DEPARTURE
"Déjà il rêvait à une thébaïde raffinée,
à un désert confortable, à une arche immobile
et tiède où il se réfugierait loin de l'incessant
déluge de la sottise humaine."
Huysmans, A Rebours.
Moscowitch, feeling bored and out of place among such obscure discussions, bowed to the honorable editors, and excusing himself to Entragues, left.
"Ah!" Renaudeau said, "perhaps we are going to learn who this new manufacturer of dramatic literature is."
"I do not know myself," Entragues answered, "having brought him here only through international courtesy."
"And to get rid of him?" Fortier questioned. "But Renaudeau does not permit himself to be overreached. Besides, we shall see, for he has left me a copy: 'The Voluntary Expiation, drama in eight scenes.' Ah! there is an Explanatory Note: 'In default of social justice, inner justice punishes the guilty; one has opprobrium for its end; the other, rehabilitation; the one abases, the other elevates.' A period, then a dash, and these three words twice underlined: 'VOLUNTARY EXPIATION SANCTIFIES.'"
"Well!" Entragues said, "it is quite puerile, but perhaps the text contains interesting details."
"Yes," Renaudeau put in, "a new form justifies all subjects, as a fine resilvering conceals verdigris. Do you ask for indulgence?"
"Oh! no," Entragues returned, "although I have a certain interest in having him believe he is destined for fame. If you wish to oblige me, humor him with illusions until the final dagger thrust."
"So you are becoming wicked, Entragues?" asked Fortier.
"No, it is just for the sport."
He requested an envelope and, after inserting the box ticket with his card and writing the name of Madame Sixtine Magne upon it, he had it dispatched to her. As soon as the office boy left, remorse seized him: perhaps he would have done better to go there in person. No. Yes. No. Yes.
Renaudeau, who had glanced over the manuscript, arrested this fatiguing game of see-saw by saying:
"It is not, perhaps, so bad. When a drama has a philosophy, it appears superior to anything we have. Our classical theater is so denuded of mystic sense! Corneille does politics, Racine, the psychology of the laboratory, and as for Molière, he is closed to aught that is not ruse, enjoyment, banal remarks on love, and vague statements. When he wishes to take up any traits of manners, it is to subject women to the materialism of life, to rail at nobility, because there is none, or at the doctors, because they cannot cure him of his hypochondria. Veuillot, but Hello especially, has judged him well: he shuts the door. It is really the theater of a Gassendist."
"You are speaking of Molière?" asked Calixte, entering. "He is a wretch: he has jeered at the dreamer."
"Nevertheless," objected Van Baël, "what of Alceste and Don Juan?"
"But," Renaudeau interposed, "even had he done nothing at all, he would be, like Voltaire, beyond criticism."
"Don Juan would have charm, were it not for his ridiculous rustics," Calixte said. "But see how everything shrinks in the brain of this bourgeois: if Don Juan is not a fastidious person, if in the vast field of corn he does not choose the finest, the highest and the most golden, if he makes a sheaf of everything, he is no longer Don Juan, he is a trailer after petticoats."
"Precisely," Entragues said, "but if he loves them all, it is because he idealizes them all."
"I do not think so," Calixte said. "Molière only made these countrywomen victims of Don Juan to put the comic note into his play: he had to make his audience laugh and the first conception that came was good. And Alceste? Does this person who detests men and who prefers solitude to the few concessions demanded by a pretty woman—does this man find, at the end of five acts, a single word to paint the soul-state of a hater of humanity? He is only a crabbed fellow. Above all else, he places the joy of being himself in liberty, far from the world, and he does not know how to express it: he has no soul! With what delicious grace does the so ridiculed Thisbé, the Thisbé of Théophile, tell Bersiane of her dread of noise, external life, the movement of things:
THISBE
Sais-tu pas bien que j'aime à rêver, à me taire
Et que mon naturel est un peu solitaire,
Que je cherche souvent à m'ôter hors du bruit?
Alors, pour dire vrai, je hais bien qui me suit:
Quelquefois mon chagrin trouverait importune
La conservation de la bonne fortune,
La visite d'un Dieu me désobligerait,
Un rayon de soleil parfois me fâcherait.
