The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume 3
Young, yes; the woman was certainly young; there could be no doubt about that, when one looked at her smooth skin, her smiling mouth which showed her white teeth, and firm bust which could be plainly noted under her thin dress.
But then, how explain her perfectly white hair, not gray or growing gray, but absolutely white, as white as any octogenarian's?
And then her eyes, her eyes beneath her smooth brow, were surely the eyes of an old woman? Certainly they were, and of a woman one could not tell how old, for it must have taken years of trouble and sorrow, of tears and of sleepless nights, and a whole long existence, thus to dull, to wear out and to roughen those vitreous pupils.
Vitreous? Not exactly that. For roughened glass still retains a dull and milky brightness, a recollection, as it were, of its former transparency. But her eyes seemed rather to have been made of metal, which had turned rusty, and really if pewter could rust I should have compared them to pewter covered with rust. They had the dead color of pewter, and at the same time, they emitted a glance which was the color of reddish water.
But it was not until some time later that I tried to define them thus approximately by retrospective analysis. At that moment, being altogether incapable of such an effort, I could only establish in my own mind the idea of extreme decrepitude and horrible old age, which they produced in my imagination.
Have I said that they were set in very puffy eyelids, which had no lashes whatever, and on her forehead without wrinkles there was not a vestige of eyebrow? When I tell you this, and considering their dull look beneath the hair of an octogenarian, it is not surprising that Ledantec and I said in a low voice at the sight of this woman, who was evidently young:
"Oh! poor, poor old woman!"
Her great age was further accentuated by the terrible poverty that was revealed by her dress. If she had been better dressed, her youthful looks would, perhaps, have struck us more, but her thin shawl, which was all that she had over her chemise, her single petticoat which was full of holes, and almost in rags, and which did not nearly reach to her bare feet, her straw hat with ragged feathers and with ribbons of no particular color through age, it all seemed so ancient, so prodigiously antique!
From what remote superannuated, abolished period did they all spring? One did not venture to guess, and by a perfectly natural association of ideas, one seemed to infer that the unfortunate creature herself, was as old as her clothes were. Now, by one, I mean by Ledantec and myself, that is to say, by two men who were abominably drunk and who were arguing with the special logic of intoxication.
It was also under the softening influence of alcohol that we looked at the vague smile on those lips with the teeth of a child, without stopping to reflect on the beauty of those youthful teeth, and seeing nothing except her fixed and almost idiotic smile, which no longer contrasted with the dull expression of her looks, but, on the contrary, strengthened them. For in spite of her teeth, it was the smile of an old woman in our imagination, and as for me, I was really pleased at the thought of being so acute when I inferred that this grandmother with such pale lips, had the set of teeth of a young girl, and still, thanks to the softening influence of alcohol, I was not angry with her for this artifice. I even thought it particularly praiseworthy, since, after all, the poor creature thus carried out her calling conscientiously, which was to seduce us. For there was no possible doubt about the matter, that this grandmother was nothing more nor less than a prostitute.
And then, drunk! Horribly drunk, much more drunk than Ledantec and I were, for we really could manage to say: "Oh! Pity the poor, poor old woman!" While she was incapable of articulating a single syllable, of making a gesture, or even of imparting a gleam of promise, a furtive flash of allurement to her eyes. With her hands crossed on her stomach, and resting against the front of the public-house, with her whole body as stiff as if she had been in a state of catalepsy, she had nothing alluring about her, except her sad smile, and that inspired us with all the more pity because she was even more drunk than we were, and so, by identical, spontaneous movement, we each of us seized her by an arm, to take her into the public-house with us.
To our great astonishment she resisted, sprang back, and so was in the shadow again, out of the ray of light which came through the door, while, at the same time, she began to walk through the darkness and to drag us with her, for she was clinging to our arms. We followed her without speaking and without knowing where we were going, but without the least uneasiness on that score. Only, when she suddenly burst into violent sobs as she walked, Ledantec and I began to sob in unison.
