The Triumph of Death

by Gabriele D'Annunzio

CHAPTER I.

Chosen by a friend and hired at Ancona, sent to San Vito, transported, not without difficulty, to the Hermitage, the piano was received by Hippolyte with childish joy. It was placed in the room that George called the library, the largest and best decorated, that in which were the divan laden with cushions, the long cane chairs, the hammock, the mats, the rugs, all the objects conducive to indolence and dreams. There arrived also from Rome a box of music.

Thereafter, for many days, there was new ecstasy. Invaded, both of them, by a quasi-delirious fever, they did nothing, forgot everything, lost themselves entirely in this new pleasure.

They were no longer embarrassed by the monotony of the long afternoons; they no longer felt the heavy, irresistible drowsiness; they could lengthen their vigils almost until daybreak; they could prolong their fasts without suffering by doing so, without noticing it, as if their corporeal life had been refined, as if they were sublimated, dispossessed of all vulgar needs. It seemed to them that their passion ascended chimerically beyond all limit, that the palpitation of their hearts attained a prodigious power. Sometimes it seemed to them that once more they had found that moment of supreme oblivion, that moment unique that they had enjoyed when their lips first met; sometimes it seemed to him that they had recovered that indefinable and confused sensation of being dispersed into space with the lightness of vapor. Sometimes it seemed to both that the spot that they had chosen was indefinably distant from other places, very distant, very isolated, inaccessible, outside of the world.

A mysterious power drew them together, joined them, blended them, melted them one in the other, similarized them in body and spirit, united them into one single being. A mysterious power separated them, disjoined them, forced them back into their solitude, dug an abyss between them, planted in the core of their being a hopeless and mortal desire.

In these alternatives both found pleasure and suffering. They reascended to the first ecstasy of their love, and they redescended to extreme and useless efforts to repossess each other. They reascended again, remounted to the origin of the earthly illusion, inhaled the mystic shadow, where for the first time their trembling souls had exchanged the same silent sentiment; and they redescended again, redescended to the torture of unrealized expectation, entered into an atmosphere of fog, thick and suffocating, like a whirlwind of sparks and hot cinders.

Each of those musicians whom they loved weaved a different charm about their supersensitive feelings. A page of Robert Schumann evoked the phantom of a very old amour that extended over him, in the guise of an artificial firmament, the woof of his most beautiful recollections, which, with an astonished and melancholy gentleness, he saw fade gradually away. An Impromptu of Frederic Chopin was saying, as if in a dream: "At night, when you are sleeping on my heart, I hear in the silence of the night a drop falling, slowly falling, always falling, so near, so far! I hear, at night, the drop falling from my heart, the blood that, drop by drop, falls from my heart, when you are sleeping, when you are sleeping, I alone." High purple curtains, dark as a merciless passion, around a bed deep as a sepulchre—that is what is evoked by the Erotic of Edward Grieg; and also a promise of death in silent voluptuousness, and a boundless kingdom, rich in all the wealth of the earth, waiting in vain for its vanished king, its dying king, in the nuptial and funereal purple. But, in the prelude to "Tristan and Ysolde," the leap of love toward death was unchained with inconceivable violence; the insatiable desire was exalted even to the intoxication of destruction. "... To drink yonder the cup of eternal love in thy honor, I would, on the same altar, consecrate thee to death with myself."

And that immense wave of harmony irresistibly enveloped them both, closed in on them, carried them away, transported them to "the marvellous empire."

It was not by means of the miserable instrument, incapable of giving the slightest echo of that torrential plenitude, but in the eloquence, in the enthusiasm of the exegesis, that Hippolyte seized all the grandeur of that tragic Revelation. And, as the lover's imagery had one day pictured to her the Guelph's deserted city, the city of convents and monasteries, so to-day appeared to her imagination the old, gray city town of Bayreuth, solitary among the Bavarian mountains, in a mystic landscape over which hovered the same soul that Albrecht Dürer imprisoned beneath the network of the lines at the bottom of his engravings and canvases.

George had not forgotten any episode of his first religious pilgrimage to the Ideal Theatre; he could relive every instant of his extraordinary emotion when he had discovered on the gentle hill, at the extremity of the great shady avenue, the edifice consecrated to the supreme feast of art; he could reconstitute the solemnity of the vast amphitheatre girt with columns and arcades, the mystery of the Mystic Gulf. In the religious shadow and silence of the place, in the shadow and ecstatic silence of every soul, a sigh went up from the invisible orchestra, a moan was uttered, a murmuring voice made the first mournful call of solitary desire, the first and confused anguish in presentiment of the future torture. And that sigh and that moan and that voice mounted from the vague suffering to the acuteness of an impetuous cry, telling of the pride of a dream, the anxiety of a superhuman aspiration, the terrible and implacable desire of possession. With a devouring fury, like a flame bursting from a bottomless abyss, the desire dilated, agitated, enflamed, always higher, always higher, fed by the purest essence of a double life. The intoxication of the melodious flame embraced everything; everything sovereign in the world vibrated passionately in the immense ravishment, exhaled its joy and most hidden sorrow, while it was sublimated and consumed. But, suddenly, the efforts of a resistance, the cholers of a battle, shuddered and rumbled in the flight of that stormy ascension; and that great spout of life, suddenly broken against an invisible obstacle, fell back again, died out, spouted forth no longer. In the religious shadow and silence of the place, in the shadow and thrilling silence of every soul, a sigh arose from the Mystic Gulf, a moan died away, a broken voice told of the sadness of eternal solitude, the aspiration toward the eternal night, toward the divine, the primal oblivion.