The Collected Prose Read online

  Ermenonville

  French literature was perfectly indifferent to the sight of green. It was Rousseau who revealed it to us. Thus, one can describe him with one word: Rousseau was the first to introduce “greenness” into our literature.

  SAINTE-BEUVE

  I continued reciting fragments of Héloise while Sylvie gathered wild strawberries.

  SYLVIE

  THE THEORY OF GARDENS is more indispensable to an understanding of Classicism and pre-Romanticism than the theory of poetry. A walk in Ermenonville is more instructive than reading Delille. The eighteenth-century jardin paysager or “English garden” is a book of poetics, a catalogue of figures and tropes explicated by a cascade, a bridge, a cluster of trees, an artificial ruin. Everything needed by tender hearts: “the grotto of secret meetings,” “the bench of a weary mother,” “the tomb of an unhappy love.” History was ruthless to these seedlings of sentimentalism. All the more reason to see Ermenonville, one of the best preserved eighteenth-century gardens.

  It was the creation of the Marquis René de Girardin12, portayed by Greuze as a rather homely gentleman with a large, pale face and the soft eyes of a hound. Dressed, as a biographer writes, “avec une élégance naturelle et très aristocratique” in a Werther outfit: a woolen frockcoat, a white, imaginatively tied foulard, and leather trousers gartered under the knees. He began his career under the sign of Mars, in deference to family tradition rather than choice. He was a captain at the court of Stanisław Leszczyski13, Prince of Lorraine. After the Prince’s death, he spent most of his life tending to his inherited estate, and specially to establishing a park on the surrounding wasteland. His book De la composition14 des paysages sur le terrain, ou des moyens d’embellir la nature près des habitations, en joignant l’agréable à l’utile (1777), is the fruit of eleven years of experience. The spirit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau hovers over it; Girardin adored the author of La Nouvelle Héloise whose pages are echoed by the leaves of Ermenonville. The Marquis based his children’s education on Émile, enriched with his own inventions. He placed a lunch-basket at the top of a high pole and made his offspring fetch their reward. The children grew up to be normal, however, and even rose to high positions.

  The Marquis liked to travel; in his youth he visited Germany, Italy, and England, where he was deeply affected by the period’s horticultural epidemic. William Kent15 designed a castle park, whose pattern was frequently imitated. The famous dandy Cobham16 sank a fortune into similar endeavors; and William Shenstone’s17 garden of cascades, ruins, and rocks influenced Girardin’s aesthetics most of all.

  These undertakings coincided with the literary revival of Hesiod, Theocritus, and Virgil and the emergence of their followers: Thomson, Gessner, Young, Gray18. The patron of French bucolic poetry is longevous Fénelon. The Xanthe River winds “among poplars and willows whose fresh, delicate green covers innumerable nests of birds singing day and night.” “The plains are covered by golden corn; hills sag under the weight of the vine and the rising amphitheaters of fruit trees. Here nature was joyful and attractive, and the sky was sweet and clear. The earth was ready to issue from her bosom new riches in return for human toil.”

  Sentimental landscape is the scenery of sentimental economy; it is no exaggeration to say that the springs of utopian socialism lie in Arcadia. Here, Virgil walks alongside Proudhon. The peasant woman Proxione “prepared wonderful cakes. She bred bees whose honey was sweeter than nectar which dripped down the oak timbers in the Golden Age. Cows came of their own accord to offer torrents of milk…daughters imitated their mothers, singing with great pleasure at work and as the sheep were led to the meadow. To this tune tender lambs danced on the grass.”

  In addition to the areas devoted to philosophical meditation and the higher emotions of the Marquis and his guests, a portion of the park was given to “our dearest peasants.” Here the art of archery (highly venerated in Valois from time immemorial) was practiced; and the country musicians’ rondo under an oak, where the traditional dances guillot, saute, perrette were danced.

  Des habitants de l’heureuse Arcadie,19

  Si vous avez les nobles moeurs,

  Restez ici, goûtez-y les douceurs

  Et les plaisirs d’une innocente vie…

  The Marquis ordered this to be cut in stone because he was also a poet, and the fact that Ermenonville Park is full of his poems indicates that he cherished certain illusions regarding his talent.

