BOOK TWO: MERLIN ENCHANTS PARIS, AND THE LAND OF FRANCE

As soon as Merlin’s renown was established, there was an immense crowd of people around him who came to ask him to enchant their ways. The first who presented themselves at his threshold at daybreak were kings, dukes, counts and barons. Among them were distinguishable, in the first rank, King Arthus, his ally Hoel of Armorica, Ossian in a cloud, Mark of Cornwall, Queen Genièvre, the blonde Yseult, King Lear, followed by an innumerable court, and the long-haired Pharamond, dragging an entire iron people after him.12

King Arthus spoke for all of them. He bowed and said:

“Merlin, wisest of men, if you are not a god, it is to you that we want to hold out our scepters and our crowns. Will you enchant them, in order that people will be submissive to us, for if force alone is mixed up in it, they will always be ready to revolt? But when a charm is attached to the yoke, they bear it joyfully; everything is easy for them and for us.”

Merlin, who had never seen himself in such a solemn assembly, was troubled at first; he seemed very emotional, but he soon mastered himself. He took the thirty crowns from Arthus; after having touched them and mingled his enchantments with them, he returned them to the kings, but not without having offered sage advice with them. He wanted to attach headbands to some of them with his own hands, with chains of diamond, and to anoint them with dew. He did that, in particular, for the great Arthus, for Pharamond, and for the Erl King, because they were the chiefs of races.13

“You see,” he said, “I love, and it’s for that reason that I received my magical power, If I didn’t love, in spite of the science that I learned from Taliesin, I couldn’t do anything more than anyone else. I’ve told you my secret; it’s up to you to do likewise. Let your peoples be to you what Viviane is for me.”

“That is what we will do,” said Arthus.

“You promise?”

“We swear.”

All those surrounding King Arthus began repeating after him, with their hands held high: “We swear.”

To confirm the oath of the lords, the troop of knights saluted with their swords.

“Give me your swords too,” said the Enchanter. “I can see that they are thirsty for blood. I will sate them.”

Having taken the sword in his hands, he baptized them one after another; to the best-tempered he gave the name of Durandal.14

“I return them to you sharper,” he added, “in order that you might cut the knot of justice. But if you make use of them for any other purpose, they will turn against your own hearts of their own accord. If you will only meditate violence in advance, the blood that is not yet shed will stain the blade to the hilt; it will cry out against you until the earth opens up.”

Only one blade remained in his hands; it was that of the long-haired Pharamond.

The Enchanter looked for a long time at the blue-tinted blade, after which he shouted, as if the words were inadequate to his thought:

“O France, at least see what I am doing for you! How many times, jeering and forgetful race, you will sicken me with this blade I have forged myself! It will grow from one age to the next, every sharper, until the point will touch the pillars of Hercules, and I can already feel the profound wound in my heart. Why, France, do you sicken me with this blade that I have sharpened myself? Your children will be dazzled by the sparks of iron and steel that spring from it; they will intoxicate themselves with that iron dew; they will forget the innocent light of day.”

Then a voice that seemed to emerge from a dense fog cried out to him: “What will be my sword, my crown? Shall I leave here with empty hands?”

“Who are you, whom I can scarcely discern, so heavy with frost in the mantle wrapped around you?” Merlin asked.

“The daughters of the clouds call me Ossian,” replied the one who lived in an eternal mist—and he let his snowy beard fall upon the invisible harp; it rendered a sound like the breath of a dying man.

“Ossian, king of the mists, what need have you of a sword?” retorted Merlin. “You will reign, like me, not by the blade but by the harp. Of all the kingdoms, that is the only one that iron cannot shake. Every chord will raise columns of diamonds around you, and you will make your abode in the green emerald grotto, where I myself will bring you presents.”

At these words, the old man fell silent, appeased, his tears mingling on his cheeks with the silvery evening dew.

As they were about to withdraw, a lord of the isles, a tall clan chieftain, strode forward from the crowd surrounding him.

“Look, Merlin, my lordly crown is not solid on my head. I can feel it tottering. Reattach my headband yourself, or I feel that I shall perish.”

Merlin replied: “It’s your own fault, Macbeth. Why are you already lending an ear to the woman who whispers to you with a homicidal joy? Look at your sword. There is one that is sweating blood. Macbeth, you have already meditated murder!”

Seeing himself revealed in the depths of the future, Macbeth kept silent, and went away to wander on the heath. But all eyes remained fixed on his sword, which was dripping a crimson dew. Several others were betrayed at the same time by a similar sign.

As clusters of jasmine and lilac agitate in the first light of dawn, and a matinal perfume is emitted therefrom, which no other hour of the day can match, so the lips of the queens, chatelaines and the women who came after them agitated and murmured at Merlin’s approach. Expectation, hope and curiosity colored with rosy tints the aurora of more than one virginal cheek.

Not content with what he had just done, Merlin picked up a cup, full of a beverage that he had prepared with his own hands with tufts of golden herb.

“This,” he said to the women, “is a love potion. Whoever drinks it will love you until death. It’s no longer the worn-out cup of the old goddess. It’s a new, unknown, painful charm full of dreams and divine sadness, which holds the heart in the clouds and causes the face to pale under blinding tears. The world has never seen its like.”

“Taste it yourself first,” said the blonde Yseult.

The Enchanter put the beverage to his lips. He drank it first, in long draughts—and after him, Viviane, and then all of those who formed a cortege. But several of them—Genièvre, Arthus’ wife, Blanchefleur, Isaure and the beautiful Enide—cried with one voice: “How bitter the taste is, Seigneur!”15

Turning to Queen Genièvre, the Enchanter said to her: “You will gain an eternal memory therefrom; but for every one that will survive, how many will be swallowed by eternal silence, along with their lovers?—and their lot will be no less worthy of envy.”

With that, he sent them away with a smile. They went, from one people to another, to pour the cup of the new love upon the lips of men; and a vague plaint, mingled with a vague hope, emerged from all things. The swords quivered in the hands of the knights. Even the men of stone, in their marble niches, began to pale and bow their heads. Each of them was dreaming of a lady of stone beneath the vault of the heavens.

Meanwhile, the kings, the lords and the clan chieftains had withdrawn, banners at the head. Arthus had the good grace to throw to the people a handful or two of medallions bearing his effigy, and the people, on seeing the cortege go by, fell to their knees. They said:

“Oh, the good lords enchanted by Merlin! Look: stars are shining on their foreheads.

“Oh, the good masters! May they live long, and may the sons of our sons be submissive to them, as we are!”

Such was Merlin’s second prodigy. The masters and the servants, the kings and the peoples, had a similar amity for one another.

III

After having hesitated a great deal, the peoples, murmuring, heads bowed, foreheads full of redness, eyes half-closed, painting, crawling, dragging themselves on their limbs in the manner of some Polyphemus, came to kneel before Merlin, and the earth was then very muddy.

“Get up, please,” he said to them.

They had to be begged for some time to stand up, for they did not dare to show themselves to the Enchanter on their feet. They thought that they would be lacking in respect if they were standing up like him.

