I am the titular lover of the pink lady; that is almost a profession, an office, and it gives a man a firm footing in society. I no longer look like a scholar seeking a mistress among a parcel of grandmothers and afraid to sing a love-song to a woman unless she's a hundred years old; I notice, since my installation, that I receive much more consideration, that all the women talk to me with jealous coquetry and go out of their way to smile on me.--The men, on the other hand, are colder, and in the few words we exchange there is a touch of hostility and constraint; they feel that they have in me an enemy already formidable, who may become much more so.--I have heard that many of them had bitterly criticised my way of carrying myself and said that my style of dress was too effeminate; that my hair was curled and anointed with more care than beseemed me; that that fact, taken in connection with my beardless face, gave me a most absurd girlish appearance; that I affected rich materials that smelt of the stage, and that I looked more like an actor than a man: a parcel of trite, sneering remarks, intended to justify themselves in being dirty and wearing wretched, ill-fitting clothes. But all this serves only to make me the whiter, and all the ladies consider that my hair is the finest in the world, and that the niceties of my toilet are in the best taste, and they seem strongly disposed to make up to me for all that I spend for their benefit, for they are not fools enough to believe that all that elegance has no other aim than my own private embellishment.
The lady of the house seemed at first a little offended at my choice, which she thought must inevitably fall upon herself, and for some days she was decidedly sour--to her rival only, for there was no change in her manner to me--her spleen manifesting itself in divers little "My dears," uttered in that dry, abrupt tone that women alone can master, and in certain uncomplimentary remarks concerning her costume, made in as loud a voice as possible, such as: "Your hair is done too high and not at all to correspond with your face," or: "Your waist bags under the arms; who in the world made that dress?" or: "You have black rings under your eyes; it seems to me you are much changed;" and a thousand other trivial observations to which the other did not fail to retort with all desirable malignity when opportunity offered; and if the opportunity was too slow in offering she made one for her own use and returned, with interest, what she had received. But soon, another object having distracted the attention of the slighted princess, the little war of words ceased and everything resumed its usual order.
I said baldly that I was the pink lady's titular lover; that is not enough for so accurate a man as you are. You will undoubtedly ask me what her name is: as for that, I shall not tell you; but, if you choose, to shorten the story and in memory of the color of the dress in which I first saw her, we will call her Rosette; it's a pretty name; my little dog has the same name.
You would like to know from point to point, for you love exactness in all things, the story of our love-affairs with this fair Bradamante, and by what successive steps I passed from the general to the particular and from the condition of simple spectator to that of actor; how, after being one of the audience, I became the lover. I will gratify your desire with the very greatest pleasure. There is nothing unpleasant in our romance; it is all rose-colored, and no tears are shed except tears of pleasure; you will find no long descriptions or repetitions, and everything moves on toward the end with the haste and speed so urgently recommended by Horace;--it is a genuine French romance.--Do not imagine, however, that I carried the citadel at the first assault. The princess, although very humane to her subjects, is not as lavish of her favors at first, as you might think; she knows their value too well not to make you purchase them; she also knows too well how a judicious delay sharpens the appetite and what relish a semi-resistance adds to the pleasure, to abandon herself to you at first, however keen the inclination you have aroused in her.
To tell the whole story at length, I must go back a little. I gave you a very circumstantial account of our first interview. I had one or two, perhaps three others in the same house, and then she invited me to call on her; I did not make her repeat the invitation, as you can believe; I went there at discreet intervals at first, then a little more frequently, then still more so, and finally whenever the fancy seized me, and I must confess that it seized me at least three or four times a day.--The lady, after we had been parted a few hours, always received me as if I had just returned from the East Indies; which fact touched me as much as anything could and impelled me to show my gratitude in a marked manner by the most gallant and tenderest words you can imagine, to which she replied as best she could.
Rosette--as we have agreed to call her that--is a very bright woman and has a most admirable appreciation of man; although she postponed the end of the chapter for some time, I did not once lose my temper with her: which is really marvellous, for you know how I fly into a passion when I don't get what I want on the instant, and when a woman goes beyond the time I have mentally allowed her in which to surrender.--I have no idea how she did it at the first interview; she gave me to understand that I should have her, and I was surer of her than if I had had her written promise signed by her hand. You will say perhaps that her bold and free-and-easy manners left the field free to rash hopes. I do not think that that is the real motive: I have seen some women whose prodigious freedom of manner excluded the last vestige of doubt, who did not produce that effect upon me, and in whose presence I was conscious of a timidity and uneasiness that were, to say the least, misplaced.
