My sweetest impressions are of the years when she returned to Les Oublis, summoned by my illness. Not only was she paying me an extra visit, on which I had not counted, but she was all sweetness and tenderness, pouring them out, on and on, without disguise or constraint. Even in those times when they were not yet sweetened and softened by the thought that they would someday be lacking, her sweetness and tenderness meant so much to me that the joys of convalescence always saddened me to death: the day was coming when I would be sound enough for my mother to leave, and until then, I was no longer sick enough to keep her from reviving her severity, her unlenient justice.
One day, the uncles I stayed with at Les Oublis had failed to tell me that my mother would be arriving; they had concealed the news because my second cousin had dropped by to spend a few hours with me, and they had feared I might neglect him in my joyful anguish of looking forward to my mother’s visit. That ruse may have been the first of the circumstances that, independent of my will, were the accomplices of all the dispositions for evil that I bore inside myself, like all children of my age, though to no higher degree. That second cousin, who was fifteen (I was fourteen), was already quite depraved, and he taught me things that instantly gave me thrills of remorse and delight. Listening to him, letting his hands caress mine, I reveled in a joy that was poisoned at its very source; soon I mustered the strength to get away from him and I fled into the park with a wild need for my mother, who I knew was, alas, in Paris, and against my will I kept calling to her along the garden trails.
All at once, while passing an arbor, I spotted her sitting on a bench, smiling and holding out her arms to me. She lifted her veil to kiss me, I flung myself against her cheeks and burst into tears; I wept and wept, telling her all those ugly things that required the ignorance of my age to be told, and that she knew how to listen to divinely, though failing to grasp them and softening their significance with a goodness that eased the weight on my conscience. This weight kept easing and easing; my crushed and humiliated soul kept rising lighter and lighter, more and more powerful, overflowing—I was all soul.
A divine sweetness was emanating from my mother and from my recovered innocence. My nostrils soon inhaled an equally fresh and equally pure fragrance. It came from a lilac bush, on which a branch hidden by my mother’s parasol was already in blossom, suffusing the air with an invisible perfume. High up in the trees the birds were singing with all their might. Higher still, among the green tops, the sky was so profoundly blue that it almost resembled the entrance to a heaven in which you could ascend forever. I kissed my mother. Never have I recaptured the sweetness of that kiss. She left the next day, and that departure was crueler than all the ones preceding it. Having once sinned, I felt forsaken not only by joy but also by the necessary strength and support.
All these separations were preparing me, in spite of myself, for what the irrevocable separation would be someday, even if, back then, I never seriously envisaged the possibility of surviving my mother. I had resolved to kill myself within a minute after her death. Later on, absence taught me far more bitter lessons: that you get accustomed to absence, that the greatest abatement of the self, the most humiliating torment is to feel that you are no longer tormented by absence. However, those lessons were to be contradicted in the aftermath.
I now think back mainly to the small garden where I breakfasted with my mother amid countless pansies. They had always seemed a bit sad, as grave as coats-of-arms, but soft and velvety, often mauve, sometimes violet, almost black, with graceful and mysterious yellow patterns, a few utterly white and of a frail innocence. I now pick them all in my memory, those pansies; their sadness has increased because they have been understood, their velvety sweetness has vanished forever.
How could all this fresh water of memories have spurted once again and flowed through my impure soul of today without getting soiled? What virtue does this morning scent of lilacs have that it can pass through so many foul vapors without mingling and weakening? Alas!—my soul of fourteen reawakens not only inside me but, at the same time, far away from me, outside me. I do know that it is no longer my soul and that it does not depend on me to become my soul again. Yet back then it never occurred to me that I would someday regret its loss.
It was nothing but pure; I had to make it strong and able to perform the highest tasks in the future. At Les Oublis, after my mother and I, during the hot hours of the day, visited the pond with its flashes of sunlight and sparkling fish, or strolled through the fields in the morning or the evening, I confidently dreamed about that future, which was never beautiful enough for her love or my desire to please her. And if not my willpower, then at least the forces of my imagination and my emotion were stirred up inside me, tumultuously calling for the destiny in which they would be realized, and repeatedly striking the wall of my heart as if to open it and dash outside myself, into life.
If, then, I jumped with all my strength, if I kissed my mother a thousand times, running far ahead like a young dog or indefinitely lagging behind to pick cornflowers and red poppies, which I brought her, whooping loudly—if I did all those things, it was less for the pleasure of strolling and gathering flowers than for the joy of pouring out the happiness of feeling all this life within me about to gush forth, to spread out infinitely, in more immense and more enchanting vistas than the far horizon of the woods and the sky, a horizon that I yearned to reach in a single leap. Bouquets of clover, of poppies, of cornflowers—if I carried you away with blazing eyes, with quivering ecstasy, if you made me laugh and cry, it was because I entwined you with all my hopes, which now, like you, have dried, have decayed, and, without blossoming like you, have returned to dust.
What distressed my mother was my lack of will. I always acted on the impulse of the moment. So long as the impulse came from my mind or my heart, my life, though not perfect, was not truly bad. My mother and I were preoccupied chiefly with the realization of all my fine projects for work, calm, and reflection, because we felt—she more distinctly, I confusedly but intensely—that this realization would only be an image projected into my life, the image of the creation, by me and in me, of the willpower that she had conceived and nurtured. However, I always kept putting it off until tomorrow. I gave myself time, I occasionally grieved at watching time pass, but so much time still lay before me!
Yet I was a bit scared, and I obscurely felt that my habit of doing without willpower was starting to weigh down on me more and more strongly as the years accumulated; and I sadly suspected that there would be no sudden change, and that I could scarcely count on an utterly effortless miracle to transform my life and create my will. Desiring a will was not enough. I would have needed precisely what I could not have without willpower: a will.
And the furious wind of concupiscence
Makes your flesh flap like an old flag.
—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
During my sixteenth year I suffered a crisis that left me sickly. To divert me, my family had me debut in society. Young men got into the habit of calling on me. One of them was perverse and wicked. His manners were both gentle and brash. He was the one I fell in love with. My parents found out, but to keep me from suffering all too much, they did not force his hand. Spending all my time thinking about him when I did not see him, I finally lowered myself by imitating him as much as was possible for me. He beguiled me almost by surprise into doing wrong, then he got me accustomed to having bad thoughts which I had no will to resist—willpower being the only force capable of driving them back to the infernal darkness from which they emerged.
When love was gone, habit took its place, and there was no lack of immoral young men to exploit it. As
