by George Sand
What is wrong? he asked me. Anyone would think that today you are remembering having been the greatest slowcoach in all creation.
Walter was an excellent young man: twenty-four years old, with an amiable face, a serious mind and a cheerful demeanour. His eyes and voice were imbued with the serenity of a clear conscience. He had always shown indulgence and affection towards me. I could not open my heart to him, for I could not see clearly into it myself; but I let him see the preoccupations which were rising up vaguely within me, and in the end I asked him what he thought of our arid studies, which had value only in the eyes of a few scientific adepts and remained a closed book to common mortals.
My dear boy, he replied, there are three ways of viewing our studies’ goal. Your uncle, who is a respectable scholar, sits astride just one of these ways, and the pony he is riding with such panache, the one he spurs on furiously, and which often carries him away beyond all certainty, is called hypothesis. The rough, ardent horseman wishes, like Curtius, to plunge into the abysses of the earth, but there to discover the beginning of things and the successive and regular development of those first things. I believe he is seeking the impossible: chaos will not let go of its prey, and the word mystery is written on the cradle of earthly life. It matters not, your uncle’s works have great value, because in the midst of many errors, he unearths many truths. Without the hypothesis which fascinates him and which has fascinated so many others, we would still find ourselves limited to the inexact symbolism of Genesis.
“But,” Walter continued, “there is a second way of viewing science, and this is the one that has won me over. It consists of applying to industry the riches which slumber between the leaves of the earth’s bark and which, every day, thanks to the progress of physics and chemistry, reveal to us new peculiarities and elements of well-being, sources of infinite power for the future of human societies.
“As for the third way, it is interesting but puerile. It consists of knowing the detail of the innumerable events and minute modifications that the mineralogical elements present. This is the science of details, which lovers of collections possess and which also interests lapidaries, jewellers …”
And women! I cried out with an accent of disdainful pity as I saw my cousin, who had just entered the gallery, walking slowly along the glass cabinet that contained the gemstones.
She heard my exclamation, turned round, threw me a look that embodied the most complete indifference, and calmly continued her examination without paying me any further attention.
I was going to continue the conversation with Walter, when he enquired if I was not going to offer my arm to my cousin and give her the explanations she might desire.
No, I replied, loudly enough to be heard. My cousin has seen her uncle’s collection many times before, and the only thing that might interest her here, is precisely the one that interests us very little.
I confess, Walter went on, lowering his voice and showing me the side of the gallery which Laura was walking along, that I would give all the precious, priceless stones heaped up in those glass cases for the beautiful specimens of iron and coal which lie here, close to us. The miner’s pick, my friend, there you have the symbol of the world’s future, and as for these glittering trifles that decorate the heads of queens or the arms of courtesans, I care as much about them as about a wisp of straw. The work on a grand scale, my dear Alexis, the work which benefits everyone and which projects the rays of civilisation far into the distance, that is what dominates my thoughts and directs my studies. As for hypothesis …
What are you saying about hypo … po … pothesis? the annoyed voice of my Uncle Tungstenius stammered behind us. Hypo … po … pothesis is a term of derision used by l … l … lazy people who receive their opinions ready-made and dismiss the investigations of great minds as if they were chimeras.
Then, little by little growing calmer in the face of Walter’s apologies and denials, the fellow went on without stuttering too much:
You will do well, children, never to abandon the governing thread of logic. There are no effects without a cause. The earth, the sky, the universe, and we ourselves, are only effects, the results of a sublime or fatal cause. Study the effects, by all means, but not without seeking the essential reason why nature itself exists.
“You are right, Walter, not to absorb yourself in the minutiae of purely mineralogical classifications and denominations; but you seek the useful with as much narrowness of thought as the mineralogists seek the rare. I care no more than you for diamonds and emeralds, which are the pride and amusement of a small number of people who are privileged to be wealthy; but, when you lock your entire soul away within the walls of some middlingly rich mine, you bring to my mind the mole who flees from the sun’s rays.
“The sun of intelligence, my child, is reasoning. Induction and deduction, there is no way out of that, and it matters little to me that you take me round the whole world in a steamship, if you never teach me why the earth is a globe and why this globe has evolutions and revolutions. Learn to strike iron, to convert it into cast iron or steel, I consent to that; but, if your whole life is nothing but an application to material things, you might just as well be iron yourself, in other words an inert substance deprived of reasoning. Man does not live by bread alone, my friend; he does not live completely except by the development of his faculties of examination and comprehension.”
My uncle went on in this vein for some time, and, without allowing himself to contradict him, Walter defended as best he could the theory of the direct utility of the treasures of science. According to him, man could not arrive at the illumination of the mind until he had conquered the joys of the positive life.
I listened to this interesting discussion, whose scope struck me for the first time. I had got to my feet and, leaning on a copper rail which protects the glass cases from the outside, I gazed mechanically towards the mineralogical collection which Laura had examined a moment before, and which had been disdained in unison by my uncle, by Walter and by myself. I had moved to stand there without quite knowing why, for my uncle and Walter had turned towards the rocks, that is the purely geological collection. Perhaps, without my realising it, I was dominated by the vague pleasure of breathing in the scent of a white rose that Laura had placed and forgotten on the edge of the glass case.
