A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney

by Natalie Clifford Barney

  Other books followed, but they were punctuated with melancholy, like the arrival of the meadow saffron casting their mauve mourning over the meadows at the end of summer.

  Her Fanal bleu, which was joined by Etoile Vesper, shone with subdued but faithful brilliance, first at her window, then on the bookshop shelves.

  I can still hear the confident voice in which she would call and tirelessly repeat, “Maurice”—rolling the r of his name to make it last longer, certain that each time she would be supported or assisted by her best friend—in that well modulated voice which would become imperious or imploring when a decision presented itself, or an over-long visit exacerbated the pain she was in.

  She strove valiantly to get the better of the pain, which came and went, impatient for periods of remission and, with a rare courage, refusing the tranquilizers which would have had a pernicious effect on her work and vitality. The pain, which was incurable, might have overwhelmed Colette if death had not put an end to it, and terminated a life which had already accorded her everything, even that easy death which gathered her up before she was aware of its presence.

  But since the precious, life-giving habit of going to see Colette had been taken from me, with what could I replace it?

  Worshipping neither funerals nor graveyards, I consider it a wasted exercise to try to draw near a body whose spirit has already abandoned it.

  I have always found it indiscreet to watch the living sleep, how much more so to contemplate the dead.

  It is customary to believe, as one prays on their graves, that they are at rest in the depths of their last sleep from which only the trumpet of the Last Judgement will awaken them.

  Having endured that long drawn-out ordeal, while still fulfilling her duty as a writer without shirking, there was nothing Colette needed to be forgiven. Ignorant of sin, and of both the heaven and the hell of believers, she must be sleeping in peace, blending into the nature she loved. Nature, cruel and beautiful as a religion, which she had followed and served with such vigor.

  And what need had she of dogma or confessor, she who made her confession an open book, open to the sky, who bore the harsh discipline of life without complaint?

  To those who criticize her for having debased love to the level of sensuality, came the excellent reply that on the contrary, she had raised sensuality to the level of love, a love evidently free of mysticism. Spirituality not being her strong point, Colette's talent was limited to her senses—which were possessed of prodigious antennae.

  Some critics have reproached Colette for her "too narrow vision." But can one scold someone for their shortsightedness especially when, like a sort of natural microscope, they are able to appreciate the fine detail they observe close up better than anyone? Furthermore, the other senses become more acute by way of compensation.

  While normal vision blurs with old age, when one so nearsighted looks into the distance, she recreates an atmosphere.

  The days of diminishment arrive, at first one renounces the horizon for the sake of the landscape, then the landscape for a garden; then, confined to the house, one ends up confined to bed—where each day takes away a little courage and strength.

  Reduced thus to her chaise-lounge, Colette retires within herself where she painstakingly gathers up what she has seen and the things that have happened to her. She remembers with the accuracy of a prisoner confined to four walls who is able to recreate all that escapes our overstimulated senses.

  She captured these essences so well that she condenses and offers them to us in each of her books, in such a personal style that as we read we seem to breathe her in, whole and entire.

  As I have written elsewhere (Aventures de l'esprit; 1929) "Colette likes what is, and draws comfort from the earth, that wholesome dish. If, enjoying life enough to get along without eternity, she sometimes allows her soul a flight, she rarely flies higher than her own nest."

  And what treasures she had laid in that series of nests! Books which are ours to read and re-read, with more attention than when she was alive. When she was alive, when we always thought there was time enough. Now, among so many tokens of the past, under such a pallid sky, where are those "momentary flashes" to help me show what she was like?—in the same gripping way as a familiar landscape which has never been seen before in the same light. Must I await that revelation? Meanwhile, I can describe her as she was each time I went to see her; I had only to lower my eyelids as I approached the better to breathe her atmosphere. Leaving other visitors to kiss her cheek, I bent over her hair—that misty aromatic cloud—as though coming closer to what she was thinking. And while her other friends listened to that sensual voice, I felt I could hear everything she did not say. Was it not from that head, as from a bushy, deep-rooted plant, that her writing blossomed? In her absence, can I not find her again the more surely now in her writing?

  1. The name given to Miss Barney in Liane de Pougy's Idylle Saphique.

  2. "Lucie Delarue Mardrus also cut her flowing brown hair, the massive tresses she had worn wrapped around her head for so long. My own hair, measuring six foot three inches, the silver thatch which crowned the forehead of the Amazon, what a harvest cut down by the whim of fashion!" (L 'Etoile vesper)

  3. Author of a daring music paper published under the name of L'Ouvreuse [The Usherette] to which Colette contributed.

  Rémy de Gourmont

  How I Became His Amazon

  How could one approach the hermit of the Rue des Saints-Pères, that monk of the mind in his gown of sackcloth, living alone in his cell of books, above everything and everyone?

  It was my neighbor, Edouard Champion, who provided the opportunity. Moved by the poems I had written on the death of Renée Vivien, he wanted to show them to Gourmont who decided in turn to publish them in a forthcoming issue of the Mercure de France.

