The Mask
There was a fancy-dress ball that evening at the Élysée-Montmartre. It was to celebrate Mid-Lent, and the crowd was pouring, like the water rushing over a weir, down the illuminated corridor that led to the dance room. The overpowering clamour of the orchestra, crashing like a storm of music, split walls and roof, spread abroad through the neighbourhood, and roused in the streets, and even in the nearby houses, the irresistible desire to leap, to be warm and amused, that slumbers in the depths of the human animal.
The regular frequenters of the place were arriving from all the four corners of Paris, people of all classes, who were fond of vulgar, roistering amusements that were a little vicious and not a little debauched. There were shop assistants, pimps, prostitutes, prostitutes in every sort of dress, from the common cotton to the finest batiste, wealthy prostitutes, the old wealthy ones, old and covered with diamonds, and the penniless sixteen-year-olds longing to enjoy themselves, to find men, to spend money. Elegants in tailed coats, in search of youthful flesh, deflowered of its primal innocence but still desirable, roved through the overheated crowd, peering, seemingly scenting it out, while the masks appeared absorbed in their desire for amusement. The famous quadrilles had already gathered round their caperings a crowded circle of people. The swaying hedge, the quivering mass of women and men who encircled the four dancers, knotted itself round like a serpent, advancing and withdrawing in time to the swerving movements of the dancers. The two women, whose thighs seemed fastened to their bodies by india-rubber springs, executed the most amazing movements with their legs. They flung them up in the air with such vigour that the limbs seemed to be flying towards the sky, then suddenly, parting them as if they were open to the navel, sliding one in front and the other behind, they touched the ground with the centre of their bodies in a quick wide split, revolting and comical to watch.
Their partners leaped, pirouetted on their feet, whirled round, their arms flapping and raised like stumps of featherless wings, and one guessed that under their masks their breath was coming in gasps.
One of them, who had taken a part in the most famous of the quadrilles to replace a celebrated dancer who was absent, the magnificent “Songe-augosse,” and was doing his best to keep pace with the indefatigable “Arête-de-veau,” was executing fantastic solo steps that provoked the joy and ironic mirth of the public.
He was lean, attired like a dandy, with a handsome varnished mask on his face, a mask with a fair curling moustache and topped by a curled wig.
He had the appearance of a model from the Grévin museum, of a strange and fantastic caricature of a charming young man in a fashion-plate, and he danced with an earnest but awkward effort, and with a droll ecstasy. He seemed rusty beside the others as he tried to imitate their gambols: he seemed crippled, as clumsy as a pug-dog playing with greyhounds. Mocking bravos encouraged him, and he, drunk with enthusiasm, leaped about with such frenzy that all at once, carried away by a wild rush, he ran full tilt into the wall of standers-by which parted before him to let him pass, then closed up again round the inert body of the motionless dancer, lying face downwards.
Men picked him up and carried him away. There were shouts for “a doctor.” A gentleman came forward, young, very elegant, in a black coat with enormous pearls in his dress shirt. “I am a professor in the Medical School,” he said, modestly. They made way for him, and in a little room full of cartons, like a business man’s office, he found the still unconscious dancer stretched across the chairs. The doctor tried first to remove the mask and discovered that it was fastened on in a complicated fashion, by a multitude of fine metal threads, which attached it cleverly to the edges of his wig and enclosed his entire head, in a solid ligature, of which one would have to know the secret. The neck itself was imprisoned in a false skin which formed a continuation of the chin, and this glove-like skin, painted flesh-colour, reached to the neck of his shirt.
They had to cut it all away with strong scissors, and when the doctor had made a gash from shoulder to temple in this amazing apparatus, he opened out this carapace and found therein an old face, the face of a pale, worn-out, thin, wrinkled man. The shock to those who carried in the young curled mask was so great that no one laughed, no one said a word.
They stared, where it lay on the rush chairs, at this sad face with its closed eyes, besprinkled with white hairs, some of them long, falling from the forehead over his face, others short, sprouting from cheeks and chin, and there beside this poor head—the small, charming, polished mask, the fresh, still smiling mask.
The man came to himself after remaining unconscious for a long time, but he seemed still so feeble, so ill, that the doctor feared some dangerous complication.
“Where do you live?” said he.
The old dancer seemed to search in his memory and then to remember, and he gave the name of a street which no one knew. So they had to ask him again for details of the neighbourhood. He furnished them with infinite pain, with a slowness and indecision that betrayed the disturbance of his mind.
The doctor continued:
“I’ll take you back there myself.”
He had been seized with curiosity to know who this strange mummer was, to see where this amazing mountebank lived.
A cab soon carried them both to the other side of the slope of Montmartre.
It was in a tall house of poverty-stricken aspect, ascended by a shiny staircase, one of those forever unfinished houses, riddled with windows, standing between two amorphous stretches of ground, squalid dens where live a horde of ragged, miserable wretches.
The doctor, clinging to the handrail, a winding wooden rod to which his hand stuck fast, supported the dazed old man, who was now regaining his strength, up to the fourth floor.
