There are specific places where silence makes its subtle omnipresence felt, where it can be more easily heard, where it may appear as a sweet, soft, continuous and anonymous sound; places to which the advice of the poet Valéry applies: ‘Listen to this delicate sound which is continuous, and which is silence. Listen to what you hear when nothing makes itself heard’; this noise ‘blankets everything, this sand of silence . . . Now nothing. This nothing is huge in the ears.’1 Silence is a presence in the air. It is ‘not visible’, wrote Max Picard, ‘and yet its existence is clearly apparent. It extends to the furthest distances, yet is so close to us that we can feel it as concretely as we feel our own bodies.’2 It is not only thought and ideas that are affected; behaviour and decisions are also subject to its strong influence.
Among the places where silence particularly makes itself felt are the house, with its rooms, hallways and bedrooms, and all the objects that furnish it, but also certain specific buildings, such as churches, libraries, castles and prisons. I shall begin by quoting examples of what was said of these places in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a time when discussion of the silence of intimate places intensified. I will reserve for later the silence that is associated with contemplation and interiority, and is a precondition for meditation, prayer and listening to the word of God.
There are houses that breathe silence, where it seems to permeate the walls. This has been powerfully conveyed in our own day by the paintings of Edward Hopper. It is equally the case with Quesnay, the house of the married priest described by Barbey d’Aurevilly: it was ‘in the silence of this house where silence had always held such sway’ that the hero, Néel de Néhou, awaiting the return of Sombreval, watched over Calixte.3
Silence was central to the work of Georges Rodenbach, for example that of the patrician residences of Bruges. All along the canals, in this dying town, the silence of these hushed houses oppresses; walking the deserted streets, the novel’s main character, Hugues Viane, ‘found himself the brother in silence and in melancholy of this doleful Bruges’.4 Here, says Rodenbach, silence is something living, real, despotic, hostile to anything that disturbs it. In this town, every sound shocks, is sacrilegious, crude and gross.
The presence of silence is crucial to Julien Gracq’s novel The Opposing Shore.5 It reigns in the palace, Vanessa’s old home, all over the town of Maremma in which it stands and in the capital, Orsenna, in fact everywhere where the decadence can be felt. I will return to this novel, which is obsessed by many different forms of silence.
Inside houses, various types of silence impregnate rooms, halls, bedrooms and studies. The silence that is the main subject of the best-known novel of Vercors, The Silence of the Sea, lay heavy in the ground floor room in which the uncle and his niece awaited the German officer Werner von Ebrennac.6 From the beginning, the German sensed it and he seemed ‘to be gauging the depth of the silence’ even before he entered the room. After he had spoken, the silence persisted; it ‘was unbroken, it grew closer and closer like the morning mist; it was thick and motionless’; the immobility of the niece and the uncle ‘made it even heavier, turned it to lead’.7
Silence then accompanies events as they unfold; it was the silence of France which the German officer struggled to overcome during ‘more than a hundred winter evenings’. To this end, he accepted the implacable silence: ‘let [it] invade the whole room, and, like a heavy unbreathable gas, saturate every corner of it’. It was as if, of the three protagonists, it was he who felt most at ease.8 On his return, years later, having lived through various traumas and understood the resistance put up by France, Werner von Ebrennac now approves the ‘healthy obstinacy’ of the silence that ‘once more fell’, but which was now ‘much more tense and thick’.9 What had been, in 1941, the silence of dignity had become the silence of resistance.
