with a green curtain, with the calm gravity of a jeweller closing his
drawers when he thinks that he is in the company of clever thieves. He
bestowed upon the two painters a profoundly cunning glance, full of
contempt and suspicion, and silently ushered them out of his studio,
with convulsive haste; then standing in his doorway, he said to them:
"Adieu, my little friends."
That "adieu" horrified the two painters. The next day Porbus, in his
anxiety, went again to see Frenhofer, and learned that he had died in
the night, after burning all his pictures.
1831.
A Seashore Drama
To
MADAME LA PRINCESSE CAROLINE GALITZIN DE
GENTHOD, NÉE COMTESSE WALEWSKA:
_The author's homage and remembrances._
Young men almost always have a pair of compasses with which they
delight to measure the future; when their will is in accord with the
size of the angle which they make, the world is theirs. But this
phenomenon of moral life takes place only at a certain age. That age,
which in the case of all men comes between the years of twenty-two
and twenty-eight, is the age of noble thoughts, the age of first
conceptions, because it is the age of unbounded desires, the age at
which one doubts nothing; he who talks of doubt speaks of impotence.
After that age, which passes as quickly as the season for sowing, comes
the age of execution. There are in a certain sense two youths: one
during which one thinks, the other during which one acts; often they
are blended, in men whom nature has favoured, and who, like Caesar,
Newton, and Bonaparte, are the greatest among great men.
I was reckoning how much time a thought needs to develop itself;
and, compasses in hand, standing on a cliff a hundred fathoms above
the ocean, whose waves played among the reefs, I laid out my future,
furnishing it with works, as an engineer draws fortresses and palaces
upon vacant land. The sea was lovely; I had just dressed after bathing;
I was waiting for Pauline, my guardian angel, who was bathing in a
granite bowl full of white sand, the daintiest bath-tub that Nature
ever designed for any of her sea-fairies. We were at the extreme point
of Le Croisic, a tiny peninsula of Brittany; we were far from the
harbour, in a spot which the authorities considered so inaccessible
that the customs-officers almost never visited it. To swim in the air
after swimming in the sea! Ah! who would not have swum into the future?
Why did I think? Why does evil happen? Who knows? Ideas come to your
heart, or your brain, without consulting you. No courtesan was ever
more whimsical or more imperious than is conception in an artist; it
must be caught, like fortune, by the hair, when it comes. Clinging to
my thought, as Astolphe clung to his hippogriff, I galloped through the
world, arranging everything therein to suit my pleasure.
When I looked about me in search of some omen favourable to the
audacious schemes which my wild imagination advised me to undertake,
a sweet cry, the cry of a woman calling in the silence of the desert,
the cry of a woman coming from the bath, refreshed and joyous, drowned
the murmur of the fringe of foam tossed constantly back and forth by
the rising and falling of the waves in the indentations of the shore.
When I heard that note, uttered by the soul, I fancied that I had seen
on the cliff the foot of an angel, who, as she unfolded her wings,
had called to me: "Thou shalt have success!" I descended, radiant
with joy and light as air; I went bounding down, like a stone down a
steep slope. When she saw me, she said to me: "What is the matter?"
I did not answer, but my eyes became moist. The day before, Pauline
had understood my pain, as she understood at that moment my joy, with
the magical sensitiveness of a harp which follows the variations of
the atmosphere. The life of man has some glorious moments! We walked
silently along the shore. The sky was cloudless, the sea without a
ripple; others would have seen only two blue plains, one above the
other; but we who understood each other without need of speech, we
who could discover between those two swaddling-cloths of infinity the
illusions with which youth is nourished, we pressed each other's hand
at the slightest change which took place either in the sheet of water
or in the expanse of air; for we took those trivial phenomena for
material interpretations of our twofold thought.
Who has not enjoyed that unbounded bliss in pleasure, when the soul
seems to be released from the bonds of the flesh, and to be restored
as it were to the world whence it came? Pleasure is not our only guide
in those regions. Are there not times when the sentiments embrace
each other as of their own motion, and fly thither, like two children
who take each other's hands and begin to run without knowing why or
whither? We walked along thus.
