Down There (Là-Bas)

CHAPTER VII

"If this continues I shall lose my mind," murmured Durtal as he sat in front of his table reperusing the letters which he had been receiving from that woman for the last week. She was an indefatigable letter-writer, and since she had begun her advances he had not had time to answer one letter before another arrived.

"My!" he said, "let's try and see just where we do stand. After that ungracious answer to her first note she immediately sends me this:

"'Monsieur,

"'This is a farewell. If I were weak enough to write you any more letters they would become as tedious as the life I lead. Anyway, have I not had the best part of you, in that hesitant letter of yours which shook me out of my lethargy for an instant? Like yourself, monsieur, I know, alas! that nothing happens, and that our only certain joys are those we dream of. So, in spite of my feverish desire to know you, I fear that you were right in saying that a meeting would be for both of us the source of regrets to which we ought not voluntarily expose ourselves…'

"Then what bears witness to the perfect futility of this exordium is the way the missive ends:

"'If you should take the fancy to write me, you can safely address your letters "Mme. Maubel, rue Littré, general delivery." I shall be passing the rue Littré post-office Monday. If you wish to let matters remain just where they are-and thus cause me a great deal of pain-will you not tell me so, frankly?'

"Whereupon I was simple-minded enough to compose an epistle as ambiguous as the first, concealing my furtive advances under an apparent reluctance, thus letting her know that I was securely hooked. As her third note proves:

"'Never accuse yourself, monsieur-I repress a tenderer name which rises to my lips-of being unable to give me consolation. Weary, disabused, as we are, and done with it all, let us sometimes permit our souls to speak to each other-low, very low-as I have spoken to you this night, for henceforth my thought is going to follow you wherever you are.'

"Four pages of the same tune," he said, turning the leaves, "but this is better:

"'Tonight, my unknown friend, one word only. I have passed a horrible day, my nerves in revolt and crying out against the petty sufferings they are subjected to every minute. A slamming door, a harsh or squeaky voice floating up to me out of the street… Yet there are whole hours when I am so far from being sensitive that if the house were burning I should not move. Am I about to send you a page of comic lamentations? Ah, when one has not the gift of rendering one's grief superbly and transforming it into literary or musical passages which weep magnificently, the best thing is to keep still about it.

"'I bid you a silent goodnight. As on the first day, I am harassed by the conflict of the desire to see you and the dread of touching a dream lest it perish. Ah, yes, you spoke truly. Miserable, miserable wretches that we are, our timorous souls are so afraid of any reality that they dare not think a sympathy which has taken possession of them capable of surviving an interview with the person who gave it birth. Yet, in spite of this fine casuistry, I simply must confess to you-no, no, nothing. Guess if you can, and forgive me for this banal letter. Or rather, read between the lines, and perhaps you will find there a little bit of my heart and a great deal of what I leave unsaid.

"'A foolish letter with "I" written all over it. Who would suspect that while I wrote it my sole thought was of You?'"

"So far, so good. This woman at least piqued my curiosity. And what peculiar ink," he thought. It was myrtle green, very thin, very pale. With his finger-nail he detached some of the fine dust of rice powder, perfumed with heliotrope, clinging to the seal of the letters.

"She must be blonde," he went on, examining the tint of the powder, "for it isn't the 'Rachel' shade that brunettes use. Now up to that point everything had been going nicely, but then and there I spoiled it. Moved by I know not what folly, I wrote her a yet more roundabout letter, which, however, was very pressing. In attempting to fan her flame I kindled myself-for a spectre-and at once I received this:

"'What shall I do? I neither wish to see you, nor can I consent to annihilate my overwhelming desire to meet you. Last night, in spite of me, your name, which was burning me, sprang from my lips. My husband, one of your admirers, it seems, appeared to be somewhat humiliated by the preoccupation which, indeed, was absorbing me and causing unbearable shivers to run all through me. A common friend of yours and mine-for why should I not tell you that you know me, if to have met socially is to "know" anyone?-one of your friends, then, came up and said that frankly he was very much taken with you. I was in a state of such utter lack of self-control that I don't know what I should have done had it not been for the unwitting assistance which somebody gave me by pronouncing the name of a grotesque person of whom I can never think without laughing. Adieu. You are right. I tell myself that I will never write you again, and I go and do it anyway.

