Vers l'action
Towards Action
Charles Péguy
Extracts from the Journal of Aurélia
I met her at Versailles, at the home of M. Amédée Violet — a sceptical and benevolent old man, a scholar without stiffness, a man of letters without pedantry, and a passionate collector of prints — and Mademoiselle Aurélia Collins struck me as an exceptional being. Beautiful with a haughty and decisive beauty, masculine in her bearing, assertive in her speech, all this not without grace or finesse, she imposed herself abruptly upon my curiosity. But her conversation, detached from the self, taught me nothing of her history. As for M. Violet, I did not dare question him, sufficiently happy that he allowed me — insignificant as I was — to open his portfolios and leaf through his albums, in order to complete the documentation for an article on Jacques Callot — a patchwork of formulas that I intended for a young and already dying Review.
Four years ago, toward the end of January, I came upon M. Violet again at the Bibliothèque nationale. His complexion sallow, his gait listless, he looked as though he went on living only with reluctance. He told me of Aurélia’s death and reproached me for no longer visiting him. I went the following Sunday. Happy to have someone to whom he could speak of the dead woman, he produced the voluminous packet of manuscripts he had gathered from her home. There were notes, fragments of an intimate journal, and letters.
Soon afterwards, I was authorised to read and classify these manuscripts. If I now publish a certain number of them, now that M. Violet is no more, it is because he himself wished them published. He could not bear the thought that Aurélia should be utterly lost in death. He therefore appended to the manuscripts a sort of memoir, composed of personal recollections, to fill a gap in the journal. This memoir, Mademoiselle Violet and the engraver Delbove have reread without changing a word.
The proper names of persons are fictitious names that I have had to substitute for the real ones.
Extract from the Journal of Aurélia
Lières, August 1883
Not a letter in ten days. He no longer answers me. Despite my efforts to repel such images, I have in my mind the sophistical reasonings he would follow interminably, the rigid gestures he repeated ceaselessly, here, during his last stay at Lières, three weeks ago. And since then, his letters have been so full of matters foreign to the two of us, to the future we had dreamed! What is this long dissertation on geometry doing in the one I have before me — a dissertation that ends in vague, nearly incoherent glimpses, where, like lanterns on a sea of fog, the visions of a man hallucinating drift and float?
And nothing of what I had asked him. He who was so tender! so occupied with me to the exclusion of all else! he who, divining my slightest inclinations, found in them the occasion to make me happy before they had even taken form in my own consciousness! — so that at times his penetration alarmed me, being certainly not a normal faculty common to attentive people, but a symptom of excessive nervousness.
What is to be done? Grandmother, more sombre and more silent in her muteness than ever — for last month at least the mobility of her gaze somewhat lightened her silence — incapable of the least movement save the mechanical coming and going of her eyelids: does she not need my presence and my care at every hour?
I no longer have the heart for anything. Anxious waiting numbs me and makes me barren. I no longer read, I no longer write, I forget my scores and music books in their rack; my old piano drowses; the heavy atmosphere of the house, the dry wainscoting, the thick partitions are losing their habit of the rhythmic sounds by which I fancied I gave them the illusion of life. Outside, everything irritates me with its air of indifference: the scorched meadows ringed by the frowning of the hedges, the noble undulation of the plains, the oak groves bruised with brown stains, and even this dear avenue of elms that runs alongside the bicentenary canal.
My sweet Maurice, what are you doing? Has he fitted out, over there, his family house for the life we laboriously conceived according to our hearts — our life that would be one of active goodness, of grave contemplation at the propitious hours, of surrender to the enthusiasm born of the senses or of thought — if all of this is achievable, despite the ambient selfishness, the shrieking pack of petty interests and mean orthodox passions, the decay that threatens every naive emotion in the universal dryness and falsehood.
From Maître Napoléon Houlet, notary at Saint-Sauge, Nièvre, to Mademoiselle Aurélia Collins
16 August 1883
Mademoiselle,
M. Maurice Dubreuil, your fiancé, has just been, following an attack of brain fever, committed — in accordance with the opinion of the physicians — to a sanatorium situated near Nancy (Meurthe-et-Moselle), where M. and Madame Pierre Dubreuil reside, his first cousins and sole heirs, who have been so good as to grant me their confidence in administering and managing the moveable and immoveable property of M. Maurice, legally interdicted — that is to say, assimilated to a minor.
You have leave to visit the patient in the establishment where he is receiving the enlightened care of specialist physicians.
His father and he himself were my clients. I know M. Maurice well enough to be edified as to the causes of his madness. It is mathematics, the delights of the capital, Wagnerian art, and socialist doctrines that have poisoned him. Add to this that in agriculture he had a marked weakness for machines of German manufacture! Divine Providence, Mademoiselle, did not leave you the time to bring him to his senses: please accept the sincere condolences of your respectful servant.
Napoléon Houlet
Extract from the Journal
Lières, 18 August 1883
I have seen him again; oh, those slackened features, that enfeebled body, that heavy stagnant countenance, that mumbling of incoherent words, those vitrified eyes, that all-absorbing animality! Nothing left of the nervous, restless being, worked upon by sudden intuitions, permeable to the most diverse impressions; nothing left of the soul that enthusiasm ceaselessly set fermenting, making it overflow in generous discourse, in tender words, in caresses, in actions.
And I fled, my brain suddenly emptied, my heart compressed, my throat dry, without a reason to resist this surge of violent repulsion. The return journey was accomplished in a nightmare. It was not I, it was some artificial creature I cannot name who consulted the timetables, had the luggage registered, changed trains where and when trains had to be changed. I found myself in my room without knowing how. Old Annette was unpacking the trunk and the valise, all the while rambling on to console me with stories of broken engagements.
Extract from the Journal
End of August 1883
Only my intelligence is ill. It seems to me that I too am clinging to reality by no more than a thread. Sometimes, without thinking, without acting, I remain seated for hours beside Grandmother, who, her eyes expressionless and her mind dead, mechanically smooths fabrics with her bony fingers.
I find it infinitely painful to recall a memory; every attempt to explain the event to myself fails miserably; the least effort, even the most habitual, costs me enormously. Often Annette plants herself in front of me, her two great hands spread flat upon her hips, with an air of idiotic commiseration: “All the same, miss, you mustn’t go taking on so.” — Then, in search of a remedy to cure me, she goes to consult the Cuisinière bourgeoise, the Key to Dreams, and the Perfect Secretary, which, together with a greasy and battered prayer book, make up her library.
The Surédas paid me a visit. Madame Suréda, yellowed, mummified in her black sheath, said to me: “That young man had happy dispositions, but he travelled far too much in Calvinist and Lutheran countries. He brought back sentiments that were neither orthodox nor patriotic.” The angular white head of M. Suréda nodded agreement: “When I was examining magistrate at Évreux,” he pronounced, “I was able to note many times the pernicious effect of bad reading matter. Novels of manners deprave the sensibility; books with red covers stir up revolutionary passions; there is poetry that brutalises the mind.” And in turn they heaped up mountains of maxims. Then I thought of the letter from Maître Napoléon Houlet, notary; I had to dig my nails into my skin to suppress a fit of nervous laughter.
Meanwhile, not listening to her parents speak, Nicole, seated on the edge of a low chair, was watching me with a timid kindness.
The atmosphere of the town is oppressive, taciturn. The fire of heaven scorches the meadows and the leaves. How dreary, the beings and the things. My old desires lose themselves in the general torpor, more haloed with unconsciousness than the dogs sleeping on the thresholds of houses. Earlier bereavements had not so desiccated me: the presence of the departed had merely become more capricious. But Maurice has truly sunk into nothingness. I can no longer even picture him to myself: the vision of the madman has carried off the image of my friend; the horror has carried off the image of the madman.
I try in vain to read a fine book, to play some Bach or Schumann. Reading? Words have lost for me all their evocative power. Music? I no longer know how to make the instrument sing: nothing left in my fingers but the agility acquired by dint of practice. Exasperated, I stop playing after five minutes and gaze absently at the very old piano, its tones thinned to those of a harpsichord, whose greenish keys no longer present a perfectly flat surface. It was already no longer a new piano when my father, still very young, bought it from a friend. And since then, every day, for years and years, its strings have trembled, transmitting through the walls, into the hush of the half-light, their vibrations so sweet!
And I see myself again, installed very small before this same keyboard, while my father, seated to my right, grew violently indignant at my wrong notes — he who was otherwise very restrained in speech, very affable, almost shy. Alas! at present these memories no longer move me: I recite them to myself rather than see them.
Extract from the Journal
10 September 1883
Yesterday, as I was sitting in the garden, toward ten o’clock in the evening, and the moonlight was falling straight down around me, I saw that the rooftops and the branches were cutting sharply against the sky. Neither half-tones nor softened shadows: the impenetrable night framed livid planes with a dry precision. Still, in the distance, the familiar sounds of the cart coming home, the dog barking, the toad singing its minor third. But one quickly ceases to distinguish these murmurs of the night from the ringing in one’s ears.
Then I felt the need to stiffen, to affirm myself as solitary, to stand distinct, in the image of things. It was a moment of exalting pride: such moments come without having been solicited; but I had sometimes told myself that they must necessarily come to a soul that is searching for itself. And so I revealed to myself a whole power of haughty reflection, a whole will to think, to act, to create according to my own law.
No faltering, now. One must not say to oneself, beguiled by the regret that surfaces at the chance of a tender gleam or a dying echo: “And yet I should have liked to live, dreamy and sensitive, attentive to gentle reprimands, a beggar for consolations, the eternal child tended like a flower from the Islands.” — Nor must one utter these lamentable words: “Take pity on yourself and on others, because kindness is of an exquisite flavour. Humble yourself: for resistance to one’s destinies is no less exhausting than presumptuous.” — No: these counsels of pity, these precepts of languor issue from a poor soul that was never made for consciousness. There is in certain people a strange laziness about distinguishing themselves from the humbler representatives of life.
In the world as I see it, in others as they appear to me, in myself as I know myself, I shall seek the reasons for acting and the methods of action. Yet I hesitate to take the first step toward my wisdom. At the decisive instant when I am about to become other, here come passing and rustling the procession of traditional ideas, of family memories, of acquired modesties, of glimpsed happinesses. In the manner of a dog that wants attention, the past surprises me ceaselessly with an obsequious intervention.
Extract from the Journal
Lières, 20 October 1883
Here I am henceforth entirely alone, and I put on again, for the last time but for a long while, these mourning clothes that flatter my senses. Grandmother’s final moments were a harrowing drama. She was choking and could not remain in bed: to the very last second, she sat upright. She did not articulate a word, despite terrible efforts. And I spoke to her, in that English I know through her, whose sounds, perhaps, recalled to her some images of the meadows across the sea — fragments of a distant childhood.
Soft gleams here and there steeped the brasswork. Crouched like a sphinx, the cat stared fixedly at the flames in the hearth. These glimmers and that beast’s form are still present to me. Annette went to and fro, without purpose, proposing old remedies. And Grandmother lay dying, her eyes wide open, her face contorted.
I did not weep; I mechanically prepared the dead woman for burial. Doctor Michelot spared me the procedures at whose cost one may offer the dead the only gift that suits them — obscure silence. I did not even think to criticise the demands of the law, the commonplace vexations of custom, as had already happened to me in similar circumstances. For I feel growing within me a reasonable contempt for social constraints, such that I yield to them without my docility carrying any consequence.
Strange that I should be calm, and as if rested. Memories do not come to contest me with the friendship of the old house, of my labours, of the sensations that come and go. And yet there would be memories enough — tender, graceful, peaceful ones — all made to give one the desire to weep gently. Grandmother was still, a few months ago, an exquisite figure, having kept a youthful slenderness in her painful old age, smiling with a sort of awkwardness that became her well — of a very exact and very fine speech, even in French — of a pure taste in matters of art and of manners, despite utilitarian and materialist views. I have often been told that she was more lively and more cheerful than her daughter, my mother. After tragic hours, what lucid and almost delicious nonchalance.
Extract from the Journal
Lières, 20 November
Nicole Suréda came to sit by my fireside, her mother having charged her with inviting me to dinner tomorrow. A pretty dark head, curly, nearsighted eyes, a small nose and a small mouth, rosy cheeks and the quickness of a mouse:
— Aurélia, my great friend, do come to dinner with us tomorrow, I beg you. Mama invites you and I implore you. You will talk the whole time and I shall hear something new: I know perfectly well that you are not in a cheerful humour, but a pretty person must not remain in sadness. Sadness suits the plain girls who process in a line wearing a red cord. Those, no doubt, have nothing left to hope for but the joys of Paradise. But we — let us give to sorrow only those moments when it outweighs our need to charm.
