CHRISTUS PATIENS
"Elle ne jugeait pas, ayant d'autres pensées."
Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Isis.
"In this so lightly tilled field, where the corn has been so hurriedly sown," Entragues told himself, "I reap nothing but problems, tares, weeds, ridiculous rank grasses! For three days I have had only the worry of a mathematician intent upon insoluble x's."
SERIES OF X's.
xa.—It was poison.
xb.—History of the portrait chamber.
xc.—S. M. to S. M.
xa
"I believed I could find the solution. In truth, the problem was buried; it sprang up again, evoked by the two others."
xb
"Is it a history in which she is implicated? Is a page of her life written in this mysterious chamber where innocent travelers are favored with such astonishing visions? Must this second x be joined to the first one? A crime might have been committed there."
xc
"There is no doubting, if heaven has endowed me with some divining sense, that one of the mono-grams signifies Sixtine Magne and perhaps both resolved themselves into the identical syllables: a homage of the present to the pact, of the Sixtine of to-day to the Sixtine of yesterday: a portrait of the lover or husband, since she was married. Ah! I have it! Her husband had a Christian name commencing with S. It is a question of finding an engraver with the name of S—— Magne and that may easily be ascertained at some print dealer's shop; or else, in the case of a lover, S—— M——. Upon what do I base this deduction? On nothing. The twice-repeated initials of the woman I love ought to torment me, else I would not love her. Perhaps they only conceal names of no interest to me, but the 'perhaps' suffices to justify my uneasiness. The past? Enough of that. The present? Ah! the unknown enemy which one divines in smiles, in incomplete phrases, in gestures, and even in the little intimacies of the woman who lets herself be loved! A pleasant sensation and one which I still have not experienced! The jealousy without cause, the jealousy that nothing can cure—not even possession!... I must put down that remark, it is true."
He wrote several lines in his note-book: "Does a woman's supreme abandon prove her love? No, for this may be due to the occasion, to ennui, to the need of deceiving, to vengeance, to the perversity which throws her into your arms. To feel yourself loved, it is necessary to believe; love is a religion. You must have faith, you must love yourself. Love yourself? Yes, that is the means of being the more easily deceived. First to strip yourself of reason, then to plunge towards the truth! Absurd. Faith, then? Yes, to have faith, and is truth itself any thing except faith? Truth, faith—two aspects of one entity—the mystery of a God in two persons. Ah! if I believed that I was loved by Sixtine, she would love me, I would have peace, the joy of union. It can be done. How? Perhaps merely by not reflecting. To embark on the light skiff and go down with the current of water.... Towards the Ocean, yes, towards the ineluctable abyss? Evidently, but this detail is insignificant. The thing is to embark and not to pass your life in watching others depart for the exquisite unknown. But you return from it! Then what is the good? If the current is a circuit, it is just as well to remain at home and read the Divine Comedy. Alighieri himself returned! There is only death. But one never returns from death, and it is of little avail to another; but it has its answer ready and whispers it in the ear when it is so inclined. Bitter is life, more bitter is death."
A church stood near him. He recognized the humble Saint-Médard, entered and fell on his knees:
"O God of the Cross, Christus patiens, eternally suffering Christ, hearken to me! I seek joy, I seek love, I seek grief, and I find only a dreary void. I can neither enjoy myself, nor love, nor suffer. Take me by the hand and lead me as a mother leads her child. Must not one first suffer with thee? Then will come love, like rain in the desert, and joy will dawn, the joy of loving, the joy of having suffered...."
"I presume to pray," said Entragues to himself, lifting his head, "and I am giving vent to rhetoric. This prayer is welcome, and if I can remember it, I will use it. It would be blasphemous to take my note-book and write it down! Why not! One must profit from inspiration, for it can not be recovered."
He made a note of his ejaculation, with very slight variations.
"I stopped myself in time. The unconscious comedy would have made me blush in the end. Do I pray seriously and am I a Christian? Yes, I wish to be a Christian, and to partake of the most mystic and abstract Catholicism, when this would serve only to separate me from the abject mob, renouncing like a vile freedman the religion which drew it from slavery. It is quite evident that in my very heart I believe in the divinity of Jesus rather than in that of Sakya-Mouni and that I laugh at the vanity of an unconscious creator!...
"Ah! how enervating are these solitary rounds!"
