Les Nuits

One May night, the Muse comes to the poet. She is insistent, feverish, almost amorous: spring is bursting forth, the wild rose is budding, the winds are ablaze, and she wants a kiss, she wants a song. But the poet sees none of this. It is dark in his inner valley, a veiled figure floats in the distance and fades away, his heart beats without his knowing why, his half-dead lamp blinds him with its glare—and he is alone. The Muse redoubles her fervor, unfurling before him every possible subject: green Scotland, brown Italy, Greece where the honey is so sweet, the heroes of ancient times, Napoleon on his mound, a virgin with flushed cheeks, a hunter slaughtering a doe—she offers him the entire world to sing. Then, seeing that he will not yield, she changes course and delivers the terrible allegory of the pelican who, returning from the sea with empty talons, tears open his own breast to feed his young with his entrails, dying intoxicated with tenderness and horror in a cry so mournful that the birds desert the shore. Great poets, she says, do the same: their feasts resemble those of the pelicans, and the most despairing songs are the most beautiful. But the poet refuses once more. He has suffered a harsh martyrdom, and the least he could say of it, were he to try it on his lyre, would break it like a reed.

December arrives, and this time the poet is alone on stage, or nearly so. He recounts a presence that has followed him since childhood: a being dressed in black who resembles him like a brother. As a schoolboy, he saw him sit at his desk and read from his open book, pensive, with a gentle smile. At fifteen, in a wood, the same young man held a lute in one hand, a bouquet of wild roses in the other, and pointed toward the hill. At the age when one believes in love, he appeared gloomy and anxious, a sword in his hand. During the days of debauchery, he emerged as a guest in a tattered cloak, and the poet's glass shattered upon touching his. Then one night, by the bed where his father had just died, an orphan dressed in black, crowned with thorns, the lute on the ground, the sword in his breast. Since then, everywhere—in Pisa, in Cologne, in Venice on the dreadful Lido where the pale Adriatic comes to die—everywhere the poet has wearied his heart and his eyes, everywhere he has sobbed like a woman, everywhere he has wished to sleep, to die, to touch the earth, the wretched figure dressed in black has come to sit in his path. Who are you, the poet asks, you who follow me without warning, who pity me without consoling me? And the vision finally answers in a calm voice: it is neither guardian angel nor evil fate, it cannot touch his hand—it is Solitude.

The following summer, it is the Muse who waits, and the poet who returns. She has remained faithful, resting her burning brow against the half-open door of a deserted dwelling, like a weeping widow. The poet greets her with ardor—his glory, his love, his nurse—and announces that he has returned to sing. But the Muse scolds him: why flee so often, why these pale flashes of lightning pursued in the deep night, these proud beauties who hold him in their chains, this poor verbena he allows to die? The poet answers with images of nature: a withered flower beside a new bud, a bird singing to the dawn while its young have died in the night. The Muse grows more alarmed, predicting that he will find nothing left but a heart of stone, that fatal passions will leave him only dreadful remnants still writhing like snakes. But the poet will hear none of these warnings. He rises and proclaims that he loves, that he wishes to grow pale, that he wishes to suffer, that he gives his genius for a kiss, that he wants to feel an inexhaustible spring streaming down his emaciated cheek. After having suffered, one must suffer again; one must love ceaselessly, after having loved.

October at last, and everything has changed. The pain has fled like a dream, the poet says, leaving only a memory akin to those light mists lifted by the dawn. The Muse approaches, trembling, like a mother at her son's cradle, and asks him to tell his tale. Then the poet speaks. He recounts the happy days first—the brook, the silvery sand, the white specter of the aspen showing the way, that beautiful body yielding in his arms in the moonlight. Then the autumn night when he waited for his mistress at the window, in a dark and deserted street, counting the hours, naming the treacherous and disloyal absentee a hundred times over, and yet feeling, at the memory of her fatal beauty, all his grievances subside. Then the dawn, the footstep on the gravel, and she entering—where do you come from, what did you do tonight, in whose bed, at whom did you smile? Anger rises, shame, fury, and the poet screams at this woman to leave, ghost of his mistress. The Muse pacifies him. She tells him that sorrow is the master of man, that none know themselves until they have suffered, that harvests need dew and man needs tears, that joy is symbolized by a broken plant, still wet with rain and covered in flowers. She shows him that without these ancient tears he could neither savor the cheerfulness of an evening among friends, nor feel a beautiful body yield in his arms, nor raise his glass with such a willing heart. And the poet gives in. Hate is impious, he says, it is a shudder full of horror when this slumbering viper uncoils within the heart. By the blue eyes of his mistress, by the azure of the firmament, by the grass of the meadow and the sap of the universe, he banishes the abhorred memory from his mind, he forgives, he breaks the spell, he receives an eternal farewell. And now, blonde dreamer, now, Muse, to our loves—come and see immortal nature emerge from the veils of sleep, we shall be reborn with her at the first ray of the sun.