Fiévreux tête-à-tête (Harlequin Azur) (French Edition)
And, at a time when he had turned night into day for his labour: Having only myself to rely upon, I have had to strengthen, to build up that self. The Baron Hulot, ruined on every side, and by his own fault, goes to Josepha, a mistress who had cast him off in the time of his prosperity, and asks her to lodge him for a few days in a garret. She laughs, pities, and then questions him. On est une canaille, mais on a du cceur. The joy of the human organism at its highest point of activity: How passionate, how moving he becomes whenever he has to speak of a real passion, a mania, whether of a lover for his mistress, of a philosopher for his idea, of a miser for his gold, of a Jew dealer for masterpieces!
His style clarifies, his words become flesh and blood; he is the lyric poet. And for him every idealism is equal: He drags to light the hidden joys of the amateur, and with especial delight those that are hidden deepest, under the most deceptive coverings. He deifies them for their energy, he fashions the world of his Human Comedy in their service, as the real world exists, all but passive, to be the pasture of these supreme egoists.
In all that he writes of life, Balzac seeks the soul, but it is the soul as nervous fluid, the executive soul, not the contemplative soul, that, with rare exceptions, he seeks. He would surprise the motive force of life: And of this visionary, this abstract thinker, it must be said that his thought translates itself always into terms of life. Pose before him a purely mental problem, and he will resolve it by a scene in which the problem literally works itself out. It is the quality proper to the novelist, but no novelist ever employed this quality with such persistent activity, and at the same time subordinated faction so constantly to the idea.
With him I action has always a mental basis, is never suf- fered to intrude for its own sake. He prefers that an episode should seem in itself tedious I rather than it should have an illogical interest. It may be, for he is a Frenchman, that his episodes are sometimes too logical.
There are moments when he becomes unreal because he wishes to be too systematic, that is, to be real by measure. He would never have under- stood the method of Tolstoi, a very stealthy method of surprising life. To Tolstoi life is always the cunning enemy whom one must lull asleep, or noose by an unexpected lasso.
He brings in little detail after little detail, seeming BALZAC 29 to insist on the insignificance of each, in order that it may pass almost unobserved, and be realised only after it has passed. It is his way of disarming the suspiciousness of life. But Balzac will make no circuit, aims at an open and an unconditional triumph over nature. Thus, when he triumphs, he triumphs signally; and action, in his books, is perpet- ually crystallising into some phrase, like the single lines of Dante, or some brief scene, in which a whole entanglement comes sharply and suddenly to a luminous point.
I will give no instance, for I should have to quote from every volume. I wish rather to remind myself that there are times when the last fine shade of a situation seems to have escaped. Even then, the failure is often more apparent than real, a slight bungling in the machinery of illusion. Look through the phrase, and you will find the truth there, perfectly explicit on the other side of it. For it cannot be denied, Balzac's style, as style, is imperfect.
That his style should lack sym- metry, subordination, the formal virtues of form, is, in my eyes, a less serious fault. I have often considered whether, in the novel, perfect form is a good, or even a possible thing, I if the novel is to be what Balzac made it, his- Uory added to poetry.
A novelist with style will not look at life with an entirely naked vision. He sees through coloured glasses. Human life and human manners are too various, too moving, to be brought into the fixity of a quite formal order. There will corne a mo- ment, constantly, when style must suffer, or the closeness and clearness of narration must BALZAC 31 be sacrificed, some minute exception of action or psychology must lose its natural place, or its full emphasis. Balzac, with his rapid and accumulating mind, without the patience of selection, and without the desire to select where selection means leaving out something good in itself, if not good in its place, never hesitates, and his parenthesis comes in.
And , often it is into these parentheses that he puts j the profoundest part of his thought. Yet, ready as Balzac is to neglect the story for the philosophy, whenever it seems to him necessary to do so, he would never have ad- mitted that a form of the novel is possible in which the story shall be no more than an ex- cuse for the philosophy.
That was because he was a great creator, and not -merely a philosophical thinker; because he dealt in f flesh and blood, and knew that the passions in action can teach more to the philosopher, and can justify the artist more fully, than all the unacting intellect in the world. The novel as Balzac conceived it has created the modern novel, but no modern novelist has followed, for none has been able to follow, Balzac on his own lines. Even those who have tried to follow him most closely have, sooner or later, branched off in one direction or another, most in the direction indicated by Stendhal.
Stendhal has written one book which is a masterpiece, unique in its kind, Le Rouge et le Noir; a second, which is full of admirable things, Le Chartreuse de Parme; a book of profound criticism, Racine et Shakspeare; and a cold and penetrating study of the physiology of love, De V Amour, by the side of which Balzac's Physiologie du BALZAC 33 Mariage is a mere jeu d' esprit. He discov- ered for himself, and for others after him, a method of unemotional, minute, slightly ironical analysis, which has fascinated modern minds, partly because it has seemed to dis- pense with those difficulties of creation, of creation in the block, which the triumphs of Balzac have only accentuated.
Goriot, Va- 16rie Marneffe, Pons, Grandet, Madame de Mortsauf even, are called up before us after the same manner as Othello or Don Quixote; their actions express them so significantly that they seem to be independent of their creator; Balzac stakes all upon each creation, and leaves us no choice but to accept or reject each as a whole, precisely as we should a human being. We do not know all the secrets of their consciousness, any more than we know all the secrets of the consciousness of our friends. But we have only so say " Valerie!
Stendhal, on f the contrary, undresses Julien's soul in public with a deliberate and fascinating effrontery. We know everything that passed through his mind, to result probably in some significant inaction. And at the end of the book we know as much about that particular intelligence as the anatomist knows about I the body which he has dissected. I should be the last to say that Julien Sorel is not a creation, but he is not a creation after the order of Balzac; it is a difference of kind; and if we look carefully at Frederic Moreau, and Madame Gervaisais, and the Abbe Mouret, we shall see that these also, profoundly differ- ent as Flaubert and Goncourt and Zola are from Stendhal,- are yet more profoundly, more radically, different from the creations of Bal- i zac.
But since Stendhal, novelists have persuaded themselves that the primary passions are a little common, or noisy, or a little heavy to handle, and they have concerned themselves with passions tempered iby reflection, and the sensations of elaborate BALZAC 35 brains. It was Stendhal who substituted the brain for the heart, as the battle-place of the novel; not the brain as Balzac conceived it, a motive-force of action, the mainspring of passion, the force by which a nature directs its accumulated energy; but a sterile sort of brain, set at a great distance from the heart, whose rhythm is too faint to disturb it.
We have been intellectualising upon Stendhal ever since, until the persons of the modern novel have come to resemble those diaphanous jelly-fish, with balloon-like heads and the merest tufts of bodies, which float up and down in the Aquarium at Naples. Thus, coming closer, as it seems, to what is called reality, in this banishment of great emotions, and this attention upon the sensa- tions, modern analytic novelists are really getting further and further from that life which is the one certain thing in the world.
The novels of Balzac are full of electric fluid. To take up one of them is to feel the shock of life, as one feels it on touching certain mag- netic hands. To turn over volume after vol- ume is like wandering through the streets of a great city, at that hour of the night when human activity is at its full.
