sunset;--the sky will have the bright orange-yellow and pale-green
tints that we see in some pictures by the great masters of the old
days: there will be a broad avenue of chestnuts in flower and venerable
elms all covered with ringdoves,--lovely trees clothed in cool dark
green, shadows full of mystery and moisture; here and there a statue or
two, some marble vases, standing out in their snowy whiteness against
the background of verdure, and a sheet of water in which the familiar
swan disports itself,--and in the background a château of brick and
stone as in the days of Henri IV., pointed, slate-covered roof, tall
chimneys, weather-cocks on every gable, long, narrow windows.--At one
of the windows, leaning in melancholy mood upon the balcony rail,
stands the queen of my heart in the costume I described to you a moment
ago; behind her is a little negro carrying her fan and her parrot.--You
see that nothing is lacking and that it is all utterly absurd.--The
fair one drops her glove;--I pick it up, kiss it and return it. We
engage in conversation; I display all the wit that I do not possess;
I say some charming things; she answers me, I retort; it is a display
of fireworks, a luminous shower of dazzling repartee.--In short, I
am adorable--and adored.--The supper hour arrives, she invites me to
join her;--I accept.--What a supper, my dear friend, and what a cook
my imagination is!--The wine laughs in the crystal goblet, the white
and gold pheasant smokes in a platter bearing her crest: the feast is
prolonged far into the night and you can imagine that I don't finish up
the night at home.--Isn't that a fine bit of imaginative work?--Nothing
in the world could be simpler, and upon my word it's very surprising
that it doesn't happen ten times rather than once.
[Illustration: Chapter I--_What a supper----The wine laughs in the
crystal goblet, the white and gold pheasant smokes in a platter bearing
her crest: the feast is prolonged far into the night and you can
imagine that I don't finish up the night at home._]
Sometimes it is in a great forest.--The hunt sweeps by; the horn rings
out, the pack gives tongue and crosses the path with the swiftness
of lightning; the fair one in a riding habit is mounted on a Turkish
horse, white as milk, spirited and swift beyond words. Although she is
an excellent horsewoman, he paws and curvets and rears, and she has
all the difficulty in the world in holding him; he takes the bit in
his teeth and rushes straight toward a precipice with her. I fall from
heaven for the express purpose of saving her, I stop the horse, I catch
the swooning princess in my arms, I bring her to herself and escort her
to her château. What well-born woman would refuse her heart to a man
who has risked his life for her?--None;--and gratitude is a cross-cut
that leads very quickly to love.
You will agree, at all events, that when I go into romance, I don't
stop half-way, and that I am as mad as it is possible for a man to be.
That is as it should be, for nothing in the world is more sickening
than rational madness. You will agree also that, when I write letters,
they are volumes rather than simple notes. I love whatever goes beyond
ordinary bounds in everything.--That is why I love you. Don't laugh too
much at all the nonsense I have scribbled; I lay aside my pen to carry
some of it into execution; for I recur always to my refrain! I mean to
have a mistress. I cannot say whether it will be the lady of the park
or the lady of the balcony, but I bid you farewell to go in quest of
her. My mind is made up. Though she whom I seek should hide herself in
the heart of the kingdom of Cathay or Samarcand, I shall find a way to
dislodge her. I will let you know of the success or non-success of my
undertaking. I hope that it will be success: give me your prayers, my
dear friend. As for myself, I dress up in my best coat, and go out of
the house determined not to return except with such a mistress as I
have in my mind.--I have dreamed long enough; now to work.
P.S.--Tell me something about little D----; what has become of him? no
one here knows anything about him; and give my compliments to your good
brother and all the family.
II
Well, my friend, I have come home again, I have not been to Cathay
or Cashmere or Samarcand;--but it is fair to say that I am no nearer
having a mistress than ever.--And yet I took myself by the hand, I
swore a mighty oath that I would go to the end of the world. I have
not even been to the end of the town. I don't know what the matter is
with me, but I have never been able to keep my word to anybody, even
to myself: it must be that the devil takes a hand in it. If I say: "I
will go there to-morrow," it is certain that I shall stay at home; if
I propose to go to the wine-shop, I go to church; if I start to go to
church, the roads get tangled under my feet like skeins of thread,
and I find myself in an entirely different place. I fast when I have
determined to have a debauch, and so it goes. Therefore I am inclined
to believe that what prevents me from having a mistress is that I have
determined to have one.
