She returned my love a hundredfold; and it was in vain that young nobles and even elders of the Council of Ten made her the most magnificent offers. A Foscari even went so far as to propose to marry her. She refused everything. She had money enough; she wanted nothing but love, a young love, a pure love, a love awakened by her, a love that must be the first and the last. I should have been perfectly happy but for an accursed nightmare that returned every night, in which I fancied myself a village cure mortifying the flesh and doing penance for my excesses of the day. Reassured by being with her, I hardly thought any more of the strange manner in which I had made her acquaintance. But the Abbé Sérapion’s words still returned to my mind at times, and did not cease to make me uneasy.
For some time Clarimonde’s health had not been so good; her colour faded day by day. The doctors who were sent for did not understand what her illness was or what treatment to give. They prescribed a few medicines that could do neither good nor harm, and did not come again. Meanwhile she grew visibly paler and became colder and colder. She was almost as white and as dead as on the memorable night in the mysterious castle. I was heart-broken to see her thus slowly fading away. Touched by my grief, she smiled upon me softly and sadly, with the resigned smile of those who know they are going to die.
One morning I was sitting at her bedside, eating my breakfast at a little table, so as not to leave her for a minute. As I was cutting some fruit, I happened to make a rather deep gash in my finger. The blood spurted out immediately in crimson jets, and some of the drops were sprinkled upon Clarimonde. Her eyes lit up, her features assumed an expression of fierce, wild joy that I had never seen in them before. She leapt out of bed with the agility of an animal, a monkey or a cat, flew at my wound, and began to suck it with an air of unspeakable delight. She swallowed the blood in small draughts, slowly and grudgingly, like an epicure tasting Xeres or Syracuse wine; she half closed her eyes, and the pupils of her green eyes became elongated instead of round. Now and again she stopped to kiss my hand, then she began again to press the wound with her lips, to coax out a few more red drops. When she saw that no more blood was coming, she stood up with moist and shining eyes, rosier than a May dawn, her face full, her hand warm and soft, lovelier than ever and in perfect health.
“I shall not die! I shall not die!” she cried, half mad with joy, and hanging on my neck; “I shall be able to love you for a long time still. My life is in yours, and all that is me comes from you. A few drops of your rich and noble blood, more precious and more potent than all the elixirs in the world, have given me back my life.”
This scene made a deep impression upon me and filled me with strange doubts concerning Clarimonde; and that very evening, when sleep had taken me back to my presbytery, I saw the Abbé Sérapion, graver and more anxious than ever. He observed me attentively, and said: “Not content with destroying your soul, you wish to destroy your body also. Unhappy young man, into what a snare you are fallen!” The tone in which he uttered these words struck me sharply, but in spite of its vividness, the impression was soon dispelled, and a thousand other cares effaced it from my mind.
One evening, however, looking in my mirror, the treacherous position of which she had not taken count of, I saw Clarimonde drop a powder into the cup of spiced wine which she used to prepare after the meal. I took the cup and pretended to sip from it; then I put it down on a table as if to finish it later at my leisure, and taking advantage of a moment when her back was turned, I threw the contents under the table; after which I retired to my room and went to bed, resolved to keep awake and see what would happen. I had not long to wait; Clarimonde came in and, having taken off her wrap, lay down in bed by my side. When she felt quite sure that I was asleep, she bared my arm and drew a golden pin from her hair; then she began to murmur in a low voice:
“One drop, just one little red drop, a ruby on the point of my needle! … Since you love me still, I must not die … Ah! poor love! his beautiful blood, so red, I am going to drink it! Sleep, my only treasure; sleep, my god, my child; I will not hurt you, I will only take from your life what I need to keep mine from going out. If I did not love you so much, I could bring myself to have other lovers, whose veins I would drain dry; but since I have known you, I have held all other men in abhorrence …. Ah! what a lovely arm! how round it is! how white it is! I shall never dare to prick that pretty blue vein.”
And as she said this she wept, and I felt her tears rain upon my arm as she held it. At length she decided to act; she made a little prick in my arm with her needle, and began to sip the blood that flowed from it. Before she had taken more than a few drops she was seized with the fear of exhausting me; she carefully bound my arm with a little bandage, after smearing the wound with an ointment that closed it at once.
