“I was born here,” she said, “of a woman who loathed her husband and hated this country—but I wasn’t really born—I was made by witches one hot windy midsummer day. They made me out of the burning sun and the shrieking mistral and the hot white dust, in the black shade of cypresses, and they added to the hot mixture, ice water from that mountain stream; then they each laid on me a curse. One said, the oldest and wickedest—‘She will covet the earth, but only love herself.’ The second said ‘She will be haunted by the evil spirits of dead men.’ The third said—‘Since the people of this country are fond of wild jokes and pranks,—they are you know, très blagueurs, les Provençaux, she will be much given to playing mischievous jokes that will do others harm.’ Then they left me in the dark cypress grove, where my mother who was wandering about and longing for the laughter and music of her Italy, found me. She, poor darling, invoked the three Marys for my protection, les Saintes Maries de la Mer who are carved in the stone over the great door, Marie Salomé, Marie Jacobé and Marie Madeleine; their shrine is in the grotto behind the house—but they had been shipwrecked themselves and were too inefficient to cope with my witches—and so that you see is what I am—burning hot and icy cold, and with a dry wind, shrieking in my heart, and three times accursed. I feel it. I know it. I have known it since I was a child—At first I struggled, then gave in, took my curses in my arms and made them mine, made them, I tell you—my religion—” She gave her dry laugh. Her voice was high and sweet and careless. She spoke, without passion, in her dry conversational tone. “If I could never love any one but myself, never forget myself, try as I might in excesses of every kind, then I would love myself utterly. If I was to be haunted by the unfulfilled ideas of men and women long dead, then I would give myself up to those ideas, and if my pranks were fated to do people harm, well—what business was it of mine? I would enjoy doing people harm—idiots that they are, why should I care for their thin silly feelings?
“You think I am talking nonsense. If you believed me, you would be horrified—eh, bien—be horrified—but you will never understand. You will never believe that I am as bad as I am. That is the reason I like you—that is the reason I talk to you. You are obstinate and faithful and strong—and beside that you have demons too—I see them in your awful sullen face that I like.
“I tell you—that I am used by ideas that are not my own—that do not come out of my own head, that come to me from I know not where. They come persistently—out of the sky, circling back again and again like black birds coming out of the sky to this tower. For instance; an idea comes to me that I must go to Nimes and see a certain matador and send for him and make him love me—I know he will be stupid and coarse and disgusting, and I refuse. Then things happen. Every day lines appear in the papers—his name is everywhere, in every village on every stable wall—I laugh—and give in—and it is all stale and horrid before it begins, but the idea had to be carried out. That you will say is just the stupid giving into caprice of any idle woman—but it is not always so ordinary. Suppose that some day the idea comes to me that I must entice my husband into the oubliette. I laugh at the idea and chase it away. Six months later it comes back more insistent, a thing with a voice. It says ‘Get him into the north tower. He is a mean creature. He will fall down the oubliette’—and I say peevishly—‘But I don’t mind his being alive—he doesn’t bother me, I am not interested in killing him’ and again I drive away the idea—but it will come back, it will keep coming back till it is satisfied. There have been many ideas like that demanding of me to be satisfied. Sooner or later I carry them out—do their bidding. Often in hours of lucidity I see how dangerous they are. I fight against them, distract myself with some idiocy or run away—take the train, go in the opposite direction—but almost always I give in, in the end.” She stopped. I see her now against the stone coping of the window, leaning out—her head in the sun—looking down—the wall fell sheer—a hundred feet of masonry and rock. “Sometimes I think I will throw myself down to get rid of them, these ideas of men and women whose restless bones are the hot dust of these mountains—but why should I—why give myself as a sacrifice? It would be silly—the people I will hurt if I live aren’t worth it—”
She jerked back into the room and came to my side, laying a hand on my shoulder, and standing so that I could not see her, a little behind me, her lips close to my ear. “There are other things,” she whispered, “worse things—ideas—that I couldn’t tell—” Her fingers clutched my shoulder, tightening until they hurt me—“You help me, but sometimes I am angry with you for being what you are and want to hurt you. Some day, who knows, the idea may come to me to do you harm. You are safe now because I don’t understand you, and feel you are stronger than I—but if I ever detected a weakness in you—or if you ever bored me, then I should hate you, then I would certainly do you a hurt. It’s a warning—” she broke off with a laugh, kissed lightly the tip of my ear and left me.
