2
How has all that freshwater surge of memories managed to spring up again and flow into my soul, today so impure, without being sullied by it? What virtue is possessed by that morning odour of lilacs that enables it to make its way across so many fetid vapours without being affected and weakened by them? Alas! the soul I had at fourteen can still awaken within me, but at the same time it is far away from me and outside of me. I know full well it is no longer my soul and that it is no longer within my power to make it so again. And yet at that time I did not think I would one day look back on it with nostalgia. It was merely pure, and I needed to make it strong and capable of performing, one day, the highest tasks. Often, at Les Oublis, after going with my mother to the edge of the pond filled with the playful glitter of the sunlight and the fish, in the heat of the day, or in the morning and evening walking with her out in the fields, I would trustingly dream of the future that was never beautiful enough to satisfy her love, nor my desire to please her; and the powers, if not of will, at least of imagination and feeling that were stirring within me, tumultuously summoned the destiny in which they could find fulfilment, and knocked repeatedly against the walls of my heart as if to burst through and rush out of me, into life. If I then jumped up, filled with exuberance, if I kissed my mother a thousand times over, ran far ahead like a puppy dog or, having lingered behind her, picking poppies and cornflowers, brought them up to her with glad cries, it was less because of the joy of the walk itself and the pleasure of picking those flowers than it was a way of giving free rein to my happiness at sensing within me all the life ready to spring forth, to spread out infinitely, in vaster and more magical perspectives than those granted by the distant horizon of the forests and the sky that I wished I could reach at a single bound. Bouquets of cornflowers, clover and poppies, if I carried you off in such intoxication, my eyes burning, quivering all over – if you made me laugh and cry – the reason was that I made you part of all the hopes I then nursed, which now, like you, have withered and perished and, without having even blossomed like you, have returned to dust.
What made my mother so sad was my lack of willpower. I did everything on a momentary impulse. As long as my life drew its sustenance from my mind or my heart, it was, if not altogether good, at least not altogether bad. My mother and I were above all else preoccupied by the attempt to fulfil all my fine plans for work, tranquillity and reasonableness, since we sensed – she more distinctly, I confusedly, but with great force – that this fulfilment would only come about if I could create by myself and within myself that willpower that she had conceived and nursed into existence. But each time I would put it off to the next day. I let myself take my time; I was sometimes sorry to see time passing, but there was still so much of it ahead of me! And yet I was rather afraid, and felt vaguely that the habit of abstaining from exercising my willpower was starting to weigh on me more and more heavily, the more the years went by, filled as I was with the melancholy suspicion that things would not change all of a sudden, and that I could hardly count, if my life were to be transformed and my willpower shaped, on some miracle that would cost me no effort at all. To desire strength of will was not enough. I would have needed to do just what I could not do without strength of will: will it.
3
And the crazed wind of concupiscence
Makes your flesh crack and flap like an old flag.*
– Baudelaire
In the course of my sixteenth year, I suffered a breakdown that left me feeling ill. To take my mind off it, my parents decided to bring me out into society. Young men fell into the habit of coming to see me. One of them was perverse and spiteful. He had manners that were both gentle and over-bold. He was the one I fell in love with. My parents learnt of it, and didn’t do anything too hasty, in case they upset me too much. Spending all the time I couldn’t see him thinking about him, I finally lowered myself to resemble him as much as I possibly could. He led me into evil ways almost by stealth, then got me into the habit of allowing bad thoughts to arise in me, thoughts which I had no strength of will to oppose – and will alone would have been the only power capable of forcing them back into the infernal shadow from which they had emerged. When my love for him faded, habit had taken its place, and there was no lack of immoral young men ready to exploit it. They were partners in my crimes, and made themselves the apologists of my misdeeds before the tribunal of my conscience. At first I was filled with agonized remorse, I made confessions that were not understood. My comrades put me off the idea of persisting in trying to tell my father. They slowly persuaded me that all girls did the same and that parents merely pretended not to know. My imagination soon glossed over the lies that I was ceaselessly obliged to tell by keeping a silence that my imagination depicted as the necessary result of some ineluctable necessity. At this time I was no longer properly living; but I was still dreaming, thinking and feeling.
