I saw flourishing before me the ultimate branch of the tree of evil. According to its ineluctable law, it was those who had sought good beyond the common law that corruption had attained and who had become the priests of ugliness. Unfortunate Essenes, so full of good intentions in the beginning, they aspired to contemplate the symbolic degeneration of beauty! And I was among them, scarcely more conscious and just as consumed by fear to the marrow of my bones. For fear was curbing heads, causing eyelids to flutter and teeth to chatter.
My gaze strayed momentarily over the backs inclined in front of me.
I was surprised by the abnormal curvature of necks, the movement of faces suddenly changed into snouts. I was at a gathering of beasts, in the midst of pigs in the process of adoring the radiant visage of intelligence turned to evil. I was participating in that festival of retrogression. I was about to see the living representation of it, by the material pollution of a pure body.
It was then that a strange power took possession of me. I do not know whether I uttered a cry, but the room was filled by a sound that emerged from a human throat, which had a resonance simultaneously terrible and insensate. That noise must have augmented the ambient terror at the same time as, by virtue of an interior alchemy whose explanation is impossible, it mutated my own terror into a divine courage.
The impetus that shoved me forward carried me to the extremity of that long room as if there was only a single pace to cross. I had the sensation of people abruptly knocked over to the right and left, groaning, but I did not have the leisure to seek the cause of their fall. I was possessed by a project that I had to realize immediately, and that realization occurred as soon as the project was conceived.
I remember the perfect delight that inundated me when I seized with both hands the great bronze lamp to the right of the azured divan and raised it above my head.
It seemed to me that I was a knight of light, covered in silver armor, and that I was lifting an enchanted sword. With all my strength, I brought that lamp down, which seemed light to me but was made of heavy bronze, on the marble visage, on the evil intelligence, on the Lucifer of distant ages.
The head, collapsing noisily, brought down the second lamp, which went out at the same time as the one I had just broken as I brought it down. As if he had received the blow himself, Monsieur Althon fell to the ground, his arms open, doubtless in order to pick up the fragments of a treasure that must be inestimable to him. Confusedly, I saw Kotzebue, livid and recoiling, shouting: “Wretch!” at me, and extending an arm before his face. With the bronze stump that remained in my hand I struck the naked man who, by virtue of professional instinct, tried to throw himself upon me, and his fall dragged down the third lamp, with the result that the room was plunged into darkness, the opacity of which multiplied the terror therein.
Trembling, Eveline had remained by the door. She had only made one gesture in the midst of the general disorder, that of picking up the peignoir that was at her feet and throwing it over her shoulders. My lucidity redoubled with my delight. I launched myself toward her, seized her by the arm and drew her through the door, which I slammed behind me
I did not know whether there was an exit in that direction and the darkness was profound; it was Eveline who guided me. She reached a stairway that must have been a service stairway and we found ourselves on the ground floor, in the kitchen by which I had come in. The moon illuminated us, but it seemed to me that Eveline did not recognize me. A great tumult reached us from the first floor.
“I’ll go with you,” I said.
I had scarcely pronounced those words than Eveline had opened the door and run outside.
My astonishment was so great that I let a few seconds go by. When I came out behind her she was already some distance away. I launched myself after her and even called out to her several times. I heard the sound of footfalls from the direction of the garden. And I saw forms fleeing. I was held back by brambles, in the midst of which I became entangled. I finally reached the small side-road that Eveline had taken, but she had disappeared. I started running as fast as I could, I feared that the state of distraction in which she was might push her to some irrational action. I perceived her silhouette under a group of pines, and then a little further on, alongside the wall of the convent. The road she was following led back to her house.
I had succeeded in getting closer to her. I called to her again. I did not know, however, what I wanted to say to her, and if she had retraced her steps perhaps I would have been mute before her. But she did not turn round. I saw her go through the hedge that separated the road from here garden, at the exact spot where Monsieur Althon, a year before, had uttered a cry of hatred on perceiving her, and had doubtless conceived the project that I had just aborted.
