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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ancient Manners, by Pierre Louys
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Ancient Manners
+       Also Known As Aphrodite
+
+Author: Pierre Louys
+
+Illustrator: Ed Zier
+
+Release Date: June 11, 2011 [EBook #36378]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANCIENT MANNERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by James D. Simmons
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Ancient Manners
+
+
+
+
+This Edition on Large Paper, is limited to 1000 copies of which this is
+No . . . . . . . . . .
+
+
+
+
+Ancient Manners
+
+COMPLETE AND INTEGRAL TRANSLATION
+INTO ENGLISH
+
+PIERRE Louys
+
+_Illustrated by ED. ZIER_
+
+Privately printed for Subscribers only
+
+PARIS
+
+
+
+
+This
+Translation of
+Ancient Manners
+was executed on the
+Printing Presses of CHARLES
+HERISSEY, at Evreux, (France),
+for Mr. Charles CARRINGTON,
+Paris, Bookseller et
+Publisher, and is the only
+complete English
+version
+extant.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+Author's Preface
+
+BOOK I
+
+    I. Chrysis
+    II. On the Quay at Alexandria
+    III. Demetrios
+    IV. The Passer-by
+    V. The Mirror, the Comb, and the Necklace
+    VI. The Virgins
+    VII. Chrysis's Hair
+
+BOOK II
+
+    I. The Garden of the Goddess
+    II. Melitta
+    III. Love and Death
+    IV. Moonlight
+    V. The Invitation
+    VI. Chrysis's Rose
+    VII. The Tale of the Enchanted Lyre
+
+BOOK III
+
+    I. The Arrival
+    II. The Dinner
+    III. Rhacontis
+    IV. The Orgie at Bacchis's
+    V. The Crucified One
+    VI. Enthusiasm
+    VII. Cleopatra
+
+BOOK IV
+
+    I. Demetrios Dreams a Dream
+    II. The Panic
+    III. The Crowd
+    IV. The Response
+    V. The Garden of Hermanubis
+    VI. The Walls Of Purple
+
+BOOK V
+
+    I. The Supreme Night
+    II. Dust Returns to Earth
+    III. Chrysis Immortal
+    IV. Pity
+    V. Piety
+
+
+
+
+AUTHOR'S PREFACE
+
+
+    The very ruins of the Greek world instruct us how our modern
+    life might be made supportable.
+
+    Richard Wagner
+
+The learned Prodicos of Ceos, who flourished towards the end of the
+fifth century before our era, is the author of the celebrated apologue
+that Saint Basil recommended to the meditations of the Christians:
+_Heracles between Virtue and Pleasure_. We know that Heracles chose the
+former and was therefore permitted to commit a certain number of crimes
+against the Arcadian Stag, the Amazons, the Golden Apples, and the
+Giants.
+
+Had Prodicos gone no further than this, he would simply have written a
+fable marked by a certain cheap Symbolism; but he was a good
+philosopher, and his collection of tales, _The Hours_, in three parts,
+presented the moral truths under the various aspects that befit them,
+according to the three ages of life. To little children he complacently
+held up the example of the austere choice of Heracles; to young men.
+doubtless, he related the voluptuous choice of Paris, and I imagine that
+to full-grown men he addressed himself somewhat as follows:
+
+"One day Odysseus was roaming about the foot of the mountains of Delphi,
+hunting, when he fell in with two maidens holding one another by the
+hand. One of them had glossy, black hair, clear eyes, and a grave look.
+She said to him: 'I am Arete.' The other had drooping eyelids, delicate
+hands, and tender breasts. She said: 'I am 'Tryphe.' And both exclaimed:
+'Choose between us.' But the subtile Odysseus answered sagely. 'How
+should I choose? You are inseparable. The eyes that have seen you pass
+by separately have witnessed but a barren shadow. Just as sincere virtue
+does not repel the eternal joys that pleasure offers it, in like manner
+self-indulgence would be in evil plight without a certain nobility of
+spirit. I will follow both of you. Show me the way.' No sooner had he
+finished speaking than the two visions were merged in one another, and
+Odysseus knew that he had been talking with the great golden Aphrodite."
+
+The principal character of the novel which the reader is about to have
+under his eyes is a woman, a courtesan of antiquity; but let him take
+heart of grace: she will not be converted in the end.
+
+She will be loved neither by a saint, nor by a prophet, nor by a god. In
+the literature of to-day this is a novelty.
+
+A courtesan, she will be a courtesan with the frankness, the ardour, and
+also the conscious pride of every human being who has a vocation and has
+freely chosen the place he occupies in society; she will aspire to rise
+to the highest point; the idea that her life demands excuse or mystery
+will not even cross her mind. This point requires elucidation.
+
+Hitherto, the modern writers who have appealed to a public less
+prejudiced than that of young girls and upper-form boys have resorted to
+a laborious stratagem the hypocrisy of which is displeasing to me. "I
+have painted pleasure as it really is," they say, "in order to exalt
+virtue." In commencing a novel which has Alexandria for its scene, I
+refuse absolutely to perpetuate this anachronism.
+
+Love, with all that it implies, was, for the Greeks, the most virtuous
+of sentiments and the most prolific in greatness. They never attached to
+it the ideas of lewdness and immodesty which the Jewish tradition has
+handed down to us with the Christian doctrine. Herodotos (I. 10) tells
+us in the most natural manner possible, "Amongst certain barbarous
+peoples it is considered disgraceful to appear in public naked." When
+the Greeks or the Latins wished to insult a man who frequented women of
+pleasure, they called him [Greek: moichos] or _moechus_, which simply
+means adulterer. A man and a woman who, without being bound by any tie,
+formed a union with one another, whether it were in public or not, and
+whatever their youth might be, were regarded as injuring no one and were
+left in peace.
+
+It is obvious that the life of the ancients cannot be judged according
+to the ideas of morality which we owe to Geneva.
+
+For my part, I have written this book with the same simplicity as an
+Athenian narrating the same adventures. I hope that it will be read in
+the same spirit.
+
+In order to continue to judge of the ancient Greeks according to ideas
+at present in vogue, it is necessary that _not a single_ exact translation
+of their great writers should fall in the hands of a fifth-form
+schoolboy. If M. Mounet--Sully were to play his part of OEdipus without
+making any omissions, the police would suspend the performance. Had not
+M. Leconte de Lisle expurgated Theocritos, from prudent motives, his
+book would have been seized the very day it was put on sale.
+Aristophanes is regarded as exceptional! But we possess important
+fragments of fourteen hundred and forty comedies, due to one hundred and
+thirty-two Greek poets, some of whom, such as Alexis, Philetairos,
+Strattis, Euboulos, Cratinos, have left us admirable lines, and nobody
+has yet dared to translate this immodest and charming collection.
+
+With the object of defending Greek morals, it is the custom to quote the
+teaching of certain philosophers who reproved sexual pleasures. But
+there exists a confusion in this matter. These rare moralists blamed the
+excesses of all the senses without distinction, without setting up any
+difference between the debauch of the bed and that of the table. A man
+who orders a solitary dinner which costs him six louis, at a modern
+Paris restaurant, would have been judged by them to be as guilty, and no
+less guilty, than a man who should make a rendez-vous of too intimate a
+nature in the public street and should be condemned therefore to a
+year's imprisonment by the existing laws. Moreover, these austere
+philosophers were generally regarded by ancient society as dangerous
+madmen; they were scoffed at in every theatre; they received thrashings
+in the street; the tyrants chose them for their court jesters, and the
+citizens of free States sent them into exile, when they did not deem
+them worthy of capital punishment.
+
+It is, then, by a conscious and voluntary fraud, that modern educators,
+from the Renaissance to the present day, have represented the ancient
+code of morality as the inspiring source of their narrow virtues. If
+this code was great, if it deserves to be chosen for a model and to be
+obeyed, it is precisely because none other has more successfully
+distinguished the just from the unjust according to a criterion of
+beauty; proclaimed the right of all men to find their individual
+happiness within the bounds to which it is limited by the corresponding
+right of others, and declared that there is nothing under heaven more
+sacred than physical love, nothing more beautiful than the human body.
+
+Such were the ethics of the nation that built the Acropolis; and if I
+add that they are still those of all great minds, I shall merely attest
+the value of a common-place. It is abundantly proved that the higher
+intelligences of artists, writers, warriors, or statesmen have never
+regarded the majestic toleration of ancient morals as illegitimate.
+Aristotle began life by wasting his patrimony in the society of riotous
+women; Sappho has given her name to a special vice; Caesar was the
+_moechus calvus_; nor can we imagine Racine shunning the stage-women nor
+Napoleon practicing abstinence. Mirabeau's novels, Chenier's Greek
+verses, Diderot's correspondence, and Montesquieu's minor works are as
+daring as the writings of Catullus himself. And the most austere,
+saintly, and laborious of all French authors, Button, would you know his
+maxim of advice in the case of sentimental intrigues? "Love! why art
+thou the happiness of all beings and man's misfortune? Because only the
+_physical part_ of this passion is good, and the rest is worth nothing."
+
+
+Whence is this? And how comes it that in spite of the ruin of the
+ancient system of thought, the grand sensuality of the Greeks has
+remained like a ray of light upon the foreheads of the highest?
+
+It is because sensuality is the mysterious but necessary and creative
+condition of intellectual development. Those who have not felt the
+exigencies of the flesh to the uttermost, whether for love or hatred,
+are incapable of understanding the full range of the exigencies of the
+mind. Just as the beauty of the soul illumines the whole face, in like
+manner virility of the body is an indispensable condition of a fruitful
+brain. The worst insult that Delacroix could address to men, the insult
+that he hurled without distinction against the decriers of Rubens and
+the detractors of Ingres, was the terrible word: eunuchs.
+
+But furthermore, it would seem that the genius of peoples, like that of
+individuals, is above all sensual. All the cities that have reigned over
+the world, Babylon, Alexandria, Athens, Rome, Venice, Paris, have by a
+general law been as licentious as they were powerful, as if their
+dissoluteness was necessary to their splendour. The cities where the
+legislator has attempted to implant a narrow, unproductive, and
+artificial virtue have seen themselves condemned to utter death from the
+very first day. It was so with Lacedaemon, which, in the centre of the
+most prodigious intellectual development that the human spirit has ever
+witnessed, between Corinth and Alexandria, between Syracuse and Miletus,
+has bequeathed us neither a poet, nor a painter, nor a philosopher, nor
+an historian, nor a savant, barely the popular renown of a sort of
+Bobillot who got killed in a mountain defile with three hundred men
+without even succeeding in gaining the victory. And it is for this
+reason that after two thousand years we are able to gauge the
+nothingness of Spartan virtue, and declare, following Renan's
+exhortation, that we "curse the soil that bred this mistress of sombre
+errors, and insult it because it exists no longer."
+
+Shall we see the return of the days of Ephesus and Cyrene? Alas! the
+modern world is succumbing to an invasion of ugliness. Civilization is
+marching to the north, is entering into mist, cold, mud. What night! A
+people clothed in black fills the mean streets. What is it thinking of?
+We know not, but our twenty-five years shiver at being banished to a
+land of old men.
+
+But let those who will ever regret not to have known that rapturous
+youth of the earth which we call ancient life, be allowed to live again,
+by a fecund illusion, in the days when human nudity the most perfect
+form that we can know and even conceive of, since we believe it to be in
+God's image, could unveil itself under the features of a sacred
+courtesan, before the twenty thousand pilgrims who covered the strands
+of Eleusis; when the most sensual love, the divine love of which we are
+born, was without sin: let them be allowed to forget eighteen barbarous,
+hypocritical, and hideous centuries.
+
+Leave the quagmire for the pure spring, piously return to original
+beauty, rebuild the great temple to the sound of enchanted flutes, and
+consecrate with enthusiasm their hearts, ever charmed by the immortal
+Aphrodite, to the sanctuaries of the true faith.
+
+Pierre Louys.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+BOOK THE FIRST
+
+I
+
+
+Chrysis
+
+She lay upon her bosom, with her elbows in front of her, her legs wide
+apart and her cheek resting on her hand, pricking, with a long golden
+pin, small symmetrical holes in a pillow of green linen.
+
+Languid with too much sleep, she had remained alone upon the disordered
+bed ever since she had awakened, two hours after mid-day.
+
+The great waves of her hair, her only garment, covered one of her sides.
+
+This hair was resplendently opaque, soft as fur, longer than a bird's
+wing, supple, uncountable, full of life and warmth. It covered half her
+back, flowed under her naked belly, glittered under her knees in thick,
+curling clusters. The young woman was enwrapped in this precious fleece.
+It glinted with a russet sheen, almost metallic, and had procured her
+the name of Chrysis, given her by the courtesans of Alexandria.
+
+It was not the sleek hair of the court-woman from Syria, or the dyed
+hair of the Asiatics, or the black and brown hair of the daughters of
+Egypt. It was the hair of an Aryan race, the Galilaeans across the
+sands.
+
+
+Chrysis. She loved the name. The young men who came to see her called
+her Chryse like Aphrodite, in the verses they laid at her door, with
+rose-garlands, in the morning. She did not believe in Aphrodite, but she
+liked to be compared to the goddess, and she went to the temple
+sometimes, in order to give her, as to a friend, boxes of perfumes and
+blue veils.
+
+She was born upon the borders of Lake Gennesaret, in a country of sun
+and shade, overgrown by laurel roses. Her mother used to go out in the
+evening upon the Jerusalem road, and wait for the travelers and
+merchants. She gave herself to them in the grass, in the midst of the
+silence of the fields. This woman was greatly loved in Galilee. The
+priests did not turn aside from her door, for she was charitable and
+pious. She always paid for the sacrificial lambs, and the blessing of
+the Eternal abode upon her house. Now when she became with child, her
+pregnancy being a scandal (for she had no husband), a man celebrated for
+his gift of prophecy told her that she would give birth to a maiden who
+should one day carry "the riches and faith of a people" around her neck.
+She did not well understand how that might be, but she named the child
+Sarah, that is to say princess in Hebrew. And that closed the mouth of
+slander.
+
+Chrysis had always remained in ignorance of this incident, the seer
+having told her mother how dangerous it is to reveal to people the
+prophecies of which they are the object. She knew nothing of her future.
+That is why she often thought about it. She remembered her childhood but
+little, and did not like to speak about it. The only vivid sensation she
+had retained was the fear and disgust caused her by the anxious
+surveillance of her mother, who, on the approach of her time for going
+forth upon the road, shut her up alone in her chamber for interminable
+hours. She also remembered the round window through which she saw the
+waters of the lake, the blue-tinted fields, the transparent sky, the
+blithe air of Galilee. The house was covered with tamarisks and
+rose-coloured flax. Thorny caper-bushes reared their green heads in wild
+confusion, over-topping the fine mist of the grasses. The little girls
+bathed in a limpid brook, where they found red shells under the tufts of
+flowering laurels; and there were flowers upon the water and flowers
+over all the mead and great lilies upon the mountains.
+
+
+She was twelve years old when she escaped from home to follow a troop of
+young horsemen who were on their way to Tyre to sell ivory. She fell in
+with them before a cistern. They were adorning their long-tailed horses
+with multi-coloured tufts. She well remembered how she was carried off,
+pale with joy upon their horses, and how they stopped a second time
+during the night, a night so clear that the stars were invisible.
+
+Neither had she forgotten how they entered Tyre: she in front, seated
+upon the panniers of a pack-horse, holding on to its mane with her
+fists, and proudly dangling her naked calves, to show the women of the
+town that she had pure blood coursing in her well-shaped legs. They left
+for Egypt that same evening. She followed the ivory-sellers as far as
+the market of Alexandria.
+
+[Illustration: Greek harlots from the isles told her the legend of
+Iphis.]
+
+And it was there, in a little white house with a terrace and tapering
+columns, that they left her two months afterwards, with her bronze
+mirror, carpets, new cushions, and a beautiful Hindoo slave who was
+learned in the dressing of courtesans' hair. Others came on the evening
+of their departure, and others on the morrow.
+
+As she lived at the extreme east of the town, a quarter disdained by
+the young Greeks of Brouchion, she was long before she made the
+acquaintance of aught but travellers and merchants, like her mother. Yet
+she inspired interminable passions. Caravan-masters were known to sell
+their merchandise dirt cheap in order to stay with her, and ruin
+themselves in a few nights. With these men's fortune she bought jewels,
+bed-cushions, rare perfumes, flowered robes, and four slaves.
+
+She gained a knowledge of many foreign languages, and knew the tales of
+all countries. Assyrians told her the loves of Douzi and Ishtar;
+Phoenicians those of Ashtaroth and Adonis. Greek harlots from the isles
+told her the legend of Iphis, and taught her strange caresses which
+surprised her at first, but afterwards enchanted her so much that she
+could not do without them for a whole day. She also knew the loves of
+Atalanta, and how, like her, flute-girls, while yet virgins, may tire
+out the strongest men. Finally, her Hindoo slave had taught her
+patiently, during seven years, the minutest details of the complex and
+voluptuous art of the courtesans of Palibothra.
+
+For love is an art, like music. It gives emotions of the same order,
+equally delicate, equally thrilling, sometimes perhaps more intense; and
+Chrysis, who knew all its rhythms and all its subtilities, regarded
+herself, with good reason, as a greater artist than Plango herself. Yet
+Plango was a musician of the temple.
+
+Seven years she lived thus, without dreaming of a life happier or more
+varied. But shortly before her twentieth year, when she emerged from
+girlhood to womanhood and saw the first charming line of nascent
+maturity take form under her breasts, she suddenly conceived other
+ambitions.
+
+And one morning, waking up two hours alter mid-day, languid with too
+much sleep, she turned over upon her breast, threw out her legs, leaned
+her cheek upon her hand, and with a long golden pin, pricked little
+symmetrical holes upon her pillow of green linen.
+
+Her reflexions were profound.
+
+First it was four little pricks which made a square, with a prick in the
+centre. Then four other pricks to make a bigger square. Then she tried
+to make a circle. But it was a little difficult. Then, she pricked away
+aimlessly and began to call:
+
+"Djala! Djala!"
+
+Djala was her Hindoo slave, and was called Djalantachtchandratchapala,
+which means: "Mobile as the image of the moon upon the water." Chrysis
+was too lazy to say the whole name.
+
+The slave entered and stood near the door, without entirely closing it.
+
+"Who came yesterday, Djala?"
+
+"You do not know?"
+
+"No, I did not look. He was handsome? I think I slept all the time; I
+was tired. I remember nothing at all about it. At what time did he go
+away? This morning early?"
+
+"At sunrise, he said--"
+
+"What did he leave me? Is it much? No, don't tell me. It's all the same
+to me. What did he say? Has no one been since? Will he come back again?
+Give me my bracelets."
+
+The slave brought a casket, but Chrysis did not look at it, and, raising
+her arm as high as she could:
+
+"Ah! Djala," she said, "ah! Djala! I long for extraordinary adventures."
+
+"Everything is extraordinary," said Djala, "or nought. The days resemble
+one another."
+
+"No, no. Formerly it was not like that. In all the countries of the
+world gods came down to earth and loved mortal women. Ah! on what beds
+await them, in what forest search for them that are a little more than
+men? What prayers shall I put up for the coming of them that will teach
+me something new or oblivion of all things? And if the gods will no
+longer come down, if they are dead or too old, Djala, shall I too die
+without seeing a man capable of putting tragic events into my life?"
+
+She turned over upon her back and interlocked her fingers.
+
+"If somebody adored me, I think it would give me such joy to make him
+suffer till he died. Those who come here are not worthy to weep. And
+then, it is my fault as well: it is I who summon them; how should they
+love me?"
+
+"What bracelet to-day?"
+
+"I shall put them all on. But leave me. I need no one. Go to the steps
+before the door, and if anyone comes, say that I am with my lover, a
+black slave whom I pay. Go."
+
+"You are not going out?"
+
+"Yes, I shall go out alone. I shall dress myself alone. I shall not
+return. Off with you! Off with you!"
+
+She let one leg drop upon the carpet and stretched herself into a
+standing posture. Djala had gone away noiselessly.
+
+
+She walked very slowly about the room, with her hands crossed behind her
+neck, entirely absorbed in the luxury of cooling the sweat of her naked
+feet by stepping about on the tiles. Then she entered her bath.
+
+It was a delight to her to look at herself through the water. She saw
+herself like a great pearl-shell lying open on a rock. Her skin became
+smooth and perfect; the lines of her legs tapered away into blue light;
+her whole form was more supple; her hands were transfigured. The
+lightness of her body was such that she raised herself on two fingers
+and allowed herself to float for a little and fall gently back on the
+marble, causing the water to ripple softly against her chin. The water
+entered her ears with the provocation of a kiss.
+
+It was when taking her bath that Chrysis began to adore herself. Every
+part of her body became separately the object of tender admiration and
+the motive of a caress. She played a thousand charming pranks with her
+hair and her breasts. Sometimes, even, she accorded a more direct
+satisfaction to her perpetual desires, and no place of repose seemed to
+her more propitious for the minute slowness of this delicate solace.
+
+The day was waning. She sat up in the piscina, stepped out of the water,
+and walked to the door. Her foot-marks shone upon the stones. Tottering,
+and as if exhausted, she opened the door wide and stopped, holding the
+latch at arm's length; then entered, and, standing upright near her bed,
+and dripping with water, said to the slave:
+
+
+"Dry me."
+
+
+The Malabar woman took a large sponge and passed it over Chrysis's
+golden hair, which, being heavily charged with water, dripped streams
+down her back. She dried it, smoothed it out, waved it gently to and
+fro, and, dipping the sponge into a jar of oil, she caressed her
+mistress with it even to the neck. She then rubbed her down with a rough
+towel which brought the colour to her supple skin.
+
+Chrysis sank quivering into the coolness of a marble chair and murmured:
+
+
+"Dress my hair."
+
+
+In the level rays of evening her hair, still heavy and humid, shone like
+rain illuminated by the sun: The slave took it in handfuls and entwined
+it. She rolled it into a spiral and picked it out with slim golden pins,
+like a great metal serpent bristling with arrows. She wound the whole
+around a triple fillet of green in order that its reflections might be
+heightened by the silk.
+
+Chrysis held a mirror of polished copper at arm's length. She watched
+the slave's darting hands with a distracted eye, as she passed them
+through the heavy hair, rounded off the clusters, captured the stray
+locks, and built up her head-dress like a spiral rhytium of clay. When
+all was finished, Djala knelt down on her knees before her mistress and
+shaved her rounded flesh to the skin, in order that she might have the
+nudity of a statue in her lovers' eyes.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Chrysis became graver and said in a low voice:
+
+
+"Paint me."
+
+
+A little pink box from the island of Dioscoris contained cosmetics of
+all colours. With a camel-hair brush, the slave took a little of a
+certain black paste which she laid upon the long curves of the beautiful
+eye-lashes, in order to heighten the blueness of the eyes. Two firm
+lines put on with a pencil imparted increased length and softness to
+them; a bluish powder tinted the eye-lids the colour of lead; two
+touches of bright vermilion accentuated the tear-corners. In order to
+fix the cosmetics, it was necessary to anoint the face and breast with
+fresh cerate. With a soft feather dipped in ceruse, Djala painted trails
+of white along the arms and on the neck; with a little brush swollen
+with carmine she reddened the mouth and touched up the nipples of the
+breasts; with her fingers she spread a fine layer of red powder over the
+cheeks, marked three deep lines between the waist and the belly, and in
+the rounded haunches two dimples that sometimes moved; then with a plug
+of leather dipped in cosmetics she gave a indefinable tint to the elbows
+and polished up the ten nails. The toilette was finished.
+
+The Chrysis began to smile, and said to the Hindoo woman:
+
+
+"Sing to me."
+
+
+She sat erect in her marble chair. Her pins gleamed with a golden glint
+behind her head. Her painted finger-nails, pressed to her neck from
+shoulder to shoulder, broke the red line of her necklace, and her white
+feet rested close together upon the stone.
+
+Huddled against the wall, Djala bethought her of the love-songs of
+India.
+
+
+"Chrysis . . ."
+
+
+She sang in a monotonous chant.
+
+"Chrysis, thy hair is like a swarm of bees hanging on a tree.
+The hot wind of the south penetrates it with the dew of
+love-battles and the wet perfume of night-flowers."
+
+
+The young woman alternated, in a softer, lower voice:
+
+"My hair is like an endless river in the plain when the
+flame-lit evening fades."
+
+
+And they sang, one after the other:
+
+
+"Thine eyes are like blue water-lilies without stalks,
+motionless upon the pools."
+
+"Mine eyes rest in the shadow of my lashes like deep lakes under
+dark branches."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"Thy lips are two delicate flowers stained with the blood of a
+roe."
+
+"My lips are the edges of a burning wound."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"Thy tongue is the bloody dagger that has made the wound of thy mouth."
+
+"My tongue is inlaid with precious stones. It is red with the
+sheen of my lips."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"Thine arms are tapering as two ivory tusks, and thy armpits are
+two mouths."
+
+"Mine arms are tapering as two lily-stalks and my fingers hang
+therefrom like five petals."
+
+"Thy thighs are two white elephants' trunks. They bear thy feet
+like two red flowers."
+
+"My feet are two nenuphar-leaves upon the water: My thighs are
+two bursting nenuphar buds."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"Thy breasts are two silver bucklers with cusps steeped in blood."
+
+"My breasts are the moon and the reflection of the moon and the water."
+
+
+[Illustration: Huddled against the wall, Djala bethought herself
+of the love-songs of India.]
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"Thy navel is a deep pit in a desert of red sand, and thy belly
+a young kid lying on its mother's breast."
+
+"My navel is a round pearl on an inverted cup, and the curve of
+my belly is the clear crescent of Phoebe in the forests."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+There was a silence. The slave raised her hands and bowed to the ground.
+
+The courtesan proceeded:
+
+"It is like a purple flower, full of perfumes and honey."
+
+"It is like a sea-serpent, soft and living, open at night."
+
+"It is the humid grotto, the ever-warm lodging, the Refuge where
+man reposes from his march to death."
+
+
+The prostrate one murmured very low:
+
+"It is appalling. It is the face of Medusa."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Chrysis planted her foot upon the slave's neck and said with trembling:
+
+"Djala."
+
+The night had come on little by little, but the moon was so luminous
+that the room was filled with blue light.
+
+Chrysis looked at the motionless reflections of her naked body where the
+shadows fell very black.
+
+
+She rose brusquely:
+
+"Djala, what are we thinking of? It is night, and I have not yet gone
+out. There will be nothing left upon the heptastadion but sleeping
+sailors. Tell me, Djala, I am beautiful?"
+
+"Tell me, Djala, I am more beautiful than ever to-night? I am the most
+beautiful of the Alexandrian women, and you know it? Will not he who
+shall presently pass within the sidelong glance of my eyes follow me
+like a dog? Shall I not perform my pleasure upon him, and make a slave
+of him according to my whim, and can I not expect the most abject
+obedience from the first man whom I shall meet? Dress me, Djala."
+
+Djala twined two silver serpents about her arms. On her feet she fixed
+sandals and attached them to her brown legs with crossed leather straps.
+Over her warm belly Chrysis herself buckled a maiden's girdle, which
+sloped down from the upper part of the loins along the hollow line of
+the groins; in her ears she hung great circular rings, on her neck three
+golden phallus-bracelets enchased at Paphos by the hierodules. She
+contemplated herself for some time, standing naked in her jewels; then,
+drawing from the coffer in which she had folded it, a vast transparent
+stuff of yellow linen, she twisted it about her and draped herself in it
+to the ground. Diagonal folds intersected the little that one saw of her
+body through the light tissue; one of her elbows stood out under the
+light tunic, and the other arm, which she had left bare, carried the
+long train high out of reach of the dust.
+
+She took her feather fan in her hand, and carelessly sauntered forth.
+
+Standing upon the steps of the threshold, with her hand leaning on the
+white wall, Djala watched the courtesan's retreating form.
+
+She walked slowly past the houses, in the deserted street bathed in
+moonlight. A little flickering shadow danced behind her.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+ON THE QUAY AT ALEXANDRIA
+
+
+On the quay at Alexandria a singing-girl was standing singing. By her
+side were two flute-girls, seated on the white parapet.
+
+
+                                  I
+
+    The satyrs pursue in the woods
+        The light-Footed oreads.
+    They chase the nymphs upon the mountains,
+        They fill their eyes with affright,
+    They seize their hair in the wind,
+        They grasp their breasts in the chase,
+    And throw their warm bodies backwards
+        Upon the green dew-covered moss,
+    And the beautiful bodies, their beautiful bodies
+        half divine,
+            Writhe with the agony . . .
+    O women! Eros makes your lips cry aloud
+        With dolorous, sweet Desire.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The flute-players repeated:
+
+    "Eros!
+    Eros!"
+
+and wailed in their twin reeds.
+
+
+                                  II
+
+    Cybele pursues across the plain
+        Attys, beautiful as Apollo.
+    Eros has smitten her to the heart, and for him,
+        O Totoi! but not him for her,
+    Instead of love, cruel god, wicked Eros,
+        Thou counsellest but hatred . . .
+    Across the meads, the vast distant plains,
+        Cybele chases Attys;
+    And because she adores the scorned,
+        She infuses into his veins
+    The great cold breath, the breath of death.
+        O dolorous, sweet Desire!
+
+ * * * * *
+
+    "Eros!
+    Eros!"
+
+Shrill wailings poured from the flutes.
+
+
+                                 III
+
+    The Goat-foot pursues to the river
+        Syrinx, the daughter of the fountain;
+    Pale Eros, that loves the taste of tears,
+        Kissed her as she ran, check to cheek;
+    And the frail shadow of the drowned maiden
+        Shivers, reeds, upon the waters.
+    But Eros kings it over the world and the gods.
+        He kings it over death itself.
+    On the watery tomb he gathered for us
+        All the reeds, and with them made the flute,
+    'Tis a dead soul that weeps here, women,
+        Dolorous, sweet Desire.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Whilst the flute prolonged the slow chant of the last line, the singer
+held out her hand to the passers-by standing around her in a circle, and
+collected four obols, which she slipped into her shoe.
+
+[Illustration: Groups formed in places, and women wandered amongst them]
+
+The crowd gradually melted away, innumerable, curious of itself and
+watching its own movements. The noise of footsteps and voices drowned
+even the sound of the sea. Sailors hauled their boats upon the quay with
+bowed shoulders. Fruit-sellers passed to and fro with teeming baskets
+upon their arms. Beggars begged for alms with trembling hand. Asses,
+laden with leathern bottles, trotted in front of the goads of their
+drivers. But it was the hour of sunset; and the crowd of idlers, more
+numerous than the crowd bent on affairs, covered the quay. Groups formed
+in places, and women wandered amongst them. The names of well-known
+characters passed from mouth to mouth. The young men looked at the
+philosophers, and the philosophers looked at the courtesans.
+
+The latter were of every kind and condition, from the most celebrated,
+dressed in fine silks and wearing shoes of gilded leather, to the most
+miserable, who walked barefooted. The poor ones were no less beautiful
+than the others, but less fortunate only, and the attention of the sages
+was fixed by preference upon those whose natural grace was not
+disfigured by the artifice of girdles and weighty jewels. As it was the
+day before the Aphrodisiae, these women had every license to choose the
+dress which suited them the best, and some of the youngest had even
+ventured to wear nothing at all. But their nudity shocked nobody, for
+they would not thus have exposed all the details of their bodies to the
+sun if they had possessed the slightest defect which might have rendered
+them the laughing-stock of the married women.
+
+
+"Tryphera! Tryphera!"
+
+And a young courtesan of joyful mien elbowed her way through the crowd
+to join a friend of whom she had just caught sight.
+
+"Tryphera! are you invited?"
+
+"Where, Seso?"
+
+"To Bacchis's."
+
+"Not yet. She is giving a dinner?"
+
+"A dinner? A banquet, my dear. She is to liberate her most beautiful
+slave, Aphrodisia, on the second day of the feast."
+
+"At last! She has perceived at last that people came to see her only for
+the sake of her slave."
+
+"I think she has seen nothing. It is a whim of old Cheres, the
+ship-owner on the quay. He wanted to buy the girl for ten minae. Bacchis
+refused. Twenty minae; she refused again."
+
+"She must be crazy."
+
+"Why, pray? It was her ambition to have a freed-woman. Besides, she was
+quite right to bargain. Cheres will give thirty-five minae, and at that
+price the girl becomes a freed-woman."
+
+"Thirty-five minae? Three thousand five hundred drachmae? Three thousand
+five hundred drachmae for a negress?"
+
+"She is a white man's daughter."
+
+"But her mother is black."
+
+"Bacchis declared that she would not part with her for less, and old
+Cheres is so amorous that he consented."
+
+"I hope he is invited at any rate."
+
+"No! Aphrodisia is to be served up at the banquet as the last dish,
+after the fruit. Everybody will taste of it at pleasure, and it is only
+on the morrow that she is to be handed over to Cheres; but I am much
+afraid she will be tired . . ."
+
+"Don't pity her. With him she will have time to recover. I know him,
+Seso. I have watched him sleep."
+
+They laughed together at Cheres. Then they complimented one another. "You
+have a pretty robe," said Seso. "Did you have it trimmed at home?"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Tryphera's robe was of fine sea-green stuff entirely trimmed with
+flowering iris. A carbuncle set in gold gathered it up into a
+spindle-shaped pleat over the left shoulder; the robe fell slantingly
+between the two breasts, leaving the entire right side of her body naked
+down to the metal girdle; a narrow slit, that opened and closed at every
+step, alone revealed the whiteness of the leg.
+
+
+"Seso!" said another voice. "Seso and Tryphera, come with me if you
+don't know what to do. I am going to the Ceramic Wall to see whether my
+name is written up."
+
+"Mousarion! Where have you come from, my dear?"
+
+"From Pharos. There is nobody there."
+
+"What do you mean? There is nothing to do but fish, it is so full."
+
+"No turbots for me. I am off to the wall. Come."
+
+
+On the way, Seso told them about the projected banquet at Bacchis's over
+again.
+
+"Ah! at Bacchis's!" cried Mousarion. "You remember the last dinner,
+Tryphera, and all the stories about Chrysis?"
+
+"You must not repeat them. Seso is her friend."
+
+Mousarion bit her lips; but Seso had already taken the alarm.
+
+"What did they say about her?"
+
+"Oh! various ill-natured things."
+
+"Let people talk," declared Seso. "We three together are not worth
+Chrysis. The day she decides to leave her quarter and shew herself at
+Brouchion, I know of some of our lovers whom we shall never see again."
+
+"Oh! Oh!"
+
+"Certainly. I would commit any folly for that woman. Be sure that there
+is none here more beautiful than she."
+
+The three girls had now arrived in front of the Ceramic Wall.
+Inscriptions written in black succeeded one another along the whole
+length of its immense white surface. When a lover desired to present
+himself to a courtesan, he had merely to write up their two names, with
+the price he offered; if the man and the money were approved of, the
+woman remained standing under the notice until the lover re-appeared.
+
+"Look, Seso," said Tryphera, laughing.
+
+"Who is the practical joker who has written that?"
+
+And they read in huge letters:
+
+    BACCHIS
+    THERSIES
+    2 OBOLS
+
+"It ought not to be allowed to make fun of the women like that. If I
+were the rhymarch, I should already have held an enquiry."
+
+But further on, Seso stopped before an inscription more to the point:
+
+    SESO OF CNIDOS
+    TIMON THE SON OF LYSIAS
+    1 MINA
+
+She turned slightly pale.
+
+"I stay," she said.
+
+And she leaned her back against the wall under the envious glances of
+the women that passed by.
+
+A few steps further on Mousarion found an acceptable offer, if not as
+generous an one. Tryphera returned to the quay alone.
+
+
+As the hour was advanced, the crowd had become less compact. But the
+three musicians were still singing and playing the flute.
+
+Catching sight of a stranger whose clothes and rotundity were slightly
+ridiculous, Tryphera tapped him on the shoulder.
+
+"I say! Papa! I wager that you are not an Alexandrian, eh?"
+
+"No indeed, my girl," answered the honest fellow. "And you have guessed
+rightly. I am quite astounded at the town and the people."
+
+"You are from Boubastis?"
+
+"No. From Cabasa. I came here to sell grain, and I am going back again
+to-morrow, richer by fifty-two minae. Thanks be to the gods! it has been
+a good year."
+
+Tryphera suddenly began to take an great interest in this merchant.
+
+"My child," he resumed timidly, "you can give me a great joy. I don't
+want to return to Cabasa to-morrow without being able to tell my wife
+and three daughters that I have seen some celebrated men, You probably
+know some celebrated men?"
+
+"Some few," she said, laughing.
+
+"Good. Name them to me when they pass. I am sure that during the last
+two days I have met the most influential functionaries. I am in despair
+at not knowing them by sight."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"You shall have your wish. This is Naucrates."
+
+"Who is Naucrates?"
+
+"A philosopher."
+
+"And what does he teach?"
+
+"Silence."
+
+"By Zeus, that is a doctrine that does not require much genius, and this
+philosopher does not please me at all."
+
+"That is Phrasilas."
+
+"Who is Phrasilas?"
+
+"A fool."
+
+"Then why do you mention him?"
+
+"Because others consider him to be eminent."
+
+"And what does he say?"
+
+"He says everything with a smile, and that enables him to pass off his
+errors as international and common-places as subtile. He has all the
+advantage. People have allowed themselves to be duped."
+
+"All this is beyond me, and I don't quite understand. Besides, the face
+of this Phrasilas is marked by hypocrisy."
+
+"This is Philodemos."
+
+"The strategist?"
+
+"No. A Latin poet who writes in Greek."
+
+"My dear, he is an enemy. I am sorry to have seen him."
+
+At this point a flutter of excitement ran through the crowd and a murmur
+of voices pronounced the same name:
+
+"Demetrios . . . Demetrios . . ."
+
+Tryphera mounted upon a street post, and she too said to the merchant:
+
+"Demetrios . . . That is Demetrios. You were anxious to see celebrated
+men."
+
+[Illustration: Tryphera mounted upon a street post.]
+
+"Demetrios? the Queen's lover? Is it possible?"
+
+"Yes, you are in luck. He never leaves his house. This is the first time
+I have seen him on the quay since I have been at Alexandria."
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"That's he, bending over to look at the harbour."
+
+"There are two men leaning over."
+
+"It is the one in blue."
+
+"I cannot see him very well. His back is turned to me."
+
+"Know you not? he is the sculptor to whom the queen offered herself for
+a model when he carved the Aphrodite in the temple."
