Lotys

“ Every man present watched the visible emotion which swept every vestige of colour from the face of Lotys, and made her eyes so feverishly bright. Every man gazed at her as she rose from her chair and came forward a little to the front of the platform. It was with a strong effort that she raised her eyes to those of the King, and in that one glance between them, the lightning flash of a resistless love tore the veil of secrecy from their souls. ”

“ Lotys,—little, domineering Lotys, why in the name of Heaven should I secure recognition as a poet, through drunkenness?”
“Because your vice kills your genius,” said Lotys; “Therefore you are quite safe! If you were less of a scamp you would be a great man,—perhaps the greatest in the country! That would never do! Your rivals would never forgive you! But you are a hopeless rascal, incapable of winning much honour; and so you are compassionately recognized as somebody who might do something if he only would—that is all, my Zouche! ”

“ I watched the growth of your passion for Lotys—I knew she loved you!—and had you indeed been the poor writer and thinker you assumed to be, all might have been well for you both! But when you declared yourself to be King, what could there be for such a woman but death? She would never have chosen dishonour! She has taken the straight way out of trouble, but—but she has left you alone! And I am sorry for you! I know what it is—to be left alone! You have a palace here, adorned with all the luxuries that wealth can buy, and yet you are alone in it! ”

“ Working for Lotys, plotting, planning, scheming for Lotys! The government intimidated,—the ministry cast out,—the throne in peril,—the people in arms,—the city in a blaze,—Revolution and Anarchy doing their wild work broad-cast together,—all for Lotys! Always a woman in it! Search to the very depth of every political imbroglio,—dig out the secret reason of every war that ever was begun or ended in the world,—and there we shall find the love or the hate of a woman at the very core of the business! ”

“ Zouche, with something like fear for the visible, yet strongly suppressed anguish of the man before him, sighed drearily as he repeated——
“Lotys is dead! It is God’s way—to kill all beautiful things, just as we have learned to love them! She,—Lotys,—used to talk of Justice and Order,—poor soul!—she never found either! Yet she believed in God!”
The King’s stern face never relaxed in its frozen rigidity of woe. Only his lips moved mutteringly.
“Dead! Lotys! My God!—my God! To rise to such a height of hope and good—and then—to fall so low! Lotys gone from me!—and with her goes all!” ”

“ The King himself stood immovable as a figure of bronze,—his eyes resting upon her with a deep insistence of purpose, as though he sought to wrest some further confession from her soul. The tension between them was painful,—almost intolerable,—and though it lasted but a minute, that minute seemed weighted with the potentialities of years. Forcing herself to break the dumb spell, Lotys went on hurriedly and half desperately:—
“You may smile at this,” she said—“Men always jest with a woman’s heart,—a woman’s folly! ”

“ Lotys grew a shade paler, but she replied at once and dauntlessly.
“I do not forget it! But if lots are cast and traitors doomed,—it is part of our procedure to give any such doomed man six months’ steady and repeated warning, that he may have time to repent of his mistakes and remedy them, so that haply he may still be spared;—and also that he may take heed to arm himself, that he do not die defenceless. Had I not saved the King, his death would have been set down to us, and our work! ”

“ Listen! When the body of the woman Lotys was borne away on that vessel, a man came to me out of the thickest of the crowd (I was on one of the furthest quays) —and offered me a purse of gold to take him out to sea—and to steer him in such a way that we should meet the funeral barque just as she was cut adrift and sent forth to be wrecked in the ocean. I did not know him then. He kept his face hidden,—he spoke low, and he was evidently in trouble. I thought he was a lover of the dead woman, and sought perhaps to comfort himself by looking at her coffin for the last time. ”

“ No preacher could persuade a thief of the practical ingloriousness of thieving, as Lotys could,—and a prison chaplain, remonstrating with an assassin after his crime, was not half as much use to the State as Lotys, who could induce such an one to resign his murderous intent altogether, before he had so much as possessed himself of the necessary weapon. ”

