Chapter I: Etang de Saint-Cucufa, June 3

A sense of keen injustice prompts this letter: _Indignatio facit versum_, as they used to say good old days. You know that I can neither read nor write, but sometimes a tiny obliging mouth tries to make me spell out of an old newspaper stained with fat and wine. Today, the friendly little hand of a schoolgirl, equipped with everything needed for writing, transfers my thought with a charming dexterity. My shaggy knees, of which she is not afraid, serve as a table. Now, therefore, I am going to tell you my story and register my protest.

You must know, first of all, that it was the little one now writing to you who advised me to address you. “He is a man who wrote, I am told, a story which is really my life. But I was eighteen and not so complex.” Yesterday, her memory was refreshed by a paper she read to me: “Virginal! My virgin heart! That’s it.” She stamped her foot at the thought. Although I have been roving in fields and near towns for about eight thousand and nine hundred years, I still do not know women very well. I have known more women than there are stars in the sky, and the last one remains as new and mysterious as the first. All this, to tell you that I do not know how her virgin heart could have interested her.—Now she is smiling, holding her tongue in the corner of her mouth.—Perhaps she is thinking of the moment when she will once more turn maiden, quite naturally, for the convenience of social ways.—I hear her sing out: “Why, of course!”—They are surprising.

But I am coming to the matter of importance. You see my innocence. I protest, then, with all the strength of an honest, though libertine satyr, against the use of the term ‘satyr’ by your newspapers, which apply it to men,—yes, to men, by Jupiter, who kidnap young girls, rip their bellies, slice them to pieces! A satyr would never do such idiotic things. Violate, when one has but to open the arms to desire? Grasp these fresh, yielding little necks with a brutal hand? Tear this soft flesh and cause these unripe bodies to bleed, cut the bud where the woman already is developing and dreaming? For what do you take us, stupid journalists? For men? Be undeceived. We are gods.

My history, which is very long, is obscure, but two episodes peculiarly dignify it. I was born in Phrygia of the loves of Hermes and an elegant Dryad, whom I greatly loved, for she was tender and pretty. She had ardent passions and the shepherds, no less than the gods, attracted but did not hold her caprice. I grew up, I exercised at hazard my curiosity, which discovered odd things at all the fords and on all the paths. Dionysius, whom you call Bacchus, brought me into his cortège and I knew, under torrid skies, women more melting than your grapes, more wanton than your goats. I passed into Greece, on my return, but men were already beginning to wage war; they locked up their women and enclosed their fields with fences. The golden age had ended:

Regrettez-vous le temps où le ciel sur la terre
Marchait et respirait dans un peuple de dieux?

I regret it so much and so often that I am filled with an unconquerable melancholy. The great gods no longer descending to an earth soiled by war, ownership, gold and those human laws which so badly translate the gentle divine laws, we remain the sole immortals that a herdsman can chance on at the fall of day, as he walks along the path. We were loved, and we were also feared. We were given milk, cakes and honey, and this was pleasant; but more than once a peevish peasant used to pursue me with a pitchfork, forcing me to run to the shelter of a wood. I am peaceable and vulnerable. I am a god, but a churl might easily cripple me. They say the golden age will return. Let us hope so.

Do not think of ancient Greece as a place where good fortune held sway. Love was there esteemed only under a form that always excited my disgust. Few joys: an escaped female slave, an eager peasant woman. Had I not had my sisters, the nymphs, I should have died of boredom; but nymphs have less variety than women, though prettier, and their pride is terrible. The disgusting teachings of a certain Socrates, that motley apostle of virtue, enemy of women and gods, hastened my flight. I made for Italy, where once more I found a certain state of nature and human customs. To refrain from astonishing people, I called myself Faun, like my Italian brothers.

It is in Italy that I have spent the best part of my life. There I found the graces of Asia, with less effeminacy, much curiosity at once erotic and passionate, and that delicious precociousness which causes young flowers, in their innocent ardor, to outstrip the spring and break their corslets at the sun’s first appearance. I enjoyed seasons worthy of Apollo. My snub nose gleamed in the fairest of eyes. The repeated sound of my feet on the rocky side of a hill awoke still slumbering desires in the vague breasts of latin maidens. Pardon my emotion at these brilliant memories. I still have days; I hardly have seasons any longer, and my eternal youth is often forced to dwell on the past: the time of gleaning has long since succeeded the period of abundance. Remember that in those days I perhaps fled as often as I pursued. I was weary of love, weary of opening new paths. For an instant, I thought of remaining on a piece of cleared ground; I was going to become domesticated.—The family of Faunus, look at the pretty little Atellanian girl!—Alas! I did not have time for this.

One day we found ourselves surrounded by a troop of peasants armed with sharp staffs, as though for a boar hunt. They were led by a sort of sorcerer with a head-dress similar to the Gauls; this man brandished a piece of wood shaped like a crutch head; with his other hand he dipped a branch of box into a little bottle, held by a slave, and sprinkled the ground. I would have liked to laugh, had the danger not been so great. My companion had left to gather grass. “They are coming to look for her,” I reflected. “They will do _her_ no hurt. But if they get _me_, beware of the boar-spears!” I rushed away and, springing over a precipice, was soon free from harm. I have not been able to recross this precipice for nearly twelve hundred years.

What centuries! I lived amid wild goats and only from time to time did an imprudent peasant girl, who happened to be good-looking, fall into my traps. One of them told me that I no longer was called Faunus, but Diabolo, and that I was considered the enemy of the human species, the creature who had caused man to fall into sin. I had seduced a woman under a serpent’s form! I believed that people had become as crazy as they were wicked, and I grieved, musing on my sad immortality. Yet, as the woman stroked my beard and kissed my snub nose and moist lips, while calling me monster, I decided that this was a mitigated extravagance which left a little hope, at least with a half of humanity.—Here, my little friend sticks out her tongue at me and says: “Ah! so it is you they call the devil?”

A noise of hunting one day awoke me. They were blowing through horns which gave a sound like those of my sea brothers, the Tritons. Hounds rent the air with harsh and violent barking. The gallop of horses rang against the firm ground like a Virgilian verse.—O days when shepherds repeated the songs of the Mantuan Shepherd!—Made more bold for some time past, I was loitering in the heath, chasing grasshoppers and lizards. The hunt drew near. I did not have time enough to leap on a rock; and, as I watched the spectacle before leaping higher and disappearing, I heard a clear voice cry, with an accent of surprise and joy: “Ecco il Fauno!” I, too, was satisfied, for I knew that this beautiful name of the Roman god was applied to me, that new days had arrived. Excited, I lay down in the thyme warm with sun kisses; evening fell, I was musing, when the same clear voice once more rang in my ears: “Fauno! Fauno!” I pricked my hairy ears, my body grew tense. I stood listening. “Fauno! Fauno!” With a few bounds, I reached the spot from which the clear voice came. She was a beautiful young woman. The better to run, she had opened her dress and the wind had loosened her hair. She let herself fall, dazed, into my arms, the while I murmured, lifting my thought to the master of gods: “Has beauty then once more descended to earth? O Jupiter, thou dost not forget thy children!”

If I were to tell you that you have always under your eyes, perhaps, the proof of the truth of my narrative, you would not believe me. Wait several days, you will no longer be incredulous. My little friend is tired.—“Yes, I really am!”—She is going to re-read to me this letter which she promises to place in your hands. With the commencement of this story, you can already show your friends the journalists that a satyr is a respectable creature, meriting consideration. But what I have still to tell you is even better.

ANTIPHILOS,
_Satyr._

II

LA FOSCA