"At first I offered myself the most ridiculous excuses, I gave myself the most illogical reasons for not leaving her. I said to myself that if I left her, Juliette would sink to even lower depths; that my love for her had in some manner been her last vestige of decency which I should finally succeed in restoring by saving her from the mire in which she wallowed. Truly I had been repaid by the luxury of pity and self sacrifice. But I was lying! I simply can't leave her! I can't because I love her, because the more depraved she is the more I love her. Because I want her, do you hear, Lirat? And if you only knew what it means to me, this love, what frenzies, what shame, what tortures? If you only knew to what depths of Hell passion can sink, you would be horrified! At night when she is asleep, I prowl about in her dressing room, opening drawers, digging among the cinders of the fire place, putting together pieces of torn letters, smelling the linens which she has just removed, devoting myself to the vilest spying, to the most shameful searching! It was not enough for me to know; I had to see as well! I have no longer a mind, a heart, or anything. I am just the embodiment of disordered, raving, famished sex, which demands its share of living flesh, like the fallow-deer that howl in their frenzy on rutting nights."
I was exhausted ... the words came out of my throat with a hissing sound ... still I continued.
"Ah! It is beyond all comprehension! Sometimes it happens that Juliette is sick. Her members, overstrained by pleasure, refuse to obey her; her constitution, worn out by nervous shocks, revolts. She takes to her bed. If you could only see her then? A child, Lirat, a sweet and touching child! She dreams only of the country, little brooks, green prairies, simple joys: 'Oh, my dear, she exclaims, 'with ten thousand francs of income, how happy we should be!' She makes all sorts of Virgilian and charming plans. 'We ought to go far, far away, to live in a house surrounded by tall trees. She will raise chickens which will lay eggs she herself will take out of the hatching place every morning; she will make cream, cheese; and she will wear aprons like this and straw hats like that, jogging along pathways astride a donkey that she will call Joseph. Geeho! Joseph, Geeho! Ah, how nice it will be!'
"When I hear her say that, I feel hope returning and I let myself be taken in by that impossible dream of a rustic life with Juliette disguised as a shepherdess. Quiet landscapes like places of refuge, enchanting like a paradise, unroll before us ... and we grow exalted and enthusiastic. Juliette cries: 'My poor little thing, I have caused you suffering, but now it's all over. I promise you. And then I am going to have a trained ram, am I not? A beautiful ram, very big, all white, around whom I shall tie a bow of red ribbon, and who will follow me everywhere together with Spy, not so, dear?' She insists that I have my dinner in front of her bed, on a little table, and she coddles me like a nurse and caresses me like a mother; she makes me eat as one does a child, repeating without end and with agitation in her voice: 'My poor little thing!'
"At other moments she becomes thoughtful and grave: 'My dear, I would like to ask you something that has been worrying me for a long time; promise that you'll tell me.' I promise. 'Well, when one is dead, in the coffin, is it true that one's feet rest against the board?' 'What an idea! Why do you speak of it?' 'Tell me, please tell me!' 'But I don't know, my dear Juliette!' 'Don't you know? Although it is true that you never know anything when I am serious ... because ... you see?... I don't want my feet to rest against the board. When I am dead ... you shall put a cushion inside and my white dress ... you know the one with pink flowers ... the dress for which I won the first prize! You'll be very sorry, my poor little thing, won't you? Embrace me! Come over here, closer to me, still closer. I adore you!'
"And I used to wish that Juliette were sick all the time! But as soon as she recovers she does not remember anything; her promises, her resolutions are gone and our life of hell begins again, more violent and exasperating than ever. And from that little bit of heaven to which I have held on for a while, I tumble down again into the filth and crime of this love even more frightfully maimed in spirit! Ah! that is not all, Lirat! I should have stayed in that apartment to brood over my shame, don't you think! I should have withdrawn into obscurity and oblivion sufficient to make people believe that I am dead. And instead of that! Well! Go to the Bois and you see me there every day. At the theatre it is I whom you will find in the stage box, in a dress suit, with a flower in my buttonhole, always I! Juliette is resplendent amidst flowers, plumes and gems. She is exquisite, she has a new dress which everyone admires, a stock of smiles each more modest than the other, and the string of pearls, for which I have not paid, which she toys gracefully with the tips of her fingers and without the least remorse. And here I have not a sou, not a sou! And I am at the end of my rope, having exhausted all my swindling tricks and crooked schemes! Often I tremble. It seems to me that the heavy hand of a gendarme is bearing down upon me. Already I hear the painful whisper, I catch the stealthy looks of contempt.
"Little by little emptiness broadens and recedes all around me as around a pestiferous person. Old friends pass by, turn their heads away, avoid me in order not to greet me.... And unwillingly I assume the sly and servile manner of disreputable people who walk with eyes asquint and cringing back in search of an outstretched hand! The horrible thing about it, you see, is that I am perfectly conscious of the fact that it is Juliette's beauty that protects me. It is the desire which she awakens, it is her mouth, it is the mystery of her nude and defiled body which in this pleasure-seeking world shields me with a false esteem, with a lying semblance of respect. A handshake, a grateful look seems to say: 'I have been with your Juliette, and I owe that to you. Perhaps you prefer money? Do you want it?' Yes, just let me quit Juliette and with one kick I shall even be thrown out of this crowd, this facile, fawning and perverted crowd and shall be reduced to sordid association with gamblers and pimps!"
I burst out sobbing. Lirat did not stir, did not raise his head. Motionless, with clasped hands he was looking at something I knew not what ... nothing, I suppose. After a few moments of silence I continued:
"My good Lirat, do you remember our talks in your studio! I used to listen to you, and what you told me was so beautiful! Without suspecting it, perhaps, you awoke noble desires and sublime raptures in me. You breathed into me a little of the belief, ambition and lofty flights of your soul. You taught me how to read nature, to understand her passionate tongue, to feel the emotions latent in things. You proved to me the existence of immortal beauty. You said to me: 'Love, why it is in the earthenware pitcher, it is in the verminous rags which I paint. To take a feeling, a joy, a moment of suffering, of palpitation, a vision, a shudder—anything, no matter how fugitive an experience of life it may be—and recreate it, fix it in colors, in words or sounds, means to love! Love is a man's yearning to create!'
"And I dreamed of becoming a great artist! Ah! my dreams, my delights in being able to perceive things, my doubts, my sacred agonies, do you remember them? Look what I have done with all that! I wanted to love and I went to a woman who kills love. I started with wings, drunk with the air, with the azure, with light! And now I am nothing but a dirty hog, sunk in its filth, with greedy snout and sides shaking with impure rutting. You can see for yourself, Lirat, that I am lost, lost, lost! ... and that I must kill myself."