"Yes. All our admiration must from this time forward be given to the beauty of our warriors. Harmonious forms, enchantment—we are done with them all, my poor child, done with them!"
"Done with them! So they say. So I thought, too, when I saw those men coming in by the hundreds, reduced to a mass of bleeding pulp; I still think so when I think of the long line of devastation which is spreading over Europe, of all those human beings who are every day dying around their torpedoed vessels; but think! The moment the art of our former days is able to realize itself anywhere, beyond a partition, it rises upon us like the sun that has been two days hidden. It will rise again, Simone! If only a few individuals are left who can hear a note, a shepherd will be found to invent the flute once again, by bringing reeds together."
"You say that because the art of which you are speaking only increases your sadness. You are cultivating your sadness, and loving it still. If you were less melancholy, like me, you would consent to accept the new life just as it offers itself; but you will always see it irremediably disfigured, poisoned by an overwhelming horror. Life from henceforth is a Lady Macbeth with red and horrific hands, marking with a bloody spot everything that it touches. What fine art could flourish except by means of men not yet born, men who will not come into the world until after this horror is no longer spoken about?"
"Remember what those poor friends of ours used to say when they talked so well in our gatherings of former days: the flowers that bloom on graves are as fresh and the harvests that grow on battlefields are more abundant than those on fields that have never known crime and death; they are innocent, divinely innocent of all the past. The souls of artists are like flowers; and they purify the imaginations that have been soiled."
"And the conclusion is that you and I both, my dear, have after all a good share of optimism, otherwise called a reserve strength upon which we can draw for a certain time. Let us hope it may be for a long time. And we find the same thing under the distress of nearly all men. Ah, how strong life is!"
[XI]
Odette began a round of visits.
For the most part they were visits of condolence. She went first to Mme. de Blauve, who had lately lost her young son, that charming boy of seventeen whom Odette had seen for a second in the Avenue d'Iena flying to the recruiting-office, to take the place of his father, who had been killed in the second month of the war. Mme. de Blauve had come back from Rheims, where at that time she had been a nurse, under unceasing bombardments; she had returned to her daughters, who were now growing up. Odette found the family no more crushed or morose than at the first time. The father, Commandant de Blauve, adored by all, was dead; the elder son, in his nineteenth year, was dead.
"Happily," said Mme. de Blauve, "I have one left."
"How old is he?" asked Odette anxiously.