The result is, generally speaking, that I am less amiable with the woman I long to possess than with those who are indifferent to me; it is because of the excitement of waiting for an opportunity and my uncertainty as to the success of my project; that makes me gloomy and casts me into a fit of musing which takes away much of my power of pleasing and my presence of mind. When I see the hours I had set aside for another purpose passing one by one, I am filled with anger in spite of myself, and I cannot keep from saying very sharp, harsh things, which sometimes go as far as brutality and put my affair back a hundred leagues.
With Rosette I had no such feeling; never, even at the moment when she resisted me most stubbornly, did I have the idea that she wanted to escape from my love. I calmly allowed her to display all her little coquetries, and I endured in patience the overlong delays to which it pleased her to subject my ardor; there was something smiling in her harshness that consoled you for it as much as possible, and in her most Hyrcanian cruelties you could distinguish a background of humanity that made it impossible for you to have any very serious fear.--Virtuous women, even when they are not really virtuous at all, have a crabbed, disdainful way which is perfectly unendurable to me. They have the air of being always ready to ring and order their footmen to put you out; and it seems to me, really, that a man who takes the trouble to pay court to a woman--and it isn't always as agreeable as you may think--doesn't deserve to be looked at in that way.
Dear Rosette has no such glances as that, not she; and I assure you that she doesn't lose anything by it; she is the only woman with whom I have ever been myself, and I am conceited enough to say that I have never been so agreeable. My wit has displayed itself freely; and, by the skill and fire of her retorts, she has led me to discover more than I had any idea that I possessed, and more perhaps than I really do possess.--To be sure, I haven't done much in the way of lyrics--that is hardly possible with her; it is not that she has no poetic side, notwithstanding what De C---- said of her; but she is so full of life and strength and movement, she seems to be so well placed in her present surroundings, that one has no desire to leave them for a flight among the clouds. She fills one's real life so pleasantly and makes of it something so entertaining to herself and others, that reverie has nothing better to offer you.
A miraculous thing! I have known her nearly two months, and in those two months the only times I have been bored have been when I was not with her. You will agree that she can be no inferior woman to produce such a result, for women usually produce exactly the opposite effect on me and are much more agreeable to me at a distance than near at hand.
Rosette has the best disposition in the world, with men I mean, for with women she's as wicked as a devil; she is bright, lively, alert, ready for anything, very original in her way of speaking, and has always some charming nonsense to tell you that you don't expect; she is a delightful companion, a jolly comrade with whom you sleep, rather than a mistress; and if I were a few years older and had fewer romantic ideas, I should be perfectly satisfied, indeed I should deem myself the most fortunate mortal on earth. But--but--that conjunction implies nothing good, and unfortunately that little devil of a restrictive word is the one most frequently employed in all human tongues;--but I am an imbecile, an idiot, a downright booby, never content with anything and always hunting mares' nests; and, instead of being altogether happy, I am only half so;--half, that is a good deal for this world, and yet I find it not enough.
In the eyes of the world I have a mistress whom several desire and envy me, and whom no one would disdain. My desire is gratified, therefore, in appearance, and I no longer have the right to pick a quarrel with fate. However, it seems to me that I have no mistress; I can convince myself that I have by arguing it out, but I do not feel it, and if anybody should ask me unexpectedly if I had one, I think I should answer no.--However, the possession of a woman who has beauty, youth, and wit, constitutes what, in all times and in all countries, has been and still is called having a mistress, and I think there is no other way. That doesn't prevent my having the strangest doubts in that connection, and it has gone so far that if several people should unite to convince me that I am not Rosette's favored lover, I should end by believing them in the face of the palpable evidence to the contrary.
Do not think from what I say that I do not love her or that she is displeasing to me in any way; on the contrary, I am very fond of her and I see in her what everybody else would see in her: a pretty, alluring creature. I simply do not feel that I possess her, that is all. And yet no woman ever gave me so much pleasure, and if I have ever known bliss, it has been in her arms.--A single one of her kisses, the most chaste of her caresses makes me shiver to the soles of my feet and sends all my blood back to my heart. Explain it all if you can. The facts, however, are as I tell them to you. But the human heart is full of such absurdities; and if we were obliged to reconcile all the contradictions it exhibits, we should have a heavy task on our hands.
How does it happen? Verily, I have no idea.