"And what do the professors mean by telling us that the sentiment of nature was unknown in the seventeenth century, when we find such verses, again in the same Théophile:
Les roses des rosiers, les ombres, les ruisseaux,
Le murmure des vents et le bruit des oiseaux,
or such lines:
Chaque saison donne ses fruits,
L' automne nous donne ses pommes,
L'Hyver donne ses longues nuits,
Pour un plus grand repos des hommes.
Le Printemps nous donne des fleurs,
Il donne l'âme et les couleurs
A la feuille qui semblait morte....
"I do not know the rest. One always reads the same books," Calixte concluded, "without suspecting that only those which the majority disdains have interest."
"Théophile," Entragues remarked, "is one of the rare French poets. He is full of delicate reveries. I know him well for I love him:
Prête-moi ton sein pour y boire
Des odeurs qui m' embaumeront.
"The second Théophile has spoken of him without having read him. This is obvious, for why should he have passed his time in explaining him, if he had known him? One only talks of what one does not know; to talk of what one knows seems useless; one gets bored and bores others as well. That is why criticism is, most often, so disagreeable when it is well informed, and partaking of an emetic laxity, the rest of the time."
"Like that of Bergeron," Calixte said. "Why have you accepted his dilution of nonsense on Verlaine and Huysmans?"
"As an advertisement, my dear," Fortier answered. "It is virtually printed on the blue sheets of the initial and final announcements."
"He is witty," Renaudeau said, "and that amuses: one must live. It has gained us several alleged subscriptions."
"The man is pretending," Entragues declared. "He is as incapable of feeling Verlaine's poetry as I of feeling Molière's."
"And then," Calixte interposed, "he is truly too destitute of principles. After some savage attack, he offers you, what? another article, 'this one serious, according to my real convictions.' As Goncourt says, there are 'droll vulgarians.' Ah! I see nothing since Hennequin, whose precision of method and sureness of deduction pardoned an absolutism of theory that was a little hard. I see nothing except those of to-morrow, those who still speak in the desert. It is, nevertheless, interesting to read the alleged opinion of an intelligence on works old or new...."
"There remains Fiction and Poetry," Entragues said, "and for me that suffices."
Dazin, who had only offered some inarticulations since his blue and red vowels had foundered under the gales of talk, declared:
"Nothing, nothing more, and besides, there was never anything; but one believed, and now one no longer believes. I love them. You will soon see the Abyssales which are now being printed: you will see. It is a chaplet of medals where, with a certain material force, I have restored the profiles of women. I believe they are in a tolerable style. Here are the first lines of the first one:
Basilisse, icon.—In the lecherous and parthenoide incognition, the abysmal gleam of the muliebrile future towards the flames and the chimerical burning ah (wings unfold for this flight and eyeballs glisten: silk rumples at the carnal rustling)! slumbers and blond the cruel senses are veiled!
She.
Here blond the gloom.
To smile at the growth of vernal grass and the gladioles died of ennui the blood returns to the heart.
Sharp already? The Arachnean dead in rents and the pungency the red and the buckler is resolved on the aureoles twinly surge the Breasts."
Among the flakes of this verbal fog, Entragues suspected Dazin of having wished to suggest the birth of puberty and the awaking of the senses. He knew the facile arcena of these strained phrases of which Dazin was not the inventor. Such a style was not absolutely to be condemned, provided one only used it for the sake of desired obscurities and with the glossary of a context.
Mortified at being understood by a simple analyst, Dazin left.
"He believes himself," Renaudeau said, "a Mallarmé or a more subtle Laforgue."
"He has not even surprised," Calixte Heliot answered, "the most elementary of their processes."
"The processes of a poet," Entragues said, "are part of his talent: it would be quite sterile to possess it. Mallarmé plays with the complementary colors of those with which he wishes to suggest vision. If Dazin had remained, I would have given him this secret and also told him that to be a more subtle Laforgue, one must have more than a capricious syntax, abusive metaphors of rare words, and the like—one must have a spontaneity which touches the heart."
Hubert and Calixte left together and walked at random through the streets, continuing, almost always in agreement, the conversation begun in the Revue.
This time, again, they did not separate until the hour of sleep; they were happy in enjoying each other, with the certainty of likewise delighting each other, of expressing concordant thoughts, of offering nothing that would be a blasphemy to the other.