I must tell you about my expedition, step by step: it is well worth
the honors of narration. I had passed at least two full hours at my
toilet that day. I had had my hair combed and curled and my moustaches,
such as they are, twisted and waxed a little; and as the excitement
of longing imparted some slight animation to my ordinarily pale face,
really I was not so bad. At last, after scrutinizing myself attentively
in the mirror in different lights, to see if I was fine enough and if
my bearing was sufficiently gallant, I went resolutely forth with head
erect, chin well raised, eyes front, one hand on the hip, making the
heels of my boots ring like an _anspessade_, elbowing the bourgeois,
and with a flawlessly triumphant and all-conquering air.
I was like another Jason setting out to conquer the Golden
Fleece.--But, alas! Jason was more fortunate than I: besides the
conquest of the fleece, he made, at the same time, the conquest of a
beautiful princess, and I--I have neither fleece nor princess.
I walked through the streets, eying all the women, and hurrying toward
them and gazing at them at closer quarters when they seemed to me to be
worth the trouble of examining.--Some assumed their high and mighty
virtuous air and passed without raising their eyes.--Others were
surprised at first, then smiled if they had white teeth.--Some turned
after a little time, to look at me when they thought I was not looking
at them, and blushed like cherries when they found themselves face to
face with me.--It was a lovely day; there were quantities of people
out walking.--And yet I must confess, notwithstanding all the respect
I feel for that interesting half of the human race, which is called by
common consent the fair sex, it is, as a whole, devilishly ugly: out of
a hundred women there is hardly one who is passably good-looking. This
one had a moustache; that one had a blue nose; others had red spots
in place of eyebrows; one was not badly built, but she had a pimply
face. The head of another was charming, but she could scratch her ear
with her shoulder; a third would have put Praxiteles to shame with the
graceful roundness of certain outlines, but she stumbled along on feet
like Turkish stirrups. Another exhibited the most magnificent shoulders
imaginable; in revenge, her hands resembled in shape and size those
immense scarlet gloves that haberdashers use for signs.--Generally
speaking, what tired-looking faces! how worn and streaked they were,
withered by degrading petty passions and petty vices! What expressions
of envy, of malevolent curiosity, of avarice, of brazen coquetry! and
how much uglier is a woman who is not beautiful, than a man who is not
handsome!
I saw nobody worth looking at--except a few grisettes;--but they have
more cotton than silk to rumple, and they don't interest me.--In very
truth, I believe that man, and when I say man I include woman, is the
vilest animal on the face of the earth. That quadruped who walks on his
hind feet seems to me extraordinarily presumptuous to claim the first
place in creation as his undoubted right. A lion, a tiger, are finer
animals than men, and in their species many individuals attain all the
beauty that belongs to it. But such a thing rarely happens among human
beings.--How many abortions for one Antinous! how many Goths for one
Phyllis!
I am very much afraid, my dear friend, that I shall never be able to
embrace my ideal, and yet there is nothing extraordinary or unnatural
about it.--It is not the ideal of a third-form school-boy. I do not ask
for ivory globes or alabaster pillars, or azure veins; I have not used
in its composition either lilies, or snow, or roses, or jet, or ebony,
or coral, or ambrosia, or pearls or diamonds; I have left the stars
of heaven at rest, and I have not unhung the sun unseasonably. It is
almost a bourgeois ideal, it is so simple, and it seems to me that with
a bag or two of piastres I could find it all ready-made and realized in
the first bazaar I might happen upon at Constantinople or Smyrna; it
would probably cost me less than a blooded horse or dog; and to think
that I shall not get what I want, for I have a feeling that I shall
not! It is enough to drive a man mad, and I fly into the hottest sort
of a rage against fate.
You are not such a mad fool as I, you are fortunate;--you have simply
taken your life as it came, without tormenting yourself trying to shape
it, and you have dealt with things as they turned up. You haven't
sought for happiness, it has come in search of you; you love and are
loved.--I don't envy you;--for Heaven's sake, don't think that! but I
am not so happy as I ought to be when I think of your felicity, and I
say to myself, with a sigh, that I would like to enjoy felicity of the
same sort.