“Give us some spells too,” they said to him, finally, but in their regional dialects, and in voices so humble, so stammering, so plaintive and so inarticulate that Merlin was obliged to lower his head and cup his hand over his ear in order to hear them.

“We haven’t dared attempt anything for so long because we haven’t been anointed by your hand.”

“Good God!” he replied. “Why didn’t you come first, with the kings, the dukes and the barons? I wouldn’t have refused you anything—not even their crowns.”

“How could we have dared?” said the peoples, kneeling down again and crawling.

But Merlin, taking them by the hand, raised them from the ground for a second time.

They stammered: “They are made to reign, we to serve. Merely give us the crumbs from their tables.”

“Not only the crumbs,” Merlin retorted, “but the feast, gladly, insofar as it intoxicates them. Who made you so humble, then? You resemble the ocean in Brittany. When it is afraid it stammers like you, holding its breath, in the seaweed; then, as soon as it thinks itself stronger, it inundates its shores. I should like to see some noble confidence in you, instead of this earthworm language that conceals tempests of which even you are unaware.”

There were peoples there from all lands, from Italy, France, Spain, England, Poland, Hungary, Germany and Switzerland; there were also Rumanians. To the Lombards he gave a Milanese viper to bite the Germanic hunter in the heel; to the French a Gallic skylark that sings in the storm; to the English a leopard crouching in ambush; to the Venetians a lion with a golden mouth that roared on the towers; to the Spaniards a unicorn; to the Portuguese a dolphin; to the Germans a tortoise; to the Austrians a hyena; to the Swiss a Bernese bear; to the Poles a white eagle; to the Hungarians and unbroken horse from Tartary; to the Greeks a sea-hawk; to the men from Rumania an aurochs. Each of those domesticated animals was educated in magic, and licked the Enchanter’s hand.

“Follow them,” said Merlin. “They know the best way, which I have taught them myself. Take care, however, not to fall far below the least of them, for most of you are still touching the confines of their blind empire. How many I can see among you who are thinking, at this very moment, of selling their birthright, like the shaggy Esau, for a bowl of lentils.

“You would rather be flattered than served. I, on the contrary, will serve you and not flatter you. That is why I too shall have my Passion, by your fault. How many times you will deny me, before the soldiers, and before the judge! You will also deny me before the servant. As I think that, I’m torn between anger, disgust, pity and shame—but it’s still the pity that holds sway.”

Scarcely had the peoples found themselves alone than they excited their magical guides in a thousand ways to bite one another; then the strongest wanted to despoil the weakest; they attacked one another, and there was a moment of horrible confusion, because they were all imitating the howling of beasts of prey, to the point of being mistaken for them.

They tore at one another furiously, as if they themselves had claws, talons, horns, fangs, tusks, forked tongues, glittering scales and raptorial beaks. Fortunately, the animals conserved the greatest self-composure in that melee. The example of their wisdom made the men blush, who finally calmed down. By then they were almost all enchained and kept out of sight by one or other of the sacred animals, which held them beneath their paws, yawning.

Love had not produced its usual effect on Merlin; it had not rendered him idle. On the contrary; Merlin never ceased visiting the neighboring countries in order to do good. Every path was good to him, provided that his eyes encountered Viviane there. For her part, she could not lose sight of him for fear of dying. As they traveled together, the arid earth was covered with verdure. One might have thought that worlds were being born beneath their feet.

One day—an immortal moment!—at sunrise, they arrived on the bank of a river with green-tinted tranquil waters, which snaked along a bed cluttered with grasses and reeds, through a forest of oaks, birches and beeches. Its two banks were covered with shadow and mystery; the place seemed uninhabited, save for motionless herons on the edge of marshes and a few green woodpeckers, which, upright against the trunks of old oaks, were waiting for oracular voices to emerge from the heartwood of the centenarian trees.

Anyone who has lost his way in the forests of America has encountered solitudes as profound, without being able to tell whether they remained the domain of savage beasts or were the cradle of a nascent people. Did the place harbor birds’ nests, insects, an anthill or an empire? Who could tell? All of human wisdom could not decide between the empire and the anthill.

In the middle of the river, our voyagers perceived a lush wooded islet bordered by poplars, which were piercing a thick fog. It had the elongated form of a ship whose prow was cleaving the watercourse. As they drew nearer to it they could not hear any sound, except for the clucking of a fowl and the cries of a flock of frightened sparrows, which alighted noisily in a flowering apple-tree. At that sound, Merlin turned his head; the mist with which the earth was enveloped had just cleared at the first breeze of the day; it allowed the sight of a small village of thatched cottages, gathered in the center of the islet beneath a quivering clump of alders. The smoke of the huts was vanishing in the blue air, along with the morning vapor that beautiful autumn sunlight was dissipating.

“What a pleasant spot!” exclaimed the Enchanter. “How I’d like to go there!”

As it happened, there was a woodcutter close by who had just finished chopping his quota of branches and was preparing to climb into a boat; he had already detached the hempen rope by which it was moored to the bank.

“Take us with you,” Merlin shouted.

“Gladly,” said the peasant.

Merlin and Viviane sat down, smiling, in the boat, on the heaped-up branches.

“What is this river?” Merlin asked.

“The Seine.”

“And that village?”

“Lutèce.”

An enclosure of palisades, sharpened for protection against the nocturnal terror of unknown forests; a wooden tower for the watchman whose trumpet had announced the daybreak; a few mossy fishermen’s cabins with large roofs; thorny hedges; nets suspended from the overhanging thatch; wandering geese squawking under Merlin’s feet as he crossed the open spaces; here and there a grim yarn-spinner on her threshold with a child suspended from her breast; a fisherman weaving a wicker basket; a laborer driving his two semi-tamed oxen into the byre; an odor of strewn straw and fuming stables, fish gaping in the sunlight, perhaps also vines or elderberries; the barking of shepherds’ dogs, the bells of herds, the plash of oars, the cries of boatmen, and, in the distance, the sonorous howl of a wolf-cub in the forest of the Louvre—yes, that was Lutèce!

Before landing, Merlin contemplated at his leisure, on the two banks, the deserted places, the profound, sacred forest from which surged in those days the shady summits of Montmartre, Saint-Cloud and Mont-Valérien, like the shaggy heads of black bison rising above the pasturage, damp with the water of invisible springs.

The grassy plain, a kind of European savannah, unfurled in the distance, endlessly, limitlessly, patched with gold here and there or brightened mat white by the reflection of a dormant pool into which the sunlight plunged, illuminating dazzling fires beneath the lustrous foliage of oaks. The wind that passed over the slender crowns of the birches extracted something like the whimper of a new-born from them. A single path, scarcely traced, frequented by large snakes, traversed the plain like an emerald robe from the village all the way to Montmartre. Through the thickness of the shadow, hills of chalk and plaster whitened in the distance, dirtied, crumbled and torn by the rain of storms, like sepulchers opened by a crack, vomiting the bones of a world of giants into the cradle of a people.

