The Human Comedy (22 page)

He woke with the sun, whose pitiless rays were falling directly on the granite and generating an unbearable heat. Now, our man from Provence had had the poor judgment to place himself on the other side from the shade projected by the verdant and majestic tops of the palm trees . . . He looked at those solitary trees and shivered! They reminded him of the elegant capitals, crowned with the long leaves, that distinguish the Saracen columns of the Arles cathedral. But after counting the palms, he cast his glance around him and felt the most terrifying despair sink deep into his soul. He saw a limitless ocean. The blackened sand of the desert extended unbroken in every direction, and it glittered like a steel blade struck by harsh light. He did not know whether this was a sea of ice or of lakes smooth as a mirror. Borne on waves, a mist of fire whirled above this moving earth. The sky was an Oriental burst of desolate purity, for it left nothing to the imagination. Sky and earth were on fire. The silence was frightening in its savage and terrible majesty. The immensity of the infinite pressed on the soul from all sides: not a cloud in the sky, not a breath of air, no undulation in the depths of the sand that shifted in small, skittering waves on the surface. Finally, the horizon ended like a sea in good weather, at a line of light as slender as the edge of a sword. The man from Provence squeezed the trunk of one of the palm trees as if it were the body of a friend; then, in the shelter of the straight, spindly shade that the tree inscribed on the granite, he wept, sitting and resting there, deeply sad as he contemplated the implacable scene that lay before him. He cried out to test his solitude. His voice, lost in the crevices of the heights, projected a thin sound into the distance that found no echo; the echo was in his heart: He was twenty-two years old, he loaded his rifle.

“There’ll always be time enough!” he said to himself, laying the weapon of his liberation on the ground.

Looking in turn at the black and the blue spaces around him, the soldier dreamed of France. He caught the delightful scent of Parisian rivulets, he remembered the cities he had passed through, the faces of his comrades, and the most trivial circumstances of his life. And his southern imagination soon conjured the stones of his dear Provence in the play of heat that undulated above the extended sheet of the desert. Fearing all the dangers of this cruel mirage, he went down the other side of the hill he had climbed the day before. He felt great joy in discovering a kind of grotto naturally carved into the gigantic crags of granite that formed the base of this small peak. The remains of a mat told him that this refuge had already been inhabited. Then, several feet farther on, he saw palm trees laden with dates. The instinct that attaches us to life awoke in his heart. He hoped to live long enough for the passage of some Maghrebis, or perhaps indeed he would soon hear the noise of cannon; for just now Bonaparte was marching through Egypt.

Revived by this thought, the Frenchman whacked down several clusters of ripe dates whose weight seemed to bend the date palm’s branches, and as he sampled this unanticipated manna he was certain that the grotto’s inhabitant had cultivated the palm trees. The delicious, cool flesh of the date provided clear evidence of his predecessor’s labors. The man from Provence shifted unthinkingly from dark despair to an almost mad joy. He climbed back up to the top of the hill and busied himself for the rest of the day cutting down one of the infertile palm trees that had provided him with a roof the previous night. A vague memory made him think of the animals of the desert, and foreseeing that they might come to drink at the watering hole lost in the sands that appeared at the base of the rocky outcropping, he resolved to guard against their visits by putting a barrier at the door of his hermitage. Despite his enthusiasm, despite the strength he drew from his fear of being devoured as he slept, he found it impossible to cut the palm tree into several pieces in the course of the day, but he succeeded in felling it.

When toward evening this king of the desert finally fell, the noise of its collapse echoed in the distance, like a groan uttered by the solitude. The soldier shivered as if he had heard some voice announcing disaster. But like an heir who does not grieve for long at a parent’s death, he stripped the fine tree of the long, broad green leaves that define its poetic decoration and used them to repair the mat on which he would sleep. Worn out by the heat and his labors, he slept under the red walls of his damp grotto.

