The Tale of Gold and Silence

by Gustave Kahn

  And the little princess left him there, half-smiling, half-groaning, mouth open, the word he had had ready abandoned before utterance.

  She had lived in many palaces, little Princess Marie. She had been afraid in some, which had been located in the North, in the midst of black and bushy foliage, where one arrived by narrow roads felted with pine-cones at melancholy pools—extremely melancholy, as gray as lead—ringed by a thousand fragile lances of reeds, and which sent you back your image as if fatigued and ill, so pale and mute that you burst out laughing. In the evenings, seen from those windows, lightly latticed with lead, noisy crows passed by, and then there were owls that perched on the stone window-sills, long corridors shivering with cold between their thick walls, rare and reddish lights flickering—always flickering—throwing themselves backwards as if to push away something invisible.

  She saw cheerful castles that bathed their foundations in large clear ponds, where hides had been built in order to fire arrows at ducks and wild geese. There were thick wall-hangings in the rooms, of violet and silver leather, the color of sunburn and the color of gold, in which knights passed endlessly over rearing unicorns and praying saints prayed endlessly. In those castles there were butterfly gardens, and on the ground, men of stone crowned with vines or ears of corn, scarred and eaten away by moss, and in the rounded, excessively white rooms, the hue of ivory or icy flesh grown old without wrinkles, lamps shed too harsh a light.

  There were also castles whose gardens ran down to the sea. Abruptly parting the foliage, one perceived the broad white band of a beach, and the sea, as green as the leaves, and sometimes as yellow as the harvest, or as gray as wrath unleashed in the mud and surf. In spite of the splendor of the Sun, in spite of the amusements of the seabirds, whose white tribes went into exile as soon as a stranger approached to within a few strides, in spite of the gaiety of the long ribbon of surf that came to play on the sand, as glad as a thirst appeased, and disappeared laughing, laughing and laughing again, those castles were sad. The beach, as pure and white as a page of destiny, as virginal as an undeployed white sail, became sad as soon as human footsteps disturbed the solitary majesty of its silence, made of the monotony of sounds.

  She had lived in many castles, little Princess Marie, but none was the one that her soul had chosen. When she grew older she lived most frequently, under her father’s orders, in the palace in the city, and a castle surrounded by pleasant woods not far away.

  Princess Marie loved songs. She loved all the songs she had heard; her memory of music and the longs of poets were like a well-arranged garden in which she wandered incessantly. For her, music was a mirror, songs a population of mirrors; as she was always, within a short span of time, sad, cheerful, lively, depressed, loquacious, silent, foolish and reasonable, she often ran rapidly to all her mirrors and looked at herself.

  She was, fundamentally, always a tall slender individual, with a very pale complexion and very symmetrical features, with a flush of first youth and exceedingly blue eyes, which were sometimes a trifle gray, sometimes the violent blue of the southern sky—but the mirrors did not always respond to the same things, and she was much changed if she saw herself in the one that had picked out of her surroundings a poor student, whose song had suddenly sprung forth while, as a poor weary pedestrian, he was eating ripe apples in the shade of a tree, or the mirror that had been carefully opened by some great lord who sometimes leaned over her love to restate it.

  She kept them all nearby, always close to her heart, songs like rural grass and songs like beautiful ostentatious roses; those that are sprigs that girls raise to their lips while walking along the road at dusk; and those of which people in velvet robes dream in the evening before the pulpit, repeating a verse that determines an unexpected echo in the high dark hall, which call forth speech in order that it might be heard again; and those of the birds in the forest; and those of goblets on the table; and those that one reads after prayers; and those that one never reads, and never listens to, but which one hears all the same, for everyone sings them.

  Time had produced great bouquets of then, because people had loved a great deal, suffered a great deal, and songs had spurted from swollen hearts, perfumed by various suns, from the swimming-pools of disputed Jerusalem to the grey strands of the North, from the high towers of the church to the open entrails of the Earth where metal-miners are busy.

