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Baudelaire - Poems and Prose Poems
Is not the slaying of the monster Time the most
ordinary and legitimate occupation of man? --So he gallantly offered his
hand to his dear, adorable, and execrable wife; the mysterious woman to
whom he owed so many pleasures, so many pains, and perhaps also a great
part of his genius.
Several bullets went wide of the proposed mark, one of them flew far
into the heavens, and as the charming creature laughed deliriously,
mocking the clumsiness of her husband, he turned to her brusquely and
said: "Observe that doll yonder, to the right, with its nose in the air,
and with so haughty an appearance. Very well, dear angel, _I will
imagine to myself that it is you! _"
He closed both eyes and pulled the trigger. The doll was neatly
decapitated.
Then, bending towards his dear, adorable, and execrable wife, his
inevitable and pitiless muse, he kissed her respectfully upon the hand,
and added, "Ah, dear angel, how I thank you for my skill! "
THE SHOOTING-RANGE AND THE CEMETERY.
"Cemetery View Inn"--"A queer sign," said our traveller to himself; "but
it raises a thirst! Certainly the keeper of this inn appreciates Horace
and the poet pupils of Epicurus. Perhaps he even apprehends the profound
philosophy of those old Egyptians who had no feast without its skeleton,
or some emblem of life's brevity. "
He entered: drank a glass of beer in presence of the tombs; and slowly
smoked a cigar. Then, his phantasy driving him, he went down into the
cemetery, where the grass was so tall and inviting; so brilliant in the
sunshine.
The light and heat, indeed, were so furiously intense that one had said
the drunken sun wallowed upon a carpet of flowers that had fattened upon
the corruption beneath.
The air was heavy with vivid rumours of life--the life of things
infinitely small--and broken at intervals by the crackling of shots from
a neighbouring shooting-range, that exploded with a sound as of
champagne corks to the burden of a hollow symphony.
And then, beneath a sun which scorched the brain, and in that atmosphere
charged with the ardent perfume of death, he heard a voice whispering
out of the tomb where he sat. And this voice said: "Accursed be your
rifles and targets, you turbulent living ones, who care so little for
the dead in their divine repose! Accursed be your ambitions and
calculations, importunate mortals who study the arts of slaughter near
the sanctuary of Death himself! Did you but know how easy the prize to
win, how facile the end to reach, and how all save Death is naught, not
so greatly would you fatigue yourselves, O ye laborious alive; nor would
you so often vex the slumber of them that long ago reached the End--the
only true end of life detestable! "
THE DESIRE TO PAINT.
Unhappy perhaps is the man, but happy the artist, who is torn with this
desire.
I burn to paint a certain woman who has appeared to me so rarely, and so
swiftly fled away, like some beautiful, regrettable thing the traveller
must leave behind him in the night. It is already long since I saw her.
She is beautiful, and more than beautiful: she is overpowering. The
colour black preponderates in her; all that she inspires is nocturnal
and profound. Her eyes are two caverns where mystery vaguely stirs and
gleams; her glance illuminates like a ray of light; it is an explosion
in the darkness.
I would compare her to a black sun if one could conceive of a dark star
overthrowing light and happiness. But it is the moon that she makes one
dream of most readily; the moon, who has without doubt touched her with
her own influence; not the white moon of the idylls, who resembles a
cold bride, but the sinister and intoxicating moon suspended in the
depths of a stormy night, among the driven clouds; not the discreet
peaceful moon who visits the dreams of pure men, but the moon torn from
the sky, conquered and revolted, that the witches of Thessaly hardly
constrain to dance upon the terrified grass.
Her small brow is the habitation of a tenacious will and the love of
prey. And below this inquiet face, whose mobile nostrils breathe in the
unknown and the impossible, glitters, with an unspeakable grace, the
smile of a large mouth; white, red, and delicious; a mouth that makes
one dream of the miracle of some superb flower unclosing in a volcanic
land.
There are women who inspire one with the desire to woo them and win
them; but she makes one wish to die slowly beneath her steady gaze.
THE GLASS-VENDOR.
These are some natures purely contemplative and antipathetic to action,
who nevertheless, under a mysterious and inexplicable impulse, sometimes
act with a rapidity of which they would have believed themselves
incapable. Such a one is he who, fearing to find some new vexation
awaiting him at his lodgings, prowls about in a cowardly fashion before
the door without daring to enter; such a one is he who keeps a letter
fifteen days without opening it, or only makes up his mind at the end of
six months to undertake a journey that has been a necessity for a year
past. Such beings sometimes feel themselves precipitately thrust towards
action, like an arrow from a bow.