In the middle of the night his sleep was disturbed by an extraordinary noise. He sat up, and in the deep silence he recognized the sound of something breathing with a savage energy that could not belong to a human creature. A deep fear made even greater by the darkness, by the silence, and by the fancies of his sudden awakening chilled his heart. He barely even felt his scalp crawl when his dilated pupils glimpsed in the darkness two faint yellow beams. At first he attributed these lights to some reflection of his own eyes, but soon the vivid brightness of the night helped him by degrees to distinguish objects within the grotto, and he perceived an enormous animal lying two steps away from him. Was it a lion, a tiger, or a crocodile? The man from Provence did not have enough education to know in what subspecies to place his enemy, but his fright was all the more violent since his ignorance caused him to assume all these disasters at once. He endured the cruel torture of hearing, of grasping the irregularities of this breathing without losing any of its nuances, and without daring to make the slightest movement. An odor as strong as a fox’s breath but more penetrating, more serious, we might say, filled the grotto, and when the man from Provence had taken it in with his nose, his terror was at its height, but he could no longer doubt the existence of the terrifying companion whose royal lair served as his bivouac.

Soon the rays of the moon sailing toward the horizon lit up the den and the subtly gleaming skin of a spotted panther. This royal Egyptian beast was sleeping rolled over like a large dog, peaceful possessor of a sumptuous nook at the door of a grand house. Its eyes opened for a moment, then closed again. It had its face turned toward the Frenchman. A thousand jumbled thoughts passed through the soul of the panther’s prisoner. At first he wanted to kill it with a rifle shot, but he saw that there was not enough space between them to aim properly—the barrel would have extended beyond the animal. And what if he were to wake it up? This hypothesis stopped him in his tracks. Listening to the beating of his heart in the silence, he cursed the pounding pulsations of his blood, dreading to disturb the sleep that allowed him to find a solution to his advantage. He put his hand twice on his scimitar, planning to cut off his enemy’s head, but the difficulty of cutting through such a tough hide forced him to give up his bold project. “Fail to kill it? Surely that would be a death sentence,” he thought. He preferred the odds of combat and resolved to wait for daylight. And daylight was not long in coming. The Frenchman then was able to examine the panther; its muzzle was tinged with blood. “She’s had a good meal!” he thought, without worrying whether the feast had been one of human flesh. “She won’t be hungry when she wakes up.”

It was a female. The fur of the white belly and thighs glimmered. Several little velvety spots formed pretty bracelets around the paws. The muscular tail was also white but tipped with black rings. The upper part of the coat, yellow as matte gold but very smooth and soft, bore those characteristic spots shaped like roses that distinguished panthers from other kinds of
Felis.
This calm and formidable hostess purred in a pose as graceful as that of a cat reclining on the cushion of an ottoman. Her bloody paws, twitching and well armed, lay beneath her head, whose sparse, straight whiskers protruded like silver wires. If she had been in a cage, the man from Provence would surely have admired the grace of this beast and the vigorous contrasts of strong colors that gave her
simarre
an imperial splendor, but just now he felt his viewing disturbed by its ominous aspect.

The panther’s presence, even asleep, made him experience the effect produced by the hypnotic eyes of a snake on, they say, a nightingale. The soldier’s courage failed for a moment before this danger, although he would surely have been exalted facing cannon spewing a hail of shot. However, an intrepid thought blossomed in his soul and halted at its source the cold sweat running down his forehead. Acting like men whom misfortune has pushed to the end of their rope, challenging death to do its worst, he saw a tragedy in this adventure without being conscious of it, and resolved to play his role with honor, even to the final scene.

“The day before yesterday, perhaps the Arabs would have killed me,” he said to himself. Considering himself a dead man already, he bravely waited with restless curiosity for his enemy to awake. When the sun appeared, the panther silently opened her eyes; then she violently extended her paws, as if to loosen them up and dissipate any cramps. At last she yawned, displaying the fearsome array of her teeth and her grooved tongue, as hard as a grater. “She’s like a little mistress!” thought the Frenchman, seeing her rolling around and making the gentlest, most flirtatious movements. She licked the blood that stained her paws, wiped her muzzle, and scratched her head with repeated gestures full of delicacy. “Good! Make your toilette,” the Frenchman thought to himself, recovering his cheer by summoning courage. “We’ll wish each other good morning.” And he grabbed the short dagger he had taken from the Maghrebis.

