by George Sand
So has been my life for many years. All the energy of my soul devours and kills itself to exercise on itself and all its external effect is to weaken and destroy the body.
I did not sleep calmer on my layer of heather than on my satin bed. Only I didn't hear it ring the hours at the front of the churches and I could imagine myself not having lost in this insomnia mixed with a bad sleep that long hour instead of a whole night. In populated places attaches, in my opinion, a great misery. It's the indomitable need to always know what time it is in your life.
In vain would we try to escape it. We are warned day by the use of time all that surrounds you. And at night, in silence, when everything sleeps and oblivion seems hover over all existences, the melancholy timbre of clocks ruthlessly count the steps you take towards eternity and the number of moments that the past you devours without return. How serious and solemn, these voices of time which rise like a death cry and which go to break indifferently on the sound walls of the remains of
alive or on the graves without echo of the cemetery! As they grab you and make you throb with anger and dread on your hot diaper! One more ! did I say to myself often, still a part of my existence that stands out!
still a ray of hope that dies out! Still hours!
always hours lost and all falling into the abyss of the past, without bringing the one where I will feel myself living!
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I spent the day yesterday in deep devastation.
I haven't thought of anything. I think I had rest for a whole day; but I did not realize that I was resting. And then at what good?
In the evening I resolved not to sleep and to use the strength that my soul finds for the dreams to pursue like once an idea. I haven't been struggling for a long time neither against waking nor against sleep. Tonight i wanted to resume the fight and, since in me matter cannot extinguish the spirit, at least make the spirit tame the material. Well ! I did not succeed. Overwritten by one and by the other, I spent the night sitting on a rock, having my feet the glacier that the moon sparkled like palaces diamonds from Arabian tales, on my head a pure and cold sky where the stars shone wide and white like
silver tears on a shroud.
This desert is really very beautiful and Sténio the poet would have spent a night of ecstasy and lyric fever! Me, alas! I I only felt indignation and murmur in my brain.
For this dead silence weighed on my soul and offended it. I am wondering what good is this curious, greedy, worried soul, unable to stay down here to always knock on a sky brazen who never opens his eyes, who never
responds with a word of hope! Yes i hated this nature radiant and magnificent, because it stood there before me, like a stupid beauty who stands silent and proud under the look of men and thinks they have done enough by showing themselves.
Then I fell back into this discouraging thought: "When I would know, I would be all the more to be pitied, not being able. "
And instead of falling into a carefree philosophical, I fell into the boredom of this nothingness where my existence is riveted. "
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" Well ! Trenmor, I'm leaving the desert. I'm going to random look for movement and noise among men. I do not know where i will go. Sténio is resigned to live a month separated from me: whether I spend this time here or elsewhere, it doesn't matter for him. I want to realize one thing: namely
if I am more or less badly on earth, with or without a affection. When I started to love Sténio, I believed that affection would take me beyond the point where it left me.
I was so proud to believe in a remnant of youth and love!…
But all this has already fallen into doubt and I no longer know what I feel or what I am. I wanted solitude for myself collect, to question me. Because to give up life without oars and without rudder on a flat and dreary sea, it is to fail in the saddest way. Better the storm, better lightning: at least we see ourselves, we feel ourselves perish.
But for me loneliness is everywhere and it's madness that look in the desert more than elsewhere. Only there she is more calm, quieter. Well ! it kills me! I discovered, I think, what still supports me in this life of disenchantment and weariness: it is suffering. The suffering excites, revives, irritates the nerves; she bleeds the
heart, it shortens the agony. It’s a violent convulsion, terrible, which lifts us up from the ground and gives us strength rise to the sky to curse and shout, Die in lethargy, it's neither living nor dying: it's losing all the benefits, it is to ignore all the pleasures of death!
Here all the faculties fall asleep. To a crippled body where the soul would be sustained vigorous and young, this lively air, this life agreste, this absence of violent sensations, these long hours for rest, these frugal habits would be so many benefits. But me, it's my soul that makes my body stupid and, as long as she suffers, the body will have to wither away, whatever the salutary influences of air and animal diet. This loneliness weighs on me right now.
Strange thing! I loved her so much and I don't love her anymore! Oh !
that is awful, Trenmor!
When I missed all the land, I took refuge in the bosom of God. I was going to invoke him in the silence of the fields. I I liked staying there for days, months, absorbed Page 118
with a view to a better future. Today here I am worn out that hope itself no longer sustains me. I still believe, because I desire; but this future is so far away and this life never not finish! What! is it impossible to attach to it and to it please? Is everything lost without return? There are days when I believe and those days are not the most cruel; those days I am wiped out. Despair is without sting, nothingness without terrors. But the days when, with a warm breath of air, a pure ray of morning, awakening in me a desire for existence, I am the most unfortunate of beings. Dread, anxiety, doubt gnaw at me. Where to flee? where to take refuge? How to get out of this marble which, according to the poet's beautiful expression, mounts me
to the knees and hold me in chains like the sepulcher hold back the dead?