  Outdoor concerts for the upper class were often held on Poplar Island. Girardin met the author of The Country Prophet through their mutual musical interests. On May 20, 1778, Jean-Jacques arrived at Ermenonville and settled into a park pavilion with the ever-present Therèse Levasseur22. These were the philosopher’s last days. He wandered in the neighborhood (“My mind needs movement”), his pockets full of birdseed. He played with the children and told them fairytales. He considered writing a companion piece to Émile and played with musical ideas. Primarily, he walked in the park as became the author of Reveries of the Solitary Walker, and enriched his herbarium, enraptured by his beloved plant—the woodruff. “These six weeks are a blank in the history of Rousseau’s writing; not a single line of his work bears an Ermenonville date.” He lived in the Marquis’s park as in the heart of a dream realized.

  Through the mercy of nature his death was easy, though its suddenness bred suspicion. On the night of July 4, 1778, his body was lowered by torchlight to a tomb, on Poplar Island, the most beautiful spot in Ermenonville Park. The inscription on the sepulchre reads: Ici repose l’homme de la Nature et de la Vérité20. Beside the funeral’s romantic side it also had a practical aspect. Five weeks earlier, the clergy had refused to bury Voltaire.

  The body of Rousseau was laid to rest in a vault decorated with his bas-relief portrait by Lesueur21. In accordance with a decree of the Convention (and through no small effort of Therese Levasseur) his remains were transferred to the Pantheon. But the spirit of Jean-Jacques lingered in Ermenonville, which became the site of literary, philosophical, even imperial pilgrimages. It is the traditional setting of Napoleon’s famous remark: L’avenir dira s’il n’eût pas mieux valu pour le repos de la terre23, que ni Rousseau ni moi n’eussions existé.

  The air of the park is green and heavy with dead sentiments. The paths are for those without aim, only to wander along bridges suspended over artificial waters toward the Altar of Dreams. Today, no one rests his hot forehead upon it. The Temple of Philosophy (devoted to Montaigne and left deliberately unfinished) evokes no deeper reflections than that one should not build ruins; history excels in producing them. Some columns have broken off the temple. Patient roots press them deeper and deeper into the ground.

  Rousseau’s tomb is not the sole stone which bespeaks the passing of time. On the high, left bank of the river Aunette, rests the Tomb of the Unknown. In the summer of 1791, a thirty-year-old neurasthenic committed a picturesque suicide. The “victime de l’amour,” as he christened himself in his note to Marquis de Girardin, asked to be buried “sous quelque épais feuillage24.”

  Near the cascade of pond water lies the Grotto of the Naiads. From a nearby bench Marie-Antoinette gazed at the philosopher’s sepulchre reflected in the still waters. The noble-sized, rectangular stone is graying in the long grass. The poplars are very tall. In the wind the dry, green flames look like Tintoretto’s angels.

  Ermenonville, a subtle instrument of sentiment and reflection, has been severely damaged by time. Numerous buildings have fallen to dust: the Altar to Friendship, the Obelisk of the Pastoral Muse, and the Pyramid, a homage to bucolic poets from Theocritus to Gessner, all are gone.

  The park is now the property of a Touring Club. Excursions are herded along paths marked in guidebooks. Rousseau’s tomb—et voilà. The cascade—tiens, tiens, tiens. The Altar of Dreams—c’est à droite. The air is laden with humidity and sighs: Marquis de Girardin’s spirit covers his eyes and weeps. One must visit Ermenonville in early spring or late autumn when the Naiads are asl
eep, the Cascade is silent and the drained lake around Poplar Island is like a mirror of mud.

  Return

  THE CHARMS OF THE countryside—no sense of symmetry, of time, and an aversion to stupid rules.

  One needs cunning to learn where the Ermenonville-Paris bus stops. “On ne sait jamais,” sometimes at the bridge, other times at the tabac. I stake it on the tabac and win. We enter the night.

