Transcriber’s Note
Italic text displayed as: _italic_
MR. ANTIPHILOS, SATYR
MR. ANTIPHILOS, SATYR
By REMY DE GOURMONT
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
_By_ JOHN HOWARD
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
JACK LEWIS
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
LIEBER & LEWIS
_MCMXXII_
Copyright, 1922,
By LIEBER & LEWIS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_Contents_
MR. ANTIPHILOS, SATYR
Introduction 9
To the Amazon 27
Apparition 43
La Fosca 57
The Afternoon of a Faun 73
Cydalise 85
Metamorphosis 95
The Cell 107
The Satyr! The Satyr! 119
Fennel Water 131
Erebus 143
Diogenes 155
Déidamie 167
The Cluster of Grapes 179
The Unknown Woman 193
Flight 205
COLORS
Blue 219
Zinzoline 239
White 259
INTRODUCTION
In an age when democratic ideas, levelling processes and the
popularization of thought are in vogue, the phenomenon of a Remy de
Gourmont emphasizing the aristocratic virtues, drawing attention to the
perfect detachment demanded by literature and art, makes one pause as
though transported to a different world, to a less nervous existence.
Gourmont, the aristocrat of letters, the thinker who could shrug his
shoulders amusedly at current acceptances of progress, modernity and
evolution, never for an instant ceased battling for a more discriminate
attitude towards life and letters. He permitted none of his carefully
reared mansions of the intellect to be sullied by aught that could not
pass the tests of “relative” truth and sincerity,—the very truth and
sincerity which the delightful dissociator of ideas loved to mock, when
the whim seized him. His was the mechanism of a brain “heedless to
please other than by the originality of thought and charm of style.”
It matters not what subject Gourmont attacks or woos. He can be
depended upon to take a view the opposite of the conventionally
accepted one. Whether the subject under treatment be women, art,
religion, style or customs, his piercing mind shrewdly discovers the
accumulations of prejudice and stupidity, scrapes off the patina of
rust from the medals of time.
He has said: “I do not love prisons of any sort.” His whole life was
a fight for intellectual freedom, waged in the seclusion of his study
with his army of ideas continually engaged against the enemy. He
early found that the only fruitful research was the research of the
non-true. This quest occupied him during his lifetime.
He achieved this by the methods of paradox and dissociation. Yet, after
having seen himself praised or blamed for this first quality, he felt
free to disclaim the gift. “I have done wrong,” he writes, “to give the
impression to the malicious that my mind has a turn for the paradox.
I never pursued it deliberately. Besides, I do not pretend to dictate
judgments concerning me. A mind of any toughness will always seem
paradoxical to timorous spirits.”
Gourmont’s individualism was pronounced to an unusual degree.
Individualism with most men is usually a rhetorically graceful gesture,
a toying attitude, a hesitant attempt at sincerity hindered by the
fear of public opprobrium; there are always the consequences of
social ostracism or worse. It leads effectually to antinomianism, the
violation of ethical codes. It becomes a harmless pose, belied by
the very words or acts of those who profess it as the basis of their
lives. Gourmont’s sincerity is testified by the tough boldness, the
crystal consistency of his writings. The best way, he always believed,
to ennoble the world is by self-development. “True charity is the act
of the conscious man living according to his own personality and the
rules of his inner and individual logic. Such a man gives what he has
and is.... He offers only the natural opulence of a generous egotism,
conforming to the divine rhythm and adequate to the divine movements.”
And the world would be much better for all, he writes elsewhere, if one
admitted the idea that society is made for the individual and not the
individual for society. “The individual is the important thing.”
The rich diversity of life made him realize how useless it was to
attempt to be oracular, to utter the indisputable, final truths of
the master. No two leaves are alike; no two human beings are alike.
This premise led to his indifference to absolutes, to the doctrines
with which men like to be fooled and entertained. He began and
ended with the idealistic, Schopenhaurian formula: “the world is my
representation.” Not what is, but what seems to be, seen through the
lens of my mind, is what I can depend upon. It followed, as a matter
of course, that he could be lenient toward many points of view, and
his Catholicism of mind is seen to advantage in _The Book of Masks_
where he has enthusiastic, appreciative words for writers united by
nothing but the name of “Symbolisme.” A further corollary was the
need of tolerance to other men’s truths. But some truths are absurd.
Shall I, Remy de Gourmont, be receptive to ugliness and hypocrisy? A
puzzling problem! Either I must be receptive to all perceptions, good
or bad, all beliefs, sincere or dissembled, or I must be suspicious of
everything. Irony and pity are the roads to freedom. What is the use of
being bellicose and vengeful toward what, in the end, does not matter?
So, in his most serious onslaughts, there is something of the amused
playboy.
One cannot help admiring his eclecticism. He saw that symbolism was
but a loose name joining many diverse talents. He took pains to show
that the popularly accepted meaning of decadence is pure trash,
since it is applied to writers whose virtues of originality and
creativeness contradict the true meaning of a down-hill movement, of
imitation and conceited artificiality. He had a good word, the proper
word invariably, for the mysticism of Maeterlinck, the obscurity of
Mallarmé’s ineffable poems, the clanging strength of Verhaeren, the
velvety dreaminess of Samain, the startling genius of Rimbaud, the
anti-democratic idealism of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, the paganism of
Louys, the jeweled fatuity of Montesquiou. He permitted no hard and
fast rules to interfere with the sensitive apparatus of his mind.