The novelist and the physician, who profess to know all things, yet
cannot explain whence comes this sudden and delirious energy to indolent
and voluptuous souls; nor how, incapable of accomplishing the simplest
and most necessary things, they are at some certain moment of time
possessed by a superabundant hardihood which enables them to execute the
most absurd and even the most dangerous acts.
One of my friends, the most harmless dreamer that ever lived, at one
time set fire to a forest, in order to ascertain, as he said, whether
the flames take hold with the easiness that is commonly affirmed. His
experiment failed ten times running, on the eleventh it succeeded only
too well.
Another lit a cigar by the side of a powder barrel, _in order to see, to
know, to tempt Destiny_, for a jest, to have the pleasure of suspense,
for no reason at all, out of caprice, out of idleness. This is a kind of
energy that springs from weariness and reverie; and those in whom it
manifests so stubbornly are in general, as I have said, the most
indolent and dreamy beings.
Another so timid that he must cast down his eyes before the gaze of any
man, and summon all his poor will before he dare enter a cafe or pass
the pay-box of a theatre, where the ticket-seller seems, in his eyes,
invested with all the majesty of Minos, AEcus, and Rhadamanthus, will at
times throw himself upon the neck of some old man whom he sees in the
street, and embrace him with enthusiasm in sight of an astonished crowd.
Why? Because--because this countenance is irresistibly attractive to
him? Perhaps; but it is more legitimate to suppose that he himself does
not know why.
I have been more than once a victim to these crises and outbreaks which
give us cause to believe that evil-meaning demons slip into us, to make
us the ignorant accomplices of their most absurd desires. One morning I
arose in a sullen mood, very sad, and tired of idleness, and thrust as
it seemed to me to the doing of some great thing, some brilliant
act--and then, alas, I opened the window.
(I beg you to observe that in some people the spirit of mystification is
not the result of labour or combination, but rather of a fortuitous
inspiration which would partake, were it not for the strength of the
feeling, of the mood called hysterical by the physician and satanic by
those who think a little more profoundly than the physician; the mood
which thrusts us unresisting to a multitude of dangerous and
inconvenient acts. )
The first person I noticed in the street was a glass-vendor whose shrill
and discordant cry mounted up to me through the heavy, dull atmosphere
of Paris. It would have been else impossible to account for the sudden
and despotic hatred of this poor man that came upon me.
"Hello, there! " I cried, and bade him ascend. Meanwhile I reflected, not
without gaiety, that as my room was on the sixth landing, and the
stairway very narrow, the man would have some difficulty in ascending,
and in many a place would break off the corners of his fragile
merchandise.
At length he appeared. I examined all his glasses with curiosity, and
then said to him: "What, have you no coloured glasses? Glasses of rose
and crimson and blue, magical glasses, glasses of Paradise? You are
insolent. You dare to walk in mean streets when you have no glasses that
would make one see beauty in life? " And I hurried him briskly to the
staircase, which he staggered down, grumbling.
I went on to the balcony and caught up a little flower-pot, and when the
man appeared in the door-way beneath I let fall my engine of war
perpendicularly upon the edge of his pack, so that it was upset by the
shock and all his poor walking fortune broken to bits. It made a noise
like a palace of crystal shattered by lightning. Mad with my folly, I
cried furiously after him: "The life beautiful! the life beautiful! "
Such nervous pleasantries are not without peril; often enough one pays
dearly for them. But what matters an eternity of damnation to him who
has found in one second an eternity of enjoyment?
THE WIDOWS.
Vauvenargues says that in public gardens there are alleys haunted
principally by thwarted ambition, by unfortunate inventors, by aborted
glories and broken hearts, and by all those tumultuous and contracted
souls in whom the last sighs of the storm mutter yet again, and who thus
betake themselves far from the insolent and joyous eyes of the
well-to-do. These shadowy retreats are the rendezvous of life's
cripples.
To such places above all others do the poet and philosopher direct their
avid conjectures. They find there an unfailing pasturage, for if there
is one place they disdain to visit it is, as I have already hinted, the
place of the joy of the rich. A turmoil in the void has no attractions
for them. On the contrary they feel themselves irresistibly drawn
towards all that is feeble, ruined, sorrowing, and bereft.
