The Chateau d'Argol

by Julien Gracq

  At the other end of the bay, where the wretched grasses gave place to naked beaches, Albert urged his horse toward a melancholy assemblage of worn grey stones fashioned by the hand of man and which, as he drew nearer, seemed to all appearances, to be a graveyard long since abandoned. The invading sands had already reached the level of the stone wall, and seemed to have completely filled the mortuary enclosure. Massive stone crosses with strangely short arms like those of Gaelic crosses emerged from the sand without any apparent order, and barely visible mounds still indicated the site of the graves. The wild desolation of this place, abandoned by man, inspired in Albert no more than a morbid curiosity, and tying his horse to the arm of one of the crosses, he walked rapidly along the paths smothered in sand. Not an inscription was any longer legible, and the agent of this pitiless and twofold sacrilegious destruction was revealed by the incessant whistling of grains of sand that the wind with horrible ferocity kept hurling in a fine dust against the granite. It seemed to flow from His inexhaustible palm, from the horrible palm of the sandman Time!

  Albert's pale face now grew paler, and the wind madly tossed the locks of his blond and so strangely lustreless hair, which was the colour of ripe oats and of sand. His gaze was arrested by a stone cross planted a little apart from the others, and that seemed, as far as could be judged from the uneven inroads of the sand, quite notably higher than the others. But what struck Albert as peculiarly disquieting about the situation of this particular cross, was that no swelling of the ground, such as mournfully accounted for the presence of the other emblems of redemption in this deserted spot, was apparent in its vicinity where nothing could be seen but the uneven striatums of the sand, so that the soul long hesitated to decide whether this cross, like the others, was the sign of Death, lying in the earth at its feet, or whether, on the contrary, it confronted this sleeping people of the graves with the proud image of eternal Life, present even in the midst of these funereal solitudes.

  Little by little the enigma of this gibbet, equivocal and available, took possession of his mind, and with some force guiding his arm, while the almost insane smile, brought to his lips by some mysterious comparisons still lingered, he walked quickly toward the cross, and picking up a sharp piece of stone, roughly engraved on it the name of

  HEIDE

  A cloud at that moment hung heavily over the graveyard, and Albert threw back his head as much to enjoy a final look at the splendour of the bay as to discover the cause of this sudden eclipse. An enormous cloud was sailing slowly over the expanse of sea like a compassionate visitor to those watery plains unknown to any ship. Nothing can describe the slow and prodigal majesty with which this celestial navigation was accomplished. For a moment it seemed to proceed toward the farthest end of the bay, then, making a solemn turn, it veered toward the east, displaying like an aerial sailing vessel the contrast of the pure and dazzling whiteness of its swelling side with the deep gulfs of shadow that opened in its bosom. For an instant its huge bulk wavered over the graveyard illuminating with its stormy, pure and regal stateliness this landscape of death, then passed on, and an instant later the incessant whistling of the wind in the dry grasses, and the monotonous and muffled stamping of a horse's hoofs in the sand, were the only signs of life left on the deserted shore.

  HEIDE

  ALBERT SPENT the whole of the following day in the study he had arranged for himself in the highest tower of the castle from which his eyes could plunge into the forest. His mind was occupied with vague and indistinct reveries: more than ever, on the eve of this awaited visit, the forest seemed to him to be multiplying its retreats, to reveal flashes of mysterious comings and goings; an imminent presence pervaded it like an airy living thing, of which the glitter of the leaves seemed to Albert the symbolic evidence. The empty rooms of the castle in their drowsy torpor waited for this presence to people them, and the sound of footsteps on the flags, a creaking of the oaken wainscot, the thud of a bee against a window-pane echoed in the recesses of the brain like a signal, long and eagerly awaited. And Albert had the curious feeling that this somnolent castle must be visited or perish, like a castle of legend, burying the enigmatic sleeping servants under its ruins. During the hot hours of the afternoon the waiting became more intolerable with every second, in the midst of an idleness that delivered up the defenceless soul to all the terrors of midday. Toward evening two tall figures appeared on the path leading to the castle, and Albert, whose heart seemed to stop beating with excitement and apprehension, hastened down to meet his guests.

  He and Herminien greeted each other in the most formal manner. Those broad shoulders, every feature of that sun-tanned face, the vigorously planted hair, the deep tones of voice so resonant in the lofty stone hall, all proclaimed contentment and a visible plenitude. While they exchanged commonplace phrases singularly devoid of expression, a third person, without effort, appropriated all the interest of the scene from which banality was instantly and effectively banished. In a flash, Heide filled the room, the castle and the whole region of Argol with her radiant and absorbing beauty.

  She appeared to be entirely dressed in white fabrics of a remarkably delicate workmanship—with ample folds, among which her pink hands fluttered. Her face was as various as the hours of the day and the different planes were so composed as to seem like a prism in which each ray of light that touched it remained imprisoned and radiated a soft lustre through the skin, a living crystallization of light. Even the eyes, in which poets have been wont to see the only human reflection of the heavens, shone with scarcely a brighter glow in that face behind which light seemed to flow through invisible and translucent vessels.

