by George Sand
So let Jesus come and put his bare powdery foot on the golden diadem of the Pharisees; that he breaks the old law and announces to future centuries this great law of spiritualism necessary to regenerate a nervous race; that he stands like a giant in the history of men and separates it into two, the kingdom of the senses and the kingdom of ideas; let him destroy with his unyielding hand all the animal power of man and that he opens up to his mind a huge new career, incomprehensible, eternal perhaps, if you believe in God, will you not kneel and say:
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"This is the Word, which was with God in the beginning centuries. He came out of God, he returns to him; he is forever with him, seated on his right, because he bought men. "?
God, who from heaven sent Jesus; Jesus who was God on the earth, and the spirit of God, who was in Jesus and who filled the space between Jesus and God, isn't that a simple trinity, indivisible, necessary for the existence of Christ and his reign?
Every man who believes and prays, every man that faith puts
in communion with God, does he not offer in him a reflection of this mysterious trinity, more or less weakened, according to the power of the revelations of the celestial spirit to the human spirit?
The soul, the impulse of the soul towards an uncreated goal and the mysterious goal
of this sublime impulse, is it not all God revealed in three separate lessons: strength, struggle and conquest?
This triple symbol of Divinity, outlined in humanity whole, could have happened once, splendid and complete, between Jesus, the Father of the world and the Holy Spirit figured by faith Catholic in the form of a dove, to signify that love is the soul of the universe.
- These mystical allegories make me smile, replied Pulcheria. This is how you are, pure souls, pure essences! You have to see and comment on the great book of the revelation; you must submit the sacred word to interpretations of your proud philosophy. And when force of subtleties, you managed to give a sense of your choice to divine mysteries, you then consent to yourself bow to the new faith explained by you and redone to your use. It is in front of your own work that you deign to bow down: agree, Lélia!
- I won't try to deny it, sister. But whatever, if this is the only way for us to believe and hope?
Blessed are those who can submit to the letter without the help of the spirit! Happy sensitive and crazy reveries which bring the rebellious spirit to submission before the letter!
As for me, I found in the rites and in the emblems of this cult sublime poetry and an eternal source tenderness. The shape and layout of the temples Catholics, the somewhat theatrical decoration of the altars, the magnificence of priests, chants, perfumes,
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intervals of meditation and silence, these ancient splendors which are a reflection of pagan customs in the middle from which the Church was born, struck me with respect whenever they surprised me in a layout
impartial.
The abbey was naked and devastated. But, wandering one day among the rubble, I had discovered the entrance to a vault which, thanks to the landslides from which it was hidden, had escaped the outrages of a time of delirium and destruction.
By opening a passage among the gravel and brambles of which it was blocked, I had been able to penetrate to the bottom of a narrow, dark staircase leading to a small chapel underground of exquisite workmanship and intact conservation.
The vault was so solid that it resisted the weight of a huge pile of debris. The humidity had respected the paintings and, on a carved oak prie-Dieu, one distinguished in the shadow I don't know what a dark priest's garment that seemed have been forgotten the day before. I approached it and leaned towards him to watch it. So I distinguished, under the folds of linen and cheesecloth, shape and attitude of a kneeling man; her head, tilted on his clasped hands, was hidden by a black cap; he seemed immersed in meditation if deep, so imposing, that I retreat struck with superstition and of terror. I no longer dared to move, because the air outside to which I had opened a passage waved the garment powdery and the man seemed to be moving: it looked like he was going to get up.
