One of Cleopatra's Nights (22 page)

The grain of snow, the micaceous brilliancy of Parian marble, the
sparkling pulp of balsamine flowers, would render but a feeble idea of
the ideal substance whereof Nyssia had been formed. That flesh, so fine,
so delicate, permitted daylight to penetrate it, and modelled itself in
transparent contours, in lines as sweetly harmonious as music itself.
According to different surroundings, it took the color of the sunlight
or of purple, like the aromal body of a divinity, and seemed to radiate
light and life. The world of perfections inclosed within the
nobly-lengthened oval of her chaste face could have been rendered by no
earthly art—neither by the chisel of the sculptor, nor the brush of
the painter, nor the style of any poet—though it were Praxiteles,
Apelles, or Mimnermus; and on her smooth brow, bathed by waves of hair
amber-bright as molten electrum and sprinkled with gold filings,
according to the Babylonian custom, sat as upon a jasper throne the
unalterable serenity of perfect loveliness.

As for her eyes, though they did not justify what popular credulity said
of them, they were at least wonderfully strange eyes; brown eyebrows,
with extremities ending in points elegant as those of the arrows of
Eros, and which were joined to each other by a streak of henna after the
Asiatic fashion, and long fringes of silkily-shadowed eyelashes
contrasted strikingly with the twin sapphire stars rolling in the heaven
of dark silver which formed those eyes. The irises of those eyes, whose
pupils were blacker than atrament, varied singularly in shades of
shifting color. From sapphire they changed to turquoise, from turquoise
to beryl, from beryl to yellow amber, and sometimes, like a limpid lake
whose bottom is strewn with jewels, they offered, through their
incalculable depths, glimpses of golden and diamond sands upon which
green fibrils vibrated and twisted themselves into emerald serpents. In
those orbs of phosphoric lightning the rays of suns extinguished, the
splendors of vanished worlds, the glories of Olympus eclipsed—all
seemed to have concentrated their reflections. When contemplating them
one thought of eternity, and felt himself seized with a mighty
giddiness, as though he were leaning over the verge of the Infinite.

The expression of those extraordinary eyes was not less variable than
their tint. At times their lids opened like the portals of celestial
dwellings; they invited you into elysiums of light, of azure, of
ineffable felicity; they promised you the realization, tenfold, a
hundredfold, of all your dreams of happiness, as though they had divined
your soul's most secret thoughts; again, impenetrable as sevenfold
plated shields of the hardest metals, they flung back your gaze like
blunted and broken arrows. With a simple inflexion of the brow, a mere
flash of the pupil, more terrible than the thunder of Zeus, they
precipitated you from the heights of your most ambitious escalades into
depths of nothingness so profound that it was impossible to rise again.
Typhon himself, who writhes under Ætna, could not have lifted the
mountains of disdain with which they overwhelmed you. One felt that
though he should live for a thousand Olympiads endowed with the beauty
of the fair son of Latona, the genius of Orpheus, the unbounded might of
Assyrian kings, the treasures of the Cabeirei, the Telchines, and the
Dactyli, gods of subterranean wealth, he could never change their
expression to mildness.

At other times their languishment was so liquidly persuasive, their
brilliancy and irradiation so penetrating, that the icy coldness of
Nestor and Priam would have melted under their gaze, like the wax of the
wings of Icarus when he approached the flaming zones. For one such
glance a man would have gladly steeped his hands in the blood of his
host, scattered the ashes of his father to the four winds, overthrown
the holy images of the gods, and stolen the fire of heaven itself, like
the sublime thief, Prometheus.

Nevertheless, their most ordinary expression, it must be confessed, was
of a chastity to make one desperate—a sublime coldness—an ignorance of
all possibilities of human passion, such as would have made the
moon-bright eyes of Phoebe or the sea-green eyes of Athena appear by
comparison more liquidly tempting than those of a young girl of Babylon
sacrificing to the goddess Mylitta within the cord-circled enclosure of
Succoth-Benohl. Their invincible virginity seemed to bid love defiance.

