Alas! Our feelings brought these insights to us and our capricious feelings take them away: sadness, a higher quality than gaiety, is not as enduring as virtue. This morning we have already forgotten the tragedy which last night elevated us so high that we were able to view our life as a whole and as a reality, with a clear-sighted and sincere pity. After just a year, perhaps, we will be consoled for the betrayal of a woman or the death of a friend. The wind, amidst this flotsam of dreams, this scattered chaos of withered joys, has sown the good seed and watered it with tears, but those tears will dry too quickly for it ever to germinate.
(After L’Invitée by M. de Curel*)
13
In Praise of Bad Music
Detest bad music if you will, but don’t hold it in contempt. As it is played and sung much more often and much more passionately than good music, so much more than the latter has it gradually been filled with the dreams and tears of mankind. For that reason you should venerate it. Its place, insignificant in the history of art, is huge in the sentimental history of societies. Respect for – I do not say love for – bad music is not merely a form of what might be called the charity of good taste or its scepticism, it is, more than that, the awareness of the importance of the social role of music. How many melodies, worthless in the eyes of an artist, become the confidants chosen by a whole host of romantic young men and of women in love. How many “golden rings” and “Ah! Sleep on, sleep on, mistress mine”, the pages of which are tremulously turned every evening by justly celebrated hands, and watered by the most beautiful eyes in the world with tears whose melancholy and voluptuous tribute would arouse the envy of the most stringent maestro in the world – ingenious and inspired confidants who ennoble sorrow and exalt dreams, and, in exchange for the ardent secret confided to them, give the intoxicating illusion of beauty. The working classes, the bourgeoisie, the army, the nobility, just as they have the same postmen to bring news of some grief to afflict them with sorrow or some happiness to fill them with pleasure, have the same invisible messengers of love and the same cherished confessors – in other words, bad musicians. The irritating refrain, for instance, that any refined and well-trained ear will immediately refuse to listen to, has been the repository for the riches of thousands of souls, and keeps the secret of thousands of lives, for which it was the living inspiration, the ever-ready consolation, always lying half-open on the piano’s music stand – a source of dreamy grace for those lives, and an ideal. Those arpeggios too, or that “re-entry” of the theme, have aroused in the soul of more than one lover or dreamer an echo of the harmonies of paradise or the very voice of the beloved woman. A book of bad romances, worn out by overuse, ought to touch us like a cemetery or a village. What does it matter if the houses have no style, if the tombs are overladen with inscriptions and ornaments in bad taste? From this dust there may arise, in the eyes of an imagination friendly and respectful enough to silence for a moment its aesthetic disdain, the flock of souls holding in their beaks the still-verdant dream that gave them a foretaste of the other world and filled them with joy or tears in this one.
14
A Meeting by the Lakeside
Yesterday, before going to have dinner in the Bois, I received a letter from Her – a rather frigid reply, a week after I had sent her a despairing letter, to say that she was afraid she would not be able to bid me farewell before leaving. And I, quite frigidly, yes, I replied to her that it was better like that and that I wished her a pleasant summer. Then I got dressed and crossed the Bois in an open carriage. I was extremely sad, but calm. I was resolved to forget, my mind was made up: it was just a matter of time.
As the carriage moved down the avenue to the lake, I spotted at the very far end of the little path that goes round the lake, fifty metres from the avenue, a solitary woman walking slowly along. I did not at first make her out clearly. She gave me a little wave, and then I recognized her in spite of the distance between us. It was her! I gave her a long slow wave. And she continued to gaze at me as if she had wished to see me stop and take her with me. I did nothing of the kind, but I soon felt an emotion seizing on me as if from some external source and holding me tightly in its grip. “I knew it!” I exclaimed to myself. “There is a reason unknown to me which has always led her to pretend to be indifferent. She loves me, the little darling!” A boundless happiness and an invincible certainty overwhelmed me; I felt as if I would faint, and I burst into tears. The carriage was approaching Armenonville, I wiped my eyes and over them passed, as if to dry their tears, the sweet wave of her hand, and her gently questioning eyes gazed steadfastly on mine, asking to get into the carriage with me.
I arrived at the dinner in a radiant mood. My happiness overflowed on everyone in the form of a joyous, grateful and cordial affability; and the feeling that none of them knew what hand, unknown to them (the little hand that had waved to me) had lit within me that great fire of joy whose blaze everyone could see – this feeling imbued my happiness with the added charm of a secret pleasure. We were waiting only for Mme de T*** and she soon arrived. She is the most insignificant person I know, and despite quite a good figure, the least likeable. But I was too happy not to forgive each of her failings and her ugliness, and I went up to her with an affectionate smile.
“You weren’t so friendly just now,” she said.
“Just now?” I said in astonishment. “Just now? But I didn’t see you.”
“What – you didn’t recognize me? It’s true you were some way away; I was walking by the lakeside, you passed proudly by in your carriage, I waved to you and I would really rather have liked to get into your carriage so as not to be late.”
“Oh, it was you!” I exclaimed, and I added several times with an expression of great sorrow, “Oh, please forgive me! Please forgive me!”
“How unhappy he looks! My compliments, Charlotte,” said the hostess. “But cheer up, young man, you’re with her now!”
I was devastated; my happiness had been totally destroyed.
Well, the most horrible thing about my mistake was that it refused to go away. That loving image of the woman who no longer loved me changed for a good long while my idea of her even once I had recognized my error. I tried to patch it up between us, I took longer to forget her, and often, in my pain, to try and console myself by forcing myself to believe that those hands had, as I’d at first sensed, belonged to her, I would close my eyes to see again her little hands waving to me, hands that would so nicely have wiped away my tears, and cooled my brow, her little gloved hands that she gently held out to me by the lakeside like frail symbols of peace, love and reconciliation while her sad, questioning eyes seemed to be asking me to take her with me.
15
Just as a blood-red sky warns the passer-by that there is a fire in the distance, certain fiery glances, of course, can betray passions that they serve merely to reflect. They are flames in the mirror. But sometimes, as well, indifferent and cheerful people have eyes as vast and sombre as sorrows, as if a filter were held out between their souls and their eyes and as if they had so to speak “filtered” all the living content of their soul into their eyes. Henceforth, warmed only by the fervour of their egotism – that likeable fervour of egotism which attracts others just as much as incendiary passion repels them – their shrivelled souls will be little more than a factitious palace of intrigue.
