The Elephant Island Chronicles

Presents

Don Juan's Most Beautiful Love

By Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

Translated by Gio Marron

Translation Note

This translation of Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's "Le plus bel amour de Don Juan" represents a collaborative effort between myself, Gio Marron, with assistance from AI language models including Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity.

The translation process involved multiple iterations, with initial drafts produced through AI assistance, followed by substantial literary refinement to capture the nuanced tone, style, and period-appropriate language of Barbey d'Aurevilly's distinctive prose. As primary translator, I focused on preserving the original's ornate, decadent literary style while ensuring readability for contemporary English-speaking audiences.

Special attention was given to maintaining the psychological complexity and subtle irony that characterize Barbey d'Aurevilly's work, particularly the supernatural elements that transform this tale from a conventional seduction narrative into something more metaphysical and profound.

The translation aims to serve both general readers interested in 19th-century French literature and scholarly audiences familiar with the Decadent movement and the evolution of the Don Juan archetype in European literary tradition.

Gio Marron May 2025

Don Juan's Most Beautiful Love

By Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

In this masterpiece of psychological insight and irony, Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly transforms the Don Juan legend into a tale of supernatural suggestion. When a aging seducer recounts his "most beautiful love" to a circle of aristocratic women, the revelation subverts all expectations—proving that the most powerful conquests happen in the realm of imagination rather than the bedchamber. A brilliant exploration of innocence, corruption, and the mystical dimensions of desire from one of 19th-century France's most provocative writers.

I

The devil's finest delicacy is an innocence. (A.)

So he still lives, that old scoundrel?

"By God, indeed he lives! — and by God's decree, Madame," I added, checking myself, for I remembered she was devout, and from the parish of Sainte-Clotilde no less—the parish of dukes! "The king is dead! Long live the king!" they used to say under the old monarchy before it shattered like Sèvres porcelain. Don Juan, democracy be damned, remains a monarch who will never be broken.

"Indeed, the devil is immortal!" she remarked, as if confirming something to herself.

"He has even—"

"Who? The devil?"

"No, Don Juan... supped, three days ago, in high spirits. Guess where?"

"At your dreadful Maison-d'Or, no doubt."

"Fie, Madame! Don Juan no longer goes there... nothing there to fricassee for his grandeur. Lord Don Juan has always been somewhat like that famous monk of Arnaud de Brescia who, according to the Chronicles, lived solely on the blood of souls. That's what he likes to tint his champagne with—and such fare hasn't been found in courtesans' cabarets for quite some time!"

"I suppose," she resumed with irony, "he must have supped at the Benedictine convent with those ladies..."

"Of Perpetual Adoration, yes, Madame! For the adoration that devil of a man once inspired seems to me to last in perpetuity."

"For a Catholic, I find you rather profane," she said slowly, though visibly tense, "and I ask you to spare me the details of your harlots' suppers, if speaking of Don Juan tonight is merely your invented way of reporting on their activities."

"I'm inventing nothing, Madame. The harlots of the supper in question, if harlots they are, aren't mine... regrettably..."

"Enough, Monsieur!"

"Allow me to be modest. They were—"

"The mille e tre?" she asked, curiosity rekindling her almost-amicable manner.

"Oh! not all of them, Madame... Only a dozen. That's already quite respectable..."

"And disreputable too," she added.

"Besides, you know as well as I that not many can fit into Countess de Chiffrevas's boudoir. Grand things may have transpired there, but the boudoir itself is decidedly small..."

"What?" she exclaimed, surprised. "So it was in the boudoir that they supped?"

"Yes, Madame, in the boudoir. And why not? Men dine on battlefields. They wanted to give an extraordinary supper to Lord Don Juan, and it was worthier of him to offer it in the theater of his glory, where memories bloom in place of orange trees. A lovely notion, tender and melancholic! It wasn't the victims' ball; it was their supper."

"And Don Juan?" she asked, as Orgon says "And Tartuffe?" in the play.

"Don Juan received the affair splendidly and supped magnificently,

He, alone, before them all!

in the person of someone you know... none other than Count Jules-Amédée-Hector de Ravila de Ravilès."

"Him! He is indeed Don Juan," she said.

And, though she had outgrown the age of reverie, this sharp-beaked, sharp-clawed devotee began to dream of Count Jules-Amédée-Hector—of that man of the Juan bloodline—that ancient, eternal Juan lineage, to whom God has not given the world, but has permitted the devil to bestow it upon him.

II

What I had just told the old lady was the unvarnished truth. Barely three days had passed since a dozen women of the virtuous Faubourg Saint-Germain (rest assured, I shall not name them!) who, all twelve, according to the dowagers' gossip, had been on the most intimate terms (a charming old expression) with Count Ravila de Ravilès, had conceived the singular idea of offering him supper—with him as the only man—to celebrate... what? They didn't say. Such a supper was bold, but women, cowardly individually, are audacious in groups. Perhaps not one of this feminine banquet would have dared to offer it at her home, tête-à-tête, to Count Jules-Amédée-Hector; but together, bolstering one another, they had not feared to form the chain of Mesmer's tub around this magnetic and compromising man, Count de Ravila de Ravilès...

"What a name!"

"A providential name, Madame... Count de Ravila de Ravilès, who, incidentally, had always obeyed the imperatives of this commanding name, was indeed the incarnation of all seducers spoken of in novels and history. Even the Marquise Guy de Ruy—that discontented old woman with cold, sharp blue eyes, though less cold than her heart and less sharp than her wit—herself admitted that in these times, when the woman question daily loses importance, if anyone could recall Don Juan, surely it was he! Unfortunately, it was Don Juan in the fifth act. Prince de Ligne could never comprehend how Alcibiades might reach fifty. Yet in this respect too, Count de Ravila would forever remain Alcibiades. Like d'Orsay, that dandy carved from Michelangelo's bronze who remained handsome until his final hour, Ravila possessed that beauty peculiar to the Juan race—that mysterious lineage which proceeds not from father to son like others, but which appears sporadically, at certain intervals, among humanity's families.

It was true beauty—insolent, joyful, imperial, Juanesque beauty; the word says everything and dispenses with description. And—had he made a pact with the devil?—he retained it still... Only, God was exacting his due; life's tiger claws were beginning to score his divine brow, crowned with the roses of so many lips, and on his broad impious temples appeared the first white hairs announcing the approaching barbarian invasion and the Empire's end... He wore these, moreover, with the impassivity of pride intensified by power; but the women who had loved him sometimes regarded them with melancholy. Who knows? Perhaps they were reading the hour striking for themselves upon that brow. Alas, for them as for him, it was the hour of that terrible supper with the cold Commander of white marble, after which comes only hell—the hell of old age, until the real one arrives! And that is perhaps why, before sharing this bitter and final supper with him, they thought to offer him theirs, crafting it into a masterpiece.

Yes, a masterpiece of taste, delicacy, patrician luxury, refinement, and exquisite conception; the most charming, delicious, dainty, intoxicating, and above all most original of suppers. Original! Consider—usually joy and the thirst for amusement inspire a supper; but here, it was memory, regret, almost despair—though despair in evening dress, concealed beneath smiles or laughter, still craving this final feast or folly, this last escapade toward youth returned for an hour, this final intoxication before bidding it farewell forever!

The Amphitryonesses of this incredible supper, so incongruous with the trembling customs of their society, must have experienced something akin to Sardanapalus on his pyre, when he heaped upon it his women, slaves, horses, jewels—all his life's opulence to perish with him. They too heaped at this burning supper all their own opulence, bringing everything they possessed of beauty, wit, resources, adornment, and power, to pour it all, at once, into this supreme conflagration.

The man before whom they draped themselves in this final flame meant more to their eyes than all Asia did to Sardanapalus. They were coquettish for him as no women had ever been for any man—let alone for one seated among twelve—and this coquetry they inflamed with that jealousy normally hidden in society, yet which they needn't conceal, for they all knew this man had belonged to each of them, and shame shared is shame dispelled... Among them all, each competed to engrave her epitaph deepest in his heart.

He, that night, savored the satiated, sovereign, nonchalant, connoisseur's voluptuousness of both the nuns' confessor and the sultan. Seated like a king—like the master—at the table's center, facing Countess de Chiffrevas, in that boudoir the hue of peach blossom—or perhaps of sin itself (the spelling of that boudoir's color was never quite settled), Count de Ravila embraced with his hell-blue eyes, which so many poor creatures had mistaken for heaven's blue, that radiant circle of twelve women, dressed with genius, who at that table laden with crystal, lit candles, and flowers, displayed all the nuances of maturity, from the vermilion of the open rose to the softened gold of amber-colored grapes.

There were no tender green youths there, no little misses whom Byron detested, smelling of tarts and still mere peeled twigs in figure, but splendid and savory summers, bountiful autumns, blossomings and plenitudes, dazzling bosoms heaving majestically at bodices' uncovered edges, and beneath the cameos of bare shoulders, arms of every form—especially powerful arms, those biceps of Sabine women who had wrestled with Romans, capable of interlacing themselves to halt the very spokes of life's chariot wheel.

I mentioned ideas. One of the most charming of this supper was to have it served by chambermaids, so none could say anything had disturbed the harmony of a feast where women reigned supreme, since they were its hostesses... Lord Don Juan—from the Ravila branch—could thus bathe his tawny gaze in a sea of luminous, living flesh as Rubens places in his plump, robust paintings, while also plunging his pride into the more or less limpid, more or less troubled ether of all these hearts. For at bottom, despite all evidence to the contrary, Don Juan is a fierce spiritualist! He resembles the devil himself, who loves souls even more than bodies, and who prefers that commerce to any other, the infernal slave trader!

Spiritual, noble, with the quintessential Faubourg Saint-Germain tone, yet that night as bold as pages of the King's household in days when kings and pages existed, they achieved an incomparable scintillation of wit, movement, verve, and brio. They felt superior to all they had ever been in their most brilliant evenings, enjoying an unknown power released from deep within themselves, one they had never before suspected.

The happiness of this discovery, the sensation of life's tripled forces, alongside physical influences so decisive upon nervous beings—the brilliance of lights, the penetrating fragrance of flowers swooning in the atmosphere heated by these beautiful bodies with effluvia too potent for the blossoms, the spur of provocative wines, the idea of this supper with precisely the piquant merit of the sin the Neapolitan woman demanded of her sherbet to find it exquisite, the intoxicating thought of complicity in this little crime of a daring supper—yes! But one that didn't descend vulgarly into Regency debauchery; one that remained a Faubourg Saint-Germain, nineteenth-century supper, where from all these adorable bodices, lined with hearts that had witnessed passion and still enjoyed kindling it, not a single pin fell... All these elements, acting in concert, stretched the mysterious harp each of these marvelous temperaments carried within, as taut as possible without breaking, reaching sublime octaves and ineffable crescendos... It must have been a sight, mustn't it? Will Ravila ever write this extraordinary page of his Memoirs? That remains a question, but only he could write it... As I told the Marquise Guy de Ruy, I was not present at this supper, and if I relate some details and the story of its conclusion, it's because I have them from Ravila himself, who, faithful to the traditional and characteristic indiscretion of the Juan race, took the trouble one evening to recount them to me.

III

It was late, then—or rather, early! Morning approached. Against the ceiling and at a certain spot on the hermetically sealed pink silk curtains of the boudoir, one could see an opal drop forming and rounding, like a growing eye—day's curious eye peering through to observe the proceedings in this inflamed boudoir. Languor was beginning to overcome these Round Table knights, these female diners so animated moments before. We know that moment in all suppers when the fatigue of emotion and the night passed seems to cast itself over everything—over collapsing hairdos, burning vermilioned or pale cheeks, weary gazes in darkened eyes growing heavy, and even over the widening, creeping lights of the thousand candles in the candelabra, those fire bouquets with stems of sculpted bronze and gold.

The general conversation, long sustained with animation, a shuttlecock game where each had extended her racket stroke, had fragmented and crumbled. Nothing distinct could be heard amid the harmonious murmur of those aristocratic voices, mingling and chattering like birds at dawn on a woodland edge... when one of them—a head voice, that one!—imperious and almost impertinent, as a duchess's voice should be, suddenly said above the others to Count de Ravila words that were doubtless the conclusion of a private conversation between them, which none of these women, each chatting with her neighbor, had overheard:

"You who are reputed to be the Don Juan of our time, you should tell us about the conquest that most flattered your masculine pride and which you judge, in the light of this moment, the most beautiful love of your life."

And the question, like the voice that spoke it, cut sharply through the noise of all these scattered conversations, suddenly imposing silence.

It was the voice of the Duchess of ***. I shall not lift her mask of asterisks, but perhaps you'll recognize her when I tell you she is the palest blonde in both complexion and hair, with the blackest eyes beneath long amber eyebrows, in all the Faubourg Saint-Germain. She sat like a righteous soul at God's right hand—at Count de Ravila's right, the god of this feast who no longer required his enemies to serve as footstools; slender and ideal as an arabesque, as a fairy, in her green velvet gown with silver reflections, whose long train twisted around her chair, rather perfectly representing the serpent's tail that ended Melusine's charming haunches.

"Now there's an idea!" said Countess de Chiffrevas, as if to support, in her capacity as hostess, the duchess's desire and motion. "Yes, of all loves, inspired or felt, which would you most wish to relive, if possible?"

"Oh! I would relive them all!" exclaimed Ravila with that insatiability of a Roman Emperor that these thoroughly jaded men sometimes possess. He raised his champagne glass—not the crude, pagan goblet that has replaced it today, but the true flute of our ancestors, perhaps named so for the celestial melodies it often pours into our hearts. Then he embraced with a circular glance all these women forming such a magnificent belt around the table. "And yet," he added, replacing his glass before him with an astonishing melancholy for such a Nebuchadnezzar who had thus far eaten no herb but the tarragon salads of Café Anglais, "and yet it's true that among life's passions, one always shines stronger in memory than the others as life advances—one for which a man would sacrifice all the rest!"

"The diamond of the jewel box," said Countess de Chiffrevas pensively, perhaps examining the facets of her own.

"And from my country's legend," Princess Jable added in turn, who hails from the Ural Mountains' foothills, "that famous and fabulous diamond, pink at first, which later turns black, yet remains a diamond—even more brilliant black than pink..." She said this with the strange charm peculiar to her, that Bohemian! For she is indeed a Bohemian, married for love by the handsomest prince of the Polish emigration, who appears every bit as much a princess as if born beneath the Jagellons' canopies.

Then came an explosion! "Yes," they all cried. "Tell us, Count!" they added passionately, already imploring, with curiosity's quivers even in the curls at the napes of their necks; pressing together, shoulder against shoulder; some with cheek in hand, elbow on table; others leaning back against chair backs, open fans over mouths; all firing at him with their bright, inquisitive eyes.

"If you absolutely insist..." said the Count with the nonchalance of one who knows that waiting intensifies desire.

"Absolutely!" declared the duchess, looking like a Turkish despot examining the edge of his scimitar—the golden edge of her dessert knife.

"Listen, then," he concluded, still nonchalant.

They melted with attentiveness, watching him. They devoured him with their eyes. Any love story interests women, but perhaps this one's charm lay, for each of them, in the thought that the story he would tell might be her own... They knew him too much the gentleman, too steeped in society's ways, not to trust he would conceal names and thicken, when necessary, details too transparent; and this idea, this certainty, only heightened their desire for the story. They felt more than desire; they felt hope.

Their vanity discovered rivals in this memory evoked as the most beautiful in the life of a man who must have had so many splendid ones! The old sultan was about to toss the handkerchief once more—which no hand would retrieve, yet which she to whom it was thrown would feel falling silently into her heart...

Now here, contrary to their expectations, is the little unexpected thunderclap he sent rolling across all those attentive foreheads:

IV

"I have often heard moralists, great experimenters of life," said Count de Ravila, "claim that the strongest of all our loves is neither the first nor the last, as many believe, but the second. Yet in matters of love, everything is both true and false, and at any rate, this wasn't so for me... What you ask of me, Ladies, what I have to tell you tonight, dates to the most beautiful moment of my youth. I was no longer precisely what one calls a young man, but I was a young man, and, as an old uncle of mine, a Knight of Malta, used to say to designate that period of life, 'I had completed my caravans.' In full vigor, then, I also found myself in what the Italians so charmingly call 'full relation' with a woman whom you all know and have all admired..."

Here the look they all exchanged simultaneously, each with all the others, this group of women drinking in the words of this old serpent, was something one must witness, for it defies description.

"This woman was indeed," continued Ravila, "everything you might imagine most distinguished, in every sense that word permits. She was young, wealthy, of a superb name, beautiful, witty, with a broad artistic intelligence, and natural with it all, as one is in your world when one truly is... Besides, having, in that world, no other aspiration than to please me and devote herself—to appear to me the most tender of mistresses and the best of friends.

I was not, I believe, the first man she had loved... She had already loved once, and it wasn't her husband; but it had been virtuously, platonically, idealistically, with that love which exercises the heart more than it fills it, which prepares its strengths for another love that must always soon follow; with that trial love, finally, which resembles the white mass young priests say to practice saying, without error, the true mass, the consecrated mass... When I entered her life, she was still only at the white mass. I became the real mass, and she then celebrated it with all the ceremony required and as sumptuously as a cardinal."

At that word, the prettiest circle of smiles turned on these twelve delicious attentive mouths, like a circular ripple on a limpid lake's surface... Rapid, but enchanting!

"She was truly a singular being!" resumed the Count. "Rarely have I seen more genuine goodness, more compassion, more excellent sentiments, even in passion which, as you know, isn't always kind. Never have I seen less artifice, less prudery and coquetry—those two qualities so often entangled in women like a skein through which a cat's claw has passed... There was no cat in this one... She was what these infernal bookmakers, who poison us with their manners of speaking, would call a primitive nature, adorned by civilization; but she had only its charming luxuries, and not a single one of those little corruptions which seem to us even more charming than these luxuries..."

"Was she brunette?" interrupted the duchess suddenly and directly, impatient with all this metaphysics.

"Ah! your vision isn't keen enough!" said Ravila shrewdly. "Yes, she was brunette, brunette of hair to the blackest jet, the most mirror-like ebony I've ever seen gleam on the voluptuous convexity of a woman's lustrous head, but she was blonde of complexion—and it's by complexion, not hair, that one must judge whether one is brunette or blonde," added the great observer, who hadn't studied women merely to paint their portraits. "She was a blonde with black hair..."

All the blonde heads at this table, blonde only by their hair, made an imperceptible movement. Evidently for them, the story's interest was already waning.

"She had Night's hair," resumed Ravila, "but upon Dawn's face, for her visage was resplendent with that incarnadine, dazzling, and rare freshness that had withstood everything in that nocturnal Parisian life she had led for years, which burns so many roses in its candelabra flames. Hers seemed merely to have caught fire, so luminous was the carmine on her cheeks and lips! Their double brilliance harmonized well with the ruby she habitually wore on her forehead, for in those days women wore ferronières, creating in her face, with her two incendiary eyes whose flame concealed their color, a triangle of three rubies! Slender but robust, even majestic, built to be a cuirassier colonel's wife—her husband was then merely a squadron leader in the light cavalry—she possessed, great lady though she was, a peasant woman's health, one who absorbs sunlight through her skin, and she possessed likewise the ardor of this imbibed sun, as much in her soul as in her veins—yes, present and always ready... But here's where the strangeness began! This powerful and ingenuous being, this crimson and pure nature like the blood watering her beautiful cheeks and rosying her arms, was... would you believe it? awkward in her caresses..."

Here some eyes lowered, but rose again, mischievous...

"Awkward in her caresses as she was imprudent in life," continued Ravila, placing no more emphasis on the information. "The man she loved had constantly to teach her two things she never learned... how not to ruin herself before a world always armed and implacable, and how to practice in intimacy love's great art, which prevents love from dying. She possessed love, however; but love's art eluded her... The opposite of so many women who possess only the art! Now, to understand and apply the Prince's politics, one must already be Borgia. Borgia precedes Machiavelli. One is the poet; the other, the critic. She was not at all Borgia. She was an honest woman in love, naive despite her colossal beauty, like the little girl in the overdoor painting who, being thirsty, tries to cup water from the fountain in her hand, and who, breathless, lets everything slip through her fingers, remaining confused...

It was almost charming, moreover, this contrast between confusion and awkwardness in this tall passionate woman who, seeing her in society, would have deceived so many observers—who had everything of love, even happiness, but lacked the power to return it as it was given. Only I wasn't then contemplative enough to content myself with this artistic charm, and it's even the reason which, on certain days, made her anxious, jealous, and violent—all that one becomes when in love, and she loved! But jealousy, anxiety, violence, all perished in the inexhaustible goodness of her heart at the first harm she wished or thought to inflict, as maladroit at wounding as at caressing! A lioness of an unknown species, who imagined she had claws, but who, when she wished to extend them, never found any in her magnificent velvet paws. With velvet she scratched!

"Where is he going with this?" said Countess de Chiffrevas to her neighbor, "for truly, this cannot be Don Juan's most beautiful love!"

All these complicated women couldn't believe in such simplicity!

"We lived, then," said Ravila, "in an intimacy occasionally stormy but never torn, and this intimacy was, in that provincial town called Paris, a secret to no one... The Marquise... she was a marquise..."

There were three at this table, also dark-haired. But they didn't flinch. They knew too well he wasn't speaking of them... The only velvet they collectively possessed was on one's upper lip—a voluptuously shaded lip which, at that moment, I swear, expressed considerable disdain.

"And thrice marquise, as pashas can be three-tailed pashas!" continued Ravila, whose verve was rising. "The Marquise belonged to that class of women who can hide nothing and who, even if they wished, could not. Her own daughter, a thirteen-year-old child, despite her innocence, perceived all too clearly her mother's feelings for me. I don't know which poet asked what daughters think of us who have loved their mothers. A profound question! which I've often asked myself when surprised by the spy's gaze, black and threatening, ambushing me from the depths of this girl's large dark eyes. This child, fiercely reserved, who usually left the salon upon my arrival and placed herself as far from me as possible when forced to remain, harbored for me an almost convulsive horror... which she sought to conceal, but which, stronger than herself, betrayed her... This revealed itself in imperceptible details, not one of which escaped me. The Marquise, no observer herself, nevertheless constantly told me: 'We must be careful, my friend. I believe my daughter is jealous of you...'

"I exercised far more caution than she.

This child could have been the devil incarnate, I would have defied her to read my game... But her mother's game was transparent. Everything showed in the purple mirror of that face, so often troubled! From the daughter's apparent hatred, I couldn't help thinking she had discovered her mother's secret through some expressed emotion, some involuntarily drenched look of tenderness. She was, if you care to know, a sickly child, entirely unworthy of the splendid mold from which she came, ugly even by her mother's admission, who only loved her more for it; a little burnt topaz... what shall I say? a kind of bronze maquette, but with black eyes... Magical! And who, since..."

He stopped after this flash... as if wanting to extinguish it, having said too much... Interest had returned, general, noticeable, intense, to every face, and the countess had even muttered between her beautiful teeth the word of enlightened impatience: "At last!"

V

"When I first began my liaison with her mother," resumed Count de Ravila, "I had shown this little girl all the caressing familiarities one has with all children... I brought her bags of sweets. I called her 'little mask', and very often, while chatting with her mother, I amused myself by smoothing her headband at the temple—a band of unhealthy hair, black, with tinder reflections—but the 'little mask', whose wide mouth offered a pretty smile to everyone else, withdrew her smile for me alone, fiercely knitting her eyebrows, and, through sheer tension, transformed from a 'little mask' into a truly wrinkled mask of a humiliated caryatid, seeming, when my hand passed over her forehead, to bear an entablature's weight beneath it.

So, encountering this sullenness always in the same place, appearing almost hostile, I eventually abandoned this sensitive plant, marigold-colored, which contracted so violently at the slightest caress... I no longer even spoke to her! 'She senses well that you're stealing from her,' the Marquise would tell me. 'Her instinct warns her you're taking a portion of her mother's love.' And sometimes, in her straightforwardness, she added: 'This child is my conscience and my remorse, her jealousy.'

Once, wishing to question her about this profound estrangement she felt toward me, the Marquise received only broken, stubborn, stupid responses, which must be extracted with a corkscrew of repeated questions from all children unwilling to speak... 'There's nothing... I don't know,' and seeing this little bronze's hardness, she ceased questioning her and, weary, turned away...

I forgot to mention that this bizarre child was intensely devout, with a somber, Spanish, medieval, superstitious devotion. She twisted around her lean body all kinds of scapulars and plastered on her chest, flat as the back of a hand, and around her tanned neck, heaps of crosses, Virgins, and Holy Spirits! 'You are unfortunately an impious man,' the Marquise told me. 'Perhaps while chatting you've scandalized her. Be careful of everything you say before her, I beg you. Don't aggravate my wrongs in this child's eyes, toward whom I already feel so guilty!' Yet as the child's conduct never changed, never softened: 'You'll end up hating her,' added the anxious Marquise, 'and I couldn't blame you.' But she was mistaken: I felt merely indifferent toward this sullen little girl, except when she exasperated me.

I maintained between us the politeness that exists between adults, particularly adults who dislike each other. I treated her ceremoniously, addressing her pompously as 'Mademoiselle', while she returned an icy 'Monsieur'. She refused to do anything before me that might reveal her—I won't say in a favorable light, but simply outside herself... Her mother could never persuade her to show me a drawing or play piano for me. When I surprised her at it, practicing with great ardor and concentration, she would stop abruptly, rise from the stool, and play no more...

