The Confession of a Child of the Century Part 8

As there is no spot on earth where one is so well known by his neighbors as at Paris, it was not long before people of my acquaintance who had seen me with Desgenais began to accuse me of being a great libertine. In that I admired the discernment of the world: in proportion as I had pa.s.sed for inexperienced and sensitive at the time of my rupture with my mistress, I was now considered insensible and hardened. Some one had just told me that it was clear I had never loved that woman, that I had doubtless merely played at love, thereby paying me a compliment which I really did not deserve; but the most of it was that I was so swollen with vanity that I was charmed with that view.

My desire was to pa.s.s for blase, even while I was filled with desires and my exalted imagination was carrying me beyond all limits. I began to say that I could not make any headway with the women; my head was filled with chimeras which I preferred to realities. In short, my unique pleasure consisted in altering the nature of facts. If a thought were but extraordinary, if it shocked common sense, I became its ardent champion at the risk of advocating the most dangerous sentiments.

My greatest fault was imitation of everything that struck me, not by its beauty but by its strangeness, and not wishing to confess myself an imitator I resorted to exaggeration in order to appear original.

According to my idea nothing was good or even tolerable; nothing was worth the trouble of turning the head, and yet when I had become warmed up in a discussion it seemed as if there was no expression in the French language violent enough to sustain my cause; but my warmth would subside as soon as my opponents ranged themselves on my side.

It was a natural consequence of my conduct. Although disgusted with the life I was leading I was unwilling to change it:

Simigliante a quella 'nferma Che non puo trovar posa in su le piume, Ma con dar volta suo dolore scherma.--DANTE.

Thus I tortured my mind to give it change and I fell into all these vagaries in order to get out of myself.

But while my vanity was thus occupied, my heart was suffering, so that there was always within me a man who laughed and a man who wept. It was a perpetual counter-stroke between my head and my heart. My own mockeries frequently caused me great pain and my deepest sorrows aroused a desire to burst into laughter.

One day a man boasted of being proof against superst.i.tious fears, in fact, fear of every kind; his friends put a human skeleton in his bed and then concealed themselves in an adjoining room to wait for his return.

They did not hear any noise, but in the morning they found him dressed and sitting on the bed playing with the bones; he had lost his reason.

There would be in me something that resembled that man but for the fact that my favorite bones were those of a well-beloved skeleton; they were the debris of my love, all that remained of the past.

But it must not be supposed that there were no good moments in all this disorder. Among Desgenais's companions were several young men of distinction, a number of artists. We sometimes pa.s.sed together delightful evenings under pretext of being libertines. One of them was infatuated with a beautiful singer who charmed us with her fresh and melancholy voice. How many times we sat listening while supper was served and waiting! How many times, when the flagons had been emptied, one of us held a volume of Lamartine and read in a voice choked by emotion! Every other thought disappeared. The hours pa.s.sed by unheeded. What strange libertines we were! We did not speak a word and there were tears in our eyes.

Desgenais especially, habitually the coldest and driest of men, was inexplicable on such occasions; he delivered himself of such extraordinary sentiments that he might have been considered a poet in delirium. But after these effusions he would be seized with furious joy.

He would break everything within reach when warmed by wine; the genius of destruction stalked forth armed to the teeth. I have seen him pick up a chair and hurl it through a closed window.

I could not help making a study of that singular man. He appeared to me the marked type of a cla.s.s which ought to exist somewhere but which was unknown to me. One could never tell whether his outbursts were the despair of a man sick of life, or the whim of a spoiled child.

During the fete, in particular, he was in such a state of nervous excitation that he acted like a schoolboy. He persuaded me to go out on foot with him one day, m.u.f.fled in grotesque costumes, with masks and instruments of music. We promenaded gravely all night, in the midst of a most frightful din of horrible sounds. We found a driver asleep on his box and unhitched his horses; then pretending we had just come from the ball, set up a great cry. The coachman started up, cracked his whip and his horses started off on a trot, leaving him seated on the box. The same evening we pa.s.sed through the Champs Elysees; Desgenais, seeing another carriage pa.s.sing, stopped it after the manner of a highwayman; he intimidated the coachman by threats and forced him to climb down and lie flat on his stomach. He then opened the carriage door and found within a young man and lady motionless with fright. Whispering to me to imitate him, we began to enter one door and go out the other, so that in the obscurity the poor young people thought they saw a procession of bandits going through their carriage.

