Читать книгу The Sahara - Pierre Loti - Страница 22

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Cora loved him, too, but the heart had little to do with the sort of love she felt.

A mulatto of Bourbon, she had been brought up in the sensual idleness and luxury of wealthy creoles, but had been kept at arm’s length by white women with pitiless contempt, repulsed everywhere as a coloured woman. The same racial prejudice had pursued her to St. Louis; although she was the wife of one of the leading farmers of revenue on the river, she was left alone, an outcast.

In Paris she had had numbers of exquisites to love her; her ample means had enabled her to make a presentable appearance in France, to taste vice according to the most elegant standards of propriety.

At present she was tired of delicate gloved hands, the sickly affectations of dandies, and their romantic languid airs. She had chosen Jean because he was big and strong. In her way she loved this splendid, wild growing plant. She loved his rough, simple manners; she found attraction even in the coarse texture of his soldier’s shirt.

Cora’s dwelling was an immense brick building, with the somewhat Egyptian aspect common to the old parts of St. Louis, and white like an Arab caravanserai. Below, there were great courts, whither came camels and Moors of the desert to crouch upon the sand, and where swarmed a grotesque, motley crowd of cattle, dogs, ostriches, and black slaves.

Up above there were endless verandahs, supported by massive, square columns, like the terraces of Babylon.

The apartments were reached by means of outside staircases of white stone, monumental of aspect. All this was dilapidated and dreary, like everything else at St. Louis, that town which has already lived its life, that moribund colony of bygone days.

The drawing-room had a certain air of grandeur, with its lordly proportions and its furniture of the past century.

Blue lizards haunted it; cats, parrots, tame gazelles chased one another over the fine Guinea mats; negro women servants went dolefully backwards and forwards across the room, shuffling their sandals, diffusing pungent odours of soumaré and musk-scented amulets. The ensemble produced an indefinably melancholy atmosphere of exile and solitude. It was very dreary, all of it, especially in the evening, when the sounds of life ceased and gave place to the eternal complaint of the African breakers.

In Cora’s bedroom everything was gayer and more modern. The furniture and hangings, lately arrived from Paris, gave it an air of fresh elegance and comfort. One breathed there the perfume of the most fashionable essences bought at the scent shops on the boulevard.

It was there that Jean passed his hours of intoxication. This room seemed to him an enchanted palace, surpassing in luxury and charm all that his imagination could have pictured.

This woman had filled his life and had become his only happiness. With the refinement of a creature sated with pleasure, she had desired to possess Jean’s soul as well as body. With the feline guile of a creole she had acted for the benefit of this lover, who was younger than herself, an irresistible comedy of ingenuous love. She had succeeded; he belonged to her, body and soul.