Silence is an essential component of a deep love. No one has expressed this better than Maurice Maeterlinck, and I shall quote him at some length: ‘If it be granted to you to descend for one moment into your soul, into the depths where the angels dwell, it is not the words spoken by the creature you loved so dearly that you will recall, or the gestures that he made’, but rather ‘the silences that you have lived together’; it is the quality of these silences, he goes on, that reveal ‘the quality of your love and your soul’. He speaks of an ‘active silence’ but also of one that is ‘passive’, a silence that sleeps, and is ‘the shadow of sleep, of death or nonexistence’.1
Silence is ‘harbinger of the special element of the unknown that is present in each love’. Here, every silence is different, and the whole fate of a love depends on ‘the quality of this first silence’ that descends upon two souls. If there is no harmony between two lovers in this first silence, ‘there can be no love in their souls’, for the silence ‘between two souls’ will never change: ‘its nature can never alter and even until the death of the lovers’ it will retain ‘the form, the attitude and the power’ it had when ‘for the first time, it came into the room’.2 Words, Maeterlinck continues, ‘can never express the real, special relationship that exists between two beings’. More generally, it is only in silence that we can perceive our truth about love, death and destiny.3 ‘If I tell someone I love them – as I may have told a hundred others – my words will convey nothing to him; but the silence which will ensue, if indeed I do love him, will . . . give birth to a conviction, that shall itself be silent.’4 In conclusion, Maeterlinck asks: ‘Is it not silence that determines and fixes the savour of love? Deprived of it, love would lose its eternal essence and perfume. Who has not known those silent moments which separated the lips to reunite the souls?’ We must constantly seek them, and there ‘is no silence more docile than the silence of love . . . it is indeed the only one that we may claim for ourselves alone’.5
During a love affair, experienced in all its depth, awaited for years, we chatter of the ticking clock or the setting sun to give ourselves time ‘to admire each other and embrace each other in another silence which the murmur of lips and thoughts cannot disturb’.6 Here, Maeterlinck rediscovers Jean Paul [Johann Paul Friedrich Richter], who wrote: ‘When I wish to love very tenderly someone dear to me, and pardon her everything, I need only look at her for a while in silence.’7
Like Maeterlinck, Georges Rodenbach subscribed to the symbolist ideal of a silent communion between beings. Thus, he wrote in one of his first poems:
J’entre dans ton amour comme dans une église
Où flotte un voile bleu de silence et d’encens.8
[I enter into your love as into a church / In which hovers a blue veil of silence and incense.]
Elsewhere, he evokes the lover who, lying in an unlit chamber, dreams of the mistress who has killed herself:
Douceur! Ne plus se voir distincts! N’être plus qu’un!
Silence! Deux senteurs en même parfum
Penser la même chose et ne pas se le dire.9
[What sweetness! No longer to see ourselves distinct! To be but one! / Silence! Two aromas with a single scent / Think the same thing and do not tell each other.]