Receptivity was a prerequisite. As a result, he is a critic sympathetic
to the core, appreciative of all works partaking of distinction and
charm.
He has given French literature something new. Never before has there
been anything like his novels, where the brilliant youths “denude
themselves with a proud candor.” All his characters are expressions
of the complete life of a superior brain; they have one thing in
common, scepticism. But as André de Fresnois says, it is “a scepticism
necessitated by the richness of an infinitely supple sensibility, and
not the frozen scepticism of a worldly lecturer; a scepticism that is
disdain, pity, intelligence especially, and not impotence.”
Amy Lowell speaks of his preoccupation with sex which has robbed his
books, she thinks, of the large view they might have had, and says that
he is therefore one for whom English readers will have little sympathy.
Whether true or not, it is beside the question of art. Sincerity first,
is his credo. In a brief essay on “The Role of Art,” he writes:
“Art has a special and altogether egotistic end: it is an end in
itself. It does not willingly assume any mission, whether religious,
social, or moral. It is humanity’s supreme game; it is the sign of
man; it affirms the divine; it tends to depart from contingencies;
it desires to be free, useless, absurd, that is to say in disaccord
with the very forces of nature which hold man in a narrow servitude.”
And as “art is not made for the people nor the people for art,” and
further, as “art is a perpetual exception,” he felt himself free to
create men who console themselves for their inability to harmonize
their thoughts with the workaday world, by trifling, delicate love
affairs. But his characters turn away weariedly even from their
_amours_. That is a preoccupation with coarseness which his sensitive
creations cannot long endure. They are martyrs to their ideas, men who
have sought happiness so long and uselessly that they abandon the quest
as hopeless and betake themselves to art and _café_ conversations. His
men reflect so much that they cannot act. Gourmont makes one of his
persons say: “Although I may be the dupe of my pride, I much prefer
this to being the dupe of my feelings.”
They have personality, but no character, amoral beings reflecting
the complexity of Gourmont himself. “I do not wish to believe, to
suffer, to be happy, to be duped. I regard, I observe, I judge, I
smile.” Yes, it is a tired smile his imaginary personages have, a
smile of disillusionment from knowing too much, a smile of mingled
helplessness and power. It is because they live in their fortresses of
thought and are so helpless when they wish to transfer their ideas to
life. Each one, like his creator, inhabits a _tour d’ivoire_. Thought
is so fertile in possibilities that his characters live a complete
life within their brains, and like Des Esseintes, in Huysman’s _A
Rebours_, have a contemptuous disgust for the compromises of the world.
But unlike Des Esseintes, they _will_ wander from their elaborately
constructed esthetic prisons. The Gourmontian characters are strong
when detached from life and the need to act; they have recourse to
brilliant talk that scintillates with cynicism and conceals their
childish incapacity to meet the world on its own terms.
His men are hurled into abysms of doubt through their superior
sophistication. Hubert D’Entragues devotes himself by taste, rather
than need, to the craft of letters, and spends his mornings developing
elaborate sequence poems after the manner of the medieval latinists,
inventing situations for imaginary characters, constructing a
symbolistic novel to parallel his futile love affair with Sixtine,
the young widow. He lives for himself; the world does not exist; like
Gourmont, he is a philosophic idealist. But the ghost of contradiction
leaves its shroud and haunts the exquisite scorner. He confides his
doubts to a friend:
“We are not mummers and applause does not make us blush with joy.
But if we write neither for universal suffrage nor to earn money, we
become truly incomprehensible.”
“Write for your mistress.”
“I have none.”
“Write for Botticelli’s Madonna.”
“That is what I am doing.”
Truly an unsatisfactory conclusion, this writing for the Madonna of
Botticelli, but following logically from the axiom that art is the mark
of intellectual disinterestedness. The audience is to be scorned since
art and the people are incompatible. Another retrenchment in the solid
ivory tower, but not without its loneliness. This engenders a cynicism:
no laws are valid other than those I choose to make. So the divine
sanction of love vanishes, the state and the validity of all ethics
made by society. To be spiritual in matters of the body is a confession
of adolescence or of a warped mind. The characters of Gourmont
consider women as flowers of the hedge to be plucked for their beauty
and fragrance, to be inserted in one’s buttonhole while the day is
still delightful, and to be replaced by another flower on the morrow.
But women, more gifted than the eglantine, have a choice: “They can
wield the menace of their thorns, if they are averse to be plucked,”
Diomède says. In love, his men are gentle cynics, a little tired and
moody and speculative, and the women, when not _jeunes filles_, follow
their whims, finding sufficient excuse, in the pleasures of the flesh,
for the act of surrender. Love is not transcendental, according to
Gourmont, it is a divine exercise of the senses. “The soul is body and
the body is spirit. The existence or the permanence of the one depends
upon the indestructibility of the other.” Soul, what we call soul,
becomes a blend of dream and act, thought and sensuality.
All this can be seen to advantage in _Mr. Antiphilos, Satyr_.
