Pleasures and Days Read online

  I am giving you this book. You are – alas! – the only one of my friends whose criticism it had nothing to fear from. I am at least confident that nowhere would its freedom of tone have shocked you. I have depicted immorality only in persons of a delicate conscience. Thus, as they are too weak to will the good, too noble to indulge with real enjoyment in evil, knowing nothing but suffering, I have managed to speak of them only with a pity too sincere for it not to purify these short essays. May that true friend, and that illustrious and beloved Master,* who have added the poetry of his music and the music of his incomparable poetry respectively, and may M. Darlu* too, that great philosopher whose inspired spoken words, more assured of lasting life than anything written, have in me as in so many others engendered thought, forgive me for having reserved for you this last token of my affection, bearing in mind that no one living, however great he may be or however dear, must be honoured before one who is dead.

  The Death of Baldassare Silvande

  Viscount of Sylvania

  1

  The poets say that Apollo tended the flocks of Admetus; so too, each man is a God in disguise who plays the fool.

  – Emerson*

  “Monsieur Alexis, don’t cry like that; maybe the Viscount of Sylvania will give you a horse.”

  “A big horse, Beppo, or a pony?”

  “A big horse, perhaps, like Monsieur Cardenio’s. But please don’t cry like that… on your thirteenth birthday!”

  The hope that he might be getting a horse, and the reminder that he was thirteen years old today, made Alexis’s eyes shine through their tears. But he was not entirely consoled, since it would mean having to go and see his uncle, Baldassare Silvande, Viscount of Sylvania. Admittedly, since the day he had heard that his uncle’s illness was incurable, Alexis had seen him several times. But since then, everything had completely changed. Baldassare had realized how ill he was and now knew that he had at most three years to live. Alexis could not understand how this certainty had not already killed his uncle with grief, or driven him mad, and for his own part felt quite unable to bear the pain of seeing him. Convinced as he was that his uncle would start talking to him about his imminent demise, he did not think he had the strength to hold back his own sobs, let alone console him. He had always adored his uncle, the tallest, most handsome, youngest, liveliest, most gentle of all his relatives. He loved his grey eyes, his blond moustache and his knees – a deep and welcoming place of pleasure and refuge when he had been smaller, seemingly as inaccessible as a citadel, affording him as much enjoyment as any wooden horse, and more inviolable than a temple. Alexis, who openly disapproved of his father’s sombre and severe way of dressing, and dreamt of a future in which, always on horseback, he would be as elegant as a fine lady and as splendid as a king, recognized in Baldassare the most ideal man imaginable; he knew that his uncle was handsome, and that he himself resembled him, and he knew too that his uncle was intelligent and noble-hearted, and wielded as much power as a bishop or a general. It was true that his parents’ criticisms had taught him that the Viscount had his failings. He could even remember the violence of his anger on the day when his cousin Jean Galéas had made fun of him, how much the gleam in his eyes had betrayed the extreme pleasure of his vanity when the Duke of Parma had offered his sister’s hand in marriage to him (on that occasion he had clenched his jaws in an attempt to disguise his pleasure and pulled a face, an expression habitual to him – one that Alexis disliked), and he remembered too the tone of contempt with which his uncle spoke to Lucretia, who professed not to like his music.

  Often his parents would allude to other things his uncle had done, things which Alexis did not know about, but which he heard being severely censured.

  But all of Baldassare’s failings, including the vulgar face he pulled, had certainly disappeared. When his uncle had learnt that in two years, perhaps, he would be dead, how much the mockeries of Jean Galéas, the friendship of the Duke of Parma and his own music must have become a matter of indifference to him!… Alexis imagined him to be just as handsome, but solemn and even more perfect than he had been before. Yes, solemn, and already no longer altogether of this world. Thus his despair was mingled with a certain disquiet and alarm.

  The horses had long been harnessed, and it was time to go; he climbed into the carriage, then stepped back out, as he wanted to go over and ask his tutor for one last piece of advice. At the moment he spoke, he turned very red.

