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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ancient Manners, by Pierre Louÿs
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world 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.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+Title: Ancient Manners
+       Also Known As Aphrodite
+
+Author: Pierre Louÿs
+
+Illustrator: Ed Zier
+
+Release Date: June 11, 2011 [EBook #36378]
+Last updated: September 22, 2019
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANCIENT MANNERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by James D. Simmons
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Ancient Manners
+
+
+COMPLETE AND INTEGRAL TRANSLATION
+INTO ENGLISH
+
+by Pierre Louÿs
+
+
+_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.
+
+
+
+This Edition on Large Paper,
+is limited to 1000 copies of
+which this is
+No . . . . . . . . 
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+ 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. Rhacotis
+ 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
+
+
+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 μοἴχος or _mœchus_, 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
+œdipus 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; Cæsar was the
+_mœchus calvus_; nor can we imagine Racine shunning the stage-women nor
+Napoleon practicing abstinence. Mirabeau’s novels, Chénier’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 Lacedæmon, 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 Louÿs.
+
+
+ill-001
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+
+
+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 Galilæans 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.
+
+ill-002
+
+
+_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;
+Phœnicians 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 after 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.
+
+ill-003
+
+
+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.”
+
+ill-004
+
+
+_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 Phœbe 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
+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, cheek 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.
+
+ill-005
+
+
+_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 Aphrodisiæ, 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 minæ. Bacchis
+refused. Twenty minæ; 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 minæ, and at that
+price the girl becomes a freed-woman.”
+
+“Thirty-five minæ? Three thousand five hundred drachmæ? Three thousand
+five hundred drachmæ 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?”
+
+ill-006
+
+
+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 minæ. 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.”
+
+ill-007
+
+
+“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.”
+
+ill-008
+
+
+_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.”
+
+ill-009
+
+
+_“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 girl’s 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 after 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.
+
+ill-010
+
+
+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 æsthetic sentiment, and he said to
+himself that she would make a perfect model for the Charis with the fan
+which he intended to design on the morrow.
+
+ill-011
+
+
+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 eyes 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.
+
+ill-012
+
+
+_“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 Galilæn.”
+
+“What is your name, Miriam or Noëmi?”
+
+“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:
+
+ill-013
+
+
+_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 Saïs; 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 . . .”
+
+ill-014
+
+
+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
+æsop 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:
+
+ill-015
+
+
+_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!”
+
+ill-016
+
+
+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 ægipan, 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.
+
+ill-017
+
+
+“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?”
+
+ill-018
+
+
+_“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 Aphrodisiæ.
+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 Iphinoë, 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.
+
+ill-019
+
+
+_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.
+
+ill-020
+
+
+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 a 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 “cité,” 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
+cteis; and beneath was graved the courtesan’s name, with the initials
+of the usual formula:
+
+Ω.Ξ.Ε.
+ΚΟΧΛΙΣ
+Π.Π.Π
+
+
+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 exposée,” 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. Lachmi, Ashtaroth, Venus,
+Ischtar, 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.
+
+ill-021
+
+
+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 apparelled 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.
+
+ill-022
+
+
+_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 minæ: 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 Astarteïon, 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.
+
+ill-023
+
+
+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 served by monstrous bulls, naïads 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 . . .
+
+ill-024
+
+
+_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 exposées” like flowers
+in a shop window.
+
+Their attitudes 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 faces, 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.
+
+ill-025
+
+
+_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!
+
+Mnaïs!
+
+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 bands 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?”
+
+
+ill-026
+
+
+“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.
+
+ΜΕΛΙΤΤΑ .Λ. ΧΡΥΣΙΔΑ
+ΧΡΥΣΙΣ .Λ. ΜΕΛΙΤΤΑΝ
+
+
+“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.”
+
+ill-027
+
+
+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.
+
+ill-028
+
+
+_“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 _accouchée_. 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
+tonight; 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 Aphrodisiæ. 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.
+
+ill-029
+
+
+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.
+
+ill-030
+
+
+
+_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. Far away,
+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 enthrals
+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.
+
+“Tonight? 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.
+
+ill-031
+
+
+_“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.
+
+ill-032
+
+
+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.
+
+ill-033
+
+
+_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 Aphrodisiæ.
+
+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 fête.
+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 Galilæan’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.
+
+ill-034
+
+
+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 à 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 fête. We shall be seven, with
+you. Don’t fail to come.”
+
+“A fête? 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.
+
+ill-035
+
+
+_“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.
+
+ill-036
+
+
+“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.”
+
+ill-037
+
+
+_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 drachmæ, the
+balance of four minæ 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.
+
+ill-038
+
+
+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 canticle began again. The murmur of the harps rose up towards
+the statue with the swirling fumes of crackling incense from the
+priest’s censer.
+
+ill-039
+
+
+_“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.”
+
+
+
+ill-040
+
+
+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 for. 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 more 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.
+
+ill-041
+
+
+_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.
+
+ill-042
+
+
+“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 minæ.
+
+ill-043
+
+
+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.”
+
+ill-044
+
+
+_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.
+
+ill-045
+
+
+_“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 grammarian, 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 does Phrasilas think about it?”
+
+“He is an admirable writer,” said the little man.
+
+“In what sense?”
+
+ill-046
+
+
+“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.”
+
+ill-047
+
+
+_“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.
+
+ill-048
+
+
+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 clientèle 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 white 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’œuvre (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
+χοῖρος 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 Gnathène, 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 Gnathène two minæ.”
+
+“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.
+
+ill-049
+
+
+_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.
+
+ill-050
+
+
+“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.”
+
+ill-051
+
+
+_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 Aretias:
+
+“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 Nabatæan women squatting between two red lamps which cast a
+gleam from below upon their heads hooded with gold.
+
+ill-052
+
+
+_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.
+
+ill-054
+
+
+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 the 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 Danaë,”
+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.”
+
+ill-055
+
+
+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 fête 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] Philodème 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 gave 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.
+
+ill-056
+
+
+_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 drachmæ 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.
+
+ill-057
+
+
+_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.
+
+ill-058
+
+
+_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.
+
+ill-059
+
+
+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 Arsinoë,
+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,
+Saïs, 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, Thebaïs. Diospolis, the Isle of Elephants, the impassable
+cataracts, the Isle of Argo . . . Meroë . . . 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 be. 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.
+
+ill-060
+
+
+“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 times 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.
+
+ill-061
+
+
+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.
+
+ill-062
+
+
+_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.
+
+ill-063
+
+
+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?”
+
+ill-064
+
+
+_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 Chæremon, _The Return_
+of Alexis, _The Mirror of Lais_ of Aristippos, _The Enchantress_, _The
+Cyclops_, the _Bucolics_ of Theocritos, _Œdipus 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’ ethrêneon, epi de stenachonto gynaikes.
+Têsin d’Andromachê leukôlenos êrche gooio,
+Hektoros androphonoio karê meta chersin echousa;
+Aner, ap’ aiônos neos ôleo, kadde me chêrên
+Leipeis en megaroisi; pais d’eti nêpios autôs,
+Hon tekomen sy t’egô 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.
+
+ill-065
+
+
+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 cast 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.
+
+“Stay 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 AS 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 loth 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.
+
+ill-066
+
+
+_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 leaden-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
+cheeks 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 follow 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.”
+
+ill-067
+
+
+_“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 Melitta,
+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.
+After 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 eyes 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.
+
+ill-068
+
+
+“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.
+
+ill-069
+
+
+_“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 Aphrodisæ
+being reserved for the exclusive devotions of the married women, the
+latter had just started for the Astarteïon 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 fête 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.
+
+ill-070
+
+
+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:
+
+“Papaië! 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.”
+
+ill-071
+
+
+_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 Danaë 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 Danaë 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. They 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 Aphrodisisæ, 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!”
+
+ill-072
+
+
+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 . . .”
+
+ill-073
+
+
+_“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? You are
+the first person I have ever spoken to like this . . .”
+
+ill-074
+
+
+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 loves 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.”
+
+ill-075
+
+
+_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 Galilæan 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.
+
+ill-076
+
+
+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 heart 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.
+
+ill-077
+
+
+_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.
+
+
+
+
+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 Thaïs 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.
+
+ill-078
+
+
+_She went on 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 be 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 . . .
+
+ill-079
+
+
+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,
+Panting 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 captive
+Her servants wail like doves
+And taber 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, 5.
+
+ [3] _Jeremiah_ II, 23, 24.
+
+ [4] _Ezekiel_ XXIII, 20, 21.
+
+ [5] _Jeremiah_ III, 1.
+
+ [6] _Ezekiel_ XXIII, 22, 25.
+
+ [7] _Nahum_ II, 7.
+
+ [8] _Hosea_ IV, 14.
+
+ [9] _Ecclesiastes_ IX, 7, 10.
+
+ [10] _Ecclesiastes_ XI, 7.
+
+ [11] _Ecclesiastes_ XII, 1, 5-7.
+
+
+
+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.”
+
+ill-080
+
+
+_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 Galilæan 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.
+
+ill-081
+
+
+
+“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?”
+
+ill-082
+
+
+_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.
+
+ill-083
+
+
+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.
+
+ill-084
+
+
+_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.
+
+ill-085
+
+
+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.”
+
+ill-086
+
+
+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:
+
+ill-087
+
+
+_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
+take 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.
+
+ill-881
+
+
+_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 cheeks 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.
+
+ΤΟΙΝΔΕ ΠΕΡΑΣ ΕΣΧΕ ΤΟ ΣΥΝΤΑΓΜΑ
+ΤΩΝ ΠΕΡΙ ΧΡΥΣΙΔΑ ΚΑΙ ΔΗΜΗΤΡΙΟΝ
+
+
+ill-089
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Ancient Manners, by Pierre Louys
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANCIENT MANNERS ***
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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: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** 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 Lou�s
+
+_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; C�sar was the
+_moechus calvus_; nor can we imagine Racine shunning the stage-women nor
+Napoleon practicing abstinence. Mirabeau's novels, Ch�nier'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 Laced�mon, 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 Lou�s.
+
+
+
+
+[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 Galil�ans 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 Aphrodisi�, 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 min�. Bacchis
+refused. Twenty min�; 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 min�, and at that
+price the girl becomes a freed-woman."
+
+"Thirty-five min�? Three thousand five hundred drachm�? Three thousand
+five hundred drachm� 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 min�. 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 �sthetic 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 Galil�n."
+
+"What is your name, Miriam or No�mi?"
+
+"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
+�sop 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 �gipan, 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 Aphrodisi�.
+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 Iphino�, 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: �.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 expos�e," 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 min�: 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 expos�e" 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 accouch�e. 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 Aphrodisi�. 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 Aphrodisi�. 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 f�te.
+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 Galil�an'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 f�te. We shall be seven, with you. Don't
+fail to come."
+
+"A f�te? 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 drachm�, the
+balance of four min� 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 min�.
+
+[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 min�."
+
+"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 Nabat�an 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 Dana�," 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 f�te 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] Philod�me 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
+drachm� 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,
+Theba�s. Diospolis, the Isle of Elephants, the impassable cataracts, the
+Isle of Argo . . .Mero� . . . 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 Ch�remon_, _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' ethr�neon, epi de stenachonto gynaikes.
+    T�sin d'Andromach� leuk�lenos �rche gooio,
+    Hektoros androphonoio kar� meta chersin echousa;
+    Aner, ap' ai�nos neos �leo, kadde me ch�r�n
+    Leipeis en megaroisi; pais d'eti n�pios aut�s,
+    Hon tekomen sy t'eg� 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 Aphrodis�
+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 f�te 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:
+
+"Papai�! 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
+Dana� 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
+Dana� 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 Aphrodisis�, 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 Galil�an 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 Tha�s 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 Galil�an 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
+    T�N PERI CHRYSIDA KAI D�M�TRION]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Ancient Manners, by Pierre Louys
+
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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
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+<title>Ancient Manners, by Pierre Louÿs</title>
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ancient Manners, by Pierre Louÿs
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world 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.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+Title: Ancient Manners
+       Also Known As Aphrodite
+
+Author: Pierre Louÿs
+
+Illustrator: Ed Zier
+
+Release Date: June 11, 2011 [EBook #36378]
+Last updated: September 22, 2019
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANCIENT MANNERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by James D. Simmons
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<h1>Ancient Manners</h1>
+
+<h4>COMPLETE AND INTEGRAL TRANSLATION<br />
+INTO ENGLISH</h4>
+
+<h2>by Pierre Louÿs</h2>
+
+<h4>
+<i>Illustrated by ED. ZIER</i>
+</h4>
+
+<p class="center">
+Privately printed for Subscribers only
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<b>PARIS</b>
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+This<br />
+Translation of<br />
+Ancient Manners<br />
+was executed on the<br />
+Printing Presses of CHARLES<br />
+HERISSEY, at Evreux, (France),<br />
+for Mr. CHARLES CARRINGTON,<br/>
+Paris, Bookseller et Publisher,<br/>
+and is the only<br />
+complete English<br />
+version<br />
+extant.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+This Edition on Large Paper,<br />
+is limited to 1000 copies of<br />
+which this is<br />
+No . . . . . . . . 
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h3>Contents</h3>
+
+<table summary="" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto">
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#pref01">PREFACE</a><br/><br/></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#book01"><b>BOOK I</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap01">I. Chrysis</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap02">II. On the Quay at Alexandria</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap03">III. Demetrios</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap04">IV. The Passer-by</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap05">V. The Mirror, the Comb, and the Necklace</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap06">VI. The Virgins</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap07">VII. Chrysis&rsquo;s Hair</a><br/><br/></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#book02"><b>BOOK II</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap08">I. The Garden of the Goddess</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap09">II. Melitta</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap10">III. Love and Death</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap11">IV. Moonlight</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap12">V. The Invitation</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap13">VI. Chrysis&rsquo;s Rose</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap14">VII. The Tale of the Enchanted Lyre</a><br/><br/></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#book03"><b>BOOK III</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap15">I. The Arrival</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap16">II. The Dinner</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap17">III. Rhacotis</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap18">IV. The Orgie at Bacchis&rsquo;s</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap19">V. The Crucified One</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap20">VI. Enthusiasm</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap21">VII. Cleopatra</a><br/><br/></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#book04"><b>BOOK IV</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap22">I. Demetrios Dreams a Dream</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap23">II. The Panic</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap24">III. The Crowd</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap25">IV. The Response</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap26">V. The Garden of Hermanubis</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap27">VI. The Walls Of Purple</a><br/><br/></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#book05"><b>BOOK V</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap28">I. The Supreme Night</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap29">II. Dust Returns to Earth</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap30">III. Chrysis Immortal</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap31">IV. Pity</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap32">V. Piety</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="pref01"></a>PREFACE</h3>
+
+<p class="right">
+The very ruins of the Greek<br/>
+world instruct us how our<br/>
+modern life might be made<br/>
+supportable.
