“The gentleman came up briskly, smiled delicately, and, with a gesture
as of a happy discoverer, he remarked that it was warm.”
[Illustration: 472]
“And the lady?”
“The lady’s eyes flashed. With an enchanting smile of approval, she
answered that it was indeed.”
“Judge what constraint they must have imposed on themselves. The
gentleman is thirty years old; for twelve years he has known his phrase;
the lady is twenty-two, she has known hers for seven years. Each has
made and heard the question and answer three or four thousand times, and
yet they appear to be interested, surprised. What empire over self! What
force {445}of nature! You see clearly that these French who are called
light are stoics on occasion.”
“My eyes smart, my feet are swollen, I have been swallowing dust; it
is one o’clock in the morning, the air smells bad, I should like to go.
Will they remain much longer?”
“Until five o’clock in the morning.”
EIGHTH.
Two days after there was a concert. The creole said in coming out that
he was very tired, and had understood nothing of all that buzzing, and
begged Paul to explain to him what pleasure people found in such noise.
“For,” said he, “they have enjoyed it, since they paid six francs for
admission, and applauded vehemently.”
“Music awakes all sorts of agreeable reveries.”
“Let us see.”
“Such an air suggests scenes of love; such another makes you imagine
great landscapes, tragic events.”
“And if you don’t have these reveries, the music bores you?”
“Certainly; unless you are professor of harmony.” {446}“But the audience
were not professors of harmony?”
“No indeed.”
“So that they have all had all those reveries you talk about, otherwise
they would be bored; and, if they were bored, they would neither have
paid nor applauded.”
[Illustration: 472]
“Well argued.”
“Explain then to me the reveries they have had; for example, that
serenade mentioned in the programme, the serenade from Don Pasquale.”
“It paints a happy love, full of pleasure and unconcern. You see a
handsome youth with laughing eyes and blooming cheek, in a garden in
Italy; under a tranquil moon, by the whispering of the breeze, he
awaits his mistress, thinks of her smile, {447}and little by little, in
measured notes, joy and tenderness spring harmoniously from his heart.”
“What, they imagined all that! What happy country-folk are your people!
What fulness of emotion and thought! What discreet countenances! I
should never have suspected, to see them, that they were having so sweet
a dream.”
“The second piece was an andante of Beethoven.”
“What about Beethoven?”
[Illustration: 473]
“A poor, great man, deaf, loving, misunderstood, and a philosopher,
whose music is full of gigantic or sorrowful dreams.”
“What dreams?”
“‘Eternity is a great eyry, whence all the centuries, like young
eaglets, have flown in turn to cross {448}the heavens and disappear.
Ours is in its turn come to the brink of the nest; but they have clipped
its wings, and it awaits death while gazing upon space, into which it
cannot take flight.’”
“What is that you are reciting to me?”
“A sentence of de Musset, which translates your andante.”
“What! In three minutes they passed from the first idea to this. What
men! What flexibility of spirit! I should never have believed in such
readiness. Without tripping, as a matter of course, they entered this
reverie on leaving a serenade? What hearts! What artists! You make me
thoroughly ashamed of myself: I shall never again dare to say a word to
them.”
“The third piece, a duo of Mozart’s, expresses quite German sentiments,
an artless candor, melancholy, contemplative tenderness, the
half-defined smile, the timidity of love.”
“So that their imagination, which was still in a perfect state
of distraction, is in a moment so transformed as to represent the
confidence, the innocence, the touching agitation of a young girl?”
“Certainly.”
“And there are seven or eight pieces in a concert?”
“At least. Moreover, these pieces being taken from three or four
countries and two or three {449}centuries, the audience must suddenly
assume the sentiments, opposite as they are and varied, of all these
centuries and of all these countries.”
“And they were crowded on benches, under a glaring light.”
“And in the pauses, the men talked railroads, the ladies dresses.”
“I am getting confused. I, when I dream, want to be alone, at my ease,
or at most with a friend. If music touches me, it is in a little dark
room, when some one plays airs of one sort, that suit my state of
mind. It is not necessary that any one should talk to me about positive
things. Dreams do not come to me at will; they fly away in spite of me.
I see clearly that I am on another continent, with an entirely different
race. One learns in travelling.”
A suspicion seized him: “Perhaps they had come there for penance? When
they came out, I saw them yawning, and dejected in countenance.”
“Don’t believe anything of it. It is because they restrain themselves.
Otherwise, they would burst into tears and throw themselves on your
neck.”
NINTH.
In the evening our creole, who had been thinking, said to Paul:
{450}“Since you are such musicians in France, your well-educated girls
must all learn music?”
“Three hours of scales every day, for thirteen years, from seven to
twenty; total, fourteen thousand hours.”
“They profit by it?”
“One out of eight; of the other seven, three become good hand-organs,
four poor hand-or-gans.”
“I suppose for a compensation they are made to read?”
“Le Ragois, La Harpe, and other dictionaries, all sorts of little
treatises of florid piety.”
“What then is your education?”
“A pretty case embalmed with incense, perfumed, securely padlocked,
where the mind sleeps while the finders turn a bird-organ.”
“Well, that is encouraging for the husband. And what does _he_ do?”
“He receives the key of the case, opens it; a little devil in a white
dress jumps at his nose, eager to dance and get out.”
“Very well, the husband serves as guide. Has he other cares?”
“Perhaps so.”
“For instance?”
“An apartment, third floor, costs two thousand francs, the dress of the
wife fifteen hundred, the {451}education of a child, a thousand; the
husband earns six thousand.”
“I understand; while dancing, they think of all sorts of melancholy
things.”
“Of economizing, keeping up appearances, flattering, calculating.”
“What then is marriage with you?”
“An act of society between a minister of foreign relations and a
minister of the interior.”
“And for preparation they have learned--”
“To roll off scales, to shine in trills, to shift their wrists.
Prestidigitation instructs in housekeeping.”
“Decidedly, you Europeans have a fine logic. And the eighth girl, the
one who does not become a hand-organ?”
“The piano forms her too. It answers for everything, everywhere.
Beneficent machine!”
“How is that?”
“It exalts and refines. Mendelssohn surrounds them with ardent,
delicate, morbid imaginings. Rossini fills their nerves with an
expansive and voluptuous joy. The sharp, tormented desires, the broken,
rebel cries of modern passions, rise from every strain of Meyerbeer.
Mozart awakens in them a swarm of affections and dim longings. They live
in a cloud of emotions and sensations.”
“The other arts would do as much.”
“Not a bit of it. Literature is a living psychology, {452}painting a
living physiology. Music alone invents all, copies nothing, is a pure
dream, gives free rein to dreams.”
“And probably they strike out into it.”
“With all the ardor of their ignorance, their sex, imagination,
idleness, and their twenty years.”
“Well, of evenings they have the poetry of the family and the world for
pasture.”
