Aphrodite, Pierre Louÿs [top 50 books to read .txt] 📗
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“By the Aphrodite, also.”
“Thou dost not believe in the Aphrodite. Swear by Iahveh Sabaoth.”
The Galilaean paled. “One does not swear by Iahveh.”
“Thou refusest?”
“It is a terrible oath.”
“It is the one I will have.”
She hesitated some time, then said in a low voice, “I make the oath by Iahveh. What demandest thou of me, Demetrios?” The young man was silent.
“Speak, Well-Beloved,” said Chrysis. “Tell me quickly. I am afraid.”
“Oh! it is very little.”
“But what?”
“I do not wish to tell thee to give me, in thy turn, three gifts, were they as simple as the first were rare. That would be against custom. But I can ask thee to receive gifts, can I not?”
“Surely,” said Chrysis, joyfully.
“This mirror, this comb, this necklace, which thou hast made me take for thee—thou didst not hope to use them, didst thou? A stolen mirror, the comb of a victim, and the necklace of the goddess; those were not jewels which one could display.”
“What an idea!”
“No. Indeed I did not think so. Then it was in pure cruelty chat thou didst impel me to ravish them at the price of the three crimes by which the entire town is overwhelmed today. Well, thou wilt wear them.
“Thou wilt go into the little closed garden where the statue of Stygian Hermes stands. This place is always deserted and thou wilt not risk being disturbed there. Thou wilt remove the left heel of the god. The stone is broken, thou wilt see. There, in the interior of the pedestal, thou wilt find the mirror of Bacchis and thou wilt take it in thy hand; thou wilt find the great comb of
[paragraph continues] Nitocris and thou wilt plunge it into thy hair; thou wilt find the seven-fold pearl necklace of the goddess Aphrodite and thou wilt put it about thy neck. Thus bedecked, fair Chrysis, thou wilt go through the town. The crowd will deliver thee to the queen’s soldiers; but thou wilt have what thou didst wish and I will come to see thee in thy prison before sunrise.”
CHRYSIS’S first movement was to shrug. She would not be so naive as to keep her oath!
The second was to go and see.
A growing curiosity impelled her toward the mysterious place where Demetrios had hidden the three criminal spoils. She wished to take them, touch them with her hand, make them shine in the sun, possess them an instant. It seemed to her that victory would not be quite complete until she had grasped the objects of her ambitions.
As for Demetrios, she would find a way to recapture him by some ulterior maneuver. How could it be that he had detached himself from her forever? The passion which she supposed in him was not of those which flicker out without return in the heart of man. The women who have been much loved form an elective household in the memory and a meeting with a former mistress, even hated, even forgotten, awakens an insurmountable unquiet whence a new love may spring. Chrysis knew this. However ardent she herself might be, however anxious to conquer this first man she had ever loved, she was not mad enough to buy him at the price of her life when she saw so many other ways of seducing him more simply.
And yet… what a sublime end he had proposed for her!
Under the eyes of an innumerable crowd, to bear the antique mirror in which Sappho had gazed, the comb which had gathered up the royal hair of Nitocris, the necklace of sea pearls which had rolled in the shell of the goddess Anadyomene… Then from the evening until morning to have Demetrios with her, to know at last how the deepest love can make a woman feel… and, toward the middle of the day, to die without effort… What an incomparable destiny!
She closed her eyes…
But no; she would not let herself be tempted.
She ascended the street which led in a straight line across Rhacotis to the Great Serapeion. This road, pierced by the Greeks, seemed somehow incongruous in this quarter of angular alleys. The two populations mingled grotesquely there, in a promiscuity still a little tinged with hate. Among the Egyptians dressed in blue skirts, the unbleached tunics of the Hellenes made splashes of white. Chrysis ascended rapidly, without listening to the conversations where the people entertained each other with the crimes committed for her.
Before the steps of the monument, she turned to the right, entered a dark street, then another where the terraces of the houses nearly touched, traversed a small star-shaped place where, near a spot of sunlight, two very brown little girls were playing in a fountain, and finally she stopped.
The garden of Hermes-Anubis was a little necropolis, abandoned long since, a sort of forgotten territory where relatives no longer came bringing libations to the dead, and which passers-by turned aside to avoid. In the midst of the crumbling tombs, Chrysis advanced in the greatest silence, frightened by each stone which crackled beneath her feet. The wind, always laden with fine sand, shook the hair upon her temples and swelled out her veil of scarlet silk toward the white leaves of the sycamores.
She discovered the statue between three funereal monuments which hid it from all sides and enclosed it in a triangle. The place was well chosen to bury a mortal secret.
Chrysis slipped as best she could into the narrow, stony passage. Seeing the statue, she paled slightly.
The jackal-headed god was standing, the right leg advanced, the headdress falling and pierced with two holes whence issued the arms. The head was bent from the height of the rigid body, following the movement of the hands which made the gesture of the embalmer. The left foot was detached.