The unbelievably naive creature of wood and dell is brought to
civilization. He is Desire, its purest essence. He knows only hunger,
fear of peasants’ pitchforks, weariness, sexual desire. Life is these
things and they represent life. Happiness comes with satisfaction of
these needs; misery from lack of satisfaction. Here is the epitome
of our animal natures. It is the animal in us,—the healthy, normal
animal. Whatever is added is superfluous; the addition is civilization.
Gourmont, himself so sophisticated, ever turns a loving, kindly eye
to men who are insistently natural, that is to say animal in their
outlook, and who are brave or simple enough to consider the other sex
in this light. Antiphilos has a try at civilization, and the result
disgusts him; we see in his abnegation the shrug of mild disgust with
which his creator views the world of men and women. Here, too, his
women are personifications of instinct, without mixture of reason and
restraint.
To every department of literature which Gourmont essayed, he brings his
supple intelligence, lighting up his subject with a clear brilliance.
Irony he used as a surgical instrument to lance the sores of society.
In his study, isolated and removed from the bustle of Parisian life,
he boldly dispelled the mists of ridicule and slander with which the
young writers were covered. A great master, his influence on French
literature was tremendous. The high standards Gourmont demanded of
himself and others, his cultivated taste are required wherever there
is a tendency to the facile and the common. His Olympian serenity,
too, is a needed antidote to the febrile, nervous note. To read him
critically is to renounce forever the false gods which are being
worshipped in literature. He gives one a delicious draught of sanity;
he is pure mind, unadulterated by muddy emotionalism or didacticism.
The things he attacked are not dead; there remain the same problems
of art and morality. Gourmont, the supremely civilized man, brings
a cynicism, a perfect detachment and poise to the task of analyzing
current and eternal values; he helps us to understand and solve these
problems.
_J. L._
TO THE AMAZON
When you accepted the dedication of this strange story, Amazon, you did
not ask me what I had meant by it. This did not at all surprise me,
for you often know my intentions better than I do, and you are ever
ready to attribute the most favorable and ingenious ones to me. Ah, my
friend, I am not always the man of intentions, plans and projects; I
like to obey whatever the gods suggest and to place my trust, so far as
execution is concerned, in that logic which dwells deep in my brain and
which reassures me about the sequence of any of my rambling stories.
Though the chain of causes necessitated a lapse of several years
between the writing of the first letters and the others, and though the
latter were produced at irregular intervals,—beside the fact that my
mind, in the course of this novel, experienced certain modifications—I
have sought to have them conserve a sufficiently apparent unity of tone
in their ensemble. Yet I fear, though this will be quite transitory,
lest any one feel a little of the weariness, towards the end, which
the monotonous psychology of my horned character gave me. Nothing is
more difficult than the study of an elementary creature whose naiveté
puts to rout our sham or civilized habits, who advances as a matter of
course into the frankest of vices, who is not even astonished at our
astonishment.
What most amuses us in our pleasant games is that they are forbidden.
Now, that is a quality of pleasure he cannot relish. He cannot grasp
the idea of a person not naturally attracted to whatever is pleasurable
to him, though he too enjoys, like others, the charm of obstacles
surmounted and difficulties vanquished. What amused me, in writing
this story, was to take the side of the instinctive creature against
the creature of reason, whose reason is so transitory a thing; but
whatever may have been my sympathy for the brazen-faced satyr, I could
not procure for him the contentment of living in a strait-laced society
whose finesses he would have had to learn before accommodating himself
to them. He lacks too many things ever to succeed in cutting much of a
figure in this world. What sort of being is he, ignorant of the value
of money and, first of all, possessing none? I even doubt whether he
will extract deep satisfactions from a more fastidious, delicate world
he may later chance to frequent. Just behold the simplicity of his
heart! He falls in love with a worthless woman, and he is not in the
least ashamed, understanding nothing of her trade: but even if he did
understand it, I do not know whether or not he would blush with shame.
He has not yet shown his fullest capacities. He would need a vaster
theatre. Antiphilos might go far in the world of the unconscious.
Do not believe, moreover, that in making him relate the beginning
of his human adventures, I had any deep satirical intentions. To
criticize the manners of men:—that would need more naiveté than I
possess. To tell the truth, I find that they do well when following
their pleasures; they alone are not dupes of our extraordinary moral
organization. But let us not judge men, and still less women, after
ourselves. Most people are very well satisfied with their slavery,
to the point where their virtue suffers at the wretched state of all
who have liberated themselves. They do everything in their power to
recapture the emancipated, to fasten collars on their necks: “You do
not know happiness, our happiness. Come and we will share it with you.”
There are unfortunate souls who let themselves be taken in with this
sort of talk. Others are seized by force, when that is possible.
The police, or some of those charitable persons of whom there are too
many, once found a nest of felicity in a hovel of the Saint-Sulpice
section. An extremely young pair of hand-to-mouth tatterdemalions
lived there. The boy might have been fifteen years old,—even less if I
remember correctly—and the girl was twelve. No one knew on what they
lived—doubtless on pickings, refuse and water. When their roamings
in search of food exhausted them, they returned to their garret and
fell asleep in each other’s arms, for they were in love. Their naive
love consoled them for having, too often, to go hungry, and those who
discovered them found them happy in their animal-like innocence.
