REMINISCENCES
Let me regret, let me remember, let me review all my youth in a single
glance.
We were then twelve years old. I met you one October evening upon the
college green, beneath the plane trees, near the little fountain. You
were weak and timid. I know not what united us; our weakness, perhaps.
From that evening, we walked together, separating from each other for a
few hours, but clasping hands with stronger friendship after each
separation.
I know that we have neither the same flesh nor the same heart. You live
and think differently from me, but you love as I do. There is the secret
of our fraternity. You have my tenderness and my pity; you kneel in
life, you seek some one upon whom to bestow your souls. We have a
communion of tenderness and affection.
Do you remember the first years of our acquaintance? We read together
idle tales, grand romances of adventure which held us for six months
beneath their fascinating spell. We wrote verses and made chemical
experiments; we indulged in painting and music. There was, at the house
of one of us, on the fourth floor, a large chamber which served as our
laboratory and atelier. There, in the solitude, we committed our
childish crimes: we ate the raisins hanging from the ceiling, we risked
our eyes over retorts brought to a white heat, we wrote rhymed comedies
in three acts which I yet read to-day when I wish to smile. I still see
that large chamber, with its broad window, flooded with white light and
full of old newspapers, engravings trodden under foot, chairs with their
straw bottoms gone, and broken wood horses. It seems to me pleasant and
smiling, when I look at my chamber of to-day and perceive, standing in
the middle of it, Laurence who terrifies and attracts me.
Later, the open air intoxicated us. We enjoyed the healthful dissipation
of the fields and long walks. It was madness, fury. We broke the
retorts, forgot the raisins and closed the door of the laboratory. In
the morning, we set out before day. I came beneath your windows to
summon you in the midst of darkness, and we hastened to quit the town,
our game bags on our backs, our guns upon our shoulders. I know not what
kind of game we chased; we went along, idling in the dew, running amid
the tall grass which bent down beneath our feet with sharp and quick
sounds; we wallowed in the country like young colts escaped from the
stable. Our game bags were empty on our return, but our minds were full
and our hearts also.
What a delicious district is Provence, biting and mild for those who are
penetrated by its ardor and tenderness! I remember those white, damp and
almost cool dawns, which filled my being and the sky above with the
peace of supreme innocence; I remember the overwhelming sun of noon, the
hot, heavy and fragrant atmosphere which weighed down upon the earth,
those broad rays which poured from the heights like gold in
fusion--virile and powerful hour, giving to the blood a precocious
maturity and to the earth a marvellous fertility. We walked like brave
children amid those dawns and scorching noons, young and frisky in the
morning, but grave and more thoughtful in the evening; we talked in
brotherly fashion, sharing our bread together and experiencing the same
emotions.
The lands were yellow or red, desert and desolate, sown with slender
trees; here and there were groves of foliage, of a dark green, staining
the broad gray stretch of the plain; then, in the distance, all around
the horizon, were low hills ranged in an immense circle, full of jagged
spots, of a light blue or a pale violet, standing out with a delicate
sharpness against the dark, deep blue of the sky. I can still see those
penetrating landscapes of my youth. I well know that I belong to them,
that what little of love and truth is in me comes to me from their
tranquil delights.
At other times, towards evening, when the sun was sinking, we took the
broad white highway which leads to the river. Poor river, meagre as a
brook, here narrow, troubled and deep, there broad and flowing in a
sheet of silver over a bed of stones. We chose one of the hollows, on
the edge of a lofty bank which the waters had eaten away, and in it we
bathed beneath the overhanging branches of the trees. The last rays of
the sun glided between the leaves, sowing the sombre shade with luminous
specks, and rested upon the bosom of the river in broad plates of gold.
We perceived only water and verdure, little corners of the sky, the
summit of a distant mountain, the vineyards in a neighboring field. And
we lived thus in the silence and the coolness. Seated upon the bank, in
the short grass, with legs hanging and bare feet splashing in the water,
we enjoyed our youth and our friendship. What delicious dreams we
indulged in upon those shores, the gravel of which was being gradually
borne away every day by the waves! Our dreams vanish thus, borne away by
the resistless current of life!
To-day these remembrances are harsh and implacable towards me. At
certain hours, in my idleness, a remembrance of that age will suddenly
come to me, sharp and dolorous, with the violence of a blow from a club.