Just then the panther turned her head toward the Frenchman and stared at him without moving. The rigidity of those metallic eyes and their unbearable clarity made the man from Provence shiver, especially when the beast walked toward him. But he gazed at her caressingly and steadily, as if attempting to exert his own animal magnetism, and let her come near him; then, with a movement as gentle, as amorous as if he had wanted to caress the prettiest woman, he passed his hand over her entire body, from head to tail, using his nails to scratch the flexible vertebrae that ran the length of the panther’s yellow back. The beast voluptuously raised her tail, her eyes softened, and when the Frenchman completed this self-interested petting for the third time, she made one of those purring noises by which our cats express their pleasure. But this murmur came from a gullet so powerful and so deep that it sounded in the grotto like the last drones of a church organ. The man from Provence, understanding the importance of his caresses, redoubled his efforts to stun and stupefy this imperious courtesan. When he felt certain of extinguishing his capricious companion’s ferocity, remembering that her hunger had been so fortunately satisfied the evening before, he rose to leave the grotto. The panther let him go, but when he had climbed the hill, she leaped with the lightness of monkeys jumping from branch to branch and came to rub herself against the soldier’s legs, curving her back like a cat. Then, looking at her guest with an eye whose brightness had become less rigid, she uttered a wild call, which naturalists compare to the noise of a saw.

“How demanding she is!” cried the Frenchman, smiling. He tried to play with her ears, caress her belly, and scratch her head hard with his nails. And seeing his success, he tickled her skull with the point of his dagger, looking for the moment to kill her. But the hardness of the bones made him tremble at the possibility of failure.

The sultana of the desert noted with approval her slave’s talents by raising her head, stretching out her neck, marking her intoxication by her repose. The Frenchman suddenly thought that in order to kill this savage princess in one blow, he would have to stab her in the throat, and he raised his blade just as the panther, no doubt sated with this play, lay down graciously at his feet, giving him looks now and then which, despite an inborn rigidity, displayed something like benevolence. The poor man from Provence ate his dates, leaning against one of the palm trees, but he glanced inquiringly at the surrounding desert in every direction, searching for liberators, and at his terrifying mate, keeping an eye on her uncertain clemency. The panther looked at the place where the date pits were falling every time he threw one of them, and then her eyes expressed a skeptic’s suspicion. She examined the Frenchman with a calculating caution that concluded in his favor, for when he had finished his meager meal she licked the soles of his shoes, and with her rough, strong tongue miraculously cleaned the encrusted dust from their creases.

“But when she gets hungry?” thought the Provençal soldier. Although this idea caused him a shiver of fear, he began out of curiosity to measure the proportions of the panther, certainly one of the most beautiful examples of the species, for she was three feet high and four feet long, not counting her tail. This powerful weapon, thick around as a gourd, was nearly three feet long. Her head, as large as the head of a lioness, was distinguished by a rare expression of refinement; a tiger’s cold cruelty was dominant, of course, but there was also a vague resemblance to the facial features of a cunning woman. Just now the face of this solitary queen revealed something like Nero’s drunken gaiety: She had quenched her thirst for blood and wanted to play. The soldier tried to come and go, and the panther let him move freely, content to follow him with her eyes, less like a faithful dog than like a large angora cat made restless by everything, even her master’s movements. When he returned, he noticed the remains of his horse next to the fountain, where the panther had dragged the cadaver. Around two-thirds of it had been devoured. This spectacle reassured the Frenchman. It was easy to explain the panther’s absence and the respect she had shown him while he slept.

This first happiness emboldened him to attempt the future: He conceived the mad hope of getting on well with the panther all that day, engaging every means to win her over and ingratiate himself. He came near her once more and had the inexpressible happiness of seeing her wave her tail with a subtle movement. So he sat near her without fear and they began to play together. He took her paws, her muzzle, he twisted her ears, rolled her onto her back, and scratched her warm, silky flanks hard. She participated willingly, and when the soldier tried to smooth the fur of her paws, she carefully retracted her claws, curved like steel blades. The Frenchman, who kept one hand on his dagger, was still of a mind to plunge it into the overly trusting belly of the panther, but he was afraid of being instantly strangled in her last wild convulsion. And besides, his heart filled with a kind of remorse that begged him to respect a harmless creature. He felt he had found a friend in this boundless desert. Unbidden thoughts came to him of his first mistress, whom he had called ironically by the nickname “Mignonne” because she was so violently jealous that as long as their passion lasted, he was afraid of the knife with which she used to threaten him. This memory of his youth prompted him to try and impose the name on the young pantheress, whose agility, grace, and softness he now admired less fearfully.