nothing more simple than what one knows. Who is surprised now to see
that the electric telegraph instantly sends human thought across
continents and seas? Who is surprised to see lunar attraction raise the
waters of the ocean and produce tides? Who is surprised to see light
transmit itself from one star to another at the rate of three hundred
thousand kilometres per second? Besides, thinkers alone could
appreciate the grandeur of these marvels; the vulgar are surprised at
nothing. If some new discovery to-morrow should enable us to make
signals to the inhabitants of Mars and receive replies from them, three
quarters of mankind would think nothing of it the day after. Yes, the
animating forces can transport themselves from one world to the other;
not everywhere nor always, to be sure, and not all of them. There are
laws and conditions. My will, with the help of my muscles, can raise my
arm or throw a stone; if I take a weight of twenty kilos, it will still
raise my arm; if I want to raise a weight of a thousand kilos, I can no
longer do it. Some minds are incapable of any activity; others have
acquired transcendent faculties. Mozart at six years of age surprised
all his hearers by the power of his musical genius, and at eight
published his first two sonatas; while the greatest dramatic author who
ever existed, Shakspeare, had written nothing worthy of his name until
after he was thirty years old. It is not necessary to believe that the
soul should belong to some supernatural world. Everything is in Nature.
It is hardly more than a hundred thousand years since terrestrial
humanity evolved itself from the animal chrysalis. For millions of
years, during the long historic series of the primary, secondary, and
tertiary periods, there was not a single eye on the earth to see these
grand sights, a single human mind to contemplate them. Progress has
slowly raised the inferior souls of plants and animals; man is quite
recent on the planet. Nature is in ceaseless progress, the universe is a
perpetual growth, ascent is the supreme law.
"All worlds," he added, "are not actually inhabited. Some are at the
dawn, others at twilight. For example, in our solar system, Mars, Venus,
Saturn, and several of his satellites seem to be in full vital
activity. Jupiter appears not to have passed its primary period; the
Moon has perhaps no longer any inhabitants. Our own period is of no more
importance in the general history of the universe than one anthill in
the infinite. Before the existence of the earth, there had been, from
all eternity, worlds peopled with humanities. When our planet shall have
ceased to live, and the last human family shall have fallen asleep on
the brink of the last lagoon of the frozen ocean, numberless suns will
still shine in the infinite, there will still be mornings and evenings,
spring-time and flowers, hopes and joys, other suns, other earths, other
humanities,--boundless space, peopled with tombs and cradles. But life,
thought, eternal progress, are the final object of creation.
"The earth is a star's satellite. Now, as well as in the future, we are
citizens of the sky; whether we know it or not, we are really living in
the stars."
Thus the two friends conversed about the deep subjects which engrossed
their thoughts; when they were conquering a problem, even if it were
incomplete, they experienced a true happiness at having taken another
step in their search for the unknown, and could then talk more quietly
about the ordinary things of life. They were two minds equally eager for
knowledge, imagining in their youthful fervor that they could isolate
themselves from the world, look down upon human ideas, and in their
celestial flight reach the star of Truth, which shone above their heads
in the depths of the infinite.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
IV.
AMOR.
In their life together, pleasant and intimate as it was, there was
something lacking. These conversations on the serious topics of being or
non-being, their exchange of ideas on the analysis of humanity, their
inquiries into the final end of the existence of things, satisfied their
minds sometimes, but not their hearts. When they had been together for a
long time, talking under the garden trellis which towered above the
picture of the great city, or in the silent library, the student, the
thinker could not leave his companion; they sat hand in hand, mute,
attracted and repelled by an irresistible power. After leaving each
other, both felt a singular, painful void in their breasts, an
indefinable uneasiness, as though some link necessary for both their
lives had been broken; and each hoped for nothing but the hour of
meeting. He loved her, not for himself, but for herself, with an almost
impersonal affection, with a feeling of high esteem as well as ardent
love; and by a constantly fought combat with his desire he had been able
to resist it. But one day, when they were both sitting on the wide divan
in the library, strewn, as usual, with books and loose leaves, a silence
fell upon them, and it happened that, overcome perhaps by the weight of
his long-continued efforts to resist so powerful an attraction, the
young author's head insensibly drooped to his companion's shoulder, and
almost at once ... their lips met....
