by Gustave Kahn
The youth marveled at Genièvre, with her eyes like blue flames, her pure complexion, her perfectly rounded neck and her long ring-laden hands. And when she walked, he thought he was seeing a swan glide, and when she came near him he thought he would faint. When she spoke to him to question him about his native land, an anguish rose into Lancelot’s throat; he was unable to reply and the Queen passed on. He did not see her again, but her image alone, in broad strokes, reddened beneath his eyelids.
The patient turned over again, and Ezra could almost follow his dream; he knew that he was courageous, besotted with adventure and beauty, and suspected that a similar image and a similar desire were passing within his fever.
The old woman, unquiet by her son’s bed, was muttering prayers.
Ezra turned the pages...
In the plain, near the camps of Artus and Galehaut, separated by the fordable river, Queen Genièvre summoned Lancelot.
“Is it for me, then, that you have accomplished so many great deeds?”
“Yes, Lady.”
“But now it will be necessary for you to remain close to us.”
“Would you have loved a man without valor, Lady?”
And Queen Genièvre thought about the former valor of Artus, reliant now on the strong shoulders of his knights to sustain his power and oversee the peace of the world. She saw that the two of them were similar, and of the same race of men. Artus had doubtless been like this young man when he had brought forth Excalibur and thus had himself recognized as the designated king. Thus he had still been when he had fought the pagans in Carmelide. It was the future valor of the world that was in her presence, and Genièvre bowed to Lancelot.
And the patient woke up, and gazed at Ezra and his mother, pensively, and said: “I was dreaming.”
“Yes,” said Ezra, showing him the book—and the young man blushed.
“Yes, Master, I was reading the beautiful adventure.”
“And do you know the ending, perhaps better told than here?”
“That the Queen died, and Lancelot languished in consequence, at about the time when Artus disappeared in the direction of Avalon.”
“I know this one:
“When Artus had visited the castle of the enchantress Morgain, the room in which Lancelot was imprisoned had depicted the entire legend of his love, the hours of his pallors and those of his kisses. Artus was returning, ardent for vengeance, when he collided with Mordret’s revolt, and Genièvre was Mordret’s captive.
“When she firmly believed that, having been at the mercy of the traitor, she had been tarnished for Lancelot, she wanted to flee into a cloister, on the most distant cape of Gaul, to bury herself as far away as possible, among the mountainous waves. The Queen cut off her blonde hair, covered her hair with a wimple, and her body with a long black cloak and a white garment, and every day, as the Queen of Great Sorrows had, she went along the long terrace over the sea, in spite of the wind that lashed her and the arrival of the white swirls of the waves thrown pell-mell against the colossal stone balcony, with the cries of the seagulls—and the tumultuous sea seemed to her to be running like the minutes of her old love and her living love.
“Every morning, after mass, the nuns had to pass through that open corridor of rocks to get back to their cells, and the Abbess brought up the rear. Since the Queen’s arrival she had taken the penultimate position in order to leave her to walk freely and remain alone on that terrace.
“Facing the nuns’ cloister, some distance away on an islet, was a convent where a few monks submissive to the hardest rule were doubtless expiating excessive pleasures in prayer and contemplation. At different times from those habitual to the nuns, the monks also passed over a terrace that overlooked the sea and faced its counterpart, and the waves of that narrow strait also came to cover their narrow pathway with surf.
“One day, an extra man marched behind the file of monks, a hood over his head and a long habit around his body—and he too was allowed by the Prior to gaze at length at the enraged waves of the strait at the extremity of the terrace—those furious waves, that drew away to calm down in the sea. And Queen Genièvre saw the monk, who, perceiving her indistinctly, was struck in the heart and remained there with his back against a pillar for some time, as if incapable of movement.
