It was told later in Libreux that someone, in sign of vengeance, traced a swastika on a smooth riverstone with his finger dipped in Girardin’s cold blood and that the ants held a Bacchic ritual and wound the rosary of their voracity around it.

  On the evening of the day of Pierre Girardin’s execution it began to rain once more, but this time wind and snowflurries joined forces with the water. Sitting in the kitchen, Génie was sewing and Martin the elder, sitting opposite her, was carving a pipe from a briar-root with his knife. Between the two was the long wooden kitchen table, and on this table, to right and left at equal distances, a black bottle of red wine and a chipped, earth-coloured plate containing white mushrooms tinged with blue and two truffles big as fists. Beside it was another white plate containing a rooster’s two cut-off feet and liver…. This was the whole of France – the blood of the earth, the flowers of heaven and hell, flowers of the falling waters, black fire from below… and the rooster, the totem, the sacrificed ‘chanticleer’.

  Under the table, exactly beneath the white plate, the cat lay sleeping. ‘I said on the day of the procession that the weather hadn’t cleared,’ said Martin, ‘and that’s when we should have had the wind that is beginning to blow now.’

  ‘And still no news of Monsieur le Vicomte d’Angerville,’ sighed Génie, looking through the half-open door at the round table in the dining-room, which now was always covered with its chocolate-brown cloth but which would have been covered with white cloths and set when Madame was well and Monsieur le Vicomte was there.

  ‘If you ask me, I don’t think we’ll ever see the Viscount of Angerville again,’ said Martin. Then he asked, ‘And Madame Solange, is she at least feeling better?’

  ‘She is better, sure she is better! Anyway she has no more fever now, but there’s something wrong up here,’ and Génie pointed her parchment-like forefinger to her forehead with its constellation of freckles, and she twisted her black-edged nail as though she were trying with the screwdriver of her finger to drive in the rusty heads of the screws of her freckles, which also somewhat resembled the grease-blobs of a very rich and golden sauce that had separated from the melted butter of her skin.

  ‘Quit banging!’ cried Génie.

  Martin stopped striking his pipe against the table to empty out the wood-shavings that plugged the hole he was making and held it suspended in mid-air.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Génie, ‘I thought I heard Madame cry.’

  Martin got up and went over to the window.

  ‘There!’ said Martin. ‘I hear the same thing you did just now! It’s as if all the dogs in Libreux were barking in chorus for some unknown reason. Listen, listen!’ So indeed it was. ‘You know, when that happens, they still say today it’s Count l’Arnan riding through the sky mounted on his black horse.’

  ‘Fairy-tales,’ said Génie, ‘you’re trying to frighten me.’

  The cat had just awakened and with a bound, as if frightened, disappeared in the direction of the dining-room.

  ‘They also say that when he passes hens flap their wings in terror, sheep cringe in their folds, and children wake up in their cradles and begin to cry.’

  ‘Be quiet, can’t you stop it? What do you want me to do, give you a – glass of wine?’ She poured out two glasses, and sighed. ‘God be praised! When I think how Madame is going to feel when she finds out Girardin has been shot! We’ll have to put off letting her know as long as possible – and I’m certainly not going to be the one to tell her. The curate will have to do it.’

  A cry from upstairs made her start and spill the wine on the table. ‘Sh! She’s just awoke!’

  ‘Génie!’ the voice of Solange de Cléda repeated.

  ‘Yes, Madame!’ Génie answered, running toward the stairs and making the sign of the cross.

  8

  Chimera of Chimeras, All Is Chimera!

  ‘To love and not know whom.’

  calderon de la barca

  It was approximately seven and a half months – rather more than less – since the Count and Veronica had been married and had been living, immediately following upon their honeymoon, in the sumptuous hacienda-palace in Palm Springs, which in the time of John Cornelius Stevens had had a zoological garden of wild animals and a private airfield attached to it. With the war restrictions these two areas, bereft of lions and planes, had become overgrown with grass.

