“I have passed through so many things, though I have made the circuit of very few, that only the steepest heights any longer tempt me. I am attacked by the malady which seizes nations and powerful men in their old age- the impossible. All that I can do has not the least attraction for ma Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, great Romans of the Empire, O you who have been so misunderstood, and are pursued by the baying of the rhetor's pack, I suffer from your disease and I pity you with all the pity that remains to me! I too would build a bridge across the sea and pave the waves; I have dreamed of burning towns to illuminate my festivals; I have wished to be a woman that I might become acquainted with fresh voluptuousness.
“Thy gilded house, O Nero! is but a miry stable beside the palace that I have raised; my wardrobe is better equipped than thine, Heliogabalus, and of very different splendor. My circuses are more roaring and more bloody than yours, my perfumes more keen and penetrating, my slaves more numerous and better made; I, too, have yoked naked courtesans to my chariot, and I have trodden upon men with a heel as disdainful as yours. Colossuses of the ancient world, there beats beneath my feeble sides a heart as great as yours, and in your place I would have done what you did and perhaps more. How many Babels have I piled up one upon another to reach the sky, slap the stars and spit thence upon creation! Why am I not God, since I cannot be man?
“Oh! I think that a hundred thousand centuries of nothingness will be needed to rest me after these twenty years of life. God of Heaven, what stone will you roll upon me? into what shadow will you plunge me? of what Lethe will you cause me to drink? beneath what mountain will you bury the Titan? Am I destined to breathe a volcano from my mouth and make earthquakes when turning over?
“When I think that I was born of a mother so sweet and so resigned, whose tastes and habits were so simple, I am quite surprised that I did not burst through her womb when she was carrying me. How is it that none of her calm, pure thoughts passed into my body with the blood that she transmitted to me? and why must I be the son of her flesh only and not of her spirit? The dove has produced a tiger which would fain have all creation a prey to his claws.
“I lived amid the calmest and chastest surroundings. It is difficult to dream of an existence so purely enshrined as mine. My years glided away beneath the shadows of my mother's arm-chair, and my little sisters and the housedog. Around me I saw only the worthy, gentle, tranquil heads of old servants who had grown grey in our service and were in a fashion hereditary, and of grave and sententious relatives or friends, clad in black, who would place their gloves the one after the other on the brim of their hats; some aunts of a certain age, plump, tidy, discreet, with dazzling linen, grey skirts, thread mittens, and their hands on their girdles like religious persons; furniture severe even to sadness, bare oak wainscoting, leather hangings, the whole forming an interior of sober and subdued color, such as is represented by certain Flemish masters.
“The garden was damp and dark; the box which marked out the bids, the ivy which covered the walls and a few fir-trees with peeled arms were charged with the representation of verdure and succeeded rather badly in their task; the brick house, with a very lofty roof, though roomy and in good condition, had something gloomy and drowsy about it. Surely nothing could have been more adapted for a separate, austere, and melancholy life than such an abode. It seemed impossible that children brought up in such a house should not end by becoming priests or nuns. Well in this atmosphere of purity and repose, in this shadow and contemplation, I became rotten by degrees, and, without showing any signs of it, like a medlar upon straw. In the bosom of this worthy, pious, holy family I arrived at a horrible degree of depravity. It was not contact with the world, for I had not seen it; nor the fire of passions, for I was chilled by the icy sweat that oozed from those excellent walls. The worm had not crawled from the heart of another fruit into mine. It had been hatched of itself entirely within my own pulp which it had preyed upon and furrowed in every direction: without, there was no appearance and warning that I was spoiled. I had neither spot nor wormhole; but I was completely hollow within, and there was left to me only a slight, brilliantly-colored pellicle which would have been burst by the slightest shock.