To take my mind off all these unwholesome desires and chase them away, I started to go out a great deal into society. Its desiccating pleasures accustomed me to living in company the whole time and, as I lost the taste for solitude, I lost the secret of the joys that nature and art had hitherto given me. Never did I go to concerts so frequently as I did in those years. Never, entirely preoccupied as I was with the desire of being admired as I sat in some elegant box, did I have less of a feeling for the music. I listened, but I heard nothing. If by chance I did hear, I had ceased to see everything that music can reveal. My walks too had been, as it were, stricken with sterility. The things which had once sufficed to make me happy for a whole day – a ray of sunlight casting its yellow beams on the grass, the odour given off by damp leaves when the last drops of rain fell – had, like me, lost their sweetness and gaiety. The woods, the sky, the lakes and rivers seemed to turn away from me, and if, lingering alone with them face to face, I anxiously questioned them, they no longer murmured those vague replies that had once so ravished me. The divine guests that are announced by the voice of the waters, leaves and sky only ever deign to visit hearts which, by dwelling within themselves, have purified themselves.
It was at this point that, seeking an inverse remedy, and not being courageous enough to will the true remedy that lay so close to me, and – alas! – so far away from me, since it was within me, I again let myself go, succumbing to guilty pleasures, thinking thereby to revive the flame which society had extinguished. It was in vain. Held back by the pleasure I took in pleasing others, I kept putting off, day after day, the definitive decision, the choice, the really free act – namely, opting for solitude. I did not give up one of these two vices for the other. I combined them. More than that: each vice assumed the responsibility of overcoming all the obstacles in thought and feeling that might have stood in the way of the other vice, and thus seemed actually to summon it into being. I would go out into society to calm myself after some misdemeanour, and I would commit another one the minute I was calm. It was at that terrible period, after the loss of innocence, and before the remorse I feel today, at that period when, of all the periods in my life, I was most worthless, that I was most highly esteemed by everyone else. I had been considered as a pretentious and eccentric little girl; now, conversely, the ashes of my imagination were greatly to the taste of society, which delighted in them. Just when I was committing the greatest of crimes against my mother, I was viewed, because of my tenderly respectful manner towards her, as a model daughter. After the suicide of my mind, everyone admired my intelligence and doted on my spirited remarks. My desiccated imagination, my choked sensibility were enough to quench the thirst of those who most craved spiritual life, so artificial was their thirst, and so mendacious – just like the source at which they all imagined they could slake it! In any case, no one suspected the secret crime of my life, and I seemed to everyone to be the ideal young girl. How many parents told my mother at that time that if I had not enjoyed such a high position and if they had been able to aspire to me, they would have wished for no othe
r wife for their sons! In the depths of my obliterated conscience, I nonetheless felt at this undeserved praise a desperate sense of shame; this shame did not reach the surface, and I had fallen so low that I was vile enough to report their praise, sarcastically, to my partners in crime.
4
I think of all who have lost what can
Never, ever be found again!*
– Baudelaire
In the winter of my twentieth year, my mother’s health, which had never been strong, was greatly impaired. I learnt that she had a heart disease, not a grave one, but one that still meant she needed to avoid any upset. One of my uncles told me that my mother wished to see me married. A specific and important duty presented itself to me. I would be able to prove to my mother how much I loved her. I accepted the first marriage request that she passed on to me, and, by agreeing to it, I charged necessity with the task which willpower had been unable to make me undertake: that of changing my life. My fiancé was exactly the man who, with his exceptional intelligence, his gentleness and his vigour, could have the most salutary influence on me. He was, in addition, resolved to live with us. I would no longer be separated from my mother, which would have been the cruellest of pains for me.
