Frank Harris - My Life And Loves, vol 5

A few minutes later, one of his sons, who had followed him into the room, heard him heave a deep and harrowing sigh. He took his hand to say a few tender words of consolation to him, but the arm dropped inactive.

Through the sad blow, that great heart was broken.

Madame Berthelot was buried with her husband in the Pantheon, the first time that this supreme honor was rendered to a woman.

Had his life been spared, Berthelot would, a friend says, probably have astonished the world by his observations on trees as regulators of electricity, and as possible media of electrical communications, and on the worldwide disasters which the clearing off of forests to make paper is likely to occasion. His walks in the forests of Meudon opened to him new and original views on the harmonies of creation.

Berthelot was a charming lecturer, charming from every point of viewartistic expression, voice enunciation, and appearance.

There was often a rhythm in his sentences which caught the ear and helped the memory to retain them. His knowledge of Greek and Latin was deep, and he thought the classics an invaluable mental discipline.

His son, Philippe Berthelot, is now in the Foreign Office in Paris and many of us foreigners who live in France have reason to be grateful to him. He, too, lives quite simply, but is naturally proud of his father's extraordinary character and noble achievements. I often think of Marcelin Berthelot as an ideal. He is the first man of whom I have said this. We are apt to think of Frenchmen as resembling Rochefort; it is well to be reminded sometimes that there are Frenchmen such as Marcelin Berthelot.

I have been asked frequently why, on my African travels, I was so cold in regard to native women. This will perhaps be my last opportunity briefly to outline all that befell me in the Dark Continent. In the first place, it would not be true to assert that I was always cold. On the contrary, some of my most passionate encounters took place on the same continent on which Rhodes and Kruger struggled and upon which the irresponsible German Kaiser cast an envious eye. Of the ludicrous braggadocio of the Emperor of Germany I shall have occasion to speak in the chapter which follows. For the momentAfrica.

Much has been said of this continent in many places. All I can add is that kind of personal reminiscence which sometimes throws a new and penetrating light on what is sometimes considered to be a problem incapable of solution. I refer to my knowledge of the African people, and in particular to my knowledge of African women. If I did not spend more time among them, it was not, as has sometimes been imputed, that I was the victim of color prejudice, but that there is an archaic quality in the tribeswomen of Africa which must eternally set them at a distance from a European. This is not true, as we shall see, of Egyptians and other Arab peoples, whose cultural development was on a par with that of the early Christians and who have lent to the West, in the shape of a workable mathematical symbolism, the basis of modern science. Let anyone who doubts this attempt a complex problem of multiplication and division using only the old Roman numerals and then let him judge in what measure the Arab culture has contributed towards our own.

But I shall speak first of the dark races. I have seen Zulu girls and Swahili girls with superb figures. Statues in ebony appeal to me as keenly as statues in ivory. How then could I live among these people on the most familiar terms without yielding occasionally to passion?

I had stayed for a number of days as the guest of the headsman of the village. At first the people in the village were curious about me, but after a while they became used to my presence at their dances and at the other few social functions of the group. One night the chief, who spoke English very well, began to talk to me about women. He asked me if white women were passionate. I said that some of them were and some of them weren't.

“It is the same here in my country,” he said. “There are some who like to make love all the time and there are others who always appear to do so reluctantly.”

He, himself, had five wives, three of whom were very passionate. The other two, he said, seemed to care for nothing but their children. He asked me if I had been attracted by any of the women of the village. I smiled and said that I had had little opportunity to be close enough to any of them to feel passion for them. He laughed and said that on that very evening there was going to be a dancea kind of frenzied religious ceremonyin the public place in the village. It would take place according to tradition after sunset and it would be a fine opportunity for me to look over the unattached women. If I wished to have sexual intercourse with a girl, however, I should have to make the normal gesture to the parentsthat is, I should have to present them with a yoke of oxen. When I had done so, the girl would automatically become my spouse.

“But I cannot remain here for the rest of my life!” I laughed.

He nodded his head, smiling. That, too, could be arranged, he said. In the meantime it would be better to say nothing of my intention to leave, since many of the parents, who could accept my departure in the normal course of events would, if warned of it prior to my nuptials with their daughter, perhaps be unwilling to surrender their daughter to me. But afterwards, who could be forewarned of the will of God? Like the practical people they were, they would accept.

At sunset, I sat next to the chief and watched the males with their hideous tribal masks raising dust from the earth by the beat of their hard heels. The dance was confessedly sexualthere is no line of demarcation between religion and sexuality amongst most of the tribesmen of Africa. Religion, or rather religious experience and sexuality, are contained and expressed within a composite series of actions, gestures and genuflections, incapable of analysis into their component elements. It is not clear even to these people themselves where the frenzy of religion ends and the ecstasy of sexual passion begins. The men, feathered and masked, seemed almost to be involved in a kind of orgasm as they danced. The women, as they approached with their breasts bare and a little tail of colored cloth between their glistening black thighs, moved inwards in a loose circle about the men, obviously in the grip of some kind of lust which caused them to wish to mingle with the men. Then, suddenly, the women were in the center, huddled together and quivering, like a flock of Sabine women waiting to be taken, while the men, making obscene gestures with their plumed hips, seemed to threaten them in a way that was half ritual and half stark physical lust.

The circle was not closed. A segment had been cut out, as it were, to allow the headsman and those, among whom I was numbered, who sat about him to see deep into the center where the women quivered frenziedly in half-simulated passion.

Before the dance had gone far, I found myself looking directly into the eyes of one of those women, whose black body rippled and writhed in the torchlight. My friend, the chief, followed my glance and laid his hand on my forearm.

“You are attracted?” he whispered. “You wish to fuck her?”

I nodded without replying.

“It is easily arranged,” he said. “I am a good friend of her parents. I myself will provide the oxen and in return you can send me a gift when you return to your own country.”

I agreed immediately. The girl, her round, firm breasts smeared with some kind of oil that glistened in the light of the fire, was still undulating her hips and gazing in my direction. I desired her at once.

Without delay, the headsman sent a boy to fetch the girl's parents who, a moment later, presented themselves obediently before their chief. He spoke quickly in the native tongue. The father, a man of about fifty, nodded gravely all the while, and swiftly the chief turned to me and said that everything had been agreed upon.