I was about to reply to tell him that I didn’t know the reason to which he was making allusion, but he stopped me.
“No, you’re certainly of my opinion; there are things that it’s better not to talk about.”
While walking he looked to the right and the left into the branches of the trees.
“Give me a sign, but without appearing to do so, if you see the sphinx Atropos with the death’s-head.5 There’s one in the park at present. I’ve only glimpsed it. It’s a black moth with a death’s-head on its wings. I ask you to make me a sign without appearing to do so because the sensibility of moths is incredible, and has never been studied intelligently. Have you noticed that, by dint of directing the research of the mind toward a goal that one believes to be utilitarian, one arrives at neglecting everything that is truly interesting?
“Thus, the sensibility of moths is completely unknown. It has never even been remarked that the substance of their bodies belongs to another kind of matter than our terrestrial matter. And yet, it’s easy to take account of the fact that the tissue with which the bodies of moths are made is neither animal nor vegetable. It’s a substance that comes from the spirit world. Lepidoptera are an exception, they constitute a divine experiment.
“Evil does not exist among Lepidoptera. One does not see them striking one another or killing one another. They are not submissive to the needs of nourishment. And they are very sensible to the amour that they bear. Those who have attempted to domesticate them have received tender marks of affection. Alas, I cannot deliver myself to such trials. I have killed too many of them in my lifetime. I only learned belated the divine origin of butterflies. Oh, ignorance! I only liked their beauty. I traversed the body with a pin in order to enjoy it more. Each individual butterfly or moth would not recognize me as a killer of its fellows. But the soul of the species knows it.
“The sphinx Atropos would turn away from me if it succeeded in recognizing me. Unless it brings me a message. For moths are often messengers. The popular soul knows that, since it considers the presence of a death’s-head moth as the announcement of an imminent death. And that’s logical. If there are gods above us—I say gods, plural, which is to say, intermediaries between God and us—when they want to warn us about something, they make use of these singular little beings, who do not know evil and are made of divine matter.
“But there it is; it’s necessary to know that sacred language, the divine language and the secret of the identification of ideas with the images of nature. My daughter tells me that you have certain knowledge. Do you know any of the symbols that the gods employ?”
I was obliged to confess my ignorance of those symbols. Monsieur de Lusignan looked at me with surprise, and a little sadness. I had caused him a disappointment.
“Evidently, it’s very difficult. Veer few men know. Are you also ignorant of the veritable language of flowers?”
“Alas!”
“I speak of the veritable language because the one that is found in little popular books is, in general, erroneous. Flowers are also made with an extraterrestrial matter. They also serve, in certain cases, as vehicles of divine thought, especially the flowers of plants that posses a power, a natural virtue, like the poppy, rosemary or hemlock. But the gods have conceptions so different from ours that it is very difficult to grasp their language, even when they make serious efforts to make themselves understood. In sum, the greatest cause of our woes comes from the rigorous barrier that separates the worlds.”
Monsieur de Lusignan spoke to me for a long time about subjects that all had a certain character of the marvelous. I sometimes looked at him covertly and I realized by his gestures, his way of walking or tugging his beard and the fashion in which he searched the sky for the sphinx Atropos, that he was a man living entirely outside reality. I thought I might risk a question without fear.
“Do you think that it is very difficult to understand the language of animals?”
“Very easy!” he exclaimed. “Infinitely easier than understanding the language of men, with words and rules of syntax! I ought to say that personally, I have never arrived at the perception of any animal speech—but that’s my fault, for lack of love! For it’s only an interior reaction to one’s love for living creatures. If you’re capable of that impulsion of love for an animal species, you understand the expression of its confused thoughts naturally. Evidently, that impulsion of love is rare among so-called civilized men. One finds that certain solitary individuals, living in the bosom of nature, have ended up identifying themselves fraternally with the animals that are close by. And yet, they almost always have a desire to eat their brethren, in the same way that I, who loved butterflies and moths, could not resist the desire to traverse their bodies with a pin. As the poet says, each man kills the thing he loves. A sad law! But the man who is strong, who is filled with love, has only to listen, and he will understand.
Monsieur de Lusignan stopped and looked at the ground in a melancholy fashion.
“He will, in any case, only understand poverties. It has sometimes been given to me to listen to the conversations of great professors of philosophy or medicine, and great writers, men of genius, or reputed as such. They only talk about mediocrities of the lowest order, if it is not about the dinner they have just had and the dishes they love. So, what can you expect from what the magpies are saying in the trees, or the frogs on the edge of the pond?”
UNCERTAINTY
And what if I’m mistaken? Is solitude really a road to becoming better? It isn’t a matter, in any case, of absolute solitude, but that which a man can support who hasn’t broken his attachments to the world, who remains bound to it by friendships, by books, by a sympathy for certain landscapes, and by his former liking for playing a role.
There is no guarantee that solitude will not develop that which is bad in us. Everything depends on the road one discovers in oneself. Not all roads lead to God.
Then again, solitude is subordinate to the frame in which it is exercised. There are favorable places and there are contrary ones.