As I understand it, the men who say that the world gives experience ought to be astonished if they are believed. The world is merely a number of whirlpools, each one whirling independent of the others; they float about in groups like flocks of birds. There is no resemblance between the different quarters of the same city, and the denizen of the Chausee d'Antin has as much to learn at Marais as at Lisbon. It is true that these whirlpools are traversed, and have been since the beginning of the world, by seven personages who are always the same: the first is called hope; the second, conscience; the third, opinion; the fourth, desire; the fifth, sorrow; the sixth, pride; and the seventh, man.

We were, therefore, my companions and I, a flock of birds, and we remained together until springtime, sometimes singing, sometimes flying.

"But," the reader objects, "where are the women in all this? I see nothing of debauchery here."

O! creatures who bear the name of women and who have pa.s.sed like dreams through a life that was itself a dream, what shall I say of you? Where there is no shadow of hope can there be memory? Where shall I seek for memory's meed? What is there more dumb in human memory? What is there more completely forgotten than you?

If I must speak of women I will mention two; here is one of them:

I ask what would be expected of a poor sewing-girl, young and pretty, about eighteen, with a romantic affair on her hands that is purely a question of love; with little knowledge of life and no idea of morals; eternally sewing near a window before which processions were not allowed to pa.s.s, by order of the police, but near which a dozen women prowled who were licensed and recognized by these same police; what could you expect of her, when, after having tired her hands and eyes all day long on a dress or a hat, she leans out of that window as night falls? That dress she has sewed, that hat she has trimmed with her poor and honest hands in order to earn a supper for the household, she sees pa.s.sing along the street on the head or on the body of a public woman. Thirty times a day a hired carriage stops before the door and there steps out a prost.i.tute, numbered as is the hack in which she rides, who stands before a gla.s.s and primps, taking off and putting on the results of many days' work on the part of the poor girl who watches her. She sees that woman draw from her pocket six pieces of gold, she who has but one a week; she looks at her feet and her head, she examines her dress, and eyes her as she steps into her carriage; and then, what could you expect? When night has fallen, after a day when work has been scarce, when her mother is sick, she opens her door, stretches out her hand and stops a pa.s.ser-by.

Such was the story of a girl I have known. She could play the piano, knew something of accounts, a little designing, even a little history and grammar, and thus a little of everything. How many times have I regarded with poignant compa.s.sion that sad sketch made by nature and mutilated by society! How many times have I followed in the darkness the pale and vacillating gleam of a spark flickering in abortive life! How many times have I tried to revive the fire that smoldered under those ashes! Alas!

her long hair was the color of ashes and we called her Cendrillon.

I was not rich enough to help her; Desgenais, at my request, interested himself in the poor creature; he made her learn over again all of which she had a slight knowledge. But she could make no appreciable progress.

When her teacher left her she would fold her arms and for hours look silently across the public square. What days! What misery! One day I threatened that if she did not work she should have no money; she silently resumed her task and I learned that she stole out of the house a few minutes later. Where did she go? G.o.d knows. Before she left I asked her to embroider a purse for me. I still have that sad relic, it hangs in my room a monument of the ruin that is wrought here below.

But here is another case:

It was about ten in the evening when, after a riotous day, we repaired to Desgenais, who had left us some hours before to make his preparations.

The orchestra was ready and the room filled when we arrived.

Most of the dancers were girls from the theaters. As soon as we entered I plunged into the giddy whirl of the waltz. That delightful exercise has always been dear to me; I know of nothing more beautiful, more worthy of a beautiful woman and a young man; all dances compared with the waltz are but insipid conventions or pretexts for insignificant converse. It is truly to possess a woman, in a certain sense, to hold her for a half hour in your arms, and to draw her on in the dance, palpitating in spite of herself, in such a way that it can not be positively a.s.serted whether she is being protected or seduced. Some deliver themselves up to the pleasure with such modest voluptuousness, with such sweet and pure abandon that one does not know whether he experiences desire or fear, and whether, if pressed to the heart they would faint or break in pieces like the rose.

Germany, where that dance was invented, is surely the land of love.

I held in my arms a superb danseuse from an Italian theater who had come to Paris for the carnival; she wore the costume of a bacchante, with a dress of panther's skin. Never have I seen anything so languishing as that creature. She was tall and slender, and while dancing with extreme rapidity, had the appearance of allowing herself to be led; to see her one would think that she would tire her partner, but such was not the case, for she moved as though by enchantment.

On her bosom rested an enormous bouquet, the perfume of which intoxicated me. She yielded to my encircling arms as does the Indian liana, with a gentleness so sweet and so sympathetic that I seemed surrounded with a perfumed veil of silk. At each turn there could be heard a light tinkling from her metal girdle; she moved so gracefully that I thought I beheld a beautiful star, and her smile was that of a fairy about to vanish from human sight. The tender and voluptuous music of the dance seemed to come from her lips, while her head, covered with a wilderness of black tresses, bent backward as though her neck was too slender to support its weight.

