Then, behold me on my return to this old parlor where I look upon the least object with tenderness. This shawl belonged to my paternal grandmother whom I never knew and who rests amid flowers in a humble cemetery of the Antilles. May the humming-birds glitter and cry above her deserted grave, and the tobacco-plants with their rosy bells delight her memory … I have never seen the portrait which represents her. But I know she had a reputation for goodness and beauty. I have read admirable letters that she wrote from there to my father when he was a child. He had been brought back to France to be educated here, and had remained here.
How often have I dreamed of reviving this past. How beautiful it would be if God gave us, once a year, the festival of seeing our dear departed return. I love to imagine it as occurring on Twelfth Night during a season of snow. The modest dining-room would be opened at the stroke of eight, and seated about the enlarged table, adorned with Christmas roses, I would find all those for whom my soul mourns beneath the cheery light of the lamps.
It seems to me that this meeting would be entirely natural with little of the uncanny, and not at all like a fairy tale. My paternal grandfather, the doctor of medicine who died at Guadeloupe, would occupy the place of honor, and about his shoulders would be a little traveling cloak on which grains of frost were shining. His steely blue eyes behind the enormous gold-rimmed spectacles, which he wore and which my mother uses to-day, would make him appear as he was, at the same time severe and good. In a grave and melodious voice he would speak of the Great Crossing, of the wind of the Eternal Ocean, of earthquakes in unexplored countries, of shipwrecked men whom he had saved.
And all would listen; and, death being eternal, it would be wonderful to see each one again at the particular age which we with singular obstinacy always attribute to our dear departed.
The cousins from Saint-Pierre-de-la-Martinique, there were four of them I believe, would not be more than eighteen years old, and would be dressed in white muslin gowns. They would laugh at some cake that had not come out right. And my great aunts who were Huguenots, rigid but happy, with long chains of gold about their necks, would interpret the revelations of the Prophets to one another. And five and seventy years would quaver in each of their cracked voices. And my maternal grandsire at nineteen, with the green coat of a romantic student, all….
But the dream fades and the wind weeps.
* * * * *
In moss full of sunshine and transparent as an alga or an emerald, I have covered the roots of these first daisies of January. They and the rare periwinkles and the furze are the only flowers of this season. It is too much love doubtless which fills them. They must be born in spite of the ice. The white little bands of their flower-heads are tinged with violet at the ends, and surround the flowers which are greenish yellow like the under side of an old mushroom. The muddy roots feel the plowed fields. I have been so cruel as to pluck these flowers and now they are wretched; they are as wounded as animals could be; and see how, slowly as if they were moved by a terrible fear, the petals of the flowers curve in to cover and protect the sheathes of the minute corollas that I can no longer see. Tenderly I try to raise these petals, but they resist me and I only succeed in murdering the plant. Fool! Why could I not let these flowers live on the edge of their ditch? There they would have felt the fresh shrivelling of drinking in the sun, a bird would have touched them lightly, the proboscis of the mosquitoes would have sucked up their pollen, and they would have died gently by the side of their friends.
* * * * *
The stars of winter are beautiful when they are dusted on the slate-colored sky, and when in the hazy blue depth they light up the shreds of clouds. I passed through the little town at six o'clock, when the candles behind the window-panes make square shadows move within the shops and shine upon the reddish mud of the pavements. A dog trots by sniffing under the doorways. A wagon whose oxen have slipped makes a grating noise. A lantern flickers, a voice is heard. The angles of the roofs are clear-cut. The rest is consumed by the darkness. Here and there, still, at great distances, a window of smoky rose, and I am at the top of the slope.
At the left an enormous star trembles. It seems to breathe and its rays alternately elongate and withdraw again. Its white fire appears to flow. I look upon the constellations, behind which there are other spaces of constellations, which hide still more constellations, until the glance is lost in luminous embers like those of a hearth.
I am in no wise troubled by these stars. I do not see in them worlds infinitely great or small according to the one with which we compare them. They are in my thoughts, such as I see them: the largest like hummingbirds the smallest like wasps. The space which separates them one from another does not seem any greater than the pace with which I measure the road. It is simply the sky of January above a little town.
