Then brusquely she turned round and walked quickly to the mirror, adjusting her veil as though she were getting ready to depart.

  ‘You’re not going to leave me now?’

  Goudreau turned her head slightly toward the Count, and looking at him through her veil that already covered her face, answered, ‘Yes! I’m staying behind.’

  ‘D’Orminy wanted you to go with us, we want you to come to America with us!’ Grandsailles commanded feebly.

  Cécile’s modest reaction to this weakness was hurriedly to open the little bag she had brought and to pull out several fabulous pearl necklaces, which she threw on the bed with a gesture full of weariness. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘put these on your canoness. They may be useful to you. I don’t need anything any more. They were presents – d’Orminy’s kind, you understand? They belonged to his mistress, the Countess Mihakowska; she gave them to me. You remember that poor angel? And you know the way she was forced to catch each of these pearls with her teeth!’

  ‘Yes, I heard that story, but I never believed it.’

  ‘Well, it’s as true as the day. D’Orminy would tie her hands behind her back and she would get down on her knees…. What does all that matter to us, now or ever?’

  Cécile Goudreau had become herself again. By making their conversation more casual and everyday, she hoped to make Grandsailles accept the pearls which he had put into her bag again and which she had pulled out and thrown back on the bed.

  ‘It’s no renunciation for me not to come,’ she went on. ‘my heart kept telling me the whole time, “It’s not right! It’s not right to leave!” I’m going back to Paris – my opium den – the green moss – my family vault! I’m not afraid of it any more. I’ll stay with the dead.’

  At this moment the siren wailed out the first signal of departure. It was long-drawn-out, and when it ceased Grandsailles said again, knowing already that his efforts to change her mind would be futile, ‘Our leaving has already cost d’Orminy his life. You have only to take off your veil to change the course of your destiny. We are here in complete security. I spoke for half an hour with the captain. You won’t be able to leave later, even if you wanted to.’

  ‘I should not want to, I shall never separate myself from my feelings,’ she replied, speaking hurriedly.

  ‘I know,’ said Grandsailles, as if trying to let himself be convinced, ‘there was no sentiment to draw you to that country!’

  Cécile Goudreau had come close to him, all ready to leave, and said with a disconcerting shade of coquettishness, ‘What do you know about my feelings? Have you ever wondered if perhaps I was in love with you?’ And she laughed at him with such candid sweetness that she seemed in a moment to have grown ten years younger. She pulled back her veil, ‘Kiss me, anyway!’

  They embraced fervently, and then she left. And Grandsailles realized that he had discovered just now for the first time that this autumnal being with her November irises could arouse desire.

  The François Coppée, having left the port of Casablanca three hours before, was now sailing in the open sea beneath the first crescent of a hard, shiny moon, a little humped and chipped like a gypsy queen’s casserole.

  ‘I don’t want to think of anything any more, I want to sleep till we get to Buenos Aires…. If only that canoness in there will stop her sobbing!’ She had been so eager, had pestered him so much to be the first to leave, and since the ship had hoisted anchor she had started to weep all the more.

  PART THREE

  The Price of Victory

  6

  ‘La Forza del Destino’

  During the twenty-three days’ crossing from Casablanca to Buenos Aires, the Count of Grandsailles almost completely forgot, not only the episodes of the dramatic conspiracies and intrigues which he had just lived through, but also the fact that the war itself existed. Unable to see clearly what lay behind the total fog of his future political activities, and with that capricious absolutism which characterized the least of his absorptions and abstentions, the Count decided to shut out of his memory everything that might cause him the slightest displeasure, while slyly leaving a breach of tolerance open to the representations of pleasure.

