The Tale of Gold and Silence

by Gustave Kahn

  He too, that evening, after the festival and the empty pitchers, with a quotidian and negligent gesture, while fastening his ample sleeping-cloak, had to surrender his copper crown, and the scepter that was almost a mallet, and remove the plumes and decorative brasses from the horse’s harness. The people, who chose him to march at their head on that day of solemn, but also slightly mocking, rejoicing—for there is mockery in all collective joy—did not mean to confer honors upon him and to put him at their head, for any other purpose than amusing ceremonies. To be sure, the Prince of the People had to be popular, but that might as easily be for a fault as a virtue, for a particularity or an eccentricity; sometimes he was a foreigner that they desired to honor.

  The man who marched behind the banners that day, was primarily an object of curiosity to the people. Laurent Télice had recently arrived from afar, it was said, in a small ship decked in flags, coming upriver, with his crew singing joyfully. He had dropped anchor; he said that he would be staying in the city for a few days, and had swiftly become notorious, hunting with white Syrian falcons with golden eyes, accompanied on his excursions on the river by numerous pages emptying pint pots and filling even more for the thirsty throats of idlers in the city’s taverns, taking up residence in the most beautiful palace he could find, and opening it sumptuously to the many new friends he had rapidly made among the soldiery and young layabouts. He was liked for his virile elegance, his handsome face, his long blond curls falling over the shoulders of Atlas, his dexterity as a horseman, and the bravery with which he was widely credited by virtue of his penetrative blue eyes.

  Weeks went by for him in very evident enjoyment; then, for a few days, he no longer went out, his house remained closed, and all that was seen of him was the reddening the attic windows far into the night, and black smoke dissolving in the sky. After these brief withdrawals, he reappeared, renewed, rejuvenated and more prodigal. It was because he was prodigal that he was liked, and it was because he was more prodigal every time he came down from his attic rooms, that it was rumored that he was an alchemist, and that he knew how to make gold.

  He was not hated for that, nor endangered, but only excited jealousy. The city loved gold more than anything else—like every city, every village, every hamlet and every paltry or enormous group of poor earth-dwellers.

  Laurent, knowing what form the festival would take, brought up to date with its customs, had wanted to be the Prince of the People; he had begun with large disbursements, and had been for a few hours the god king who pours and slices for his people.

  In the great meadow, at a spot which the feet of the crowd have not trampled, among the white seed-bed of golden-hearted daisies, the new May Tree has been planted, and like its neighbors, aligned along a broad esplanade overlooking a bend in the river, it will grow, a sign of one more year’s prosperity, if no storms come to wither its branches with a grim blast, as happens to other trees.

  The priests, emerging from a large chapel built on the esplanade for that purpose, come forward, and amid the light smoke of a little incense, terrestrial vapor rising into the vapors of the sky, they bless it, and the Emperor thanks them. He is very close to the tree, the princess by his side; the young women of her retinue hold on to the garlands of the May Tree.

  It is the moment when the Prince of Lovers has to present himself and offer his homage to the May.

  Hail to the new May, which laughs upon so many lips

  beautiful or wise: the flowers of laughter

  in all the gardens of flesh are open

  in the hands of the divine goldsmith

  to Spring, a youth in a green cap

  who will grow in time to be Summer!

  He has come to the Church of Gladness to predict

  a year of joy for the beautiful city.

  The day has its stars; they twinkle in your eyes

  in the polished gleam of your brightness,

  O beauties divided by the dream of your fingers

  Slender and industrious!

  In avenues of trees and flowers, welcoming trees

  show the route to kings,

  show the route to knights,

  show the route to pious travelers

  who are heading directly for the Church of Gladness

  Tree of the new May—one more head of hair

  that the gentle evening wind will caress with kisses

  while the violet night will guide toward you

  corteges of balms that leave Arabia

  and traverse the world to bring to you

  their counsel of love, hope and adventure

  and inspire your benign hands, on bended knee,

  to gather joy in the shadow of the night.

  Tree of the new May, when your fruits come

  to crown your strong branches with heir tender freshness,

  and your leaves against the ardor midday Sun

  will be the shield, solid and fragile

  and fresh, to the sound of springs amid the garlic,

  ready alms for the traveler, that he might rest and eat

  and dream, even weary and dusty, that the Sabbath

  welcomes him to our city of hectic bells,

  tree of the new May, tree with sacred roots.

  Grow in the Mays of the future Sun;

  my love replete, my charming and harsh pain

  ended, concluding my exile far from words

  in which my Lady charms her mirror, and the mad vine

  of her scattered thoughts, by the scarlet and the songs,

  enable my hands to plant a rival beside you,

  tree of the new May: a tree scaling

  the white and blue Empyrean with branches of desire

  heavy with the garlands of triumphal crowns.

  And may its shadow cover the distant fields,

  and the tree of love be so tall, so vast,

  and such a blessed retreat, such an ardent cupola,

  that others who love, others whom emotion

  similar to mine, pieces and devastates the heart,

  might sleep at the whim of my victorious kiss,

  which will make a shadow around it, in which all hearts,

  might nestle in the frigid silence

  and love in tranquility, in tranquil delight,

  tree of my love with sacred roots!

