I arrived at the dinner in a radiant mood. My happiness overflowed on everyone in the form of a joyous, grateful and cordial affability; and the feeling that none of them knew what hand, unknown to them (the little hand that had waved to me) had lit within me that great fire of joy whose blaze everyone could see – this feeling imbued my happiness with the added charm of a secret pleasure. We were waiting only for Mme de T*** and she soon arrived. She is the most insignificant person I know, and despite quite a good figure, the least likeable. But I was too happy not to forgive each of her failings and her ugliness, and I went up to her with an affectionate smile.
“You weren’t so friendly just now,” she said.
“Just now?” I said in astonishment. “Just now? But I didn’t see you.”
“What – you didn’t recognize me? It’s true you were some way away; I was walking by the lakeside, you passed proudly by in your carriage, I waved to you and I would really rather have liked to get into your carriage so as not to be late.”
“Oh, it was you!” I exclaimed, and I added several times with an expression of great sorrow, “Oh, please forgive me! Please forgive me!”
“How unhappy he looks! My compliments, Charlotte,” said the hostess. “But cheer up, young man, you’re with her now!”
I was devastated; my happiness had been totally destroyed.
Well, the most horrible thing about my mistake was that it refused to go away. That loving image of the woman who no longer loved me changed for a good long while my idea of her even once I had recognized my error. I tried to patch it up between us, I took longer to forget her, and often, in my pain, to try and console myself by forcing myself to believe that those hands had, as I’d at first sensed, belonged to her, I would close my eyes to see again her little hands waving to me, hands that would so nicely have wiped away my tears, and cooled my brow, her little gloved hands that she gently held out to me by the lakeside like frail symbols of peace, love and reconciliation while her sad, questioning eyes seemed to be asking me to take her with me.
15
Just as a blood-red sky warns the passer-by that there is a fire in the distance, certain fiery glances, of course, can betray passions that they serve merely to reflect. They are flames in the mirror. But sometimes, as well, indifferent and cheerful people have eyes as vast and sombre as sorrows, as if a filter were held out between their souls and their eyes and as if they had so to speak “filtered” all the living content of their soul into their eyes. Henceforth, warmed only by the fervour of their egotism – that likeable fervour of egotism which attracts others just as much as incendiary passion repels them – their shrivelled souls will be little more than a factitious palace of intrigue. But their eyes, ceaselessly inflamed with love, and soon to be moistened with the dew of languor that will make them gleam, swim and drown, without being able to extinguish them – their eyes will amaze the universe with their tragic blaze. Twin spheres, henceforth independent of their soul, spheres of love, burning satellites of a world that has frozen over for ever, they will continue until their death to cast an unwonted and deceptive gleam, false prophets, and perjurers too, promising a love with which their heart will not keep faith.
16
The Stranger
Dominique had sat near the now extinguished fire as he waited for his guests. Every evening, he would invite some great lord to come and dine with him, together with some witty guests, and as he was well born, rich and charming, he was never alone. The candles had not yet been lit and the day was fading away in the melancholy gloom of the bedroom. Suddenly, he heard a voice addressing him, a distant and intimate voice saying, “Dominique”; and merely hearing it uttered, uttered so far away and so near – “Dominique” – he was frozen by fear. Never before had he heard that voice, and yet he recognized it so easily; his remorse recognized so clearly the voice of a victim, a noble sacrificial victim. He tried to think what old crime he had committed, and could not remember. And yet the tone of this voice was certainly reproaching him with a crime, a crime that he had doubtless committed without being aware of it, but for which he was responsible – this much was attested by his sadness and his fear. He looked up and saw, standing in front of him, grave and familiar, a stranger of ambiguous but striking aspect. Dominique greeted his melancholy and undeniable authority with a few respectful words.
“Dominique, could I be the only man you will not invite to dinner? You committed crimes against me, old crimes, and you need to make reparation for them. And then I will teach you to get by without other people who, when you are old, will come no more.”
“I do invite you to dinner,” replied Dominique with an affectionate gravity that he had never suspected in himself.
“Thank you,” said the stranger.
There were no insignia inscribed in the gemstone on his ring, and wit had not glazed his words with the brilliant needles of its hoar frost. But the gratitude in his steady, fraternal gaze filled Dominique with an unfamiliar and intoxicating happiness.
“But if you wish to keep me with you, you must send away your other guests.”
Dominique could hear them knocking at the door. The candles had not been lit, the darkness was complete.
“I can’t send them away,” said Dominique. “I can’t be alone.”
“And with me, you would indeed be alone,” said the stranger, sadly. “And yet you really should keep me. You committed old crimes against me and you need to make reparation for them. I love you more than do any of the others, and I would teach you to get by without them, for, when you are old, they will come no more.”
“I can’t,” said Dominique.
And he sensed that he had just sacrificed a noble happiness, following the orders of some imperious and vulgar habit, which no longer even had any pleasures to dispense to him in reward for obedience.
“Choose quickly,” resumed the stranger, in a suppliant and haughty tone.
Dominique went to open the door to the guests, and at the same time he asked the stranger, without daring to turn his head:
“So who are you?”
And the stranger, the stranger who was already starting to vanish, told him:
“The habit to which you are sacrificing me again this evening will be even stronger tomorrow thanks to the blood from the wound that you are inflicting on me to nourish it. More imperious for having been obeyed one more time, each day it will turn you away from me, will force you to make me suffer even more. Soon you will have killed me. You will never see me again. And yet you owed more to me than to the others, who, very shortly, will abandon you. I am within you and yet I am forever far away from you; already I barely exist any more. I am your soul, I am yourself.”
The guests had come in. They passed into the dining room and Dominique tried to relate his conversation with the vanished visitor but, given the general boredom and the visible effort the host was forced to make in trying to recall an almost faded dream, Girolamo interrupted him, to the satisfaction of all, including Dominique himself, and drew this conclusion:
“One should never remain alone – solitude engenders melancholy.”
Then they started drinking again; Dominique chatted gaily but joylessly, flattered, nonetheless, by his brilliant guests.
17
Dream
Your tears flowed for me, my lips have drunk your tears.
– Anatole France*
I can effortlessly remember what my opinion of Mme Dorothy B*** was last Saturday (four days ago). As chance would have it, it was on that very day that people had been talking about her, and I was sincere when I said that I found her without charm or wit. I think she is twenty-two or twenty-three. In addition I hardly really know her, and when I was thinking about her, no vivid memory rose to the surface of my attention; I merely had the letters of her name before my eyes.
On Saturday I went to bed quite early. But at around two o’
clock the wind became so strong that I was forced to get up again to close a loose shutter that had woken me up. I cast a retrospective glance over the short period in which I had just been sleeping, and was delighted to see how restorative it had been, without discomfort or dreams. Hardly had I climbed back into bed than I was again asleep. But after a certain while – it was difficult to say precisely how long – little by little I awoke, or rather I woke little by little into the world of dreams, indistinct, at first, just like the real world when we wake up in the ordinary fashion; but it soon became more precise. I was lying on the beach at Trouville, which was simultaneously a hammock in an unfamiliar garden, and a woman was gazing at me with a fixed and gentle expression. It was Mme Dorothy B***. I was no more surprised than I am in the morning, when I wake up and recognize my bedroom. But nor was I surprised at the supernatural allure of my companion and the transports of simultaneously sensual and spiritual adoration that her presence aroused in me. We gazed at each other in mutual understanding, and a great miracle of happiness and glory was in the process of being accomplished, a miracle of which we were fully conscious, for which she bore a shared responsibility, and for which I was infinitely grateful to her. But she was saying to me:
“You are crazy to thank me – wouldn’t you have done the same thing for me?”
And the feeling (in fact, it was a sense of perfect certainty) that I would indeed have done the same thing for her exalted my joy to the point of delirium, like the manifest symbol of the closest union. She made a mysterious sign with her finger and smiled. And I knew, as if I had been both within myself and within her, that it meant, “All your enemies, all your problems, all your regrets, all your weaknesses – are they now quite gone?” And without my having said a word, she heard me replying to her that she had easily been victorious over everything, had destroyed everything, and most pleasurably mesmerized my suffering away. And she approached, stroking my neck, and gently playing with the tips of my moustache. Then she said to me, “Now let us go to the others, let us enter into life.” A superhuman joy filled me, and I felt within myself the strength to realize this virtual happiness in its entirety. She wanted to give me a flower, and from between her breasts she drew a rose whose bud was still closed, yellow and bedewed, and attached it to my buttonhole. Suddenly, I felt my intoxication increased by a new pleasure. It was the rose which, fixed to my buttonhole, had started to exhale its odour of love into my nostrils. I saw that Dorothy was disturbed by my joy and filled with an emotion that I could not understand. At the very same moment as her eyes (and I was certain of this, thanks to the mysterious awareness I had of her own individuality) experienced the slight spasm that precedes by a single second the moment when one starts to weep, it was my eyes which filled with tears – with her tears, I might almost say. She came up to me, placed her head to my cheek, throwing it back so that I could contemplate its mysterious grace, its captivating vivaciousness, and, darting out her tongue from her young, smiling mouth, gathered all my tears on the edges of my eyes. Then she swallowed them, making a slight noise with her lips, which I experienced as a strange new kiss, more intimately disturbing than if it had touched me directly. I suddenly awoke, recognized my bedroom and, just as when a storm is close a clap of thunder follows immediately after the flash of lightning, a dizzy memory of happiness coincided with, rather than preceded, the crushing certainty of its falseness and impossibility. But, in spite of all rational argument, Dorothy B*** had ceased to be for me the woman she had still been the day before. The little furrow left in my memory by the few occasions on which I had met her had almost been effaced, as after a powerful tide which had left unfamiliar traces behind it as it withdrew. I had a huge desire, disappointed in advance, to see her again, and an instinctive need to write to her, restrained by a cautious mistrust. Her name uttered in a conversation made me start, and yet merely evoked the insignificant image that would alone have accompanied her name before that night; and while she was a matter of indifference to me just like any other ordinary society woman, she attracted me more irresistibly than the most beloved mistresses, or the most intoxicating destiny. I would not have taken a single step to see her, and yet for the other “her” I would have given my life. Every hour effaces something of the memory of this dream that is already quite disfigured by my relating it. I can see it less and less distinctly, like a book that you want to carry on reading at your table when the declining day no longer sheds enough light, when night falls. If I wish still to perceive it, I am obliged to stop thinking about it for a few minutes, just as you are obliged to close your eyes at first if you are to continue to read a few letters in the book filled with shadow. However much it has been effaced, it still leaves a great turmoil within me, the foam of its wake or the sensuality of its perfume. But this turmoil itself will vanish, and I will see Mme B*** without it bothering me. And anyway, what would be the use of talking to her about these things, of which she has remained quite unaware?
Alas! Love has passed over me like this dream, with a power of transfiguration just as mysterious. And so, you who know the woman I love and who were not part of my dream, you cannot understand me – so do not try to give me any advice.
18
The Genre Paintings of Memory
We have certain memories that are, as it were, the Dutch paintings of our memory, genre pictures in which the characters are often of the middling sort, taken at a perfectly ordinary moment of their lives, without any solemn events, sometimes without any events at all, in a setting that is in no way extraordinary and quite lacking in grandeur. The natural quality of the characters and the innocence of the scene are what comprise its attractiveness, and distance sets between it and us a gentle light which bathes it in beauty.
My regimental life was full of scenes of this kind that I experienced quite naturally, without any particularly intense joy and without any deep sorrow, and which I remember with much gentle affection. The rural character of the location, the simplicity of some of my peasant comrades, whose bodies had remained more handsome and more agile, their minds more original, their hearts more spontaneous and their characters more natural than was the case with the young men I frequented previously as well as subsequently, the calm of a life in which one’s occupations are more regular and imagination less enslaved than in any other, in which pleasure keeps us company all the more continually as we never have the time to flee from it by running after it – everything concurs to make, now, of this period of my life a series (admittedly filled with gaps) of little paintings imbued with charm and a truth bathed in happiness, on which time has shed its sweet sadness and its poetry.
19
Sea Breeze in the Countryside
I will bring you a young poppy, with crimson petals.
– Theocritus, ‘The Cyclops’
In the garden, in the little wood, across the countryside, the wind deploys a crazed and futile ardour in scattering the flurries of sunlight, harrying them along as it furiously shakes the branches of the coppice where they had first flung themselves, all the way to the sparkling thicket where they now tremble, all aquiver. Trees, clothes hanging out to dry, the outspread tail of the peacock, all cast, through the transparent air, extraordinarily clear blue shadows that fly along before every gust of wind without leaving the ground, like a kite that has not taken off. The helter-skelter of wind and light makes this nook of the Champagne region resemble a coastal landscape. When we reach the top of this path which, scorched by the light and swept by the wind, climbs up in the dazzling sunlight, towards a naked sky, is it not the sea that will soon greet our sight, white with sunlight and foam? In the same way, you had come every morning, your hands filled with flowers and the soft feathers which a wood pigeon, a swallow or a jay had dropped onto the avenue as it flew past. The feathers tremble in my hat, the poppy in my buttonhole is shedding its petals, let’s go home, this very minute.
The house groans in the wind like a ship, you can hear inv
isible sails bellying out and invisible flags cracking outside. Let this clump of fresh roses continue to lie across your knees and allow my heart to weep between your clasped hands.
20
The Pearls
I came home as day was dawning and, shivering in the cold, went to bed, all aquiver with a melancholy and frozen frenzy. Just a while ago, in your room, your friends from the day before, your plans for the next day (so many enemies, so many plots being hatched against me), and your current thoughts (so many hazy miles I would never be able to cross) separated you from me. Now that I am far away from you, this imperfect presence, the fleeting mask of eternal absence (a mask which kisses soon lift) would, it seems to me, be enough to show me your true face and to fulfil every aspiration of my love. I had to take my leave; how sad and frozen I remain when far from you! But by what sudden enchantment do the familiar dreams of our happiness again start to rise up, a thick smoke mounting from a clear and burning flame, climbing joyfully and uninterruptedly in my head? From my closed hand, as it warms up beneath the blankets, there again wafts the odour of the rose cigarettes that you had given me to smoke. I plant my lips on my hand and draw in, deeply and slowly, the perfume which, in the heat of memory, breathes out dense whiffs of tenderness, of happiness, of you. Ah, my beloved! At the very same moment that I can so easily do without you, as I wallow joyfully in your memory – which now fills the bedroom – without having to struggle against your insurmountable body, let me tell you, absurd as it is, let me tell you, for I cannot help it, that I cannot do without you. It is your presence which imparts to my life that subtle hue, warm and melancholy, with which it also imbues the pearls that spend the night on your body. Like them, I live on your warmth and sorrowfully take on its subtle tints, and like them, if you did not keep me on you, I would die.
Pleasures and Days Page 16