BEHIND THE GLASS

Max Ophüls had tried to convey it in his films through many devices: an iron grating, a windowpane, a half-open blind, a piece of lace, a curtain that the camera lens has to brush past. Or perhaps just a bundle of objects that distance and frame the characters. Or perhaps the vast fringe of darkness that shrouds them. Then, finally, he referred in a radio interview to this text, which, in just a few words, describes the film image: “Anyone who looks through an open window from outside never sees all the things that are seen by someone looking through a closed window. No object is more profound, more mysterious, more fertile, more somber, more dazzling than a window illuminated by a candle. What you see in sunlight is always less interesting than what is going on behind a windowpane.” This is the voice of Baudelaire, but also of Ophüls, his cinematographic heir. The screen image appears in an age in which mental images tend to invade the streets and become transformed into raw perceptions, acceptable to any empiricist. During this invasion some images are captured on the screen—and there they continue to lead a double life. Their esotericism, which is at the heart of great cinema, wants them to remain in contact both with their mental origin as well as with their ultimate release into the streets. This result is represented by Baudelaire’s “open window,” by the illusion of a continuity between inside and outside, of a life that remains intact on two dimensions. But the other path, which is directed to the origin, takes the image back onto the screen of the mental image, therefore to the image “behind the glass,” which appears to “someone looking through a closed window.” The window of the mind can be the surface of the mirror, or the transparency of the lace curtain, or the frame provided by objects and by darkness: all signals of an imperceptible and unbridgeable distance between the world and its reflection, between the two perpetual sources of the image. “Behind the glass,” the light emanating from beings and objects is no longer a light of nature, but the radiance of the surface itself: the radiance of Psyche.

And meanwhile, “it hasn’t yet been established what illness Flaubert died from.” Laforgue in Berlin was pondering this point, while his voice was flowing over the pages that Empress Augusta was asking him to read, skipping here and there over the impertinent passages. He graciously accepted his role as a rather chlorotic lady-in-waiting, custodian of boredom like “the clock of a deserted railway station.” But in his physiology, the great philosophical terms, always high-sounding (Will! Renunciation! Schopenhauer! Hartmann!), underwent a rich change, degenerating into illustrations from a biological atlas. The concepts were quietly crouching behind a sheet of glass, no longer directed toward Hyperuranion, but suspended in the Berlin aquarium. “Before the atonic, sated, sober, buddhist gaze of the crocodiles, of the pythons (the ophidians), etc. How I understand those old races of the Orient that had exhausted all meanings, all temperaments, all metaphysics.” And there was something that went even further: “the ideal is these sponges, these starfish, these plasmas in the cool, dull, all dreamlike silence of the water.” It was Debussy’s piano that covered a now empty thought, corroding it beneath its band of sound.

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In that “critical age in which some people tend toward the ironic and sour, others toward the insipid and sugary, and yet others toward the vulgar,” in the first official age of the bourgeoisie, the years of Louis Philippe and of disappointment—here a curtain descends, edged in black, though still transparent, separating the present from the past. The present certainly gives cause for concern, if only because it is gross, massive, but it no longer has the aesthetic decorum of history. A new dimension of dreariness is born. Sensitive beings were struck for the first time by a sense of foreboding that the world around might even be ugly forever. Someone suggests, on the other hand, that history means scenery, costumes, and ruinous passions. And every history, now, tends inadvertently to be transformed into a Ludwig II of Bavaria in disguise, talking aloud to the Names in the archives. Spiritualism, after 1848, becomes the basis for even the most rigorous studies—until a recent historian, Robert Darnton, would recognize there, almost as if it were something obvious, the special vocation of his profession: “The reconstruction of worlds is one of the historian’s most important tasks. He undertakes it, not for some strange urge to dig up archives and sift through old paper, but because he wants to talk with the dead.”

