by George Sand
“Pardon me my fears and suspicion,” she said to us once we had satisfied her questions. “We’ve been persecuted, we’ve suffered a great deal. Thank heaven, misfortune has made my friend lose his memory; nothing can worry him or make him suffer any longer. But I whom God has placed near him for his safekeeping, I have to worry in his stead and watch over him. Your physiognomies and the tone of your voices reassure me even more than the signs and words we’ve just exchanged; for people have made strange misuse of the mysteries, and there have been as many false brothers as quack doctors. Human prudence should give us leave not to believe in anything or anyone from now on, but God preserve us from ever reaching that degree of egotism and impiety! True, the family of the faithful is scattered; there is no longer any temple in which to commune in spirit and in truth. The disciples have lost the sense of the mysteries; the letter has killed the spirit. Divine art is misconceived and profaned among men, but what does it matter if faith persists in a few? What does it matter if the word of life remains in trust in some sanctuary? It will emerge once again, go forth into the world once again, and perhaps the temple will be rebuilt by the Canaanite’s faith and the widow’s penny.”
“That word of life is precisely what we’ve come to find,” replied the master. “It is uttered in every sanctuary, and it’s true that no one understands it any more. We’ve made fervent explications of it, we’ve persevered in bearing it within our hearts and minds and, after years of work and meditation, we believe that we’ve found the true interpretation. That’s why we’ve come to ask your husband to sanction our faith or correct our error. Let us speak with him. Have him hear us out and tell us what he thinks.”
“That’s not up to me,” replied the Zingara, “and even less to him. Trismegistus isn’t always inspired, even though he’s now living under the spell of poetic illusions. Music is his usual manifestation. Rarely are his metaphysical ideas lucid enough to be abstracted from emotions of an exalted sort. Just now he won’t be able to tell you anything satisfying. His words are always clear to me, but that wouldn’t be the case for you who don’t know him. I have to warn you; according to men blinded by their cold reason, Trismegistus is mad; and while the people, poets each and every one, humbly offer gifts of hospitality to the sublime virtuoso who moved and delighted them, the vulgar throw alms of pity at the vagabond rhapsodist who wanders through the cities with his inspiration. But I’ve taught our children that they mustn’t gather up these alms, or only for the crippled beggar whom we see along the way, to whom the heavens have denied the genius for moving and persuading mankind. We, on the other hand, we have no need of the rich man’s money, we’re not begging; alms demean the receiver and harden the giver. Everything that is not exchange must disappear in future society. In the meantime, God allows my husband and me to practice that life of exchange and thereby to partake of the ideal. We bring art and enthusiasm to souls capable of feeling the one and aspiring to the other. We receive the religious hospitality of the poor, we share their meager shelter, their frugal meals, and when we need a crude garment, we earn it by staying for a few weeks and giving the family music lessons. When we pass by a lord’s proud manor, since he is our brother as well as the shepherd, the laborer, and the craftsman, we sing under his window and move on without waiting for wages; we consider him an unfortunate who is unable to exchange anything with us, so it is we who give him alms. In short, we’ve fulfilled the life of the artist as we’ve come to understand it; for God made us artists, and we had to make use of his gifts. We have friends and brothers everywhere in the bottom ranks of this society that would find it demeaning to ask us our secret for being honest and free. Every day we make new disciples of art, and when we’ve exhausted our strength, when we can no longer feed and carry our children, they’ll carry us in turn, and we’ll be fed and consoled by them. If our children were to leave us, swept far away by different vocations, we would do like old Zdenko whom you saw yesterday, and who, after having charmed forty years long all the peasants of the land with his legends and songs, is taken in and looked after in his last years as a friend and venerable teacher. With simple tastes and frugal habits, the love of the road, the health given by a life in accord with nature’s will, with the enthusiasm of poetry, the absence of evil passions and above all faith in the future of the world, do you believe it mad to live as we do? Yet Trismegistus may seem to you deranged by enthusiasm, as he once seemed to me deranged by pain. But if you follow him a while, perhaps you’ll see that it’s the insanity of men and the error of institutions that make men of genius and invention seem mad. Look, come along for the day with us, if that’s what it takes. Perhaps there’ll come an hour when Trismegistus will be talking about something other than music. You mustn’t ask that of him, it will just happen all by itself at a given moment. Something random can reawaken his old ideas. We’re leaving in an hour, our being here can bring down new dangers on my husband’s head. Anywhere else we don’t run the risk of being recognized after so many years of exile. We are going to Vienna, by way of the mountains through the Bohemian Forest and the course of the Danube. I traveled that route in the past, and I’ll do it again with pleasure. We’re on our way to visit two of our children, the older ones that well-off friends wanted to keep to see about their education; for not everyone is born to be an artist, and we all have to walk the path in life that Providence has drawn for us.”
