3
A Walk
Despite the sky so pure and the sun already warm, the wind was still blowing just as cold and the trees were still as bare as in winter. To build a fire, I had to cut down one of those branches that I thought were dead, and the sap spurted from it, spattering my arm to the shoulder and betraying a tumultuous heart beneath the tree’s icy bark. Between the trunks, the bare wintry ground was strewn with anemones, cowslips and violets, and the rivers, which even yesterday were dark and empty, were filled with a tender, blue and living sky lolling in their depths. Not that pale and wearied sky of the fine October evenings which, stretching out in the water’s depths, seems to be dying of love and melancholy, but an intense and ardent sky on whose tender and cheerful azure sheen there passed at every moment, grey, blue and pink, not the shadows of the pensive clouds, but the glittering and gliding fins of a perch, an eel or a smelt. Drunk with joy, they darted between the sky and the weeds, in their meadows and under their forests that had, like ours, been filled with dazzling enchantment by the resplendent genie of spring. And flowing freshly over their heads, through their gills, beneath their bellies, the waters also rushed along, singing and chasing merry sunbeams before them.
The farmyard where you had to go for eggs was no less attractive a sight. The sun, like an inspired and prolific poet who does not disdain to shed beauty over the humblest places that had seemed hitherto to fall outside the remit of art, was still warming the beneficent energies of the manure heap, the uneven cobbles of the yard and the pear tree, its back bent like an old servant woman.
But who is this personage adorned in royal vestment advancing towards us, through this rustic farmyard scene, on the tip of its toes, as if to avoid getting dirty? It is the bird of Juno, gleaming not with lifeless jewels but with the very eyes of Argus* – the peacock, whose fabulous luxury here takes us by surprise. Arrayed as on some feast day, a few moments before the arrival of the first guests, in her robe with its multicoloured train, an azure gorget already tied round her royal throat, and her head adorned with sprays, the hostess, a radiant figure, crosses her courtyard before the marvelling eyes of the curious onlookers gathered outside the railings, to go and give one final order or await a prince of the blood whom she is to receive on the very threshold.
No: it is here that the peacock spends its life, a veritable bird of paradise in a farmyard, between the turkeys and the hens, like captive Andromache spinning wool among the slaves, but unlike her not forced to shed the magnificence of the royal insignia and the hereditary jewels, an Apollo easy to recognize, even when he guards, still radiant, the herds of Admetus.*
4
A Family Listening to Music
For music is so sweet,
It fills the soul, and like a choir, with heavenly art
Awakes a thousand voices that sing within the heart.*
For a family that is really alive, one in which every member thinks, loves and acts, a garden is a really welcome possession. On spring, summer and autumn evenings, everyone, now that their day’s task is ended, gathers there; and however small the garden, however close its hedges, they are not so high that they prevent you from seeing a great expanse of sky to which everyone can raise his eyes, without speaking, as he dreams. The child dreams of his future plans, of the house where he will live with his favourite playmate from whom he need never again be separated, and of the mysteries of the earth and of life; the young man dreams of the mysterious charm of the woman he loves; the young woman dreams of her child’s future; the wife who was once troubled at soul discovers, in these deep and lucid hours, that beneath her husband’s cold exterior is hidden a painful regret, which fills her with pity. The father, following with his gaze the smoke rising over the roof, dwells on the peaceful scenes of his past which the evening light illuminates with a distant magical glow; he thinks of his imminent death, and the life his children will lead after his death; and thus the soul of the entire family ascends with religious feeling towards the setting sun, while the great lime, chestnut or pine tree casts over them all the blessing of its exquisite odour or its venerable shade.
But for a family that is really alive, one in which every member thinks, loves and acts, for a family which has a soul, how much sweeter it is, when evening comes, for this soul to be able to find embodiment in a voice, in the clear and inexhaustible voice of a young girl or a young man lucky enough to possess a gift for music and song. The stranger walking past the garden gate when the family is sitting in silence would fear, if he approached, to disturb the almost religious dream that each of them harbours; but if this stranger, without being able to hear the song, could see the gathering of friends and family listening, how much more he would imagine they were attending some invisible mass; in other words, despite their diverse postures, how much the resemblance between the expressions on their faces would demonstrate the true unity of their souls, attained for a few moments by the attraction they feel for one and the same ideal drama, by their communion with one and the same dream. Every now and then, just as the wind bends the grass and makes the branches sway to and fro, an unseen breath bends their heads or makes them look up suddenly. Then, as if a messenger invisible to you were recounting some exciting tale, all of them seem to be anxiously awaiting, listening with delight or terror to the same news which nonetheless arouses different echoes in each of them. The anguish of the music reaches a peak; its moments of aspiration suddenly collapse, only to be followed by even more desperate aspirations. Its boundless glowing expanses, its mysterious darkness, represent for the old man the vast spectacle of life and death, for the child the urgent promises of land and sea, for the man in love the mysterious infinity and the glowing darkness of passion. The thinker sees his inner life flow by in its entirety; the dying falls of the melody are his own dying falls, and his whole heart lifts and leaps forward again when the melody resumes its flight. The powerful murmur of the harmonies makes the rich dark depths of his memory quiver. The man of action starts breathing heavily at the clash of the chords, and the gallop of the vivaces; he triumphs majestically in the adagios. Even the unfaithful wife senses that the error of her ways has been pardoned, infinitized – an error which also took its divine origin from the dissatisfaction of a heart that had not been assuaged by the usual joys and had gone astray, but only because of its quest for mystery; its vastest aspirations are fulfilled by this music, full to the brim like the voice of church bells. The musician, despite claiming to enjoy in music only its technical side, also feels these meaningful emotions, but they are enveloped in his sense of musical beauty, a feeling which conceals those emotions from him. And last but not least, I myself, listening in music to the most vast and universal beauty of life and death, sea and sky, I also feel in it everything that is most individual and unique in your allure, my dearest beloved.
5
The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the coarsest and most unpleasant prejudices of today had their moment of novelty, in which fashion lent them its fragile grace. Many of today’s women want to free themselves from all prejudices, and by “prejudices” they mean “principles”. That is their prejudice – a burdensome one, even though they adorn themselves with it as though it were a delicate and somewhat strange flower. They think that nothing has any hidden background; they put everything on the same level. They enjoy a book, or life itself, as if it were a nice day or an orange. They speak of the “art” of a dressmaker or the “philosophy” of “Parisian life”. They would be abashed if they had to classify anything or judge anything, and say: this is good, this is bad. In former times, when a woman behaved well, it was as it were an act of vengeance on the part of her moral being – her thought – over her instinctual nature. Today, when a woman behaves well, it is an act of vengeance on the part of her instinctual nature over her moral being, i.e. her theoretical immorality (see the plays of MM. Halévy and Meilhac).* Now that all moral and social bonds are growing real
ly slack, women drift from this theoretical immorality to that instinctual goodness. They seek only pleasure and find it only when they are not seeking it, when they suffer involuntarily. This scepticism and this dilettantism would be shocking in books, like an old-fashioned piece of jewellery. But women, far from being the oracles of intellectual fashion, are rather its belated parrots. Even today, dilettantism pleases them and suits them. If it warps their judgement and corrupts their behaviour, it undeniably gives them an already tarnished but still likeable grace. They make us feel, and even delight in all the ease and mellowness that existence can provide in highly refined civilizations. Their perpetual embarkation for a spiritual Cythera* where the feast would be less one for their blunted senses than for their imaginations, their hearts, their minds, their eyes, their nostrils, and their ears, gives a certain voluptuousness to their postures. The most exact portraitists of this period will not show them, I imagine, looking particularly tense or stiff. Their lives spread the sweet perfume of hair that has been let down.
6
Ambition intoxicates more than fame; desire makes all things blossom, and possession makes them wither away; it is better to dream your life than to live it, even though living it is still dreaming it, albeit less mysteriously and less clearly, in a dark, heavy dream, like the dream diffused through the dim awareness of ruminating beasts. Shakespeare’s plays are more beautiful when viewed in a study than when put on in the theatre. The poets who have created imperishable women in love have often only ever known humdrum servant girls from taverns, while the most envied voluptuaries are unable to grasp fully the life they lead, or rather the life which leads them. I knew a young boy of ten, of sickly disposition and precocious imagination, who had developed a purely cerebral love for an older girl. He would stay at his window for hours on end to see her walk by, wept if he didn’t see her, wept even more if he did. He spent moments with her that were very few and far between. He stopped sleeping and eating. One day, he threw himself out of his window. People thought at first that despair at never getting close to his lady friend had filled him with the resolve to die. They learnt that, on the contrary, he had just had a long conversation with her: she had been extremely nice to him. Then people supposed that he had renounced the insipid days he still had to live, after this intoxication that he might never be able to experience again. Frequent remarks he had previously made to one of his friends finally led people to deduce that he was filled with disappointment every time he saw the sovereign lady of his dreams; but as soon as she had left, his fertile imagination restored all her power to the absent girl, and he would start to long for her again. Each time, he would try to find an accidental reason for his disappointment in the imperfect nature of the circumstances. After that final interview in which he had, in his already active and inventive fantasy, raised his lady friend to the high perfection of which her nature was capable, and been filled with despair when he compared that imperfect perfection to the absolute perfection on which he lived and from which he was dying, he threw himself out of the window. Subsequently, having been reduced to idiocy, he lived for a long time, since his fall had left him with no memory of his soul, his mind or the words of his lady friend, whom he now met without seeing her. In spite of supplications and threats, she married him, and died several years later, without having managed to make him recognize her. Life is like this girl. We dream of it, and we love what we have dreamt up. We must not try to live it: we throw ourselves, like that boy, into a state of stupidity – but not all at once: everything in life deteriorates by imperceptible degrees. Within ten years, we do not recognize our dreams, we deny them, we live, like an ox, for the grass we graze on moment by moment. And from our marriage with death, who knows if we will arise as conscious, immortal beings?
7
“Captain,” said his orderly, a few days after the little house had been made ready for him to live in, now that he had retired, until the day he died (a heart disease meant that this would not be long), “Captain, perhaps now that you can no longer make love, or go into battle, a few books might provide you with some entertainment; what should I go and buy for you?”
“Don’t buy anything; no books; they can’t tell me anything as interesting as what I’ve done, and since I don’t have long for that, I don’t want anything to distract me from remembering it. Give me the key to my big trunk; its contents will give me plenty to read every day.”
And from it he took out letters, a whole sea of letters, flecked with white and sometimes grey in hue. Some of these letters were very long, some of them just a single line, written on cards, with faded flowers, various objects, notes to himself to help him remember what had been going on when he received them, and photographs that had been spoilt despite his precautions, like those relics that the very piety of the faithful has worn away with too frequent kisses. And all of those things were very old, and some of them came from dead women, and others from women he had not seen for over ten years.
In all this there were small things that bore the precise memory of episodes of sensuality or affection fabricated from the most insignificant circumstances in his life, and it was like a vast fresco, depicting his life without narrating it, selecting only its most colourful and passionate moments, in a way at once very vague and very precise, with great and poignant power. There were evocations of kisses on the mouth – that young mouth where he would unhesitatingly have left his soul, and which had since turned away from him: these made him weep for a long time. And despite the fact that he was very weak and forlorn, when he emptied at one draught a few of these still-vivid memories, like a glass of warm wine matured in the sunshine that had devoured his life, he felt a nice lukewarm shudder, of the kind spring gives us when we are convalescing, or the winter hearth when it warms our languor. The feeling that his old worn-out body had all the same burnt with the same flames gave him a new lease of life – burnt with the same devouring flames. Then, reflecting that what was stretching out its full length over him was merely the immense and moving shadow of those things – so elusive, alas! – and soon to be mingled together in eternal night, he would start to weep again.
Then, even though he knew that they were only shadows, the shadows of flames that had flickered away to burn elsewhere, and that he would never see them again, he nonetheless started to worship those shadows and to lend them a cherished existence, as it were, in contrast to the absolute nothingness that lay in wait. And all those kisses and all those locks of hair he had kissed and all those things of tears and lips, of caresses poured out like an intoxicating wine, and the moments of despair as vast as music or eventide, filled with the bliss of imagining that they could touch the infinite and its mysterious destinies; this or that adored woman who held him so tightly that nothing existed henceforth except that which he could employ in the service of her adoration… she held him so tightly, and now she was leaving him, becoming so indistinct that he could not hold her back, could no longer even retain the perfume that wafted from the fugitive hems of her mantle: he made every effort to reliving it all, trying to bring it back to life and pin it down in front of him like a butterfly. And each time it grew more difficult. And he had still not caught a single one of the butterflies – but each time his fingernails had scratched away a little of the mirage of their wings; or rather, he could see them in a mirror, and banged vainly against the mirror in his attempt to touch them, but merely tarnished it a little each time, so that the butterflies simply became blurred and less enchanting to his eyes. And this mirror of his heart was so tarnished that nothing could wipe it clean any more, now that the purifying breath of youth or genius would no longer blow over it – by what unknown law of our seasons, what mysterious equinox of our autumn?…
And each time he felt less sorrow at having lost them – those kisses on that mouth, and those endless hours, and those perfumes that once had made him delirious.
And he was filled with sorrow at feeling less sorrow; and even that sorr
ow soon vanished. Then all his sorrows left, every one; no need to send his pleasures packing; they had fled long since on their winged heels, without looking round, holding their flowering branches in their hands; they had fled the dwelling that was no longer young enough for them. Then, like all men, he died.
Pleasures and Days Page 14