tained by Gautier. He has certainly succeeded in impressing his public with the sensation of the South, and in making intelligible the superstition that has so fast a hold upon the inhabitants of Naples. Of course, innumerable logical objections at once occur to the dispassionate reader, to the man who re- fuses to yield to the spell that Gautier would cast upon him. The sequence of events is not irreproachable, and there are unmistakable weaknesses here and there that a careful modern writer, trained in the school of Realism, would have avoided, but the main object is attained: the superstition is explained and the interest of the reader is secured. AVATAR In each of the two tales, « Avatar " and " Jetta- tura," the position of the author and the reader is iden- tical with that of the dramatist and the spectator of a melodrama. Provided the spectator is willing to allow the dramatist perfect liberty of action and will consent to forego his right of criticism, the playwright will undertake to produce a combination of scenes and situations that shall move, excite, and interest the spectator and keep him breathless from the rising of the curtain unto the going down of the same. So with these stories : grant Gautier what he asks, and what it is reasonable he should ask, in view of the particular form of intellectual and emotional entertainment sought by his reader, and he will accomplish what he under- takes to do — to keep one entertained and interested. And what more can be desired ? — especially when it is borne in mind that he was writing these tales for publi- cation in a daily newspaper that required of him spicy entertainment for a constituency composed mainly of the detested bourgeois class, which in all countries at the present day still revels in the sensational and cares little or nothing for the psychological or the reasonable. Thus, while one may fairly object to the peculiar resolution taken by Paul d'Aspremont to blind himself INTRODUCTION in order that he may not destroy by his glances the woman he loves, though he first and foremost looks at her hard enough and long enough to annihilate her on the spot ; while one may wonder at the extraordinary rapidity with which the death of the girl is brought about, and may feel not unreasonable incredulity at the terrific portents and phenomena that preface and ac- company the suicide of the hero, yet all these things are perfectly consistent with the general idea of the story, and quite in accord with the particular system of fiction that obtained so largely at that period. Almost equally startling is the tale of metempsy- chosis which Gautier has entitled " Avatar." Almost, not quite, for there can be no doubt in the mind of any sane reader that in this story Gautier is not attempting to relate any actual occurrence, but merely to give free play to his fancy, while in " Jettatura " there is evident a desire to convince the reader of the truth of the events narrated. But "Avatar" is really more inter- esting and more artistic, though the stage-setting is un- commonly fanciful, and the plot extravagant. There is in this story a really clever situation, which the author has most happily saved. The mere transference of the soul of one man to the body of another is not in AVATAR itself a novelty in fiction, and apart from the possible comical or tragical mistakes to which it may give rise, is not startlingly novel. But, owing to the motive which Gautier has invented to account for the trans- ference in the case of Octavius and the husband of the woman he loves, a new element of interest and dis- quietude enters into the story. As a matter of fact, it is not with Octavius and his mad passion for that rara avis in Romanticist literature — a perfectly pure and abso- lutely chaste woman — nor with the angry and helpless Labinski that one is concerned, but with the Countess herself, the unconscious victim of the hideous plot laid by the old French doctor and Octavius. Here was indeed a dramatic situation, and one that might well lead to most unpleasant results, which, however, a modern Realist would not have hesitated to bring about, and to describe with fullest wealth of epithet and crude phrase. Gautier has admirably saved the situation and won a triumph for himself in the clever scene in which the Countess, alarmed by the hot glance of Octavius-Labinski, so skilfully and so wittily avoids the apparently inevitable. It was a delicate subject to handle, and Gautier has handled it like a master. 8 INTRODUCTION " The Water Pavilion " is a graceful exotic fancy, in which the author sought to exhibit his mastery of local colour, so much in vogue among the Romanticists, rather than a story in the ordinary meaning of the word. It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the love incidents in themselves are chiefly used for the purpose of bringing out the peculiarities of Chinese education and Chinese manners. The de- scription of the Water Pavilion itself is one of those delicate bits that Gautier alone can manage with com- plete success, and the other delightful picture, that of the two young people first becoming aware of each other's existence, suffices to account for the prolonged popularity of this particular story of Gautier's. " The Water Pavilion " was the first published, for it appeared in 1846 in the September number of the Musk des families^ and six years later in the volume entitled " The Tiger Skin," being finally included, in 1863, in "Novels and Tales." "Jettatura" saw the light in the columns of the Moniteur universe/, coming out in instalments between the end of June and the end of July, 1856. It bore then the title " Paul d'As- premont," but had been advertised three years before under the name " The Jettatore," and when it was AVATAR subsequently published in book form, in 1857, it as- sumed its present title, which has ever since been retained. "Avatar" also came out in the columns of the Moniteur universel, in 1856, and was republished in book form in the course of the following year. 10 Avatar A FA TAR ^^^^^^^^ic'k^^^ig^'k'k'k'k^isie^iR I OCTAVIUS DE SAVILLE was slowly dy- ing of a mysterious disease, which baffled every one. He was not bedridden ; he led his usual life ; nor did a complaint ever es- cape him, but he was visibly wasting away. To the in- quiries of the physicians whom his anxious relatives and friends insisted upon his consulting, he answered that he felt no particular pain, and the medical men failed to dis- cover in him any alarming symptoms. The ausculta- tion of his chest resulted in a satisfactory sound, and scarce could a too slow or too rapid beating of the heart be noted when the ear was applied to that organ. He did not cough, he had no fever, yet life was leaving him through one of the numerous leaks of which, ac- cording to Terentius, the human frame is full. Sometimes a strange syncope would make him turn pale and cold as marble. For a moment or two he looked like a dead man, then the pendulum, released 13 AVATAR by the mysterious finger that had held it back, resumed its swing, and Octavius seemed to awake as out of a dream. He had been sent to drink the waters, but the nymphs of the streams had been powerless to help him. Nor did a trip to Naples prove more efficacious ; its glorious sun, so much bepraised, had seemed to him as dark as that in Albrecht Diirer's engraving ; the bat that bears on its wing the single word. Melancholia^ flapped its dusty membranes in the azure heavens and fluttered between him and the light. On the Mergel- lina Quay, where the half nude lazzaroni cook them- selves in the sunshine and impart a bronze patina to their skins, he had shivered with cold. He had, therefore, returned to his little apartment in the Rue Saint-Lazare, and, to all outward appearance, had resumed his former habits. The apartment was as comfortably furnished as it is possible for a bachelor's home to be ; but as dwellings gradually assume the aspect, and perchance even acquire the thoughts, of their inhabitants, Octavius' rooms had gradually become duller : the damask of the curtains had faded and a gray light alone filtered through it. The great clumps of peonies were withering on the white ground of the carpet, itself dingier ; the gilding AVATAR of the frames of a few water-colour paintings and of sketches by distinguished artists had slowly reddened under the implacable dust ; the fire, discouraged, was dying out and smoking amid the ashes. The old BouUe clock, inlaid with brass and tortoise-shell, attenu- ated the sound of its ticking, and the chimes struck the weary hpurs softly as in a sick chamber. The doors closed noiselessly, and the footsteps of the few visitors were deadened by the thick Wilton carpet. Laughter stopped of itself as one entered these cold, dark, gloomy rooms, where, nevertheless, reigned the fullest modern luxury. John, Octavius' valet, glided through them like a shadow, his duster under his arm, for, unwittingly im- pressed by the melancholy atmosphere of the place, he had ended by losing his loquacity. On the walls hung trophies composed of boxing-gloves, masks, and foils, but it was plain that they had not been used for a long time. On the tables and other pieces of furniture lay books taken up and then thrown away carelessly, as though Octavius had sought to lull some fixed thought by mechanical reading. A letter begun, but the paper of which had grown yellow, seemed to have been awaiting completion for some months past, and lay like a mute reproach upon the centre of the desk. The 15 AVATAR apartment looked deserted though it was inhabited ; life had withdrawn from it, and on entering it one was met by a pufF of cold air such as issues from a vault when it is opened. In this gloomy abode, where never the tip of a wo- man's boot ventured, Octavius was happier than any- where else. The silence and solitude suited him ; the joyous bustle of life, in which he occasionally en- deavoured to take part, repelled him ; he returned more sombre than ever from the masquerades, the evening parties and the suppers to which his friends took him. He had, therefore, ceased to struggle against his myste- rious sufFering and let the days slip by with the indiffer- ence of a man who no longer reckons on the morrow. He formed no plans, for he no longer believed in the future, and having tacitly handed in to God his resig- nation of life, he waited for its acceptance. But it would be a mistake to suppose that his face was hol- lowed and thin, that his complexion was wan, his limbs worn out, or that he was outwardly wasted away ; scarcely did a few brown marks show under the eyes, an orange tint around them, and a slight wrinkling on the blue-veined temples. What was lacking was the sparkle of the eye, whence will, hope, and desire had _ tijbtir tl; ^ ^ d: ^ ^ ^ «7 ^^^dbdb:l;:lrd;^:l:tf? !l; jbdb AVATAR fled. The dead glance in the young face formed a strange contrast and produced a more painful impres- sion than the worn features and the feverish eyes that mark the ordinary invalid. Before falling into this wasting sickness Octavius had been, and indeed yet was, what is called a hand- some young fellow. He had thick black hair, that curled richly and fell silky and lustrous on either side of his temples. His eyes, large, velvety, of a dark blue like that of night, fringed with curling lashes, some- times flashed with a moist glance; when they were at rest and not animated by passion, they were notice- able for the serene quiet characteristic of Orientals indulging in the kiefF at the door of a Smyrna or a Constantinople cafe, after they have smoked their nar- ghileh. He had never had much colour and his com- plexion resembled those olive-coloured Southern faces that gain their full value in artificial light only. His hands were small and delicate; his feet narrow and well-shaped. He dressed well, without being ahead of the fashion of the day or behind it either, and knew perfectly how to bring out to the full his natural ad- vantages. Although he did not pretend to be a dandy or a gentleman-rider, he would not have been refused at 17 AVATAR the Jockey Club had he chosen to become a candidate - for election. How was it, then, that young, handsome, rich, and with so much cause to be happy, this young man was wasting away so wretchedly ? It may be supposed that Octavius was blase, that the fashionable novels of the day had filled him with their unhealthy notions, that he had ceased to believe in anything, that of his youth and his wealth, squandered in riotous living, naught was left him but debts, but all this was far from the truth. Octavius could not be sated with pleasure, for he had tasted it but little; he was neither splenetic nor atheistic, neither romantic nor a libertine nor a spend- thrift ; up to this time his life had been given partly to study and partly to enjoyment, like the lives of other young fellows. In the morning he attended the lec- tures at the Sorbonne, and in the evening he took his stand on the stairs at the Opera to watch the stream of dresses. He was not known to be the lover of a Marble Heart or of a duchess, and he spent his income without allowing his fancies to trench upon his capital. His lawyer thought well of him, so that he was a non- eccentric person, quite incapable of hurling himself down a precipice like Manfred, or of asphyxiating him- AVATAR self like d'Escousse. But as regards the cause of the singular state into which he had fallen, I dare not con- fess it, so improbable is it in Paris in the nineteenth century, and I therefore leave it to my hero to tell it himself. As ordinary physicians could make nothing of this strange disease of his, the dissection of souls not being yet undertaken in medical schools, recourse was had in the last resort to a queer physician, who had returned from the East Indies after a long stay in those regions and who had the reputation of performing wonderful cures. Octavius, feehng that this physician was endowed with an extraordinary perspicacity that would enable him to divine his secret, dreaded the doctor's visit, and it was only in deference to the reiterated requests of his mother that he consented to receive Dr. Balthazar Cherbonneau. When the physician entered, Octavius was lying on a divan, a pillow supporting his head, another under his elbow, and a third on his feet. He was wrapped up in the soft warm folds of a gandoura, and reading, or rather holding a book, for his glance, though it rested on a page, was elsewhere. His face was pale, but, as I have already said, did not exhibit any marked 19 AVATAR change. A superficial observer would not have be- lieved the young patient to be in danger, for on the table at his side was a box of cigars instead of the vials, lotions, potions, herb tea, and other medicaments regularly seen in such cases. His clear cut, though somewhat tired features had lost scarcely anything of their grace, and but for the deep atony and the incur- ably despairing look in his eyes, Octavius seemed to be in the enjoyment of ordinary health. Indifferent to everything as Octavius might be, he was nevertheless struck by the curious aspect of the physician. Dr. Balthazar Cherbonneau seemed to have emerged from some fantastic tale by Hoffmann, and to be walking about in the midst of reality amazed at the sight of this droll character. His deeply tanned face was almost swallowed up by a huge skull which a growing baldness caused to appear larger still. This bare skull, shining like ivory, had retained its white colour, while the face, exposed to the rays of the sun, had acquired, thanks to successive layers of tan, the shade of old oak or a smoky portrait. The flat sur- faces, the cavities and the projections of the bones stood out so strongly that the small amount of skin that covered them resembled, with its innumerable 20 i: rfc :fc ;lr i: d: 4: 4: i: :fc ir 4r4r A ti: db tfc d; dr sir df :fe A :fe AVATAR broken wrinkles, a wet skin drawn over a death's head. The few remaining gray hairs that still lingered on his poll, brushed together in three thin wisps, one of which, springing from the nape of the neck, flattened out in front, while the other two upreared themselves behind his ears, made one regret the old full-bottomed wig or the modern tow mop, and grotesquely topped his nut- cracker-like face. But what irresistibly attracted one in him was his eyes. In the midst of his face tanned by years, calcined by burning skies, worn by study, and on which the fatigue of science and life had left its mark in the form of deep furrows, of widespread- ing crowfeet, in folds closer pressed than the leaves of a book, there sparkled two eyes of a turquoise blue, inconceivably limpid, fresh, and youthful-looking. These blue stars shone from out of two brown orbits and concentric membranes, the tawny circles of which faintly recalled the feathers arranged in the form of an aureole round the nyctalopial eyes of the owl. It seemed as though, thanks to a spell learned from brah- mins and pandits, the doctor had stolen the eyes of a child and had fitted them to his own cadaverous face. Judged by their glances, the old man was twenty and the young man sixty. 