It created a terrible scandal, still discussed, perhaps, by devout
persons and others of the neighborhood. Naturally they were separated,
although they cried hard; the boy was sent to a home, while the girl
had to follow the skirts of some good nun. And everybody thought this
was as it should be. I, too. I was compelled, so as not to be treated
with contempt, and you would have done likewise, my friend,—would you
not? to preserve the esteem of respectable people. Is it right, in
fact, that children should begin to live in a state of nature, here
in Paris, in a decent section, several steps away from a church, the
Luxembourg Gardens and the Senate? The matter of the pickings might
have been passed by, but the love! Is it not true that such perversity,
manifested so precociously, is disconcerting? Antiphilos would have
been affected by this story, but Antiphilos is very much suspected and
he is at home only in natural ethics. He practices it without knowing
its theory.
You do not know, Amazon, how grateful I am that you loved this
uncertain little book and that you did not reprove its tendencies! I am
grateful to the point of being tempted to say that you have loved it
more than it deserved. Besides, is this not what I think of nearly all
of my writings? There is hardly one which has wholly satisfied me. That
is why I decided never to correct them when they were being printed
or reprinted, for I am always tempted to throw them into the printing
press and have their dried ink replaced by new ink. This you know well,
you who have wrested one of my books from my hands. I am haunted by
the technique of the unknown masterpiece. But I practice too well the
philosophy of detachment even to yield to such naivetés of conceit, and
I resign myself to the displeasure which my writings cause me, while
dreaming of the marvelous books I shall never write. Ah! how I envy
those authors who admire themselves in their works and who do not see
the approaching oblivion into which their works will sink with them.
I envy them, but I smile with a touch of irony, perhaps, for all this
has really little importance. Yet one must love, and to do so it is
necessary to hold firmly to some support, along the stream which sweeps
everything forward, like the castaways that we are. The feeling that
you please those very persons whom you would have chosen to please, and
the feeling that you displease others whom you would have willingly
designated for this service, sometimes suffices to keep you in
balance, to fortify heart and hands. One of these comforts only affects
the pride and has but negative effects on the pleasure of living;
but the other, which stirs every fibre of sympathy, can alone confer
the joy that is complete. Why, through what cowardice place these
necessary terms in the plural? A beautiful tenderness has achieved its
end. Amazon, I really believe that without you I should no more love
myself very much; I no longer would have a deep confidence in life or
in myself. So again I thank you for having taken Antiphilos under your
protection. Of his destiny among humans I am reassured, since you have
smiled upon him, dear friend.
_Remy de Gourmont._
MR. ANTIPHILOS, SATYR
...Fugiunt per devia Nymphae:
Has agitant Satyri per juga quaeque leves,
Nec fuit in sylvis arbos nec rupibus antrum
Sub quo non illic pressa puella foret.
_B. P. PRIGNANUS, Mutinensis, De imperio cupidinis. Lib. I._
I
APPARITION
I
Etang de Saint-Cucufa, June 3.
A sense of keen injustice prompts this letter: _Indignatio facit
versum_, as they used to say good old days. You know that I can neither
read nor write, but sometimes a tiny obliging mouth tries to make me
spell out of an old newspaper stained with fat and wine. Today, the
friendly little hand of a schoolgirl, equipped with everything needed
for writing, transfers my thought with a charming dexterity. My shaggy
knees, of which she is not afraid, serve as a table. Now, therefore, I
am going to tell you my story and register my protest.
You must know, first of all, that it was the little one now writing
to you who advised me to address you. “He is a man who wrote, I am
told, a story which is really my life. But I was eighteen and not so
complex.” Yesterday, her memory was refreshed by a paper she read to
me: “Virginal! My virgin heart! That’s it.” She stamped her foot at
the thought. Although I have been roving in fields and near towns for
about eight thousand and nine hundred years, I still do not know women
very well. I have known more women than there are stars in the sky, and
the last one remains as new and mysterious as the first. All this, to
tell you that I do not know how her virgin heart could have interested
her.—Now she is smiling, holding her tongue in the corner of her
mouth.—Perhaps she is thinking of the moment when she will once more
turn maiden, quite naturally, for the convenience of social ways.—I
hear her sing out: “Why, of course!”—They are surprising.
But I am coming to the matter of importance. You see my innocence. I
protest, then, with all the strength of an honest, though libertine
satyr, against the use of the term ‘satyr’ by your newspapers, which
apply it to men,—yes, to men, by Jupiter, who kidnap young girls,
rip their bellies, slice them to pieces! A satyr would never do such
idiotic things. Violate, when one has but to open the arms to desire?
Grasp these fresh, yielding little necks with a brutal hand? Tear this
soft flesh and cause these unripe bodies to bleed, cut the bud where
the woman already is developing and dreaming? For what do you take us,
stupid journalists? For men? Be undeceived. We are gods.