The cold and the fog had suddenly congested our brains again, and we had again lost all precise consciousness of our acts, of our thoughts and of our sensations. Our sobs had nothing of grief in them, but we were floating in an atmosphere of perfect bliss, and I can remember that at that moment it was no longer the exterior world which seemed to me as if I were looking at it through the penumbra of an aquarium; it was I myself, an I composed of three, which was changing into something that was floating adrift in something, though what it was I did not know, composed of palpable fog and intangible water, and it was exquisitely delightful.
From that moment I remember nothing more until what follows, and which had the effect of a clap of thunder on me, and made me rise up from the bottom of the depth to which I had descended.
Ledantec was standing in front of me, his face convulsed with horror, his hair standing on end and his eyes staring out of his head, and he shouted to me: —
"Let us escape! Let us escape!" Whereupon I opened my eyes wide, and found myself lying on the ground, in a room into which daylight was shining. I saw some rags hanging against the wall, two chairs, a broken jug lying on the floor by my side, and in a corner a wretched bed on which a woman was lying, who was no doubt dead, for her head was hanging over the side, and her long white hair reached almost to my feet.
With a bound I was up, like Ledantec.
"What!" I said to him, while my teeth chattered: "Did you kill her?"
"No, no," he replied. "But that makes no difference; let us be off."
I felt completely sober by that time, but I did think that he was still suffering somewhat from the effects of last night's drunk; otherwise, why should he wish to escape? while the remains of pity for the unfortunate woman forced me to say: —
"What is the matter with her? If she is ill, we must look after her."
And I went to the wretched bed, in order to put her head back on the pillow, but I discovered that she was neither dead nor ill, but only sound asleep, and I also noticed that she was quite young. She still wore that idiotic smile, but her teeth were her own and those of a girl. Her smooth skin and her firm bust showed that she was not more than sixteen; perhaps not so much.
"There! You see it, you can see it!" Ledantec said. "Let us be off."
He tried to drag me out, and he was still drunk; I could see it by his feverish movements, his trembling hands and his nervous looks. Then he implored me and said: —
"I slept beside the old woman; but she is not old. Look at her; look at her; yes, she is old after all!"
And he lifted up her long hair by handfuls; it was like handfuls of white silk, and then he added, evidently in a sort of delirium, which made me fear an attack of delirium tremens: "To think that I have begotten children, three, four children. Who knows how many children, all in one night! And they were born immediately, and have grown up already! Let us be off."
Decidedly it was an attack of madness. Poor Ledantec! What could I do for him? I took his arm and tried to calm him, but he thought that I was going to try and make him go to bed with her again, and he pushed me away and exclaimed with tears in his voice: "If you do not believe me, look under the bed; the children are there; they are there, I tell you. Look here, just look here."
He threw himself down, flat on his stomach, and actually pulled out one, two, three, four children, who had hidden under the bed. I do not exactly know whether they were boys or girls, but all, like the sleeping woman, had white hair, the hair of an octogenarian.
Was I still drunk, like Ledantec, or was I mad? What was the meaning of this strange hallucination? I hesitated for a moment, and shook myself to be sure that it was I.
No, no, I had all my wits about me, and I in reality saw that horrible lot of little brats; they all had their faces in their hands, and were crying and squalling, and then suddenly one of them jumped onto the bed; all the others followed his example, and the woman woke up.
And then we stood, while those five pairs of eyes, without eyebrows or eyelashes, eyes with the dull color of pewter, and whose pupils had the color of red water, were steadily fixed on us.
"Let us be off! let us be off!" Ledantec repeated, leaving go of me, and at that time I paid attention to what he said, and, after throwing some small change onto the floor, I followed him, to make him understand, when he should be quite sober, that he saw before him a poor Albino prostitute, who had several brothers and sisters.
COUNTESS SATAN
I
They were discussing dynamite, the social revolution, Nihilism, and even those who cared least about politics, had something to say. Some were alarmed, others philosophized, while others again, tried to smile.
"Bah!" N – said, "when we are all blown up, we shall see what it is like. Perhaps, after all, it may be an amusing sensation, provided one goes high enough."