Then, suddenly:
"I must see her, I must see her! Ah! provided it isn't Wednesday?"
The newspapers spread on the stand of a little bookshop told him that to-day was Friday, October 27. So ten days had already passed, ten irrevocable days since that dismal Wednesday when his love had collapsed. Collapsed! well, it could be rebuilt. But it really was too much, literally, to love at a distance. Sixtine did not, like himself, occupy her hours in analyzing everything and nothing: to have oneself loved, one must be seen. Henceforth, he would seek every occasion, he would follow her like a hunter, pressing her pitilessly to the very quarry of kisses. He would cease reflecting, and would think only of the end, counting obstacles as naught. He would commence from this evening.
His feet, already, obeyed, following this mental activity. He quickly ascended a popular street full of children, little democratic dauphins, brats of the modern sovereign. At this moment the inventor of popular suffrage seemed to him the most execrable monster produced by humanity and Nero and Attila, recast in a single model, compared to this unknown dastard, were creatures worthy of the genuflection. No one had abased the Idea to this point, no one had tried to make of the world such a desolate stable, where the kicking, respected Houyhnhms would have the ascendancy. He was a Pharisee and did himself justice for never having eaten the bitter hay of this royal rack: at the age of reason he had renounced, with disgust, his part in the sovereignty and never had a ballot soil his aristocratic fingers. This was due less to his early education than to subsequent and personal reflections, for modern degeneration accepts accomplished facts, and all that is left are single, inward and useless protests.
As he descended the Boulevard Saint-Michel, his step fell into an idle rhythm with the pace of the strollers. He looked around him and judged that no superior essence emanated from this other environment: here was the same evaporation of unconsciousness. Below, just as alongside and above, by devious ways people sought happiness, without suspecting, according to Pastor Manders, that it is open rebellion to seek happiness in this life. The social right was another political illusion equally chimerical. On this subject Herbert decided to read some Hobbes, at the first opportunity.
But did he himself, for example, consider himself above or only on a level with humanity? Ah! there is the intimate thought of each of the noble copies of baked clay which a God formerly modeled on the shores of the Tigris: I and the others, I and men, I and the rest, etc. It is thanks to this process that one judges, that one writes the novel or the story, that one rails in comedies or in shorter pleasantries. Judging is the universal and the particular, it is everything, it is life. Is not the famous tribunal, the tribunal of consciousness, with egoism for presiding judge and vices for assessors? And Hubert judged too: in defiance of all reason, he weighed the imponderable and fathomed the impenetrable, that is to say, the thoughts of others, without reflecting that one can know nothing outside of oneself and that to judge men, in short, is to judge the idea we have of men. Like the first of these prisoners, he had let himself be caught in the snare of reality: scoffing at those who sought happiness, he scoffed at himself, for what had he done since his birth in this world of sensibility except to consume the best part of his force in this quest? Vain and vainer than ever now that he was straying towards the external clouds. To what did he pretend, in loving Sixtine, and the yielding clouds dispersed, would he enjoy himself just as well with the fundamental night? When he broke the dear head between two stones, would he see what was within? One can doubtless use more human means and, for example, inoffensive fascination.
He returned to his preceding revery and the circle was closed; decidedly he must not reflect, he must act.
He found himself in excellent humor and quite ready, this time, to count without boredom the quarter hours on the clocks of the streets. He would even have willingly laughed with some chance companion, or considered the toddling of women, or strolled past diverting pictures. The Louvre, which he perceived from the other side of the stream, tempted him: he went to see once more the striking Clytemnestra so drolly illuminated with a torch and he was soon amusing himself in this room which, in previous days, he would have called a corner of shame. It did not equal, for comic intensity, the terrible Hogarths and the distressing Daumiers, but David and his school, nevertheless, had ridiculed antiquity successfully. The sober Flaxman had never succeeded in delineating personages so completely stupefied at having been cut out by a punch.
Entragues had once said that to make place for this foreign exhibition the paintings of the masters of an immoral nudity had been hidden in closets: it was the secret cabinet of the guards of the People's paintings. There remained to determine if bad paintings has not its own immorality and if the Serment des Horaces should not be put under key as well as the Atalante et Méléagre, the Parrhasius, perhaps a little exciting, in which Tiberius delighted?