* * * * *
A peasant-woman has sold me some mushrooms. They are very rare nowadays. Their odor captures me, and I dream of the edges of the meadows, of the elves who, according to Shakespeare, make the mushrooms grow beneath the spell of the moon. They have been moistened by the melting frost, and fine and long grasses have become attached to their humidity. They bear within them the quivering mist of the nights. The first, they came forth from the earth under their umbels of ivory to find out whether the feet of the hedge were still surrounded by moss. They must have been deceived. They could not have seen the periwinkles or the violets, but only the irritating and fine gray rain in the gray sky.
* * * * *
Often I have visualized Heaven for myself. That of my childhood was the hut an old man had built at the top of a climbing road. This hut was calledParadise. My father brought me there at the hour when the dark mist of the hills became gilded like a church. I expected, at the end of each walk, to find God seated in the sun which seemed to sleep at the summit of the stony pathway. Was I mistaken?
It is less easy for me to imagine the Catholic Paradise: the harps of azure, the rosy snow of legions in the pure rainbows. I still cling to my first vision, but since I have known love I have added to the divine kingdom a warm, sloping lawn in front of the old man's hut. On it a young girl gathers herbs.
* * * * *
I have simultaneously the soul of a faun and the soul of an adolescent. And the emotion which I feel on looking upon a woman is quite contrary to that which I feel on gazing at a young girl. If one could make one's self understood by the aid of fruits and flowers, I would offer to the first burning peaches, the rosy blossoms of the belladonna, heavy roses; to the second, cherries, raspberries, the blossoms of the wild quince, eglantine, and honeysuckle. I find it difficult to have any feeling which is not accompanied by the image of a flower or a fruit. When I think of Martha, I dream of gentians. With Lucy I associate the white anemones of Japan, and with Marie the lilies of Solomon; with another a citron which should be transparent.
To the first meeting that a sweetheart has granted me, I have brought a spray of gladiolus whose throats have the rosy hue of an apricot. We placed them on the window during the night when I forgot them to remember only my love. To-day I would forget my loved one, to recall only the gladiolus.
My memory is therefore, if I may so express it, vegetal. Trees as well as flowers and fruits symbolize for me beings and emotions. Plants as well as animals and stones filled my childhood with a mysteriouscharm. When I was four years old I remained rapt in contemplation of the broken stones of the mountain, lying in heaps along the roads. When struck they gave forth fire in the twilight. When rubbed against one another they felt the burning heat. I gathered pieces of marble from among them which seemed heavy with a water they had concealed within themselves. The mica of the granite held my curiosity in a way which nothing could satisfy. I felt that there was something that no one could tell me—the life of the stones.
At the same age I was scolded because I carried away the artificial beetles from a hat of my mother. I had the passion of collecting animals, I felt toward them so great a love that I wept if I thought them unhappy. And I still endure a deep anguish when I remember the little nightingales which some one gave me and which pined away in the dining-room. Still at the same age, in order to make me go to sleep, they had to place not far from me a bottle containing a tree-frog. I knew that here was a faithful friend who would protect me against robbers. The first time that I saw a stag-beetle, I was so overcome by the beauty of its horns that the longing to possess one became an actual torment.
The passion for plants did not develop until later, about the age of nine years, and I did not really begin to understand their life until about the age of fifteen. I remember the circumstances under which it happened. It was in summer, one Thursday, on a scorching afternoon. I was passing through the botanical garden of a great city with my mother. A white sun, dense blue shadows, and perfumes so heavy that one could almost feel them cling, made of this half desert spot a kingdom whose portal I crossed at last.
In the tepid and reddish-brown water of the ponds plants vegetated; some were leathery and gray, and others long, soft, and transparent. But from the very heart of these poor and sad algae there rose into the very blue of the sky itself, green lance-like stalks whose rose and white umbels challenged the ardent day with their grace; water-lilies slept on their leaves as in a trustful afternoon sleep.
To the plants of the water, the plants of the earth answered. I recall an alley where students, a handkerchief about the neck, were as if buried beneath the beauty of the leaves. It was the alley of theumbelliferae. The fennel and the ferula raised their crowns upon their stems with glistening sheaths. The perfumes spoke to each other in the silence. And one felt that a silent understanding went from plant to plant, and that over this isolated realm there hovered something like resignation.
