第 4 页

I knew all the domestic arrangements of El Nouzha. In the centre of the edifice is a vast circular hall, to which the daylight is admitted by a cupola of ground glass, supported by pillars of white marble. Lamps hanging between the pillars give out a mysterious light. Once arrived there, I listened. All was silent. I found Kondjé-Gul's chamber, and went close up to it. I listened again, with my ear to the door. An indistinct rustling which I heard, apprized me that she was not yet in bed. With key in hand, I still hesitated before opening. At last I made up my mind.

Picture to yourself a sweetly perfumed room, both rich and coquettish in its arrangements, lined with Indian silk hangings of gay colours, and illumined by the soft light of a small chandelier of three branches. In front of a large glass Kondjé-Gul was seated, her long hair reaching down to the floor. With her bare arms uplifted, and her head turned backwards, she held in her hand a golden comb. Seeing me, she uttered a little cry, got up with a bound, and blushing all the while, and fixing upon me her great frightened eyes, she rested motionless and almost in a tremble. Her agitation communicated itself to me.

"Did I frighten you—" I commenced, trying to speak with a firm voice; "and will you pardon me for coming in like this—"

She did not answer a word, but lowered her eyes, a smile glanced furtively over her lips, and then, with her hand on her bosom, she bowed to me.

"Kondjé-Gul! Dear Kondjé-Gul!" I exclaimed, touched to the depths of my soul by this act of submission.

And springing towards her, I took her in my arms to chase away her fears; I kissed her brow, which she offered to me, pressing her face against my bosom, with a lovely bashful look of alarm.

"You have come, then!" she whispered.

"Did you imagine I did not love you—" said I, as truly affected as she was.

At this question she raised her head with an inexpressible languor and smiled again, looking into my eyes, and so close that our lips met.

Louis, is it true that the ideal embraces the infinite, and that the human soul soars into regions so sublime that the blisses of this world below cannot satisfy it—… I did not want to quit the harem without having also seen Hadidjé, Zouhra, and Nazli. Poor little dears, no doubt they already fancied themselves disdained! I must dry up their tears.

You will understand by this time the complications in my uncle's will which have prevented me, these four months past, from finding a minute to write to you.

I will relate to you the incidents of this remarkable situation, of this quadruple passion by which I am possessed to such an extent that I am sincere in all my professions. You may tell me, if you like, from the commonplace standpoint of your own limited experiences, that it is all madness. I love, I adore, after the manner of a poet or a pagan—as you like, in fact—but what does it all amount to— My uncle, who was a Mussulman, leaves me his harem; what could I do—

If it should happen that your work leaves you a little leisure, don't come to Férouzat; you understand— That's what we sultans are like! The girls are dying to see Paris; very likely I shall turn up there one of these days.

I need hardly impress upon you, I suppose, the advisability of keeping this letter most carefully from the eyes of your wife.

CHAPTER II.

Madam, let me be very candid; I have a warm temperament, certainly—more so, perhaps, than an ordinary Provençal. I will confess to even more than this, if your grace so wills it, and I will not blush for it; but pray condescend to believe that I am also a respecter of conventional proprieties, and that I should feel most keenly the loss of your esteem in this regard. Now, from a few words of satirical wit, concealed like small serpents under the flowery condolences of your malicious letter, I concluded that this miserable fellow Louis, abandoning all considerations of delicacy, and at the risk of ruining my reputation, had played me a most abominable trick, by reading out to you all the nonsense which I wrote to him last week. You need not deny it! He confesses it to-day, unblushingly, in the budget of news which he sends me, adding that you "laughed over it." Good gracious! what can you have thought of me— After such a story, I certainly could never again look you in the face, but that I can clear myself by assuring you at once that all this tale was nothing but a mystification, invented as a return for some of his impertinent chaff regarding my uncle Barbassou's will. Louis fell into the trap like any booby. But for him to have drawn you with him, is enough to make me die of shame.

