Part 9

That was the most burlesque evening of my whole life. Can you imagine the appearance I must have presented with my hat and feather under my paw, rings on every claw, a little silver-hilted sword and a sky-blue ribbon on its hilt? I approached the fair one, and, having made her a most graceful reverence, sat down beside her and besieged her in due form. The flattering madrigals, the exaggerated compliments I addressed to her, all the jargon suited to the occasion assumed a strange significance in passing through my bear's muzzle; for I had a superb head of painted cardboard which I was soon obliged to throw under the table, my deity was so adorable that evening, and I longed so to kiss her hand and something better than her hand. The skin soon followed the head; for not being accustomed to play the bear, I was stifled in it, more so than was necessary. Thereupon the ball-dress had a fine time as you can imagine; the feathers fell like snow around my beauty, the shoulders soon came out of the sleeves, the bosom from the corset, the feet from the shoes, the legs from the stockings; the unstrung necklaces rolled on the floor, and I believe that fresher dress was never more pitilessly rumpled and torn; the dress was of silver gauze and the lining of white satin. Rosette displayed on that occasion a heroism altogether unusual to her sex, which gave me a most exalted opinion of her. She looked on at the sack of her costume like an uninterested witness, and did not for a single instant show the slightest regret for her dress and her lace; on the contrary, she was wildly gay, and assisted with her own hands in tearing and breaking anything that wouldn't untie or unclasp quickly enough to suit my taste and hers.--Doesn't this strike you as worthy to be handed down in history beside the most brilliant deeds of the heroes of antiquity? The greatest proof of love a woman can give her lover is to refrain from saying to him: "Take care and not rumple me or spot my dress," especially if the dress be new.--A new dress is a greater source of security to a husband than is commonly supposed. It must be that Rosette adores me or else she is blessed with a philosophy superior to that of Epictetus.

Nevertheless I think that I paid Rosette the full value of her dress and more, in coin which is none the less esteemed and valued because it does not pass current with tradesmen. Such unexampled heroism surely deserved such a recompense. However, like the generous creature she is, she repaid what I gave her. I had a wild, almost convulsive sort of pleasure, such as I did not believe myself capable of enjoying. The resounding kisses mingled with bursts of laughter, the shuddering, impatient caresses, all the piquant, tantalizing sensations, the pleasure imperfectly enjoyed because of the costume and the situation, but a hundred times keener than if there had been no obstacles, produced such an effect on my nerves that I was seized with paroxysms which I had some difficulty in overcoming.--You cannot conceive the proud, affectionate way in which Rosette gazed at me as she tried to soothe me, and the joyful yet anxious manner with which she lavished attentions upon me: her face glowed with the pleasure that she felt in producing such an effect upon me, while her eyes, swimming in sweet tears, bore witness to her alarm at my apparent illness and the interest she took in my health.--She had never seemed so beautiful to me as at that moment. There was something so maternal and so chaste in her glance that I entirely forgot the more than anacreontic scene that had just taken place, and threw myself on my knees at her feet, asking permission to kiss her hand; which permission she granted with extraordinary dignity and gravity.

That woman certainly isn't as depraved as De C---- claims and as she has often seemed to me to be; her corruption is in her mind and not in her heart.

I have cited this scene from among twenty others: it seems to me that after such an experience one can, without overweening conceit, believe himself a woman's lover.--And yet I have not that feeling.--I had no sooner returned home than that thought took possession of me and began to work upon me as usual.--I remembered perfectly all that I had said and heard, all that I had done and seen. The slightest gestures, the most insignificant attitudes, all the most trivial details stood out clearly in my memory: I remembered everything, even to the slightest inflections of the voice, the most indescribable shades of enjoyment; but it did not seem to me that all those things had happened to me rather than to some one else. I was not sure that it was not all an illusion, a phantasmagoria, a dream, or that I had not read it somewhere or other, or even that it was not a story invented by myself as I had invented many others. I dreaded being the dupe of my own credulity or the plaything of some deception; and notwithstanding the evidence of my weariness and the material proofs that I had not slept at home, I could easily have believed that I had gone to bed at my usual hour and slept till morning.

I am very unfortunate in my inability to acquire the moral certainty of something of which I am physically certain. In ordinary cases the contrary is the case and the fact proves the idea. I would like well to prove the fact by the idea; I cannot do it; although it is a strange thing, it is so. It rests with myself, to a certain extent, to have a mistress; but I cannot force myself to believe that I have one, even though that is the fact. If I have not the necessary faith in me, even for a thing so palpable as that, it is just as impossible for me to believe in so simple a fact as for another to believe in the Trinity. Faith is not to be acquired, it is a pure gift, a special grace from Heaven.