  Then, Sire, your city, the city of Gold and Passion,

  will shine upon all the world’s hills; the horizons

  will gaze upon your great flamboyant pyre of joy

  and its bloodied tiles like lips lacerated

  by kisses. Behold the city with gates of love

  where joy holds its lamp high night and day,

  as straight and firm as the Sun,

  and the marvel of your city will be built

  higher than giants, towers and Babels,

  piers, churches and paradises of old.

  O Sire whose wisdom is served by Genius.

  The hours of my life sing from ground level,

  Princess, among the stones of the road, and the moss

  of sources in your forests!

  The hours of my voice are those of a sparrow

  which flutters and sings its pain and emotion,

  outside paradises guarded with heavy bars,

  rough against imprudent and overly direct leaps.

  But today is the fête of leaves and blades of grass,

  when nature opens its basilica

  to landings of trees, vaults of sunlight, pavements where sheaves

  might provide bread in abundance to the starving;

  concede grace to the poem of the Prince of Lovers.

  For you he has the eyes of entire nations,

  his voice declares the love of all, and then his own,

  a love without a pledge, a prayer,

  more than a desire and more than a vow, ancient love,

  swallow of the soul, which builds its nest beneath my eyelid.

  The Emperor had listened silently, stiff and
indifferent; he evidently did not like the music, and the last verses annoyed him. Powerful as he was, at this festival, semi-Saturnalian in the evening and popular by day, he was primarily a guest. Obviously, the poet had not strayed too far from the canon of poems of that sort: a compliment, an homage to the beauty of ladies of high rank were implicit therein; the imperial ears had often heard cruder ones—for the Prince of Lovers was not always a poet, but sometimes a soldier or an overly humorous songmaker—but today, this young man, with the serious face, the emotional tone and the handsome appearance, had indisposed the emperor. He took himself too seriously; his commencement had had something about it that was much too sacerdotal, his conclusion had been pronounced in a very intimate, very profound tone.

  Fragments of legend surfaced in the emperor’s memory, trivia distractedly overheard in the conversations of poets that the princess attracted to the palace. Oh yes, Princess Marie’s lover! That remained to be seen. The princess had listened too, with a very attentive expression—but that was of no importance. He looked sideways at the princess, who, according to the established ritual, her expression naïve and blank, only smiling with her eyes, was offering a red flower to the poet with her pretty and graceful hands. Immediately, and without further ado, she turned in an amicable manner to the Prince of the People, who said:

  “Sire Emperor, and you, Princess of power, grace and beauty, the city of joyful life and kind hospitality had decided that on this feast-day it should be a foreigner who makes a speech to you, doubtless to furnish you with the opportunity to amuse yourselves by the manner in which he travesties your mellifluous language. Nevertheless, the opportunity is infinitely welcome that permits me to express my profound respect and arrest your attention for a moment on your humble servant. I would rather have appeared before you in a fool’s cap, however, for such is my crown to me; and if such justice had been rendered to me, I would have said to the tree of May, the sovereign of this day, and to you, Sire Emperor, its vicar, everything that passed through my head, and my head produces witticisms and follies as sea-dunes produce thistles, gardens weeds, a stockbroker’s purse écus and your power, Sire Emperor, the abundance of all goods and the sign of grandeur, blessed Gold—accursed Gold, as has sometimes been murmured. Perhaps…but here it is blessed Gold.

  “It comes from distant seas on heavy ships from whose prows Neptune’s horses gallop incessantly. It comes from isles with pearly shores, aromatic forests, roads who ditches produce abundant spices, profound valleys in which diamonds and carbuncles flourish, where the birds are bubbles of gems. It comes to you from forests felled at the base, whose great oaks have fallen into your river. It comes to you from broad plains, which turn green and then yellow. It comes to you, a king’s ransom, under the guard of your cavaliers and a thousand chariots, bringing it to your charter. It comes to you from the Heavens, for the Heavens are witness to your piety and greatness. But above all, it comes to you from the City.

  “Your city is a crucible in which everything is amalgamated to make gold; you have in the palaces that surround your noble palace a thousand Midases who change everything into gold, and to whom no mythological punishment has ever been applied. The richest veins snake through your streets, and the merchants’ signs are, in truth, enormous vines entwined before their doors, which produce the grapes of the Hesperides. They extract gold from everything: from hunger, from thirst, from vanity, from love, from devotion, from gluttony, from sloth, and bring you your share scrupulously, for they fear their conscience as much as the hangman’s rope. All that they lack in order to be entirely happy is this: to extract gold from nothing at all. They are weary of giving something in exchange, in fatigue or thought; they would like to possess the philosopher’s stone.

  “Who will give it to them? Will it be under your ephemeral reign, Tree of May? Will it be your successor, one of your successors on a day of rejoicing, who will be acclaimed as the first tree of the Golden Age of paradise marching over the Earth among torches gleaming with metal? I would like it to be in our time that this good fortune be realized for all your people.

  “Hail to you, Sir Emperor, and to you, noble Princess, and hail to the city with the enormous walls and to the marvelous unknown that reveals the years of the future—and thank you to all you people whose goodwill desired my presence here, wise and sagacious people of the great city.”