  All ordinary notions of beauty commonly associated with proportion and line had to be abandoned the minute one sought to appreciate the inimitable radiance of this countenance which seemed destined to render strikingly apparent, even to the most untutored eyes, the distinction of quality and of degree. And because pure quality reigned mistress there, independent of all questions of proportion, and consequently of appraisement, one instinctively sought in music the elements of comparison for this scarcely terrestrial face: no painter, no poet, without a secret sense of ridicule, would have attempted to render its supernatural radiance—but, on the contrary, it was to certain rare and profoundly ambiguous melodic contours, particularly to certain almost incantatory phrases of Lohengrin—where the intolerable glare of a sword seems by its glitter to thwart the warmest and most nostalgic sonorities—that the mind turned, as a last resort, in its attempt to assimilate a beauty before which the judgment had from the first capitulated—and which must forever leave one helpless and without appeal, in that, even before it had been perceived, it was felt to be unique.

  Try as he might to elucidate the ties—totally unsuspected by him until today—that might exist between Herminien and Heide, or to explain the reasons for this double visit, they remained inscrutable. Slowly he and his guests strolled through the rooms of the castle which now, for the first time, revealed to Albert a remarkable property, for their unprecedented and always varied dimensions through a baffling acoustics, regulated the tones of the speakers' voices, and the conversation, bright and gay in the apartments filled with sunlight, lent to the metallic resonance of the copper plaques in the dining-room a sharp and sparkling sonority like the clash of arms, while in the drawing-room, muffled by the half-light and the height of the vaulted ceiling, it fell to a murmur, faint and intensely musical.

  Having seated themselves around the massive copper table, their conversation gradually took on a profounder tone and an accelerated tempo. Heide now gave proof, not only of a very surprising culture, but even of an extensive learning,, which astonished Albert. The most discerning and original views were combined in her with an absence—apparent but, for all that, difficult to fathom—of all the most universally accepted moral and social prejudices. And yet an evident modesty was continually being restored to her by her fantastic beauty: and it seemed that these social laws which she thus
ignored were easy enough for her to abolish in a world over which she was willingly accorded omnipotent power, but which must, nevertheless, be resuscitated, and were all the more fatal for a being whose privileged state seemed, in spite of herself, to give rise to a thousand unknown and menacing interdictions. Thus she remained, in the midst of the most daring and dangerous utterances, lofty, inaccessible, and redoubtable—and no matter how passionately she sought to explain and, without the least embarrassment to reveal herself to her interlocutors, her character seemed every moment to become only more completely unknowable. In the mysteries of her beauty, seemingly projected outside herself and surrounding her like impalpable veils, she was ceaselessly buried and reborn with the lustre of total newness, crossing and recrossing a magic threshold forbidden to men, like the forever inviolable curtain of a theatre, and behind which she provided herself with new arms, daggers, philters and impenetrable cuirasses.

  For Albert and Herminien the bonds, indefinable in spite of everything, and of which the reader has been sufficiently apprised, were renewed by this fresh meeting with a swiftness and a violence all the greater now that a setting perfectly designed to arouse all sorts of disquieting sensations lent its dangerous complicity. Through all the detours of a sprightly conversation—to which the presence of Heide added a perilous attraction—their only object, in spite of all appearances, was to effect a mutual reconnaissance, to reconstruct and, with acute delight, to make each other touch the infinitely sinuous line of demarcation which the shock, so often repeated, of these two natures had long ago fixed in ideal space where they took refuge. They looked for and found each other! Finally, with a rapture they hardly dared admit, they recognized certain ambiguous glances, certain perfidious insinuations—the intention hidden in a certain over-emphasis studiously humorous, even the drawling pronunciation of a certain vowel became for them significant: all the most complex subtleties of the game were tried with a supreme nonchalance and, at the first signal, easily understood—the dubious alliance was again perfect, and this league, stronger than any vows, presented an unbroken front to the world whose attacks it scorned—diabolic and indissoluble to such a degree that each one's most spontaneous thoughts being instantaneously caught by the other in their total interiority seemed, even to the most innocent eyes, to bear the indubitable mark of conspiracy.

  Meanwhile, little by little, the sun in its decline flooded the room with its almost horizontal rays, crowned Heide's blond hair with a golden aureole and for the space of a second lent her the overwhelming importance that the contre-jour gives to figures in a living scene no less than to those in Rembrandt's works—the eyes of Albert and Herminien, drawn in spite of themselves to the centre of this luminous phantasmagoria, met for the space of a lightning flash—and understood. Something had changed.

  The strangeness of their dialogue which had in the last few minutes taken on an accelerated, an almost fantastic pace, the limpidity of the mechanism of their minds which seemed to function without the least effort at a quadruple speed, the sparkling quality of the words exchanged without respite which had seemed to devour the hours of the evening like a flame revived by an incessant flow of oxygen—of all this, with anguished stupefaction, they took cognizance, attributing it to its veritable cause. The setting sun now forced their attention on this effect of light: it suddenly acquired complete ascendancy over their taut nerves—as over the pilgrims the ray of light with which Rembrandt envelops his Christ—and Heide now seemed indicated, more surely than by the pointing finger of destiny, as the origin of this singular alteration in their relations which can only be understood by analogy with the phenomenon which physicists call catalysis.