I see her all day, and all night too, if I choose. I bestow as many caresses on her as I please; I have her naked or dressed, in town or in the country. Her good humor is inexhaustible, and she enters heart and soul into my whims however eccentric they may be; one evening the fancy seized me to possess her in the middle of the salon, with all the candles lighted, the fire blazing on the hearth, the chairs arranged in a circle as if for a grand evening reception, she, in a toilette de bal with her bouquet and her fan, all her diamonds on her fingers and her neck, feathers in her hair--the most magnificent costume imaginable--and I dressed like a bear; she consented.--When everything was ready, the servants were greatly surprised to receive orders to close the doors and admit no one; they acted as if they had not the slightest comprehension of what it all meant, and went away with a dazed look that made us laugh heartily. They certainly thought that their mistress was stark mad; but what they thought or did not think mattered little to us.
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.
I have waited in vain for such a moment and have tried unsuccessfully to lead up to a repetition of it. We have often ridden together through the avenue of elms at sunset on lovely evenings; the trees had the same verdure, the birds sang the same song, but to us the sun seemed dull, the foliage withered: the song of the birds had a harsh, discordant sound, we were no longer in harmony with it all. We brought our horses to a walk and we tried the same kiss.--Alas! only our lips met and it was only the spectre of the former kiss.--The beautiful, the sublime, the divine, the only real kiss I have given and received in my whole life had flown away forever. Since that day I have always had an inexpressibly sad feeling on returning from the forest. Rosette, light-hearted madcap that she naturally is, cannot avoid the feeling and her reverie betrays itself by a sweet little pout, which is at least as attractive as a smile.
Scarcely anything but the fumes of wine and a great blaze of candles enable me to shake off these fits of depression. We both drink like men condemned to death, silently and glass after glass, until we have swallowed the necessary amount; then we begin to laugh and mock most heartily at what we call our sentimentality.
We laugh--because we cannot weep. Ah! who will succeed in sowing a tear in my parched eye?
Why did I enjoy that evening so? It would be very hard for me to say. I was the same man, Rosette the same woman. It was not my first experience on horse-back, nor hers; we had already watched the sun set and the spectacle had touched us no more than a picture, which one admires or not according as the colors are more or less brilliant. There is more than one avenue of elms and chestnuts in the world, and that was not the first one we had ridden through; what then caused us to find such a sovereign fascination there, what metamorphosed the dead leaves into topazes, the green leaves into emeralds, gilded all those whirling atoms and changed into pearls all the drops of water scattered over the greensward, what imparted such sweet melody to the tones of a bell that was usually discordant and to the twittering of countless young birds?--There must have been a very penetrating flavor of poesy in the air, as even our horses seemed to catch the scent of it.
And yet nothing in the world could be more pastoral and more simple: a few trees, a few clouds, five or six clumps of wild thyme, a woman, and a sunbeam over all like a gold chevron on a coat of arms.--There was neither surprise nor bewilderment in my sensations. I knew perfectly well where I was. I had never been to that precise spot, but I remembered perfectly the shape of the trees and the position of the clouds, the white dove that flew across the sky I had seen flying in the same direction; the little silvery bell, which I then heard for the first time, had often tinkled in my ears, and its voice seemed to me like the voice of a friend; although I had never been there, I had many times passed through that avenue with princesses mounted on unicorns; my most voluptuous dreams rode there every evening and my desires had exchanged kisses absolutely like the one exchanged by myself and Rosette.--There was nothing new to me in that kiss; but it was as I had thought it would be. It was perhaps the only time in my life that I have not been disappointed and that the real has seemed to me as beautiful as the ideal.--If I could find a woman, a landscape, a building, anything that corresponded as closely to my desires as that moment corresponded to the moment I had dreamed of, I should have no reason to envy the gods, and I would gladly renounce my box in paradise.--But, in truth, I do not believe that any man of flesh and blood could have an hour of such exquisite enjoyment; two kisses like that would pump a whole life dry and leave a complete void in a heart and a body.--But no such consideration as that would stop me; for, not being able to prolong my life indefinitely, I am ready to die, and I should prefer to die of pleasure rather than of old age or ennui.
But that woman doesn't exist.--Yes, she does exist; it may be that only a wall separates us.--Perhaps I jostled her in the street yesterday or to-day.
In what does Rosette fall short of being that woman? In this, that I do not believe she is. By what fatality do I always have for mistresses, women that I do not love? Her neck is smooth enough to set off the most beautifully-wrought necklaces; her fingers are taper enough to do honor to the loveliest and richest rings; the ruby would blush with pleasure to gleam on the pink lobe of her delicate ear; the cestus of Venus would fit her waist; but Love alone has the secret of tying his mother's scarf.
