Fantastic Tales Read online

  An abandoned boat gently rocks on the transparent surface of the lake. The two oars extending from its sides imprint the waves with two parallel furrows of silver, which fill up and form again, without disappearing and without leaving the slightest trace of themselves—fitting emblem of life. For who believes that the future exists? Who believes that the past exists? There is only the present, and it is the imperceptible point that joins them together: time is a chain paid out from the abyss of the future and pulled into the chasm of the past. But perhaps the part that disappears will return—the snake biting its own tail. Who knows whether the past does not resurface with its situations, places, and events? The laws that govern the evolution of stars and worlds—why do they not likewise govern the evolution of time? Everything sets out from a single principle of life: small worlds in a large world, little existences in a great existence…Yes, time returns, or else eternity would be no more than the raving of mortals. Can the idea of eternity be conceived where things are dying?

  Perhaps these are the ideas stirring in Bouvard’s mind as he sits forlorn in his boat. At his young age, he is beginning to experience that malaise of the heart born from deluded hopes and nurtured in solitary affections.

  The opening pages of the book of life contain delightful stories, predictions and presentiments of happiness without end, but the pages in the middle prepare for disillusionment, the closing ones for resignation. Often the book is thrown away, and only a few memories of one’s reading remain alive. Bouvard did what all unhappy people have done: he devoured the opening pages contemptuously and has now stopped disconsolate in the middle of the book. But he did not read these pages—no, he guessed them; he has not hastened his disillusionment, just anticipated it. In the pleasures of existence he has found only a prostitution unworthy of our nature, a fictitious world that flees us and yet caresses us, a lie that degrades and yet nourishes us…Which age in fact is most often the object of nostalgia? Which days do we dare call happy? Youth…And yet the period that follows it reveals its errors, strips that seeming, mendacious world of its fatuous and dazzling colors, demonstrates the vanity of those passions, the pettiness of those joys, the nothingness of those pleasures, the ridiculousness of those aspirations, the cruel source of those dreams that promise us the infinite delights of a virile life. Yet if we recognize that fraud to the advantage of truth, how can we dare be nostalgic for it?

  Of course, a cruel punishment still weighs on all our heads: wherever the tree of knowledge spreads its branches and entices men to gather forbidden fruits, the terrible sentence heaven hurled down on our fathers seems to be renewed. Every step humanity has so far taken on the road to truth progress has marked a step away from its happiness and moral perfection. What happens to nations happens to the individual; what happens to the existence of the masses happens to private lives. The joys of youth shun those men to whom a precocious intellectual development and fatal habit of reflection have revealed too early the profound nothingness of life and taught that truth is a naked phantom, that our very eagerness to reach it invests it with dazzling colors and celestial shapes, for which only one desperate consolation remains—withdrawal.

  Bouvard is only nineteen, and already he has surveyed the tempestuous ocean of existence in its entirety: he perceives glory, fame, prosperity, the noisy, elegant life, all the mild waves that seem to ensure him a calm, secure position. Yet this is not where he wants to rest; he yearns for another shore, distant and unforeseen…Dare he name it? Dare he utter it to himself? Bouvard desires love, a love as passionate and infinite as his soul, a love wherewith to satiate himself or die.

  He was born to love. There are some lives that are ever but a continuous incessant revelation of this sentiment. Bouvard first loved his mother, and with her his cabin, the flowers and birds of his mountains, then his marmot from which he parted in tears, then his blind companion and the poor villages in the Savoy where they traveled together.

  It was above all to his companion that Bouvard directed his piteous cares and affection for many years. That old man had taken the place of a world for him; there he found the harsh tenderness of a father and the confident warmth of a friend. Poor Jeanin was once a well-known artist who, embittered by the malice of the wicked, was later ungratefully forgotten. He wanted to make Bouvard a student destined to vindicate his genius. The youth also followed Jeanin’s example by subduing his heart to an infinite tenderness, a sensitivity without comfort, a generosity of soul too great and too often scorned by men. In their peregrinations through the countryside, they sometimes loved to sleep under the open sky on summer nights and breathe in the music of nature. They occasionally went into the villages, but only to let others hear the harmony they derived from it, like a sudden emanation of their genius, like a tribute owed to men who relieved the needs of their material life. Having performed their mission, they returned to the fields, with Bouvard often leading his companion to sit along the riverbanks or in the remote reaches of the valleys, where the wind constantly stirs the broad oak leaves and nightingales sing in the serene nights till morning.