There is a par- ticular kind of excitement inherent in the very aspect of a modern city, of London or Paris; in the mere sensation of being in its midst, in the sight of all those active and fatigued faces which pass so rapidly; of those long and endless streets, full of houses, each of which is like the body of a multiform soul, looking out through the eyes of many windows. There is something intoxicating in the lights, the movement of shadows under the lights, the vast and billowy sound of that shadowy movement.
And there is something more than this mere unconscious action upon the nerves. A new future is possible at every street corner. I never know, when I go out into one of those crowded streets, but that the whole course of my life may be changed before I return to the house I have quitted. I am writing these lines in Madrid, to which I have come suddenly, after a long quiet in Andalusia; and I feel already a new pulse in my blood, a keener consciousness of life, and a sharper human curiosity. Even in Seville I knew that I should see to-morrow, in the same streets, hardly changed since the Middle Ages, the same people that I had seen to-day.
But here there are new possibilities, all the exciting accidents of the modern world, of a population always changing, of a city into which civilisation has brought all its unrest. And as I walk in these broad, windy streets and see these people, whom I hardly recog- nise for Spaniards, so awake and so hybrid are they, I have felt the sense of Balzac com- ing back into my veins. For Balzac is the equivalent of great cities. He is bad reading for solitude, for he fills the mind with the nostalgia of cities.
When a man speaks to me familiarly of Balzac I know already something of the man with whom I have to do. Few young people care for him, for there is nothing in him that appeals to the senses except through the intellect. But it is natural that he should be the favourite reading of men of the world, of those men of the world who have the distinction of their kind; for he supplies the key of the enigma which they are studying. In he writes: I took the air only at that window which dominates Paris, which I mean to domi- nate. I am dashed against a rock, I recover myself and go on to another reef.
Fievreux Tete-A-Tete (Harlequin Azur) (French, Electronic book text)
I shall die in the trenches of the intellect. In the modern world, as he himself realised more clearly than any one, money is more often a symbol than an entity, and it can be the symbol of every desire. It meant leisure to visit the woman whom he loved, and at the end it meant the possibility of marrying her. There were only two women in Balzac's life: He had loved her for twenty years; she was married, and lived in Poland; it was only at rare intervals that he was able to see her, and then very briefly; but his letters to her, published since his death, are a simple, perfectly individual, daily record of a great passion.
But we see the fo A ce of that sentiment passing into his work; Sera- phita is its ecstasy, everywhere is its human shadow; it refines his strength, it gives hiitf surprising intuitions, it gives him all that was BALZAC 41 wanting to his genius. A great lover, to whom love, as well as every other passion and the whole visible world, was an idea, a flaming spiritual percep- tion, Balzac enjoyed the vast happiness of the idealist.
Contentedly, joyously, he sacrificed every petty enjoyment to the idea of love, the idea of fame, and to that need of the organism to exercise its forces, which is the only defini- tion of genius. I do not know, among the lives of men of letters, a life better filled, or more appropriate. A young man who, for a short time, was his secretary, declared: Balzac tasted more than all earthly pleasures as he sat there in his attic, creating the world over again, that he might lay it at the feet of a woman. His death was as fortunate as his life; he died at the height of his powers, at the height of his fame, at the moment of the fulfilment of his happiness, and perhaps of the too sudden relief of that delicate burden.
This young man had something insolent and ex- tremely unpleasant about him. His eyes, small and without expression, had always the same look, and this look was ill-natured. Such was my first impression of the best of my present friends. I am not too sure of his heart, but I am sure of his talents. His mother has a good deal of French wit and a superior intelligence. Like her son, it seems to me that she might give way to emotion once a year.
He went to England at the age of twenty-three, to Spain four years later, and might seem to have been drawn naturally to those two countries, to which he was to return so often, by natural affinities of temper and manner.
It was the English manner that he liked, that came naturally to him; the correct, unmoved exterior, which is a kind of positive strength, not to be broken by any onslaught of events or emotions; and in Spain he found an equally positive animal acceptance of things as they are, which satisfied his profound, re- strained, really Pagan senusality, Pagan in the hard, eighteenth-century sense. From the beginning he was a student, of art, of history, of human nature, and we find him enjoying, in PROSPER MfiRIMfiE 45 his deliberate, keen way, the studied diversions of the student; body and soul each kept exactly in its place, each provided for without par- tiality.
He entered upon literature by a mys- tification, Le Theatre de Clara Gazul, a book of plays supposed to be translated from a living Spanish dramatist; and he followed it by La Guzla, another mystification, a book of prose ballads supposed to be translated from the Illyrian. He travelled at almost regular intervals, not only in Spain and England, but in Corsica, in Greece and Asia Minor, in Italy, in Hun- gary, in Bohemia, usually with a definite, scholarly object, and always with an alert attention to everything that came in his way, to the manners of people, their national char- acters, their differences from one another.
An intimate friend of the Countess de Montijo, the mother of the Empress Eugenie, he was a friend, not a courtier, at the court of the Third Empire. Soon after, his imagination seemed to flag; he abandoned himself, perhaps a little wearily, more and more to facts, to the facts of history and learning; learned Russian, and trans- lated Poushkin and Tourguenieff; and died in , at Cannes, perhaps less satisfied with himself than most men who have done, in their PROSPER MERIMEE 47 lives, far less exactly what they have intended to do.
Precise opinions lead easily to prejudices, and Me'rime'e, who prided himself on the really very logical quality of his mind, put himself somewhat deliberately into the hands of his prejudices. Thus he hated religion, distrusted priests, would not let himself be carried away by any instinct of admiration, would not let himself do the things which he had the power to do, because his other, critical self came mockingly behind him, suggesting that very few things were altogether worth doing.
It is not only for an effect, but more and more genuinely, that he sets his acquirements as a scholar above his accomplishments as an artist. Clear- ing away, as it seemed to him, every illusion from before his eyes, he forgot the last illusion of positive people: Merimee realises a type which we are accus- tomed to associate almost exclusively with the eighteenth century, but of which our own time can offer us many obscure examples. It is the type of the esprit fort: To such a man the pursuit of women is part of his con- stant pursuit of human experience, and of the document, which is the summing up of human experience.
He liked anecdotes, not great events, in his his- tory; and he was careful to avoid any too serious passions in his search for sensations. There, no doubt, for the sensualist, is happi- ness, if he can resign himself to it. I can imagine him ending every day with satisfaction, and beginning every fresh day with just enough expectancy to be agreeable, at that period of his life when he was writing the finest of his stories, and dividing the rest of his leisure between the drawing-rooms and the pursuit of uneventful adventures.
Only, though we are automates autant qu'- esprit, as Pascal tells us, it is useless to expect that what is automatic in us should remain invariable and unconditioned. If life could be lived on a plan, and for such men on such a plan, if first impulses and profound passions could be kept entirely out of one's own experi- ence, and studied only at a safe distance, then, no doubt, one could go on being happy, in a PROSPER MERIMEE 51 not too heroic way. He begins with curiosity, which passes with singular rapidity into a kind of self- willed passion; already in the eighth letter, long before he has seen her, he is speculating which of the two will know best how to torture the other: Then he discovers, for the first time, and without practical result, "that it is better to have illusions than to have none at all.