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+RICHARD WAGNER
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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: <i>Heracles between
+Virtue and Pleasure</i>. 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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, <i>The Hours</i>, 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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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:
+&lsquo;I am Arete.&rsquo; The other had drooping eyelids, delicate hands, and
+tender breasts. She said: &lsquo;I am &lsquo;Tryphe.&rsquo; And both exclaimed:
+&lsquo;Choose between us.&rsquo; But the subtile Odysseus answered sagely.
+&lsquo;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.&rsquo; 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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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. &ldquo;I have painted pleasure as
+it really is,&rdquo; they say, &ldquo;in order to exalt virtue.&rdquo; In
+commencing a novel which has Alexandria for its scene, I refuse absolutely to
+perpetuate this anachronism.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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, &ldquo;Amongst certain barbarous peoples it is considered
+disgraceful to appear in public naked.&rdquo; When the Greeks or the Latins
+wished to insult a man who frequented women of pleasure, they called him
+&#956;&#959;&#7988;&#967;&#959;&#962; or <i>mœchus</i>, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is obvious that the life of the ancients cannot be judged according to the
+ideas of morality which we owe to Geneva.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In order to continue to judge of the ancient Greeks according to ideas at
+present in vogue, it is necessary that <i>not a single</i> exact translation of
+their great writers should fall in the hands of a fifth-form schoolboy. If M.
+Mounet&mdash;Sully were to play his part of Œdipus 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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;
+Cæsar was the <i>mœchus calvus</i>; nor can we imagine Racine shunning the
+stage-women nor Napoleon practicing abstinence. Mirabeau&rsquo;s novels,
+Chénier&rsquo;s Greek verses, Diderot&rsquo;s correspondence, and
+Montesquieu&rsquo;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? &ldquo;Love! why art thou the happiness of all beings and
+man&rsquo;s misfortune? Because only the <i>physical part</i> of this passion
+is good, and the rest is worth nothing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 Lacedæmon,
+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&rsquo;s exhortation, that we &ldquo;curse
+the soil that bred this mistress of sombre errors, and insult it because it
+exists no longer.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+Pierre Louÿs.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-001.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-001" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="book01"></a>BOOK I</h3>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap01"></a>I<br/>
+CHRYSIS</h3>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Languid with too much sleep, she had remained alone upon the disordered bed
+ever since she had awakened, two hours after mid-day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The great waves of her hair, her only garment, covered one of her sides.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This hair was resplendently opaque, soft as fur, longer than a bird&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 Galilæans across the sands.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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 &ldquo;the riches and faith of a people&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-002.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-002" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p style="text-align: center;"><i>Greek harlots from the isles told her the
+legend of Iphis.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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&rsquo; hair. Others came on the evening of their departure, and
+others on the morrow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s fortune she bought jewels, bed-cushions, rare perfumes, flowered
+robes, and four slaves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She gained a knowledge of many foreign languages, and knew the tales of all
+countries. Assyrians told her the loves of Douzi and Ishtar; Phœnicians 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And one morning, waking up two hours after 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her reflexions were profound.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Djala! Djala!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Djala was her Hindoo slave, and was called Djalantachtchandratchapala, which
+means: &ldquo;Mobile as the image of the moon upon the water.&rdquo; Chrysis
+was too lazy to say the whole name.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The slave entered and stood near the door, without entirely closing it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who came yesterday, Djala?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You do not know?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At sunrise, he said&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What did he leave me? Is it much? No, don&rsquo;t tell me. It&rsquo;s
+all the same to me. What did he say? Has no one been since? Will he come back
+again? Give me my bracelets.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The slave brought a casket, but Chrysis did not look at it, and, raising her
+arm as high as she could:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah! Djala,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;ah! Djala! I long for extraordinary
+adventures.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Everything is extraordinary,&rdquo; said Djala, &ldquo;or nought. The
+days resemble one another.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She turned over upon her back and interlocked her fingers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What bracelet to-day?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are not going out?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, I shall go out alone. I shall dress myself alone. I shall not
+return. Off with you! Off with you!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She let one leg drop upon the carpet and stretched herself into a standing
+posture. Djala had gone away noiselessly.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s length; then entered, and, standing upright near her bed, and
+dripping with water, said to the slave:
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Dry me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+The Malabar woman took a large sponge and passed it over Chrysis&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chrysis sank quivering into the coolness of a marble chair and murmured:
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Dress my hair.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chrysis held a mirror of polished copper at arm&rsquo;s length. She watched the
+slave&rsquo;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&rsquo;
+eyes.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-003.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-003" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Chrysis became graver and said in a low voice:
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Paint me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chrysis began to smile, and said to the Hindoo woman:
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Sing to me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Huddled against the wall, Djala bethought her of the love-songs of India.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Chrysis . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+She sang in a monotonous chant.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+The young woman alternated, in a softer, lower voice:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My hair is like an endless river in the plain when the flame-lit evening
+fades.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+And they sang, one after the other:
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Thine eyes are like blue water-lilies without stalks, motionless upon
+the pools.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mine eyes rest in the shadow of my lashes like deep lakes under dark
+branches.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Thy lips are two delicate flowers stained with the blood of a
+roe.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My lips are the edges of a burning wound.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Thy tongue is the bloody dagger that has made the wound of thy
+mouth.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My tongue is inlaid with precious stones. It is red with the sheen of my
+lips.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Thine arms are tapering as two ivory tusks, and thy armpits are two
+mouths.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mine arms are tapering as two lily-stalks and my fingers hang therefrom
+like five petals.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thy thighs are two white elephants&rsquo; trunks. They bear thy feet
+like two red flowers.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My feet are two nenuphar-leaves upon the water: My thighs are two
+bursting nenuphar buds.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Thy breasts are two silver bucklers with cusps steeped in blood.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My breasts are the moon and the reflection of the moon and the
+water.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-004.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-004" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p style="text-align: center;"><i>Huddled against the wall, Djala bethought
+herself of the love-songs of India.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Thy navel is a deep pit in a desert of red sand, and thy belly a young
+kid lying on its mother&rsquo;s breast.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My navel is a round pearl on an inverted cup, and the curve of my belly
+is the clear crescent of Phœbe in the forests.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+There was a silence. The slave raised her hands and bowed to the ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The courtesan proceeded:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is like a purple flower, full of perfumes and honey.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is like a sea-serpent, soft and living, open at night.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is the humid grotto, the ever-warm lodging, the Refuge where man
+reposes from his march to death.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+The prostrate one murmured very low: &ldquo;It is appalling. It is the face of
+Medusa.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Chrysis planted her foot upon the slave&rsquo;s neck and said with trembling:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Djala.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The night had come on little by little, but the moon was so luminous that the
+room was filled with blue light.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chrysis looked at the motionless reflections of her naked body where the
+shadows fell very black.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+She rose brusquely:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She took her feather fan in her hand, and carelessly sauntered forth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Standing upon the steps of the threshold, with her hand leaning on the white
+wall, Djala watched the courtesan&rsquo;s retreating form.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She walked slowly past the houses, in the deserted street bathed in moonlight.
+A little flickering shadow danced behind her.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap02"></a>II<br/>
+THE QUAY AT ALEXANDRIA</h3>
+
+<p>
+On the quay at Alexandria a singing-girl was standing singing. By her side were
+two flute-girls, seated on the white parapet.
+</p>
+
+<h4>I</h4>
+
+<p class="poem">
+The satyrs pursue in the woods<br/>
+    The light-footed oreads.<br/>
+They chase the nymphs upon the mountains,<br/>
+    They fill their eyes with affright,<br/>
+They seize their hair in the wind,<br/>
+    They grasp their breasts in the chase,<br/>
+And throw their warm bodies backwards<br/>
+    Upon the green dew-covered moss,<br/>
+And the beautiful bodies, their beautiful bodies half divine,<br/>
+    Writhe with the agony . . .<br/>
+O women! Eros makes your lips cry aloud<br/>
+    With dolorous, sweet Desire.<br/>
+</p>
+
+<hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;" />
+
+<p>
+The flute-players repeated
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+&ldquo;Eros<br/>
+Eros!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+and wailed in their twin reeds.
+</p>
+
+<h4>II</h4>
+
+<p class="poem">
+Cybele pursues across the plain<br/>
+    Attys, beautiful as Apollo.<br/>
+Eros has smitten her to the heart, and for him,<br/>
+    O Totoi! but not him for her,<br/>
+Instead of love, cruel god, wicked Eros,<br/>
+    Thou counsellest but hatred . . .<br/>
+Across the meads, the vast distant plains,<br/>
+    Cybele chases Attys;<br/>
+And because she adores the scorned,<br/>
+    She infuses into his veins<br/>
+The great cold breath, the breath of death.<br/>
+    O dolorous, sweet Desire!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+&ldquo;Eros!<br/>
+Eros!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+Shrill wailings poured from the flutes.
+</p>
+
+<h4>III</h4>
+
+<p class="poem">
+The Goat-foot pursues to the river<br/>
+    Syrinx, the daughter of the fountain;<br/>
+Pale Eros, that loves the taste of tears,<br/>
+    Kissed her as she ran, cheek to cheek;<br/>
+And the frail shadow of the drowned maiden<br/>
+    Shivers, reeds, upon the waters.<br/>
+But Eros kings it over the world and the gods.<br/>
+    He kings it over death itself.<br/>
+On the watery tomb he gathered for us<br/>
+    All the reeds, and with them made the flute,<br/>
+&rsquo;Tis a dead soul that weeps here, women,<br/>
+    Dolorous, sweet Desire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-005.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-005" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>Groups formed in places, and women wandered amongst them</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 Aphrodisiæ, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Tryphera! Tryphera!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And a young courtesan of joyful mien elbowed her way through the crowd to join
+a friend of whom she had just caught sight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tryphera! are you invited?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where, Seso?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To Bacchis&rsquo;s.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not yet. She is giving a dinner?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A dinner? A banquet, my dear. She is to liberate her most beautiful
+slave, Aphrodisia, on the second day of the feast.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At last! She has perceived at last that people came to see her only for
+the sake of her slave.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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 minæ. Bacchis refused. Twenty
+minæ; she refused again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She must be crazy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, pray? It was her ambition to have a freed-woman. Besides, she was
+quite right to bargain. Cheres will give thirty-five minæ, and at that price
+the girl becomes a freed-woman.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thirty-five minæ? Three thousand five hundred drachmæ? Three thousand
+five hundred drachmæ for a negress?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She is a white man&rsquo;s daughter.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But her mother is black.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bacchis declared that she would not part with her for less, and old
+Cheres is so amorous that he consented.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I hope he is invited at any rate.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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
+. . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t pity her. With him she will have time to recover. I know
+him, Seso. I have watched him sleep.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They laughed together at Cheres. Then they complimented one another. &ldquo;You
+have a pretty robe,&rdquo; said Seso. &ldquo;Did you have it trimmed at
+home?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-006.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-006" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Tryphera&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Seso!&rdquo; said another voice. &ldquo;Seso and Tryphera, come with me
+if you don&rsquo;t know what to do. I am going to the Ceramic Wall to see
+whether my name is written up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mousarion! Where have you come from, my dear?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;From Pharos. There is nobody there.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you mean? There is nothing to do but fish, it is so full.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No turbots for me. I am off to the wall. Come.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+On the way, Seso told them about the projected banquet at Bacchis&rsquo;s over
+again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah! at Bacchis&rsquo;s!&rdquo; cried Mousarion. &ldquo;You remember the
+last dinner, Tryphera, and all the stories about Chrysis?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You must not repeat them. Seso is her friend.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mousarion bit her lips; but Seso had already taken the alarm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What did they say about her?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh! various ill-natured things.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let people talk,&rdquo; declared Seso. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh! Oh!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Certainly. I would commit any folly for that woman. Be sure that there
+is none here more beautiful than she.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look, Seso,&rdquo; said Tryphera, laughing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who is the practical joker who has written that?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And they read in huge letters:
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+BACCHIS<br/>
+THERSIES<br/>
+2 OBOLS
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But further on, Seso stopped before an inscription more to the point:
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+SESO OF CNIDOS<br/>
+TIMON THE SON OF LYSIAS<br/>
+1 MINA
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She turned slightly pale.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I stay,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she leaned her back against the wall under the envious glances of the women
+that passed by.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A few steps further on Mousarion found an acceptable offer, if not as generous
+an one. Tryphera returned to the quay alone.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+As the hour was advanced, the crowd had become less compact. But the three
+musicians were still singing and playing the flute.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Catching sight of a stranger whose clothes and rotundity were slightly
+ridiculous, Tryphera tapped him on the shoulder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I say! Papa! I wager that you are not an Alexandrian, eh?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No indeed, my girl,&rdquo; answered the honest fellow. &ldquo;And you
+have guessed rightly. I am quite astounded at the town and the people.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are from Boubastis?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No. From Cabasa. I came here to sell grain, and I am going back again
+to-morrow, richer by fifty-two minæ. Thanks be to the gods! it has been a good
+year.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tryphera suddenly began to take an great interest in this merchant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My child,&rdquo; he resumed timidly, &ldquo;you can give me a great joy.