  “Do you see the sun?” the old man sometimes asked him. “Is it still as bright as when I saw it in my youth? Give me your hand, let me touch your face and hair; I want to feel whether your features are like mine at that age.”

  Young as he was, Bouvard slept soundly through the night, and often in his sleep he heard Jeanin talking to himself or praying. One night the old man’s sweet playing seemed so sublimely unfamiliar, Bouvard thought that one of the angels, whom he once discussed with his mother, might have descended to teach him a melody that can be heard only in heaven. Then he heard the old man moan and murmur some prayers, then nothing at all. Jeanin was still sleeping when Bouvard awoke in the morning. He waited for his companion to awake and, reluctantly, shook him…He was dead! Bouvard wept for several days, then buried him with his violin under three tall trees that grew nearby, along a river that flows into the Rhône: having heard Jeanin say that he was from the village of Montélimar, the youth thought that in time the waters would bear his corpse back to his native land.

  At this point, a new future opened before Bouvard’s gaze. Although modest, he was aware of his genius; he felt that he was an artist, that he could test himself in places very different from the poor villages in the Savoy. The hope of finding his father, an itinerant puppeteer in France, drew him to that country almost in spite of himself. He entered the Saône region, played for the first time at Bourges, then Mâcon, Moulins, Nevers. Everywhere he won applause, everywhere he provoked the most unexpected admiration. At Melun, the audience threw crowns to him, and since he happened to be so close to Paris, he entered the city, attracted by that noisy, happy life in which he longed to lose himself.

  Four years passed. The little Savoyard, the poor hurdy-gurdy player, became an elegant young man, a sought-after artist, the spiritual element of grand gatherings. The social elite competed for Bouvard as if he were the living genius of art or one of those illustrious scientists whose favor and esteem are coveted.

  It was in those great towns that he studied men more than they did themselves. He saw clearly that wherever hands stretched out to grasp his, wherever he listened to words of homage, his lips drew near the honeyed poison of adulation. Yet his soul seemed to be offended by that sham existence, and when he sought a heart, just a heart, he realized that a desert opened about him, friendship shunned that seeming, counterfeit life, and his deformity condemned him to be isolated from love.

  In every age there are women who sacrifice their reputations to beauty detached from genius—but none who sacrifice themselves to genius detached from beauty. Woman, this quintessence of dust, the most perfect work in the entire creation, often hides the most delicate traces of sensuality behind the irritable mask of modesty. In the passion of love, man is almost always guided by virtue in his choice, woman ever by attractiveness. No woman has solaced the life of some great unfortunate man w
ith a lover’s affection. A recent death—the death of the unhappy Leopardi—censures the sensual egoism of woman before the court of humanity.

  Bouvard perceived too soon that he could not hope to love, and at the same time he recognized that this need had penetrated his nature so deeply that it could be allayed only by death. Angry with that indifferent, clamorous life where everything is bestowed on appearance, he thought that solitude would put him in greater harmony with himself and realized that he still had something to love—his memories. He was rather well-off; he bid farewell to public life and went traveling through his mountains. But here some unexpected disenchantments were reserved for him: everything was changed in the rustic theater of his childhood. The melting snows had eroded large portions of the cliffs at various points; the mountaineers had felled a favorite pine forest where he used to rest in the dog days of August; all that remained of his cabin was a heap of rocks where green lizards flashed in the sunlight. As he came to his friend’s grave, he found that the loose, damp soil was completely covered with that vermillion cyclamen which grows in the mountains, and he picked a bit of it to carry with him for the rest of his life, the only relic that had survived the shipwreck of his happiness and youth.