I have spent my life in being praised for qualities which I do not possess, and calumni- ated for defects which are not mine. Perhaps of all love-letters, these of Merime'e show us love triumphing over the most care- fully guarded personality. Here the obstacle PROSPER MfiRIMfiE 53 is not duty, nor circumstance, nor a rival; but on her side as on his, it would seem a carefully trained natural coldness, in which action, and even for the most part feeling, are relinquished to the control of second thoughts.
A habit of repressive irony goes deep: Merime'e might well have thought himself secure against the outbreak of an unconditional passion. Yet here we find passion betraying itself, often only by bitterness, together with a shy, surprising tenderness, in this curious lovers' itinerary, marked out with all the customary sign-posts, and leading, for all its wilful deviations, along the inevitable road. It is commonly supposed that the artist, by the habit of his profession, has made for himself a sort of cuirass of phrases against the direct attack of emotion, and so will suffer less than most people if he should fall into love, and things should not go altogether well with him.
Rather, he is the more laid open to attack, the more helplessly entangled when once the net has been cast over him. He lives through every passionate trouble, not merely with the daily emotions of the crowd, ' but with the whole of his imagination. What is most torturing in every not quite fortunate love is I memory, and the artist becomes an artist by J his intensification of memory. Well, to the artist his own life is. The practice of art is a sharp- ening of the sensations, and, the knife once sharpened, does it cut into one's hand less deeply because one is in the act of using it to carve wood?
And so we find Merime'e, the most imper- sonal of artists, and one of those most critical of the caprices and violences of fate, giving in to an almost obvious temptation, an anon- ymous correspondence, a mysterious unknown woman, and passing from stage to stage of a finally very genuine love-affair, which kept him in a fluttering agitation for more than thirty years. She has the " wicked eyes" of all his heroines, from the Mariquita of his first attempt in literature, who haunts the Inquisitor with "her great black eyes, like the eyes of a young cat, soft and wicked at once.
It is one of the privileges of art to create nature, as, according to a certain mystical doctrine, you can actual- ise, by sheer fixity of contemplation, your mental image of a thing into the thing itself. The Inconnue was one of a series, the rest imaginary; and her power over Me'rime'e, we can hardly doubt, came not only from her queer likeness of temperament to his, but from the singular, flattering pleasure which it must have given him to find that he had invented with so much truth to nature.
In his subjects he is as " Romantic" as Victor Hugo or Gautier; he adds, even, a peculiar flavour of cruelty to the Romantic ingredients. But he distin- guishes sharply, as French writers before him had so well known how to do, between the passion one is recounting and the moved or unmoved way in which one chooses to tell it. While others, at that time, were intoxicating themselves with strange sensations, hoping that " nature would take the pen out of their hands and write," just at the moment when their own thoughts became least coherent, PROSPER MfiRIMfiE 57 M6rim6e went quietly to work over something a little abnormal which he had found in nature, with as disinterested, as scholarly, as mentally reserved an interest as if it were one of those Gothic monuments which he inspected to such good purpose, and, as it has seemed to his biographer, with so little sympathy.
His own emotion, so far as it is roused, seems to him an extraneous thing, a thing to be concealed, if not a little ashamed of. It is the thing itself he wishes to give you, not his feelings about it; and his theory is that if the thing itself can only be made to stand and speak before the reader, the reader will supply for himself all the feeling that is needed, all the feeling that would be called out in nature by a perfectly clear sight of just such passions in action.
It seems to him bad art to paint the picture, and to write a description of the picture as well. And his method serves him wonderfully up to a certain point, and then leaves him, without his being well aware of it, at the moment even when he has convinced himself that he has realised the utmost of his aim.
He has often been taken at his word, but to take him at his word is to do him an injustice. What he has really done is to materialise a myth, by accepting in it precisely what might be a mere superstition, the form of the thing, and leaving out the spiritual meaning of which that form was no more than a temporary expression. The ring which the bridegroom sets on the finger of Venus, and which the statue's finger closes upon, accepting it, symbolises the pact between love and sensuality, the lover's abdi- cation of all but the physical part of love; and the statue taking its place between husband and wife on the marriage-night, and crushing life out of him in an inexorable embrace, symbolises the merely natural destruction PROSPER MfiRIMfiE 59 which that granted prayer brings with it, as a merely human Messalina takes her lover on his own terms, in his abandonment of all to Venus.
Merimee sees a cruel and fantastic superstition, which he is afraid of seeming to take too seriously, which he prefers to leave as a story of ghosts or bogies, a thing at which we are to shiver as at a mere twitch on the nerves, while our mental confidence in the impossibility of what we cannot explain is preserved for us by a hint at a muleteer 's vengeance. The devil, the old pagan gods, the spirits of evil incarnated under every form, fascinated him; it gave him a malign pleasure to set them at their evil work among men, while, all the time, he mocks them and the men who believed in them.
He is a materialist, and yet he believes in at least a something evil, outside the world, or in the heart of it, which sets humanity at its strange games, relent- lessly. Is he, perhaps, at times, the athiest who fears that, after all, God may exist, or at least who realises how much he would fear him if he did exist? Me'rimee had always delighted in mystifica- tions; he was always on his guard against being mystified himself, either by nature or by his fellow-creatures. In the early " Romantic" days he had had a genuine passion for various things: But even then he had invented it by a kind of trick, and, later on, he explains what a poor thing " local colour" is, since it can so easily be invented without leaving one's study.
He is full of curiosity, and will go far to satisfy it, regretting "the decadence," in our times, "of energetic passions, in favour of tranquillity and perhaps of happiness. Me'rime'e prized happiness, material comfort, the satisfaction of one's immediate desires, very highly, and it was his keen sense PROSPER MfiRIMEE 61 of life, of the pleasures of living, that gave him some of his keenness in the realisation of violent death, physical pain, whatever dis- turbs the equilibrium of things with unusual emphasis.
Himself really selfish, he can dis- tinguish the unhappiness of others with a kind of intuition which is not sympathy, but which selfish people often have: It is not pity, though it communicates itself to us, often enough, as pity. It is the clear-sighted sensitiveness of a man who watches human things closely, bringing them home to himself with the deliberate, essaying art of an actor who has to represent a particular passion in movement.
Indifference, in him, as in the man of the world, is partly an attitude, adopted for its form, and influencing the temperament just so much as gesture always influences emotion. In time he will not merely seem calm but will be calm, at the moment when he learns that a great disaster has be- fallen him. But, in M6rimee, was the indif- ference even as external as it must always be when there is restraint, when, therefore, there is something to restrain?
Was there not in him a certain drying up of the sources of emotion, as the man of the world came to accept almost the point of view of society, reading his stories to a little circle of court ladies, when, once in a while, he permitted himself to write a story?
And was not this increase of well-bred indifference, now more than ever characteristic, almost the man himself, the chief reason why he abandoned art so early, writing only two or three short stories during the last twenty-five years of his life, and writing these with a labour which by no means conceals itself? He declines to consider psychology except through its expression in facts, with an impersonality far more real than that of Flaubert.