And the fire of green wood set dancing flowers upon her childlike face. Her dress, cut by Madame Suréda the elder, had an archaic shape and a venerable aspect. But, not too stiffly encased in this uncomfortable sack, she spoke to me without embarrassment, in a firm voice — she who in her family’s presence dares only mumble:
— Aurélia, elder sister, I have my ideas about life. The curé’s rigmarole — I believe in it, but it passes reason. I believe in it out of filial deference, out of habit, out of a sense of order: that is all. The motives and the excuses for my actions lie elsewhere. The pleasure I take in profane things, such as dancing or boating, is a more imperious master than the divine commandments. I seek it because it is pleasure; I cling to it because it is born of me. Rest assured that I love life very much and that I am entirely in a position to give advice on the art of living happily.
— Nicole, there is in you something I can only call Epicurean. You should know that Epicurus the Wise placed the Good in honest and moderate pleasures. All others are to be shunned because they turn into pains. Above all, fear the pleasures toward which instinct carries you blindly.
I spoke to her thus in order to exercise my soul by acting upon hers. I felt myself suddenly called to moral preaching.
— Aurélia, Nicole retorted, I am pleased with myself as I am: that is the essential thing. And besides, I believe that once emancipated, I shall not displease others. To please oneself and to please: at least my morality is not exclusively selfish.
Whereupon, without allowing me to reply, she rose and went off to rejoin Madame Suréda, who cannot do without her daughter when she goes to see, according to the weekly custom, besides the curé and the three vicars of the parish, the lady patronesses of two charitable works, and the Abbé Frutaine — long since retired from the priesthood, a blind and nearly deaf old man who lives with his sister, a voiceless person.
Extract from the Journal
Lières, 1 December 1883
White frost on the lawn, like a thin layer of powdered salt, and on the tiles and slates as well. A short letter from M. Amédée Violet, my father’s old friend. He still lives at Versailles, more curious about prints and more of a rummager than ever. His collection is renowned. He does not merely possess the taste that discerns, moved by qualities of art; he has a very fine sense for defunct realities. He is a historian who sees the past in its most familiar, often its most trivial images — blurred in grey wash or tinted in sanguine. For him, this past resides above all in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whose imagery he has never ceased to explore.
And then he is a gentle soul, he is a sceptic, he is someone perfectly happy. His disappointments as a collector, far from discouraging him, have made the search more alluring. If he has suffered from the tragic or wretched images that the chance of a find gave him to contemplate, it is with a suffering as faded as the original lustre of his prints.
I want to reply, but I feel weary. These last days I have not stopped playing Beethoven: I have steeped myself in heroism, in triumphant energy, and in superb joy. I have sat up late to write letters, to read, to annotate, to meditate. My moral enterprise requires, if it is to succeed, that I avoid falling inert after an effort: no rest, but the mind taut, the senses alert, the body brisk. I shall no longer feed this fire that disposes to far niente. I drink only water, I sleep little, I eat just barely the essential: is it enough? I would wish my asceticism more complete.
The past is still very close, despite everything. So many habits — in me and in others in relation to me — persist in the new life! I think of that effacement of my being in the mist of former evenings, when, my thoughts heavy and confused, I wandered along the promenade in the cool air with my big dog; and I still feel too much mist in me, around me.
Extract from the Journal
Lières, 11 December 1883
In the countryside, along the frozen canal, on the towpath that is bordered, on the meadow side, by a double row of leafless lime trees, I walked this afternoon with Nicole. For the past few days Madame Suréda has been showing me a great deal of confidence. This Catholic matron no doubt esteems me for the expectant and reserved attitude I adopt at her house every Friday evening, while savouring the eggs, the skate in black butter, and the dish of lentils whose purpose is to mortify us all: perhaps also because I beat M. de Chapemont, churchwarden, and M. Suréda at whist — a game that Madame Suréda has never been able to understand.
Now Nicole, bundled up in a Picard cloak, her hair spilling out from under her fur toque, her nose pink and her eye bright, was trotting along saying a thousand things without rhyme or reason. And we walked as far as the place where the canal turns toward the ruins of the château, not far from the great lock; and there is an old stone bench there, a remnant of the former ducal park. As despite myself this old bench drew my gaze — because last year, in summer, I had come to sit there with Him, and because, despite everything that was later decided, such memories are tenacious — Nicole noticed my agitation and fell silent.
On the way back, I spoke to her to break the silence. We had left at her house, visiting, a certain M. Valentin Latour, son of an opulent factory-owner of Givreux. And M. Valentin passes for a sort of Pico della Mirandola in our provincial corner. Ours once more after a long sojourn in Paris, abundantly credentialled and variously honoured by several Faculties, Academies, and Learned Societies, this encyclopaedic personage declares that he has resolved, after agonising deliberations, to devote his life to linguistics.
— He would do better, I said to Nicole, to devote himself to his father’s factory. Science is noble, but it is nobler to study the ills of society in order to cure them. For I do not wish to make of him a bourgeois industrialist and merchant; I want him to find there the matter for reflection and action according to equity. How could a man so full of sense and so cultivated savour in cold blood, like so many others, the opulent life that the labour of a wretched and blighted humanity pays for? No: what I expect of him — — —
— Frankly, Nicole interrupted with a burst of laughter, you are raving, Aurélia. Are you his mother or his aunt, this boy’s? — And besides, where does this fine zeal for the labouring class come from? When I hear Papa say that a quarter of the workers should be shot to bring the other three-quarters to their senses, I find that rather stiff. But I confine myself to finding it rather stiff, because, you see, it is not for women to delve into these tedious problems. It seems to me that we have better things to do.
I was indignant; Nicole sniggered; I left her almost roughly. My meditations of these last days incline me to consider the social struggles. Oh, the wholesome joy of playing even an imperceptible part in them, for the happiness of the greatest number! — and this without love or hope of being loved, without sentimental impulse, with no other points of support than ideas and facts. Is this not, at last, the haughty action — isolating despite the multiplied contacts — affirmative? Nicole appears to me like the cricket whose dwarf stalks limit its horizon. It is freezing hard; I am shivering: I shall have to light the fire again all the same.
M. Amédée Violet to Mademoiselle Aurélia Collins
Versailles, 17 December
Your letter, dear child, delights and worries me. I am pleased to see that you remember me, but apprehensive that you are becoming an abnormal creature.
It is not ordinary for a young woman of twenty-three to study in depth the Politeia of Aristotle and to contemplate reading Karl Marx. These would be no more than harmless sports if you were a snob and capricious. But I know your soul to be sincere, unyielding, and one that never gives up.
Take care that an intuition made of nervous shocks, of dreaming, of dazzlement is not a sufficient reason to compel oneself to live according to uncomfortable rules. One evening, your vision of the world declared itself more sharply defined, as if to set you apart. That was merely an incident: will you suspend your entire existence from it?
Do not impose upon yourself a discipline that hardens and sterilises. Fear for yourself and for others the fanaticism of reason. Do not grow passionate about doctrines that would kill in you the feeling for living reality. Do not tyrannise the naive; do not disturb the convinced.
Dear child, I am sixty-three years old: in my day I had my hours of intransigence; but I have become accommodating. The surest thing I have gained from the pain of living is the resigned certainty that words are an empty noise and actions are dreams or nightmares. And so I let things present to me their mask — comic, indifferent, or tragic: I let myself be moved, and that is all.
Alas, Aurélia! I know the disaster of the sentiments that filled your life three months ago. Consider this: in order to free itself, grief sometimes takes unexpected detours; sometimes wilful natures, rather than languish over a sorrowful memory, exert themselves in heroic labours. Be sincere with yourself.
Amédée Violet
Extract from the Journal
Lières, night of 31 December 1883 to 1 January 1884
Midnight is about to strike, and it will be the first time I have had no one here to embrace while murmuring fond and hopeful words. They have all gone: Mama, when I was very small; — then Sir Clarence Blake, my uncle, who having often taken me travelling through the Germanic and Latin countries, died bequeathing me, along with his fortune, all manner of vexatious scruples; — then my father, so swiftly and so early departed; — then Him; then Grandmother. And my arms hang limp, as if there were no longer any use for them.
M. Cat sleeps on a pile of scores, quite unconcerned with dividing time by means of cosmic events. The old clock goes without haste, still more indifferent to the time it measures than my cat, who is at least capable of distinguishing the seasons. The Surédas are in Paris with their family; Doctor Michelot is confined to bed by a lumbago: not a friend, not even one of those one has for want of better, out of an instinct for sociability.
Ah, the corners of a life that is narrow, warm, and secure, in the half-tones of the family lamps! In my sadness I perceive Dutch interiors, when the fallen night has brought the man back to his beer, the woman to her lace-making, the dog and children near the fire. And just as I once contemplated them, my heart joyful, on the still-fresh canvases of the old masters, so I see them again — these beings of innocent materiality — through the tedium of being alone and the regrets for what I no longer have.
Am I still thinking of Him — of Him who is now no more than a fragment of inert matter? And could it be that I am clinging to elegiac puerilities? But no — that good collector tends to misjudge me. My decision to act for equity is not a diversion from the sorrows of a silly girl; it is rooted in a precious moment of intelligence and perspicacity. My regrets this evening are not personal to me; they are the regrets of the defunct generations whose line I close: the ancient custom of New Year’s wishes protests against my solitude with all the force accumulated over centuries.
Extract from the Journal
Lières, 5 January 1884
Nicole declared to me: “I love Paris very much: there I was finally able to dress myself properly; I was a success as a dancer; my chatter was thought witty; the tumult intoxicated me ineffably. But the thing is: I still prefer our countryside and our dead little town. Here, one’s relations are more intimate, more familiar — I do not say with the people, who, apart from you, matter little to me, but with the things.” Thus Nicole revealed herself to be double: a woman of pleasure and a woman of the hearth.
My head is heavy, my hands burning, my heart shivering and weary. Outside, an opaque haze surrounds the stunted trees. What a fever! The thoughts that occupy me have, however, the freshness of a marshmallow tisane: the image of Nicole passes and repasses among Norman wardrobes; then it is a distant house, long embraces, white curtains over iron bedsteads, tiny hands being guided across the slate. — The fever undermines me and my delirium is as silly as a little girl’s prayer.
I remember: the day before yesterday, at the Surédas’, besides M. de Chapemont, churchwarden, there was M. Valentin Latour. This personage struck me strangely — his long frock coat pinched at the waist, the small cone of hair that crowns his vertical forehead, and his high cravat whose infinite coils do not permit one to guess the shadow of a collar. Nothing more bony or more drawn-in could be dreamt of than this young man: I have the impression that his cheeks and the orbits of his eyes have hollowed themselves by a voluntary effort.
They spoke of personality. M. Valentin Latour is an obliging repertory of scientific theories: he knows them all. He sketches them in a well-articulated voice, in neat little phrases, with learned gestures. As he ventured the elegance of a parallel between the cellular organism and the fabric of moral facts, M. Suréda, former examining magistrate, censured this method which tends to confuse the physical with the moral: “The world of bodies,” he affirmed, “is subject to a blind fatality; that of minds is the empire of freedom. It is by departing from these salutary beliefs that one authorises criminal acts. I am no longer surprised, monsieur, to see the workload of my young colleagues grow and grow more complicated each day, since the educated class, to which you belong, hurls the most pernicious ideas at the crowd.” — Yes indeed, added Madame Suréda, who was serving tea, but all these horrors, you see, Monsieur Suréda, come of course from the fact that people no longer have any religion.
M. Valentin Latour bowed respectfully, for he knows that not all minds are constituted in the same way and that discussion becomes confused as soon as one does not agree on principles. Meanwhile Nicole, eyes lowered, was embroidering a handkerchief, making a little pout.
— Monsieur, I said to him, do you not find it arbitrary to limit a creature that thinks and feels? The slightest sensation is great with infinity. The most foolish act holds its place in a series never opened and never closed. The least idea ramifies wildly. Who can say where a soul begins and where it ends?
M. Latour made me a courteous bow, and lowering the veil of his eyelids over his greenish eyes, he was about to reply, when Madame Suréda offered him a cup of tea: “Dear monsieur, do not answer Mademoiselle Aurélia. I have always forbidden table-turning in my house. Nor do I wish diabolical remarks to be made in it. Perhaps Aurélia says rather good things; but she does not at all employ the terms of the Church; and I am sure she would not have the approval of the Abbé Frutaine. She is a learned woman, Monsieur Latour, and she has always given us great cause for alarm, Monsieur Suréda and me. Fortunately she is of a very honourable family, Monsieur Latour: ah, if you had known her parents! There are, after all, people on this earth the like of whom one does not see” (sic).
Whereupon M. de Chapemont, churchwarden, having just won a game of piquet, rose, cleared his throat, took a pinch of snuff, blew his nose, and addressing Madame Suréda the elder, said: “Madame Suréda, you speak like a worthy woman and like a good Christian.” Nicole, bent over her embroidery, was dozing.
