The last or seventh chapter of his robber romance is very short and contradictory. The third day he visited her in her garden, was delicate, rational, temperate, reserved, as if he were a married man. As he found her full of trouble, which she, however, only half expressed, he accordingly, out of anxiety for her health, came again several times; and, when he found that she had not suffered in the least, he stayed—away. Towards Albano, during the aforesaid anxiety, he behaved meekly, and, after it, he was the same as ever, but not long; for when his sister, whom of all human beings he perhaps loved most purely, became blind through Albano's wildness, he then, even on account of a similarity of guilt, flung at him a real hatred, and something like it at all his (Albano's) relations. Rabette got nothing from him now but—letters and apologies, short pictures of his wild nature, which must, he said, have free play-room, and which, fastened to another, must beat and bruise and gall that one with the chain quite as much as itself. All objections of Rabette's he knew how to remove so well, as they consisted only in words, and not in looks and tears, that he at last himself began to perceive he was right; and almost nothing was left to the poor May-flower, crushed by the fall of this smooth May-pole, than the real last word,—namely, the mute life, which is not the first thing to announce to the murderer that he has smitten and destroyed a heart.
88. CYCLE.
Here is Roquairol's letter to Albano:—
"It must once be, and be over; we must see each other as we are, and then hate each other, if it must be so. I make thy sister unhappy; thou makest mine unhappy and me too; these things just balance each other. Thou distortedst thyself out of an angel to me more and more passionately into a destroying angel. Strangle me, then, but I grapple thee too.
"Now look upon me, I draw off my mask, I have convulsive movements on my face, like people who live after drinking sweet poison. I have made myself drunk with poison, I have swallowed the poison-pill, the great poison globule, the earth-globe. Out with it freely! I exult no more, I believe nothing more, I do not even lament right valiantly. My tree is hollowed out, burnt to a coal by fantastic fire. When, occasionally, in this state, the intestinal worms of the soul, exasperation, ecstasy, love, and the like, crawl round again, and gnaw and devour each other, then do I look down from myself to them; like polypuses, I cut them in twain and turn them wrong end foremost and stick them into each other. Then I look again at my own act of looking, and as this goes on ad infinitum, what then comes to one from it all? If others have an idealism of faith, so have I an idealism of the heart, and every one who has often gone through with all sensations on the stage, on paper, and on the earth, is in the same case. What boots it? If thou shouldst die at this moment, I often say to myself, then, as all radii of life run together into the minute point of a moment, all would verily be wiped out, invisible; to me, then, it is as if I had been nothing. Often I look upon the mountains and floods and the ground about me, and it seems to me as if they could at any and every moment flutter asunder and melt away in smoke, and I with them. The future life (as even the present is hardly to be called a life), and all that hangs thereupon, belongs to the ecstasies which one winks at; especially it belongs to the ecstasy of love.
"As thou so readily assumest every difference from thyself to be enervation, so do I say to thee outright: Only ascend farther, only knead thyself more thoroughly, only lift thy head higher out of the hot waves of the feelings, then wilt thou no longer lose thyself in them, but let them billow on alone. There is a cold, daring spirit in man, which nothing touches at all,—not even virtue; for it alone chooses that, and is its creator, not its creature. I once experienced at sea a storm, in which the whole element furiously and jaggedly and foamingly lashed itself into commotion, and flung its waters pell-mell through each other, while overhead the sun looked on in silence;—so be thou! The heart is the storm; self is the heaven.
"Believest thou that the romancers and tragedians, that is, the men of genius among them, who have a thousand times aped, and aped their own apings of everything, divine and human, are other than I? What keeps them and the world's people still real is the hunger after money and praise; this eating gastric-juice is the animal glue, the salient point in the soft floating and fleeting world. The apes are geniuses among beasts; and the geniuses are—not merely before higher beings, as Pope says of Newton, but even here below—apes, in aesthetic imitation, in heartlessness, malignity, malicious pleasure, sensuality, and—merriment.
"The last and last but one I reserve for myself. Against the longueurs (lengthy passages) in life's book,—a book which no man understands,—there is no remedy except some merry passages, of which I think no more so soon as I have read them. In order only to get over this cold, hobbly life, I will surely sooner scatter below me rose-cups than thistles. Joy is of itself worth something, if only that it crowds out something worse before one lays down his heavy head and sinks into nothingness.
"Such am I; such was I; then I saw thee, and would be thy Thou—but it serves not, for I cannot go back; thou, however, goest forward, thou becomest my very self one day,—and then I would have loved thy sister! May she forgive me for it! Here drink pure wine! I know best how one fares with the women,—how their love blesses and robs,—how all love, like other fire, kindles itself with much better wood than that which feeds it,-and how, universally, the Devil gets all he brings.
"O, why then can no woman love but just so far as one will have her, and no further,—absolutely none? Hear me now: everywhere lazy preachers would fain hold us back from all transitory pleasure by telling us of the discomfort that comes after. Is not then the discomfort transitory too? Rabette meant well with me, on the same ground of desire upon which I meant well with her and myself. But does any one know, then, what purgatorial hours one wades through with a strange heart, which is full, without making full, and whose love one at last hates,—before which, but not with which, one weeps, and never about the same thing, and to which one dreads to unveil any emotion, for fear of seeing it transmuted into nourishment of love,—from whose anger one imbibes the greater wrath, and from its love the lesser! And now to have absolutely the more joyous relations screwed down forever to this state of torment, when they ought rather to exalt us above the tormenting ones, the long wished for gods'-bliss of life perverted forever into a flat show and copper-plate engraving,—the heart into a breast and mask,—the marrow of existence into sharp bones,—and yet, as to all reproaches of coldness, chained only to silence, bound innocent and dumb to the rack,—and that, too, without end!