by André Gide
“Is it really true,” she said, “that the earth is as beautiful as the birds say it is? Why don’t we talk about it more? Why don’t you tell me more about it? Is it for fear of hurting me because I cannot see it? You would be wrong. I hear the birds very well. I believe that I understand everything they are saying.”
“Those who can see do not hear them as well as you, my Gertrude,” I said to her while trying to console her.
“Why don’t other animals sing?” she asked again. Sometimes her questions surprised me and I remained perplexed for a minute, because she forced me to think about things that until then I accepted without question. It was thus that I considered, for the first time, that the more an animal is attached to the earth and the more weight it has, the more it is sad. This is what I tried to make her understand, and I told her of the squirrel and of its games.
She asked me then if the birds were the only animals that flew.
“There are also the butterflies,” I said to her.
“And do they sing?”
“They have another means of expressing their joy,” I said. “They have colors inscribed on their wings,” and I described the streaks of colors of the butterflies to her.
28 February
I will take a step back because yesterday I let myself wander.
In order to teach Gertrude I had to learn the alphabet of blind people for myself. But soon she became much more capable than me to read this writing that I had difficulty recognizing, and on top of that, I followed it more readily with my eyes than with my hands. In addition, I was not the only one to instruct her. And at first I was happy to have this help because I had much to do in the community where the houses are dispersed in such a way that my visits to the poor and sick obliged me to make journeys that were sometimes far away. Jacques had managed to break his arm while ice-skating during the Christmas vacation that he spent with us, for in the meantime he had returned to Lausanne where he had already begun his first studies, having entered into the Faculty of Theology. The fracture did not present any difficulties, and Martins, whom I had called right away, treated it easily without the need for a surgeon. But the precautions that he required Jacques to take meant he had to stay at the house for some time. He suddenly became quite interested in Gertrude who up until then he had barely even thought about, and he took up helping me teach her how to read. His collaboration only lasted for the time of his convalescence, about three weeks, but during that time Gertrude made exceptional progress. An extraordinary zeal stimulated her at present. It seemed that this intelligence, which yesterday was still numb, manifests itself brilliantly today. It was as if she started to run almost before she started walking. I admired with what little difficulty she could formulate her thoughts and how promptly she managed to express them in a proper manner, helping herself create an image of the idea or the object that we wanted to teach her. Sometimes we would discuss with her and describe for her something that we could not directly put in her hands. We would try to refer to things she did know in those cases until she got the idea, proceeding almost in the manner of a rangefinder.
But I don’t believe it is useful to note here all of the first echelons of this instruction which, without doubt, are used to teach all blind people. And I think that, for each one of those blind persons, the question of colors has plunged every teacher into the same kind of embarrassment. (And on this subject I am called to remark that nowhere in the gospel is the subject of colors discussed.) I do not know how the others proceeded, but I began by naming for her the colors of the prism in the order that the rainbow presents them to us. But soon she became confused about the difference between color and clarity, and I realized that her imagination did not allow her to make any distinction between the quality of the nuance and what painters call, I believe, “value.” She had the greatest difficulty to understand that each color could be more or less dark, and that they can be infinitely mixed. Nothing intrigued her more, and she returned to the subject often.
However, it was given to me to take her to Neuchâtel where we listened to a concert. The role of each instrument in the symphony permitted me to come back to this question of colors. I remarked to Gertrude about the different sounds of the brass, the stringed instruments, and the woodwinds, and that each one of them was able to offer in its own manner, and with more or less intensity, the entire scale of sounds from the lowest to the highest. I invited her to represent nature in the same way, the colors of red and orange analogous to the different sounds of horns and trombones, the yellows and the greens to those of violins, cellos, and basses, and the violets and blues recalling the differences between flutes, clarinets, and oboes. A sort of interior delight then came to replace her doubts.
“Oh how that must be beautiful!” She said.
Then, all of a sudden,
“But what about white? I do not understand what white would resemble.”
It then suddenly appeared to me how precarious my comparison was.
“White,” I tried to tell her in any case, “is the high limit where all the tones mixed together, like black is the low limit.”
But this did not satisfy me any more than it did her, since she quickly remarked that the woodwinds, the brass, and the violins kept distinct sounds from each other in the lowest as well as the highest notes. As it happened in the past, I remained silent at first, perplexed, looking for some other comparison that I could appeal to.
“Oh good!” I finally said to her, “Represent white as something that is completely pure, something that has no color but only light. Think about black, to the contrary, as being loaded with color until all of it has become obscured.”