21 AVATAR He wore the classical dress of a physician, black coat and trousers, black silk waistcoat, and in his shirt front a huge diamond given him by a nabob or a rajah. But his clothes hung on him as if they were suspended from a hook, and formed perpendicular folds that were broken into sharp angles by his tibias and femurs when he sat down. The blazing sun of India did not of itself account for such phenomenal leanness ; no doubt Balthazar Cherbonneau had submitted, in the course of some initiation, to the long fasts of the fakirs and had sat with the yoghis on a gazelle skin between four burning braziers. The loss of flesh, however, did not mean any weakening of his powers ; solid ligaments, stretched out on the hands like the strings on the neck of a violin, connected the dry bones of the knuckles and made them move without much creaking. The doctor took the seat which Octavius pointed to by the side of the divan, folding his elbows like a yard measure and indulging in gestures that betrayed an in- veterate habit of sitting on carpets. Thus placed. Dr. Cherbonneau had his back to the light, which shone full on his patient's face, a situation favourable to observa- tion and generally adopted by those who are more desirous of seeing than of being seen. Although the phy- 22 AVATAR sician's face was in the shadow, and the top of his skull, rounded and shining like an ostrich's egg, alone caught the light, Octavius perceived the gleam of the strange blue eyes that seemed endowed with a light of their own, after the manner of phosphorescent bodies. There flashed from them a clear, piercing glance that struck the young man fair in the breast with a sensation of prickling and heat comparable to that caused by emetics. " Well, sir," said the physician, after a moment of silence during which he appeared to be summing up the signs noted by him in a rapid examination, " I see at once that in your case we have not to do with ordinary pathology. You are not suffering from any of those diseases that are catalogued, the symptoms of which are well known, and which a doctor can cure or aggravate ; so that after I have talked a little with you I shall not ask you for a sheet of paper on which to inscribe a harmless formula from the Codex, with an undecipher- able signature at the bottom of it, for your man to take to the druggist's at the corner." Octavius smiled faintly, as if to thank the physician for sparing him useless and unnecessary remedies. " Do not rejoice too soon," continued the doctor. " Because you have neither hypertrophy of the heart, 23 AVATAR nor tuberculosis, nor softening of the spine, nor water on the brain, nor typhoid, nor nervous fever, it does not follow that you are in good health. Give me your hand." Thinking that Dr. Cherbonneau wished to feel his pulse, and expecting to see him pull out his chro- nometer, Octavius pulled up the sleeve of his gandoura, uncovered his wrist, and mechanically held it out to the physician. Without troubling to find with his thumb that slow or rapid pulsation which indicates whether the clock of life in man is out of order. Dr. Cher- bonneau took the young man's slender, veined, and moist hand in his own brown one, the bony fingers of which looked like the claws of a crab, and felt it, kneaded it and massaged it, so to speak, as if to estab- lish magnetic relations with his patient. Sceptical as Octavius was in medical matters, he could not help feeling a certain nervous anxiety, for it seemed to him that the physician was drawing his very soul out of him by the pressure of his hand, and that the blood had fled from his cheeks. " My dear Mr. Octavius," said the physician as he dropped the young man's hand, " your condition is more serious than you believe, and science, such as old 24 AVATAR European routine understands it, can do nothing for you. You have lost the will to live, and your soul is gradually detaching itself from your body ; you are not suffering from hypochondria, lypemania or any melan- cholic tendency to suicide. Not in the least. Strange to say, you might, did I not interpose, die without having any appreciable internal or external lesion. It was high time you sent for me, for your spirit clings to your body by a mere thread ; however, we shall put a good knot in it." Whereupon the doctor rubbed his hands gleefully, with a grimacing smile that caused a perfect eddy of wrinkles on his many-lined face. " I do not know. Dr. Cherbonneau, whether you can cure me or not ; to tell the truth, I do not care much whether you do or not, but I am bound to confess that at the first glance you have perceived the cause of the mysterious condition in which I find myself. It seems to me as though my body had become permeable, so that my being escapes from it as water from a sieve. I feel myself melting into the great Everything and I find it difficult to distinguish myself from that into which I am plunging. Though, in order not to grieve my par- ents and my friends, I perform, so far as I am able, the 25 AVATAR usual pantomime of life, yet that life itself seems to be so far removed from me that there are times when I believe myself to have already left this earthly sphere. I come and go from the same motives that formerly acted upon me and the mechanical impulse of which still subsists, but without entering into what I do. I sit down to table at the usual hours, and appear to be eat- ing and drinking ; but I find the spiciest dishes and the headiest wines tasteless; the light of the sun is no brighter than that of the moon as far as I am con- cerned, and the candles burn with a black flame. On the hottest days of summer I feel cold, and sometimes there falls within me a silence so deep that my heart appears to have stopped beating and the inner wheels to have been arrested by some unknown cause. If the dead can feel, death must be something like that." "You are suffering," returned the physician, "from a chronic impossibility of living, which is a much more common malady than is supposed. Thought is a force as capable of killing as prussic acid or the electric cur- rent, although the traces of the ravages it makes are not perceptible to the slight means of analysis at the dis- posal of ordinary scientists. What is the grief which has struck its sharp hooked beak into your liver? ^6 AVATAR What vaulting ambition in you has overleapt itself and caused you to fall back broken and bruised ? What bitter despair are you nursing in your immobility? Are you a prey to the thirst for power ? Have you of your own accord given up attaining an end beyond the power of the human will ? You are rather young for that. Has some woman betrayed you ? " " No such luck, doctor," answered Octavius. " I am not even so fortunate as that would imply." "Yet," replied Dr. Balthazar Cherbonneau, " I can read in your lack-lustre eyes, in the discouraged attitude of your body, in the dull tone of your voice, the title of one of Shakespeare's plays as plainly as if it were stamped in gilt letters on the back of a morocco binding." " And what is the play I translate unwittingly ? " asked Octavius, whose curiosity was awakened in spite of himself. " ' Love's Labour 's Lost,' " returned the doctor, in an accent so correct that it testified to a long sojourn in the British possessions in India. Octavius did not answer, but a blush mantled his cheeks, and to conceal his embarrassment he took to playing with the cords of his girdle. The doctor had 27 A:lr 4; :S: 4: :!: ir i: i: :!: ^db:lrdb!fcdbsfcd;;fctfc:fc !& d:dt AVATAR crossed his legs in a way to suggest the cross bones on tombstones, and held his foot with his hand in the Oriental fashion. His blue eyes looked straight into Octavius' and questioned him with a glance at once imperious and gentle. " Come, confide in me," said he. " I am the physi- cian of souls; you are my patient, and like a Roman priest with his penitent I call for a full confession, which you can make without having to kneel down." " What would be the good of it ? Even supposing you have guessed aright, it would not ease my pain to tell you of it. I am not a talkative sufferer, and no human power, not even yours, can cure me." " That is as may be," returned the doctor, settling himself more comfortably in his arm-chair, like a man making ready to listen to somewhat lengthy confidences. " I do not mean," went on Octavius, " that you shall accuse me of childish obstinacy, and give you the chance, through my keeping silence, of washing your hands of my death ; so, since you insist upon it, I shall tell you my story; you have guessed the main part of it; I shall not refuse to let you hear the details. But do not look for anything romantic or singular. My adventure is very simple, very common, very ordinary; 28 AVATAR but, as Heine says in his song, it is always new to the subject of it and breaks his heart. Indeed, I am some- what ashamed to tell so commonplace a thing to a man like you, who have lived in the strangest and the most wonderful lands." " Let not that trouble you ; it is only the common- place that is extraordinary to me now," returned the physician, with a smile. " Well, then, doctor, I am dying of love." 29 AVATAR ^4: 4r :& ^ ^ ^ ^ i ^ ir^tfeslf &tlr d::!:tlr:8?& ^ & A II I HAPPENED to be in Florence in 184-, at the end of the summer, that is, at the best season in which to see Florence. I had leisure, money, good introductions, and I was at that time a cheerful young fellow ready to enjoy life. I lodged on the Long' Arno, secured a carriage, and let myself be car- ried away by that delightful Florentine life so charming to a stranger. In the morning I would visit some one of the churches, a palazzo, or a gallery, at my leisure and without hurrying myself, for I desired to avoid having that indigestion of masterpieces that causes tourists in Italy, when too eager, to hate art. At other times I would study the bronze gates of the Baptistery, or the Perseus by Benvenuto under the Loggia dei Lan- zi, the portrait of the Fornarina at the UfEzi, or again Canova's Venus in the Pitti Palace, but I never stud- ied more than one thing at a time. Then I would breakfast at the Cafe Doney on a cup of iced cofFee, smoke a few cigars, run through the papers, and after having, whether I would or not, purchased a flower for 30 AVATAR my buttonhole from the pretty flower-girls in straw hats who ply their trade in front of the cafe, I returned home to enjoy a siesta. At three o'clock my carriage drove up to take me to the Cascine, which is to Florence what the Bois de Boulogne is to Paris, save that every one knows every one else and that the round open space forms an open-air drawing-room, where the arm-chairs are replaced by carriages drawn up in a semicircle. The ladies, in full dress, half recumbent on the cushions, receive the visits of their lovers and particular admirers, of the dandies and the attaches, who remain standing on the carriage step bare-headed. But you know all about it as well as I do. It is there that plans are made for the evenings, that meetings are arranged, that answers are given and invitations accepted. It is like a Pleasure Exchange held from three to five in the afternoon under the shade of the fine trees and under the loveliest sky in the world. Every one who is any one at all is bound to put in an appearance once a day at the Cascine ; nor did I fail to do so, while in the evening, after dinner, I visited friends or went to the Pergola, when the singer was worth the trouble. " I thus spent one of the happiest months in my life, but that happiness was to be of brief duration. A splen- 31 AVATAR did carriage appeared one day at the Cascine. This superb Vienna-built vehicle, a masterpiece by Laurenzi, shining with the brightest varnish and adorned with an almost regal coat of arms, was drawn by the handsomest pair of horses that ever pranced in Hyde Park or at a Queen's drawing-room at Saint James'. It was driven postillion fashion in the most perfect form by a very young jockey in white breeches and green jacket. The brass on the harness, the axles of the wheels shone like gold and flashed in the sunshine. Everybody watched this splendid equipage, which, after making on the sanded drive a curve as regular as if it had been traced with compasses, drew up alongside of the other car- riages. You guess of course that the carriage was not unoccupied, but as it drove up rapidly, it had been im- possible to note more than a shoe tip resting on the front cushions, the broad fold of the shawl, and the disk of a sunshade fringed with white silk. The sun- shade was closed, and there burst on our sight a woman of incomparable beauty. " Being on horseback I was able to draw near enough to lose no part of this human masterpiece. The strange lady wore a dress of that silvery water-green which makes any woman whose complexion is not irre- 32 AVATAR proachable, look as black as a mole. It was a piece of audacity on the part of a fair woman sure of herself. A large shawl of white China crape, thickly covered with embroidery of the same colour, enveloped her in its soft drapery that fell in small pleated folds like a tunic by Phidias. Her face was framed in a bonnet of the finest Florentine straw, trimmed with forget-me-nots and deli- " cate water plants with narrow glaucous leaves. She wore no jewels ; but a delicately tinted long gray glove envel- oped in artistic folds reaching to the elbow the arm with which she supported the ivory handle of her sunshade. " Forgive me, dear doctor, this society journal de- scription, but the least remembrances assume extraor- dinary importance in the eyes of a lover. Thick bands of wavy golden hair, the ringlets of which formed as it were waves of light, fell in opulent masses on either side her brow, whiter and purer than the virgin snow that has fallen by night upon the highest summit of an alp. Long, delicate lashes, resembling the golden threads which the mediaeval miniaturists set about the heads of their angels, half veiled her eyes of a blue green similar to the light which shines through glaciers under certain sun effects. Her mouth, divinely shaped, had the rosy tint of the valves of Venus' shells, while 3 33 AVATAR her cheeks resembled timid white roses blushing under the confession of a nightingale or the kiss of a butter- fly. No human brush could reproduce that complexion, so exquisite, so blooming, so transparent, that it seemed to have nothing material about it, and its colouring to be due to something else than the common blood that flows through our veins. Alone could the first flush of dawn on the summits of the Sierra Nevada, the rosy tint of some white camellias where the petal turns over, or Parian marble seen through a rosy gauze, give a distant notion of it. So much of her skin as showed between the ribbons of her bonnet and the top of her shawl shone with iridescent fairness, with faint opaline re- flections on the edge of the contours. It was the col- ouring and not the drawing of that dazzling head that first attracted one, like the fine works of the Venetian school, though her features were as pure and delicate as those of antique profiles engraved on cameos. "Just as at the sight of Juliet, Romeo forgot Rosalind, so did I, on the apparition of this sovran beauty, for- get all my former loves ; the leaves of the book of my heart became fair and clean again, every name and every remembrance was blotted from them. I could not understand how I had ever taken any pleasure in the 34 AVATAR commonplace connections which so few young men manage to steer clear of, and I regretted having indulged in them, just as if they had been positive infidelities. That fateful meeting opened a new life for me. " The carriage left the Cascine and returned towards the city, bearing away the dazzling vision. I rode by the side of a young Russian, a very amiable fellow and well informed as regarded travellers belonging to the highest society, for he was a great frequenter of water- ing-places and was received in every cosmopolitan drawing-room in Europe. Little by little I turned the conversation to the strange lady, and I learned that she was the Countess Prascovia Labinski, a Lithua- nian lady of illustrious birth and vast wealth, whose husband had now been for two years fighting in the Caucasus. " I need not relate to you how diplomatically I set to work in order to be introduced to the Countess, who, on account of her husband's absence, was exceedingly careful not to receive many persons ; but at last I gained my point, — two dowager princesses and four baronesses of mature age having pledged their antique virtue that I was respectable. 