Solange looked at Grandsailles admiringly. ‘It’s wonderful,’ she said to herself. ‘So much calculation and hardness. He is already taking advantage of his flatteries to impose his plan on me – he would not even soften the word “nothing”; he had to emphasize it by the word “absolutely”…. “Easily uprooted”… what a cruel phrase…. Uprooted!…’ Solange repeated to herself, fascinated.

  ‘I have no right to ask you the question I should like to ask. I can only draw on the credit of confidence you may be willing to grant to my imagination,’ said Grandsailles, and waited to be asked to continue.

  ‘One does not impose conditions on the vanquished who is able to remain on an equal footing – on his knees.’

  ‘The beauty and nobility of your answer oblige me now not to conceal my shameful question from you. Would you be willing to step down from your present pedestal to become merely my mistress, even knowing that I don’t love you?’

  ‘I have already answered you – yes!’

  ‘Well,’ said Grandsailles, suddenly moved, ‘it’s even less than that! And it’s also so much more! What I want of you….’ and he rested his forehead for a few seconds in the hollow of his hand.

  Solange gently drew his hand from his face. ‘You are going to leave again.’ she said reproachfully, ‘without telling me what it is!’

  ‘Yes! I can’t today,’ the Count answered, resuming his coldness, ‘but I promise to tell you next time. Today I wanted to tell you about my liaison with Lady Chidester-Ames; this passion has left ravages in my spirit, of a kind I could never have imagined.’

  Solange pressed the Count’s hand imperceptibly.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Grandsailles, ‘you want me to spare you this… I can reassure you, for that’s all over now…. Yet it’s rather too bad you won’t listen to me…. All those stories about the perversity of our relationship are quite untrue; moreover, if you knew all the details of this passion, you would find what I want of you so much more human and comprehensible.’

  ‘Nothing will appear incomprehensible to my love… provided you give my jealousy a little chance to slumber.’

  ‘Then I shall not tell you about Lady Chidester-Ames,’ Grandsailles answered. He looked at her musingly.

  ‘Do you believe,’ he said finally, ‘that in the ideal physiology of love the orgasm must necessarily occur simultaneously in both partners?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s an essential condition, though a very desirable one,’ said Solange.

  ‘Yet the whole orthodoxy of physical love since antiquity seems to revolve around that single question,’ said Grandsailles. Then after a long silence, ‘Certain very widespread practices in the Middle Ages set this as the final goal of the sorcerer’s art in the realm of love.’

  ‘You are referring to the phenomena of love-spells?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Grandsailles, ‘I am thinking of those beliefs, considered as dogmas for several centuries, in the possibility of employing magic processes to induce love between two persons purposely chosen as having nothing to predispose them to each other. Love was imposed on them progressively, like a kind of condemnation, or punishment.’

  ‘Neither modern psychology nor certain recent biological discoveries would seem wholly to reject such magic processes,’ Solange hazarded ingratiatingly, stretching the little white cat’s paws of her erudition on the waves of feathers of the carpet of their fluid conversation.

  ‘That’s quite true,’ said Grandsailles, ‘I have just reread several tales that tell of such love-spells, the process and methods of which, quite apart from their astonishing poetic beauty, strike me as having a hallucinatory plausibility!’

  Solange folded her arms across her bosom and pressed her shoulders with her hands, showing her readiness to listen.

  ‘One begins,’ Grandsailles went on, ‘by choosing the couple destined to become lovers, preferably individuals having hostile tendencies. They must not be virgins, but from the moment the two have been chosen they are held to a complete chastity which must not be broken till the end. After several months of carnal abstinence, during which their bodies are nourished with food and drink in the preparation of which all the aphrodisiac sciences of herbs since the time of ancient Egypt have a part, and their imaginations are kindled unceasingly by appropriate tales, mostly borrowed from the dialogues of famous lovers and from the ardent maxims of Odoclirée, who unites lovers, then, and only then, occurs the first meeting of the couple to bring them under the spell. For this “presentation” they must encounter each other naked, adorned only with jewels composed of gems and precious metals selected according to the conjunction of their horoscopes and other favourable influences. During the whole course of this meeting, for which a rigorous ceremonial is prescribed, no word must be spoken nor must there be any physical contact. Any infraction of this constraint would jeopardize the ultimate success of the love-spell. After this preliminary scene their meetings are graduated with a refined art to awaken and stimulate their budding desire. But contrary to what one might expect, instead of progressing in the direction of normal physical temptations their relations only retrogress. Then the course of their romance enters what might be called a new phase of idealization.’

