When I rejoined her she was sleeping. I did not waken her.
Second Note Book
November 19—
As we were nearing Rome, I pointed out to Raymonde the Sabine mountains, already covered with snow. But she only saw a rainbow, trembling in the golden haze which the setting sun, reappearing after the rain, drew from the damp soil. She derived from it a happy omen.
Then she compared the dome of St. Peter’s, which one sees first of all, to a rick in the field. Later, was she not to compare the Eternal City, upon which the centuries have left their imprint, to her forest, with its centenarian trees covered with moss, ivy, and mistletoe? One thinks that one will always remain bewildered, and soon things become so familiar, although imposing, that one speaks and listens to them. Her forest had prepared her. The shafts of the trees formed innumerable arches as at St. Paul’s outside the Walls; on the old trunks new stems grew, and the fallen leaves composed the soil which nourished the roots. Thus the continuity of historic Rome, which allowed Christian churches to flourish on the sites of pagan temples, did not astonish her.
Her divine ignorance preserved her miraculously from that insincere admiration which the sanctity of established reputations imposes upon most of us. She delighted in art as she breathed the morning air in the woods, of which one knows neither where it comes from nor why it leaves upon the lips so agreeable a flavour. With sure taste she walked through the midst of statues and pictures as through a garden pointing out to me her favourites. Invariably these were works of calmness and serenity, in which the old masters represented life either with all its natural joy or with religious acceptation,—the draped Muses of the Vatican, that veiled woman on one of the sides of the throne of the goddess in the “Thermos” Museum who keeps alive the sacred fire on the hearth,—what others shall I name, a young Madonna by Fra Angelico; Raphael’s Parnassus; or Michelangelo’s sublime creation of the first man. By instinct she turned to them as to old friends. I never caught her in a mistake. Like the doves of the Villa Adrien who stoop on the basin and then lift their throats swelled with water, she was drinking in the masterpieces, in her appreciation of which I might well have tried to imitate her.
However, I did not accept this unexpected superiority, this straightforward impulse of a young and unspoiled sensitiveness. I paraded my learning, I imposed on her my instruction. Her assurance disconcerted me, at the same time that her willing attention did not prevent her from confusing the different schools and classifications I tried to teach her. I corrected and scolded her, and she apologized and made more mistakes—except in the selection of her favourites.
Through a spirit of contradiction in which vanity played the chief part, I turned her attention to works palpitating with unrest, misery, passion or sensuality. The contortions of a Laocoön, the “Dying Gladiator” crushed to the ground, Apollo darting forward with a theatrical gesture, Venus bowed under the weight of her own beauty and not like a Diana free in her movements,—these satisfied me but offended her. She did not respond to my enthusiasms, surmising perhaps that they were forced, and inwardly I reproached her for not understanding, for not knowing.
“She knows nothing,” I thought, “of the passion that disfigures, the jealousy that twists, the doubt that convulses these countenances and permits them no peace. For the moment she and I are far apart.”
And I prided myself on the discovery.