Ги де Мопассан
The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume 8
DREAMS
It was after a dinner of friends, of old friends. There were five of them, a writer, a doctor, and three rich bachelors without any profession.
They had talked about everything, and a feeling of lassitude came on, that feeling of lassitude which precedes and leads to the departure of guests after festive gatherings. One of those present, who had for the last five minutes been gazing silently at the surging boulevard starred with gas-lamps, and rattling with vehicles, said suddenly:
"When you've nothing to do from morning till night, the days are long."
"And the nights, too," assented the guest who sat next to him. "I sleep very little; pleasures fatigue me; conversation is monotonous. Never do I come across a new idea, and I feel, before talking to anyone, a violent longing to say nothing and listen to nothing. I don't know what to do with my evenings."
And the third idler remarked:
"I would pay a great deal for anything that would enable me to pass merely two pleasant hours every day."
Then the writer, who had just thrown his overcoat across his arm, turned round to them and said:
"The man who could discover a new vice, and introduce it among his fellow-creatures, even though it were to shorten their lives, would render a greater service to humanity than the man who found the means of securing to them eternal salvation and eternal youth."
The doctor burst out laughing, and, while he chewed his cigar, he said:
"Yes, but 'tis not so easy as that to discover it. Men have, however crudely, been seeking for and working for the object you refer to since the beginning of the world. The men who came first reached perfection at once in this way. We are hardly equal to them."
One of the three idlers murmured:
"'Tis a pity!"
Then, after a minute's pause, he added:
"If we could only sleep, sleep well without feeling hot or cold, sleep with that perfect unconsciousness we experience on nights when we are thoroughly fatigued, sleep without dreams."
"Why without dreams?" asked the guest sitting next to him.
The other replied:
"Because dreams are not always pleasant, and they are always fantastic, improbable, disconnected, and because when we are asleep we cannot have the sort of dreams we like. We require to be awake when we dream."
"And what's to prevent you from being so?" asked the writer.
The doctor flung away the end of his cigar.
"My dear fellow, in order to dream when you are awake you need great power and great exercise of will, and when you try to do it, great weariness is the result. Now, real dreaming, that journey of our thoughts through delightful visions, is assuredly the sweetest experience in the world; but it must come naturally, it must not be provoked in a painful manner, and must be accompanied by absolute bodily comfort. This power of dreaming I can give you provided you promise that you will not abuse it."
The writer shrugged his shoulders:
"Ah! yes, I know – haschich, opium, green tea – artificial paradises. I have read Baudelaire, and I even tasted the famous drug, which made me very sick."
But the doctor, without stirring from his seat, said:
"No: ether, nothing but ether, and I would suggest that you literary men ought to use it sometimes."
The three rich men drew closer to the doctor.
One of them said:
"Explain to us the effects of it."
And the doctor replied:
"Let us put aside big words, shall we not? I am not talking of medicine or morality; I am talking of pleasure. You give yourselves up every day to excesses which consume your lives. I want to indicate to you a new sensation, only possible to intelligent men, let us say even very intelligent men, dangerous, like everything that overexcites our organs, but exquisite. I might add that you would require a certain preparation, that is to say, a practice, to feel in all their completeness the singular effects of ether.
"They are different from the effects of haschich, from the effects of opium and morphia, and they cease as soon as the absorption of the drug is interrupted, while the other generators of day dreams continue their action for hours.
"I am now going to try to analyze as clearly as possible the way one feels. But the thing is not easy, so facile, so delicate, so almost imperceptible, are these sensations.
"It was when I was attacked by violent neuralgia that I made use of this remedy, which perhaps I have since slightly abused.
"I had in my head and in my neck acute pains, and an intolerable heat of the skin, a feverish restlessness. I took up a large flagon of ether, and lying down, I began to inhale it slowly.
"At the end of some minutes, I thought I heard a vague murmur, which ere long became a sort of humming, and it seemed to me that all the interior of my body had become light, light as air, that it was dissolving into vapor.
"Then came a sort of torpor of the soul, a somnolent sense of comfort in spite of the pains which still continued, but which, however, had ceased to make themselves felt. It was one of those sensations which we are willing to endure and not any of those frightful wrenches against which our tortured body protests.
"Soon, the strange and delightful sense of emptiness which I felt in my chest extended to my limbs, which, in their turn, became light, as light as if the flesh and the bones had been melted and the skin only were left, the skin necessary to enable me to realize the sweetness of living, of bathing in this well-being. Then I perceived that I was no longer suffering. The pain had gone, melted also, evaporated. And I heard voices, four voices, two dialogues, without understanding what was said. At one time, there were only indistinct sounds, at another time a word reached my ear. But I recognized that this was only the humming I had heard before, accentuated. I was not asleep; I was not awake; I comprehended, I felt, I reasoned with the utmost clearness and depth, with extraordinary energy and intellectual pleasure, with a singular intoxication arising from this separation of my mental faculties.
