Lakeside Encounter
Yesterday, before going to dine in the Bois de Boulogne, I received a letter from Her: after a week she was responding rather coldly to my desperate letter, notifying me that she feared she could not say goodbye to me before leaving. And I, yes, rather coldly replied that it was better this way, and I wished her a pleasant summer. Then I dressed and I rode across the Bois in an open carriage. I felt extremely sad, but calm. I was determined to forget, I had made up my mind: it was a matter of time.
As my carriage turned into the lakeside drive, I spotted a lone woman slowly walking at the far end of the small path that circles the lake fifty meters from the drive. At first I could barely make her out. She waved casually at me, and then I recognized her despite the distance between us. It was she! I waved back for a long time. And she continued to gaze at me as if wanting me to halt and take her along. I did nothing of the kind, but I soon felt an almost exterior agitation pounce upon me and grip me firmly. “I guessed right!” I exclaimed. “For some unknown reason she’s always feigned indifference toward me. She loves me, the dear thing.”
An infinite happiness, an invincible certainty came over me; I felt dizzy and I burst into sobs. The carriage was approaching Armenonville; I dried my eyes, and the gentle greeting of her hand passed over them as if also to dry their tears, and her softly questioning eyes fixed on mine, asking if I could take her along.
When I arrived at the dinner, I was radiant. My happiness spread to each person in hearty, blissful, thankful amiability: nobody had the slightest inkling what hand unknown to them—the little hand that had waved to me—had kindled this great fire of my joy, its radiance visible to everyone; and my sense of their unawareness of that hand added the charm of secret sensual delights to my happiness.
We were waiting only for Madame de T., and she soon arrived. She is the most insignificant person I know and, though somewhat attractive, the most unpleasant. But I was too happy not to forgive each individual for his faults, his ugliness, and I went over to her with an affectionate smile.
“You were less friendly just now,” she said.
“Just now?” I said, astonished. “Just now? But I haven’t seen you.”
“What do you mean? You didn’t recognize me? It’s true you were far away. I was strolling along the lake, you drove by proudly in your carriage, I waved at you and I wanted to ride with you so as not to be late.”
“You mean that was you?” I exclaimed and in my despair I repeated several times: “Oh, do please forgive me, please forgive me!”
“How unhappy he looks! My compliments, Charlotte,” said the mistress of the house. “But you can cheer up, she’s with you now.”
I was crushed; my entire happiness was destroyed.
All well and good! But the most horrible part of it was that it was not as if it had not been. Even after I realized my mistake, that loving image of the woman who did not love me altered my conception of her for a long time.
I attempted a reconciliation, I forgot about her less quickly, and, struggling to find solace for my distress by imagining that those were her hands as I had originally felt, I often closed my eyes to evoke those little hands, which had waved to me, which would have so nicely dried my eyes, so nicely cooled my brow—those little gloved hands, which she gently held out by the lake, as frail symbols of peace, love, and reconciliation, while her sad and questioning eyes seemed to ask me to take her along.
Like a blood-red sky that warns the passerby, “There is a fire over there,” certain blazing looks often reveal passions that they serve merely to reflect. They are flames in the mirror. But sometimes even carefree and cheerful people have eyes that are vast and somber like grief, as if a filter had been stretched between the soul and the eyes so that all the live content of the soul had virtually seeped into the eyes.
Warmed solely by the fervor of their egoism (that attractive fervor of egoism, to which people are drawn as strongly as they are alienated by inflammatory passion), the parched soul is henceforth nothing but an artificial palace of intrigues.
However, their eyes, which endlessly burn with love, and which a dew of languor will water, set aglow, cause to float, and drown without extinguishing them—those eyes will astonish the universe with their tragic blaze. Twin spheres that are now independent of the soul, spheres of love, ardent satellites of an eternally frozen world, those spheres will continue to cast an unwonted and deceptive shimmer until the death of these false prophets, these perjurers, whose promise of love the heart will not keep.
The Stranger
Dominique had settled next to the extinguished fire, waiting for his guests. Every evening he would invite some aristocrat to come for supper together with men of wit; and since he was rich, well-born, and charming, he was never alone. The candles had not yet been lit, and the daylight was dying sadly in the room.
All at once he heard a voice, a distant and intimate voice, saying to him: “Dominique”; and at the mere sound of it, so far and so near, “Dominique,” he froze with fear. He had never heard that voice before, and yet he recognized it so clearly, his remorse recognized so clearly the voice of a victim, a noble victim that he had immolated. He tried to remember some ancient crime he had committed, but none came to mind.
Yet the tone of that voice reproached him for a crime, a crime he had probably committed without realizing it, but for which he was responsible—as attested by his fear and sadness. Upon raising his eyes he saw, standing before him, grave and familiar, a stranger with a vague and gripping demeanor. Uttering a few respectful words, Dominique bowed to the stranger’s obvious and melancholy authority.
“Dominique, am I the only person you won’t invite to supper? You have some wrongs to right with me, ancient wrongs. Then I will teach you how to get along without other people, who will no longer come when you’re old.”
“I invite you to supper,” Dominique replied with a warm gravity that surprised him.
“Thank you,” said the stranger.
No crest was inscribed in the stone on his ring, nor had wit frosted his words with its glittering needles. However, the gratitude in his firm, brotherly gaze intoxicated Dominique with unknown happiness.
“But if you wish to keep me here, you have to dismiss your other guests.”
Dominique heard them knocking at the door. The candles were unlit; the room was pitch-black.
“I can’t dismiss them,” Dominique replied, “I can’t be alone.”
“With me you’ll be alone, that’s true,” said the stranger sadly. “But you have to keep me here. You have to right ancient wrongs that you did me. I love you more than all of them do and I’ll teach you how to get along without those others, who will no longer come when you’re old.”
“I can’t,” said Dominique.
And he sensed he had just sacrificed a noble happiness at the command of an imperious and vulgar habit, that no longer had even pleasures to dispense as prizes for obedience.
“Choose quickly,” said the stranger, pleading and haughty.
Dominique went to open the door, and at the same time he asked the stranger, without daring to turn his head: “Just who are you?”
And the stranger, the stranger who was already disappearing, said: “Habit, to which you are again sacrificing me tonight, will be stronger tomorrow thanks to the blood of the wound that you’re inflicting on me in order to nourish that habit. And more imperious for being obeyed yet again, habit will turn you away from me slightly more each day and force you to increase my suffering. Soon you will have killed me. You will never see me again. Yet you’ll have owed me more than you owe the others, who will shortly abandon you. I am inside you and yet I am forever remote from you; I almost no longer exist. I am your soul, I am yourself.”
The guests had entered. The company stepped into the dining room, and Dominique wanted to describe his conversation with the visitor, who had disappeared; but given the overall boredom and the obvious strain it put on the host to remember an almost faded dream, Girolamo interrupted him—to the great satisfaction of everyone, including even Dominique—and drew the following conclusion:
“One should never be alone; solitude breeds melancholy.”
Then they resumed drinking; Dominique chatted gaily but without joy, though flattered by the dazzling company.
Dream
Your tears flowed for me, my lip drank your weeping.
—ANATOLE FRANCE
It takes no effort for me to
