Ancient Manners; Also Known As Aphrodite

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 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.

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; Cæsar was the _moechus 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.

[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 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.

[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 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?"

[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 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."

[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 æsthetic 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 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:

[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 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:

[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 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.

[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 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.

[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: Ô.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 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. 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 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 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 exposée" 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 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 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 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.

[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 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 fète. 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.

[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 fète. We shall be seven, with you. Don't fail to come."

"A fète? 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 constit