"But we shall not be blown up at all," G – the optimist, said, interrupting him. "It is all a romance."
"You are mistaken, my dear fellow," Jules de C – replied. "It is like a romance, but with that confounded Nihilism, everything seems like one, but it would be a mistake to trust to it. Thus, I myself, the manner in which I made Bakounine's acquaintance …"
They knew that he was a good narrator, and it was no secret that his life had been an adventurous one, so they drew closer to him, and listened religiously. This is what he told them.
II
"I met Countess Nioska W – , that strange woman who was usually called Countess Satan, in Naples; I immediately attached myself to her out of curiosity, and I soon fell in love with her. Not that she was beautiful, for she was a Russian who had all the bad characteristics of the Russian type. She was thin and squat, at the same time, while her face was sallow and puffy, with high cheek bones and a Cossack's nose. But her conversation bewitched every one.
"She was many-sided, learned, a philosopher, scientifically depraved, satanic. Perhaps the word is rather pretentious, but it exactly expresses what I want to say, for in other words, she loved evil for the sake of evil. She rejoiced in other people's vices, and liked to sow the seeds of evil, in order to see it flourish. And that on a fraud, on an enormous scale. It was not enough for her to corrupt individuals; she only did that to keep her hand in; what she wished to do, was to corrupt the masses. By slightly altering it after her own fashion, she might have adopted the famous saying of Caligula. She also wished that the whole human race had but one head; but not in order that she might cut it off, but that she might make the philosophy of Nihility flourish there.
"What a temptation to become the lord and master of such a monster! And I allowed myself to be tempted, and undertook the adventure. The means came unsought for by me, and the only thing that I had to do, was to show myself more perverted and satanical that she was herself. – And so I played the devil.
"'Yes,' I said, 'we writers are the best workmen for doing evil, as our books may be bottles of poison. The so-called men of action, only turn the handle of the mitrailleuse which we have loaded. Formulas will destroy the world, and it is we who invent them.'
"'That is true,' she said, 'and that is what is wanting in Bakounine, I am sorry to say.'
"That name was constantly in her mouth, and so I asked her for details, which she gave me, as she knew the man intimately.
"'After all,' she said, with a contemptuous grimace, 'he is only a kind of Garibaldi.'
"She told me, although she made fun of him as she did so, about his Odyssey of the barricades and of the hulks which made up Bakounine's legend, and which is, nevertheless, only the exact truth; his part of chief of the insurgents, at Prague and then at Dresden; his first death sentence; about his imprisonment at Olmütz and in the casemates of the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul; in a subterranean dungeon at Schüsselburg; about his exile to Siberia and his wonderful escape down the river Amour, on a Japanese coasting-vessel by way of Yokohama and San Francisco, and about his final arrival in London, whence he was directing all the operations of Nihilism.
"'You see,' she said, 'he is a thorough adventurer, and now all his adventures are over. He got married at Tobolsk and became a mere respectable, middle-class man. And then, he has no individual ideas. Herzen, the phamphleteer of Kolokol inspired him with the only fertile phrase that he ever uttered: Land and Liberty! But that is not yet the definite formula, the general formula; what I will call, the dynamite formula. At best, Bakounine would become an incendiary, and burn down cities. And what is that, I ask you? Bah? A second-hand Rostopchin! He wants a prompter, and I offered to become his but he did not take me seriously.' …
"It would be useless to enter into all the Psychological details which marked the course of my passion for the Countess, and to explain to you more fully the attraction of curiosity which she offered me more and more every day. It was getting exasperating, and the more so, as she resisted me as stoutly as the shyest of innocents could have done, but at the end of a month of mad Satanism, I saw what her game was. Do you know what she had thought of? She meant to make me Bakounine's prompter, or, at any rate, that is what she said. But no doubt she reserved the right to herself, and that is how I understood her, to prompt the prompter, and my passion for her, which she purposely left unsatisfied, assured her that absolute power over me.