  That grave was the site whereon he composed the most beautiful melodies the genius of music could ever inspire, as a tribute to the holy memory owed to the man who had taught him the rudiments of art and revealed the most sublime mysteries of harmony.

  But as no one is capable of remaining unhappy long, Bouvard thought that a sojourn in a large city would divert him from his disconsolate meditations, and his pain was nearly dulled and soothed. The fame of La Nouvelle Héloïse—the most beautiful book ever written about love—was still widespread and flourishing among the passionate youth of that era. Bouvard devoured its pages in a kind of delirious fever. The great socialist’s life was then declining, splendid and majestic as one of those stars that blaze more brightly before they vanish from men’s sight. Bouvard wanted to kiss the soil that had given life to Jean-Jacques, and he went to Geneva.

  Here we see him again in that city, in the silence of a starry night, alone, forsaken on a boat in the middle of the tranquil waves of Lake Leman. What is he doing? What is the young man thinking at that moment?

  There are periods of excitement in the growth of the human spirit, when the soul is sublimed and elevated to an immeasurable grandeur inconceivable to anyone but itself. What word dares display those impulses? The word can express only small passions, the sensations inherent in matter. Yet everyone possesses something that he does not reveal, that he cannot reveal; everyone is greater than what he appears to be, than what perhaps he himself believes he is. And what do we call genius, if not the faculty of imagining and expressing, with as much truth as possible, this profoundly secret spiritual life of man?

  Bouvard gazes at the stars, the sky, the motionless surface of the lake, the willows bending over the banks, the fish darting after one another, the fireflies sparkling in the oar-stirred waves. And from this varied spectacle he derives ideas that he feels, understands, but is still unable to articulate to himself. It is the arcane language between us and nature that God has not permitted man to voice.

  But the young man’s eyes insistently turn to the distant lights that appear on the banks like so many motionless sentries in the night, to the villas scattered along to the shore, to their windows, half-closed and lit, hiding countless mysteries of happiness and love. Beneath each of those roofs lives a family, hearts loving one another, hopeful and joyous, whose existence is not entirely woven with pain…To feel oneself born to love, to possess a heart capable of loving a universe, and yet to search the desert of life in vain for some answer to the incessant call of the spirit—always in vain! Eternally in vain! “Beauty, cruel beauty! Why was the absolute empire of love granted to you alone? Why are you the only revelation, the sole sensible form of this sentiment? Why?” exclaims Bouvard. “Why imprison my soul in a creation so abhorrent to nature? Why give me this Ethiope’s profile, this Hottentot’s nose, this Laplander’s mouth? Could deformity dress me in more repulsive clothing? The terrible sentence that joins visible ugliness with moral beauty and destines the one to reveal the other!”

  After that night Bouvard fell ill. He had barely recovered when he abruptly left Geneva and traveled into Italy.

  Three years passed. He went to Venice, Rome, Florence, and finally stopped at Naples where, rich in fame and money, he resolved to end his artistic career in mystery and isolation.

  The most extreme and unanticipated disillusion struck him in those last years of his triumph: he disdained his art. Why should he use it to create an ideal, fantastic world that society refused to let him attain? Why caress his illusions, palliate his misfortune, excite his sensibility, if he already noted the vanity of these remedies and if his pride insistently ordered him to shun them? Why squander his treasures of harmony, the superabundance of his art, on a thoughtless throng who showered him with gold, acclaimed him a divine artist, but whom he would have begged in vain for even one of those emotions he aroused so powerfully in their hearts? They admired the artist in him, not the man, his genius, not the delicate feeling that accompanied it, not the ineffable martyrdom that paid for it. He felt beaten, gripped by a depression he would have pointlessly tried to overcome. To live for himself and by himself, to forget, even to hate, perhaps even hate, since hate can very well deny his desire for love—this is Bouvard’s ultimate resolution, the desperate comfort he expected from his plan.

