Mademoiselle de Maupin (Illustrated Edition). Theophile Gautier
elbowing the bourgeois, and with a flawlessly triumphant and all-conquering air.
I was like another Jason setting out to conquer the Golden Fleece.—But, alas! Jason was more fortunate than I: besides the conquest of the fleece, he made, at the same time, the conquest of a beautiful princess, and I—I have neither fleece nor princess.
I walked through the streets, eying all the women, and hurrying toward them and gazing at them at closer quarters when they seemed to me to be worth the trouble of examining.—Some assumed their high and mighty virtuous air and passed without raising their eyes.—Others were surprised at first, then smiled if they had white teeth.—Some turned after a little time, to look at me when they thought I was not looking at them, and blushed like cherries when they found themselves face to face with me.—It was a lovely day; there were quantities of people out walking.—And yet I must confess, notwithstanding all the respect I feel for that interesting half of the human race, which is called by common consent the fair sex, it is, as a whole, devilishly ugly: out of a hundred women there is hardly one who is passably good-looking. This one had a moustache; that one had a blue nose; others had red spots in place of eyebrows; one was not badly built, but she had a pimply face. The head of another was charming, but she could scratch her ear with her shoulder; a third would have put Praxiteles to shame with the graceful roundness of certain outlines, but she stumbled along on feet like Turkish stirrups. Another exhibited the most magnificent shoulders imaginable; in revenge, her hands resembled in shape and size those immense scarlet gloves that haberdashers use for signs.—Generally speaking, what tired-looking faces! how worn and streaked they were, withered by degrading petty passions and petty vices! What expressions of envy, of malevolent curiosity, of avarice, of brazen coquetry! and how much uglier is a woman who is not beautiful, than a man who is not handsome!
I saw nobody worth looking at—except a few grisettes;—but they have more cotton than silk to rumple, and they don't interest me.—In very truth, I believe that man, and when I say man I include woman, is the vilest animal on the face of the earth. That quadruped who walks on his hind feet seems to me extraordinarily presumptuous to claim the first place in creation as his undoubted right. A lion, a tiger, are finer animals than men, and in their species many individuals attain all the beauty that belongs to it. But such a thing rarely happens among human beings.—How many abortions for one Antinous! how many Goths for one Phyllis!
I am very much afraid, my dear friend, that I shall never be able to embrace my ideal, and yet there is nothing extraordinary or unnatural about it.—It is not the ideal of a third-form school-boy. I do not ask for ivory globes or alabaster pillars, or azure veins; I have not used in its composition either lilies, or snow, or roses, or jet, or ebony, or coral, or ambrosia, or pearls or diamonds; I have left the stars of heaven at rest, and I have not unhung the sun unseasonably. It is almost a bourgeois ideal, it is so simple, and it seems to me that with a bag or two of piastres I could find it all ready-made and realized in the first bazaar I might happen upon at Constantinople or Smyrna; it would probably cost me less than a blooded horse or dog; and to think that I shall not get what I want, for I have a feeling that I shall not! It is enough to drive a man mad, and I fly into the hottest sort of a rage against fate.
You are not such a mad fool as I, you are fortunate;—you have simply taken your life as it came, without tormenting yourself trying to shape it, and you have dealt with things as they turned up. You haven't sought for happiness, it has come in search of you; you love and are loved.—I don't envy you;—for Heaven's sake, don't think that! but I am not so happy as I ought to be when I think of your felicity, and I say to myself, with a sigh, that I would like to enjoy felicity of the same sort.
Perhaps my happiness passed by my side and I did not see it, blind that I was; perhaps a voice spoke, and the uproar of my internal tempests prevented me from hearing it.