+I don&rsquo;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?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Some few,&rdquo; she said, laughing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-007.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-007" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You shall have your wish. This is Naucrates.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who is Naucrates?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A philosopher.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what does he teach?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Silence.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By Zeus, that is a doctrine that does not require much genius, and this
+philosopher does not please me at all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is Phrasilas.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who is Phrasilas?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A fool.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then why do you mention him?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because others consider him to be eminent.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what does he say?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All this is beyond me, and I don&rsquo;t quite understand. Besides, the
+face of this Phrasilas is marked by hypocrisy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is Philodemos.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The strategist?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No. A Latin poet who writes in Greek.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My dear, he is an enemy. I am sorry to have seen him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this point a flutter of excitement ran through the crowd and a murmur of
+voices pronounced the same name:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Demetrios . . . Demetrios . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tryphera mounted upon a street post, and she too said to the merchant:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Demetrios . . . That is Demetrios. You were anxious to see celebrated
+men.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-008.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-008" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>Tryphera mounted upon a street post.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Demetrios? the Queen&rsquo;s lover? Is it possible?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where is he?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s he, bending over to look at the harbour.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There are two men leaning over.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is the one in blue.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I cannot see him very well. His back is turned to me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Know you not? he is the sculptor to whom the queen offered herself for a
+model when he carved the Aphrodite in the temple.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They say he is the royal lover. They say he is the master of
+Egypt.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And he is as beautiful as Apollo.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The last girl who passed softly cast her yellow flowers at him, and laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Night fell upon the quays.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap03"></a>III<br/>
+DEMETRIOS</h3>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The town was illumined by a dazzling little cloud which lingered upon the moon,
+and the sky was bathed in soft light.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young man looked around him. The flute-girls&rsquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were only these words:
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+Myrtis Loves Rhodocleia
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was wearied. The queen was tedious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s amorous imagination beyond the most
+extravagant dreams.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios fell respectfully on his knees, and took Queen Berenice&rsquo;s naked
+little foot in his hand, in order to kiss it, as one kisses an object delicate
+and rare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then she rose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-009.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-009" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>&ldquo;I am Astarte. Take a block of marble and your chisel and<br/>
+reveal me to the men of Egypt. I desire them to worship my image.&rdquo;</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Demetrios looked at her, and divined, unerringly, the artless, novel sensuality
+with which this young girl&rsquo;s body was animated. He said, &ldquo;I am the
+first to worship it,&rdquo; and he took her in his arms. The queen was not
+angry at this brusquerie, but stepped back a pace and asked, &ldquo;You think
+yourself Adonis, that you dare to lay hands on the goddess?&rdquo; He answered,
+&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo; She looked at him, smiled a little, and concluded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are right.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus was why he became insupportable, and his best friends left him; but he
+ravished the hearts of all women.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His conversation with these fair, self-possessed ladies was idle and
+unaffected. The day&rsquo;s visitors, the probable weather on the morrow, the
+softness of the grass, the mildness of the night&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When freed from the embrace of their religious arms, he mounted the temple
+steps and fell to an ecstatic contemplation of the statue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s crescent between two round clouds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;O divine sister!&rdquo; he would say. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had been adoring her after 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&rsquo; chant.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-010.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-010" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, he turned his head towards the quays, and, in the distance, saw the yellow
+shimmer of a woman&rsquo;s veil.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap04"></a>IV<br/>
+THE PASSER-BY</h3>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Demetrios watched her as she drew near.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He recognised by her jewels that she was a courtesan. In order to avoid her
+salutation he crossed the road rapidly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios did not take his eyes off her, and fell into a singular astonishment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She continued to walk like a yellow shadow in the distance, nonchalant, and
+preceded by the little black shadow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He heard at each step the slight creak of her shoe in the dust.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She walked on as far as the island of Pharos and went up into the rocks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+æsthetic sentiment, and he said to himself that she would make a perfect model
+for the Charis with the fan which he intended to design on the morrow.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-011.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-011" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Then, suddenly, all his thoughts became confused, and a crowd of anxious
+questions surged up into his mind about this woman in yellow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap05"></a>V<br/>
+THE MIRROR, THE COMB, AND THE NECKLACE</h3>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 eyes was like the siren&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I salute you,&rdquo; said he.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-012.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-012" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>&ldquo;I salute you,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;I salute you also,&rdquo;
+answered the woman</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;I salute you also,&rdquo; answered the woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios continued:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where are you going to in so leisurely a fashion?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am going home.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Alone?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Alone.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she made a movement as if to resume her walk.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To your husband?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She put her two hands to her sides and began to laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t one this evening.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios bit his lip and suggested, almost timidly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t look for one. You have set to work too late. There is no one
+about now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who told you that I was looking for one? I am taking a walk by myself,
+and am looking for nothing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where have you come from then? You certainly have not put on all those
+jewels for your own pleasure, and that silken veil. . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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. . . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, I am not a Jewess. I am a Galilæn.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is your name, Miriam or No&euml;mi?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He put his hand on her arm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh! no, no,&rdquo; she said mockingly. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bending down, she took her foot in her hand:
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-013.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-013" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>Bending down, she took her foot in her hand.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Demetrios passed his hand over his forehead; then, with the careless air of a
+man who condescends to make his choice, he murmured:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Show me the way.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I shall do nothing of the kind,&rdquo; said Chrysis with a stupefied
+air. &ldquo;You do not even ask me whether it is my pleasure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You do not know who I am.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You? Of course I do! You are Demetrios of Saïs; 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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She came a little nearer to him, and went on in a caressing voice:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, you love me. Oh! don&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-014.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-014" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios gazed at her without understanding.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Yes, all that is a pure matter of indifference to you, is it not?&rdquo;
+continued Chrysis. &ldquo;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&rsquo;t know why one of us has not had enough
+hatred to kill you both in one another&rsquo;s arms, first you, and afterwards
+the queen.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios quietly took her by the two arms, and, without answering a word, bent
+her backwards with violence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had a moment&rsquo;s anguish; but suddenly she stiffened her knees,
+stiffened her elbows, backed a little, and said in a low voice:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were silent for a few minutes; then Demetrios answered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Chrysis still kept silence. He continued more gently:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What are you afraid of?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are accustomed to the love of others. Do you know what ought to be
+given to a courtesan who does not love?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He became impatient.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have it in my hair. I am tired of gold. I don&rsquo;t want gold. I
+want but three things. Will you give them to me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I want a silver mirror to gaze at my eyes within my eyes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You shall have it. What else do you want? Quickly.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I want a carved ivory comb to plunge into my hair like a net into water
+that sparkles in the sun.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And then?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You will give me my comb?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, yes. Go on.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I want a pearl necklace to hang on my breast, when I dance you the
+nuptial dances of my country in my chamber.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He raised his eyebrows;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is that all?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You will give me my necklace?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Any you please.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her voice became very tender.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Any I please? Ah! that is exactly what I wanted to ask you. Will you let
+me choose my presents?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You swear?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I swear.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What oath will you swear?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dictate it to me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By the Aphrodite you carved.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I swear by the Aphrodite. But why these precautions?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah! . . . I was uneasy; but now I am reassured&rdquo;.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She raised her head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have chosen my presents.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios suddenly became anxious and asked:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Already?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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 æsop and was redeemed by
+Sappho&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is pure madness,&rdquo; cried Demetrios. &ldquo;Do you expect me to
+steal?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+He understood that she was ruining him, but he yielded without a struggle,
+almost willingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I will do what you say,&rdquo; he answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She toyed a moment with the peacock feathers of her round fan, and suddenly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah! . . . Neither do I wish for a common ivory comb bought at a
+tradesman&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And how am I to get it?&rdquo; asked Demetrios.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She pouted at Demetrios, who was looking on the ground. Then she concluded very
+quickly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have chosen my necklace also. I want the seven-stringed pearl necklace
+on the neck of Aphrodite.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios started violently.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But she closed his mouth with her hand and resumed her caressing tone:
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-015.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-015" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>But she closed his mouth with her hand.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;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&rsquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Demetrios looked at her with a frenzied eye.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She continued tenderly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios tried to touch it . . . She recoiled and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To-morrow!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You shall have it,&rdquo; he murmured.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He tried to stroke them. She drew them behind her back and repeated:
+&ldquo;To-morrow!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I will bring it,&rdquo; he said very low. &ldquo;Ah! I knew it!&rdquo;
+cried the courtesan; &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-016.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-016" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios held out his head, supplicatingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shot him a brilliant glance and gave him her sensual lips . . .
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When he opened his eyes she was already afar off. A little pale shadow danced
+before her floating veil.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He returned vaguely towards the town, with his forehead bent under the weight
+of an inexpressible shame.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap06"></a>VI<br/>
+THE VIRGINS</h3>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo; faces under the
+hair of purple sea-weed. Daylight came all at once.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+The quay was deserted. The town was dead. It was the grey light before the
+first day blush that illumines the world&rsquo;s sleep and brings the feverish
+dreams of morning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing existed, except silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the sound of light footsteps fell tremulously upon the ground, and two
+young girls appeared, one dressed in yellow, the other in blue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They both wore maidens&rsquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Myrtocleia answered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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 ægipan, 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&rsquo;s
+fleece. Your skin is as white as shepherd&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The very idea was so wild and cruel that Rhodis&rsquo;s long eyes filled with
+smiles and tears. She placed her foot upon a street-post:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My flowers between my legs hamper me. Undo them, adored Myrto. I have
+finished dancing for to-night.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The singing-girl started.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-017.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-017" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rhodis exclaimed with conviction:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She smiled, and continued:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, it is that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They deceive themselves, Myrto. They do not know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Myrtocleia took her in her arms, and both kept silence together.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wind mingled their hair.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap07"></a>VII<br/>
+CHRYSIS&rsquo;S HAIR</h3>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look,&rdquo; said Rhodis, &ldquo;look! I see some one.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The singing-girl looked. A woman, in the distance, was walking rapidly along
+the quay.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;I recognise her.&rdquo; resumed the child.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is Chrysis. She is wearing her yellow robe.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What! is she dressed already?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They advanced to meet her, and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hail, Chrysis.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hail. How long have you been here?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know. It was daylight when we arrived.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There was nobody on the quay?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-018.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-018" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>&ldquo;It is Chrysis. She is wearing her yellow robe.&rdquo;</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Nobody.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not a man! are you sure?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, quite sure. Why do you ask?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chrysis did not answer. Rhodis went on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You wanted to see somebody?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But what is the matter? Do tell us, Chrysis.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, no.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not even us? Not even us, your little friends?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You shall know later on, together with the whole town.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is very amiable of you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, Chrysis, Chrysidion, we are so tired! We are going home certainly,
+but to have a good sleep.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, you can sleep afterwards. To-day is the eve of the Aphrodisiæ. 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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She put her arms round their waists, and closing her caressing hands upon their
+little half naked breasts, bore them hurriedly off.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rhodis, however, remained preoccupied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And when we are in your bed,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;will you not tell
+us what is happening; what you expect?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I will tell you many things, everything you please; but about that
+subject I shall say nothing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Even when we are in your arms, naked, with the lamp extinguished?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do not insist, Rhodis: you shall know to-morrow. Wait till
+to-morrow.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are going to be very happy? or very powerful?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very powerful.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rhodis opened her eyes wide and exclaimed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are going to sleep with the queen!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Chrysis laughing; &ldquo;but I am going to be as
+powerful as she is. Do you desire anything?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, yes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the little girl became thoughtful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, what is it?&rdquo; asked Chrysis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is something impossible. Why should I ask?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Myrtocleia spoke for her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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 Iphino&euml;, 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 &ldquo;fiancee&rdquo; 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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We will change the law,&rdquo; said Chrysis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But leave it to me, you shall marry one another.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, is it true?&rdquo; cried the little girl, flushing with joy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes; and I don&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She asked for her mirror.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-019.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-019" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>She was not conscious of the presence of Djala, who silently<br/>
+untied and unwound her long saffron veil.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Was she beginning to feel afraid that she was not beautiful enough to keep this
+new lover&mdash;for keep him she must&mdash;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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-020.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-020" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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 a sort of amorous fury, and her long golden hair
+enveloped the three young heads.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="book02"></a>BOOK II</h3>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap08"></a>I<br/>
+THE GARDENS OF THE GODDESS</h3>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This flowering forest on the sea&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+&ldquo;cité,&rdquo; composed of fourteen hundred houses. A corresponding number
+of prostitutes inhabited this sacred town, and in this unique spot were
+represented seventy different nationalities.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 cteis; and
+beneath was graved the courtesan&rsquo;s name, with the initials of the usual
+formula:
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+&#937;.&#926;.&#917;.<br/>
+&#922;&#927;&#935;&#923;&#921;&#931;<br/>
+&#928;.&#928;.&#928;
+</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 &ldquo;chambre exposée,&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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. Lachmi, Ashtaroth, Venus, Ischtar, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some came from a still greater distance: dainty, deliberate little beings,
+whose language nobody understood, and who resembled yellow monkeys.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-021.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-021" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 apparelled in black gauze,
+Negresses enveloped in many-coloured costumes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were fourteen hundred.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-022.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-022" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>The poorer tradesman . . . preferred to address themselves<br/>
+to the women who slept thus in the open air.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Those who had no girl friends offered themselves of their own accord as slaves
+to their more prosperous colleagues.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s class-room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 minæ: 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Far different was the discipline of the temple.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+The temple, the Great Temple of the Great Goddess, the most sacred spot in all
+Egypt, the inviolable Astarteïon, 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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-023.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-023" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+The entrance did not face towards the east, but in the direction of Paphos,
+that is to say, towards the north-east. The sun&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 served by monstrous bulls,
+naïads 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.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap09"></a>II<br/>
+MELITTA</h3>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Purify thyself, stranger.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I shall enter pure,&rdquo; said Demetrios.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then he pressed forward into the wood of Aphrodite.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 . . .
