A Surfeit of Mirrors Read online

  That is because, little shepherdess, you guarded your sheep on a moor of pink heather and yellow gorse, on the edge of the forest, standing or sitting among your flock, in your large cape of coarse wool, which sometimes sheltered a fearful lamb from the wind.

  Beautiful eyes make the simplicity of a face more beautiful, and yours were such that the widowed Seigneur, having seen you as he passed by, loved you and wanted to marry you. His beard was entirely white then, and his gaze was so sad, O Shepherdess, that he moved you more than he tempted you with the adventure of being a great Lady, and living in the château where you tell the time by the shadow of the towers in the forest.

  No hint of the noble Sire’s bad reputation had reached the solitude of the little guardian, for she was humble and poor, so no one deigned to take to her, and, being proud, she did not interrogate those who went past her isolated thatched cottage between two old elms, against which her sheep rubbed themselves, wearing away an necklace of bark. In any case, she did not regret being what she was, since she was in love; although she would have liked to be able to buy a new dress for the occasion of her imminent marriage, she consoled herself with the thought that her lover never showed any sign that her woolen cape and cotton bonnet displeased him.

  At dawn, a fanfare of horns awoke the forest, and four banners, deployed simultaneously at the summits of the four towers at the corners of the manor, undulated in the morning wind. A rumor of celebration filled the vast dwelling. The corridors were abuzz; in the courtyard, horses pawed the ground, some covered with gaudy blankets, others bearing complicated saddles, the strongest skirted with steel mail, and each of them having a beautiful rose mounted of the forehead. In a corner, a few musicians dressed in yellow smocks, were standing with their backs to the wall, quietly rehearsing flute preludes.

  Finally, the drawbridge was lowered. The cortege emerged. In the lead, men-at-arms dressed in buff leather, carrying baskets of flowers on their long interlaced lances. Then came, in good order, a multitude of valets and braided pages, archers, slingshot-wielders and halberdiers, and virtuosos in groups, the first of whom were blowing into bizarre twisted horns. Their cheeks were inflated, that corpulence nourishing their rubicund faces. A few, agile or thin, were banging copper cymbals rhythmically; the rest played delicate instruments and marched with small steps, their eyes lowered and their expressions attentive. The last preceded an empty litter borne on the shoulders of mulattos and followed, on horseback, by the Lord of the Manor, in a white silk coat embroidered with oval pearls, over which his silvery beard descended. Behind him came a troop of pikemen and musketeers, and, bringing up the rear, the servants from the cellar, the kitchen and the stables extended the procession.

  The little cottage at which all that pomp stopped was asleep, the door closed. The sheep could be heard bleating softly in the fold, and birds that had come to perch in the elms or on the roof flew away, frightened by that approach but reassured by the silence of the cavalcade that stood motionless all around. A light breeze stirred the plumes of the helmets, turned over the lace of collars and scattered the horses’ manes, but the silence did not prevent a murmur running through the ranks that the person who lived there was a shepherdess named Héliade.

  The Sire got down from his horse, knelt in front of the door and knocked three times. The door opened, and they saw the Bride appear on the threshold.

  She was stark naked and smiling.

  Her long hair matched the golden color of the flowering gorse; the nipples of her young breasts were as pink as the sprigs of heather. The whole of her charming body was simple, and innocence itself, so unaware did her smile seem of her beauty. In seeing her so beautiful of face, the men looking at her did not perceive the nudity of her body.

  Those who noticed it were not astonished by it, and no more than a couple of valets whispered to one another. Then, in the ingenious cunning that had suggested to her that she should appear naked, she advanced, grave and victorious, though poor, into the ambush of her Destiny.

  The entire town was excited by the ceremony announced for that day. Curiosity was augmented by the fact that, although they knew the harsh Seigneur by virtue of the rigor of his tolls and his demanding taxation, no one knew who was about to go through the doors of the Church with him, as his bride.

