I want to express some sentiments about Prosper Mérimée’s 1837 story LA VENUS D’ILLE, and I think it will go better for both of us if you read it first, if you never have. Of course I can’t make you, I’m not your mother. Listen, I’m not your aunt, I’m not your uncle. Look, I can’t compel you, I’m not your conscience, I’m not your familiar spirit, I can’t FORCE you, I’m not your dad. Listen, I’m not your guidance counselor, I’m not a cop. Look
anyhow here it is, in English translation to prove I’m not a snob.
It’s a story of the statue-betrothal type, and here, I’ll tell it to you in summary to bring you up to the point of interest, so that we’re all together:
I, an archaeologist and ostensibly disinterested narrator modeled loosely after Sarah Caudwell’s Hilary Tamar — alive to propriety; equal parts pitying, concerned, and fastidious when faced with human frailty and sexual catastrophe — visit the town of Ille with an introduction to M. de Peyrehorade, a knower about local Roman ruins. His son, Alphonse, is to be married to a Mlle. de Puygarrig. Alphonse! a pig, a monster of crudeness! What a shame! What a bastard, this Alphonse! An indefatiguable tennis player, that says it all. No! there is more to be said! but later.
Meanwhile the ruins-knower shows me his VENUS PUDICA, newly dug up from the earth, looking like a corpse when they found her. Made of bronze, heavy as a church bell, wicked in aspect, no virgin, they say. Fell on a man’s leg, snapped it like a twig. On purpose, they say. The young men swell with fury against this Venus: “If I had my chisel I would soon force out its big white eyes, as I would pop an almond from its shell.”
Alphonse is greedy for his bride’s inheritance, not for her self; his vileness shocks me! He shows me the ring for his intended; 12,000 francs’ worth of diamonds on it, engraved with thine forever. Well, that’s fine! He’ll give it to her tomorrow. The future Mme. Alphonse, how I admire her, her delicacy, her fragility, her kind look in which I am persuaded I detect a touch of malice, linking her to the wicked Venus so daringly, don’t you think, but in her it is alluring, not frightening. What a pity, I say to myself, that such a beautiful girl should be rich: she should be courted and loved for her face and figure only: to love a beautiful poor girl for her beauty, whose beauty is her only dowry, her only possession: this is purity, this is right.
Then, Alphonse! that bastard Alphonse is a baby when he loses at tennis, blaming the ring for it, the diamond-crusted woman’s wedding ring still on his own finger, not given away yet. This cursed ring, he says, squeezes my finger too tightly and makes me miss the ball. and then in a petty rage against all merciless constricting feminine things, he drags it off and thrusts it onto the finger of the VENUS OF ILLE.
Then he forgets it. Then he can’t get it back, because the VENUS OF ILLE has accepted the ring, has bent her finger into a fist to keep it. The deed is accomplished.
Well—! this is what he tells me. I don’t believe his story, but never mind, he finds a simple substitute ring for the human bride who knows nothing about it, the great shameful waste is accomplished by the priest, “the most virtuous girl in the world is delivered over to the Minotaur,” and the couple retires to their chambers, leaving me strangely flustered indignant and resentful about the ensuing activities I of course am not imagining in detail, why would I.
The next morning Alphonse is found crushed, strangled, squeezed, smothered, dead. A livid mark round his chest as if from a tight, contracting band of metal.
I ask the magistrate: What of that poor girl, the bride? What did she see, what did she say?
“That unfortunate young woman has gone crazy,” he said, smiling sadly. “Crazy, quite crazy. That is what she says:
“She had been in bed for several minutes with the curtains drawn, when the door of her room opened and some one entered. Mme. Alphonse was on the inside of the bed with her face turned to the wall. Assured that is was her husband she did not move. Presently the bed creaked as if laden with a tremendous weight. She was terribly frightened, but dared not turn her head. Five minutes, or ten minutes perhaps- she has no idea of the time- passed in this way. Then she made an involuntary movement, or else it was the other person who made one, and she felt contact of something as cold as ice, that is her expression. She buried herself against the wall trembling in all her limbs.
