I
The air had become still. There was not a breath of air, nor any voice to be head. Already, the nebulae were letting rays that were less pale fall at the feet of the leafless trees. The escarpments of the mountains became similar to the region where the Jura raises its towers and boulevards to form a belt for France, and although the slopes were black, the peaks were flamboyant with the red gleams of an invisible sun.
No path led to the summits, where several people were standing who seemed to have wandered away from the crowd passing by beneath their feet. Perhaps the eagles had lent their wings to those solitaries. They seemed to be occupied with the dreams of a sacred sleep. All of them, with one exception, had retained the serenity of the nascent world in their facial expressions.
“Have you lost the path of the living?” the prophet shouted to them. “Or have you forgotten to live, you who are taking the place of the eagles?”
His voice was lost in the air; the solitude became greater.
The conductor of the three lives searched to discover where the rock was least harsh, but did not find any beaten track. Helping himself then, with the wings of the mind, he made a path for himself, and went to join those who were inhabiting the summits, much as the shepherd leaves the wilting low valleys in summer and takes his flocks on to Mont Rose, where they drink the virginal snow.
The first he met stamped his foot as soon as he had the opportunity to speak and said: “Tell me whether it moves?”
“Yes, it moves, Galileo! Have no fear of vertigo.”
At that response the spirit, radiant with joy, tried to stammer on the edge of the gulf: “Brothers, it moves!” But his voice scarcely passed his lips. He was ashamed of that, and his divine joy was mingled with dolor. He would have liked to hide his confusion behind his companions.
“Don’t flee the light, Galileo,” said the prophet, holding him back. “That’s how all science is acquired. A little dolor is mingled with every new enlightenment; you’ll experience that yourself when you come into the world. Make an apprenticeship here in the pale light of Limbo, before contemplating the sun. Otherwise, you won’t be able to support it in its glory.”
He was about to continue when one of the solitaries approached him from behind, believing that he had not been noticed—but his shadow betrayed him. Out of dread or surprise, he dropped the globe and compasses that he had been holding in his hand, to while away the idleness of the hours, since the commencement of things.
At that sound, the prophet turned round severely. He picked up the compasses and opened them to their full extent, and, bending down over the globe, he placed the sharp point at the necessary spot, saying: “It’s here, Newton, that it’s necessary to put the finger and trace the circle to enclose the vast heavens. Be careful never to forget it! Don’t let yourself be diverted any longer by passing matters.”
Meanwhile, he had arrived at the summit brushed by the rays of an invisible sun, and he saw, close at hand in that dawn, a spirit that seemed to be drifting, full of anxiety, like a migratory bird that soars for a long time high in the sky, interrogating all the points of the horizon with its eyes, before finding the route to the natal nest and launching itself forward with rapidly-beating wings.
“Are you their chief?” he said to him. “What brought you so high on these uninhabited peaks? Was it the birds in the sky?”
“I don’t know,” the spirit replied, “what brought me to this place, or where I came from, or where I’m going. That’s why you see me so pensive.”
“What are you searching for?”
“The Eternal.”
At these words, as a lapidary divines beneath the brute stone the diamond that ought to sparkle with a thousand fires, the eyes of the prophet recognized the spirit beneath the humble swaddling-clothes that still covered him. He greeted him with these words:
“O sweet Bretagne, it’s true, then, that I’m looking at one of your long-haired children! This one will be born on the same terrain as me.56 He’ll drink the water of the same river as me; he’ll speak the same language. Hail, source of all wisdom! In Bretagne they’ll call you René; for everyone else you’ll be Descartes. But how far off the day is when you’ll shine through the veils that hide you here!”
As he finished this speech, the thought of the sweet homeland made him forget where he was. He held out his hands to the one to whom he was speaking. But the Breton soul moved away and said, fearfully: “Am I not a breath, a vapor, a nothing?”
“No,” the Enchanter told him. “You’re an immortal spirit of my family.” And, drawing him closer, he tried to embrace him.
The spirit remained astonished for some time by that first grip of life; then, parting the long unkempt hair that fell over his forehead, he said: “If it’s true that I’m to have the same cradle as you, tell me where these larvae, sketched like me are going—these shadows, these mute individuals who never come back and whose number never diminishes, What abode is great enough to receive them all? See how they march in silence, insouciantly, with their heads tilted, without looking back. What hand is pushing them? What hand is pulling them? Where are they coming from, so confident and yet so timid? How, weak as they are, are they going along this rude road?”