The PROSPER MERIMEE 63 document, historical or social, must translate itself into sharp action before he can use it; not that he does not see, and appreciate better than most others, all there is of signi- ficance in the document itself; but his theory of art is inexorable. He never allowed him- self to write as he pleased, but he wrote always as he considered the artist should write. Thus he made for himself a kind of formula, confin- ing himself, as some thought, within too narrow limits, but, to himself, doing exactly what he set himself to do, with all the satisfaction of one who is convinced of the justice of his aim and confident of his power to attain it.
Like so much of his work, it has something of the air of a tour de force, not taken up entirely for its own sake. Written under a title which suggests a work of actual history, it is more than possible that the first suggestion of this book really came, as he tells us in the preface, from the reading of "a large number of memoirs and pamphlets relating to the end of the sixteenth century.
Bartholomew, in which there was pre- cisely the violence of action and uncertainty of motive which he liked to set before him at the beginning of a task in literature. Probable, clearly defined people, in the dress of the period, grew up naturally about this central motive; humour and irony have their part; there are adventures, told with a sword's point of sharpness, and in the fewest possible words; there is one of his cruel and loving women, in whom every sentiment becomes action, by some twisted feminine logic of their own.
It is the most artistic, the most clean- cut, of historical novels; and yet this perfect neatness of method suggests a certain indif- PROSPER MERIMfiE 65 ference on the part of the writer, as if he were more interested in doing the thing well than in doing it. And that, in all but the very best of his stories even, perhaps, in Arsene Guillot only not in such perfect things as Carmen, as Mateo Falcone , is what Merimee just lets us see, underneath an almost faultless skill of narrative. An incident told by Me'rime'e at his best gathers about it something of the gravity of history, the composed way in which it is told helping to give it the equivalent of remoteness, allowing it not merely to be, but, what is more difficult, to seem classic in its own time.
The phrase is scarcely too strong to apply to what is best in his own work. Made out of elemental passions, hard, cruel, detached as it were from their own sentiments, the stories that he tells might in other hands become melodramas: Carmen, taken thoughtlessly out of his hands, has supplied the libretto to the most popu- lar of modern light operas.
And each is a little world which he has made his own, with a labor at last its own reward, and taking life partly because he has put into it more of him- self than the mere intention of doing it well. All the little parade of local colour and philology, the appendix on the Calo of the gipsies, done to heighten the illusion, has more significance than people sometimes think.
Etienne thought it already needful to say: We find him writing, a little dryly, on Catiline, on Csesar, on Don Pedro the Cruel, learning Russian, and trans- lating from it yet, while studying the Russians before all the world, never discovering the mystical Russian soul , writing learned articles, writing reports. He looked around on con- temporary literature, and found nothing that he could care for. Stendhal was gone, and who else was there to admire? Baudelaire made him furious, Ren an filled him with pitying scorn.
In the midst of his contempt, he may perhaps have imagined that he was being left behind. He died probably at the moment when he was no longer a fashion, and had not yet become a classic. His father was surgeon-major; his mother died before he was old enough to remember her, following the Grande Armee on the Rus- sian campaign; and Gerard was brought up, largely under the care of a studious and erratic uncle, in a little village called Montagny, near Ermenonville. He was a precocious schoolboy, and by the age of eighteen had published six little collections of verses. It was during one of his holidays that he saw, for the first and last time, the young girl whom he calls Adri- enne, and whom, under many names, he loved to the end of his life.
One evening she had come from the chateau to dance with the young peasant girls on the grass. She had danced with Gerard, he had kissed her cheek, he had crowned her hair with laurels, he had heard her sing an old song telling of the sorrows of a princess whom her father had shut in a tower because she had loved. After- wards, he heard that Adrienne had taken the veil; then, that she was dead. To one who had realised that it is "we, the living, who walk in a world of phantoms," death could not ex- clude hope; and when, many years later, he fell seriously and fantastically in love with a little actress called Jenny Colon, it was because he seemed to have found, in that blonde and very human person, the re-incarnation of the blonde Adrienne.
Meanwhile Gerard was living in Paris, among his friends the Romantics, writing and living in an equally desultory fashion. Le bon Gerard was the best loved, and, in his time, not the least famous, of the company. He led, by choice, now in Paris, now across Eu- rope, the life of a vagabond, and more per- sistently than others of his friends who were driven to it by need. At that time, when it was the aim of every one to be as eccentric as possible, the eccentricities of Gerard's life and thought seemed, on the whole, less noticeable than those of many really quite normal per- sons.
Blanche's asylum at Montmartre. He entered March 21, , and came out, apparently well again, on the 21st of November. It would seem that this first access of madness was, to some extent, the consequence of the final rupture with Jenny Colon; on June 5, , she died and it was partly in order to put as many leagues of the earth as possible be- tween him and that memory that Gerard set out, at the end of , for the East.
It was also in order to prove to the world, by his con- sciousness of external things, that he had recovered his reason. He returned to Paris at the end of or the beginning of , and for the next few years he lived mostly in Paris, writing charming, graceful, remarkably sane articles and books and wandering about the GERARD DE NERVAL 73 streets, by day and night, in a perpetual dream from which, now and again, he was somewhat rudely awakened. When, in the spring of , he went to see Heine, for whom he was doing an admirable prose translation of his poems, and told him he had come to return the money he had received in advance, because the times were accomplished, and the end of the world, announced by the Apocalypse, was at hand, Heine sent for a cab, and Gerard found himself at Dr.
Dubois' asylum, where he remained two months.
A Tale of Two Cities (Webster's French Thesaurus Edition)
It was on coming out of the asylum that he wrote Sylvie, a delightful idyl, chiefly autobiographical, one of his three actual achievements. On August 27, , he had to be taken to Dr. Blanche's asylum at Passy, where he remained till May 27, Thither, after a month or two spent in Germany, he returned on August 8, and on October 19 he came out for the last time, man- ifestly uncured.
He was now engaged on the narrative oi his own madness, and the first part of Le Reve et la Vie appeared in the Revue de Paris of January 1, He was used to such little misadventures, but he complained of the difficulty of writing. Do you know I can scarcely write twenty lines a day, the darkness comes about me so close! The snow was freezing on the ground, and on the night of the 25th, at three in the morning, the landlord of a "penny doss" in the Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, a filthy alley lying between the quays and the Rue de Rivoli, heard some one knocking at the door, but did not open, on account of the cold.
At dawn, the body of Gerard de Nerval was found hanging by the apron-string to a bar of the window. He was not a great writer; he had moments of greatness; and it is the particular quality of these moments which is of interest for us. There is the entertaining, but not more than entertaining, Voyage en Orient; there is the estimable translation of Faust, and the ad- mirable versions from Heine; there are the volumes of short stories and sketches, of which even Les Illumines, in spite of the promise of its title, is little more than an agreeable compilation.
But there remain three compositions: The sonnets belong to two of these periods, Le Reve et la Vie to the last; Sylvie was written in the short interval between the two attacks in the early part of We have thus the case of a writer, graceful and elegant when he is sane, but only inspired, only really wise, passionate, collected, only really master of himself, when he is insane. It may be worth looking at a few of the points which so suggestive a problem presents to us. Gerard de Nerval lived the transfigured inner life of the dreamer. And like so many dreamers, who have all the luminous darkness of the universe in their brains, he found his most precious and uninterrupted solitude in the crowded and more sordid streets of great cities.
