– Petit-Abbeville (Dieppe), August 1895
27
The Chestnut Trees
In particular, I loved to pause under the huge chestnut trees when they were turning yellow in the autumn. How many hours I spent in those mysterious green-hued grottoes, gazing at the murmuring cascades of pale gold over my head, as they poured out freshness and darkness! I envied the robins and the squirrels who could live in those frail and deep pavilions of verdure amid the branches, those ancient hanging gardens which each springtime, for two centuries now, has covered with white, sweet-smelling flowers. The branches, imperceptibly curved, swept nobly down from the tree to the ground, as if they were other trees planted into the trunks, upside down. The pallor of the remaining leaves set off even more strongly the branches that already appeared more solid and blacker now that they were bare, and attached to the trunk in this way, they seemed to hold in place, like some magnificent comb, the lovely profusion of sweet blond hair.
– Réveillon,* October 1895
28
The Sea
The sea will always fascinate those for whom world-weariness and the lure of mystery preceded their first sorrows, like a foretaste of reality’s inability to satisfy them. Those who need rest even before they have experienced any fatigue will derive consolation from the sea, and a vague sense of exaltation. Unlike the earth, the sea bares no trace of the labours of man and of human life. Nothing remains on it, nothing passes by except fleetingly, and of the ships that cross it, how quickly the wake vanishes! Hence the great purity of the sea, which earthly things do not possess.
And that virgin water is much more delicate than the hardened earth, which you need a pickaxe to break open. A child stepping into water makes a deep, hollow furrow in it, accompanied by a bright “plop!”, and the smooth gradations of the water are for a moment broken; then every vestige is effaced, and the sea is again as calm as it was in the first days of the world. He who is weary of the earth’s paths or who guesses, after trying them out, how uneven and unrewarding they are, will be seduced by the pale sea roads, more dangerous and more gentle, uncertain and deserted. Everything here is more mysterious, including those great shadows that sometimes peacefully float on the bare fields of the sea, without home and without shelter, cast by the clouds, those hamlets of the skies, those vague branches.
The sea has the allure of things that do not fall silent at night-time, and grant our unquiet lives permission to sleep; a promise that everything is not doomed to disappear for ever, like the night light of small children who feel less lonely when it glimmers. The sea is not separated from the sky as is the earth; the sea is always in harmony with the sky’s colours, and affected by its most delicate tints. The sea gleams in the sunlight, and every evening she seems to die with him. And when the sun has disappeared, she continues to miss him, to preserve something of his glowing memory, unlike the earth which is dark all over. This is the time when her melancholy reflections gleam, so sweet that you feel your heart melt as you gaze at them. When night has almost fallen and the sky is dark over the blackened earth, the sea still faintly gleams by we know not what mysterious and glowing relic of the day that has sunk beneath the waves.
She refreshes our imagination, because she does not make us think of the life of men, but she rejoices our soul, because she is, like our soul, an infinite and powerless aspiration, a forward momentum forever failing, an eternal and gentle lament. She thus enchants us like music, which unlike language does not bear the trace of things, and tells us nothing of men, but mimics the movements of our souls. Our heart, as it rushes forward with their waves and falls back with them, thus forgets its own failings and takes consolation in an intimate harmony between its sadness and that of the sea, which melds its own destiny with theirs.
– September 1892
29
Seascape
I have lost the sense of certain words: perhaps I ought to learn it again by listening to all those things which have long opened a path leading inside me, one that has been neglected for many years, but one that can be followed again and which, I firmly believe, is not for ever closed. I would need to go back to Normandy, not making any particular effort, but just going to the coast.
Or rather I would take the wooded paths from which you occasionally catch sight of it and where the breeze mingles together the smell of the salt, damp leaves and milk. I would ask nothing from all these natal things. They are generous to the child whose birth they witnessed, and they would of their own free will teach him the things he has forgotten. Everything, its odour first of all, would tell me that the sea was near – but I would still not have seen it.
I would hear it faintly. I would follow a path of hawthorns, once so familiar to me, with tender emotion, and with anxiety too at the prospect of suddenly spotting, through a gap in the hedge, the invisible, ever-present friend, the madwoman at her eternal laments, the old melancholy queen, the sea. Suddenly I would see her; it would be on one of those days of somnolence beneath a dazzling sun, when she reflects the sky that is as blue as she is, only paler. Sails white like butterflies would be dotted over the motionless water, happy not to move any more, almost swooning in the heat. Or alternatively, the sea would be rough, yellow in the sunlight like a great field of mud, with swells that, from such a distance, would appear stationary and crowned with dazzling snow.
30
Sails in Harbour
In the harbour, narrow and long like a watery highway between its low quays along which gleamed the lights of evening, passers-by stopped to gaze at the vessels that had assembled there like noble strangers who had arrived the day before and were ready to set off once more. These ships, indifferent to the curiosity they aroused amongst a crowd whose vulgarity they seemed to disdain or whose language, quite simply, they did not speak, preserved, in the liquid lodgings where they had stopped for the night, their silent and immobile momentum. Their strong stems spoke no less eloquently of the long journeys they still had to accomplish than the signs of wear and tear on them spoke of the fatigues they had already withstood on those gliding roads, as ancient as the world and as new as the passage that cuts them and which they do not outlive.
Frail and resistant, they were turned with a sad pride towards the Ocean which they dominate and in which they seemed so lost. The marvellous and skilful intricacy of the rigging was reflected in the water like an exact and far-sighted intelligence plunging headlong into the uncertain destiny which sooner or later will break it. So recently withdrawn from the terrible and splendid life in which they would again be immersed the very next day, their sails still drooped from the wind that had made them belly out, their bowsprits bent out over the water just as they themselves had done so only yesterday, impelled by their forward momentum; and, from stem to stern, the curve of their hulls seemed to preserve the mysterious and flexible grace of their wake.
The End of Jealousy
1
“Give us good things, whether we ask for them or not, and keep away from us evil things, even if we ask you for them.” – This prayer seems right and effective. If you find anything in it that needs correcting, don’t keep it to yourself.
– Plato*
“My little tree, my little donkey, my mother, my brother, my country, my God, my little stranger, my little lotus, my little seashell, my darling, my little plant, go away, let me get dressed and I’ll see you in the rue de la Baume at eight o’clock. Please don’t arrive after a quarter past eight, because I’m starving.”
She tried to close the door of her bedroom on Honoré, but he added, “Neck!”, and she proffered her neck with a docility and an exaggerated zeal that made him burst out laughing.
“Even if you didn’t want to,” he told her, “there exist between your neck and my mouth, between your ears and my moustache, between your hands and my hands, close relations of friendship. I’m sure that these relations would not cease if we no longer loved one another, any more than, ever since I’ve quarrelled with my cousin Paule, I can stop my footman going every evening to chat to her chambermaid. It’s of its own free will and without my assent that my mouth moves towards your neck.”
They were now just a step away from one another. Suddenly their eyes met and each of them tried to fix in the eyes of the other the thought that they were in love; she remained for a second thus, standing erect, before collapsing breathless onto a chair, as if she had been running. And they said to each other, at almost the same time, with intense exaltation, uttering the words deliberately with their lips, as if preparing to kiss:
“My love!”
She repeated in a sad and mournful tone, as she shook her head:
“Yes, my love.”
She
