Mr. Antiphilos, satyr
Date: 2026-03-14T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Short stories; French -- Translations into English; French fiction -- Translations into English; Satire

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Title: Mr. Antiphilos, satyr

Author: Remy de Gourmont

Translator: John Howard

Louis Lozowick

Release date: March 14, 2026 [eBook #78206]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Lieber & Lewis, 1922

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78206

Credits: Bob Taylor, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MR. ANTIPHILOS, SATYR ***

MR. ANTIPHILOS, SATYR

MR. ANTIPHILOS, SATYR

By REMY DE GOURMONT

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
By John Howard

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
Jack Lewis

NEW YORK
LIEBER & LEWIS
MCMXXII

Copyright, 1922,
By LIEBER & LEWIS

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

MR. ANTIPHILOS, SATYR
Introduction | 9
To the Amazon | 27
Apparition | 43
La Fosca | 57
The Afternoon of a Faun | 73
Cydalise | 85
Metamorphosis | 95
The Cell | 107
The Satyr! The Satyr! | 119
Fennel Water | 131
Erebus | 143
Diogenes | 155
Déidamie | 167
The Cluster of Grapes | 179
The Unknown Woman | 193
Flight | 205

COLORS

Blue | 219
Zinzoline | 239
White | 259

INTRODUCTION

In an age when democratic ideas, levelling processes and the popularization of thought are in vogue, the phenomenon of a Remy de Gourmont emphasizing the aristocratic virtues, drawing attention to the perfect detachment demanded by literature and art, makes one pause as though transported to a different world, to a less nervous existence.

Gourmont, the aristocrat of letters, the thinker who could shrug his shoulders amusedly at current acceptances of progress, modernity and evolution, never for an instant ceased battling for a more discriminate attitude towards life and letters. He permitted none of his carefully reared mansions of the intellect to be sullied by aught that could not pass the tests of “relative” truth and sincerity,—the very truth and sincerity which the delightful dissociator of ideas loved to mock, when the whim seized him. His was the mechanism of a brain “heedless to please other than by the originality of thought and charm of style.”

It matters not what subject Gourmont attacks or woos. He can be depended upon to take a view the opposite of the conventionally accepted one. Whether the subject under treatment be women, art, religion, style or customs, his piercing mind shrewdly discovers the accumulations of prejudice and stupidity, scrapes off the patina of rust from the medals of time.

He has said: “I do not love prisons of any sort.” His whole life was a fight for intellectual freedom, waged in the seclusion of his study with his army of ideas continually engaged against the enemy. He early found that the only fruitful research was the research of the non-true. This quest occupied him during his lifetime.

He achieved this by the methods of paradox and dissociation. Yet, after having seen himself praised or blamed for this first quality, he felt free to disclaim the gift. “I have done wrong,” he writes, “to give the impression to the malicious that my mind has a turn for the paradox. I never pursued it deliberately. Besides, I do not pretend to dictate judgments concerning me. A mind of any toughness will always seem paradoxical to timorous spirits.”

Gourmont’s individualism was pronounced to an unusual degree. Individualism with most men is usually a rhetorically graceful gesture, a toying attitude, a hesitant attempt at sincerity hindered by the fear of public opprobrium; there are always the consequences of social ostracism or worse. It leads effectually to antinomianism, the violation of ethical codes. It becomes a harmless pose, belied by the very words or acts of those who profess it as the basis of their lives. Gourmont’s sincerity is testified by the tough boldness, the crystal consistency of his writings. The best way, he always believed, to ennoble the world is by self-development. “True charity is the act of the conscious man living according to his own personality and the rules of his inner and individual logic. Such a man gives what he has and is.... He offers only the natural opulence of a generous egotism, conforming to the divine rhythm and adequate to the divine movements.” And the world would be much better for all, he writes elsewhere, if one admitted the idea that society is made for the individual and not the individual for society. “The individual is the important thing.”

The rich diversity of life made him realize how useless it was to attempt to be oracular, to utter the indisputable, final truths of the master. No two leaves are alike; no two human beings are alike. This premise led to his indifference to absolutes, to the doctrines with which men like to be fooled and entertained. He began and ended with the idealistic, Schopenhaurian formula: “the world is my representation.” Not what is, but what seems to be, seen through the lens of my mind, is what I can depend upon. It followed, as a matter of course, that he could be lenient toward many points of view, and his Catholicism of mind is seen to advantage in The Book of Masks where he has enthusiastic, appreciative words for writers united by nothing but the name of “Symbolisme.” A further corollary was the need of tolerance to other men’s truths. But some truths are absurd. Shall I, Remy de Gourmont, be receptive to ugliness and hypocrisy? A puzzling problem! Either I must be receptive to all perceptions, good or bad, all beliefs, sincere or dissembled, or I must be suspicious of everything. Irony and pity are the roads to freedom. What is the use of being bellicose and vengeful toward what, in the end, does not matter? So, in his most serious onslaughts, there is something of the amused playboy.

One cannot help admiring his eclecticism. He saw that symbolism was but a loose name joining many diverse talents. He took pains to show that the popularly accepted meaning of decadence is pure trash, since it is applied to writers whose virtues of originality and creativeness contradict the true meaning of a down-hill movement, of imitation and conceited artificiality. He had a good word, the proper word invariably, for the mysticism of Maeterlinck, the obscurity of Mallarmé’s ineffable poems, the clanging strength of Verhaeren, the velvety dreaminess of Samain, the startling genius of Rimbaud, the anti-democratic idealism of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, the paganism of Louys, the jeweled fatuity of Montesquiou. He permitted no hard and fast rules to interfere with the sensitive apparatus of his mind. Receptivity was a prerequisite. As a result, he is a critic sympathetic to the core, appreciative of all works partaking of distinction and charm.

He has given French literature something new. Never before has there been anything like his novels, where the brilliant youths “denude themselves with a proud candor.” All his characters are expressions of the complete life of a superior brain; they have one thing in common, scepticism. But as André de Fresnois says, it is “a scepticism necessitated by the richness of an infinitely supple sensibility, and not the frozen scepticism of a worldly lecturer; a scepticism that is disdain, pity, intelligence especially, and not impotence.”

Amy Lowell speaks of his preoccupation with sex which has robbed his books, she thinks, of the large view they might have had, and says that he is therefore one for whom English readers will have little sympathy. Whether true or not, it is beside the question of art. Sincerity first, is his credo. In a brief essay on “The Role of Art,” he writes:

“Art has a special and altogether egotistic end: it is an end in itself. It does not willingly assume any mission, whether religious, social, or moral. It is humanity’s supreme game; it is the sign of man; it affirms the divine; it tends to depart from contingencies; it desires to be free, useless, absurd, that is to say in disaccord with the very forces of nature which hold man in a narrow servitude.”

And as “art is not made for the people nor the people for art,” and further, as “art is a perpetual exception,” he felt himself free to create men who console themselves for their inability to harmonize their thoughts with the workaday world, by trifling, delicate love affairs. But his characters turn away weariedly even from their amours. That is a preoccupation with coarseness which his sensitive creations cannot long endure. They are martyrs to their ideas, men who have sought happiness so long and uselessly that they abandon the quest as hopeless and betake themselves to art and café conversations. His men reflect so much that they cannot act. Gourmont makes one of his persons say: “Although I may be the dupe of my pride, I much prefer this to being the dupe of my feelings.”

They have personality, but no character, amoral beings reflecting the complexity of Gourmont himself. “I do not wish to believe, to suffer, to be happy, to be duped. I regard, I observe, I judge, I smile.” Yes, it is a tired smile his imaginary personages have, a smile of disillusionment from knowing too much, a smile of mingled helplessness and power. It is because they live in their fortresses of thought and are so helpless when they wish to transfer their ideas to life. Each one, like his creator, inhabits a tour d’ivoire. Thought is so fertile in possibilities that his characters live a complete life within their brains, and like Des Esseintes, in Huysman’s A Rebours, have a contemptuous disgust for the compromises of the world. But unlike Des Esseintes, they will wander from their elaborately constructed esthetic prisons. The Gourmontian characters are strong when detached from life and the need to act; they have recourse to brilliant talk that scintillates with cynicism and conceals their childish incapacity to meet the world on its own terms.

His men are hurled into abysms of doubt through their superior sophistication. Hubert D’Entragues devotes himself by taste, rather than need, to the craft of letters, and spends his mornings developing elaborate sequence poems after the manner of the medieval latinists, inventing situations for imaginary characters, constructing a symbolistic novel to parallel his futile love affair with Sixtine, the young widow. He lives for himself; the world does not exist; like Gourmont, he is a philosophic idealist. But the ghost of contradiction leaves its shroud and haunts the exquisite scorner. He confides his doubts to a friend:

“We are not mummers and applause does not make us blush with joy. But if we write neither for universal suffrage nor to earn money, we become truly incomprehensible.”

“Write for your mistress.”

“I have none.”

“Write for Botticelli’s Madonna.”

“That is what I am doing.”

Truly an unsatisfactory conclusion, this writing for the Madonna of Botticelli, but following logically from the axiom that art is the mark of intellectual disinterestedness. The audience is to be scorned since art and the people are incompatible. Another retrenchment in the solid ivory tower, but not without its loneliness. This engenders a cynicism: no laws are valid other than those I choose to make. So the divine sanction of love vanishes, the state and the validity of all ethics made by society. To be spiritual in matters of the body is a confession of adolescence or of a warped mind. The characters of Gourmont consider women as flowers of the hedge to be plucked for their beauty and fragrance, to be inserted in one’s buttonhole while the day is still delightful, and to be replaced by another flower on the morrow. But women, more gifted than the eglantine, have a choice: “They can wield the menace of their thorns, if they are averse to be plucked,” Diomède says. In love, his men are gentle cynics, a little tired and moody and speculative, and the women, when not jeunes filles, follow their whims, finding sufficient excuse, in the pleasures of the flesh, for the act of surrender. Love is not transcendental, according to Gourmont, it is a divine exercise of the senses. “The soul is body and the body is spirit. The existence or the permanence of the one depends upon the indestructibility of the other.” Soul, what we call soul, becomes a blend of dream and act, thought and sensuality.

All this can be seen to advantage in Mr. Antiphilos, Satyr. The unbelievably naive creature of wood and dell is brought to civilization. He is Desire, its purest essence. He knows only hunger, fear of peasants’ pitchforks, weariness, sexual desire. Life is these things and they represent life. Happiness comes with satisfaction of these needs; misery from lack of satisfaction. Here is the epitome of our animal natures. It is the animal in us,—the healthy, normal animal. Whatever is added is superfluous; the addition is civilization. Gourmont, himself so sophisticated, ever turns a loving, kindly eye to men who are insistently natural, that is to say animal in their outlook, and who are brave or simple enough to consider the other sex in this light. Antiphilos has a try at civilization, and the result disgusts him; we see in his abnegation the shrug of mild disgust with which his creator views the world of men and women. Here, too, his women are personifications of instinct, without mixture of reason and restraint.

To every department of literature which Gourmont essayed, he brings his supple intelligence, lighting up his subject with a clear brilliance. Irony he used as a surgical instrument to lance the sores of society. In his study, isolated and removed from the bustle of Parisian life, he boldly dispelled the mists of ridicule and slander with which the young writers were covered. A great master, his influence on French literature was tremendous. The high standards Gourmont demanded of himself and others, his cultivated taste are required wherever there is a tendency to the facile and the common. His Olympian serenity, too, is a needed antidote to the febrile, nervous note. To read him critically is to renounce forever the false gods which are being worshipped in literature. He gives one a delicious draught of sanity; he is pure mind, unadulterated by muddy emotionalism or didacticism. The things he attacked are not dead; there remain the same problems of art and morality. Gourmont, the supremely civilized man, brings a cynicism, a perfect detachment and poise to the task of analyzing current and eternal values; he helps us to understand and solve these problems.

J. L.

TO THE AMAZON

When you accepted the dedication of this strange story, Amazon, you did not ask me what I had meant by it. This did not at all surprise me, for you often know my intentions better than I do, and you are ever ready to attribute the most favorable and ingenious ones to me. Ah, my friend, I am not always the man of intentions, plans and projects; I like to obey whatever the gods suggest and to place my trust, so far as execution is concerned, in that logic which dwells deep in my brain and which reassures me about the sequence of any of my rambling stories. Though the chain of causes necessitated a lapse of several years between the writing of the first letters and the others, and though the latter were produced at irregular intervals,—beside the fact that my mind, in the course of this novel, experienced certain modifications—I have sought to have them conserve a sufficiently apparent unity of tone in their ensemble. Yet I fear, though this will be quite transitory, lest any one feel a little of the weariness, towards the end, which the monotonous psychology of my horned character gave me. Nothing is more difficult than the study of an elementary creature whose naiveté puts to rout our sham or civilized habits, who advances as a matter of course into the frankest of vices, who is not even astonished at our astonishment.

What most amuses us in our pleasant games is that they are forbidden. Now, that is a quality of pleasure he cannot relish. He cannot grasp the idea of a person not naturally attracted to whatever is pleasurable to him, though he too enjoys, like others, the charm of obstacles surmounted and difficulties vanquished. What amused me, in writing this story, was to take the side of the instinctive creature against the creature of reason, whose reason is so transitory a thing; but whatever may have been my sympathy for the brazen-faced satyr, I could not procure for him the contentment of living in a strait-laced society whose finesses he would have had to learn before accommodating himself to them. He lacks too many things ever to succeed in cutting much of a figure in this world. What sort of being is he, ignorant of the value of money and, first of all, possessing none? I even doubt whether he will extract deep satisfactions from a more fastidious, delicate world he may later chance to frequent. Just behold the simplicity of his heart! He falls in love with a worthless woman, and he is not in the least ashamed, understanding nothing of her trade: but even if he did understand it, I do not know whether or not he would blush with shame. He has not yet shown his fullest capacities. He would need a vaster theatre. Antiphilos might go far in the world of the unconscious.

Do not believe, moreover, that in making him relate the beginning of his human adventures, I had any deep satirical intentions. To criticize the manners of men:—that would need more naiveté than I possess. To tell the truth, I find that they do well when following their pleasures; they alone are not dupes of our extraordinary moral organization. But let us not judge men, and still less women, after ourselves. Most people are very well satisfied with their slavery, to the point where their virtue suffers at the wretched state of all who have liberated themselves. They do everything in their power to recapture the emancipated, to fasten collars on their necks: “You do not know happiness, our happiness. Come and we will share it with you.” There are unfortunate souls who let themselves be taken in with this sort of talk. Others are seized by force, when that is possible.

The police, or some of those charitable persons of whom there are too many, once found a nest of felicity in a hovel of the Saint-Sulpice section. An extremely young pair of hand-to-mouth tatterdemalions lived there. The boy might have been fifteen years old,—even less if I remember correctly—and the girl was twelve. No one knew on what they lived—doubtless on pickings, refuse and water. When their roamings in search of food exhausted them, they returned to their garret and fell asleep in each other’s arms, for they were in love. Their naive love consoled them for having, too often, to go hungry, and those who discovered them found them happy in their animal-like innocence. It created a terrible scandal, still discussed, perhaps, by devout persons and others of the neighborhood. Naturally they were separated, although they cried hard; the boy was sent to a home, while the girl had to follow the skirts of some good nun. And everybody thought this was as it should be. I, too. I was compelled, so as not to be treated with contempt, and you would have done likewise, my friend,—would you not? to preserve the esteem of respectable people. Is it right, in fact, that children should begin to live in a state of nature, here in Paris, in a decent section, several steps away from a church, the Luxembourg Gardens and the Senate? The matter of the pickings might have been passed by, but the love! Is it not true that such perversity, manifested so precociously, is disconcerting? Antiphilos would have been affected by this story, but Antiphilos is very much suspected and he is at home only in natural ethics. He practices it without knowing its theory.

