Alexis flung himself on his mother; she thought he wanted to kiss her, but, pressing his lips against her ear, he whispered:
“How old is my uncle?”
“He’ll be thirty-six this June.”
Alexis wanted to ask: “Do you think he’ll ever reach thirty-six?”, but he did not dare.
A door opened, Alexis trembled, a domestic said: “The viscount is coming shortly.”
Soon the domestic returned, with two peacocks and a kid, which the viscount took along everywhere. Then, more steps were heard, and the door opened again.
“It’s nothing,” Alexis thought to himself, his heart beating whenever he heard noise. “It’s probably a servant, yes, quite probably a servant.”
But at the same time he heard a soft voice: “Bonjour, my little Alexis, I wish you a happy birthday.”
His uncle, kissing the boy, frightened him. He must have sensed it, for, paying him no further heed in order to give him time to recover, the viscount started brightly chatting with Alexis’s mother, his sister-in-law, who, ever since his mother’s death, was the person he loved most in the world.
Now, Alexis, reassured, felt nothing but immense tenderness for this still charming young man, who was a wee bit paler and so heroic as to feign gaiety in these tragic minutes. The boy wanted to throw his arms around him but did not dare, afraid he might sap his uncle’s strength and make him lose his self-control. More than anything else the viscount’s sad, sweet gaze made the boy feel like crying. Alexis knew that those eyes had always been sad and, even in the happiest moments, they seemed to implore a consolation for sufferings that he did not appear to experience. But at this moment Alexis believed that his uncle’s sadness, courageously banished from his conversation, had taken refuge in his eyes, which, along with his sunken cheeks, were the only sincere things about his entire person.
“I know you’d like to drive a carriage and pair, my little Alexis,” said Baldassare, “you’ll get one horse tomorrow. Next year I’ll complete the pair and in two years I’ll give you the carriage. But this year perhaps you’ll learn how to ride a horse; we’ll try when I come back. You see, I’m definitely leaving tomorrow,” he added, “but not for long. I’ll be back in less than a month, and we’ll go to the matinee, you know, the comedy I promised I’d take you to.”
Alexis knew that his uncle was going to visit a friend for several weeks; he also knew that his uncle was still allowed to go to the theater; but Alexis was thoroughly imbued with the idea of death, which had deeply upset him prior to his coming here, and so his uncle’s words gave him a deep and painful shock.
“I won’t go,” Alexis thought to himself. “He’ll suffer awfully when he hears the buffoonery of the actors and the laughter of the audience.”
“What was that lovely melody we heard when we came in?” Alexis’s mother asked.
“Oh, you found it lovely?” Baldassare exclaimed vividly and joyfully. “It’s the love song I told you about.”
“Is he play-acting?” Alexis wondered to himself. “How can the success of his music still bring him any pleasure?”
At that moment the viscount’s face took on an expression of deep pain; his cheeks paled, he frowned, his lips puckered, his eyes filled with tears.
“My God!” Alexis cried out mentally. “His play-acting’s too much for him. My poor uncle! But why is he so scared of hurting us? Why is he forcing himself so hard?”
However, the pains of general paralysis, which at times squeezed Baldassare like an iron corset, the torture often leaving marks on his body and, despite all his efforts, making his face cramp up, had now dissipated.
After wiping his eyes he resumed chatting in a good mood.
“Am I mistaken,” Alexis’s mother tactlessly asked, “or has the Duke of Parma been less friendly to you for some time now?”
“The Duke of Parma!” Baldassare furiously snapped. “The Duke of Parma less friendly! Are you joking, my dear? He wrote me this very morning, offering to put his Illyrian castle at my disposal if mountain air could do me any good.”
He jumped up, re-triggering his dreadful pain, which made him pause for a moment; no sooner was the pain gone than he called to his servant:
“Bring me the letter that’s by my bed.”
And he then read in a lively voice:
“ ‘My dear Baldassare, how bored I am without you, etc., etc.’ ”
As the prince’s amiability unfolded in the letter, Baldassare’s features softened and they shone with happy confidence. All at once, probably to cloak a joy that did not strike him as very sublime, he clenched his teeth and made the pretty little grimace that Alexis had thought forever banished from that face bearing the calm of death.