“Is it not an inexplicable thing that a child, born of virtuous parents, brought up with care and discretion, and kept away from everything bad, should be perverted of himself to such a degree, and come to be what I am now? I am sure that if you went back as far as the sixth generation you would not find a single atom among my ancestors similar to those of which I am formed. I do not belong to my family; I am not a branch of that noble trunk, but a poisonous toadstool sprung up amid its moss-grown roots some heavy, stormy night; and yet no one has ever had more aspirations and soarings after the beautiful than I, no one has ever tried more stubbornly to spread his wings; but each attempt has made my fall the greater, and I have been lost through what ought to have saved me.
“Solitude is worse for me than society, although I wish for the first more than for the second. Everything that takes me out of myself is wholesome for me; companionship wearies me, but it snatches me away perforce from the vain dreaming, whose spiral I ascend and descend with bended brow and folded arms. Thus, since the tete-a- tete has been broken off, and there have been people here with whom I am obliged to put some constraint upon myself, I have been less liable to give myself up to my gloomy moods, and have been less tormented by the inordinate desires which swoop upon my heart like a cloud of vultures as soon as I am unoccupied for a moment.
“There are some rather pretty women, and one or two young fellows who are amiable enough and very gay; but in all this country swarm I am most charmed by a young cavalier who arrived two or three days ago. He pleased me from the very first, and I took a fancy to him, merely on seeing him dismount from his horse. It would be impossible to be more graceful; he is not very tall, but he is slender and has a good figure; there is something soft and undulating in his walk and gestures which is most agreeable; many women might envy him with his hands and feet. The only fault that he has is that he is too beautiful, and has too delicate features for a man. He is provided with a pair of the finest and darkest eyes in the world, which have an indefinable expression, and whose gaze it is difficult to sustain; but as he is very young and has no appearance of a beard, the softness and perfection of the lower part of his face tempers somewhat the vivacity of his eagle eyes; his brown and lustrous hair flows over his neck in great ringlets, and gives a peculiar character to his head.
“Here, then, is at last one of the types of beauty that I dreamed of realized and walking before me f What pity it is that he is a man, or rather that I am not a woman! This Adonis, who to his beautiful face unites a very lively and far-reaching wit, enjoys the further privilege of being able to utter his jests and pleasantries in silvery and thrilling tones which it is difficult to hear without emotion. He is truly perfect.
“He appears to share my taste for beautiful things, for his clothes are very rich and refined, his horse very frisky and thorough-bred; and, that everything might be complete and harmonious, he had a page fourteen or fifteen years old mounted on a pony behind him, fair, rosy, as pretty as a seraph, half asleep, and so fatigued with his ride, that his master was obliged to lift him off the saddle and carry him in his arms to his room. Rosette received him very kindly, and I think that she intends to make use of him to rouse my jealousy and in this way bring but the little flame that sleeps beneath the ashes of my extinguished passion. Nevertheless, formidable as such a rival may be, I am little disposed to be jealous of him, and I fed so drawn towards him that I would willingly enough abandon my love to have his friendship.”
Mlle. de Maupin and The Pretty Page
VI
At this point, if the gentle reader will permit us, we shall for a time leave to his dreams the worthy personage who, up to the present, has monopolized the stage and spoken for himself alone, and go back to the ordinary form of romance, without, however, prohibiting ourselves from taking up the dramatic form, if necessary, later on, and reserving to ourselves the right of drawing further on the species of epistolary confession addressed by the said young man to his friend, being persuaded that, however penetrating and full of sagacity we may be, we must know far less in this matter than he does himself.
… The little page was so worn out that he slept in his master's arms, his little head all dishevelled, swaying to and fro as though he were dead. It was some distance from the flight of steps to the room which had been assigned to the new arrival, and the servant who showed him the way offered to carry the child in his turn; but the young cavalier, to whom, moreover, the burden seemed but a feather, thanked him and would not relinquish it. He laid him down very gently on the couch, taking a thousand precautions not to awake him; a mother could not have done better. When the servant had retired and the door was shut, he knelt down in front of him and tried to draw off his boots; but the little feet, which were swelled and painful, rendered this operation somewhat difficult, and the
