Often, at Les Oublis, after going with my mother to the edge of the pond filled with the playful glitter of the sunlight and the fish, in the heat of the day, or in the morning and evening walking with her out in the fields, I would trustingly dream of the future that was never beautiful enough to satisfy her love, nor my desire to please her; and the powers, if not of will, at least of imagination and feeling that were stirring within me, tumultuously summoned the destiny in which they could find fulfilment, and knocked repeatedly against the walls of my heart as if to burst through and rush out of me, into life.
If I then jumped up, filled with exuberance, if I kissed my mother a thousand times over, ran far ahead like a puppy dog or, having lingered behind her, picking poppies and cornflowers, brought them up to her with glad cries, it was less because of the joy of the walk itself and the pleasure of picking those flowers than it was a way of giving free rein to my happiness at sensing within me all the life ready to spring forth, to spread out infinitely, in vaster and more magical perspectives than those granted by the distant horizon of the forests and the sky that I wished I could reach at a single bound. Bouquets of cornflowers, clover and poppies, if I carried you off in such intoxication, my eyes burning, quivering all over – if you made me laugh and cry – the reason was that I made you part of all the hopes I then nursed, which now, like you, have withered and perished and, without having even blossomed like you, have returned to dust.
What made my mother so sad was my lack of willpower. I did everything on a momentary impulse. As long as my life drew its sustenance from my mind or my heart, it was, if not altogether good, at least not altogether bad. My mother and I were above all else preoccupied by the attempt to fulfil all my fine plans for work, tranquillity and reasonableness, since we sensed – she more distinctly, I confusedly, but with great force – that this fulfilment would only come about if I could create by myself and within myself that willpower that she had conceived and nursed into existence.
But each time I would put it off to the next day. I let myself take my time; I was sometimes sorry to see time passing, but there was still so much of it ahead of me! And yet I was rather afraid, and felt vaguely that the habit of abstaining from exercising my willpower was starting to weigh on me more and more heavily, the more the years went by, filled as I was with the melancholy suspicion that things would not change all of a sudden, and that I could hardly count, if my life were to be transformed and my willpower shaped, on some miracle that would cost me no effort at all. To desire strength of will was not enough. I would have needed to do just what I could not do without strength of will: will it.
3
And the crazed wind of concupiscence
Makes your flesh crack and flap like an old flag.*
– Baudelaire
In the course of my sixteenth year, I suffered a breakdown that left me feeling ill. To take my mind off it, my parents decided to bring me out into society. Young men fell into the habit of coming to see me. One of them was perverse and spiteful. He had manners that were both gentle and over-bold. He was the one I fell in love with. My parents learnt of it, and didn’t do anything too hasty, in case they upset me too much.
Spending all the time I couldn’t see him thinking about him, I finally lowered myself to resemble him as much as I possibly could. He led me into evil ways almost by stealth, then got me into the habit of allowing bad thoughts to arise in me, thoughts which I had no strength of will to oppose – and will alone would have been the only power capable of forcing them back into the infernal shadow from which they had emerged. When my love for him faded, habit had taken its place, and there was no lack of immoral young men ready to exploit it.
They were partners in my crimes, and made themselves the apologists of my misdeeds before the tribunal of my conscience. At first I was filled with agonized remorse, I made confessions that were not understood. My comrades put me off the idea of persisting in trying to tell my father. They slowly persuaded me that all girls did the same and that parents merely pretended not to know. My imagination soon glossed over the lies that I was ceaselessly obliged to tell by keeping a silence that my imagination depicted as the necessary result of some ineluctable necessity. At this time I was no longer properly living; but I was still dreaming, thinking and feeling.
To take my mind off all these unwholesome desires and chase them away, I started to go out a great deal into society. Its desiccating pleasures accustomed me to living in company the whole time and, as I lost the taste for solitude, I lost the secret of the joys that nature and art had hitherto given me. Never did I go to concerts so frequently as I did in those years. Never, entirely preoccupied as I was with the desire of being admired as I sat in some elegant box, did I have less of a feeling for the music. I listened, but I heard nothing.
If by chance I did hear, I had ceased to see everything that music can reveal. My walks too had been, as it were, stricken with sterility. The things which had once sufficed to make me happy for a whole day – a ray of sunlight casting its yellow beams on the grass, the odour given off by damp leaves when the last drops of rain fell – had, like me, lost their sweetness and gaiety. The woods, the sky, the lakes and rivers seemed to turn away from me, and if, lingering alone with them face to face, I anxiously questioned them, they no longer murmured those vague replies that had once so ravished me. The divine guests that are announced by the voice of the waters, leaves and sky only ever deign to visit hearts which, by dwelling within themselves, have purified themselves.
It was at this point that, seeking an inverse remedy, and not being courageous enough to will the true remedy that lay so close to me, and – alas! – so far away from me, since it was within me, I again let myself go, succumbing to guilty pleasures, thinking thereby to revive the flame which society had extinguished. It was in vain. Held back by the pleasure I took in pleasing others, I kept putting off, day after day, the definitive decision, the choice, the really free act – namely, opting for solitude.
I did not give up one of these two vices for the other. I combined them. More than that: each vice assumed the responsibility of overcoming all the obstacles in thought and feeling that might have stood in the way of the other vice, and thus seemed actually to summon it into being. I would go out into society to calm myself after some misdemeanour, and I would commit another one the minute I was calm. It was at that terrible period, after the loss of innocence, and before the remorse I feel today, at that period when, of all the periods in my life, I was most worthless, that I was most highly esteemed by everyone else.
I had been considered as a pretentious and eccentric little girl; now, conversely, the ashes of my imagination were greatly to the taste of society, which delighted in them. Just when I was committing the greatest of crimes against my mother, I was viewed, because of my tenderly respectful manner towards her, as a model daughter. After the suicide of my mind, everyone admired my intelligence and doted on my spirited remarks.
My desiccated imagination, my choked sensibility were enough to quench the thirst of those who most craved spiritual life, so artificial was their thirst, and so mendacious – just like the source at which they all imagined they could slake it! In any case, no one suspected the secret crime of my life, and I seemed to everyone to be the ideal young girl. How many parents told my mother at that time that if I had not enjoyed such a high position and if they had been able to aspire to me, they would have wished for no other wife for their sons! In the depths of my obliterated conscience, I nonetheless felt at this undeserved praise a desperate sense of shame; this shame did not reach the surface, and I had fallen so low that I was vile enough to report their praise, sarcastically, to my partners in crime.
4
I think of all who have lost what can
Never, ever be found again!*
– Baudelaire
In the winter of my twentieth year, my mother’s health, which had never been strong, was greatly impaired. I learnt that she had a heart disease, not a grave one, but one that still meant she needed to avoid any upset. One of my uncles told me that
