The Chateau d'Argol (10 page)

However, their fear was dissipated in the resplendent light of day. The amazing radiance which every morning rose from the clear surface of the river drew them lingeringly through the light mist still veiling the high branches of the trees, and, falling on them in fine drops, seemed by the evidence of their wet faces the true mark of the
baptism
of the new day, the refreshing and delectable anointment of the morning. Little by little, the trees came confusedly out of the mist and as though by a unique privilege, stripped of their particularly picturesque quality, filled the barely awakened soul with the pure consciousness of their
volume
and of their harmonious luxuriance in the heart of a landscape in which colour seemed to lose completely its ordinary power of localization and, on the shores of these calm waters, inscribed for the eye, freed as by a miracle from all that the ordinary work of perception contains of a
reductio
ad absurdum
, appeared only the soothing and almost divine conjunction of the horizontal plane and the sphere. And nature, restored by the fog to its secret geometry, now became as unfamiliar as the furniture of a drawing-room under dust-covers to the eye of an intruder, substituting, all at once, the menacing affirmation of pure volume for the familiar hideousness of utility, and by an operation whose magical character must be evident to any one, restoring to the instruments of humblest use, until then dishonoured by all that
handling
engenders of base degradation, the particular and striking splendour of the
object.

With slow steps, they entered the forest, virgin in every respect, and pursued their way along those noble avenues. And now the sun showed above the crests of the high mountains, a cool breeze swayed the trees, and the roughened waters sparkled with a thousand lights, but all day long the bluish shadow of an iridescent fog still lingered over the horizon as though kept at a distance only by the radiation of this luminous couple. Unbelievable then was their felicity, their inexhaustible and absorbing bliss, and into the deep waters of each other's eyes, into their depths, they plunged like strong swimmers, and prolonged to the point of dizziness the fixity of their intolerable gaze, in which alternated the very ice of the abysses and the atrocious fires of the sun. They could not satisfy their inexorable eyes, devastating suns of their hearts, dripping suns, suns of the sea, suns sprung drenched from the lowest depths, icy and trembling like a living jelly in which light has been made flesh by the operation of an inconceivable spell.

One day, through the trees, they followed a wide green avenue covered by a vaulting of branches a hundred feet overhead, whose singular character, immediately apparent to the soul always on the alert for the perpetual snares of the forest, was due to the fact that while it ran through particularly hilly country and continually embraced each slightest sinuosity, yet the
rigidity
of its direction imposed itself upon the eye in the midst of all the natural undulations of the ground, and, directly in front of the traveller through the dark barrier of trees at the horizon, carved a luminous and sharply defined notch—suggesting to the mind, obsessed by the impenetrable wall of trees, a door opening onto an entirely unknown country which, because of the insistent straightness of the avenue drawn over hill and dale as by some wild caprice, by a will royally disdainful of all difficulties, seemed to confer a gift of supreme attraction. Amazing, too, was the indubitable
exaggeration
of its dimensions, leaving between the glorious walls of lofty verdure the span of a veritable clearing covered with a carpet of grass, vast and empty as the bare stage of a theatre, and whose colossal width seemed destined to reveal gradually to the soul all the, by no means ordinary, terrors of
agoraphobia.
And yet, in spite of the abnormal urgency suggested by the straightness of this cut—as though on a planet inhabited by mad geometers it had been considered of prime necessity to paint
first of all
the meridians on the ground—the character of pure
direction
, free from all idea of a goal, seemed in its peremptory affirmation alone sufficient—Albert and Heide turning to look back, noticed, not without a feeling of uneasiness, that the avenue only a short distance behind them, gradually invaded by the extravagant vegetation of the underbrush, little by little relinquished its geometric majesty and was lost in the
impasse
of the uniform ocean of trees.

