The Wild Ass's Skin Read online

  ‘He was no gambler,’ said the banker, ‘or he would have divided his money into three lots to give himself more of a chance.’

  The young man went out without asking for his hat back; but the old watchdog, having noted the battered state of this item, gave it back anyway without comment; mechanically, the gambler handed him the chit, and went down the stairs whistling Di Tanti Palpiti* so feebly that he himself could scarcely hear that lovely tune.

  * * *

  He soon found himself walking through the arcades of the Palais Royal, and as far as the Rue Saint Honoré; he took the street that led to the Tuileries and crossed the gardens with indecisive steps. He walked as if in the middle of a desert, jostled by men he didn’t see, hearing but one single voice through the noise of people, the voice of death; he was in fact lost in a bemused meditation similar to the one that pervades the minds of criminals being conveyed in the tumbril from the Palais de Justice to the Place de Grève, towards that scaffold, red with all the blood spilled there since 1793.

  There is something noble as well as terrible about suicide. The downfall of many men is not dangerous, for they fall like children, too near the ground to do themselves harm. But when a great man breaks, he has soared up to the heavens, espied some inaccessible paradise, and then fallen from a great height. The forces that make him seek peace from the barrel of a gun cannot be placated. How many young talents confined to an attic room wither and perish for lack of a friend, a consoling wife, alone in the midst of a million fellow humans, while throngs of people weary of gold are bored with their possessions.

  Seen like this, suicide assumes gigantic proportions. Between self-inflicted death and the fertile hope that first summoned a young man to Paris, God alone understands the chaos of ideas, the abandoned poems, the despair or stifled cries for help, the vain attempts, the masterpieces begun but not finished. Every suicide is a sublime poem of melancholy. Where can you find in the great ocean of literature, a book still afloat which can compete in genius with a newspaper item like this one:

  Yesterday at four o’clock a young woman threw herself into the Seine from the parapet of the Pont des Arts.

  Everything pales before this laconic Parisian notice: dramas, novels, even the old frontispiece The Lamentations of the Glorious King of Kaernavon Imprisoned by his Children; the last fragment of a forgotten book, which made Sterne* weep simply to read it, though he himself abandoned wife and children.

  The stranger was assailed by a thousand such thoughts, which passed through his mind like so many shreds of torn flags waving in the midst of battle. Setting down the burden of his intelligence and memories to pause next to some flowers, their heads gently swaying in the breeze amongst the clumps of greenery, he was instantly seized with a spasm of an insistent life force that rebelled against the idea of suicide weighing upon him, and he lifted his eyes to heaven. But there the grey clouds, the melancholic gusts of wind, the oppressive atmosphere, again counselled him to die. As he made his way to the Pont Royal he was thinking about the final fantasies of those who had gone before. He smiled as he remembered that Lord Castlereagh had satisfied the most humble of a man’s needs before cutting his throat, and the academician Auger* had gone to fetch his snuffbox to take a pinch as he went to his death. He was pondering these eccentricities and wondering about his own reactions when, as he squeezed against the parapet of the bridge to let a porter from les Halles* past, the man brushed against him and left a white mark on his sleeve and to his surprise he found himself carefully shaking off the dust. Arriving at the highest arch of the bridge, he stared gloomily at the water.

  ‘Bad weather for throwing yourself in,’ a ragged old woman suggested, with a laugh. ‘The Seine’s that cold and dirty!’

  His answering smile expressed an innocence which bore witness to the foolhardiness of his courage; but he shuddered suddenly when he caught sight of the hut in the distance at the Tuileries landing-stage, with a sign on top where the words were traced in letters a foot high: FIRST AID FOR THE DROWNING. M. Dacheux* appeared to him, armed with philanthropy, wielding his virtuous oars and smashing the skulls of the half-drowned who have the bad luck to rise again to the surface; he could see him summoning up the curious, sending for a doctor, getting the fumigations ready; he could read the gloomy death-notices written by journalists enjoying themselves among smiling dancers; he could hear the crowns being counted out for him to the boatmen by the prefect of the Seine. Dead, he was worth fifty francs, but alive, he was only a man of talent without any backers, without any friends, without any patrons, without anyone to bang his drum for him, a real social nonentity, useless to society, which did not care about him in the least. But to die in the middle of the day seemed ignoble to him, so he resolved to die during the night in order to leave an unidentifiable corpse to this society unaware of the greatness of his life. So he went on his way in the direction of the Quai Voltaire, walking indolently like someone who wants to kill time.