‘Every bedroom’, wrote Claudel, ‘is a huge secret.’10 Indeed, bedrooms are the private space of silence par excellence. It is necessary to them. The nineteenth century, observes Michelle Perrot, saw the rise of the desire for a private bedroom, for personal space, a shell, a place of secrecy and silence.11 This desire is historical fact. Baudelaire proclaimed the delight he felt when at last, in the evening, he was alone in the haven of his bedroom. There, he wrote, citing La Bruyère, he escaped ‘the great woe of not being able to be alone’, by contrast with those who lose themselves in the crowd, ‘probably afraid they couldn’t tolerate themselves’. ‘Finally alone! Now only the rattling of some lingering and exhausted carriages can still be heard. For a few hours, we will possess silence, if not rest. Finally! The tyranny of the human face has disappeared, and now only I myself will make me suffer.’ Then, ‘annoyed with everyone and annoyed with myself, I long to redeem myself and to bolster my pride a bit in the silence and solitude of the night.’12
Huysmans attributes a similar desire to several characters in his novels. Des Esseintes surrounds himself with almost mute servants, old people weighed down by years of silence. He contrives a silent bedroom for himself: a rug, a padded ceiling and well-oiled doors ensure that he never hears the footsteps of the servants. He dreamed of ‘a sort of oratory’, a false ‘monastic cell’, a place of ‘retreat for thoughts’, though eventually he found the silence burdensome.13
Marcel Proust had the walls of his bedroom covered with cork and bribed the workmen not to do the jobs for which they were hired in the apartment above his. Kafka expressed the desire to have a hotel room that would allow him ‘to isolate himself, say nothing, delight in silence and write at night’.14
Other writers have analysed in more detail the roots of this widespread desire for silence in a room of one’s own. Its importance is often linked to the emotions stirred by the faint and familiar sounds emanating from members of the family. Walt Whitman acclaims ‘the mother at home, quietly placing the dishes on the supper-table’.15 Rilke describes the happiness he felt in the ‘silent room of an ancestral house among the quiet things in their abiding places’, hearing ‘the tits sounding their first notes outside in the green and sun-shot garden, and away in the distance the village clock’.16 Here, happiness comes from the osmosis between private space and an indeterminate external space.
Rilke also described the various silences created for a child by the mother’s visit:
O the silence on the staircase, the silence in the next room, the silence high up under the ceiling. O Mother: O you, the only one who dealt with all that silence, back in my childhood; who took it upon herself, saying: Do not be afraid – it’s me; who had the courage, in the dead of night, to be that silence for one who was frightened, who was scared stiff. You light a lamp, and that sound is already you.17
There is, he said, another particular silence within a bedroom, the silence created when the neighbours stop making a racket: ‘And now . . . silence fell. It was as silent as in the aftermath of pain. The silence was strangely palpable and prickling, as if a wound were healing.’ It was a silence that came as a surprise and kept him awake; ‘the nature of that silence had to be experienced; it cannot be described.’18
The narrator of In Search of Lost Time frequently analyses the nature of the silence that surrounds him. He savours the ‘charming quality’ of silence on the Legrandin terrace. In a much-quoted passage, he describes the interior of Tante Léonie’s bedroom:
The air of [this room] was saturated with the fine bouquet of a silence so nourishing, so succulent that I could not enter . . . without a sort of greedy enjoyment, particularly on those first mornings, chilly still, of the Easter holidays, when I could taste it more fully, because I had just arrived then at Combray.19
We shall return to the care with which the narrator maintains his silence in the room in which Albertine sleeps.