“It’s you, René, who will serve as their guide.”
“O master! How shall I be their guide if I remain lost, like them, among vain things. Which is the best way? Where does the light separate itself from the darkness? Where does the dream end? Where does wakefulness begin? I cannot walk as all those around me do, taking the night for counsel.”
On hearing him speak thus, the prophet took pity on that immortal spirit; he led him by the hand, as a guide leads a blind man, making him touch each of the objects around him one after another. He taught him thus to distinguish the random gleams of Limbo, the vain errant fireflies, from the flame that springs internally from the tiniest spirit. When he saw that he was reassured, he gave him a thread that he took care to attach to one of the roots that penetrated to the center of the earth.
“Have no fear that it will break,” he said to him. “I’ve woven it myself; it will guide you easily, you and your companions, through the labyrinth of eternal things.”
The one who had been lost a moment before seized the thread avidly ad started marching among the abysms, in such a way that his feet hardly touched the ground; and, turning round, he saw the flock of the spirits that were coming after him increasing.
A new ambition gripped him then.
“O Master,” he added, “since you love me, conduct me toward the source of things. I can hear it, dully, not far from here. Show me the dust from which sparkling worlds are born. Teach me to weigh in my hands those shaggy globes that I perceive here by accident—for they, at least, when they pass by, do not refuse their light to our Limbo. Enable me to taste the premises of that terrestrial daylight, which knows neither darkness nor shadow. I shan’t publish before time the glory of the heavens, if you entrust it to me. I’ll put my finger over my mouth. No one shall know the splendor of the visible universe prematurely. They’ll flock around me; they’ll ask me, as they’re accustomed to do where I know what lies beyond the gates of Limbo, but I’ll reply: I don’t know.”
“Restrain your curiosity, René!” the prophet replied, with an almost-divine majesty. “Dread allowing yourself to be consumed before time by everything that glitters, as you see a nocturnal moth hurling itself ecstatically into the burning naphtha source. What do the changing skies matter that your eyes can’t yet see? Content yourself today with the immutable, and seize the invisible at your leisure. What have you, who fear so much being deceived, to do with the deceptive promises of waves and seas?
“If you’re not yet oppressed by the burden of the senses, know that you’ll enjoy them further on, while criticizing limbo. How much wiser you would be to take advantage here of the silence of things, and the matinal meditation of the nascent universe, to converse freely, one to one, a pure spirit with unveiled spirit! Later, the vestment of flesh will weigh upon you heavily; your efforts to get rid of it will be in vain. The visible world will distract you with its illusory fêtes. It will disguise the ingenuous soul with tatters. It will envelop you and hold you captive with its sounds, its colors, its perfumes and its vain splendors. What toil it will be then, René, to recover within the nudity of the stainless soul that first inviolate dawn of Limbo! I don’t know whether you’ll ever succeed.
“You will want to make the universe fall silent around you, in order only to listen to your own thoughts, but the smallest cicada will resist you with its obstinate song. The buzzing of flies will cover the voice of infinity. You’ll put your hands over your eyes to flee the deceptive light of the terrestrial day; it will rise up between the truth and you to cast the eternal light into shadow.
“Do you not see how the forms around you are attenuated here, how the colors are obligingly effaced, how the pale nebulosities close their eyelids in order that your thoughts might gleam alone and unrivaled? Don’t wait any longer, then, for the body, in growing, to come to oppress the mind. Don’t call out any longer in your impatience for the vain tumult of things. More often than not, it disperses the best ideas.”
“Can I not at least converse today with humans?” murmured René.
“Be glad to converse with the larvae; they seem to honor you. The people of my time have descended too far from the summits. They won’t understand you.”
These words filled the one that the prophet had called René with the melancholy of sages. He would have liked to ask whether, after Limbo, it would be necessary to pass through other Limbos, whether the novitiate of darkness would soon be complete, and when the true rebirth would come, no longer in an uncertain and deceptive corpuscle but in the splendor and the plenitude of the eternal sun. Already armed with courage, he was about to open his mouth, when a chorus of larvae was heard in the distance.
