The Human Comedy (18 page)

But at the time of these events those glittering salons may still have held a handful of philosophers who, taking an ice or a sorbet, or setting their empty punch glass on a sideboard, quietly remarked to each other, “I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that these people are felons. That old man, always hidden away, appearing only at equinoxes or solstices, seems to me the very image of a murderer . . .”

“Or a swindler . . .”

“It’s much the same thing. Sometimes it’s far worse to kill a man’s fortune than to kill the man himself.”

“Monsieur, I placed a bet of twenty louis, I have forty coming to me.”

“But, monsieur, there are only thirty left on the table.”

“Very uneven crowd in this place. You daren’t gamble here.”

“It’s true. Say, soon six months since we last saw the Spirit. Do you believe it’s a living being?”

“Heh heh, at the very most . . .”

These last words were spoken in my vicinity by strangers who wandered off just as I was summing up my reflections in one final thought, black mingled with white, life with death. No less than my eyes, my fevered imagination contemplated by turns the party, its splendor now at a peak, and the dark tableau of the gardens. I know not how long I meditated on those two sides of the human coin; in any case, I was abruptly awoken by a young woman’s stifled laughter. The image that then offered itself to my gaze left me dumbstruck. By an extraordinary caprice of nature, the semi-funereal fantasy that was twisting and turning in my mind had suddenly broken free: It was standing before me, personified, alive, burst like Minerva from Jupiter’s brow, full-grown and strong, it was at once one hundred years old and twenty-two, it was living and dead. Escaped from his room like a madman from his cell, the old man must have discreetly taken cover behind a row of guests raptly listening as Marianina sang the last notes of the cavatina from
Tancredi
. He might almost have appeared from below the floor, hoisted by some theatrical mechanism. Motionless and somber, he stood for a moment watching the festivities, whose murmur had no doubt faintly reached his ears. He stared all around him, almost like a sleepwalker, his attention so fixed on the scene that he stood in the heart of the crowd without seeing the crowd. He had materialized unannounced beside one of Paris’s most breathtaking creatures, an elegant young dancer, a woman of delicate physique, with one of those faces as fresh as a child’s, white and pink, and so slight, so transparent, that a man’s gaze might almost run straight through it, as the rays of the sun penetrate a pristine pane of glass. There they stood before me, the two of them, together, united, so close each to the other that the stranger brushed against both her gauzy dress and her garlands of flowers, both her slightly crimped hair and her loose, floating sash.

I had brought this young woman to Madame de Lanty’s ball. As this was her first visit to that house, I forgave her her stifled laugh, but I silenced her with a curt and imperious sign, ordering her to show some respect for her neighbor. She sat down nearby me. The old man would not be parted from that delectable creature, to whom he had capriciously attached himself with the mute, seemingly gratuitous obstinacy to which the aged are prone, in which they are very like children. He was forced to pull up a folding chair to sit near the young lady. He moved with the mechanical awkwardness of a paralytic, sluggish and tentative. He sat down slowly, cautiously, mumbling a few unintelligible words. His broken voice was like the sound of a stone falling into a well. The young lady gave my hand a powerful squeeze, as if she were standing terrified atop a high precipice, and she shivered when the old man noted her stare and turned toward her two eyes without warmth, two murky eyes comparable only to dulled nacre.

“I’m afraid,” she murmured into my ear.

“No need to whisper,” I answered. “He’s very hard of hearing.”

“You know him, then?”

“Yes.”