My history, which is very long, is obscure, but two episodes peculiarly
dignify it. I was born in Phrygia of the loves of Hermes and an elegant
Dryad, whom I greatly loved, for she was tender and pretty. She had
ardent passions and the shepherds, no less than the gods, attracted
but did not hold her caprice. I grew up, I exercised at hazard my
curiosity, which discovered odd things at all the fords and on all the
paths. Dionysius, whom you call Bacchus, brought me into his cortège
and I knew, under torrid skies, women more melting than your grapes,
more wanton than your goats. I passed into Greece, on my return, but
men were already beginning to wage war; they locked up their women and
enclosed their fields with fences. The golden age had ended:
Regrettez-vous le temps où le ciel sur la terre
Marchait et respirait dans un peuple de dieux?
I regret it so much and so often that I am filled with an unconquerable
melancholy. The great gods no longer descending to an earth soiled by
war, ownership, gold and those human laws which so badly translate
the gentle divine laws, we remain the sole immortals that a herdsman
can chance on at the fall of day, as he walks along the path. We were
loved, and we were also feared. We were given milk, cakes and honey,
and this was pleasant; but more than once a peevish peasant used to
pursue me with a pitchfork, forcing me to run to the shelter of a wood.
I am peaceable and vulnerable. I am a god, but a churl might easily
cripple me. They say the golden age will return. Let us hope so.
Do not think of ancient Greece as a place where good fortune held
sway. Love was there esteemed only under a form that always excited
my disgust. Few joys: an escaped female slave, an eager peasant woman.
Had I not had my sisters, the nymphs, I should have died of boredom;
but nymphs have less variety than women, though prettier, and their
pride is terrible. The disgusting teachings of a certain Socrates, that
motley apostle of virtue, enemy of women and gods, hastened my flight.
I made for Italy, where once more I found a certain state of nature
and human customs. To refrain from astonishing people, I called myself
Faun, like my Italian brothers.
It is in Italy that I have spent the best part of my life. There I
found the graces of Asia, with less effeminacy, much curiosity at once
erotic and passionate, and that delicious precociousness which causes
young flowers, in their innocent ardor, to outstrip the spring and
break their corslets at the sun’s first appearance. I enjoyed seasons
worthy of Apollo. My snub nose gleamed in the fairest of eyes. The
repeated sound of my feet on the rocky side of a hill awoke still
slumbering desires in the vague breasts of latin maidens. Pardon my
emotion at these brilliant memories. I still have days; I hardly have
seasons any longer, and my eternal youth is often forced to dwell on
the past: the time of gleaning has long since succeeded the period
of abundance. Remember that in those days I perhaps fled as often as
I pursued. I was weary of love, weary of opening new paths. For an
instant, I thought of remaining on a piece of cleared ground; I was
going to become domesticated.—The family of Faunus, look at the pretty
little Atellanian girl!—Alas! I did not have time for this.
One day we found ourselves surrounded by a troop of peasants armed with
sharp staffs, as though for a boar hunt. They were led by a sort of
sorcerer with a head-dress similar to the Gauls; this man brandished a
piece of wood shaped like a crutch head; with his other hand he dipped
a branch of box into a little bottle, held by a slave, and sprinkled
the ground. I would have liked to laugh, had the danger not been so
great. My companion had left to gather grass. “They are coming to look
for her,” I reflected. “They will do _her_ no hurt. But if they get
_me_, beware of the boar-spears!” I rushed away and, springing over a
precipice, was soon free from harm. I have not been able to recross
this precipice for nearly twelve hundred years.
What centuries! I lived amid wild goats and only from time to time did
an imprudent peasant girl, who happened to be good-looking, fall into
my traps. One of them told me that I no longer was called Faunus, but
Diabolo, and that I was considered the enemy of the human species, the
creature who had caused man to fall into sin. I had seduced a woman
under a serpent’s form! I believed that people had become as crazy
as they were wicked, and I grieved, musing on my sad immortality.
Yet, as the woman stroked my beard and kissed my snub nose and moist
lips, while calling me monster, I decided that this was a mitigated
extravagance which left a little hope, at least with a half of
humanity.—Here, my little friend sticks out her tongue at me and says:
“Ah! so it is you they call the devil?”
A noise of hunting one day awoke me. They were blowing through horns
which gave a sound like those of my sea brothers, the Tritons. Hounds
rent the air with harsh and violent barking. The gallop of horses rang
against the firm ground like a Virgilian verse.—O days when shepherds
repeated the songs of the Mantuan Shepherd!—Made more bold for some
time past, I was loitering in the heath, chasing grasshoppers and
lizards. The hunt drew near. I did not have time enough to leap on
a rock; and, as I watched the spectacle before leaping higher and
disappearing, I heard a clear voice cry, with an accent of surprise
and joy: “Ecco il Fauno!” I, too, was satisfied, for I knew that this
beautiful name of the Roman god was applied to me, that new days had
arrived. Excited, I lay down in the thyme warm with sun kisses; evening
fell, I was musing, when the same clear voice once more rang in my
ears: “Fauno! Fauno!” I pricked my hairy ears, my body grew tense. I
stood listening. “Fauno! Fauno!” With a few bounds, I reached the spot
from which the clear voice came. She was a beautiful young woman. The
better to run, she had opened her dress and the wind had loosened her
hair. She let herself fall, dazed, into my arms, the while I murmured,
lifting my thought to the master of gods: “Has beauty then once more
descended to earth? O Jupiter, thou dost not forget thy children!”
