A Surfeit of Mirrors Read online

Afterwards, I went through great forests where, the further I advanced, the trees became stunted before becoming widely spaced and sickly, increasingly rare until they were finally lacking on interminable heaths, all of the same short and shaggy grass.

  The river that had bathed the towns, brushed the villages and reflected in its waters the trees of the forest and the reeds of open country, after the steeples and the roofs, ended up fading away through the sands. The sands had insidiously absorbed its course, divided up into arms that had thinned into meanders. Its ultimate waters stagnated in silent pools, a few of which were no longer any more than patches of cracked mud.

  It is the plain and the dried-up river that one sees at the far end of the grounds of my domain, through a breach in the trees and walls. No one any longer passes that way who might look inside, at my forest or my house. What does it matter if its rotten shutters no longer close, any more than the windows? This province is deserted and this dwelling is so isolated! There silence here is such that I could almost believe that I’m alone.

  Then I lean on the old tome, closed again, in which I have been reading, for hours on end, some scrupulous and baroque treatise, some Mirror of Time or Clock of the Soul. I fix a point for my dreams; my thought is incorporated in the invisible; it clothes itself in formless complacency and constitutes a reality beyond my desires, until my gaze becomes weary; then, eyes closed, I see the debris of the voluntary idol reduce my dream to dust, to the luminous ashes of its artifice, to end in a rain of prismatic stars, powdered gems, and eye-spots similar to those which radiate and blink in the visionary tails of peacocks!

  Today, I have watched leaves fall into a pool of water, one by one. Perhaps I was wrong to have had any other occupation in my life than that melancholy measuring of time, leaf by leaf, in some bleak and circumspect water. Thus, of the days of my life, I would only have had the memory of the same tree, augmented by a similar one and others in sequence, side by side and face to face, in an alternating and augural avenue, until the conclusion of my past, as far away as my past.

  The leaves fall, more frequently; two at once oppose their fall. A slight wind that has got up weighs them delicately before letting them go, weary and useless, one by one. Those which fall into the pool float, then, gradually, become waterlogged, become heavier and partially sink. Yesterday’s are like that; there are others wandering beneath the surface. They are visible through the transparency of the glacial water, clear until the bed, scaled by the fraudulent bronze of litter already submerged.

  I know the destiny of all those leaves; I know how they sprout and become verdant, how they wither in the days of autumn in spite of the false adornment of the various shades of gold and the hypocrisy of their red patches.

  The setting sun is red through the trees; the violet putrefaction of dusk corrodes the dolorous clouds. The hypochondria of the moment is almost aggressive.

  The lamp is burning in a corner of the vast room with high windows, and I remain there with my face to the dull pane. I can no longer see the leaves falling, but now it is within me that I sense something becoming detached and slowly piling up. It seems to me that I can hear the fall of my thoughts in my silence. They fall from a great height, one by one, in a slow leaf-fall, and I welcome therein al the past that is in me. Their light, dead fall no longer weighs anything of what they would like to live. Pride is deciduous, and glory loses its petals.

  Another day. There’s the lamp! I have watched the leaves fall, one by one, and yet there are thyrses in the vineyard and the gardens. Lips have sucked the juice of the pears. A child carried golden apples in his hands, and, when his face turned, on the threshold, to face the dusk, a crown of laurels was visible around his temples, while horns sounded in the depths of coves.

  In the old cedar in front of the house, near a massive stone table, I can hear the screech of raucous trumpets. The gold of their sound seems disjointed by some rift. The breath therein is sour and discordant. They are mocking the glory they are intoning; they are saying that something considerable within them is abortive, and their hoarseness includes, while falsifying it, a fanfare!

  It is the peacocks that are screeching, from their perch in the large cedar near the stone table. They are outlined in black against the dusk, still sulfurous and red-tinted; they are jade against the Etruscan sky; they are black, less as if they were being carbonized by the ardor of the furnaces of the sunset than by the virtue of their own glare and the devouring incandescence of their plumage.

