But why was that message being proclaimed in that particular place at an hour when everyone was asleep, when there was the least chance of it being heard? For, resounding as those voices were, they were only resonating for the pines, the mimosas and the wild laburnums.
Certain ideas are so elevated, I thought, that they have to be enunciated in the immaculate hour that precedes the dawn, and have no need of any listener. And suddenly, I thought of the prayer of Eleutherius, which, by virtue of its power, had perhaps impregnated that earth and had made it a magical place. Then again, there was, in fact, a listener at that window, anguished and full of bitterness, but retaining, like an ember beneath the ashes, his desire to understand the world. At the thought that the song was resounding within me, I knelt down and put my hands together.
The annunciators continued their hymn. They revealed the beauty hidden behind changing forms, the immense labor of creatures enclosed in the prison of terrestrial envelopes and seeking to attain the degree of spirit to which each might aspire, in accordance with its effort.
They proclaimed that life is woven with threads of dolor, that every step forward is a wrench in the flesh, a wound in the soul, but that it is nevertheless necessary to advance, for the law is immutable. But they announced the light. There is a light for everyone, which becomes brighter and more beautiful as one discovers it. And it is in suffering that everyone must find his own.
And then my light appeared to me materially. The trees of the garden emerged from the darkness and were outlined against a mobile blue. An impalpable glow, which gave the impression of being produced by their branches, enveloped them. Thousands of tiny drops of dew, invisible until then, became brilliant, lit up like the lamps of a minuscule fairyland, but expanded to infinity. The garden emerged from the mysterious bath of the night, rejuvenated and purified.
And I too had to purify myself. I had gone back down the road of desire. After an attempt to raise myself up, to attain the realm of the spirit, the ineffable realm where the blissful reside, penetrated by serene wisdom and divine love, I had descended again, intoxicated by physical form and the promise of pleasure. I had exchange pure gold for base matter. I had betrayed the cause of God.
My God, how long the road is! How distant perfection is! How fugitive the spirit is! And what traps are extended for us! There is the very beauty that is in the faces of women, the ineffable color of gazes, and the harmony of attitudes. And that beauty is deceptive. It leads us along the retrograde path, toward the material joy of the senses, the blind pleasure whose terminus is oblivion. How to know? How to recognize the good road?
Meanwhile, the light continued to engender itself. Every blade of grass was impregnated by it, and every leaf emitted a little radiation. Every flower had an aureole as a sign of sanctity.
Then I slapped my forehead and reproached myself for my pride. I had thought that the hymn of the bird and the insect were for my exclusive intention. I understood that it was nothing of the sort, that it was resounding for the entire portion of the earth susceptible of perceiving it. For I had the awareness of an immense attention of arboreal creatures: those that lived in the flower beds and the cracks in bark, the inhabitants of the bushes, the ditches and the dust, the trees themselves, the vegetables, the parasites of the vegetables and the confused personality of the stones.
The annunciation of perfection in progress, the duty of working toward the spirit beneath the hard carapace of successive forms was proclaimed to all the beings animated by a current of life, no matter how rudimentary. And all of them were waiting, all of them were listening to the living speech of the messengers.
The wood of the trees creaked. Droplets of gum trickled over the trunk of the pine, and every drop glittered with a fragment of soul-light extracted from the earth by the roots and mutated into solar matter along the channels of the wood. The flowers extended their pistils like supplicant arms. I heard the delicate sound of calices bursting forth in a surge of amour. I saw the antennae of insects agitating in the grass, and sometimes the circle of a flight attested to the intoxication of a dragonfly, the hopeful impulse of a scarab prey to the dream of scaling the sky. The turtle was running hither and yon. A white cat with phosphorescent eyes had leapt on to a gatepost and was crouching there as if pinned by an invisible arrow.
With what an immeasurable amour were the living beings earth and the air attentive! A purity was floating that I had never felt. It was in the design of the veins of leaves, the crystallization of drops of dew, the fluidity of the air penetrated by the presence of the rising sun. I understood that I was participating in a mystical mass celebrated by two creatures animated by the gift of expressing God, a mass for the usage of trees, insects and flowers—and perhaps also for the kneeling man, because the profound speech of the great sounds made by nature is addressed equally to everything that lives beneath the sky.
THE RETURN OF THE SUBLIME FRIENDS
It was a little later, when the sun had already appeared and the morning was already advanced, that I perceived an unaccustomed activity in the house. I had slept, without being able to remember at what moment I had lain down fully dressed on my bed. The window was still open. There was a great peace within me. But what were those sounds, those whisperings, those presences? I was breathing a different air than the day before.
I shouted “Antoinette!” but there was no response. Antoinette arrived early, prepared the coffee, made a simulacrum of order, and then went to the market. I thought that she had already gone. In that case I could not explain the animation of sorts that had reached me, and as the opposite of the sense of solitude.
I ran down the narrow staircase that connected my bedroom to the spacious room on the ground floor that was simultaneously the library, the dining room and the drawing room.