35 AVATAR " Countess Labinski had rented a magnificent villa that had formerly belonged to the Salviati. It stood a couple of miles or so outside of Florence, and in a few days she had managed to install modern comfort in the antique manor without in the least detracting from its severe beauty and its quiet elegance. Great blazoned portieres were hung between the pointed arches ; old- fashioned arm-chairs and furniture harmonised with the walls, wainscotted in brown woods or covered with frescoes of a dull, faded tone like that of old tapestries. No crude colours, no bright gilding troubled the eye, and the present did not strike a false note in the mem- ories of the past. The Countess herself looked so naturally a lady of the manor that the old palace seemed to have been built expressly for her. " Deeply impressed as I had been by the radiant beauty of the Countess, I was still more so, after a few visits, by her remarkable, refined, highly cultured mind. When she spoke on a subject that interested her, her soul emerged, so to speak, and became visible. Her fairness was illumined, like alabaster, by an inter- nal light; her complexion glowed with the phospho- rescent scintillations, the lupiinous quiverings, of which Dante speaks in his description of the splendours of " 36 AVATAR Paradise ; at such times she looked like an angel stand- ing out brightly against the sun, I remained dazzled, plunged in ecstasy, speechless. Absorbed in the con- templation of her beauty, ravished by the sounds of her celestial voice that made every tongue ineffable music, I w^ould stammer, when compelled to speak, a few incoherent words that must have led her to entertain a very low opinion of my intelligence. Sometimes, indeed a faint smile, full of kindly irony, flitted like a rosy gleam upon her lovely lips as I uttered words that betrayed my deep emotion or my incurable folly. " I had not once as yet spoken to her of my love. In her presence I seemed wholly to lack the power of thinking; I had no strength, no courage; my heart beat as though it would break its bonds and leap into the lap of its queen. Again and again I resolved to speak out, but an insurmountable timidity held me back ; the least cold or reserved look on her part made me suffer deadly pain, like a criminal who, his head on the block, is awaiting the stroke of the axe upon his neck. I was choked by nervousness, and icy sweat broke out all over my body. I reddened and turned pale in turns, and finally would leave without hav- ing said a word, finding the door with difficulty and 37 AVATAR staggering like a drunken man on the steps of the stairs. " Once outside, my faculties returned and I poured out to the winds the most burning dithyrambics, ad- dressing to my absent idol a thousand declarations of love irresistible in their eloquence. In these mute apostrophes I equalled the greatest poets that have sung of love. Solomon's "Song of Songs," with its troublous Oriental perfume and its hasheesh-inspired lyricism, Petrarch's sonnets, with their platonic subtle- ties and their ethereal sweetness, Heinrich Heine's Intermezzo, full of nervous delirious feeling, fell far short of these inexhaustible effusions of my soul in which I exhausted my life. As I ended these monolo- gues, it seemed to me that the Countess, vanquished at last, must of necessity descend from heaven upon my heart, and more than once I closed my arms believing that I was clasping her in them. " I was so thoroughly possessed that I would spend whole hours murmuring like a litany of love the two words, Prascovia Labinski, — experiencing inexpres- sible delight in the speaking of these syllables, that now I dropped slowly as though they were pearls, and now spoke with the feverish volubility of a devotee intoxicated 38 AVATAR by his prayer itself. At other times I would write her beloved name upon the finest sheets of vellum, indulg- ing in all the calligraphic refinements of the manuscripts of the Middle Ages, ornaments of gold, fleurons of azure, scrolls of green. I spent in this minutely pas- sionate and childishly perfect labour the weary hours that intervened between my visits to the Countess. I could neither read nor busy myself with anything. Outside of Prascovia nothing interested me, and I did not even open the letters that reached me from France. I made repeated efforts to shake off this condition ; I tried to recall the axioms of seduction believed in by young men and the stratagems resorted to by the Love- laces of the Cafe de Paris and the Don Juans of the Jockey Club ; but when it came to applying these, my heart would fail me and I would regret that I did not possess, like Stendhal's Julian Sorel, a series of gradu- ated letters that I might copy and send to the Countess. I was satisfied with loving her, giving myself wholly without asking for aught in return, without even the most distant hope, for in my boldest dreams I scarcely dared to touch with my lips her rosy finger tips. No more religiously could a young novice in the fifteenth century, his brow pressed upon the steps of the altar, or a 39 AVATAR knight kneeling in his armour of steel, have worshipped the Blessed Virgin." Dr. Balthazar Cherbonneau had listened to Octavius with deep attention, the young man's story being to him something more than a mere romantic tale, and he said to himself, during one of the pauses made by the narrator: "Yes, that is the very diagnosis of the pas- sion of love ; a curious disease that I have but once before met with, at Chandernagore, in a young pariah maid who loved a Brahmin. She died of it, did the poor girl, but she was a savage, while you, Mr. Octa- vius you are civilised, and I shall cure you." Having closed his parenthesis, he signed to the young man to proceed, and, having folded his leg back against his thigh like the leg of a grasshopper, so as to rest his chin on his knee, he settled himself in that position, which no one else could have assumed, but which seemed to be particularly commodious in his case. " I shall not weary you with a detailed account of my secret martyrdom," continued Octavius, " and I shall come at once to a decisive incident. One day, unable longer to repress my imperious desire to see the Countess, I called earlier than usual. The weather 40 AVATAR was close and stormy. I did not find her in the drawing-room ; she had settled herself under a portico, supported by slender pillars, that opened on a terrace leading down to the gardens. She had had her piano, rattan arm-chairs, and chairs brought there; flower- stands, filled with the choicest flowers — nowhere so beautiful as in Florence — stood in the spaces between the pillars and perfumed the faint pufFs of air that at long intervals blew down from the Apennines. Through the open arcading showed the trimmed yews and clipped box-trees of the garden, while centenarian cypresses rose from among them and a population of mythological marbles in the fretful taste of Baccio Bandinelli and Ammanato. In the distance, above the sky-line of Florence, swelled the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore and the square belfry-tower of the Palazzo Vecchio rose in the air. "The Countess was alone, resting on the rattan couch. Never had she seemed so fair; her lissom body, relaxed by the heat, was plunged, like that of a sea-nymph, in the white foam of a full Indian muslin wrapper, trimmed from top to bottom with a fringe curled like the silver crest of a wave. A brooch of Khorassan inlaid steel fastened on the bosom this robe 41 AVATAR which was as light as the drapery that flutters around the Bending Victory. From her sleeves, open above the elbow, like the pistil of the calyx of a flower, emerged her arms purer in tone than the alabaster the Florentine sculptors use in making copies of antique statues. A broad black ribbon, fastened at the waist and the ends of which fell down in front, con- trasted strongly with the white of the dress. This con- trast of shades, commonly adopted for mourning, was brightened by the tip of a little Circassian slipper, with- out heel-pieces, and embossed with yellow arabesques, that peeped out under the hem of the muslin skirt. " The Countess' fair hair, the puffed bandeaux of which, as though lifted by the breeze, showed her fair brow and her transparent temples, formed a sort of halo round her head in which the light played with golden scintillations. " On a chair by her side fluttered in the wind the brim of a great rice-straw hat, trimmed with long black ribbons like those on the dress, and by it lay a pair of Suede gloves that had never been worn. As she saw me, Prascovia closed the book she was reading — it was the 'Poems of Miskiewicz' — and gave me a kindly nod. She was alone, an uncommon and favourable cir- 42 AVATAR cumstance. I sat down in front of her on the seat she pointed to. Silence, embarrassing when prolonged, fell upon us for a few moments. I could not think of any of the usual commonplaces of conversation ; my brain was inert, hot flushes rose from my heart to my eyes, and my love cried out to me : ' Do not lose this supreme chance.' " I know not what I might have done, had not the Countess, who divined my emotion, half risen and stretched out her lovely hand as if to close my lips. " ' Do not say a word, Octavius ; you love me ; I know it, I feel it, I believe it. Nor am I angry with you on that account, for love is involuntary. Other and more severe women would take offence ; but as for me, I pity you, for I cannot love you and it is sad for me to be the cause of sorrow to you. I regret that you ever met me, and I curse the caprice that led me to leave Venice for Florence. I had hoped that my persistent coolness would weary you and cause you to leave me ; but true love, every mark of which I read in your eyes, is not to be repelled. Let not my kind- ness lead you to indulge in the least illusion, in the least dream of hope, and do not mistake my pity for encouragement. An angel with diamond shield and 43 4.«|.4.4<4>4.4.4.4;4>4<'i>4.4;4;<|>^:l;:|>f|;«|;j|;tl;i; afiu afiw MW VM •■« wiw «m ■*• •&■ m» •" ■•• •■* *•• *"• """ "^ "^ ^^ ^^ AVATAR flaming sword protects me against all seductions better than religion, duty, and virtue could do it. That angel is my love. I adore Count Labinski. I am fortunate enough to have found passion in marriage.' "This frank, loyal, and nobly chaste confession made the tears pour in floods from my eyes, and I felt the springs of life dry up within me. Prascovia much moved, rose and with a movement of gracious feminine pity, dried my eyes with her cambric hand- kerchief. " ' Come, do not weep,' she said. ' I forbid you to do so. Try to think of something else ; fancy that I have gone forever, that I am dead ; forget me. Travel, work, do good, take an active part in human affairs; let art or another love console you.' " I interrupted her with a gesture of negation. " ' Do you think you would suflfer less if you con- tinued to see me ? ' went on the Countess. ' Come, then ; I shall always be at home to you. God says we must forgive our enemies ; why, then, should we treat less generously those who love us ? Yet absence seems to me the safer remedy. Two years hence we may meet without danger — so far as you are con- cerned,' she added with an attempt at a smile. 44 AVATAR " I left Florence the next day, but neither study, nor travel nor time have softened my sufferings, and I feel that I am dying. Pray do not try to prevent it, doctor." " Have you ever met Countess Labinski since then ? " asked the doctor, whose blue eyes shone strangely. "No," answered Octavius ; "but she is now in Paris." And he handed Dr. Cherbonneau an engraved card on which were these words : — - " Countess Prascovia Labinski, at home, Thursdays." 45 4r:fc4: :*: * tir :lr 4: * :lr ^*:l:***^**** * ** AVATAR ^^■:k'^isrk'k'^'&-:ki:'k'i:^ik4;^±^db^A4:ie III AMONG the then infrequent pedestrians who in the Champs-£lysees proceeded up the Avenue Gabriel, between the Turkish Em- bassy and the £lysee Bourbon, — preferring the soli- tude, silence, and coolness of that road, bordered on the one side with trees and on the other with gar- dens, to the dusty whirl and fashionable bustle of the main road, — there were few who did not stop, thoughtful and admiring, with a touch of envy, in front of a mysterious and poetic retreat in which, wonderful to relate, wealth and happiness seemed to dwell together. Who is there who has not stayed his steps in front of the gates of a park, and looked long at the white villa within, through the clumps of verdure, and then gone on his way with heavy heart as though the dream of his life were concealed behind the walls? On the other hand, there are dwellings that, thus seen from the exterior, fill one with undefinable gloom ; ennui, loneliness, despair seem to make the facades ice- _ AVATAR cold with their gray tints and to yellow the tops of the half leafless trees ; the statues are covered with a mossy leprosy ; the flowers are blighted ; the water in the ponds is green and stagnant ; the weeds, heedless of the hoe, grow on the walks ; the birds, if any there be, are silent. The gardens, on a lower level than the main walk, were separated from it by a ha-ha fence, and ran, in broader or narrower bands, up to the mansion the front of which looked out upon the Rue du Faubourg-Saint- Honore. The one to which I refer ended at the ditch in a platform supported by a wall built of large stones, selected on account of the peculiar irregularity of their shapes, and which, rising on either side, like the wings of a stage, framed within their broken outlines and sombre masses the cool, green prospect between them. In the crevices of these stones Indian fig trees, car- nation milk-wort. Saint John's wort, London pride, ivy- leaved toad flax, white stonecrop, red Alpine campion, and Irish ivy had found soil enough to feed their roots, and showed their varied greens against the bold back- ground of stone — no painter could have devised a better set-ofF in the foreground of his picture. 47 ^ w^ 4W» ««w JS» *fl* cvM WT* WW ^f» ^ a* tifm «*• •»« Mi* ■*« afi* mw •r* •*• «B> «w <^ AVATAR The side walls which enclosed this terrestrial para- dise disappeared under a mantle of climbing plants, aristolochias, blue passion-flowers, bell-flowers, honey- suckle, gypsophila, Chinese glycinas, periplocas from Greece, the tendrils, filaments, and stems of which twisted and climbed upon a green trellis, for even hap- piness refuses to be imprisoned. Thanks to this arrangement, the garden resembled a forest clearing rather than a somewhat narrow flower garden circum- scribed by civilised fences. Somewhat behind the masses of rockery were grouped a few clumps of trees, of elegant port and rich foliage, contrasting happily the one with the others : Japanese sumachs, Canadian lignum vitae, Virginian plane-trees, green ash-trees, white willows, nettle-trees of Provence, and, rising above all these, two or three larches. Beyond the trees stretched a rye-grass lawn, in which not one blade of grass was taller than its neighbour, a sward finer and silkier than a queen's velvet mantle, and of that ideal emerald green seen in perfection only in England in front of the facades of feudal manor-houses ; a soft natural carpet which the eye loves to dwell on and the foot fears to press, a veg- etable Wilton on which alone may play, by day, the 48 AVATAR tame gazelle and the ducal baby in its lace robes, and, at night, may glide some Titania from the West End, her hand clasped in that of an Oberon whose name is inscribed in Burke's " Peerage and Baronetage." A walk covered with carefully sieved sand, lest a bit of shell or of flint should hurt the aristocratic feet that left their delicate imprint upon it, ran like a yellow rib- bon round the well rolled, green, short, thick sward, which artificial rain kept constantly moistened, even in the driest days of summer. At the end of the lawn blazed, at the time of my tale, a perfect fireworks of flowers, due to a mass of geraniums the scarlet stars of which flamed against a brown background of heath. The prospect was closed by the elegant facade of the mansion. Slender Ionic pillars supporting an attic, surmounted, at each corner, by a graceful marble group, gave it the look of a Greek temple transported thither by a millionaire's whim, and it toned down, by the thoughts of art and poetry it awakened, any possible excess in the luxuriousness of the place. Between the pillars the blinds, striped with broad red bands and almost always closed, shaded and indicated the windows, that opened level with the portico like glass doors. 