An experienced eye is never deceived. In these rigid and dejected
lineaments; in these eyes, wan and hollow, or bright with the last
fading gleams of the combat against fate; in these numerous profound
wrinkles and in the slow and troubled gait, the eye of experience
deciphers unnumbered legends of mistaken devotion, of unrewarded
effort, of hunger and cold humbly and silently supported.
Have you not at times seen widows sitting on the deserted benches? Poor
widows, I mean. Whether in mourning or not they are easily recognised.
Moreover, there is always something wanting in the mourning of the poor;
a lack of harmony which but renders it the more heart-breaking. It is
forced to be niggardly in its show of grief. They are the rich who
exhibit a full complement of sorrow.
Who is the saddest and most saddening of widows: she who leads by the
hand a child who cannot share her reveries, or she who is quite alone? I
do not know. . . . It happened that I once followed for several long hours
an aged and afflicted woman of this kind: rigid and erect, wrapped in a
little worn shawl, she carried in all her being the pride of stoicism.
She was evidently condemned by her absolute loneliness to the habits of
an ancient celibacy; and the masculine characters of her habits added to
their austerity a piquant mysteriousness. In what miserable cafe she
dines I know not, nor in what manner. I followed her to a reading-room,
and for a long time watched her reading the papers, her active eyes,
that once burned with tears, seeking for news of a powerful and personal
interest.
At length, in the afternoon, under a charming autumnal sky, one of those
skies that let fall hosts of memories and regrets, she seated herself
remotely in a garden, to listen, far from the crowd, to one of the
regimental bands whose music gratifies the people of Paris. This was
without doubt the small debauch of the innocent old woman (or the
purified old woman), the well-earned consolation for another of the
burdensome days without a friend, without conversation, without joy,
without a confidant, that God had allowed to fall upon her perhaps for
many years past--three hundred and sixty-five times a year!
Yet one more:
I can never prevent myself from throwing a glance, if not sympathetic at
least full of curiosity, over the crowd of outcasts who press around the
enclosure of a public concert. From the orchestra, across the night,
float songs of fete, of triumph, or of pleasure. The dresses of the
women sweep and shimmer; glances pass; the well-to-do, tired with doing
nothing, saunter about and make indolent pretence of listening to the
music. Here are only the rich, the happy; here is nothing that does not
inspire or exhale the pleasure of being alive, except the aspect of the
mob that presses against the outer barrier yonder, catching gratis, at
the will of the wind, a tatter of music, and watching the glittering
furnace within.
There is a reflection of the joy of the rich deep in the eyes of the
poor that is always interesting. But to-day, beyond this people dressed
in blouses and calico, I saw one whose nobility was in striking contrast
with all the surrounding triviality. She was a tall, majestic woman, and
so imperious in all her air that I cannot remember having seen the like
in the collections of the aristocratic beauties of the past. A perfume
of exalted virtue emanated from all her being. Her face, sad and worn,
was in perfect keeping with the deep mourning in which she was dressed.
She also, like the plebeians she mingled with and did not see, looked
upon the luminous world with a profound eye, and listened with a toss of
her head.
It was a strange vision. "Most certainly," I said to myself, "this
poverty, if poverty it be, ought not to admit of any sordid economy; so
noble a face answers for that. Why then does she remain in surroundings
with which she is so strikingly in contrast? "
But in curiously passing near her I was able to divine the reason. The
tall widow held by the hand a child dressed like herself in black.
Modest as was the price of entry, this price perhaps sufficed to pay
for some of the needs of the little being, or even more, for a
superfluity, a toy.
She will return on foot, dreaming and meditating--and alone, always
alone, for the child is turbulent and selfish, without gentleness or
patience, and cannot become, any more than another animal, a dog or a
cat, the confidant of solitary griefs.
THE TEMPTATIONS; OR, EROS, PLUTUS, AND GLORY.
Last night two superb Satans and a She-devil not less extraordinary
ascended the mysterious stairway by which Hell gains access to the
frailty of sleeping man, and communes with him in secret. These three
postured gloriously before me, as though they had been upon a stage--and
a sulphurous splendour emanated from these beings who so disengaged
themselves from the opaque heart of the night. They bore with them so
proud a presence, and so full of mastery, that at first I took them for
three of the true Gods.
The first Satan, by his face, was a creature of doubtful sex. The
softness of an ancient Bacchus shone in the lines of his body. His
beautiful langourous eyes, of a tenebrous and indefinite colour, were
like violets still laden with the heavy tears of the storm; his
slightly-parted lips were like heated censers, from whence exhaled the
sweet savour of many perfumes; and each time he breathed, exotic
insects drew, as they fluttered, strength from the ardours of his
breath.