When he heard that, the master stopped him with a gesture of the hand and said to him: “Can you hear, unquiet soul? Come with me to meet those who are singing so sweetly Gloria in excelsis Deo.”
René followed him, and looked behind him at a spirit who was holding a cup in his hand and walking as if intoxicated, but not by wine. “That’s my disciple,” he said. “Shall I wake him up so that he can come with us?”
“No,” said the prophet. “Of all of you who inhabit this region, that’s the most serene soul, and the only one I envy. I know him; he doesn’t need anyone. His pilgrimage is finished before having begun. Before life, as afterwards, nothing has changed for him. Because of that, you will call him Benedict Spinoza. Come on, let’s go. He’s drained his cup; he’s drunk on the Eternal.”
II
The mountain was divided on one side by a horizontal band of white vapor, so that the frowning black summit seemed to be floating on the cloud; you might have thought that it was a celestial hill floating in mid-air.
Who were those descending the rocky slope singing, while fireflies sowed a fiery dust in the atmosphere? Momentarily, they plunged into the cloud; then they came through it and reappeared under the awning of mist. Pale and pensive, some put their hands together to pray; others carried white hawthorn branches stripped of their bark, tied together in the form of a cross.
It was a great population of mystical souls amorous of tears, intoxicated by terror, who were going in search of divine voluptuousness. They had at the angelic Doctor57 at their head, and in scattered groups, Saint Bernard, Joachim of Fiore, Catherine of Siena, St. Theresa, and you too, Adam the Pole, whom I have seen with my own eyes and loved with a faithful heart during your pilgrimage on earth—too brief, alas, not for your glory, but for the consolation of your captive people.58
All of them, wandering together over the landscape, were coming to meet the children who had died unbaptized, who were returning to the depths of limbo in bewilderment. The crowd had surrounded the new-borns who had barely glimpsed the light. Everyone was interrogating them with gestures and gazes, trying to discover what they had seen and heard beyond the cradle.
“Did you visit sacred Jerusalem?” they said to them. “Did you see the Lord?”
But like a flock of birds emerged too soon from the roost, in haste to return to it, having been surprised by the bird-catcher, they returned, weeping and wailing, to the most secret place from which they had been taken. If they stammered anything, it was: “Mother, where are you? Father, why have you expelled me from the cradle into limbo?”
In the distance, an invisible bell was tolling a knell, and that knell resembled one that I once heard in Rome in the gardens of the Palatine hill, in the evening, when the laity came out to bury their dead.
Then the spirits of the mystic crowd lost themselves in a thousand confused thoughts. They could not understand why the new-borns had come back among them, for none of them understood what it is to die.
At that moment, they encountered the conductor of spirits at a bend in the wooded path. The one who would one day be St. Bernard said to him: “You don’t resemble any of us, for you’re already clad in a body and you appear to know life, by virtue of having experienced it. Doubtless you’re a messenger of the divine Sion, and are bringing us news of the cross. Why have you come back, like those who can only babble? Why have they fled the daylight so soon? What has made them so pale?”
“They’re dead,” the prophet replied.
“What is dead?” asked the crowd, whose members, without knowing why, began to shiver. That word was soon on the lips of all those who populated Limbo. A secret anxiety agitated the virginal souls; the first mourning extended among them.
“You’ve seen the Lord at the portals of life,” they said, “and the roses of Sion strewn on the threshold.”
“I’ve seen the tomb beside the cradle everywhere,” the pilgrim of the three worlds replied. “All enter and emerge weeping and wailing.”
“The dwelling of eternal love is prepared in the stainless city; have you not lived therein?”
“I have seen the gnashing of teeth by those who speak of love, and the swords in their hands.”
“At least the heavens remain.”
“I have seen the heavens change. The gods wither like leaves; like them, they strew the parvis of the eternal portals.”
At these words, the mystic souls went away, confused; they veiled themselves for the first time; their sadness was unconsolable; it seemed that life and death were both lacking for them. Adam the Pole was the last to linger, very pensively. He turned round to say to those who were following him: “His words are harsh, but they are merited. Churchmen, you are the Pharisees who have doomed the cross.”