In 1955, Max Picard said that, in love, there is more silence than speech. Lovers, he wrote, are conspirators, in a conspiracy of silence. The mistress listens to the silence more than to the words of her lover. ‘Be silent’, she seems to murmur, ‘be silent’, so I may hear you. ‘It is easier to love when one is silent’, because ‘in the silence love can reach out into the remotest corners of space’. Silence is a sign of the closeness of a friendship, too. Picard, quoting Péguy, describes the friends who enjoy the pleasure of being silent together, side by side, mile after mile, hour after hour, walking silently along silent roads. ‘Happy are two friends who love each other enough to be able to be silent together’, in a silent countryside.10
The emphasis on the depth of silence in love has a long history – we need only think of courtly love; it requires us to step back in time, and to more banal considerations. In The Book of the Courtier (1580), Baldesar Castiglione states, if not exactly in connection with a silent love affair, that he ‘who loves much speaks little’. Lorenzo the Magnificent is told that ‘just as true lovers have glowing hearts, so they have cold tongues, with broken speech and sudden silence’.11 Castiglione offers advice: to make his love known, the courtier should show it by his manner rather than by his words. More affection ‘is sometimes revealed in a sigh, in reverence, in timidity, than a thousand words’. The lover should make his eyes ‘faithful messengers to bear the embassies of his heart’ – we should not forget that at this period the look was a ‘touch’.12 It is the eyes, ‘kind and soft’, that silently fire their arrows. It is they that silently seal the loving accord. ‘They send out their rays straight to the eyes of the beloved at a moment when these are doing the same’; then ‘the spirits meet’. It is the eyes that produce the ‘sweet encounter’.13 Two lovers convey by their eyes ‘what is written in their heart’. They engage in a ‘long and free love talk’ which is not understood by the others present thanks to their ‘discretion and precaution’. The eyes of the lovers whisper ‘only those words that signified’.14
The presence of silence in the life of lovers is proclaimed by the novels of the classical age. In L’Astrée, the bed is a place of ‘intimate favours obtained in secrecy and in silence’.15 The image of the silence that leads to love at the heart of the earthly paradise described by Milton is surprising: when Adam and Eve come together in their bower, the poet tells us, ‘silence was pleased’. Pascal wrote that ‘in love, silence is of more avail than speech . . . there is an eloquence in silence that penetrates more deeply than language can’.16
The romantic age is here the link between the injunctions of the moralists and the subtlety of the symbolists. Faced with the dying Eleanor, Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, who no longer loves her, observes that she has retained her feelings for him. ‘She was too weak to be able to say much’, he said, ‘but she looked at me in silence and at these times I had the impression she was begging me to give her life, which I could no longer do.’17 In Constant’s Cécile, the narrator’s wife loves another man than her husband. One evening, spent by the three of them alone ‘in a fairly unbroken silence’, the husband observes ‘the glances of the two lovers, their mutual understanding revealed in the slightest matter, their happiness at being together – although they could not say a word out of my hearing’; it ‘plunged me into deep meditation’, he writes.18 Here, the silence cocoons the amorous glances and the desire of the two persons. After the husband has managed to break this mute alliance, he is moved by the tears shed by Cécile, who remains ‘silent and still’.19
Senancour’s Obermann believed that ‘silence protects the dreams of love’, but when the silence of love ceases, ‘the void in which your life is quenched’ began.20 Alfred de Vigny often refers to the power of the silence that binds lovers together. In some famous lines, the poet proposes to his mistress that he wheel his shepherd’s hut into a thick patch of heather:
Et là, parmi les fleurs, nous trouverons dans l’ombre
Pour nos cheveux unis un lit silencieux.21
[And there, among the flowers, we shall find in the shadow / A silent couch for our two heads.]
Eva, in reply, proclaims that she will go ‘solitary and serene, in chaste silence’.22
Victor Hugo frequently returned to the theme of silence as one of the pleasures of love. In Contemplations, he writes of the lovers’ silent walk:
Longtemps muets, nous contemplâmes
Le ciel où s’éteignait le jour.
Que se passait-il dans nos âmes?
Amour! Amour!
[Long silent, we watched / The sky from which day faded. / What was happening in our souls? / Love! Love!]
In his Sous les arbres (Beneath the Trees), he is more specific about these rich moments of silence:
Ils marchaient . . . s’arrêtaient,
Parlaient, s’interrompaient, et, pendant les silences,
Leurs bouches se taisant, leurs âmes chuchotaient.23
[They walked . . . stopped, / Talked, interrupted each other, and, during the silences, / Their lips falling quiet, their souls whispered.]
The link between love and silence became a leitmotif of the twentieth century. Proust’s narrator in In Search of Lost Time silently watches Albertine asleep, then sleeps with her without making a sound:
Then, feeling that the tide of her sleep was full . . . I would climb deliberately and noiselessly on to the bed, lie down by her side, clasp her waist in one arm, and place my lips upon her cheek and my free hand on her heart and then on every part of her body in turn, so that it too was raised, like the pearls, by her breathing . . . The sound of her breathing, which had grown louder, might have given the illusion of the panting of sexual pleasure, and when mine was at its climax, I could kiss her without having interrupted her sleep.24
We might compare this feeling to the silence of the bedroom in which love letters are written.