In the places where Saint-Roch, Saint-Merry, Saint-Germain and Saint-Sulpice now stand, wheeling in the air in rapid, hectic flight, were multitudes of hawks, buzzards, kites, and even seagulls and stray ospreys that traveled up the Seine in those days. All were soaring together, with piercing cries, above the cadaver of some red deer died of old age, buried in the densest part of the wood in the undergrowth, which the wolves were beginning to tear apart. Above that sea of verdure, the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, itself enveloped at its summit by a garland of forests like a mural crown, gazed at Montmartre and seemed to be saying: “Will human feet ever tread upon us?”

On entering the woodcutter’s enclosure, Merlin admired two fig-trees enveloped with straw, which had been acclimatized by dint of artistry; he immediately took from that a good augury for the future of that hamlet. Then he redirected his gaze to the waters of the river, on which a flock of swans had just settled among the flowering water-lilies, which resembled a clutch of eggs hatched during the night.

“No place has ever inspired me like this one,” he said. “I feel outside myself in contemplating these virgin solitudes, where the great Arthus has not yet ridden. Queen Genièvre has not once sat on the edge of that indolent river. What is happening beneath those dense shadows, where I can hear ephemera buzzing and green woodpeckers hammering the trunks of trees. I love this earth more than any other. I would like to see a happy people here, submissive to the king of justice.”

“Do you not have the power of enchantments?” said Viviane.

“Oh, if I have that power, now is the moment to prove it. I bless this earth, where your feet repose, this place from which you are smiling at me; I bless this river, which reflects your face; I bless these banks and the unknown heaths that no one has visited. But such a profound solitude saddens me; this earth calls for humans. What can I do to assemble them here?”

“Desire it,” said Viviane.

“By my love, I wish it!” Merlin exclaimed.

“Let it be done according to your will.”

The next day, at dawn, Merlin, still half-asleep, heard something like the buzzing of a swarm; he thought that it was the ephemera awakening in the garden. The sound only increased, however; he ran to the window and perceived that a swarm of humans had assembled in haste, and was covering the horizon. They were already busy building huts and houses, even cloisters and bastilles. But they did not have any plan; they were working at hazard, not perceiving one another.

Scarcely had Merlin recovered from his astonishment than he learned that the wisest of those people wanted to salute him and wish him welcome. As soon as they came in, Merlin invited them to sit down on a trunk in the corner of the hut.

Without seeming to have much understanding, they said to him, with a hint of conceit: “We are the sages of this country. Would you care to tell us what your nature is, your essence? Is it double or simple? Do you have faculties?”

“Yes, undoubtedly,” said Merlin, precipitately.

“If that’s the case, how many do you have?”

Bewildered by that tone, suspended half-way between seriousness and irony, Merlin replied, modestly, and also because those words always came to his lips first: “First of all, I have the faculty of loving.”

Some of them burst out laughing; the others immediately went on: “Aren’t you bringing us any new dogma? We’re quite disgusted with the old ones. What do you think about the accord between dogma and philosophy?”

“I assume,” Merlin replied, that you’re talking about the philosopher’s stone?”

Without giving him time to finish, the sages went on: “What is your solution to the problem of destiny? Your means of enriching the human species in a morning? For you must sense that it’s quite pointless to build the smallest edifice here, if you don’t bring us the ultimate verity of all matters first.”

“Nothing is more certain,” put in one of the sages. “For myself, I can say that I’m in touch with the truth, but I haven’t yet grasped it in its entirety. Until then, believe me, neither sow nor build; until I’ve finished my Treatise on happiness, it would be a waste of effort.”

“In sum, Merlin,” they continued, in chorus, in a nervous voice taut with impatience, “bring us the final solution, or you can’t expect us to stay here in the mud of Lutèce any longer. Speak, then!”

The worthy Merlin, who was beginning to be stunned by so many precipitate questions, asked for a few moments to think. He apologized because he was not used to improvisation.

At that reply, the sages cried out, angrily: “You see! The wretch! He’s reflecting! He doesn’t have the solution that cuts through all difficulties, present and future. No, he doesn’t have it. Look—he’s still thinking about what he ought to say! No, never since remote antiquity has anyone seen such slowness of mind. Honestly, where does he come from? In his place, we’d already have resolved the problems of twenty worlds.”

Merlin listened calmly to that torrent of impertinence, to which he replied, gravely: “Alas, impatience befits ephemera, so I shan’t reproach you. You’re only rough drafts, as yet, and already, I see, you’re very curious, and somewhat sarcastic. Perhaps, for you, that’s the source of great things. Just be careful of being too refined, because I foresee that you might get caught up in your subtleties, as if in spiders’ webs. That, I warn you in advance, is your principal danger; you carry it within yourselves. Beware that intelligence doesn’t lead to a complete lack of it. Your objective, in brief, is good sense—don’t stray from it, I beg you. If you lose the appetite for pure light, even I won’t recognize you any longer. Don’t strive for darkness; don’t be jealous of moles.”

In the same tone, he added a great deal of advice about the conduct to adopt for nascent peoples, and, as he did not mingle any bitterness with it, his simple and modest language ended up winning the hearts of his audience. They had come with a secret desire to mock him; they went away full of respect for his science. A large number, in fact, who did not believe in enchanters, had only decided to visit him in order to poke fun at his enchantments; even those, vanquished by what they had heard, said to him as they withdrew: “Master, enchant our ways.”

And the good Merlin, without retaining any rancor, traced circles around them that promised them peace, prosperity and liberty, on the sole condition that they followed his advice. He spread spells over them by the handful.

“I give them to you gladly,” he said, “because I love you, without yet knowing why. But please, be modest! Don’t go boasting about being Merlin’s favorites, the only ones, the Benjamins, the elite, the incomparable, the conductors of worlds, without doing anything to merit those titles. The wise will mock you and you’ll excite the hatred of all the rest against me.”

VII

The next day, he went with them to the place where the Louvre is today. In those days, there were no carts rolling or anvils resounding in the vicinity, nor people murmuring like the sea, but magpies were chattering in the trees, wolves were howling in their lairs and otters were prowling in the marshes.

Merlin and his cortege were stopped at first by a herd of aurochs, which had been grazing in the area since the origin of the world. The enchanter took a hazel-branch and dispersed the wild cattle; they fled lowing. Afterwards, he came back to his companions.

“Master,” they said to him, on seeing him again, “Draw us the plan of a new city here.”

“Gladly.”

“But do it today, before nightfall; tomorrow will be too late.”

“What! Always so impatient!” Merlin replied. Bending down, however, he drew on the ground the plan of the new city, and gave it the name of Paris, instead of that of Lutèce, which it had previously had. In addition, he laid its foundations, blessed the first stone, traced the walls, marked out the portals, rounded the bastions, baptized the streets and chose the paving-stones—in brief, he wanted to make a city of light, the hostelry of the world.

