I went out on the street like an exile,
I who am an everyday man, who resemble everybody else
so much, too much. I went through the streets
and crossed the squares with my eyes fixed upon things
without seeing them. I was walking, but I seemed
to be falling from dream to dream, from desire to
desire. A door ajar, an open window gave me a
pang. A woman passing by grazed against me,
a woman who told me nothing of what she might have
told me. I dreamed of her tragedy and of mine.
She entered a house, she disappeared, she was dead.
I stood still, a prey to a thousand
thoughts, stifled in the robe of the evening.
From a closed window on the ground floor floated a
strain of music. I caught the beauty of a sonata
as I would catch distinct human words, and for a moment
I listened to what the piano was confiding to the
people inside.
Then I sat down on a bench.
On the opposite side of the avenue lit by the setting
sun two men also seated themselves on a bench.
I saw them clearly. They seemed overwhelmed
by the same destiny, and a mutual sympathy seemed
to unite them. You could tell they liked each
other. One was speaking, the other was listening.
I read a secret tragedy. As
boys they had been immensely fond of each other.
They had always been of the same mind and shared their
ideas. One of them got married, and it was the
married one who was now speaking. He seemed
to be feeding their common sorrow.
The bachelor had been in the habit
of visiting his home, always keeping his proper distance,
though perhaps vaguely loving the young wife.
However, he respected her peace and her happiness.
The married man was telling him that his wife had
ceased to love him, while he still adored her with
his whole being. She had lost interest in him,
and turned away from him. She did not laugh
and did not smile except when there were other people
present. He spoke of this grief, this wound to
his love, to his right. His right! He
had unconsciously believed that he had a right over
her, and he lived in this belief. Then he found
out that he had no right.
Here the friend thought of certain
things she had said to him, of a smile she had given
him. Although he was good and modest and still
perfectly pure, a warm, irresistible hope insinuated
itself into his heart. Listening to the story
of despair that his friend confided to him, he raised
his face bit by bit and gave the woman a smile.
And nothing could keep that evening, now falling
grey upon those two men, from being at once an end
and a beginning.
A couple, a man and a woman-poor
human beings almost always go in pairs-approached,
and passed. I saw the empty space between them.
In life’s tragedy, separation is the only thing
one sees. They had been happy, and they were
no longer happy. They were almost old already.
He did not care for her, although they were growing
old together. What were they saying? In
a moment of open-heartedness, trusting to the peacefulness
reigning between them at that time, he owned up to
an old transgression, to a betrayal scrupulously and
religiously hidden until then. Alas, his words
brought back an irreparable agony. The past,
which had gently lain dead, rose to life again for
suffering. Their former happiness was destroyed.
The days gone by, which they had believed happy,
were made sad; and that is the woe in everything.
This couple was effaced by another,
a young one, whose conversation I also imagined.
They were beginning, they were going to love.
Their hearts were so shy in finding each other.
“Do you want me to go on that trip?”
“Shall I do this and that?” She answered,
“No.” An intense feeling of modesty
gave this first avowal of love so humbly solicited
the form of a disavowal. But yet they were already
thinking of the full flower of their love.
Other couples passed by, and still
others. This one now-he talking,
she saying nothing. It was difficult for him
to master himself. He begged her to tell him
what she was thinking of. She answered.
He listened. Then, as if she had said nothing,
he begged her again, still harder, to tell him.
There he was, uncertain, oscillating between night
and day. All he needed was for her to say one
word, if he only believed it. You saw him, in
the immense city, clinging to that one being.
The next instant I was separated from these two lovers
who watched and persecuted each other.
Turn where you will, everywhere, the
man and the woman ever confronting each other, the
man who loves a hundred times, the woman who has the
power to love so much and to forget so much.
I went on my way again. I came and went in the
midst of the naked truth. I am not a man of
peculiar and exceptional traits. I recognise
myself in everybody. I have the same desires,
the same longings as the ordinary human being.
Like everybody else I am a copy of the truth spelled
out in the Room, which is, “I am alone and I
want what I have not and what I shall never have.”
It is by this need that people live, and by this need
that people die.
But now I was tired of having desired
too much. I suddenly felt old. I should
never recover from the wound in my breast. The
dream of peace that I had had a moment before attracted
and tempted me only because it was far away.
Had I realised it, I should simply have dreamed another
dream.
Now I looked for a word. The
people who live my truth, what do they say when they
speak of themselves? Does the echo of what I
am thinking issue from their mouths, or error, or
falsehood?
Night fell. I looked for a word
like mine, a word to lean upon, a word to sustain
me. And it seemed to me that I was going along
groping my way as if expecting some one to come from
round the corner and tell me everything.
I did not return to my room.
I did not want to leave the crowds that evening.
I looked for a place that was alive.
I went into a large restaurant so
as to hear voices around me. There were only
a few vacant places, and I found a seat in a corner
near a table at which three people were dining.
