During breakfast I had many opportunities to appreciate the good taste,
tact, and intelligence of Madame de Gabry, who told me that the
chateau had its ghosts, and was especially haunted by the
“Lady-with-three-wrinkles-in-her-back,” a prisoner during her lifetime,
and thereafter a Soul-in-pain. I could never describe how much wit and
animation she gave to this old nurse’s tale. We took out, coffee on
the terrace, whose balusters, clasped and forcibly torn away from their
stone coping by a vigorous growth of ivy, remained suspended in the
grasp of the amorous plant like bewildered Athenian women in the arms of
ravishing Centaurs.
The chateau, shaped something like a four-wheeled wagon, with a turret
at each of the four angles, had lost all original character by reason of
repeated remodellings. It was merely a fine spacious building, nothing
more. It did not appear to me to have suffered much damage during its
abandonment of thirty-two years. But when Madame de Gabry conducted me
into the great salon of the ground-floor, I saw that the planking was
bulged in and out, the plinths rotten, the wainscotings split apart, the
paintings of the piers turned black and hanging more than half out of
their settings. A chestnut-tree, after forcing up the planks of the
floor, had grown tall under the ceiling, and was reaching out its
large-leaved branches towards the glassless windows.
This spectacle was not devoid of charm; but I could not look at it
without anxiety as I remembered that the rich library of Monsieur Honore
de Gabry, in an adjoining apartment, must have been exposed for the
same length of time to the same forces of decay. Yet, as I looked at the
young chestnut-tree in the salon, I could not but admire the magnificent
vigour of Nature, and that resistless power which forces every germ
to develop into life. On the other hand I felt saddened to think that,
whatever effort we scholars may make to preserve dead things from
passing away, we are labouring painfully in vain. Whatever has lived
becomes the necessary food of new existences. And the Arab who builds
himself a hut out of the marble fragments of a Palmyra temple is really
more of a philosopher than all the guardians of museums at London,
Munich, or Paris.
August 11.
All day long I have been classifying MSS.... The sun came in through
the loft uncurtained windows; and, during my reading, often very
interesting, I could hear the languid bumblebees bump heavily against
the windows, and the flies intoxicated with light and heat, making their
wings hum in circles around my head. So loud became their humming
about three o’clock that I looked up from the document I was reading--a
document containing very precious materials for the history of Melun in
the thirteenth century--to watch the concentric movements of those tiny
creatures. “Bestions,” Lafontaine calls them: he found this form of
the word in the old popular speech, whence also the term,
tapisserie-a-bestions, applied to figured tapestry. I was compelled
to confess that the effect of heat upon the wings of a fly is totally
different from that it exerts upon the brain of a paleographical
archivist; for I found it very difficult to think, and a rather pleasant
languor weighing upon me, from which I could rouse myself only by a very
determined effort. The dinner-bell then startled me in the midst of my
labours; and I had barely time to put on my new dress-coat, so as to
make a respectable appearance before Madame de Gabry.
The repast, generously served, seemed to prolong itself for my benefit.
I am more than a fair judge of wine; and my hostess, who discovered my
knowledge in this regard, was friendly enough to open a certain bottle
of Chateau-Margaux in my honour. With deep respect I drank of this
famous and knightly old wine, which comes from the slopes of Bordeaux,
and of which the flavour and exhilarating power are beyond praise.
The ardour of it spread gently through my veins, and filled me with an
almost juvenile animation. Seated beside Madame de Gabry on the terrace,
in the gloaming which gave a charming melancholy to the park, and lent
to every object an air of mystery, I took pleasure in communicating
my impression of the scene to my hostess. I discoursed with a vivacity
quite remarkable on the part of a man so devoid of imagination as I am.
I described to her spontaneously, without quoting from an old texts, the
caressing melancholy of the evening, and the beauty of that natal earth
which feeds us, not only with bread and wine, but also with ideas,
sentiments, and beliefs, and which will at last take us all back to her
maternal breast again, like so many tired little children at the close
of a long day.
“Monsieur,” said the kind lady, “you see these old towers, those trees,
that sky; is it not quite natural that the personage of the popular
tales and folk-songs should have been evoked by such scenes? Why, over
there is the very path which Little Red Riding-hood followed when she
went to the woods to pick nuts. Across this changeful and always vapoury
sky the fairy chariots used to roll; and the north tower might have
sheltered under its pointed roof that same old spinning woman whose
distaff picked the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood.”
I continued to muse upon her pretty fancies, while Monsieur Paul related
to me, as he puffed a very strong cigar, the history of some suit he
had brought against the commune about a water-right. Madame de Gabry,
feeling the chill night air, began to shiver under the shawl her husband
had wrapped about her, and left us to go to her room. I then decided,
instead of going to my own, to return to the library and continue my
examination of the manuscripts. In spite of the protests of Monsieur
Paul, I entered what I may call, in old-fashioned phrase, “the
book-room,” and started to work by the light of a lamp.
