Sarrasine | Page 5

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 the gold ear-rings which hung at his ears, by the rings
containing stones of marvelous beauty which sparkled on his fingers,
like the brilliants in a river of gems around a woman's neck. Lastly, this
species of Japanese idol had constantly upon his blue lips, a fixed,
unchanging smile, the shadow of an implacable and sneering laugh,
like that of a death's head. As silent and motionless as a statue, he
exhaled the musk-like odor of the old dresses which a duchess' heirs
exhume from her wardrobe during the inventory. If the old man turned
his eyes toward the company, it seemed that the movements of those
globes, no longer capable of reflecting a gleam, were accomplished by
an almost imperceptible effort; and, when the eyes stopped, he who was
watching them was not certain finally that they had moved at all. As I
saw, beside that human ruin, a young woman whose bare neck and
arms and breast were white as snow; whose figure was well-rounded
and beautiful in its youthful grace; whose hair, charmingly arranged
above an alabaster forehead, inspired love; whose eyes did not receive
but gave forth light, who was sweet and fresh, and whose fluffy curls,
whose fragrant breath, seemed too heavy, too harsh, too overpowering
for that shadow, for that man of dust--ah! the