Extract from the Journal
Lières, 24 January 1884
M. Valentin Latour took Nicole and me on a visit to his father’s factory. M. and Madame Suréda had stayed behind with M. Latour senior, who was telling them of his sorrow at seeing his only son lost in unprofitable researches. Meanwhile, the monstrousness of the indolent and methodical machines intimidated me; I grew faint near the furnaces; I felt myself falling beneath the steam hammers; my head oscillated to the rhythm of the flywheels; it seemed to me that I was being chewed by metallic teeth, crushed beneath wheels that roared like sea beasts, flayed by rolling mills. — And everywhere these oily, bony men, spectres wandering in a greasy cloud, with their corpse-eyes — eyes that resemble cloudy, dusty windowpanes, greened with twilight.
Meanwhile, impassive as ever, M. Valentin Latour spoke: “We have a nursery for infants, a school, and a hospice for the old people who have worked at least thirty years in the factory and for the cripples who were maimed in it. These foundations earned my father the cross. See, the thin young woman coming out of the office — she is the one who runs the nursery: though she holds her advanced certificate, she was starving when she was recommended to us. Education should serve women only as a frivolous ornament: the Greeks, a sensible people, admitted it only in the woman of luxury.”
The return: a long ribbon of road that winds between peat bogs. Here and there a skeleton of a tree, twisted over the frozen water. From time to time, in the distance, the fires of a factory. Then meadows, rows of poplars, woods. Our antique vehicle fitted with a high folding top casts a bat-like shadow. Nicole judges that M. Latour senior is very humane and his son very witty.
Extract from the Journal
Lières, 29 January 1884
The occasion to act has come, then. Earlier, at the Surédas’, M. Valentin Latour, in convoluted phrases, praised my body and my soul. Beneath the phrases, however, no emotion. His eyes shine more brightly when he speaks to Nicole. He leaves. The two old Surédas set themselves up as a tribunal and, fixing upon me the stares of batrachians, interrogate me: Do you feel the full impropriety of your situation? Are you not growing sour in your solitude? Are not religion and public opinion in favour of marriage? All this leading to: “What do you think of M. Valentin Latour? His father finds you presentable and him charming.”
Thus creaked the two puppets. How did I persuade them that M. Valentin Latour was in love with Nicole? that in order to marry her he would sacrifice Linguistics for Industry? that Nicole would be a good angel for this already prosperous factory? — For persuade them I did. I must have been very eloquent. I might be eloquent still, for my enthusiasm has not subsided. In my mind, Nicole and the other, united by me, allow themselves to be guided toward gentle and fraternal acts, and over there in Givreux, they gradually cease to be the solitary and mistrustful masters, to become equals who are revered.
Lières, 30 January 1884
The emerald pupils of M. Cat are enigmatic. This impassive animal delights in contemplating the play of light upon the walls. A white sun of frost riddles the hangings, bathes the fireplace, the heavy furniture, the sadness of the old portraits and etchings. Nothing that is not perfectly well-behaved and perfectly in its place. I feel inclined to discipline everything.
Extract from the Journal
Lières, 10 February 1884
I remember a walk with Him in the woods of La Chevrée, not two years ago. Then, pearls of light were falling on the moss between the tender leaves, and we walked among the half-opened hyacinths. He marvelled at finding in himself these adorable lies of verdure and flowering: — All these delicate structures are our handiwork, Aurélia; all these colours are within us. Distant ancestors imagined them in order to smile at one another: man has a genius for falsehood.
These friendly words still sing in my ears. It is all that remains to me of him — murmurs that chance causes to be reborn. The silhouette has sunk into the fog.
Oh, that meeting this afternoon! — The Surédas’ drawing room: on the wall, M. Thiers, Louis XVI, and Marie-Antoinette; on the mantelpiece, the Empire clock, well gilded, between two candelabra in the same style, the whole under glass, so that the flies may not speck its splendours. Madame Suréda, infinitely round, her pink hands crossed upon her thighs, is seated to the left of the fireplace. M. Valentin Latour occupies a small pouffe by the corner of a whatnot, and M. Suréda, standing before M. Valentin Latour, is holding forth at length.
I, in a dark corner, am looking at a photograph album. All these albums are alike: always the same ancestors, great-uncles, great-aunts, second cousins male and female — the gentlemen clean-shaven with forelocks on their brows, high cravats, and flea-coloured coats over nankeen trousers; the ladies half-masked by smooth bands of hair, their bodies tricked out in funnels of faille. Meanwhile, M. Suréda is pleading the cause of industry: the sticks that serve him for arms beat time to his periods; the sounds emitted by his throat scrape the ears. M. Valentin Latour is wearing a beige cloth jacket and a green velvet waistcoat; his cravat presents a secluded bay between two menacing promontories. He has emboldened himself so far as to contemplate the black hair and the supple figure of Nicole; content at having raised his eyes, he twists his beard between thumb and forefinger. Beatifically, Madame Suréda clucks.
Extract from the Journal
Lières, 25 February 1884
In the sickly gleams of the dying day, I was playing a fugue by Bach. I loved its calm and its goodness. This music, with its firm progressions, its commitment to honest science, in time brings to life in souls a tenderness that is grave and sure of itself. Greenish patches, ochre filaments were settling everywhere. Objects lost all foothold; their dimensions exaggerated themselves in both grandeur and smallness; they presented bizarre gaps: in this mauve haze, one no longer knows what holds them or what limits them, or whether they are not about to merge and vanish.
Extract from the Journal
Lières, 28 February 1884
So it is settled: M. Valentin Latour becomes a factory man, and he marries Nicole. The Surédas keep repeating: “He is a man of character: he knew how to leave behind frivolous occupations; he settled down all at once; here he is, serious and solid: he will certainly go far.” In Nicole, no rush of feeling toward the new convert. But she proclaims, joyous: “At last I shall have properly cut bodices; I shall also have a little Japanese sitting room, a white bearskin in my bedroom, muslin Liberty curtains, and a sheepdog.” M. Valentin Latour has not spoken of his philological vocation since learning that Nicole is richly endowed, given the large fortune of Madame Suréda, née Treilhard-Latouche (Velvets and Ribbons).
And I, like a child confronted with his blunder, stand stupefied before my conscience.
Extract from the Journal
Lières, 2 March 1884
Found a letter I thought was lost. It dates from two years ago. Why such emotion?
We transcribe below the letter of which Aurélia speaks:
Paris, 2 June 1882
I have received your letter, my beloved Aurélia. It prolongs in me the moments of that walk we took together in the garden, the evening before my departure, under a milky sky. The fountain was sputtering on the basin. Our voices did not dare disturb the half-silence; our ideas veiled themselves in awkward expressions.
Why thank me for the Grieg albums you received from Paris? This music of graceful madness, of half-smiling dreams, of fugitive nuances — when it lives in your playing, it will charm my whole being, and it will not be you who owes me thanks. It has sudden and delicate surrenders, such as you yourself, Aurélia, revealed to me when you let your brow fall upon my shoulder along the paths of mystery. It was then that an echo of Peer Gynt brushed my thought; and I wished that, stirred by the alternately bold and dying surges of these rhythms, you might understand your charm of that other evening.
For you found there a moment of strange unease that I had not expected. Your self-assured affection seemed to me ignorant of delicate entreaties. And you who find reasons for everything cannot tell me the reason for that act of forgetfulness. I love you.
Maurice
Extract from the Journal
Lières, 15 March 1884
Nicole flutters her nimble fingers among billowings of fabric. A light washed with rain powders the silks and gauzes. M. Valentin Latour, hieratic, treats a question of metallurgy with serenity. As for me, I am like that Englishman in L’Ève future, when he converses with an artificial woman — except that he is at least disturbed by the automaton’s perfections, and I am not. I am moved only after a time, by delving into and bringing together these impressions of automatism: for are not people all mechanisms that haunt our perpetual dream? They do what is required at the appointed moment; they also have the superfluous gesture, the uniform rictus, the vain laughter and babble of puppets driven by invisible clockwork. And all this precision terrifies me: one sees so clearly that free and creative effort has nothing to do with it! These beings called living have for all their life only the activity of a pendulum that oscillates or a spring that uncoils. To feel oneself exist, and to endure the vision of these mannequins, in whom one may suppose, at a pinch, all consciousness abolished!
I was reading this morning in Marcus Aurelius: Consider each of your acts as the last of your life. So then, outside bourgeois life, automatism is found again in virtuous heroism: once the attitude is fixed, the formula announces itself. Thus are the books of human wisdom composed — of precepts that are commands in the imperative; and their authors believe they dominate life, when they are machines of habit, and nothing more.
Meanwhile Nicole shakes herself: “Aurélia, what are you gazing at through the window? Always meditating! They’ve just brought me for the trip one of those dresses!” — And the dress wriggles about with the rustlings of dead leaves. I must leave the window from which one sees, lightly veiled in rose, the little valley of the Yselle, which rises at the far end into plateaux half wooded, half pastoral, with village steeples, and even, lost in a tangle of chestnut trees, an old turreted château.
I acquiesce. Like a sphinx, M. Latour junior stares straight ahead. He wears on his left hand an enormous ring that exasperates me. The comings and goings of Madame Suréda stir the surroundings. What is to be hoped from this prevailing boredom?
Letter from M. Amédée Violet to Mademoiselle Aurélia Collins
Versailles, 4 March 1884
To your recent letters, so moved, so full of things felt and thought, I have been unable to reply as I should. For two months I have been living in Germany, rummaging through museums, libraries, and private collections. Back in Versailles, I am working on my Catalogue raisonné of Jacques Callot. I would gladly write a book on this great artist, if I knew how to write and make books. Would that I were a harmonious arranger of notions and words like M. Valentin Latour.
This young man preoccupies you greatly: you attribute to him principles of equity and solidarity that are very firm beneath an elegant scepticism. Here he is, by your doing, engaged to Mademoiselle Suréda, who, indoctrinated by you, is to be the humanitarian Egeria of this metallurgical Numa. — What has become of the perspicacious and judicious Aurélia of old?
Your Nicole strikes me as a young goose. As for M. Valentin Latour, one of his former comrades has spoken to me about him. M. Valentin Latour distinguished himself, three or four years ago, by rather well-simulated neuroses: a few naive souls saw in them a proof of delicacy; the rest shrugged their shoulders. Sometimes he was heard humming idiotic ditties; he also recited monologues and acted in drawing-room theatricals. He was seen spending three-quarters of an hour gazing at himself in the mirror to tie his cravat or criticise the cut of his waistcoat. — Moreover thrifty, even parsimonious. He denied the possibility of being a decent type (sic) without having a great deal of money. He sometimes regretted not having gone into industry, alleging, to excuse his scientific or literary studies, the curiosity of his mind. He often declared that he would make a good marriage in the provinces, with or without love. Meanwhile he flirted here and there, in an easy set, to collect souvenirs of youth. Withal a supple mind, a tenacious memory, clear views, a remarkable power of assimilation; but no scientific zeal, no enthusiasm, little taste, no originality.
Such is the sketch that was drawn for me. Take care: your soul revises and corrects everything reflected in it. Become, I beg you, more of a realist once more.
Amédée Violet
P.S. — When will you come and ask me for my hospitality?
Extract from the Journal
Lières, 20 March 1884
That man knew my father, whom so few knew. We shall speak together of my father, if it is truly possible to speak of the dead whom one goes on loving — for often the life they lived in themselves is lost beneath the new life they live in us, in our tissues and our fibres, in our senses, in all our daily images.
This morning I found a photograph of my father as a young man, taken in Paris, when he was learning his trade as a musician. Then I fixed him in my memory as he was in the last years of his life. And I observed that he had kept, to the final moment, the same calm and abstracted expression. The universe he created in order to live in must have been made of restful visions, light voices, suave sadnesses — and no doubt we figured in it, we whom he loved, free of the asperities that wounded our own consciences.
I went to the cemetery, wishing to draw still nearer to him. I had a large bunch of violets to place on the grave. Along the path that follows the Yselle, I walked beneath the lime trees. In the distance, the scraggly shoots were downing the woods with a russet down, and nature seemed a naive dream of a little shepherd boy. A poor backdrop for the intense dramas I would like to stir within myself, to bring to life around me. But this view drew me back to him; and when, having climbed the slope of the hill where the old people of the town sleep, I arrived at the very top of the cemetery, among more recent tombs, I was overcome with sadness in the slightly warm air that smelled of wet grass.
Extract from the Journal
Lières, end of March?
Nicole’s wedding will take place around the 20th of April. I often accompany the Surédas to Givreux. The great iniquities still reign there, with a tranquil unconsciousness. In the absence of bellicose enthusiasm, I rediscover the taste for criticism and discussion. I have spoken several times with M. Valentin Latour, endeavouring to bring him to formulate his social ideas, his plans for the administration of the factory. But he evades all explanation by means of erudite digressions on various moral, historical, or economic problems.