At this point, we may turn to silent dreams of love. Saint-Exupéry talked movingly of the young girl who created a kingdom ‘out of the thoughts, the voice, the silences of a lover’.25 In Albert Camus’s The Outsider, it is in silence, on the beach, that the idyll between Marie and the narrator begins: ‘I kissed her. From that point on, neither of us said anything.’26 Much later, Pascal Quignard wrote: ‘Only silence allows us to contemplate the other.’27
There is another silence of love, however, already suggested by Alfred de Vigny, that which is present during sex or, more generally, erotic sensuality, another aspect of our subject, to which I shall now turn. Orgasm itself, its anticipation, its culmination and its aftermath, often dictate a range of deep silences. This was the case, according to the great names of eighteenth-century erotic literature, during masturbation, especially female masturbation, then such a source of excitement to men.
By definition, the pursuit of pleasure in the act of masturbation takes place in a silence of a particular quality and flavour. The French physician Félix Roubaud quoted the case of a young man of lymphatic temperament who was incapable of ejaculating ‘when he faced the test of coitus and who could succeed only in the silence of masturbation’. Doctor Léopold Deslandes quoted other cases, those of the masturbators who operated in total silence, in the living room, surrounded by their family. ‘They made no or almost no movement’, but there was, ‘in the subject’s posture, physiognomy and silence . . . something unusual’ which would not have eluded the man of medicine. ‘It would have been impossible, in particular, to conceal from vigilant observers the ultimate thrill however experienced the masturbator.’28
Alfred Delvau’s Dictionnaire érotique moderne, which dates from 1864, takes pleasure in emphasizing the ecstatic state of the female who is coming to orgasm. Here, it is not so much a question of voluntary silence as of the silence caused by what was then called ‘la petite mort’ (little death), which happened when the woman’s eyes rolled upwards, and she displayed ‘white eyes’.29
Barbey d’Aurevilly describes as essential the silence of sexual climax in ‘The Crimson Curtain’. The heroine, Alberte, is a very silent person. Her whole attitude expressed the permanent depth of her silence. It culminated during sexual intercourse. Night after night, ‘always, she lay, right against my heart, silent, barely speaking to me with her voice’, relates the narrator; she never responded to him ‘except by long embraces’. From her ‘sad mouth’ came nothing ‘except kisses’. Unlike other women, having climaxed, ‘she said not a word’.30 This sphinx uttered ‘at the very most a monosyllable’. This went on for six months. One night, Alberte was ‘more silently amorous than ever . . . I could hear her through her embraces. Suddenly, I heard no more. Her arms no longer pressed me to her heart.’ He thought it was ‘one of those swoons into which she often fell . . . I was familiar with Alberte’s voluptuous spasms.’31 But this time she was dead, inert, cold, still joined to her lover under the blue cover, in the terrifying silence of the house.
At a later date, Georges Bernanos powerfully describes the sensuality of silence in his novel Monsieur Ouine, to which I have already referred. A poor, simple couple had come together: Hélène, daughter of old Devandomme, a local small farmer, had married the poacher Eugène, later accused of the killing of a young farm boy. The situation was hopeless. It was from Eugène that she had learned ‘a certain proud male silence making her pity everyone else. Now, day and night, there was nothing left but that silence in which she took her rest, sinking into it like a gentle patient animal – that silence alone. Outside it, everything was pale or cowardly.’32 It is because of this that she agrees to commit suicide with Eugène in the hut where they lived. After the shot came ‘a patch of silence and of night’.33
Silence can be delightful evidence of the depth of love, but it can also be a symptom of its destruction. Often, wrote Marcel Proust, between Albertine and me, there was the obstacle of a silence probably made up of
grievances which she now felt and which she kept to herself because she doubtless considered them irremediable, impossible to forget, unavowable, but which nevertheless created between us a significant verbal prudence on her part or an impassable barrier of silence.34
Let us return to the couple imagined by Huysmans in his novel Becalmed. The long stay in the gloomy house of the greedy and silent cousins gradually came between the young couple. The country has killed love by silence. Each now cherishes their own dream of a future alone, a silent dream which is a dream of the death of the partner. At night, they each pretend to sleep so as not to have to speak. They have nothing more to say to each other. The old couple who have put them up are themselves embarrassed, on the day they leave, by the muteness of Jacques and Louise.
