A Divorce Case
Mme. Chassel’s counsel began his speech: My Lord, gentlemen of the jury, the case which I am called on to defend before you would more suitably be treated by medicine than by justice and constitutes much more a pathological case than an ordinary case of law. At first sight the facts seem simple.
A young man, of considerable wealth, of a high-minded and ardent nature, a generous heart, falls in love with a supremely beautiful young girl, more than beautiful, adorable, as gracious, as charming, as good, and as tender as she is pretty, and he marries her.
For some time, he conducts himself towards her as a solicitous and affectionate husband; then he neglects her, bullies her, seems to feel for her an insurmountable aversion, an unconquerable dislike. One day even, he strikes her, not only without any right, but even without any excuse.
I will not labour to represent to you, gentlemen, his strange behaviour, incomprehensible to everyone. I will not paint for you the unspeakable life of these two creatures and the frightful grief of this young woman.
To convince you I have only to read to you some fragments from a diary written each day by this poor man, this poor madman. For it is with a madman that we have to do, gentlemen, and the case is all the more curious, all the more interesting in that it recalls in many particulars the mania of the unfortunate prince who died recently, the fantastic king who reigned platonically in Bavaria. I will recall that case: the madness of a romantic.
You will remember all the tales told of that strange prince. He had built in the heart of the most magnificent scenery in his kingdom veritable fairy castles. Even the reality of the beauty of things and places were not enough for him, he imagined and created in these fantastic dwellings artificial horizons produced by means of theatrical devices, changes of scene, painted forests, fabled demesnes where the leaves of the trees were of precious stones. He had Alps and glaciers, steppes, sandy deserts scorched by the sun; and at night, under the rays of the real moon, lakes illuminated below by fantastic electric lights. On these lakes swans floated and small boats glided, while an orchestra composed of the finest musicians in the world, intoxicated the royal madman’s senses with romance.
This man was chaste, this man was a virgin. He had never loved anything save a dream, his dream, his divine dream.
One evening he carried off in his boat a young woman, a great artiste, and begged her to sing. She sang, herself intoxicated by the beauty of the courtyards, by the warm, sweet air, by the fragrance of flowers and by the ecstasy of this young handsome prince.
She sang, as women sing whom love has touched, then, distraught, trembling wildly, she fell on the king’s heart and sought his lips.
But he threw her in the lake, and taking up his oars, gained the shore, without troubling whether she were rescued or not.
Gentlemen of the jury, we have before us a case in all respects similar. I will do no more than read to you now some passages from the diary which we discovered in the drawer of a bureau.
How dull and ugly everything is, always the same, always hideous! How I dream of a lovelier, nobler, more changeful world. How wretched would be the imagination of their God, if their God existed or if he had not created other things as well.
Always woods, little woods, rivers that are like all other rivers, plains like all other plains, all things are alike and monotonous. And man! … Man? … What a horrible animal, wicked, proud and disgusting!
One should love, love madly, without seeing the object of one’s love. For to see is to understand, and to understand is to despise. One should love, intoxicating oneself with the beloved as one gets drunk on wine, in such a way as to lose consciousness of what one is drinking. And drink, drink, drink, without drawing breath, day and night.
I have found her, I think. She has in all her person something ideal that does not seem of this world and lends wings to my dream. Oh, how far otherwise than in reality do people seem to me in my dreams. She is fair, very fair, with hair full of inexpressible delicate shades. Her eyes are blue. Blue eyes are the only ones that ravish my soul. The whole being of a woman, the woman who exists in the depths of my heart, shows itself to me in the eye, only in the eye.
Oh, a mystery! What mystery? The eye? … The whole universe lies therein, because it sees it, because it reflects it. It contains the universe, things and beings, forests and oceans, men and beasts, sunsets, stars, the arts, all, all, it sees, plucks, and bears everything away; and it holds still more, it holds the soul, it holds the thinking man, the man who loves, who laughs, who suffers. Oh, look into the blue eyes of women; they are deep as the sea, changing as the sky, so sweet, so sweet, sweet as gentle winds, sweet as music, sweet as kisses, transparent, so clear that one sees behind, one sees the soul, the blue soul that colours them, that animates them, that makes them divine.
Yes, the soul shares the colours of the glance. Only the blue soul bears the dream in its depths, it has stolen its azure from sea and space.
The eye! Think of it! The eye! It drinks in the visible creation to feed thought. It drinks in the world, colour, movement, books, pictures, all beauty, all ugliness, and creates ideas therefrom. And when it looks at me, it fills me with the sense of a happiness not of this world. It foreshadows to us the things of which we are forever ignorant; it makes us realise that the realities of our thoughts are despicable and filthy things.
I love her too for her manner of walking.
Méme quand l’oiseau marche, on sent qu’il a des ailes,26
the poet said.
When she passes, one feels that she is not of the same race as ordinary women, she is of a finer, more divine race.
I marry her tomorrow. … I am afraid. … I am afraid of so many things.
Two beasts, two dogs, two wolves, two foxes, prowl through the woods and meet. The one is male, the other female. They mate. They mate because of an animal instinct which drives them to continue the race, their race, the race whose form, skin, stature, movements and habits they have.
All beasts do as much, without knowing why!
We too. …
All that I have done in marrying her is to obey this senseless urge that drives us towards the female.