I only recall this dialogue to point out an example of the difficulties that I bumped up against too often. Gertrude had some things that she never seemed to understand like people often do who fill their minds with imprecise or false facts and because of which any subsequent reasoning becomes flawed. Until an idea was clear in her mind, each notion remained a cause of worry and bother for her.
With regard to what I said above, the difficulty was increased by the fact that in her mind the notion of light and heat were at first tightly linked, such that I had great difficulty to dissociate them later.
And thusly I continued to try and deal with how the visual world and the world of sounds differed from each other and at what point all comparisons between the two for her become lame.
29 February
Having been completely wrapped up with my comparisons, I did not yet point out the immense pleasure that Gertrude took from this concert at Neuchâtel. It was precisely The Pastoral Symphony that was played there. I say, “precisely” because there was not, one can easily understand, another work that I would have more preferred for her to hear. For a long time after we left the concert hall, Gertrude remained silent as if drowning in ecstasy.
“Is what you see really as beautiful as that?” she finally said.
“As beautiful as what, my dear?”
“As this ‘Scene on the Bank of the River.’”
I did not respond to her immediately, for I was thinking that these indescribable harmonies painted not the world such that it is but what it could be if it were without evil and without sin. Never before had I dared to speak to Gertrude of evil, sin, or of death.
“Those who have eyes,” I finally said, “are not aware of their happiness.”
“But I who do not have them,” she said suddenly, “I know the happiness of hearing.”
She held herself close to me while we walked, and she weighed on my arm like little children do.
“Pastor, can you feel how happy I am? No, no, I do not say that just to make you feel good. Look at me. When someone says something that is not true, is it not possible to see that in the face? I can recognize it so well in the voice. Do you rem
ember the day when you told me that you were not crying after my aunt (that is how she refers to my wife) reproached you for not doing anything for her? I wanted to cry out, ‘Pastor, you are lying!’ Oh! I sensed it right away in your voice that you were not telling me the truth. I did not need to touch your cheeks to know that you were crying.” And she repeated in a high voice, “No, I did not need to touch your cheeks.” This made me blush because we were still in the town and the passersby were turning around.
However, she continued. “There is no sense in trying to delude me, you see. First of all, because it would be very cowardly to try and fool a blind person. And then because you could not get away with it,” she added while laughing. “Tell me, Pastor, you are not unhappy, are you?”
I held her hand to my lips, as if to make her feel without confessing it to her that part of my happiness came from her. Then I responded, “No, Gertrude, no, I am not unhappy. Why would I be unhappy?”
“Do you cry sometimes, however?”
“I have cried sometimes.”
“Not since the time that I spoke of?”
“No, I have not cried again since then.”
“And you don’t feel like crying anymore?”
“No, Gertrude.”
“And tell me, since then, have you ever wanted to lie?”
“No, dear child.”
“Will you promise me to never try to fool me?”
“I promise.”
“Good! Then tell me right away, am I pretty?”
I was taken aback by this brusque question even more because up until this day, I did not want to pay attention to the undeniable beauty of Gertrude, and on top of that, I felt that it was perfectly useless to tell her about it.
“Why is that important for you to know?” I said to her right away.
“That is my worry,” she said. “I would like to know if I am not… how would you say it?… a sour note in the symphony. Who else could I ask about this, Pastor?”
“A pastor does not need to bother about the beauty of faces,” I said, trying to defend myself as best I could.
“Why?”
“Because it is the beauty of souls that is important.”
“So you prefer to let me believe that I am ugly,” she said with a charming pout, which made me cry out,
“Gertrude, you know very well that you are pretty.”
She then became silent and her face took on a serious expression that she held until we reached home.
Shortly after we returned, Amélie found the means to make me feel that she disapproved of how I spent the day. She could have told me this earlier, but as was her habit, she let us leave together, Gertrude and I, without saying a word. She then reserved for herself the right to criticize after the fact. She did not reproach me specifically, but her silence was like an accusation. Would it not have been natural for her to ask what we had listened to, since she knew that I was taking Gertrude to a concert? Would the joy of this child not have been increased by the slightest interest in knowing what caused her such pleasure? Amélie did not remain silent after that, but she seemed to assume an attitude where she only spoke about the most inconsequential things. And it was not until later that evening, after the children had gone to bed, that I took her aside and asked her severely,
“Are you angry that I took Gertrude to a concert?”
