a Fe À, rHÈ & : es ene, LR SNe Sick OS oat CE» a en Der SG aS | CN VAE +. ee a PU. } 4 anse dein: ans » p> ASE Sar ah se a À es } J, 3.6) € | on ae (se ase cot OX = | 5) | “ES CAS S vw + = 7 — —. | ; 4 aile \ BOYS GOGO dr) Net LEONE AE tee ere otre sole ()s | ‘ / | | (EF D EX «3 x} £ > : , | 4 a >9 € st Neo) anse) SIO one SEO VS BRIAR ETO ) 4 L161—H41 University of Illinois Library oO? 3 © peed oO Se, 4, Oo oF E [ani + un © = S a = Ww © on G ei > eh o a re eB) he © CP © À w © S © A © © Kes! = ee re c he a YY Oo aa ( \=t eX) ae GS | | re > | À > + + i à \ arte) parte Vo An CE THE DIABOLIQUES a ey, sa 5, £a ET, £a ay ry tS, a 5, a ET, (x tS, sa tS, sa 25, fy ES, an THE 9 BLUE JADE & 8 LIBRARY #8 THE WOOINGS OF JEZEBEL PETTYFER Haldane Mac Fall THE LIFE OF HENRI BRULARD Henry Beyle-Stendhal x TWILIGHT OF THE GODS x Richard Garnett So THE VALLEY OF KINGS Se sa Marmaduke Pickthall GX K THE DIABOLIQUES x Jules Barbey d’ Aurevilly OTHER TITLES IN PREPARATION eh er) THE DIABOLIQUES x fod rack Translated from the French, with an et) introduction, by Ernest Boyd ce, AND AN ESSAY BY SIR EDMUND GOSSE eh) CL) 4 CH $532 + NEW YORK, ALFRED A. KNOPF 1925 an (ss) an) GE br) (9) Ga, er) GE) Gr. CH RENE COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. * PUBLISHED, MARCH, 1925 ° PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 1 ay a / Vv LE é $ \ FRA ; =) pd mi i on, & oo ¥ = = € + Y "er À ame BS os eed hea w/a D) h pe & NU BS PO es aS A ee ur tu À V7 À ee CONTENTS Weed INTRODUCTION by Ernest Boyd JULES BARBEY D’AUREVILLY by Sir Edmund Gosse THE CRIMSON CURTAIN THE GREATEST LOVE OF DON JUAN HAPPINESS IN CRIME BENEATH THE CARDS OF A GAME OF WHIST — AT A DINNER OF ATHEISTS | A WOMAN’S REVENGE Vii Xill 51 77 127 181 239 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2021 with funding from University of Illinois Uroana-Champaign https ://archive.org/details/diaboliquesOObarb INTRODUCTION BY ERNEST BOYD Juzes AmepEe Barsey p’AuREVILLY was born at Saint-Sauveur- le-vicomte, in that Norman peninsula of La Manche whose claim upon the attention of the modern world lies rather in the fact that it serves as a background for the peculiar beauties of Cherbourg. That sonorous string of vocables appears in somewhat truncated form in the parish register, which says: “On Wednesday, this second day of November, 1808, Julle-Amédez Barbey, born yesterday, the legitimate offspring of Monsieur André-Marie- Théophile Barbey and Dame Ernestine-Eulalie-Théose Ango, his wife, was baptised by M. Dubost,” who did not, as the record shows, foresee that this infant would find Barbey inadequate until, in his twenty-fifth year, he added the d’Aurevilly title which one of his uncles had borne, although by this time the lands of Aureville had passed out of the possession of the family. How- ever, when Barbey d’Aurevilly died in Paris, at the age of eighty- one, that genealogical inexactitude was the least of the legends connected with this almost mythological figure. During his long life, which actually embraced in its span the First Empire, the Restoration of the Bourbons, Louis Philippe, the Second Republic, the Second Empire, and the Third Republic, Barbey d’Aurevilly produced a very considerable amount of literature; forty-one volumes of poetry, fiction, criticism and biography which, with posthumous publications amounting to nearly half as many again, brings the complete bibliography of his writings to the total of sixty-three volumes. His verse is of little importance, but as a critic he presents a phenomenon of some interest. He was the rival and adversary of Sainte-Beuve, vii viil INTRODUCTION and during the same years both men necessarily commented upon the same publications as they appeared. As the one was the antithesis of the other, the divergence of their views makes comparison between them rather amusing for those interested in literary history. Barbey d’Aurevilly is impetuous, extrava- gant, impressionistic and inconsistent. His opponent was subtle, malicious, learned and authoritative. D’Aurevilly called Victor Hugo “an imbecile of genius”; the salon of Louise Colet was an “academic oyster bed”; Corneille was a “hydrocephalic hunch- back,” and the activities of George Sand were compared to those of a mother stork bringing innumerable little adulteries into the home. He had no sense of logic, consistency or proportion, and reviled the same authors for the same works which he had al- ready praised. His own stories were anathema to all moralists, and blasphemous in the eyes of good, Catholics, but he never ceased to declare himself a militant and pious child of the Church, and was loud in his denunciations of the immorality of all writers whom he did not like, from the author of Manon Lescaut to Elle et lui. Yet, to his credit stands his immediate appreciation of Baudelaire, Becque, Huysmans, Mendès, Bourget and Richepin, when he was often alone in his recognition of their potentialities. The qualities which still lend a flavor to his criticism, however wrong-headed,—his mastery of striking epithet, his superb courage and imagination—find their supreme expression in his fiction. After writing, at the age of sixteen, an Ode to the Heroes of Thermopylae, inspired by the Greek war of independence, and dedicated to Casimir Delavigne, he began his literary career proper, in 1834, with his first book of fiction, Amaïdée, which was not published until after his death, in 1890. To the same period belongs the story Germaine, written in 1835, but published forty-nine years later under the title of Ce qui ne meurt pas, which is known to English-speaking readers in the translation, “What Never Dies,” attributed to Oscar Wilde. After two books of minor merit, there began to appear those works upon which he ERNEST BOYD 1X established the fame that slowly accumulated during his life- time: Une vieille maitresse, L’Ensorcelée, Le Chevalier des Touches, Un prétre marié, Les diaboliques, and Une histoire sans nom, which happens to have been his first book to appear in English, when Edgar Saltus published 4 Story without a Name, in 1891. The trait common to all these stories, and the characteristic mark of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s peculiar talent, is their Satanic mysticism, their preoccupation with what is diabolical, in the literal and original sense of that word. The title, Les diaboliques, describes not only the six women of this book, but the central figures in all the others, for all Barbey’s characters are pos- sessed by the devil. In L’ensorcelée, the Abbé Croix-Jugan, his face seared by the pistol shot with which he tried to commit suicide, looked “like a demon in priestly garb, who came to defy God in His own Church, in the shadow of the crucifix.” He was shot at the altar by a jealous husband, and his spectre haunts the church of Blanchelande at midnight, when the clock always strikes nine (the hour at which the mass was interrupted), try- ing to celebrate a phantom mass to the end. It is significant that this same volume contained Le dessous de cartes d’une partie de whist, which was included in Les diaboliques, twenty years later, and which made “the dowagers cry out against the corruption of their daughters” and the author’s “devilish writings.” La vieille maitresse, which is the other novel belonging to the period when Barbey’s Catholicism was most intransigeant, is as Satanic as any of the works which followed his break with the pious friend of his youth and his publisher, Trébutien, who acted as a check upon Barbey’s instinctive Romantic æstheticism. That element warred incessantly with his Christian moralism, but neither Trébutien nor any other orthodox believer could reconcile d’Aurevilly’s stern theories with his immoral practice. La Vellini was “a feminine trilogy, composed of woman, demon and animal,” and even this most Balzacian of his novels was never accepted, as Barbey wished La Vieille maitresse to be accepted, as a work x INTRODUCTION of lofty Catholic morality. So much the worse, said he, for the “bloodless of good taste,” which became his favourite expression of contempt. The Chevalier des Touches, as a layman, is lacking in that flavour of sacrilege and blasphemy in which Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Catholic soul found its shuddering delight, but he is an enigmatic, cruel, androgynous figure, of the authentic diabolonian lineage. The Abbé Sombreval in Un prétre marié is the perfect devil’s disciple, this priest who has broken his vows, and whose daughter has the mark of the cross upon her forehead, who loves her to a point at which no crime nor blasphemy can stop him, but who loses her to God and ends by disinterring her corpse and disap- pearing for ever from mortal sight by jumping into a pond with the girl clasped in his arms. No trace of them is ever found. His reverend brother in evil is the Capuchin father Riculf in Une histoire sans nom, whose mission to the little village in the Cevennes includes the rape of Lasthénie de Ferjol while she is lying in a somnambulistic sleep on the staircase, with mysterious consequences which are explained only after the broken-hearted girl is dead. Léon Bloy, in many ways the unique successor to Barbey’s disquieting tradition of Catholicism in French literature, declared that Un prétre marié was “the only Christian novel which a human being could read,” but the Archbishop of Paris ordered every copy of it to be destroyed. Like Jules Lemaitre, that prelate apparently thought that there was “nothing less Christian than the Catholicism of M. d’Aurevilly. It looks like the feather in a musketeer’s cap. . . . M. d’Aurevilly wears his God in his hat.” The damned have an irresistible attraction for him. “He cannot admit that they could ever be flat-footed or poor devils . . . Almost all the heroes of the novels written by this Christian are atheists, and atheists of genius—with tender hearts. He regards them with a terror full of secret tenderness. He is deliciously fascinated by the devil.” Jules Lemaitre, it is clear, was not very sympathetic to Barbey, and saw the ludicrous rather than the weirdly imaginative side ERNEST BOYD xi of him. Sadistic Catholicism had no attraction for the French critic, either in his sceptical youth, when he wrote his Contem- porains, or in the later period of his patriotic and right-thinking royalism, although never was there a more vociferous monarchist, aristocrat and champion of law and order than Barbey d’Aurevilly. Yet, one will search in vain for his name even in a footnote to any of the standard histories of French literature by Brunetière, Faguet, Doumic, and Lanson—not to mention their imitators and echoes in America and England. George Saintsbury and Edmund Gosse have rushed in where the Professors Nitze and Dargan and the rest fear to tread. But appreciation of Barbey d’Aurevilly has been restricted to the “happy few” of Stendhal, who was with Byron and Balzac the master of the author of Les diaboliques. These three are a strange but happy combina- tion, the more so perhaps because Barbey, with characteristic perversity, realized without disapprobation the incest motive in Byron’s life, and actually related a complaisant story of the same kind, founded upon historical fact, in Une page d'histoire, his last work of narrative prose, but denounced Edgar Allan Poe, whose power he recognized, as a reprehensible influence! His style has been described as “brutal and exquisite, violent and delicate, bitter and sweet. It is like a witches’ brew com- posed of flowers and serpents, tigers’ blood and honey,”—a com- pliment decidedly in his own style. Readers of The Pleasant Memoirs of the Marquis of Bradomin will find in Les diaboliques the source of Ramon del Valle-Inclan’s inspiration, for Barbey d’Aurevilly, like the Marquis, was “ugly, Catholic and senti- mental.” The story of The Crimson Curtain is in essence the fourth Sonata of the Memoirs, and the Spanish novelist’s first. book was palpably patterned on Les diaboliques. Femeninas was also a series of six studies of women, with La Nifia Chole so typical a figure out of Barbey d’Aurevilly that the stories were later republished as Historias perversas, and served in part to make the Sonata of Summer in the Memoirs, which is, in turn, essentially a work after Barbey’s own heart, in its mixture of Xil INTRODUCTION perversity, romanticism, blasphemy and sentimentality. Ramon del Valle-Inclan learned also from his French predecessor the value of creating a personal legend and dressing one’s part in literature. Barbey d’Aurevilly, as became a dandy of 1840, who had written a book on Beau Brummel and dandyisme, preserved to the end of his life the corset and the costume of the period. Eye-witnesses report that he looked like Mesnilgrand, the hero of Un diner d’athées. He wore what he himself would call “a love of a frock coat,” with flowing skirts and broad lapels. His waistcoat was of velvet or black cashmere, and his white cravat had the tint of old ivory, dotted with imperceptible little hand-embroidered stars. He wore lace cuffs fastened with diamond studs, and plum-coloured trousers with mauve tints, strapped under his boots. His long hair, beneath a huge wideawake hat, was dyed, and, as his nails were long, they were usually black, because he would run his fingers wildly through his mane. Such was the figure whom Anatole France remembered when, as a child of nine, he went out with his grandmother, who pointed out the gentleman with the hat whose brim was of crimson velvet, and who slapped his tight, gold braided trousers with his riding-whip. It was the same figure upon whom France and Paul Bourget used to call later on, when he lived in his bare little room in the Rue Rousselet, concealing his poverty with his accustomed magnificence: “T have sent my furniture and my tapestries to my estate in the country.” He was one of Anatole France’s earliest memories and one of the most enduring, and so he will be for those who once submit to his violent enchantment. Who could forget the man who said to Baudelaire: “I have always put my passions above my convictions”? It would be difficult to find a better summary of Barbey d’Aurevilly, the man and his work. ature JULES BARBEY D’AUREVILLY * BY SIR EDMUND GOSSE Txose who can endure an excursion into the backwaters of lit- erature may contemplate, neither too seriously nor too lengthily, the career and writings of Barbey d’Aurevilly. Very obscure in his youth, he lived so long, and preserved his force so consistently, that in his old age he became, if not quite a celebrity, most cer- tainly a notoriety. At the close of his life—he reached his eighty- first year—he was still to be seen walking the streets or haunting the churches of Paris, his long, sparse hair flying in the wind, his fierce eyes flashing about him, his hat poised on the side of his head, his famous lace frills turned back over the cuff of his coat, his attitude always erect, defiant, and formidable. Down to the winter of 1888 he preserved the dandy dress of 1840, and never appeared but as M. de Pontmartin has described him, in black satih trousers, which fitted his old legs like a glove, in a flapping, brigand wide-awake, in a velvet waistcoat, which revealed diamond studs and a lace cravat, and in a wonderful shirt that covered the most artful pair of stays. In every action, in every glance, he seemed to be defying the natural decay of years, and to be forcing old age to forget him by dint of spirited and ceaseless self- assertion. He was himself the prototype of all the Brassards and Misnilgrands of his stories, the dandy of dandies, the mum- mied and immortal beau. His intellectual condition was not unlike his physical one. He was a survival—of the most persistent. ‘The last, by far the last, of the Romantiques of 1835, Barbey d’Aurevilly lived on into an * Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Messrs. Charles Scribners’ Sons, from French Profiles, xiii XIV JULES BARBEY D’AUREVILLY age wholly given over to other aims and ambitions, without changing his own ideals by an iota. He was to the great man who began the revival, to figures like Alfred de Vigny, as Shirley was to the early Elizabethans. He continued the old tradition, without resigning a single habit or prejudice, until his mind was not a whit less old-fashioned than his garments. Victor Hugo, who hated him, is said to have dedicated an unpublished verse to his portrait: “Barbey d’Aurevilly, formidable imbécile.” But imbécile was not at all the right word. He was absurd; he was outrageous; he had, perhaps, by dint of resisting the de- crepitude of his natural powers, become a little crazy. But im- becility is the very last word to use of this mutinous, dogged, implacable old pirate of letters. Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly was born near Valognes (the “V i which figures in several of his stories) on the 2nd of November, 1808. He liked to represent himself as a scion of the bluest no- bility of Normandy, and he communicated to the makers of dic- tionaries the fact that the name of his direct ancestor is engraved on the tomb of William the Conqueror. But some have said that the names of his father and mother were never known, and others (poor d’Aurevilly!) have set him down as the son of a butcher in the village of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte. While yet a school-boy, in 1825, he published an elegy Aux héros des Thermopyles, and dedicated it to Casimir Delavigne. He was at college with Maurice de Guérin, and quite early he became personally acquainted with Chateaubriand. His youth seems to be wrapped up in mystery; according to one of the best-informed of his biographers, he vanished in 1831, and was not heard of again until 1851. ‘To these twenty years of alleged disappearance, one or two remarkable books of his are, however, ascribed. So characteristic a novel as L'Amour Impossible saw the light in 1841, and it appears that what is perhaps the most character- istic of all his writings, Du Dandyisme et de Georges Brummell, SIR EDMUND GOSSE XV was written as early as 1842. In 1845 a very small edition of it was printed by an admirer of the name of Trebutien, to whose affection d’Aurevilly seems to have owed his very existence. It is strange that so little is distinctly known about a man who, late in life, attracted much curiosity and attention. He was a con- summate romancer, and he liked to hint that he was engaged during early life in intrigues of a corsair description. The truth seems to be that he lived, in great obscurity, in the neighbour- hood of Caen, probably by the aid of journalism. Of all the productions of his youth, the only one which can now be met with is the prose poem of Amaidée, written, I sup- pose, about 1835; this was published by M. Paul Bourget as a curiosity immediately after Barbey d’Aurevilly’s death. Judged as a story, Amaidée is puerile; it describes how to a certain poet, called Somegod, who dwelt on a lonely cliff, there came a young man altogether wise and stately named Altai, and a frail daughter of passion, who gives her name to the book. These three per- sonages converse in magnificent language, and, the visitors pres- ently departing, the volume closes. But an interest attaches to the fact that in Somegod (Quelque Dieu!) the author was paint- ing a portrait of Maurice de Guérin, while the majestic Altai is himself. The conception of this book is Ossianic; but the style is often singularly beautiful, with a marmoreal splendour founded on a study of Chateaubriand and, perhaps, of Goethe, and not without relation to that of Guérin himself. The earliest surviving production of d’Aurevilly, if we except Amaidée, is L’Amour Impossible, a novel published with the object of correcting the effects of the poisonous Lélia of George Sand. Already, in the crude book, we see something of the Barbey d’Aurevilly of the future, the Dandy-Paladin, the Catholic Sensualist or Diavolist, the author of the few poor thoughts and the sonorous, paroxysmal, abundant style. I forget whether it is here or in a slightly later novel that, in hastily turning the pages, I detect the sentiment, “Our forefathers were wise to cut the throats of the Huguenots, and very stupid not to burn Luther.” XVI JULES BARBEY D’AUREVILLY The late Master of Balliol is said to have asked a reactionary undergraduate: “What, sir! would you burn, would you burn!” If he had put the question to Barbey d’Aurevilly, the scented hand would have been laid on the cambric bosom, and the answer would have been: “Certainly I should.” In the midst of the infidel society and literature of the Second Empire, d’Aurevilly persisted in the most noisy profession of his entire loyalty to Rome, but his methods of proclaiming his attachment were so violent and outrageous that the Church showed no gratitude to her volunteer defender. This was a source of much bitterness and recrimination, but it is difficult to see how the author of Le Prétre Marié (1864) and Une Histoire sans Nom (1882) could expect pious Catholics to smile on his very peculiar treatment of eccle- siastical life. Barbey d’Aurevilly undertook to continue the work of Chateau- briand, and he gave his full attention to a development of the monarchical neo-catholicism which that great inaugurator had sketched out. He was impressed by the beauty of the Roman ceremonial, and he determined to express with poetic emotion the mystical majesty of the symbol. It must be admitted that, al- though his work never suggests any knowledge of or sympathy with the spiritual part of religion, he has a genuine appreciation of its externals. It would be difficult to point to a more delicate and full impression of the solemnity which attends the crepuscular light of a church at vespers than is given in the opening pages of À un Diner d’Athées. In L’Ensorcelée (1854), too, we find the author piously following a chanting procession round a church, and ejacu- lating: “Rien n’est beau comme cet instant solennel des céré- momes catholiques” Almost every one of his novels deals by preference with ecclesiastical subjects, or introduces some power- ful figure of a priest. But it is very difficult to believe that his interest in it all is other than histrionic or phenomenal. He likes the business of a priest, he likes the furniture