The Bacchantes, page 6
“I swear.”
The romantic side of the adventure amused him, and something told him that he would have need of this pretty woman some day, who was so good and kind to him.
When the meal was finished they went out together and she took him to a secluded redoubt three hundred meters away, locked with a key, built into the wall of the grounds, opening internally to the property and externally into a clump of trees. To that single, spacious and elegantly furnished room, where there was electricity, a telephone, a small bookcase, a large divan and an alcove forming a dressing-room, Ariana retired when she felt the need to be alone—which happened often. No one, including Ignacio, was to disturb her there; it was an absolute rule.
“There are only two keys to this place. Here’s one. Keep the second. Unlock the exterior door.”
He obeyed. All went well. The disposition of the little wood and its dense undergrowth was such that one could, even in broad daylight, go in and out without being seen—all the more so after nightfall. The beauty and the rustic were no longer merely friends; they were now accomplices.
They separated.
Ariana went back to the château alone. In the distance, the guard-dogs were barking. She cleared the plates and cutlery from the table, checked the doors and went to bed. An hour later, the servants came back, arguing in low voices. After reading for a while, she became drowsy.
She was more completely detached from her husband, in spite of his generosity and passion for her, than she had ever been. She heard him come back in and approach her bed; she sensed that he was looking at her tenderly, but did not open her eyes. Finally, he put out the electric light and withdrew on tiptoe.
The next morning he came to find her and gave her a wad of thousand-franc banknotes, for the running of the house. He had withdrawn a million the day before from the bank where it was deposited, for rumors of war were continuing to circulate, and he was afraid, with good reason, of the deceptiveness of the so-called moratorium. The artistic aristocrat was both a spendthrift and skilled in business affairs.
Not without pride, he said to his wife: “Can you imagine that yesterday, on the train, I ran into Ségétan, who asked my advice about the matter of his interests, in the present harsh circumstances. I wouldn’t be astonished if he had the intention of buying and making good use of Les Arges farm, or if he married the beautiful Tullie. He’s a very extraordinary individual, and, in spite of his dyonisiac theories, science is everything to him.”
“Don’t you believe it! Women count for a great deal to him, physically speaking, and he has a way of looking at you, under the stars, and of taking hold of the arms or shoulders of one or other of them, that is unmistakable.”
“Is he paying court to you?” asked Ignacio, already enticed and drawing the lovely star toward him with a feverish hand.
She pulled away.
“One can’t call that paying court. He burns you with his incessant desire, which he carries around like a pocket torch. One senses that he’s madly in love with Tullie, and yet capable of slipping into you in five seconds, if the fancy takes him.”
“He must be as crazy as you are, the old satyr. You know his thesis: woman’s beauty is the mother of discovery. Abbé Parroy says that he’s a pagan; personally, I think he’s a Platonist. But he’s never asked you to show yourself to him like the woman with the parakeet?”
“Not yet, but if you want me to suggest the idea to him.…”
The man’s face changed, and he made a movement. She ran away toward the staircase. He pursued her. She reached her bedroom, plunged into it and drew the bolt. He shook the door like a great ape, begging and threatening, but, still preoccupied by the image of Calvat, she remained mute and insensitive. After a few minutes, she heard footsteps drawing away.
It was then that she wondered, with a certain anxiety, whether the experiments with the waves of the past might not be throwing everyone’s minds into confusion, and whether Jean, who saw the scientist as a caster of spells, might not be right.
There are seductive monsters. Was the Master of Masters one of them?
* * * *
Some time after that, Ségétan, who had gone out for a walk in order to meditate—walking was a fecund source of inspiration for him—perceived the delightful silhouette of a woman coming toward him around the corner of the Quatrebois road, across the sunlit plain. It was Mélanie Dévonet.
On seeing him, the latter shivered. Her delicate bronzed face with the expressive eyes was framed by a flexible straw hat in the style of Marie-Antoinettte, ornamented by a large cherry-red ribbon.
