PRIDE
"... Voire mesme que si un de nos confraires
se monstroit attaché à quelque chose,
qu'il en soit aussistost privé...."
Règle de S. Benoist, ch. xxxviii.
When Azélia presented herself the next morning, her face bearing the marks of tears and trouble, for "she was now sure that Madame had been murdered; never had Madame gone away so long without notifying her," Entragues was able to reassure her:
"Madame is at Nice, in the Grand Hôtel des Deux-Mondes. She arrived there yesterday evening, is in splendid health and finds that the sea is blue, so blue! And the palms and the flowers! Everything is fragrant. Never before has she felt how sweet life is!"
"So Monsieur has received a telegram. Ah! good. But to leave without telling me! If Madame writes, I shall communicate with Monsieur, for Madame loves Monsieur very much."
"Yes, we are, as they say, a pair of friends."
A day passed, then another, and Hubert grew really bored. It was the sensation of emptiness usually felt by all sensitive creatures in like occurrences.
The light had fled from him; he moved in deserts of dark expanses.
No distraction is possible, since the only being from whom pleasure could come has withdrawn from the visual field, since the generating soul of all joy has fled, since the beams have perished, since the night of absence reigns.
He could have lived near her, removed by a distance of several streets, without any great need of visiting. The possibility of a meeting, the certainty of a welcome sufficed for the vitality of his desires. Here rises the tyranny of the Spirit of Contradiction and its immutable disdain for the present hour. Moralists have always quarreled with man on this matter: "You do not know how to enjoy the fugitive minute." No, but how go about it, since it would be necessary that the fugitive minute suspend its flight, it would be necessary that it exist. Now, it is a vulgar idea that only the past or the future has an appearance of objectivity: the moment never comes to pass.
Hubert had not even the liberty for such elementary deductions. He suffered like an exile, a pure suffering and with a fixed idea. Jealousy in no way troubled its undulations: it was the unique sensation of the lost object. His joy, fallen into the sea, was lying under moving waves; with each wave the diamond was engulfed in the sands more deeply, and he could not yet anticipate the tempest which would throw it on the surface, tossing it to the strand among the eternal pebbles.
Ah! the solitary dream house among the dunes had indeed fallen to his lot suddenly and too soon. He had not had time to arrange his parcels, to bring the least illusion—more bare of spiritual comfort than a hermit in the desert—of lust.
Such a state of soul brought about this reaction: "I am perhaps deceived in the value of these coincidences. Well, I must not despair."
He delighted in this self-contempt for several hours, inhaling his baseness and wallowing in it as in warm mire. Yet there were instants of respite, and in the evening he walked tranquilly, with a normal step, towards the dwelling of the absent one, but restless as a man who is expected.
Azélia opened the door before he rang.
"Monsieur! ah! just look!"
And she drew a letter from her dress.
"Madame has written me, and this is for you."
The white envelope with the oblique water-marks bore no writing.
"This is prudence!"
At the pressure of his fingers, he felt a very thin English onion-skin paper within.
"She has written me a volume here. Ah! Prolixity! Would a word not have sufficed?—Adieu!"
Hubert was very calm as he received this sentence of death, and his indifference, perfectly acted, although for himself, scandalized the good Azélia.
She believed in kisses, thought that he would press the object to his heart, ejaculating some words of tenderness, as in the romances and chromos, which are painted romances.
With a "thank you!" he placed the letter in his pocket and, pushing a door open, entered the little room in whose corners his dying illusions still played, like ironic dryads, careless of the approaching agony.
"Moriuntur ridendo."
A light voiceless laugh came from him:
"These are the ruins of Carthage. They are well preserved and yet how many centuries is it since we left them, already in the state of ruins. Within me generations have succeeded; the same essence of humanity reigns, the man is another man. Ah! how far away all this is!
"These objects were once familiar to me: I knew them. I was a little their master. They have escaped my hands. Well! I abandon the rest. Let all things be transitory. How this breathes of death! It is my heart that is becoming decomposed....
"Why read the letter? She laughs at me or pities me, and never have I tolerated the one or the other."
He carried it through the streets.
"I believe myself," he thought, "stronger and more logical. Have I denied my old philosophy to such a point? The punishment for laughing at the external world is to fall in the first snare laid by the innocent Maia, as the theosophist expresses it. Could there be, then, an invincible human nature more stable in its versatility than the architecture of thought? Invincible, no, since haughty contemptuous things have conquered it. It is because I lack method. Spiritual training is required. As an elementary precaution, it will first be necessary to place attentive sentinels at the door of the senses, ready to halt every suspected sensation, to admit no one unless stripped of its cloak of deceit....
"Ah! I have no lucidity and I am bored. No remedy, the nervous crisis will accomplish its cycle. It would be somewhat diverting to go to Nice and pierce them with my ironies, but afterwards? Then, the vulgarity of this conduct would be repugnant and hardly fit for a fourth act: then, the case of pistols, the denouement which death hardly saves from a ridiculousness which is bourgeois as well as theatrical....
"Shall I read this letter? I am sure it is full of things which will no longer interest me...."
He stopped and struck the ground with a savage thump of his heel.
"Shame! Enough. No, for me there are neither Circes nor Delilahs. My mind at least is above all wiles and lusts. They who fall into the toils of the swine-breeders, those who are caught in the snares of elegant vampires—they fulfill their destiny. Mine is different. I shall be cowardly neither in facing grief, nor in facing pleasure, nor in facing ennui. You will not make me suffer beyond my will; and neither you, nor any one like you, can tempt me to other disobediences. Even though I be the dupe of my pride, I prefer this to being the dupe of my sensitiveness, and I shall disdain even the memory of the unconscious murderess who might have overwhelmed me."
He entered a café and, developing his brutal bravado to its extreme, wrote, so as to laugh at himself until the blood ran, strange and purposely false verses, which Egyptian readings had suggested to him.
HIÉROGLYPHES
O pourpiers de mon frère, pourpiers d'or fleur d'Anhour
Mon corps en joie frissonne quand tu m' as fait l'amour,
Puis je m'endors paisible au pied des tournesols.
Je veux resplendir telle que les flèches de Hor:
Viens, le kupi embaume les secrets de mon corps,
Le hesteb teint mes ongles, mes yeux out le kohol.
O maître de mon coeur, qu'elle est belle, mon heure!
C'est de l'eternité quand baiser m'effleure,
Mon coeur, mon coeur s'élève, ah! si haut qu'il s' envole.
Armoises de mon frère, ô floraisons sanglantes,
Viens, je suis lAmm où croît toute plante odorante,
La vue de ton amour me rend trois fois plus belle.
Je suis le champ royal où ta faveur moissonne,
Viens vers les acacias, vers les palmiers dAmmonn:
Je veux t'aimer à l'ombre bleue de leurs flabelles.
Je vieux encore t'aimer sous les yeux roux de Phrâ
Et boire les délices du vin pur de ta voix,
Car ta voix rafraîchît et grise comme Elel.
O marjolaines de mon frère, ô marjolaines,
Quand ta main comme un oiseau sacre se promène,
En mon jardin paré de lys et de sesnis,
Quand tu manges le miel doré de mes mamelles,
Quand ta bouche bourdonne ainsi qu'un vol d'abeilles
Et se pose et se tait sur mon ventre fleuri,
Ah! je meurs, je m'en vais, je m'effuse en tes bras
Comme une source vive pleine de nymphéas,
Armoises, marjolaines, pourpiers, fleurs de ma vie!
Following this, Hubert returned to his room, verified some terminologies, and retired.
Tranquilly, by the light of a little lamp, he read Sixtine's letter.