As they were noting the parallelism of these two evenings which chance meetings had given them, at a short interval, Hubert remarked the duality in the development of events.
"When an act is produced, it is always produced a second time. This is an axiom. It is evident that, to demonstrate it, one would have to be fortified with a multiplicity of historic anecdotes, and I do not know if this is possible. As far as I and my past life are concerned, there is such a surprising and frightful exactitude in the axiom that I believe I could predict nearly half the things which will happen to me from to-day until the last sleep. Besides, this axiom, perhaps, is quite personal to me, special to my organism. Such a tendency to repetition is not the source of any joy. I wish that pleasures could be doubled like pains and that the proportion, in short, could remain the same, but consider the infirmity of mathematics applied to the human soul: it is assuredly less painful to me to have seven griefs for one felicity than to bear a double weight counterbalanced by such a weak duplication as that of one to two. Prolonged to infinity, the two proportions would go on eternally equipoised, but the scale of pains breaks with its chains and crushes our hearts."
At the request of Calixte, skilful in diverting a conversation headed for the abysses, Entragues related some of his plans to his friend. What works to be constructed! It was not that the freestone was lacking, nor cement, nor accessories; it was a question of time. He had, ready for erection, more ideas than a century could utilize, and sometimes the things which would never be done frightened and haunted him like a swarming of gnomes. He had thought of this on certain mornings: to put some books, his copybooks, his notes, his written sheets in a valise and hide himself for the rest of his life in a closed house, facing the sea. He saw it built on the dunes, between the strand and the first trees of the coast: no vegetation nearby excepting the pallid grass, the violet thistles and the tall darnels; the view of steeples far off, on the land side; on the other side, the sea and a lighthouse, amid wind and wave, like a symbol. Wagons pass, full of sea-weed; horses and men pant on the sand, yoked to the labor of the fecundation of the ground, and he, yoked to the labor of the sterilization of desires, would watch them pass. Towards the equinoxes, the spray of waves agitated by moon and tempest would come to strike against his window, like a bird's wing. And birds would also come towards the gleam of his lamp and he would open his window to the spray of waves and the wings of birds. Like a monster, he would be alone. "For we are monsters, my poor Calixte, we have put our duty above life; our souls afar from men, like fabulous dragons, we guard imaginary treasures, and we know it, and to this nothingness we sacrifice all, even our life! We have hearts of anchorites and we would court women! Ah! were I there—a hermit among my dreams, an excellent shelter—I should write what I shall perhaps not write: a work. But to what end? Now, at other times I would like to get into some fixed habit, punctually deliver myself to love, quarrel with my wife at stated hours, rise late, enfeeble the ennui of evenings in the vain noise of theaters, eat nourishing foods which charge the nerves with vibrant fluids, and busy myself, during rainy hours, with an honorable compilation."
"It would be better to clothe oneself in love," Calixte said. "To transfer one's egoism to a woman: to be jealous of one's own joys more than of hers, in fine, to give to another the absurd happiness one would not wish for oneself; to dream that she is happy, that she feels it and knows it is through my agency."
"Do you imagine that this would be possible for us?" Entragues asked.
He made no allusion to his personal sentiments, for even Calixte was not his confidant. In questioning his friend or in answering him, he spoke with full liberty, completely abstract.
"Yes," Calixte answered, "the 'Imitation' gives the clue. It suffices to transfer to a creature the love, proportionately lessened, which the priest feels towards God. It would be a sort of obligation to love which one would impose upon oneself, the first rule of a more general rule of life, freely and Chistianly accepted, once for all."
"I had not thought of this," Entragues said, "of love considered as a spiritual discipline."
"Such is the exact formula," Calixte declared. "If we can yet save ourselves, we and all similar monsters, it is through Christianity and Christian discipline. This will singularly elevate our souls and it may curb our transcendental egoisms!"
"We should require Beatrices," Hubert said.
"They can be created," Calixte responded, "and we can baptize a nobly profiled woman with divine love."
(Hubert received this note on the following day:
"It is perhaps quite compromising, but I am free. Be good enough to call for me at eight o'clock."
Then he began to dream of the joy of shared pleasures, and instantly the fourth chapter of The Adorer found itself shaped.)