by Gustave Kahn
In a single instant, he relived the most painful moments of his life.
The evening after the festival, when the Emperor and Princess Marie had emerged from their palace to walk among the crowds in the main square, neither one had paid any heed to his religious bow; both were still talking, at length, about his rival, Prince of the People, dressed that day entirely in red and surrounded by quivering buffoons. The latter quit the large elm beneath which he was drinking, cup still in hand, in order to joke and laugh with the sovereigns and the high officials.
The curiosity of the princess was satisfied on hearing that Prince of Fools tell stories of his arrivals in distant lands, and his search for happiness in all lands—and the Princess’s eyes, at that moment, during the banal narrative, were no less candidly pensive, her mouth no less subdued by silence, and her clear face no less calmed by profound meditation, than when listening to songs awaken in timeless reveries.
What did he know about banal narratives? Did not the entire city listen—more willingly than to his songs, which only young lovers, and only in moments of passion, picked out—to the brief stories of the voyager who had come, had seen and had left to see something else, his gaze and his speech ever victorious, and his hands always open. Oh, they were not the flowers of the old man in his dream, who fell upon them at every occasion, during every pause, brief or long, but the Gold of various and different effigies, the gold of the princes of the Earth, the gold of wages, the gold of powers, the word ambition ductilized, desire simplified, one of the currencies of Force.
In the large square, shadowed by beeches, which advanced in a triangle of coolness and light upon the mildness of the river, where Laurent Télice, the Prince of the People, was speaking and laughing, he had seen Old Ezra. Ezra had come over to him briefly, then had led him closer to Laurent. They had listened momentarily, and then resumed their walk.
Before Ezra’s gaze, it was as if all the people there were projected on a screen, in judgment before the eternal—but Master Ahasver was sitting not far from Laurent, chatting with him gaily.
Samuel had questioned Ezra about that; the latter had told him: “Asverus is a sage; it’s because he is a sage that he keeps company with fools of that sort, who are only fools for some, and seem perfectly reasonable to the majority of people. They know that life is short; we know that it is not—but we are both right, and logical, according to our point of departure.”
In Samuel’s eyes, the city was oscillating with the scarlet rumor of fires of joy. In every back-street, light sprang from open doors, illuminated windows and lanterns perched on strong beams, producing a whole strip of artificial daylight with rare shadowy corners. Only the points of the roofs reached the night. Around fountains of wine and beer, in the vicinity straw-padded clowns, eyes raised toward scintillating acrobats, the crowds laughed at their ease. Outside taverns decorated with green branches they delighted in storyteller’s tales, soldiers’ bluster, the charades of wits and the merry clucking of singers.
A physical wellbeing and material ease fanned the imaginations of the host. Everyone was cheerful and happy. Next to men whose eyes were closing slightly with fatigue and good cheer, women walked slowly, in groups, with a slightly shrill gaiety, dissolving into excessive laughter beneath their calm, enervated and expectant expressions, as if they were still only watching the prologue of the Comedy. The simplest beggars lit up an entire crossroads with joy. In the large squares, chains of dancers of both sexes swirled around, and in the delightful and fertile cool of the evening and the earth, embalmed serenity departed from the plain, the river and gardens to drift over the city.
Weary, Samuel had headed for a garden beside the river, planted with old chestnut trees, in order to shelter his solitary sadness from all that tinkling pleasure. He leaned on the wall; a few bright-lit boats were already drawing away toward the villages. The wind, messenger of the bright folly in the distance, brought him bursts of musical notes; then only the sounds of the water and the foliage lapped within his melancholy.
Black clouds gathered together to immure the stars; on the quay that bordered the other side of the river the smoky ruddy light of torches picked out running pink fauns. A flash of lightning sprang from a cloud, splitting the black curtain, and the city appeared to him as a dismal series of white cubes.
In the triple flash of another lightning-strike he perceived a chariot of violence launched into an avenue of tombs.