He who had loved the Queen of Sheba, and seen the seven Elohims dividing the world, could find nothing more tolerable GERARD DE NERVAL 77 in mortal conditions, when he was truly aware of them, than the company of the meanest of mankind, in whom poverty and vice, and the hard pressure of civilisation, still leave some of the original vivacity of the human comedy. The real world seeming to be always so far from him, and a sort of terror of the gulfs holding him, in spite of himself, to its fly- ing skirts, he found something at all events realisable, concrete, in these drinkers of Les Halles, these vagabonds of the Place du Carrousel, among whom he so often sought refuge.
It was literally, in part, a refuge. During the day he could sleep, but night wakened him, and that restlessness, which the night draws out in those who are really under lunar influences, set his feet wandering, if only in order that his mind might wander the less. The sun, as he mentions, never appears in dreams; but, with the approach of night, is not every one a little readier to be- lieve in the mystery lurking behind the world?
Grains, dans le mur aveugle, un regard qui t'6pie! It is one of the terrors of human existence that we may be led at once to seek and so shun solitude; unable to bear the mortal pressure if its embrace, unable to endure the nos- talgia of its absence. But to have drunk of the cup of dreams is to have drunk of the cup of eternal memory. The past, and, as it seemed to him, the future were continually with him; only the present fled continually from under his feet. It was only by the effort of this contact with people who lived so sincerely in the day, the minute, that he could find even a temporary foothold.
With them, at least, he could hold back all the stars, and the darkness beyond them, and the inter- minable approach and disappearance of all the ages, if only for the space between tavern and tavern, where he could open his eyes on so frank an abandonment to the common drunkenness of most people in this world, GERARD DE NERVAL 79 here for once really living the symbolic in- toxication of their ignorance.
The fatal transfiguration of the footlights, in which reality and the artificial change places with so fantastic a regularity, has drawn many moths into its flame, and will draw more, as long as men persist in demanding illu-. The Jenny Colons of the world are very simple, very real, if one will but refrain from assuming them to be a mystery. But it is the penalty of all imaginative lovers to create for themselves the veil which hides from them the features of the beloved. It is their privilage, for it is incomparably more entrancing to fancy oneself in love with Isis than to know that one is in love with Manon Lescaut.
It gave permanency to the trivial, crystallising it, in another than Stendhal's sense; and when death came, changing mere human memory into the terms of eternity, the darkness of the spiritual world was lit with a new star, which was henceforth the wandering, desolate guide of so many visions. The tragic figure of Aurelia, which comes and goes through all the labyrinths of dream, is now seen always "as if lit up by a lightning- flash, pale and dying, hurried away by dark horsemen. To love a nun under the form of an actress! It is enough to drive one mad! It was a dream, per- haps refracted from some broken, illumi- nating angle by which madness catches un- seen light, that revealed to him the meaning of his own superstition, fatality, malady: It seemed to me that the goddess appeared before me, saying to me: At each of thine ordeals I have dropt yet one more of the masks with which I veil my countenance, and soon thou shalt see me as I am!
C'est encor la premiere; Et c'est toujours la seule, ou c'est le seul moment: Car es-tu reine, 6 toi! Es-tu roi, toi le seul ou le dernier amant? Aimez qui vous aima du berceau dans la biere; Celle que j'aimai seul m'aime encor tendrement; C'est la mort ou la morte. La Rose qu'elle tient, c'est la Rose tremiere.
Sainte napolitaine aux mains pleines de feux, Rose au coeur violet, fleur de sainte Gudule; As-tu trouve" ta croix dans le desert cieux? Tombez, fantomes blancs, de votre ciel qui brule: La Sainte de 1'abime est plus sainte a mes yeux! Are there not moments when that link seems to be worn down to so fine a tenuity that the wing of a passing dream might suffice to snap it?
The consciousness seems, as it were, to expand and contract at once, into something too wide for the uni- verse, and too narrow for the thought of self to find room within it. Is it that the sense of identity is about to evaporate, an- nihilating all, or is it that a more profound identity, the identity of the whole sentient universe, has been at last realised? Leaving the concrete world on these brief voyages, the fear is that we may not have strength to return, or that we may lose the way back.
Every artist lives a double life, in which he is for the most part conscious of the illusions of the imagination. He is conscious also of the illusions of the nerves, which he shares with every man of imaginative mind.
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Nights of insomnia, days of anxious waiting, the sudden shock of an event, and one of these common disturbances may be enough to jangle the tuneless bells of one's nerves. Yet is there not some danger that he may come to confuse one with the other, that he may "lose the thread" which conducts him through the in- tricacies of the inner world? The supreme artist, certainly, is the furthest of all men from this danger; for he is the supreme intelligence.
Like Dante, he can pass through hell unsinged. With him, imag- ination is vision; when he looks into the dark- ness, he sees. The vague dreamer, the inse- cure artist and the uncertain mystic at once, sees only shadows, not recognising their out- lines. He is mastered by the images which have come at his call; he has not the power which chains them for his slaves. The madness of Gerard de Nerval, what- ever physiological reasons may be rightly given for its outbreak, subsidence, and return, GERARD DE NERVAL 85 I take to have been essentially due to the weakness and not the excess of his visionary quality, to the insufficiency of his imaginative energy, and to his lack of spiritual discipline.
He was ah unsystematic mystic; his " Tower of Babel in two hundred volumes," that med- ley of books of religion, science, astrology, his- tory, travel, which he thought would have rejoiced the heart of Pico della Mirandola, of Meursius, or of Nicholas of Cusa, was truly, as he says, " enough to drive a wise man mad. He speaks vaguely of the Cabbala; the Cabbala would have been safety to him, as the Catholic Church would have been, or any other reasoned scheme of things. Wavering among intuitions, ignor- ances, half-truths, shadows of falsehood, now audacious, now hesitating, he was blown hither and thither by conflicting winds, a prey to the indefinite.
Le Reve et la Vie, the last fragments of which were found in his pockets after his 86 THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT suicide, scrawled on scraps of paper, inter-, rupted with Cabbalistic signs and "a demon- stration of the Immaculate Conception by geometry," is a narrative of a madman's visions by the madman himself, yet showing, as Gautier says, "cold reason seated by the bedside of hot fever, hallucination analysing it sen 7 by a supreme philosophic effort.
Now that I have recovered what men call reason, must I not regret having lost them? An old man, who was brought there at certain hours of the day, and who made knots as he consulted his watch, seemed to me to be charged with the notation of the course of the hours. I attributed to myself an influence over the course of the moon, and I believed that this star had been struck by the thunderbolt of the Most High, which had traced on its face the imprint of the mask which -I had observed.
An error, in my opinion, had crept into the general combination of numbers, and thence came all the ills of humanity. I believed also that the celestial spirits had taken human forms, and assisted at this general congress, seeming though they did to be concerned with but ordinary occupations. My own part seemed to me to be the re-establishment of universal harmony by Cabbalistic art, and I had to seek a solution by evoking the occult forces of various religions. But now observe what follows: The words of my companions had mysterious messages, the sense of which I alone under- GERARD DE NERVAL 89 stood; things without form and without life lent themselves to the designs of my mind; out of combinations of stones, the figures of angles, crevices, or openings, the shape of leaves, out of colours, odours, and sounds, I saw unknown harmonies come forth.