In short, he evades by stratagems that are not manly. At first he appears to answer; but he confines himself to commonplaces until the moment when, by a well-managed transition, he slips to other subjects. His concealed resistance is the resistance of a stubborn woman who coquettishly plays at docility. At other times, by means of imperceptible allusions, through developments of a general character on the form of intelligences, he manifests some vague regrets regarding philology. When he touches on this subject, he has sudden reticences, noddings of the head, sidelong glances — a whole collection of enigmatic grimaces.
I dare not ask him point-blank whether he intends to take any steps toward justice or not, whether he does not see in his workers of today the associates of tomorrow. What I know of him commands reserve. Despite myself, I shade in some rather dubious depths of soul in him. Why the devil does he contrive to brush against my hips and to sniff my hair?
Yesterday evening, I was thinking about all this seated by a fire of green wood. M. Cat contemplated me from the top of the mantelpiece with the gravity of a disdainful fakir. As nine o’clock struck, Annette showed in Doctor Michelot. He sat down mechanically in the armchair he always used to occupy, when he came regularly to hear me play Beethoven, or to hold forth as a peaceable atheist to Grandmother, who was hardly alarmed by it. — That fine complexion of yours is fading, he growled from his corner of shadow. It’s just the opposite with the little Suréda girl: there’s a lass with a sparkle in her eye; scatterbrained, chattery, all aquiver with it. She shakes herself like a filly and yaps like a lapdog. Very funny, that little one. But I’ve known sprites like her by the dozen: she’s lively because she’s a well-made little creature. Unfortunately, they mummify in marriage; in a few months they become a mannequin stuffed with inept manias and sickening prejudices. The animal life made them fizz: they had spirit, piquancy, savour, despite their ignorance as young sows, despite the great stupidities wadding their brains, despite their entourage of cretins. — And then all that reclaims them, to dominate them, once the matter has settled down.
After a brief silence, he added: — I bear them no grudge: it is not necessary for living matter to produce thought. Thought is, all in all, a rather rare phenomenon: perhaps it is a disease. What is certain is that most men are devoid of it. One would avoid many sorrows by meditating a little on one’s animality, when one happens to have the strength to reflect. One would see oneself in that state of half-somnolence in which the ruminants take their pleasure — a sort of torpor traversed by formless dreams, vague pleasures, indefinable malaises; a night in which, for a few irritable brains, fireflies are lit. — Then, instead of lamenting the stupidity of people, one should on the contrary rejoice in it, since it is our most essential attribute. That is why, in the end, I shall always excuse little Nicole for being stupid, even when her stupidity, like that of Mama Suréda, makes me break into sweats and sends shivers down my spine.
I confess it to my shame: I thought less of defending my little friend than of criticising, for the hundredth time, the old doctor’s rural materialism. But he flew into a rage, called me a crackpot, a mystic, and a bluestocking. He spoke roughly, hammering my armchair’s arm with his fist. Unconcerned with refuting an objection, he hurled across the drawing room — whose every delicate thing cowered — a dithyrambic eulogy of the animal life: and the harsh nature of the fields and woods, with their still and running waters, their plants, their beasts, and their people — all of it trembled in those abrupt words. And once more I found in this old man the poet of rough emotions, a kind of Lucretius with views half scientific, half realistic, who lends to the hypothetical elements of things all the dramatic fervour and all the romantic splendour of things themselves.
And I played him some Beethoven, as in former times: the great joy of being and of willing unfolded. I felt myself nearer to his thought, and he grew more exalted still. Toward midnight a boy came to fetch him: a woman was dying in a farmhouse three leagues from the town. Then, his great ox-eyes all tearful, he crushed my hand in his. Then he went off into the night.
Extract from the Journal
Lières, 15 April
Return from La Frette, where I wished to see again, before leaving for Versailles, relatives I have not seen in a very long time — a flock of cousins, male and female, each more affectionate than the last. In the fresh and comfortable security of a great provincial farmhouse, patched here and there, flanked by less ancient outbuildings, and entirely dressed in black ivy, I gave a few days to collected sentiments of no consequence. A Flemish tranquillity was overtaking me: before the bearing of the industrious girls, their eternal smile of welcome; in the half-silence and near-solemnity of meals, sometimes cheerful with a clumsy, heavy-footed cheerfulness like the paintings on earthenware; in the slightly timid kindness of the men who came home each evening when their work was done.
And the quietude of all of them was almost winning me over. Having never conceived of this happiness, I took pleasure in it all the same. I took pleasure in it for the gliding of thoughts that do not finish, for the slightly soft intimacy in which the soul loses all need for clear expression and sustained reflection. I was there far from the things that can rouse dizzying contradictions in the reason and frisky anxieties in the senses. And it was still He, the Absent One, who reappeared in the ashen dusk of the rooms, in the scent of the wainscoting. He again, with glimpses of pensive intimacies in an autumnal, misty park. My life could have been framed in this way. How little, no doubt, it took for my destiny to become what it is! — a glance too penetrating, the sudden intuition of a connection, a symmetrical arrangement of images — what do I know? All souls brush past the snares of madness: the poor friend who haunts me let himself be caught by one of them.
Among these people, daily life seems to escape the grip of chance: it begins itself anew each day, fussily, in its old-fashioned regularity, a stranger to adventure. It certainly dates, even among the young, from at least a century ago: every act comes from elsewhere and from another time; and the weave is so tight that I can hardly see where the unexpected could slip through.
Extract from the Journal
Lières, 25 April 1884
On account of my mourning, I attended only the religious ceremony. During the Mass, I thought above all of my approaching departure. The disfigurement of the church sickened me: statues in painted plaster, of recent manufacture; the refinements of the old capitals caked in a barrack-room wash; the insipid blue and the silly pink of the stained glass: all the excesses of the sacerdotal taste that presumes to impose repulsive forms upon the adoration of the faithful.
The bridal procession, the guests, and the curious packed into this ambiguous décor: vague figures, whose mass had the bearing of a herd. I could make out Madame Suréda, in black silk, methodically bobbing her head in order to be more humble in her prayers, at the risk and peril of her hat, which was a sort of bepearled tiara. I also caught a glimpse of M. Valentin Latour, whose dress coat was truly a masterpiece of English cut. These two silhouettes still come to graze me. The rest is confused in my memory. At once I felt myself carried far from Lières; I imagined the gliding of landscapes along my route. Sensations of travel presented themselves: German and Dutch cities, architectures floating against the skies, hooded hovels, streets sleeping beside flat canals; then misty forests, hop fields, pink polders, lagoons; then an English meadow, often trodden long ago, very near a comfortable cottage with its fripperies of foliage — the home of Sir Clarence Blake, my uncle.
The organ, centuries old, broken down, emptied, emitted the snorings of a fat man, the gluggings of a bottle, the cries of cloth being torn. Many persons blew their noses when the rings were exchanged. But my thoughts did not weigh upon these contingencies. I was still flying far away, toward less sullen lands. I was not telling myself at all that this was my work, this tedious wedding in this stone flower turned into a cheap shack; that I had caused its realisation to be conceived as possible and desirable; and that this manœuvre concealed humanitarian aims; and that finally these two destinies were henceforth bound to mine.
I thought only of flight: the place could apparently suggest nothing better. Suddenly people jostled me and crushed my feet. In the sacristy, Nicole kissed me, which was painful. She promised me a letter in the near future. The human current seized me and I found myself before the porch. The opalescent air blunted the edges of the houses: the innocence of the world was laughing in the light of the heavens, while I left behind me in the nave — with its mud-coloured tints, its fairground-museum ornaments — the terror of hateful dominations.
Letter from Madame Valentin Latour to Mademoiselle Aurélia Collins
Givreux, 5 May 1884
I have not forgotten your counsels, my dear Aurélia; believe me, they will be followed. We shall do good socialist work or I’ll eat my hat. To tell the truth, your plans, your thingamajigs, your wishes for transforming the salaried workforce into an associated one — all that is squabbling a bit in my brain: but never fear, we shall set to work.
For the moment, I am settling in. I have an exquisite boudoir, pure Louis XV — a gift from old Latour. That old man is the cream of men. He has also bought me a monkey. — As for my bathroom, it is the last word in comfort. Ah, my Aurélia, it’s no laughing matter now! I have the feeling of a very heavy responsibility; it changes me: servants to supervise, composition of menus, guests or diners to lodge well and feed copiously, two men to launder and mend for. There are also the preserves, the jams, and the homemade liqueurs. So many cares make me grave, and imperceptibly I am becoming worthy of the role you have destined for me.
Not cheerful — or rather downright dismal — the town, with its miserable inhabitants, despite all the philanthropic works of Papa Latour. Industrious wretchedness is far more frightening than idle wretchedness; it is sly, taciturn, contemptuous. Brrr! it sends a chill down my spine. But we shall reform all that, shan’t we? I embrace you.
Extract from the Journal
Lières, 6 May 1884
She checks her cook’s accounts and inspects flannel waistcoats. Such a present is always the past with variations, ornaments, and more assiduous demands. Very comical, the end of her letter: she has forged herself a literary emotion. Her excuse is to have wished to flatter my manias. Poor little featherhead, I shall have loved you very much all the same. You alone kept, in the critical days, before my despair and my solitude, that silence of gentleness which is the only way to be kind to the inconsolable. The others advised, analysed, pitied. It is a proof of high intelligence not to substitute, in such a case, the petty vanity of commentary for the mute awkwardness of one’s sentimental wretchedness.
You were a pretty, good girl. Your manners remained graceful, though you were atrociously got up. One evening, I saw you coming down a path between hawthorn hedges: and you went so simply in the infinitely restful light that I thought I saw a Tanagra figurine walking. — M. Cat, in the garden, is rolling in the sunshine on the lawn. He no longer loves the sleeping house, now that it is warm outside and the sounds of wings and cries of birds awaken his hunter’s instincts. He has forgotten my caresses and the divine warmth of the hearth, attentive to the latest sensation that flatters his Epicurean, his feline, his anarchist inclinations.
One might say that my thought plays with Nicole as it plays with my cat, gliding over the surface of these two images in the manner of a reflection upon troubled waters. This game is the entire profit one draws, when all is said, from social relations. ^(1)
^(1) Here I read in the margin of the manuscript the word: boutade! — Editor’s note.
Manuscript of M. Amédée Violet
Aurélia came to Versailles on the 10th of May. I admired her greatly, not having seen her for five years. For she was just as you knew her at my home: tall, harmonious, and supple; a white and delicate skin; noble movements; two ink-black eyes beneath a head of dull gold hair; dressed, though in mourning, with elegance — an elegance very simple. I learned that she made fairly frequent trips from Lières to Paris for her wardrobe. Yet she affected, on the subject of clothes, a dreary indifference.
Beside her, my sister Laurence looked even more ungainly, more sickly, more sallow. But she smiled, poor Laurence — she smiled the smile of a child cheered by a ray of light. If she could have seen Aurélia’s thoughts, she would not have smiled. This was no longer the convinced girl, obstinately affirmative and joyfully serene, I had known in former days; it was an Aurélia often feverish and unsure of herself, her mind sterilised by contradictions, subject to hours of logical and sentimental desolation.
Her ideas destroyed one another. She was sharp and tenacious only in drawing up indictments, in criticising and denying. She professed an atheism that scandalised Laurence. Religions were odious to her, and above all Catholicism: “It is the only one,” she thundered, “that has so brazenly instituted prizes for virtue in the next world!”
Despite her lack of serenity, she excelled at appearing reasonable. Her actions fitted together like pieces of clockwork. Usually, in the morning, she went to Paris, because the great city is more honest, healthier, and more industrious in the morning than in the evening; after luncheon, she took a walk for digestion; on her return, she played the piano, because walking conduces to rhythm; after which she read or conversed, because music, stirring a forest of images, disposes the mind to concrete life. She gave these explanations with an entirely British gravity.
To be reasonable, for her, also meant to feel, act, and think phlegmatically. Thus the sight or the idea of a wretched condition did not seem to cause her revolt, or repulsion, or disgust. She wished to suffer from it only as from a badly concluded syllogism — an intellectual suffering. She called her numerous liberalities not alms but restitutions: — I give out of a spirit of social equity, she would say; I am well aware of the uselessness of my gifts: but reason commands. — And she gave ceaselessly, in the desolation of that dry equity.
This perpetual effort of insensibility exasperated my young friend Delbove, the engraver: — Nothing has ever been accomplished by reason, he declaimed one evening, in a voice that made the windowpanes tremble. It is madness that governs the world. Your men of principle explain the cause of the abscess and formulate remedies that would no doubt be marvellous if the patient were already cured. One day the poor wretch takes a red-hot iron and burns, in his delirium, the cells of putrefaction. The decisive hours for human happiness are the most charged with mystery: ideas and sensations mingle in a whirlwind of vertigo. — And besides, nothing, when all is said, guarantees me the efficacy of your rational remedies, assuming them to be applicable. Reason in the throes of philanthropy is terribly barbarous: it cuts and trims right and left among the vegetation of souls. It makes itself hateful and cruel toward the simple folk who fail to recognise it, toward the refined who criticise it.