She reached the threshold of the door and I heard the battens close loudly.
Then I stopped. I listened. Another door closed inside the house. Everything became silent again. The moon seemed to me to be icier above the landscape, more motionless. In the far distance, the barking of a dog on a farm dragged on with infinite sadness. A eucalyptus leaf spun and came to fall at my feet, like a regret.
And it seemed to me that, for having attempted to save Eveline from evil, beauty was forever lost for me on earth.
How long after the scene I have just recounted was it that I visited the exhibition in Nice? I can’t remember.
Around me, a few rare visitors were laughing and pointing at canvases they judged incomprehensible. But scarcely had I entered that I was struck by astonishment before the first picture I contemplated, so much did I sense the profound life of the color and the landscape penetrate to the roots of my being.
It was sunset over abandoned fields. There were feet of sick vines, twisted by old storms and trees deprived of leaves that one sensed to be so poor in sap that they were about to expire. In the foreground, sunk to the knees in muddy furrows, a semi-human creature was making a powerful effort to extract itself from the shifting earth. That creature was not a woman, for the extremity of its limbs extended in roots and even its legs were formed of vegetal tissues. But the body had an animal form, was hairy, and the grossness of the belly gave the impression that it was pregnant. One of its arms was drawing from the redoubtable soil a sort of larva, a phantom of a child, streaming with mud and covered with herbal filaments. But the breasts and shoulders of the creature were human and covered by the softly veiled complexion of feminine flesh. The contour became increasingly delicate as it rose toward the face. And that face covered by a dolorous beauty in which, shining distinctly in the gleam of the eyes, were hope and courage, that face whose temples were radiant with amour, had a perfect resemblance to Laurence.
Over that struggle of the creature enchained to obscure matter, who wanted to become spirit, the painter had caused the supernatural light of a sun the color of blood to fall. A line of sterile hills cut the horizon, but the shade of the sky above the hills was sufficient to make one think that there was a more favored valley further away, with grapes on the vines and flowers on the trees.
I started considering the other paintings. In all of them, there was Laurence’s face, and in all of them, under different symbolisms, through multiple subjects, I found the same conception of an extraction from imperious matter that holds humans by the roots, and in all of them there was, evoked by a ray of light, an incomplete horizon or a star in dense might, the sentiment of an ideal landscape that was further away, invisible, inaccessible and yet real, in another world.
Who was the painter who could only imagine an individual with Laurence’s gaze? My astonishment increased further. There were paintings in which my personal imaginations had taken substance, to the point that I wondered momentarily whether it was not me that had given birth to that gallery of dreams, during hours of unconsciousness.
I saw a public dance-hall full of animals with an orchestra of negroes charged with carcans and chains. The drinks were represented by incandescent embers, and those who had lifted them to t
heir lips had frightful burns that magnified the design of their mouths. In the center of the dance-floor floated a nebulous aerial form whose head was that of Laurence, and at the extremity of her robe of light trailed a dog with the face of a demon, on which Laurence was casting a gaze full of pity. I recognized the Bal Wagram by the style of the columns that framed the painting and the gigantic door to the toilets toward which the human-animal couples were flooding.
As I was certainly not the author of the painting, I thought that it was me who was represented by the dog with the demonic head, and in considering it further, I found that it was indeed painted in my image with a rigorous exactitude.
Demons often recurred in the canvases of that painter so fraternally close to me. There was one who was kissing Laurence on the lips, but who was weeping so sadly while giving her that kiss that my heart was moved by it, remembering myself. There was a demon of avarice represented by a fat man with a pelisse and a rosette of the Légion d’honneur, who was sprawled on banknotes and had just perceived the vanity of his amour, for his eyes expressed an infinite despair.