  On the lips of the princess many songs murmured in their freshness of springs running over pearly mosses; king’s sons espoused shepherdesses and king’s daughters espoused captains charge with conquests and fortunes, but no one could remember having heard the tale hummed of how an emperor’s daughter had given herself to a minstrel.

  Princess Marie, who was tall and slender, with an undulating mantle of golden hair, circled her forehead with a narrow silver crown, exceedingly narrow and simple. She dressed in long white dresses gathered around the waist by a silver belt with a heavy clasp, and there were only a few gilded embroideries at the bottom of her long, trailing dress. On her shoulders she fastened pale blue mantles; of her necklace of gold and pearls, whether hidden by her mantle or her hair, a flood of blue or a flood of gold, one only perceived a few links on her breast, and her hands were not laden with any rings.

  With the stance of a noble princess she amalgamated childish laughter, with the result that he robust emperor with the gray beard could refuse her nothing. Into her slow and measured stride she sometimes introduced an acrobatic agility, with the result that serious men—priests, soldiers and clerks—felt as benevolent toward her as to a pampered child. And since she was young and knew all the ancient songs, she wanted to know the new ones, and the poets came to sing them to her; and because she was beautiful, and she listened to all songs as if dreaming of tender morning sunlight, the poets were infatuated with her—Samuel more than any other.

  How he loved that beauty; the music of so many poems dissolved in that beauty, some distant apparition amid the sumptuousness of the gardens of the palace and the pageantry of the guards, or that beauty and that power leaning down to the level of the road to listen in the hedges for whoever had the most beautiful and lively voice. What did he hope for except a choice between two tortures: to keep his love beneath all the locks of secrecy, or to hear it mocked. If some new tolerance had admitted that the princess might have a lover in the city, a sonorous and docile lute, how could that passion end?

  Was he in love with her? He believed so; he was sure of it; he suffered in consequence; he knew no more than that.

  He could not see clearly into his own inner depths. He did not even try, any more than the shoot that an errant seed lodges in a crack in a rock reflects on its motives. Like the blade of grass, he lived, shivered, trembled, folded beneath the rain, dried out in the Sun, knowing nothing of life but slumber and dew.

  He had obtained from the learned Ezra what a man of his time was able to know, but that mass of information had passed over him without even brushing his soul. To him, his knowledge was like a bookshelf, always with arm’s reach. He forgot it most of the time, but on certain days, moved by the occasion, he reached out his hand and opened one of the old tomes. To him, his knowledge was like a nearby city to which one sometimes goes under the cover of tall trees, by virtue of habit, where one amuses oneself momentarily, but without ever participating in its life. His knowledge was his, but outside of him. He was like a child burdened with heavy luggage; he liked nothing better than to set it down in the corner of some cheerful and populous square and forget about it; his whole brain was full of neglected terrains, where the bushes of hazard could grow at their leisure and produce all their leaves and berries. It was also a bare plain in which any fire might run wild and set everything alight at a stroke, beneath the vault of a low sky without enough stars.

  The princess knew that she was loved, and smiled at him, for the poet, in his serious youth, seemed a poor creature not yet steady on his legs; she had been curious enough to listen to him and compliment him; sin
ce when there had been golden cupolas—sometimes, admittedly, veiled with cloud—on Samuel’s horizons, in moments of effulgent hope.

  THE MAY FESTIVAL

  It is the day of the festival of May, the celebration of the salvation of a people by the ardent Sun—still its god, always and in spite of everything. Because the river has broken its cold white clots; because its mossy and yellow waters are no longer flowing slowly and slimily beneath a long quivery radiance, but running blue and steely as rapidly as arrows of silver and light; because the star has dried the mud on the land, from which stems, leaves and wings are springing forth everywhere, the entire City, with its citizens, its priests, its emperor, with its old men, its women, its children, its wisdom, its beauty, its hope and flying banners of duty, law and religion, is setting forth on the road of celebration, of flowers and draperies and music, to acclaim the divine Sun—which, say the ages, rotates around the Earth in the divine imponderable ether, in order to warm everything more effectively with its caress, and kiss its innumerable breasts!

