I had not been reading in my room for very long before having to go to the park, a kilometre out of the village. But this enforced playtime over, I would cut short the end of tea, which had been brought in baskets and handed out to the children by the river bank, on the grass where my book had been laid with orders not to pick it up again. A little further on, in certain rather overgrown and rather mysterious reaches of the park, the river ceased from being an artificial, rectilinear watercourse, covered with swans and lined by paths of cheerful statues, and skipping now and again with carp, and gathered speed, flowed rapidly on past the enclosure of the park to become a river in the geographical sense of the word – a river which must have had a name – and to lose no time in spreading itself out (was it really the same one as between the statues and beneath the swans?) between pastures where cattle slept and whose buttercups it had drowned, a sort of meadowland it had made quite marshy, attached on one side to the village by some shapeless towers, remains it was said, of the Middle Ages, while on the other side it was joined, up climbing paths of eglantine and hawthorn, to ‘nature’, which stretched away into infinity, villages which had other names, the unknown.
I would leave the others to finish having tea at the bottom of the park, beside the swans, and run up into the maze as far as some arbour or other and there sit, unfindable, my back against the clipped hazel bushes, taking note of the asparagus bed, the edging of strawberry plants, the ornamental lake up into which, on certain days, the water would be pumped by circling horses, the white gate at the top which was the ‘end of the park’ and, beyond it, the fields of poppies and cornflowers.
In my arbour the silence was profound, the risk of being discovered negligible, my security made all the sweeter by the distant shouts summoning me in vain from down below, which at times even drew closer, mounted the first banks, searching everywhere, but then turned back again, not having found; then, no further sound; only, from time to time, the golden notes of the bells that, far away, beyond the plains, seemed to be ringing out behind the blue sky and might have warned me that time was passing; but surprised by their softness and troubled by the deeper silence, emptied of their last notes that ensued, I was never certain of the number of strokes.
These were not the thunderous bells you heard when re-entering the village – as you approached the church which, from close to, had resumed its tall, rigid stature, its slate cowl punctuated by corbels standing up against the blue of the evening – shivering the sound into splinters on the village square ‘for the good things of the earth’. They were soft and feeble by the time they reached the end of the park and being directed not at me, but at the whole countryside, at all the villages, at the country people isolated in their fields, they in no way obliged me to look up but passed close beside me, carrying the time to distant places, without seeing me, or recognizing me, or disturbing me.
And sometimes in the house, in my bed, long after dinner, the last hours of the evening would also give shelter to my reading, but only on days when I had come to the last chapters of a book, when there was not much to be read before getting to the end.
Then, at the risk of being punished if I was discovered, or of an insomnia which might last right through the night once the book was finished, as soon as my parents were in bed I relit my candle; while in the street nearby, between the gunsmith’s house and the post office, both steeped in silence, the dark yet blue sky was full of stars, and to the left, above the raised alley-way where one began the winding ascent to it, you could sense the monstrous black apse of the church to be watching, whose sculptures did not sleep at night, a village church yet a historic one, the magical dwelling-place of the Good Lord, of the consecrated loaf, of the multicoloured saints and of the ladies from the neighbouring châteaux who set the hens squawking and the gossips staring as they crossed the marketplace on feast-days, when they came to mass ‘in their turn-outs’, and who, on their way home, just after they had emerged from the shadow of the porch where the faithful were scattering the vagrant rubies of the nave as they pushed open the door of the vestibule, did not fail to buy from the pâtissier in the square some of those cakes shaped like towers, which were protected from the sunlight by a blind – ‘manqués’, ‘saint-honorés’ and ‘genoa cakes’, whose indolent, sugary aroma has remained mingled for me with the bells for high mass and the gaiety of Sundays.
Then the last page had been read, the book was finished. The frantic career of the eyes and of the voice which had been following them, noiselessly, pausing only to catch its breath, had to be halted, in a deep sigh.
And then, so as to give the turbulence loose inside me for too long to be able to still itself other movements to control, I would get up and start walking up and down by my bed, my eyes still fixed on some point that might have been looked for in vain either inside the room or without, for it was the distance of a soul away, one of those distances not to be measured in metres or in miles, unlike others, and which it is impossible moreover to mistake for them once one sees the ‘remote’ stare of those whose thoughts are ‘elsewhere’.
Was there no more to the book than this, then? These creatures on whom one had bestowed more attention and affection than on those in real life, not always daring to admit to what extent you loved them, and even, when my parents found me reading and seemed to smile at my emotion, closing the book with studied indifference or a pretence of boredom; never again would one see these people for whom one had sobbed and yearned, never again hear of them. Already, in the last few pages, the author himself, in his cruel ‘Epilogue’, had been careful to ‘space them out’ with an indifference not to be credited by anyone who knew the interest with which he had followed them hitherto, step by step.
The occupation of each hour of their lives had been narrated to us. Then, all of a sudden: ‘Twenty years after these events an old man might have been met with in the rue des Fougères, still erect, etc.’1 And the marriage, the delightful possibility of which we have been enabled to glimpse through two whole volumes, fearful at first and then overjoyed as each obstacle was raised and then smoothed away, we learn from a casual phrase by some minor character that it has been celebrated, we do not know exactly when, in this astonishing epilogue written, it would seem, from up in heaven, by someone indifferent to our momentary passions who has taken the author’s place.
One would have so much liked for the book to continue or, if that was impossible, to have other facts about all these characters, to learn something of their lives now, to employ our own on things not altogether unconnected with the love they have inspired in us,2 whose object was now all of a sudden gone from us, not to have loved in vain, for an hour, human beings who tomorrow will be no more than a name on a forgotten page, in a book unrelated to our lives and as to whose value we were certainly mistaken since its fate here below, as we could now see and as our parents had taught us when need arose by a dismissive phrase, was not at all, as we had thought, to contain the universe and our own destiny, but to occupy a very narrow space in the lawyer’s bookcase, between the unglamorous archives of the Journal de modes illustré and La Géographie d’Eure-et-Loir.
Before attempting to show, on the threshold to ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’, why in my opinion Reading should not play the preponderant role in life assigned to it by Ruskin in this little work, I needed to make an exception for that delightful childhood reading the memory of which must remain a benediction for each one of us. No doubt the length and nature of the preceding exposition proves only too well what I had first of all claimed for it: that what it chiefly leaves behind in us is the image of the places and the times