“Bonjour, my dear. You find me in the midst of meditating on a remark made by Dévonet on the variations in the periodicity of our waves. There is, as we ‘big brains’ say a ‘snag.’ Happy are you, O stimulants and fertilizers of the masculine mind, who have no preoccupations of that sort.”
She smiled sadly, which added depth to the exquisite oval of her pretty face. “What do you know? Our ‘snags’ are of another kind than yours, but they exist.”
“Tell me one of them, for example.”
“You.”
“Oh, damn it!” said Ségétan, pretending not to understand. “You’re worried about the gossip that’s circulating about me in Loir-et-Cher—but it’s of no importance. I’m not going to stand for election to parliament, or the Senate.”
“I don’t care about gossip. It’s your person alone that’s important to me—which I hide from my husband, your friend.”
As she said that, they continued to walk side by side, without looking at one another—but various incomplete images of the delightfuil young woman who had made that point-blank declaration, in broad and blinding daylight, gave him the desire to indulge in Marivaudage.17
A few paces further on, on the edge of a field, was one of those abandoned huts carpeted with a bed of straw in which grape-gatherers sleep during the September heat. The door was missing, replaced by two simple planks of wood placed side by side. With a common accord, the two strollers headed toward that shelter. The surrounding countryside was hot, desrted as far as the eye could see.
“I know you, Mélanie,” Ségétan said. “I’ve known you for years, since your marriage—but even so, I don’t know you.” He emphasized the verb the second time.
“Is Tullie no longer sufficient for you?” She articulated the question impertinently, and then, without any further pleading—for she knew him—she added: “You shall know me, fair sir. Wait outside a moment, until I call you.”
She went into the cool, dark hut with the gilded floor. He waited, his throat dry, his eyes avid and speckled with round flames, attentive to the modifications that his present “aura” was bringing to Dévonet’s question, either to simplify or confuse it. The wife was, therefore, about to come to her husband’s aid, by virtue of an unexpected detour. The seeker’s heart was beating strongly—which was a good sign.
A faint, clear voice said: “Come in!”
He went in.
There was an odor of straw and warm wood. In the sudden gloom, on the litter of sparkling woodchips, the most accomplished Tanagra18 in the world presented to his quivering admiration, without any modesty, pure breasts, firm and strawberry-red, a rounded abdomen, and legs completely different from Tullie’s, of another but equally elegant perfection.
Every accomplished female body—as he had observed and taken note—is a distinct work of art, a special creation, in its morophology and coloration, whose intoxicating essence will touch or exalt some part of the intellect. To the mathematician, the biologist, the poet, the dramaturge and the physicians, definite types of Eve, the sight, contact possession and ambiance of whom serve the cause or the end, correspond to the word or the number, the quality or the quantity. Thus is explained, by the harmony and uncanny splendor of its women, the power of the sculpture, the philosophy, the lyricism, the architecture and the dramaturgy of Periclean Greece. Thus is explained, by the beauty, the surge, the melting grace and voluptuousness of the female body of the sixteenth century, the genius of Shakespeare, Webster, Montaigne, Rabelais, Ronsard and Amyot.
These reflections, which had been rolling around Ségétan’s brain for a long time, became precise at each new bound of a sensuality that overflowed the cup of his life.
At that moment, dazzled by the Mélanian flesh, as he had been just now in the sunlight, he was interiorly inundated by a major accord between beauty and truth, beauty being eternal, truth linked to the century, in that which concerns the earth.
The young woman turned round very slowly, in order to present two profiles to him successively, the face and the loins thus corresponding to the four aspects of maternal ideas and the syntax that translates them. A bronze reflection rose from the straw, alloyed with the amber of her skin.
A moral and intellectual wellbeing took possession of the intoxicated spectator, to the detriment of his virile faculties. Although Tullie’s body united all the powers in him, Mélanie’s, for some unknown reason, divided them: one, the physical, was weakened; the other, the immaterial, was moved.
The beauty perceived that, having the experience of her husband, who was also drawn by love to scientific penetration, imitating the master.
