DIAMOND DUST
"Chino la fronte e con lo sguardo a terra
L'amoroso Pensier rode se stesso."
Cav. Marino, _l'Adone_, VIII, 12.
More than two weeks had passed since the feverish and mysterious
evening which Sixtine granted to Entragues. Three times he had tried to
see her, three times he had failed: irritated, exasperated, cast down,
such were his three successive states of mind.
After the door had closed on him, by the gleam of an instantaneous
if tardy clairvoyance, he had seen and deciphered Sixtine's final
irony: "You do not take me? Yet I am at your mercy. I have the air
of thinking, of listening, of speaking, but I do not think, I do not
listen, I do not speak--I merely pretend to do all these things and I
await. Yet another half-hour, another ten minutes, five, one, the last
one, nothing! Go! you make me lose my patience!"
"Now," Entragues told himself, "it is quite well reorganized, I must
not lose it." And going by the longest route to his home, meditatively
he recomposed the scene, wrote it in his mind. How Would it go at
the theater? He planned the play. While the man in love explains
the tenderness of his sentiments, the woman disrobes. He shrugged
his shoulders: this would not be understood, he would be charged
with coarseness. And yet the comic Plato had already done it, then
Andronicus, then several Destouches, several Picards and several
Augiers.
One could pass on a little note to the eminent professors who
lecture on dramatic history (that vast science in three hundred
thousand _feuilletons_): Note.--Cf.: _Plato com. Frag. ed. Brulend._
§3;--_Andron. ap. Taschend._ t. XXXVII; etc. In the matter of books,
criticism buries you, in the matter of the theater, it overwhelms
you. To write for one's sole pleasure, with an absolute disdain for
present opinions. Yes, but if they are just, that is to say favorable,
one glories in it. Isolation is difficult, vanity ceaselessly and
indefatigably solders the cable one has cut. Vanity! Fatuity! And in
everything. Thus this monologue lends itself to Sixtine. I reason like
a male; and she feels like a female and I shall never know what she
felt at a certain moment, because, even taking for granted a confession
and the wish to be sincere, she would lie by nature. The truth is what
one thinks it; when one no longer thinks of anything--all is reduced to
nothing! There remains sensation, but analyzed sensation--diamond dust!
He went to bed feeling miserable, and as he was dozing off with the
consciousness of his moral powerlessness he was seized with a fit of
despondency comparable to that of impotent men when in the presence of
the desired woman. Incapable of loving, incapable of tearing from his
heart the parasitic science whose tentacles strangled him, it seemed
to him as if he had swallowed plaster, as if muddy blood stagnated in
his veins; or rather as if his arteries slowly carried a curare which
gradually benumbed his muscles. His mind obstructed with the most
contradictory metaphors, he tried them one after the other, vaguely
disgusted with their absurdity. Finally, with a rush of vitality, he
somewhat reconquered his logic and ceased to hold himself in contempt:
"I suffer, hence I love!" This thought, though he ironically perceived
its mild naïveté, comforted him, a very long and decisive breathing
reëstablished the haematosis, and he was able to sleep peacefully.
Painful doubts of this sort came to torture him on more than one
evening. He was only delivered from them by anger--the first time
that he knocked at Sixtine's door without getting a response. Certain
deceptions on certain days determined this action, when strong desire
had a precise end. At this moment it was to see Sixtine, merely to see
her, merely the pleasure of the eyes.
The effect was the same after the second check, but accentuated to a
sort of rage, a hardly dangerous crisis whose very lashes were salutary.
The last mockery of fortune, on the other hand, threw him into a
resigned dejection. "She does not want to see me; I have displeased
her, but how? Yet I love her." Thus displaced from the subject to the
object, doubt was supportable as an imposed pain which one accepts
without having any responsibility: "It is not my fault."
So he paced the streets or visited his friends and the _Revue
spéculative_, a pale melancholy upon him like the vegetation of a cave.
Under the shadow of a strong habit which no disturbance could uproot,
he still worked in the mornings, but he shortened the hours, impatient
for his distracting strolls. His imagination no longer accompanied
him. It seemed that in ever projecting his thought towards an external
creature, he had proportionately diminished the intensity of his
evocative faculty.
As he was leaving the _Revue_, after Fortier had told him that the
countess, now installed in her home because of affairs, was receiving
some friends on a certain evening, at nine o'clock, he discovered that
the present day was Wednesday, the day in question.
