Very Woman (Sixtine): a Cerebral Novel
Copyright© 2024 by Remy de Gourmont
Chapter 38: Pride
“ ... Voire mesme que si un de nos confraires
se monstroit attaché à quelque chose,
qu’il en soit aussistost privé...”
Règle de S. Benoist, ch. xxxviii.
When Azélia presented herself the next morning, her face bearing the marks of tears and trouble, for “she was now sure that Madame had been murdered; never had Madame gone away so long without notifying her,” Entragues was able to reassure her:
“Madame is at Nice, in the Grand Hôtel des Deux-Mondes. She arrived there yesterday evening, is in splendid health and finds that the sea is blue, so blue! And the palms and the flowers! Everything is fragrant. Never before has she felt how sweet life is!”
“So Monsieur has received a telegram. Ah! good. But to leave without telling me! If Madame writes, I shall communicate with Monsieur, for Madame loves Monsieur very much.”
“Yes, we are, as they say, a pair of friends.”
A day passed, then another, and Hubert grew really bored. It was the sensation of emptiness usually felt by all sensitive creatures in like occurrences.
The light had fled from him; he moved in deserts of dark expanses.
No distraction is possible, since the only being from whom pleasure could come has withdrawn from the visual field, since the generating soul of all joy has fled, since the beams have perished, since the night of absence reigns.
He could have lived near her, removed by a distance of several streets, without any great need of visiting. The possibility of a meeting, the certainty of a welcome sufficed for the vitality of his desires. Here rises the tyranny of the Spirit of Contradiction and its immutable disdain for the present hour. Moralists have always quarreled with man on this matter: “You do not know how to enjoy the fugitive minute.” No, but how go about it, since it would be necessary that the fugitive minute suspend its flight, it would be necessary that it exist. Now, it is a vulgar idea that only the past or the future has an appearance of objectivity: the moment never comes to pass.
Hubert had not even the liberty for such elementary deductions. He suffered like an exile, a pure suffering and with a fixed idea. Jealousy in no way troubled its undulations: it was the unique sensation of the lost object. His joy, fallen into the sea, was lying under moving waves; with each wave the diamond was engulfed in the sands more deeply, and he could not yet anticipate the tempest which would throw it on the surface, tossing it to the strand among the eternal pebbles.
Ah! the solitary dream house among the dunes had indeed fallen to his lot suddenly and too soon. He had not had time to arrange his parcels, to bring the least illusion—more bare of spiritual comfort than a hermit in the desert—of lust.
Such a state of soul brought about this reaction: “I am perhaps deceived in the value of these coincidences. Well, I must not despair.”
He delighted in this self-contempt for several hours, inhaling his baseness and wallowing in it as in warm mire. Yet there were instants of respite, and in the evening he walked tranquilly, with a normal step, towards the dwelling of the absent one, but restless as a man who is expected.
Azélia opened the door before he rang.
“Monsieur! ah! just look!”
And she drew a letter from her dress.
“Madame has written me, and this is for you.”
The white envelope with the oblique water-marks bore no writing.
“This is prudence!”
At the pressure of his fingers, he felt a very thin English onion-skin paper within.
“She has written me a volume here. Ah! Prolixity! Would a word not have sufficed?—Adieu!”
Hubert was very calm as he received this sentence of death, and his indifference, perfectly acted, although for himself, scandalized the good Azélia.
She believed in kisses, thought that he would press the object to his heart, ejaculating some words of tenderness, as in the romances and chromos, which are painted romances.
With a “thank you!” he placed the letter in his pocket and, pushing a door open, entered the little room in whose corners his dying illusions still played, like ironic dryads, careless of the approaching agony.
“Moriuntur ridendo.”
A light voiceless laugh came from him:
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