+
+"They say he is the royal lover. They say he is the master of Egypt."
+
+"And he is as beautiful as Apollo."
+
+"Ah! he has turned round. I am very glad that I came. I shall say that I
+have seen him. I have heard so much about him. It seems that no woman
+has ever resisted him. He has had many love adventures, has he not? How
+is it that the queen has not heard of them?"
+
+"The queen knows of them as well as we do. She loves him too much to
+speak of them. She is afraid of his returning to Rhodes, to his master,
+Pherecrates. He is as powerful as she is, and it is she who desired
+him."
+
+"He does not look happy. Why does he look so sad? I think I should be
+happy if I were in his place. I should like to be he, were it only for
+an evening."
+
+
+The sun had set. The women gazed at this man, their common dream. He,
+without appearing to be conscious of the stir he created, remained
+leaning over the parapet, listening to the flute-girls.
+
+The little musicians made another collection; then, they softly threw
+their light flutes over their backs. The singing-girl placed her arms
+round their necks and all three returned to the town.
+
+At night-fall, the other women went back into immense Alexandria in
+little groups, and the herd of men followed them; but all turned round
+as they walked, and looked at Demetrios.
+
+The last girl who passed softly cast her yellow flowers at him, and
+laughed.
+
+Night fell upon the quays.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+DEMETRIOS
+
+
+Demetrios remained alone, leaning on his elbow, at the spot vacated by
+the flute-girls. He listened to the murmur of the sea, to the slow
+creaking of the ships, to the wind passing beneath the stars.
+
+The town was illumined by a dazzling little cloud which lingered upon
+the moon, and the sky was bathed in soft light.
+
+The young man looked around him. The flute-girls' tunics had left two
+marks in the dust. He remembered their faces: they were two Ephesians.
+He had thought the elder one pretty; but the younger was without charm,
+and, as ugliness was a torture to him, he avoided thinking about her.
+
+An ivory object gleamed at his feet. He picked it up: it was a
+writing-tablet, with a silver style attached to it. The wax was almost
+worn away and it had been necessary to go over the words several times
+in order to make them legible. They were even scratched into the ivory.
+
+There were only these words:
+
+    Myrtis Loves Rhodocleia
+
+and he did not know to which of the two women this belonged, and whether
+the other was the loved one, or whether it was some unknown girl left
+behind in Ephesos. Then he thought for a moment of overtaking the two
+musicians in order to restore them what was perhaps the souvenir of a
+cherished dead friend; but he could not have found them without
+difficulty, and as he was already beginning to lose interest in them, he
+turned round languidly and threw the little object into the sea.
+
+It fell rapidly, with a gliding motion like a white bird, and he heard
+the splash it made away out in the black water. This little noise
+enhanced the immense silence of the harbour. Leaning against the cold
+parapet, he tried to drive away all thought, and began to look at the
+things around him.
+
+He had a horror of life. He only left his house when the life of the day
+was dying down, and he returned home when the dawn began to draw the
+fishermen and market-gardeners to the town. The pleasure of seeing
+nought in the world but the ghost of the town and his own stature had
+become a voluptuous passion with him, and he did not remember having
+seen the mid-day sun for months.
+
+He was wearied. The queen was tedious.
+
+He could hardly understand, that night, the joy and pride that had
+possessed him three years before, when the queen, bewitched perhaps by
+the stories of his beauty and genius, had sent for him to the palace,
+and had heralded him to the Evening Gate with the sound of the silver
+salpinx.
+
+His arrival at the palace sometimes lighted up his memory with one of
+those souvenirs which, through excess of sweetness, become gradually
+embittered in the soul and then intolerable . . . The queen had received
+him alone, in her private apartments, consisting of three rooms of
+incomparable luxury, where every sound was muffled by cushions. She lay
+upon her left side, embedded, at it were, in a litter of greenish silks
+which, by reflection, bathed the black locks of her hair in purple. Her
+youthful body was arrayed in a daring open-worked costume which she had
+had made before her eyes by a Phrygian courtesan, and which exposed the
+twenty-two places where caresses are irresistible. One had no need to
+take off that costume during a whole night, even though one exhausted
+one's amorous imagination beyond the most extravagant dreams.
+
+Demetrios fell respectfully on his knees, and took Queen Berenice's
+naked little foot in his hand, in order to kiss it, as one kisses an
+object delicate and rare.
+
+Then she rose.
+
+Simply, like a beautiful slave posing, she undid her corselet, her
+bandelettes, her open drawers, took off the very bracelets from her
+arms, the rings from her ankles, and stood up erect, with her hands open
+before her shoulders, her head slightly thrown back, and her coral coif
+trembling upon her cheeks.
+
+She was the daughter of a Ptolemy and a Syrian princess descended from
+all the gods, through Astarte, whom the Greeks call Aphrodite. Demetrios
+knew this, and that she was proud of her Olympian lineage. Accordingly
+he was not disconcerted when the queen said to him without moving: "I am
+Astarte. Take a block of marble and your chisel and reveal me to the men
+of Egypt. I desire them to worship my image."
+
+[Illustration: "I am Astarte. Take a block of marble and your chisel and
+reveal me to the men of Egypt. I desire them to worship my image."]
+
+Demetrios looked at her, and divined, unerringly, the artless, novel
+sensuality with which this young girls body was animated. He said, "I am
+the first to worship it," and he took her in his arms. The queen was not
+angry at this brusquerie, but stepped back a pace and asked, "You think
+yourself Adonis, that you dare to lay hands on the goddess?" He
+answered, "Yes." She looked at him, smiled a little, and concluded.
+
+"You are right."
+
+Thus was why he became insupportable, and his best friends left him; but
+he ravished the hearts of all women.
+
+When he entered one of the apartments of the palace, the women of the
+court ceased talking, and the other women listened to him too, for the
+sound of his voice was an ecstasy. If he took refuge with the queen,
+their persecution followed him even there, under pretexts ever new. Did
+he wander through the streets, the folds of his tunic became filled with
+little papyri on which the women wrote their names with words of
+anguish. But he crumpled them up without reading them. He was tired of
+all that. When his handiwork was set up in the temple of Aphrodite, the
+sacred enclosure was invaded at every hour of the night by the crowd of
+his feminine adorers, who came to read his name chiselled in the stone
+and offer a wealth of doves and roses to their living god.
+
+His house was soon encumbered with gifts, which he accepted at first
+out of negligence, but ended by refusing all, when he understood what
+was desired of him, and that he was being treated like a prostitute. His
+very slave-women offered themselves. He had them whipped, and sold them
+to the little porneion at Rhacotis. Then his men-slaves, seduced by
+presents, opened his door to unknown women whom he found at his bed-side
+when he came home, and whose attitude left no doubt as to their
+passionate intentions. The trinkets of his toilet-table disappeared one
+after the other; more than one of the women of the town had a sandal or
+a belt of his, a cup from which he had drunk, even the stones of the
+fruit he had eaten. If he dropped a flower as he walked, he did not find
+it again. The women would have picked up the very dust upon which his
+shoes had trampled.
+
+In addition to the fact that this persecution was becoming dangerous and
+threatened to kill all his sensibility, he had reached the stage of
+manhood at which a thinking man perceives the urgency of dividing his
+life into two parts, and of ceasing to confound the things of the
+intellect with the exigencies of the senses. The statue of Aphrodite was
+for him the sublime pretext of this moral conversion. The highest
+realization of the queen's beauty, all the idealism it was possible to
+read into the supple lines of her body, Demetrios had evoked it all from
+the marble, and from that day onward he imagined that no other woman on
+earth would ever attain to the level of his dream. His statue became the
+object of his passion. He adored it only, and madly divorced from the
+flesh the supreme idea of the goddess, all the more immaterial because
+he had attached it to life.
+
+When he again saw the queen herself, she seemed to him destitute of
+everything which had constituted her charm. She served for a certain
+time to hoodwink his aimless desires, but she was at once too different
+from the Other, and too like her. When she sank down in exhaustion after
+his embraces, and incontinently went to sleep, he looked at her as if
+she were an intruder who had adopted the semblance of the beloved one
+and usurped her place in his bed. The arms of the Other were more
+slender, her breast more finely cut, her hips narrower than those of the
+Real one. The latter did not possess the three furrows of the groins,
+thin as lines, that he had graved upon the marble. He finally wearied of
+her.
+
+His feminine adorers were aware of it, and though he continued his daily
+visits it was known that he ceased to be amorous of Berenice. And the
+enthusiasm on his account doubled. He paid no attention to it. In point
+of fact, he had need of a change of quite other importance.
+
+It often happens that in the interval between two mistresses a man is
+tempted and satisfied by vulgar dissipation. Demetrios succumbed to it.
+When the necessity of going to the palace was more distasteful to him
+than usual, he went off at night to the garden of the sacred courtesans.
+This garden surrounded the temple on every side.
+
+The women who frequented it did not know him. Moreover, they were so
+wearied by the superfluity of their loves that they had neither
+exclamations nor tears, and the satisfaction he was in search of was not
+dashed, in that quarter at least, by those frenzied cat-cries with which
+the queen exasperated him.
+
+His conversation with these fair, self-possessed ladies was idle and
+unaffected. The day's visitors, the probable weather on the morrow, the
+softness of the grass, the mildness of the night-these were the charming
+topics. They did not beg him to express his theories in statuary, and
+they did not give their opinion upon the Achilleus of Scopas. If it
+befell that they dismissed the lover who had chosen them, and that they
+thought him handsome and told him so, he was quite at liberty not to
+believe in their disinterestedness.
+
+When freed from the embrace of their religious arms, he mounted the
+temple steps and fell to an ecstatic contemplation of the statue.
+
+Between the slim columns crowned with Ionian volutes, the goddess stood
+instinct with life upon a pedestal of rose-coloured stone laden with
+rich votive offerings. She was naked and fully sexed, tinted vaguely and
+like a woman. In one hand she held her mirror, the handle of which was a
+priapus, and with the other she adorned her beauty with a pearl necklace
+of seven strings. A pearl larger than the others, long and silvery,
+gleamed between her two breasts, like the moon's crescent between two
+round clouds.
+
+Demetrios contemplated her tenderly, and would fain have believed, like
+the common people, that they were real sacred pearls, born of the drops
+of water which had rolled in the shell of Anadyomene.
+
+"O divine sister!" he would say. "O flowered one! O transfigured one!
+You are no longer the little Asiatic woman whom I made your unworthy
+model. You are her immortal Idea, the terrestrial soul of Astarte, the
+mother of her race. You shone in her blazing eyes, you burned in her
+sombre lips, you swooned in her soft hands, you gaped in her great
+breasts, you strained in entwining legs, long ago, before your birth;
+and the food which the daughter of a sinner hungers for is your tyrant
+also, you, a goddess, the mother of gods and men, the joy and anguish of
+the world. But I have seen you, evolved you, caught you, O marvelous
+Cytherea! It is not to your image, it is to yourself that I have given
+your mirror, and yourself that I have covered with pearls, as on the day
+when you were born of the fiery heaven and the laughing foam of the sea.
+like the dew-steeped dawn, and escorted with acclamations by blue
+tritons to the shores of Cyprus."
+
+
+He had been adoring her alter this fashion when he entered the quay, at
+the hour when the crowd was melting away, and he heard the anguish and
+tears of the flute-girls' chant.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+But he had spurned the courtesans of the temple that evening, because a
+glimpse of a couple beneath the branches had stirred him with disgust
+and revolted him to the soul.
+
+The kindly influence of the night penetrated him little by little. He
+turned his face of the wind, the wind that had passed over the sea and
+seemed to carry to Egypt the lingering scent of the sweet-smelling roses
+of Amathus.
+
+Beautiful feminine forms took shape in his brain. He had been asked for
+a group of the three Charites, enclasping one another, for the garden of
+the goddess, but it was distasteful to his youthful genius to copy
+conventions, and he dreamed of bringing together on the same block of
+marble the three graceful motions of woman. Two of the Charites were to
+be dressed, one holding a fan and half closing her eyelids to the
+gently-swaying feathers; the other dancing in the folds of her robe. The
+third should be standing naked behind her sisters, and, with her
+uplifted arms, would be twisting the thick mass of her hair upon her
+neck.
+
+His mind conceived still other projects, as, for example, to erect, upon
+the rocks of Pharos, an Andromeda of black marble confronting the
+tumultuous monster of the sea, or to enclose the agora of Brouchion
+between the four horses of the rising sun, like wrathful Pegasi; and
+what was not his exultant rapture at the idea, which began to germinate
+within him, of a Zagreus terror-stricken by the approaching Titans? Ah!
+how beauty had once more taken him for its own! how he was escaping from
+the clutches of love! how he was separating from the flesh the supreme
+idea of the goddess! In a word, how free he felt!
+
+Now, he turned his head towards the quays, and, in the distance, saw the
+yellow shimmer of a woman's veil.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE PASSER-BY
+
+
+She carried slowly along the deserted quay, which was bathed in
+moonlight. Her head leaned over one shoulder. A little shadow danced and
+flickered before her footsteps.
+
+
+Demetrios watched her as she drew near.
+
+
+Diagonal folds intersected the little one saw of her body through the
+thin tissue; one of her elbows stood out in relief under the tight
+tunic, and the other arm, which she had left bare, carried the long
+train, holding it high out of the dust.
+
+He recognised by her jewels that she was a courtesan. In order to avoid
+her salutation he crossed the road rapidly.
+
+He did not want to look at her. He obstinately centered his thoughts
+upon the rough plan of his Zagreus. Nevertheless his eyes turned in the
+direction of the passer-by.
+
+Then he saw that she did not stop, that she paid no attention to him,
+that she did not even affect to look at the sea, or to raise the front
+of her veil, or to absorb herself in her reflections; but that she was
+merely taking a walk by herself and was in search of nothing but the
+freshness of the breeze, solitude, abandonment, the subtle thrill of
+silence.
+
+Demetrios did not take his eyes off her, and fell into a singular
+astonishment.
+
+She continued to walk like a yellow shadow in the distance, nonchalant,
+and preceded by the little black shadow.
+
+He heard at each step the slight creak of her shoe in the dust.
+
+She walked on as far as the island of Pharos and went up into the rocks.
+
+Suddenly, and as if he had loved this unknown woman for a long time,
+Demetrios ran after her, then stopped, retraced his steps, trembled, got
+angry with himself, tried to leave the quay; but he had never utilised
+his will except in the service of his pleasure, and when it was time to
+set it in motion for the salvation of his character and the ordering of
+his life, he felt completely powerless and nailed to the spot on which
+he stood.
+
+As he could not throw off the thought of this woman, he tried to find
+excuses in his own eyes for the preoccupation which was so violently
+distracting him. He imagined that his admiration for the graceful
+apparition was due to a purely aesthetic sentiment, and he said to
+himself that she would make at perfect model for the Charis with the fan
+which he intended to design on the morrow.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Then, suddenly, all his thoughts became confused, and a crowd of anxious
+questions surged up into his mind about this woman in yellow.
+
+What was she doing in the island at this hour of the night? Why, for
+whom had she left home so late? Why had she not addressed him? She had
+seen him, certainly she had seen him while he was crossing the quay. Why
+had she gone her way without a word of salutation? It was rumoured that
+certain women sometimes chose the fresh hours before the dawn to bathe
+in the sea. But there was no bathing at Pharos. The sea was too deep.
+Besides, how unlikely that a woman would be covered with all those
+jewels for no other object than to go bathing! Then what took her so far
+from Rhacotis? A rendezvous perhaps? Some young rake, avid of variety,
+who had chosen for a temporary bed the great rocks polished by the
+waves?
+
+Demetrios wished to be certain. But the young woman was already
+returning, with the same calm and indolent step. The sluggish radiance
+of the moon shone full upon her face as she advanced, brushing the dust
+of the parapet with the end of her fan.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE MIRROR, THE COMB, AND THE NECKLACE
+
+
+She had a special beauty of her own. Her hair seemed two masses of gold,
+but it was too abundant, and it padded her low forehead with two heavy
+waves charged with amber, which swallowed up the ears and twisted
+themselves into a seven-fold coil upon the nape of the neck. The nose
+was delicate, with expressive nostrils which palpitated sometimes,
+surmounting a thick and painted mouth, with rounded mobile corners. The
+supple line of the body undulated at every stop, receiving animation
+from the harmonious motion of her unfettered breasts, or from the swing
+of the beautiful hips that supported her lissom waist.
+
+When she was within ten paces of the young man, she turned her eyes upon
+him. Demetrios was seized with trembling. They were extraordinary eyes;
+blue, but deep and brilliant at the same time, humid, weary, bathed in
+tears and flashing fire, almost closed under the weight of the eyelids
+and eyelashes. The glance of these eves was like the siren's song.
+Whosoever crossed their path was inevitably a captive. She knew it well,
+and cunningly she used their virtue; but she counted still more upon
+affected indifference as a weapon of attack against the man whom so much
+sincere love had been incapable of touching deeply.
+
+
+The navigators who have sailed over the purple seas, beyond the Ganges,
+relate that they have seen, beneath the water, rocks of magnetic stone.
+When ships pass near them, the nails and iron fittings are wrenched down
+to the submarine cliff and remain fixed to it for ever. And what was
+once a swift craft, a habitation, a living being, becomes nought but a
+flotsam of planks, scattered by the winds, tossed by the waves. Thus did
+Demetrios, in the presence of the spell of two great eyes, lose his very
+self, and all his strength ebbed away.
+
+
+She lowered her eyes and passed by close to him. He could have shouted
+with impatience. He clenched his fists. He was afraid of not being able
+to recover a calm attitude, for speak to her he must. Nevertheless he
+approached her with the formula of convention.
+
+"I salute you," said he.
+
+[Illustration: "I salute you," said he. "I salute you also," answered
+the woman]
+
+"I salute you also," answered the woman.
+
+Demetrios continued:
+
+"Where are you going to in so leisurely a fashion?"
+
+"I am going home."
+
+"Alone?"
+
+"Alone."
+
+And she made a movement as if to resume her walk.
+
+
+Then Demetrios thought that perhaps he had made a mistake in taking her
+for a courtesan. For some time past, the wives of the magistrates and
+functionaries had taken to dressing and painting themselves like the
+women of pleasure. She was probably a woman of honourable reputation,
+and it was not without irony that he finished his question thus:
+
+"To your husband?"
+
+She put her two hands to her sides and began to laugh.
+
+"I haven't one this evening."
+
+Demetrios bit his lip and suggested, almost timidly:
+
+"Don't look for one. You have set to work too late. There is no one
+about now."
+
+"Who told you that I was looking for one? I am taking a walk by myself,
+and am looking for nothing."
+
+"Where have you come from then? You certainly have not put on all those
+jewels for your own pleasure, and that silken veil. . ."
+
+"Would you have me go out naked, or dressed in wool like a slave-woman?
+I dress for my own benefit. I like to know that I am beautiful, and I
+look at my fingers as I walk in order to recognise all my rings . . ."
+
+"You ought to have a mirror in your hand and look at nothing but your
+eyes. Those eyes did not see the light at Alexandria. You are a Jewess.
+I recognise it by your voice, which is softer than ours."
+
+"No, I am not a Jewess. I am a Galilaen."
+
+"What is your name, Miriam or Noemi?"
+
+"My Syriac name you shall not know. It is a royal name which is not home
+here. My friends call me Chrysis, and it is a compliment that you might
+have paid me."
+
+He put his hand on her arm.
+
+"Oh! no, no," she said mockingly. "It is much too late for this kind of
+trifling. Let me go home quickly. I have been up for nearly three hours.
+I am dying of hunger."
+
+Bending down, she took her foot in her hand:
+
+[Illustration: Bending down, she took her foot in her hand.]
+
+"See how my little thongs hurt me. They are too tightly strapped. If I
+do not loose them in a moment, I shall have a mark on my foot, and that
+will be a pretty object to kiss. Leave me quickly. Ah! what an ado! If I
+had known, I would not have stopped. My yellow veil is all crumpled at
+the waist, look."
+
+
+Demetrios passed his hand over his forehead; then, with the careless air
+of a man who condescends to make his choice, he murmured:
+
+"Show me the way."
+
+"I shall do nothing of the kind," said Chrysis with a stupefied air.
+"You do not even ask me whether it is my pleasure.
+
+"Show me the way! Listen to him! Do you take me for a porneion-girl, who
+puts herself on her back for three obols without looking to see who is
+possessing her? Do you even know whether I am free? Do you know what
+appointments I may have? Have you followed me in the street? Have you
+noted the doors that open for me? Have you counted the men who think
+they are loved by Chrysis? Show me the way! I shall not show it you, if
+you please. Stay here or go away, but you shall not go home with me!"
+
+"You do not know who I am."
+
+"You? Of course I do! You are Demetrios of Sais; you made the statue of
+my goddess; you are the lover of my queen and the lord of my town. But
+for me you are nothing but a handsome slave, because you have seen me
+and you love me."
+
+She came a little nearer to him, and went on in a caressing voice:
+
+"Yes, you love me. Oh! don't interrupt me. I know what you are going to
+say: you love no one, you are loved. You are the Well-beloved, the
+Darling, the Idol. You refused Glycera, who had refused Antiochus.
+Demonassa the Lesbian, who had sworn to die a virgin, entered your bed
+during your sleep, and would have taken you by force if your two Lybian
+slaves had not put her naked into the street. Callistion, the
+well-named, despairing of approaching you, has bought the house opposite
+yours, and shows herself at the open window in the morning, as scantily
+dressed as Artemis in the bath. You think that I do not know all that?
+But we courtesans hear of everything. I heard of you the night of your
+arrival at Alexandria; and since then not a single day has passed
+without your name being mentioned. I even know things you have
+forgotten. I even know things that you do not yet know yourself. Poor
+little Phyllis hanged herself the day before yesterday on your
+door-post, did she not? well, the fashion is catching. Lyde has done
+like Phyllis: I saw her this evening as I passed, she was quite blue,
+but the tears were not yet dry upon her cheeks. You don't know who Lyde
+is? a child, a little fifteen-year-old courtesan whom her mother sold
+last month to a Samian shipwright who was passing the night at
+Alexandria before going up the river to Thebes. She came to see me. I
+gave her some advice; she knew absolutely nothing, not even how to play
+at dice. I often took her in my bed, because, when she had no lover, she
+did not know where to sleep. And she loved you! If you had seen her hug
+me to her and call me by your name. She wanted to write to you. Do you
+understand? I told her it was not worth while. . ."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Demetrios gazed at her without understanding.
+
+
+"Yes, all that is a pure matter of indifference to you, is it not?"
+continued Chrysis. "You did not love her. It is I that you love. You
+have not even listened to what I have just told you. I am sure you could
+not repeat a single word. You are absorbed in wondering how my eyelids
+are made up, speculating on the sweetness of my mouth, on the softness
+of my hair. Ah! how many others know all this! All who have desired me
+have had their pleasure upon me: men, young men, old men, children,
+women, young girls. I have refused nobody, do you understand? For seven
+years, Demetrios, I have only slept alone three nights. Count how many
+lovers that makes. Two thousand five hundred and more. I do not include
+those that came in the daytime. Last year I danced naked before twenty
+thousand persons, and I know that you were not one of them. Do you think
+that I hide myself? Ah! for what, pray? All the women have seen me in
+the bath. All the men have seen me in bed. You alone, you shall never
+see me. I refuse you. I refuse you. You shall never know anything of
+what I am, of what I feel, of my beauty, of my love! You are an
+abominable man, fatuous, cruel, insensible, cowardly! I don't know why
+one of us has not had enough hatred to kill you both in one another's
+arms, first you, and afterwards the queen."
+
+Demetrios quietly took her by the two arms, and, without answering a
+word, bent her backwards with violence.
+
+She had a moment's anguish; but suddenly she stiffened her knees,
+stiffened her elbows, backed a little, and said in a low voice:
+
+"Ah! I am not afraid of that, Demetrios! you shall never take me by
+force, were I as feeble as an amorous virgin and you as strong as a son
+of Atlas. You desire not only the satisfaction of your own senses, but
+chiefly of mine. Moreover, you want to see me from head to foot, because
+you believe that I am beautiful, and I am beautiful indeed. Now the moon
+gives less light than my twelve waxen torches. It is almost dark here.
+And then it is not customary to undress upon the quay. I could not dress
+myself again without the help of my slave. Let me free, you hurt my
+arms."
+
+They were silent for a few minutes; then Demetrios answered:
+
+"We must have done with this, Chrysis. You know well that I shall not
+force you. But let me follow you. However proud you are, you would pay
+dearly for the glory of refusing Demetrios."
+
+
+Chrysis still kept silence. He continued more gently:
+
+"What are you afraid of?"
+
+"You are accustomed to the love of others. Do you know what ought to be
+given to a courtesan who does not love?"
+
+He became impatient.
+
+"I do not ask you to love me. I am tired of being loved. I do not want
+to be loved. I ask you to abandon yourself. For that, I will give you
+all the gold in the world. I have it in Egypt."
+
+"I have it in my hair. I am tired of gold. I don't want gold. I want but
+three things. Will you give them to me?"
+
+
+Demetrios felt that she was going to ask for the impossible. He looked
+at her anxiously. But she began to smile, and said in slow tones:
+
+"I want a silver mirror to gaze at my eyes within my eyes."
+
+"You shall have it. What else do you want? Quickly."
+
+"I want a carved ivory comb to plunge into my hair like a net into water
+that sparkles in the sun."
+
+"And then?"
+
+"You will give me my comb?"
+
+"Yes, yes. Go on."
+
+"I want a pearl necklace to hang on my breast, when I dance you the
+nuptial dances of my country in my chamber."
+
+He raised his eyebrows;
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+"You will give me my necklace?"
+
+"Any you please."
+
+Her voice became very tender.
+
+"Any I please? Ah! that is exactly what I wanted to ask you. Will you
+let me choose my presents?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"You swear?"
+
+"I swear."
+
+"What oath will you swear?"
+
+"Dictate it to me."
+
+"By the Aphrodite you carved."
+
+"I swear by the Aphrodite. But why these precautions?"
+
+"Ah! . . . I was uneasy; but now I am reassured".
+
+She raised her head.
+
+"I have chosen my presents."
+
+Demetrios suddenly became anxious and asked:
+
+"Already?"
+
+"Yes. Do you think I shall accept any sort of silver mirror, bought of a
+merchant of Smyrna, or some stray courtesan. I want the mirror of my
+friend Bacchis, who stole a lover from me last week and jeered at me
+spitefully in a little orgie she had with Tryphera, Mousarion, and some
+young fools who repeated everything to me. It is a mirror she prizes
+greatly because it belonged to Ithodopis, who was fellow-slave with
+AEsop and was redeemed by Sappho's brother. You know that she is a very
+celebrated courtesan. Her mirror is magnificent. It is said that Sappho
+used it, and it is for this reason that Bacchis lays store on it. She
+has nothing more precious in the world; but I know where you will find
+it. She told me one night, when she was intoxicated. It is under the
+third stone of the altar. She puts it there every evening when she
+leaves her house at sunset. Go to-morrow to her house at that hour and
+fear nothing: she takes her slaves with her."
+
+"This is pure madness," cried Demetrios. "Do you expect me to steal?"
+
+"Do you not love me? I thought that you loved me. And then, have you not
+sworn? I thought you had sworn. If I am mistaken, let us say no more
+about it."
+
+
+He understood that she was ruining him, but he yielded without a
+struggle, almost willingly.
+
+"I will do what you say," he answered.
+
+"Oh! I know well that you will. But you hesitate at first. I understand
+that. It is not an ordinary present. I would not ask it of a
+philosopher. I ask you for it. I know well that you will give it me."
+
+She toyed a moment with the peacock feathers of her round fan, and
+suddenly:
+
+"Ah! . . . Neither do I wish for a common ivory comb bought at a
+tradesman's in the town. You told me I might choose, did you not? Well,
+I want . . . I want the carved ivory comb in the hair of the wife of the
+high priest. It is much more valuable than the mirror of Rhodopis. It
+came from a queen of Egypt who lived a long time ago, and whose name is
+so difficult that I cannot pronounce it. Consequently the ivory is very
+old, and as yellow as if it were gilded. It has a carved figure of a
+young girl walking in a lotus-marsh. The lotus is higher than she is,
+and she is stepping on tiptoe in order not to get wet . . . It is really
+a beautiful comb. I am glad you are going to give it to me. I have also
+some little grievances against its present possessor. I had offered a
+blue veil to Aphrodite last month; I saw it on this woman's head next
+day. It was a little hasty, and I bore her a grudge for it. Her comb
+will avenge me for my veil."
+
+"And how am I to get it?" asked Demetrios.
+
+"Ah! that will be a little more difficult. She is an Egyptian, you know,
+and she makes up her two hundred plaits only once a year, like the other
+women of her race. But I want my comb to-morrow, and you must kill her
+to get it. You have sworn an oath."
+
+She pouted at Demetrios, who was looking on the ground. Then she
+concluded very quickly:
+
+"I have chosen my necklace also. I want the seven-stringed pearl
+necklace on the neck of Aphrodite."
+
+Demetrios started violently.
+
+
+"Ah! this time, it is too much! You shall not have the laugh of me to
+the end! Nothing, do you understand? neither the mirror, nor the comb,
+nor the collar."
+
+But she closed his mouth with her hand and resumed her caressing tone:
+
+[Illustration: But she closed his mouth with her hand.]
+
+
+"Don't say that. You know well that you will give me this too. I am sure
+of it. I shall have the three gifts. You will come to see me to-morrow
+evening, and the day after to-morrow if you like, and every evening. I
+shall be at home at any hour, in the costume you prefer, painted
+according to your taste, with my hair dressed after your pleasure, ready
+for your most extravagant caprices, If you desire but tender love, I
+will cherish you like a child. If you thirst after rare sensations, I
+will not refuse you the most agonising. If you wish for silence, I will
+hold my peace, when you want me to sing, ah! you will see, Well-Beloved!
+I know songs of all countries. I know some that are soft as the murmur
+of springs, others that are terrible as the coming of thunder. I know
+some so simple and fresh that a young girl might sing them to her
+mother; and I know some that could not be sung at Lampsacos. I know some
+that Elephantis would have blushed to hear, and that I dare not sing
+above a whisper. The nights you want me to dance, I will dance till
+morning. I will dance fully dressed, with my trailing tunic, or in a
+transparent veil, or in open drawers and a corselet with two openings to
+allow the breasts to peep through. But have I promised you to dance
+naked? I will dance naked if you prefer. Naked and with flowers on my
+head, or naked with my hair loose, painted like a divine image. I can
+balance my hands, circle my arms, vibrate my breast, heave my belly,
+contort my croup, you will see! I dance on the tips of my toes or lying
+down in the carpets. I know all the dances of Aphrodite, that are danced
+before Ourania, and those that are danced before Astarte. I even know
+some they dare not dance. I will dance you all the loves. When this is
+finished we shall be only at the beginning. You will see! The queen is
+richer than I am, but there is not in all the palace a chamber as
+amorous as mine. I don't tell you what you will find there. There are
+things too beautiful for me to be able to give you an idea of them, and
+others so strange that I do not know the words to describe them. And
+then, do you know what you will see, something which transcends all the
+rest? You will see Chrysis whom you love, and whom you do not yet know.
+Yes, you have only seen my face, you do not know how beautiful I am. Ah!
+Ah! . . . Ah! Ah! You will have surprises. Ah! how you will play with my
+nipples, how you will bend my little waist as it lies upon your arm, how
+you will tremble in the grasp of my knees, how you will faint away on my
+moving body! And how excellent my mouth! Ah! my kisses!"
+
+
+Demetrios looked at her with a frenzied eye.
+
+She continued tenderly:
+
+"What! You will not give me a poor old silver mirror when you may have
+all my hair like a golden forest in your hands?"
+
+Demetrios tried to touch it . . . She recoiled and said:
+
+"To-morrow!"
+
+"You shall have it," he murmured.
+
+"And you will not take for me a little ivory comb which pleases me, When
+you can have my two arms like two branches of ivory around your neck?"
+
+He tried to stroke them. She drew them behind her back and repeated:
+"To-morrow!"
+
+"I will bring it," he said very low. "Ah! I knew it!" cried the
+courtesan; "and you will also give me the seven-stringed necklace of
+pearls on the neck of Aphrodite, and for that I will sell you all my
+body, which is like a half-opened shell of mother-of-pearl, and more
+kisses in your mouth than there are pearls in the sea!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Demetrios held out his head, supplicatingly.
+
+She shot him a brilliant glance and gave him her sensual lips . . .
+
+When he opened his eyes she was already afar off. A little pale shadow
+danced before her floating veil.
+
+He returned vaguely towards the town, with his forehead bent under the
+weight of an inexpressible shame.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE VIRGINS
+
+
+The dim dawn rose on the sea. All things were tinted with lilac. The
+furnace blazing on the summit of the tower of Pharos died down with the
+moon. Fugitive yellow gleams appeared in the violet waves like sirens'
+faces under the hair of purple sea-weed. Daylight came all at once.
+
+
+The quay was deserted. The town was dead. It was the grey light before
+the first day blush that illumines the world's sleep and brings the
+feverish dreams of morning.
+
+Nothing existed, except silence.
+
+The long boats anchored in line near the quays, with their rows of
+parallel oars hanging in the water, looked like sleeping birds. The
+perspective of the architectural line of the streets was unbroken by
+vehicle, horse, or slave. Alexandria was but a solitude, the unreal
+phantom of some antique city abandoned for centuries.
+
+But the sound of light footsteps fell tremulously upon the ground, and
+two young girls appeared, one dressed in yellow, the other in blue.
+
+They both wore maidens' girdles, which circled round the hips and
+buckled low down upon the body below the navel. They were the musicians
+of the night, the singing-girl and one of the flute-girls.
+
+The flute-girl was younger and prettier than her friend. Her eyes smiled
+faintly, pale as the blue of her robe, half hidden under her eyelids.
+Her two slender flutes hung dangling from her flowered shoulder-knot
+along her back. A double iris-garland, fastened to the ankles by two
+silver anklets, undulated beneath the gauzy robe and encircled the
+rounded legs.
+
+She said:
+
+"Myrtocleia, do not be sad because you have lost our tablets. Would you
+ever have forgotten that you possess the love of Rhodis, and can you
+think, naughty girl, you would ever have read in solitude the line
+written by my hand? Am I one of those faithless friends who engrave
+their bed-sister's name upon their nail and unite themselves to another
+girl as soon as the nail has grown to the limit? Do you need a souvenir
+of me when you have my living body? I am barely of nubile age, and yet I
+was not half so old on the day I saw you for the first time. You
+remember it well. It was at the bath. Our mothers took us in their arms
+and held us towards one another. We played for a long time on the marble
+before putting on our clothes again. We have never left one another
+since that day, and, five years afterward, we loved each other."
+
+Myrtocleia answered:
+
+"There is another first day, Rhodis, and you know it. It is the day you
+linked our two names together in writing upon the tablets. That was the
+first day! It will never come back again. But never mind. Each day is
+new for me, and when you awake towards evening, it is as if I saw you
+for the first time, You are not a girl at all: you are a little Arcadian
+nymph that has left her forests because Phoibos has dried up her
+fountain. Your body is supple as an olive branch, your skin is soft as
+water in summer, the iris circles about your legs, and you wear the
+lotus-flower like Astarte the open fig. In what wood haunted by
+immortals did your mother betake her to sleep before your
+thrice-blessed birth? and what roaming aegipan, or what river-god united
+himself with her in the grass? When we have left this terrible African
+soil, you shall take me to your fountain, far beyond Psophis and
+Phenens, to vast shady forests where, upon the soft earth, one may see
+the double footprints of satyrs and light-treading nymphs. There you
+shall search out a smooth rock, and you shall engrave upon the stone the
+words you wrote upon the wax: the words that are our joy. Listen,
+listen, Rhodis! By the girdle of Aphrodite upon which all desires are
+embroidered, all desires are unknown to me; for you are more than my
+dream! By the horn of Amaltheia whence flow all the good things of the
+world, the world is a matter of indifference to me; for you are the only
+good I have found in it! When I look at you and when I see myself, I
+know not why you love me in return. Your hair is as fair as ears of
+corn; mine is black as a ram's fleece. Your skin is as white as
+shepherd's cheese; mine is brown as the sand upon the beach. Your tender
+breast is as flowered as the orange tree in autumn; mine is meagre and
+barren as the rock pine. If my face has gained in beauty, it is because
+I have loved you. O Rhodis! well you know that my singular virginity is
+like the lips of Pan eating a sprig of myrtle; yours is the colour of
+roses, and dainty as the mouth of a little child. I do not know why you
+love me; but if you ceased to love me for a day; if, like your sister
+Theano who plays the flute by your side, you ever stayed to sleep in the
+houses that employ us, then I should never even think of sleeping alone
+in our bed, and when you came in you would find me strangled with my
+girdle."
+
+The very idea was so wild and cruel that Rhodis's long eyes filled with
+smiles and tears. She placed her foot upon a street-post:
+
+"My flowers between my legs hamper me. Undo them, adored Myrto. I have
+finished dancing for to-night."
+
+The singing-girl started.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Oh! it is true. I had already forgotten them, those men and women. They
+made both of you dance, you in this Cossian robe, transparent as water,
+and your sister naked with you. If I had not protected you, they would
+have possessed you like a prostitute, as they did your sister before our
+eyes in the same room. Oh, what an abomination! Did you hear her cries
+and wailings? How dolorous is the love of man!"
+
+She knelt down beside Rhodis and unclasped the two garlands, and then
+the three higher up, imprinting a kiss on the place of each. When she
+rose to her feet, the child took her by the neck and swooned under her
+mouth.
+
+"Myrto, you are not jealous of all those debauchees? What does it matter
+that they should have seen me? Theano suffices them, and I have
+relinquished her to them. They shall not have me, darling Myrto. Do not
+be jealous of them."
+
+"Jealous! I am jealous of everything that approaches you. In order that
+your robes may not have you alone, I put them on when you have worn
+them. In order that the flowers in your hair may not remain amorous of
+you, I give them to mean courtesans who will defile them in their
+orgies. I have given you nothing, in order that nothing may possess you.
+I am afraid of everything you touch, and I hate everything you look at.
+I should like to pass my whole life between the four walls of a prison
+alone with myself and you, and unite myself with you so profoundly, hide
+you so well between my arms, that no eye would suspect your presence. I
+would I were the fruit that you eat, the perfume that delights you, the
+sleep that glides beneath your eyelids, the love that strains your
+limbs. I am jealous of the happiness I give you, and I would I could
+give you the very happiness I derive from you. That is what I am jealous
+of; but I do not fear your mistresses of a night when they help me to
+satisfy your girlish desires. As for lovers, I know well that you will
+never be theirs; I know well that you cannot love man, intermittent and
+brutal man."