Perhaps I have been loved in secret by some humble heart that I have neglected or broken; perhaps I have myself been the ideal of another, the pole-star of a suffering heart—the dream of a night and the thought of a day.—If I had looked at my feet, perhaps I should have seen there some fair Magdalene with her box of ointment and her dishevelled hair. I walked along with my arms raised to heaven, longing to pluck the stars that fled from me, and scorning to pick the little daisy that opened its golden heart in the dewy grass. I have made a great mistake: I have asked love for something other than love, something that it could not give. I forgot that love was naked, I failed to grasp the meaning of that magnificent symbol.—I asked him for brocade dresses, feathers, diamonds, sublime intellect, learning, poesy, beauty, youth, supreme power—everything that is not love;—love can offer naught but love, and he who seeks to extort anything else from him is unworthy to be loved.
I have been in too much of a hurry, of course: my hour has not yet come; God who lent me my life will not take it back without letting me live. What's the use of giving a poet a lyre without strings, or man a life without love? God cannot be guilty of such inconsistency; and I have no doubt that when the allotted moment comes, He will place in my path the woman I am to love and by whom I am to be loved.—But why has love come to me before a mistress? Why am I thirsty when I have no fountain at which to quench my thirst? or why can I not fly, like the birds of the desert, to the spot where water is to be found? The world to me is a Sahara without wells or date-trees. I have not in my whole life a single shady nook to give me shelter from the sun: I suffer all the ardors of passion without its ineffable ecstasy and delight; I know its torments and have not its pleasures. I am jealous of something that does not exist; I am ill at ease for the shadow of a shade; I heave sighs that mean nothing; I have sleepless nights embellished by no adored vision; I shed tears that flow to the ground without being wiped away; I give the wind kisses that are not returned to me; I wear out my eyes trying to distinguish a vague, deceitful shape in the distance; I await what cannot come, and I count the hours with feverish anxiety as if I had an appointment.
Whoever you be, angel or demon, virgin or courtesan, shepherdess or princess, whether you come from north or south, you whom I do not know but whom I love! oh! do not force me to wait longer, or the flame will consume the altar, and you will find only a heap of cold ashes in place of my heart. Descend from the sphere where you now are; leave the crystal sky, O comforting spirit, and cast upon my heart the shadow of your great wings. Come, woman that I love, come, and let me clasp about you the arms that have been open so long. Ye golden doors of the palace where she dwells, turn on your hinges; raise yourself, latch of her humble cottage; untwine yourselves, ye branches of trees and thorns by the road-side; be broken, ye enchantments of the turret, ye spells of magicians; open, ranks of the common herd, and let her pass.
If you come too late, O my ideal! I shall not have the strength to love you:—my heart is like a dovecote full of doves. Every hour of the day some desire takes flight. The doves return to the dovecote, but my desires do not return to my heart.—The azure sky is whitened by their countless swarms; they wing their way through space, from world to world, from sky to sky, seeking some love to light upon and pass the night: haste, O my dream! or you will find naught in the empty nest save the shells of the birds that have flown.
My friend, ray childhood's companion, you are the only one to whom I can say such things. Write me that you pity me and that you don't look upon me as a hypochondriac; comfort me, I never was in greater need of it; how greatly to be envied are they who have a passion they can satisfy! The drunkard finds no cruelty in any sort of a bottle; he falls from the wine-shop to the gutter and is happier on his dung-heap than a king on his throne. The sensual man resorts to courtesans in search of ready loves or shameless refinements of indecency: a painted cheek, a short skirt, an exposed bosom, an obscene jest, he is happy; his eye turns white, his lip is moist; he attains the height of his happiness, he enjoys the ecstasy of his vulgar lust. The gambler needs only a green cloth and a worn and greasy pack of cards to procure the poignant excitement, the nervous spasms and the diabolical joy of his ghastly passion. Such people can satisfy their cravings or find distraction;—to me it is impossible.
This idea has taken such thorough possession of me that I no longer care for the arts, and poetry has now no charm for me; the things that used to be my delight do not make the least impression on me. I begin to believe that I am wrong, I demand more of nature and society than they can give. What I seek does not exist and I ought not to complain because I cannot