The Ark

by André Arnyvelde

  The king sat down on a bench, replete with the suave harmony of the garden, the beautiful disposition of its flights of steps, its stone balustrade, its low basin surrounded by vivid flowers, and its great trees, and he remained immobile, gently breathing the perfumed dusk.

  “Now,” he said to himself, “let’s put some order into our judgment. Here, then, men fly, penetrate the stars, go from one point of the earth to another without moving their limbs, cross mountains, rivers and torrents, traverse forests, cities, the countryside—those, at least, that separate Traese from Paris—in scarcely more time than it takes to blink…like the messenger who brought news to my traveling companions this morning. Certainly, strange privileges have been acquired by the people of this world. Nevertheless, I see them before me, in this very place, walking, sitting down and gesticulating just as Galadians do. And all the others, it seems to me—thus far, for what magic des the next minute have in store or me?—are similar to Galadians, two legs beneath the torso, a head above it, and a nose in the middle of the face...

  “Yes indeed…but inside that torso…yes…inside, with what palpitations must their hearts beat? Behind their forehead, what light must their mind recreate? And of what emotions, what passions, what desires, what joys are those palpitations and that light made? In Gyzir, eating well, being rich, well-dressed, decorated…in Gyzir, health, glory, Paradise, the love of women, were the only immutable goals, the source and summit of dreams, desires and delights...

  “Certainly, also for those rare individuals who attained the elevation of a Mnektes, the possession of Wisdom...

  “But what am I saying? In Gyzir, were there so many goals? If I can judge by myself, and my cruel ordeal, and the vow that followed it, nothing soon existed for me any longer that was worth being loved, as soon as the love of women was forbidden to me! And it was as if all other goals and other joys immediately dried up for me…and desubstantiated one by one into distractions!”

  Feeling as if his soul were spreading out within him, he went on: “Oh, blessed be that ordeal! And blessed be my vow, which, truly inspired by heaven, led me via ennui and the privation of joy to discover the secret route to the world!

  “Nevertheless, if by privation of amour, all other joys and distractions came to dry up within me, how thin, it must be said, were Galadian joys and distractions!

  “Ah, for those of this world, I would swear...

  “My God, how pitiful would the people of this world judge such a case to be!

  “Even though very new among them, I would swear, that those who have, I sense, more distractions than a great bear of our forests has hairs on its entire body, those not only have an extend of the earth to come and go, all garnished with forests flowers, monuments, cities, domestic machines—compared with which my homeland is like a little heap of sand—but have all the roads of that earth open before them, and also roads above the earth and similarly below it, doubtless having what is necessary for prodigious distraction from amour, either do not accord it the importance that I accorded it, or, being humans and similar to the humans of Galade, they make it the sum of all joys, what an astonishing amour, containing them all and surpassing them all, their amour must be!

  “Oh, assuredly blessed was my vow, and very useful at this moment. How could I approach a woman here? What a figure I would cut, and how could I avoid her laughing in my face? What pale words and what poor little fêtes could I offer—me, a narrow Galadian—to her, who knows what there is in the stars, can doubtless be given the moon, other than in songs, and who must enjoy all the natural prodigies as much as my beautiful lady-friends in Gyzir enjoy the adornments and precious stones that they take out of their golden caskets, and caused to jump between their fingers from one hand to another...

  “Oh, how can I think of loving? First…first…to learn...

  “That’s it, Sire of Galade, my good friend! Of course! The wherewithal to love, and without betraying the vow.... Open your eyes, Sire de Galade, Emmanuel, and with all the force of your young heart… Work, Sire, work to know what humans have become…men, women and amour…in the six hundred years that you have been sleeping the great sleep of Galade!”

  At that moment, music rose up in the beautiful garden, some distance away, and the king, extracted from his reflections, immediately looked in the direction from which the sounds were coming—but at first he only saw a compact crowd circling slowly around a little pavilion. Soon, through the rare and narrow gaps in that crowd, he perceived musicians dressed in military costumes sitting in the pavilion and playing instruments of gleaming brass.