I feel a burning sensation running across my breast. It is my youth
which is awakening in me, desolate and dying. I take my head in my
hands, restraining my sobs; I plunge with a bitter delight into the
history of those vanished days and take pleasure in enlarging the wound,
the while repeating to myself that all this is no more and will never be
again. Then, the recollection vanishes; the lightning has passed over
me; I am overwhelmed with grief, recalling nothing.
Later still, at the age when the man awakens in the child, our life
changed. I prefer the first hours to those hours of passion and budding
virility; the recollections of our hunting excursions, of our vagabond
existence, are more agreeable to me than the far off vision of young
girls, whose visages remain imprinted on my heart. I see them, pale and
indistinct, in their coldness, their virgin indifference; they passed
by, knowing me not, and, to-day, when I dream of them again, I say to
myself that they cannot dream of me. I know not how it is, but this
thought makes them strangers to me; there is no exchange of
recollections, and I regard them in the light of thoughts alone, in the
light of visions which I have cherished and which have vanished.
Let me also recall the society which surrounded us: those professors,
excellent men, who would have been better had they possessed more youth
and more love; those comrades of ours, the wicked and the good, who were
without pity and without soul like all children. I must be a strange
creature, fit only to love and weep, for I was softened and suffered
from the time I first walked. My college years were years of weeping. I
had in me the pride of loving natures. I was not loved, for I was not
understood and I refused to make myself known. To-day, I no longer have
any hatred; I see clearly that I was born to tear myself with my own
hands. I have pardoned my former comrades who ruffled me, wounded me in
my pride and in my tenderness; they were the first to teach me the rude
lessons of the world, and I almost thank them for their harshness. Among
them were sorry, foolish and envious lads, who must now be perfect
imbeciles and wicked men. I have forgotten even their names.
Oh! let me, let me recollect. My past life, at this hour of anguish,
comes to me with a singular sensation of pity and regret, of pain and
joy. I feel myself deeply agitated, when I compare all that is with all
that is no more. All that is no more are Provence, the broad, open
country flooded with sunlight, you, my tears and my laughter of other
days; all that is no more are my hopes and dreams, my innocence and
pride. Alas! all that is are Paris with its mud, my garret with its
poverty; all that is are Laurence, infamy, my tenderness and love for
that miserable and degraded woman.
Listen: it was, I believe, in the month of June. We were together on the
brink of the river, in the grass, our faces turned towards the sky. I
was talking to you. I have this instant recollected my words, and the
remembrance of them burns me like a red hot iron. I had confided to you
that my heart had need of purity and innocence, that I loved the snow
because it was white, that I preferred the water of the springs to wine
because it was limpid. I pointed to the sky; I told you that it was blue
and immense like the clear, deep ocean, and that I loved the ocean and
the sky. Then, I spoke to you of woman; I said I would have preferred
that she were born, like the wild flowers, in the open air, amid the
dew, that she were a water plant, that an eternal current washed her
heart and her flesh. I swore to you that I would love only a pure girl,
a spotless innocent, whiter than the snow, more limpid than the water of
the spring, deeper and more immense in purity than the sky and the
ocean. For a long while, I held forth enthusiastically to you thus,
quivering with a holy wish, anxious for the companionship of innocence
and immaculate whiteness, unable to pause in my dream which was soaring
towards the light.
At last, I possess a companion, a spotless innocent! She is beside me
and I love her. Oh! if you could see her! She has a sombre and unfeeling
visage like a clouded sky; the waters were low and she has bathed in the
mud. My spotless innocent is soiled to such an extent that formerly I
would not have dared to touch her with my finger, for fear of dying
therefrom. Yet I love her.
I am laughing; I feel a strange delight in jeering at myself. I dreamed
of luxury, and I have no longer even a morsel of cloth with which to
clothe myself; I dreamed of purity, and I love Laurence!
Amid my poverty, when my heart bled and I realized that I loved, my
throat was choked, terror seized upon me. Then it was that my
remembrances rose up. I have not been able to drive them away; they have
remained with me, implacable, in a crowd, tumultuous, all entering
simultaneously into my breast and burning it. I did not summon them;
they came and I yielded to them. Every time I weep, my youth returns to
console me, but its consolations redouble my tears, for I dream of that
youth which is dead forever.