“Shortly afterwards, the door opened a second time, and some one came in who said, ‘Good evening, my little wife.’ Then the curtains were drawn back. She heard a stifled cry. The person who was in the bed beside her sat up apparently with extended arms. Then she turned her head and saw her husband, kneeling by the bed with his head on a level with the pillow, held close in the arms of a sort of greenish-colored giant. She says, and she repeated it to me twenty times, poor woman!- she says that she recognized- do you guess who?-the bronze Venus, M. de Peyrehorade’s statue. Since it has been here every one dreams about it. But to continue the poor lunatic’s story. At this sight she lost consciousness, and probably she had already lost her mind. She cannot tell how long she remained in this condition. Returned to her sense she saw the phantom, or the statue as she insists on calling it, lying immovable, the legs and lower part of the body on the bed, the bust and arms extended forward, and between the arms her husband, quite motionless. A cock crew. Then the statue left the bed, let fall the body, and went out. Mme. Alphonse rushed to the bell, and you know the rest.”
Now — and this is me again, not the Archaeologist; there is more to the story before the end, but I have imposed on your patience long enough with my zeal for summarizing. This, the quoted part above, is the point I was coming to. The point of this long, very long story is all in here in these two paragraphs. Merimee hides it, he wraps it around in burlap sacking and yards of brown tweed with elbow patches on, to blunt it. This essential story is three narrators deep: the woman tells the magistrate who tells the frame narrator who tells us. But the point of interest all through is never the narrator, whose gaze filters all; never Alphonse, that absolute son of a bitch; only sometimes the VENUS OF ILLE, but always THE BRIDE, the transmitter of the tale, the small almond in this thick shell. Peel back the two layers of kindly male contempt and this is the bare story:
She lies alone, unseeing in the dark, for who knows how many minutes, with the Bronze Venus - of whom all her senses perceive is her immense weight, so heavy on the bed next to her, and the presence itself, that sensation of another being in the room, and the creaking cracking bed frame. And she felt the arm of Venus, too, “froid comme la glace” — the men transmitting her story between themselves laugh at her for this little cliche — and pressed herself against the wall, not looking, waiting and not looking, for a divine being manifested in gigantesque physicality: cold, a coldness almost electric, and mass, too much mass for a bed to bear. All this you can perceive without looking.
And then her husband comes in after a paragraph break for the unspeakable & unknowable, and she sees, for the first time and all in a flash, what it is on the bed with her, as it takes her husband in its arms. At this point (she told the gentlemen) she lost consciousness for an indefinite span of time, but not so long, surely, since when she awoke again the Bronze Venus was still there, now lying down again, still holding her husband tightly. Surely in the dark of the blacked-out episode was the consummation which killed him; surely also she did not lose her senses, not really, but only said she did, but only censored herself for her interrogators. A wedding night is for a bride to learn the secrets of the marriage bed, but not to tell them.
To all this, which is after all only a restatement of the two very good paragraphs that make the climax of Mérimée's tale, I can only stress what he, an artist, prudently left unstressed: it was Alphonse who rashly and ignorantly betrothed himself to the Bronze Venus and delivered himself to her arms in ignorance to pay the debt of a bigamous husband. But it was his wife and only his wife — only his second wife — who ever lay alone in bed with the god, just the two of them, with no witnesses and no one permitted to know what happened.
It’s such a good story! go read it, I know you didn’t when I told you to before.
In the end, they don’t believe the bride’s story but they melt down the Bronze Venus just the same, kill God and cast a church bell out of her: a wicked church bell whose ringing freezes the grapes on the vine.
Remember, a man puts his ring on Venus' finger in jest, but she accepts it in deadly earnest. you don’t want to get married to Venus, don’t you go doing that.
This plot is, as you can see, the bare bones of REBECCA. but there’ll be time enough to talk about that later.
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as for the Kurt Weill musical whose title I stole for my own, the music is good but the theology is bad. the idea of a Venus subject to summary recall by Jove — subject to any higher authority, any time, anywhere!—
still we must all be grateful to ONE TOUCH OF VENUS, for without it there would be no MANNEQUIN and without MANNEQUIN there would be no MAKING MR. RIGHT.
Venus-Aphrodite is always miscast, on stage or on film. This is because short-sighted & impious show people cast for looks; they think beauty is the important thing. And it is important! very important. but there are things even more important. You have to think of Venus as Eve Babitz* put it when she said: Elizabeth Taylor served everyone right.
* * *
*let her be, she said some true things and had some good lines, and that one is both.
[Note: Kenneth Gross’s THE DREAM OF THE MOVING STATUE is a very good book touching on nearly everything I think of as my special subjects and preempting the best of my many unwritten works, so THANK GOD he is wrong on this story or I wouldn’t be able to handle it. He does not see the centrality of the mechanism by which we apprehend the mystery: the obscured experience of the sole witness to this fatal marriage. nor does he make much of anything out of the alleged malice embedded in the Bride’s own beauty. well, that’s what I’m here for.]