I shall also return to the subtle eroticism pervading the bedroom evoked by Barbey d’Aurevilly in ‘The Crimson Curtain’. Here, I shall consider only the various menacing silences inside the house, which is a veritable kingdom of silences. The lover, awaiting the silent arrival of Alberte, checks the ‘terrifying silence’ of the sleeping house. He listens to the ominous silence of the parental bedroom. Stealth was essential to avoid any surprises, to prevent any noise from the creaking hinges of the doors. Alberte’s first appearance in the narrator’s bedroom comes when he is cocooned in the silence of the room. The street itself was as quiet as ‘the bottom of a well’. ‘I would have heard a fly move’, he says, ‘but if, by chance, there happened to be one in my bedroom, it must have been asleep in some corner of the window or in one of the deep pleats of this curtain . . . that hangs in front of the window, perpendicular and immobile.’ In this ‘profound and total silence’ – we should reflect on this distinction – the door, all of a sudden, gently opens and Alberte appears, terrified she may have made a noise.20
Another bedroom imagined as impregnated with silence is that of the young woman bent over her work who is so feelingly described by Victor Hugo. Work, purity, piety and quiet coexist in her attic. In this ‘obscure refuge’, while ‘musing on God, simple and without fear, this maiden performed her noble and worthy task, dreamy Silence was seated at her door’.21 The voices on the wind, which ‘rose vaguely from the silent doorsteps’ of the street, say to her: ‘Be pure! . . . Be calm . . . Be joyful . . . Be good.’22
Angelique, the heroine of Zola’s The Dream, a novel in which a permanent silence contrasts with the sound of the nearby cathedral bells, seems to illustrate the Hugolian dream. Silence is crucial to one of the novel’s great scenes: on the evening when, for the first time, the lovesick Félicien appears, the silence in the bedroom was ‘so absolute’ that it accentuated every sound and revealed the noises ‘of the quivering, sighing house’, the noises that inspire night terrors.23
Jules Verne, in a comic short story with the title A Fantasy of Dr Ox, pushed his description of the total silence that reigned within an imaginary Flemish town to absurdities, which allowed him to itemize all the noises that would ordinarily have been heard. Thus the residence of the Burgomaster van Tricasse was a ‘peaceful and silent’ mansion, ‘whose doors never creaked, whose windows never rattled, whose floors never groaned, whose chimneys never roared, whose weathercocks never grated, whose furniture never squeaked, whose locks never clanked, and whose occupants never made any more noise than their shadows’. The god Harpocrates, he adds, would assuredly have chosen it for his Temple of Silence.24
The French novelist of the next century most obsessed by the silence of the bedroom and driven to describe it and convey it was undoubtedly Georges Bernanos. This is particularly visible in his Monsieur Ouine. The quality of the silence of this man’s bedroom reflects his character, ‘genius of nothingness’, of emptiness and of evil, ‘schoolteacher of nothingness’, ‘pederast of souls’, monstrous reptile. Here, silence expresses desperation. It accompanies a death, preceded by a long last agony.
The young Steeny, when he first enters Monsieur Ouine’s room, is at once struck by ‘the wondrous silence of the little bedroom, softly turning on an unseen axis’. He even thinks he can feel it ‘slipping across his forehead, over his chest and along his palms, caressing him like water’.25 He then becomes aware of a murmur, a distant weeping. ‘One could not say that the silence was broken, but it did flow by him, little by little going on its way.’ Behind him, there was ‘a scarcely perceptible shudder’, which was not yet a noise, but which preceded and foreshadowed one.26
Later, Monsieur Ouine talks of Anthelme, his landlady’s husband, who was on his deathbed.
He spoke calmly, deliberately, in a voice hardly lowered at all, yet [Steeny], not without a vague sense of fear, thought he felt that they were enclosed within the same silence, a silence absorbing only the higher registers of sound and leaving the illusion of becoming itself some sort of audible purity.27
In fact it was Monsieur Ouine, who was himself a silence that poisoned minds and corrupted instincts. This was evident when he was on the point of death: ‘Monsieur Ouine’s breathing did not disturb the silence of the little room, but just gave it a sort of funereal, almost religious, dignity.’28 ‘For the length of my solitary life’, the dying man confides, ‘I’ve [never] been one to talk to myself, in the proper sense of the expression, but I rather spoke in order to avoid hearing myself.’ The silence that followed ‘brought no relaxation. It was a silence full of other words, unpronounced words, which Steeny thought he heard hissing and twisting in the shadows like a tangle of snakes.’ And then, as he died, Monsieur Ouine laughed softly, a sound that ‘scarcely even rose above the silence’.29
It would be quite inadequate to restrict my discussion to the bedroom as refuge, confinement, fear, the osmosis of silence and the vague susurration of noises coming from outside. A consideration of the silence of bedrooms must also include their furniture, and the objects and even people who have a particular affinity with the silence of these spaces.