“In the evening, a night-capped gentleman, their husband, talks to
them of his reports and his practice. The children in their cradle are
spoiled or grumble. The cook brings her account. They bow to fifteen
men in their _salon_, and compliment fifteen ladies on their dresses. In
addition, once in awhile, the penitential and funereal ceremony you saw
three days ago.”
“But then the piano seems chosen expressly.”
“To resign them at the outset to the meanness of a commonplace
condition, the nothingness of the feminine condition, the wretchedness
of the human condition. It is plain that all will be content, that none
will become languishing or sharp. Dear and beneficent instrument! Salute
it with respect, when you enter a room. It is the source of domestic
concord, of feminine patience and conjugal bliss.”
“Saint Jacques, I swear that my wife shall not know music!”{453}
“You are making bachelor’s vows, my dear friend. Nowadays every girl who
wears gloves has made her fingers run over that machine; otherwise she
would think herself no better than a washerwoman.”
“I will marry my washerwoman.”
“The day after your wedding she will have a piano brought in.”
*****
Paul has sprained his foot and spent two days in his room, occupied
in watching a poultry yard. He improved the occasion by writing the
following little treatise for the use of the young creole, a sort
of viaticum, with which he will nourish himself for the better
understanding of the world. I thought the treatise melancholy and
skeptical. Paul replies, that one should be so at first, in order not to
be afterward, and that it is well to be a little skeptical if you wish
not to be too skeptical. {454}
[Illustration: 480]
LIFE AND PHILOSOPHICAL OPINIONS OF A CAT.
I.
I was born in a cask, at the back of a hay-loft: the light fell on
my closed eyelids, so that the first eight days, everything appeared
rose-colored to me.
The eighth, it was still better; I looked, and saw a great fall of light
upon the dark shade; the dust and insects danced in it. The hay was
warm and fragrant; the spiders hung in sleep from the tiles; the gnats
hummed; everything seemed happy; that emboldened me; I wanted to go
and touch the white patch where those little diamonds were whirling and
which rejoined the roof by a column of gold. I rolled over like a ball;
my eyes were burned, my sides bruised; I was choking, and I coughed till
nightfall. {455}
II.
When my paws had become firm, I went out and soon made friends with
a goose, an estimable creature, for she had a warm belly; I cowered
underneath, and during this time her philosophic conversation was
forming me. She used to say that the poultry yard was a republic of
allies; that the most industrious, man, had been chosen for chief, and
that the dogs, although turbulent, were our guardians. I shed tears of
emotion under my kind friend’s belly.
One morning the cook appeared looking as if butter would not melt in her
mouth, and showing a handful of barley. The goose stretched forth her
neck, which the cook grasped, drawing a big knife. My uncle, an active
philosopher, ran up and began to exhort the goose, which was uttering
indecorous cries: “Dear sister,” said he, “the farmer, when he shall
have eaten your flesh, will have a clearer intelligence, and will watch
better over your welfare; and the dogs, nourished with your bones,
will be the more capable of defending you.” Thereupon the goose became
silent, for her head was cut off, and a sort of red pipe stuck out
beyond the bleeding neck. My uncle ran for the head and carried it
nimbly away; as for me, a little frightened, I {456}drew near to the
pool of blood, and, without thinking, I dipped my tongue into it; the
blood was very good, and I went to the kitchen to see if I could not
have some more of it.
III.
My uncle, a very old and experienced animal, taught me universal
history.
[Illustration: 482]
At the beginning of things, when he was born, the master being dead,
the children at the funeral and the servants at a dance, all the animals
found themselves free. It was a frightful hubbub; a turkey, whose
feathers were too fine, was stripped by his comrades. In the evening, a
ferret, which had slipped in, sucked the jugular vein of three-quarters
{457}of the combatants, who, naturally, made no further outcry. The
spectacle in the farmyard was fine; here and there was a dog swallowing
a duck; the horses in pure sportiveness were breaking the backs of the
dogs; my uncle himself crunched a half-dozen little chickens. That was
the golden age, said he.
In the evening, when the people came home, the whipping began. Uncle
received a lash which took off a strip of his fur. The dogs, well
flogged and tied up, howled with repentance and licked the hands of
their new master. The horses resumed their burden with administrative
zeal. The fowls, protected, clucked their benedictions; only, six months
after, when the dealer passed, they killed fifty at once. The geese,
among whose number was my late kind friend, flapped their wings, saying
that everything was in good order, and praising the farmer, the public
benefactor.
IV.
My uncle, although surly, acknowledges that things are better than they
used to be. He says that at first our race was savage, and that there
are still in the woods cats who are like our first ancestors, which, at
long intervals, catch a mole or dormouse, but oftener the contents of a
shot-gun. {458}Others, lean, short-haired, run over the roofs and think
that mice are very rare. As for us, brought up on the summit of earthly
felicity, we whisk a flattering tail in the kitchen, we utter tender
little mewings, we lick the empty plates, and at the utmost we put up
with a dozen cuffs in the course of the day.
V.
[Illustration: 484]
{459} Music is a heavenly art, and it is certain that our race has the
privilege of it; it springs from the depths of our entrails; men know
this so well that they borrow them from us when they want to imitate us
with their violins.
Two things inspire in us these heavenly songs: the view of the stars
and love. Men, clumsy copyists, cram themselves ridiculously into a low
hall, and skip about thinking to equal us. It is on the summit of the
roofs, in the splendor of the night, when all the skin shivers, that
the divine melody can find vent. Out of jealousy they curse us and fling
stones at us. Let them burst with rage. Never will their expressionless
voice attain to those serious rumblings, those piercing notes, mad
arabesques, inspired and unexpected fancies, which soften the soul of
the most stubborn she, and give her over to us, all trembling, while up
above the voluptuous stars twinkle and the moon grows pale with love.
How happy is youth, and how hard it is to lose its holy illusions! And
I too, I have loved and have haunted the roofs, modulating the while the
roll of my bass. One of my cousins was touched thereby, and two months
after brought into the world six pink and white kittens. I ran to them
and wanted to eat them; I certainly had a right, since I was their
father. Who would believe it! My cousin, my spouse, to whom I was
willing to give her share {460}of the banquet, flew at my eyes. This
brutality roused my indignation, and I strangled her on the spot; after
which I swallowed the entire litter.
But the hapless little rogues were good for nothing, not even to nourish
their father: their flabby flesh weighed on my stomach for three days.
Disgusted with the strong passions, I gave up music, and returned to the
kitchen.
VI.
I have thought much on the ideal happiness, and I think I have made
thereupon some notable discoveries.
It evidently consists, in warm weather, in sleeping near the barnyard
pool. A delicious odor arises from the fermenting dung; lustrous straws
shine in the sunlight. The turkeys ogle lovingly, and let their crest of
red flesh fall on their beak. The fowls scratch up the straw, and
bury their broad bellies to take in the rising heat. The pool gleams,
swarming with moving insects which make the bubbles rise to its surface.