No one ever longed as I do to live the life of others and to assimilate another nature to my own; no one ever had less success. Whatever I may do, other men are little more than phantoms to me and I do not feel their existence; but it is not the desire to understand their lives and share in them that I lack. It is the power or the want of real sympathy with anything on earth. The existence or non-existence of a person or thing does not interest me enough to affect me in a perceptible and convincing way. The sight of a man or a woman who appears before me in flesh and blood leaves on my mind no more definite trace than the fanciful vision of a dream: a pale world of shadows and of apparitions, false or true, hovers about me, murmuring low, and in the midst of them I feel as utterly alone as possible, for not one of them has any effect upon me for good or evil, and they seem to me to be of a nature altogether different from mine. If I speak to them and they make what seems a sensible reply, I am as surprised as if my dog or my cat should suddenly open his mouth and take part in the conversation: the sound of their voices always astonishes me and I could easily believe that they are only fleeting apparitions and I the mirror in which they are reflected. Inferior or superior, I certainly am not of their kind. There are moments when I recognize none but God above me, and others when I deem myself hardly the equal of the earthworm under its stone or the mollusk on its sand-bank; but whatever my frame of mind, exalted or humble, I have never been able to persuade myself that men were really my fellows. When any one calls me _monsieur_, or, in speaking of me, refers to me as _that man_, it always seems strange to me. My very name seems to me but an empty one and not my real name; and yet, no matter how low it may be uttered, amid the loudest noise, I turn suddenly with a convulsive and peevish eagerness which I have never been able to explain.--Is it the dread of finding in the man who knows my name, and to whom I am no longer simply one of the common herd, an antagonist or an enemy?

It is when I have been living with a woman that I feel most strongly how utterly my nature repels every sort of alliance and mixture. I am like a drop of oil in a glass of water. No matter how much you turn it and shake it, the oil will never mix with the water; it will separate into a hundred thousand little globules which will unite again and rise to the surface the instant it becomes calm: the drop of oil and the glass of water epitomize my history. Even lust--that diamond chain that binds all human beings together, that consuming fire that melts the stone and metal of the heart and causes them to fall in tears as material fire melts iron and granite--all powerful as it is, has never been able to subdue or move me. And yet my senses are very sharp; but my heart is a hostile sister to my body, and the ill-mated couple, like every possible couple, lawfully or unlawfully united, lives in a state of constant warfare.--A woman's arms, the strongest of all earthly bonds, so it is said, are to me very weak fetters, and I have never been farther from my mistress than when she was straining me to her heart.--I was stifled, that's the whole story.

How many times have I been angry with myself! What superhuman efforts have I made to be different! How I have exhorted myself to be affectionate, lover-like, passionate! how often I have taken my heart by the hair and dragged it to my lips in the middle of a kiss! Whatever I do, it always recoils, wiping the kiss away, as soon as I release my hold. What torture for that poor heart to look on at the orgies of my body and to be constantly compelled to sit through banquets at which it has nothing to eat!

It was when I was with Rosette that I determined, once for all, to ascertain if I am not hopelessly unsociable, and if I can take enough interest in another person's existence to believe in it. I exhausted the whole category of experiments, and I have not succeeded in solving my doubts to any great extent. With her my pleasure is so keen that my heart often finds itself diverted at least, if not touched, a state of things that impairs the accuracy of observations. After all, I have discovered that it didn't go below the skin and that my enjoyment was confined to the epidermis, the heart participating only through curiosity. I have pleasure because I am young and ardent; but the pleasures came from myself and not from another. Its source was in myself rather than in Rosette.

It is of no use for me to struggle, I cannot go out of myself for a single moment. I am still what I was, that is to say, a very tired, very tiresome creature, who disgusts me exceedingly. I have failed utterly to introduce into my brain the idea of another human being, into my heart, another's emotion, into my body, another's pain or pleasure. I am a prisoner in myself and all escape is impossible: the prisoner longs to escape, the walls ask nothing better than to crumble, and the doors to open before him; but some inexplicable fatality keeps every stone immovable in its place, every bolt in its groove; it is as impossible for me to admit any one to my quarters as to go myself to others; I cannot make or receive calls, and I live in the most absolute solitude amid the multitude: my bed may not be widowed, but my heart always is.