She is my wife. So long as I desired her ideally, she was for me the irrealisable dream on the verge of being realised.
From the very second when I held her in my arms, she was no more than the being of whom nature has made use to bring to naught all my hopes.
Has she brought them to naught? No. Yet I am tired of her, tired of being unable to touch her, to brush her with my hand or my lips, without my heart swelling with an inexpressible disgust, not perhaps disgust with her, but a loftier, wider, more contemptuous disgust, disgust with the embrace of love, so vile as it has become for all refined beings, a shameful act which must be hidden, which is only spoken of in low tones, with blushes. …
I can no longer endure the sight of my wife approaching me, calling to me with smile and glance and arms. I can no longer endure it. I imagined once that her kiss would transport me to the heavens. One day she was suffering from a passing fever, and I caught in her breath the faint subtle almost imperceptible odour of human decay. I was utterly overcome!
Oh! flesh, seductive living dung, a mass of decay that walks, thinks, speaks, looks and smiles, full of fermenting food, rosy, pretty, tempting, full of deceit as is the soul. …
Why is it only flowers that feel so good, great pale or brilliant flowers, whose tones and hues make my heart flutter and trouble my eyes? They are so beautiful, so delicate in structure, so varied and so sensual, half open like mouths, more tempting than mouths, and hollow, with lips curled back, toothed, fleshy, powdered with a seed of life that engenders in each one of them a different perfume.
They reproduce themselves, they, only they, in all the world, without defilement of their inviolable race, giving off round themselves the divine incense of their love, the fragrant sweat of their caresses, the essence of their incomparable bodies, of their bodies that are adorned with all grace, all elegance, all form, and possess the fascination of all colour forms; and the intoxicating charm of all scents …
Selected fragments, six months later.
… I love flowers, not as flowers but as delicate and material beings; I pass my days and my nights in the greenhouses where I hide them like women in harems.
Who, except myself, knows the sweetness, the maddening charm, the shuddering, sensual, ideal, superhuman ecstasy of these tender caresses; and these kisses on rosy flesh, on red flesh, on white flesh, the miraculously varied, delicate, rare, fine, unctuous flesh of these wonderful flowers?
I have greenhouses where no one enters but myself and the man who looks after them.
I enter them as if I were stepping into a place of secret delight. In the high glass gallery, I pass first between two throngs of corollas, shut, half open or spread wide, which slope from ground to roof. It is the first kiss they send me.
Those particular ones, those flowers, those that adorn this anteroom of my mysterious passions, are my servants and not my favourites.
They greet me, as I pass, with their changing brilliance and their fresh exhalations. They are darlings, coquettes, rising tier upon tier in eight rows on my right hand and eight rows on my left, and so crowded that they have the aspect of two gardens coming down to my feet.
My heart palpitates, my eye lights up at sight of them, the blood runs madly through my veins, my soul leaps within me, and my hands tremble already with the desire to touch them. I pass on. There are three closed doors at the end of this high gallery. I can make my choice. I have three harems.
But I turn oftenest to the orchids, my drowsy favourites. Their room is low, stifling. The damp, warm air makes my skin moist, my throat contract for want of air, and my fingers tremble. They come, these stranger women, from swampy, burning, unhealthy countries. They are as fascinating as sirens, deadly as poison, marvellously grotesque, soul-destroying, terrifying. See how like they are to butterflies with their enormous wings, their tiny paws, their eyes. For they have eyes. They look at me, they see me, prodigious, unbelievable beings, fairies, daughters of the holy earth, the impalpable air, and warm light, the mother of the world. Yes, they have wings and eyes and delicate shades that no painter can catch, all the charms, all the graces, all the shapes that one can dream of. Their sides are cleft, perfumed and transparent, open for love and more tempting than any woman’s flesh. The unimaginable contours of their tiny bodies thrust the soul, drunk, into a paradise of visions and ideal delights. They quiver on their stems as if about to take flight. Will they fly, will they come to me? No, it is my heart which hovers above them like some mystic male creature, tortured with love.
No insect’s wing can brush them. We are alone, they and I, in the translucent prison that I have built them. I watch them and I contemplate them, I admire them, I adore them, one after the other.
How sleek they are, how mysterious, rosy, with a rosiness that moistens the lips with desire. How I love them! The rim of their calyx is curled, paler than their throats, and the corolla hides itself there, mysterious seductive mouth, sweet to the tongue and displaying and concealing the delicate, wonderful and sacred organs of these divine little creatures which smell pleasant and do not talk.
Sometimes I am seized with a passion for one of them which endures as long as its existence, a few days, a few nights. Then it is taken from the common gallery and enclosed in a darling little glass retreat where a thread of water murmurs through a bed of tropic grass come from the islands of the great Pacific. And there I stay, at her side, ardent, feverish and tormented, knowing her death so close and watching her fade, while I possess her, while I breathe, drink, pluck her short life with one inexpressible caress.
When he had finished reading these fragments, counsel continued:
Decency, gentlemen of the jury, restrains me from continuing to lay before you the curious confessions of this shamefully idealistic madman. The few passages that I have just laid before you will be sufficient, I think, for you to understand this case of mental disease, less rare than one thinks in our age of hysterical dementia and corrupted decadence.
I feel therefore that my client is entitled more than any other woman to demand her divorce in the exceptional position in which she has been placed by the strange mental derangement of her husband.