  Thus in spite of having promised himself a restorative quiescence, a vacation of ‘vegetative amnesia’ in the limbo of his brain, he was soon assailed relentlessly by hallucinating and tenacious evocations of his libido, too long waylaid by the fulminating risks of his daily activity which had now suddenly ceased. Grandsailles’ mind readily became the prey and the ‘pasture’ of a series of interminable morose reveries – translucent pebbles of the same great themes of sympathetic magic and of succubus-possession monotonously rolled on the sand by the waves as if to become perfected and polished… dull stones that turn green like old sparkling ardours resuscitating from the ashes of forgetfulness…. All the real or fanciful memories of his prolix love experiences strewn in disorder along the semi-precious beach of his life were now gathered together and arranged by his libido in the great hierarchical and opalescent vase of his sybaritic egoism in which he stored the treasure of secret pleasure. With the constant and skilful little blows of the hammer and chisel of his obsession and of his perverse abstinence, Grandsailles could strike at will more and more disquieting new magic flashes – obtained, however, at a loss of cerebral retina, of visual marrow and medullary substance.

  It was as though Cécile Goudreau’s last rapid kiss, which in spite of the dramatic circumstances of the departure had produced such a disconcerting effect, had stimulated and sharpened all his senses to the quick; and if in his memory of the Malta episode, but recently so dense with emotion, there now remained only a limp spider’s web covered with dust and the three black and sinister stains of his three dead cohorts, all buried so to speak in a dark corner of the stable in which the domestic animals of his political instincts slumbered, Cécile Goudreau’s unexpected kiss was still vivid, a sensation more real than at the moment when he had experienced it. It was as though each time he evoked Cécile’s image through the grey veils which had fallen over her face since that moment, she had the power, in spite of time and distance, to renew the sting inflicted on his desire by a kind of invisible tongue, quick, ardent and cold as a snake’s. How could Grandsailles ever have suspected such a thing? So many long evenings spent chatting with Cécile, the two of them alone together, without any other witnesses than the four heads of the four bear-rugs submerged by the satin of the propitious atmosphere of her opium den, and without a single spark of carnal lust having swept across the often dried-up hills of his prolonged continences.

  Cécile appeared to him now clothed with attributes combining infinitely attractive shades of malice and pathos. With her faultlessly beautiful legs he often visualized her emerging, silent and obedient, from the places where his most gnostic imaginative orgies and bacchanalia were consummated, and not infrequently at the climax of their troubling scenes it was precisely Cécile’s face, delicately veiled in grey, that would in the last moment replace the usual one of the Honourable Lady Chidester-Ames who in turn had until then supplied the human embodiment of certain fauns with flawless legs and the ambiguous bodies of hermaphrodites, covered with soft, shiny fur.

  But if Cécile’s image now held the golden bridle of the extravagant cavalcades of his lasciviousness, harnessed to the mud-wallowing panthers of his perversity, one single being seemed on the other hand to detach itself from this part of himself, so tormented by base appetites, one single being emerging each time more victorious from each of the new ordeals of his more and more exacting desire, one single being who was beginning to appear to him as half-divine – Solange! Solange de Cléda who had found her way to him through all the walls of his pride, armed with the sole dignity and beauty of her image, her naked image, passing across the deep, thorny pits envenomed by the vipers of the outrageous injustice of the contempt in which the Count had tried to confine her. Yes! He no longer concealed it from himself now, since he had boarded this ship and his spirit, so long absorbed by the tragedy of his country, now again had leisure to dwell on her: he had become aware of a deep and sincere remorse over his inhuman, inflexible and pitiless behaviour toward the one being who, he knew, adored him with an all-absorbing passion.

  Solange de Cléda! He visualized her now as perfect, as a transparent Louis XIV fountain, in which all the attributes of her personality were architecturally transformed into the precious metals on which her spirit was ‘mounted’ and which served her as an accessory and a pedestal. He would look at her and not see her: carved in celestial geometry, only the ‘silks’ of the rock-crystal of her soul were visible in her limpidness. But if Solange’s spirit, because of its translucent purity, seemed to him more and more inaccessible to the senses, all that might be called the ornamentation of ‘her fountain’ now no longer appeared to him as light and virtual attributes. On the contrary each leaf of her modesty and each garland of her grace was chiselled with a minute detail and a refined art, as in a rare masterpiece of jewelry, so that the sculptured motifs, elaborately executed in the opaque metal of the border, only set off the smooth and unclouded diaphanousness of the receptacle that stood in the centre of her deep being. What uncompromising and gratuitous rigour he had shown toward her! She had wanted to marry him? What wrong was there in this, if it was willed solely by her passion? What would he himself not have done in order to possess a mite of authority in the soul of his country – which, perhaps to punish him for his pride, had in turn condemned him with equal injustice to the torturing elegies of ostracism!