Twined about his tunic of purple stuff, in the manner of a cincture, was
an iridescent Serpent with lifted head and eyes like embers turned
sleepily towards him. Phials full of sinister fluids, alternating with
shining knives and instruments of surgery, hung from this living girdle.
He held in his right hand a flagon containing a luminous red fluid, and
inscribed with a legend in these singular words:
"DRINK OF THIS MY BLOOD: A PERFECT RESTORATIVE";
and in his left hand held a violin that without doubt served to sing his
pleasures and pains, and to spread abroad the contagion of his folly
upon the nights of the Sabbath.
From rings upon his delicate ankles trailed a broken chain of gold, and
when the burden of this caused him to bend his eyes towards the earth,
he would contemplate with vanity the nails of his feet, as brilliant and
polished as well-wrought jewels.
He looked at me with eyes inconsolably heartbroken and giving forth an
insidious intoxication, and cried in a chanting voice: "If thou wilt, if
thou wilt, I will make thee an overlord of souls; thou shalt be master
of living matter more perfectly than the sculptor is master of his clay;
thou shalt taste the pleasure, reborn without end, of obliterating
thyself in the self of another, and of luring other souls to lose
themselves in thine. "
But I replied to him: "I thank thee. I only gain from this venture,
then, beings of no more worth than my poor self? Though remembrance
brings me shame indeed, I would forget nothing; and even before I
recognised thee, thou ancient monster, thy mysterious cutlery, thy
equivocal phials, and the chain that imprisons thy feet, were symbols
showing clearly enough the inconvenience of thy friendship. Keep thy
gifts. "
The second Satan had neither the air at once tragical and smiling, the
lovely insinuating ways, nor the delicate and scented beauty of the
first. A gigantic man, with a coarse, eyeless face, his heavy paunch
overhung his hips and was gilded and pictured, like a tattooing, with a
crowd of little moving figures which represented the unnumbered forms of
universal misery. There were little sinew-shrunken men who hung
themselves willingly from nails; there were meagre gnomes, deformed and
under-sized, whose beseeching eyes begged an alms even more eloquently
than their trembling hands; there were old mothers who nursed clinging
abortions at their pendent breasts. And many others, even more
surprising.
This heavy Satan beat with his fist upon his immense belly, from whence
came a loud and resounding metallic clangour, which died away in a
sighing made by many human voices. And he smiled unrestrainedly, showing
his broken teeth--the imbecile smile of a man who has dined too freely.
Then the creature said to me:
"I can give thee that which gets all, which is worth all, which takes
the place of all. " And he tapped his monstrous paunch, whence came a
sonorous echo as the commentary to his obscene speech. I turned away
with disgust and replied: "I need no man's misery to bring me happiness;
nor will I have the sad wealth of all the misfortunes pictured upon thy
skin as upon a tapestry. "
As for the She-devil, I should lie if I denied that at first I found in
her a certain strange charm, which to define I can but compare to the
charm of certain beautiful women past their first youth, who yet seem to
age no more, whose beauty keeps something of the penetrating magic of
ruins. She had an air at once imperious and sordid, and her eyes, though
heavy, held a certain power of fascination. I was struck most by her
voice, wherein I found the remembrance of the most delicious contralti,
as well as a little of the hoarseness of a throat continually laved with
brandy.
"Wouldst thou know my power? " said the charming and paradoxical voice of
the false goddess. "Then listen. " And she put to her mouth a gigantic
trumpet, enribboned, like a mirliton, with the titles of all the
newspapers in the world; and through this trumpet she cried my name so
that it rolled through space with the sound of a hundred thousand
thunders, and came re-echoing back to me from the farthest planet.
"Devil! " cried I, half tempted, "that at least is worth something. " But
it vaguely struck me, upon examining the seductive virago more
attentively, that I had seen her clinking glasses with certain drolls of
my acquaintance, and her blare of brass carried to my ears I know not
what memory of a fanfare prostituted.
So I replied, with all disdain: "Get thee hence! I know better than wed
the light o' love of them that I will not name. "
Truly, I had the right to be proud of a so courageous renunciation. But
unfortunately I awoke, and all my courage left me. "In truth," I said,
"I must have been very deeply asleep indeed to have had such scruples.
Ah, if they would but return while I am awake, I would not be so
delicate. "
So I invoked the three in a loud voice, offering to dishonour myself as
often as necessary to obtain their favours; but I had without doubt too
deeply offended them, for they have never returned.