The harsh whiteness of the walls renders yet deeper the bluish recesses
where the gnats hum. With eyes half closed you dream; and, as you have
almost ceased to think, you no longer wish for anything. {461}In winter,
happiness is in sitting at the fireside in the kitchen. The little
tongues of flame lick the log and shoot amidst the sparks; the twigs
snap and writhe, while the twisted smoke rises in the dark chimney to
the very sky. Meanwhile the spit turns with a harmonious and pleasing
ticktack. The fowl that is impaled reddens, turns brown, becomes
splendid; the fat which moistens it softens its hues; a delightful odor
irritates the olfactories; your tongue involuntarily caresses your lips;
you take in the divine emanations of the fat; with eyes lifted to heaven
in a serious transport, you wait till the cook takes off the creature
and offers you the part that belongs to you.
[Illustration: 487]
He who eats is happy, he who digests is happier, he who sleeps while
digesting is happier still. All the rest is only vanity and vexation of
spirit. The {462}fortunate mortal is he who, warmly rolled into a ball
with his belly full, feels his stomach in operation and his skin expand.
A delightful tickling penetrates and softly stirs the fibres. The outer
and the inner creature enjoy with their every nerve. Surely if the
universe is a great and blessed God, as our sages say, the earth must be
an immense belly busy through all eternity digesting the creatures, and
warming its round skin in the sun.
VII.
My mind has been greatly enlarged by reflection. By a sure method,
sound conjectures and sustained attention, I have penetrated some of the
secrets of nature.
The dog is an animal so deformed, of such an unruly character, that
from the earliest times it has been considered to be a monster, born and
moulded in despite of all laws. Indeed, when rest is the natural state,
how explain an animal that is forever in motion and busy, and that
without aim nor need, even when he is gorged and not afraid? When beauty
universally consists in suppleness, grace and prudence, how allow
an animal to be forever brutal, howling, mad, jumping at the nose of
people, running after kicks and rebuffs? When the favorite {463}and
masterpiece of creation is the cat, how understand an animal that hates
it, runs at it, without having received a single scratch from it, and
breaks its ribs without any desire to eat its flesh?
These contradictions prove that dogs are condemned beings; without a
doubt the souls of the guilty and punished pass into their bodies. They
suffer there; that is why they worry one another, and fret unceasingly.
They have lost their reason, so they spoil everything, incite to battle,
and are chained three-quarters of the day. They hate the beautiful and
the good, consequently they try to throttle us.
[Illustration: 489]
VIII.
Little by little the mind frees itself from the {464}prejudices in which
it was reared; light dawns; it thinks for itself; thus it is that I have
attained to the true explanation of things.
Our first ancestors (and the gutter cats have retained this belief) said
that heaven is a very lofty granary, well covered, where the sun never
hurts the eyes.
[Illustration: 490]
In this granary, my great-aunt used to say, there are troops of rats
so fat that they can {465}hardly walk, and the more we eat of them, the
more there are to eat.
But it is evident that this is the opinion of poor devils, who, since
they have never eaten anything but rat, cannot imagine a better diet.
Besides, granaries are wood-color or gray, and the sky is blue, which
finishes their confusion.
In truth, they rest their opinion upon a sufficiently shrewd remark: “It
is evident,” they say, “that the sky is a granary of straw or flour,
for there come out of it very often clouds light, as when the wheat is
winnowed, or white, as when bread is sprinkled in the kneading-trough.”
But I reply to them that the clouds are not formed by the chaff of grain
or the dust of flour; for when they fall, it is water that we receive.
Others, more refined, have maintained that the Dutch oven was God,
saying that it is the fount of every blessing, turns unceasingly, goes
to the fire without being burned, and that the sight of it is enough to
throw one into ecstasy.
In my opinion they have erred here only because they saw it through
the window, from a distance, in a poetic, colored, sparkling smoke,
beautiful as the sun at evening. But I, who have sat near it during
whole hours, I know that it has to be sponged, mended, wiped; and in
acquiring knowledge, I have lost the innocent illusions of heart and
stomach. {466}The mind must be opened to conceptions more vast, and
reason by more certain methods. Nature is everywhere uniform with
herself, and in small things offers the image of the great.
[Illustration: 492]
From what do all animals spring? from an egg; the earth then is a very
great egg; I even add that it is a broken egg.
You will convince yourself of this if you examine the form and the
limits of this valley, which is the visible world. It is concave like
an egg, and the sharp edges by which it rejoins the sky are jagged, are
keen-edged and white like those of a broken shell.
The white and the yolk, pressed into lumps, have {467}formed these
blocks of stone, these houses and the whole solid earth. Some parts have
remained soft and form the surface that men plough; the rest runs in
water and makes the pools, the rivers; each spring-time there runs a
little that is new.
As to the sun, nobody can doubt its use; it is a great red firebrand
that is moved back and forth above the egg to cook it gently; the
egg has been broken on purpose, in order that it may be the better
impregnated with the heat; the cook always does so. The world is a great
beaten egg.
Now that I have reached this stage of wisdom, I have nothing more to
ask of nature, nor of men, nor of any one; except, perhaps, some little
tidbits from the roaster. In future I have only to cradle myself to
rest in my wisdom; for my perfection is sublime, and no thinking cat has
penetrated into the secret of the world so far as I.
[Illustration: 493]
{468}
[Illustration: 494]
CHAPTER IV. THE ROAD TO BA GNÈRES-DE-LUCHON.
I.
Every man who has the use of his eyes and ears ought, in travelling, to
climb up to the imperial. The highest places are the most beautiful;
ask those who occupy them. You break your neck if you fall from them;
consult the same people about this. But you enjoy yourself while you are
there.
In the first place, you see the landscape, which produces descriptions
that you offer to the public. In the coupé, your only spectacle is the
harness of the horses; in the interior, you see through a tiny window
the trees trooping by like soldiers carrying arms; in the rotunda, you
are in a cloud {469}of dust that dims the landscape and strangles the
traveller.
In the second place, at the top you will have comedy. In the lower
places, the people preserve decorum and are silent. The peasants here
perched aloft, who are your companions, the postilion and the conductor,
make open-hearted confidences: they talk of their wives, their children,
their property, trade, neighbors, and above all of themselves; so that
at the end of an hour you imagine their housekeeping and their life as
clearly as if you were at home with them. It is a novel of manners that
you skim through on the road. Not one of them gives ideas so vivid and
so truthful. You get to know the people only by living with them, and
the people from three-quarters of the nation. These bits of conversation
teach you the number of their ideas and the hue of their passions; now,
on these ideas and passions depend all the great events. Besides their
rude manners, their loud bursts of laughter, their frank respect for
bodily strength, their acknowledged inclination for the pleasure of
eating and drinking, offer a contrast to the humbug of our politeness
and our affectation of refinement. The conductor told the postilion how
the evening before they had eaten the half of a sheep among three of
them. It was good, fat mutton; they served up no better at the Hotel of
the Great Sun: {470}there were sirloins, cutlets, a neat leg of mutton.