  ‘Sublimation,’ Solange suggested.

  ‘After their second meeting, their nakedness is almost completely covered with interlaced leaves, at their fourth encounter they appear clothed in sumptuous garments, and their gestures, still regulated in advance as for a ballet, instead of being crudely immodest as they were in their first state of nakedness, become more pure, expressive of delicate feelings, unction and humility as they progress toward the final stages.’

  ‘I can see,’ said Solange, ‘that this kind of exhibitionism in reverse might become a violent stimulus to the senses of those subjected to such ceremonies, to the point of arousing in them a wholly cerebral desire for each other. But does this frightful Tantalus torture of their flesh have anything in common with the sovereign and permanent feeling of love?’

  ‘Yes, assuredly,’ answered Grandsailles, ‘or at least this is what the texts attest, on condition that the couple satisfactorily reach the end of their ordeal.’

  ‘What happens when the spell is at last complete?” Solange asked, ‘what is the final goal?’

  ‘At the end,’ Grandsailles continued, ‘the two lovers are left alone, face to face, clad in veils which by their richness are suggestive of sumptuous nuptial robes. Both are bound separately to the branches of a myrtle tree in such a way as not only to prevent the contact of their bodies but also to maintain them in the most complete immobility. After a certain time, if the spell is successful the orgasm occurs simultaneously in the two lovers without any other communication between them than by facial expression. And it is said that this phenomenon is almost always accompanied by tears,’ Grandsailles concluded, pouring Solange another cup of tea. There was another silence.

  These tears,’ she said at last, ‘and the expression of the faces with their capacity for infinite shades of pain and pleasure are undoubtedly what make the human act differ most from that of animals….’ And as if debating with herself she continued, ‘So it is possible to consummate a great physical passion without contact? This seems to lead inevitably to a wholly new theory of love which might in fact unite the conceptions of Epicurus and of Plato in a single idea.’

  ‘In any case, it is at least a new perversion to consider,’ said Grandsailles with reticence.

  ‘But even so, do you seriously believe this kind of thing to be possible except for people having the extremely suggestible state of mind implied by the whole complex of mediaeval beliefs?’

  ‘You are right,’ said Grandsailles, ‘such states of emotive hyperaesthesia could be achieved in present-day life only by creating real psychological monsters…. Nevertheless, modern psychopathology presents us every day with phenomena of the same order as those of witchcraft, in the seraglio of the hystero-epileptics who fill our hospitals. The hysteric arch which instantaneously bends a feminine body into a contortion which for a normal person would require weeks of acrobatic apprenticeship has the same spiritual origins, so to speak, as the spasms so well known since Chaplin, which enable patients to perform feats of coordination of which they are normally incapable. The floods of tears that great actresses are able to shed at will seem to produce nervous releases corresponding in every respect to those of true grief; here the limits of simulation apparently have the same medullary source as pleasure. The phenomenon of pleasure, in fact, though more independent of our will than that of tears, is all the more acute when it is dissociated from mechanical action and is produced more slowly, brought about by what might be called more spiritual means. I know that the word “spiritual” as I use it seems nonsensical and can only provoke sneers among the materialistic minds of our epoch. But the general conception of love as it has been presented to us since the eighteenth century strikes me as an aberration. The idea of “love at first sight” is a barbarous one which in itself is a serious symptom of the foggy decadence, the lack of contours and of details, in which the “dream” of humanity seems to be sinking. When one thinks of the Egyptians, of the men of the Renaissance who could dream of obelisks, of learned geometries, of mathematical proportions which enabled them to carry over into a waking state the application of subtle problems of architectural aesthetics which their oniric life had solved, the lack of rigour of the dreams of our contemporaries is a scandal, and their oniric episodes are barely to be distinguished from the wretched vaudevilles of their pitiful daily lives!’