  “Monsieur Legrand, is it better if my uncle thinks or does not think that I know that he is going to die?”

  “Better that he does not think so, Alexis!”

  “But what if he starts talking about it?”

  “He won’t talk about it.”

  “He won’t talk about it?” said Alexis in surprise, for this was the only possibility he had not foreseen: each time he had started imagining his visit to his uncle, he had heard him speaking of death to him with the gentleness of a priest.

  “Yes but, what if he does talk about it?”

  “You’ll tell him he’s wrong.”

  “And what if I start crying?”

  “You’ve cried enough this morning, you won’t cry when you’re at his place.”

  “I won’t cry!” exclaimed Alexis in despair. “But he’ll think I’m not sorry about it, that I don’t love him… my dear old uncle!”

  And he burst into tears. His mother, tired of waiting, came to fetch him; they set off.

  When Alexis had given his little overcoat to a valet in white-and-green livery, with the Sylvanian coat of arms, who was standing in the entrance hall, he paused for a moment with his mother to listen to a violin melody coming from a nearby room. Then they were led into a huge round room, with windows extending all around it, where the Viscount was often to be found. As you went in, you saw the sea facing you and, as you looked round, lawns, pastures and woods were visible; at the far end of the room, there were two cats, roses, poppies and a great number of musical instruments. They waited for a while.

  Alexis suddenly rushed over to his mother. She thought he wanted to kiss her, but he asked her in a low voice, his mouth glued to her ear, “How old is my uncle?”

  “He’ll be thirty-six in June.”

  He wanted to ask, “Do you think he’ll ever actually make thirty-six?” but he did not dare.

  A door opened, Alexis trembled, and a servant said, “The Viscount will be here presently.”

  Soon the servant returned, ushering in two peacocks and a kid goat that the Viscount took everywhere with him. Then they heard some more footsteps and the door opened again.

  “It’s nothing,” Alexis told himself; his heart thumped every time he heard a noise. “It’s probably a servant, yes, most probably a servant.” But at the same time he heard a gentle voice saying, “Hello, young Alexis, many happy returns of the day!”

  And his uncle came to kiss him, and made him feel afraid – and no doubt realized as much, since he turned away to give him time to pull himself together, and started to chat cheerfully to Alexis’s mother, his sister-in-law, who, ever since the death of his mother, had been the person he loved most in the world.

  Alexis, now feeling reassured, felt only immense affection for this young man, still so charming, scarcely any paler and so heroic as to be able to adopt a tone of cheerfulness during these tragic minutes. He would like to have flung his arms around him, but did not dare, fearing that he might break his uncle’s composure and cause him to lose his self-possession. It was the Viscount’s sad and gentle eyes that especially made him want to cry. Alexis knew that his eyes had always been sad and that, even at the happiest times, he seemed to be imploring you to console him for sorrows that apparently did not affect him. But just now, he felt that his uncle’s sadness, bravely banished from his conversation, had taken refuge in his eyes, the only sincere thing about his whole appearance, together with his hollowed cheeks.

>   “I know you’d like to drive a two-horse carriage, young Alexis,” said Baldassare. “Tomorrow they’ll bring you a horse. Next year I’ll make up the complete pair, and in two years I’ll give you the carriage. But perhaps this year you’ll already be able to ride the horse – we’ll try it out when I get back. I’m leaving tomorrow, you see,” he added, “but not for long. I’ll be back within a month and we can go off together and, you know, see a matinee of that comedy I promised to take you to.”

  Alexis knew that his uncle was going to spend a few weeks at one of his friends’ houses. He also knew that his uncle was still allowed to go to the theatre; but as he was even now transfixed by the idea of death that had so deeply shaken him before coming to his uncle’s, the latter’s words gave him a painful and profound surprise.

  “I won’t go,” he said to himself. “How much pain it would cause him to hear the actors’ buffoonery and the audience’s laughter!”

  “What was that lovely violin tune we heard when we came in?” asked Alexis’s mother.

  “Ah! So you thought it was lovely?” said Baldassare quickly, looking extremely pleased. “It was the romance I mentioned to you.”