But it was not displeasing to Aurélia that reason should make itself intolerant, even persecutory: — Human happiness requires that a few hundred individuals be sacrificed to it. They must be sacrificed without hatred, with discernment, with method. The mob in its frenzy burns anything at all and massacres anyone at all. A philosopher-dictator will cut the heads that need cutting: he will act as a hygienist who, in order to make a premises healthy, employs exclusively scientific methods. Whether he realises it or not, a whole past of considered experience will weigh upon his decrees.
And not without grace, with slow gestures, Aurélia reconstructed Robespierre, whom she greatly admired: the correct and glacial dictator was deduced from the mechanistic conceptions that had previously been elucidated; the work of the guillotine became a remote but direct effect of Cartesianism; and likewise the Cult of Reason. Aurélia listened to herself a little as she spoke. The lace of her sleeves hung from the tip of her oratorical gesture. The young light, filtered through white curtains, was sculpting her. I was very fond of her in this laborious rigorism, which set off her beauty. But I felt her living elsewhere.
Yes, she was living elsewhere, and without being aware of it. Her speeches were too ingenious, her mimicry too artful; she laboured to put her whole self into them; she clung to a frantic wisdom. But the hours of nervous relaxation would come: then she lay heavily in an armchair; she was silent; her languid eyes fixed on nothing. She appeared hypnotised, and it would end with a shake of the head, a shudder of the torso, a sigh. Then she would sit down at the piano, and with a delicious abandon, fits of nervousness, impetuous surges, gentle vivacities, she would play — almost always — Grieg: that music of ecstatic suavities, of intoxicating vertigo. Later, I understood the reasons for this choice.
Delbove liked to repeat to her, with his habitual roughness, that she had been or would be a creature fatal to many, for having wished to arrange their lives to her liking. Laurence scolded Delbove; Aurélia produced arguments. At the beginning of July, she received the following letter:
Mademoiselle, you have made of our daughter Nicole a rebel, a socialist, and worse still. The poor lost girl seeks to throw off the conjugal yoke. The counsels or the orders of her lawful husband no longer count for her! She appears to know and approve the subversive doctrines of collectivist thieves. Who, we asked ourselves, Madame Suréda and I — who has corrupted this innocent child, raised in the faith of her ancestors and in respect for the laws of her country? — We conducted a minute inquiry, and now we can no longer doubt your culpability. You abused our confidence; like a serpent, you poisoned our daughter with your venom. May the sorrow of two white-haired old people bring you no good fortune. Christophe Suréda, former examining magistrate
This puppet’s letter darkened Aurélia. She became taciturn; she no longer made my old house sing and tremble. She ceased to explain to me the Capital of Karl Marx or to listen to my dissertations on Callot, Nanteuil, and Aliamet. Having written to the Surédas, then to Nicole, she received no answer. Then she sank into a sort of animal torpor.
Laurence, one evening, took her hand and in her faded voice said to her: — Aurélia, could I not know everything you are thinking, so that I may grieve with you? This was in my study: the lamp shone peacefully, and with its golden rays spread over the glass cases — guardians of the portfolios and albums — a frozen swell of discs and stars. Aurélia was not reading the book open before her on the table, a volume of the works of Carlyle: she was gazing at the motionless play of light. When Laurence had spoken, Aurélia tried to smile: — I was thinking of nothing, she said. Weary of regrets and feeble wishes, I was letting the obsession of things act upon me. My head is empty, my energy shattered. You cannot conceive, my friends, how strong I thought myself for having united those two beings. I was imposing upon this marriage consequences near or distant: a corner of happiness not too boorish, a little ideal made real, a kindly smiling equity, justice installed without a gesture of hatred, without a clamour of pride. — And now, you see: I have warped two destinies; I have exasperated that small bird-soul; I have recalled to his vocation a despot who was losing himself in philology. — The future presented itself so firm and so brave in my resolution! Ah, what madness! to correct in mid-air the errors of reality, without regard for characters or circumstances. — Now that the event rises up against my humiliated reason, what remains of me? I search for myself without finding myself, and from weariness I think of nothing more, I desire nothing more.
There was a silence. The peace of the tomb reigned along the Avenues; the moon, through a window that the lamp did not illuminate, let fall a haze of opal. A bugle sounded the curfew. Laurence murmured: — I grieve over you, not over your sublime dreams, for I can scarcely conceive of them, having only a small shrivelled soul. But it seems to me that you exist elsewhere than in those dreams. There is in your senses more selfish sadness than you think. I divined this from the moment of your arrival, by your strange distractions, by your often wandering gaze; and then your emotion spoke at the tips of your fingers, in revealing sonorities. — Do not say no, Aurélia. Recluse and ill, my eyes are too weak to admire the splendour of things. But the least gesture half-glimpsed, the inflections of a voice, the timbre of a chord, are for me what they do not wish or believe themselves to be — a language.
Aurélia answered only with a weary gesture. She mechanically opened a portfolio of unclassified prints and engravings, and appeared to examine at length a curious specimen of cross-hatching: the Descartes by Hals, engraved by Edelinck — a very rare copy, but unfortunately in very poor condition. The face emerged from the darkness, thick-lipped, the mouth long, the nose aquiline and broad at the base, the eyes like magnifying lenses, the eyelids heavy — a face without gentleness or unease, framed by long black hair, not thick, which one could guess to be rather coarse; the moustache, ill-disciplined, seemed made of horsehair; the rough skin stretched itself with vigour: there reason was affirmed, tenacious and strong, bound by steel links to firm and resistant tissues.
The next day and the days that followed, Aurélia stayed close to my sister. She translated for her the Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge and the Idylls of Tennyson. On Sunday morning, Delbove came to surprise me. He did not wear his brutal air. He was humble, hesitant, mysterious. Finally, he explained himself: — It is about Mademoiselle Aurélia. I began by hating her; for she has her pedantic moments; she does not appear to listen when one speaks to her; she is a philanthropist in the bourgeois fashion and hasn’t fourpence-worth of revolutionary spirit; she imagines that reason can bring us back the golden age and that she must personally contribute to social progress. — Look, there were times when I wanted to make her cry. Which means I already loved her. Now I think of nothing but her; I desire only her; my portfolios are full of her portraits — sketches I make from memory.
The sickness of love had become intolerable for this young man of very simple habits, of an athletic temperament, a sincere and upright artist, rather slow to feel but who always retained the impressions he received. He asked my advice: “Speak to her and marry if she is willing,” I answered, “but expect nothing good, poor friend.” — He looked at me, dilating his great round eyes.
At the far end of the park, toward Trianon, there was no one that day; I sat down to read a Review, leaving Aurélia and Delbove to walk toward the Dairy. Through the neatly trimmed bushes, spindles of light passed and scattered green flecks upon Aurélia’s elegant mourning. After reading a few words, I raised my head and saw that Delbove was gesticulating violently, his muscles rigid, his fists ceaselessly thrust forward, as if to ward off invisible assailants. Aurélia, head bowed, must have been listening without a word: her pace had slowed, her arms were swinging loosely, a strange weakness was breaking her bearing.
They walked around the cottages. For a moment I lost sight of them. When they came back toward me, the roles were reversed. Delbove, thoroughly dejected, was letting his cane trail at his fingertips, barely closed around the knob; his rigidity had slackened; his clothes, though of good cut, hung limp and pitiful. As for Aurélia, very calm, sparing in gesture, she was speaking. She must have been speaking slowly, with gentleness and firmness, if I correctly interpreted her pantomime. I watched these two tormented beings in the old-fashioned setting of the royal sheepfolds. I decided to myself that they were, where love was concerned, she too grave and he too impetuous for so prettily adorned a nature. Their art of loving consisted, in her case, of cultivating a sorrowful memory; in his, of following brutal impulses. The considered naïveté of the canals, the little meadows, the neatly thatched cottages made a poor frame for this drama, half romantic, half realistic.
Delbove did not stay for dinner, alleging urgent work. This young man’s suffering lacks delicacy: the blood at his skin, his eyes swollen, his breath hoarse, he pitched, he lurched, he clutched at the furniture. Aurélia, collapsed, hunched in my leather armchair, looked like an inanimate form. From then on, Delbove made himself scarce, wild, and silent. She, mute on the subject of this event, was suddenly seized by a tumultuous and frantic need to act. She played Beethoven sonatas, Schumann’s symphonic studies, troubling with melancholy passion, heroism, and deep joy the dried-out beams and sleeping walls of the house. I saw the margins of her Carlyle grow stained with strange marks. Aided by scholarly grammars and specialist lexicons, she deciphered old Anglo-Saxon texts. In the evening, she would talk to us about social questions: she would speak gravely, with simplicity, like a bard of primitive times, of the romantic life of the revolutionary Lassalle, the formation of the social-democratic party in Germany, the genesis of the Ghent Vooruit and the Belgian cooperatives. And reviews of sociology or political economy, socialist pamphlets, heavy learned volumes gradually piled up on my furniture.
No more languor, no more rest. And not a gesture, not a word that did not presuppose an effort. Her energy, strained to excess, earned her sleepless nights. She grew thin and coughed more cruelly. And she did not deign to look after herself. She spent the month of August in England, then came back to us. On the 10th of September I left for Utrecht, where a sale of art objects attracted me. This trip lasted a fortnight. On my return — no more Aurélia! She had gone back to Lières. Here is what had happened:
Maurice Dubreuil having died at Nancy (Meurthe-et-Moselle) in a sanatorium, Maître Napoléon Houlet, notary at Saint-Sauge (Nièvre), informed Aurélia that the deceased had left an unacknowledged son named Jacques, aged eleven. — This was, Maître Houlet specified, the fruit of blameworthy and thoroughly Parisian debaucheries. A lyric artiste, Mademoiselle Claudine Berthier, the child’s aunt, was keeping him at her home in Paris. The mother, another lyric artiste, had more or less disappeared. Among Maurice Dubreuil’s papers were scattered the fragments of a sort of Confession, extravagant in form and scandalous in substance, according to the aforementioned ministerial officer. Maurice Dubreuil had therein related his liaison, the birth of Jacques, the amount of the sums he had allocated to the child’s early education, and other particulars relating to the same subject. Now, for the heirs of Maurice, Jacques was null and void; they did not even wish to hear of this bastard. A philanthropist above all and naturally inclined to succour unhappy childhood, Maître Napoléon Houlet, notary, brought the existence of little Jacques to the attention of Mademoiselle Aurélia Collins, in the hope that she would take an interest in the fate of the innocent creature.
Aurélia had not even reflected: this opportunity to act was too fine. Mademoiselle Claudine Berthier, lyric artiste, had hastened to cede her rights as aunt. This young person was scarcely acquainted with her nephew, who had been left to the care of Sylvie, a red-haired and misshapen lady’s maid, who had taught the child to read from the serial stories of the Petit Parisien. This woman, of a sour aspect, had been won over by Jacques’s delicate face and pretty manners. — “Without him,” she told Aurélia, “I would not have stayed with Mademoiselle Berthier: it is not the position I need. I prefer single young gentlemen.” Laurence, Delbove, and Doctor Michelot fought this idea of adoption, but in vain. They cited the doubtful paternity of Maurice Dubreuil, Aurélia’s pedagogical inexperience, her youth sterilised in a thankless task, the danger of gossip: she heard none of it. She rented a house at Marly-le-Roi so as not to be far from us or from Paris. Then she went to Lières to fetch her furniture, her cat, and her old servant. Here is the letter she wrote to me from there:
Aurélia Collins to M. Amédée Violet
Lières, 27 September 1884
Ah, my old friend, to mould this soul I feel a little mine — what joy! my old friend. Yes, a little mine — is that not strange? As if I had had some part in the wretched genesis of this child! Why this elation before these eyes recovered, this black hair of the same black? It is bizarre in a heart as methodically desiccated as mine. I want Jacques, through my care, to become quick of mind, robust of body, to begin to live a life that is full and wide.
Already, around me, forms are growing more defined, and to my eyes colours shine brighter, to teach me where to direct and how to guide other eyes still clumsy. My memories come flooding back, sorted and simplified, all ready to enter into my daily lessons and counsels. What more can I say? I catch myself ceaselessly explaining, in extremely familiar terms, extremely banal truths. The day after tomorrow, departure for Marly. We have driven the last nails into the crates. Annette, moaning at leaving the country and the house, lent me the aid of her rustic grip. For my part, I do not share her regrets: the past does not hold me and I am burning to leave.
P.S. — Delbove has made, from memory, my portrait in sanguine. It is a work of sober brutality that captivates and jars: I had never conceived the possibility of so complete an expression with so little material. But every stroke of the pencil betrays a violent gesture, a convulsion of fury.