4 49 AVATAR When the capricious Paris sky condescended to stretch a background of blue behind this palazzino, the lines of it showed so delightfully between the masses of verdure that it might have been taken for the rest- ing place of the Queen of Fairies or for an enlarged painting by Baron. Had some early rising poet passed through the Avenue Gabriel with the first flush of dawn, he would have heard the nightingale warbling the last trills of its nocturne, and seen the blackbird walking about the garden walk in yellow slippers, like one thoroughly at home. At night, that same poet, after the roll of the last carriages returning from the Opera had died out in the silence of the sleeping city, would have dimly made out a white shadow leaning on the arm of a handsome youth, and he would have climbed up to his solitary garret, his soul sick unto death. The reader has already guessed that this had been for some time the abode of Countess Prascovia La- binski and of her husband, Count Olaf Labinski, who had returned from the war in the Caucasus after a glori- ous campaign, in which, even though he had not fought hand to hand with the mysterious and elusive Schamyl, he had had to do with the most fanatically devoted 50 AVATAR Mourids of the illustrious sheik. He had escaped the deadly bullets in the way in which brave men escape them, by dashing to meet them, and the curved Da- mascus blades of the fierce warriors had been broken on his breast without penetrating it. Courage is a cui- rass of proof. Count Labinski had the valour of the Slavonic races, which love danger for its own sake, and to whom may still be applied that refrain of the old Scandinavian song: "They slay, die, and laugh." Thomas Moore alone, writing in the vein of his " Loves of the Angels," could depict the intoxicating joy which filled the pair, for whom marriage was but a passion allowed of God and men, when they were reunited. Every drop of ink in my pen would have to turn into a drop of light, and every word evaporate on the paper in flame and perfume like a grain of incense. How can I paint these two souls melted into one and similar to two dewdrops that, gliding down the petal of a lily, meet, mingle, absorb one another and form but a single pearl ? Happiness is so rare a thing in this world that it has not occurred to man to invent words capable of expressing it, while the vocabulary of suffering, moral and physical, fills numberless columns in the diction- aries of every language. 51 ibt&*^^* ^ •!» *t' *ft* ■!» 'I ; ' i »' l ' " j; «j; ^ jf " j; ^ j; j; ti; ^ jb AVATAR Olaf and Prascovia had loved each other in child- hood ; their hearts had never been stirred save by the one name; almost from the cradle they had known that one day they would wed, and the rest of the world did not exist for them. They seemed to be the halves of Plato's androgyne, which have in vain sought each other since the original divorce, and which had met and united in them. They were the duality in unity which is complete harmony, and side by side they walked, or rather flew through life, with an even, sustained flight, soaring like two doves called by the same desire, to recall Dante's exquisite image. That naught might trouble their felicity it was bathed in a golden atmosphere of immense wealth. Wherever the radiant couple appeared, poverty relieved threw ofF its rags, and tears dried up ; for Olaf and Prascovia had the noble selfishness of happiness : they could not bear the sight of grief within their own radiance. Since the day when polytheism bore away with it the young gods, the smiling genii, the celestial youths with forms so absolutely perfect, so rhythmically harmonious, so ideally pure, and since Greece has ceased to sing the hymn of beauty in strophes of Parian 52 •A* **• •s* *4* •^v "^ •4**i« ^ *^^*^^*^tl> MbsSrssT^tlrs? s •£■ AVATAR marble, man has taken cruel advantage of the permis- sion to be ugly, and although he was made in the image of God, he is but a poor counterfeit presentment of Him. Count Labinski, however, had not availed himself of the license thus given ; the somewhat long oval of his face, his thin nose, bold and delicate in outline, the well cut lips, set off by a blond mustache drawn to a point, his well turned, dimpled chin, his black eyes — a piquant singularity, graceful in its strangeness — made him look like one of those warrior angels. Saint Michael or Saint Gabriel, who, clad in golden armour, fight the demon. He would have been too handsome but for the virile flash of his dark eyes and the tan with which the Asiatic suns had browned his features. The Count was of medium stature, thin, slender, muscular, concealing a frame of steel under apparent frailness. When, at some ambassadorial ball, he wore his magnate's costume, heavily braided with gold and starred with diamonds, he passed among the guests like a dazzling apparition, exciting the jealousy of the men and the love of the women, whom Prascovia's beauty rendered indifferent to him. I need not add that he had gifts of mind that equalled his physical qualities ; 53 AVATAR the good fairies had richly endowed him at his birth, and the wicked fairy that spoils everything had shown herself good-tempered on that day. It will readily be understood that with such a rival Octavius de Saville had but little chance of success, and that he showed wisdom in letting himself die quietly on the cushions of his divan, in spite of the hopes that the eccentric doctor strove to inspire him with. The only way would have been to forget Pras- covia, but it was also the one thing impossible. On the other hand, what was the good of seeing her again ? Octavius felt that the young woman's resolve would not abate one jot of its gentle implacability or of its kindly coldness. He dreaded having his yet unhealed wounds reopened and bleeding in the presence of her who was his innocent murderer; nor would he accuse her of it, for he loved her. 54 AVATAR IV TWO years had elapsed since the day when Countess Labinski had stayed on Octavius' lips the declaration of love she must not listen to. Octavius, his dream rudely shattered, had departed, bearing away with him a consuming grief, and had never sent any news of himself to Prascovia. The one thing he might have written he must not write. Yet more than once had the Countess, fright- ened by his silence, recalled with sadness the remem- brance of her unfortunate adorer. Had he forgotten her i" Divinely free from coquetry, she hoped he had, though she could not bring herself to believe it, for the undying flame of passion burned in his eyes, and the Countess had not read it wrong. Love and the gods recognise each other by the glance. The thought was a cloudlet on the clear azure of her happiness, and made her share the gentle sadness of angels that in heaven still remember earth. Her sweet soul suf- fered because she knew that far away some one was unhappy on her account ; yet what can the star that 55 AVATAR twinkles in the heavens do for the lowly herd who passionately stretches out his arms to it ? In the days of mythology, it is true, Phoebe did descend from the heavens in the form of a silver beam upon the sleep- ing Endymion, but she was not wedded to a Polish count. As soon as she reached Paris, Countess Labinski sent Octavius the hackneyed invitation which Doctor Balthazar Cherbonneau was absent-mindedly twisting between his fingers, and when he did not come, she had said to herself with an involuntary movement of joy, " He still loves me ! " Yet she was a woman of angelic purity and chaste as the snow on the highest peak of the Himalayas, and Count Olaf himself could not have blamed her for that delicate emotion of her soul. "Your story, which I have attentively listened to," said the doctor to Octavius, " convinces me that it would be madness for you to entertain the least hope. Countess Labinski will never return your love." "And therefore, doctor, you must see that I am right not to try to prolong my wasting life." "What I said was that there is no hope in usual means," went on the doctor. " There are, however, 7(> AVATAR occult powers which modern science is unacquainted with, and the traditional knowledge of which has been preserved in those strange countries called barbarous by an ignorant civilisation. There, in the early days of the world, mankind, then in close contact with the living forces of nature, was acquainted with secrets now believed to be lost, and which the migrating tribes, that later grew into nations, did not carry away with them. These secrets were at first transmitted by one of the initiated to another, in the mysterious depths of the temples ; next were written in sacred idioms not under- stood of the vulgar, and cut in panels of hieroglyphs on the cryptic walls of Ellora. You may still, on the slopes of Mount Merou, whence flows the Ganges, at the foot of the white marble steps of Benares, the Holy City, or in the recesses of the ruined pagodas of Ceylon, come upon centenarian Brahmins deciphering unknown manuscripts, or yoghis busy repeating the ineffable monosyllable om, unaware that the birds of heaven are nesting in their hair, or fakirs whose shoulders bear the scars inflicted by the iron hooks of Juggernaut. These men possess the lost secrets by means of which, when they choose to make use of them, they obtain marvel- lous results. Our own Europe, wholly absorbed by 57 AVATAR material cares, does not suspect the degree of spiritual- ism which has been attained by the penitents of India. Absolute fasts, contemplations terrifying in their inten- sity, impossible postures maintained for years at a time, have so thoroughly attenuated their bodies that they might be taken, when seen crouching under a burning sun, between blazing braziers, letting their nails grow until they enter the palms of their hands, for Egyptian mummies withdrawn from their cases and bent into the attitudes of monkeys. Their human frame is no more than a chrysalis, which the soul, the immortal butterfly, may leave or return to as it pleases. While their skinny frame remains there, inert, horrible to behold, resembling a larva of night surprised by the daylight, their mind, freed from all bonds, soars on the wings of hallucination, to measureless heights in the supernatural world. They have strange visions and dreams ; they follow in a succession of ecstasies the undulations of the vanished centuries upon the ocean of eternity ; they traverse the infinite in every direction ; they behold the birth of worlds, the genesis and the meta- morphoses of the gods. They recall the sciences swallowed up in the Plutonian and diluvian cataclysms, and the forgotten relations of man and the elements. _ AVATAR In that strange condition they murmur words belonging to tongues that no people has spoken on the surface of the earth for thousands and thousands of years ; they come upon the primal Word, the Word that caused the light to flame out of the everlasting darkness. People call them mad ; they are almost gods ! " This singular preamble excited in the highest degree Octavius' attention, and not knowing what Dr. Bal- thazar Cherbonneau was driving at, he fixed upon him eyes that were full of amazement and sparkled with questionings. He could not make out the connec- tion between the penitents of India and his love for the Countess Prascovia Labinski. The doctor guessing his thoughts, waved his hand as if to forestall his questions, and said : — " Patience, my dear patient ; you will see presently that I am not indulging in needless digressions. Weary of questioning with a scalpel, on the marble tables of dissecting schools, bodies that answered not and that showed me but death where I sought life, I formed the project, as bold as that of Prometheus when he stormed the heavens to steal fire, — to find and seize upon the soul, to analyze it, and, so to speak, to dissect it. I abandoned the effect for the cause, and felt the deep- 59 ■■W W>W •■« «•■ VIW W« M* •«■• •!■• «C« •** ^W *'** *** "W AVATAR est contempt for materialistic science, of which I had fathomed the nothiiigness. It struck me as coarse empiricism to work upon vague forms and chance aggre- gations of atoms that were forthwith dissolved. I en- deavoured, by making use of magnetism, to relax the bonds that imprison the spirit within its frame, and soon I had gone beyond Mesmer, Deslon, Maxwell, Puysegur, Deleuze, and the most skilful of them, in absolutely prodigious experiments, that, however, failed to satisfy me. Catalepsy, somnambulism, second sight, ecstatic lucidity, all these effects, inexplicable to the common run of men, but simple and intelligible to me, I produced at will. I went farther back. From the ecstasies of Cardan and Saint Thomas Aquinas I passed to the nervous attacks of the Pythiae ; I dis- covered the arcana of the Greek Epoptes and the Hebrew Nebiim ; I was retrospectively initiated into the mysteries of Trophonius and Esculapius, ever and always recognising in the marvels told of them either an expansion or a contraction of the soul, due to a gesture, to a glance, to a word, to the will, or some other unknown agent. I performed, one after another, every miracle worked by Apollonius of Tyana, and yet my scientific dream had not come true; the soul still Copyright l3Ce by GeoTj^e_D_Spi^ AVATAR escaped me. I could feel it, hear it, act upon it; I could excite or benumb its faculties, but there remained between me and it a fleshy veil that I could not draw aside without its escaping. I was like a bird-catcher that has a bird captive under a net he dare not lift lest he see his winged booty take flight into the heavens. " I started for India, hoping to discover the solution of the riddle in that land of ancient wisdom. I learned Sanscrit and Pacrit, the learned and the vulgar idioms, and conversed with pandits and Brahmins. I traversed the jungles where roars the tiger crawling on its belly ; I passed along the sacred ponds where dwell the scaly crocodiles ; I crossed impenetrable forests defended by creepers, starting clouds of bats and troops of monkeys, and coming face to face with elephants at the corner of some path made by wild beasts, in order to reach the hut of a famous yoghi holding intercourse with the Mounis ; and I sat for many days by him, sharing his gazelle skin, and noting the faint incantations whispered by his black and cracked lips in his ecstasy. In this way I learned omnipotent words, formulae of evocation, and syllables of the Creative Word. " I studied the symbolical carvings in the inner cham- bers of pagodas that no profane eye has ever rested 6i AVATAR upon and into which my Brahmin's robe allowed me to penetrate. I read many a cosmogonic mystery, many a legend of vanished civilisations. I dis- covered the meaning of the emblems held in the numerous hands of the hybrid gods, as varied as is nature itself in India. I meditated upon the circle of Brahma, the lotus of Vishnu, the hooded cobra of Siwa, the blue God. Ganesa, stretching out his pachyderm's trunk and winking his little eyes with the long lashes, seemed to smile upon my efforts and to encourage me in my search. Every one of these monstrous figures said to me in their language of stone : ' We are but forms ; it is the spirit that acts upon matter.' " A priest of the Temple of Trincomalee, to whom I confided the idea that haunted me, told me of a peni- tent who inhabited one of the caves on the island of Elephanta, and who had attained to the highest degree of sublimity. I found him leaning against the wail of the cave, clothed in a rag of esparto, his chin between his knees, his hands clasped on his legs, in a state of absolute immobility. Only the whites of his eyes were visible ; and his lips were turned back upon his gumless teeth ; his skin, tanned by an incredible leanness, clung to his cheek-bones ; his hair, thrown back, hung stiff as 62 AVATAR the filaments of a plant from the edge of a crag, while his beard had parted into two streams that almost touched the ground, and his finger-nails resembled the talons of an eagle. " He had been blackened and dried up by the sun to such an extent that his Indian's skin, naturally brown, looked like basalt, and as he leaned there he had the shape and colour of a Canopus vase. At the first glance I thought he was dead. I shook him by the arms, which were as if petrified in cataleptic stiffness, and shouted into his ear as loudly as I could the sacra- mental words by which he would know me for one of the initiated, but he made no motion and his eyelids did not quiver. I was about to depart, hopeless of getting anything out of him, when I heard a strange crackling ; a bluish spark flashed past my eyes with the lightning- like rapidity of electric light, fluttered for a second upon the half-opened lips of the penitent, and vanished. " Brahma-Loghum — such was the name of the holy man — seemed to awake as out of a trance ; his eye- balls rolled back into their places, he looked at me with a human glance, and answered my questions. " ' Well, your wish has been granted ; you have seen a soul. I have succeeded in separating mine from my 6^ AVATAR body whenever I please. It leaves it and returns to it under the form of a luminous bee, perceptible only to the adepts. I have fasted, prayed, and meditated so long, I have kept up such rigorous macerations, that I have managed to loose the earthly bonds that con- fine it, and that Vishnu, the god of the ten incarna- tions, has revealed to me the mysterious w^ord which guides the soul in its avatars through different forms. Should I, after having made the prescribed gestures, speak that word, your soul would flee away to ani- mate the man or the animal I should point out to it. This secret I bequeath to you ; I am the only one on this earth who possesses it. I am very glad you have come, for I long to melt away in the bosom of the Uncreated, as does a drop of water in the ocean.' " Thereupon the penitent whispered in my ear, with a voice as weak as the last murmur of the dying, but perfectly distinct, a few syllables that made, as Job says, ' fear come upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake.' " " What do you mean, doctor ? " cried Octavius. " I dare not venture to sound the terrifying depths of your words." AVATAR " I mean," quietly returned Dr. Balthazar Cherbon- neau, " that I have not forgotten the magical formula of my friend Brahma-Loghum, and that Countess Prascovia would have to be very clever indeed to recog- nise the soul of Octavius de Saville in the body of Olaf Labinski." 