Octave Mirbeau Archive
Written: 1886.
Source: Text from RevoltLib.com.
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
“Madame Juliette Roux, if you please?”
“Will Monsieur please come in?” the maid asked.
Without demanding my name or waiting for my answer, she made me cross a small, dark antechamber, and led me into a room where at first I could only distinguish a lamp covered by a large lamp-shade, which burned low in a corner. The maid raised the flame of the lamp and carried out an otter skin cape which had been thrown on the sofa.
“I will go tell madame,” she said.
And she disappeared, leaving me alone in the room.
So I was at her house! For eight days the thought of this visit had tortured me. I had no special business, I simply wanted to see Juliette; some kind of keen curiosity, which I did not stop to analyze, drew me to her. Several times I had gone to the Rue Saint Petersbourg with the firm intention of calling on her, but at the last moment my nerve failed me, and I left without mustering sufficient courage to cross her threshold. And now I was the most embarrassed being in the world, and I regretted my foolish step, for obviously it was a foolish step. How would she receive me? What should I say? What caused me the greatest uneasiness was that after I had made a thorough search in my brain I found not a single phrase, not a single word with which to begin our conversation when Juliette entered. What if words should fail me and I should be left standing here with gaping mouth! How ridiculous that would be!
I examined the room into which Juliette was presently to come. It was a dressing room which also served as a parlor. It made a rather unfavorable impression on me. The toilet table, ostentatiously displayed with its two wash basins of cracked, pink cut glass, shocked me. The walls and ceiling, hung with loud red satin, the furniture, bordered with elaborate plush hangings, the knick-knacks, costly and ugly, placed here and there on the furniture, the queer tables serving no apparent purpose, consols weighed down with heavy ornaments—all this bespoke a vulgar taste. I noticed in the center of the mantelpiece, between two massive vases of onyx, a terra cotta statuette of Cupid, smiling with a sort of grimace and offering a flower held at the tips of his outspread fingers. Every detail revealed, on the one hand, a love of expensive and unrefined luxury, and on the other a regrettable predilection for romance and puerile affection. It was at once distressing and sentimental. Nevertheless, and that was a relief to me, I saw here no evidence of that incongruity, that transitory air, that severity of aspect so characteristic of ladies’ boarding houses, those apartments where one is made aware of a haggard existence, where by the number of knick-knacks one can count the number of lovers who have passed there, lovers for an hour, a night, a year; where every chair tells of the lack of decency, the unfaithfulness; where on the glass one can see the tragedy of fortune’s fickleness; on the marble, traces of a tear still warm; on the candlestick, blood drops still moist. The door opened and Juliette appeared wearing a white, long flowing dress. I trembled, color came to my face; but she recognized me and, smiling that smile of hers which at last I found again, she stretched out her hand.
“Ah! Monsieur Mintié!” she said, “how nice of you not to have forgotten me! Has it been long since you saw that eccentric Lirat?”
“Why, yes, Madame, I have not seen him since the day I had the honor of meeting you at his place.”
“Ah, my God, I thought you two never separated at all.”
“It is true,” I replied, “that I see him quite often. But I have been working all these days.”
As I thought I detected a note of irony in the sound of her voice, I added, to provoke her:
“What a great artist, isn’t he?”
Juliette let this remark pass unanswered.
“So you are always working?” She took up the subject again. “For the rest, I am told you live like a regular recluse. Really, one sees very little of you, Monsieur Mintié!”
The conversation took a quite ordinary turn, the theater furnishing food for nearly all of it. A remark which I made seemed to astound her, and she was rather scandalized.
“What, you don’t like the theater? Is it possible—and you an artist? I am passionately fond of it. The theater is so amusing! We are going to the Varieté tonight, for the fourth time, mind you.”
A feeble yelp came from behind the door.
“Ah, my God!” Juliette exclaimed, hurriedly rising. “My Spy whom I left in my room! Shall I present Spy to you, Monsieur Mintié? Don’t you know Spy?”
She opened the door, drew aside the hangings, which were very wide.
“Come, Spy!” she said coaxingly. “Where have you been, Spy? Come over here, poor thing!”