From the arbitrary stupidity of the Neo-Romans Entragues went to the powdered heads of those enemies of the Nation and Humanity which David had designed, finally stripped of their paint, but so scornful that, one might say, he had lowered their eyes. The Pierrot gallery was charming and made you understand the Revolution, the envy of the People and its hate for graces so high and remote.
While leaving, and under the portices of the rue de Rivoli, he began to follow a woman whose restless gait, from the Cour du Louvre, excited his curiosity. She was not at all bad; she wore a rather original dress with black lace that fell in waves; but nothing striking. A brown pigment covered her eyes and served as a background, but there was no magical attraction: she was somewhat tall, slender, dark, very pale and the two sides of her face seemed unequal, because of the unequal droop of the corners of her mouth, the unequal lifting of her brows above heavy eye-lashes, one quite distended, the other in little contracted waves.
Nothing of caricature, but the sustained impression was painful.
The flat basket of an orange seller, at the corner of the rue de Marengo, and the sundry encumbrances of boxes and little wagons under the three arcades, seemed to exasperate her; she hastened forward, brushed against the fourth pillar, then against the fifth, then against the others, but sedately now, like a person who walks unconcernedly. If a group of persons collected around a pillar, she waited, brushed against it, and left; if the distraction of shop-windows had drawn her towards the other side of the walk, she quickly returned, as if with remorse at having passed one of the steps of her sorrowful path. Strict obedience to her impulse did not present her from noticing the curiosity of the passerby, but she had acquired such a skill, through long practice doubtless, such a deceptive gait, that no one noticed her.
She crossed the Palais-Royal Square, gained the Avenue de l'Opéra, all the time touching the gas lamps, trees and columns. There, she recommenced her maneuver with this variation: she touched each shop-door with her knee. One of them was opened; she waited, as before a precipice, gazing at the curtains of red plush of a milliner of ill-repute; she had such an unfortunate air that Entragues, with a discreet bow, accosted her:
"You seem troubled, Madame, can I be of any service?"
She looked at him, and not observing anything unpleasant in his tone or gestures, replied:
"Yes, you can save me, if you have any magnetism. Call a carriage, get in with me and take me back. I live at the Avenue de Clichy and am going there on foot without being able ... without being able to do otherwise.... You have seen me? As soon as I go out by myself, I walk, I walk ... and when I return, I faint with fatigue and shame."
Entragues had already, with his lifted cane, signaled a coachman, who drew near the pavement.
"You are merely a little nervous and need rest. Come, here is the carriage."
He took her arm; she resisted, saying, for the abyss had closed:
"Always this, nothing but this, the last one!"
She had set off again, turning her head supplicatingly, but without will-power.
"Well!" Entragues thought, "if I use force, the passerby will be attracted. As for magnetism, I can't see myself making passes at four o'clock in the afternoon, here in the Avenue de l'Opéra. It requires a severe glance and a commanding voice. What an odd adventure and what a queer hysterical person!"
Nevertheless he went and overtook her.
"Come," he roughly said, "the carriage is waiting. Come."
She lifted her eyes and, under his steady gaze, let herself be led.
Once in the carriage, she grew amiable, very amiable in fact; she told him secrets, spoke of her husband, of her little girl, her only child who was so dark and pretty, so capricious and wilful, breaking the heads of her dolls to punish them, throwing live coal on rugs to smell the burning odor, only liking salads, oranges and raw carrots, and not yet eight years old!
"Stop the carriage there," she said as they arrived at Clichy Square. "I am so grateful to you and you must come to see me. Would you like to be my doctor? Be my doctor. I will obey you implicitly."
"But...."
"You are no doctor, but what does it matter? So long as my husband believes it. He leaves at ten o'clock each morning. He is a stupid, functionary.... Ah! I am not understood!"
Her eyes, lit like embers, betokened an approaching danger. Entragues, who was concerned with quite other matters than the consoling of hysterical women, stopped the carriage, got out and said:
"A bientôt. I understand you."
She smiled, with a quick toss of her head. The carriage departed.
"She is at a crisis," mused Entragues. "Some one else will profit by it, for she is not ugly and should have, at certain moments, a sort of Maenad beauty. But I love Sixtine and feel incapable of loving other women. But why is it that so many women whom you pay no heed to, throw themselves at you, while the only one you desire shuns you?"