Melusine

by Maurice Magre

  It was the admirable Ruysbroeck who appeared to me first, to disappear immediately. I don’t know where he was, or even whether he was there. I saw his slightly square Flemish head, his features sculpted by meditation, his eyes sparkling, like the eyes of those who have seen God. There was no discontentment in his face at my inattention while awake. I even thought I distinguished a total indifference. He did not see me, or, rather, he no longer saw me, for I had the sentiment that he had seen me before. He was near the door and he went out.

  He was followed almost immediately by a small man with a jaundiced face, deprived of all race and entirely clad in black, like a rabbi of a very distant epoch. I recognized him by virtue of a handful of telescope lenses that he was holding in one hand and which were shining like his thoughts. It was Spinoza. He followed Ruysbroeck.

  As if that philosopher had given a signal, I saw various sublime men who were heading for the door. They gave the impression of emerging from the somber mass of the books. For the entire section of the library that contained the works of philosophers and sages was in the corner at the back of the room, and that corner, because of the branches of the old pine that extended in front of the windows, was plunged in semi-obscurity.

  I recognized the author of the Imitation, whose name has not reached us, as his modesty was so great that he hid his face beneath a carefully lowered hood.17 He maintained it with a hand with long translucent fingers, whose mobility betrayed the copyist of archaic texts and illuminations that he had been. Behind him stood a group of Greek philosophers. They impressed me by virtue of the grandeur of their foreheads and their noses. I saw Plotinus, slightly stooped, perhaps for having carried within him for a long time the fifty-four books of the Enneads. I noticed that Proclus was extremely elegant, in a robe of immaculate linen that had a broad green-gold border. He took great care not to bump a large sapphire that he had on his left hand, which permitted him to communicate with the worlds of the gods.

  Behind them passed the Hindus, whom I revered among all. I saw on their breasts the mark of the interior fire that had burned them. Perhaps they were debating the differences of yogis, but their words had no sound. Milarepa was almost naked and I understood on seeing his unusual thinness and the skeleton designed beneath his skin how young women had mistaken him one evening for a dead man emerging from the cemetery.18

  There were also Jacob Boehme, Claude de Saint-Martin, Emerson and other authors of books whose promise of wisdom had been my comfort. I did not recognize them all, since they became less precise, seemingly fading away. Their faces did not allow any expression of discontentment or criticism to show. No, they emerged from their books and they went away. They were not interested in someone who did not show them more love.

  As for me, I watched them draw away without doing anything to retain them. I ought to have shouted out, fallen to my knees with open arms, attempting to retain them by means of tears and supplication, those great masters who had done me the signal honor of keeping me company. How many times I had called them sublime friends, how many times I had been filled with gratitude for their books, from which I hoped to extract my own elevation. And now I was watching them depart with indifference.

  One thought occupied me. I have said that it was prodigiously futile. Can the quality of thoughts be evaluated? At that moment, that thought appeared to me to be the only important thing in life. That thought was related to the solution of the following problem:

  The day before, while we were walking, Roseline had taken in her hand a wild flower, some flower or other, a flower whose personality had not been active enough to found a special class with a special name. At least, that is what I thought. She had considered it and she had said: “It has seven petals, as I have seven desires.”

  That remark had seemed very profound to me and I wondered with a sharp curiosity what those seven desires were. Why were there seven of them? And were those desires orientated, like the petals of the rustic flower, in a semi-horizontal manner? Were those seven desires lightly turned toward the sun or did they tend in the direction of the earth?

  Oh, what did the departure of the sublime friends matter to me? It was as if something within me were suddenly consumed. I had become like the man I had been, uniquely preoccupied with problems of sentimental stupidity.

  THE POWER OF THE PAST

  There is in the human soul a curious passage from intelligence to stupidity. It even seems to be the theater of a constant combat between those two powers. But stupidity has infinitely more strength; it is everywhere, it overflows in all directions, and when one thinks that one has spread a little light over a part of oneself, it frequently happens that stupidity, like a great dark wave, extends again over what one thought one had stolen from it.

  That was what happened to me. And, in returning by means of memory to that moment in my life, I am alarmed to think of the rapidity with which one loses what one has taken so long to acquire.

  For it is first necessary to remark how much time it takes to progress in an imperceptible fashion. The spirit seems to consist of a subtle matter and all those who talk about it are in accord on that subject. That is an affirmation so frequent that one cannot argue with it. And yet the most vulgar matter is transformed more easily than the spirit. An iron bar, in spite of its apart immutability, ends up volatilizing if it is subjected to a sufficiently high temperature. There is no high temperature that renders an ordinary mind apt for philosophical comprehension.

  No matter how convinced a soul might be of the necessity of becoming more perfect and developing virtues, if it is miserly, it remained miserly; if it is prey to lustful imaginations, it continues to find the same temptations in them, due to the force and exactitude of the images. If it fights with all the strength of it will the birth of those evocative images, it will only see them decrease with a despairing slowness. And if it arrives in the end, by means of an express order of the will, in preventing their appearance, the images will not be dead; they will still be there, lurking, like an obliging cinema, ready to emerge in the darkness and unfurl the splendor of possible sensualities, when the will buckles in the evening as one is on the point of falling to sleep but has not yet fallen,

  Progress demands immense efforts. Self-modification is only achieved by means of unusual patience. And in a moment, in the time that a woman’s glance lasts, a vast edifice, patiently constructed, can be destroyed.

