The Passion Trilogy – The Calvary, The Torture Garden & The Diary of a Chambermaid. Octave Mirbeau
was disconcerting. And a curious thing! At one moment I saw the horrible image of the singer at the Bouffes taking shape near her. And this image formed Juliette's shadow, so to speak. Far from vanishing, this image, as I looked at it, was assuming in some way a fixed corporeal form. It grimaced, wriggled, leaped with lurid contortions, its foul, obscene lips distended toward Juliette, who seemed to draw the image toward herself and whose hand sank in its hair and passed tremblingly along its body, happy to sully herself with its impure contact. And the sordid juggler was removing Juliette's clothes and showing her to me in a swoon, in the wretched splendor of sin! I had to shut my eyes and make a painful effort to dispel this abominable image, and Juliette immediately assumed her expression of enigmatic, candid tenderness.
"And above all, come to see me, often, very often," she said, seeing me to the door, while Spy, who had followed her into the antechamber, barked and danced on his thin, spider legs.
Outside, I felt the return of a sudden and passionate affection for Lirat and, reproaching myself for being sulky with him, I resolved to ask him to dine with me that very evening. On my way from the Rue Saint Petersbourg to the Boulevard de Courcelles where Lirat lived, I made some bitter reflections. The visit had disillusioned me, I was no longer under the spell of a dream and I quickly returned to desolate reality, to the denial of love. What I had imagined about Juliette was quite vague.
My spirit, exalted by her beauty, was ascribing to her moral qualities and mental attainments which I could not define and which I assumed were extraordinary, the more so since Lirat, by attributing to her, without reason, a dishonorable existence and shameful proclivities, had made her a veritable martyr in my eyes, and my heart was moved. Pushing this folly still further, I thought that by some sort of irresistible sympathy she would confide her suffering to me, the grave and sorrowful secrets of her soul; I already saw myself consoling her, speaking to her of duty, virtue, resignation. I looked forward to a series of solemn and touching things.
Instead of all this poesy—a frightful dog who barked at my feet and a woman just like others, without brains, without ideas, occupied solely with pleasures, confining her enthusiasm to the Théâtre des Varietés and the caressing of her Spy, her Spy! … Ha! Ha! Ha! … Her Spy whom she loved with the tenderness and devotion of a porter! And on my way I kicked the air, at an imaginary Spy and, imitating Juliette's voice, was saying: "Come, dear! Oh, dear little dog! Oh, my love, my dearest Spy!" Shall I admit it, I also had a grudge against her for not having said a word about my book. That no one spoke about it in ordinary life was almost a matter of indifference to me. But a compliment from her would have delighted me! I would have felt so happy to know that she had been moved by some page, provoked by another, as I hoped she had been. And instead—nothing! Not even an allusion! Yet, I remember, I had cleverly furnished her with an opportunity for such consideration.
"Decidedly, she is a goose!" I said to myself as I rapped at Lirat's door.
Lirat received me with open arms.
"Ah! my little Mintié!" he exclaimed, "it's very nice of you to come to dine with me. And you have come just in time, I tell you. We are going to have cabbage soup."
He rubbed his hands, and seemed very happy. He wanted to help me remove my overcoat and hat and, dragging me into the small room which served as his parlor, he repeated:
"My little Mintié, I am so glad to see you. Will you come tomorrow to the studio?"
"Surely."
"Well, you shall see! You shall see! First of all, I am going to give up painting, do you understand?"
"Are you going into business?"
"Listen to me! Painting is humbug, my little Mintié."
He grew animated, moved about the room briskly, waving his arms.
"Giotto! Mantegna! Velasques! Rembrandt! Well, Rembrandt! Watteau! Delacroix! Ingres! Yes and then who? No, that is not true? Painting depicts nothing, expresses nothing, it's all humbug! It's all right for the art critics, bankers, and generals who have their portraits on horseback with a howitzer shell exploding in the foreground. But to render a glimpse of the sky, the shade of a flower, the ripple of the water, the air—you understand? The air—all this impalpable and invisible nature, with a paste of paint colors! With a paste of paint colors?"
Lirat shrugged his shoulders.
"With a paste of paint colors coming out of tubes, with a paste of paint colors made by the dirty hands of chemists, with a paste of paint colors, heavy, opaque and which sticks to the fingers like jelly! Tell me … painting … what humbug! No, but you will admit, my little Mintié, that it is humbug! A drawing, an engraving, a two-tone piece … that's the thing! That does not deceive, it's honest … the amateurs sneer at that kind of work and don't presume to bother you about it … it evokes no empty enthusiasm in their 'salons'! But real art, majestic art, artistic art is there. Sculpture … yes … when it is beautiful, it shakes you. … But next to it is the art of drawing, drawing … my little Mintié, without Prussian blue, just plain drawing! Will you come to my studio tomorrow?"
"Certainly."
He continued to chop his phrases, fumble his words, excited by their very sound.
"I am beginning a series of etchings. You'll see! A nude woman, coming out of a deep shadow, carried upward on the wings of a beast. Scattered about, in unnatural positions, are parts of human corpses with dirty folds and swellings of decaying flesh … a belly cut open and losing its viscera, a belly of terrible outline, hideous and true! A dead head, but a living dead head, you understand? Greedy, gluttonous, all lips. She is rising in front of a crowd of old men in tall hats, silk coats and white cravats. She is rising and the old men bend toward her panting, with hanging jaws, watering mouths, contracted eyes … all have lewd faces!"
Stopping before me with an air of defiance, he continued:
"And do you know what I am going to call it? Do you know? I am going to call it Love, my little Mintié. What do you think of it? … "
"That seems to me a little bit too symbolic," I ventured.
"Symbolic!" interrupted Lirat. "You are talking nonsense, my little Mintié! Symbolic! Why that's life itself! Let's go out and eat."
Our dinner was a very gay affair; Lirat displayed a charming disposition; he was full of original ideas, without extremes or paradoxes, on art. He had again found his normal self, as in the better days of his life. Several times I had a notion to tell him that I had seen Juliette. A kind of shame held me back; I had not the courage.
"Work, work, my little Mintié," he said to me, when we were parting. "To create, always to create, to draw from one's sinews or from one's brains no matter what … be it only a pair of rubbers. There is nothing outside of that!"
Six days later I went again to Juliette and gradually I formed the habit of calling regularly and spending an hour before dinner. The disagreeable impression left on me at the time of my first visit had vanished. Little by little, without suspecting it, I grew so used to the red tapestry in her parlor, to the terra cotta statue of Cupid, to Juliette's childish prating, even to Spy who had become my friend, that whenever I passed a day without seeing her, it seemed as though a great void had been created in my life.
Not only did the things which at first had shocked me no longer do so, but, on the contrary, they now moved me, and each time Juliette talked to Spy or attended to him with exaggerated care, it was a positive pleasure to me, appearing as an added proof of the simplicity and affectionate qualities of her heart. In the end I, too, began to speak this dog language. One evening, when Spy was sick, I grew uneasy and, removing the covers and quilts which covered him, I gently murmured: "Baby Spy has a hurt; where does it hurt our little baby?" Only the image of the singer, rising near Juliette, somewhat disturbed the tranquility of our meetings, but I only had to close my eyes for a moment or turn away my head, and the image would instantly disappear. I persuaded Juliette to tell me her life. Until now she had always refused.
"No! no!" she would say.
And she would add with a smile, looking at me with her large, sad eyes:
"What