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-024.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-024" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>The young gate-keeper moistened first his eyelids.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Was it necessary to make a direct call on Chrysis&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The courtesans were on show in their &ldquo;chambres exposées&rdquo; like
+flowers in a shop window.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Their attitudes 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 faces, 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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-025.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-025" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>Demetrios passed slowly before them.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Demetrios passed slowly before them, with unflagging admiration. He had never
+yet succeeded in contemplating a woman&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Friend,&rdquo; said a voice, &ldquo;you don&rsquo;t recognise me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s indispensable adultery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Clonarion!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Gnatene!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Plango!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mnaïs!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Crobyle!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ioessa.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is it quite out of the question?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The novelty of this mode of address made him smile. He stopped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Open the door,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I choose you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Gorgo,&rdquo; said the little girl, &ldquo;I have got somebody; quickly,
+get some cakes and Cretan wine, and make the bed.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She turned round to Demetrios.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t want any satyrion?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said the young man laughing. &ldquo;You have some?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have to keep it,&rdquo; said the child. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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 bands 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s weight upon an over-delicate mare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you are not a woman!&rdquo; he exclaimed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am not a woman! By the two goddesses, what am I, then? A Thracian, a
+porter, or an old philosopher?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How old are you?&rdquo;<br/>
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-026.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-026" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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
+&lsquo;The Goat.&rsquo; Shall I send for her, if you think me too little? Her
+house is not far from mine.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have been to the Didascalion?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am still there in the sixth class. I shall have finished next year;
+and not too soon either.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t you happy?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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&rsquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know it. It is longer and no better than the other way. I see that you
+are a good pupil.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have many lovers?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is your name?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Melitta. Did you not see my name upon the door?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I did not look.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You can see it in my room. They have written it all over the walls. I
+shall soon be forced to have them repainted.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios raised his head: the four panels of the chamber were covered with
+inscriptions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is very curious, indeed.&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;May one
+read?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, if you like. I have no secrets.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He read. Melitta&rsquo;s name was there several times repeated, coupled with
+various men&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is that? What is that? Speak!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who? What? Where?&rdquo; said the child. &ldquo;What is the matter with
+you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here. That name. Who wrote that?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And his finger stopped under this double line.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+&#924;&#917;&#923;&#921;&#932;&#932;&#913; .&#923;. &#935;&#929;&#933;&#931;&#921;&#916;&#913;<br/>
+&#935;&#929;&#933;&#931;&#921;&#931; .&#923;. &#924;&#917;&#923;&#921;&#932;&#932;&#913;&#925;<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; she answered, &ldquo;that&rsquo;s me. I wrote that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who is she, Chrysis?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My great friend.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I dare say. That is not what I ask you. Which Chrysis? There are
+many.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mine, the most beautiful. Chrysis of Galilee.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sat down upon the couch and took the little girl upon his knees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are in love, then?&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That matters little to you. Tell me what you know; I am in a hurry to
+hear everything.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How is she made?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-027.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-027" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And she put her arm round the neck of Demetrios.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you know anything about her?&rdquo; he began again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know&mdash;I know that she comes from Galilee, that she is nearly
+twenty years old, and that she lives in the Jews&rsquo; quarter, in the east
+end, near the gardens. But that is all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t know whether she has any other <i>amie</i> in the
+gardens? Nobody?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, one of her countrywomen, Chimairis. She is very poor.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where does she live? I must see her.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios rapidly buckled the plaited leather straps round Melitta&rsquo;s
+slender ankles. Then he handed her her short robe, which she merely threw over
+her arm, and they departed in haste.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-028.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-028" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>&ldquo;My little girl! my little love! how are you?&rdquo;</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+It was not yet dusk. The intense light of summer days has something permanent
+about it which lingers vaguely in the slow twilight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The faint, humid stars, hardly brighter than the body of the sky, twinkled and
+throbbed gently, and the shadows of the branches remained indecisive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mamma! There&rsquo;s mamma,&rdquo; cried Melitta suddenly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My little girl! my little love! how are you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am guiding somebody who wants to see Chimairis. And you? Are you out
+for a walk?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Corinna is <i>accouchée</i>. I have been to see her. I have dined by her
+bedside.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what has she given birth to? A boy?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Two twin girls, my dear, as pink as wax dolls. You can go and see them
+tonight; she will show them to you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh! how lovely! Two little courtesans. What are their names?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They are both called Pannychis, because they were born on the day before
+the Aphrodisiæ. It is a divine presage. They will be pretty.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She replaced the child upon her feet, and turning to Demetrios:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you think of my daughter? Have I the right to be proud of
+her?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have the right to be satisfied with one another,&rdquo; he answered
+gravely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Kiss mamma,&rdquo; said Melitta.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He silently imprinted a kiss between her breasts. Pythias returned it to him
+upon the mouth, and they separated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is here.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s breast.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Chimairis,&rdquo; said Melitta, &ldquo;get up. Here is somebody who
+wishes to speak to you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Jewess looked, but did not move.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios advanced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you know Chrysis?&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you see her often?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Will you talk to me about her?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What? No? What? you cannot?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Melitta was stupefied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Speak to him,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Have confidence. He loves her, he
+wishes her well.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I see clearly that he loves her.&rdquo; answered Chimairis. &ldquo;If he
+loves her, he wishes her ill. If he loves her, I shall not speak.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios tingled with rage, but said nothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Give me your hand,&rdquo; said the Jewess. &ldquo;It will tell me
+whether I am mistaken.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She took the young man&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you see?&rdquo; said Demetrios.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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 . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In my blood?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In a woman&rsquo;s blood. And then the blood of another woman. And then
+yours, a little later on.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios shrugged his shoulders, and when he turned, he perceived Melitta
+fleeing down the alley at full speed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It has given her a fright,&rdquo; said Chimairis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo; And she dropped his hand.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap10"></a>III<br/>
+LOVE AND DEATH</h3>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A woman&rsquo;s blood. Afterwards another woman&rsquo;s blood.
+Afterwards yours, but a little later on.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s prediction haunted his mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In his turn, he examined the palm of his left hand, on which his life was
+summed up in secret and indelible signs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of the three presents she had asked for, one was already in his possession.
+Remained the other two: the comb and the necklace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The comb first,&rdquo; he said to himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Every evening at sunset, the high priest&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-029.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-029" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios, noiselessly, sat down on the bench, by her side.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the same stealthy tenderness, Demetrios withdrew his hot hand, to let it
+be refreshed by the light breeze.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-030.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-030" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>She was asleep.... dreaming peacefully.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The moon inclined her great goblet of blood over the waters. Far away, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Touni still slumbered, her head leaning backwards, her body well-nigh naked,
+enshrouded in tinted muslin folds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was then that the sculptor took Touni&rsquo;s sweet face in both his hands,
+turning her features towards his own. Her eyes opened and became dilated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Demetrios! Demetrios! Is it you? Oh! You have come at last! You are
+here!&rdquo; she murmured, clasping him in her arms, as her voice rang with the
+accents of happiness. &ldquo;Is it really you, Demetrios, whose hands awake me?
+Is it you, son of my goddess; God of my body and my life?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios made as if to retreat. With one bound, she was close to him again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you fear?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;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&rsquo; 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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios did not open his lips.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Listen to me a little while longer,&rdquo; she went on. &ldquo;I know
+who enthrals 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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios, more steadfastly serious than before, pierced her with his glance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wretched creature, what do you suppose emanates from the Gods, if it be
+not. &mdash; &rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Love!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Or Death!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What mean you?&rdquo; she exclaimed, starting to her feet. &ldquo;Death!
+Yes, Death indeed! But it is so far off for me! In sixty years&rsquo; time,
+I&rsquo;ll think of my end. Why speak to me of Death, Demetrios?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Death this very night!&rdquo; he said quietly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She laughed outright, in sheer fright.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tonight? No, no! Who says so? Why should I die? Answer me! Speak! What
+means this vile mockery?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are condemned.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By whom?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By your destiny.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How know you that?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because my destiny is interwoven with yours, Touni.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is it my fate to die now?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is your lot to die by my hand, on that bench.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He seized her wrist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Demetrios!&rdquo; she stammered, affrighted. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll not
+shriek! I&rsquo;ll not call for aid! Only let me speak first!&rdquo; She wiped
+the sweat from her brow. &ldquo;If death&mdash;should come from you&mdash;death
+will be sweet&mdash;for me. I accept it; I desire it, but hearken!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Staggering from stone to stone, she led him away in the dark night of the
+woods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Since in your hands are all the gifts of the Gods,&rdquo; she continued,
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was no reply in the vague look he gave her, but she thought she read the
+&ldquo;Yes&rdquo; he had not uttered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Transfigured a second time, she lifted towards him a new face, where desire,
+born again, drove, with the strength of desperation, all terror away.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-031.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-031" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>&ldquo;Demetrios!&rdquo; she stammered, affrighted.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-032.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-032" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, she gained this supreme victory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah! Kill me! Kill me, I say, Demetrios! Why do you tarry?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap11"></a>IV<br/>
+MOONLIGHT</h3>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, this woman would have given him her comb and her hair also, for
+love&rsquo;s sake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s hair. That is why he considered it his duty to consent to
+bloodshed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>ensemble</i>. 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so, after cutting the storied comb out of Touni&rsquo;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&rsquo;s
+necklace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He knew that sixty paces were to be made in a straight line, and that
+afterwards it would be necessary to feel one&rsquo;s way along the wall in
+order not to knock against the subterranean staircase of the temple.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The exceeding freshness of the deep earth calmed him little by little.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a few minutes he arrived at the limit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He mounted the stairs, and pushed open the trap-door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-033.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-033" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>Demetrios lost himself in ineffable adoration.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Outside, a tempest of bird-songs twittered, whistled, sang in the garden.
+Women&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 Aphrodisiæ.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios resolved to fly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 fête. Thence one might reach the gardens.
+Demetrios entered, and stopped before the bronze-plated openings which pierced
+the massive stone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The two golden doors swung heavily open. Then the procession entered.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap12"></a>V<br/>
+THE INVITATION</h3>
+
+<p>
+Towards the middle of the night, Chrysis was awakened by three knocks at the
+door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+Galilæan&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A sound of voices was heard in the entrance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chrysis disengaged herself with great care, stepping over her companions, and
+getting down from the couch, held the door ajar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who is it, Djala? Who is it?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is Naukrates who wants to see you. I have told him you are not at
+liberty.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What nonsense! Certainly I am at liberty! Enter, Naukrates, I am in my
+room.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she went back to bed.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-034.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-034" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sit down,&rdquo; said Chrysis. &ldquo;There is no need for coquetry
+between us. I know that you do not come for me. What do you want of me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Naukrates was a philosopher of repute, who had been Bacchis&rsquo;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 à 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am the bearer of an invitation,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Bacchis is
+giving a dinner to-morrow, to be followed by a fête. We shall be seven, with
+you. Don&rsquo;t fail to come.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A fête? A propos of what?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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&rsquo;s at this very moment.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh! it is true,&rdquo; cried Rhodis, &ldquo;we had forgotten about it.
+Get up, Myrto, we are very late.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Chrysis protested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Our robes are not complicated,&rdquo; said the child. &ldquo;And we are
+not beautiful enough to spend much time in dressing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I shall see you at the temple, of course?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good. Your behaviour is charming.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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 <i>amies</i>, 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 . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah! no!&rdquo; cried Chrysis. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what difference do you see?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is not a question of difference. There is no connection between the
+one and the other: that&rsquo;s clear!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I do not say you are wrong. I want to know your reasons.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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. <i>She alone knows how to love.
+She alone knows how to be loved.</i> 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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are hard on Plato, my girl.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The philosopher made a gesture.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-035.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-035" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>&ldquo;I can tell Bacchis that she may count on you?&rdquo; he said.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are somewhat wanting in reverence,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Excellent,&rdquo; said Chrysis in astonishment. &ldquo;But then what
+have you to reproach me with?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+At this point Naukrates considered that the conversation had lasted long
+enough, and he rose to his feet, simply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can tell Bacchis that she may count on you?&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I will go,&rdquo; answered Chrysis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The philosopher kissed her knees and slowly went out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Then she joined her hands together and spoke aloud though she was alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The slave-woman entered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Give me my knuckle-bones,&rdquo; said Chrysis. &ldquo;I want to tell my
+own fortune.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She tossed the four little bones into the air.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Oh . . . Oh . . . Djala, look! the Aphrodite throw!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Djala remarked coldly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What did you ask for?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is true,&rdquo; said Chrysis, disappointed. &ldquo;I forgot to wish.
+I certainly had something in my mind, but I said nothing. Does that count all
+the same?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;I think not; you must begin again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chrysis cast the bones again.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-036.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-036" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The Midas throw, this time. What do you think of that?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;One cannot tell. Good or bad. It is a throw which is interpreted by the
+next one. Now start with a single bone.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chrysis consulted the game a third time; but as soon as the bone fell, she
+stammered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The . . . the Chian ace!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she burst into sobs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why did you make me begin again? I am sure the first throw
+counted.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you wished, yes. If not, no. You alone know,&rdquo; said Djala.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Besides, the bones prove nothing. It is a Greek game. I don&rsquo;t
+believe in it. I shall try something else.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have confidence in this. This does not deceive&rdquo;, she said.
+&ldquo;Lift up the skirt of your robe; I will use it as a bag.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+She cast the twenty-two counters into the slave&rsquo;s tunic, repeating
+mentally:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Shall I wear Aphrodite&rsquo;s necklace? Shall I wear Aphrodite&rsquo;s
+necklace? Shall I wear Aphrodite&rsquo;s necklace?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she drew the tenth arcanam, and this signified plainly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-037.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-037" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>An old white-bearded priest preceded the youthful band.</i>
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap13"></a>VI<br/>
+CHRYSIS&rsquo;S ROSE</h3>
+
+<p>
+It was a procession, white and blue and yellow and pink and green.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thirty courtesans advanced, bearing baskets of flowers, snow-white doves with
+red feet, veils of the most fragile azure, and precious ornaments.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+One of them advanced and said:
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Tryphera, O beloved Cypris, offers thee this blue veil which she has
+woven herself, that thou mayest continue to deal gently with her.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Another:
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Yet another:
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Myrtocleia and Rhodis advanced, holding one another by the hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here are two doves of Smyrna, with wings white as caresses, with feet
+red as kisses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+A very young courtesan followed:
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Aphrodite Peribasia, receive my virginity with this blood-stained tunic.
+I am Pannychis of Pharos: I have dedicated myself to thee since last
+night.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p>
+Another:
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Another:
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;On thine altar, O Paphia, Callistion places sixty silver drachmæ, the
+balance of four minæ she received from Cleomenos. Give her a lover still more
+generous if thou thinkest it a goodly offering.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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 . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+She unbuckled the clasps of her tunic; the tissue slipped down to the ground
+and she stood revealed quite naked.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+. . . &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-038.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-038" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 . . .