III
The ringing of the bell was already fading away in the air when, in its stead, a soft chirping became audible, like the chorus of young nightingales in a nest in a cypress, awakening at dusk. Those who were interrupting the silence of the nascent world were the winged population of souls who nourish themselves on beautiful sounds, and search the universe for the music of things. They would one day be called Guido of Arezzo, Palestrina, Pergolese, Mozart and Beethoven. At the moment, sad and thoughtful, they were lending their ears to the muted, inarticulate sounds traversing Limbo, like those who are searching for something and cannot find it. Each of them carried a viol in his hand, but each of those viols had but one bronze string, and they did not know where to find the ones that were missing, of which they had a presentiment.
From time to time, one of them drew a note from his instrument that resembled a sigh; immediately, the others repeated that sigh—after which, discouraged, with heads bowed, they fell back into eternal silence.
When the pilgrim passed by, the boldest among them—the one that was to be Beethoven—separated from his companions.
“O bard,” he said, “tell me how the wind moans over the surface of the sea. What is the titillation of nascent light? What have you heard in the silence of deserts? How does soft human speech resonate in the hearts of the living? What is the sound of a breaking heart? What does the sight of a soul occupied in contemplating the nascent daylight resemble? How does a person belated in the night moan?”
Without making any reply, the master took the viol. He drew a chord from it that made the hearts of those who were listening quiver. They all tried to imitate it. Having been unable to succeed, however, their eyes were veiled by sadness. Of all those inhabiting limbo they were, if not the most miserable, at least the most filled with desires. Their laments seemed to be the best part of their art.
IV
At the master’s sweet music, the larvae crowded around him—and I, who had so far been walking behind him, was more prompt this time than all the rest. The sweetness of those chords intoxicated me so much that I had never felt a greater desire to emerge from limbo, nor a greater audacity to attempt the paths that had not yet been frayed. Remembering the reply he had made to me, I asked him for another.
“If these chords touch your heart,” I said to him, “as you can see that they stir Limbo, have pity on me and give me the response that I have been seeking since I have been following in your footsteps. Tell me, before emerging from this place—for if I’m not mistaken, you’re preparing to leave—who among these will be the companions who will make the pilgrimage of life with me. Teach me to know them I advance. Lead my heart toward them; show me their faces in advance.”
The master replied to me with the following words, which were imprinted on my thoughts so firmly that I can still hear them: “Your request is less ambitious now; that is why I want to answer it. Come, follow me. I shall introduce you to those you will have for companions under the sun of the living.”
Having said that, he led me from one group to another through the crowd, and he said to me, pointing out ingenuous and smiling souls, the oldest of which had not reached adolescence:
“These are the first you will encounter in terrestrial life, on the torrential banks of the Ain, and the majority will follow you no more than half way along the route. See how the sweet beverage of childhood rejoices them in advance! But their joy will be brief, and that separation will be your first. See how they find their vain amusement in Limbo! They are unaware of their premature end.
“Look now at those who will traverse radiant youth with you. How sweet their embrace will be to you! How promptly your heart will go out to them! How many hopes and projects will be common to you! How many sweet secrets will bind you with magical chains! Few of these will conserve the flame until the final hour. Time, absence, the road that each one has before him, will disperse their thoughts. But they will not betray you—except one, perhaps, and even for that one, it will be weakness and not perfidy.”
At the same time, he told me their names; I was about to hurl myself toward them, already sensing the sweet flame of amity, which, at first, so closely resembles love, when he stopped me by saying: “Look this way, and prepare your heart. Here is the one you will love in the first hour of youth, and the blow will be so heavy that you will almost fall.”
“Who is she?”
“You’ll know soon enough, when you receive life. Come, let’s pass on.”
And he continued to speak to me thus: “This is the first one who will teach you what it is to die—for you will live along time without knowing; she is the one who will give you the light.”
“Stop, Master!” I said to him. “She won’t live as long as me, then? Oh, you’ve rendered life cruel before I’ve tasted it. You’ve introduced me to the poison before my lips have touched the cup. I fear now that that word might come back to me when I’m under the sun, and corrupt all the joys for which I hope.”
The master continued: “Here are those you will bury with your own hands. There are three, and among them the palest is a saint. See how little they suspect the final hour! How they bathe their eyes in yours! How sweet the promise of life is to them! But you, who know how brief it will be, weep and moan!”