Well ! let's suffer! it's better than sleeping. In this peaceful and dumb desert, suffering dulls, the heart gets poorer; God, nothing but God is too much or too little! In the bustle of social life, it is not a compensation sufficient, a comfort within our reach. In isolation, it’s too huge a thought: it crushes, it frightens, it gives rise to doubt. Doubt enters the dreaming soul, the faith descends into the suffering soul.
And then I was used to my suffering. It was my life, she was my companion, she was my sister; cruel, relentless, merciless, but proud, but diligent, but always escorted by stoic resolution and austere advice.
Come back then, oh my pain! Why did you leave me? Yes I can't have any friend other than you, at least I don't want to lose you. Are you not my heritage and my lot? It's by you only that man is tall. If he could be happy in this world today if he could cross with a serene front and to see with a calm eye the ugliness of the human race which surrounds him, he would be no more than this stupid and cowardly crowd, who gets drunk on crime and falls asleep in the mire. It's you, oh sublime pain, which reminds us of the feeling of our dignity, making us cry over the bewilderment of men!
You are the one who sets us apart and places us, sheep of the desert, under the hand of the celestial pastor who looks at us, complains, perhaps waiting for him to console us!
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Oh ! the man who has not suffered is nothing! He is a being incomplete, useless force, raw and worthless matter, that the worker's chisel may break when trying to
shape. Also I consider Sténio less than you, Trenmor, although Sténio does not have a vice and that you had them all.
But you, hard steel, God melted you into the fiery furnace; and after twisting you a hundred ways, he made you a metal solid and precious.
For me, what will become of me? Oh ! if i could rise of the same flight as you and become more powerful than all evils and all the goods of life! "
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Lélia went down the mountains
and, with a little gold poured on its way, it quickly crosses the border valleys.
Few days after sleeping on the Monteverdor heather, she displayed the luxury of a queen, in one of these beautiful cities of the lower plateau which compete with opulence between them and which still see the arts flourish on the earth from where they are us Venus.
Like Trenmor, who had rejuvenated, and fortified in the penal colony, Lélia hoped to be reborn, by the force of her courage, in the middle of the world she hated and the joys that made her horror. She resolved to defeat herself, to tame the revolts of his wild spirit, to throw himself into the flow of life, to shrink for a while, get dizzy, in order to see up close what cesspool of society and reconcile with itself by the comparison.
Lélia had no sympathy for the human race,
although she suffered the same evils and summed up in her all the pains sown on the face of the earth. But this breed blind and deaf felt his unhappiness and his humiliation without want to realize it. Those, hypocritical and conceited, hid the wounds of their breast and the exhaustion of their blood Page 120
under the radiance of vain poetry. They blushed to see each other if old, so poor, in the midst of a generation they don't did not see old age and poverty breaking through on all sides; and, to make themselves young like those they thought young, they they lied, they made up all their ideas, they denied all their feelings: they were boastful of innocence and simplicity, decrepit them from the womb of their mothers! These less cheeky, let themselves be carried away by the century: slow and stupid, they went away with the world, without knowing why, without ask where was the cause, where was the end. They were by nature too mediocre to worry much about their boredom; small and weak, they withered with resignation. They don't not asking if they could find help in virtue or in vice; they were also below one and
the other. Without faith, without atheism, enlightened just to the point of lose the benefits of ignorance, ignorant to the point of wanting to subject everything to tight systems, they could see what makes up history
material world but they never wanted to study the moral world nor read history in the heart of man; They had been stopped by the foolish inflexibility of their preventions. It was the men of the day who reasoned over past and future centuries without realizing that their geniuses had all gone through the same mold and that, gathered in droves, they could still sit on the benches of the same school and follow the law of the same pedant.
Some were the few, but they
nevertheless represented a social power, had crossed the poisoned atmosphere of the times, without losing anything primitive vigor of the species. They were men exceptional compared to the crowd. But between them, they all looked like. Ambition, the only spring of an era without
belief, annihilated the male and characteristic nobility, to each of them, to confuse them
all in a type of coarse beauty and without prestige.
They were still the iron men of the Middle Ages; They had the fawn look, the strong thoughts, the robust arm, the thirst for glory and the taste for blood, just as if they were called Armagnac and Bourgogne. But to these broad Page 121
organizations that nature still produced lacked the sap of heroism. Everything that gave birth to it and fed it was dead: love, brotherhood of arms, hatred, family pride, fanaticism, all the personal passions that give the intensity of the characters, from the physiognomy to the actions. There had more of these bitter courage's motives than illusions youth destroyed in two mornings and virile ambition, stubborn, dirty, deplorable girl of civilization.
Lélia, sad existence withered by the feeling of its degradation, only perhaps attentive enough to notice it, sincere enough to admit it; Lélia, weeping over her passions extinct and his faculties lost, crossed the world without seek pity, without finding affection there. She knew well that these men, despite their breathless and puny agitation, were no more active, no more alive than she; but she also knew that they had the impudence to deny it or the stupidity to ignore it. She witnessed the agony of this breed, as the prophet, sitting on the mountain, wept over Jerusalem, opulent and old debauchery stretched out at its feet.