After the fall of Napoleon an insidious and imprudent feeling begins to circulate: that passions, grand gestures, and the perpetual drama of the soul now belong to the stage or to the past, but not to the events of the day. Any display of it is now overlaid, like a levy, by a deep sense of inadequacy, a general tinge of mediocrity. So every feverish Julien Sorel dreams about Napoleon’s victories as the final picture of the past; and every Joseph Delorme will nurture his hypochondria with a rejection of the present. A new breed concerns itself above all with eliminating all personal semblance of contact with the world. To cut links, to distance the heart, and finally to sabotage. From the dandy to the nihilist conspirator, young Barrès, black or white esotericism, Ludwig II, the flight to the Orient, spleen and rancor, silent exaltation, heightened perception—all appear as solitary points, dim lights that form the constellation of contempt: they are Gobineau’s Pléiades, calendars, wandering dervishes who tell interconnected stories, children of kings often born in small apartments, sometimes crippled by fortune. They meet at the table of an inn, on their restless Grand Tour, and the few words they exchange are enough to alert them: perhaps the acquaintance they have only just met, this artist who does not let his hair fall on his shoulders, who dresses like everyone else, who is naturally well mannered, who gives nothing away in his appearance—perhaps he, too, is the son of a king. And so it happened, recounts Gobineau, that Conrad Lanze met Wilfrid Ore on the boat for Arona, after having crossed the St. Gotthard Pass, among the dust and rhododendrons, together with Louis de Laudon, whom he had met two weeks before in Zurich, where they had been “taken by a fine love for each other.”

If we must indeed find a distinction between what can be said about modernity and all we find in every previous age—isn’t it perhaps a certain capacity that it has to be swept along by form or gesture, to disregard limits even when it expressly defends them, to invade every off-limits area, perhaps with the excuse of guarding it from all abuse? Why do we regard Joseph de Maistre as so akin to his hated Voltaire? Why does Pascal converse as a brother with the most unbelieving moralists? It is a certain disregard for the consequences, moving impulsively and with the pleasure of roving, rapacious, reckless movement: eris palpans in meridie—you shall grope about at noonday.

Sainte-Beuve’s balanced and equanimous tone cost him a continual congestion of the black humors in his circulation: his capillaries became poisonous coral. We find them pasted into the Cahier vert that Sainte-Beuve wanted to fall “only into friendly hands,” and which has so far fallen mainly into indifferent hands. Few people have noticed the “very dark and very thick base of the palette,” which served to fix those pieces of gossip that couldn’t be published for reasons of decency, par bienséance, just as much as to thicken clots of confession that could never be dissolved verbally, par bienséance. On the other hand, those isolated, laconic words conceal a pathos that suspends them in the void, or against the background of his “arsenal of vendettas,” like the spare chapters of the only novel written by Sainte-Beuve: the Cautious Journey of a Delicate Soul toward Desolation:

“All of my organs have reached such a state of wear and are, so to speak, in such a threadbare state that I no longer allow myself to exert any of them.”

“… recently, rereading Theocritus, I felt my pastoral soul reawaken within me, that soul of the golden age covered over by so many layers of bronze, of earth and of lead…”

“… our heart has all the skins of the snake, the seven double folds, like impenetrable shields.”

“I have been a thieving youngster, I will be an old pirate. Oh, how I would prefer to be a good literary gentleman who lives on his lands in a state of poetry!”

“There is no corruption worse than that of tender hearts and mystics.”

“I am the vainest and weakest of beings; and it’s precisely the combination of my weaknesses that gives me the air of a wise man; each weakness undoes the other.”

“Living in a vast city in a century of corruption and wild ambition, in the midst of a literature with insatiable pretensions, of abominable vices, outrageous and full of filth, I worked hard from the start to develop as far as possible, within me, the faculty of contempt.

“—then, having done this, after a certain time there’s no more need to worry about it; one has already moved on to indifference.”

“Why do I no longer love nature, the countryside? Why do I no longer love strolling along narrow footpaths? I’m well aware that they’re exactly the same, but now there’s no longer anything behind the hedge.”

On September 7, 1847, Sainte-Beuve wrote to François Collombet: “Chateaubriand is more silent than ever: he lives in his dreams. His fine mouth still smiles, there are tears in his eyes, his broad peaceful brow has all its majesty. But what is there inside and below? And is there indeed anything?”

After a failed cataract operation, Madame Récamier was by now almost blind and lived in darkness. Outside, the barricades of 1848, the abdication of Louis Philippe, the proclamation of the Republic. The visitor groped his way into the main room of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, where the furniture had been arranged for years in geometrical and hierarchical patterns. The shutters and the curtains were closed. From the doorway, a blade of light stretched into the semi-darkness, but it was not enough to guide his steps, until Madame Récamier’s voice came to his aid, prompting him to move toward the large screen that concealed her armchair. Chateaubriand sat down beside her, immutably silent.