of a church, but there, in spite of his vehement protestations, his piety seems to a candid reader to have begun and ended. SIR EDMUND GOSSE XVII For a humble and reverent child of the Catholic Church, it must be confessed that Barbey d’Aurevilly takes strange liberties. The mother would seem to have had little control over the caprices of her extremely unruly son. There is scarcely one of these ultra- Catholic novels of his which it is conceivable that a pious family would like to see lying upon its parlour table. The Devil takes a prominent part in many of them, for d’Aurevilly’s whim is to see Satanism everywhere, and to consider it matter of mirth; he is like a naughty boy, giggling when a rude man breaks his mother’s crockery. He loves to play with dangerous and for- bidden notions. In Le Prétre Marié (which, to his lofty indigna- tion, was forbidden to be sold in Catholic shops) the hero is a renegade and incestuous priest, who loves his own daughter, and makes a hypocritical confession of error in order that, by that act of perjury, he may save her life, as she is dying of the agony of knowing him to be an atheist. ‘This man, the Abbé Sombreval, is bewitched, is possessed of the Devil, and so is Ryno de Marigny in Une Vieille Maîtresse, and Lasthénie de Ferjol in Une Histoire sans Nom. This is one of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s favourite tricks, to paint an extraordinary, an abnormal condition of spirit, and to avoid the psychological difficulty by simply attributing it to sor- cery. But he is all the time rather amused by the wickedness than shocked at it. In Le Bonheur dans le Crime—the moral of which is that people of a certain grandeur of temperament can be absolutely wicked with impunity—he frankly confesses his parti- ality for “la plaisanterie légèrement sacrilége,’ and all the philoso- phy of d’Aurevilly is revealed in that rash phrase. It is not a matter of a wounded conscience expressing itself with a brutal fervour, but the gusto of conscious wickedness. His mind is in- timately akin with that of the Neapolitan lady, whose story he was perhaps the first to tell, who wished that it only were a sin to drink iced sherbet. Barbey d’Aurevilly 1s a devil who may or may not believe, but who always makes a point of trem- bling. The most interesting feature of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s tempera- XVIII JULES BARBEY D’AUREVILLY ment, as revealed in his imaginative work, is, however, his pre- occupation with his own physical life. In his youth, Byron and Alfieri were the objects of his deepest idolatry; he envied their disdainful splendour of passion; and he fashioned his dream in poverty and obscurity so as to make himself believe that he was of their race. He was a Disraeli—with whom, indeed, he has cer- tain relations of style—but with none of Disraeli’s social advan- tages, and with a more inconsequent and violent habit of im- agination. Unable, from want of wealth and position, to carry his dreams into effect, they became exasperated and intensified, and at an age when the real dandy is settling down into a man of the world, Barbey d’Aurevilly was spreading the wings of his fancy into the infinite azure of imaginary experience. He had convinced himself that he was a Lovelace, a Lauzun, a Brummell, and the philosophy of dandyism filled his thoughts far more than if he had really been able to spend a stormy youth among mar- chionesses who carried, set in diamonds in a bracelet, the ends of the moustaches of viscounts. In the novels of his maturity and his old age, therefore, Barbey d’Aurevilly loved to introduce mag- nificent aged dandies, whose fatuity he dwelt upon with ecstasy, and in whom there is no question that he saw reflections of his imaginary self. No better type of this can be found than that Vicomte de Brassard, an elaborate, almost enamoured, portrait of whom fills the earlier pages of what is else a rather dull story, Le Rideau Cramoisi. The very clever, very immoral tale called Le Plus Bel Amour de Don Juan—which relates how a super- annuated but still incredibly vigorous old beau gives a supper to the beautiful women of quality whom he has known, and recounts to them the most piquant adventure of his life—is redolent of this intense delight in the prolongation of enjoyment by sheer refusal to admit the ravages of age. Although my space forbids quotation, I cannot resist repeating a passage which illustrates this horrible fear of the loss of youth and the struggle against it, more especially as it is a good example of d’Aurevilly’s surcharged and intrepid style: SIR EDMUND GOSSE XIX “Il n'y avait pas là de ces jeunesses vert tendre, de ces petites demoiselles quexécrait Byron, qui sentent la tartelette et qui, par la tournure, ne sont encore que des épluchettes, mais tous étés splendides et savoureux, plantureux automnes, épanouissements et plénitudes, seins éblouissants battant leur plein majestueux au bord découvert des corsages, et, sous les camées de l’épaule nue, des bras de tout galbe, mais surtout des bras puissants, de ces biceps de Sabines qui ont lutté avec les Romains, et qui seraient capables de s’entrelacer, pour l'arrêter, dans les rayons de la roue du char de la vie.” This obsession of vanishing youth, this intense determination to preserve the semblance and colour of vitality, in spite of the passage of years, is however, seen to greatest advantage in a very curious book of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s, in some aspects, indeed, the most curious which he has left behind him, Du Dandyisme et de Georges Brummell. This is really a work of his early maturity, for, as I have said, it was printed so long ago as 1845. It was not published, however, until 1861, when it may be said to have introduced its author to the world of France. Later on he wrote a curious study of the fascination exercised over La Grande Mademoiselle by Lauzun, Un Dandy d’avant les Dandys, and these two are now published in one volume, which forms that section of the immense work of d’Aurevilly which best rewards the curious reader. Many writers in England, from Thomas Carlyle in Sartor Re- sartus to our ingenious young forger of paradoxes, Mr. Max Beerbohm, have dealt upon that semi-feminine passion in fatuity, that sublime attention to costume and deportment, which marks the dandy. The type has been, as d’Aurevilly does not fail to observe, mainly an English one. We point to Beau Nash, to Byron, to Lord Yarmouth, to Sheridan, and, above all, “à ce Dandy royal, S. M. Georges IV”; but the star of each of these must pale before that of Brummell. These others, as was said in a different matter, had “other preoccupations,” but Brummell was entirely absorbed, as by a solemn mission, by the conduct of his person and his clothes. So far, in the portraiture of such a figure, there is nothing very singular in what the French novelist has XX | JULES BARBEY D’AUREVILLY skilfully and nimbly done, but it is his own attitude which is so original. All other writers on the dandies have had their tongues in their cheeks. If they have commended, it is because to be pre- posterous is to be amusing. When we read that “dandyism is the least selfish of all the arts,” we smile, for we know that the author’s design is to be entertaining. But Barbey d’Aurevilly is doggedly in earnest. He loves the great dandies of the past as other men contemplate with ardour dead poets and dead musi- cians. He is seriously enamoured of their mode of life. He sees nothing ridiculous, nothing even limited, in their self-concentration. It reminds him of the tiger and of the condor; it recalls to his imagination the vast, solitary forces of Nature; and when he con- templates Beau Brummell, his eyes fill with tears of nostalgia. So would he have desired to live; thus, and not otherwise, would he fain have strutted and trampled through that eighteenth cen- tury to which he is for ever gazing back with a fond regret. “To dress one’s self,” he says, “should be the main business of life,” and with great ingenuity he dwells upon the latent but positive influence which dress has had on men of a nature apparently furthest removed from its trivialities; upon Pascal, for instance, upon Buffon, upon Wagner. It was natural that a writer who delighted in this patrician ideal of conquering man should have a limited conception of life. Women to Barbey d’Aurevilly were of two varieties—either nuns or amorous tigresses; they were sometimes both in one. He had no idea of soft gradations in society: there were the tempestuous marchioness and her intriguing maid on one side; on the other, emptiness, the sordid hovels of the bourgeoisie. This absence of observation or recognition of life d’Aurevilly shared with the other Romantiques, but in his sinister and contemptuous aristoc- racy he passed beyond them all. Had he lived to become ac- quainted with the writings of Nietzsche, he would have hailed a brother-spirit, one who loathed democracy and the humanitarian temper as much as he did himself. But there is no philosophy in SIR EDMUND GOSSE XXI Barbey d’Aurevilly, nothing but a prejudice fostered and a senti- ment indulged. In referring to Nicholas Nickleby, a novel which he vainly en- deavoured to get through, d’Aurevilly remarks: “I wish to write an essay on Dickens, and at present I have read only one hundred pages of his writings. But I consider that if one hundred pages do not give the talent of a man, they give his spirit, and the spirit of Dickens is odious to me.” “The vulgar Dickens,” he calmly remarks in Journalistes et Polémistes, and we laugh at the idea of sweeping away such a record of genius on the strength of a chapter or two misread in Nicholas Nickleby. But Barbey d’Aurevilly was not Dickens, and it really is not necessary to study closely the vast body of his writings. The same charac- teristics recur in them all, and the impression may easily be weakened by vain repetition. In particular, a great part of the later life of d’Aurevilly was occupied in writing critical notices and studies for newspapers and reviews. He made this, I sup- pose, his principal source of income; and from the moment when, in 1851, he became literary critic to Le Pays to that of his death, nearly forty years later, he was incessantly dogmatizing about literature and art. He never became a critical force, he was too violent and, indeed, too empty for that; but a pen so brilliant as his is always welcome with editors whose design is not to be true, but to be noticeable, and to escape “the obvious.” ‘The most cruel of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s enemies could not charge his criticism with being obvious. It is intensely contentious and contradictory. It treats all writers and artists on the accepted nursery principle of “Go and see what baby’s doing, and tell him not to.” ‘This is entertaining for a moment; and if the shower of abuse is spread broadly enough, some of it must come down on shoulders that deserve it. But the “slashing” review of yester-year is dismal reading, and it cannot be said that the library of reprinted criti- cism to which d’Aurevilly gave the general title of Les Œuvres et les Hommes (1861-65) is very enticing. XXII JULES BARBEY D’AUREVILLY He had a great contempt for Goethe and for Sainte-Beuve, in whom he saw false priests constantly leading the public away from the true principle of literary expression, “le couronnement, la gloire et la force de toute critique, que je cherche en vain.” A very ingenious writer, M. Ernest Tissot, has paid Barbey d’Aure- villy the compliment of taking him seriously in this matter, and has written an elaborate study on what his criterium was. But this is, perhaps, to inquire too kindly. I doubt whether he sought with any very sincere expectation of finding; like the Persian sage, “he swore, but was he sober when he swore?” Was he not rather intoxicated with his self-encouraged romantic exasperation, and determined to be fierce, independent, and uncompromising at all hazards? Such are, at all events, the doubts awakened by his indignant diatribes, which once amused Paris so much, and now influence no living creature. Some of his dicta, in their showy way, are forcible. “La critique a pour blason la croix, la balance et la glaive”; that is a capital phrase on the lips of a reviewer, who makes himself the appointed Catholic censor of worldly let- ters, and is willing to assume at once the cross, the scales, and the sword. More of the hoof peeps out in this: “La critique, c'est une intrépidité de l'esprit et du caractére.’ To a nature like that of d’Aurevilly, the distinction between intrepidity and arrogance is never clearly defined. It is, after all, in his novels that Barbey d’Aurevilly displays his talent in its most interesting form. His powers developed late; and perhaps the best-constructed of all his tales is Une Histoire sans Nom, which dates from 1882, when he was quite an old man. In this, as in all the rest, a surprising narrative is well, although extremely leisurely, told, but without a trace of psychol- ogy. It was impossible for d’Aurevilly to close his stories ef- fectively; in almost every case, the futility and extravagance of the last few pages destroys the effect of the rest. Like the Fat Boy, he wanted to make your flesh creep, to leave you cataleptic with horror at the end, but he had none of Poe’s skill in producing an effect of terror. In Le Rideau Cramoisi (which is considered, SIR EDMUND GOSSE XXlil I cannot tell why, one of his successes), the heroine dies at an embarrassing moment, without any disease or cause of death being suggested—she simply dies. But he is generally much more violent than this; at the close of 4 un Diner d’Athées, which up to a certain point is an extremely fine piece of writing, the angry parents pelt one another with the mummied heart of their only child; in Le Dessous des Cartes, the key of all the intrigue is dis- covered at last in the skeleton of an infant buried in a box of mi- gnonette. If it is not by a monstrous fact, it is by an audacious feat of anti-morality, that Barbey d’Aurevilly seeks to harrow and terrify our imaginations. In Le Bonheur dans le Crime, Haute- claire Stassin, the woman-fencer, and the Count of Savigny pursue their wild intrigue and murder the Countess slowly, and then marry each other, and live, with youth far prolonged (d’Aure- villy’s special idea of divine blessing), without a pang of remorse, without a crumpled rose-leaf in their felicity, like two magnifi- cent plants spreading in the violent moisture of a tropical forest. On the whole, it is as a writer, pure and simple, that Barbey d’Aurevilly claims most attention. His style, which Paul de Saint- Victor (quite in his own spirit) described as a mixture of tiger’s blood and honey, is full of extravagant beauty. He has a strange intensity, a sensual and fantastic force, in his torrent of inter- twined sentences and preposterous exclamations. The volume called Les Diaboliques, which contains a group of his most charac- teristic stories, published in 1874, may be recommended to those who wish, in a single example, compendiously to test the quality of Barbey d’Aurevilly. He has a curious love of punning, not for purposes of humour, but to intensify his style: “Quel oubli et quelle oubliette” (Le Dessous des Cartes), “boudoir fleur de pêcher ou de péché” (Le Plus bel Amour), “renoncer à Pamour malpropre, mais jamais à l'amour propre” (A un Diner d Athées). He has audacious phrases which linger in the memory: “Le Profil, c’est Pécueil de la beauté” (Le Bonheur dans le Crime); “Les verres a champagne de France, un lotus qui faisait [les Anglais] oublier les sombres et religieuses habitudes de la patrie”; XXIV JULES BARBEY D’AUREVILLY “Elle avait air de monter vers Dieu, las mains toutes pleines de bonnes œuvres” (Memoranda). That Barbey d’Aurevilly will take any prominent place in the history of literature is improbable. He was a curiosity, a droll, obstinate survival. We like to think of him in his incredible dress, strolling through the streets of Paris, with his clouded cane like a sceptre in one hand, and in the other that small mirror by which every few minutes he adjusted the poise of his cravat, or the studious tempest of his hair. He was a wonderful old fop or beau of the forties handed down to the eighties in perfect preservation. As a writer he was fervid, sumptuous, magnifi- cently puerile; I have been told that he was a superb talker, that his conversation was like his books, a flood of paradoxical, flam- boyant rhetoric. He made a gallant stand against old age, he defied it long with success, and when it conquered him at last, he retired to his hole like a rat, and died with stoic fortitude, alone, without a friend to close his eyelids. It was in a wretched lodg- ing high up in a house in the Rue Rousselet, all his finery cast aside, and three melancholy cats the sole mourners by his body, that they found, on an April morning of 1889, the ruins of what had once been Barbey d’Aurevilly. THE CRIMSON CURTAIN L à ak \ 1 ’ LA + i vi À 1 À ‘i A F4 L i x 1 (Ye f hy it ( i ÿ x ; | on ; , y ¥ i) l 4 A] } Jj Veg t i i Mail f 1 j if | i (M a is 4 "My i ï { nt , ia A D PTE RUE A er a | eau vq AN: ni DA ACTE LS ER Ua, à ured wnt) NE fi, à | } MATE Fit ul HAN { 1 (ar i ME WU Hg \ i Theat PE AIME , L 7 yy ', À k ‘ ALARME Re UN Hf fa (4 À mip ia wi ra 1 A NA at EN À al , | nr dain At a M THE CRIMSON CURTAIN A CONSIDERABLE number of years ago I went to shoot waterfowl in the western marshes, and, as there was no railway then, I took the diligence, which passed the cross-roads near the Chateau de Rueil, and which at that precise moment contained only one passenger inside. This person, a very remarkable man in every respect, and whom I knew by having often met him in society, I will ask your permission to introduce as the Vicomte de Bras- sard. The precaution is probably useless! The few hundred people who constitute Parisian society are, no doubt, able to supply the real name. It was about five o’clock in the evening. The sun shed its slanting rays on a dusty road, edged with poplar-trees and fields, through which we rattled, drawn by four stout horses, whose strong flanks rolled heavily at each crack of the postilion’s whip—a postilion always reminds me of life, there is a great deal too much whip-cracking at the outset. Vicomte de Brassard was at that time of life when he was no longer disposed to crack his whip. But he was one of those men worthy of being an Englishman (he was educated in Eng- land), who, if he had been mortally wounded, would have died declaring he was alive. In the world, and even in books, we are used to laugh“at the pretensions to youth of those who have passed the happy age of inexperience and foolishness—and the custom is not a bad one when the pretensions take a ridiculous form; but when they do not, but on the contrary assume a pride that will not confess defeat, I do not say they are not senseless, for they are useless, but they deserve respect, like many other senseless things. If it was heroic of the Guards at Waterloo to die and not surrender, it is the same when we are face to face with old age, which is not so romantic as bayonets. Some heads 3 4 THE DIABOLIQUES are built in a military manner, never to surrender, and that is the whole question, as it was at Waterloo. Vicomte de Brassard, who has not surrendered—he is still alive, and I will tell you about him later, for it is worth knowing —Vicomte de Brassard was then, at the time when I travelled with him in the diligence, what the world, which is as spiteful as an old woman, rudely calls “an old beau.” For those who care little for words or figures, and who deem that in the matter of age a man is only as old as he appears to be, Vicomte de Bras- sard might have passed for a “beau” without any qualification. At least, at that very time the Marquise de V . . . —who was an expert judge of young men, and who had shaved a dozen men as clean as Delilah shaved Samson—wore, with much pride in an enamelled gold bracelet, one of the ends of the Vicomte’s moustache, of which time, or the devil, had not changed the colour. Only, whether old or not, do not attach to the expression “beau,” as the world has done, an idea of someone frivolous, lean, and cadaverous, for you would not have a proper idea of Vicomte de Brassard, in whom everything—intellect, manners, physiog- nomy—was large, opulent, redolent of patrician calmness, as befitted the most magnificent dandy I have ever known—I, who have seen Brummell go mad, and d’Orsay die. For he was really a true dandy. If he had been less so, he would certainly have become Marshal of France. He had been in his youth one of the most brilliant officers of the latter days of the First Empire. I have heard it said many times by his regimental comrades that he was distinguished by the bravery of Murat added to that of Marmont, and that as he was cool and level-headed when the drums were not beating, he might in a short time have attained to the highest rank of the military hierarchy if it had not been for dandyism. If you combine dandyism with the qualities which go to make up an officer— discipline, regularity, etc.