Where shall I go? The earth is vast, I will follow every road to its end, I will empty every horizon, even though I perish while rounding the Cape, die of cholera in Calcutta, or of the plague in Constantinople!
If only I were a mule driver in Andalusia! Then I could trot along all day through the gorges of the sierras, watch the Guadalquivir flow by, on which there are islands of oleanders, hear, in the evenings, the guitars and the voices singing beneath the balconies, and watch the moon mirroring herself in the marble basin of the Alhambra, where once the wives of sultans would bathe.
I wish I were a gondolier in Venice or the driver of one of those carrioles which, in the fine season, take you from Nice to Rome! And yet there are people who actually live in Rome, people who need never leave. Happy the beggar in Naples who sleeps in broad daylight, asleep on the shore, and who, as he smokes his cigar, can also see the smoke from Vesuvius rising into the sky! I envy him his bed of pebbles and the dreams he can dream; the sea, unfailingly lovely, wafts to him the scent of its waves and the distant murmur that comes from Capri.
Sometimes I imagine arriving in Sicily, in a small village of fishermen, where all the boats have lateen sails. It’s morning; there, between baskets and stretched-out nets, a working-class woman is sitting, barefoot; round her corset hangs a golden cord, as on the women of the Greek colonies; her black hair, separated into two tresses, falls down to her heels; she rises to her feet, and shakes out her apron; she walks along, and her figure is at once robust and supple, like that of an ancient nymph. If only I could be loved by such a woman! Some poor ignorant child, unable even to read – but her voice would be so sweet when she told me, in her Sicilian accent, “I love you! Stay here!”
The manuscript stops here, but I knew its author, and if anyone has reached this page after making his way through all the metaphors, hyperboles and other figures that fill the previous pages, and now wishes to know how it ended, let him continue reading; we are about to tell him.
Feelings can be expressed in words only with great difficulty, otherwise this book would have been completed in the first person. Doubtless, our man must have concluded he had nothing else to say; there comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more – it was at this point that he came to a halt: too bad for the reader!
I admire the way that chance so decided that the book should stop here, just when it could have been improved; the author was about to go out into society, he would have had countless things to teach us, but instead he retired more and more into an austere solitude from which nothing emerged. And he judged fit to stop complaining, perhaps because he began to suffer for real. Neither in his conversation, nor in his letters, nor in the papers I went through after his death, in which I found this narrative, did I ever come across anything that could disclose the state of his soul after the period at which he stopped writing his confessions.
His greatest regret was that he was not a painter; he said he had some really beautiful pictures in his imagination. He was also sorry not to be a musician; on spring mornings, when he would go for walks along the avenues of poplar trees, endless symphonies would echo through his head. In any case, he understood nothing of painting or music; I saw him admire real nonentities and come away from the Opera with a raging headache. With a little more time, patience and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspect of the arts, he would have managed to write mediocre poetry, good enough for a lady’s album – and this is always a gallant thing to do, whatever you may say.
In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older, he lost his taste for them, but the excellent authors just didn’t fill him with the same enthusiasm.
He was a passionate devotee of beauty, and ugliness repelled him as much as crime; indeed, there is something quite dreadful about an ugly person; from a distance he fills you with horror, and from close up with disgust; when he speaks, you suffer; if he weeps, his tears irritate you; you feel like beating him up when he laughs and, in silence, his motionless face strikes you as the seat of every vice and every base instinct. So it was that he never forgave a man to whom he had taken a dislike at their very first encounter; on the other hand, he was perfectly devoted to people who had never spoken more than a few words to him, but whose way of walking or the cut of whose jib he liked.
He shunned gatherings, shows, balls and concerts, for hardly had he entered them than he felt himself filled with an icy gloom and his hair stood on end as if in a cold blast. When he was jostled by the crowd, a fresh new hatred rose to his heart, and he felt towards them all a wolfish hatred, that of a wild beast tracked down in his lair.
He had the vanity to believe that men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.
Public misfortunes and collective sorrows saddened him but little; I would even go so far as to say that he felt more pity for canaries in their cages, fluttering their wings when the sun shines, than for whole peoples condemned to slavery. This was just the way he was. He was full of delicate scruples and real sensitivity; for instance, he could not go into a tea room and see a poor man watching him eat without blushing to the ears; as he left, he would press all the money he had into his hand and flee. But he was considered cynical, because he called a spade a spade and said aloud what people usually keep to themselves.
The love of kept women (the ideal of young men who don’t have the means to keep a woman themselves) was hateful to him, and filled him with disgust; he thought that the man who pays for his services is the master, the lord, the king. Although he was poor, he respected riches and not rich people; to be, for free and for nothing, the lover of a woman who is housed, dressed and fed by another man, struck him as about as witty as stealing a bottle of wine from another man’s cellar; he would add that to boast of doing so was the characteristic of rascally servants and petty-minded men.