  A young man went past the bench were the king was sitting, holding a brightly-dressed young woman by the arm. The couple were chatting gaily, At the first sounds, the young man said to his companion: “Beethoven.” They sat down nearby on iron chairs.

  The king looked at the musicians again, while an astonishing emotion took hold of him, which came from musical chords rising up from the group of instruments, with such an amplitude and power that they were, so to speak, fixed in his soul, and obliged him to listen, as an idle stroller along the shore of the ocean can be suddenly nailed to the spot by the sight of an immense wave springing from the midst of the calm waves, which submerges the shore in an instant, and everything, in front of that stupefied, anguished passer-by, simultaneously struck with admiration.

  Far from spreading out and slowly being absorbed, like a wave, however, the chords were further amplified, and continued rising, extending above the crowd surrounding the pavilion, above the crowd scattered about the garden, above the statues and the trees, beyond the clouds, reaching the sky, clothing it, developing something akin to another sky, tumultuous and multicolored; they espoused the air, the light, becoming confused with them, substituted for them, making gazes, hands and nostrils of dazzled ears.

  Gripped by an ineffable vertigo, the king allowed himself to be lifted from the earth, balanced by the subtle waves, feeling his heart turbulent with the rhythm of the impetuous movement, his blood rushing like lava through his veins, confusedly recovering the sensation of being snatched away that he had experienced during the departure from Traese, but with as much superb and veritable voluptuous emotion as he had then felt dolor and fear.

  The king did not know of any music other than the popular songs of the villages of Galade, which shepherds, washerwomen and drunkards sang, the plainsong of the churches, transmitted by the priests, and a few joyful operas to which the ballerinas of the court had danced before his vow, which lords invented between an amorous night and a hunting party. Instruments were not very numerous in Galade: sistrums, cistoles, mandoras, cymbals, rebecs, flutes, trumpets and horns. The musical emotions of the king had scarcely ever been anything but melancholy in church, playful in ballets. What was this music, which, abruptly and imperiously penetrated his soul and his heart, kneading them, as if juggling with them, invading the sky, usurping the light: that formidable tide by which all realities were submerged, and whose flux created a hundred others?

  But it became slow and murmurous, that music, then brisk and cheerful, soon descending once again toward the earth. It hung on to the flowers, rippled the water in the basin, slid between the trees and rose up again into the sky: gallop, charge, cascade, zephyr, cries of infants playing in the flower-beds, clamors of the crowd, sobs, prayers....something strange occurred. All the intimacy of the king was exhaled, adapted itself to, modeled itself on, the music; all the confusion, all the chaos of his mind since the departure from Traese, the marvels of an unsuspected world, and his still-unresolved problems, and the profundities of him, of his former being and his present being, of the child, the young man, his games and amours, his joys and his chagrins…all of it issued from him in a living population, of which the music was the palpitating blood and sap...

  Yes, it was really thus that he had run and played in the flowery paths of the royal park, that he had ridden through the woods of Galade, and those cries of passion and joy, he had uttered
them…but how much fainter, scarcely whimpering…how many cries and infantile games there had been in six hundred years! That music evoked, but it immensified... Of what joy, of what sobs, was it the expression? Oh, if it was with that force and that magnificence, that the beings of this world loved, suffered, dreamed, their life must truly be what he had sensed!

  Yes, it really was that. The music affirmed it. It resolved problems. If these beings dreamed and suffered, and if they still loved, the music affirmed, and measured, there were giants and kings in this world...

  Silence fell. He rediscovered the enchanted garden in the blond dusk. He got up from the bench, and moved his numb body. And as the music resumed, he was afraid... He knew enough… He felt happy, but weary, as if exhausted.

  Without hearing any more, he went out of the garden.