“ While he could not, as a brave man, refuse his respect and homage to the monarch who had quietly made himself complete master of the ‘Revolutionary’ organisation, and who had succeeded in turning thousands of disaffected persons into ardent Loyalists, he was nevertheless troubled by a lurking suspicion that Lotys had secretly known and favoured the King’s scheme. ”

“ The wild turbulence of Nature around him had only intensified his perfect content. He had pleased himself by taking care of the sleeping Lotys—such tender care! He had tried to shield her coffin from the onslaughts of the fierce waves; he had protected many of the funeral flowers from destruction, and had lifted the gold fringe of the purple pall many and many a time out of the drenching spray cast over it. ”

“ No female of even the lower middle ranks of life, with any faint pretence to ‘fashion,’ would have been seen listening to “that dreadful woman,”—as Lotys was very often called by her own sex,—simply because of the extraordinary fascination she secretly exercised over men. ”

“ He spoke so quietly and firmly, yet with such an air of assurance and authority, that something of an electric thrill passed through the entire company, and all eyes were fixed on him in mingled admiration and wonderment.
“Of the ‘Corruption of the State,’ concerning which our fair teacher has spoken to-night,” he continued, with another quick glance at Lotys—“there can be no manner of doubt. But we should, I think, say the ‘Corruption of the Ministry’ rather than of the State. It is not because a few stock-jobbers rule the Press and the Cabinet, that the State is necessarily corrupt. ”

“ Roving, restless, concerned solely with the misery of his own soul and the beauty of the world, Loti carries his dreams with him to the remotest shores, and in order to distract his thoughts from life which bores him, he has gathered together extraordinary colours, the brilliant dust of picturesque ruins, and has created for himself a capricious and sensual world, in which nothing, perhaps, is real excepting his own melancholy, yet which amuses and enchants him with its prodigious fund of poetry. ”

“ Here is the well, surrounded by bamboos, where we are wont to make a nocturnal halt for Chrysantheme to take breath. Yves begs me to throw forward the red gleam of my lantern, in order to recognize the place, for it marks our halfway resting-place.
And at last, at last, here is our house! The door is closed, all is silent and dark. Our panels have been carefully shut by M. Sucre and Madame Prune; the rain streams down the wood of our old black walls. ”

“ Still the grand, glorious sun lit up all, like a conflagration of the whole world, with blood-laden clouds; through the aperture of the port-hole, a wide streak of crimson fire blazed in, and, spreading over Sylvestre's bed, formed a halo around him.
At that very moment that same sun was to be seen in Brittany, where midday was about to strike. It was, indeed, the same sun, beheld at the precise moment of its never-ending round; but here it kept quite another hue. Higher up in the bluish sky, it kept shedding a soft white light on grandmother Yvonne, sitting out at her door, sewing. ”

“ In all the American bars, grinding organs are hammering it with many an odious variation and flourish, in order to attract our men.
One amusing recollection comes back to me of that evening. On our return, we had by mistake turned into a street inhabited by a multitude of ladies of doubtful reputation. I can still see that big fellow Yves, struggling with a whole band of tiny little ‘mousmes’ of twelve or fifteen years of age, who barely reached up to his waist, and were pulling him by the sleeves, eager to lead him astray. ”

“ That I might remain hidden as long as possible I crouched lower and still lower, and I felt the joy a little Indian boy feels when he is in his beloved forest.
Suddenly I heard someone call: “Pierre! Pierre! Dear Pierre!” I did not reply, but instead lay as close as possible to the ground, and sought to hide under the weeds and the waving branches of the asparagus.
Still I heard: “Pierre, Pierre.” It was Lucette; I knew her voice, and from the mockery of her tone I felt sure that she had spied me. But I could not see her although I looked about me very carefully: no one was visible! ”

“ The next tide brought in a stiff little corpse, a little body of white wax, which was laid to rest near the chapel, under a wooden cross and a mound of green turf.
She still cherished a hope in her son Yves, the last, the best beloved, because he had remained the longest at home. . . . Perhaps he, at least, would return one day to live near her!
But it was not to be. This Marie Keremenen had stolen him from her; and, at the same time—a thing which counted in her rancour—she had taken from her also the money which this son had previously sent to help her to live. ”