  I sent him a thank you note slipped inside Eparpillements, my book of epigrams. He replied immediately,

  23rd June 1910

  Dear Mademoiselle,

  Your subterfuge nearly worked. I open, cut and read your Eparpillements without seeing the letter on the first two leaves. Only the brief dedication struck my eye. It was not until I re-read the book, which I enjoyed, that I found that which makes it dearer yet. It is a great thing to have charmed you, and to receive recognition of that fact: I appreciate the value of those leaves, they are precious to me.

  In the printed pages which follow I discovered a noble and delicate spirit (and much else besides) with whom I feel in sympathy, even when it seems enigmatic. But one should remain an enigma, even to oneself.

  After this epistolary beginning, Edouard Champion suggested that I accompany him to Rémy de Gourmont's “day”—to which he invited only a few literary persons or close friends: Apollinaire and Rouveyre. But a female stranger?

  "Not such a stranger, since he knows and likes your poems and epigrams."

  Rémy de Gourmont opened the door, stood straight in front of me and held out his hand warmly. I was nervous and hardly noticed his scarred face and swollen lips but stammered out something or other, for my attention was caught by his pale eyes which changed with each thought that struck him. There was a spontaneity in his welcome, a hesitancy in his demeanor and a repressed joie de vivre in his gaze.

  How could I set that joy free? Persuade him to mix once more with the living? There was such a gap between the cloistered life he led among his books and writing and real life! With the exception of an occasional flight towards Rouen, he went out on routine business only: from the Mercure de France to the Revue des Idées, from the bookstalls of the Quai Voltaire to the Cafe du Flore.

  This encounter with Rémy de Gourmont, without demands on either side, left us free to see each other again or not.

  Our first meeting, far from putting a full stop to our correspondence was, on the contrary, only the beginning.

  During another visit I had the temerity to suggest a ride to the Bois one afternoon in the near future. Not knowing how to refuse, he
grumbled that "he did not..."

  I interrupted, "Yes, yes, I'll come and fetch you. Sometimes one needs to rebel against one's habits; even if only to return to them with renewed pleasure."

  My chauffeur went to fetch him at the appointed hour. Gourmont climbed into my Renault without too much trouble, despite its wide running board, and sat down next to me without saying a word. How to interrupt this silence? To a mind which is sufficient unto itself, nothing seems worth the trouble of being put into words. I kept quiet too, to give him time to get over whatever he must be feeling upon finding himself traveling toward the Bois de Boulogne away from his usual haunts. The Bois greeted us with the scent of its acacias. Rémy de Gourmont, despite his grumbling, could not resist sniffing the air. We stopped beside the great lake; as he gazed at one last shimmer on the water he gave a sigh.

  How could one remain unaffected by the beauty of the hour and the place? He shrugged it off, saying that, like Mérimée, were he to see diamonds sparkling on the ground, he would not even stoop to pick them up, having no one to give them to.

  "Nor I," I said sadly.

  His face brightened at last, with a quick glance at me, he rejoined, "Do not forget that I know your poems and epigrams."

  "They were for a dead woman."

  "Not all."

  I do not remember what else we said.

  What a long and difficult conquest is that of a person’s mind! But his was worth all my patience and all my prudence. I had learned patience with Renée Vivien, if not prudence.

  Setting aside the problem for a moment, I left for Evian with someone who was equally difficult to captivate, for other reasons, and who seemed equally worth the trouble. I was agreeably surprised to receive this unexpected letter from Rémy de Gourmont near the beginning of my stay:

  Paris, 20th August 1910

  My resentment, already nearly a week old, has turned against me, seeing that I would do nothing to spur it on. I am certainly not in the habit of walking in the evening with young women in the Bois de Boulogne, so I did not begin to enjoy the situation until after it was over. Not because it was unpleasant, but rather because it was too pleasant and because it presupposed a state of mind I had no reason to believe was your own. And anyway the moon over the Bois is too much like an electric light bulb. I found you terribly intimidating though your voice was soft and natural. Perhaps that is what threw me off guard, your naturalness, though I expected nothing else from you. But since it is very rare for a woman to be natural, one needs to be prepared.

  That long, short walk will remain in my memory just as it was, when I had no other prompting but to listen to your voice like ironic music (the irony was mine, against myself).

  Now something tells me I may have found a friend with whom to play at life again from time to time, when you have the time to spare?

  Goodbye. You are in Evian, Drink the water. It is very good.

  What a responsibility it is to become part of someone's life!

  Did I have the right? Should I run the risk of disturbing my new friend with hope and expectations? Had he not recently replied to a woman who was infatuated with his writing and who had asked to meet him, that: "There was not even room in his life for a hairpin."

  As a true friend I had to think of him first, rather than myself. I was certainly attracted by the vigor and diversity of his books, the freedom of his opinions (one of which had lost him his job at the Bibliothèque Nationale and was the motivation for his joining the Mercure de France). I felt a sense of kinship with that most well-balanced, most learned, sincerest mind of our time, whose calibre has been attested by others more competent to judge than I. For Henri de Régnier, "He is our Montaigne, he is our Sainte-Beuve, he is our Gourmont." Léauraud himself remarked in his Journal, "There is no writer to equal de Gourmont in modern times.”