After having read fifteen pages, evidently written by some ignorant and
careless scribe, for I could scarcely discern their meaning, I plunged
my hand into the pocket of my coat to get my snuff-box; but this
movement, usually so natural and almost instinctive, this time cost me
some effort and even fatigue. Nevertheless, I got out the silver box,
and took from it a pinch of the odorous powder, which, somehow or other,
I managed to spill all over my shirt-bosom under my baffled nose. I am
sure my nose must have expressed its disappointment, for it is a very
expressive nose. More than once it has betrayed my secret thoughts, and
especially upon a certain occasion at the public library of Coutances,
where I discovered, right in front of my colleague Brioux, the
“Cartulary of Notre-Dame-des-Anges.”
What a delight! My little eyes remained as dull and expressionless as
ever behind my spectacles. But at the mere sight of my thick pug-nose,
which quivered with joy and pride, Brioux knew that I had found
something. He noted the volume I was looking at, observed the place
where I put it back, pounced upon it as soon as I turned my heel, copied
it secretly, and published in haste, for the sake of playing me a
trick. But his edition swarms with errors, and I had the satisfaction of
afterwards criticising some of the gross blunders he made.
But to come back to the point at which I left off: I began to suspect
that I was getting very sleepy indeed. I was looking at a chart of which
the interest may be divined from the fact that it contained mention of
a hutch sold to Jehan d’Estonville, priest, in 1312. But although, even
then, I could recognise the importance of the document, I did not give
it that attention it so strongly invited. My eyes would keep turning,
against my will, towards a certain corner of the table where there was
nothing whatever interesting to a learned mind. There was only a big
German book there, bound in pigskin, with brass studs on the sides, and
very thick cording upon the back. It was a find copy of a compilation
which has little to recommend it except the wood engravings it contains,
and which is known as the “Cosmography of Munster.” This volume, with
its covers slightly open, was placed upon edge with the back upwards.
I could not say for how long I had been staring causelessly at the
sixteenth-century folio, when my eyes were captivated by a sight so
extraordinary that even a person as devoid of imagination as I could not
but have been greatly astonished by it.
I perceived, all of a sudden, without having noticed her coming into the
room, a little creature seated on the back of the book, with one knee
bent and one leg hanging down--somewhat in the attitude of the amazons
of Hyde Park or the Bois de Boulogne on horseback. She was so small that
her swinging foot did not reach the table, over which the trail of her
dress extended in a serpentine line. But her face and figure were those
of an adult. The fulness of her corsage and the roundness of her waist
could leave no doubt of that, even for an old savant like myself. I will
venture to add that she was very handsome, with a proud mien; for my
iconographic studies have long accustomed me to recognise at once the
perfection of a type and the character of a physiognomy. The countenance
of this lady who had seated herself inopportunely on the back of
“Cosmography of Munster” expressed a mingling of haughtiness and
mischievousness. She had the air of a queen, but a capricious queen; and
I judged, from the mere expression of her eyes, that she was accustomed
to wield great authority somewhere, in a very whimsical manner. Her
mouth was imperious and mocking, and those blue eyes of hers seemed to
laugh in a disquieting way under her finely arched black eyebrows. I
have always heard that black eyebrows are very becoming to blondes; but
this lady was very blonde. On the whole, the impression she gave me was
one of greatness.
It may seem odd to say that a person who was no taller than a
wine-bottle, and who might have been hidden in my coat pocket--but
that it would have been very disrespectful to put her in it--gave me
precisely an idea of greatness. But in the fine proportions of the
lady seated upon the “Cosmography of Munster” there was such a proud
elegance, such a harmonious majesty, and she maintained an attitude at
once so easy and so noble, that she really seemed to me a very great
person. Although my ink-bottle, which she examined with an expression of
such mockery as appeared to indicate that she knew in advance every word
that would come out of it at the end of my pen, was for her a deep basin
in which she would have blackened her gold-clocked pink stockings up to
the garter, I can assure you that she was great, and imposing even in
her sprightliness.
Her costume, worthy of her face, was extremely magnificent; it consisted
of a robe of gold-and-silver brocade, and a mantle of nacarat velvet,
lined with vair. Her head-dress was a sort of hennin, with two high
points; and pearls of splendid lustre made it bright and luminous as
a crescent moon. Her little white hand held a wand. That wand drew my
attention very strongly, because my archaeological studies had taught me
to recognise with certainty every sign by which the notable personages
of legend and of history are distinguished. This knowledge came to my
aid during various very queer conjectures with which I was labouring.
I examined the wand, and saw that it appeared to have been cut from a
branch of hazel.
“Then its a fairy’s wand,” I said to myself; “consequently the lady who
carries it is a fairy.”
Happy at thus discovering what sort of a person was before me, I tried
to collect my mind sufficiently to make her a graceful compliment. It
would have given me much satisfaction, I confess, if I could have talked
to her about the part taken by her people, not less in the life of the
Saxon and Germanic races, than in that of the Latin Occident. Such a
dissertation, it appeared to me, would have been an ingenious method of
thanking the lady for having thus appeared to an old scholar, contrary
to the invariable custom of her kindred, who never show themselves but
to innocent children or ignorant village-folk.