THE END
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ordinary and legitimate occupation of man? --So he gallantly offered his
hand to his dear, adorable, and execrable wife; the mysterious woman to
whom he owed so many pleasures, so many pains, and perhaps also a great
part of his genius.
Several bullets went wide of the proposed mark, one of them flew far
into the heavens, and as the charming creature laughed deliriously,
mocking the clumsiness of her husband, he turned to her brusquely and
said: "Observe that doll yonder, to the right, with its nose in the air,
and with so haughty an appearance. Very well, dear angel, _I will
imagine to myself that it is you! _"
He closed both eyes and pulled the trigger. The doll was neatly
decapitated.
Then, bending towards his dear, adorable, and execrable wife, his
inevitable and pitiless muse, he kissed her respectfully upon the hand,
and added, "Ah, dear angel, how I thank you for my skill! "
THE SHOOTING-RANGE AND THE CEMETERY.
"Cemetery View Inn"--"A queer sign," said our traveller to himself; "but
it raises a thirst! Certainly the keeper of this inn appreciates Horace
and the poet pupils of Epicurus. Perhaps he even apprehends the profound
philosophy of those old Egyptians who had no feast without its skeleton,
or some emblem of life's brevity. "
He entered: drank a glass of beer in presence of the tombs; and slowly
smoked a cigar. Then, his phantasy driving him, he went down into the
cemetery, where the grass was so tall and inviting; so brilliant in the
sunshine.
The light and heat, indeed, were so furiously intense that one had said
the drunken sun wallowed upon a carpet of flowers that had fattened upon
the corruption beneath.
The air was heavy with vivid rumours of life--the life of things
infinitely small--and broken at intervals by the crackling of shots from
a neighbouring shooting-range, that exploded with a sound as of
champagne corks to the burden of a hollow symphony.
And then, beneath a sun which scorched the brain, and in that atmosphere
charged with the ardent perfume of death, he heard a voice whispering
out of the tomb where he sat. And this voice said: "Accursed be your
rifles and targets, you turbulent living ones, who care so little for
the dead in their divine repose! Accursed be your ambitions and
calculations, importunate mortals who study the arts of slaughter near
the sanctuary of Death himself! Did you but know how easy the prize to
win, how facile the end to reach, and how all save Death is naught, not
so greatly would you fatigue yourselves, O ye laborious alive; nor would
you so often vex the slumber of them that long ago reached the End--the
only true end of life detestable! "
THE DESIRE TO PAINT.
Unhappy perhaps is the man, but happy the artist, who is torn with this
desire.
I burn to paint a certain woman who has appeared to me so rarely, and so
swiftly fled away, like some beautiful, regrettable thing the traveller
must leave behind him in the night. It is already long since I saw her.
She is beautiful, and more than beautiful: she is overpowering. The
colour black preponderates in her; all that she inspires is nocturnal
and profound. Her eyes are two caverns where mystery vaguely stirs and
gleams; her glance illuminates like a ray of light; it is an explosion
in the darkness.
I would compare her to a black sun if one could conceive of a dark star
overthrowing light and happiness. But it is the moon that she makes one
dream of most readily; the moon, who has without doubt touched her with
her own influence; not the white moon of the idylls, who resembles a
cold bride, but the sinister and intoxicating moon suspended in the
depths of a stormy night, among the driven clouds; not the discreet
peaceful moon who visits the dreams of pure men, but the moon torn from
the sky, conquered and revolted, that the witches of Thessaly hardly
constrain to dance upon the terrified grass.
Her small brow is the habitation of a tenacious will and the love of
prey. And below this inquiet face, whose mobile nostrils breathe in the
unknown and the impossible, glitters, with an unspeakable grace, the
smile of a large mouth; white, red, and delicious; a mouth that makes
one dream of the miracle of some superb flower unclosing in a volcanic
land.
There are women who inspire one with the desire to woo them and win
them; but she makes one wish to die slowly beneath her steady gaze.
THE GLASS-VENDOR.
These are some natures purely contemplative and antipathetic to action,
who nevertheless, under a mysterious and inexplicable impulse, sometimes
act with a rapidity of which they would have believed themselves
incapable. Such a one is he who, fearing to find some new vexation
awaiting him at his lodgings, prowls about in a cowardly fashion before
the door without daring to enter; such a one is he who keeps a letter
fifteen days without opening it, or only makes up his mind at the end of
six months to undertake a journey that has been a necessity for a year
past. Such beings sometimes feel themselves precipitately thrust towards
action, like an arrow from a bow.
