Aphrodite, Pierre Louÿs [top 50 books to read .txt] 📗
- Author: Pierre Louÿs
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It is the voice of my beloved. that knocketh,
Saying, Open to me, my dove, my undefiled;
For my head is filled with dew,
And my locks with the drops of the night.
I opened to my beloved,
But my beloved had withdrawn himself,
And was gone.
My soul failed when he spake:
I sought him, but 1 could not find him;
I called him, but he gave me no answer.
I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
If ye find my beloved,
That ye tell him that I am sick of love. [*1]
“Ah! It is the Song of Songs, Demetrios! It is the nuptial canticle of the girls of my country.
“The voice of my beloved!
Behold, he cometh,
Leaping upon the mountains,
Skipping upon the hills.
My beloved is like a roe or a young hart:
Behold! He standeth behind our wall;
He looketh forth at the windows,
Showing himself through the lattice.
My beloved spake, and said unto me,
Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For lo, the winter is past—
The rain is over and gone,
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of the birds is come,
And the voice of the ring-dove is heard in our land.
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs,
And the vines, with the tender grape, give a good smell.
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock,
In the secret places—
Let me see thy countenance,
Let me hear thy voice,
For sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.
Take us the foxes, the little foxes,
That spoil the vines:
For our vines have tender grapes.
My beloved is mine, and I am his:
He feedeth among the lilies.
Until the day break, and the shadows flee away,
Turn, my beloved,
And be thou like a roe or a young hart
Upon the mountains.” [*2]
She throws her veil from her and stands in a narrow garment which clasps her closely from knees to hips.
“As the apple tree among the trees of the wood,
So is my beloved among the sons.
I sat down under his shadow with great delight,
And his fruit was sweet to my taste.
He brought me to the banqueting house,
And his banner over me was love.
—Thou hast ravished my heart, my spouse;
Thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes,
With one chain of thy neck.
How much better is thy love than wine,
And the smell of thine ointments than all spices.
Thy lips drop as the honeycomb, O my spouse;
Honey and milk are under thy tongue,
And the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon.
A garden enclosed is my spouse,
A spring shut up,
A fountain sealed.
Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates,
With pleasant fruits—Camphire, with spikenard,
And saffron; calamus and cinnamon,
With trees of frankincense, myrrh and aloes:
A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters,
And streams from Lebanon.” [*3]
She throws back her head, closing her eyes.
“Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south;
Blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out.
Let my beloved come into his garden,
And eat his pleasant fruits.” [*4]
She curves her arms and offers her mouth.
“I am my beloved’s, and his desire is toward me.
Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field,
Let us lodge in the villages.
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it:
If a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.
Thou that dwellest in the gardens,
The companions hearken to thy voice:
Cause me to hear it.
Make haste, my beloved,
And be thou like to a roe, or to a young hart,
Upon the mountains of spices.” [*5]
Without moving her feet, without bending her closed knees, she slowly turns her torso upon her motionless hips. Her face above her garments seems like a great rosy flower in a vase of drapery.
She dances gravely, with her shoulders and her head and her beautiful arms entwined. She seems to suffer in her encasements. Respiration swells her bosom. Her mouth cannot close. Her eyelids cannot open. An increasing fire reddens her cheeks.
Sometimes her ten fingers are interlaced before her face. Sometimes she raises her arms, stretching deliciously. A long fugitive furrow separates her raised shoulders. Finally, panting, covering her face with her hair in a single quick gesture, as one rolls the wedding veil, she stands silent in the center of the floor in all the mystery of her grace.
Demetrios and Chrysis…
So harmonious, so immediately perfect, is their first embrace, that they hold it, motionless, to taste to the full its many-faceted delight. Chrysis is crushed in the arms which embrace her so strongly. Their lips cling in the glowing sweetness of a demanding affection that will not be recklessly satisfied. Intoxicated with each other, their very souls ache.
Nothing is observed so intimately as the face of a loved woman. Seen at the excessive approach of the kiss Chrysis’s eyes seem enormous. When she closes them, two parallel folds appear upon each lid and a uniformly pallid tint extends from the brilliant eyebrows to the beginning of the cheeks. When she opens them, a green ring, fine as a silken thread, lightens with a corona of color the unfathomable black pupil which enlarges beyond measure under the long, curved lashes. The little rosy corner whence the tears flow has sudden palpitations.
This kiss will never finish. It seems as though it were not honey and milk as is said in the Scripture, but something living, quick, enchanted—more caressing than the hand, more expressive than the eyes, a moving flower which Chrysis animates with all tenderness and all fancy…. Caresses prolong and envelop. The tips of her fingers clasp him in a network of ceaseless convulsive shudders. She is happy, but desire terrifies her as though it were a suffering. She puts him aside with her outstretched arms, her lips begging. Demetrios holds her by force.