You do not know, Amazon, how grateful I am that you loved this uncertain little book and that you did not reprove its tendencies! I am grateful to the point of being tempted to say that you have loved it more than it deserved. Besides, is this not what I think of nearly all of my writings? There is hardly one which has wholly satisfied me. That is why I decided never to correct them when they were being printed or reprinted, for I am always tempted to throw them into the printing press and have their dried ink replaced by new ink. This you know well, you who have wrested one of my books from my hands. I am haunted by the technique of the unknown masterpiece. But I practice too well the philosophy of detachment even to yield to such naivetés of conceit, and I resign myself to the displeasure which my writings cause me, while dreaming of the marvelous books I shall never write. Ah! how I envy those authors who admire themselves in their works and who do not see the approaching oblivion into which their works will sink with them. I envy them, but I smile with a touch of irony, perhaps, for all this has really little importance. Yet one must love, and to do so it is necessary to hold firmly to some support, along the stream which sweeps everything forward, like the castaways that we are. The feeling that you please those very persons whom you would have chosen to please, and the feeling that you displease others whom you would have willingly designated for this service, sometimes suffices to keep you in balance, to fortify heart and hands. One of these comforts only affects the pride and has but negative effects on the pleasure of living; but the other, which stirs every fibre of sympathy, can alone confer the joy that is complete. Why, through what cowardice place these necessary terms in the plural? A beautiful tenderness has achieved its end. Amazon, I really believe that without you I should no more love myself very much; I no longer would have a deep confidence in life or in myself. So again I thank you for having taken Antiphilos under your protection. Of his destiny among humans I am reassured, since you have smiled upon him, dear friend.

Remy de Gourmont.

MR. ANTIPHILOS, SATYR

...Fugiunt per devia Nymphae:
Has agitant Satyri per juga quaeque leves,
Nec fuit in sylvis arbos nec rupibus antrum
Sub quo non illic pressa puella foret.

B. P. PRIGNANUS, Mutinensis,
De imperio cupidinis. Lib. I.

I
APPARITION

I

Etang de Saint-Cucufa, June 3.

A sense of keen injustice prompts this letter: Indignatio facit versum, as they used to say good old days. You know that I can neither read nor write, but sometimes a tiny obliging mouth tries to make me spell out of an old newspaper stained with fat and wine. Today, the friendly little hand of a schoolgirl, equipped with everything needed for writing, transfers my thought with a charming dexterity. My shaggy knees, of which she is not afraid, serve as a table. Now, therefore, I am going to tell you my story and register my protest.

You must know, first of all, that it was the little one now writing to you who advised me to address you. “He is a man who wrote, I am told, a story which is really my life. But I was eighteen and not so complex.” Yesterday, her memory was refreshed by a paper she read to me: “Virginal! My virgin heart! That’s it.” She stamped her foot at the thought. Although I have been roving in fields and near towns for about eight thousand and nine hundred years, I still do not know women very well. I have known more women than there are stars in the sky, and the last one remains as new and mysterious as the first. All this, to tell you that I do not know how her virgin heart could have interested her.—Now she is smiling, holding her tongue in the corner of her mouth.—Perhaps she is thinking of the moment when she will once more turn maiden, quite naturally, for the convenience of social ways.—I hear her sing out: “Why, of course!”—They are surprising.

But I am coming to the matter of importance. You see my innocence. I protest, then, with all the strength of an honest, though libertine satyr, against the use of the term ‘satyr’ by your newspapers, which apply it to men,—yes, to men, by Jupiter, who kidnap young girls, rip their bellies, slice them to pieces! A satyr would never do such idiotic things. Violate, when one has but to open the arms to desire? Grasp these fresh, yielding little necks with a brutal hand? Tear this soft flesh and cause these unripe bodies to bleed, cut the bud where the woman already is developing and dreaming? For what do you take us, stupid journalists? For men? Be undeceived. We are gods.

My history, which is very long, is obscure, but two episodes peculiarly dignify it. I was born in Phrygia of the loves of Hermes and an elegant Dryad, whom I greatly loved, for she was tender and pretty. She had ardent passions and the shepherds, no less than the gods, attracted but did not hold her caprice. I grew up, I exercised at hazard my curiosity, which discovered odd things at all the fords and on all the paths. Dionysius, whom you call Bacchus, brought me into his cortège and I knew, under torrid skies, women more melting than your grapes, more wanton than your goats. I passed into Greece, on my return, but men were already beginning to wage war; they locked up their women and enclosed their fields with fences. The golden age had ended:

Regrettez-vous le temps où le ciel sur la terre
Marchait et respirait dans un peuple de dieux?

I regret it so much and so often that I am filled with an unconquerable melancholy. The great gods no longer descending to an earth soiled by war, ownership, gold and those human laws which so badly translate the gentle divine laws, we remain the sole immortals that a herdsman can chance on at the fall of day, as he walks along the path. We were loved, and we were also feared. We were given milk, cakes and honey, and this was pleasant; but more than once a peevish peasant used to pursue me with a pitchfork, forcing me to run to the shelter of a wood. I am peaceable and vulnerable. I am a god, but a churl might easily cripple me. They say the golden age will return. Let us hope so.

Do not think of ancient Greece as a place where good fortune held sway. Love was there esteemed only under a form that always excited my disgust. Few joys: an escaped female slave, an eager peasant woman. Had I not had my sisters, the nymphs, I should have died of boredom; but nymphs have less variety than women, though prettier, and their pride is terrible. The disgusting teachings of a certain Socrates, that motley apostle of virtue, enemy of women and gods, hastened my flight. I made for Italy, where once more I found a certain state of nature and human customs. To refrain from astonishing people, I called myself Faun, like my Italian brothers.

It is in Italy that I have spent the best part of my life. There I found the graces of Asia, with less effeminacy, much curiosity at once erotic and passionate, and that delicious precociousness which causes young flowers, in their innocent ardor, to outstrip the spring and break their corslets at the sun’s first appearance. I enjoyed seasons worthy of Apollo. My snub nose gleamed in the fairest of eyes. The repeated sound of my feet on the rocky side of a hill awoke still slumbering desires in the vague breasts of latin maidens. Pardon my emotion at these brilliant memories. I still have days; I hardly have seasons any longer, and my eternal youth is often forced to dwell on the past: the time of gleaning has long since succeeded the period of abundance. Remember that in those days I perhaps fled as often as I pursued. I was weary of love, weary of opening new paths. For an instant, I thought of remaining on a piece of cleared ground; I was going to become domesticated.—The family of Faunus, look at the pretty little Atellanian girl!—Alas! I did not have time for this.

One day we found ourselves surrounded by a troop of peasants armed with sharp staffs, as though for a boar hunt. They were led by a sort of sorcerer with a head-dress similar to the Gauls; this man brandished a piece of wood shaped like a crutch head; with his other hand he dipped a branch of box into a little bottle, held by a slave, and sprinkled the ground. I would have liked to laugh, had the danger not been so great. My companion had left to gather grass. “They are coming to look for her,” I reflected. “They will do her no hurt. But if they get me, beware of the boar-spears!” I rushed away and, springing over a precipice, was soon free from harm. I have not been able to recross this precipice for nearly twelve hundred years.

What centuries! I lived amid wild goats and only from time to time did an imprudent peasant girl, who happened to be good-looking, fall into my traps. One of them told me that I no longer was called Faunus, but Diabolo, and that I was considered the enemy of the human species, the creature who had caused man to fall into sin. I had seduced a woman under a serpent’s form! I believed that people had become as crazy as they were wicked, and I grieved, musing on my sad immortality. Yet, as the woman stroked my beard and kissed my snub nose and moist lips, while calling me monster, I decided that this was a mitigated extravagance which left a little hope, at least with a half of humanity.—Here, my little friend sticks out her tongue at me and says: “Ah! so it is you they call the devil?”

A noise of hunting one day awoke me. They were blowing through horns which gave a sound like those of my sea brothers, the Tritons. Hounds rent the air with harsh and violent barking. The gallop of horses rang against the firm ground like a Virgilian verse.—O days when shepherds repeated the songs of the Mantuan Shepherd!—Made more bold for some time past, I was loitering in the heath, chasing grasshoppers and lizards. The hunt drew near. I did not have time enough to leap on a rock; and, as I watched the spectacle before leaping higher and disappearing, I heard a clear voice cry, with an accent of surprise and joy: “Ecco il Fauno!” I, too, was satisfied, for I knew that this beautiful name of the Roman god was applied to me, that new days had arrived. Excited, I lay down in the thyme warm with sun kisses; evening fell, I was musing, when the same clear voice once more rang in my ears: “Fauno! Fauno!” I pricked my hairy ears, my body grew tense. I stood listening. “Fauno! Fauno!” With a few bounds, I reached the spot from which the clear voice came. She was a beautiful young woman. The better to run, she had opened her dress and the wind had loosened her hair. She let herself fall, dazed, into my arms, the while I murmured, lifting my thought to the master of gods: “Has beauty then once more descended to earth? O Jupiter, thou dost not forget thy children!”

If I were to tell you that you have always under your eyes, perhaps, the proof of the truth of my narrative, you would not believe me. Wait several days, you will no longer be incredulous. My little friend is tired.—“Yes, I really am!”—She is going to re-read to me this letter which she promises to place in your hands. With the commencement of this story, you can already show your friends the journalists that a satyr is a respectable creature, meriting consideration. But what I have still to tell you is even better.

Antiphilos,
Satyr.

II

LA FOSCA

II

Au Mont Agel, July 17.

The cold drove me into the south, where I had just arrived when I first wrote to you. It is on the fragrant slopes of this peaceful mountain, looking upon the violet sea, that I am passing the bitter winter. Favorable grottos provide me with shelter and, when the sun shines, I gambol about, watching the strange passers-by along the paths. It is a beautiful country and I am enchanted by the charm of its wonderful girls. When the weather grows too warm, I climb upwards and it seems that in proportion as I proceed, I carry the spring with me. I am known in the villages. Everybody waits for me. People whisper to each other: “You know, I’ve seen him!” “Oh, my dear!” And at the fringe of the woods, at evening, I perceive light shadows vanishing under the pines or oaks. By chance I surprise and seize one, sometimes two. Stifled laughter blends with long sighs. I am the joy that passes, the joy troubled by a delicious fear. My hand has calmed throbbing breasts, revived many a throbbing heart. I pass, and when I am gone the young men find the maidens less shy. I sow kisses and I do not await the harvest time. That I leave to others. I only seize the flower, as long as there are flowers to be taken. Such is the way of gods. The gods are fastidious.

When I left the banks of the Seine, the little one who wrote to you, wished to follow me. A true love! That child will be fiercely faithful. I left hurriedly, I traveled without pausing, save to sleep, and I was very cold. Here, I am warming myself again, amusing myself a little. The girl to whom I dictate this differs greatly from my little secretary of the Saint-Cucufa pool. She is taller. She is almost a woman.—“Almost?”—She writes on fine transparent paper with an instrument which she calls a fountain-pen. I have never seen such a thing before. The girl is delicate and unbreakable, wanton as a goddess, and she has the air of having descended from Olympus yesterday at dawn. She comes every day from Roquebrune. Having risen with the sun, she walks through the dew, leaves to mingle innocently with the morning strollers, and never forsakes her royal mask, even when she murmurs: “Darling, darling!” She pleases me indeed. (Here the fountain-pen is thrust painfully into my knee, but I say nothing, I am satisfied.) Her curiosities are infinite, and she methodically satisfies them, without ever abandoning her serious look. I like this. Love is serious. When one has deep sensibility, love can cause tears; laughter, never. It is only among mortals that love is accompanied with laughter. The gods never laugh, except at the silliness of mankind. When my little English woman is stirred, she recites verses and then translates them for me, for I only know the Mediterranean languages. She says, while caressing me:

Tiens, couche-toi sur ce tapis de fleurs,

Pendant que je caresserai tes aimables joues,

Pendant que je piquerai des roses parfumées dans le poil soyeux de ta douce tête

Et que je baiserai tes larges et belles oreilles, ô ma tendre joie!

... Oh! comme je t’aime! Je suis folle de toi!

And sometimes I fall asleep, the while she gazes at me tenderly.

But I want to begin my story where I left off. I am anxious to narrate the adventure which does me honor, to my way of thinking, and which I have promised you. For two days and nights I was in love with the fair creature who had come, crying: “Fauno! Fauno!” It was near eventide; the sun was shining brightly and its rays, passing beneath the pines, were lighting up the ground, each tuft of grass, each flower. My sweetheart was sleeping and, to keep off the buzzing flies, for she was naked, I had thrown her long scarf over her. But, from time to time, unable to resist my desire, so beautiful she was, I approached to lift a corner of the veil and to watch her as she slept. At a certain moment, I discovered with terror that we were not alone. Somebody, concealed in the thicket, was spying on us. I ran towards the enemy: a man arose. I was about to throw myself at him, enraged with jealousy, when he made a gesture at once imperious and friendly:

“Do you understand the language of men?” he asked. “In that case, know that I am not come to fight you. I am walking about in search of beautiful things. I seek Nature and it seems I have found her. Now I see. Are you a beast, are you a god?”

“I am a god.”

“Then it is true that such beings live,” the young man murmured. “And she?”

“She? A woman, but as lovely as my mother, who was a goddess. I was born in Phrygia, in the time when gods were as numerous on the earth as men.”

“Let me do your portrait and that of the divine woman sleeping at your feet.”

He brought out paper and pencils. I was on the point of agreeing to his whim when my beloved awoke. Half lifting herself on one of her arms, she said:

“Seigneur Allegri, I hope you will not betray me!”

“Oh, it is La Fosca. I did not know you were so wonderful, my dark beauty!”

“And glowing today, eh! But turn your head away a moment, for it would not be right to let you see the movements of my body. I am marble when I sleep; but when I move, I become a woman. I want to dress, to honor your presence and to offer you some fruit from our woods, and water from our spring.”

“Have you then left humanity forever?”

“Perhaps. Only the gods can love, and I have found one.”

“A marvelous adventure,” Allegri said. “But if you put a robe on, two suns will set at the same instant.”

“You will see me again if you come here, for my god is not jealous. And why should he be jealous, he who surpasses men in strength, as an oak surpasses an ivy?”

I smiled, and my mouth was so broad that Allegri exclaimed:

“He really is a faun. He resembles the one that Seigneur Buonarroti made not long ago, to amuse our sainted Guilio.”

While Allegri was tracing on his paper a figure in which I recognized myself, La Fosca had risen and gone, draped in her scarf, farther off. I went to fetch water in a buffalo horn, while La Fosca brought fruit, blackberries, apples and nuts. We made a pleasant meal of these things.

In the days that followed, Allegri visited us frequently. He sketched on small sheets with crayons of different colors. As soon as he arrived, La Fosca used to stretch out, in the pose you know, and I had the goodness to remain near her, holding the veil I was about to remove, in an attitude of desire which was not feigned. This comedy slightly bored me. I found the sittings too long. And then La Fosca had too happy smiles in her pretended sleep, her body moved with such charm.

One night, when we remained chatting and laughing,—he had brought preserves and a bottle of wine—the sky paled a little.

“It is time,” Allegri said, getting up. “Come. In an hour we shall reach the solitary hut where I have established my studio. My picture is finished, but I would like, at least once, to compare it with the original, for the recollection of my eyes may have deceived me, although they are very dependable mirrors.”

We followed him. The work was perfect. La Fosca truly breathed, I was truly handsome, with my infatuated air. La Fosca reposed on skins of beasts, and Allegri feverishly completed his work with rapid strokes, each one of them,—what a miracle!—augmenting the distinction, the relief, the splendor, the life. At that instant, he was the real god!

“I hear the peasants,” he suddenly cried. “Save yourself. I will bring her to you tonight.”

I fled, for I stand in terror of pitchforks. I have never since seen La Fosca. Her fall only affected me during the first few days, for I had felt her love for me grow less from the moment she yielded to Allegri’s admiration; and besides, I had tasted so many pleasures that I was on the verge of satiety.

A little later I made the acquaintance of a young peasant girl who caused me to forget the other completely. Yet I never see, without emotion, the picture done by this Allegri, my portrait and the divine nudity of that noble La Fosca, whom love transformed into a bacchante, but who never, not even in her most wanton attitudes, made a disgraceful gesture. Her beauty has made her deserve immortality: she will live as long as I live, as long as the trees, the streams and mountains, as long as the world itself. Yesterday, my little Englishwoman brought me a photograph of the portrait. I prefer the old engravings, but this manner is perhaps more exact. Why the thing is called “Jupiter and Antiope,” no one, not even the little darling, has been able to explain. At least you will know that it represents the Faun Antiphilos and La Fosca, who has since become the Marquise de Sassuolo.

Allegri came to see me a month later. I was with the young peasant girl, and yet I was about to shower him with reproaches, when, with a very melancholy mien, he said:

“She left me, in turn.”

I answered:

“You deserved it.”

“Doubtless; but you are consoled and I, I am not yet consoled.”

He told me that La Fosca was the daughter of an extremely dissolute, indebted patrician of Modena who had sold her to a priest. She had stabbed the priest and fled to Sassuolo where the Marquis Giambattista met, welcomed and hid her, because of her beauty. Finally through gratitude, she became his mistress, and lived at his court.