Since then I have understood the flowers and that theirfamiliesbelonged together and have a natural affinity, and are not merely divided into classes as an aid to our slow memories. Toward what solution do these geometries in action, which are plants, progress? I do not know. But there is a fascinating mystery in considering that even as species correspond to certain geological periods and thus group their sympathies, even so to-day they group themselves according to the seasons. What correspondence is there between the character of the shivering and snowy liliaceous plants of winter and the purple solanaceous plants of autumn? And then there are still other delightful dispositions which are due far less to the artifice of man than to the consent of certain species to regard others as their friends and not to pine away beside them. How sweet is the village garden where the gleaming lily, like those gods who often visit the humble, lives amid the cabbages, the blue leek, and the scallions, which boil in the black pot of the poor! How I love the peasant gardens at noonday when the mournful blue shadow of the vegetables sleeps in the white squares of granular earth, when the cock calls the silence, and when the buzzard, slanting and wheeling, makes the scuttling hen cluck! There are the flowers of simple loves, the flowers of the young wife who will dry the blue lavender to scent her coarse sheets. And in this garden grows also the flower of the rondel—the humble gilliflower with its simple perfume. There is also the faithful box, each leaf of which is a small mirror of azure, and the hollyhock in which the sweet and pure flame of melancholy corollas burns; they are the flowers of religion vowed to silence and austerity.
And I love also the flora of the meadows: the meadow-sweet swayed by the breezes, rocked by the murmur of the brook. Its perfumed crown is adorned like the water-beetles, more iridescent than the throats of humming-birds.
It is the beloved of the greensward, the bride of the grassy borders.
But it is in the deep recesses of old deserted parks that the plants are most mysterious. There dwell those which we callold flowers, such as the ground-lilac, the belladonna-amaryllis, the crown-imperial. Elsewhere they would die. Here they persist, guarded by the favor of the age-old trees, strange trees, the names of which have disappeared. And these affected and distinguished blossoms raise their swaying heads only when, murmuring across the liquadambars and the maples, the wind moans like Chateaubriand.
* * * * *
The very mournfulness of the little town is pleasing to me; I love its streets of dark shops, the worn thresholds, and the gardens. In the fine season they seem to float against a background of blue mist which is a confusion of hollyhocks, glycins, trellises; or again they seem patchy as the skin of asses, with drying rags above the hedges of battered boxwood. The tanner's brook drifts by with the pale mother-of-pearl of the sky, and reflects sharply the rooftops amid the slimy plants; the mountain torrent, which hollows the rocks, gleams, twines and flows away.
The little place is charming when the grasshopper shrills in the summer's elms and the autumn wind scours it, or when the rains streak it. There is a little public garden that Bernardin de Saint Pierre would have loved; in May the night there is dense, blue, and soft in the chestnut-trees.
For years I have lived here, whence my grandfather and a great uncle departed toward the flower-covered Antilles. They listened to the roaring of the sea; robes of muslin glided upon the verandas, and they died perhaps looking back with regret on these streets, these shops, these thresholds, these gardens, this brook, and this mountain torrent.
When I go to my little farm I say to myself that this is where they once were. They brought their luncheon in a little basket, and one of them carried a guitar. And young girls surely followed swiftly. Song stirred among the damp hedgerows. An unutterable love frightened the birds, the mulberries were green. They kept time as they walked. A young girl's cry stirred the air, a big hat turned the corner of the road, a clear laugh rose from the rain-torn eglantines; then hearts beat when, in the bright dog-days, the black barns softened the clucking of the hens under the scarlet sky of the south.
…This guitar or another I heard in the courtyard of my Huguenot great-aunts, one summer's evening when I was four years old. The courtyard slept in the white twilight, the roofs shed an unimaginable tenderness upon the climbing rosebushes and the bright paving-stones. Some one sitting on a beam was making merry at the expense of my childhood and my white apron. My great uncle sang some melody from the capital. I can see him again, standing upright with his head thrown back. The air trembled softly. At the end of a roulade he made an exaggerated and charming bow.
I bless you, oh humble town where I am not understood, where I shelter my pride, my suffering, and my joy, where I have hardly any other distraction than that of listening to the barking of my old dog and watching the faces of the poor. But I reach the hillside where the prickly furze is spread, and in musing upon my difficulties I am filled with a beneficent gentleness. To-day it is no longer the coarse and disdainful laugh of the public, nor the terrible doubt of everything, which disturbs me. The laugh of my detractors has grown wearied, and I have become indifferent to what I am. Yet I have become grave toward myself and others. It is with an apprehensive joy that I regard the heedlessness of the happy. I have learned what misery may spring from love, what blindness is born of a glance. And it is because of what I have suffered that I would bestow a sad and slow caress on those who have not yet known anything but happiness.
