Hanc ego de coelo ducentem sidera vidi;
Fluminis haec rapidi carmine vertit iter.
Haec cantu finditque solum, manesque sepulchris
Elicit, et tepido devorat ossa rogo.
Quum libet, haec tristi depellit nubila coelo:
Quum libet, aestivo convocat orbe nives.
Tibullus
(‘I myself have seen this woman draw the stars from the sky; she diverts the course of a fast-flowing river with her incantations; her voice makes the earth gape, it lures the spirits from the tombs, sends the bones tumbling from the dying pyre. At her behest, the sad clouds scatter; at her behest, snow falls from a summer’s sky’.
Catullus, Elegies, 1, 2.)
[Attributed by Nodier to Tibullus but actually by Catullus.]
For this, be sure, to-night thou shall have cramps,
Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up; urchins
Shall forth at vast of night, that they may work
All exercise on thee; thou shalt be pinch’d
As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging
Than bees that made them
(Tempest Act I scene II)
Who amongst you, O young maidens, is unacquainted with the sweet caprices of women, asked Polemon in delight. You have probably known the power of love, and how the heart of a pensive widow, led by her solitary memories to pace the sandy banks of the Peneus, sometimes allows herself to be surprised by some dark-skinned soldier whose eyes are sparkling with the fire of war, and whose breast shines with the éclat of a glorious scar. Tender and proud, he walks amidst women like a tame lion trying to drown his memories in the pleasures of an easy servitude. Thus does the soldier love to occupy a woman’s heart, when the clarion call of battle no longer summons him, when the hazards of combat no longer claim his vaulting ambition. He smiles under the glances of young girls, and seems to say to them: Love me!…
Since you are women of Thessaly, you know too that no woman’s beauty ever equalled that of the noble Méroé: since her widowhood, she has been trailing long white draperies, embroidered with silver: Méroé, the most beautiful of the beauties of Thessaly. She is as majestic as a goddess, yet there is some mortal fire in her eyes which emboldens thoughts of love. O how often have I breathed in the air that moves around her, trodden the dust her feet set flying, relished the happy shade which follows her!… How often have I thrown myself before her steps to steal a glance, a breath, an atom from the whirlwind which surrounds her every movement; how often (Thelaire, will you forgive me?) have I seized the delicious opportunity of feeling the merest fold of her garment moving against my tunic, or holding to eager lips one of the sequins which fell from her embroidered robes in the walks of the gardens of Larissa! When she passed by, you see, the clouds would blush as at the approach of a storm; my ears would hum, my eyes would darken in their staring sockets, my heart was overwhelmed beneath the weight of an intolerable joy. She was there! I would salute the shadows which had flowed over her, I would breath the air which had surrounded her; I asked the trees on the river edge if they had seen my Méroé; if she had been stretched out on some flowery bank, with what jealous love I plucked the flowers which her body had bowed — the carmine-streaked petals fringing the bent head of the anenome, the dazzling arrows which burst from the golden disk of the ox-eye daisy, the chaste gauze veil which winds around a young lily before it has opened to the sun; and if I dared throw myself upon this bed of cool verdure in a sacrilegious embrace, it was because she fired me with an ardour keener than that with which death weaves the night-time garments of a fevered man. Méroé could not have failed to notice me. I was everywhere. One day, at the approach of twilight, I caught her gaze: it proffered hope; she had been walking before me, and I saw her turn. The air was calm, her hair unruffled, yet she raised her hand as though to make good its disarray. Lucius, I followed her as far as the palace, the temple of the princesses of Thessaly, and night surprised us, a night of joys and terrors!… O that it might have been my last.
