Et le blasphème de mon corps
Brandi vers Dieu comme une torche.
—La dame en noir des carrefours
Qu’attendre après de si longs jours
Qu’attendre?
—J’attends cet homme au couteau rouge.”
Emile Verhaeren.
In Europe she wears black. That colour is better suited to the ignoble tragedy of which she is both heroine and victim. At night you may see her hovering furtively about the edge of a square, where shadows hang darkest, or plucking at passers-by with words of vulgar endearment. All she has to offer is momentary pasture for the teeth of desire, since love and confidence, the lanterns of happy wedlock, shed no light on her outcast bed. Society damns, but cannot destroy, her. Shame and solitude are the wages which corrode her soul even more rapidly than her body, though that has become in Christian eyes, as the poet so finely says, “a blasphemy, brandished like a torch before God”; but man, denying her the status of any but an unconvicted criminal, forces her to drop lower and lower through remorse and infamy to the hospital-pallet or the assassin’s knife.