DIAMOND DUST
"Chino la fronte e con lo sguardo a terra
L'amoroso Pensier rode se stesso."
Cav. Marino, l'Adone, VIII, 12.
More than two weeks had passed since the feverish and mysterious evening which Sixtine granted to Entragues. Three times he had tried to see her, three times he had failed: irritated, exasperated, cast down, such were his three successive states of mind.
After the door had closed on him, by the gleam of an instantaneous if tardy clairvoyance, he had seen and deciphered Sixtine's final irony: "You do not take me? Yet I am at your mercy. I have the air of thinking, of listening, of speaking, but I do not think, I do not listen, I do not speak—I merely pretend to do all these things and I await. Yet another half-hour, another ten minutes, five, one, the last one, nothing! Go! you make me lose my patience!"
"Now," Entragues told himself, "it is quite well reorganized, I must not lose it." And going by the longest route to his home, meditatively he recomposed the scene, wrote it in his mind. How Would it go at the theater? He planned the play. While the man in love explains the tenderness of his sentiments, the woman disrobes. He shrugged his shoulders: this would not be understood, he would be charged with coarseness. And yet the comic Plato had already done it, then Andronicus, then several Destouches, several Picards and several Augiers.
One could pass on a little note to the eminent professors who lecture on dramatic history (that vast science in three hundred thousand feuilletons): Note.—Cf.: Plato com. Frag. ed. Brulend. §3;—Andron. ap. Taschend. t. XXXVII; etc. In the matter of books, criticism buries you, in the matter of the theater, it overwhelms you. To write for one's sole pleasure, with an absolute disdain for present opinions. Yes, but if they are just, that is to say favorable, one glories in it. Isolation is difficult, vanity ceaselessly and indefatigably solders the cable one has cut. Vanity! Fatuity! And in everything. Thus this monologue lends itself to Sixtine. I reason like a male; and she feels like a female and I shall never know what she felt at a certain moment, because, even taking for granted a confession and the wish to be sincere, she would lie by nature. The truth is what one thinks it; when one no longer thinks of anything—all is reduced to nothing! There remains sensation, but analyzed sensation—diamond dust!
He went to bed feeling miserable, and as he was dozing off with the consciousness of his moral powerlessness he was seized with a fit of despondency comparable to that of impotent men when in the presence of the desired woman. Incapable of loving, incapable of tearing from his heart the parasitic science whose tentacles strangled him, it seemed to him as if he had swallowed plaster, as if muddy blood stagnated in his veins; or rather as if his arteries slowly carried a curare which gradually benumbed his muscles. His mind obstructed with the most contradictory metaphors, he tried them one after the other, vaguely disgusted with their absurdity. Finally, with a rush of vitality, he somewhat reconquered his logic and ceased to hold himself in contempt: "I suffer, hence I love!" This thought, though he ironically perceived its mild naïveté, comforted him, a very long and decisive breathing reëstablished the haematosis, and he was able to sleep peacefully.
Painful doubts of this sort came to torture him on more than one evening. He was only delivered from them by anger—the first time that he knocked at Sixtine's door without getting a response. Certain deceptions on certain days determined this action, when strong desire had a precise end. At this moment it was to see Sixtine, merely to see her, merely the pleasure of the eyes.
The effect was the same after the second check, but accentuated to a sort of rage, a hardly dangerous crisis whose very lashes were salutary.
The last mockery of fortune, on the other hand, threw him into a resigned dejection. "She does not want to see me; I have displeased her, but how? Yet I love her." Thus displaced from the subject to the object, doubt was supportable as an imposed pain which one accepts without having any responsibility: "It is not my fault."
So he paced the streets or visited his friends and the Revue spéculative, a pale melancholy upon him like the vegetation of a cave. Under the shadow of a strong habit which no disturbance could uproot, he still worked in the mornings, but he shortened the hours, impatient for his distracting strolls. His imagination no longer accompanied him. It seemed that in ever projecting his thought towards an external creature, he had proportionately diminished the intensity of his evocative faculty.
As he was leaving the Revue, after Fortier had told him that the countess, now installed in her home because of affairs, was receiving some friends on a certain evening, at nine o'clock, he discovered that the present day was Wednesday, the day in question.