The cheeks of Nyssia, which no human gaze had ever profaned, save that
of Gyges on the day when the veil was blown away, possessed a youthful
bloom, a tender pallor, a delicacy of grain, and a downiness whereof the
faces of our women, perpetually exposed to sunlight and air, cannot
convey the most distant idea. Modesty created fleeting rosy clouds upon
them like those which a drop of crimson essence would form in a cup of
milk, and when uncolored by any emotion they took a silvery sheen, a
warm light, like an alabaster vessel illumined by a lamp within. That
lamp was her charming soul, which exposed to view the transparency of
her flesh.

A bee would have been deceived by her mouth, whose form was so perfect,
whose corners were so purely dimpled, whose crimson was so rich and warm
that the gods would have descended from their Olympian dwellings in
order to touch it with lips humid with immortality, but that the
jealousy of the goddesses restrained their impetuosity. Happy the wind
which passed through that purple and pearl, which dilated those pretty
nostrils, so finely cut and shaded with rosy tints like the
mother-of-pearl of the shells thrown by the sea on the shore of Cyprus
at the feet of Venus Anadyomene! But are there not a multitude of favors
thus granted to things which cannot understand them? What lover would
not wish to be the tunic of his well-beloved or the water of her bath?

Such was Nyssia, if we dare make use of the expression after so vague a
description of her face. If our foggy Northern idioms had the warm
liberty, the burning enthusiasm of the Sir Hasirim, we might, perhaps,
by comparisons—awakening in the mind of the reader memories of flowers
and perfumes, of music and sunlight, evoking, by the magic of words, all
the graceful and charming images that the universe can contain—have
been able to give some idea of Nyssia's features; but it is permitted to
Solomon alone to compare the nose of a beautiful woman to the tower of
Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus. And yet what is there in the
world of more importance than the nose of a beautiful woman? Had Helen,
the white Tyndarid, been flat-nosed, would the Trojan War have taken
place? And if the profile of Semiramis had not been perfectly regular,
would she have bewitched the old monarch of Nineveh and encircled her
brow with the mitre of pearls, the symbol of supreme power?

Although Candaules had brought to his palace the most beautiful slaves
from the people of the Soræ, of Askalon, of Sogdiana, of the Sacæ, of
Rhapta, the most celebrated courtesans from Ephesus, from Pergamus, from
Smyrna, and from Cyprus, he was completely fascinated by the charms of
Nyssia. Up to that time he had not even suspected the existence of such
perfection.

Privileged as a husband to enjoy fully the contemplation of this beauty,
he found himself dazzled, giddy, like one who leans over the edge of an
abyss, or fixes his eyes upon the sun; he felt himself seized, as it
were, with the delirium of possession, like a priest drunk with the god
who fills and moves him. All other thoughts disappeared from his soul,
and the universe seemed to him only as a vague mist in the midst of
which beamed the shining phantom of Nyssia. His happiness transformed
itself into ecstasy, and his love into madness. At times his very
felicity terrified him. To be only a wretched king, only a remote
descendant of a hero who had become a god by mighty labors, only a
common man formed of flesh and bone, and without having in aught
rendered himself worthy of it—without having even, like his ancestor,
strangled some hydra, or torn some lion asunder—to enjoy a happiness
whereof Zeus of the ambrosial hair would scarce be worthy, though lord
of all Olympus! He felt, as it were, a shame to thus hoard up for
himself alone so rich a treasure, to steal this marvel from the world,
to be the dragon with scales and claws who guarded the living type of
the ideal of lovers, sculptors, and poets. All they had ever dreamed of
in their hope, their melancholy, and their despair, he possessed—he,
Candaules, poor tyrant of Sardes, who had only a few wretched coffers
filled with pearls, a few cisterns filled with gold pieces, and thirty
or forty thousand slaves, purchased or taken in war.

Candaules's felicity was too great for him, and the strength which he
would doubtless have found at his command in time of misfortune was
wanting to him in time of happiness. His joy overflowed from his soul
like water from a vase placed upon the fire, and in the exasperation of
his enthusiasm for Nyssia he had reached the point of desiring that she
were less timid and less modest, for it cost him no little effort to
retain in his own breast the secret of such wondrous beauty.

