Why is it only flowers that feel so good, great pale or brilliant flowers, whose tones and hues make my heart flutter and trouble my eyes? They are so beautiful, so delicate in structure, so varied and so sensual, half open like mouths, more tempting than mouths, and hollow, with lips curled back, toothed, fleshy, powdered with a seed of life that engenders in each one of them a different perfume.
They reproduce themselves, they, only they, in all the world, without defilement of their inviolable race, giving off round themselves the divine incense of their love, the fragrant sweat of their caresses, the essence of their incomparable bodies, of their bodies that are adorned with all grace, all elegance, all form, and possess the fascination of all colour forms; and the intoxicating charm of all scents …
Selected fragments, six months later.
… I love flowers, not as flowers but as delicate and material beings; I pass my days and my nights in the greenhouses where I hide them like women in harems.
Who, except myself, knows the sweetness, the maddening charm, the shuddering, sensual, ideal, superhuman ecstasy of these tender caresses; and these kisses on rosy flesh, on red flesh, on white flesh, the miraculously varied, delicate, rare, fine, unctuous flesh of these wonderful flowers?
I have greenhouses where no one enters but myself and the man who looks after them.
I enter them as if I were stepping into a place of secret delight. In the high glass gallery, I pass first between two throngs of corollas, shut, half open or spread wide, which slope from ground to roof. It is the first kiss they send me.
Those particular ones, those flowers, those that adorn this anteroom of my mysterious passions, are my servants and not my favourites.
They greet me, as I pass, with their changing brilliance and their fresh exhalations. They are darlings, coquettes, rising tier upon tier in eight rows on my right hand and eight rows on my left, and so crowded that they have the aspect of two gardens coming down to my feet.
My heart palpitates, my eye lights up at sight of them, the blood runs madly through my veins, my soul leaps within me, and my hands tremble already with the desire to touch them. I pass on. There are three closed doors at the end of this high gallery. I can make my choice. I have three harems.
But I turn oftenest to the orchids, my drowsy favourites. Their room is low, stifling. The damp, warm air makes my skin moist, my throat contract for want of air, and my fingers tremble. They come, these stranger women, from swampy, burning, unhealthy countries. They are as fascinating as sirens, deadly as poison, marvellously grotesque, soul-destroying, terrifying. See how like they are to butterflies with their enormous wings, their tiny paws, their eyes. For they have eyes. They look at me, they see me, prodigious, unbelievable beings, fairies, daughters of the holy earth, the impalpable air, and warm light, the mother of the world. Yes, they have wings and eyes and delicate shades that no painter can catch, all the charms, all the graces, all the shapes that one can dream of. Their sides are cleft, perfumed and transparent, open for love and more tempting than any woman’s flesh. The unimaginable contours of their tiny bodies thrust the soul, drunk, into a paradise of visions and ideal delights. They quiver on their stems as if about to take flight. Will they fly, will they come to me? No, it is my heart which hovers above them like some mystic male creature, tortured with love.
No insect’s wing can brush them. We are alone, they and I, in the translucent prison that I have built them. I watch them and I contemplate them, I admire them, I adore them, one after the other.
How sleek they are, how mysterious, rosy, with a rosiness that moistens the lips with desire. How I love them! The rim of their calyx is curled, paler than their throats, and the corolla hides itself there, mysterious seductive mouth, sweet to the tongue and displaying and concealing the delicate, wonderful and sacred organs of these divine little creatures which smell pleasant and do not talk.
Sometimes I am seized with a passion for one of them which endures as long as its existence, a few days, a few nights. Then it is taken from the common gallery and enclosed in a darling little glass retreat where a thread of water murmurs through a bed of tropic grass come from the islands of the great Pacific. And there I stay, at her side, ardent, feverish and tormented, knowing her death so close and watching her fade, while I possess her, while I breathe, drink, pluck her short life with one inexpressible caress.
When he had finished reading these fragments, counsel continued:
Decency, gentlemen of the jury, restrains me from continuing to lay before you the curious confessions of this shamefully idealistic madman. The few passages that I have just laid before you will be sufficient, I think, for you to understand this case of mental disease, less rare than one thinks in our age of hysterical dementia and corrupted decadence.
I feel therefore that my client is entitled more than any other woman to demand her divorce in the exceptional position in which she has been placed by the strange mental derangement of her husband.
Looking just like all the other wooden hostelries set down amid the High Alps, at the feet of the glaciers, in the bare and rocky corridors that cleave the white peaks of the mountains, the Schwarenback Inn serves as a refuge for travellers over the Gemmi pass.
For six months in the year it remains open, inhabited by Jean Hauser’s family; then, as soon as the snow lies
