INTOXICATION
"Ως ἧν έν άεχἥ"
_Greek Liturgy_.
"Man, meditate on the syllable Om."
_The Khandogya Upanishad_.
Hubert wrote two notes, and the evening of the second day knocked at
Sixtine's door. Absence. A third note and another visit were likewise
in vain.
"She is sulking," he thought. "So much the better. Her anger will
exhaust itself against my shadow and, when she condescends to receive
me, her beautiful face will be free of all vexation."
He was too assured of virtual possession even to suppose an attempt
to fly from his hands. By imaginary advances, realized in desire, the
union was established for ever. All scorn was impossible: she had
breathed the fragrance of the philter.
Far from grieving, he congratulated himself; far from languishing, he
breathed more deeply the invigorating breezes of certitude. Having
achieved peace with himself, having thrown his pride overboard, his
lightened bark now moving spiritedly towards the haven of golden
sands, he would enter at the propitious hour.
The morning of the fourth day, he received news in this form:
"Please do not forget the soirée of the Countess on Wednesday next.
This on her behalf.
"On my own behalf, I am sorry for having been too unwell and too busy
either to receive you or to reply.
"But have we not eternity? S. M."
Entragues saw no disquieting bitterness in this raillery--and another
day passed.
"The catalogue of obscene joys is brief, but it suffices, on certain
days, to give the desire of purifying oneself for this world and the
other. Solange had some rather just views before his malady: it is
distressing that the chastity of devotees should be defiled in the
hour when they regain their solitary oratories. I shall do well to
read Tertullian and some consoling pages before retiring, for I fear
the power of words. No, I shall dream of Sixtine. Dear creature of
my desire, I trust in your magic: what wanton importunities will not
yield to the grace of your gestures? Abode of my will, retreat of my
illusions of love, appear to me and protect me!"
They were standing, interlaced. She kissed him lightly and repeatedly
on the corner of his eyes, while having him breathe a rose. It could
not last, he was becoming too languid.
Silvery moonlight, clouds, strident peals which usher in lightning,
silvery moonlight.
The storm hovers in the velvety sky, the turbulent clouds pass, rifts
pour out silvery moonlight.
It has thundered, indeed. Far away it rumbles, it rumbles! Another
flash! Ah! it lightens, long! Again! He is dead.
Hubert awoke, roused by the terrible rumbling.
"Ah! Desecration! It was Sixtine. Ah! the plague of imbecile nerves!"
All during the storm, he remained up in his bed, haggard and shivering.
The confusion of his sensations stunned him: he could not understand
how this carnal hallucination had developed parallel with the beginning
of the storm in a moonlight night. At last, when the dream's absurdity
was evident to him, he grew calm and, benumbed by the cold, fell again
between his covers.
"This day will be horrible. After all, it is worse than Guido, worse
than Valentine! Such a retrogression is degrading. And I think I
am master of myself, master of the external world, master of this
universe--a woman--when I cannot even regulate the order the logical
sequence of my impressions! The human mechanism should be known to
me, and if consequences are unconquerable, at least the causes should
submit to my will. The saints, with the aid of God, had this power;
but God has deserted us and because of the modern Celsus' has left us,
without bucklers, exposed to the arrows of Sin. Henceforth, all hours
are its hour and we all belong to it: it has conquered time, space and
number."
Hubert had never felt, as in those moments, the misfortune of being
a man and of being nothing else. His pride, ruined by his passion,
collapsed like an old wall, and, lying on the ruins bemoaned himself.
This attraction, reasoned and combatted with the logical weapons of
his character, became the stronger, dominated him consciously and
unconsciously. He had come to a state where he no longer thought; his
mind no longer functioned save in brief deductions, and the need of
security distracted him from exact observation. During those decisive
days, in which Sixtine had taken a part, without a doubt, he limited
his tactics to brief recalls of presence, instead of obtruding himself
point-blank and barring the road to every other unforeseen arrival.
It was easy to avoid the nocturnal visitation, by going himself to
the fair visitor: if a magnetic and super-reasonable force had thrust
Sixtine in his arms while asleep, this same force, according to the
most elementary directions, had, on occasion, very, surely joined their
realities, as it had joined their phantasms. He lost knowledge of his
philosophy, revealed himself capable of nothing but theories--a critic
and not a creator of life.
Whether this encounter in unconsciousness was the result of a wholly
personal hallucination, or whether both had been, in their sleep,
summoned towards each other by the power of desire, and whether, while
she visited him, he, in turn, had gone to her--all this he could not
unravel.