  The people of the city are going into the great plan, where the May Tree will be planted; the people of the coasts and the sea are coming upriver; their fanfares respond to the music of the city like the cries of gulls and the crowing of cocks. The beautiful daughters of the city line up along the river, throwing flowers to the beautiful daughters of the coast, traveling in their beribboned boats, and their gestures are so noble and beautiful that one might think one were seeing the Muses flattering the Sirens.

  At the head of the procession, first of all, there were the scarlet heralds, golden eagles on their breasts, golden eagles on their tall hats, and the long staffs in their hands that protect the friends and smite the enemies of the empire. Then came the trumpets, long tubes of polished brass like the buccinas of the emperors of Rome, slightly raised toward the radiant sky, and bowing right and left according to the musicians’ steps, playing the strident appeal that wakes up the soldiers in the distance of immense camps. Then came the long drums draped in scarlet, whose muffled and heavy beat is like the footsteps of the host running to answer the call of the brass conches; then a thick curtain of ironclad cavaliers, with gold on the visors on their helmets, gold on the eagles on their breastplates and gold on the head-dress of their horses, sheathed in iron coats of mail and the shafts of their long lances, like an autumnal forest; the Sun lit up the points like a pyre; red sashes the color of blood, with gold stripes, evoked the horror and the recompense of war.

  Behind them came the forest of foot-soldiers, the long pikes on their shoulders decked with flowers and branches, their coarse ale-drinkers’ faces, beneath large crenellated hats, smiling at the thought of the imminent libation. They passed by in broad ranks, wearying in their number—and then, on a chariot decorated with beautiful fabrics stiffened by golden thread, supplied by the Church, noble ladies and rich townspeople, a chariot moving like an enormous radiant plaque, came the May Tree, held upright by the burgers of the city clad in red velvet. And before it rode the Emperor, in helmet and armor, his charger radiant with golden armor and blue enamel.

  Today, the men-at-arms, and the first among them, the Emperor, are merely vassals of May.

  A folly of green branches, fleecy thyrses in the soft colors of a dawn-lit sea, transparencies, nacres, sparkling scarlets, amaranths and nacarats, around the white flesh-colored petals, blue, green and black flame-flowers, streaked with gold, glaucous amid the enamels of eyes, pinks in the candor of long white or pale yellow veils, golden tresses iridiscent with sunlight, brown tresses circled with roses and bright silver, a blaze of living gems scintillating and smiling, advancing in a bright fading charm as amid the mad kisses of the light: these were the young women of the city, the queens of the May—and among them, in a large cart overflowing with carnations, bright poppies, streaming branches of lilac, upright and blonde, dressed in white and silver, with a high crown of silver and pearls restricting the golden glow of her curls, Princess Marie.

  She seemed to be guiding the white horses of the Sun, magnified by the entire swell of beauty, grace and youth following the train of her long white dress and blue mantle, by the slow and rhythmic oscillation of tresses that pressed upon her heels. She stood up, a mystic flower, a magical flower, as the elect of that gathering of soft and striking features, as if surging forth from a general beauty, ready to reproduce itself once again and forever, as immense and multiform as the light and the sea, and their unlimited play; and the swarm of laughing young women was as dense as an army.

  After them, bearers of branches, all dressed in bright velvets and glittering silks, illuminating the grassy ground with a splendor of fabrics and plumes, the gleam of whose weapons had been banished for today, came the young men. For this festival, they had to choose a leader who was named the Prince of Lovers, and of their own accord, they had picked Samuel.

  The young man, on horseback, followed by squires carrying lutes and guitars, was radiant with that momentary processional sovereignty: a lightning-flash between the grey of the day before and the profound darkness of the dusk that would fall when the Sun finished tearing up its scarlet and carried that brief splendor away into the far neverending west.

  And in their wake came a festival march, and a masquerade of animated statues of gods, demigods and goddesses on marvelous carts: light and vibrant Fame raising the horn of joy to her lips, with agile Mercury beside her, and Night in her long robe the color of retreat and shelter, her forehead starred with twinkling gems. Fauns and Satyrs bore in their brawny and muscular arms an enormous smiling Silenus, red-faced and pot-bellied, periodically bursting into laughter, and behind him, back and grave, the majesty of Pluto and the severe mourning-dress of Proserpine, and their sober retinue of pages of Erebus.