"'Your own-as I cannot be in reality without wounding us both.'

"Then when I wrote a burning reply, this was brought by a maid on a dead run:

"'Ah, if I were not afraid, afraid!-and you know you are just as much afraid as I am-how I should fly to you! No, you cannot hear the thousand conversations with which my soul fatigues yours… Oh, in my miserable existence there are hours when madness seizes me. Judge for yourself. The whole night I spent appealing to you furiously. I wept with exasperation. This morning my husband came into the room. My eyes were bloodshot. I began to laugh crazily, and when I could speak I said to him, "What would you think of a person who, questioned as to his profession, replied, 'I am a chamber succubus'?" "Ah, my dear, you are ill," said he. "Worse than you think," said I.

"'But if I come to see you, what could we talk about, in the state you yourself are in? Your letter has completely unbalanced me. You arraign your malady with a certain brutality which makes my body rejoice but alienates my soul a little. Ah, what if our dreams could really come true!

"'Ah, say a word, just one word, from out your own heart. Don't be afraid that even one of your letters can possibly fall into other hands than mine.'

"So, so, so. This is getting to be no laughing matter," concluded Durtal, folding up the letter. "The woman is married to a man who knows me, it seems. What a situation! Let's see, now. Whom have I ever visited?" He tried vainly to remember. No woman he had ever met at an evening party would address such declarations to him. And that common friend. "But I have no friends, except Des Hermies. I'd better try and find out whom he has been seeing recently. But as a physician he meets scores of people! And then, how can I explain to him? Tell him the story? He will burst into a roar and disillusion me before I have got halfway through the narrative."

And Durtal became irritated, for within him a really incomprehensible phenomenon was taking place. He was burning for this unknown woman. He was positively obsessed by her. He who had renounced all carnal relations years ago, who, when the barns of his senses were opened, contented himself with driving the disgusting herd of sin to the commercial shambles to be summarily knocked in the head by the butcher girls of love, he, he! was getting himself to believe-in the teeth of all experience, in the teeth of good judgment-that with a woman as passionate as this one seemed to be, he would experience superhuman sensations and novel abandon.

And he imagined her as he would have her, blonde, firm of flesh, lithe, feline, melancholy, capable of frenzies; and the picture of her brought on such a tension of nerves that his teeth rattled.

For a week, in the solitude in which he lived, he had dreamed of her and had become thoroughly aroused and incapable of doing any work, even of reading, for the image of this woman interposed itself between him and the page.

He tried suggesting to himself ignoble visions. He would imagine this creature in moments of corporal distress and thus calm his desires with unappetizing hallucinations; but the procedure which had formerly been very effective when he desired a woman and could not have her now failed utterly. He somehow could not imagine his unknown in quest of bismuth or of linen. He could not see her otherwise than rebellious, melancholy, dizzy with desire, kindling him with her eyes, inflaming him with her pale hands.

And his sensual resurrection was incredible-an aberrated Dog Star flaming in a physical November, at a spiritual All Hallows. Tranquil, dried up, safe from crises, without veritable desires, almost impotent, or rather completely forgetful of sex for months at a time, he was suddenly roused-and for an unreality!-by the mystery of mad letters.

"Enough!" he cried, smiting the table a jarring blow.

He clapped on his hat and went out, slamming the door behind him.

"I know how to make my imagination behave!" and he rushed over to the Latin Quarter to see a prostitute he knew. "I have been a good boy too long," he murmured as he hurried down the street. "One can't stay on the straight and narrow path for ever."

He found the woman at home and had a miserable time. She was a buxom brunette with festive eyes and the teeth of a wolf. An expert, she could, in a few seconds, drain one's marrow, granulate the lungs, and demolish the loins.

She chid him for having been away so long, then cajoled him and kissed him. He felt pathetic, listless, out of breath, out of place, for he had no genuine desires. He finally flung himself on a couch and, enervated to the point of crying, he went through the back-breaking motions mechanically, like a dredge.

Never had he so execrated the flesh, never had he felt such repugnance and lassitude, as when he issued from that room. He strolled haphazard down the rue Soufflot, and the image of the unknown obsessed him, more irritating, more tenacious.

"I begin to understand the superstition of the succubus. I must try some bromo-exorcism. Tonight I will swallow a gram of bromide of potassium. That will make my senses be good."