“The Queen waited for him to recover, and addressed a slow nod of the head to him—and from then on, Genièvre and Lancelot, both closer together and more separate than they had been in their time of caresses, bowed to one another once a day, slowly, each following a file of faithful souls with whom they lived. And for fear of being seeing one another too closely, of discovering how many wrinkles had marked the faces orphaned on their love, they only stayed on the terrace momentarily, long enough to bow, and Lancelot never took off his hood, or Genièvre her wimple—and the immortal illusion floated between them, to the violent racket of the sea, and vibrated its extended white wings between them. There is no greater suffering than great love, no greater cold than when it is destroyed, and no greater fever than when it begins.”
The sage Ezra, having poured a large dose of Lethe into a cup, held it out to the young man, who soon went back to sleep. Ezra said to the old woman: “He will be better tomorrow; send him to my house.”
And he went back into the nocturnal city.
THE CITY
The city awoke. By virtue of the flight of the shadow, the tall belfries and the steeples of bell-towers seemed to stretch themselves. Hurried sailors prepared ships. Rafts towed by barges glided along. Shutters struck the walls and the wrinkled faces of old women showed momentarily; then smoke rose from high chimneys. The screens of shop-windows were raised, and people became visible cutting cloth and sewing leather. A morning song rose up, multiple and discordant, and large carts presented themselves at the bridges, fully-laden with vegetables and bellowing or bleating animals. The city’s hunger awoke. Fisherman hastened, and their damp and scintillating booty quivered on marble slabs. Baskets of fruit and pitchers of milk encumbered the main square, and townspeople with voluminous cloaks circulated with difficulty in the midst of these encumbrances, augmented by the shrill cries of pigs, the screeches of poultry and the joyful yapping of dogs marveling, as always before so much nourishment. The tavern doors were already open; people were tucking into beer and salted fish. Metal clinked on the tables of restaurants and the counters of money-changers’ shops.
The Sun rose above the gilded roofs and held itself motionless over that chattering multitude of sellers and buyers. Helmets and lances flashed at the entrance to the square and a file of cavaliers passed slowly by, to disappear in the direction of the bridges and the countryside. Carillons of bells rang out in chorus, and the doors of the churches soon let out processions of smiling women clad in velvet, and young men crowded around them; white greyhounds sent mastiffs packing; soft words were exchanged between the church and the square, and robust tradesmen paused to watch them pass by, and then resumed work; and impatient individuals waited in front of their shops for their distraction to conclude, on order to obtain a cloak or shoes confided a trifle rapidly to the idle obsequiousness of those artisans.
At the foot of structures of scaffolding, masons folded their arms meditatively, in the fashion of poets. Sellers of herbs and vegetables stopped to listen to the beautiful voices of public criers, proud of the riches they trumpeted from one to another. The petty merchants of hot drinks ran around everyone with their iron cauldrons, their ladles and goblets, chirping, boasting, shouting, offering and inciting everyone to take the opportunity, thanks to their pretext, of a minute of leisure.
The joyous matinal tumult was not contained by the main square; it extended through the streets, as far as the narrow side-streets, and its cheerful din penetrated as far as the narrow back-street where Rizpah, standing in the doorway next to the tanned and parchment-faced old woman were watching the departure of the young man whose fever old Ezra had calmed the previous night. And young Samuel, after having turned toward
her one more time, disappeared around the first street-corner into the moving current of the crowd.
First he went past the palace of the emperors, whose roseate marble colonnade was enhanced by the gilded horses rearing up. A cambered balcony marked the place where the newly-crowned emperor showed himself to the people, the crown on his head and the cup welcoming him to the city in his hand. Facing it, surrounded by wrought-iron railings decorated with grape-clusters and roses, a fountain wept. On the cornice of the building, colossal statues symbolized strength; a high tower permitted the ruler of so many people to glimpse the sea, by which bold seekers of fortune went away and the harvests of victory returned, and the arrows of a thousand masts were beginning to gather at the quays not far away. Then he arrived in the main square, where the pinnacles of the Town Hall and numerous stone statuettes were watching the cluttering of the market stalls, and the black enormous mass of the Market Hall facing them, from which porters emerged carrying quarters of meat and artisans carrying cloth and leather.