Then I plucked up the courage to tell my confessor of all my misdeeds. I asked him if I should admit them to my fiancé too. He was compassionate enough to dissuade me, but made me swear that I would never relapse into those errors, and gave me absolution. The belated flowers that joy made blossom in my heart – a heart that I had thought was for ever sterile – bore fruit. The grace of God, the grace of youth – in which we see so many wounds closing of themselves, thanks to the vitality of that time of life – had cured me. If, as St Augustine says, it is more difficult to become chaste once one has lost the habit of chastity, then I really experienced how difficult virtue can be. No one suspected that I was an immeasurably better person now than I had been previously, and every day my mother would kiss my brow which she had never ceased to think of as pure without knowing that it was now regenerate. Indeed, I was at this period unjustly rebuked for my inattentiveness, my silence and my melancholy in society. But these rebukes did not annoy me: the secret that I shared with my satisfied conscience gave me a pleasure altogether sufficient. The convalescence of my soul – which now ceaselessly smiled on me with a face like that of my mother, and gazed at me with an expression of tender reproach through its drying tears – was imbued with boundless charm and languor. Yes, my soul was experiencing a rebirth. I myself could not understand how I had been able to mistreat it, make it suffer, almost kill it. And I effusively thanked God for having saved it in time.
It was the harmony between this pure and profound joy on the one hand, and the fresh serenity of the sky on the other, that I was busy enjoying on the evening when it all finally happened. The absence of my fiancé, who had gone to spend a couple of days with his sister, and the presence at dinner of the young man who bore the greatest share of responsibility for my former errors did not cast the slightest sadness over that limpid May evening. There was not a cloud in the sky, which in all its perfect clarity was reflected in my heart. In addition, my mother, as if there had been a mysterious solidarity between her and my soul – despite her total ignorance of my misdeeds – was more or less fully cured. “She needs lots of tender loving care from you over the next fortnight,” the doctor had said, “and after that, she’s in no risk of a relapse!” These words alone were for me the promise of a future happiness whose sweetness made me burst into tears. That evening, my mother was wearing a more elegant dress than usual, and, for the first time since my father’s death, even though that was now a good ten years ago, she had added a dash of mauve to her habitual black dress. She was quite abashed to have dressed like this, in the clothes she had worn when she was younger, and both sad and happy to have forced herself to do violence to her grief and mourning so as to give me pleasure and celebrate my joy. I held up to her bodice a pink carnation which at first she brushed away, but then pinned to her clothing – since it came from me – albeit with a rather hesitant and embarrassed hand. Just as we were about to sit down at table, I pulled her face towards me, as we stood near the window – her face now fresh and rejuvenated after her past sufferings – and I passionately kissed her. I had been wrong to say that I had never again experienced the sweetness of our kiss at Les Oublis. The kiss I gave her on that evening was as sweet as any other. Or rather, it was the very same kiss as that at Les Oublis which, summoned by the attractive force of a similar moment, wafted gently up from the depths of the past and came to place itself between my mother’s still somewhat pallid cheeks and my lips.
A toast was raised to my forthcoming marriage. I only ever drank water because of the overexcitement that wine aroused in my nerves. My uncle declared that, at a moment like this, I could make an exception. I can see in front of my eyes his cheerful face as he uttered those stupid words… My God! My God! I have confessed everything so calmly, am I going to be obliged to stop here? I can no longer see straight! Oh yes… my uncle said that I could, after all, make an exception at a moment like this. He looked at me laughingly as he said these words; I drank quickly, before glancing at my mother, in case she forbade me. She said gently, “One should never yield an inch to evil, however insignificant it seems.” But the champagne was so cool that I drank another two glasses. My head had become really heavy; I needed simultaneously to rest and to discharge my nervous tension. Everyone was getting up from table; Jacques came over to me and said, as he stared at me:
“Come with me, please; I’d like to show you some poetry I’ve written.”
His handsome eyes twinkled above his fresh young cheeks, and he was slowly twirling his moustache. I realized I was destroying myself and I had no strength to resist. Trembling all over, I said:
“Yes, I’d love to.”
It was in uttering these words, or even earlier, in drinking the second glass of champagne, that I committed the really deliberate act, the abominable act. After that, I merely let myself go. We had locked both doors, and he, his breath on my cheeks, held me tight, his hands wandering feverishly up and down my body. Then, as pleasure started to overwhelm me, I felt arising in the depths of my heart a boundless desolation and sadness; it seemed that I was making them all weep – the soul of my mother, the soul of my guardian angel, the soul of God. I had never been able to read without a shudder of horror the account of the torture that evildoers inflict on animals, on their own wives, on their children; it appeared to me now, indistinctly, that in every pleasurable and sinful action the body in thrall to rapture is just as fierce as they are; within us, just as many good intentions and just as many pure angels weep as they suffer martyrdom.