They had emptied six bottles. The other made him tell it over, and
seemed to eat in imagination, by the reaction, by recoil, as it were.
[Illustration: 496]
After the banquet, he had made the horses gallop; he had passed by
Ribettes. Ribettes had swallowed dust for a whole hour; Ribettes wanted
to get ahead again, but wasn’t able. Ribettes grew very angry. They
had dared Ribettes. The story of Ribettes and the mutton was told eight
times in an hour, and seemed the last time as delightful and as new as
the first. They laughed like the blest.
In the third place, that is the only spot where you can breathe. The
other divisions are sweating-rooms whose partitions and black cushions
hold and concentrate the heat. Now, there is no man, no matter how he
may love colors and lines, who can enjoy a landscape shut up in a
box without air. When the creature is cramped, the soul is cramped.
{471}Admiration presupposes comfort, and when you are broiled by the sun
you curse the sun.
II.
The coach starts very early in the morning and climbs a long ascent
under the gray brightness of the dawn. The peasants come in troops; the
women have five or six bottles of milk on the head, in a basket. Oxen,
with lowered brows, drag carts as primitive and Gallic as at-Pau. The
children, in brown _berets_, run in the dust, alongside their mothers.
The village is coming to nourish the city.
Escaladieu shows at the wayside the remains of an ancient abbey. The
chapel is still standing and preserves fragments of gothic sculpture.
A bridge is at the side, shaded by tall trees. The pretty river Arros
runs, with _moiré_ reflexes and guipures of silver, over a bed of dark
pebbles. No one could choose a situation better than the monks: they
were the artists of the time.
Mauvoisin, an ancient stronghold of robber-knights, lifts its ruined
tower above the valley. Froissart relates how they besieged these honest
folk; of a truth, in those times, they were as good as their neighbors,
and the Duke of Anjou, their enemy, had done more harm than they.
{472}“A Gascon squire, an able man-at-arms, named Raymonet de l’Epèe,
was at that time Governor of Malvoisin. There were daily skirmishes at
the barriers, where many gallant feats were done by those who wished to
advance themselves....
“The castle of Malvoisin held out about six weeks, there were daily
skirmishes between the two armies at the barriers, and the place would
have made a longer resistance, for the castle was so strong it could
have held a long siege; but the well that supplied the castle with water
being without the walls, they cut off the communication: the weather was
very hot, and the cisterns within quite dry, for it had not rained one
drop for six weeks, and the besiegers were at their ease, on the banks
of this clear and fine river, which they made use of for themselves and
horses.
“The garrison of Malvoisin were alarmed at their situation, for they
could not hold out longer. They had a sufficiency of wine, but not one
drop of sweet water. They determined to open a treaty; and Raymonet de
l’Epêe requested a passport to wait on the duke, which, having easily
obtained, he said: ‘My lord, if you will act courteously to me and my
companions, I will surrender the castle of Malvoisin.’ ‘What courtesy is
it you ask?’ replied the Duke of Anjou:{473}
[Illustration: 499]
{474}
{475}“‘Get about your business each of you to his own country, without
entering any fort that holds out against us; for if you do so, and I
get hold of you, I will deliver you up to Jocelin, who will shave you
without a razor.’ ‘My lord,’ answered Raymonet, ‘if we thus depart we
must carry away what belongs to us, and what we have gained by arms and
with great risk.’ The duke paused awhile, and then said, ‘I consent that
you take with you whatever you can carry before you in trunks and on
sumpter horses, but not otherwise; and if you have any prisoners, they
must be given up to us.’ ‘I agree,’ said Raymonet. Such was the treaty,
as you hear me relate it; and all who were in the castle departed, after
surrendering it to the Duke of Anjou, and carrying all they could with
them. They returned to their own country, or elsewhere, in search of
adventures.”
These good folk who wished to keep the fruits of their labor, had spent
their time “in fleecing the merchants” of Catalonia, as well as
of France, “and in making war on and harrying them of Bagnères and
Bigorre.” Bagnères was then “a good, big, closed city.” People fortified
everywhere, because there was fighting everywhere. They went out
only with a safe-conduct and an escort: instead of gendarmes they met
plunderers; instead of umbrellas they carried off lances. A secure
{476}house was a fine house; when a man had immured himself in a thick
tower built like a well, he breathed freely, he felt at his ease. Those
were the good old times, as every one knows.
III.
Encausse is very near here, at the turn of the road. Chapelle and
Bachaumont came there to restore their stomachs, which needed and
deserved it well, for they used them more than some do. They wrote their
travels, and their style flows as easily as their life.
[Illustration: 502]
They go by short stages, drink, chat, feast among the friends they
have everywhere, court the ladies, make game very pleasantly of the
provincial folk. They drink the health of the {477}absent, enjoy the
muscatel as much as possible, and trifle in prose and verse. They are
the epicureans of their time, easy poets who are troubled about nothing,
not even about glory; graze all that they touch, and write only for
their own amusement.
“Encausse,” say they, “is far from all commerce, and a man can have no
other diversion in it than that of watching the return of his health. A
small stream that, a score of paces away from the village, winds among
willows and the greenest fields imaginable, was our only consolation.
We used to go every morning to take our water in this pretty spot, and
after dinner to walk there. One day when we were on the brink, seated
on the grass, there came suddenly from the midst of the reeds that were
nearest a man who had apparently been listening to us; it was an old
man, all white, pale and lean, whose beard and locks hung below his
girdle, such (an one) as Melchisedec is painted; or rather the figure
is that of a certain old Greek bishop, who, with many a salaam, tells
everybody’s fortune; for he wore a top-piece like a cauldron-lid, but of
exceeding size, which answered him for a hat. And this hat, whose broad
brim went drooping upon his shoulders, was made of branches of willow,
and covered nearly all his body. His coat of greenish hue was woven of
rushes, the whole {478}covered with great bits of a thick and bluish
crystal.
“At sight of this apparition, fear caused us to make the sign of the
cross twice over, and go three paces backward. But curiosity prevailed
over fear, and we resolved, although with some little palpitation of
heart, to await the extraordinary old man, whose approach was thoroughly
courteous, and who spoke to us very civilly as follows:
“Gentlemen, I am not surprised that with my unexpected appearance you
should be a little startled in mind, but when you shall have learned in
what rank the fates have set my birth to you unknown, and the motive of
my coming, you will calm your minds.