  The Princess, with a smile that was a ray of sunlight over the ripening wheat, offered him a flower, as she had to the poet, but with more abandon, and the Emperor, who had listened smiling, thanked him with warm benevolence, and the high officers and the populace applauded and cheered, and the clergy considered him with a very indulgent curiosity.

  Chapter Three

  THE ASHEN TOWER

  That night, Samuel had a dream.

  Into the brown heaths of his soul, lit by a faint cold daylight, sad and harsh, people were coming. They were tasting the water of the river; they were turning toward the red-tinted hills that closed the horizon; they were planting the pegs of their tents and releasing horses that bounded toward the plateaux furnished with meager grass, and cooking-pots had been placed on the fires.

  All these people were small, with stern bushy beards, except for one of them, with a melancholy and weary expression, who let orders fall from his lips in a very low voice; but they extended their ears at close range and carried them out quickly. The chief soon had a large fire lit, near to which he shivered until a rapid flame reddened his face, and Samuel perceived that he resembled him slightly.

  The man who was warming himself—the fire twisted like a hydra in a hundred serpents of flame; then there was a bush whose scarlet branches were devoid of white and heat-sensitive flowers, and fragrances of mulberry and juniper and the rustic savor of resins—the man who rested in the warmth of that heat and light reached down and raised a trap-door at his feet; men with the same bushy beards, even smaller than the servants busy on the plain, climbed out therefrom. One by one he watched them appear, and each of them offered him a strange luminous flower, shining with scarlet, violet and orange fires, and the man dropped them disdainfully.

  Finally, one of these dwarfs begged his permission, humiliated himself and, picking up the flowers of light from the ground, wove a crown out of them, and the man allowed it to be placed on his head. The crown shone with a vivid gleam, whereupon all the servants scattered in the plain came running, making signs of child-like joy.

  Even paler and more morose, the man pointed to the open trap-door, and they soon came back up, carrying enormous blocks of raw metal. The man smiled, and then the dwarfs over all the surface of the ground threw up their hands in gestures of despair, and slipped away and disappeared—and the servants came up through the trap-door and went down again, always more heavily laden with valuable stones. Finally, the man made a weary gesture; then the servants lit another great fire. A kind of vertical blue and yellow curtain, in which points of gold were burning, rose up, and atoms of gold were leaping and rebounding from the ground in a long indented plume, and hammers made a hole in the silence, and sparks ignited tufts of grass that suddenly burst into flame with a dry crackle.

  An enormous crown with a harsh and continuous glare was formed. The man threw away the one the dwarfs has given him and put it on his head, and the beautiful unknown flowers of the rejected crown went out, with a plaintive crystalline hiss. When the last one was extinct, light wisps of a black-tinted mist gradually invaded the plain, and Samuel could see no more in the brown heaths of his soul than indecisive clouds.

  That shadow thinned out and became more ashen, then gray, then white, and it was no more than a brown-tinted fog—and a thin streak of dirty yellowish light appeared; then a deep red-brown gained substance, became a disk and then produced yellowing extensions on various sides. One might have thought that a spider was slowly stretching out long legs, barbed with other long and filamentous limbs, and the whole fog crackled—and through sudden fissures, Samuel perceived monstrous stain
ed faces, moving in the jaundiced light of a distant and somnolent Moon, from which the wind was slowly stripping the last white veils away.

  Then the faces became calmer, the water mobile, and, from a dolorous aurora about their cheeks, a pale aureole congealed around their faces; and the great confused eyes of a sphinx, as large as marshes with islets of vegetation, gazed at him; and the crowned man emerged from the fog, as if climbing the steps of a difficult stairway. An entire sparkling mountain abruptly appeared, sculpted from the base to the summit and guarded by a thousand sphinxes on all of its platforms.

  The crowned man tried to go up; then a sphinx, with a slow and indolent movement, shifted the entirety of its leonine body, as if it were emerging from the mountain, and barred his route. The man was forced to descend into the symmetrical and ornamented stones with which the slope of the mountain was lined and then go around the sphinx and make his way laboriously toward another platform—where, with a similar feline undulation, another sphinx barred his route. Up above, on the superior platform, a great triangle of light appeared, alive with singing voices and the forms of veiled women. The crowned man gazed at them, weeping and putting his hands together, and in his fervor, he stumbled, tripped and rolled to the bottom of the mountain.

  And something like a velum of bright and gilded mist, a compact sparkling wall, covered Samuel’s eyes completely.

  The wall gradually became a solar light. From its center, rays like immense scimitars shone more terribly red-gold on the mat gold background. Blue-tinted frissons furrowed it from end to end. It seemed to draw away slowly…slowly. It retreated…retreated, ever more resplendent, and seemed to seal the horizon.

  In the foreground, blackened forms had been swarming for a few seconds—in dream time—and when the wall of light was far enough away for the eye to be able to distinguish what was standing at its base, Samuel perceived that there was a forest; its branches and trees spiraled everywhere, and it grew; one might have thought it a sheet of lace applied to the golden mask from a distance.