  It was Sunday afternoon. The Count of Grandsailles was alone, sitting in the midst of the frigid luxury of the vast smoking-room whose imitation Spanish Renaissance furniture imitated the outmoded theatricality of a great Inquisition room…. The Count seemed sad and was watching a millipede that remained motionless in the middle of a white wall.

  ‘If one day I decided to kill myself,’ the Count reflected, ‘which is extremely unlikely, I should choose the moment immediately after the radio, at no matter what hour of the day, has announced the despairing and inexorable phrase, “Bulova Watch Time”!’

  Five o’clock had just been announced in this way over the radio of the immense room and once more the sempiternal ‘Bulova Watch Time’ had rung out those fateful and pitiless syllables on the anguishing stroke of five in the cloudless California afternoon. The Count of Grandsailles would have liked to get up to go and turn off the radio which a servant had probably left on inadvertently, but he remained seated without moving, covered with the Sunday newspapers which he had been absentmindedly scanning while he was thinking of other things.

  Far from his plain of Creux de Libreux, where the lifegiving rains must have begun to darken the fields, all that surrounded him here, and life itself, appeared oppressively monotonous and devoid of that imponderable element which constitutes the whole miracle – savour. With all his nails he clutched at memories. Sundays especially tugged at his heart, and if by mischance, as had happened on this particular day, the sinister and maudlin strains of a Sunday morning organ poured through the broadcasts had wounded his ears on getting up, it was enough to give him the blues for the rest of the day. But Veronica could not get along without listening to the radio. He had already endured it now for an hour; hence his hypochondria was already irreparably ensconced, transparent and heavy on his spirit, in his very own armchair; a little more or a little less of this fluff-music would make no difference, and thus it was that he had resigned himself to it, bound hand and foot by one of those fits of insurmountable indolence that enable you to endure, almost complacently, the enervating sound of a dripping tap or a banging door.

  Yet the Count was at this moment far from being a prey to one of his habitual fits of moral depression, which used to assail him periodically in his Château de Lamotte with their hyperchloridic but hallucinatory torments. No, his conjugal life here with Veronica was obviously not heaven, but neither was it hell. It was a kind of purgatory, a pleasant purgatory, like a bath in a tepid lake, where time was Bulova Watch Time. Aside from this, and more importantly, the world seemed to him each day to be increasingly covered with the sordid moss of the dreary lack of the unforeseen. Everything was in decadence, nothing was worthwhile any morel The world news, too, with its often extravagant sensationalism, had in its turn ended by dissipating his passionate love of history. Since Rudolf Hess had thrown himself in a parachute upon Scotland – what a childish period!

  Moreover, the war was becoming long-drawn-out…. He was looking now at an advertisement boasting of the progress of aviation, in which the world appeared progressively smaller in a series of pictures. At last it was so small that it could be held between the thumb and forefinger of a human hand, no bigger than a vitamin pill. ‘What an aberration!’ he said to himself in discouragement.

  The geniuses of the Renaissance – Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo, the only ones who perhaps have touched God with their fingertips – had no other ambitions with their cosmogonies than to expand the world in the image of heaven. But today our horrible mechanical civilization means to reduce the terrestrial globe to the dimensions of a tiny pill which does not even have the virtues of a laxative! Man may achieve the feat of flying round the globe three times in a single day – what then? What a nuisance that is going to be! When one reflects that the swiftest minds, such as that of a Pascal, have conceived human wisdom as consonant with the ability to remain in a room without having a desire to leave it! And always the same things, the same images, but more and more insipid and commercialized. The same faces, all alike, the standardized sensuality of the movie stars; always the same Russian ballets, and – the new ones were even worse! Before, in the time of Diaghilev, they still knew how to dance, and even to fly, with the grace of fairies; today they had invented frightful new styles – such as he had just seen in New York – in which, instead of dancers, one saw creatures that might have come out of the nearest drug-store, dressed in street-costume, stiff and very constipated, walking with infinite precaution to avoid putting their feet in the muck.