  He went down the steps at the end of the footpath over the bridge and at the corner of the quay his attention was caught by the second-hand books laid out along the parapet. He almost bargained for one or two. He started smiling, put his hands philosophically back into his pockets, and went on his way with an air of insouciance shot through with a cold contempt, when to his surprise he heard some coins rattling around in a very odd fashion at the bottom of his pocket. A hopeful smile lit up his countenance, spread from his lips to his entire face, and caused his eyes and sombre cheeks to shine with delight. This spark of happiness was like flames running through the last shreds of paper already consumed by fire. But his face, like the blackened cinders, darkened again when, after pulling his hand rapidly from his trouser pocket, the stranger perceived three large sous.

  ‘Ah, kind sir, la carita, la carita, catarina! A penny for some bread!’

  A young chimney-sweep with a black, puffy face, a skin swarthy with soot, and in tattered clothes, held out his hand to this man for his few remaining coppers.

  Two steps away from the little Savoyard* a wretched, disreputable old man, sick and ailing, and vilely dressed in a coat cut from curtain material, with holes for his head and arms, said to him in a low, gruff voice:

  ‘Monsieur, give me whatever you like, I’ll pray for you …’

  But when the younger man looked at him, the old man fell silent and asked nothing more, perhaps recognizing in that deathly face a misery harsher than his own.

  ‘La carita, la carita!’

  The stranger threw his change to the lad and to the old pauper as he stepped off the pavement and made his way towards the houses, unable to bear the heart-rending sight of the Seine any longer.

  ‘We’ll pray God lets you live long,’ said the two beggars to him.

  Arriving at the display in the window of an engraver’s shop this man, almost at death’s door, met a young woman who was alighting from a very smart carriage and pair. He contemplated this charming woman with delight; her pale face was harmoniously framed in an elegant satin hat. He was attracted by her slim figure, her graceful movements. Her dress, which she raised slightly as she stepped down, revealed a leg whose fine contours were outlined by a white, well-drawn-up stocking. The young woman entered the shop and discussed the price of some albums, collections of lithographs. They cost her several gold coins, which shone and clinked on the counter.

  The young man, apparently busy looking at engravings displayed in the glass case just outside the shop, exchanged with the unknown beauty the most rapid and searching glance a man can give, and had in return one of those careless, random looks a woman casts at a passer-by. It was, on his part, a farewell to love, to womankind! But this final, powerful, and questioning gaze was not understood, did not stir the heart of that frivolous woman, did not cause her to blush, or lower her eyes. What did it mean to her? Just one more admiring glance, one more awoken desire which that evening would make her say reassuringly to herself: ‘I was looking my best today.’

  Th
e young man went quickly over to another case, and did not turn his head when the unknown woman climbed back into her carriage. The horses trotted off, and this last image of luxury and elegance faded away into the distance, just as his own life would fade. He walked gloomily along outside the shops, examining the samples of merchandise without much interest. When he came to the end of the shops, he turned his attention to the Louvre, the Institute, the towers of Notre Dame and the Palais, the Pont des Arts. These monuments seemed to acquire a dismal aspect as they reflected the sky, grey with rare gleams of light, making Paris seem menacing, like a pretty woman subject to inexplicable whims, sometimes ugly, sometimes beautiful. Thus nature herself conspired to plunge the dying man into an ecstasy of sorrow. A prey to the malevolent force whose liquefying action finds a vehicle in the juices circulating in our veins, he felt his body little by little suffused by the phenomena of fluidity. This agonizing torment created in him a sensation of being tossed by the waves, so that buildings, men, and everything swayed in a mist before his eyes. Wanting release from the strange feelings in his head caused by these physical reactions, he made his way towards a curiosity shop with the intention of nourishing his senses, or of passing the time till night by bargaining over objets d’art. It was, if you will, a bid for courage, a request for a cheering draught, such as is made by criminals whose strength fails them as they go to the scaffold; but the awareness of his impending death temporarily restored to the young man the confidence of a duchess who has two lovers, and it was with an air of insouciance that he entered the old curiosity shop, allowing himself a fixed smile like that of a drunkard. For was he not drunk with life, or rather death? He sank once more into a state of dizziness and continued to see things in bizarre colours, or rather as if they were moving slightly, the cause no doubt being an irregular circulation of his blood, which at times boiled like rapids, and was, at others, still and insipid, like warm water.