  I had not arrived at great results. I had only attained the moment of transition in which one recognizes the vanity of one’s past life, in which one sees a new road and in which one is ready to launch forth along it. I had confessed to myself—which is to say that I had exposed the details of my life and the consequences of my errors before a judge who is all the more severe because he has only recently been elevated to the rank of judge and is making an experiment of judgment. I had drawn up the tableau of wasted time, and it was an immense picture. All my life, with all its hours, was inscribed there. I had an entire life to recapture!

  The marvelous times of youth, with its facilities, the possession of memory, the joyful delight in learning, I had squandered in the search for the sterile pleasure that women procure. And the epithet sterile is insufficient. Because, not only is that pleasure not productive, but it is destructive. It destroys all the wealth one possesses in the spiritual order.

  I am not talking about physical pleasure alone, which is the least dangerous. One pays, in immediate disgust and in lassitude, the debt that any material attachment contracts for you. One liberates oneself from it almost immediately because it demands its settlement in the hours that follow. I am talking about the intellectual pleasure by which one believes one is magnifying oneself in a liaison with a woman, even, and especially, if that liaison has the noble duration of a lifetime. It is more deadly then, because one gives it a mystical and familial range.

  It brings, indisputably, quotidian wellbeing, the warm light of the hearth and the absence of sentimental cares; but in setting aside to
rment, it also sets aside research. It brings the mysterious mediocrity with which the tranquil man is penetrated, with which the heart and the body are equally satisfied. Society favors and glorifies the man who obeys in a docile fashion the rule of unique amour, on which the cathedral of the family reposes, with its pious columns, the bed that serves as the altar and tabernacle of memories. That cathedral has its beauty for men, of meals at set hours, regular prayers and median good sentiments. Society has made it the central monument of the city, because society does not favor the appearance of perfection in humans, and even fears it.

  Perfection has to be discovered in isolation, in the darkness of oneself. And the man who wants to discover it, or only to get closer to it—for it is infinitely distant and hidden behind forests of ignorance—must pitilessly reject the being that is known as the affectionate companion, the twin soul, the soul of one’s soul, and seek the joyless solitude, the bleak isolation in which the speech of the gods can be heard.

  I had only arrived at the point of understanding that necessity. It is a first stage on the road. One sees ahead ennui, bleak evenings, insomnia and awakenings without the hope of a known face. But rapidly, new hopes, with faces that one has never seen, begin to appear. They are hopes that do not ask anything of anyone, which have no need of human aid, like certain flowers in certain gardens that are born without having been sown, by virtue of an inexplicable understanding between the sun and the soil. Those hopes contain a promise so beautiful that once one has glimpsed them, one wants to go a long way on the road on which one knows that one ought to encounter them.

  That was where I was. I knew what I could extract from solitude. I knew that books are like instruments of magic, more powerful than the classic circle or steel point. Like a magician, I had disposed them around me. When the light of the rising sum passing through the branches of the old pine colored them, I was conscious of their power. Via them, I had entered into communication. Their reading had given birth to a supernatural light in my soul. I was enlightened—or rather, I would be, for time is required and the repetition of magical ceremonies.

  It is not sufficient for a verity to be well understood; it is necessary to live it. The greatest secrets are immediately understood, but forgotten as rapidly. It is necessary to identify with the spirit of those who inform us of them. That is the mysterious operation that must be accomplished in solitude, and the first condition must be the forgetfulness of the past.

  That was where I was. And not only had I not forgotten the past, but it suddenly revived within me as if I had done nothing to abolish it. I found myself once again in the condition that I had been in twenty years before. I had the same anxiety and the same desire, the same stupid craving for sentimental words. The exclusive love of a certain quality of stupidity possessed me again. In vain, I had been ashamed of what I had been. In vain I had repeated, while laughing, certain speeches once pronounced, as symbols of the state of mediocrity and aberration in which I had found myself. I was ready to pronounce those same words today, with the profound accent of sincerity.

  Nothing had changed, except Roseline’s name, a few details of her features and hair-color, the shape of her dress and the tone of her voice.

  TWILIGHT OVER THE LITTLE BEACH

  One evening, I fell asleep...

  Why have I fallen asleep above a little beach, on a slope where clover had grown and which as strewn with pine-needles? I had no reason to feel drowsy and I never go to sleep in the open air. Sitting on the bare ground, I feel the weight of the landscape upon me too forcefully; I am crushed by the celestial metal of the azure, oppressed by the immensity. Then again, comfortable as the place on the ground that I have chosen is, and where I am sitting, there is always some terrestrial asperity, some sharp stone that enters into my flesh. And if it happens that I lie down completely in order to be face to face with the sky, in the confused hope of glimpsing, thanks to that divine confrontation, an immense and benevolent face whose eyes are fixed upon me, I always have the dread that some audacious insect, some creature armed with a minuscule but very sharp dart might penetrate my nose or my ear in order to stick that dart there, out of ignorance or malice.