+
+Rhodis exclaimed with conviction:
+
+"I would rather go, like Nausithoe, and sacrifice my virginity to the
+god Priapos adored at Thasos. But not this morning, darling. I have
+danced a long time, and I am very tired. I wish I were at home, sleeping
+on your arm."
+
+She smiled, and continued:
+
+"We must tell Theano that our bed is no longer hers. We will make her up
+another one beside the door. After what I have seen this night I cannot
+embrace her again. Myrto, it is really horrible. Is it possible to love
+like that? Is that what they call love?"
+
+"Yes, it is that."
+
+"They deceive themselves, Myrto. They do not know."
+
+Myrtocleia took her in her arms, and both kept silence together.
+
+The wind mingled their hair.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+CHRYSIS'S HAIR
+
+
+"Look." said Rhodis, "look! I see some one."
+
+The singing-girl looked. A woman, in the distance, was walking rapidly
+along the quay.
+
+
+"I recognise her." resumed the child.
+
+"It is Chrysis. She is wearing her yellow robe."
+
+"What! is she dressed already?"
+
+"I can't understand it. Usually she does not go out before mid-day, and
+the sun is hardly up. Something must have happened to her: something
+fortunate no doubt: she is so lucky."
+
+They advanced to meet her, and said:
+
+"Hail, Chrysis."
+
+"Hail. How long have you been here?"
+
+"I don't know. It was daylight when we arrived."
+
+"There was nobody on the quay?"
+
+[Illustration: "It is Chrysis. She is wearing her yellow robe."]
+
+"Nobody."
+
+"Not a man! are you sure?"
+
+"Oh, quite sure. Why do you ask?"
+
+Chrysis did not answer. Rhodis went on:
+
+"You wanted to see somebody?"
+
+"Yes . . . perhaps . . . I think perhaps it is as well I have not seen him.
+Yes, it is as well. I was wrong to come back; I could not restrain
+myself."
+
+"But what is the matter? Do tell us, Chrysis."
+
+"Oh, no."
+
+"Not even us? Not even us, your little friends!"
+
+"You shall know later on, together with the whole town."
+
+"It is very amiable of you."
+
+"You shall know a little before, if you really want to; but this morning
+it is impossible. Extraordinary things are happening, my dears. I am
+dying to tell you, but I must hold my tongue. You were going home? Come
+and sleep with me, I am quite alone."
+
+"Oh, Chrysis, Chrysidion, we are so tired! We are going home certainly,
+but to have a good sleep."
+
+"Well, you can sleep afterwards. To-day is the eve of the Aphrodisiae.
+Is it a day for rest? If you want the goddess to protect you and to make
+you happy next year you must enter her temple with eyelids dark as
+violets and cheeks white as lilies. We will see to that; come with me."
+
+She put her arms round their waists, and closing her caressing hands
+upon their little half naked breasts, bore them hurriedly off.
+
+Rhodis, however, remained preoccupied.
+
+"And when we are in your bed," she said, "will you not tell us what is
+happening; what you expect?"
+
+"I will tell you many things, everything you please; but about that
+subject I shall say nothing."
+
+"Even when we are in your arms, naked, with the lamp extinguished?"
+
+"Do not insist, Rhodis: you shall know to-morrow. Wait till to-morrow."
+
+"You are going to be very happy? or very powerful?"
+
+"Very powerful."
+
+Rhodis opened her eyes wide and exclaimed:
+
+"You are going to sleep with the queen!"
+
+"No," said Chrysis laughing; "but I am going to be as powerful as she
+is. Do you desire anything?"
+
+"Oh, yes."
+
+And the little girl became thoughtful.
+
+"Well, what is it?" asked Chrysis.
+
+"It is something impossible. Why should I ask?"
+
+Myrtocleia spoke for her:
+
+"At Ephesos, in our country, when two virgins of nubile age like Rhodis
+and me love one another, the law allows them to be united in marriage.
+They both go to the temple of Athena and sacrifice their double girdle;
+thence to the sanctuary of Iphinoe, where they offer a lock of their
+hair, interwined; and finally to the peristyle of Dionysios, where the
+more male of the two receives a little knife of sharp-edged gold, and a
+white linen cloth to stanch the blood. In the evening, the "fiancee" is
+conducted to her new home in a flowered chariot between her husband and
+the paranymph, escorted by torch-bearers and flute-girls. And
+thenceforth they have the rights of married people; they may adopt
+little girls and associate them in their intimate life. They are
+respected. They have a family. That is the dream of Rhodis. But it is
+not the custom here."
+
+"We will change the law." said Chrysis.
+
+"But leave it to me, you shall marry one another."
+
+"Oh, is it true?" cried the little girl, flushing with joy.
+
+"Yes; and I don't ask which of you is to be the husband. I know that
+Myrto possesses everything necessary to create that illusion. You are
+fortunate, Rhodis, to have such a friend. They are rare, whatever people
+say."
+
+They reached the door, where Djala was sitting on the steps weaving a
+towel of flax. The slave-woman rose to allow them to pass, and then
+followed them.
+
+The two flute-girls took off their simple clothing in an instant. They
+performed minute ablutions upon each other in a green marble bowl
+communicating with the bath. Then they rolled upon the bed.
+
+Chrysis looked at them without seeing them. The words spoken by
+Demetrios, even the most trivial, ran in her memory unceasingly. She was
+not conscious of the presence of Djala, who silently untied and unwound
+her long saffron veil, unbuckled the girdle, took off the rings, the
+seals, the armlets, the silver serpents, the golden pins; but the gentle
+titillation of her hair falling over her shoulders woke her vaguely.
+
+She asked for her mirror.
+
+[Illustration: She was not conscious of the presence of Djala, who
+silently untied and unwound her long saffron veil.]
+
+Was she beginning to feel afraid that she was not beautiful enough to
+keep this new lover--for keep him she must--after the mad exploits she
+had demanded of him? Or was it that, by a detailed examination of each
+one of her physical beauties, she wanted to calm her alarms and justify
+her confidence?
+
+She brought the mirror close to every part of her body, touching each in
+succession. She appraised the whiteness of her skin, estimated its
+softness by long caresses, its warmth by embraces. She tested the
+fullness of her breasts, the firmness of her belly, the tension of her
+flesh. She measured her hair and considered its glossiness. She tried
+the strength of her regard, the expression of her mouth, the fire of her
+breath; and she bestowed a long, slow kiss along her naked arm from the
+region of the armpit down to the bend of the elbow.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+An extraordinary emotion, compounded of astonishment and pride, of
+certainty and impatience, took possession of her at this contact with
+her own lips. She turned round as if she were looking for somebody; but
+catching sight of the two forgotten Ephesian girls upon her bed, she
+leaped into their midst, separated them, hugged them with at sort of
+amorous fury, and her long golden hair enveloped the three young heads.
+
+
+
+
+Book II
+
+
+I
+
+THE GARDENS OF THE GODDESS
+
+
+The temple of Aphrodite-Astarte stood outside the gates of the town, in
+an immense park, full of flowers and shade. The Nile water, conveyed by
+seven aqueducts, induced an extraordinary verdure all the year round.
+
+This flowering forest on the sea's verge, these deep streams, these
+lakes, these darkling meadows, had been created in the desert more than
+two centuries previously by the first of the Ptolemies. Since then, the
+sycamores planted by his orders had grown to gigantic size; under the
+influence of the fertilising waters, the lawns had grown into meads, the
+basins had widened into ponds, nature had turned a park into a
+champaign.
+
+The gardens were more than a valley, more than a country; they were a
+complete world enclosed by bounds of stone and governed by a goddess,
+the soul and centre of this universe. All around it stood a circular
+terrace, eighty stades long and thirty-two feet high. This was not a
+wall, it was a colossal "cite," composed of fourteen hundred houses. A
+corresponding number of prostitutes inhabited this sacred town, and in
+this unique spot were represented seventy different nationalities.
+
+The plan of the sacred houses was uniform and as follows: the door, of
+red copper (a metal consecrated to the goddess), bore a phallos-shaped
+knocker which fell upon a receiving-plate in relief, the image of the
+eteis; and beneath was graved the courtesan's name, with the initials of
+the usual formula:
+
+    [Greek: O.X.E
+    KOCHLIS
+    P.P.P]
+
+Two rooms contrived like shops opened out on either side of the door,
+that is to say, there was no wall on the side facing the gardens. The
+one on the right, the "chambre exposee," was the place where the
+courtesan sat bedecked with her adornments upon a lofty cathedra at the
+hour when the men arrived. The one on the left was at the disposal of
+suitors who wished to pass the night in the open air, without, however,
+sleeping on the grass.
+
+When the door was opened, a corridor gave access to a vast court-yard
+paved with marble, the centre of which was occupied by an oval basin. A
+peristyle cast a circle of shadow round this patch of light, and
+interposed a zone of coolness between it and the entries to the seven
+chambers of the house. At the further end rose the altar of red granite.
+
+Each woman had brought a little idol of the goddess from her native
+country, and each adored it in her own tongue, as it stood upon the
+altar, without understanding the other women. Lakshmi, Ashtaroth, Venus,
+Ishtar, Freia, Mylitta, Cypris, such were the religious names of their
+deified VOLUPTAS. Some venerated her under a symbolic form: a red
+pebble, a conical stone, a great knotted shell. Most of them had a
+little statuette on a pedestal of green wood, usually a rudely-carved
+figure with thin arms, heavy breasts, and excessive hips. The hand
+pointed to the delta-shaped locks of the belly. They laid a
+myrtle-branch at its feet, scattered the altar with rose leaves, and
+burned a little grain of incense for every prayer granted. It was the
+confidant of all their troubles, the witness of all their undertakings,
+the supposed cause of all their pleasures. At their death, it was placed
+in their fragile little coffin, to watch over their sepulture.
+
+The most beautiful of these women came from the kingdoms of Asia. Every
+year, the vessels which carried the presents of the tributaries or
+allies to Alexandria landed, together with the bales and leathern
+bottles, a cargo of a hundred virgins chosen by the priests for the
+service of the sacred garden. They were Mysians and Jewesses, Phrygians
+and Cretans, daughters of Ecbatana and Babylon, maidens from the Bay of
+Pearls and from the sacred banks of the Ganges. Some were white-skinned
+with medallion-like faces and inflexible bosoms; others, brown as the
+earth under rain, wore silver rings in their noses. Their hair fell short
+and dark upon their shoulders.
+
+Some came from a still greater distance: dainty, deliberate little
+beings, whose language nobody understood, and who resembled yellow
+monkeys.
+
+Their long eyes pointed towards their temples; they dressed their
+straight black hair in the quaintest fashion. These girls remained all
+their lives as timid as strayed animals. They knew the movements of
+love, but refused the kiss upon the mouth. Between two passing unions
+they were to be seen sitting on their little feet, and playing with one
+another, and amusing themselves like infants.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In a solitary meadow, the pink and pale daughters of the North lived
+together, lying upon the grass. They were Sarmatians with triple
+tresses, robust legs, square shoulders, who made garlands for themselves
+with the branches of trees, and wrestled for a pastime. There were
+big-breasted, flat-nosed, hairy Scythians, who paired in the attitude of
+beasts; gigantic Teutons who terrified the Egyptians with their hair
+pale as that of old men and their flesh softer than that of children;
+Gauls, sandy-hued like cows, and who laughed without a motive; young
+Celts with sea-green eyes, who never went out naked.
+
+Elsewhere, the brown-breasted Iberians assembled together during the
+day. They had heavy hair that they dressed with extreme care, and
+nervous bellies which they did not depilate. Their firm skins and
+powerful croups were held in great esteem by the Alexandrians. They were
+chosen for dancing-girls as often as for mistresses. Under the large
+shadow of the palm-trees lived the daughters of Africa: Numidians veiled
+in white, Carthaginians appareled in black gauze, Negresses enveloped
+in many-coloured costumes.
+
+They were fourteen hundred.
+
+When once a woman had entered the garden, she never left it till the
+first day of her old age. She gave the half of her gains to the temple,
+and the remainder went to defray the cost of her meals and perfumes.
+
+[Illustration: The poorer tradesman . . . preferred to address themselves
+to the women who slept thus in the open air.]
+
+They were not slaves, and each was the real owner of one of the houses
+of the Terrace; but all were not equally beloved, and the most fortunate
+often found the opportunity of buying the neighbouring houses, which
+their owners were willing to sell in order to escape the ravages of
+hunger. These girls carried off their obscene statuettes to the park and
+searched out a flat stone to serve as an altar, in a corner which
+henceforth they did not leave. The poorer tradesmen were aware of this.
+and preferred to address themselves to the women who slept thus in the
+open air upon the moss near their sanctuaries; but occasionally even
+these suitors were not forthcoming, and then the poor creatures took to
+themselves a partner in distress. These passionate friendships developed
+almost into conjugal love. The couple shared everything down to the last
+scrap of wool. They consoled one another for their long periods of
+chastity by alternate complaisances.
+
+Those who had no girl friends offered themselves of their own accord as
+slaves to their more prosperous colleagues.
+
+The latter were forbidden to have more than a dozen of these poor
+creatures in their service; but twenty-two courtesans were quoted as
+having attained the maximum. These had chosen a motley staff of
+domestics from all the nationalities.
+
+If, in the course of their stray amours, they conceived a son, he was
+brought up in the temple-enclosure in the contemplation of the perfect
+form and in the service of its divinity. If they were brought to bed of
+a daughter, the child was consecrated to the goddess.
+
+On the first day of its life, they celebrated its symbolic marriage with
+the son of Dionysos, and the Hierophant deflowered it herself with a
+little golden knife; for virginity is displeasing to Aphrodite. Later
+on, the little girl entered the Didascalion, a great monumental school
+situated behind the temple, and where the theory and practice of all the
+erotic arts were taught in seven stages: the use of the eyes, the
+embrace, the motions of the body, the secrets of the bite, of the kiss,
+and of glottism.
+
+The pupil chose the day of her first experiment at her own good
+pleasure, because desire is ordained by the goddess, whose will must be
+obeyed. On that day, she was allotted one of the houses of the Terrace,
+and some of these children, who were not even nubile, counted amongst
+the most zealous and the most esteemed.
+
+The interior of the Didascalion, the seven class-rooms, the little
+theatre, and the peristyle of the court, were decorated with ninety-two
+frescoes designed to sum up the whole of amatory teaching. It was the
+life-work of one man. Cleochares of Alexandria, the natural son and
+disciple of Apelles, had terminated them on the eve of his death.
+Recently, Queen Berenice, who was greatly interested in the celebrated
+school and sent her young sisters to it, had ordered a series of marble
+groups from Demetrios in order to complete the decoration; but as yet
+only one of them had been erected, in the children's class-room.
+
+At the end of each year, in the presence of the entire body of
+courtesans, a great competition took place, which excited an
+extraordinary emulation amongst this crowd of women, for the twelve
+prizes which were offered conferred the right to the most exalted glory
+it was possible to dream of: the right to enter the Cotytteion.
+
+This last monument was shrouded in so much mystery, that it is
+impossible for us to give a detailed description of it. We know merely
+that it was comprised in the peribola and that it had the form of a
+triangle of which the base was a temple of the goddess Cotytto, in whose
+name fearful unknown debauches took place. The other two sides of the
+monument were composed of eighteen houses; they were inhabited by
+thirty-six courtesans, so sought after by rich lovers that they did not
+give themselves for less than two minae: they were the Baptes of
+Alexandria. Once a month, at full moon, they assembled in the temple
+enclosure, maddened by aphrodisiacs, and girt with the canonical
+phallos. The oldest of the thirty-six was required to take a mortal dose
+of the terrible erotogenous philter. The certainty of a speedy death
+impelled her to attempt without hesitation all the dangerous feats of
+sensual passion before which the living recoil. Her body, covered with
+foam, became the centre and model of the whirling orgie; in the midst of
+prolonged shriekings, cries, tears, and dances, the other naked women
+embraced her with frenzy, bathed their hair in her sweat, fastened on
+her burning flesh, and drew fresh ardors from the uninterrupted spasm of
+this furious agony. Three years these women lived thus, and such was the
+wild madness of their end at the close of the thirty-sixth month.
+
+Other less venerated sanctuaries had been erected by the women, in
+honour of the other names of the multiform Aphrodite. There was an altar
+sacred to the Ouranian Aphrodite, which received the chaste vows of
+sentimental courtesans: another to the Apostrophian Aphrodite, who
+granted forgetfulness of unrequited loves; another to the Chrysean
+Aphrodite, who attracted rich lovers; another to Genetyllis, the patron
+goddess of women in child-birth; another to Aphrodite of Colias, who
+presided over gross passions, for everything which related to love fell
+within the pious cult of the goddess. But these special altars possessed
+no efficacy or virtue except in the case of unimportant desires. Their
+service was haphazard, their favours were a matter of daily occurrence,
+and their votaries were on terms of familiarity with them. Suppliants
+whose prayers had been granted made simple offerings of flowers; those
+who were not content defiled them with their excrements. They were
+neither consecrated nor kept up by the priests, and their profanation
+incurred no punishment.
+
+Far different was the discipline of the temple.
+
+
+The temple, the Great Temple of the Great Goddess, the most sacred spot
+in all Egypt, the inviolable Astarteion, was a colossal edifice one
+hundred and thirty six feet in length, standing on the summit of the
+gardens and approached on all sides by seventeen steps. The golden gates
+were guarded by twelve hermaphrodite hierodules; symbolising the two
+objects of love and the twelve hours of the night.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The entrance did not face towards the east, but in the direction of
+Paphos, that is to say, towards the north-east. The sun's rays never
+penetrated directly into the sanctuary of the Great Goddess of the
+Night. Eighty-six columns upheld the architrave: they were tinted purple
+as far as their mid-height, and all the upper part stood out from these
+gaudy trappings with an unspeakable whiteness, like the busts of
+standing women.
+
+Between the epistyle and the coronis, the long belt-shaped Zophora
+unfolded its bestial sculptures, erotic and fabulous. There were
+centauresses mounted by stallions, goats tumbled by meagre satyrs,
+virgins severed by monstrous bulls, naiads covered by stags, bacchantes
+loved by tigers, lionesses seized by griffins. All this great wallowing
+multitude of beings was exalted by the irresistible divine passion. The
+male strained, the female opened, and the fusion of the creative forces
+produced the first thrill of life. The crowd of obscure couples
+sometimes, by chance, left a clear space round some immortal scene:
+Europa on hands and knees bearing the weight of the glorious Olympian
+beast; Leda guiding the hardy swan between her beautiful arched thighs.
+Farther on, the insatiable Siren exhausting expiring Glaucos; the god
+Pan standing upright and possessing an hamadryad with flying hair; the
+Sphinx raising her croup to the level of the horse Pegasos. At the end
+of the frieze, the sculptor had carved a figure of himself facing the
+goddess Aphrodite. He stood there modelling the contours of a perfect
+cteis in soft wax, with the goddess herself as his model, as if his
+whole ideal of beauty, joy, and virtue had long since taken refuge in
+this precious fragile flower.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+MELITTA
+
+
+"Purify thyself, stranger."
+
+"I shall enter pure," said Demetrios.
+
+Dipping the end of her hair in water, the young gate-keeper moistened
+first his eyelids, then his lips and fingers, in order that his glance
+might be sanctified, as also the kiss of his mouth and the caress of his
+hands.
+
+And then he pressed forward into the wood of Aphrodite.
+
+Through the dark branches, he perceived a setting sun of sombre purple,
+powerless to dazzle the eyes. It was the evening of the day on which his
+life had been convulsed by the meeting with Chrysis.
+
+The feminine soul is of a simplicity incredible to men. Where there is
+nothing but a straight line, they obstinately search for the complexity
+of a web; they find emptiness and go astray in it. Thus it was that the
+soul of Chrysis, limpid as a little child's, appeared to Demetrios more
+mysterious than a problem in metaphysics. After leaving this woman upon
+the quay, he went back to his house like a man in a dream, incapable of
+answering all the questions which tormented him. What did she want with
+these three gifts? It was impossible for her either to wear or to sell a
+celebrated mirror, acquired by theft, the comb of an assassinated woman,
+the pearl necklace of the goddess. If she kept them at home, she would
+expose herself every day to the possibility of a fatal discovery. Then
+why ask for them? To destroy them? He knew only too well that women are
+incapable of enjoying things in secret and that good fortune brings them
+happiness only as soon as it is noised abroad. And then, what
+divination, what profound clairvoyance had led her to judge him capable
+of accomplishing three such extraordinary actions for her sake?
+
+Assuredly, if he had liked, he might have carried off Chrysis from her
+home, held her at his mercy, and made her his mistress, his wife, or his
+slave, at choice. He had even the right to do away with her, simply.
+Former revolutions had accustomed the citizens to violent deaths, and no
+one would have troubled about the disappearance of a courtesan. Chrysis
+must know this, and yet she had dared . . .
+
+[Illustration: The young gate-keeper moistened first his eyelids]
+
+The more he thought about her, the more grateful he was to her for
+having varied the usual routine of bargaining in so charming a manner.
+How many women of equal worth with Chrysis had offered themselves
+clumsily! But what did this one ask for? Neither love, nor gold, nor
+jewels, but three unheard-of crimes! She interested him keenly. He had
+offered her all the treasures of Egypt; he felt distinctly, now, that if
+she had accepted them she would not have received two obols, and that he
+would have tired of her even before knowing her. Three crimes were
+certainly an unusual salary: but she was worthy to receive it since she
+was a woman capable of exacting it, and he promised himself to go on
+with the adventure.
+
+In order not to give himself the time to repent of his firm resolve, he
+went the very same day to the house of Bacchis, found the house empty,
+took the silver mirror and went off to the gardens.
+
+Was it necessary to make a direct call on Chrysis's second victim?
+Demetrios thought not. The priestess Touni, who owned the famous ivory
+comb, was so charming and so weak that he was afraid of repenting if he
+went straight to her house without any preliminary precautions, He
+retraced his steps and went along the Grand Terrace.
+
+The courtesans were on show in their "chambres exposee" like flowers in
+a shop window.
+
+Their altitudes and their costumes had no less diversity than their
+ages, types, and races. The most beautiful, according to the tradition
+of Phryne, leaving exposed nothing but the oval of their laces, sat
+enveloped from head to foot in their great garment of fine wool. Others
+had adopted the fashion of transparent robes, under which one
+distinguished their beauties mysteriously, just as, through limpid
+water, one discerns the green mosses lying in splashes of shade upon the
+bottom. Those whose sole charm consisted in their youthfulness sat naked
+to the waist, stiffening out their busts in order to display to the best
+advantage the firmness of their breasts. But the most mature, knowing
+that the features of the feminine visage age more quickly than the skin
+of the body, sat quite naked, holding their breasts in their hands, and
+stretching their clumsy thighs apart, as if they wished to prove that
+they were still women.
+
+[Illustration: Demetrios passed slowly before them.]
+
+Demetrios passed slowly before them, with unflagging admiration. He had
+never yet succeeded in contemplating a woman's nudity without intense
+emotion. He understood neither disgust before the corpse of a young
+woman nor insensibility to the body of a little girl. That evening any
+woman could have charmed him. Provided she remained silent and did not
+display more ardour than the minimum required by the etiquette of the
+bed, he was quite ready to forgive her for her lack of beauty. And what
+is more, he even preferred that she should have a coarse body, for the
+more his intelligence considered faultless forms, the less room was
+there for his sensual desires. The agitation which he felt upon contact
+with living beauty was due to a sensualism exclusively cerebral, which
+annihilated mere sexual excitation. He remembered with anguish having
+remained all night as impotent as an old man, by the side of the most
+admirable woman he had ever held in his arms. And since that night he
+had learnt to choose mistresses of less purity.
+
+"Friend," said a voice, "you don't recognise me?"
+
+He turned round with a negative sign, and went on his way, for he never
+undressed the same woman twice. It was the principle that guided his
+visits to the gardens. A woman one has not yet possessed retains
+something of the virgin; but what good result, what surprise can one
+expect from a second rendez-vous? It is almost marriage. Demetrios did
+not expose himself to the illusions of the second night. Queen Berenice
+sufficed for his rare conjugal impulses, and with that exception he was
+careful to choose a new accomplice for every evening's indispensable
+adultery.
+
+"Clonarion!
+
+Gnatene!
+
+Plango!
+
+Mnais!
+
+Crobyle!
+
+Ioessa."
+
+They cried their names as he passed, and some added protestations of
+their ardent natures or proposed an abnormal vice. Demetrios followed
+the road. He was preparing to choose at a venture, according to his
+habit, when a little girl entirely dressed in blue leaned her head upon
+her shoulder and said to him softly, without rising:
+
+"Is it quite out of the question?"
+
+The novelty of this mode of address made him smile. He stopped.
+
+"Open the door," he said. "I choose you."
+
+The little girl gleefully jumped to her feet and gave two raps with the
+phallus-shaped knocker. The door was opened by an old slave woman.
+
+"Gorgo," said the little girl, "I have got somebody; quickly, get some
+cakes and Cretan wine, and make the bed."
+
+She turned round to Demetrios.
+
+"You don't want any satyrion?"
+
+"No," said the young man laughing. "You have some?"
+
+"I have to keep it," said the child. "I am asked for it oftener than you
+think. Come this way; be careful of the steps, one of them is worn. Go
+into my room. I shall be back in a moment."
+
+The room was quite simple, like those of the novices. A great bed, a
+couch, a few seats and carpets composed all the scanty furniture; but
+through a large open bay there was a view over the gardens, the sea, the
+double harbour of Alexandria. Demetrios remained standing and looked at
+the distant city.
+
+
+Suns setting behind harbours! Incomparable glories of maritime cities,
+calm skies, purple waters! Upon what soul vociferous with joy or sorrow
+would you not cast a shroud of silence? What feet have not halted, what
+passions have not withered, what voices have not died away before you?
+. . . Demetrios looked; a swell of torrential flame seemed to issue from
+the sun, half dipping into the sea, and to flow straight to the left
+bend of the wood of Aphrodite. From horizon to horizon, the
+Mediterranean was flooded by the sumptuous purple spectrum which lay in
+sharply-defined hands of colour, golden red and dull violet side by
+side. Between this ever-shifting splendour and the peaty mirror of Lake
+Mareotis, stood the white mass of the town, bathed in red and violet
+reflexions. Its twenty thousand flat houses spreading in different
+directions picked it out marvellously with twenty thousand dashes of
+colour that underwent a perpetual metamorphosis according to the various
+phases of the setting luminary. The flaming sun shot forth rapid shafts,
+then was swallowed up, almost suddenly, in the sea, and with the first
+reflux of the night, there floated over the whole earth a thrill, a
+muffled breeze, uniform and transparent.
+
+
+"Here are figs, cakes, a piece of honeycomb, wine, a woman. Eat the figs
+while it is daylight and the woman when it is dark."
+
+It was the little girl, laughing as she entered. She bade the young man
+sit down, mounted astride on his knees, and stretching her two arms
+behind her head, made fast a rose which was on the point of slipping
+down from her auburn hair.
+
+In spite of himself Demetrios could not restrain an exclamation of
+surprise. She was completely naked, and when divested of her ample robe,
+her little body was seen to be so young, so infantine in the breast, so
+narrow at the hips, so visibly immature, that Demetrios felt a sense of
+pity, like a horseman on the point of throwing his man's weight upon an
+over-delicate mare.
+
+"But you are not a woman!" he exclaimed.
+
+"I am not a woman! By the two goddesses, what am I, then? A Thracian, a
+porter, or an old philosopher?"
+
+"How old are you?"
+
+"Ten and a half. Eleven. One may say eleven. I was born in the gardens.
+My mother is a Milesian. She is called Pythias, but she goes by the name
+of 'The Goat.' Shall I send for her, if you think me too little? Her
+house is not far from mine."
+
+"You have been to the Didascalion?"
+
+"I am still there in the sixth class. I shall have finished next year;
+and not too soon either."
+
+"Aren't you happy?"
+
+"Ah! if only you knew how difficult the mistresses are to please! They
+make you recommence the same lesson twenty times! Things perfectly
+useless that men never ask for. And then one is tired out, all for
+nothing. I don't like that at all. Come, take a fig; not that one, it is
+not ripe. I will show you a new way to eat. Look!"
+
+"I know it. It is longer and no better than the other way. I see that
+you are a good pupil."
+
+"Oh! I have learnt everything I know by myself. The mistresses would
+have us believe that they are cleverer than we are. They have more
+style, that may be, but they have invented nothing."
+
+"You have many lovers?"
+
+"They are all too old: it is inevitable. Young men are so foolish! They
+only like women forty years old. Now and again I see young men pretty as
+Eros pass by, and if you were to see what they choose! Hippopotami! It
+is enough to make one turn pale. I hope sincerely that I shall never
+reach these women's age: I should be too ashamed to undress. I am so
+glad to be still quite young. The breasts always develop too soon. I
+think that the first month I see my blood flow I shall feel ready to
+die. Let me give you a kiss. I like you very much."
+
+Here the conversation took a less serious if not a more silent turn, and
+Demetrios rapidly perceived that his scruples were beside the mark in
+the case of so expert a young lady. She seemed to realise that she was
+somewhat meagre pasturage for a young man's appetite, and she battled
+her lover by a prodigious activity of furtive finger-touches, which he
+could neither foresee nor elude, nor direct, and which never left him
+the leisure for a loving embrace. She multiplied her agile, firm little
+body around him, offered herself, refused herself, slipped and turned
+and struggled. Finally they grasped one another. But this half hour was
+merely a long game.
+
+She jumped out of bed the first, dipped her finger in the honey-bowl and
+moistened her lips; then, making a thousand efforts not to laugh, she
+bent over Demetrios and rubbed her mouth against his. Her round curls
+danced on either side of their cheeks. The young man smiled and leaned
+upon his elbow.
+
+"What is your name?" he asked.
+
+"Melitta. Did you not see my name upon the door?"
+
+"I did not look."
+
+"You can see it in my room. They have written it all over the walls. I
+shall soon be forced to have them repainted."
+
+Demetrios raised his head: the four panels of the chamber were covered
+with inscriptions.
+
+"That is very curious, indeed?" said he. "May one read?"
+
+"Oh, if you like. I have no secrets."
+
+He read. Melitta's name was there several times repeated, coupled with
+various men's names and barbaric drawings. Tender, obscene, or comic
+sentences jostled oddly with one another. Lovers boasted of their
+vigour, or detailed the charms of the little courtesan, or poked fun at
+her girl-friends. All this was interesting merely as a written proof of
+a general degradation. But, looking towards the bottom of the right-hand
+panel, Demetrios gave a start.
+
+"What is that? What is that? Speak!"
+
+"Who? What? Where?" said the child. "What is the matter with you?"
+
+"Here. That name. Who wrote that?"
+
+And his finger stopped under this double
+line.
+
+    [Greek: MELITTA .L. CHRYSIDA
+    CHRYSIS .L. MELITTAN]
+
+"Ah!" she answered, "that's me. I wrote that."
+
+"Who is she, Chrysis?"
+
+"My great friend."
+
+"I dare say. That is not what I ask you. Which Chrysis? There are many."
+
+"Mine, the most beautiful. Chrysis of Galilee."
+
+"You know her! you know her! But speak, speak! Where does she come from?
+Where does she live? who is her lover? Tell me everything!"
+
+He sat down upon the couch and took the little girl upon his knees.
+
+"You are in love, then?" she said.
+
+"That matters little to you. Tell me what you know; I am in a hurry to
+hear everything."
+
+"Oh! I know nothing at all. It is quite short. She has been to see me
+twice, and you may imagine that I have not asked her for details about
+her family. I was too happy to have her, and I did not lose time in
+conversation."
+
+"How is she made?"
+
+"Like a pretty girl, what do you expect me to say? Do you want me to
+name all the parts of her body, adding that everything is beautiful? And
+then, she is a woman, a real woman . . . Every time I think about her I
+desire somebody."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+And she put her arm round the neck of Demetrios.
+
+"Don't you know anything about her?" he began again.
+
+"I know--I know that she comes from Galilee, that she is nearly twenty
+years old, and that she lives in the Jews' quarter, in the east end,
+near the gardens. But that is all."
+
+"And about her life, her tastes? can you tell me nothing? She is fond of
+women, since she came to see you. But is she altogether Lesbian?"
+
+"Certainly not. The first night she passed here, she brought a lover,
+and I swear to you there was no make-believe about her. When a woman is
+sincere, I can see it by her eyes. That did not prevent her from
+returning once quite alone. And she has promised me a third night."
+
+"You don't know whether she has any other _amie_ in the gardens? Nobody?"
+
+"Yes, one of her countrywomen, Chimairis. She is very poor."
+
+"Where does she live? I must see her."
+
+"She has slept in the wood for upwards of a year. She has sold her
+house. But I know where her den is. I can take you to it if you wish.
+Put on my sandals, will you?"
+
+Demetrios rapidly buckled the plaited leather straps round Melitta's
+slender ankles. Then he handed her her short robe, which she merely
+threw over her arm, and they departed in haste.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+They walked far. The park was immense. From time to time, a girl under a
+tree proffered her name and opened her robe, then lay down again and
+leaned her face upon her hand. Melitta knew some of them: they embraced
+her without stopping her. Passing before a rustic altar, she gathered
+three great flowers and placed them upon the stone.
+
+[Illustration: "My little girl! my little love! how are you?"]
+
+It was not yet dusk. The intense light of summer days has something
+permanent about it which lingers vaguely in the slow twilight.
+
+The faint, humid stars, hardly brighter than the body of the sky,
+twinkled and throbbed gently, and the shadows of the branches remained
+indecisive.
+
+"Mamma! There's mamma," cried Melitta suddenly.
+
+A woman, dressed in a garment of triple muslin striped with blue, was
+seen advancing with a tranquil step, alone. As soon as she caught sight
+of the child she ran up to her, raised her off the ground, lifted her up
+in her arms, and kissed her energetically on the cheek.
+
+"My little girl! my little love! how are you?"
+
+"I am guiding somebody who wants to see Chimairis; And you? Are you out
+for a walk?"
+
+"Corinna is accouchee. I have been to see her. I have dined by her
+bedside."
+
+"And what has she given birth to? A boy?"
+
+"Two twin girls, my dear, as pink as wax dolls. You can go and see them
+to-night; she will show them to you."
+
+"Oh! how lovely! Two little courtesans. What are their names?"
+
+"They are both called Pannychis, because they were born on the day
+before the Aphrodisiae. It is a divine presage. They will be pretty."
+
+She replaced the child upon her feet, and turning to Demetrios:
+
+"What do you think of my daughter? Have I the right to be proud of her?"
+
+"You have the right to be satisfied with one another," he answered
+gravely.
+
+"Kiss mamma," said Melitta.
+
+He silently imprinted a kiss between her breasts. Pythias returned it to
+him upon the mouth, and they separated.
+
+Demetrios and the child advanced a few more paces beneath the trees,
+whilst the courtesan receded into the distance, turning her head as she
+walked. At last they reached their goal, and Melitta said:
+
+"It is here."
+
+Chimairis was sitting crouching upon her left heel, on a little
+grass-plot between two trees and a bust. A sort of red rag, her last
+remaining day garment, lay spread out beneath her. At night, she slept
+upon it naked, at the hour the men passed. Demetrios contemplated her
+with growing interest. She had the feverish aspect of certain emaciated
+dark women whose tawny bodies seem consumed by an ever-throbbing ardour.
+Her powerful lips, the excessive brilliancy of her glance, her livid
+eyelids combined to produce a double expression of sensual lustfulness
+and physical exhaustion. The curve of her hollow belly and her nervous
+thighs formed a natural cavity, designed as if to receive; and as she
+had sold everything, even her combs and pins, even her depilatory
+tweezers, her hair was tangled together in inextricable disorder. A
+black pubescence invested her nudity with a certain savage and shaggy
+effrontery.
+
+A great he-goat stood stiffly on its four legs beside her. It was
+tethered to a tree by a gold chain which had formerly glittered in a
+quadruple coil upon its mistress's breast.
+
+
+"Chimairis," said Melitta, "get up. Here is somebody who wishes to speak
+to you."
+
+The Jewess looked, but did not move.
+
+Demetrios advanced.
+
+"Do you know Chrysis?" he said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Do you see her often?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Will you talk to me about her?"
+
+"No."
+
+"What? No? What? you cannot?"
+
+"No."
+
+Melitta was stupefied.
+
+"Speak to him," she said. "Have confidence. He loves her, he wishes her
+well."
+
+"I see clearly that he loves her." answered Chimairis. "If he loves her,
+he wishes her ill. If he loves her, I shall not speak."
+
+Demetrios tingled with rage, but said nothing.
+
+"Give me your hand," said the Jewess. "It will tell me whether I am
+mistaken."
+
+She took the young man's left hand and turned it towards the moonlight.
+Melitta leaned forward to see, although she could not read the
+mysterious lines, but their fatality attracted her.
+
+"What do you see?" said Demetrios.
+
+"I see . . . Can I tell what I see? will you be obliged to me? First I see
+happiness, but it is all in the past. I also see love, but it is drowned
+in blood . . ."
+
+"In my blood?"
+
+"In a woman's blood. And then the blood of another woman. And then
+yours, a little later on."
+
+Demetrios shrugged his shoulders, and when he turned, he perceived
+Melitta fleeing down the alley at full speed.
+
+"It has given her a fright," said Chimairis.
+
+"But there is no question of Melitta or of me. Let things take their
+course, since nothing can be prevented. Your destiny was certain even
+before your birth. Go. I shall say no more." And she dropped his hand.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+LOVE AND DEATH
+
+
+"A woman's blood.  Afterwards another woman's blood. Afterwards yours,
+but a little later on."
+
+Demetrios repeated these words to himself as he walked, and in spite of
+himself, his belief in them weighed upon him. He had never had any faith
+in oracles drawn from the bodies of victims or the movements of planets.
+These affinities seemed too problematical. But the complex lines of the
+hand have, in themselves, an exclusively personal horoscopic aspect
+which he considered with uneasiness. The fortune-teller's prediction
+haunted his mind.
+
+In his turn, he examined the palm of his left hand, on which his life
+was summed up in secret and indelible signs.
