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“To de Marsay, these dramatic events were as a dream, but one of those dreams which, as it fades, leaves a feeling of such supernatural pleasure that a man will chase after it for the rest of his life. A single kiss had sufficed. Never had an assignation been conducted with more decency, more purity, more coldness perhaps, in a place littered with such horrible objects and facing an even more hideous idol; for her mother was imprinted on Henri’s imagination as some hellish, squatting, cadaverous, immoral, ferocious, and savage beast, a creature which the imagination of painters and poets had yet to conjure up. Indeed, no previous assignation had so inflamed his senses, or hinted at bolder pleasures, or caused so much love to flow from his heart until it seemed to surround him like a cloud. It was darkly mysterious, sweet and tender, both stifling and invigorating, a marriage of the horrific and the heavenly, paradise and hell, and intoxicating to de Marsay. He was no longer himself, but he was still man enough not to allow himself to be swept uncontrollably along by pleasure.”
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“As I listened to these people, I was able to live their lives; I felt their rags on my back, and walked with their worn-out shoes on my feet. Their wants, their needs, all passed into my soul, or perhaps it was my soul which passed into theirs. It was like the dream of a man who is wide awake. I shared their indignation against tyrannical foremen, or against bad customers who made them come back several times without paying them. To discard my own habits, to become someone other than myself by an exaltation of my moral faculties, and to play this game at will, such was my amusement. To what do I owe this gift? Is it a kind of second sight? Is it one of those qualities which, if abused, could lead to madness? I have never tried to explain this power; I possess it and make use of it, that is all. All you need to know is that, already, at that time, I had broken up into its elements the heterogenous mass called ‘the people’, and had analysed it in such a way that I could appraise both its good and its bad qualities. I already knew what use could be made of this district, this breeding-ground of revolutions which contains heroes, inventors, technicians, rogues, scoundrels, virtues and vices, all oppressed by poverty, stifled by want, soaked in alcohol, worn out by strong drink. You cannot imagine how many unrecorded adventures, how many forgotten dramas there are in this town of suffering, how many horrible and beautiful things. It would be impossible to imagine the truth which is concealed in it and which no one can take steps to reveal. You would have to dig too deep to discover these wonderful scenes of tragedy and comedy, these masterpieces produced by chance. I don’t know how I have been able to keep untold for so long the story I am about to tell you; it is one of those strange tales stored in the bag of memory and drawn out at random like numbers in a lottery. I know many more, as odd as this one and buried as deeply. But their turn will come, you may be sure.”
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“I paid forty francs a month to this poor creature who used to come every morning to make my bed, clean my shoes, brush my clothes, sweep the room and prepare my lunch. For the rest of the day she turned the handle of a machine, and at this nasty job she earned ten sous a day. Her husband, a cabinet-maker, earned four francs. But as the couple had three children, they could barely earn enough to live on. I have never met a more unshakeable honesty than this man’s and this woman’s. For five years after I had left the district, mère Vaillant would come to congratulate me on my saint’s day, bringing me flowers and oranges, even though she never had ten sous saved up. Poverty had brought us together. I could never give her more than ten francs, often borrowed for the occasion.”
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“Imagine Dante’s death-mask lit up by the red glow of the lamp and crowned with a forest of silver-white hair. The bitter, sorrowful expression of this magnificent face was enhanced by blindness, for the power of thought gave a new life to the dead eyes. It was as if a burning gleam emanated from them, the effect of a single relentless desire which was vigorously marked on a high brow, furrowed with wrinkles like stone-courses in an old wall. The old man puffed away [at his clarinet] at random, without paying any attention to the time or the tune; his fingers went up and down touching the old keys mechanically. He did not worry about playing wrong notes, but neither did the dancers nor my Italian’s two acolytes notice them; for I was sure that he was an Italian and in fact I was right. There was something great and masterful about this old Homer who kept within himself an Odyssey doomed to oblivion. It was a greatness so real that it triumphed even over his abject condition, a masterfulness so strong that it dominated his poverty. Not one of the violent passions which can lead a man to good as well as to evil, make him a criminal or a hero, was absent from the nobly formed, sallow Italian face. It was a face with overhanging, greying eyebrows that cast their shade over the deep sockets below; I trembled lest I should see the light of thought reappear in them, just as I would be afraid to see robbers armed with torches and daggers come to the mouth of a cave. There was a lion in that cage of flesh and blood, a lion whose fury had been spent in vain against its iron bars. The conflagration of despair had expired in its ashes, the lava had grown cold. But the furrows, the devastation, a little smoke bore witness to the violence of the eruption, to the ravages of the fire. These thoughts aroused by the man’s appearance were as burning in my soul as they were frozen on his face.”