The distant scraps of music, the stars that allowed themselves to fall into the immense net of shadow, the sparks of torches that extended along the quay to fade away in the city, the bright squares of light in the houses that closed one by one like drowsy eyes, the still-distant rumbling of thunder and the dull din of the distant agitation, placed themselves within his mind at the extreme limit of the apprehension of misfortune. Under the whiplash of the lightning he saw the entire city again, and its towers and domes, and then the pale furnace of its lights—and it was a colossal and multiple hypogea, in which people were still stirring before the ultimate sleep.
Under the whiplash of the lightning, it was a city beside a river descending to the sea, its hands abandoning the lives of men and cargoes to the sinuous banks: warehouses without end, the good news contained descending slowly toward the loading-docks, the perspectives of harbors and havens, toward the islands and continents beyond the sea, toward other huddled phantoms welcoming the haste of the specters from here, conversing with them, inanely, about trivia, exchanging their insipid chimeras.
It was a cage in which a thousand fireflies were buzzing around the torches in whose gold they were doomed to die, bringing their bodies of snow and sackcloth and their blazing eyes—dots as brilliant as the fire, but which could not see the fire—to the cage whose form modeled all the flights of Ephemerae; and those which did not perish entirely in the flame crawled on the ground, or ended up on the viscous bank.
And the insufficient warning-light of the Moon fled into the clouds, as if masked, a mediocre adviser or a witness to everything, forever pale—and with what fatigue, or what ennui, if it has only to wander over the same cakes of wax, so regularly honeycombed, with the same passion, the same tedium, the same destiny, in the depths of all those little gulfs?
The stormy Night appeared to him, over the pale city, like a threat, and the minutes charged with malaise passed over his tense nerves.
“O City,” he thought, “where a few sounds of harps have sown necklaces of blonde pearls, in exiling themselves to infinity, City where beautiful faces have gazed at the Wanderer, which is forever renewed and marches on, from their windows garlanded with emblems of hope, you can offer a man a crystal cup and draw from your cellars the wine of love and duration, but you hold nothing in your hands but a copper plate covered with coarse aliments.
“O City, your hands ought to be those of a beautiful and robust woman scarcely entered into her prime, and the savor of your aspect would make the thin soup that your present to the guest pleasant—but your hands are stiff and wrinkled, those of an old woman, harassed and plastered.
“City, your sons ought to be densely gathered around you, attentive in the evening to music and strength, smiling and moved by the beauty and truth they are able to perceive—but you have no sons any longer; you have only guests, and when you open your threshold to them, it is in a banal whitewashed chamber, without effigies on the walls, without palms at the doors, without beauty in the lamp, that you direct them to an empty corner ,and a cloak with which to warp themselves and await the dream.
“And the dream, in your home, which could descend in a light veil of perfume and grace from the crowns of cedars, to refresh with the broad waters of pure springs, comes to our sleep timid and dwarfed, as if emerging painfully from a gray cell in which a spider extends interminable webs.
“When you sing, it is not with the large and free voice of someone summarizing your land, your sky and your temples; you repeat old counsels and judgments. You do not walk in the great folia
ge of a park; you sit down and crouch in the depths of a meager garden, near a shallow well in which you sometimes see your image—you and a few branches of the petty tree that shades it—and your guest becomes breathless and chokes between your bushy borders, if he is a poet, if he is the messenger for whom you seem to be waiting.
“When he is close to you, you raise your eyes to the Heavens and you wait…in an irritating silence you pretend to be unaware of his presence and the fact that his hands are extended toward the folds of your dress, and you interrogate the luminous and empty sky with the blue vacuity of your pupils—and if he persists, if his cry has been loud enough, piercing enough, violent enough to disturb the slothful harmony of your vague reverie, you call the priests and the doctors, those whom you adorn with the heavy embroideries of your winter nights, and ask them whether a new truth is shining, and what has been discovered beneath the peristyles of the palace of the stars.