  He asked simply to visit the showrooms and see if there were things hidden away inside that might take his fancy. A young lad with a fresh, round face, red hair, and a hat made of otter-skin first gave charge of the shop to an old peasant woman, a kind of female Caliban who was busy cleaning a stove, the marvellous result of the genius of Bernard de Palissy;* then the lad remarked casually to the stranger:

  ‘We only have rather ordinary objects down here, Monsieur; but if you would care to go up to the first floor, I could show you some very fine mummies from Cairo, several inlaid pieces of pottery, some carved ebonies, genuine Renaissance, recently arrived, which are exquisite.’

  In the stranger’s terrible situation this babble, this silly sales talk, seemed like the petty mocking remarks with which the narrow-minded man assassinates a man of genius. Bearing this cross to the very end, he seemed to be listening to his guide, and answered him with gestures or monosyllables; but little by little he was able to assert his right to keep silent and could give his mind to his last meditations, which were truly dreadful. He was a poet and his soul had by chance wandered into an immense pasture: he was to see in advance the bones of a score of vanished worlds.

  At first glance the rooms presented a chaotic picture, in which all works, human and divine, were jumbled together. Crocodiles, monkeys, stuffed boa-constrictors kept company with stained-glass windows, and seemed to be trying to take a bite from the carved busts, running after the lacquerware, climbing up the lamps. A Sèvres vase, on which Madame Jacotot had painted Napoleon, was next to a sphinx dedicated to Sesostris.* The origins of the world and the events of yesterday were grotesquely jolly bedfellows. A spit had been placed upon a monstrance, a Republican sword on a medieval hackbutt. Madame du Barry painted in pastels by la Tour,* with a star on her head, naked and in a cloud, seemed to be lasciviously contemplating an Indian hookah, trying to work out the purpose of the smoke spirals which came twisting towards her.

  The instruments of death, swords, curious pistols, weapons with hidden springs, lay around higgledy-piggledy with the instruments of life: porcelain soup tureens, plates from Saxony, diaphanous cups from China, ancient salt-cellars, sweet-dishes from feudal times. An ivory ship was in full sail on the back of a motionless tortoise. An air-pump poked out the eye of the emperor Augustus, who remained impassive and majestic. Several portraits of French aldermen, Dutch burgomasters, as unfeeling then as when they were alive, towered above this chaos of antiquities, casting a pale, disapproving glance at them.

  All the countries on earth seemed to have provided some remnants of their sciences, a sample of their art. It was a kind of philosophical midden in which nothing was missing, not the reed pipe of the savage, nor the green and gold slippers of the seraglio, the yatagan* of the Moor, nor the idol of the Tartars. There was even a soldier’s tobacco pouch, a priest’s ciborium, the plumes of a throne. And these monstrous tableaux were subjected to a thousand accidents of light by the odd multitude of reflections caused by the mixture of tones, the abrupt contrasts of light and shade. The ear believed it could hear smothered cries, the mind imagined it saw unfinished dramas, the eyes perceived half-hidden glimmers of light. And finally a persistent dust had settled in a light veil on all these objects, whose multiple angles and numerous twists and turns produced the most picturesque effects.

  At first the stranger compared these three rooms stuffed with civilization, cults, divinities, masterpieces, kingdoms, the products of debauchery, reason, and madness, to a mirror of many facets, each one representing a different world. After this hazy impression he tried to choose what he might enjoy; but by dint of looking, thinking, dreaming, he fell under the power of a fever which was perhaps caused by the hunger raging in his belly. The sight of so many national or individual lives, as evidenced by these proofs of humanity which survived them, completed the numbing of the young man’s senses; the desire which had propelled him into the shop had been fulfilled: leaving his real life behind, he rose by degrees into an ideal world, arrived in the enchanted palaces of Ecstasy where the universe appeared to him in strips and tongues of fire, as the future had once passed in flames before the eyes of St John on Patmos.*