“Are you satisfied, Master? Have I been useful to you?” she said—and picked up her clothes, with an agile dip, like a ballerina preparing for an entrechat or a swimmer about to dive.
“I’m delighted,” Ségétan replied. “So much so that you’ve disarmed me…which is perfectly grotesque.”
“In you, nothing can be grotesque. Anyway, it’s so hot today that we’d be stuck together like postage-stamps. And that straw would be prickly! My feet are hankering for my stockings.
It did not take five minutes for her to get dressed again.
“Dévonet has had a narrow escape,” said the scientist, by way of conclusion—and that statement brought a charming burst of laughter from her, child-like and caressing, but which could not match Tullie’s broken laughter at the supreme moment.
When he got home, Romain Ségétan received from the hands of his beautiful mistress a letter that bore the postmark Napoli.
My dear,
The experiments in Avenillon are the only topic of conversation here. My young husband, who is, as you know, a highly-reputed American archaeologist and physicist, has to go to Paris soon to acquire electrical machines for the production of high-tension currents. He is taking me with him; it will be our real honeymoon voyage. We’re leaving by car in ten days. Tell me the date on which your friend of childhood and youth can come to disturb you, in the company of her husband.
Entirely yours, and so looking forward to seeing you again,
Donabella
“I’m quite familiar with the remarkable work of Hatchinson,” Ségétan said, “but how is it that your friend knows about me?”
“We correspond regularly. I was so happy and proud that when I told her about the death of Père Calvat I made her party to the profound change in my life. When shall we invite them here, then?”
“I’m planning, a fortnight from now, to gather thirty colleagues—French, English, German, Italian and Belgian—for a major séance of temporal waves, which, according to my calculations, will pass over us like a comet at a certain day and hour. Ignacio and Ariana will give them lunch in Brancheville. We can invite Hatchinson and his wife for the day before, and they can stay here, at Dyonisos for two or three days as they please.”
1010. Probably Edmond Auclair, author of The Tonic Supreme, A Unique and Scientific Treatise on Human Regeneration (1918).
11. Léon Vannier (1880-1963) was the most famous homeopathic physician in Paris from 1905 onwards, the founder of the journal L’Homéopathie française in 1912 and author of numerous books on the subject.
12. The Occitan poet Frédéric Mistral (1830-1914) was a close friend of Alphonse Daudet for many years. Calendau, translated into French as Calendal, was published in 1867.
13. This name is applied to more than one kind of night-blooming flower, most commonly to the Central American Epiphyllum oxypetalum.
14. The second of the three major English victories of the Hundred Years’ War, fought on 19 September 1356 and won by an army under the command of Edward, the Black Prince.
15. From the explanatory notice to the “Dream-Fugue” (1847) included in De Quincey’s Colleced Writings (1854).
16. Renaud and Armide (Rinaldo and Armida in the original) are characters in Torquato Tasso’s chivalric romance La Gerusalemme Liberata (1580), whose French translation was a standard school text in nineteenth-century France. Armide is an enchantress who sets out to seduce the knight Renaud cynically, but is won over by his nobility and falls in love wih him.
17. “Marivaudage,” named for the early eighteenth-century playwright and novelist Pierre de Marivaux, refers to a mode of conduct and narration in which characters explain their thinking at length, with all its subtle nuances, to one another and to the spectator or reader. As the reader will observe, the desire experienced by Romain is quickly suppressed, although the author is, as usual, not slow to step in on his behalf.
18. Tanagra is a town in Greece noted in antiquity for the production of terracotta figurines, mostly depicting human figures in naturalstic costumes, which took its name.
CHAPTER THREE
DYONISOS’ FIRST ARROW
The Villa Dyonisos at Avenillon had, as they say, put on its Sunday best. The American scientist Hatchison was expected, coming from Paris by automobile with his young wife Donabella. It was noon; the sky was clear and cloudless, a light blue akin to that of the Île-de-France. Old Marianne was finishing setting the table in the spacious and bright dining-room. Tullie was rereading the menu and deciding on the seating. She had invited Bénalep, the Dévonets and the Ignacios. With the travelers, they would be nine, in conformity with the gastronomic axiom “no fewer than the Graces, no more than the Muses.”
