Legends: Autobiographical Sketches

by August Strindberg

So the next day we actually have our meal together, and fall into the pleasant mood which is desirable at such times. We treat each other with respect, avoid saying unpleasant things, put ourselves at each other's point of view, and obtain the illusion of being of one mind in all matters. After our meal, since the evening is mild, we continue our conversation, and cross the river, proceeding to the Boulevards till we finally reach the Café du Cardinal. It is now midnight, but we are far from being tired, and now begin those wonderful hours when the soul gets free from her wrappings, and the spiritual faculties, which would ordinarily be employed in dreaming, are roused to waking, and clear conceptions and keen glances into the past and future. During these night hours, my spirit seems to hover over and outside my body, which sits there like a stranger. Our drinking is merely a secondary matter which serves to keep sleep away, perhaps also to open the flood-gates of memory whence all the occurrences of my life flow forth, so that at every moment I can call up facts, dates, years, scenes, and pictures. That is the attraction and power of vinous excitement over me, but a religious-minded occultist has told me that it is a sin, for it is wrongfully antedating salvation, which consists in the liberation of the soul from matter. Therefore this trespass is punished with terrible subsequent tortures.

Meanwhile they begin to disturb us by giving signs of closing the Boulevard cafés, but as I do not want to finish, I name the word "Baratte," and my friend is ready at once. Café Baratte, near the "Halls," has always had a wonderful attraction for me, without my exactly knowing why. It may be the proximity of the "Halls." When it is night on the Boulevard, it is morning in them—all through the night in fact—which with its enforced want of occupation and dark dreams is banished. The mind which has become intoxicated in immaterial worlds descends to eating, sin, and noise. This scent of fish, flesh, and vegetables, over the refuse of which we step, seems to me an effective contrast to the lofty themes which we have just been discussing.

That is the stuff out of which we are created and re-created three times a day, and when one enters from the darkness, dirt, and knots of seedy figures outside, into the comfortable café, one is greeted by light, warmth, song, mandolines, and guitars. At this hour of the day all class distinctions are wiped out. Here sit artists, students, authors, drinking at long tables, and in a sort of waking trance. Or have they fled from the sad sleep which, perhaps, has ceased to visit them? There is no sparkling hilarity, but a kind of stupor broods over the whole, and it seems to me as if I had entered into a realm of shadows peopled by half-real phantoms.

I know an author who used to sit there at night and write. I have seen strangers there dressed as though they came from a brilliant supper at Parc Monceau. I have seen a public man, with the appearance of a foreign ambassador, stand up and sing a solo. I have seen people who looked like disguised princes and princesses drinking champagne, and I really don't know whether they are real mortals, all these shadows, or the projected "astral" bodies of sleepers outside who hallucinate those drunk with sleep who sit there. The remarkable thing is that no coarseness prevails in the company packed together in the narrow café. The songs are mostly sentimental, and the melancholy guitars heal the needle-pricks with which the sharp steel-strung mandoline pricks the brain.

Now in the night, after my long course of loneliness, I feel happy in the crowd, which seems to radiate warmth and sympathy. For the first time after a long interval I am seized with a sentimental pity for the unhappy women of the night. Near our table sit half a dozen of them looking depressed, and not having ordered anything. They are most of them ugly, despised, and probably unable to order anything. I suggest to my friend, who is as disinterested as myself, to invite two of the ugliest who sit near us. He agrees; and I invite two, asking if they will have anything to drink, adding at the same time that they must have no other designs and behave with propriety.

They seem to understand the part they have to play, and ask first for food. My friend and I continue our philosophical conversation in German, now and then speaking a word to the women, who are not presuming, and who seem more anxious to eat than to be attended to.

For a moment the thought strikes me, "Suppose one of your acquaintances saw you now?" Yes, I know what he would say, and I know what I would answer: "You have thrust me out of society, condemned me to solitude, and I am compelled to purchase the companionship of pariahs, outcasts like myself, and hungry as I have been. My simple pleasure is to be able to see these despised ones plume themselves on a conquest which is no conquest, to sec them eat and drink, and to hear their voices, which are at any rate those of women. Moreover, I have not paid them in any way, not even in order to append a moral exhortation."

I simply find a pleasure in sitting together with human beings, and in being able to give out of my momentary superfluity, for in a month I may be as poor as they are.

It is now morning; the clock strikes five, and we go. But my companion demands fifteen francs for having given me her society, a demand which from her point of view I find quite comprehensible, for my society is as worthless as my power to protect her against the police. But I do not believe that will increase my self-respect, rather the opposite.

Meanwhile I go home with a good conscience after a well-spent night, sleep till ten o'clock, awake well rested, and spend the day in work and meditation. But the following night I have an attack of the terrible kind which Swedenborg describes in his Dreams. So that was the punishment! What for? I really don't understand. I thought that this was a new lesson in the art of life,—that I should learn that all men alike are good cabbage-eaters, and had actually for a moment imagined that the part I had played in the night-café was rather that of a philanthropist than of a sinner, or at any rate morally indifferent. During the following days I was much depressed, and one evening I looked forward to passing a night of terror. At nine o'clock I had Cicero's Natura Deorum before me, and was so pleased with Aristotle's doctrine that the gods quite ignored our world, and would pollute themselves if they had anything to do with this filth, that I determined to copy it out. At the same time I noticed that blood had broken out on the back of my right hand without any apparent cause. When I wiped it off, I found no mark of a scratch. But I forgot it, and went to bed. About half-past twelve I awoke with the fully developed symptoms of what I have called "the electric girdle." Notwithstanding that I know its nature and inner significance, I am compelled to seek the cause of it outside myself. I made an effort and lighted the lamp. As the Bible lay close by I determined to consult it, and it gave the answer: "I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way that thou shalt go; I will guide thee with Mine eye: be not like to horse and mule, whose mouths must be drawn with bit and bridle, else they will not come near thee."