  Incident

  For me, a very truthful storyteller, it is not easy to describe in detail the actions and emotions of the king between that first day and a singular event that happened to him after he had visited Paris for a long time, and the principal capitals of Europe. About that singular event I shall be able to say everything I know, as you will see, in any case, in the following chapter—but before then, I would have liked to show you the king in the streets of Paris, on the great boulevards, at the theater, at concerts, and then on the shore of the Mediterranean, in Venice, in Florence, in Rome, and then in Berlin, at Bayreuth, and also in London...

  Except that I was not with him. I only know what he has told me orally. It was in accordance with his account that I have been able to reconstruct the intoxication of his Beethovian contact, and the idea he formed of our complex humanity on emerging from that contact.

  When I was his friend, he was a laborer—to be more precise, a laborer employed in working on the excavations for the Métropolitain railway in the Place Saint-Michel11—so I can only say, about his adventures in Paris, his travels in Italy, Germany and England, what he told me in retracing the course of his memories. In detail, that would require a volume double or triple the size of this one. Assuredly, in substance, I prefer humbly to let everyone imagine what the impressions of a young traveler twenty years old before Notre-Dame de Paris and the panorama that extends to the left and the right of the Pont Royal, in the morning, in the vaporous dawn, and the evening, when the reddening sun sprinkles, like a magical powder-puff, a gilded dust over the Tuileries, the Cours-la-Reine and the hills of Passy; before Santa Maria della Salute in Venice; before Donatello’s Saint George that stands in the very street in a niche in the Orsanmichele church in Florence; before…before…never mind! I’m not Baedeker and my recitation of his enthusiasms would be tedious for you, who are reading me and who know as well as I do what can be said about that, by virtue of having read all the poets and all the estheticians, or by virtue of having contemplated it yourself.

  Undoubtedly, I would amuse you if I reported that the king, having gone into a music hall on the grand boulevards of Paris, was even more impressed by the play of the lights and machinery than by the songs, the dances and the acrobatics. The beauty of the dances touched him by virtue of the generous harmony to which the slimness and beauty of each dancer contributed. Having heard one of his neighbors manifest to a companion the pleasure that he would have in holding one of those dancers in his arms, he did not think for a moment that it could be for one of the embraces to which he was accustomed himself with the ballerinas if Gyzir, but certainly for a reason of an order superior to anything he could imagine.

  Shall I tell you how the king left Paris for the first time? One morning, when the sky was gray and the air cold, while he was going along the boulevard, his attention was attracted by a painted image stuck to a wooden panel, which represented a brightly sunlit country on the edge of an azure sea. He looked at the dull sky, and then the establishment, which, on the window of its door announced in large colored letters: Travel Agency. He opened the promising door, went in, and said that he wanted to go to that beautiful sunlight.

  A man clad in a somber uniform brightened by gilded buttons, coiffed in a cap with the name of the company inscribed in gold thread, got him to give some money to a man seated in a cage, and asked him to follow him. He had the king climb into a little automobile stationed outside the door. The vehicle conveyed the king and his companion to a nearby railway station in the blink of an eye. The uniformed man took the king to a train whose machine was puffing out dense spirals of black smoke, handed him a small piece of paper, bowed respectfully and went away as the train departed.

  A few hours later the king was on the shore of the blue sea, beneath the bright sun, in the middle of flowery summer.

  It was from there, after having stayed there for a week or two, that the king went to visit Italy…but as I say, a great many pages would be necessary to describe his journeys in detail. It is decidedly necessary to pass over them, and to permit myself to show you the moment when, full of contemplation, having acquired a little more certainty every day of the size of the world and the beauty of living, he found himself in Paris without a sou in his pocket, having spent in the course of his travels all the gold that he had brought from Galade.

  On the advice of the old lady who managed the hotel where he had stayed in the first days after his arrival, he had confided all his gold to a bank, which had given him in exchange for the gold a little booklet made up of pages with stubs, on which he only had to write, in accordance with his caprice, the sum of which he had need, in order to receive it immediately from any bank in the country he was traversing.

