The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley Read Free Book Online Page B

poetry, he could at least talk about it. After 1623 the Public Prosecutor’s drawing-room became the centre of Loudun’s intellectual life. It was a pretty feeble life, now that Sainte-Marthe was gone. Trincant himself was a well-read man; but most of his friends and relatives were not. Excluded from the Hôtel Sainte-Marthe, these people had, unfortunately, a prescriptive right to an invitation from the Public Prosecutor. But when they came in at the door, learning and good conversation flew out of the window. How could it be otherwise with those bevies of cackling women; those lawyers who knew about nothing except statutes and procedure; those country squires whose only interests were dogs and horses? And finally there were M. Adam the apothecary, and M. Mannoury the surgeon—Adam, the long-nosed, Mannoury, the moon-faced and pot-bellied. With all the gravity of doctors of the Sorbonne, they held forth on the virtues of antimony and blood-letting, on the value of soap in clysters and the cautery in the treatment of gunshot wounds. Then, lowering their voices, they would speak (always, of course, in strictest confidence) of the Marquise’s pox, of the King’s Counsel’s wife’s second miscarriage, of the Bailiff’s sister’s young daughter’s green sickness. At once absurd and pretentious, solemn and grotesque, the apothecary and the surgeon were predestined butts. They invited sarcasm, they solicited the shafts of derision. With the merciless ferocity of a clever man who will go to any lengths for the sake of a laugh, the parson gave them what they asked for. In a very little while he had two new enemies.
    And meanwhile another was in the making. The Public Prosecutor was a middle-aged widower with two marriageable daughters, of whom the elder, Philippe, was so remarkably pretty that, throughout the winter of 1623, the parson found himself looking more and more frequently in her direction.
    Watching the girl as she moved among her father’s guests, he compared her appraisingly with his mental image of that spritely young widow whom he was now consoling, every Tuesday afternoon, for the untimely death of her poor dear husband, the vintner. Ninon was unschooled, could hardly sign her own name. But under the inconsolable sable of her weeds, the full-blown flesh was only just beginning to lose its firmness. There were treasures there of warmth and whiteness; there was an inexhaustible fund of sensuality, at once frenzied and scientific, violent and yet admirably docile and well-trained. And, thank God, there had been no barriers of prudery to be laboriously demolished, no wearisome preliminaries of Platonic idealization and Petrarchian courtship to be gone through! At their third meeting, he had ventured to quote the opening lines of one of his favourite poems:
    Souvent j’ ai menti les ébats
    Des nuits, t’ayant entre mes bras
    Folâtre toute nue;
    Mais telle jouissance, hélas!
    Encor m’est inconnue .
     
    There had been no protest, only the frankest laughter and a look out of the corner of the eye, very brief but unequivocal. At the end of his fifth visit, he had been in a position to quote Tahureau again.
    Adieu, ma petite maîtresse ,
    Adieu, ma gorgette et mon sein ,
    Adieu, ma délicate main ,
    Adieu, donc, mon téton d’albâtre ,
    Adieu, ma cuissette folâtre ,
    Adieu, mon œil, adieu, mon cœur ,
    Adieu, ma friande douceur!
    Mais avant que je me départe ,
    Avant que plus loin je m’écarte ,
    Que je tâte encore ce flanc
    Et le rond de ce marbre blanc .
     
    Goodbye, but only until the day after tomorrow, when she would come to St. Peter’s for her weekly confession—he was a stickler for weekly confessions—and the usual penance. And between then and next Tuesday he would have preached the sermon he was now preparing for the feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin—the finest thing he had done since M. de Sainte-Marthe’s funeral oration. What eloquence, what choice and profound