The strong man breaks all his ties, does not see faces around him, does not know that there are trees, fields and stars. I am not that strong man. I make an attempt at solitude and I expect aid from the beauty of the country that surrounds me. But how tempting beauty is, and how closely linked to sensuality! Beauty does not push you forward toward the pure realm. It stops you in a sensual exaltation, in a paganism that has no other objective than joy. There must be a fashion of opening one’s soul to beauty in such a way as to be enriched thereby.
I’ve hired, at random, a house with a garden, in order to read there and meditate there, in the hope of becoming a little more intelligent and progressing in the knowledge of the marvelous world that is around us and which we do not see. I’ve sat down in the shade of a tall pine tree; I’ve gazed at the plants and insects; I’ve talked to a neighbor, made the acquaintance of an old lady, a young woman, and her father. I know that, in one direction, there is the sea, and in the other, dense woods. All of that is very ordinary.
And yet, I sense a great mystery around me. Perhaps that mystery exists everywhere, and is only making itself felt in me because I’m more attentive. But perhaps there is something here that isn’t elsewhere, the influence of which is acting upon me.
Who is it that I ought I to ask to enlighten me? Men are so ignorant and so blind. The majority confuse superiority with ironic doubt. And if one appeals to invisible beings, how slow the response is! All the more so as one has contracted the habit of indentifying an appeal with the syllables of the name of the entity to which one is appealing. And then, how can one appeal to those who no more have a name than a form?
THE APPEARANCE OF THE CROW
I was in my bedroom; it was hot, the window was open, and I was on the point of going to bed. I had switched off the lamp because of mosquitoes and I was looking at the garden, faintly illuminated by a moon that was about to disappear over the horizon.
Suddenly
, I heard the caw of a crow. It was coming from the tall pine in the middle of the garden.
“The crow!” I exclaimed. “There it is! It’s come back.”
And almost immediately, the marvelous phenomenon was reproduced. I understood the language of animals again! The caw of the crow was no longer a cry devoid of meaning. It was a brief sentence which could be translated as: “He’s not there!”
And I understood another remark, slightly longer, which was a dolorous exclamation: “How sad I am to be alone!”
The crow only had strictly limited sentiments, for it recommenced: “He’s not there!” and after a pause it went on: “How sad I am to be alone!”
So the crow was looking for someone, observing his absence and affirming its sadness in solitude. It experienced the need to proclaim that in the night, and I heard it, for a few minutes, expressing those simple things in the shadow of the pine. Then there was a flutter of wings and it flew away.
“Blood! Blood!” sang a mosquito in my ear. It had to be prey to a blind desire, for it expressed it untiringly.
I went out into the garden precipitately in order to hear other voices, the expression of more animal sentiments. But the night was particularly silent. I had been reading under my lamp and it was late. Many animals were asleep. Doubtless many had no need to express what they were experiencing vocally.
Suddenly, very close to me, at my feet, a cricket intoned its song. It was not paying any heed to me. It must have been the same one that I had heard on the night of my arrival, an exceptional cricket, a luminary among crickets, whose sharpened senses permitted it to know that it was not running any danger by virtue of my presence. Doubtless it had exercised its observation since I had been walking around the flower-beds amid which its existence unfurled. What it said surpassed infinitely what one might have supposed to be the sentiments of an animal species.
“The night is protective! Nature is rich and marvelous! Everything has been created for crickets! How the trees are glorified by providing the leaves in which we find both nourishment and knowledge. For the veins of leaves form characters of a divine language, in which the secrets of the world are traced. Those characters are innumerable and it is necessary to learn them incessantly in order to know the meaning of the indefinite enigmas that surround us. But crickets possess patience and the delight of spiritual labor. We have arrived at knowing how there are periods of light and darkness, how roots plunge while dividing themselves into the earth, and have the extraordinary power of taking water and transmitting it to the branches, and how various creatures are, some of them inoffensive and others armed with sharp darts. We have arrived at knowing how transformative death is beneficial, and yet it is necessary to attempt with all one’s might to delay it. All is well, everything is ordered, the earth is soft—as is appropriate in order for us to hollow out profound dwellings therein to shelter from wasps—the rain falls when necessary, and the sun fills us with joy.”
My comprehension was abruptly interrupted, as it had been the first time. The song of the cricket became once again that monotonous noise to which I was accustomed.
What could be the cause of such a phenomenon? Did the advent of the crow have something to do with it? When I had gone back up to my bedroom, I meditated for a long time, leaning on the window sill. But no plausible explanation occurred to me.
Hazard would to put me on the path, a little later.
A VISIT TO SAINT ROSELINE
I had not seen Roseline for several days when she came to find me in order to go with her to the village of La Mothe. There, in an old chapel, in a glass reliquary, the body of the saint whose name she bears is conserved.6
We had talked about Saint Roseline, in regard to the death of a certain Guillard and the abnormal conservation of his body after death, a conservation all the more strange because it had been accompanied by a sweet perfume of roses.
“We’ll go to see Saint Roseline at La Mothe,” Roseline had said to me. I had wanted to fix the day, but she had decided to fix it herself. She had added, with a clear gaze: “My father has a little farm at La Mothe. I’ll take advantage of it to see the farmers and bring back butter and eggs.”