To want a married woman, and to make friends with her husband to this end, to shake his hand affectionately, to laugh at his puns, to sympathize with him when business was bad, to run errands for him, to read the same newspaper as him – in a word, to perform, in a single day, more base and vulgar actions than ten galley slaves have done in their whole lives – was something too humiliating for his pride, and yet he did love several married women; sometimes he set out to woo them, but he would suddenly be seized by repugnance, when the lovely lady was already starting to simper at him, just as frosts in May nip apricot flowers in the bud.
And what about women of easy virtue, I hear you asking? Well, the answer is no! He couldn’t bring himself to climb up into some garret to kiss a mouth that had just dined on cheese, and hold a hand covered with chilblains.
As for seducing a young woman, he would have felt less guilty if he had raped her; to yoke someone to you was for him worse than murdering her. He seriously thought that there is less harm in killing a man than producing a child: in the first case you are relieving someone of life, not his whole life, but a half or a quarter or a hundredth part of that existence that is going to finish, that would finish without you; but as for the second, he would say, are you not responsible to him for all the tears he will shed, from the cradle to the grave? Without you he would never have been born, and why is he born? For your amusement, not for his, that’s for sure; to carry your name, the name of a fool, I’ll be bound – you may as well write that name on some wall; why do you need a man to bear the burden of three or four letters?
To his eyes, the man who, basing his actions on the Civil Code, forcibly enters the bed of the virgin who has been given to him that same morning, thereby carrying out a legal rape that is protected by authority, had no counterpart among apes, hippopotami and toads; they at least, male and female, copulate when common desires lead them to seek out each other and unite, in such a way that there is neither terror and disgust on the one side, nor brutality and obscene despotism on the other; and he would set out long immoral theories to
prove his point – though it would be futile to relate them here.
That is why he never married and took as his mistress neither a kept woman, nor a married woman, nor a woman of easy virtue, nor a girl; that left widows, and the thought of them didn’t even cross his mind.
When he had to choose a profession, he hesitated between countless repellent possibilities. To be a philanthropist he wasn’t cunning enough, and his kindly nature led him to shun medicine; as for commerce, he was incapable of calculating, and the mere sight of a bank set his nerves on edge. Despite his wild eccentricities, he had too much common sense to take seriously the noble profession of lawyer; in any case, his sense of justice would never have been able to fit in with existing laws. He had too much good taste to become a critic, and he was, perhaps, too much of a poet to succeed in literature. And anyway, are those really professions? One needs to settle down in a good job and find a position in the world, one gets bored with idleness, one must make oneself useful, man is born to labour: maxims that are difficult to grasp, though people took care to repeat them to him frequently.
Resigned to being bored everywhere and by everything, he declared he would study law, and he went to live in Paris. Many people in his village envied him his journey, and told him how lucky he was, able to hang out in cafés, take in shows, go to restaurants and see beautiful women; he let them have their say, and he smiled in the same way one does when on the verge of tears. And yet, how often he had longed to leave his room once and for all, that room where he had yawned his head off, and where his elbows had worn out the mahogany surface of the old desk on which he had composed his dramas at the age of fifteen! And yet he found it hard to leave all that behind; it is, perhaps, the places that we have cursed most roundly that we prefer to the others – don’t prisoners feel nostalgic for their prisons? The reason is that in their prisons they could still hope, whereas once they are out, they have nothing more to hope for; through the walls of their cells, they could see the countryside dotted with bright daisies, criss-crossed by streams, covered with yellow corn and tree-lined roads – but once they have been returned to liberty, to wretchedness, they again see life as it really is: a stony, bumpy road, muddy and icy, as is the countryside, so beautiful yet in reality thronged with local policemen who stop them picking fruit when they are thirsty, and appointed with forest rangers to prevent them killing game when they are hungry, and crawling with gendarmes if they feel like going out for a stroll and don’t have their papers.
He took up lodgings in a furnished room, where the furniture had been bought for other lodgers, and worn threadbare by them; he thought he was living in ruins. He spent his days working, listening to the muffled noise from the street, and watching the rain falling onto the rooftops.
When it was sunny, he would go for a walk in the Luxembourg Gardens, scuffling through the fallen leaves, remembering how he had done just the same at school; but he had never suspected that, ten years later, he would still be doing exactly the same thing. Or else he would sit on a bench and think of countless sad and tender things, gazing at the cold, black water of the ponds, and returning home feeling sick at heart. Two or three times, not knowing what to do, he went into churches for the Benediction, and tried to pray; how much his friends would have laughed if they had seen him dipping his fingers into the holy water and making the sign of the cross!
One evening, as he was wandering round some streets and feeling so very angry, for no apparent reason, that he would have liked to throw himself against naked swords and fight to the death, he heard voices singing and the sweet sounds of an organ swelling and fading in reply. He went in. Beneath the portico, an old woman, squatting on the ground, was asking for alms as she rattled coppers in a tinplate cup; the upholstered door swung to and fro every time someone went in or out; you could hear the clatter of clogs and the scraping of chairs across the flags; at the far end, the chancel was lit, the tabernacle was gleaming amid the candles, the priest was chanting the prayers, the lamps, hanging in the nave, were swaying on their long chains, the tops of the ogive windows and the aisles were lost in shadow, the rain was beating on the stained-glass windows and rattling off their leads, the organ played on, and the voices resumed, as on the day when he had listened from the cliff tops as the sea and the birds spoke to each other. He was filled with the desire to be a priest, so he could say prayers over the bodies of the dead, wear a hair shirt and prostrate himself, overwhelmed by the love of God… Suddenly a guffaw of pity rose from the depths of his heart; he pulled his hat firmly down over his ears, and left with a shrug.
