• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1890 0

was the pleasure that I pictured to myself all the time. It would naturally have been destroyed if I had dined on that island without Mme de Stermaria; but perhaps as greatly diminished had I dined, even with her, somewhere else. Besides, the attitudes according to which one envisages a pleasure are prior to the woman, to the type of woman suitable thereto. They dictate the pleasure, and the place as well, and for that reason bring to the fore alternatively, in our capricious fancy, this or that woman, this or that setting, this or that room, which in other weeks we should have dismissed with contempt. Daughters of the attitude that produced them, certain women will not appeal to us without the double bed in which we find peace by their side, while others, to be caressed with a more secret intention, require leaves blown by the wind, water rippling in the dark, things as light and fleeting as they are.

No doubt in the past, long before I received Saint-Loup’s letter and when there was as yet no question of Mme de Stermaria, the island in the Bois had seemed to me to be specially designed for pleasure, because I had found myself going there to taste the bitterness of having no pleasure to enjoy there. It is to the shores of the lake from which one goes to that island, and along which, in the last weeks of summer, those ladies of Paris who have not yet left for the country take the air, that, not knowing where to look for her, or whether indeed she has not already left Paris, one wanders in the hope of seeing the girl go by with whom one fell in love at the last ball of the season, whom one will not have a chance of meeting again on any evening until the following spring. Sensing it to be at least the eve, if not the morrow, of the beloved’s departure, one follows along the brink of the shimmering water those pleasant paths by which already a first red leaf is blooming like a last rose, one scans that horizon where, by a contrivance the opposite of that employed in those panoramas beneath whose rotundas the wax figures in the foreground impart to the painted canvas beyond them the illusory appearance of depth and mass, our eyes, travelling without transition from the cultivated park to the natural heights of Meudon and the Mont Valérien, do not know where to set the boundary, and make the natural country trespass upon the handiwork of the gardener, the artificial charm of which they project far beyond its own limits; like those rare birds reared in liberty in a botanical garden which every day, wherever their winged excursions may chance to take them, sound an exotic note here or there in the surrounding woods. Between the last festivity of summer and one’s winter exile, one anxiously ranges that romantic world of chance encounters and lover’s melancholy, and one would be no more surprised to learn that it was situated outside the mapped universe than if, at Versailles, looking down from the terrace, an observatory round which the clouds gather against the blue sky in the manner of Van der Meulen, after having thus risen above the bounds of nature, one were informed that, there where nature begins again at the end of the great canal, the villages which one cannot make out, on a horizon as dazzling as the sea, are called Fleurus or Nijmegen.

And then, the last carriage having rolled by, when one feels with pain that she will not now come, one goes to dine on the island; above the quivering poplars which endlessly recall the mysteries of evening more than they respond to them, a pink cloud puts a last touch of living colour into the tranquil sky. A few drops of rain fall soundlessly on the ancient water which, in its divine infancy, remains always the colour of the weather and continually forgets the reflexions of clouds and flowers. And after the geraniums have vainly striven, by intensifying the brilliance of their scarlet, to resist the gathering twilight, a mist rises to envelop the now slumbering island; one walks in the moist darkness along the water’s edge, where at the most the silent passage of a swan startles one