And I saw a diminutive little animal, with a pointed snout, long ears, advancing, dancing on its thin paws that resembled a spider’s legs and whose whole body, bent and skinny, quivered as though in fever. A ribbon of red silk, carefully tied on the side, encircled its neck in place of a collar.
“Come on, Spy. Say hello to Monsieur Mintié!”
Spy turned on me his round, stupid and cruel eyes which were on a level with his head, and barked viciously.
“That’s right, Spy. Now give your paw. Will you give me your paw? Come, now!”
Juliette bent down and threatened the dog with her finger. Spy finally put his paw in his mistress’ hand. She picked him up, patted and embraced him.
“Oh! the dear little dog! Oh, darling dog! Oh, my love, my dearest Spy!”
She sat up again, still holding the dog in her arms like a child, rubbing her cheek against the snout of the frightful beast, whispering caressing and endearing words into his ears.
“Now show us that you are pleased, Spy! Show it to your little mammy!”
Spy barked again, then licked the lips of Juliette who joyously abandoned herself to these odious caresses.
“Ah, what a dear you are, Spy! Ah, how very, very nice you are!”
And addressing herself to me, whom she seemed to have forgotten completely since Spy’s unfortunate entry, she suddenly asked:
“Do you like dogs, Monsieur Mintié?”
“Very much, Madame,” I answered.
Then she told me, with a wealth of childish detail, the history of Spy, his habits, his urgent needs, his tricks, the scraps with the housekeeper who could not stand him.
“But you ought to see him when he is asleep,” she said to me. “You know he has a bed, sheets, an eiderdown coverlet, like a real person. Every night I put him to bed. And his little head looks so funny on it, all black. Aren’t you very funny, Monsieur Spy?”
Spy chose a comfortable place on Juliette’s dress, and, after turning several times, rolled himself into a black lump, almost entirely lost in the cloth’s silken folds.
“That’s it! By-by, Spy, my little baby!”
During this long conversation with Spy, I had a chance to observe Juliette at leisure. She was indeed very beautiful, even more beautiful than I had dreamed she was under her veil. Her face was truly radiant. It had such freshness, such an aurora-like clearness, that the very air about her seemed illumined. Whenever she turned or bent forward I saw her thick hair, very dark, descending along her dress in an enormous tress, which added something peculiarly virginal and youthful to her appearance. I thought I saw a perpendicular, willful wrinkle furrowed in the middle of her forehead, at the root of her hair, but it was visible only in certain instances of light reflection, and the luminous sweetness of her eyes, the extremely graceful curve of her mouth tempered its rigid aspect. One felt that under her ample garments quivered a supple, nervous body of passionate pliancy; what delighted me most were her hands, delicate, deft and of surprising agility, whose every movement, even of indifference or anger, was a caress.
It was hard for me to form a definite opinion of her. There was in this woman a mixture of innocence and voluptuousness, of shrewdness and stupidity, of kindness and malevolence, which 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 will we gain, my friend?”
I insisted, I begged.
“It is your duty to reveal it to me and my duty to know it.”
At last, conquered by this argument which I never tired of using in various and appealing forms, she consented. Oh, with what sadness!
Her home was in Liverdun. Her father was a physician and her mother, who led a frivolous life, had left her husband. As for Juliette, she had been placed in the home of the Sisters. Her father came home drunk every evening, and there were terrible scenes, for he was very ill-natured. The scandal grew to such proportions that the Sisters sent Juliette away, not wishing to keep the daughter of a wicked woman and a drunkard in their house. Ah, what a miserable life it was! Always locked up in her room and sometimes beaten by her father for no cause whatever! One night, very late, the father entered Juliette’s room. “How shall I express it to you!” Juliette said blushing. “Oh, well, you understand....” She jumped out of bed, shouted, opened the window. But the father was frightened and went away. The next morning Juliette left for Nancy, planning to live by working. It was here she had met Charles.
While she was talking in a gentle, even voice I took her hand, her beautiful hand which I pressed with feeling, at the sad points of the story. I was indignant over the action of her father. And I cursed the mother for abandoning her child. I felt the stirrings of a self-sacrificing devotion, and a vindictive desire to avenge her wrongs. When she had finished I wept with burning tears.... It was an exquisite hour.