  A multitude of sorrowing, gracious, or terrible faces, dark or light, distant or near, rose up in masses, in myriads, in generations. Egypt, rigid and mysterious, appeared out of its sands, represented by a mummy wrapped in black bandages; then came the Pharaohs burying entire nations in order to build a tomb; and Moses and the Hebrews, and the wilderness. A whole world, ancient and solemn, passed before his eyes. Smooth and fresh, a shining white marble statue on a wreathed column spoke to him of the voluptuous myths of Greece and Ionia. Oh, who would not have smiled, as he did, to see that young black figure of a girl dancing on a red background on the fine clay of an Etruscan vase before the god Priapus* she was welcoming so joyously? Facing her, a Latin queen lovingly caressed her chimera!* The caprices of the whole of Imperial Rome were there: baths, couches, an indolent Julia at her toilette, lost in thought, awaiting her Tibullus.* Armed with the power of Arabian talismans, the head of Cicero evoked memories of the freedom of Rome and unfolded for him the pages of Livy. The young man contemplated the Senatus Populusque Romanus:* the consul, the lictors, the crimson-edged togas, the fights in the Forum, the angry people filing slowly before him like the insubstantial figures of a dream.

  And Christian Rome dominated these images. A painting uncovered the heavens; he could see the Virgin Mary enveloped in a cloud of gold, in the bosom of the angels, eclipsing the glory of the sun, a newborn Eve smiling gently as she listened to the woes of unhappy creatures. As he touched a mosaic made out of the different lavas of Vesuvius and Etna his spirit took flight into warm, wild Italy: he was present at the orgies of the Borgias, he ran in the Abruzzi, he aspired to Italian amours, falling in love with lily-white faces and black almond eyes.

  Catching sight of a medieval dagger whose hilt was worked like lace, and whose patches of rust resembled blood, he imagined, with a shudder, nocturnal adventures interrupted by a husband’s icy blade. India and her
religions lived again in an idol with a pointed headdress, with raised diamond shapes, decorated with little bells, dressed in gold and silk. Near this grotesque a rush mat, as pretty as the bayadera*who had entwined herself in it, still gave off its scent of sandalwood. A cross-eyed monstrosity from China, with deformed mouth and distorted limbs, struck you with the inventiveness of a nation that, weary of beauty that is ever the same, takes inexpressible pleasure in the richness of the ugly.

  A salt-cellar from the studio of Benvenuto Cellini* took him back to the bosom of the Renaissance, to a time when arts and licence flourished, when kings amused themselves torturing people, when prelates abed in the arms of their courtesans decreed chastity for simple priests. He saw the conquests of Alexander on a cameo, the massacres of Pizarro* in an arquebus with a safety-fuse, the wars of religion, frenzied, fiery, cruel, round the bottom of a helmet. Smiling figures from the age of chivalry, well prepared for battle, sprang from a polished Milanese suit of armour expertly damascened, and under their visor you could still see the shining eyes of a paladin.

  To him this sea of furniture, inventions, fashions, works of art, and wreckage made up an endless poem. Forms, colours, ideas, everything came alive once more in that place. But he could perceive nothing whole in it. The poet was to finish the drawing sketched out by the great painter who had prepared this enormous palette and in which the countless accidents of human life had been scattered in such disdainful profusion. After possessing the whole world, contemplating lands, ages, reigns, the young man reverted to the life of the individual. He took on his own person again, concentrating on details, and rejecting the life of nations as too overwhelming for one man.

  A waxen child was asleep, saved from Ruysch’s cabinet,* and this ravishing creature reminded him of the happiness of his early childhood. At the glorious sight of the virginal sari of some girl from Tahiti, his burning imagination conjured up the simple life of nature, the chaste nakedness of true modesty, the lazy delights so natural to man, a quiet, dreamy place on the banks of a cool stream, under a banyan tree giving off a heady manna, all without cultivation. But then suddenly he was a corsair swathed in the terrifying lines of poetry of Lara,* vividly inspired by a thousand pearl-coloured shells, exultant at the sight of madrepores* smelling of wrack and weed and Atlantic storms.