When the waltz was over I threw myself on a chair; my heart beat wildly.

"O, Heaven!" I murmured, "how can it be possible! O, superb monster! O, beautiful reptile! How you writhe, how you coil in and out, sweet adder, with supple and spotted skin! Thy cousin the serpent has taught thee to coil about the tree of life, holding between thy lips the apple of temptation. O, Melusina! Melusina! The hearts of men are thine. You know it well, enchantress, with your soft languor that seems to suspect nothing! You know very well that you ruin, that you destroy, you know that he who touches you will suffer; you know that he dies who basks in your smile, who breathes the perfume of your flowers and comes under the magic influence of your charms; that is why you abandon yourself so freely, that is why your smile is so sweet, your flowers so fresh; that is why you so gently place your arms on our shoulders. O, Heaven! what is your will with us?"

Professor Halle has said a terrible thing: "Woman is the nervous part of humanity, man the muscular." Humboldt himself, that serious thinker, has said that an invisible atmosphere surrounds the human nerves. I do not quote the dreamers who watch the flight of Spallanzani's bat, and who think they have found a sixth sense in nature. Such as nature is, her mysteries are terrible enough, her powers mighty enough, that nature which creates us, mocks at us, and kills us, without deepening the shadows that surround us. But where is the man who has lived who will deny woman's power over us, if he has ever taken leave of a beautiful dancer with trembling hands. If he has ever felt that indefinable enervating magnetism which, in the midst of the dance, under the influence of the sound of music, and the warmth that makes all else seem cold, that comes from a young woman, that electrifies her and leaps from her to him as the perfume of aloes from the swinging censer? I was struck with stupor. I was familiar with a certain sensation similar to drunkenness, which characterizes love; I knew that it was the aureole which crowned the well-beloved. But that she should excite such heart-throbs, that she should evoke such fantoms with nothing but her beauty, her flowers, her motley costume, and a certain trick of turning she had learned from some merry-andrew; and that without a word, without a thought, without even appearing to know it! What was chaos if it required seven days to transform it?

It was not love, however, that I felt, and I do not know how to describe it unless I call it thirst. For the first time I felt vibrating in my body a cord that was not attuned to my heart. The sight of that beautiful animal had aroused a responsive roar from another animal in my bowels. I felt sure I would never tell that woman that I loved her or that she pleased me or even that she was beautiful; there was nothing on my lips but a desire to kiss her, and say to her: "Make a girdle of those listless arms and lean that head on my breast; place that sweet smile on my lips." My body loved hers, I was under the influence of beauty as of wine.

Desgenais pa.s.sed and asked what I was doing there.

"Who is that woman?" I asked.

"What woman? Of whom do you speak?" I took his arm and led him into the hall. The Italian saw us coming and smiled. I stopped and stepped back.

"Ah!" said Desgenais, "you have danced with Marco?"

"Who is Marco?" I asked.

"Why, that idle creature who is laughing over there. Does she please you?"

"No," I replied, "I have waltzed with her and wanted to know her name; I have no further interest in her."

Shame led me to speak thus, but when Desgenais turned away I followed him.

"You are very prompt," he said, "Marco is no ordinary woman. She was almost the wife of M. de -----, amba.s.sador to Milan. One of his friends brought her here. Yet," he added, "you may rest a.s.sured I shall speak to her. We shall not allow you to die so long as there is any hope for you or any resource left untried. It is possible that she will remain to supper."

He left me, and I was alarmed to see him approach her. But they were soon lost in the crowd.

"Is it possible," I murmured, "have I come to this? O, heavens! is this what I am going to love? But after all," I thought, "my senses have spoken, but not my heart."

Thus I tried to calm myself. A few minutes later Desgenais tapped me on the shoulder.

"We shall go to supper at once," said he. "You will give your arm to Marco; she knows that she has pleased you and it is all arranged."

"Listen," I said; "I hardly know what I experienced. It seems to me I see limping Vulcan covering Venus with kisses while his beard smokes with the fumes of the forge. He fixes his affrighted eyes on the dazzling skin of his prey. His happiness in the possession of his prize causes him to laugh for joy, and at the same time shudder with happiness, and then he remembers his father, Jupiter, who is seated up on high among the G.o.ds."

Desgenais looked at me but made no reply; taking me by the arm he led me away.

"I am tired," he said, "and I am sad; this noise wearies me. Let us go to supper, that will refresh us."

The supper was splendid, but I could not touch it.