I gave my order, and while my eyes mechanically followed
the white-gloved hand pouring soup into my plate from
a silver cup, I listened to the general hubbub.
All I could catch was what my three
neighbours were saying. They were talking of
people in the place whom they knew, then of various
friends. Their persiflage and the consistent
irony of their remarks surprised me.
Nothing they said was worth the while,
and the evening promised to be useless like the rest.
A few minutes later, the head waiter,
while serving me with filets of sole, nodded his head
and winked his eye in the direction of one of the
guests.
“M. Villiers, the famous writer,”
he whispered proudly.
I recognised M. Villiers. He
resembled his portraits and bore his young glory gracefully.
I envied that man his ability to write and say what
he thought. I studied his profile and admired
its worldly distinction. It was a fine modern
profile, the straightness of it broken by the silken
point of his well-kept moustache, by the perfect curve
of his shoulder, and by the butterfly’s wing
of his white necktie.
I lifted my glass to my lips when
suddenly I stopped and felt all my blood rush to my
heart.
This is what I heard:
“What’s the theme of the novel you’re
working on?”
“Truth,” replied Pierre Villiers.
“What?” exclaimed his friend.
“A succession of human beings caught just as
they are.”
“What subject?” somebody asked.
People turned and listened to him.
Two young diners not far away stopped talking and
put on an idling air, evidently with their ears pricked.
In a sumptuous purple alcove, a man in evening clothes,
with sunken eyes and drawn features, was smoking a
fat cigar, his whole life concentrated in the fragrant
glow of his tobacco. His companion, her bare
elbow on the table, enveloped in perfume and sparkling
with jewels, and overloaded with the heavy artificiality
of luxury, turned her simple moon-like face toward
the speaker.
“This is the subject,”
said Pierre Villiers. “It gives me scope
to amuse and tell the truth at the same time.
A man pierces a hole in the wall of a boarding-house
room, and watches what is going on in the next room.”
I must have looked at the speakers
just then with a rather sorry expression of bewilderment.
Then I quickly lowered my head like a child afraid
to be seen.
They had spoken for me, and
I sensed a strange secret service intrigue around
me. Then, in an instant this impression, which
had got the better of my common sense, gave way.
Evidently a pure coincidence. Still I was left
with the vague apprehension that they were going to
notice that I knew, and were going to recognise
me.
One of the novelist’s friends
begged him to tell more of his story. He consented.
He was going to tell it in my presence!
With admirable art in the use of words,
gestures, and mimicry, and with a lively elegance
and a contagious laugh, he described a series of brilliant,
surprising scenes. Under cover of his scheme,
which brought all the scenes out into peculiar relief
and gave them a special intensity, he retailed a lot
of amusing oddities, described comical persons and
things, heaped up picturesque and piquant details,
coined typical and witty proper names, and invented
complicated and ingenious situations. He succeeded
in producing irresistible effects, and the whole was
in the latest style.
They said, “Ah!” and “Oh!”
and opened their eyes wide.
“Bravo! A sure success! A corking
funny idea!”
“All the characters who pass
before the eyes of the man spying upon them are amusing,
even the man who kills himself. Nothing forgotten.
The whole of humanity is there.”
But I had not recognized a single thing in the entire
show.
A stupor and a sort of shame overwhelmed
me as I heard that man trying to extract the utmost
entertainment possible from the dark happenings that
had been torturing me for a month.
I thought of that great voice, now
silenced, which had said so clearly and forcefully
that the writers of to-day imitate the caricaturists.
I, who had penetrated into the heart of humanity and
returned again, found nothing human in this jiggling
caricature! It was so superficial that it was
a lie.
He said in front of me-of me the awful
witness:
“It is man stripped of all outward
appearances that I want people to see. Others
are fiction, I am the truth.”
“It has a philosophical bearing, too.”
“Perhaps. But that wasn’t
my object. Thank God, I am a writer, and not
a thinker.”
And he continued to travesty the truth,
and I was impotent-the truth, that profound
thing whose voice was in my ears, whose shadow was
in my eyes, and whose taste was in my mouth.
Was I so utterly forsaken? Would
no one speak the word I was in search of?
The Room was flooded with moonlight.
In that magnificent setting there was an obscure
white couple, two silent human beings with marble faces.
The fire was out. The clock
had finished its work and had stopped, and was listening
with its heart.
The man’s face dominated.
The woman was at his feet. They did nothing.
An air of tenderness hovered over them. They
looked like monuments gazing at the moon.
He spoke. I recognised his voice.
It lit up his face for me, which had been shrouded
from my sight before. It was he, the nameless
lover and poet whom I had seen twice before.
He was telling Amy that on his way
that evening he had met a poor woman, with her baby
in her arms.
She walked, jostled and borne along
by the crowd returning home from work, and finally
was tossed aside up against a post under a porch, and
stopped as though nailed there.
“I went up to her,” he said, “and
saw she was smiling.
“What was she smiling at?