Such were the explanations that the strange woman, pressed by our questions and often interrupted by our objections, gave about the way of life that she had taken up according to her husband’s tastes and ideas. We joyfully accepted her invitation to follow along behind, and when we stepped out of the cottage with her, the civilian guard formed for the purpose of detaining us had opened its ranks to let us go.
“Come on, children,” the Zingara cried to them in her full, harmonious voice, “your friend awaits you under the linden trees. It’s the loveliest moment of the day, and we’ll have morning prayer in music. You can trust these two friends,” she added, waving her hand toward us in her beautiful, naturally theatrical way. “Their cause is ours, and they only wish us well.”
The peasants, shouting and singing, dashed after us. On the way the Zingara told us that she and her family were leaving the hamlet this very morning.
“You mustn’t say so,” she added. “That would cause too many tears, for we have many friends here. But we aren’t safe in these parts. Some old enemy can come along and recognize Albert von Rudolstadt in Bohemian dress.”
We arrived at the hamlet’s green, a grassy clearing surrounded by superb linden trees that through their enormous flanks gave one a glimpse of humble little houses and whimsical paths drawn and beaten down by herds of animals. This seemed to us an enchanted place, with the emerald carpet of the meadows glistening in the first oblique rays of sun and silvery morning mists folding over the flanks of the surrounding mountains. The shady areas seemed to have kept something of the night’s bluish luminosity while the treetops were turning gold and crimson. Everything was pure and clear, everything seemed to us fresh and young, even the ancient linden trees, the moss-eaten roofs and the white-bearded old men coming out of their cottages with a smile. In the middle of the clearing where crystalline water trickled forth in two streams crisscrossing back and forth under one’s feet, we saw Trismegistus surrounded by his children, two charming little girls and a boy of fifteen, beautiful as the Endymion of sculptors and poets.
“This is Wanda,” said the Zingara introducing the elder girl, “and the younger one is Wenceslawa. As for our son, who was given the cherished name of his father’s best friend, he is called Zdenko. Old Zdenko has a marked preference for him. You see that he’s holding Wenceslawa between his knees, and the other one on his lap. But his mind is not on them. He’s got his eyes fastened on my son, as if he couldn’t get enough of looking at him.”
We turned our eyes to the old man. Tears were streaming down his cheeks, and his bony face, furrowed with lines, had a
n expression of beatitude and ecstasy while he was contemplating the young man, the last scion of the Rudolstadts, who bore his slave name with joy, standing next to him, holding his hand. I would have liked to paint this group, and Trismegistus beside them, contemplating them in turn with a tender look while tuning his violin and trying his bow.
“It’s you, friends?” he cordially replied to our respectful greeting. “So my wife went to fetch you? Good for her. I’ve got fine things to say today, and I’d be happy to have you hear them.”
Then he played the violin with even greater exuberance and majesty than the day before. This at least was our impression, which became stronger and more delectable through contact with that rustic assembly that quivered with pleasure and enthusiasm hearing the old ballads of the fatherland and the sacred hymns of ancient liberty. Their emotion was translated in various ways on these manly faces. Some, carried away like Zdenko into a vision of the past, were holding their breath and seemed imbued with that poetry, like a parched plant meditatively imbibing drops of salutary rain. Others, transported with holy furor at the thought of the present troubles, clenched their fists, threatened invisible enemies and seemed to take heaven as witness to their dashed dignity, their outraged virtue. There were sobs and roars, frenetic applause, and delirious shouts.
“Friends,” Albert said to us at the end, “see these simple men! They’ve understood perfectly what I wanted to tell them; they don’t ask me, as you were doing yesterday, what my prophecies mean.”
“Yet you spoke to them only of the past,” said Spartacus, hanging on his words.
“Past, future, present! What vain niceties!” said Trismegistus with a smile. “Doesn’t man carry all three in his heart, and doesn’t his whole existence partake of this triple medium? But since you absolutely require words to depict your ideas, listen to my son. He’s going to sing you a hymn, his mother having written the music, and I the words.”
The beautiful adolescent came forward with a calm, modest bearing to the center of the circle. It was clear that his mother, without believing that she was flattering a weakness, had told herself that, by right, perhaps also by duty, one had to respect and groom the artist’s beauty. She dresses him with a certain studied elegance; his superb locks are carefully combed, and the materials of his rustic costume are of a brighter hue and finer texture than those of the rest of the family. He removed his cap, greeted his listeners by blowing them all a kiss from the tips of his fingers, to which a hundred of the same were the effusive reply; and after his mother had played a guitar prelude with a particular meridional flair, he began to sing, with her accompaniment, the following words that I’m translating for you from the Slavic language, and whose admirable melody they kindly let me take down:
The Gentle Goddess of Poverty
Ballad
“Sandy paths of gold, verdant moors, ravines cherished by the mountain goat, great mountains crowned with stars, vagabond torrents, impenetrable forests, make way, make way for the gentle goddess, the goddess of poverty!
