REFLECTIONS
"In carne enim ambulantes non secundum
carnem militamus."
Saint Paul, Cor., II, 10, 3.
Entragues wrote only in the morning, but often extended his work of the forenoon into the afternoon. When he did not feel lucid enough for the logic of prose, he amused himself. Poetry, a simple music admitting neither passion nor analysis, is only intended to suggest vague sentiments and confused sensations; a half-consciousness suffices for it. In imitation of Saint Notker, he composed obscure sequences full of alliterations and interior assonances. Walt Whitman, with his intuitive genius, unconsciously restored this lost poetic form. Entragues, at certain hours, delighted in it. This literature of about the tenth century, usually judged as the puerile distraction of barbarous monks, seemed to him on the contrary full of an ingenuous freshness and of an ingenious refinement. Notker charmed him, besides, by the red-blooded boldness of his metaphors, charmed and terrified him while throwing him on his knees before this God for whom prayer is a bleeding holocaust, and who demands, like a slaughtering of lambs, "immolated praise." He also took pleasure in a short and delicate sequence of Godeschalk, where Saint Mary Magdalene "covers with kisses" the feet of Jesus "which she has washed with her tears." A monk of the eleventh century had written a work entitled: The Nothingness in the Darkness. Entragues could find no trace of it beyond the mention of the title. It was one of the unknown books he would have liked to read.
Apart from two or three scorners of actual life, a strict logician of criticism, an extreme and absolute dreamer, an extraordinary creator of phrases and shaper of images, and several modern poets, he now hardly ever opened anything but antique theologies and dictionaries. He had a mania for lexicons, tools which seemed to him, generally, more interesting than works, and he spent over such instruments, often quite useless, many an idle hour. Thus ended the first day of his return.
On the morrow, after a night in which he had relived some of the most characteristic minutes passed with Sixtine at the château de Rabodanges, Hubert suspected that his life was about to change in orientation, that an inevitable crisis threatened him. It was a propitious occasion for meditation. In several weeks perhaps—oh! only perhaps!—he will have undergone obvious modifications. It was necessary—in order to make a reckoning of it later—to note certain dominant traits of the state of his actual mind, to proceed to a summary examination of consciousness. His travel note book already containing some sufficiently precise remarks on this subject, he restricted himself to completing them with the following reflections:
"I am ashamed to admit it, so banal is this malady: I am bored. I have excruciating awakenings. I believe in nothing and I do not love. My calling is a sad one. It is to experiment with all the griefs and all the horrors of the human soul, so that men may recognize themselves in my work and say: 'Well roared, lion'! Yet, I am free: without nightly obligations, neither a parasite nor a worldling, nor a dramatic critic, I retire early, when I please. Having reached my thirtieth year with hardly any social relations, having enough revenue to be independent, I act in everything as I desire, heedless of general customs and satisfied, for example, to testify my scorn for the civilization of gas, by burning my lamp for ten hours. I am free, I have neither wife nor mistress. I fear mistresses for the confusion in which they throw the regularity of my work; but with sensitive beings a large lagoon is hollowed from principles to acts. When I am with some one, I desire solitude; alone, I feel the disquietudes of the void.
"When the commandment of the flesh hurls me to lustful adorations, I blush at such a servitude and at the earliest lucid moment I treat myself with contempt. When I have long stored the concentrated poison of vain seeds, hammer strokes drum on me, my organism gives way and my brain becomes troubled. Never having been kept upright by hair-cloth, iron tacks, wounds freshened by perpetual excoriations, pitiless fasts, privation of sleep, nor any of the mystic and Franciscan maneuvers, I subdue my flesh by leading it to pasture, but with no more sin in my intention than an invalid who breaks his abstinence to procure a remedy. Although pleasure follows, it is an obedience to the ineluctable commands governing animated life. Though I accept it, it is a human weakness. To love so much that one wishes to die—that test I have had in adolescence, and the reasonable insensibility of the woman I adored has never shed any bitterness on that far off remembrance. I do not smile pityingly on these days of umbrageous follies. After ten or eleven years, I am as sure as I was at the first hour of having been deprived of the greatest happiness put within reach of my hands by the Decrees, and in moments of emotion this regret can still throw a gloom over my revery. Since then, nothing but transitory pluckings; barely, now and then, an attempt at the band broken at the first touch.
"Far from being the aim of my life, sensation is its accident: I reserve my voluntary strength for the tales I tell my contemporaries. They have been found cold and ironic, but I have neither the quality to be an enthusiast of my age, nor to take it too seriously. Another motive removes me from emotional researches: without being a pessimist, without denying the possibility of satisfaction, without even denying happiness, I scorn it. I do not seek to aggravate my miseries by meditations on the universal misery, to which my egoism, moreover, makes me almost indifferent. A state of perfect peace of mind agrees with me. It is possible for me to regret an unhatched joy, but I wish neither to provoke nor to lie in wait for the hatching. In fine, there is no doubt that I do not know how to live. A perpetual celebration, my existence is the very negation of ordinary life, which is composed of ordinary loves. I have no tendency towards the altruisms demanded by society. If ever I could be drawn from myself, for the benefit of some creation, it would be in the manner of an imaginative person, at all points re-creating the object of my passion, minutely scrutinizing the mechanism of my impressions. Such is my character: it is obvious that I have not applied myself to elude the knowledge of myself; and yet no one knows better than I do to what point this knowledge is puerile and unhealthy."