  The Bishop had only been warned to have his altar dressed for the occasion and to order his most beautiful liturgies, so, without having replied to the imperious mandate of the châtelain, he was standing on the parvis with his miter and crosier, in full pomp, with his cantor and all his clergy, as soon as the bells had signaled, by their peals, the entrance of the procession within the walls.

  The people, weary of waiting and considering the lamps lit behind the choir, counting the garlands strung between the pillars and numbering the episcopal entourage, uttered cries of joy when they perceived, at the far end of the main street, above the moving heads, the long lances of the cavaliers marching through the populace, pushing them back to form a corridor and driving them toward the already-crowded square—for good folk love ostentation and this, both martial and nuptial, had excited their curiosity and provoked their collaboration. Thus, they were already pressing around the escort surrounding the mysterious litter from which the strange bride would emerge.

  They were amazed to begin with, and thought it some sacrilegious fantasy of the audacious suzerain; but as they were, for the most part, naïve souls, and they had seen figures that resembled this one many a time, painted on stained-glass windows and sculpted on porches,—Eve, Agnes and Virgin Martyrs, equally tender in their flesh and similarly embellished with soft eyes and long hair—their astonishment turned to admiration, in thinking that some celestial benevolence had sent this miraculous Child to reduce the intractable pride and cruelty of the Sinner.

  Side by side, she and he advanced into the Church that I had visited a short while before, so peaceful in its meditative dusk. The nave was perfumed and illuminated by candles and sunlight. Midday was blazing through the rose-windows and incandescent stained glass, and the sly and glabrous Clerics thought, in seeing the naked girl pass through their midst, a stranger to their concupiscence, that the Sire de Carnoët was espousing, by virtue of witchcraft, some Siren or Nymph like those mentioned in pagan texts. Had the Bishop not ordered the thurifer-bearers to charge their incense burners, in order that their smoke might interpose itself between the Visitor and the eyes of God and humans?—thus isolating, with its thick veil, the unexpected group that could be seen, through an odorous mist, bowing before the altar: one golden-haired and one silver-headed, beneath the benediction of the long crosier, which consecrated the exchange of the rings.

  The shepherdess Héliade, who had married in the nude, lived for a long time with Bluebeard, who did not kill her as he had killed Emmène, Poncette, Blismode and Tharsile, and that Alède he no longer regretted.

  The sweet presence of Héliade cheered up the old château. She was seen sometimes, clad in a white dress like those of the Ladies allegorical of Wisdom and Virtue, before whom, beneath the castle walls, the pure Unicorns with the crystal hooves knelt down, sometimes in a dress as blue as shadows on the grass in summer, or mauve, like the shells that one finds on the sand of gray beaches beside the distant Sea, or glaucous and coral-spiced, or in muslin the color of the dawn or the dusk, according to the caprice of its folds, diminishing or augmenting the transparency, but most often covered by a long cape of coarse wool, wearing a cotton bonnet—for, although she sometimes wore one of the five beautiful dresses that her husband had give her, she still preferred her cape and bonnet to their ostentation.

  When she died, after having survived her husband, and the old manor had collapsed, of age and neglect, it was for that reason that she, alone among the ghosts who wandered amid the ancient debris, returned there fully dressed, and that she appeared to me, perhaps, with the features of the peasant woman who had had taken me there that evening, and who, standing on the bank, watched me draw away, to th
e sound of the oars, over the dismal water and through the taciturn Night.

  Eustase and Humbeline

  To Ferdinand Herold 5

  Of all those who were enticed to fall in love with the beautiful Humbeline, one alone remained faithful. He seemed to owe that to the perseverance of his passion, rather than to any recompense she might have given him. Nothing having intervened to diminish it, it remained the same, for it is not so much time that wears away our sentiments as the credit that one accords to it, and although the reasons for falling in love are in ourselves, it is from elsewhere that those which cause us to love no longer ordinarily originate.