I do not know if you have ever borne on your outstretched arm the weight of the body of a sleeping mistress who has abandoned herself to repose, unaware of your torments (a burden borne with resignation tinged with impatience, and with tenderness); if you have tried to struggle against the frisson which rises gradually in your blood, against the numbness which enchains your subject muscles; to parry death, which now threatens to engulf your very soul. It is thus, Lucius, that a painful tremor ran rapidly throughout my sinews, setting them unexpectedly aquiver, like the sharp spikes of the plectrum which makes all the strings of the lyre cry out in discord under the fingers of a skilled musician. My flesh seethed like a dry membrane brought near to the fire. My heaving breast was nigh to bursting the iron bonds which enveloped it, when Méroé, suddenly seated at my side, fixed me with a piercing look, stretched out her hand upon my heart to ascertain that its movement was suspended, leaving it to rest there, heavy and cold, and then fled from me with the speed of an arrow which the archer’s string lets fly with a whirring sound. She sped across the marble floor, reciting the songs of the shepherdesses of Syracuse which beguile the moon in its nacreous silvery clouds, paced through the depths of the vast hall, crying out from time to time in bursts of chilling gaiety, to shadowy friends as yet unknown to me.
While I watched, full of terror, and saw a countless throng of vapours, distinct from one another, yet mere substanceless forms, passing along the walls, hastening beneath the porticoes, swaying under the vaulting; uttering sounds as faint as that of the stillest pool on a silent night, with a shifting of colour borrowed from the objects behind their floating, transparent forms…suddenly a blue-tinged flickering flame burst forth from the tripods, and Méroé, mistress of the scene, flew from one to another murmuring confusedly: ‘Here be flowering verbena… there, three sprigs of sage gathered at midnight in the cemetery of those who perished by the sword… here, the veil of the beloved beneath which her lover hid his pallor and his desolation after having slit the throat of her sleeping husband in order to enjoy her favours… and here, the tears of a tigress overcome by hunger, inconsolable at having devoured one of her little ones!’
Her shattered features expressed such suffering and horror that I almost felt pity for her. Alarmed at seeing her spells thwarted by some unforeseen obstacle, she leapt with rage and disappeared, to return armed with two long wands, linked at their extremities by a flexible tie composed of thirteen hairs plucked from the neck of a superb white mare by the very thief who had killed his master; on this she set bounding the ebony rhombus, with its empty, sonorous globes: wildly it hummed and whirred in the air, then, with a muffled sound, slowed down and fell. The flames of the tripods strained like serpents’ tongues, the shades were satisfied. ‘Come, come,’ cried Méroé, ’the demons of the night must be appeased, the dead must rejoice. Bring me flowering verbena, sage picked at midnight, four-leaved clovers; bring an abundance of pretty bouquets to Saga and the demons of the night.’ Then she cast a distracted eye upon the gold asp, whose coils were encircling her naked arm; upon her precious bracelet, the work of the most skilled artist of Thessaly, who had skimped on neither choice of metals nor on the perfection of the craftsmanship, encrusted as it was with delicate scales of silver, nor was there one whose pallor was not heightened by the glow of a ruby or the lovely transparency of a sapphire bluer than the sky. She removes it, she ponders, she dreams, she summons the serpent, murmuring secret words; and the serpent, coming to life, uncoils and snakes off with a hiss of joy like a freed slave. And the rhombus turns again; it turns, rumbling, like receding thunder groaning in clouds borne off by the wind, in an abating storm.
Meanwhile, the vault opens up, the expanses of the sky are revealed, the stars come down, the clouds sink lower and bathe the threshold in a court of shadow. The moon, spattered with blood, resembles the breast-plate upon which the body of a young Spartan, his throat slit by the enemy, has just been brought in. I feel its livid disk weighing upon me, clouded yet further by the smoke from the extinguished tripods, Méroé continues her headlong course, striking the countless columns of the palace, from which long trails of light leap forth; each column divides under Méroé’s fingers to reveal an immense colonnade peopled with phantoms, and each phantom strikes, as she does, a column which reveals new colonnades; nor is there any column which is not witness to the sacrifice of a new-born babe snatched from its mother’s cradling arms. Pity! I cried, pity for the hapless mother who, for her child, would challenge death itself. But this stifled prayer reached my lips with no more strength than the breath of a dying man saying: Adieu! It died away in purlings on my stammering mouth. It faded like the call of a drowning man, in vain committing his last, desperate cry to the voiceless waters. The unresponsive element muffles his voice; it sheathes him, grim and cold; it devours his plaining; never will it reach the shore.
