THE CARNAL HOUR
"And a thousand others, who never knew
what it was to have a soul...; yet, sir,
these men adorned society."
Poe: Bon-Bon.
Once in the street, Hubert saw the ardent eyes of an invisible spectre glaring at him through the gloom—two terrible, imperious and inciting eyes. He recognized them and an oppressiveness crushed him. They were the eyes of Lust.
"For women, the prowling phantom is called Sin—it is a male; for men it is the female Lust. Ah! yes, I recognize her. She is a companion of childhood. She is ingenious, She used to strum ballads to the moon on my adolescent nerves. Today, she drums the roundelay of the Lupanars on the back of my neck. With one stroke she wishes to degrade the lover and the love. I will betake myself to vile titillations and she whom I love will be the cause."
He reflected: a voluptuous dream brought on, from earliest adolescence, by the contemplation of the madonna's eyes; since that time, the association had been constant, often inexorable: he had to obey or suffer absolute insomnia, or else race like a noctambulist towards a retreating prey. In the last case, the winning talks at street corners little by little dissolved desire in the slow fire of disgust. But how terrible these nights when the shame of his obscene vagabondage overwhelmed him with horror!
Yet he did not want to go and knock, like an obsessed bourgeois, like clerks on paydays, at the latticed door of some sordid house, leading his idealism to promiscuous divans and submitting his body to the least withered bidder! He hesitated between a quite proper harem nearby, and the semblances of soothing intrigue: he did not despise a reciprocal choice that had the appearance of being voluntary, the excuse of a desire that fixed on this one rather than on the other, public preliminaries which are cleansed of all shame by the complicity of the environment—the Bal Bullier, for example, or the Folies-Bergère. By making a rapid decision and calling a carriage, he could reach one of those slave markets before closing time. Upon reflection, he abandoned the Bullier: the jades of this place were enjoying a rest. As for the other exhibition, it was quite far away.
Undecided, he grew composed. For a moment he hoped to have freed himself cheaply, but the eyes, the implacable eyes reappeared—obscene stars that would cease and vanish only at the clandestine house.
It was in a little street near the Saint-Sulpice market.
There, lived a woman whose eyes, adequate for his youthful dreams, had formerly captivated him—formerly, when he was about twenty—and no reasoned disgust dulled the senses. Each time his carnal obsessions evoked this pleasant memory he believed, with an animal waywardness, that he would find the same woman and the same contentment.
Since she did not surrender to the first importunate caller, having the coquetry of a certain amorous fastidiousness, one often found her either alone or able, under the pretext of a jealous protector, to turn out the guest of the evening, if the newcomer pleased her more.
"So this," reflected Entragues, "is the end? Honest women know quite well to what promiscuities they are exposed by their refusals; they should yield for the sake of dignity, at least. They should be taught this: it would be one of the useful chapters in the courses of love which old women could teach so well! But if they should yield, then farewell to the pleasant duels of vanity."
Without suspecting how futile and mischievous his reflections were, he followed the star.
"Now then, what is going to happen? Oh! I know in advance. None the less, I am going in!"
He knocked in a certain way.
"To think that I remember all this! Yet it is long since I came here. I have been spared these sudden and irremissible tortures for years. Years! She must be changed, old and ugly. All the better, it will be the necessary douche, and perhaps in a half-hour I shall be laughing at myself instead of crying. Perhaps she will be absent, or asleep, or engaged. Engaged! Like a school boy, I have a mind to run away before the door opens. One, two ... I am going to leave."
No, he knocked a second time.
"Who is it?"
"........"
"Toi!"
"She addresses me so familiarly, it is frightful."
"........"
"Yours forever!"
"Again! After all, I please her. It is less vile than indifference."
Now, whisperings reached him, interrupted by the opening and closing of doors. He had the sensation of conversations of nuns coming through a wooden partition. This sordid place had the mysteries of a convent; the approach of women and their movements always give man similar impressions, different though the surroundings be. She was debating with somebody; at last the bolt was unfastened, the key turned: another wait, but shorter, in a dark antechamber: the sounds of a second outside door, of steps descending the stairs: he had left.
She was dressed, a hat on her head, and gloved.
"Anyway, she has not just come from some one else's arms."
She had not aged. She was a warmly-blown summer which the breath of mutual happy moments had not withered. Women can withstand anything; neither vigils, nor fastings, nor repeated surrenders blight them; quite the contrary, in order to bloom, they cannot have too much care.
She showed her joy in little exclamations and tiny unruly words; Entragues thought it just as well to seize the present hour and attempt an amiable libertinism.
She thought him handsome and made for kisses; he let her go on, rather content with this impression and conscious of giving this woman, who was superior to her companions, a moment of sincere pleasure.