The novelist and the physician, who profess to know all things, yet
cannot explain whence comes this sudden and delirious energy to indolent
and voluptuous souls; nor how, incapable of accomplishing the simplest
and most necessary things, they are at some certain moment of time
possessed by a superabundant hardihood which enables them to execute the
most absurd and even the most dangerous acts.
One of my friends, the most harmless dreamer that ever lived, at one
time set fire to a forest, in order to ascertain, as he said, whether
the flames take hold with the easiness that is commonly affirmed. His
experiment failed ten times running, on the eleventh it succeeded only
too well.
Another lit a cigar by the side of a powder barrel, _in order to see, to
know, to tempt Destiny_, for a jest, to have the pleasure of suspense,
for no reason at all, out of caprice, out of idleness. This is a kind of
energy that springs from weariness and reverie; and those in whom it
manifests so stubbornly are in general, as I have said, the most
indolent and dreamy beings.
Another so timid that he must cast down his eyes before the gaze of any
man, and summon all his poor will before he dare enter a cafe or pass
the pay-box of a theatre, where the ticket-seller seems, in his eyes,
invested with all the majesty of Minos, AEcus, and Rhadamanthus, will at
times throw himself upon the neck of some old man whom he sees in the
street, and embrace him with enthusiasm in sight of an astonished crowd.
Why? Because--because this countenance is irresistibly attractive to
him? Perhaps; but it is more legitimate to suppose that he himself does
not know why.
I have been more than once a victim to these crises and outbreaks which
give us cause to believe that evil-meaning demons slip into us, to make
us the ignorant accomplices of their most absurd desires. One morning I
arose in a sullen mood, very sad, and tired of idleness, and thrust as
it seemed to me to the doing of some great thing, some brilliant
act--and then, alas, I opened the window.
(I beg you to observe that in some people the spirit of mystification is
not the result of labour or combination, but rather of a fortuitous
inspiration which would partake, were it not for the strength of the
feeling, of the mood called hysterical by the physician and satanic by
those who think a little more profoundly than the physician; the mood
which thrusts us unresisting to a multitude of dangerous and
inconvenient acts. )
The first person I noticed in the street was a glass-vendor whose shrill
and discordant cry mounted up to me through the heavy, dull atmosphere
of Paris. It would have been else impossible to account for the sudden
and despotic hatred of this poor man that came upon me.
"Hello, there! " I cried, and bade him ascend. Meanwhile I reflected, not
without gaiety, that as my room was on the sixth landing, and the
stairway very narrow, the man would have some difficulty in ascending,
and in many a place would break off the corners of his fragile
merchandise.
At length he appeared. I examined all his glasses with curiosity, and
then said to him: "What, have you no coloured glasses? Glasses of rose
and crimson and blue, magical glasses, glasses of Paradise? You are
insolent. You dare to walk in mean streets when you have no glasses that
would make one see beauty in life? " And I hurried him briskly to the
staircase, which he staggered down, grumbling.
I went on to the balcony and caught up a little flower-pot, and when the
man appeared in the door-way beneath I let fall my engine of war
perpendicularly upon the edge of his pack, so that it was upset by the
shock and all his poor walking fortune broken to bits. It made a noise
like a palace of crystal shattered by lightning. Mad with my folly, I
cried furiously after him: "The life beautiful! the life beautiful! "
Such nervous pleasantries are not without peril; often enough one pays
dearly for them. But what matters an eternity of damnation to him who
has found in one second an eternity of enjoyment?
THE WIDOWS.
Vauvenargues says that in public gardens there are alleys haunted
principally by thwarted ambition, by unfortunate inventors, by aborted
glories and broken hearts, and by all those tumultuous and contracted
souls in whom the last sighs of the storm mutter yet again, and who thus
betake themselves far from the insolent and joyous eyes of the
well-to-do. These shadowy retreats are the rendezvous of life's
cripples.
To such places above all others do the poet and philosopher direct their
avid conjectures. They find there an unfailing pasturage, for if there
is one place they disdain to visit it is, as I have already hinted, the
place of the joy of the rich. A turmoil in the void has no attractions
for them. On the contrary they feel themselves irresistibly drawn
towards all that is feeble, ruined, sorrowing, and bereft.
An experienced eye is never deceived. In these rigid and dejected
lineaments; in these eyes, wan and hollow, or bright with the last
fading gleams of the combat against fate; in these numerous profound
wrinkles and in the slow and troubled gait, the eye of experience
deciphers unnumbered legends of mistaken devotion, of unrewarded
effort, of hunger and cold humbly and silently supported.