“It is your bleak science to interrogate the truth when the guest has summoned it, when the guest so soon misunderstood arrives charged with nothing but wonder for beauty, and your balances have judged him insufficient. When he turns away, dolorously, when he has departed once again by hard pathways into your plain, you reopen the gymnasia in which our learned men trace equal squares in the sand, in order to ask where beauty is.
“I know full well that large kitchens extend behind that gray house, and that huge quarters of meat are roasting over the enormous forces that you can light, and the glory of your skill as a housekeeper and farmer’s wife, storing enormous amounts of grain; I know that—and also your harvesters’ dances, and the brim-full glasses that your cooks drink; and every evening, after the crimson mantle of the Sun has unraveled, you dream momentarily, and from your balustrades you follow with a little sadness the dull vintagers of light disappearing over the horizon.
“Melancholy! Melancholy! Vain custom, vain habit! When you lean on your elbows and wait, if nothing that moves you is profiled on the black screen of night, you know that nothing will arrive, and that is what your serene majesty of expectations contrives. No light comes in the night, nothing rises at dusk, nothing can match your moment, O queen of futile and servile fatigue.
“And if you are genuinely pleased by the jewels of the evening, the mobile pink pools that it paints on the glass rooftops of your pavilions, do you not have at that very moment the certainty that you will not fail to forget them before the last glow-worm expires? And you go up to your terraces, with the confident and dignified gesture of someone who can look without being smitten, and you are already thinking about being firm and grave and robust in the dawn, an active overseers of labors in which you take pride, to make sure that all the debris of butterflies come from who knows where to your veridical, fateful and destructive torch is swept away.
“If the servants show you a body in the current of the river that washes the dependencies of your great gray house, which is descending slowly among the clumps of grass, you will not recognize the guest of yesterday, the man who spoke to you about beauty, and whom you did not want to hear.”
Samuel’s sadness was eased by the accuracy of his thoughts. He was alone in the empty place, under the old somber chestnut-trees, beside the murmur of the water, whose tenuousness is associated for humans with the idea of gentleness, before the city that had been brutally sonorous a little while before, but was now unfastening its necklaces of light with weary fingers.
The tiaras and lofty diadems of the city, its towers and its domes, were gradually attained by the devouring shadow, and the lamps that were going out, having flickered, were being touched one by one by a finger of ash.
The sadness of terminated festivals is like an unexpected solitude and an ineluctable destruction. That ascendant shadow increased the opaque horizons of the young man’s soul, already so sad, and his sadness became dolor—perhaps mistakenly, for every festival comes to an end; none is ever a festival of happiness, and today’s dolor was no more acute, and ought not to have been any more profound, than yesterday’s because he was alone, because it was the palace he had chosen as the threshold that he wanted to cross. But what did that matter? Is not a man who is dying by virtue of his own fault suffering as much as one struck down by destiny, in the logical and habitual course of affairs? All agony remains agony.
Samuel became weary of the bland silence and went back toward the city. The quays were still enlivened by cordial farewells; at ground level the sights of shining taverns and the sound of tankards and voices rang out; dark back-streets were languishing. In the smaller squares, like reddening embers of the fête, there were joyous encounters under the branches, murmured songs and words of love as people gradually got a grip on themselves after the noise and general merriment, and tardy children picked up crowns from the ground.
The acridity of Samuel’s dolor increased. Did all those contended people, all those wheedling women, not understand that tomorrow, hard labor would again unroll its oily waves? Had all of them accepted servitude and the imprisonment of their dreams in exchange for one day of merriment? The laborer would take up the plough in the same place; the weavers would recommence the squirrel-play of the shuttle in their cellars, their sad uninterrupted song repeating like the threads of their fabric:
The days are woven with black and white threads.
The shuttle of time mingles them indifferently.
All of them would be marching to their sentry-boxes, their shops, their palaces, to their courtyards and workshops, with the same mechanical step, to the same refrain, very nearly, as the night-watchman who announces the inevitable march of the hours.