{479}“I am the god of this stream, who, with an ever inexhaustible urn,
tilted at the foot of that hill, take the task in this meadow of pouring
unceasingly the water, which makes it so green and flowery. For eight
days now, morning and evening, you come regularly to see me without
thinking to pay me a visit. It is not that I do not deserve that you
should pay me this respect; for, in short, I have this advantage, that a
channel so pure and clear is the place of my appanage. In Gascony such a
portion is very neat for a cadet.”
{480}The two travellers were talking of the tides of the Garonne, and of
the reasons for them given by Gassendi and Descartes. This very obliging
god relates to them how Neptune thereby punishes an ancient rebellion
of the rivers. “Then the honest river-god takes himself off, and when he
has gone a score of paces the good soul is melted entirely into water.”
Nowadays this mythology seems unmeaning, and the thought flat. Look at
the environs, the surroundings save it. Carelessness, intoxication,
are on one side. It is born between two glasses of good wine thoroughly
relished, in the midst of an unpremeditated letter. Are people so very
nice at table? It is a refrain they are humming; flat or not, is of no
consequence. The main thing is good humor and the inclination to laugh.
I picture to myself the honest fellows, well-dressed, portly, their eyes
still shining from the long dinner of yesterday, with rubies on their
cheeks, perfectly ready to sit down to dine at the first inn and to
bedevil the maid. La Fontaine did so, especially when he travelled. They
made stops, forgot themselves, the broad jokes flew.{481}
[Illustration: 508]
{482}
{483} They didn’t cross France as nowadays, after the fashion of
a cannon-ball or an attorney; they allowed five days for going to
Poitiers, and in the evening, on going to bed, they fed the body. It was
the last age of the good corporeal life, that heavy _bourgoisie_
which had its flower and its portrait in Flemish art. It was already
disappearing; aristocratic propriety and lordly salutes were taking
possession of literature; Boileau gave us serious verse, thoroughly
useful and solid, like pairs of tongs. Nowadays when the middle-class
man is a philosopher, ambitious, a man of business, it is far worse. Let
us not speak ill of those who are happy; happiness is a sort of poetry;
it is in vain that we boast ourselves, that poetry we have not.
IV.
The road is bordered with vines, each of which carries up its tree, elm
or ash, the crown of a fresh verdure, and lets its leaves and tendrils
fall again in plumes. The valley is a garden long and narrow, between
two chains of mountains. On the lower slopes are beautiful meadows where
the living waters run in orderly fashion in trenches, nimble, prattling
irrigators; the villages are seated {484}alone the little river;
vine-stocks climb alone the dusty wall. The mallows, straight as tapers,
lift above the hedges their round flowers, brilliant as roses of rubies.
Orchards of apples pass continually on both sides of the coach; cascades
fall in every hollow of the chain, surrounded with houses that seek a
shelter. The heat and the dust are so terrible that they are obliged
every time we pass a spring to sponge the nostrils of the horses. But
at the end of the valley a mass of dark, rugged mountains lifts itself,
with tops that are white with snow, feeding the river and closing the
horizon. Finally, we pass beneath an alley of fine plane-trees, between
two rows of villas, gardens, hotels, and shops. It is Luchon, a little
city as Parisian as Bigorre. {485}
[Illustration: 511]
CHAPTER V. LUCHON.
I.
The street is a broad alley, planted with large trees, and lined with
rather handsome hotels. It was opened by the intendant d‘Ètigny, who,
for this misdeed, was near being stoned. It was necessary to call in a
company of dragoons to force the Luchonnais to endure the prosperity of
their country.
At the end of the alley a pretty chalet, like those in the Jardin
des Plantes, shelters the _du Pr’e_ spring. Its walls are a fantastic
trellis of gnarled branches, adorned with their bark; its roof is
thatched; its ceiling is a tapestry of moss. A {486}young girl sitting
at the taps distributes to the bathers glasses of sulphurous water.
The elegant toilettes come about four o’clock. Meanwhile you sit in the
shade on benches of woven wood, and watch the children playing on the
turf, the rows of trees descending toward the river, and the broad green
plain, sprinkled with villages.
Below the spring are the bathing-houses, nearly finished, and which will
be the finest in the Pyrenees. At present the neighboring field is still
strewn with materials; the lime smokes all day, and makes the air to
flame and quiver.
The court of the baths contains a large votive altar, bearing on one of
its faces an amphora and this inscription:
Nymph is.
Aug.
Sacrum.
They have preserved in two:
Nymphis T. Claudius Rufus
V. S. L. M.
This god Lixo, they say, was in the time of the Celts the tutelary deity
of the country. Hence the addition these other name of Luchon.
Lixoni Deo Fabia Festa
V. S. L. M.
{487}He is maimed and not destroyed. The gods are tenacious of life.
[Illustration: 513]
There are several balls, and orchestras in certain cafés. These
orchestras are strolling families, hired at so much a week, to make the
house uninhabitable. One of these, composed of a flute, male, and
four violins, female, used fearlessly to play the same overture every
evening. The privileged beings {488}who had paid were in the hall among
the music stands. A throng of peasants always crowded at the door, with
open mouths; they formed in a circle and mounted on the benches to see.
The tradespeople of every sort turn their shops into a lottery: lottery
of plate, of books, of little objects of ornament, etc. The tradesman
and his wife distribute cards, price one sou, to the servant-maids,
soldiers, and children, who compose the crowd. Somebody draws; the
gallery and those interested stretch their necks eagerly forward.
The man reads the number; a cry is heard, the unguarded sign of an
overflowing joy. “It’s I that have won, I, monsieur the merchant.” And
you see a little serving-maid, blushing all over, lift herself on
tiptoe and stretch out her hands. The merchant dexterously seizes a pot,
parades it above his head, and makes everybody about remark it. “A fine
mustard-pot; a mustard-pot worth three francs, threaded with gold. Who
wants numbers?” The assembly lasts four hours. It begins anew every day;
the customers are not wanting for a single moment.
These people have a genius for display. One day we heard the roll of
drums, followed by four men marching solemnly, swathed in shawls and
pieces of cloth. The children and the dogs follow the procession with
hubbub; it is the opening of a {489}new shop. The next day I copied the
following handbill printed on yellow paper:
“Orpheonic festival in the grotto of Gargas.
“The Orpheonic Society from the city of Montrejean will execute
“The polka;
“Several military marches;
“Several waltzes;
“Divers other pieces from the works of the great masters.
“Among other amateurs who will allow themselves to be heard, one will
sing some stanzas on eternity.
“Finally, an exquisite voice, which wishes to remain anonymous in order
to avoid those deserved praises that people are fond of lavishing on its
sex, will sing also a number of pieces analogous to the circumstances.
“It will be delicious and even seraphic to lend an ear to the echo of
the sonorous concretions of the stalactites, which will unite with the
vibrating echo of the vault to repeat the harmonious notes; and when the
divine voice shall be heard, the intoxicating charm of the spell will
surpass every impression which can have been left in the soul by the
most delightful of musical reunions.