  So, I never fall asleep in the midst of the beauty of nature. But this evening, by virtue of an exception that nothing can explain, I fall asleep.

  Everyone has experienced the softness of that moment of a warm and slightly humid evening at the end of May when the sun is about to disappear. If there is a breeze, it drops. The poplars are more attentive than usual to establishing the measure of vegetal time, which is the role assigned to them. The clover straightens up and extends its trefoil leaves, as if to affirm that a fourth would be useless to them and would not bring good luck to anyone. Clover is very satisfied as it is, and asks nothing more. There is no vibration on the telegraph poles. The first marriage of the evening frogs is announced by a croak.

  I had gone past the terrace where Madame Tournadieu was weaving her threads of cloth; I had exchanged a few banal words with her and I had said: “I’m going to the little beach.”

  I had fixed that rather distant point in order that she would not get up with a mutinous exclamation and propose to accompany me. Fortunately, she quickly ran out of breath.

  I am noting that brief dialogue because it constitutes a link in the chain of events. I never went as far as the place known as the little beach at the hour when the poplars are occupied with time and the clover straightens up. For me to do so, it required that Roseline knew of my presence via Madame Tournadieu. If I had gone past without saying anything, perhaps there would have been another sequence of events.

  The little beach is a strip of sand surrounded by pines of a nature so maritime that some of them advance audaciously into the sea, to the extent that the same tree and lodge a nightingale on a branch and a crab between its roots. Great acanthus leaves cover he slopes that descend all the way to the sea. They are mingled with yellow and green cacti, and arborescent euphorbias respectfully surround an agave that is getting ready to launch its high flower toward the sun. To the right there is a very ancient fig tree that renounced producing figs a long time ago in order to devote itself to meditation, and to the left a group of several eucalypti with their bark cut into strips and a perfume that they mix, like skillful chemists, with the perfume of seaweed and wrack.

  An ancient romanticism obliges humans to lean on something and assume the appearance of someone dreaming when the landscape, impregnated with the melancholy of the evening, realizes a beauty that is personal. For a landscape has its autonomy in nature. The little beach, with its fig tree and its eucalypti, formed a whole, animated by a particular reverie with which it was difficult to achieve a rapport. Every time I went past the little beach alone—solitude is indispensable to the comprehension of nature—I had the vision of an arrival in boats, under triangular sails, of African individuals, and I saw thin-legged slaves with red rings throwing carpets over a long, narrow plank, in order to permit several delicate and veiled women to disembark without getting their feet wet.

  I was accustomed to the vision of that disembarkation. I leaned on one of the eucalypti. But the chemist was just in the process of giving the maximum potency to the perfume that it manufactures tirelessly, and that inconvenienced me. I took three or four steps into the midst of the acanthi and I sat down.

  A nightingale started to sing, as if it approved of my action. It was a pure coincidence, for I am convinced that it was not concerned with what a human might be doing next to the little beach. I noted that the moon was quite high in the sky. A few thoughts of a rather insignificant character passed nonchalantly through my mind, like travelers who do not know where they are going. I had placed my head on my elbow, and sleep took possession of me.

  I was woken up by a burst of laughter: Roseline’s burst of laughter. She was laughing at finding me asleep. It even procured her an exaggerated hilarity, for the phenomenon of sleep is frequent and familiar. In spite of its frequency, I experi
enced a certain confusion at being found asleep. As soon as I had felt the tip of Roseline’s umbrella, with which she had touched my shoulder, I told myself that an abrupt sleep, at the end of an afternoon, might be considered as a symptom of old age. I stammered, while Roseline continued laughing, but I had sufficient presence of mind to invite her to sit down.

  She made a semblance of hesitation, and a semblance of calculating whether or not she had the time, and sat down. And I had the sentiment that she had premeditated everything. How? Why? I don’t know. One always thinks that women, submissive to events, are drawn by the combination of circumstances. Nothing of the sort. They make the same decisions as men; the only difference is in the manner in which they realize them. They make a semblance of submission, while they are directing by devious means.

  The presence of the moon and the exact measure of its light, the activity of the arboreal chemist and the sweetness of its perfume, intoxicating if one is alone, but bewitching if there are two, the benevolence of the fig tree, the propitious character of the hour and the bewilderment of the awakening, had all been calculated and arranged by Roseline a long time ago. How long? Perhaps five minutes, since the moment when Madame Tornadieu had told her that I was at the little beach, perhaps much longer, since an anterior life dating from the Middle Ages or some more distant epoch.

  But in the bosom of the event, who cares about the cause of the event? I knew that it sometimes happens in life that things one has desired are realized as one has desired, even with an unexpected savor that adds to the charm of the realization. It is very rare, but it happens. I had desired, in the depths of my unconscious, to be sitting on clover amid acanthus leaves, by the light of a nascent moon, next to Roseline.