Seeing that the dolor with which he had just filled me was stronger than me—for my vision darkened and I was obliged to lean on him in order not to fall—the master tried to console me. He continued in these terms:
“Get up! Look at the one who will travel with you longest and who, from the first day to the last, will give you the strongest friendship.59 He is not your brother, but he will be more than your brother. Several will try to divide you, but they will only serve to unite your more solidly. O peace! O strength! O repose! O sweetness of two souls united in combat and justice! Look at him. He is carrying in his hands the tablets, blank as yet, on which he will inscribe the history of France. He is conversing with the one who will be called Vico.”
I took a step toward him and was about to call out to him, but the master held me back.
“It’s not yet time,” he said. Others are arriving whom you will only know in bad times. They will not follow the same path as you through the hours of youth, but when adversity comes, it will unite you all. See how proudly they are marching, and how the storm has not curbed their heads. The world is insulting them, because it sees them disarmed.
“They are alone; they fall silent, because they are forbidden to speak. Their mouths are sealed, but their thought is shining on their foreheads. See how their children, following them on the austere road, are racked by hunger, and how they weep as they walk! See how their wives toil over linen, groaning in the night in order to smile by day! See how they are refused shelter because they want to bring justice in with them, and how they are rejected from one threshold to another, without anyone crying: Pity! See how they nourish themselves with hope and are indulgent to the people who have forgotten them! You will be one of them. Like them, you will live on hope, but you will not have the same softness of heart, and your indulgence will not be as great.”
They were his last words. As he finished, I envisaged with piety those who would one day traverse terrestrial life at the same time as me. I hastened toward them, as if they had already formed an eternal society with me, but they seemed astonished. Not knowing my secret, they passed on without turning their heads or giving me any sign. That first apprenticeship in life was bitter for me.
Soon, they drew away, and it seemed to me that my life was fleeing as I tried to grasp it. I remained, as on the day after a fête, among ruins. The impression of that existence, which had passed over me, lighter than a shadow, is still present as I write these lines.
I wanted to cry out: “Friends! Brothers! Companions! Stop!” but speech failed me; they all continued on their way in silence, without looking back. Only one, whose consciousness shone like a diamond, stopped and said to me: “Go on! I’ll follow you.”
Seeing then that that first intuition of life had passed, without return, I lost myself, annihilating myself in the sentiment of the brevity of all things—for I had only had the complete sentiment of existence for as long as the pilgrim of the three worlds was speaking to me. For as long as he was speaking, I had felt fully alive; I thought that I was liberated from oblivion. As soon as he stopped speaking to me, I ceased to believe in myself; I fell back into the depths of limbo. As he drew away, the anticipatory consciousness of existence faded in my heart.
At that moment, a terrible cry of “Merlin! Merlin!” pierced Heaven, Hell and Limbo.
That voice reached the prophet. He ran, for he feared that he might find the door closed. Was it not already too late to see once again the one who was calling to him from Viviane’s Heaven?
When I heard him, from afar, crossing the threshold of Limbo with great strides, never to enter it again, and closing the sacred portals behind him, I mingled with the host of indifferent larvae, groaning. The promise of life no longer seemed to me to be anything but a lure. I mocked myself for having believed it so easily. I looked at the one who was accompanying me and I said to her: “Where is your hope? The world has passed. You remain to me.”
And the spectacle of everything that was not her foundered, irredeemably.
V
Whence came, Reader, that formidable cry that had made our hero’s heart tremble? I cannot omit telling you that. By a strange, truly providential coincidence, in the interval when Merlin paused in the idleness of limbo, the king of the abyss had taken advantage of the Enchanter’s absence to abduct his mother, Séraphine, from the place where she was doing penance. He had dragged Merlin’s mother away by force. Already he was approaching the black shaft, seeking to give his abduction the classical appearance of a free descent into Hell.
“Come, dear Séraphine,” he said to her. “You have not aged an hour. Come into my fortress.”
“Let me be!” cried Merlin’s mother. “Get out! You won’t abuse me any more with false promises. I know who you are. I know you. I hate you. You’ve doomed me already; once was too much. Your words are serpents. O night, cover me! Defend me!”
“Why flee from me, Séraphine?” replied Merlin’s father. “I’m not asking you for anything, my dear—absolutely nothing. Only give me your hand, nothing but your hand. No? Well, I’ll content myself with kissing the hem of your robe, the edge of your wimple.”