At the moment that the roofs of the town appeared on the horizon,
forming a grayish line, we met a poor fisherman who was returning to
Le Croisic. His feet were bare, his canvas trousers were ragged on
the edges, with many holes imperfectly mended; he wore a shirt of
sail-cloth, wretched list suspenders, and his jacket was a mere rag.
The sight of that misery distressed us--a discord, as it were, in the
midst of our harmony. We looked at each other, to lament that we had
not at that moment the power to draw upon the treasury of Aboul-Cacem.
We saw a magnificent lobster and a crab hanging by a cord which the
fisherman carried in his right hand, while in the other he had his
nets and his fishing apparatus. We accosted him, with the purpose
of buying his fish, an idea which occurred to both of us, and which
expressed itself in a smile, to which I replied by slightly pressing
the arm which I held and drawing it closer to my heart. It was one
of those nothings which the memory afterward transforms into a poem,
when, sitting by the fire, we recall the time when that nothing moved
us, the place where it happened, and that mirage, the effects of which
have never been defined, but which often exerts an influence upon the
objects which surround us, when life is pleasant and our hearts are
full.
The loveliest places are simply what we make them. Who is the man,
however little of a poet he may be, who has not in his memory a bowlder
that occupies more space than the most famous landscape visited at
great expense? Beside that bowlder what tempestuous thoughts! there,
a whole life mapped out; here, fears banished; there, rays of hope
entered the heart. At that moment, the sun, sympathising with these
thoughts of love and of the future, cast upon the yellowish sides of
that cliff an ardent beam; some mountain wild-flowers attracted the
attention; the tranquillity and silence magnified that uneven surface,
in reality dark of hue, but made brilliant by the dreamer; then it was
beautiful, with its meagre vegetation, its warm-hued camomile, its
Venus's hair, with the velvety leaves. A prolonged festivity, superb
decorations, placid exaltation of human strength! Once before, the Lake
of Bienne, seen from Île St.-Pierre, had spoken to me thus; perhaps the
cliff of Le Croisic would be the last of those delights. But, in that
case, what would become of Pauline?
"You have had fine luck this morning, my good man," I said to the
fisherman.
"Yes, monsieur," he replied, stopping to turn towards us the tanned
face of those who remain for hours at a time exposed to the reflection
of the sun on the water.
That face indicated endless resignation; the patience of the fisherman,
and his gentle manners. That man had a voice without trace of
harshness, kindly lips, no ambition; an indefinably frail and sickly
appearance. Any other type of face would have displeased us.
"Where are you going to sell your fish?"
"At the town."
"How much will you get for the lobster?"
"Fifteen sous."
"And for the crab?"
"Twenty sous."
"Why so much difference between the lobster and the crab?"
"The crab is much more delicate, monsieur; and then it's as cunning as
a monkey, and don't often allow itself to be caught."
"Will you let us have both for a hundred sous?" said Pauline.
The man was thunderstruck.
"You sha'n't have them!" I said laughingly; "I will give ten francs. We
must pay for emotions all that they are worth."
"Very well," she replied, "I propose to have them; I will give ten
francs two sous."
"Ten sous."
"Twelve francs."
"Fifteen francs."
"Fifteen francs fifty," she said.
"One hundred francs."
"One hundred and fifty."
I bowed. At that moment we were not rich enough to carry the bidding
any farther. The poor fisherman did not know whether he ought to be
angry as at a practical joke, or to exult; we relieved him from his
dilemma by giving him the name of our landlady and telling him to take
the lobster and the crab to her house.
"Do you earn a living?" I asked him, in order to ascertain to what
cause his destitution should be attributed.
"With much difficulty and many hardships," he replied. "Fishing on the
seashore, when you have neither boat nor nets, and can fish only with
a line, is a risky trade. You see you have to wait for the fish or
the shell-fish to come, while the fishermen with boats can go out to
sea after them. It is so hard to earn a living this way, that I am the
only man who fishes on the shore. I pass whole days without catching
anything. The only way I get anything is when a crab forgets himself
and goes to sleep, as this one did, or a lobster is fool enough to stay
on the rocks. Sometimes, after a high sea, the wolf-fish come in, and
then I grab them."
"Well, take one day with another, what do you earn?"
"Eleven or twelve sous. I could get along with that if I were alone;
but I have my father to support, and the poor man can't help me, for
he's blind."
