by George Sand
fearful and wary of the traps of our industry; the Tigers and lions tame and come from deserts serve fun to the people of the North. Animals that had never could acclimatize with us left without dying, for live in domesticity, their warm sun and forgot this harsh and proud sorrow that killed them in bondage. Is that everywhere the blood becomes poorer and freezes as the instinct grows and develops. The soul is exalted and leaves the earth insufficient for its needs, to steal the fire from heaven
Prometheus; but, lost in the midst of darkness, it stops Page 107
in its flight and falls; for God, seeing his daring, extends the hand and take away the sun. "
7
Solitude
" Well ! Trenmor, the child obeyed me: he left me alone in the deserted valley. I feel good here. The season is soft. An abandoned chalet serves as a retreat and, each morning the herdsmen from the neighboring valley bring me milk goat and unleavened bread, baked outdoors with trees dead of the forest. A rich bed of dry heather, a thick coat for the night and some clothes, that's what endure a week or two without suffering too much from life hardware.
The first hours that I spent like this seemed to me the most beautiful of my life. To you I can say everything, can't I, Trenmor?
As Sténio moved away, I felt the weight of the life lighten up on my shoulders. First his pain to leave me, his reluctance to leave me in this desert, his terror, his submission, its tears without reproach and its caresses without bitterness had made me repent of my resolution. When he was at the bottom of the first slope of Monteverdor, I wanted the remember, because his dejected gait tore me apart. And then I love him, you know that I love him from the bottom of my heart; affection holy, pure, true, is not dead in me, you know it well, Trenmor; for you also love me. I do not like you like him. I do not have this fearful concern for you, tender, almost childish, that I have for him, as soon as he suffers.
You never suffer, you don't need us to
love you so!
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I motioned for her to come back. But it was already too far. He believed that I sent him a last farewell. He answered it and continued his way. So I cried because I felt the pain I had in her did by dismissing him, and I prayed to God, to soften him, from him send, as usual, the holy poetry which makes the precious pain and beneficial tears.
So I long contemplated it as a point no
lost in the depths of the valley, sometimes hidden by a mound, sometimes by a mass of trees, and then reappearing at-above a cataract or on the side of a ravine. And to see it go away like this, slow and melancholy, I stopped regretting it, because already, I thought, he admires the foam of the torrents and the green mountains; already he invokes God, already he places me in his clouds, already he grants the lyre of his genius, already he gives to his pain a form that widens its development as let it decrease its intensity.
Why would you want me to be afraid of the fate of Sténio? Make me responsible, predict me
horror is unjust rigor. Sténio is much less unhappy that he does not say it and that he does not believe it. Oh ! as I would eagerly exchange my existence for hers! that riches are in him, which are no longer in me! As he is young, how tall he is, how he believes in life!
When he complains the most about me, that's when he's the happier because he sees me as an exception monstrous; the more he pushes back and fights my feelings, the more he believes in his own, the more he becomes attached to him, the more he has faith in himself.
Oh ! believe in yourself ! sublime and foolish fatuity of the
youth! arrange your own future and dream of destiny we want, take a look of superb contempt on tired and lazy travelers clogging up the road and believe that we will rush towards the goal, strong and fast like the thought, without ever losing breath, without ever falling into way! to know so little that one takes desire for will!
O happiness and insolent stupidity! O bluster and naivety!
We were like that, Trenmor, weren't we well happy ?
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When it became imperceptible in the distance, I looked for my suffering and I no longer found it: I felt relieved as of remorse, I lay down on the grass and I slept like the prisoner from whom his irons are removed and who, for first use of his freedom, chooses rest.
And then I go back down the Monteverdor on the side of the desert and I put the top of the mountain between Sténio and me, between the man and solitude, between passion and reverie.
Everything you told me about the enchanting calm revealed to you after the storms of your life, I felt it by finding myself alone finally, absolutely alone between the earth and the sky. Not one human figure in this immensity; not a living being in the air nor on the mountains. It seemed like this loneliness was happening austere and beautiful to welcome me. There was not a breath of wind, not a bird's flight through space. So I was afraid of movement that came from me.
Every blade of grass I waved while walking seemed to me suffer and complain. I disturbed the calm, I insulted the silence. I stopped, crossed my arms over my chest and I held my breath.
Oh ! if death were so, Trenmor! if it was only the
rest, contemplation, calm, silence! If all faculties that we have to enjoy and suffer were paralyzed, if we only had a weak conscience, a
imperceptible intuition of our nothingness! If we could sit in a still air in front of an empty landscape and dismal, knowing that we suffered, that we will no longer suffer and let us rest there, under the protection of the Lord! But what will be the other life? I had not yet found a shape under which I could desire it. Until then, in some aspect that it appeared to me, it frightened or pitied me. Where does I did not stop one day yet did not want it? what's this unknown and burning desire which has no designed object and which devour the heart like a passion? The human heart is an abyss of suffering whose depth has never been surveyed and never will be.