No spectacle of nature—neither the flames of the western sun, nor the tempest among the palms, nor thunderbolts, nor mirage, nor the great risings of the waters—seems worthy of astonishment to those who have seen a woman transfigured in their arms. Chrysis’s eyes, lighted by gratitude, gaze dizzily from the corners of the lids. Her cheeks are resplendent. Every muscular line is admirable.
Demetrios contemplates, with a sort of religious fear, this power of the goddess in the feminine nature, this transport of a whole being, this superhuman ecstasy whose direct cause he is, which he exalts or represses freely and which, for the thousandth time, confounds him. Under his eyes, all the forces of life put forth effort and magnify themselves to create. Already she seems to take on a maternal majesty.
Footnotes
^186:1 Song of Solomon, 5: 2, 6, 8.
^187:2 Ibid., 2: 8-17.
^188:3 Ibid., 2: 3-4; 3: 9-15.
^188:4 Ibid., 3: 16.
^189:5 Ibid., 7: 10-11; 8: 7, 13-14.
OVER the sea and the gardens of the Goddess, the moon erected her mountains of light. Melitta, the young girl, so delicate and slender, whom Demetrios had taken for an instant and who had offered to lead him to Chimairis the Chiromant, remained alone with the savage, crouching sibyl.
“Do not follow that man,” Chimairis said to her.
“Oh! But I have not even asked him if I shall see him again… Let me run after him and I will return…”
“No, thou wilt not see him again. And that is better, girl. Those who see him once know sorrow. Those who see him twice play with death.”
“Why dost thou say that? I, who have just seen him, have played only with pleasure in his arms.”
“Thou hast had pleasure with him because thou knowest not what love is, my child. Forget him as a comrade and congratulate thyself that thou art not twelve years old.”
“Then people are very unhappy when they are grown up?’ asked the child. “All the women here speak constantly of their troubles and I, who hardly ever weep, see them weep so much.”
Chimairis buried her hands in her hair and groaned. The goat shook his golden collar, turning his head toward her, but she did not even look at him.
Melitta continued purposely, “However, I know one happy woman. It is my great friend, it is Chrysis… I am sure she does not weep…”
“She will weep,” said Chimairis.
“Oh! prophetess of ill fortune! Take back what thou hast said, old mad-woman, or I will detest thee!”
But before the gesture of the little girl the black goat rose erect with forelegs drawn in and horns advanced.
Melitta fled, caring not whither.
Twenty paces farther on she burst out laughing at sight of a ridiculous couple among the bushes. And that sufficed to change the course of her thoughts.
She took the longest way to return to her house; then she decided not to return at all. The moonlight was magnificent, the night was warm, the gardens full of voices, laughter and song. Satisfied by what Demetrios had given her, she had a sudden desire to trail around the paths and bushes like a homeless priestess, in the depths of the wood, among the poor passers-by. Thus she was halted three or four times, under trees, beside stelae, and at benches; she amused herself with this new game whose setting sufficed to change the method of playing it, until a soldier standing in the middle of the path caught and raised her in his robust arms, like the god of the garden meeting a dryad. She exclaimed over this in triumphant delight.
Again free and continuing her way along a colonnade of palm trees, she met a lad named Mikyllos who seemed to be lost in the forest. She offered to serve him as guide, but she misled him to keep him all for herself. Mikyllos was not long in ignorance of Melitta’s designs. Soon, comrades rather than lovers, they ran side by side into a more and more silent isolation and suddenly discovered the sea.
The place they had reached was far from the regions where the courtesans ordinarily fulfilled their religious profession. Why they chose other meeting places than this—the most admirable of all—they could not have said. The wood where the crowd meets is quickly stamped, once for all, with its central vista and its network of paths and squares and star-shaped clearings. On the outskirts, whatever may be the charm and beauty of the spots, an eternal void and the forest growth dominate in peace.
Mikyllos and Melitta arrived thus, hand in hand, at the edge of the public forest, a short hedge of aloes which defined a needless bound between the gardens of Aphrodite and those of her High Priest.
Encouraged by the silence and solitude of this flowering desert, both easily crossed the irregular wall of thick, twisted plants. At their feet the Mediterranean lapped softly upon the strand with little waves light as the welling of a river. The two children plunged waist deep and laughingly pursued each other to attempt, in the water, difficult acrobatics which they quickly interrupted like games only half learned. Then, glistening and streaming, shaking their thin legs in the moonlight, they leaped upon the shadowy shore.
Footprints upon the sand drew them onward. They followed.
The night shone with an extraordinary brilliancy. They walked, ran, struggled with each other’s hands, their sharp shadows silhouetting their figures behind them. How far would they go thus? They saw only themselves in the blue immensity of the horizon.
But suddenly Melitta cried: “Ah… Look!…” “What is
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