Was it possible that a man had survived the massacre of his brothers, that he might have existed thirty years, confined by pain and austerity, in these undergrounds whose depth I did not know
and the issues? For a moment I believed it and, fearing to interrupt his meditation, I remained motionless, chained by respect, Seeking what I was going to tell her, ready to leave without daring talk to him. But as my eyes got used to
in the dark, I could make out the flabby folds of the fabric falling from flat on slender, angular limbs. I understood the mystery which I witnessed and I carried a respectful hand to this relic of saint. No sooner had I touched the hood than it fell to dust and my hand met the cold skull and Page 166
parched human skeleton. It was a scary thing and sublime to see for the first time that this monk's head where the wind was still shaking a few tufts of gray hair, the beard entwined with the emaciated knuckles of the hands crossed under the chin. Certain vaults, impregnated with large amount of saltpeter, have the property of drying out body and keep them whole for centuries. We have discovered many corpses preserved from corruption by these natural influences. The yellow and transparent skin like a parchment sticks and attaches to the removed muscles and hardened; the membranes of the lips fold around the teeth solid and shiny; eyelashes remain implanted around eyes without enamel and without color; facial features retain a kind of austere and calm physiognomy; forehead smooth and taut has a certain lugubrious majesty and the members keep the inflexible attitudes where death surprised them.
These sad human remains retain a character of greatness that cannot be denied and it does not seem in them watching carefully that waking up is impossible.
The body I had before me had something
more sublime still, because of its situation. This religious,
death without convulsion and agony in the calm of prayer, seemed to be clothed in a halo of glory. What happened spent around him during his last moments? Sentenced to an inflexible penance for some noble fault, he thought asleep in the Lord, confident and resigned, deep in pace , while his ruthless brothers sang the hymn dead on his head? This assumption vanishes when I I was assured that no part of the underground was walled up and that there was no appearance in this place devoted to worship of dungeon. So it was the revolutionary storm that had surprised this martyr in his retirement. He had gone down there maybe, hearing the fierce cries of the people, to escape their desecration or to receive the last blow on the steps from the altar. But the trace of no injury attested that it would have been so. I stopped to believe that the collapse of upper parts of the building under the furious hand of had suddenly cut him off and he
had had to resign himself to undergo the ordeal of the Vestals. It was died without torture, perhaps with joy, in the midst of these awful Page 167
days when death was a blessing even to unbelievers. He had surrendered his soul to God, prostrate before Christ and praying for his executioners.
This relic, this vault, this crucifix became sacred to me.
It was under this dark and cold vault that I often went put out the heat of my blood. I wrapped in a new clothing the sacred remains of the priest. I knelt every day with her. Often I spoke to her out loud in the agitations of my suffering; like a companion of exile and pain. I got a holy and crazy affection for this corpse. I confessed to him: I told him the
anguish of my soul; I asked him to stand between the heaven and me to reconcile; and often in my dreams I saw him pass in front of my pallet like the spirit of visions of Job and I heard him whisper in a weak voice like the breaks words of terror or hope.
I also liked in this underground chapel a large Christ of white marble which, placed at the bottom of a niche, must have once be flooded with light through a top opening.
Now, this ventilator was obstructed, but some weak rays still crept into the interstices of the stones in mess accumulated outsid
e. This dull and creepy day poured a singular sadness on the beautiful pale forehead of Christ.
I enjoyed contemplating this poetic and
painful symbol. What could be more touching on earth than the image of a physical torture crowned by the expression of heavenly joy! What greater thought, what more deep emblem that this martyred God, bathed in blood and tears, extending his arms to the sky! O picture of the suffering, raised on a cross and rising like a prayer, like incense, from earth to heaven! Expiatory offering of the pain that stands all bloody and naked towards the throne of the Lord! Radiant hope, symbolic cross, where stretch and rest the limbs broken by the torture!
Headband of thorns surrounding the skull, sanctuary of intelligence, a fatal tiara imposed on the power of the man ! I have often invoked you, I have often prostrate before you! My soul is often offered on this cross, it bled under these thorns; she often adored, Page 168
under the name of Christ , the human suffering raised by divine hope; resignation, that is to say acceptance of
human life; redemption, that is, calm in agony and hope in death.