One picture showed Laurence lying down and offering herself to the demon of lust. It was a larger canvas than the others, in which the quivering fat flesh, the overflowing bellies the gelatinous torsos and the acned faces of men reddened with abject rictuses of desire. The lower part of Laurence’s body, camped on the ravaged bed of a brothel, had an obscene movement, the thrust of a resolute and remorseless offering. But her features were those of a martyr whose flesh is being tortured and who is attaining by the excess of suffering the ecstatic illumination of sanctity.
The painting that struck me the most, because it opened a new door to my meditations, represented a sunken road rising toward a hilltop beyond which one perceived desolate landscapes extending to infinity. The sunken road was strewn with stones, somber and enclosed; the hilltop was desolate, the distant horizon a succession of deserts. A meager Christ, naked and stooped, so thin that one could see his ribs, so stooped that he seemed hunchbacked, was advancing painfully, leaning on the arm and shoulder of a Lucifer equally emaciated and hunchbacked, who was climbing the hill with him. Fatigue was visible in the jutting of the muscles, the droplets of sweat, the bloody feet. An enormous cross weighed upon their common shoulders, and one sensed from the movement of arms and the tension of necks the double effort that each of them was making to assume the heavier part of the burden and liberate his companion slightly. The Christ and the demon were supporting one another like two brothers. They were not looking at the low and heavy sky above them, or the immense extent of the deserts they had to cross. They were turned toward one another, their faces full of pity, and one could see that they were deriving a marvelous comfort from the division of their misery and the sentiment of their reciprocal love.
Who was the painter whose soul contained such an elevated conception of fraternity? I ran to a little glazed compartment in which an employee was standing as wan and fleshless as the Christ and the Lucifer of the painting. But the resemblance stopped at that emaciation. The gaze, behind the spectacles, was vile. With a gesture of scorn that embraced both the painter and the person who was interested in the painter, he handed me a catalogue and I read a name: Drevet.
That name told me nothing at first, but on considering a portrait that was on the catalogue, I seemed to see a face that resembled that portrait in the cloud of ancient memories. That face was slumped next to an empty glass and several cups, in Alberte’s bar, and it reflected brutality and hostility in my regard.
Drevet! That was the alcoholic painter, the degenerate Bohemian that I had known in Alberte’s bar, and whom Laurence, with her innate liking for the spoiled and the wretched, had immediately found so sympathetic.
Phrases of hers returned to memory.
“I’m sure that he would have a great deal of talent, if he contrived to work, if someone loved him enough to make him work.” And when I had asked her how she could have such an idea on that subject, she had replied in a natural tone: “But I recognize immediately those who have a need to be aided by a little happiness. There are so many people who do not realize themselves because of that little bit of happiness that no one has ever given them.”
I was at an exhibition of Drevet’s works and I saw Laurence idealized in every canvas. And those canvases, perhaps incomprehensible for the public that was looking at them and mocking them, appeared to me to be profound, revelatory and sublime.
Where was Drevet? Where had he painted my own dreams? How had he escaped the nightmares of alcohol and by what astonishing communication did he respond my soul in his visions?
The villainy of the employee’s gaze had informed me that I could, with money, obtain what I desired to know concerning Drevet.
I interrogated him, and he spoke, punctuating his discourse with scornful shakes of the head and sniggers of hate.
Drevet was a wretch. He meant “wretch” in the sense of poor, and he stressed that poverty, which seemed to him, a petty employee in an exhibition hall in Nice, was the most withering thing of which one could accuse anyone, the utmost degree of abjection. The pauper was an alcoholic who was no longer drinking for the moment, but would certainly drink again. He was also consumptive. At that point the employee tapped his chest forcefully to emphasize the gravity of the disease and also the joy he felt in announcing Drevet’s imminent demise. For there are people who have unmerited strokes of luck, and the alcoholic painter Drevet was one of them. He had found, God knows where, a woman who was willing to go with anyone at all, who was useful to him. She was devoted to him, like a bitch. She admitted him, she made him paint, she found him the subjects of his paintings. Who knew, perhaps it was even her who painted them. She did herself harm in order to sell those daubs. If there was an exhibition it was her who arranged it with the boss. Ha ha! And the art-lovers. They sometimes bought these horrors very dear, because they knew that they could have the woman into the bargain. Ha ha! The painter was very content He was painting now, but he would soon be drinking again. Poor people! Paupers! Wretches!