  Black and fateful, do they not seem to be keeping vigil over a tomb? And the stone table is funereal this evening. Its rough-hewn block is sullen and seems weighed down. Will you take apart the oppressive and analogous slab, finally, O mysterious lost one, O subterranean one, who, being more than life, can only be possessed in death, you who are named Eurydice!

  It seems so good to me to have known the other side of the river that I have named Eurydice. That name pleases her and she smiled to hear it given, as if it reawakened ancient joys within her. Sometimes, however, she will sigh to hear herself so called, for ancient sadnesses perhaps abide in the depths of her dreams. She was standing between two sequences of echoes; I did not know where they led her memory, for I knew nothing of the avenues of her Destiny, and my love in the face of her beauty was uniquely satisfied therein. I do not want to talk about my love nor discuss sentiments instead of evoking images. There is none more precious in my soul than that of Eurydice. My solitude is made solely for the phantom of her presence, and my silence endures solely for the survival of her voice.

  I see again the undulation of her hair on the cushions on which she gladly leans back, for her beauty, like all truly delightful beauty, is not without languor. They were cushions with large ornamental flowers skillfully denatured. Mingled therein were motifs of fruits, pomegranates and tulips. The beautiful fruits were swollen or bulbous and the slender flowers were not so much imitative as logical and rational. Some fabrics were light enough for the interior down to appear therein by transparency: the white down of the swans of Montsalvat, the black stuffing of the swans of Hades!

  Toward evening, she untied the hyacinth ribbon that retained her hair, and we sometimes walked in the twilight.

  Most often, she wore a bright pale green dress. Silver glints shone in the prasine lucidity of the fabric. Translucent enamel roses ornamented it, which weighed down the folds and imposed a statuesque, seemingly archaic rigidity thereon. A necklace of gems juxtaposed on the skin of her breast the bright droplets of emeralds with the spaciously dead water of opals. Her feet were bare; her dress trailed slightly on the warm sand of the pathways of the garden in which we were strolling. It was an ancient strand, fluvial or marine. Little tortoises with yellow and black shells were walking there. Dwarf lemon-trees grew there. Their fruits were fleshy, acid with a bitter aftertaste.

  Eurydice’s face was singularly beautiful. It is in all the mirrors of my dreams; it is in your own that it is necessary to look at her, for she is, in every one of us, the eternal taciturnity, the secret resting on its elbows.

  We have often contemplated the dusk together, Eurydice and I. At that hour, her name resonated more softly, more melodiously, the syllables being a collision of limpid nocturnal crystal, a fountain in a cypress wood. It was the hour when her name vibrated in its most melancholy fashion. Sometimes, she talked. The soft slowness of her voice seemed to draw away to the distance of a dream. Her voice became very low, as if muffled and lost in the labyrinth of her self, from which her ordinary gentleness gradually returned.

  She talked willingly about waters and flowers, often about mirrors and what can be seen in them that is not there. We would also compose strange dwellings, rooms or palaces. We would deduce their possible gardens. She imagined them charming and melancholy. There was one with porphyries that time seemed to have healed of the blood they had shed, marbles, pathways with a poignant geometry, lawns where jets of water spread out, as if broken on the wheel of the sun.

  One evening, I remember—it was one of the last times I saw her—she talked to me about peacocks. She hated them, and could never bear their presence in the peaceful and silent places in which we lived so inexplicably. I remember that evening, our meeting and the bleak river on which my boat encountered hers. She was there alone. She was weeping. A peacock had perched on the prow, its head and neck mirrored in the water while its tail filled the entire boat with its dazzling profusion. The sad, pale passenger was sitting among the plumes. The longest were dangling in the water at the rear.

  And as that memory, composed of bleak water between old trees, a slow boat, an imperial bird in the dusk, an unknown and silent woman, was dear to me, I put my head, for the sake of melancholy and tenderness, on Eurydice’s knees. She supported it with her beautiful hands; she seemed to be weighing it.