All things live, all things are in motion, all things correspond; the magnetic rays emanating from myself or others traverse without obstacle the infinite chain of created things: Now a captive upon the earth, I hold converse with the starry choir, which is feelingly a part of my joys and sorrows. Truth, and especially that soul of truth which is poetry, may be reached by many roads; and a road is not necessarily misleading because it is dangerous or forbidden.
Here is one who has gazed at light till it has blinded him; and for us all that is important is that he has seen something, not that his eyesight has been too weak to endure the pressure of light overflowing the world from beyond the world. Des forces que tu tiens ta liberte" dispose, Mais de tous tes conseils 1'univers est absent. Chaque fleur est une ame a la Nature e" close; Un mystere d'amour dans le metal repose; "Tout est sensible! Ne la fais pas servir a quelque usage impie! But in the other sonnets, in Artemis, which I have quoted, in El Desdichado, Myrtho, and the rest, he would seem to be deliberately obscure; or at least, his obscurity results, to some extent, from the state of mind which he describes in Le Reve et la Vie: His genius, to which madness had come as the liberating, the precipitating, spirit, disengaging its finer essence, consisted in a power of materialising vision, whatever is most volatile and unseizable in vision and without losing the sense of mystery, or that quality which gives its charm to the intangible.
Madness, then, in him, had lit up, as if by lightning-flashes, the hidden links of distant and divergent things; perhaps in somewhat the same manner as that in which a similarly new, startling, perhaps over- true sight of things is gained by the artificial stimulation of haschisch, opium, and those other drugs by which vision is produced de- GERARD DE NERVAL 93 liberately, and the soul, sitting safe within the perilous circle of its own magic, looks out on the panorama which either rises out of the darkness before it, or drifts from itself into the darkness.
The very imagery of these sonnets is the imagery which is known to all dreamers of bought dreams. Rose au cceur violet, fleur de sainte Gudule; le Temple au peristyle immense; la grotte ou nage la syrene: But no one before Gerard real- ised that such things as these might be the basis of almost a new aesthetics. That he made the discovery, there is no doubt; and we owe to the fortunate accident of madness one of the foundations of what may be called the practical aesthetics of Symbolism.
Look again at that sonnet Arte- mis, and you will see in it not only the method of Mallarme, but much of the most intimate manner of Verlaine. Vision, the over-powering vision, had come to him beyond, if not against, his will; and he knew that vision is the root out of which the flower must grow. Vision had taught him symbol, and he knew that it is by symbol alone that the flower can take visible form. So it was with disdain, as well as with confidence, that he allowed these sonnets to be overheard.
It was enough for him to say: J'ai r6v6 dans la grotte oil nage la syrne; and to speak, it might be, the siren's lan- guage, remembering her. It is only now that the best critics in France are beginning to realise how great in themselves, and how great in their influence, are these sonnets, which, forgotten by the world for nearly fifty years, have all the while been secretly bringing new aesthetics into French poetry. For me Christ did not come; I am as much a pagan as Alcibiades or Phidias. I have never plucked on Golgotha the flowers of the Pas- sion, and the deep stream that flows from the side of the Crucified and sets a crimson girdle about the world, has never washed me in its flood; my rebellious body will not acknowledge the supremacy of the soul, and my flesh will not endure to be mortified.
I find the earth as beautiful as the sky, and I think that per- fectiqn of form is virtue. I have no gift for spirituality; I prefer a statue to a ghost, full noon to twilight. Three things delight me: I have looked on love in the light of antiquity, and as a piece of sculpture more or less perfect. All my life I have been concerned with the form of the flagon, never with the quality of its contents. Gautier knew him- self, and could tell the truth about himself as simply, as impartially, as if he had been de- scribing a work of art.
Or is he not, indeed, describing a work of art? Was not that very state of mind, that finished and limited tem- perament, a thing which he had collaborated with nature in making, with an effective height- ening of what was most natural to him, in the spirit of art? Gautier saw the world as mineral, as metal, as pigment, as rock, tree, water, as architec- ture, costume, under sunlight, gas, in all the colours that light can bring out of built or growing things; he saw it as contour, move- ment; he saw all that a painter sees, when the painter sets himself to copy, not to create.
He was the finest copyist who ever used paint with a pen. But he absorbed all this visible world with the hardly discriminating impartiality of the retina; he had no moods, was not to be distracted by a sentiment, heard no voices, saw nothing but darkness, the nega- tion of day, in night. He was tirelessly atten- tive, he had no secrets of his own and could keep none of nature's. Waltz of Chopin Perfumes of Bergamc Departure of Pierrot Brossor of the moon Sensitive to the cold evenings of December, By heating my purple fingers, I dream a theatre of room. I dream a theatre of room.
Decoration Large birds of crimson and gold, These fluttering precious stones, Breughel installation, in its fairyhoods, On the blue trees of the decoration. They vibrate, and their broad rise Throw a shade with the short-nap cloth of the meadows, Large birds of crimson and gold, These fluttering precious stones. Pierrot ' Dandy D ' an odd moonbeam Shine the crystal bottles On the wash-hand basin of sandal Pale dandy bergamask. The fountain laughs in its basin With a clear metal sound. Of an odd moonbeam Shine the crystal bottles. Disappointment Guests, fork with the fist, Saw surbtiliser the liters, Roasts, tortas, oysters, And quince jams.
Of the Gilles, hidden in a corner, Draw from the grimaces clowns. Guests, fork with the fist, Saw subtilizing the liters. The celestial one and soft worker Tying its skirt on its hips, Under the passing very close to kiss of the branches, Extends its linen of light, Like a pale lavender field.
Albert Giraud
Sudden Cassandre, intervening, Blame this night acrobat, Of a grotesque dissonant bow Aggravating its violate punt. Pierrot rejects it, and fascinating Of one comes up very delicate The old man by his roide tie, Streak the bedon the awkward one Of a grotesque dissonant bow.
Lyric Kitchen The Moon, it yellow omelet, Beaten with large gold eggs, At the bottom of the black azure falls asleep, And in the panes reflects itself. Pierrot, in its white toilet, Guigne, known R the roof, close to the edge, The moon, it yellow omelet, Beaten with large gold eggs. Arlequinade Harlequin carries a rainbow Reds and green silk trade, And seems, in the gold of fairyhoods, An artificial snake. Having for essential goal The lie and cheatings, Harlequin carries a rainbow Reds and green silk trade.
In yellow Cassandre of gall It counts its seigniories In Spain, and its armorial bearings: Because on bottom of azure and honey, Harlequin carries a rainbow. It fixes of an eye which lights Its impromptu rescuer: One gleaming polar ice floe, Of cold light sharpened. In Colombine Pale flowers of the moonlight, Like pinks of clearness, Flower in the nights of summer: If I could gather one of them! And I will alleviate my resentment, If I obtain irritated sky Chimerical pleasure To thin out the leaves of on your brown fleece Pale flowers of the moonlight!