+
+In the first place he saw, at the summit, a sort of regular crescent,
+the ends of which pointed towards the base of the fingers. Below this, a
+deep quadruple line, knotted and roseale, marked in two places by very
+red spots. Another line, but thinner, ran parallel to this at first, and
+then swerved brusquely round towards the wrist. Finally, a third line,
+short and clear, turned round the base of the thumb, which was entirely
+covered with thread-like markings. He saw all that; but, not being able
+to read the hidden symbol, he passed his hand over his eyes and changed
+the subject of his meditations.
+
+Chrysis! Chrysis! Chrysis! This name throbbed within him like a fever.
+Satisfy her, vanquish her, clasp her in his arms, fly with her
+elsewhere, to Syria, to Greece, to Rome, no matter where, provided it
+was a place where he had no mistress and she no lovers: that was the
+thing, and immediately, immediately.
+
+Of the three presents she had asked for, one was already in his
+possession. Remained the other two: the comb and the necklace.
+
+"The comb first," he said to himself.
+
+Every evening at sunset, the high priest's wife went forth and sat upon
+a marble seat, with her back turned to the forest and her face set to
+the great expanse of sea in front of her. Demetrios knew this well, for
+this woman, like so many others, had been in love with him, and she had
+told him that the day he chose to possess her it was there he would find
+her.
+
+It was to that spot, then, that he directed his steps. And there indeed
+she was; but she did not see him coming. She was sitting with her eyes
+shut, with her body thrown back upon the seat, and her arms hanging
+negligently by her sides.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+She was an Egyptian. Her name was Touni. She wore a light tunic of
+bright purple, without clasp or girdle, and without other adornments
+than two black stars to mark the points of her breasts. The thin tissue,
+ironed into pleats, terminated at the curve of the delicate knees, and
+little shoes of blue leather, fitting like gloves, covered her dainty
+round feet. Her skin was very swarthy, her lips very thick, her
+shoulders very small, and her fragile, supple waist seemed to bend under
+the weight of her full throat. She was asleep with her mouth open,
+dreaming peacefully.
+
+Demetrios, noiselessly, sat down on the bench, by her side.
+
+
+He slowly drew nearer and nearer, leaning over her, appreciating the
+delicate lines of her smooth, dark-skinned shoulders, slender at the
+summit, muscular near the armpit and joined to the bust by the shading
+of the bush beneath.
+
+Lower down, the long, loose slit of the purple muslin tunic was open as
+far as the hips. Through the gaping drapery, Demetrios slowly passed his
+hand, and his united finger-tips touched the curves of her left breast,
+damp with perspiration. Its nipple rose erect in the palm of his hand.
+Notwithstanding, Touni slept on.
+
+Her dream gradually changed, but did not fade. Her breath came quicker
+through her half open lips and she murmured a long, unintelligible
+sentence, as her fevered head fell back once more.
+
+With the same stealthy tenderness, Demetrios withdrew his hot hand, to
+let it be refreshed by the light breeze.
+
+[Illustration: She was asleep, dreaming peacefully.]
+
+From the vague outline of the blue garden slopes as far as the immense
+scintillation of the night, shuddered the eternal sea. Like unto another
+bosom of some fresh priestess, its undulations were swelling
+heavenwards, uplifted by the dreams of antiquity that still cause it to
+thrill in the sight of our belated glances. When the end of all things
+is nigh, the last living beings will try before they disappear to fathom
+the mysteries of the moving ocean.
+
+The moon inclined her great goblet of blood over the waters. Faraway, in
+the purest atmosphere that had ever united heaven and earth, a slight
+red trail, where black veins meandered, trembled on the surface of the
+waves beneath the rising orb of night, as when the agitation of a caress
+on a rounded breast, in the dead of night, remains long after the hand
+that caused it has been lifted.
+
+
+Touni still slumbered, her head leaning backwards, her body well-nigh
+naked, enshrouded in tinted muslin folds.
+
+The purple glare of the moon, as yet on the horizon, came over the sea
+towards the sleeping woman. The fatal, vivid rays lit her up with a
+flame that seemed immobile. Little by little, their brilliancy mounted,
+encircling the Egyptian girl. Her black curls appeared one by one, and
+finally the Comb flashed out of the darkness: the royal Comb that
+Chrysis coveted. The ivory diadem was now bathed in the glory of the
+crimson moonbeams.
+
+It was then that the sculptor took Touni's sweet face in both his hands,
+turning her features towards his own. Her eyes opened and became
+dilated.
+
+"Demetrios! Demetrios! Is it you? Oh! You have come at last! You are
+here!" she murmured, clasping him in her arms, as her voice rang with
+the accents of happiness. "Is it really you, Demetrios, whose hands
+awake me? Is it you, son of my goddess; God of my body and my life?"
+
+Demetrios made as if to retreat. With one bound, she was close to him
+again.
+
+"What do you fear?" she said. "For you I am not the woman before whom
+all tremble, because she is surrounded by the might of the High Priest.
+Forget my name, Demetrios. In their lovers' arms, women have no name. I
+am no longer what you think. I am nothing but a woman who loves and
+whose yearning for you fills her frame as far as the points of her
+breasts."
+
+Demetrios did not open his lips.
+
+"Listen to me a little while longer," she went on. "I know who enthralls
+you. I will not even be your mistress, nor make the least attempt to
+rival the queen. No, Demetrios. Do with me as you will. Take me like
+some little slave-wench that a man possesses for a few minutes, leaving
+her afterwards with a remembrance that becomes oblivion. Take me like
+the lowest poverty-stricken harlot who, crouching by the roadside,
+awaits the charity of some furtive and brutal attack of lust.  After all,
+what am I to place myself above those women? Have the Immortals given me
+anything more than that with which they have endowed the most servile of
+all my slaves? You, at least, are Beauty incarnate, with its out
+spreading emanations of the Gods."
+
+Demetrios, more steadfastly serious than before, pierced her with his
+glance.
+
+"Wretched creature, what do you suppose emanates from the Gods, if it be
+not.--"
+
+"Love!"
+
+"Or Death!"
+
+"What mean you?" she exclaimed, starting to her feet. "Death! Yes, Death
+indeed! But it is so far off for me! In sixty years' time, I'll think of
+my end. Why speak to me of Death, Demetrios?"
+
+"Death this very night!" he said quietly.
+
+She laughed outright, in sheer fright.
+
+"To-night? No, no! Who says so? Why should I die? Answer me! Speak! What
+means this vile mockery?"
+
+"You are condemned."
+
+"By whom?"
+
+"By your destiny."
+
+"How know you that?"
+
+"Because my destiny is interwoven with yours, Touni."
+
+"Is it my fate to die now?"
+
+"It is your lot to die by my hand, on that bench."
+
+He seized her wrist.
+
+"Demetrios!" she stammered, affrighted. "I'll not shriek! I'll not call
+for aid! Only let me speak first!" She wiped the sweat from her brow.
+"If death--should come from you--death will be sweet--for me. I accept
+it; I desire it, but hearken!"
+
+Staggering from stone to stone, she led him away in the dark night of
+the woods.
+
+"Since in your hands are all the gifts of the Gods," she continued, "the
+first thrill of life and the final throb of agony, let both your palms,
+bestowing all they hold, be opened to my eyes, Demetrios. Give me the
+hand of Love as well as that of Death. If you do this, I die without
+regret."
+
+There was no reply in the vague look he gave her, but she thought she
+read the "Yes" he had not uttered.
+
+Transfigured a second time, she lifted towards him a new face, where
+desire, born again, drove, with the strength of desperation, all terror
+away.
+
+[Illustration: "Demetrios!" she stammered, affrighted.]
+
+She spoke no more, but already between her lips that were never to close
+again, each breath she drew sang a soft song, as if she was beginning to
+feel the deepest voluptuousness of love before even being gripped in the
+conjunction she craved.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Nevertheless, she gained this supreme victory.
+
+With one movement, she tore off her light tunic and rolled it up into a
+ball of muslin that she threw behind her, smiling with scarce a vestige
+of sadness. Her young and slender body was outstretched in such great
+and lively felicity that it was impossible for it not to be eternal, and
+as her preoccupied lover, who perhaps was merely anxiously hesitating,
+terminated the work of Love without beginning that of Death, she
+suddenly exclaimed:
+
+"Ah! Kill me! Kill me, I say, Demetrios! Why do you tarry?"
+
+He rose up a little, resting on his hands; looked once more at Touni,
+whose great eyes peered ecstatically in his face, from beneath him, and
+drawing out one of the long, golden hairpins that glittered behind her
+ears, he drove it deliberately home under her left breast.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+MOONLIGHT
+
+
+Nevertheless, this woman would have given him her comb and her hair
+also, for love's sake.
+
+If he did not ask for it, it was because he had scruples. Chrysis had
+very categorically demanded a crime, and not such or such old jewel
+stuck in a young woman's hair. That is why he considered it his duty to
+consent to bloodshed.
+
+He might have reflected, too, that the vows one makes to women during
+the first heat of passion may be forgotten in the interval without any
+great detriment to the moral worth of the lover who has sworn them, and
+that if ever this involuntary forgetfulness deserved to be excused it
+was certainly in a case where the life of another woman, assuredly
+innocent, was also in the scales. But Demetrios did not trouble himself
+with this method of reasoning. The adventure upon which he was engaged
+seemed to him too curious to allow of his juggling away its violent
+incidents. He was afraid that, later on, he might regret having cut out
+of the plot a scene which, though short, was indispensable for the
+beauty of the ensemble. A feeble truckling to virtue is often all that
+is required to reduce a tragedy to the common-places of everyday
+existence. The death of Cassandra, he mused, is not absolutely necessary
+for the development of Agamemnon; but if it had not taken place, the
+whole Orestes Trilogy would have been spoilt.
+
+And so, after cutting the storied comb out of Touni's hair, he stowed it
+away in his garments, and, without further reflection thereon, undertook
+the third of the labours ordained by Chrysis: the seizing of Aphrodite's
+necklace.
+
+It was useless to dream of entering the temple by the main door. The
+twelve hermaphrodites who guarded the entrance would certainly have
+allowed Demetrios to pass, in spite of the order directing the exclusion
+of every profane person in the absence of the priests; but he had no
+need to prove his future guilt in this ingenuous manner, since a secret
+entrance led to the sanctuary.
+
+Demetrios betook himself to a part of the wood which sheltered the
+Necropolis of the high priests of the goddess. He counted the first
+tombs, opened the door of the seventh, and closed it again behind him.
+
+With great difficulty, for the stone was heavy, he raised the
+burial-slab under which a marble staircase plunged down into the earth,
+and he descended step by step.
+
+He knew that sixty paces were to be made in a straight line, and that
+afterwards it would be necessary to feel one's way along the wall in
+order not to knock against the subterranean staircase of the temple.
+
+The exceeding freshness of the deep earth calmed him little by little.
+
+In a few minutes he arrived at the limit.
+
+He mounted the stairs, and pushed open the trap-door.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The night was clear without, and pitch dark within the divine enclosure.
+When he had softly and carefully closed the resounding door, a chill
+fell upon him, and he felt as though hemmed in by the coldness of the
+stones. He dared not raise his eyes. This black silence terrified him:
+the darkness became alive with the unknown. He put his hand to his
+forehead like a man who does not want to awake for fear of finding
+himself among the living. At last he looked.
+
+He saw, in a glory of moonbeams, the dazzling figure of the goddess. She
+stood upon a pedestal of pink stone laden with pendent treasures. She
+was naked and fully sexed, vaguely tinted with the natural colours of
+woman. With one hand, she held a mirror with a priapus handle, and with
+the other she adorned her beauty with a seven-stringed pearl necklace.
+One pearl larger than the others, long and silvery, shone between her
+two nipples like a nocturnal crescent between two rounded clouds. And
+they were the real sacred pearls born of the water-drops which had
+rolled into the shell of Anadyomene.
+
+[Illustration: Demetrios lost himself in ineffable adoration.]
+
+Demetrios lost himself in ineffable adoration. He believed in very truth
+that Aphrodite herself was there. He did not recognise his handiwork,
+for the abyss between what he had been and what he had become was
+profound. He stretched out his arms and murmured the mysterious words of
+prayer which are used in the Phrygian ceremonies.
+
+Supernatural, luminous, impalpable, naked, and pure, the vision floated
+upon the stone, palpitated gently. He fixed his eyes upon it, dreading
+lest the caress of his glance should cause this frail hallucination to
+dissolve into thin air. He advanced very softly, touched the pink heel
+with his finger, as if to make sure of the statue's existence, and,
+incapable of resisting the powerful attraction it exercised upon him,
+mounted to its side, laid his hands upon the white shoulders, and gazed
+into its eyes.
+
+He trembled, he grew faint, he began to laugh with joy. His hands
+wandered over the naked arms, pressed the hard, cold bust, descended
+along the legs, caressed the globe of the belly. He hugged this
+immortality to his breast with all his might. He looked at himself in
+the mirror, he lifted up the pearl necklace, he took it off, he made it
+glitter in the moonlight, and put it back again, fearfully. He kissed
+the bended hand, the round neck, the wave-like throat, the parted marble
+lips. Then he stepped back to the edge of the pedestal, and, taking the
+divine arms in his hands, tenderly gazed at the adorable head.
+
+
+The hair was dressed in the Oriental style, and veiled the forehead
+slightly. The half-closed eyes prolonged themselves in a smile. The lips
+were parted, as in the swoon of a kiss. He silently arranged the seven
+rows of pearls upon the glittering breast, and descended to the ground
+to contemplate the idol at a distance.
+
+Then he became conscious of an awakening. He remembered what he had come
+to do, what he had wished to accomplish, what he had barely escaped
+accomplishing: a monstrous deed. He flushed to the temples.
+
+The recollection of Chrysis passed before his memory like a vision of
+grossness. He enumerated all the flaws in her beauty: the thick lips the
+heavy knees, the loose gait. He had forgotten what her hands were like;
+but he imagined them large, to add an odious detail to the image he
+abhorred. His mental state became similar to that of a man surprised at
+dawn by his mistress in the bed of an ignoble prostitute, and unable to
+explain to himself how he had allowed himself to be tempted the night
+before. He could find neither an excuse nor a serious reason. Evidently,
+throughout one day, he had been the victim of a sort of temporary
+madness, a physical perturbation, a disease. He felt that he was cured,
+though still drunk with giddiness.
+
+In order to complete his recovery, he planted himself against the temple
+wall and remained standing for a long time before the statue. The light
+of the moon continued to descend through the square opening in the roof;
+Aphrodite was resplendent; and, as the eyes were veiled in shade, he
+sought to meet their glance.
+
+
+The whole night passed thus. Then daylight came and the statue took on
+in succession the rosy lividness of the dawn and the gilded reflection
+of the sun.
+
+Demetrios had ceased to think. The ivory comb and the silver mirror
+which he carried in his tunic had slipped from his memory. He abandoned
+himself voluptuously to serene contemplation.
+
+Outside, a tempest of bird-songs twittered, whistled, sang in the
+garden. Women's voices were heard, talking and laughing at the foot of
+the walls. The bustle of the early morning arose from the awakened
+earth. Demetrios experienced nothing but feelings of bliss.
+
+The sun was already high, and the shadow of the roof had already shifted
+when he heard a confused sound of light feet upon the outer flight of
+steps.
+
+It was doubtless a sacrifice to be offered to the goddess, a procession
+of young women coming to carry out or utter vows before the statue, for
+the first day of the Aphrodisiae. Demetrios resolved to fly.
+
+The sacred pedestal opened at the back, in a way known only to the
+priests and the sculptor. It was there that the hierophant stood to
+dictate to a young girl whose voice was clear and high the miraculous
+discourses which issued from the statue on the third day of the fete.
+Thence one might reach the gardens. Demetrios entered, and stopped
+before the bronze-plated openings which pierced the massive stone.
+
+The two golden doors swung heavily open. Then the procession entered.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE INVITATION
+
+
+Towards the middle of the night, Chrysis was awakened by three knocks at
+the door.
+
+She had slept all day between the two Ephesians, and, but for the
+disorder of their bed, they might have been taken for three sisters
+together. The Galilaean's thigh, bathed in perspiration, rested heavily
+upon Rhodis nestling up against her hostess. Myrtocleia was asleep upon
+her breast, with her face in her arm and her back uncovered.
+
+A sound of voices was heard in the entrance. Chrysis disengaged herself
+with great care, stepping over her companions, and getting down from the
+couch, held the door ajar.
+
+"Who is it, Djala? Who is it?" she asked.
+
+"It is Naukrates who wants to see you. I have told him you are not at
+liberty."
+
+"What nonsense! Certainly I am at liberty! Enter, Naukrates, I am in my
+room."
+
+And she went back to bed.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+Naukrates remained for some time on the threshold, as if fearing to
+commit an indiscretion. The two music-girls opened their sleep laden
+eyes and made efforts to tear themselves away from their dreams.
+
+"Sit down," said Chrysis. "There is no need for coquetry between us. I
+know that you do not come for me. What do you want of me?"
+
+Naukrates was a philosopher of repute, who had been Bacchis's lover for
+more than twenty years, and did not deceive her, more from indolence
+than fidelity. His grey hair was cut short, his beard pointed a la
+Demosthenes, and his moustache cropped so as not to hide his lips. He
+wore a large white garment made of simple wool with a plain stripe.
+
+"I am the bearer of an invitation," he said. "Bacchis is giving a dinner
+to-morrow, to be followed by a fete. We shall be seven, with you. Don't
+fail to come."
+
+"A fete? A propos of what?"
+
+"She is to liberate her most beautiful slave, Aphrodisia. There will be
+dancing-girls and flute-girls. I think that your two friends are engaged
+to be there, and, as a matter of fact, they ought not to be here now.
+The rehearsal is going on at Bacchis's at this very moment."
+
+"Oh! it is true," cried Rhodis, "we had forgotten about it. Get up,
+Myrto, we are very late."
+
+But Chrysis protested.
+
+"No, not yet! how disagreeable of you to steal away my women. If I had
+suspected that, I would not have let you in. Why, they are actually
+ready!"
+
+"Our robes are not complicated," said the child. "And we are not
+beautiful enough to spend much time in dressing."
+
+"I shall see you at the temple, of course?"
+
+"Yes, to-morrow morning, we are going to offer doves. I am taking a
+drachma out of your purse, Chrysis, otherwise we should have nothing to
+buy them with. Good-bye till to-morrow."
+
+
+They ran out. Naucrates considered for a short time the door that had
+just closed upon them; then he folded his arms and, turning round to
+Chrysis, said in a low voice:
+
+"Good. Your behaviour is charming."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"One woman is not enough for you. You must have two, now. You even pick
+them up in the street. It is a noble example you are setting. But kindly
+tell me what is to become of us men? You have all got little _amies_,
+and after quitting their insatiable arms, you have just as much passion
+to offer as they are willing to leave you. Do you think this can go on
+indefinitely? If things continue like this, we shall be forced to apply
+to Bathyllos . . ."
+
+"Ah! no!" cried Chrysis. "You will never get me to admit that! I know
+well that people make the comparison, but it is entirely absurd; and I
+am astonished that you, who pretend to be a thinker, do not understand
+how ridiculous it is."
+
+"And what difference do you see?"
+
+"It is not a question of difference. There is no connection between the
+one and the other: that's clear!"
+
+"I do not say you are wrong. I want to know your reasons."
+
+"Oh! I can tell them you in two words: listen carefully. From the point
+of view of love, woman is a perfect instrument. From head to foot she is
+constructed, solely, marvellously, for love. She alone knows how to
+love. She alone knows how to be loved. Consequently, if a couple of
+lovers is composed of two women, it is perfect; if there is only one
+woman, it is only half as good; if there is no woman at all, it is
+purely idiotic. That is all I have to say."
+
+"You are hard on Plato, my girl."
+
+"Great men are not, any more than the gods, great under all
+circumstances. Pallas understands nothing about painting; Plato did not
+know how to love. Philosophers, poets, or rhetoricians, all who follow
+him, are as worthless as their master, and however admirable they may be
+in their art, in love they are devoid of knowledge. Believe me,
+Naukrates, I feel that I am right."
+
+The philosopher made a gesture.
+
+[Illustration: "I can tell Bacchis that she may count on you?" he said.]
+
+"You are somewhat wanting in reverence," he said; "but I do not by any
+means think you are wrong. My indignation was not real. There is
+something charming in the union of two young women, on condition that
+they both consent to remain feminine, keep their hair long, uncover
+their breasts, and refrain from arming themselves with adventitious
+instruments, as if they were illogically envious of the gross sex for
+which they profess such a pretty contempt. Yes, their liaison is
+remarkable because their caresses are entirely superficial, and the
+quality of their sensual satisfaction is all the more refined. They do
+not clasp one another in a violent embrace, they touch one another
+lightly in order to taste of the supreme joy. Their wedding-night is not
+defiled with blood. They are virgins, Chrysis. They are ignorant of the
+brutal action; this constitutes their superiority over Bathyllos, who
+maintains that he offers the equivalent, forgetting that you also, even
+in this sorry respect, could enter into competition with him. Human love
+is to be distinguished from the rut of animals only by two divine
+functions: the caress and the kiss. Now these are the only two functions
+known to the women in question. They have even brought them to
+perfection."
+
+"Excellent," said Chrysis in astonishment. "But then what have you to
+reproach me with?"
+
+"My grievance is that there are a hundred thousand of you. Already a
+great number of women only derive perfect pleasure from their own sex.
+Soon you will refuse to receive us altogether, even as a makeshift. It
+is from jealousy that I blame you."
+
+
+At this point Naukrates considered that the conversation had lasted long
+enough, and he rose to his feet, simply.
+
+"I can tell Bacchis that she may count on you?" he said.
+
+"I will go," answered Chrysis.
+
+The philosopher kissed her knees and slowly went out.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Then she joined her hands together and spoke aloud though she was alone.
+
+"Bacchis . . . Bacchis . . . he comes from her house and he does not know!
+The mirror is still there, then! . . . Demetrios has forgotten me . . . If
+he has hesitated the first day, I am lost, he will do nothing. But is it
+possible that all is finished? Bacchis has other mirrors which she uses
+more often. Doubtless she does not know yet. Gods! Gods! no means of
+having news, and perhaps . . . Ah! Djala! Djala!"
+
+The slave-woman entered.
+
+"Give me my knuckle-bones," said Chrysis. "I want to tell my own
+fortune."
+
+She tossed the four little bones into the air.
+
+
+"Oh . . . Oh . . . Djala, look! the Aphrodite throw!"
+
+
+This was the name given to a very rare throw whereby all the
+knuckle-bones presented a different face. The odds against this
+combination were exactly thirty-five to one. It was the best throw in
+the game.
+
+Djala remarked coldly:
+
+"What did you ask for?"
+
+"It is true," said Chrysis, disappointed. "I forgot to wish. I certainly
+had something in my mind, but I said nothing. Does that count all the
+same?"
+
+
+"I think not; you must begin again."
+
+Chrysis cast the bones again.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"The Midas throw, this time. What do you think of that?"
+
+"One cannot tell. Good or bad. It is a throw which is interpreted by the
+next one. Now start with a single bone."
+
+Chrysis consulted the game a third time; but as soon as the bone fell,
+she stammered:
+
+"The . . . the Chian ace!"
+
+And she burst into sobs.
+
+Djala too was uneasy, and said nothing. Chrysis wept upon the bed, with
+her hair lying in confusion about her head. At last she turned round
+angrily.
+
+"Why did you make me begin again? I am sure the first throw counted."
+
+"If you wished, yes. If not, no. You alone know," said Djala.
+
+"Besides, the bones prove nothing. It is a Greek game. I don't believe
+in it. I shall try something else."
+
+She dried her tears and crossed the room. She took a box of white
+counters from a shelf, counted out twenty-two, then with the point of a
+pearl clasp, engraved in succession the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew
+alphabet. They were the arcana of the Cabbala she had learnt in Galilee.
+
+"I have confidence in this. This does not deceive", she said. "Lift up
+the skirt of your robe; I will use it as a bag."
+
+
+She cast the twenty-two counters into the slave's tunic, repeating
+mentally:
+
+"Shall I wear Aphrodite's necklace? Shall I wear Aphrodite's necklace?
+Shall I wear Aphrodite's necklace?"
+
+And she drew the tenth arcanam, and this signified plainly:
+
+"Yes."
+
+[Illustration: An old white-bearded priest preceded the youthful band.]
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+CHRYSIS'S ROSE
+
+
+It was a procession, white and blue and yellow and pink and green.
+
+Thirty courtesans advanced, bearing baskets of flowers, snow-white doves
+with red feet, veils of the most fragile azure, and precious ornaments.
+
+An old white-bearded priest, swathed to the head in stiff unbleached
+cloth, preceded the youthful band and guided the line of bending
+worshippers to the altar of stone.
+
+They sang, and their song languished like the sea, sighed like a
+southern breeze, panted like an amorous mouth. The first two carried
+harps which they rested upon the hollow of their left hand and which
+curved forward like sickles of slender wood.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+One of them advanced and said:
+
+
+"Tryphera, O beloved Cypris, offers thee this blue veil which she has
+woven herself, that thou mayest continue to deal gently with her."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+
+Another:
+
+"Mousarion places at thy feet, O goddess of the beautiful coronal, these
+wreaths of wall-flowers and this bouquet of drooping daffodils. She has
+borne them in the orgie and has invoked thy name in the wild ecstasy of
+their perfumes, O! victorious one! have respect to these spoils of
+love."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+
+Yet another:
+
+"As an offering to thee, golden Cytherea, Timo consecrates this spiral
+bracelet. Mayest thou entwine vengeance round the throat of her thou
+wottest of, even as this silver serpent entwined itself around her naked
+arms."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+
+Myrtocleia and Rhodis advanced, holding one another by the hand.
+
+"Here are two doves of Smyrna, with wings white as caresses, with feet
+red as kisses.
+
+"O! double goddess of Amathontis, accept them of our joined hands, if it
+be true that the tender Adonis is not alone sufficient for thee and that
+sometimes thy sleep is retarded by a yet sweeter embrace."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+
+A very young courtesan followed:
+
+
+"Aphrodite Peribasia, receive my virginity with this blood-stained
+tunic. I am Pannychis of Pharos: I have dedicated myself to thee since
+last night."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+
+Another:
+
+
+"Dorothea conjures thee, O charitable Epistrophia to remove far from her
+spirit the desire that Eros has implanted in it, or else to inflame for
+her the eyes of him that says her nay. She offers thee this branch of
+myrtle, because it is the tree thou lovest best."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+
+Another:
+
+"On thine altar, O Paphia, Callistion places sixty silver drachmae, the
+balance of four minae she received from Cleomenos. Give her a lover
+still more generous if thou thinkest it a goodly offering."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+There remained before the altar only a blushing little child who had
+occupied the last place in the procession. She held nothing in her hand
+but a little crocus wreath, and the priest scorned her for the poverty
+of her offering.
+
+She said:
+
+"I am not rich enough to give you silver coins, O glittering Olympian
+goddess. Besides, what could I give thee that thou lackest? Here are
+flowers, yellow and green, pleated into a wreath for thy feet. And
+now . . ."
+
+
+She unbuckled the clasps of her tunic; the tissue slipped down to the
+ground and she stood revealed quite naked.
+
+
+"I dedicate myself to thee body and soul, beloved goddess. I desire to
+enter thy gardens and die a courtesan of the temple. I swear to desire
+naught but love, I swear to love but to love, I renounce the world and I
+shut myself up in thee."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Then the priest covered her with perfumes and enveloped her nudity in
+the veil woven by Tryphera. They left the nave together by the door
+opening into the gardens.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The procession seemed at an end, and the other courtesans were about to
+retrace their steps when another woman, a belated arrival, was seen upon
+the threshold. She had nothing in her hand, and it seemed as if she also
+had naught but her beauty to offer. Her hair appeared as two streams of
+gold, two deep waves full of shade, which engulfed the ears and were
+twisted in seven rolls over the back of the neck. The nose was delicate,
+with expressive nostrils which palpitated at times over a thick painted
+mouth, the corners rounded and throbbing. The flexible line of the body
+undulated at every step, animated by the rolling of the hips or the
+oscillation of the breasts, under which bent the supple waist.
+
+Her eyes were extraordinary: blue but dark and bright at the same time,
+changing and glinting like moonstones, half closed under drooping lashes.
+Those eyes looked, as sirens sing . . .
+
+The priest turned towards her, waiting for her to speak.
+
+She said:
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"Chrysis, O Chryseia, supplicates thee. Accept the poor gifts she lays
+at thy feet. Hear, love, and solace her that lives after thine example
+and for the cult of thy name, and grant her her prayers."
+
+She held out her hands gilded with rings, and bent low with her legs
+close together.
+
+The vague cantiele began again. The murmur of the harps rose up towards
+the statue with the swirling fumes of crackling incense from the
+priest's censer.
+
+[Illustration: "To thee, O Hetaira! . . . Chrysis consecrates her
+necklace."]
+
+She drew herself up slowly to her full height and offered a bronze
+mirror which hung from her girdle.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"To thee, Astarte of the Night, that joinest hand to hand and lip to
+lip, and whose symbol is like to the footprint of the deer upon the pale
+soil of Syria, Chrysis consecrates her mirror. It has seen the haggard
+darkness of the eyelids and the glitter of the eyes after love, the hair
+glued to the temples by the sweat of thy battles, O! warrior-queen of
+ruthless hand, thou that joinest body to body and mouth to mouth."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The priest laid the mirror at the feet of the statue. Chrysis drew from
+her golden hair a long comb of red copper, the planetary metal of the
+goddess.
+
+"To thee," she said, "Anadyomene, born of the rosy dawn and the
+sea-foam's smile; to thee. O nudity shimmering with tremulous pearls,
+that didst bind thy dripping hair with ribbons of green seaweed, Chrysis
+consecrates her comb. It has plunged into her hair tossed by thy
+convulsions, O furiously-panting mistress of Adonis, that furrowest the
+camber of the loins and racks the stiffening knee!"
+
+ * * * * *
+
+She gave the comb to the old man and inclined her head to the right in
+order to take off her emerald necklace.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"To thee", she said, "O! Hetaira, that drivest away the blushes of
+shamefaced maidens and promptest the lewd laugh, for whom we sell the
+love that streams from our entrails, Chrysis consecrates her necklace.
+It was given to her for her fee by a man whose name she knows not, and
+each emerald is a kiss on which thou hast lived an instant."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+[Illustration]
+
+She made a last and more prolonged reverence, put the collar into the
+priest's hand and took a step as if to depart.
+
+The priest stayed her:
+
+"What do you ask of the goddess for these precious offerings?"
+
+She shook her head, smiled, and said:
+
+"I ask nothing."
+
+Then she passed along the procession, stole a rose from a basket, and
+put it in her mouth as she went out.
+
+One by one all the women followed. The door closed upon the empty temple.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Demetrios remained alone, concealed in the bronze pedestal.
+
+He had not lost a gesture or a word of all this scene, and when
+everything was over, he remained motionless for a long time, harassed by
+new torments, passionate, irresolute.
+
+He had thought himself quite cured of his madness of the night before,
+and had believed that henceforth nothing could throw him a second time
+into the ardent shadow of this strange woman.
+
+But he had counted without her.
+
+Women! O women! if you wish to be loved, show yourselves, return,
+present yourselves! The emotion he had felt on her entrance was so
+entire and overwhelming that it was out of the question to dream of
+struggling against it by a violent effort of the will. Demetrios was
+bound like a barbarian slave to a triumphal car. The idea of escape was
+an illusion. Without knowing it, and quite naturally, she had made him
+her captive.
+
+He had seen her coming in the distance, for she wore the same yellow
+robe she had had on the quay. She walked with low, supple steps and with
+languid undulations of the hips. She had come straight to him, as if she
+had divined him behind the stone.
+
+He realised from the first instant that he was ready once more to fall
+at her feet. When she drew the mirror of polished bronze from her
+girdle, she looked at herself in it for the last time before giving it
+to the priest, and the brilliancy of her eyes became stupefying. When,
+in order to take her copper comb, she laid her hand upon her hair and
+raised her bended arm, in conformity with the gesture of the Graces, the
+beautiful line of her body revealed itself under the tissue, and the sun
+illumined a tiny dew of brilliant sweat under her armpit, finally, when,
+in order to lift up and unbuckle her necklace of heavy emeralds, she
+parted the pleated silk that veiled her double bosom down to the sweet
+shade-hidden place that admits of nothing more than a bouquet being
+slipped into it, Demetrios was seized with such a frenzied desire to put
+his lips upon it and tear off the whole dress that . . . But Chrysis began
+to speak.
+
+She spoke, and every one of her words was torture to him. She seemed
+wantonly to insist and enlarge upon the prostitution of the vase of
+beauty that she was, white as the statue itself, and full of overflowing
+gold streaming down in a shower of hair. She told how her door was open
+to the lounging passer-by, how her body was delivered over to the
+contemplation of the unworthy, how the task of firing her cheeks with
+the flush of passion was committed to clumsy children. She spoke of the
+venal fatigue of her eyes, of her lips hired by the night, of her hair
+entrusted to brutal hands, of her divinity crucified.
+
+Even the exceeding facility of her access was a charm in Demetrios's
+eyes, though he was resolved to use it solely for his own benefit and to
+close the door behind him. For it is profoundly true that a woman only
+reaches the utmost limit of her seductiveness when she gives occasion
+for jealousy.
+
+And so, having given the goddess her green necklace in exchange for the
+one she hoped tor. Chrysis returned to the town carrying a human will in
+her mouth, like the little stolen rose whose stalk she was nibbling.
+
+Demetrios waited until he was left alone in the temple; then he issued
+forth from his retreat.
+
+He looked at the statue apprehensively, expecting an infernal inward
+struggle. But, being incapable of renewing a violent emotion at so short
+an interval of time, he once mere became astonishingly calm, without
+premature remorse. Negligently, tranquilly, he climbed close up to the
+statue, took the necklace of true pearls from off Anadyomene's neck, and
+slipped it into his raiment.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE TALE OF THE ENCHANTED LYRE
+
+
+He walked very rapidly, hoping to overtake Chrysis in the road which led
+to the town. He was afraid that if he delayed any further he might once
+again lose his courage and his power of will.
+
+The white, hot road was so luminous that Demetrios closed his eyes as if
+the midday sun was shining. He was walking in this way without looking
+in front of him, when he narrowly escaped colliding with four black
+slaves who were marching at the head of a fresh procession. Suddenly a
+musical little voice said softly:
+
+"Well-beloved, how glad I am!"
+
+He raised his head: it was Queen Berenice leaning on her elbow in her
+litter.
+
+She gave the order:
+
+"Stop, porters!"
+
+And held out her arms to her lover.
+
+
+Demetrios was greatly put out, but he could not refuse, and he got in
+sulkily.
+
+Then Queen Berenice, beside herself with joy, crawled on her hands and
+knees to the far end, and rolled in the cushions like a playful kitten.
+
+For this litter was a chamber carried by four and twenty slaves. It
+afforded ample room for twelve women to recline in it at random, upon a
+thick blue carpet strewn with stuffs and cushions; and its height was so
+great that one could not touch the roof, even with the tip of one's fan.
+Its length was greater than its width, and it was closed in front and on
+the three sides by very fine yellow curtains which scintillated with
+light. The back was of cedar-wood, draped in a long veil of
+orange-coloured silk. At the top of this splendid wall, the great golden
+hawk of Egypt hung grimly with its two wings extended to their full
+extent. Lower down, carved in ivory and silver, the antique symbol of
+Astarte gaped above a lighted lamp whose rays strove with the daylight
+in elusive reflections. Underneath, lay Queen Berenice, fanned on either
+side by two Persian slave women, waving two tufts of peacock's feathers.
+
+
+She beckoned the young sculptor to her side with her eyes, and repeated:
+
+"Well-beloved, I am happy!" She stroked his cheek.
+
+"I was looking for you, well-beloved. Where were you? I have not seen
+you since the day before yesterday. If I had not met you I should soon
+have died of grief. I was so unhappy all alone in this great litter. I
+have thrown all my jewels over the bridge of Hermes, to make circles in
+the water. You see I have neither rings nor necklace. I look like a
+little pauper at your feet."
+
+
+She turned round to him and kissed him on the mouth.
+
+The two fan-bearers sat down upon their haunches a little further off,
+and when Queen Berenice began to speak in a low tone, they put their
+fingers close to their ears in order to make a semblance of not hearing.
+But Demetrios did not answer, barely listened, remained like one
+bewildered. He saw of the young queen nothing but the red smile of her
+mouth and the black cushion of her hair which she always wore loosely
+bound in order to be able to rest her weary head upon it.
+
+[Illustration: But Demetrios did not answer.]
+
+She said:
+
+
+"Well-beloved, I have wept during the night. My bed was cold. When I
+awoke, I stretched my naked arms to my two sides and I did not find you,
+and my hand nowhere met the hand I embrace to-day. I waited for you in
+the morning, and you had not been since the full moon. I sent slaves
+into all the quarters of the town and I had them executed when they came
+back without you. Where were you? were you at the temple? you were not
+in the garden with those strange women? No, I see by your eyes that you
+have not loved. Then what were you doing far away from me? You were
+before the statue? Yes, I am sure you were there. You love it more than
+me now. It is exactly like me, it has my eyes, my mouth, my breasts, but
+it is the statue that you treasure. I am a poor deserted woman. I weary
+you, and I see it well. You think of your marble and your ugly statues
+as if I were not more beautiful than all of them, and, in addition,
+alive, amorous, and tender, ready to grant you whatever you are willing
+to accept, resigned whenever you refuse. But you want nothing. You have
+refused to be a king, you have refused to be a god and be adored in a
+temple of your own. You almost refuse to love me now."
+
+She gathered her feet under her and leaned upon her hand.
+
+
+"I would do anything to see you at the palace, Well-beloved. If you do
+not want me any longer, tell me who it is that attracts you, she shall
+be my friend. The . . . the women of my court . . . are beautiful. I have a
+dozen also who have been kept in ignorance of the very existence of men.
+They shall all be your mistresses if you will come to see me after
+them. . . And I have others with me who have had more lovers than the sacred
+courtesans and are expert in love. Choose which you will, I have also a
+thousand foreign slave-women; you shall have any of them you please. I
+will dress them like myself, in yellow silk and silver.
+
+"But no, you are the most beautiful and the coldest of men. You love no
+one, you suffer yourself to be loved, you lend yourself, out of charity,
+to those who are captured by your eyes. You permit me to have my
+pleasure of you, but as an animal allows itself to be milked, looking
+somewhere else all the time. Ah! Gods! Ah! Gods! I shall end by being
+able to do without you, young coxcomb that the whole town adores, and
+from whom no woman can draw tears. I have other than women at the
+palace; I have sturdy Ethiopians with chests of bronze and arms bulging
+out with muscles. In their embrace, I shall soon forget your womanish
+legs and your pretty beard. The spectacle of their passion will
+doubtless be a new one for me, and I shall give my amorousness a rest.
