THIS DELIRIUM lasted two whole years, during which my spiritual faculties reached the highest pitch of exaltation. I used to speak little, and now I did not speak at all; I used to study, and now I tossed my books aside. My taste for solitude redoubled. I had all the symptoms of a violent passion: my eyes were sunken, I was skinny as a rail, I couldn’t sleep; I was distracted, sad, ardent, sullen. My days passed in a wild, weird, insane fashion, which was nevertheless full of delights.
To the north of the castle there was a moor littered with Druidic stones. I would go and sit on one of these stones at sunset. The gilded treetops, the splendor of the land, the evening star twinkling through the rosy-colored clouds: all these things carried me back to my dreams. I would have liked to enjoy these sights with the ideal object of my desires. In my mind, I walked in step with the day star: I gave him my beautiful girl to escort, so that he might present her in all her radiance and receive homage from the universe. It was only when an evening wind stirred the networks that the insects stretched between the grass blades, and a moor lark landed on a rock, that I was recalled to reality. I plodded back along the path to the castle, crestfallen and heavy-hearted.
On stormy summer days, I would climb to the top of the big western tower. The thunder rolling beneath the attics of the castle, the torrents of rain pounding on the pyramidal roofs of the towers, and the lightning that furrowed the clouds and bounced off the copper weathercocks with its electric flames incited my enthusiasm. Like Ismen on the ramparts of Jerusalem, I called on the thunder, hoping it might bring me Armida.[9]
And if the weather was clear? I would cross the Grand Mall until I reached the fields on the far side, which were divided by planted rows of willows. I had constructed a seat, like a nest, in one of these willows. Up there, alone between heaven and earth, I spent many hours with the warblers. My nymph was by my side. I associated her image with the beauty of those spring nights filled with the fresh dew, the nightingale’s sighs, and the murmuring breezes.
Other times, I followed a long abandoned path or a small river bordered by its riverine plants. I listened to the noises that issue from unfrequented places; I pressed my ear to the trunk of every tree: I believed I could hear the moonlight singing in the wood. I would have liked to tell someone of these pleasures, but the words died on my lips. I cannot begin to count how many times I rediscovered my goddess in the timbre of a voice, the quivering of a harp, the velvet or liquid tones of a horn or a harmonium. It would take too long to recall the many gorgeous voyages that I made with my love flower: how we visited the famous ruins hand in hand—Venice, Rome, Athens, Jerusalem, Memphis, Carthage—or how we leapt across the seas, how we asked for happiness from the palms of Tahiti and the balmy groves of Ambon and Timor, how we went to wake the dawn at the zenith of the Himalayas, how we traveled down the sacred rivers whose waters coursed toward distant pagodas with their golden domes ablaze, or how we slept on the shore of the Ganges, while the avadavat, perched on the mast of our bamboo gondola, sang his Indian barcarole.
Heaven and earth were nothing to me anymore. I especially forgot the former. But if I no longer addressed my prayers to it, still it heard the voice of my secret misery. For I was suffering, and suffering is prayer.