"These women, after all," he thought, "are not so repulsive as the adulterous ones; they lack, it is true, the aureole of deceit, but they are neither more nor less guilty: what is the difference between having two men at the same time, and having ten? With the second, vice commences; and if the latter must be scorned, the same scorn should be meted out to the former. Doubtless, since they are transgressing a stricter law and breaking a definitive vow, the adulteresses should enjoy a keener abandon, for hell-fire is already present in their kisses, if they have been favored with a Christian education; but how many of them are capable of so exquisite an enjoyment, of savoring in love the irremediable damnation incurred for the pleasure of him they love? One must grant them another possible superiority—that is, if there are children—for while the offspring of the unmarried have no father, adulterous offspring have two, a wise precaution against orphan-hood."
Meanwhile, Valentine had brought cakes and a bottle of that Aumalian wine which gives people the illusion of a princely treat. Then she grew tender towards Entragues, her eyes beamed forth cajolery, allurement, and promises.
She watched him dip his lips into the glass and wanted to drink after him, seemingly intoxicated with desire and genuine love, consoling herself in one evening, with this unexpected pilgrim, for some years perhaps, of exactions in which she took no pleasure.
A blasphemous comparison had made him liken her to a Magdalene suddenly seized with adoration, her soul just surrendered to a revealed God, lovely with inner and useless supplications, so persuaded to love above herself that a gesture of acquiescence would overwhelm her with joy.
This quite surprising spectacle charmed Entragues, but he felt his fault aggravated by this prolonged titillation. It had ceased to be the simple shock necessary to re-establish his composure, and had inexcusably become a pleasure in itself.
She kissed his hand prettily, the last traces of remorse fled—their emotions became identical.
They talked of trifles and he, employing those bagatelles which please women, made her laugh: she seemed, at times, astonished at her own delight, as if the cold air around her had suddenly and magically evaporated in effervescent perfumes.
The weak and ravaged Entragues seemed beautiful to her: blond hair, thinner and whiter at the temples, beard becoming a brown at the cheeks and ending in two long points as in old Venetian portraits; the brow high, the skin very pale but rosy in moments of animation, a curveless nose, a heavy mouth, eyelashes and eyebrows almost black over eyes gilded like certain feline eyes, but gentle. He had ordinary muscles and frame, carried his head erect, and seemed to be gazing at mirages, his eyes at once distant and steady, as if in a trance.
Valentine chiefly watched his lips. He perceived the fact and gave them. She was neither powdered nor painted, but her authentic self.
Entragues gazed at her with pleasure but without agitation, for the nude, especially in a woman's chamber, is not particularly sensuous; it is such a natural state, so simple, so free of provocation, so little suggestive by its absence of mystery, that a foot glimpsed in the street, a bodice cleverly arranged, a rustling of petticoats, an ungloved hand, a smile behind a fan, a certain air, a certain gesture, a certain glance, even with a wholly chaste intention, are much more rousing. A quite banal observation, but Entragues, pardonable in pausing to note it as a directly experienced impression, still sought to fathom its cause.
Now, he experienced a great discouragement: "I shall not have this beauty which pleases me, which I desire and which is mine. I can take her in my arms, I can press her against me, but I cannot have her. When I kiss her with as many kisses as deceit has tongues, still I shall not have her. And all the kinds of possession I can dream of are vain; even were I able to surround her like a wave, I should still not have her. The impulsion of love is unreal and it is only the illusion of desire which makes me believe in its possible accomplishment. I know it is error, I know that disillusion awaits me. I shall be punished by a frightful disappointment for having sought self-oblivion outside of myself, for having betrayed idealism, and yet it is unavoidable, for the senses are imperative and I have not merited the supernatural gift of grace."
Entragues had a prompter disillusion than he would have desired.
The adorable woman surrendered to his kisses; the carnal dream made them unconscious of good and evil; they advanced, eagerly and with swimming heads, ready to place their feet on the bark that sails towards the Isle of Delights, seeking to ascertain how the sails were shifting and the condition of the rudder. Entragues suddenly got up, pale; ghostly behind the window curtains, terrible in her red robe, Sixtine had revealed herself.
"Ah!" he vaguely thought, terrified, but his own self again, "this is reality. The illusions are reaped, the hay is brought in, the field is bare. This had to happen. The images which one voluntarily evokes come to acquire mischievous habits and evoke themselves independently. This one is impatient. So much the worse tor her; I did not invite her."
The bed curtains had to be closed and the lights put out. Sixtine spared them by not moving and by disdaining the stratagem of phosphorescence.
The candles, when after a while they were lit again, showed Entragues an empty room: Sixtine had departed. But departed also where the desires and all the unacknowledged pleasure of a delightful night of debauchery.
He dared not go out, fearing a solitude that might be peopled against his will. To fatigue the body is to fatigue the intelligence: he had enfeebled himself as a person stupefies himself with laudanum.