All Rosette's merit is in herself, I have attributed nothing to her that she has not. I have not cast over her beauty the veil of perfection with which love envelops the loved one;--the veil of Isis is transparent beside that veil. Naught but satiety can raise the corner of it.
I do not love Rosette; at least my love for her, if I have any, does not resemble the ideal I have formed of love. It may be that my ideal is not a just one, I do not dare to say. Certain it is that it makes me insensible to the merits of other women, and I have desired no other with any consistency since I have had her. If she has any reason to be jealous, it is of phantoms only, about which she worries very little, and yet her most formidable rival is my imagination; that is something which, with all her shrewdness, she will probably never discover.
If women only knew!--How many infidelities the least fickle lover is guilty of to the most adored mistress!--It is to be presumed that they pay us back in full and more; but they do as we do and say nothing. A mistress is a necessary subject, who ordinarily disappears under flourishes and embroidery. Very often the kisses you give her are not for her; you embrace the idea of another woman in her person, and she profits not infrequently--if it can be called profiting--by the desires aroused by another. Ah! my poor Rosette, how many times you have served as a body to my dreams and given reality to your rivals; to how many infidelities have you unwittingly been accessory! If you could have imagined, at times when my arms clasped you so tightly, when my mouth was most closely united to yours, that your beauty and your love had nothing to do with my passion, that the thought of you was a hundred leagues from my mind; what if some one had told you that those eyes, veiled with amorous languor, were cast down simply in order not to look at you and not to banish the illusion that you served only to complete, and that, instead of being a mistress, you were simply an instrument of lust, a means of assuaging a desire impossible of realization!
O divine creatures, ye lovely virgins, slender and diaphanous, who lower your periwinkle eyes and clasp your lily hand in the pictures with golden backgrounds of the old German masters, ye stained-glass saints, ye missal martyrs who smile so sweetly amid the convolutions of the arabesques, and come forth so fresh and fair from the flower-bells!--O ye lovely courtesans lying all naked in your hair on beds strewn with roses, beneath great purple curtains, with your bracelets and necklaces of huge pearls, your fan and your mirrors, gleaming in the shadow in the fiery rays of the setting sun!--ye dark-skinned maidens of Titian, who display so wantonly your undulating hips, your firm, round thighs, your polished breasts and your supple and muscular loins!--ye antique goddesses, who rear your white phantoms in the shady corners of gardens!--ye are a part of my seraglio; I have possessed you all in turn.--Sainte Ursule, I have kissed your hands on the fair hands of Rosette; I have toyed with the black hair of the Muranese and Rosette never had such a hard task to rearrange her hair: I have been with you more than Acteon was, O virgin Diana, and I have not been changed to a stag: it was I who replaced your handsome Endymion!--What a multitude of rivals whom she does not suspect and upon whom she cannot be revenged! yet they are not all painted or carved!
Women, when you notice that your lover is more affectionate than usual, that he presses you in his arms with unwonted emotion; when he rests his head upon your knees and raises it to look at you with moist and wandering eyes; when enjoyment serves only to augment his desire and he stifles your voice with his kisses as if he dreaded to hear it, be sure that he simply does not know that you are there; that he has, at that moment, an assignation with a chimera which you make palpable, and whose part you play.--Many chamber-maids have profited by the love that queens inspire.--Many women have profited by the love that goddesses inspire, and a commonplace reality has often served as the pedestal for an ideal idol. That is why poets habitually take dirty trollops for mistresses.--You can lie ten years with a woman without ever seeing her; that is the history of many great geniuses, whose ignoble or obscure connections have caused the world to wonder.
I have been unfaithful to Rosette in no other way than that. I have been false to her only for pictures and statues and she has been equally concerned in the treachery. I have not the slightest material sin upon my conscience with which to reproach myself. I am, in that respect, as white as the snow-capped Jungfrau, and yet, while not in love with anybody, I would like to be with some one. I do not seek the opportunity, but I shall not be sorry if it comes; if it should come, I might not use it, perhaps, for I have an innate conviction that it would be the same with another, and I prefer that it should be so with Rosette than with any other; for, take away the woman, I still have a jolly companion, witty, and very agreeably depraved; and that consideration is not one of the least of those that restrain me, for, in losing the mistress, I might be distressed to find that I had lost the friend.
