I
No (said my friend Charles Jouvent), I do not know Italy; I started to
see it thoroughly twice, and each time I was stopped at the frontier and
could not manage to get any further. And yet my two attempts gave me a
charming idea of the manners of that beautiful country. I must, however,
some time or other visit its cities, as well as the museums and works of
art with which it abounds. I will also make another attempt to penetrate
into the interior, which I have not yet succeeded in doing.
You don't understand me, so I will explain myself: In the spring of 1874
I was seized with an irresistible desire to see Venice, Florence, Rome,
and Naples. I am, as you know, not a great traveler; it appears to me a
useless and fatiguing business. Nights spent in a train, the disturbed
slumbers of the railway carriage, with the attendant headache, and
stiffness in every limb, the sudden waking in that rolling box, the
unwashed feeling with your eyes and hair full of dust, the smell of the
coal on which one's lungs feed, those bad dinners in the draughty
refreshment rooms are, according to my ideas, a horrible way of
beginning a pleasure trip.
After this introduction by the express, we have the miseries of the
hotel; of some great hotel full of people, and yet so empty; the strange
room, and the dubious bed! I am most particular about my bed; it is the
sanctuary of life. We intrust our almost naked and fatigued bodies to it
so that they may be reanimated by reposing between soft sheets and
feathers.
There we find the most delightful hours of our existence, the hours of
love and of sleep. The bed is sacred, and should be respected,
venerated, and loved by us as the best and most delightful of our
earthly possessions.
I cannot lift up the sheets of an hotel bed without a shiver of disgust.
What have its occupants been doing in it the night before? Perhaps
dirty, revolting people have slept in it. I begin, then, to think of all
the horrible people with whom one rubs shoulders every day, people with
suspicious-looking skin which makes one think of the feet and all the
rest! I call to mind those who carry about with them the sickening smell
of garlic or of humanity. I think of those who are deformed and
purulent, of the perspiration emanating from the sick, and of everything
that is ugly and filthy in man.
And all this, perhaps, in the bed in which I am going to sleep! The mere
idea of it makes me feel ill as I get in.
And then the hotel dinners--those dreary _table d'hôte_ dinners in the
midst of all sorts of extraordinary people, or else those terrible
solitary dinners at a small table in a restaurant, feebly lighted up by
a wretched composite candle under a shade.
Again, those terribly dull evenings in some unknown town! Do you know
anything more wretched than when it is getting dark on such an occasion?
One goes about as if almost in a dream, looking at faces which one has
never seen before and will never see again; listening to people talking
about matters which are quite indifferent to you in a language that
perhaps you do not understand. You have a terrible feeling, almost as if
you were lost, and you continue to walk on so as not to be obliged to
return to the hotel, where you would feel more lost still because you
are _at home_, in a home which belongs to anyone who can pay for it, and
at last you fall into a chair of some well-lit café, whose gilding and
lights overwhelm you a thousand times more than the shadows in the
streets. Then you feel so abominably lonely sitting in front of the
glass of flat _bock_,[5] that a kind of madness seizes you, the longing
to go somewhere or other, no matter where, as long as you need not
remain in front of that marble table and in the dazzling brightness.
And then, suddenly, you perceive that you are really alone in the world,
always and everywhere; but that in places which we know the familiar
jostlings give us the illusion only of human fraternity. At such moments
of self-abandonment and somber isolation in distant cities one thinks
broadly, clearly, and profoundly. Then one suddenly sees the whole of
life outside the vision of eternal hope, outside the deceptions of our
innate habits, and of our expectations of happiness, of which we indulge
in dreams never to be realized.
It is only by going a long distance that we can fully understand how
short-lived and empty everything near at hand is; by searching for the
unknown we perceive how commonplace and evanescent everything is; only
by wandering over the face of the earth can we understand how small the
world is, and how very much alike everywhere.
How well I know, and how I hate and almost fear those haphazard walks
through unknown streets; and this was the reason why, as nothing would
induce me to undertake a tour in Italy by myself, I made up my mind to
accompany my friend Paul Pavilly.
You know Paul, and how woman is everything, the world, life itself, to
him. There are many men like that, to whom existence becomes poetical
and idealized by the presence of women. The earth is inhabitable only
because they are there; the sun shines and is warm because it lights
upon them; the air is soft and balmy because it blows upon their skin
and ruffles the short hairs on their temples, and the moon is charming
because it makes them dream and imparts a languorous charm to love.
Every act and action of Paul's has woman for its motive; all his
thoughts, all his efforts and hopes are centered on them.
When I mentioned Italy to Paul he at first absolutely refused to leave
Paris. I, however, began to tell him of the adventures I had on my
travels. I assured him that all Italian women are charming, and I made
him hope for the most refined pleasures at Naples, thanks to certain
letters of introduction which I had; and so at last he allowed himself
to be persuaded.