“Since the beginning of the world, since mankind was made, she has been rambling over the earth, she lives in our midst, she roams as she sings, or she sings as she works, the goddess, the gentle goddess of poverty!
“A few men joined together to curse her. They found her too beautiful and blithe, too nimble and strong. Let’s tear off her wings, they said; let’s put her in chains and give her a good thrashing; let her suffer and die, the goddess of poverty!
“They chained the gentle goddess, they beat and persecuted her; but they could not demean her; she took refuge in the souls of poets and peasants, of artists and martyrs and saints, the gentle goddess, the goddess of poverty!
“She has wandered more than the Wandering Jew; she has traveled more than the swallow; she is older than the cathedral of Prague and younger than the wren’s egg; she has sprung up all over the earth more than wild strawberries in the Bohemian Forest, the goddess, the gentle goddess of poverty!
“She has had many children, and she has taught them the secret of God; she has spoken to the heart of Jesus on the mountain; to the eyes of Queen Libussa falling in love with a ploughman; to the spirits of Jan and Jerome on the pyre at Constance. She knows more than all the doctors of the church and all the bishops, the gentle goddess of poverty!
“She always does the greatest and most beautiful things seen on this earth; she tills the fields and prunes the trees; she leads the flocks while singing the most beautiful melodies; she sees the dawning of the day and gathers the sun’s first smile, the gentle goddess of poverty!
“It is she who frames the woodcutter’s hut out of green branches, who gives the poacher his eagle eye; it is she who raises the most beautiful marmots and makes the plough and the spade light in the hands of old men, the gentle goddess of poverty!
“It is she who inspires the poet and makes the violin, guitar, and flute eloquent under the fingers of the vagabond artist; it is she who carries him on her light wings from the headwaters of the Moldau to those of the Danube; it is she who crowns his locks with pearls of dew; for him she makes the stars shine brighter and clearer, the goddess, the gentle goddess of poverty!
“It is she who schools the clever craftsman and teaches him how to cut stone, carve marble, work gold and silver, copper and iron; it is she who makes the hands of the elderly mother and young maid spin linen supple and fine as a thread of hair, the gentle goddess of poverty!
“It is she who holds up the cottage shuddering in the storm; it is she who husbands the resin for the torch and the oil for the lamp; it is she who kneads the family’s bread and weaves their summer and winter garments; it is she who nurtures and feeds the world, the gentle goddess of poverty!
“It is she who raised up the great castles and ancient cathedrals; it is she who bears the saber and the gun; it is she who makes war and conquest; it is she who gathers up the dead, cares for the wounded, and hides the vanquished warrior, the gentle goddess of poverty!
“You are all mildness and patience, all strength and mercy, oh gentle goddess! It is you who gather together all your children in holy love, who give charity, faith, hope, oh goddess of poverty!
“One day your children will cease carrying the world on their shoulders; they’ll be rewarded for their pain and labor. The time is coming when there’ll no longer be either rich men or poor, when one and all will eat of the fruits of the earth and enjoy equal shares of God’s bounty; but you’ll not be forgotten in their hymns, oh gentle goddess of poverty!
“They’ll remember that you were their fertile mother, their robust nurse and militant church. They’ll pour balm on your wounds and make the earth, once again young and fragrant, into a bed where you’ll at last be able to take your rest, oh gentle goddess of poverty!
“While awaiting the day of the Lord, torrents and forests, mountains and valleys, moors teeming with little flowers and birds, sandy paths of gold that have no masters, make way, make way for the gentle goddess, the goddess of poverty!”
Just imagine this ballad rendered in beautiful verse in a sweet, naïve language that seems made for adolescent lips, set to a melody that stirs the heart and brings forth the purest tears, a seraphic voice that sings with exquisite purity, an incomparable musical accent; and all this in the mouth of Trismegistus’ son, the Zingara’s student, the most beautiful, the most candid and gifted among the children of the earth! If you can picture this among a vast number of men’s faces, ingenuous and picturesque, amidst one of Ruysdael’s landscapes, and the mountain stream that, though out of sight, was wafting from the depths of the ravine a refreshing harmony mingled with the distant bells of the goats on the mountain, you’ll understand our emotion and the ineffable poetic delight in which we were long immersed.