Very Woman (Sixtine): a Cerebral Novel
Copyright© 2024 by Remy de Gourmont
Chapter 1: The Dead Leaves
“When Nature produces these masterpieces,
she rarely offers them to the man who could
best appreciate and be worthy of possessing
them.”
Kant: Essay on the Beautiful.
They walked side by side, under the gloomy old firs whose heavy branches leaned towards the yellowing lawn.
Countess Aubry, with her charm of a negotiator of worldly loves, had just hastily brought them together, as though they were predestined for each other.
They were slightly acquainted already. They remembered having met during the past winter in the Marigny Avenue Salon, that haunt of miscarried glories, and, during the past week that they had been staying at the Château de Rabodanges (among several invalids of distinction) they had succeeded in exchanging a few vaguely suggestive words, a few affected witticisms, not without disdain for such a vain communion.
The one knew that Madame Sixtine Magne, a widow, had never held out her neck towards a new necklace—and believed it. The other knew that Hubert d’Entragues had dedicated himself, by inclination rather than by necessity, to the imperious craft of a man of letters. Her first impulse had been to consider him a cavalry captain, but the name captivated her, that name faded in history, so far as a pretty woman was concerned, and which a young man restored to all its freshness, under her eyes. Amorous and royal reminiscences whose auricular remembrance had remained in her head like a viol sound, like ripplings on fading silks, and suddenly with rustlings of steel—an admission with which her preciosity amused itself, perhaps, for she was very artful, through pride.
Entragues, on his side, was at the point of confessing to the young woman that she dazzled his imagination, but he would have had to tell her at the same time the origin—too fantastic not to be futile—of this wound, and he feared to have the air of inventing a tale.
“Then,” he reflected, “her mind would work, she would try to please me, forcing herself to deliberate charms. The experiment would be warped. I want to know what is in her; I want to penetrate coldly into the mysterious brambles of this sacred wood.”
A man and a woman, at the age of useful deceits, are never cold or truthful, face to face. Hubert judged himself capable of acting naturally, but where does the natural begin with a being endowed with several spare souls? Sixtine was but half duped and, from the first words, let it be perceived.
“Are you familiar with all the emotions of a return?” asked Entragues. “It is delicious and torturing. You enter, agitated and unbalanced and, in the confusion of brief thoughts, you say to yourself: ‘Can she be there! No, she is not there!’ The fear of a sudden grief has anticipated the deception: can it be that such joys are attained outside of dreams? ‘She is not there. There is no danger. What? No double lock? A night lamp? Is she there?’ Yes, she was there, asleep in her rose-colored morning-gown; she had risen at the sound of the key and, with bare feet and disheveled hair, pale with emotion, kissed your face, whatever her eyes fell upon—lips, brow, nose, beard—one arm gently entwining itself about your neck, the other trembling at first with the hesitancy of not knowing where to rest. She cried, meanwhile, like a hallucinated person: ‘It is you! It is you!’ Then she stepped back to gaze at you, seemed to doubt, saying: ‘Is it really you?’ And she coyly gave herself to you, resting on your shoulder, gave herself again with an ‘I am yours, still yours, as before!’ You are thrilled with happiness. To depart leaving tears, to find a smile upon your return, a being transported by your presence—that is a real pleasure, mingled somewhat with that necessary vanity of feeling yourself indispensable to some one. A special vanity in which the male experiences a despotic satisfaction.”
“Are you thus expected?” asked Sixtine.
“Who? I? No, but it might happen, and you see that I have felt it while talking to you. The slightest impulse diverts me from the present, the very tone of a voice rouses in me an inner activity and every possibility of life opens before me.”
“You must be wonderful at pretending!”
“Ah, Madame,” answered Entragues, “imagination does not destroy sincerity: it clothes sincerity with brocatels and rubies, places a diadem on it, but the same body of a woman is under the royal cloak, just as it is under tatters. To adorn truth is to respect it. This makes me recall those old evangelistaries that are so covered with illuminations that profane eyes seek the holy text in vain.”
“There are difficult writings,” said Sixtine.
“Divination is necessary when one cannot decipher. Have not women, the illiterates of love, all the intuitions of ignorance? Now then! if I said to you; ‘The heart feels the heart’s beating,’ you would agree. We are still taken in by some old aphorisms.”
“Nothing is so good as to let oneself be taken!”
Instantly astonished by a boldness of speech, whose precise meaning Entragues sought in her eyes, she laughed.
This purely voluntary laughter whose essence he notwithstanding penetrated, troubled him. A careful writer always on the quest for the exact word, new or old, rare or common, but of exact meaning, he imagined that everybody spoke as he himself wrote, when he wrote well. It was in good faith that he stubbornly persisted in reflecting, suddenly arrested by a disquietude in the presence of such words of conversation, habiliments of pure vanity. The knowledge of this eccentricity had never cured him of it, nor was he helped by the punishments of repeating this mea culpa after each mistake, taken from Goethe and composed for his personal use: “When he hears words, Entragues always believes there is a thought behind them.”
This greatly complicated his life and his talks, inducing considerable hesitations in his replies, but he was concerned only with literary anatomy and he loved to encounter complex minds upon whose momentary intricacies he would later throw light, by deduction.
Since the nut might be empty, he threw a pebble at the tree so as to cause several others to fall.
“It is preferable to give than to be robbed.”
“Oh!” Sixtine replied, “the sensation is quite different. First of all, not every one who wishes it, can be robbed. It is not even enough to let one’s door ajar, Monsieur d’Entragues.”
He felt that she had pronounced those last words in an insidious voice, but why? While waiting to understand, he responded:
“That itself would be quite a childish system. One usually places sentinels to guard the treasure chests and one provides locks for odd boxes. The spice in the pleasure of robbing lies in forcing, breaking, or taking a thing to pieces. True artists are repelled when there is nothing to do except thrust out the hand. But this is the most elementary ethics: no pleasure without effort.”
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