I was not afraid of her then—what she said did not disturb me. I laughed at it; I was happy and confident. I had everything in the world I wanted, and I lived in a daze of joy and excitement—Europe, Paris, the miracles produced by my wealth, still dazzled and amazed me; going to bull-fights with Bianca, or hunting wild boar, with the old Duke, or attending the Courts of Rome, Vienna, Berlin or St. James’s with Philibert, everything was marvellous. I had no time to worry, and no reason to do so that I knew of.
But I remembered what Bianca had said, and in the light of what happened, I understood that she had been speaking the truth. It was simply her way of admitting that she was a supreme egotist. Put simply, it meant that the one motive power in her, was her vanity. It was her vanity that held her together and gave her an outline. And as she grew older she developed it as other women develop a gift for music. She worshipped herself, and she made of her egotism an elaborate religion. Her adoration of herself grew into a passion and burned with the ardour of a saint’s miraculously revealed inspiration. She would have gone to the stake for it. It incased her in complete armour. No one and nothing could touch her through it. She was the only woman I have ever known who lived consistently and exclusively for herself, and she did so with the sustained passion of a religious maniac. One can only compare her to a Savanorola.
Her vanity was her power and her curse. It was an ogre. It had to be fed. Human beings were thrown to it as to the devouring dragons in fairy tales. We were all victims. I was, and you were, and Philibert and Jinny, and Micky and Fan and all the others. Insatiable vanity, that was all there was to Bianca in the last analysis. That was all the meaning of her, but its manifestations, its results, its devious ways of arriving at its own ends, these were infinite, would fill volumes.
You can see how the curse would operate. It operated through her intelligence. Had she been stupid, all would have been well, but concentrated on the study and care of herself, elaborating year after year her attentions to herself, nursing her body, her face, her senses, supplying to herself stimulants and soothing preparations, searching for curious new sensations, she was aware of her own limited power to please herself. Distinctly she perceived something beyond her reach, a quality of experience outside her range, a beauty she could not attain. She would have liked best to have been a queen of love, whom all men adored, like the radiant Simonetta—fairy queen of Florence, beautifully worshipped by an entire population, and she only succeeded in being la femme fatale. With no gladness in her soul, she could not inspire gladness—always in the faces of her victims she saw a reflection of her own darkness. If occasionally, in the lurid light of the excitement she could so easily evoke, she saw in a man’s face a flash that resembled joy, ecstacy, delight, she as often saw it fade to a dismal stupidity, or rage or disgust. Impossible for her to create anything more than an imitation of bliss. Her egoism spoiled its own gratification. It contained poison. Her touch was magical and deadly. This, in the end, bored her. She used to complain exasperatedly of people being afraid of her. The care with which they succumbed disgusted her. Men grovelling at her feet, men writing sentimental verses, men touching her with clumsy hands; she came to loathe them. There was nothing in it; she wanted something else, something out of the ordinary, something continually surprising, unexpected, dramatic. Alas! Humanity goes its stolid way comfortably enough in spite of the Biancas of the world. Men will “play up” to a certain point. They will pretend to be dying of love to please a beautiful lady’s caprice, but they won’t really die. One of the things Bianca longed for was to have a crop of suicides laid to her account. She would have been pleased had some of her victims blown their brains out, but somehow they didn’t. They only threatened to do so. Once out of her sight, they recovered the normal and sallied forth from her boudoir to enjoy fat beefsteaks.