Whatever the reason, my eyes were fixed on the series of quartz hyalines, also called rock crystals, before which Laura had appeared to halt for a moment with a certain pleasure, and, whilst listening to my uncle’s reasoning, and wishing to forget Laura, who had disappeared, I contemplated a magnificent geode of amethyst quartz, completely filled with crystals which were truly remarkable, transparent and had the freshness of prisms.
However, my thoughts were not as fixed as my gaze; they floated at random, and the scent of the little musk rose brought my being back under the control of instinct. I loved that rose, and yet I believed I hated the one who had plucked it. I breathed in its scent with aspirations that translated themselves into kisses, I pressed it to my lips with a disdain that translated itself into bites. Suddenly I felt a light hand upon my shoulder, and a delicious voice, the voice of Laura, spoke in my ear.
Do not turn round, do not look at me, she said; leave that poor rose alone, and come with me to gather the flowers of stone that do not wither. Come, follow me. Do not listen to my uncle’s cold reasoning and Walter’s blasphemies. Quickly, quickly, friend, let us leave for the fairy regions of the crystal. I am running towards them, follow me, if you love me!
I felt so surprised and troubled, that I had the strength neither to look at Laura, nor to answer her. Moreover, she was already no longer at my side; she was in front of me, as if she had passed through the glass case, or the case had become an open door. She was fleeing or rather flying in a luminous space, and I followed her, not knowing where I was, nor by what fantastical brightness I was dazzled.
Fatigue halted me and overcame me after a period of time whose length I could not calculate. Disco
uraged, I let myself fall. My cousin had disappeared.
Laura! dear Laura! I cried out in despair, where have you led me, and why have you abandoned me?
I then sensed Laura’s hand upon my shoulder once more, and her voice speaking in my ear again. At the same time, far away Uncle Tungstenius’s piercing voice was saying:
No, there is no hypo … po … pothesis in all of that!
However Laura was speaking to me as well, and I could not understand her. I thought at first that it was in Italian, then in Greek, and finally I recognised that it was in a completely new language, which little by little was revealing itself to me like the memory of another life. I grasped the meaning of the last sentence very clearly.
So, see where I have brought you, she was saying, and understand that I have opened your eyes to the sky’s light.
I then began to see and understand in what surprising place I found myself. I was with Laura in the centre of the amethyst geode which graced the glass case in the mineralogical gallery; but what up to then I had taken blindly and on the faith of others for a block of hollow flint, the size of a melon cut in half and lined inside with prismatic crystals of irregular size and groupings, was in reality a ring of tall mountains enclosing an immense basin filled with steep hills bristling with needles of violet quartz, the smallest of which might have exceeded the dome of St Peter’s in Rome both in volume and in height.
From that moment on I was no longer astonished by the tiredness I had experienced while running up one of these rocky needles, and I felt a great surge of fear as I saw that I was on the slope of a sparkling precipice, at the bottom of which mysterious shimmers were calling to me with a vertiginous fascination.
Stand up and fear nothing, Laura told me; in this land, thoughts walk and the feet follow. Those who understand cannot fall.
Tranquil, Laura was indeed walking on these steep slopes, which plunged down in all directions towards the abyss, and whose polished surface received the full brilliance of the sun and reflected it back in iridescent sprays. The place was admirable, and I soon saw that I could walk there as safely as Laura. Finally she sat down on the edge of a small crack and asked me with a childish laugh if I recognised the place.
How could I recognise it? I said. Is this not the first time I have come here?
Silly-head! she replied, have you already forgotten that, last year, you handled the geode clumsily and dropped it on the gallery floor? One of the crystals was chipped, you didn’t make a great fuss about it; but the trace of the accident has remained, and here it is. You have looked at it often enough to recognise it. Today, it serves you as a cave to shelter your poor head, tired out by the brilliance of the sun on the gemstone.
Indeed, Laura, I replied, I now recognise it very well; but I cannot understand how a break barely visible to the naked eye, in a specimen which my two hands could contain, has become a cavern in which the two of us can sit down on the flank of a mountain which could cover our entire town …
And, Laura went on, at the centre of a land that embraces a horizon whose depths your gaze can barely grasp? All this astonishes you, my poor Alexis, because you are a child without experience and without contemplation. Take a good look at this charming land, and you will easily understand the transformation that the geode seems to have effected upon you.
I gazed for a long time, and without tiring, at the dazzling vista we overlooked. The more I looked at it, the more able I became to bear its brilliance, and little by little it became as gentle upon my eyes as the greenery of the woods and meadows of our earthly regions. I was surprised to discern in it general shapes reminiscent of our glaciers, and soon even the smallest details of this gigantic crystallisation became as familiar to me as if I had explored them a hundred times in every direction.
You see, my companion then said, picking up one of the brilliant stones which lay beneath our feet, you see, this circular, hollow mountain range is just like this pebble, with its empty centre. One may be small and the other immense, but the difference is scarcely appreciable in the limitless expanse of creation. Each jewel in this vast screen has its own matchless value, and the mind which in its love cannot associate the grain of sand with the star is a sick mind, or played false by the deceptive notion of reality.