65 ^d:4;^ir d: 4:4; 4:4. 4.^4.4.4.4. 4.4.4:^4. 4; ;|:d. AVATAR :l:4:4::fc4;A^4.^^^^:4.^:4.*4.4.4.:l;4.^i.i V DR. BALTHAZAR'S reputation as a physi- cian and thaumaturgist was beginning to spread through Paris, his eccentricities, whether nat- ural or affected, having made him all the rage. But far from seeking to build up a practice, he did his best to repel patients by closing his door to them, giving them strange prescriptions, or ordering them to follow an impossible regimen. He attended desperate cases only, dismissing to his colleagues with haughty con- tempt commonplace cases of pneumonia, enteritis, or typhoid fever, and in these difficult cases he made cures that were fairly amazing. Standing by the bedside, he would make magical gestures over a cup of water, and the body, already cold and stiiF, and ready for the coffin, would after a few drops of the water had been poured down between the jaws set in the agony of death, re- cover the flexibility of life and the colours of health, and sit up of itself, casting around a glance already used to the shades of the tomb. Cherbonneau therefore became known as the Physician of the Dead or the 66 sb db :!; :£; :!; ^ ^ ^ ^ 4< ^ 4>«|; >!• •!; ^ 4; 4; ^ 4; ^ ;!> <|>^ AVATAR Resurrectionist. Nor did he always condescend to per- form cures, and more than once he refused the large fees offered him by dying millionaires. It required the grief of a mother begging for the life of her only child, the despair of a lover praying for the reprieve of his beloved, or the belief on his part that the endan- gered life was of use to poetry, science, or the progress of the human race, to induce him to enter the lists with death. It was thus that he saved the life of a baby dying of croup, that of a lovely girl in the last stages of consump- tion, that of a poet the victim of delirium tremens, and that of an inventor struck down by apoplexy and who was about to carry away with him the secret of his dis- covery. In other cases he would reply that Nature should not be interfered with, that there was a good reason why certain deaths should occur, and that one ran the risk, by preventing them, of creating a disturb- ance in the order of the universe. Dr. Cherbonneau, it will be seen, was the most paradoxical of physicians, and had returned from India a confirmed eccentric. His renown as a mesmerist was even greater than his fame as a physician ; he had admitted a small number of elect to seances in which he performed prodigies that _ AVATAR surpassed all notions of the possible or the impossible, and that were far ahead of the wonders wrought by Cagliostro. The doctor lived on the ground-floor of an old house in the Rue du Regard, where he had an apart- ment en suite^as they used to be built, the high windows of which opened out on a garden planted with great trees with blackened trunks and sparse foliage. Al- though it was summer, powerful furnaces sent out blasts of hot air through their brass registers into the great rooms, keeping the temperature up to ninety or a hundred degrees, for Balthazar Cherbonneau, accus- tomed to the burning heats of India, shivered under the pale Parisian sun, just like that traveller who, having returned from the sources of the Blue Nile in Central Africa, trembled with cold in Cairo, and never went out save in a closed carriage, wrapped up in a pelisse of blue Siberian fox fur, and his feet resting upon a tin hot-water foot-warmer. There was no other furniture in the rooms than low divans covered with Malabar stuffs embellished with chimerical elephants and fabulous birds, what-nots, carved, painted, and gilded with barbaric artlessness by the natives of Ceylon, and Japanese vases filled with 68 AVATAR exotic flowers, while on the floor was spread, from one end of the apartment to the other, one of those funereal carpets with black-and-white flower pattern woven, by way of penance, by imprisoned Thugs, and the woof of which seems to be made of the hemp of their stranglers' cords. On stands in the corners there were a few Hindoo idols, in marble or bronze, cross-legged, with long, almond-shaped eyes, rings in their noses, thick, smiling lips, pearl necklaces falling down to their navels, and mysterious and strange at- tributes. Along the walls hung miniatures in water- colours, the work of some Calcutta or Lucknow artist, representing the nine avatars through which Vishnu has already passed, the fish, the tortoise, the pig, the human-headed lion, the Brahmin dwarf, the Rama, the hero fighting with the many-armed giant Cartasuciriar- gunen, the Kitona, the miraculous child, in which some recognise a Hindoo Christ ; the Bouddha, worshipping the great god Mahadevi, and, finally, asleep in the centre of the Milky Sea, upon the cobra with its five heads curving up over him in the form of a dais, wait- ing until it is time to assume, as a last incarnation, the form of the winged pale horse, which, striking the earth with its hoof, is to cause the end of the world. 69 ■ AVATAR In the end room, heated even more than the others, sat Dr. Balthazar Cherbonneau, surrounded by San- scrit books engraved with a style upon thin blades of wood pierced with a hole at one end and fastened by a cord in such a way that they resembled Venetian blinds more than the books found in European book- sellers' shops. An electrical machine, with its jars full of gold leaf, and its glass disks revolved by handles, exhibited its troublous and complicated silhouette in the centre of the room, by the side of a mesmeric tub into which was set a metal rod and from which radiated numerous iron bars. Dr. Cherbonneau was anything but a charlatan, and did not care for stage- setting, yet it was difficult to enter that strange retreat without experiencing, in part at least, an impression similar to that which alchemists' laboratories must have produced of yore. Count Olaf Labinski had heard of the miracles wrought by the physician, and his half credulous curiosity had been awakened by these reports. The Slavic races have a natural love for the marvellous, a tendency not always checked by education even of the best. Besides, witnesses of undoubted credibility who had been present at the seances reported things which 70 4; 4;^^^ ^^^^4.^4.4;:^^^^^^^^^^^ AVATAR it is impossible to believe unless one has seen them with one's own eyes, however implicitly one may trust in the narrator. So Count Olaf paid the thau- maturgist a visit. When he entered the place, he felt himself bathed, as it were, in a faint atmosphere of fire ; the blood rushed to his brain ; his temples throbbed. The ex- cessive heat of the rooms suffocated him ; the aromatic oils burning in the lamps, and the great Javanese flowers the huge calyxes of which swung like censers, intoxicated him with their subtile emanations and asphyxiating scents. He staggered towards Dr. Cher- bonneau, who was curled up on a divan in one of those curious attitudes adopted by fakirs and sannyasis, so picturesquely illustrated by Prince Soltikoff in his " Travels in India." With his angular limbs showing through the folds of his garments, he looked like a human spider curled up in the centre of its web and remaining motionless in the presence of its prey. At the sight of the Count his turquoise blue eyes lighted up with phosphorescent gleams that played in the centre of their golden orbits brown as hepatite, but they were at once dimmed as if by a film drawn over them at will. The doctor, perceiving OlaPs distress, put out 71 AVATAR his hand towards him and with two or three passes surrounded him with an atmosphere of springtime, thus creating for him a cool paradise in that hell of heat. " Do you feel any better ? " he asked. " Your lungs, used to the Baltic breezes that reach you chilled after passing over the primeval snows of the Pole, must have panted like the bellows of a forge in this burning air, in which, nevertheless, I, who have been baked, roasted, and calcined, as it were, in the furnaces of the sun, shiver and tremble." Count Olaf Labinski intimated that he no longer suffered from the oppressive heat of the room. " Well," went on the doctor ; " I suppose you have heard of my sleight-of-hand tricks, and are desirous of having a sample of my powers. I am far superior to Comus, Comte, or Bosco." " My curiosity is not quite so frivolous," answered the Count, " and I have more respect for one of the princes of science." " I am not a scientist in the usual meaning of the word," returned the physician. " On the other hand, while engaged in studying certain matters disdained by science, I have mastered unemployed occult forces, 72 AVATAR and I produce results that, although natural, seem marvellous. By dint of watching for it, I have occa- sionally surprised the soul ; I have profited by the con- fidences it has imparted to me, and remembered the words it has spoken to me. The spirit is everything; matter is but a mere appearance, and it may be that the universe is naught else than a dream of God or the irradiation of the Word in the infinite. I play as I please with the rag called the body; I stay life or hasten it ; I suppress space ; I displace the senses and destroy pain without needing the aid of chloroform, ether, or any other anaesthetic. Armed with my will, which is an intellectual electricity, I give life or blast it. Nothing remains opaque to my eyes; my glance traverses everything. I can distinctly see the rays of thought, and just as the rays of the solar spectrum can be projected on a screen, so I can compel them to pass through my invisible prism and force them to reflect themselves upon the white screen in my brain. But all this is nothing by the side of the prodigies per- formed by some of the Hindoo yoghis, who have attained the highest pitch of asceticism. We Euro- peans are too superficial, too careless, too frivolous, too much in love with our earthen prison to open in it 73 AVATAR windows large enough to look out from upon eternity and the infinite. I have, nevertheless, obtained some rather strange results, of which you shall yourself be the judge," concluded Dr. Balthazar Cherbonneau as he drew back a heavy portiere that concealed a sort of alcove at the end of the room. By the light of a spirit lamp quivering upon a bronze pedestal, Count Olaf Labinski beheld a sight so terrifying that in spite of his bravery he could not repress a shudder. On a black marble table lay the body of a young man, nude to the waist, and lying in the rigid immobility of death. Not a drop of blood flowed from his torso, which was stuck as full of darts as that of Saint Sebastian. He might have been taken for a coloured representation of a martyr, the lips of whose wounds had not been tinted with red. " That strange physician," said Olaf to himself, " is perchance a worshipper of Siwa, and this is a victim offered up to his idol." " He does not suffer in the least. You may prick him without fear ; not a muscle will move," said the doctor as he drew the darts from the body, just as pins are taken from a pin-cushion. 74 AVATAR A few rapid passes with the hands freed the patient from the network of effluvia in which he was im- prisoned, and he woke with an ecstatic smile on his lips as if emerging from a dream of delight. Dr. Bal- thazar Cherbonneau dismissed him with a wave of the hand, and the youth withdrew by a small door cut in the wainscotting of the alcove. " I could have cut off his leg or his arm without his being aware of it," went on the physician, wrinkling his lips by way of a smile. " I did not do so because I have not yet got the length of creating, and because man, inferior in this respect to the lizard, is not yet sufficiently vigorous to grow new limbs in the room of those he loses. But if I cannot create, on the other hand I can make young again." As he said these words, he took off the veil which covered an aged woman sur(k in a magnetic sleep in an arm-chair, not far from the black marble table. Her features, which had no doubt once been beautiful, were wasted, and the ravages of time were plainly discerni- ble in the emaciated outlines of her arms, her shoulders, and her bosom. The doctor fixed upon her for a few moments, with obstinate intensity, the glance of his blue eyes. Then 75 AVATAR the sunken lines filled out, the contours of the bosom resumed their virginal roundness, the hollows in the neck turned into white, satiny flesh ; the cheeks rounded out and were covered with a peach-like bloom, the bloom of youth ; the eyes opened and sparkled in a living fluid ; the mask of old age, removed as by magic, allowed the long vanished beauty of the young woman to be seen again. " Do you think the Fountain of Youth poured out its waters anywhere ? " asked the doctor of the Count, who stood amazed at the metamorphosis. " I think it did, for man invents nothing, and every one of his dreams is a guess or a remembrance. But let us drop that frame remoulded for a time by my will, and let iis consult the young woman sleeping quietly in yonder corner. , Question her; you will find she knows more than did the sybils and pythias. You may send her to any one of your seven castles in Bohemia, ask her what is contained in the most secret of your drawers, and she will tell you, for it does not take her spirit more than a second to traverse the distance ; not a very sur- prising thing, for the matter of that, since electricity travels two hundred and ten thousand miles in the same space of time, and electricity is to thought as a cab is _ AVATAR ^^ to a railway train. Take her hand so as to place your- self in communication with her. You need not for- mulate your question ; she can read it in your mind." The girl, in a voice as colourless as that of a shadow, replied to the unspoken question put by the Count. " In the cedar casket there is a piece of earth dusted with fine sand on which is the imprint of a small foot." " Has she guessed right ? " asked the doctor care- lessly, and as if sure of the somnambulist's infallibility. A deep blush covered the Count's features. It was a fact that in the early days of his love he had taken from one of the walks in a park the print of Prascovia's foot, and he kept it like a relic in a box of the most precious workmanship, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and silver, the tiny key of which he wore on his neck hung from a Venice chain. Dr. Balthazar Cherbonneau, who was a well-bred man, noted the Count's embarrassment, and, without waiting for an answer to his question, led him to a table on which was placed a cup of water as clear as diamond. " No doubt you have heard of the magic mirror in which Mephistopheles showed Faustus the image of Helen ; now, although my silk stocking does not con- 77 ' AVATAR ceal a cloven foot and I do not wear two cock's feathers in my hat, I can regale you with that simple prodigy. Bend over this cup and think intently of the person whom you wish to see. Living or dead, near by or far off, she will answer your call, whether from the ends of the world or the depths of history." The Count bent over the cup, the water in which soon changed colpur as he gazed, and became opaline as though a drop of essence had been poured into it. The vase became rimmed with the iridescent colours of the prism, forming a frame for the picture which already began to show within the whitish cloudiness. The mist vanished. A young woman in a lace wrapper, with sea-green eyes and wavy golden hair, her lovely hands playing like white butterflies upon the ivory keys of the piano, showed as in a mirror at the bottom of the water, that had resumed its limpidity, and so marvellously perfect that she would have driven every painter to despair. It was Prascovia Labinski, who, unknowing it, obeyed the passionate evocation of the Count. " And now let us pass to something stranger," said the physician, as he took the Count's hand and placed it upon one of the iron rods in the mesmeric bucket. ^8 AVATAR No sooner had Olaf touched the metal rod, charged with lightning-like electricity, than he fell as if smitten by a thunderbolt. The physician took him up in his arms, lifted him as if he had been a feather, placed him on a divan, rang the bell, and said to the servant who appeared at the door : — " Go and fetch Mr. Octavius de Saville." 