As for Brown’s photograph of Botticelli’s Spring or the plaster cast of The Unknown Woman from the Lille Museum on the walls and the mantelpiece in Maple’s rooms – William Morris’s only concessions to useless beauty – I must confess that my room had instead a kind of engraving that depicted Prince Eugene, terrifying and handsome in his hussar jacket, and whom I was quite astonished to see one night in a great din of locomotives and hail, still terrifying and handsome, by the door to a restaurant in a train station, serving as an advertisement for a brand of biscuits.
I now suspect that my grandfather had once been given the engraving as a gift from a generous manufacturer, before putting it up in my room forever. But back then I didn’t care where it had come from; its origins seemed to me historical and mysterious, and I didn’t imagine that there could be multiple copies of the being I saw as a real person, a permanent resident of the room that I only shared with him, where I rediscovered him every year, always the same. It is a very long time now since I have seen him and I suppose I shall never see him again.
But if such good fortune ever should come to pass, I think he would have far more to tell me than Botticelli’s Spring. I will leave it to men and women of taste to decorate their homes with reproductions of the masterpieces they admire, unburdening their memory of the task of preserving a truly valuable image of those masterpieces by entrusting it to a carved wooden frame. I will leave it to men and women of taste to turn their room into the very picture of that taste, and to fill it solely with objects their taste can approve of.
As for me, I feel myself live and think only in rooms where everything is the creation, the language, of lives profoundly different from my own, of a taste opposed to mine, where I can find nothing of my own conscious thoughts, where my imagination is excited by feeling itself driven into the heart of the not-me; I feel happy only when I set foot in one of those provincial hotels – on Avenue de la Gare, on the church square, by the harbour – with long, cold hallways where the wind from outside battles and defeats the best efforts of the radiator, where the detailed map of the neighbourhood is yet again the only décor on the walls, where every sound serves only to make the silence appear by shifting it somewhere else, where the rooms have a musty smell that the strong draught scrubs but does not remove and that the nostrils inhale a hundred times in order to carry it to the imagination, which is enchanted with it, which makes it pose like a model so that it can try to re-create it inside itself with all the thoughts and memories it contains; where, in the evening, when you open the door to your room, you have the feeling of breaking in on the life that lies scattered there, of taking it boldly in hand when, the door having closed again, you enter deeply into the room and walk up to the table or the window; the feeling of sitting down with that life in a sort of easy promiscuity on the sofa that an upholsterer in this provincial capital has done up in what he imagined to be the Parisian style; the feeling of caressing every inch of that life’s naked flesh, in the hope of arousing yourself with the liberties you are taking, when you put your things here and there, play the master in this room that is filled to overflowing with others’ souls and that preserves the imprint of their dreams even in the shape of the andirons and the design of the curtains, when you walk barefoot on its unknown carpet — it is a hidden life you have the feeling of locking up with you when you go, trembling all over, to bolt the door, of pushing in front of you onto the bed, and finally of lying with under large white sheets which come up over your face while nearby the bells of the church toll for the whole city the insomniac hours of dying men and lovers.
I had not been reading in my room a very long time when I had to go out to the park, about half a mile from the village.2 But after the game I was forced to play, I would cut short my tasting of the treats that had been carried out in baskets and handed out to the children alongside the river, on the grass where the book had been put down with orders not to pick it up again.
A little farther on, in certain of the park’s rather wild and mysterious depths, the river ceased to be a rectilinear and artificial body of water bedecked with swans and bordered by paths where statues stood smiling, and instead rushed onward, now jumping with carp, at high speed past the park fence and turned into a river in the geographical sense of the word — a river deserving a name – before quickly flowing out (was it really the same water as the water between the statues, beneath the swans?) into the pastures where cattle lay sleeping, where it inundated the golden buttercups: a kind of meadow which the river turned marshy and which was joined to the village on one side by the crude towers that were left over, it was said, from the Middle Ages, and was joined to ‘nature’ on the other side by means of the ascending paths of wild rose and hawthorn trees – a ‘nature’ extending to infinity, to villages bearing other names, to the unknown.
I would let the others finish eating down in the park, by the swans, and run up into the maze, to a bower where I could sit and not be found, with my back to the clipped hazelnut tree, and from there I could see the asparagus plants, the fringes of strawberry bushes, the pond into which, on some days, horses hitched to a wheel would pump water, the white gate up higher that was ‘the end of the park’, and beyond it the fields of cornflower and poppy.
In this bower the silence was deep and the risk of being discovered almost nonexistent, a safety rendered even sweeter by the distant cries down below, calling me in vain, sometimes even approaching, climbing the lower slopes, searching everywhere, before going back down, not having found what they were looking for; then no other sound; only, from time to time, the golden sound of the bells that, far away across the pastures, seemed to toll behind the blue sky and might have warned me of the passing hours, but I, surprised by how soft they sounded and disturbed by the deeper silence that followed after their last chimes had been emptied out of it, was never sure what time it had tolled.
These were not the thundering bells that you heard when you returned to the village – when you neared the church that, from close up, regained its great, rigid height, its slate-gray cowl dotted with black crows rearing up into the evening blue – letting fly their bursts of sound across the square ‘for the bounties of the earth’. These bells reached the park only weakly, softly, and addressed themselves not to me but to the whole countryside, all the villages, all the lonely farmers in their fields; they in no way compelled me to raise my head, they passed close by me, bearing the time of day into the distant countryside, without noticing me, without recognising me, and without disturbing me.
And sometimes, at home, in my bed, long after dinner, the last hours of the evening also sheltered my reading, but only on the days when I had reached the final chapters of a book, when there was not much more to read to get to the end.
Then, risking both punishment if I was discovered and the insomnia that, once I had finished the book, might last all night, I re-lit my candle after my parents went to bed; in the street outside, between the gunsmith’s house and the post office, bathed in silence, the sky was dark but nonetheless blue and full of stars, and to the left, on the raised lane just at the turn where its elevated ascent began, you could feel watching you the monstrous black apse of the