"Perhaps I will find Sixtine there?"
This quite natural reflection guided his somnambulism towards Marigny Avenue. In the interval he had dressed and dined with a perfect unconsciousness. A system of newly organized revery relieved the slow and rude friction of transitions; furnished with a problem of metaphysics, commerce, art, politics, it mattered not what so long as it required shrewd deductions, he used to be so perfectly absorbed in them that the hours vainly pricked him with their pins, the minutes. He walked through the streets insentient, inexistent. But, involuntarily, this action of his mind which shut him in between the walls of the fixed idea was a grievous imprisonment against which his will rebelled; on the other hand, chosen and brought about in entire freedom, this incarceration saved him, without the tax of suffering, from the ennui of expectation. Nothing was so painful to him as changes of rhythm. He wished them to be abrupt or imperceptible, partaking of a sudden brutality or of an infinitesimal gentleness, the unity of force sustained with all its initial violence or decomposed into the infinity of its diminishing fractions. Leibnitz had taught him the arithmetical method of reducing the sensation of time to an evanescent progression: he applied the method to life. To live and not to be aware of living was an ideal to which his senses, deceivers, but unrelenting, too often barred the road. Today the obstacle had been surmounted.
In the small modern room on the ground floor there were many people: some raised their heads when his name was announced; the usual movements and whisperings:
"An Entragues?"
"Which Entragues?"
"Oh! some stray stem of an Entragues! The name is quite common in the South."
"Yet he carries himself well."
"The countess will tell us about him." As soon as he was freed from the ceremonial of introduction, Entragues sought the eyes of some friend with whom he could be at ease. He found Sixtine's eyes: a gesture beckoned him.
He obeyed without astonishment, for he had seen a chair near her, guarded by a fan.
"I noticed you. How criminal I consider myself towards your friendliness and insistence.... Do you want me to number your visiting cards? Why did you not write to me?"
"But I wanted to see you."
"Yes, but writing has a witchery unknown to printed forms. Instead of seeking me, you should have called me. And you have sought so badly!"
"No, since I find you at last."
"By chance! Are you satisfied? You wished to see me, well, look at me."
"That is what I am doing," Hubert responded, "and with pleasure. I would never grow tired of it, Madame."
"I supposed it was quite the other way," Sixtine rejoined, "and that a secret or very inconsiderate presentiment informed you of my absences. How one blames one's friends! For the past three weeks, I left three times, in the evening, to come here, and naturally on the Wednesday of each week. Admit that it was odd for me to find your card, each Wednesday that I returned home."
"I am lost if you suppose I did it purposely," Hubert answered, "for every explanation is too simple to seem probable. I will give you the best one, although it may not perhaps be the true one. The first evening in which I passed a few minutes at your home was a Wednesday. A latent force must have led me to your door on the following Wednesdays, and this without any participation of my will. This periodical return, like the regular culmination of a feverish condition, is after all quite natural."
"These are the reasonings," Sixtine replied, "of an automaton who would be hard put to explain why he always plays the same tune on the flute, at the same hour. But you have come to the countess, instead of knocking at my door. Did no one wind you up this morning? On whom does this task devolve?"
"It would be yours, Madame, if you consented."
Each of them, ill at ease, felt the same desire to be silent and to go away. Sixtine, not yet calmed after the old ill-humor that had finally exploded, feared to hurt Hubert, feared to bleed him with too many prickings. Hubert, who feigned a sad politeness, endured suffocating agony. So he had been judged and Sixtine had pronounced sentence, with what aggravations for the unhappy man! Incapable, perhaps, of loving; certainly incapable of sharing his love. Would no mirage, then, be able to deceive him persistently, with sufficient certitude to give him courage to lead across the desert, towards the oasis, a phantom of love vivified by desire? She scoffed him and he surrendered; she fled and he watched her flee.