  “Is he putting it on?” Alexis wondered. “How can the success of his music still give him any pleasure?”

  Just then, the Viscount’s face assumed an expression of deep pain; his cheeks had grown pale, he pursed his lips and knit his brows, and his eyes filled with tears.

  “Good Lord!” thought Alexis in alarm. “He’s not up to playing this part! Poor uncle! Anyway, why is he so concerned to spare us any suffering? Why take such a burden on himself?”

  But the painful effects of his general paralysis, which sometimes gripped Baldassare as if in an iron corset, even imprinting marks and bruises on his body, and whose intensity had just forced him to contort his face despite his best efforts, had vanished.

  He resumed his good-humoured conversation, after wiping his eyes.

  “I have the impression the Duke of Parma has been rather neglecting you of late?” Alexis’s mother asked, unthinkingly.

  “The Duke of Parma?” exclaimed Baldassare in tones of rage. “The Duke of Parma, neglecting me? But what can you be thinking of, my dear? This very morning he wrote to me to put his castle in Illyria at my disposal, if I think the mountain air will do me any good.”

  He suddenly stood up, but this brought on another attack of his dreadful pain, and he had to keep still for a while; his suffering had hardly been assuaged before he summoned a servant.

  “Bring me the letter next to my bed.”

  And he made haste to read:

  My dear Baldassare,

  How sorry I am not to be able to see you, etc.

  As the Prince came out with more and more kindly words, Baldassare’s face softened and shone with happiness and confidence. Suddenly, no doubt because he wished to disguise a joy that he felt was not very dignified, he clamped his teeth together and made the attractive and rather vulgar little grimace that Alexis had imagined for ever banished from his face, pacified as it was by death.

  This little grimace, now twisting Baldassare’s lips as it had before, opened the eyes of Alexis who, ever since he had been in his uncle’s presence, had thought and hoped that he would be able to contemplate the face of a dying man forever detached from vulgar realities – a face on which the only expression would be the gentle hint of a heroically forced smile, tender and melancholy, heavenly and disenchanted. Now his doubts had been removed, and he knew that Jean Galéas, by teasing his uncle, had yet again made him angry, and that in the sick man’s gaiety, in his desire to go to the theatre, there was no trace of either pretence or courage, and that now that he was on the threshold of death, Baldassare still continued to think only of life.

  On his return home, Alexis was overwhelmed by the thought that he too would one day die, and that even if he himself still had much more time ahead of him than his uncle, the latter’s old gardener and his cousin, the Duchess of Alériouvres, would certainly not survive Baldassare for long. And yet, even though he was wealthy enough to retire, Rocco continued to work ceaselessly so as to earn even more money, and was trying to win a prize for his roses. The Duchess, in spite being seventy years old, took great care to dye her hair and paid for newspaper articles in which the youthfulness of her bearing, the elegance of her receptions and the refinements of her table and her wit were all celebrated.

  These examples did nothing to diminish the sudden amazement that his uncle’s attitude had aroused in Alexis, but rather gave him a kindred feeling that, gradually spreading, turned into an immense stupefaction at the universal scandal of these existences, his own included, walking backwards into death with their gaze still fixed on life.

  Resolved not to imitate such a shocking aberration, he decided, following the ancient prophets of whose renown he had been taught, to retire to the desert with some of his close friends, and he communicated this wish to his parents.

  Happily, more powerful than their derision, life itself, whose sweet and fortifying milk he had not yet drunk dry, proffered her breast to dissuade him. And he settled back to drink from it anew, with an avid joy whose insistent grievances his credulous and fertile imagination took with naive seriousness, and whose dashed hopes that same imagination made amends for so magnificently.

  2

  The flesh is sad, alas…

  – Stéphane Mallarmé*

  The day after Alexis’s visit, the Viscount of Sylvania had left for the nearby chateau for a stay of three or four weeks: the presence of numerous guests might take his mind off the melancholy that often followed his attacks of ill health.