Ah! to be unable to increase one's size by a single line, by a single atom; to be unable to admit others' blood into one's veins; to see always with one's own eyes, never clearer, never farther, never otherwise; to hear sounds with the same ears and the same sensation; to touch with the same fingers; to perceive changing objects with an unchangeable organ; to be doomed to the same tone of voice, the repetition of the same sounds, the same phrases, the same words, and not to be able to fly, to escape one's self, to take refuge in some corner where no one can follow; to be compelled to keep always to one's self, to dine and lie alone--to be the same man to twenty different women; to play, throughout the most complicated situations of the drama of your life, a part that is forced upon you, whose lines you know by heart; to think the same things, to have the same dreams:--what torture, what ennui!

I have longed for the horn of the Tangut brothers, for Fortunatus's hat, Abaris's bâton, Gygès's ring; I would have sold my soul to snatch the magic wand from a fairy's hand, but I have never longed so intensely for anything as to meet on the mountain, like Tiresias the soothsayer, those serpents who can change the sex of mortals, and what I most envy in the strange, monstrous gods of the Indies are their constant incarnations and innumerable transformations.

I began by longing to be another man; then, as I reflected that I could, by analogy, foresee almost exactly what I should feel and therefore not experience the change and the surprise I expected, I concluded that I would prefer to be a woman; that idea always occurred to me when I had a mistress who was not ugly; for an ugly woman is like a man to me, and in my moments of enjoyment I would gladly have changed my rôle, for it is very annoying to know nothing about the effect one produces and to judge of others' pleasure only by one's own. Such reflections and many others have often given me, at moments when it was most inappropriate, a meditative, dreamy air, which has caused me to be accused most unjustly of coldness and infidelity.

Rosette, who, very luckily, doesn't know all this, believes me to be the most amorous man on earth; she takes that impotent _frenzy_ for a frenzy of passion, and she does her utmost to humor all the experimental caprices that pass through my brain.

I have done all that I possibly could to convince myself that she belongs to me. I have tried to go down into her heart, but I have always stopped on the first step of the staircase, at her flesh or her mouth. Despite the intimacy of our corporeal relations, I feel that we have nothing in common. Never has an idea of the same tenor as mine spread its wings in that youthful, smiling head; never has that heart, overflowing with life and fire, whose palpitations cause that firm, white breast to rise and fall, beaten in unison with my heart. My soul has never coalesced with hers. Cupid, the god with the hawk's wings, has not kissed Psyche on her fair ivory brow. No!--that woman is not my mistress.

If you know all that I have done to compel my heart to share the love of my body! with what frenzy I have glued my mouth to hers and wound my arms in her hair, and how tightly I have embraced her rounded, supple figure. Like Salmacis of old, enamored of the young Hermaphrodite, I have tried to melt her body and mine together; I have drunk her breath and her warm tears that bliss forced from the brimming chalice of her eyes. The more inextricably our bodies were intertwined, the closer our embrace, the less I loved her. My heart, sitting sadly by, looked on with a pitying air at that deplorable union to which it was not bidden, or veiled its face in disgust and wept silently behind the skirt of its cloak. All this is attributable perhaps to the fact that I do not really love Rosette, worthy to be loved though she be, and anxious as I am to love her.

To rid myself of the idea that I was myself, I transported myself to most unusual surroundings, where it was altogether unlikely that I should meet myself, and being unable to cast my individuality to the dogs, I tried to expatriate it so that it would no longer recognize itself. I have had but moderate success therein, for that devil of a myself follows me persistently; there is no way of getting rid of him; I haven't the resource of sending word to him, as I do to other uncomfortable callers, that I am not at home or that I have gone into the country.

I have had my mistress in the bath and I have played the Triton as best I could.--The sea was a huge marble tub. As for the Nereid, what she showed accused the water, transparent though it was, of not being sufficiently so for the exquisite beauty of what it concealed.--I have had her at night, by moonlight, in a gondola with music.

That would be very commonplace at Venice, but here it is anything but that.--In her carriage, with the horses going at a gallop, amid the rattling of the wheels, the leaping and jolting, sometimes by the light of lanterns, sometimes in the densest darkness.--That doesn't lack a certain stimulating interest and I advise you to try it: but I forget that you are a venerable patriarch, and that you don't indulge in such refinements.--I have climbed in at her window when I had the key to the door in my pocket.--I have made her come to my apartments in broad daylight, in fact, I have compromised her so thoroughly that no one--myself excepted, be it understood--now doubts that she is my mistress.

By reason of all these inventions which, if I were not so young, would resemble the expedients of a blasé old rake, Rosette adores me far and away above all others. She sees therein the ardor of a teasing passion that nothing can restrain, and that is always the same despite the changes of time and place. She sees therein the constantly renewed effect of her charms and the triumph of her beauty, and, in truth, I would that she were right, and it is neither my fault nor hers--I must be just--that she is not.