But he realized that the trouble was not primarily physical, that really it was only the consequence of an extraordinary state of mind. His love for that which departed from the formula, for that projection out of the world which had recently cheered him in art, had deviated and sought expression in a woman. She embodied his need to soar upward from the terrestrial humdrum.

"It is those precious unworldly studies, those cloister thoughts picturing ecclesiastical and demoniac scenes, which have prepared me for the present folly," he said to himself. His unsuspected, and hitherto unexpressed, mysticism, which had determined his choice of subject for his last work was now sending him out, in disorder, to seek new pains and pleasures.

As he walked along he recapitulated what he knew of the woman. She was married, blonde, in easy circumstances because she had her own sleeping quarters and a maid. She lived in the neighbourhood, because she went to the rue Littré post-office for her mail. Her name, supposing she had prefixed her own initial to the name of Maubel, was Henriette, Hortense, Honorine, Hubertine, or Hélène. What else? She must frequent the society of artists, because she had met him, and for years he had not been in a bourgeois drawing-room. She was some kind of a morbid Catholic, because that word succubus was unknown to the profane. That was all. Then there was her husband, who, gullible as he might be, must nevertheless suspect their liaison, since, by her own confession, she dissembled her obsession very badly.

"This is what I get for letting myself be carried away. For I, too, wrote at first to amuse myself with aphrodisiac statements. Then I ended by becoming completely hysterical. We have taken turns fanning smouldering ashes which now are blazing. It is too bad that we have both become inflamed at the same time-for her case must be the same as mine, to judge from the passionate letters she writes. What shall I do? Keep on tantalizing myself for a chimera? No! I'll bring matters to a head, see her, and if she is good-looking, sleep with her. I shall have peace, anyway."

He looked about him. Without knowing how he had got there he found himself in the Jardin des Plantes. He oriented himself, remembered that there was a café on the side facing the quay, and went to find it.

He tried to control himself and write a letter at once ardent and firm, but the pen shook in his fingers. He wrote at a gallop, confessed that he regretted not having consented, at the outset, to the meeting she proposed, and, attempting to check himself, declared, "We must see each other. Think of the harm we are doing ourselves, teasing each other at a distance. Think of the remedy we have at hand, my poor darling, I implore you."

He must indicate a place of meeting. He hesitated. "Let me think," he said to himself. "I don't want her to alight at my place. Too dangerous. Then the best thing to do would be to offer her a glass of port and a biscuit and conduct her to Lavenue's, which is a hotel as well as a café. I will reserve a room. That will be less disgusting than an assignation house. Very well, then, let us put in place of the rue de la Chaise the waiting-room of the Gare Montparnasse. Sometimes it is quite empty. Well, that's done." He gummed the envelope and felt a kind of relief. "Ah! I was forgetting. Garçon! The Bottin de Paris."

He searched for the name Maubel, thinking that by some chance it might be her own. Of course it was hardly probable, but she seemed so imprudent that with her anything was to be expected. He might very easily have met a Mme. Maubel and forgotten her. He found a Maubé and a Maubec, but no Maubel. "Of course, that proves nothing," he said, closing the directory. He went out and threw his letter into the box. "The joker in this is the husband. But hell, I am not likely to take his wife away from him very long."

He had an idea of going home, but he realized that he would do no work, that alone he would relapse into daydream. "If I went up to Des Hermies's place. Yes, today was his consultation day, it's an idea."

He quickened his pace, came to the rue Madame, and rang at an entresol. The housekeeper opened the door.

"Ah, Monsieur Durtal, he is out, but he will be in soon. Will you wait?"

"But you are sure he is coming back?"

"Why, yes. He ought to be here now," she said, stirring the fire.

As soon as she had retired Durtal sat down, then, becoming bored, he went over and began browsing among the books which covered the wall as in his own place.

"Des Hermies certainly has some curious items," he murmured, opening a very old book. Here's a treatise written centuries ago to suit my case exactly. Manuale exorcismorum. Well, I'll be damned! It's a Plantin. And what does this manual have to recommend in the treatment of the possessed?

