III
It was at the Opéra, during an entr’acte of Robert le Diable. In the stalls, men stood up, hats on their heads, low-cut waistcoats revealing white shirts on which shone gold or jewelled studs, and looked round at the boxes full of women in evening dress, covered with diamonds and pearls, displayed in this brilliantly lighted greenhouse where lovely faces and gleaming shoulders seemed blossoming for all eyes to gaze on, in the midst of the music and the human voices.
Two friends, their backs turned to the orchestra, were quizzing, as they talked, all this gallery of elegance, all this exhibition of true or artificial charm, jewels, luxury and ostentation that spread itself in a circle round the great theatre.
One of them, Roger de Salins, said to his companion, Bernard Grandin:
“Look at the Comtesse de Mascaret, as lovely as ever.”
The other man turned to stare at the tall woman in the opposite box: she looked still very young, and her startling beauty seemed to draw all eyes from every corner of the theatre. Her pale complexion, with its ivory gleams, gave her the look of a statue, while in her hair, which was black as night, a slender rainbow-shaped diadem, powdered with diamonds, glittered like a milky way.
When he had looked at her for some time, Bernard Grandin replied with a humorous accent of sincere conviction:
“I’ll grant you that she’s lovely!”
“How old will she be now?”
“Wait. I can tell you exactly. I have known her since her childhood. I saw her make her entry into society as a young girl. She is … she is … thirty … thirty … thirty-six years old.”
“It’s impossible.”
“I’m sure of it.”
“She looks twenty-five.”
“She has had seven children.”
“It’s incredible.”
“They are all seven alive too, and she’s an admirable mother. I visit the house sometimes: it’s a pleasant house, very quiet and restful. She achieves the difficult art of being a mother and a social being.”
“Odd, isn’t it? And there’s never been any talk about her?”
“Never.”
“But what about her husband? He’s a strange man, isn’t he?”
“Yes and no. There may have been some little incident between them, one of those little domestic incidents that one suspects, never hearing the whole story but guessing it fairly accurately.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t know anything about it myself. Mascaret is very much the man about town nowadays after having been a perfect husband. During all the time that he was a thoroughly good husband, he had a thoroughly bad disposition, suspicious and surly. Since he took to a gay life, he has become quite careless, but one feels that he has some worry, some grief, a gnawing canker of some kind: he is ageing very much, he is.”
For a few minutes the two friends philosophised on the secret troubles, impossible to understand, that differences of character or perhaps physical antipathies, unnoticed at first, can create in a family.
Roger de Salins, who was still eyeing Mme. de Mascaret, added:
“It is incomprehensible that this woman has had seven children.”
“Yes, in eleven years. After which she made an end, at the age of thirty, of her period of reproduction, in order to enter on the brilliant period of display, which seems far from finishing.”
“Poor women!”
“Why do you pity them?”
“Why? Oh, my dear, think of it! Eleven years of pregnancy for a woman like that! What a hell! It’s the whole of her youth, all her beauty, her every hope of success, the whole romantic ideal of the brilliance of life, that is sacrificed to this abominable law of reproduction which turns the normal woman into a mere egg-laying machine.”
“What’s to be done? That’s only nature!”
“Yes, but I say that nature is our enemy, that we must fight all our lives against nature, because she never ceases to force us back and back to the beast. Whatever there is of decency, of beauty, of graciousness, of idealism, on earth, was not put there by God, but by man, by man’s brain. It is we who have introduced into the created world some little grace, beauty, a charm foreign to it, and mystery, by the songs we sing of it, the interpretations we offer, by the admiration of poets, the idealisations of artists, and the explanations of scientists who are deluded but who do find ingenious reasons for phenomena. God has created only gross creatures, full of the germs of disease, who after a few years of animal development grow old in infirmity, with all the ugliness and all the impotence of human decrepitude. He made them, it seems, only to reproduce themselves in a revolting fashion and thereafter to die, like the ephemeral insects of summer evenings. I said, ‘to reproduce themselves in a revolting fashion’: I repeat it. What is indeed more shameful, more repugnant than the filthy and ridiculous act of human reproduction, from which all delicate sensibilities shrink and will always shrink in disgust? Since all the organs invented by this economical and malignant creator serve two purposes, why did he not choose others, that were not ill-suited and defiled, to which to entrust this sacred mission, the noblest and most uplifting of all human functions? The mouth that nourishes the body with material food, is also the medium of words and thoughts. The flesh is restored by it at the same time that it gives expression to the intelligence. The sense of smell, which gives the lungs their vital air, gives the brain all the perfumes in the world: the scent of flowers, woods, trees, the sea. The ear which puts us in communication with our fellow beings, has also made it possible for us to invent music, to create from its sounds imagination, happiness, the infinite, and even physical pleasure. But one would suppose that a malicious and cynical creator had wished to prevent man from ever ennobling, beautifying and idealising his relations with women. Nevertheless, man found love, which is not so bad as a reply to a God who is a cheat, and he has so endowed it with poetical conceits that woman often forgets to what contacts she is forced. Those among us who are powerless to delude ourselves by self-idealisation, have invented vice and refined debauch, which is yet another way of making a fool of God and rendering a wanton homage to beauty.
“But the normal human being makes children like a beast mated by law.
“Look at this woman! Isn’t it abominable to think that this jewel, this pearl born to be beautiful, admired, fêted and adored, has passed eleven years of her life in giving heirs to the Comte de Mascaret!”
Bernard Grandin said, laughing:
“There’s a good deal of truth in that; but few people would understand you.”