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The priest turned towards her, waiting for her to speak.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She held out her hands gilded with rings, and bent low with her legs close
+together.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The vague canticle began again. The murmur of the harps rose up towards the
+statue with the swirling fumes of crackling incense from the priest&rsquo;s
+censer.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-039.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-039" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>&ldquo;To thee, O Hetaira! . . . Chrysis consecrates her
+necklace.&rdquo;</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She drew herself up slowly to her full height and offered a bronze mirror which
+hung from her girdle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To thee,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;Anadyomene, born of the rosy dawn and
+the sea-foam&rsquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+She gave the comb to the old man and inclined her head to the right in order to
+take off her emerald necklace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;To thee&rdquo;, she said, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-040.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-040" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+She made a last and more prolonged reverence, put the collar into the
+priest&rsquo;s hand and took a step as if to depart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The priest stayed her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you ask of the goddess for these precious offerings?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shook her head, smiled, and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I ask nothing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then she passed along the procession, stole a rose from a basket, and put it in
+her mouth as she went out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One by one all the women followed. The door closed upon the empty temple.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Demetrios remained alone, concealed in the bronze pedestal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he had counted without her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even the exceeding facility of her access was a charm in Demetrios&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so, having given the goddess her green necklace in exchange for the one she
+hoped for. Chrysis returned to the town carrying a human will in her mouth,
+like the little stolen rose whose stalk she was nibbling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios waited until he was left alone in the temple; then he issued forth
+from his retreat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 more became astonishingly calm, without premature remorse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Negligently, tranquilly, he climbed close up to the statue, took the necklace
+of true pearls from off Anadyomene&rsquo;s neck, and slipped it into his
+raiment.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap14"></a>VII<br/>
+THE TALE OF THE ENCHANTED LYRE</h3>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well-beloved, how glad I am!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He raised his head: it was Queen Berenice leaning on her elbow in her litter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She gave the order:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stop, porters!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And held out her arms to her lover.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios was greatly put out, but he could not refuse, and he got in sulkily.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s
+feathers.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+She beckoned the young sculptor to her side with her eyes, and repeated:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well-beloved, I am happy!&rdquo; She stroked his cheek.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+She turned round to him and kissed him on the mouth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-041.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-041" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>But Demetrios did not answer.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She said:
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She gathered her feet under her and leaned upon her hand.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have not understood?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He leaned carelessly upon his elbow and said quietly and unmovedly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have thought of a tale.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Long ago, long before the conquest of Thrace by your father&rsquo;s
+ancestors, it was inhabited by wild beasts and a few timorous men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The animals were very beautiful: there were lions tawny as the sun,
+tigers striped like the evening, and bears black as night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-042.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-042" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then he asked her in astonishment; &lsquo;Why do you not beg me to
+play?&rsquo; She answered that she cared nothing about it. He said to her:
+&lsquo;Do you not know me?&rsquo; She answered: &lsquo;You are Orpheus.&rsquo;
+He answered: &lsquo;And you don&rsquo;t want to hear Me?&rsquo; She repeated,
+&lsquo;No.&rsquo; &lsquo;Oh!&rsquo; he cried, &lsquo;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.&rsquo; She answered: &lsquo;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.&rsquo; He thanked her for the
+moderation of her demands, and did what she required.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For one hour he played before her: but afterwards he broke his lyre and
+lived as if he were dead.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The queen sighed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I never understand allegories. Explain it to me, Well-beloved. What does
+it mean?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+He rose.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She began to weep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was sure of it! I was sure of it!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="book03"></a>BOOK III</h3>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap15"></a>I<br/>
+THE ARRIVAL</h3>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Aphrodisia was the favourite slave, the prettiest and best-loved. She often
+shared her mistress&rsquo;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
+minæ.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-043.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-043" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Bacchis&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+That evening Chrysis was the first arrival.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was dressed in a green robe worked with enormous rose-branches which
+flowered over her breasts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last, when Chrysis was ready:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where are the <i>shades?&rdquo;</i> she said to the slave.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;shades&rdquo; had nothing to do but to
+bring their bed-cushions and prove themselves people of breeding.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Aretias answered:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-044.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-044" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>Aretias opened the door for her.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Seso entered at this precise moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Chrysis!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My darling!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The two women embraced, and enlarged with many an exclamation upon the happy
+chance which had brought them together.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was afraid of being late,&rdquo; said Seso. &ldquo;That poor Archytas
+has kept me. . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What, Archytas again?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is always the same thing. Whenever I go out to dine, he imagines that
+my body is to be at everybody&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the baby that is coming? It does not show yet, however.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are right,&rdquo; said Chrysis. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;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? &lsquo;Ah! if you saw my breasts!&rsquo; and she had
+tears in her eyes. I told her she was still pretty, but she repeated: &lsquo;If
+you saw my breasts! ah! ah! if you saw my breasts!&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t spoil yours, my Seso. Leave
+them fresh and firm as they are. A courtesan&rsquo;s two breasts are worth more
+than her necklace.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, my pretty dears, what a good idea on the part of Naukrates to invite
+you both together this evening!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We congratulate ourselves on its being to your house that we are
+invited,&rdquo; answered Chrysis without appearing to understand the innuendo.
+And, in order to say something venomous immediately, she added:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How is Doryclos?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Doryclos was a young and extremely rich lover who had just deserted Bacchis to
+marry a Sicilian woman.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-045.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-045" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>&ldquo;Ah, my pretty dears, what a good idea . . .&rdquo;</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I . . . I have turned him away,&rdquo; said Bacchis, brazenly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is it possible?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While asking: &ldquo;How is Doryclos?&rdquo; Chrysis had thought: &ldquo;Where
+is your mirror?&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have brought someone with me,&rdquo; he said laughing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Whom?&rdquo; asked Bacchis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A certain Demo, a girl from Mendes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Demo! What can you be thinking of, my dear fellow? She is a street girl.
+She can be had for a fig.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good, good. We won&rsquo;t insist on it.&rdquo; said the young man.
+&ldquo;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&rsquo;t
+want her. . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Timon is really extraordinary,&rdquo; declared Bacchis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She called a slave:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She turned and looked round:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Has not Phrasilas come yet?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap16"></a>II<br/>
+THE DINNER</h3>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was there.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Phrasilas was a polygraph of repute of whom it would have been difficult to say
+exactly whether he was a philosopher, a grammarian, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Come! to table!&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Timon felt that his freak had chilled the women. He therefore did not speak to
+them at first, but, addressing Philodemos, said gravely:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is precisely because I am his friend that I cannot answer your
+question,&rdquo; said Philodemos. &ldquo;I know him too well; consequently I
+know him ill. Ask Phrasilas, who, having read him but little, will judge him
+without error.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, what does Phrasilas think about it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He is an admirable writer,&rdquo; said the little man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In what sense?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-046.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-046" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am not of your opinion,&rdquo; said Naukrates, without lifting his
+eyes. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Seso lightly tapped the table with the handle of her fan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Timon, my friend,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you think so?&rdquo; said the young man, simply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Phrasilas began a second little couplet, with a suave, ironical intonation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Timon shot a glance of irritation at Phrasilas, but he reserved his reply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;However that may be,&rdquo; answered Seso, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very good,&rdquo; said Naukrates. &ldquo;Choose for us, Faustina. What
+shall we talk about?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young Italian woman turned her head, raised her eyes, blushed, and with an
+undulation of her whole body, sighed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Love.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A very pretty subject,&rdquo; said Seso, trying not to laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But no one took it up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such was the first course. The guests chose little tit-bits from each fish, and
+left the rest to the slaves.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Love,&rdquo; began Phrasilas, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-047.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-047" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>&ldquo;I like to have the sensual gratification.&rdquo;</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For my part,&rdquo; interrupted Chrysis, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Love,&rdquo; murmured Philodemos, &ldquo;is neither passion nor sensual
+gratification. Love is something quite different.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, for Heaven&rsquo;s sake,&rdquo; exclaimed Timon, &ldquo;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. . . .
+.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Allow me . . .&rdquo; said Phrasilas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I do not deny,&rdquo; continued Timon, &ldquo;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 <i>Banquet</i> 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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Timon!&rdquo; cried Bacchis in indignation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Phrasilas motioned to her to be silent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+&ldquo;What is the aim of life?&rdquo; she asked him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-048.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-048" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless he answered with a certain calm:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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
+clientèle 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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+There was a silence for several minutes; then Seso began to speak.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What shall I say about love?&rdquo; answered the Guest par excellence.
+&ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But to possess unexpectedly,&rdquo; said Philodemos, smiling; &ldquo;is
+not that true felicity?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What a rarity!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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 white 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This chef-d&rsquo;œuvre (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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+&#967;&#959;&#8150;&#961;&#959;&#962; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Timon turned to Bacchis:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why,&rdquo; he asked, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are mad,&rdquo; said Bacchis, without discussing the question.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nonsense, my friend; ask your neighbours, where is the man of birth who
+would choose a girl without jewels as his mistress.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have done it,&rdquo; said Philodemos with simplicity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the women despised him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Last year,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;at the end of spring,
+Cicero&rsquo;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&rsquo;s, softer than one&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Naukrates nodded approval, took a draught of wine, and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You know nothing about it, Naukrates,&rdquo; said Chrysis with a smile.
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you know that pure beauty has no need of adornment, and
+suffices for itself?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes. Well, institute a competition between a pure beauty, as you say,
+and Gnathène, 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
+Gnathène two minæ.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Men are stupid,&rdquo; Seso concluded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, simply lazy. They do not take the trouble to choose their
+mistresses. The best-loved women are the most mendacious.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But if,&rdquo; suggested Phrasilas, &ldquo;but if, on the one hand, I
+should willingly applaud . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he delivered himself, with great charm, of two set discourses entirely
+devoid of interest.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s hand received the fugitive
+caress of a hot thigh.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-049.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-049" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>Soon they formed in couples.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What does our friend think about it?&rdquo; said Phrasilas with his
+piping voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I feel perfectly happy,&rdquo; answered Timon. &ldquo;I have never
+before so clearly understood the supreme mission of women.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what is it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Prostitution, either with or without art.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is only an opinion.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Give me some Lesbian wine,&rdquo; said Seso to the slave. &ldquo;It is
+stronger than the other.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I maintain,&rdquo; Timon went on, &ldquo;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,&mdash;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&rsquo;s bargain.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She acts in fancied obedience to a duty,&rdquo; said Naukrates without
+conviction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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: &lsquo;I shall know my husband, and in addition, ten
+lovers, perhaps twelve&rsquo;, 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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are ambitious,&rdquo; said Chrysis.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-050.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-050" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But with what incense, with what golden poesy,&rdquo; exclaimed the
+gentle Philodemos, &ldquo;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&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+The dancing-girls had ceased dancing.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+A young girl-acrobat had just entered, who juggled with daggers and walked on
+her hands between the upright blades.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+As the attention of the guest was entirely absorbed by the lassie&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Chrysis in a low voice, &ldquo;no, my friend.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he had slipped his arm around her through the large slit in her robe and
+was carefully caressing the reclining courtesan&rsquo;s delicate, burning skin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wait,&rdquo; she implored. &ldquo;We shall be seen. Bacchis will be
+angry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-051.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-051" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>She let herself slip down from the bed.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Chrysis resisted no longer.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+A violent respiration agitated her naked breast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Enough,&rdquo; said Chrysis briefly: &ldquo;you have only excited me a
+little. Let us have no more of it. Leave me. Leave me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And at the moment when the two Ephesians rose, according to the tradition, to
+play <i>The Fable of Hermaphroditus</i>, she let herself slip down from the bed
+and went out feverishly.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap17"></a>III<br/>
+RHACOTIS</h3>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She would never know anything, then!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Timon&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She called the slave Aretias:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Keep my jewels for me: I am going out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she descended the seven stone steps.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She walked along down the street.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Bacchis&rsquo;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&rsquo;s catch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But this evening, she felt even without turning her head that she was being
+followed by a double footstep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With dry throat and swollen temples, but sustained by Bacchis&rsquo;s wine, she
+pursued her flight, turned from right to left, pale, panic-stricken.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where are you going to, my little wisp of gold?&rdquo; said one of them
+laughing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let me pass.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Eh? you are lost, young lady, you don&rsquo;t know Rhacotis well, eh? We
+are going to show you the town.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A little calm, please. You know that the Greeks are not loved here:
+nobody will come to your assistance.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am not Greek!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You lie, you have a white skin and a straight nose. Unless you want the
+stick, submit quietly.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chrysis looked at the speaker, and suddenly fell on his neck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I love you, I will follow you,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You will follow
+both of us. My friend shall have his share. Walk with us: it will not be
+dull.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Where were they taking her to? She had not the least idea, but this second
+sailor&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Finally, they entered life once more. At a turning of the street, suddenly,
+eight, ten, eleven lights appeared, illuminated doorways occupied by Nabatæan
+women squatting between two red lamps which cast a gleam from below upon their
+heads hooded with gold.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-052.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-052" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>She shouted and struggled.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the distance, they heard first a swelling murmur, and then a confused roar
+of chariots, tumbling bales, asses&rsquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh! myxaira sweets!&rdquo; said Chrysis gleefully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she bought two sous&rsquo; worth of the little girl who hawked them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But suddenly she swooned, overcome by the insupportable stink of this den, and
+the sailors carried her out in their arms.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+The fresh air brought her round a little.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where are we going to?&rdquo; she implored. &ldquo;Let us be quick: I
+can walk no more. You see that I don&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap18"></a>IV<br/>
+THE ORGIE AT BACCHIS&rsquo;S</h3>
+
+<p>
+When she once more found herself at Bacchis&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As soon as Chrysis had left the room the orgie had developed like a flame.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Philodemos was by the side of Faustina.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had torn her robe and was singing her the verses he had made in her honour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;O feet,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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.&rdquo; [<a
+name="chapIII_IVfn1text"></a><a href="#chapIII_IVfn1">1</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Drink, my little darling. You are thirsty. Drink, my little darling.
+Drink. Drink. Drink.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Standing alone behind a curtain, Naukrates and Phrasilas discussed courteously
+the respective value of Arcesilas and Carneades.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the end of the hall, Myrtocleia protected Rhodis against the over-zealous
+enterprises of one of the guests.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-054.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-054" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+As soon as the two Ephesians saw Chrysis enter, they rose to meet her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come away, my Chryse. Theano stays: but we are going.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I stay too,&rdquo; said the courtesan. And she lay down on her back upon
+a great bed covered with roses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;Fable of Dana&euml;,&rdquo; simulating a mad ecstasy
+of voluptuous delight every time a golden coin penetrated her. The
+child&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A mirror! a mirror! let her see herself!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The slave brought a bronze mirror. &ldquo;No, not that one. The mirror of
+Rhodopis. She merits it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-055.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-055" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That instant was to decide her whole life. Her last hope was either to vanish
+or be realised. The fête continued all around her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+The slave who had gone out did not return.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last Selene came back, empty-handed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The mirror?&rdquo; asked Bacchis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It . . . It has gone . . . it . . . has been . . . stolen,&rdquo;
+stammered the servant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bacchis uttered a cry so piercing that all ceased speaking, and a frightful
+silence brusquely interrupted the tumult.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What! What!&rdquo; she shrieked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And as Selene did not answer, she seized her violently by the neck:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have stolen it yourself! You have stolen it yourself! Answer,
+answer! I will loosen your tongue with the whip, miserable little bitch!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is Aphrodisia! It is not I! it is not I!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your sister!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, yes,&rdquo; said the mulatto woman; &ldquo;it is Aphrodisia who has
+taken it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And they dragged their sister, who had just fallen into a fainting fit, before
+Bacchis.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="chapIII_IVfn1"></a> [<a href="#chapIII_IVfn1text">1</a>] Philodème AP.