“She was with him at the hunt when she ran to you. The Marquis sought her high and low for a week and then learned that I was concealing a woman in my shack. He came: instead of flying into a rage, he wept, pardoned me, purchased my picture and invited me to the marriage. She became the Marquise de Sassuolo this very morning. These old men have odd ideas. What creations I could have made with such a figure!”

“You are neither man nor god, Allegri, only a painter.”

He did not answer, but remained plunged in revery a long time. I have not seen him since.

Antiphilos,
Satyr.

III
THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN

III

Cogolin, June 3.

At last I have the leisure to write and give you another chapter of my adventures, since I know that you have communicated them to other men. Like nature, the gods exist only at the instant you speak and think of them, and as soon as your attention is distracted from divine things, they fall again into the dim, pantheistic immensity where their lives glide by, mute, deep and plant-like. I partake of the gods, I have lived that life. I partake of men, and I know what human joys are. Alas! destiny has meted them out to me so miserly, in these days, that I hardly feel my humanity any longer. That is why I am sad, yes, sad, despite the restless eyes which reproachfully gaze at me this very moment, despite cheeks made slightly rosy by paint and now somewhat pale, rubbing against my old, immortal, shaggy skin. For the past three years I have tasted more bitterness than I experienced in my life heretofore. Solitude has poisoned my heart and if such times, or worse,—who knows?—were to return, I would be reduced to imploring the gods to recall me to Olympus, to the parental habitation. Ah! to renounce women! The gods no longer descend to the earth and I fear the goddesses. What a sorry figure this poor goat-footed satyr would make among them!

But was I not born to be happy? When I say this, Cydalise treats me as a romantic satyr, and though I do not very well understand, I feel it means that such a dream is considered chimerical. I and your philosophers do not understand happiness in the same way. I will die only when nature dies, and it is with her alone that I should take my stand. The seasons mean more to me than does metaphysics. Why should there not be a return to the old, faun liberties? The gates of sheepfolds will not always be so firmly shut and Venus, who seems to have forgotten herself in particular loves, will yet again remember her universal mission. It is a fact that the nymphs no longer inhabit the woods and that for three years I have not been able to capture any maiden, but Cydalise has comforted the old solitary faun and the hope of vintage time returns to my heart. Do not believe the things I told you at the beginning of this letter. They were the remains of melancholy moods I have not been able to share with anyone. Now that you have felt them with me, I no longer feel them. What matters the past to him who holds the present?

Cydalise descended from the Thespian chariot to come to me. Her profession is to recite verses of the poets to the people. She was seeking me, which means that she had already found me, according to some verses she recited and which evidently apply to my divinity, ever present and ever active. Cydalise has not invoked me in vain. The hoary, old god has always the youth of his desires and the desires of his youth. Weak men disappoint women, many women have told me, but satyrs never; others say they have known, trembling and blushing, men too late for happiness. Dreamy and wanton, Cydalise loves to recite poems in the interval of two frenzies. She begins with a voice a little out of breath because of the divine inspiration; then she slowly grows elated and falls into a sort of sudden trembling which ends still more rapidly in my arms. So, I know the first stanzas better than I do the last, which die in vague murmurs. I remember a similar adventure in Campania. I was enamoured of a Greek slave of marvelous beauty who used to come to visit me each evening, and who always wished to sing the first idyll of Theocritus for me, to show that her voice was as pure as her body anointed with oil of lavender. She never had the strength to begin the third verse: “Sweet is the murmuring of the pine near the fountains, O goatherd, sweet is the sound of thy flute....” Her voice stopped at [Greek: Tyrisdes]. Perhaps she did not wish, as Aesop says, to lose the prey for the shadow. The gods be praised! Gaiety returns to me with these distant memories which are so delicately woven into the present, across the centuries. This one knows better how to resist the violence of desire: She prepares with more skill the denouement whose plaintive syllables she knows how to prolong. She has not received a bad education: perhaps I shall be attached to her more than to all the others, though my nature always drives me to new discoveries. Such women are so rare!

But love knows a forced repose, and honest satyrs themselves respect this state, for they hold blood in as much horror as tears. One of these days of languor, she came to me with a book and, still smiling through her resigned sadness, began to read aloud, without any explanation: The Afternoon of a Faun. What a miracle! Lulled by these rhythms that were as irregular as a stream running down woody hillsides, I had almost as much pleasure in watching her moving lips as in holding them sealed to mine. Then she explained the poem to me, as the philosophers formerly did in the academies.

And I saw myself rising from between the willows of the bank, my ear intent for hint of pastimes which I desired and which was lacking. I remember it was one of those exciting and warm days, the like of which I have not experienced for a long time; I had heard the river lightly plash, as though on some plunging body, and I was about to run away, for I fear the hostility of mankind, when I fancied I saw floating hair on the water’s edge, some hemp held by a rush. I watched. If it was a woman, come from a garden of roses, she would return; the hedge was translucent and the house quite high, up towards the hill. Long I waited. Tired, I went in quest of her. I saw nothing. Now I heard laughter. I imagined many things, the very things this poet has described. Oh! to seize them! They are at least two, since there is so much laughter. Laughter, games, delicate caresses. It is yonder. Now silence reigns. Could they have guessed? No. Pleasure meditates before bursting forth. And I? But if you know the poem, you also know my agitation, my exasperated restlessness, panting, atremble, made dizzy. A man stood up among the trees, far above me.

“It was he,” said Cydalise.

“Who is ‘he’?”

“The poet.”

And she kissed his name on the title page of the book.

“So it was really he?”

“Certainly.”

“I took to flight!”

“To run away! But he saw you, he would have liked to approach. Just fancy! he resembled you, as much as any man can resemble a god, and no one was ever nearer the gods by spirit. To run away from him. Your brother in candor!”

This is the adventure such as I have been able to learn it. Cydalise says I should be very proud because of it. She has made me memorize three lines of this divine poem, so that I shall never have the air of being ignorant of my past:

Alors m’éveillerais-je à la ferveur première,

Droit et seul, sous le flot antique de lumière,

Lys! et l’un de vous tous pour l’ingénuité.

Candor, again! But nothing suits me any longer.

I have made a bargain with Cydalise. I permit her to send you kisses: accept them. She permits me to make, to renew rather, an entreaty to you. Do not allow those rascals who disembowel girls to be called satyrs. A satyr is incapable of such crimes. The lasses I have met have been highly satisfied with me and their kisses, innocent like nature, have thanked me fervently with a thousand little tricks I taught them.

Antiphilos,
Satyr.

IV
CYDALISE

IV

Cogolin, September 30.

Realize that I myself write to you. Cydalise has achieved this miracle. My divinity, which was already old six thousand years ago, now knows almost as much as those little lads coming out from school. I will not say that it has revealed the world to me. It has veiled it, on the contrary, and I have seen the world diminish, just as the pines on the hillsides lessen in size as one moves away. But in shrinking in stature, the world becomes sharper, its outlines grow more fixed, its light stronger. My brain is quite changed. It is no longer that of a god. The vision, vast but confused, and almost unconscious, has suddenly assumed form. Little by little I have detached myself from nature, where I was at home. She lived within me and I felt her like the beating of my heart. It is now I who live in her and in vain do I seek to touch her hands: no longer is she only air, light, odors and nourishment. I felt her breathing with the same breath as my own and now I must drink her essence: it intoxicates me.

Cydalise is amused at my astonishment:

“I see,” she says, “the birth of a man. That is finer than a god. I was curious about you. Now I love you, for I read a fraternity in your eyes. One can only love one’s equals or those who have been fashioned in one’s image. When the gods begin to love, they become men.”

This strange language delights me, for it is the truth: I have begun to love Cydalise. I know it by the fact that I now view the loveliest creatures almost indifferently, by the fact that the image of Cydalise immediately is interposed between them and me, if by chance they please and attract me. There were many of them under our pines, this summer. They used to lie on the lavender, their large hats shading their eyes; and they would pretend to sleep in the warm peacefulness of nature, beneath the sun’s last rays. Oh! the sudden emotion, the thrill that instantly seizes you, when the slowly lifted robe reveals a beautiful body! This is not an old recollection. There are still such refinements which were once common. Those bare feet in sandals, those hoods, those robes of a nun I once had seen in Florence, upright and modest in wool—the color of time and innocence—I beheld again, one evening, under the Cogolin pines.

How good and beautiful and gentle she was,—the little nun of Cogolin! It was my last adventure. Its memory is dear to me and I have not sacrificed it for Cydalise’s love; but since then I have sought nothing, accepted nothing. When I learned my alphabet, I wanted to carve these words on the bark of a plane-tree:

THE SATYR ANTIPHILOS
IS FAITHFUL TO
CYDALISE.

Re-reading this inscription, I could not believe it to be the truth, could not believe that I myself had written it. I was about to burst into laughter, when I beheld a happy expression in Cydalise’s eyes. I understood that I had not been lying.

We are living golden days. My sweetheart gives me almost all her time. When she leaves for the town, she returns a trifle fatigued, with pieces of gold which she smilingly shows, cakes, milk and honey. We share the food by the banks of a pure stream where doves come to drink.

Then she gives me a lesson. I think the gold she brings back with her comes from the lessons she gives men, down there. When I ask if her pupils are progressing, her only reply is to play with my curls and kiss me. I am acquiescent. Then we traverse our domain, that is to say the pine wood, the carpet of heather and lavender, the arid hillside where a stream, near which several plane-trees have sprung up, pauses beside a grotto and brambles.

Cydalise thinks it odd and amusing to dwell in a grotto. I have never slept anywhere but in the open or in grottos, and what astonishes me in our haven is not that it is a grotto, but that Cydalise has transformed it into a palace worthy of Olympus. In a chariot drawn by a swift-footed steed she brought a large sack of wool, skilfully sewed, on which we rest, much more at our ease than on the dead leaves which, notwithstanding, are comfortable; she also brought skins of beasts, and material richly woven and painted with liveliest colors. For her toilette she has collected a thousand objects which would make goddesses envious and, placed in elegant little boards are—and I have never seen the like of this—books and sketches. With her aid,—she is so frank, so refined, divine one might say—I live in a state of enchantment. I have leisure. My prepared repasts await me and the time I once spent in gathering fruits and roots is now passed with a book in which I discover life.

What surprises me, even more than the wonders created by Cydalise, is that life can be contained in the pages of a book. Yes, I have noticed that a sheet of paper on which one would say that a bug has taken a deliberate stroll with its dirty legs,—that such a rag of paper holds in itself more things than do the valleys and hillsides, the trees and horizons which stand or spread out in front of me. My long and divine experience is confounded. I believed I knew things because I had seen them; but men have regarded them, and that is not the same thing. I can only faintly express my joys, those of a budding, young, civilized creature. Into me have entered ideas of whose existence I never had the slightest suspicion, and as a result I am quite perturbed. It is in vain that I would attempt to explain them to you. Then, it would be like explaining flying to one who is at home in the air. But I need a confidant, a man to whom I can confess my new state of mind, without being laughed at. Cydalise intimidates me too much: near her I am like a big child trying to read thoughts in eyes and finding only itself reflected therein.

Ah! divine nature, thou art the agent, nevertheless, and it is thee I must thank. It is my noble nudity and the wild boldness of my carriage that have attracted this woman to me. The antennæ of pleasure have slowly changed to those of intelligence. When Cydalise, under my attentive eyes, disrobes and stands radiant, it seems to me that it is Isis herself; my brain is awhirl and no longer my senses alone, and my mind expands and blossoms with the same movement as my flesh.

Well! Not so bad for a satyr, eh? I re-read what I have written with a sense of pleasure, change a few commas and amuse myself hugely.

V
METAMORPHOSIS

V

Toulon, December 15.

Oh, what adventures since my last letter which itself announced so many changes in my life! I believe Cydalise is the victim of Aphrodite who has caused her to become infatuated with me.

“Before knowing you,” she tells me, “I did not know what love was?”

I laugh up my sleeve, for Cydalise, though mortal, has always seemed to me an expert in this immortal science, which I have practiced long enough to be considered a good judge. But I say nothing. How retort? My divine irony pauses at my lips, for Cydalise makes me experience such a strange sentiment. It is certain that I cannot do without her, and such a thing never happened to me before. To me she is more beautiful than all other women, fresher than maidens, more melting than perfumed matrons. With her I possess everything and I regret nothing. I soar higher than the gods, to the point where it seems to me that to become more than a god, one must cease being divine at each hour of existence. True divinity is intermittent and reposes deliciously in the vague condition of having been a god. I offer so many things in love that heretofore I had never sought of women; of them I had asked nothing more than to be a pretext, an opportunity for self-display. Now I feel that Cydalise throws as many jewels at my feet as I do: accordingly, not to be outdone in generosity, I obey her. She does what she wishes with me. What a metamorphosis!

I could not bear to be separated from her and the inclemency of the season made our meetings more and more difficult. Then she hit on the idea of bringing me to town:

“For I want to love you among my people,” she said.

I, who recalled the blows of pitchforks and the fangs of dogs, remained silent, gazing at her with terror.

“Are you afraid?”

“How can I follow you with my bareness?”

Cydalise broke into laughter, threw herself into my arms. That day we spoke no more of my departure.

One morning I was sadly meditating, dreaming of flight like a boar bearing in its flank the spear which has wounded it. Despite my love, the intriguing vision of new women began to swim before me; I was hearing their laughter, their disputes and their restless mockery, when Cydalise appeared at the end of the road, carrying a large bundle which she let fall, at the same instant that she herself dropped to the ground. Without uttering a word, she by turns looked at the package and at me. At last, she decided to laugh, as is her wont in embarrassing situations. She rolled on the moss, a prey to such a fit of hysterical gayety that her dress gave way. This changed the tenor of her thoughts and instantly calmed her. As soon as I noticed her troubled and serious face, I drew near and, after kissing her eyes tenderly, opened the package.

Cydalise’s eyes were following my every emotion with curiosity:

“Yes, it’s for you. I’m going to take you to town.”

You have guessed that it contained man’s apparel. I experienced a moment of despair:

“What, put on this!”

But Cydalise looked at me with such solicitude that I murmured, as submissive as an infant:

“I would really like to.”

She clapped her hands and we entered the grotto. There, it was quite cool and this perhaps influenced my mood. I was very much satisfied with myself after I had donned these garments which at first had seemed such wretched instruments of torture.

I felt warm and there emanated from me a certain human elegance of which I was proud. A sailor has since told me that I had the grace of Ho-Papo, the negro king, and he was not joking: a king is always a king, a satyr is always a satyr. With usual feminine good taste, Cydalise began to admire me. She did not tire of flattery, made me turn like a top, and smoothed the wrinkles and pockets of the suit. She only pouted at my blue tie which did not go well with my complexion, she said. “But we will see about that later.” My shoes were of soft, brilliant leather and did not hurt me in the least. A round, broad-brimmed hat completely covered my little, curving horns and my heavy shock of hair. Blushing a little, she put some pieces of gold and silver in my coat pocket. Then:

“Now, dear, you are ready. Let’s leave.”

“Farewell, grotto where I have been happy with the wind; and you, trees, streams, holly-trees, adieu. Nature, adieu....”

Cydalise interrupted my effusions, which seemed ridiculous, besides, to me, now that I had donned this human livery, and we transferred the contents of the grotto into a packet hardly bigger than the one which had contained the elements of my metamorphosis. I would have really liked to sacrifice once more to the sylvan Aphrodite, but Cydalise said that the train would not wait for us. We reached the carriage waiting for us at the edge of the pine forest.

My sensations, in this extraordinary beginning of my new life, were too confused for me to be able to find words to characterize them correctly. I traveled with something of the feeling of the animal I had been until now, but a divine animal in whom all sounds leave an impression. If I applied myself to the task, I might succeed in deciphering my impressions, as I did the phrases in my first reading book, but I fear that the results will give you nothing new, and I am going to delay the co-ordination of my emotions till later, if I should then decide that it is worth the trouble.

“Thus I behold these rapid objects which pass through the country, fleeter than the deer, more clamorous than wolves....”

You know how this sort of thing is done. Or again:

“Now I am installed in one of those palaces seen massed far off in the valleys or on the hills, and from which spreads a confused, continuous roar like the sea.”

Besides, my astonishments have ceased. I live with Cydalise in a room which looks out on the sea and where I suffocate when the window is shut. I hardly see my divine creature more often than in the days when our couch had only pine branches for a curtain. She never returns before two or three o’clock in the morning, and so fatigued that she only thinks of love upon awakening. She continues to recite the verses of the poets before groups of people, and amateurs of poetry demand her talents after the public performances. Despite this, I am not bored. I pay attention to things. So far, I do not see very well. My happiness is concentrated in Cydalise, and I am the joy of her days.