Oh, unutterable joys of requited love; insatiable intoxication of the
heart transported with happiness; never-ending delights of the uncurbed
imagination; sweet music of the heart,--to what ethereal heights have
you not raised the chosen ones, given up to your supreme felicities!
Suddenly forgetful of this lower world, they fly on outstretched wings
to some enchanted paradise, lose themselves in celestial depths, and
soar away to the sublime regions of eternal rapture. The world, with its
joys and its sorrows, no longer exists for them; they live in light, in
fire,--they are salamanders, phoenixes, freed from all weight, light as
flame, burning themselves out, rising again from their ashes, always
luminous, always ardent, invulnerable, invincible.
The expansion of their first long-repressed delights threw the lovers
into an ecstatic existence in which metaphysics and its problems were
for a time forgotten. This lasted six months. The sweetest but most
imperious of feelings had suddenly absorbed and taken possession of
them, thus completing the insufficient intellectual satisfactions of the
mind. From the day of the kiss, George Spero not only entirely
disappeared from society, but even ceased to write; and I lost sight of
him myself, notwithstanding the long and true affection he had professed
for me. Logicians might have been able to conclude from this that for
the first time in his life he was satisfied that he had found the
solution of the great problem,--the supreme object of the existence of
beings.
[Illustration]
They were living in this "selfishness for two" which, while moving
mankind from our optic centre, diminishes its defects and makes it
appear more beautiful. Satisfied by their mutual affection, everything
in nature and humanity sang a perpetual hymn of happiness and love.
Often in the evening they walked along the banks of the Seine, dreamily
contemplating the effects of light and shade which make the sky of Paris
so exquisite at twilight, when the silhouettes of towers and buildings
are thrown out against the luminous background in the west. Piles of
rose-colored and purple clouds, illuminated by the distant reflection of
the sea over which the vanished sun is still shining, give our skies a
character of their own, not like that of Naples, bathed in the west by
the Mediterranean mirror, but surpassing Venice perhaps, whose
illumination is pale and eastern. It might chance that, their steps
having led them to the old island of the Cité, they would stroll along
the river bank, passing in sight of Notre Dame and the old Châtelet,
whose dark outlines might still be seen against the dimly lighted sky.
Sometimes, often indeed, enticed by the brilliance of the setting sun
and by the fresh green of the country, they went along the _quais_, out
beyond the ramparts of the great city, and strayed as far as the
solitudes of Boulogne or Billancourt, shut in between the dusky hills of
Meudon and Saint-Cloud. They were contemplating Nature; they forgot the
noisy city lost behind them; and walking with the same step, forming but
one being, they received the same impressions, thought the same
thoughts, and by their silence spoke the same language. The stream
flowed on at their feet, the noises of the day were dying away, the
first stars were peeping out. Icléa liked to tell George their names as
they appeared.
[Illustration]
March and April often offer Paris mild evenings, on which the first warm
breezes, forerunners of spring, greet us. Orion's brilliant stars, the
dazzling Sirius, the Twins, Castor and Pollux glitter in the immense
sky; the Pleiades sink towards the western horizon; but Arcturus and
Boötes, shepherd of the celestial flocks, return, and a few hours later
white and resplendent Vega rises on the eastern horizon, soon followed
by the Milky Way. Arcturus with its golden rays is always the first star
to be recognized, from its piercing brilliancy and from its position in
the prolongation of the tail of the Great Bear. Sometimes the lunar
crescent was hanging in the western sky, and the young girl gazed
admiringly, like Ruth by Boaz' side, at "that golden sickle in the field
of stars."
The stars surround the earth, the earth is in the sky. Spero and his
companion realized this, and perhaps no other couple on any other
celestial earth lived on more intimate terms than they with the sky and
infinity.