“Price of admission: 1 franc.”
These people are descendants of Clemence {490}Isaure. Their
advertisements are odes. By way of compensation many odes are
advertisements.
In fact, you are here not far from Toulouse; like the character, the
type is new. The young girls have fine, regular, clear-cut faces, of a
lively and gay expression. They are small, with a light step, brilliant
eyes, the nimbleness of a bird. In the evening, about a lottery-shop,
these pretty faces stand out animated and full of passion beneath the
flickering light, fringed with a black shadow. The eyes sparkle, the red
lips tremble, the neck tosses with the little abrupt movements of the
swallow; no picture can be more full of life.
If you leave the lighted and tumultuous alley, at the distance of an
hundred paces, you find silence, solitude and obscurity. At night, the
valley is of great beauty; it is framed and drawn out between two chains
of parallel mountains, huge pillars which stretch in two files and
support the dark vault of heaven.
Their arches mark it out like a cathedral ceiling, and the immense nave
vanishes several leagues away, radiant with stars; these stars fling out
flames. At this moment, they are the only living things; the valley is
black, the air motionless; you can only distinguish the tapering tops
of the poplars, erect in the tranquil night, wrapt in their mantle of
leaves. The topmost branches stir, and {491}their rustle is like the
murmur of a prayer echoed by the distant hum of the torrent.
III.
[Illustration: 517]
The valley is not a gorge, but a beautiful level meadow marked with trees
and fields of maize, among which the river runs, but does not leap.
Luchon is surrounded with alleys of plane-trees, poplars and lindens.
You leave these alleys for a pathway which follows the waves of the
Pique and winds amidst the high grass. The ashes and oaks form a screen
along the two banks; big brooks come from the mountains; you cross them
on trunks laid bridge-wise or on broad slabs of slate. All these waters
{492}flow in the shade, between knotted roots which they bathe, and
which form trellises on both sides. The bank is covered with hanging
herbage; you see nothing but the fresh verdure and the dark waters. It
is here that at noon the pedestrians take refuge; along the sides of
the valley wind dusty roads where stream the carriages and the horsemen.
Higher up, the mountains, gray or browned with moss, display their soft
lines and noble forms as far as the eye can reach. They are not wild
as at Saint Sauveur, nor bare as at Eaux-Bonnes; each of these chains
advances nobly toward the city and behind it leaves its vast ridge to
undulate to the very verge of the horizon.
IV.
Above Luchon is a mountain called Super-Bagnères. At the outset I run
across the Fountain of Love; it is a hut of planks where beer is sold.
A winding staircase, crossed by springs, then steep pathways in a black
forest of firs lead you in two hours to the pastures on the summit.
The mountain is about five thousand feet high. These pastures are great
undulating hills, ranged in rows, carpeted with short turf and thickset,
fragrant thyme; here and there in crowds are broad tufts {493}of a sort
of wild iris, the flower of which fades in the month of August.
[Illustration: 519]
You reach there fatigued, and on the grass of the highest point you may
sleep in the sunlight with the utmost pleasure in life. Clouds of
winded ants eddied in the warm rays. In a hollow beneath us we heard the
bleating of sheep and of goats. A quarter of a league {494}off, on the
back of the mountain, a pool of water was glittering like burnished
steel. Here, as on Mount Bergonz and the Pic du Midi, you look on an
amphitheatre of mountains. These have not the heroic severity of the
primal granite, black rocks clothed with luminous air and white snow.
On one side alone, toward the Crabioules mountains, the naked and jagged
rocks were silvered with a girdle of glaciers. Everywhere else, the
slopes were without escarpment, the forms softened, the angles dulled
and rounded. But, although less wild, the amphitheatre of the mountains
was imposing. The idea of the simple and imperishable entered with an
entire dominion into the subdued mind. Peaceful sensations cradled the
soul in their mighty undulations. It harmonized itself with these huge
and immovable creatures. It was like a concert of three or four notes
indefinitely prolonged and sung by deep voices.
The day was declining, clouds dimmed the chilled sky. The woods, the
fields, the mossy moors, the rocks of the slopes, took various hues in
the waning light. But this opposition of hues, obliterated by distance
and the greatness of the masses, melted into a green and grayish shade,
of a melancholy and tender effect, like that of a vast wilderness
half stocked with verdure. The shadows of the clouds travelled slowly,
darkening the tawny summits. All {495}was in harmony, the monotonous
sound of the wind, the calm march of the clouds, the waning of the day,
the tempered colors, the softened lines.
[Illustration: 521]
Here it is the second age of nature. The earth conceals the rocks, the
mosses clothe the earth, the rounded undulations of the upheaved soil
resemble the tired {496}waves an hour after the tempest. Luchon is
not far from the plains; its mountains are the last billows of the
subterranean storm which lifted the Pyrenees; distance has diminished
their violence, tempered their grandeur, and softened their steeps.
Toward evening we descended into the hollow where the goats were
passing. A spring was running there, caught in the hollowed trunks
of trees which answered for watering-troughs to the herds. It is a
delicious pleasure after a day’s tramp to bathe hands and lips in the
cold fountain. Its sound on this solitary plateau was charming. The
water trickled through the wood, among the stones, and everywhere that
it glided over the blackened earth the sun covered it with splendor.
Lines of reeds marked its track to the brink of the pool. Herdsman and
animals had gone down; it was the sole inhabitant of this abandoned
field. Was it not singular to meet with a marsh at the height of five
thousand feet?
V.
Toward the south the river becomes a torrent. Half a league from Luchon
it is swallowed up in a deep defile of red rocks, many of which have
fallen; the bed is choked with blocks; the two walls of rock close
together in the north, and the dammed-up {497}water roars to get out of
its prison; but the trees grow in the crevices, and along the wall the
white flowers of the bramble hang in locks.
[Illustration: 523]
Very near here, on a round eminence of bare rock, rises the ruin of
a Moorish tower, named Cas-tel-Vieil. Its side is bordered with a
frightful mountain, black and brown, perfectly bald and resembling
a decayed amphitheatre; the layers hang one over another, notched,
dislocated, bleeding; the sharp edges and fractures are yellowed with
wretched moss, vegetable ulcers that defile with their leprous patches
the nudity of the stone. The pieces of this {498}monstrous skeleton
hold together only by their mass; it is crannied with deep fissures,
bristling with falling blocks, broken to the very base; it is nothing
but a ruin dreary and colossal, sitting at the entrance of a valley,
like a battered giant.
There was an old beggar-woman there, with naked feet and arms, who was
worthy of the mountain. For a dress she had a bundle of rags of every
color sewn together, and remained the whole day long crouched in the
dust. One might have counted the muscles and tendons of her limbs; the
sun had dried her flesh and burned her skin; she resembled the rock
against which she was sitting; she was tall, with large, regular
features, a brow seamed with wrinkles like the bark of an oak, beneath
her grizzled lids a savage black eye, a mat of white hair hanging in the
dust. If a sculptor had wished to make a statue of Dryness, the model
was there.