Have you not at times seen widows sitting on the deserted benches? Poor
widows, I mean. Whether in mourning or not they are easily recognised.
Moreover, there is always something wanting in the mourning of the poor;
a lack of harmony which but renders it the more heart-breaking. It is
forced to be niggardly in its show of grief. They are the rich who
exhibit a full complement of sorrow.
Who is the saddest and most saddening of widows: she who leads by the
hand a child who cannot share her reveries, or she who is quite alone? I
do not know. . . . It happened that I once followed for several long hours
an aged and afflicted woman of this kind: rigid and erect, wrapped in a
little worn shawl, she carried in all her being the pride of stoicism.
She was evidently condemned by her absolute loneliness to the habits of
an ancient celibacy; and the masculine characters of her habits added to
their austerity a piquant mysteriousness. In what miserable cafe she
dines I know not, nor in what manner. I followed her to a reading-room,
and for a long time watched her reading the papers, her active eyes,
that once burned with tears, seeking for news of a powerful and personal
interest.
At length, in the afternoon, under a charming autumnal sky, one of those
skies that let fall hosts of memories and regrets, she seated herself
remotely in a garden, to listen, far from the crowd, to one of the
regimental bands whose music gratifies the people of Paris. This was
without doubt the small debauch of the innocent old woman (or the
purified old woman), the well-earned consolation for another of the
burdensome days without a friend, without conversation, without joy,
without a confidant, that God had allowed to fall upon her perhaps for
many years past--three hundred and sixty-five times a year!
Yet one more:
I can never prevent myself from throwing a glance, if not sympathetic at
least full of curiosity, over the crowd of outcasts who press around the
enclosure of a public concert. From the orchestra, across the night,
float songs of fete, of triumph, or of pleasure. The dresses of the
women sweep and shimmer; glances pass; the well-to-do, tired with doing
nothing, saunter about and make indolent pretence of listening to the
music. Here are only the rich, the happy; here is nothing that does not
inspire or exhale the pleasure of being alive, except the aspect of the
mob that presses against the outer barrier yonder, catching gratis, at
the will of the wind, a tatter of music, and watching the glittering
furnace within.
There is a reflection of the joy of the rich deep in the eyes of the
poor that is always interesting. But to-day, beyond this people dressed
in blouses and calico, I saw one whose nobility was in striking contrast
with all the surrounding triviality. She was a tall, majestic woman, and
so imperious in all her air that I cannot remember having seen the like
in the collections of the aristocratic beauties of the past. A perfume
of exalted virtue emanated from all her being. Her face, sad and worn,
was in perfect keeping with the deep mourning in which she was dressed.
She also, like the plebeians she mingled with and did not see, looked
upon the luminous world with a profound eye, and listened with a toss of
her head.
It was a strange vision. "Most certainly," I said to myself, "this
poverty, if poverty it be, ought not to admit of any sordid economy; so
noble a face answers for that. Why then does she remain in surroundings
with which she is so strikingly in contrast? "
But in curiously passing near her I was able to divine the reason. The
tall widow held by the hand a child dressed like herself in black.
Modest as was the price of entry, this price perhaps sufficed to pay
for some of the needs of the little being, or even more, for a
superfluity, a toy.
She will return on foot, dreaming and meditating--and alone, always
alone, for the child is turbulent and selfish, without gentleness or
patience, and cannot become, any more than another animal, a dog or a
cat, the confidant of solitary griefs.
THE TEMPTATIONS; OR, EROS, PLUTUS, AND GLORY.
Last night two superb Satans and a She-devil not less extraordinary
ascended the mysterious stairway by which Hell gains access to the
frailty of sleeping man, and communes with him in secret. These three
postured gloriously before me, as though they had been upon a stage--and
a sulphurous splendour emanated from these beings who so disengaged
themselves from the opaque heart of the night. They bore with them so
proud a presence, and so full of mastery, that at first I took them for
three of the true Gods.
The first Satan, by his face, was a creature of doubtful sex. The
softness of an ancient Bacchus shone in the lines of his body. His
beautiful langourous eyes, of a tenebrous and indefinite colour, were
like violets still laden with the heavy tears of the storm; his
slightly-parted lips were like heated censers, from whence exhaled the
sweet savour of many perfumes; and each time he breathed, exotic
insects drew, as they fluttered, strength from the ardours of his
breath.
