Sarrasine | Page 7

glance must pass through her as the sun's rays pass through
flawless glass. They stood there before me, side by side, so close
together, that the stranger rubbed against the gauze dress, and the
wreaths of flowers, and the hair, slightly crimped, and the floating ends
of the sash.
I had brought that young woman to Madame de Lanty's ball. As it was
her first visit to that house, I forgave her her stifled laugh; but I hastily
made an imperious sign which abashed her and inspired respect for her
neighbor. She sat down beside me. The old man did not choose to leave
the charming creature, to whom he clung capriciously with the silent
and apparently causeless obstinacy to which very old persons are
subject, and which makes them resemble children. In order to sit down
beside the young lady he needed a folding-chair. His slightest
movements were marked by the inert heaviness, the stupid hesitancy,

which characterize the movements of a paralytic. He sat slowly down
upon his chair with great caution, mumbling some unintelligible words.
His cracked voice resembled the noise made by a stone falling into a
well. The young woman nervously pressed my hand, as if she were
trying to avoid a precipice, and shivered when that man, at whom she
happened to be looking, turned upon her two lifeless, sea-green eyes,
which could be compared to nothing save tarnished mother-of-pearl.
"I am afraid," she said, putting her lips to my ear.
"You can speak," I replied; "he hears with great difficulty."
"You know him, then?"
"Yes."
Thereupon she summoned courage to scrutinize for a moment that
creature for which no human language has a name, form without
substance, a being without life, or life without action. She was under
the spell of that timid curiosity which impels women to seek perilous
excitement, to gaze at chained tigers and boa-constrictors, shuddering
all the while because the barriers between them are so weak. Although
the little old man's back was bent like a day-laborer's, it was easy to see
that he must formerly have been of medium height. His excessive
thinness, the slenderness of his limbs, proved that he had always been
of slight build. He wore black silk breeches which hung about his
fleshless thighs in folds, like a lowered veil. An anatomist would
instinctively have recognized the symptoms of consumption in its
advanced stages, at sight of the tiny legs which served to support that
strange frame. You would have said that they were a pair of
cross-bones on a gravestone. A feeling of profound horror seized the
heart when a close scrutiny revealed the marks made by decrepitude
upon that frail machine.
He wore a white waistcoat embroidered with gold, in the old style, and
his linen was of dazzling whiteness. A shirt-frill of English lace, yellow
with age, the magnificence of which a queen might have envied,
formed a series of yellow ruffles on his breast; but upon him the lace
seemed rather a worthless rag than an ornament. In the centre of the
frill a diamond of inestimable value gleamed like a sun. That
superannuated splendor, that display of treasure, of great intrinsic worth,
but utterly without taste, served to bring out in still bolder relief the
strange creature's face. The frame was worthy of the portrait. That dark

face was full of angles and furrowed deep in every direction; the chin
was furrowed; there were great hollows at the temples; the eyes were
sunken in yellow orbits. The maxillary bones, which his indescribable
gauntness caused to protrude, formed deep cavities in the centre of both
cheeks. These protuberances, as the light fell upon them, caused
curious effects of light and shadow which deprived that face of its last
vestige of resemblance to the human countenance. And then, too, the
lapse of years had drawn the fine, yellow skin so close to the bones that
it described a multitude of wrinkles everywhere, either circular like the
ripples in the water caused by a stone which a child throws in, or
star-shaped like a pane of glass cracked by a blow; but everywhere very
deep, and as close together as the leaves of a closed book. We often see
more hideous old men; but what contributed more than aught else to
give to the spectre that rose before us the aspect of an artificial creation
was the red and white paint with which he glistened. The eyebrows
shone in the light with a lustre which disclosed a very well executed bit
of painting. Luckily for the eye, saddened by such a mass of ruins, his
corpse-like skull was concealed beneath a light wig, with innumerable
curls which indicated extraordinary pretensions to elegance. Indeed, the
feminine coquettishness of this fantastic apparition was emphatically
asserted by