The Human Comedy (19 page)

“At this moment,” she answered, heartbreakingly adorable, “I am burning to know that secret. Tomorrow, I might not even listen to you . . .”

She smiled, and we parted; she still as proud, as formidable, and I every bit as ridiculous as ever. She had the audacity to waltz with a young aide-de-camp, leaving me by turns furious, sulking, admiring, affectionate, jealous.

“Until tomorrow,” she told me toward two in the morning, as she was leaving the ball.

“I won’t go,” I thought. “I’ll have no more to do with you. You are more capricious, perhaps a thousand times more wayward than . . . than my imagination.”

The next evening we were sitting before a lively fire in an elegant little salon, she on a love seat, I on some cushions, almost at her feet, looking up into her eyes. The street outside was silent. The lamp cast a gentle glow. It was one of those evenings that enrapture the soul, one of those moments one never forgets, one of those hours full of tranquillity and desire, whose charm will later be looked back on with enduring wistfulness, even once all our wishes have been granted. Who can erase the radiant mark left by the first stirrings of love?

“Go on, then,” she said, “I’m listening.”

“But I don’t dare begin. Parts of this tale are treacherous for the narrator. If I grow too enthusiastic, you will silence me.”

“Speak.”

“I obey . . .

“Ernest-Jean Sarrasine was the only son of a prosecutor of the Franche-Comté,” I began, after a pause. “His father had more or less honestly amassed an annual revenue of six to eight thousand pounds, a professional’s income which in those days and in the provinces passed for a colossal sum. Having only one child, the good lawyer Sarrasine spared no expense for his education, hoping to make of him a magistrate and to live long enough to see the grandson of Matthieu Sarrasine, a simple laborer of Saint-Dié, sit on a lily-emblazoned bench and sleep through the sessions for the greater glory of the parliament. But heaven did not have that joy in store for the prosecutor. Entrusted at an early age to the Jesuits, young Sarrasine proved a most turbulent pupil. He had the typical childhood of a man of great talent. He studied only what he wished, he was often rebellious, and sometimes he spent hours lost in meandering meditations, now contemplating his schoolmates as they played, now picturing Homer’s heroes in his mind’s eye. When he did happen to join in their frolics, he displayed a fearsome intensity. His scuffles with classmates rarely ended without bloodshed. If he was the weaker combatant, he bit. By turns active and passive, now unable to keep up with the lessons, now far beyond them, his unconventional nature earned him the fear of his masters and schoolmates alike. Rather than acquire the elements of the Greek language, he drew portraits of the father parsing some passage from Thucydides; he sketched the mathematics teacher, the prefect, the valets, the proctor, and covered the walls with aimless drawings. Rather than exalt the Lord, he amused himself during services by carving figures into the back of a bench; or, if he had succeeded in stealing a piece of wood, he sculpted some female saint. If he had no wood, stone, or pencils, he modeled his fancies in bread. Whether copying the figures in the paintings that adorned the choir or simply improvising, he always left some hastily done study on his seat, whose licentious character drove the younger priests to despair—and, claimed the gossips, brought a smile to the lips of the elderly Jesuits. At last, if we are to believe the school’s chronicles, he was expelled for having sculpted a figure of Christ from a thick log as he waited his turn in the confessional one Good Friday. The impiety that graced this statue was too enormous for the artist to go unpunished. And to make matters worse, he’d had the audacity to place that distinctly irreverent figure on top of the tabernacle!

