The Confession of a Child of the Century Part 7

I found nothing suggestive of pleasure but in its place the word, "Prost.i.tution;" and it has always appeared ineffaceable, not graven in that metal that takes the sun's light, but in the palest of all, that of the cold light whose colors seem tinted by the somber hues of night, silver.

The first time I saw the people--it was a frightful morning of Ash Wednesday, near Courtille. A cold fine rain had been falling since the evening before; the streets were covered with pools of water. Masked carriages filed hither and thither, crowding between hedges of hideous men and women standing on the sidewalks. That sinister wall of spectators had tiger eyes, red with wine, gleaming with hatred. The carriage wheels splashed mud over this wall, but it did not move. I was standing on the front seat of an open carriage; from time to time a man in rags would step out from the wall, hurl a torrent of abuse at us, then cover us with a cloud of flour. Mud would soon follow; yet we kept on our way toward the Isle of Love and the pretty wood of Romainville consecrated by so many sweet kisses. One of my friends fell from his seat into the mud, narrowly escaping death on the paving. The people threw themselves on him to overpower him and we were obliged to hasten to his a.s.sistance. One of the trumpeters who preceded us on horseback was struck on the shoulder by a paving stone; the flour had given out. I had never heard of anything like that.

I began to understand the time and comprehend the spirit of the age.

CHAPTER III

DESGENAIS had planned a reunion of young people at his country house. The best wines, a splendid table, gaming, dancing, hunting, nothing was lacking. Desgenais was rich and generous. He combined antique hospitality with modern custom. Moreover one could always find in his house the best books; his conversation was that of a man of learning and culture. He was a problem.

I took with me a taciturn humor that nothing could overcome; he respected it scrupulously. I did not reply to his questions and he dropped the subject; he was satisfied that I had forgotten my mistress. Nevertheless, I went to the chase and appeared at the table and was as convivial as the best; he asked no more.

One of the most unfortunate proclivities of inexperienced youth is to judge of the world from first impressions; but it must be confessed that there is a race of men who are very unfortunate; it is that race which says to youth: "You are right in believing in evil, and we know what it is." I have heard, for example, a curious thing spoken of, a medium between good and evil, a certain arrangement between heartless women and men worthy of them; they call love the pa.s.sing sentiment. They speak of it as of an engine constructed by a wagon builder or a building contractor. They said to me: "This and that are agreed upon, such and such phrases are spoken and certain others are repeated in reply; letters are written in a prescribed manner, the knees adjusted in a certain att.i.tude." All that was regulated as a parade; these fine fellows had gray hair.

That made me laugh. Unfortunately for me I can not tell a woman whom I despise that I love her, even when I know that it is only a convention and that she will not be deceived by it. I have never bent my knee to the ground when my heart did not go with it. So that cla.s.s of women known as easy is unknown to me, or if I allow myself to be taken with them, it is without knowing it, and through simplicity.

I can understand that one's soul can be put aside but not that it should be handled. That there is some pride in this, I confess, but I do not intend either to boast or to lower myself. Above all things I hate those women who laugh at love and I permit them to reciprocate the sentiment; there will never be any dispute between us.

Such women are beneath the courtesans, for courtesans may lie as well as they; but courtesans are capable of love and those women are not. I remember a woman who loved me and who said to a man many times richer than I with whom she was living: "I am weary of you, I am going to my lover." That woman is worth more than many others who are not despised by society.

I pa.s.sed the entire season with Desgenais, and learned that my mistress had left France; that news left in my heart a feeling of languor which I could not overcome.

At the sight of that world which surrounded me, so new to me, I experienced at first a kind of bizarre curiosity, at once sad and profound, that caused me to look at things as does a restless horse. An incident occurred which made a deep impression on me.

Desgenais had with him a very beautiful mistress who loved him much. One evening as I was walking with him I told him that I considered her such as she was, that is to say, admirable, as much on account of her attachment for him as because of her beauty. In short, I praised her highly and with warmth, giving him to understand that he ought to be happy.

