King of Camargue

by Jean Aicard

A spark is the basis of all fire. A man and a woman are the basis of all love. Infinity is no greater than the number two. And that is why the great scholars, who figure like Barrême, know no more of life and the heart than Livette and Renaud—who knew nothing at all.

They knew naught save that they were alive and that they wished to love each other and that they sought and shunned each other at the same moment—but they did not ask each other why. They said nothing. They felt. They could not say to each other that rivalry and jealousy, that is to say grief, serve the designs of nature, whose purpose doubtless is, by arousing those emotions, to quicken desire, so that creation may be assured by outbursts of passion, and the future of mankind by the imperious need of pleasure.

What does the law care for the weak and the vanquished? the strong alone, they say, it wishes to perpetuate.

Pity and justice are human inventions, and will never triumph until they have been slowly assimilated by the human mind to the matter of which it is made.

They suffered, they longed for happiness—beneath that mystery-laden spring sky. They awaited the coming of their joy, they summoned their every hope, and they gazed at the dark horizon, at the desert, where the tracts of sand shone like mirrors among the dark reeds, and the ponds glistening with salt between the black lines of tamarisks. They gazed upon the boundless expanse in which they seemed lost, and where, nevertheless, they felt that they alone were an epitome of everything; they listened, without hearing them, to the unending noises of the island,—the murmuring of the water, the rustling of the reeds, the waving foliage, the growling of wandering beasts, the distant roaring of two rolling rivers and a restless sea;—and this combined voice of the whole island formed a fitting accompaniment, by reason of the extent and number of the sounds that composed it, to the silent twinkling of the stars, that no one hears.

There was in the park, invisible to them at that hour, a foreign tree, on which the flowers could be seen, by daylight, opening with a slight noise. They sometimes amused themselves by watching that tree, said to have come from Syria. A slight report, as if muffled, and a tiny cloud, of very powerful odor, would issue from the bursting cell. The tree continued, during the night, to send out its dust of passions in quest of prey, and its strange perfume was wafted upward to the lovers.

They trembled with joy at the slightest contact with each other. Ah! if she could but have given him, on that beautiful May evening, all the love his lusty youth demanded; if he could but have felt her clinging lips melt beneath his burning ones, upon that lofty terrace overlooking the rounded tops of the huge trees in the park, beneath that dark star-spangled sky, doubtless his little betrothed would have remained sole mistress of his heart!

But there were too many obstacles between Livette and Renaud; and as he struggled virtuously to keep away from her, his thoughts flew off to the other.

And Livette was already conscious of the heartache of the deserted lover. All the broad expanse of level country that her eyes knew so well, and that she felt about her in the darkness, suddenly seemed empty to her, a desert in very truth, and thereby to resemble her own heart. And softly, silently, she began to weep,—whereupon one of the great farm dogs, her favorite, who had been seeking her in every direction, came up to her and licked her hand as it hung at her side.

And down yonder, far down above the dark line of the sea, Renaud, meanwhile, fancied that he saw a naked woman’s form emerge from the water, and await his coming, suspended in mid-air, or standing on the surface of the waves.