Mademoiselle de Maupin

XIII

“Theodore, Rosalind, for I know not by what name to call you, — I have only just seen you and I am writing to you.-Would that I knew your woman's name I it must be pleasant as honey, and hover sweeter and more harmonious than poetry on the lips! Never could I have dared to tell you this, and yet I should have died for lack of saying it. What I have suffered no one knows nor can know, nor could I myself give any but a faint idea of it; words will not express such anguish; I should appear to have turned my phrases carefully, to have striven to say new and singular things, and to be indulging in the most extravagant exaggeration when merely depicting what I have experienced with the help of unsatisfying images.

“O Rosalind! I love you, I worship you; why is there not a word more expressive than that! I have never loved, I have never worshipped any one save you; I prostrate myself, I humble myself before you, and I would fain compel all creation to bend the knee before my idol; you are more to me than the whole of nature, more than myself, more than God, — nay, it seems strange to me that God does not descend from heaven to become your slave. Where you are not all is desolate, all is dead, all is dark; you alone people the world for me; you are life, sunshine-you are everything. Your smile makes the day, and your sadness the night; the spheres follow the movements of your body, and the celestial harmonies are guided by you, O my cherished queen! O my glorious and real dream! You are clothed with splendor, and swim ceaselessly in radiant effluence.

“I have known you scarcely three months, but I have long loved you. Before seeing you, I languished for love of you; I called you, sought for you, and despaired of ever meeting with you in my path, for I knew that I could never love any other woman. How many times have you appeared to me, — at the window of the mysterious mansion leaning in melancholy fashion on your elbow in the balcony and casting the petals of some flower to the wind, or else a petulant Amazon on your Turkish horse, whiter than snow, galloping through the dark avenues of the forest! It was indeed your proud and gentle eyes, your diaphanous hands, your beautiful, waving hair, and your faint, adorably disdainful smile. Only you were less beautiful, for the most ardent and unbridled imagination, the imagination of a painter and a poet, could not attain to the sublime poetry of this reality.

“There is in you an exhaustless spring of graces, an ever-gushing fountain of irresistible seductions: you are an ever open casket of most precious pearls, and, in your slightest movements, in your most forgetful gestures, in your most unstudied attitudes, you every moment throw away with royal profusion inestimable treasures of beauty. If the soft waving contour, if the fleeting lines of an attitude could be fixed and preserved in a mirror, the glasses before which you had passed would cause Raphael's divinest canvases to be despised and be looked upon as tavern sign-boards.

“Every gesture, every pose of your head, every different aspect of your beauty, are graven with a diamond point upon the mirror of my soul, and nothing in the world could efface the deep impression; I know in what place the shadow was, and in what the light, the flat part glistening beneath the ray, and the spot where the wandering reflection was blended with the more softened tints of neck and cheek. I could draw you in your absence; the idea of you is ever placed before me.

“When quite a child I would remain whole hours standing before the old pictures of the masters, and eagerly explore their dark depths. I gazed upon those beautiful faces of saints and goddesses whose flesh, white as ivory or wax, stands out so marvellously against the obscure backgrounds that are carbonized by the decomposition of the colors; I admired the simplicity and magnificence of their shape, the strange grace of their hands and feet, the pride and fine expression of their features which are at once so delicate and firm, the grandeur of the draperies which flutter around their divine forms, and the purplish folds of which seem to extend like lips to kiss those beauteous bodies.

“Prom obstinately burying my eyes beneath the veil of smoke thickened by ages, my sight grew dim, the outlines of objects lost their precision, and a species of motionless and dead life animated all those pale phantoms of vanished beauties; I ended by finding that these faces had a vague resemblance to the fair unknown whom I worshipped at the bottom of my heart; I sighed as I thought that she whom I was to love was perhaps one of them, and had been dead for three hundred years. This idea often affected me so far as to make me shed tears, and I would indulge in great anger against myself for not having been born in the sixteenth century, when all these fair ones had lived. I thought it unpardonable awkwardness and clumsiness on my part.

“When I grew older the sweet phantom beset me still more closely. I continually saw it between me and the women whom I had for mistresses, smiling with an ironic air and deriding their human beauty with all the perfection of its own which was divine. It caused me to find ugliness in women who really were charming and capable of giving happiness to any one who had not become enamored of this adorable shadow whose body I did not think existed and which was only the presentiment of your own beauty. O Rosalind! how unhappy have I been on your account, before I knew you! O Theodore! how unhappy I have been on your account, after I knew you I If you will, you can open up to me the paradise of my dreams. You are standing on the threshold like a guardian angel wrapped in his wings, and you hold the golden key in your beautiful hands. Say, Rosalind, say, will you?