"Ah," he would murmur to himself during the deep reveries which absorbed
him at all hours that he did not spend at the queen's side, "how strange
a lot is mine! I am wretched because of that which would make any other
husband happy. Nyssia will not leave the shadow of the gynæceum, and
refuses, with barbarian modesty, to lift her veil in the presence of any
other than myself. Yet with what an intoxication of pride would my love
behold her, radiantly sublime, gaze down upon my kneeling people from
the summit of the royal steps, and, like the rising dawn, extinguish all
those pale stars who during the night thought themselves suns! Proud
Lydian women, who believe yourselves beautiful, but for Nyssia's reserve
you would appear, even to your lovers, as ugly as the oblique-eyed and
thick-lipped slaves of Nahasi and Kush. Were she but once to pass along
the streets of Sardes with face unveiled, you might in vain pull your
adorers by the lappet of their tunic, for none of them would turn his
head, or, if he did, it would be to demand your name, so utterly would
he have forgotten you! They would rush to precipitate themselves beneath
the silver wheels of her chariot, that they might have even the pleasure
of being crushed by her, like those devotees of the Indus who pave the
pathway of their idol with their bodies.

"And you, oh goddesses, whom Paris-Alexander judged, had Nyssia appeared
among you, not one of you would have borne away the golden apple, not
even Aphrodite, despite her cestus and her promise to the
shepherd-arbiter that she would make him beloved by the most beautiful
woman in the world!...

"Alas! to think that such beauty is not immortal, and that years will
alter those divine outlines, that admirable hymn of forms, that poem
whose strophes are contours, and which no one in the world has ever read
or may ever read save myself; to be the sole depositary of so splendid a
treasure! If I knew even, by imitating the play of light and shadow with
the aid of lines and colors, how to fix upon wood a reflection of that
celestial face; if marble were not rebellious to my chisel, how well
would I fashion in the purest vein of Paros or Pentelicus an image of
that charming body, which would make the proud effigies of the goddesses
fall from their altars! And long after, when deep below the slime of
deluges, and beneath the dust of ruined cities, the men of future ages
should find a fragment of that petrified shadow of Nyssia, they would
cry: 'Behold, how the women of this vanished world were formed!' And
they would erect a temple wherein to enshrine the divine fragment. But I
have naught save a senseless admiration and a love that is madness! Sole
adorer of an unknown divinity, I possess no power to spread her worship
through the world."

Thus in Candaules had the enthusiasm of the artist extinguished the
jealousy of the lover. Admiration was mightier than love. If in place of
Nyssia, daughter of the Satrap Megabazus, all imbued with Oriental
ideas, he had espoused some Greek girl from Athens or Corinth, he would
certainly have invited to his court the most skilful painters and
sculptors, and have given them the queen for their model, as did
afterward Alexander his favorite Campaspe, who posed naked before
Apelles. Such a whim would have encountered no opposition from a woman
of the land where even the most chaste made a boast of having
contributed—some for the back, some for the bosom—to the perfection
of a famous statue. But hardly would the bashful Nyssia consent to
unveil herself in the discreet shadow of the thalamus, and the earnest
prayers of the king really shocked her rather than gave her pleasure.
The sentiment of duty and obedience alone induced her to yield at times
to what she styled the whims of Candaules.

Sometimes he besought her to allow the flood of her hair to flow over
her shoulders in a river of gold richer than the Pactolus, to encircle
her brow with a crown of ivy and linden leaves like a Bacchante of Mount
Mænalus, to lie, hardly veiled by a cloud of tissue finer than woven
wind, upon a tiger-skin with silver claws and ruby eyes, or to stand
erect in a great shell of mother-of-pearl, with a dew of pearls falling
from her tresses in lieu of drops of sea-water.

When he had placed himself in the best position for observation, he
became absorbed in silent contemplation. His hand, tracing vague
contours in the air, seemed to be sketching the outlines for some
picture, and he would have remained thus for whole hours if Nyssia, soon
becoming weary of her rôle of model, had not reminded him in chill and
disdainful tones that such amusements were unworthy of royal majesty and
contrary to the holy laws of matrimony. "It is thus," she would exclaim,
as she withdrew, draped to her very eyes, into the most mysterious
recesses of her apartment, "that one treats a mistress, not a virtuous
woman of noble blood!"