Then she swallowed them, making a slight noise with her lips, which I experienced as a strange new kiss, more intimately disturbing than if it had touched me directly. I suddenly awoke, recognized my bedroom and, just as when a storm is close a clap of thunder follows immediately after the flash of lightning, a dizzy memory of happiness coincided with, rather than preceded, the crushing certainty of its falseness and impossibility. But, in spite of all rational argument, Dorothy B*** had ceased to be for me the woman she had still been the day before.
The little furrow left in my memory by the few occasions on which I had met her had almost been effaced, as after a powerful tide which had left unfamiliar traces behind it as it withdrew. I had a huge desire, disappointed in advance, to see her again, and an instinctive need to write to her, restrained by a cautious mistrust. Her name uttered in a conversation made me start, and yet merely evoked the insignificant image that would alone have accompanied her name before that night; and while she was a matter of indifference to me just like any other ordinary society woman, she attracted me more irresistibly than the most beloved mistresses, or the most intoxicating destiny.
I would not have taken a single step to see her, and yet for the other “her” I would have given my life. Every hour effaces something of the memory of this dream that is already quite disfigured by my relating it. I can see it less and less distinctly, like a book that you want to carry on reading at your table when the declining day no longer sheds enough light, when night falls.
If I wish still to perceive it, I am obliged to stop thinking about it for a few minutes, just as you are obliged to close your eyes at first if you are to continue to read a few letters in the book filled with shadow. However much it has been effaced, it still leaves a great turmoil within me, the foam of its wake or the sensuality of its perfume. But this turmoil itself will vanish, and I will see Mme B*** without it bothering me. And anyway, what would be the use of talking to her about these things, of which she has remained quite unaware?
Alas! Love has passed over me like this dream, with a power of transfiguration just as mysterious. And so, you who know the woman I love and who were not part of my dream, you cannot understand me – so do not try to give me any advice.
18
The Genre Paintings of Memory
We have certain memories that are, as it were, the Dutch paintings of our memory, genre pictures in which the characters are often of the middling sort, taken at a perfectly ordinary moment of their lives, without any solemn events, sometimes without any events at all, in a setting that is in no way extraordinary and quite lacking in grandeur. The natural quality of the characters and the innocence of the scene are what comprise its attractiveness, and distance sets between it and us a gentle light which bathes it in beauty.
My regimental life was full of scenes of this kind that I experienced quite naturally, without any particularly intense joy and without any deep sorrow, and which I remember with much gentle affection. The rural character of the location, the simplicity of some of my peasant comrades, whose bodies had remained more handsome and more agile, their minds more original, their hearts more spontaneous and their characters more natural than was the case with the young men I frequented previously as well as subsequently, the calm of a life in which one’s occupations are more regular and imagination less enslaved than in any other, in which pleasure keeps us company all the more continually as we never have the time to flee from it by running after it – everything concurs to make, now, of this period of my life a series (admittedly filled with gaps) of little paintings imbued with charm and a truth bathed in happiness, on which time has shed its sweet sadness and its poetry.
19
Sea Breeze in the Countryside
I will bring you a young poppy, with crimson petals.
– Theocritus, ‘The Cyclops’
In the garden, in the little wood, across the countryside, the wind deploys a crazed and futile ardour in scattering the flurries of sunlight, harrying them along as it furiously shakes the branches of the coppice where they had first flung themselves, all the way to the sparkling thicket where they now tremble, all aquiver. Trees, clothes hanging out to dry, the outspread tail of the peacock, all cast, through the transparent air, extraordinarily clear blue shadows that fly along before every gust of wind without leaving the ground, like a kite that has not taken off.
The helter-skelter of wind and light makes this nook of the Champagne region resemble a coastal landscape. When we reach the top of this path which, scorched by the light and swept by the wind, climbs up in the dazzling sunlight, towards a naked sky, is it not the sea that will soon greet our sight, white with sunlight and foam? In the same way, you had come every morning, your hands filled with flowers and the soft feathers which a wood pigeon, a swallow or a jay had dropped onto the avenue as it flew past. The feathers tremble in my hat, the poppy in my buttonhole is shedding its petals, let’s go home, this very minute.
The house groans in the wind like a ship, you can hear invisible sails bellying out and invisible flags cracking outside. Let this clump of fresh roses continue to lie across your knees and allow my heart to weep between your clasped hands.
20
The Pearls
I came home as day was dawning and, shivering in the cold, went to bed, all aquiver with a melancholy and frozen frenzy. Just a while ago, in your room, your friends from the day before, your plans for the next day (so many enemies, so many plots being hatched against me), and your current thoughts (so many hazy miles I would never be able to cross) separated you from me. Now that I am far away from you, this imperfect presence, the fleeting mask of eternal absence (a mask which kisses soon lift) would, it seems to me, be enough to show me your true face and to fulfil every aspiration of my love.
I had to take my leave; how sad and frozen I remain when far from you! But by what sudden enchantment do the familiar dreams of our happiness again start to rise up, a thick smoke mounting from a clear and burning flame, climbing joyfully and uninterruptedly in my head? From my closed hand, as it warms up beneath the blankets, there again wafts the odour of the rose cigarettes that you had given me to smoke.
I plant my lips on my hand and draw in, deeply and slowly, the perfume which, in the heat of memory, breathes out dense whiffs of tenderness, of happiness, of you. Ah, my beloved! At the very same moment that I can so easily do without you, as I wallow joyfully in your memory – which now fills the bedroom – without having to struggle against your insurmountable body, let me tell you, absurd as it is, let me tell you, for I cannot help it, that I cannot do without you. It is your presence which imparts to my life that subtle hue, warm and melancholy, with which it also imbues the pearls that spend the night on your body. Like them, I live on your warmth and sorrowfully take on its subtle tints, and like them, if you did not keep me on you, I would die.
21
The Shores of Oblivion
“They say that Death makes beautiful those whom it strikes down and exaggerates their virtues, but in general it is much truer to say that it was life that failed to do them justice. Death, that pious and irreproachable witness, teaches us, in accordance with truth and love, that in every person there is usually more good than evil.”* What Michelet here says about death is perhaps even truer of that death which follows a great unhappy love affair. Take a person who, after making us suffer so much, ceases to mean anything at all to us – is it enough to say, as does the common expression, that such a person is “dead for us”?
We weep for the dead, we still love them, for a long time we are subject to the irresistible attraction of the enchantment that survives them and which often causes us to return to their tombs. But the person who has made us feel every emotion, and by whose essence we are saturated, can no longer even cast on us the merest shadow of any sorrow or joy. Such a person is more than dead for us. After considering such a person as the sole thing of value in this world, after cursing him and despising him, we find it impossible to judge him, the features of his face are barely discernible to the eyes of our memory, exhausted as they are by having gazed on him for too long.
But this judgement on the loved one, a judgement which varied so considerably, sometimes torturing our blind hearts with its sharp eyes, sometimes itself turning a blind eye to any