  Solange might have been an incomparable spouse, just as d’Orminy had probably been one of his best friends without his ever having suspected it, just as Cécile Goudreau possessed demonic-virtues as capable as Lady Chidester-Ames’ of awakening the tortuous witchcraft of his vices.

  The ship sailed on to the monotonous rhythm of its engines. His eyes that had always been sealed to the demands of his indomitable character had at last been opened by his recent experiences. But was it not too late? In the face of the miles of Atlantic ocean that were impassively devoured at each hour of their journey the misunderstanding with Solange appeared to him progressively as a drop of salt water, smaller and smaller and on the point of evaporating without leaving any other trace than a slightly bitter taste.

  ‘I have never loved anyone but her,’ Grandsailles would repeat to himself. And he promised himself that he would start a love correspondence with her as soon as he reached America. Would she be able to come and join him? And this man, who had not given a single thought to poor Fouseret, from whom d’Orminy’s suicide had been unable to draw a single tear, now remembered with infinite emotion the last sentence he had heard Solange utter, when he had treated her so outrageously and started down the stairs without a word of farewell. ‘Take good care of yourself!’ Abandoning all effort to defend herself, she had thought of only these words, uttered in a tone so loving, so poignant and full of maternal tenderness.

  And while the François Coppée left the ephemeral foamwhirl of the stages of its voyage behind it one after another the Count of Grandsailles, coming out into the daylight after one of his black and tyrannical sensual phantasmagorias, would imperceptibly move his lips to repeat to himself noiselessly, ‘Take good care of yourself!’ It had required a whole ocean of bitterness to moisten his eyes: ‘The bitterness and dishonour of war had to uproot me to make me feel you taking root at last in my heart, Solange de Cléda!’

  On the ceiling of the cabin the image of the sea-waves filed past upside down. The Count shut his eyes, and with an unaccustomed, hyperaesthesized visual acuteness, he saw cavalcades and triumphs similar to those described in Le Rêve de Polyphile and painted by Piero della Francesca. If he wished to examine a fragment of one of his imaginings at leisure he had only to tighten the muscles of his eyelids. This seemed to bring the optic diaphragm of his hypnagogic hallucinations exactly into focus, enabling him to decipher the enigmatic inscriptions of each trophy and to savour the chiselled floral motifs on the golden spokes of chariot wheels turning on hubs of black agate in which he distinctly saw a few white veins.

  Thanks to this faculty of irritating his visualizations to the point of blinding clarity, he could thus by concentrating on a fleeting smile immediately see the curling lines of blessed turpitudes drawn as sharply as in a sculpture by Carpeaux and could individualize the minute anomalies of each of the pure, saliva-moistened teeth – his imagination in turn moistening, tooth by tooth. He could even distinguish through the veils over their bodies the various shades of salmon-pink on the tips of the breasts of dancing nymphs.

  Each triumphal chariot of perversion passed across his vision, drawn by different creatures, by druids crowned with leaves bearing Arabic topaz vases of ‘liquid desires’, unicorns with feminine rumps, bulls white as foam, lions with the faces of angels… Cécile and Lady Chidester-Ames dressed in sea-cow skins opened the procession, applying their whips of myrtle branches that left myrtle-shaped marks on the innumerable flesh of the slaves of his mistresses, to whom Grandsailles now self-indulgently gave the names of famous lovers of antiquity – Celta Morgana who turned into a river of milk, Alimbrica with the white gums, the gentle Hemophia who loved blood, Corina with the breasts of a child, and Nacrea! But in the midst of this throng subservient to his specialized pleasures one saw a principal chariot which was at the same time a tomb and a fountain of Adonis. On this chariot lay a young horse of infelicity, all white, and on this horse Solange was seated like a queen, happy but a little terrified, her hands clutching the animal’s mane for fear of falling on the host of her beautiful former rivals who were making elegiac gestures. Solange de Cléda wore a dress of blue gold and her chariot was drawn by six centaurs of the race of Ixion harnessed by means of strong flat-shaped bronze chains – God, how beautifully proportioned those flat-shaped bronze chains were! He had borrowed them from his Louix XVI clock, one of his last acquisitions before leaving Paris – the Count of Grandsailles had a habit of mixing up the mistresses he had possessed with the antiquities he had bought.