Antiphilos,
Satyr.

VI
THE CELL

VI

March 1.

Strange, this life for which I have exchanged my familiar woods and their hazards! And all through Cydalise! What monotony at first; then what annoyance and ennui! I thought of escape many a time, but my sweetheart imprisoned me with her tears, her smiles, her kisses, her gestures of entreaty.

“At least, wait until good weather arrives, dear,” she said. “What will you do in this severe cold, with the wind moaning through the pines, now that you have grown accustomed to the softness of beds and my tenderness? Could you find your way alone, among all these houses that conceal the horizon from your gaze? O Antiphilos! think of me, think of our mornings, think of my days made divine by your presence! What! you wish to leave your Cydalise! Have you not everything needed by a satyr? Come, tell me what it is you lack?”

I am at a loss for a reply to these honied words breathed into my pointed ears, and on my lips as well, while she kisses me. I desire to rediscover myself, but would she understand if I told her this? So I am silent. I also keep from her an adventure which has upset me. I fear she suspects it, although I would not wish her to be certain of it. The thing still makes me tremble, but you will know it, for you are my friend. And if I did not tell you, who then? For I no longer can confide in the pines, the rhododendrons, the crags and streams. Formerly, when some unlucky adventure befell me, through having strayed too near civilization, I would joyously chant my griefs and fears. Now, a prisoner, I have no living thing to listen to me, and when my voice rises, it stuns me. Besides, I have other concerns than liberty, the liberty I know I shall never recover.

One sunny day of last month, when I was leaning against the window and peering out, I discovered a grassy nook not far from here, a garden from which sharp cries came. I desired to go there. Cydalise daily takes me for a walk before dinner—as she would a favorite, pet animal. We go through old streets, towards the harbor, trying to reach the country; but it is too far away, and Cydalise never has time to spare. We dine early; she returns with me and, after a few caresses, leaves me with a parting injunction to be good. These maternal, little ways delight me, but they are also hard on me. I see myself reduced to an obedient infant, and this hurts my pride. At other times, I reflect that it is love which holds me, modifying my soul. Then I no longer dare commiserate myself, and I obey Cydalise’s every whim with a good grace.

I can fall asleep quickly. Reading by natural light dazes me, and I have preserved that faculty, more divine than animal, of instantly falling into an easy slumber, at once profound and light, which plunges me to the depths in a trice, and in a breath brings me back to the surface. I awake only with the return of Cydalise, who comes at a late hour, with the harmonious bees of Pindus still murmuring within her. She hums the verses she has been declaiming before the people, with new rhythms unfamiliar to my ear accustomed more to the stirring of winds through trees than to the fanciful inventions of inspired Euterpe. Sometimes she falls into my arms, almost dead with fatigue. Sometimes she disrobes frantically, astonishing me even by the boldness of her wanton movements. But I must confess that usually she is quite calm. After hailing me with a “Good evening, Tityrus,” she counts the money lying in her large bag which never leaves her; generally, she seems satisfied with herself and loses no time in falling asleep.

Were it not for the mornings, I certainly could not support a life so measured and confined; despite my love for Cydalise, I would go whither the road led; but I must confess that the mornings embellish my life. Cydalise is very lovely and surrenders her beauty even more completely than was her wont in the grottos and on the mosses. The open air and absence of seclusion frighten women a little. So I can understand and admire the means taken by your civilization to reassure them. If I can judge by Cydalise, how faun-like they become behind a stout bolt and under a light softly sifted by curtains! She is worthy of the gods. Why art thou not, like myself, immortal! I cannot behold thee without melancholy, for now that I perceive thy continued existence, I also perceive thy fate. It is only en passant, like a flash of lightning that gods should love women, who then experience them as a memorable thunderclap descending, illuminating, consuming, disappearing. And for them love, in their life, is but a deeper sensation, a profounder inspiration, a headier cup of wine. But the constant union of two beings so different in essence, though almost alike in desires and pleasures! Cydalise’s love makes me aware of the sadness of perishable things. I think of flowers, I think of the harvest time, I think of the seasons, of all that lives but a day, of all things that inevitably fall into the gulf, never to reappear. In giving me her feminine love, Cydalise has given me a man’s soul,—a soul realizing that destiny will not strike it, while witnessing the passing of all dear ones.

I already possess the metaphysical jargon of men. I can no longer accept life as it is offered, good or bad, but ever adorable by the fact that it exists. In spite of my divinity, I think of what will be, as though I did not bear the present and future within me, and as though I were not destined never to feel their burden on my shoulders. Mysterious gods, I need an effort not to think with sadness, I whose unconscious life once exulted in brief moments of illumination! Shall I really be transformed into a man, through having loved a woman? Then, I too, would have age. How long do infatuated fauns live? Perhaps that is why they have disappeared, for one no longer encounters them, at least in these Occidental lands.

You see to what excesses my ramblings lead me and the illogical thoughts which attack me while contemplating the mortal head of Cydalise, asleep as though she were dead. Ah, mortals! how poisonous is your love, and what an idea was mine to lift towards my lips the cool amphoras which seemed to contain pure water! Trust in pure water, fauns and satyrs.

And I have not told you my adventure. Cydalise is yet asleep, but she will soon awake. I dare not. I will write you more anon. Despite his sunny mornings, pity the poor satyr.

Antiphilos,
Satyr.

VII
THE SATYR! THE SATYR!

VII

Toulon, March 15.

Dear friend, the head of a satyr living in Toulon with a lyrical declaimer of verse, the people’s favorite, and seeing nothing but the ungraceful habitations of humanity, is subject to strange effervescences. So you will pardon the ramblings of my last letter in which I desired to describe a certain incident but did not know how to go about it. I have not yet learned how to assort my ideas into their compartments. They are jumbled together in complete disorder, and the result is confusion. When I wish to draw one of them out, the others interfere, and much time is spent in putting the whole into some semblance of order.

I was on the point of touching the matter in question when the hour struck for Cydalise to give to her rested features the smile that illuminates them. This is the same as saying that Cydalise awakes with a smile. It occurs like a rose unfolding quickly enough to let one observe the opening of its petals. I would not willingly miss the phenomenon, and from the rose I watch each morning I draw the dew of moist lips. The hamadryads and the oreads are beautiful. Happy is he who can surprise them in the freshness of dawn and awaken storms of pleasure in their breasts. But Cydalise effaces their memory by her indescribable grace in which promises and desires are blent. She is really the waking nymph, but she is the nymph who awaits her beloved, joyously taking possession at the same instant that she surrenders. I would never reach an end, dear friend, if I dared tell you all the delights Cydalise causes me to experience. It is an incantation, perhaps, but I lend myself happily to its consummation, and never am I surfeited by the divine potion, no more than by the ecstasy with which it fills me.

On a certain morning of the month that has passed, Cydalise was cruel. She permitted me to drink her dawning smile, but the perfumed, blossomed cup was rudely snatched from my lips, at the same time that her arms, clasped an instant round my neck, disengaged themselves and thrust me away.

“Tityrus,”—this is how she always addresses me—“I have business to attend. I must leave for I am already late. Be good, my dear.”

Not a word did I say; I merely looked at her distressfully. She quickly dressed, kissed me almost discreetly and disappeared.

She left me in a state which you, perhaps, will not understand, since you are not a faun. Within me these lines murmured:

Tant pis! vers le bonheur d’autres m’entraîneront

Par leur tresse nouée aux cornes de mon front....

She had forgotten to lock me in. I was out in a trice. I had taken pains with my attire, had given myself all the elegance worthy of my athletic, satyr form. It was the morning hour. Shrill cries issuing from a little garden gave me my bearings. There were all sorts of short-skirted creatures who were playing, leaping, running; but I particularly noticed two almost tall girls near a clump of trees. They were conversing while combing their dolls. Another bench was opposite; I sat down on it.

Already you are trembling because you know the person, because he has confessed several amusing anecdotes to you, because it is by a mere slip of a girl that you first learned of my existence. Well, my friend, nothing occurred, unless it be that I was suddenly seized with fear, that I took to my heels and returned home, followed, from a distance, happily—by a yelling troop of Yahoos.

“The satyr! The satyr!”

I was allayed. I did not desire to be led “by their tresses tied to the horns of my head.”

But what reflections are these!

Now you see the result of five or six months of living in a civilization of which I have not been a part. Certainly, I have never been foolhardy and I prefer to flee from blows to having the blows scathe me; but nonetheless, I would never have trembled, in the old days, like a hare at the shadow of my ears. Could it be the reading of your newspapers which has distracted me? I think so. An honest man—at least, I have the appearance of one—can no longer sit facing and smiling at the playful affectations of two little girls without having his ears tingle with the baying of a pack of hounds.

Yet these young lasses with hair down their backs are pretty; but since this foolish adventure, I detest them. Ah! how I suffer through my cowardice and faithfulness. Cydalise, always Cydalise! Does she imagine that, because I love her, I can love no one but her?

Alas! I am enchained. After having broken my bonds, I have myself rewelded them. I fear lest she grumble, I fear lest she ridicule, I fear her eyes, especially, her eyes in which I see and tremblingly await the dawning of suspicion.

Is it thus you love, you others? With such laceration and an equal submissiveness? Do you feel within you the roarings of an impatient and obedient animal? Perhaps, at bottom, men and gods are formed of the same elements, with the exception that the fauns have a more energetic leaven? This might easily be the case, since in all times the gods have mingled with your women and, to please and serve them, have occasionally abdicated their divinity. We all are children of destiny and our immortal life is, after all, but a succession of human lives badly joined to each other by the confused mortar of recollection. What matters the past to me, today? I easily perceive that there is only a present, for the present effaces every other instant of time. There is such a difference between the being I was yesterday and the being I am today that it is only with difficulty that I can establish any logical connection. Duration, or what you call by this name, is only an illusion of the passage of time. But it is motionless for me, who am ever the same and whose life is always recommencing, rather than continuing, since duration is time. Do you understand? My dear, I have read the metaphysicians and have concluded that life means nothing to mortals, since it has an end, and nothing to the gods, since it has none. All things are equal in absurdity. Yet, I still have a vague reminiscence of pleasures I knew as a free animal. I did not act the animal every day, but neither do I do so every day with Cydalise. By Jupiter! if I came to such a pass that I loved no longer, what would I become between these four walls, or outside, among those swarming Yahoos!

I want Cydalise to take me with her to the people she delights with her art. I must familiarize myself with external movement and speech. Have I not everything needful to please? Yes, I am satisfied with myself when I gaze into my darling’s mirror. Besides, since she looks upon me with pleasure, why should others be startled? I had no doubts concerning myself in the woody dells when my limbs were plastered with dried mud, with moss and leaves clinging to my hairy body; and never did woman flee long before me without bringing on an opportune fall. It is true that everything seemed good to me at that time and that I have since become more fastidious. I am even astounded by the number of ugly and unattractive women we meet in our walks. I jest so loudly about it to Cydalise that she scolds me, but she holds my opinion and often softly murmurs: “What figures?”

I did not wish to relate my experiences with the young girls to Cydalise. I have changed my mind. I want her to know of it. I even want to exaggerate the dangers—almost imaginary—which I risked among these Yahoos, so that she may see the necessity of familiarizing me with the world.

Yahoos! That is the feeling you all give me. Do not be offended! There are women, there are men among the Yahoos.

Antiphilos,
Satyr.

VIII
FENNEL WATER

VIII

Toulon, April 1.

Friend, I thank you for your advice which I found to the point. Everything has succeeded beautifully. My chagrin has touched Cydalise. It was real. I had but to feign an excess of feeling and simulate despair. A week of high comedy has reduced her to acquiescence. How easy it is to deceive women! I came to this conclusion long ago with the naive nymphs of my fatherland; women, just a little more subtle, fall into the same snares. Occupied with themselves more than with anyone else, and totally confident of the power of their charms, they do not know that one can deprive oneself of them for a week, merely to acquire that superior thing,—liberty. Creatures of instinct, they are superior in the conflicts of instinct, but the exercise of intelligence puts them to rout, because they never think of crediting their adversaries with this quality. Cydalise understood but one thing, that I might escape her tenderness; ever since, she redoubles her cajoleries. Mine reassure her and, as I have been well received by the society she frequents, we are more than ever united.

I secretly made preparations for my new mode of life. From the very first, I found myself at my ease. I owe it to myself, I said, to the antiquity and divinity of my race, and I assumed the disillusioned attitude of a superior person exiled among the Scythians. I converse little, save when Cydalise is near enough to nudge me with her elbow or knee, and by degree I am acquiring the reputation of a contemptuous or indifferent man.

“Some gentleman’s son, some solid country squire,” I have heard people remark.

Cydalise, to whom I repeated this, laughed heartily.

“Isn’t it true!” she kept on saying.

She informed me that a country squire signifies a nobleman of the country who has remained slightly rustic. Stroking my beard, she kissed me before everybody. This brought queer little cries from many of the women present. It took place in the café de l’Amirauté, where I made my debut in the career of a man of the world, of the vast world.

Women gaze at me intently. This does not astonish me, for I must seem supernatural to them, but hardly any one of them has yet pleased me, and Cydalise sees her anxieties dissipated from day to day. She has entrusted me to one of her friends, an old naval officer who has known human nature of every kind and who tells me, from morning to night, of his sea voyages and experiences. He is very proud of having known a girl named Rarahu who was inconsolable, like Calypso at the departure of Ulysses, and whom he, notwithstanding, consoled.

“I have never seen my equal,” he tells me, “in consoling mulatto girls abandoned by the whites.”

This inferior love inspires me with some pity, but I am glad to know of his function in love. If I ever leave Cydalise to follow my destiny, which is unlimited, besides, I shall place her in the hands of this fine fellow.

A crony came to see him and they began to recount what they term their lucky fortunes. This comrade is very agreeable, but a trifle of a bore.

What a poverty of recollections and sensations! From their recitals there emanates an indefinable odor of smutty talk which sickens. As for myself, love never made me laugh. It was to me the most serious, the most profound thing in the world. I have always found a savor of infinity even with the coarse farm girl, smelling of cow dung.

Besides, I really believe that love gives us what we already possess and that it can give us this alone. That is why, to natures like mine, the quality of the adversary matters little, allowing for youth and strength. Yet beauty has always been a fountain wherein my forces increased, and where I have ever found my desires renewed as soon as I abandoned myself to the secret of the waters.

But beauty is so rare! I can confess to you that even the immortal nymphs are sometimes a little flat-nosed, and there is a common quality in their eyebrows which are too close together, and their hair which falls too far down. Like myself, before the transformation, they are redolent of the earth, dead leaves and flowers crushed by thighs. Do not dream of those loves which are beautiful only by reason of their unconsciousness. They can still delight me, I can still renew my original essence with them and the vigorous youth of my Phrygian desires, but your Cydalises, so precious through their very fragility, surpass the deliciousness of the immortal creatures, and it is their skin which is fragrant with the odor of violets.

My two sailors drank a sort of grass-colored water with the aroma of fennel. Their complexion took on richer hues and, playing with some little bones, like Sicilian shepherds, they exchanged no speech save for a few words whose meaning I could not seize. They had forgotten the women and I was not at all sorry, for I hardly relish the insane conversations of which they are the pretext.

I was free to gaze at those who now filled the café and who seemed to be paying no attention to me. Yet I noticed that two eyes, apparently straying listlessly, were fixed on my figure from time to time, and vanity caused me to smile. A smile answered me. I, who was not drinking any of the fennel water, felt myself grow redder than my companions, and I suddenly made a movement to rise. My old instincts came to the surface, I was about to run toward my pleasure, as in days past. An instant, I thought I breathed real fennel and the odor of the Cogolin oranges. Had she also risen, had she made a gesture of flight like the wild creatures I once knew, how I would have bounded in pursuit! But she took a newspaper, behind which she concealed her face, and the source of enticement being removed, I remained tranquil. Cydalise approached. It is probable that her arrival, perceived in the mirror, had caused the newspaper to be unfolded. I promised myself to be, henceforth, more a master of myself and to survey the mirrors.

My beloved Cydalise annoyed, then exasperated me by stupidly calling me “her old Tityrus”; this caused the release of a little rusty spring in the old officer who labouriously let fall these words:

“Tityre tu recubans, recubans....”

