DEPARTURE
"Déjà il rêvait à une thébaïde raffinée,
à un désert confortable, à une arche immobile
et tiède où il se réfugierait loin de l'incessant
déluge de la sottise humaine."
Huysmans, _A Rebours_.
Moscowitch, feeling bored and out of place among such obscure
discussions, bowed to the honorable editors, and excusing himself to
Entragues, left.
"Ah!" Renaudeau said, "perhaps we are going to learn who this new
manufacturer of dramatic literature is."
"I do not know myself," Entragues answered, "having brought him here
only through international courtesy."
"And to get rid of him?" Fortier questioned. "But Renaudeau does not
permit himself to be overreached. Besides, we shall see, for he has
left me a copy: '_The Voluntary Expiation_, drama in eight scenes.' Ah!
there is an _Explanatory Note_: 'In default of social justice, inner
justice punishes the guilty; one has opprobrium for its end; the other,
rehabilitation; the one abases, the other elevates.' A period, then a
dash, and these three words twice underlined: 'VOLUNTARY EXPIATION
SANCTIFIES.'"
"Well!" Entragues said, "it is quite puerile, but perhaps the text
contains interesting details."
"Yes," Renaudeau put in, "a new form justifies all subjects, as a fine
resilvering conceals verdigris. Do you ask for indulgence?"
"Oh! no," Entragues returned, "although I have a certain interest in
having him believe he is destined for fame. If you wish to oblige me,
humor him with illusions until the final dagger thrust."
"So you are becoming wicked, Entragues?" asked Fortier.
"No, it is just for the sport."
He requested an envelope and, after inserting the box ticket with his
card and writing the name of Madame Sixtine Magne upon it, he had it
dispatched to her. As soon as the office boy left, remorse seized him:
perhaps he would have done better to go there in person. No. Yes. No.
Yes.
Renaudeau, who had glanced over the manuscript, arrested this fatiguing
game of see-saw by saying:
"It is not, perhaps, so bad. When a drama has a philosophy, it appears
superior to anything we have. Our classical theater is so denuded of
mystic sense! Corneille does politics, Racine, the psychology of the
laboratory, and as for Molière, he is closed to aught that is not
ruse, enjoyment, banal remarks on love, and vague statements. When he
wishes to take up any traits of manners, it is to subject women to
the materialism of life, to rail at nobility, because there is none,
or at the doctors, because they cannot cure him of his hypochondria.
Veuillot, but Hello especially, has judged him well: he shuts the door.
It is really the theater of a Gassendist."
"You are speaking of Molière?" asked Calixte, entering. "He is a
wretch: he has jeered at the dreamer."
"Nevertheless," objected Van Baël, "what of Alceste and Don Juan?"
"But," Renaudeau interposed, "even had he done nothing at all, he would
be, like Voltaire, beyond criticism."
"Don Juan would have charm, were it not for his ridiculous rustics,"
Calixte said. "But see how everything shrinks in the brain of this
bourgeois: if Don Juan is not a fastidious person, if in the vast field
of corn he does not choose the finest, the highest and the most golden,
if he makes a sheaf of everything, he is no longer Don Juan, he is a
trailer after petticoats."
"Precisely," Entragues said, "but if he loves them all, it is because
he idealizes them all."
"I do not think so," Calixte said. "Molière only made these
countrywomen victims of Don Juan to put the comic note into his play:
he had to make his audience laugh and the first conception that came
was good. And Alceste? Does this person who detests men and who prefers
solitude to the few concessions demanded by a pretty woman--does
this man find, at the end of five acts, a single word to paint the
soul-state of a hater of humanity? He is only a crabbed fellow. Above
all else, he places the joy of being himself in liberty, far from
the world, and he does not know how to express it: he has no soul!
With what delicious grace does the so ridiculed Thisbé, the Thisbé of
Théophile, tell Bersiane of her dread of noise, external life, the
movement of things:
THISBE
Sais-tu pas bien que j'aime à rêver, à me taire
Et que mon naturel est un peu solitaire,
Que je cherche souvent à m'ôter hors du bruit?
Alors, pour dire vrai, je hais bien qui me suit:
Quelquefois mon chagrin trouverait importune
La conservation de la bonne fortune,
La visite d'un Dieu me désobligerait,
Un rayon de soleil parfois me fâcherait.