I asked whether they lived in Nice.
Yes, yes, they had settled here like all the consumptives who came to die. They had a shack in the suburbs...
I made a note of the address and fled,
I took a tram. I searched for a long time for that road bordered by gardeners’ houses, in an outlying district staged in the midst of stones, overlooking the sea. The afternoon was reaching its end.
It was a very small, very straight road. On one side there was a file of wooden fences, absolutely similar, with modern houses constructed on the same model, and on the other, waste ground strewn with wild cacti, old newspapers and food-tins. Every fence had a number painted in blue, far too large for the exiguity of the domains whose threshold they decorated. The gardens one perceived were almost all composed of neatly aligned cabbages, over which tomatoes hanging from pickets made red patches. Only the number ten, before which I intended to pass, had a garden devoid of vegetables, where there was nothing but a folding chair and an empty easel. At another time, that landscape, with its crepuscular nostalgia, would have given me a desire to weep, and I would have fled without even reaching the threshold of number ten.
But a little breath of warm tenderness passed through me, similar to the effluvium that emanates from a place where people are happy. I advanced along the road. At a window of the house there was a raised pink curtain. I recognized Irma Pascaud behind the pane, who was sewing. She had a tranquil and mild profile and she was following the movement of her needle with a placid attention. The wooden gate had only been pushed to, as if someone would soon return.
I continued marching straight ahead.
And suddenly I perceived them. But I had no fear of being seen myself, so much were they thinking of each other and occupied by their own presence, Laurence was holding Drevet’s arm, and she was squeezing it proudly. He was walking like a man who has just escaped a great danger and was now saved.
They were leaning on one another with an attitude similar to that of the Christ and the Lucifer in the painting I had just seen. They were the Christ and the Lucifer, the redeemer and the sinner, and I divined above their heads the cross of life that it would be necessary for them to bear until the end of time.
I was on a hill. I started to descend slowly. The light of the setting sun illuminated me obliquely. Street lamps were lighting up here and there. The landscape that unfurled before my eyes, of stony slopes, a little clump of pines, and three fig-trees in the middle of a field, appeared to me to be clad in a noble and familiar grandeur. The sky over the suburb was a more profound, more limitless blue. The resonance of sounds penetrated further into the heart.
The window of a small grocery at the corner of two streets suddenly lit up. Oh, how pleasant it would have been for me to go in any purchase oil or coffee and carry them lightly toward a house where beloved individuals were waiting for me! Oh, how light the cross would be for the two companions on the sunken road who were sustaining one another!
I perceived that tears were running down my face, but it was all the same to me, I watched internally, with a pious curiosity and a total absence of self-pity, the images of a life unfurl that would never be mine.
No, it was not grief that I experienced but a sudden comprehension of the value off souls and of my own soul, and that discovery was so passionate that it enabled all regret to be effaced.
I had arrived at a crossroads where people were passing by. Shutters closed over a window. I passed children who were going home.
My God, how simple life is, in sum. Everything is clear. The last are really the first. The gift of oneself, to which I gave the name of sin, is the most divine holocaust of amour. Fortunate are those who have understood that it is necessary to extract oneself from the furrow of terrestrial mud and incline toward the beautiful landscape of light that is always further away beyond the mountain, and of the existence of which one is uncertain. My God, you have not extended malediction over anyone, No pact links to evil. Everyone has his task on earth somewhere. It is sufficient to discover it and execute it humbly.
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