Regrets, Reveries the Color of Time, Marcel Proust
Regrets, Reveries the Color of Time
So the poet’s habit of living should be set on a key so low that the common influences should delight him. His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Tuileries
At the Garden of the Tuileries this morning, the sun dozed off on all the stone steps, one by one, like a blond youth whose light sleep is promptly interrupted by the passing of a shadow. Young sprouts are greening against the old palace walls.
The breath of the enchanted wind mingles the fresh scent of the lilacs with the fragrance of the past. The statues, which, in our public squares, are as terrifying as lunatics, dream here in the bowers like sages under the lustrous verdure that protects their whiteness.
The basins, with the blue sky basking in their depths, shine like eyes. From the terrace on the edge of the water we see a hussard riding by, as if in another era, from the old quarter of the Quai d’Orsay on the opposite bank. The morning glories spill wildly from the vases, which are crowned with geraniums.
Blazing with sunshine, the heliotrope burns its perfumes. In front of the Louvre the hollyhocks soar up as slender as masts, as noble and graceful as columns, and blushing like young girls. Iridescent with sunlight and sighing with love, the water jets spurt toward the sky. At the end of the terrace a stone horseman, galloping furiously without budging, his lips glued to a joyful trumpet, embodies all the ardor of spring.
But now the sky is darkening; it is about to rain. The basins, where no azure is shining anymore, are like blank eyes or vases full of tears. The absurd water jet, whipped by the breeze, raises its now ludicrous hymn more and more swiftly toward the sky.
The futile sweetness of the lilacs is infinitely sad. And over there, riding hell for leather, the immobile and furious motion of his marble feet urging on his charger in its fixed and dizzying gallop, the oblivious horseman keeps endlessly blasting his trumpet against the black sky.
Versailles
A canal that inspires dreams in the most inveterate chatterboxes the instant they draw near, and where I am always happy whether I feel cheerful or mournful.
—GUEZ DE BALZAC IN A LETTER TO MONSIEUR DE LAMOTHE-AIGRON
The exhausted autumn, no longer warmed by the meager sunshine, is losing its final colors one by one. The extreme ardor of its foliage, blazing so intensely as to maintain the glorious illusion of a sunset throughout the afternoons and even the mornings, is now extinguished. Only the dahlias, the French marigolds, and the yellow, violet, white, and pink chrysanthemums are still glowing on the somber and desolate face of autumn.
At six in the evening, when you walk across the uniformly gray and naked Tuileries under the equally gloomy sky, where, branch for branch, the black trees sketch their profound and delicate despair, an abruptly spotted bed of those autumn flowers brightens richly in the dusk, inflicting a voluptuous violence on our eyes, which are accustomed to those ashen horizons.
The morning hours are gentler. The sun still shines intermittently, and, leaving the terrace by the edge of the water and going down the vast stone stairway before me, I can still see my shadow descending the steps one by one.
After so many others (especially Mssrs. Maurice Barrès, Henri de Régnier, and Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac), I would hesitate to utter your name, Versailles, your grand name, sweet and rusty, the royal cemetery of foliage, of vast marbles and waters, a truly aristocratic and demoralizing place, where we are not even troubled by remorse that the lives of so many workers merely served to refine and expand not so much the joys of another age as the melancholy of our own.
After so many others I would hesitate to utter your name, and yet how often have I drunk from the reddened cup of your pink marble basins, drunk to the dregs, savoring the delirium, the intoxicating bittersweetness of these waning autumn days. In the distance the earth, mixed with faded leaves and rotted leaves, always seemed to be a tarnished yellow and violet mosaic.
Passing close to the Hameau and pulling up my overcoat collar against the wind, I heard the cooing of doves. I was intoxicated everywhere by the fragrance of blessed palms as on Palm Sunday. How could I still pick a slender nosegay of spring in these gardens ransacked by autumn?
On the water the wind crumpled the petals of a shivering rose. In this vast defoliation of the Trianon, only the slight arch of a small white geranium bridge raised its flowers above the icy water, their heads scarcely bowed by the wind.
