Then Baron B. climbed to the other floors, visited every room in the castle, and having arrived at his bedchamber, threw himself on his bed and said, “I come to sleep with you, Baron, sir.” In that interval of repose, his ideas reorganized themselves; he recalled everything that had happened to him during those two hours, and it terrified him. Yet this was only an instant—very soon he fell back under the domination of that will which directed him as it pleased.
It returned to repeat the words it had said a moment ago: “I come to sleep with you, Baron, sir.” And new memories were aroused in his soul; they were double memories—that is, recollections of impressions that the same event leaves in two different spirits—and he welcomed both sorts of impressions in himself. Yet these recollections were not like the ones that had already been evoked under the trellis: those were simple, these complex; those left a part of his soul empty, neutral, impartial; these occupied it totally. And since they were memories of love, at that moment he understood the great unity, the immense inclusiveness of love, which, since the inexorable laws of life make it a sentiment divided in two, can be comprehended only partially by any one person. It was the full and complete fusion of two spirits, a fusion toward which love is only an aspiration, the delights of love no more than a shadow, an echo, a dream of those delights. Nor can I express with less confusion the singular state in which he found himself.
He spent about an hour in this state, after which he noticed that the pleasure was diminishing and the two lives that seemed to animate him were separating. He rose from the bed, passed his hands over his face as if to tear away some light object…a veil, a shadow, a feather. Then he felt a different touch; it seemed as if his features had changed, and he experienced the same sensation as if he were caressing another person’s face.
There was a mirror nearby, and he ran to gaze in it. How strange! He was no longer himself, or at least he certainly saw his image reflected there, but he saw it as another person’s image; he saw two images in one. Through the diaphanous surface of his body shone a second image whose contours were hazy, unstable, familiar. And it seemed very natural to him because he knew that this unity contained two people, that he was not just one person, but two at the same time.
Removing his eyes from the glass, he saw an old, life-size portrait on the opposite wall and said, “Ah! this is Baron B…How he has aged!” Then he turned back to study himself in the mirror.
The sight of that painting reminded him that an image hanging in a corridor of the castle resembled the one he had just seen glowing beneath his skin, and he felt overcome by an irrepressible desire to see it again. He rushed toward the corridor.
Several maids walking past at that moment were seized by a fright even more intense than before, and they fled, calling the green-liveried footmen who assembled in the anteroom to plan what has to be done.
Meanwhile, a considerable number of the curious had gathered in the courtyard of the castle: the news of the follies committed by the baron spread through the village in an instant, and the doctor, the magistrate, and other influential people were hurried there.
The decision was made to enter the corridor. The unfortunate baron was found standing before a painting of a young girl—the very girl who had disappeared from the castle some months ago—in a state of nervous excitation impossible to describe. He seemed to be suffering a violent attack of epilepsy; all his vital forces appeared to be riveted on that canvas; he seemed to contain something that wanted to burst out of his body, wanted to break away from it in order to enter the image in the painting. He stared at it apprehensively and took prodigious leaps toward it, as if he were drawn by an irresistible power.
But the most astonishing prodigy was that the longer he stared at the painting, the more his lineaments seemed to metamorphose and acquire a different expression. Everyone recognized him as Baron B., but at the same time they saw a strange resemblance to the image reproduced in the painting. The crowd packing the corridor halted, stricken by an indescribable panic. What did they see? They did not know; they felt as if they were witnessing some supernatural event.
No one dared draw near—no one moved—an insuperable fear took possession of everyone; a shudder of terror coursed through all their nerves…
The baron, meanwhile, continued to hurl himself toward the painting. His excitement mounted, his features were changing more and more, his face reproduced the girl’s image with increasing precision…and already several people seemed on the verge of bursting into screams of terror, even though a mysterious fear had rendered them mute and motionless. All of a sudden, a voice rose from the crowd, shouting, “Clara! Clara!”
That shout broke the spell. “Yes, Clara! Clara!” the people gathered in the corridor repeated in one voice. Then they began crashing into each other as they rushed for the doors, overwhelmed by an even greater terror. That was the name of the girl who had disappeared from the castle, whose image was reproduced in the painting.
At that shout, Baron B. tore himself away from the painting and dashed into the midst of the crowd, screaming, “My murderer, my murderer!” The crowd scattered and parted. A man fell to the ground in a faint—the very man who had shouted—the young woodsman who had been a suspect in Clara’s mysterious disappearance.
Baron B. was forcefully restrained by his green-liveried footmen. The revived woodsman called for the magistrate, to whom he confessed of his own accord that he killed the girl in a jealous rage and buried her in a field, precisely at the spot where a few hours ago he had seen the unfortunate baron sitting and eating the raspberries from the bush.
Baron B. was immediately given a strong dose of an emetic, which made him vomit the undigested fruit and freed him from the girl’s spirit.
Her corpse, in whose breast the raspberry bush had taken root, was disinterred and received a Christian burial in the cemetery.
The woodsman was brought to justice and sentenced to twelve years of hard labor.
In 1865, I met him in the penal institution at Cosenza, which he had persuaded me to visit. At that time, two years were remaining in his sentence. It was he himself who told me this marvelous tale.