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“’But if you were a senator of Venice, you must have been rich: how did you come to lose your fortune?’”
At this question he turned his head towards me, with a truly tragic movement as if to examine me and replied, ‘In misfortunes.’”
“He no longer thought of drinking and, with a gesture, refused the glass of wine which the old flageolet-payer was just at that moment handing to him; then he bowed his head. While these three machine-like musicians were playing the dance, I examined the old Venetian noblemen with the avid feelings of a twenty-year-old. I could see Venice and the Adriatic; I could see it in ruins on that ruined face. I walked in that town so beloved of its inhabitants. I went from the Rialto to the Grand Canal, from the Quai des Esclavons to the Lido; I went back to the cathedral, so distinctly sublime; I looked at the windows of the Casa d’Oro, each of which is differently ornamented; I gazed at the old palaces with their wealth of marble; and, in short, at all those wonders which the scholar appreciates all the more in that he can colour them as he pleases and does not deprive his dreams of their poetry by the sight of reality. I reconstructed the life-history of this offspring of the greatest of the condottieri, trying to discover in it the traces of his misfortunes and the causes of that deep-seated physical and moral deterioration which made even more beautiful the newly-revived sparks of greatness and nobility. His thoughts were no doubt the same as mine, for I think that blindness speeds up intellectual communication, by preventing the attention from being frittered away on external objects. I did not have long to wait for a proof of our fellow-feeling. Facino Cane stopped playing, rose from his chair, came up to me and said, ‘Let’s go.’ The effect of his words on me was like an electric shock. I gave him my arm and we went out.”
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“If at times you have seen me bitter and hard, it was because I was super-imposing my early sufferings on the lack of feeling, the selfishness, of which I had thousands of examples in high places; or I was thinking of the obstacles which hatred, envy, jealousy, and calumny have placed between me and success. In Paris, when certain people see you ready to put your foot in the stirrup, some of them pull you back by the coat-tail, others loosen the buckle of the saddle-girth so that you’ll fall and break your head; this one takes the shoes of your horse, that one steals your whip. The least treacherous is the one you see coming up to shoot you at point-blank range. You have enough talent, my dear fellow, soon to be acquainted with the horrible, unending battle which mediocrity wages against superiority. If one evening you lose twenty-five louis, the next day you will be accused of being a gambler and your best friends will say that the day before you lost twenty-five thousand francs. If you have a headache, you will be called a lunatic. If you have one outburst of temper, they will say you are a social misfit. If, in order to resist this army of pygmies, you muster your superior forces, your best friends will cry out that you want to eat up everything, that you claim to have the right to dominate and lord it over others. In short, your good qualities will become failings, your failings will become vices, and your virtues will be crimes. If you have saved a man, they’ll say you have killed him; if your patient is in circulation again, they will affirm that you have sacrificed the future to the present; if he is not dead, he will die. Hesitate, and you will be lost! Invent anything at all, claim your just due, you will be regarded as a sly character, difficult to deal with, who is standing in the way of the young men. So, my dear fellow, if I don’t believe in God, I believe still less in man.”
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“There is, on one of the walls, a sundial decorated with this bourgeois and Christian inscription: ULTIMAM COGITA! The roof of the house is horribly dilapidated, the shutters are always closed, the balconies are covered with swallows’ nests, the doors are continually shut. Tall grasses have outlined in green the cracks in the doorsteps, and the ironwork is rusty. The moon, the sun, the winter, the summer, the snow have hollowed the woodwork, warped the timbers and eaten away the paint. The dismal silence which reigns there is disturbed only by birds, cats, weasels, rats and mice, free to trot to and fro, to fight and to eat each other. Everywhere an invisible hand has written the word Mystery. If, moved by curiosity, you were to go and look at the street side of the house, you would perceive a large door, rounded at the top, in which children of the district have made numerous holes. I learned later that this door had been boarded up for ten years. Through these irregular gaps you would be able to see the perfect harmony that exists between the frontage on the garden side and that on the courtyard side. The same disorder reigns there. Clumps of grass surround the paving stones. Enormous cracks furrow the walls, whose blackened tops are festooned by a thousand garlands of pellitory. The front steps are loose, the bell rope is rotted, the gutters are broken. What fire from heaven has fallen this way? What court of law has given the order to scatter salt on this dwelling? Has God been insulted here? Has France been betrayed here? These are the questions you ask yourself. The snakes crawl about without giving you a reply. The empty deserted house is an immense riddle to which no one knows the answer. It used to be a little fief and bears the name of La Grande Bretèche. During my stay in Vendôme, where Desplein had left me to look after a rich patient, the sight of this strange dwelling became one of my keenest pleasures. Was it not better than a ruin? Undeniably authentic memories are attached to a ruin, but this house, which was still standing, though gradually being demolished by an avenging hand, contained a secret, an unknown thought; it suggested at least a whim.”