And yet by degrees, perhaps without noticing it himself, the young
philosopher was gradually taking up again by shattered fragments his
interrupted studies; analyzing subjects now with a deep feeling of
optimism which he had never known before, in spite of his natural
kindliness; excluding cruel conclusions because they seemed to him to be
due to an insufficient knowledge of causes, looking at the panoramas of
Nature and of humanity in a new light. She too had taken up, at least
partially, the studies which she had begun in common with him; but a
new feeling filled her soul, and her mind had not the same freedom for
intellectual work. Absorbed in this constant affection for a being whom
she had wholly won, she saw only through him, acted only by him. In
quiet evening hours, when she went to the piano and played a sonata by
Chopin, which she was astonished to find she had not understood until
she was in love, or to accompany her pure rich voice while singing the
Norwegian _lieder_ by Grieg or Bull, or our own Gounod's melodies, it
seemed to her, unconsciously perhaps, that her lover was the only
listener capable of appreciating these inspirations of the heart. What
delicious hours he spent, stretched on a divan in that spacious library
in the house at Passy, sometimes idly following the capricious rings of
smoke from a Turkish cigarette, while she gave herself up to fanciful
memories, singing the sweet _Saetergientens Sondag_ of her native land,
the serenade from "Don Juan," Lamartine's "Lake," or else when running
her skilful fingers over the keys she sent the melodious dream of
Boccherini's minuet floating into the air.
Spring had come. May had brought the opening fêtes at the Universal
Exhibition of which we spoke at the beginning of this story, and the
great trees in the garden at Passy shaded the Eden of the loving couple.
Icléa's father, who had suddenly been called to Tunis, returned with a
collection of Arabian arms for his museum at Christiania. He intended to
go back to Norway very soon, and it had been agreed between the young
Norwegian girl and her lover that the marriage should take place in her
native land on the anniversary of the mysterious apparition.
[Illustration]
Their love was, from its very nature, very far removed from all those
common-place unions founded, some on gross sensual pleasure, others on
motives of interest more or less disguised, which represent the greater
part of human love. Their cultivated minds kept them isolated in the
loftier regions of thought; their delicacy of feeling kept them in an
ideal atmosphere where all material burdens were forgotten; the extreme
impressibility of their nerves, the exquisite refinement of all their
sensations, brought them delights whose enjoyment seemed to have no end.
If there is love in other worlds, it can be no deeper or more exquisite
feeling. To a physiologist they would have been the living witnesses of
the fact that, contrary to ordinary opinion, all enjoyment comes from
the brain, the intensity of sensation corresponding to the psychic
sensibility of the being.
Paris was for them, not a city, not a world, but the theatre of human
history. They lived the past centuries over again. The old quarters
which had not yet been ruined by modern changes,--the Cité, with Notre
Dame, Saint-Julien le Pauvre, whose walls still recall Chilpéric and
Frédégonde; the old houses where Albert le Grand, Petrarch, Dante,
Abelard, had lived; the old University, anterior to the Sorbonne, and
belonging to the same vanished centuries; the cloister of Saint-Merry
with its sombre little paths, the abbey of Saint-Martin, Clovis' tower
on the mountain, Saint-Geneviève, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a relic of
the Merovingians, Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, whose bell sounded the
tocsin, the Sainte-Chapelle at Louis IX.'s palace, all memorials of
French history, were the object of their pilgrimages. They were alone
in crowds, looking into the past and seeing what very few people know
how to see.
And so the immense city spoke its language of other days,--either when,
lost amid the monsters, griffins, pillars, and capitals, the arabesques
of the tower and galleries of Notre Dame, they saw the human hive go to
sleep at their feet in the evening dusk, or, when rising higher still,
they tried from the top of the Panthéon to restore the old outlines of
Paris and its gradual development from the Roman emperors who lived in
the Baths, to Philip Augustus and his successors.
The spring sunshine, the blooming lilacs, the joyous May mornings, full
of bird-songs and nervous exhilaration, often drew them at random away
from Paris into the meadows and woods. The hours flew by like a breath
of wind, the day had passed like a thought, and the night prolonged the
divine dream of love. In the swiftly revolving world of Jupiter, where
the days and nights are twice as rapid as they are here, and do not even
last ten hours, lovers do not find the time fade away any more quickly.
The measure of time is in ourselves.