  I looked into her eyes; an immemorial sadness veiled them, and I heard her say to me, in an ancient voice, so distant that it appeared to be coming from the other side of the river, the other face of Destiny, she said, in an ancient and veridical voice, so faintly that I could hardly hear it, so faintly that I shall never hear it again:

  “It was me who, on the river’s edge, one evening, lifted up in my pure and pious hands the head of the murdered Singer, which I carried for days on end, until exhaustion halted me.

  “On the edge of a peaceful wood where entirely white peacocks were wandering in the shade beneath the trees, I sat down and went to sleep, sensing through my slumber, with grief and joy, the burden of the sacred head that rested on my knees.

  “But when I awoke, I saw the dolorous head directing the gaze of its red and empty orbits at me. The cruel birds that had pecked out the eyes were stretching their supple necks around me, and smoothing their plumage with their bloody b
eaks.

  “My reaction was of horror and sacrilege, and as I started, they had rolled among the frightened and taciturn peacocks, which deployed and displayed, without being aware of it, the extraordinary prodigy that they had become, for their plumes bore, from then on and forever afterwards, instead of their whiteness, imaginary eye-spots and vindicatory gemstones, the veridical emblem of the sacred eyes whose mortal slumber they had profaned...”

  Hermogenes

  To Jean Lorrain 8

  As I entered the forest I turned my head, and, with my hand on the dappled rump of my horse, I paused to gaze over my shoulder through the first trees at the land I had just passed through, in order to try to catch one more glimpse of the house of my master, Hermogenes.

  It should have been at the extremity of the bleak, briny and boggy plain that displayed its checkered salt-marsh, flat and far and wide, where roseate puddles reflected and crystallized the rays of the setting sun. The sun blinded me, for it was straight in front of me, and the whole of that broken ground, traversed in the dampness of a autumnal afternoon, was no more, at that hour, than a expanse of gilded mist upon a glitter. The vapor and the glare outside the forest were reemphasized by the demi-obscurity slumbering in the interior of the covert.

  Tall pines loomed up from a dull and felted ground, their slender trunks sunlit to mid-height, the shadow increasing as the sun descended over the sea. I could see the sea, smooth on the horizon, beyond the bare plain checkered by the pools in which, so brackish was their lukewarm water, my horse had refused to slake its thirst. It pawed the russet ground of the underwood with its hoof, causing the pine-cones with which it was strewn to roll gently down the slope.

  They reminded me of those that were burning in the hearth of my master, Hermogenes the other evening, whose delicate scales, where tears of resin scintillated, I manipulated with my fingers, while my host, sitting beside me, told me his story, so quietly that his voice seemed to come from within myself, as if it were to the depths of my own being that he was speaking.

  Oh, how often I had thought of him again while riding along the little crackling paths alongside the salty mash-waters. The dampness of the spongy air was so impregnated with salt that my tongue could taste it on my lips. Hermogenes’ sadness could certainly not have been sharper or sourer. He had seemed to me to be retracing the path of his days and I told myself, as I resumed my route through the place that was already darkening; “May I be able to enter the twilight like him! May I be able to sit down at the spring, where there is a hearth for all the ashes of my dreams!”

  I had arrived in a part of the forest where it appeared to me in its supreme autumnal beauty. There was a clearing between the tall trees. The foliage was red-brown and gilded, and even though the sun had disappeared, it seemed that a gleam continued in the treetops, where the illusion of its survival persisted by virtue of the tint of its presence. None of the leaves was moving and yet one of them, dull gold in color and already dry, or bright gold and still living, sometimes fell, as if the tiny melancholy sound of the spring in which their suspension was reflected had sufficed to determine, in the silent indifference of the atmosphere, the pretext for their fall.

  I watched those which were falling into the pool of the spring. Two, then others, and one that I felt brush my hand. I shivered, for I was waiting, anxious in the silence, in order to continue my progress, for the cry of some bird to break the immobilizing spell. Everything fell silent, from tree to tree, to such a distance that I felt myself going pale, perhaps less because of the solitude than the caress of the leaf that had brushed my hand, lighter than a dream on the lips of memory itself.

