10
An elegant milieu is one in which the opinion of each consists of the opinion of all the others. And if the opinion of each consists in holding the opposite opinion to all the others, it’s a literary milieu.
*
The libertine’s desire to take a virgin is still a form of the eternal homage paid by love to innocence.
*
On leaving the **, you go to see the ***, and the stupidity, the malice and the wretched situation of the ** is dissected before your eyes. Overwhelmed by admiration for the lucidity of the ***, you at first blush with shame at having initially had any esteem for the **. But when you go back to see them again, they shoot holes through the *** using more or less the same tactics. To go from one to the other is to visit two enemy camps. But as the one side can never hear the shots fired by the other, it thinks that it alone is armed. Once you have noticed that the supply of arms is the same and that the strength, or rather the weakness, is more or less equal on each side, you cease to admire the side that is shooting and to despise the side under attack. This is the beginning of wisdom. Wisdom itself would mean having nothing more to do with either side.
11
Scenario
Honoré is sitting in his bedroom. He rises and looks at himself in the mirror:
HIS CRAVAT: How many times have you languorously tied my expressive and slightly loose knot, and dreamily patted it into shape? So you are in love, dear friend; but why are you sad?…
HIS PEN: Yes, why are you sad? For a whole week you have been overworking me, Master, and yet I have really changed my lifestyle. I, who seemed destined for more glorious tasks, am starting to think that I will never write anything other than love letters, to judge from this writing paper you have just had designed for yourself. But those love letters will be sad – I can foresee as much from the attacks of hysterical despair during which you pick me up and put me back straight down again. You are in love, my friend, but why are you sad?…
ROSES, ORCHIDS, HORTENSIAS, MAIDENHAIR FERNS AND COLUMBINES (which fill the bedroom): You have always loved us, but never did you summon us in such numbers together to charm you with our proud and winsome poses, our eloquent gestures and the touching intonations of our perfume! To be sure, we represent to you the fresh graces of your beloved. You are in love, but why are you sad?…
BOOKS: We were ever your prudent councillors, always being asked for advice and never heeded. But even if we have never impelled you to act, we did make you understand – and when you nonetheless rushed to your defeat, at least you did not find yourself struggling in the dark, as if in a nightmare: do not relegate us to a distant corner, like old tutors no longer required. You held us in your childish hands. Your eyes, still pure, were filled with astonishment as you contemplated us. If you do not love us for ourselves, love us for the way we remind you about yourself, about all that you have been, all that you might have been; and the fact that you might have been such a person means, does it not, that while you were dreaming of being it, to some extent you were it?
Come and hear our familiar, sermonizing voice; we will not tell you why you are in love, but we will tell you why you are sad, and if our child is filled with despair and begins to weep, we will tell him stories, we will cradle him as once we did when the voice of his mother lent its sweet authority to our words, in front of the fire flickering with all its flames, and with all your hopes and all your dreams.
HONORÉ: I am in love with her and I think I will be loved in return. But my heart tells me that I, who was once so changeable, will always be in love with her, and my good fairy knows that I will be loved by her for only a month. That is why, before entering the paradise of those brief joys, I halt on the threshold to wipe my eyes.
HIS GOOD FAIRY: Dear friend, I have come from heaven to bring you mercy, and your happiness will depend on you yourself. If, for a month, you are prepared to take the risk of spoiling, by an artificial stratagem, the joys you had promised yourself from this relationship, if you disdain the woman you love, if you contrive to behave with a certain coquetry and pretend to be indifferent to her, not turning up at the meeting place you had arranged and refusing to place your lips on her bosom that she will proffer to you like a bouquet of roses, then your mutual, faithful love will rise up proud and strong for all eternity on the incorruptible foundation of your patience.
HONORÉ (jumping for joy): My good fairy, I adore you and I will obey you!
THE LITTLE DRESDEN CLOCK: Your lady friend is not punctual, my finger has already passed the minute you had been dreaming of for so long, the minute at which your beloved was supposed to arrive. I am fearful of marking time for you, with my monotonous tick-tock, as you languish in melancholy expectation; while I know what time is, I understand nothing of life; sad hours take the place of joyful minutes, and melt together within me like bees in a beehive…
The bell rings; a servant goes to open the door.
THE GOOD FAIRY: Remember to obey me: the eternity of your love depends on it.
The clock ticks feverishly, the perfume of the roses grows disquieted, and the orchids twist and turn towards Honoré in anxious torment; one of them has a malicious expression. His inert pen considers him, filled with sadness at not being able to move. The books do not cease from their grave murmuring. Everything tells him, “Obey the fairy and remember that the eternity of your love depends on doing so…”
HONORÉ (without hesitating): Of course I will obey! How can you doubt me?
The beloved enters; the roses, the orchids, the maidenhair ferns, the pen and paper, the Dresden clock and a breathless Honoré all quiver as if vibrating in harmony with her. Honoré flings himself onto her mouth, crying: I love you!…
EPILOGUE: It was as if he had blown out the flame of the beloved’s desire. Pretending to be shocked by the indecent way he had just behaved, she fled, and whenever he encountered her again, it was only to see her torturing him with a stern and indifferent gaze…
12
A Painted Fan
Madame, I have painted this fan for you.
May it, at your desire, evoke in your retreat the vain and charming shapes that peopled your salon, so rich as it then was in gracious living, but now for ever closed.
The chandeliers, all of whose branches bear great pale flowers, shed their radiance on objets d’art from every time and from every land. I kept the spirit of our age in mind while, with my paintbrush, I led the curious glances of those chandeliers to the varied range of your bibelots. Like them, that spirit has contemplated examples of the thought or the life of different centuries throughout the world. It has immeasurably extended the circle of its excursions. Out of pleasure, and out of boredom, it has made them as varied as if they were so many different paths down which to stroll, and now, disheartened at not finding its goal, or even the way to it, and feeling its forces fail and its courage abandoning it, it lies flat on its face on the ground so as to see nothing more, like a brute. And yet I painted the rays shed by your chandeliers with such tenderness; they caressed, with an amorous melancholy, so many things and so many people,