[1869]
Bouvard
…with all deformity’s dull, deadly, Discouraging weight upon me, like a mountain, In feeling, on my heart as on my shoulders—An hateful and unsightly molehill to The eyes of happier man.
BYRON, The Deformed Transformed
BOUVARD! Who was Bouvard?
Perhaps someone among my readers still attempts—and not without success—to revive in his heart the vague, distant memories annexed to that name; perhaps he yet remembers a mysterious tale that has long stirred youthful reveries of those days and received from all sensitive souls an homage of pity and affection.
I myself strive to recall the circumstances of this piteous story like distant childhood memories, like the fantastic visions of a dream—beautiful and fleeting as they are, harsh and melancholy like everything evocative of sentiment and love.
Nature has destined certain lives for publicity, heaven has directed that certain intellects be made known to lead the masses like a shining beacon, and nonetheless those lives ended mysteriously neglected, those intelligences wasted away in the shadows, disdainful. Do two forces exist in nature? The positive force that creates and predestines, the negative force that reacts and destroys? Ask the man, ask him the secret of his innermost life, ask the unfortunate genius!
Bouvard was an unfortunate genius. His name faded as rapidly as the precipitate evening star; his life was the transit of a dazzling meteor that burns out in the middle of its arc and disappears in the astonished eyes that marvel at it.
I shall not weave an imagined narrative here: I shall write the story of a man who suffered, the story of a life whose every deed was focused on pain, whose ruin filled with horror and pity every generous soul who knew of it. I write for myself; I write to
prolong the memories of my youth throughout my entire life and to preserve for the years of aridity the inexpressible comfort of tears.
Anyone who has never visited the Savoy region—its varied land, its snow-filled valleys, its mountains of pine and granite—is unacquainted with that point on the earth where nature hid the secret of her melancholy. In the Crest-Voland mountains the birds have a sweeter voice, the oriole sings the saddest notes in the hedges, and throughout the territory of the Chablais massif there is a species of wren whose scarcely audible cry resembles a dying man’s lament. Along the sides of the mountains, the banks tapestried with white violets (which superstition classes among cemetery flowers) stand out like bright waving ribbons against the dark green of the heather, where swarms of gray butterflies flutter about the dense shrubbery.
Bouvard was born in that place, born in a cabin. His father played the hurdy-gurdy and made a marmot dance in the Champagneux Valley. Bouvard’s family made a sad purchase with the birth of this boy: he was stunted and sickly; deformity marked him with its repulsive traces and did not leave anything normal, anything attractive in his face, any charm in his eye or voice. It seems that nature partly repudiated him, allowing him none of the sheer pleasure of life.
When Bouvard was seven years old, he began to notice the derision his deformity earned him, and his heart was pierced, imagining and perhaps foreseeing the fate of his entire existence. His first childhood adversities made him prone to meditation and solitude; and perhaps he owed to this early misfortune the extraordinary development of his sensibility, perhaps even his very genius—because if pain creates or modifies great minds (and in the greatest, misfortune is a cause, not an accident or effect), its action must be more efficacious in the early years of life, when society has still not steeled the heart for protection, and the innocent, virginal spirit retains the indelible marks of nature.
He was forced to part company with his fellows and at night would sit along the banks of the Isère, watching the waters stream by and the sun set behind the forest of Gresy.
“How beautiful the sun is!” Bouvard once said to himself. “How beautiful are these butterflies and these birds that build their nests here! Here is a magnificent lily. How precise in all its parts, how exact in the arrangement of its leaves, how marvelously flexible in its stem!” And in bowing to pick it, he glimpsed his image in the transparent surface of the river—his image, ugly, obscene, hideous…Bouvard sat on the bank and wept long, and with abandon. At the very least, he would have liked a heart in which to confide the secret of his early sufferings; and perhaps his mother’s melancholy tenderness understood the wealth of emotion enclosed within that boy’s delicate soul, perhaps in his mother he found a friend. Yet that friend was soon stolen away from him—at ten Bouvard remained alone in the world.
One day his father told him, “My dear son, you are now ten years old, and although you are somewhat sickly and your appearance is truly not one of the best, your strength is sufficiently developed, and you can henceforth do well enough on your own. I intend to go to France, and it is time for us to part. Take my marmot and my hurdy-gurdy. They are much more than I can give you, but heaven may at least reward your father’s generous sacrifice with your success.”
Bouvard took the road to Bonneville and slept the first night in a canebrake along the bank of a stream. It was a beautiful night in August. He had never seen so many stars nor heard so clearly the noise of the locusts in the stubble of the harvested fields and the countless soft, indescribable sounds of the leaves on a quiet summer night. Bouvard felt something unusual in himself: he was not asleep, he was not afraid, he felt no weariness, no discomfort, he was calm and peaceful—an infinite feeling of well-being infused every part of his body with a sweetness he had never experienced until then: he was at once thoughtful and serene.
“Listen,” he said. “It is a fine thing that this cricket is chirping, but why does it chirp?…And what are you doing up there, all those lights God burns every night?…And these plants?…And this nightingale I hear trilling from afar? I never really noticed that there were so many beautiful things in the sky, or that the crickets sang so sweetly at night. Oh, the Lord must be good if he created so many marvelous things.”