He made no reply. It was his manner, for he was the driest of men. That night when all had retired and I had been in bed some fifteen minutes I heard a knock at my door. I supposed it was some one of my friends who could not sleep and invited him to enter.

There appeared before my astonished eyes a woman, very pale, carrying a bouquet in her hands to which was attached a piece of paper bearing these words: "To Octave, from his friend Desgenais."

I had no sooner read these words when a flash of light came to me. I understood the meaning of this action of Desgenais in making me this Turk's gift. It was intended for a lesson in love. That woman loved him, I had praised her and he wished to tell me that I ought not to love her, whether I refused her or accepted her.

That made me think. The poor woman was weeping and did not dare dry her tears for fear I would see them. What threat had he used to make her come? I did not know. I said to her:

"You may return and fear nothing."

She replied that if she should return Desgenais would send her back to Paris.

"Yes," I replied, "you are beautiful and I am susceptible to temptation; but you weep, and your tears not being shed for me, I care nothing for the rest. Go, therefore, and I will see to it that you are not sent back to Paris."

One of my peculiarities is that meditation, which with the great number is a firm and constant quality of the mind, is in my case an instinct independent of the will and it seizes me like an access of pa.s.sion. It comes to me at intervals in its own good time, in spite of me and in almost any place. But when it comes I can do nothing against it. It takes me whither it pleases by whatever route seems good to it.

When the woman had left, I sat up.

"My friend," I said to myself, "behold what has been sent you. If Desgenais had not seen fit to send you his mistress he would not have been mistaken, perhaps, in supposing that you might fall in love with her.

"Have you well considered it? A sublime and divine mystery is accomplished. Such a being costs nature the most vigilant maternal care; yet man who would cure you, can think of nothing better than to offer you lips which belong to him in order to teach you how to cease to love.

"How was it accomplished? Others than you have doubtless admired her, but they ran no risk. She might employ all the seduction she pleased; you alone were in danger.

"It must be that Desgenais has a heart, since he lives. In what respect does he differ from you? He is a man who believes in nothing, fears nothing, who knows no care or ennui, perhaps, and yet it is clear that a scratch on the finger would fill him with terror, for if his body abandons him, what becomes of him? He lives only in the body. What sort of creature is that who treats his soul as the flagellants treat their bodies? Can one live without a head?

"Think of it. Here is a man who possesses the most beautiful woman in the world; he is young and ardent; he finds her beautiful and tells her so; she replies that she loves him. Some one touches him on the shoulder and says to him 'She is unfaithful.' Nothing more, he is sure of himself. If some one had said: 'She is a poisoner,' he would, perhaps, have continued to love her, he would not have given her a kiss less; but she is unfaithful and it is no more a question of love with him than of the star of Saturn.

"What is there in that word? A word that is merited, positive, withering, it is agreed. But why? It is still but a word. Can you kill a body with a word?

"And if you love that body? Some one pours a gla.s.s of wine and says to you: 'Do not love that, for you can get four for six francs.' And if you become intoxicated?

"But that Desgenais loves his mistress, since he keeps her; he must, therefore, have a peculiar fashion of loving? No, he has not; his fashion of loving is not love, and he cares no more for the woman who merits affection than for her who is unworthy. He loves no one, simply and truly.

"What has led him to that? Was he born thus? To love is as natural as to eat and to drink. He is not a man. Is he a dwarf or a giant? What! always that impa.s.sive body? Upon what does he feed, what brew does he drink?

Behold him at thirty as old as the senile Mithridates; the poisons of vipers are his familiar friends.

"There is the great secret, my child, the key to which you must seize. By whatever process of reasoning debauchery may be defended, it will be proven that it is natural at a given day, hour or evening, but not to-morrow nor every day. There is not a people on earth which has not considered woman either the companion and consolation of man or the sacred instrument of life, and has not under these two forms honored her.

