Chapter 34: Poetic Rapture

“Quand le monde fait peur, quand la foule fatigue.
Quand le coeur n’ a qu’un cri:—Te voir, te voir, te voir!”
Mme. Desbordes-Valmore.

He rose late, enjoying, through the window whose curtains were lifted, the wintry charm of a pale noon sun, and delighting in the state of half-consciousness which follows, after an irregular night, an extremely physical fatigue. His anaemia of a transplanted plant, combatted and almost vanquished by a regime that was country-like, returned on such mornings. He felt the languor of the consumptive and the melancholia of the adolescent.

The substantial breakfast arranged by his maid was less a comfort to his fatigued organs than an intoxication. The smoking of a single cigarette turned his head: he acquired, without having sought it, an exquisite beatitude. It was like a new condition of animated matter: the dissolving state—a special enjoyment reserved for lazy sleepers and late breakfasters. Brief, like all delights, it was not long in waning, but it was transformed gradually into an agreeable sensation of peace.

Then, stretching an arm towards his Gothic Bible, he removed the copper clasp and read, in a cloud of blue smoke, drinking strong coffee in little sips, the aphorisms of Ecclesiastes.

A reading decidedly proper to lift a wise man far above other men, a cup where one drinks sheer emptiness as surely as in a cupule of lotus, ah! ideal banalities, written, without a doubt, for the days that follow festivals.

FORTITUDE

“Poverty, labor, bodily miseries, bleeding heart wounds, bitterness of bread and wine,

“Repose, suppleness, flowerings, embraces, warmth of joyous repasts,

“And all, and all vibrations.