The silent discourse of the objects that constitute decor has been called the ‘mute language of the soul’.30 ‘Every object’, wrote Max Picard
has a hidden fund of reality that comes from a deeper source than the word that designates the object. Man can meet this hidden fund of reality only with silence. The first time he sees an object, man is silent of his own accord. With his silence, man comes into relationship with the reality in the object which is there before ever language gives it a name. Silence is his tribute of honour to the object.31
The object ‘speaks’, says Georges Rodenbach; ‘it expresses its nature in a silent discourse, private because perceptible by its interlocutor alone’. In his poetry, Rodenbach exalted many objects which speak silently to the soul. They include the ‘thin window panes always complicit with the outside’, against which women press their faces, on Sundays, gazing on emptiness and silence; the mirror, ‘sister soul of the bedroom’; old chests; ‘the bronze statuette with arching back, reflecting in a silent hymn’. Here, dreams hang in the air like balloons, and ‘the bedroom remains silent and juggles’ with them. When evening falls, only the gently vibrating chandelier ‘emits its discontented noise in the enclosed silence’. Rodenbach sees the bedroom as a ‘regalia of silence with motionless fabrics’. Here more than anywhere else ‘the pensive virginity of silence’ reigns.
There are many other objects that speak silently to the soul: the bedside lamp; the old portraits ‘with which we often converse in silence’; the fish tank, a vessel which communicates a rejection of exteriority, where the water flees ‘to the bottom of its house of glass’; and, among the jewels, the pearl, ‘being without being’. Rodenbach saw grey as the sensitive colour of silence, together with the white of the plumage of the swans of the canals of Bruges and the black of night. Bedrooms, he wrote:
. . . vraiment sont de vielles gens
Sachant des secrets, sachant des histoires . . .
Qu’elles ont cachés dans les vitres noires
Qu’elles ont cachés au fond des miroirs.
[. . . are really old people / Knowing secrets, knowing stories . . . / Which they have hidden in the black panes / Which they have hidden at the back of the mirrors.]
And night-time sees ‘a cascade of secrets that no one tells’.32
If decor is the silent language of the soul, silence itself imposes on the soul its subtle omnipresence. This is what gives a particular object its aura, that ‘boundary where being becomes absence’, which then constitutes ‘like a subtle vibration, a silent speech’.
Certain beings have an affinity with silence, in particular children. As we have seen, they sense its motherly presence. ‘The child’, wrote Max Picard, ‘is like a little hill of silence’, on which ‘suddenly the word appears . . . more silence than sound comes out through the words of children.’33 Many film directors have made children’s silence telling. For Philippe Garrel, children induce silence and turn it into territory.34
Max Picard dwells on the ‘dense silence’ that is in animals. They ‘carry silence around with them on behalf of man’, he wrote, ‘and are always putting silence down in front of man.’ They are ‘images of silence’. But the silence of animals is ‘a heavy silence. Like a block of stone’; they try ‘to tear themselves away but [are] always chained to it’.35 Among animals, the cat in particular inhabits the silence it seems to symbolize, a feature that film directors have used to good effect.