+But the day I am certain that your eyes have ceased to trouble me by
+their absence, and that I can replace your mouth, then I shall despatch
+you from the top of the bridge of Hermes to join my necklace and my
+rings like a jewel I have worn too long. Ah! what it is to be a queen!"
+
+She sat up and seemed as if waiting. But Demetrios remained impassive,
+and did not move a muscle, as if he had not heard her. She resumed
+angrily:
+
+"You have not understood?"
+
+He leaned carelessly upon his elbow and said quietly and unmovedly:
+
+"I have thought of a tale.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"Long ago, long before the conquest of Thrace by your father's
+ancestors, it was inhabited by wild beasts and a few timorous men.
+
+"The animals were very beautiful: there were lions tawny as the sun,
+tigers striped like the evening, and bears black as night.
+
+"The men were little and flat-nosed, covered with old, worn skins, armed
+with rude lances and bows without beauty. They shut themselves up in
+mountain holes, behind huge stones which they moved with difficulty.
+They passed their lives at the chase. There was blood in the forests.
+
+"The country was so forlorn that the gods had deserted it. When Artemis
+left Olympus in the whiteness of the morning, she never took the path
+which would have led her to the North. The wars which were waged there
+did not disturb Ares. The absence of pipes and flutes repelled Apollo.
+The triple Hecate alone shone in solitude, like the face of a Medusa
+upon a petrified land.
+
+"Now, there came to live in that country a man of more favoured race,
+one who did not dress in skin like the mountain savages.
+
+"He wore a long white robe which trailed behind him a little. He loved
+to wander at night in the calm forest-glades by the light of the moon,
+holding in his hand a little tortoise-shell in which were fixed two
+auroch-horns. Between these horns were stretched three silver strings.
+
+"When his fingers touched the strings, delicious music passed over them,
+much sweeter than the sound of fountains, or the murmur of the wind in
+the trees, or the swaying of the barley. The first time he played, three
+sleepy tigers awoke, so prodigiously charmed that they did him no harm,
+but approached as near as they could and retired when he ceased. On the
+morrow there were many more, and wolves also, and hyenas, and snakes
+poised upright on their tails.
+
+"After a very short time the animals came of their own accord, and
+begged him to play to them. A bear would often come quite alone to him
+and go away enchanted on hearing three marvellous chords. In return for
+his favours, the wild beasts provided him with food and protected him
+against the men.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"But he tired of this tedious life. He became so certain of his genius,
+and of the pleasure he afforded to the beasts, that he ceased to care to
+play well. The animals were always satisfied, so long as it was he who
+played. Soon he refused even to give them this satisfaction, and stopped
+playing altogether, from indifference. The whole forest mourned, but for
+all that the musician's threshold did not lack savoury meats and fruits.
+They continued to nourish him, and loved him all the more. The hearts of
+beasts are so constructed.
+
+"Now one day, he was leaning against his open door, looking at the
+sunset behind the motionless trees, when a lioness happened to pass by.
+He took a step inside as if he feared tiresome solicitations. The
+lioness did not trouble about him, and simply passed by.
+
+"Then he asked her in astonishment; 'Why do you not beg me to play?' She
+answered that she cared nothing about it. He said to her: 'Do you not
+know me?' She answered: 'You are Orpheus.' He answered: 'And you don't
+want to hear Me?' She repeated, 'No.' 'Oh!' he cried, 'oh! how I am to
+be pitied! It is just for you that I should have liked to play. You are
+much more beautiful than the others, and you must understand so much
+better. If you will listen to me one little hour, I will give you
+everything you can dream of.' She answered: 'Steal the fresh meats that
+belong to the men of the plain. Assassinate the first person you meet.
+Take the victims they have offered to your gods, and lay all at my
+feet.' He thanked her for the moderation of her demands, and did what
+she required.
+
+"For one hour he played before her: but afterwards he broke his lyre and
+lived as if he were dead."
+
+The queen sighed:
+
+"I never understand allegories. Explain it to me, Well-beloved. What
+does it mean?"
+
+
+He rose.
+
+
+"I do not tell you this in order that you may understand. I have told
+you a tale to calm you a little. It is late. Good-bye, Berenice."
+
+She began to weep.
+
+"I was sure of it! I was sure of it!"
+
+
+He laid her like a child upon her soft bed of luxurious stuffs,
+imprinted a smiling kiss upon her unhappy eyes, and tranquilly descended
+from the great litter without stopping it.
+
+
+
+
+Book III
+
+
+I
+
+THE ARRIVAL
+
+
+Bacchis had been a courtesan for more than twenty-five years. That is
+equivalent to saying that she was nearly forty, and that her beauty had
+changed its character several times.
+
+Her mother, who had long been the directress of the house and her
+general adviser, had given her principles of conduct and economy which
+had enabled her gradually to acquire a great fortune, which she was in a
+position to spend freely, at an age when the magnificence of the bed
+supplies the place of physical splendour.
+
+Thus it was that instead of buying adult slaves at the market at a high
+rate, an expense which so many others considered necessary, and which
+ruined the young courtesans, she had been content for ten years with a
+single negress, and had provided for the future by making her beget a
+child every year, in order to create for herself, for nothing, a
+numerous staff of domestics who should be a source of riches later on.
+
+As she had chosen the father with care, seven very beautiful mulatto
+girls had been born of her slave, and also three boys whom she had
+killed, because male slaves give useless suspicions to jealous lovers.
+She had named the seven daughters after the seven planets, and had
+chosen them diverse functions, in harmony, as far as possible, with the
+names they bore. Heliope was the slave for the day-time, Selene for the
+night, Aretias guarded the door, Aphrodisia tended the bed, Hermione did
+the buying, and Cronomagira, the cooking. Finally, Diomeda, the
+housekeeper, kept the books and superintended the staff.
+
+Aphrodisia was the favourite slave, the prettiest and best-loved. She
+often shared her mistress's bed at the request of lovers who took a
+fancy to her. Consequently, she was dispensed from all servile work in
+order that her arms might be kept delicate and her hands soft. By an
+exceptional favour, her hair was not covered, so that she was often
+taken for a free woman, and that very night she was to be freed in
+reality at the enormous price of thirty-five minae.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Bacchis's seven slaves, all tall and admirably trained, were such a
+source of pride to her that she never went out without having them in
+her train, at the risk of leaving her house empty. Thanks to this
+imprudence, Demetrios had been able to enter her house without
+difficulty; but when she gave the festival to which Chrysis was invited
+she was still in ignorance of the calamity.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+That evening Chrysis was the first arrival.
+
+She was dressed in a green robe worked with enormous rose-branches which
+flowered over her breasts.
+
+Aretias opened the door for her without her having to knock, and,
+according to the Greek custom, took her aside into a little room, untied
+her red shoes, and gently washed her naked feet. Then, raising the robe,
+or parting it, according to the place, she perfumed wherever there was
+necessity for it: for the guests were spared every kind of trouble, even
+that of making their toilette before going in to dinner. Then she
+offered a comb and pins to restore the lines of her head-dress, together
+with cosmetics, both dry and moist, for her lips and cheeks.
+
+At last, when Chrysis was ready:
+
+"Where are the _shades_?" she said to the slave.
+
+This was the term applied to all the diners, except to one alone, the
+guest par excellence. The guest in honour of whom the dinner was given
+brought whomsoever he pleased with him, and the "shades" had nothing to
+do but to bring their bed-cushions and prove themselves people of
+breeding.
+
+Aretias answered:
+
+"Naukrates has invited Philodemos with his mistress, Faustina, whom he
+has brought back from Italy. He has also invited Phrasilas and Timon,
+and your friend Seso of Cuidos."
+
+[Illustration: Aretias opened the door for her]
+
+Seso entered at this precise moment.
+
+"Chrysis!"
+
+"My darling!"
+
+The two women embraced, and enlarged with many an exclamation upon the
+happy chance which had brought them together.
+
+"I was afraid of being late," said Seso. "That poor Archytas has kept
+me. . ."
+
+"What, Archytas again?"
+
+"It is always the same thing. Whenever I go out to dine, he imagines
+that my body is to be at everybody's disposal in turn. Then he insists
+on having his revenge beforehand, and that takes such a time! Ah! my
+dear, if he knew me better! I am far from wanting to deceive my lovers.
+I have quite enough of them as it is."
+
+"And the baby that is coming? It does not show yet, however."
+
+"I hope not indeed. It is the third month. It is growing, the little
+wretch. But it does not bother me yet. In six weeks I shall begin to
+dance. I hope that will prove very unpleasant to it, and that it will
+disappear quickly."
+
+"You are right," said Chrysis. "Don't let your shape get disfigured. I
+saw Philemation yesterday, our former little friend, who lived three
+years at Boubaste with a grain merchant. Do you know the first thing she
+said to me? 'Ah! if you saw my breasts!' and she had tears in her eyes.
+I told her she was still pretty, but she repeated: 'If you saw my
+breasts! ah! ah! if you saw my breasts!' weeping like a Byblis. Then I
+saw that she was almost anxious to show them, and I asked to see them.
+My dear, two empty bags! And you know what beauties she had. They were
+so white that the points were invisible. Don't spoil yours, my Seso.
+Leave them fresh and firm as they are. A courtesan's two breasts are
+worth more than her necklace."
+
+
+During this conversation, the two women were making their toilette.
+Finally they entered the banqueting-room together, where Bacchis was
+standing waiting, with her waist encircled by breast-bands and her neck
+loaded with rows of gold necklaces reaching up to the chin.
+
+"Ah, my pretty dears, what a good idea on the part of Naukrates to
+invite you both together this evening!"
+
+"We congratulate ourselves on its being to your house that we are
+invited," answered Chrysis without appearing to understand the innuendo.
+And, in order to say something venomous immediately, she added:
+
+"How is Doryclos?"
+
+Doryclos was a young and extremely rich lover who had just deserted
+Bacchis to marry a Sicilian woman.
+
+[Illustration: "Ah, my pretty dears, what a good idea . . ."]
+
+"I . . . I have turned him away," said Bacchis, brazenly.
+
+"Is it possible?"
+
+"Yes; they say he is going to marry out of spite. But I expect him the
+day after his marriage. He is madly in love with me."
+
+While asking: "How is Doryclos?" Chrysis had thought: "Where is your
+mirror?" But Bacchis did not look one in the face, and the only
+expression to be read in her eyes was a vague embarrassment devoid of
+meaning. Besides, there was time for Chrysis to elucidate this question,
+and, in spite of her impatience, she knew how to wait with resignation
+for a more favourable opportunity.
+
+She was about to continue the conversation, when she was prevented by
+the arrival of Philodemos, Faustina, and Naukrates, which involved
+Bacchis in fresh interchanges of politeness. They fell into ecstasies
+over the poet's embroidered garment and the diaphanous robe of his
+mistress. This young girl, being unfamiliar with Alexandrian usage, had
+thought to Hellenize herself in this manner, not knowing that a dress of
+the kind was inadmissible at a festival where hired dancing-women,
+similarly unclothed, were to appear.
+
+Bacchis affected not to notice this error, and in a few amiable phrases
+complimented Faustina on her heavy blue hair swimming in brilliant
+perfumes. She wore her hair raised high above the neck in order to avoid
+staining her light silken stuffs with myrrh.
+
+They were about to sit down to table when the seventh guest arrived; it
+was Timon, a young man whose want of principle was a natural gift, but
+who had discovered in the teaching of the philosophers of his time some
+superior reasons for self-satisfaction.
+
+"I have brought someone with me," he said laughing.
+
+"Whom?" asked Bacchis.
+
+"A certain Demo, a girl from Mendes."
+
+"Demo! What can you be thinking of, my dear fellow? She is a street
+girl. She can be had for a fig."
+
+"Good, good. We won't insist on it." said the young man.  "I have just
+made her acquaintance at the corner of the Canopic way. She asked me to
+give her a dinner, and I brought her to you. If you don't want her. . ."
+
+"Timon is really extraordinary," declared Bacchis.
+
+She called a slave:
+
+"Heliope, go and tell your sister that she will find a woman at the door
+and that she is to drive her away with a stick. Off you go!"
+
+She turned and looked round:
+
+"Has not Phrasilas come yet?"
+
+
+
+II.
+
+THE DINNER
+
+
+At these words, a sickly little man, with a grey forehead, grey eyes,
+and a small, grey beard, advanced with little steps and said smiling:
+
+"I was there."
+
+
+Phrasilas was a polygraph of repute of whom it would have been difficult
+to say exactly whether he was a philosopher, a graminarian, a historian,
+or a mythologist. He undertook the most weighty studies with timid
+ardour and ephemeral curiosity. Write a treatise he dare not. Construct
+a drama he could not. His style had something hypocritical, finniking,
+and vain. For thinkers he was a poet; for poets he was a sage: for
+society he was a great man.
+
+
+"Come! to table!" said Bacchis. And she lay, down with her lover upon
+the bed which stood at the head of the banqueting board. On her right,
+reclined Philodemos and Faustina with Phrasilas. On Naukrates's left,
+Seso, then Chrysis and young Timon. Each one of the guests reclined in a
+diagonal position, leaning upon silken cushions and wearing wreaths of
+flowers upon their heads. A slave-girl brought the garlands of red roses
+and blue lotus-flowers, then the banquet began.
+
+Timon felt that his freak had chilled the women. He therefore did not
+speak to them at first, but, addressing Philodemos, said gravely:
+
+"They say you are the devoted friend of Cicero. What do you think of
+him, Philodemos? Is he an enlightened philosopher or a mere compiler,
+without discernment and without taste? for I have heard both opinions
+put forward."
+
+"It is precisely because I am his friend that I cannot answer your
+question," said Philodemos. "I know him too well; consequently I know
+him ill. Ask Phrasilas, who, having read him but little, will judge him
+without error."
+
+"Well, what docs Phrasilas think about it?"
+
+"He is an admirable writer," said the little man.
+
+"In what sense?"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"In the sense that all writers, Timon, are admirable in something, like
+all landscapes and all souls. I cannot prefer the spectacle of the sea
+itself to the most monotonous plain. And so I am unable to classify in
+the order of my sympathies a treatise by Cicero, an ode of Pindar, and a
+letter written by Chrysis, even if I knew the style of our excellent
+little friend, when I put down a book, I am content if I carry away in
+my memory a single line which has given me food for thought. Hitherto,
+all the books I have opened have contained that line: but no book has
+ever given me a second. Perhaps each of us has only one thing to say in
+his life, and those who have attempted to speak at greater length have
+done so because they were inflated by ambition. How much more do I
+regret the irreparable silence of the millions of souls who have said
+nothing."
+
+"I am not of your opinion," said Naukrates, without lifting his eyes.
+"The universe was created for the expression of three verities, and to
+our misfortune, their certitude was proved five centuries before this
+evening. Heraclitos has solved the riddle of the world; Parmenides has
+unmasked the soul; Pythagoras has measured God; we have nothing left us
+but to hold our tongues. I consider the chickpea very rash."
+
+
+Seso lightly tapped the table with the handle of her fan.
+
+"Timon, my friend," she said.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Why do you propound questions without any interest either for me who am
+ignorant of Latin, or for yourself who want to forget it? Do you fancy
+you can dazzle Faustina with your foreign erudition? My poor fellow, I
+am not the woman to be duped by your words. I undressed your great soul
+last night under my bed-clothes, and I know the chickpea it concerns
+itself with."
+
+"Do you think so?" said the young man, simply.
+
+But Phrasilas began a second little couplet, with a suave, ironical
+intonation.
+
+"Seso, when you think fit to give us the pleasure of judging Timon,
+whether to applaud him, as he deserves, or to blame him, unjustly in my
+opinion, remember that he is an invisible being and that the nature of
+his soul is hidden from us. It has no existence in itself, or at least
+we cannot know it; but it reflects the souls of those that mirror
+themselves in it, and changes its aspect when it changes its place. Last
+night it resembled you exactly; I am not astonished you were pleased
+with it. Just now it took the image of Philodemos; that is why you have
+just said it belied itself. Now it certainly does not belie itself,
+because it does not affirm itself. You see my dear, that we ought to
+beware of rash judgments."
+
+Timon shot a glance of irritation at Phrasilas, but he reserved his
+reply.
+
+"However that may be," answered Seso, "there are four of us courtesans
+here, and we intend to direct the conversation, in order that we may not
+resemble pink children who only open their mouths to drink milk.
+Faustina, you arrived the last, please begin."
+
+"Very good," said Naukrates. "Choose for us, Faustina. What shall we
+talk about?"
+
+The young Italian woman turned her head, raised her eyes, blushed, and
+with an undulation of her whole body, sighed:
+
+"Love."
+
+"A very pretty subject," said Seso, trying not to laugh.
+
+But no one took it up.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The table was covered with wreaths, flowers, tankards, and jugs. Slaves
+brought wicker baskets, containing bread as light as snow. On
+terra-cotta plates were to be seen fat eels sprinkled with seasoning,
+wax-coloured alphests, and sacred beauty-fish.
+
+There was also a pompilus, a purple fish which was supposed to have
+sprung from the same foam as Aphrodite, bebradons, a grey mullet served
+up with calmars, multi-coloured scorpenas Some were brought in their
+little sauce-pans, in order that they might be eaten foaming hot; fat
+tunnyfish, hot devil-fish with tender tentacles, slices of lamprey;
+finally the belly of a white electric eel, round as that of a beautiful
+woman.
+
+Such was the first course. The guests chose little tit-bits from each
+fish, and left the rest to the slaves.
+
+
+"Love," began Phrasilas, "is a word which has no meaning, or rather too
+much, for it designates in turn two irreconcilable feelings: sensual
+gratification and passion. I do not know in what sense Faustina takes
+it."
+
+[Illustration: "I like to have the sensual gratification."]
+
+"For my part," interrupted Chrysis, "I like to have the sensual
+gratification, and to leave passion to my lovers. We must speak both of
+one and the other, or my interest will only be partial."
+
+"Love," murmured Philodemos, "is neither passion nor sensual
+gratification. Love is something quite different."
+
+"Oh, for Heaven's sake," exclaimed Timon, "let us have a banquet for
+once without philosophies. We are aware, Phrasilas, that you can uphold
+with graceful eloquence and honeyed persuasiveness the superiority of
+multiple pleasure over exclusive passion. We are aware also that after
+having spoken for a full hour on such a thorny question, you would be
+ready, during the next hour, with the same graceful eloquence and the
+same honeyed persuasiveness, to defend the arguments of your adversary.
+I do not . . ."
+
+"Allow me . . ." said Phrasilas.
+
+"I do not deny," continued Timon, "the charm of this little sport, or
+even the wit you bring to bear on it. I have my doubts as to its
+difficulty, and consequently as to its interest. The _Banquet_ you
+published some time ago and incorporated in a story of lighter tone, and
+also the reflexions you placed recently in the mouth of a mythical
+personage who resembles your ideal, seemed new and rare in the reign of
+Ptolemy Auletes. But for three years we have been living under the young
+Queen Berenice, and I know not by what transformation the method of
+thought you had adopted, that of an illustrious exegetical critic,
+harmonious and smiling, has suddenly grown a century older under your
+pen, like the fashion of tight sleeves and yellow hair. Excellent
+master, I deplore it, for if your stories lack fire, if your experience
+of the female heart is not worth serious consideration, on the other
+hand you are gifted with the comic spirit, and I am grateful to you for
+having made me smile."
+
+"Timon!" cried Bacchis in indignation.
+
+Phrasilas motioned to her to be silent.
+
+"Let him alone, my dear. Unlike most men, I retain only the eulogistic
+portion of the judgments people pass upon me. Timon has given me his;
+others will praise me on other points. It would be impossible to live in
+the midst of unanimous approbation, and I regard the very variety of the
+sentiments I provoke as a charming flower-bed in which I desire to
+breathe the scent of the roses without tearing up the spurge."
+
+
+Chrysis moved her lips in a way which showed clearly how slight was the
+value she set on this man and his cleverness at terminating disputes.
+She turned towards Timon, who shared her bed with her, and put her hand
+on his neck. "What is the aim of life?" she asked him.
+
+It was the question she usually asked when she was at a loss what to say
+to a philosopher; but this time she introduced a tender note into her
+voice, and Timon fancied he detected a declaration of love.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Nevertheless he answered with a certain calm:
+
+"Each one has his own object in life, my Chrysis. There is no object
+universal and common to all beings. For my part, I am the son of a
+banker whose clientele is composed of all the great courtesans of Egypt,
+and, my father having amassed an enormous fortune by ingenious methods,
+I restore it honourably to the victims of his favours by sleeping with
+them as often as the strength the Gods have given me allows me to do so.
+I have decided that my energy is only susceptible of performing one duty
+in life. I have chosen this duty because it combines the exigencies of
+the rarest virtue with contrary satisfactions that another ideal would
+support less easily."
+
+During this speech he had slipped his right leg behind those of Chrysis,
+who was lying on her side, and he tried to part the closed knees of the
+courtesan as if to give a precise object to existence for that evening.
+But Chrysis did not humour him.
+
+
+There was a silence for several minutes; then Seso began to speak.
+
+"Timon, it is very annoying of you to interrupt at the very beginning
+the only serious conversation of which the subject is capable of
+interesting us. At any rate, let Naukretes speak, since you are so
+spiteful."
+
+"What shall I say about love?" answered the Guest par excellence. "It is
+the name given to sorrow to console those who suffer. There are only two
+ways of being unhappy: either we desire what we have not, or we possess
+what we desired. Love begins with the first, and comes to an end with
+the second, in the most lamentable state, that is to say, as soon as it
+succeeds. May the gods preserve us from love!"
+
+"But to possess unexpectedly," said Philodemos, smiling; "is not that
+true felicity?"
+
+"What a rarity!"
+
+"Not at all, if one is careful. Listen to me, Naukrates: not to desire,
+but to act in such a way that the opportunity offers itself; not to
+love, but to cherish from a distance certain well-chosen women for whom
+one feels one might have a taste in the long run, if chance and
+circumstances combined to throw them into one's arms; never to adorn a
+woman with qualities one wants her to have, or with beauties of which
+she makes a mystery, but always to take the insipid for granted in order
+to be astonished by the exquisite. Is not this the best advice a sage
+can give to lovers? They only have lived happily who, in the course of
+their dear existences, have been wise enough occasionally to reserve for
+themselves the priceless purity of unforeseen joys."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The second course was drawing to a close. There had been pheasants,
+attagas, a magnificent blue and red porphyris, and a swan with all its
+feathers, the cooking of which had been spread over forty-eight hours so
+as not to burn its wings. Upon curved plates one saw phlexids, pelicans,
+a while peacock which seemed to be sitting on a dozen and a half of
+roast and stuffed spermologues; in a word, enough food to feed a hundred
+persons on the fragments left behind after the choice pieces had been
+set aside. But all this was nothing compared with the last dish.
+
+This chef-d'ouvre (such a work of art had not been seen for many a long
+day at Alexandria) was a young pig, of which one half had been roasted
+and the other boiled. It was impossible to distinguish the wound which
+had provoked its death, or by what means its belly had been stuffed with
+everything it contained. It was stuffed with round quails, chicken
+breasts, field-larks, succulent sauces, and slices of vulva and
+mince-meat. The presence of all these things in an animal apparently
+intact seemed inexplicable.
+
+The guests uttered an unanimous cry of admiration, and Faustina asked
+for the recipe. Phrasilas smilingly delivered himself of sententious
+metaphorical maxims; Philodemos improvised a distich in which the word
+[Greek: choiros] was taken alternately in both senses. This made Seso,
+already drunk, laugh till the tears flowed, but Bacchis having given the
+order to pour seven rare wines into seven cups for the use of each
+guest, the conversation strayed.
+
+
+Timon turned to Bacchis:
+
+"Why," he asked, "should you have been so hard on the poor girl I wanted
+to bring with me? She was a colleague, nevertheless. If I were in your
+place, I should respect a poor courtesan more highly than a rich
+matron."
+
+"You are mad," said Bacchis, without discussing the question.
+
+"Yes, I have often noticed that those who, once in a way, venture to
+utter striking truths, are taken for lunatics. Paradoxes find everybody
+agreed."
+
+"Nonsense, my friend; ask your neighbours, where is the man of birth who
+would choose a girl without jewels as his mistress."
+
+"I have done it," said Philodemos with simplicity.
+
+And the women despised him.
+
+"Last year," he went on, "at the end of spring, Cicero's exile gave me
+good reason to fear for my own safety, and I took a little journey. I
+retired lo the foot of the Alps, to a charming place named Orobia, on
+the borders of the little lake Clisius. It was a simple village with
+barely three hundred women, and one of them had become a courtesan in
+order to protect the virtue of the others. Her house was to be
+recognised by a bouquet of flowers hanging over the door, but she
+herself was indistinguishable from her sisters or cousins. She was
+ignorant of the very existence of paint, perfumes, cosmetics,
+transparent veils and curling-tongs. She did not know how to preserve
+her beauty, and depilitated herself with pitchy resin just as one pulls
+up weeds from a courtyard of white marble. One shudders at the thought
+that she walked without boots, so that it was impossible to kiss her
+naked feet as one kisses Faustina's, softer than one's hand. And yet I
+discovered so many charms in her that beside her brown body I forgot
+Rome for a whole month and blessed Tyre and Alexandria."
+
+Naukrates nodded approval, took a draught of wine, and said:
+
+"The great event in love is the instant when nudity is revealed.
+Courtesans should know this and spare us surprises. Now, it would seem
+on the contrary that they devote all their efforts to disillusioning us.
+Is there anything more painful than a mass of hair bearing traces of the
+curling irons? Is there anything more disagreeable than painted cheeks
+that leave the marks of the cosmetics on the mouth that kisses them! Is
+there anything more pitiable than a pencilled eye with the charcoal half
+rubbed off? Strictly speaking, I can understand chaste women using these
+illusory devices: every woman likes to surround herself with a circle of
+male adorers, and the chaste ones amongst them do not run the risk of
+familiarities which would unmask the secrets of their physique. But that
+courtesans whose end and resource is the bed, should venture to show
+themselves less beautiful in it than in the street is really
+inconceivable."
+
+"You know nothing about it, Naukrates," said Chrysis with a smile. "I
+know that one does not keep one lover out of twenty; but one does not
+seduce one man out of five hundred, and before pleasing in the bed one
+must please in the street. No one would notice us if we did not rouge
+our faces and darken our eyes. The little peasant-girl Philodemos speaks
+of, attracted him without difficulty because she was alone in her
+village. There are fifteen thousand courtesans here. The competition is
+quite another thing."
+
+"Don't you know that pure beauty has no need of adornment, and suffices
+for itself?"
+
+"Yes. Well, institute a competition between a pure beauty, as you say,
+and Gnathene, who is old and plain. Dress the former in a tunic covered
+with holes and set her in the last row at the theatre, and put the
+latter in her star-embroidered robe in the places reserved by her
+slaves, and note their prices at the end of the performance: the pure
+beauty will get eight obols and Gnathene two minae."
+
+"Men are stupid," Seso concluded.
+
+"No, simply lazy. They do not take the trouble to choose their
+mistresses. The best-loved women are the most mendacious."
+
+"But if," suggested Phrasilas, "but if, on the one hand, I should
+willingly applaud . . ."
+
+And he delivered himself, with great charm, of two set discourses
+entirely devoid of interest.
+
+
+One by one, twelve dancing girls appeared, the two first playing the
+flute and the last the timbrel, the others manipulating castanets. They
+arranged their bandelets, rubbed their little sandals with white resin,
+and waited with extended arms for the music to begin . . . A note . . . two
+notes . . . a Lydian scale, and the twelve young girls shot forward to the
+accompaniment of a light rhythm.
+
+Their dance was voluptuous, languorous, and without apparent order,
+although all the figures had been settled beforehand. They confined
+their evolutions to a small space: they intermingled like waves. Soon
+they formed in couples, and without interrupting the step, unfastened
+their girdles and let their pink tunics glide to the ground. An odour of
+naked women spread about the men, dominating the perfume of the flowers
+and the steam of the gaping viands. They threw themselves backwards with
+brusque movements, with their bellies tightly drawn, and their arms over
+their eyes. Then they straightened themselves up again and hollowed
+their loins, and touched one another, as they passed, with the points
+of their dancing breasts. Timon's hand received the fugitive caress of
+a hot thigh.
+
+[Illustration: Soon they formed in couples.]
+
+"What does our friend think about it?" said Phrasilas with his piping
+voice.
+
+"I feel perfectly happy," answered Timon.
+
+"I have never before so clearly understood the
+supreme mission of women."
+
+"And what is it?"
+
+"Prostitution, either with or without art."
+
+"That is only an opinion."
+
+"Phrasilas, once again, we know that nothing can be proved: worse still,
+we know that nothing exists, and that even that is not certain. This
+being conceded and in order to satisfy your celebrated mania, permit me
+to hold a theory at once contestable and antiquated, as all of them are,
+but interesting to me, who affirm it, and to the majority of men, who
+deny it. In the ease of thought, originality is an ideal still more
+chimerical than certitude. You are aware of that."
+
+"Give me some Lesbian wine," said Seso to the slave. "It is stronger
+than the other."
+
+"I maintain," Timon went on, "that the married woman, by devoting
+herself to a man who deceives her, by refusing herself to all others (or
+by committing adultery very rarely, which comes to the same thing), by
+giving birth to children who deform her before they see the light and
+monopolise her when they are born,--I maintain that by living thus a
+woman destroys her life without merit, and that on her wedding-day a
+young girl concludes a dupe's bargain."
+
+"She acts in fancied obedience to a duty," said Naukrates without
+conviction.
+
+"A duty? and to whom? Is she not free to settle a question which
+concerns nobody but herself? She is a woman, and in virtue of her sex is
+generally insensible to the pleasures of the intellect; and not content
+with remaining a stranger to one half of human joys, she excludes
+herself, by her marriage, from the other aspect of pleasure. Thus a
+young girl can say to herself, at the age when she is all passion: 'I
+shall know my husband, and in addition, ten lovers, perhaps twelve', and
+believe that she will die without having regretted anything? Three
+thousand women will not be enough for me on the day I take my leave of
+life."
+
+"You are ambitious," said Chrysis.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"But with what incense, with what golden poesy," exclaimed the gentle
+Philodemos, "should we not praise to eternity the beneficent courtesans!
+Thanks to them, we escape all the complicated precautions, the
+jealousies, the stratagems, the throbbings of the heart that accompany
+adultery. It is they who spare us hours of waiting in the rain, rickety
+ladders, secret doors, interrupted meetings, and intercepted letters and
+misunderstood signals. O! dear creatures, how I love you! With you there
+are no sieges to be undertaken: for a few little coins you give us what
+another would hardly be capable of granting us as a condescension, after
+three weeks of coldness. For your enlightened souls, love is not a
+sacrifice, it is an equal favour exchanged by two lovers, and so the
+sums we confide to you do not serve to compensate you for your priceless
+caresses, but to pay at its proper price for the multiple and charming
+luxury with which, by a supreme complaisance, you pacify nightly our
+ravenous passions. As you are innumerable, we always find amongst you
+both the dream of our lives and our fancy for the evening, all women at
+a day's notice, hair of every shade, eyes of every colour, lips of every
+savour. There is no love under heaven so pure that you cannot feign it,
+nor so revolting that you dare not propose it. You are tender to the
+disreputable, consolatory to the afflicted, hospitable to all, and
+beautiful! That is why I tell you, Chrysis, Bacchis, Seso, Faustina,
+that it is a just law of the gods which decrees that courtesans shall be
+the eternal desire of lovers and the eternal envy of virtuous spouses."
+
+
+The dancing-girls had ceased dancing.
+
+
+A young girl-acrobat had just entered, who juggled with daggers and
+walked on her hands between the upright blades.
+
+
+As the attention of the guest was entirely absorbed by the lassie's
+dangerous sport, Timon looked at Chrysis, and gradually, without being
+seen, manoevered so that he lay behind her at full length and touched
+her with his feet and mouth.
+
+"No," said Chrysis in a low voice, "no, my friend."
+
+But he had slipped his arm around her through the large slit in her robe
+and was carefully caressing the reclining courtesan's delicate, burning
+skin.
+
+"Wait," she implored. "We shall be seen. Bacchis will be angry."
+
+[Illustration: She let herself slip down from the bed.]
+
+A glance convinced the young man that he was not being watched. He
+ventured upon a caress after which women rarely resist when once they
+have allowed things to go so far. Then, in order to quench by a decisive
+argument the last scruples of expiring modesty, he put his purse in her
+hand, which happened by chance to be open.
+
+
+Chrysis resisted no longer.
+
+
+Meanwhile the young acrobat continued her subtle and dangerous tricks.
+She walked upon her hands, with her skirt reversed, with her feet
+dangling in front of her head, between sharp swords and long keen
+blades. The effort occasioned by this critical posture, and perhaps also
+the fear of wounds, flooded her cheeks with dark warm blood, which
+heightened still further the glitter of her wide-open eyes. Her waist
+bent and straightened itself again. Her legs parted like the arms of a
+dancing girl.
+
+
+A violent respiration agitated her naked breast.
+
+"Enough," said Chrysis briefly: "you have only excited me a little. Let
+us have no more of it. Leave me. Leave me."
+
+And at the moment when the two Ephesians rose, according to the
+tradition, to play _The Fable of Hermaphroditus_, she let herself slip
+down from the bed and went out feverishly.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+RHACOTIS
+
+
+Hardly had the door closed upon her than Chrysis pressed the inflamed
+centre of her desire with her hand as one presses a sore spot to relieve
+shooting pains. Then she leaned up against a column and twisted her
+fingers, groaning with anguish.
+
+She would never know anything, then!
+
+As the hours passed, the improbability of her success increased, became
+flagrant. Brusquely to ask for the mirror was a very risky method of
+discovering the truth. In case it should have been taken, she would
+attract the suspicions of all to herself, and would be lost. On the
+other hand, she had left the banqueting hall out of sheer impatience.
+
+Timon's clumsinesses had merely served to exasperate her dumb rage. A
+trembling fit due to over-excitement compelled her to apply her whole
+body to the freshness of the smooth, monstrous column. She felt an
+attack coming on and was afraid.
+
+She called the slave Arelias:
+
+"Keep my jewels for me: I am going out."
+
+And she descended the seven stone steps.
+
+
+The night was hot. Not a breath of wind to fan the heavy beads of sweat
+upon her forehead. The disappointment increased her discomfort and made
+her reel.
+
+She walked along down the street.
+
+
+Bacchis's house was situated at the extremity of Brouchion, on the
+limits of the native town, an enormous slum inhabited by sailors and
+Egyptian women. The fishermen, who slept upon their vessels anchored
+during the crippling heat of the day, came to pass their nights there
+till the break of dawn, and in return for a double intoxication left the
+harlots and the wine-sellers the price of the evening's catch.
+
+Chrysis entered the narrow streets of this Alexandrian Suburra, full of
+sound, movement and barbarous music. She cast furtive glances through
+open doors into rooms reeking with lamp smoke, where naked couples lay
+enlaced together. At the cross-roads, on low trestles erected in front
+of the houses, multi-coloured mattresses creaked and tumbled in the
+shadow, under a double human load. Chrysis walked along with
+embarrassment. A woman without a lover solicited her. An old man
+caressed her breasts. A mother offered her her daughter. A gaping
+peasant kissed the back of her neck. She fled, in a sort of hot terror.
+
+This foreign town within the Greek town was, for Chrysis, full of night
+and dangers. She was ill acquainted with the strange labyrinth, the
+intricacy of the streets, the secrets of certain houses. When, at rare
+intervals, she ventured to set foot in it, she always followed the same
+direct road towards a little red door; and there she forgot her usual
+lovers in the indefatigable arms of a young ass-driver with strong
+muscles, whom she had the joy of paying in her turn.
+
+But this evening, she felt even without turning her head that she was
+being followed by a double footstep.
+
+She increased her pace. The double footstep did likewise. She began to
+run; the footsteps behind her ran also; then beside herself with terror,
+she took another alley, and then another in the opposite direction, and
+then a long street which stretched away in an unknown direction.
+
+With dry throat and swollen temples, but sustained by Bacchis's wine,
+she pursued her flight, turned from right to left, pale, panic-stricken.
+
+Finally, a wall blocked farther progress: she was in a blind alley. She
+tried hastily to double, but two sailors with brown hands barred the
+narrow passage.
+
+"Where are you going to, my little wisp of gold?" said one of them
+laughing.
+
+"Let me pass."
+
+"Eh? you are lost, young lady, you don't know Rhacotis well, eh? We are
+going to show you the town."
+
+And they both took her by the waist. She shouted, and struggled, struck
+out with her fist, but the second sailor seized both her hands in his
+left hand and simply said:
+
+"A little calm, please. You know that the Greeks are not loved here:
+nobody will come to your assistance."
+
+"I am not Greek!"
+
+"You lie, you have a white skin and a straight nose. Unless you want the
+stick, submit quietly."
+
+Chrysis looked at the speaker, and suddenly fell on his neck.
+
+"I love you, I will follow you," she said.
+
+"You will follow both of us.  My friend shall have his share. Walk
+with us: it will not be dull."
+
+
+Where were they taking her to? She had not the least idea, but this
+second sailor's very rudeness, his brutish head pleased her. She
+considered him with the imperturbable glance that young bitches have in
+the presence of meat. She bent her body towards him, to touch him as she
+walked.
+
+With rapid steps they traversed strange quarters, without life, without
+lights. Chrysis could not understand how they threaded their way through
+this nocturnal maze out of which she never could have got alone on
+account of the curious intricacy of the streets. The closed doors, the
+deserted windows, the motionless shadows terrified her. Above her head,
+between the houses, that almost met, ran a pale ribbon of sky, flooded
+with moonlight.
+
+
+Finally, they entered life once more. At a turning of the street,
+suddenly, eight, ten, eleven lights appeared, illuminated doorways
+occupied by Nabataean women squatting between two red lamps which cast a
+gleam from below upon their heads hooded with gold.
+
+[Illustration: She shouted and struggled.]
+
+In the distance, they heard first a swelling murmur, and then a confused
+roar of chariots, tumbling bales, asses' footsteps, and human voices. It
+was the square of Rhacotis where, during the Alexandrian summer, all the
+provisions for nine hundred thousand mouths a day were collected and
+stacked up.