—you will see how much of the officer will remain in the combination, and whether he does not blow up like a powder-magazine. If the Vicomte de Brassard had THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 5 never exploded, it was because, like all dandies, he was happy. Mazarin would have employed him—and so would Mazarin’s nieces, but for another reason. He was superb. He had had that beauty which is necessary to a soldier more than to anyone else, for there is no youth without beauty, and the army is the youth of France! It was that beauty, moreover, which not only seduces women; but circumstances themselves— the rascals—had not been the only protection spread over the head of Captain de Brassard. He was, I believe, of Norman family, of the race of William the Conqueror, and he had, it is said, conquered a good deal himself. After the abdication of the Emperor, he had naturally gone over to the Bourbons, and, during the Hundred Days, had remained supernaturally faithful to them. So, when the Bourbons came back for the second time, the Vicomte was made a Chevalier of Saint-Louis and decorated by Charles X (then Monsieur) with his own royal hand. During the whole time of the Restoration, the handsome de Brassard never once mounted Guard at the Tuileries without the Duchesse of Angouléme addressing a few gracious words to him as she passed. She in whom misfortune had slain graciousness, man- aged to find some for him. The Minister, seeing this favour, would have done all he could to advance the man whom Madame thus singled out; but, with the best will in the world, what could be done for this terrible dandy who, at a review, had drawn his sword on the inspecting general for having made some re- marks about his military duties? It was quite enough to save him from a court martial. This careless disdain of discipline always distinguished Vicomte de Brassard. Except when on a campaign, when he was a thorough officer, he was never amenable to discipline. Many times he had been known—at the risk of being imprisoned for an indefinite period— to have secretly left a garrison, to go and amuse himself in some neighbouring town, and only to return when there was a review or a parade—warned by one of the soldiers, who loved him, for if his superiors scarcely cared to have under their orders a man 6 THE DIABOLIQUES to whom were repugnant all routine and discipline, the soldiers, on the other hand, adored him. To them he was an excellent officer. He only required that they should be brave, punctilious, and careful in their persons and dress, and thus realize the old type of the French soldier, as he is depicted in La Permission de dix heures, and in two or three old songs which are masterpieces in their way. He was, perhaps, too fond of making them fight duels, but he asserted that it was the best means he knew to develop the military spirit. “I am not the government,’ he said, “and I have no medals to give them when they fight bravely amongst themselves, but the Orders of which I am the grand- master (he had a considerable private fortune) are gloves, spare cross-belts, and whatever may spruce them up—so far as the regulations will allow.” So the company which he commanded eclipsed, in the matter of equipment, all the other companies of the Grenadiers of the Guard, brilliant as they were. Thus he flattered to excess the soldiers, who in France are always prone to fatuity and coquetry, two permanent provocations, the one because of its tone, the other because of the envy it excites. It will easily be understood, after this, that all the other companies were jealous of his. The men would fight to get into it, and then had to fight not to get out of it. Such had been, during the Restoration, the exceptional position of Captain Vicomte de Brassard. And as he had not then every day, as he had during the Empire, the resource of doing brave deeds which would have caused all to be forgiven, no one could have foreseen or guessed how long this insubordination which astonished his comrades, would have lasted, but the Revolution of 1830 happened just in time to prevent him from being cashiered. He was badly wounded during the Three Days, and disdained to take service under the new dynasty of the Orleans, for whom he had contempt. When the Revolution of July made them masters of a country they did not know how to keep, it found the Captain in bed, laid up with an injury to his foot which he had received in THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 7 dancing—as he would have charged—at the last ball of the Duchesse de Berry. But at the first roll of the drum he, nevertheless, rose and joined his company, and as he would not put on his boots on account of his wound, he went to the rioting as he would have gone to a ball, in varnished shoes and silk socks, and it was thus he led his grenadiers to the Place de la Bastille, with instructions to clear the whole length of the Boulevards. Paris, in which no barricades had yet been erected, had a gloomy and terrible appearance. It was deserted. The sun glared down, and seemed a fiery rain, soon to be followed by another, when from behind the closed shutters of every window there should pour a deadly storm. Captain de Brassard drew up his men in two Hines as close as possible to each row of houses so that each file of en was exposed only to the fire from the houses opposite, whilst he, more dandified than ever, walked down the middle of the road. Aimed at from both sides by thousands of guns, pistols, and carbines, all the way from the Bastille to the Rue de Richelieu, he was not hit, in spite of the breadth of his chest, of which he was perhaps a little too proud—for Captain de Brassard swelled out his chest in a fight, as a pretty woman who wants to show off her charms does at a ball—when, just as he arrived in front of Frascati’s, at the corner of the Rue de Richelieu, and at the moment when he commanded the troops to mass together in order to carry the first barricade which he had found on his road, he received a ball in this magnificent chest, which was doubly tempting, both on account of its size and the long silver braid which went from one shoulder to the other, and he had also his arm broken by a stone—which did not prevent him from carry- ing the barricade, and proceeding as far as the Madeleine at the head of his excited soldiers. There, two ladies in a carriage, who were fleeing from the in- surrection in Paris, seeing an officer of the Guards wounded, cov- ered with blood, and lying on the blocks of stone which at that 8 THE DIABOLIQUES time surrounded the Madeleine, which was still in course of construction, placed their carriage at his disposal, and he was taken by them to Gros Caillou, where the Marshal de Raguse was, to whom he said, in military fashion: “Marshal, I have not, perhaps, more than two hours to live, but during those two hours put me wherever you like.” Only he was wrong. He was good for more than two hours. The ball which passed through his body did not kill him. It was more than fifteen years later when I knew him, and he declared then that in defiance of all the doctors, who had expressly for- bidden him to drink as long as the fever caused by his wound continued, he had been saved from a certain death only by Bor- deaux wine. And how he did drink!—for, dandy as he was, he drank as he did everything else—he drank like a trooper. He had made for him a splendid goblet of Bohemian glass, which held a whole bottle of Bordeaux, by God, and he would drain it off at a draught. He would say, after he had drunk it, that he always drank like that—and it was true. But in these days, when strength of every kind is continually diminishing and is no longer thought much of, it may seem that this feat is nothing to boast about. He was like Bassompierre, and could take his wine as he did. I have seen him toss off his Bohemian glass a dozen times without seeming any the worse for it. I have often seen him also on those occasions which respectable people call “orgies,” and never, after even the most inordinate bouts, did he appear to be more than what he called a “little tight.” I —who wish to make you understand what sort of man he was, in order that you may follow my story—may as well tell you that I have known him to keep seven mistresses at the same time. He entitled them, poetically, “the seven strings of his lyre”’— and I must say that I disapprove of his speaking in this jesting and musical way of his immorality. But what would you have? If Captain Vicomte de Brassard had not been all that I have had the honour to tell you, my story would have been less sensational, THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 9 and probably I should not have thought it worth while to relate it to you. It is quite certain that I did not expect to find him there when I got into the diligence at the Chateau de Rueil cross-roads. It was a long time since I had seen him, and I took much pleasure in the prospect of spending several hours in the company of a man who belonged to our time, and yet differed so much from the men of our day. The Vicomte de Brassard, who could have worn the armour of Francis I as easily as he did the officer’s tunic of the Royal Guards, resembled neither in his proportions nor his appearance the young men of the present time. This setting sun, so grand and radiant, made the rising crescent moons look very pale and poor. He had the beauty of the Emperor Nicholas, whom he resembled in body, but his face was less ideal and Greek, and he wore a short beard, which, like his hair, had remained black in some mysterious way, and this beard grew high on his cheeks which had a manly ruddy tinge. His forehead was high, project- ing, unwrinkled, and as white as a woman’s arm, and beneath it were two dark-blue eyes, sparkling like cut emeralds. Those eyes never glanced; they penetrated. We shook hands, and talked. Captain de Brassard spoke slowly, with a resonant voice that was capable of filling the Champ de Mars when he gave the word of command. Having been brought up from infancy in England, as I have already said, per- haps he thought in English, but this slowness, which was devoid of embarrassment by the way, gave a distinction to what he said, even when he joked, for the Captain loved to joke, and his jokes were sometimes rather broad. Captain de Brassard always went too far, as the Comtesse de F . . . used to say, that pretty widow who since her husband’s death had worn only three colours— black, violet, and white. He must have been very good company, or people would have thought him impossible, and when that is the case, you know that much will be forgiven in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. 10 THE DIABOLIQUES One of the advantages of talking in a carriage is that you can leave off when you have nothing more to say, without troubling anybody. In a drawing-room that liberty does not exist. Po- liteness compels you to talk, and this innocent hypocrisy is often punished by the hollowness and boredom of the conversation, in which the fools, even those born silent (and there are such), do their best to say something and be very amiable. In a public conveyance you are as much at home as anyone else is—and you may without rudeness lapse into the silence and reverie which fol- lows a conversation. Unfortunately, the chances are against you in this life, and formerly (for there is a “formerly” already) you rode twenty times in a public conveyence—as you may now twenty times in a railway carriage—without meeting a man whose conversation was animated and interesting. Vicomte de Brassard and I talked, at first, about the journey, the landscape, and old memories of the fashionable world which cropped up in the course of conversation—then the sun declined, and we both fell into the twilight silence. Night, which in autumn seems to fall from the sky at once, it comes so quickly, chilled us, and we rolled ourselves in our cloaks, resting our heads against the hard corner which is the traveller’s pillow. I do not know whether my companion slept in his corner, but I was wide awake in mine: I was so well acquainted with the route we were travelling, which I had gone over often, that I hardly noticed the external objects which disappeared as the dili- gence rolled on, and which seemed travelling through the night in an opposite direction to us. We passed through several small towns dotted here and there along the long road. The night became as black as an extinguished stove; and, in this obscurity, the unknown towns through which we passed took on a strange appearance, and made us think we were at the world’s end. In most of these little towns gas-lamps were rare, and there was less light than on the country roads behind us. In the country the sky was broader and there was a kind of dim light, but it was blotted out in the narrow streets of the towns, and THE CRIMSON CURTAIN II only a star or two was to be seen between the roofs, adding to the mysterious air of these sleepy towns, where the only person we saw was the ostler with his lantern, at the door of some inn, as he brought out the fresh horses and buckled the straps of the harness, whistling meanwhile, or swearing at some obstinate or skittish horse. Except for that, and the eternal question, always the same, of some traveller awakened from sleep, who lowered the window and cried in a voice which the silence of the night rendered louder: “Where are we now, postilion?” no sign of life was heard. Nothing was seen but the carriage full of sleeping people, in a sleeping town; though perhaps some dreamer like myself would try to discern through the window the fronts of the houses, or fix his attention and thoughts on some casement still lighted up at this late hour, even in those towns where early and regular hours are the rule, and the night is specially devoted to sleep. A human being watching—even if it be a sentinel—when all others are plunged in that rest which comes from physical fatigue, is always an affecting sight. But ignorance as to who is watching behind the curtains of a window, where the light gleaming be- tokens life and thought, adds poetry—the poetry of reality—to the dream. At least, for my part, I can never see a window lighted up in the night, in a sleeping town through which I am passing, without attaching a whole crowd of fancies to that light; without imagining behind those curtains all kinds of domestic affairs or dramas. Even now, after all these years, I can still think of those windows with their eternal and melancholy light, and I often say to myself, fancying I see them again in my dreams: “What can there be behind those curtains?” Well, one of those which has remained longest in my memory (you will know the reason presently) was a window in one of the streets of the town of ****, which we passed that night. It was in the third house—you see how exact my memory 1s— beyond the inn at which we changed horses; but this window 12 THE DIABOLIQUES I had leisure to examine for longer than a mere change of horses would have necessitated. An accident had happened to one of the wheels of our coach, and they had to send and wake up the wheelwright. Now to wake up a wheelwright in a sleeping town, and get him to come and tighten up a nut on a diligence, when there is no competition on that line, is not a trifling affair of a few minutes. In the first place, if the wheelwright was as fast asleep as everybody in our coach, it could not have been easy to wake him. I could hear, through the partition, the snores of the inside pas- sengers, and not one of the outside passengers, who, as you know, have a mania for getting down whenever the coach stops, probably —for vanity is found everywhere in France, even on the outside of coaches—in order to show their agility in getting up again, had descended from his seat. It is true that the inn at which we were, was shut up. We did not sup there. We had supped at the last stage. The inn was sleeping like the rest of us. Nothing betrayed a sign of life. Not a sound disturbed the profound silence—unless it was the wearisome, monotonous sound of a broom wielded by someone (man or woman—we knew not, and it was too dark to ascertain) who was sweeping out the court-yard of this silent inn, the yard- gates of which were usually open. Even the broom dragged as though the sweeper were asleep, or were devilishly anxious to be. The front of the inn was as black as the other houses in the street, where indeed there was only a light at one window—pre- cisely that window which is still fixed in my memory. The house, in which you could not exactly say that this light shone, for it was screened by a double crimson curtain, through whose thick- nesses the light filtered mysteriously, was a large building with only one upper story, but that placed very high. “It is very singular,” said Vicomte de Brassard, as though he were talking to himself; “one would think it was still the same curtain!” THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 13 I turned towards him to look at him, but the lamp which was by the coachman’s box, and which is intended to show the horses the road, had just gone out. I thought he was asleep, but he was not, and he had been struck, like me, by the appearance of the window; but he knew more than I, because he knew why it was lighted up. But the tone in which he had said that—though it was a simple remark—was so unlike the voice of the worldly Vicomte de Bras- sard, and astonished me so much, that I was overcome by curios- ity to see his face, and I struck a match, as though I had wanted to light a cigar. The blue flame of the match lit up the gloom. He was pale—not pale as a dead man, but as pale as Death itself. Why should he turn pale? This window, with its peculiar ap- pearance, the remark, and the pallor of a man who very rarely turned pale, for he was full-blooded, and emotion, when he was moved, made him turn scarlet up to the crown of his head, the shiver that I felt run down the muscles of his powerful biceps, which, as we were sitting close together, was against my arm— all gave me the impression that there was something hidden that I, the seeker after stories, might perhaps learn with a little pains. “You were looking then at that window, Captain, and even seemed to recognize it,” I said in that tone which does not seem to court a reply, and is the hypocrisy of curiosity. “Parbleu! I do recognize it,” he replied in his rich, deep voice, seeming to dwell on every word. Calmness had again resumed its sway over this dandy, the most stolid and majestic of all dandies, who—as you know—scorn all emotions as being beneath them, and do not believe, like that idiot Goethe, that astonishment can ever be a proper feeling for the human mind. “I do not come by here often,” continued the Vicomte de Bras- sard quietly; “I even avoid passing by here. But there are some 14 THE DIABOLIQUES things one never forgets. There are not many, but there are some. I know of three: the first uniform one puts on, the first battle one was in, the first woman one ever slept with. Well, for me that window is the fourth thing I cannot forget.” He stopped and lowered the window which was in front of him. Was it that he might the better see the window of which we spoke? The conductor had gone for the wheelwright, and had not re- turned. The fresh horses were late, and had not yet come. Those which had brought us were motionless from fatigue, worn out, and not unharnessed, and, with their heads between their legs, they did not even stamp on the silent pavement with impa- tience to return to their stable. Our sleepy diligence resembled an enchanted coach, fixed by some fairy’s wand in some open glade in the forest of the Sleeping Beauty. “The fact is,” I said, “that for any man with imagination, that window possesses a certain character” “I don’t know what it has for you,” replied Vicomte de Bras- sard, “but I know what it has for me. That is the window of the room in which I lived when I was first in garrison. Confound it! that is fully thirty-five years ago! “Behind that curtain—which does not seem to have changed in all those years—and which is now lighted as it was when——” He stopped and left his thought unexpressed, but I was deter- mined to make him speak out. “When you were studying tactics, Captain; in those early days when you were a second lieutenant.” “You give me more than my due,” he replied. “I was, it is true, a second lieutenant at that time, but I did not spend my nights in studying tactics, and if my light was burning at unac- customed hours, as respectable people say, it was not to read Marshal Saxe.” “But,” I said—quick as a ball from a racket—“it was perhaps to imitate him.” He returned the ball as promptly. y THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 15 “Oh,” he said, “it was not then that I imitated Marshal Saxe in the way you mean. That was not till much later. Then I was merely a brat of a second lieutenant, very stiff and prim in my uniform, but very awkward and timid with women, though they would never believe it—probably on account of my con- founded face. I never got the full benefit of my timidity from them. Moreover, I was but seventeen in those happy days. I had just left the military college. We left in those days at the age at which you enter nowadays, for if the Emperor, that terrible consumer of men, had lasted longer, he would have ended by having soldiers twelve years of age, de some of the Asiatic sultans have concubines nine years of age.” “If he goes on talking about the Emperor and concubines,” I thought to myself, “I shall not learn what I want to know.” “Yet, Vicomte,” I replied, “I would wager that you would never have preserved the memory of that window which is shining there unless there had been a woman behind the curtain.” “And you would have won your bet, sir,” he said, gravely. “Ah, parbleu!” I replied. “I was sure of it. For a man like you, in a little provincial town that you have not perhaps passed through ten times since you were first in garrison there, it must be some siege you have sustained, or some woman you took by storm, that could make you remember so vividly the window of a house that is now lighted up amidst the general gloom.” “Yet I did not, however, sustain any siege—at least in the mili- tary sense,” he replied, still gravely, but gravity was sometimes his way of joking; “and, on the other hand, when one surrenders so quickly, can it be called a siege? But as to taking a woman, by storm or otherwise, I have told you that in those days I was quite incapable of it. So it was not a woman who was taken here—it was I.” I bowed; did he see it in the dark carriage? “Berg op Zoom was taken,” I said. “And subalterns of seventeen,” he replied, “are not generally Berg op Zooms of impregnable wisdom and chastity.” 16 THE DIABOLIQUES “So,” I said gaily, “it was some Madame or Mademoiselle Potiphar.” “It was a demoiselle,” he interrupted with a frankness that was almost comic. “To add to the sum of all the others, Captain. Only in this case the Joseph was a soldier—a Joseph not likely to run away.” “But who certainly did run away, on the contrary,” he replied with the greatest coolness; “although too late, and very much afraid!!! With a fright which made me understand the expres- sion used by Marshal Ney, which I heard with my own ears, and which, coming from such a man, I must own somewhat com- forted me, I should like to see the b [only he gave the words in full] who has never been afraid!” “The story of how you came to feel that sensation must be interesting, Captain.” “Pardieu!” he said quickly; “I can, if you are curious, tell you the story of an event which bit into my life as acid bites into steel, and which has left a dark stain on the page of my libertine pleasures.