The Chateau d'Argol

by Julien Gracq

  They entered the sanctuary through a low door. A heavy, dense air, a fragrant and almost total obscurity filled this refuge of prayer, in the middle of which, hanging from the vaulted ceiling, shone a lamp in a red globe whose marvellously fragile flame was constantly flaring up, bent over and lifted as by the beating of invisible wings. There were large breaches in the roof through which glided pell-mell, as into a deep abyss (and without the soul that was pierced to its very depths like the sharp point of a spear, being able to distinguish the sound of the light—the yellow and vibrant cry of the sun) the dazzling darts of the flaming breast of a bird. And the whole chapel, submerged in the green dusk diffused by its stained glass windows against which the leaves, indistinct through the dirt and thickness of the panes, floated with a movement more indolent and softer than seaweed, seemed to have descended into the gulfs of the forest as into some submarine grotto that pressed with all the force of its cool palms against these walls of glass and of stone, and to be held over these vertiginous depths only by the marvellous cable of the sun.

  Their eyes, finally accustomed to the sudden obscurity, distinguished in one of the corners of the confined space, a large stone which was apparently the slab—as heavy as sleep—of an ancient tomb, and lingered for a few moments on the ex voto inscriptions in an ancient and almost indecipherable tongue, accompanying, it appeared, the offerings of a helmet and an iron lance which could be seen hanging on the darkest side of the deserted altar, and whose polished surfaces and sharp point, in spite of the persistent humidity of the walls, still preserved an astonishing brilliance. And a growing disquietude took hold of Albert's mind, deeply disturbed for many minutes now by these objects, whose character appeared so exclusively emblematic. It seemed to him that between the iron clock, the lamp, the tomb, the helmet and the lance there must be woven, perhaps through the effect of some ancient spell, but more likely because of their intimate and dangerous conjunction of an appalling antiquity, as the glistening saltpetre of the vault bore witness, a bond difficult in the circumstances to discover, but whose unquestionable existence imprisoned the imagination as in a perfect circle, and designated in an intentionally closed space the very geometric locus of the Enigma, whose inextricable knots had been stifling him since morning with an embrace at every instant more convincing—so that in the middle of his journey toward the altar he stopped abruptly, a prey to a sudden terror lest his enchanted footsteps, if they continued, should bring him face to face with its disconcerting and incontestable countenance.

  Strange parallels, and not so much those of resemblance as those, in every respect more curious, of Analogy, all tending to imply that this visit, so altogether baffling, had not indeed been directed toward a chapel lost in the forest, but really toward some castle enchanted by the menace of the equivocal arms of the Fisher King, made a sudden ineffaceable inroad on his brain. The sun's rays shining down onto the middle of the empty and desolate altar, the sound of the heavy drops of water on the flagstones, the damp obscurity of the place, the song of the bird through the breach in the vault shriller than if it had burst inside the ear itself and as though fraught with an inexplicable and delirious hope, the regular ticking of the iron clock—all filled his soul with glorious and melancholy visions, exhausted it with an imperious and devastating suspense that rising, little by little, with the trills of the bird to a supreme point where it attained the consuming ardour of fire, in its vigorous plenitude wrung tears from the eyes no less than might the sound of the most sumptuous brass instruments. And perhaps it was not perceptible to him in the midst of his tumultuous agitation, how much higher than all the voices of nature resounded here with a dissonant clamour the glaring disappropriation of all things—of the altar all the more majestic for being abandoned, of the useless lance, of the tomb as perturbing as a cenotaph, of the clock ticking for nothing outside of time, on which its gears had no more grip than a mill-wheel in a dried-up stream, of the lamp burning in full daylight, of the windows palpably made to be looked into from outside, and against which were glued all the green tentacles of the forest.

  Then out of the depth of his disquietude there rose a sound that seemed instantly to fill the whole chapel and stream down the glistening walls, and without daring to turn around, so stunned was he by its inconceivable amplitude, he now realized that during his own silent exploration of the chapel, Herminien had mounted the stone steps of the organ loft which rose in the darkness to the left of the door, occupying a considerable portion of the chapel, but which, his own attention having been at once captured by the alluring light effect, had escaped his notice until now. Herminien's playing was stamped with a singular force, and such was his expressive power that Albert, as though he could read in the depths of his soul, divined each succeeding theme of this wild improvisation. At first it seemed that Herminien, with dissonant and tentative gropings, interrupted by reiterations and regressions in which the principal motif was repeatedly taken up in a more timid and, as it were, interrogative mode, was only trying out the volume and acoustical capacity of this perturbing edifice. And now burst forth waves of sound, as violent as the forest and free as the winds of the heights, and the storm which Albert had contemplated with such horror from the high terraces of the castle thundered out of those mystic depths, while above them sounds of a crystalline purity fell, one by one, in a surprising and hesitating decrescendo, and floated like a sonorous vapour shot with flashes of yellow sunlight, curiously following the rhythm of the drops of water that were dripping from the vault.

  After these effects of nature came an access of violent, sensual passion, and with perfect fidelity the organist painted his savage frenzy: like a luminous mist Heide floated on high, vanished, returned, and finally established her empire over melodic swells, of an extraordinary amplitude that seemed to transport the senses into an unknown region, and, by means of an incredible perversion, to endow the ear with all the graces of touch and sight. Meanwhile, although the artist had already given full rein to a tremulous and incoercible passion, it seemed to Albert apparent from now on, that even in the full plenitude of his improvisation, whose curious arabesques still kept something of the tentative character of an experiment, Herminien was searching for the key to an even loftier soaring, the necessary support for a final leap whose completely decisive consequences were at once both forecast and unpredictable, and that he was hesitating on the very brink of that abyss whose glorious approaches he described with such wild enveloping grace.

  Clearly now—and with every moment it became more apparent to Albert—he was looking for the unique angle of incidence at which the eardrum, deprived of its power of interception and of diffusion, would become permeable like pure crystal, and would change this thing of flesh and blood into a sort of prism of total reflection, where sound would be accumulated instead of passing through, and would irrigate the heart with the same freedom as the sanguine medium, thus restoring to the desecrated word ecstasy its true significance. A sonorous vibration, growing ever more concentrated, seemed the exterior sign of the sombre fever of his quest, and settled everywhere swarmingly like bees out of a suddenly shattered hive. Finally a note, held with marvellous steadiness, shrilled in incredible splendour, and taking off as from a beach of sound, rose a phrase of ineffable beauty. And still higher, in a mellow golden light which seemed to accompany the descent into the chapel of a sublime grace as an answer to his prayer, Herminien's fingers resounded, as if a light and consuming warmth ran through them, the song of virile fraternity. And the final breath that gradually left the lungs as it soared to unbelievable heights, let the salutary tide of a sea, as light and free as the night, rise into the completely vacant body.

  THE FOREST

  DURING THE DAYS that followed, endless rains descended upon Argol. Night and day, with unrelenting persistence, through all the echoing rooms could be heard the hammering of their myriad drops, and, in a slower rhythm, against the background of the shower that furiously lashed the ground, the fantastic dri
pping of the thick globules falling from the branches, one by one, like sterile, liquid fruit, and prolonging their measured strokes with the particular savagery, the inexplicable meticulousness of a torture. A heavy idleness took possession of the inmates of the castle, and with rare and insignificant words they appeared persistently to avoid each other, to such an extent that even their chance meetings in the mazes of the winding corridors, filled with a faltering white light which seeped through the curtains of the rain as though diffused by the moisture ceaselessly streaming down the walls, engendered a visible malaise. Even their protracted and assiduous meditations borrowed from the hypnotic monotony of the rain a strange and persistent perspicacity that passed into and continued without any apparent diminution through their dreams even in the midst of their quiet slumber, which now, in the heart of the dim twilight reigning throughout the castle, had become their most natural and, without restriction, their fullest mode of existence—and from which each morning they were awakened not so much by the imperfect daylight as by a gradual and singular clairvoyance.

  And so, in the midst of an indefinable anxiety in which the lucid conscience scrutinized, one by one, the most secret recesses of the heart, unfolded another wholly imaginary day which, throughout its entire lugubrious duration, wore the blank, wan look attributed in most descriptions to the dawn. It seemed as though the different scattered members of the day, unable to reassemble so far from the heat of the sun, wandered desperately under the grey cope of the sky, and, here and there, one could see in their own hideous shred of light, as in the faint light of a beacon, the icy glint of the waters of a spring, the greyish mud of an inexplicable path that could only lead to the horrible and vacuous waste-countries of the rain.

  It now seemed ever more certain to Albert that the improvisation which Herminien had given voice to in the chapel and whose echoes kept ceaselessly resounding in his memory, had less the value of a caprice of his sensibility troubled by that strange pilgrimage, than of an act and an appeal—and that Herminien had sought in the soothing balm of music, not so much an appeasement of his sufferings, as a protection against an ineluctable temptation. Albert found in his own heart the proof that interests other than those of a passing and purely aesthetic emotion had been weighing in the balance, when he remembered the anxiety which had gripped it in the chapel, that anxiety whose indefinite nature, whose surprising character of a warning, could only be ascribed to some precarious struggle in which the forces of life and death themselves were at stake. And so it was that when the deathly rays of the sun reappeared, throwing wide open for them the forest's snares once more, he had the overwhelming feeling that the days of the end were now at hand.

  On an afternoon of crushing heat which seemed by its intensity to bleach all the blue out of the sky, as colour from some airy fabric, Albert sat in the tower room overlooking the high terraces. He gazed at the woods of Storrvan, at all that austere landscape, and suddenly it seemed to him that the sea of trees flowing without a break to the horizon was completely detached from the world, separated by the malediction of a magic spell, and that it had begun to turn around the castle like a wheel whose movement nothing could stop, and as terrifying as the apparently slow motion, inappreciable and as it were secondary, of the blades of a propeller turning at its very maximum speed. And, in truth, he was convinced that this world surrounding him was sustained in its ghostly fixity only by the tension, now approaching its limit, of some unimaginable force that, by a miracle, kept it from dissolution, and that all these fragile phenomena whose very passivity constituted the real terror for the soul, must perforce be shattered and fly to pieces before his eyes at the slightest loss of speed.

  In the midst of this frenzy which his reason could only with difficulty control, he glanced down and saw Herminien and Heide leave the castle and disappear into the forest. Their erect shadows ran rapidly along the ground, and Albert's eye caught sight of the long barrel of a rifle slung over Herminien's shoulder, which he followed for a long time as it glinted cruelly through the curtain of forest trees, appearing and disappearing at intervals with the unendurable gleam of a naked sword.

  Little by little, Albert slipped into a profound reverie in which the flash of that hostile steel in the midst of exhausting and equivocal meditations, seemed to reappear at long intervals like those luminous streaks left on the retina by a too dazzling light, emerging finally as a dominant motif and, in the midst of dim and indistinct images, invariably accompanied by an indefinable sensation of an impending danger. And below this obsessive recurrence, deep in his memory, some obscure travail seemed to be going on, without his mind, prostrate and totally inert, lending the least participation. In the mass of his memories, slight and almost molecular detachments and displacements seemed to be taking place under the pressure of a prodigious weight, and, like iron filings moved by an invisible magnet on a piece of paper, seemed to shape themselves, did finally shape themselves, into what now appeared to be an interpretable figure, but which his feverish reason, struck with a furious impotence, circled without success, and as though under a spell, recognized the clearly oriented lines without yet, by intuition, penetrating their suddenly dazzling significance. Then the lines seemed once more to blur like those of a landscape reflected in water, and at the moment when the mind, a prey to the most harrowing despair, was being buffeted furiously on the waves, brusquely one single feature floated up from the wreck, unimaginably descriptive and familiar, and a fiery hand began to fashion the secret capacity of the soul as though into a perfect mould to which the face of truth itself adhered, too narrowly and too near to be then decipherable.

  For a long time these exhausting efforts continued, and when at last Albert's eyes, until now turned inward through the effect of intense concentration, looked out over the landscape again and for a moment rested there, he was filled with an unendurable sensation of solitude. Coming out of his quest among equivocal phantoms of the past, a quest equalling in its distracting power that of sleep itself, it suddenly seemed to him that it had been many long mortal hours since Herminien and Heide had left the castle, and this sudden blank in his consciousness seemed to confer on this time left behind, this lost time, an unparalleled value. In the midst of a growing anxiety, in a paralyzing suspense, he strode through the rooms and out onto the terraces, vainly questioning the horizon which over its whole extent preserved a merciless immobility. Great storm clouds bore down slowly on the forest, and the approach of dusk, which gave an objective and now undeniable strangeness to the prolonged absence of the castle guests, redoubled his nervous tension. Lowering his worried gaze to the inner courts of the castle he saw, lying asleep on the stones in a pose of torpid prostration, the same servant who had met him on the day of his arrival. And this disconcerting sight sent a chill through his heart, as though his glance—for it was apparent that the man was plunged into the heart of a purely animal realm, and to such a degree that it would have seemed scarcely surprising, as one realized with a sickening shudder, to see, when he awoke, the face of a leopard turned toward the sky, instead of that of a man—had borne the mark of an exorbitant and sacrilegious indiscretion.

  Large drops began to fall hesitatingly, resounding on the leaves, then stopped, and this rain, powerless to cool, suddenly made tangible the stifling density of the heat. And the threat of storm everywhere present in the painful immobility of the air, in the fuliginous hue of the sky, and in the anguish that filled the body and drove the soul to the very frontiers of madness, was far crueller than its imminent outburst.

  Down the empty and echoing stairs, through the deserted courtyards, Albert fled the castle and plunged into the funereal solitudes of the forest. The horror of those lonely woods was deepened by the approach of night. At this troubling hour of twilight, it seemed that everywhere—in the crackings of the over-heated bark, in the strangely reverberating fall of a dead branch in a deserted avenue, in the mist floating around the dense masses of the trees, in the intermittent cries of a belate
d bird flying lazily from branch to branch like a fortuitous guide—a redoubtable alchemy was at work behind impenetrable veils as the forest prepared its nocturnal mysteries.

  Soon Albert lost himself in the circuitous windings of the woods. Little by little, as the majesty and silence of the trees unconsciously took possession of him, his pace grew slower and finally, his body filled with a painful weariness, he sank down on the moss, and stretched out at full length beside a murmuring spring whose pure waters flowed among the roots of a gigantic pine. Above his head the bright colours faded in the sky and the first stars shone sweetly between the motionless branches. Finally, the moon rose, enormous and round, behind the trunk of the pine and suddenly it seemed to be hanging on the pine's branches, very bright and near, like an enormous shield not a stone's throw away. The continuous and monotonous noise of the brook so close to his head gradually filled him with a flow of sweetness, which laid over him in a transparent bath of calm oblivion, and seemed, in its timid insistence, to triumph even over the tumult of his blood, assuaged now in the coolness of the night. Freed from the furious pounding of his heart, he was now astonished by the delicate accuracy of awareness and the power of suggestion his senses had acquired: from of the intoxicating odour of the resin of the pines, the silvery quivering of the leaves, the velvet darkness of the sky, with every second, he was born into a new life which reflected the same intensity as the incredible vigour of his perceptions. Silently, in limpid peace, his spirit rose toward the branches softly lighted by the moon, lost itself in the purifying freshness of the night, and such became the exclusive power of attention of his captivated hearing, that the noise of the brook seemed gradually to swell over its stony bed and, risen to the proportions of a tumultuous roar, to fill the entire forest with its crystalline harmonies, and even to transform into sounds of an ineffable transparency the pools of silver which fell from the moon.