I saw immediately that the cutlery and bottles of the previous evening’s dinner had disappeared. But I stopped, open-mouthed, on the steps, so surprised was I by the spectacle that struck my eyes.
I have scarcely formulated those words that I take account of their inexactitude. There was no spectacle, and in reality, I did not see anything. I was, however, witness to something extraordinary.
The books, which had disappeared without anyone taking them away, which had by means of I know not what inconceivable magic been removed from my sight, were back in place. They were offering themselves; they were splendid; they were displaying their striped spines and their labels, on which golden letters shone. And I saw, filling the room, coming from the garden, heading toward the books and disappearing into them, without my being able to explain the mystery of that union, the authors of the books, the philosophers and sages that I had neglected for long days.
In truth, I cannot say that I saw them. I am certain that, if I had finished descending the stairway, I would not have been able to touch them. No, I would not have seized Socrates’ mantle, if I had had the audacity to make the gesture, before he was absorbed into the Phaedo bound in dark green. And yet they were there. They had come back. I saw Socrates’ maroon wool mantle floating.
And they were slightly different. They were accessible. They no longer had the closed faces that were familiar to me; they were no longer similar to silent enigmas. I cannot explain either their manner of existence or the mystery of that presence, nor the relationship that united them with their books, the symbols of their thought, as they emerged from those books or reentered them, as people emerge from and reenter human dwellings. No, I can’t explain it, but they were there.
In any case, what’s the point of trying to explain it? Everything in life is a mystery. And the operation that consists of making a large plant emerge from a seed is much more astonishing than the presence in your house of long-dead wise men. Besides which, isn’t the true miracle in the fact that thoughts that are vast and ungraspable, which embrace the stars, can be combined and condensed on small areas of paper and can, at will, spring forth, expand and embrace the stars again.
Thanks to thos
e presence, certain things that I had not understood until then became clear. The resemblance of certain teachings given at intervals of thousands of centuries, in different parts of the world, were clarified by the resemblance of their authors. The distant Hindu who had written the Bhagavad Gita on sheets of bark with the tip of a reed, had almost the same features—a kind of family resemblance—with the monastic author of the Imitation of Christ. One had his hair in long braids and the other a tonsure, but both had in their features the same modesty, the detachment from all things that they taught as the shortest way to attain the divine world.
Jewish prophets passed as if under a door through the striped green spine of an enormous volume entitled The Sacred Books of All Religions. They had long hair. Some were haggard and their eyes were sparkling. They had a family resemblance with the philosopher Nietzsche. In his skeletal thinness, the Tibetan ascetic Milarepa was similar to various Christian ascetics. With similar frock-coats, Goethe and Carlyle had analogous silhouettes.
There were some who were exchanging winks, and at least had a certain malignity in common. They were making signs that they had deliberately employed in an abstract style in order not to be understood, and also to appear greater. Those winks were saying: It is appropriate to dupe limited men slightly.
And they were divided up into families. There were the desperate sages, authors of thoughts moving and icy at the same time, like Pascal and Marcus Aurelius. There were those who had enclosed themselves in a cosmogony of stone, like Lao Tsu, and smiling sages ready to accept ministerial posts, like Confucius. Descartes was an exception in carrying a sword and, in any case, perhaps because of that useless weapon, he did not seem much considered.
I was astonished to see them so numerous. But those who had not written were brought by the authors of books in which there was mention of them. Their thoughts were mingled intimately, and yet they retained their personal character.
I heard speech:
“I was only an adolescent,” said Proclus, “when Minerva appeared to me to consecrate me to the spirit.”
“I had the amity of angels, with whom I was able to converse when I pleased throughout my life,” said Swedenborg, “and even now, I only have to call them...”
“The angels, who know better than me who has written the Divine Names and established the differences of the hierarchies,” said Dionysius the Areopagite.
“Bah! Angels! Only the work counts,” said a monk of short stature with myopic eyes. “Who can boast of having written, like me, forty quarto volumes?”
“I don’t see them here,” said a voice, ironically.
“It’s an oversight. They’ve just been reprinted by the Carthusians.”
“Whereas I can see The Imitation of the Life of Poverty.”
“The Response to the Forty Questions of the Soul,”
“The Tree of Life.”
“The Man of Desire.”
“The Ethics.”
“I’m wondering whether it’s necessary to write books. I am the man who has been called the unknown superior, the man who came one night to instruct Tauler of the truth and disappeared without giving his name. It was me who interrupted Jacob Boehme, as a child, while he was nailing soles on shoes in order to announce the grandeur of his mission.”20
And, saying these various things, they all disappeared. A bee starting flying around in the middle of the room. I felt a great serenity. The books were in their place, each with its spiritual promise. I touched them. I moved a few of them around. What joys they held enclosed! But the Enneads only had three volumes...
MADAME TOURNADIEU
“Did she at least apologize?” asked Madame Tournadieu. And as she posed that question, a crease furrowed her brow and she took on the appearance of an administrator of justice.
I replied that she had apologized by a note sent the following day, and that it was of no importance.