The newspaper did not budge, but I prudently lowered my eyes. Fortunately, the game of bones was ended, the two old men turned towards her and assailed her with gallantries. The one who had arrived last was the most assiduous and Cydalise, amused, recovered a little of her animation. She accepted a glass of grass juice and the gentlemen profited by the occasion to fill their cups, begging me to follow their example.

“Not he, not he!” Cydalise cried. “It makes him wild. He wants some milk.”

The milk was bluish and tasted like old paper, but I preferred it to the fennel. How often, in my wanderings through fields, have I not pressed Io’s drugs to my lips! I wanted to mention this aloud. Happily, the grimace I made, in tasting this strange beverage, removed from my mind this unreasonable piece of confidence.

I kept silent, imbibing the benefits of civilization without a word.

“Well, there are compensations,” I told myself.

We left. On the threshold I turned toward the newspaper. It had been lowered. Cydalise examined the folds of her dress. I foolishly threw a kiss at the face which now was looking at me.

“Are you coming, Tityrus?”

I followed.

Am I beginning to understand?

Antiphilos,
Satyr.

IX
EREBUS

IX

Toulon, June 17.

You now know the manner of my life for the past two months, my dear friend, and although you have not let me hear from you for such a length of time, I am going to tell you something of myself, to call forth your advice. Young persons and the eternally young gods need the remonstrances of the sages, and you are a sage, you who do not scorn satyrs. You know that the manner of their life exposes them to unpleasant adventures among mortals more infatuated with the idea of love than with love itself.

It seems that some sort of Olympic games are being celebrated at Turin and that different representatives from the whole world have come there to dispute for the embossed cups and laurel wreaths. A director of the performances who traveled through this place became enamoured of Cydalise’s face and entreated her to represent the goddesses, in unveiled poses, before the assembled throngs. He supposes that a beautiful body always follows from a fine figure and I must confess to you that he was not deceived, in this instance. Cydalise is like myself; she has no false modesty and she would even consider it criminal obstinately to conceal from the world what the supreme Creator of men and satyrs has formed for the delight of eyes. She therefore accepted,—she has since then laughingly told me that the tyrant of this country, whom I thought more humane, far from wishing to lighten the draperies of goddesses, insists on their being very opaque and heavy; but this is a secondary point in the story, so we will pass it by,—without concealing the fact that there was a question of me; this embarrassed her greatly. She said that she feared all sorts of dangers for her dear Antiphilos, and Antiphilos who preferred to remain at Toulon hastened to reveal a scandalous joy in the idea of the trip. So she has left me here, promising—and her director has agreed to this—to return once a week to spend a day with me.

She faithfully returns, as she has promised, bringing on each trip a quantity of golden money with the most diverse effigies: I would never have supposed that the world contained so many tyrants. If they wage war, as was customary in the old days, in what state must the earth be, O master of Olympus? I am the guardian of this treasure, which steadily increases. I do not yet know very well what can be done with this gold; I have other means of persuasion, but Cydalise knows, and I content myself with fulfilling my office which is to stuff all this gold in a bag, make it fast and be silent.

I have other means of persuasion. They are apparent in the eagerness of my eyes which are not, as the poet says, “hard, brilliant and sad,” but soft, brilliant and joyous, eyes of a lover, eyes of a magnet, eyes which attract hearts and eyes, as the magic stone, sapphires. You have guessed that my conquest of the Admiralty café has fallen into my arms and that she was satisfied to be there. She is far from being as comely as Cydalise and hardly gives me any pleasure outside that of variety. Yet she, too, knows the rules of the game and all its finesse. What especially stimulates her is the idea of deceiving Cydalise, whom she knows and who has never wanted to associate with her. Let us hope, O god of the winged heel, that she proceeds not to boast of her good fortune! I will make a sacrifice to Harpocrates so that he may place a seal on her lips. I have called her Erebus; why, she does not know. Her body is like those gilded flambeaux, smudged with black, that I remember having seen at Ephesis after the conflagration. As we were strolling on the wharf the other day, a sailor sang:

Elle est un peu brunette,

Ce sont les plus belles gens.

She began to listen and laugh:

“Is that so, Satyros?”

“Yes, Erebus.”

I have not confided anything to her, but she has beheld, carved on the poop of a Greek vessel, a satyr’s head that resembled me; and a sailor spelled for her the name with which she calls me. All this amuses me. The Phrygian Oreads used to call me this name for the fun of provoking me, and they would stamp a figure on the ground, telling of my victory. O sweet land of Phrygia!

All the same, I have entreated her to keep this name for our intimacy, for the satyrs have more and more acquired a bad reputation in this country and it maddens me. Did not Erebus have the idea, the other day, to buy and read aloud a newspaper proudly called The Journal of Satyrs:

“Ah! Ah! there is the paper for you! The only thing it lacks is your picture.”

By Apollo! What incoherencies! What nonsense! What idea, anyway, have the slaves who write these pages, of a satyr? Despite my debonair attitude of mind, I grew angry both against the journal and against the archons who have thrown, it seems, the slaves into prison. They are but fools. They hardly merit the punishment with which Priapus threatens plunderers of the orchards: inrumabo! I explained all this to Erebus: she became serious. We began to speak of other things.

This is to what you expose your satyr, Cydalise, in letting him stroll through the streets, while the Olympic youths drain the enchased cups, filled with a dark wine, in your honor. Erebus only likes champagne. I am always faithful to my milk with the paper taste and, when Erebus is astonished at this, I tell her that milk is the wine of satyrs. She quickly assumes a smiling expression: it is her manner of intimating that she has understood.

When Cydalise returns, we pass every minute at our home, the days as well as the nights. Thus I avoid chance meetings and explanations, which would cause me to lose my head, for my only diplomacy consists in taking to flight and in concealing myself behind a tree trunk. How fettered I feel myself with your civilization and how unreasonable women are! This they call treason, betrayal. But I love them all. Do they not all belong to me, since I can satisfy them all? Neither they, nor you perhaps, yet know what it is to be a satyr, the quality of that force of nature unchained by desire. Cydalise will have to make a decision and admit that satyrs are not formed for constancy and that caprice is a divine thing.

O caprice, diversity of forms under the eternal law, caprice with changing eyes!

Caprice, slender maiden with breasts of brass, matron where autumn and its colors are enthroned!

Caprice, nymphs stained with blackberries, with argil backs, with cheeks cut by brambles, pure or impure like the earth,—and dry leaves rustle in their entangled tresses!

Caprice, the young shepherds run towards the cot, and the shepherdesses takes each other by the hand, crying like fowl surprised by a fox, and turning round to laugh between their cries!

Caprice, pungent odor of ferns, odor of shoulders under willows and of limbs in streams still white with the foam of the daughter of Latona bathing there!

Caprice!

Let not this flight of fancy surprise you. The summer has mounted to my head.

Antiphilos,
Satyr.

X
DIOGENES

X

Toulon, July 15.

Joyful, indeed, and happy is my lot since I became a domesticated faun. No longer do I experience hunger or cold, absence of love, hostility of mankind, the bites of dogs. But with my happiness there mingles a vague sense of shame, an indescribable feeling of being cramped. I have the sensation of diminishing divinity: the man grows in me, subtly and gradually stifling my primitive nature, which was Desire. I have the nostalgia of desire. Once I desired fruits, leaves, women; and now that these things have come to me, I dream only of being naked and famished in a desert. Oh! what attractions solitude has for him who lives in the midst of humanity!

The Phrygian Aesop—I knew his brothers, who were handsome and stupid—has written a fable to prove that liberty is the chief blessing. I heard it in the Greek of my infancy, and young girls learned it by heart on my knees. It is true and false, like every human invention. Liberty is a burden which one desires to throw on the ground, when one knows nothing else, and in the slavery of the happiest of civilizations there is a bitterness that oppresses the heart. Once my very sadness was a sort of joy that caused my life to expand flower-like and become glorious. My sadness was a momentary transformation of the forces of my being and when, by chance, I encountered someone with whom to share this mood, it bourgeoned in the voluptuous silence of nights until it equalled the very immensity of the world. Now and then I suffered, but I never experienced ennui. What is this new distemper whose existence I learned at the same time that I knew its name? One day I observed that things around me were becoming colorless and that the eyes of women were fading at my approach, like a metal mirror. I no longer interested myself in anything, I dreamed of lands that were inexistent. My past itself, so rich in adventures, no longer sufficed to fix memory on any single point of my history, and my dormant desire stirred not at the prospect of future loves.

This only lasted several days, but I am still affected by it and I feel that I shall never be cured. Cydalise’s return brought a temporary recovery; since her second departure, I support my life without extracting much pleasure out of it. Erebus has forsaken me, I am alone, and it is in vain that Déidamie, a little Greek girl, puts herself in my way when I go to see my friends who drink the green water. She is a friend of Erebus, who has also bequeathed me an old dealer in syllables who used to write love letters for her in return for the pleasure her visits gave him. She had a habit of tossing her dark hair at him, while letting fall a medley of words that were sharp and peppery. Erebus called him her secretary and I address him as Diogenes. I have often heard their quarrels and debates, one wishing to clothe the secret thoughts of Erebus in fitting diction, the other hurling them forth at random, as naked as Aphrodite emerging from the waves, and much less chaste. How comical my old Diogenes seemed in this struggle. But I was hurt to learn that Erebus trafficked in her charms, with the same unconsciousness as Destiny. The manner of my breaking with her is an insignificant episode. Several days afterwards, I learned that she had left with an English traveler who had no desire to view sunny sites without a companion. Diogenes was in tears when he told me the news. He attends when I dress and awaits my morning talk, but it is I who make him speak.

His discourse is pleasant and bitter. At first I was immensely amused, but his disillusioned words soon made me reflect on myself and on life more than he would have wished, and I think it is perhaps this that has made me ill. It is not surprising to find him disenchanted, for he is old and poor, reduced to associate with a circle of people that goes against his instincts and habits. I have perhaps erred in calling him Diogenes, for he is more melancholy than cynical, more resigned than depraved. Little as I am versed in apparel and styles, he seems to me to be garbed with a sort of old-fashioned refinement. His hair has the color of hemp one sees steeping in the ponds of fields; it is as discolored as his soul. His linen is always immaculate, his complexion is rosy, his hands fine, his eyes gentle and vague; and his fleshy lips give him an air of goodness and innocent sensuality.

There are priests of Jupiter here with this appearance, but some Greek phrases he let fall have revealed to me the old professor of eloquence or philosophy. Now I listen to his explanations of life without dismay and I even experience the pleasures of the initiate. Sometimes I seem to hear a Bacchant, sometimes a Mithriac, and sometimes again, a man in his cups. Wine, which makes me wild and which I like only in the grape, makes him bold. When he visits me, I always order a flagon the color of amber or of new roses, the sight of which is pleasant to my eyes, and I hearken to his wisdom while brushing my hair or polishing my horns, for I keep no secrets from him.

Like Erebus, he familiarly calls me Satyros, and I find this quite natural. She was the subject of our first conversation, or rather of his first discourse:

“What I like in this woman is her disinterestedness. She sells her body only the better to surrender herself; it is her weakness. She has a marvelous appetite and can only satisfy it with those of her choice. Those who choose her find her but a servant of Aphrodite. Were she rich, she would be the most honest of women and would only select her loves among those who most resemble the gods. Wealth is a great privilege, even in love. Thus it happens that there are two races on the globe, everlastingly creating and re-creating themselves,—the race submissive to destiny and the race which surmounts it. You have heard the contrary. It is nonsense. Give heed to the voice of a man whom fate overwhelms and who, to be reconciled with a woman he loves, has changed himself into her domestic slave. She will return; I shall again feel the odor of her hair and of her scorn. I have ruined myself for Aspasia. It is right that Aspasia should hold me in contempt.”

I give you quite faithfully some of his words; I have not understood them well. It seemed to me, besides, that his face flushed and grew ruddy, that he was getting drunk. He added words that I understood even less, about the pleasure of suffering and the keen delights of humiliation. Then he recited Theognis’ invective against poverty, thus completing the confession of his absolute incoherence.

He is not always so senseless. He is an unfortunate wretch punished by Aphrodite for having misused love—this is only permitted the gods—but she usually offers him a respite and then his conversation is less depressing. If I am to tell you the end of my experiences, I shall doubtless have to speak of Diogenes. But I am truly forbearing, for he has taken advantage of me.

Antiphilos,
Satyr.

XI
DÉIDAMIE

XI

Monte-Carlo, September 15.

How it all came about, my dear friend, is a puzzling matter, but Diogenes led me into an adventure which could not help make me uneasy, though I am confident the protection of the all-powerful gods will never fail me. Everything was proceeding smoothly; the roguish snares of Déidamie, to which I had at last yielded, had freed me of that vague ennui which tormented me.... But I must make you familiar with this, in the episodic manner, before giving you the recital of the dreadful happenings. Picture to yourself this Phrygian girl, born on the Mæander shores, and if this does not move you, at least you will understand my emotion upon discovering, once more, a lass hailing from my native land! But the Phrygians have always been inconstant: Déidamie is the very embodiment of caprice. Charming maid! She was the inamorata of an archon’s wife, herself strikingly lovely, partaking of the beauty that men have given Pallas Athena.

“You love those who resemble you, O Déidamie of the violet eyes!”

Déidamie loved those who were like her and those unlike her. How privileged women are! They bring grace to their loves. Diogenes explained to me that it was thus they disarmed morality, that power dreaded by mankind, and whose aim is to prevent the extraction of too much pleasure from life. Déidamie was taken away from me while I still loved her. That is a good time to lose a woman. Regrets then are transformed into pleasant memories, and one is spared satiety. Diogenes had predicted that this would hardly last and that Déidamie, being accustomed to feminine cajoleries, would soon weary, after the first days of felicitous astonishment, of a being awkward in tender adorations.

“You will not know,” he said, “how to feed the flame sleeping in her soft eyes. Your bellows will extinguish instead of keeping it alive.”

And he continued:

“I know all about you, Satyros. You always excite curiosity and you never fail to disappoint it. Your career consists of abduction, the sudden surprise, the stupefaction.”

I wanted to reply that there was much truth in his judgment of my character, but I remained silent, meditating on my companion’s wisdom and perspicacity. Yet I thought of Cydalise, of whom he was ignorant. I related the story to him and surprised him. After a moment’s reflection, he confessed that to know and classify the types of women was a vain and sorry task; some one would always turn up to contradict and annihilate the most positive theories.

“What you tell me, Satyros, does not go against the grain, since it instructs me. The science of men and women is composed of exceptions, each one of which constitutes a rule. Thus the science is a very long and laborious one. It thus resembles the Chinese language, which aged men begin to master after sixty years of study and when they no longer have either the strength or the inclination to discourse. The eyes grow impaired in observing men, and it is quite other faculties that are used in the company of women, without which, besides, they would be equally spent. But you cannot understand this, you who were kneaded out of an immortal clay, moulded so that you would never experience exhaustion, and who are the image of a youthfulness whose illusions should be realities.”

While saying this, Diogenes looked at me with an air of envy in which was affection, that air carried by the poor in the presence of vases filled with gold, such as I have seen in the street behind iron railings. He continued, as though issuing from a dream:

“Are you truly immortal, Satyros? The great gods, your masters and the masters of men, are dead....”

“Destiny has overlooked me, Diogenes, and besides, I believe that I have brethren in the depths of every forest, in the grottos of every mountain, in every dale. I have never seen, but I divine them. We are the forces of nature and if we died, you would be condemned to death.”

“That is rather what we are. I think you are confusing immortality and perpetuity.”

I did not answer. I find it difficult to enter into subtleties. It seems to me that my horns then begin to shoot out of my head. This time he looked at me with pity:

“Hm! Satyr,” he said. “To return to a more sensible topic, since Cydalise loves you, why do you not go to find her again?”

“And will you come with me, Diogenes?”

“Without a doubt. You spoke of destiny, and since it has placed in my path a son, or even a grand-cousin of the immortal gods, do you suppose that I can abandon him? You do not know friendship, Satyros. It is man’s virtue.”

Thereupon, he delivered a long discourse which enchanted me by the charmingly cadenced arrangement of its periods. I imagined myself transported to the times of my childhood, I drank his eloquence like my mother’s milk. I was stirred, I wept with emotion and I panted, half-drowned under these harmonious waves. I am Greek and sensitive to the felicities of rhetoric. Ah! had he spoken in Greek, I would have offered to share my divinity with him, but I was thankful for his discretion and embraced him. It was the time propitious for swearing eternal friendship. I passed the remainder of the day congratulating myself on the good fortune which had fallen to my lot among mankind. I had a friend, and without understanding the joys that this should bring me, I considered them great and equal to those painted by Diogenes in his flowered discourse.