“ From Bannalec to Toulven is an hour's drive through the woods. With my eyes fixed in front of me I watch for the granite steeple of the church in the distance of the green horizon.
And now it appears reflected deep below in the mournful pool. The weather has cleared and the sky is blue again, a pale blue.
Toulven! . . . The diligence stops. Yves is there waiting for me, holding little Pierre by the hand.
We look at each other—and our first impulse is to laugh, on account of our moustaches. Our faces are altered, and we seem odd to each other. ”

“ I said, "I shall marry at once."
"Ah!" said Yves, with the indifferent air of one whom nothing can surprise.
"Yes—I shall choose a little, creamy-skinned woman with black hair and cat's eyes. She must be pretty and not much bigger than a doll. You shall have a room in our house. It will be a little paper house, in a green garden, deeply shaded. We shall live among flowers, everything around us shall blossom, and each morning our dwelling shall be filled with nosegays—nosegays such as you have never dreamed of." ”

“ At eight o'clock, at nightfall, our maneuver being at an end, I embarked with Yves on board a sampan; this time it is he who is carrying me off and taking me back to my home.
On land, a delicious perfume of new-mown hay greets us, and the road across the mountains lies bathed in glorious moonlight. We go straight up to Diou-djen-dji to join Chrysanthème; I feel almost remorseful, although I hardly show it, for my neglect of her.
Looking up, I recognize from afar my little house, perched on high. It is wide open and lit up; I even hear the sound of guitar. ”

“ The two smugglers, immovable on their chairs, appear as silhouettes, of wide shoulders on all this white of the walls, and of their lost features one hardly sees the black more intense of the mustache and the eyes. The two nuns, whose outlines are unified by the veil, seem already to be two spectres all black—
“Wait, Sister Mary Angelique,” says the Mother Superior to the transformed young girl who was formerly named Gracieuse, “wait sister till I light the lamp in order that you may at least see your brother's face!” ”

“ He turned his eyes away, looking outside; his cheeks blazed red, a rush of blood burned all his face, and his quivering nostrils dilated with every breath, keeping time with the heavings of his chest, like a young bull's.
“The night of the ball,” she tried to continue, “when we were together, you bade me good-bye, not as a man speaks to an indifferent person. Monsieur Yann, have you no memory? What have I done to vex you?”
The nasty western breeze blowing in from the street ruffled his hair and the frills of Gaud's coiffe, and behind them a door was banged furiously. ”

“ I thought of little Pierre and of Marie, of the good folk of Toulven, who had put their hope in me, and then of an oath I had sworn to an old mother in Plouherzel.
And above all, I realized that I still loved my poor Yves as a brother. . . . I went back to my room and began hurriedly to write to him; for this must be the only means of communication between us; with our characters, explanations would never be successful. I wrote quickly, in large letters, so that he could still read them: darkness was coming on quickly, and, in the dockyard, a light is a thing forbidden. ”

“ Still rather sleepy, drinking in chestfuls of the fresh, chill air, they stepped up, drawing their long sea-boots higher, and having to shut their eyes, dazzled at first by a light so pale, yet in such abundance.
Yann and Sylvestre took their breakfast of biscuits, which they had to break with a mallet, and began to munch noisily, laughing at their being so very hard. They had become quite merry again at the idea of going down to sleep, snugly and warmly in their berths; and clasping each other round the waist they danced up to the hatchway to an old song-tune. ”

“ Look long at your little Sylvestre, poor old woman; until the very latest moment, do not lose sight of his fleeting shadow, which is fading away for ever.
When she could see him no longer, she fell back, completely crushing her still clean unrumpled cap, weeping and sobbing in the agony of death itself.
He had turned away slowly, with his head bent, and big tears falling down his cheeks. The autumn night had closed in; everywhere the gas was flaring, and the sailors' riotous feasts had begun anew. ”