79 i:dbi: :& :£; i: i: i: :i; ir ^^:l;db:b:&i;sbd;dei; tl;:^^' AVATAR i::!: 4: i: 4: ^ ^ ^ :fc db 4r irtlr^dr^ :!: A :ij4; A A Adfc VI THE sound of a coupe was heard in the silent court-yard of the mansion, and almost imme- diately Octavius presented himself before the doctor. He was thunderstruck when Dr. Cherbonneau showed him Count Olaf Labinski stretched out upon a divan and apparently dead. His first thought was that a murder had been committed, and for a few moments he remained speechless with horror, but closer exami- nation showed him that the young sleeper's breast rose and fell with an almost imperceptible respiration. " There," said the physician, " is your disguise all ready for you. It is somewhat more difficult to put on than a costume hired from Babin, but Romeo, when he scaled Juliet's balcony, did not think of the danger he ran of breaking his neck, knowing that Juliet was awaiting him above in her nightrobe ; surely Countess Prascovia Labinski is worth as much at least as the daughter of the Capulets." Octavius, overcome by the strangeness of the situa- tion, made no answer, but kept looking at the Count, — AVATAR whose head, slightly thrown back, rested on a pillow, so that he resembled an efSgy of a knight lying on a tomb in a Gothic cloister, with a carved marble pillow under its stifF neck. In spite of himself, the noble and handsome form he was about to rob of its soul, inspired him with remorse. The doctor mistook Octavius' thoughtfulness for hesitancy, and a faint smile of contempt flickered on his lips. " If your mind is not made up," he said, " I can awaken the Count, who will leave as he came, wonder- ing at my magnetic power; but pray remember that such an opportunity may never again recur. At the same time, however much I may be interested in your love afFair, and however desirous I am of trying an experi- ment never yet attempted in Europe, I am bound to tell you that there is a certain amount of danger in this transference of souls. Search your breast and question your own soul. Do you freely stake your life on this last card ? Love is as strong as death, says the Bible." " I am ready," quietly replied Octavius. " That is right, young man," exclaimed the doctor, rubbing his wrinkled brown hands together with ex- 6 8i •I»4*«l* 4« 4* 4* 4* »!• «!• «l*4t«l«4*«l«4«4*«i*4««l»4*4* 4*4*^ AVATAR traordinary rapidity, as if he had been trying to make a fire after the manner of savages. " A love that hesi- tates at nothing pleases me. There are but two things in this world : love and will. It certainly shall not be my fault if you are not made happy. Ah ! my old Brah- ma-Loghum, you shall now see from the depths of Indra's heaven, where the apsaras surround you in volup- tuous groups, whether I have forgotten the irresistible formula you whispered in my ear as you cast away your mummified frame. Words and gestures, I have retained them all. And now, to work ! to work ! I shall make a strange stew in my caldron, like the witches in Macbeth, but without the wretched witch- craft of the North. — Seat yourself before me in that arm-chair, and abandon yourself trustfully to my power. That is right ; your eyes fixed on mine and your hands in my hands. — The spell is already working ; he is losing the notion of time and space ; self-consciousness vanishes ; his eyelids are closing ; his nerves, no longer receiving the orders of the brain, are relaxing ; his thoughts are slumbering, and every delicate fibre that binds the soul to the body is loosened. Brahma him- self, in the golden egg wherein he dreamed for twice five thousand years, was not more separated from ex- 82 AVATAR ternal things. Now let me saturate him in effluvia and bathe him in rays." As he muttered these broken words, the doctor did not for a moment intermit his passes, and from his outstretched hands flashed luminous jets that smote the brow or the heart of his patient, around whom was little by little forming a sort of visible atmosphere, that was phosphorescent like a halo. " That is good, very good," said Dr. Cherbon- neau, applauding his own work. " He is in just the condition I want him. Come, come ; what is it that still resists in that corner ? " he cried after a pause, and as if he were reading through Octavius' brain the dying effort of the individuality about to be destroyed. " What is that rebellious thought, which, driven from the convolutions of the brain, tries to avoid my in- fluence by clinging to the primitive monad, to the central point of life ? I know how to catch and conquer it." To overcome this involuntary revolt, the physician recharged even more powerfully than before the mag- netic battery of his glance, and reached the rebellious thought between the base of the cerebellum and the insertion of the spinal marrow, the most secret sane- 83 AVATAR tuary, the most mysterious tabernacle of the soul. His triumph was complete. Then he prepared himself with majestic solemnity for the incredible experiment he was about to attempt. He put on a linen robe, as if he were a mage ; washed his hands in perfumed water ; drew from various boxes powders with which he made hieratic marks on his cheeks and brow ; wound round his arm the Brahminic cord ; read two or three slokas from the sacred poems, and omitted none of the minute rites recommended by the sannyasi of the caves of Elephanta. Having completed these ceremonies, he opened wide the hot-air registers, so that ere long the room was full of a burning atmosphere that would have made the tigers of the jungle pant, the crust of mud on the rough backs of the buffaloes crack, and the great flower of the aloe explode into bloom. " The two sparks of divine fire which will presently be nude and freed for a few seconds from their mortal envelopes, must not pale or die in our icy air," said the doctor as he looked at the thermometer, which at that moment was up to one hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit. 8^ AVATAR Standing between the two inert bodies, Dr. Bal- thazar Cherbonneau, in his white robes, looked like a priest of one of those sanguinary creeds that cast the bodies of men on the altars of their gods. He re- called the priest of Vitziliputzili, the grim Mexican idol, of which Heinrich Heine speaks in one of his ballads, but his intentions were assuredly more peaceable. He drew near Count Olaf Labinski, who remained motionless, and uttered the ineffable syllable, which he then rapidly proceeded to repeat over Octavius, who was in a sound sleep. The ordinarily eccentric figure of Dr. Cherbonneau was at this moment singu- larly majestic ; the sense of the mighty power at his command ennobled his jumbled features, and had any one seen him performing these rites with sacerdotal gravity, he would not have recognised in him the HoiFmannic physician who challenged, though at the same time he defied, the caricaturist's pencil. Strange things then occurred : Octavius de Saville and Count Olaf Labinski seemed to feel simultaneously the throes of the dying, their faces were greatly altered, a light froth rose to their lips, the pallor of death over- laid their complexion, while two little bluish, trembling points of light sparkled uncertainly above their heads. _ AVATAR In response to a commanding gesture of the doctor's, who seemed to indicate the road they were to follow through the air, the two luminous points moved on, leaving behind them a wake of light, and proceeded to their new homes. The soul of Octavius entered the body of Count Labinski ; that of Count Olaf penetrated into that of Octavius ; the avatar was accomplished. A slight colour rising to the cheek-bones showed that life had re-entered the human clay that had re- mained soulless for a few seconds, and that would have fallen a prey to the Dark Angel but for the physician's power. Dr. Cherbonneau's blue eyes blazed with the exulta- tion of triumph, and he said to himself, as he strode up and down the room : " Let the most famous physi- cians do as much, they who are so proud of being able to repair the human mechanism when it gets out of order. Hippocrates, Galen, Paracelsus, Van Hel- mont, Boerhaave, Rasorl, one and all, the meanest Hindoo fakir crouching on the steps of a pagoda knows a thousand times more than you. What matters the body when one can command the spirit ? " As he ended his peroration, Dr. Cherbonneau leaped for delight, and danced round like the mountains in 86 AVATAR King Solomon's Sir-Hasirim ; indeed, he very nearly fell on his nose, his foot having tripped in the folds of his Brahminical robe. This slight accident recalled him to himself and restored all his calm. " Let me waken my sleepers," said he, after having wiped off the coloured powder marks he had made on his face, and put away his Brahmin dress. Standing in front of the body of Count Labinski, now inhabited by the soul of Octavius, he made the passes necessary to draw him from the state of somnambulism, and at every pass he shook his fingers, heavy with the fluid he drew away. In a few minutes Octavius-Labinski — for so I shall call him for the sake of clearness — sat up, passed his hand over his eyes, and cast around him a look of amazement which was as yet unillumined by the con- sciousness of his new being. When he at last man- aged to perceive things clearly, the first thing he saw was his own body lying on a divan beyond him. He beheld himself, not merely reflected as in a mirror, but actually. He uttered a cry, which did not sound like his own voice and startled him, for the transference of souls having been effected during his magnetic sleep, he had no remembrance of it and experienced strange 87 AVATAR discomfort. His thought, served by different organs, was like a workman who has been given new tools in exchange for those with which he was familiar. His bewildered soul beat with restless wings against the walls of that unknown cranium, and lost itself in the convolutions of the brain, in which still lingered some traces of foreign ideas. "Well," said the doctor, when he had sufficiently- enjoyed the surprise of Octavius-Labinski, " what think you of your new home ? Is your soul comfortable in the body of that handsome cavalier, hetman, hospo- dar, or magnate, the husband of the most beautiful woman in the world ? You do not feel like letting yourself die as you did the first time I saw you in your apartment in the Rue Saint-Lazare, now that the doors of the Labinski mansion stand wide open before you, and that you no longer fear that Prascovia will close your lips with her hand as she did in the Villa Salviatij when you desire to speak to her of your love ! You see that old Balthazar Cherbonneau, with his ape-like face, that he might exchange for any other, were he so minded, has not a few pretty good recipes up his sleeve." " Doctor," replied Octavius-Labinski, " you have the power of a god or of a fiend, at the least." 88 AVATAR " Be not in the least degree alarmed ; there is no devilment in all this, and your eternal salvation is in no wise endangered. I have no intention of making you sign a contract with your blood. What has taken place is the simplest thing possible. The Word that created the light can surely transfer a soul, and if men would only listen to God through time and space, they would do a good deal more, I can tell you." " What amount of gratitude, of devotion, do I not owe you for this priceless service ! " " You owe me nothing at all. I became interested in you, and to an old Lascar like myself, burned by every sun, and steeled by events, to feel an emotion is a rare thing. You have revealed love to me, and you know that we dreamers, who are something of alchemists, something of wizards, and something of philosophers, are all more or less in quest of the abso- lute. But pray rise, move and walk about, and see whether your new skin does not feel tight here and there." Octavius-Labinski obeyed the doctor's directions, and walked round the room a few times. He already felt less strange ; though inhabited by another soul, the Count's body still felt the impulse of its former habits, 8^ AVATAR and the new guest relied upon these physical remem- brances, for it was needful that he should assume the gait, the ways, and the gestures of the body's former owner. "If I had not myself performed but now the trans- fer of your souls," said Dr. Cherbonneau with a laugh, " I could swear nothing out of the way had occurred this evening, and I should take you for the genuine, legitimate, and authentic Lithuanian Count Olaf La- binski, whose ego is still slumbering in yonder chrysalis that you have so contemptuously cast off. But it will soon be midnight ; you had better be off, or Prascovia will scold you and accuse you of preferring baccarat or lansquenet to herself. You must not begin your wedded life with a quarrel ; that would be a bad omen. Meanwhile I shall busy myself awaking your former frame with all the care and attention it de- serves." Perceiving the wisdom of the physician's remarks, Octavius-Labiiiski hastened out. At the foot of the steps were impatiently prancing the Count's splendid bay horses, which had covered the pavement with foam as they champed their bits. At the sound of the young man's steps, a splendid footman in green livery, of 90 AVATAR the lost race of the heyducs, sprang to the carriage steps and let them down noisily. Octavius, who had started mechanically in the direction of his own modest brougham, settled himself in the great, splendid coupe, and told the footman, who passed the word to the coachman : " Home ! " Scarcely was the carriage door shut when the curveting horses started off, while the worthy successor of the Almanzors and Azolans hung on to the broad braided bands with an agility that one would not have expected from so tall a man. To such horses the distance between the Rue du Regard and the Faubourg Saint-Honore is a mere trifle ; they covered it in a few moments, and the coach- man called out in a stentorian voice, " Gate ! " The porter threw back the two huge leaves of the gate ; the carriage passed through, and circling round a great sanded court, stopped with remarkable precision under an awning striped red and white. The court itself, as Octavius-Labinski noted with that rapidity of vision one acquires on certain solemn occasions, was vast, surrounded by symmetrical buildings, and lighted by bronze lamp-posts, the gas jets of which were in glass shades similar to those that formerly were used in the decoration of the Bucentaur. The court had more 91 AVATAR the appearance of belonging to a palace than to a pri- vate mansion ; orange trees in boxes, and worthy of figuring on the terrace at Versailles, were placed at regular intervals along the asphalt border that framed in the central sanded space. The poor transformed lover, as he stepped upon the threshold, had to stop for a moment and to put his hand to his heart to stop its beating. He had indeed the body of Count Labinski, but that only. Every thought the brain had contained had fled with the soul of the former owner ; the dwelling that was henceforth to be his own was unknown to him, and he was not acquainted with the internal arrangements of it. A stair faced him ; he ascended it, trusting to luck, and prepared, if he made a mistake, to ascribe it to absent- mindedness. The well-rubbed steps were dazzlingly white and set off the rich red of the Wilton carpet, held fast by gilded brass rods, that formed a soft way for the feet ; flower-stands filled with exotic flowers stood on every step. A huge lamp traceried and open-worked, and hung from a heavy cord of purple silk, adorned with knots and tufts, sent shimmers of gold upon the walls covered with white stucco, polished like marble, and 92 AVATAR cast floods of light upon a replica, by the sculptor him- self, of one of Canova's most famous groups, " Love embracing Psyche." The landing-place of the only story was paved with mosaics of precious workmanship, and on the walls, suspended by silken cords, were four paintings by Paris Bordone, Bonifazzio, Palma Vecchio, and Paolo Veronese, the pompous architectural style of which harmonised with the magnificence of the stairs. From this landing-place opened a high door, covered with serge set off by gilded nails. Octavius-Labinski pushed it open and found himself in a vast antecham- ber where were dozing a dozen footmen in full livery ; as he entered they rose as if moved by springs, and stood ranged along the walls, impassible as Oriental slaves. He went on into a white and gold drawing-room next to the antechamber. There was no one there. Octavius rang the bell, and a maid appeared. " Can her ladyship receive me ? " " Her ladyship is undressing just now, but she will see your lordship in a moment." 93 ±^±^±i:^^±:ki:-ki!i::k:k^i:i:i:i:iki:& AVATAR i:^':k-:ki::k-ki:±^:k'k^^d!