He came to live with me. He installed himself in an adjoining room which I was happy to be able to offer him, as is fitting in true friendship, and he did not hesitate to share my frugal repasts, with which he was pleased to be contented. Then he spoke once more of Cydalise, whose portrait arose from the depths of his memories. I described her to him and he forthwith knew her. His talk afforded me pleasure. To speak of her was to revive her under my very eyes, almost under my lips. She was nearer to me, each time I pronounced her name aloud, and it seemed to me that the door was about to open and reveal her.

Cydalise had not returned for nearly a month and she had only written me somewhat enigmatic letters which but half reassured me. The last was a note so brief that I read it at a glance, as one drinks with a single draught the water scooped into the palm of the hand. I had been distracted from my uneasiness by Déidamie’s caprice, but now that the little Phrygian had returned to her friend, I thought deeply of Cydalise. It was easy for Diogenes to prevail on me to go and join her, and as he wished to spare me all the inconveniences of the trip, our departure was decided upon, following a new discourse which profoundly stirred me to the depths of my heart and satisfied my last scruples. We made our preparations. I did not forget the treasure with whose care I was entrusted. Diogenes took charge of it.

You will know the consequences.

Antiphilos,
Satyr.

XII
THE CLUSTER OF GRAPES

XII

Monte-Carlo, September 20.

Consequently we left. Diogenes was in very good spirits and I a trifle out of countenance by such a rapid decision, for he had hardly obtained my consent than, our affairs in order, we were on our way.

“Perhaps,” I said, “Cydalise is returning at the very moment that I leave. What will she think of me?”

But Diogenes seemed quite sure of the matter.

“Doubtless, at this very moment she is climbing the flight of stairs, she knocks at the door, no one answers her, she grows perturbed, she begins to make inquiries. This is possible since everything is possible. But Cydalise is not one of those giddy, thoughtless persons who arrive all of a sudden at the home of their lover, especially when the lover goes by the name of Satyros. Life has given such a one experience. Trust in me, my friend, and let us have no anxieties about the matter.”

As I am always sensitive to the last impression which strikes me, I easily agreed with the opinion of Diogenes and began to examine the landscape which still possessed the richness of summer. Everywhere I imagined I found once more the appearance of the Cogolin countryside and the fragrance of its orange-trees. In vain did Diogenes endeavor to put me right by informing me that we were quite remote from that spot; still I saw the woods of the last days of my liberty, and I grew enthusiastic as though they were about to return.

“Let us get off at this spot,” I would say each moment, “I feel that happiness awaits me in these rocks. A woman has come for me in this very place, she is looking for me, she believes she has spied me behind each clump of arbutus. See, she turns round hopefully and scans the autumn-hued land. Let us get off, let us get off!”

“It is a long time since you beheld the country fields, Satyros,” Diogenes answered. “Your head is turned. What would you have us do in this wild desert? It is nothing but a color, it is nothing but imagination.”

The train slackened its speed and Diogenes had to stop me as I was about to hurl myself through the carriage door. It opened at the same moment and two women entered our compartment where we had been alone up till now. Diogenes now knew that he need no longer watch me. From his pocket he drew a newspaper and began to read tranquilly, confident that I would not try to escape. In fact, I was quite at ease, quite satisfied with the turn of affairs. Although the new arrivals afforded no pleasure to my eyes, they were capable of occupying my imagination. I recognized their coiffure. How many similar heads had I not pursued in days of yore among the shadows of descending night, on the skirt of the vineyards! They were not absolutely ugly and their eyes had even a certain beauty; but what heaviness of outline, what disgracefulness of forms! Certainly I had loved more than one with less comeliness. And these were the types of conquests with which I had once been so elated, those fruits of nature which I had devoured, those earthen urns out of which I had quaffed my pleasures so boldly. These buxom daughters of Pomona carried in each arm a basket of grapes, oranges and vegetables. These they deposited near them, and as I looked at the contents of the baskets more intently than at their owners, one of them addressed me in a singing voice:

“Perhaps you would like to eat a bunch of grapes?”

I stretched my hand forward and she gracefully lifted her heavy basket toward me. She was the less coarse of the two.

“I can only offer you,” I said, “a kiss.”

Both of them commenced to laugh and the other, in an engaging manner, remarked:

“The baskets belong to the two of us.”

I kissed her on the cheek, and her companion on the corner of her lips. I had once again become a faun; my contemptuous reflections had counted for naught against the tempting odor of a market woman!

They laughed so loudly, to conceal their embarrassment, that they failed to notice the train’s arrival at Arcs. Diogenes, whom the scene had diverted from his newspaper, mentioned the fact aloud and the countrywomen hastened to dismount. As I held out their baskets to them, she whom I had touched with my desire bowed to me with a smile while the other said:

“Shall we perhaps meet again?”

I had dominated my emotion. When the train started again, Diogenes sententiously proferred these words which I was long in understanding:

“That is what one gets for having frequented the little courtesans of Toulon.”

Noticing my astonishment, he added:

“Satyros is becoming farther and farther removed from nature. Perhaps we shall be able to make something out of him.”

Diogenes’ perspicacity surprised and enchanted me at the same time. How well the two propositions reunite and how faithfully they render my own sentiment. But what could be the meaning of these words: “Perhaps we shall be able to make something out of him. Am I then nothing, nothing of consequence, nothing serious and true?”

“Diogenes,” I answered, “I understand your first thought; it answers to mine; but what do you propose to make of me? This is vague.”

“A philosopher, Satyros, nothing more and nothing less, a philosopher like myself, that is to say a man who is the dupe of nothing or who, when he is a dupe, knows and enjoys his deception. It is a very rare state of mind and surpasses even that of the Gods whom, if I am to judge by yourself, are totally ignorant and always at the mercy of the impressions of the moment. I was satisfied to notice with what an eye you studied the rustics who tried their best little tricks upon you. That is the first stage. One must know how to resist the passions. The second consists in yielding to them. To be neither above nor below human weakness, which the divine foibles greatly resemble, if once more I can judge by yourself,—here you have the ideal position. Be always at their level, always ready to respond to them.”

“Had I met them along some path, in the mountain, despite my repulsion of the first moment I would not have been able to master my desire.”

“It is thus I understand the second stage,” answered Diogenes, “but there is a third stage, which is still more advantageous. This takes place when a person loves himself sufficiently, loves himself more than the desires which make him leave his egoism. I am journeying toward that condition, which I do not believe you will ever attain, Satyros.”

“No more do I myself believe it, Diogenes. If the nature of the gods is hardly removed from that of men, it nevertheless differs in this essential point: all poetry is forthwith incorporated with its substance, effortlessly and by the very play of desire. I enrich myself where you impoverish yourself, Diogenes.”

It was his turn to meditate upon the profundity of my words. He did not know what to answer, doubtless, for on his face I read ennui and sadness and envy perhaps. Diogenes is no longer very young. I fear his philosophy is only a sort of insouciant resignation to the fatality which weighs on mankind. I perceive—books have already taught me this—that there are as many philosophies as there are ages and temperaments. He has sufficiently outlined this for me by his theory of the three stages. One desires to resist passions when they are so weak that a little attention suffices to master them. One yields to them when they are so strong that a struggle is grievous. One scorns them on the day they become nerveless, when one no longer dare regret the time of their heydey for fear of appearing in the attitude of a vanquished person. That is the moment of virtue. According as young or old men, the feeble or the strong govern society, the one or the other spirit dominates the world. And I really believe that this applies to all human inclinations. States fluctuate according as action or thought and dream are held in higher repute. Ah! I understand why they laugh in Olympus.

Antiphilos,
Satyr.

XIII
THE UNKNOWN WOMAN

XIII

Cannes, December 1.

Good friend, I have not told you what happened to us at Monte-Carlo and it is with difficulty that I now recall it. At first it seemed important and stirring, but I readily see that events have hardly any interest outside of their novelty: this should teach us to view them philosophically at the very moment when they appear most grievous. It really seems to me that the adventure which befell Diogenes, and which affected us both, might have turned out badly for both of us, at least this is what he told me, but my insouciance did not linger on the matter overlong and life soon put me to rights.

“Fortunate Antiphilos!” said Diogenes, gazing at me with an admiration in which anger was mingled, “we are lost and he is as calm as a god! Are you at least capable of giving me some advice? Divine animal, be oracular, be Dodonian, pronounce a number!”

It is probable that I obeyed, for Diogenes manifested a sudden contentment and disappeared, leaving me slightly bewildered by his eccentricities, on one of the garden seats, in the dim shadow of the palm trees. I was not long in finding tranquility, since the place was propitious to peace. Young women passed by accompanied by aged men and the same thoughts certainly did not inhabit their heads, for their glances were unlike. The expressions on the men’s faces were dull, the women looked stupid, and though some among them were quite pretty, they did not inspire me with any desire.

Besides, I do not dispute a woman with any male. Only the rams, goats and bulls intertwine their horns and battle for the conquest of females. I, whose ways are peaceful, only attack unescorted women; it is surer. Unless it be night, I even wait to see, in their eyes, near the dwellings, the provocative little flame which my presence rarely fails to light in their eyes. I do not put myself to any trouble, unless I am sure of pleasing. Diogenes has told me that men are not so constituted and that what often excites them in a woman is her coldness, no less than the obstacles which shield her. On this subject they use in their speech all sorts of images of warfare which make veritable treaties of strategy of their books on love. It is a question of siege, stratagems, skirmishes, attack, defeat, resistance, victory, conquest. I do not understand all these things. Love is naught when it is not the leaping of a twin desire. Yet I would not be worthy of my name of Satyros did I not admit assault and abduction, the surprise which satisfies desire lulled to sleep before it has had time to awake. It is not perhaps the most beautiful side of my nature, but it is such as the gods have made it and besides, neither women nor girls have ever taken offense at it. I must confess that I have completely leashed these habits since living, in the towns, a life similar to that of other men. If I have not yet been able to understand that one lays siege to woman, as Alexander laid siege to the city of Tyre, it is perhaps due to the fact that I still rely more on the candor of her desires than on a possession which, in the strategic system, one generally owes to the weariness of the besieged, to the poliorcetic science of the besieger.

“Satyros,” Diogenes suddenly cried out, “Satyros! You are the true God or at least a true god!”

And, plunging a hand in his pocket, he drew it forth filled with gold pieces.

“But let us be circumspect,” he continued. “One must no longer question destiny. It has answered in no uncertain terms. Let us flee this town. Take my arm on the side where I carry the gold and let us leave without turning our heads.”

“You are wrong, monsieur,” a voice behind us answered. “One does not thus break his lucky streak....”

The voice belonged to an extremely pretty woman who lacked neither elegance nor distinction. Diogenes apostrophized her strongly:

“Are you the guardian dragon of these portals, recovering from mortals the gold which destiny conceded them? Are you....”

“I am not even a dragon of virtue,” answered the young woman, smiling pleasantly. “You are right. It is time to go and breakfast. I will show you the way.”

I had the look of a schoolboy rescued from the perils of an adventure by his elder brother and I found that Diogenes really protected my virtue a little too carefully, for this woman decidedly pleased me. I am ashamed to avow it, but I struggled an instant longer against my desire, I was on the point of obeying Diogenes, my arm relaxed its hold, I felt myself the docile son of the dreariest civilization, which sits down at the roadside and watches its dream pass, without daring to arrest them. But she turned her fair head, her clear eyes toward me, our glances penetrated each other and I suddenly felt myself become again the faun of the forests, the jovial, whinnying faun who can overcome pitchfork blows, but not reasonings.

With a harsh burst of laughter, I scoffed at my hesitations. My companion trembled and grasped my arm tighter. She led me away and I imagined that I was carrying her off, for already I felt her limbs tremble under my strength.

When Diogenes rejoined us in the rooms, to which he had the key, she was already arranging her hair in front of the mirror, while glancing at my reflection in one of its corners. She was murmuring:

“What a man! Amazing!”

He had the rudeness to come and behold us, then he shrugged his shoulders and said:

“It might as well be this one as another. Besides, she is pretty, even though she has blond hair. Satyros could not remain good very long. And one must enliven the journey. We are going far, madam, and the caprices of the gods are short-lived. I leave you, unless you are going to invite me to the repast.”

The nymph was still dressing her hair. I reflected on the fortunate state of women in being able to arrange their hair in delicate situations. I myself did not know what to say, I did not know what to do.

“What repast?” asked the lady. “It is finished,” she added with a happy laugh. “At least, I believe so.”

“And are you ready?” questioned Diogenes.

“Who are you anyway?” she rejoined, almost angry. “Why do you come to interfere?...”

“Madam, I am Satyros’ secretary, and as I fear that he does not know the customs very well....”

“I understand. You imagine me venal? I am life’s slave, that is all. I know how to enjoy, making allowances for my chain and its length, the enchantments of the present moment, and I accept the disappointing after-taste that follows. Leave me with my friend an hour, so that I may gather, under my eyelids, tears for the moment he will quit me.... I have often seen love bud in eyes that followed me, but I have not known how to make the bud thrive, how to keep it fresh, at least, like a rose in a glass of water. When friends abandon me, they tear the rose to bits and sneer, they throw it to the ground and trample it. Are you, too, ashamed of your pleasures?”

“How well she speaks!” exclaimed Diogenes, who loves eloquence. “How I love this flute player! And you say nothing, Satyros?”

But I spoke and she remained.

Antiphilos,
Satyr.

XIV
FLIGHT

XIV

Cannes.

A sage among civilized people, Diogenes tells me, decrees the uttering of hypocritical compliments during the last days of the year, but this does not suit me at all for several reasons. The first one is that I am aware of the seasons, but not of the years, which have already fallen on me in such numbers that I should be engulfed by them. Now it is warm, now it is cold. The seasons alternate and do not accumulate. The second, third and other reasons are that I have a profound disgust for men and no longer wish to resemble them in anything. I am going to leave, I shall return to the old, consecrated woods, to the fortune awaiting me on the paths. I have engaged my passage on a vessel which returns to the land of Theocritus, deprived of the citrons it brought. Diogenes has pointed out to me that I would doubtless be very ill and that I might be shipwrecked, but I believe he did it only to frighten me, and besides I prefer risking every peril to becoming, in the end, a man like yourself. I leave, I leave! Nothing shall hold me.

I flee a frightful evil, which reduces my strength, exhausts my limbs, which might succeed in turning my skin white. Diogenes, who is touched with the malady like myself, but less perhaps, supports it merrily, laughs at me, swears that it is the common lot of mankind and that I must learn to live with him. I already suffered an attack and acquainted you with its nature, I believe, but this time it is intolerable. This is boredom. Everything seems unprofitable. I have no desire and life for me is vapid. Diogenes tells me that this seizure will pass like the first one, but it is much stronger and I succumb to it. I feel that solitude alone can cure me and I must apply myself to seek it with the last ounce of energy left in me.

Cydalise has absolutely forgotten me. This caused me bitter pain, a sentiment of which I am ashamed. Diogenes finds it an honorable one, but happily I am not fashioned like you and find myself horrified at the idea that a woman should have been able to reduce me to such a degree of slavery that her forgetfulness would make me wretched. The worst of it is that a part of me thinks like Diogenes. He has left for a trip to Toulon. She has never returned. She has not written. Finally, through a female companion, he learned that Cydalise had never gone to Toulon; the informant added that we would perhaps have some tidings before long. I would henceforth like to know only chance women like the one I met in the gardens of Monte-Carlo. It is wrong for a person to belie his own nature. I am pleased with those women who come led by pure chance, and who pass.

I am leaving! Yet there is a consolation in those syllables which I often repeat and which betoken my last days among men. Diogenes does not try very hard to detain me. He sees my dejection and has renounced the idea of conquering it. Besides, I believe he is feeling the nostalgia of his libidinous life, the trip to Toulon awoke his memories. I shall perhaps miss him. He is not at all ignorant of the customs of the women of the country and I, who am almost totally ignorant of them, enjoyed his bitter words which were yet full of gayety.

“You will return to us, Satyros, when solitude, or rather barbarism, will have strengthened your heart. You still have many experiences awaiting you among us, I mean to say among women who love and this includes them all, if one counts those who shun love because they fancy they are afraid. You have only known those who throw themselves at men, but there are others who must be conquered. There lies infinity, Satyros. It is our infinity and generally our sepulchre. We descend thither, ever dreaming of the enigma of their smile, and we will never know whether their smiles are natural expressions or condescensions. You cannot understand this, I fear, Satyros, but one loves these women in proportion as one suspects their love, of which one is never sure. They are never completely conquered, and this is what gives such value to their slightest favors. It is a quite different world. You have not the faintest idea of it, Satyros. You have remained with Phryne, access to whom is always assured by a bag of gold....”