Madam, I prefer now to make my confession. I am not the hero of a romance of the Harem. I am a good young man, an advocate of morality and propriety, notwithstanding the fact that you have often honoured me with the title of "a regular original." Be so good as to believe, then, that the most I have been guilty of is a too artless simplicity of character. I did not suppose that Louis would show you this eccentric letter, for I had expressly enjoined him to keep it from you. My only crime therefore in all this matter has been that I forgot that a woman of your intelligence would read everything, when she had the mind to do so, and a husband like yours.

In fact, madam, I hardly know why I have taken the trouble to excuse myself with so much deliberation. I perceive that by such apologies I run the risk of aggravating my mistake. What did I write, after all, but a very commonplace specimen of those Arabian stories which girls such as you have read continually in the winter evenings, under the eyes of their delighted mothers— When I consider it, I begin to understand that your laughter, if you did laugh, must have been at the feebleness of my imagination—you compared it with the Palace of gold and the thousand wives of the Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid.—But please remember, once more, that I am a poor Provençal and not a Sultan.

"My tastes are those of a simple bachelor."

Observe moreover that, out of regard for probability, no less than from respect for local colouring, I was obliged to decide upon a somewhat simple harem, and to confine it within the strictly necessary limits. Like a school-boy, falling in love with the heroine he has put into his story, I found myself so charmed with my fancy, that in order to further enjoy my pleasures of illusion, I determined not to overstep the limits of a perfectly realisable adventure.

But since I abandoned myself to this folly, does it not seem to you, reconsidering the matter, that a great deal would have been lost if such a romance had never occurred to me— And above all if it had stopped short at the first page— Is it not astonishing that no author had thought of writing such a thing before— Would not this have been just the work for a moralist and a philosopher, worthy at once of a poet and of a scholar— This poor world of ours, madam, moves in a narrow circle of passions and sensations, so limited that it seems to me as if every soul rather more lofty than the average must continually feel itself imprisoned. What felicity it must be, by a single flight of the imagination, to escape from this prison locked by prejudice! To fly away into the regions of dreamland! Slave of our civilized conventions, what bliss to run away unfettered into the shady paths of the pagan world, peopled with its merry, enchanting nymphs! Or again to wander, like a happy child of Asiatic climes in gardens of sycamores, where young sultanas bathe and disport themselves in basins of porphyry. The Bois de Boulogne is a charming place, no doubt, madam; but you will admit that it is inferior to the Valley of Roses, and that the painted and bedizened young women you see there will bear no comparison with my houris.

What, then— Does my thirst after the ideal merit any censure— Do not you consider, you who read novels, that it would, on the contrary, be an instructive as well as a curious study to follow up the strange incidents which would necessarily result from such a very natural conjunction of oriental love transferred to the midst of our own world— What contrasts they would provoke, and what strange occurrences! Does not the absence of such a study leave a void in our illustrious literature—

But I divine upon your lips a word which frightens me—"Immoral! Immoral!" you say.

Madam, this word shows me that you are strangely mistaken about my pure intentions. You are a woman of considerable intelligence; let us understand each other like philosophers or moralists. Suppose my name to be Hassan. You would read without the least ruffle on your brow the very simple narrative of my pretended amours, and if they were hindered by any untoward obstacles, you would perhaps accord them a small tribute of tears, such as you have doubtless shed over the misfortunes of poor Namouna. The question of morality therefore, is in this case simply a question of latitude, and the impropriety of my situation would disappear at once if I inhabited the banks of the Bosphorus, or some palace at Bagdad.

Perhaps you take your stand upon the more elevated ground of "sentiment—" Well, this is precisely the pyschological point of view that I am about to discuss, madam. Yes, if it were only in order to inquire whether the human soul freed from all constraint, is capable of infinite expansion, like a liberated gas. To mix positive and materialist science with etherialised sensualism, such is my object. A simple passion, we all know what that is; but to adore four women at a time—while so many honest folk are well content to love one only—this seems to me a praiseworthy aspiration, fit to inspire the soul of a poet who prides himself upon his gallantry, no less than the brain of a philosopher in search of the vital elixir and the sources of sensation. Such a study would, assuredly, be arduous and severe, and would at any rate not be without glory, as you will admit, if it should happen to terminate logically in the triumph of the sublime Christian love over pagan or Mahometan polygamy.