Some buildings, too, are temples of silence, though in a different way from the house, its passages and its bedrooms. The most notable are churches and cloisters. ‘Cathedrals are built around . . . silence’, wrote Max Picard; ‘the silence of a Romanesque cathedral exists as a substance . . . it is as though the cathedral, by the very fact of its existence, were producing walls of silence, cities of silence, men of silence.’ Cathedrals, he continues, ‘are like silence inlaid with stone . . . [they] stand like enormous reservoirs of silence.’36
Huysmans, especially in his novels of conversion, keeps presenting his heroes as searching for silence, anxious to seek refuge in it, attracted in particular by that found in ‘deserted churches and dark chapels’. Durtal, living in Lourdes and renouncing the ugly modern basilica, takes pleasure in frequenting the old and now derelict church: ‘Very silent, hardly lighted at all, and very intimate, it was almost empty on weekdays’ and, having emerged from the crowds of the new Lourdes, he loved ‘to take refuge there’. The handful of women who prayed in front of the holy sacrament remained motionless in their seats and noiseless; not a sound was to be heard; here, ‘you could talk to [the Virgin] sweetly and at length in the silence and the dimness’.37
Durtal went to live in Chartres in order to enjoy the cathedral, which he expected to find a haven of silence. When, on his first visit, he descended into the crypt, his hopes were somewhat dashed: ‘Presently, the clapclap of sabots became audible, and then the smothered footfall of nuns; there was silence but for sneezing and nose-blowing stifled by pocket handkerchiefs, and then all was still.’38 Having retreated to a study opposite the towers of the cathedral, and obsessed by the building, he could hear only ‘the cawing of the rooks and the strokes of the hours’ as ‘they fell one by one on the silence of the deserted square’. He had placed his table in front of the window, and ‘there he sat dreaming, praying, meditating, making notes’, in the ‘provincial’ silence in which, he believed, he could work better than in Paris. Durtal remained in Chartres for some time, captivated by the tranquil charm of the cathedral close, while also regretting that its silence was only partial. When he decided to leave, it was ‘that very silence, that solitude in the cathedral’ that he regretted.39
While in Chartres, he visited the convent of the Sisters of Saint Paul. There, in the silent corridors, ‘the backs of the good women might be seen crossed by the triangular fold of linen, and the click could be heard of their heavy black rosaries on links of copper, as they rattled on their skirts against the hanging bunch of keys’.40
I will pass quickly over the connection between silence and the liturgy, it is so self-evident. Durtal emphasizes it, of course, in connection with the movements of the altar boy, which punctuated the service.
[It] proceeded slowly, soaking into the abject silence of the worshippers, and the child, more reverent and attentive than ever, rang the bell; it was like a shower of sparks tinkling under the smoky vault, and the silence seemed deeper than ever behind the kneeling boy.41
The roll call of silent buildings is long and it would be tedious to enumerate them all. They include prisons, where silence is obligatory. Edmond de Goncourt, haunted by the memory of his brother Jules, who had died of aphasia, devoted the second part of his novel La Fille Élisa to the destruction of the person by the silence of the penitentiary. Albert Camus takes up the same theme in the last pages of The Outsider. Obermann, hero of Senancour’s novel of that name, takes refuge in the Bibliothèque nationale in order to overcome the intolerable boredom that afflicts him in Paris. There, he declares, ‘I experience greater tranquillity among persons who are silent like myself, than when alone amidst a boisterous crowd’. The library had a peaceful grassy courtyard, with a few statues, and he rarely left, he said, ‘without pausing for a few minutes in this hushed enclosure’.42
Let us return now to Julien Gracq’s The Opposing Shore, which, as already observed, is a work in which every nuance of silence plays its part. The Admiralty, the fortress in which the narrator is based, has the silence of an abandoned hulk, and this ‘was the sign of an arrogant hostility’. The building is inhospitable from beginning to end of the novel. ‘The silence of its empty casemates, of its corridors buried like mine galleries in the dread density of stone’, gave it ‘the dimensions of a dream’.
The heart of this silence was in the map room, to which the author keeps returning. At the beginning of the novel, the silence of this room is ‘cloistral’; inside it, at the same time, it was as if ‘something had mysteriously awakened’. From the main map, over which the narrator pored for hours on end, there appeared to come ‘a faint rustling’, which ‘seemed to people the enclosed room and its lurking silence’. This oppressive place, in which the idea was first conceived of confronting the enemy, long dormant, by an expedition on the ship The Redoubtable, seemed an oasis of silence. The narrator, hero of the foolhardy venture, returned from his foray to the calm of his absent commander’s office, where now, in the ‘muffled silence’, there could be heard the lapping of the sea, and in the distance the sound of a machine ‘wakening that secluded silence like the murmur of bees’.43 The quiet of the Admiralty’s rooms now reflected the defiance triggered in him by the decision.
Places and sounds weigh on people; behaviour and choices feel its subtle influence. These impressions have marked so many authors that they have constantly returned to them, and evocations of space have become an expression of their inner state. Nature, too, would excite their senses and stimulate their quest for silence.