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

of beautiful expectant mouths, like a concentric ring on the limpid surface of a lake… It was swift, but ravishing!
    ‘She was a rare pearl!’ the Comte went on. ‘Rarely have I seen such genuine goodness, such tender-heartedness, such good instinctive feeling, intact even in passion, which as you know, is not always good… I have never encountered less calculation, less prudery and coquettishness—two things often to be found mingled in women, like some material marked with a cat’s claw… there was nothing of the cat in her… Hers was what those blasted scribblers who poison our lives by their style call a simple nature, ornamented by civilization; but she was in possession of all the luxuries, and not one of the little vices that come to seem even more charming than the luxuries…’
    ‘Was she brunette?’ the Duchesse broke in point-blank, who was growing bored with all this metaphysics.
    ‘Ah! you don’t look deep enough!’ said Ravila cleverly. ‘Yes, she was brunette, brunette to the point of being black as jet, the most luxuriant mirror of ebony I have ever seen shining on the voluptuous curve of a woman’s head, but she was fair-complexioned—and it is by the complexion, and not the hair, that you have to judge if a woman is blonde or brunette’—added the great observer, who had not studied women just to paint their portraits.—‘She was a blonde with black hair…’
    All the lovely heads around the table who were blonde of hair only, stirred imperceptibly. For them, clearly, the story had already lost something of its interest.
    ‘She had the sable locks of Night,’ went on Ravila, ‘but they framed the face of Dawn itself, a face that shone with a rare and radiant freshness that had lost nothing of its bloom despite exposure to years of Parisian night-life, which burns up so many roses in its candelabra. Hers seemed merely to have been kissed, the pink in her cheeks and lips remaining bright to the point of luminosity. The twofold flushalso went well with the ruby frontlet she usually wore—this was the time women did their hair
en ferronnière
, * after Leonardo. With her flashing eyes, whose colour was obscured by the flame that issued from them, they made a triangle whose tips were rubies! Slim, but strong, majestic even, she was built to be the wife of a colonel of dragoons—her husband was at that time merely a squadron-leader in the light cavalry—and she enjoyed, despite her pedigree, the rude health of a peasant-girl who drinks in the sun through her skin. She had the ardour that goes with it, too—she imbibed the sun into her soul as well as her veins, she was always present, and always ready… But here’s the strange thing! This powerful and unaffected creature, whose pure, passionate nature was like the blood that fed her beautiful cheeks and gave a pink flush to her arms, was… would you credit it? awkward in a man’s arms…’
    At this some of his listeners lowered their eyes, but raised them again, mischievously…
    ‘As awkward in love as she was rash in life,’ went on Ravila, who did not linger on the tidbit he had just dropped. ‘And the man who loved her had repeatedly to instruct her in two things she seemed not to have learned… never to lose control in a world always hostile and always implacable, and in private, to learn the greatest art of love, which is that of keeping it alive. She loved, certainly; but the art of love was lacking in her… In this she was unlike the majority of women, who possess merely the art! Now, to understand and apply the strategies of
The Prince
, you must first be a Borgia. Borgia comes before Machiavelli. * One is the poet, the other is the critic. She possessed nothing of the Borgia. She was a good woman, very much in love; and despite her monumental beauty, she remained naive, like the little girl in one of those motifs above a door who, being thirsty, thrusts her hand impulsively into the fountain and stands there