"All this may appear madness to you, but it is, nevertheless, the exact truth, and, in short, one morning she bluntly made the offer: 'Become Bakounine's soul, and you shall have me.'
"Of course, I accepted, for it was too fantastically strange to refuse; do you think so? What an adventure! What luck! A number of letters between the Countess and Bakounine prepared the way; I was introduced to him at his house, and they discussed me there. I became a sort of Western prophet, a mystic charmer who was ready to nihilate the Latin races, the Saint Paul of the new religion of nothingness, and at last a day was fixed for us to meet in London. He lived in a small, one-storied house in Pimlico, with a tiny garden in front, and nothing noticeable about it.
"We were first of all shown into the commonplace parlor of all English homes, and then upstairs. The room where the Countess and I were left, was small, and very badly furnished, with a square table with writing materials on it, in the middle. That was his sanctuary; the deity soon appeared, and I saw him in flesh and bone; especially in flesh, for he was enormously stout. His broad face, with prominent cheek-bones, in spite of the fat; and with a nose like a double funnel, with small, sharp eyes, which had a magnetic look, proclaimed the Tartar, the old Turanian blood, which produced the Attilas, the Gengis-Khams, the Tamerlanes. The obesity, which is characteristic of the nomad races, who are always on horseback or driving, added to his Asiatic look. The man was certainly not a European, a slave, a descendant of the deistic Aryans, but a descendant of the Atheistic hordes, who had several times already almost overrun Europe, and who, instead of any ideas of progress, have the belief in nihility, at the bottom of their hearts.
"I was astonished, for I had not expected that the majesty of a whole race, could be thus revived in a man, and my stupefaction increased after an hour's conversation. I could quite understand why such a Colossus had not wished for the Countess as his Egeria; she was a mere silly child to have dreamt of acting such a part to such a thinker. She had not felt the profoundness of that horrible philosophy which was hidden under that material activity, nor had she seen the prophet under that man of the barricades. Or, perhaps, he had not thought it advisable to reveal himself to her like that; but he revealed himself to me, and inspired me with terror.
"A prophet? Oh! yes. He thought himself an Attila, and foresaw the consequences of his revolution; it was not only from instinct, but also from theory that he urged a nation on to nihilism. The phrase is not his, but Tourgueneff's, I believe, but the idea certainly belongs to him. He got his program of agricultural communism from Herzen, and his destructive radicalism from Pougatcheff, but he did not stop there. I mean that he went on to evil for the sake of evil. Herzen wished for the happiness of the Slav peasant; Pougatcheff wanted to be elected Emperor, but all that Bakounine wanted, was to overthrow the actual order of things, no matter by what means, and to replace social concentration by a universal upheaval.
"It was the dream of a Tartar; it was true nihilism pushed to extreme practical conclusions. It was, in a word, the applied philosophy of chance, the indeterminateism of anarchy. Monstrous it may be, but grand in its monstrosity.
"And you must note, that the man of action who was so despised by the Countess, discovered in Bakounine the gigantic dreamer whom I have just shown you, and his dream did not remain a dream, but began to be realized. It was by the care of that organizer that the Nihilistic party assumed a body; a party in which there is a little of everything, you know; but on the whole, a formidable party, on account of the advanced guard in true Nihilism, whose object is nothing less than to destroy the Western world, to see it blossom from under the ruins of a general dispersion, which is the last conception of modern Tartarism.
"I never saw Bakounine again, for the Countess's conquest would have been too dearly bought by any attempt to act a comedy with this Old-Man-of-the-Mountains. And besides that, after this visit, poor Countess Satan appeared to me quite silly. Her famous Satanism was nothing but the flicker of a spirit-lamp, after the general conflagration of which the other had dreamt, and she had certainly shown herself very silly, when she could not understand that prodigious monster. And as she had seduced me, only by her intellect and her perversity, I was disgusted as soon as she laid aside that mask. I left her without telling her of my intention, and never saw her again, either.
"No doubt they both took me for a spy from the Third section of the Imperial Chancellery. In that case, they must have thought me very strong to have resisted, and all I have to do is to look out, if any affiliated members of their society recognize me!.."
