The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait

by Gabriel de Lautrec

  It is now necessary that I say something about the manner in which these people were breathing. On my appearance among them, it seemed to me that I was waking up with the sensation of an inexpressible malaise. I opened my eyes and found myself lying on the edge of a sidewalk. A circle of curious individuals surrounded me, while one man with a serious expression leaned toward me and held under my nose a translucent blue tablet whose strong odor reanimated me. When I had recovered my senses, he urged me, by means of gestures, to keep the tablet under my nose. I found out later that it was solidified air, and that it was breathed by emanation.

  For a long time, in fact, all—or almost all—of the oxygen had disappeared from the air. We complain that, in our cities, air and space are in short supply, and that it is almost necessary to pay to breathe, as we do to eat. But here, that was not a joke; air was purchased, literally. It was impossible for me to find out whether that suppression of oxygen was caused by human action or a natural phenomenon. I saw the blue-tinted translucent tablets that were on sale in shops, but I did not have the leisure to ascertain whether they came from factories or mines. Perhaps industrialists had monopolized the fluid, and had condensed it by means of powerful machines. Perhaps the transformation had been produced spontaneously, in consequence of the passage of time, and the compacted air, taking refuge in the bosom of the Earth, had slowly solidified, as primitive vegetables did to form coal. I could not resolve the problem, or did not pay attention to it.

  Evidently, in such conditions, one would not expect to breathe several times a minute, as we do without even noticing. Whales breathe at long intervals, however, and they are animals with lungs like us. A slow education—an adaptation, to put it more accurately—had led these humans to use air as we deal with food. Their bodies were accommodated to the necessity. From time to time, one saw people take out their tablets and take several deep breaths. I think, too, that the air in question, composed of almost pure oxygen, was more vivifying, and that it was less necessary to multiply aspirations.

  The usage of air having become similar to that of food, one bought the tablets as one bought bread. There were shops in the street. The price of air varied according to supply and demand. If it rose too high, the people rebelled. Fat men with ruddy faces were breathing beautiful blue tablets insolently, with full noses and full mouths, while poor devils were wearing themselves out on a meager debris of dirty and dusty air that they had picked up in the gutter, or pausing beside passers-by and timidly asking for alms. Some of them had not breathed for three days.

  As the vivifying atmosphere had been suppressed, another had replaced it, and that simple transposition had permitted the problem of aerial navigation to be solved. An exceedingly dense layer of neutral gas extended upwards for hundreds of miles and encircled the globe. Scientists had long ago found a formula for its unlimited manufacture. With medium-sized wings, people flew effortlessly. From the first day, after a brief apprenticeship, I had the impression not of flying but of swimming, but without any dread of being submerged. Soon, I no longer had any anxiety, and was able to deliver myself entirely to the joy of floating freely above the imperious ground, which had once retained me with its leaden hands.

  That joy was superhuman. It is only in dreams that we have the illusion of flying, and yet, very often, that flight is nothing but an undulatory skimming, a few meters above the ground. With one bound, though, as one jumps a stream, I launched myself over monuments and hills, far from the abruptly vanished ground. I no longer felt the weight of my body. Certain intoxications, it’s said—that of ether, for example—procure that sensation of deliverance, but here I was plunged into the ether.

  And how light life, in its entirety, had become! People no longer set off on journeys in heavy earthbound machines, but flew. No more roads, no more rails and customs posts, but svelte apparitions gliding through space with as little fear of collision as the stars in the sky. In terms of movement, it was the conquest of the third dimension.

  On fine nights, one saw lovers taking flight together, to the top of a tower or a hill, their wings blanching in the moonlight. Sometimes, two light forms, carried away by their intoxication, would rose so high into the air that they never came down again.

  The wings were taken from a particular kind of bird that was bred for that purpose. It was a strongly-built species with large vigorous wings, doubtless obtained by cross-breeding. When they were fully grown, their wings were amputated for adaptation to the human body. Children were taught to fly, as they were taught to walk. All of them received wings when they were strong enough.

  In addition, by virtue of hereditary adaptation, their arms had gradually acquired a prodigious force and development. It was hoped that children would one day be born with wings.

  For a long time, people had been aware of the superiority of birds relative to us, of which we can only have an incomplete knowledge at present. Their dwelling is the upper sphere, and those we see only form a minority. We have no right to judge their totality by the rare individuals that descend as far as us, any more than fish can form an idea of what we might be on the basis of divers and the drowned. Their race is more perfect than ours, for it is more evolved. They are unacquainted with heavy labor and the deformity of pregnancy. They are borne from a solitary egg, like the world in ancient cosmogonies.

  The conquest of the air has not been without difficulties. I was told about the terrible wars to which that rivalry had given rise. But our species had triumphed over others once more. As the breathable air disappeared, plumed cadavers covered the ground in greater numbers, to the extent that nothing any longer remained of turtle-doves and vultures, nor of forms never previously observed that were seen to descend successively from the more-or-less distant heights at which their lungs exploded. Apocalyptic monsters spiraled down to land at the feet of terrified crowds. One day, there were no longer any but the single species retained for the use of its wings, the choice of which had been determined by its robust form.

  These things were told to me while I floated voluptuously above that strange world. A city unrolled beneath my eyes. I saw terraces from which wings were fleeing. I had passed over the white terraces when I perceived some sort of broad, deep ditch between high walls, near the city gates. There were black masses in the depths of the ditch, agitating in vain leaps, as if permanently crippled. Among them, in the dust and ordure, lay fragments of air over which the creatures were fighting voraciously.

  And I recognized, with an anguish and a sudden pity, by their amputated stumps, the mutilated bodies of the birds from whom human wings were borrowed…

  The Wall

  For Albert Lenoir15

  From all memory, that humankind had sheltered itself under tents, as under an external vestment. They were afraid of the infinity that surrounded them, and wanted to hide from its eyes. Their initial dwellings were made of fragile canvas which the desert sand, arriving from the depths of the horizon, passed over untiringly. The shepherds of the origin had planted in the ground the curved staffs with which, while on the move, they directed their herds; their cloaks, placed over that naïve frame and falling to either side, formed the walls behind which they sheltered the mystery of their lives. The wind that penetrated through the oblique cracks caused the fire set in the center, on two black stones, to flare up. The family grouped around it, and created itself.

  Humans already, when they had found shelter, they regretted the sight of leaves and clouds, and the animals that had once lived with them they saw hasten toward the mountains or the variegated plain. To distract themselves, they decorated the interior of their abode with strewn green branches. The feathers of birds and skins of beasts were extended over the walls. When, later, art was born, the deception of objects was imitated by painters. The most sumptuous tapestry evoked the faint memory, effaced from the wall, of the tree-branches that had been scattered in indeterminate times inside human dwellings to perpetuate for the eyes, indoors, the landscape beyond. And the same s
ymbolism was realized in the monuments whose construction was made possible by the science of later ages. Humankind had multiplied. Encounters of genius had presented future ideas to the gazes of sages. The soul of humankind had grown with the dwellings of humankind. From one side of the globe to the other, thoughts and sensations flow on wings of fire. A vast city was born of scattered cities. There was no more open country, and the proud mountains had bowed down, but a universal city, crossing the torrents and the deserts, slowly sowed its columns and palaces over the planet.

  The walls of those palaces loomed up within the city, and glistened in the grandiose exterior, as if silently slumbering. In the immutable sky, they followed horizontal lines that clouds of the same light whiteness continued as they pass by, in slowly metamorphosing vaults. People sitting on terraces, modeled on the form of those spirals, talked about the future. There were priests at the crossroads, with thorny staffs in their hands and tortuous jewels round their necks, who sang psalms when anyone passed by. Their black patches were picturesque at the feet of the wall. Springs ran between two walls, and another was visible in a subterranean passage, with peaks whose reflection in the water was tremulous. And that whiteness, which, seen from afar, gave the city the grandiose appearance of a gigantic battlefield where armies of dead gods had left their ivory bones, was covered on the inside by paintings in the latest hues—the spectrum of the colors continues beyond violet and beyond red. There really was, on the edge of their dwellings, a kind a duplicate of their real life, less profound but more vain, which they loved for its silence and its durability.

  Those who, in ancient times, retained the childhood which, in the hearts of some, even in old age, never dies, lived almost from then on the mute life of images that never breathed. One saw adolescents smitten with a painted muse, and poets celebrate rhythmically, with new chords, chimeras whose name, not even an image, was traced on the fronts of sanctuaries. Who can say where death ends or life begins? If He who made all things created beings with a conscience—or, at least, believing in the possession of a conscience as fugitive as a flash of color or the echo of a sound, why would he refuse it to creatures more imperfect than human beings? Is not life similar to the ruby liquor that everyone carries in his cupped hands, a single drop of which, falling on the ground, is sufficient to bring forth a flower of life? The awkward figure that we draw on the paper takes on a personality. It has a soul, as tenuous as the form is imperfect, whose sensations are rare. But a masterpiece is already breathing. Such an image of a saint, with her hands upraised, is thinking about the lost paradise. She has only one single gesture, her thought is eternal and simple; it is an existence without depth, but endowed with a profound charm. Have we not, for hours on end, during those nights scarcely blurred by the nightlight, with staring eyes, contemplated the banal flowers of tapestries, in which the demon of images made us see fantastic and implausible forms apparently emerging from the wall? And the stone monsters that project from towers in ogives, like the laughter of the monument, do you think that they do not have souls, by dint of being contemplated, from the street-corners, by the crowds that raise their heads on Sundays and holidays toward the bell-tower? But they have no thought of anything but the rain, the Sun and the wind, and no visions but those of birds passing through the air in front of them, uttering shrill cries. Every word pronounced and every line drawn has a soul that follows them, like fearful shadows following the golden staff along the edge of the black Erebus.16 Life is everywhere; everyone sows forms and sounds in space. And when a man has gone mad for having dreamed too much of his work, it is because his soul has abandoned him in order to animate the work he has created. An unfaithful mistress, vaingloriously delighted with the beautiful château that the king has built for her, abandons the man who loves her to imprison herself in its golden gates.

  Nothing dies. The infinite circulates through finite things And that people had had the divine sense to multiply the forms of existence around itself. In its dwellings, beside paintings in which mounted armored warriors rose up in forceful colors, light frescoes were to be seen reminiscent of virgins in transparent tunics. Expanses of lifeless gold covered the space between two doorways with porphyry columns; the mat gold was interrupted by pale heads, hands bearing theorbos. Processions of dancers wound along the halls. In temples, bare and divine, the objects of worship were represented on the walls. The only real thing, in the middle of the sanctuary, was a cup of some unknown metal, on a heavy ebony table.

  Those temples were numerous, and marble columns bordered them, having around them, at human height, liters of black cloth on which the symbols of immortality were inscribed in silver lines. Between the columns passed the silent movement of the people. Mouths pronounced magic words. At the back of the temple was a wall, extending from the ground to the vault and from one wing to the other. It loomed up in the distance like some vast empty page.

  The religion of the people was similar to that wall. They dared not find there the face of a limited god. The painters who evoked the adored image, with a pious brush, on the backs of decorated choir-stalls, were deceived many times over! Their illuminated idols had not lasted. Every thousand years, someone came, and his hand, steeped in errant streams, wiped the image from the wall. But the same traveler, in the same place, established the face of another god.

  Many of these temples were on the shore of the sea, and yet surrounded by gardens with living hedges where the mysteries had to be performed. On evenings when the leaves were agitated and marvelous insomniac nights, sighs and sobs were heard. Priestesses with lamps passed along distant pathways. Servants went in great haste to find harps and flutes carved in the docile black wood. The wind carried the odor of myrrh toward the sea, like a light homage. The sea was out there, a broad breath: the monotonous sea, over which the low clouds erected vain monuments.

  On the side opposite the sea, the city extended. It went toward the great curved line and climbed the mountains, putting clusters of humankind on the flanks. A crowd gesticulated in the streets; raised arms were seen and a few cries heard. Windows opened on the supple air. The silence of that superhuman city made a clamor in infinity, and stray birds fell, dead of fright, when their wings merely brushed the iron doors with heavy knockers. The open country where they had been able to fly free, amid the murmur of leaves, was disappearing by the day. The Earth, that living being, felt itself being gradually devoured by a marble leprosy. And the isolated dwellings were markers placed along the road pointing to the horizon; thus, the first houses, in the country, in the approaches to our cities, advance sparsely to meet the traveler, to give him a good welcome, before the crowd of serried roofs.

  They arrived at the edge of the world, beyond which there was no more land before the fall into the void. And the sky appeared from top to bottom. Life and humankind had reached their final limit. Guided by the human folly that is to enclose oneself incessantly and search childishly on the canvas of the narrow tent for the reflection of the immensity, instead of reaching out with widespread arms toward that very immensity, they had the vain idea of building the ultimate enclosing wall on the edge of the abyss, where some divine child might, in the course of some idle stroll, trace his name awkwardly with a stump of charcoal. That wall would summarize the effort. It was like the obscure barrier that the men of times past had imagined on the horizon of space, when they had not yet discovered that space is infinite. Blocks of stone and iron were brought. A powerful will lifted up the heavy loads. In olden times, the energy of magicians was manifest in musical speech; a single gesture made everything move. Beneath the Sun and the shivering rain, slaves bent their weary backs. Generations disappeared, exhausted like the tribes of the Hebrews. And the wall was harmoniously reminiscent of the monuments of ancient Egypt. Humankind, emerged from the cradle by virtue of a divination, had placed the pyramids in the center of the known world. Now, in the dusk, an immense wall followed the curvature of the horizon, distanced from the center according to the rite of
the ripples made by a stone thrown into water.

  The Sun rose behind the wall, and all day long its sad eye wandered successively over the city. In the evening, it sank toward the sea, where its red globe was deformed, a torch dropped from a hand and stamped out on the ground. The sharp gables of the dwellings still retained a gilding of light at their summit. Down below, in the inextricable streets, the crowd was already moving in darkness. At that tragic moment before nightfall, the entire city was silhouetted in infernal lines on the posthumous whiteness of the wall. Then, the people who had lifted up the marble blocks with their hands and their breathless breasts, and had arranged them toward the firmament, reassembled on the edge of the city and began to moan. Their convulsive hands veiled their eyes. Regret, that bleak god, was born in their hearts. Confronted by the lofty work, they had just remembered the little wall of dry stones that a Galilean goat could jump over, covered in vines and ivy, which had once enclosed the domain of their puerile happiness.

  On the highest platform was a chapel consecrated to Herostratus.17 The priests who succeeded one another, as in all ages, before the fire—the lamp of the Catholic church or the Latin torch of the vestals—received prayers, incense and gold from the hands of the crowd, wandering on worn-out knees. The only arched window in the smooth walls of the temple was an open red eye. People spent their days lying on platforms, in varied attitudes, voicing the same anxiety. They had taken cloaks, and the women, at dawn, did not forget their puerile cares in front of a mirror, until the day when one of them thought she could make out, like the advent of space, a slight shadow on her mirror. What grim and vagabond god had tarnished it with his breathing mouth? The priests revived the hot coals beneath the myrrh. When the crepuscular mantle fell, all the people got to their feet with a slightly weary final effort. But suddenly, from incalculable depths, like another great white page, an unreal wall loomed up in the clouds.