Seeking refuge from the threat of paternal malediction, Sarrasine came to Paris. His powerful will was of the sort that admit to no obstacle, and so, heeding the dictates of his genius, he entered the studio of Edmé Bouchardon. He worked all day long and in the evening went to beg for his subsistence. Astounded at the young artist’s progress and intelligence, Bouchardon soon realized the depth of his student’s poverty; he offered his aid, took a liking to him, and treated him like his own child. Then, when Sarrasine’s genius was revealed by one of those works in which the mature talent to come battles the excesses of youth, the kindly Bouchardon tried to restore him to the good graces of the prosecutor, whose fatherly wrath subsided before the authority of the great sculptor. All of Besançon congratulated itself on having brought a future great man into the world. In his flattered vanity’s first rush of joy, the parsimonious lawyer offered his son the wherewithal to cut a respectable figure in society. For some time the long, laborious studies that sculpture demands tamed Sarrasine’s impetuous nature and restless mind. Foreseeing the violence with which the passions would surely rage in that youthful soul, perhaps as furiously unbridled as Michelangelo’s, Bouchardon smothered his ardency under continual labors. He succeeded in maintaining Sarrasine’s fervor within acceptable limits, now forbidding him to work, now proposing distractions when he saw him obsessed by some project, now assigning him arduous tasks just when he was about to give himself over to dissipation. But kindliness was always the most powerful weapon for subduing that passionate soul, and it was only by arousing his gratitude with paternal affections that the master acquired a real hold over his pupil. At the age of twenty-two, Sarrasine was wrenched away from Bouchardon’s salutary influence on his mores and habits. He paid the price of his genius by winning the sculpture prize funded by the Marquis de Marigny, Madame de Pompadour’s brother, that great benefactor of the arts. Diderot hailed Bouchardon’s student’s sculpture as a masterpiece. It was with profound sorrow that the sculptor to the king watched the departure for Italy of a young man whose profound ignorance of the ways of this world he had so scrupulously protected. For six years Sarrasine had shared Bouchardon’s table. No less obsessed with his art than Canova would later prove, he rose at dawn, made for the studio, and stayed there late into the night, living only with his muse. If he went to the Comédie-Française, it was only at his master’s insistence. Profoundly ill at ease at Madame Geoffrin’s, and in all the social circles into which Bouchardon sought to introduce him, he preferred to spend his time alone and forwent all the pleasures of that licentious age. He had no mistress other than Sculpture, apart from Clotilde, one of the Opéra’s brightest stars—and even that affair would be a short-lived one. Sarrasine was rather homely, always badly dressed, and so untamed in his nature, so immoderate in his ways that the celebrated nymph, fearing some catastrophe, soon returned the sculptor to the arms of the Arts. Sophie Arnould made some sort of quip on the subject, expressing, I believe, her surprise that her friend had ever stood a chance against statues.

Sarrasine left for Italy in 1758. As he traveled, his imagination was fired by the deep golden light, by the magnificent monuments scattered all through that fatherland of the arts. The statues, the frescoes, the paintings, everything filled him with wonder, and stirred by competitive zeal, he arrived in Rome burning to inscribe his name between those of Michelangelo and Monsieur Bouchardon. Thus, in the beginning, he divided his time between the studio and the study of the works of art so abundant in Rome.

He spent two full weeks in the ecstatic state that the queen of ruins inspires in all youthful imaginations, and then one evening he happened onto the Teatro Argentina, before which a great crowd had gathered. Asking the cause, he was answered by two names: ‘Zambinella! Jommelli!’ He entered and found a seat in the parterre, pressed in between two remarkably fat
abati
but close to the stage and with a rather fine view. The curtain went up. This was his first encounter with that music whose praises he had heard so eloquently sung by Monsieur Jean-Jacques Rousseau one evening at the Baron d’Holbach’s. The young sculptor’s senses were lubricated, so to speak, by Jommelli’s sublime harmonies. The languorous mannerisms of those perfectly interwoven Italian voices plunged him into a rapturous ecstasy. He sat silent, motionless, oblivious even to the compression exerted by the two priests. His soul flooded into his ears and eyes. His every pore seemed to be listening. All at once a roar of applause, loud enough to bring down the whole edifice, hailed the entrance of the prima donna. She coyly advanced to the lip of the stage and greeted the public with infinite grace. The lighting, the enthusiasm of a vast crowd, the illusion of the stage, the bewitchments of her costume (for the fashion of those times was singularly enticing): all this conspired to her advantage. Sarrasine cried out in pleasure. There before his marveling eyes stood that ideal beauty whose perfections he had thus far sought out only in bits and pieces, looking to one model, often ignoble, for the curve of an impeccable leg; to another for the contours of the breast; to this one for her white shoulders; finally taking the neck of a young girl, and the hands of this woman, and the gleaming knees of that child; never encountering, beneath the cold skies of Paris, the sumptuous, fluid creations of ancient Greece. In La Zambinella he found—united, delicate, and perfectly alive—all the exquisite proportions for which he so yearned, all the perfections of a femininity of which a sculptor is at once the sternest and the most passionate critic. Her mouth was expressive, her eyes amorous, her skin brilliant white. And to this, which would surely have delighted a painter, add all the wonders of those Venuses so revered by the Greeks and re-created by their chisels. The artist never tired of admiring the inimitable grace with which her arms were joined to her torso, the haunting curve of her neck, the harmonious lines of her eyebrows, her nose, then the perfect oval of her face, the purity of its youthful forms, and the effect of the lush, curving lashes that fringed her long and voluptuous eyelids. She was more than a woman, she was a masterpiece! In that undreamt-of creation there was love to delight any man and beauty to earn the raves of any critic. Sarrasine’s eyes devoured this work of Pygmalion, descended from her pedestal for him alone. When La Zambinella sang, a tumult filled his soul. The artist felt a sudden chill, then a rush of heat scintillating in his most intimate depths, in what we call the heart, for want of a more precise word! He did not applaud, he said nothing, he felt a wave of madness, a sort of frenzy that stirs us only at the age when desire has something terrible and infernal about it. Sarrasine wanted to leap onto the stage and take her in his arms. His physical strength—multiplied a hundredfold by a desperation that cannot be explained, since these phenomena were taking place in a sphere inaccessible to human scrutiny—was struggling, with painful violence, against its constraints. To see him, one would have thought him a cold and dull-witted man. Fame, learning, future, existence, laurels, everything came crashing down. ‘Earn her love or die’: such was the ultimatum that Sarrasine addressed to himself. Utterly intoxicated, he no longer saw the theater, nor the spectators, nor the actors; he heard no music. More than that, all distance between himself and La Zambinella was abolished; he possessed her; glued to her person, his eyes took her over. By the grace of an almost diabolical potency, he could feel the breath conveying her voice, smell the powder that scented her hair, see every contour of that face, count the blue veins that tinged her satin skin. Finally, that agile voice, so fresh, so clear, supple as a thread to which every slight puff of breath gives a new form, curling it, extending it, looping it, that voice so deeply shook his soul that more than one involuntary cry burst from his breast, born of convulsive delectations too rarely supplied by human passions. Soon he had no choice but to flee the theater, his trembling legs almost refusing to carry him. He was drained, weak as a timid and anxious man who has given himself over to some towering fit of rage. So great had been his pleasure—or, perhaps, so terrible his torment—that his life had poured out of him like water from an overturned vase. He felt an emptiness inside him, an annihilation very like the listlessness of a convalescent after some serious illness. Invaded by an inexplicable sadness, he sat down on the steps of a church. His back pressed to a column, he fell into a meditation as tangled as a dream. Passion had left him utterly undone.

