Chapter 14: The Faun

“Sancte pater, sic transit gloria mundi.”
Le Pontifical romain.

No sooner was he in Sixtine’s presence than Hubert felt his pleasure spoiled by the questionings which an algebraic schema had laid down but had not solved. So his will to act weakened under the weight of the present. First he must decipher the puzzle.

He coldly advanced, with a calm smile, kissing the hand she gave him; this contact quieted his need of knowledge. Then, he asked himself whether the interlaced foliage of two or three problems would not form the necessary aureola around this fair head.

“And when I should reach the precise explanations, would I have added more beauty to this body full of beauties? As for the soul, I know that it is a secret coffer to which no one—not even she herself—has the key. And what could I do with it, and what could she do with it? So my anxiety is quite futile. What if I took her merely with plausible words, as the bird-call, by its mechanical song, captures the free birds?”

They spoke of different things, particularly of the falling leaves, and Hubert skilfully led, under the same stimulus, his revery and the conversation.

A Ziem, at the end of the room, cleverly illuminated by hidden lights, a resplendent Italian road-stead, with purple-tinted sails, many colored clouds in the sky, and over all a deep transparency, a sense of great distance, a brilliancy of atmosphere full of the magic of unfailing blue:

“Naples, a Naples I have never seen! Ah! that is because I scarcely look towards the gulf, for the Novella is my heaven and my ocean.”

“Monsieur d’Entragues, why have you such a distracted air?”

This brought him back to the truth: he was not Della Preda, she had just pronounced his correct name, and Naples disappeared; after a few minute’s absence, he found himself in Paris again, near Madame Sixtine Magne and before a quite good view of Venice.

“It is that picture,” continued Sixtine. “It pleases me, but do not observe it too closely, for you will be forced to admit that it is mediocre, but charged with some power of illusion for imaginative minds.”

While cursory words were being exchanged about painters and their paintings, there reawakened in Hubert, without any determinable cause, one of the most significant impressions of his adolescence. Feeling the impossibility of evading it and fearing a fit of abstractions, he repeated it aloud. The word “madonna” uttered by Sixtine furnished the pretext:

“Summer and a stormy evening. I had been restless all day; sudden languors made me prostrate; my nerves vibrated like harp-strings with each clap of thunder. My grandmother’s harp rested in a corner of the room and when any one touched a door, it echoed. I compared myself to this mysterious instrument which I had once seen out of its rose silk case. I listened to the interior murmurings of my overexcited life, sounds welled within me, made me ill, and slowly went to a death of which it seemed I should die. Then the fears, the sweet fears of seeing, among the branches, a strange woman who would smile to me. Then the indiscreet titillations of pubescence which passed, played, breathed like a warm wind upon my skin. It was vacation time in the country: they had left me to my own devices and I rolled on the grass and ate it; I cut switches and shoots and instantly abandoned them; I climbed up trees and, half way, let myself slip with lax muscles. Obscene, vaguely understood couplets returned to me. Alexis and Corydon preoccupied me and I fancied that for the first time I understood the dim ardors of the poets. My desires were altogether formless. I had still another anguish: what was this malady which gripped me? Life would not be endurable, if I had to live thus. The night quieted me somewhat. As I annoyed everybody, that is to say my great-aunt Sophie, Aunt Azélia, an old maid, and the two house cats, dear and precious creatures, I was given pictures to look at, with instructions not to stir. They belonged to different parts of books given to quiet noisy children. Suddenly, as I was reading, I stopped, having found my childish ideal: the Madonna de Masolino da Panicale. Later in life I came upon that name under a quite different lithograph, alas! although it represented the same picture and the same madonna. I felt myself grow pale with emotion and confusion. The half-opened eyes gazed on me tenderly and the inflection of the head was so coy and amorous that my heart pounded. But the eyes soon preoccupied me above all the rest: I made a rampart of one of the leaves, I pretended to read attentively, I was alone with the divine eyes and gazed upon them. An hour perhaps had passed in this way but it seemed that I had hardly looked at them when the inflexible Azélia uttered the daily phrase: ‘The curfew has rung.’ Nothing rang in the house with its very old-fashioned clocks; so it was a metaphor; she always repeated it and I usually did not even smile at its mention. That evening I flew into a passion and I bantered the old maid so much that she sent me to bed ‘without a candle, as cats go to the loft.’ I fell asleep and slept as one sleeps at thirteen, but, in the night, the eyes of the Madonna visited me and I have since felt an inexplicable pleasure when gazing upon eyes that resemble the eyes of the Madonna de Masolino da Panicale.”