Perhaps my happiness passed by my side and I did not see it, blind that
I was; perhaps a voice spoke, and the uproar of my internal tempests
prevented me from hearing it.
Perhaps I have been loved in secret by some humble heart that I have
neglected or broken; perhaps I have myself been the ideal of another,
the pole-star of a suffering heart,--the dream of a night and the
thought of a day.--If I had looked at my feet, perhaps I should
have seen there some fair Magdalene with her box of ointment and
her dishevelled hair. I walked along with my arms raised to heaven,
longing to pluck the stars that fled from me, and scorning to pick
the little daisy that opened its golden heart in the dewy grass. I
have made a great mistake: I have asked love for something other than
love, something that it could not give. I forgot that love was naked,
I failed to grasp the meaning of that magnificent symbol.--I asked him
for brocade dresses, feathers, diamonds, sublime intellect, learning,
poesy, beauty, youth, supreme power--everything that is not love;--love
can offer naught but love, and he who seeks to extort anything else
from him is unworthy to be loved.
I have been in too much of a hurry, of course: my hour has not yet
come; God who lent me my life will not take it back without letting me
live. What's the use of giving a poet a lyre without strings, or man
a life without love? God cannot be guilty of such inconsistency; and
I have no doubt that when the allotted moment comes, He will place in
my path the woman I am to love and by whom I am to be loved.--But why
has love come to me before a mistress? Why am I thirsty when I have no
fountain at which to quench my thirst? or why can I not fly, like the
birds of the desert, to the spot where water is to be found? The world
to me is a Sahara without wells or date-trees. I have not in my whole
life a single shady nook to give me shelter from the sun: I suffer all
the ardors of passion without its ineffable ecstasy and delight; I know
its torments and have not its pleasures. I am jealous of something that
does not exist; I am ill at ease for the shadow of a shade; I heave
sighs that mean nothing; I have sleepless nights embellished by no
adored vision; I shed tears that flow to the ground without being wiped
away; I give the wind kisses that are not returned to me; I wear out my
eyes trying to distinguish a vague, deceitful shape in the distance; I
await what cannot come, and I count the hours with feverish anxiety as
if I had an appointment.
Whoever you be, angel or demon, virgin or courtesan, shepherdess or
princess, whether you come from north or south, you whom I do not know
but whom I love! oh! do not force me to wait longer, or the flame
will consume the altar, and you will find only a heap of cold ashes in
place of my heart. Descend from the sphere where you now are; leave the
crystal sky, O comforting spirit, and cast upon my heart the shadow of
your great wings. Come, woman that I love, come, and let me clasp about
you the arms that have been open so long. Ye golden doors of the palace
where she dwells, turn on your hinges; raise yourself, latch of her
humble cottage; untwine yourselves, ye branches of trees and thorns by
the road-side; be broken, ye enchantments of the turret, ye spells of
magicians; open, ranks of the common herd, and let her pass.
If you come too late, O my ideal! I shall not have the strength to love
you:--my heart is like a dovecote full of doves. Every hour of the day
some desire takes flight. The doves return to the dovecote, but my
desires do not return to my heart.--The azure sky is whitened by their
countless swarms; they wing their way through space, from world to
world, from sky to sky, seeking some love to light upon and pass the
night: haste, O my dream! or you will find naught in the empty nest
save the shells of the birds that have flown.
My friend, my childhood's companion, you are the only one to whom I
can say such things. Write me that you pity me and that you don't look
upon me as a hypochondriac; comfort me, I never was in greater need
of it; how greatly to be envied are they who have a passion they can
satisfy! The drunkard finds no cruelty in any sort of a bottle; he
falls from the wine-shop to the gutter and is happier on his dung-heap
than a king on his throne. The sensual man resorts to courtesans in
search of ready loves or shameless refinements of indecency: a painted
cheek, a short skirt, an exposed bosom, an obscene jest, he is happy;
his eye turns white, his lip is moist; he attains the height of his
happiness, he enjoys the ecstasy of his vulgar lust. The gambler needs
only a green cloth and a worn and greasy pack of cards to procure the
poignant excitement, the nervous spasms and the diabolical joy of
his ghastly passion. Such people can satisfy their cravings or find
distraction;--to me it is impossible.
