French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) by Unknown Page A

Bohemian, married for love to the finest prince among the Polish exiles, and as much a princess in her bearing as any born in the palace of the Jagellons. *
    This was followed by a veritable explosion… ‘Yes!’ they all exclaimed. ‘Do tell us about it, Comte!’ they added with warmth, begging him now, all trembling with curiosity down to the curls at the nape of their necks, and bunching up together shoulder to shoulder, some with cheek in hand, an elbow propped on the table, others leaning back in their chairs, fans in front of their mouths; they challenged him with wide, inquisitive eyes.
    ‘If you absolutely insist…’ said the Comte, with the nonchalance of a man who knows how much delay exacerbates desire.
    ‘We do, absolutely!’ said the Duchesse, fixing—much as a Turkish despot might the blade of his sword—the golden prongs of her dessert fork.
    ‘Then listen,’ he concluded, still casually.
    They became as one, staring at him with rapt attention. They drank him and devoured him with their eyes. Women always like a love story—but who knows? Perhaps the particular charm here wasthat the story he was to tell would be their very own… They knew he was too well bred and too well versed in social etiquette to name names, and that he would omit certain details that were too compromising; and knowing this made them even more impatient to hear the story. They more than desired to hear it, they placed their hopes in it.
    In their vanity, they found themselves rivalling each other, to be the most beautiful memory in the life of a man who must have had so many of them. The old Sultan was once more to throw down the handkerchief… that no one would pick up—but the one for whom he threw it down would assuredly receive it silently into her heart…
    And now, in the light of their expectations, this is the little thunderbolt he unleashed on their attentive heads:
IV
    ‘I HAVE often heard it said by the moralists, who are fine connoisseurs of life,’ began the Comte de Ravila, ‘that our greatest love is not the first, nor the last, as many think, but the second. But in matters of love, everything is true, and everything is false, and in any case, it was not so with me… What you have asked of me tonight, ladies, and what I am about to relate dates back to the proudest moment of my youth. I was no longer exactly what they call a ‘young man’, but I was young, and as an old uncle of mine—a Knight of Malta—used to say of this stage in life, ‘I had sown my wild oats’. * In my prime, then, I was in full relations, as the Italians put it so charmingly, with a woman who is known to you all and whom you have all admired…’
    And here, the look which all these women—who were drinking up the words of the old serpent—then exchanged with each other had to be seen to be believed—it was truly indescribable.
    ‘She was a fine woman,’ went on Ravila, ‘and utterly distinguished, in every sense of the word. She was young, rich, of noble extraction; she was beautiful and spirited, with a broad-minded, artistic intelligence; and she was unaffected—in a way your milieu can produce, when it does… In any case, all she desired then was to please me, to play the role of the tenderest of mistresses, and the dearest of friends.
    ‘I was not, I think, the first man she had loved… She had been in love before, but not with her husband; this was of the virtuous, platonic, utopian type—the kind of love that exercises the heart ratherthan fills it; the kind that strengthens the heart for the love that almost always follows soon after—the trial run, so to speak, like the white mass, said by young priests practising for when they come to celebrate the true, consecrated mass… When I came into her life she was still at the white mass. I was her first true mass, and she celebrated it sumptuously and with full ceremony, like a cardinal.’
    At this remark, the prettiest of pretty smiles went round that table