Harlequin Brilliant like a solar spectrum, Here the very thin Harlequin, Who crumples the casaquin Of the maidservant man of moods. In order to alleviate its anger, he makes gleam a sequin. Shining like a solar spectrum, Here the very thin Harlequin. The old woman, empochant her wages, Deliver Colombine to the faquin, Who on a large blue sky turquin Takes shape, and sings lanlaire, Shining like a solar spectrum.
Clouds Like splendid fins Celestial changing fish, The clouds have moneys, Golds, mother-of-pearl, ivories. They are made iridescent in front of glories Dying of the plunging suns, Like splendid fins Celestial changing fish. With the foot of the red platform, It charged the gestures with the king: We are parents by the Moon, Pierrot Bergamask and me. I have the worms luisants for fortune; I live while drawing. We are parents by the Moon!
Pierrot robber The reds sovereign rubies, Injected murder and of glory, Sommeillent with the hollow of a-cupboard In the horror of the long undergrounds. Pierrot, with brigands, Wants ravir one day, after drinking, The reds sovereign rubies, Injected murder and of glory. But the fear roughcasts their hairs: Among velvet and the moire, Like eyes in the black shade, Ignite bottom of the jewel cases The reds sovereign rubies! It gives up the charms of the flight; Its strange gaity of fol As a white bird east flees.
Spleen, at the soot horizon, Ferment as well as a black alcohol. Pierrot of Bergamo is bored: Pierrot of Bergamo is bored. Moon intoxication The wine which one drinks by the eyes With green floods of the Moon runs, And submerges like a swell Quiet horizons. Soft pernicious consultings In the philtre yagent as a crowd: The wine which one drinks by the eyes With green floods of the Moon runs.
The religious Poet Strange drunk wormwood, Candidate, - until it rolls, The insane gesture, the head with the skies, - The wine which one drinks by the eyes! The Song of the ' Bracket The thin in love one with the long neck Will be the last mistress, This drag-leg in distress, The EC dream-of gold without the penny. This thought is like a nail That in its head inserts intoxication: The thin in love one with the long neck Will be its last mistress.
She is slender like a bamboo; On its throat aanse a braid, And, of one strangling cherishes, Will make enjoy like insane, The thin anioureuse one with the long neck! Its drunk gesture becomes disconcerting: It ferments the wine of Sunday. In its white Moon dress. Pierrot laughs its bloody laughter. Black butterflies D E sinister black butterflies Sun extinguished glory, And the horizon seems a grimoire Smeared ink every evening. It comes out of occult encensoirs A perfume disturbing the memory; Disasters black butterflies Sun extinguished glory. Sunset The Sun opened the veins On a bed of russet-red clouds: Its blood, by the mouth of the holes, Ejaculate yourself in reds fountains.
The branches convulsifs of the oaks Whip the insane horizons: The Sun opened the veins On a bed of russet-red clouds. The sick moon O The moon, night phthisical, On the black pillow of the skies, Your immense feverish glance Attract me like a music! You die of a chimerical love, And of a quiet desire, O The moon, night phthisical, On the black pillow of the skies!
But ' in its physical pleasure The lover who passes heedless Takes for gracious rays Your white blood and melancholic person, O The moon, night phthisical! Wormwood In an immense sea of wormwood, I discover drunk countries, With the capricious and insane ciels Like a desire of pregnant woman. In an immense sea of wormwood, I discover drunk countries. But suddenly my boat is pressure By viscous and soft octopuses: In the medium of a sticky movement I disappear, without a complaint, In an immense sea of wormwood. Your voice which begs has the sound Block which notch the sword: A filled up red basket of sound Balance in your contracted hand!
Decapitation The Moon, like a white sabre On a dark cushion of moire, Curves itself in night glory Of a fantastic sky and pare. Sauntering a Pierrot length Fix with gestures of fair The Moon, like a white sabre On a dark cushion of moire. It trembles, and, kneeling, Dream in the black vastness That for expiatoire death On its neck falls down while whistling The Moon, like a white sabre. Its pale face is a gangue From which comes out this pushing back ruby: Cruel and red language, With the salivating flesh of blood. Its vertiginous body which pitches Is like a white hoisting vessel With its dazzling mainmast Its house color of mango: Cruel and red language!
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Waltz of Chopin As a spittle sanguinolent, Mouth of phthisical, He falls from this music A morbid charm and pare. A its red - white dream Revive the pale tunic, As a spittle sanguinolent Mouth of phthisical. The soft topic and violent one Waltz melancholic person Leave me a physical savour, An insipid disconcerting after-taste, As a spittle sanguinolent.
The Church In the odorous Church and sinks -- Like a moonbeam entered By the faded stained glass, - Pierrot clarifies the half-light. It goes towards the chorus which sinks. With a glance of inspired, In the odorous Church and sinks Like a moonbeam entered. And sudden candles without a number, Tearing the expired evening, Bleed on the illustrated furnace bridge, Like the wounds of the Shade, In the odorous Church and sinks.
Evocation Madonna of Hysterias I Go up on the furnace bridge of my worms, Fury of glaive through Your thin dried up udders. Your wounds endolories Seem reds open eyes: O Madonna of Hysterias! Go up on the furnace bridge of my worms. Red mass For cruel Eucharistie, Under the flash of plugging golds And of the candles to disconcerting fires, Pierrot comes out of the sacristy. Its hand, of the invested Grace, Tear its white ornaments, For cruel Eucharistie, Under the flash of plugging golds, And of a great gesture of amnesty It shows with faithful trembling Its heart between its bloody fingers, -- Like horrible and red host For cruel Eucharistie.
Crosses The beautiful worms are cd. With glaives the cold corpses Offered festivals scarlets The beautiful worms are cd. They have departed, hair right, Far from crowd to the clamours animals, Setting suns on their heads How crowns cd. The beautiful worms are broad crosses! The spring of the laughter, Between my teeth I broke it: The clear decoration was erased In a mirage in Shakspeare. With the mast of my sad ship A black house is hoisted: The spring of the laughter, Between my teeth I broke it.
When return to me you, lyre bird, Guerissor of the wounded spirit, Adorable snow of the past, Face of the Moon, white lord, O Pierrot! Moon violin The heart of the trembling violin, Full with silence and harmony, Dream in its varnished box IUn dreams languide and disconcerting. Who thus will make of an arm pare IVibrer in the infinite night The heart of the trembling violin, Full with silence and harmony? The Moon, of a mean and slow ray, With softnesses of anguish. Cherish of its irony, Like a luminous white bow, The heart of the trembling violin.
Nostalgia Like a soft crystal sigh, The heart of the old comedies Complains about the stiffened paces Slow sentimental Pierrot. In its sad mental desert Resound in deafened notes, Like a soft crystal sigh, The heart of the old comedies. With through the white fires The moons in the wave increased, Its regret flies to the native sky, Like a soft crystal sigh.
Soft the and insane ones rized Turn in the subtilized air. Desire finally carried out A long time scorned things: The charm of the spleen is broken: Departure of Pierrot A moonbeam is the oar, A white water lily, the launch; It regains, the breeze in poop, On a pale river, Bergamo. The flood sings a humidc ganrnre Under the nacelle which cuts it. A moonbeam is the oar, A white water lily, the launch.