As for Samuel, it was as if a distant beacon-light in his life, until then sufficient, had gone out; as if a cord of love, a solid fiber of his being, had broken inside him.
“Oh, City, sleep monotonously in your network of ennui: I shall be like you, sad and grave, and go mad for one day of the year. I shall be like you, monotonous and bored; the shuttle of my life will bound like a squirrel in a low, closed room, and if I should see a ray of sunlight filtering through the ventilation shaft, I shall cry, like them: ‘Oh! The enormous disk that warms me and burns me!’ And if some child should throw a poor dandelion flower down the ventilation shaft, I shall cry: Greetings Sun, the color of God; greetings, color of gold, reflection of the solar fire; greetings, perfumed gardens, circuses of flowers, festive mountains, delight of all ringing bells! Ha ha!’”
And he laughed, somewhat dolorously.
A shrill fanfare of fifes, lively Basque drums and little bells rang out; a procession emerged, and there, amid the dancing clowns and madly singing girls, solid and enormous in his one-day scarlet, was that hearty fellow, the gay Prince of the People, red and breathless from singing and shouting, with a mallet in his hand. Samuel could not avoid them, and amid the laughter, a beautiful girl shouted: “Here’s the Prince of Lovers, all alone!”
And laughter bust forth—not hostile, but drunken.
“It is, Seigneur,” a buffoon cried, “a grave infraction of our laws for the Prince of Lovers to be encountered, at the Festival of May, so solitary, brooding like a catafalque, and so poorly lit by the reflections of good wine.”
A beautiful girl came toward him. “O timid Prince of Lovers, you have missed all your rendezvous with the joys of this evening...”
“That’s true,” said others. “We’ve lost sight of you...”
“Poets seek pools of shadow in brought daylight, and the Sun by night,” said the other.
“Truce! Peace, even!” cried Laurent. “Our two majesties will drink together; at the hour of our eclipse, let us be united, so that out two natures might stumble into obscurity together. Come to my palace, Seigneur Samuel, which will soon be full of cups, jokes, and all these beauties.”
“Thank you, Seigneur, but I’m tired and want to go home.”
“At least, Seigneur, you’ll do us justice here; here’s my majesty’s tankard, borne by my trusty follower.” And a man approached,
carrying a tankard and a cup.
“Thank you, Seigneur,” Samuel relied, firmly, “but I won’t drink and I won’t go with you—I’m tired.”
“It’s just come back to me,” cried Laurent, “that you’re an acrimonious seigneur, discontented that the world is not in step with you. The mildest of men would be offended this evening by your dark expression around my pardonable and legitimate gaiety. That might cause grief between us, but if it pleases you, let’s drown the dispute, so that we’ll have forgotten it tomorrow.”
“Neither promises of pleasure nor threats can prevent me from retiring, Seigneur.”
“You’ll doubtless find yourself in worse company; my buffoons are certainly worth as much as your reciter of familiar nonsense.”
“That’s enough, Seigneur.”
“I think so too—we’ll see one another again tomorrow.”
“Now! Now!” cried a female voice. “Now—and we’ll laugh afterwards!”
“I have no desire to laugh, I assure you,” said Samuel. “Let me be.”
A buffoon had taken Laurent aside to calm him down, and everyone had started to dance around Samuel, laughing and singing, when Samuel, addressing Laurent, cried: “Messire, it’s insolent and cowardly to make a fool of me by means of your valets, instead of drawing your sword...”
And Laurent came forward, sword in hand.
Their combat frightened the women, who began screaming. Their blades clashed, and their animosity increased at the unexpected contact of the weapons. Anger mounted within them. Undoubtedly, they were obscurely aware of their fatal enmity, of the latent hatred between the poor poet, reflective, all mind and passion, and the agile adventurer, all nerve, movement, ambition and egotism. It was no longer the hostility of two men, one of whom had been greeted more kindly by a princess admired by both; they were no longer merely rivals of a day, but enemies of all time, the man of intellect and the man of action—and their swords clashed.
