Confessions of a Mask Read Free

book. I would never so much as take it in my hands again. Years later I was to discover a glorification of the death of a beautiful knight in a verse by Oscar Wilde:
    Fair is the knight who lieth slain
Amid the rush and reed. . . .
     
    In his novel Là-Bas, Huysmans discusses the character of Gilles de Rais, bodyguard to Joan of Arc by royal command of Charles VII, saying that even though soon to be perverted to "the most sophisticated of cruelties, the most exquisite of crimes," the original impulse for his mysticism came from seeing with his own eyes all manner of miraculous deeds performed by Joan of Arc. Although she had a contrary effect upon me, arousing in me a feeling of repugnance, in my case also the Maid of Orleans played an important role. . . .
     
    Yet another memory : It is the odor of sweat, an odor that drove me onward, awakened my longings, overpowered me. . . .
    Pricking up my ears, I hear a crunching sound, muffled and very faint, seeming to menace. Once in a while a bugle joins in. A simple and strangely plaintive sound of singing approaches. Tugging at a maid's hand, I urge her to hurry hurry, wild to be standing at the gate, clasped in her arms.
    It was the troops passing our gate as they returned from drill. Soldiers are fond of children, and I always looked forward to receiving some empty cartridges from them. As my grandmother had forbidden me to accept these gifts, saying they were dangerous, my anticipation was whetted by the joys of stealth. The heavy thudding of army shoes, stained uniforms, and a forest of shouldered rifles are enough to fascinate any child utterly. But it was simply their sweaty odor that fascinated me, forming a stimulus that lay concealed beneath my hope of receiving cartridges from them.
    The soldiers' odor of sweat—that odor like a sea breeze, like the air, burned to gold, above the seashore —struck my nostrils and intoxicated me. This was probably my earliest memory of odors. Needless to say, the odor could not, at that time, have had any direct relationship with sexual sensations, but it did gradually and tenaciously arouse within me a sensuous craving for such things as the destiny of soldiers, the tragic nature of their calling, the distant countries they would see, the ways they would die. . . .
     
    These odd images were the first things I encountered in life. From the beginning they stood before me in truly masterful completeness. There was not a single thing lacking. In later years I sought in them for the wellsprings of my own feelings and actions, and again not a single thing was lacking.
    Ever since childhood my ideas concerning human existence have never once deviated from the Augustinian theory of predetermination. Over and over again I was tormented by vain doubts—even as I continue being tormented today—but I regarded such doubts as only another sort of temptation to sin, and remained unshaken in my deterministic views. I had been handed what might be called a full menu of all the troubles in my life while still too young to read it. But all I had to do was spread my napkin and face the table. Even the fact that I would now be writing an odd book like this was precisely noted on the menu, where it must have been before my eyes from the beginning.
     
    The period of childhood is a stage on which time and space become entangled. For example, there was the news I heard from adults concerning events in various countries—the eruption of a volcano, say, or the insurrection of an army—and the things that were happening before my eyes—my grandmother's spells or the petty family quarrels—and the fanciful events of the fairytale world in which I had just then become immersed: these three things always appeared to me to be of equal value and like kind. I could not believe that the world was any more complicated than a structure of building blocks, nor that the so-called "social community," which I must presently enter, could be more dazzling than the