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The richest among the small princes of the state gave a
Party. Lélia appeared dazzling in adornment, but sad under the brilliance of its diamonds and less happy than the last of wealthy bourgeois who strut with pride under their splendor of a day. For her, these naive pleasures of woman did not exist. She dragged velvet and satin after her broché d'or and cords of precious stones and long feathers airy and soft, without casting this look of childish vanity that sums up all the glories of a sex yet child in its decrepitude. She didn't play with her diamond needles to show his white hand and tapered. She did not run her fingers lovingly through curls of her hair. She barely knew what colors she was adorned with what cloths she had been clothed with. With his impassive, his pale cold forehead and his rich clothes, would have gladly taken her for one of those alabaster madonnas whom the devotion of Italian women covers with silk dresses and shiny rags. Lélia was insensitive to her beauty, to her adornment, like the virgin of marble with her chiseled gold crown and to his silver gauze veil. She was indifferent to the looks fixed on it. She too despised all these men for take pride in their praise. What did she come to do in prom?
She came there to get a show. These vast paintings moving, arranged with more or less taste and skill as part of a party, were for her an object of art to examine, criticize or praise in its parts or in its together. She did not understand that in a poor climate and cold, where the houses, narrow and unsightly, pile up men like bundles of goods in a warehouse,
one could boast of knowing luxury and elegance. She thought that in such nations the feeling of the arts is necessarily foreign. She felt sorry for what are called balls in these
sad and tight rooms, where the ceiling crushes the hairstyle of Page 123
women, where, to spare the cold of the night on their shoulders naked, we replace the vital air with a feverish atmosphere and corrosive that intoxicates or suffocates; where we pretend to stir and dance in the narrow marked space between the double rows of seated spectators, who barely save their feet from the waltz attacks and their clothes from the neighborhood of candles.
She was one of those difficult people who only love luxury tall and who want no middle ground between the welfare of the interior life and the superb lavishness of high beings social. Still it only granted to southern peoples the privilege of understanding the life of pomp and pageantry. She said that the trading and industrial nations have neither sense of taste, nor the instinct for beauty and that we had to go the use of form and color among these aged peoples who, for want of present energy, have kept the religion of the past in principles and in things.
Nothing is further from realizing the claim of the beautiful than a badly ordered party. It takes so many difficult things to reunite that he may not be giving it, in a whole century, two that are satisfactory for the artist. You need the climate, the local, decoration, music, food and costumes. he it takes a night from Spain or Italy, a dark night without moon; because the moon, when it reigns in the sky, pours on the men an influence of languor and melancholy which is reflects on all their feelings. It takes a cool night and well ventilated, with stars shining weakly through clouds and he doesn't seem to make fun of the lights.
Large gardens are needed whose intoxicating scents penetrate
by waves in the apartments. The scent of orange and the rose of Constantinople are especially fit to develop the excitement of the heart and the brain. You need light meals, tasty wines, fruits from all climates and flowers of all seasons. There is a profusion of rare things and difficult to own. Because a party must be the realization of the most capricious desires, the summary of the most greedy. Before giving a party, you must penetrate yourself with a thing: it is that the rich and civilized man can no longer find pleasure only in the hope of the impossible. So we need to Page 1
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approach the impossible as far as man is allowed to do.
The Prince of 'Bambuccj was a man of taste, which is for a rich the most eminent and rarest quality. The the only virtue that is required of these people is to know properly spend their money. On this condition, we takes care of all other merits; but, more often than not, they are below their vocation and live bourgeoisly without abdicating the pride of their class.
Bambuccj was the first man in the world to pay a horse, woman or painting, without haggling and without let it wrinkle. He knew the price of things to the nearest scudo .
His eye was trained like that of an auctioneer or a slave trader. The olfactory sense was so developed in him that he could say, just by the smell of wine, not only what was the degree of latitude and the name of the vineyard but still at what sun exposure was located on the slope of the hill who produced it. No artifice, no miracle of feeling or coquetry was only capable of making him mistaken for six months on the age of an actress: just to see her walk to the bottom of the
theater, he was ready to draw up his birth certificate. Just see a horse run a hundred paces away he could signal to his leg the existence of an imperceptible wheel on the veterinarian finger. Just touching the hair of a dog hunting he could tell which ascending generation the purity of his race had been altered; and, on a school board Florentine or Flemish, how many brushstrokes had been given by the master. In a word, he was a man superior and so recognized for such that he could no longer bear it doubt himself.
The last party he gave did little to help
support the high reputation he had acquired. Large alabaster vases, widespread in halls, stairways and galleries of his palace, were filled with exotic flowers, including name, form and fragrance were unknown to most those who saw them. He had taken care to distribute in the ball around twenty scientists, tasked with serving ciceroni to ignorant, and to explain to them without affectation the use and price of the things they admired. The facade and courtyards of the Page 125