“Get away, dog of Hell!”
“You drive me away in vain. The dog will lie down at your feet. He will let himself be insulted, beaten, whipped; he will lick the hand that strikes him. Then, O my love, know a little of the whim of the lion who spares you, being able to devour you.”
“O Death, deliver me!”
“What are you afraid of, Séraphine? A descent into Hell? But nothing is more frequent among the living. Only remember prudent Ulysses, pious Aeneas, Orpheus, Telemachus, Hercules the Strong, Psyche—none ever repented of that mark of confidence.”
“Vile serpent! Down! Crawl!”
“What, Séraphine, insults? Why? Call me, if you wish, Iblis, like the dark-eyed women of the Orient. Tell me, my angel, has a child not sealed our marriage? What is there more sacred on the earth? Is it not a valid, respectable marriage? I only want to legitimate our child by a solemn union. Where is our son, Séraphine? What have you done with him? My beloved child, where is he? Oh, it’s taken me a long time to find and finally enjoy, in all conscience, the holy name of father!”
“I’m no longer what I was—repentance has changed me. Holy waters have ashes away my sin.”
“Do you call a sin the most authentic marriage to which darkness has served as witness? Don’t dishonor our beautiful days. If you’ve changed, I haven’t; I never will. Come!”
“No! No!”
“Come on, darling, don’t oblige me to use force. I’d be in despair, but I’d do it, in the sacred interest of my son. I can’t leave him to rot, dishonored, in bastardy. I need to give him my family name, honorably. Whenever there’s some incompatibility, everything must give way to the interest of the children. Come on, no more procrastination—come! Suffer this gentle violence. It originates from the sincerest love, dear angel!”
“Will no one come to my aid? O Death! O Night! O Merlin!”
It was the last cry that had just reached the ears of our Enchanter. He launched himself forward to bar the way to the abductor, and found himself face to face with him; he was already about to recall Virgil and ask his advice, when the abductor reflected that the place was badly chosen for a wrestling match. If victorious, his victory would only be partial in that subterranean location; if vanquished, all of Hell would be witness to his defeat—so he immediately decided to avoid combat, certain of finding a more propitious opportunity at a later date.
Séraphine had thrown her arms around her son’s neck and was hugging him.
“Oh my son, my Merlin!” she cried. “Will you let me descend among the damned? You’re strong; you’re more powerful than Hell. Protect me.”
Before Merlin had pronounced a single word, the sniggering Beelzebub had raised his voice:
“Welcome, my dear son! This is just a lovers’ quarrel—don’t worry about it. O joy, O transports! The father, the mother and the son, all together at last! What a spectacle! Dear child, contribute to the union of your parents. Arbitrate between them; your wisdom is precocious. Tell me, isn’t it necessary for the mother of a family to live with her spouse? Isn’t it the simplest of duties? Why, then, pray, defy opinion unnecessarily, with no serious reason? If I’ve ever discontented or annoyed your mother, I repent of it. Well, what more can one want? If I’ve sometimes been in a surly mood, that’s largely due to the pain your absence has caused me. The vivacity of character, the impetuosity of temperament, a few minor faults, a few inequalities, a few words slipped out in a moment of displeasure, irritable nerves with the north wind blows, perhaps too much ardor in the manner of my love-making, an overly-delicate sensibility, but never a serious defect—can’t that be forgiven? Come on, dear son of my loins, sit down here, closer, between the two of us. Make my peace with your mother. Bring her back to the paternal hearth. The family! The family! My dear, that’s the supreme wealth!”
During this speech, Séraphine was clinging to her son and trembling in every limb.
“That’s her response,” said Merlin. “Don’t hope to vanquish her by force.”
“Force!” his father interjected. “Why, my son, who’s thinking of making use of that? Have I ever employed any arms in her regard than those of pure love? Persuasion, sighs, winks, kobold music, moonlight conversations, reveries, tales of my long insomnias, my sufferings, my distant wars, from which I never brought back a single scar—that’s what my arms have been! She rejects me! She leaves me to stew in my burning solitude! Well, since she wishes it, I’ll bury myself here all alone. I shall suffer, alas! I can suffer! She wants it; I consent to it. Nothing remains to me but the desert hearth. Let her spend happy days on earth! Let her lend her ears to the aubades and serenades of young men, while I, here...”