I could no longer be in doubt, the Abbé Sérapion was right. But in spite of this conviction, I could not suppress my love for Clarimonde, and I would willingly have given her all the blood she needed to maintain her artificial existence. Besides, I was not really frightened; to me, the woman made up for the vampire, and what I had heard and seen reassured me; I had then rich veins that would not quickly be exhausted, and I was not bargaining away my life drop by drop. I would have opened my arm myself and said to her: “Drink! let my love enter your body with my blood!” I avoided making the least allusion to the powder she had poured out for me, or to the scene with the needle, and we went on living in the most perfect harmony.
Nevertheless, my priest’s scruples tormented me more than ever, and I was always seeking new penances to tame and mortify my flesh. Although all this visionary existence was involuntary, and my other self took no part in it, I dared not touch the Christ with hands so contaminated and a soul polluted by such debaucheries, real or imagined. To avoid falling into these fatiguing hallucinations, I tried to prevent myself from sleeping; I held my eye-lids open with my fingers and stood upright against the wall, struggling against sleep with all my strength; but my eyes were soon full of drowsiness, and finding that the struggle was in vain, I let my arms fall in discouragement and weariness, and the tide swept me back towards the treacherous shores.
Sérapion remonstrated with me with the greatest vehemence, and reproached me bitterly for my supineness and lack of fervour. One day, when I had been more agitated than usual, he said to me:
“There is only one way to rid you of this obsession, and although it is an extreme measure, it must be taken; for desperate ills, desperate remedies. I know where Clarimonde was buried; we must dig up her body, and let you see in what a wretched state the object of your love now is; you will not be tempted to lose your soul for a filthy corpse, devoured by worms and ready to fall to dust; it will surely bring you to your right mind.”
For my own part, I was so worn out with this double life that I agreed, wishing to learn, once for all, whether the priest or the nobleman was the victim of an illusion; I was prepared to kill one of these two men who were in me for the benefit of the other, whichever it might be, or to kill them both, for such a life could not last. The Abbé Sérapion provided himself with a mattock, crow-bar, and lantern, and at midnight we set out for the cemetery of, the arrangement of which, below and above ground, he knew perfectly.
After turning the light of the dark lantern on the inscriptions on several tombstones, we came at last to a stone half buried in long grass and covered with moss and parasitic plants, on which we deciphered the beginning of an epitaph:
Here lies Clarimonde
Beautiful beyond
All that earth could …
“This is it,” said Sérapion, and placing the lantern on the ground, he slipped the crow-bar into the interstice of the stone and began to lift it. The stone gave way, and he set to work with the mattock. I watched him, gloomier and more silent than the night itself; he himself, bent over his dismal work, dripped sweat and panted; his laboured breath sounded like a death-rattle.
It was a strange sight, and anyone who had seen us from outside would h
ave taken us for sacrilegious shroud-stealers rather than for priests of God. There was something hard and savage in Sérapion’s zeal that gave him the look more of a demon than that of an apostle or angel, and his face, with its large austere features accentuated by the rays of the lantern, was not reassuring. I felt an icy sweat gathering in beads on my limbs, and my hair stood up on my head with a tingling sensation; in my heart I looked upon the action of the pitiless Sérapion as an abominable desecration, and would have been glad if, from the flank of the dark clouds that rolled heavily over us, a triangle of flame had shot out and reduced him to ashes. The owls perched in the cypresses, disturbed by the light of the lantern, came flapping heavily against the glass with their dusty wings and uttering plaintive cries; foxes yelped in the distance; and a thousand sinister sounds broke the silence.
At length Sérapion’s mattock struck against the coffin, the boards of which echoed with a hollow, sonorous sound, that awful sound which nothingness gives when touched; he lifted the lid, and I saw Clarimonde, pale as marble, with clasped hands; her white shroud made only one single fold from head to feet. A little red drop gleamed like a rose at the corner of her discoloured mouth.
