I shut the window, laughing heartily.
“Another Vandal punished by Venus! Would that all the destroyers of our ancient monuments had their heads broken in the same way!”
With this charitable desire, I fell asleep.
It was broad daylight when I awoke. At one side of my bed stood M. de Peyrehorade in his dressing-gown; at the other a servant, sent by his wife, a cup of chocolate in his hand.
“Come! get up, Parisian! That’s just like you lazy people from the capital!” said my host, while I dressed myself hurriedly. “Eight o’clock, and still in bed! Why, I’ve been up since six o’clock! This is the third time I’ve been upstairs; I went to your door on tiptoe; no one, no sign of life. It is bad for you to sleep too much at your age. And my Venus, whom you have not seen yet! Come, quick and take this cup of Barcelona chocolate.... Real smuggled.... Chocolate such as you don’t have in Paris. Fortify yourself, for, once you are in the presence of my Venus, there will be no tearing you away from her.”
In five minutes I was ready, that is to say, half shaved, buttoned awry, and scalded by the chocolate that I had swallowed boiling hot. I went down to the garden, and found myself before an admirable statue.
It really was a Venus of marvellous beauty. The upper part of the body was nude, as the ancients usually represented the greater divinities; the right hand, raised level with the breast, was turned palm inwards, the thumb and first two fingers extended, the others slightly bent. The other hand, approaching her haunch, supported the drapery that covered the lower part of the body. The pose of the statue recalled that of the player at morra, which is designated, for some reason or other, by the name of Germanicus. Perhaps the intention was to represent the goddess as playing at morra.
Be that as it may, nothing more perfect could possibly be seen than the body of that Venus; nothing more suave, more voluptuous than its contours; nothing more elegant and more noble than its drapery. I had expected some work of the Lower Empire; I saw a masterpiece of the best period of sculpture. What struck me above all was the exquisite truth of the forms, so much so that one might have supposed them moulded from nature, if nature produced such perfect models.
The hair, piled above the forehead, seemed to have been gilded at one time. The head, small like that of almost all Greek statues, was slightly inclined forwards. As for the face, I shall never succeed in expressing its strange character, the type of which was not like that of any other antique statue that I can remember. It was not the calm and severe beauty of the Greek sculptors, who, on system, gave all the features a majestic immobility. Here, on the contrary, I observed with surprise the distinct intention of the artist to render mischievousness almost bordering on malice. All the features were slightly contracted: the eyes a little oblique, the mouth raised at the corners, the nostrils somewhat distended. Disdain, irony, cruelty were to be read on this visage, which was at the same time of an incredible beauty. In fact, the more one looked at that admirable statue, the more one experienced a feeling of pain that such marvellous beauty could be allied to utter absence of sensibility.
“If the model ever existed,” I said to M. de Peyrehorade—” and I doubt if Heaven ever produced such a woman—how I pity her lovers! She must have found pleasure in making them die of despair. There is something ferocious in her expression, and yet I have never seen anything so beautiful.”