  One Sunday afternoon he perceived while making a purchase in the street that he had come out without any money. It was necessary for him to return to his current hotel and ask for a few coins in exchange for one of the pages in his booklet, because the banks were closed on Sundays. Mechanically, he took the booklet out of his pocket and opened it, His attention was vaguely alerted, although he was thinking about something else, by the fact that there was only one page left in the booklet, and that on the stub of the penultimate page, above a very small number, was written “funds remaining.”

  What? he said to himself, without losing his customary good humor. Don’t I have any more money?

  He reflected, standing still, suddenly gripped by the circumstance, full of unforeseen consequences. He went through the stubs in the booklet, back to the beginning, and saw that he really had exhausted, except for the minimal sum marked as “funds remaining,” the entire sum indicated on the first leaf.

  Uh oh! he thought, a trifle anguished. Am I going to find myself a prisoner in Paris, without even having the means to go back to Galade if I want to?

  Return to Galade…I’ve scarcely thought about it. Have I not come back to Paris to learn, in this great city, the thousand profound things that I still need to know before telling my dear people, judiciously, about all the splendors of a world ignored for too long?

  …

  Of course!

  He had remembered an episode in Galadian history. Toward 1500, his ancestor Georgis the Headstrong, after a violent war in which all Galade had been at odds, had been obliged to flee Gyzir and take refuge for some time, hiding his sovereign dignity, among the miners of Boudroude, sharing their life and their mores, and giving not the slightest indication, even during his worst labors, that he was King Georgis.

  Of course! He was strong, young, hardy and self-confident. He too would work with his hands—his vigorous hands—and his strong shoulders...

  He went back to his hotel, changed the last page of the booklet, summoned the bellboy who normally served him to his room, and asked him: “Tell me, what can a man without money do, in Paris?”

  “With all due respect, Monsieur,” the bellboy replied. “die of starvation.”

  Another Parenthesis

  One day, in Rome, the king was leaving the little church of San Pietro in Vincoli, where he had just spent a long time before Michelangelo’s Moses, when a drunkard collided rudely with him. The latter had come awa
y from the wall that he normally used as a point of support for his vacillating march, and was desperately trying to get back to it—which is to say that he was extending his arms in one direction, and then the other, and zigzagging in the direction of his extended arms. The king, happening to be between the arms and the wall, had received the man’s impetus. He pushed him away, his mind elsewhere; the drunkard fell, and the king, taking pity on him, helped him to get up again—but the drunkard’s rubicund face, stupid gaze and foaming lips left him for a few moments with an image that superimposed itself over the warm memory of Michelangelo’s statue.

  “Beside that, this!” he murmured.

  As one can imagine, the king had encountered drunkards many a time: men of the people with gross gestures, individuals clad in rags, workers with black hands. How could he not be astonished that in a world of which he had the certainty that it was a liberated, magnificent world, a world of kings and giants, brutes, wretches and slaves still existed…?

  Fundamentally, the king’s mind was that of a Medieval king. A Christian, he readily admitted that all men were brothers, that the unshakable justice of God and the infinite mercy of his Son made them equal in Paradise—but not on earth. As soon as he arrived in Paris, he had felt a assurance forming within him that life on earth, as it was presented to him there, was not a vale of tears, as Monseigneur Gohain had preached to him in little Galade, and that the beings of this earth were great and inflated by superior amours; he had not taken into consideration the poor, who were as poor here as they were in Galade and everywhere else.

  The stoker of the locomotive that had drawn him toward the Mediterranean, such as he saw him walking idly alongside the train during a halt, was evidently not a man who took his place in the category of those he considered to be the men of this astonishing world. Certainly, that stoker traversed the earth without moving his legs; he profited naturally, from the benefits of an enlarged life, but he had remained—black, sweaty, bent down before the furnace on the narrow iron platform—among the number of all those men of all times and places whose function is to serve other men.