Extract from the Journal of Aurélia
Marly, 1 October 1884
I waited by the acacias, which a wet wind was rocking and making murmur. Sylvie brought me Jacques, and Jacques smiled at me. The poor child had scarcely seen trees except in the Parc Monceau: the things of the open air stupefied him. Annette walked him through the garden and the house, while I listened to the good woman’s final lamentations. When she had gone, I saw Jacques from the garden at the window of his room: he was marvelling at the valley of the river, spread wide open beneath him, bounded on the left by a stiff violet line, veiled in mist at the far end over the bald hills of Argenteuil, abruptly cut off on the right by the hill surmounted by the aqueduct.
Jacques had the look of a little king too young for the vastness of his domain, suddenly saddened before the enormity of his task. I went up to his room, and as he remained still motionless, somewhat dazed before the falling night, gently I slipped my left arm around his neck. He raised his head to meet my gaze with his, and we were both satisfied with one another. — Let us close the window, Jacques, or you will catch cold. Tomorrow we shall go for a walk. — Jacques said to me: “I was beginning to be frightened, because it’s all black. All the things have arms and legs, and all the things look mean.” — My little man, you must be braver than that. Come now, let us go to dinner. And arm in arm we went downstairs.
At table, he ate little: “What a pity,” said Annette, “nothing but skin and bones, and wants practically to perish.” — “So you’re the Sylvie here?” Jacques said to her. He asked me if I knew M. Isidore: “He’s a senator, you know; he gives me jujubes when he comes. Sylvie says a senator is like a policeman. She used to see that in the Petit Parisien. But Auntie always chased me away when he arrived: is he mean, say?”
An unknown sensation of calm and goodness was unfolding in the flow of family lamplight upon the white cloth, in the chatter of this pale child, and I was silently exalted by it; I was exalted in heart and mind, dreaming of hours of exquisite tenderness and conceiving a thousand ways of being useful to Jacques — all of it very light, very vague, and as if blurred upon my beatitude. At last he fell silent and sustained a short struggle against the imperious necessity of sleep. I, seated beside him, was playfully running my fingers through his girlish hair and showing him pictures — Doré’s illustrations for Ariosto: a whole Middle Ages, slender, airy, bathed in lunar silver, with here and there droll paunches. But soon his pretty head came to rest upon my breast, and then I saw his eyelids closed, I heard the rustling of a well-measured breath, I felt with emotion the warmth of this small abandoned body.
With heavy but infinite precautions, Annette carried him off. Left alone, I tried to read, but I was entirely taken up with the impression of the prattle and the caresses. Then a dull unease weighed upon my joy, prevented it from reigning, frank and robust, over my reverie: an obscure thought was spoiling for me the charm of this beginning intimacy. By chance, I turned my eyes toward my portrait in sanguine, which I have fixed to a small easel on the trefoil-shaped table. But at this sight, a shiver grazed my skin. Truly, I was there possessed of an evil and vain energy: no other thought haunted my eyes than that of affirming myself as implacable dominatrix. Instinctively, I took the lamp and went before a mirror. There, my image appeared to me whitish, with a face of exhaustion and alarm. I had a smile of gratitude for the mirror, and went up to Jacques’s room.
The nightlight, with its bloodless gleams, was sponging his thin skin; the long curls of black silk carved paths of shadow upon the whiteness of the linen: one arm, graceful as a swan’s neck, was raised to frame his head upon the pillow; the other hung nonchalantly over the edge of the bed. Slowly I took this straying arm, and on the fine warm hand I placed my lips, very gently. Then I understood the feeling of unease that had just tightened my heart. The idea that this was not my son, and that another woman, in an animal spasm, had prepared for me these moments of pious love — it was sharpening and honing itself, glacial. Ah! I could dash myself against the angles of these persistent facts: cold chastity, happiness dissipated as soon as glimpsed, attempts at insensibility, the wretchedness of solitude, all the unknown of the life led by Maurice, and, in this child’s soul, all that would live again of maternal instincts. I was kneeling beside the bed — a very low brass bed, my girlhood bed. I was desolate and grieved; but Jacques smiled in his sleep, and suddenly, swifter than reflection, tears swelled my eyes and rolled to my lips. Sweet tears! I had not wept for a very long time.
Extract from the Journal
Marly, 2 October 1884
— And your papa, Jacques, do you remember him, say? You must have seen him often. — Oh! Papa — there were lots of them. They were very nice gentlemen. They all kissed me. M. Isidore used to give me jujubes.
Extract from the Journal
Marly, 3 October 1884
Made this child walk too far yesterday in the forest; abused his small stubborn attention to overload his memory with explanations about trees, seasons, the north wind, rivers, and heat. I was striding through space as through ideas, in great steps, drunk with a naive zeal, at the risk of paralysing these poor nerves bruised with effort, of obstructing this imagination that is barely ajar. Yes, perhaps I was indeed the creature of blind and baneful energy that Delbove drew out of me. And yet today, how gentle and fraternal I feel, beside Jacques, feverish and aching all over.
He lies on a divan in the small hall I have fitted up for music and the grave labours of the mind. The window is open and a melancholy warmth of late season comes toward us with scents of cut grass and yellowed leaves. I am rereading sonnets by George Meredith, seated beside the patient. He, with a slow gesture, has taken my hand to keep it between his: “Big sister, you won’t leave me any more, say?” — Poor child, his voice filters timidly; his black eyes have a troubled phosphorescence; his dry skin burns me: “Big sister, why are the leaves green; and then yellow with ink spots?” — Jacques, you should be quiet and try to sleep. — “But you always said you always have to learn and do things, and that without that, you’re naughty.” — When your head hurts, you should sleep. — “Big sister, are you reading a story?” — Yes, a beautiful story, in English. — “Is English the same as negro talk?”
Placid, M. Cat, sprawled in the manner of a seal upon a score of the Meistersinger, gazes through the window at this landscape new to him, with the nonchalance and indifference that a prolonged stay in the house would authorise. — “I don’t like Monsieur Cat,” says Jacques, “he’s lazy. You spoil him a lot, don’t you, big sister?” — I closed the window, fearing the damp gusts of evening. Jacques soon drowsed, and I remained kneeling on the linoleum, my elbows on the edge of the divan, because I felt myself there both guardian and guarded. If he could understand, I would ask his pardon for having broken his limbs, weighed down his little brain; for I flung myself upon this pedagogical work with a sort of voracity. Do I not know that a principle must ask of facts its passport, its tools, and its route? — What a humiliation for me to find myself blind and reckless, after such hard lessons! I could not study him in one day, this little man. And it is absurd to attempt an experiment without knowing at least some properties of the forces one enlists in it. This logical error should grieve my reason more than anything.
And yet I scarcely think of it: my torment is less noble: it is rather the flesh that suffers. I suffer above all that this child is not my child. I hate the woman whose divine love would cause thornless roses to bloom for his happiness. The most foolish of mothers has profound intuitions, the delicacies of a fairy. And yet, Jacques, in the sweetness of your presence, I lose the strength to accuse myself, and my envious anguish grows lighter. So frail, you dispel anxieties, you inspire good hopes — and above all, you drive back into nothingness the threats of the past.
Madame V. Latour to Mademoiselle Aurélia Collins
Givreux, 6 October 1884
Dear Aurélia, I am told you are now working in pedagogy. That is yet another way of acting and creating happiness. Only fear that this enterprise may not turn out better than the first. In what tangles you have entangled me, my poor great friend! Your only excuse is that you deceived yourself. You imagined, in pushing me toward this marriage, that a salutary example of concord and justice would come of it. But this fancy masked the true motives of your act. You were yielding to the ambitious inclination to arrange a parcel of the world to your liking, and perhaps even this was for you merely a means of warding off ever-cruel memories.
Misfortune holds me now. The man I ought to love, each day I detest a little more than the day before. So much pretentious, mannered, learnedly pitiless selfishness was needed at my side to make me — the scatterbrain of yesterday — curious about moral things: to observe and reflect, that is where my enslaved soul finds a little independence. I have broken off all relations with my parents, whose stupid morality exasperated me. For having railed against the sacrament and the institution of marriage, I was cursed in heaven’s name by my mother, in the name of the civil code by my father: and it seemed to me that God and men expressed their indignation in a very ridiculous fashion.
As for my husband, after harrowing scenes in which we spent — he, treasures of wounding irony, of learned loquacity, and of glacial obstinacy; I, an entire stock of abusive anger — he has decided to ignore, or to appear to ignore, my presence. And so I no longer know the disgust of being an instrument of pleasure or the fury of seeing myself criticised, censured, mocked, treated as an unconscious thing or a perverse animal by this tedious and vain despot. Old M. Latour remains to me. But the poor man is no more than a taciturn and sorrowful shadow. Worn out by work, tormented by cares, before it is time to go he is going, his gaze extinguished and his energy dead. I fear that our conjugal dissensions have hastened his decline.
He no longer concerns himself with anything. My husband runs everything with an engineer. Our expenditures lead me to believe that business is doing well. But there are rumours of a strike going around. People speak of wages cut, of overtime, of inhuman dismissals. When I go out, people turn away so as not to greet me, and they whisper behind my back. In certain homes where there were sick people, I was received with a hateful politeness. I am for this suffering world what the Austrian woman once was for the starving Parisians. It is sinister. Just look at where your dream ends up: two hells, one inside the other. If I had not kept a little of my madness, I would be nothing but a human rag. But at moments I have sudden intoxications in which I find myself once more desirous of living. My thought takes flight, and I am seized by violent urges to fly away like it. I cannot answer for what I shall do tomorrow.
Extract from the Journal
Marly, 15 October 1884
Curtains of cotton-wool fall here and there upon the faded trees, stained with rust and ochre, that grieve over there on the slopes of the hills and in the spacious valley. I have just replied to Nicole, and all my excuses limped, all my exhortations seemed detached from a Handbook of Morals for Primary Education. When I reread my letter, I saw in it — or rather felt, beneath the words — only my vain sorrow, crushed beneath the weight of facts, my sorrow lamentably resigned like this autumn vegetation.
Jacques notices everything. He came to brush against me and said: “You’re sulking; are you ill?” He showed me his exercise book and a drawing that represents a house. I kissed him, pleased with his zeal. Then I trembled. No, my child, I am not ill, but I am afraid of myself for your sake. You are frail, you are sickly, you have nothing in your brain, you are a poor sensitive and drifting creature. You will need strong arms, a solid chest, a sharp mind, a firm will. And it is I who presume to give you all that — I, whose every attempt at doing good has failed, I, whose initiative has been disastrous for those I wished to raise to happiness. But is it possible to create happiness in this selfish and voracious world? To help others — is it not to arm them for the wicked struggle, so that they may become plunderers or prey? wrapped in hatred or smitten with hatred?
Meanwhile, as I keep silent, Jacques thinks me either ill or displeased with him. He does not know what countenance to adopt, and his eyes grow moist with tears, his nose pinches, his thin lips tighten. Gently, having drawn him to me, I kiss him on the forehead. He whispers to me, consoled at once: “You smell very nice.”
Extract from the Journal
[Marly, undated]
These last days I have scarcely left him; and we are great friends. We would walk through the woods over the yellow and red leaves, in a russet half-light. He chattered and I was in a wild gaiety. I made myself extremely naive in order to speak his language, and imperceptibly I led him to say sensible things. This very morning I was explaining verses to him that he was to learn by heart. It is a little poem by Hugo entitled La Bible. Jacques repeated my explanations with fervour, in a childish but clear language, which he enlivened with marvellous hypotheses. Sometimes I brushed his soft fine hair with my fingertips, and then we would exchange a smile. — Dear sister, the little boy says: Nous mandions notre pain de si bon appétit / Que les femmes riaient quand nous passions près d’elles. You say it means that a little boy is funny when he eats well and not funny when he doesn’t. And then also, if you’ll allow me, he’s funny especially to the women. I think something: women are happy with men who eat well, because they’re stronger; and then they kill the wolves and the wicked people better, and everything that hurts women.
And I was proud that he had, without vanity or bitterness, a sort of noble and cruel idea. I was sure of him as a disciple and sure of myself as an educator. Now I doubt, and I am afraid of us both — of myself above all. Annette has taken him to the village, and I, left alone at home, am recalling everything I can know of his constitution, his character. My eyes still retain the impression of his matt complexion, his too-brilliant pupils; I think of his attitudes of a weary child who seeks in an embrace a nest of rest; my ears are torn by his dry morning cough.
And the sudden chances of a soul in the making — interventions all the more fierce as the soul is less ordinary — shall I know how to calculate their effects in order to regulate their use? He is one of those whom the slightest sensation penetrates to the marrow, stirring in its passage impulses of distant origin; for in the tenderest flesh sleeps the activity of dead generations. And I conceive with terror a possible awakening of perversity. Should I dare, if the case arose, impose a discipline upon him? Alas! what discipline, and how? My intelligence is muddled, I have lost all courage, I no longer have confidence in myself, and quite as much as this child, I would need a guide.