  A perceptible break now occurred in the conversation, followed by painful and desultory talk, scarcely heeded by either of them, each being preoccupied in trying to fathom the possible consequences of an event hardly less extraordinary than would have seemed the sudden crumbling of the castle about their heads. An embarrassment, growing every second more intolerable and which seemed to hover over the table like a thunder cloud, followed their discovery—buried by each on the instant in the depths of his heart—and Albert, to mitigate by any sort of interruption the throbbings of that heart which from now on it would be impossible to quiet altogether, led Heide to the upper terraces.

  The moon flooded the whole landscape with a heady loveliness. Night lavished her treasures. In the sky each star took its place with the same exactitude as on a sidereal chart, and presented such an authentic image of night, as one had always known and had a right always to expect, that the heart was touched by this scrupulous, naïve, and almost childish reconstruction, as by an act of unfathomable beneficence. Night lavished her treasures. The air was deliciously cool. And as Heide and Albert reached the edge of the stone parapet suddenly they were both at the same moment seized by a strange emotion. As though bathed by the glow of footlights, the round heads of the trees everywhere loomed out of the abyss, huddled together in silence, risen out of the abyss of silence surrounding the manor like a people conjured up by darkness, who had assembled and were waiting for the three strokes to resound from the castle towers. This mute, motionless, obstinate waiting overwhelmed the heart which could not possibly fail to respond to this mad, this marvellous hope.

  Pale, both of them, they stood there on the high terrace, and caught thus in the ray of the moon's gaze and of the forest's, they dared not withdraw. Nor dared they look at each other, for suddenly everything took on an aspect of unaccountable gravity. They knew not what was to become of them, nor anything of what would be decided for them. And the night resembled them! Then Heide with a shudder of her whole being (no doubt, as a woman, she was less invincibly timid, and no doubt Albert was not in love with her) laid on Albert's hand her hand, as cold as marble and as hot as fire; with the slowness of torture, with force and frenzy, she twined each one of her fingers in his, and drawing his face to hers, she forced him to take her lips in a prolonged kiss that shook her entire body as though lightning had passed through it. And now, as they went down the stairs, along the corridors, through all the lugubrious darkness of the empty castle—they could not free their hearts of the appalling weight of the event.

  Left alone, Herminien sat lost in gloomy and absorbing thought, to which, little by little, the monotonous ticking of a massive copper clock ornamenting one corner of the room—and that had grown suddenly loud and strangely noticeable since the departure of the other two—lent a character of inexorable fatality. His nerves quivered as the pendulum with each succeeding second aggravated to a horrifying extent the duration of this inexplicable disappearance. With melancholy insistence Herminien's mind followed Albert and Heide through all the devious windings of the castle. Certainly this dinner, apparently so commonplace, could not have failed to provide him with a quantity of passionate and, no doubt, torturing observations—which he now recapitulated in detail with hallucinating precision—which his devastatingly lucid mind unrolled before him through all their infinitely changing—and yet wholly significant mazes. How could the too visible signs of interest, which Heide had never for an instant ceased to show for Albert, have escaped him!—but now he discerned their fatal character as well.

  The fabulous atmosphere in which this lonely countryside, this sequestered domain, enveloped such a manifestly romantic figure, the curious detachment Albert had shown toward Heide throughout the dinner while he engaged Herminien in a dialogue whose inner character must have intrigued to the highest degree a naturally dominating mind—all this might have, must have, awakened in Heide a passionate interest, growing stronger with each passing second, for Herminien's friend. She had hitherto only known Herminien in his isolation, in his relative poverty, and she must have attributed the cause of this sudden fulguration, this feverish, electric atmosphere, invariably recreated at each conjunction of these two polarizing figures, and in whose effluvium she had felt herself bathed all evening, to Albert alone—and for a being whose native freedom and abru
pt impulses, which he well knew, this could not have have failed to mark the beginning of a fanatical passion. And while the clock, second by second, ticked away the fragments of an hour that seemed suddenly charged for Herminien with a richer substance and stamped with a character, above all else, irremediable, a bitter, unfinished smile—at the same time contradicted by an expression of intense reflection—played over his lips.

  This double absence at last afforded him an opportunity to turn his attention—until now violently taken up by the other actors on the stage—to himself, and the singularly unjustifiable character of this journey to Argol which he had undertaken with Heide, now became apparent, together with its true, its overwhelming significance. He had to admit that an instinct, certainly very different from that of self-preservation, had governed his conduct ever since he had known Heide, believing from the first that he felt for this, in every respect, most singular being a complete personal detachment. And it was perhaps at this instant that he realized for the first time that in every human being the instinct for self-destruction, for devastating self-immolation, constantly wars, and no doubt with unequal arms, with his concern for his own safety. Certainly he might well have imagined in advance what would be—what could not fail to be—Heide's feeling for Albert, but apart from a perhaps morbid curiosity, he thought he could now detect in his conduct a much more disconcerting motive, and this sudden realization burst like an access of fever in his brain.