That is how I see it now, but at that time what impressed me most powerfully was the account of the Epiphany, when they were looking for him.
The young Duke of Lorraine, who the day before had ridden into his wretched town of Nancy after that remarkably precipitate battle, had wakened his entourage at a very early hour and asked after the Duke of Burgundy. One messenger after another was dispatched, and he himself appeared at the window from time to time, restless and anxious. He could not always make out who the men were that they were bringing in on their carts and litters; he saw only that none of them was the Duke. Nor was he among the wounded, and none of the prisoners they were continuously bringing in had set eyes on him. The fugitives, though, bore all manner of reports hither and thither, and were confused and frightened, as though they were afraid of running into him. As darkness fell there was still no news of him. The word that he had disappeared had time enough to spread on that long winter's evening. And wherever it spread, it produced in everyone an assertive, overstated certainty that he was still alive. Never before, it may be, was the Duke so real to every imagination as he was that night. There wasn't a house where they did not sit up watching and waiting and thinking they heard him knock. And if he did not come to their door, it was because he had already gone by.
It froze that night, and it was as if the idea that he still existed froze as well, so hardened did it become. And years and years were to pass before it melted away. All of those people, though they might not properly know it, were determined that he should still be. The fate he had brought upon them was bearable only if he were there. It had been so hard for them to learn that he was; but now that they had learned the lesson, they found him easy to remember, and impossible to forget.
On the following morning, however, the seventh of January, a Tuesday, the search for him was resumed. And this time there was someone to lead the way, one of the Duke's pages, who had apparently seen his master fall, from a distance; now he was going to show them the place. He himself had said nothing; the Count of Campobasso had brought him in and had spoken for him. Now the page walked ahead, and the rest followed close behind. Those who saw him, muffled and oddly unsure of himself, found it hard to believe that this was in fact Gian-Battista Colonna, who had the beauty and slender limbs of a girl. The cold made him shiver; the air was stiff with night frost; the crunching underfoot was like the grinding of teeth. Every one of them was frozen, for that matter. Only the Duke's fool, whom they dubbed Louis-Onze, was constantly on the move. He played at being a dog, ran ahead, came back, and ambled along for a time on all fours beside the youth; but whenever he spied a corpse, he bounded over and bowed to it and urged it to pull itself together and be the man they were looking for. He gave it a while to think it over, but then returned to the rest, grouchy, uttering threats and curses, and bemoaning the mulishness and sloth of the dead. And on they went, and the search was never-ending. The town was almost lost to view; murky weather had settled in meanwhile, despite the cold, and it had turned grey, and visibility was poor. The country lay flat and indifferent, and the small, compact group looked more and more lost, the further they went. No one said a word; only an old woman who had walked along with them muttered something, shaking her head – perhaps she was praying.
Presently the leader of the group stopped and looked about him. Then he turned abruptly towards Lupi, the Duke's Portuguese physician, and pointed ahead. A few paces further on lay an expanse of ice, some sort of pool or pond, and in it, half immersed, lay ten or twelve bodies. They had been stripped almost completely bare, and robbed. Lupi went from one to the next, bowed and all attention. And now Olivier de la Marche and the chaplain were to be seen as well, walking about separately. The old woman, however, was already kneeling in the snow, whimpering, bent over a large hand, the outspread fingers of which pointed stiffly towards her. Everyone ran to the spot. Lupi and some of the attendants attempted to turn the corpse over, which was lying on its belly. But the face was frozen fast, and, as they pulled it away from the ice, one cheek peeled off, thin and brittle, while the other proved to have been torn off by dogs or wolves; and the whole was cleft by a great wound, running from the ear, so that it could not be called a face at all.
One after another they looked round, each expecting to find the Roman behind him; but all they saw was the fool running towards them, angry and bleeding. He was holding a cloak at arm's length and shaking it, as if to dislodge something from it; but there was nothing in the cloak. So they cast about for marks of identity, and did indeed find a number. A fire had been started and they washed the body with warm water and wine. This revealed the scar on the throat, and the traces of the two large abscesses. The doctor no longer had any doubt. But other evidence was found as well. A few steps further on, Louis-Onze had discovered the cadaver of Moreau, the great black stallion the Duke had ridden in the battle of Nancy. He sat astride it, his short legs dangling. The blood still flowed from his nose into his mouth, and you could see that he was tasting it. One attendant some way off recalled that the Duke had had an ingrown toenail on his left foot; so now they all looked for this nail. But the fool wriggled as if he were being tickled, and called out, ‘Ah, Monseigneur, forgive them for revealing your gross defects, these dolts, and for failing to recognize you in my long face, wherein your virtues are written.’
