I left, and Boullan remained with her for more than an hour. When he finally called for me again, he said that Diana would be going to the church at Passy the following day, but would like me to accompany her.
«Yes, Father,» Diana said to me with eyes unusually sparkling and cheeks flushed. «Please do.»
I should have refused, but I was curious and did not want Boullan to think me a prig.
I tremble as I write. My hand runs across the page almost by itself. I’m not recalling but reliving it, as if describing something that is happening at this very instant.
It was the evening of the 21st of March. You, Captain, began your diary on the 24th of March, recounting how I had lost my memory on the morning of the 22nd. If something terrible happened, it must have been on the evening of the 21st.
I am trying to piece it together but find it difficult. I have a fever, I fear; my forehead is burning.
Having picked up Diana at Auteuil, I give an address to the fiacre driver, who looks at me out of the corner of his eye as if he mistrusts a customer like me, despite my ecclesiastical dress, but when offered a generous tip he sets off without saying anything. We travel farther and farther from the center of town, along roads that become darker and darker, until we turn into a lane flanked by abandoned houses which ends abruptly at the almost derelict façade of an old chapel.
We get out, and the coachman seems anxious, to such an extent that when, having paid the fare, I search my pockets for a few extra francs, he shouts, «It doesn’t matter, Father, thanks all the same!» and forgoes the tip in order to be off as soon as possible.
«It’s cold, I’m frightened,» says Diana, pressing against me. I pull back, but at the same time, though I cannot see her arm, I feel it under the clothes she is wearing, and I realize she is dressed strangely: she wears a hooded cloak, covering her from head to foot, so in the darkness she might be mistaken for a monk, or one of those characters appearing in monastery crypts in those gothic novels that were much in vogue at the beginning of this century. I had never seen it before, though, then again, it had never crossed my mind to examine the trunk with all the things she had brought with her from Doctor Du Maurier’s house.
The small door of the chapel is half open. We enter a single nave, illuminated by an array of candles that burn on the altar and by many lighted tripods that form a circle around a small apse. The altar is covered with a dark pall, like those used for funerals. Above, in place of the crucifix or other image, is a statue of the devil in the form of a he-goat, with a large phallus protruding by at least thirty centimeters. The candles are not white or ivory but black. At the center of the altar, in a tabernacle, are three skulls.
«Abbé Boullan told me about them,» Diana whispers to me. «They are the relics of the three Magi, the real ones, Theobens, Menser and Saïr. They received a warning when they saw a falling star burn out, and turned away from Palestine so as not to be witnesses to the birth of Christ.»
In front of the altar, arranged in a semicircle, is a row of youngsters, boys to the right and girls to the left. Both groups are so unripe in age that little difference is to be noted between the two sexes, and that charming amphitheater would seem populated by sweet androgynes, whose differences are all the more concealed by the fact that all wear a crown of dried roses on their heads, except that the boys are naked, and can be distinguished for their member, which they flaunt and show to each other, while the girls are covered with short tunics of almost transparent fabric, which caress their small breasts and the unripe curves of their hips, without hiding anything.
They are all very beautiful, even if their faces express more malice than innocence, but this certainly increases their charm—and I have to confess (a curious situation in which I, a member of the clergy, confess to you, Captain!) that while I feel, not terror, but at least fear in front of a woman who is now mature, it is difficult for me to resist the seduction of a prepubescent creature.
Those unusual acolytes hold resinous branches to the tripods, lighting them, and with them they charge the thuribles, from which a dense smoke and an enervating aroma of exotic spices are unleashed. Others among those naked, gracile children are distributing small cups, and one is also offered to me. «Drink, Monsieur Abbé,» says a youth with brazen gaze. «It is to help you enter the spirit of the ritual.»
I drink it and now see and hear everything as if in a mist.
Here Boullan enters. He is wearing a white chlamys, and over it a red chasuble embroidered with an upside-down crucifix. At the intersection of the two arms of the cross is the image of a black he-goat, rearing up on its hind legs, horns spread. At the first movement the abbé makes, as if by chance or negligence but in fact out of brazen depravity, the chlamys opens to reveal a phallus of notable proportions that I would never have imagined on that flaccid individual, and already erect, due to some drug taken earlier. His thighs are bound by two dark yet transparent stockings, like those worn by Celeste Mogador when she danced the cancan at Bal Mabille (now reproduced in Charivari and other weekly publications, and there, alas, for priests and abbés to see, whether they wish to or not).
The celebrant has turned his back to the congregation and begins his Mass in Latin while the androgynes give the responses:
«In nomine Astaroth et Asmodei et Beelzébuth. Introibo ad altare Satanae.»
«Qui laetificat cupiditatem nostram.»
«Lucifer omnipotens, emitte tenebram tuam et afflige inimicos nostros.»
«Ostende nobis, Domine Satana, potentiam tuam, et exaudi luxuriam meam.»
«Et blasphemia mea ad te veniat.»
Then Boullan takes a cross from his robe, places it beneath his feet and tramples on it several times: «O Cross, I crush thee in memory of and in vengeance for the ancient Masters of the Temple. I crush thee because thou were an instrument of false sanctification of the false god Jesus Christ.»
At this moment, Diana, without warning, and as if struck by an illumination (but certainly following the instructions that Boullan had given her yesterday in confession), crosses the nave between the two groups of devotees and goes straight to the foot of the altar. Turning toward the faithful (or unfaithful, as it were) with a hieratic gesture, she suddenly removes her hood and cloak, appearing stark-naked. I cannot describe it, Captain Simonini, but it is as if I see her now, unveiled as Isis, her face covered only by a slender black mask.
I am overcome as if by a spasm, seeing a woman for the first time in all the unbearable violence of her body stripped bare.
Her tawny golden hair that she keeps chastely in a bun is let free, and falls immodestly to caress buttocks of wickedly perfect roundness. The haughty thin neck of this pagan statue rises like a column above shoulders of marble whiteness, while her breasts (and I see the naked bosoms of a woman for the first time) stand out arrogantly and satanically proud. Between them, the only unfleshly remnant, the locket that Diana is never without.
Diana turns and climbs the three steps up to the altar with lubricious ease, then, helped by the celebrant, she lies upon it. Her head rests on a black velvet cushion fringed with silver, her hair flows over the edge of the altar, her belly is slightly arched, her legs splayed to show the auburn fleece hiding the entrance to her womanly cavern while her body shines eerily in the reddish glow of the candles. Dear God, I don’t know how to describe what I am seeing. It is as if my natural horror of female flesh and the fear it moves within me are melting away to leave just enough space for one new feeling, as if a hitherto unsampled elixir is running through my veins…
Boullan has placed a small ivory phallus on Diana’s breast, and on her belly an embroidered cloth on which he has laid a chalice made of dark stone.
From the chalice he takes a host, not one of those already consecrated ones that you trade in, Captain Simonini, but a wafer that Boullan, still a fully fledged priest of the Holy Roman Church, though probably now excommunicated, is about to consecrate on Diana’s belly.
And he says: «Suscipe, Domine Satana, hanc hostiam, quam ego indignus famulus tuus offero tibi. Amen.»
Then he takes the host and, after lowering it twice toward the ground, raising it twice heavenward and turning it once to the right and to the left, shows it to the congregation, saying: «From the south I invoke the benevolence of Satan, from the east the benevolence of Lucifer, from the
