Very Woman (Sixtine): a Cerebral Novel
Copyright© 2024 by Remy de Gourmont
Chapter 13: Christus Patiens
“Elle ne jugeait pas, ayant d’autres pensées.”
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Isis.
“In this so lightly tilled field, where the corn has been so hurriedly sown,” Entragues told himself, “I reap nothing but problems, tares, weeds, ridiculous rank grasses! For three days I have had only the worry of a mathematician intent upon insoluble x’s.”
SERIES OF X’s.
xa.—It was poison.
xb.—History of the portrait chamber.
xc.—S. M. to S. M.
xa
“I believed I could find the solution. In truth, the problem was buried; it sprang up again, evoked by the two others.”
xb
“Is it a history in which she is implicated? Is a page of her life written in this mysterious chamber where innocent travelers are favored with such astonishing visions? Must this second x be joined to the first one? A crime might have been committed there.”
xc
“There is no doubting, if heaven has endowed me with some divining sense, that one of the mono-grams signifies Sixtine Magne and perhaps both resolved themselves into the identical syllables: a homage of the present to the pact, of the Sixtine of to-day to the Sixtine of yesterday: a portrait of the lover or husband, since she was married. Ah! I have it! Her husband had a Christian name commencing with S. It is a question of finding an engraver with the name of S—— Magne and that may easily be ascertained at some print dealer’s shop; or else, in the case of a lover, S—— M——. Upon what do I base this deduction? On nothing. The twice-repeated initials of the woman I love ought to torment me, else I would not love her. Perhaps they only conceal names of no interest to me, but the ‘perhaps’ suffices to justify my uneasiness. The past? Enough of that. The present? Ah! the unknown enemy which one divines in smiles, in incomplete phrases, in gestures, and even in the little intimacies of the woman who lets herself be loved! A pleasant sensation and one which I still have not experienced! The jealousy without cause, the jealousy that nothing can cure—not even possession! ... I must put down that remark, it is true.”
He wrote several lines in his note-book: “Does a woman’s supreme abandon prove her love? No, for this may be due to the occasion, to ennui, to the need of deceiving, to vengeance, to the perversity which throws her into your arms. To feel yourself loved, it is necessary to believe; love is a religion. You must have faith, you must love yourself. Love yourself? Yes, that is the means of being the more easily deceived. First to strip yourself of reason, then to plunge towards the truth! Absurd. Faith, then? Yes, to have faith, and is truth itself any thing except faith? Truth, faith—two aspects of one entity—the mystery of a God in two persons. Ah! if I believed that I was loved by Sixtine, she would love me, I would have peace, the joy of union. It can be done. How? Perhaps merely by not reflecting. To embark on the light skiff and go down with the current of water ... Towards the Ocean, yes, towards the ineluctable abyss? Evidently, but this detail is insignificant. The thing is to embark and not to pass your life in watching others depart for the exquisite unknown. But you return from it! Then what is the good? If the current is a circuit, it is just as well to remain at home and read the Divine Comedy. Alighieri himself returned! There is only death. But one never returns from death, and it is of little avail to another; but it has its answer ready and whispers it in the ear when it is so inclined. Bitter is life, more bitter is death.”
A church stood near him. He recognized the humble Saint-Médard, entered and fell on his knees:
“O God of the Cross, Christus patiens, eternally suffering Christ, hearken to me! I seek joy, I seek love, I seek grief, and I find only a dreary void. I can neither enjoy myself, nor love, nor suffer. Take me by the hand and lead me as a mother leads her child. Must not one first suffer with thee? Then will come love, like rain in the desert, and joy will dawn, the joy of loving, the joy of having suffered...”
“I presume to pray,” said Entragues to himself, lifting his head, “and I am giving vent to rhetoric. This prayer is welcome, and if I can remember it, I will use it. It would be blasphemous to take my note-book and write it down! Why not! One must profit from inspiration, for it can not be recovered.”
He made a note of his ejaculation, with very slight variations.
“I stopped myself in time. The unconscious comedy would have made me blush in the end. Do I pray seriously and am I a Christian? Yes, I wish to be a Christian, and to partake of the most mystic and abstract Catholicism, when this would serve only to separate me from the abject mob, renouncing like a vile freedman the religion which drew it from slavery. It is quite evident that in my very heart I believe in the divinity of Jesus rather than in that of Sakya-Mouni and that I laugh at the vanity of an unconscious creator!...
“Ah! how enervating are these solitary rounds!”
Then, suddenly:
“I must see her, I must see her! Ah! provided it isn’t Wednesday?”
The newspapers spread on the stand of a little bookshop told him that to-day was Friday, October 27. So ten days had already passed, ten irrevocable days since that dismal Wednesday when his love had collapsed. Collapsed! well, it could be rebuilt. But it really was too much, literally, to love at a distance. Sixtine did not, like himself, occupy her hours in analyzing everything and nothing: to have oneself loved, one must be seen. Henceforth, he would seek every occasion, he would follow her like a hunter, pressing her pitilessly to the very quarry of kisses. He would cease reflecting, and would think only of the end, counting obstacles as naught. He would commence from this evening.
His feet, already, obeyed, following this mental activity. He quickly ascended a popular street full of children, little democratic dauphins, brats of the modern sovereign. At this moment the inventor of popular suffrage seemed to him the most execrable monster produced by humanity and Nero and Attila, recast in a single model, compared to this unknown dastard, were creatures worthy of the genuflection. No one had abased the Idea to this point, no one had tried to make of the world such a desolate stable, where the kicking, respected Houyhnhms would have the ascendancy. He was a Pharisee and did himself justice for never having eaten the bitter hay of this royal rack: at the age of reason he had renounced, with disgust, his part in the sovereignty and never had a ballot soil his aristocratic fingers. This was due less to his early education than to subsequent and personal reflections, for modern degeneration accepts accomplished facts, and all that is left are single, inward and useless protests.
As he descended the Boulevard Saint-Michel, his step fell into an idle rhythm with the pace of the strollers. He looked around him and judged that no superior essence emanated from this other environment: here was the same evaporation of unconsciousness. Below, just as alongside and above, by devious ways people sought happiness, without suspecting, according to Pastor Manders, that it is open rebellion to seek happiness in this life. The social right was another political illusion equally chimerical. On this subject Herbert decided to read some Hobbes, at the first opportunity.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.