"L'Invitation au Voyage"
There is a wonderful country, a country of Cockaigne, they say,
which I dreamed of visiting with an old friend. It is a strange
country, lost in the mists of the North and one might call it
the East of the West, the China of Europe, so freely does a
warm and capricious fancy flourish there, and so patiently and
persistently has that fancy illustrated it with a learned and
delicate vegetation.
A real country of Cockaigne, where everything is beautiful,
rich, quiet, honest; where order is the likeness and the
mirror of luxury; where life is fat, and sweet to breathe;
where disorder, tumult, and the unexpected are shut out; where
happiness is wedded to silence; where even cooking is poetic,
rich and highly flavoured at once; where all, dear love, is
made in your image.
You know that feverish sickness which comes over us in our
cold miseries, that nostalgia of unknown lands, that anguish
of curiosity? There is a country made in your image, where all
is beautiful, rich, quiet and honest; where fancy has built
and decorated a western China, where life is sweet to breathe,
where happiness is wedded to silence. It is there that we
should live, it is there that we should die!
Yes, it is there that we should breathe, dream, and lengthen
out the hours by the infinity of sensations. A musician has
written an "Invitation à la Valse": who will compose the
"Invitation au Voyage" that we can offer to the beloved, to the
chosen sister?
Yes, it is in this atmosphere that it would be good to live;
far off, where slower hours contain more thoughts, where clocks
strike happiness with a deeper and more significant solemnity.
On shining panels, or on gilded leather of a dark richness,
slumbers the discreet life of pictures, deep, calm, and devout
as the souls of the painters who created it. The sunsets which
colour so richly the walls of dining-room and drawing-room,
are sifted through beautiful hangings or through tall wrought
windows leaded into many panes. The pieces of furniture are
large, curious, and fantastic, armed with locks and secrets
like refined souls. Mirrors, metals, hangings, goldsmith's work
and pottery, play for the eyes a mute and mysterious symphony;
and from all things, from every corner, from the cracks of
drawers and from the folds of hangings, exhales a singular
odour, a "forget-me-not" of Sumatra, which is, as it were, the
soul of the abode.
A real country of Cockaigne, I assure you, where all is
beautiful, clean, and shining, like a clear conscience, like a
bright array of kitchen crockery, like splendid jewellery of
gold, like many-coloured jewellery of silver! All the treasures
of the world have found their way there, as to the house of
a hard-working man who has put the whole world in his debt.
Singular country, excelling others as Art excels Nature, where
Nature is refashioned by dreams, where Nature is corrected,
embellished, re-moulded.
Let the alchemists of horticulture seek and seek again, let
them set ever further and further back the limits to their
happiness! Let them offer prizes of sixty and of a hundred
thousand florins to whoever will solve their ambitious
problems! For me, I have found my "black tulip" and my "blue
dahlia"!
Incomparable flower, recaptured tulip, allegoric dahlia, it
is there, is it not, in that beautiful country, so calm and
so full of dreams, that you live and flourish? There, would
you not be framed within your own analogy, and would you not
see yourself again, reflected, as the mystics say, in your own
"correspondence"?
Dreams, dreams ever! and the more delicate and ambitious the
soul, the further do dreams estrange it from possible things.
Every man carries within himself his natural dose of opium,
ceaselessly secreted and renewed, and, from birth to death, how
many hours can we reckon of positive pleasure, of successful
and decided action? Shall we ever live in, shall we ever pass
into, that picture which my mind has painted, that picture made
in your image?
These treasures, this furniture, this luxury, this order, these
odours, these miraculous flowers, are you. You too are the
great rivers and the quiet canals. The vast ships that drift
down them, laden with riches, from whose decks comes the sound
of the monotonous songs of labouring sailors, are my thoughts
which slumber or rise and fall on your breast. You lead them
softly towards the sea, which is the infinite, mirroring the
depths of the sky in the crystal clearness of your soul; and
when, weary of the surge and heavy with the spoils of the East,
they return to the port of their birth, it is still my thoughts
that come back enriched out of the infinite to you.