This idea has taken such thorough possession of me that I no longer
care for the arts, and poetry has now no charm for me; the things that
used to be my delight do not make the least impression on me. I begin
to believe that I am wrong, I demand more of nature and society than
they can give. What I seek does not exist and I ought not to complain
because I cannot find it. However, if the woman we dream of does not
come within the conditions of human nature, how is it that we love only
her and not others, since we are men and our instinct should draw us
irresistibly toward them? What puts this imaginary woman into our head?
with what clay do we mould this invisible statue? where do we get the
feathers we fasten to the back of this chimera? what mystic bird laid
in a dark corner of our soul the unseen egg from which our dream was
hatched? what is this abstract beauty that we feel but cannot define?
why, before a woman who may be charming, do we sometimes say that she
is beautiful,--whereas we find her very ugly? Where is the model, the
type, the interior pattern that serves us as a point of comparison?
for beauty is always comparative and can be appreciated only by
contrast.--Was it in the sky that we saw her--in a star--at a ball
in the shadow of a mother, fresh bud of a leafless rose?--was it in
Italy or in Spain? was it here or there, yesterday or long ago? was it
the admired courtesan, the popular cantatrice, the prince's daughter?
a proud and noble head bending under a heavy diadem of pearls and
rubies? a young and childish face stooping over the nasturtiums and
volubilis in the window?--Of what school was the picture from which
that beauty looked forth, fair and beaming amid dark shadows? Was it
Raphael who caressed the contour that has caught your fancy? Was it
Cleomenes who polished the marble that you adore?--are you in love with
a Madonna or a Diana?--is your ideal an angel, a sylph, or a woman?
Alas! it is a little of all of these and it is none of them.
That transparent tint, that charming, blooming freshness, that flesh
wherein the blood and the life flow in abundance, that lovely fair
hair falling over the shoulders like a cloak of gold, that sparkling
laughter, those amorous dimples, that figure undulating like a
flame, that strength, that suppleness, that glistening satin, those
rounded outlines, those plump arms, that full, smooth back, that
whole appearance of blooming health belongs to Rubens.--Raphael alone
could have given that pale tinge of amber to such pure features. What
other than he drew the curves of those long, fine black eyebrows,
and spread out the lashes of those modestly lowered lids?--Do you
think that Allegri had no part in your ideal? From him the lady of
your thoughts stole the warm, ivory whiteness of complexion that
fascinates you. She stood long before his canvas to catch the secret
of the angelic smile that is always on her lips; she modelled her oval
features upon those of a nymph or a saint. That line of the hip that
undulates so voluptuously is taken from the sleeping Antiope.--Those
plump, well-shaped hands might be claimed by Danaë or Magdalen. Dusty
antiquity itself supplied much material for the composition of your
young chimera; those strong and supple loins, about which you twine
your arms so passionately, were carved by Praxiteles. The divinity left
everything for the express purpose of putting the toes of her charming
foot outside the ruins of Herculaneum, so that your idol should not be
lame. Nature also has contributed its share. You have seen here and
there, in the prismatic rays of desire, a beautiful eye behind a blind,
an ivory forehead pressed against a window, a mouth smiling behind a
fan.--You have divined the quality of the arm from the hand, of the
knee from the ankle. What you saw was perfect; you assumed that the
rest was like what you saw and you finished it out with bits of other
beauties gathered elsewhere.--Not even ideal beauty, as realized by
painters, is sufficient for you, and you must go and ask the poets
for outlines even more gracefully rounded, shapes more ethereal,
charms more divine, refinement more exquisite; you begged them to give
breath and speech to your phantom, all their love, all their musings,
all their joy and their sadness, their melancholy and their morbid
fancies, all their memories and all their hopes, their knowledge and
their passion, their mind and their heart; you took all these from them
and you added, to cap the climax of the impossible, your own passion,
your own mind, your dreams and your thoughts. The star lent its beams,
the flower its perfume, the palette its colors, the poet his harmony,
the marble its shape, and you, your longing.--How could a real woman,
who eats and drinks, who goes to bed at night and gets up in the
morning--however adorable and instinct with charm she may be--sustain
comparison with such a creature! We cannot reasonably hope for such
a thing, and yet we do hope for it and seek it.--What extraordinary
blindness! it is sublime or absurd. How I pity and admire those who
pursue the reality of their dream through everything and die content,
if only they have once kissed their chimera on the lips! But what a
frightful fate is that of the Columbuses who have not discovered their
world, and of lovers who have not found their mistress.