“To you! To do that to you! In your place…and note that she came to me almost bragging about it.”
She made the gesture of cutting of a head with the back of her hand.
“And why? I ask you? To go strolling in the moonlight with your friend, the one who dresses badly. It’s better to laugh about it.”
Under the pretext of a slight threat of rain, Madame Tournadieu had taken me into a little drawing room full of cushions.
“It’s here that I come to sit down to dream. Don’t you think that there are certain natures that are a little, or very far, from being understood, like Christ?”
“What do you mean?”
“When I dream here all alone, it seems to me that, like Christ, I take all the sins of human beings upon me. I suffer for them. It depends on the days. When the evening is stormy, like this evening, I feel more keenly the evil that has been done. I’m not talking about bad actions directed against me. I always forgive. Such is my nature. I feel above all the harm done to others. Thus, for example, I find that Roseline’s conduct has been unworthy.”
Again, Madame Tournadieu made the gesture of cutting off a head.
“And I can see her game very well. Anyway, you can see it yourself. She wants to make that handsome fellow, that Grimaldi with whom she goes out, jealous. He’s a handsome fellow but I believe him to be of very vulgar extraction. That’s obvious at a glance. The jaw isn’t deceptive as to the origin. In any case, what does it matter? Roseline will be punished.”
The idea of an imprecise and vast punishment put a smile of triumph on Madame Tornadieu’s face.
I was in haste to withdraw,
“I have to work,” I had said, on coming in. I repeated it.
“Oh, how you work! I’m sure that you work too hard. Do you know what you need? I know what you need. You need a twin soul beside you. Oh, don’t protest! I’m not talking about that vulgar companion that men have to take care of their hearth, washing and meals. I’m thinking about the exceptional creature that you need...a woman who will protect you from evil influences, who will prevent harm from reaching you, who will be a little like Jesus Christ. Well? Isn’t that the companion you need?”
Madame Tornadieu’s eyes were bright and slightly moist. She was looking at me intently, and I had no difficulty in divining that she believed that she was bringing to bear a magnetic force whose power she attributed to herself. One day, I had seen on her table beside her deck of cards books entitled The Marvels of the Will, The Miracle of the Gaze and Power at a Distance. I knew that Madame Tournadieu claimed to communicate with her sister in Paris without making use of the obsolete means of correspondence. She attributed a great authority to herself, which was only manifest in the invisible.
I was only thinking about the joy of being outside and walking alone under the pines. My eyelids fluttered and I took on, for a few seconds, the appearance of a weak man who might perhaps need to have a female Christ beside him. However, I reached the threshold in the midst of a bath of fluids.
“Thinkers like you need reflections and meditations to make decisions,” said Madame Tournadieu, casting a melancholy glance at the cushions of her divan, like a general gazing at a useless army after a battle that has not been fought. “Yes, they’re children, veritable children...”
I did in fact have a desire to start running, like a child.
“That large cloud is threatening. You’d do better to wait until all threat of rain has disappeared.”
“That large cloud will certainly burst within five minutes. I’ll try to get home before then.”
THE AGRIPPA,
ALSO KNOWN AS THE EGROMUS
I had received a note from Monsieur Spéluque asking me to come and see him urgently. It concluded: I have something admirable to show you.
I felt remorse in his regard. I left for Fréjus immediately.
As soon as I was in his library, I saw his gaze light up, as it does when in the presence in the presence of someone to whom one is about to surprise with an unexpected revelation.
He got up from the seat he occupied behi
nd his table, and could not prevent himself from gesticulating.
“Well, there it is!” he said, in a triumphant tone. “At least I know the dimension of the mystery that we were seeking the other day. At any rate, I have information on that subject.”
I was seized by a fit of frankness. I was weary of playing the game of silence with him and making a semblance of understanding something of which I had no idea. I confessed to him that my decision to install myself in the locality did not come from a particular knowledge of an occult order. It was chance alone that had brought me. But since I had arrived I had been witness to certain inexplicable phenomena. I scarcely dared formulate the assertion that one evening, I had understood the language of animals. There was something abnormal, although I did not know what, connected to the influence of the area. I was incapable of explaining clearly what I meant. I merely sensed that there was a mystery, and I would be very glad to have the key to it.
Monsieur Spéluque looked at me for a long time in silence and I understood that he was wondering whether he was dealing with a wily individual, a stupid one, or a sincere one. Perhaps he concluded that I was all three. But how can one stop when one has composed in one’s mind a thesis to which one attributes a character of brilliance?
“By chance! You’re telling me that you came here by chance? How do you know? There is no chance. You’re a link in a chain. You’ve promised me to attain the truth. But what’s surprising is that we’re alone, or almost alone, in seeing and marveling. That’s the power of conformism. If Jesus Christ, preceded by an angel, were to walk through the streets of Fréjus, everyone would think it was a joke, and the next morning, those who said timidly that they had seen him would be treated as lunatics. Go tell them, then, that you once understood the language of animals, and that there are gnomides that come out of caves nearby!”
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