Midnight: Gusts upon the woods. In the garden, the sizzling of dry leaves. And in the corners of the attic, the mewlings of the north wind. My soul still rhythmed to the rhythm of an old fugue, I dream, my cat upon my knees. Jacques must be sleeping, white on the white sheets. Poor little thing! My heart is inclined to tenderness, but it is a passive tenderness, one I do not recognise in myself.
Extract from the Journal
Marly, 28 October 1884
Doctor Michelot, who is spending three days in Paris, came to Marly to have luncheon with us. — You’ve tied a foolish marriage there, he said in his gruff way. After all, I don’t know that I can hold it against you. If the human species were not rotten with refined feelings and false ideas, couples would live united. But by dint of reflection and intelligence, one destroys the vital instincts. Woman tends to spiritualise herself in a ridiculous fashion; man becomes a living cipher, or a kind of indigestible dictionary, or else a pump for honours. We forget more and more the beasts that we are, and we shall perish the victims of a brain that has been perfected too far.
Toward one o’clock, a visit from Delbove. We are no longer awkward near each other. I remember without being moved his violent declaration and my decided refusal. That day, when he had proposed that I become his wife, I had the intuition of a commitment that already bound me, of an ill-defined duty that commanded me to remain free. Without seeking a foolish means of postponing my answer, I refused outright, alleging my independent humour. — You love another man, Delbove growled. That other man will certainly never be anything to you. Despite everything, and without your knowledge, you remain faithful to him. Your misdirected energy tends toward the same happiness by different paths. You labour in the domestic idyll, in justice for all. Works of art, all of it! You pursue with an artist’s sensuality the image of the happiness you missed, or some kindred image. You seek yourself in your work, and that is why it is wretched.
He did not let me protest; he added: — You boast of your cold reason, which would be, if you are to be believed, the principle of all your actions. But that is merely an attitude, either constantly willed or hard-won. You pass through crises of enthusiasm and hours of affliction whose causes you could neither mark nor whose content you could analyse. It is the unknown of passion reclaiming its rights.
Then, with a humility touching in a being robust and sanguine, of rigid will and haughty imagination, he told me of his sufferings of love. The mixture of rough and delicate words that came to his lips spoke at once of the anxiety of the senses and the obsession of thought. But I could feel for him neither pity nor admiration. I was trying to react against the self-distrust he had just inspired in me.
Today, in the low autumn light, he at first appeared to me — he who had once been so abrupt and harsh — singularly refined and softened. But the impression did not persist. As Doctor Michelot, in a genial tone, was conversing with Jacques, Delbove and I took a few turns in the garden. — This child is graceful in his manner and his mind, he said to me; he has pauses of meditation that make him resemble a young prophet. But the kind of affection you show him is hardly suited to a child of his age. You cast upon him looks of entreaty; you address to him ecstatic smiles; you imprison him in nervous embraces. Examine your feelings, then, and search carefully whom it is you love in him. — What you are insinuating is odious, I answered sharply. He resumed with his hard look, suddenly recovered: — I shall never make you suffer enough.
I despised him for insulting me out of spite, but without answering, for a strange fear paralysed me — fear of him, who was staring at me with wild eyes; fear of the monstrous ideas he was suggesting; fear of myself, finally, whose conscience protested without force. Doctor Michelot having rejoined us: — Keep an eye on Jacques, he grumbled. The little fellow doesn’t look well. The blood is weak and the nerves are restless. I fear he thinks: at his age one must not think. Otherwise, watch out for the meninges! Ah, heredity, heredity! — Rotten invention.
Before my alarm, he forced himself to reassure me, for he is not master of his brutal frankness, and only his actions know how to be humane. He kissed me and left. My soul was frozen in a vegetable torpor. The foul coolness of the mist enveloped me, and I did not feel it. In the taciturn air, it seemed that nothing could either think, or desire, or live.
A stifled murmur grazed me; my hand found itself caught in a large hot hand. It was Delbove asking my pardon. — I spoke brutally, he said, but I am only a beast of obscure instincts, of fierce impulses. I shall never know how to reflect or foresee. Now I remain inert beside your desolation, because I can imagine nothing to console. You see, I am good only for bruising hearts. And yet it is not tolerable, to see you in this state: and I want to make myself very small, to hide, to disappear, so humiliated am I before you — for not having known how to keep silent just now, and for not knowing how to speak now. I had the strength to smile at him and press my fingers upon his palm. I begged him to leave me alone: he went away with a heavy step, zigzagging a little.
Extract from the Journal
Marly, 5 December 1884
The days pass, grey or bright, taciturn or full of confused clamours. Only the crows wander the fields; the closed-up little houses pull an ugly face. It is an event when an old man in a woollen jersey — a knotted, hunched form — hobbles along the walls. Jacques lets himself be cared for docilely; he grumbles against the cod-liver oil, but he absorbs it. Annette praises the phlegm he maintains under the ablutions of ice-cold water. On our walks, despite the speed I impose on his slender legs, he grumbles only in moderation.
This perpetual contact would be delightful if I dared respond to his tenderness. But I remember Delbove’s cruel words. In my dealings with Jacques, I study myself closely, I suppress every affectionate impulse. Jacques asks me whether I am cross with him or whether I am sad. I dismiss both hypotheses. Then he does not know what to conjecture and falls into a sullen reverie. To draw him out of it, one must of course resort to caresses, to gentle words. But the fine velvet of his skin, the joy lit up in his eyes, the simple swift movements that betray his happiness — so many voluptuous sensations in which I first take pleasure, then take fright. So that our effusions end badly; for I suddenly withdraw from his ingenuous gratitude, and he, to explain this bizarre phenomenon to himself, puts his surprised soul painfully to work.
Yesterday, after having collected myself in this way, as I had asked him — not without brusqueness, not without stiffness — to let me write a letter, he crouched in a corner, his expression closed, a book on his knees, directly facing M. Cat, who, gravely seated beneath an araucaria, was alternately licking his two forepaws, then, having moistened them, using them to smooth his whiskers and clean his ears. And M. Cat devoted to this task all his stubborn and limited attention, all his mechanical skill inherited from distant ancestors. That is why he did not notice Jacques’s pain, and Jacques understood that he was utterly alone. There was an uneasy silence; then he murmured: “It hurts a lot here.” I noticed that he was holding his head in his hands. A dreadful idea blazed; trembling, I went to him. — A few minutes later, we were going out arm in arm, he happy with my recovered familiarity, I still shaken by this alarm.
Under a grey shroud, the trees were writhing in pain. We were crushing dead leaves and blackish twigs. Along a vast park, adjacent to the forest, runs a ditch beyond which one sees fir trees on broad lawns and beds of roses. — “Here,” said Jacques, “the Sleeping Beauty sleeps. When I’m strong, I’ll go and wake her up.” — But he added, having reflected: “Actually no, because she’s not as beautiful as you.” — Are you still in pain, Jacques? — “A tiny bit, but it’s nothing.” — And at his request, I told him marvellous stories. He learned the adventures of Robin Hood the Saxon, the moonlit rides of the Accursed Huntsman, the walks of Titania in the cool dew, and the fairies who haunt the springs, and the venerable nymphs who sleep in the hollows of oaks. Without a word, Jacques clung to me, holding his breath, stirred by a sacred terror. No less than he was I moved: for the mystery of the woods was floating in the air and in my stories.
Extract from the Journal
Marly, 18 December 1884
A winter vigil, short for Jacques, long for me. First, the fireside after dinner: I, seated before the blazing hearth; he, at my feet on a stool, his head resting against my knees. He asks me for clarifications on the stories I have told him. Do the trees think? Do they hold conversations among themselves? And are the ladies who dwell beneath the bark pretty? Outside, a thick silence; walls of coal. Annette comes to tell me it is snowing. A bell, in the distance, tolls, its voice muffled. I think of the wretchedness scattered through the night; I think of vigils past: industrious vigils around the lamp; vigils of calm dreaming or of good conversations; vigils of boredom; vigils beside a dead body.
Ah! always to remember what was gentle or cruel, with the obligatory tenderness born of regret, with the unwholesome voluptuousness of glimpsing imprecise forms, a crepuscular world: this is what wears us down and numbs us, in this century proud of its dreamy melancholy as of a finer and more complete intelligence of things — when, to live well, happily and fraternally, one would need to see clearly in the present, to judge firmly and decide quickly. — Jacques has fallen asleep with his head upon my knees, and Annette has carried him away. The horror of the images surmised outside reinforces the exquisite impression of security and well-being in which I drowse. The so-familiar forms of the furnishings, the delicate touches of green or mauve reflections on the hangings, the voices of the embers and the warmth with its scents of ash — a thousand pleasant sensations reign at once, in which I softly scatter myself, not without a protest, deep in my conscience, from the knowing, rigid, and wilful creature that I was, or dreamed of being. Vain protest: I feel myself become a girl again, carried back to the time when, on evenings like this one, in the drawing room with its dark velvets of the provincial house, I would rest, a little weary from the labours of the day.
And I listened to the lime trees in the garden moaning, the chimneys sobbing, the weather vanes crying. I observed in turn the tongues of flame cut against the logs in the hearth, the silhouette of my grandmother reading near a lamp in old cloisonné, and the English engravings, after Lawrence or Gainsborough, upon which the chance of a gleam here and there made the muslin dresses and the great silk fichus tremble. Meanwhile, muffled and truncated, modulations, chords, melodic phrases came from the room where my father was working, and it was like a mysterious enchantment. Ah! I yield to the need to relax my nerves and my thought. The vertigo of pride that mounts to the head when our ascendancy is exercised or our domination imposed, whether by force or by persuasion — this vertigo is not worth the languor of a soul spread out over appearances, in the favour of distant music or of mystical silences, in the safe and pleasant retreat that the rains and gales graze without entering.
Is it to harm or offend others, to savour with nonchalance delicate sensations? There is certainly more bitterness and less gentleness in an indefatigable energy than in a sensibility that is indolent and collected. Moved by noble ideas, in the service of which I placed all my mind, all my grace, all my zeal, I have succeeded only in bruising consciences, sharpening cupidities, setting interests against one another. By letting things alone without meddling, I would have assured others some bourgeois satisfactions, and myself precious leisure for agreeable meditations and honest pleasures. I was decidedly in error and I must leave it behind, even were I to think myself diminished by circumscribing my activity to petty occupations. For this child, I dreamed of an unbreakable reason, a sovereign equity, an absolute mastery of the self. But what cruelty! to impose constraints and methods upon a mind that wanders so prettily; to ration this sensibility so fine; to strip this impressionable and already reflective being of a thousand occasions for emotion, for dreaming, for thought: for many material privations do not come without a moral fast. No, before this frail existence — but one deeply permeated with itself — I find myself strangely timid and disarmed.
Midnight tolls on my Flemish clock and outside at the parish church. One would say that things are breathing softly; my body, rested, lightened, weighs no more. And I feel a Sybarite’s sleep falling upon me.
Extract from the Journal
Marly, 25 January 1885
At most one weeds the past; one does not uproot it, and it always grows back: it climbs like ivy upon the new edifice the soul was building for itself, or else it surprises, in the manner of the plants the poets have sung, with explosive flowerings. Three weeks have just passed that seemed very short to me. I was becoming a child again, to amuse Jacques, and he, gravely, played the reasonable man to interest me. I had my moments of madness, he had his hours of wisdom: I understood and he felt that we wished to live as people who love each other.
My cheerful tenderness, never at fault, transfigured him. Our lessons degenerated into laughing conversations; our walks ended in disorderly races. He was stretching and filling out, becoming more mischievous, but without malice. His sensibility was beginning to express itself with a graceful drollery. He would say to Annette: “You are old Vesta, goddess of houses; my big sister is Minerva, who loves fables and arithmetic.” And Annette, who is not acquainted with these personages, raised her arms heavenward in dismay. At Christmas, English cousins came to visit me: the respectable M. Kimble, an industrialist from the county of Glamorgan, and his daughters, two little blonde misses with raspberry complexions. They held themselves as stiff as sticks. At the least word addressed to them, they laughed in unison with a piercing sharpness. Under their direction, Jacques danced the jig and sang ballads from across the sea. He told them he would marry them both and take them away to an island, and they were scandalised.
Then came New Year’s Day. Early in the morning, as I was still drowsing, Jacques crept into my room, and well coached by Annette, he spoke thus: “You know, big sister, it’s New Year’s Day; so be well and have lots of luck and have a very good time. I kiss you.” And I returned his kiss. A green fagot was crackling in the fireplace, and the flame was leaping passionately. Everything seemed to take an interest in me, even the Saxe clock, and even the portrait of Mr Gladstone.