More than ever he fell into a sadness, more than ever the days seemed long to him; the barrel organ that he could hear playing under his window tugged at his heartstrings; he found that these instruments had an irresistible melancholy, and he would say that those musical boxes were full of tears. Or rather, he didn’t say anything at all, since he didn’t try to pass himself off as bored and blasé, as the man who is disillusioned by everything; eventually, indeed, people found he had become more cheerful in character. It was, more often than not, some poor man from the south of France, or from Piedmont or Genoa, who was turning the handle on the barrel organ. Why had such a man left his mountain home, and his hut crowned with maize at harvest? He would watch him for a long time, with his big square head, his black beard and his suntanned hands, a little monkey dressed in red hopping around on his shoulder pulling faces; the musician would hold out his cap, and he flung a few coins down into it, and followed him until he was out of sight.
Opposite him, a house was being built; it took three months. He saw the walls rising, the storeys mounting one on top of another; the panes were fitted into the windows, it was whitewashed and painted, and then the doors were closed; households moved in and started to live their lives there; he was annoyed to have neighbours, he would have preferred the sight of stones.
He would saunter through museums, gazing at all those painted, motionless portraits, for ever young in their ideal lives – all those portraits of famous people one goes to see, and who watch the crowds go by without lifting their hands from their swords: their eyes will still be shining when our grandsons are dead and buried. He would lose himself in the contemplation of ancient statues, especially those that were mutilated.
There was one rather sad event that occurred: one day, in the street, he thought he recognized someone passing close by him; the stranger, likewise, had given a start; they halted in their tracks and went up to one another. It was him! His old friend, his best friend, his brother, the boy he had always had by his side at school, in class, at private study, in the dormitory; they did their impositions and their homework together; in the schoolyard and when they went out for walks, they would always stroll along arm in arm; they had sworn in bygone days to live together, sharing everything, and to remain friends till death did them part. First they shook hands, calling each other by name, then they looked each other up and down from head to toe in silence – both of them had changed and aged somewhat already. After asking each other what they now did, they stopped and didn’t know how to continue; they had not seen each other for six years and they couldn’t think of anything else to say. Finally bored and irritated at gazing straight into one another’s eyes, they separated.
As he had no energy for anything, and as time, despite what the philosophers have said about it, seemed to him the form of wealth least capable of being borrowed, he started to drink brandy and to smoke opium; he would frequently spend his days lying flat on his back, half-drunk, in a state midway between apathy and nightmare.
At other times his strength would return to him, and he would suddenly bounce back like a coiled spring. Then work appeared to tempt him again, and the glowing radiance of thought brought a smile to his lips, the serene and profound smile of the wise; he quickly settled down to work, he had superb plans, he wanted to show certain periods in a completely new light, to link art with history, to interpret the great poets as well as the great painters,
and with this aim in view he would need to learn languages, to go back to Antiquity and to become acquainted with the Orient; he could see himself already reading inscriptions and deciphering obelisks; then he decided he was crazy, and folded his arms again.
He had stopped reading, or rather he read books that he thought were bad and that nonetheless gave him a certain pleasure through their very mediocrity. At night he could not sleep, he twisted and turned sleeplessly on his bed, he dozed and dreamt and woke up again, with the result that, when morning came, he was more tired than if he had stayed awake all night.
Worn out by the terrible habit of boredom, and even deriving a certain pleasure from the mindless state that results, he was like those people who watch themselves die; he didn’t open his window to get a breath of fresh air, he no longer bothered to wash his hands, he lived in the squalor of poverty, wearing the same shirt for a whole week; he stopped shaving and combing his hair. Although he felt the cold, if he had gone out in the morning and got his feet wet, he would keep the same shoes on all day without lighting a fire, or else he would throw himself fully clothed onto his bed and try to get off to sleep; he watched the flies running across the ceiling, he smoked and followed with his eyes the little blue spirals that coiled upwards from his lips.
The reader will easily realize that he had no aim in life, and that was precisely the nub of his problem. What could have spurred him on and inspired him? Love? He shunned it; ambition made him laugh; as for money, he was thoroughly rapacious, but his sloth got the upper hand, and then a million francs wasn’t worth the trouble of gaining it, in his view; luxury befits a man born in opulence; the man who has actually earned his fortune almost never knows what to do with it; and his pride was so great that he would have turned down a throne. You will ask me, “What did he want?” I don’t know, but one thing is for sure: he had no intention of getting himself elected to Parliament later on; he would even have refused a post as prefect, including the embroidered uniform, the cross of the Legion of Honour around his neck and the buckskins and riding boots worn on ceremonial occasions. He preferred to read André Chénier than to be a minister, and he would rather have been Talma than Napoleon.*
Memoirs of a Madman and November Page 18