THE TRANSPARENT CURTAIN OF TIME
"In laying down his Cogito ergo sum as the
only certainty, and in considering the world's
existence as problematical, Descartes found
the essential departing point of all philosophy."
Schopenhauer: _The World as Idea_.
Entragues rose early and penholder in hand, turning over his papers
while he drank tea and smoked cigarettes, he began the day.
Monsieur Dubois, through an administrative memorandum, had the goodness
to inform him about his affairs. There had been postal supplications
and telegraphic pardons. Madame du Boys was returning. The envelope
contained the letter and the copy of the dispatch. Entragues
appreciated this attention which would permit him to follow, without
fatigue, the developments of the oratorio.
The letter, dated from Geneva, was a reply. The secretary, among
indistinct phrases, had doubtless let fall the seed of hope, for Madame
du Boys seemed to accept at the same time that she implored. Though
standing on her dignity, she was not displeased with this rope flung
in the midst of her muddled situation. She joyfully clutched it, with
the naïve and vainglorious pleasure of being able to say: "It is he who
is taking the first step! How anxious he is to have me! Ah! the poor
man, I do not want to make him suffer any more." This could be read
all around the pages, on all the margins, even on the envelope, which
had been addressed with a poised hand. Too, there flowered a boredom
from this international paper: "I enjoy myself more even in Paris, by
the side of a stupid and solemn husband, than on the banks of Lake
Geneva, where I am alone with my maid from nine in the morning till six
at night--without counting the days when business delays _Monsieur le
comte_--and where, to fall asleep, I drink, in the _Revue des Treize
Cantons_, lymphatic emanations on the course of life and the meaning of
death!"
"P. S. Say that I am passing a season in Switzerland for my health."
She arrives, lets fall her little bundles, opens her arms, and Monsieur
Dubois, very agitated, falls into them.
"Ah! my poor friend, so I find you again! What trials!"
She has pardoned.
Monsieur Dubois dries his eyes, not knowing what to say; his flown
discourse leaves him speechless.
Bending towards one of the little parcels which she lifts, Madame du
Boys, serpentine and coy, murmurs:
"I have thought of you, dear one, I bring you a box of cigars."
Entragues was greatly amused by this unforseen denouement. He was just
finishing the draught of a sketch when the bell rang; it was a letter
with a handwriting unknown to him. The wording was brief:
"Monsieur d'Entragues is expected this evening to give a commentary on
his _Dream_. Only auditors: the four walls and Sixtine Magne."
Two joyful tidings already, and it was not yet midday. It was only
at this hour that his scanty correspondence was brought him, for
the precious mornings could not be troubled by the intrusion of the
external problematical world. Even amid a quite feverish contentment,
he did not regret the instructions he had given once for all; Sixtine's
letter came at a moment when he could think at leisure and without
remorse. His pleasure was manifested by a vivacity of movement
altogether juvenile; a semblance of adolescence surged from his
precocious maturity. Though he generally was incapable of giving a
clear account of his impressions, he felt himself rejuvenated, and this
astonished him. He walked about with lively quick movements.
Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs was almost gay.
A reddish brown made the sun-bathed Luxembourg, through which he
strolled, resplendent. It was full of pretty children and flashing
ribbons. Towards the Odéon he ceased to be aware of the things
around him--a beaming cloud enveloped him. In the afternoon, having
breakfasted, though he could not have stated how or where, he found
himself on the Pont-Neuf, and collected his thoughts. Presence of mind
returned to him and, dissipating with a last breath his cloud, he began
consciously to revel in his happiness. The moment was brief: leaning on
his elbows, looking at the unchanging water, he felt the premonitory
thrill he so well knew; the frozen aura of spleen whistled in his
ears and, bounding the horizon like a wall, the black Idea reared
itself before him. An infinite distress overwhelmed him and, far from
wishing the burden removed, he bent his shoulders, letting himself be
crushed even to suicide. He closed his eyes with suffering, he trembled
with cold, and a flicker of reason deep within him warned him of the
absurdity of such a sudden and causeless grief. Yet he persisted, now
lying under the avalanche of gloom, immobile, experiencing the garrot
of solitary death, the slow excoriation of moral agony. This lasted
an hour, during which he suffered weeks of real and profound pains,
the cruelest pains ever invented by unjust human imagination, hopeless
pains, infernal pains. He ached when he resumed his normal state and
unsteadily went on his way.
The distraction of book hunting proved a great relief. The mummies,
ranged in dozens in their tombs, awaited a momentary resurrection.
He rescued several, _les Promenades_ by Stendhal, which he did not
possess, an old breviary embellished with armorial bearings, and a
Venetian lexicon. He regretted having purchased the Stendhal. It was a
subject of sadness and in the unhealthy state in which his crisis had
left him, the mere material contact of these artless but bitter little
notes might be dangerous. Bitter! For him alone, perhaps, for he found
such desolation in it: "This Rome of the Popes, this womb of the ideal,
this Ninevah of the purple, this Babylon of the cross, this Sodom of
mysticism, this ark of sadistic dreams, this incunabulum of sacred
follies, this generator of the new passion, this Rome, I never again
shall see!" A tiny kingdom had openly stolen its traditional capital
and the modern baseness had ratified the theft.
