TRAVEL NOTES
Rai-Aube
"And when you will be thus formed, when
you will be imbued with this truth, 'there
is no truth, nothing truly existent for you
except what your fertile mind gives,' observe
the general course of the world and, letting
it follow its own way, associate with the
minority."
Goethe: _Testament_.
_Dreux_.--To see trains pass by--to see life pass by--never to go within
save to strike cushions.
_A little farther_.--Trains have a destination; life has none.
But life's originality lies precisely in having no destination. I
occasionally find in it, as in old lace, the same charm of uselessness.
_A little farther_.--I viewed the landscape as far as Dreux.
The unconsciousness of the vegetable kingdom is a decidedly too
melancholy void. To become interested in it, one must make it live
by incorporating oneself with the trees and grass, transferring the
sentient soul of a man into the oak's trunk. I am an oak, I am a
holly-tree, I am a wild poppy, but I realize it, while the oak, the
holly-tree, the wild poppy do not: for this reason they do not exist.
Pantheists are very fine fellows.
_Nonancourt_.--These syllables shouted through the train evoke a pretty
convent of nuns, rather dissolute before the reform of Borromée;
afterwards, it was devoted to God until the revolutionary dispersal.
Now the house, henceforth plebeian, serves as a barn, stable and
pigsty. As the notary who last sold it said: "It will serve as a farm."
Cows now ruminate where women once prayed--a notable advance.
_Tillières_.--A ravine cuts this plain in two, a dastardly act, life.
_Verneuil_.--I was alone since leaving Paris. A man enters, opens
his newspaper and expands into a _gauloiserie_. If it were evening,
near his better half, or if, in my place, some obliging girl revealed
a part of her foot! These flights of animalism are truly painful to
a calm man. The flower-like opening contracts; the joyous flame of
eyes brightens into a waxing ferocity; cruel lust opens its mouth and
shows its teeth. Awaking: a searching glance: the mimicry by degrees
is extinguished and there remains the disappointed ennui of a vain
excitement. No, I do not care to serve as an aphrodisiac to citizens.
To think of this would compel you towards a monachal literature, hard
and contemptuous of vile lust.
_Bourth or nearby_.--The man speaks. It was inevitable. He speaks of
himself, full of a need of making himself known, of introducing the
passerby into his little universe. He travels for a bookseller of
religious books. He goes from parsonage to parsonage, well received by
the _curés_, who ask him to dinner. A good clientele and good payers.
His center is Verneuil; thence he radiates, like an apostle. Usually a
horse and carriage, rented for the season, conducts him from church to
church; having some business to transact at Laigle, he took a train to
amuse himself; to amuse himself he climbed into a first-class apartment
with a second-class ticket. (There is no inspection at such hours.)
"Verneuil's a fine town. A rare thing for the province (isn't it so,
between ourselves), that this big borough has a well-kept inn, quite
renovated." He is a free-thinker, but tolerant, enveloping with the
same sympathetic pity, children, women, priests, devout souls--more
stupid than ill-meaning, he assures you. As for himself, if a God
exists he will go straight to Heaven, never having hurt a fly. Sound
instruction will gradually cure us of religion. He has no fear on this
score and, his conscience quite tranquil, places his _Corneille de la
Pierre_ for the best. Unmarried, but desiring a marriage so as to have
sturdy little republicans, strong defenders of _la Patrie_: Alsace and
Lorraine, Gambetta, and so forth.
_Laigle_.--He offers me _something_. I politely decline, he withdraws.
Throughout the world, this matter interests the millions of similarly
constituted minds: for whom do you work, poor unconscious bees? The
species? But does the intelligence of a few balance the universal
stupidity?
_Rai-Aube_.--A village I never again shall see, a village with such
a pretty name, with such a fine combination of radiant words--aurora
and ray--an alliance of syllables married by a morning smile; grasses
watered by the freshness of dew, transparent springs, murmuring
fluidity of waters flowing under the abundant rushes: all this,
Rai-Aube, and oblivion, and the ineffable, palpitates in the white
letters of your name, alluring and fugitive rebus hung on the gable of
the station! Remembrance rather than vision: in my youth I lived among
these vernal delights and steeped myself in them. I do not belong to
towns and a built-up plot of ground does not incite me to excessive
joys. All that was created by youthful eyes remains young, and for me
the country-side often has the sex of its spelling, even under the
surplice of snow. That alone remains of my earliest years: all is
dead, whether by real death or the death of memory. The tenderness
of vague figures bending towards my precocious orphanhood, is the
farthest removed; of school, the horror is still painful to remember;
a Dantesque and futile horror inflicted upon my pitiful childhood. But
already, due a little to my will, the world retreated from me and by a
slow or sudden recreation, I reformed for myself a life more harmonious
with my intimate sense. But already, in arrogant moments, I scorned
everything external to me, everything that had not been reformed and
reground by the machine ceaselessly in motion in my head. Excepting the
unknowable principle, I have fashioned everything anew; at least, for
scepticism even gnaws at one's personality, such is the allusion in
which I have confined myself.