If I were to tell you that you have always under your eyes, perhaps,
the proof of the truth of my narrative, you would not believe me. Wait
several days, you will no longer be incredulous. My little friend is
tired.—“Yes, I really am!”—She is going to re-read to me this letter
which she promises to place in your hands. With the commencement of
this story, you can already show your friends the journalists that a
satyr is a respectable creature, meriting consideration. But what I
have still to tell you is even better.
ANTIPHILOS,
_Satyr._
II
LA FOSCA
II
Au Mont Agel, July 17.
The cold drove me into the south, where I had just arrived when I first
wrote to you. It is on the fragrant slopes of this peaceful mountain,
looking upon the violet sea, that I am passing the bitter winter.
Favorable grottos provide me with shelter and, when the sun shines, I
gambol about, watching the strange passers-by along the paths. It is
a beautiful country and I am enchanted by the charm of its wonderful
girls. When the weather grows too warm, I climb upwards and it seems
that in proportion as I proceed, I carry the spring with me. I am
known in the villages. Everybody waits for me. People whisper to each
other: “You know, I’ve seen him!” “Oh, my dear!” And at the fringe
of the woods, at evening, I perceive light shadows vanishing under
the pines or oaks. By chance I surprise and seize one, sometimes two.
Stifled laughter blends with long sighs. I am the joy that passes, the
joy troubled by a delicious fear. My hand has calmed throbbing breasts,
revived many a throbbing heart. I pass, and when I am gone the young
men find the maidens less shy. I sow kisses and I do not await the
harvest time. That I leave to others. I only seize the flower, as long
as there are flowers to be taken. Such is the way of gods. The gods are
fastidious.
When I left the banks of the Seine, the little one who wrote to
you, wished to follow me. A true love! That child will be fiercely
faithful. I left hurriedly, I traveled without pausing, save to
sleep, and I was very cold. Here, I am warming myself again, amusing
myself a little. The girl to whom I dictate this differs greatly from
my little secretary of the Saint-Cucufa pool. She is taller. She
is almost a woman.—“Almost?”—She writes on fine transparent paper
with an instrument which she calls a fountain-pen. I have never seen
such a thing before. The girl is delicate and unbreakable, wanton
as a goddess, and she has the air of having descended from Olympus
yesterday at dawn. She comes every day from Roquebrune. Having risen
with the sun, she walks through the dew, leaves to mingle innocently
with the morning strollers, and never forsakes her royal mask, even
when she murmurs: “Darling, darling!” She pleases me indeed. (Here
the fountain-pen is thrust painfully into my knee, but I say nothing,
I am satisfied.) Her curiosities are infinite, and she methodically
satisfies them, without ever abandoning her serious look. I like this.
Love is serious. When one has deep sensibility, love can cause tears;
laughter, never. It is only among mortals that love is accompanied with
laughter. The gods never laugh, except at the silliness of mankind.
When my little English woman is stirred, she recites verses and then
translates them for me, for I only know the Mediterranean languages.
She says, while caressing me:
Tiens, couche-toi sur ce tapis de fleurs,
Pendant que je caresserai tes aimables joues,
Pendant que je piquerai des roses parfumées dans le poil soyeux de
ta douce tête
Et que je baiserai tes larges et belles oreilles, ô ma tendre joie!
... Oh! comme je t’aime! Je suis folle de toi!
And sometimes I fall asleep, the while she gazes at me tenderly.
But I want to begin my story where I left off. I am anxious to narrate
the adventure which does me honor, to my way of thinking, and which I
have promised you. For two days and nights I was in love with the fair
creature who had come, crying: “Fauno! Fauno!” It was near eventide;
the sun was shining brightly and its rays, passing beneath the pines,
were lighting up the ground, each tuft of grass, each flower. My
sweetheart was sleeping and, to keep off the buzzing flies, for she
was naked, I had thrown her long scarf over her. But, from time to
time, unable to resist my desire, so beautiful she was, I approached to
lift a corner of the veil and to watch her as she slept. At a certain
moment, I discovered with terror that we were not alone. Somebody,
concealed in the thicket, was spying on us. I ran towards the enemy: a
man arose. I was about to throw myself at him, enraged with jealousy,
when he made a gesture at once imperious and friendly:
“Do you understand the language of men?” he asked. “In that case,
know that I am not come to fight you. I am walking about in search of
beautiful things. I seek Nature and it seems I have found her. Now I
see. Are you a beast, are you a god?”
“I am a god.”
“Then it is true that such beings live,” the young man murmured. “And
she?”
“She? A woman, but as lovely as my mother, who was a goddess. I was
born in Phrygia, in the time when gods were as numerous on the earth as
men.”
“Let me do your portrait and that of the divine woman sleeping at your
feet.”
He brought out paper and pencils. I was on the point of agreeing to
his whim when my beloved awoke. Half lifting herself on one of her
arms, she said:
“Seigneur Allegri, I hope you will not betray me!”
“Oh, it is La Fosca. I did not know you were so wonderful, my dark
beauty!”
“And glowing today, eh! But turn your head away a moment, for it would
not be right to let you see the movements of my body. I am marble when
I sleep; but when I move, I become a woman. I want to dress, to honor
your presence and to offer you some fruit from our woods, and water
from our spring.”
“Have you then left humanity forever?”
“Perhaps. Only the gods can love, and I have found one.”
