She also cursed her imagination; it had nurtured her love so tenderly that Françoise sometimes wondered if her imagination alone had given birth to this love, which now tyrannized and tortured its birth-giver.
She also cursed her ingenuity, which, for better and for worse, had so skillfully devised so many intrigues for meeting him that their frustrating impossibility may have attached her all the more strongly to the hero of those novels; she cursed her goodness and the delicacy of her heart, which, if she surrendered, would corrupt the joy of her guilty love with remorse and shame. She cursed her will, which could rear so impetuously and leap over hurdles so dauntlessly when her desires strove toward impossible goals—her will, so weak, so pliant, so broken not only when she was forced to disobey her desires, but also when she was driven by some other emotion.
Lastly she cursed her mind in its godliest forms, the supreme gift that she had received and to which people, without finding its true name, have given all sorts of names—poet’s intuition, believer’s ecstasy, profound feelings of nature and music—which had placed infinite summits and horizons before her love, had let them bask in the supernatural light of her love’s enchantment, and had, in exchange, lent her love a bit of its own enchantment, and which had won over to this love all its most sublime and most private inner life, bonding and blending with it, consecrating to it—as a church’s collection of relics and ornaments is dedicated to the Madonna—all the most precious jewels of her heart and her mind, her heart, whose sighs she heard in the evening or on the sea, and whose melancholy was now the sister of the pain inflicted on her by his total absence: she cursed that inexpressible sense of the mystery of things, which absorbs our minds in a radiance of beauty, the way the ocean engulfs the setting sun—for deepening her love, dematerializing it, broadening it, making it infinite without reducing its torture, “for” (as Baudelaire said when speaking about late afternoons in autumn) “there are sensations whose vagueness does not exclude intensity, and there is no sharper point than that of infinity.”
And so, beginning with the rising sun, he was consumed, on the seaweed of the shore, keeping at the bottom of his heart, like an arrow in the liver, the burning wound of the great Kypris.
—THEOCRITES: THE CYCLOPS
It was in Trouville that I just recently encountered Madame de Breyves, whom I have known to be happier. Nothing can cure her. If she loved Monsieur de Laléande for his good looks or his intelligence, one could seek to find a more intelligent or better-looking young man to divert her attention. If it were his benevolence or his love for her that attached her to him, someone else could try to love her more faithfully. But Monsieur de Laléande is neither good-looking nor intelligent. He has had no chance to show her whether he is tender or brutal, neglectful or faithful.
It is truly he whom she loves and not merits or charms that could be found to the same high degree in others; it is truly he whom she loves despite his imperfections, despite his mediocrity; she is thus doomed to love him despite everything. He—does she know what that is? Only that he induces such great thrills of despair and rapture in her that all else in her life, all other things, do not count. The most beautiful face, the most original intelligence would not have that particular and mysterious essence, so unique that no human being will ever repeat it in the infinity of worlds and the eternity of time.
Had it not been for Geneviève de Buivres, who innocently got her to attend the princess’s soirée, none of this would have happened. But the chain of circumstances linked up, imprisoning her, the victim of an illness that has no remedy because it has no reason. Granted, Monsieur de Laléande, who at this very moment must be leading a mediocre life and dreaming paltry dreams on the beach of Biarritz, would be quite amazed to learn about his other life, the one in Madame de Breyves’s soul, an existence so miraculously intense as to subjugate and annihilate everything else: an existence just as continuous as his own life, expressed just as effectively in actions, distinguished purely by a keener, richer, less intermittent awareness.
How amazed Monsieur de Laléande would be to learn that he, rarely sought after for his physical appearance, is instantly evoked wherever Madame de Breyves happens to be, among the most gifted people, in the most exclusive salons, in the most self-contained sceneries; and how amazed he would be to learn that this very popular woman has no thought, no affection, no attention for anything but the memory of this intruder, who eclipses everything else as if he alone had the reality of a person, and all other present persons were as empty as memories and shadows.
Whether Madame de Breyves strolls with a poet or lunches at the home of an archduchess, whether she leaves Trouville for the mountains or the countryside, reads by herself or chats with her most cherished friend, rides horseback or sleeps, Monsieur de Laléande’s name, his image lie upon her, delightful, truculent, unyielding, like the sky overhead. She, who always despised Biarritz, has now gone so far as to find a distressing and bewildering charm in everything regarding this city. She is nervous about who is there, who will perhaps see him but not know it, who will perhaps live with him but not enjoy it.
She feels no resentment for the latter, and without daring to give them messages, she keeps endlessly interrogating them, astonished at times that people hear her talking so much around her secret yet never surmise it. A large photograph of Biarritz is one of the few decorations in her bedroom. She lends Monsieur de Laléande’s features to one of the strollers whom one sees in that picture, albeit hazily. If she knew the bad music he likes and plays, those scorned ballads would probably replace Beethoven’s symphonies and Wagner’s operas on her piano and soon thereafter in her heart, both because of the sentimental cheapening of her taste and because of the spell cast on them by the man from whom all spells and sorrows come to her.
Now and then the image of the man she has seen only two or three times, and for moments at that, the man who has such a tiny space in the exterior events of her life and such an absorbing space in her mind and her heart, virtually monopolizing them altogether—his image blurs before the weary eyes of her memory. She no longer sees him, no longer recalls his features, his silhouette, barely remembers his eyes. Still, that image is all she has of him. She goes mad at the thought that she might lose that image, that her desire (which, granted, tortures her, but which is entirely herself now, in which she has taken refuge, fleeing everything she values, the way you value your own preservation, your life, good or bad)—that her desire could vanish, leaving nothing but a feeling of malaise, a suffering in dreams, of which she would no longer know the cause, would no longer see it even in her mind or cherish it there. But then Monsieur de Laléande’s image reappears after that momentary blurring of inner vision. Her grief can resume and it is almost a joy.
How will Madame de Breyves endure going back to Paris, to which he will not return before January? What will she do until then? What will she do, what will he do after that?
I wanted to leave for Biarritz twenty times over and bring back Monsieur de Laléande. The consequences might be terrible, but I do not have to examine them; she will not stand for it. Nonetheless I am devastated to see those small temples throbbing from within, beating strongly enough to be shattered by the interminable blows of this inexplicable love. This love gives her life the rhythm of anxiety. Often she imagines him coming to Trouville, approaching her, telling her he loves her. She sees him, her eyes glow. He speaks to her in that toneless voice of dreams, a voice that prohibits us from believing yet forces us to listen. It is he. He speaks to her in those words that make us delirious even though we never hear them except in dreams when we see the very shiny and poignant, the divine and trusting smile of two destinies uniting.
Thus she is awakened by the feeling that the two worlds of reality and her desire are parallel, that it is as impossible for them to join together as it is for a body and the shadow it casts. Then, remembering that minute in the cloakroom when his elbow grazed her elbow, when he offered her his body, which she could now press against her own if she had wished, if she had known, and which may remain forever remote from her, she is skewered by cries of despair and revolt like those heard on sinking ships. If, while strolling on the beach or in the woods, she allows a pleasure of contemplation or reverie, or at least