“I wait for but a word from you to live or to die-will you pronounce it?

“Are you Apollo driven from heaven, or the fair Aphrodite coming forth from the bosom of the sea? where have you left your chariot of gems yoked with its four flaming steeds? what have you done with your nacreous conch and your azure-tailed dolphins? what amorous nymph has blended her body with yours in the midst of a kiss, O handsome youth, more charming than Cyparissus and Adonis, more adorable than all women?

“But you are a woman, and we are no longer in the days of metamorphoses; Adonis and Hermaphrodite are dead, and such a degree of beauty can no longer be attained by man;-for, since heroes and gods have ceased to be, you alone preserve in your marble bodies, as in a Grecian temple, the precious gift of form anathematized by Christ, and show that the earth has no cause to envy heaven; you worthily represent the first divinity of the world, the purest symbolization of the eternal essence, — beauty.

“As soon as I saw you something was rent within me, a veil fell, a door was opened, I felt myself inwardly flooded by waves of light; I understood that my life was before me, and that I had at last arrived at the decisive crossway. The dark and hidden portions of the half radiant figure which I was seeking to separate from the shadow were suddenly illuminated; the browner tints drowning the background of the picture were softly lighted; a tender roseate gleam crept over the greenish ultramarine of the distance; the trees which had formed only confused silhouettes began to be more clearly defined; the dew-laden flowers dotted with brilliant specks the dull verdure of the turf. I saw the bull-finch with his scarlet breast at the end of an elder bough, the little white pink-eyed straight-eared rabbit putting out his head between two sprays of wild thyme and passing his paw across his nose, and the timid stag coming to drink at the spring and admire his antlers in the water.

“From the morning when the sun of love rose upon my life everything has been changed; there, where in the shadow used to wander ill-defined forms rendered terrible or monstrous by their uncertainty, groups of flowering trees show themselves with elegance, hills curve in graceful amphitheatres, and silver palaces, their terraces laden with vases and statues, bathe their feet in azure lakes and seem to float between two skies; what in the darkness I took for a gigantic dragon having wings armed with claws and crawling over the night with its scaly feet, is nothing but a felucca with silken sail, and painted and gilded oars, filled with women and musicians, and that frightful crab which methought was shaking its fangs and claws above my head, is nothing but a fan-palm whose long and narrow leaves were stirred by the nocturnal breeze. My chimeras and errors have vanished:-I love.

“Despairing of ever finding you I accused my dream of a lie and quarrelled furiously with fate: I told myself that I was altogether mad to seek for such a type, or that nature was very barren and the Creator very unskilful to be unable to realize the simple idea of my heart. Prometheus had the noble pride to desire to make a man and rival God; I had created a woman, and I believed that, as a punishment for my audacity, a never satisfied desire would gnaw my liver like a second vulture; I was expecting to be chained with diamond fetters on a hoary rock at the edge of the savage ocean, — but the fair marine nymphs with their long green hair, raising their white pointed breasts above the waves, and displaying to the sun their nacreous bodies all streaming with the tears of the sea, would not have come and leaned their elbows on the shore to converse with me and console me in my pain as in the play of old Aeschylus.

“There has been nothing of all this.

“You came, and I had reason to reproach my imagination with its impotence. My torment was not what I dreaded, to be the perpetual prey of an idea on a sterile rock; but I suffered none the less. I had seen that you did in fact exist, that my presentiments had not been false to me on this point; but you manifested yourself to me with the ambiguous and terrible beauty of the sphinx. Like the mysterious goddess, Isis, you were wrapped in a veil which I dared not raise lest I should be stricken dead.

“If you knew with what panting and restless heed, beneath my apparent inattention, I watched you and followed you even in your slightest movements! Nothing escaped me; how eagerly I gazed upon the little flesh that appeared at your neck or wrist in my endeavor to determine your sex! your hands have been the subject of profound studies by me, and I am able to say that I know their smallest curves, their most imperceptible veins, and their slightest dimple; though you were to conceal yourself from head to foot in the most impenetrable domino, I should recognize you on seeing merely one of your fingers. I analyzed the undulations in your walk, the manner in which you placed your feet, and dressed your hair; I sought to discover your secret in the habits of your body. I especially watched you in those hours of indolence when the bones seem to be withdrawn from the body and the limbs sink and bend as though they had lost their stiffness, to see whether the feminine line would be more boldly pronounced amid this forgetfulness and carelessness. Never was anyone eyed so eagerly as you.