At that sentence, uttered with perfect simplicity, Pauline and I looked
at each other without a word.
"You have a wife or a sweetheart?"
He cast at us one of the most pitiful glances that I ever saw, as he
replied:
"If I had a wife, then I should have to let my father go; I couldn't
support him, and a wife and children too."
"Well, my poor fellow, how is it that you don't try to earn more by
carrying salt to the harbour, or by working in the salt marshes?"
"Oh? I couldn't do that for three months, monsieur. I am not strong
enough; and if I should die, my father would have to beg. What I must
have is a trade that requires very little skill and a great deal of
patience."
"But how can two people live on twelve sous a day?"
"Oh, monsieur, we eat buckwheat cakes, and barnacles that I take off
the rocks."
"How old are you?"
"Thirty-seven."
"Have you ever been away from here?"
"I went to Guérande once, to draw my lot in the draft, and I went to
Savenay, to show myself to some gentlemen who measured me. If I had
been an inch taller I should have been drafted. I should have died on
the first long march, and my poor father would have been asking alms
to-day."
I had thought out many dramas; Pauline was accustomed to intense
emotions, living with a man in my condition of health; but neither
of us had ever listened to more touching words than those of that
fisherman. We walked some distance in silence, both of us measuring
the silent depths of that unknown life, admiring the nobility of that
self-sacrifice which was unconscious of itself; the strength of his
weakness surprised us; that unconscious generosity made us small in our
own eyes. I saw that poor creature, all instinct, chained to that rock
as a galley-slave is chained to his ball, watching for twenty years
for shell-fish to support himself, and sustained in his patience by a
single sentiment. How many hours passed on the edge of that beach! how
many hopes crushed by a squall, by a change of weather! He hung over
the edge of a granite shelf, his arms stretched out like those of an
Indian fakir, while his father, sitting on a stool, waited in silence
and darkness for him to bring him the coarsest of shell-fish and of
bread, if the sea were willing.
"Do you ever drink wine?" I asked him.
"Three or four times a year."
"Well, you shall drink some to-day, you and your father, and we will
send you a white loaf."
"You are very kind, monsieur."
"We will give you your dinner, if you will guide us along the shore as
far as Batz, where we are going, to see the tower which overlooks the
basin and the coast between Batz and Le Croisic."
"With pleasure," he said. "Go straight ahead, follow the road you are
now on; I will overtake you after I have got rid of my fish and my
tackle."
We nodded simultaneously, and he hurried off towards the town, light at
heart. That meeting held us in the same mental situation in which we
were previously, but it had lowered our spirits.
"Poor man!" said Pauline, with that accent which takes away from a
woman's compassion whatever there may be offensive in pity; "does it
not make one feel ashamed to be happy when one sees such misery?"
"Nothing is more cruel than to have impotent desires," I replied.
"Those two poor creatures, father and son, will no more know how keen
our sympathy is than the world knows how noble their lives are; for
they are laying up treasures in heaven."
"What a wretched country!" she said, as she pointed out to me, along
a field surrounded by a loose stone wall, lumps of cow-dung arranged
symmetrically. "I asked some one what those were. A peasant woman, who
was putting them in place, answered that she was _making wood_. Just
fancy, my dear, that when these blocks of dung are dried, these poor
people gather them, pile them up, and warm themselves with them. During
the winter they are sold, like lumps of peat. And what do you suppose
the best paid dressmaker earns? Five sous a day," she said, after a
pause; "but she gets her board."
"See," I said to her, "the winds from the ocean wither or uproot
everything; there are no trees; the wrecks of vessels that are beyond
use are sold to the rich, for the cost of transportation prevents
them from using the firewood in which Brittany abounds. This province
is beautiful only to great souls; people without courage could not
live here; it is no place for anybody except poets or barnacles. The
storehouse for salt had to be built on the cliff, to induce anybody
to live in it. On one side, the sea; on the other, the sands; above,
space."
