The Inferno

by Henri Barbusse

  “It was because her voice and the poems had been vibrating with life and because the ardour and delirium of our love had adorned my rhymes with all their charms, that they seemed so beautiful. But all that was past, and in reality our love was no more.

  “It was oblivion that I read at the same time as I read my book. Yes, death had been contagious. My verses had remained there too long, sleeping down below there in awful peace – in the sepulchre into which I should never have dared to enter if love had still been alive. She was indeed dead.

  “I thought of what a useless and sacrilegious thing I had done and how useless and sacrilegious everything is that we promise and swear to here below.

  “She was indeed dead. How I cried that night. It was my true night of mourning. When you have just lost a beloved there is a wretched moment, after the brutal shock, when you begin to understand that all is over, and blank despair surrounds you and looms like a giant. That night was a moment of such despair when I was under the sway of my crime and the disenchantment of my poems, greater than the crime, greater than everything.

  “I saw her again. How pretty she was, with her bright, lively ways, her animated charm, her rippling laugh, the endless number of questions she was always asking. I saw her again in the sunlight on the bright lawn. She was wearing a dress of old rose satin, and she bent over and smoothed the soft folds of her skirt and looked at her little feet. (Near us was the whiteness of a statue.) I remembered how once I had for fun tried to find a single flaw in her complexion. Not a spot on forehead, cheek, chin – anywhere. Her skin was as smooth as if it had been polished. I felt as though that exquisite delicate face were something ever in flight that had paused for an instant for my sake, and I stammered, almost with tears in my voice, 'It is too much! It is too much!' Everybody looked on her as a princess. In the streets of the town the shopkeepers were glad to see her pass by. Did she not have a queenly air as she sat half-reclining on the great carved stone bench in the park, that great stone bench which was now a kind of empty tomb?

  “For a moment in the midst of time I knew how much I had loved her, she who had been alive and who was dead, who had been the sun and who was now a kind of obscure spring under the earth.

  “And I also mourned the human heart. That night I understood the extremes of what I had felt. Then the inevitable forgetfulness came, the time came when it did not sadden me to remember that I had mourned.

  ***

  “That is the confession I wanted to make to you, Anna. I wanted this story of love, which is a quarter of a century old, never to end. It was so real and thrilling, it was such a big thing, that I told it to you in all simplicity, to you who will survive. After that I came to love you and I do love you. I offer to you as to a sovereign the image of the little creature who will always be seventeen.”

  He sighed. What he said proved to me once more the inadequacy of religion to comfort the human heart.

  “Now I adore you and you alone – I who adored her, I whom she adored. How can there possibly be a paradise where one would find happiness again?”

  His voice rose, his inert arms trembled. He came out of his profound immobility for a moment.

  “Ah, you are the one, you are the one – you alone.”

  And a great cry of impotence broke from him.

  “Anna, Anna, if you and I had been really married, if we had lived together as man and wife, if we had had children, if you had been beside me as you are this evening, but really beside me!”

  He fell back. He had cried out so loud that even if there had been no breach in the wall, I should have heard him in my room. He voiced his whole dream, he threw it out passionately. This sincerity, which was indifferent to everything, had a definite significance which bruised my heart.

  “Forgive me. Forgive me. It is almost blasphemy. I could not help it.”

  He stopped. You felt his will-power making his face calm, his soul compelling him to silence, but his eyes seemed to mourn.

  He repeated in a lower voice, as if to himself, “You! You!”

  He fell asleep with “You” on his lips.

  ***

  He died that night. I saw him die. By a strange chance he was alone at the last moment.

  There was no death rattle, no death agony, properly speaking. He did not claw the bedclothes with his fingers, nor speak, nor cry. No last sigh, no last flash.

  He had asked Anna for a drink. As there was no more water in the room and the nurse happened to be away at that moment, she had gone out to get some quickly. She did not even shut the door.

  The lamplight filled the room. I watched the man's face and felt, by some sign, that the great silence at that moment was drowning him.

  Then instinctively I cried out to him. I could not help crying out so that he should not be alone.

  “I see you!”

  My strange voice, disused from speaking, penetrated into the room.

  But he died at the very instant that I gave him my madman's alms. His head dropped back stiffly, his eyeballs rolled. Anna came in again. She must have caught the sound of my outcry vaguely, for she hesitated.

  She saw him. A fearful cry burst from her with all the force of her healthy body, a true widow's cry. She dropped on her knees at the bedside.

  The nurse came in right after her and raised her arms. Silence reigned, that flashing up of incredible misery into which you sink completely in the presence of the dead, no matter who you are or where you are. The woman on her knees and the woman standing up watched the man who was stretched there, inert as if he had never lived. They were both almost dead.

  Then Anna wept like a child. She rose. The nurse went to tell the others. Instinctively, Anna, who was wearing a light waist, picked up a black shawl that the nurse had left on a chair and put it around her.

  ***

  The room, so recently desolate, now filled with life.

  They lit candles everywhere, and the stars, visible through the window, disappeared.