While I was struggling against the terror which had seized me, and trying to pluck from my breast some curse that might arouse the vengeance of the gods in heaven: O wretched one, cried Méroé, may you be punished for ever for your insolent curiosity! Ah! You dare to violate the enchantments of sleep… You speak, you cry out and you see… Well! You shall speak no more but to lament, you shall cry out no more but to implore the hollow pity of the absent, you shall see no more but scenes of horror which will chill your soul!’ Thus expressing herself, in a voice more searing and high-pitched than that of a wounded hyena still threatening its hunters, she took from her finger the iridescent turquoise which sparkled with lights as varied as the colours of the rainbow, or as the wave which rears up with the rising tide, reflecting, as it furls upon itself, the mingled hues of the rising sun. She presses the hidden spring, to reveal a golden casket containing a colourless and formless monster, which thrashes and howls and leaps and falls back crouching on the enchantress’ breast. ‘There you are, my dear Smarra,’ she says, ‘sole darling of my amorous thoughts, you whom the hatred of the heavens has chosen amongst all their treasures to wreak despair among the sons of men. I order you to go now, fond, beguiling or terrible spectre, go and torment the victim I have delivered up to you; plague him with tortures as cruel and implacable as my own wrath. Go and sate yourself upon the anguish of his beating heart, count the convulsive poundings of his quickening pulse at it speeds up or grows slow… contemplate his painful death throes and suspend them merely in order to begin again… This is the price, oh faithful slave of love, to be extracted at the gate of dreams before you sink once more upon the scented pillow of your mistress, and embrace the queen of nightly terrors in your loving arms…’. She speaks, and the monster leaps from her burning hand like the rounded quoit of the discobolus; he spins in the air with the speed of those fireworks they launch on ships, spreading his weirdly scalloped wings, rises, falls, swells, diminishes and, like some deformed and gleeful dwarf, his fingers armed with nails of a metal finer than steel, which penetrate the flesh without rending it, and suck the blood from it like the insidiously pumping leech, he clamps himself upon my heart, swells, lifts his great head and laughs. In vain my gaze, frozen with fear, spans the space it can encompass for the sight of some consoling object: the thousand demons of the night escort the fearful demon of the turquoise. Stunted, wild-eyed women; purple-red snakes whose mouths spit flame; lizards poking human faces above the lake of mud and blood; heads newly-severed from their trunks by the soldier’s war-axe, but which look at me with living eyes, hopping on reptiles’ feet…
Since that baneful night, O Lucius, there are no more untroubled nights for me. The scented couches of young girls, which harbour but voluptuous dreams; the fickle tent of the traveller, put up each evening under new shade; the very sanctuaries of the temples are havens powerless against the demons of the night. Barely have my poor eyelids closed, weary of battling against abhorrèd sleep, than all the monsters are there, as at the moment I saw them bursting, with Smarra, from Méroé’s magic ring. They run a circle round me, deafen me with their cries, affright me with their pleasures and sully my quivering lips with their harpy caresses. Méroé leads them and hovers above them, shaking her long hair, which gives off sparks of livid blue. Even yesterday… she was vaster than I had seen her before… her forms and features were the same, but beneath their seductive appearance I discerned, to my alarm, as though through some light gauze, the leaden hue of the sorceress and her sulphur-coloured limbs; her eyes, staring and hollow, were brimming with blood, tears of blood furrowed her gaunt cheeks, and her hand, moving through space, left printed on the very air the trace of a bloody hand… Come, she said to me, almost brushing me with a finger which would have destroyed me had it touched me, come and visit the empire that I give my husband, for I want you to know every domain of terror and despair… — And thus speaking, she flew before me, her feet barely off the ground, darting and swooping over the earth, like the flame that dances above a dying torch. How repugnant to all senses was the path we were speeding along. How impatient the sorceress herself appeared to reach its end. Imagine to yourself the ghostly charnel-house in whose confines they pile the remains of all the innocent victims of their sacrifices; among even the most butchered of their mutilated remains, there is not a shred which has not retained a voice to groan and weep! Imagine shifting, living masonry, pressing upon your step from either side, gradually nudging your limbs like the confines of a chill and cramping prison… Your troubled breast strains to breath in something of the air of life amidst the dust of the ruins, the smoke of the torches, the damp of the catacombs, the poisonous exhalations of the dead… and all the demons of the night, wailing, hissing, howling or jibbering in your appallèd ear: You shall breathe no more!
