The Magic Skin

Italians shone in the throng, serene and self-possessed in their bliss; handsome Normans, with splendid figures; women of the south, with black hair and well-shaped eyes. Lebel might have summoned together all the fair women of Versailles, who since morning had perfected all their wiles, and now came like a troupe of Oriental women, bidden by the slave merchant to be ready to set out at dawn. They stood disconcerted and confused about the table, huddled together in a murmuring group like bees in a hive. The combination of timid embarrassment with coquettishness and a sort of expostulation was the result either of calculated effect or a spontaneous modesty. Perhaps a sentiment of which women are never utterly divested prescribed to them the cloak of modesty to heighten and enhance the charms of wantonness. So the venerable Taillefer’s designs seemed on the point of collapse, for these unbridled natures were subdued from the very first by the majesty with which woman is invested. There was a murmur of admiration, which vibrated like a soft musical note. Wine had not taken love for traveling companion; instead of a violent tumult of passions, the guests thus taken by surprise, in a moment of weakness, gave themselves up to luxurious raptures of delight.

Artists obeyed the voice of poetry which constrains them, and studied with pleasure the different delicate tints of these chosen examples of beauty. Sobered by a thought perhaps due to some emanation from a bubble of carbonic acid in the champagne, a philosopher shuddered at the misfortunes which had brought these women, once perhaps worthy of the truest devotion, to this. Each one doubtless could have unfolded a cruel tragedy. Infernal tortures followed in the train of most of them, and they drew after them faithless men, broken vows, and pleasures atoned for in wretchedness. Polite advances were made by the guests, and conversations began, as varied in character as the speakers. They broke up into groups. It might have been a fashionable drawing-room where ladies and young girls offer after dinner the assistance that coffee, liqueurs, and sugar afford to diners who are struggling in the toils of a perverse digestion. But in a little while laughter broke out, the murmur grew, and voices were raised. The saturnalia, subdued for a moment, threatened at times to renew itself. The alternations of sound and silence bore a distant resemblance to a symphony of Beethoven’s.

The two friends, seated on a silken divan, were first approached by a tall, well-proportioned girl of stately bearing; her features were irregular, but her face was striking and vehement in expression, and impressed the mind by the vigor of its contrasts. Her dark hair fell in luxuriant curls, with which some hand seemed to have played havoc already, for the locks fell lightly over the splendid shoulders that thus attracted attention. The long brown curls half hid her queenly throat, though where the light fell upon it, the delicacy of its fine outlines was revealed. Her warm and vivid coloring was set off by the dead white of her complexion. Bold and ardent glances came from under the long eyelashes; the damp, red, half-open lips challenged a kiss. Her frame was strong but compliant; with a bust and arms strongly developed, as in figures drawn by the Caracci, she yet seemed active and elastic, with a panther’s strength and suppleness, and in the same way the energetic grace of her figure suggested fierce pleasures.

But though she might romp perhaps and laugh, there was something terrible in her eyes and her smile. Like a pythoness possessed by the demon, she inspired awe rather than pleasure. All changes, one after another, flashed like lightning over every mobile feature of her face. She might captivate a jaded fancy, but a young man would have feared her. She was like some colossal statue fallen from the height of a Greek temple, so grand when seen afar, too roughly hewn to be seen anear. And yet, in spite of all, her terrible beauty could have stimulated exhaustion; her voice might charm the deaf; her glances might put life into the bones of the dead; and therefore Emile was vaguely reminded of one of Shakespeare’s tragedies – a wonderful maze, in which joy groans, and there is something wild even about love, and the magic of forgiveness and the warmth of happiness succeed to cruel storms of rage. She was a siren that can both kiss and devour; laugh like a devil, or weep as angels can. She could concentrate in one instant all a woman’s powers of attraction in a single effort (the sighs of melancholy and the charms of maiden’s shyness alone excepted), then in a moment rise in fury like a nation in revolt, and tear herself, her passion, and her lover, in pieces.