If the palace of the emperors was sparkling with gilded statues and richly-colored emblems, bearing on its white and roseate background a grandiose appearance of ornamented youth, and if the Town Hall, in its chiseled gray robe streaked with bands of colored écus, with its statuettes, stones strung out in a symbolic necklace, an ornamentation acquired stone by stone, resembled an opulent lady in her prime, still beautiful, content in sober dress and quiet contemplation, the Market Hall was a squat pile of brick, heaped up brick by brick, where hard work could be divined, and he gauche building with its lateral belfry had something of the appearance of the heavy gesture of a laborer accustomed to carrying his burden over his shoulder. The building suggested a durable and gathered strength, unselfconscious and limited to toying with its burdens. It was a naked building, where frescoes ought to be.
Further on, the façade of the cathedral barred the largest square, and its high towers dominated the city, higher than the palace, the Town Hall and the Market Hall. The immense mass sparkled by virtue of its stained-glass windows; the gold of the sunlight was transmuted as it passed through translucencies in enormous rare gemstones, impassive ornaments in gold, silver and rubies, fixed fires embodying the promise of marvelous lands.
In bright valleys, as green as the meadows of Heaven, luminous sages marched, where there were Perseuses slaying ancient dragons with scales of azure and light, with aureoled crowns around their helmets. Processions of maidens descended toward rivers between the grayer mass of mail-clad archers, and the bright light and the vitrified substance with the splendors of magical water increased the ecstasy in their eyes, and the saints in prayer were as handsome as pagan gods, Apollonian tresses crowning the foreheads of the Saint Michaels.
Under the three immense portals, bas-reliefs chained vanquished enemies to the church doors: cloven-hoofed Pans, devils who disguised themselves as monks and those who adopted the costumes of wise men introducing, with the familiar and usurped ostentation poured out amid the most venerable white beards, bad advice and lusts to families, abusing the daughters while the fathers are away at war, and lifting grimacing fauns by the ear in their robust hands. The beauty of foolish virgins sparkled in the granite, and the emaciated bodies of saints, their hollow eyes upraised, seemingly exorcising the memory of the ardors of those captive fauns. And the flora of contorted, curled up, simplified fields, sometimes also deformed in a thousand sculpted tentacles, garlanded that tableau of victories and captivities, which even contained the victory of the soul over death, the pure soul escaping from the boat where the bloated clawed fingers of the hairy bodyguards of sin wanted to maintain it.
The church doors opened with a slow beat and closed again soundlessly. In spite of their thick solidity, the faithful were able to perceive that there was nothing really there but a curtain to separate the palace of prayer from the outside world, momentarily occupied elsewhere; and the triple naves launched forth into a symphony of sculpted stones, columns that were tall petrified trees.
In the scintillation of the stained-glass, sometimes reminiscent of the radiant dawn, sometimes the sunset over a plain of marvels near a fabulous Jordan, the tall polychromatic columns played the part of the eternal and primitive forest, the forest of cults, the one in which fearful humans had paused to stammer a prayer and returned to listen to the exiled priest preaching generosity to them, and adopted the custom of fixing a day to come back for the sacrifice and the offering.
That primitive forest they carry with them into their cities when faiths are victorious, and reconstruct it, solid against the vicissitudes of the seasons, against the autumn that prunes the graceful roses of legend and the winter that throws refrigerant ice beneath bare feet. It is the forest of summer with all its legendary noisiness, its simplified perfumes remade, rising from cassolettes to entertain the illusion of the warm clarity of apparitions in the clearings; and the organs restate the grave song of thickets distances, which the wind plays like instruments.
If faith contains a few problems, which might agitate between a few philosophies, there is no trace of it here. The common man has constructed an envelope around his chimera, and alongside the god about whom he is told—the one who cries in the thunder and appears in the depths of souls in advice of forbearance—he has placed all his gods, all the ancient gods to whom he still remains faithful, and with them his faith of the present moment, his desire not to die, for the long clarion-calls of resurrection launch forth from the arches here.