After having crossed the river again in a small boat, as he was clearing a path not far from the Thermes, a blackbird taking off from the undergrowth uttered a screech. At that screech, the Enchanter looked up. At the entrance to the clearing he saw a shepherdess who was spinning with her distaff while guarding a flock of sheep. Her long-haired dog was beside her, lying on the new grass and licking her feet.

“Who’s that?” Merlin asked the person nearest to him.

“What? Don’t you know here? That’s Geneviève the shepherdess.”

Then Merlin went over to her, and saw that she was weeping, because she had lost two new-born lambs that morning, the best in the flock, which had gone astray in the vines, perhaps in the Thermes or the thickets with which the place was covered then. Firstly, he helped her to look for them, and then consoled her with these words:
“Don’t cry, Geneviève. I’ll look after your sheepfold. Your ewes will grow so well that the fold won’t be able to contain them, and they’ll jump over the barrier that you’ve made out of reeds. Your flock will fill all the surrounding area, as far as the eye can see. It will leave wisps of its fleeces on the most distant hedges, and chilly nations will make white woolen tunics therefrom, against the winter cold.

“For as long as it covers the country freely, the worlds will blossom in hope. Unfortunately, no one will want to follow its guidance; everyone will think himself the ram with the silver horn, and will march alone, head held high, along the bramble path, without looking back to see if the flock is following. And when your flock is tied up, by the neck, in the fold, the earth will also be tied in the night without a dawn. The mute word will reenter the hearts of men, and the poison will accumulate there. Your song will no longer be heard in the wood, nor your pipe, but the sniggering of goats and the wicked. After you, Geneviève, will come the harsh shepherds who will make use, not of the crook but of the knife.”16

Speaking thus, they arrived with the shepherdess at the entrance to her hut, situated on the top of the hill; its roof was covered in thatch and moss, intermingled with white bindweed, which hung down over the paltry wall. A little black bread, ewe’s milk in an earthenware bowl, a few clusters of hazelnuts still attached to the branch, medlars in a basket made of the pith of rushes and elder—that was the maiden’s treasure; she covered it with a straw mat.

Having eaten and dunk at their leisure, our guests withdrew. As they were on the threshold, they turned back once again, and saw a nimbus shining around Geneviève’s head. That glory, still expanding from circle to circle, girdled the entire horizon with a sacred band of red, opal and incarnadine, from Meudon to Nanterre, from Nanterre to Suresnes, from Suresnes to Saint-Denis. There was no one there who did not display the greatest astonishment, except for Merlin. He seemed to be pleased by it, as if by his own handiwork; he only smiled.

The dog uttered a long howl.

VIII

Nothing was to be seen then in the surrounding area but good people sowing justice and reaping joy. Abundance entered by a hundred gates, with overflowing carts, and peace through twenty more. No one coveted anything, having everything in profusion: money, food, clothes, rest, and even sufficient love! Vanity was yet to appear; no one would have sold his soul for a word, a coin, a rag, and scarcely for a treasure!

In basin of sculpted marble, full to the brim, flowed the virginal Seine, to which the deer of Montmartre and Vincennes came to drink, pell-mell with the people, the gentlefolk, the barons and the kings. Montmartre had sunk, the marshes had been raised. Suresnes produced the wine of Candia. The old city gleamed, like an ivory boat on a silver river. On the heights of the towers of Notre-Dame, which had no wrinkles on its forehead as yet, one could read: Hic Regnum Merlini.

Having found a skylark’s nest, not far from the Seine, he built a bastille, which he surrounded with a surplus of moats and drawbridges.

“Who will live in this fortress?” people asked him. “We cannot see here a roof for vagrants, a convent for monks or a keep for the king!”

“The most beautiful of new-borns,” Merlin replied. “But you must be a better fortress for her.”

“And who is this new-born?”

“Liberty,” said the Enchanter. “She has only to be born. Listen to her, weeping and wailing! Be careful that no one tricks her nurse. Good people, here is the layette woven by my hands and marked with my name.” At the same time, he handed the keys, which were sculpted and studded in pure gold.

“Liberty?” they replied. “It’s a nice name. We’ve never seen her, or met her, or touched her. How will we recognize her?”

“By this linen cloth and this bracelet of fine gold.”

Wicked individuals, having heard, were the only ones to profit from these words. They went into the country to search for a stray child, hairy and hideous—some son, I believe, of Caliban. After having dressed him in linen cloth and put a fine gold bracelet on his arm, they smuggled him into the enclosure by night, instead of the new-born announced by Merlin. Her, they took into the woods in order to leave her to perish—and the people did not perceive the difference. They nourished the substitute infant with their sweat, as they would have pampered the true one, and perhaps even better.

“It’s strange,” they sometimes said, “how he bites his nurse.” The most honest dare not say any more; it would take centuries to realize that the child was counterfeit.

While the walls, the towers, the bastilles, the belfries and the steeples, still enveloped by their scaffolding, emerged confusedly from an ocean of mist, as one sees a host of masts of frigates, corvettes, caravels and brigantines rise up in a port, groaning, from the dormant gulf, Merlin took the greatest pleasure in the world from walking outside the nascent city. His mind soared above that social chaos. A great dazed crowd never failed to follow him through the countryside, which was then fallow.

As he was always hanging on Viviane’s words and smiles, he walked with an odd gait, at hazard. When Viviane stopped, he set up a stone in the form of a boundary-marker, on which she sat down and recovered her breath. At other times, he took a little golden knife with a mother-of-pearl handle from the pocket of his doublet, and distractedly made a broad scratch in the ground.

“What are you doing, wise Merlin?” asked one of the men who was following him.

“I’m dividing up the fields,” he replied. “I’m giving them to you. These are as many heritages that I’ve marked out in the earth with Viviane’s dagger. Everywhere she wanted to sit down, I’ve placed a boundary marker. Fortunate is the place that her feet have touched! Respect it!”

Then he showed each of those who were following him the share that he had allocated to him. But the greater number cried out: “Why have you made the portions so unequal?” And they pointed to their fields, capriciously divided and randomly variegated, without any wisdom seeming to have presided over the division.

Merlin bowed his head. He searched for a reply. He felt that with more reflection, he might well have done otherwise. Was he ruled, then, by Viviane’s caprice? Might the excess of love have led him to injustice? That was what he was asking himself, silently. Extraordinarily, he had the courage to express himself overtly.

“How can one hold to the rigor of geometry when the heart is astir?”

Everyone agreed that it would be difficult.

After such a frank confession, Merlin continued. He said that the best enchanters had not succeeded any better than him in establishing the equality of property, as witness Moses, Joseph the Egyptian, Pythagoras, Orpheus, Numa Pompilius and all the rest; that it was the usual snag of people of his art; that what doomed republics were false ideas as much as evil princes; that he wanted to found his on granite and not on clouds; and besides, one risked a great deal by trying to do everything at the same time.

For his part, he was proud of his discretion, of the known reason of those who listened to him; he wanted to attach himself to the people not by vain chimerical bait but by veritable benefits, the sole mark by which once could distinguish good enchanters from evil ones. To which he added that, if all the shares had been equal, they would soon have ceased to be, but that he could not be intervening all the time in new distributions of the land, which would not leave him a moment of leisure. Furthermore, if anyone was at fault, he accepted all the blame himself, instantly demanding that no one should be held responsible but him.