The valley narrows and ascends; the Gave rolls between two slopes of
great forests, and falls in a constant succession of cascades. The eyes
are satiated with freshness and verdure; the trees mount to the very
sky, thickset, splendid; the magnificent light falls like a rain on the
immense slope; the myriads of plants suck it in, and the mighty sap that
gorges them overflows in luxury and vigor. On all hands the heat and the
water {499}
[Illustration: 525]
{500}
{501}invigorate and propagate them; they accumulate; enormous beeches
hang above the torrent; ferns people the brink; moss hangs in green
garlands on the arcades of roots; wild flowers grow by families in the
crevices of the beeches; the long branches go with a leap to the further
brink; the water glides, boils, leaps from one bank to the other with a
tireless violence, and pierces its way by a succession of tempests.
Further on some noble beeches climb the slope, forming an inclined plane
of foliage. The sun gives lustre to their rustling tops. The cool shadow
spreads its dampness between their columns, over the ribbons of sparse
grass, and on strawberries red as coral. From time to time the light
falls through an opening, and gushes in cataracts over their flanks
which it illuminates; isles of brightness then cleave the dim depths;
the topmost leaves move softly their diaphanous shade; the shadow almost
disappears, so strong and universal is the splendor. Meanwhile a small
hidden spring beads its necklace of crystal among the roots, and great
velvet butterflies wheel in the air in broken starts, like falling
chestnut-leaves.
At the bottom of a hollow filled with plants, appears the hospice
of Bagnères, a heavy house of stone, which serves as a refuge. The
mountains open opposite it their amphitheatre of rock, a huge {502}and
blasted pit; to crown the whole the clouds have gathered, and dull the
rent enclosure which fences off the horizon--enclosure that winds with
dreary air, perfectly barren, with the grinning army of its pinnacles,
its raw cuts, its murderous steeps; beneath the dome of clouds, wheels a
band of screaming crows. This well seems their eyry; wings are needed
to escape the hostility of all those bristling points, and of so many
yawning gulfs which draw on the passer in order to dash him to atoms.
Soon the road seems brought to an end; wall after wall, the serried
rocks obstruct every outlet; still you advance, zigzag, among rounded
blocks, along a falling stairway; the wind sweeps down these, howling.
No sign of life, no herbage; everywhere the horrible nakedness and the
chill of winter. Squat rocks lean beetling over the precipice; others
project their heads to meet one another; between them the eye plunges
into dark gulfs whose bottom it cannot reach. The violent juttings of
all parts advance and rise, piercing the air; down there, at the bottom,
they spring forward in lines, climbing over one another, in heaps,
bristling against the sky their hedge of pikes. Suddenly in this
terrible battalion a cleft is opened; the Maladetta springs up like a
great spectre; forests of shivered pines wind about its foot; a girdle
of black rocks embosses its arid breast, and the glaciers make it a
crown.{503}
[Illustration: 529]
{504}
{505}
[Illustration: 532]
Nothing is dead, and in respect to this our feeble organs deceive us;
those mountain skeletons seem to us inert because our eyes are used to
the mobile vegetation of the plains; but nature is eternally alive, and
its forces struggle together in these sepulchres of granite and snow,
as well as in the {506}human hives or the most flourishing forests.
Each particle of rock presses or supports its neighbors; their apparent
immobility is an equilibrium of forces; everything works and struggles;
nothing is calm and nothing uniform. Those blocks that the eye takes
to be massive are networks of atoms infinitely removed from each other,
drawn by innumerable and contrary attractions, invisible labyrinths
where unceasing transformations are wrought out, where ferments the
mineral life, as active as other lives, but grander. And ours, what is
it, confined within the experience of a few years and the memory of a
few centuries? What are we, but a transitory excrescence, formed of a
little thickened air, grown by chance in a cleft of the eternal rock?
What is our thought, so high in dignity, so little in power? The mineral
substance and its forces are the real possessors and the only masters
of the world. Pierce below this crust which sustains us as far as that
crucible of lava which tolerates us. Here strive and are developed the
great forces, the heat and the affinities which have formed the soil,
have composed the rocks which support our life, have furnished
its cradle for it, and are preparing its tomb. Everything here is
transformed and stirs as in the heart of a tree; and our race, nested
on a point of the bark, perceives not that silent vegetation which
has lifted the trunk, spread the branches, {507}and whose invincible
progress brings in turns flowers, fruits and death. Meanwhile a vaster
movement bears the planet with its companions around the sun, borne
itself toward an unknown goal, in the infinite space wherein eddies
the infinite people of the worlds. Who will say that they are not there
merely to decorate and fill it? These great rolling masses are the first
thought and the broader development of nature; they live by the same
right with ourselves, they are sons of the same mother, and we recognize
in them our kin and elders.
[Illustration: 534]
But in this family there are ranks. I know I am but an atom; to
annihilate me, the least of these stones would suffice; a bone half as
thick as my thumb is the wretched cuirass that defends my thought
from delirium and death; my entire action and that of all the machines
invented within sixty centuries would not avail to scrape one of the
leaves of the mineral crust that supports and {508}nurtures me. And yet
in this all-powerful nature I count for something. If among her works
I am the most fragile, I am also the last; if she confines me within a
corner of her expanse, it is in me that she ends. It is in me that she
attains the indivisible point where she is concentred and perfected; and
this mind through which she knows herself opens to her a new career
in reproducing her works, imitating her order, penetrating her work,
feeling its magnificence and eternity. In it is opened a second world
reflecting the other, reflecting itself also, and, beyond itself
and that other, grasping the eternal law which engenders them both.
To-morrow I shall die, and I am not capable of displacing any portion of
this rock. But during one moment I have thought, and within the limits
of that thought nature and the universe were comprehended.
[Illustration: 535]
{509}
[Illustration: 536]
CHAPTER VI. TOULOUSE.
I.
When, after a two months’ sojourn in the Pyrenees, you leave Luchon, and
see the flat country near Martres, you are delighted and breathe freely:
you were tired, without knowing it, of those eternal barriers that shut
in the horizon; you needed space. You felt that the air and light were
usurped by those monstrous protuberances, and that you were not in a
land of men, but in a land of mountains. Unknown to yourself you longed
for a real champaign, free and broad. That of Martres is as level as
a sheet of water, populous, fertile, stocked with good plants, well
cultivated, convenient for life, a realm of abundance and security.
{510}There is no doubt that a field of brown earth, broadly ploughed
with deep furrows, is a noble sight, and that the labor and happiness of
civilized man are as pleasant to behold as the ruggedness of the untamed
rocks.