He has brought his love of candid beauty in a blue dress, with blue eyes, flaxen hair and hesitant tread, advancing through the tranquil freshness of meadows, in a cheerful and busy countryside, for here is Mary walking cautiously over the rump of the Evil One. He has brought his troubled love, embarrassed before imperious beauty, dazzling beauty, true beauty, and his rancor against eyes that are too willful and authoritative, for here is the golden-haired Mary Magdalen, humiliated.
The common man has added to this the unexpectedness of his song, and he remembers his humble friends, the birds that sing to distract him, the turtle-dove with the swollen throat of which he dreams obscurely as a symbol of his desire, and messenger birds that bring the beloved the gratitude of the lover, for here is the white dove. If the master architect has lavished in the nave pathways cleverly disposed in the form of a cross, to recall the martyrdom, the common man scarcely perceives it, and it is to the signs of resurrection that he goes, amid the forest of pillars, beneath the somber vault where the music drones; and that music, whatever effort is made to measure its cadence severely and throw a shred of the veil of mourning into the light, consists of ancient songs, those rendered in loud voices along the roads, in the sylvan solitudes and at celebrations, which would have been recognized by the models of the statues, statues of martyrs, statues of kings ancestral to the virgin—his creatures, or at least his memories, his heroes blurred by a millenary dream.
Along the walls of the church, under the horizontal tombstones, sleeping in a false humility beneath the tread of passers-by, are old counts and old dukes, and the noble splendor of their spouses laid beside them in a mendacious equality, in a mendacious humility that seemed appropriate to them, a final and solitary sacrifice made during their lives to the to the popular chimera of coming to sleep at ground level in the forest of stone without a roof-nothing but an image, like the industrious play of a few stones in a clearing indicating their presence. They are very old sepulchers.
Already, however, near the choir, in the part of the cathedral in which the organized pride of the priestly hierarchy reigns more evidently, not far from the stalls with the heads of griffins where the dignitaries sit, the high tombs appear, upright and full of pride. The carefully-hammered and retracted copper retains tints of gold in the coats-of-arms of those who are laid there on a bulwark of marble, bearing on their black marble cloaks on their broad shoulders whose carefully-lowered hoods hide their faces.
Are these forms, without any attribution of sex ben
eath their hard and durable drapery poverties, humilities, charities and forgivenesses, or rather the dead aspects of courages, determinations and violences of desire? In their gestures, lowered beneath the weight of the body and the bed of exhibition, ought one read the joyous submission of disciplined virtues, accompanying the body and soul that was their host, or vanquished captives, or intimidated servants? And why have those marble faces been hooded in black: for reasons of modesty, or the fear of perceiving them?
The motionless funeral procession of the sequence of tombs seems, in the maze of columns, to be a somber procession of mourners paused among the trees of the forest. They seem to be strangers among all the sculpted, painted and sung joys here bequeathed to the soul of the people; the excessive pride of armories shone over the excessive humility of the bearers of the definitive stretcher, but higher still, up toward the vaults, the most elevated of the stained-glass windows continue the colored fête of fairy-tale characters in the plains of merriment: little gods, joyful corporation mascots, almoner saints and familiar spirits deified; the entire thin and regal lineage of gods given birth in crowds by all the ages—and then the steeple rising toward the blue sky, ever-incomplete, reaching ever higher; for in every century, people have always tried to construct Babel.
And all around the cathedral wound narrow streets, profound caves beneath the Heavens: streets that were almost silent, where footfalls were muffled, shop-fronts deserted, stillnesses plastered with images in niches and little lamps burning as in obscurity—and that tortuous network resembled the tangled roots of the great popular forest, and rudimentary souls lived there silently, immured in the prodigious nursery, living the vegetative life of seeds, with all their threats and promises.