Silence can have a more tragic effect. In Mauriac’s Thérèse Desqueyroux, that of the couple, the result of a lack of communication, leads to a crime. The silence of Bernard is the real reason for the tragic act of Thérèse. From the beginning, between the two spouses, it is silence that has made impossible ‘the enchanted sphere of passionate love’, it is what has destroyed them both. Thérèse gradually comes to feel that she will be annihilated by silence, that she will be trapped by it. The silence of her life consigned this woman to the ‘darkness of her being’,35 and the silence of Bernard is the main motive for the crime.
And still on this tragic theme, Alfred de Vigny had earlier made his readers share the wait of Dolorida for her faithless companion, in his long poem of that name: ‘How long the silence!’ thinks the mistress who is going to kill her lover.36
In his novel The Grass, Claude Simon described the soundscape of the rape of Louise, in a bathroom, by the person described simply as ‘the old man’. After a short struggle, the two bodies collapse in a crash,
a cascade of noises echoing disproportionately in the still of the night . . . and after that the silence not flowing back but falling in a mass, suddenly something absolute, crushing (a ton of silence) and total, until (like a spring trickling, it gradually wore a passage beneath a screen of fallen rocks) the minuscule, multiple and vast crackling of the rain could be heard again.37
The fiction describing the destructive effect of silence within a couple reflects a social reality that is the subject of a fine study by Frédéric Chauvaud, Histoire de la haine (History of Hate). After a lifetime immersed in the judicial archives of the nineteenth century, Chauvaud has come to see silence as one of the chief elements in the destruction of couples, as it was explained to the hearing, when the hatred between them was made plain. The ‘couples full of hatred’ had been torn apart by ‘simmering resentments’. They had mostly renounced violence, but opted instead for a protracted period of ‘the sulks’. ‘The heavy, almost interminable, silence’, he writes, ‘proved an invisible yet formidable weapon.’ Not to speak to your partner is ‘a way of demonstrating your hatred by shutting them out of your life’. Not without a trace of humour, he observes that, paradoxically, this hatred often became ‘a sort of cement which ensured the longevity of the couple, far better than love could have done’; and all the more so in that this silence of hate was from time to time broken by social convention. Appearances must be preserved. In front of an audience, whoever it might be, the couple would exchange a few words so as to put people off the scent. Once ‘away from prying ears’, however, they reverted to not speaking and sank back into ‘a charged silence’. Chauvaud discusses the origins of this willed silence. It was sometimes after a simple quarrel or trivial disagreement that two lovers or a married couple suddenly began to hate each other and swore to themselves, silently, that they would never utter another word to their partner. They were then caught up in ‘a world of old hatreds’, where each seemed to be keeping a list of minor grievances to nurture a dogged and hate-filled silence.38
Admirers of the work of Edward Hopper know how insistently he portrayed the silence that expresses distance between a man and a woman, when, for example, one of them gazes out of a window some way away from the other, or they each isolate themselves in a task that apparently absorbs them. Similarly, many filmgoers remember the silence that is the main theme of Pierre Granier-Deferre’s film The Cat. The two characters, played by Simone Signoret and Jean Gabin, illustrate how silence is the culmination of a deep-seated hatred, or at least of a profound disconnection. Their attitude demonstrates Chauvaud’s argument that, paradoxically, this same silence gradually becomes a cement or at least a connivance between the two persons.