His final word was that the damage was easy enough to repair.

“Easy!” cried the crowd. “What do you mean, Merlin?”

The worthy Merlin indicated the best remedies, but none of them satisfied him fully. They always lacked something, principally in their institutions of credit. He did not know how to please the debtors and the creditors at the same time. To be sure, he would have liked it to be possible, to everyone’s satisfaction, to lend without being out of pocket, to borrow without repaying, to produce without laboring, to labor without sweating, to enjoy without consuming, to live without nourishment, to die without weakening, to resuscitate without dying. That would have been ideal, so far as he was concerned, but to realize that at a stroke would be difficult. For the first time, he felt seriously embarrassed.

“Oh,” he cried, in the end, “love will repair the fault of love! The man whose field is insufficient or sterile will be aided by the others. No one surely, will want to leave him in difficulty.”

“God preserve us!” they replied, in unison.

“Wait,” said Merlin, again. “To the man who has the smallest share, I leave Viviane’s golden knife. See how it shines. Everywhere it plunges in, abundance will spring forth.”

Scarcely had he returned to the city than an innumerable host of artisans presented themselves at his threshold. They had heard that the fields had been divided up.

“What remains for us? You’ve given everything to them,” they said to Merlin.

Then Merlin had them pass before him one by one.

“Don’t judge me so lightly. This is what I’ve reserved for you.”

Then, as they filed past, he handed them the primary tools of each profession. For some it was the vagabond shuttle, to others the toothed rasp; to this one the drill, or the awl, or the mallet, to that one the plane or the workbench, to others the pruner or the chisel.

These tools, unknown until that day, caused a great admiration in the audience, and as Merlin handed them out he informed them of their usage. He also showed them that Viviane had hidden treasures under each of those modest implements.

Everyone was in a hurry to make use of them, for, although they had not long assembled, time was beginning to weigh upon them. They set to work joyfully and forgot the initial surge of ill-humor that they had experienced in the morning at the news of the division of heritages. In addition, as soon as they were weary, Viviane mopped their foreheads with a flap of her own veil. No worries harassed them, and, trusting in Merlin’s words, they waited patiently for the marvels that each tool concealed.

Then came one last artisan, empty-handed, named Fantasus.

“Who are you?” said Merlin. “What is your estate?”

“Poet,” Fantasus replied.

“Are you sure of that?”

“I think so.”

“What reason do you have for thinking so?”

“These are my reasons: I’m discontented with everything I see and everything I hear; I curse this nascent city; I don’t care about the ancient; I’m melancholy and irritable; I only like what doesn’t exist, and execrate everything that does; I make myself the center of the globe—if there really is a globe—and am only interested in my own history. Are those not the marks that reveal the true poet?”

Merlin saw that he was dealing with a mind even more prideful than poetic; he refrained, however, from wounding him, for he recognized an authentic dolor in that pride. He tried to show him that the supreme poetry is also the supreme reason.

“What we need to do,” he added, “is restore common sense. You have a few ideas hereabouts, but three-quarters of them are false. Attach yourself to the small number that are true.”

“But what about the future?” Fantasus put in, excitedly.

“The future, I can talk about,” Merlin replied calmly, “since I’m its messenger. Well, Fantasus, be sure that it won’t arrive in the world with as much fuss as you suppose. It isn’t always on the tripod, as you imagine. It isn’t always in the burning bush, nor on the mountain in the midst of lightning flashes. Believe me, my friend, more often than not, it comes without anyone noticing. It slips in, it arrives, it’s there, it reigns, and all without the pomp and thunderclap that you imagine.”

“That’s utterly wretched!” retorted Fantasus, indignantly. “Is that, then, the poet, the diviner, of whom I’ve heard so much talk? Great gods, what a pity! What a disappointment, as soon as one approaches prophets! What do you take me for, wanting me to be swallowed by such a city?”

With that, he went away, full of wrath—but no one followed him.

The crowd of sages who had stayed behind then cried: “Merlin, give us the final word of your doctrine today.”

“Listen,” replied the Enchanter gravely, “From everything I see here, I can tell that you’re still only rough drafts. Harsh proof has shown you that you’re a hundred times more leaden in thought than you think you are. You’re scarcely born, and already your minds have rusted with regard to all sorts of higher things. The time hasn’t yet come for me to unveil to you my final thought. How could you tolerate the glare, you who can’t even spell out the runes written in letters twenty cubits high on the rocks?”

He taught them then an elementary, pygmy religion, which might nevertheless save them. It was neither paganism nor druidism, nor was it the purest orthodoxy. It was a page of the eternal Gospel, written in all languages in the flowers, in the rocks, in the veins of crystal, in the faces of stars, and even in the hearts of children. Those who did not know the ABC were astonished to be able to read that book fluently. There were exemplars of it everywhere, displayed on the earth. Negligently, they were left there to be spelled out by the vilest insects.

“Certainly,” Merlin said to them, “it’s a very modest step, but it’s infinitely superior to the one where you are. It’s said that your forefathers scaled the heavens. You do the opposite, and crawl in the abyss. Several of you have told me that you expect a new dogma to impose itself on the universe. Good people, I tell you that you’ve been duped by your old ideas. The new dogma has come and you haven’t seen it. You’re waiting for the Messiah? The Messiah is in front of you and you don’t know him; his name is Liberty. Please don’t imitate the peasant who sits down on the bank until the river has passed by. Do you know his story? The dark river did not weary of flowing; it amassed its waves; it growled like an angry man. The peasant found himself swallowed up among the reeds, with his bundle and his flock. Doubtless hunger, cold, frost, and the long wait and the false hope too, had already killed him by the time the great waters reached him.”

Such were the speeches that he gave them, but that language did not please any of them. They would rather have perished a hundred times over than recognize what they lacked. Seeing that they could not reach Merlin’s height at the first bound, they preferred to plunge back, head first, into their most ancient and sordid superstitions. They formed associations to weave wicker baskets, in which they burned prophets. Their self-respect was greatly soothed by that, and they devoted themselves intently to the affairs of Heaven.

XII

“Be our king!” said the people to Merlin, every time they encountered him.

“God preserve me from that!” he replied. “I make kings, and wouldn’t like to be one. But be patient; I’ll give you the most handsome of kings, young, well-built, obliging, better than you imagine. You’ll thank me for him.”

He had, in fact, warned the king of the just, Arthus, to be ready to receive the most beautiful of kingdoms. Arthus was waiting with all his court in the shade of the bushy woods of Vincennes. It was Merlin that opened the gates for him and handed him the keys of the city on a silver platter. He also presented him with an embroidered and deployed flag that could shade the entire tiny people if necessary. Clad in a sable cloak, the king of the just, riding a bay palfrey shod with gold and caparisoned with silk, made his entrance to the city to the sound of bells and oliphants. He confessed that he had never seen a kingdom garnished with people he liked so much.