Twined about his tunic of purple stuff, in the manner of a cincture, was
an iridescent Serpent with lifted head and eyes like embers turned
sleepily towards him. Phials full of sinister fluids, alternating with
shining knives and instruments of surgery, hung from this living girdle.
He held in his right hand a flagon containing a luminous red fluid, and
inscribed with a legend in these singular words:
"DRINK OF THIS MY BLOOD: A PERFECT RESTORATIVE";
and in his left hand held a violin that without doubt served to sing his
pleasures and pains, and to spread abroad the contagion of his folly
upon the nights of the Sabbath.
From rings upon his delicate ankles trailed a broken chain of gold, and
when the burden of this caused him to bend his eyes towards the earth,
he would contemplate with vanity the nails of his feet, as brilliant and
polished as well-wrought jewels.
He looked at me with eyes inconsolably heartbroken and giving forth an
insidious intoxication, and cried in a chanting voice: "If thou wilt, if
thou wilt, I will make thee an overlord of souls; thou shalt be master
of living matter more perfectly than the sculptor is master of his clay;
thou shalt taste the pleasure, reborn without end, of obliterating
thyself in the self of another, and of luring other souls to lose
themselves in thine. "
But I replied to him: "I thank thee. I only gain from this venture,
then, beings of no more worth than my poor self? Though remembrance
brings me shame indeed, I would forget nothing; and even before I
recognised thee, thou ancient monster, thy mysterious cutlery, thy
equivocal phials, and the chain that imprisons thy feet, were symbols
showing clearly enough the inconvenience of thy friendship. Keep thy
gifts. "
The second Satan had neither the air at once tragical and smiling, the
lovely insinuating ways, nor the delicate and scented beauty of the
first. A gigantic man, with a coarse, eyeless face, his heavy paunch
overhung his hips and was gilded and pictured, like a tattooing, with a
crowd of little moving figures which represented the unnumbered forms of
universal misery. There were little sinew-shrunken men who hung
themselves willingly from nails; there were meagre gnomes, deformed and
under-sized, whose beseeching eyes begged an alms even more eloquently
than their trembling hands; there were old mothers who nursed clinging
abortions at their pendent breasts. And many others, even more
surprising.
This heavy Satan beat with his fist upon his immense belly, from whence
came a loud and resounding metallic clangour, which died away in a
sighing made by many human voices. And he smiled unrestrainedly, showing
his broken teeth--the imbecile smile of a man who has dined too freely.
Then the creature said to me:
"I can give thee that which gets all, which is worth all, which takes
the place of all. " And he tapped his monstrous paunch, whence came a
sonorous echo as the commentary to his obscene speech. I turned away
with disgust and replied: "I need no man's misery to bring me happiness;
nor will I have the sad wealth of all the misfortunes pictured upon thy
skin as upon a tapestry. "
As for the She-devil, I should lie if I denied that at first I found in
her a certain strange charm, which to define I can but compare to the
charm of certain beautiful women past their first youth, who yet seem to
age no more, whose beauty keeps something of the penetrating magic of
ruins. She had an air at once imperious and sordid, and her eyes, though
heavy, held a certain power of fascination. I was struck most by her
voice, wherein I found the remembrance of the most delicious contralti,
as well as a little of the hoarseness of a throat continually laved with
brandy.
"Wouldst thou know my power? " said the charming and paradoxical voice of
the false goddess. "Then listen. " And she put to her mouth a gigantic
trumpet, enribboned, like a mirliton, with the titles of all the
newspapers in the world; and through this trumpet she cried my name so
that it rolled through space with the sound of a hundred thousand
thunders, and came re-echoing back to me from the farthest planet.
"Devil! " cried I, half tempted, "that at least is worth something. " But
it vaguely struck me, upon examining the seductive virago more
attentively, that I had seen her clinking glasses with certain drolls of
my acquaintance, and her blare of brass carried to my ears I know not
what memory of a fanfare prostituted.
So I replied, with all disdain: "Get thee hence! I know better than wed
the light o' love of them that I will not name. "
Truly, I had the right to be proud of a so courageous renunciation. But
unfortunately I awoke, and all my courage left me. "In truth," I said,
"I must have been very deeply asleep indeed to have had such scruples.
Ah, if they would but return while I am awake, I would not be so
delicate. "
So I invoked the three in a loud voice, offering to dishonour myself as
often as necessary to obtain their favours; but I had without doubt too
deeply offended them, for they have never returned.
THE END
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