Yet he knew the import and the frequency of these mutual evocations and
his soul was a battlefield where mysticism had instantly vanquished
incredulity.
He went to stroll along the quais. The winter sun smiled, the wind
had abated, sparrows chirped on the leafless trees, a warm humidity
vaporized the mild air.
Books, first, passed before his eyes as far off and inaccessible
things; then a binding tempted his hand, an unknown title, his
attention. He felt the first titillations of fever, and gave himself up.
Now, one by one, he touched them, opened them, to acquire the certainty
of the nothingness within; he grieved that a pleasant golden binding
enclosed the gallant nonsense of little shivering verses of indigence,
or the philosophism of a Diderot, or the worthless manuals of
Jansenistic piety.
For a few sous he had just bought a treatise on simony and
haggled eagerly with a rogue of a vendor for some Neo-Parnassian
collections--recently received and already depreciated by the universal
indifference--when a familiar hand was placed on his shoulder.
With a twisting movement, with a natural but sure insolence, he freed
himself, then turned his head.
It was Marguerin, the theosophist, whose friends excused his licentious
folly as a malady of the cerebellum. His play of features, strangely
promising, seduced women in search of debasement: he was rich and
subsidized an angelical review. This day, a fixed idea, which he
confided to Entragues, gave his face an imbecile appearance.
"Dead! Perhaps you remember that blond girl, Maia!"
"His present phantasy," thought Hubert, "does not incite any
repugnance. Have I not had the madness of eyes, and am I cured of it?
Has not the vision of two large eyes ever been necessary to complete
my happiness? It is strange that there should be this constant union
of two sensations so different in kind, namely, visual sensation and
spasm. Sick, ah! an innate and uncurable sickness!"
(_While sipping absinthe_:)
"Intoxication is a very noble passion, and I would like to acquire
it.... Intoxication, one should rather say drunkenness, but
philanthropists, have brought the word down to the humanitarian mud of
their Anglican dissertations.... Alcoholism has been contaminated, no
less.... Intoxication suffices. This absinthe is comforting. The blond
Maia was perhaps loved by that wretch. She was lovely and here is what
is left of it: a pathological regret. Why disdain intoxication? It is
the most intellectual of passions; it does not depress like gambling;
it does not weaken like love. Ah! what a godsend! Absinthe is not at
all hurtful; it is green and concentrated wine. Is it not ideal to
be able to arrive at intoxication with a single glass of liquid? The
Orientals have opium, but for that is needed the Oriental sky. And
then, to each one his own system. The important thing is that it remove
you far from the world: everything that draws us away from ourselves
is divine. How many times nevertheless, have I been drunk with pure
contemplation! yes, that too is a method. All are salutary. I hate
myself, I wish to live another life, I wish to correct ideally the
infirmities inherent in my carnal state, I wish to deliver my soul from
the miseries of my body ... I should love her from afar, as Guido loves
his madonna. Contact is a destroyer of dreams. You will not know the
book of love where I have beatified you, for it will disappear with
desire, burned by the flames of your first kiss. The pyre that will
open heaven for you will consume my forces: you will ascend upward
through space and I will fall like Satan, I will fall into the infernal
hells for eternity.... A singular declamation and quite difficult to
justify! All this for some pleasure mutually shared by two beings who
adore each other. The consequences of the union of the sexes are not at
all so tragic, ordinarily ... I am very much upset. It is quite urgent
that the denouement restores security to one of the actors. To bring
things back to their true state: she will be troubled and I will be
calmed--a very desirable result.
"For the aim of an intelligent life is not to live with the Princess
of Trebizond, but to explain oneself in one's motives of action by
deeds or by gestures. Writing reveals the inward act; it is much less
important to feel than to know the order of sensation, and this is the
mind's revenge on the body: nothing exists save through the Word. As
well say that the Word alone exists. Saint John, the evangelist, knew
it, and the Rajah Ramohun Roy knew it, and others: Om and Logos: it
is the only science; when that is known everything is known. I will
realize myself, accordingly, through the Word.... And you? What shall
I do with you and your soul! Ah! Sixtine, your soul I shall drink,
little by little, in nightly and daily celebrations, diluted in the
saliva of your kisses,--like holy portions: you will have no existence
save in me, and you will fortify me like a spiritual elixir. We shall
be hermaphrodites. Thus will unity be brought about: and I shall have
renounced, without renouncing you, the chimerical pursuit of a love
external to myself. Ah! unity will not be ternary--sin against the
rites! For I do not want carnal posterity. May my flesh be sterile and
my mind fruitful! We shall beget dreams and with our thoughts we shall
people the night of space. We shall talk, and our speech, diffused
beyond the stars, will make the gloomy eternity of the ether vibrate
eternally. We shall have gestures of love, and the signs of our love
will be reflected in the innumerable mirrors of the molecules of light.
