The theories of William Morris, applied so consistently by Maple and the English interior designers, decree that a bedroom is beautiful solely on condition that it contain only objects that are useful to us and that any useful object, be it a simple nail, should be not concealed but showing. Above the slatted and completely uncovered brass bedstead, on the bare walls of these hygienic bedrooms, a few reproductions of masterpieces. Judged by the principles of which aesthetic, my own bedroom was in no way beautiful, for it was full of objects that could serve no purpose and which modestly concealed, to the extent of making it extremely hard to use them, those which did serve a purpose. But for me it was from these very objects which were not there for my convenience, but seemed to have come for their own pleasure, that my bedroom derived its beauty.
The tall white curtains which hid from view the bed, set back as if in a sanctuary; the scattering of marceline quilts, flowered counterpanes, embroidered bedspreads, and batiste pillow-slips beneath which it disappeared during the day, like an altar beneath its flowers and festoons in the month of Mary, and which, in the evening, so that I could get into bed, I would lay cautiously down on an armchair where they consented to spend the night; beside the bed, the trinity of the glass with its blue designs, the matching sugar bowl and the water-jug (empty ever since the day following my arrival on the orders of my aunt, who was afraid to have me ‘upsetting’ it), like the implements of some religion – almost as holy as the precious orange-blossom liqueur sitting next to them in a glass phial – which I would no more have thought myself permitted to profane or even possible to make use of for my own personal ends than if they had been consecrated ciboria, but which I contemplated at length before getting undressed, for fear of upsetting them by some false movement; the little crochet-work stoles which cast a mantle of white roses over the backs of the armchairs and which cannot have been thornless because, whenever I had finished reading and tried to stand up, I noticed I was still hooked on to them; the glass dome beneath which, immured from vulgar contact, the clock chattered intimately away for the seashells brought from afar and for an old sentimental flower, but which was so heavy to lift up that when the clock stopped, no one, except the clockmaker, would have been rash enough to undertake to rewind it; the white point-lace cloth which had been thrown like an altar-covering over the commode decorated with two vases, a picture of the Saviour and a palm-frond, making it look like the Communion Table (the evocation of which was completed by a prie-dieu, put away there every day when the bedroom was ‘done’), but whose frayed ends were perpetually catching in the cracks of the drawers and stopping them so completely from working that I could never take out a handkerchief without all at once bringing down the picture of the Saviour, the holy vases, and the palm-frond, and without myself stumbling and holding on to the prie-dieu; the triple thickness finally of thin butter-cloth curtains, heavy muslin curtains and still heavier damask curtains, always cheerful and white as the mayblossom and often with the sun on them, yet fundamentally most annoying in the clumsy, obstinate way they moved around their parallel wooden rods and became caught one in the other and all of them together in the window the moment I wanted to open or close it, a second one being ever ready, if I had succeeded in freeing a first, immediately to take its place in the joins, which they stopped up as completely as a real hawthorn bush might have done or the nests of swallows that had taken it into their heads to build there, with the result that I could never manage this apparently very simple operation, of opening or closing my casement, without help from a member of the household; all these objects which not only could not answer to any of my needs but which actually placed an obstacle, albeit slight, in the way of their satisfaction, and which had obviously never been put there to be useful to anyone, peopled my bedroom with thoughts that were somehow personal, with that air of predilection of having chosen to live and enjoy themselves there which trees often have in a clearing, or flowers by the roadside or on old walls.
They filled it with a diverse and silent life, with a mystery in which my person was at once lost and entranced; they made that bedroom into a sort of chapel where the sunshine – once it had passed through the little panes of red glass which my uncle had inserted into the tops of the windows, – after turning the mayblossom of the curtains to pink, speckled the walls with glimmerings as strange as if the little chapel had been enclosed within a larger nave of stained-glass; and where the sound of the bells reached one so resonantly, our house being close to the church, to which we were joined moreover, on high feast-days, by the floral way of the altars of rest, that I could fancy that they were being rung in our own roof, just above the window from which I would often greet the priest with his breviary, or my aunt on her way back from vespers, or the choirboy bringing us consecrated bread.
As for the photograph by Brown of Botticelli’s ‘Spring’ or the cast of the ‘Unknown Woman’ from the museum in Lille, which were William Morris’s concession to a useless beauty on the walls and mantelpieces of Maple’s bedrooms, I have to confess that in my bedroom they had been replaced by a sort of engraving showing Prince Eugène, handsome and terrible in his dolman, which I was greatly astonished to catch sight of one night, amidst a great crashing of locomotives and hailstones, still handsome and terrible, in the entrance to a station buffet, where it was serving as an advertisement for a make of biscuits.
Nowadays I suspect my grandfather of having got it in the old days as a bonus from a generous manufacturer, before installing it permanently in my bedroom. But at that time I was unconcerned by its origins, which seemed to me historical and mysterious, and I did not imagine that there might be several copies of what I looked on as a person, as a permanent inhabitant of the room which I merely shared with him and where every year I rediscovered him, forever the same. It is a long time now since I saw him, and I suppose that I shall never see him again. But were such good fortune to befall me, I believe he would have many more things to say to me than Botticelli’s ‘Spring’.
I leave it to people of taste to decorate their homes with reproductions of the masterpieces which they admire and to relieve their memories of the trouble of preserving a precious image for them by entrusting it to a carved wooden frame. I leave it to people of taste to make of their bedrooms the very image of their taste and to fill them only with those objects of which it can approve.
For myself, I only feel myself live and think in a room where everything is the creation and the language of lives profoundly different from my own, of a taste the opposite of mine, where I can rediscover nothing of my conscious thought, where my imagination is exhilarated by feeling itself plunged into the heart of the non-self; I only feel happy when I set foot – in the Avenue de la Gare, overlooking the harbour, or in the Place de l’Eglise – in one of those provincial hotels with long cold corridors where the wind from outside is winning the battle against the efforts of the central heating, where the detailed map of the locality is still the only decoration on the walls, where each sound serves only to make the silence apparent by displacing it, where the bedrooms preserve a musty aroma which the fresh air washes away but cannot erase, and that the nostrils breathe in a hundred times to carry it to the imagination, which is enchanted by it and makes it pose as a model to try and recreate it within itself with all it contains by way of thoughts and memories; where in the evenings, when you open the door of your bedroom, you feel you are violating all the life that remains dispersed there, taking it boldly by the hand as, the door once closed, you enter further in, up to the table or the window; that you are sitting in a sort of free promiscuity with it on a settee made by the upholsterer in the county town in what he believed was the Parisian style; that you are everywhere touching the bareness of this life in the intention of disturbing yourself by your own familiarity, as you put your things down in this place or that, playing the proprietor in a room filled to overflowing with the souls of others and which preserves the imprint of their