Salins became excited.
“Do you know my conception of God?” said he. “A monstrous creative organ unknown to us, who sows millions of worlds through space as a single fish lays eggs in the sea. He creates because that is his God function: but he is ignorant of what he does, senselessly prolific, unconscious of the multitudinous combinations produced by his scattered germs. Human thought is a happy little accident born of the chances of his fecundities, a local accident, passing and unforeseen, condemned to disappear with the earth, and to begin again, perhaps, here or elsewhere, the same or different, with the new combinations of the eternal re-beginnings. It is due to this, to this little accident of intelligence, that we exist ill at ease in a state of being not made for us, which had not been prepared to receive, house, nourish and content thinking beings, and it is due to this too that we have to fight without rest, such of us as are truly refined and civilised, against what are still called the designs of Providence.”
Grandin, who was listening to him attentively, knowing of old the startling leaps of his imagination, asked him:
“So you believe that human thought is a spontaneous product of the blind parturition of God?”
“Why not? A fortuitous function of the nervous centres of our brains, similar to unforeseen chemical actions due to new combinations, similar too to a manifestation of electricity, created by friction or by unexpected contiguities, in short to all the phenomena engendered by the infinite and fecund fermentations of living matter.
“But, my dear, the proof leaps to the eye of anyone who looks round him. If human thought, willed by a conscious creator, had been intended to be that which it has become, quite different from the thought and the resignation of the beasts, exacting, questing, disturbed, tormented, would the world created to receive the creatures that we are today have been this uncomfortable little park for small beasties, this salad bed, this stony, spherical, sylvan kitchen-garden, where your shortsighted Providence had destined us to live naked, in caves or under trees, nourished by the murdered flesh of the animals, our brothers, or the raw vegetables growing in sun and rain?
“But it only requires a second’s reflection to realise that this world is not made for creatures like us. Thought, hatched and developed by a miraculous quality of the nerves of our brain cells, quite powerless, ignorant and confused as it is and will always remain, makes us all intellectuals of the world of the ideal, and miserable exiles in this world.
“Contemplate this world, in the state in which God gave it to the beings who dwell thereon. Is it not visibly and solely designed, planted and wooded for animals? What is there for us? Nothing. And for them, all: caves, trees, leafy places, rivers, watering-places, food and drink. So that fastidious people like me are never happy there. Only men who approximate to the brutes are content and satisfied. But the others, poets, squeamish creatures, dreamers, seekers, restless beings … oh, poor wretches!
“I eat cabbages and carrots, dammit, onions, turnips and radishes, because we have been constrained to accustom ourselves to them, even to acquire a taste for them, and because nothing else grows, but these things are a food fit only for rabbits and goats, as grass and clover are food for horses and cows. When I look at the ears of a field of ripe corn I don’t doubt but that it has germinated in the soil for the beaks of sparrows and larks, but not for my mouth. So when I masticate bread I am robbing the birds, as I am robbing the weasel and the fox in eating poultry. Are not quail, pigeon and partridge the natural prey of the hawk; sheep, venison and beef the prey of the great carnivorous beasts, rather than meats fattened for us to be served roasted with truffles that have been disinterred especially for us by the pigs?
“Animals have nothing to do but live here, my dear. They are in their own place, sheltered and fed, they have only to browse or hunt or eat each other, following the promptings of their instincts, for God never foresaw gentleness and peaceful way: he foresaw only the death of creatures impelled to destroy and devour each other.
“As for us! Oh, we have had to use labour, effort, patience, invention, imagination, industry, talent, and genius to make this root-bound stony soil something like a dwelling-place. Think what we have done, in spite of nature, in opposition to nature, to establish ourselves in barely tolerable conditions, hardly decent, hardly comfortable, hardly elegant, unworthy of us.
“And the more civilised, intelligent and refined we are, the more we must vanquish and tame the animal instinct that represents the will of God in us.
“Consider how we have had to invent civilisation, which includes so many things, so very many things of all kinds, from socks to telephones. Think of all the things you see every day, all the things that are useful to us in every sort of way.
“To soften our brutish fate, we have discovered and manufactured everything, beginning with houses, and going on to delicate foods, sweets, cakes, drinks, liqueurs, tapestries, clothing, ornaments, beds, hair mattresses, carriages, railways, innumerable machines: more, we have discovered science and art, writing and poetry. Yes, we have created the arts, poetry, music, painting. Everything that belongs to the imagination comes from us, and all the gay conceits of life, feminine dress and masculine talent, which has managed to make the merely reproductive existence, for which alone a divine Providence gave us life, a little more beautiful in our eyes, a little less naked, less monotonous and less harsh.
“Look at this theatre. Is there not here a human world created by us, unforeseen by the eternal Fates, unknown to Them, comprehensible to our minds alone, a gay titillation of mind and senses, created solely for us and by the feeble discontented restless animal that we are?
“Look at this woman, Mme. de Mascaret. God had made her to live in a cave, naked, or clothed in the skins of beasts. Isn’t she better like this? But, talking of her, who knows why or how her brute of a husband, having had a woman like that for a companion and especially after having been uncouth enough to make her seven times a mother, abandoned her all at once to run after loose women?”
Grandin replied:
“Oh, my dear, that’s probably the only reason. He discovered at last that sleeping in his own bed costs him too much. He has arrived by way of domestic economy at the same theories you hold philosophically.”
The bell rang three times for the last act. The two friends turned round, removed their hats and took their seats.