Would you believe that Merlin, at these words, thought for a moment of advising his mother to immolate herself for such a great exile? He did not say anything, thank God! But his heart was stirred by what he had just heard. He could not help finding some nobility in that language.
“Come on,” the incubus added, “since your hour hasn’t come, I’ll release my prey again, although I have the right to seize it. Think about your father, Merlin—and you Séraphine, at least don’t forget that you have a husband.”
With these words, the incubus plunged into his dark realm. Merlin, Séraphine and Viviane went back across the dismal threshold in silence and saw the light again. Séraphine returned incontinently to her convent, whose door she walled up for a second time. Viviane did not leave Merlin’s side. Merlin had not found his father as odious as he had been depicted.
After all, he said to himself, he’s my father. And who knows whether there was not at the start, some fault on the other side?
Thus was avoided, that day, the combat between the father and the son. But open warfare, for having been delayed, could not fail to burst forth eventually.
VI
Merlin had not taken a hundred steps outside Hell when he encountered a pauper covered in rags. It was the first he had seen in the world. He contemplated him at fist as a marvel, and then felt troubled and gave him his purse.
Fifty paces further on, a pauper more wretched than the first was lying by the roadside; Merlin gave him his cloak. The pauper pointed out that his feet were bare; Merlin took off his shoes and gave them to him, adding his hat and his sky blue doublet.
He took another fifty steps and encountered a third pauper. It was a handsome young man who had found nothing to do with his hands and was eaten away by anger. Merlin apologized for having nothing to give him.
Immediately, the indignant young man raised his head and cried: “That’s the rich all over! Hard, pitiless, miserly! They never have anything when it’s a matter of giving. Curse them all!” And he continued his invective.
“I see, my friend,” Merlin put in, “that poverty hasn’t taken away your pride.”
Then, approaching a chatelaine who was passing by on horseback, with a falcon on her wrist, he said to her: “I bring you a great joy.”
“What?” asked the lady, stopping.
“A unique opportunity to give away your horse and your falcon.”
“To whom?”
“To this wretch.”
“You’re mad, Merlin, I think,” said the lady, darting a disdainful glance at the pauper. “What are you thinking?”
“Oh, Madame,” said Merlin, “I’ve just come back from Hell; I didn’t see anything there more terrible than what I see at this moment: impassivity, harshness and avarice on the face of an angel.”
That response caused the lady to look into herself; she remembered that she had a heart; above all, she was ashamed of having been caught frowning with pursed lips, as if she had wrinkles.
She darted a more expansive glance at the wretch. Her astonishment was unequaled when she saw that he was a man, and that a wretch could have dark eyes and curly hair. She leapt lightly to the ground and handed her horse and falcon to Merlin.
“Here,” she said. “I’m giving them to him.”
That gesture melted the young man’s heart like wax; poverty alone had distorted it. He immediately improvised lines of poetry born of his emotion, and, in his gratitude, he was already head-over-heels in love. They were the first lines that had ever been composed in that land and in that language.
The lady’s name was Gabrielle, which inspired the young poet with the idea of comparing her to a gazelle, in order to have time to arrange his thoughts. That chance resonance made both of them smile. That was the origin of rhyme among the people of that land.
Astonished and even more delighted by that new, rhythmic language, of which she had had no inkling, the lady was prompted to a thousand reveries.
“What honeyed language,” she said. “I’ve never heard anything like it in my castle. Is it the language of the poor?”
“No, Madame,” said Merlin. “It’s the language of love; I ought to have invented it.”
With that, he told her that those lines were the most beautiful that had been composed, and how she had occasioned the miracle.
When she returned to her castle, the lady was gripped by a great ennui.
“Talk to me in verse, then,” she said to the host of courtiers who wanted to be loved.
No one understood. They all seemed coarse and rude to her by comparison with what she had heard. She listened from the top of her tower; she could still hear the song of her servant in the valley. From that day on, one gave, the other received; both were replete.
That prodigy was one of the greatest that Merlin wrought. He reconciled the rich with the poor, and invented poetry at the same time.
VII
What was Merlin’s recompense for spreading so many benefits through the world?