Because one happens to be a fairy, one is none the less a woman, I said
to myself; and since Madame Recamier, according to what I heard J. J.
Ampere say, used to blush with pleasure when the little chimney-sweeps
opened their eyes as wide as they could to look at her, surely the
supernatural lady seated upon the “Cosmography of Munster” might feel
flattered to hear an erudite man discourse learnedly about her, as about
a medal, a seal, a fibula, or a token. But such an undertaking, which
would have cost my timidity a great deal, became totally out of the
question when I observed the Lady of the Cosmography suddenly take from
an alms purse hanging at her girdle the very smallest of nuts I had ever
seen, crack the shells between her teeth, and throw them at my nose,
while she nibbled the kernels with the gravity of a sucking child.
At this conjuncture, I did what the dignity of science demanded of me--I
remained silent. But the nut-shells caused such a painful tickling that
I put up my hand to my nose, and found, to my great surprise, that my
spectacles were straddling the very end of it--so that I was actually
looking at the lady, not through my spectacles, but over them. This
was incomprehensible, because my eyes, worn out over old texts, cannot
ordinarily distinguish anything without glasses--could not tell a melon
from a decanter, though the two were placed close up to my nose.
That nose of mine, remarkable for its size, its shape, and its
coloration, legitimately attracted the attention of the fairy; for she
seized my goose-quill pen, which was sticking up from the ink-bottle
like a plume, and she began to pass the feather-end of that pen over
my nose. I had had more than once, in company, occasion to suffer
cheerfully from the innocent mischief of young ladies, who made me join
their games, and would offer me their cheeks to kiss through the back
of a chair, or invite me to blow out a candle which they would lift
suddenly above the range of my breath. But until that moment no person
of the fair sex had ever subjected me to such a whimsical piece of
familiarity as that of tickling my nose with my own feather pen. Happily
I remembered the maxim of my late grandfather, who was accustomed to say
that everything was permissible on the part of ladies, and that whatever
they do to us is to be regarded as a grace and a favour. Therefore, as a
grace and a favour I received the nutshells and the titillations with my
own pen, and I tried to smile. Much more!--I even found speech.
“Madame,” I said, with dignified politeness, “you accord the honour of
a visit not to a silly child, not to a boor, but to a bibliophile who
is very happy to make your acquaintance, and who knows that long ago you
used to make elf-knots in the manes of mares at the crib, drink the milk
from the skimming-pails, slip graines-a-gratter down the backs of our
great-grandmothers, make the hearth sputter in the faces of the old
folks, and, in short, fill the house with disorder and gaiety. You
can also boast of giving the nicest frights in the world to lovers who
stayed out in the woods too late of evenings. But I thought you had
vanished out of existence at least three centuries ago. Can it really
be, Madame, that you are still to be seen in this age of railways and
telegraphs? My concierge, who used to be a nurse in her young days, does
not know your story; and my little boy-neighbour, whose nose is still
wiped for him by his bonne, declares that you do not exist.”
“What do you yourself think about it?” she cried, in a silvery voice,
straightening up her royal little figure in a very haughty fashion, and
whipping the back of the “Cosmography of Munster” as though it were a
hippogriff.
“I don’t really know,” I answered rubbing my eyes.
This reply, indicating a deeply scientific scepticism, had the most
deplorable effect upon my questioner.
“Monsieur Sylvestre Bonnard,” she said to me, “you are nothing but an
old pedant. I always suspected as much. The smallest little ragamuffin
who goes along the road with his shirt-tail sticking out through a hole
in his pantaloons knows more about me than all the old spectacled folks
in your Institutes and your Academies. To know is nothing at all; to
imagine is everything. Nothing exists except that which is imagined. I
am imaginary. That is what it is to exist, I should think! I am dreamed
of, and I appear. Everything is only dream; and as nobody ever dreams
about you, Sylvestre Bonnard, it is YOU who do not exist. I charm the
world; I am everywhere--on a moon-beam, in the trembling of a hidden
spring, in the moving of leaves that murmur, in the white vapours
that rise each morning from the hollow meadow, in the thickets of pink
brier--everywhere!... I am seen; I am loved. There are sighs uttered,
weird thrills of pleasure felt by those who follow the light print of
my feet, as I make the dead leaves whisper. I make the little children
smile; I give wit to the dullest-minded nurses. Leaning above the
cradles, I play, I comfort, I lull to sleep--and you doubt whether I
exist! Sylvestre Bonnard, your warm coat covers the hide of an ass!”
She ceased speaking; her delicate nostrils swelled with indignation; and
while I admired, despite my vexation, the heroic anger of this little
person, she pushed my pen about in the ink-bottle, backward and forward,
like an oar, and then suddenly threw it at my nose, point first.
I rubbed by face, and felt it all covered with ink. She had disappeared.
My lamp was extinguished. A ray of moonlight streamed down through a
window and descended upon the “Cosmography of Munster.” A strong cool
wind, which had arisen very suddenly without my knowledge, was blowing
my papers, pens, and wafers about. My table was all stained with ink. I
had left my window open during the storm. What an imprudence!