*(The Duke's fool was also the first to enter when the corpse had been laid out. It was in the house of one Georges Marquis, for no reason anyone could account for. The pall had not yet been spread, and so he got the full impact. The white of the shroud and the crimson of the cloak stood in harsh and hostile contrast with the twofold black of the baldachin and bed. Scarlet long-boots stood before the bed, pointing towards him with their big, gilded spurs. And there could be no disputing that that thing up there was a head, once you saw the coronet. It was a large ducal coronet, set with precious stones of some description. Louis-Onze walked about, examining everything closely. He even felt the satin, although he knew little about such things. It would presumably be good satin, albeit perhaps a trifle cheap for the House of Burgundy. He stepped back one last time to take it all in. In the light reflected off the snow, the colours seemed strangely unrelated to each other. He impressed each one separately upon his memory. ‘Well accoutred,’ he observed at length, with approval, ‘if a little too assertively.’ Death seemed to him like a puppet-master finding himself in urgent need of a duke.)
[56] One does well simply to acknowledge that certain things that will not change are as they are, without lamenting the facts or indeed pronouncing judgement on them. Thus, for instance, I have realized that I was never a proper reader. In childhood, I saw reading as a calling one would enter into at some later date, when all of the vocations came up for consideration, one after another. To be honest, I had no clear idea when that might be. I trusted that one would recognize a time when life turned around, as it were, and now came from the outside only, just as formerly it had come from within. I imagined this would be a clear and unambiguous matter which one could not possibly fail to grasp; not a simple business, by any means – on the contrary, a most demanding, complex and difficult thing, if you will – but at any rate a visible process. That strangely unbounded quality of childhood, the lack of proportion, that refusal of things ever to be quite foreseen, would all be behind one. Not that I could really see how. Essentially this was all still growing apace on me, closing in on every side, and the more I looked out, the more I stirred up what was within me: God knows where it came from. But probably it grew to its uttermost and then broke off abruptly. It was easy to see that grown-ups were very little troubled by all of this; they went about making their judgements and doing what they did, and, if ever they were in difficulties, it was external circumstances that were to blame.
I resolved that reading would be one of the things that ushered in changes of this order. When the time came, I would behave towards books as I would towards acquaintances; there would be time for them, a specific amo
unt of time that would pass smoothly and pleasantly, just as much time as suited me. Naturally some of them would be closer to me than others, and I could not say for certain that I'd be proof against wasting the odd half hour with them now and then, missing a walk, an appointment, the opening scene of a play, or a letter that urgently had to be written. But that my hair should be matted or tousled, as if I had been lying on it, or that my ears should burn and my hands be cold as metal, or that a tall candle beside me should burn right down to its holder – these things, thank God, would be utterly out of the question.
I mention these phenomena because they were quite strikingly part of my own experience during those holidays at Ulsgaard when I so suddenly took to reading. It promptly became apparent that I wasn't up to it. I had of course begun my reading before the period I had set aside for it. But that year in Sorö, among a lot of others about my own age, had left me wary of such plans. While I was there, a number of unanticipated experiences had swiftly stolen up on me, and quite clearly they took me to be a grown-up. They were large-as-life experiences, and bore upon me with all their actual weight. To the selfsame extent as I grasped their reality, though, my eyes were also opened to the infinite reality of my childish state. I knew that it would not come to an end now, any more than that other state was only just beginning now. I told myself that everyone was of course at liberty to partition experience, but the dividing lines they drew were mere fictions. And it turned out that I lacked the knack of devising such divisions myself. No matter how often I tried, life gave me to understand that it knew nothing of their existence. If I insisted, though, that my childhood was over, everything that lay ahead of me vanished at that precise moment as well, and all that remained to me was as much as a lead soldier has beneath his feet to stand on.
This discovery understandably isolated me even more. It kept me busy with myself and filled me with a species of conclusive blitheness which I took for affliction, since it was far in advance of my years. I was also disquieted, as I recall, by the thought that, as nothing was set for any particular period, one might miss out on some things altogether. And when I returned to Ulsgaard in this frame of mind, and beheld all the books, I fell upon them, in quite a hurry, and very nearly with a bad conscience. Somehow I had a premonition of what I so often felt at later times: that you did not have the right to open a single book unless you engaged to read them all. With every line you read, you were breaking off a portion of the world. Before books, the world was intact, and afterwards it might be restored to wholeness once again. But how was I, who could not read, to take up the challenge laid down by all of them? There they stood, even in that modest study, in their hopelessly outnumbering ranks, shoulder to shoulder. In defiant desperation I pressed on from book to book, fighting my way through the pages like one called upon to perform a labour beyond his capacity. At that time, I read Schiller and Baggesen, Oehlen-schläger and Schack-Staffeldt,41 and all there was of Walter Scott and Calderón. Some things came into my hands that I ought to have read already, as it were, while for other things it was far too early; next to nothing was suitable for the age I was then. And nonetheless I read.
In later years, I would occasionally wake at night to find the stars so very real, and so brimful of significance, that I could not understand how people could bear to miss out on so much world. It was a similar feeling, I believe, whenever I looked up from the books and out to where summer was, where Abelone was calling. That she must needs call, and that I did not even answer, was a turn neither of us anticipated at all. It came in the midst of our happiest time. But since I was now in the grip of reading, I clung on hard to the habit and hid away, wilful and self-important, from our daily holidays. Inept as I was at taking advantage of the many, often subtle opportunities afforded by natural happiness, I was not loth to see in our growing disharmony the promise of future reconciliations, which became the more appealing the longer they were postponed.
