Here and there a bit of sunshine stagnates at the foot of trees, which sometimes dip into it dreamily, gilding the outermost leaves of their branches. Everything else, relaxed and inert, remains silent in a gloomy happiness. Erect and towering in the vast offering of their branches, and yet calm and refreshed, the trees, in their strange and natural posture, murmur gracefully, inviting us to participate in this so ancient and so youthful life, so different from our own, and virtually its obscure and inexhaustible reserve.
For an instant a faint breeze ruffles their glistening and somber immobility, and the trees quiver softly, balancing the light on their crowns and stirring the shade at their feet.
Petit-Abbeville, Dieppe, August 1895
The Chestnut Trees
More than anything, I loved pausing under the immense chestnut trees when they were yellowed by autumn. How many hours did I spend in those mysterious and greenish caverns, gazing overhead at the murmuring cascades of pale gold that poured down in coolness and darkness! I envied the robins and the squirrels for dwelling in those frail, deep pavilions of verdure in the branches, those ancient hanging gardens that each spring for two centuries now has decked out in white and fragrant blossoms.
The scantly curving branches descended nobly from tree to earth, as if they were other trees planted head-down in the trunk. The pallor of the remaining leaves more sharply accentuated the boughs, which already seemed darker and more solid for being stripped bare, and which, thereby reunited with the trunk, looked like a magnificent comb holding back the sweet, blond, flowing hair.
Réveillon, October 1895
The Sea
The sea will always fascinate those people in whom the disgust with life and the enticement of mystery have preceded their first distress, like a foreboding of reality’s inability to satisfy them. People who need rest before so much as experiencing any fatigue will be consoled and vaguely excited by the sea. Unlike the earth, the sea does not bear the traces of human works and human life. Nothing remains on the sea, nothing passes there except in flight, and how quickly the wake of a ship disappears! Hence the sea’s great purity, which earthly things do not have. And this virginal water is far more delicate than the hardened earth, which can be breached only by a pick.
With a clear sound a child’s footstep in water leaves a deep wake, and the united tinges of the water are broken for a moment; then, every vestige is wiped away, and the sea is once more calm as it was on the earliest days of the earth. The man who is weary of earthly paths or who, before even trying them, can guess how harsh and vulgar they are will be seduced by the pale lanes of the sea, which are more dangerous and more inviting, more uncertain and more forlorn. Everything here is more mysterious, even those huge shadows that sometimes float peacefully across the sea’s naked fields, devoid of houses and shade, and that are stretched by the clouds, those celestial hamlets, those tenuous boughs.
The sea has the magic of things that never fall silent at night, that permit our anxious lives to sleep, promising us that everything will not be obliterated, comforting us like the glow of a night-light that makes little children feel less alone. Unlike the earth, the sea is not separated from the sky; it always harmonizes with the colors of the sky and it is deeply stirred by its most delicate nuances.
The sea radiates under the sun and seems to die with it every evening. And when the sun has vanished, the sea keeps longing for it, keeps preserving a bit of its luminous reminiscence in the face of the uniformly somber earth. It is the moment of the sun’s melancholy reflections, which are so gentle that you feel your heart melting at the very sight of them. Once the night has almost fully thickened, and the sky is gloomy over the blackened earth, the sea still glimmers feebly—who knows by what mystery, by what brilliant relic of the day, a relic buried beneath the waves.
The sea refreshes our imagination because it does not make us think of human life; yet it rejoices the soul, because, like the soul, it is an infinite and impotent striving, a strength that is ceaselessly broken by falls, an eternal and exquisite lament. The sea thus enchants us like music, which, unlike language, never bears the traces of things, never tells us anything about human beings, but imitates the stirrings of the soul. Sweeping up with the waves of those movements, plunging back with them, the heart thus forgets its own failures and finds solace in an intimate harmony between its own sadness and the sea’s sadness, which merges the sea’s destiny with the destinies of all things.
September 1892
Seascape
In regard to words whose meanings I have lost: perhaps I should have them repeated by all those things that have long since had a path leading into me, a path that has been abandoned for years but that could be taken anew, and that I am certain is not blocked forever. I would have to return to Normandy, not make much of an effort, but simply head for the sea.
Or rather, I would stroll along one of the woodland paths from which, now and then, one can catch glimpses of the sea, and where the breeze mingles the smells of salt, wet leaves, and milk. I would ask nothing of all those things of infancy. They are generous to the child they have known since birth; they would, on their own, reteach him the forgotten things.
Everything, and above all its fragrance, would announce the sea, but I would not have seen it as yet. . . . I would hear it faintly. I would walk along a once familiar hawthorn-lined path, feeling deeply moved and also fearing that a sudden slash in the hedge might reveal my invisible yet present friend, the madwoman who laments forever, the old, melancholy queen, the sea.
All at once I would see it; it would be on one of those somnolent days under a glaring sun, when the sea reflects the sky, which is as blue as the water, but paler. White sails like butterflies would be resting on the motionless surface, unwilling to budge as if fainting in the heat. Or else, quite the opposite, the sea would be choppy and yellow under the sun, like a vast field of mud, with huge swells that, from so far away, would appear inert and crowned with dazzling snow.
Sails in the Harbor
In the harbor, long and narrow like a watery roadway between the just slightly elevated wharves, where the evening lights shone, the passersby paused near the assembled ships and stared as if at noble strangers who have arrived on the previous day and are now ready to leave. Indifferent to the curiosity they excited in the crowd, apparently disdaining its lowness or simply ignorant of its language, the ships maintained their silent and motionless impetus at the watery inn where they had halted for a night.
The solidity of each stem spoke no less about the long voyages still to come than its damage spoke about the distress already suffered on these gliding lanes, which are as old as the world and as new as the passage that plows them and that they do not survive. Fragile and resistant, they were turned with sad haughtiness toward the Ocean, over which they loom and in which they are virtually lost. The marvelous and skillful intricacies of the riggings were mirrored in the water the way a precise and prescient intelligence lunges into the uncertain destiny that sooner or later will shatter it.
They had only recently withdrawn from the terrible and beautiful life into which they would plunge back tomorrow, and their sails were still limp after the bellying wind; their bowsprits veered across the water as the ships had veered yesterday in their gliding, and from prow to poop, the curving of their hulls seemed to preserve the mysterious and sinuous grace of their furrowing wakes.
The end
