Free French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) by Unknown Page A

accepted the fact that Alcibiades could ever get to be fifty years old. And by the same token, the Comte de Ravila went on acting like Alcibiades. Like the Comte d’Orsay, * that dandy cast in the bronze of Michelangelo, who was handsome to the day he died, Ravila had the sort of beauty particular to the race of Don Juan—that mysterious race which does not proceed from father to son, like everyone else, but which occurs here and there, at different intervals, within the families of humanity.
    His beauty was the genuine article—insolent, joyous, imperious—in a word, it was
Juanesque
: the adjective says it all and needs no further elaboration; and what is more—had he made a pact withthe devil?—he possessed it still… Only, God had now started to stake his claim—the tiger claws of life had begun to furrow the superb forehead that had been so crowned with roses, and by scores of lips; and on his broad, insolent temples the first white hairs were visible, announcing the imminent arrival of the barbarians, and the end of the Empire… In truth, he bore them with the imperviousness that comes from pride magnified by potency; but the women who had loved him observed them with melancholy. Who knows? Did they see their own advancing age reflected in his countenance? Alas, for them as well as for him, the hour had come for that terrible supper with the cold and marble-white Commendatore, * after which there was nowhere left but hell—the hell of old age, waiting for the one to come! Which is why, perhaps, before they came to share with him the bitterness of that ultimate supper, they thought they would treat him to their own, and it would be a masterpiece.
    A masterpiece it was indeed, of taste, delicacy, patrician luxury, of inventiveness and resource; it was to be the most delightful, delicious, generous, captivating, and above all the most original of suppers. Just imagine it! Normally, suppers are made of overflowing high spirits, intent on a good time; but this one was animated by memory, by regret, almost by despair, but despair dressed up, hidden behind smiles and laughter, and determined on this final feast or folly, on this last intoxicating return of youth, oh may it never end!…
    The Amphitryons * who gave this unbelievable supper, so contrary to the insipid customs of the class to which they belonged, must have felt rather like Sardanapalus * on his pyre, which he heaped with his wives, slaves, horses, jewels, and every luxury he possessed, so they would perish with him. In the same way, these women heaped this blazing supper with every luxury they had. They brought to it everything they had of beauty, wit, resource, ornament, allure, and poured all of it all at once into this supreme conflagration.
    The man for whom they draped and enveloped themselves in this final flame was worth more, in their eyes, than all of Asia in the eyes of Sardanapalus. They were more deliciously flirtatious with him than women had ever been with any man, or even with a drawing room full of men; and this flirtatiousness they spiced up with the jealousy which is hidden in society, and which they had no need to hide, for they all knew that this man had been with each one of them, and a shameful secret shared is one no longer… The only rivalrybetween them now was, whose epitaph would be graven most deeply upon his heart.
    That evening he had the sensuous, sovereign, nonchalant, fastidious manner of a confessor to nuns, or of a sultan. Seated like a king—or the master—at the centre of the table, directly opposite the Comtesse de Chiffrevas, in her peach-tinted boudoir of forbidden fruits, the Comte de Ravila turned his hell-blue eyes—eyes that so many poor creatures had mistaken for the blue of the sky—blazing upon this gorgeous circle of twelve women. Their elegance was touched with genius, and where they sat, around this table loaded with crystal, lighted candles, and flowers, they spread before him, from the scarlet of