Nothing can convey an idea of the suggestive power of this
road
, open for the soul alone in the heart of a forest isolated from the world, and which, by the disconcerting amplitude of its useless dimensions, seemed to render more complete the solitude of these sequestered regions. At this moment the sun, low in its course, shone in the very middle of the trench, which the avenue cut through the trees all the way to the distant horizon, and filled the theatrical vessel with a flood of golden light: as far as the eye could see the double colonnade of trees, more motionless than a curtain of leaves reflected in a sheet of water, seemed to make way before it; and, as on a path opened through the sea, and in the midst of a silence more sumptuous than that of an empty palace and which seemed to hold all things in suspense in the sustained flash of its enchantment, Heide and Albert started down the middle of the avenue. For a long time through the declining hours of the day, they followed the implacable rigidity of the route, colliding with the suffocating walls of their destiny.

Sometimes a bird flew like a triumphant arrow across the avenue, and its particular and now surprising
immunity
, during its whole passage across what seemed, even to the least initiated eye, one of the authentic
high-tension lines
of the globe, had an effect on the mind akin to watching the nerve-racking gymnastics of a sparrow on an electric wire. Sometimes a brook crossed the path, recognized far off by the singular gaiety, the entirely gratuitous musicality of the murmur of its transparent waters, and Albert then with a fraternal grace, would take Heide's shoes from her tired feet, improvising a scene comparable, by the excessive force of its effect upon the soul abandoned in these lonely haunts, with that scene which the critic of symphonies has designated by a completely strange title—because it suggests, and intends to suggest, that certain human relations lost in an animality as pure and fluent as thought, are completely reducible to an element for the first time envisaged
from within
—of "scene beside the brook".

At last night fell over the forest and the sky revealed all its stars, but nothing could stop their divine course, guarded more surely within the temple in the woods than by the tutelary sphinxes along the avenues of the Egyptian tombs.
Trust
, restored Albert and Heide to the state of pure virtue and resembling the milky emanation of the night bathed by the moon, visited them with all its primitive grace. As once before, on that harrowing day, across the watery plains of the sea, retreat was now no longer possible. But the night lingered and the avenue stretched out in all its fatal length. And they knew now that their road would end only with the surprising splendour of the morning. And this couple, arms linked over shoulders, endlessly prolonged their enchanted walk with eyes closed, hair flying, bare feet on moss out of the strange tales of chivalry, and with their slightest gestures visibly surrounded by all the signs of a
false elegance
a thousand times more disturbing than the real.

Long lingered the hours of the profound night. And now a vague feeling they were powerless to resist invaded the souls of Heide and of Albert. It seemed to them that the planet, swept along by the heart of the night which it belaboured with the crests of all its trees, overturned and spun backward following the obstinate direction of the avenue, more unreal than the axis of the poles, more abundant than the sun's rays drawn in chalk on a blackboard. And as though lifted by a prodigious effort onto the roof of the smooth planet, onto the nocturnal ridge of the world, they felt, with a divine shudder of cold, the sun sinking under them to an immense depth, and the unballasted avenue as it climbed right through the thickness of the true night revealing to them, minute by minute, all its secret and untrodden paths. In the silence of the woods, hardly distinguishable from that of the stars, they lived through a night of the world in all its sidereal intimacy, and the revolution of the planet, its thrilling orb, seemed to govern the harmony of their most ordinary gestures.

Now, however, it appeared to them that they were crossing low and watchful plains, interspersed with stagnant waters, where reeds like spears rose in supernatural immobility, then the road slowly climbed an imposing hill where a lighter air presaged still incommensurable altitudes—and often they would look back avidly, trying to make out the levelled landscape still completely covered by the dense veils of night. But their mad anguish was drawing to an end. A gentle breeze out of the black sky swayed the funereal folds of what seemed at first the unknown and unnameable substance of primeval chaos itself, but that finally proved to be only a heavy covering of grey clouds hovering over this nightmare landscape. And morning with its wings swept the shivering stretches of pure solitude. And, as though at the brusque signal of a warning gun, Heide and Albert stood still.