“For whole hours I would forget myself in this contemplation. Apart in some corner of the drawing-room, with a book in my hand which I was not reading, or crouched behind the curtain in my room, when you were in yours and your window-blinds were raised, then, penetrated with the marvellous beauty which is diffused about you like a luminous atmosphere, I would say to myself, 'Surely it is a woman;'-then suddenly an abrupt bold movement, a manly accent or an off-hand manner would in a minute destroy my frail edifice of probabilities and throw me back again into my former irresolution.

“I would be voyaging with flowing sails over the limitless ocean of amorous dreaming, and you would come and ask me to fence or play tennis with you; the young girl, I transformed into a young cavalier, would give me terrible blows and strike the foil from my hand as quickly and cleverly as the most experienced swashbuckler; at every moment of the day there was some such disappointment.

“I would be about to approach you and say to you, 'My dear fair one, 'tis you that I adore,' and I would see you bending down tenderly to a lady's ear and breathing puffs of madrigals and compliments through her hair. Judge of my situation. Or, perhaps, some woman whom, in my strange jealousy, I could have flayed alive with all the voluptuousness in the world, would hang on your arm, and draw you aside to confide some puerile secrete to you, and would keep you for hours together in an embrasure of the window.

“I was maddened to see women talking to you, for it made me believe that you were a man, and, had you been so, it would have cost me extreme pain to endure it. When men came up in a free and familiar fashion, I was still more jealous, because then I thought that you were a woman and that they had a suspicion of it like myself; I was a prey to the most contrary passions and did not know what conclusion to arrive at

“I was angry with myself, and addressed the harshest reproaches to myself for being thus tormented by such a love and for not having the strength to uproot from my heart the venomous plant which had sprung up there in a night like a poisonous toad-stool; I cursed you, I called you my evil genius; I even believed for a moment that you were Beelzebub in person, for I could not explain the sensation which I experienced in your presence.

“When I was quite persuaded that you were in fact nothing else but a woman in disguise, the improbability of the motives with which I sought to justify such a caprice plunged me again into my uncertainty, and I began again to lament that the form which I had dreamed of for the love of my soul belonged to one of the same sex as myself;-I accused chance which had clothed a man with such charming appearance, and, to my everlasting misfortune, had caused me to meet with him just when I had lost the hope of seeing realized the absolute idea of pure beauty which I had cherished in my heart for so long.

“Now, Rosalind, I have the profound certainty that you are the most beautiful of women; I have seen you in the costume of your sex, I have seen your pure and correctly rounded shoulders and arms. The beginning of your bosom, of which your gorget gave a glimpse, could belong only to a young girl; neither the beautiful hunter Meleager, nor the effeminate Bacchus, with their dubious forms, ever had such sweetness of line or such delicacy of skin, even though they be both of Paros marble and polished by the kisses of twenty centuries. I am tormented no longer in this respect. But this is not all: you are a woman, and my love is no longer reprehensible, I may give myself up to it without remorse and abandon myself to the billow which is bearing me towards you; great and unbridled as the passion that I feel may be, it is permitted and I may confess it; but you, Rosalind, for whom I was consumed in silence and who knew not the immensity of my love, you whom this tardy revelation will only, it may be, surprise, do you not hate me, do you love me, can you ever love me? I do not know, — and I tremble, and am yet more unhappy than before.

“There are moments when it seems to me that you do not hate me; when we acted 'As you like it,' you gave a peculiar accent to certain passages in your part which strengthened their meaning, and, in a measure, invited me to declare myself. I believe that I could see in your eyes and smile gracious promises of indulgence, and could feel your hand respond to the pressure of mine. If I was deceived, O God! it is a thing on which I dare not reflect. Encouraged by all this and impelled by my love, I have written to you, for the dress you wear is ill-suited to such avowals, and my words have a thousand times been stayed upon my lips; even though I had the idea and firm conviction that I was speaking to a woman, that manly costume would startle all my tender loving thoughts and hinder them from taking their flight towards you.

“I beseech you, Rosalind, if you do not yet love me, strive to love me who have loved you in spite of everything, and beneath the veil in which you wrap yourself, no doubt out of pity for us; do not devote the remainder of my life to the most frightful despair and the most gloomy discouragement; think that I have worshipped you ever since the first ray of thought shone into my head, that you were revealed to me beforehand, and that when I was quite little, you appeared to me in my dreams with a crown of dew-drops, two prismatic wings, and the little blue flower in your hand; that you are the end, the means, and the meaning of my life; that without you I am but an empty shadow, and that, if you blow upon the flame that you have kindled, nothing will remain within me but a pinch of dust finer and more impalpable than that which besprinkles the very wings of death. Rosalind, you who have so many recipes to cure the sickness of love, cure me, for I am very sick; play your part to the end, cast aside the dress of the handsome page Ganymede, and stretch out your white hand to the younger son of the brave knight Rowland-des-Bois.”

The Duel