With this she found the courage to make a brief study of that creature with no name in our human tongues, form without substance, being without life, or life without will. She had fallen under the spell of the tremulous curiosity that compels women to seek out dangerous sensations, to gaze on chained tigers, to peer at boas, protected by only the most tinglingly tenuous barrier. The old man was stooped like a day laborer, but it was nonetheless plain that he had once been of average height. His excessive thinness and delicate limbs proved that his build had always been slight. His black silk breeches fluttered around his fleshless thighs, draping like a slack sail. An anatomist would immediately have recognized the symptoms of a dreadful consumption on seeing the withered legs that supported that strange body. They looked in every way like two crossed bones on a gravestone. An overpowering horror at the fate that awaits us all gripped the heart on discovering the ravages decrepitude had wrought on that fragile machine. The stranger wore a white waistcoat, embroidered in gold, as was once the fashion, and his linens were dazzlingly white. A rather dingy jabot of English lace, whose opulence a queen would have envied, made yellow ruffles on his breast, but on him that lace was more rag than ornament. At the center of the jabot, a diamond of incalculable price blazed like the sun. That outmoded flourish, that flagrant, tasteless treasure set off the bizarre creature’s face all the more. The frame harmonized with the portrait. His dark face was angular and rutted every which way. His chin was hollow; his temples were hollow; his eyes were deep-set in yellowed orbits. His jawbones, sharply defined by an emaciation beyond words, created cavities in the middle of each cheek. Unevenly illuminated, these depressions produced curious patterns of shadow and light that stripped his countenance of its last sameness with the human face. On top of all this, the passing years had so strongly glued that face’s fine yellow skin to its bones that it was covered by a multitude of wrinkles, some circular, like the ripples of water disturbed by a child’s pebble, some in the form of an asterisk, like a crack in a window, but all of them as deep and dense as the pages of a closed book. There are aged men who bring us face-to-face with more hideous portraits, but above all else, it was his glistening rouge and white powder that made the specter before us seem an artificial creation. Under the lamplight, the eyebrows of his mask had a sheen that revealed a careful application of paint. Happily for the eye, saddened at the sight of such ruination, his cadaverous skull was concealed beneath a blond wig whose countless curls bore witness to an exceptional vanity. Indeed, the feminine coquetry of this phantasmagorical creature was rather overtly declared by the gold hoops that hung from his ears, by the rings whose fine stones gleamed on his ossified fingers, and by a watch chain that glimmered like the gems of a necklace on a woman’s throat. Finally, the blue-tinged lips of this sort of Japanese idol were fixed in an unwavering smile, an implacable, mocking smile not unlike a skull’s. Silent, still as a statue, he exuded the musky odor of old gowns exhumed from a duchess’s wardrobe by her heirs in the course of an inventory. If he turned his eyes toward the assembled guests, the movement of those lifeless orbs seemed the work of some hidden artifice, and when those eyes fell still, he who examined them soon doubted they had ever moved. To see, beside these human ruins, a young woman whose neck, arms, and throat were naked and white; whose rounded forms, blooming with beauty, whose hair, lush and vital above an alabaster forehead, inspired love; whose eyes did not receive the light but disseminated it; who was silken and fresh; whose airy curls and perfumed breath seemed too heavy, too hard, too powerful for that shadow, for that man of dust—ah! it truly was life and death, my thought incarnate, an imaginary arabesque, a chimera, half hideous but divinely feminine about the bust.

“And yet there is no lack of such marriages in society,” I said to myself.

“He smells of the graveyard,” cried the young woman in horror, nestling against me as if seeking assurance of my protection, her violent tremors conveying the depth of her fear. “He’s horrible! I can’t stay here a moment longer. If I look at him again, I’ll be sure death itself has come for me. But is he alive?”

She laid one hand on the phenomenon, with that special boldness women derive from the vehemence of their desires; but all at once a cold sweat broke from her pores, for the moment she touched the old man, she heard a rattling cry. That grating voice, if voice it was, had escaped from an almost perfectly dry gullet. This croak was quickly followed by a small childlike cough, violent and distinctive in its sound. Hearing that cough, Marianina, Filippo, and Madame de Lanty turned to look at us with furious eyes. The young woman would gladly have been at the bottom of the Seine. She seized my arm and pulled me away toward a boudoir. Men and women alike, everyone stepped aside to make way for us. At the far end of the reception rooms, we entered a small semicircular chamber. My companion dropped onto a divan, quivering with terror, unsure where she was.

“Madame, you are mad,” I told her.

“But,” she replied, after a moment of silence that I spent admiring her, “is it my fault? Why does Madame de Lanty let ghosts wander at liberty in her home?”

“Come now,” I said, “you’re behaving like those other fools. You take a little old man for a specter.”