"It was not like the dreams caused by haschich or the somewhat sickly visions that come from opium; it was an amazing acuteness of reasoning, a new way of seeing, judging, and appreciating the things of life, and with the certainty, the absolute consciousness that this was the true way.
"And the old image of the Scriptures suddenly came back to my mind. It seemed to me that I had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge, that all the mysteries were unveiled, so much did I find myself under the sway of a new, strange, and irrefutable logic. And arguments, reasonings, proofs, rose up in a heap before my brain only to be immediately displaced by some stronger proof, reasoning, argument. My head had in fact, become a battle-ground of ideas. I was a superior being, armed with invincible intelligence, and I experienced a huge delight at the manifestation of my power.
"It lasted a long, long time. I still kept inhaling the ether from the opening of my flagon. Suddenly I perceived that it was empty."
The four men exclaimed at the same time:
"Doctor, a prescription at once for a liter of ether!"
But the doctor, putting on his hat, replied:
"As for that, certainly not; go and get poisoned by others!"
And he left them.
Ladies and gentlemen, what is your idea on the subject?
MOONLIGHT
Madame Julie Roubere was awaiting her elder sister, Madame Henriette Letore, who had just returned after a trip to Switzerland.
The Letore household had left nearly five weeks ago. Madame Henriette had allowed her husband to return alone to their estate in Calvados, where some matters of business required his attention, and come to spend a few days in Paris with her sister. Night came on. In the quiet parlor, darkened by twilight shadows, Madame Roubere was reading, in an absent-minded fashion, raising her eyes whenever she heard a sound.
At last, she heard a ring at the door, and presently her sister appeared, wrapped in a traveling cloak. And immediately without any formal greeting, they clasped each other ardently, only desisting for a moment to begin embracing each other over again. Then they talked, asking questions about each other's health, about their respective families, and a thousand other things, gossiping, jerking out hurried, broken sentences and rushing about while Madame Henriette was removing her hat and veil.
It was now quite dark. Madame Roubere rang for a lamp, and as soon as it was brought in, she scanned her sister's face, and was on the point of embracing her once more. But she held back, scared and astonished at the other's appearance. Around her temples, Madame Letore had two long locks of white hair. All the rest of her hair was of a glossy, raven-black hue; but there alone, at each side of her head, ran as it were, two silvery streams which were immediately lost in the black mass surrounding them. She was nevertheless only twenty-four years old, and this change had come on suddenly since her departure for Switzerland.
Without moving, Madame Roubere gazed at her in amazement, tears rising to her eyes, as she thought that some mysterious and terrible calamity must have fallen on her sister. She asked:
"What is the matter with you, Henriette?"
Smiling with a sad face, the smile of one who is heartsick, the other replied:
"Why nothing I assure you. Were you noticing my white hair?"
But Madame Roubere impetuously seized her by the shoulders, and with a searching glance at her repeated:
"What is the matter with you? Tell me what is the matter with you. And if you tell me a falsehood, I'll soon find it out."
They remained face to face, and Madame Henriette, who became so pale that she was near fainting, had two pearly tears at each corner of her drooping eyes.
Her sister went on asking:
"What has happened to you? What is the matter with you? Answer me!"
Then, in a subdued voice, the other murmured:
"I have – I have a lover."
And, hiding her forehead on the shoulder of her younger sister, she sobbed.
Then, when she had grown a little calmer, when the heaving of her breast had subsided, she commenced to unbosom herself, as if to cast forth this secret from herself, to empty this sorrow of hers into a sympathetic heart.
Thereupon, holding each other's hands tightly grasped, the two women went over to a sofa in a dark corner of the room, into which they sank, and the younger sister, passing her arm over the elder one's neck, and drawing her close to her heart, listened.
"Oh! I recognize that there was no excuse for one; I do not understand myself, and since that day I feel as if I were mad. Be careful my child, about yourself – be careful! If you only knew how weak we are, how quickly we yield, we fall. All it needs is a nothing, so little, so little, a moment of tenderness, one of those sudden fits of melancholy which steal into your soul, one of those longings to open your arms, to love, to embrace, which we all have at certain moments.
"You know my husband, and you know how fond of him I am; but he is mature and sensible, and cannot even comprehend the tender vibrations of a woman's heart. He is always, always the same, always good, always smiling, always kind, always perfect. Oh! how I sometimes have wished that he would roughly clasp me in his arms, that he would embrace me with those slow, sweet kisses which make two beings intermingle, which are like mute confidences! How I wished that he was self-abandoned and even weak, so that he should have need of me, of my caress, of my tears!