  Solange blushed, for she never dreamed.

  ‘This same lack of rigour also annihilates passions,’ Grandsailles continued vehemently; ‘as soon as two beings want each other they rush to satisfy their desire no matter how, where or under what conditions – awkwardly, twisting their arms and choking each other with their saliva, only to satisfy their passing urges and their exaltations. All the love experience of my life condemns and rejects this orgiastic promiscuity! Just as the inspired poet‡ is incapable of writing beautiful poems, so a lover is incapable of building a true passion…. On the contrary, an almost non-existent initial desire can be cultivated, brought by a series of studied crystallizations from its confused state of a sentimental murmur to the cold splendours of aesthetics, which are of a different order from the scrambled hash of the flesh. I want to build a passion like a true architecture in which the hardness of each rib shall sing with the precision of the stone-angles in each of the mouldings of the sonnets of the Paladian windows – a passion with stairs of pain leading to landings of the expectation of uncertainty, with benches on which to sit and wait at the threshold of the gate to desire, columns of anguish, capitals of jealousy carved with acanthus leaves, reticences in the form of broken pediments, round, calm smiles like balustrades, vaults and cupolas of enchanted ecstasy….’

  By an effort of will Solange obliterated all the sounds around her the better to listen. Why, in Heaven’s name, could she not be loved by Grandsailles? If each of his words could so overwhelm her, what would it not be to live with him always! And as she listened to him, Solange de Cléda kept repeating within herself, ‘What is it that you do that makes each of your words secretly nest in my soul!’

  But Grandsailles had slipped on his very narrow glove, and now made the reverse of it snap in a characteristic way that made him seem already far down the street.

  ‘When shall we have our next session in sympathetic magic?’ said Solange, laughing in her brightest voice.

  ‘Do you want to meet me here, the day after tomorrow at the same time? Yes I know, I must tell you everything!’ exclaimed Grandsailles; then becoming again the man of the world he added, ‘You won’t mind, chérie, if I don’t take you now to the Château de Madrid, as I had promised? I am terribly sorry it’s so late.’

  ‘I should have liked to dance with you once more perhaps, before launching on this experiment; is that going to be forbidden us too?’ said Solange, getting up and putting her hands on each of the Count’s shoulders. The latter had only to turn his head to kiss Solange’s left hand, and he said, ‘It is a wonderful miracle that there has never yet been anything between us,’ adding in a hoarse voice, ‘let us swear never to do anything that can diminish our desire!’ Then he kissed her other hand, said in a low, firm voice, ‘We’re going to bind ourselves together in a spell!’

  ‘Can I be more under your spell than I am now?’ asked Solange, her head stretched toward him.

  ‘I want to be under your spell,’ Grandsailles replied, looking into the depths of her eyes and taking her by the arm, barely touching her.

  Before they parted, Solange reminded him, ‘Tomorrow evening we are dining together at Béatrice de Brantès’. Since we are only at the beginning, may I still wear my most décolleté dress?’

  The conversation with Solange had left the Count shattered and, feeling as if he had undergone a violent nervous shock, he had retired to bed very early in his house in the Bois. In bed he opened the Annales de Démonologie at random and fell on the very minute description of a curious case of a succubus visitation occurring in a waking state, of which a reverend Dominican Father, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, had three times been the victim, each time with a different subject. While sitting in the confessional, the demonic body of the woman he was confessing had broken away from her human body and, tying all his members, had subjected him to a horrible captive pleasure while during all this the conversation had gone on uninterruptedly with the subject’s double who had remained respectfully and piously kneeling.