  Now he was thumbing through an illustrated magazine: lips heavily rouged, parted, and always those horrible smiles, those teeth shot by an explosion of magnesium against the wall of the zebra couches of El Morocco…. A soldier camouflaged as a feather-bedecked leopard-frog pouring coconut juice on the bare head of a bearded Canadian soldier, naked to the waist, his socks impeccably held up by a brand new pair of garters…. A lady with the face of a curate breaking a bottle of champagne against the prow of a new battleship.

  ‘I shall have to plunge into my new books of demonology. There’s no salvation anywhere. But I still believe, in spite of progress, that it is the succubi and incubi who can procure me the greatest consolation in this despiritualized world!’

  And love with Veronica? Since the beginnings of their marriage he had not ceased for a day to want her. Like most Frenchmen, the Count professed a veritable fetichistic cult for divinely beautiful legs as well as a sentimental veneration for a vacant stare. Veronica possessed these two attributes to a superlative degree. She aroused him, he would look at her with the cold curiosity of a consummate voluptuary. He would surprise her by refined flashes of turpitude, he would artfully trouble her in the naked darkness of slow initiations. But between all this and loving her – no, he did not love her, did not love her at all, and from each of those nights, mornings, afternoons or evenings of love, the sole image that emerged more and more exclusive, victorious and strong, was the present and real one of Solange de Cléda. But the Count of Grandsailles was one of those who can easily give the illusion of a great passion, even while consecrating to it only a negligible attention. And on Veronica he lavished all his infinite resources of tenderness, attention and fluid, uninterrupted homages adorned with traditional courtly gallantry.

  Thus Grandsailles lived, repeating to himself that only by trying to make Veronica happy could he eventually redeem the wrong of having usurped this marriage. And Veronica considered herself happy. If, in her heart of hearts, her old anxiety continued to be fed by her instinct, which also told her that Grandsailles would never give her the son she biologically craved, she was so dazzled by the discovery of the Eleusis mysteries of the flesh – two bodies and a single leg – that she could not yet perceive the Lenten ones with a thousand legs. For Grandsailles, beginning to moderate his ardours, had warned her of his need to go into periodic retreats, to remain sometimes for long days in succession withdrawn in his ‘secret’, in his books; and it was thus also that their single room became two and that they came to live apart in opposite corners of the big house, and that the distance which grew between their love was peopled with the coming and going of a thousand delicate, swift and imperceptible steps like legs of insects scurrying over the surface of the water of their habits that were so soon turning to autumn.

  Grandsailles had, for that matter, gone as far in his sincerity as the integrity of his lie had allowed him to go. With a skilful and apparently crude two-edged frankness he himself had at the very beginning imposed the draconian conditions of his own marriage.

  ‘I am not the one whose name I bear, but my destiny has willed that the one I am now must disappear forever or survive in hiding. You must give up all thought of finding out and swear to me you will never try to find out or let anyone inform you of my past and my true personality. This would be my undoing. My life is based on a horrible secret and the woman who shares the former can never share the latter. I shall often seem melancholy, and even more often you will feel that my thoughts are far away, that I live by your side like one obsessed. This will be because I am indeed obsessed. My life has condemned me to still other infirmities aside from those of my conscience. My organism also has its secrets and its reasons for being wasted and lessened. In marrying me, you, who are almost a child, will be linking your life to that of a man criminally ravaged and scarcely more real than the one your own imagination has invented. Let us not get married!’

  But aside from this last, Veronica accepted all Grandsailles’ conditions without flinching – she who had believed herself capable of dedicating her life to cherishing an image of which almost nothing remained in her memory but the inscrutable white contour of its envelope now attached herself to a creature of flesh and bone, loved with the harmonious turbulence of all her viscera. But there remained within her a secret yearning on which the successive moons shed their milky light. With her initiation to physical love she was discovering that her true goal, beyond pleasure, was none other than the almost animal one of achieving motherhood. She now understood her delirious fixation on Betka’s son.