  ‘None of my sentiments,’ he would often repeat, ‘but is capable of being carved in stone – they may be slightly hunchbacked harpies, if you will, but their hump forms an ornamental semi-circle, and the whole is set off by noble acanthus-leaves.’ Solange de Cléda was now the lady…. He evoked her planted in the plain of Creux de Libreux, the illuminated plain, and he thought of land while his eyes contemptuously watched the sea roll by…. The sea is bitter to some, to those who love it – the romantics; and some are bitter to the sea – the classics. Grandsailles belonged to the latter, and the ocean, knowing this, darkened with melancholy while the Count of Grandsailles smiled at the approach of the concise limits of the new continent.

  Since their return to America, Barbara Stevens, Veronica, Betka and her son, accompanied by Miss Andrews, had been living on a property of Barbara’s in the middle of the desert, near Palm Springs. There, around their hacienda-palace, there was no suggestion of the mossy and ordered vegetation of France – only space strewn with rocks in disorder looking up at the hard sky with their empty holes. And while Barbara, keeping constantly indoors, had to treat her aggravated heart ailment with delicate precautions, Veronica spent most of her time outdoors wearing out her heart galloping on horseback, trampling her heart, so to speak, beneath her horse’s hooves that drew sparks of fire from the rocks, shattering them into fragments of rough tourmaline and frightening the great royal lizards that were soft as ‘cheese of polished tourmalines’, slipping without wounding themselves between the spines of old cactuses wounded in the flank. Each evening these cactuses formed groups of congealed gesticulations of ‘viae crucis’ and of ‘descents from the cross’ silhouetted against the agates of the sunsets.

  Veronica would ride her chestnut horse, her rounded forehead bowed like a menacing volute of obstinacy, the mother-of-pearl pincers of her thighs pressing the animal’s flanks and blending with it in a pearly communion of centaur sweat. She lived thus, riding her chimera and preserving an absolute faithfulness to the image of the ‘man with the hidden face’, and between the dark, damp depth of the cellar of the house on Quai des Orfèvres where they had known each other and the calcinated, radiant mud over which the horse of her impatience reared its hope there was only desert, heroic aridity of love. Each evening the constellation of the three diamonds of the cross she had given him would appear quaveringly suspended in the sky. In what latitudes was this cross now sailing toward her? For it shone differently according to the indecisions of her heart. With all her curative saliva, dried by the violent exercise of riding. Veronica would efface, one after another, the traces of the scars that streaked the face of her hero so that it might soon be freed of the protective embrace of his helmet, which would open like an eggshell. Then he would come to her without any other stigmata than those of glory. (Gallop, gallop, gallop! Deliria of galloping, spurs, saddles of chastity, bitterness and wind – whip all this!)

  Two curtains were now about to rise on the far horizon of Veronica’s tragic life. The first of these was all black and bore the inscription: ‘Nothing is more certain than death.’ And this was the curtain of mourning for her mother, who died of her heart ailment the month after their arrival in America. The second of these curtains was a pure white banner; it had a strong fragrance of sandalwood, and one could decipher on it the four Greek letters formed of intermingled embroidered flowers – imHn – which means virginity. This curtain was drawn before a fountain to conceal what was behind, and there was Veronica, her torn veil attached to the body of this fountain in human form which was Adonis. In an access of timidity and virginal modesty Veronica had scratched and bloodied his face, and he now kept it hidden in shame, masking it with two myrtle branches.