+V. 132.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap19"></a>V<br/>
+THE CRUCIFIED ONE</h3>
+
+<p>
+They all repeated together:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is Aphrodisia who has taken it! Bitch! Bitch! Filthy thief!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Their hatred of the favourite sister was reinforced by their fear for
+themselves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Aretias gave her a kick in the breast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where is it?&rdquo; asked Bacchis. &ldquo;Where have you put it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She has given it to her lover.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who is he?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An Opian sailor.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where is his ship?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It sailed this evening for Rome. You will never see your mirror again.
+Let us crucify the bitch, the bloody animal!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah! Gods! Gods!&rdquo; sobbed Bacchis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then suddenly her sorrow changed into a frenzy of rage.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-056.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-056" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>Bacchis seized her by the hair.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Aphrodisia had come to herself again; but, paralysed by terror, and unable to
+understand what was happening, she remained speechless and tearless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bacchis seized her by the hair, dragged her over the soiled floor, through the
+flowers and pools of wine, and cried:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The cross! the cross! bring the nails! bring the hammer!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; said Seso to her neighbour; &ldquo;I have never seen that.
+Let us follow them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+All pressed forward to follow. And Chrysis, who alone knew the guilty one, and
+was alone the cause of everything, Chrysis followed too.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bacchis went straight into the slaves&rsquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then they opened out her arms.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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 drachmæ as completely as if she had thrown the
+money into the Eunostis. And then, was the life of a minion worth troubling
+about?
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is not enough! Thief! Sow! Sailors&rsquo; strumpet!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She contemplated this work of vengeance for some time; then she returned into
+the banqueting-hall with all the guests.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Phrasilas and Timon alone did not follow her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+After a moment&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Although I am,&rdquo; he said to her, &ldquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pain&rdquo;, he said, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Having spoken thus, Phrasilas re-adjusted the folds of his garment over his
+shoulder and vanished with an unsteady gait.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Timon remained alone in the room with the woman hanging in the throes of death
+upon the cross.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The memory of a night passed on the poor wretch&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He pressed his hand over his eyes in order not to see her torture, but he
+<i>heard</i> the unceasing trembling of the body upon the cross.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Aphrodisia! do you hear me! do you recognise me? It is I, Timon;
+Timon.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her glance, almost blind, rested on him for a second. But the head turned
+incessantly. The body trembled continually.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-057.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-057" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>A kiss of infinite tenderness.</i>
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap20"></a>VI<br/>
+ENTHUSIASM</h3>
+
+<p>
+So, the deed was accomplished. Chrysis had the proof.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ah! to think of it, to repeat it, to say it out aloud, alone!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chrysis rushed out of the noisy house and ran quickly, straight before her,
+with the fresh breeze of morning bathing her face.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Take me! take me!&rdquo; 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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-058.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-058" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>She extended her arms.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 . . .
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She undressed slowly. Vestiges of the orgie fell from her tunic, crumbs of
+cake, hairs, rose-leaves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+She mounted.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+The sun had barely risen. It lay on the horizon line like a vast swollen
+orange.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-059.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-059" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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 Arsinoë, 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&mdash;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, Saïs, 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, Thebaïs. Diospolis, the Isle
+of Elephants, the impassable cataracts, the Isle of Argo . . . Mero&euml; . . .
+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.&mdash;all this, all, should be the kingdom, the
+domain, the possession of Chrysis, the courtesan.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+She almost choked, and threw her arms on high as if she thought to touch the
+heavens.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And simultaneously, she watched on her left the slow flight towards the open
+sea of a great bird with black wings.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap21"></a>VII<br/>
+CLEOPATRA</h3>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+About this time, she was twelve years of age, and no one could tell what her
+beauty would be. 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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The little Princess lived in a spacious room, opening on to the vast sea and
+joined to the Queen&rsquo;s apartment by a vestibule under a colonnade.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It came to pass that in the night when&mdash;far from her and her
+thoughts&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the monumental corridor, armed guards were also sound asleep, except one who
+stood sentinel at the door of the Queen&rsquo;s room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Princess Cleopatra, I crave thy pardon! I cannot let thee pass!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lass drew herself up to her full height, knitted her brows violently, and
+dealt a dull blow on the soldier&rsquo;s forehead with her clenched fist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As for thee,&rdquo; she said in smothered accents, but with ferocious
+meaning, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll raise a cry of rape, and have thee quartered!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, in silence, she entered the Queens chamber.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Berenice was asleep, her head pillowed on her arm, her hand hanging down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s supple nudity were thus enwrapped in
+misty shadow, between these two contrasting lights.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Slender Cleopatra sat straight up on the edge of the bed. She took her
+sister&rsquo;s face in her two little hands, waking Berenice up by touch and
+speech.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why is your lover not with you?&rdquo; asked Cleopatra.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Berenice, startled, opened her lovely eyes.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-060.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-060" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Cleopatra! What are you doing here? What do you want of me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why is your lover not with you?&rdquo; repeated the girl, insisting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is he not with me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Certainly not! You know that well enough!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;True! He&rsquo;s never here. Oh, Cleopatra, how cruel of you to wake me,
+to tell me so!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But why is he always away?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I see him when he chooses,&rdquo; sighed Berenice, in grief.
+&ldquo;During the day&mdash; for a minute or two.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did you not see him yesterday?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes. I met him by the roadside. I was in my litter. He got in with
+me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As far as the Palace?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No&mdash;not quite. He was still in sight nearly as far as the
+gates.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What did you tell him?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I was furious! I said most wicked things. Yes, darling, I
+did!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Indeed?&rdquo; rejoined the young girl, ironically.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why not have called him back?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I feared to displease him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cleopatra, swelling with indignation, took her sister by the shoulders, and
+looking her full in the face, spoke thus to her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How now! You are the Queen, the people&rsquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Reign . . . reign!&rdquo; said Berenice, hanging her head.
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s easy to say, but, look you, one does not reign over a lover
+as if dominating a slave.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And why not, pray?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You know not how to love,&rdquo; said the young lass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, little presumptuous virgin!&rdquo; she sighed. &ldquo;When for the
+first time you&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A woman can always be a queen should she so will it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But she has no longer any power of will.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have! Why should you not be the same? You are my elder!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Berenice smiled again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My little girl, upon whom do you exercise your strength of will? On
+which one of your dolls?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On my lover!&rdquo; said Cleopatra.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Without allowing her sister time to find words to express her stupefaction, the
+damsel went on talking with growing vivacity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have got a lover! Yes, I&rsquo;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&rsquo;m no longer a little girl. I
+know now! I know! Be silent&mdash;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&rsquo;ve died a hundred times
+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&mdash;you, who are someone&rsquo;s slave!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-061.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-061" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s sloping, slender shoulders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So you&rsquo;ve a lover?&rdquo; Berenice now spoke timidly, almost
+respectfully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you don&rsquo;t believe me, you can look,&rdquo; replied the girl,
+curtly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When do you see him?&rdquo; sighed Berenice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Three times a day.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you want me to tell you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How comes it that you do not know this?&rdquo; interrogated Cleopatra in
+her turn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Watch me if you like. When I can no longer have my own way, I&rsquo;ll
+kill myself. Therefore, little care I, whatever happens!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are free,&rdquo; replied Berenice, shaking her head. &ldquo;At any
+rate, it is too late to restrain you. But, answer me, darling. You have a lover
+and&mdash;you manage to keep him to yourself?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have my way of holding him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who taught you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Will you not tell me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Follow me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-062.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-062" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>Cleopatra crossed a courtyard.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Follow me. It&rsquo;s rather far,&rdquo; she said, turning to her
+sister.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last, they reached a massive door, clamped with iron like a warrior&rsquo;s
+breastplate. In the lock, Cleopatra slipped her key, turning it twice. Then,
+pushing open the portal, a man&mdash;a very giant in the darkness&mdash;rose to
+his full height out of the depths of his dungeon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Berenice stirred with emotion, looked in, and with drooping head, said very
+softly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tis you, my child, who know not how to love. At least&mdash;not yet. I
+was quite right when I told you that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Love for love, I prefer mine,&rdquo; said the girl. &ldquo;He gives me
+naught but joy, at any rate.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So saying, erect on the prison threshold, and without making a step forward,
+she said to the man who stood in the shadow:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come hither, and kiss my foot, son of a cur!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When he had done so, she pressed her mouth to his lips.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="book04"></a>BOOK IV</h3>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap22"></a>I<br/>
+DEMETRIOS DREAMS A DREAM</h3>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+He is going towards the quay, mingled with the crowd, on a strange moonless
+night, cloudless, but shedding a peculiar brilliance of its own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Without knowing why, or what it is that draws him, he is in a hurry to arrive,
+to be <i>there</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 . . .
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then the human mass closes in upon him; Demetrios pales; a man pushes him with
+his shoulder; a woman&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he realises that it will advance no further.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The quay lies white and straight like the first stage of an unfinished road
+which has undertaken to cross the sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios walks ever onwards.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-063.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-063" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;and
+the sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And still he turns round.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+An island is behind him, covered with great trees whence droop enormous
+blossoms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 . . .
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In all this mourning garb, Demetrios sees but the hair, like a golden vase on
+an ebony column. He recognises Chrysis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 . . .
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come,&rdquo; says Chrysis. &ldquo;Follow me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The house has but one storey. Chrysis halts at the topmost step.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There are four chambers,&rdquo; she says.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When you have seen them, you will never leave them. Will you follow me?
+Have you confidence?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-064.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-064" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>A monstrous iris-flower reaches to the level of her lips.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he will follow her everywhere. She opens the first door and closes it
+behind him.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here are the books you love,&rdquo; says Chrysis. &ldquo;There are no
+others.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios opens them: they are <i>The Oineus</i> of Chæremon, <i>The Return</i>
+of Alexis, <i>The Mirror of Lais</i> of Aristippos, <i>The Enchantress</i>,
+<i>The Cyclops</i>, the <i>Bucolics</i> of Theocritos, <i>Œdipus at
+Colonos</i>, the <i>Odes</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now,&rdquo; murmurs Chrysis, drawing from a long golden coder a
+manuscript consisting of a single leaf, &ldquo;here is the page of antique
+poesy that you never read alone without weeping.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young man reads at a venture:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+[Greek: Hoi men ar&rsquo; ethr&ecirc;neon, epi de stenachonto gynaikes.<br/>
+T&ecirc;sin d&rsquo;Andromach&ecirc; leuk&ocirc;lenos &ecirc;rche gooio,<br/>
+Hektoros androphonoio kar&ecirc; meta chersin echousa;<br/>
+Aner, ap&rsquo; ai&ocirc;nos neos &ocirc;leo, kadde me ch&ecirc;r&ecirc;n<br/>
+Leipeis en megaroisi; pais d&rsquo;eti n&ecirc;pios aut&ocirc;s,<br/>
+Hon tekomen sy t&rsquo;eg&ocirc; te dysammoroi. . .]
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stops, casting upon Chrysis a look of surprise and tenderness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You?&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;You show me this?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah! you have not seen everything. Follow me. Follow me quickly.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They open another door.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is the House of Felicity,&rdquo; says Demetrios in a low voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he lets his forehead sink into his hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Chrysis opens another door.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come! Come!&rdquo; repeats Chrysis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They open another door.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-065.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-065" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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 cast 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;See,&rdquo; explains the woman in an affectionate and tranquil tone,
+&ldquo;there are three different beds in the three corners of <i>our</i>
+chamber.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios does not answer. And he asks within himself:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Chrysis speaks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Well-Beloved, you asked for me; I am come, look at me well . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She raises her two arms together, lays her hands upon her hair, and, with her
+elbows projecting in front of her, smiles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well-Beloved, I am yours . . . Oh! not immediately . . . I promised you
+to sing, I will sing first . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;By night, on my bed,<br/>
+I sought him whom my soul loveth:<br/>
+I sought him, but I found him not. . . . .<br/>
+I charge ye, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,<br/>
+If ye find my beloved,<br/>
+Tell him<br/>
+That I am sick of love.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah! it is the Song of Songs, Demetrios. It is the nuptial canticle of
+the women of my country.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;I sleep, but my heart waketh:<br/>
+It is the voice of my beloved . . .<br/>
+That knocketh at my door,<br/>
+The voice of my beloved!<br/>
+He cometh,<br/>
+Leaping upon the mountains<br/>
+Like a roe<br/>
+Or a young hart.&rdquo;
+
+</p> <p class="poem">
+&ldquo;My beloved speaks, and says unto me:<br/>
+Open unto me, my sister, my fair one:<br/>
+My head is filled with dew,<br/>
+And my locks with the drops of the night.<br/>
+Rise up, my love, my fair one,<br/>
+And come away.<br/>
+For lo, the winter is past,<br/>
+The rain is over and gone,<br/>
+The flowers appear on the earth.<br/>
+The time of the singing of birds is come,<br/>
+The voice of the turtle-dove is heard in the land.<br/>
+Rise up, my love, my fair one,<br/>
+And come away.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She casts her veil away, and stands up arrayed in some tight-fitting stuff
+wound closely round the legs and hips.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;I have put off my coat;<br/>
+How shall I put it on?<br/>
+I have washed my feet:<br/>
+How shall I defile them?<br/>
+My well-beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door,<br/>
+And my bowels were moved for him.<br/>
+I rose up to open to my beloved,<br/>
+And my hands dropped with myrrh,<br/>
+And my fingers with sweet-smelling myrrh,<br/>
+Upon the handles of the lock.<br/>
+Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She throws her head back and half closes her eyelids.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Stay me, comfort me,<br/>
+For I am sick of love.<br/>
+Let his left hand be under my head<br/>
+And his right hand embrace me.<br/>
+Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, with<br/>
+one of thine eyes,<br/>
+With one chain of thy neck.<br/>
+How fair is thy love!<br/>
+How fair are thy caresses!<br/>
+How much better than wine!<br/>
+The smell of thee pleaseth me more than all spices.<br/>
+Thy lips drop as the honeycomb:<br/>
+Honey and milk are under thy tongue.<br/>
+The smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon.&rdquo;<br/>
+<br/>
+&ldquo;A garden enclosed is my sister,<br/>
+A spring shut up, a fountain sealed.