[Illustration]
They were sitting one evening on the roof of the old tower at the
Château de Chevreuse; there was no railing, and they were close together
in the centre, from whence one can look down over the unobstructed
surrounding landscape. The warm air from the valley, impregnated with
wild perfumes from the neighboring woods, rose to where they sat; the
warbler was still singing, and the nightingale in the growing shadows
was trying over his melodious hymn to the stars. The sun had just set in
a blaze of crimson and gold, and the west alone was still illuminated by
a glowing radiance. Everything seemed to be asleep on Nature's broad
bosom.
[Illustration]
Icléa was a little pale; but in the glow of the western sky her skin was
so clear, so delicate, so ideal that the light seemed to penetrate it
and illuminate it from within. Her eyes were misty with soft languor,
and her little, childlike mouth was lightly parted; she seemed lost in
contemplation of the sunset light. Leaning on Spero's breast, her arms
twined about his neck, she was sinking into a revery when a
shooting-star crossed the sky just over the tower. She started with a
little feeling of superstition.
The most brilliant stars were already sparkling in the heavenly depths.
Arcturus, a brilliant golden yellow, was very high, almost at the
zenith; Vega, a pure white light, had already risen towards the west; in
the north, Capella; in the west, Castor, Pollux, and Procyon. The seven
stars of the Great Bear, Regulus, Spica Virginis, were also discernible.
Noiselessly, one by one, the stars came out to punctuate the heavens.
The north star showed the only motionless spot in the celestial sphere.
The moon was rising, its reddish disk somewhat diminished from being on
the wane. Mars was shining between Pollux and Regulus in the southwest,
Saturn in the southeast. Twilight was slowly yielding its place to the
mysterious reign of night.
"Does it not seem to you," she asked, "that all these stars are like
eyes looking down at us?"
"Celestial eyes, like yours. What can they see on earth more beautiful
than you--and our love?"
"And yet--" she added.
"Yes, 'and yet,'--the world, family, society, custom, moral laws, and
all that. I understand your thought. We have forgotten all these things
to obey attraction alone,--like the sun, like all those stars, like the
warbling nightingale, like all Nature. Very soon we shall give those
social customs the part which belongs to them, and can openly proclaim
our love. Shall we be any happier for that? Is it possible to be any
happier than we are at this very moment?"
"I am yours," she replied, "I do not exist for myself. I am swallowed up
in your light, your love, in your happiness, and I care for nothing,
nothing more. No. I was thinking of those stars, of those eyes looking
down at us, and wondering where all the human eyes are which have
watched them for millions of years as we do to-night. Where are all the
hearts that have beaten as our heart beats now? Where are all the souls
who have lost themselves in endless kisses in the mysterious vanished
nights?"
"They all exist, nothing can be destroyed. We associate heaven and
earth, and we are right. In all the ages, with all peoples, among all
beliefs, mankind has always asked the secret of its destiny of the
starry heavens. That was one kind of divination. The Earth is a star of
heaven, like Mars and Saturn, which we see yonder, earths of the sky,
lighted by the same sun as we are, and like all these stars, which are
distant suns. Thought translates what man has believed ever since it
existed. All eyes have sought the answer to the great enigma in the
skies, and Urania has replied to them since the early days of
mythology."
The night was coming on. The moon, slowly rising in the eastern sky, was
shedding her radiance through the atmosphere, insensibly displacing the
twilight; and in the city at their feet, below the thickets and ruins, a
few lights were already beginning to appear here and there. The two had
risen, and were standing in the centre of the tower roof, closely
clasped together. She was beautiful, framed in the aureole of her hair,
whose curls floated over her shoulders; little puffs of spring-like
air, fragrant with perfume of violets, gillyflowers, lilacs, and May
roses were rising from the neighboring gardens. Solitude and silence
were about them. Their lips united in a long kiss,--the hundredth at
least of that beautiful day of spring. She was still dreaming. A
fugitive smile suddenly lighted up her face, then faded away like a
passing cloud.
"Of what are you thinking?" he asked.
"Oh, nothing! A worldly, foolish thought; a little silly--nothing."
"But what was it?" he asked, taking her again in his arms.