Bouvard fell into a deep meditation. He thought of his mother and his cabin and that unknown world he was about to enter so young. Little by little, his senses grew drowsy. He concentrated on the melancholy harmony that soothed his ear like a child’s song, the rustling of the stalks, the murmur of the insects, the lament of the water, the voice of the wind and leaves. His soul acquired a strange sensibility, his hearing an ineffable sensory power: he distinguished the most delicate notes, the most melodious tones, the sweetest cadences, and he felt that he perceived the magnificent music of nature. He took his hurdy-gurdy and played an old plaintive air he had once heard from his father. There was nothing more simple than that music, nothing more monotonous than that sound, but he nonetheless found such tenderness in it that his eyes filled with tears, and when he finished, he realized he was kneeling in prayer.
Nature made a momentous revelation to Bouvard in that instant: he understood that he was an artist; through an extraordinary power of intuition, he fathomed the mystery of an entire life. A boundless self-confidence, an irresistible eagerness for the future were then stirring in his heart: he felt proud of himself, proud of his divine art; he was well aware that he had not yet achieved anything, but he knew that everything would be achieved in time.
Bouvard fell asleep because it was very late, and he dreamt of the angels and the flowers, his cabin and his mountains, the white swallows of the Isère and its banks blooming with buttercups…He was still dreaming when he felt someone beating on his shoulders, and as he awoke, he saw two men seated near him. One of them, who appeared quite old, was watching him intently.
“My little one,” this man said to Bouvard, “it seems to me that you are earning your bread with this ugly marmot and this wretched instrument, and you are still very young to be setting out so alone in the world. I shall give you a companion. Here is my friend Jeanin, from whom I must part this very day. He is a distinguished person and possesses only one small defect, a flaw of no consequence for his art: he is blind in both eyes, but sees perfectly with his mind and has better hearing than us, because my friend Jeanin is not in fact a fool and will bring you decent money with his violin. Truly, your face does not much eulogize your mother, but you seem like a kind boy, and heaven will be obliged to you if you are a good companion to my friend. Come now, untie this tailless marmot’s leash immediately, since it will not do well to try your fortune with a badge of poverty, give your hand to your companion, and get going. By noon I must be on the road to Villaz, along the canal.”
Bouvard considered this event an extraordinary gift of fortune, and he felt that something agreeable might reside in the mission of charity and love with which heaven seemed to entrust him in his unanticipated alliance to the blind man.
He was not mistaken.
Seven years later, the newspapers in Geneva read: “Bouvard, the celebrated violinist, will give a public performance in our theater this evening. The extraordinary genius of this young artist and the universal fame that precedes him free us from the need to add any words of praise and recommendation.”
* * *
—
We next see Bouvard in the second phase of his life—no longer the little Savoyard, but the man of the world, the elegant youth, the extraordinary artist.
What are his passions, his heart?
Lake Leman lies calm and peaceful, the sky is serene and starry, the moon is reflected in the waves. It is one of those nights of silence and love when everything in the creation stirs, alive with this sentiment. What says the whisper of the wind that gently ripples the waters? What say the waters to the wind? Why do the myriad flowers in that tree quiver, whispering among themselves? The dewdrop that descends from the sky
to the lodge itself in the flower’s cherished calyx—what attractive force showed her the path to him, in the vast universe that created her? Let us attend to this language of beings unappreciated by man. There we hear the drone of the insect performing his nuptials among the scented petals of the rose; the hum of the nocturnal butterfly fluttering around his female companion in her nest of leaves and silk; the voice of the zephyr preparing for the mysterious fecundation of the flowers; the shudder of the seaweed bending to caress the fleeting waves of the stream; the secret language of the stars, the murmuring of the stalks and buds, the fern’s kisses, the infinite numbers that reveal in nature the universal and overwhelming sentiment of life—love.
Yet how many men can hear this language? Is not man the only creature to have prostituted love and sacrificed this heavenly sentiment on the altar of his egoism? Do not inquire about love from man, ask him only about a shadow—a hazardous show that feigns, declares, vows…There was a time when men loved one another, before the family, that pure, virginal girl, was taken away from the forest and cabins to attend her wedding with society and met gold in her path, the petulant, adventurous boy who did violence to her. From that disgrace egoism was born, the wicked and insatiable monster that devours the emotions to which he himself gives birth, as Saturn once devoured his children.
But just as we sometimes observe, among the hundred withered limbs of a tree blasted by lightning, a single surviving branch dressed in such lovely flowers as that tree never gave forth in the fullness of its youth and spring; not otherwise did love, banished from the womb of humanity, take refuge in the breasts of a few men who preserved it in the secrecy of their hearts. Ask them how to love, what they hope from love, ask them if one can love with impunity. Oh, youth is harsh, and the laws of society are not less harsh!…Avoid the struggle, therefore, soil your soul, hurl your crown of roses to the earth before it is torn from your head and replaced by a wreath of thorns and cypress.
Fantastic Tales Page 4