Allegories; Fantasy fiction; Historical fiction; Middle Ages -- Fiction
Then he recoiled, because there is no mistaking the feel of dead
flesh. The effigy was not colored stone: it was the body of a dead
woman. More unaccountable still, it was the body of Félise de
Puysange, whom Jurgen had loved very long ago in Gâtinais, a great
many years before he set up in business as a pawnbroker.
Very strange it was to Jurgen again to see her face. He had often
wondered what had become of this large brown woman; had wondered if
he were really the first man for whom she had put a deceit upon her
husband; and had wondered what sort of person Madame Félise de
Puysange had been in reality.
"Two months it was that we played at intimacy, was it not, Félise?
You comprehend, my dear, I really remember very little about you.
But I recall quite clearly the door left just a-jar, and how as I
opened it gently I would see first of all the lamp upon your
dressing-table, turned down almost to extinction, and the glowing
dust upon its glass shade. Is it not strange that our exceeding
wickedness should have resulted in nothing save the memory of dust
upon a lamp chimney? Yet you were very handsome, Félise. I dare say
I would have liked you if I had ever known you. But when you told me
of the child you had lost, and showed me his baby picture, I took a
dislike to you. It seemed to me you were betraying that child by
dealing over-generously with me: and always between us afterward was
his little ghost. Yet I did not at all mind the deceits you put upon
your husband. It is true I knew your husband rather intimately--.
Well, and they tell me the good Vicomte was vastly pleased by the
son you bore him some months after you and I had parted. So there
was no great harm done, after all--"
Then Jurgen saw there was another woman's body lying like an effigy
upon another low flat tomb, and beyond that another, and then still
others. And Jurgen whistled.
"What, all of them!" he said. "Am I to be confronted with every
pound of tender flesh I have embraced? Yes, here is Graine, and
Rosamond, and Marcouève, and Elinor. This girl, though, I do not
remember at all. And this one is, I think, the little Jewess I
purchased from Hassan Bey in Sidon, but how can one be sure? Still,
this is certainly Judith, and this is Myrina. I have half a mind to
look again for that mole, but I suppose it would be indecorous.
Lord, how one's women do add up! There must be several scores of
them in all. It is the sort of spectacle that turns a man to serious
thinking. Well, but it is a great comfort to reflect that I dealt
fairly with every one of them. Several of them treated me most
unjustly, too. But that is past and done with: and I bear no malice
toward such fickle and short-sighted creatures as could not be
contented with one lover, and he the Jurgen that was!"
Thereafter, Jurgen, standing among his dead, spread out his arms in
an embracing gesture.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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