"Perhaps I will find Sixtine there?"
This quite natural reflection guided his somnambulism towards Marigny
Avenue. In the interval he had dressed and dined with a perfect
unconsciousness. A system of newly organized revery relieved the
slow and rude friction of transitions; furnished with a problem of
metaphysics, commerce, art, politics, it mattered not what so long as
it required shrewd deductions, he used to be so perfectly absorbed in
them that the hours vainly pricked him with their pins, the minutes. He
walked through the streets insentient, inexistent. But, involuntarily,
this action of his mind which shut him in between the walls of the
fixed idea was a grievous imprisonment against which his will rebelled;
on the other hand, chosen and brought about in entire freedom, this
incarceration saved him, without the tax of suffering, from the ennui
of expectation. Nothing was so painful to him as changes of rhythm.
He wished them to be abrupt or imperceptible, partaking of a sudden
brutality or of an infinitesimal gentleness, the unity of force
sustained with all its initial violence or decomposed into the infinity
of its diminishing fractions. Leibnitz had taught him the arithmetical
method of reducing the sensation of time to an evanescent progression:
he applied the method to life. To live and not to be aware of living
was an ideal to which his senses, deceivers, but unrelenting, too often
barred the road. Today the obstacle had been surmounted.
In the small modern room on the ground floor there were many people:
some raised their heads when his name was announced; the usual
movements and whisperings:
"An Entragues?"
"Which Entragues?"
"Oh! some stray stem of an Entragues! The name is quite common in the
South."
"Yet he carries himself well."
"The countess will tell us about him." As soon as he was freed from the
ceremonial of introduction, Entragues sought the eyes of some friend
with whom he could be at ease. He found Sixtine's eyes: a gesture
beckoned him.
He obeyed without astonishment, for he had seen a chair near her,
guarded by a fan.
"I noticed you. How criminal I consider myself towards your
friendliness and insistence.... Do you want me to number your visiting
cards? Why did you not write to me?"
"But I wanted to see you."
"Yes, but writing has a witchery unknown to printed forms. Instead of
seeking me, you should have called me. And you have sought so badly!"
"No, since I find you at last."
"By chance! Are you satisfied? You wished to see me, well, look at me."
"That is what I am doing," Hubert responded, "and with pleasure. I
would never grow tired of it, Madame."
"I supposed it was quite the other way," Sixtine rejoined, "and that a
secret or very inconsiderate presentiment informed you of my absences.
How one blames one's friends! For the past three weeks, I left three
times, in the evening, to come here, and naturally on the Wednesday
of each week. Admit that it was odd for me to find your card, each
Wednesday that I returned home."
"I am lost if you suppose I did it purposely," Hubert answered,
"for every explanation is too simple to seem probable. I will give
you the best one, although it may not perhaps be the true one. The
first evening in which I passed a few minutes at your home was
a Wednesday. A latent force must have led me to your door on the
following Wednesdays, and this without any participation of my will.
This periodical return, like the regular culmination of a feverish
condition, is after all quite natural."
"These are the reasonings," Sixtine replied, "of an automaton who
would be hard put to explain why he always plays the same tune on the
flute, at the same hour. But you have come to the countess, instead of
knocking at my door. Did no one wind you up this morning? On whom does
this task devolve?"
"It would be yours, Madame, if you consented."
Each of them, ill at ease, felt the same desire to be silent and to go
away. Sixtine, not yet calmed after the old ill-humor that had finally
exploded, feared to hurt Hubert, feared to bleed him with too many
prickings. Hubert, who feigned a sad politeness, endured suffocating
agony. So he had been judged and Sixtine had pronounced sentence, with
what aggravations for the unhappy man! Incapable, perhaps, of loving;
certainly incapable of sharing his love. Would no mirage, then, be able
to deceive him persistently, with sufficient certitude to give him
courage to lead across the desert, towards the oasis, a phantom of love
vivified by desire? She scoffed him and he surrendered; she fled and he
watched her flee.