At life, on account of her child. Under the
refuge where she was cowering, facing the setting sun,
she was thinking of the growth of her child in the
days to come. However terrible they might be,
they would be around him, for him, in him. They
would be the same thing as her breath, her walk, her
look.
“So profound was the smile of
this creator who bore her burden and who raised her
head and gazed into the sun, without even looking down
at the child or listening to its babbling.
“I worked this woman and child up into a poem.”
He remained motionless for a moment,
then said gently without pausing, in that voice from
the Beyond which we assume when we recite, obeying
what we say and no longer mastering it:
“The woman from the depths of
her rags, a waif, a martyr-smiled.
She must have a divine heart to be so tired and yet
smile. She loved the sky, the light, which the
unformed little being would love some day. She
loved the chilly dawn, the sultry noontime, the dreamy
evening. The child would grow up, a saviour,
to give life to everything again. Starting at
the dark bottom he would ascend the ladder and begin
life over again, life, the only paradise there is,
the bouquet of nature. He would make beauty beautiful.
He would make eternity over again with his voice
and his song. And clasping the new-born infant
close, she looked at all the sunlight she had given
the world. Her arms quivered like wings.
She dreamed in words of fondling. She fascinated
all the passersby that looked at her. And the
setting sun bathed her neck and head in a rosy reflection.
She was like a great rose that opens its heart to
the whole world.”
The poet seemed to be searching for
something, to be seeing things, and believing infinitely.
He was in another world where everything we see is
true and everything we say is unforgettable.
Amy was still on her knees with eyes
upraised to his. She was all attention, filled
with it like a precious vase.
“But her smile,” he went
on, “was not only in wonder about the future.
There was also something tragic in it, which pierced
my heart. I understood it perfectly. She
adored life, but she detested men and was afraid of
them, always on account of the child. She already
disputed over him with the living, although he himself
was as yet scarcely among the living. She defied
them with her smile. She seemed to say to them,
’He will live in spite of you, he will use you,
he will subdue you either to dominate you or to be
loved by you. He is already braving you with
his tiny breath, this little one that I am holding
in my maternal grasp.’ She was terrible.
At first, I had seen her as an angel of goodness.
Now, although she had not changed, she was like an
angel of mercilessness and vengeance. I saw a
sort of hatred for those who would trouble him distort
her face, resplendent with superhuman maternity.
Her cruel heart was full of one heart only.
It foresaw sin and shame. It hated men and settled
accounts with them like a destroying angel.
She was the mother with fearful nails, standing erect,
and laughing with a torn mouth.”
Amy gazed at her lover in the moonlight.
It seemed to me that her looks and his words mingled.
“I come back as I always do
to the greatness of mankind’s curse, and I repeat
it with the monotony of those who are always right-oh,
without God, without a harbour, without enough rags
to cover us, all we have, standing erect on the land
of the dead, is the rebellion of our smile, the rebellion
of being gay when darkness envelops us. We are
divinely alone, the heavens have fallen on our heads.”
The heavens have fallen on our heads!
What a tremendous idea! It is the loftiest
cry that life hurls. That was the cry of deliverance
for which I had been groping until then. I had
had a foreboding it would come, because a thing of
glory like a poet’s song always gives something
to us poor living shadows, and human thought always
reveals the world. But I needed to have it said
explicitly so as to bring human misery and human grandeur
together. I needed it as a key to the vault
of the heavens.
These heavens, that is to say, the
azure that our eyes enshrine, purity, plenitude-and
the infinite number of suppliants, the sky of truth
and religion. All this is within us, and has
fallen upon our heads. And God Himself, who
is all these kinds of heavens in one, has fallen on
our heads like thunder, and His infinity is ours.
We have the divinity of our great
misery. And our solitude, with its toilsome
ideas, tears and laughter, is fatally divine.
However wrong we may go in the dark, whatever our
efforts in the dark and the useless work of our hearts
working incessantly, and whatever our ignorance left
to itself, and whatever the wounds that other human
beings are, we ought to study ourselves with a sort
of devotion. It is this sentiment that lights
our foreheads, uplifts our souls, adorns our pride,
and, in spite of everything, will console us when
we shall become accustomed to holding, each at his
own poor task, the whole place that God used to occupy.
The truth itself gives an effective, practical, and,
so to speak, religious caress to the suppliant in
whom the heavens spread.
“I have such respect for the
actual truth that there are moments when I do not
dare to call things by their name,” the poet
ended.
“Yes,” said Amy, very
softly, and nothing else. She had been listening
intently. Everything seemed to be carried away
in a sort of gentle whirlwind.
“Amy,” he whispered.
She did not stir. She had fallen
asleep with her head on her lover’s knees.
He looked at her and smiled. An expression of
pity and benevolence flitted across his face.
His hands stretched out part way toward the sleeping
woman with the gentleness of strength. I saw
the glorious pride of condescension and charity in
this man whom a woman prostrate before him deified.