+
+They passed the houses of the square, between green piles, vegetables,
+lotus roots, smooth beans, baskets of olives. Chrysis took a handful of
+mulberries out of a violet heap, and ate them without stopping. Finally,
+they arrived before a low door and the sailors entered with her for whom
+had been stolen the True Pearls of Anadyomene.
+
+There was an immense hall there. Five hundred men of the people sat
+waiting for the day, drinking cups of yellow beer, eating figs, lentils,
+sesame cakes, olyra bread. In their midst, swarmed a herd of yelping
+women, a whole field of black hair and multicoloured flowers in an
+atmosphere of fire. They were poor homeless girls who were the property
+of all. They came there to beg for scraps, bare-footed, bare-breasted,
+with a scanty red or blue rag tied round their bellies, carrying, for
+the most part, a tattered infant on their left arm. There were also
+dancing-girls, six Egyptians on a dais, with an orchestra of three
+musicians, the first two of whom smote ox-hide timbrels with
+drum-sticks, whilst the third wielded a great sistrum of sonorous brass.
+
+"Oh! myxaira sweets!" said Chrysis gleefully.
+
+And she bought two sous' worth of the little girl who hawked them.
+
+But suddenly she swooned, overcome by the insupportable stink of this
+den, and the sailors carried her out in their arms.
+
+
+The fresh air brought her round a little.
+
+"Where are we going to?" she implored. "Let us be quick: I can walk no
+more. You see that I don't resist, I am nice to you. But let us find a
+bed as soon as possible, otherwise I shall drop down in the street."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE ORGIE AT BACCHIS'S
+
+
+When she once more found herself at Bacchis's door, she was penetrated
+by the delicious sensation produced by the respite from desire and the
+silence of the flesh. Her forehead no longer ached. Her mouth no longer
+twitched. She felt nothing but an intermittent pain which seized her
+from time to time in the small of the back. She mounted the steps and
+crossed the threshold.
+
+As soon as Chrysis had left the room the orgie had developed like a
+flame.
+
+Other friends entered, to whom the twelve dancing girls fell an easy
+prey. Forty tattered wreaths strewed the ground with flowers. A leathern
+bottle of Syracusan wine had burst in a corner, and its golden flood
+flowed under and around the table.
+
+Philodemos was by the side of Faustina.
+
+He had torn her robe and was singing her the verses he had made in her
+honour.
+
+"O feet," he said, "O sweet thighs, deep reins, round croup, cloven fig,
+hips, shoulders, breasts, mobile neck; O all ye things that charm me,
+warm hands, expert movements, active tongue! You are a Roman, you are a
+Roman, you are too dark and you do not sing the poems of Sappho; but
+Perseus was the lover of the Indian Andromeda." [1]
+
+Meanwhile, Seso lay flat upon her belly on the table in a pile of
+crushed fruit. She was completely overpowered by the fumes of Egyptian
+wine, and as she lay dipping the nipple of her right breast in a pond of
+snow-cooled wine, she kept repeating with a comical pathos:
+
+"Drink, my little darling. You are thirsty. Drink, my little darling.
+Drink. Drink. Drink."
+
+Aphrodisia, still a slave, triumphed in the midst of a circle of men,
+and was celebrating her last night of servitude by an extravagant
+debauch. In obedience to the tradition of all Alexandrian orgies, she
+had begun by giving herself to three lovers at once; but her task did
+not end there, and according to the law of slaves who became courtesans,
+she was expected to prove by an incessant zeal, lasting all night, that
+she had not usurped her new dignity.
+
+Standing alone behind a curtain, Naukrates and Phrasilas discussed
+courteously the respective value of Arcesilas and Carneades.
+
+At the end of the hall, Myrtocleia protected Rhodis against the
+over-zealous enterprises of one of the guests.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+As soon as the two Ephesians saw Chrysis enter, they rose to meet her.
+
+"Come away, my Chryse. Theano stays: but we are going.
+
+"I stay too," said tho courtesan. And she lay down on her back upon a
+great bed covered with roses.
+
+A din of voices and the clattering of money falling on the floor
+attracted her attention. It was Theano who, in order to parody her
+sister, had bethought her to caricature the "Fable of Danae," simulating
+a mad ecstasy of voluptuous delight every time a golden coin penetrated
+her. The child's daring impiety amused all the guests, for they were no
+longer in the days when the thunderbolt would have exterminated those
+who scoffed at the Immortal One. But the sport degenerated, as might
+have been foreseen.  A clumsy fellow hurt the poor little thing, and she
+fell to weeping noisily.
+
+
+It was necessary to invent a new amusement to console her. Two
+dancing-girls pushed into the centre of the room an immense silver-gilt
+bowl filled to the top with wine. Then somebody seized Theano by the
+feet, and made her drink with her head downwards. This convulsed her
+with a fit of laughter which she was unable to master.
+
+
+This idea was such a success that everybody crowded around, and when the
+flute-girl was set on her feet again, the sight of her little face
+purple with congestion and dripping with wine, produced such a general
+hilarity that Bacchis said to Selene:
+
+"A mirror! a mirror! let her see herself!"
+
+The slave brought a bronze mirror. "No, not that one. The mirror of
+Rhodopis. She merits it."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+Chrysis sprang up with a bound. The blood spurted to her cheeks, then
+retired again, and she remained perfectly pale, with the beatings of her
+heart battering her breast, and her eyes fixed on the door through which
+the slave had disappeared.
+
+That instant was to decide her whole life. Her last hope was either to
+vanish or be realised. The fete continued all around her. An iris
+wreath, thrown from somewhere or other, fell upon her lips. A man broke
+a little phial of perfume over her hair. It ran down too quickly and
+wetted her shoulders. The splashes of wine from a full tankard into
+which somebody had thrown a pomegranate spotted her silk tunic and
+penetrated to the skin. She bore all the traces of the orgie
+magnificently.
+
+
+The slave who had gone out did not return.
+
+
+Chrysis remained stone-pale, motionless as a sculptured goddess. The
+rhythmic and monotonous wail of a woman in travail of love not far away
+marked the passage of time for her. It seemed to her that this woman had
+been moaning thus since the night before. She could have twisted
+something, broken her fingers, shouted.
+
+At last Selene came back, empty-handed.
+
+"The mirror?" asked Bacchis.
+
+"It . . . It has gone . . . it . . . has been . . . stolen," stammered the
+servant.
+
+Bacchis uttered a cry so piercing that all ceased speaking, and a
+frightful silence brusquely interrupted the tumult.
+
+
+Men and women crowded round her from all parts of the vast chamber,
+leaving a little space in the centre which was occupied by the
+distracted Bacchis and the kneeling slave.
+
+"What! What!" she shrieked.
+
+And as Selene did not answer, she seized her violently by the neck:
+
+"You have stolen it yourself! You have stolen it yourself! Answer,
+answer! I will loosen your tongue with the whip, miserable little
+bitch!"
+
+
+Then a terrible thing happened. Beside herself with fear, the fear of
+suffering, the fear of death, the most instant terror she had ever
+known, the child exclaimed hurriedly:
+
+"It is Aphrodisia! It is not I! it is not I!"
+
+"Your sister!"
+
+"Yes, yes," said the mulatto woman; "it is Aphrodisia who has taken it."
+
+And they dragged their sister, who had just fallen into a fainting fit,
+before Bacchis.
+
+    [1] Philodeme AP. V. 132.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE CRUCIFIED ONE
+
+
+They all repeated together:
+
+"It is Aphrodisia who has taken it! Bitch! Bitch! Filthy thief!"
+
+Their hatred of the favourite sister was reinforced by their fear for
+themselves.
+
+Aretias grave her a kick in the breast.
+
+"Where is it?" asked Bacchis. "Where have you put it?"
+
+"She has given it to her lover."
+
+"Who is he?"
+
+"An Opian sailor."
+
+"Where is his ship?"
+
+"It sailed this evening for Rome. You will never see your mirror again.
+Let us crucify the bitch, the bloody animal!"
+
+"Ah! Gods! Gods!" sobbed Bacchis.
+
+Then suddenly her sorrow changed into a frenzy of rage.
+
+[Illustration: Bacchis seized her by the hair.]
+
+Aphrodisia had come to herself again; but, paralysed by terror, and
+unable to understand what was happening, she remained speechless and
+tearless.
+
+Bacchis seized her by the hair, dragged her over the soiled floor,
+through the flowers and pools of wine, and cried:
+
+"The cross! the cross! bring the nails! bring the hammer!"
+
+"Oh!" said Seso to her neighbour; "I have never seen that. Let us follow
+them."
+
+
+All pressed forward to follow. And Chrysis, who alone knew the guilty
+one, and was alone the cause of everything, Chrysis followed too.
+
+Bacchis went straight into the slaves' chamber, a square apartment
+furnished with three mattresses on which they slept in couples when the
+nights were over. At the lower end, like an ever-present menace, stood a
+T-shaped cross which had never yet been used.
+
+In the midst of the confused murmur of the young men and women, four
+slaves hoisted the martyr to the level of the branches of the cross.
+
+Not a sound had yet left her lips; but when she felt the touch of the
+cold rough beam on her naked back, her long eyes dilated, and she was
+seized with a convulsive fit of groaning which lasted till the end.
+
+They put her astride on a wooden peg driven into the centre of the
+upright. This served to support the body and obviate the tearing of the
+hands.
+
+Then they opened out her arms.
+
+
+Chrysis looked on and held her peace. What could she say? She could only
+have exonerated the slave by incriminating Demetrios, who was beyond
+reach of all attack, and who would have taken a cruel revenge. Besides,
+a slave was a source of riches, and it was a satisfaction to the
+long-standing grudge that Chrysis bore her enemy to think that she was
+destroying in this way with her own hands the value of three thousand
+drachmae as completely as if she had thrown the money into the Eunostis.
+And then, was the life of a minion worth troubling about?
+
+
+Heliope handed Bacchis the first nail and the hammer, and the torture
+began. Intoxication, rancour, anger, all the passions together, even the
+instinct of cruelty which lurks in a woman's heart, animated the soul of
+Bacchis at the moment she struck, and she uttered a shriek almost as
+piercing as that of Aphrodisia when the nail bent in the open palm.
+
+She nailed up the second hand. She nailed the feet one upon the other.
+Then, excited by the sight of the blood spurting from the three wounds,
+she cried:
+
+"It is not enough! Thief! Sow! Sailors' strumpet!"
+
+She took the long pins out of her hair, and dug them violently into the
+flesh of her breasts, the belly, and the thighs. When she had no more
+weapons left in her hands, she smacked the poor wretch and spat upon
+her.
+
+She contemplated this work of vengeance for some time; then she returned
+into the banqueting-hall with all the guests.
+
+Phrasilas and Timon alone did not follow her.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+After a moment's silent meditation, Phrasilas coughed slightly, put his
+right hand into his left, raised his head, lifted his eyebrows, and drew
+near the crucified one, whose body shook with a continuous, horrible
+trembling.
+
+"Although I am," he said to her, "in divers circumstances, opposed to
+absolute theories so-called, yet I cannot blind myself to the fact that,
+in the conjuncture which has overtaken you, you would gain by being
+familiarised in more solid fashion with the maxims of the Stoics. Zeno,
+who does not seem to have had a spirit completely exempt from error, has
+left us several sophistries of no great general import, but, at the same
+time, you might derive profit from them to the particular end of calming
+your last moments.  Pain", he said, "is a word void of meaning, since
+our will transcends the imperfections of our perishable body. It is true
+that Zeno died at the age of ninety-eight, without ever having had,
+according to his biographers, any illness, however slight; but this
+circumstance cannot be used as an argument against him, for from the
+mere fact that he succeeded in maintaining an unimpaired good health, we
+cannot logically conclude that he would have been lacking in force of
+character had he fallen ill. Besides, it would be an abuse to compel the
+philosophers to practise in their persons the rules of conduct they
+profess, and to cultivate without respite the virtues they deem
+superior. In a word, not to prolong inordinately a discourse which might
+last; longer than yourself, endeavour to lift up your soul, my dear, as
+far as possible, above your physical sufferings. However melancholy,
+however cruel they may appear to you, I beg you to believe that I have a
+real part in them. They are drawing to a close: be patient, forget.
+Between the various doctrines which attribute immortality to us, this is
+the moment for choosing the one most fitted to alleviate your regrets at
+having to disappear. If these doctrines are true, you will have
+lightened the bitter agony of the passage. If they lie, what does it
+matter? You will never know that you were mistaken."
+
+Having spoken thus, Phrasilas re-adjusted the folds of his garment over
+his shoulder and vanished with an unsteady gait.
+
+
+Timon remained alone in the room with the woman hanging in the throes of
+death upon the cross.
+
+The memory of a night passed on the poor wretch's breast haunted his
+brain, and confounded itself with the atrocious vision of the imminent
+rottenness into which this splendid body that had burned in his arms
+was about to fall.
+
+He pressed his hand over his eyes in order not to see her torture, but
+he _heard_ the unceasing trembling of the body upon the cross.
+
+Finally, he looked. Great threads of blood formed a network on the skin
+from the pins in the breast down to the curled-up heels. The head turned
+perpetually.  All the hair, matted with blood, sweat, and perfume, hung
+over the left side.
+
+"Aphrodisia! do you hear me! do you recognise me? It is I, Timon;
+Timon."
+
+Her glance, almost blind, rested on him for a second. But the head
+turned incessantly. The body trembled continually.
+
+Softly, as if he feared the sound of his foot-steps would hurt her, the
+young man advanced to the foot of the cross. He stretched out his arms,
+he carefully took her strengthless and ever-turning head between his two
+fraternal hands, piously smoothed away her tear-drenched hair from her
+cheeks, and imprinted on the hot lips a kiss of infinite tenderness.
+
+Aphrodisia closed her eyes. Did she recognise him who had charmed her
+horrible end by this impulse of affectionate pity? An inexpressible
+smile distended her blue eyelids, and with a sigh she gave up the ghost.
+
+[Illustration: A kiss of infinite tenderness.]
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+ENTHUSIASM
+
+
+So, the deed was accomplished. Chrysis had the proof.
+
+If Demetrios had brought himself to commit the first crime, the two
+others had probably followed without delay.  A man of his rank would
+consider murder, and even sacrilege, as less dishonourable than theft.
+
+He had obeyed, consequently he was a captive. This man, free, impassive,
+and cold as he was, had submitted to the yoke of slavery like the
+others, and his mistress, his tamer, it was she, Chrysis, Sarah of
+Gennesaret.
+
+Ah! to think of it, to repeat it, to say it out aloud, alone!
+
+Chrysis rushed out of the noisy house and ran quickly, straight before
+her, with the fresh breeze of morning bathing her face.
+
+
+She went as far as the Agora along the road which led to the sea, at the
+end of which the masts of eight hundred ships stood huddled together
+like gigantic stalks of corn. Then she turned to the right, before the
+immense avenue of the Dromos where the house of Demetrios was. A thrill
+of pride came over her when she passed in front of the windows of her
+future lover; but she did not commit the indiscretion of attempting to
+see him the first. She followed the long road as far as the Canopic
+Gate, and cast herself upon the ground between two aloes.
+
+
+He had done it. He had done everything for her, certainly more than any
+lover had ever done for any woman. She repeated it unceasingly and
+reiterated her triumph again and again. Demetrios, the Well-Beloved, the
+impossible and hopeless dream of so many feminine hearts, had run every
+sort of peril for her, every kind of shame, of willing remorse. He had
+even abjured the ideal of his thought, he had despoiled his handiwork of
+the miraculous necklace, and that day which was just dawning would see
+the lover of the goddess at the feet of his new idol.
+
+"Take me! take me!" she cried. She adored him now. She called out for
+him. She longed for him. The three crimes became metamorphosed in her
+mind into three heroic actions, in return for which she would never be
+able to give enough affection, enough passion. With what an incomparable
+flame would their love burn--this unique love of two beings equally
+young, equally beautiful, equally loved by one another and united for
+ever after the conquest of so many obstacles.
+
+[Illustration: She extended her arms]
+
+
+They would go away together, they would set sail for mysterious
+countries, for Amaronthis, for Epidauros, or even for that unknown Rome
+which was the second town in the world after immense Alexandria, and
+which had undertaken the subjugation of the earth. What would they not
+do, wherever they might be? What joy would be a stranger to them, what
+human felicity would not envy them theirs, and pale before their
+enchanted passage?
+
+Chrysis rose from the ground, dazzled, She extended her arms, set back
+her shoulders, threw out her bust. A sensation of languor and mounting
+joy stiffened her firm breasts. She set out for home . . .
+
+
+On opening the door of her chamber, she started with surprise to see
+that nothing had changed under her roof since the night before. The
+little objects on her toilet-table, on the stands, on the shelves,
+appeared to her an inadequate setting for her new life.
+
+She broke some that reminded her too directly of bygone useless lovers,
+for whom she now conceived a sudden hatred. If she spared others, it was
+not that she valued them more, but she was afraid of dismantling her
+chamber in case Demetrios had formed the design of passing the night
+there.
+
+She undressed slowly. Vestiges of the orgie fell from her tunic, crumbs
+of cake, hairs, rose-leaves.
+
+When her waist was relieved of the pressure of her girdle, she smoothed
+the skin and plunged her fingers into her hair to lighten its weight.
+
+But before going to bed a longing came over her to rest an instant on
+the rugs of the terrace, where the coolness of the air was so delicious.
+
+
+She mounted.
+
+
+The sun had barely risen. It lay on the horizon line like a vast swollen
+orange.
+
+
+A great gnarled palm-tree stood with its thicket of green leaves hanging
+over the balustrade. Chrysis ensconced her tingling nudity in its shade,
+and shivered, with her breasts in her hands.
+
+
+Her eyes wandered over the gradually whitening town. The violet vapours
+of the dawn rose from the silent streets and disappeared in the pellucid
+air.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Suddenly, an idea burst upon her mind, grew upon her, took possession of
+her. Demetrios, who had already done so much, why should he not kill the
+Queen, Demetrios who might be the king?
+
+And then?
+
+ * * * * *
+
+And then, that monumental ocean of houses, palaces, temples, porticoes,
+colonnades, that swam before her eyes from the Necropolis of the west to
+the gardens of the Goddess: Brouchion, the Egyptian town, in front of
+which the gleaming Paneion reared itself aloft like a mountain
+acropolis; the Great Temple of Serapis, from the facade of which arose,
+horn-like, two long pink obelisks; the Great Temple of Aphrodite
+engirded by the rustling of three hundred thousand palm-trees and
+countless waves; the Temple of Persephone and the Temple of Arsinoe, the
+two sanctuaries of Poseidon, the three towers of Isis Lochias, and the
+theatre, and the Hippodrome, and the Stadium where Pittacos had run in
+competition with Nicosthenes, and the tomb of Stratonice, and the tomb
+of the god Alexander--Alexandria! Alexandria! the sea, the men, the
+colossal marble Pharos whose mirror saved men from the sea! Alexandria!
+the city of the eleven Ptolemies, Physcon, Philometor, Epiphanes,
+Philadelphos; Alexandria, the climax of all dreams, the diadem of all
+the glories conquered during three thousand years in Memphis, Thebes,
+Athens, Corinth, by the chisel, the pen, the compass, and the sword!
+Still farther away, the Delta, cloven by the seven tongues of Nile,
+Sais, Boubastis, Heliopolis; then, travelling towards the South, that
+ribbon of fertile land, the Heptanomos with the long array of its twelve
+hundred riverside temples dedicated to all the gods, and further still,
+Thebais. Diospolis, the Isle of Elephants, the impassable cataracts, the
+Isle of Argo . . .Meroe . . . the unknown; and even, if it was permitted to
+believe the traditions of the Egyptians, the country of the fabulous
+lakes, whence escapes the antique Nile, lakes so vast that one loses
+sight of the horizon when crossing their purple flood, and perched so
+high upon the mountains that the stars are reflected in them like golden
+apples.--all this, all, should be the kingdom, the domain, the possession
+of Chrysis, the courtesan.
+
+
+She almost choked, and threw her arms on high as if she thought to touch
+the heavens.
+
+And simultaneously, she watched on her left the slow flight towards the
+open sea of a great bird with black wings.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+CLEOPATRA
+
+
+Queen Berenice had a young sister called Cleopatra. Many other Egyptian
+princesses had borne the same name, but this girl became in later years
+the great Cleopatra who destroyed her kingdom, and killed herself, as
+one might say, on the corpse of her dead empire.
+
+About this time, she was twelve years of age, and no one could tell what
+her beauty would he. Her body, tall and thin, seemed out of place in a
+family where all the females were plump. She was ripening like some
+badly-grafted, bastard fruit of foreign, obscure origin. Some of her
+lineaments were hard and bold, as seen in Macedonia; other traits
+appeared as if inherited from the depths of Nubia, where womankind is
+tender and swarthy, for her mother had been a female of inferior race
+whose pedigree was doubtful. It was surprising to see Cleopatra's lips,
+almost thick, under an aquiline nose of rather delicate shape. Her young
+breasts, very round, small, and widely separated, were crowned with a
+swelling aureola, thereby showing she was a daughter of the Nile.
+
+The little Princess lived in a spacious room, opening on to the vast sea
+and joined to the Queen's apartment by a vestibule under a colonnade.
+
+Cleopatra passed the hours of the night on a bed of bluish silk, where
+the skin of her young limbs, already of a dark hue, took on still deeper
+tints.
+
+It came to pass that in the night when--far from her and her
+thoughts--the events already chronicled in these pages look place,
+Cleopatra rose long before dawn. She had slept but little and badly,
+being anxious about her troubles of puberty which she had just
+experienced, and disturbed by the extreme heat of the atmosphere.
+
+Without waking the woman who watched over her slumbers, she softly put
+her feet to the ground, slipped her golden bangles round her ankles,
+girded her little brown belly with a row of enormous pearls, and thus
+accoutred, left her chamber.
+
+In the monumental corridor, armed guards were also sound asleep, except
+one who stood sentinel at the door of the Queen's room.
+
+He fell on his knees and whispered in dire terror, as if he had never
+before found himself thus struggling in such a conflict of duty and
+danger:
+
+"Princess Cleopatra, I crave thy pardon! I cannot let thee pass!"
+
+The lass drew herself up to her full height, knitted her brows
+violently, and dealt a dull blow on the soldier's forehead with her
+clenched fist.
+
+"As for thee," she said in smothered accents, but with ferocious
+meaning, "I'll raise a cry of rape, and have thee quartered!"
+
+Then, in silence, she entered the Queens chamber.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Berenice was asleep, her head pillowed on her arm, her hand hanging
+down.
+
+Over the great crimson couch, a hanging lamp mingled its feeble glare
+with that of the moon, reflected by the whiteness of the walls. The
+vague, luminous outlines of the slumbering woman's supple nudity were
+thus enwrapped in misty shadow, between these two contrasting lights.
+
+Slender Cleopatra sat straight up on the edge of the bed. She took her
+sister's face in her two little hands, waking Berenice up by touch and
+speech.
+
+"Why is your lover not with you?" asked Cleopatra.
+
+Berenice, startled, opened her lovely eyes.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Cleopatra! What are you doing here? What do you want of me?"
+
+"Why is your lover not with you?" repeated the girl, insisting.
+
+"Is he not with me?"
+
+"Certainly not! You know that well enough!"
+
+"True! He's never here. Oh, Cleopatra, how cruel of you to wake me, to
+tell me so!"
+
+"But why is he always away?"
+
+"I see him when he chooses," sighed Berenice, in grief. "During the day--
+for a minute or two."
+
+"Did you not see him yesterday?"
+
+"Yes. I met him by the roadside. I was in my litter, he got in with me."
+
+"As far as the Palace?"
+
+"No--not quite. He was still in sight nearly as far as the gates."
+
+"What did you tell him?"
+
+"Oh, I was furious! I said most wicked things. Yes, darling, I did!"
+
+"Indeed?" rejoined the young girl, ironically.
+
+"Perhaps too wicked, for he never answered me. Just when I felt myself
+scarlet with rage, he recited a long fable for my benefit. As I did not
+quite understand it, I did not know how to reply. He slipped out of the
+litter, just as I thought of keeping him by my side.
+
+"Why not have called him back?"
+
+"I feared to displease him."
+
+Cleopatra, swelling with indignation, took her sister by the shoulders,
+and looking her full in the face, spoke thus to her:
+
+"How now! You are the Queen, the people's goddess! Half the world
+belongs to you; all that Rome does not rule is yours; you reign over
+the Nile and the entire ocean. You even reign over the heavens, since
+you are nearer to the ear of the Gods than anyone, and yet you cannot
+reign over the man you love!"
+
+"Reign . . . reign!" said Berenice, hanging her head. "That's easy to say,
+but, look you, one does not reign over a lover as if dominating a
+slave."
+
+"And why not, pray?"
+
+"Because . . . But you cannot understand! To love, is to prefer the
+happiness of another to that which we formerly selfishly desired before
+meeting the loved one. Should Demetrios be content, so likewise would I
+be, even weeping and far from his side. I wish for no delight that is
+not his, and all I bestow on him gives me great joy."
+
+"You know not how to love," said the young lass.
+
+Berenice smiled sadly, then she stretched her two arms stiffly on either
+side of her couch, as she jutted out her breasts and arched her loins.
+
+"Ah, little presumptuous virgin!" she sighed. "When for the first time
+you'll swoon in loving conjunction, then only will you understand why
+one is never the queen of a man who causes you thus to lose your
+senses."
+
+"A woman can always be a queen should she so will it."
+
+"But she has no longer any power of will."
+
+"I have! Why should you not be the same? You are my elder!"
+
+Berenice smiled again.
+
+"My little girl, upon whom do you exercise your strength of will? On
+which one of your dolls?"
+
+"On my lover!" said Cleopatra.
+
+Without allowing her sister time to find words to express her
+stupefaction, the damsel went on talking with growing vivacity.
+
+"I have got a lover! Yes, I've a lover! Why should I not have a
+sweetheart like everybody else, the same as you and my mother, and my
+aunt, and the lowest woman in Egypt? A lover? Of a surety! And why not,
+prithee, seeing that for six months past, I am a woman, and you have not
+yet found me a husband? Aye, Berenice, I have a lover. I'm no longer a
+little girl. I know now! I know! Be silent--say nothing, for I know
+more than you. I, too, have clasped my arms till they were fit to snap,
+over the naked back of a man who thought he was my master. I, too, have
+crooked my toes in the empty air, feeling as if life was leaving me, and
+I've died a hundred limes over in the same way as you have swooned, but
+immediately afterwards, Berenice, I was on my feet, upstanding, erect!
+Say naught to me, for I am ashamed to claim you as my Sovereign--you,
+who are someone's slave!"
+
+Little Cleopatra drew herself up to her full height, endeavouring to
+appear as tall as possible. She took her head in her hands, like an
+Asiatic queen trying on a tiara.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Seated on the bed, her feet tucked under her, the elder sister listened,
+and then knelt, so she could come near to the young lass and place her
+hands on Cleopatra's sloping, slender shoulders.
+
+"So you've a lover?" Berenice now spoke timidly, almost respectfully.
+
+"If you don't believe me, you can look," replied the girl, curtly.
+
+"When do you see him?" sighed Berenice.
+
+"Three times a day."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"Do you want me to tell you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How comes it that you do not know this?" interrogated Cleopatra in her
+turn.
+
+"I know nothing, not even what goes on at the Palace. Demetrios is the
+only subject of conversation I care about. I have not watched over you
+as I should have done, my child. All this is my fault."
+
+"Watch me if you like. When I can no longer have my own way, I'll kill
+myself. Therefore, little care I, whatever happens!"
+
+"You are free," replied Berenice, shaking her head. "At any rate, it is
+too late to restrain you. But, answer me, darling. You have a lover
+--and you manage to keep him to yourself?"
+
+"I have my way of holding him."
+
+"Who taught you?"
+
+"I taught myself all alone. Such knowledge comes instinctively or never.
+When I was but six years old, I knew how I meant to hold my sweetheart
+later on in life."
+
+"Will you not tell me?"
+
+"Follow me."
+
+Berenice rose slowly, put on a tunic and a mantle, shook out her heavy
+tresses, adhering together by the sweat of the bed, and both the sisters
+left the room.
+
+[Illustration: Cleopatra crossed a courtyard.]
+
+First went the youngest, straight along the vestibule, back to her bed.
+Under the mattress of fresh, dry byssos, she took a newly-cut key.
+
+"Follow me. It's rather far," she said, turning to her sister.
+
+In the middle of the passage was a staircase which she ascended. Then
+she glided along a never-ending colonnade, opened several doors, walking
+on carpets, white marble slabs and the mosaic floors of a score of
+empty, silent apartments.
+
+She descended a stone stairway, and stepped over the dark thresholds of
+clanging doors. Now and again, the two women came upon soldiers, resting
+on mats in couples, their spears close to their hands. Some long time
+afterwards, Cleopatra crossed a courtyard lit up by the rays of the full
+moon, and the shadow of a palm-tree caressed her hips. Berenice, wrapped
+in her blue mantle, still followed her.
+
+At last, they reached a massive door, clamped with iron like a warrior's
+breastplate. In the lock, Cleopatra slipped her key, turning it twice.
+Then, pushing open the portal, a man--a very giant in the
+darkness--rose to his full height out of the depths of his dungeon.
+
+Berenice stirred with emotion, looked in, and with drooping head, said
+very softly:
+
+"Tis you, my child, who know not how to love. At least--not yet. I was
+quite right when I told you that."
+
+"Love for love, I prefer mine," said the girl. "He gives me naught but
+joy, at any rate."
+
+So saying, erect on the prison threshold, and without making a step
+forward, she said to the man who stood in the shadow:
+
+"Come hither, and kiss my foot, son of a cur!"
+
+When he had done so, she pressed her mouth to his lips.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV
+
+I
+
+
+DEMETRIOS DREAMS A DREAM
+
+Now, with the mirror, the necklace, and the collar, Demetrios having
+returned home, a dream visited him in his slumber, and this was his
+dream:
+
+
+He is going towards the quay, mingled with the crowd, on a strange
+moonless night, cloudless, but shedding a peculiar brilliance of its
+own.
+
+Without knowing why, or what it is that draws him, he is in a hurry to
+arrive, to be _there_ as soon as he can, but he walks with effort, and the
+air opposes an inexplicable resistance to his legs, as deep water
+hampers footsteps.
+
+He trembles, he thinks he will never reach the goal, that he will never
+know towards whom, in this bright obscurity, he is walking thus, panting
+and troubled.
+
+At times, the crowd disappears entirely, whether it be that it really
+fades away, or that he ceases to be conscious of its presence. Then it
+jostles more importunately than ever, and all press, on, on, on, with a
+quick and sonorous step, more quickly than he . . .
+
+Then the human mass closes in upon him; Demetrios pales; a man pushes
+him with his shoulder; a woman's buckle tears his tunic; a young girl is
+wedged against him, so tightly that he feels the pressure of her nipples
+against his chest, and she pushes his face away with two terrified
+hands.
+
+Suddenly he is alone, the first, upon the quay. And as he turns to look
+behind him, he perceives in the distance the white swarm of the crowd
+which has all at once receded to the Agora.
+
+And he realises that it will advance no further.
+
+The quay lies white and straight like the first stage of an unfinished
+road which has undertaken to cross the sea.
+
+He wants to go to Pharos, and he walks. His legs have suddenly become
+light. The wind blowing in the sandy deserts drives him headlong towards
+the watery solitudes into which the quay plunges venturesomely. But in
+proportion as he advances, Pharos retreats before him; the quay is
+immeasurably prolonged. Soon the high marble tower on which blazes a
+purple wood-pile touches the livid horizon, flickers, dies down, wanes,
+and sets like another moon!
+
+Demetrios walks ever onwards.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Days and nights seem to have passed since he left the great quay of
+Alexandria far behind him, and he dare not turn his head, for fear of
+seeing nothing but the road he has travelled along: a white line
+stretching to infinity and the sea.
+
+And still he turns round.
+
+
+An island is behind him, covered with great trees whence droop enormous
+blossoms.
+
+Has he crossed it like a blind man, or does it spring into sight at the
+same instant and become mysteriously visible? He does not think of
+conjecturing: he accepts the impossible as a natural event . . .
+
+A woman is in the isle. She is standing before the door of its one
+house, with her eyes half closed and her face bending over a monstrous
+iris-flower that reaches to the level of her lips. She has heavy hair,
+the colour of dull gold, and of a length one may surmise to be
+marvellous, judging by the mass of the great coil that lies on her
+drooping neck. A black tunic envelopes this woman, and a robe blacker
+still is draped upon the tunic, and the iris whose perfume she breathes
+with downcast eyelids is of the same hue as night.
+
+In all this mourning garb, Demetrios sees but the hair, like a golden
+vase on an ebony column. He recognises Chrysis.
+
+The recollection of the mirror and of the necklace and of the comb
+recurs to him vaguely; but he does not believe in it, and in this
+singular vision reality alone seems to him a dream . . .
+
+"Come," says Chrysis. "Follow me."
+
+He follows her. She slowly mounts a staircase strewn with white skins.
+Her arm rests upon the rail. Her naked heels float in and out from under
+her robe.
+
+The house has but one storey. Chrysis halts at the topmost step.
+
+"There are four chambers," she says.
+
+"When you have seen them, you will never leave them. Will you follow me?
+Have you confidence?"
+
+[Illustration: A monstrous iris-flower reaches to the level of her
+lips.]
+
+But he will follow her everywhere. She opens the first door and closes
+it behind him.
+
+
+This room is long and narrow. It is lighted by a single window, through
+which is seen enframed the great expanse of sea. On the right and left
+are two small tables and on them a dozen book-rolls.
+
+"Here are the books you love," says Chrysis. "There are no others."
+
+Demetrios opens them: they are _The Oineus of Chaeremon_, _The Return
+of Alexis_, _The Mirror of Lais of Aristippos_, _The Enchantress_, _The
+Cyclops_, the _Bucolics of Theocritos_, _OEdipus at Colonos_, the _Odes
+of Sappho_, and several other little works. Upon a pile of cushions, in
+the midst of this ideal library, there is a naked girl who utters no
+word.
+
+"Now," murmurs Chrysis, drawing from a long golden coder a manuscript
+consisting of a single leaf, "here is the page of antique poesy that you
+never read alone without weeping."
+
+The young man reads at a venture:
+
+    [Greek: Hoi men ar' ethreneon, epi de stenachonto gynaikes.
+    Tesin d'Andromache leukolenos erche gooio,
+    Hektoros androphonoio kare meta chersin echousa;
+    Aner, ap' aionos neos oleo, kadde me cheren
+    Leipeis en megaroisi; pais d'eti nepios autos,
+    Hon tekomen sy t'ego te dysammoroi. . .]
+
+He stops, casting upon Chrysis a look of surprise and tenderness.
+
+"You?" he says. "You show me this?"
+
+"Ah! you have not seen everything. Follow me. Follow me quickly."
+
+They open another door.
+
+
+The second chamber is square. It is lighted by a single window, through
+which is seen enframed all nature. In the midst, stands a wooden trestle
+bearing a lump of red clay, and in a corner, a naked girl lies upon a
+curved chair, and utters no word.
+
+"Here you will model Andromeda and Zagreus and the Horses of the Sun. As
+you will create them for yourself alone, you will break them in pieces
+before your death."
+
+"It is the House of Felicity," says Demetrios in a low voice.
+
+And he lets his forehead sink into his hands. But Chrysis opens another
+door.
+
+
+The third chamber is vast and round. It is lighted by a single window,
+through which is seen enframed the great expanse of blue sky. Its walls
+consist of gratings of bronze bars so disposed as to form lozenge-shaped
+interstices. Through them glides a music of flutes and pipes played to a
+doleful measure by invisible musicians. And against the far wall, upon a
+throne of green marble, sits a naked girl who utters no word.
+
+"Come! Come!" repeats Chrysis.
+
+They open another door.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+The fourth chamber is low, sombre, hermetically closed, and triangular.
+thick carpets and rugs array it so luxuriously from floor to roof that
+nudity is not astonished in it. Lovers can easily imagine that they have
+east off their garments upon the walls in all directions. When the door
+is closed again, it is impossible to guess where it was. There is no
+window. It is a narrow world, outside the world. A few wisps of black
+hair hanging to the cushions shed tear-drops of perfumes. And this
+chamber is lighted by seven little myrrhine panes which colour diversely
+the incomprehensible light of seven subterranean lamps.
+
+"See," explains the woman in an affectionate and tranquil tone, "there
+are three different beds in the three corners of _our_ chamber."
+
+Demetrios does not answer. And he asks within himself:
+
+"Is it really a last term? Is it truly a goal of human existence? Have I
+then passed through the other three chambers only to stop in this one?
+And shall I, shall I ever be able to leave it if I lie in it a whole
+night in the attitude of love which is the prostration of the tomb."
+
+But Chrysis speaks.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"Well-Beloved, you asked for me; I am come, look at me well . . ."
+
+She raises her two arms together, lays her hands upon her hair, and,
+with her elbows projecting in front of her, smiles.
+
+"Well-Beloved, I am yours . . . Oh! not immediately . . . I promised you to
+sing, I will sing first . . ."
+
+And he thinks of her no more, and lays him down at her feet. She has
+little black sandals. Four threads of blue pearls pass between the
+dainty toes, on the nails of which has been painted a carmine lunar
+crescent.
+
+With her head reposing on her shoulder, she taps on the palm of her left
+hand with her right, and undulates her hips almost imperceptibly.
+
+    "By night, on my bed,
+    I sought him whom my soul loveth:
+    I sought him, but I found him not . . .
+    I charge ye, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
+    If ye find my beloved,
+    Tell him
+    That I am sick of love."
+
+"Ah! it is the Song of Songs, Demetrios.
+It is the nuptial canticle of the women of my
+country."
+
+    "I sleep, but my heart waketh:
+    It is the voice of my beloved . . .
+    That knocketh at my door,
+    The voice of my beloved!
+    He cometh,
+    Leaping upon the mountains
+    Like a roe
+    Or a young hart."
+
+    "My beloved speaks, and says unto me:
+    Open unto me, my sister, my fair one:
+    My head is filled with dew,
+    And my locks with the drops of the night.
+    Rise up, my love, my fair one,
+    And come away.
+    For lo, the winter is past,
+    The rain is over and gone,
+    The flowers appear on the earth.
+    The time of the singing of birds is come,
+    The voice of the turtle-dove is heard in the land.
+    Rise up, my love, my fair one,
+    And come away."