  Immediately, however, rustic flutes hymned the presence of Pan, one of the kings of the festival, crowned with roses, a long beard flowing in blond waves over his shoulders, serious and meditative, surrounded by Nymphs and Dryads, who were spreading perfumes around him and carrying curious baskets of flowers and rare fruits, brought from odorant shores by heavy galiots: golden fruits refreshed by the pale estuaries of Northern rivers. And also surrounding him, in carts drawn by white goats, were the most beautiful of the city’s children.

  On a high litter, as high as a terrace, carried by vigorous shoulders, was a Bacchus with a forehead circled by vine-branches and black hair that made his symmetrical face seem thinner; soft and coquettish, in a ship of white silks and doves, arrogant with her cerulean eyes and the noble curves of her face, was Venus; after laurel-bearers and living torches in the bright daylight, Apollo was dragged on a low quadriga, bow in hand; in the midst of a howling pack of hounds and mastiffs, was a light, upright and virginal Diana, and beside her, holding her hand, chosen for a strict resemblance, but older, grave and black-clad, with a star of gems that seems to be melting in the daylight into glittering droplets suspended between Heaven and Earth on rival rays, the somber and grandiose Hecate.

  Amid the quivering of long, undulating palm-fronds and the slow sound of cymbals and silvery bells, with bare-armed women with naked ankles dancing before her, the Queen of Sheba advanced, a tiara on her forehead, white veils embroidered with large imaginary flowers the color of sunset tumbling over the flanks of a black horse, her dull gold-tinted face the color of thirst-quenching fruits, the color of the liberating metal, the color of the bright tunics that the hours escorting the chariot of destiny wear.

  That was Rizpah—for custom dictated that all young women of grace, virtue and beauty should appear in the procession—effulgent among that gilded decor, with the softness of her delicate features, her welcoming lips and her eyes, softly burning in the bright amber of her face, which seemed changed, hardened and magnified. Among the undulating palms, and the angelic salute of graceful dances, and the tall stature of guards with sparkling shields and lances made of sheaves of silky flowers, and the multicolored dwarfs capering behind the guards, and amid the slow murmur of ad
miration that ran through the edges of the crowd, she stood up in her own right, more than herself, as her true esthetic incarnation.

  After her, after the variegated dwarfs, came the troop of chimeras, the bizarre masks in which humans dress up in their dreams, and in their knowledge—which is also a dream—of the humans of the distant past, of whom they know nothing. Moors, miscreants, black men, people of Cathay and Taprobane, Hyperboreans, Ogres, Giants from the Arabian deserts and mountains of Ethiopia, slingshot-wielders who fell mountain-demons, fishers of souls in seas of pink coral, and the black faces of those who dream for a hundred years in the hollow of a tree as vast as a forest, which is multiplied in the ground by a thousand verdant pillars—all of these masks mounted on oxen and donkeys or perched on stilts, yellow, red, green, shiny with enamel plaques, helmeted with iron saucepans: all the grotesquerie and strangeness of the distant, following, singing, crying out to the sounds of the flattest music.

  Then, after an interval, as if triumphant over this gathering of peoples, intercalated between the beauties of the city, its wealth, its science and them, marching preceded by a varlet bearing a star of gold on high, and a perch garlanded with lilies, came the three mage-kings followed by the four evangelists.

  In the wake of this figurative procession, after the beautiful forms and the beautiful colors of the past, after the images of strength and beauty and love, the image of number, after the emblems of the mind of the city, came the emblems of the city itself and its mighty banners, with its escutcheon of ships and lions, the banners of its guilds, borne by liveried standard-bearers, banners with the images of patron saints arranged in broad and profound lines before the populace—and before the human mass, which arrived singing and numerous, a man on horseback who was, for the day, the Prince of the People: an elected prince as ephemeral as the Prince of Lovers.