"Oh! I was only wondering if people had mouths in those other worlds;
because, you know--a kiss--lips--"
And so the hours passed away,--days, weeks, months, in a perfect union
of all their thoughts, all their feelings and impressions. The June sun
was already shining at its solstice, and the time to leave for Icléa's
home had come. At the appointed time she left with her father for
Christiania, and Spero followed them a few days later. It was the
young savant's intention to stay in Norway until autumn, and
continue the studies on the aurora borealis he had begun the year
before,--observations which were especially interesting to him, and
which he had had scarcely time to begin.
[Illustration]
This visit to Norway was the prolongation of a happy dream. The fair
Northern girl cast an aureole of perpetual winsomeness about him which
would perhaps have made him still forget the attractions of science if
she herself had not had, as we have seen, an insatiable taste for study.
The experiments which the indefatigable seeker had undertaken on
atmospheric electricity interested her as much as they did him. She too
wanted to know about those mysterious flames in the aurora borealis
which palpitate at night in high atmospheres; and as his series of
investigations led him to desire a balloon ascension, in order to reach
and surprise the phenomenon at its source, she also experienced the same
wish. He tried to dissuade her from it, those aeronautic expeditions not
being free from danger. But the very idea of sharing a peril with him
would have been enough to make her deaf to her loved one's entreaties.
After long hesitation Spero decided to take her with him, and prepared
for an ascension from the University of Christiania on the first night
of the aurora borealis.
[Illustration]
V.
THE AURORA BOREALIS.
The disturbances of the magnetic needle had announced the aurora's
presence even before the sun went down, and the inflation of the balloon
with pure hydrogen gas was begun while the sky showed in the magnetic
North that coloring of golden green which is always the sure indication
of an aurora borealis. The preparations were ended in a couple of
hours. The atmosphere, entirely free from all clouds, was perfectly
limpid, the stars twinkled in the bosom of a sky profoundly dark and
without a moon; but towards the North a soft light shone in an arc above
a black segment, throwing into the upper atmosphere slight flushes of a
pale greenish rose color, symbolizing the palpitations of an unknown
life. Icléa's father, who was watching the inflation of the balloon, had
no suspicion that his daughter was going; but at the last moment she
stepped into the car as if to inspect it. Spero gave the signal, and the
balloon rose slowly, majestically, over the city of Christiania, which,
lighted by thousands of lamps, appeared under the eyes of the travellers
rising through the air, to diminish in size as it disappeared in the
darkness.
[Illustration]
Soon the balloon, taking an oblique ascent, hovered over the darkened
landscape, and the paling lights also disappeared. The noises of the
city died away at the same time into profound silence: it was the
silence of the upper heights which enveloped the air-ship now. Icléa was
impressed by this extraordinary stillness, perhaps, above all, by the
novelty of the situation, and clung to her rash lover's side. They
mounted rapidly. The aurora borealis appeared to descend, and spread
itself out under the stars, like an undulating drapery of fleecy gold
and purple, overrun with electric flashes. Spero watched his
instruments, and by the help of a little crystal globe filled with
glow-worms, wrote down the indications corresponding to the heights
attained. The balloon went up steadily. What a delight to the
investigator! In a few moments he would soar to the crest of the aurora
borealis; he would find an answer to the question about the aurora's
height which had been asked in vain by so many philosophers, and
especially by his beloved masters, the two great "psychologists and
philosophers," Oersted and Ampère!
Icléa's emotion had calmed itself. "Were you afraid?" asked her lover.
"The balloon is safe; you need fear no accident,--everything has been
provided for. We will go down in an hour; there is not a breath of wind
stirring on the earth."
"No," she said, while the celestial light threw over her a roseate and
transparent illumination; "but it is so strange, so beautiful, so
divine. It is grand for little me! I shuddered for a moment. It seems to
me that I love you more than ever!" and throwing her arms about his
neck, she kissed him in a long, passionate, clinging embrace.
The solitary balloon was moving silently through the aerial heights, a
spheroid of transparent gas enclosed in its silken envelope, whose
vertical gores, joining each other at the valve on the top, could be
seen from the car; the lower part of the balloon being open for the
dilation of the gas.