We had already passed the town and were within the species of desert
which separates Le Croisic from the village of Batz. Imagine, my dear
uncle, a plain two leagues in length, covered by the gleaming sand that
we see on the seashore. Here and there a few rocks raised their heads,
and you would have said that they were gigantic beasts lying among the
dunes. Along the shore there is an occasional reef, about which the
waves play, giving them the aspect of great white roses floating on the
liquid expanse and coming to rest on the shore. When I saw that plain
bounded by the ocean on the right, and on the left by the great lake
that flows in between Le Croisic and the sandy heights of Guérande, at
the foot of which there are salt marshes absolutely without vegetation,
I glanced at Pauline and asked her if she had the courage to defy the
heat of the sun, and the strength to walk through the sand.
"I have on high boots; let us go thither," she said, pointing to the
tower of Batz, which circumscribed the view by its enormous mass,
placed there like a pyramid, but a slender, indented pyramid, so
poetically adorned that it allowed the imagination to see in it the
first ruins of a great Asiatic city. We walked a few yards and sat down
under a rock which was still in the shadow; but it was eleven o'clock
in the morning, and that shadow, which ceased at our feet, rapidly
disappeared.
"How beautiful the silence is," she said to me; "and how its intensity
is increased by the regular plashing of the sea on the beach!"
"If you choose to abandon your understanding to the three immensities
that surround us, the air, the water, and the sand, listening solely to
the repeated sound of the flow and the outflow," I replied, "you will
not be able to endure its language; you will fancy that you discover
therein a thought which will overwhelm you. Yesterday, at sunset, I had
that sensation; it prostrated me."
"Oh, yes, let us talk," she said, after a long pause. "No orator can
be more terrible than this silence. I fancy that I have discovered
the causes of the harmony which surrounds us," she continued. "This
landscape, which has only three sharp colours, the brilliant yellow
of the sand, the blue of the sky, and the smooth green of the sea, is
grand without being wild, it is immense without being a desert, it is
changeless without being monotonous; it has only three elements, but it
is diversified."
"Women alone can express their impressions thus," I replied; "you would
drive a poet to despair, dear heart, whom I divined so perfectly."
"The excessive noonday heat imparts a gorgeous colour to those three
expressions of infinity," replied Pauline, laughing. "I can imagine
here the poesy and the passion of the Orient."
"And I can imagine its despair."
"Yes," she said; "that dune is a sublime cloister."
We heard the hurried step of our guide; he had dressed himself in
his best clothes. We said a few formal words to him; he evidently
saw that our frame of mind had changed, and, with the reserve that
misfortune imparts, he kept silent. Although we pressed each other's
hands from time to time, to advise each other of the unity of our
impressions, we walked for half an hour in silence, whether because we
were overwhelmed by the heat, which rose in shimmering waves from the
sand, or because the difficulty of walking absorbed our attention. We
walked on, hand in hand, like two children; we should not have taken
a dozen steps if we had been arm in arm. The road leading to Batz was
not marked out; a gust of wind was enough to efface the footprints of
horses or the wheel-ruts; but our guide's practised eye recognised the
road by the droppings of cattle or of horses. Sometimes it went down
towards the sea, sometimes rose towards the upland, at the caprice of
the slopes, or to skirt a rock. At noon, we were only half-way.
"We will rest there," said I, pointing to a promontory formed of rocks
high enough to lead one to suppose that we should find a grotto there.
When I spoke, the fisherman, who had followed the direction of my
finger, shook his head and said:
"There's some one there! People who go from Batz to Le Croisic, or from
Le Croisic to Batz, always make a detour in order not to pass that
rock."
The man said this in a low voice, and we divined a mystery.
"Is he a thief, an assassin?"
Our guide replied only by a long-drawn breath which increased our
curiosity.
"But will anything happen to us if we pass by there?"
"Oh no!"
"Will you go with us?"
"No, monsieur."
"We will go then, if you assure us that we shall be in no danger."
"I don't say that," replied the fisherman hastily; "I say simply that
the man who is there won't say anything to you, or do any harm to you.
Oh, bless my soul! he won't so much as move from his place!"
"Who is he, pray?"
"A man!"
