A light breeze momentarily disturbs their brightly flickering but sombre immobility, and the trees tremble slightly, balancing the light on their tops and stirring the shadows at their feet.
– Petit-Abbeville (Dieppe), August 1895
27
The Chestnut Trees
In particular, I loved to pause under the huge chestnut trees when they were turning yellow in the autumn. How many hours I spent in those mysterious green-hued grottoes, gazing at the murmuring cascades of pale gold over my head, as they poured out freshness and darkness! I envied the robins and the squirrels who could live in those frail and deep pavilions of verdure amid the branches, those ancient hanging gardens which each springtime, for two centuries now, has covered with white, sweet-smelling flowers. The branches, imperceptibly curved, swept nobly down from the tree to the ground, as if they were other trees planted into the trunks, upside down. The pallor of the remaining leaves set off even more strongly the branches that already appeared more solid and blacker now that they were bare, and attached to the trunk in this way, they seemed to hold in place, like some magnificent comb, the lovely profusion of sweet blond hair.
– Réveillon,* October 1895
28
The Sea
The sea will always fascinate those for whom world-weariness and the lure of mystery preceded their first sorrows, like a foretaste of reality’s inability to satisfy them. Those who need rest even before they have experienced any fatigue will derive consolation from the sea, and a vague sense of exaltation. Unlike the earth, the sea bares no trace of the labours of man and of human life. Nothing remains on it, nothing passes by except fleetingly, and of the ships that cross it, how quickly the wake vanishes! Hence the great purity of the sea, which earthly things do not possess. And that virgin water is much more delicate than the hardened earth, which you need a pickaxe to break open. A child stepping into water makes a deep, hollow furrow in it, accompanied by a bright “plop!”, and the smooth gradations of the water are for a moment broken; then every vestige is effaced, and the sea is again as calm as it was in the first days of the world. He who is weary of the earth’s paths or who guesses, after trying them out, how uneven and unrewarding they are, will be seduced by the pale sea roads, more dangerous and more gentle, uncertain and deserted. Everything here is more mysterious, including those great shadows that sometimes peacefully float on the bare fields of the sea, without home and without shelter, cast by the clouds, those hamlets of the skies, those vague branches.
The sea has the allure of things that do not fall silent at night-time, and grant our unquiet lives permission to sleep; a promise that everything is not doomed to disappear for ever, like the night light of small children who feel less lonely when it glimmers. The sea is not separated from the sky as is the earth; the sea is always in harmony with the sky’s colours, and affected by its most delicate tints. The sea gleams in the sunlight, and every evening she seems to die with him. And when the sun has disappeared, she continues to miss him, to preserve something of his glowing memory, unlike the earth which is dark all over. This is the time when her melancholy reflections gleam, so sweet that you feel your heart melt as you gaze at them. When night has almost fallen and the sky is dark over the blackened earth, the sea still faintly gleams by we know not what mysterious and glowing relic of the day that has sunk beneath the waves.
She refreshes our imagination, because she does not make us think of the life of men, but she rejoices our soul, because she is, like our soul, an infinite and powerless aspiration, a forward momentum forever failing, an eternal and gentle lament. She thus enchants us like music, which unlike language does not bear the trace of things, and tells us nothing of men, but mimics the movements of our souls. Our heart, as it rushes forward with their waves and falls back with them, thus forgets its own failings and takes consolation in an intimate harmony between its sadness and that of the sea, which melds its own destiny with theirs.
– September 1892
29
Seascape
I have lost the sense of certain words: perhaps I ought to learn it again by listening to all those things which have long opened a path leading inside me, one that has been neglected for many years, but one that can be followed again and which, I firmly believe, is not for ever closed. I would need to go back to Normandy, not making any particular effort, but just going to the coast. Or rather I would take the wooded paths from which you occasionally catch sight of it and where the breeze mingles together the smell of the salt, damp leaves and milk. I would ask nothing from all these natal things. They are generous to the child whose birth they witnessed, and they would of their own free will teach him the things he has forgotten. Everything, its odour first of all, would tell me that the sea was near – but I would still not have seen it. I would hear it faintly. I would follow a path of hawthorns, once so familiar to me, with tender emotion, and with anxiety too at the prospect of suddenly spotting, through a gap in the hedge, the invisible, ever-present friend, the madwoman at her eternal laments, the old melancholy queen, the sea. Suddenly I would see her; it would be on one of those days of somnolence beneath a dazzling sun, when she reflects the sky that is as blue as she is, only paler. Sails white like butterflies would be dotted over the motionless water, happy not to move any more, almost swooning in the heat. Or alternatively, the sea would be rough, yellow in the sunlight like a great field of mud, with swells that, from such a distance, would appear stationary and crowned with dazzling snow.
30
Sails in Harbour
In the harbour, narrow and long like a watery highway between its low quays along which gleamed the lights of evening, passers-by stopped to gaze at the vessels that had assembled there like noble strangers who had arrived the day before and were ready to set off once more. These ships, indifferent to the curiosity they aroused amongst a crowd whose vulgarity they seemed to disdain or whose language, quite simply, they did not speak, preserved, in the liquid lodgings where they had stopped for the night, their silent and immobile momentum. Their strong stems spoke no less eloquently of the long journeys they still had to accomplish than the signs of wear and tear on them spoke of the fatigues they had already withstood on those gliding roads, as ancient as the world and as new as the passage that cuts them and which they do not outlive. Frail and resistant, they were turned with a sad pride towards the Ocean which they dominate and in which they seemed so lost. The marvellous and skilful intricacy of the rigging was reflected in the water like an exact and far-sighted intelligence plunging headlong into the uncertain destiny which sooner or later will break it. So recently withdrawn from the terrible and splendid life in which they would again be immersed the very next day, their sails still drooped from the wind that had made them belly out, their bowsprits bent out over the water just as they themselves had done so only yesterday, impelled by their forward momentum; and, from stem to stern, the curve of their hulls seemed to preserve the mysterious and flexible grace of their wake.
The End of Jealousy
1
“Give us good things, whether we ask for them or not, and keep away from us evil things, even if we ask you for them.” – This prayer seems right and effective. If you find anything in it that needs correcting, don’t keep it to yourself.
– Plato*
“My little tree, my little donkey, my mother, my brother, my country, my God, my little stranger, my little lotus, my little seashell, my darling, my little plant, go away, let me get dressed and I’ll see you in the rue de la Baume at eight o’clock. Please don’t arrive after a quarter past eight, because I’m starving.”
She tried to close the door of her bedroom on Honoré, but he added, “Neck!”, and she proffered her neck with a docility and an exaggerated zeal that made him burst out laughing.
“Even if you didn’t want to,” he told her, “there exist between your neck and my mouth, between your ears and my moustache, betwe
en your hands and my hands, close relations of friendship. I’m sure that these relations would not cease if we no longer loved one another, any more than, ever since I’ve quarrelled with my cousin Paule, I can stop my footman going every evening to chat to her chambermaid. It’s of its own free will and without my assent that my mouth moves towards your neck.”
They were now just a step away from one another. Suddenly their eyes met and each of them tried to fix in the eyes of the other the thought that they were in love; she remained for a second thus, standing erect, before collapsing breathless onto a chair, as if she had been running. And they said to each other, at almost the same time, with intense exaltation, uttering the words deliberately with their lips, as if preparing to kiss:
“My love!”
She repeated in a sad and mournful tone, as she shook her head:
“Yes, my love.”
She knew he could not resist this little head movement; he threw himself on her and kissed her and said to her slowly, “Naughty girl!”, so tenderly that her eyes grew moist.
The clock chimed half-past seven. He left.
On his return home, Honoré kept repeating to himself, “My mother, my brother, my country” – he stopped – “yes, my country!… My little seashell, my little tree,” and he could not restrain a laugh as he uttered these words that they had so quickly adopted for their own ends, those little words that can seem empty and that they had filled with infinite meaning. Trusting unthinkingly in the fertile and inventive genius of their love, they had little by little seen it endow them with a language of their own, as if they were an entire nation to be given weapons, games and laws.
As he dressed for dinner, his thought hung effortlessly on the moment when he would see her again, just as a gymnast already touches the still-distant trapeze towards which he is flying, or just as a musical phrase seems to reach the chord that will resolve it and is already pulling it towards itself, by virtue of the very distance between them, with all the strength of the desire that promises that phrase and summons it into being. Thus it was that Honoré had over the past year been wishing his life away, hurrying forward, as soon as it was morning, to the time in the afternoon when he would see her. And his days in reality were not composed of twelve or fourteen different hours, but of the four or five half-hours that he longed for and then looked back on.
Honoré had already been at the home of the Princesse d’Alériouvre for a few minutes, when Mme Seaune came in. She greeted her hostess and the different guests, and seemed less to wish Honoré a good evening than to take his hand as she might have done in the middle of a conversation. If their relationship had been public knowledge, it might have seemed as if they had arrived together, and that she had waited for a few moments outside the door so as not to come in at the same time as him. But even if they had not seen each other for two days (which over the last year had not happened a single time), they would still not have experienced that joyful surprise at being reunited which lies behind every friendly hello, since, unable to go five minutes without thinking of each other, they could never actually meet again, since they never separated.
During the dinner, each time they spoke to each other, their manners surpassed in vivacity and gentleness those of a mere pair of friends, but were imbued with a majestic and natural respect that is unknown among lovers. They thus appeared similar to those gods who, according to fable, lived in disguise among men, or like two angels whose fraternal familiarity exalts the joy, but does not diminish the respect that is inspired in them by the shared nobility of their origins and their mysterious blood. At the same time as it yielded to the powerful scent of the irises and roses that reigned languidly on the table, the air was gradually imbued with the perfume of the tenderness that Honoré and Françoise naturally emitted. At certain moments, it seemed to spread its fragrance with a violence even more delicious than its habitual gentleness, a violence that nature had not allowed them to moderate any more than it has allowed a heliotrope in the sun to do so, or lilacs blooming in the rain.
Thus it was that their tenderness, not being secret, was all the more mysterious. Everyone could approach it, just as everyone can approach those impenetrable and defenceless bracelets on the wrists of a woman in love, which bear written in unknown and visible characters the name that gives life or death, whose meaning they seem ceaselessly to offer to the curious and disappointed eyes that cannot grasp it.
“How much longer will I continue to love her?” Honoré asked himself as he rose from table. He recalled how many passions, which at their birth he had thought immortal, had in fact lasted only a short time, and the certainty that this passion would one day end cast a shadow over his tenderness.
Then he remembered how, that very morning, while he was at Mass, as the priest was reading the Gospel and saying, “Jesus, stretching out his hand, told them: That creature is my brother, and my mother also and all my family,” he had for a moment held out his entire soul to God, trembling but erect, like a palm tree, and had prayed, “My God! My God! Give me the grace to love her for ever. My God, this is the only grace I ask of you, grant me, my God, you who can ensure it, grant me that I may love her for ever!”
Now, in one of those altogether physical hours when the soul effaces itself within us behind the stomach busy digesting, behind the skin which is still rejoicing in its recent ablution and its clean underwear, and the mouth that enjoys a smoke, and the eye which feasts on naked shoulders and gleaming lights, he repeated his prayer with less intensity, doubtful that a miracle would come to disturb the psychological law of his inconstancy, a law as impossible to break as the physical laws of gravity or death.
She saw his preoccupied eyes, rose and, coming up to him (he hadn’t seen her), as they were quite some distance away from the others, she said to him in that drawling, whimpering tone of voice, the tone of a small child which always made him laugh, and as if he had just spoken to her:
“What?”
He started to laugh and told her:
“Don’t say another word, or I’ll kiss you, d’you hear, I’ll kiss you in front of everybody!”
She started to laugh, then, assuming her sad and discontented voice again, to amuse him, she said:
“Yes, yes, that’s just fine, you weren’t thinking of me in the slightest!”
And he, gazing at her and laughing, replied:
“How easily you tell lies!” And, gently, he added, “You naughty, naughty girl!”
She left him and went over to talk to the others. Honoré reflected, “When I feel my heart growing detached from her, I’ll try to withdraw it so gently that she won’t feel a thing. I will still be just as tender, just as respectful. I will conceal from her the new love which will have replaced my love for her in my heart just as carefully as I conceal from her right now the pleasures which my body enjoys here and there without her and separate from her.” (He glanced towards the Princess d’Alériouvre.) And for her part, he would let her gradually settle her affections elsewhere, and start a new life. He would not be jealous, and would even point out the men who would seem to him to offer her a more decent or a more glorious homage. The more he imagined Françoise as another woman whom he did not love, but all of whose charm and wit he appreciated as a connoisseur, the more did sharing her seem the noble and easy thing to do. The words “tolerant and warm friendship”, and “a fine act of charity performed for the worthiest of recipients, giving them the best thing one has”, came and hovered on his slack, serene lips.
Just then, Françoise, seeing that it was ten o’clock, bade everyone goodnight and left. Honoré accompanied her to her carriage, imprudently kissed her in the darkness and came back in.
Three hours later, Honoré was walking home with M. de Buivres, whose return from Tonkin* had been celebrated that evening. Honoré was asking him about the Princesse d’Alériouvre, who, having been left a widow at more or less the same age as Françoise,
was much more beautiful than her. Honoré, without being in love with her, would have greatly enjoyed the pleasure of possessing her if he could have been certain of doing so without Françoise finding out and being hurt.
“Nobody knows much about her,” said M. de Buivres, “or at least nobody knew much when I went away – I haven’t seen anybody since I got back.”
“In short, there weren’t any easy pickings this evening,” concluded Honoré.
“No, not much,” replied M. de Buivres; and as Honoré had reached his door, the conversation was about to end when M. de Buivres added:
“Except for Madame Seaune, to whom you must have been introduced, since you were there at dinner. If you fancy her, it can easily be arranged. But she wouldn’t tell me as much!”
“I’ve never heard anyone say what you’ve just told me,” said Honoré.
“You’re young,” said M. de Buivres, “and anyway, this evening there was someone there who had a bit of a fling with her, I think that’s beyond dispute: that young chap François de Gouvres. He says she’s pretty hot-blooded! But it appears she hasn’t got much of a figure. He decided he didn’t want to continue. I bet that, as we’re speaking, she’s living it up somewhere or other. Did you notice how she always leaves social gatherings early?”
“But ever since she’s been widowed, she’s lived in the same house as her brother, and she wouldn’t risk the concierge telling everyone she comes back in the middle of the night.”
“But my dear boy, between ten o’clock and one in the morning, there’s plenty of time to get up to all sorts of things! And then, who knows? But it’ll be one o’clock in no time, you really ought to toddle off to bed.”
Pleasures and Days Page 18