* * * * *
The open door, the blue sky, the watering of the grass and the gilliflowers, and the hyacinths, and a single bird which chirps, and my dogs stretched on the ground and the rosebushes with their thick stems, the verdure of the lilacs, and a clock that is striking, a wasp which flies straight and marks the meadow with the lines of its golden vibration, and stops, hesitates, sets off again, is silent and buzzes….
Hearts and choirs of primroses in the moist, shadowy mosses of the woods; long threads of rose and blue dew floating and swinging and suspended—from what?—in the immaterial morning; tree-frogs with golden eye-lids and white throbbing throats; furze whose perfume of faded peach and rose follows along the roads, already torrid….
Iris, cries of jays, turtledoves, mountains of blue snow which are rocks of azure, green fields laid out in squares, brook rolling a golden pebble in the silence; first foliage of the waters, icy trembling of the body beside the springs when the sun lies burning on your hands….
* * * * *
Slender alders; fiery marshes where toward noonday puffing out their throat, the hoarse gray frogs climb up on the coriaceous plants, while slowly from the deep of the shady and gilded mire rises a bubble….
Dry and twisted vines; swarms of insects from the blossoms of rosy peach-trees, in slanting flight into the azure; pear-trees and roses of Bengal….
* * * * *
Setting of the cherry sun; nocturnal snow of a fruit-tree; green and transparent shadowing of the lanes; summit of little hills at seven o'clock where the trees are like sponges which little by little blend into the severity of the uniform curve which swells and rises sharply.
Starless night; violet night in which the white sandals of a beloved pagan can hardly be distinguished, and dense bristling of slender, dry trees; pallor of a limestone slope, and water in which something casts two long and deep shadows….
Night; fire; lines of shadow blended with shadows of lines; fire; humid thickness of fields; fire; crimsoning and reddening of clouds; poplars; whiteness which must be a village. Water again, water, and shadows of water….
A wagon passes. The lantern lights up only the rear of the horse, all else is night. When I was a child it was this which astonished me—this light which was quenched again. Another wagon…One sees only the rosy bust of a girl. It slips into the night….
* * * * *
I return from a journey. The recollection of a maroon reflection of a boat in the canal, the color of gray fish, makes my memory quiver. I dream of white tulips.
I have returned at night. The croaking of frogs has greeted me from the depths of the damp meadow. My heart, do not burst!… Do not burst like the lilacs of the flower-garden whose fragrance I alone have touched….
Will hope be born again? I am afraid. Is this one more disillusion?
The wasp has hummed. I love none but the violet lilacs, I love none but the blue violets. It is Sunday, and I hear in the depths of my soul the droning of the harmoniums of poor churches.
My life, behold my life, ardent and sad like a flame which burns through too warm a summer night beside the open window. An imperceptible breeze has suddenly swelled out the curtain of muslin like my heart.
* * * * *
In the garden the perfume of the lilacs suddenly make me feel ill because I am horribly sad.
Nevertheless, lilacs, you are dear to me since childhood. Then I thought your clusters were the beautiful polished images of a box of toys.
And you, oh lilacs, have also haunted an orchard which I knew well in my youth. In this orchard there were hedge-hogs. They glided along old beams. How innocent and gentle the hedge-hogs are in spite of their quills! I remember my emotion one winter's evening, when I found one of them at the threshold of the kitchen; it had taken flight from the snow, and was poking its little nose into the refuse left there….
* * * * *
I love the creatures of the night, the screech-owls with their graceful flight, the bats, the badgers, all the timid beasts which glide through the air or in the grass and of which we know so little. What festivals do they hold amid the plants, their sisters?
At the hour when man is at rest, the rabbits, silvered by the dew, bound over the mint of the furrow and hold their conventicles; the frogs croak in the marsh and make it ripple; the glowworms filter their soft and humid yellow light; the mole bores the meadow; the nightingale sobs like a fountain; the owl utters sad laughter as if it too, however timidly, were trying to have a share in the joy of God.
How I would like to be a creature of the night, a hare trembling in a hedge of hawthorn, a badger grazed by the leaves of the juicy green corn. My only care would have been to safeguard my physical being. I would not have loved. I would not have hoped.