When I was obliged to leave her for a short time, and returned to my
room, I felt, even at mid-day, as if I had been immured in a dungeon
without air or light. The brightest sun afforded me no light, unless
its rays were reflected by her eyes. I admired her more, the more I saw
her; and could not believe she was a being of the same order as myself.
The divine nature of her love had become a part of the creed of my
imagination; and in spirit I was ever prostrate before the being who
appeared to me too tender to be a divinity--too divine to be a woman! I
sought a name for her, and found none. I called her Mystery, and under
that vague and indefinite title, offered her worship which partook of
earth by its tenderness, of a dream by its enthusiasm, of reality by
her presence, and of heaven by my adoration.
She had obliged me to confess that I had sometimes written verses, but
I had never shown her any. She did not much like that artificial and
set form of speech, which, when it does not idealize, generally impairs
the simplicity of feeling and expression. Her nature was too full of
impulse, too feeling, and too serious, to bend itself to all the
precision, form, and delay of written poetry. She was Poetry without a
lyre--true as the heart, simple as the untutored thought, dreamy as
night, brilliant as day, swift as lightning, boundless as space! No
rules of harmony could have bounded the infinite music of her mind; her
very voice was a perpetual melody, that no cadence of verse could have
equalled. Had I lived long with her, I should never have read or
written poetry. She was the living poem of Nature and of myself; my
thoughts were in her heart, my imagery in her eyes, and my harmony in
her voice.
She had in her room a few volumes of the principal poets of the end of
the eighteenth century, and of the Empire, such as Delille and
Fontanes; but their high-sounding and material poetry was not suited to
us. She had been lulled by the melodious murmur of the waves of the
tropic, and her soul contained treasures of love, imagination, and
melancholy, which all the voices of the air and waters could not have
expressed. She would sometimes attempt with me to read these books, on
the strength of their reputation, but would throw them down again
impatiently; they gave no sound beneath her touch, like those broken
chords which remain voiceless when we strike the keys. The music of her
heart was in mine, but I could never give it forth to the world; and
the verses she was one day to inspire were destined to sound only on
her grave. She never knew before she died whom she had loved. In her
eyes I was her brother, and it would have mattered little to her that I
had been a poet for the rest of the world. Her love saw nothing in me
but myself.
Only once I involuntarily betrayed before her the poor gift of poetry
that I possessed, and which she neither suspected nor desired in me. My
friend Louis--had come to stay a few days with us. The evening had been
spent till midnight in reading, in confidential talk, in musing, in
sadness, and in smiles. We wondered to see three young lives, which a
short time before were unknown to each other, now united and identified
beneath the same roof, at the same fireside, with the same murmur of
autumnal winds around, in a cottage of the mountains of Savoy; we
strove to foresee by what sport of Providence, or Chance, the stormy
winds of life might scatter or reunite us once more. These distant
vistas of the horizon of our future lives had saddened us, and we
remained silent round the little tea-table on which we were leaning. At
last Louis, who was a poet, felt a mournful inspiration rising in his
heart, and wished to write it down. She gave him paper and a pencil,
and he leaned on the marble chimney-piece and wrote a few stanzas,
plaintive and tearful as the funeral strophes of Gilbert. He resembled
Gilbert, and he might have written those lines of his, which will live
as long as the lamentations of Job, in the language of men:
Au banquet de la vie, infortuné convive,
J'apparus un jour et je meurs;
Je meurs, et sur ma tombe, où lentement j'arrive,
Nul ne viendra verser des pleurs!
Louis's verses had affected me; I took the pencil from him, and,
withdrawing for an instant to the end of the room, I wrote in my turn
the following verses, which will die with me unknown to all; they were
the first verses that sprung from my heart, and not from my
imagination. I read them out without daring to raise my eyes to her, to
whom they were addressed. They ran thus--
* * * * *
but, no! I efface them! My love was all my genius, and they have
departed together.
As I finished reading the verses, I saw on Julie's face, on which the
light of the lamp fell, such a tender expression of surprise and such
superhuman beauty, that I stood uncertain, as my verses had expressed
it, between the woman and the angel,--between love and adoration. This
latter feeling predominated at last in my heart, and in that of my
friend. We fell on our knees before the sofa, and kissed the end of the
black shawl which enveloped her feet. The verses seemed to her merely
an instantaneous and solitary expression of my feelings towards her;
she praised them, but never mentioned them again. She much preferred
our familiar discourse, or even our pensive silence in each other's
company, to these exercises of the mind which profane our feelings
rather than reveal them, Louis left us after a few days.