Sérapion, on seeing this, burst into a fury:
“Ah! there you are, demon, shameless harlot, drinker of blood and gold!” and he sprinkled with holy water the corpse and the coffin also, tracing upon it the figure of a cross.
No sooner had poor Clarimonde been touched by the sacred dew than her lovely body crumbled into dust; nothing remained but a horrible, shapeless heap of ashes, flesh, and half-calcined bones.
“Behold your mistress, my lord Romuald!” said the pitiless priest, pointing to the miserable relics. “Will you ever again be tempted to go walking with your beautiful lady at Lido and Fusine?”
I bowed my head; a great change had taken place in me. I returned to my presbytery, and the lord Romuald, lover of Clarimonde, took leave of the poor priest with whom he had so long and so strangely kept company. I only saw Clarimonde once more; the following night she appeared and said to me, as at our first meeting under the portal of the church:
“Unhappy man! unhappy man! what have you done? Why did you listen to that idiot priest? Were you not happy? And what had I done to you, that you should violate my poor grave and strip bare the horror of my annihilation? All communication between our souls and our bodies is broken. Farewell, you will regret me.”
She vanished into the air like smoke, and I never saw her again.
Alas, she spoke the truth! I have regretted her more than once, and I still regret her. My soul’s peace has been very dearly bought; the love of God was not too great a thing to replace hers.
There, brother, is the story of my youth. Never look on a woman, but go with your eyes fixed on the ground, for chaste and steadfast as you may be, one minute may make you lose Eternity.
PROSPER MÉRIMÉE
The Venus of Ille
(La Vénus d’Ille, 1837)
Yet another great theme of nineteenth-century fantastic literature is the survival of classical antiquity, the nullification of the historical discontinuity that separates us from the Greco-Roman world.
I could also have chosen Gautier’s “Arria Marcella” (1852) to represent this theme, a story set in Pompeii possessing notes of great sexual delicacy. The trace of a girl’s breast in lava allows us to enter the world of the past. Another example is Henry James’s “The Last of the Valerii” (1874). There have been many variations on the theme, but I prefer this story because it is very representative of Mérimée (1803–1870) and his consummate skill in the presentation of local color, climates, and human atmosphere.
Mérimée wrote few fantastic stories, but they constitute an essential part of his narrative production: “Lokis” (1868), a story of Lithuanian superstitions, contains an unforgettable vision of the animal world of the forests.
The Venus of llle, a bronze statue—Greek or Roman—is looked upon most unfavorably by the inhabitants of the town in Roussillon,where it has recently been discovered. They consider it an “idol” The fiance of the archeologist’s daughter, teasing her, takes off her ring and slips it onto the statue’s finger. He can’t get it off. Has he become engaged to the statue? The gigantic Venus, dream of serenity and Olympian beauty, is transformed on the wedding night into a terrifying nightmare.
IWAS GOING DOWN the last slope of the Canigou, and, although I the sun had already set, I could distinguish on the plain the houses of the little town of Ille, towards which I was making.
“You know, no doubt,” I said to the Catalan who had been my guide since the previous day, “where Monsieur de Peyrehorade lives?”
“Do I know where?” he exclaimed. “I know his house as well as I know my own; and if it wasn’t so dark I would point it out to you. It is the prettiest in Ille. Monsieur de Peyrehorade is a rich man; and he is marrying his son to a lady even richer than himself.”
“Is the marriage to take place soon?” I asked.
“Very soon; indeed, the fiddlers may already have been ordered for the wedding. Perhaps it will be tonight, or tomorrow, or the day after, for all I know. It’ll be at Puygarrig; for the son is to marry Mademoiselle de Puygarrig. Oh, it’ll be a very grand affair!”
I had been recommended to call on Monsieur de Peyrehorade by my friend Monsieur de P., who told me he was a very learned antiquarian and extremely good-natured. He would be delighted to show me all the ruins for miles around. So I had been looking forward to visiting with him the district surrounding Ille, which I knew to be rich in monuments both of ancient times and the Middle Ages. This wedding, of which I now heard for the first time, would upset all my plans. I said to myself that I was going to be a killjoy; but I was expected, and as Monsieur de P. had written to say I was coming, I should have to present myself.
