That is man!

  Backs of lead, sexual organs of fire, fears of mica, chemical hearts of the televisions of blood, hidden faces and wings – always wings, the north and south of our being!

  Never has it been more appropriate than in this case to bring forward the Dalinian maxim that ‘ideas of genius can best be illustrated by the most common images’. This is why it can be said without fear of banality that just as the future world conflagration was going to make the creatures that were to compose the fighting masses resemble those of the Martian world of insects, and just as the apocalyptic battles that would be lighted round the great fire of war would be comparable in their precision and hallucinatory cruelty only to those in the kingdom of the articulated orthopterans and apterous locusts, so the protagonists of this novel, subject to the inescapable laws of the great metamorphosis, would in turn be consumed as they approached the common stake of history, clothed and armed with their new entomological attributes and rising by that very fact to the category of epic characters.

  At this moment, then, it will be easy for the reader to see the deep reality of each of the protagonists of this novel at a single glance by imagining them for a few seconds illuminated by the same flame….

  Veronica and Baba appear as a pair of praying mantidae, in the role of Tristan and Isolde devouring each other; Solange de Cléda as a Cledonia frustrata with great white wings and a mercury body; Betka as a moth; d’Angerville as a gold scarab; and Grandsailles as the grey, nocturnal sphinx butterfly, the middle of whose hairy back is marked with a death’s head. Spangling the serene sky of this novel, the six protagonists, in the sign of Taurus, will perpetuate the eternal myth of the rising of the Pleiades.*

  Each of them will know the ravages of his strange passions, and while attaining the biological frenzy characteristic of the most ferocious insects, the orbits of their lives will always remain as distant from one another as the cold scintillation of the constellations.

  There then remains for the faithful chronicler of these lives only to describe their physical embraces with the objectivity of an entomologist and the conjunctions of their destinies with the mathematical coldness of the astronomer.

  For three years, in the Château de Lamotte, there occurred no notable event to be recorded, except that the Canoness of Launay during this time lost the rest of her hair, which she replaced by a reddish-brown wig which left no doubt that tawdry cheapness had determined its purchase. For some time her hair, becoming increasingly thin, had been gathered at the back of her head in a little knot achieved by dint of ingenuity and skilful capillary economies; latterly the chignon had been reduced to the dimensions of a silk cocoon and the hair that held it up was so thinned out and fine that it seemed to stay on by a miracle. One windy afternoon when she was taking down the wash near the fig-tree a branch that beat against a low window grazed her head and completely tore off her chignon. She was grief-stricken, and she weepingly dragged herself about on all fours, trying to find her bloodstained roll of greying hair among the profusion of half-rotten figs with gaping red pulps which had fallen from the branches and lay scattered on the ground.

  Aside from this event, Maître Girardin with his ant’s patience and his militant honesty had succeeded in tripling the income from the Count’s property. In Grandsailles’ bedroom Saint Blondine’s skull still continued to occupy the same place, and his violin beside it now flaunted a new red string. Since the evening when Grandsailles had performed the operation of changing this string, an infinity of tiny bright red silk threads that he had scratched away from one end remained in the room in spite of all the dustings. They appeared everywhere, in the ink, stuck to the ends of the clockhands, and often they could be seen flying across a sunbeam.

  In the kitchen of the Château, the old servant Prince had aged by exactly three years. Béatrice de Brantès owned three large new yellow diamonds and had redecorated her apartment with immense white screens painted with milk, which had already turned yellow. Dick d’Angerville had acquired a large calendar-clock, executed by the famous automaton-inventor, Houdin, made entirely of crystal, and transparent…. And so on and so forth.

  It was as though on the half-effaced background, as of an old tapestry, representing the confused and foggy life of all these beings, only the objects stood out with some sharpness…. Three years! An ash-coloured chignon lost among rotten figs, a bit of red thread that floats across a sunbeam, the hardness of a few new jewels, much hidden sorrow, an invisible clock, and a flow of milk to a mother’s breasts. Three years! One does not see them but, transparent as tears, they nevertheless suffice to leave a bitter aftertaste that softens the faces and the gestures of friends, covering them with that slightly golden tint that was not yet a patina of sentiment but was already the light powder of poetry.

  These three years that preceded the war left few traces, especially in the lives of the protagonists, and even the most attentive chronicler of the Parisian life of this period would have had difficulty in noting essential differences; if by magic one could have concealed from him this lapse of time he might very well on returning to his observations have been fooled and believed that those three years that had passed were but a day. If it is true that during this period several rather surprising changes occurred in fashion, it was also true that just at this moment certain characteristic styles of three or four years before, which had been quickly forgotten, had been revived; so that while living and being consumed in an actuality which had all the appearances of the most continual tension and spiritual invention, people did nothing but rotate the same elegances, the same literary styles, the same hidden passions, the same overt liaisons, the same perfumes, the same concierge odours, the same quarrels and reconciliations, the same gossip. The gossip of Paris has in its favour that solidly bourgeois, permanent something which, if it have ever so slight a foundation, one can count on for the rest of one’s life.

