Sylva

This visit calmed me a little. I slept fairly well. On Monday the various jobs on the farm occupied my actions and thoughts all day. I reached home tired, but it was a welcome fatigue. After dinner I settled down by the fire and tried to read. It was an uneasy attempt, preoccupied as I was. Nevertheless I was just beginning to succeed when a soft scratching on the door made me raise my head. The scratching was repeated several times. I went to open the door with a throbbing heart. It was Sylva.

She slipped inside like a shadow and sank down beside the fireplace. She was panting a little, though almost quietly. But her appearance wrung my heart: her poor chemise hung in pitiful rags, and her body underneath was clawed, bleeding, prickling with thorns. She had slumped down on her side, in the gently relaxed, weary attitude of a greyhound after a race, her head thrown back a little, her hair spread out. She closed her eyes and breathed less noisily.

I knelt down beside her and started to pull away her rags which in places were stuck with clotted blood and sweat. She let me do it, only quivering a little when I had to pull at the cloth to make it come away. I went to fetch a basin of water and began to sponge her gently, extracting a thorn, a bur here and there. She did not object, just moaned a little, but without resistance. I also discovered tooth marks: she must have tried to return to her burrow, to her fox and fox cubs. But she was a woman; how could they have recognized her? They had defended themselves against her as against an intruder, an enemy.

For how long after that had she gone on roaming, too tall and clumsy and hurt by every thorn, before she had decided to come back? Perhaps she had also fled from the fox hunt.

When I had cleansed her thoroughly, I applied a healing balm to her scratches and sprayed talcum powder all over her body. We were near the fire; it was warm; she nestled close to me and began to murmur gently with sleepiness and well-being. I wrapped my arms around her and rocked her softly like a child. It was the first time I had dared to take her close to me, naked and abandoned. I am a self-respecting man but a prudent one, too, and I have always considered that the surest way of resisting temptation is to avoid it. But on that evening Sylva’s return-when I had already almost despaired of it-the intense relief at seeing my fears dispelled, my slightly overwrought joy at her sweet fidelity, all overwhelmed my watchfulness. I felt lighthearted, gay, carefree with a dash of boldness in which there soon mingled a new tenderness that was freer, more unrestrained, soon even more audacious and almost reckless, and gradually tending to libertinism… After all, I told myself with a sort of delightful dizziness, she’s a woman, isn’t she? What harm would there be? And if she’s a fox, she probably hasn’t even a soul, so what sin would there be in it? She was purring under the caresses with which I was soothing her to sleep, very chaste caresses but which I now found hard to control, for they were wandering a little over her arched hips, her breasts. My fingers were trembling.

The purring stopped, or rather it changed into the tender mewing of a cat. The body quivered and rippled. My nerves were taut, and when she jerked round to flatten herself against me, I only just managed not to lose my head completely. But now the mewing, which had been meek and peaceful, became more violent and at last so totally feline, so totally beastlike, that it shocked me through and through. I let the bewitching body slide to the carpet and walked away, quivering with a kind of dizziness, a horror, an anguish, perhaps even with terror and a piercing interrogation, merciless as the stab of a stiletto between the ribs.

As soon as I released her, my lascivious vixen simply ceased mewing and even purring. She sprawled on the carpet, rolling about a little, softly rubbing her cheek. I looked at her from a distance and felt seething in me a strange mixture of desire and repulsion-one I had felt before, it is true, on several occasions but never with the violence of that night. Luckily for me, Sylva instantly dropped into slumber, like a very young child. She fell asleep with such animal languor, too, that the last fires died within me, leaving room only for tenderness. I took advantage of her abandon to make her take a bath. She gave no more than a little start when the warm water touched her, and continued to sleep. And I carried her, still asleep, to her bed. I had put a fresh chemise on her.