She gave me this response, “You do things for her that you would have never done for any of your own children.”
So it was always the same grief and the same refusal to understand that one celebrates the child who comes back but not those who remain, as the parable shows. It also pained me to see that she took no notice of the infirmity of Gertrude, who could hope for no other celebration than this one. Since I was fortunate to have some free time today, although I am normally very busy, the reproach of Amélie was even more unjust because she knew very well that each of the children had work to do or were occupied by other things, and that Amélie herself had no taste for music. In fact, she would never choose to go to a concert even if it was being played at our front door.
What gave me even more chagrin was that Amelie dared to say all this in front of Gertrude, for even though I had taken my wife aside, she raised her voice enough for Gertrude to hear her. I felt more indignation than sadness, and several instants after Amélie had left us, I went up to Gertrude and held her frail hand to my face.
“You see! This time I am not crying.”
“No, this time it is my turn,” she said while forcing herself to smile at me. And suddenly I could see that the beautiful face she lifted towards me was inundated with tears.
8 March
The only pleasure that I can give to Amélie is to abstain from doing things that displease her. These negative testimonies of love are all that she will permit me. She cannot understand to what point she has already narrowed my life. Ah! God only grant that she would ask me to complete some difficult task! With what joy would I accomplish the reckless, the perilous, for her! But one could say that she is repugnant to all that is not customary, in such a way that for her, progress in life only consists of adding together similar days from the past. She does not desire and she will not even accept from me any kind of new virtues or even any increment of old virtues. She looks at any effort of the soul that wants to see in Christianity anything other than a domestication of instincts either with concern or outright reprobation.
I must confess that I had completely forgotten, once we got to Neuchâtel, to pay our account with the tailor and bring him a box of thread as Amélie had asked me to do. I was angrier with myself than she could have been with me, even more so because I promised myself not to forget to do this knowing also that “He who is faithful with little things will also be so with important things.” And I also feared what conclusions she might draw from my omission. I would have even liked for her to give me some kind of reproach, for I certainly deserved it. But, as it usually happens, imaginary grief outweighed the actual. Ah! How beautiful life would be and how easily we could support our misery if we were content to think about only real pains without listening to the ghosts and monsters in our spirit. But I will let myself note here that this could be the subject of a sermon (Matt., XII, 29: “Do not have a troubled mind”). But it is the intellectual and moral development of Gertrude that I am recording here. I will thus return to it.
I was hoping to be able to follow this development step-by-step, and I have begun to outline some details. But beyond the fact that I don’t have the time to meticulously note all the phases, it is extremely difficult for me today to remember the exact chain of events. As my story moved along, I reported at first about some reflections of Gertrude, some conversations with her, and someone who by chance would read these pages would no doubt be astonished to hear her speak so aptly and reason so judiciously. In fact her progress was disconcertingly rapid. I often admired how quickly her mind seized upon the intellectual food that I fed her and all that it encompassed. She made it her own through an effort of assimilation and of continual maturation. She often surprised me, anticipating my thoughts and going beyond them, and often, from one session to another, I no longer recognized my student.
After only a couple of months it did not seem any longer like her intelligence had been sleeping for so long. But she was already showing more wisdom than most young ladies who become dissipated by the exterior world and to whom many useless preoccupations cause them to lose attention. Moreover, I believe she was a bit older than we had assumed she was at first. It seemed that she was able to take advantage of her blindness in such a way that I began to think that perhaps this infirmity might have been a benefit for her in numerous ways. Despite myself I compared her to Charlotte, and sometimes when I helped her with her lessons, seeing her mind distracted by the least little insect th
at was flying around, I thought, “All the same, how she would listen to me more carefully if she could not see!”
It goes without saying that Gertrude was avid about reading, but wanting to control her thoughts as much as possible, I preferred that she did not read a lot, especially without me. In particular, I did not want her to read the Bible by herself, which might seem strange for a Protestant. I will explain that later, but before going into a question of such importance, I want to relate a little fact that was related to music that took place, such as I remember, shortly after the concert at Neuchâtel.
Yes, this concert took place, I believe, three weeks before the beginning of the summer vacation which brought Jacques back home to us. In the meantime, on several occasions I sat Gertrude down in front of the little organ in our chapel, which was normally played by Mlle de la M… Louise de la M… had not yet begun to give music lessons to Gertrude. Despite the love I have for music, I do not know much about it, and I felt that I was not capable to teach her anything when I sat next to her in front of the keyboard.