Yes, we shall amuse ourselves with this illusion, in overturning Laws,
by our phantasy, for we are not ignorant of the fact that the world
dies of the caducity of thought which creates it and that the stars, as
well as the nail of our little finger, will perish when death closes
the eyes of the last man.
"Ah! I mount very high, I go very far. Like a bomb my head is filled
with explosives and the lucidity of my mind grows extremely bright....
Then the novel will be vanquished: a new form of analysis will have
been demonstrated. The identity of character will be affirmed by its
very contradictions and something Hegelian will relieve the gloomy
simplicity of ordinary creatures clothed in the rigidity of a material
style. The novel of hearts, the novel of souls, the novel of bodies,
the novel of all the sensibilities: after this must come the novel of
minds. As I understand it, the word 'soul' represents the quintessence
of heart; mind, that is to say pure intelligence in conflict with
carnal inconveniences, was disdained, without doubt, as uninteresting.
Always, and nothing but this, conjunctions of sexes and joy. Oh! well!
quite natural! 'to possess the woman one loves.' But at last there are
modern Antonies who have proposed other pur-poses to themselves, who
have reduced all duties to a single duty--to conform one's life to
one's dream. Passersby who jostle you proceed dreaming of the universal
idealism as seriously as you of the surprises of perfected corsets.
And some of them, if the beast asks for oats will answer: 'Death's
white horse did not eat any of it.' And do you not suppose that if
humiliating forces curve their refractory knees before a woman, they
will not have, very often, recourse to the consolation of inward irony?
In fine, I affirm the cerebral life--and all the rest was written in
manuals of psychology.
"Irony is but a momentary protest, a mental destruction and a pledge
against the excess of sensual satisfaction; it is not a certain
way of liberation. From this halting-place one gradually mounts to
a dominating position by pride or by contemplation, by art or by
mysticism. These methods, known in their principle, are denied, like
fairy-like childishness: in the novel they must be given the importance
they have in daily life: As an animal, man thought only of perfecting
his animalism; and Christianity was, one thinks, a notable spiritual
advance. It endowed simple humanity with a complex soul. When Flaubert
wrote _Salammbô_, he instinctively made the young priestess a Carmelite
rather than a Vestal, for the Vestal obeys an order and the Carmelite a
love; one is attached to her position through habit, the other through
love. The idyl, the satire of customs, the picaresque romance, the
tragic and fatal passion, the patriotic epic, the amorous plaint,--the
ancients had no other literature: the first histories of a soul, the
first analytical novel was spontaneously born in the new genius of a
Christianized mind and it was Saint Augustine who wrote it. Modern
literature commences with the _Confessions_.
"We must return to it. Zola and others may continue to catalogue
their inferior animals, they have no interest for us: they are crude
creatures about to acquire light, chrysalid intelligences: we are
little concerned with the quality of the food with which they gorge
themselves, or with their pruriencies. Whatever is not intellectual is
foreign to us.
"What a disconcerting irony that in this century which drinks the blue
democratic wine from the Chalice, no original prose writer was revealed
who was not Christian by instinct or belief, desire or necessity, love
or disgust,--from Chateaubriand to Villiers and Huysmans, and no true
poet, from Vigny to Baudelaire and Verlaine!
"Comte has not touched, with his heavy stones, the souls he wanted to
overwhelm,--no more than an infant who hurls tiny pebbles from the
strand at the inaccessible flight of gulls! And this very age, which
claims to admit only the force that is mathematically proved, will
be extinguished by verbal idealism. People will no longer believe in
things, but in the mere ideas we have of them; and, as the obscurity of
the idea is clarified only by speech, nothing more of things will exist
than the words describing them and the final destruction of matter will
end with the judgment of this axiom: The universe is the sign of the
word...."
"But," reflected Hubert again, as he left the _café_, "this, and
my scorn of a derisive reality and illusive truth, does not imply
laziness in art, or cowardice, or the approximate. Nor has the idealism
I profess anything in common with the vague intuitions of those
spinners of psychological ribbons,--it is a documented idealism,
solidly erected, like the ornamented portal of a cathedral, upon the
foundations of accuracy...."