With such a fixed determination, with this Kantian system which can be
called transcendental egoism, my life has marched with a relatively
light pace. Of all the griefs which my will has not succeeded in
putting aside, the heaviest to bear is my very solitude. Never having
surrendered to its deceits, I know not if hope be aught but a bleeding
spur, driving man towards a future nothingness. I know not if the
wound opened without respite and the sight of the spilled blood be
not powerful stimulants necessary for the functioning of the human
mechanism. I have never experienced them. I only believe in the final
charnel-house, but without coveting it. Life does not yet displease
me sufficiently. Without this, having no philosophical principles
to converge with a possible practice, I would be consistent with
my disgust and would give it my sanction. Like Crantor, I will die
"without being astonished;" if my organs are still sound when death
comes, perhaps regretfully. As for survival, on this point I have
no such tranquilizing ideas as has the traveling salesman of Dreux.
Perhaps the delightful Unconscious reserves some of its good tricks
for the truly supreme, last moment of corporeal decomposition! This
relative fear doubtless comes to me from my Christian youth, and I
repudiate neither the one nor the other; Catholicism is an aristocracy.
I do not know how this positive religion can come to be allied in me
with subjective idealism; it is an obscure amalgam, like all heresies.
Theology always procured me the most agreeable reading; from Augustine
I can go to Claudius Mamertinus; there the joys are not less because
of the curiosity. How I would have loved to be a bishop in some less
modern Rome, or a cardinal! If I dwelt on this rather sterile desire,
a sensation of a deficient life would clutch my throat, a vulgar
sensation that my pride contemptuously repels. And then, have I not of
my own accord tasted the mystic happiness and the celestial anguishes
of episcopacy? Have I not clothed myself with the violet robe lifted
at the bottom, or trailing up the stairs of the altar? Have I not
ascended, mitre on head, the steps of the presidial chair? What then
would reality serve me, when I have the dream and the faculty of
changing myself like Proteus, the faculty of successively possessing
all forms of life, all states of soul which man diversifies himself.
_Surdon_.--Curled feathers bob up and plunge into the window. Seeing
me alone, the female traveler hesitates, but the whistle has blown,
a guard shoves her inside. She sits down opposite me, fallen there
somewhat out of breath; she is uneasy although she is not blushing.
The hesitation came from the fear of appearing to have expressly
chosen the compartment in which sat one man. I try to reassure her
with very polished phrases, but I succeed imperfectly. I am quite
certain that some good proverb would amuse and pique her. I end
with: "Occasion makes the thief." In the province, proverbs, that
grammatical archæology, are still the current coin of conversation;
they permit the saying of nothing at all while appearing to say a
great deal. She appreciated my adage and complained of the habitual
grossness of men. I answer her: "That is because women always desire
what is not offered them and scorn what is offered them. A delicate
man, by indefinable signs, lets his fancy be guessed, and does not
commit himself to a decisive movement until the exact moment when
he sees that it is shared." She smiles: "How does one feel this?" I
answer: "The acquiescences are diverse, but there is a special flicker
of the eye-lashes, very slow, which it is difficult to mistake." She
looks at me with astonishment. A very honest woman, amused at this
scabrous conversation, but inexperienced. Her youth and the rosiness
of her complexion bespeak a recent marriage and little maternity:
openly curious, having an eternity of ten years before her, to learn
the secret. Otherwise pretty, and with much distinction, that modern
name for grace; between blonde and brunette; clear, rather large eyes,
the lower part of her face having no hint of brutishness. The trip
from Surdon to Argentan takes sixteen minutes; our several questions
and replies have exhausted them. The brake is put on, we slow up.
Before I could anticipate her movement, she opens the carriage door
until the train comes to a stop, holds the door back, and there I am,
surprised to receive, at the same time, an equivocal bow and a glance
of surprising intensity.
Is it an invitation to run after her? I believe it is and I hasten
out, but I cannot find her. I had rapidly taken my light hand baggage,
valise, rug, overcoat, etc. I am not forced to return to my railway
carriage and I leave the station to seek the carriage bearing the
arms of the countess. She is waiting for me and, thank heaven! I am
the only one expected to-day. I will travel _tête-à-tête_ with my
disappointment. The coachman said the trip would take an hour, I have
an hour in which to school myself with such a useless emotion. We
start off; here is the Orne with its two adjacent bridges and, along
the stream embanked with walls, an amusing house with balustrades and
balconies on the water; an umbrella shop with a strolling singer's
good-looking red parasol for an emblem; not a carriage in the peaceful
streets, and thus one leads to doors of men and women, but not
children; the birdless cage, the childless home: it was a prophecy.
The school, the college, the barracks, the office, the study: the
French revolution has perfected slavery, it is unanimous. A half-Gothic
church, some old gables and less uniform façades amuse me; but we go
quickly, despite the climb; then the sorry outskirts, the flat road,
the stretch of grey level grass, race-grounds and wheels, some poplars.