The day is over. A great restfulness descends into poor minds that the
day's work has wearied; and thoughts take on the tender and dim colours
of twilight.
Nevertheless from the mountain peak there comes to my balcony, through
the transparent clouds of evening, a great clamour, made up of a crowd
of discordant cries, dulled by distance into a mournful harmony, like
that of the rising tide or of a storm brewing.
Who are the hapless ones to whom evening brings no calm; to whom, as to
the owls, the coming of night is the signal for a witches' sabbat? The
sinister ululation comes to me from the hospital on the mountain; and,
in the evening, as I smoke, and look down on the quiet of the immense
valley, bristling with houses, each of whose windows seems to say,
"Here is peace, here is domestic happiness!" I can, when the wind blows
from the heights, lull my astonished thought with this imitation of the
harmonies of hell.
Twilight excites madmen. I remember I had two friends whom twilight
made quite ill. One of them lost all sense of social and friendly
amenities, and flew at the first-comer like a savage. I have seen him
throw at the waiter's head an excellent chicken, in which he imagined
he had discovered some insulting hieroglyph. Evening, harbinger of
profound delights, spoilt for him the most succulent things.
The other, a prey to disappointed ambition, turned gradually, as the
daylight dwindled, sourer, more gloomy, more nettlesome. Indulgent and
sociable during the day, he was pitiless in the evening; and it was not
only on others, but on himself, that he vented the rage of his twilight
mania.
The former died mad, unable to recognise his wife and child; the
latter still keeps the restlessness of a perpetual disquietude; and, if
all the honours that republics and princes can confer were heaped upon
him, I believe that the twilight would still quicken in him the burning
envy of imaginary distinctions. Night, which put its own darkness into
their minds, brings light to mine; and, though it is by no means rare
for the same cause to bring about opposite results, I am always as it
were perplexed and alarmed by it.
O night! O refreshing dark! for me you are the summons to an inner
feast, you are the deliverer from anguish! In the solitude of the
plains, in the stony labyrinths of a city, scintillation of stars,
outburst of gaslamps, you are the fireworks of the goddess Liberty!
Twilight, how gentle you are and how tender! The rosy lights that still
linger on the horizon, like the last agony of day under the conquering
might of its night; the flaring candle-flames that stain with dull red
the last glories of the sunset; the heavy draperies that an invisible
hand draws out of the depths of the East, mimic all those complex
feelings that war on one another in the heart of man at the solemn
moments of life.
Would you not say that it was one of those strange costumes worn by
dancers, in which the tempered splendours of a shining skirt show
through a dark and transparent gauze, as, through the darkness of the
present, pierces the delicious past? And the wavering stars of gold and
silver with which it is shot, are they not those fires of fancy which
take light never so well as under the deep mourning of the night?