With this little grimace crinkling Baldassare’s lips as it normally did, the scales dropped from Alexis’s eyes; ever since he had been with his uncle, he had believed, had wished he were viewing a dying man’s face forever detached from humdrum realities and containing only a flickering smile that was heroically constrained, sadly tender, celestial and wistful. Now the boy no longer doubted that when teasing Baldassare, Jean Galeas would have infuriated him as before, nor did Alexis doubt that the sick man’s gaiety, his desire to go to the theater were neither deceitful nor courageous, and that, arriving so close to death, Baldassare would keep thinking only of life.
Upon their coming home, it vividly dawned on Alexis that he too would die someday and that while he had far more time than his uncle, still Baldassare’s old gardener, Rocco, and the viscount’s cousin, the Duchess of Alériouvres, would certainly not outlive him by much. Yet, though rich enough to retire, Rocco continued working nonstop in order to earn more money and to obtain a prize for his roses. The duchess, albeit seventy, carefully dyed her hair and paid for newspaper articles that celebrated her youthful gait, her elegant receptions, and the refinements of her table and her mind.
These examples, which did not diminish Alexis’s amazement at his uncle’s attitude, inspired a similar astonishment that, growing by degrees, expanded into an immense stupefaction at the universal odiousness of those existences—not excluding his—that move backward toward death while staring at life.
Determined not to imitate so shocking an aberration, Alexis, emulating the ancient prophets whose glory he had been taught about, decided to withdraw into the desert with some of his little friends, and he informed his parents of his plans.
Fortunately, life, which was more powerful than their mockery and whose sweet and strengthening milk he had not fully drained, held out its breast to dissuade him. And he resumed drinking with a joyous voracity, his rich and credulous imagination listening naïvely to the grievances of that ravenousness and making wonderful amends for its blighted hopes.
My flesh is sad, alas! . . .
—STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ
The day after Alexis’s visit, the Viscount of Sylvania left to spend three or four weeks at the nearby castle, where the presence of numerous guests could take his mind off the sorrow that followed many of his attacks.
Soon all his pleasures there were concentrated in the company of a young woman who doubled his pleasures by sharing them. While believing that he could sense she loved him, he was somewhat reserved toward her: he knew that she was absolutely pure and that, moreover, she was looking forward to her husband’s arrival; besides, Baldassare was not sure he really loved her and he vaguely felt how sinful it would be to lead her astray. Subsequently he could never recall at what point the nature of their relationship had changed. But now, as if by some tacit agreement that he could no longer pinpoint, he kissed her wrists and put his arm around her neck. They seemed so happy that one evening he went further: he began by kissing her; next he caressed her on and on and then he kissed her eyes, her cheek, her lip, her throat, the sides of her nose. The young woman’s smiling lips met his caresses halfway, and her eyes shone in their depths like pools warmed by the sun. Meanwhile Baldassare’s caresses had gotten bolder; at a certain moment he looked
at her: he was struck by her pallor, by the infinite despair emanating from her lifeless forehead, from her weary, grieving eyes, which wept with gazes sadder than tears, like the torture suffered during a crucifixion or after the irrevocable loss of an adored person. Baldassare peered at her for an instant; and then, with a supreme effort, she looked at him, raising her entreating eyes which begged for mercy at the same time that her avid mouth, with an unconscious and convulsive movement, asked for more kisses.
Overpowered again by the pleasure that hovered around them in the fragrance of their kisses and the memory of their caresses, the two of them pounced on each other, closing their eyes, those cruel eyes that showed them the distress of their souls; they did not want to see that distress, and he, especially, closed his eyes with all his strength, like a remorseful executioner who senses that his arm would tremble the instant it struck if, rather than imagine his victim provoking his rage and forcing him to satisfy it, he could look him in the face and feel his pain for a moment.
The night had come, and she was still in his room, her eyes blank and tearless. Without saying a word, she left, kissing his hand with passionate sadness.