All that was normal. As we were about to climb into the automobile, for La Mothe was about half an hour away, Roseline said to me, negligently: “Oh, if by chance you see my father, it’s not worth the trouble of telling him that we’ve been to La Mothe. There are little secrets in the family that it would take too long to explain.”
My God! All that, strictly speaking, was normal.
We set forth. The weather was fine. Roseline was particularly cheerful and in a mood for confidences.
“You haven’t had a Russian mother?” she asked me, point blank.
“In truth,” I replied, surprised, “my mother was born in Toulouse.”
But the precision was unnecessary. Without paying any heed, Roseline went on: “You can’t know what it is to have a Russian mother. To begin with, one loves her much more. And then, there are the stories of a Russian childhood, a maternal childhood that went by long ago, and which one can never forget. The people have names so complicated that one can’t retain them; it’s a matter of indeterminate steppes, phantom forests and fortresses, perhaps Siberian, perhaps Caucasian. Cavaliers go by with fur bonnets that come down to the chin and they have lances so long that they’re lost in the clouds. There are Cossack hunters who crack their whips and show sparkling teeth like rows of icicles when they laugh. Others have bearskins on their backs, on which they’ve left the head intact in order to put it on their own head, so that they seem to have two heads, one human and one ursine. There are journeys by sleigh under fir trees, with packs of wolves howling behind, whose red eyes can be seen shining like living embers. There are icons in the chapels in translucent gold, into which drunken princes go with their violet boots and crimson gloves, falling to the flagstones weeping and demanding vodka while proclaiming prayers.”
Roseline stopped and raised her hand as if to seize a piece of Russian silk fluttering in the air.
“A Russian mother! I must have been thirteen when she died. But what advice she gave me! All my knowledge of the world comes from her. Oh, she didn’t have ideas like everyone. ‘My daughter, there’s no true love,’ she often said to me. ‘I’m speaking in the interests of your happiness. It’s necessary not to occupy yourself with prejudices. When you’re twenty, remember what I’ve told you. Love whom you please and don’t occupy yourself with anything else. For there’s an immense conspiracy in society to prevent young women from seizing the miserable portion of happiness that nature accords to them. Oh, a very miserable portion! And in spite of that, parents, friends, and the whole world are in league to take it away from them.’
“And once, shortly before she died, my mother took me in her arms and she murmured to me, as if it were a secret: ‘Never marry a scientist, especially a scientist who loves butterflies!’
“For it’s an anomaly in the Lusignan family to love creatures other than snakes. The love of snakes is transmitted like a tradition. Note that my father maintains an entire collection of them in the depths of the park, in a locked place to which he might take you some day, if he thinks you’re worthy. And they’re mostly venomous snakes. He has them sent from distant countries and sometimes spends hours watching them sleep. I’m sure he’ll end up getting himself bitten.”
Roseline remained pensive momentarily, but not for long. Then the fear of bites vanished.
“What can one do when one has a mother who has advised you to love and a father who engages you every day never to love?”
That contradiction could not have weighed excessively on Roseline’s soul, however, for she took a small mirror out of her handbag and hastily put on lipstick. We had arrived at the entrance to a park, in which the chapel was situated.
“What time is it?” Roseline asked, with a hint of anxiety. “Is it three o’clock?”
I relied that it was quarter to three.
/> “Oh! Good!” She seemed reassured.
“There’s no urgency.”
“No, evidently not.”
One does not take cognizance of certain observations at the moment when one makes them. It was only in the evening, when I had returned to the House of the Crow, that it occurred to me that Roseline, during our visit to the saint, had been absent, hurried and as if detached from what she saw. To be sure, it was not the first time that she had contemplated the extraordinary case of the incorruptibility of Saint Roseline. She was only showing it to the stranger that I was. But there was something strangely hasty in her attitude and in her manner of assuring me that, except for the glass reliquary, nothing in the chapel merited retaining the attention.
Saint Roseline, who had died six centuries before in the convent of which she was the prioress, had left, as a testimony to her perfect life, a purified form that death had not altered. The bodies of saints, in those distant times, were consigned to numerous displacements. Churches and monasteries made one another pious gifts of miraculous remains. The still-intact body of Saint Roseline had been transported hither and yon. During the wars of religion it had been so well-hidden, in order to preserve it from the impious, that it had never been found again.
It was a blind man who, in the course of a fervent prayer in the chapel, where her place was empty, suddenly saw with the mind’s eye the secret place where Saint Roseline reposed. She was restored to the place where it was given to me to contemplate her. But in the meantime, she as visited by Louis XIV. The powerful king was accompanied by his physician, named Vallot.7 That man must have been animated by the spirit of skepticism. The supernatural gleam of the eyes, after a lapse of three centuries, made him fear some trickery. Sheltering behind the authority of science, he made a slight incision in one of the eyes, and the divine light of the gaze vanished forever, for miracles are not repeated in accordance with human caprice. Behind the lowered eyelids, however, enough of the delicate substance of the eye was discernible to admire how our fragile flesh can receive eternity by virtue of the passage of a pure soul.
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