  What gift could I bring that Latin Celt, the best of the writer philosophers and philosopher writers, dedicated to "eternal parchments" and so rich in himself? Let him experience a little of the life of which he had been too soon deprived? Did I respond to the appeal I had provoked? I no longer know, but a letter of his dated 4th October shows that I saw him again and suggested I come to his next "day." An arrangement for a box to watch Molière having fallen through, he wrote to me:

  Would you like me to come on Wednesday, around 5 o'clock and take a turn or two in your garden? We have already had a Wednesday... Sunday in any case. And of course I expect you as usual. Say as I do.

  —Your friend, Rémy.

  I would sometimes accompany him on his usual round to the Gare d’Orsay where he delivered his article for La Dépêche de Toulouse.

  Examining the scenes of the Gare d'Orsay with you was most pleasant. I have been there quite often at that hour and always alone. I will see your face beside me, but not with sadness, for it will be a continuation of the present, not a regret for the past...

  And, a little later:

  Dear friend, you were so kind to me and so trustful that I want to write to you to have a pretext for dwelling on it further. I have done scarcely anything all day but write this letter, sharpening my impressions so that they may live again the more vibrantly. I am so much a man of letters! No, that is not really it. I write so that you will know I think of you more tenderly still. You already knew, I am sure, but it is what one knows best that one most likes to hear oneself repeat. Your presence is a sweet pleasure which permeates me all the days that follow, changing their color. Perhaps you will make me rediscover a lost interest in life: if it can be done, it will come from you because you are a true friend and because I love you.

  Indeed I feel most strongly the benefit of your presence; I think about it all week; it provides a fixed point around which other moments evolve, before and after. I am hard to seduce. My first impulse is to withdraw into my shell. Despite that instinct, however, I remember very well how struck I was the first time I saw you by the absence of that affectation, which makes me shudder and turns me to ice. Since then I have felt that not only were you a woman friend, but a man too...

  I will call this friend Natalis; he deserves that flowering name, and I will speak of him only so:

  Natalis was already a page,

  Natalis was already a woman.

  He remained both page and woman,

  She remained both woman and page.

  She may be a page to women,

  She is woman enough for a page.

  If I were young, were I a page,

  I would love in Natalis the woman.

  Put on a doublet, put on a bodice,

  You will not change your soul.

  You will not fool my soul.

  By the form your bodice takes.

  Being indeed this double creature, how could I become close to such a presence, not only intellectually but also emotionally, and exchanging looks more understanding than words, awaken and test emotions which went, perhaps, as far as love?

  Gourmont described these uncertain boundaries very well:

  ...In friendship as in love, can one ever say exactly where lie feelings such as ours? Where they begin? Where they end, if there is an end? They are there, we feel them, that is enough. One should ask no more, neither interrogate nor cross them. Let them live freely.

  Or should I uproot those feelings which I had consciously cultivated before they grew deeper, for I was no longer free, even for an affair of the mind? Already committed elsewhere, how could I continue this new friendship, this new love?

  Should I be "The creature with gauze wings" for my friend, and everything else for the other!

  May my chivalric instincts guide this unmatched tandem, while I kept my independence like the "wild girl of Cincinnati" (as Salomon Reinach put it) that I was!

  I once waltzed into my friend's study when I'd been out riding, dressed "en amazone”—in a riding habit. Then I went to one of his Sundays in more conventional attire.

  "I have cancelled my day," he declared. "For myself, and for you, if you wish." />
  "Then what will become of your regulars from the Mercure?"

  "We already see quite enough of each other in the Rue de Condé."

  "And what will your friends Apollinaire and Rouveyre say?"

  "They can arrange to come and see me when they want."

  "But what about Edouard Champion to whom I owe our first encounter?"

  "He provided the bridge between us."

  ...There are men whose only mission is to serve as an intermediary for others: we cross them like bridges and go on....

  It was at a party at my house, a masked ball, that we next met Edouard Champion. We had enjoyed preparing for the event, Rémy and I. I had written an invitation in verse and he felt nothing would be finer than to reproduce the handwriting itself, with a little mask in one corner. I had made my friend a mask, an old Arabian smock embroidered with saffron leaves, and wrapped a turban round his head made of one of my green silk stockings. I wore the costume of a Japanese glow-worm chaser with an electric torch hidden in a wicker basket; there I had to hand a spray of little bulbs which gave a very good imitation of the light of glowworms, their gleams visible through my hair. Thus my guests were able to recognize me even at the bottom of the garden, dimly lit by Chinese lanterns hung from the trees.

  Gourmont describes the evening in Les amis d'Edouard [Edouard's Friends]:

  I have just come from an evening-dress ball... A dress ball amongst distinguished company is no mediocre pleasure. Men show more of their true selves when wearing a disguise than in the modern uniform; their tastes are displayed simply and joyfully. It is, perhaps, in their daily lives that they wear the thickest mask and most absolute disguise. And so it should be. Put your mask of flesh back on, my dear, the others have arrived...