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“I have often wept there, I have never laughed there. More than once I have felt involuntary terror as I heard over my head the dull whirring of the wings of some hastening wood-pigeon. The ground there is damp. You have to watch out for lizards, vipers and frogs which disport themselves freely in the wildness of nature. Above all you must not be afraid of the cold, for in a few moments you can feel a cloak of ice being placed on your shoulders like the Commander’s hand on Don Juan’s neck. One evening I shivered there. The wind had turned an old rusty weathercock whose creaking was like a moan uttered by the house, just as I was finishing a pretty gruesome tale in explanation of this monument of grief. I came back to my hotel, a prey to melancholy thoughts.”
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“The artillery of the Russians’ left flank fired relentlessly on that horde, which appeared as a massive blot in the snow, here black, there aglow with flames; but to the numbed multitudes those implacable cannonballs seemed only one more inconvenience to be borne. It was like a thunderstorm whose bolts inspired only derisions, for wherever they fell their victims would already be ailing or dying, if not already dead. At every moment, fresh packs of stragglers appeared. These walking corpses scattered at once, staggering from bonfire to bonfire, begging for a place to rest; then, having generally been turned away, they joined up again to obtain by brute force the hospitality they’d been refused a moment before. Deaf to the voices of a small number of officers who predicted that the coming day would be their last, they exhausted their courage and energy – the very courage and energy they would need to cross over the river – in the fabrication of a shelter for the night, in the confection of an often deadly meal. The death that awaited them no longer seemed so terrible a horror; at least, it would allow them an hour of sleep. The word horror they reserved for their hunger, for their thirst, for the cold. When there was no more wood to be found, no more fire, nor canvas, nor shelter, fierce clashes erupted between the empty-handed newcomers and those so wealthy as to enjoy some manner of hearth. The weakest perished. At length the moment came when a group of men fleeing the Russians found nothing but snow for their campsite, and there they lay down, never to rise again. Gradually this mass of half-annihilated beings grew so dense, so deaf, and so dulled – or perhaps so hungry – that Marshal Victor, Duc de Bellune, he who had so heroically defended them in battle against Wittgenstein’s twenty thousand Russian troops, had no choice but to force his way through that human forest in order to cross the Berezina with the five thousand warriors he was bringing to the emperor. Rather than make way, the dejected masses allowed themselves to be crushed, and they died in silence, smiling at their extinguished fires, never thinking of France.
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“His every act, from the hour he woke to his evening fit of coughing, was regular as a pendulum. He was a kind of automation, rewound each night by sleep. If you touch a woodlouse as it crosses a sheet of paper, it will stop short and play dead; in the same way, this man would stop speaking in mid-sentence while a carriage passed in the street, so as not to strain his voice. Like Fontonelle, he was sparing with his vital energies and concentrated all his human feeling on the self. Thus his life flowed as quietly as the sand in an hourglass. Occasionally his victims would raise a ruckus and carry on; then there would come a great silence, as in a kitchen when a duck has its throat slit. Toward evening this banknote man would turn into an ordinary human, and his metals metamorphosed into a human heart. If he was pleased with his day, he would rub his hands together and the crevassed folds of his fact would let off a smoke of gaiety – there is no other way to describe the silent play of those muscles, an effect akin to Leatherstocking’s hollow laughter. In even his fiercest transports of pleasure, though, his conversation was still monosyllabidc, and his face remained empty of expression."