^^^^i:4e4:i:± VII LEFT alone with the body of Octavius de Saville, now inhabited by the soul of Count Olaf Labinski, Dr. Balthazar Cherbonneau set about restoring life to the inert shape. After a few passes, Olaf-de Saville — I must be allowed to conjoin these two names in order to designate the dual nature of the person — emerged like a phantom from the limbo of the deep sleep, or catalepsy rather, which had held him, motionless and rigid, in the corner of the divan. He rose with an automatic motion yet undirected by his will, and staggered under the in- fluence of the last effects of vertigo. Everything was turning around him ; the incarnations of Vishnu were dancing a saraband upon the walls, and the figure of the old physician appeared under the form of the old sannyasi of Elephanta, waving his arms like the wings of a bird and rolling his blue eyes in orbs of brown wrinkles that looked like the frames of goggles. The strange sights he had beheld before falling into the magnetic trance were reacting upon his mind, and he 94 AVATAR was returning but slowly to reality ; he was like a sleeper suddenly awaking from a nightmare, and who still mistakes for spectres his clothes scattered upon the chairs, with a vague resemblance to human shapes, and the shining brass hooks of the curtains illumined by the reflection of the night-light, for the eyes of Cyclops. Gradually the fanciful sight vanished and everything resumed its normal appearance. Dr. Balthazar Cher- bonneau was no longer a Hindoo penitent, but an ordinary doctor of medicine, smiling in the most com- monplace way upon his patient. "Are you satisfied. Count, with the few experiments I have had the pleasure of performing before you ? " he asked in a tone of obsequious humility, in which a trace of irony might have been discerned. " I venture to hope you will not think your evening wasted, and that you will leave me convinced that all that is told of magnetism is not merely lies and trickery, as official science maintains." Olaf-de Saville nodded in assent, and left the room accompanied by Dr. Cherbonneau, who bowed deeply to him at every door. The brougham came up to the entrance, shaving the steps, and the soul of the husband 95 &dbtfe:fc4: d: db^ 4:^^i:4rtif&Asb:lr AAA A A& AVATAR of the Countess Labinski got into it without paying particular attention to the fact that it was neither the Labinsici carriage nor the Labinski livery. The coachman inquired whither he should drive. " Home," replied Olaf-de Saville, vaguely surprised at not recognising the voice of his green-coated foot- man, who usually asked that question in a most pro- nounced Hungarian accent. The brougham in which he found himself was lined with dark blue damask, while his own coupe was lined with buttercup yellow satin. The Count was struck by the difference, while accepting the fact as one does in dreams with customary objects that present themselves under widely different aspects, though they remain recognisable. He also felt himself shorter than usual ; besides, he thought he had been in eveti- ing dress when he went to the physician's, yet now, though he had no recollection of having changed, he was dressed in a light summer coat that had never figured in his wardrobe. His mind suffered from strange discomfort, and his thoughts, so lucid that morning, were difficult to clear up. Attributing this strange condition to the extraordinary things he had beheld that evening, he ceased thinking about it, rested _ AVATAR his head in the corner of the carriage, and let himself float away into a vague reverie, a half-dozing state, which was neither sleep nor waking. The sudden pulling up of the horse and the coach- man's call of " Gate ! " recalled him to himself. He lowered the window, put his head out, and saw by the light of the gas lamp an unknown street and a house which was not his own. " Where the devil are you driving me to, you fool ? " he cried. " This is not the Faubourg Saint- Honore and Labinski House." " Beg your pardon, sir," grumbled the coachman ; " I had mistaken your directions." And he drove off to the place indicated. On the way the transfigured Count asked himself a number of questions to which he could give no sat- isfactory answers. How was it that his carriage had left without him, when he had given orders that it should wait ? How did he happen to be in another man's carriage ? He supposed that a slight touch of fever interfered with the clearness of his perceptions, or that perhaps the thaumaturgist doctor had made him breathe during his sleep, in order to make a deeper impression upon his credulity, a vial of hasheesh or 7 97 *l« •!« via «!• •£« aivJUviv »i» JU >A» A>i>»i»»|»a|» A g j U « | » » i «^ ■!• •a**fe AVATAR other intoxicating drug, the illusions caused by which would be dispelled by a night's sleep. The carriage reached the Labinski mansion, but the porter, on being called, refused to open the gate, saying that there was no reception that evening, that the Count had been home for more than an hour, and that the Countess had retired to her apartments. "Are you drunk or mad, you rascal?" cried Olaf- de Saville, as he sprang at the colossus who stood huge upon the threshold of the half-opened gate, like one of those bronze statues, told of in Arab tales, that pre- vent knights-errant from entering enchanted castles. " It is you, my little man, that are drunk or mad," replied the porter, whose naturally crimson face turned purple with anger. "You scoundrel," roared Olaf-de Saville; "but for my own self-respect — " " You hold your tongue, or I '11 smash you and throw out the pieces on the pavement," returned the giant. "It is of no use to turn nasty with me just because you have drunk one or two bottles of cham- pagne too many." Olaf-de Saville, exasperated, shoved the porter so roughly that he made good his ingress into the court. 98 AVATAR Some of the footmen who had not yet gone to bed hurried up at the sound of the dispute. " I dismiss you, you fool, you scoundrel, you rascal ! I shall not allow you to remain the night. Away with you, or I shall kill you like a mad dog. Do not compel me to shed a low-born lackey's blood." And the Count, dispossessed of his own body, sprang, with bloodshot eyes, foaming lips, and clenched fists, at the huge porter, who, catching in his one hand the two hands of his aggressor, almost crushed them in the grip of his short fingers, muscular and knotty like those of a mediaeval torturer. " Come, keep quiet," said the giant, good-natured at bottom, and who had nothing to dread from his assailant, whom he jerked now and then to force him to behave. " What is the sense of getting into such a state, when one is dressed like a gentleman, and of coming to kick up such a row at night in a respectable house ? Good wine commands respect, and it must have been prime liquor that you got drunk on. That is why I do not break your head for you, and why I shall be satisfied with chucking you into the street, where the watch will pick you up if you keep up your racket. A little cool- ing in the jug will do you no harm." 99 AVATAR " Wretches," cried Olaf-de Labinski ; " is this how you allow this infamous scoundrel to insult your master, the noble Count Labinski ? " The servants hooted unanimously on hearing this name, and a vast, Homeric, irresistible laugh broke from all the braided breasts. " The poor fellow thinks he is Count Labinski ! Ha ! ha ! ho ! ho ! that is a good joke ! " A cold sweat broke out on Olaf-de Saville's face; a sharp thought flashed through his brain like a steel blade, and he felt himself grow cold to the marrow. Had Smarra pressed its knee upon his breast, or was he really alive ? Had his reason disappeared within the sombre sea of magnetism, or was he the plaything of some abominable machination ? None of his lackeys, so trembling, submissive, and humble in his presence, seemed to recognise him. Had his body been changed for him like his clothes and his carriage ? " You may be quite sure you are not Count La- binski," said one of the most insolent in the crowd ; " for look yonder, there he comes himself, attracted by the row you have been making." The porter's prisoner looked to the end of the court and saw standing under the awning a young man of 100 AVATAR slender and elegant stature, with an oval face, black eyes, aquiline nose, and slight mustache, who was no other than himself or his double, modelled by the devil, and so like as utterly to deceive one. The porter released his hands ; the footmen respect- fully drew up against the wall, eyes down, hands by their sides, absolutely motionless, like icoglans when a pasha approaches. They were paying to the phantom the honours they refused to the real Count. Prascovia's husband, bold as a Slav though he was, and there are none bolder, felt indescribable terror at the approach of that Dromio, who, more terrible than his stage compeer, mingled in real life and rendered his twin unrecognisable. His terror was increased by the recollection of a family legend that came back to his memory. Every time a Labinski was about to die, he was warned of the fact by the apparition of a phantom identically like unto him. Among Northern nations, it has always been held that for a man to see his double, even in a dream, is an omen of death, so that the intrepid warrior of the Caucasus, at the sight of this external vision of himself, was filled with invincible superstitious horror, and while he would not have hesitated to plunge his arm into the muzzle lOI AVATAR of a cannon ready to be fired, he drew back from himself. Octavius-Labinski drew near his former body, in which the Count's soul was struggling and shivering with indignation, and said to it in a tone of haughty and icy politeness : — " Sir, cease to lower yourself by disputing with my servants. If you wish to see me, I am at home from twelve to two in the day, and the Countess receives on Thursdays the persons who have had the honour of being presented to her." Having spoken these words slowly and with due accent on every syllable, the sham Count withdrew quietly and the doors closed behind him. The footmen placed in his carriage Olaf-de Saville, who had fainted. When he recovered jiis senses, he was lying on a bed that was not of the shape of his own, in a room in which he could not recollect having ever entered, and by him was a strange servant holding his head and making him breathe ether. " Are you better, sir ? " asked John of the Count, whom he took for his master. " Yes," replied Olaf-de Saville ; " it was but a passing faintness." 102 AVATAR " Shall I go now, sir, or sit up ? " " Do not sit up ; leave me alone. Only, before you go, relight the candles by the mirror." " Will not the bright light keep you from sleeping, sir .? " " Not in the least ; besides, I am not sleepy yet." "I shall not go to bed, sir, and if you happen to need anything, I shall be with you as soon as you ring," said John, inwardly disturbed by the pallor and the altered features of the Count. When John had withdrawn after lighting the candles, the Count sprang to the mirror, and in the deep, clear crystal in which quivered the scintillation of the lights, he saw a young, gentle, sad face, with long black hair, dark blue eyes, pale cheeks, covered with a light downy, silky, brown beard, a head that was not his own, and that looked at him out of the mirror with an air of wonderment. At first he tried to believe that some practical joker had framed a face in the brass and mother- of-pearl inlaid frame of the bevelled mirror; but on passing his hand over the back, he felt only the boards of the wainscotting. There was no one there. 103 AVATAR His hands, which he felt, were thinner, longer, and more veined ; on the ring finger stood out a large gold ring set with aventurine, on which was engraved a coat of arms — a shield fasced gules and argent, and above it a baron's coronet. This ring had never belonged to the Count, whose arms were or, an eagle displayed, beaked and armed of the same, with the pearl coronet on top. He looked through his pockets, and found a note-book containing visiting- cards with the name Octavius de Saville engraved upon them. The laughter of the domestics at his mansion, the apparition of his double, the unknown face substituted for his own reflection in the mirror, might have been, after all, but hallucinations of a diseased brain, but the different clothes, the ring on his finger, were patent, palpable, material proofs which it was impossible to reject. A complete metamorphosis had taken place in him without his being aware of it ; some wizard, un- questionably, a demon, perchance, had robbed him of his form, his rank, his name, his whole individuality, and had left him but his soul without the means of manifesting it. The fantastic stories of Peter Schlemyl and of Saint 104 AVATAR Sylvester's Eve returned to his mind, but the characters in the tales of Lamotte-Fouque and HoiFmann had lost merely, the one his shadow, the other his reflection, and even if the strange lack of a projection enjoyed by every one else gave rise to odd suspicions, no one at least denied that these men w^ere themselves. His condition was far worse. He could not claim his title of Count Labinski under the form in which he was imprisoned. Everybody would take him for an impu- dent impostor or for a madman at the very least. His wife herself would not recognise him in that lying garb. What means had he of proving his identity ? Un- doubtedly there were numberless private circumstances, innumerable secret details unknown to any one else which, were he to recall them to Prascovia, would en- able her to recognise her husband's soul in that disguise, but what would be the value of that single acknowledg- ment, supposing he succeeded in obtaining it, in the face of unanimous opinion to the contrary ? He was really and completely dispossessed of his own self. Then he had another cause of anxiety. Did the meta- morphosis confine itself to an external change in his height and his features, or was he in truth dwelling in another man's body ? In that case, what had become 105 AVATAR of his own ? Had it been thrown into a pit with quick-lime, or had it been appropriated by some bold thief? The double he had seen at the Labinski man- sion might be a spectre, a vision, but it might also be a living being, installed in the frame which the fakir- looking physician, with his infernal skill, had robbed him of. A hideous thought, that stung him like an adder's bite, occurred to him : " That fictitious Count Labinski, made in my likeness by the hands of the fiend, that vampire who now inhabits my mansion, whom my servants obey even against me, may be at this very moment entering with his cloven hoof into that room which I have never entered without feeling the same emotion as on the first night, and Prascovia may be gently smiling at him, and bending with divine blushes her lovely head upon that shoulder of his, branded with the devil's own sign-manual, — believing that that lying larva, that ghoul, that empusa, that hideous child of night and hell is myself! Why should I not run to the mansion, set fire to it, and shout through the flames to Prascovia : " You are being deceived. It is not your beloved Olaf whom you are pressing to your heart ! You are about to commit innocently an abomi- io6 AVATAR nable crime, that my despairing soul will remember even when eternity wearies of turning over its hour- glass ! " The hot blood surged to the Count's brain; he uttered inarticulate cries of rage ; he bit his fists and stormed round the room like a wild beast. Madness had nearly destroyed the dim self-consciousness he had left. He ran to Octavius' dressing-table, filled a basin with water, plunged his head into it and drew it out steaming. He recovered his coolness, and said to himself that the days of witchcraft and magic were past ; that death alone can part the body and the soul ; that it was im- possible to kidnap in such a fashion, in the very centre of Paris, a Polish Count with a millionaire's balance at Rothschild's ; one who was allied to the greatest houses, the beloved husband of a fashionable lady, a nobleman who wore the star of the first class of the order of Saint Andrew ; that the whole business was no doubt a practi- cal joke in very bad taste played upon him by Dr. Bal- thazar Cherbonneau, which could be explained in the most natural way possible, like the terrors in Anne RadclifFe's novels. As he was nearly dead of fatigue, he threw himself 107 AVATAR down on Octavius' bed and slept a heavy, deep, death- like sleep, from which he had not aroused when John, thinking his master must have awakened, came in with the letters and morning papers. io8 AVATAR VIII THE Count opened his eyes and cast a compre- hensive glance around him. He saw a comfortable, though simple bedroom ; a spotted carpet, imitating a leopard's skin, covered the floor ; tapestry curtains, just drawn aside by John, hung by the windows and concealed the doors ; the walls were hung with plain velvety green paper in imitation of cloth, a clock, formed of a single block of black mar- ble, with a platinum dial, surmounted by an oxidised silver reduction by Barbedienne of the statuette of Diana of Gabies, and flanked by two antique cups, also of silver, adorned the mantel of the white, blue- veined, marble chimneypiece. The Venetian mirror in which the Count had discovered the evening before that he no longer owned his customary face, and the portrait of an old woman, by Flandrin, — no doubt that of Octavius' mother, — were the only ornaments of the somewhat gloomy and sober room. A divan, an easy-chair by the chimney, a desk, covered with papers and books, furnished it comfortably, but 109 AVATAR in no wise recalled the splendours of the Labinski residence. " Are you going to rise, sir ? " said John, in the soft voice he had studied to acquire during the time Octavius had been ill, and presenting to the Count the coloured shirt, the flannel trousers, and the Algerian gandoura which his master was in the habit of wearing in the morning. Although the Count disliked wearing a stranger's clothes, he had to accept those brought in by the servant, if he did not want to go nude ; so he stepped down upon the silky black bear-robe placed by the bedside. He dressed quickly, and John, who apparently had not the least doubt of the identity of the fictitious Octavius de Saville whom he was helping to