Dorga
8th June. – Christine was right once more. I have seen the Marchioness again. She was unrecognizable.
Three days is all it has taken for this complete transformation to take effect. Now she is a living person once more. In any case, she seems to have regained her appetite for life.
She goes out… or rather they take her out in an open, horse-drawn carriage... It would seem that she adores horses… She returns from her outings to the park with cheeks aglow... the look on her face is still sad and anxious, but at least blood flows through her veins once more… The mind is still sick, but the body has healed…
She goes out with her English lady in waiting. Sangor drives. Sing-Sing sits there behind him… She never receives visitors… Christine tells me that it is, in fact, she who does not want to see anyone… She refuses to go out into society… And society has not insisted… A rumour has begun to spread that the poor young woman has a weak brain… Her silences, her weird peculiarities and her ever-more distant, aloof air have, little-by-little, detached her from the social circle of the Marquis. In the first months following his return to France, the Marquis gave several parties in his mansion; but all these festivities, that for a moment resuscitated life on the Béthune quays, came to an abrupt end. And now they all pitied Georges-Marie-Vincent. Nevertheless, his friends congratulated him for his ability to rise above his domestic misfortunes.
Naturally, I related all of these details to Christine. She seemed resigned to the whole thing.
“The Coulteray bloodline is the strongest of them all!” she told me. “They have outlived most others..! A petty bourgeois would be crushed by his misfortunes. Sure, he takes mistresses; and he would like to have added me to his collection… but he has not succeeded. He’s over that now, or at least I hope he is. I am not, I cannot be, anything more than a friend to him and to the Marchioness... they need me as a go-between. There you have the secret of my situation in this house.”
In the meantime, the Marquis had entered, with a decanter and silver goblets in his hand. His eyes were gleaming.
“You simply must taste this,” he said, “this is what Saib Khan has prescribed for the Marchioness. She has tried it. She has declared it to be excellent! It is some cocktail, believe you me! And have you any idea what’s in it? It’s a mixture of horse blood, of haemoglobin, and other things that I cannot identify..! Have a taste of it with me, I say! There’s nothing nauseating about it… quite the contrary… it sits warmly in the stomach, like a vintage Armagnac! It would awaken the dead! And it gives you such an appetite!” We drank. It was, indeed, everything that the Marquis had said.
“With some of this, my little Christine, we’ll have her back on her feet in fifteen days!”
He turned towards me: “You were there when they came to take her to the doctor, were you not..? Christine told you about it, I presume?... You are a true friend… The poor girl! If only it were in our power to save her!... Bah! When the body is working, the head will be better in good time!”
He tapped his forehead and went away with his decanter and his goblets; he was delighted, radiant, glowing…
“It’s always the same,” Christine said to me, “every time he imagines that his wife has been saved! Then, in the meantime, he will go out this evening to meet his Dorga!”
“His Dorga..?”
“Yes, Dorga – she’s a famous Indian dancer!...”
“Decidedly, he ought to stay here in Paris – the man shouldn’t go all the way to India!”
“He brought her over at the same time as his wife…”
“You were telling me how much he adored the Marchioness!”
“Aren’t you the innocent one... a Coulteray is capable of loving his wife and having ten mistresses at the same time… and this one truly does him proud… Half of Paris chases after her...”
9th June. – I have seen Dorga… yes, even though I never go out in the evening more than ten times a year, I was curious enough to see the dance act of this beautiful Hindu goddess for myself… I went to the music hall. There she had, as they say in the jargon of theatrical reviews, ‘a brilliant audience.’
I had expected to see a half-naked little dancing girl, with a few bits of jewellery covering her flesh, a couple of discs over her breasts, a metal belt and heavy bracelets around her ankles; I had expected a few lewd rhythmic movements of the hips in the setting of some kind of pagoda scene, in the usual tedious, ‘generic’ style that was introduced to Europe after the last Great Exhibition. But what actually appeared was a magnificent, beautiful creature, with a pale amber complexion, wearing a stunning gown of the latest fashion.
My, my, the Marquis is certainly fond of contrasts! The Marchioness and Dorga, they’re like day and night: here a pale day, sinking into inevitable decline, its last rays fading out in an anaemic crepuscule in the northern sky; and there a sultry evening, burning, fabulous and flaming with all the fires of the Orient; but I noticed that the dazzling jewels that ornamented her were outshone by the light in her cruel, voluptuous eyes – eyes that outshone the sudden flame that lights an iron furnace.
The Orient adorned in a dress from the Rue de la Paix, the limbs of the goddess Kali in silk stockings; she danced a shimmy while an intense silence descended over those who watched.
After her last dance, when the room was once again able to breathe, a deafening round of applause attested to the satisfaction of the spectators, who wanted an encore: but the beautiful dancer had disappeared, quite scornfully, and did not return…
The lights came back on over the faces of the crowd, pale or flushed according to temperament, and I noticed the Marquis, scarlet-faced, coming out of a box with Saib Khan…
He condescended to recognize me:
“You saw her?” he called out to me… “You saw her, eh?... What a marvel she is!”
Then, to my complete stupefaction, he took me by the arm:
“Let’s go and congratulate her..!”
I allowed myself to be swept along. We were soon at her dressing room door, which was under siege, and was opened for no-one but us… There she stood, half-naked and surrounded by flowers.
The Marquis introduced me:
“Benedict Masson, a great poet!”
I did not protest… I would have been incapable of saying a word. I looked at her furtively, shamefaced, and with an indifferent expression… which is a posture that I often adopt around women in order to mask my timidity. But she just threw a scornful glance at me in her mirror and didn’t even turn around. Then she spoke few indifferent words of politeness. She must have thought me to be extremely badly dressed. She called for champagne, then she passed behind a screen; and I ran out of there, my head hot, my ears ringing.
I felt myself in the grip of a violent hatred for the Marquis… and for all these other rich men, who have only to debase and ruin themselves financially in order to pick up women like her.
But I... What could I ever have?... Only the image of Christine inside my head… that charming and delicate effigy!...
Oh, Lord God! I feel as though I ought to tattoo my skin like a native… like a “happy” man… with a heart pierced by an arrow and around it the words:
“I love Christine...” Perhaps if I could look at myself in the mirror, I might believe that it has happened!...