Let us listen to the confession of a companion in hell:

"O divine Bridegroom, my Lord, do not refuse the confession of the saddest of your maidservants. I am lost. I am intoxicated. I am impure. What a life!
"Forgiveness, divine Lord, forgiveness! Ah! forgiveness! How many tears! And how many tears again later, I trust!
"Later, I shall know the divine Bridegroom! I was born submissive to Him. -The other one can thrash me now!
"At present, I am at the bottom of the world! O my friends! ...no, not my friends... Never deliriums or tortures like these... How senseless it is!
"Ah! I suffer, I cry out. I really do suffer. Everything, however, is permitted me, charged with the contempt of the most contemptible hearts.
"Finally, let us make this disclosure, even if we have to repeat it twenty times over, -as dismal and as insignificant as it is!
"I am the slave of the infernal Bridegroom, he who ruined the foolish virgins. He is surely that very demon. He is not a specter, he is not a phantom. But I who have lost my discretion, who am damned and dead to the world, -no one will kill me! -How am I to portray him for you! I do not even know how to speak anymore. I am in mourning, I weep, I am terrified. A little coolness, Lord, if you are willing, if you are truly willing!
"I am a widow... -I was a widow... -why yes, I was quite serious once, and I was not born to become a skeleton!... -He was practically a child... His mysterious delicate ways had seduced me. I forgot my every human obligation in order to follow him. What a life! Real life is absent. We are not in the world. I go where he goes, I must. And often he loses his temper with me, me, the poor soul. The Demon! -He is a Demon, you know; he is not a man.
"He says: 'I don't like women. Love has to be invented over again, that's known. They can do no more than wish for a secure position. When the position has been gained, love and beauty are put aside: nothing remains except frigid disdain, the sustenance of marriage, nowadays. Or else I see women, with the signs of happiness, of whom I could have made good companions, utterly consumed from the outset by brutes as sensitive as funeral piles...'
"I listen to him turning infamy into glory, cruelty into charm. 'I am of a far-off people: my ancestors were Scandinavians: they pierced their sides, drank their own blood. -I will make gashes over my entire body, I will tattoo myself, I wish to become as hideous as a Mongol: you will see, I will howl in the streets. I wish to become quite mad with rage. Never show me jewels, I would crawl and writhe on the carpet. My riches, I would like them stained with blood all over. Never will I work...' On some nights, his demon seizing me, we tumbled about, I wrestled with him! -Often, at night, drunk, he takes up his position in the streets or houses, in order to terrify me to death. -'Someone will really behead me; it will be "disgusting."' Oh! those days when he is determined to walk about with an air of crime!
"Every now and then he speaks, in a kind of tender patois, about death that brings repentance, about the unfortunates who certainly do exist, about painful toil, about separations that rend hearts. In the hovels where we would get drunk, he would weep while contemplating those who surrounded us, cattle of misery. He would raise drunkards to their feet in the dark streets. He felt the pity of a wayward mother for little children. -He would go away with the graciousness of a little girl on her way to catechism. -He pretended to be enlightened about everything, commerce, art, medicine. -I followed him, of necessity!
"I would see the whole setting with which, in his fancy, he surrounded himself: clothes, sheets, furniture; I lent him weapons, another guise. I saw everything which concerned him, as he would have wished to create it for himself. When he seemed to be apathetic, I would follow him, far, myself, in strange and complicated actions, good or bad: I was sure of never entering his world. Beside his dear sleeping body, how many hours of the nights I kept watch, seeking the reason why he wished so much to escape from reality. Never did a man have a wish equal to it. I recognized, -without being apprehensive for him, -that he could be a serious danger in society. -Does he perhaps possess secrets for transforming life? No, he is doing no more than searching for them, I would answer myself. In short, his charity is bewitched, and I am its prisoner. No other soul would have sufficient strength, -strength of despair! -to endure it, -to be protected and loved by him. Besides, I never imagined him with another soul: one sees his own Angel, never the Angel of another, -I think. I existed in his soul as a palace which has been emptied so that no one should see a person so ignoble as you: that's all. Alas! I depended entirely on him. But what did he want with my dull and cowardly existence? He was not improving me, if he was not killing me! Sadly vexed, I said to him sometimes: 'I understand you.' He would shrug his shoulders.
"Thus, my sorrow being unceasingly renewed, and finding myself more lost in my own eyes, -as in the eyes of all who would have wished to stare at me, if I had not been condemned forever to be forgotten by everyone! -I hungered more and more for his kindness. With his kisses and his fond embraces, it was certainly a heaven, an overcast heaven which I entered, and where I would have wished to be left, poor, deaf, dumb, blind. Already I was getting used to it. I regarded us as two good children, free to roam within the Paradise of sadness. We suited one another. Quite moved, we toiled together. But, after a poignant caress, he would say: 'How odd this will seem to you, when I am no longer here, this which you have gone through. When you no longer have my arms upon your neck, nor my heart to rest on, nor these lips on your eyes. Because I shall have to go away, very far, one day. Then I must help others: it is my duty. Though it will hardly be pleasing..., dear soul...' At once I could foresee myself, with him gone, in the clutch of vertigo, plunged into the most frightful darkness: death. I made him promise that he would not cast me off. He made it twenty times, this promise of a lover. It was as frivolous as my saying to him: 'I understand you.'
"Ah! I have never been jealous of him. He will not leave me, I think. What's to become of him? He hasn't one acquaintance; he will never work. He wants to live as a somnambulist. Would his goodness and his charity alone give him any claim in the real world? Off and on, I forget the pitiful state into which I have sunk: he will make me strong, we shall travel, we shall hunt in wildernesses, we shall sleep on the pavements of unknown towns, without cares, without troubles. Or I shall wake up, and laws and morals will have changed, -thanks to his magic power, -the world, while remaining the same, will leave me to my desires, my joys, my nonchalant ways. Oh! the adventurous life that exists in chilren's books, will you give it to me to repay me, I have suffered so much? He cannot. I do not know his ideal. He has told me he has regrets, hopes: this is not likely to concern me. Does he speak to God? Perhaps I ought to appeal to God. I am at the very bottom of the abyss, and I no longer know how to pray.
"If he explained his sorrows to me, would I understand them better than his railleries? He attacks me, he spends hours making me ashamed of everything that has been able to move me in the world, and is indignant if I weep.
"-You see that elegant youn man, entering the fine and serene house: his name is Duval, Dufour, Armand, Maurice, for all I know. A woman devoted herself to loving this worthless fool: she is dead, she is most certainly a saint in heaven, at present. You will kill me as he killed that woman. That is our lot, assigned to us, the loving hearts...' Alas! he had days when all active men seemed to him the playthings of grotesque deliriums; he would laugh frightfully, for a long time. -Then, he would resume his demeanor of young mother, of beloved sister. If only he were less wild, we should be saved! But his sweetness also is deadly. I am submissive to him. -Ah! I am insane!
"One day perhaps he will disappear miracylously; but I must know if he is likely to rise to some heaven again, so that I may view briefly the assumption of my little lover!"


A strange menage!


Translated by: Enid Rhodes Peschel