  They knelt down, and cried and prayed to him. The dead man held command. “He” was always on their lips. Servants were there whom I had not yet seen but whom he knew well. These people around him all seemed to be lying, as though it was they who were suffering, they who were dying, and he were alive.

  “He must have suffered a great deal when he died,” said the doctor, in a low voice to the nurse, at a moment when he was quite near me.

  “But he was so weak, the poor man!”

  “Weakness does not prevent suffering except in the eyes of others,” said the doctor.

  ***

  The next morning the drab light of the early day fell upon the faces and the melancholy funeral lights. The coming of the day, keen and cold, had a depressing effect upon the atmosphere of the room, making it heavier, thicker.

  A voice in a low apologetic tone for a moment interrupted the silence that had lasted for hours.

  “You mustn't open the window. It isn't good for the dead body.”

  “It is cold,” some one muttered.

  Two hands went up and drew a fur piece close. Some one rose, and then sat down again. Some one else turned his head. There was a sigh.

  It was as if they had taken advantage of these few words to come out of the calm in which they had been concealed. Then they glanced once more at the man on the bier – motionless, inexorably motionless.

  I must have fallen asleep when all at once I heard the church bells ringing in the grey sky.

  After that harassing night there was a relaxation from rigid attention to the stillness of death, and an inexplicable sweetness in the ringing of the bells carried me back forcibly to my childhood. I thought of the countryside where I used to hear the bells ringing, of my native land, where everything was peaceful and good, and the snow meant Christmas, and the sun was a cool disk that one could and should look at.

  The tolling of the bells was over. The echo quietly died away, and then the echo of the echo. Another bell struck, sounding the hour. Eight o'clock
, eight sonorous detached strokes, beating with terrible regularity, with invincible calm, simple, simple. I counted them, and when they had ceased to pulsate in the air, I could not help counting them over again. It was time that was passing – formless time, and the human effort that defined it and regularized it and made of it a work as of destiny.

  CHAPTER XIV

  I was alone. It was late at night, and I was sitting at my table. My lamp was buzzing like summer in the fields. I lifted my eyes. The stars studded the heavens above. The city was plunged at my feet. The horizon escaped from nearby into eternity. The lights and shadows formed an infinite sphere around me.

  I was not at ease that night. I was a prey to an immense distress. I sat as if I had fallen into my chair. As on the first day I looked at my reflection in the glass, and all I could do was just what I had done then, simply cry, “I!”

  I wanted to know the secret of life. I had seen men, groups, deeds, faces. In the twilight I had seen the tremulous eyes of beings as deep as wells. I had seen the mouth that said in a burst of glory, “I am more sensitive than others.” I had seen the struggle to love and make one's self understood, the refusal of two persons in conversation to give themselves to each other, the coming together of two lovers, the lovers with an infectious smile, who are lovers in name only, who bury themselves in kisses, who press wound to wound to cure themselves, between whom there is really no attachment, and who, in spite of their ecstasy deriving light from shadow, are strangers as much as the sun and the moon are strangers. I had heard those who could find no crumb of peace except in the confession of their shameful misery, and I had seen faces pale and red-eyed from crying. I wanted to grasp it all at the same time. All the truths taken together make only one truth. I had had to wait until that day to learn this simple thing. It was this truth of truths which I needed.

  Not because of my love of mankind. It is not true that we love mankind. No one ever has loved, does love, or will love mankind. It was for myself, solely for myself, that I sought to attain the full truth, which is above emotion, above peace, even above life, like a sort of death. I wanted to derive guidance from it, a faith. I wanted to use it for my own good.

  I went over the things I had seen since living in the boarding-house. They were so numerous that I had become a stranger to myself. I scarcely had a name any more. I fairly listened to the memory of them, and in supreme concentration I tried to see and understand what I was. It would be so beautiful to know who I was.

  I thought of all those wise men, poets, artists before me who had suffered, wept, and smiled on the road to truth. I thought of the Latin poet who wished to reassure and console men by showing them truth as unveiled as a statue. A fragment of his prelude came to my mind, learned long ago, then dismissed and lost like almost everything that I had taken the pains to learn up till then. He said he kept watch in the serene nights to find the words, the poem in which to convey to men the ideas that would deliver them. For two thousand years men have always had to be reassured and consoled. For two thousand years I have had to be delivered. Nothing has changed the surface of things. The teachings of Christ have not changed the surface of things, and would not even if men had not ruined His teachings so that they can no longer follow them honestly. Will the great poet come who shall settle the boundaries of belief and render it eternal, the poet who will be, not a fool, not an ignorant orator, but a wise man, the great inexorable poet? I do not know, although the lofty words of the man who died in the boarding-house have given me a vague hope of his coming and the right to adore him already.

  But what about me – me, who am only a glance from the eye of destiny? I am like a poet on the threshold of a work, an accursed, sterile poet who will leave no glory behind, to whom chance lent the truth that genius would have given him, a frail work which will pass away with me, mortal and sealed to others like myself, but a sublime work nevertheless, which will show the essential outlines of life and relate the drama of dramas.