The snow-covered king of mimodrar- Rectify its bunch proudly: Like punch in a cut, The vague green horizon ignites - a moonbeam is the oar. Mime Absurdity and soft like a lie Blue Italian decoration With the mimes of the old drama Open with the vagueness of a dream. In the vaporous distances plunges, Capped air tulle, Absurdity and soft like a lie, Blue air decoration.
Pierrot strikes to blows of longe Cassandre academician, And the red magician On the bottom of the table lengthens, Absurdity and soft like a lie. But its toilet the inportune: It is inspected, and ends up seeing A very pale moonbeam On the back of its black dress. It thinks that it is one Stain of plaster, and without hope, To the sailor, on the pavement, Rub, the large heart of resentment, A very pale moonbeam!
The Alphabet A variegated alphabet, Whose each letter was a mask, Was the alphabetical odd one That in my childhood I spelled. Very a long time I remembered, Better than my sabres and my helmet, A multi-coloured alphabet Whose each letter was a mask. Contempt of the unworthy things, Dislike of the softened hearts Are the precepts which I read In the triumph of your lines, Whitenesses of Snow and Cygnes' Pink Dust A fine pink dust Dance at the horizon of the morning. A very soft remote orchestra Susurre an air cd. A fine pink dust Dance at the horizon of the morning. Suddenly it intends to burst Pointed whistles of the breeze: The Moon laughs at the mistake, And its rays seem to imitate Knitting needles.
The moon ' mocker The Moon draws a horn In the transparency of blue. In Cassandre one made this play To conceal its tricorn to him. The old man walks dull, Bringing back its last hair; The Moon draws a horn In the transparency of blue. The Moon draws a horn. The Lantern The clear one and merry lantern, Where vibrates a tongue of fire, Pierrot the gate at the end of a pile Not to choir in the cistern.
Any corner of street it lantern And on the ground deposits a little The clear one and merry lantern Where vibrates a tongue of fire. It does not see it any more, - prosterne, Light the small blue point Of its match, and, by play, Seek of a gesture which constern- The clear one and merry lantern. Cruel Pierrot In the polished head of Cassandre.
Whose cries bore the tympanum, Pierrot inserts the trepan, Of an air hypocritically tender. Maryland which it has just taken, Its underhand hand spreads it In the polished head I Cassandre Whose cries pcrcent the tympanum. It fixes an end of purple wood With cranium, and the white rogue, With very red lips pumping, Smoke - by driving out finger ash In the polished head of Cassandre!
Decoration Sun, like a large pink egg, Enlumine the gray horizon, And of the tree trunks rabougris Erase the setting morose one. In the slow metamorphosis Long turned sour landscapes, Sun like a large pink egg, Enlumine the gray horizon. Black birds, with broad cries, Break nozzle, in the closed night, Sun, like a large pink egg. The Mirror Of a laughing crescent of the moon Indent yourself the blue sky of the evening, And by the balcony of the boudoir Penetrate the wandering light.
Opposite, in vibrating peace The limpid one and deep mirror, Of a laughing crescent of the moon Indent yourself the blue sky of the evening. Pierrot, in a conquering way Are reflected - and sudden in the black Laughs in silence to see itself Capped by its white relationship Of a laughing crescent of the moon! Enriching these fanfioles The Moon shines like a sequin, And under a pink baldachin Madrigalisent violate, In alanguissantes skiffs. The Moon, of a familiar step, Fact, in its usual round, On the marble of the staircase, Light a froufrou of light.
Bohemian crystal A moonbeam locked up In a beautiful bottle of Bohemia, Such is the fairy-like poem That in these rondels I have rrme. By this symbol is expressed. Pierrot Lunaire — by Albert Giraud. Dont Breughel peindrait les volets,. Et Watteau, les fonds couleur d'ambre. En chauffant mes doigts violets,. On y verrait les Crispins laids. Pour Colombine qui se cambre.
LES grands oiseaux de pourpre et d'or,. Ils vibrent, et leur large essor. Jette une ombre au ras des prairies,. Les grands oiseaux de pourpre et d'or,. Le soleil perce avec effort. L'azur vert des b ranches fleuries,. Les grands oiseaux de pourpre et d'or.
D 'un rayon de lune fantasque. Luisent les flacons de cristal. Sur le lavabo de santal. La fontaine rit dans sa vasque. D'un rayon de Lune fantasque. Et le fard vert oriental. Les convives, fourchette au poing,. Ont vu surbtiliser les litres,. Et les confitures de coing. Tirent des grimaces de pitres. Ont vu subtiliser les litres. Nouant sa jupe sur ses hanches,. D 'un grotesque archet dissonant. Il pince un air inconvenant. D'un grotesque archet dissonant. Pierrot la rejette, et prenant. Le vieux par sa roide cravate,. La Lune, la jaune omelette,.
Battue avec de grands oeufs d'or,. Au fond de l'azur noir s'endort,. Pierrot, dans sa blanche toilette,. La lune, la jaune omelette,. Battue avec de grands oeufs d'or. La Lune, la jaune omelette. Arlequin porte un arc-en-ciel. De rouges et vertes soieries,. Ayant pour but essentiel. Le mensonge et les fourberies,. De rouges et vertes soieries. A Cassandre jaune de fiel. En Espagne, et ses armoiries: Car sur fond d'azur et de miel,. Interpelle dans la nuit claire.
Si je pouvais en cueillir une! Pour soulager mon infortune,. Et j'apaiserai ma rancune,. D'effeuiller sur ta toison brune. Brilliant comme un spectre solaire,. Qui chiffonne le casaquin. De la servante atrabilaire. Brillant comme un spectre solaire,. La vieille, empochant son salaire,. Livre Colombine au faquin,. Qui sur un grand ciel bleu turquin. Se dessine, et chante lanlaire,. Brillant comme un spectre solaire. C OMME de splendides nageoires.
Les nuages ont des argents,. Des ors, des nacres, des ivoires. Ils s'irisent devant les gloires. Mourantes des soleils plongeants,. Comme de splendides nageoires. Mais la Nuit, sur ses barques noires,. Prennent les ondoyantes moires. A mon cousin de 'Bergame.
Nous sommes parents par la Lune,. Le Pierrot Bergamasque et moi,. Quand elle allaite la nuit brune. Au pied de la rouge tribune,. Il chargeait les gestes du roi: Le Pierrot Bergamasque et moi. J'ai les vers luisants pour fortune;. Je vis en tirant,. Et la parole m'importune: Nous sommes parents par la Lune! Les rouges rubis souverains,. Sommeillent au creux d'une-armoire.
Dans l'horreur des longs souterrains. Pierrot, avec des malandrins,. Parmi le velours et la moire,. Comme des yeux dans l'ombre noire,. Les rouges rubis souverains! Il renonce aux charmes du vol;. Comme un oiseau blanc s'est enfuie. Fermente ainsi qu'un noir alcool. Pierrot de Bergame s'ennuie: La Lune sympathique essuie.
Des nuages, et sur le sol. Claque la chanson de la pluie: Pierrot de Bergame s'ennuie. Le vin que l'on boit par les yeux. A flots verts de la Lune coule,. Et submerge comme une houle. De doux conseils pernicieux.