“What is this thing you call gold?”

“Or a fine reputation as a faun.”

“That is more to the point.”

“I do not deny that this last merit, which is yours, might not still gain you some hearts whose pride has not killed curiosity, but for this, too, you will need a diplomatic tact which is not yet a part of you.”

“The thing bores me in advance!”

“You cannot know. Ah! Satyros, despite your little adventure with Cydalise, you still have a lovely, sentimental ignorance. How many steps you have still to mount, or perhaps descend, to reach the level of beautiful, delicate humanity!”

“To descend, Diogenes, to descend. But I no longer desire to resemble men. I want to leave.”

“You too will think so when you will be alone with your brothers the trees and the vanishing shadows of your desires. Patience! You will return. And for this one must leave. Nostalgia is the beginning of the spiritual life. Ennui is the nobility of the soul.”

“I would have thought it was rather joy.”

“No, a joyous soul will never be thoroughly distinguished. If you must caper, at least let it be done with melancholy. Look at me steadily. Infinity commences to appear in your eyes, Satyros, I believe I discover in you a Christian faun in his birth.”

“I dimly feel, Diogenes, that you are bantering. No matter, I will perhaps miss you.”

“I really hope so. But I am not bantering. I find that a certain sadness has touched your heart. If you remained, you would soon weary of pleasures. In fine, this state does not befit a god. It is good for us, it is good for me who have no more than this means of living the last years of my poor life. Life escapes me and I only capture it by feigning indifference, for there is an irony in things and they love the malice of contradiction. But I feel that I still have some love for them and that this love is useless. Do you see what is taking place in me?”

“I see nothing at all, despite my earnest application, but I hope that you will be happy and that Erebus will be good to you.”

“That is understood. Adieu. I return to my turpitude.”

Ah! I shall never understand men! But my vessel leaves at break of day and I must sleep on board. I do not know if I shall ever again have the occasion or even the desire to write you.

Antiphilos,
Satyr.

(END)

Three Stories from

COLORS

By REMY DE GOURMONT

Translated by Louis Lozowick

NEW YORK
LIEBER & LEWIS
MCMXXII

Copyright, 1922,
By LIEBER & LEWIS

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

BLUE

La demoiselle bleu aux bords frais de la source
Th. Gautier.

She was a princess. Sister of the queen, she lived together with her and shared her royal honors. But her fancy counselled pleasures less splendid, and she gladly paid occasional visits to one of her maids of honor whose husband served in the royal body guard, and was an excellent gentleman, young, fair, clever, amiable.

In her own country the princess had been married to a prince who might have become king, had several generations disappeared in some catastrophe. They never loved each other. However, the princess, sometimes gay and always proud, was known as a woman with a heart of steel. She received much homage but accepted little. Either she would assume a mocking attitude or take an icy tone. She loved only to dress, to play, to reign. What pleased her at the house of the royal guardsman was that her smile was there equivalent to law; besides, she was always winning in vingt-et-un; then, too, her dresses and her jewels eclipsed all other robes and adornments. The guardsman had never exhibited any other sentiment except that of profound respect.

Being a blond she liked blue clothes, blue flowers, blue sapphires—as blue as her own eyes, so that she finally came to be called the Blue Princess. This appellation which seemed to come out of some fairy tale, pleased her greatly. One day as she was listening to the melancholy stories of her maid of honor, she felt a kind of languor in her body and mind, and said: “My soul is a blue bird.” These words repeated several times, brought back her serene mood—so beautiful they were. Then she looked about her and said:

“Is your husband absent, my dear? I do not think he came out to greet me.”

“You noticed my husband’s absence today, but isn’t he always absent?”

“What do you mean?”

“Isn’t he always absent-minded?”

“My poor friend, that means he is neglecting you.”

“He does not love me any more.”

“Really? A fine state of affairs. But that’s impossible. Moreover, I won’t allow it. I do not want to see my friend unhappy. I am going to order him.”

“Ah! Do you think, Madame, a heart can obey orders?”

“Certainly. Was I, a princess, consulted about my marriage? I was told to love my husband, and I did.”

“How long?”

“I might have loved him always had he wanted it. He did not.”

“There, you see.”

“He did not or perhaps could not. Marriage brought me no pleasure whatever; he reproached me with indifference and I cried. Thenceforth we never met without witnesses. In the beginning I felt deeply humiliated, but gradually I learned to appreciate the calm of solitary nights. I lead the life of a virgin with great pleasure. But since my sad experiences, the plays, the dramas, the comedies of love seem to me more inexplicable than ever.... Does the marriage ceremony really interest you?”

The maid of honor looked at her mistress with respectful and sad irony.

Then she said:

“I fear my husband hides from me some love or infatuation.”

“Infatuation?” said the princess. “A pretty word. Infatuation is nothing serious, is it?”

“Serious? No, infatuation passes while love endures. But I do not know. Perhaps it is real love that alienates him from me. I fear this greatly.”

“I scarcely understand anything of this,” said the princess, “but I would like to see you as happy as I am myself. For me, to observe the passing show of life is quite sufficient. For you—since you need love—I shall try to do something to help you, I repeat. The word of a princess will touch his heart.... Oh! my good friend, it is I, perhaps, whom he adores?”

“Perhaps, alas!”

“Why ‘alas!’ If that is so, you are saved.”

At that moment the guardsman came in and went to greet the princess.

“Sir,” she said to him, “I shall receive you at the palace, in private audience, at six o’clock.”

She rose and left.

Everybody followed the example of the princess, and the husband and wife, very excited, remained face to face.

“Madame,” said the husband, “so you have angered the princess? It is to you then that I owe this affront?”

“Affront? Your heart’s desire wants to see you in private and you complain?”

At first he did not know what to answer, for this was the first time his wife made allusion to the feelings he thought securely hidden in his heart.

“My heart’s desire,” he said brutally, “is my career, and you have doubtless ruined it through your chatter.”

“I am not a chatter-box.”

“You are stupid.”

“Ah! let me be, you do not deserve to be loved.”

The woman ran away overcome with despondent anger. Yet she hoped despite her reason that the intervention of the princess would be crowned with success. She passed the rest of the day in tears.

The guardsman worshipped the princess in secret and without hope. Timid and violent, he reserved his timidity for his idol, his violence for his wife. But every brutal act left him in deep shame and every act of shyness caused him untold suffering. He was almost always unhappy. Thus, he began to seek in ambition a remedy for his ills. He had spent all that afternoon in most humiliating errands for the king’s mistress who was troubled by the conduct of a lover she had recently dismissed. In exchange for a note of three lines the guard was to receive a warrant for the rank of captain. The note was in his pocket-book now and he had to deliver it to the king’s favorite lady at six o’clock exactly.

Love, curiosity, disquietude had the better of ambition. Dressed in his finest, and well perfumed, he ran to the audience, saying to himself: “Perhaps this is a rendez-vous?”

The princess, instead of letting him wait for her, was herself waiting, and not without impatience. She was prettier now, being paler, and her eyes were shining. Her face had the sweetness of white lilac hiding in the foliage, but the foliage was fair: her hair intentionally disarranged with great art let a few curls fall casually to her shoulders.

“Come here,” she said dolefully, “come here. Sit down near me. I am ill and can speak only in a whisper. And besides, it is a friend of your wife that is receiving you and not a princess. Well then: I noticed that you do not love Elizabeth any more and this grieves me. Is it really true that you no longer love her?”

“Alas!”

“And the consciousness of your duty, of your honor?”

“My honor?”

“Yes, you swore conjugal fidelity as well as eternal affection.”

“She believed it.... Perhaps I believed it myself....”

“It is wrong to forsake her, to torment her.... She is crying at this very moment, I am sure....”

“I am not severe with her.”

“Very well, then. Will you promise not to cause her any more suffering?”

“I never did that intentionally.”

“Good, but promise me more, promise me....”

She seemed crushed, and her voice became so weak that to hear her the guard had to bend his head so near her as almost to touch her hair. Although he had been trained in all the dissimulation of a courtier, he suffered frightfully. To love the princess from a distance seemed to him sweet pain in comparison with the racking torture his desire caused him at that moment. With any other woman he would either fall on his knees or flee; with the princess he had to stay still, keep silent and maintain an attitude of a soldier receiving orders.

“Promise me,” went on the princess, “to be kind to her, to be very kind, to love her....”

The guardsman was mute.

“Do you promise?”

He was still silent.

“That is impossible, then? Is it all over between you! Can you reproach her with anything serious?”

“I have nothing to reproach her with. I do not love her any longer, that is all.”

“At least, do not let her notice it!”

“I had hoped that she never would notice it.”

“Then it is possible to stop loving a woman without her noticing it?”

“That is very hard if one has not the necessary ability. More easy it is, alas! to love a woman without her noticing it.”

“Oh! Do you think so?”

“I am quite sure of it. She whom I love never suspected it and never shall.”

“Sir guardsman,” said the princess, “Sir soldier, you are a child. She whom you love is aware of it....”

“Alas!” he said, incredulous.

“... and she loves you,” she added extending both her hands to him.

Still hesitating and breathlessly agitated, he flung himself into the proferred hands.

“Kiss them, child,” said the princess, “kiss me, you who love me, you who desired me so long in the secrecy of your heart. Embrace your blue princess, embrace your love.”

Next morning, the chamber-maid said to her mistress:

“Oh! Madame has a blue spot on her breast.”

“Nothing surprising. This is a birthmark. But how strange! Now here, now there. It appears, it disappears. On the breast, on the heart....”

“Maybe that is why Madame is called the blue princess?” she continued innocently.

“Go and see whether my maid of honor is here.”

Remaining alone for a moment, the princess looked with emotion at the blue mark.

“God! How happy I am!” she thought, “and how clever! How stupid my friend! To share love confidence with any one! Poor Ariane, without you I might never have suspected anything. His glances which I mistook for a sign of warm and respectful attachment, were glances of love!... But here she is....”

The maid of honor came in agitated.

“Oh, princess! I had to wait for him till four o’clock in the morning! I am mad! All is lost!”

“There, now! Won’t you ever be reasonable? On the contrary, everything is settled.”

“Oh! Thank you!”

“Listen to me. I made him confess. It was difficult and took a long time. At last I know the truth. Mere infatuation. The person who turned your husband’s head is an actress of no importance. It is the type one picks up, discards, picks up again. She passed through many hands already, those of my husband, among others.... You see, we are of the same family.... Now, the actress is rarely free during the day. Her freedom begins at the time when the freedom of the other women ends—at midnight. I therefore decided that your husband be on guard at my palace every day from midnight to four in the morning.... Naturally, he will receive his compensation, for the work is very exhausting.... His future is assured, and his happiness.... Is he ambitious? Yes. Very well. Would a promotion please him? A decoration? First of all I attach him to my person. As soon as he is promoted to higher rank, in six months, in three months, he shall become my aide-de-camp, my secretary. He shall leave me only to court you, happy spouse. We will save him for both of us.”

“How kind you are!”

“Am I?”

“You are kindness itself.”

“You are beautiful and that is worth more.”

“Beautiful! Who is more beautiful than you?”

“Flatterer! I am thirty years old and you are twenty-five.... Alas! I have renounced everything. Will you at least love me?”

“I always did love you. I will adore you. My life belongs to you. I will be devoted to you until death, and my husband also, I hope.”

“I hope so too, I saved him perhaps from a grave danger, from unhappy love, for what joy could he find in the adventure he had entered into?”

“When he comes to himself he will be very grateful to you.... Last night, that is, this morning, he was very agitated. When he returned I thought him intoxicated. He looked at me with wandering eyes. As soon as he entered his room he locked the door, then I heard him cry: ‘Ah! Ah! Ah!’”

“He said nothing more?”

“I think not. He is not very talkative.”

“An excellent trait. What would you say of a husband who should be making humiliating confessions before you?... There are such.... Mine, for example....”

“You were very unhappy!”

“Yes and no. I think no more about it. The present fills my heart with joy.... To give happiness to those whom you love and who love you—is there anything like it in the world?”

“You are adorable.”

“And adored.”

“Oh, yes!”

“Dearest friend!”

She allowed her maid of honor to take her hand and cover it with kisses.

“Kisses superimposed,” she thought, “but the last do not efface the first. Your lips, poor couple, still meet with passion but on my skin.... Very strange....”

“Ah!” she began aloud, “now that you are certain of regaining your happiness sooner or later, I hope you will use discretion. From his confidential talk I gather that your husband is a little weary of conjugal joys. Men dislike to have women make advances to them....”

“Oh! between husband and wife! However, I shall be prudent, kind friend....”

“More kind than you think! For, after all, your husband is quite seductive. He is young, younger than I am, beautiful, warm-hearted, passionate....”

“He was.”

“He still is, rest assured, and it will not take you long to perceive it. If I had not renounced everything, if I were not a princess.... In your place I would be jealous.”

“Heavens! I know your heart too well.”

“Then you will return home full of hope? Still a little sad?”

“A little.”

“But the clouds are scattering, the sky is becoming blue again?”

“Yes.”

“Blue like my soul, my sweet friend, blue like my heart.”

And she pressed her finger to her breast where she felt the blue mark that thrilled her love-intoxicated flesh.

ZINZOLINE

D’une lumière zinzoline....
Scarron

Color was the subject of conversation, and the young women were expressing their commonplace preferences. One liked rose, another liked blue, a third praised pale green, a fourth preferred red.

“And you, Alain?”

“Oh! I as a man,” said Alain, “am condemned to black, gray and brown. I do not dream like you of brilliant plumage. Still, if I were allowed my choice, I should like to dress in zinzoline.”

All burst out laughing to hide their ignorance.

“Is not the word beautiful?” continued Alain.

No answer came. Then the young man went on:

“I do not want to deceive you. The word is pretty but the color is frightful. Imagine something reddish violet, recall a piece of violet velvet all worn and showing the warp of a dubious red.”

“You are making fun of us, that is not fair.”

“I am not making fun. I like the word because it is so pretty, because it rhymes with my name, perhaps because it rhymes with yours, my Aline. Zinzoline!”

And he passionately kissed his sister who protested vigorously:

“No, I am not zinzoline; I do not want to be zinzoline.”

“But though I like the word I do not like the color it denotes, and if my Aline did in truth become zinzoline I would not love her so much.”

“Naughty boy!” said Aline.

“For several minutes,” said Alain.

The girl called Blue was an orphan. A daughter of the closest friend of Alain and Aline’s mother, she entered their house as a little girl and grew up there, although it was generally felt that she was not one of the family. Her nature separated her from her foster-relatives. She was gloomy, they were gay; she seemed to be afraid of life; they joyfully plunged into it, young and old, as into a warm sea. Neither the first nor the last possessed a strong will. Paula (this was her real name) was, on the contrary, always in a state of high, moral tension, and if she ever happened to laugh in company, aloud like everybody else, she would suddenly cut herself short as soon as she became aware of it. A philosopher would have found in this child the passion for suffering which priesthood has so often exploited in women among whom it is not at all rare; a passion which most men like because it flatters their pride or better still because they find it quite natural. Such women are hard to tame because they are very suspicious and also very apprehensive. One often thinks them cruel while they are only timorous. The more skilled in the art of self-torment seek often to displease, just as others seek to please; always, however, with some hidden motive; and when one divines this motive, he becomes their master.

Paula was neither ugly nor beautiful. When the features of her somewhat concentrated face were illumined with a smile, she became attractive. Her eyes would have been very eloquent had she not imposed an oath of unexpressiveness on them. She was small though not slight, and very nimble; her very thick hair was chestnut of that indefinable hue which is perhaps most captivating because most mysterious, because it does not promise anything.

Besides the two young girls there were two young women and it was to them, naturally, that Alain paid his chief attention. He was not quite sure which of the two pleased him more, nor, in fact, whether either one of them pleased him at all. Both, decided brunettes, scared him a little, but as they answered his banter, he kept teasing them somewhat as one teases a strange animal to see what would happen. What did happen was that while playing, they exchanged sidelong glances, and that each in turn brightened up whenever an extra compliment fell to her share. Alain kissed the tapering fingers of one, and the waist, where the fingers immediately withdrew to seek shelter, heaved like a big wave. He then walked up, like a traitor, to the other woman, and his lips touched the down on the nape of her neck; the neck and the entire body quivered long after.

Motionless, with a dull glance and disdainful air, Paula seemed to see nothing and saw everything. She seemed to feel nothing and suffered great pains.