  Humbeline had doubtless held the presence of Eustase the philosopher in too much esteem not to have chosen the best means of conserving it.

  Eustase excelled at explaining Humbeline to herself. To him, she was an abbreviation of the whole universe; they were both grateful for that. A gracious exchange was established between them in consequence, and to the extent that she was attentive and benevolent toward him, he was assiduous and circumspect toward her.

  Some had been more and less to her than Eustase. They had tried to divert Humbeline from her taste for herself, to the profit of those who had a similar taste. The futility of their enterprise and the rejection of their pretentions had rendered them exceedingly sensible of the check to their demands.

  Eustase amused himself by consoling his rivals, showing them by example, and trying to prove to them by subtle arguments, what an infirmity there was in wanting to possess the most beautiful things other than by thinking them beautiful, and, as he delighted in allusions, he made use of that means to clarify their folly.

  If they came to visit him at home to consult him about their disappointment, he showed them, smiling, and with a delightfully renunciatory gesture, a marvelous item of glassware, which isolated, against the funerary backcloth of an ebony bracket on the wall of his bedroom, his visible prestige.

  It was a fragile vase, complicated and taciturn, in a cold and enigmatic crystal; it seemed to contain a philter of some extraordinary power, for its swollen, seemingly respectful paunch was corroded; arborescent vitrifications streaked the interior in the crepuscular translucency of its walls; it was intact and intangible in its slenderness, brittle in its frosty hardness, and so beautiful that the mere sight of it filled the soul with gladness that it existed and sadness by virtue of its sacred reservation.

  And to anyone who did not understand the gesture and the emblem, Eustase said: “I found it in the Domain of Arnheim;6 Psyche and Ulalume have held it in their marvelous hands.” And he added, in a whisper; “I haven’t drunk from it; it was made to be only ever sipped by the lips of Solitude and Silence.”

  Dusk entered the spacious and cenobitic chamber. Through the clear windows, the setting sun reddened; it seemed to be doubled; outside, very close to the bloody and sulfurous clouds that were slowly scarring it, and also very distant in an inclined mirror facing the window, which reflected it. The occidental fervor burned, coldly, in the crystal; it shrank there in miniature, cured of what had been too poignant in the distance, reduced therein to a glacial and mineralized aspect.

  That was the moment when Eustase went out every day to visit Humbeline. She lived, alternately and according to the time of the year, in her garden or her drawing-room. The drawing-room, as large as a garden, and the garden, as small as a drawing-room, resembled one another. The soft lawn was smoothed out into a carpet. The water in the pond was reproduced, clarified, in the mirrors of the boudoir, and the wall-hangings represented in interior arabesques the shadow of the leaves outside on the walls of the cottage.

  Every day, Eustase went there, as he had the day before, and the charm of the conversation that took place between the young woman and the philosopher was due to the honest exchange they made of the reciprocal utility that they had for one another.

  Humbeline freed Eustase from mingling with life. The aspects to be found there were, for him, summarized in the instructive Lady, with all their contradictions and variety. That delicate individual was, in herself alone, an exquisite tumult. All the incoherence of passions existed in her tastes, reduced to minuscule dimensions, and to an infinitesimal but equivalent motion. Furthermore, she offered to Eustase the memory of all the landscapes in which that which our sentiments find in their image strives and extenuates. For their part, her dresses already depicted the nuances of the seasons, and the ensemble of her hair was simultaneously the whole of autumn and all forests. The echo of seas certainly murmured in the naïve shells of her ears. Her hands were florid with horizons whose flexible lines were traced by her gestures.

  It was these resemblances that Eustase interpreted for her. He detailed their infinitesimal analogies for her, and gave her the pleasure of having, at every moment, a consciousness of what she was, magnified beyond what she seemed to be. She thus made contact with the world through every pore of her charming skin and every point of her moist, friable and sponge-like egotism, loving nothing but herself in everything, but in a communicative and amalgamated fashion.

