Monsieur De Phocas (Decadence From Dedalus) by Jean Lorrain

Author:Jean Lorrain [Lorrain, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781909232198
Publisher: Dedalus Ltd
Published: 2013-09-11T00:00:00+00:00

THE SPHINX

9 November 1898

Thomas Welcome has just left me. I am still under his spell and yet, at the same time, I feel fearful.

Thomas Welcome took a risk in coming to me. His visit was most unexpected and disconcerting, and yet most amicable. What driving force caused him to take such a step, given that he hardly knows me? I only met him for the first time three days ago, at that horrible opium party organised by Ethal. What can have moved him to take me into his confidence, and to make that sort of life-saving attempt on behalf of one who is a stranger to him, whose fate ought to be a matter of complete indifference?

I hunt for an explanation but cannot find one.

Was it some irrational and spontaneous feeling of sympathy? I cannot believe it. My appearance is a deterrent; at first sight I am disquieting and frightening. In addition, there are the things which are said about me. I am withdrawn; the word ‘likeable’ has never been applied to me – and if it ever were applied to me, I would make every effort to disassociate myself from its implications. A ‘likeable’ person is one of those who aproaches people around and about the Loggia; it is a word to apply to the interpreters in Florentine hotels and the rogues of the gallery Umberto in Naples. Such a notion would be unworthy of Sir Thomas Welcome and myself.

Could it be some resentment against Ethal, a suddenly-conceived hatred for the painter? The step he has taken might be reckoned a disservice to Claudius. But Ethal has told me that Welcome is his best friend – and then again, I have a definite feeling that there is some kind of complicity, some obscure and unbreakable bond between the two men.

From pity, then? Pity for me! I would not like to think so.

What if this is the latest stratagem of Ethal’s, calculated to disturb me and increase my distress? Might it be designed to precipitate the kind of enveloping madness by which I feel myself to be gripped, suffocating me in its meshes like that frightful hand: the purposeful raptorial talon of that sinister Englishman, decorated with horrid rings? What if these two men are acting in concert to delude me and – by means of suspicion and terror – to push me ever closer to the brink of the abyss into which Claudius wants me to fall?

I no longer know what I am doing. I am no longer in control of myself. I am turned upside down and bumped about, and I feel that I am staggering into an ambush, into terror…

Since that last soiree in Ethal’s studio, the nightmare figures and hallucinations of that appalling night…

I have not recovered my soul!

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