The door at which they had knocked opened, and a woman appeared, old too, and clean, with a white nightcap framing a bony face with strongly marked features, the characteristic, broad, good, rough-hewn face of an industrious and faithful woman of the working-class. She cried:
“My God, what’s happened to him?”
When the affair had been explained to her in twenty words, she was reassured, and reassured the doctor himself by telling him that this was by no means the first of such adventures that had happened.
“He must go to bed, sir, that’s all, he’ll sleep, and next day there’ll be nothing to show for it.”
The doctor answered:
“But he can hardly speak.”
“Oh, it’s nothing, he’s a little drunk, nothing else. He ate no dinner so that he should be supple, and then he drank two absinths to liven himself up. The absinth, you know, revives his legs, but it takes away his wits and his words. He’s not of an age now to dance as he does. No, indeed, I’ve lost all hope of him ever getting any sense.”
The doctor, surprised, insisted:
“But why does he dance like that, old as he is?”
She shrugged her shoulders; she was flushed with the anger that was slowly rousing in her.
“Oh, yes, why! To tell the truth, it’s so that people will think he’s young under his mask, so that the women will still take him for a gay dog and whisper nasty things in his ear, so that he can rub himself against their skin, all their dirty skins with their scents and their powder and their pomades. Oh, it’s a nasty business! Well, I’ve had a life of it, I have, sir, for the forty years it’s been going on. … But he must be got to bed first so he doesn’t take any harm. Would it be too much trouble to you to give me a hand? When he’s like that, I can’t manage by myself.”
The old man was sitting on the bed, with a drunken look, his long white hair fallen over his face.
His companion regarded him with pitying, angry eyes. She went on:
“Look what a fine face he has for his age, and he must go and disguise himself like a worthless scamp so that people will think he’s young. If it’s not a pity! He really has a fine face, sir! Wait, I’ll show it to you before we put him to bed.”
She went towards a table on which was the hand basin, the water jug, soap, comb and brush. She took the brush, then returned to the bed and, lifting the old drunkard’s tangled head of hair, in the twinkling of an eye she gave him the face of a painter’s model, with long curls falling on his neck. Then, stepping back to contemplate him:
“He really is handsome for his age, isn’t he?”
“Very handsome,” declared the doctor, who was beginning to find it very amusing.
She added:
“And if you had known him when he was twenty-five years old! But we must put him to bed, or else his absinths will upset him in his stomach. Now, sir, will you draw off his sleeve? … higher … that’s it … good … the breeches now … wait, I’ll take off his shoes … that’s better. … Now, hold him up while I turn down the bed … there … lay him down … if you think he’ll disturb himself shortly to make room for me, you’re mistaken. I must find my corner, anywhere, anyhow. He doesn’t worry about it. There, you gay spark, you!”
As soon as he felt himself between his bedclothes, the good man shut his eyes, reopened them, shut them again, and his whole contented face expressed an energetic determination to sleep.
The doctor, examining him with an ever-growing interest, asked:
“So he plays the young man at fancy-dress balls, does he?”
“At all of them, sir, and he comes back to me in the morning in such a condition you can’t imagine. You know, it’s regret that drives him there, and makes him put a cardboard face over his own. Yes, regret that he’s no longer what he was, and so has no triumphs any more.”
He was sleeping now, and beginning to snore. She contemplated him with a compassionate air, and added:
“Oh, he has had his triumphs, that man has! More than you’d think, sir, more than the fine society gentleman and more than any tenor or any general.”
“Really? What was he then?”
“Oh, it surprises you at first, seeing that you didn’t know him in his best days. When I met him, it was at a ball, too, for he was always attending them. I was taken as soon as I saw him—yes, taken like a fish on a line. He was charming, sir, so charming he’d bring tears to your eyes to look at him, dark as a crow, and curly-haired, with black eyes as large as windows. Oh, yes, he was a beautiful young man. He carried me off that evening, and I never left him again, sir, no, not for a day, in spite of everything. Oh, he has given me some bad times!”
The doctor asked:
“You are married?”
She answered simply:
“Yes, sir … or else he would have left me like the others. I have been his wife and his nurse, everything, everything he wanted … and he has made me weep for it … tears that I did not let him see. For he used to tell his adventures to me, to me … to me … sir—never realising how it hurt me to listen to them. …”
“But what was his profession?”
“Oh, yes … I forgot to tell you. He was head assistant at Martel’s, such an assistant as you never saw … an artist at ten francs the hour, on an average.
“Martel? … who was Martel?”
“The hairdresser, sir, the famous hairdresser of the Opéra, who had all the actresses as his customers. Yes, all the smartest actresses came to have their hair done by Ambroise, and gave him rewards that made his fortune. Oh, sir, all women are alike, yes, all of them. When a man pleases them, they offer themselves to him. It’s so easy … and that’s a hard lesson to learn. For he used to tell me all … he couldn’t keep silent … no, he couldn’t. These things give so much pleasure to men! and more pleasure still to tell about than to do, perhaps.