His recompense was this: in one of the places he had enchanted, he had built a dwelling at his whim. You would not have found it large enough or sumptuous enough for you, but it was exactly proportionate to his desires. Perhaps the main body of the building would have been too severe, had it not been cheered up at the two sides by two wings with Roman arches, each supported by twelve columns, in memory of the twelve knights. Around these columns wound garlands of honeysuckle and wild vines. A wooden gallery and an iron balustrade connected the two wings. Oh, how often they resonated under joyful or thoughtful footsteps!
Above it there was an orchard of sacred apple trees that always bore fruits and flowers; below it a gently-sloping garden, a trifle wild, planted with linden trees. Sometimes, a muffled groan emerged from the dormant waters, but the blue-tits put an end to it by twittering and fluttering in eccentric short hops, like dancing spirits, from tree to tree.
Every year, in that region, there were a certain number of serene, gilded, red-tinted days, such as are not seen anywhere else in the world, but they did not last long, scarcely beyond the month of May. As soon as June, the honeyed breath of nenuphar lilies and mallow expanded into the air, causing you to breathe melancholy itself. There was a softness, a languor and tears in everything, like presages of a soft sepulcher. What an indescribable, mystic, angelic, incorporeal odor emerged from the extenuated plants then! There was nothing of this world about it. I think the pacifying breath of the dead was exhaled with the myrrh of long hedges of hazelnuts and raspberry bushes, through the curtains of the clayey earth, and that breath passed through your hair.
The mystery was especially profound around the dormant pools into which the great oaks dipped their feet, shivering. A ruin, an old tower, emerged from the middle of the deep water, but no one was nearby; there was no boat to land there, no one to indicate the way. In the calices of water-borne flowers, sparkling white sylphs danced rounds, chasing one another hither and yon, and the airborne down of thistles was carried away by the breeze. It was there that the foxglove opened its large flowers, gaping like the mouths of serpents around a caduceus.
Motionless on the edge of a distant oat-field stood a heron, the hieroglyph of a world of dreams. Never was the screech of an axle heard in the clearings, never a herald in the depths of the forest. Sometimes there was a conflagration of dry grass, which no one had lit and no one thought of putting out.
Assuredly, the place could have been better chosen, but so what! Merlin had put his heart into it from the first day. He never disavowed it.
When he went to stroll in his garden, the bees, either because they were visiting the cornflowers in the neighboring hayfields, or the strawberry flowers, or the opium poppies, or because they preferred to settle on the new buds of the hawthorn, formed a chorus as he passed by, and cried out in their high-pitched voices: “Honor and glory to Merlin!”
With their matinal voices the bees woke up the other creatures, which said, all together: “Let nothing ever trouble the betrothal of Merlin and Viviane! Their happiness spreads over is. The future of the world is attached to their love. May no cloud ever come between them, for that cloud would cast its shadow over the earth, and the tempest would engender reptiles.
“The serenity of the heavens envelops everything. Viviane’s breath expands over the wild roses hidden in the heather, and Merlin’s wisdom fills the buzzing towns.
“We thought that we would not see the spring again, for the chill of death kept us enclosed in hollow trees or subterranean dwellings. The snow covered us with a shroud and the universe seemed dead. But when Viviane exhaled, a sacred breath penetrated our profound retreats. A quiver of life makes itself felt all the way to the heart of the oaks, when the footsteps of Viviane and Merlin have trodden the daisies in the meadows.
“Butterflies, sleeping the slumber of the dead in your white cocoons of silk, listen to the trump of the cicadas announcing the resurrection to the four winds! Quit your shrouds! Emerge from the sepulchers that you have woven for yourselves. Resuscitate, iridescent troupe, light souls! Winged flowers, do not scorn the flowers because they remain enchained to the earth, where you refuse to alight.
“Come, all of you who have a voice that the echo loves to repeat! Awaken, cicadas, to the eternal song! Bees who mingle murmur with toil; nightingales, inhabitants of bushy clearings; damsel-flies with azure corsages that hover over the sources of streams! Say, without wearying: There is nothing as beautiful on earth as Viviane; there is nothing as wise as Merlin. May this moment last forever!”
Plunged in a mute reverie, the good Merlin listened to the choir, under the linden-trees that were then in flower. Pensively, he held Viviane’s hand in his, while drops of water fell from the vaults of grottoes into the profound source.