Dressed in red velvet, she trampled under her reckless feet the stray flowers fallen from other heads, and held out a salver to the two friends, with careless hands. The white arms stood out in bold relief against the velvet. Proud of her beauty; proud (who knows?) of her corruption, she stood like a queen of pleasure, like an incarnation of enjoyment; the enjoyment that comes of squandering the accumulations of three generations; that scoffs at its progenitors, and makes merry over a corpse; that will dissolve pearls and wreck thrones, turn old men into boys, and make young men prematurely old; enjoyment only possible to giants weary of their power, tormented by reflection, or for whom strife has become a plaything.

“What is your name?” asked Raphael.

“Aquilina.”

“Out of Venice Preserved!” exclaimed Emile.

“Yes,” she answered. “Just as a pope takes a new name when he is exalted above all other men, I, too, took another name when I raised myself above women’s level.”

“Then have you, like your patron saint, a terrible and noble lover, a conspirator, who would die for you?” cried Emile eagerly – this gleam of poetry had aroused his interest.

“Once I had,” she answered. “But I had a rival too in La Guillotine. I have worn something red about me ever since, lest any happiness should carry me away.”

“Oh, if you are going to get her on to the story of those four lads of La Rochelle, she will never get to the end of it. That’s enough, Aquilina. As if every woman could not bewail some lover or other, though not every one has the luck to lose him on the scaffold, as you have done. I would a great deal sooner see a lover of mine in a trench at the back of Clamart than in a rival’s arms.”

All this in the gentlest and most melodious accents, and pronounced by the prettiest, gentlest, and most innocent-looking little person that a fairy wand ever drew from an enchanted eggshell. She had come up noiselessly, and they became aware of a slender, dainty figure, charmingly timid blue eyes, and white transparent brows. No ingenue among the naiads, a truant from her river spring, could have been shyer, whiter, more ingenuous than this young girl, seemingly about sixteen years old, ignorant of evil and of the storms of life, and fresh from some church in which she must have prayed the angels to call her to heaven before the time. Only in Paris are such natures as this to be found, concealing depths of depravity behind a fair mask, and the most artificial vices beneath a brow as young and fair as an opening flower.

At first the angelic promise of those soft lineaments misled the friends. Raphael and Emile took the coffee which she poured into the cups brought by Aquilina, and began to talk with her. In the eyes of the two poets she soon became transformed into some sombre allegory, of I know not what aspect of human life. She opposed to the vigorous and ardent expression of her commanding acquaintance a revelation of heartless corruption and voluptuous cruelty. Heedless enough to perpetrate a crime, hardy enough to feel no misgivings; a pitiless demon that wrings larger and kinder natures with torments that it is incapable of knowing, that simpers over a traffic in love, sheds tears over a victim’s funeral, and beams with joy over the reading of the will. A poet might have admired the magnificent Aquilina; but the winning Euphrasia must be repulsive to every one – the first was the soul of sin; the second, sin without a soul in it.

“I should dearly like to know,” Emile remarked to this pleasing being, “if you ever reflect upon your future?”

“My future!” she answered with a laugh. “What do you mean by my future? Why should I think about something that does not exist as yet? I never look before or behind. Isn’t one day at a time more than I can concern myself with as it is? And besides, the future, as we know, means the hospital.”

“How can you forsee a future in the hospital, and make no effort to avert it?”

“What is there so alarming about the hospital?” asked the terrific Aquilina. “When we are neither wives nor mothers, when old age draws black stockings over our limbs, sets wrinkles on our brows, withers up the woman in us, and darkens the light in our lover’s eyes, what could we need when that comes to pass? You would look on us then as mere human clay; we with our habiliments shall be for you like so much mud – worthless, lifeless, crumbling to pieces, going about with the rustle of dead leaves. Rags or the daintiest finery will be as one to us then; the ambergris of the boudoir will breathe an odor of death and dry bones; and suppose there is a heart there in that mud, not one of you but would make mock of it, not so much as a memory will you spare to us. Is not our existence precisely the same whether we live in a fine mansion with lap-dogs to tend, or sort rags in a workhouse? Does it make much difference whether we shall hide our gray heads beneath lace or a handkerchief striped with blue and red; whether we sweep a crossing with a birch broom, or the steps of the Tuileries with satins; whether we sit beside a gilded hearth, or cower over the ashes in a red earthen pot; whether we go to the Opera or look on in the Place de Greve?”

