Even more, she would have liked other people to be dominated by him too, and found relief in the thought that what occupied such a large place in her heart filled up a considerable space around her as well; she would have liked to possess strong and healthy wild animals who would languish on seeing her pain. At times, in despair, she wanted to write to him, or get someone else to do so – to dishonour herself, saying “nothing really mattered any more”. But it was better for her, in the very interests of her love, to maintain her social situation, which one day might give her more authority over him – if that day ever came. And should a brief closer acquaintance with him break the spell that he had cast over her (she would not and could not believe it, or even for a single moment imagine it; but her mind, more perspicacious, could perceive that cruel and fateful possibility despite the blindness of her heart), she would thereafter remain without a single comfort in the world.
And if some other love chanced to come along, she would no longer have the resources that she could at least still count on now – her great influence, which would, on her return to Paris, make it so easy for her to get to know M. de Laléande. Trying to distance herself from her own feelings and examine them objectively, she kept telling herself, “I know he’s nothing special; I’ve always thought as much. That’s my settled opinion of him, and it hasn’t wavered. The emotional turmoil set in later, but it has left that first opinion quite unaffected. He’s nothing much, but it’s for that nothing much that I live. I live for Jacques de Laléande!” But immediately, having uttered his name, by an association of ideas that this time was quite involuntary and irrational, she saw him again, and felt so much euphoria and so much suffering that she sensed that even if he was nothing much, that did not matter – he still made her experience sufferings and joys next to which all the rest were as nothing.
And even though she reflected that, if she got to know him better, it would all evaporate, she endowed this mirage with all of her pain and all of her longing. A passage from the Mastersingers that she had heard at the reception of the Princess of A*** had the capacity to evoke M. de Laléande for her with the greatest precision (“Dem Vogel der heut sang dem war der Schnabel hold gewachsen”*). She had involuntarily turned it into the real leitmotiv of M. de Laléande and, hearing it one day in a concert in Trouville, she burst into tears.
From time to time, not too often in case she started to weary of it, she would shut herself away in her room, where she had had the piano brought in, and started to play it, closing her eyes the better to see him: this was her only joy, an intoxication which left an aftertaste of disenchantment, the opium which she could not do without. Stopping sometimes to listen to the flow of her pain, in the same way that one bends over to hear the sweet incessant plaint of a spring, and thinking of the agonizing alternative between her future shame and the subsequent despair of her family on the one hand, and (if she did not yield to her desires) her eternal sadness on the other, she cursed herself for having created such an ingenious balance between the ingredients of pleasure and pain in her love that she had been unable either to reject it at once as a deadly poison, or to cure herself of it.
She cursed her eyes first and foremost, and perhaps even more than them her hateful spirit of coquetry and curiosity which had made those eyes open as wide as flowers to tempt that young man, and had then exposed her to the gaze of M. de Laléande, as swift and sure as arrows and more invincible in their sweetness than if they had been injections of morphine. She cursed her imagination too; it had so tenderly nourished her love that Françoise sometimes wondered whether her imagination alone had given birth to it – that love which had now overpowered its mother and was torturing her to death.
She cursed her ingenuity as well, which had so skilfully, for good and ill, contrived so many scenarios in which she would be able to see him again, that their frustrating impossibility had perhaps bound her even more tightly to their hero. She cursed her kindness and the delicacy of her heart which, if she were to give herself to him, would infect with remorse and shame the joy of that guilty love; she cursed her impetuous will, rearing up so high and bold to leap over every obstacle every time her desires led it towards an impossible goal, but so weak, so flabby and so broken, not only when she was forced to disobey those desires, but when some other emotion directed her.
Finally she cursed her powers of thought, in their divinest aspects – thought, the greatest gift ever granted her; thought, which people have called by every name without ever finding the right one: the poet’s intuition, the believer’s ecstasy, the profound sense for nature and music; thought, which had placed high peaks and endless horizons before her love, bathing them in the supernatural glow of its allure and in exchange imbuing her love with some of itself; thought, which had taken an interest in this love, shown solidarity with it and saturated it with its own highest and most intimate inner life, dedicating to it, in the way the treasure in a church is dedicated to the Madonna, all the most precious jewels of her mind and heart – that heart which she could hear lamenting in the evenings, or hovering over the sea whose melancholy was now the sister of the sadness she experienced at not being able to see him.
And she cursed that inexpressible sense of the mystery of things, when our minds sink into a radiant beauty, like the sun setting in the sea, for having turned her love into something deeper and more immaterial, more extensive and so to speak infinite, without having made it any less torturing – “for” (as Baudelaire put it in his evocation of late autumn afternoons) “there are sensations that, however vague, are still intense, and there is nothing more keenly penetrating than infinity.”*
5
αὐτόθ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἀϊόνος κατετάκετο φυκιοέσσας
ἐξ ἀοῦς, ἔχθιστον ἔχων ὑποκάρδιον ἕλκος,
Κύπριδος ἐκ μεγάλας τό οἱ ἥπατι πᾶξε βέλεμνον.
and as soon as the sun rose, he was consumed, there on the seaweed of the shore, keeping in the depths of his heart, like an arrow in his liver, the smarting wound of great Kypris.
Theocritus, ‘The Cyclops’*
It is in Trouville that I have just met Mme de Breyves again. I must say I’ve seen her looking happier than she is now. Nothing can cure her. If she loved M. de Laléande for his good looks or his wit, we could find some wittier or more handsome young man to take her mind off him. If it were his kindness or his love for her that had bound her to him, another man might try to love her with even greater fidelity. But M. de Laléande is neither handsome nor intelligent. He has had no opportunity to prove to her whether he is affectionate or hard-hearted, forgetful or faithful.
So it must be he whom she loves, and not certain merits or charms that might be found to an equally high degree in others; it must be he whom she loves, for all his imperfections, all his lack of distinction; she is thus destined to love him in spite of everything. He – did she know what this was? All she had to go on was the fact that he filled her, from afar, with such shudders of desolation or bliss that all the rest of her life, everything else in the world, no longer counted for her.
The most handsome face, the most original intelligence, would never possess that particular and mysterious essence, so unique that no human being will ever have an exact double, even given an infinity of worlds and an eternity of time. Without Geneviève de Buivres, who quite innocently took her to the reception at the home of Mme d’A***, none of this would have happened. But the circumstances joined up to form a chain and imprisoned her, making her the victim of a malady that is incurable because it has no rational explanation.
To be sure, M. de Laléande, who is doubtless at this very moment strolling along the beach at Biarritz, leading his mediocre little life filled with footling little dreams, would be quite astonished if he knew of that other life, so miraculously intense that it subordinates everything to itself and annihilates everything apart from itself – the life he leads
