Chapter 15: The Carnal Hour

“And a thousand others, who never knew
what it was to have a soul...; yet, sir,
these men adorned society.”
Poe: Bon-Bon.

Once in the street, Hubert saw the ardent eyes of an invisible spectre glaring at him through the gloom—two terrible, imperious and inciting eyes. He recognized them and an oppressiveness crushed him. They were the eyes of Lust.

“For women, the prowling phantom is called Sin—it is a male; for men it is the female Lust. Ah! yes, I recognize her. She is a companion of childhood. She is ingenious, She used to strum ballads to the moon on my adolescent nerves. Today, she drums the roundelay of the Lupanars on the back of my neck. With one stroke she wishes to degrade the lover and the love. I will betake myself to vile titillations and she whom I love will be the cause.”

He reflected: a voluptuous dream brought on, from earliest adolescence, by the contemplation of the madonna’s eyes; since that time, the association had been constant, often inexorable: he had to obey or suffer absolute insomnia, or else race like a noctambulist towards a retreating prey. In the last case, the winning talks at street corners little by little dissolved desire in the slow fire of disgust. But how terrible these nights when the shame of his obscene vagabondage overwhelmed him with horror!

Yet he did not want to go and knock, like an obsessed bourgeois, like clerks on paydays, at the latticed door of some sordid house, leading his idealism to promiscuous divans and submitting his body to the least withered bidder! He hesitated between a quite proper harem nearby, and the semblances of soothing intrigue: he did not despise a reciprocal choice that had the appearance of being voluntary, the excuse of a desire that fixed on this one rather than on the other, public preliminaries which are cleansed of all shame by the complicity of the environment—the Bal Bullier, for example, or the Folies-Bergère. By making a rapid decision and calling a carriage, he could reach one of those slave markets before closing time. Upon reflection, he abandoned the Bullier: the jades of this place were enjoying a rest. As for the other exhibition, it was quite far away.

Undecided, he grew composed. For a moment he hoped to have freed himself cheaply, but the eyes, the implacable eyes reappeared—obscene stars that would cease and vanish only at the clandestine house.

It was in a little street near the Saint-Sulpice market.

There, lived a woman whose eyes, adequate for his youthful dreams, had formerly captivated him—formerly, when he was about twenty—and no reasoned disgust dulled the senses. Each time his carnal obsessions evoked this pleasant memory he believed, with an animal waywardness, that he would find the same woman and the same contentment.

Since she did not surrender to the first importunate caller, having the coquetry of a certain amorous fastidiousness, one often found her either alone or able, under the pretext of a jealous protector, to turn out the guest of the evening, if the newcomer pleased her more.

“So this,” reflected Entragues, “is the end? Honest women know quite well to what promiscuities they are exposed by their refusals; they should yield for the sake of dignity, at least. They should be taught this: it would be one of the useful chapters in the courses of love which old women could teach so well! But if they should yield, then farewell to the pleasant duels of vanity.”