—Ah, it is not always profitable to be a rake,” he added in a melancholy voice, which struck "me as rather strange coming from one I had always regarded as a regular hardened rogue. He pulled up the glass he had lowered, as though he feared the sound of his voice might be heard outside, though there was no one near the coach, which was motionless as though deserted— or else he thought the regular beat of the broom would interrupt his story. I listened attentively to his voice—to the slightest ex- pression of his voice—for I could not see his face in the dark— and with my eyes fixed more than ever on the window with the crimson curtain, behind which the light still burned with such fascinating power, and about which he was ready to speak. “I was then seventeen,” he continued, “and had just left the military college. I had been appointed ensign in a regiment of the line, which was then impatiently awaiting orders to leave for Germany, where the Emperor was conducting that campaign THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 17 which history has named the campaign of 1813. I had just time to kiss my old father before joining, in this town, the battalion of which I formed part—for in this little town of some few thou- sands of inhabitants at most, the garrison consisted of only our two first battalions. The two other battalions were in some neighbouring town. “You, who have probably seen this town only when you were travelling towards the West, cannot imagine what it is—or at least what it was thirty years ago—when you are obliged, as I was then, to live in it. It was certainly the worst garrison to which chance—which I believe to be the devil, at that time repre- sented by the Minister of War—could have sent me as a starting- place for my military career. What an infernally dull hole it was! I do not remember ever having been in a more wearisome place. But, at my age, and in the first intoxication of the uni- form—a feeling you do not know, but which all who have worn it have experienced—lI scarcely suffered from what at a later time would have seemed insupportable. “After all, how could this dull provincial town affect me? I lived in it much less than I did in my uniform—a masterpiece of sartorial art which delighted me. My uniform, of which I was madly fond, hid or adorned everything, and it was—though this may appear an exaggeration, but it is the truth—the uniform which was, strictly speaking, my garrison. When I was too much bored by this uninteresting and lifeless town, I put on full uni- form, and boredom fled. I was like those women who give extra attention to their toilette when they are alone and expect no one. I dressed myself for myself. I enjoyed in solitude my epaulets and the clank of my sabre, as I promenaded the lonely streets in the afternoons, and I felt as puffed up with pride as I have done since in Paris when I have heard people say behind me: ‘There is a really fine-looking officer.’ “In the town, which was not a rich one, and had no commerce or activity of any kind, there were only a few old and almost ruined families who grumbled at the Emperor, because he had 18 THE DIABOLIQUES not, as they said, made the robbers of the Revolution yield up their booty, and who for that reason paid no great heed to the officers. ‘Therefore there were no parties, or balls, or soirées, or dances. At the best there was but the Promenade, where on Sunday, after church, the mothers came to show off their daughters until two o’clock in the afternoon—and when the first bell rang for Vespers all the petticoats disappeared, and the Promenade was deserted. “This midday Mass, to which we never go, became, by the way, a military Mass during the Restoration, and all the officers were obliged to attend it, and that was quite an event in this dead-alive town. For young fellows like us, who were at a time of life when we care greatly for love or women, this military Mass was quite a pleasure. All the officers, except those on duty, were scattered about the nave of the church. We nearly always contrived to sit behind the prettiest women who came to Mass, because they were sure to be looked at, and whom we delighted by talking be- tween ourselves, loud enough for them to hear, about their charms or appearance. Ah, that military Mass, what romances have I seen begin there! I have seen many love-letters slipped into the muffs which the girls left on their chairs when they knelt by the side of their mothers—letters to which they brought the reply on the following Sunday, also in their muffs. “But in the days of the Emperor there was no military Mass, and consequently no means of approaching the ‘respectable’ girls of the little town. Nor were there any compensations. Those establishments which are never mentioned in good society were simply horrible. The cafés, in which so much home-sickness is drowned during the long idlenesses of garrison life, it was impos- sible for anyone who respected his epaulets to enter. “Luxury is now found here, as elsewhere, but there was not then a single hotel where the officers could dine together without being horribly swindled, so we were forced to give up all ideas of a mess-table, and we were scattered about various boarding- houses, amongst households that were not over-rich—people who THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 19 let their apartments as dearly as they could, and so added a little to their skimpy revenues. “T lived in lodgings. One of my comrades lived at the Poste aux Chevaux, which was in this street at that time—there! a few houses behind us, and if it were daylight you could see on the house an old golden sun emerging from a cherry-coloured cloud, with the inscription, “The Rising Sun” This comrade found an apartment for me close to his own—where that window is perched up there, and which seems to me this evening to belong to me still, as it did then. I let him find my lodgings for me. He was older than I was, had been longer in the regiment, and he liked to give advice to one who was inexperienced and careless. “I have already said that except for the uniform—a point on which I lay stress, because that is a feeling of which your gen- eration, with your Peace Congresses, and philosophical and hu- manitarian clowning, will soon have no idea—and the hope of hearing the cannon in my first battle, in which I was to lose my military maidenhead—excuse the expression—it was all much alike to me. I lived only in those two ideas—in the second es- pecially, for it was a hope, and we always care more for what we have not than for that which we have. “This is how I spent my life. Except during meal-times—and I took my meals with the people of the house, and about whom I will tell you presently—and the time devoted daily to military duties, I lived nearly always in my own room, lying on a huge dark-blue sofa, which was so cool that it seemed to me like a cold bath after the hot parade-ground, and I scarcely ever left this sofa except to take a fencing-lesson, or have a game of cards with my neighbour opposite, Louis de Meung, who was not so lazy as I was, for he had picked up, amongst the grisettes of the town, a rather pretty girl, whom he had taken for his mistress and who served, as he said, to kill time. “But what I knew of women did not tempt me to imitate my friend Louis. What little I knew of them I had picked up where the cadets of Saint-Cyr acquire that information when they are 20 THE DIABOLIQUES out on leave. Besides, some phases of character are late in de- veloping. Did you know Saint-Rémy, one of the greatest rakes of his day, and who was called by the other libertines ‘the Minotaur’; not because of his horns, although he wore them, for he had killed his wife’s lover, but because of the number of virgins he had destroyed?” | “Yes, I knew him,” I replied, “but when he was old and incor- rigible, and becoming more of a debauchee each year that passed over his head; of course I knew that rompu, as Brantôme would have called him.” “He was, in fact, like one of Brantôme’s men,” replied the Vicomte. “But, at any rate, Saint-Rémy, when he was twenty- seven, had never touched a glass or a petticoat. He will tell you the same thing if you ask him. At twenty-seven years of age, he was, in the matter of women, as innocent as a new-born babe, and though his nurse no longer suckled him, he had never drunk anything but milk or water.” “He made up well for lost time,” I remarked. “Yes,” said the Vicomte, “and so did I. But I had less lost time to make up. My first period of prudence hardly exceeded the time that I spent in this town, and although I was not so absolutely chaste as Saint-Rémy, I lived like a Knight of Malta —and indeed I was one, by birth—Did you know that? I should even have succeeded one of my uncles as a ‘Master’ if the Revolution had not abolished the Order, the ribbon of which— though the Order is abolished—I sometimes wear—foolishly per- haps.—As to the people who had let me their apartment,” con- tinued Vicomte de Brassard, “they were, as you may imagine, thoroughly bourgeois. They were only two—husband and wife; both old, and well-behaved. In their relations with me, they even displayed that politeness you never find in these days—especially in their class—and which is like the scent of a bygone period. I was not of an age to observe, and they interested me so little that I never cared to penetrate the past of these two old people, THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 21 into whose life I entered only in the most superficial way, two hours a day—noon and evening—when I dined or supped with them. Nothing concerning this past transpired in their conver- sation before me, for this conversation generally turned on per- sons or matters relating to the town, of which they informed me —the husband in a spirit of humorous backbiting, and his wife, who was very pious, with more reserve, but certainly with no less pleasure. “T think, however, I have heard it said that the husband travelled in his youth, but for whom or what I know not, and that when he returned, he married—the girl having waited for him. They were good, honest people, calm and quiet. The wife spent her time in knitting socks for her husband, and he, being music-mad, scraped old airs on his violin in a garret over my room. Perhaps they had once been better off. Perhaps some loss of fortune (which they concealed) had obliged them to take a lodger; but, except for that, they showed no sign of poverty. Everything in the house breathed an air of comfort, as is the case in old-fashioned houses, which abound with linen that smells fresh and good, heavy silver plate, and movables which seem to be immovable, they are so seldom renewed. I was very comfortable there. The table was good, and I had full permission to quit it as soon as I had ‘wiped my beard’—as old Olive, the servant who waited on us, called it, though she did me too much honour in dignifying by the name of a beard the cat’s whiskers which constituted the moustache of an ensign who was still a growing lad. “I had been there about six months, living as quietly as my hosts, and I had never heard a single word of the existence of the person I was about to meet at their house, when one day, in going down to dinner at the accustomed hour, I saw, in a corner of the dining-room, a tall young woman standing on tiptoe and hanging her hat by its ribbons on a hat-rack, like a woman who feels herself quite at home, and has just come in from a walk. Her body was stretched to reach the peg, which was placed 22 THE DIABOLIQUES high, and she displayed a figure as graceful as an opera-dancer. She was dressed in a tight-fitting bodice and a narrow skirt, which revealed the shape of her hips. “With the arms still raised, she turned her head when she heard me enter, and thus I was enabled to see her face; but she finished what she was about as though I had not been there, and looked to see whether the ribbons of her bonnet had not crumpled in hanging it up, and she did all this slowly, carefully, and almost impertinently—for, after all, I was standing waiting to bow to her—before she took any notice of me, and did me the honour to regard me with two very cold, black eyes, to which her hair, which was done in wavy curls massed on the forehead, gave that deep expression which is peculiar to that kind of coiffure. “I could not imagine who she could be at that hour, and in that place. No one ever came to dine with my hosts—yet she had certainly come to dine, for the table was prepared, and four covers were laid. But my astonishment to see her there was greatly surpassed by my astonishment to learn who she was; as I did when my hosts entered the room and presented her to me as their daughter, who had just left boarding-school, and who was going in future to live with them. “Their daughter! It was impossible for anyone to be more unlike the daughter of people like them! Not but what the prettiest girls are the daughters of all sorts of people. I have known many such, and you also, no doubt. Physiologically speak- ing, the ugliest being may produce the most beautiful. But there was the chasm of a whole race between her and them! More- over, physiologically, if I may employ that pedantic word, which belongs to your days and not to mine, one could not help remark- ing her air, which was very singular in a girl as young as she was, for it was a kind of impassive air very difficult to describe. If she had not had it, one would have said: ‘That is a pretty girl without thinking any more of her than of all the pretty girls one meets by chance, and about whom one has said that and never thought any more about it. But this air—which dis- THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 23 tinguished her not only from her parents, but from everyone else, amazed you and petrified you; for she appeared to have neither passions nor feelings. “The Infanta with the Spaniel,’ by Velas- quez, may, if you know the picture, give you an idea of that air, which was neither proud, nor scornful, nor disdainful, but simply impassive; for a proud, scornful, or contemptuous air informs people that they do exist, since one takes the trouble to despise or contemn them, whilst this air said coolly: ‘For me, you do not even exist.’ “I own that her appearance made me put to myself on that first day and many others, a question which is still unsolved: how that tall, slim girl could be the offspring of the little, stout man in a greenish-yellow coat and a white waistcoat, who had a complexion the colour of his wife’s jam, and a wen on the back of his fat neck, and stuttered in his speech. And if the husband did not trouble me much, for the husband may be eliminated from questions of this sort—the wife appeared quite impossible to explain. Mademoiselle Albertine (that was the name of this archduchess who had fallen from heaven into this bourgeois family, as though heaven had tried to play a joke upon them) was called Alberte by her parents, because her name was too long. The name suited her face and figure, but she did not appear to be the daughter of either of her parents. “At this first dinner, and those which followed, she appeared to me to be a young girl very well brought up, with no affectation, and habitually silent, but who, when she did speak, said clearly and sensibly what she had to say, and never exceeded those limits. Besides, if she had had more wit than I knew of, she would hardly have found an opportunity to show it at the dinner-table. The presence of their daughter necessarily had some effect on the gossip of the two old people. All the little scandals about the townsfolk were suppressed. As a matter of course, we never talked about anything more interesting than the weather. There was only the impassive air of Mademoiselle Albertine or Alberte, which had so much struck me at first, and I soon wearied of 24 THE DIABOLIQUES that. If I had met her in that society for which I was intended, her impassiveness would have aroused my curiosity. But to me she was not a girl to whom I could make love—even with the eyes. My position in respect to her—as I was living with her parents—was delicate, and a mere trifle might have made it much worse. She was neither sufficiently near nor sufficiently remote to be anything in my life, and I soon fell naturally, and quite unintentionally, into the most complete indifference to her impassiveness. “Nor was this disturbed either on her part or on mine. There was nothing between us but the merest politeness, and the most indifferent speeches. To me she was just a figure that I scarcely saw—and what was I to her? At table—we never met elsewhere —she looked more at the stopper of the decanter or the sugar- basin than she did at me. All that she said was correct, and very well expressed, but signified little or nothing, and gave me no clue to her character. Besides, what did that matter to me? I should have passed my whole life without dreaming of even looking at that quiet and insolent girl, had it not been for a circumstance about which I will tell you, and which struck me like a thunderbolt—a bolt from the blue, indeed. “One evening, nearly a month after Mademoiselle Alberte had come home, we were sitting down to supper. She was seated next to me, and I really paid so little attention to her that I had never noticed that she had changed her place, and was next to me instead of sitting between her father and mother as usual. I was unfolding my napkin on my knees when—I shall never be able to express my feeling of astonishment—I felt a hand boldly press mine under the table. I thought I was dreaming—or, rather, I could think of nothing at all. I could only feel the touch of that hand, boldly seeking mine under the napkin. It was so extraordinary and unexpected. All my blood, set aglow by that touch, rushed from my heart to my hand, as though attracted by her, and then returned violently as though driven by a pump to my heart. Everything swam before my eyes—my ears tingled. THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 25 I must have turned deadly pale. I thought I was going to faint —that I should melt away in the inexpressible pleasure caused by the pressure of that hand,—which was rather large and strong, like that of a boy—when it closed upon mine. “When you are young, you know, pleasure always brings with it a sense of shame, and I tried to withdraw my hand, but hers seemed aware of the pleasure it had caused me, and compelled mine to remain by a deliciously warm squeeze. . . . That is thirty- five years ago, and, as you may believe, I have touched many a woman’s hand since, but I still feel, when I think of it, the sensa- tion of that hand pressing mine with despotic passion. “The thousand tremors which that hand caused to shoot through my whole body made me fear to betray what I felt to the father and mother whose daughter, before their eyes, dared to... Ashamed, however, to prove myself less of a man than this bold girl who risked her reputation, and whose incredible coolness concealed her follies, I bit my lips till they bled, in a superhuman effort to stop the tremors of desire which might have told these poor people so much, and then my eyes sought her other hand, which 1 had not yet looked at, and which at this dangerous moment was calmly turning up the wick of a lamp which had just been placed on the table, for the evening was beginning to grow dark. I looked at it. It was the fellow of the hand whose touch was thrilling me, and sending long tongues of fire as from a furnace through my veins! The hand was rather thick, but the fingers were long and well-shaped, and looked transparently rosy in the light which fell full upon them, but they never trembled, and performed the little operation on which they were engaged with firmness, ease, and an incomparable, graceful languor. “We could not stop like that for ever! We needed our hands to eat with. Mademoiselle Alberte’s hand dropped mine, but at the same moment her foot, which was quite as expressive as her hand, placed itself on mine in the same despotic manner during all this too brief dinner, and reminded me of one of those baths which are insufferably hot to begin with, but to which you get 26 THE DIABOLIQUES accustomed, and end by thinking so comfortable that you willingly believe that the damned in their cauldron must be as cool and as much at home as fish in water. “You may fancy whether I dined that day, or if I took much part in the chatter of my worthy hosts, who were far from sus- pecting the mysterious and terrible drama which was going on under the table. They saw nothing, but they easily might have seen, and really I was more disturbed on their account than I was for myself, or for her. I had all the frankness and sympathy of seventeen. I said to myself: ‘Is she quite shameless? Is she mad?” And I looked out of the corner of my eye at her, but she did not lose for a single second, during the whole of the dinner, her air of a princess at a state ceremony, and her face remained as calm as ever, though her foot was saying and doing all the foolish things which a foot can say or do—to mine. I must con- fess that I was more surprised at her coolness than at her im- prudence. I had read a good deal of light literature, in which women were not spared. I had been educated at a military school. I considered myself quite a Lovelace, like every lad who has kissed his mother’s chambermaid behind the door or on the staircase. But my experience as a Lovelace of seventeen was upset. This appeared to me worse than anything I had ever heard or read about the deceit of women, and how they could conceal their deepest or most violent emotions. Only fancy! she was but eighteen! Was she even as much? She had just left a school which I had no reason to suspect, considering the morality and the piety of her mother, who had selected it for her