And yet here is an armed warrior who leaps into the abyss that G.o.d has dug with his own hands between man and brute; as well might he deny the fact. What mute t.i.tian is this who dares repress under the kisses of the body the love of the thought, and place on human lips the stigma of the brute, the seal of eternal silence?

"There is a word that should be studied. There breathes under the wind of those dismal forests that are called secrets of the body, one of those mysteries that the angels of destruction whisper in the ear of night as it descends upon the earth. That man is better or worse than G.o.d has made him. His bowels are like those of sterile women, where nature has not completed her work, or there is distilled in the shadow some venomous poison.

"Ah! yes, neither occupation nor study have been able to cure you, my friend. To forget and to learn, that is your device. You finger the leaves of dead books; you are too young for ruins. Look about you, the pale herd of men surrounds you. The eyes of the sphinx glitter in the midst of divine hieroglyphics; decipher the book of life! Courage, scholar, launch out on the Styx, the invulnerable flood, and let the waves of sorrow waft you to death or to G.o.d."

CHAPTER IV

"ALL there was of good in that, supposing there was some good in it, was that false pleasures were the seeds of sorrow and of bitterness which fatigued me to the point of exhaustion." Such are the simple words spoken with reference to his youth by that man who was the most a man of any who have lived, Saint Augustine. Of those who have done as I, few would say those words, all have them in their hearts; I have found no others in mine.

Returning to Paris in the month of December I pa.s.sed the winter attending pleasure parties, masquerades, suppers, rarely leaving Desgenais, who was delighted with me; I was not with him. The more I went about, the more unhappy I became. It seemed to me after a short enough time, that the world, which had at first appeared so strange, would tie me up, so to speak, at every step; where I had expected to see a specter, I discovered, upon closer inspection, a shadow.

Desgenais asked what was the matter with me.

"And you?" I asked. "What is the matter with you? You have lost some relative? Or do you suffer from some wound?"

At times he seemed to understand me and did not question me. We sat down before a table and drank until we lost our heads; in the middle of the night we took horses and rode ten or twelve leagues into the country; returning we went to the bath, then to table, then to gambling, then to bed; and when I reached mine, I fell on my knees and wept. That was my evening prayer.

Strange to say, I took pride in pa.s.sing for what I was not, I boasted of being worse than I really was, and experienced a sort of melancholy pleasure in doing so. When I had actually done what I claimed, I felt nothing but ennui, but when I invented an account of some folly, some story of debauchery or recital of an orgy with which I had nothing to do, it seemed to me that my heart was better satisfied, although I know not why.

Whenever I joined a party of pleasure-seekers and we visited some spot made sacred by tender a.s.sociations I became stupid, went off by myself, looked gloomily at the trees and bushes as though I would like to crush them under my feet. Upon my return I would remain silent for hours.

The baleful idea that truth is nudity beset me on every occasion.

"The world," I said to myself, "is accustomed to call his disguise virtue, his chaplet religion, his flowing mantle convenience. Honor and Morality are his chamber-maids; he drinks in his wine the tears of the poor in spirit who believe in him; while the sun is high in the heavens he walks about with downcast eye; he goes to church, to the ball, to the a.s.sembly, and when evening has come he removes his mantle and there appears a naked bacchante with hoofs of a goat."

But such thoughts aroused a feeling of horror, for I felt that if the body was under the clothing, the skeleton was under the body. "Is it possible that that is all?" I asked in spite of myself. Then I returned to the city, I saw a little girl take her mother's arm and I became like a child.

Although I had followed my friends into all manner of dissipation, I had no desire to resume my place in the world of society. The sight of women caused me intolerable pain; I could not touch a woman's hand without trembling. I had decided never to love again.

Nevertheless I returned from the ball one evening so sick at heart that I feared that it was love. I happened to have beside me at supper the most charming and the most distinguished woman whom it had ever been my good fortune to meet. When I closed my eyes to sleep I saw her image before me. I thought I was lost, and I at once resolved that I would avoid meeting her again. A sort of fever seized me and I lay on my bed for fifteen days, repeating over and over the lightest words I had exchanged with her.