"Hmmm. Contains some quaint counter-spells. Here are some for energumens, for the bewitched; here are some against love-philtres and against the plague; against spells cast on comestibles; some, even, to keep butter and milk sweet. That isn't odd. The Devil entered into everything in the good old days. And what can this be?" In his hand he held two little volumes with crimson edges, bound in fawn-coloured calf. He opened them and looked at the title, The anatomy of the mass, by Pierre du Moulin, dated, Geneva, 1624. "Might prove interesting." He went to warm his feet, and hastily skimmed through one of the volumes. "Why!" he said, "it's mighty good."

On the page which he was reading was a discussion of the priesthood. The author affirmed that none might exercise the functions of the priesthood if he was not sound in body, or if any of his members had been amputated, and asking apropos of this, if a castrated man could be ordained a priest, he answered his own question, "No, unless he carries upon him, reduced to powder, the parts which are wanting." He added, however, that Cardinal Tolet did not admit this interpretation, which nevertheless had been universally adopted.

Durtal, amused, read on. Now du Moulin was debating with himself the point whether it was necessary to interdict abbés ravaged by lechery. And in answer he cited himself the melancholy glose of Canon Maximianus, who, in his Distinction 81, sighs, "It is commonly said that none ought to be deposed from his charge for fornication, in view of the fact that few can be found exempt from this vice."

"Why! You here?" said Des Hermies, entering. "What are you reading? The anatomy of the mass? Oh, it's a poor thing, for Protestants. I am just about distracted. Oh, my friend, what brutes those people are," and like a man with a great weight on his chest he unburdened himself.

"Yes, I have just come from a consultation with those whom the journals characterize as 'princes of science.' For a quarter of an hour I have had to listen to the most contradictory opinions. On one point, however, all agreed: that my patient was a dead man. Finally they compromised and decided that the poor wretch's torture should be needlessly prolonged by a course of moxas. I timidly remarked that it would be simpler to send for a confessor, and then assuage the sufferings of the dying man with repeated injections of morphine. If you had seen their faces! They came as near as anything to denouncing me as a tout for the priests.

"And such is contemporary science. Everybody discovers a new or forgotten disease, and trumpets a forgotten or a new remedy, and nobody knows a thing! And then, too, what good does it do one not to be hopelessly ignorant since there is so much sophistication going on in pharmacy that no physician can be sure of having his prescriptions filled to the letter? One example among many: at present, sirup of white poppy, the diacodia of the old Codex, does not exist. It is manufactured with laudanum and sirup of sugar, as if they were the same thing!

"We have got so we no longer dose substances but prescribe ready-made remedies and use those surprising specifics which fill up the fourth pages of the journals. It's a compromise medicine, a democratic medicine, one cure for all cases. It's scandalous, it's silly.

"No, there is no use in talking. The old therapeutics based on experience was better than this. At least it know that remedies ingested in pill, powder, or bolus form were treacherous, so it prescribed them only in the liquid state. Now, too, every physician specializes. The oculists see only the eyes, and, to cure them, quite calmly poison the body. With their pilocarpine they have ruined the health of how many people for ever! Others treat cutaneous affections. They drive an eczema inward on an old man who as soon as he is 'cured' becomes childish or dangerous. There is no more solidarity. Allegiance to one party means hostility to all others. Its a mess. Now my honourable confrères are stumbling around, taking a fancy to medicaments which they don't even know how to use. Take antipyrine, for example. It is one of the very few really active products that the chemists have found in a long time. Well, where is the doctor who knows that, applied in a compress with iodide and cold Bondonneau spring water, antipyrine combats the supposedly incurable ailment, cancer? And if that seems incredible, it is true, nevertheless."

"Honestly," said Durtal, "you believe that the old-time doctors came nearer healing?"

"Yes, because, miraculously, they know the effects of certain invariable remedies prepared without fraud. Of course it is self-evident that when old Paré eulogized 'sack medicine' and ordered his patients to carry pulverized medicaments in a little sack whose form varied according to the organ to be healed, assuming the form of a cap for the head, of a bagpipe for the stomach, of an ox tongue for the spleen, he probably did not obtain very signal results. His claim to have cured gastralgia by appositions of powder of red rose, coral and mastic, wormwood and mint, aniseed and nutmeg, is certainly not to be borne out, but he also had other systems, and often he cured, because he possessed the science of simples, which is now lost.