“I am nothing. He did not look at me even once! I am ugly, it’s true, and badly dressed in this blue so unbecoming to me. But I am satisfied. Oh! I wish I could displease him still more!”

At that moment Alain noticed her.

“She is really the prettiest.”

He threw her a rose he had just stolen from one of the other two women.

“Thanks, Zinzoline,” said Paula, “you do not often make me presents; I shall keep this one.”

“He wanted to humiliate me,” she thought, “what shall I do to displease him still more? Stay here or go?”

She looked at the two young women:

“Stay.”

She smelled the rose:

“Go.”

“I am going up,” said Aline at that moment, “are you, Paula?”

She looked again at the two young women half concealed from her by Alain who was facing them.

“No, I stay here.”

Alain turned his head towards her. His face was smiling.

“Yes, I am going too, wait for me.”

She was thinking:

“He looked at me ironically. He thinks I want to watch him. What an idea! I scorn him!”

Aline entered the parlor. Paula went up to her room. She put some water into a small vase of blue crystal, and, before putting the rose in it, long inhaled its odor, looked attentively at it, then suddenly with a quick motion brought it to her lips.

“I am going mad. I am ashamed of my own self! What’s this flower to me? How stupid! No! no! no!”

And she crushed the rose in a violent fury, threw its shreds on the floor, and began to stamp her feet over the petals in ever-rising childish wrath. Coming to herself, she carefully swept into the fireplace the remnants of her rejected joy, when another fit overtook her in this humble plight. With the small duster in one hand, leaning with the other on the marble, comical and tragic, she burst into tears.

Paula once more found strength to counteract this. She straightened up, washed her eyes, forced herself to read three pages from The Treasure of the Humble, and went down calm and cool. Everybody was already in. As usual, she helped Aline to serve the tea. Alain, in the meantime, continued his adolescent pranks. Alain, eighteen years of age, was awkward and insolent, though quite innocently so, for he thought himself very clever as he had already conquered the hearts of two servant maids and one little flower girl in the neighboring city. He saw them swoon away by turns from pleasure and disappointment, and told them such things as occasions required. Hence, he did not think himself insolent at all but, on the contrary, well-bred and even affable.

He was rather tall and graceful, beardless and with hair closely cut. His head was of two hues superimposed above each other, rose and copper, in the rose—two big blue flowers. He was peculiar in appearance and very captivating; women desired him as they desire a sparkling, rare jewel, but being too self-conscious, he failed to notice their desire. Besides, the friends of his mother or sister seemed to him impenetrable fortresses. These two women, however, showed their weakness, and he began to believe them vulnerable.

Remaining alone with the two women, he began to tell them, rather awkwardly, the greatest impertinences in the world.

“I love you both, yes, both.”

“We don’t need to be loved,” answered the younger quickly, “we have husbands.”

“Husbands? Do they know how to love?”

“Certainly,” she answered.

“If your husbands loved you they would not have gone out hunting. They would have acted like me. They would have got a sudden pain in their foot and stayed with you.”

And he pointed to his slipper.

The young woman would not admit herself defeated. She said:

“There is a time for all things.”

But she was thinking:

“Heavens! He remained for my sake! he loves me.”

“So he loves me?” thought the other. “He loves me!”

As if divining their secret thoughts, Alain became more daring.

“Only lovers know how to love.”

“Perhaps this is true?” thought the older. “Shall I try it?”

“He is right,” thought the younger, who had some experience. “He would love me splendidly!”

They dropped their eyes to dream the better.

“Mesdames,” said Alain, “I place my heart at your feet.”

This time they both laughed.

“What a devil!”

“What a little demon!”

“Oh! I wish I could whisper something in your ears, to both at the same time.”

“Naughty boy!”

“Naughty boy!”

“Alright, one after the other. Let us draw lots.”

They began to laugh still more loudly.

“I shall say one word to each and ask one question. I expect an answer.”

“No, I don’t want to hear anything.”

“And still less, to answer.”

“But I won’t say the same thing to both, and won’t ask the same question.”

“You wouldn’t say anything that can’t be listened to?”

“You wouldn’t ask questions that can’t be answered?”

“Naturally.”

“Alright, give us the lots, naughty boy.”

“I yield my turn.”

“Your turn, dear Madame. Be kind enough to come near. Good: ‘I love you. And you?’ ‘Monster!’ Now yours: ‘I adore you. Do you love me!’ ‘Hush!’ I kept my word and you did likewise. Now let us go and have tea with a gratified conscience of duty performed.”

They walked, thinking. Alain followed them and was asking himself:

“With which shall I begin and how?”

The dawn was hardly breaking when Paula was already on her feet. She had slept very little. Before dressing, she went out of her bedroom, and straight to an adjacent room called the laundry, which contained besides the wash of the entire household, all sorts of remnants of worn-out clothes, hats, and discarded ribbons—a heritage left by several generations of women. There were multicolored silks brought into fashion by the Empress Eugenie, there was amaranthine velvet, and nacarat satins.

“Ah! Here is something I want!”

She took a box of ribbons the sad color of which seemed to answer fully the definition of zinzoline—reddish violet.

“How ugly!”

She fastened bows of zinzoline silk to her blue waist, to her white neck, to her chestnut hair.

“I look like a wild woman,” she said looking at herself in the mirror, “he will laugh at me; perhaps he is angry. If I do not quite displease him this time, what else can I do?”

She went into the garden. A blackbird was madly whistling the five notes of its monotonous plaint; the sun was casting long shadows; there was velvety dew on the leaves and the grass. She saw a morning glory open truly like a pretty eye; she ate up an apple cold as ice. Paula thought of nothing except how jolly it would be to leap like an early roe.

But what was that she suddenly noticed under the lilac bush? Alain sitting on a bench and looking at her in surprise!

The sight of this friendly enemy revived her rancor.

“What! You are not thinking about me?”

“No, dear, Paula, I was thinking of my own self.”

“Do you always get up so early?”

“Only today.”

Standing in the full light of the sun, Paula sparkled with zinzoline hues.

“Where did you find this?”

“What?”

“These dreadful ribbons.”

“Dreadful? Do you think so?”

“You put them on for my sake, perhaps?”

“Why not?”

“If you intended to displease me, you fully succeeded. But listen, I thought you were indifferent to everything, I thought nothing could touch your heart, and here I see you up at five in the morning....”

“And you?”

“I! I am, at least, in love.”

“Not I.”

“... and you disguise as a gypsy and run about in the garden to shake off your thoughts.... Sit down near me, Paula, come.... This is really zinzoline.... What an idea! But you have not been so foolish as you thought, and I am less stupid than you imagine....”

“Well?” she said with ill-disguised coolness.

“Well, I am like you, I do not know what to say. I would like to jest, but cannot.... Paula, Paula, do you know why we both got up with the sun? Tell me, do you?... Give me your hand, Paula.”

She let him take her hand, she let his arm embrace her, she allowed him to press her to his breast. The trees, flowers, heaven and earth—all became a whirling confusion. She shut her eyes, her head fell.

“Tell me, do you know?” continued Alain. “Well, we sought and found each other.”

She was a tender mistress of Alain during all his vacation and long after, every time he returned home.

One day Alain said to her:

“We ought to marry. But how shall we do it? Can a man marry at eighteen? Let us wait a little.”

“Let us not talk about it,” answered Paula, “I am yours, and you can do with me whatever you please.”

And so she reconciled her happiness with her love of suffering. She was very happy in the course of many years.

WHITE

Cet unanime blanc conflit
D’une guirland avec la même.
S. Mallarmé.

There were once two children of the same age, a little boy and a little girl. They loved each other very much, were never happy apart, and their playing had much tenderness in it. In the game of hide-and-seek, whenever the little girl was caught, she would fall into the arms of her friend, throw her head back, lower her eyes, half-open her mouth; and if the kisses were not showered upon her, she would demand them or go in search of them, raising her mouth gracefully to his timid or distracted lips. They had just completed their tenth year.

One day when it was very warm, they removed their socks and went splashing into the stream. They became very wet and went to dry themselves in the sun on the warm grass. The sight of their little rosy legs and wet knees excited their curiosity. They made comparisons, and the little boy had the good sense to notice that his skin was less smooth. “And not so tender,” he said; and his hands were in agreement with his eyes.

They recommenced next day, and read more with each day. Their kisses, now accompanied by soft caresses, sent the blood to their heads. But an instant later they thought no more of it and broke out in innocent laughter. They were happy.

With the coming of the first cold and rainy days they transferred their games to a big half-empty room, left entirely to them. The little boy, who was attending school, came to pass his time at his friend’s house. The little girl was receiving instruction at home. Whenever the weather was bad, the little boy took lessons together with her. Their parents, with an eye on the future, noticed with pleasure the childish intimacy of the two pupils.

Toward the month of September a curé came to the house, and was taken by the mother into the large room where the children were at play. They brought him an armchair and a foot-stool. He sat down, pulled out his snuff-box, blew his nose, took a good pinch of snuff, and began to talk of God. They knew the topic very well, but the little girl became attentive when the priest turned to her and said:

“My child, I hope you will soon make the acquaintance of your creator. You know how much he loves you and also how much you love Him. Pure hearts always love the kind God. But true love requires greater intimacy and greater sacrifice. Jesus will come to you and you must submit to Him with trust. You will feel the sacred embrace of your creator. In a word, my dear little girl, we are going to prepare you for your first communion.”

“And I?” asked the little boy.

“Listen,” said the priest, “and profit by my words. You know,” he continued, turning again to the little girl, “the whole importance of such an act. Catechism teaches you the grandeur of this sacrament. What mystery in the union of the creator and the created! This union is achieved by the Eucharist, and brings to those who know how to prepare themselves for it and how to render themselves worthy of it, the ineffable joys of divine love....”

He spoke a long time, and the frigidity of his speech contrasted strangely with the exalted sentiments he was expressing. Every minute he unfolded a big red, dirty handkerchief, opened his snuff-box, took a pinch, spat, sneezed. The little girl understood nothing of all the grandiloquence on love retailed by the old automaton; however, he spoke of love, and this word even in such a mouth charmed her and made her tremble a little.

Her confessor did not as yet question her on the sixth commandment, but at the approach of the great day he departed from his usual reserve and indifference. His questions, very precise and in conformity with the church manual, interested the little girl very much. Her heart bled reflecting upon them. Then all that was sin! These games, kisses, fondling, caresses—sins! The priest did not, however, apprise her of anything through which might have lost her innocence without knowing it.

One afternoon, she refused a kiss of her friend, and went, without further explanation, to kneel in a corner of her room. Then she took out a book and began to read: “Let us have faith to remove all obstacles that prevent the coming of Christ within us. Let us prepare Him a sanctuary, pure, adorned, kindled with love; and when He comes we can say in the fervor of our joy: ‘My beloved is mine, He rests in my heart’....”

She pronounced these last words aloud. The little boy heard them and asked in tears:

“You don’t love me any more, then?”

“You cannot understand these things. I like you as a brother, as a little friend; I have great affection for you, but my love belongs to Jesus.”

“To Jesus!”

He shrugged his shoulders, vexed in his affliction.

“Jesus loves me, how can I fail to love Him. He is courting me, how can I resist Him? Don’t you know that He is Almighty, that He can grind both of us to dust, at this very moment?”

“Is that true?”

He reflected, overwhelmed, upon this stranger so powerful and so cruel who came to take his friend away, to break his heart.

“Ah! Let Him kill me, but let Him not take you away!”

“He won’t take me away. Did He take Angela, Laura, Juliette whom He loved last year and who are still happy?”

“Then he won’t always love you?”

“He will always love me but from a distance; and I will love Him. But I am not the only one on this earth and He has to reach the hearts of all the little girls who have their first communion.”

“Does he also reach the hearts of little boys?”

“I don’t think so,” she said in a tone of irony. “He cannot offer little boys anything more than good, firm friendship.”

“I will never love Him.”

“You will have to love Him, when your heart is pure. You’ll see.”

“Ah!”

“I have a pure heart. I confessed all my sins!”

“What sins?”

“Be still and ask God’s forgiveness.”

She turned again to her prayers.

Her friend was lost in thought.

Less mature than little girls, little boys have their first communion a year later than girls of the same age. It was a custom; he did not feel himself humiliated by it. Still he was very anxious to participate in the mysteries into which his friend was going to be initiated. He was resentful both through jealousy and fear.

“I hope,” he thought, “He doesn’t do her any harm!”

The great day arrived. He saw his little friend pale and pretty in a cloud of muslin. Coming near her, he whispered:

“How I do love you!”

She lowered her eyes and began to roll the rosary between her hands gloved in white. She passed without answering him, without looking at him. He was sad throughout the ceremony. The reading of the acts braced him up a little, but his heart broke when he heard the voice of his friend:

“Oh, my wealth, my treasure, my life, my paradise, my love, my all, receive a heart burning with love.... Oh, my treasure, I want to live and die in endless communion with you!... My well-beloved is mine and I am His. Oh, Jesus, I do not want to be my own, I want to be yours. Let all my faculties be yours and let them serve your pleasure....”

“Ingrate!” he thought. He felt a spasm of anger. Then he recalled the enchanting moments spent with his friend, their games, their laughter, those long kisses which left them breathless, those embraces out of which they came blushing, skin burning, eyes moist....

“Someone else will now give her all these pleasures! And I am going to be alone.... She does not love me any more....”

The little girl had the honor to speak again after communion. She returned to her place first from the ceremony, fell on her knees, hid her face in her hands, and remained long absorbed in thought. A powerful sentiment was weighing her down. She felt sad and happy:

“He is within me, I feel Him in my heart.... My heart is expanding.... I am choking with joy.... I am loved, I am loved.... Is this you, my love? Oh! Rest in my arms, clasp me to you again, again! Ah! My heart is faint.... My head is reeling.... Ah! Ah! what emotion! I am going to confess my love for Him aloud. I am very happy, very proud.... Do you love me? He loves me.”

And she rose and said:

“Oh, kind Savior, I have devoted myself to you, You have devoted yourself to me. I want to sacrifice to You all my earthly pleasures. I sacrifice to You my body, my soul, my will. This is all I have to offer, alas! If I had more I would give more, I would like to die for You.... Kindle me with Your love. But I cannot be pleased with a spark, I want a tongue of flame, I want a thousand of them, I want a conflagration which would destroy within me all attachment to living creatures.... Vain creatures, leave me alone, you will no longer see me. My heart belongs entirely to my well-beloved....”

“She does not love me any more,” he thought, “she will never love me again.”

He cried. His neighbors thought it was from piety.

In the meantime the Mass was being finished and one could already hear the moving of chairs in the back of the church. The little girl reborn through love was also devoured by hunger. Then she thought of her home, her parents, her friend, of the fine ceremonial table sparkling with flowers, crystals, silverware; she thought of the kitchen and the cook. She was sure that a fine plate of soup was already being cooled for her.

“After that I shall eat a little cake.... My friend will be there anxious to wait upon me.... I like him very much.... We shall take a walk while waiting for the vespers. We shall pick some flowers, nothing but white, white like my veil, like my heart. I am happy!”

The little boy ran to the house of his friend where his own family breakfasted that day. He came to notify the cook. And in the pantry were two portions of soup, two wonderful tarts, and two glasses of wine.

When the little girl arrived, he took her hand and she allowed him to lead her. At the sight of the little dinner all prepared, her little, feminine heart leaped with joy. She fell on the neck of the little boy and embracing him with all her strength, said:

“You know, Jesus is my mystic spouse, but this will not last long. While He still loves me, tell me what you want, He will not refuse anything to his little spouse.”

“I want you to love me as before.”

“Here,” she said.

And she offered her lips.

“Are you satisfied? Let us eat now, I am hungry.”

Transcriber’s Notes

- pg 146 Changed: that my conquest of the Admirality
To: that my conquest of the Admiralty

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Table of Contents

- MR. ANTIPHILOS, SATYR
- INTRODUCTION
- TO THE AMAZON
- MR. ANTIPHILOS, SATYR
- I APPARITION
- II LA FOSCA
- III THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN
- IV CYDALISE
- V METAMORPHOSIS
- VI THE CELL
- VII THE SATYR! THE SATYR!
- VIII FENNEL WATER
- IX EREBUS
- X DIOGENES
- XI DÉIDAMIE
- XII THE CLUSTER OF GRAPES
- XIII THE UNKNOWN WOMAN
- XIV FLIGHT
- BLUE
- ZINZOLINE
- WHITE
- Transcriber’s Notes
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE