The individual who was speaking was thin, with long grey and white side-whiskers; the shape of his mouth was suggestive of indulgent bonhomie, and his mannerisms were full of self-confidence.
“Oh,” said another, much younger, junior relative, “the real advantage is the economy of the procedure.”
There was laughter, and a few chairs stirred; then everyone fell silent.
The necromancer had just come in. He was holding a modestly-sized piece of card in his hands, and was looking attentively at the individual represented in the image.
The eyes of the audience turned toward him. Curiosity led them to contemplate the features of the face, and a vague anxiety in their souls made them apprehensive. Did that unique face, resulting from the combination of theirs, that imaginary individual, resemble anyone? What mystery was more disturbing than that of the consciousness and the soul represented and imperiously necessitated by that gaze, too lively never to have lived.
The necromancer held the image out to them. An exclamation of amazement and anguish escaped their throats. It was Old Hop Jones’s own face that was smiling at them.
Before the air vibrated by their clamors of alarm had calmed down, however, the door of the room opened wide, and on the threshold, in the midst of gestures of recoil and hands veiling faces, appeared Old Hop Jones himself, with his cane and his wig, in flesh and bone…
After the fainting-fits, everyone hurried forward. The old man was pressed against waistcoats and the shop-fronts of dresses. Everyone wanted to shake his hand. He let them so do, with a slightly sad smile, and then asked about his familiar windows and quayside. No allusion was made to his absence; even the slightest would have been in bad taste.
All ceremonies concluded, heading for home, on the cushions of the carriage, Uncle Jones, shaken by the jolts, abandoned himself with an inclination of his old-fashioned head to visions of monuments and trees, cut off by the rim of the window, sudden scenes that he recognized by virtue of having encountered them by day, in the rain or bleak sunlight.
A great celebration was held. The entrepreneur of funerals and marriages, the lighter of nocturnal lamps, from his shop with the black hoarding, summoned the same suits and the same finery as before, to the same rendezvous—but they came waving open letters of invitation. A joyful family occasion was announced. Carriages rolled noiselessly along the riverbank all evening. There were apparitions of bright cravats and flowers in hair. Men armed with torches bowed before ladies with their skirts gathered in their hands, moving lightly toward the door open to beautiful luminous vestibules. There was a certain amount of embarrassment at first. Then, with the uncle, sitting in an armchair by the fire, in bright candlelight, the party got going. Monologues took flight.
Uncle Hop Jones recovered his place at the family table. The old round-shouldered coat remained in the dusty wardrobe; a new suit was inaugurated to celebrate the joyous occasion, and when the numerous but unique image, the cause of the prodigy, was hung on the wall of the study, the ancestor sat opposite, and the provincial offices regulated their dispatches.
As the days passed, however, and external events became more similar every day, a slow and dull disturbance penetrated the house. The novelty of the phenomenon, unperceived in the surge of first impressions, appeared to rested eyes. The revenant had resumed his afternoon walks in the sunshine, but in the street, the sound of his voice was strange, and a confused thought arose in everyone’s mind, that he ought not to linger at dusk, not for his own sake but that of frightened others. Something had returned that should not have returned. As soon as the curfew sounded and the family meal was ready, the ancestor went back inside, where his servants, under the puerile pretexts of possible assistance and cares, crouched behind the doors, keeping track of his respiration. Fear imprisoned everyone.
The ancestor had, however, never been more similar to himself in the time of his first existence. The ancient gestures rediscovered, when he passed in front of a mirror, prey to vague doubts, reassured him as to the mystery of his tenebrous identity. But it was that identity itself which frightened him in its turn. There was, in his fashion of leaning on his elbows and sitting down, an element of déjà vu. Exterior scenes suggested other images to him of which he knew nothing, except that they had existed. That movement of lifting his hand to his forehead at times when his mind was thoughtful was not new. Sometimes, in the dark, a thought whose form he could not distinguish, but which he sensed all the more real and present for it, came to die on the frontier of his life. It came from somewhere immeasurably more distant than his anterior existence. One might have thought it a chimera, luminous in the dark, with green-golden wings, fleeing an inexhaustible frisson through vanished worlds, the last of which was unfolding in his present surroundings.
At the same time, the old man felt a new soul emerging within his own, composed of all those distributed around him. He recognized himself in some gesture or some play of expression observed in one of the Hop Joneses, and at other times, by contrast, paused thoughtfully as he noticed in himself, in the blink of an eye, some attitude that drew his memory imperiously to some cousin or other. It seemed that his consciousness, a vain and obsolete thing, was obliged to borrow, in order to dream, the shreds of the lives of more present consciousnesses, his descendants, as, in the ancient folktale, the empty heads of the dead drink the blood of victims before answering.
All these mysterious images moved within a singularly vulgar frame, for one thought moves through a thousand different ones, all true. The ridiculous and sulky old man was depressing for the house. Why was he not still in the shadows, which his time to enter had come? Quarrels broke out. His place had been taken, with respect to the smallest quotidian details; that finally became obvious. These were verities of observation and not of reasoning. Besides, it seemed that the man, having lived more than once, had more than one bitterness in his heart; he complained. The belated fear that he inspired was not a sufficient pretext for respect, and the commercial honesty of the Hop Joneses had got the upper hand again. By what right had he come back, demanding his part in a game from which a superior will had excluded him the first time around? His wealth had been shared out. He lived on in his descendants. To claim, beyond that, some personal existence, seemed to be a kind of blameworthy plurality that ought not to be encouraged.
It did not take long for Uncle Hop Jones to become odious to everyone. The old man, bending under that reprobation and the burden of two existences, slowly made his way toward the route from which his steps had strayed, to some cypress-planted crossroads, and while his gestures were designed more rarely and more uncertainly, hasty and ardent joys awaited his funereal immobility.
It was on an evening similar to the one that had seen him reappear. All the upsetting things that inspire fear of oblivion, remedies and souvenirs, had been brought into the room. The entire family was assembled around his death-bed; candles had been lit all over the room to illuminate everything, for it seemed that the most frightening visitor was about to enter the room. One candle was placed on Uncle Hop Jones’s bed-head, whitening the old man’s face.
As the moment drew nigh, a greater serenity became legible in his features. Calm had repossessed his soul at the approach of a familiar country, and, as the wind agitated the treetops, and came through the window open on the distant darkness to caress the old man’s hands, it really seemed to be a breath from beyond.
Uncle Hop Jones smiled, as did the demoiselle at the piano; the wind blew more strongly through the windows, and all the candles went out, except for the one at the head of the dead man’s bed.
Monsieur Ciboire, Innkeeper
Monsieur Ciboire27 was an innkeeper in the Rue Saint-Jacques, at the sign of the Crowned Ox. He was, moreover, when he got up that morning, in a very bad temper. All night, the sleep of his legitimate spouse had been disturbed. Her husband had moaned, turned over and over like a fish on a hot stove, causing the virtuous mattress to groan in chorus with his plaints, and lau
nched the unmade bedclothes across the room at hazard. Madame Ciboire was distressed; her husband was going mad.
The profession of innkeeper has, among other inconveniences, one more serious than the rest. It is necessary to lend an ear to clients and their sometimes-perverse theories, and it was the memory of conversations with the regulars of the Crowned Ox that was tormenting Monsieur Ciboire.
People in cafes have been known to take a malign pleasure in making an idiot of the lady enthroned at the counter in the midst of precisely-calculated and sugar cubes placed one atop another, in much the same fashion as the stones making up the pyramids were measured by the geometers of Egypt and set in place by the Hebrews. They talk to her about absurd things, which bring a smile to her lips, and her torturers track the progress of madness in her troubled brain on a daily basis. The same thing was happening to Monsieur Ciboire, and for days his dreams had been troubled by nightmares.
Among the inn’s regulars there were painters who spent their time like the majority of young painters, wearing strange clothes and emitting superannuated paradoxes. One of them, named Brancowich, who had been smoking his pipe at the second table on he left for ten years, while waiting until he could get a place at the Institut’s manger, had chosen the innkeeper as a victim. Had he not undertaken to demonstrate one evening last week, with supporting evidence and indubitable philosophical citations, that color did not exist?
To tell the truth, the existence of certain painters is an energetic and continuous protest against the reality of colors—but Monsieur Ciboire’s innocent soul had never raised the slightest doubt about the existence of colors. Monsieur Ciboire’s fine blue eyes had never regarded the various hues of everyday objects as anything but luminous verities. Monsieur Ciboire did not understand philosophical theories at all. He would never, like Descartes, have shut himself up in an earthenware stove in order to attain, ten years later, the sublime discovery that what exists, exists, and that what doesn’t exist, doesn’t. If anyone had told our innkeeper about such procedures, he would have shrugged his shoulders while looking sympathetically at the little earthenware stove on which he warmed water for shaving in the morning, and would not have hesitated to consider any man who proposed using a similar object for philosophical experiments as a madman. Monsieur Ciboire’s logic did not admit such compromises.
Thus, his mind was singularly disturbed every time he found himself in the presence of a correctly-presented paradox.
Monsieur Ciboire got out of bed slowly and regretfully. Madame Ciboire, who was sensitive to cold, swathed herself in the bedclothes and flattened her nose against the wall—firmly decided, a superficial observer would have thought—to contemplate the flowers on the wallpaper at the closest possible range until death. A sonorous snoring, which rose up shortly afterwards, would, however, have proved the observer wrong.
Her husband opened the door and stumbled downstairs to the ground floor. Through the cracks in the shutters, the timid yellow morning light crept in from outside. When the shutters were open, Monsieur Ciboire was outlined against the black background of the room, lit by the oily stain of a lamp, like a character in a badly-reproduced etching. The street-lights, awaiting the heavy tread of the extinguisher who was bringing their night-caps, gave a flash of joy at the sight of him on the shop’s doorstep, which was for them a regular presage of pleasant slumber.
But Monsieur Ciboire did not look at the street-lights or the rare early morning pedestrians. He did not go, as he usually did, to stand momentarily on the sidewalk on the other side of the narrow street, with his flat hands hooked on to the front of his belt, to contemplate the familiar façade proudly. Above the iron bars surrounding the low bay of the shop swayed the sheet of canvas on which Brancowich had painted a Crowned Ox in colors whose crudity would have brought a smile to the faces of anyone who had ever set out to cook such an animal, in any kind of oven.
Glumly, the proprietor of the Crowned Ox started collecting the glasses and bottles left on the counter the previous evening. His eyes no longer paid any attention to the things that surrounded him. The philosophical poison was beginning to take effect. When Brancowich arrived, he expressed the desire to have a serious conversation with him. They were visible in the rear of the shop, to either side of a bottle of old wine, tracing geometric figures on the account slate. Their silhouettes were profiled as gesticulating black shadows on the frosted glass of the partition.
New theories were put forth in the following days, and the innkeeper felt the sane and calm ideas that had previously inhabited the narrow dwelling of his brain without any complaint become unsteadier with every passing minute. Now, he too debated in the pipe-smoke, under the puerile pretext of keeping his clients company, as a good host should. In the society of painters that frequented his establishment, his behavior was gradually transformed. His nascent skepticism gave him a pretext for irregularity. He went out in the evenings with Brancowich—and the disturbance imported into his conduct and the calmness of his employment was manifest when he returned from his nocturnal expeditions, in evidences of which the good Madame Ciboire, although astonished by the rejuvenation, did not complain.
It was, in fact, natural for him to discuss tastes as well as colors. His initial negations on the latter subject were gradually developed into timid conjectures, soon to be transformed into ferocious affirmations. As often happens, the placid ox, derided for his amiability, became a spirited bull.
He was seen strolling in the street, shaking his head at the signs whose illumination gave the neighboring houses the air of Medieval stalls. The merchant of colors and varnishes, whose shop was situated at the corner of the Rue Saint-Jacques and the Faubourg, a personal friend of M. Ciboire’s, was obliged to listen to him. The innkeeper profited from these moments of liberty to come and tell him about his theories. Since color did not exist, the sale of varied tubes, brushes and varnishes was an insult to common sense. The passers-by witnessed strange conflicts in which M. Ciboire hurled energetic abuse at his neighbor.
If he had ruined that commerce, his own was not worth much more. The painters, happy to have succeeded in their humorous enterprise, better than they could have hoped, took their paradoxes elsewhere. His habitual clients made the gesture of shaking their heads while raising a forefinger to the forehead sadly, whenever M. Ciboire turned his back. His wife, troubled by day with tyrannical explanations and at night by nightmares, thought of seeking refuge with her mother. Her remonstrations were in vain. Her husband’s madness only got worse. He bought technical books and dreamed of a great work that he would write, which would render his name immortal.
Anyway, although his wife did not appreciate him, and little children ran after him in the street, there were compensations. An avant-garde review, seduced by the theories that he explained to a few editors who had strayed into his establishment, entrusted essays in art criticism to his authorized pen.
From then on, he claimed the most rigorous rights from the external world. Only being able to modify, according to his whim, the things that he knew to be no more than a whim of his imagination, he wanted, at least, to see them differently. Evenings were taken up in the fabrication of an ingenious instrument designed to demonstrate his ideas. It was an enormous pair of spectacles in the form of a spherical skullcap, applied to both eyes and only allowing light to pass through the window that sealed them in. That mobile window-pane was, for M. Ciboire, the pretext for the wildest orgies of color. He adapted painted lenses—red, yellows, blues—to his spectacles, through which external objects seemed to him to be magnificently illuminated. It was a sort of magic lantern in which his eyes enjoyed the focal point. Thus, when he went out in the evening, with his two enormous portholes, one might have taken them for the red and tremulous headlights of an omnibus.
People came from far and wide to see him, driven by curiosity. He was cited, with ironic eulogies, in the medical journals. Reporters came to interview him. He talked to them about Nero, to whom he compared hims
elf because of the carved emerald that the Roman emperor had worn in his eye.
He had even better ideas. He made plans, briefly, to inject red madder or ultramarine blue into the very globe of the eye. His wife had a great deal of difficulty persuading him to renounce them.
She had stayed with him, in spite of everything, out of devotion. His madness got worse and became dangerous. Now, he bounded through his colorist doctrines like an acrobatic clown, bursting through them in the middle of painted paper hoops.
He had to be locked up. He languished behind the walls of an asylum, and then, after several weeks, died in a fit of frenzy. The exact cause of his death was an abuse of reason. One had to believe, he knew, that colors do not exist, but one nevertheless had to live as if they did. A true philosopher knows full well that there is nothing but appearances, but consents in practice to regard appearances as realities.
Monsieur Ciboire died at the age of forty years, six months and four days. A respectable funeral was held at the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, and his widow continued his business, having mourned him for a decent interval.
Eulogy to the Moon
For Anatole France28
The temple was illuminated with a yellow and placid light, which a wind fresher than the wind of tombs, coming through the high windows, caused to vacillate. The aisle was equal in its red splendor to that of any poem. From the numerous nave where my presence was evidently indecisive, a scene of absolute happiness was revealed to me. The attitude of the witnesses was resigned. All the usual features of churches were gilded by an ideal magic. Even the old women shifting their chairs and rattling the keys in their belts gave evidence in their bearing of a supreme and involuntary dignity. One sensed that the familiar ridicule associated with the person of sacristans and beadles was the indulgent ridicule of something holy. They were far above the most noble among us.
The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait Page 13