"This all seems very silly; but we women are made like that. How can we help it?
"And yet the thought of deceiving never came near me. To-day, it has happened, without love, without reason, without anything, simply because the moon shone one night on the Lake of Lucerne.
"During the month when we were traveling together, my husband, with his calm indifference, paralyzed my enthusiasm, extinguished my poetic ardor. When we were descending the mountain paths at sun-rise, when as the four horses galloped along with the diligence, we saw, in the transparent morning haze, valleys, woods, streams, and villages, I clasped my hands with delight, and said to him: 'What a beautiful scene, darling! Kiss me now!' He only answered with a smile of chilling kindliness: 'There is no reason why we should kiss each other because you like the landscape.'
"And his words froze me to the heart. It seems to me that when people love each other, they ought to feel more moved by love than ever in the presence of beautiful scenes.
"Indeed he prevented the effervescent poetry that bubbled up within me from gushing out. How can I express it? I was almost like a boiler, filled with steam and hermetically sealed.
"One evening (we had been for four days staying in the Hotel de Fluelen), Robert, having got one of his sick headaches, went to bed immediately after dinner, and I went to take a walk all alone along the edge of the lake.
"It was a night such as one might read of in a fairy tale. The full moon showed itself in the middle of the sky; the tall mountains, with their snowy crests seemed to wear silver crowns; the waters of the lake glittered with tiny rippling motions. The air was mild, with that kind of penetrating freshness which softens us till we seem to be swooning, to be deeply affected without any apparent cause. But how sensitive, how vibrating, the heart is at such moments! How quickly it leaps up, and how intense are its emotions!
"I sat down on the grass, and gazed at that vast lake so melancholy and so fascinating, and a strange thing passed into me; I became possessed with an insatiable need of love, a revolt against the gloomy dullness of my life. What! Would it never be my fate to be clasped in the arms of a man whom I loved on a bank like this under the glowing moonlight? Was I never then, to feel on my lips those kisses so deep, delicious, and intoxicating which lovers exchange on nights that seem to have been made by God for passionate embraces? Was I never to know such ardent, feverish love in the moonlit shadows of a summer's night?
"And I burst out weeping like a woman who has lost her reason. I heard some person stirring behind me. A man was intently gazing at me. When I turned my head round, he recognized me, and, advancing, said:
"'You are weeping, Madame?'
"It was a young barrister who was traveling with his mother, and whom we had often met. His eyes had frequently followed me.
"I was so much confused that I did not know what answer to give or what to think of the situation. I told him I felt ill.
"He walked on by my side in a natural and respectable fashion, and began talking to me about what we had seen during our trip. All that I had felt he translated into words; everything that made me thrill he understood perfectly, better than I did myself. And all of a sudden he recited some verses of Alfred de Musset. I felt myself choking, seized with indescribable emotion. It seemed to me that the mountains themselves, the lake, the moonlight, were singing to me about things ineffably sweet.
"And it happened, I don't know how, I don't know why, in a sort of hallucination.
"As for him I did not see him again till the morning of his departure.
"He gave me his card!"
And, sinking into her sister's arms, Madame Letore, broke into groans – almost into shrieks.
Then, Madame Roubere, with a self-contained and serious air, said very gently:
"You see, sister, very often it is not a man that we love, but love. And your real lover that night was the moonlight."
THE CORSICAN BANDIT
The road with a gentle winding reached the middle of the forest. The huge pine-trees spread above our heads a mournful-looking vault, and gave forth a kind of long, sad wail, while at either side their straight slender trunks formed, as it were, an army of organ-pipes, from which seemed to issue that monotonous music of the wind through the tree-tops.
After three hours' walking there was an opening in this row of tangled branches. Here and there an enormous pine-parasol, separated from the others, opening like an immense umbrella, displayed its dome of dark green; then, all of a sudden, we gained the boundary of the forest, some hundreds of meters below the defile which leads into the wild valley of Niolo.
On the two projecting heights which commanded a view of this pass, some old trees grotesquely twisted, seemed to have mounted with painful efforts, like scouts who had started in advance of the multitude heaped together in the rear. When we turned round, we saw the entire forest stretched beneath our feet, like a gigantic basin of verdure, whose edges, which seemed to reach the sky, were composed of bare rocks shutting in on every side.
We resumed our walk, and, ten minutes later, we found ourselves in the defile.
Then I beheld an astonishing landscape. Beyond another forest, a valley, but a valley such as I had never seen before, a solitude of stone ten leagues long, hollowed out between two high mountains, without a field or a tree to be seen. This was the Niolo valley, the fatherland of Corsican liberty, the inaccessible citadel, from which the invaders had never been able to drive out the mountaineers.
My companion said to me: "Is it here, too, that all our bandits have taken refuge?"