  ***

  What am I? I am the desire not to die. I have always been impelled – not that evening alone – by the need to construct the solid, powerful dream that I shall never leave again. We are all, always, the desire not to die. This desire is as immeasurable and varied as life's complexity, but at bottom this is what it is: To continue to be, to be more and more, to develop and to endure. All the force we have, all our energy and clearness of mind serve to intensify themselves in one way or another. We intensify ourselves with new impressions, new sensations, new ideas. We endeavour to take what we do not have and to add it to ourselves. Humanity is the desire for novelty founded upon the fear of death. That is what it is. I have seen it myself. Instinctive movements, untrammelled utterances always tend the same way, and the most dissimilar utterances are all alike.

  ***

  But afterwards! Where are the words that will light the way? What is humanity in the world, and what is the world?

  Everything is within me, and there are no judges, and there are no boundaries and no limits to me. The de profundis, the effort not to die, the fall of desire with its soaring cry, all this has not stopped. It is part of the immense liberty which the incessant mechanism of the human heart exercises (always something different, always!). And its expansion is so great that death itself is effaced by it. For how could I imagine my death, except by going outside of myself, and looking at myself as if I were not I but somebody else?

  We do not die. Each human being is alone in the world. It seems absurd, contradictory to say this, and yet it is so. But there are many human beings like me. No, we cannot say that. In saying that, we set ourselves outside the truth in a kind of abstraction. All we can say is: I am alone.

  And that is why we do not die.

  Once, bowed in the evening light, the dead man had said, “After my death, life will continue. Every detail in the world will continue to occupy the same place quietly. All the traces of my passing will die little by little, and the void I leave behind will be filled once more.”

  He was mistaken in saying so. He carried all the truth with him. Yet we, we saw him die. He was dead for us, but not for himself. I feel there is a fearfully difficult truth here which we must get, a formidable contradiction. But I hold on to the two ends of it, groping to find out what formless language will translate it. Something like this: “Every human being is the whole truth.” I return to what I heard. We do not die since we are alone. It is the others who die. And this sentence, which comes to my lips tremulously, at once baleful and beaming with light, announces that death is a false god.

  But what of the others? Granted that I have the great wisdom to rid myself of the haunting dread of my own death, there remains the death of others and the death of so many feelings and so much sweetness. It is not the conception of truth that will change sorrow. Sorrow, like joy, is absolute.

  And yet! The infinite grandeur of our misery becomes confused with glory and almost with happiness, with cold haughty happiness. Was it out of pride or joy that I began to smile when the first white streaks of dawn turned my lamp pale and I saw I was alone in the universe?

  CHAPTER XV

  It was the first time I had seen her in mourning, and that evening her youth shone more resplendent than ever.

  Her departure was close at hand. She looked about to see if she had left anything behind in the room, which had been made ready for other people, the room which was already formless, already abandoned.

  The door opened. The young woman turned her head. A man appeared in the sunny doorway.

  “Michel, Michel, Michel!” she cried.

  She stretched out her arms, hesitated, and for a few seconds remained motionless as light, with her full gaze upon him.

  Then, in spite of where she was and the purity of her heart and the chastity of her whole life, her legs shook and she was on the verge of falling over.

  He threw his hat on the bed with a sweeping romantic gesture. He filled the room with his presence, with his weight. His footsteps mad
e the floor creak. He kept her from falling. Tall as she was, he was a whole head taller. His marked features were hard and remarkably fine. His face under a heavy head of black hair was bright and clean, as though new. He had a drooping moustache and full red lips.

  He put his hands on the young woman's shoulders, and looked at her, in readiness for his eager embrace.

  They held each other close, staggering. They said the same word at the same time, “At last!” That was all they said, but they said it over and over again in a low voice, chanting it together. Their eyes uttered the same sweet cry. Their breasts communicated it to each other. It seemed to be tying them together and making them merge into one. At last! Their long separation was over. Their love was victor. At last they were together. And I saw her quiver from head to foot. I saw her whole body welcome him while her eyes opened and then closed on him again. They made a great effort to speak to each other. The few shreds of conversation held them back a moment.

  “How I waited for you! How I longed for you!” he stammered. “I thought of you all the time. I saw you all the time. Your smile was everywhere.” He lowered his voice and added, “Sometimes when people were talking commonplaces and your name happened to be mentioned, it would go through my heart like an electric current.”

  He panted. His deep voice burst into sonorous tones. He seemed unable to speak low.

  “Often I used to sit on the brick balustrade at the top of the terrace of our house overlooking the Channel, with my face in my hands, wondering where you were. But it did not matter how far away you were, I could not help seeing you all the same.”

  “And often I,” said Anna, bending her head, “would sit at the open window warm evenings, thinking of you. Sometimes the air was of a suffocating sweetness, as it was two months ago at the Villa of the Roses. Tears would come to my eyes.”