  The Count of Grandsailles had been ill with a prolonged attack of sciatica which had put the plan for his ball completely out of his mind. But people were talking of it again these days as of something imminent. Aside from the period when his illness had kept him riveted to the Château de Lamotte, the Count was almost continually going to London. Recently there had been much whispering, sprinkled with strange reticences, about two of his ephemeral affairs, the most permanent and least obscure of which was the one with the Honourable Lady Chidester-Ames. But whether the Count was at his Château or in London, ill or in the arms of his mistresses, Madame Solange de Cléda continued to receive flowers from him every day without a lapse during these three years, and the jasmines reappeared chronologically in their season, always in their ritual wrapping, like a veritable institution.

  During these last years Grandsailles had seen Solange during each of his brief stays in Paris, but never intimately; as they met only in society, they never had a tête-à-tête which went beyond the limits of a superficial conversation. Solange, increasingly courted and admired, lived constantly surrounded by the crowd of her admirers, who proclaimed her to be the smartest woman in Paris. The Viscount of Angerville, in his effaced rôle of a Pygmalion, had succeeded in chiselling the atmosphere of Solange’s salon on Rue de Babylone, which soon reached the height of refinement, luxury and wit. D’Angerville’s almost continual presence might have made one assume that he harboured for Madame de Cléda a hidden passion restrained only by his certain knowledge of Solange’s unalterable feelings for the Count. But in spite of the doubts and even the fears that the rumours about Grandsailles’ latest bizarre liaisons had inspired in them, d’Angerville seemed on every occasion to wish to nourish in Solange’s mind the hope of an eventual marriage with the Count.

  One late afternoon in late August, 1939, the Canoness of Launay turned up in Paris. She got down from a second-class coach at the Gare de l’Est, wiping her right eye with the corner of her apron. The Count of Grandsailles was going to establish himself in Paris for a long season, and as usual the canoness arrived three days in advance to make the two residences ready so that the Count would find the indulgence of all his slightest manias maniacally prepared for on his arrival.

  The first of these residences was, so to speak, the official one, composed of a rather melancholy suite of rooms on the fourth floor of the Hotel Meurice, that had been kept since the beginning by his valet, Grimard. The second was a small two-storey house hidden away in the Bois de Boulogne, in the Bois de Boulogne style – that is to say, no style at all-done in deliberately bad taste and often containing objects of great value which spent quarantine periods there before being sent to join the rare furnishings of the Château de Lamotte. The 1900 house in the Bois de Boulogne was surrounded by a dense little wood of chestnut trees which made it completely invisible and was of course intended for the Count’s most secret rendezvous. But this address was also known to antiquarians, herbalists, dealers in rare books, in very special old works, and to florists. The canoness, who had her apartment on the first floor of this house, where she assumed the role of concierge, gave a particularly exacting and reluctant care to the upkeep of the luxurious and unusual details and complications of the second floor. She often sighed while she was about her chores, ‘Seigneur Dieu! What things haven’t I seen in my long life!’

  The boudoir reserved for the Count of Grandsailles’ mistresses, which contained merely the usual toilet articles in addition to its furniture, was always prepared hastily, without negligence but only to the point of adequacy. On the other hand the canoness spent hours in the Count’s bedroom and dressing-room, which were cluttered with intricate and esoteric pharmaceutical preparations that an alchemist would have envied: unguents with tenacious odours in vials of porous earthenware that had to be constantly wrapped in white cloth bandages which immediately became dirty and had to be changed frequently like a baby’s diapers; heavy roots tumefied with purplish excrescences and black warts hanging from vine-stalks in the ceiling like bulbous hands afflicted with elephantiasis; cat-skins marinating in opaque glass crocks under a thick bed of mercury…. In the midst of all this confusion of heteroclitic objects, on the immaculate cloth of an out-of-the-way table, there always stood, arranged with the canoness’s extreme meticulousness, two flasks of the same size but of different colour, one of red enamel, the other of blue, each respectively accompanied by a glass and a spoon which were also of fine enamel and in matching colours. These two flasks contained liquids of a resinous green turning to chocolate, both of them odourless, having violent and opposite tastes. The right-hand flask, the red one, contained a kind of thick, very sweet nectar; the one on the left, the blue one, held a very volatile liquid, whose taste was so bitter and nauseating that it was impossible to swallow it without vomiting unless its effect had been previously neutralized by a spoonful of the contents of the first. The canoness kept a constant eye on the relative positions of these two flasks, so that if the Count should want to use them in the middle of the night he could do so without mistaking them in the complete darkness and without having to turn on the light.