“Paris! Paris!” he repeated, in a low voice. “It’s the best of my thirty crowns. I owe it to you, Merlin; you’ll advise me.” But he did not feel at ease on seeing the crowd respond to him with acclamations that rose up to the clouds.

Crowned at Notre-Dame, he visited the Louvre, the Bastille and Geneviève’s cabin; everything seemed to his liking.

Merlin said to him, as he extended the hand of justice to him: “If you find fault with anything, my king, say so. These people are very new, but they’re inconstant, lighter of heart than the lightest leaf. I’m apprehensive of some disturbance, but I think I’ll be able to correct it.”

“By the Son of Mary,” Arthus replied, “don’t do anything, Merlin—you’ll annoy me. Everything is going well, emerging from your hands. These people please me as they are: lively, cheerful, almost child-like, and easily amused. Don’t touch them, for God’s sake—you might make them worse.”

“As you please, Sire.”

Night had fallen. The king slept at the Louvre, Perceval at the Marais, Tristan in Les Halles, Blasius in the cloister at Cluny, Yvain in the Boucheries tower. Arthus’ porter, Gleouloued of the wide hands, bolted the door and posted the watchmen. The prefect of the palace, Owenn,17 lodged in the Thermes. After the trumpets had sounded, silence extended over the city and the river.

XIII

The night was black. When Merlin found himself alone, still full of what he had just said, done and heard, he felt divination awakening within him. What presentiments filed his mind then! How he found himself oppressed by the weight of future centuries, seeing in advance the nations linked to their crimes, without wanting to detach themselves therefrom. He was the only prophet of his time who sought the truth and not illusion.

As he measured the faults, the frivolity, the vanity, the hardening and the ingratitude of the people he loved, he wanted to try to soften them with his songs, like a lullaby casting its spell into the cradle of a newborn. Perhaps he also thought that a note, a sincere sigh, or a word, might ward off the future. Most of all, he wanted to mingle with the winged words of the poet the education of the sage, for he hoped thus to make it enter, through the gate of song, into the heart of the sleeping nations. He took up his harp. At the first chord, the towers and keeps trembled all the way to their foundations. His thoughts overflowed; they broke the rhythm and cadence like a dyke.

Merlin allowed his first prophecy to fall from his lips.

“There are three roads, three abodes, three kingdoms, three worlds, and I am the guide through those three lives.

“I do not prophesy by the flight of the bird, by the blade of the oar, by the orb of the shield. My runes are written in my heart.

“Others make their enchantments with the hazel-branch, with simples collected in the forests. My enchantments are in my soul.

“All have announced dolors, plagues, famines; for my part, I announce joys, benedictions, smiles.

“I say to winter: ‘There will be a spring,” to tears, ‘There will be a smile,’ to injustice, a judge, to malady, a cure, to death, a rebirth.

“I too have lived in tears; the world was indifferent to me distress. All my hopes changed into the points of swords to transpierce me,

“I have cried: ‘Is there nowhere a place for justice, for hope, for love?’ I was ready to perish when I saw myself saved.

“Now, I say: ‘When iniquity has covered all the earth, if justice has been able to hide in the shadow of a blade of grass, that will be enough for it to grow and perfume the three worlds.”

The prophet interrupted himself momentarily and pricked up his ears. He heard the sound of a leaf falling on the edge of the river. But the people were profoundly asleep, like new-borns.

Then he resumed, in these terms:

“If only I had a hundred scribes around me! The earth would hear the scraping of their pens in the silence of the consternated worlds.

“I gaze at the stars that heap up soundlessly above my head. They inform me of the routes of kingdoms across the mute generations.

“Speak! How many sparks does it require to remake the widow’s hearth? How many men to remake the human race? How many grains of wheat to save the dough? How many of the just to save justice? You who have replied to me, be the seed that will repopulate the devastated field of hope!

“Shall I no longer see a human face blossom in gentle pity? Is the speech of the flame that nourished all those who listened to it extinct forever? Will women always have a gaze as harsh as men? Pity, beauty, love, will you never return?

“They pass beside one another hard, pitiless and grim. They have only to glimpse one another momentarily upon the earth, and they flee! Or, if they speak, the words are brief, cold and sordid, like the rusty voice of copper in a miser’s hand.

“The wicked! They have made my life an island, separated from their iniquities. They have hollowed out an insurmountable precipice all around; their insulting voices can scarcely reach me. They have put guardians around that abyss; an entire army watches over its bounds to prevent me from approaching them; but all of their precautions protect me from them. If only they could raise a wall of steel in order that their thoughts, on rampant wings, could not reach me!

“Yes, they have made my life a sacred isle. Far from here are the vain dolors, the deceptive hopes, the servile desires and the black regrets. Only alight here, you flocks of white swans departed from eternal shores. Teach my soul incorruptible whiteness!

“In whatever place injustice resides, close at hand or far away, through the ages, through the darkness, I see it! I recognize it by its shadow; I understand it by its breath; I follow it by the odor of blood. Present, absent, hidden, disguised, mute or resounding, it robs me of sleep.

“I see it through the thickness of mountains and heaped-up lies. If it hid at the bottom of the sea, I would still see it through the murky, jaundiced waves, on its throne of algae and hair-like grass. Above all, I can recognize it through the honeyed smile of a hypocritical face. Let it disappear from the earth, or I shall fall upon it!”

At that moment a cloud veiled the disk of the moon over the treetops. Darkness extended everywhere.

Merlin went on:

“The night is amassing around me! Oh, how profound and full of ambushes is the night of the soul! The sepulchral darkness of subterranean places is nothing by comparison. In spite of the darkness, I await the dawn. If the dawn does not come, I shall await the daylight in its glory; if the daylight deceives me too, I shall see the uncreated splendor of the following day. In a slave universe, I shall live and I shall die free.

“O world, I defy you! You will extend indifference over me, and then malevolence, and then disgust, aversion, denial, exile, bloody words, like a shroud perforated by the corners of the sepulcher in a desert heath. After that, you will add the silence heavier than stone. Then you will weave over my lips the web of forgetfulness, more subtle than the spider’s; you will then sit down upon my cold remains. And when you have finished your work, you will keep me buried and you will say, shaking your head: ‘He is dead, the diviner, the dreamer, the hollow dream!’—and then I shall raise myself up on to my elbow, with a burst of laughter; I will call you by your name. The gentle words of hope, long retained, will emerge from my mouth, in waves as urgent as the snow. And you, you will respond to me with hatred, with derision, with insults, with calumny, with blasphemy, with the sword, with death. You will go a little further, full of wrath, to hollow me out another abyss with your fingernails; I shall obligingly allow myself to be swallowed up, without fear, for I shall laugh at your impotence to keep me imprisoned; I shall emerge almost immediately to mock.

“Why should I no longer dare to smile? I have proven my heart in the darkness. I have felt it, like a faithful armor, which rust cannot corrode.

“Those who loved me love me still. I have not known treason—or, at least, it has come from those who cannot offend me.