The second winter was less peaceful than the first. The patient resignation with which I had first worked make my existence possible in the midst of isolation and deprivation abandoned me the following year. Indolence and summer daydreams had changed the situation of my mind and the disposition of my physical being. I felt more robust, but also more irritable, more accessible to suffering, less calm to undergo it and yet more lazy to avoid it. All the rigors that I had imposed myself with joy became to me bitter. I no longer found that proud voluptuousness which had supported me first.
The brevity of the days forbade me the sad pleasure of daydreams on the terrace and, from the bottom of my cell where the long evening hours passed, I heard the cry Mournful kiss. Often tired of the efforts I made to isolate myself from external objects, incapable of attention in study or rule in thinking I let myself be dominated by the sadness of my external impressions. Sitting in the doorway of my window, I saw the moon rise slowly above the roofs covered with snow and shine on the needles of ice hanging from the serrated carvings of the cloisters.
These cold and bright nights had a character of desolation, of which nothing can give the idea. When the wind blows was silent, a deathly silence hung over the abbey. The snow is noiselessly detached from the branches of the old yew trees and fell in silent flakes on the lower branches. We could have shake off all the dried brambles that garnished the courtyards, without awakening a single animated being, without hearing a whistle snake or crawling an insect.
In this dreary isolation, my character became distorted, the
resignation degenerated into apathy, the activity of thoughts became the deregulation. The most abstract, the most confused ideas, the most frightening ones besieged my brain in turn. In vain, I tried to withdraw into myself and live in the present. I don't know what vague ghost of the future was floating in Page 169
all my dreams and tormented my reason. I said to myself that the future must have had a known form for me, which I had to accept that after doing it myself, that it had to model it on the present that I had created for myself. But soon I I realized that the present did not exist for me, that my soul was making vain efforts to shut itself up in this prison, but that she still wandered beyond, that she needed the universe and that she would exhaust it the same day that the universe would be given. I finally felt that the occupation of my life was to constantly turn to lost joys or to
joys still possible. The ones I looked for in the loneliness fled from me. At the bottom of the vase, there as everywhere, I found the bitter lie.
It was towards the end of a hot summer that my wish expired.
I saw the term approach with a mixture of desire and of dread which significantly altered my health and my reason.
I felt an incredible need for movement.
I called life with ardor without thinking that I was already living too much and that I was suffering from the excess of life.
But after all, I said to myself, what will I find in life of which I have not already probed the void? What pleasures I don't have discovered the void, what beliefs that have not vanished in front of my severe examination? Shall i ask men the calm that I could not find in solitude? Will give me they what God refused me? If I exhaust my again
heart in pursuit of a vain dream, if I give up retirement to which I condemned myself, to go disillusion myself again, where will i find refuge after despair then?
What religious or philosophical hope can
smile or welcome me again, when I have penetrated the bottom of all my illusions, when I have acquired the proof complete, indisputable of my helplessness?
And yet, I said to myself again, what is retirement for, what is the use of reflection? Have I suffered less among these tombs in ruins only within human pumps? Qu'est-what a stoic philosophy, which only serves to create the man of new sufferings? What is a
expiatory and groaning religion, the purpose of which is to seek the Page 170
pain instead of avoiding it? Isn't all this the height of pride and madness? Without all these refinements of the thought, men, delivered only to the pleasures of the senses, do not wouldn't they be happier and bigger? This alleged elevation of the human spirit, maybe God reproves it and, in the day of justice, perhaps he will cover her with his contempt!
