Scenario
Honoré is sitting in his room. He stands up and looks at himself in the mirror:
His Tie: You have so often loaded my knot with languor and loosened it dreamily—my expressive and slightly undone knot. You must be in love, my friend, but why are you sad? . . .
His Pen: Yes, why are you sad? For a week now, my master, you have been overworking me, and yet I have thoroughly altered my lifestyle! I, who seemed destined for more glorious tasks, I believe that henceforth I will write only love letters, to judge by this stationery that you have just had made. However, these love letters will be sad, as presaged by the high-strung despair with which you seize me and suddenly put me down. You are in love, my friend, but why are you sad?
Roses, Orchids, Hydrangeas, Maidenhair Ferns, Columbines (all of which fill the room): You have always loved us, but never have you rallied so many of us at once to enchant you with our proud and delicate poses, our eloquent gestures, and the poignant voices of our fragrances. For you we are certainly the very image of the fresh charms of your beloved. You are in love, my friend, but why are you sad? . . .
Books: We were always your prudent advisors, forever questioned, forever unheeded. But while we never caused you to act, we did make you understand; nevertheless you dashed to your doom, but at least you did not struggle in the dark and as if in a nightmare: do not thrust us aside like old and now unwanted tutors. You held us in your childhood hands. Your still pure eyes gaped at us in amazement. If you do not love us for ourselves, then love us for everything we remind you of about yourself, for everything you have been, for everything you could have been, and is not “could have been” almost “have been” while you dreamed about it?
Come listen to our familiar and admonishing voices; we will not tell you why you are in love, but we will tell you why you are sad, and if our child despairs and cries, we will tell him stories, we will lull him as we once did when his mother’s voice lent our words its gentle authority before the fire that blazed with all its sparks, with all your hopes and dreams.
Honoré: I am in love with her and I believe I am going to be loved. But my heart tells me that I, who used to be so fickle, I will love her forever, and my good fairy knows that I will be loved for only one month. That is why before entering the paradise of these fleeting joys I have paused at the threshold to dry my eyes.
His Good Fairy: Dear friend, I have come from the heavens to bring you your dispensation; your happiness will depend on you. If, during one month, you play any tricks, thereby running the risk of spoiling the joys you looked forward to at the start of this love, if you disdain the woman you love, if you flirt with other women and pretend indifference, if you miss appointments with her and turn your lips away from the bosom she holds out to you like a sheaf of roses, then your shared and faithful love will be constructed 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 Small Dresden Clock: Your beloved is late, my hand has already advanced beyond the minute that you have been dreaming about for so long, the minute at which your beloved was due. I fear that my monotonous tick-tock will scan your sensual and melancholy wait for a long time; though I tell time, I understand nothing about life; the sad hours follow the joyous minutes, as indistinguishable for me as bees in a hive. . . .
(The bell rings; a servant goes to open the door.)
The Good Fairy: Remember to obey me and remember that the eternity of your love depends on it.
(The clock ticks feverishly, the fragrances of the roses waft uneasily, and the tormented orchids lean anxiously toward Honoré; one orchid looks wicked. Honoré’s inert pen gazes at him, sad that it cannot move. The books do not interrupt their grave murmuring. Everything tells Honoré: Obey the fairy and remember that the eternity of your love depends on that. . . .)
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 the paper, the Dresden clock, and a breathless Honoré all quiver as if in harmony with her.)
Honoré flings himself upon her lips, shouting: “I love you!
Epilogue: It was as if he had blown out the flame of his beloved’s desire. Pretending to be shocked by the impropriety of his action, she fled, and if ever he saw her after that, she would torture him with a severe and indifferent glance. . . .
The Fan
Madame, I have painted this fan for you.
May it, as you wish in your retirement, evoke the vain and enchanting figures that peopled your salon, which was so rich with graceful life and is now closed forever.
The chandeliers, whose branches all bear large, pallid flowers, illuminate objets d’art of all eras and all countries. I was thinking about the spirit of our time as my brush led the curious gazes of those chandeliers across the diversity of your knick-knacks. Like them the spirit of our time has contemplated samples of thought or life from all centuries all over the world. It has inordinately widened the circle of its excursions. Out of pleasure, out of boredom, it has varied them as we vary our strolls; and now, deterred from finding not even the destination but just the right path, feeling its strength dwindling and its courage deserting it, the spirit of our time has lain down with its face on the earth to avoid seeing anything, like a brutish beast.
Nevertheless I have painted the rays of your chandeliers delicately; with amorous melancholy these rays have caressed so many things and so many people, and now they are snuffed forever. Despite the small format of this picture, you may recognize the foreground figures, all of whom the impartial artist has highlighted identically, just like your equal sympathies: great lords, beautiful women, and talented men. A bold reconciliation in the eyes of the world, though inadequate and unjust according to reason; yet it turned your society into a small universe that was less divided and more harmonious than that other world, a small world that was full of life and that we will never see again.
I therefore would not want my fan to be viewed by an indifferent person, who has never frequented salons like yours and who would be astonished to see “politesse” unite dukes without arrogance and novelists without pretentiousness. Nor might he, that stranger, comprehend the vices of this rapprochement, which, if excessive, will soon facilitate only one exchange: that of ridiculous things. He would, no doubt, find a pessimistic realism in the spectacle of the bergère on the right, where a great author, to all appearances a snob, is listening to a great lord, who, dipping into a book, seems to be holding forth about a poem, and whose expression, if I have managed to make it foolish enough, shows quite well that he understands nothing.
Near the fireplace you will recognize C.
He is uncorking a scent bottle and explaining to the woman next to him that he has concentrated the most pungent and most exotic perfumes in this blend.
B., despairing of outdoing him, and thinking that the surest way to be ahead of fashion is to be hopelessly out of fashion, is sniffing some cheap violets and glaring scornfully at C.
As for you yourself, have you not gone on one of those artificial returns to nature? Had those details not been too minuscule to remain distinct, I would have depicted, in some obscure nook of your music library at that time, your now abandoned Wagner operas, your now discarded symphonies by Franck and d’Indy and, on your piano, several open scores by Haydn, Handel, or Palestrina.
I did not shy away from depicting you on the pink sofa. T. is seated next to you. He is describing his new bedroom, which he artfully smeared with tar in order to suggest the sensations of an ocean voyage, and he is disclosing all the quintessences of his wardrobe and his furnishings.
Your disdainful smile reveals that you set no store by this feeble imagination, for which a bare chamber does not suffice for conjuring up all the visions of the universe and which conceives of art and beauty in such pitifully material terms.
Your most delightful friends are present. Would they ever forgive me if you showed them the fan? I cannot say. The most unusually beautiful woman, standing out like a living Whistler before our enchanted eyes, would recognize and admire herself only in a portrait by Bouguereau. Women incarnate beauty without understanding it.
Your friends may say: “We simply love a beauty that is not yours. Why should it be beauty any less than yours?”
Let them at least allow me to say: “So few women comprehend their own aesthetics. There are Botticelli madonnas who, but for fashion, would