“A marvelous adventure,” Allegri said. “But if you put a robe on, two
suns will set at the same instant.”
“You will see me again if you come here, for my god is not jealous. And
why should he be jealous, he who surpasses men in strength, as an oak
surpasses an ivy?”
I smiled, and my mouth was so broad that Allegri exclaimed:
“He really is a faun. He resembles the one that Seigneur Buonarroti
made not long ago, to amuse our sainted Guilio.”
While Allegri was tracing on his paper a figure in which I recognized
myself, La Fosca had risen and gone, draped in her scarf, farther off.
I went to fetch water in a buffalo horn, while La Fosca brought fruit,
blackberries, apples and nuts. We made a pleasant meal of these things.
In the days that followed, Allegri visited us frequently. He sketched
on small sheets with crayons of different colors. As soon as he
arrived, La Fosca used to stretch out, in the pose you know, and I
had the goodness to remain near her, holding the veil I was about to
remove, in an attitude of desire which was not feigned. This comedy
slightly bored me. I found the sittings too long. And then La Fosca had
too happy smiles in her pretended sleep, her body moved with such charm.
One night, when we remained chatting and laughing,—he had brought
preserves and a bottle of wine—the sky paled a little.
“It is time,” Allegri said, getting up. “Come. In an hour we shall
reach the solitary hut where I have established my studio. My picture
is finished, but I would like, at least once, to compare it with
the original, for the recollection of my eyes may have deceived me,
although they are very dependable mirrors.”
We followed him. The work was perfect. La Fosca truly breathed, I was
truly handsome, with my infatuated air. La Fosca reposed on skins of
beasts, and Allegri feverishly completed his work with rapid strokes,
each one of them,—what a miracle!—augmenting the distinction, the
relief, the splendor, the life. At that instant, _he_ was the real god!
“I hear the peasants,” he suddenly cried. “Save yourself. I will bring
her to you tonight.”
I fled, for I stand in terror of pitchforks. I have never since seen La
Fosca. Her fall only affected me during the first few days, for I had
felt her love for me grow less from the moment she yielded to Allegri’s
admiration; and besides, I had tasted so many pleasures that I was on
the verge of satiety.
A little later I made the acquaintance of a young peasant girl who
caused me to forget the other completely. Yet I never see, without
emotion, the picture done by this Allegri, my portrait and the
divine nudity of that noble La Fosca, whom love transformed into a
bacchante, but who never, not even in her most wanton attitudes, made
a disgraceful gesture. Her beauty has made her deserve immortality:
she will live as long as I live, as long as the trees, the streams
and mountains, as long as the world itself. Yesterday, my little
Englishwoman brought me a photograph of the portrait. I prefer the
old engravings, but this manner is perhaps more exact. Why the thing
is called “Jupiter and Antiope,” no one, not even the little darling,
has been able to explain. At least you will know that it represents
the Faun Antiphilos and La Fosca, who has since become the Marquise de
Sassuolo.
Allegri came to see me a month later. I was with the young peasant
girl, and yet I was about to shower him with reproaches, when, with a
very melancholy mien, he said:
“She left me, in turn.”
I answered:
“You deserved it.”
“Doubtless; but you are consoled and I, I am not yet consoled.”
He told me that La Fosca was the daughter of an extremely dissolute,
indebted patrician of Modena who had sold her to a priest. She had
stabbed the priest and fled to Sassuolo where the Marquis Giambattista
met, welcomed and hid her, because of her beauty. Finally through
gratitude, she became his mistress, and lived at his court.
“She was with him at the hunt when she ran to you. The Marquis sought
her high and low for a week and then learned that I was concealing a
woman in my shack. He came: instead of flying into a rage, he wept,
pardoned me, purchased my picture and invited me to the marriage. She
became the Marquise de Sassuolo this very morning. These old men have
odd ideas. What creations I could have made with such a figure!”
“You are neither man nor god, Allegri, only a painter.”
He did not answer, but remained plunged in revery a long time. I have
not seen him since.
ANTIPHILOS,
_Satyr._
III
THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN
III
Cogolin, June 3.
At last I have the leisure to write and give you another chapter of
my adventures, since I know that you have communicated them to other
men. Like nature, the gods exist only at the instant you speak and
think of them, and as soon as your attention is distracted from divine
things, they fall again into the dim, pantheistic immensity where
their lives glide by, mute, deep and plant-like. I partake of the
gods, I have lived that life. I partake of men, and I know what human
joys are. Alas! destiny has meted them out to me so miserly, in these
days, that I hardly feel my humanity any longer. That is why I am sad,
yes, sad, despite the restless eyes which reproachfully gaze at me
this very moment, despite cheeks made slightly rosy by paint and now
somewhat pale, rubbing against my old, immortal, shaggy skin. For the
past three years I have tasted more bitterness than I experienced in
my life heretofore. Solitude has poisoned my heart and if such times,
or worse,—who knows?—were to return, I would be reduced to imploring
the gods to recall me to Olympus, to the parental habitation. Ah! to
renounce women! The gods no longer descend to the earth and I fear the
goddesses. What a sorry figure this poor goat-footed satyr would make
among them!