  Soon all the pleasures he enjoyed there came to be concentrated in the company of a young woman who made them twice as intense by sharing them with him. He thought he could sense that she was in love with him, but kept her at a certain distance: he knew she was absolutely pure, and was in any case impatiently awaiting her husband’s arrival; and then, he was not sure he really loved her, and felt vaguely what a sin it would be to lead her into temptation. When exactly their relationship had become less innocent he was never able to recall. Now, as if by virtue of a tacit understanding, which had come into existence at some indeterminate period, he would kiss her wrists and stroke her neck. She seemed so happy, that one evening he went further: he started by kissing her; then he caressed her at length and once more kissed her on her eyes, her cheek, her lips, her neck and the wings of her nose. The young woman’s lips puckered up with a smile to meet his caresses, and her eyes shone in their depths like a pool of water warmed by the sun. Meanwhile, Baldassare’s caresses had become bolder; one minute he gazed at her; he was struck by her pallor, by the infinite despair expressed by her lifeless brow, her weary, grief-stricken eyes shedding glances sadder than tears, like the torture endured during crucifixion or after the irremediable loss of someone you love. He gazed at her for a while; and then, in one final effort, she raised up to him her suppliant eyes begging for mercy, while her avid lips, in an unconscious, convulsive movement, asked for yet more kisses.

  Both of them were rapt in the pleasure that hovered all around them, in the perfume of their kisses and the memory of their caresses, and they flung themselves on one another, but with their eyes now closed, those cruel eyes that showed them their souls’ distress, a distress they refused to see – he in particular kept his eyes shut tight, with all his strength, like a remorseful executioner sensing that his arm might waver when the time comes to strike his victim, aware of the risk he would run if, instead of imagining her as still arousing and thus forcing him to assuage the wrath she aroused, he were to look into her face and for a moment feel her pain.

  Night had fallen and she was still in his room, dry-eyed, her gaze wandering. She left without saying a word, kissing his hand with passionate melancholy.

  He however could not sleep, and if he did momentarily d
oze off, he would come to with a start, sensing his sweet victim’s eyes raised towards him, imploring and desperate. All at once, he imagined her as she now must be, also unable to sleep and feeling so very lonely. He got dressed, walked quietly to her room, not daring to make any noise in case he woke her, should she be asleep, not daring, either, to go back to his room, where heaven and earth and his own soul would suffocate him under their weight. He stood there, just outside the young woman’s room, each moment thinking that he would be unable to contain himself a second longer and would have to walk in; then, horrified at the idea of breaking that sweet oblivion in which she slept – breathing softly, sweetly and evenly, as he could hear – only to deliver her cruelly over to the remorse and despair from whose grip she had, for a moment, found repose, he remained there, at her door, sometimes sitting, sometimes kneeling, sometimes lying down. In the morning, he returned to his room, feeling the chill, and calmer now; he slept for a long time and woke up in a state of great well-being.

  They found ingenious ways of mutually allaying each other’s conscience, and grew used to the remorse which faded and to the pleasure which also lost its edge, and when he returned to Sylvania, he retained, as did she, no more than a gentle, somewhat frigid memory of those cruel and fiery moments.

  3

  The din of his youthful days means he can’t hear.

  – Mme de Sévigné*

  When Alexis, on his fourteenth birthday, went to see his uncle Baldassare, he did not feel, as he had expected he would, the violent emotions of the previous year. His repeated rides on the horse his uncle had given him had imbued him with new strength, and overcome his tendency to nervous exhaustion, reviving in him that uninterrupted feeling of good health which supplements our youth like the obscure awareness of the depths of our resources and the latent powers of our vitality. As he felt his chest swelling like a sail in the breeze awoken by his gallop, his body burning like a winter fire and his forehead as cool as the fleeting foliage that wreathed it in passing, and as he stretched out his body under a cold shower, or allowed it to relax at length as he savoured the meal he was digesting, he would exalt in those inner powers of life which, having once been the tumultuous pride of Baldassare, had for ever withdrawn from him and come to bring new joy to younger souls, whom they would also, nonetheless, one day desert.