“When the sea of servitude has risen and has covered the earth, I have rediscovered the route of serene thought. I am sitting on a sheer peak with the companion of my eternal life; I have driven back with my foot the Ocean vomited by Hell.

“The vulture called to its chicks and all the birds of the air. It said to them: ‘Today is the day that you shall take your nourishment from the free human heart and the flesh of innocent peoples.’ And it brushed with its livid wing the pale forehead of nations. I have driven it away to its lair with a cry; since that moment, fear has vanished from the human heart. The earth, widow of the sky, has taken back her bridal garland.”

There Merlin stopped and pricked up his ears again, but his voice found not a single echo. It passed over the face of the nations as if over desiccated bones.

Dawn was beginning to appear. Merlin perceived in the distance the peoples who were keeping still, as one sees stone dolmens rising in a deserted landscape, whitening in the night. None tried to respond, none took a step toward him.

One figure alone, paler than all the rest, approached him and said to him, weeping: “Don’t speak to them anymore; they’re deaf, for they’ve been turned to stone. I alone have heard you; I alone know who you are. I too know justice and hope, but I am dead!”

“Console yourself, poor soul in mourning,” the prophet replied. “Whether or not they’ve been turned to stone, I don’t know; I’m beginning to believe it, on seeing them so mute and so hard, but I’m patient; I can wait until they open the hearts and their ears again.”

XIV

Merlin discovered in the future the entire destiny of the people who had just blossomed around the hamlet of Lutèce. He described the most imminent dangers point by point, and also marked out the means of avoiding them. From all that, he formed a set of instructions that he gave in a sacred volume to the principal individuals of the city, with the express responsibility of explaining them to the ignorant—who, unfortunately, were numerous in the region.

From that moment on, that book of Prophecies has not ceased to be consulted in cases of public calamity, but fatality determined that it would only ever be consulted after the event, when Merlin’s wisdom arrived too late to remedy the evil.

“At least,” the sages said, then, “we know exactly why we’re perishing.”

“That’s true,” replied the indiscreet, “but why didn’t you open the book a day sooner?”

“We’ll remember that another time,” said the sages.

The opportunity recurred the following years; the book was forgotten again.

Such was the character of the people. Who could correct them, since Merlin had been unable to do so?

Prophet, king, poet, enchanter, bard, son of a saint and an incubus—how many different characters my hero has! Not only, like other heroes, has he a double divine and human nature; he also has a touch of the infernal, softened, corrected and tempered but not destroyed by science. Small at the moment when he seems largest; when I seek him in the clouds he is on earth; an incredible difficulty for his historian, that diversity of tones, of language, of conditions!

What pen would be winged enough to follow him in his course through the three worlds? And it’s not enough to depict him in his public life; it’s necessary to show him in the hearth, in the intimacy of his private life. That’s where the difficulty lies. The lesser danger, with such a hero, is going astray and being precipitated a hundred times a day, by passing too abruptly from heaven to earth, from earth to Hell, from the sublime to the familiar, from the tragic to the comic.

I’ll give you proof of it. What did Merlin think, would you say, of the women of Lutèce? What became of his art and his science with them? What was his facial expression, his bearing? I ought to say, if I don’t want to leave an unforgivable lacuna in that regard. Let us lower the tone, then; it’s time to furl the wings. The classics open the way to me here, as witness the two twins, spoiled children of the gods, who were living in Olympus one day, and the next in the miserable hamlet of Therapnes.18

Take this confession as you wish: Merlin was afraid of the women of Lutèce. Their soft voices, like mocking birds, disconcerted him at first. He listened, without daring to speak, to that human twittering between earth and sky, without knowing whether it was art of nature. Their smile also scared him, because that smile, brushing everything, seemed to challenge everything.

Merlin did not know how to act with them, and felt disarmed as well as mistrustful. He was incapable of playing with the sacred words like a viol player improvising a prelude on the viol of love. Was it because his heart was so full that he could neither imagine anything, nor want anything, not covet anything? I don’t say that. In a full soul, there always remains at least enough room for a drop of poison. A word fallen at hazard from a playful mouth dug into his heart, all day long, as a drop of joyful water will hollow out a rock.

He knew a thousand stories that he believed to be charming, a thousand confidences of streams with pebbles on the bank, a thousand ingenuous secrets of flowers, stones, elves, and even stars—but those stories, to his great astonishment, did not interest the most beautiful of beauties at all, to whom he told them for preference. What a humiliation it was to see the slightest anecdote from any passer-by preferred a hundred times to all the sparking secrets of the errant stars, which he knew so well. That was his first disappointment.

One thing astonished him even more. The young women laughed wholeheartedly and made fun of his enchantments as soon as his back was turned. That seemed to him, not without reason, a great ingratitude. For after all, he said to himself, they profit from them. Whence comes, I ask you, if not from Merlin, that je ne sais quoi more powerful than the girdle of the ancient goddess? They do not have her Greek profile, but nevertheless, they have her humor, her taste, her cheerful Attic knowingness. Who taught it to them? There they are, scarcely emerged from the woods, having only two or three garments at the most, and already they seem to be queens among queens. Who taught them, if it wasn’t me, the power of a ribbon, a strip of fabric, a flower in the hair, the magic of a glance, of a half-pronounced word, of slightly parted lips—less than that, of a silence? I taught them all of that, so that they could mock me.

Full of those ideas, he did not hesitate to open up to the most beautiful, named Isaline.19

“Don’t be offended, Merlin,” Isaline said to him. “We’ve only just made our entrance; we’re already laughing at everything in this region, at what we love as well as what we hate, the rose and the thorn, liberty and slavery, the cradle and the tomb, and even love. Sometimes—rarely, fortunately—in the midst of those games, those smiles, a profound thought slips into the heart and raps itself in its folds. Then the poison is more subtle, more venomous, I swear, than in any other land.”

“That’s some consolation,” Merlin replied.

Isaline had cheeks that were a trifle pale for her jet-black hair, a mouth full of amorous malice, a high, angelic forehead, a figure as supple as meadow-grass and, better than that, the largest, daintiest, most mischievous, most profound, most serious, most ingenuous and most reflective dark eyes that were ever seen on earth. When Merlin saw those large velvety eyes for the first time, he thought he was seeing the luminous source of all magic. He drank them in at his leisure, slowly and conscientiously. Was it not the starry flame in which every enchanter ought to bathe?

By dint of intelligence, Isaline understood Merlin’s imagination, or at least let him think so. She had no taste for what we would now call nature, art, poetry or reverie; she would have traded all the stars in the sky for a single diamond from the lapidary’s boutique, all legends for one telling gibe, all the harmonious lowing of the distant sea for one whispered conversation in private with a friend, by the fireside. Although society—or what we understand by it, at least—did not exist as yet, she had divined it.

What we have learned about the tide of the passions would have been antipathetic to her, but that was unknown to both the men and the women of her time. Nor would she have been able to bear our systems of theology transported into amour, our mysticism, our bombast, or even our good qualities—if they exist—acquired at the price of grace. She was grace itself; she cursed as an impiety everything lacking it.