“Aquilina mia, you have never shown more sense than in this depressing fit of yours,” Euphrasia remarked. “Yes, cashmere, point d’Alencon, perfumes, gold, silks, luxury, everything that sparkles, everything pleasant, belongs to youth alone. Time alone may show us our folly, but good fortune will acquit us. You are laughing at me,” she went on, with a malicious glance at the friends; “but am I not right? I would sooner die of pleasure than of illness. I am not afflicted with a mania for perpetuity, nor have I a great veneration for human nature, such as God has made it. Give me millions, and I would squander them; I should not keep one centime for the year to come. Live to be charming and have power, that is the decree of my every heartbeat. Society sanctions my life; does it not pay for my extravagances? Why does Providence pay me every morning my income, which I spend every evening? Why are hospitals built for us? And Providence did not put good and evil on either hand for us to select what tires and pains us. I should be very foolish if I did not amuse myself.”

“And how about others?” asked Emile.

“Others? Oh, well, they must manage for themselves. I prefer laughing at their woes to weeping over my own. I defy any man to give me the slightest uneasiness.”

“What have you suffered to make you think like this?” asked Raphael.

“I myself have been forsaken for an inheritance,” she said, striking an attitude that displayed all her charms; “and yet I had worked night and day to keep my lover! I am not to be gulled by any smile or vow, and I have set myself to make one long entertainment of my life.”

“But does not happiness come from the soul within?” cried Raphael.

“It may be so,” Aquilina answered; “but is it nothing to be conscious of admiration and flattery; to triumph over other women, even over the most virtuous, humiliating them before our beauty and our splendor? Not only so; one day of our life is worth ten years of a bourgeoise existence, and so it is all summed up.”

“Is not a woman hateful without virtue?” Emile said to Raphael.

Euphrasia’s glance was like a viper’s, as she said, with an irony in her voice that cannot be rendered:

“Virtue! we leave that to deformity and to ugly women. What would the poor things be without it?”

“Hush, be quiet,” Emile broke in. “Don’t talk about something you have never known.”

“That I have never known!” Euphrasia answered. “You give yourself for life to some person you abominate; you must bring up children who will neglect you, who wound your very heart, and you must say, ‘Thank you!’ for it; and these are the virtues you prescribe to woman. And that is not enough. By way of requiting her self-denial, you must come and add to her sorrows by trying to lead her astray; and though you are rebuffed, she is compromised. A nice life! How far better to keep one’s freedom, to follow one’s inclinations in love, and die young!”

“Have you no fear of the price to be paid some day for all this?”

“Even then,” she said, “instead of mingling pleasures and troubles, my life will consist of two separate parts – a youth of happiness is secure, and there may come a hazy, uncertain old age, during which I can suffer at my leisure.”

“She has never loved,” came in the deep tones of Aquilina’s voice. “She never went a hundred leagues to drink in one look and a denial with untold raptures. She has not hung her own life on a thread, nor tried to stab more than one man to save her sovereign lord, her king, her divinity… Love, for her, meant a fascinating colonel.”

“Here she is with her La Rochelle,” Euphrasia made answer. “Love comes like the wind, no one knows whence. And, for that matter, if one of those brutes had once fallen in love with you, you would hold sensible men in horror.”

“Brutes are put out of the question by the Code,” said the tall, sarcastic Aquilina.

“I thought you had more kindness for the army,” laughed Euphrasia.

“How happy they are in their power of dethroning their reason in this way,” Raphael exclaimed.

“Happy?” asked Aquilina, with dreadful look, and a smile full of pity and terror. “Ah, you do not know what it is to be condemned to a life of pleasure, with your dead hidden in your heart…”

A moment’s consideration of the rooms was like a foretaste of Milton’s Pandemonium. The faces of those still capable of drinking wore a hideous blue tint, from burning draughts of punch. Mad dances were kept up with wild energy; excited laughter and outcries broke out like the explosion of fireworks. The boudoir and a small adjoining room were strewn like a battlefield with the insensible and incapable. Wine, pleasure, and dispute had heated the atmosphere. Wine and love, delirium and unconsciousness possessed them, and were written upon all faces, upon the furniture; were expressed by the surrounding disorder, and brought light films over the vision of those assembled, so that the air seemed full of intoxicating vapor. A glittering dust arose, as in the luminous paths made by a ray of sunlight, the most bizarre forms flitted through it, grotesque struggles were seen athwart it. Groups of interlaced figures blended with the white marbles, the noble masterpieces of sculpture that adorned the rooms.