+
+She casts her veil away, and stands up arrayed
+in some tight-fitting stuff wound closely round
+the legs and hips.
+
+    "I have put off my coat;
+    How shall I put it on?
+    I have washed my feet:
+    How shall I defile them?
+    My well-beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door,
+    And my bowels were moved for him.
+    I rose up to open to my beloved,
+    And my hands dropped with myrrh,
+    And my fingers with sweet-smelling myrrh,
+    Upon the handles of the lock.
+    Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth:
+
+She throws her head back and half closes her eyelids.
+
+    "Slay me, comfort me,
+    For I am sick of love.
+    Let his left hand be under my head
+    And his right hand embrace me.
+    Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, with
+    one of thine eyes,
+    With one chain of thy neck.
+    How fair is thy love!
+    How fair are thy caresses!
+    How much better than wine!
+    The smell of thee pleaseth me more than all spices.
+    Thy lips drop as the honeycomb:
+    Honey and milk are under thy tongue.
+    The smell of thy garments is like the smell of
+    Lebanon.
+
+    "A garden enclosed is my sister,
+    A spring shut up, a fountain sealed.
+
+    "Awake, O north wind!
+    Blow, thou south!
+    Blow upon my garden,
+    That the spices thereof may flow out."
+
+She rounds her arms, and holds out her mouth.
+
+    "Let my beloved come into his garden
+    And eat of his pleasant fruits.
+    Yes, I come into my garden,
+    O! my sister, my spouse,
+    I gather my myrrh with my spice,
+    I eat my honeycomb with my honey.
+    I drink my wine with my milk.
+    SET ME A SEAL UPON THINE HEART
+    AS A SEAL UPON THINE ARM
+    FOR LOVE IS STRONG AS DEATH" [1]
+
+Without moving her feet, without bending her tightly-pressed knees, she
+slowly turns her body upon her motionless hips. Her face and her two
+breasts, above her tightly-swathed legs, seem three great pink flowers
+in a flower-holder made of stuffs.
+
+She dances gravely, with her shoulders and her head and the
+intermingling of her beautiful arms. She seems to suffer in her sheath
+and to reveal ever and ever more the whiteness of her half imprisoned
+body. Her breathing inflates her breast. Her mouth cannot close. Her
+eyelids cannot open. A heightening flame flushes her cheeks.
+
+Now her ten interlocked fingers join before her face. Now she raises her
+arms. She strains voluptuously. A long fugitive groove separates her
+shoulders as they rise and fall. Finally, with a single movement of her
+body, enveloping her panting visage in her hair as with a bridal veil,
+she tremblingly unfastens the sculptured clasp which retained her
+garment about her loins, and allows all the mystery of her grace to slip
+down upon the ground.
+
+
+Demetrios and Chrysis . . .
+
+Their first embracement before love is immediately so perfect, so
+harmonious, that they keep it immobile, in order fully to know its
+multiple voluptuousness. One of her breasts stands out erect and round,
+from under the strong encircling arm of Demetrios. One of her burning
+thighs is rivetted between his two legs, and the other lies with all its
+heavy weight thrown upon them. They remain thus, motionless, clasped
+together but not penetrated, in the rising exaltation of an inflexible
+desire which they are loath to satisfy. At first, they catch at one
+another with their mouths alone. They intoxicate each other with the
+contact of their aching and ungated virginities.
+
+[Illustration: She dances gravely with her shoulders and her head.]
+
+We look at nothing so minutely as the face of the woman we love. Seen at
+the excessively close range of the kiss, Chrysis's eyes seem enormous.
+When she closes them, two parallel creases remain on each eyelid, and a
+loaden-hued patch extends from the brilliant eyebrows to the verge of
+the cheeks. When she opens them, a green ring, fine as a silken thread,
+illumines with a coloured coronal the fathomless black eyeball
+immeasurably distended under the long curved lashes. The little pellet
+of red flesh whence the tears flow has sudden palpitations.
+
+Their kiss is endless. Chrysis would seem to have under her tongue, not
+milk and honey, as in Holy writ, but living, mobile, enchanted water.
+And this multiform tongue itself, now incurved like an arch, now rolled
+up like a spiral, now shrinking into its hiding-place, now darting forth
+like a flame, more caressing than the hand, more expressive than the
+eyes, circling, flower-like, into a pistil, or thinning away into a
+petal, this ribbon of flesh that hardens when it quivers and softens
+when it licks, Chrysis animates it with all the resources of her
+endearing and passionate fantasy . . . Then she showers on him a series of
+prolonged caresses that twist and turn. Her nervous finger-tips suffice
+to grasp him tightly, and to produce convulsive tremblings along his
+sides. She is happy only when palpitating with desire or enervated by
+exhaustion: the transition terrifies her like a torture. As soon as her
+lover summons her, she thrusts him away with rigid arms: she presses her
+knees close together, she supplicates him dumbly with her lips.
+Demetrios constrains her by force.
+
+No spectacle of nature, neither the blazing glory of the setting sun,
+nor the tempest in the palm-trees, nor the mirage, nor the mighty
+upheavals of the waters, seem worthy of astonishment to those who have
+witnessed the transfiguration of a woman in their arms. Chrysis becomes
+extraordinary. Arching her body upwards, and sinking back again in
+turns, with her bent elbow resting on the cushions, she seizes the
+corner of a pillow, clutches at it like a dying woman, and gasps for
+breath, with her head thrown back. Her eyes, brilliant with gratitude,
+fix the madness of their glance at the corner of the eyelids. Her checks
+are resplendent. The curve of her swaying hair is disconcerting. Two
+admirable, muscular lines, descending from the ear and the shoulder,
+meet under the right breast and bear it like a fruit.
+
+Demetrios contemplates this divine madness in the feminine body with a
+sort of religious awe--this transport of a whole being, this superhuman
+convulsion of which he is the direct cause, which he exalts or represses
+at will, and which confounds him for the thousandth time.
+
+Under his very eyes all the mighty forces of life strain in the effort
+to create. The breasts have already assumed, up to their very tips,
+maternal majesty. And these wails, these lamentable wails that
+prematurely weep over the labour of childbirth! . . .
+
+    [1] Song of Songs.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE PANIC
+
+
+Far above the sea and the Gardens of the Goddess, the moon poured down
+torrents of light.
+
+
+Melitta--that little damsel, so delicate and slender, possessed by
+Demetrios for a fleeting moment, and who had offered to take him to
+Chimairis, learned in chiromancy--had remained behind alone with the
+fortune-teller, crouching, and still fierce.
+
+"Do not fellow that man," Chimairis had said.
+
+"Oh yes, I will! I've not even asked him if I am ever to see him again.
+Let me run after him to kiss him, and I'll come back--"
+
+"No, you'll not see him ever more. And so much the better, my girl.
+Women who meet him once, learn to knew pain. Women who meet him twice,
+trifle with death."
+
+[Illustration: "Oh, prophetess of evil! Take back what you've said!]
+
+"Why say it? I've just met him, and I've only trifled with pleasure in
+his arms."
+
+"You owe your pleasure to him because you do not know what
+voluptuousness means, my tiniest of tiny girls. Forget him as you would
+a playmate and congratulate yourself on being only twelve years old."
+
+"So one is very unhappy when grown up?" asked the child. "All the women
+here chatter unceasingly of their troubles, and I, who never hardly cry,
+see so many weeping!"
+
+Chimairis dug her two hands into her hair and uttered a groan. Her goat
+shook its gold collar and turned its head in her direction, but she did
+not bestow a glance on the animal.
+
+"Nevertheless, I know one happy woman," continued Melitla,
+significantly. "She's my great friend, Chrysis. I'm certain she never
+sheds a tear."
+
+"She will," said Chimairis.
+
+"Oh, prophetess of evil! Take back what you've said, distraught old
+woman, or I shall hate you!"
+
+Seeing the young girl's threatening gestures, the black goat reared up
+erect, its front legs bent under; its horns thrust forward.
+
+
+Melitta fled without looking where she went.
+
+Twenty paces farther on, she burst out laughing, as she caught sight of
+a ridiculous couple hidden between two bushes. That sufficed to change
+the current of her young thoughts.
+
+She took the longest road before returning to her hut, and then decided
+not to go home at all. It was a magnificent, warm, moonlight night. The
+gardens were full of many voices and songs. Satisfied with what she had
+earned through the visit of Demetrios, she was seized with a sudden
+fancy to play the part of a vagrant girl of roads and ditches, in the
+depths of the wood, with pauper passers-by. In this way, she was enjoyed
+twice or three against a tree, a stone pillar, or on a bench, and found
+amusement as if the game was new, because the scene kept changing. A
+soldier, standing in the middle of a pathway, lifted her bodily up in
+his robust arms and identified himself with the God of the Gardens who
+joins himself to the wenches who tend the rose-trees without needing to
+let the hussies feet touch the ground. At this, Melitta uttered a cry of
+triumph.
+
+
+Escaping again, she continued her flight through an avenue of palms,
+where she met a lad, named Mikyllos, seemingly lost in the forest. She
+offered to be his guide, but led him astray designedly, so as to keep
+him with her for her own purposes. Mikyllos was not long in fathoming
+Melitta's intentions, as well as her tiny talents and capabilities. Soon
+becoming companions, rather than lovers, they ran along side by side in
+solitude that grew more and more silent. Suddenly, they came in front of
+the sea.
+
+
+The spot where they found themselves was far distant from the
+parts where the courtesans generally celebrated the rites of their
+religious profession. Why they chose other trysting-places in preference
+to this--the most admirable of all--they could not have told you. The
+part of the wood where the crowd gathered soon became a notorious
+central alley, surrounded by a network of bypaths and starry glades. On
+the outskirts, despite the charm or the beauty of the sites, there
+reigned eternal solitude where luxuriant vegetation flourished
+peacefully.
+
+
+Thus strolling, hand in hand, Mikyllos and Melitta reached the limit of
+the public park, a low hedge of aloes, forming a useless dividing line
+between the gardens of Aphrodite and those of her High Priest.
+
+Encouraged by the hushed solitude of this flowery wilderness, the young
+couple easily climbed over the irregular wall formed by the quaint
+twisted plants. The Mediterranean, at their feet, slowly swept the
+shore, with wavelets like the fringes of a river. The two children waded
+in breast-high and chased each other, laughing meanwhile, as they tried
+to effect difficult conjunctions in the water. They soon put an end to
+these sports, which failed like games insufficiently rehearsed. Alter
+that, luminous and dripping wet, wriggling their frog-like legs in the
+moonlight, they sprang upon the dark edge of the sea.
+
+
+Traces of footprints on the sand urged the boy and girl onwards. They
+walked, ran, and struggled, pulling each other by the hand; their black,
+well-defined shadows sketching bold outlines of their two figures. How
+far were they to go in this wise? They saw no other living things on the
+immense azure horizon.
+
+"Ah! Look!" exclaimed Melitta, all of a sudden.
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+"There's a woman!"
+
+"A courtesan! Oh, the shameless thing! She has fallen asleep in the
+open."
+
+"No, no!" rejoined Melitta, shaking her head. "I dare not go near her,
+Mikyllos. She's no courtesan."
+
+"I should have thought she was.
+
+"No, I say, Mikyllos, she's not one of us. It's Touni, wife of the High
+Priest. Look well at her. She is not asleep. Oh, I'm afraid to approach
+her. Her eves are wide open! Let us go away! I'm afraid--oh, so
+afraid!"
+
+Mikyllos made three steps forward on tip-toe.
+
+"You're right, Melitta. She is not sleeping, poor woman! She is dead."
+
+"Dead?"
+
+"There is a pin in her heart."
+
+He stretched out his hand to draw it from her breast, but Melitta was
+terrified.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"No, no! Touch her not! She is sacred! Remain by her side, watch over
+her, protect her. I'll call for help. I'll tell the others."
+
+She fled with all the strength of her legs into the deep shadow of the
+black trees.
+
+Alone and trembling, Mikyllos wandered round the corpse of the young
+woman. He touched the pierced breast with his finger. Then, either
+scared by death, or more likely fearing to be taken for an accomplice of
+the murder, he suddenly took to his heels, resolved to apprise no one.
+
+The icy nakedness of Touni remained as before, abandoned in the bright
+light of the moon.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+A long time afterwards, the woods near where she lay became filled with
+murmurs which were frightful because almost imperceptible.
+
+On all sides, between tree-trunks and bushes, a thousand courtesans,
+huddled together like frightened sheep, advanced slowly, their masses
+quivering with a unanimous shudder.
+
+By a movement as regular as that of the sea striking the sandy
+foreshore, the front rank of this army made way for those following
+behind. It seemed as if nobody wanted to be the first to find the dead
+woman.
+
+A great cry, taken up by a thousand mouths and dying away at a distance,
+arose to salute the poor corpse when it was perceived stretched out at
+the foot of a tree.
+
+A thousand naked arms were first uplifted and then as many others.
+
+"Goddess! Not on us!" now sobbed many voices. "Goddess, not on us! If
+thou wreakest vengeance, Goddess, spare our lives!"
+
+"To the Temple!" was the rallying-cry arising from one despairing
+throat.
+
+[Illustration: "Open the gates for us!"]
+
+"To the Temple! To the Temple!" repeated all the other women.
+
+At this juncture, a new eddy convulsed the surging multitude. Without
+daring to cast another look at the dead woman, stretched out on her back
+on the ground, her eyes upturned and her arms thrown back, all the
+courtesans in one great mob, black women and white, those of the East
+and the West, some in sumptuous robes and others in vague nudity,
+scampered through the trees, rushing across glades, paths, and roads;
+swarming into the vast open spaces in front of the houses, until they
+mounted the gigantic pink marble staircase that gleamed deeply red in
+the light of coming day. With their weak clenched fists, they battered
+the lofty bronze doors, squalling childishly:
+
+"Open the gates for us! Open! Let us in!"
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE CROWD
+
+
+The morning the orgie at Bacchis's came to an end an event took place at
+Alexandria: rain fell.
+
+Immediately, contrarily to what usually happens in countries less
+African, everybody went out to welcome the shower.
+
+The phenomenon was neither torrent-like nor stormy. Large warm drops
+fell from a violet cloud and traversed the air. The men looked at the
+sky with interest. The little children roared with laughter, and went
+about splashing their tiny naked feet in the surface-mud.
+
+Then the cloud faded away in the light, the sky remained implacably
+pure, and a short time after midday the mud had once more turned into
+dust under the sun.
+
+
+But this momentary shower had sufficed. It filled the town with gaiety.
+The men congregated on the pavement of the Agora, and the women thronged
+together in groups, intermingling their shrill voices.
+
+Only the courtesans were there, for the third day of the Aphrodisae
+being reserved for the exclusive devotions of the married women, the
+latter had just started for the Astarteion in a great procession, and
+there was nothing in the square but flowered robes and eyes blackened
+with paint.
+
+As Myrtocleia passed by, a young girl called Philotis, who was talking
+with many others, pulled her by the sleeve knot.
+
+"Ho, my little lass! you played at Bacchis's yesterday? What happened?
+What took place there? Did Bacchis put on a new necklace to hide the
+cavities in her neck? Has she got wooden breasts or copper ones? Did she
+forget to dye the little white hairs on her temples before putting on
+her wig? Come, speak, fried fish!"
+
+"Do you suppose I looked at her? I arrived after the banquet, I played
+my piece, I received my payment, and I ran off."
+
+"Oh, I know you don't dissipate!"
+
+"To stain my robe and receive blows? No, Philotis. Only rich women can
+afford to indulge in orgies. Little flute-girls get nothing but tears."
+
+"When one doesn't want to stain one's robe, one leaves it in the
+ante-chamber. When one receives blows, one insists on being paid double.
+It is quite elementary. So you have nothing to tell us? not an
+adventure, not a joke, not a scandal? We are yawning like storks. Invent
+something if you know nothing."
+
+"My friend Theano stayed after me. When I awoke a few minutes ago, she
+had not yet come. The fete is perhaps still going on."
+
+"It is finished," said another woman. "Theano is down there, by the
+ceramic wall."
+
+
+The courtesans started off at a run, but presently stopped with a smile
+of pity.
+
+Theano, in a naive fit of drunkenness, was obstinately pulling at a rose
+stripped of its leaves, the thorns of which were caught in her hair. Her
+yellow tunic was soiled with red and white stains as if she had borne
+the brunt of the whole orgie. The bronze clasp, which kept up up the
+converging folds of the stuff upon her left shoulder, dangled below the
+waist, and revealed the mobile globe of a young breast already too
+mature, and which was stained with two spots of purple.
+
+As soon as she saw Myrtocleia, she brusquely went off into a peal of
+singular laughter. Everybody knew it at Alexandria, and it had procured
+her the nickname of the "Fowl." It was an interminable cluck-cluck, a
+torrent of gaiety which commenced in a very low key and took her breath
+away, then shot up again into a shrill cry, and so forth, rhythmically,
+like the joy of a triumphant hen.
+
+"An egg! an egg!" said Philotis.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+But Myrtocleia made a gesture:
+
+"Come, Theano, come to bed. You are not well, come with me."
+
+"Ah! . . . ha! . . . Ah! . . . ha!" laughed the child. And she took her breast in
+her little hand, crying in a hoarse voice:
+
+"Ah! . . . Ha! . . . the mirror . . ."
+
+"Come along!" repeated Myrto, losing patience.
+
+"The mirror . . . it is stolen, stolen! Ah! haaa! I shall never laugh so
+much again if I live to be as old as Chronos. Stolen, stolen, the silver
+mirror!"
+
+The singing-girl tried to drag her away, but Philotis had understood.
+
+"Hi!" she cried to the others, waving her two arms. "Come here quickly!
+There is news! Bacchis's mirror has been stolen!"
+
+And all exclaimed:
+
+"Papaie! Bacchis's mirror!"
+
+
+In an instant, thirty women crowded round the flute-girl:
+
+"What is happening?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Bacchis has had her mirror stolen: Theano has just said so."
+
+"But when?"
+
+"Who has taken it?"
+
+The child shrugged her shoulders:
+
+"How do I know?"
+
+"You passed the night there. You must know. It is not possible. Who
+entered her house? You have certainly been told. Try to collect
+yourself, Theano."
+
+[Illustration: Thirty women crowded round the flute-girl.]
+
+"What do I know about it? There were more than twenty of them in the
+banqueting room.
+
+"They had hired me to play the flute, but they prevented me from playing
+because they do not like music. They asked me to mimic the figure of
+Danae and they threw gold coins at me, and Bacchis took them all away
+from me . . . It was a band of madmen. They made me drink head downwards
+out of a bowl overflowing with wine. They had poured seven tankards in
+it because there were seven wines upon the table. My face was all
+dripping. Even my hair was soaked, and my roses."
+
+"Yes," interrupted Myrto, "you are an awful fright. But the mirror? Who
+took it?"
+
+"Exactly! when they put me on my feet again, my head was suffused with
+blood, and I was covered with wine up to the ears. Ha! Ha! they all
+began to laugh . . . Bacchis sent for the mirror . . . Ha! ha! it had
+disappeared. Somebody had taken it."
+
+"Who? That is what we want to know."
+
+"It was not I, that is all I know, It was no use searching me: I was
+quite naked. I cannot hide a mirror under my eyelid, like a drachma. It
+was not I, that is all I know. She crucified a slave, perhaps on account
+of that. When I saw that they were not looking at me, I picked up the
+Danae coins. See, Myrto, I have five: you shall buy robes for the three
+of us."
+
+The news of the theft spread gradually over the whole square. The
+courtesans did not hide their envious satisfaction.  A noisy curiosity
+animated the moving groups.
+
+"It is a woman," said Philotis; "it is a woman who is responsible for
+this piece of work."
+
+"Yes, the mirror was well hidden. A thief could have carried off
+everything in the room and upset everything without finding the stone."
+
+"Bacchis had enemies, especially her former friends. The knew all her
+secrets. One of them has probably enticed her away somewhere, and then
+entered her house at the hour when the sun is hot and the streets are
+almost deserted."
+
+"Oh! she has perhaps sold the mirror to pay her debts."
+
+"Supposing it were one of her lovers? They say she takes porters now!"
+
+"No, it is a woman, I am sure of it."
+
+
+"By the two goddesses! it serves her right." Suddenly, a still more
+excited mob rushed towards a point of the Agora, followed by a rising
+rumour which drew all the passers-by after it.
+
+"What is the matter? what is the matter?"
+
+And a shrill voice dominating the tumult shouted over all their heads:
+
+"The High-Priest's wife has been killed!"
+
+Violent consternation took possession of the crowd. It was incredible.
+People refuse to believe that so atrocious a murder could have been
+committed at the very height of the Aphrodisisae, bringing down the
+wrath of the gods upon the town. But the same sentence passed from mouth
+to mouth in all directions:
+
+
+"The wife of the High-Priest has been killed! The festival at the Temple
+is put off."
+
+
+News arrived rapidly. The body had been found, lying on a pink marble
+seat, in a lonely place, at the summit of the gardens.
+
+A long golden pin penetrated her left breast; the wound had not bled;
+but the assassin had cut off all the young woman's hair, and had carried
+away the antique comb of Queen Nitaoucrit.
+
+
+After the first exclamations of anguish, a profound stupor gained the
+uppermost. The whole multitude grew every minute. The whole town was
+there: it was a sea of bare heads and women's hats, an immense herd
+pouring simultaneously from the streets bathed in blue shade into the
+dazzling brilliance of the Alexandrian Agora. Such a throng had never
+been seen since the day when Ptolemy Auleter had been driven from the
+throne by the partisans of Berenice. And even political revolutions
+seemed less terrible than this piece of sacrilege, on which the safety
+of the whole city might depend.
+
+The men pushed their way close to the witnesses. They clamoured for
+further details. They put forth conjectures. Women informed the new
+arrivals of the theft of the celebrated mirror. The wiseacres swore that
+these two simultaneous crimes had been committed by the same hand.
+
+But who could it be? Courtesans, who had made their offerings the night
+before for the ensuing year, were fearful lest the goddess should pay no
+attention to them, and sat sobbing, with their heads buried in their
+robes.
+
+An ancient superstition had it that two such events would be followed by
+a third and still graver one. The crowd awaited the third. After the
+mirror and the comb, what had the mysterious robber taken? A stifling
+atmosphere, inflamed by the south wind and filled with sand dust,
+weighed upon the motionless crowd.
+
+Gradually, as if this human mass were a single being, it was seized with
+a shivering which grew little by little until it became a panic, and all
+eyes were turned towards the same point on the horizon.
+
+It was at the distant extremity of the long straight avenue which
+traversed Alexandria from the Canopic gate and led from the Temple to
+the Agora. There, on the top of the gentle incline, where the road
+opened upon the sky, a second terror-stricken multitude had just made
+its appearance and was running down the hill to join the first one.
+
+
+"The courtesans, the sacred courtesans!"
+
+
+Nobody stirred. Nobody dared to go and meet them, for fear of hearing of
+a new disaster. They arrived like a living flood, preceded by the dull
+noise of their footsteps on the ground. They waved their arms, they
+jostled one another, they seemed to be in flight before an army. They
+were to be recognised now. One could distinguish their robes, their
+girdles, their hair. Rays of light gleamed on their golden jewels. They
+were quite near. They opened their mouths. There was a silence.
+
+
+"The necklace of the Goddess has been stolen, the True Pearls of
+Anadyomene are gone!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+A clamour of despair arose at the fatal utterance. The crowd retreated
+at first like a wave, then poured headlong forward, beating the walls,
+filling the road, thrusting back the frightened women, in the long
+avenue of the Dromos, towards the desecrated immortal saint.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE RESPONSE
+
+
+And the Agora was left empty, like a beach after the tide.
+
+Empty, but not completely: a man and a woman stayed behind, the only two
+mortals who knew the secret of the great public emotion, the two beings
+who were the cause of it: Chrysis and Demetrios.
+
+The young man was seated on a block of marble near the port. The young
+woman stood at the opposite end of the square. They could not recognise
+one another; but they divined one another mutually: Chrysis, drunk with
+pride and finally with desire, ran in the full glare of the sun.
+
+"You have done it!" she cried; "you have done it, then!"
+
+"Yes," said the young man simply. "You are obeyed."
+
+She quickly sat herself on his knees and embraced him deliriously:
+
+"I love you! I love you! I have never before felt what I feel now! Gods!
+At last I know what it is to be in love! You see, my beloved, I give you
+more than I promised you the day before yesterday. I, who have never
+denied anyone, I could not dream that should change so quickly. I had
+only sold you my body upon the bed, now I give you all my excellence,
+all my purity, my sincerity, my passion, my virgin soul, Demetrios. Come
+with me; let us leave this town for a time; let us go into a hidden
+place, where there are, only you and I. We will spend days such as the
+world has never seen. Never did a lover do what you have done for me.
+Never did a woman love as I love: it is not possible! it is not possible!
+I can hardly speak. I am choking. You see, I weep. I know now what it is
+to weep: it is through excess of happiness. But you do not answer! You
+say nothing? Kiss me!"
+
+
+Demetrios stretched out his right leg to ease his knee, which was a
+little cramped. Then he raised the young woman, stood up, shook the
+creases out of his garments, and said softly with an enigmatic smile:
+
+
+"No . . . Adieu . . ."
+
+[Illustration: "You say nothing! Kiss me!"]
+
+And he tranquilly turned away.
+
+
+Chrysis stood rooted to the ground with stupefaction, her mouth open and
+her head dangling.
+
+"What? What . . . what . . . what do you say?"
+
+"I say adieu," he said, without raising his voice.
+
+"But . . . but it cannot be you who . . ."
+
+"Yes. I had promised."
+
+"Then . . . I fail to understand . . ."
+
+"My dear, whether you understand or not is a matter of indifference to
+me. I leave this little mystery to your meditations. If what you have
+told me is true, they are likely to be prolonged. This affair occurs
+most conveniently to give them occupation. Adieu."
+
+"Demetrios! what do I hear? . . . what is the meaning of this tone? Is it
+really you who speak? Explain! I conjure you! What has happened between
+us? It is enough to make one dash one's head against the wall."
+
+"Am I to repeat the same thing a hundred times? Yes, I have taken the
+mirror; yes, I have killed the priestess Touni in order to get the
+peerless comb; yes, I have stolen the great seven-stringed necklace of
+the goddess. I was to hand you over the presents in exchange for a
+single sacrifice on your part. It was putting it at a high value, was it
+not? Now, I have ceased to estimate it at this extraordinary value, and
+I have nothing more to ask of you. Act in the same way, and let us part.
+I wonder you do not understand a situation the simplicity of which is so
+evident."
+
+"Keep your presents! Do you suppose I care about them? It is yourself
+that I want, you, you alone."
+
+"Yes, I know. But once again, I am not willing, and, as the consent of
+both the parties is necessary for a rendez-vous, I am very much afraid
+it will not take place, if I persist in my present views. This is what I
+am trying to impress upon you with all the clearness of diction of which
+I am capable. I see it is inadequate; but as I cannot improve it, I beg
+you to kindly accept the accomplished fact with a good grace, without
+prying into what you consider obscure about it, since you do not admit
+that it is within the limits of probability. I am most anxious to bring
+this discussion to an end. It can lead to no result, and might perhaps
+force me to be impolite."
+
+"People have been tittle-tattling about me?"
+
+"No!"
+
+"Oh yes, I guess as much! People have been talking about me, don't deny
+it. They have said things about me behind my back! I have terrible
+enemies, Demetrios! You must not listen to them: I swear to you by the
+gods, they lie!"
+
+"I do not know them."
+
+"Believe me! Believe me, Well-beloved! What interest could I have in
+deceiving you, since I desire nothing from you except yourself?"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"You are the first person I have ever spoken to like this . . ."
+
+
+Demetrios looked her in the eyes.
+
+"It is too late," he said. "I have possessed you."
+
+"You are raving . . . When? Where? How?"
+
+"I speak the truth. I have possessed you in spite of yourself. What I
+hoped from your complaisance you have given me without your knowledge.
+You took me to the country you want to go to, in a dream, last night,
+and you were beautiful . . . ah! you were beautiful, Chrysis! I have
+returned from that country. No human will shall force me to see it
+again. The same event never brings happiness twice. I am not so mad as
+to ruin a happy souvenir. I am indebted for this to you, you will say;
+but as I have only loved your shadow, you will dispense me, dear
+creature, from thanking your reality."
+
+
+Chrysis pressed her hands to her temples.
+
+"It is abominable, abominable! And he dares to say this! And he makes a
+boast of it!"
+
+
+"You jump to definite conclusions very quickly. I have told you that I
+have had a dream: are you sure that I was asleep? I have told you that I
+was happy: does happiness, according to you, consist in the gross
+physical thrill which you say you are so expert in producing, but which
+you cannot diversify, since it is much the same with all women who give
+themselves! No, it is yourself that you belittle by taking this most
+unbecoming point of view. I think you do not quite realise all the
+felicities which spring from under your footsteps. What differentiates
+mistresses from one another is that they have each a fashion, personal
+to themselves, of preparing and terminating an incident which, as a
+matter of fact, is as monstrous as it is necessary, and the quest of
+which, supposing we had only it in view, would not be worth all the
+trouble we take to find a perfect mistress. In this preparation and in
+this termination you excel beyond all women. At least, it has been a
+pleasure to me to think so, and perhaps you will grant me that after
+having produced the Aphrodite of the Temple my imagination has had no
+great difficulty in divining the manner of woman you are. Once again, I
+will not tell you whether it is a question of a night dream or a waking
+error. It is enough for you to know that, whether dreamed or conceived,
+your image has appeared to me in an extraordinary frame. Illusion; but,
+in all things I shall prevent you, Chrysis, from disillusioning me."
+
+"And me, what do you mean to do with me, who love you still in spite of
+all the horrors that proceed from your mouth? Have I had the
+consciousness of your odious dream? Have I had my share in this
+happiness of which you speak, and which you have stolen, stolen from me!
+Has one ever heard of a lover so amazingly selfish as to take his
+pleasure of the woman who loves him without allowing her to share it!
+. . . This confounds all thought. It will drive me mad."
+
+
+At this point, Demetrios dropped his tone of mockery, and said, in a
+voice that trembled slightly:
+
+"Did you trouble yourself about me when you took advantage of my sudden
+passion to extort from me, in a moment of folly, three actions which
+might have destroyed my existence, and which will always leave behind
+them the remembrance of a triple shame?"
+
+"If I asked this, it was to attach you to me. I should not have got you
+if I had given myself."
+
+"Good. You have been satisfied. You have held me, not for long, but you
+have held me, nevertheless, in the serfdom you desired. Today, you must
+allow me to free myself!"
+
+"I am the only slave, Demetrios."
+
+[Illustration: He freed himself from both her arms.]
+
+"Yes, you or I, but one of us two if he loves the other. Slavery!
+Slavery! that is the real name of passion. You have all of you only one
+dream, one idea in your heads; to break men's strength with your
+feebleness and govern his intelligence with your futility. As soon as
+your breasts take form, you desire neither to love nor to be loved, but
+to bind a man to your ankles, to lower him, to bow his head and put your
+sandals upon it. Then, in conformity with your ambition, you can dash
+the sword, the chisel, or the compass out of our hands, break everything
+which transcends you, emasculate everything which frightens you, tweak
+Hercules by the nose and set him a-spinning wool. But when you have been
+able neither to bow his head nor weaken his character, you adore the
+fist that beats you, the knee that strikes you to the ground, the very
+mouth that insults you. The man who has refused to kiss your naked feet
+satisfies your dearest wish if he violates you. The man who has not wept
+when you left his house, can drag you there by the hair: your love will
+spring up again from your tears, for there is but one thing that
+consoles you when you are unable to impose slavery, amorous women! and
+that is to submit to it."
+
+"Ah, beat me, if you like! but love me afterwards!"
+
+And she hugged him so brusquely that he had not time to turn away his
+lips. He freed himself from both her arms.
+
+"I detest you! Adieu," he said.
+
+But Chrysis clung to his mantle.
+
+"Do not lie. You adore me. Your soul is full of me: but you are ashamed
+at having yielded. Listen, listen, Well-beloved! If that is all that is
+needed to console your pride, I am ready to give you, in order to have
+you, still more than I asked of you. Whatever sacrifice I make you, I
+will not complain of life after our union."
+
+Demetrios looked at her curiously, and, like her, the night before upon
+the quay, he said to her:
+
+"What oath do you swear me?"
+
+"By Aphrodite also."
+
+"You do not believe in Aphrodite. Swear by Jehovah Sabaoth."
+
+The Galilaean woman paled.
+
+"We do not swear by Jehovah."
+
+"You refuse?"
+
+"It is a terrible oath."
+
+"I must have it."
+
+She hesitated, then said in a low voice: "I swear by Jehovah. What do
+you want of me, Demetrios?"
+
+The young man kept silence.
+
+"Speak quickly, I am afraid."
+
+"Oh! very little."
+
+"But what is it?"
+
+"I will not ask you to give me three presents, were they as simple as
+the first three were rare. It would be contrary to the usages. But I can
+ask you to accept some, can I not?"
+
+"Assuredly," said Chrysis joyously.
+
+"This mirror, this necklace, this comb, which you made me steal for you,
+you did not expect to use them, I suppose? A stolen mirror, the comb of
+a victim, and the goddess's necklace are not jewels one can make a
+display of."
+
+"What an idea!"
+
+"No, I thought so. It is therefore out of pure cruelty that you incited
+me to ravish them at the price of the three crimes with which the whole
+town resounds to-day. Well, you are going to wear them."
+
+"What?"
+
+"You must go into the little enclosed garden where the statue of the
+Stygian Hermes is. This place is always deserted, and you will run no
+risk of being disturbed. You will take off the god's left heel. The
+stone is broken, you will see. Then, in the interior of the pedestal, you
+will find Bacchis's mirror, and you will place it in your hand; you will
+find the great comb of Nitaoucrit, and will place it in your hair; you
+will find the seven pearl necklaces of the goddess Aphrodite, and you
+will put them on your neck. Thus adorned, beautiful Chrysis, you will go
+about the town. The crowd will deliver you to the Queen's soldiers, but
+you will have what you desired, and I will go and see you in your prison
+before sunrise."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE GARDEN OF HERMANUBIS
+
+
+Chrysis's first impulse was to shrug her shoulders. She would not be so
+ingenuous as to keep her word.
+
+
+The second was to go and see.
+
+
+A rising curiosity impelled her toward the mysterious place where
+Demetrios had hidden the three criminal trophies. She wanted to take
+them, to touch them with her hands, to make them gleam in the sunlight,
+to possess them for an instant. It seemed to her that her victory would
+not be quite complete so long as she should not have seized the booty of
+her ambitions.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+As for Demetrios: she would find the means of recapturing him
+ultimately. How was it possible to believe that he had emancipated
+himself from her for ever? The passion she attributed to him was not one
+of those that die out in a man's heart irrevocably. The women one has
+once greatly loved form a family of election in a man's hearts and the
+meeting with a former mistress, even though hated or forgotten, excites
+an unexpected disorder of the soul whence the new love may burst forth.
+Chrysis was not ignorant of this. However ardent she might be herself,
+however anxious to conquer the first man she had ever loved, she was not
+mad enough to buy him at the cost of her life when she saw so many other
+methods of seducing him more simply.
+
+And yet . . . what a blessed end he had proposed to her!
+
+Under the eyes of an innumerable crowd, bear the antique mirror into
+which Sappho had gazed, the comb which had held in place the royal hair
+of Nitaoucrit, the necklace of marine pearls that had rolled in the
+shell of the goddess Anadyomene . . . Then, from the evening till the
+morning drink madly of all the sensations with which the wildest love
+can inspire a woman . . . and towards the middle of the day, die without
+effort . . . what an incomparable destiny!
+
+She closed her eyes . . .
+
+
+But no: she would not allow herself to be tempted.
+
+She crossed Rhacotis and mounted the street which led in a straight line
+to the Great Serapeion. This road, constructed by the Greeks, seemed
+incongruous in this quarter of angular alleys. The two populations
+mingled oddly, in a promiscuity from which hatred was not absent.
+Amongst the blue-shirted Egyptians, the unbleached tunics of the
+Hellenes made splashes of white. Chrysis mounted rapidly, without
+listening to the conversations in which the people discoursed of the
+crimes committed for her sake.
+
+Before the steps of the monument, she turned to the right, took an
+obscure street, then another, the houses of which almost touched,
+crossed a little star-shaped square where two swarthy little girls were
+playing in a sunny fountain, and finally she stopped.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+The garden of Hermes Anubis was a little necropolis long ago abandoned,
+a sort of no man's land to which parents no longer brought the libations
+to the dead, and that the passers-by avoided. In the midst of the
+crumbling tombs, Chrysis advanced in the greatest silence, quaking with
+fear at every stone that clattered under her feet. The wind, always
+charged with fine sand, blew her hair over her temples and sent her veil
+of scarlet silk floating towards the white leaves of the sycamores.
+
+She discovered the statue between three monuments that hid it on all
+sides and enclosed it in a triangle. The spot was well chosen for the
+concealment of a mortal secret.
+
+Chrysis forced her way as best she could through the narrow, stony
+passage; on seeing the statue she paled slightly.
+
+The jackal-headed god was in a standing attitude, with his right leg
+advanced, and with his hair falling on his shoulders. This hair was
+pierced by two holes for the arms.
+
+The head on the top of the rigid body was bent downwards and
+contemplated the movement of the hands as they performed the
+characteristic gesture of the embalmer. The left foot was loose.
+
+Looking round slowly and fearfully, Chrysis made sure that she was quite
+alone. A little noise behind her made her start; but it was only a green
+lizard slipping away into a marble fissure.
+
+Then she ventured at last to lay hold of the broken foot of the statue.
+She lifted it obliquely, and not without difficulty, for it was attached
+to a loose fragment of the hollow pedestal. And under the stone she
+suddenly saw the gleam of the enormous pearls.
+
+She withdrew the necklace altogether. How heavy it was! She would never
+have imagined that unmounted pearls could weigh with such a weight upon
+the hand. The pearl globes were all marvellously round and of an almost
+lunar water. The seven strings succeeded one another in ever-widening
+circles, like circular clouds on a star-studded lake.
+
+
+She put it round her neck.
+
+[Illustration: On seeing the statue she paled slightly.]
+
+She arranged it in tiers with one hand, closing her eyes in order the
+better to feel the coldness of the pearls on her skin. She disposed the
+seven tiers regularly along her naked breast, and thrust the last one
+into the warm channel between her breasts.
