But for a truly dynamic family, in which each member thinks, loves, and acts, for a family with a soul, how much sweeter it is if, in the evening, that soul can materialize in a voice, in the clear and inexhaustible voice of a girl or a young man who has received the gift of music and song. A stranger, passing the gate of a garden in which the family holds its tongue, would fear that his approach might rouse them out of a religious dream.
But if the stranger, without hearing the singing, perceived the gathering of friends and relatives listening to it, then how much more would the family appear to be attending an unseen mass—that is, despite the variety of postures, how strongly the resemblance of expressions would manifest the true unity of souls, a unity momentarily realized in their sympathy for the same ideal drama, by their communion in one and the same dream.
At times, as the wind bends the grass and agitates the branches for a long time, a breath bows the heads or suddenly raises them again. Then, as if an invisible messenger were telling a thrilling tale, they all seem to be waiting anxiously, listening in rapture or terror to the same news, which, however, elicits diverse echoes in each person. The anguish of the music reaches its peak; its outbursts are shattered by deep plunges and followed by more desperate outbursts.
For the old man, the lustrous infinity, the mysterious darkness of the music are the vast spectacles of life and death; for the child, they are the urgent promises of sea and land; for the lover they are the mysterious infinity; they are the luminous darkness of love. The thinker sees his mental life unroll fully; the plunges of the faltering melody are its faltering and its plunges, and its entire heart rebounds and snaps back when the melody regains its flight. The powerful murmuring of the harmonies stirs up the rich and obscure depths of his memory. The man of action pants in the melee of chords, in the gallop of vivaces; he triumphs majestically in the adagios.
Even the unfaithful wife feels that her sin is forgiven, is lost in infinity, her sin, which also originated in the dissatisfaction of a heart that, unappeased by the usual joys, had gone astray, but only in a quest for the mystery, and whose highest aspirations are now gratified by this music, which is as full as the voices of bells.
The musician, who, however, claims to take only technical pleasure in music, also experiences those meaningful emotions, which, however, are so thoroughly wrapped up in his concept of musical beauty as to be hidden from his sight.
And I myself, finally, listening in music to the most expansive and most universal beauty of life and death, sea and sky, I also feel what is unique and particular in your enchantment, oh darling beloved.
Today’s paradoxes are tomorrow’s prejudices, for today’s grossest and most disagreeable prejudices had their moment of novelty, when fashion lent them its fragile grace. Many women today wish to rid themselves of all prejudices, and by prejudices they mean principles.
That is their prejudice, and it is heavy even though it adorns them like a delicate and slightly exotic flower. They believe there is no such thing as perspective depth, so they put everything in the same plane. They enjoy a book or life itself like a beautiful day or like an orange. They talk about the “art” of a dressmaker and the “philosophy” of “Parisian life.” They would blush to classify anything, to judge anything, to say: This is good, this is bad.
In the past, when a woman behaved properly, it was the revenge of her morals, that is, her mind, over her instinctive nature. Nowadays, when a woman behaves properly, it is the revenge of her instinctive nature over her morals—that is, her theoretical immorality (look at the plays of Mssrs. Halévy and Meilhac). In an extreme loosening of all moral and social bonds, women drift to and fro between that theoretical immorality and their instinctive righteousness.
All they seek is pleasure, and they find it only when they do not seek it, when they are in a state of voluntary inaction. In books this skepticism and dilettantism would shock us like an old-fashioned adornment. But women, far from being the oracles of intellectual fashions, are actually their belated parrots. Even today, dilettantism still pleases them and suits them. While it may cloud their judgment and hamstring their conduct, one cannot deny that it lends them an already withered but still appealing grace. They make us rapturously feel whatever ease and sweetness existence may have in highly refined civilizations.
In their perpetual embarcation for a spiritual Cythera—where they will celebrate not so much their dulled senses as the imagination, the heart, the mind, the eyes, the nostrils, the ears—women add some voluptuous delight to their attitudes. And I assume that the most faithful portraitists of our time will not depict them with any great tension or rigidity. Their lives emit the sweet perfume of unbound hair.
Ambition is more intoxicating than fame; desire makes all things blossom, possession wilts them; it is better to dream your life than to live it, even if living it means dreaming it, though both less mysteriously and less vividly, in a murky and sluggish dream, like the straggling dream in the feeble awareness of ruminant creatures. Shakespeare’s plays are more beautiful when viewed in your study than when mounted on a stage. The poets who have created imperishably loving women have often known only mediocre barmaids, while the most envied voluptuaries do not understand the life that they lead or, rather, that leads them.
I knew a little ten-year-old boy who, in poor health and with a precocious imagination, had devoted a purely cerebral love to an older girl. He would sit at his window for hours, waiting for her to pass, weeping if he did not see her, weeping even more if he did see her. He would spend very rare, very brief moments with her. He could no longer sleep or eat. One day he threw himself out the window.
At first, people believed that his despair at never approaching his sweetheart had driven him to suicide. But then they learned that he had just had a very long chat with her: she had been extremely kind to him. So everyone assumed he had renounced the insipid days that remained of his life after that euphoria, which he might never have a chance to relive.
However, from secrets he had often confided in a friend people finally inferred that he had been disappointed whenever he saw the sovereign of his dreams; but once she was gone, his fertile imagination granted the absent girl all her former power, and he again desired to see her.
Each time, he tried to blame the accidental reason for his disappointment on the imperfection of circumstances. After that final conversation, when his already skillful imagination had carried his sweetheart to the supreme perfection of which her nature was capable, the boy, desperately comparing that imperfect perfection with the absolute perfection by which he lived, by which he died, threw himself out the window. Subsequently, having become an idiot, he lived a very long life, but his fall had cost him all memory of his soul, his mind, the voice of his sweetheart, whom he would run into without seeing her. She, despite pleas and threats, married him and died several years later without ever getting him to recognize her.
Life is like that little sweetheart. We dream it and we love it in dreaming it. We should not try to live it: otherwise, like that little boy, we will plunge into stupidity, though not at one swoop, for in life everything degenerates by imperceptible nuances. At the end of ten years we no longer recognize our dreams; we deny them, we live, like a cow, for the grass we are grazing on at the moment. And who knows if our wedding with death might not lead to our conscious immortality?
“Captain,” said his orderly several days after the preparation of the cottage, where the retired officer was to live until his death (which his heart condition would not keep waiting for long). “Captain, now that you can no longer make love or fight, perhaps some books might distract you a little. What should I buy for you?”
“Buy me nothing; no books; they can’t tell me anything as interesting as the things I’ve done. And since I don’t have much time left, I don’t want anything to distract me from my memories. Hand me the key to my large chest; its contents are what I’ll be reading every day.”
And he took out letters, a whitish, sometimes tinted sea of letters: some very long, some consisting of a single line, on a card, with faded flowers, objects, brief notes he had jotted down to recall the momentary surroundings where he had received them, and photographs that had spoiled despite precautions, like relics worn out by the very piety of the faithful: they kiss them too often. And all those things were very old, and there were some from women who had died and others whom he had not seen in over ten years.
Among all those things there were the slight but clear-cut traces of sensuality or affection tied to the least minutiae of the circumstances of his