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11. |
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Montriveau slept on the rock for two nights, wrapped in his coat. The evensongs and matins filled him with inexpressible joy. He went up to the wall to be able to hear the music of the organ and made an effort to distinguish one voice among the mass of voices. But in spite of the silence, only the jumbled effects of the music reached his ears in the vast space. In those sweet harmonies defects of execution are lost; the pure thought of art alone reaches the soul without demanding efforts of attention or a strain on understanding. For Armand, overwhelming memories of love flowered again whole in this breath of music, in which he wanted to find airborne promises of happiness. The day followed the last night, he climbed down before sunrise after several hours inert, with his eyes focused on the window of a cell without a grille. The grilles were not necessary above the abyss. A light shone there all night long. And that instinct of the heart – which is false as often as it is true – had cried to him, “She is there!”
“She is surely there, and tomorrow I will have her,” he said to himself, mingling joyous thoughts with the slow tolling of a bell. Odd quirkiness of the heart! He loved even more passionately the nun withering in the yearning of love, consumed by tears, fasting, and prayer vigils, the woman of twenty-nine tried and tested years, rather than the insouciant young girl, the sylphlike twenty-four-year-old. But men with strong souls have a penchant for sublime expressions that noble misery or impetuous movements of thought have engraved on the face of a woman.
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12. |
Never Can Never
05:13
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“The artillery of the Russians’ left flank fired relentlessly on that horde, which appeared as a massive blot in the snow, here black, there aglow with flames; but to the numbed multitudes those implacable cannonballs seemed only one more inconvenience to be borne. It was like a thunderstorm whose bolts inspired only derisions, for wherever they fell their victims would already be ailing or dying, if not already dead. At every moment, fresh packs of stragglers appeared. These walking corpses scattered at once, staggering from bonfire to bonfire, begging for a place to rest; then, having generally been turned away, they joined up again to obtain by brute force the hospitality they’d been refused a moment before. Deaf to the voices of a small number of officers who predicted that the coming day would be their last, they exhausted their courage and energy – the very courage and energy they would need to cross over the river – in the fabrication of a shelter for the night, in the confection of an often deadly meal. The death that awaited them no longer seemed so terrible a horror; at least, it would allow them an hour of sleep. The word horror they reserved for their hunger, for their thirst, for the cold. When there was no more wood to be found, no more fire, nor canvas, nor shelter, fierce clashes erupted between the empty-handed newcomers and those so wealthy as to enjoy some manner of hearth. The weakest perished. At length the moment came when a group of men fleeing the Russians found nothing but snow for their campsite, and there they lay down, never to rise again. Gradually this mass of half-annihilated beings grew so dense, so deaf, and so dulled – or perhaps so hungry – that Marshal Victor, Duc de Bellune, he who had so heroically defended them in battle against Wittgenstein’s twenty thousand Russian troops, had no choice but to force his way through that human forest in order to cross the Berezina with the five thousand warriors he was bringing to the emperor. Rather than make way, the dejected masses allowed themselves to be crushed, and they died in silence, smiling at their extinguished fires, never thinking of France.
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13. |
Lemmy
02:53
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Montriveau slept on the rock for two nights, wrapped in his coat. The evensongs and matins filled him with inexpressible joy. He went up to the wall to be able to hear the music of the organ and made an effort to distinguish one voice among the mass of voices. But in spite of the silence, only the jumbled effects of the music reached his ears in the vast space. In those sweet harmonies defects of execution are lost; the pure thought of art alone reaches the soul without demanding efforts of attention or a strain on understanding. For Armand, overwhelming memories of love flowered again whole in this breath of music, in which he wanted to find airborne promises of happiness. The day followed the last night, he climbed down before sunrise after several hours inert, with his eyes focused on the window of a cell without a grille. The grilles were not necessary above the abyss. A light shone there all night long. And that instinct of the heart – which is false as often as it is true – had cried to him, “She is there!”
“She is surely there, and tomorrow I will have her,” he said to himself, mingling joyous thoughts with the slow tolling of a bell. Odd quirkiness of the heart! He loved even more passionately the nun withering in the yearning of love, consumed by tears, fasting, and prayer vigils, the woman of twenty-nine tried and tested years, rather than the insouciant young girl, the sylphlike twenty-four-year-old. But men with strong souls have a penchant for sublime expressions that noble misery or impetuous movements of thought have engraved on the face of a woman.'
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HöFLICH Singapore
Peter Hoflich is a musician living in Singapore. He has sung in the rock bands MegalomaniA, the Hideous Motör-Apes, Reckless Hearts, Von Doom and The Sinisters, as well as the folk unit the Es with Athena Desai and Jae Lee. He also performs his own acoustic songs from time to time, and is trying a few experimental things in the home studio. ... more
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