+
+Then she took the ivory comb, considered it for a time, caressed the
+white figurine carved in the dainty coronal, and plunged the jewel into
+her hair several times before fixing it exactly as she wished.
+
+Then she drew the silver mirror from the pedestal, looked at herself in
+it, saw her triumph in it, her eyes gleaming with pride, her shoulders
+adorned with the spoils of the gods . . .
+
+
+And enveloping herself to the hair in her great purple cyclas, she left
+the necropolis, taking with her the terrible jewels.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE WALLS OF PURPLE
+
+
+Then, out of the mouth of the hierodules, the people had learnt the
+certainty of the sacrilege for the second time, they gradually melted
+away through the gardens.
+
+The courtesans of the temple crowded by hundreds along the paths of
+black olive trees. Some scattered ashes on their heads. Others beat
+their foreheads on the ground, or pulled out their hair, or tore their
+breasts, as a sign of calamity. Many sobbed, with their heads in their
+hands.
+
+
+The crowd descended into the town in silence, along the Dromos and along
+the quay. Universal mourning spread consternation throughout the
+streets. The shopkeepers had hastily taken in their multicoloured
+stands, from fear, and wooden shutters kept in place by iron bars
+succeeded one another like a monotonous palisade on the ground-floor of
+windowless houses.
+
+The life of the harbour had come to a stand-still. The sailors sat
+motionless on the street-posts, with their cheeks in their hands. The
+ships ready to leave had taken in their long oars and clewed up their
+pointed sails along the masts rocking in the wind. Those who wished to
+enter the harbour waited for the signals out in the open, and some of
+their passengers, who had relatives at the queen's palace, believing a
+bloody revolution was in progress, sacrificed to the infernal gods.
+
+
+At the corner of the island of Pharos and the quay, Rhodis recognised
+Chrysis standing near her in the crowd.
+
+"Ah! Chrysis! take me under your care! I am afraid! Myrto is here! but
+the crowd is so great . . . I am afraid that we shall be separated. Take
+us by the hand."
+
+"You know," said Myrtocleia, "you know what is happening? Do they know
+the culprit? Is he being tortured? Nothing like it has ever been seen
+since Hierostratos. The Olympians are deserting us. What is going to
+become of us?"
+
+Chrysis did not answer.
+
+"We had given doves," said the little flute-player; "will the goddess
+remember? The goddess must be very angry. And you, my poor Chryse! you
+who were to be very happy to-day or very powerful . . ."
+
+"All is accomplished," said the courtesan.
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+Chrysis took two steps backwards and lifted her right hand to her mouth.
+
+"Look well, Rhodis; look, Myrtocleia. Human eyes have never beheld what
+you are to behold to-day, since the day, when the goddess descended upon
+Ida. And such a sight will never be seen again upon the earth."
+
+The two friends, believing her to be mad, recoiled in stupefaction. But
+Chrysis, lost in her dream, walked to the monstrous Pharos, a mountain
+of gleaming marble in eight hexagonal tiers. Taking advantage of the
+public inattention, she pushed open the bronze door and closed it on the
+inside by letting drop the sonorous bars.
+
+
+A few minutes elapsed.
+
+The crowd surged perpetually. The living tide added its clamour to the
+regular upheavals of the waters.
+
+Suddenly a cry arose upon the air, repeated by a hundred thousand
+voices.
+
+"Aphrodite!"
+
+"Aphrodite!!"
+
+A thunder of cries burst forth. The joy, the enthusiasm of a whole
+people sang in an indescribable tumult of ecstasy at the walls of
+Pharos.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The rout that covered the quay surged violently forward into the island,
+took possession of the rocks, mounted on the houses, on the signal
+masts, on the fortified towers. The isle was full, more than full, and
+the crowd arrived ever more compact, like the onrush of a swollen river
+hurling long rows of human beings into the sea from the top of the
+precipitous cliff.
+
+This flood of men was interminable. From the palace of the Ptolemies to
+the wall of the Canal, the banks of the Royal Port, of the Great Port,
+and of Euroste were alive with a dense mass of human beings that
+received continual reinforcements from the side streets. Above this
+ocean, agitated by immense eddies, a foaming mass of arms and faces,
+floated like a barque in peril the yellow sails of Queen Berenice's
+litter. The tumult gathered force every moment and became formidable.
+
+Neither Helen on the Scain Gates, nor Phryne in the waves of Eleusis,
+nor Thais setting fire to Persepolis have known what triumph means.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Chrysis had appeared by the western Gate, on the first terrace of the
+red monument.
+
+She was naked like the goddess, she held in her two hands the ends of
+her scarlet veil which floated with the wind upon the evening sky, and
+in her right hand the mirror, in which was reflected the setting sun.
+
+[Illustration: She went in her way towards the sky.]
+
+Slowly, with bended head, moving with infinite grace and majesty, she
+mounted the outer staircase which wound around the high vermilion tower
+like a spiral. Her veil flickered like a flame. The rosy sunset reddened
+the pearl necklace like a river of rubies.
+
+She mounted, and in this glory, her gleaming skin took on all the
+magnificence of flesh, blood, fire, blue carmine, velvety red, bright
+pink, and revolving upwards with the great purple walls, she went on her
+way towards the sky.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK V
+
+
+I
+
+THE SUPREME NIGHT
+
+
+"You are loved of the gods," said the old gaoler. "If I, a poor slave,
+had committed the hundredth part of your crimes, I should have been
+bound upon the rack, hung up by the feet, lashed with thongs, burnt with
+pincers. They would have poured vinegar into my nostrils, overwhelmed
+and crushed me with bricks, and if I had died under the agony, my body
+would already he food for the jackals of the burning plains. But you who
+have stolen, assassinated, profaned, you may expect nothing more than
+the gentle hemlock, and in the meanwhile you enjoy a good room. May Zeus
+blast me with his thunderbolt if I can tell why! You probably know
+somebody at the palace."
+
+"Give me figs," said Chrysis; "my mouth is dry."
+
+The old slave brought her a dozen ripe figs in a green basket.
+
+Chrysis was left alone.
+
+
+She sat down and got up again, she walked round the room, she struck the
+walls with the palms of her hands without thinking of anything whatever.
+She let down her hair to cool it, and then put it up again almost
+immediately.
+
+They had dressed her in a long garment of white wool. The stuff was hot.
+Chrysis was bathed in perspiration. She stretched her arms, yawned, and
+leaned herself against the lofty window.
+
+
+Outside, the silvery moon shone in a sky of liquid purity, a sky so pale
+and clear that not a star was visible.
+
+It was on just such a night that, seven years before, Chrysis had left
+the land of Gennesaret.
+
+She remembered . . . They were five. They were sellers of ivory. Their
+long-tailed horses were adorned with parti-coloured tufts. They had met
+the child at the edge of a round cistern . . .
+
+
+And before that, the blue lake, the transparent sky, the light air of
+the land of Galilee . . .
+
+The house was environed with pink flax-plants and tamarisks. Thorny
+caper-bushes pricked one's fingers when one went a-catching
+butterflies . . . One could almost see the wind in the undulations of the
+pine grasses . . .
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The little girls bathed in a limpid brook where one found red shells
+under the flowering laurels: and there were flowers upon the water, and
+flowers all over the mead, and great lilacs upon the mountains, and the
+line of the mountain was that of a young breast . . .
+
+Chrysis closed her eyes with a faint smile which suddenly died away. The
+idea of death had just occurred to her. And she felt that, until the
+last, she would be incapable of ceasing to think.
+
+"Ah!" she said to herself, "what have I done? Why did I meet that man:
+Why did he listen to me? Why did I let myself be caught in the trap? How
+is it that, even now, I regret nothing?
+
+"Not to love or to die: that is the choice God has given me. What have I
+done to deserve punishment?"
+
+And fragments of sacred verses occurred to her that she had heard quoted
+in her childhood. She had not thought of them for seven years. But they
+returned, one after the other, with an implacable precision, to apply to
+her life and predict her penalty.
+
+She murmured:
+
+
+"It is written:
+
+    I remember thy love when thou wast young.
+    For of old thou hast broken thy yoke.
+    And burst thy bonds;
+    And thou hast said: I will no longer serve.
+    But upon every high hill,
+    And under every green tree,
+    Thou hast wandered, playing the harlot. [1]
+
+
+"It is written:
+
+    I will follow after my lovers,
+    Who give me my bread and my wine,
+    And my wool and my flax,
+    And my oil and my wine. [2]
+
+
+"It is written:
+
+    How canst thou say: I am not polluted?
+    See thy way in the valley,
+    Know what thou hast done,
+    O thou dromedary traversing her ways,
+    O thou wild ass,
+    Painting and ever lustful,
+    Who could prevent thee from satisfying thy desire? [3]
+
+
+"It is written:
+
+    _She has played the harlot in the land of Egypt._
+    She has doted upon paramours
+    Whose flesh is as the flesh of asses,
+    And whose issue is like the issue of horses.
+    Thus thou callest to remembrance the lewdness of thy youth,
+    In bruising thy teats by the Egyptians
+    For the paps of thy youth." [4]
+
+
+"Oh!" she cried. "It is I! It is I!"
+
+"And it is written again:
+
+    Thou hast played the harlot with many lovers,
+    And thou wouldst return again to me! saith the Lord. [5]
+
+
+"But my chastisement also is written:
+
+    Behold: I raise up thy lovers against thee:
+    They shall judge thee according to their judgments.
+    They shall take away thy nose and thine ears,
+    And thy remnant shall fall by the sword. [6]
+
+
+"And again:
+
+    She is undone; she is stripped naked, she is led away
+    Her servants wail like doves captive
+    And tabor upon their breasts. [7]
+
+
+"But does one know what the Scripture says?"
+she added to console herself. "Is it not written elsewhere:
+
+    I will not punish your daughters when they commit
+    whoredom. [8]
+
+
+"And elsewhere does not Scripture give this advice:
+
+    Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy and drink thy wine with a
+    merry heart: for God now accepteth thy works. Let thy garments
+    be always white, and let thy head lack no ointment. Live
+    joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life
+    of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun; for there
+    is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave,
+    whither thou goest. [9]
+
+
+She shivered, and repeated in a low voice:
+
+    For there is no work, nor device nor knowledge, nor wisdom in
+    the grave, _whither thou goest!_
+
+    Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is to see the
+    sun. [10]
+
+    Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart cheer thee
+    in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thy heart and
+    in the sight of thine eyes, or ever thou goest to thy long home
+    and the mourners go about the streets: or ever the silver cord
+    be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken or the pitcher be broken
+    at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, or the dust
+    return to the earth as it was. [11]
+
+
+Shivering once more, she repeated slowly:
+
+    Or the dust return to the earth as it was.
+
+And as she took her head in her hands in order to stifle her thoughts,
+she suddenly felt, without having foreseen it, the mortuary form of her
+cranium through the living skin: the empty temples, the enormous orbits,
+the flat nose under the cartilage, and the protruding jaws.
+
+Horror! this it was, then, that she was about to become! With frightful
+lucidity, she had the vision of her corpse, and she passed her hands
+over her whole body in order to probe to the bottom an idea which,
+though simple, had never yet occurred to her--that she bore _her
+skeleton within her_, that it was not a result of death, a
+metamorphosis, a culmination, but a thing one carries about, a spectre
+inseparable from the human form, and that the framework of life is
+already the symbol of the tomb.
+
+A furious desire to live, to see everything again, to begin everything
+again, to do everything again, suddenly came over her. It was a revolt
+in the presence of death: the impossibility of admitting that she would
+never see the evening of the dawning day: the impossibility of
+understanding how this beauty, this body, this active thought, this
+opulent life of the flesh could cease to be, in its zenith, and go to
+rottenness.
+
+The door opened quietly.
+
+Demetrios entered.
+
+    [1] _Jeremiah_ II, 2, 20.
+
+    [2] _Hosea_ II, 7.
+
+    [3] _Jeremiah_ II, 23, 24.
+
+    [4] _Ezekiel_ XXIII, 20, 21.
+
+    [5] _Jeremiah_ III, 1.
+
+    [6] _Ezekiel_ XXIII, 22, 25.
+
+    [7] _Nabum_ III, 8.
+
+    [8] _Hosea_ IV, 14.
+
+    [9] _Ecclesiastes_ IX, 7, 10.
+
+    [10] _Ecclesiastes_ XI, 7.
+
+    [11] _Ecclestiastes_ XII, 1, 8, 9.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+DUST RETURNS TO EARTH
+
+
+"Demetrios!" she cried.
+
+And she rushed forward.
+
+
+But after carefully dropping the wooden bolt, the young man remained
+motionless, and his glance betrayed such profound tranquility that
+Chrysis was suddenly stricken with a cold chill.
+
+She had hoped for an impulse of generosity, a movement of the arms, the
+lips, anything, an outstretched hand . . .
+
+Demetrios did not move.
+
+
+He waited in silence for an instant, in an extremely correct attitude,
+as if he wished clearly to disavow all responsibility in the case.
+
+Then, seeing that nothing was asked of him, he strode towards the window
+and planted himself in the embrasure to contemplate the dawn of day.
+
+Chrysis sat upon the low bed, with a fixed look in her dulled eyes.
+
+
+Then Demetrios began to commune with himself.
+
+
+"It is better thus," He said to himself. "Such trivial amusements on the
+very eve of death would, as a matter of fact, be most lugubrious. I
+wonder, however, that she should not have had a presentiment of it from
+the very beginning, and I marvel that she should have received me so
+enthusiastically. As for me, it is an adventure terminated. I regret
+somewhat this denouement, for all things considered, the only crime of
+which Chrysis is guilty is to have expressed very frankly an ambition
+which might have been shared by most women, without doubt, and if it
+were not necessary to cast a victim to the public indignation, I should
+be satisfied with the banishment of this too-ardent young woman, in
+order to get rid of her and at the same time leave her the joys of life.
+But there has been a scandal, and none can stop the course of events.
+Such are the effects of passion. Thoughtless sensuality, or its
+contrary, the idea without the reality, do not involve these fatal
+consequences. We ought to have many mistresses, but to beware, with the
+help of the gods, of forgetting that all mouths resemble one another."
+
+[Illustration: Chrysis sat upon the low bed.]
+
+
+Having thus, in an audacious aphorism, summed up one of his moral
+theories, he lightly resumed the normal course of his ideas.
+
+He remembered vaguely an invitation to dine that he had accepted for the
+night before and then forgotten in the whirl of events, and he resolved
+to send an apology.
+
+
+He considered whether he should put his slave-tailor up for sale, an old
+man who had remained attached to the fashionable cut of the former
+regime, and who succeeded very imperfectly with the new puckered
+tunics.
+
+
+His mind was even so free from all preoccupation that he stumped out
+upon the wall a rough study of his group of _Zagreus and the Titans_, a
+variant which modified the position of the principal character's right
+arm.
+
+
+Hardly had he finished, when a gentle knock was heard at the door.
+
+
+Demetrios opened without haste. The old executioner entered, followed by
+two helmeted hoplites.
+
+"I bring the little cup," he said, smiling obsequiously at the royal
+lover.
+
+Demetrios kept silence.
+
+
+Chrysis, half beside herself, raised her head. "Come, my girl,"
+continued the gaoler, "the hour has come. The hemlock is crushed. There
+is really nothing left but to take it. Do not be afraid. There is no
+pain."
+
+Chrysis looked at Demetrios, who did not turn away his eyes.
+
+
+Still continuing to regard him with her great black eyes that were
+rimmed with green light, Chrysis stretched out her hand, took the cup,
+and slowly raised it to her mouth.
+
+She dipped her lips in it. The bitterness of the poison and also the
+pangs of the poisoning had been tempered with honey and narcotics.
+
+She drank half the contents of the cup, then, whether it was that she
+had seen this gesture at the Theatre, in the _Thyestes_ of Agathon, or
+whether it was really the outcome of a spontaneous sentiment, she handed
+the poison to Demetrios. But the young man waved away this indiscreet
+suggestion.
+
+Then the Galilaean drank the rest of the beverage even to the green
+slime at the bottom. An agonising smile overspread her cheeks, a smile
+in which there was certainly a little contempt.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"What must I do?" she said to the gaoler.
+
+
+"Walk about the room, my girl, until you feel a heaviness in the legs.
+Then lie down on your back, and the poison will do the rest."
+
+
+Chrysis walked to the window, leaned her head against the wall, with her
+temples in her hand, and cast a last look of vanished youth upon the
+violet dawn.
+
+
+The orient was bathed in a sea of colour. A long band, livid as a water
+leaf, enveloped the horizon with an olive-coloured girdle. Higher up,
+several tints sprang out of one another, liquid sheets of blue-green
+sky, irisated, or lilac-coloured, melting insensibly into the leaden
+azure of the upper heavens. Then, these tiers of colour rose slowly, a
+line of gold appeared, mounted, expanded: a thin thread of purple
+illumined this melancholic dawn, and, in a flood of blood, the sun was
+born.
+
+
+It is written:
+
+    "The light is sweet . . ."
+
+
+She remained thus, standing, so long as her legs could sustain her. When
+she showed signs of reeling, the hoplites carried her to the bed.
+
+
+There, the old man disposed the white folds of the robe along the rigid
+limbs. Then he touched her feet and asked her:
+
+
+"Do you feel anything?"
+
+[Illustration: The hoplites carried her to the bed.]
+
+
+She answered:
+
+
+"No."
+
+
+He touched her knees and asked her:
+
+
+"Do you feel anything?"
+
+She made a sign to him that she felt nothing, and suddenly, with a
+movement of her mouth and shoulders (for her very hands were dead),
+seized with a supreme frenzy of passion, and perhaps with regret, at
+this sterile hour, she raised herself towards Demetrios, but before he
+could answer she fell back lifeless, with the light for ever gone from
+out of her eyes.
+
+
+Then the executioner covered her face with the upper folds of her
+garment: and one of the assistant soldiers, supposing that a more tender
+past had once united this young man and woman, severed with his sword
+the uttermost lock of her hair, and it fell down upon the paving-stones.
+
+
+Demetrios took it in his hand, and in truth it was Chrysis in her
+entirety, the gold that survived her beauty, the very pretext of her
+name . . .
+
+He took the warm lock between his thumb and his fingers, severed the
+strands slowly, dropped them to the-earth, and ground them into the dust
+under the sole of his shoe.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+CHRYSIS IMMORTAL
+
+
+When Demetrios found himself alone in his red studio, littered with
+marble statuary, rough models, trestles, and scaffoldings, he
+endeavoured to apply himself once more to his work.
+
+With his chisel in his left hand and his mallet in his right, he
+resumed, but without ardour, an interrupted rough study. It was the
+breast and shoulders of a gigantic horse intended for the temple of
+Poseidon. Under the close-cropped mane, the skin of the neck, puckered
+by a movement of the head, curved in geometrically like an undulating
+marine basin.
+
+Three days before, the details of this regular muscular arrangement had
+entirely absorbed all Demetrios's interest; but on the morning of the
+death of Chrysis, the aspect of things seemed changed. Less calm than he
+could have wished, Demetrios could not succeed in fixing his preoccupied
+thoughts. A sort of veil which he could not lift interposed itself
+between him and the marble. He throw down his mallet and began to pace
+about amongst the dusty pedestals.
+
+
+Suddenly he crossed the court, called a slave, and said to her:
+
+"Prepare the piscina and the aromatics. Bathe me and perfume me, give me
+my white garments, and light the round perfume-pans."
+
+When he had finished his toilette, he summoned two other slaves.
+
+"Go," said he, "to the Queen's prison; hand the gaoler this lump of
+potter's earth, and tell him to place it in the death-chamber of Chrysis
+the courtesan. If the body has not already been thrown into the dungeon,
+charge him to take no action until he receives my orders. Go quickly."
+
+He put a roughing-chisel into the fold of his girdle and opened the
+principal door which gave upon the deserted avenue of the Dromos.
+
+
+Suddenly he halted on the threshold, stupefied by the immense midday
+light of Africa.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The street was certainly white and the houses white too, but the flame
+of the perpendicular sunbeams bathed the gleaming surfaces with such a
+fury of reflections that the limestone walls and the pavements danced
+with prodigious incandescence in dark blue, red, green, raw ochre, and
+hyacinth. Great palpitating pillars of colour seemed to hang in the air
+and to be superimposed in transparent masses over the shimmering,
+flaming facades. The very lines of the houses lost their shape behind
+this dazzling magnificence; the right wall of the street rounded off
+dimly into space, floated like a piece of drapery, and in certain places
+became invisible. A dog lying near a street-post was literally bathed in
+crimson.
+
+Lost in admiration, Demetrios saw a symbol of his new existence in this
+spectacle. He had lived long enough in solitary night, in silence, and
+in peace. Long enough had he taken moon-beams for light, and, for his
+ideal, the languid line of a too delicate pose, His work was not virile.
+There was an icy shiver on the skin of his statues.
+
+During the tragic adventure which had just convulsed his intelligence,
+he had, for the first time, felt the great living breath of life inflate
+his breast. If he feared a second ordeal; if, victorious in the
+struggle, he swore above all things not to run the risk of flinching
+from the beautiful attitude he had adopted in the face of the world, at
+any rate he had just realised that that only is worthy of being imagined
+which penetrates by means of marble, colour or speech to one of the
+profundities of human emotion--and that formal beauty is merely so much
+uncertain matter, ever capable of being transfigured by the expression
+of sorrow or joy.
+
+Just as he was finishing this line of thought, he arrived before the
+door of the criminal prison.
+
+His two slaves were waiting for him.
+
+"We have brought the lump of red clay," they said. "The body is on the
+bed. It has not been touched. The gaoler salutes you and hopes you will
+not forget him."
+
+
+The young man entered in silence, Followed the long corridor, mounted
+some steps, and penetrated into the death-chamber. He carefully closed
+the door after him.
+
+
+The body lay upon the bed, with the head covered with a veil, the
+fingers extended, and the feet close together. The fingers were laden
+with rings: two silver bangles encircled the pale ankles, and the nails
+of each toe were still red with powder.
+
+Demetrios laid his hand on the veil in order to raise it; but he had no
+sooner touched it than a dozen flies rapidly escaped from the opening.
+
+He shivered from head to foot. Nevertheless he removed the tissue of
+white wool and wound it round the hair.
+
+
+Chrysis' face had little by little become illumined with the expression
+of eternity that death dispenses to the eyelids and hair of corpses. In
+the bluish whiteness of the cheeks, the azure veinlets gave the immobile
+head the appearance of cold marble. The diaphanous nostrils were
+distended above the fine lips. The fragile ears had something immaterial
+about them. Never, in any light, even in his dreams, had Demetrios seen
+such superhuman beauty and such a brilliancy of fading skin.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+And then he remembered the words uttered by Chrysis during their first
+interview: "You only know my face. You do not know how beautiful I am!"
+An intense emotion suddenly stifles him. He wishes to know. He has the
+power.
+
+Of his three days of passion he wishes to keep a souvenir which shall
+last longer than himself.--to lay bare the admirable body, to pose it
+as a model in the violent attitude in which he saw it in his dreams, and
+to create, from the corpse, the statue of Immortal Life.
+
+He unclasps the buckle and unties the knot. He throws back the
+draperies. The body is heavy. He raises it. The head falls backwards.
+The breasts tremble. The arms drop pendent. He withdraws the robe
+entirely and casts it into the middle of the chamber. Heavily, the body
+falls back again.
+
+Placing his two hands under the icy armpits, Demetrios pulls the dead
+woman to the upper end of the bed. He turns the head over on to the left
+cheek, collects and arranges the hair splendidly under the back. Then he
+raises the right arm, bends the forearm over the forehead, closes the
+still soft fingers over the stuff of a cushion: two admirable muscular
+lines, descending from the ear and elbow, meet under the right breast
+and bear it like a fruit.
+
+[Illustration: The rough figure takes life and precision.]
+
+Afterwards, he arranges the legs, one stretched out stiffly on one side,
+the other with the knee raised and the heel almost touching the croup.
+He rectifies a few details, turns over the waist a little to the left,
+straightens out the right foot and takes off the bracelets, the
+necklaces and the rings, in order not to mar by a single dissonance the
+pure and complete harmony of feminine nudity.
+
+
+The Model has taken the pose.
+
+
+Demetrios casts the dark lump of clay upon the table. He presses it,
+kneads it, lengthens it out into human form: a sort of barbarous monster
+takes shape under his burning fingers: he looks.
+
+The motionless corpse preserves its attitude of passion. But a thin
+thread of blood trickles from the right nostril, flows upon the lip, and
+falls, drop by drop, under the half-opened mouth.
+
+Demetrios continues. The rough figure takes life and precision. A
+prodigious left arm circles over the body as if it were clasping someone
+in a tight embrace. The muscles of the thigh stand out violently. The
+heels are bent upwards.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+When night mounted from the earth and darkened the low chamber,
+Demetrios had finished the statue.
+
+He had it carried to his studio by four slaves. That very evening, by
+lamplight, he had a block of Parian marble rough-hewed, and a year after
+that day he was still working at the marble.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+PITY
+
+
+"Gaoler, open! Gaoler, open!"
+
+Rhodis and Myrtocleia knocked at the closed door.
+
+The door opened half way.
+
+"What do you want?"
+
+"To see our friend," said Myrto. "To see Chrysis, poor Chrysis, who died
+this morning."
+
+"It is not allowed; go away!"
+
+"Oh, let us enter. No one will know. We will tell no one. She was our
+friend, let us see her once more. We will go out again. We will go out
+again quickly. We will make no noise."
+
+"And supposing I am caught, my little girls? Supposing I am punished on
+your account? You will not pay the fine?"
+
+"You will not be caught. You are alone here. There are no other inmates
+of the prison. You have sent away the soldiers. We know this. Let us
+enter."
+
+"Well, well! Do not stay too long. Here is the key. It is the third
+door. Tell me when you go away. It is late and I want to go to bed."
+
+The kindly old man handed them a key of beaten iron which hung from his
+girdle, and the two little virgins ran immediately, on their noiseless
+sandals, along the obscure corridors.
+
+Then the gaoler re-entered his lodge, and did not insist any further
+upon a useless surveillance. The penalty of imprisonment was not applied
+in Greek Egypt, and the little white house that was placed under the
+care of the gentle old man served merely for the reception of culprits
+condemned to death. In the interval between executions it remained
+almost deserted.
+
+The moment the great key entered the lock, Rhodis arrested her friend's
+hand:
+
+"I do not know whether I dare see her," she said. "I loved her well,
+Myrto . . . I am afraid . . . Go in first, will you?"
+
+Myrtocleia pushed open the door; but as soon as she had cast a glance
+into the chamber she cried:
+
+"Do not enter, Rhodis! Wait for me here."
+
+"Oh! What is there? You are afraid too . . . What is there on the bed? Is
+she not dead?"
+
+"Yes, wait for me . . . I will tell you . . . Stay in the corridor and do
+not look."
+
+
+The body was still in the ecstatic attitude in which Demetrius had
+arranged it for his Statue of Immortal Life. But the transports of
+extreme joy confine upon the convulsions of extreme pain, and Myrtocleia
+asked herself what atrocious sufferings, what agonies had produced such
+an upheaval in the corpse.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+She approached the bed on tiptoe.
+
+The thread of blood continued to flow from the diaphanous nostril. The
+skin of the body was perfectly white; the pale tips of the breasts
+receded like delicate navels; not a single rose-coloured reflection gave
+life to the ephemeral recumbent statue; but some emerald-coloured spots
+that tinted the smooth belly signified that millions of new lives were
+germinating in the scarcely--cold flesh, and were demanding "the right
+of succession!"
+
+Myrtocleia took the dead arm and laid it flat along the hip. She tried
+also to pull out the left leg; but the knee was almost rigid, and she
+did not succeed in pulling it out completely.
+
+
+"Rhodis," she said, in a troubled voice, "come; you can enter now."
+
+The trembling child penetrated into the chamber. Her features
+contracted, her eyes opened wide.
+
+As soon as they felt that there were two of them, they fell into one
+another's arms and burst into long-drawn sobs.
+
+"Poor Chrysis! Poor Chrysis!" repeated the child.
+
+They kissed one another on the cheek with a desperate affection from
+which all sensuality had disappeared and the taste of the tears upon
+their lips filled their forlorn little souls with bitterness.
+
+They wept, and wailed, they looked at one another other with anguish,
+and sometimes they spoke both together in a hoarse voice of agony, and
+their words ended in sobs.
+
+"How we loved her! She was not a friend for us. She was a little mother
+for both of us . . ."
+
+Rhodis repeated:
+
+"Like a little mother . . ."
+
+And Myrto, dragging her to the side of the dead woman, said in a low
+voice:
+
+"Kiss her."
+
+They both bent down, and placed their hands upon the bed, as, with fresh
+sobs, they touched the icy forehead with their lips.
+
+
+And Myrto took the head between her two hands, buried them in the hair,
+and spoke to her thus:
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"Chrysis, my Chrysis, you who were the most beautiful and the most
+adored of women, who were so like the goddess that the people took you
+for her, where are you now, what have they done with you? You lived to
+impart beneficent joy. No fruit was ever sweeter than your mouth, no
+light brighter than your eyes; your skin was a glorious robe that you
+would not veil; voluptuousness floated upon it like a perpetual odour;
+and when you unclasped your hair, all desires flowed from it; and when
+you clasped your naked arms, one implored the gods for permission
+to die."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Rhodis sat huddled up on the ground, sobbing.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+"Chrysis, my Chrysis." pursued Myrtocleia, "but yesterday you were
+living, and young, and hoping for length of days, and now you are dead,
+and no power on earth can induce you to speak a word to us. You have
+closed your eyes, and we were not there. You have suffered and you did
+not know that we wept for you behind the walls. Your dying eyes looked
+for someone and did not meet our eyes stricken with sorrow and pity."
+
+
+The flute-girl wept continually. The singing girl took her by the hand.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Chrysis, my Chrysis, you once told us that one day, thanks to you, we
+should marry. Our union is one of tears, and sad is the betrothal of
+Rhodis and Myrtocleia. But sorrow, rather than love, welds together two
+enclasped hands. Those who have once wept together will never desert one
+another. We are going to lay your dear body under the ground,
+Chrysidion, and we will both of us cut off our hair upon your tomb.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+She enveloped the beautiful body and then she said to Rhodis:
+
+"Help me."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+They lifted her up gently; but the burden was a heavy one for the little
+musicians, and they laid it down upon the ground.
+
+"Let us take off our sandals," said Myrto. "Let us walk bare-footed in
+the corridors. The gaoler is surely asleep. If we do not wake him we
+shall pass, but if he sees us he will prevent us . . . To-morrow matters
+not: when he sees the empty bed, he will say to the Queen's soldiers
+that he has thrown the body into a ditch, according to the law. Let us
+fear nothing, Rhodis! . . . Put your sandals in your girdle, like me. And
+come! Take the body under the knees. Let the feet hang behind. Walk
+without noise, slowly, slowly . . ."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+PIETY
+
+
+After the turning of the second street, they laid the body down a second
+time in order in put on their sandals. Rhodis's feet, too delicate to
+walk naked, were torn and bleeding.
+
+The night was full of brilliancy. The town was full of silence. The
+iron-coloured shadows lay in square blocks in the middle of the streets,
+according to the profile of the houses.
+
+The little virgins resumed their load.
+
+"Where are we going to?" asked the child. "Where are we going to bury
+it?"
+
+"In the cemetery of Hermanubis. It is always deserted, it will be in
+peace there."
+
+"Poor Chrysis! Could I ever have thought that on her last day, I should
+bear her body without torches and without funeral car, secretly, like a
+thing stolen."
+
+
+Then both began to talk volubly as if they were afraid of the silence,
+cheek by jowl with the corpse. The last day of Chrysis's life filled
+them with astonishment. Where had she got the mirror, the necklace and
+the comb? She could not have taken the pearls of the goddess herself.
+The temple was too well guarded for a courtesan to be able to enter it.
+Then somebody must have acted for her? But who? She was not known to
+possess any lover amongst the Stolists to whom the guard of the divine
+statue was entrusted. And then, if someone had acted for her, why had
+she not denounced him? And, in any case, why these three crimes? Of what
+had they availed her, except to deliver her over to punishment? A woman
+does not commit such follies without an object, unless she be in love?
+Was Chrysis in love? and who could it be?
+
+"We shall never know", concluded the flute-player. "She has taken her
+secret with her, and even if she had an accomplice he would be the last
+to enlighten us."
+
+At this point, Rhodis, who had been resting for several instants, sighed:
+
+[Illustration: The little virgins resumed their load]
+
+"I cannot carry her any longer, Myrto. I shall fall down on my knees, I
+am broken with fatigue and grief."
+
+Myrtocleia took her by the neck:
+
+"Try again, my darling. We _must_ carry her. Her nether life is at
+stake. If she has no sepulture and no obol in her hand, she will roam
+eternally on the banks of the river of hell, and when we in our turn,
+Rhodis, go down to the dead, she will reproach us with our impiety, and
+we shall not know what to answer her."
+
+But the child, overcome with weakness, burst into tears.
+
+"Quickly, quickly!" exclaimed Myrtocleia.
+
+"Somebody is coming along the end of the street. Place yourself in front
+of the body with me. Let us hide it behind our tunics . . . If it is seen,
+all is lost . . ."
+
+She stooped short.
+
+"It is Timon. I recognise him. Timon with four women. Ah, gods! what is
+going to happen? He laughs at everything and will mock us . . . But no,
+stay here, Rhodis; I will speak to him."
+
+And, inspired by a sudden thought, she ran down the street to meet the
+little group.
+
+"Timon," she said, and her voice was full of supplication; "Timon, stop.
+I have grave words to utter to you alone."
+
+"My poor little thing," said the young man, "how excited you are! Have
+you lost your shoulder-knot or have you dropped your doll and broken its
+nose? This would be an irreparable disaster."
+
+The girl threw him a look of anguish; but the four women, Philotis, Seso
+of Cnidos, Callistion, and Tryphera, were already clamouring round her
+with impatience.
+
+"Get away, little idiot!" said Tryphera, "if you have dried up your
+nurse's teats, we cannot help it, we have no milk. It is almost
+daylight, you ought to be in bed; what business have children to roam
+about in the moonlight?"
+
+"Her nurse?" said Philotis. "She wants to steal away Timon."
+
+"The whip! She deserves the whip!" said Callistion, who put one arm
+round Myrto's waist, lifting her off the ground and raising her little
+blue tunic, But Seso interposed:
+
+"You are mad," she cried. "Myrto has never known a man. If she calls
+Timon, it is not to sleep with him. Let her alone, and let us have done
+with it!"
+
+"Come," said Timon, "what do you want with me? Come here. Whisper in my
+ear. Is it really serious?"
+
+"The body of Chrysis is there, in the street," said the young girl
+tremblingly. "We are carrying into the cemetary, my little friend and I.
+but it is heavy, and we ask you if you will help us. It will not lake
+long. Immediately afterwards you can rejoin your women . . ."
+
+Timon's look reassured her.
+
+"Poor girls! To think that I laughed! You are better than we are . . .
+Certainly I will help you. Go and join your friend and wait for me, I am
+coming."
+
+Turning to the four women . . .
+
+"Go to my house," he said, "by the street of the Potters. I shall be
+there in a short time. Do not follow me."
+
+Rhodis was still sitting in front of the corpse. When she saw Timon
+coming, she implored him:
+
+"Do not tell! We have stolen it to save her shade. Keep our secret, we
+will love you, Timon."
+
+"Have no fears," said the young man.
+
+He took the body under the shoulders and Myrto took it under the knees,
+and they walked on in silence, with Rhodis tottering along behind.
+
+Timon said not a word. For the second time in two days, human passion
+had carried off one of the transitory guests of his bed, and he
+marvelled at the unreason that drove people out of the enchanted road
+that leads to perfect happiness.
+
+"Impassivity," he thought, "indifference, quietude, voluptuous serenity!
+who amongst men will appreciate you?  We fight, we struggle, we hope,
+when one thing only is worth having: namely, to extract from the
+fleeting moment all the joys it is capable of affording, and to leave
+one's bed as little as possible."
+
+They reached the gate of the ruined necropolis.
+
+"Where shall we put it?" said Myrto.
+
+"Near the god."
+
+"Where is the Statue? I have never been in here before. I was afraid of
+the tombs and the inscriptions. I do not know the Hermanubis. It is
+probably in the centre of the little garden. Let us look for it. I once
+came here before when I was a child, in quest of a lost gazelle. Let us
+follow the alley of white sycamores. We cannot fail to discern it."
+
+Nor did they fail to find it.
+
+Dawn mingled its delicate violets with the moonbeams on the monuments. A
+vague and distant harmony floated in the cypress branches. The regular
+rustling of the palms, so similar to tiny drops of falling rain, cast an
+illusion of freshness.
+
+Timon opened with difficulty a pink stone imbedded in the earth. The
+sepulture was excavated beneath the hands of the funerary god, whose
+attitude was that of the embalmer. It must have contained a body,
+formerly; but at present nothing was to be found but a handful of
+brownish dust.
+
+[Illustration: They passed the limp body to Timon.]
+
+The young man jumped into the grave, as far as his waist, and held out
+his arms:
+
+"Give it to me," he said to Myrto. "I am going to lay it at the far end,
+and we will close up the tomb again."
+
+But Rhodis threw herself on the body.
+
+"No, do not bury her so quickly! I want to see her again! One last time!
+One last time! Chrysis! My poor Chrysis! Ah! the horror of it . . . How she
+has changed! . . ."
+
+
+Myrtocleia had just disarranged the blanket which covered the dead
+woman, and the sight of the sudden change the face had undergone made
+the two girls recoil. The checks had become square, the eyelids and lips
+were puffed out like half-a-dozen white pads. Nothing was left of all
+that superhuman beauty. They drew the thick winding-sheet over her
+again: but Myrto slipped her hand under the stuff and placed an obol for
+Charon in her fingers.
+
+Then, shaken by interminable sobs, they passed the limp inert body to
+Timon.
+
+And when Chrysis was laid in the bottom of the sandy tomb, Timon opened
+the winding-sheet again. He fixed the silver obol tightly in the
+nerveless hand; he propped up the head with a flat stone; he spread the
+long deep-gold hair over her body from the forehead to the knees.
+
+Then he left the tomb, and the musicians, kneeling before the yawning
+opening, cut off their young hair, bound it together in one sheaf, and
+buried it with the dead.
+
+    [Greek: TOIONDE PERAS ESCHE TO SYNTAGMA
+    TON PERI CHRYSIDA KAI DEMETRION]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Ancient Manners, by Pierre Louys
+
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