Chasing the Dream by Liane De Pougy

Author:Liane De Pougy [Anderson, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912868568
Publisher: Dedalus
Published: 2021-03-22T16:00:00+00:00

XII

Josiane de Valneige to Jean Leblois

Alas, my friend, you were a very poor prophet when you hoped ‘it would not be so’. My adventure with Fleurignac made a lasting impression.

I emerged from it entirely stripped of any faith in the future, in myself, in love, in anything at all. Very well, if that was the case, why keep trying? Since it has been proved that I am not made for happiness, or that happiness does not exist, it would be mere folly. Let’s do the same as everyone else, then: forward march, eyes closed!

What’s the point in hankering after midday at two in the afternoon? It’s a fool’s game, so three cheers for those who take life as it comes!

But that is just making arguments for the sake of it.

However much I wanted to act on them, convince myself, stifle my thoughts, this latest experience lay deep in my bones and provoked as much revolt as genuine affliction.

I remained crushed by this blow for months. What was the matter with Josiane de Valneige? People were taking notice, I can tell you!

Some asserted that my boredom, my disgust were the result of having enjoyed life too greedily – imbeciles! Others swore I had turned to morphine, to ether, a host of poisons currently much in favour and utterly wonderful, apparently.

Just between the two of us, I did think about it. But morphine, whose delights I’d heard so much about, was just another fanciful joke.

Blisters, itching under the skin, that’s all. It seems I’m not cut out for that either. It’s annoying!

One day a friend of mine sent me her doctor, Doctor Tardenot.

Tardenot is very well known, he specialises in our fin de siècle ailments. The best way he could think of to cure me of what he called, by a horrible name incidentally: neurasthenia – yes, imagine that, I was a neurasthenic! – was for me to take him as my lover.

Ah, wasn’t that handy for him, the excellent Tardenot.

No! No more lovers! Peace: peace in the company of steady friends who would ask little of me and of whom I would not ask more than they could give.

But what a strange destiny! To be ready for love, to live only for love, to have demeaned myself in its pursuit, and never to find it! My dear, you are my witness: have I, yes or no, done everything I could to encounter it, to hold on to it? And you, after all, know more about me on that score than anyone!

But the whole business had been a torture, I had become the Tantalus of the human heart!

The moment I thought I had it in my grasp, bliss escaped me.

Sometimes everything suddenly went cold in me, at other times it was the other party who cast me back into the void, through letting me down or through turning out to be an inferior person.

Some women manage to be happy, so what is their trick? They don’t have a heart, that’s what. All

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