Then, memory awakening within him, he added:
“I who tell you, I carried her to the grave. She was not very heavy, poor thing! But to know she was dead—that took the strength out of your arms and legs. All the villagers came.”
By the dates it might be Madame Cernay of whom he spoke. But she had passed away almost unnoticed. Her death, too early though it was, had not awakened such regret in Paris. It had occurred at a distance, in the country, unobtrusively. Raymond Cernay himself had not reappeared after it until the notable week of Rheims, when he had won the prize for altitude by an ascension in regular spirals, like the circles described by some gigantic bird of prey, and amid the applause of a delirious crowd, became in a moment the popular hero.
We are always ready to consider reserved persons, who ward off our confidences or fail to accord to our remarks all the importance we ourselves attach to them, as insignificant. This was the epithet with which she who was dead had been characterised in my hearing. My memory could at first revive her only as a colourless, washed out, vanishing figure. Then I vaguely recalled her hair, of many tinted blond, and her limpid eyes, so bright that one might suppose no shadow should ever have dimmed them. She was so reserved or so indifferent that people talked little with her. Once, chance having placed me beside her at a charity concert, I had been struck by an ecstatic expression on her usually pale countenance. Her face was suffused with colour, while on the stage a singer was interpreting, with an orchestral accompaniment, the air in Lulli’s Amadis:
O faithful wood, redouble now your shades,
You can not be too sombre—nothing fades
Too pale before my own too luckless love.
It is an entreaty and supplication to the familiar forest that Lulli develops with a classic regularity, which far from weakening the energy of its musical expression, is in fact strengthened by it. Not a single one of those crude imitations of nature sounds superficial and meaningless, such as the well-known “Murmurs” in Siegfried, marred the air, in which passion is restrained by purity, and by consciousness of its own danger; but its ardour is none the less felt for not being expressed in outcry and convulsive rhythm. Mme. Cernay at my side was veritably living again the sentiments of the great poem. The episode gave me an intuitive conviction that the imputation of insignificance put upon her by society to justify its neglect of her, was false. I recalled it now. Still she had either little conversational power, or cared little to use it; she never sought the slightest display of culture. She kept her impressions to herself. Certainly no one ever saw her posing, nor ever practising the slightest deception, as other women in society do, putting on knowledge of art like a new headdress.
I don’t know whether it was due to some dim conviction, or to curiosity now, that I asked the good man who had thus far been my informant:
“Where is the graveyard?”