The gigantic avenue ended at the very summit of the plateau. In the middle of a level heath swept at this moment by the morning breeze, stretched a vast circular arena, appearing and disappearing in the capricious vagaries of the trailing mist, and very exactly delimited by a tender and luminous grassy turf which rendered its circumference clearly discernible, and contrasted strangely with the dishevelled, brambly and in every way utterly lugubrious character of the bushes carpeting the hillside. Cordons of stones scattered negligently here and there, which owed to the growth of the lichen now cloaking them their eerie hue of long bleached bones, accentuated for the eye the exorbitant circumference, and redoubled an almost intolerable perplexity. For, avenues in every respect
exactly similar
to the one Heide and Albert had been following here converged from all parts of the horizon, and from this vantage point the eye could encompass the entire vast perspective. It would be difficult for me to make the reader fully understand the impression produced upon Heide and Albert by this very strictly
incongruous
manifestation of the combined efforts of nature and art, unless it is realized that the most conclusive motive for the oppression transmitted to their minds from all sides, was that of an irrevocable and yet incomprehensible
necessity.
And perhaps the word
rendezvous
with the double meaning it implies—by a twist, whose profound cruelty is here apparent—of carefully concerted machinations and, at the same time, of the entire abdication of all the purely defensive reflexes, would best translate the dismayed impression instantly produced on the spectators of the scene by the perverse uselessness of this grandiose décor.

Meantime, while they wandered lost in the last shreds of shadow still lingering over these uplands, the pounding of a runaway horse's hoofs could be heard, and soon the animal appeared filling the deserted plateau with the noise of its furious galloping, its body covered with foam which it tossed wildly around it on every side, while on its back—and apparently the very centre of those convulsions which at moments started it frantically plunging—could be seen an empty saddle. Then they both recognized—and with a shudder of sudden anguish identified by
that empty saddle
—Herminien's favourite horse.

Fallen in the grass, coiled in the grass, more motionless than a meteoric stone, with the strange floating uncertainty of his wide-open corpse's eyes, as though revived in his face after death by the secret hand, and with the disquieting insinuations of an embalmer, the eyelids seemingly touched by the majestic makeup of death, Herminien lay nearby, and his uncovered face in the icy nakedness of the morning radiated a silent horror, as though, through the effect of a bloody irony, the blackness of a crime accomplished without a witness were painted on the face of the victim himself. Near him a block of sandstone half hidden in the grass was the very one on which his horse's hoof must have stumbled.

Silently they lifted him, removed his clothes, and his torso appeared, white, vigorous and soft—and their eyes obstinately avoided each other—and in his side below his ribs, appeared the hideous wound where the horse's shoe had struck, black and bloody, circled with clotted blood as though the haemorrhage had been stopped only by the effect of a charm or of a philtre. Little by little, they felt life returning under their fingers and it was not long before the doors of the castle closed behind the wounded man in a silence full of foreboding. And all during the grey and ghostly day, filled with the same magic as the night, while the sun's white disc remained obstinately hidden behind heavy mists, Albert continued to wander through the long empty corridors lighted, as though by the eerie reflections of the snow, by the continuously diffused light of the white sky, soft, and with a look of blindness, a prey to an intense agitation comparable only to the highest state of tension of one who keeps vigil. And whenever he passed in front of the closed door of Herminien's room, behind which the timid clink of a glass, and the musical and surprising sound of an isolated sigh in the heart of the tense silence acquired the majestic and uncertain accents of life and death themselves, all the blood in his veins would leap up in a fiery surge.

Worn out with fatigue, he at last lay down outside that forbidden door, and was soon visited by funereal visions. His dream seemed to take him back to those far-off days when, with Herminien on calm summer nights, their intoxicating walks would take them all over sleeping Paris, revealing to them, in the midst of a conversation inordinately interrupted by silence and invariably leading them by capricious roundabout ways to the vicinity of the jardin du Luxembourg, mysteriously deserted at that hour, the splendour of the nocturnal leaves, more entrancing than a stage setting in the light of the street lamps. And now, for the last few moments, their ears, no longer heeding their own desultory words, seemed to distinguish besides the hypnotic hissing of the arc lights, a similar and surprisingly moving noise coming from behind the high black walls cutting off their view on all sides, which was, it soon became evident, the collective murmuring of a kneeling invisible crowd praying in the middle of the street in a perfect delirium of unrestrained fervour. And now they found themselves drawn by these sounds into the maze of narrow and perpetually deserted streets that connect the place Saint-Sulpice with the rue de Vaugirard.