Free Ecstasy by Louis Couperus Page A

eyes fixed upon the florid decoration of the Palace of Justice, tracing a background of architecture behind the withered trees of the Plein.
    “Look, Taco, will this do?” asked Jules, after hanging an Algerian sabre between two creeses, and draping the folds of a Javanese sarong between.
    “Beautifully,” answered Quaerts. But he did not look at the trophies, and continued gazing at the Palace. He lay motionless. There was no thought in him; only listless dissatisfaction with himself, and consequent sadness. For three weeks he had led a life of debauch, to deaden consciousness, or perhaps he did not know precisely what: something that was in him, something that was fine, but tiresome in ordinary life. He had begun with shooting, in North Brabant, over a friend’s land. It lasted a week; there were eight of them; sport in the open air, followed by sporting dinners, with not only a great deal of wine, certainly the best, but still more genever, also very fine, like a liqueur. Turbulent excursions on horseback in the neighbourhood; madnesses perpetrated at a farm – the peasant-woman carried round in a barrel, and locked up in the cowhouse – mischievous exploits worthy only of unruly boys and savages; at the end of it all, in a police-court, a summons, with a fine and damages. Wound up to a pitch of excitement with too much sport, too much oxygen, and too much wine, five of the pack, among whom was Quaerts, had gone on to Brussels. There they had stayed almost a fortnight, leading a life of continual excess – champagne and larking; a wild joy of living, which, naturally enough at first, has in the end to be screwed up and screwed up higher still, to make it last a couple of days longer; the last nights spent weariedly over
écarté
, with none but the fixed idea of winning, the exhaustion of all their violence alreadypulsing through their bodies, like nervous relaxation, their eyes gazing without expression upon the cards of the game.
    During that time Quaerts had only once thought of Cecile; and he had not followed up the thought. She had no doubt arisen three or four times in his brain, a vague image, white and transparent; an apparition which had vanished again immediately, leaving no trace of its passage. All this time too he had not written to her, and it had only once struck him that a silence of three weeks, after their last conversation, must at least seem strange to her. There it had remained. He was back now; he had lain three days long at home on his bed, on his sofa, tired, feverish, dissatisfied, disgusted with everything, everything; then one morning, remembering that it was Wednesday, he had thought of Jules and his riding-lesson.
    He sent for Jules, but too lazy to shave or dress, he remained lying where he was. And he still lay there, realising nothing. There before him was the Palace. Next to it the Privy Council. At the side he could see the White Club, and William the Silent standing on his pedestal in the middle of the Plein: that was all exceedingly interesting. And Jules was hanging up trophies: also interesting. And the most interesting of all was the stupid life he had been leading. What tension to give the lie to his ennui! Had he really amused himself during that time? No; he had made a pretence of being amused:the peasant-woman episode and the
écarté
; the sport had been bad; the wine good, but he had drunk too much of it. And then that particularly filthy champagne … at Brussels … And what then? He had absolute need of it, of a life like that, of sport and wild enjoyment; it served to balance the other thing that was in him, that was tiresome for him in ordinary life.
    But why was it not possible to preserve some mean, in one as well as in the other? He was well equipped for ordinary life, and with that he possessed something in addition; why could he not remain balanced between those two spheres of disposition? Why was he always tossed from one to the other, as a thing belonging to