“When I saw him come home in the evening a little pale, with an air of contentment, and shining eyes, I used to say to myself: ‘Another one. I am sure he’s caught another one.’ Then I used to long to question him, a longing that scorched my heart, and I longed not to know, too, to prevent him from talking if he began. And we used to look at each other.
“I knew well that he would not hold his tongue, that he was going to come to the point. I felt it in his manner, in the laughing manner he assumed to make me understand. ‘I have had a good day today, Madeleine.’ I pretended not to see, not to guess: I set the table; I brought the soup; I sat down opposite him.
“In those moments, sir, it was just as if my liking for him was being crushed out of my body with a stone. That’s a bad thing, that is, a dreadful thing. But he didn’t guess it, not he, he didn’t know: he felt the need to tell someone about it, to boast, to show how much he was loved … and he had only me to tell it to … you understand … only me … so … I had to listen and take it like poison.
“He began to eat his soup and then he used to say:
“ ‘Another one, Madeleine.’
“I used to think: ‘Now it’s coming. My God, what a man! That I should have taken up with him!’
“Then he started: ‘Another one, and a beauty. …’ And it would be a little girl from the Vaudeville or maybe a little girl from the Variétés, and maybe one of the great ones too, the most famous of these theatrical ladies. He told me their names, described their rooms, and all, all, yes, all, sir. … Details that tore my heart. And he would keep on about it, he would tell his story again from beginning to end, so pleased that I used to pretend to laugh so that he would not be angry with me.
“Perhaps it wasn’t all true. He was so fond of glorifying himself that he was quite capable of inventing such things! And perhaps, too, it was true. On those evenings, he made a show of being tired, of wanting to go to bed after supper. We had supper at eleven, sir, because he never came in earlier, on account of the evening hairdressing.
“When he had finished relating his adventures, he used to smoke cigarettes and walk up and down the room, and he was such a handsome fellow, with his moustache and his curly hair, that I thought: ‘It’s true, all the same, what he tells me. Since I’m mad about that man myself, why shouldn’t other women be infatuated with him too?’ Oh, I wanted to cry about it, to scream, to run away, to throw myself out of the window, as I was clearing the table while he went on smoking. He yawned when he opened his mouth, to show me how tired he was, and he used to say two or three times before getting into bed: ‘God, how I shall sleep tonight!’
“I bear him no grudge for it, because he did not know he hurt me. No, he could not know it! He loved to boast about women like a peacock spreading his tail. He came to imagine that they all looked at him and wanted him. It made it hard when he began to grow old.
“Oh, sir, when I saw his first white hair, it gave me a shock that took my breath away, and then joy … a cruel joy—but so deep, so deep. I said to myself: ‘It’s the end … it’s the end.’ I felt that I was going to be let out of prison. I should have him all to myself, when the others didn’t want him any more.
“It was one morning, in our bed. He was still sleeping, and I was bending over him to waken him with a caress, when I saw in the curls on his temple a little thread that shone like silver. What a surprise! I would not have believed it possible. For a moment I thought of pulling it out, so that he shouldn’t see it himself! but looking closely, I caught sight of another one higher up. White hairs! He was going to have white hairs! It made my heart beat and my skin wet; but all the same, in the bottom of my heart, I was very glad about it.
“It’s not pleasant to think of it, but I went about my work in rare spirits that morning, and I didn’t wake him just then; and when he had opened his eyes without being roused, I said to him:
“ ‘Do you know what I discovered when you were asleep?’
“ ‘No.’
“ ‘I discovered that you have some white hairs.’
“He gave a start of vexation that made him sit down as if I had tickled him, and he said in an annoyed way:
“ ‘It’s not true.’
“ ‘Yes, on the left temple. There are four of them.’
“He jumped from the bed to run to the mirror.
“He did not find them. Then I showed him the first, the lowest down, the little curly one, and I said to him:
“ ‘It’s not surprising considering the life you lead. Two years from now you’ll be finished.’
“Well, sir, I spoke truly; two years later, you wouldn’t have known him. How quickly a man changes! He was still handsome but he was losing his freshness, and women no longer ran after him. Oh, I had a hard life of it, I did, in those days: he made me suffer cruelly for it! Nothing pleased him, not the least thing. He left his profession for the hat trade, in which he got rid of a lot of money. And then he tried to be an actor, without any success, and then he began to frequent public dances. Well, he has had the good sense to keep a little of his money, on which we’re living. It’s enough, but it’s not much. To think that at one time he had almost a fortune!
“Now you see what he does. It’s like a frenzy that takes hold on him. He must be young, he must dance with women who smell of scent and pomade. Poor old darling that he is!”
Moved, ready to weep, she looked at her old husband, who was snoring. Then, drawing near him with light steps, she dropped a kiss on his hair. The doctor had risen and was preparing to leave; he could find nothing to say in the presence of this fantastic pair.
Then, as he was going, she asked:
“Will you just give me your address? If he gets worse I will come and fetch you.”