III
Then he smiled, and turning to the waiter who had just come in, he said: "Meanwhile, open us another bottle of champagne, and make the cork pop! It will, at any rate, somewhat accustom us to the day when we shall all be blown up with dynamite ourselves."
KIND GIRLS
Every Friday, regularly, at about eleven o'clock in the morning, he came into the courtyard, put down his soft hat at his feet, struck a few chords on his guitar and then began a ballad in his full, rich voice. And soon at every window in the four sides of that dull, barrack-like building, some girls appeared, one in an elegant dressing gown, another in a little jacket, most of them with their breasts and arms bare, all of them just out of bed, with their hair hastily twisted up, their eyes blinking in the sudden blaze of sunlight, their complexions dull and their eyes still heavy from want of sleep.
They swayed themselves backwards and forwards to his slow melody, and gave themselves up to the enjoyment of it, and coppers, and even silver, poured into the handsome singer's hat, and more than one of them would have liked to have followed the penny which she threw to him, and to have gone with the singer who had the voice of a siren, and who seemed to say to all these amorous girls; "Come, come to my retreat, where you will find a palace of crystal and gold, and wreaths which are always fresh, and happiness and love which never die."
That was what they seemed to hear, those unhappy girls, when they heard him sing the songs of the old legends, which they had formerly believed. That was what they understood by the foolish words of the ballad. Then and nothing else, for how could any one doubt it, on seeing the fresh roses on their cheeks, and the tender flame which flickered like a mystic night-light in their eyes, which had, for the moment, become the eyes of innocent young girls again? But of young girls, who had grown up very quickly, alas! who were very precocious, and who very soon became the women that they were, poor vendors of love, always in search of love for which they were paid.
That was why, when he had finished his second ballad, and sometimes even sooner, concupiscent looks appeared in their eyes. The boatman of their dreams, the water-sprite of fairy tales, vanished in the mist of their childish recollections, and the singer re-assumed his real shape, that of musician and strolling player, whom they wished to pay, to be their lover. And the coppers and small silver were showered on him again, with engaging smiles, with the leers of a street-walker, even with: "p'st, p'st," which soon transformed the barrack-like courtyard into an enormous cage full of twittering birds, while some of them could not restrain themselves, but said aloud, rolling their eyes with desire: "How handsome the creature is! Good heavens, how handsome he is!"
He was really handsome, and nobody could deny it, and even too handsome, with a regular beauty which almost palled on people. He had large, almond-shaped, gentle eyes, a Grecian nose, a bow-shaped mouth, hidden by a heavy moustache, and long, black, curly hair; in short, a head fit to be put into a hair-dresser's window, or, better still, perhaps, onto the front page of the ballads which he was singing. But what made him still handsomer, was that his self-conceit had a look of sovereign indifference for he was not satisfied with not replying to the smiles, the ogles, and the p'st, p'st's, by taking no notice of them; but when he had finished he shrugged his shoulders, he winked mischievously, and turned his lips contemptuously, which said very clearly: "The stove is not being heated for you, my little kittens!"
Often, one might have thought that he expressly wished to show his contempt, and that he tried to make himself thought unpoetical in the eyes of all those amorous girls, and to check their love, for he cleared his throat ostentatiously and offensively, more than was necessary, after singing, as if he would have liked to spit at them. But all that did not make him unpoetical in their eyes, and many of them, most of them, who were absolutely mad on him, went so far as to say that he did it like a swell!
The girl, who in her enthusiasm had been the first to utter that exclamation of intense passion, and who, after throwing him small silver, had thrown him a twenty-franc gold piece, at last made up her mind to have an explanation. Instead of a p'st, p'st, she spoke to him boldly one morning, in the presence of all the others, who religiously held their tongues.
"Come up here," she called out to him, and from habit she added: "I will be very nice, you handsome dark fellow."
At first they were dumbfounded at her audacity, and then all their cheeks flushed with jealousy, and the flame of mad desire shot from their eyes, from every window there came a perfect torrent of:
