On a tripod taller than a man’s height there was a Chinese jade vase with a big bunch of violet carnations and black roses (they looked as if they had been skillfully made of wrought iron) carnally perfumed with ambergris; they let out a cry of picturesque immodesty.
The notes of the invisible violin were like drops of dew slipping along a silk spider’s web in the sun.
Tito Arnaudi: And who’s the man that looks like a convalescent cuckold?
Pietro Nocera: He’s an antique dealer. He and the other two who look like incurable sentimentalists are three ex-lovers of the lady of the house. They’re called the mummies’ gallery, because their volcanic lover has made them literally useless from the love-making point of view. It seems that in that connection the lady once said: What does it matter to me if a man is of no use to other women after he has been useful to me?
Tito Arnaudi: What rubbish. Do you believe that excess can lead to —
Surgeon: And why shouldn’t it? Look at the tortoise. It lives for a hundred years, but makes love only once a year.
Painter: I don’t envy it. So far as I’m concerned, there’s only one thing that’s worse than excess.
Surgeon: And what’s that?
Painter: Abstinence.
The man who was always asleep, waking up: I heard you talking about me; you said I was a cuckold. Cuckold, tart — they’re just words. The cuckold is ridiculous because of the existence of the word. A deceived woman would be just as ridiculous if there were a corresponding word for her. An unfaithful woman is a tart. An unfaithful man is merely an unfaithful man, only because a term for a male tart has not yet been coined. But what does it matter? I spend my time in dream or sleep. When there’s morphine in my veins I dream; when there isn’t I sleep.
And he dropped off to sleep again.
Tito Arnaudi: But why does he sleep all the time?
Surgeon: Morphine.
Two flunkeys came in and raised both parts of the curtain door to allow two dancers to appear.
“Danse polynésienne,” the male dancer announced, putting his arm round his partner’s waist.
The violinist struck up a wild tune.
But no one took any notice. The surgeon had taken a small gold box from the pocket of his white waistcoat and inhaled a big pinch of cocaine, and at Kalantan’s instigation a flunkey had filled the glasses with more ether and more champagne.
Kalantan went down on her knees in front of a glass that had been put on the floor and drank as if she were drinking the clear water of a lake.
While she drank, Tito Arnaudi put his face near her black hair, which had an exciting odor of musk, like India ink.
The dancers withdrew, and the flunkies reappeared with small white cups like those in which Arabs take coffee.
“Strawberries with chloroform,” a thin lady with a green wig explained.
“Who’s she? Tito asked.
“A recently launched hetaira. You’d have said she was born and had spent her life at an imperial court, though last year she was still a waitress at a divisional police station. These women provide the most remarkable examples of mimicry in the animal kingdom. One year they still have dirty feet, and the next they graciously offer you their hand and take offence if you don’t kiss it. One year they don’t know whether numbers are read from left to right or from right to left, and the next you find them talking about shares in the railway from Senegal to Zanzibar by way of Lake Tanganyika and discussing the latest Goncourt Prize and the paintings of Cézanne.”
The room was suddenly invaded by a swarm of butterflies. Some of the terrified creatures crashed into the mirrors in their dash for freedom, and others performed the most absurd evolutions among the guests. They glittered like pieces of cloth shot with metal, purple, gold and glass, silver and ice, air and brass. They flew desperately this way and that, landing upside down on the luminous ceiling or fluttering on the floor. One came to rest on the moiré silk lapel of an evening dress jacket, with its wings spread and its huge stupefied eyes.
Then it took off again, hovered undecidedly between a woman’s red hair and a glass, and then, asphyxiated by the fumes of ether and chloroform, fell into a glass of champagne, covering it with its spread wings like a paten on a chalice.
Others alighted on the flowers.
“They’re sent to me by a friend of mine in Brazil,” Kalantan explained. “They’re the loveliest butterflies in the world. Every steamer from Rio de Janeiro brings me a small cageful. I’d like to have an arena and the most marvelous wild beasts and give them my servants to eat for your entertainment, but unfortunately the only exotic creatures I can offer you are butterflies.”
“What a bitch she is,” Tito said to Nocera. “If they’re all like that in her country, I shall begin to think the Kurds are right and I shall approve of the Armenian massacres.”
“And so the only spectacle I can offer you is the death of the butterflies,” Kalantan went on. “They die intoxicated by subtle poisons and perfumes. Perfume affects butterflies as it does gems. Did you know that perfumes harm gems? It’s an enviable death, because butterflies preserve all the beauty they had in life. You see them in collections transfixed by pins, and they seem to be alive because of their variegated colors. When I die you must all come and make me up as if I were to appear at a dress rehearsal at the Comédie.”
“Poor creatures,” said the incurable sentimentalist.
“Stop it,” the Armenian lady said to him. “Besides, I think my house is a tomb very worthy of a butterfly. A house,” she added with a smile, “where distinguished personalities such as yourselves come to kill yourselves little by little.”
“But where’s your coffin?” asked Tito.
“You wouldn’t want me to have it carried round in procession in accordance with the Egyptian practice at banquets,” Kalantan said.
“Why not?” said Tito. “There’s no one here who has a horror of death.”
“I have a certain familiarity with coffins,” the skinny painter said. “During my worst days as a Bohemian I got permission to sleep on a pile of straw in a coffin factory near the Bercy custom house. On the first night I couldn’t sleep. I have a lively imagination, and I kept trying to assure myself that all those boxes were to be used for transporting fruit or ladies’ underwear, but the shape gave the lie to that theory. On the second night I slept by fits and starts, and on the third night I slept well. But, though I had no more nightmares, the damp got into my bones and bits of straw into my skin.
“One evening they had made a magnificent coffin for a bishop, who was to take up permanent residence in it next day. It was a masterpiece, both decoratively and for comfort. There was a cushion for the episcopal feet and a pillow for the episcopal skull. All that was lacking was the episcopal corpse. There was even a kind of umbrella stand for the episcopal alpenstock.
“I decided it was unfair that a living artist should have to sleep on straw while a corpse was being given such a comfortable coffin to decompose in and, when I was sure that the caretaker had gone to bed, I went to sleep in it. I slept in papal splendor in that coffin.
“Next day they took it away, but there was a deluxe coffin there every evening, though not such a splendid one as the bishop’s, and none was to be expected until another bishop died. They were actually too luxurious for a proletarian like me. I admit that at first it was rather inconvenient to change beds, change coffins, every evening, but I got perfectly used to it, and I wouldn’t have exchanged my coffin for the bed of the Roi Soleil that’s kept at Versailles.