daughter. This absence of all constraint, or, to speak plainly, this absolute want of modesty, this perfect control over herself whilst doing the most imprudent things that could be done by a youny girl who had never by a sign or a glance forewarned the man to whom she made such an advance—all this rose clearly to my mind, despite my confusion. “But neither then nor later did I stop to philosophize about it. I had no sham horror for the conduct of this girl who had shown THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 27 such terribly precocious depravity. Besides, at the age I was then, or even much later, you do not consider a girl depraved because she throws herself into your arms. On the contrary, you are almost inclined to regard it as a matter of course, and if you say ‘Poor girl,’ it is more out of modesty than pity. But though I was shy, I did not want to be taken for a ninny—the good old French reason for doing a bad deed without any remorse. I knew without doubt that it was not love the girl felt for me. Love does not act in that shameless, impudent way; and I also knew well enough that what she had caused me to feel was not love either. But, love or not—whatever it was, I wanted it. When I rose from the table, my mind was made up. Alberte’s hand, of which I had not thought for a moment before it seized mine, had stirred in my soul a desire to embrace her whole body as her hand had embraced mine! “I went up to my room like a madman, and when I was a little bit calmed by reflection, I asked myself what I should do to clinch this ‘intrigue’-—as they call it in the country—with a girl who was so devilishly tempting. I knew pretty well—like one who has never tried to know more—that she never left her mother, and that the two worked side by side all day in the window-seat of the dining-room, which also served as their drawing-room; that she had no lady-friend who came to see her, and that she hardly ever went out except to Mass or Vespers on Sunday, with her parents. “That was not very encouraging, was it? I began to regret that I had not seen more of these worthy people; for though I had not held aloof from them, I had treated them with that distant or somewhat listless politeness you show to people in whom you take only a remote interest; but I reflected that I could not very well change my attitude towards them without exposing myself to the chance of revealing to them, or making them suspect, that which I wished to conceal. “The only opportunities I had to speak to Mademoiselle Alberte in secret were meetings on the staircase, as ] went up or came 28 THE DIABOLIQUES down from my room—but on the staircase we might be seen and heard. The best resource open to me—in that small and well- regulated house where everybody was close to everybody else’s elbow—was to write; and since the hand of that brazen hussy knew so well how to find mine under the table, it would perhaps not make much ado about taking a note that was slipped into it; and so I wrote. “It was a letter suited to the circumstances—supplicatory, com- manding, and delirious—of a man who has drunk his first draught of happiness and asks for a second. “Only, in order to give it to her, I must wait till dinner-time the next day, and that seemed a long time; but at last dinner-time came! The incentive hand, whose touch I had felt for twenty- four hours, did not fail to seek mine under the table as on the previous evening. Mademoiselle Alberte felt my letter, and took it, as I foresaw. But what I did not foresee was, that with that Infanta-like air of sublime indifference, she should slip it into her breast, under the pretence of arranging a bit of lace that was doubled down, and perform the act so naturally and so quickly that her mother, who was engaged in serving the soup, saw noth- ing; and whilst her old idiot of a father, who was always hum- ming something, and thinking of his violin when he was not playing, was gazing into the fire.” “Oh, that is done every day, Captain,” I interrupted gaily, for his story appeared to me to be likely to turn soon into a mere history of a garrison love-affair—for I did not suspect what was to follow. “Why, only a few days ago there was at the opera, in the box next to mine, a lady of probably the same sort as your Mademoiselle Alberte. She was more than eighteen, certainly; but, I give you my word of honour, I have rarely seen more majes- tic modesty in any woman. During the whole performance she sat as motionless as though she had been on a granite pedestal. She did not turn once, either to the right or left, but no doubt she saw with her shoulders, which were very bare and very beautiful, for there was in the same box with me, and consequently behind THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 29 us both, a young man who appeared quite as indifferent as she was to everything but the opera that was being sung. I can certify that this young man had not made one of those grimaces which men make to women in public places, and which you may call declarations from a distance. Only, when the piece was over, and amid the general confusion as the boxes emptied, the lady rose and buttoned her cloak, and I heard her say to her husband in a clear and conjugally imperious voice, ‘Henri, pick up my hood! and then over his back, as he was stooping down, she ex- tended her hand and arm, and took a note the young man handed her, just as though she had been taking her fan or her bouquet from her husband’s hand. He rose up, poor man! holding the hood—a scarlet satin hood, but not so scarlet as his face, for which he had, at the risk of apoplexy, dived under the seats as he best could. Upon my word, when I saw that, I went away think- ing that, instead of giving it to his wife, he ought to have kept that hood to hide his own head in, for the horns were about to sprout.” “Your story is a good one,” said Vicomte de Brassard calmly, and at another time I should have enjoyed it more—but allow me to finish my tale. I confess that with a girl of that sort I was not for a moment doubtful of the fate of my letter. She might be tied to her mother’s apron-strings, but she would find means to read my letter and reply to it. I even expected a long cor- respondence, carried on under the table as we had begun, and when the next day I entered the dining-room, firmly convinced in my own mind that I was about to have a reply to my letter of the previous evening, I thought my eyes must have played me a trick when I saw that the covers had been changed, and that Made- moiselle Alberte was placed, where she always ought to have been, between her father and mother. “What was the meaning of this change? Did her father and _ mother suspect anything? Mademoiselle Alberte was opposite to me, and I looked at her with that fixed expression which demands an answer. ‘There were twenty-five notes of interrogation in my ? 30 THE DIABOLIQUES eyes; but hers were as calm, as silent, as indifferent as usual. They looked at me as though they did not see me. I have never seen a look more annoying than that long calm gaze, which fell on you as though you were an inanimate object. I boiled with curiosity, vexation, impatience, and many other emotions—and | could not understand how it was that this girl, who was so sure of herself, did not dare to give me a sign which would warn me, or make me guess, or tell me, that we understood each other, and that we were conniving or conspiring together in the same mys- tery, whether it was love or something else. “I asked myself if it could be really the same girl who had touched my hand and foot under the table; who had received the letter the previous evening and had slipped it so cleverly into her breast, before her parents, as she would have placed a flower there. She had done so much already that she need not have been em- barrassed to give me a glance. But no! I had nothing. The din- ner passed without that glance for which I was watching and waiting. ‘She must have found some means to reply to me,’ I said to myself as I left the table and went up to my room, not believing that such a woman would retreat after such an incredible advance—not admitting that fear or prudence could stand be- tween her and her fancies, and parbleu! frankly refusing to acknowledge that she had not a fancy for me. “If her parents have no suspicion,’ I said to myself, ‘if it is by chance that she has changed her place at the table, to-morrow I shall find her by my side again/—But on the morrow, and on the following days, I was not seated near Mademoiselle Alberte, who continued to wear the same incomprehensible look, and to say the same ordinary phrases in the same impassive way. “You may well imagine that I observed her with much interest. She appeared as undisturbed as possible, whilst I was horribly annoyed, even to anger—an anger that I was forced to conceal! This air, which she never lost, made me seem farther away from her than ever. I was so exasperated that in the end I did not fear to compromise her by looking at her, and fixing on her im- THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 31 penetrable eyes the earnest, burning gaze of mine. Was it a clever manceuvre on her part? Was it coquetry? Was it but one caprice following another—or simply stupidity? ‘If one knew the right moment!’ as Ninon used to say. Had the right moment already passed? “However, I still waited—for what?—a word, a sign—so easily given as we pushed the chairs back when we rose from dinner— and as that did not come, all the most foolish and absurd ideas began to fill my head. I imagined that because of the difficulties which surrounded us in the house, she would write to me by post —she was quite cunning enough to slip a letter into the box when she was out with her mother—and impressed by that idea, my blood boiled twice a day, an hour before the postman passed. Ten times a day did I ask the old servant, in a voice choked with emotion: ‘Are there any letters for me, Olive?’ to which she re- plied imperturbably: ‘No, sir, there are not.’ “Finally the anxiety grew too intense. Desire deceived turned to hate. I began to hate Alberte, and to explain to myself her conduct towards me by motives which would cause me to despise her, for hate needs scorn. ‘Cowardly little wretch, she is afraid to write,’ I said to myself. I endeavoured not to think of her, and I heaped abuse upon her when I spoke of her, to Louis de Meung—for I did tell him about her, for she had extinguished all my sense of chivalry, and I related the whole adventure to my friend, who twisted his long fair moustache whilst he listened to me, and who frankly replied—for we were not moralists in the 27th: ‘Do as I do. One nail drives out another. Take one of the little sempstresses of the town for a mistress, and think no more about the young devil.’ “But I did not follow his advice. I had too much at stake. If I had taken a mistress, and she had known of it, I might have aroused her vanity or her jealousy. But she would not know it. How should she? If I had brought home some woman to my lodgings, as Louis did, I should have embroiled myself with the a2 THE DIABOLIQUES worthy people of the house, who would at once have requested me to look out for other apartments, and I was not willing to give up the chance of again meeting the hand or the foot of that confounded Alberte, who, after all she had dared to do, still re- mained ‘Mademoiselle Impassible.’ ““Call her, rather, impossible,’ said Louis, who made fun of me. “À whole month passed, and in spite of my resolutions to forget Alberte, and to seem as indifferent as she was—to oppose marble to marble, and coldness to coldness—my whole life was passed on the watch—which I detest, even when I am shooting. Yes, sir, my days were spent on the watch. I was on the watch when I went down to dinner, and hoped to find her alone in the dining- room as on the first occasion. On the watch during dinner, when she met my eyes with a calm cold gaze which did not avoid mine, or reply to it either. On the watch after dinner, when I remained a little time to see the two women resume their work in the window-seat; hoping that she would drop something—her thimble, or scissors, or a bit of work—that I could pick up, and in restor- ing touch her hand—that hand which burned into my brain! On the watch when I had regained my own room, and thought I heard in the corridor the foot which had pressed on mine so firmly. On the watch on the staircase, where I hoped I might meet her, and where old Olive discovered me one day, to my great confusion. On the watch at my window—the window you see—where I planted myself when she was going out with her mother, and from which I did not budge until she returned; but which was as useless as all the rest. When she went out—wearing a shawl with red and white stripes, printed with black and yellow flowers— she never once turned; and when she returned, still by her mother’s side, she never raised her head or her eyes to the window where I was awaiting her. “Such were the miserable practices to which she had condemned me. Of course I know that women make lackeys of us—but not to that extent. Ah, I no longer took pleasure in my uniform! When the duties of the day were over—after the drill or the THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 33 parade—I returned home quickly, but not to read a pile of memoirs or novels, my sole reading at that time. I never went to see Louis de Meung. I never touched the foils. I had not even the resource of tobacco which deadens the nerves, and which you young men of the present day use. We did not smoke then in the 27th, or only the privates did in the guard-room, when they played cards on the head of the drum. The only exercise I took was to tramp up and down the six feet of clear space in my room, like a caged lioness that smells raw meat. “And if it were so in the day, it was also the same for a great part of the night. I went to bed late. I did not sleep. That infernal Alberte kept me awake. She had kindled a fire in my veins, and then gone away—like an incendiary who does not even turn his head to see the flames burst forth behind him. In the evening, I lowered, as it is now’—here the Vicomte passed his glove over the coach-window, to wipe away the moisture—“the same crimson curtain in front of the same window, and which was better than shutters to prevent inquisitive neighbours from seeing into the room. “The room was furnished in the style of the period—the Empire—with a parquetry floor, no carpet, and a bed all bronze and cherry-wood, with a sphinx at each corner, and lion’s paws for the feet. There was also on each drawer of the writing-table a lion’s head with a ring in its mouth, by which ring you pulled the drawer open. A square table, also in cherry-wood, but of a rather pinker shade than the rest of the furniture, and having a grey marble top and copper ornaments, stood opposite the bed against the wall, between the window and the door of a dressing- room; and opposite the fire-place was the large blue morocco sofa of which I have already spoken. High up in each corner stood a bracket of imitation lacquer, and upon one of them was a statuette of Niobe—rather an astonishing ornament to find in a bourgeois family. But wasn’t this incomprehensible Alberte even more astonishing? ‘The walls were painted a whitish yellow, and were devoid of pictures and engravings. I hung up my arms, sus- 34 THE DIABOLIQUES pended on gilt copper hooks. When I hired this great calabash of an apartment—as Louis de Meung, who was not poetical, elegantly called it—I had placed in the centre a large round table, which I covered with military maps, books, and papers. It was my bureau, at which I wrote—whenever I did write. “Well, one evening, or rather one night, I had wheeled the sofa up to this large table, and I was drawing by the light of the lamp —not to distract my mind from the sole thought which had occu- pied it for a month, but rather the reverse, for it was the head of that perplexing Alberte which I was sketching—it was the face of that she-devil, who worried me as a devotee is worried by the other devil. “It was late. The street—through which passed two diligences every night, one each way (as now), one at a quarter to one in the morning, and the other at half past two, and both of which stopped to change horses at the Hotel de la Poste—the street was as silent as the grave. I could have heard a fly, and if by chance there was one in my room, it must have been asleep in a corner of the window-pane, or in one of the pleats of the curtain, which was of heavy stuff, and hung stiff and motionless before the window. The only noise was that which I myself made with my pencil and stump. “Yes, it was her face I was drawing; God knows with what care and attention! Suddenly, without any sound from the lock to forewarn me, my door opened a little way, giving that squeaky sound which doors make when the hinges are dry, and remained ajar, as though it were frightened by the sound it had made. I raised my eyes, thinking that I could not have closed the door properly that it should have opened in this unexpected way with a plaintive squeak that might frighten all those who were awake, and wake those who were asleep. I rose from the table in order to close it, but the half-opened door opened still wider, and still very gently, but with a repetition of that shrill sound which echoed like a groan through the silent house, and I saw, when it had opened to its full extent—Alberte! THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 35 “Alberte, who in spite of all her precautions, and the deadly fear in which she was, could not prevent that cursed door from crying out. “Ah, tonnerre de Dieu! they may talk about visions—but not the most supernatural vision would have surprised me, or made my heart bound as it did when I saw coming towards me Alberte, frightened at the noise the door had made in opening, and which it would repeat when she closed it. Remember that I was but eighteen! Perhaps she saw my terror, and her own, and repressed by a quick sign the cry of surprise which might have escaped me— and certainly would have escaped but for this gesture—then she closed the door; not slowly but rapidly, to prevent the hinges from squeaking. It did not prevent them, and they gave one short shrill cry. The door being closed, she listened with her ear against it, if another sound more terrible might not reply to that of the door. . . . I thought I saw her totter. I sprang towards her, and she was soon in my arms.” “She seems to be getting along very nicely, your Miss Alberte,” I said to the Captain. “You think, perhaps,” he continued, as though he had not heard my jesting remark, “that when she fell into my arms she had lost her head through fright, or love—like a girl who 1s pur- sued, or may be pursued; who does not know what she is doing when she does the most stupid things, but abandons herself to that devil which is in every woman (they say) and which would always be her master, were it not that she has two others also in her—Cowardice and Shame—to interfere with the first one. Well, no, it was not like that! If you think so, you are wrong. She had no vulgar and shamefaced fears. It was rather she who took me to her arms than I who took her to mine... . Her first movement had been to throw her head on my breast, but she raised it again, and looked at me with her great eyes—those won- derful eyes—as if to see if it were really I she held in her arms. “She was horribly pale—more pale than I had ever seen her— but she had not lost that look of a princess. Her features were 36 THE DIABOLIQUES still as hard and unimpressionable as a medal. Only on the slightly pouting lips there hovered an expression of I know not what, unless it was passion satisfied, or soon to be satisfied! Yet there was something so sad about this, that, in order not to see it, I impressed on her beautiful pink and pouting lips the kiss of triumphant desire! The mouth was half open, but the dark eyes, whose long lashes almost touched mine, did not close—or even wink—but behind them, as upon her mouth, I saw the same expression of madness. “As she clung to me in a burning kiss, I carried her to the blue morocco sofa—which had been St. Laurence’s grill to me during the month that I had rolled upon it thinking of her—and it creaked voluptuously under her bare back, for she was half naked. She had come from her bed and—would you believe it?—had been obliged to pass through the chamber where her father and mother slept! She had crept groping, with her hands in front of her, in order not to knock against some piece of furniture, and so make a noise which would wake them up.” “Ah!” T said, “one is not braver than that in the trenches. She was worthy to be a soldier’s mistress.” “And that she was, the first night,” replied the Vicomte. “She was as violent as I was, and I can swear that I was bad enough. But, in spite of that, there was a drawback. Neither she nor I could forget, in our most delicious transports, the dreadful situation in which we both were. In the midst of the happiness which she came to offer me, she was as though stupe- fied by the act which she had accomplished with such a firm will and such stubborn obstinacy. I was not astonished at it. I, for my part, was also stupefied. I had—though I did not tell her, or show it—a most terrible anxiety in my heart, whilst she pressed me closely to her own. I listened through her sighs and kisses, and through the terrifying silence which lay on that sleeping and trusting household, for something terrible—for the mother who did not awake, for the father who did not get out of bed! And I looked over her shoulder to see if the door—of which she had not THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 37 taken out the key for fear of the noise it might make—would not open again, and show me the Medusa heads, pale and indignant, of the two old people whom we were deceiving so boldly and so shamefully—spectres of violated hospitality and justice. “Even the creaking of the blue sofa, though it sounded the reveille of Love, made me tremble dreadfully. My heart beat against hers, which seemed to re-echo the beatings. It was simul- taneously intoxicating and sobering; but it was terrible. After- wards I did not so much mind. By dint of repeating this in- credible imprudence, it ceased to disturb me. I grew accustomed to the danger of being surprised. I did not think of it. I thought only of being happy. At this first critical meeting she decided that she would come to me every other night—since I could not go to her, her room having only one door which led to the room of her parents—and she came every second night, but she never got rid of the sensation—the stupor—of the first night! Time did not produce on her the effect that it did on me. She was never inured to the risk she ran each time. She always lay on my breast, hardly speaking—for, as you may suppose, she was not a great talker—and when later on I grew calmer, seeing the dan- ger always avoided, and spoke to her, as a man speaks to his mistress, of what had already passed between us—of that strange insane coldness which had followed her bold step; when I asked her all those endless questions put by a lover, and which are, after all, nothing but curiosity, her only reply was a long embrace. Her sad mouth was dumb—in all but kisses. “There are women who tell you: ‘I have ruined myself for you’; and there are others who say: ‘How you must despise me!’ They are different ways of expressing the fatality of love—but she, no! She said nothing! A strange thing! A still stranger per- sonality! She gave me the idea of a thick, hard marble slab which had a fire burning beneath it. I believed there would come a moment when the marble would be cracked by the heat, but the marble continued to be as solid as ever. Night after night saw no change in her, and, if I may be permitted an ecclesiastical 38 THE DIABOLIQUES expression, she was always as ‘difficult to confess’ as she had been the first night. I could get nothing out of her. At the most a syllable wrung from those beautiful lips, which I doted on the more because I had seen them cold and indifferent during the day, and this syllable did not give me much insight into the character of a girl who appeared to be more of a sphinx than all the others which adorned the Empire furniture.” “But, Captain,” I interrupted, “there must, however, have been an end to all this. You are a sensible man, and the sphinxes are fabulous animals. Devil take it! you must at last have found out what idea had got into the girl’s mind.” “An end! Yes, there was an end,” said Vicomte de Brassard, suddenly lowering the coach-window, as though the breath had failed in his broad chest, and he needed air before he could finish what he had to say. “But the idea, as you call it, of this singular girl was not discovered, after all. Our love, our relations, our intrigue—call it what you will—gave us, or rather gave me, sensa- tions which I do not think I have ever experienced since with women I loved more than Alberte, who, perhaps, did not love me, and whom, perhaps, I did not love! I never fully understood what I was to her, and what she was to me—and this lasted more than six months. During these six months, all that I understood was a kind of happiness of which you have not an idea when you are young. I understood the happiness of those who have something to hide. I understood the enjoyment of complicity in mystery, which, even without the hope of success, is the delight of conspira- tors. Alberte, at her parents’ table and elsewhere, was still always the ‘Infanta’ who had made such an impression on me the first time I saw her. Her Nero face, beneath the hard curls of the blue-black hair which touched her eyebrows, told nothing of the guilty nights, showed no blush. “I tried to be as impenetrable as she was, but I am sure I must have betrayed myself ten times if I had been well observed. I flattered myself proudly, and almost sensually, at the bottom of my heart, that all this superb indifference was for me, and that THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 39 she felt for me all the baseness of passion—if passion can ever be base. No one but ourselves knew that; the thought was delicious. No one—not even my friend, Louis de Meung, with whom I had been discreet since I had become happy! He had guessed all, no doubt, but then he was as discreet as I was. He did not question me. I had, without any effort, resumed my friendly habits with him, the walks on the Promenade, in full uniform or undress, cards, fencing, and punch! Pardieu! when you know that happi- ness will come in the shape of a pretty girl, whose senses are aflame, and visit you regularly every other night at the same hour, that simplifies your existence wonderfully !” “But the parents of Alberte must have slept like the Seven Sleepers!” I said jokingly, cutting short the reflection of the old dandy by a jest, in order not to appear too much interested in his story, though it did interest me; for with dandies a joke is the only way of making yourself respected. “You imagine, then, I am romancing, and exaggerating the effects?” said the Viscomte. “But I am not a novelist. Some- times Alberte did not come. The door—the hinges of which were oiled now and went as soft as wool—sometimes did not open all night—because her mother had heard her, and cried out, or her father had seen her creeping on tiptoe across the room. But Alberte, having a head like iron, had always a pretext ready. She was ill. She was seeking the sugar-basin, and without a light, in oiter not to awake anyone.” “Those heads of iron are not so rare as you seem to think, Captain,” I interrupted again. “Your Alberte, after all, was no cleverer than the girl who received every night, in her grand- mother’s room—whilst the old lady was asleep behind the cur- tains—a lover, who came in through the window, and, as they had no blue sofa, they calmly lay down on the carpet. You know the story as well as I do. One night, a sigh louder than usual woke the grandmother, who cried from behind the curtains: ‘What is the matter, little one?’ and the girl nearly fainted on her lover’s breast, but nevertheless recovered herself, and replied: “The 40 THE DIABOLIQUES busk of my stays hurt me whilst I was looking for a needle which has fallen on the floor, and which I cannot find,’ ” “Yes, I know the story,” replied the Vicomte. “The young girl of whom you speak was, if I remember rightly, one of the Guises. She acted up to her name, but you do not mention that after that night she never opened her window again to her lover, who was, I think, M. de Noirmoutier; whereas Alberte came to me the day after one of these terrible shocks, and exposed herself again to danger just as though nothing had occurred. I was then only an ensign, and not very strong in mathematics, with which I did not trouble myself; but it must have been evident to one who could calculate chances that some day—or night—there would be a dénouement.” “Ah, yes,’ I remarked, remembering what he had said before he began his story, “the dénouement which made you acquainted with the sensation of fear, Captain.” “Precisely,” he replied, in a voice so grave that it contrasted strongly with the flippant tone I had assumed. “You have seen, have you not? that from the time she seized my hand under the table, to the moment when she appeared like a ghost framed in my open doorway, Alberte had made me suffer all kinds of emo- tion. She had caused to pass through me more than one kind of shudder, more than one kind of terror; but they had been merely like the bullets which whistle round you—like the cannon- balls of which you feel only the wind: you shudder, but you go on. Well! it was not that. It was fear—thorough and complete fear, and no longer for Alberte, but for myself; for myself alone. What I felt was that sensation which makes the heart as pale as the face—that panic fear which makes whole regiments take to flight. I have seen the whole Chamboran regiment take to its heels, carrying with it its colonel and all the officers. But at that time I had seen nothing of the kind, and I learned—that which I believed to be impossible. “Listen! It was one night. In the life we were leading, it was bound to be at night—a long winter’s night. I will not say THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 41 it was one of our calmest nights. Our nights were all calm. We were so happy that they became so. We slept over a powder- magazine. We were not disturbed at the thought of making love on a sword-blade over an abyss, like the bridge which leads to the Turkish hell. Alberte had come earlier than usual, in order to stay longer. When she thus came, my first caress, my first attention, was for her feet—those pretty feet, not now en- cased in green or blue slippers, but bare in order to make no sound—for they were icy from the cold bricks over which she walked the length of the corridor which led from her parents’ room to mine, which was at the other side of the house. “I warmed those icy feet, which for my sake had come out of a warm bed, fearing that she might catch some terrible disease of the lungs. I knew how to warm them, and bring back the pink or red tint to those pale, cold feet; but that night my method failed. My mouth was powerless to bring back the flush of blood. “Alberte was that night more silently loving than ever. “Her embraces had that languor and that force which were to me like a language, and a language so expressive that, if I had told her all my mad intoxication of joy, I should have needed no other answer. I understood those embraces. “But suddenly I felt them no longer. Her arms ceased to press me to her heart. I thought it was one of those swoons such as she often had, though generally in these swoons her embrace never relaxed.—I need not be prudish to you. We are both men, and we can speak as men. “I had had some experience of the voluptuous spasms of Alberte, and when they seized her, they did not interrupt my embraces. “TI remained as I was, on her breast, waiting till she should re- turn to consciousness, and proud in the certainty she would recover her senses under my embraces, and that the blow which had struck her, by striking again, would revive her. “But this was the exception to the rule. I gazed at her as she lay close to me on the blue sofa, awaiting the moment when her 42 THE DIABOLIQUES eyes, now hidden under the long lids, should again reveal to me those splendid orbs of black velvet and flame; when those teeth which clenched almost tight enough to break the enamel at the least kiss on her neck or shoulders, should reopen and allow her breath to pass. But the eyes did not reopen, and the teeth did not unclench. “The icy chill rose from her feet, and mounted even to her lips. When I felt that horrible cold, I sat up, in order to look at her the better; with a bound I tore myself from her arms, one of which fell back on her body, and the other dropped to the ground by the side of the sofa on which she lay. Frightened, but having still my senses about me, I put my hand on her heart... . No sign of life! No sign in the pulse, in the temples, no sign in the carotid arteries, no sign anywhere.—Death with its terrible rigidity was everywhere! “I was sure of her death—and yet I could not believe it. “The human brain sometimes makes those stupid resolutions even in the face of clear evidence and destiny. Alberte was dead. Of what? I did not know; I was not a doctor. But she was dead, and though I saw as clearly as the sun at noonday that all I could do would be useless, yet I did everything that I knew would be absurdly useless. In my absolute ignorance of all knowl- edge, and want of all instruments and resources, I emptied over her face all the bottles on my dressing-table. I beat her hand, in spite of the noise it made in a house where the least sound made us tremble. I had heard one of my uncles, a captain in the 4th Dragoons, say that he had once saved one of his friends from apoplexy by bleeding him with a fleam, such as is used for bleeding horses. I had plenty of weapons in my room. I picked up a dagger, and cut Alberte’s arm deeply, but no blood flowed. “At the most a few drops coagulated. Neither kisses nor bites could galvanize into life that stiff corpse—which had become a corpse beneath my lips. Not knowing what more to do, I ended by extending myself on her body—the means employed (accord- ing to the old legends) by all the miracle-workers of the past THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 43 when they resuscitated dead bodies—not hoping to restore her to life, but acting as though I did so hope. And it was whilst I was lying on this cold body that a thought, which had not before been able to form itself in the mental chaos in which the frightfully sudden death of Alberte had thrown me, appeared clearly, and I was afraid. “Yes, I was seized by a dread—a terrible dread. Alberte had died in my room, and her death would reveal everything. What would become of me? What should I do? “At the thought, I seemed to feel a terrible physical dread, and my hair stood on end. My backbone turned to ice, and I tried to struggle—but in vain—against the unmanly feeling. I told myself I must be calm; that I was a man—a soldier. I took my head in my hands, and whilst my brain reeled, I compelled my- self to think of the terrible situation in which I was, and consider all the ideas which whipped my brain as though it were a top— and all these ideas centred in the inanimate body of Alberte, and how her mother would find her in the morning in ‘the officer’s room’—dead and dishonoured! “The thought of the mother whose daughter I had dishonoured and perhaps killed, weighed more on my mind than even the corpse of Alberte. The death could not be concealed—but was there no means of concealing the dishonour proved by the dis- covery of the body in my room? That was the question I asked myself; the point on which I fixed all my attention. “The difficulty increased the more I studied it, until it assumed the proportions of an absolute impossibility. Frightful hallucina- tion! Sometimes the corpse ot Alberte seemed to fill the whole room. Ah, if her bedroom had not been placed behind that of her parents, I would have carried her back, at all risks, to her own bed. “But how could I, with a dead body in my arms, pass through a room with which I was unacquainted, and which I had never entered, and where the father and mother of the unfortunate girl slumbered in the light sleep of old people? 44 THE DIABOLIQUES “Yet such was my state of mind, and my fear of the morrow and of the dead body found in my room galloped so madly through my brain, that this bold madness of carrying Alberte to her own room possessed me as the only means of saving the honour of the poor girl, and sparing me the shame of the reproaches of the father and mother. Would you believe it?—I can hardly be- lieve it myself when I think of it!—I had the strength to take Alberte’s dead body, raising it by the arms, and place it on my shoulders. Horrible burden! heavier by far than that of the damned in Dante’s hell. You must have carried, as I did, that fardel of flesh which but an hour before had made my blood boil with desire, and which now terrified me! You must have carried it yourself ere you can know what I felt and suffered. “Thus laden, I opened the door, and, like her, with bare feet that I might make no noise, I entered the corridor which led to her parents’ room, the door of which was at the end of the passage, and, stopping at each step, whilst my legs almost gave way under me, I listened for the least sound, and could hear nothing but the beating of my own heart. The moments seemed terribly long. Nothing moved. One step succeeded another. But when I arrived in front of that fatal door which I must enter, and which she had not quite closed, that she might find it still open on her return—and when I heard the long, quiet breathing of those two poor old people who were sleeping in such peace and confidence, I dared go no farther. I dared not pass that doorway, looking so black and threatening in the darkness. “I drew back; I almost fled with my burden. I returned to my room more and more terror-struck. I replaced the body of Alberte on the sofa, and, on my knees beside her, I repeated those supplicating questions. What is to be done? What will be the end? So perturbed was I, that the senseless and atrocious idea occurred to me to throw the body of this beautiful girl, who had been my mistress six months, out of the window. Despise me if you will! I opened the window—I drew aside the curtain THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 45 you see there, and I looked into the black hole at the bottom of which was the street, for it was very dark that night. I could not see the pavement. “They will believe it is a suicide,’ I said to myself—and I once more raised Alberte’s body. But then a ray of common sense shot across my madness. ‘How was she killed? From whence could she have fallen if she is found under my window?’ “I fully realized the impossibility of what I had been about to do. I closed the window, the fastening of which creaked dismally. I drew the curtain again, feeling more dead than alive at each sound I made. Besides, either through the window—on the staircase—in the corridor—wherever I might leave or throw the body, it would be an eternal accuser—the profanation would be useless. An examination of the corpse would reveal everything, and a mother’s eyes would see all that the doctor or the judge tried to conceal from her. “What I suffered was insupportable, and I had a good mind to finish it all with a pistol-shot and in the ‘demoralized’ (an expression of the Emperor’s that I learned to understand later) condition in which I was, I looked at the weapons shining on the walls. But there! I will be frank. I was seventeen, and I loved—my sword. Both by inclination and race, I was a soldier. I had never been under fire, and I wished to be. I had military ambitions. In the regiment we joked about Werther—regarded as a hero at that time—but whom we officers pitied. The thought which prevented me from getting rid, by killing myself, of the ignoble fear which oppressed me, led to another which appeared to be salvation in the strait in which I was. “If I went and saw the Colonel! I said to myself. The Colonel is the father of the regiment—and I dressed myself as though the call to arms were beating for a surprise attack. I took my pistols as a precaution. Who knew what might happen? I em- braced for the last time, with all the affection of seventeen—one is always sentimental at seventeen—the dumb mouth of the poor 46 THE DIABOLIQUES dead Alberte, which during the last six months had showered upon me such delights. I descended the stair on tiptoe. Breath- less as one who is fleeing for his life, I took an hour (it seemed to me an hour) to unbolt the street-door and turn the big key in the enormous lock; and, after having closed the door again with all the precautions of a thief, I ran like one fleeing for his life to the Colonel’s house. “I rang as though the house had been on fire. I shouted as though the enemy had been about to capture the flag of the regi- ment. I knocked everything over, including the orderly who tried to prevent me from entering his master’s room, and when once the Colonel was awake, I told him everything. I made a complete confession rapidly and boldly, for time pressed, and 1 begged of him to save me. “The Colonel was a man of action. He saw at a glance in what a horrible gulf I was struggling. He had pity on the youngest of his children, as he called us, and indeed I was in a condition to be pitied. He told me—accentuating the statement with a round oath—that I must begin by clearing out of the town, immediately, and that he would undertake the rest; that he would see the parents as soon as I had gone, but that I must go at once, and take the diligence which would stop in ten minutes’ time at the Hotel de la Poste, and go to a town which he named, where he would write. He gave me some money, for I had omitted to put any in my pocket, pressed his old grey moustache to my cheeks, and ten minutes after this interview I had climbed on the roof—it was the only place left—of the diligence which was making the same journey as we are now, and I passed at a gallop under the window (you may guess how I looked at it) of the funeral chamber where I had left Alberte dead, and which was lighted up as it is to-night.” Vicomte de Brassard stopped, his voice quite broken. I no longer felt inclined to joke. The silence did not last long. “And after?” I said. THE CRIMSON CURTAIN 47 “Well,” he replied, “there was no after. For a long time I was tortured by curiosity. I followed faithfully the Colonel’s instructions. I impatiently awaited a letter that would inform me of what had happened after my departure. I waited about a month; but at the end of the month it was not a letter from the Colonel I received, for he scarcely ever wrote, except with a sabre on the bodies of his enemies, but an order to join in twenty-four hours the 33rd Regiment, to which I had been appointed. A campaign, and that my first, distracted my thoughts. The battles in which I took part, the hardships, and also some adventures with women, caused me to neglect to write to the Colonel, and turned my thoughts from the sad memory of Alberte, without, however, effacing it. I preserved it still, like a bullet that cannot be ex- tracted. I said to myself that I should some day meet the Colonel, who would inform me of that which I wished to know, but the Colonel was killed at the head of his regiment at Leipsic. Louis de Meung also had been killed about a month before. “It is shameful, no doubt,” added the Captain, “but memories end by dying. The devouring curiosity to know what had hap- pened after my departure no longer disturbed me. I might have come back in after years to this little town—and, changed as I was, I should never have been recognized—and learned what had been the end of my tragic adventure. But something, which was certainly not respect for public opinion, which I have all my life despised, but rather a disinclination to face a second time that which had given me such a deadly fear, always restrained me.” This dandy, who had related without any dandyism such a grim and true story, was silent. I was thinking over his story, and I understood that this fine flower of dandyism had other sides to his character than those which appeared to his acquaintances. I remembered that he had said at the beginning that there was a black blot which had all his life destroyed his pleasures as a libertine—when suddenly he astonished me still more by seizing my arm roughly. 