"And what do the professors mean by telling us that the sentiment
of nature was unknown in the seventeenth century, when we find such
verses, again in the same Théophile:
Les roses des rosiers, les ombres, les ruisseaux,
Le murmure des vents et le bruit des oiseaux,
or such lines:
Chaque saison donne ses fruits,
L' automne nous donne ses pommes,
L'Hyver donne ses longues nuits,
Pour un plus grand repos des hommes.
Le Printemps nous donne des fleurs,
Il donne l'âme et les couleurs
A la feuille qui semblait morte....
"I do not know the rest. One always reads the same books," Calixte
concluded, "without suspecting that only those which the majority
disdains have interest."
"Théophile," Entragues remarked, "is one of the rare French poets. He
is full of delicate reveries. I know him well for I love him:
Prête-moi ton sein pour y boire
Des odeurs qui m' embaumeront.
"The second Théophile has spoken of him without having read him. This
is obvious, for why should he have passed his time in explaining him,
if he had known him? One only talks of what one does not know; to talk
of what one knows seems useless; one gets bored and bores others as
well. That is why criticism is, most often, so disagreeable when it is
well informed, and partaking of an emetic laxity, the rest of the time."
"Like that of Bergeron," Calixte said. "Why have you accepted his
dilution of nonsense on Verlaine and Huysmans?"
"As an advertisement, my dear," Fortier answered. "It is virtually
printed on the blue sheets of the initial and final announcements."
"He is witty," Renaudeau said, "and that amuses: one must live. It has
gained us several alleged subscriptions."
"The man is pretending," Entragues declared. "He is as incapable of
feeling Verlaine's poetry as I of feeling Molière's."
"And then," Calixte interposed, "he is truly too destitute of
principles. After some savage attack, he offers you, what? another
article, 'this one serious, according to my real convictions.' As
Goncourt says, there are 'droll vulgarians.' Ah! I see nothing since
Hennequin, whose precision of method and sureness of deduction
pardoned an absolutism of theory that was a little hard. I see nothing
except those of to-morrow, those who still speak in the desert. It
is, nevertheless, interesting to read the alleged opinion of an
intelligence on works old or new...."
"There remains Fiction and Poetry," Entragues said, "and for me that
suffices."
Dazin, who had only offered some inarticulations since his blue and red
vowels had foundered under the gales of talk, declared:
"Nothing, nothing more, and besides, there was never anything; but one
believed, and now one no longer believes. I love them. You will soon
see the _Abyssales_ which are now being printed: you will see. It is a
chaplet of medals where, with a certain material force, I have restored
the profiles of women. I believe they are in a tolerable style. Here
are the first lines of the first one:
_Basilisse, icon.--In the lecherous and parthenoide incognition, the
abysmal gleam of the muliebrile future towards the flames and the
chimerical burning ah (wings unfold for this flight and eyeballs
glisten: silk rumples at the carnal rustling)! slumbers and blond the
cruel senses are veiled!_
_She._
_Here blond the gloom._
_To smile at the growth of vernal grass and the gladioles died of ennui
the blood returns to the heart._
_Sharp already? The Arachnean dead in rents and the pungency the red
and the buckler is resolved on the aureoles twinly surge the Breasts."_
Among the flakes of this verbal fog, Entragues suspected Dazin of
having wished to suggest the birth of puberty and the awaking of
the senses. He knew the facile arcena of these strained phrases of
which Dazin was not the inventor. Such a style was not absolutely
to be condemned, provided one only used it for the sake of desired
obscurities and with the glossary of a context.
Mortified at being understood by a simple analyst, Dazin left.
"He believes himself," Renaudeau said, "a Mallarmé or a more subtle
Laforgue."
"He has not even surprised," Calixte Heliot answered, "the most
elementary of their processes."
"The processes of a poet," Entragues said, "are part of his talent:
it would be quite sterile to possess it. Mallarmé plays with the
complementary colors of those with which he wishes to suggest vision.
If Dazin had remained, I would have given him this secret and also
told him that to be a more subtle Laforgue, one must have more than a
capricious syntax, abusive metaphors of rare words, and the like--one
must have a spontaneity which touches the heart."
Hubert and Calixte left together and walked at random through the
streets, continuing, almost always in agreement, the conversation begun
in the Revue.
This time, again, they did not separate until the hour of sleep; they
were happy in enjoying each other, with the certainty of likewise
delighting each other, of expressing concordant thoughts, of offering
nothing that would be a blasphemy to the other.