I stayed there as long as the sun was above the horizon and all this time I was fine. But when there was no longer in the Page 110
sky as reflections, growing concern spread in nature. The wind rose, the stars seemed to fight the agitated clouds. Birds of prey raised their large cries and their powerful flight in the sky; they were looking for a lodging for the night, they were tormented by need, by fear.
They seemed slaves of necessity, weakness and habit, as if they had been men.
This emotion at the approach of the night was revealed in the smaller things. The azure butterflies, which sleep in the sun in the tall grasses rose in swirls to go
bury themselves in these mysterious retreats where they are not found never. The green marsh frog and the cricket with wings began to sow the air with sad notes and
incomplete that produced on my nerves a kind of sore irritation. The plants themselves seemed shiver in the damp evening breath. They closed their leaves, they tense their anthers, they withdraw their petals at the bottom of their calyx. Others, in love on time of the breeze that takes care of their messages and their hugs, half-open, thrilling, warm at the
touch like human breasts. They all worked out to sleep or to love.
I felt myself alone again. When everything seemed lifeless, I could identify with the desert and be part of it like a rock or an extra bush. When I saw that everything was coming back to life, that everything was worried about tomorrow and manifested feelings of desire or concern, I was indignant not to have a will, a need, a fear in me. The moon rose, she was beautiful; the grass of the hills had transparent reflections like emerald; but that did the moon and its nocturnal magic matter to me? I was not waiting nothing an hour more or less in its course: none regret, no hope was attached to me the flight of these hours that interested all of creation. For me, nothing in the desert, nothing among men, nothing at night, nothing in life. I retired to my cabin and tried to sleep out of boredom more than necessary.
Sleep is a sweet and beautiful thing for little ones children, who only dream of fairies or paradise, for the little ones Page 111
bi
rds, flocking frail and warm under the down of their mother ; but for us, who came to an extension outraged by our faculties, sleep has lost its chaste voluptuousness and its deep languors. Life, arranged as it is,
takes away the most precious of the night, the oblivion of the days. I don't talk about you, Trenmor, who, according to the sacred word, live in the world as not being there. But me, in the course of my life without rule and without brake, I did like the others.
I have abandoned necessities with superb contempt for the soul imperious of the body. I disregarded all the gifts of existence, all the benefits of nature. I cheated on hunger with tasty and exciting food, I cheated on sleep by aimless agitation or profitless work. Sometimes, at the light of the lamp, I looked in the books for the key to great puzzles of human life. Earlier, launched in the whirlwind of the century, crossing the crowd with a bleak heart and taking a dark look at all of his disgust
and satiety, I sought to capture in the fragrant air of the holidays nocturnal a sound, a breath that give me an emotion.
Other times, wandering in the countryside, silent and cold, I was going to interrogate the stars bathed in the mist and measure, in a painful ecstasy, the distance impassable from earth to sky.
How many times has the day surprised me in a palace resounding in harmony or in the wet meadows of the morning dew or in the silence of an austere cell, forgetting the law of rest that shadow imposes on all living creatures and who has become powerless for sentient beings civilized! What a superhuman exaltation sustained my mind to chasing some chimera while my weakened body and broken demanded sleep, without my condescending see me for his revolts? I told you: spiritualism taught to the nations, first as a religious faith, then as ecclesiastical law, ended up passing within manners, habits, tastes. We all tamed
physical needs, we wanted to poetize appetites like
feelings. Pleasure has fled the lawn beds and cribs to go sit on the velvet at tables
loaded with gold. Elegant living, irritating the organs and overexciting the spirits, closed the house to the rays of day Page 112
rich people; she lit the torches to light their awakening and placed the use of life at the hours that nature marked for his abdication: How to resist this feverish and deadly challenge? How to run in this career gasping, without getting exhausted before reaching half its term? So here I am, old as if I were a thousand years old. My beauty that is praised is nothing more than a deceptive mask under which hide exhaustion and agony. In the age of energetic passions, we no longer have passions, we we don't even have any more desires, except to end it tiredness and resting lying in a coffin.
For me, I lost sleep. Really alas! I do not know more what it is. I don't know what to call this heavy and painful numbness hanging over my brain and fills it with dreams and suffering for a few hours of the night. But this sleep from my childhood, this good, this sweet sleep, so pure, so fresh, so beneficent, this sleep that an angel seemed to protect from his wing and that a mother cradled in her song, this restful calm of the double existence of man, this soft heat spread over the limbs, this peaceful and regular breathing, this veil of gold and azure lowered over the eyes and this airy breath that the breath of the night runs in the hair and around the neck, this sleep there, I lost it and will never find it again. A kind bitter and somber delirium hovers over my soul deprived of guide.
