More than a knight filled with intoxication and giddiness by the accelerating speed of his adored mount, we yield trembling with trust and joy to the tumultuous thoughts which we feel hold us in their thrall more and more irresistibly the more we possess them and can direct them. Filled with affectionate emotion we make our way through the dark countryside and greet the oaks filled with night, like the solemn field, like the epic witnesses of the momentum that impels us forward and fills us with rapture.
On looking up skywards, we cannot fail to recognize, exultantly, in the gaps between the clouds still touched by the sun’s farewell, the mysterious reflection of our thoughts: we plunge deeper and deeper into the countryside, and the dog which follows us, the horse which carries us, or the now silent friend (less, at times, when there is no living creature with us), the flower in our buttonholes or the walking stick waved about joyfully by our feverish hands, receive in glances and tears the melancholy tribute of our frenzy.
24
As by Moonlight
Night had fallen; I went to my room, now too filled with anxiety to remain in the dark without seeing the sky, the fields and the sea gleaming in the sunlight. But when I opened the door, I found the room lit as if by the setting sun. Through the window I could see the house, the fields, the sky and the sea, or rather it seemed to me as if I could “see” them again in a dream; the gentle moon reminded me of them rather than showing them to me, shedding over their outlines a pale splendour which did not scatter the darkness that lay as dense as oblivion over their shapes. And I spent hours gazing into the courtyard at the memory, mute, vague, enchanted and pallid, of the things which, during the daytime, had given me pleasure or pain, with their cries, their voices or their persistent hum.
Love has faded, I feel afraid at the threshold of oblivion. But here, tranquil now, a little pale, quite close to me and yet distant and already vague, as if in the moonlight, are all my past times of happiness and all my healed sorrows, gazing at me wordlessly. Their silence fills me with affection while their distance and their wavering pallor intoxicate me with sadness and poetry. And I cannot stop gazing at this interior moonlight.
25
A Critique of Hope in the Light of Love
Hardly has an as yet future hour become the present for us than it is divested of its charms, only to recover them, it is true – if our soul is wide and deep enough and able to arrange a fine set of perspective views – when we have left it far behind us, on the roads of memory. Thus the poetic village, towards which we were spurring on our impatient hopes and our weary mares, once again breathes (as soon as we have passed the hill) those veiled harmonies, whose promises the vulgarity of its streets, the jumble of its houses – brought so close together that they flowed into one another on the horizon – and the lifting of the blue mist that seemed to imbue it, had all belied.
But like the alchemist, who attributes each of his failures to an accidental cause (a different one each time), far from suspecting an incurable imperfection in the very essence of the present, we accuse the malignity of particular circumstances, the responsibilities of this or that envied position, the bad character of this or that desired mistress, the poor state of our health on a day which was to have been a day of pleasure, or the bad weather or the bad hostelries on our journey, of having poisoned our happiness. Thus, certain that we will manage to eliminate these causes that destroy all fruition, we ceaselessly appeal, with an at times muted but never entirely disillusioned confidence, from a realized (that is, disappointed) dream to a dreamt-of future.
But certain reflective and sorrowful men, even more radiant than others with the light of hope, discover rather quickly that – alas! – this light does not gleam at the hours when we expect it, but emanates from our hearts overflowing with rays that are unbeknown to nature and which pour them out in torrents over hope without managing to kindle any fire. These men no longer feel the strength to desire what they know not to be desirable, or to wish to fulfil dreams that will wither in their hearts as soon as they try to pluck them outside themselves. This melancholy predisposition is singularly strengthened and justified in love. Imagination, as it ceaselessly and repeatedly goes over its hopes, wonderfully sharpens its disappointments. Unhappy love, which makes it impossible for us to experience happiness, also prevents us from discovering how null and void that happiness is. But what lesson of philosophy, what advice of old age, what foiled ambition can surpass in melancholy the joys of a happy love affair? You love me, my darling girl; how could you have been so cruel as to tell me? So that is the ardent happiness of shared love, the mere thought of which made me feel giddy and my teeth chatter!
I undo your flowers, I lift your hair, I tear off your jewels, I touch your flesh, my kisses cover your body as tumultuously as the rising sea beating against the sand; but you yourself elude me, and with you goes happiness. I have to leave you, I return home alone and sadder. Accusing this latest calamity, I return to you for ever; it is my last illusion which I have torn down, I am doomed to unhappiness for ever.
I do not know how I had the courage to tell you this, it is the happiness of my whole life that I have just pitilessly rejected, or at least my life’s consolation, since your eyes, whose trusting happiness still sometimes filled me with intoxication, will now no longer reflect anything but the sad disenchantment of which your sagacity and your disappointments had already warned you. Since this secret, which one of us was keeping hidden from the other, has now been uttered aloud, there is no longer any happiness for us. We no longer even have the disinterested joys of hope. Hope is an act of faith. We have disabused its credulity: it is dead. Having abandoned the quest for fulfilment and pleasure, we can no longer derive any enchantment from hoping. Hoping without hope, which would be so wise, is impossible.
But come to me, my darling girl. Wipe your eyes, just to see… I don’t know if it is tears which are blurring my view, but I think I can make out over there, behind us, great fires being lit. Oh, my darling, how I love you! Give me your hand, let us go towards those lovely fires, but not too close… I think that it is indulgent and mighty Memory which wishes us well and is at this very moment doing so much for us, my dear.
26
Undergrowth
We have nothing to fear, but much to learn from the vigorous and pacific tribe of trees which endlessly produces for us fortifying essences and tranquillizing balms, and in whose graceful company we spend so many fresh, silent and enclosed hours. During those scorching afternoons when the light, by its very excess, evades our gaze, let us go down into one of the Normandy “estates” from which rise supple, tall and thick-leaved beeches, whose foliage parts that ocean of light like a slender but sturdy barge, and retain of it no more than a few drops that tinkle melodiously in the black silence of the undergrowth.
Our spirit does not experience, as it does by the seaside, in the plains, or on the mountains, the joy of spreading over the world, but the happiness of being separated from it; and, hemmed in on every side by trunks that can never be uprooted, it flings itself upwards, as do the trees. Lying on our backs, our heads resting on the dry leaves, we can follow from the depths of our deep repose the joyful agility of our spirit mounting, without causing the foliage to tremble, to the highest branches where it settles at the edge of the gentle sky, next to a singing bird.
Here and there, a patch of sunlight stagnates at the foot of the trees which, at times, dreamily dangle, in the golden light, the leaves on the tips of their branches. Everything else, relaxed and immobile, remains silent, in a sombre bliss. Soaring and erect, amid the vast offering of their branches, and yet rested and calm, the trees, through their strange and natural posture, invite us with grateful murmurs to feel kinship with a life so ancient and so young, so different from ours and yet appearing as its dark and inexhaustible reservoir.
A light breeze momentarily disturbs their brightly flickering but sombre immobility, and the trees tremble slightly, balancing the light on their tops and stirring the shadows at