"The present-day physicians shrug their shoulders when the name of Ambrose Paré is mentioned. They used to pooh-pooh the idea of the alchemists that gold had medicinal virtue. Their fine scorn does not now prevent them from using alternate doses of the salts and of the filings of this metal. They use concentrated arseniate of gold against anemia, muriate against syphilis, cyanide against amenorrhea and scrofula, and chloride of sodium and gold against old ulcers. No, I assure you, it is disgusting to be a physician, for in spite of the fact that I am a doctor of science and have extensive hospital experience I am quite inferior to humble country herborists, solitaries, who know a great deal more than I about what is useful to know-and I admit it."

"And homeopathy?"

"It has some good things about it and some bad ones. It also palliates without curing. It sometimes represses maladies, but for grave and acute cases it is impotent, just like this Mattei system, which, however, is useful as an intermediary to stave off a crisis. With its blood-and lymph-purifying products, its antiscrofoloso, its angiotico, its anti-canceroso, it sometimes modifies morbid states in which other methods are of no avail. For instance, it permits a patient whose kidneys have been demoralized by iodide of potassium to gain time and recuperate so that he can safely begin to drink iodide again!

"I add that terrific shooting pains, which rebel even against chloroform and morphine, often yield to an application of 'green electricity.' You ask me, perhaps, of what ingredients this liquid electricity is made. I answer that I know absolutely nothing about it. Mattei claims that he has been able to fix in his globules and liquors the electrical properties of certain plants, but he has never given out his recipe, hence he can tell whatever stories suit him. What is curious, anyway, is that this system, thought out by a Roman count, a Catholic, has its most important following and propaganda among Protestant pastors, whose original asininity becomes abysmal in the unbelievable homilies which accompany their essays on healing. Indeed, considered seriously, these systems are a lot of wind. The truth is that in the art of healing we grope along at hazard. Nevertheless, with a little experience and a great deal of nerve we can manage so as not too shockingly to depopulate the cities. Enough of that, old man, and now where have you been keeping yourself?"

"Just what I was going to ask you. You haven't been to see me for over a week."

"Well, just now everybody in the world is ill and I am racing around all the time. By the way, I've been attending Chantelouve, who has a pretty serious attack of gout. He complains of your absence, and his wife, whom I should not have taken for an admirer of your books, of your last novel especially, speaks to me unceasingly of them and you. For a person customarily so reserved, she seems to me to have become quite enthusiastic about you, does Mme. Chantelouve. Why, what's the matter?" he exclaimed, seeing how red Durtal had become.

"Oh, nothing, but I've got to be going. Good night."

"Why, aren't you feeling well?"

"Oh, it's nothing, I assure you."

"Oh, well," said Des Hermies, knowing better than to insist. "Look at this," and took him into the kitchen and showed him a superb leg of mutton hanging beside the window. "I hung it up in a draft so as to get some of the crass freshness out of it. We'll eat it when we have the astrologer Gévingey to dine with us at Carhaix's. As I am the only person alive who knows how to boil a gigot à l'Anglaise, I am going to be the cook, so I shan't come by for you. You will find me in the tower, disguised as a scullery maid."

Once outside, Durtal took a long breath. Well, well, his unknown was Chantelouve's wife. Impossible! She had never paid the slightest attention to him. She was silent and cold. Impossible! And yet, why had she spoken that way to Des Hermies? But surely if she had wanted to see him she would have come to his apartment, since they were acquaintances. She would not have started this correspondence under a pseudonym-

"H. de Maubel!" he said suddenly, "why, Mme. Chantelouve's name is Hyacinthe, a boy's name which suits her very well. She lives in the rue Babneux not vary far from the rue Littré post-office. She is a blonde, she has a maid, she is a fervent Catholic. She's the one."

And he experienced, almost simultaneously, two absolutely distinct sensations.

Of disappointment, first, for his unknown pleased him better. Mme. Chantelouve would never realize the ideal he had fashioned for himself, the tantalizing features, the agile, wild animal body, the melancholy and ardent bearing, which he had dreamed. Indeed, the mere fact of knowing the unknown rendered her less desirable, more vulgar. Accessibility killed the chimera.

At the same time he experienced a lively relief. He might have been dealing with a hideous old crone, and Hyacinthe, as he immediately began to call her, was desirable. Thirty-three at most, not pretty, but peculiar; blonde, slight and supple, with no hips, she seemed thin because she was small-boned. The face, mediocre, spoiled by too big a nose, but the lips incandescent, the teeth superb, her complexion ever so faint a rose in the slightly bluish milk white of rice water a little troubled.