  She could also have understood the essential myth of virginity which is the white myth of Leda, laying ultra-white eggs. Then she might have seen that white, faceless head of her chimera emerging from the shadows of her conscience in the depth of the cellar of the Quaides Orfèvres house like a large egg ready to break, which would contain her child. For all virgins who, like Leda, are hallucinated by the whiteness of chastity marry the silver swan of Lohengrin in their dreams. Grandsailles, who was succumbing more and more to the vice of ‘mythologizing’, had discovered and analysed this myth as it manifested itself in Veronica, and he would say to himself:

  ‘He – the white man with the hidden face – is still a swan. There are only white swans and black swans. I rather fancy myself as a grey swan – the colour of lead, like certain October clouds – but there aren’t any such, and in my case, which is more to the point, I am not a swan.’

  Then he would wonder anxiously if his sterility was not a result of the too frequent abuse of his aphrodisiac drugs, his elixirs of youth and his love philtres. For he, too, would have liked to have a son by Veronica and he knew that such a son would have been his, the child of his brain, the pure conception of Cléda – and, yes, he would have been the one for whom the canoness never ceased to sigh, the heir to the Count of Grandsailles, more and more haunted by her secret fears that he might remain without progeny.

  This was the great problem, the great mystery in which he wished to plunge once more to escape from this period of egalitarianism and of de-hierarchization – the great mystery of progeniture, of heredity, of conception – for all the bases of aristocracy rested on this. He would leap forward several centuries by going back to the heart of the marrow of his beloved Middle Ages. In order to give himself over once more to ardent speculations of this kind he must get at two great trunks of books which had remained unpacked, among which the most esoteric ancient treatises of satanism and magic had their place alongside of the most rigorous scientific monographs of modern biology. There were also the great theological problems to which the subject had given rise, and especially that of ‘mortal sin by representation’ or by omission… and all those precepts preached in the epochs of inquisitorial Catholicism by the Holy Fathers of the church, precepts that were terrible and sometimes outrageously funny. Nightshirts with ingenious apertures to enable God-fearing couples to perform the act of procreation without sin; the explicit stipulation that the couple ‘must not shut their eyes’ during the act, and that they ‘must look each other in the face, preferably in the nose, in order thus to prevent and avoid other representations and sinful memories of other persons’. And the forehead that must always remain moistened by a cross of holy water so that it may be preserved of all evil thoughts, in this way exorcizing the infiltration into the soul and the body of malefic spirits dangerously avid of possessing the flesh in such propitious circumstances. And also the constant refrain of the terrible maxim, ‘Pulva eris et pulva reverteris’ with which the fires of all uncontrolled lubricity were to be extinguished at the supreme moment on which might depend the engendering of a saint, a monster, an evil spirit… or a king. The Count of Grandsailles reflected that one had only to take these rich and substantial beliefs and superstitions of the church to the letter and to shed upon them the light of the special sciences of our time to see the dazzling path of Truth stretched out before one: mortal sin by representation!

  ‘Indeed,’ he would say to himself, ‘if morality exists, the most terrible and reprehensible infidelities and adulteries are not those which are committed furtively and far from the loved being, but on the contrary, those which are committed in her very arms, in the moment of the act, by voluntarily or involuntarily representing to oneself the image of another, thus transmitting an impure life.’

  From this faculty of dissociation and interdependence of the fundamental physiological and psychological functions of the human being arose all the theories of the body considered as a simple vessel, a receptacle of the spirits which, because continually present, communicating and in ‘contact’ through the power of evocation of the memory, could be materialized in blood, becoming then impossible to separate by any distance and any ocean. This idea of the numerously inhabitable body was rooted in the origin of all ancient beliefs of the Orient. What was it if not the splitting, reincarnation and transmigration of souls? But metempsychosis, which he considered a grave metaphysical error, was in his own experience a truth for everyday life. The Europe of the Middle Ages had, according to him, found precisely the most ‘practical’ solutions and the forms that were closest and best adapted to reality, those of the oniric world of incubi and succubi, whose secrets were compiled – with what minuteness of empiric details – in the annals of demonology and of the satanic practices of sympathetic magic. And the whole modern science of hypnotism was already contained in these practices, since hypnosis is in effect but the hyperaesthetic manifestation of a permanent state of animism and of transmigration.