Juliette received very few people; some of Malterre’s friends, and two or three of Malterre’s feminine friends. One of them, Gabrielle Bernier, a tall, pretty blond woman, always entered the house in the same fashion.
“Good morning, Monsieur, good morning, deary. Don’t trouble yourself, I’ll be gone in a minute.”
And she would sit down on the brace of the armchair, smoothing her muff with a brusque motion of her hand.
“Just think of it, I have just had another scene with Robert. If you only knew what sort of a man he is! He comes to my house and says whimpering: ‘My dear little Gabrielle, I must leave you, my mother told me so this morning, she won’t give me any more money.’ ‘Your mother! I wish I had a chance to answer her. Well, you can tell your mother in my name, that whenever she is ready to give up her lovers, I’ll quit you that very day. But in the meantime, she’ll have to dig into her pockets alright.’ And I don’t believe it’s true either—a dirty trick like that! I think it’s Robert who has cooked it up! We are going to the Ambigu tonight. Are you going?”
“Thank you.”
“Well, I must be off! Don’t trouble yourself. Good day, Monsieur; good day, deary.”
Gabrielle Bernier irritated me very much.
“Why do you receive such women?” I would say to Juliette.
“What harm is there, my friend? She amuses me.”
Malterre’s friends, on the other hand, spoke of races and high life; they always had club and women stories to tell and never tired of discussing theatrical matters. It seemed to me that Juliette took an exaggerated pleasure in these conversations, but I excused her, ascribing it to excessive politeness. Jesselin, a very rich young man, considered a serious fellow, was the leader of the circle and all bowed before his evident superiority. “What will Jesselin say? We must ask Jesselin. Jesselin did not advise that.” He was very much sought after. He had traveled widely and knew better than anyone else the best hotels. Having been in Afghanistan, he remembered one particular thing of the entire trip through Central Asia, namely that the Emir of Caboul, with whom he had had the honor of playing chess one day, played as fast as the French. “Why that Emir certainly amazed me.” Quite often he would also offer this information: “You know how much I enjoy travel. Well, I can say this much. In sleeping cars, in cabins, in a Russian telega, no matter how or where I was, at half past seven every evening I was in my dress suit!”
Malterre did not like me, friendly though he was. Having a quiet, timid nature, he dared not show his aversion for me, for fear of displeasing Juliette, but I could see it flaring up in his smiling look which was like that of a good-natured but frightened dog, and in his handshake I felt it clamoring for an outlet.
I was happy only when alone with Juliette. There, in the red parlor, under the ægis of the terra cotta statuette of Cupid, we sometimes sat for hours, without uttering a word. I would look at her, she would droop her head, pensively playing with the trimming of her dress or the lacework of her waist. Often my eyes for some reason unknown, filled with tears, which rolled down my cheeks like some perfume, flooding my soul with its magic liquid. And my whole being felt a sensation of satiety and delicious torpor.
“Ah! Juliette! Juliette!”
“Come, come my friend, be sensible.”
Those were the only words of love that escaped us.
Some time after this, Juliette gave a dinner to celebrate Charles’ birthday. During the whole evening she appeared nervous and irritated. To Charles who offered a timid remark, she replied harshly and curtly, in a manner which seemed foreign to her. It was two o’clock in the morning before the crowd left. I alone remained in the parlor. Near the door, Malterre stood with his back to me, talking to Jesselin who was putting on his overcoat in the vestibule. And I saw Juliette, her elbows resting on the piano, looking fixedly at me. A gleam of fierce passion flashed in her eyes, suddenly turned dark, almost terrible, marking them as with a novel flame. The wrinkle on her forehead deepened, her nostrils quivered; a strange expression of something unchaste wandered on her lips. I leaped toward her. My knees sought her own, my body cleaved to hers, my mouth pressed against her own, I clasped her in a furious embrace.
She abandoned herself to me entirely and in a very low, choking voice:
“Come tomorrow!” she said.