With a slow and fearful look, Chrysis assured herself that she was quite alone. A sound behind her made her shudder; but it was only a little green lizard which disappeared into a fissure of the marble.
Then, at last, she dared lay hand upon the broken foot of the statue. She raised it obliquely and not without some trouble, for it drew with it a part of the hollowed socle which lay upon the pedestal. And underneath the stone she beheld, suddenly, the gleam of the enormous pearls.
She drew out the whole necklace. How heavy it was! she would not have thought that pearls almost without settings would lie with such a weight in the hand. The globes were all marvelously round and of an almost lunar oriency. The seven strands succeeded each other, increasing like ripples upon star-lit water.
She laid it about her neck.
With one hand she arranged it, closing her eyes the better to feel the cold of the pearls on her skin. She spaced the seven rows regularly below her throat and let the last fall into the recess of her bosom.
Next she took the ivory comb, considered it for some time, caressed the little white figure which was sculptured in the thin crown, and plunged the jewel into her hair several times before fixing it as she wished.
Then she drew the silver mirror from the socle, looked into it and saw there her triumph, her eyes illuminated with pride, her shoulders adorned with the spoils of the gods…
And, enveloping herself even to the hair in her great scarlet cyclas, she went out from the necropolis without putting off the terrible jewels.
WHEN, from the mouths of the hierodules, the mob had learned for the second time the certainty of the sacrilege, it flowed out slowly across the gardens. The temple courtesans thronged by hundreds along the paths of black olives. Some strewed ashes upon their heads. Others bowed their foreheads into the dust or tore their hair or clutched their breasts, in token of calamity. Many sobbed, their eyes hidden in their arms.
The crowd descended silently into the town, through the Drome and out upon the quays. A universal mourning filled the streets with consternation. The terrified shop-keepers had precipitately withdrawn their many-colored wares, and wooden shutters fastened by bars succeeded each other like a monotonous palisade along the ground floors of the blind houses.
The life of the port was arrested. The sailors sat motionless upon the stone parapets, their cheeks resting in their hands. The vessels ready to depart had lifted their long oars and furled their pointed sails along the masts which swayed in the wind. Those who wished to enter the roadstead waited for signals in the offing and some of their passengers who had relatives in the queen’s palace, fearing a bloody revolution, sacrificed to the gods of the underworld.
At the corner of the island of the Pharos and of the jetty, Rhodis, in the multitude, recognized Chrysis near leer.
“Ah! Chryse! Protect me, I am afraid. Myrto is here, but the crowd is so great… I am afraid they will separate us. Take our hands.”
“Thou knowest,” said Myrtocleia, “thou knowest what has happened? Do they know the guilty one? Is he being tortured? Since Herostratos, no one has seen anything like this. The Olympians abandon us. What will become of us?”
Chrysis did not reply.
“We gave doves,” said the little flute-player. “Will the goddess remember that? The goddess is surely angry. And thou, and thou, my poor Chryse? Thou who wert to be, today, either very happy or very powerful…”
“All is done,” said the courtesan.
“What sayest thou!”
Chrysis took two steps backward and raised her right hand to her mouth.
“Look well, my Rhodis; look, Myrtocleia. What you will see, today, human eyes have never seen since the day the goddess descended upon Ida. And until the end of the world, it will never be seen again upon the earth.”
The two friends recoiled in astonishment, believing her mad. But Chrysis, lost in her dream, walked to the monstrous Pharos, the flaming mountain of marble in eight hexagonal tiers. She pushed the bronze door and, profiting by the public inattention, she closed it from the inside by lowering the clanging bars.
Some moments passed.
The crowd muttered continuously. The living surge added its rumble to the regular beat of the waters.
Suddenly a cry arose, repeated by a hundred thousand throats.
“Aphrodite!!
—Aphrodite!!!”
A thunder of cries burst out. The joy, the enthusiasm of a whole people sang in an indescribable tumult of gladness at the foot of the walls of the Pharos.
The throng which covered the jetty swarmed violently into the island, swept over the rocks, mounted upon the houses, on the signal masts, on the fortified towers. The island was full, more than full, and the crowd arrived, still more compact, like the sweep of a flooded river, throwing back to the sea long human ranks from the height of the abrupt cliff.
The end of this inundation of men could not be seen. From the Palace of the Ptolemies to the wall of the Canal, the banks of the Royal Gate, from the Great Gate and from the Eunostos, vomited a serried mass fed indefinitely by the tributary streets. Above this ocean, stirred by immense eddies, foaming with arms and faces, the yellow-veiled litter of the queen Berenice tossed like a bark in peril. And from moment to moment, augmented by new mouths, the noise became formidable.
Neither Helen on the Skaian Gates, nor Phryne in the waters of Eleusis, nor Thais inspiring the burning of Persepolis have known what triumph is.
Chrysis had appeared through the door of the occident, upon the first terrace of
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