  I went closer to the water, instinctively, in order to look at my face in it, and, seeing it pale and perplexed, aged by all that a ripple can add to the nocturne of that which is mirrored within it, I thought of Hermogenes, of my master Hermogenes. I heard his voice again in the depths of my inner being, and it repeated the melancholy story that he had told me, the story that also began at a crossroads in a forest, near a spring in which he could see his face.

  By what mysterious ways, Hermogenes said to me, through what pitiless adventures must I have passed, only to have acquired the sentiment of a sadness so immense that it has veiled, by the excess of its bulk, the memory of its origin and the progress of its estate. It oppresses me with the total oblivion of its causes and all the weight its consistency.

  Nothing in that dark and secret past is illuminated. Golden blades among the cypresses, rings of joy and alliance lost in seductive waters, torches, on the threshold in the night-wind, smiles in the depths of twilight: nothing illuminates that invariable shadow from which I had come, by laborious paths, to the point at which, weary of a march of which fatigue alone caused me to feel the distance, lost in the forest, I sat down on the edge of a spring, as one rests next to a tomb.

  All that I had suffered was dead within me, and I breathed in the odor of the ashes that my memory exhaled. It was certainly mingled with flesh, flowers and tears, for I found therein a triple perfume of regret, melancholy and bitterness. There were echoes in the depths of that interior taciturnity, but they were torpid, and that formless and mysterious past surrounded me with its dolorous darkness. Without knowing its circumstances, I still felt regret, melancholy and bitterness. I would have liked its lips to murmur the cause in my dream; I would have liked to drink from its Lethean lake a memorial youthfulness, as in the water of that spring I perceived myself coming toward me, as silence comes to solitude, each with the desire to learn from the other the secret of their accord.

  Was nothing of myself going to appear in my face in the intermediary water, then? My hands reached out their wounded palms toward the reflection. O my shadow, who appears to me thus, you seem nonetheless to have come from the depths of my past. You must know its ways, mysterious or ordinary, its adventures pitiless or otherwise. Speak! Smiles in the dusk! Golden blades among the cypresses, or perhaps the torch, or the rings...

  A fallen stone had destroyed the mirror, and caused me to raise my eyes. They met those of the Stranger who had thus interrupted my reverie, and who seemed to be following her own, without perceiving my presence.

  She was standing in her torn and ash-stained dress, which surpassed the bare foot with which she had pushed the perturbatory stone. A singular curiosity led me to speak to the newcomer. It seemed to me that I would only have to hear what she would say to me to remember. Our Destinies must have touched their lips and hands before separating for some inverse circuit in which they were finally meeting again at a point of their duration. They were two halves of a whole, and my sadness could only be the understanding of her silence.

  Yes, my son, Hermogenes continued, she spoke to me. She told me why she had left the town. The life she had led there was loquacious, bombastic and frivolous; a futile slumber. The eve did not fructify any tomorrow therein, and the transient flowers of every day perished. The town was immense and populous. Its innumerable streets intercrossed in a thousand junctions, and all of them ended, via some that opened thereon, in a vast central square paved with marble.

  Odorant trees grew here and there between disjointed paving stones, and sculpted a delightful shade there; fresh water sprang forth there amid the moist silence in a crystalline atmosphere. But the square was always deserted; it was forbidden to pause there, and even to cross it. One would have been able to dream there under the trees, drink the water and confront the solitude, but the crowd had to wander incessantly through the labyrinth of dusty streets, between the tall stone houses with bronze doors, amid the different faces and the superfluous speeches.

  Oh, sad town! One wandered desperately there, in search of oneself—those, at least, who were not satisfied with arguing on the street-corners, making speeches on the boundary-markers, trafficking over the counters or dancing to the music of tambourines.

  The majority were content with that. They came and went without coming together save for the agreement of a bargain or the satisfaction of a desire. A few sages walked there, with mirrors in their hands. They looked at themselves obstinately, trying to be alone, but spiteful children smashed the evidential looking-glasses with thrown stones, and the crowd laughed, thus imposing the authority of its despotism...