48 THE DIABOLIQUES “Look!” he said. “Look at the curtain!” The slim shadow of a woman was plainly delineated on the curtain. “The ghost of Alberte!” said the Captain. “Fortune is mock- ing us to-night,” he added bitterly. The shadow passed, and the red bright square was again empty. But the wheelwright, who, whilst the Captain was speaking, had been busy with his screw, had finished his task. The fresh horses were ready, and were pawing the ground, striking out sparks with their iron shoes. The driver, his astrakhan cap over his ears, and the way-bill between his teeth, took the reins and climbed to the box, and, when once he was in his seat, cried in a loud clear voice: “Go on!” And we went on, and had soon passed the mysterious window with its red curtain—but I still continue to see it in my dreams. THE GREATEST LOVE OF DON JUAN en PT OM OP eo AY NON NAME NAS St ARE UT on ya ; N SEA HN, THE GREATEST LOVE OF DON JUAN “The Devil’s primest fare is innocence.” I “HE is still alive then, that hoary old reprobate?” “Still alive! I should rather think he was,—by God’s grace,” I took care to add, remembering Madame’s piety, “and of the most distinguished and aristocratic parish of Sainte-Clotilde—‘Le rot est mort! vive le roi! is what they used to say under the old Monarchy, in the days when that fine old piece of Sévres porcelain was yet unbroken. But Don Juan, in spite of all your democ- racies, is a monarch they will never break.” “Yes! yes! no doubt the Devil is in the immortal!” she returned in a self-approving tone. “As a matter of fact, he... Who 4). the Devil! ..)....” “No! no! Don Juan. He supped, I say, only three days ago in pleasant company. . . . Guess where... . “At your horrid Nate d'Orrof course. Lu “My dear Madame! Don Juan never goes there now... they’ve no fish fit to fry for his Highness’ palate. The Sefior Don Juan has always been a bit like Arnold of Brescia’s famous monk who, the Chronicles tell us, lived only on the blood of souls. That is what he loves to colour his champagne with, and it’s many a long day since it was to be had at that rendezvous of the com- monplace cocotte!” “You'll be telling me next,” she interrupted, in the ironic vein, “he supped at the Benedictine nunnery with the holy ladies . . .” “Yes! ladies of the Perpetual Adoration; why, certainly, 51 2 22 LIBRARY ‘ En UNIVERSITY OF | nut yore 52 THE DIABOLIQUES Madam. For indeed I do think the adoration he has once in- spired, our redoubtable Lovelace, seems to last for good and all.” “And I think that for a good Catholic you are a trifle profane, sir!”’—this she said slowly, but not without a touch of irritation— “and I must beg you to spare me the details of your naughty suppers. I suppose this is a new way of telling me about your disreputable lady friends, this harping on Don Juan and his doings to-night.” “I merely state the facts, Madam. The disreputable persons present at the supper in question, if they are disreputable, are not my friends at all . . . unfortunately . . .” “Enough! enough!” “Forgive my modest disclaimer. . . . They were. . “The mille é trè? . . .” she interrupted again, thinking better of it and all but recovering her good temper under the stress of curiosity. “Oh! not all of them. . . . À round dozen merely. With as many as that, nothing could be more respectable, you know.” “Or more disreputable,” she put in tartly. “Besides, you know as well as I do the Comtesse de Chiffrevas’ boudoir will not hold a crowd. Everything was done that could be done; but, after all, it’s only a small room, her boudoir.” “What!”—raising her voice in her astonishment. “They had supper in the boudoir?” “Yes! in the boudoir. And why not? A battle-field makes a famous place to dine. They wished to give a very special and particular supper to Señor Don Juan, and it seemed better worthy of his exploits to give it on the scene of his former triumphs, where fond memories bloom instead of orange-blossoms. A pretty no- tion, at once tender and sad! ’Twas no victims’ ball! it was a victims’ supper-party!” “And Don Juan?” she asked in the tone of Orgon, in the play, saying: “And Tartufe?” “Don Juan took it in excellent part, and made an excellent supper, 22 e THE GREATEST LOVE 53 ‘,.. He, he alone before them all, as the poet sings—in the person of someone you know very well indeed—none other than the Comte Jules-Amédée-Hector de Ravila de Ravilès.” “Comte de Ravilés! Why, yes! He was a Don Juan. . .. So saying, the pious lady, case-hardened in her narrow bigotry as she was, and long past the age of day-dreams, lapsed then and there into a fond reverie of which Comte Jules-Amédée was the theme—that man of the old Don Juan breed, to which God has not indeed given “all the world and the glory thereof,’ but has suffered the Devil to do it for Him. 9) II What I had just told the aged Marquise Guy de Ruy was the unvarnished truth. Hardly three days had elapsed since a dozen ladies of the virtuous Faubourg Saint-Germain (rest them easy, I will never damage their noble names!), who every one, the whole dozen, if we are to believe the cackling dowagers of the quarter, had been “on the best of good terms” (a really charming, old- fashioned locution) with the Comte Ravila de Ravilés, had con- ceived the singular idea of offering him a supper—he being the only male guest—in pious memory of . . . well! they did not say of what. A bold thing to do, but women, while timid individually, are as bold as brass when banded together. Probably not one of the whole party would have ventured to invite the Comte to a tête-à-tête supper at her own house; but all together, each back- ing up the other, they feared not to weave a chain, like mesmerists round their mystic tub, round this magnetic and most compromis- ing individual, the Comte de Ravila de Ravilés.... “What a name!” “A providential name, Madam.” The Comte de Ravila de Ravilés, who, by the by, had always lived up to his high-sounding and picturesque title, was the 54 THE DIABOLIQUES perfect incarnation of all the long line of Lovelaces Romance and History tell of, and even the old Marquise Guy de Ruy—a dis- contented old lady, with light-blue eyes, cold and keen, but not so cold as her heart or so keen as her tongue—allowed that in these times, when women and women’s concerns grow day by day less important, if there was anyone who could recall Don Juan, it must surely be he! Unfortunately, it was Don Juan in the Fifth Act. The witty Prince de Ligne said he could not make himself believe Alcibiades ever grew to be fifty; and here again the Comte de Ravila was to be a true Alcibiades to the end of the chapter. Like d’Orsay, a dandy hewn out of the marble of Michael Angelo, who was the handsomest of men down to his last hour, Ravila had possessed the good looks specially belong- ing to the Don Juan breed—that mysterious race which does not proceed from father to son, like other races, but appears here and there, at recurring intervals, in the families of mankind. His beauty was beyond dispute—of the gay, arrogant, imperial sort, Juanesque in fact (the word is a picture and makes descrip- tion needless); and—had he made an unholy bargain with the ~ Devil?—it was his still. . . . Only, God was beginning to exact His penalty; life’s cruel tiger-claws already seamed that “front divine,” crowned with the roses of so many kisses, and on his wide and wicked temples appeared the first white hairs that pro- claim the impending invasion of the barbarian hosts and the Fall of the Empire. . . . He wore them, it is true, with the calm insouciance of pride surfeited with power; but women who had loved him would sometimes gaze at them with sad eyes. Who knows? perhaps they read what hour of day it was for them- selves on that whitening brow? Alas and alas! for them as for him, ’twas the hour for the grim supper with the cold white- marble commendator, after which only Hell is left—first the Hell of old age, then the other! And this perhaps is why, before sharing with him this last, bitter meal, they planned to offer him this supper of their own, and made it the miracle of art it was. THE GREATEST LOVE 55 Yes, a miracle of good taste and refinement, of patrician luxury, elegance, and pretty conceits; the most charming, the most deli- cious, the most toothsome, the most heady, and, above all, the most original of suppers. How original, just think for a moment! Commonly it is love of merriment, the thirst for amusement, that supply motives for a supper-party; but this one was dedicated only to fond memories and soft regrets, we might almost say to despair—but despair in full dress, despair hidden beneath smiles and laughter, despair that craved just one more merry night, one more escapade, one last hour of youth, one last intoxication—and so an end of it all for ever. The fair Amyphitryons of this incredible supper, so far removed from the timid habits of the society to which they belonged, must surely have experienced something of the feelings of Sardanapalus on his funeral-pyre when he heaped upon it, to perish with him, wives, slaves, horses, jewels, all the splendid trappings of his life. They too collected at this last supper of farewell all the splendours of their past. To it they brought all their stores of beauty, of wit and wisdom, of magnificence and power, to pour them forth once and for all in one supreme and final conflagration. The hero before whom they wrapped and robed themselves in this garment of consuming fire counted for more in their eyes than all Asia did for Sardanapalus. They flirted with him as never women flirted with any man before, or with any roomful of men; and their keen coquetry was yet further inflamed by jealousy, which is concealed in good society, but which they had no cause to dissemble here, for they all knew that he had been the lover of each and all of them, and shame shared among so many ceases to be shame at all. . . . The sole and only rivalry between them was, Which should carve his epitaph deepest in her heart? That night he enjoyed the rich, sovereign, nonchalant, ruminat- ing pleasure of a father confessor and a sultan. There he sat, monarch and master, in the centre of the table, facing the Com- tesse de Chiffrevas, in her boudoir with its peach-blossom hang- _ ings—or was it the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of evil?—~ 56 THE DIABOLIQUES this has always been a moot point. The fiery gaze of his blue eye—heavenly blue many a poor creature has deemed to her cost, to find it later of quite another sort—was fixed on his fair com- panions. All twelve were beautiful, all were dressed to perfec- tion; and, seated round the festive board, which glistened with crystal lights and flowers, they displayed, from the scarlet of the open rose to the soft gold of the mellow grape, every nuance of ripe and opulent charms. Only the crude green of extreme youth was absent, the little girls Byron loathed, smelling of bread and butter, thin, weedy, undeveloped creatures. Fine, full-favoured summer, rich and generous autumn, these were the seasons represented—full curves and ample proportions, dazzling bosoms, beating in majestic swell above liberally cut corsages, and below the clear modelling of the naked shoulder, arms of every type of beauty, but mostly pow- erful arms, Sabine biceps that have struggled against the Roman ravisher, vigorous enough, you would think, to grasp the wheels of the car of life and twine around the spokes and stop its course by sheer force. I have spoken of happy ideas. One of the happiest at this supper was to have all the waiting done by maidservants, that nothing might disturb the harmony of a celebration where women were the only queens, and did all the honours. . . . Señor Don Juan then was able to bathe his burning gaze in a sea of living and dazzling flesh, such as Rubens delights to flaunt in his strong, fleshy pictures, but, besides, he could plunge his pride in the ether, more or less transparent, more or less turgid, of all these hearts. The fact is, at bottom, and despite all appearances to the con- trary, Don Juan is an ardent idealist! He is like the Devil, his master, who loves men’s souls better than their bodies, and ac- tually traffics in the former by choice, the hellish slave-driver! Witty, high-bred, and aristocratic, but for the nonce as reck- lessly gay as pages of the Household—when there was a King’s Household and pages of it—they exhibited a scintillating bril- liance, a dash, a verve, a brio, that were beyond compare. They THE GREATEST LOVE 57 felt themselves in better form than they had ever been in their most palmy days; they felt a new and mysterious power in their inmost being which they had never suspected the existence of before. Joy at this discovery, a sensation of tripled intensity in the vital powers, still more the physical incitements, so stimulating to highly strung temperaments, the flashing lights, the penetrating odour of many flowers dying in an atmosphere overheated with the emanations of all these lovely bodies, the sting of heady wines, all acted together. Then the mere thought of this supper, which had just that piquancy of naughtiness the fair Neapolitan asked for in her lemonade to make it perfectly delicious, the intoxicating notion of complicity in this wild, wicked feast—not that it con- descended for an instant to any of the vulgar incidents of the Regent’s Suppers; it remained throughout true to the tone of the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the nineteenth century, and of all those lovely bosoms, with hearts beating beneath that had been under fire and still loved to tempt the fray, not one lost so much as a pin or a knot of ribbon—all these things together helped to tune the magic harp which all of them carried within themselves and to stretch the strings well-nigh to breaking-point, till they quivered again in passionate octaves and ineffable diapasons of emotion. . . . A curious page it will make of his Secret Memoirs this, if Ravila ever writes them! . . . As I told the Marquise Guy de Ruy, I was not at the supper myself, and if I am able to report some of its incidents and the narrative with which it con- cluded, I owe them to no other than Ravila himself, who, faith- ful to the traditional indiscretion characteristic of all the Don Juan breed, took the trouble one evening to tell me the whole story. III It was getting late—or, rather, early—and dawn was near. On the ceiling and at one spot in the pink silk curtains of the boudoir, otherwise hermetically closed, there grew and increased a splash 58 THE DIABOLIQUES of opalescent light, like an ever-enlarging eye, the eye of day as if fain to look in through the crevice and see what was doing in the brilliantly lighted room. A certain languor was in the air, assailing these champions of the Round Table, these merry-makers who had been so animated but a moment ago. The crisis is famil- jar at every supper-party, the instant when, wearied with the gaiety and emotional stress of the night, everything seems to languish at once, drooping heads, burning cheeks, reddened or paled by excitement, tired eyes under heavy, darkened lids, even the candles themselves, which seem to quiver and grow larger in the many-branched candelabra, fiery flowers with stems of chiselled bronze and gold. The conversation, hitherto general and vivacious, a game of shuttlecock where each had put in her stroke, had grown frag- mentary and broken, and no distinct word was now audible amid the musical confusion of voices, which, with their aristocratic tones, mingled in a pretty babble, like birds at break of day on the confines of a wood, when one of them—a high-pitched voice, imperious, almost insolent, as a Duchess’s should be—cried sud- denly above all the rest to the Comte de Ravila what was evi- dently the conclusion of a previous whispered conversation be- tween the two, which none of the others, each engaged in talk with her immediate neighbour, had heard. “You are the reputed Don Juan of our day: well! you should tell us the history of the conquest of all others which most flattered your pride as a ladies’ man, and which you judge, in the light of the present moment, the greatest love of your life... .” And the question, no less than the voice in which it was uttered, instantly cut short all the scattered conversations that were buzz- ing round the table, and imposed a sudden silence. The voice was that of the Duchesse de * * * * *—I will not lift the veil of asterisks, but you will very likely know who it was when I tell you she is the fairest of all fair women, both complexion and hair, with the darkest eyes under long golden eyebrows in all the Faubourg Saint-Germain. She was seated, THE GREATEST LOVE 59 like a saint at God’s right hand, at the right hand of the Comte de Ravila, the God of the feast, a God that, for the moment, waived his right to use his enemies as his footstool; slender and spiritual, like an arabesque and a fairy, in her dress of green velvet with glints of silver, the long train twining round her chair, no bad imitation of the serpent’s tail in which the alluring shape of the sea-nymph Melusina terminates. “A happy thought!” put in the Comtesse de Chiffrevas, second- ing as mistress of the house the wish expressed by the Duchess. “Yes! the love of all loves, inspired or felt, you would most gladly live again, were such a thing possible.” “Oh, I would be glad to live them all again!” cried Ravila with the unquenchable gusto of a Roman Emperor, the insatiable crav- ing your utterly blasé man of pleasure sometimes retains. And he flourished aloft his champagne-glass—not the silly, shallow cup fashionable in these pagan days, but the true champagne- glass, the glass our fathers drank from, tall and slender, and called by them a flute, mayhap from the celestial harmonies in which it often bathes our heart!—Then he embraced in one sweeping look the whole circle of fair women that wreathed the board so royally —“And still,” he went on, replacing his glass before him with a sigh that sounded strange from such a Nebuchadnezzar, whose only experience as yet of the grass of the field as an article of diet had been the tarragon salads at the Café Anglais,—“and still, how true it is there is always one among all the emotions of a lifetime that shines ever in the memory more brightly than the rest, as life advances—one for which we would gladly exchange them all.” “The brightest diamond of the casket,” murmured the Comtesse Chiffrevas in a dreamy tone, perhaps looking back at the spar- kling facets of her own career. “... The legends of my country,” broke in the Princess Jable —who is from the foot-hills of the Ural Mountains—“tell of a famous and fabulous diamond, rose-coloured at first, but which turns black presently, yet remains a true diamond all the time, 60 THE DIABOLIQUES and sparkles only the more brilliantly for the change. . . .”—She said it with the strange exotic charm peculiar to her, this Gipsy Princess. For a true Gipsy she is, married for love by the hand- somest Prince of all the exiled Polish nobility; yet having as much the air of a high-born Princess as if she had first seen the light in the palace of the Jagellons. A regular explosion followed! “Yes! yes!” they clamoured with one voice. “Tell us, Comte!” they urged in tones already vibrating with a passionate supplication, curiosity quivering in the very curls that fringed the back of their necks. They drew together, shoulder to shoulder; some with cheek on hand and elbow on the board, some leaning back in their chairs, with open fans before their mouths, all challenging him with wide, inquisitive eyes. aff you are bent on hearing the story,” said the Comte with the nonchalance of a man well aware how much procrastination adds to the keenness of desire. “We are, we are!” cried the Duchesse, gazing, as a Turkish despot might at his sabre’s edge, at the gold dessert-knife she held in her fingers. “Well, listen then,” he said finally, still with the same fine air of indifference. They fell into attitudes of profound attention, and, fixing their gaze on his face, devoured him with their eyes. Every love-story is interesting to a woman; but here, perhaps—who knows?—the chief charm lay for each one of his audience in the thought that the tale he was about to unfold might be her own... . They knew him to be too much of a gentleman and too well-bred not to be sure he would suppress all names and, where necessary, slur over indiscreet details; and their conviction of this fact made them so much the more eager to hear the story. ‘They not only desired, but, what is more, they hoped—each for a special and particular sop to her own vanity. Yet this same vanity was on the qui vive to scent a rival in this reminiscence called up as the tenderest in a life that must THE GREATEST LOVE 61 have been so full of them. The old sultan was going once more to throw the handkerchief . . . that no hand would stoop to pick up, but which the favoured one it should have fallen to would silently and gratefully receive into her heart. Knowing what his fair audience expected, you will now be able to realize the utterly unexpected thunderclap he called down on all those listening heads. IV “T have often heard moralists declare—men who have had deep experience of life,” began the Comte de Ravila, “that the strongest of all our loves is neither the first nor yet the last, as many think, but the second. But in these matters everything is uncertain, and at any rate it was not so with me. . . . What you ask me about, ladies, the story I am about to tell you to-night, dates from the best period of my youth. I was not then what is technically called a ‘young man,’ but I was young, albeit I had already, as an old uncle of mine, a Knight of Malta, used to say to describe this epoch of life, sown my wild oats.t I was in the full vigour of my prime, and I was in full relations (to use the pretty Italian phrase) with a woman you all know well and have all gomired.. . .” At this the look which each of the group simultaneously cast at all the rest, one and all eagerly drinking in the old serpent’s honeyed words, was a thing to have seen—for, indeed, it is indescribable. “The woman in question,” Ravila went on, “had every element of ‘distinction’ you can imagine, in every sense of the word. She was young, rich, of noble name, beautiful, witty and artistic— simple, too, and unaffected, with the genuine unaffectedness to be found only in well-bred circles, and not always there—to crown 1“Pavais fini mes caravanes”; caravane was the word used by the Knights of Malta to designate their periodical filibustering cruises against the Turks. 