Reasons of State Read Online Free Page A

actors say: that they should concentrate on interpreting their parts—whether that of impatient girlfriend, satanic nun, provincial girl full of perverse curiosity, aristocrat concealing her identity, grand lady come down in the world, foreigner-passing-through-and-avid-for-new-sensations, etc., etc.; in short that they should behave like well-trained actresses, and they were forbidden to snatch coins off the corner of the table with their sexual labia, as other girls of a very different style did in the Salon of Performances down below—“
au choix, Mesdames
”—wearing nothing at all except a bolero made of Spanish sequins, a Tahitiannecklace, or the hint of a Scottish kilt with a fox’s tail in the belt buckle.
    Now Sylvestre brings in the barber. While he shaves me he tells me news of the latest exploits of the apaches, who are now using motor cars and guns. Just as he is powdering my cheeks he shows me a recent photograph of his son, looking very martial—as I tell him—with cassowary plumes in his shako. I praise the organisation and discipline of a nation where a young man of modest origins can by his own virtue and industry rise to the same military rank as soldiers who, before they ever fire a gun, have to know by calculus and logarithms what will be the trajectory and distance of a shell. (My artillery, for the most part, decide on the sighting and angle of a gun by the empirical method—although marvellously effective in a few cases, one must admit—of: “Three hands up and two to the right, with a finger and a half of rectification, towards that house with the red roof … Fire!” And the best of it is that they hit the target.) From beneath the portrait of the cadet from Saint-Cyr the barber brings out a recent photo of a young woman swathed in transparent veils, who is so tremendously excited by the interest at 6.4 per cent on the new Russian loan that it seems she would be ready—very discreetly, of course—to acquire shares and so restore a fortune once supported by escutcheons covered in gules and ermine, which was now on the point of shipwreck; this young woman—and it was easy to see that her “know-how,” as they say, was not to be sneezed at—in short, this young woman … (I must first send for Peralta to have a look at me, palpate me, and say …)
    Through the window panes summer announces its presence, as if new, just arrived, in the splendid foliage of the chestnut trees. Now the tailor comes and measures and re-measures me, covering me with segments of sports coats,jackets, frock coats, adjusting, tightening, joining together, drawing theoretical figures in white chalk on pieces of a dark woollen garment. I turn around, like a mannequin, stopping at angles where my figure appears in a favourable light. And according to the orientation thus imposed on my eyes, I look at the pictures or sculptures surrounding me, which seem to be reborn as I turn, since I’ve seen them so often that I hardly ever look at them now. Here, as always, is Jean-Paul Laurens’ Saint Radegunde, Merovingian and ecstatic, receiving the relic brought from Jerusalem, a piece of the Cross of Our Lord, offered to her in a beautiful marble casket by hooded emissaries. Over there, a spirited sculpture of some gladiators by Gérome, with the retiarius defeated, tangled in his own net, and twisting his body under the victorious foot of a he-man in a helmet and mask, who seems to be awaiting Caesar’s verdict, with his sword ready. (“
Macte
,” I always say when I look at this work, turning down my right thumb …) A quarter turn on my own axis, and I am looking at Elstir’s fine seascape, exposing its restless blues between a confusion of foam and clouds, with sailing boats in the foreground, not far from the pink marble of the
Little Faun
, winner of the Gold Medal in the latest Salon of French artists.
    “A little more to the right,” says the tailor. And now it is the voluptuous nudity of the
Sleeping