As they were noting the parallelism of these two evenings which chance
meetings had given them, at a short interval, Hubert remarked the
duality in the development of events.
"When an act is produced, it is always produced a second time. This
is an axiom. It is evident that, to demonstrate it, one would have to
be fortified with a multiplicity of historic anecdotes, and I do not
know if this is possible. As far as I and my past life are concerned,
there is such a surprising and frightful exactitude in the axiom that
I believe I could predict nearly half the things which will happen to
me from to-day until the last sleep. Besides, this axiom, perhaps,
is quite personal to me, special to my organism. Such a tendency to
repetition is not the source of any joy. I wish that pleasures could be
doubled like pains and that the proportion, in short, could remain the
same, but consider the infirmity of mathematics applied to the human
soul: it is assuredly less painful to me to have seven griefs for one
felicity than to bear a double weight counterbalanced by such a weak
duplication as that of one to two. Prolonged to infinity, the two
proportions would go on eternally equipoised, but the scale of pains
breaks with its chains and crushes our hearts."
At the request of Calixte, skilful in diverting a conversation headed
for the abysses, Entragues related some of his plans to his friend.
What works to be constructed! It was not that the freestone was
lacking, nor cement, nor accessories; it was a question of time. He
had, ready for erection, more ideas than a century could utilize, and
sometimes the things which would never be done frightened and haunted
him like a swarming of gnomes. He had thought of this on certain
mornings: to put some books, his copybooks, his notes, his written
sheets in a valise and hide himself for the rest of his life in a
closed house, facing the sea. He saw it built on the dunes, between
the strand and the first trees of the coast: no vegetation nearby
excepting the pallid grass, the violet thistles and the tall darnels;
the view of steeples far off, on the land side; on the other side,
the sea and a lighthouse, amid wind and wave, like a symbol. Wagons
pass, full of sea-weed; horses and men pant on the sand, yoked to the
labor of the fecundation of the ground, and he, yoked to the labor
of the sterilization of desires, would watch them pass. Towards the
equinoxes, the spray of waves agitated by moon and tempest would come
to strike against his window, like a bird's wing. And birds would also
come towards the gleam of his lamp and he would open his window to
the spray of waves and the wings of birds. Like a monster, he would
be alone. "For we are monsters, my poor Calixte, we have put our
duty above life; our souls afar from men, like fabulous dragons, we
guard imaginary treasures, and we know it, and to this nothingness we
sacrifice all, even our life! We have hearts of anchorites and we would
court women! Ah! were I there--a hermit among my dreams, an excellent
shelter--I should write what I shall perhaps not write: a work. But
to what end? Now, at other times I would like to get into some fixed
habit, punctually deliver myself to love, quarrel with my wife at
stated hours, rise late, enfeeble the ennui of evenings in the vain
noise of theaters, eat nourishing foods which charge the nerves with
vibrant fluids, and busy myself, during rainy hours, with an honorable
compilation."
"It would be better to clothe oneself in love," Calixte said. "To
transfer one's egoism to a woman: to be jealous of one's own joys more
than of hers, in fine, to give to another the absurd happiness one
would not wish for oneself; to dream that she is happy, that she feels
it and knows it is through my agency."
"Do you imagine that this would be possible for us?" Entragues asked.
He made no allusion to his personal sentiments, for even Calixte was
not his confidant. In questioning his friend or in answering him, he
spoke with full liberty, completely abstract.
"Yes," Calixte answered, "the 'Imitation' gives the clue. It suffices
to transfer to a creature the love, proportionately lessened, which
the priest feels towards God. It would be a sort of obligation to love
which one would impose upon oneself, the first rule of a more general
rule of life, freely and Chistianly accepted, once for all."
"I had not thought of this," Entragues said, "of love considered as a
spiritual discipline."
"Such is the exact formula," Calixte declared. "If we can yet save
ourselves, we and all similar monsters, it is through Christianity and
Christian discipline. This will singularly elevate our souls and it may
curb our transcendental egoisms!"
"We should require Beatrices," Hubert said.
"They can be created," Calixte responded, "and we can baptize a nobly
profiled woman with divine love."
* * * * *
(Hubert received this note on the following day:
"It is perhaps quite compromising, but I am free. Be good enough to
call for me at eight o'clock."
Then he began to dream of the joy of shared pleasures, and instantly
the fourth chapter of _The Adorer_ found itself shaped.)