Though the two friends yet preserved a sort of fallacious clearness in their ideas and voices, a feeble appearance and faint thrill of animation, it was yet almost impossible to distinguish what was real among the fantastic absurdities before them, or what foundation there was for the impossible pictures that passed unceasingly before their weary eyes. The strangest phenomena of dreams beset them, the lowering heavens, the fervid sweetness caught by faces in our visions, and unheard-of agility under a load of chains, – all these so vividly, that they took the pranks of the orgy about them for the freaks of some nightmare in which all movement is silent, and cries never reach the ear. The valet de chambre succeeded just then, after some little difficulty, in drawing his master into the ante-chamber to whisper to him:

“The neighbors are all at their windows, complaining of the racket, sir.”

“If noise alarms them, why don’t they lay down straw before their doors?” was Taillefer’s rejoinder.

Raphael’s sudden burst of laughter was so unseasonable and abrupt, that his friend demanded the reason of his unseemly hilarity.

“You will hardly understand me,” he replied. “In the first place, I must admit that you stopped me on the Quai Voltaire just as I was about to throw myself into the Seine, and you would like to know, no doubt, my motives for dying. And when I proceed to tell you that by an almost miraculous chance the most poetic memorials of the material world had but just then been summed up for me as a symbolical interpretation of human wisdom; whilst at this minute the remains of all the intellectual treasures ravaged by us at table are comprised in these two women, the living and authentic types of folly, would you be any the wiser? Our profound apathy towards men and things supplied the half-tones in a crudely contrasted picture of two theories of life so diametrically opposed. If you were not drunk, you might perhaps catch a gleam of philosophy in this.”

“And if you had not both feet on that fascinating Aquilina, whose heavy breathing suggests an analogy with the sounds of a storm about to burst,” replied Emile, absently engaged in the harmless amusement of winding and unwinding Euphrasia’s hair, “you would be ashamed of your inebriated garrulity. Both your systems can be packed in a phrase, and reduced to a single idea. The mere routine of living brings a stupid kind of wisdom with it, by blunting our intelligence with work; and on the other hand, a life passed in the limbo of the abstract or in the abysses of the moral world, produces a sort of wisdom run mad. The conditions may be summed up in brief; we may extinguish emotion, and so live to old age, or we may choose to die young as martyrs to contending passions. And yet this decree is at variance with the temperaments with which we were endowed by the bitter jester who modeled all creatures.”

“Idiot!” Raphael burst in. “Go on epitomizing yourself after that fashion, and you will fill volumes. If I attempted to formulate those two ideas clearly, I might as well say that man is corrupted by the exercise of his wits, and purified by ignorance. You are calling the whole fabric of society to account. But whether we live with the wise or perish with the fool, isn’t the result the same sooner or later? And have not the prime constituents of the quintessence of both systems been before expressed in a couple of words —Carymary, Carymara.”

“You make me doubt the existence of a God, for your stupidity is greater than His power,” said Emile. “Our beloved Rabelais summed it all up in a shorter word than your ‘Carymary, Carymara’; from his Peut-etre Montaigne derived his own Que sais-je? After all, this last word of moral science is scarcely more than the cry of Pyrrhus set betwixt good and evil, or Buridan’s ass between the two measures of oats. But let this everlasting question alone, resolved to-day by a ‘Yes’ and a ‘No.’ What experience did you look to find by a jump into the Seine? Were you jealous of the hydraulic machine on the Pont Notre Dame?”

“Ah, if you but knew my history!”

“Pooh,” said Emile; “I did not think you could be so commonplace; that remark is hackneyed. Don’t you know that every one of us claims to have suffered as no other ever did?”

“Ah!” Raphael sighed.