In the event, one day my reader's trance ended as abruptly as it had begun; and on that occasion we put each other in a royal rage. By now, Abelone was not sparing me any kind of ridicule or disdain, and if I joined her in the summerhouse she would claim to be reading. On that particular Sunday morning, the book was indeed beside her, albeit unopened; but she seemed more than fully employed in carefully stripping redcurrants from their little clusters with a fork.
It must have been one of those early mornings one gets in July, fresh and rested times when joyful and spontaneous things are happening all around. From a million tiny irrepressible impulses, a mosaic of the most compelling life is assembled; things vibrantly intermingle, and move out into the air, and their coolness makes the shadows vivid and lends lightness and spirit to the radiance of the sun. No one thing in the garden stands out above the rest; all things are everywhere, and one would needs be a part of it all, if nothing were to be missed.
In Abelone's humble employment, moreover, the whole scene appeared afresh. It was such a happy notion, to be doing that very thing, and precisely as she did it. Her hands, bright in the shade, worked together so lightly and dextrously, and the round berries leaped mischievously from the fork into a bowl lined with dew-matted vine leaves, where others were already heaped, red and blond, gleaming, with the good seeds within the tart flesh. Seeing this, all I wanted was to watch; but, as I would probably be told off if I did, and in order to appear at ease, I picked up the book, sat down on the other side of the table, and, leafing through it only briefly, began to read somewhere or other.
‘You might at least read aloud, you bookworm,’ said Abelone after a while. This did not sound anywhere near as quarrelsome, and since I felt it was high time we made up, I instantly started reading out loud, and continued to the end of the chapter and the next heading, ‘To Bettina’.
‘No, not the replies,’ Abelone interrupted, and all at once she put down the little fork with an air of exhaustion, then promptly laughed at my expression as I sat looking at her.
‘My God, you really read that badly, Malte.’
I had to admit that my mind had not been on what I was reading for a single second. ‘I was only reading so that you would interrupt me,’ I confessed, and grew hot and turned back to the title page of the book. Only then did I know what it was. ‘And why not the replies?’ I asked, curious.
Abelone might as well not have heard me. There she sat in her bright dress, as if the darkness were deepening everywhere within her, just as it was in her eyes.
‘Give it to me,’ she said suddenly, as if in anger, and, taking the book out of my hand, she opened it at the page she wanted. And then she read one of Bettina's letters.42
I do not know how much I took in, but it was as if a solemn promise had been made to me that one day I should understand it all. And as her voice filled out, until at last it was almost the voice with which I had heard her sing, I felt ashamed that I had had so petty an idea of our reconciliation. For I well understood that that was what this was. But now it was taking place somewhere in the vast open spaces high above me, out of my reach.
[57] That promise is still being kept. At some time or other, that same book found its way among my books, those very few books I shall never part with. Now it opens at the passages I happen to have in mind for me too, and when I read them I cannot be certain whether it is Bettina I am thinking of or Abelone. No, Bettina has become more real within me; Abelone, whom I actually knew, was like a preparation for her, and now, for me, she has completely merged into Bettina, as if she had been transmuted into her own absolute self. For that strange creature, Bettina, brought space into being with all of her letters, a world of spacious dimensions. From the very start she was present in everything, as if she already had her death behind her. Everywhere she entered into the profound depths of being, herself a part of it, and whatever happened to her was an eternal part of Nature; there she recognized herself, and pulled back with something akin to pain; she pieced herself together again, laboriously, as if inferring herself from the tale
s people tell, and conjured herself up like a spirit, and endured herself.
Just now you still were, Bettina; I sense your presence. Does not the earth still bear your warmth? And do not the birds still leave a space for your voice? The dew is different, but the stars are still the stars of your nights. Or isn't the whole world in fact yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love, and watched it burn and blaze, and secretly replaced it with another while everyone slept. You felt in such complete harmony with God when every morning you demanded a new world of Him, so that all the worlds He had made might have their turn. You thought it shabby to save them up or mend them; you used them up and held out your hands for more world, more. For your love was equal to anything.
How can it be that people are not still all talking about your love? What has happened since then that was more extraordinary? Whatever are they thinking of? You yourself were well aware of the value of your love, and spoke it aloud to your greatest of poets,43 that he might make it human; for as yet it was still elemental. But in writing to you, he persuaded people not to believe in it. Everyone has read those replies, and people place more credence in them, because the poet is more intelligible to them than Nature. But perhaps it will one day be seen that this marked the limit of his greatness. This woman in love was a challenge posed to him, and he was unequal to it. What does his inability to respond signify? Love of this order requires no response: it bears the mating call and the answer within itself; it hears its own prayer. But he should have humbled himself before her, in all his splendour, and written what she dictated, with both hands, like John on Patmos, kneeling. That voice, which ‘performed the office of the angels’, left him no choice; it was come to enfold him and bear him away to eternity. Here was the chariot of his fiery ascension.44 Here was the dark myth he left void, prepared against his death.