Ere long we were at the further end of this chasm so wild, so inconceivably beautiful.
Not a blade of grass, not a plant – nothing but granite. As far as our eyes could reach, we saw in front of us a desert of glittering stone, heated like an oven by a burning sun, which seemed to hang for that very purpose right above the gorge. When we raised our eyes towards the crests, we stood dazzled and stupefied by what we saw. They looked red and notched like festoons of coral, for all the summits are made of porphyry; and the sky overhead seemed violet, lilac, discolored by the vicinity of these strange mountains. Lower down the granite was of scintillating gray, and under our feet it seemed rasped, pounded; we were walking over shining powder. At our right, along a long and irregular course, a tumultuous torrent ran with a continuous roar. And we staggered along under this heat, in this light, in this burning, arid, desolate valley cut by this ravine of turbulent water which seemed to be ever hurrying onward, without being able to fertilize these rocks, lost in this furnace which greedily drank it up without being penetrated or refreshed by it.
But suddenly there was visible at our right a little wooden cross sunk in a little heap of stones. A man had been killed there; and I said to my companion:
"Tell me about your bandits."
He replied:
"I knew the most celebrated of them, the terrible St. Lucia. I will tell you his history.
"His father was killed in a quarrel by a young man of the same district, it is said; and St. Lucia was left alone with his sister. He was a weak and timid youth, small, often ill, without any energy. He did not proclaim the vendetta against the assassin of his father. All his relatives came to see him, and implored of him to take vengeance; he remained deaf to their menaces and their supplications.
"Then, following the old Corsican custom, his sister, in her indignation, carried away his black clothes, in order that he might not wear mourning for a dead man who had not been avenged. He was insensible to even this outrage, and rather than take down from the rack his father's gun, which was still loaded, he shut himself up, not daring to brave the looks of the young men of the district.
"He seemed to have even forgotten the crime and he lived with his sister in the obscurity of their dwelling.
"But, one day, the man who was suspected of having committed the murder, was about to get married. St. Lucia did not appear to be moved by this news, but, no doubt, out of sheer bravado, the bridegroom, on his way to the church, passed before the two orphans' house.
"The brother and the sister, at their window, were eating little fried cakes when the young man saw the bridal procession moving past the house. Suddenly he began to tremble, rose up without uttering a word, made the sign of the cross, took the gun which was hanging over the fireplace, and he went out.
"When he spoke of this later on, he said: 'I don't know what was the matter with me; it was like fire in my blood; I felt that I should do it, that in spite of everything I could not resist, and I concealed the gun in a cave on the road to Corte.'
"An hour later, he came back, with nothing in his hand, and with his habitual air of sad weariness. His sister believed that there was nothing further in his thoughts.
"But when night fell he disappeared.
"His enemy had, the same evening, to repair to Corte on foot, accompanied by his two bridesmen.
"He was pursuing his way, singing as he went, when St. Lucia stood before him, and looking straight in the murderer's face, exclaimed: 'Now is the time!' and shot him point-blank in the chest.
"One of the bridesmen fled; the other stared at the young man saying:
"'What have you done, St. Lucia?'
"Then he was going to hasten to Corte for help, but St. Lucia said in stern tone:
"'If you move another step, I'll shoot you through the legs.'
"The other, aware that till now he had always appeared timid, said to him: 'You would not dare to do it!' and he was hurrying off when he fell instantaneously, his thigh shattered by a bullet.
"And St. Lucia, coming over to where he lay, said:
"'I am going to look at your wound; if it is not serious, I'll leave you there; if it is mortal I'll finish you off.'
"He inspected the wound, considered it mortal, and slowly re-loading his gun, told the wounded man to say a prayer, and shot him through the head.
"Next day he was in the mountains.
"And do you know what this St. Lucia did after this?
"All his family were arrested by the gendarmes. His uncle, the curé, who was suspected of having incited him to this deed of vengeance, was himself put into prison, and accused by the dead man's relatives. But he escaped, took a gun in his turn, and went to join his nephew in the cave.
"Next, St. Lucia killed, one after the other, his uncle's accusers, and tore out their eyes to teach the others never to state what they had seen with their eyes.
"He killed all the relatives, all the connections of his enemy's family. He massacred during his life fourteen gendarmes, burned down the houses of his adversaries, and was up to the day of his death the most terrible of the bandits, whose memory we have preserved."
The sun disappeared behind Monte Cinto and the tall shadow of the granite mountain went to sleep on the granite of the valley. We quickened our pace in order to reach before night the little village of Albertaccio, nothing better than a heap of stones welded beside the stone flanks of a wild gorge. And I said as I thought of the bandit:
"What a terrible custom your vendetta is!"
My companion answered with an air of resignation:
"What, would you have? A man must do his duty!"