He, however, could not sleep, and if he dozed off for a moment, he shuddered when feeling upon himself the desperate and entreating eyes of the gentle victim. Suddenly he pictured her as she must be now: sleepless, too, and feeling so alone. He dressed and walked softly to her room, not daring to make a sound for fear of awakening her if she slept, yet not daring to return to his room, where the sky and the earth and his soul were suffocating him under their weight. He stayed there, at her threshold, believing at every moment that he could not hold back for another instant and that he was about to go in. But then he was terrified at the thought of disturbing her sweet oblivion, the sweet and even breathing that he could perceive; he was terrified at the thought of cruelly delivering her to remorse and despair instead of letting her find a moment’s peace beyond their clutches; he stayed there at the threshold, either sitting or kneeling or lying. In the morning, Baldassare, chilled but calm, went back to his room, slept for a long time, and woke up with a deep sense of well-being.
They strained their ingenuity to ease one another’s consciences; they grew accustomed to remorse, which diminished, to pleasure, which also grew less intense; and when he returned to Sylvania, he, like her, had only a pleasant and slightly cool memory of those cruel and blazing minutes.
His youth is roaring inside him, he does not hear.
—MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ
When Alexis, on his fourteenth birthday, went to see his uncle Baldassare, he did not, although anticipating them, fall prey to the violent emotions of the previous year. In developing his strength, the incessant rides on the horse his uncle had given him had lulled the boy’s jangled nerves and aroused in him that constant spirit of good health, a sensation accompanying youth as a dim inkling of the depth of its resources and the power of its joyfulness. Under the breeze stirred up by his gallop, he felt his chest swelling like a sail, his body burning like a winter fire, and his forehead as cool as the fleeing foliage that wreathed him when he charged by; and then, upon returning home, he tautened his body under cold water or relaxed it for long periods of savory digestion; whereby all these experiences augmented his life forces, which, after being the tumultuous pride of Baldassare, had abandoned him forever, to gladden younger souls that they would someday desert in turn.
Nothing in Alexis could now falter because of his uncle’s feebleness, could die because of his uncle’s imminent death. The joyful humming of the nephew’s blood in his veins and of his desires in his mind drowned out the sick man’s exhausted complaints. Alexis had entered that ardent period in which the body labors so robustly at raising its palaces between the flesh and the soul that the soul quickly seems to have vanished, until the day when illness or sorrow has slowly undermined the barriers and transcended the painful fissure, allowing the soul to reappear. Alexis was now accustomed to his uncle’s fatal disease as we are to all things that last around us; and because he had once made his nephew cry as the dead make us cry, the boy, even though his uncle was still alive, treated him like a dead man: he had begun to forget him.
When his uncle said to him that day, “My little Alexis, I’m giving you the carriage along with the second horse,” the boy grasped what his uncle was thinking: “Otherwise you may never get the carriage”; and Alexis knew that it was an extremely sad thought. But he did not feel it was sad, for he no longer had room for profound sadness.
Several days later, the boy, while reading, was struck by the description of a villain who was unmoved by the most poignant affection of a dying man who adored him.
That night, the fear of being the villain, in whom he thought he saw his own portrait, kept him from falling asleep. The next day, however, he had such a wonderful horseback ride, worked so well, and felt, incidentally, so much affection for his living relatives that he went back to enjoying himself without scruples and sleeping without remorse.
Meanwhile the Viscount of Sylvania, who could no longer walk, now seldom left his castle. His friends and his family were with him all day, and he could own up to the most blameworthy folly, the most absurd extravagance, state the most flagrant paradox, or imply the most shocking fault without his kinsmen reproaching him or his friends joking or disagreeing with him. It was as if they had tacitly absolved him of any responsibility for his deeds and words. Above all they seemed to be trying to keep him from hearing the last sounds, to muffle with sweetness, if not drown out with tenderness, the final creakings of his body, from which life was ebbing.