  A stop in Senlis. At the stop a soldier and girl locked in an embrace, kiss, lost in each other. The driver coughs, blows the horn, flashes the lights, then turns to the passengers and smiles. Finally, he starts the bus slowly so that the soldier can leave her without undue haste and jump in on the corner. On the radio Edith Piaf complains:

  La fille de joie est belle

  Au coin de la rue là-bas

  Elle a une clientèle

  Qui lui remplit son bas

  When I return in twenty-five years’ time, Piaf will be a dead star like Mistinguette. Her name will be a link with my generation, those who survived the same wars. I shall be understood whenever I casually mention her name.

  In twenty-five years, how many generations of carp will have bitten the slime of the pond near the palace of Chantilly? Only Sassetta will be the same, and the virtue of poverty flying to the heavens like a stilled Eleatic arrow. Thanks to Sassetta I shall step twice into the same river, and time, the “boy playing with stones,” will be merciful for a moment.

  On the move again. I rush towards death. In my eyes—Paris—the chatter of lights.

  STILL LIFE WITH A BRIDLE

  translated by

  John and Bogdana Carpenter

  ESSAYS

  DELTA

  The visible world would be more perfect if seas and continents had a regular shape.

  —MALEBRANCHE1, MÉDITATIONS CHRÉTIENNES

  “Imensi Tremor Oceanii”

  —INSCRIPTION ON A SARCOPHAGUS OF MICHIEL DE RUYTER. AMSTERDAM, NIEUWE KERK

  JUST AFTER CROSSING the Belgian-Dutch border, suddenly and without reason or reflection I decided to change my original plan. Instead of the classical road to the north I chose the road to the west, in the direction of the sea. I wanted to get to know Zeeland, even if superficially; I had never been there. All I knew was that I would not experience great artistic revelations.

  Until now my travels through Holland had always followed the movement of a pendulum along the coast. That is, to speak graphically, from Bosch’s2 “Prodigal Son” in Rotterdam to “The Night Watch3” in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, a trajectory typical for someone who devours paintings, books, and monuments, leaving all the rest to those who, like the Biblical Martha, care only for earthly things.

  At the same time I realized my limitations, because clearly the ideal traveler knows how to enter into contact with nature, with people and their history as well as their art. Only familiarity with these three overlapping elements can be the starting point of knowledge about a country. This time I allowed myself the luxury of leaving behind “essential and important” things in order to compare monuments, books, and paintings with the real sky, the real sea, and real land.

  So we are driving through an enormous plain, a civilized steppe, the road as smooth as an airport runway amid endless meadows similar to the flat green paradise in the polyptych of the van Eyck brothers4 in Ghent. Though nothing extraordinary happens, though I am prepared because I have read about it a hundred times, changes still take place in my sensory apparatus that are difficult to describe yet at the same time very concrete. My eyes of a city dweller, unused to the expansive landscape, fearfully and uncertainly check the faraway horizon as if learning to fly above an unattainable surface. It is similar to a huge overflow rather than a mainland, which in my experience is always associated with an accumulation of elevations, mountains, rising cities that break the line of the horizon. This is why I was in a state of constant alarm during my journeys in Greece and Italy, a never-ending need to reach a broader “birdlike” perspective that would allow me to take in the whole image, or at least a great part of it. This is why I climbed the steep slope of Delphi, strewn with marble, to see the spot of the mortal duel of Apollo with the beast. This is why I tried to climb Olympus in the illusory hope of embracing the entire Valley of Thessaly from sea to sea (to my misfortune, the gods had an important meeting in the clouds just at that moment, so I saw nothing). I also patiently polished winding steps in the towers of Italian city halls and churches. But my efforts were rewarded only with something that could be called a “torso of a landscape”—splendid, of course splendid fragments. Later they became pale and I arranged them in my memory like postcards, these deceitful images with false colors and false light, untouched by emotion.

  Here in Holland, I had a feeling the smallest hill would be enough to take in the entire country: all its rivers, meadows, canals, its red cities, like a huge map that one can bring closer or move farther from the eyes. It was not at all a feeling accessible to lovers of beauty, or purely aesthetic. It was like a particle of the omnipotence that is reserved for the highest beings: to embrace the limitless expanse with its wealth of detail, herbs, people, waters, trees, houses, all that is contained only in God’s eye—the enormous magnitude of the world and the heart of things.

