“Good Lord!” thought Alexis in alarm. “He’s not up to playing this part! Poor uncle! Anyway, why is he so concerned to spare us any suffering? Why take such a burden on himself?”
But the painful effects of his general paralysis, which sometimes gripped Baldassare as if in an iron corset, even imprinting marks and bruises on his body, and whose intensity had just forced him to contort his face despite his best efforts, had vanished.
He resumed his good-humoured conversation, after wiping his eyes.
“I have the impression the Duke of Parma has been rather neglecting you of late?” Alexis’s mother asked, unthinkingly.
“The Duke of Parma?” exclaimed Baldassare in tones of rage. “The Duke of Parma, neglecting me? But what can you be thinking of, my dear? This very morning he wrote to me to put his castle in Illyria at my disposal, if I think the mountain air will do me any good.”
He suddenly stood up, but this brought on another attack of his dreadful pain, and he had to keep still for a while; his suffering had hardly been assuaged before he summoned a servant.
“Bring me the letter next to my bed.”
And he made haste to read:
My dear Baldassare,
How sorry I am not to be able to see you, etc.
As the Prince came out with more and more kindly words, Baldassare’s face softened and shone with happiness and confidence. Suddenly, no doubt because he wished to disguise a joy that he felt was not very dignified, he clamped his teeth together and made the attractive and rather vulgar little grimace that Alexis had imagined for ever banished from his face, pacified as it was by death.
This little grimace, now twisting Baldassare’s lips as it had before, opened the eyes of Alexis who, ever since he had been in his uncle’s presence, had thought and hoped that he would be able to contemplate the face of a dying man forever detached from vulgar realities – a face on which the only expression would be the gentle hint of a heroically forced smile, tender and melancholy, heavenly and disenchanted. Now his doubts had been removed, and he knew that Jean Galéas, by teasing his uncle, had yet again made him angry, and that in the sick man’s gaiety, in his desire to go to the theatre, there was no trace of either pretence or courage, and that now that he was on the threshold of death, Baldassare still continued to think only of life.
On his return home, Alexis was overwhelmed by the thought that he too would one day die, and that even if he himself still had much more time ahead of him than his uncle, the latter’s old gardener and his cousin, the Duchess of Alériouvres, would certainly not survive Baldassare for long. And yet, even though he was wealthy enough to retire, Rocco continued to work ceaselessly so as to earn even more money, and was trying to win a prize for his roses. The Duchess, in spite being seventy years old, took great care to dye her hair and paid for newspaper articles in which the youthfulness of her bearing, the elegance of her receptions and the refinements of her table and her wit were all celebrated.
These examples did nothing to diminish the sudden amazement that his uncle’s attitude had aroused in Alexis, but rather gave him a kindred feeling that, gradually spreading, turned into an immense stupefaction at the universal scandal of these existences, his own included, walking backwards into death with their gaze still fixed on life.
Resolved not to imitate such a shocking aberration, he decided, following the ancient prophets of whose renown he had been taught, to retire to the desert with some of his close friends, and he communicated this wish to his parents.
Happily, more powerful than their derision, life itself, whose sweet and fortifying milk he had not yet drunk dry, proffered her breast to dissuade him. And he settled back to drink from it anew, with an avid joy whose insistent grievances his credulous and fertile imagination took with naive seriousness, and whose dashed hopes that same imagination made amends for so magnificently.
2
The flesh is sad, alas…
– Stéphane Mallarmé*
The day after Alexis’s visit, the Viscount of Sylvania had left for the nearby chateau for a stay of three or four weeks: the presence of numerous guests might take his mind off the melancholy that often followed his attacks of ill health.
Soon all the pleasures he enjoyed there came to be concentrated in the company of a young woman who made them twice as intense by sharing them with him. He thought he could sense that she was in love with him, but kept her at a certain distance: he knew she was absolutely pure, and was in any case impatiently awaiting her husband’s arrival; and then, he was not sure he really loved her, and felt vaguely what a sin it would be to lead her into temptation.
When exactly their relationship had become less innocent he was never able to recall. Now, as if by virtue of a tacit understanding, which had come into existence at some indeterminate period, he would kiss her wrists and stroke her neck. She seemed so happy, that one evening he went further: he started by kissing her; then he caressed her at length and once more kissed her on her eyes, her cheek, her lips, her neck and the wings of her nose.
The young woman’s lips puckered up with a smile to meet his caresses, and her eyes shone in their depths like a pool of water warmed by the sun. Meanwhile, Baldassare’s caresses had become bolder; one minute he gazed at her; he was struck by her pallor, by the infinite despair expressed by her lifeless brow, her weary, grief-stricken eyes shedding glances sadder than tears, like the torture endured during crucifixion or after the irremediable loss of someone you love. He gazed at her for a while; and then, in one final effort, she raised up to him her suppliant eyes begging for mercy, while her avid lips, in an unconscious, convulsive movement, asked for yet more kisses.
Both of them were rapt in the pleasure that hovered all around them, in the perfume of their kisses and the memory of their caresses, and they flung themselves on one another, but with their eyes now closed, those cruel eyes that showed them their souls’ distress, a distress they refused to see – he in particular kept his eyes shut tight, with all his strength, like a remorseful executioner sensing that his arm might waver when the time comes to strike his victim, aware of the risk he would run if, instead of imagining her as still arousing and thus forcing him to assuage the wrath she aroused, he were to look into her face and for a moment feel her pain.
Night had fallen and she was still in his room, dry-eyed, her gaze wandering. She left without saying a word, kissing his hand with passionate melancholy.
He however could not sleep, and if he did momentarily doze off, he would come to with a start, sensing his sweet victim’s eyes raised towards him, imploring and desperate. All at once, he imagined her as she now must be, also unable to sleep and feeling so very lonely. He got dressed, walked quietly to her room, not daring to make any noise in case he woke her, should she be asleep, not daring, either, to go back to his room, where heaven and earth and his own soul would suffocate him under their weight. He stood there, just outside the young woman’s room, each moment thinking that he would be unable to contain himself a second longer and would have to walk in; then, horrified at the idea of breaking that sweet oblivion in which she slept – breathing softly, sweetly and evenly, as he could hear – only to deliver her cruelly over to the remorse and despair from whose grip she had, for a moment, found repose, he remained there, at her door, sometimes sitting, sometimes kneeling, sometimes lying down. In the morning, he returned to his room, feeling the chill, and calmer now; he slept for a long time and woke up in a state of great well-being.
They found ingenious ways of mutually allaying each other’s conscience, and grew used to the remorse which faded and to the pleasure which also lost its edge, and when he returned to Sylvania, he retained, as did she, no more than a gentle, somewhat frigid memory of those cruel and fiery moments.
3
The din of his youthful days means he can’t hear.
– Mme de Sévigné*
When Alexis, on his fourteenth birthday, went to see his uncle Baldassare, he did not feel, as he had expected he would, the violent emotions of the previous year. His repeated rides on the horse his uncle had given him had imbued him with new strength, and overcome his tendency to nervous exhaustion, reviving in him that uninterrupted feeling of good health which supplements our youth like the obscure awareness of the depths of our resources and the latent powers of our vitality.
As he felt his chest swelling like a sail in the breeze awoken by his gallop, his body burning like a winter fire and his forehead as cool as the fleeting foliage that wreathed it in passing, and as he stretched out his body under a cold shower, or allowed it to relax at length as he