Never were two syllables uttered in such a tragic tone. At that moment
we were twenty yards from that reef, about which the sea was playing;
our guide took the road which skirted the rocks; we went straight
ahead, but Pauline took my arm. Our guide quickened his pace in order
to reach the spot where the two roads met again at the same time that
we did. He evidently supposed that, after seeing the man, we would
quicken our pace. That circumstance kindled our curiosity, which then
became so intense that our hearts throbbed as if they had felt a thrill
of fear. Despite the heat of the day and the fatigue caused by walking
through the sand, our hearts were still abandoned to the indescribable
languor of a blissful harmony of sensations; they were filled with
that pure pleasure which can only be described by comparing it to
the pleasure which one feels in listening to some lovely music, like
Mozart's _Andiano mio ben_. Do not two pure sentiments, which blend,
resemble two beautiful voices singing? In order fully to appreciate
the emotion which seized us, you must share the semivoluptuous
condition in which the events of that morning had enveloped us. Gaze
for a long while at a turtle-dove perched on a slender twig, near a
spring, and you will utter a cry of pain when you see a hawk pounce
upon it, bury its steel claws in its heart, and bear it away with the
murderous rapidity that powder communicates to the bullet.
When we had walked a yard or two across the open space that lay in
front of the grotto, a sort of platform a hundred feet above the ocean,
and sheltered from its rage by a succession of steep rocks, we were
conscious of an electric shock not unlike that caused by a sudden noise
in the midst of the night. We had spied a man seated on a bowlder of
granite, and he had looked at us. His glance, like the flash of a
cannon, came from two bloodshot eyes, and his stoical immobility could
be compared only to the unchanging posture of the masses of granite
which surrounded him. His eyes moved slowly; his body, as if it were
petrified, did not move at all. After flashing at us that glance which
gave us such a rude shock, he turned his eyes to the vast expanse of
the ocean, and gazed at it, despite the dazzling light which rose
therefrom, as the eagles are said to gaze at the sun, without lowering
the lids, which he did not raise again. Try to recall, my dear uncle,
one of those old druidical oaks, whose gnarled trunk, newly stripped
of its branches, rises fantastically above a deserted road, and you
will have an accurate image of that man. He had one of those shattered
herculean frames, and the face of Olympian Jove, but ravaged by age,
by the hard toil of the seafaring man, by grief, by coarse food, and
blackened as if struck by lightning. As I glanced at his calloused,
hairy hands, I saw chords which resembled veins of iron. However,
everything about him indicated a robust constitution. I noticed a large
quantity of moss in a corner of the grotto, and upon a rough table,
hewn out by chance in the midst of the granite, a broken loaf covering
an earthen jug. Never had my imagination, when it carried me back to
the deserts where the first hermits of Christianity lived, conceived a
face more grandly religious, or more appallingly penitent than was the
face of that man.
Even you, who have listened to confessions, my dear uncle, have perhaps
never met with such sublime remorse; but that remorse was drowned in
the waves of prayer, the incessant prayer of silent despair. That
fisherman, that sailor, that rude Breton, was sublime by virtue of
some unknown sentiment. But had those eyes wept? Had that statuelike
hand struck its fellow man? Was that stern forehead, instinct with
pitiless uprightness, on which, however, strength had left those marks
of gentleness which are the accompaniment of all true strength--was
that forehead, furrowed by wrinkles, in harmony with a noble heart?
Why was that man among the granite? Why the granite in that man? Where
was the man? Where was the granite? A whole world of thoughts rushed
through our minds. As our guide had anticipated, we had passed in
silence, rapidly; and when he met us, we were tremulous with terror, or
overwhelmed with amazement. But he did not use the fulfillment of his
prediction as a weapon against us.
"Did you see him?" he asked.
"Who is that man?" said I.
"They call him _The Man of the Vow_."
You can imagine how quickly our two faces turned towards our fisherman
at those words! He was a simple-minded man; he understood our silent
question; and this is what he said, in his own language, the popular
tone of which I shall try to retain:
"Madame, the people of Le Croisic, like the people of Batz, believe
that that man is guilty of something, and that he is doing a penance
ordered by a famous priest to whom he went to confess, a long way
beyond Nantes. Other people think that Cambremer--that's his name--has
an evil spell that he communicates to everybody who passes through
the air he breathes. So a good many people, before they pass that
rock, look to see what way the wind is. If it's from _galerne_," he
said, pointing towards the west, "they wouldn't go on, even if it
was a matter of searching for a piece of the true Cross; they turn
back, because they're frightened. Other people, the rich people of Le
Croisic, say that he's made a vow, and that's why he's called _The Man
of the Vow_. He is always there, night and day; never comes out.