  They lived happily thus; she only seeing of everything external to her that which constituted her, and that which she constituted, and he seeing entirety within her.

  Sometimes they juxtaposed their steps in a stroll, if she happened to conceive the whim, one evening in spring or summer night, at dusk in autumn or midday in winter. Everywhere, Humbeline moved only through herself; Eustase walked not so much with her as within her. He made delightful voyages there, and on returning, gladly said to her: “The setting sun of your hair was a tragic golden hue his evening, Humbeline!” or gave her to understand that a sleeping serpent was coiled according to the torpid tresses of her gorgonian coiffure.

  She laughed, and nonetheless preferred what was slightly enigmatic to her in Eustase’s words to the all-too-clear conversations that the lovers she had sent away had imposed upon her.

  They took revenge for their dismissal by denigrating the choice that had replaced them. All of them, loving too much, by virtue of jealousy or ill-temper, to admit the principle of reciprocal reserve that the two companions in spirit adopted with respect to the other, and supposing that intimacy to be very different, alleged, as if it were a reproach that menaced its duration, that Eustase had not always been like that.

  To be sure, he had once been very different. I know that by virtue of having known him in an era when he believed in life. Like others, he had desired, seen and possessed, and then, weary of being dispersed in his desires, appropriated to their objects, possessed by everything he believed that he possessed, he had made dreams of them, of which perhaps the bitter aftertaste remained of being more identical to those that replaced them than what they had actually been.

  Life had cooled and had been deposited within him like a sky in a mirror.

  Having suffered from being the intermediary between himself and nature himself, he had made Humbeline his mediator. It was that to which the mirror in Eustase’s room made allusion, and the enigmatic item of glassware on the bracket of funerary ebony, in which the vitrified matter fashioned by means of illusion the water of which it was empty—and that was also the referent of what Eustase said, at dusk, about the Domain of Arnheim, Psyche and Ulalume, and what he said about the lips of Solitude and Silence.

  Manuscript Found in a Cupboard

  To Pierre Louÿs 7

  …Perhaps there is no solitude, and, if solitary individuals are thinking about themselves, deliberately or apathetically, they are not alone. They are looking at themselves in the future or seeing themselves in the past; they are anticipating or remembering. Theirs is a hypocritical solitude. All solitude is hypocritical: is mine any more veridical for being that of someone who appears to be limited to himself? However, I sometimes seem to be alone: the most alone of mortals in the most solitary of dwellings.

  I chose an abode in the most deserted of our provinces. Old maps give it a name; very old people still remember having known one. It is a lo
ng time after having left any road that one arrives there, and when I lost their last trace I had already passed through places singularly and irredeemably abandoned.

  To begin with, along the twisting roadways, the milestones gradually petered out. Those still encountered were cracked and moss-covered. Then the roads changed into paths, which thinned out themselves, hesitantly, and disappeared. The routes exiting from moribund villages skirted villages in their death-throes, and ended beyond the final cottages.

  Sad and plaintive towns! Packed in a corner of their over-large boundaries, which encircle ruined towers with the superabundant braid of their gnarled walls, the pitiful emaciation of a residential area, they shrivel up in the bottom of the basket of their walls like fruits hardening in a dry and ashy putrefaction. The autumnal wind seems to peck at them, with its dolorous bird-cries, from the entire sky.

  In the villages, old hands were no longer able to set the bells in motion in the belfries, which are cracked all the way to the roof, disintegrating stone by stone and tile by tile in the grass. Such collapses were slow and soft, for those ancient stones and old tiles, all furred with moss, made no noise as they fall. They were friable, and ready, on contact with the ground, to revert to the dust that they had been before.

  There were still hovels here and there, so wretched that they buckled beneath the branches; their venerable thatch seemed to purr under the caressing fingers of the foliage, and the animal somnolence of their fur of crude straw crouched down.