The Dévonets arrived first, Mélanie in the full radiance of her gentility and beauty. Then it was Bénalep’s turn, broad and massive, like a Hebrew Silenus. At that moment, a superb vehicle drew up at the door from which descended a tall, thin fellow of indeterminate age, a “stuffed shirt,” as Dévonet put it, accompanied by a vertritable nymph, blonde and slim, with frank eyes, who immediately threw herself into Tullie’s arms.
That was Donabella from Naples, Tullie’s childhood friend, whom she had not seen for several years. The new arrival was clad in pink, heightened by a single golden nenuphar water-lily, as vaporous as a butterfly in the harbor of Rio de Janeiro; her greeter was in jet black, like a living statue enveloped in silky darkness—and their sincere joy described the scintillating spirals of Baudelaire’s Lola de Valence.19 That was the judgment of Ignacio, who disembarked at the same time, accompanied by Ariana, dressed in pale green.
Ségétan, as natural as an element at rest, with his face a mixture of Napoléon and Dante, welcomed his American colleague cordially and his svelte companion gallantly. Meanwhile, Abrice took his fellow Pietro to the garage; in order to show off his erudition he had made the Fascist salute.
“Oh, my dear, how glad I am to see you again!” said Tullie.
Immediately, they switched into Italian, the words of which were outlined by brilliant fissures against a grave background of sun and shadow. If English is reminiscent of birdsong, with its mocking and dreamlike inclusions, Italian is the most distinct of languages, the most delimited by a pure and sonorous succession, while Spaish is sculpted in a sort of red dusk. The two young women—Donabella was four years younger than Tullie—thus exchanged, in a few seconds, an essence of memories that made them laugh and gave them the appearance of little girls playing around the Château de l’Oeuf.20
The American told his host how proud he was to be in his home, and assured him that in the United States he was known as the Edison of France—but that compliment scarcely flattered Ségétan, who considered the famous inventor of Menlo Park to be an ingenious mechanic.
They sat down at table, the host having Donabella to his right and Ariana to his left. Tullie, who played hostess like a legitimate spouse—but without benefit of Maire or Curé—had Bénalep to her right and Hatchinson to her left.
“Tullie and I have put together a simple menu,” said the Master of the Waves, “but which ought to please you: hors d’oeuvre with melon and port; salmon trout; braised leg of beef with olives; chicken Soubise; fricassee of cultivated mushrooms; lettuce salad; ice-cream medley; Loir-et-Cher fruits. As wines—for I presume, my dear Hatchinson, that you’re not a prohibitionist in France”—the physicist shook his head—“I’ll offer you a Château-Yquem, a Lur Saluces, with a hint of licorice, but a good year, and a negligible vin de pays. The drive-shaft of the meal will be a Beaune Hôpital from the Maison Bouchard—which says it all.”
“This evening, Madame and Monsieur,” Bénalep declared in his turn, “I invite you and everyone else here present to be my guests. My old bachelor’s cooking can’t match Caroline’s, but I’ll personally make you a cheese soup and a classic cassoulet and offer you an authentic raspberry liqueur that an Alsatian colleague sent me. Finally, you’ll make the acquaintance of my digitalis coffee—by which I mean associated with foxgloves in the soil, cultivated in Indochina according to my principles, and which, putting no strain on the heart, enjoys special therapeutic qualities.”
This proposal delighted those who were aware of Bénalep’s culinary skills as well as the newcomers. An ambiance of good cheer and lofty intellectualism was established. The name of the Blésois villa led to that of the magical apparatus that evoked the past, and also to the topic of the famous Villa of the Dyonisiac Mysteries discovered fairly recently in Pompeii, with its incomparable Hellenic frescoes, dating from the era of Greek greatness five centuries before Christ.21