But was I not born to be happy? When I say this, Cydalise treats
me as a romantic satyr, and though I do not very well understand, I
feel it means that such a dream is considered chimerical. I and your
philosophers do not understand happiness in the same way. I will die
only when nature dies, and it is with her alone that I should take
my stand. The seasons mean more to me than does metaphysics. Why
should there not be a return to the old, faun liberties? The gates of
sheepfolds will not always be so firmly shut and Venus, who seems to
have forgotten herself in particular loves, will yet again remember
her universal mission. It is a fact that the nymphs no longer inhabit
the woods and that for three years I have not been able to capture
any maiden, but Cydalise has comforted the old solitary faun and the
hope of vintage time returns to my heart. Do not believe the things I
told you at the beginning of this letter. They were the remains of
melancholy moods I have not been able to share with anyone. Now that
you have felt them with me, I no longer feel them. What matters the
past to him who holds the present?
Cydalise descended from the Thespian chariot to come to me. Her
profession is to recite verses of the poets to the people. She was
seeking me, which means that she had already found me, according to
some verses she recited and which evidently apply to my divinity, ever
present and ever active. Cydalise has not invoked me in vain. The
hoary, old god has always the youth of his desires and the desires of
his youth. Weak men disappoint women, many women have told me, but
satyrs never; others say they have known, trembling and blushing, men
too late for happiness. Dreamy and wanton, Cydalise loves to recite
poems in the interval of two frenzies. She begins with a voice a
little out of breath because of the divine inspiration; then she slowly
grows elated and falls into a sort of sudden trembling which ends still
more rapidly in my arms. So, I know the first stanzas better than I do
the last, which die in vague murmurs. I remember a similar adventure in
Campania. I was enamoured of a Greek slave of marvelous beauty who used
to come to visit me each evening, and who always wished to sing the
first idyll of Theocritus for me, to show that her voice was as pure
as her body anointed with oil of lavender. She never had the strength
to begin the third verse: “Sweet is the murmuring of the pine near
the fountains, O goatherd, sweet is the sound of thy flute....” Her
voice stopped at [Greek: Tyrisdes]. Perhaps she did not wish, as Aesop
says, to lose the prey for the shadow. The gods be praised! Gaiety
returns to me with these distant memories which are so delicately
woven into the present, across the centuries. This one knows better
how to resist the violence of desire: She prepares with more skill the
denouement whose plaintive syllables she knows how to prolong. She
has not received a bad education: perhaps I shall be attached to her
more than to all the others, though my nature always drives me to new
discoveries. Such women are so rare!
But love knows a forced repose, and honest satyrs themselves respect
this state, for they hold blood in as much horror as tears. One of
these days of languor, she came to me with a book and, still smiling
through her resigned sadness, began to read aloud, without any
explanation: _The Afternoon of a Faun_. What a miracle! Lulled by
these rhythms that were as irregular as a stream running down woody
hillsides, I had almost as much pleasure in watching her moving lips as
in holding them sealed to mine. Then she explained the poem to me, as
the philosophers formerly did in the academies.
And I saw myself rising from between the willows of the bank, my ear
intent for hint of pastimes which I desired and which was lacking. I
remember it was one of those exciting and warm days, the like of which
I have not experienced for a long time; I had heard the river lightly
plash, as though on some plunging body, and I was about to run away,
for I fear the hostility of mankind, when I fancied I saw floating
hair on the water’s edge, some hemp held by a rush. I watched. If
it was a woman, come from a garden of roses, she would return; the
hedge was translucent and the house quite high, up towards the hill.
Long I waited. Tired, I went in quest of her. I saw nothing. Now I
heard laughter. I imagined many things, the very things this poet has
described. Oh! to seize them! They are at least two, since there is so
much laughter. Laughter, games, delicate caresses. It is yonder. Now
silence reigns. Could they have guessed? No. Pleasure meditates before
bursting forth. And I? But if you know the poem, you also know my
agitation, my exasperated restlessness, panting, atremble, made dizzy.
A man stood up among the trees, far above me.
“It was he,” said Cydalise.
“Who is ‘he’?”
“The poet.”
And she kissed his name on the title page of the book.
“So it was really he?”
“Certainly.”
“I took to flight!”
“To run away! But he saw you, he would have liked to approach. Just
fancy! he resembled you, as much as any man can resemble a god, and
no one was ever nearer the gods by spirit. To run away from him. Your
brother in candor!”
This is the adventure such as I have been able to learn it. Cydalise
says I should be very proud because of it. She has made me memorize
three lines of this divine poem, so that I shall never have the air of
being ignorant of my past:
Alors m’éveillerais-je à la ferveur première,
Droit et seul, sous le flot antique de lumière,
Lys! et l’un de vous tous pour l’ingénuité.
Candor, again! But nothing suits me any longer.
I have made a bargain with Cydalise. I permit her to send you kisses:
accept them. She permits me to make, to renew rather, an entreaty to
you. Do not allow those rascals who disembowel girls to be called
satyrs. A satyr is incapable of such crimes. The lasses I have met
have been highly satisfied with me and their kisses, innocent like
nature, have thanked me fervently with a thousand little tricks I
taught them.
ANTIPHILOS,
_Satyr._
IV
CYDALISE
IV
Cogolin, September 30.