62 THE DIABOLIQUES all, without another thought or inspiration but to please me, to be my devoted slave, at once the fondest of mistresses and the best of comrades. “I was not, I have reason to believe, the first man she had loved. . . . She had given her affection once before—and it was not to her husband; but the whole affair had been virtuous, platonic, utopian—the sort of love that practises rather than satis- fies a woman’s heart, that trains its powers for another and fuller passion, which is bound to supervene ere long. It is prentice love in fact, something like the messe blanche young priests repeat by way of rehearsal, that they may not blunder in the genuine, solemn Mass that is to follow. . . . When I came into her life, she was only at the ‘white Mass’; I was her genuine Mass—and she went through it with every circumstance of pomp and cere- mony, like a very cardinal.” At this the prettiest smile flashed out on the twelve sweet mouths that listened round, like a circling eddy on the limpid sur- face of a pool. . . . It was gone in an instant, but entrancing while it lasted. “She was indeed one in a thousand!” the Comte resumed. “Rarely have I known more real good-heartedness, more gentle compassion, more justness of feeling—and this even in love, which is, you know, a passion made up of evil as well as good. . . . No- where have I seen less manceuvring, or less prudishness and vanity, two things so often entangled in the web of feminine character, like a skein clawed over by a mischievous cat... . The cat had no part in her composition. . . . She was what those. confounded romance-writers who poison our minds with phrases would call a ‘simple, primitive nature, complicated and em- bellished by civilization’; but she had borrowed of it only the pretty luxury of her habits, and not one of those little vices that sometimes seem even more alluring than the luxuries.” “Was she dark or fair?” suddenly interrupted the Duchesse, with a startling directness, tired out with so much meta- PHYSICS 200 THE GREATEST LOVE 63 “Ah! you miss my point!” exclaimed Ravila keenly. “Well, I will tell you; her hair was dark, black as the blackest jet, the most perfect ebony mirror I have ever seen flash back the light from a woman’s head, but her complexion was fair—and it is by com- plexion, not hair, you should pronounce a woman brunette or blonde,” added this student of the sex, who had observed women for something else than just to paint their portraits after- wards. . . . She was blonde with black hair. . . .” Each blond head around the table (alas, only blond-haired they!) betrayed an almost imperceptible movement of disappoint- ment. For them clearly the tale had henceforth lost something of its interest. “She had the ebony locks of Night,” resumed Ravila, “but crowning the face of Aurora, for indeed her face glowed with a rosy freshness of dawn, as dazzling as rare, that had triumphantly resisted years of Paris life with its hot rooms and artificial light, that burns up so many roses in the flames of its candelabra. Her roses seemed but to win a richer hue, so brilliant was the carmine that mantled on cheek and lip! Indeed, this twofold radiance accorded well with the ruby she always wore on her forehead (the frontlet was still in fashion in those days), which, in com- bination with her flashing eyes, whose very brilliancy made it impossible to distinguish their colour, formed a triangle, as it were, of three bright jewels in her face! Tall, but robust and even majestic in figure, cut out for the helpmate of a colonel of dragoons—her husband at that time was only a major in the Light Horse—she enjoyed, for all her fine-ladyhood, a peasant woman’s vigorous health, who drinks in the sun at every pore. And she had all the heat and ardour of the sun in her veins, and in her very soul as well—ever present, and ever ready. . . . But— and this was the strange part of it—this being, so strong and simple and unspoiled, as generous and as pure as the red blood that mantled in her cheeks and dyed her rosy arms, was—can you credit it?—maladroit and awkward in a lover’s arms. . . .” Here one or two fair auditors dropped their eyes, only to raise 64. THE DIABOLIQUES them again directly with a look of demure mischief in their GEDIDS (iw ss “Yes! awkward in this respect as she was reckless in her regard for appearances,” continued Ravila, and vouchsafed no further information on this delicate point. “In fact, the man who loved her had to be incessantly teaching her two lessons, neither of which she ever really learnt—not to affront needlessly public opinion, a foe that is always under arms and always merciless, and to practise in the intimacy of private life those all-important acts of love that guard passion from dying of satiety. Love she had in abundance, but the art and mystery of its skilled exponents were beyond her ken. . . . She was the antipodes of most women, who possess the latter qualifications to perfection, but of the other not a whit. Now to comprehend and apply the cunning maxims of the Jl Principe, you must be a Borgia to begin with. Borgia comes first, Machiavelli second; one is the poet, the other the critic. No Borgia was she, but just a good woman in love, as simple-minded, with all her monumental beauty, as the little maid in the rustic picture who tries to take up a handful of spring water from the fountain to quench her thirst, but in her trembing haste lets it trickle away every drop between her fingers, and stands there an image of embarrassment and confusion... . “Yet in a way the contrast was piquant and almost delightful between this embarrassed awkwardness and the grand, passion- fraught personality of the woman, who would have deceived the most acute observer when seen in society—who knew love, and even love’s bliss, but had not the faculty to pay back half of what she received. Only, unfortunately, I was not artist enough to be content with this mere delight of contrast; hence now and again displays on her part of disquiet, jealousy, and even violence. But all this, jealousy, disquiet, violence, was swallowed up in the in- exhaustible kindness of her heart at the first sign of pain she thought she had inflicted—as awkward at wounding as she was at caressing! ‘Tigress of an unknown species, she fondly imag- ined she had claws, but lo! when she would show them, none THE GREATEST LOVE 65 were to be found within the sheath of her beautiful velvet paws. Her very scratches were velvet-soft!” “What is the man driving at?” whispered the Comtesse de Chiff- revas to her neighbour. “This surely cannot be Don Juan’s proudest triumph!” All these complex natures could not understand such simplicity and remained incredulous. “Thus we lived,” Ravila went on, “on terms of friendship, now and then interrupted by storms, yet never shipwrecked, a friend- ship that, in the little village they call Paris, was a mystery to none. .. . The Marquise—she was a Marquise . . .” There were three at table, and raven-locked too. But they made no sign. They knew only too well it was not of them he spoke. . . . The only velvet about the trio was on the upper lip of one of the three—a lip bearing a voluptuous shadowing of down, and for the moment, I can assure you, a well-marked expression of disdain. “. . - And a Marquise three times over, just as Pashas may be Pashas of Three Tails,” continued Ravila, who was getting into the swing of his narrative. “The Marquise was one of those women who have no idea of hiding anything and who, if they had, could never do it. Her daughter even, a child of thirteen, for all her youth and innocence, saw only too clearly the nature of the feeling her mother had for me. I know not which of our poets has asked what the girls think of us, the girls whose mothers we have loved. A deep question I often put to myself when I caught the child’s inquisitive gaze fixed black and menacing upon me from the ambush of her great, dark eyes. . . . A shy, reserved creature, she would, more often than not, leave the drawing-room when I entered, and, if obliged to remain, would invariably station herself as far away from me as possible; she had an almost con- vulsive horror: of my person—which she strove to hide in her own bosom, but which was too strong for her and betrayed itself against her will by little almost imperceptible signs.—I noticed every one. The Marquise, though anything but an observant 66 THE DIABOLIQUES woman, was for ever warning me: ‘You must take care, dearest. I think my girl is jealous of you. . . ? “But I was taking much better care all the while than she was. “Had the little girl been the Devil himself, I would have defied her to decipher my game. . . . But her mother’s was as clear as day. Everything was visible in the rosy mirror of her beautiful face, so often troubled by passing clouds! From the strange dis- like the child showed, I could not help thinking she had surprised her mother’s secret through some indiscreet burst of feeling, some involuntary look fraught with excess of tenderness. I may tell you she was a funny-looking child, quite unworthy of the glorious mould she had issued from, an ugly child, even by her mother’s admission, who only loved her the more for it. A little rough- cut topaz—how shall I describe it?—a half-finished sculptor’s study in bronze—but with eyes black as night and having a strange, uncanny magic of their own. Later on.. .” But here he stopped dead as if regretting his burst of confidence and fearful of having said too much. . . . Every face once more expressed an open, eager, vivid curiosity, and the Countess, with a knowing air of pleased expectancy, actually dropped from be- tween her lovely lips an expressive “At last!” af “In the earlier days of my liaison with her mother,” the Comte de Ravila resumed, “I had shown the child all the little fondling familiarities one has with children. . . . I used to bring her bags of sugared almonds; I used to call her my ‘little witch,’ and very often, when talking to her mother, I would amuse myself with fingering the curls that hung over her temple—thin, sickly-looking curls, like black tow—but the ‘little witch,’ whose big mouth had a pretty smile for everybody else, at once waxed pensive, her cheerfulness disappeared, and her brows would knit fiercely. Her little face grew tense and rigid, the wrinkled mask of an overbur- dened caryatid, and as my hand brushed her forehead, it looked THE GREATEST LOVE 67 for all the world as though it bore the crushing weight of some vast entablature. “After a while, meeting invariably with the same sullenness and apparent hostility, I took to leaving this sensitive plant alone, which drew in its sad-coloured petals so violently at the least touch of a caress. . . . I even left off speaking to her! ‘She feels you are robbing her,’ the Marquise would say to me. ‘Her in- stinct tells her you are appropriating a portion of her mother’s love” Sometimes she would add outright: ‘The child is my con- science, and her jealousy my remorse.’ “Once the Marquise had tried to question her as to the pro- found disfavour in which she held me, but she had got nothing out of her but the broken, obstinate, stupid answers you have to drag out with a corkscrew of reiterated questions from a child that prefers not to speak. . . . ‘Nothing is the matter... I don’t know . . ? and so on, and soon. Finally, seeing how hard and obstinate the little image was, she had left off questioning her and turned away in sheer weariness. “I forgot, by the by, to tell you one thing. The queer child was profoundly religious, in a gloomy, medieval, Spanish, superstitious sort of way. She twined around her meagre little person all kinds of scapularies and stuck on her bosom, which was as flat as the back of your hand, and round her swarthy throat, a whole heap of crosses, Blessed Virgins and Holy Spirits. ‘You are a free- thinker, you know,’ the Marquise would say to me, ‘worse luck; perhaps you have shocked her feelings some time with your talk. Be very careful of anything you say before her; and do not add to my sins in the eyes of my child, towards whom I already feel myself so guilty!’ Then, later on, the girl’s behavior showing no change or improvement whatever, ‘You will end by hating the child,’ the Marquise would complain anxiously, ‘and I cannot blame you” But she was wrong in this; my feeling towards the sullen child was one of simple indifference, when I took the trouble to think of her at all. “I treated her with the ceremonious politeness usual between 68 THE DIABOLIQUES grown-up people who do not like each other. I addressed her formally, as Mademoiselle, and she returned the compliment with a freezing Monsieur. . . . She would do nothing when I was there to attract admiration or even notice. . . . Her mother could never persuade her to show me one of her drawings or play a piece on the piano in my presence. If ever I came upon her seated at the instrument practising eagerly and industriously, she would stop dead, get up from the music-stool, and refuse utterly to go on. ... “Once only, when there was company and her mother desired her to play, she consented to take her place at the open key- board, with a look of being victimized that was anything but propitiating, I can tell you, and began some drawing-room piece with abominally difficult fingering. I was standing by the fire- place, and enfiladed her with my gaze. Her back was towards me, and there was no mirror in front of her in which she could see I was looking at her. . . . All of a sudden her back—she always held herself ill, and many a time her mother would tell her: ‘If you will hold yourself like that, you'll end by getting consumption’ —well, all of a sudden her back straightened as if my look had broken her spine like a bullet; and, slamming down the lid of the piano with a resounding crash, she rushed out of the room... . They went to look for her, but for that evening, at any rate, noth- ing would induce her to come back. “Well, vain as men are, it would seem their vanity is often blind, and, for all her strange behavior (and indeed I gave it very little attention), I had never a suspicion of the true feeling the mys- terious creature entertained for me. Nor yet had her mother; jealous as the latter was of every woman who entered her drawing- room, in this case her jealousy was as fast asleep as my own van- ity. The truth was eventually revealed in a sufficiently startling fashion. The Marquise, who could keep nothing from her inti- mates, told me the story, her face still pale with the fright she had had, though bursting with laughter at the notion of having been frightened at all. In doing so, she was ill-advised.” The word “ill-advised” the Count had marked with just that THE GREATEST LOVE 69 touch of emphasis a clever actor knows how to throw into his voice when he has a point to make. This was the thread, he was perfectly aware of the fact, on which the whole interest of his story now hung! The mere hint was enough apparently, for all twelve faces flushed once more with an intensity of emotion comparable only to the cherubim’s countenances before the throne of the Almighty! Is not curiosity in a woman’s heart as intense an emotion as ever adoration among the angels of God? . . . For his part, he marked them all, those cherub faces (which were a good deal more than mere head and shoulders, though) and, finding them doubtless primed for what he had to say, quickly resumed and went on without further pause. “Yes, she could not help bursting with laughter, merely to think of it!—so the Marquise told me a while after, when she came to relate the story; but she had been in no laughing mood at first!—‘Only picture the scene,’ she began (I will endeavour to recall her exact words); ‘I was seated just where we are now.’ “This was one of those small double sofas known as a dos-d-dos, of all contrivances in the way of furniture surely the best-designed for a pair of lovers to quarrel and make it up again, without leav- ing their seats. ““But you were not where you are now—thank goodness !— when, who do you think was announced?—you would never guess —who but the respected curé of Saint-Germain-des-Prés? Do you know him? . . . No, you never go to church, you bad man! . . . 90 how should you know the poor old curé, who is a saint, and who never sets foot inside the doors of any woman in his par- ish unless it is a question of raising money for his poor or his Church? For a moment I thought this was what he had come for now. ““He had prepared my daughter at the proper time for her first communion; and as she went regularly to communion, sub- sequently, she had retained him as her confessor. For this reason, over and over again since then, I had invited the good priest to 70 THE DIABOLIQUES dine with us, but always in vain. On entering the room, he dis- played the greatest agitation, and I read in his usually placid features manifest signs of an embarrassment so extreme and so uncontrollable, I could not set it down to the account of mere shyness. Involuntarily the first words that escaped me were: “Good heavens, Father! What is the matter?” “<«“The matter, dear Madam,” he began, “. . . the matter is, you see before you the most embarrassed man in Europe. For fifty years I have been a minister in God’s service, and all that time I have never had a more delicate mission to perform, or one that baffled me more completely to understand... .” “Then he sat down, asking me to have the door shut against all comers throughout our interview. As you may suppose, all these solemn preliminaries began rather to frighten me... . “Noticing this, he added: “Nay! do not be frightened, I beg of you; you will need all your calmness to attend to my story, and to account, to my satisfaction, for the unheard-of circum- stance we have to deal with, and which even now I cannot be- lieve authentic. . . . Your daughter, Madam, on whose behalf I am here, is—you know it as well as I do—an angel of purity and goodness. I know her very soul. I have held it between my two hands since she was a child of seven, and I am convinced she is deceiving herself—through sheer innocence of heart, it may be. . . . But this morning she came to me to avow in confession —you will not believe it, nor can I, but the word must come out— that she was pregnant!” “À cry escaped me of wonder and incredulity... . KT did the very same thing this morning in my confessional,” the priest declared, “on hearing her make this assertion, accom- panied as it was by every mark of the most genuine and terrible despair. I know the child thoroughly; she is absolutely ignorant of the world and its wickedness. ... Of all the young girls I confess, she is undoubtedly the one I could most unhesitatingly answer for before God.—There is no more to tell! We priests are the surgeons of souls, and it is our duty to deliver them of THE GREATEST LOVE 71 shameful secrets they would fain conceal, with hands careful neither to wound nor pollute. I therefore proceeded, with all possible guardedness, to interrogate, question, and cross-question the desperate girl. But, the avowal once made, the fault once confessed—she calls it a crime herself, and her eternal damnation, fully believing herself, poor girl, a lost soul—she thenceforth re- fused to say another word, maintaining an obstinate silence which she broke only to beseech me to come to you, Madam, to inform you of the crime—‘for mamma must know,’ she said, ‘and I shall never, never be brave enough to tell her.’ ” You may easily imagine with what mingled feelings of amazement and anxiety I listened to the curé of Saint-Germain- des-Prés. I was just as sure as he was, surer in fact, of my little girl’s innocence; but do not the innocent sometimes fall, out of very innocence? ... And what she had told the confessor was not in the nature of things impossible. ...I did not be- lieve it! . . . could not believe it! but still it was not in itself impossible! . . . She was only thirteen, but she was a woman, and the very fact of her precocity had startled me before now. .. . A fever, a frenzy of curiosity came over me. KT must and will know all!” I cried excitedly to the worthy priest as he stood there listening to me with a bewildered air, plucking his hat to pieces in his agitation. “Leave me, Father. She would not speak before you; but I am certain she will tell me everything . . . I am certain I can drag everything out of her. Then we shall understand what is now so utterly incom- prehensible.” “On this the good priest took his departure. The instant he was gone, I sprang upstairs to my daughter’s room, not having patience enough to send for her and wait till she came. “I found her kneeling—no! not kneeling, prostrate—before her crucifix, pale as death, her eyes dry and very red, like eyes that have wept many bitter tears. I took her in my arms, seated her by my side, and presently on my knees, and told her I could not believe what her confessor had just been telling me was true. 72 THE DIABOLIQUES ““But here she interrupted me to assure me with a heart- broken voice and look that it was true, what he had said; and at this point, more and more anxious and wondering, I asked her who it was that... “‘T left the sentence unfinished. . . . The terrible moment was come! She had her head and face on my shoulder... but I could see the blush of shame burning on her neck behind, and feel her shudder. The same leaden silence she had opposed to her father confessor, she now opposed to me. She was im- penetrable. “<“Tt must be someone very much beneath you, since you are so deeply ashamed? . . .” I said, trying to make her speak in self-exculpation, for I knew she had plenty of pride. “