Very Woman (Sixtine): a Cerebral Novel
Copyright© 2024 by Remy de Gourmont
Chapter 28: The Esthetic Thrill
“Le style est inviolable.”
Ernest Hello.
“Besides, here is the spring, it will enliven me. You will see,” said the actor, with a malicious smile. “You will see. I do not detest the country, once in a while. It inspires fresh ideas that sometimes are lucrative. It is like the theater...”
“The public seems uneasy,” said Sixtine. “One would swear that it does not understand.”
“While waiting to be shocked. It is permissible to curse gold, not to scorn it. Would you,” continued Hubert, “incite men to the mockery of the secret quintessence of their ideal? To scoff at lucre in the theater is to blaspheme God in a church.”
“Oh! my manner, Monsieur,” said the actress, “never signifies anything...”
This was taken by Sixtine almost as a personal allusion. She would have liked to hear herself addressed in a phrase which permitted such a reply. All the hypocrisy imposed on women protected in syllables against the stupidity of men who never guess. When she heard:
“ ... Yes ... I believe you have some illusions concerning my true nature...”
Her hands came together in a gesture of applause. She, too, was misunderstood; she felt herself capable of using a similar phrase. The audience murmured.
“You are mistaken,” she told Hubert. “Here is sympathy, if these sounds are, as I believe, a mark of indignation against the impudent foolishness of this man.”
“I think,” said Hubert, “that they are growing angry against the boldness of the woman. Visibly before them, she lies to her duty which is to lie and go noiselessly about her love affairs.”
“ ... Be honest and rich, the rest is vanity...”
“There is an unbending,” remarked Hubert. “This last has been received as a flattery. They now believe she is going to reproach him because she has only been honest and rich, thanks to herself. There! that’s right. This is fine, this is invigorating! Ah! ah!”
“I told you of admirable things of the earth, I told you of the true reality, that which you must choose...”
“Sixtine leaned forward, drawn by the magnetism of the noble speech, then fell back in her seat, dreamy, her fingers trembling, feeling the imperious desire of a hand to envelop her hand. Without moving her head, she turned her eyes towards Hubert: he was listening, less moved than fascinated.
“I want to live! Do you understand, madman that you are! ... I thirst after serious things! I want to breathe the full air of the sky!”
The same esthetic thrill shook them at the same instant: their breath came faster, they had grown pale; their lips opened as for silent exclamations.
The electric current which descended down their spines with rapid waves stirred their limb, and at last, unconsciously attracted to each other, they were forced to let their hands obey the attraction of the fluids.
Then, the intensity of the emotional excitement doubled: their beings floated in a warm and caressing eddy, under the delicious downpour of a water-fall warmed by a mysterious sun, and the corporeal flowers of sensuality burned to open.
They listened, without letting a syllable of the magic prose escape their ears, and they dreamed while listening; they forgot “the omnipotence of inferior minds;” they deified each other, they ascended, supple and light, the mystic steps, summoned now by the illusion of a very pure and very expanding air at the summit of a narrow mountain above the clouds. Indeed, they had, “agitated minds,” as the male character of the piece had so well said; they said to the whole world: “Your joys are not my joys;” all that stirred outside of them, all things that agitated below their flight were quite truly “infantile and noxious,” in the silence they were in rapport with their “old friend”; they cried aloud to life: “It is no longer a question of all this! Adieu!...”
And at the end, when they went down with the curtain’s fall to the stupefied room, the same stifled cry issued from their mouths, the cry of Hamlet:
“Horrible! Horrible! Horrible!”
Entragues, swept away by a movement of anger, so little in accord with his usual character, thus challenged a man who was hissing:
“Monsieur, you are a cur!”
As the rascal contented himself with shrugging his shoulders, in this way taking his key away, Entragues felt sadness and shame welling within him in place of anger.
“We will protest,” said Sixtine, “by foregoing the rest of the play.”
It was nine o’clock. Some persons, having been spared the rise of the curtain, were strolling under the Odéon galleries, looking at the latest novels: Hubert recognized several eminent critics and thought he could read, underneath the ribbon of their hats, the repetition of the naive avowal Collé made in his Journal: “I undertake to criticize plays because I cannot write any myself.” They spoke of the revival of the little machine, and one of them deemed, in a simple and new style, that “the need of it did not perhaps make itself very acutely perceived.” This irony was relished.
“We shall go on foot,” said Sixtine.
The weather was humid, but mild. They walked through little dark streets, grazed by occasional passersby, in silence.
She asked him if he personally knew the author of this piece so unlike the things ordinarily heard at the theater.
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