Near the fireplace you will recognize C. He is unstopping a small bottle and explaining to the woman next to him that he has created a concentrate of the most potent and most exotic perfumes. B, in despair at the fact that he cannot outdo his rival, and reflecting that the surest way of overtaking fashion is to be brazenly old-fashioned, is sniffing two pennyworth of violets and staring contemptuously at C***.
Did not you yourself try to get “back to nature” by resorting to these artificial means? I would like to have depicted (if such details had not been too tiny to be made out clearly), in a quiet corner of your musical library of that period, your Wagner operas, your symphonies by Franck and d’Indy pushed to one side, and on your piano some scores by Haydn, Handel or Palestrina,* all still open.
I had no compunction about depicting you on the pink sofa. T*** is there, sitting next to you. He is describing his new bedroom, skilfully treated with tar to evoke the sensations of a sea journey, and he is detailing for you all the quintessences of his dressing table and his furnishings.
Your disdainful smile bears witness to the fact that you have little esteem for that infirm imagination which finds that a bare bedroom is not in itself quite enough to contain within it all the visions of the universe – an imagination which conceives of art and beauty in such a pitifully materialistic way.
Your most delightful lady friends are there. Would they ever forgive me if you were to show them my fan? I don’t know. The most strangely beautiful of them, who seemed a living and breathing Whistler to our marvelling eyes, would not have recognized and admired herself unless she had been portrayed by Bouguereau.* Women incarnate beauty without understanding it.
They will say, perhaps, “We merely like a beauty different from yours. Why should it be any less beautiful?”
Let them allow me at least to say this: how few women understand the aesthetic which makes them what they are! A Botticelli virgin would have found Botticelli himself gauche and artless, were it not for the dictates of fashion.
Accept this fan with indulgence. If one of the shades that, after flitting through my memory, have settled on it, happened – while still a participant in life – to make you weep, then recognize it without bitterness, reflecting that it is a shade and will not make you suffer any more.
I have managed to set down these shades innocently on this frail paper, to which the movement of your hand will give wings, only because they are too unreal and too insignificant to be able to do any harm…
No more harm, perhaps, than when you invited them to come for a few hours to forestall death and live the vain life of phantoms, in the artificial joys of your salon, under the chandeliers whose branches were covered with great pale flowers.
13
Olivian
Why do we see you going to the theatre every evening, Olivian? Don’t your friends have more wit than Pantaloon, Scaramouche or Pasquariello?* And would it not be nicer to have supper with them? But you could do better. If the theatre is the resort of conversationalists with tongue-tied friends or insipid mistresses, then conversation, however exquisite, is the pleasure of men without imagination. It is a complete waste of time trying to tell you, Olivian, what a man of wit does not need to have dunned into him, since he learns it quite simply by making conversation. The voice of the soul and the imagination is the only voice which can make the entire soul and imagination echo in harmony; and part of the time you killed in trying to make yourself popular would have given you – if only you had brought that time to life, if you had nourished it with reading or reverie, by your fireside in the winter or in your gardens in the summer – a rich memory of deeper and fuller hours. Have the courage to take up your spade and your rake. One day you will be filled with pleasure when you smell a sweet perfume rising from your memory, as from a wheelbarrow filled to brimming.
Why do you travel so much? Carriages take you so slowly to destinations you could reach so quickly in your dreams. In order to be at the seaside, you need only close your eyes. Let those who have only bodily eyes force their entire households to follow them and settle in Pozzuoli or Naples. You want to finish a book there, you say? Where will you work better than here in town? Within its walls, you can elaborate the most grandiose settings you desire; here you will avoid more easily than in Pozzuoli the lunches given by the Princess of Bergamo, and you will be less often tempted to go for a stroll without accomplishing anything. Above all, why do you insist so strenuously on enjoying the present, weeping when you cannot manage to do so? Man of imagination, you can enjoy things only in nostalgia or in anticipation: in other words, you can enjoy only the past or the future.
That is why, Olivian, you are discontented with your mistress, your holidays in the country, and yourself. The reason for these ills is something that you have perhaps already noted; but in that case, why do you continue to wallow in them rather than trying to be cured of them? The fact is that you are thoroughly wretched, Olivian. You have hardly reached manhood, and already you are a man of letters.
14
Characters from the Social Comedy
Just as in comedies Scaramouche is always boastful and Harlequin always oafish, the behaviour of Pasquino is plotting and intrigue and that of Pantaloon avarice and credulity; likewise, society has decreed that Guido is witty but treacherous, and would not hesitate to sacrifice a friend for the sake of a clever joke; that Girolamo hoards, beneath an external appearance of rough-and-ready frankness, treasures of sensitivity; that Castruccio, whose vices anyone can castigate, is the most faithful friend and the most scrupulous son; that Iago, despite ten fine books, is a mere amateur, while a few poor newspaper articles have immediately meant that Ercole is acclaimed as a writer; and that Cesare must be something of a policeman – a reporter or a spy. Cardenio is a snob and Pippo’s amiability is quite insincere, for all his protestations of friendship. As for Fortunata, the definitive verdict has been pronounced: she is nice and kind. Her plump curves are quite enough to guarantee the benevolence of her character: how could such a fat lady be a nasty person?
In addition, each person is by nature quite different from the character which society has fetched from the general store of roles and costumes and imposed on him once and for all, and deviates all the more from that character since the a-priori conception of his good qualities, by opening up for him a generous credit of the corresponding failings, gives him the benefit of a sort of impunity. His immutable character as a faithful friend in general allows Castruccio to betray each of his friends in particular. Only the friend suffers from it: “What a villain he must have been for Castruccio – such a faithful friend – to abandon him!” Fortunata can spill rivers of malicious gossip. Who would be foolish enough to seek the source of those rumours within the folds of her bodice, whose shapeless plumpness serves to conceal everything? Girolamo can practise flattery without fear, since his habitual frankness makes it seem even more piquantly unexpected.
He can treat one of his friends with a rudeness bordering on ferocity, since it is understood that this brutality is all in the friend’s best interests. Cesare asks me about my health: it is so he can report back to the Doge. He didn’t even ask me how I am: how well he knows how to hide his hand! Guido comes up to greet me, he compliments me on how well I am looking. “Nobody is as witty as he