Soon my uncles would have finished their game of cards and would be coming back. We would do it before they returned, I would never again yield, this was the last time… Then, above the fireplace, I saw myself in the mirror. None of the diffuse anguish of my soul was painted on my face, but from my shining eyes to my burning cheeks and my proffered lips, everything in that face breathed a sensual, stupid and brutal joy. Then I thought of the horror anyone would feel who had seen me just now kissing my mother with melancholy tenderness, and could now see me thus transformed into a beast. But immediately there arose in the mirror, against my face, Jacques’s mouth, avid beneath his moustache. Shaken to my depths, I moved my head towards his, when opposite me I saw – yes, I am telling it to you just as it happened, listen to me since I can tell you – on the balcony, outside the window, I saw my mother gazing at me, horror-struck. I don’t know if she cried out, I heard nothing, but she fell backwards and remained with her head caught between the two bars of the railing…
This isn’t the last time I’ll be telling you my story: as I said, I almost missed myself; even though I’d taken careful aim, I did not shoot straight. But they were not able to extract the bullet and my heart has started to behave erratically. But I can lin
ger on for a week in this state, and until then I’ll be constantly trying to understand how it all started, and seeing how it finished. I would have preferred my mother to see me commit yet other crimes – or even that particular one, but without her catching sight of the expression of joy that my face had in the mirror. No, she can’t possibly have seen it… It was a coincidence… She was struck down by apoplexy a minute before she saw me… She didn’t see that expression… It’s not possible! God, who knew everything, would never have allowed it.
A Dinner in Town
But, Fundanius, who shared with you the pleasures of that meal? I am longing to know.
– Horace*
1
Honoré was late; he said hello to the hosts, to the guests he knew, was introduced to the others, and went to sit down at table. After a few moments, his neighbour, a very young man, asked him to name the guests and tell him something about them. Honoré had never met him in society until now. He was very handsome. The hostess kept gazing at him with burning eyes that indicated quite well enough why she had invited him, and showed that he would soon be part of her circle. Honoré sensed within him the potential for future greatness, but, without any envy, out of polite benevolence, he decided it was his duty to reply. He looked around. Opposite, two neighbours were not talking to each other; they had been invited together, out of clumsy good intentions, and placed next to each other because they were both active in literature. But on top of this initial reason for hating each other, they had a more specific one. The older, a kinsman – doubly hypnotized – of M. Paul Desjardins and M. de Vogüé, affected a scornful silence towards the younger man, the favourite disciple of M. Maurice Barrès,* who considered him in turn with a certain irony. Furthermore, the ill will each of them felt exaggerated – greatly against their respective desires – the importance of the other, as if the chief of rogues had been forced to confront the king of imbeciles. Further along, a superb Spanish woman was eating in a furious temper. She had unhesitatingly – being a serious kind of person – sacrificed a lovers’ tryst this evening to the probability that she might advance her social career by coming to dinner in an elegant household. And indeed, there was every likelihood that she had made the right choice. The snobbery of Mme Fremer was for her lady friends, and the snobbery of her lady friends was for Mme Fremer, like a mutual insurance against becoming commonplace and bourgeois. But chance had so willed it that Mme Fremer was going through, on just this very evening, a stock of people she hadn’t had time to invite to her dinners before – people to whom, for different reasons, she really wanted to be polite, and whom she had assembled almost at random. The whole gathering was suitably crowned by a duchess, but one whom the Spanish woman already knew and who was of no further interest to her. And so she kept exchanging angry glances with her husband, whose guttural voice could always be heard at these evening receptions saying successively (leaving between each request an interval of five minutes suitably filled with other little tasks), “Would you please introduce me to the Duke?” And, to the Duke, “Monsieur, would you please introduce me to the Duchess?” And, to the Duchess, “Madame, may I introduce my wife to you?” Exasperated at having to waste his time, he had nonetheless resigned himself to striking up a conversation with his neighbour, the associate of the master of the house. For over a year, Fremer had been begging his wife to invite this man. She had finally yielded and had hidden him away between the Spanish woman’s husband and a humanist. The humanist, an omnivorous reader, was also an omnivorous eater. Quotations and burps kept welling from his lips, and these two disagreeable