The only wrong I have done her consists in being myself. If I told her that, the child would reply at once that that is my greatest merit in her eyes; which would be more courteous than sensible.

Once--it was in the beginning of our liaison--I believed that I had gained my end, for a moment I believed that I loved her--I did love her.--O my friend, I have never lived except during that moment, and if it had lasted an hour I should have become a god. We had ridden out together in the saddle, I on my dear Ferragus, she on a snow-white mare that looks like a unicorn, her feet are so delicate and her body so slender. We rode along a broad avenue of elms of prodigious height; the sun poured down upon us, bright and warm, sifting through the serrated foliage; ultra-marine patches showed here and there amid the fleecy clouds, broad bands of pale blue lay along the horizon, changing to a most delicate apple-green when they encountered the golden rays of the setting sun. The appearance of the sky was unusual and fascinating; the breeze wafted to our nostrils an indefinable perfume of wild flowers delicious beyond words. From time to time a bird rose in front of us and flew singing along the avenue. The church-bell of an invisible village softly rang the Angelus, and the silvery notes, which came but faintly to our ears because of the distance, were inexpressibly sweet. Our horses were going at a foot pace, and they walked side by side in such perfect step that neither of them was an inch ahead of the other.--My heart dilated and my soul overflowed upon my body. I had never been so happy. I did not speak, nor did Rosette, and yet we never understood each other so perfectly. We were so close together that my leg touched her horse's side. I leaned toward her and put my arm about her waist; she made a similar movement and rested her head against my shoulder. Our mouths met; O such a chaste, delicious kiss! Our horses walked on, the reins lying on their necks. I felt Rosette's arms relax and her body yield more and more. I knew that my own strength was failing me, and I was near fainting.--Ah! I promise you that at that moment I cared but little whether I was myself or somebody else. We rode in that way to the end of the avenue, where the sound of footsteps caused us abruptly to resume our natural positions; some of our acquaintances, also in the saddle, rode up and spoke to us. If I had had my pistols, I believe I should have fired at them.

I glared at them with a fierce, lowering expression that must have seemed very strange to them. After all, I was wrong to be so angry with them, for they had unwittingly done me the service of cutting my pleasure short at the moment when, by its very intensity, it was certain to become pain or to sink under its violence. The science of stopping in time is not regarded with all the respect it deserves.--Sometimes, as you lie with a woman, you put your arm under her waist: at first it is a most blissful sensation to feel the pleasant warmth of her body, the soft, velvety flesh of her sides, the polished ivory of her hips, and to press your hand against her breast which throbs and quivers. The fair one falls asleep in that voluptuous, charming posture; the curve of her loins becomes less pronounced, the agitation of her bosom is calmed, her sides rise and fall with the freer, more regular respiration of sleep, her muscles relax, her face is hidden by her hair.--Meanwhile the weight upon your arm grows heavier, you begin to observe that she is a woman, not a sylph; but you would not remove your arm for anything on earth. There are many reasons for that: the first is that it is dangerous to wake a woman with whom one is lying; one must be prepared to substitute for the blissful dream she is probably dreaming, a more blissful reality; the second is that, if you ask her to raise herself so that you can take away your arm, you tell her indirectly that she is heavy and discommodes you--which is not polite--or else you give her to understand that you are feeble and overdone--an extremely humiliating admission for you and likely to lower you greatly in her mind; the third is that, as you have had pleasure in that position, you think that if you retain the position the pleasure may be renewed, wherein you are mistaken. The poor arm is caught under the mass that crushes it, the blood is checked, the nerves are distended and numbness pricks you with its countless needles: you are a sort of Milo of Crotona on a small scale, and the mattress and the back of your divinity are a sufficiently accurate representation of the two parts of the tree that have reunited. Day comes at last to deliver you from your martyrdom and you leap out of that instrument of torture more eagerly than ever husband descended from the nuptial scaffold.

That is the history of many passions. It is the history of all pleasures.

However that may be--despite the interruption or because of the interruption--never had such a blissful sensation fallen to my lot: I felt that I was really somebody else. Rosette's soul in its entirety had entered into my body. My soul had left me and filled her heart as hers had filled mine. They had met, no doubt, during that long equestrian kiss, as Rosette dubbed it afterward--to my annoyance by the way--and had penetrated and mingled as inextricably as the souls of two mortal creatures can upon a morsel of perishable clay.

Angels surely must kiss like that, and the real paradise is not in heaven but on the lips of the woman we love.