As I walked, an insect a thousand times smaller than that which attacks the delicate tissue of the leaves of the rose with its paltry tooth, a deformed atom which takes a thousand years to move one step on the universal sphere of the heavens whose matter is a thousand times harder than the diamond… it too was walking; and the stubborn trace of its lazy feet had riven this imperishable globe down to its very axis.
After having thus crossed a distance for which the language of man has no term of comparison, so rapid was our course, I saw streaks of pale brightness burst from a barred opening as near as the remotest star. Full of hope, Méroé surged forward, I followed her, dragged by an unseen power; indeed the way back, blotted out like nothingness, infinite as eternity, had just closed in behind me in a way impenetrable to man’s ingenuity and patience. Between Larissa and ourselves there already yawned all the debris of the countless worlds which preceded our own in creation since the dawn of time, and most of which exceed it in immensity as the prodigious size of our own world exceeds that of the invisible nest of the gnat. The sepulchral gate which received us, nay sucked us in, as we left this abyss, opened on to a boundless, barren expanse. In one remote corner of the heavens one could just make out the vague outline of a steadfast, obscure star, stiller than the air, darker than the shadows which reign in this realm of desolation. This was the corpse of the oldest of suns, couched on the cloudy limits of the firmament, like a submerged boat sunk on a lake swollen by the melting of the snows. But the pale glimmer which now met my gaze did not come from this relic. It seemed to have no source and was just an especial hue of the night, or perhaps the result of the burning up of some remote world whose ashes were still smouldering. Then — it seemed barely possible — all the sorceresses of Thessaly appeared, escorted by the dwarves of the earth who labour in their mines, with their coppery faces and hair as blue as silver when it is in the furnace; by the long-limbed salamanders, with their oar-like tails and untold colours, which dart unharmed into the flames, like black lizards, through a fiery dusk; by frail-bodied Aspioles, with their deformed yet laughing heads, teetering on the bones of their fragile, hollow legs, like barren haulm strewn by the wind; by Achrones, which have neither limbs, nor voice, nor face, nor age, and who leap, weeping, over the moaning earth like goat-skins swollen with air; by the Psylles, snake-charmers who dance in circles, avid for ever more cruel poisons, and who utter sharp hisses to awaken the serpents in their hidden lair, in their sinuous hiding-places; even by the Morphoses which you so loved, as beautiful as Psyche, which play like the Graces, give concerts like the muses, and whose seductive gaze, sharper and more venomous than the viper’s tooth, will set your blood aflame and send the marrow seething in your calcined bones. You would have seen them, wrapped in their purple shrouds, trailing clouds brighter than the East, more scented than the perfumes of Arabia, lovelier than the first sigh of a virgin melted by love, their intoxicating vapour beguiling the soul merely in order to extinguish it. Sometimes their eyes send out a moist flame which entrances and devours; sometimes they bow their heads with a grace all their own, demanding your total trust with a caressing smile, the smile of a perfidious and living mask which conceals the delights of crime and the ugliness of death. What can I say? Drawn onwards by the whirlwind of spirits which floated like a cloud; like the blood-red smoke which settles above a burning city, like the liquid lava which spreads to form a network of innumerable molten, intertwining streamlets over an ash-strewn countryside… I arrived at last… All the tombs stood open… all the dead had been disinterred… all the ghouls were there — pale, impatient, hungry; they were straining at the planks of their coffins, rending their sacred garments, the final garments of the corpse; sharing hideous remains with an even more hideous relish and, with an iron hand — for I was, alas, as helpless a captive as a babe in the cradle — they forced me — O terror — to partake with them of their execrable banquet!…’
As he finished these words, Polemon raised himself on his bed and, trembling, desperate, hair on end, his gaze fixed and awestruck, he called out to us in a voice that was not of this world. But the tunes of Myrthé’s harp were already wafting across the air; the demons were quietened, the silence was as untroubled as the thoughts of the innocent man as he falls asleep on the eve of his judgement. Polemon was sleeping peacefully to the sweet sounds of Myrthé’s harp.