Again, madam, in reprimanding me for my poor little harem, do you mean to preach against King David, or the seven hundred wives of Solomon— Without going back to the biblical legends of these venerable sovereigns, have you not read the classics— In what respect, may I ask, is the poem of Don Juan more moral than my subject— And did good old Lafontaine drop any of his artless probity, when he dipped his pen into the Boccaccian inkpot— The morality of a given book, madam, depends entirely upon the morality of its author, who respects himself first by respecting his public, and who will not lead the latter into bad company, not wishing to corrupt it with bad sentiments.

It gives me pleasure to draw the picture of those ideal amours which every warm-blooded youth of twenty has at one time or other cherished in his thoughts; to substitute virginal charms and graces for vice and harlotry—and after the manner of those charming heathen poets who have so often filled our dreams with their fancies, to mingle the anacreontic with the idyllic. Open any of your moral stories, madam, and I'll wager my harem you will find that the interest in them is always kept up by adultery, in thought or in deed, which has been erected into a social institution! The same Minotaur has served for us since the time of Menelaus. Adultery, adultery, always adultery! it is as inevitable as it is monotonous!

Do you prefer the novel of the day, on the lives and habits of courtesans— revelations of the boudoir, where all is impure, venal, and degrading— No, madam, I won't proceed any farther, out of respect alike for you and for my pen.

Possibly your taste inclines you to those moralist's studies of "Woman," in which the author warns his readers on the first page that "he does not speak for chaste ears." Madam, it is my boast that I have never written a line which a virtuous woman might not read… My book will certainly lose thereby in the circulation which it will obtain; but I shall console myself by the thought that if I sometimes cause you to smile, that smile will never be accompanied by a blush. Being the nephew of a Pasha, it struck me as a capital idea to lay the scene of a Turkish romance in Provence, and to found upon it a study in psychology. Every romance must be based upon love. Am I to be blamed, therefore, because oriental customs prescribe for lovers different modes of love— Confess, if you please, that my heroines are more poetic than the young women à la mode, into whose company I had as much right as any other author to conduct my hero if I had so chosen. I will excuse myself by saying, like the simpleton De Chamfort, "Is it my fault if I love the women I do love better than those I don't—"

P.S. Above all things, not a word to Louis about the mystification of which I am making him a victim.

You wretch! Here's a fine pickle you've got me into! What, after I confided to you the extraordinary adventures which I have passed through, relying upon your absolute secrecy and discretion, you go straight off and read my letter to your wife, at the risk of bringing upon me by your recklessness the most cruel gibes on the subject of my pasha-ship! Can't you see that if this story gets wind, Paris will be too hot a place for me— I shall become the butt of the Society journals and the halfpenny press, who will treat me as a most eccentric and romantic personage. Never more shall I be able to set foot in club, theatre, or private drawing-room, without being followed by the stares of the inquisitive and the quiet chaff of the ribald! I can picture myself already in the Bois, with all the loafers in my train pointing out "the man with the harem." Have you lost your senses, that you have betrayed me in this abominable fashion—

In all seriousness I now rely upon you to repair this blunder, by accepting, in the eyes of your wife, the part of one mystified, which I have made you assume. I wrote to her that not one word of this story is true, and that it is a romance I have been composing in order to occupy the leisure hours which I am forced to pass in the solitude of Férouzat, while the business connected with my inheritance is being wound up. In short, as I am positive that the first thing she will do will be to show you her letter, I expect you, if your friendship is good for anything, to pretend to believe it. Upon this condition only will I continue my confidences; and I suspend them until you have given me your word of honour to observe discretion.

Having received your promise, Louis, I now resume my narrative at the point where I broke off. Now you will see what you might have lost.

Just one word by way of preface.

I am relating to you, my dear friend, a story which is more especially remarkable for the multitude of unaccustomed sensations with which it abounds, and which I experience at every step—for my amourous adventures, as you will agree, bear no resemblance to the ready-made class of amours. It would really have been a great loss for the future of psychology, if the hero of such adventures had not happened to be, as I am, a philosopher capable of bringing to bear upon them powers of correct analysis.