Was it Laura who spoke to me in this way? I sought to verify this; but she too shone like the brightest of the gemstones, and my eyes, by now accustomed to the splendours of the new world she had revealed to me, could not bear the additional radiance which seemed to emanate from her.
My dear Laura, I said, I am beginning to understand. And yet up there, a long way from here, and all around the horizon which encloses us, there are icy peaks and snowfields …
Look at the little geode, said Laura, placing it in my hand; you can clearly see that the crystals around the perimeter are limpid like ice and veined with opaque shades of white, like snow. Come with me, and you shall see at close quarters these eternal glaciers where cold is unknown and where death cannot seize us unawares.
I followed her, and this journey—which I estimated must have been of several leagues—was covered so swiftly that I was unaware of the moments passing. We were soon on the tallest summit of the great ice peak, which was in reality just a colossal prism of milky hyaline quartz, as was borne out, on a manageably small scale, by the geode which I held as a point of comparison, and just as Laura had declared to me; but what a grandiose sight came into view again from the very summit of the great white crystal! At our feet, the circle of amethyst, drowned in its own reflections, was now only a small element of the picture, agreeable because of the melancholy sweetness of its lilac tints, the elegance of its shapes contributing to the harmony of the whole. How many other splendours were unfurled in space!
O Laura, my dear Laura! I cried out, bless you for bringing me here! Where did you learn of the existence of these marvels, and how to reach them?
What does that matter to you! she replied; gaze upon the beauty of the crystalline world and savour it. The valley of the amethyst is, as you can see, only one of the thousand aspects of this nature, whose riches are inexhaustible. Here, on the other side of the large crystal, you see the charming world of the jaspers with their changing veins. No cataclysm has sullied these magnificent, patient works of nature, or buried them in barbaric mixtures and brutal confusions. Whilst in our little world, troubled and refashioned a hundred times, the gemstone is shattered, dispersed, enshrouded in a thousand unknown, dark places, here it is plain for all to see. It sparkles, reigns everywhere, fresh and pure, and truly royal as it was in the first days of its happy formation.
“Further off, you can see the valleys where amber-coloured chalcedony is rounded into powerful hills, while a chain of dark, glowing-red zirconium completes the illusion of a limitless blaze. The lake which half-reflects them at its edges, but whose centre presents a surface of slackly lapping waves, is made up of indeterminate shades of chalcedony, whose nebulous fleeciness reminds one of white horses on the sea when there is a steady breeze.
“As for these masses of beryls and sapphires, a material whose rarity is so prized among us, they have no more importance here than God’s other works. They stretch out to infinity in slender colonnades which you take perhaps for far-off forests, as I wager you take those slender, tender stems of green chalcedony to be thickets, and those crystalline efflorescences of pyromorphite for carpets of velvety moss caressing the edges of the many-coloured agate ravine; but that is nothing.
“Let us go on a little, you shall explore the opal oceans where the sun, that blazing diamond whose creative power is unknown to me, plays in all the reflections of the rainbow. Do not linger on these islands of turquoise, further on are those of tender lazulite and of lapis, run through with veins of gold.
“Here is mad labradorite, the reflections from its facets by turns colourless and pearly, and aventurine with silver rain that displays its polished flanks, while the fires of red, warm almandine, whose praises were once s
ung by a seer called Hoffmann, are concentrated around the centre of its austere mountain.
“As for me, I love those humble rose gypsums forming long walls, piled on top of each other, right up to the skies, and those fluorites lightly tinted with the freshest colours, or then again those blocks of feldspar, which we call moonstone, because it has the smooth reflection of that heavenly body’s rays.
“If you will climb to the poles of this enchanted world, across the ice floes of satiny sericolite and limpid aquamarine, we shall see the permanent aurora borealis which man has never gazed upon, and you will understand that, in this universe which you see as immobile, the most intense life palpitates in the breaths of an energy so formidable that …”
Here, my cousin Laura’s intoxicating voice was drowned out by a din like that of a hundred million thunderclaps. A hundred billion resplendent fireworks shot up into a black sky which I had at first taken for a measureless vault of tourmaline, but which was torn into a hundred billion burning strips. All the reflections were extinguished, and I saw, laid bare, the heaven’s abysses scattered with stars whose colours were so intense and whose size so terrifying, that I toppled backwards and lost consciousness …
It is nothing, my dear Alexis, Laura told me, placing upon my forehead something cold that had the effect of an ice cube. Return to yourself and recognise your cousin, your Uncle Tungstenius and your friend Walter, who are urging you to shake off this lethargy.
No, no, it will be nothing, said my uncle, who was holding my wrist to take my pulse; but, another time, when you have talked a little too much at lunch while absent-mindedly drinking glass after glass of my little white wine from Neckar, do not amuse yourself by breaking the glass display cases with your head and scattering all the crystals and gemstones of the collection like a madman. God knows what damage you could have done, if we had not been there, not to mention the fact that your wound could have been serious and cost you an eye or part of your nose! Mechanically, I raised my hand to my brow and when I took it away it was reddened with a few drops of blood.