Just as she belonged to ancient France, she belonged to the old school, preferring prose to poetry. She would have been a Classicist if there had been Romantics in her lifetime. Don’t ask what she would have thought about enjambment in verse or realism; such questions didn’t exist in her era.

Thus, she seemed frivolous; in reality, she wasn’t; there was even a little routine in her way of being. She resembled the sea, mobile on the surface and immutable in the depths. But she would have rejected that comparison as too ambitious. I’ve already said that she would have preferred the clarity and simplicity of the eighteenth century to all our lyricism.

The sound of her voice resembled…please, don’t ask me what. I don’t know of anything that bears the slightest resemblance to it, except one, that I no longer hear and can’t talk about. That one, if I heard it, would immediately make me feel homesick—and that’s precisely why I want to avoid it throughout the course of this work. Let’s pass on!

Was she married, yes or no? I can’t say for sure. I think she was. In any case, it made no difference. Perhaps she was separated? Perhaps her husband was on a long voyage, for distraction. Perhaps he was busy with commerce or the crusades? Perhaps he was dead? Not that she wasn’t good, and aware of her duties, but, all things considered, nothing about her announced the hindrance of a servile, obsequious linkage. If she had a restraint, she forged it voluntarily, every day, with her own reason.

Was she religious? Yes, she was, but not as we understand it nowadays. She didn’t wear her devotion like a mantle. She didn’t talk about the Gospel, the Holy Fathers, or any of the commandments, at table, at a dance, a concert, in the woods or at the Opera. She only talked about them in church, and then in hushed tones. She didn’t deploy her most sacred thoughts like a fan. On the contrary, she shut them away, withheld them, like a well, in order to drink therefrom on difficult days. The rest of the time, she was cheerful, playful, detesting hypocrisy like ugliness itself, never mingling the sacred and the profane. She even made fun of the Triads. That was wrong, I know; once again, it was a product of her time, not her individuality. Don’t ask her time for the virtues of ours. Let’s at least respect historical color.

With so many differences and so few resemblances, how were Merlin and Isaline able to understand one another for a single day? They were both young, and both had grace. That, I think, is the first link that was able to bring them together.

Doubtless Merlin thought he was only amusing himself, or at least distracting himself from his sublime endeavors; he didn’t know that conversation can be simultaneously an art, a game, a drama and a combat. He felt caressed, mocked, admired, challenged, lacerated and cured, all at the same time. As I say, he didn’t have the slightest idea of the art of playing with the heartstrings without breaking them; at first he was amused, then dazzled, then stunned.

Sometimes he experienced a burning anguish, as if all his beautiful azure palaces were about to dissipate at the first breath from that laughing mouth, and he remained suspended from that smile, between life and death. All his magical kingdoms were then at the mercy of a mocking word that might fall without warning from Isaline’s lips like a raindrop on a soap bubble. That anguish, in which his life was at stake, was, however, full of indescribable delights.

Merlin, the child of legends, knew very well what could be done with enthusiasm, genius and prophetic inspiration. No one could have taught him anything in that regard. But wit, something new to him, astonished him to the highest degree. He was obliged to admit that no one knew anything similar in the court of Brittany or in the three Bardic kingdoms. Sometimes he compared the effect that he obtained to that of lightning in a forest of resinous fir-trees, ready to catch fire, sometimes to the blade or the sparkling edge of a sword with a diamond hilt in the hands of a virgin, but most often to a fire-follet drawing a traveler toward a crystal palace in which a feast is laid out.

“Leave your fire-follet and your feast there,” Isaline said. “Get back to the diamonds!”

Disconcerted, Merlin brought the conversation back to what he knew best: the blue sky, infinite space, the mysterious region of the ecliptic.

Without rising to those heights, Isaline replied with a good deal of sense by talking about the earth.

When would they see his sister Ganieda?20 Was the city of Loel as nice as Paris? What was said about the king of the Orkneys? Who was, in his opinion, the most beautiful of beauties? Was it Enide with the azure robe, Lady Yguerne 21 or Tegaf with the golden breast 22—or even Queen Genièvre?

Thos simple words resonated like as many pearls in a silver bowl.

Again, even more troubled, he talked about the three lives, the three felicities.

“Three felicities!” Isaline exclaimed, half laughing, half weeping. “If I could only know one!”

Oh, first winged divagations of two hearts, pursuing one another and fleeing from one another in the transparent morning air! Let’s not hope to describe them to you. With so much divergence of ideas, how could their minds ever reach one another? They kept long silences. At least their eyes spoke, and thought they understood one another. Merlin no longer knew where he was; he found himself delighted in Isaline’s presence; he took her by the hand, and his prophetic lips resounded, choked, allowed weak sighs to escape, certain presages of dolor and felicity.

I repeat that it was, of course, only a game. And yet Merlin’s heart was bleeding. It was only a childish game, and yet the heart and the mind came together, colliding, breaking, lighting up. And what sparks sprang forth from that impact of two such different hearts!

Did Merlin forget Viviane, then? It would be madness to think so, an impiety to say so. No, certainly, he did not forget her. He knew what a difference there is between an ideal person and an exceedingly positive person, however charming. But in the end, he could not help noticing for the first time that there are different sorts of beauty on the earth. Viviane’s was certainly prodigious, celestial, uranian, almost supernatural; nevertheless, Isaline’s was not to be scorned.

Was my hero eclectic, then? What a question! We are too accustomed to spoiling the best of things by means of pedantic terms.

It happened that one day, at a feast in Arthur’s court, Viviane found herself in the same company as Isaline. Immediately, she lacked air, she thought she was about to die a thousand times. Everything that emerged from Isaline’s mouth struck Viviane like an arrow. If she had not hastened to leave, she would surely have died.

When Merlin caught up with her, he found her in tears. She had just discovered that Merlin did not have the fixity of the stars. One might have thought that it was their first quarrel, the first ripple on their silvery lake, until then as smooth as a mirror. At least no one witnessed it. A few brief words, a few precipitate steps, a broken alabaster cup, then a momentary silence, and after that a sigh, a sob, and almost immediately a furtive reconciliation, sealed with tears—that was all that anyone head. It was also the unique denouement of the story.

Perhaps it would have been better not to say anything about it? I’m beginning to think so. But could I, then, conceal Viviane’s first tears?

Certainly, it was a fault on Merlin’s part, although it didn’t exceed the limits of a simple conversation, such as the best of men permit themselves every day a thousand times and more, without criticizing one another. I would have liked my hero to be perfect, so that he might serve as a model to all the generations to come, for him never to have turned his gaze away for an instant from the pure ideal to look at a real creature, even in a conversation. That’s what I would have liked! But since he was unable to maintain himself at that height, I ought to say so—and may I not have any other confession of that sort to make!

In any case, Reader, don’t worry! Expiation will have its hour. You’ll be content. If the hero leaves something to be desired, the moral of the work will be all the more perfect for it.