At the foot of the stairs which she had rapidly descended, remorse
seized Sixtine by the flap of her cloak; she turned her head and
waited for several seconds. Then, lifting her skirts, she hurried to
the carriage which a watchful gamin, upon noticing her at the sidewalk,
had motioned with mock gestures of obsequiousness. Profiting by the new
indecision, remorse tried to seduce her with these insinuations:
"The air is very pleasant, the sky is clear, it would be nice to return
on foot, chatting on the way. This poor Hubert would appreciate it, and
I have really been a bit severe with him: he asks so little! But what
can he be doing?"
She listened: no sound of a person issuing from the house. "What is
this! You seem to be waiting for him! What an attitude for a woman!"
the thin and whispering voice of feminine vanity breathed to her. She
gave the driver her address and climbed into the carriage.
Hubert had slowly walked down the stairs stopping at each step. He
staggered under a fit of contempt. His whole person, the very necessary
movement of his limbs seemed to him an insult to life. His reflection,
perceived in the mirrors, gave him a horror of effectual futility.
This careful attire--what a pretentious obedience to vanity I How ugly
he was with his pale cheeks and empty gaze! Ah! dust compressed into
a human form, what prevents thee from returning to thy natural state,
where thou couldst humbly blend thyself, as would be fitting, with the
bruised and scorned sand crying beneath thy phantom feet?
He reached the gate; a carriage, detaching itself from the file,
departed: "Perhaps it was she? No, she must be far away, by now.
The air is very pleasant, the sky clear, it would have been nice to
return on foot, chatting. This pleasure was not made for me, and it is
ridiculous even to dream of it. Yet, would she have refused me, if I
had asked? Eh! there I reason as if this woman had the slightest liking
for me. Shall I, then, never cure myself of the stupid presumption
with which I so grievously delude myself? What is the good of my
philosophy? Everything is useless. Ah! I suffer less! The futility of
my life is not unique; it is confounded with the universal nothingness.
Yes, but all the same I can only consider myself, only myself, since I
know nothing outside of my consciousness. Well, then! I remain alone,
indemnified and invulnerable. What is that cloud, called Sixtine, which
comes to trouble my royal indifference and to conceal my sun--death?
I do not want to go to sleep in the shadow of her beauty. What is the
good of loving, when the awakening is certain. Ah! if eternity were
given me! Indispensable eternity, without you life is only a quite
despicable thoroughfare. Does the present hour exist for the condemned
person who knows that the next hour will not belong to him? And this
life is less than an hour for whomsoever knows the worth of what he
has been deprived of in being robbed of eternity." How he would have
sacrificed his genius to be a Christian and no longer a dilettante of
Christianity, believing, not in the unique beauty, but in the truth
of religion, assured not alone of his social necessity, but of his
immutable, absolute and solar truth!
He issued from his metaphysical cloud near the Pont-Royal, and fell
back into his actual misery. The woman he loved did not love him and
would never love him. In vain he scorned himself, in vain he accused
himself of emotional impotence, the man deep in him protested and
repeated: "I must love, since I suffer."
But, with Entragues, the man never pronounced the final aphorism. After
the troubled divagations of the lover came the romancer, an artist or
ditch-digger who gathered impressions together, clothed them in words
as with a shroud of chatoyant folds, and laid them to rest, with care,
respect and tenderness, in the vault whose portal bears the words
written in letters of gold: LITERATURE.
He went to sleep, dreaming of the embryo of a romance which a more
disinterested person would find in this new adventure. But perhaps
he would some day acquire that necessary disinterestedness! At first
the idea was outrageous, then he grew accustomed to it; he mentally
sketched a first chapter--that of the encounter. He transported
the scene to Naples, at the end of the fifteenth century, and the
personages became pure symbols. The Man, a prisoner, typified the
idea of the soul imprisoned in the jail of the flesh, quite ignorant
of the external world, refashioning the vague vision transmitted by
the senses. The Woman, a madonna, was a statue which the prisoner's
love endowed with life and feeling, becoming as really existent to him
as a creature of God. And on this theme could be developed all the
divagations of love, dream and madness.
On the morning of the next day, he commenced this story which was
closely based upon his actual state of mind, and in which he would take
delight in transposing, in a manner of logical extravagance, the drama
he was naively playing with Sixtine.
This madonna was the new woman, _la Madonna Novella_, and what name
should be given to the prisoner, a prey to his own imagination, if
not that of _Della Preda_, since we are in Italy. _Veltro_ fits the
indispensable turnkey, and for title--_The Adorer_.