“I’ll bet you, Monsieur,” said my guide, when we were already in the plain—“I’ll bet you a cigar that I can guess why you’re going to Monsieur de Peyrehorade’s.”
“But that is not a difficult thing to guess,” I replied, offering him a cigar. “At this hour, after travelling six leagues on the Canigou hills, the main thing is to have supper.”
“Yes, but tomorrow? … I’ll bet that you have come to Ille to see the idol. I guessed that when I saw you drawing pictures of the Saints at Serrabona.”
“The idol! What idol?” The word had aroused my curiosity.
“What! Did nobody tell you at Perpignan that Monsieur de Peyrehorade had found an idol in the earth?”
“Do you mean a statue in terracotta, in clay?”
“No, I don’t. It’s made of copper, and there’s enough of it to make hundreds of coins. It weighs as much as a church bell. It was a good way down, at the foot of an olive tree, that we dug it up.”
“So you were present at the find?”
“Yes, sir. Monsieur de Peyrehorade told Jean Coll and me, a fortnight ago, to uproot an old olive tree which had been killed by the frost last year, for there was a very hard frost, you’ll remember. Well, then, while he was working at it with all his might, Jean Coll gave a blow with his pickaxe, and I heard a ting, just as if he had hit a bell. ‘What’s that?’ I said. We went on picking away, and a black hand appeared, which looked like the hand of a dead man coming out of the ground. I felt frightened; I went up to Monsieur and I said to him: ‘There’s dead folk, master, under the olive tree; you’ll have to send for the priest.’ ‘What dead folk?’ he asked. He came along, and he’d no sooner seen the hand than he cried out: ‘An antique statue! An antique statue!’ You might have thought he’d found buried treasure. And then he set to with a pickaxe and hands, as if his life depended on it, and did almost as much work as the two of us together.”
“And what did you find in the end?”
“A huge black woman, more than half naked, saving your presence, sir, all in copper, and Monsieur de Peyrehorade told us it was an idol of pagan times … you know, when Charlemagne was alive.”
&
nbsp; “I see what it is … a statue of the Virgin in bronze which belonged to a convent that has been destroyed.”
“The Blessed Virgin? Not on your life! … I’d have known straight away if it had been the Blessed Virgin. I tell you it’s an idol; you can see from her appearance. She looks straight at you with her great white eyes …. Anybody’d think she was trying to stare you out, because you daren’t look her in the eyes.”
“White eyes, were they? No doubt they are inlaid in the bronze; it might be a Roman statue.”
“Roman! That’s it! Monsieur de Peyrehorade said that it was Roman. Ah! I can see that you’re a learned man like him.”
“Is it whole and in good condition?”
“Oh, it’s all there, Monsieur. It’s much more beautiful and better finished than the painted plaster bust of Louis-Philippe in the town hall. But for all that, I don’t fancy the idol’s face. She looks wicked … and she is wicked, too.”
“Wicked! What harm has she done you?”
“None to me exactly; but you can judge for yourself. We had gone down on all fours to raise her up on end, and Monsieur de Peyrehorade, too, was tugging at the rope, although he’s no stronger than a chicken, the dear man! After a lot of trouble we got her upright. I was picking up a tile to prop her up, when—bang!—she fell slap on her back. ‘Look out!’ I yelled, but I wasn’t quick enough, for Jean Coll didn’t have time to pull his leg away.”
“And was he injured?”
“His poor leg was broken as clean as a whistle. By heavens, when I saw it I was furious. I wanted to break up the idol with my pickaxe, but Monsieur de Peyrehorade wouldn’t let me. He gave some money to Jean Coll, but all the same, he’s been in bed the whole fortnight since it happened, and the doctor says he’ll never walk with that leg again as well as with the other. It’s a crying shame; he was our best runner and, after Monsieur de Peyrehorade’s son, our best tennis player too. Monsieur Alphonse de Peyrehorade was terribly upset, for he always played against Coll. It was a treat to see them sending the balls back and forth. Biff! Biff! They never touched the ground.”