“Be quiet,” she shot back, with that scornful, imperious air women so expertly adopt when they want to be right. “What a wonderful boudoir!” she cried, looking around her. “Blue satin looks so lovely on a wall. How fresh it is! Ah, what a fine painting!” she added, standing up and approaching a magnificently framed canvas.

We stood for a moment lost in contemplation of that marvel, the work of some supernatural paintbrush, it seemed, depicting Adonis reclining on the skin of a lion. Softened by an alabaster shade, the ceiling lamp lit the canvas with a gentle glow that brought out all its beauty.

“Can such a perfect creature exist?” she asked me, once she had studied the exquisite grace of his body, his pose, his coloring, his hair—in short, everything—with a sweetly approving smile.

“He’s too beautiful for a man,” she added, subjecting him to the same minute scrutiny she would have given a female rival.

Oh, how deeply did I then feel the very pangs of jealousy that a poet had fruitlessly struggled to make me believe in—a jealousy of engravings, of paintings, of statues, of that exaggerated human beauty an artist creates, obeying a doctrine that demands that all things be idealized!

“It’s a portrait,” I told her, “from the talented hand of Joseph-Marie Vien. But that great painter never saw the original, and your admiration will perhaps be less fervid when you learn that the model for this nude was a statue of a woman.”

“But who is it?”

I hesitated.

“I want to know,” she added, sharply.

“I believe,” I told her, “that this Adonis represents a . . . a . . . a relative of Madame de Lanty.”

To my chagrin, I saw her utterly rapt in her admiration of that figure. She sat down in silence. I took my place beside her and clasped her hand, and she never so much as noticed! Forgotten for a portrait! Just then the silence was broken by the delicate sound of a rustling gown and a woman’s footfalls. Young Marianina came in, her innocent expression enhancing her radiant beauty even more than her natural elegance or the freshness of her gown and makeup. She walked slowly, one arm encircling, with maternal attentiveness and filial solicitude, that specter in human garb who had driven us from the music room, leading him, watching him with a sort of apprehension as he slowly set down his unsteady feet, one after the other. At last they made their laborious way to a door concealed in the wall. Marianina knocked gently. Immediately, as if by magic, a tall wiry man, a sort of household spirit, appeared in the doorway. Before entrusting the old man to this mysterious guardian, the child respectfully kissed that walking corpse, and in her chaste caress was a hint of that winsome flirtatiousness whose secret is known to only a few privileged women.

“
Addio, addio!
” she said, with the prettiest inflections of her young voice.

She even added an admirably skillful melisma to the last syllable, but quietly and as if seeking to portray the effusions of her heart by a poetic expression. The old man stood on the threshold of that secret room, suddenly struck by some memory. In the deep silence that enveloped us, we could hear a heavy sigh escaping his breast; he pulled off the finest of the rings burdening his skeletal fingers and placed it in Marianina’s bosom. The girl broke into a laugh, took out the ring, slipped it over a gloved finger, and tripped off toward the salon, where the first measures of a contra dance were playing. She caught sight of us.

“Ah! You were here!” she said, blushing.

She stared at us inquiringly, then ran off to her partner with all the lighthearted exuberance of her age.

“What does this mean?” my young friend asked me. “Is he her husband? I must be dreaming. Where am I?”

“You!” I answered. “You, madame, who are so full of feeling, you who, so perfectly understanding the most rarefied emotions, can cultivate the most fragile sentiments in a man’s heart without depleting it, without breaking it on the first day, you who take pity on all heartache, you who combine the wit of a Parisienne with a passionate soul worthy of Italy or Spain—”

She could hear the vexed sarcasm underlying my words; seeming to pay it no mind, she interrupted me: “Oh! You’re remaking me to suit your own tastes. A strange sort of tyranny that is! You want me to be something other than
me
.”

“Oh! I want nothing,” I cried, crushed by her stern manner. “Is it at least true that you like hearing tales of the lively passions aroused in our hearts by the ravishing women of the south?”

“It is. What of it?”

“Well, in that case I shall come to you tomorrow night around nine o’clock, and I will lay bare this entire mystery.”

“No,” she answered defiantly, “I want to know now.”

“You haven’t yet given me the right to obey you when you say ‘I want.’”