+
+</p> <p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Awake, O north wind!<br/>
+Blow, thou south!<br/>
+Blow upon my garden,<br/>
+That the spices thereof may flow out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She rounds her arms, and holds out her mouth.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Let my beloved come into his garden<br/>
+And eat of his pleasant fruits.<br/>
+Yes, I come into my garden,<br/>
+O! my sister, my spouse,<br/>
+I gather my myrrh with my spice,<br/>
+I eat my honeycomb with my honey.<br/>
+I drink my wine with my milk.<br/>
+SET ME AS A SEAL UPON THINE HEART<br/>
+AS A SEAL UPON THINE ARM<br/>
+FOR LOVE IS STRONG AS DEATH.&rdquo; [<a name="chapIV_Ifn1text"></a><a
+href="#chapIV_Ifn1">1</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Demetrios and Chrysis . . .
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 loth 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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-066.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-066" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>She dances gravely with her shoulders and her head.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We look at nothing so minutely as the face of the woman we love. Seen at the
+excessively close range of the kiss, Chrysis&rsquo;s eyes seem enormous. When
+she closes them, two parallel creases remain on each eyelid, and a leaden-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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+...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 cheeks 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios contemplates this divine madness in the feminine body with a sort of
+religious awe&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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! . . .
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="chapIV_Ifn1"></a> [<a href="#chapIV_Ifn1text">1</a>] Song of Songs.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap23"></a>II<br/>
+THE PANIC</h3>
+
+<p>
+Far above the sea and the Gardens of the Goddess, the moon poured down torrents
+of light.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Melitta&mdash;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&mdash;had remained behind alone with the fortune-teller,
+crouching, and still fierce.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do not follow that man,&rdquo; Chimairis had said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh yes, I will! I&rsquo;ve not even asked him if I am ever to see him
+again. Let me run after him to kiss him, and I&rsquo;ll come back&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, you&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-067.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-067" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>&ldquo;Oh, prophetess of evil! Take back what you&rsquo;ve said!</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why say it? I&rsquo;ve just met him, and I&rsquo;ve only trifled with
+pleasure in his arms.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So one is very unhappy when grown up?&rdquo; asked the child. &ldquo;All
+the women here chatter unceasingly of their troubles, and I, who never hardly
+cry, see so many weeping!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nevertheless, I know one happy woman,&rdquo; continued Melitta,
+significantly. &ldquo;She&rsquo;s my great friend, Chrysis. I&rsquo;m certain
+she never sheds a tear.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She will,&rdquo; said Chimairis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, prophetess of evil! Take back what you&rsquo;ve said, distraught old
+woman, or I shall hate you!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seeing the young girl&rsquo;s threatening gestures, the black goat reared up
+erect, its front legs bent under; its horns thrust forward.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Melitta fled without looking where she went.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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&mdash;the most admirable
+of all&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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. After that, luminous and dripping wet, wriggling
+their frog-like legs in the moonlight, they sprang upon the dark edge of the
+sea.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah! Look!&rdquo; exclaimed Melitta, all of a sudden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s a woman!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A courtesan! Oh, the shameless thing! She has fallen asleep in the
+open.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, no!&rdquo; rejoined Melitta, shaking her head. &ldquo;I dare not go
+near her, Mikyllos. She&rsquo;s no courtesan.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I should have thought she was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, I say, Mikyllos, she&rsquo;s not one of us. It&rsquo;s Touni, wife
+of the High Priest. Look well at her. She is not asleep. Oh, I&rsquo;m afraid
+to approach her. Her eyes are wide open! Let us go away! I&rsquo;m
+afraid&mdash;oh, so afraid!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mikyllos made three steps forward on tip-toe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re right, Melitta. She is not sleeping, poor woman! She is
+dead.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dead?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There is a pin in her heart.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stretched out his hand to draw it from her breast, but Melitta was
+terrified.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-068.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-068" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, no! Touch her not! She is sacred! Remain by her side, watch over
+her, protect her. I&rsquo;ll call for help. I&rsquo;ll tell the others.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She fled with all the strength of her legs into the deep shadow of the black
+trees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The icy nakedness of Touni remained as before, abandoned in the bright light of
+the moon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+A long time afterwards, the woods near where she lay became filled with murmurs
+which were frightful because almost imperceptible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A thousand naked arms were first uplifted and then as many others.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Goddess! Not on us!&rdquo; now sobbed many voices. &ldquo;Goddess, not
+on us! If thou wreakest vengeance, Goddess, spare our lives!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To the Temple!&rdquo; was the rallying-cry arising from one despairing
+throat.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-069.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-069" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>&ldquo;Open the gates for us!&rdquo;</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To the Temple! To the Temple!&rdquo; repeated all the other women.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Open the gates for us! Open! Let us in!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap24"></a>III<br/>
+THE CROWD</h3>
+
+<p>
+The morning the orgie at Bacchis&rsquo;s came to an end an event took place at
+Alexandria: rain fell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Immediately, contrarily to what usually happens in countries less African,
+everybody went out to welcome the shower.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Only the courtesans were there, for the third day of the Aphrodisæ being
+reserved for the exclusive devotions of the married women, the latter had just
+started for the Astarteïon in a great procession, and there was nothing in the
+square but flowered robes and eyes blackened with paint.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As Myrtocleia passed by, a young girl called Philotis, who was talking with
+many others, pulled her by the sleeve knot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ho, my little lass! you played at Bacchis&rsquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you suppose I looked at her? I arrived after the banquet, I played my
+piece, I received my payment, and I ran off.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I know you don&rsquo;t dissipate!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When one doesn&rsquo;t want to stain one&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My friend Theano stayed after me. When I awoke a few minutes ago, she
+had not yet come. The fête is perhaps still going on.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is finished,&rdquo; said another woman. &ldquo;Theano is down there,
+by the ceramic wall.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+The courtesans started off at a run, but presently stopped with a smile of
+pity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;Fowl.&rdquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An egg! an egg!&rdquo; said Philotis.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-070.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-070" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+But Myrtocleia made a gesture:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come, Theano, come to bed. You are not well. Come with me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah! . . . ha! . . . Ah! . . . ha!&rdquo; laughed the child. And she took
+her breast in her little hand, crying in a hoarse voice:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah! . . . Ha! . . . the mirror . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come along!&rdquo; repeated Myrto, losing patience.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The singing-girl tried to drag her away, but Philotis had understood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hi!&rdquo; she cried to the others, waving her two arms. &ldquo;Come
+here quickly! There is news! Bacchis&rsquo;s mirror has been stolen!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And all exclaimed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Papai&euml;! Bacchis&rsquo;s mirror!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+In an instant, thirty women crowded round the flute-girl:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is happening?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bacchis has had her mirror stolen: Theano has just said so.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But when?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who has taken it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The child shrugged her shoulders:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How do I know?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-071.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-071" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>Thirty women crowded round the flute-girl.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do I know about it? There were more than twenty of them in the
+banqueting room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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 Dana&euml;
+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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; interrupted Myrto, &ldquo;you are an awful fright. But the
+mirror? Who took it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who? That is what we want to know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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 Dana&euml; coins. See,
+Myrto, I have five: you shall buy robes for the three of us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is a woman,&rdquo; said Philotis; &ldquo;it is a woman who is
+responsible for this piece of work.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, the mirror was well hidden. A thief could have carried off
+everything in the room and upset everything without finding the stone.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bacchis had enemies, especially her former friends. They 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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh! she has perhaps sold the mirror to pay her debts.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Supposing it were one of her lovers? They say she takes porters
+now!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, it is a woman, I am sure of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By the two goddesses! it serves her right.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+ </p>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.
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is the matter? what is the matter?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+And a shrill voice dominating the tumult shouted over all their heads:
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;The High-Priest&rsquo;s wife has been killed!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 Aphrodisisæ, bringing down the wrath of the gods upon the
+town. But the same sentence passed from mouth to mouth in all directions:
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;The wife of the High-Priest has been killed! The festival at the Temple
+is put off.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+News arrived rapidly. The body had been found, lying on a pink marble seat, in
+a lonely place, at the summit of the gardens.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A long golden pin penetrated her left breast; the wound had not bled; but the
+assassin had cut off all the young woman&rsquo;s hair, and had carried away the
+antique comb of Queen Nitaoucrit.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;The courtesans, the sacred courtesans!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;The necklace of the Goddess has been stolen, the True Pearls of
+Anadyomene are gone!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-072.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-072" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap25"></a>IV<br/>
+THE RESPONSE</h3>
+
+<p>
+And the Agora was left empty, like a beach after the tide.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have done it!&rdquo; she cried; &ldquo;you have done it,
+then!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the young man simply. &ldquo;You are obeyed.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She quickly sat herself on his knees and embraced him deliriously:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;No . . . Adieu . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-073.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-073" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>&ldquo;You say nothing! Kiss me!</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he tranquilly turned away.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Chrysis stood rooted to the ground with stupefaction, her mouth open and her
+head dangling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What? What . . . what . . . what do you say?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I say adieu,&rdquo; he said, without raising his voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But . . . but it cannot be you who . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes. I had promised.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then . . . I fail to understand . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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&rsquo;s head against the wall.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Keep your presents! Do you suppose I care about them? It is yourself
+that I want, you, you alone.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;People have been tittle-tattling about me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh yes, I guess as much! People have been talking about me, don&rsquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I do not know them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Believe me! Believe me, Well-beloved! What interest could I have in
+deceiving you, since I desire nothing from you except yourself? You are the
+first person I have ever spoken to like this . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-074.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-074" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Demetrios looked her in the eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is too late,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I have possessed you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are raving . . . When? Where? How?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Chrysis pressed her hands to her temples.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is abominable, abominable! And he dares to say this! And he makes a
+boast of it!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And me, what do you mean to do with me, who loves 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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+At this point, Demetrios dropped his tone of mockery, and said, in a voice that
+trembled slightly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If I asked this, it was to attach you to me. I should not have got you
+if I had given myself.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am the only slave, Demetrios.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-075.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-075" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>He freed himself from both her arms.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, beat me, if you like! but love me afterwards!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she hugged him so brusquely that he had not time to turn away his lips. He
+freed himself from both her arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I detest you! Adieu,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Chrysis clung to his mantle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios looked at her curiously, and, like her, the night before upon the
+quay, he said to her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What oath do you swear me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By Aphrodite also.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You do not believe in Aphrodite. Swear by Jehovah Sabaoth.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Galilæan woman paled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We do not swear by Jehovah.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You refuse?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is a terrible oath.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I must have it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She hesitated, then said in a low voice: &ldquo;I swear by Jehovah. What do you
+want of me, Demetrios?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young man kept silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Speak quickly, I am afraid.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh! very little.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But what is it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Assuredly,&rdquo; said Chrysis joyously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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&rsquo;s necklace are not jewels one can make a display
+of.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What an idea!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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&rsquo;s left heel. The stone is
+broken, you will see. Then, in the interior of the pedestal, you will find
+Bacchis&rsquo;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&rsquo;s soldiers, but you will have what you
+desired, and I will go and see you in your prison before sunrise.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap26"></a>V<br/>
+THE GARDEN OF HERMANUBIS</h3>
+
+<p>
+Chrysis&rsquo;s first impulse was to shrug her shoulders. She would not be so
+ingenuous as to keep her word.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+The second was to go and see.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-076.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-076" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s heart irrevocably. The women one has once greatly loved form a
+family of election in a man&rsquo;s heart 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet . . . what a blessed end he had proposed to her!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She closed her eyes . . .
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+But no: she would not allow herself to be tempted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+The garden of Hermes Anubis was a little necropolis long ago abandoned, a sort
+of no man&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chrysis forced her way as best she could through the narrow, stony passage; on
+seeing the statue she paled slightly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+She put it round her neck.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-077.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-077" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>On seeing the statue she paled slightly.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 . . .
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+And enveloping herself to the hair in her great purple cyclas, she left the
+necropolis, taking with her the terrible jewels.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap27"></a>VI<br/>
+THE WALLS OF PURPLE</h3>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s palace, believing a bloody revolution was in progress, sacrificed
+to the infernal gods.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+At the corner of the island of Pharos and the quay, Rhodis recognised Chrysis
+standing near her in the crowd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You know,&rdquo; said Myrtocleia, &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chrysis did not answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We had given doves,&rdquo; said the little flute-player; &ldquo;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 . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All is accomplished,&rdquo; said the courtesan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chrysis took two steps backwards and lifted her right hand to her mouth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+A few minutes elapsed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The crowd surged perpetually. The living tide added its clamour to the regular
+upheavals of the waters.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suddenly a cry arose upon the air, repeated by a hundred thousand voices.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Aphrodite!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Aphrodite!!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<img style="width: 600px; height: 863px;" alt="" src= "images/ill-000.jpg" />
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s litter. The tumult gathered force every
+moment and became formidable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Neither Helen on the Scain Gates, nor Phryne in the waves of Eleusis, nor
+Thaïs setting fire to Persepolis have known what triumph means.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Chrysis had appeared by the western Gate, on the first terrace of the red
+monument.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-078.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-078" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>She went on her way towards the sky.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="book05"></a>BOOK V</h3>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap28"></a>I<br/>
+THE SUPREME NIGHT</h3>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are loved of the gods,&rdquo; said the old gaoler. &ldquo;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 be 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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Give me figs,&rdquo; said Chrysis; &ldquo;my mouth is dry.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The old slave brought her a dozen ripe figs in a green basket.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chrysis was left alone.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Outside, the silvery moon shone in a sky of liquid purity, a sky so pale and
+clear that not a star was visible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was on just such a night that, seven years before, Chrysis had left the land
+of Gennesaret.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 . . .
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+And before that, the blue lake, the transparent sky, the light air of the land
+of Galilee. . . . .
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The house was environed with pink flax-plants and tamarisks. Thorny
+caper-bushes pricked one&rsquo;s fingers when one went a-catching butterflies .
+. . One could almost see the wind in the undulations of the pine grasses . . .
