8
Relics
I have bought up all of her belongings that were put on sale – that woman whose friend I would like to have been, and who did not even condescend to talk to me for a few minutes. I have the little card game that kept her amused every evening, her two marmosets, three novels that bear her coat of arms on their boards and her bitch. Oh, you delights and dear playthings of her life, you had access – without enjoying them as I would have done, and without even desiring them – to all her freest, most inviolable and most secret hours; you were unaware of your happiness and you cannot describe it.
Cards that she would hold in her fingers every evening with her favourite friends who saw her getting bored or breaking into laughter, who were witnesses to the start of her liaison, and whom she threw down to fling her arms round the man who thereafter came every evening to enjoy a game with her; novels that she would open and close in her bed, as her fancy or her fatigue bade her, chosen by her on impulse or as her dreams dictated, books to which she confided her dreams and combined them with the dreams expressed by the books that helped her better to dream for herself – did you retain nothing of her, and can you tell me nothing about her?
Novels, she dreamt in turn the lives of your characters and of your authors; and playing cards, for in her own way she enjoyed in your company the tranquillity and sometimes the feverishness of intimate friendships – did you keep nothing of her thoughts, which you distracted or filled, or of her heart, which you wounded or consoled?
Cards, novels, you were so often in her hands, or remained for so long on her table; queens, kings or knaves, who were the still guests at her wildest parties; heroes of novels and heroines who, at her bedside, caught in the cross-beam of her lamp and her eyes, dreamt your silent dream, a dream that was nonetheless filled with voices: you cannot have simply let it evaporate – all the perfume with which the air of her bedroom, the fabric of her dresses and the touch of her hands or her knees imbued you.
You have preserved the creases left when her joyful or nervous hand crumpled you; you perhaps still keep prisoner those tears which she shed, on reading of a grief narrated in some book or experienced in life; the day which made her eyes shine with joy or sorrow left its warm hues on you. When I touch you, I shiver, anxiously awaiting your revelations, disquieted by your silence. Alas! Perhaps, like you, charming and fragile creatures, she was the insensible and unconscious witness of her own grace. Her most real beauty existed perhaps in my desire. She lived her life, but perhaps I was the only one to dream it.
9
Moonlight Sonata
I
I had been worn out less by the fatigues of the journey than by the memory and the apprehension of my father’s demands, of Pia’s indifference and of my enemies’ relentlessness. During the day, the company of Assunta, her singing, her kindness to me (even though she barely even knew me), her white, brown and pink beauty, her perfume which continued to hang in the great gusts of wind from the sea, the feather in her hat, the pearls around her neck had taken my mind off those problems. But, around nine in the evening, feeling overwhelmed with fatigue, I asked her to go back in the carriage and leave me here to rest awhile in the open air. We had almost reached Honfleur; the place had been well chosen, against a wall, at the start of a double avenue of great trees which gave shelter from the wind; the air was mild; she agreed, and left me. I lay down on the grass, my face turned towards the dark sky; lulled by the sound of the sea, which I could hear behind me, without being able to see it clearly in the darkness, I had quickly dozed off.
Soon I dreamt that in front of me the sunset was shedding its light on the sand and the sea in the distance. Twilight was falling, and it seemed to me that it was a sunset and a twilight like all twilights and all sunsets. But a letter was brought to me; I tried to read it and couldn’t make anything out. Only then did I realize that in spite of this impression of intense and widespread light, it was in fact very dark. This sunset was extraordinarily wan, glowing without clarity, and on the magically illumined sand, the darkness had become so deep and dense that I had to make an intense effort to recognize the shape of a seashell. In that twilight particular to dreams, it was like the setting of an ailing and discoloured sun on some polar strand. My sorrows had suddenly evaporated; my father’s decisions, Pia’s feelings, my enemies’ bad faith still held me in their thrall, but they no longer crushed me; it was as if they were a natural and now indifferent necessity. The paradox of this dark gleam, the miracle of this magical truce granted to my problems inspired no mistrust in me, and no fear – but I was wrapped, bathed, drowned in a growing sweetness whose intense delight finally awoke me. I opened my eyes. In wan splendour, my dream stretched all around me. The wall in whose shelter I had curled up to sleep was brightly lit, and the shadow cast by its ivy fell as clear and vivid as if it had been four in the afternoon. The leaves of a white poplar, quivering in the barely perceptible breeze, glittered. Waves and white sails could be seen on the sea, the sky was clear, the moon had risen. Every so often, light clouds passed in front of it, but then they became tinged with a delicate blue, whose profound pallor was like that of a transparent jellyfish or the heart of an opal. And yet my eyes could nowhere grasp the brightness that was shining all around. Even on the grass, which shone with a mirage-like intensity, the darkness persisted. The woods, or a ditch, were totally black. Suddenly, a slight noise rose as slowly and surely as a growing anxiety, rapidly grew louder, and seemed to come rolling across the wood. It was the rustle of the leaves quivering in the breeze. One by one I heard them unfurling like waves against the vast silence of the huge night sky. Then even this noise diminished and faded away. In the narrow meadow stretching before me between the dense avenues of oak trees, there seemed to flow a river of light, contained within these two riverbanks of shadow. The moonlight, as it conjured up the gamekeeper’s house, the foliage or a sail from the night in which they lay buried, had not awoken them. In the silence of sleep, it illumined merely the vague phantom of their forms, without it being possible to distinguish the outlines which restored them to me in their full daytime reality, oppressing me then by the certainty of their presence and the permanency of their banal proximity. The house without a door, the foliage without a trunk and almost without leaves, the sail without a ship seemed, instead of being a cruelly undeniable and monotonously habitual reality, the strange, inconsistent and luminous dream of the sleeping trees immersed in the darkness. Never, indeed, had the woods slept so deeply; the moon gave the impression of having taken advantage of their slumber to throw a great but subdued party, sweetly spectral, silently unfolding over the sea and the sky. My sadness had vanished. I could hear my father scolding me, Pia making fun of me, my enemies hatching plots – and none of this seemed real. The only reality lay in this unreal light, and I summoned it with a smile. I did not understand what mysterious resemblance had united my sorrows to the solemn mysteries being celebrated in the woods, on the sea and in the sky, but I felt that their explanation, their consolation, their pardon was being proffered, and that it was quite unimportant that my intelligence had been left out of the secret, since my heart understood it so well. I called my holy mother night by name, my sadness had recognized in the moon her immortal sister, the moon shone on the transfigured sufferings of night, and in my heart, whence the clouds had dispersed, there had risen a great melancholy.
II
Then I heard steps. Assunta was coming towards me, her white face hovering over a vast dark mantle. She said to me, almost under her breath, “I was afraid you might be cold, my brother had gone to bed, I came back.” I went up to her; I was shivering, she took me under her mantle and, to hold it in place, put her arm round my neck. We walked a few steps beneath the trees, in the deep darkness. Something shone in front of us; I did not have time to step back and went round it, thinking we were going to walk into a tree, but the obstacle vanished beneath our feet; we had walked into a pool of m
oonlight. I leant her head against mine. She smiled, I started to weep, I saw that she was weeping too. Then we realized that the moon was weeping and that her sadness was in unison with ours. The gentle, poignant accents of her light went straight to our hearts. Like us, she was weeping, and, as is almost always the case with us, she was weeping without knowing why, but feeling her sweet and irresistible despair so deeply that she dragged down into it the woods, the fields, the sky – which was again reflected in the sea – and my heart, which at last could see clearly into hers.
10
The Source of Tears That Are in Past Loves
The way novelists or their heroes hark back to their defunct love affairs, so touching for the reader, is unfortunately quite artificial. This contrast between the immensity of our past love and the absolute nature of our present indifference, of which a thousand material details make us aware – a name recalled in conversation, a letter discovered lying in a drawer, an actual meeting with the person or, even more, our belated and, as it were, retrospective possession of that person; this contrast, so painful, so full of barely contained tears when represented in a work of art, is something we can register with cold detachment in life, precisely because our present state is one of indifference and forgetfulness, because our beloved and our love no long afford us any pleasure other than an aesthetic one at most, and because, together with love, our emotional turmoil and our faculty of suffering have disappeared. The poignant melancholy of this contrast is thus merely a moral truth. It would also become a psychological reality if a writer were to place it at the beginning of the passion he is describing and not after its end.
Indeed, when we begin to love, it is often the case that, forewarned by our experience and our sagacity – despite the protestation of our heart which has the feeling or rather the illusion that its love will last for ever – we know that one day the woman the thought of whom constitutes our whole life will be as indifferent to us as are, just now, all other women apart from her… We will hear her name without any thrill of pain, we will see her handwriting without trembling, we will not change our route to catch a glimpse of her in the street, we will meet her without being affected by the encounter, we will possess her without ecstasy. Then that sure foreknowledge, despite the absurd and yet powerful premonition that we will always love her, will make us weep; and love, the love that will still be hovering over us like a divine morning, infinitely mysterious and sad, will offer to our pain some of the expanse of its great and strange horizons, in all their depth, and some of its enchanting desolation…
11
Friendship
When we are filled with sorrow, it is sweet to hide in the warmth of our beds and, now that all effort and all resistance have been abandoned, pull our head under the blankets, and completely let ourselves go, groaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is an even better bed, filled with divine perfumes. It is our sweet, our deep, our impenetrable friendship. When my heart is feeling sad and frozen, I shelter it in our friendship, shivering in the cold. Burying even my thoughts in the warmth of our affection, perceiving nothing more of the world outside and no longer seeking to defend myself, disarmed, but by the miracle of our tender affection immediately fortified, invincible, I weep with pain, and with the joy of having a trusting soul in which I can lock it away.
12
The Ephemeral Efficacity of Sorrow
Let us be grateful to the people who give us happiness; they are the charming gardeners thanks to whom our souls are filled with flowers. But let us be more grateful to the spiteful or merely indifferent women, and to the cruel friends who have caused us sorrow. They have laid waste to our hearts that are now strewn with unrecognizable debris, they have uprooted the trunks and mutilated the most delicate branches, like a desolate wind, but one which sowed a few good seeds in the uncertain hope of some future harvest.
These people have, by breaking to pieces all the brief moments of happiness that concealed the extent of our misery from us, and by turning our heart into a naked and melancholy courtyard, made it possible for us to contemplate our heart and judge it. Plays with sad endings do us good in a similar way; so we should consider them as greatly superior to plays that end happily, which cheat our hunger rather than satisfying it: the bread from which we must draw sustenance is bitter to the taste. When life is going well, the destinies of our fellows do not appear to us in their reality, since either interest masks them or desire transfigures them. But in the detachment afforded by suffering (in life), and in the feeling of a painful beauty (in the theatre), the destinies of other men, and ours too, force our attentive souls to hear at last the eternal unheard message of duty and truth. The sad oeuvre of a real artist speaks to us with the accent of those who have suffered and who force every man who has suffered to drop everything else and listen.
Alas! Our feelings brought these insights to us and our capricious feelings take them away: sadness, a higher quality than gaiety, is not as enduring as virtue. This morning we have already forgotten the tragedy which last night elevated us so high that we were able to view our life as a whole and as a reality, with a clear-sighted and sincere pity. After just a year, perhaps, we will be consoled for the betrayal of a woman or the death of a friend. The wind, amidst this flotsam of dreams, this scattered chaos of withered joys, has sown the good seed and watered it with tears, but those tears will dry too quickly for it ever to germinate.
(After L’Invitée by M. de Curel*)
13
In Praise of Bad Music
Detest bad music if you will, but don’t hold it in contempt. As it is played and sung much more often and much more passionately than good music, so much more than the latter has it gradually been filled with the dreams and tears of mankind. For that reason you should venerate it. Its place, insignificant in the history of art, is huge in the sentimental history of societies. Respect for – I do not say love for – bad music is not merely a form of what might be called the charity of good taste or its scepticism, it is, more than that, the awareness of the importance of the social role of music. How many melodies, worthless in the eyes of an artist, become the confidants chosen by a whole host of romantic young men and of women in love. How many “golden rings” and “Ah! Sleep on, sleep on, mistress mine”, the pages of which are tremulously turned every evening by justly celebrated hands, and watered by the most beautiful eyes in the world with tears whose melancholy and voluptuous tribute would arouse the envy of the most stringent maestro in the world – ingenious and inspired confidants who ennoble sorrow and exalt dreams, and, in exchange for the ardent secret confided to them, give the intoxicating illusion of beauty. The working classes, the bourgeoisie, the army, the nobility, just as they have the same postmen to bring news of some grief to afflict them with sorrow or some happiness to fill them with pleasure, have the same invisible messengers of love and the same cherished confessors – in other words, bad musicians. The irritating refrain, for instance, that any refined and well-trained ear will immediately refuse to listen to, has been the repository for the riches of thousands of souls, and keeps the secret of thousands of lives, for which it was the living inspiration, the ever-ready consolation, always lying half-open on the piano’s music stand – a source of dreamy grace for those lives, and an ideal. Those arpeggios too, or that “re-entry” of the theme, have aroused in the soul of more than one lover or dreamer an echo of the harmonies of paradise or the very voice of the beloved woman. A book of bad romances, worn out by overuse, ought to touch us like a cemetery or a village. What does it matter if the houses have no style, if the tombs are overladen with inscriptions and ornaments in bad taste? From this dust there may arise, in the eyes of an imagination friendly and respectful enough to silence for a moment its aesthetic disdain, the flock of souls holding in their beaks the still-verdant dream that gave them a foretaste of the other world and filled them with joy or tears in this one.
14
A Meetin
g by the Lakeside
Yesterday, before going to have dinner in the Bois, I received a letter from Her – a rather frigid reply, a week after I had sent her a despairing letter, to say that she was afraid she would not be able to bid me farewell before leaving. And I, quite frigidly, yes, I replied to her that it was better like that and that I wished her a pleasant summer. Then I got dressed and crossed the Bois in an open carriage. I was extremely sad, but calm. I was resolved to forget, my mind was made up: it was just a matter of time.
As the carriage moved down the avenue to the lake, I spotted at the very far end of the little path that goes round the lake, fifty metres from the avenue, a solitary woman walking slowly along. I did not at first make her out clearly. She gave me a little wave, and then I recognized her in spite of the distance between us. It was her! I gave her a long slow wave. And she continued to gaze at me as if she had wished to see me stop and take her with me. I did nothing of the kind, but I soon felt an emotion seizing on me as if from some external source and holding me tightly in its grip. “I knew it!” I exclaimed to myself. “There is a reason unknown to me which has always led her to pretend to be indifferent. She loves me, the little darling!” A boundless happiness and an invincible certainty overwhelmed me; I felt as if I would faint, and I burst into tears. The carriage was approaching Armenonville, I wiped my eyes and over them passed, as if to dry their tears, the sweet wave of her hand, and her gently questioning eyes gazed steadfastly on mine, asking to get into the carriage with me.
Pleasures and Days Page 15