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on my elbow, and, rising in my bed, I listened attentively.
It was one of those somber evenings when the sighing of the wind
resembles the moans of a dying man; a storm was brewing, and between the
splashes of rain on the windows there was the silence of death. All
nature suffers in such moments; the trees writhe in pain and twist their
heads; the birds of the fields cower under the bushes; the streets of
cities are deserted. I was suffering from my wound. But a short time
before I had a mistress and a friend. The mistress had deceived me and
the friend had stretched me on a bed of pain. I could not clearly
distinguish what was passing in my head; it seemed to me that I was under
the influence of a horrible dream and that I had but to awake to find
myself cured; at times it seemed that my entire life had been a dream,
ridiculous and childish, the falseness of which had just been disclosed.
Desgenais was seated near the lamp at my side; he was firm and serious,
although a smile hovered about his lips. He was a man of heart, but as
dry as a pumice-stone. An early experience had made him bald before his
time; he knew life and had suffered; but his grief was a cuirass; he was
a materialist and he waited for death.
"Octave," he said, "after what has happened to you I see that you believe
in love such as the poets and romancers have represented; in a word, you
believe in what is said here below and not in what is done. That is
because you do not reason soundly and it may lead you into great
misfortune.
"The poets represent love as the sculptors design beauty, as the
musicians create melody; that is to say, endowed with an exquisite
nervous organization, they gather up with discerning ardor the purest
elements of life, the most beautiful lines of matter, and the most
harmonious voices of nature. There was, it is said, at Athens a great
number of beautiful girls; Praxiteles designed them all, one after
another; then from all these diverse types of beauty, each one of which
had its defects, he formed a single faultless beauty and created Venus.
The first man who created a musical instrument and who gave to that art
its rules and its laws, had for a long time listened to the murmuring of
reeds and the singing of birds. Thus the poets who understand life, after
having known much of love, more or less transitory, after having felt
that sublime exaltation which passion can for the moment inspire,
deducting from human nature all elements which degrade it, created the
mysterious names which through the ages are passed from lip to lip:
Daphne and Chloe, Hero and Leander, Pyramus and Thisbe.
"To try to find in real life such love as this, eternal and absolute, is
the same thing as to seek on the public squares such a woman as Venus or
to expect nightingales to sing the symphonies of Beethoven.
"Perfection does not exist; to comprehend it is the triumph of human
intelligence; to desire to possess it, the most dangerous of follies.
Open your window, Octave; do you not see the infinite? You try to form
some idea of a thing that has no limits, you who were born yesterday and
who will die to-morrow? This spectacle of immensity in every country in
the world, produces the wildest illusions. Religions are born of it; it
was to possess the infinite that Cato cut his throat, that the Christians
delivered themselves to lions, the Huguenots to the Catholics; all the
people of the earth have stretched out their hands to that immensity and
have longed to plunge into it. The fool wishes to possess heaven; the
sage admires it, kneels before it, but does not desire it.
"Perfection, my friend, is no more made for us than infinity. We must
seek for nothing in it, demand nothing of it, neither love nor beauty,
happiness nor virtue; but we must love it if we would be virtuous, if we
would attain the greatest happiness of which man is capable.
"Let us suppose you have in your study a picture by Raphael that you
consider perfect; let us suppose that upon a close examination you
discover in one of the figures a gross defect of design, a limb
distorted, or a muscle that belies nature, such as has been discovered,
they say, in one of the arms of an antique gladiator; you would
experience a feeling of displeasure, but you would not throw that picture
in the fire; you would merely say that it is not perfect but that it has
qualities that are worthy of admiration.
"There are women whose natural singleness of heart and sincerity are such
that they could not have two lovers at the same time. You believed your
mistress such a one; that is best, I admit. You have discovered that she
has deceived you; does that oblige you to despise and to abuse her, to
believe her deserving of your hatred? [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] - zanotowane.pl
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