He returned home and threw himself into one of those paroxysms of activity that reveal the presence of a new order in our existence. Rapt in that first surge of love, as much pleasure as pain, he tried to quell his impatience and agitation by drawing La Zambinella from memory. It was a sort of material meditation. On one sheet La Zambinella appeared in that seemingly cold, placid pose so beloved of Raphael, of Giorgione, of all the great painters. On another, she held her head delicately turned to one side, as if listening to herself as she finished a trill. Sarrasine sketched his mistress in every possible attitude: He depicted her unveiled, sitting, standing, lying, both chaste and amorous, his pencil’s frenzied fantasies materializing all the impulsive ideas that vie for our imagination’s attention when we think intensely of a mistress. But his untamable thoughts did not stop at drawing. He saw La Zambinella, he talked to her, he entreated her, he ran through a thousand years of life and happiness with her, placing her in every situation imaginable, trying on, so to speak, a shared future. The next day he sent a footman to rent a private box beside the stage for the remainder of the season. Then, like every young man with a powerful soul, he inflated in his mind the difficulties of his undertaking, and as a prelude to better things, he offered his passion the opportunity to gaze on his mistress without hindrance. This golden age of love, in which we delight in our own emotion and are made happy almost by ourselves, was not to last long for Sarrasine. Nevertheless, events overtook him when he was still under the spell of that budding hallucination, as innocent as it is sensual. Over some eight days, he lived an entire life. In the morning he kneaded the clay from which he would fashion a superb likeness of La Zambinella, despite all the veils, skirts, corsets, and knotted ribbons that distanced her from him. In the evening, settling early into his box, alone, outstretched on a sofa, he invented for himself, like a Turk in the embrace of opium, a happiness as rich and unsparing as he wished. First he gradually inured himself to the overpowering emotions inspired by his mistress’s singing; then he trained his eyes to look on her, and soon found himself able to contemplate her with no fear of the muted explosion of fury that had shaken him that first evening. His passion grew more profound as it grew more pacific. On top of all this, the unsociable sculptor guarded his solitude—peopled with imaginings, decorated with the caprices of desire, full of happiness—against any intrusion by his comrades. So powerful was his love, and so naïve, that he fell prey to all the youthful uncertainties that besiege us in our first amorous experience. Realizing that he would soon have to take action, bestir himself, learn where La Zambinella lived, determine if she had a mother, an uncle, a guardian, a family—musing, in short, on the measures required to see her, to speak with her—he felt his heart swelling so powerfully at such ambitious ideas that he postponed these considerations until the next day, happy in his physical torment no less than in his mental delight.”