My burning, oppressed chest lifts effortlessly
ability to inhale the subtle scents of the night. The night is gone for me that a stingy and drying atmosphere. My dreams no longer have this kind and gracious disorder that summed up all a life of enchantment in a few hours of illusion. My dreams have an appalling character of truth; the spectra of all my disappointments come back to it, meaning no more miserable, more hideous every night. Every ghost, every monster evoked by the nightmare is a clear allegory and striking that responds to some deep and secret suffering of my soul. I see the shadows of the friends I don't love flee more, I hear the cries of alarm from those who died and whose the soul wanders in the darkness of the other life. And then I go down myself, pale and sorry, in the abyss of this abyss without bottom called Eternity and whose mouth seems to me Page 113
still gaping at the foot of my bed, like an open sepulcher.
I dream that I slowly descend the steps, looking for a greedy eye a small ray of hope in these depths without bounds and finding for torch in my path only the puffs of hellish clarity, red and sinister, which burns me my eyes to the back of my head and which gets me more and more astray.
These are my dreams. It's always human reason struggling with pain and impotence.
Such sleep shortens life instead of
extend. It spends enormous energy. The work of the thought, more disorderly, more whimsical in dreams, is also more violent and harsher. The sensations are awakened by surprised, harsh, terrible and heartbreaking, as they would be before reality. Judge it, Trenmor, by the impression that you leave the dramatic representation of some passion strongly expressed. In the dream, the soul attends the shows
the most terrible and cannot distinguish the illusion from the truth. The body leaps, twists and pulsates under awful emotions of terror and suffering, without the mind being aware of his mistake to give himself, as in the theater, the strength to go until the end. We wake up bathed in sweat and tears, mind stupid dismay and tired of everything one day of the unnecessary exercise that has just been imposed on him.
There are still more painful dreams, It's to believe yourself, condemned to perform some extravagant task, some impossible work, like counting the leaves in a forest or run fast and light as air; to cross, as fast as thought, valleys, seas and mountains to achieve a fleeting, uncertain image, which we always gets ahead and always attracts us by changing its appearance. Do not have-you haven't had that dream, Trenmor, while there was in your life of desires and chimeras? Oh ! as he often returns this ghost! as he calls me, as he invites me!
Sometimes it is in the delicate and pale form of a virgin who was my partner and my sister in the morning of my life and who, more happy that I died in the flower of his youth and his illusions. She invites me to follow her during the stay of rest and calm. I try to walk after her. But, ethereal stuff the wind blows, it gets ahead of me, abandons me and Page 114
disappears in the clouds. And yet, I still run: because I saw the misty shores of an imaginary sea rise up, another spectrum which I took for the first and which I continue with the same ardor. But when he turns around, it's something hideous object, an ironic demon, a bloody corpse, a temptation or remorse. And I'm still running, because a fatal charm leads me to this Proteus which never stops,
which sometimes seems to be swallowed up in the red stream of the horizon and which suddenly comes out of the ground under my feet to give me a new direction.
Alas! that of universes I traversed in these voyages of the soul! I crossed the white steppes of the frozen regions.
I took a quick look at the scented savannas where the moon rises so beautiful and white. I touched on the wings of the sleep those vast seas whose terrifying immensity thought. I ran ahead of the thinnest ships sailboats and large swallows of prey. I have, in space an hour saw the sun rise over the shores of Greece and sleep behind the blue mountains of the New World.
I have seen peoples and empires under my feet. I have looked closely at the red face of the stars wandering in the solitudes of the air and in the plains of the sky. I met the frightened face of the shadows scattered by a breath of the night.
What treasures of imagination, what wonderful riches of nature have I not exhausted in these vain hallucinations of the sleep? So what was the use of traveling? Have i ever seen anything that looked like my fantasies? Oh ! that nature seemed poor to me, the dull sky and the narrow sea, at the cost of lands, skies and seas that I crossed in my flight immaterial! What's left in real life of beauties for us charm, to the human soul of powers to enjoy and admire, when the imagination has worn everything out in advance by an abuse of its strengt
h ?
These dreams were, however, the image of life: they showed obscured by the too bright brightness of a light supernatural, like the facts of the future and the history of the world are written dark and terrible in the sacred poems of prophets. Dragged after a shadow through the reefs, the deserts, the enchantments and the abysses of life, I have everything
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seen, without being able to stop me. I admired everything in passing, without to be able to enjoy anything. I faced all the dangers without succumb to none, always protected by this power fatal which carries me in its whirlwind and isolates me from the universe that she brings under my feet.
This is the sleep we have gotten.
Days are used to rest nights. plunged
in a kind of frustration, the hours of activity for all creation find us, nonchalant and lifeless, busy waiting for the evening to wake up and the night for spend the little strength amassed during the day in vain dreams.