dress, said to him : — " At what time will you have breakfast, sir .? " "At the usual time," replied the Count, who, in order to be free to take such steps as he might determine upon for the recovery of his individuality, had resolved to accept, as far as outward seeming went, his incom- prehensible metamorphosis. The servant withdrew, and Olaf-de Saville opened the two letters that had been brought with the papers, no AVATAR hoping to learn something from them. The first con- tained friendly reproofs, and complained of a causeless break in pleasant comradeship. It was signed with a name unknown to the Count. The second was from Octavius' lawyer and urged him to draw the amount of a quarter's income, long since paid in, or to give instructions, at least, as to the manner in which he desired the sum, at present lying useless, to be invested. " It would seem," said the Count to himself, " that the Octavius de Saville whose body I am inhabiting, very much against my will, does really exist. He is no mere creation of the fancy ; he has rooms, friends, a lawyer, an income, all that constitutes the existence and social position of a gentleman. And yet I am sure that I am Count Labinski." But a single glance at the mirror sufficed to convince him that no one else would share that belief. In the bright light of day, as in the less brilliant light of the candles, the reflection given back was one and the same. At this moment John entered, announcing Mr. Alfred Humbert, who came into the room with the familiarity of an old friend, without waiting until the man had returned with his master's answer. Ill AVATAR " Good-morning," said the new-comer, a handsome young fellow with a frank, cordial look. " What are you doing with yourself? Are you dead or alive? you go nowhere and you leave my letters unanswered. I ought really to cut you, but I own that in matters of friendship I have no self-love, so I have come to inquire after you ; for, devil take it, a man cannot let his old school chum die of melancholy in rooms as gloomy as Charles V's cell in the Yuste monastery. " You fancy you are ill, but you are merely bored ; so I mean to compel you to have a change, and I am going to take you, whether you will or not, to a jolly breakfast given by Gustave Raimbaud before he abdi- cates the freedom of bachelorhood." And while saying this in a tone half of annoyance, half of amusement, he vigorously shook, in English fashion, the hand of the Count. " Excuse me," replied the Count, entering into the spirit of his part, " I am worse to-day than usual, and do not feel up to the breakfast. I should only cast a damper on the company and be in the way." " Well, I must say you do look pale and tired out. So be it, then ; and let us look forward to another opportunity. I must be off, for I am three dozen 112 AVATAR green oysters and one bottle of Sauterne late," said Alfred Humbert as he walked to the door. " Raimbaud will be sorry not to see you." The visit increased the Count's wretchedness. John took him for his master, and Alfred for his friend. But one last test had to be gone through with. The door opened, and a lady, whose hair was streaked with silver, entered. She was strikingly like the portrait hanging on the wall. She sat down on the divan, and said to the Count : — " How are you to-day, my poor Octavius ? John told me you had come home last night in an alarming state of weakness. Do take care of yourself, my dear son, for you know how much I love you, in spite of the grief caused me by that inexplicable sadness the secret of which you will not confide to me." "Do not fear, mother," replied Olaf de Saville. "It is nothing, and I feel much better to-day." Madame de Saville, reassured, rose and went out, desiring not to trouble her son, whose dislike to be dis- turbed in his solitude by a prolonged call she was aware of. " I am unquestionably Octavius de Saville," cried the Count when the old lady had gone. " His mother 8 X13 AVATAR recognises me and does not suspect that there is another soul in her son's body. I am perhaps for ever enclosed in this frame. A strange prison for the spirit is another man's body ! Yet it is hard to give up being Count Olaf Labinski; to lose my rank, my wife, my for- tune, and to be condemned to a pitiful middle-class existence. But I swear that I shall rid myself of that Dejanira's robe that clings to my ego, and it shall be in tatters that I shall return it to its former owner. Suppose I were to go back to my home ? No ! I had better not ; I should only make a scene, and the porter would throw me out, for I am weak as a child in that invalid's dressing-gown. But come, let me look around a little, for I must learn something of the life of that Octavius de Saville, whom I have now become." Whereupon he tried to open the note-book, the spring of which he happened to touch, and from the pockets he drew first a number of papers, covered with a close, small handwriting, and next a square of vellum. On this square, an unskilful but cor- rect hand had traced, with the memory of the heart and with a success not always attained even by great artists, a pencil portrait of Countess Prascovia 114 AVATAR Labinski, which it was impossible not to recognise at a glance. The Count was thunderstruck at this discovery. His surprise was followed by a furious rush of jealousy. How did the Countess' portrait happen to be in that unknown young man's pocket-book ? Whence did it come ? Who had drawn it ? Who had given it to him ? Could his Prascovia, religiously worshipped by him, have descended from her heaven of love to in- dulge in an intrigue ? By what infernal trick did he, the husband, come to be incarnated in the body of the lover of the woman he had hitherto believed so pure ? He had been the husband and now he was to be the lover ! That was a sarcastic metamorphosis with a vengeance ; a change to drive a man mad. He would be in a position to fool himself; to be at once the betrayer and the betrayed ! These thoughts stormed tumultuously through his brain. He felt his reason leaving him, and summoned up all his strength of will to recover his self-command. Without heeding John, who came to inform him that breakfast was served, he continued his feverish exami- nation of the mysterious pocket-book. The papers formed a sort of psychological journal, "5 AVATAR left ofF and resumed at different times. Here are a few extracts, which the Count perused with anxious curiosity : — " Never will she love me ; never, never ! I have read in her eyes that are so sweet those words than which Dante could find none more cruel for the inscrip- tion on the brazen gates of his City of Sorrows : ' All hope abandon.' What have I done to God that I should be damned alive ? To-morrow, and to-morrow, it will be the same ! The planets may interlace their orbits, the stars in conjunction may form knots, but my fate will remain unchanged. With a single word, she has dispelled my dream ; with one gesture she has broken the wings of my fancy. The fabulous combi- nations of impossibilities hold no chances for me ; the numbers, were they cast a million times in the wheel of fortune, would not come out to my advantage. There is no winning number for me ! " " Unfortunate wretch that I am ! I know that Para- dise is closed to me, and yet I remain foolishly seated on the threshold, my back against the gate, which will never open; and I weep in silence, steadily, without an effort, as if mine eyes were springs of living waters. I have not the courage to arise and to go down into ^76 AVATAR the mighty desert or to enter into the tumultuous Babel of men." " Sometimes, at night, when I cannot sleep, I think of Prascovia. When I do sleep, it is of her I dream. Oh ! how beautiful she was that day in the garden of the Villa Salviati in Florence ! Her white dress and her black ribbons, at once lovely and funereal! The white for her, the black for me ! At times the ribbons, fluttering in the breeze, formed a cross upon that back- ground of dazzling whiteness. An invisible spirit sang the Requiem Mass of my heart." " Were some incredible catastrophe to place on my brow the crown of an Emperor or a Caliph, were the earth to pour out for me the gold of its veins, were I free to pillage at will the sparkling gems of Golconda and Vishapur, were Byron's lyre to sound under my hand, were the most perfect masterpieces of antiquity and of modern art to lend me their beauties, were I to discover a new world, I should be no better ofF for all that ! " " What is fate ? I meant to go to Constantinople ; then I should not have met her ; I remained in Florence, I saw her and I am dying." " I would have killed myself, but that she breathes 117 *s* •£*«£« *£* •s* •»* •&* *4* *s* *" #4* *s* •=*«£* •£**=!• •9* •a* *B»^g*^l* *{»• yks*is AVATAR the air in which I live, and mayhap my eager lips will drink in — oh, bliss ineffable ! — a faint breath of her balmy breath. Besides, my guilty soul would have been exiled to some distant planet, and I should have lost the chance of being loved by her in another life. Dread thought ! I might have been separated from her yonder : she in heaven and I in hell ! " " Why should I have fallen in love with the one and only woman who cannot feel love for me ? Others, said to be beautiful, and who were free, have smiled on me with their tenderest smile and seemed to invite a confession that was never made. Oh ! happy is he, her husband ! What sublime anterior life did he lead that God has rewarded him with the gift of that glorious love ? " There was no need of reading more. The sus- picions that had arisen in the Count's mind at the sight of the portrait, had vanished at the perusal of the first few lines of these sad confidences. He under- stood that the beloved face, drawn again and again, had been caressed, far from the model, with the in- defatigable patience of unrequited love ; that it was the Madonna of a little mystic chapel, before which knelt hopeless adoration. TTs AVATAR " But suppose this Octavius entered into a pact with the devil to rob me of my body, and to surprise Prascovia's love under my disguise ! " The absurdity of such a notion, in the nineteenth century, quickly caused the Count to put it aside, though it caused him considerable distress. Smiling at his own credulity, he ate the breakfast, now cold, served by John, dressed, and called for his carriage. As soon as it was brought round, he had himself driven to Dr. Balthazar Cherbonneau's ; he traversed the rooms he had entered the night before under the name of Count Olaf Labinski, and whence he had gone out called Octavius de Saville by every one. The doctor was seated, as usual, on the divan at the end of the farthermost room, his foot in his hand, and apparently sunk in deep meditation. At the sound of the Count's steps he looked up. " Ah ! it is you, my dear Octavius. I was just coming round to see you, but it is a good sign when the patient comes himself to see his doctor." " Octavius again," said the Count. " It will drive me mad ! " Then, crossing his arms, he stood in front of the physician, and looking at him fixedly and fiercely, said : 119 dbdb i: i: i: ^ db :^ ir ^ ^i;^:^^^ ^^db^i;^ !& tirdir AVATAR " You know very well. Dr. Balthazar Cherbonneau, that I am not Octavius, but Count Olaf Labinski ; for you yourself, last night, in this very place, robbed me of my body by your outlandish witchcraft." On hearing these words the doctor broke out into a loud guffaw, threw himself back on his cushions, and held his sides with his hands to moderate his laughter. " Repress, sir, that most untimely mirth, which you may have cause to repent. I am speaking seriously." " So much the worse ; that shows that the anaesthesia and the hypochondria for which I am treating you are turning to dementia. I shall have to change the treatment." " I do not know, you physician of Satan, why I do not strangle you with my own hands," roared the Count, striding towards Cherbonneau. The physician smiled at the Count's threat, and touched him with a small steel wand. Olaf-de Saville felt a terrible shock and thought his arm was broken. " We have ways of quieting patients when they grow troublesome," said he, at the same time casting upon him the look, cold as an ice-water douche, that 120 AVATAR tames maniacs and compels lions to crawl on their bellies. " Go home, take a bath, and your excitement will pass away." Olaf-de Saville, stunned by the shock, left the doctor's place, more uncertain than ever and more troubled than before. He had himself driven to Passy, to consult Dr. B . " I am," he said to the famous physician, " a prey to a strange hallucination. When I look at myself in the glass, my face does not appear to me with its usual features ; the forms of the objects around me are changed ; I recognise neither the walls nor the fur- niture of my room. I seem to be another person than myself," " Under what form do you see yourself ? " asked the physician. " The error may be due to the eyesight or to the brain." " I see myself with black hair, dark blue eyes, and a pale face with a beard." " Your description in your passport could not be more accurate. You are suffering neither from in- tellectual hallucination nor from disease of the sight. You are, as a matter of fact, such as you describe yourself." 121 AVATAR " But that is not so ; naturally I have fair hair, dark eyes, tanned complexion, and a sharp-pointed mustache." " Now," answered the physician, " we are coming upon a slight affection of the intellectual faculties." " Yet, doctor, I am not mad ! " " No doubt ; it is only those who are in full pos- session of their senses who call upon me. Fatigue, or excess of study or of pleasure is the cause of the disturbance. You are mistaken ; the vision itself is the reality, and the notion is the fancy. Instead of being a fair-haired man who thinks himself dark, you are a dark-haired man who thinks himself fair." " I am nevertheless sure that I am Count Olaf Labinski ; yet, since yesterday, every one calls me Octavius de Saville." "Just what I was telling you," answered the phy- sician ; " you are Mr. de Saville and you fancy you are Count Labinski, whom I remember seeing and who is, as you say, fair. That quite explains how it is you see another face than yours in the glass. That face, which is your own, does not correspond with your inward belief and it causes you surprise. Pray note that every one calls you Mr. de Saville, and consequently does not share your belief. Corne and 122 AVATAR spend a fortnight here ; bathing, resting, and walks under the trees will soon overcome your unfortunate delusion." The Count bowed and promised to return. He knew not what to believe. He returned to the apartment in the Rue Saint-Lazare, and by chance caught sight of the Countess' invitation which Octa- vius had shown to Dr. Cherbonneau. " With that talisman," he cried, " I can see her to-morroW ! " 123 4ri:4r4:*4:ir*i::Sr**:lr**!lj*d:AA*!fc!ir& AVATAR ir:&i; 4::!: 4: 4.4. 4:4.4.^4.4.4.^4.4.4.^4.4.4.^ IX WHEN the footmen had borne to his carriage the true Count Labinski, driven from his earthly Paradise by the sham guardian angel standing on its -threshold, the metamorphosed Octavius re-entered the small white and gold drawing-room to await the Countess' pleasure. As he leaned against the white marble mantel, the hearth of which was filled with flowers, he saw him- self reflected in the mirror symmetrically placed upon a pier table with carved and gilded feet. Although he was aware of the secret of his metamorphosis, or, to speak more accurately, of his transposition, he found it difiicult to believe that that image, so different from his own, was the double of his figure, and he could not take his eyes off the phantom which, nevertheless, was himself. He looked at himself and saw another man. Involuntarily he turned to see whether Count Olaf was not leaning near him on the shelf of the mantel and whether it was not his reflec- tion he saw in the mirror. He was quite alone, 124 AVATAR however, and Dr Cherbonneau had performed his work conscientiously. In a few moments Octavius-Labinski ceased to think of the wonderful avatar by which his soul had passed into the body of Prascovia's husband, and his thoughts turned into a channel more suitable to his circum- stances. An incredible event, which the most fan- tastic hope would not have ventured to dream of, even in delirium, had happened ! He was about to find himself in the presence of the beauty he worshipped, and she would not repel him ! The one and only com- bination which could conciliate his happiness and the Countess' immaculate virtue had been brought about ! At this supreme moment, he suffered in his soul dreadful anxiety and anguish. The timidity of true love made him faint as though that soul still dwelt in the rejected form of Octavius de Saville. The maid's entrance cut short the contention of his emotions. As she drew near he could not repress a nervous start, and his blood rushed back to his heart as the girl said to him : — " Her ladyship is ready to see your lordship." Octavius-Labinski followed the maid, for he was not acquainted with the interior arrangement of the man- T25 •I* *4* *4« •!• «jt» vA* vl**^ •^■•A>*^«i»A^