Ah! if I were a poet, I would consecrate my verses to those whose
existence is a failure, whose arrows have not reached the target,
who have died with the word they had to say still unsaid and without
pressing the hand that was destined for them; to all who have been
unsuccessful or have passed by unnoticed, to genius without issue,
stifled fire, the undiscovered pearl at the bottom of the sea, to all
who have loved without being loved, to all who have suffered and not
been pitied;--it would be a noble task.
How wise it was of Plato to wish to banish you from his republic,
and what harm you have done us, O poets! Your ambrosia has made our
absinthe more bitter than ever; and we have found our lives more arid
and more devastated after plunging our eyes into the vistas leading to
eternity that you open to us! What a terrible struggle your dreams have
brought upon our realities! and how our hearts have been stamped upon
and trampled under foot by those rude athletes!
We have seated ourselves like Adam at the foot of the walls of the
terrestrial paradise, on the steps of the staircase that leads to the
world you have created, seeing a light brighter than the sunlight
gleam through the chinks of the door, hearing vaguely some few
scattered notes of a seraphic harmony. Whenever one of the elect enters
or comes out amid a flood of glory, we stretch our necks trying to see
something through the open door. It is fairy-like architecture equalled
nowhere save in Arabian tales. Great numbers of pillars, superimposed
arches, fluted spiral columns, leaf-work marvellously carved, trefoils
hollowed out of the stone, porphyry, jasper, lapis-lazuli and Heaven
knows what! transparencies and dazzling reflections, a profusion of
strange stones, sardonyx, chrysoberyl, aquamarines, rainbow-hued
opals, azerodrach, jets of crystal, torches to make the stars turn
pale, a gorgeous vapor filled with noise and vertigo--genuine Assyrian
magnificence!
The door closes: you see no more--and you cast down your eyes, filled
with burning tears, to the poor, bare, lifeless earth, to the ruined
hovels, to the people in rags, to your own soul, an arid rock upon
which nothing grows, to all the woes and misfortunes of reality. Ah! if
we could only fly as far as that, if the steps of that fiery staircase
did not burn our feet; but alas! none but angels can climb Jacob's
ladder!
What a fate is that of the poor man at the rich man's door! what
ghastly irony in a palace opposite a hovel, the ideal opposite the
real, poetry opposite prose! what deep-rooted hatred must tighten the
knots at the bottom of the poor wretches' hearts! what a gnashing of
teeth there must be at night on their poor beds, when the wind brings
to their ears the sighing notes of the lutes and viols of love! Poets,
painters, sculptors, musicians, why have you lied to us? Poets, why did
you tell us your dreams? Painters, why did you place upon your canvas
the intangible phantom that ascended and descended between your heart
and your brain with the throbbing of your blood, and say to us: "This
is a woman." Sculptors, why did you procure marble from the bowels of
Carrara to make it express for all time, in the eyes of all men, your
most secret and most fleeting desire? Musicians, why did you listen to
the song of the stars and the flowers during the night, and note it
down? Why do you write such lovely ballads that the softest voice that
says to us: "I love you!" seems to us as hoarse as the rasping of a
saw or the cawing of a crow?--My curse on you, impostors!--and may the
fire from heaven burn and destroy all pictures, poems, statues, and
concerted pieces.--Ouf! there's a tirade of interminable length and a
little out of the ordinary epistolary style.--What a harangue!
I just gave full swing to the lyric impulse, my dear friend, and I have
been talking on stilts for a long, long time. All this is very far
from our subject, which is, if I remember rightly, the glorious and
triumphant history of the Chevalier d'Albert in pursuit of Daraïde,
the loveliest princess in the world, as the old romances say. But in
truth the story is so poor that I am compelled to have recourse to
digressions and reflections. I hope that it will not always be so, and
that, before long, the romance of my life will be more involved and
complicated than a Spanish imbroglio.