Then her real charm, the really deceptive enigma of her, was in her eyes; ash-grey eyes which seemed uncertain, myopic, and which conveyed an expression of resigned boredom. At certain moments the pupils glowed like a gem of grey water and sparks of silver twinkled to the surface. By turns they were dolent, forsaken, languorous, and haughty. He remembered that those eyes had often brought his heart into his throat!

In spite of circumstantial evidence, he reflected that those impassioned letters did not correspond in any way to this woman in the flesh. Never was woman more controlled, more adept in the lies of good breeding. He remembered the Chantelouve at-homes. She seemed attentive, made no contribution to the conversation, played the hostess smiling, without animation. It was a kind of case of dual personality. In one visible phase a society woman, prudent and reserved, in another concealed phase a wild romantic, mad with passion, hysterical of body, nymphomaniac of soul. It hardly seemed probable.

"No," he said, "I am on the wrong track. It's merely by chance that Mme. Chantelouve spoke of my books to Des Hermies, and I mustn't jump to the conclusion that she is smitten with me and that she has been writing me these hot letters. It isn't she, but who on earth is it?"

He continued to revolve the question, without coming any nearer a solution. Again he called before his eyes the image of this woman, and admitted that she was really potently seductive, with a fresh, girlish body, flexible, and without a lot of repugnant flesh-and mysterious, with her concentrated air, her plaintive eyes, and even her coldness, real or feigned.

He summarized all that he really knew about her: simply that she was a widow when she married Chantelouve, that she had no children, that her first husband, a manufacturer of chasubles, had, for unknown reasons, committed suicide. That was all. On the other hand, too, too much was known about Chantelouve!

Author of a history of Poland and the cabinets of the north; of a history of Boniface VIII and his times; a life of the blessed Jeanne de Valois, founder of the Annonciade; a biography of the Venerable Mother Anne de Xaintonge, teacher of the Company of Saint Ursula; and other books of the same kind, published by Lecoffre, Palmé, Poussielgue, in the inevitable shagreen or sheep bindings stamped with dendriform patterns: Chantelouve was preparing his candidacy for the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and hoped for the support of the party of the Ducs. That was why he received influential hypocrites, provincial Tartufes, and priests every week. He doubtless had to drive himself to do this, because in spite of his slinking slyness he was jovial and enjoyed a joke. On the other hand, he aspired to figure in the literature that counts at Paris, and he expended a good deal of ingenuity inveigling men of letters to his house on another evening every week, to make them his aides, or at least keep them from openly attacking him, so soon as his candidacy-an entirely clerical affair-should be announced. It was probably to attract and placate his adversaries that he had contrived these baroque gatherings to which, out of curiosity as a matter of fact, the most utterly different kinds of people came.

He had other motives. It was said that he had no scruples about exploiting his social acquaintances. Durtal had even noticed that at each of the dinners given by Chantelouve a well-dressed stranger was present, and the rumour went about that this guest was a wealthy provincial to whom men of letters were exhibited like a wax-work collection, and from whom, before or afterward, important sums were borrowed.

"It is undeniable that the Chantelouves have no income and that they live in style. Catholic publishing houses and magazines pay even worse than the secular, so in spite of his established reputation in the clerical world, Chantelouve cannot possibly maintain such a standard of living on his royalties.

"There simply is no telling what these people are up to. That this woman's home life is unhappy, and that she does not love the sneaky sacristan to whom she is married, is quite possible, but what is her real rôle in that household? Is she accessory to Chantelouve's pecuniary dodges? If that is the case I don't see why she should pick on me. If she is in connivance with her husband, she certainly ought to have sense enough to seek an influential or wealthy lover, and she is perfectly aware that I fulfil neither the one nor the other condition. Chantelouve knows very well that I am incapable of paying for her gowns and thus contributing to the upkeep of their establishment. I make about three thousand livres, and I can hardly contrive to keep myself going.

"So that is not her game. I don't know that I want to have anything to do with their kind of people," he concluded, somewhat chilled by these reflections. "But I am a big fool. What I know about them proves that my unknown beloved is not Chantelouve's wife, and, all things considered, I am glad she isn't."