  He then withdrew to a remote villa near Posillipo and lived for an extended period in obscurity. Perhaps oblivion would have erased his name forever from the pages of fame, if a mysterious event had not inscribed it with indelible characters, if a terrible catastrophe had not illuminated his premature decline with a dismal, frightening light.

  Bouvard was twenty-five years old, and he had not loved. Rather, he desired love—longed for a woman’s affection as one longs for the ideal affect of an angel—he begged heaven for it like a madman. For a brief, fleeting moment of love, he would have accepted an entire lifetime of agony. At twenty-five, love is no longer a vague aspiration, no longer the changeable, indecisive, extremely unfocused sentiment that develops in youth, but a novel feeling that is transmitted throughout our being and gathers all the spiritual and physical threads of our existence. The life granted to men lies in the exact harmony of spirit and matter, and true, powerful love balances them evenly; every affection that evades these laws is opposed to the laws of nature. It is at twenty-five that woman is loved; at fifteen, only love itself.

  Yet if Bouvard’s soul was delicate and sensitive, at the same time it was also severe. If he was unable to ignore his own deformity, he did not fail to appreciate the loftiness of his spirit and mind: a common affection was not worthy of him; he would rather pine away in the awful solitude of his passions than accept the love of a woman who could not understand the treasures of poetry and emotion concealed in his lacerated heart.

  To the lover’s gaze, virtue is revealed only in beauty. Beauty and goodness seem to share the same nature, to couple and display one another—it could be said that goodness is moral beauty, and beauty visible goodness. Bouvard deceived himself, as all men do: he did not realize that an inexplicable force often keeps them separate, nor that this fatal contradiction emerges distinctly and more often than not in the vacuous nature of woman. No matter how seldom one has lived in society or drawn lessons from experience, it will be observed that the fabled beauties of every period are distinguished by a moral defect, often by a wicked heart or unbridled vice; it is the mediocre beauties who figure among the women with the best and sweetest dispositions, perhaps because their number is more widespread. Yet deformity exceeds these bounds and almost always shows signs of extreme goodness or wickedness. Bouvard, wanting to seek out virtue, sought beauty and found it.

  One autumn evening, as he sat along the seashore
in one of those delightful little inlets formed here and there by the water’s erosion of the surrounding rocks, he was contemplating the sunset behind the serrated reefs of Lacco Ameno, when a boat suddenly passed near the beach. An elderly lady sat in the prow reading, and not very far from her a most beautiful young woman meditated in silence, her eyes lifted toward the sky in an attitude of rapturous abandon, a hand dangling deathlike from the side of the boat, the palest fingers grazing the waves that encircled her like a moving bracelet of pearls and silver. A pure white sail swelling with wind, the celestial light of the sunset mirrored in the waves, the waves crashing on the shore composed the background of that marvelous painting, which slipped by and vanished before the young man’s eyes like an instantaneous creation of his fancy or the heavenly vision of a dream. The woman had not so much seen Bouvard as beheld him—beheld him at length. Her motionless, staring eyes seemed to pour into him sentiments that perhaps sprang from the thought of a distant, beloved creature, and he seemed to be made the object of aspirations that were heavenly in origin and that the maiden would have tried in vain to reveal on earth.

  Bouvard knew that he could not be loved, but his faith in woman’s sacrifice was still so great that he believed he could be loved out of compassion. He felt that he possessed an enticement—misfortune—and he ascribed to it the omnipotence of beauty. No, it is not true that love inspired by compassion can breed humiliation in whomever receives it; such love is the most proud, most noble, and most durable of the passions, perhaps the only one that heaven blesses and that dies with life alone, because only with the passing of life does the misfortune that bred it pass away.

  Bouvard attributed that gaze to himself. “She loves me,” he said. “She has divined my suffering. And could that angelic face counterfeit a sentiment that was not pity and tenderness? Could she love a happy man?…Insolent, jesting, mendacious happiness!” He had seen the woman on other occasions, seen her in his dreams, every night, for seventeen years: she was the fantastic genius of his art, the severe creation of his music, the concretized being, alive, sensitive, vibrant, whom he had composed in the ecstasy of his melodies and meditations.