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-079.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-079" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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 . . .<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; she said to herself, &ldquo;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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not to love or to die: that is the choice God has given me. What have I
+done to deserve punishment?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She murmured:
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;It is written:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+I remember thy love when thou wast young.<br/>
+For of old thou hast broken thy yoke.<br/>
+And burst thy bonds;<br/>
+And thou hast said: I will no longer serve.<br/>
+But upon every high hill,<br/>
+And under every green tree,<br/>
+Thou hast wandered, playing the harlot. [<a name="chapV_Ifn1text"></a><a
+href="#chapV_Ifn1">1</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;It is written:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+I will follow after my lovers,<br/>
+Who give me my bread and my wine,<br/>
+And my wool and my flax,<br/>
+And my oil and my wine. [<a name="chapV_Ifn2text"></a><a
+href="#chapV_Ifn2">2</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;It is written:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+How canst thou say: I am not polluted?<br/>
+See thy way in the valley,<br/>
+Know what thou hast done,<br/>
+O thou dromedary traversing her ways,<br/>
+O thou wild ass,<br/>
+Panting and ever lustful,<br/>
+Who could prevent thee from satisfying thy desire? [<a
+name="chapV_Ifn3text"></a><a href="#chapV_Ifn3">3</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;It is written:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<i>She has played the harlot in the land of Egypt.</i><br/>
+She has doted upon paramours<br/>
+Whose flesh is as the flesh of asses,<br/>
+And whose issue is like the issue of horses.<br/>
+Thus thou callest to remembrance the lewdness of thy youth,<br/>
+In bruising thy teats by the Egyptians<br/>
+For the paps of thy youth.&rdquo; [<a name="chapV_Ifn4text"></a><a
+href="#chapV_Ifn4">4</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;It is I! It is I!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And it is written again:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+Thou hast played the harlot with many lovers,<br/>
+And thou wouldst return again to me! saith the Lord. [<a
+name="chapV_Ifn5text"></a><a href="#chapV_Ifn5">5</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;But my chastisement also is written:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+Behold: I raise up thy lovers against thee:<br/>
+They shall judge thee according to their judgments.<br/>
+They shall take away thy nose and thine ears,<br/>
+And thy remnant shall fall by the sword. [<a name="chapV_Ifn6text"></a><a
+href="#chapV_Ifn6">6</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;And again:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+She is undone: she is stripped naked, she is led away captive<br/>
+Her servants wail like doves<br/>
+And taber upon their breasts. [<a name="chapV_Ifn7text"></a><a
+href="#chapV_Ifn7">7</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;But does one know what the Scripture says?&rdquo; she added to console
+herself. &ldquo;Is it not written elsewhere:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+I will not punish your daughters when they commit whoredom. [<a
+name="chapV_Ifn8text"></a><a href="#chapV_Ifn8">8</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;And elsewhere does not Scripture give this advice:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+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.
+[<a name="chapV_Ifn9text"></a><a href="#chapV_Ifn9">9</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+She shivered, and repeated in a low voice:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+For there is no work, nor device nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave,
+<i>whither thou goest!</i> Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is
+to see the sun. [<a name="chapV_Ifn10text"></a><a href="#chapV_Ifn10">10</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+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. [<a name="chapV_Ifn11text"></a><a
+href="#chapV_Ifn11">11</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Shivering once more, she repeated slowly:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+Or the dust return to the earth as it was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;that she bore <i>her skeleton within her</i>,
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The door opened quietly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios entered.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<small> <a name="chapV_Ifn1"></a> [<a href="#chapV_Ifn1text">1</a>]
+<i>Jeremiah</i> II, 2, 20.<br/><br/>
+<a name="chapV_Ifn2"></a> [<a href="#chapV_Ifn2text">2</a>] <i>Hosea</i> II,
+5.<br/><br/>
+<a name="chapV_Ifn3"></a> [<a href="#chapV_Ifn3text">3</a>] <i>Jeremiah</i> II,
+23, 24.<br/><br/>
+<a name="chapV_Ifn4"></a> [<a href="#chapV_Ifn4text">4</a>] <i>Ezekiel</i>
+XXIII, 20, 21.<br/><br/>
+<a name="chapV_Ifn5"></a> [<a href="#chapV_Ifn5text">5</a>] <i>Jeremiah</i>
+III, 1.<br/><br/>
+<a name="chapV_Ifn6"></a> [<a href="#chapV_Ifn6text">6</a>] <i>Ezekiel</i>
+XXIII, 22, 25.<br/><br/>
+<a name="chapV_Ifn7"></a> [<a href="#chapV_Ifn7text">7</a>] <i>Nahum</i> II,
+7.<br/><br/>
+<a name="chapV_Ifn8"></a> [<a href="#chapV_Ifn8text">8</a>] <i>Hosea</i> IV,
+14.<br/><br/>
+<a name="chapV_Ifn9"></a> [<a href="#chapV_Ifn9text">9</a>] <i>Ecclesiastes</i>
+IX, 7, 10.<br/><br/>
+<a name="chapV_Ifn10"></a> [<a href="#chapV_Ifn10text">10</a>]
+<i>Ecclesiastes</i> XI, 7.<br/><br/>
+<a name="chapV_Ifn11"></a> [<a href="#chapV_Ifn11text">11</a>]
+<i>Ecclesiastes</i> XII, 1, 5-7. </small>
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap29"></a>II<br/>
+DUST RETURNS TO EARTH</h3>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Demetrios!&rdquo; she cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she rushed forward.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had hoped for an impulse of generosity, a movement of the arms, the lips,
+anything, an outstretched hand . . .
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demetrios did not move.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+He waited in silence for an instant, in an extremely correct attitude, as if he
+wished clearly to disavow all responsibility in the case.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chrysis sat upon the low bed, with a fixed look in her dulled eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Then Demetrios began to commune with himself.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;It is better thus,&rdquo; he said to himself. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-080.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-080" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>Chrysis sat upon the low bed.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Having thus, in an audacious aphorism, summed up one of his moral theories, he
+lightly resumed the normal course of his ideas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+His mind was even so free from all preoccupation that he stumped out upon the
+wall a rough study of his group of <i>Zagreus and the Titans</i>, a variant
+which modified the position of the principal character&rsquo;s right arm.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Hardly had he finished, when a gentle knock was heard at the door.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Demetrios opened without haste. The old executioner entered, followed by two
+helmeted hoplites.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I bring the little cup,&rdquo; he said, smiling obsequiously at the
+royal lover.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Demetrios kept silence.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Chrysis, half beside herself, raised her head. &ldquo;Come, my girl,&rdquo;
+continued the gaoler, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Chrysis looked at Demetrios, who did not turn away his eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She drank half the contents of the cup, then, whether it was that she had seen
+this gesture at the Theatre, in the <i>Thyestes</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then the Galilæan 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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-081.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-081" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What must I do?&rdquo; she said to the gaoler.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+It is written:
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+"The light is sweet . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+There, the old man disposed the white folds of the robe along the rigid limbs.
+Then he touched her feet and asked her:
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Do you feel anything?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-082.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-082" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>The hoplites carried her to the bed.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She answered:
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+He touched her knees and asked her:
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Do you feel anything?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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 . . .
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap30"></a>III<br/>
+CHRYSIS IMMORTAL</h3>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Three days before, the details of this regular muscular arrangement had
+entirely absorbed all Demetrios&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Suddenly he crossed the court, called a slave, and said to her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Prepare the piscina and the aromatics. Bathe me and perfume me, give me
+my white garments, and light the round perfume-pans.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When he had finished his toilette, he summoned two other slaves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;to the Queen&rsquo;s prison; hand the gaoler
+this lump of potter&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Suddenly he halted on the threshold, stupefied by the immense midday light of
+Africa.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-083.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-083" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;and that formal beauty
+is merely so much uncertain matter, ever capable of being transfigured by the
+expression of sorrow or joy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Just as he was finishing this line of thought, he arrived before the door of
+the criminal prison.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His two slaves were waiting for him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We have brought the lump of red clay,&rdquo; they said. &ldquo;The body
+is on the bed. It has not been touched. The gaoler salutes you and hopes you
+will not forget him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shivered from head to foot. Nevertheless he removed the tissue of white wool
+and wound it round the hair.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Chrysis&rsquo; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+And then he remembered the words uttered by Chrysis during their first
+interview: &ldquo;You only know my face. You do not know how beautiful I
+am!&rdquo; An intense emotion suddenly stifles him. He wishes to know. He has
+the power.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of his three days of passion he wishes to keep a souvenir which shall last
+longer than himself.&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-084.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-084" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>The rough figure takes life and precision.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+The Model has taken the pose.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+When night mounted from the earth and darkened the low chamber, Demetrios had
+finished the statue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap31"></a>IV<br/>
+PITY</h3>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Gaoler, open! Gaoler, open!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rhodis and Myrtocleia knocked at the closed door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The door opened half way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you want?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To see our friend,&rdquo; said Myrto. &ldquo;To see Chrysis, poor
+Chrysis, who died this morning.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is not allowed; go away!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And supposing I am caught, my little girls? Supposing I am punished on
+your account? You will not pay the fine?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The moment the great key entered the lock, Rhodis arrested her friend&rsquo;s
+hand:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I do not know whether I dare see her,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I loved
+her well, Myrto . . . I am afraid . . . Go in first, will you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Myrtocleia pushed open the door; but as soon as she had cast a glance into the
+chamber she cried:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do not enter, Rhodis! Wait for me here.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh! What is there? You are afraid too . . . What is there on the bed? Is
+she not dead?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, wait for me . . . I will tell you . . . Stay in the corridor and do
+not look.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-085.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-085" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+She approached the bed on tiptoe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 &ldquo;the right of succession!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Rhodis,&rdquo; she said, in a troubled voice, &ldquo;come; you can enter
+now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+The trembling child penetrated into the chamber. Her features contracted, her
+eyes opened wide.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As soon as they felt that there were two of them, they fell into one
+another&rsquo;s arms and burst into long-drawn sobs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Poor Chrysis! Poor Chrysis!&rdquo; repeated the child.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How we loved her! She was not a friend for us. She was a little mother
+for both of us . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rhodis repeated:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Like a little mother . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Myrto, dragging her to the side of the dead woman, said in a low voice:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Kiss her.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They both bent down, and placed their hands upon the bed, as, with fresh sobs,
+they touched the icy forehead with their lips.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+And Myrto took the head between her two hands, buried them in the hair, and
+spoke to her thus:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Rhodis sat huddled up on the ground, sobbing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Chrysis, my Chrysis.&rdquo; pursued Myrtocleia, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The flute-girl wept continually. The singing girl took her by the hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+</p> <hr style="color:#000000;background-color:#000000;width: 5%; height: 5px;"
+/>
+
+<p class="p2">
+She enveloped the beautiful body and then she said to Rhodis:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Help me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-086.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-086" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+They lifted her up gently; but the burden was a heavy one for the little
+musicians, and they laid it down upon the ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let us take off our sandals,&rdquo; said Myrto. &ldquo;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&rsquo;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 .
+. .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3><a name="chap32"></a>V<br/>
+PIETY</h3>
+
+<p>
+After the turning of the second street, they laid the body down a second time
+in order in put on their sandals. Rhodis&rsquo;s feet, too delicate to walk
+naked, were torn and bleeding.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The little virgins resumed their load.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where are we going to?&rdquo; asked the child. &ldquo;Where are we going
+to bury it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In the cemetery of Hermanubis. It is always deserted, it will be in
+peace there.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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&rsquo;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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We shall never know&rdquo;, concluded the flute-player. &ldquo;She has
+taken her secret with her, and even if she had an accomplice he would be the
+last to enlighten us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this point, Rhodis, who had been resting for several instants, sighed:
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-087.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-087" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>The little virgins resumed their load</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I cannot carry her any longer, Myrto. I shall fall down on my knees, I
+am broken with fatigue and grief.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Myrtocleia took her by the neck:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Try again, my darling. We <i>must</i> 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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the child, overcome with weakness, burst into tears.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Quickly, quickly!&rdquo; exclaimed Myrtocleia.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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 . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She stooped short.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, inspired by a sudden thought, she ran down the street to meet the little
+group.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Timon,&rdquo; she said, and her voice was full of supplication;
+&ldquo;Timon, stop. I have grave words to utter to you alone.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My poor little thing,&rdquo; said the young man, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Get away, little idiot!&rdquo; said Tryphera, &ldquo;if you have dried
+up your nurse&rsquo;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?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Her nurse?&rdquo; said Philotis. &ldquo;She wants to steal away
+Timon.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The whip! She deserves the whip!&rdquo; said Callistion, who put one arm
+round Myrto&rsquo;s waist, lifting her off the ground and raising her little
+blue tunic, But Seso interposed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are mad,&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come,&rdquo; said Timon, &ldquo;what do you want with me? Come here.
+Whisper in my ear. Is it really serious?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The body of Chrysis is there, in the street,&rdquo; said the young girl
+tremblingly. &ldquo;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 take long.
+Immediately afterwards you can rejoin your women . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Timon&rsquo;s look reassured her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Turning to the four women . . .
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go to my house,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;by the street of the Potters. I
+shall be there in a short time. Do not follow me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rhodis was still sitting in front of the corpse. When she saw Timon coming, she
+implored him:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do not tell! We have stolen it to save her shade. Keep our secret, we
+will love you, Timon.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Have no fears,&rdquo; said the young man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Impassivity,&rdquo; he thought, &ldquo;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&rsquo;s bed as little as possible.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They reached the gate of the ruined necropolis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where shall we put it?&rdquo; said Myrto.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Near the god.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nor did they fail to find it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-088.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-881" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>They passed the limp body to Timon.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young man jumped into the grave, as far as his waist, and held out his
+arms:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Give it to me,&rdquo; he said to Myrto. &ldquo;I am going to lay it at
+the far end, and we will close up the tomb again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Rhodis threw herself on the body.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;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! . . .&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+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 cheeks 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, shaken by interminable sobs, they passed the limp inert body to Timon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+&#932;&#927;&#921;&#925;&#916;&#917; &#928;&#917;&#929;&#913;&#931; &#917;&#931;&#935;&#917;
+&#932;&#927; &#931;&#933;&#925;&#932;&#913;&#915;&#924;&#913;<br/>
+&#932;&#937;&#925; &#928;&#917;&#929;&#921; &#935;&#929;&#933;&#931;&#921;&#916;&#913;
+&#922;&#913;&#921; &#916;&#919;&#924;&#919;&#932;&#929;&#921;&#927;&#925; <br/>
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+<img src="images/ill-089.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="ill-089" /><br/><br/>
+</div>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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+</pre>
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+</body>
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+</html>
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@@ -0,0 +1,8612 @@
+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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