His sadness turned to anger. Entragues smiled at this quixotism, but
the violence of even a fugitive indignation ended by making him sound
again, and, recovering full consciousness, he breathed.
In the street, Entragues did not sympathize with the rumbling
consciousness dispersed among the human fluid emanating from the
throngs. The passersby seemed phantoms to him, he was not aware
of them, considering them as inconsistent as the vignettes of an
illustrated book. The most tragic public event only elicited from him
an acquiescence or repulsion of the artist: to shrug the shoulders and
cry: Bravo, Chance! A very scornful observer and thoroughly persuaded
in advance that nothing new can be produced by the encounters of
individuals with one another or against things, since the elaborating
brains partake eternally of a fundamental identity and their visible
differences are but the right and reverse sides of an untearable
material embroidered with a durable and everlasting embroidery;
conscious of the uselessness of leaving his house to enter another
house which is just the same, Entragues loved the proximity of books
that demonstrated to him the probability of his philosophy. He never
tired of admiring the courageous perserverance of men who invariably
repeated the same thing. All that had been written since the Bible
could be resumed in three words; fired in a fantastic crucible, the
totality of books would give this for a chemical residuum: cogito, ergo
sum. Descartes was the only man who had ever expressed a necessary
idea, and thirteen letters had sufficed for it. He would have wished to
see them engraved on the front of monuments.
Outside of these three words, nothing indubitably existed except art;
for it alone, endowed with the critical faculty, has the power of
evoking life. It alone, without remarking the warp and woof, however,
can variegate the embroidery of the stuff, because it embroiders safe
from contingencies. The existence of Marie-Antoinette is problematical;
that of Antigone is certain. The queen who died on the scaffold is at
the mercy of deductions and negations; Antigone is as eternal as the
family love she symbolizes, and the falling stars will not hush the
piteous and charming confession of her feminine heart murmuring across
the centuries: "I am born to love and not to hate." The symbol is as
imperishable as the idea whose transcendental form it is and becomes
necessary to it as soon as it clothes the idea. When you persecute
Galileo, it is a man who suffers; when you separate Romeo from
Juliette, it is the entire species that feels their anguish.
Having placed art above and even in the place of life, Entragues
still doubted. Was art not an illusion as well? If the external world
consists of phantoms only, could he create aught but phantoms, unless
he confined himself to the eternal reproduction of the eternal ego? But
at its highest degree of personality, individual consciousness contains
all forms, and just as, by a necessary objectivity, it projects
externally the silhouettes on the transparent curtain of time, which is
life, it can project them outside of time, which is art.
The ant in distress swam boldly towards the last straw, withstanding
the cruel waves; it did not founder in the hollows of the
rivulet--which are for it larger than the ocean--and it saw safety when
the motion of the waves raised it to the pinnacle.
His meditations were suddenly troubled, like the water of a pool into
which a swan plunges. The jovial, merry instinct recovered its toy.
There was now no means of arguing upon the illusion of suffering: the
lashes of presentiment cut his back so keenly and severely that it was
clear the hand could not be wheedled by any reasoning.
The child was amusing itself too well. "And yet! and yet!" All was
vain and it was true. Entragues, upon returning to his quarters, found
this mortal note, mortal in the state of exaltation in which he had
lived since the morning, a damper that truly resembled death.
"Inpromptu dinner with the countess who has come on some business.
Regrets. Let tomorrow take the place of to-day. S. M."
As he sat reading these lines, his head in his hands, without having
removed his hat, gloves, overcoat and cane, he had the misfortune to
wish to seek the secret causes; he passed, without stirring, two or
three very painful hours. His reasoning went thus: in writing the
first letter to me yesterday, she evidently knew how matters stood. He
then asked himself why she was playing with him. He employed the whole
evening in resolving this difficult question. Finally, after having
followed several diverse solutions, he concluded: "Perhaps, as she
said, it really was a simple accident." As aching as a victim of the
inquisition, after his seance of torture, he fell asleep cursing hope,
that torture more subtle than the wooden horse, needles and spiders, a
sketch but lately illuminated by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam.
He fell asleep, living again the pages of the master in a terrifying
nightmare, and only in the morning did rest come.
Upon arising, he was another person, and certitude, pure and clear
certitude did not abandon him an instant until evening. At half past
eight, the hour chosen and fixed by her, he would see her. Until then
he walked with closed eyes, almost like a blind man, all the powers of
his mind, all his faculties of idealisation, together with his scorn
and skepticism, drowned in that drop of water--Sixtine. He did not even
have enough strength for astonishment: a rising moon, a dawning love
dominated his horizon. This unique contemplation, by gentle degrees,
isolated him in a trance.