At the foot of the stairs which she had rapidly descended, remorse seized Sixtine by the flap of her cloak; she turned her head and waited for several seconds. Then, lifting her skirts, she hurried to the carriage which a watchful gamin, upon noticing her at the sidewalk, had motioned with mock gestures of obsequiousness. Profiting by the new indecision, remorse tried to seduce her with these insinuations:
"The air is very pleasant, the sky is clear, it would be nice to return on foot, chatting on the way. This poor Hubert would appreciate it, and I have really been a bit severe with him: he asks so little! But what can he be doing?"
She listened: no sound of a person issuing from the house. "What is this! You seem to be waiting for him! What an attitude for a woman!" the thin and whispering voice of feminine vanity breathed to her. She gave the driver her address and climbed into the carriage.
Hubert had slowly walked down the stairs stopping at each step. He staggered under a fit of contempt. His whole person, the very necessary movement of his limbs seemed to him an insult to life. His reflection, perceived in the mirrors, gave him a horror of effectual futility. This careful attire—what a pretentious obedience to vanity I How ugly he was with his pale cheeks and empty gaze! Ah! dust compressed into a human form, what prevents thee from returning to thy natural state, where thou couldst humbly blend thyself, as would be fitting, with the bruised and scorned sand crying beneath thy phantom feet?
He reached the gate; a carriage, detaching itself from the file, departed: "Perhaps it was she? No, she must be far away, by now. The air is very pleasant, the sky clear, it would have been nice to return on foot, chatting. This pleasure was not made for me, and it is ridiculous even to dream of it. Yet, would she have refused me, if I had asked? Eh! there I reason as if this woman had the slightest liking for me. Shall I, then, never cure myself of the stupid presumption with which I so grievously delude myself? What is the good of my philosophy? Everything is useless. Ah! I suffer less! The futility of my life is not unique; it is confounded with the universal nothingness. Yes, but all the same I can only consider myself, only myself, since I know nothing outside of my consciousness. Well, then! I remain alone, indemnified and invulnerable. What is that cloud, called Sixtine, which comes to trouble my royal indifference and to conceal my sun—death? I do not want to go to sleep in the shadow of her beauty. What is the good of loving, when the awakening is certain. Ah! if eternity were given me! Indispensable eternity, without you life is only a quite despicable thoroughfare. Does the present hour exist for the condemned person who knows that the next hour will not belong to him? And this life is less than an hour for whomsoever knows the worth of what he has been deprived of in being robbed of eternity." How he would have sacrificed his genius to be a Christian and no longer a dilettante of Christianity, believing, not in the unique beauty, but in the truth of religion, assured not alone of his social necessity, but of his immutable, absolute and solar truth!
He issued from his metaphysical cloud near the Pont-Royal, and fell back into his actual misery. The woman he loved did not love him and would never love him. In vain he scorned himself, in vain he accused himself of emotional impotence, the man deep in him protested and repeated: "I must love, since I suffer."
But, with Entragues, the man never pronounced the final aphorism. After the troubled divagations of the lover came the romancer, an artist or ditch-digger who gathered impressions together, clothed them in words as with a shroud of chatoyant folds, and laid them to rest, with care, respect and tenderness, in the vault whose portal bears the words written in letters of gold: LITERATURE.
He went to sleep, dreaming of the embryo of a romance which a more disinterested person would find in this new adventure. But perhaps he would some day acquire that necessary disinterestedness! At first the idea was outrageous, then he grew accustomed to it; he mentally sketched a first chapter—that of the encounter. He transported the scene to Naples, at the end of the fifteenth century, and the personages became pure symbols. The Man, a prisoner, typified the idea of the soul imprisoned in the jail of the flesh, quite ignorant of the external world, refashioning the vague vision transmitted by the senses. The Woman, a madonna, was a statue which the prisoner's love endowed with life and feeling, becoming as really existent to him as a creature of God. And on this theme could be developed all the divagations of love, dream and madness.
On the morning of the next day, he commenced this story which was closely based upon his actual state of mind, and in which he would take delight in transposing, in a manner of logical extravagance, the drama he was naively playing with Sixtine.
This madonna was the new woman, la Madonna Novella, and what name should be given to the prisoner, a prey to his own imagination, if not that of Della Preda, since we are in Italy. Veltro fits the indispensable turnkey, and for title—The Adorer.