Once, her mother insisting (there were people present), she positioned herself before the open instrument with a martyred air that, I assure you, held nothing sweet about it, and began some piece or other with abominably contradictory fingers. I stood at the fireplace, observing her obliquely. Her back was turned to me, with no mirror before her in which she might see me watching... Suddenly her back (she habitually carried herself poorly, her mother often saying: 'If you always hold yourself so, you'll develop a chest ailment'), suddenly her back straightened as if my gaze had broken her spine like a bullet; and violently slamming down the piano lid, which made a dreadful noise in falling, she fled the salon... They went to find her, but that evening they could never induce her to return.

"Well, it seems the most conceited men are never conceited enough, for this shadowy child's conduct, which interested me so little, gave me nothing to think about regarding her feelings toward me. Nor did it strike her mother. The Marquise, jealous of every woman in her salon, was no more jealous than I was vain concerning this little girl, who eventually revealed herself in an incident that the Marquise, effusiveness itself in intimate moments, still pale from the terror she had experienced yet laughing heartily at having felt it, had the imprudence to relate to me."

He emphasized by inflection the word "imprudence" as the most skillful actor might have done—a man who knew that his entire story's interest now hung by that single word's thread!

But apparently that sufficed, for these twelve beautiful women's faces had reignited with a feeling as intense as Cherubim's faces before God's throne. Is not the feeling of curiosity in women as intense as the feeling of adoration in Angels?... He regarded them all, these Cherubim faces not ending at the shoulders, and finding them sufficiently primed for what he must tell them, resumed quickly without further pause:

"Yes, she was laughing heartily, the Marquise, just thinking about it! But she hadn't always laughed!—she told me some time later, reporting the incident. 'Imagine,' she said (I'll try to recall her exact words), 'I was sitting exactly where we are now'—(on one of those settees called dos-à-dos, furniture best conceived for sulking and reconciling without changing places)—'But you weren't where you are now, thankfully! when they announced... guess who?... you'd never guess... the parish priest of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Do you know him?... No! You never attend mass, which is terribly wrong... How could you know this poor old priest, a saint who never sets foot in any parish woman's house except for collections for his poor or his church? I initially thought that was his purpose.

He had once prepared my daughter for her first communion, and she, who took communion often, had kept him as her confessor. For this reason, I had many times invited him to dinner, always in vain. When he entered, he appeared extremely troubled, and I noticed on his ordinarily placid features an embarrassment so poorly concealed and so profound that it couldn't possibly stem from mere shyness, compelling me to immediately ask: Goodness! what's the matter, Father?

—What's the matter, Madame, he replied, is that you see before you the most embarrassed man alive. For over fifty years I've served in holy ministry, yet never have I been charged with a more delicate commission nor one that I understood less than the one I must now carry out for you...'

'And he sat down, asking me to have my door closed for the duration of our conversation. You can well imagine that all these solemnities frightened me a little... He noticed it.

— Do not be so alarmed, Madame, — he continued; — you need all your composure to listen to me and to help me understand the unheard-of matter at hand, which in truth I cannot accept... Your daughter, on whose behalf I come, is, you know as well as I, an angel of purity and piety. I know her soul. I have held it in my hands since she was seven years old, and I am persuaded that she is mistaken... perhaps through excess of innocence... But this morning, she came to declare to me in confession that she was, you will scarcely believe it, Madame, nor do I, but I must speak the word... pregnant!'

'I uttered a cry...

— I cried out just as you did in my confessional this morning, the priest continued, at this declaration made with all the marks of the most sincere and most terrible despair! I know this child thoroughly. She is ignorant of everything in life and sin... She is certainly of all the young girls I confess the one for whom I would most answer before God. That is all I can tell you! We priests are the surgeons of souls, and we must deliver them of the shames they conceal with hands that neither wound nor stain them. I therefore questioned this despairing child with every possible precaution, pressed her with questions, yet once she had spoken, once the fault was confessed—which she calls a crime and her eternal damnation, for she believes herself damned, poor girl!—she answered me no more and obstinately enclosed herself in a silence broken only to beg me to come to you, Madame, and inform you of her crime, — for mama must know, — she said, — and I will never have the strength to confess it to her!'