  The Count, on the basis of personal experiments, considered the mixture of these two potions to have very special aphrodisiac virtues, while at the same time its frequent use acted as a powerful stimulant on other nerve centres, particularly the brain. A formula similar to his elixir, though less elaborate, is to be found in the Neapolitan Laporta’s Natural Magic. It was actually but the love philtre of the Middle Ages, which according to him constituted the key, as it were, to that wonderful Rêve de Polyphile, brought into France by Béroalde in 1600 – the Count of Grandsailles’ favourite book, his bible. Having a horror of all the rationalist and positivist tendencies of the eighteenth century, the Count had studied deeply the works of Albertus Magnus, Paracelsus and Ramon Lull, seeking their grandiose intentions everywhere in nature. He availed himself of the help of the old herbalist Guimet, a character whose picturesqueness verged on the absurd, who claimed not to have bathed for seven years, for strictly hygienic reasons, but who seemed to be familiar with the virtues of the most delicate and unknown herbs. Grandsailles, going beyond the esoteric side of his herbalist’s superstitions, could not help becoming day by day more aware of the treasure of empiricism which these formulas infallibly concealed beneath their aspect of apparent trickery. What, indeed, was the most up-to-date pharmacopeia doing if not reactualizing under other names the mysteries that for a long time were attributed to the credulity of the Middle Ages? The influences and therapeutic virtues which the alchemists accorded to the mineral world of gems and precious metals had been so much laughed at! Well, was the use of gold salts not looked upon in our day as a powerful curative? And what about the direct application of certain living animals on an afflicted part of the body? Was not a toad or a chrysalis a charged and panting congeries not only of unknown electrical phenomena but also, and especially, of the still elusive ones of radio-activity, since their secretions and salivas seemed more and more to be proved to be in direct connection, not with the NBC short waves, but with the interplanetary ones of the music of the celestial spheres? As for the Canoness of Launay, if she had been told all this she would have listened to it only as to celestial music, and meanwhile this whole collection of drugs and disparate objects of unknown usage appeared to her rather to give off a demoniac odour of sulphur, especially since on a certain morning while doing the Count’s room she had come by chance upon an open book exposing an abominable engraving of a succubus scene that illustrated the treatise written by Durtal† on Gilles de Rais’ satanic practices. And since that morning, the canoness tried to avoid glancing at the pages of books left lying open, and more than ever she was careful to walk only on tiptoe in the upstairs rooms.

  Since his arrival in Paris, the Count of Grandsailles seemed preoccupied and meditative. The final breaking-off of his last liaison with Lady Chidester-Ames had left his blasé mind a prey to an obsessing series of new fantasies, and now he spent most of his afternoons browsing in special bookstores in search of books and documents which could directly or indirectly provide a basis for those bizarre meditations elaborated throughout his monastic retreats at the Château de Lamotte and heated by the constant and overflowing imaginative ferment of his long daily conversations with Pierre Girardin. Moreover, the thought of Solange de Cléda, whose tacit availability had for four years eradicated from his mind all desire and lust to possess her, was now beginning to prod him anew, and her image seemed to incorporate itself in, and be destined to become the protagonist of, his new fantasies. But he still refused to contemplate this seriously, saying to himself. ‘She will be mine the day I wish it.’ Solange’s image would feign to disappear and lose its obsessive value for a few seconds, but suddenly he would remember the frank and noble inflection with which she had recently reacted to certain gallant insinuations of his. ‘You know perfectly well – I want you so much!’ Then Grandsailles would feel himself weaken and launch into unbridled purchases of more antiquities….

  After nine days in Paris the Count of Grandsailles could no longer resist the desire to have a long tête-à-tête with Solange. It would be their first real meeting since the incident that had occurred in the Count’s bedroom at the Château de Lamotte four years before.

  As an appropriate setting Grandsailles had chosen a solemn restaurant with a high ceiling and fine crystal candelabra situated at the Porte Dauphine, a place that was deserted around tea-time; at the end of the evening they could go and dance a waltz in the Bois, at the Château de Madrid. Grandsailles took his car and called for Solange at her house on Rue de Babylone. When they reached the Porte Dauphine it began to rain. They picked a table near a large window, alive with wriggling rain patterns, and the Count gave the violinist a tip to make him stop playing for the rest of the afternoon.

  ‘The progress you have been making in the last four years,’ Grandsailles began, ‘inevitably makes me reflect upon my own senescence. You have never wanted to show up in London, but your radiance was reflected from afar in all the salons, especially in the most hostile ones.’

  ‘I have done all this only for you.’ Solange answered, watching the downpour. ‘Since the day when I sacrificed my pride by confessing my love for you I have wanted this love to be at your level.’

  ‘Yet you won’t deny,’ said Grandsailles, ‘that your new rôle as a social idol partly compensates for your pride, whose sacrifice I have never yet been willing to accept.’

  ‘The glories of the world,’ thought Solange, ‘are like bubbles in the rain.’

  ‘If we had the curiosity to try to observe the bases of our feelings objectively,’ Grandsailles went on, passing his lighted cigarette to Solange. ‘I am sure your pride might derive satisfaction from the present vulnerability of my desire – which, however. I should not dare to qualify with the same confidence as you by the name of “love”, which is so easily uprooted. On the contrary, according to my Stendhalian methods of observing the famous “crystallization” of love, nothing indicates this in my feelings – absolutely nothing….’

  ‘I know I have grown in your esteem; but why do you use the word “desire”, when you no longer need it,’ said Solange with dignity.

  ‘I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your present state of mind, which at last is going to enable us to talk over our case without blinding ourselves,’ said Grandsailles, watching Solange attentively to assure himself that her calm was not feigned.