He spent long and charming hours reclining and having a tête-à-tête with himself, the only guest he had neglected to ask to supper in his lifetime. He tried to adorn his suffering body, to lean in resignation on the windowsill, gazing at the sea, a melancholy joy. With ardent sadness he contemplated the scene of his death for a long time, endlessly revising it like a work of art and surrounding it with images of this world, images that still imbued his thoughts, but that, already slipping away from him in his gradual departure, became vague and beautiful. His imagination already sketched his farewell to Duchess Oliviane, his great platonic friend, whose salon he had ruled even though it brought together all the grandest noblemen, the most glorious artists, and the finest minds in Europe. He felt he could already read the account of his final conversation with the duchess:
“. . . The sun was down, and the sea, glimpsed through the apple trees, was mauve. As airy as pale, faded wreaths and as persistent as regrets, blue and rosy cloudlets drifted along the horizon. A melancholy row of poplars sank into the shadows, their resigned tops remaining in a churchly rose; the final rays, tinting the branches without touching the trunks, attached garlands of light to these balustrades of darkness. The breeze blended the three scents of ocean, wet leaves, and milk. Never had the Sylvanian countryside softened the evening melancholy more voluptuously.
“ ‘I loved you very much, but I gave you so little, my poor friend,’ she said.
“ ‘What are you talking about, Oliviane? What do you mean you gave me so little? You gave all the more the less I asked of you, and actually a lot more than if our senses had played any part in our affection. I worshiped you and, as supernatural as a madonna and as gentle as a wet nurse, you cradled me. I loved you with an affection whose keen sagacity was never marred by any hope for carnal pleasure. What an incomparable friendship you gave me in exchange, what an exquisite tea, a conversation that was adorned in a natural way, and how many bunches of fresh roses! You alone, with your maternal and expressive hands, knew how to cool my feverish forehead, drip honey between my parched lips, and place noble images in my life.
“ ‘My dear friend, give me your hands and let me kiss them.’ ”
With all his senses and all his heart he still loved Pia, the little Syracusian princess, who was smitten with a furious and invincible love for Castruccio, and it was her indifference to Baldassare that occasion
ally reminded him of a crueler reality which, however, he struggled to forget. Until the last few days, he had attended some festivities, where, sauntering with her on his arm, he thought he could humiliate his rival; but even when strolling at her side, the viscount sensed that her deep eyes were distracted by another love, which she tried to conceal only out of pity for the sick man. And now even that was beyond him. The movements of his legs had become so unhinged that he could no longer go out. However, she came by frequently and, as if joining the others in their vast conspiracy of gentleness, she spoke to him incessantly with an ingenious tenderness that was never again belied, as it had been in the past, by the cry of her indifference or the avowal of her anger. And from her more than from anyone else, he felt the appeasement created by that gentleness spreading over him and delighting him.
But then one day, as Baldassare was rising from his chair to go to the dining table, his astonished domestic saw him walking much better. He sent for the physician, who put off his diagnosis. The next day Baldassare walked normally. A week later, he was allowed to go out. His friends and his relatives felt an immense hope. The doctor believed that a simple and curable nervous disease might have at first shown the symptoms of general paralysis, which were now indeed starting to disappear. He presented his speculations to Baldassare as a certainty:
“You are saved!”
The condemned man expressed a deep-felt joy upon learning of his reprieve. But after an interval of great improvement, a sharp anxiety began to pierce his joy, which had already been weakened by the brief habituation. He was sheltered from the inclemencies of life in that propitious atmosphere of encompassing gentleness, of forced rest and free meditation, and the desire for death began obscurely germinating inside him. He was far from suspecting it, and he felt only a dim anxiety at the thought of starting all over, enduring the blows to which he was no longer accustomed, and losing the affection that surrounded him. He also confusedly felt that it was wrong to seek forgetfulness in pleasure or action now that he had gotten to know himself, the brotherly stranger who, while watching the boats plowing the sea, had conversed with him for hours on end, so far and so near: in himself. As if now feeling the awakening of a new and unfamiliar love of native soil, like a young man who is ignorant of the location of his original homeland, he yearned for death, whereas he had initially felt he was going into eternal exile.