characteristics were equally repugnant to the woman next to him, a noble commoner, Mme Lenoir. She had soon brought the conversation round to the victories of the Prince de Buivres in Dahomey* and said in a voice tremulous with emotion, “Dear boy, how delighted I am to see him honouring his family!” She was indeed a cousin of the Buivres, who, all being younger than she was, treated her with the deference due to her age, her attachment to the royal family, her huge fortune and the unfailing sterility of her three marriages. She had transferred to the entire Buivres clan all the family feelings of which she was capable. She took personal umbrage when any of them so misbehaved that he had to be put under legal guardianship; and, around her right-thinking brow, on the parting in her Orleanist hair, she naturally wore the laurels of the family member who happened to be a general. Initially an intruder into that hitherto so exclusive family, she had become its head and, as it were, its dowager. She felt really exiled in modern society, and always spoke with nostalgic affection of the “gentlemen of bygone days”. Her snobbery was all in her imagination: indeed, her imagination contained nothing else. Names rich in history and glory exerted a singular influence on her sensitive mind, and she took great delight, quite devoid of self-interest, in dining with princes or reading memoirs from the Ancien Régime. She always wore the same grape-bedecked hats, which were as invariable as her principles. Her eyes sparkled with inanity. Her smiling face was noble, her affected gestures exaggerated and meaningless. Thanks to her trust in God, she was in a similarly optimistic flutter on the eve of a garden party or a revolution, and made darting little gestures that seemed designed to ward off radicalism or bad weather. Her neighbour the humanist was talking to her with wearisome eloquence and a dreadfully facile gift for the right formula; he kept quoting Horace to excuse his gluttony and drunkenness in the eyes of others, and to add a poetic sheen to those failings in his own. Invisible, ancient and yet freshly plucked roses wreathed his narrow brow. But with an equal politeness, which came to her easily since she found in it a way of exerting her influence and showing her respect – nowadays rare – for old traditions, Mme Lenoir turned every five minutes or so to talk to M. Fremer’s associate. The latter had, in any case, no cause for complaint. From the other end of the table, Mme Fremer was addressing to him the most charming flatteries. She wanted this dinner to count for several years’ worth and, resolved not to have to invite this wet blanket for a long time to come, she was burying him under garlands of praise. As for M. Fremer, who worked all day at his bank and then in the evening found himself being dragged out into society by his wife, or forced to stay at home if they were giving a reception, he was always ready to eat anyone alive, but always muzzled, so that he had ended up by putting on, in the most everyday circumstances, an expression compounded of muted irritation, sulky resignation, barely contained exasperation and profound brutishness. However, on this particular evening, this expression on the financier’s face had given way to a cordial satisfaction every time that his eyes met those of his associate. Although he couldn’t stand him in the ordinary course of things, he had discovered in himself feelings of fleeting but sincere affection for him, not because he found it easy to dazzle him with his opulence, but because of that same vague fellow feeling that overcomes us when we are abroad and see a Frenchman, even an odious one. He, so violently torn away every evening from his habits, so unjustly deprived of the rest he had deserved, so cruelly uprooted, at last felt a bond, one that usually filled him with violent resentment, but strong nonetheless, which made him feel close to someone and meant that he could emerge and even escape from his fierce and desperate isolation. Opposite him, Mme Fremer allowed the enchanted eyes of her fellow diners to reflect her blond beauty. The double reputation which surrounded her like an aura was a deceiving prism through which everyone tried to distinguish her true features. An ambitious woman, an intriguer, almost an adventurer – or so it was said in the world of finance that she had abandoned for a more brilliant destiny – she appeared, on the contrary, in the eyes of the faubourg and the royal family (whom she had quite won over with her superior intelligence), an angel of gentleness and virtue. In addition, she had not forgotten her old and humbler friends, and remembered them in particular when they were ill or bereaved – those touching circumstances which had the added advantage that, since they then of course stayed at home instead of going out into society, they could not complain about no
t being invited anywhere. Hence she gave full rein to her charitable impulses, and in her conversations with relatives or priests at the bedside of the dying, she shed sincere tears, killing little by little the remorse that her excessively easy life inspired in her scrupulous heart.
Pleasures and Days Page 12