A few days later, a walk to Versailles. M. Violet and Delbove came out with us. For the first time I found displeasing this effort of rectitude and symmetry in stone and verdure. M. Violet explained my impression to me. — “It is a symbol of rigid will and clear reason that you loved here. In short, you sought and found here nothing but yourself. Now these buildings bore you, these gardens exasperate you — not because they have become boring and exasperating, but because your soul has grown softer and more relaxed. You would go into raptures before a cottage of capricious structure, black with ivy and capped with moss. That is the setting which would now suit your inner life. In art, one never loves anything but a shelter offered to the feelings, a possible abode for thought.”
I listened without critical attention to these old-fashioned aphorisms: I was not in the humour to argue. Skaters were gliding on the great sheet of water. Jacques, petrified with astonishment, occupied my senses and my mind entirely. Soon it was a deluge of questions about the sliding gentlemen, about the frozen water, about the fellow on horseback who had built these great houses and gardens. And as I was composing naive answers, I heard Delbove whisper to M. Violet: “Decidedly, happiness makes people idiotic.” — And this remark amused me until evening.
Now yesterday, Sunday, as Jacques was humming an English round, leaning his thread of a voice upon the furtive sounds I was drawing from the piano, Annette burst in, distraught — resembling, though naturally hardly sculptural, a statue of Fatality. — “Mademoiselle,” she articulated between two hoarse breaths, “it’s the little Suréda girl: you know? Madame Latour. She’s plastered like a cellar and got up practically like a she-devil. Oh, who would ever have believed it!”
In my cramped drawing room, Nicole, prettily befrilled, having tossed her astrakhan jacket onto a pouffe, was amusing herself by recognising the English engravings and the terracotta figurines exiled with me in these ordinary regions. She threw herself upon my neck and nearly suffocated me. Then came abundant and disconnected chatter, from which it emerged that she had left the conjugal home after having voluntarily compromised herself with a vague country squire who frequented her house. Hence a legal separation, prelude to a probable divorce. M. Suréda had attempted to reconcile the two spouses, but in vain. He had then committed Nicole to the avenging action of the laws. As for Madame Suréda, growing ever more yellow and bent upon severity, she was trying to amend her daughter by sending her from Lières to Paris, almost daily, extracts from unctuous homilies and edifying biographies.
Nicole had settled in the avenue Kléber, in a smart apartment: “You will come to see me there, Aurélia. I have charming friends whom I will introduce to you — an American family I met at my cousins’. They live next door to me and we are inseparable.” — And with perfect ease: “Let them call me a déclassée, an adventuress — what does it matter? Now I know myself: I am not a domestic creature. I am made for the free life, for the surprises of chance. What can I do against my destiny?”
I did not know what to reply. She dazed me. She showed, in affirming her right to anarchy, the same assurance as of old, when she used to prattle gaily. — Could you really no longer live down there, Nicole? — Oh, come now! Old Latour is paralysed; my late husband does just as he pleases. He treated me as an inferior animal. And then, since he has cut the wages, lengthened the hours, abolished all Papa’s philanthropic machinery, he is detested. There have even been partial strikes; soon there will be a great one. And me — they detested me just the same. This enveloping hatred prevented me from living. So I made my move, and bolted.
She planted her shining, too-bold eyes in mine: “Still beautiful, you are, Aurélia. And what a toilette! Only you are very pale, my darling, very diminished, and your cough tears the ears. What about going to luncheon?” And removing her toque, she tossed it onto an armchair: “Let us go, Aurélia, I am treating you.” She was still the same little girl. Outside, a fine clear frost. The light fell straight upon my portrait: “That is certainly you,” Nicole judged. “But what a baleful expression! You look like a wicked fairy who happens to be pretty.” And her ringing laugh shot through the house. In the small hall, Nicole kissed Jacques, who was very dignified and asked: “Do you know my auntie? She dresses like you.” Nicole, amused, let fly nonsensical remarks and ate like a young she-wolf. Toward the end of the meal, Jacques went off to run about in the garden.
— Where has your fine assurance gone, Aurélia? One would think I frighten you. Have I become a scarecrow, by emancipating myself? And yet this revolutionary act has rather made me better. Respect for prejudices nourishes a malevolent, pitiless pride. Now I judge everything with indulgence. Admit that it is a small step forward. — What do you intend to do? I murmured, almost timidly. — I live in the present. I frequent with my exotic companions the theatres and the frivolous places; I am educating myself in worldly things; I dress a great deal. I give myself to certain sports. I work myself into fevers or maintain myself in a voluptuous abandon. I do my accounts and manage my income; and that is all. I foresee nothing; I do not rummage in the future. One never does anything but what it pleases us to do or what is imposed upon us: a double constraint — that of fancy and that of fatality — which drives our calculations to unexpected solutions, without consulting our plans for existence. This theory seems enormous to you; it offends deep convictions in you. But you are not above the law. The adoption of this child — who is an angel, by the way — is neither the conclusion of a reasoning nor the result of an experience. You did it because you need to love, and not just anyone, but Him, the departed, and everything that attaches to Him. And perhaps you have never acted — upon me, upon others, upon this child, upon yourself — except according to your violent regrets and your sterilised dreams.
It was with feebleness, in a thin and slow voice, head bowed, arms hanging, that I answered. I argued that I was not much of a woman, that I deliberated and decided with a dry soul, that I hated sentimentalism. And other such assertions, which no longer seemed to me either lies or truths. Nicole assumed a grave air that was new to me, tried a sad smile, and murmured: “Does one ever really know, in any case, why one goes this way rather than that: the motives alleged after the fact no longer satisfy.”
We went out. A light haze was rising around the skeletons of trees. Along the paved road that leads from the Abreuvoir to Port-Marly, not a cat, not a rustle. It was the great winter sleep. Nicole prescribed tisanes for me and begged me to come see her at her home. — At least you will not hesitate to visit an excommunicate, a cursed girl, and a citizen placed outside the law. And I divined, in the discreet trembling of the words, behind this question that wished to be comical, a little anxious pride. Then a blaze of tender enthusiasm warmed me; and as her tramway was about to leave, I kissed her, calling her little Nicole, as in former times.
Only, when she was no longer there, the shame of defeat weighed again upon my strength. I had the impression of being paltrily malign. I called into question the sincerity of my former reformist zeal. As Jacques was clinging to my arm, the sudden idea that I might do harm to this weak and trusting being assailed me with the violence of a squall, and a sweat froze my skin. Jacques meanwhile was speaking to me. But receiving no answer, he grew sombre. The haze was thickening into mist, and I believe we were both walking in a nightmare.
Extract from the Journal
Marly, 15 February 1885 and following days
Thus, from the height of my reinforced dogmatism — a position retaken and stubbornly held — I harry the senses and the thought of this child, to discipline them coldly into analyses and austere reflections. I do not seem to perceive the wild desires that at moments invade me, to liberate us both, to live an untroubled and trusting life — I teaching him as occasions arise, he charming me with his ingenuous gratitude. No, I am too afraid of the sudden returns of the past, of the images whose seductive trace I would abruptly find again in him. And then, no doubt, I would do him harm, as I did to the others. I would certainly have the will to enlarge and beautify his soul, but an illusory will, the excuse for a voluptuous inclination. I would certainly devise theories to justify my indulgent method, but hypocritical theories, good only for hiding weaknesses of the heart, sensible attractions, a whole complicated selfishness.
He, meanwhile, with a somewhat dull docility, listens, obeys passively, without impulse as without effort, and he is no more than a small effaced being whose existence grows more silent each day. Rarely, and as if by forgetting himself, he overflows — with a moist look, a childish manner, a bird-cry — but at once, wary and retractile, he collects himself again, he falls back into a humble reserve. He said to me one day, as we were walking along the old mossy aqueduct under a spongy sky: “I’m trying to think whether I’ve been naughty to you, and I think I haven’t. So why have you changed with me? You’re not mean, I know that. So you’re sad and you won’t say why. But you know: I’m your little brother and I love you.” It was the only time he allowed me a glimpse of his preoccupations, and he embarrassed me greatly. What could I say to him? He would have understood nothing. I lied, declaring that I loved him always in the same way, that I had in view only his sole interest in imposing a somewhat strict discipline. He was not taken in, and remained closed.
I saw myself a little while ago in a mirror — the thin white face of a dying woman or a Carmelite nun. My mind is less quick, less curious, and more inclined to the languor of reveries. My throat is torn, I have shivers of fever, cold sweats, very hot hands, weak legs. Annette’s tisanes and innocent remedies do nothing. A nameless anguish takes from me all possibility of rest and quietude. The bourgeois calm of the little house near the sleeping village would be salutary, if I could curl up in the bourgeois peace of the senses and the mind. But, with no more strength to realise themselves, the old chimeras haunt me — or at least their ghost.
How far away my reason for being is! And yet the occasion is there — the occasion to enrich and enlarge a soul. Is it the defeat that has broken me? But it is not too late to make up for it with a victory. Is it the difficulty of the task that terrifies me? For the excessive resignation of this child precludes the enthusiasm that would spur my will to succeed. But must I need him to encourage me, and is it not from me that the enthusiasm must be born? Yes, at moments, with a joyous intoxication, I picture him grown, young and handsome, his expression and his voice grave, in a position to see, to know, and to address the multitudes — like an apostle or a prophet — and taking pleasure in consoling, in uniting, in building wide and lasting happinesses. I attribute to him persuasive speeches, gestures of tenderness, examples of sacrifice, an exquisite and powerful charm. — Vain image! It is my desire that creates it, to play at ease within it. But why is it always he who furnishes the sketch?
And now I scarcely dare look at him. Yesterday I played a fugue by Bach, to impose its severe and stubborn rhythm upon my feelings. But soon my sight silted up, my aching arms fell. And mechanically, still seated at the piano, I was looking at the score — the rise and fall of the black notes between the vertical divisions of the staves. My strange embarrassment at being there, doing and thinking nothing, gazing stupidly at black upon white, caused my posture to shift little by little; and suddenly I perceived, reflected in the smooth varnish of the instrument, the silhouette of Jacques, seated behind me — his right forearm propped on his knee to serve as a support for his chin, his back hunched, his eyes fixed — motionless, as if he were still listening. And I started: for moments already lived were unexpectedly coming back to life. Thus outlined in the lustre of the ebony, it was almost Maurice — as he used to appear to me long ago, still listening after I had stopped playing. He resembles him too much. He recovers the same habitual gestures, the same daily attitudes, almost the same way of articulating words and scanning phrases — but with that begging, demanding grace of small children who implore laughing attention and caresses.
Extract from the Journal
Marly, 18 February 1885
Delbove said to me once: “To act for the best of other beings — it is not possible. To improvise oneself a demiurge in order to mould noble consciences, to build happinesses around oneself — it is charlatanism or illusion. Will you ever cease to be yourself in order to feel, with the soul of your patients, what may suit and delight them?” And as I spoke to him of my hatred of inert selfishness, which lets things be, he added, drawing a puff from his cherrywood pipe: “I do not praise inertia. I love action that is useful and humane, whether it be violence or gentleness. But I hold it to be an achievement of blind passion, not the application of some banal idea that one wishes to realise.”
Extract from the Journal
Marly, 25 February
He is in bed upstairs, his hands hidden beneath the sheets. His half-closed eyes gaze inward. He answers yes and no so softly that one can barely hear. His forehead burns like fire. The doctor shook his head.
[Undated]
Meningitis. Three nights of vigil in horror. His face has melted away. People spoke to me; I heard nothing. Delbove tried to drag me away; a struggle. Muffled voices, whisperings. A little while ago I fell asleep like a brute on my chaise longue. Then a round shape with the head of a beast and a black arm came and sat on my chest. An agonised awakening. Who is upstairs? Ah yes — Nicole, Delbove, M. Violet. Why these people? I would like to be alone, all alone with my sick child. They are stealing him from me; they are killing him.
Here the journal of Aurélia ends. What follows was communicated to me by M. Violet.
Jacques died in the night of the 26th to the 27th of February. Aurélia had become an inert thing. She neither spoke nor moved. Her old servant had to force food into her mouth. It was soon apparent that she no longer had either will or desire. Delbove came to visit her almost every day. But her eyes no longer saw him; her ears no longer heard anything. She ended by no longer swallowing, and rejected all food. In her, the most mechanical activity seemed abolished. The cough that ceaselessly tore her lungs brought forth, around the time of the first leaves, some pink spots upon her livid cheeks.
On the last Sunday in April, she appeared to notice Delbove and leaned on his arm to go out to the garden: the air was warm and luminous. Suddenly, a hoarse fit of coughing shook her exhausted body. Blood came from her mouth. Her eyes dilated. Then Delbove took her in his arms, and in them she died. He carried back this lamentable burden without stiffening his muscles: she had become so light that a child could have laid her in her coffin.
March 1897 — January 1898 Saint-Germain-en-Laye