Granted, ever since I inhaled the sea breeze and the salt air in the sunken roads of Normandy, ever since I glimpsed the ocean shining through the branches of blossoming rhododendrons, I have known about everything that the closeness of water can add to the charms of vegetation.
But what more virginal purity in this sweet, white geranium, leaning with graceful restraint over the chilly waters among their banks of dead leaves. Oh, silvery old age of woods still green, oh, weeping branches, ponds and pools that a pious gesture has placed here and there, like urns offered up to the melancholy of the trees!
Stroll
Despite the pure sky and the already hot sunshine, the wind was still as cold, the trees were still as bare as in winter. To light a fire I had to cut down one of the branches that I thought were dead, but the sap spurted out, soaking my arm up to the elbow and exposing a tumultuous heart under the frozen bark of the tree. In between the trunks the bare winter soil was covered with anemones, cowslips, and violets, while the streams, yesterday still gloomy and empty, were now filled with a blue, vivid, tender sky basking in the watery depths.
Not the pale, weary sky of lovely October evenings, a sky stretching out on the watery bottom, virtually dying there of love and melancholy, but an intense and blazing sky on the tender and cheerful azure, from which grays, blues, and pinks kept flashing by: not the shadows of pensive clouds, but the dazzling and slippery fins of a perch, an eel, or a smelt.
Drunk with joy, they scooted between sky and grass, through their meadows and forests, which were all brilliantly enchanted, like ours, by the resplendent genius of spring. And the waters, gliding coolly over their heads, between their gills, and under their bellies, hurried too, singing and gaily chasing the sunbeams.
The farmyard, where you went for eggs, was no less pleasant a sight. Like an inspired and prolific poet, who never refuses to spread beauty to the humblest places, which until now did not seem to share the domain of art, the sun still warmed the bountiful energy of the dung heap, of the unevenly paved yard, and of the pear tree worn down like an old serving maid.
Now who is that regally attired personage moving gingerly among the rustic articles and farm implements, tiptoeing to avoid getting soiled? It is Juno’s bird, dazzling not with lifeless gems but with the very eyes of Argus: it is the peacock, whose fabled glory is astonishing in these surroundings.
Just as on a festive day, strutting before the clusters of gaping admirers at the gate, several minutes before the arrival of the first few guests, the glittering mistress of the house, in a gown with an iridescent train, an azure gorgerin already attached to her royal throat, her aigrettes on her head, crosses the yard to issue a final order or wait for a prince of the blood, whom she must welcome right at the threshold.
And yet this is where the peacock spends its life, a veritable bird of paradise in a barnyard, among the chickens and turkeys, like a captive Andromache spinning her wool amid female slaves, but, unlike her, never abandoning the magnificence of royal insignia and crown jewels: a radiant Apollo, whom we always recognize even when he is guarding the herds of Admetus.
Family Listening to Music
For music is sweet,
It makes the soul harmonious and, like a heavenly choir,
It rouses a thousand voices that sing in the heart.
—VICTOR HUGO: HERNANI, ACT V, SCENE 3
For a truly dynamic family, in which each member thinks, loves, and acts, a garden is a pleasant thing. On spring, summer, and autumn evenings, they all gather there upon completing the tasks of the day; and however small the garden, however close its hedges, the latter are not so tall as not to reveal a large stretch of sky at which everyone gazes up in wordless reveries. The child dreams about his future plans, about the house he will inhabit with his best friend, never to leave him, about the secrets of earth and life.
The young man dreams about the mysterious charm of the girl he loves; the young mother about her child’s future; in the depths of these bright hours the once troubled wife discovers, behind her husband’s cold façade, a painful and poignant regret that stirs her pity. The father, watching the smoke curling up from a roof, dwells on the peaceful scenes of his past, which are transfigured by the faraway evening light; he thinks about his coming death, about his children’s lives after his death. And thus the soul of the united family