In the midst of these irresolutions, I searched the books a direction to my floating will. The naive poems of primitive ages, the voluptuous hymns of Solomon, the lascivious pastoral care of Longus, erotic philosophy of Anacreon sometimes seemed to me more religious in their sublime nudity as mystical sighs and fanatics hysteria of saint Thérèse. But more often than not I allowed more immediate sympathy to
ascetic books. It was in vain that I wanted to detach myself from all spiritual impressions of Christianity; I came back to it always. I had only a passing youth in mind
to start at the wife's hymns , to smile at the embraces of Daphnis and Chloe. A moment was enough to use this fake heat that a real simplicity of heart did not maintain, that the fires of an eastern sun did not did not come to renew. I loved to read the Life of the Saints, these beautiful poems, these dangerous novels, where humanity appears so big and so strong that you can't bend over and to look at the men as they are. I liked these eternal, deep retreats, these pious brooding pains in the mystery of the cell, these great renunciations, these terrible expiations, all these crazy and magnificent actions who console the common evils of life by a nobleman feeling of flattered pride. I also liked to read these consolations sweet and tender that the solitary received in secret from their soul, these intimate talks of the faithful and the holy spirit in the night of the temples, these naive correspondences of François de Sales and Marie de Chantal; but especially these effusions full of austere love and metaphysics dreamer between God and man, between Jesus in the Eucharist and the unknown author of the Imitation.
These books were full of meditation, tenderness and poetry. They embellished solitude; they promised the Page 171
greatness in isolation, peace in work, rest of the mind in the tiredness of the body. I found there the reflection of such happiness, the imprint of a wisdom so delicious that I recovered by reading them the hope of arriving at the same goal; i am said that, like me, these holy men had been experienced by violent temptations to return to the world, but that they had courageously overcome them; i am also said that giving up my work after two years of
fights and triumphs, it was to lose the fruit of such rough efforts and act with more madness than cowardice; instead of that by attaching myself to my resolution, by renewing my vow for a more or less extended time, I would perhaps collect soon the fruits of my perseverance. I was going to go back to the society perhaps to break me there without return, instead of waiting a few more days at the bottom of my cloister, I would no doubt enter the beatitude of the elect.
After these long fights where my reason ran out, I fell into despon
dency and wondered, laughing at myself with contempt, if my life was a thing enough important to defend it as well and to walk its debris in the midst of so many storms.
These irresolutions led me to the approaches of the spring. When my wish expired, to cut it short to my anxieties, I took an average end: I took refuge in the inertia that is always dragged on by great emotions, I let the days go by without fixing my future, waiting for the awakening of my faculties pushed me in life or chained me into oblivion.
In fact, it was not long before I felt the new goads of this eager and stinging concern that had already made me suffer so many evils. I realized one day that my freedom was returned to me; that no oath devoted me more to God, that I belonged to humanity and that it was time perhaps to be to return to it, if I did not want to lose entirely the use of my senses and my intelligence. Days that so often found a place in my life
left a long fright and I struggled alternately against the apprehension of idiocy and that of madness.
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One evening I felt deeply shaken in my faith religious and, of the doubt, I passed to atheism. I lived several hours under the spell of a sense of pride inconceivable and then I fell from this height into abysses of terror and desolation. I felt that vice and crime were close to entering my life if I lost the heavenly hope which alone had hitherto made me bear the men:
Thunder thundered over my head: it was the first spring storm, one of those premature thunderstorms that sometimes upset unexpectedly the cold days of the April. I never heard lightning roll and saw the fire from the sky crisscrossing the clouds, without a feeling of admiration and enthusiasm has brought me back to instinct faith. I involuntarily started and, out of habit, I exclaimed to me, seized with a holy terror: "You are great, oh my God ! lightning is under your feet and your forehead emanates the light… ”
The storm was increasing; I returned to my cell, alone really sheltered place of the abbey. The night came good hour, the rain fell in torrents, the wind roared without interruption in long corridors and pale flashes were extinguished under the clouds which burst from all sides. So I found in my isolation, in the safety of my shelter, in the austere but real calm that surrounded me in the middle of the disorder of the elements, a feeling of unspeakable well-being and passionate gratitude to heaven. Hurricane removed to the ruins of the swirls of dust and chalk he was sowing on uncultivated shrubs and rubble. He was snatching on the walls their twigs of climbing plants, with the swallow the frail shelter of its half-built nest under the arches dusters. There was not a poor flower, not a leaf