'I listened to the priest of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. You can imagine with what mixture of stupefaction and anxiety! Like him and even more than he, I believed myself certain of my daughter's innocence; but innocents often fall, even through innocence... And what she had told her confessor was not impossible... I didn't believe it... I didn't want to believe it; but nevertheless it wasn't impossible!... She was only thirteen, but she was already a woman, and this very precocity had frightened me... A fever, a surge of curiosity seized me.

I want and will know everything! — I said to this bewildered priest before me who, as he listened, was overflowing with embarrassment from his hat. — Leave me, Father. She wouldn't speak before you. But I'm certain she'll tell me everything... that I'll extract it all from her, and then we'll understand what is now incomprehensible!'

'And the priest departed on that note, — and as soon as he had gone, I hurried to my daughter's room, lacking the patience to have her summoned and wait for her.

I found her prostrate before the crucifix above her bed, not kneeling but prostrate, pale as death, her eyes dry yet very red, like eyes that have wept abundantly. I took her in my arms, seated her beside me, then upon my knees, and told her I couldn't believe what her confessor had just told me.

But she interrupted me to assure me with heartbreaking tones and expressions that it was true, what he had said, and it was then that, increasingly anxious and astonished, I asked her the name of the one who...

I didn't finish... Ah! that was the terrible moment! She buried her head and face on my shoulder... but I could see the fiery flush at the back of her neck, and I felt her trembling. The silence she had opposed to her confessor, she now maintained with me. It was impenetrable.

— It must be someone far beneath you, for you to feel such shame?... — I said, hoping to make her speak by provoking her pride, for I knew she was proud.

But it was still the same silence, the same burying of her head against my shoulder. This lasted what seemed an eternity to me, when suddenly she said without raising herself: 'Swear to me that you will forgive me, mama.'

I swore everything she wanted, even at the risk of a hundred perjuries—I cared so little! I was impatient. I was seething... It seemed my forehead would burst open and release my brain...

— 'Well! it is Monsieur de Ravila', she said in a low voice; and she remained as she was in my arms.

— 'Ah! the effect of that name, Amédée! I received in a single blow, straight to the heart, the punishment for the great sin of my life! You are, in matters of women, such a formidable man, you have made me fear such rivalries, that the horrible 'why not?' said about the man one loves and of whom one doubts, rose within me... What I felt, I had the strength to hide from this cruel child, who had perhaps divined her mother's love.

— Monsieur de Ravila! — I said, with a voice that seemed to me to reveal everything, — but you never speak to him?' — You avoid him, — I was about to add, for anger was beginning; I felt it rising... You are both so deceptive then? — But I suppressed that... Didn't I need to learn the details, one by one, of this horrible seduction?... And I asked them of her with a gentleness I thought would kill me, when she freed me from this vise, from this torture, by saying to me naively:

— 'Mother, it was one evening. He was in the large armchair at the corner of the fireplace, opposite the settee. He remained there a long time, then he rose, and I had the misfortune to sit down after him in this armchair he had vacated. Oh! mama!... it was as if I had fallen into fire. I wanted to get up, I couldn't... my heart failed me! and I felt... here, mama... that what I had... was a child!...'

The Marquise had laughed, said Ravila, when she recounted this story to him; but none of the twelve women seated around this table thought of laughing—nor did Ravila himself.

"And that is, Ladies, believe it if you will," he added by way of conclusion, "the most beautiful love that I have inspired in my life!"

And he fell silent, as did they. They were pensive... Had they understood him?

When Joseph was a slave at Potiphar's house, he was so handsome, says the Koran, that, from reverie, the women he served at table cut their fingers with their knives while gazing at him. But we are no longer in Joseph's time, and the preoccupations one has at dessert are less intense.

"What a great fool, with all her wit, your Marquise was, to have told you such a thing!" said the Duchess, who permitted herself to be cynical, but who cut nothing at all with the gold knife she still held in her hand.

Countess de Chiffrevas was gazing attentively into the depths of a Rhine wine glass, emerald crystal, as mysterious as her thought.

"And the little mask?" she asked.

"Oh, she had died, very young and married in the provinces, when her mother told me this story," replied Ravila.

"Otherwise!..." said the pensive Duchess.

From all of us here at the Elephant Island Chronicles, we hope you have enjoyed this short story by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly. Until next time, stay curious.

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