[Illustration: 537]
A highway white and flat led in a straight line to the very horizon, and
ended in a cluster of red houses; the peaked belfry lifted its needle
into the sky; but for the sun, it would pass for a Flemish landscape. In
the streets there {511}
[Illustration: 539]
{512}
{513}were Van Ostade’s interiors. Old houses, roofs of uneven thatch,
leaning one upon another, machines for hemp displayed in the doorways,
little courtyards filled with tubs, wheelbarrows, straw, children,
animals--a gay and well-to-do air; above all the great illuminator of
the country, the universal decorator, the everlasting giver of joy, the
sun poured in profusion its beautiful warm light over the walls of ruddy
brick, and patched with strong shadows the white roughcast.
II.
Toulouse appears, all red with bricks, amidst the red dust of evening.
A melancholy city, with narrow and flinty streets. The town hall, called
_Capicole_, has but one narrow entrance, commonplace halls, a pronounced
and elegant façade in the taste of the decorations for public festivals.
In order that no one may doubt its antiquity, they have inscribed on
it the word _Capitolium._ The cathedral, dedicated to St. Stephen, is
remarkable only for one pleasant memory:
“Towards the year 1027,” says Pierre de Marca,
“It was the custom at Toulouse to box a Jew’s ears in public on Easter
day, in the Church of St. Stephen. Hugues, chaplain to Aimery, Viscount
{514}de Rochechouart, being at Toulouse in his master’s suite, dealt the
Jew a blow with such force that it crushed his head and made his brains
and eyes to fall out, as Adhémar has observed in his chronicle.”
The choir where Adhémar made this observation is wanting in neither
beauty nor grandeur; but what strikes you most on leaving the mountains,
is the museum. You find anew thought, passion, genius, art, all the most
beautiful flowers of human civilization.
It is a broad, well-lighted hall, flanked by two small galleries of
greater height, which form a semicircle, and filled with pictures of all
the schools, some of which are excellent. A Murillo, representing _St.
Diego and his Monks_; you recognize in it the monastic harshness, the
master’s sentiment of reality, his originality of expression and earnest
vigor. A _Martyrdom of St. Andrew,_ by Caravaggio, black and horrible.
Several pictures by the Caracci, Guercino and Guido. A _Ceremony of the
Order of the Holy Ghost_ in 1635, by Philip de Champagne. These most
real, delicate and noble faces are portraits of the time; you see the
contemporaries of Louis XIII. in life. Here are the correct drawing,
temperate color, conscientious but not literal exactness of a Fleming
become a Frenchman. {515}
[Illustration: 544]
{516}
{517}A charming _Marquise dc Largillere_ with a wasp waist in blue
velvet, elegant and haughty. A _Christ Crucified,_ by Rubens, the eyes
glassy, flesh livid--a powerful sketch, wherein the cold whiteness of
the faded tints exhales the frightful poetry of death.
I name only the most striking; but the liveliest sensation comes from
the modern pictures. They transport the mind all at once to Paris, into
the midst of our discussions, into the inventive and troubled world
of the modern arts, the immense laboratory where so many fruitful and
opposing forces weave the work of a renewing century: A celebrated
picture by Glaize, the _Death of St. John the Baptist_; the half-naked
butcher who holds the head is a superb brute, a careless instrument
of death which has just done its work well. An elegant and affected
painting by Schoppin, _Jacob before Laban and his two Daughters_.
The daughters of Laban are pretty drawing-room misses who have just
disguised themselves as Arabs. _Muley Abd-el-Rhaman,_ by Eugene
Delacroix. He is motionless on a bluish and melancholy horse. Files of
soldiers are presenting arms, packed in masses in a stifling atmosphere;
dull heads, stupid and real, hooded with the white bournous; ruined
towers are piled behind them under a leaden sun. The crude colors,
the heavy garments, bronzed limbs, massive parasols, that lifeless and
animal{518} expression are the revelation of a land where thought
sleeps overwhelmed and buried under the weight of barbarism, of the
religion and the climate. In a corner of the small gallery is the first
brilliant stroke of Couture, _The Thirst of Gold._ All misery and every
temptation come to solicit the miser: a mother and her starving child,
an artist reduced to beggary, two half-nude courtesans. He gazes at them
with sorrowful ardor, but the hooked fingers cannot let go the gold. His
lips shrivel, his cheeks glow, his burning eyes are fastened to their
wanton bosoms. It is the torture of the heart torn by the rebellion of
the senses, the concentrated despair of repressed desire, the bitter
tyranny of the ruling passion. Never did face better express the soul.
The drawing is bold, the color superb, more daring than in the _Romans
of the Decadence_, so lively that you forget to notice a few crude
tones, hazarded in the transport of composition.
It is perhaps too much praise. All these moderns are poets who have
determined to be painters. One has sought out dramas in history, another
scenes of manners; one translates religions, another a philosophy. Such
an one imitates Raphael, such another the early Italian masters; the
landscapist employs trees and clouds to compose odes or elegies. No one
is simply a painter; they are all archaeologists, psychologists, giving
setting to {519}some memory or theory. They please our learning, our
philosophy. Like ourselves, they are full and overflowing with general
ideas, Parisians uneasy and curious. They live too much by the brain,
and too little by the senses; they have too much wit and too little
artlessness. They do not love a form for its own sake, but for what it
expresses; and if they chance to love it, it is voluntarily, with an
acquired taste, from an antiquary’s superstition.
[Illustration: 547]
They are children of a wise generation, harassed and thoughtful, in
which men who have won equality and the freedom of thought, and of
shaping each for himself his religion, rank, {520}and fortune, wish to
find in art the expression of their anxieties and meditations. They are
a thousand leagues away from the first masters, workmen or cavaliers,
who lived out-of-doors, scarcely read at all, and thought only of giving
a feast for their eyes. It is for that that I love them; I feel like
them because I am of their century. Sympathy is the best source of
admiration and pleasure.
III.
Below the museum is a square tower enclosed by a gallery of slender
columns, which towards the top bend and are cut into trefoils, forming
a border of arcades. They have gathered under this gallery all the
antiquities of the country: fragments of Roman statues, severe busts of
emperors, ascetic virgins of the middle ages, bas-reliefs from churches
and temples, knights of stone lying all armed upon their tombs. The
court was deserted and silent; tall slender trees, tufted shrubbery,
were bright with the loveliest green. A dazzling sunlight fell on the
red tiles of the gallery; an old fountain, loaded with little columns
and heads of animals, murmured near to a bench of rose-veined marble. A
statue of a young man was seen amidst the branches; stems of green hops
climbed up around broken columns.{521}
[Illustration: 549]
{522}
{523}This mixture of rustic objects and objects of art, these wrecks of
two dead civilizations and the youth of flowery plants, the joyous rays
on the old tiles, united in their contrasts all that I had seen for two
months.
THE END.