  Grandsailles shut this book while with one hand he rubbed the back of his neck with his thumb and forefinger; then he opened the Rêve de Polyphile at a page marked by a ribbon, and read:

  ‘The mouth of this last vase was heaped with a mountain, a mass of precious stones, all uncut and unpolished, tightly packed, crudely and without order, wherefore the mountain seemed rugged and difficult to scale. On the summit grew a pomegranate tree, of which the trunk and branches were of gold, the leaves of emerald and the fruit of natural size, the bark of unburnished gold, and the seeds of oriental rubies, all big as beans, and the membrane or film that separated the seeds was of silver. The gentle craftsman who had wrought this masterpiece had placed here and there split and half-open granates, and some of the seeds which seemed not yet to have ripened he had formed of large oriental pearls, a most superb invention that brought a blush to the cheek of nature.’

  On reaching the word ‘nature’ Grandsailles put out the light and gave himself over to a deep sleep. He slept straight through and awoke only at eleven-thirty the next morning. As he was about to leave the house he passed the canoness in the hall and she said to him, as she stopped and scrutinized him:

  ‘Monsieur should not overdo the green potion…. So many innocent little souls waiting in limbo to come into this world!’ Then, seeing that Grandsailles was looking for his cane, she added without coming to his aid. ‘No secrets for your canoness! She makes your bed!’ And she went off, muttering, ‘Poor angels! God be praised!’

  During these years Solange de Cléda’s dream of some day becoming the proprietress of the Moulin des Sources had not ceased to haunt her for a second, and today, crowning the fruit of her persistence, this once vague and chimerical plan was on the eve of being realized. It is true that Solange’s desires could never have been realized by themselves alone, in spite of their vehemence, without the aid of a devout, prompt, constant and unconditional complicity. This she obtained through Maître Girardin’s unparalleled devotion. In playing this role, the notary in no way thought he was committing the slightest disloyalty to the Count of Grandsailles, quite the contrary. For if it was true that on Solange’s explicit request his professional duty obliged him to maintain the strictest secrecy as to his client’s intentions, it was no less true that he could imagine Solange’s acquisition of the Moulin des Sources only as something equally fortunate for the Count. Not only would this property thus revert to friendly hands, eliminating all the fears of industrialization which haunted Grandsailles, but also the tacit community of interests which this transaction would create between Solange and the Count could only increase the likelihood of a marriage which he ardently wished from the depth of his modest heart.

  Maître Girardin however, in spite of all his efforts, had been unable to obtain a reasonable final price, and he had definitely decided to advise against the purchase for the moment. In spite of the very considerable reduction from the original figure, the lowest price which Rochefort had been willing to accept was still more than twice the real value of the land, which with the most recent agricultural lay-out rendered the mortgaging of the investment extremely problematic. Madame de Cléda obviously had a right to spend almost the whole of her fortune as she pleased, but she had an eleven-year-old son in Switzerland, and it was the thought of him that awakened all the notary’s scruples.

  In this state of mind Girardin appeared for the conference which would probably settle the question. Solange de Cléda received him in the little drawing-room adjoining her bedroom where the first fire of the year had been kindled in the fireplace. Girardin kissed Solange’s hand and said, ‘Allow me to announce to you that England has just declared war on Germany.’

  ‘This means,’ Madame de Cléda said after a silence, ‘that we shall inevitably be drawn into the war? France must follow this decision by only a few hours, and it may be that our declaration of war is being transmitted at this very moment….’

  Out in the yard someone could be heard monotonously hammering nails. Girardin was burning with eagerness to launch into the subject of the purchase of the Moulin des Sources, but did not dare to interrupt Solange’s concentrated silence. She paced back and forth the length of the little room, taking deep puffs of smoke through her long cigarette-holder. Then Maître Girardin moderated his impatience and calmly sat down. Thereupon he tempered his assurance by getting up again, and finally found his poise by leaning with both hands on the open folder which he had placed on the desk, bending his body forward and bowing his head over the documents which he pretended to consult, so that in this way his attentive waiting and even the advice he was preparing to give might appear less personal and more immediately related to the duties of his profession.