Very Woman (Sixtine): a Cerebral Novel
Copyright© 2024 by Remy de Gourmont
Chapter 25: Departure
“Déjà il rêvait à une thébaïde raffinée,
à un désert confortable, à une arche immobile
et tiède où il se réfugierait loin de l’incessant
déluge de la sottise humaine.”
Huysmans, A Rebours.
Moscowitch, feeling bored and out of place among such obscure discussions, bowed to the honorable editors, and excusing himself to Entragues, left.
“Ah!” Renaudeau said, “perhaps we are going to learn who this new manufacturer of dramatic literature is.”
“I do not know myself,” Entragues answered, “having brought him here only through international courtesy.”
“And to get rid of him?” Fortier questioned. “But Renaudeau does not permit himself to be overreached. Besides, we shall see, for he has left me a copy: ‘The Voluntary Expiation, drama in eight scenes.’ Ah! there is an Explanatory Note: ‘In default of social justice, inner justice punishes the guilty; one has opprobrium for its end; the other, rehabilitation; the one abases, the other elevates.’ A period, then a dash, and these three words twice underlined: ‘VOLUNTARY EXPIATION SANCTIFIES.’”
“Well!” Entragues said, “it is quite puerile, but perhaps the text contains interesting details.”
“Yes,” Renaudeau put in, “a new form justifies all subjects, as a fine resilvering conceals verdigris. Do you ask for indulgence?”
“Oh! no,” Entragues returned, “although I have a certain interest in having him believe he is destined for fame. If you wish to oblige me, humor him with illusions until the final dagger thrust.”
“So you are becoming wicked, Entragues?” asked Fortier.
“No, it is just for the sport.”
He requested an envelope and, after inserting the box ticket with his card and writing the name of Madame Sixtine Magne upon it, he had it dispatched to her. As soon as the office boy left, remorse seized him: perhaps he would have done better to go there in person. No. Yes. No. Yes.
Renaudeau, who had glanced over the manuscript, arrested this fatiguing game of see-saw by saying:
“It is not, perhaps, so bad. When a drama has a philosophy, it appears superior to anything we have. Our classical theater is so denuded of mystic sense! Corneille does politics, Racine, the psychology of the laboratory, and as for Molière, he is closed to aught that is not ruse, enjoyment, banal remarks on love, and vague statements. When he wishes to take up any traits of manners, it is to subject women to the materialism of life, to rail at nobility, because there is none, or at the doctors, because they cannot cure him of his hypochondria. Veuillot, but Hello especially, has judged him well: he shuts the door. It is really the theater of a Gassendist.”
“You are speaking of Molière?” asked Calixte, entering. “He is a wretch: he has jeered at the dreamer.”
“Nevertheless,” objected Van Baël, “what of Alceste and Don Juan?”
“But,” Renaudeau interposed, “even had he done nothing at all, he would be, like Voltaire, beyond criticism.”
“Don Juan would have charm, were it not for his ridiculous rustics,” Calixte said. “But see how everything shrinks in the brain of this bourgeois: if Don Juan is not a fastidious person, if in the vast field of corn he does not choose the finest, the highest and the most golden, if he makes a sheaf of everything, he is no longer Don Juan, he is a trailer after petticoats.”
“Precisely,” Entragues said, “but if he loves them all, it is because he idealizes them all.”
“I do not think so,” Calixte said. “Molière only made these countrywomen victims of Don Juan to put the comic note into his play: he had to make his audience laugh and the first conception that came was good. And Alceste? Does this person who detests men and who prefers solitude to the few concessions demanded by a pretty woman—does this man find, at the end of five acts, a single word to paint the soul-state of a hater of humanity? He is only a crabbed fellow. Above all else, he places the joy of being himself in liberty, far from the world, and he does not know how to express it: he has no soul! With what delicious grace does the so ridiculed Thisbé, the Thisbé of Théophile, tell Bersiane of her dread of noise, external life, the movement of things:
THISBE
Sais-tu pas bien que j’aime à rêver, à me taire
Et que mon naturel est un peu solitaire,
Que je cherche souvent à m’ôter hors du bruit?
Alors, pour dire vrai, je hais bien qui me suit:
Quelquefois mon chagrin trouverait importune
La conservation de la bonne fortune,
La visite d’un Dieu me désobligerait,
Un rayon de soleil parfois me fâcherait.
“And what do the professors mean by telling us that the sentiment of nature was unknown in the seventeenth century, when we find such verses, again in the same Théophile:
Les roses des rosiers, les ombres, les ruisseaux,
Le murmure des vents et le bruit des oiseaux,
or such lines:
Chaque saison donne ses fruits,
L’ automne nous donne ses pommes,
L’Hyver donne ses longues nuits,
Pour un plus grand repos des hommes.
Le Printemps nous donne des fleurs,
Il donne l’âme et les couleurs
A la feuille qui semblait morte...
“I do not know the rest. One always reads the same books,” Calixte concluded, “without suspecting that only those which the majority disdains have interest.”
“Théophile,” Entragues remarked, “is one of the rare French poets. He is full of delicate reveries. I know him well for I love him:
Prête-moi ton sein pour y boire
Des odeurs qui m’ embaumeront.
“The second Théophile has spoken of him without having read him. This is obvious, for why should he have passed his time in explaining him, if he had known him? One only talks of what one does not know; to talk of what one knows seems useless; one gets bored and bores others as well. That is why criticism is, most often, so disagreeable when it is well informed, and partaking of an emetic laxity, the rest of the time.”
“Like that of Bergeron,” Calixte said. “Why have you accepted his dilution of nonsense on Verlaine and Huysmans?”
“As an advertisement, my dear,” Fortier answered. “It is virtually printed on the blue sheets of the initial and final announcements.”
“He is witty,” Renaudeau said, “and that amuses: one must live. It has gained us several alleged subscriptions.”
“The man is pretending,” Entragues declared. “He is as incapable of feeling Verlaine’s poetry as I of feeling Molière’s.”
“And then,” Calixte interposed, “he is truly too destitute of principles. After some savage attack, he offers you, what? another article, ‘this one serious, according to my real convictions.’ As Goncourt says, there are ‘droll vulgarians.’ Ah! I see nothing since Hennequin, whose precision of method and sureness of deduction pardoned an absolutism of theory that was a little hard. I see nothing except those of to-morrow, those who still speak in the desert. It is, nevertheless, interesting to read the alleged opinion of an intelligence on works old or new...”
“There remains Fiction and Poetry,” Entragues said, “and for me that suffices.”
Dazin, who had only offered some inarticulations since his blue and red vowels had foundered under the gales of talk, declared:
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