  Thus we drive through a plain that puts up no resistance, as if the laws of gravity were suddenly suspended. We move with the motion of a sphere on a smooth surface. We are overwhelmed by a powerful sensual feeling, blessed monotony, sleepiness of the eyes, dulled hearing, and the retreat of touch because nothing happens around us to cause anxiety or exaltation. Only later, much later, do we discover the fascinating richness of the great plain.

  A STOP IN VEERE. It is reasonable to begin the sightseeing of a country not from its capitals or spots marked with “three stars” in a guide but precisely from a godforsaken province abandoned and orphaned by history. A matter-of-fact and laconic Baedeker from 1911 I never part with has devoted twelve cool lines to Veere (“manche Erinerungen aus seiner Blutezeit5”), while my precious Guide Michelin flies on the wings of touristlike poésie de circonstance: “Une lumière douce6, une atmosphère ouatée et comme assoupie donnent à Veere l’allure d’une ville de légende…Ses rues calmes laissent le visiteur sous un charme mélancolique.”

  Indeed Veere, once famous, populous, and rich, is now a degraded, make-believe city; it is deprived of its own life like a moon reflecting the life and light of others. Only in the summer as a “port de plaisance” is it filled with a crowd of merry nomads; afterward it goes underground and leads the secret existence of plants. In the fall it gives the impression of a drawing from which the artist has removed people in order to put city walls, buildings, and facades into relief. Streets and squares are empty, shutters closed. No one answers a ringing at the gates.

  It looks as if the town was touched by an epidemic but the whole drama carefully concealed, victims removed behind the deceitful decorations of an idyll. A huge number of shops with antiques. At the day’s end their windows look like cemeteries in the gentle light of dusk, huge still lifes.

  A cane with a silver handle has a romance with a fan.

  The square with the city hall is lit with amber light; a pretty building, with sculpted details but strong at the same time, sits squatly on the ground, proof of old splendor. A number of sculptures in niches on the facade: portraits of councillors, mayors, and benefactors of local history.

  During my night wanderings I come upon a powerful building, thickset and smooth—a sculpture of God without a face. It emerges from the night similar to a rock growing from the ocean; not a single ray of light reaches this place. A dark mass of primordial matter against the background of night’s blackness.

  AN ATTACK OF ALIENATION, but a gentle one that touches most people transported into a foreign place. A sense of the otherness of the world, a conviction that nothing happening around takes me into account, that I am superfluous, rejected, and even ridiculous with my grotesque intention to see the
old church tower.

  In a state of alienation the eyes react quickly to objects and banal events that do not exist for the practical eye. I am surprised by the color of mailboxes, tramways, different shapes of copper doorknobs, knockers on doors, stairs always winding in a dangerous way, wooden shutters whose surface is crossed by two straight diagonal lines, a big “X” and the four fields of these big “X”s alternately filled with black and white, or white and red paint.

  I know I waste too much time listening to a painted street organ huge as a gypsy’s wagon, and also on the steps of the post office where I stand staring at a green vehicle coming out of the Moses and Aaron Street. It stirs up clouds of dust by setting brushes in its chassis into a whirling motion, which might not be the ideal way of cleaning a city but is a serious warning that dust will never find peace here.

  Petty events, small street-fragments of reality.

  It happens that my wanderings without any plan bring unexpected profit. For a long time the Binnenhof, or its interior courtyard, has been my favorite architectural complex in the center of The Hague. Surrounded by a pond, almost quiet in the late afternoon, as my master Fromentin7 says, “It is an exceptional place, very solitary and not deprived of melancholy, especially when one comes at this time of day, when one is a foreigner and the joyful years no longer keep a man company. Imagine a great pool encircled by stiff embankments and black palaces. On the right a tree-lined, empty promenade, on the left the Binnenhof emerging out of the water with its brick facade, its slate-covered roof and grim expression, its physiognomy from another century or rather from all centuries, full of tragic memories, concealing an atmosphere characteristic of places on which history has left its traces…Exact but colorless reflections fall on the sheet of sleeping water with that somewhat deadly immobility of recollections which distant life leaves in extinguishing memory.”