Sylvie

I was coming out of a theater where every evening I appeared in the full dress of a suitor, indifferent to the house and the stage, except when a well-known apparition illuminated the empty space and breathed life back into those vain figures that surrounded me. Her smile filled me with an infinite beatitude, her deeply resonant voice made me thrill with joy and love, and for a year I had not thought to inquire as to what she might be otherwise—I feared to disturb the magic mirror that returned her image to me. We were living then in a strange epoch, a blend of activity and indolence, of brilliant utopias and vague enthusiasms, and we had no refuge left but that ivory tower of the poets where we climbed ever higher to isolate ourselves from the crowd, drunk on poetry and love—love of vague forms, of pink and blue hues, of metaphysical phantoms.

That evening, a friend informed me that the actress had a lover, a pale and nervous young man who indifferently tossed gold upon a whist table. What did it matter to me, he or any other? It was but an image I pursued, nothing more. And then, passing through the reading room, I discovered in a newspaper that my neglected stocks had just been recognized—I was wealthy once again. Money rose before me like the golden statue of Moloch, and the thought crossed my mind that the beloved woman was mine if I so wished, but my pride rebelled: it is not at my age that one kills love with gold. Then my eyes fell upon two lines, an announcement of a country festival: the archers of Senlis were to return the bouquet to those of Loisy. These words awakened within me a whole series of forgotten impressions—the distant horn and drum in the hamlets, the young girls weaving garlands, and we, the children of those lands, forming the procession with our bows and arrows.

Plunged into a half-slumber, I saw again a castle from the time of Henry IV with its pointed slate roofs, a great green square framed by elms and lindens, and young girls dancing in a ring upon the lawn, singing old tunes handed down by their mothers. I was the only boy in this round, and I had brought my companion, still quite young, Sylvie, a little girl from the neighboring hamlet, so lively and so fresh, with her black eyes and slightly sun-kissed skin. I loved only her, I saw only her—until then. For suddenly, following the rules of the dance, a tall and beautiful blonde girl named Adrienne found herself placed alone with me in the middle of the circle. We were told to kiss, and as I gave her that kiss, I could not help but press her hand. An unknown turmoil took hold of me. Adrienne sang, in a fresh and piercing voice, one of those ancient romances full of melancholy and love, and as she sang, the shadow descended from the great trees, and the moonlight fell upon her alone, isolated from our attentive circle. I ran to gather laurels which I wove into a crown and placed upon her head—she resembled Dante's Beatrice smiling at the wandering poet on the edge of the holy dwellings. Then she ran back into the castle. We were told she belonged to a family allied to the ancient kings of France, and that the next day she would return to her convent. When I came back to Sylvie, she was weeping.

Everything was explained to me by this half-dreamt memory. The vague and hopeless love I conceived for that woman of the theater had its seed in the memory of Adrienne, a pink and blonde phantom gliding over the green grass half-bathed in white mists. To love a nun in the guise of an actress—and what if they were the same! It was enough to drive one mad. But Sylvie, why had I forgotten her for three years? She existed, good and pure of heart. I saw again her window where the vine entwines the rosebush, I heard the clatter of her sonorous bobbins. She was still waiting for me—who would have married her? And this very night was the festival of the bow, the only one of the year when they dance all night long. What time is it? I went down to the concierge: one o'clock in the morning. In four hours I could reach the ball at Loisy. I hailed a cab in the Place du Palais-Royal and set off down that dreary Flanders road which only grows beautiful upon reaching the forest zone.

As the carriage climbed the hills, the memories of the Valois returned. A few years after the childhood round, I had found myself back in Loisy for the patronal feast. Bunting-draped boats had led us toward an island shaded by poplars, in the middle of a pond, where an oval, columned temple served as a hall for the banquet—the crossing of the lake recalled Watteau's Embarkation for Cythera. It was there that I had found myself near Sylvie once more. Her brother had chided me for not visiting her family, and she had reproachfully told me that I was a Parisian who forgot village folk. Then a wild swan had flown up from the vast basket, lifting tangled garlands and crowns with its strong wings, and I had the good fortune to catch one of the most beautiful to adorn Sylvie's brow. She had allowed herself to be kissed more tenderly this time, and I understood that I was erasing the memory of another time. She had become so beautiful—she was no longer that little village girl I had disdained for one older and more accustomed to the graces of the world. Her smile had something Athenian about it, her delicately elongated hands, her arms which had whitened as they rounded, made her quite another person.

After the festival, I had escorted her home to Loisy, then wandered through the night across the Druidic rocks and the heather, and in the morning, awakened by a convent bell, I briefly imagined that Adrienne perhaps lived there—but the growing daylight chased this vain memory from my mind and left only the rosy features of Sylvie. I had gone to wake her, and she had drawn me toward Othys, to her great-aunt's house, across meadows strewn with daisies and the woods of Saint-Laurent where the blackbirds whistled. I recited fragments of La Nouvelle Héloïse to her while she gathered strawberries in the thickets. At the aunt's house, Sylvie had introduced me as her sweetheart. While the good old woman cooked a slice of bacon, we had climbed into the bedroom where the portrait of a young gamekeeper in the uniform of the House of Condé smiled from a gilt-framed oval—and in another medallion, his young wife, lithe and mischievous, teasing a bird perched on her finger. Yet it was the same good old woman cooking at this moment, bent over the hearth fire. Sylvie had found a great gown of shot taffeta in the famous drawer, and she had put it on, and asked me to clasp it, and I had donned the gamekeeper's wedding clothes, and we had gone down together holding hands. The aunt had let out a cry and begun to weep, then to smile through her tears—it was the image of her youth. And we had sung the stanzas of the epithalamium together, amorous and flowered, and we were husband and wife for one whole beautiful summer morning.

Still other memories crowded into the night of the journey—an evening at the Abbey of Châalis, where Sylvie's brother had taken me in his cart. Beneath the arches of the chapels with fine ribbing decorated by Italian artists, boarders from a nearby convent were acting out a sort of mystery play of ancient times, and among the angels clad in robes of azure and dawn, a spirit rose from the abyss holding a flaming sword—this spirit was Adrienne transfigured by her costume, the gilded cardboard halo that crowned her angelic head seeming to us quite naturally a circle of light, her voice embroidering the severe phrases of a pompous recitative with birdlike warbles. But were these details real, or had I dreamt them? This memory was perhaps an obsession.

Fortunately, the carriage stopped. I entered the ball at Loisy at that melancholy hour when the lights pale at the approach of day. Everyone was pale, and I struggled to find familiar faces, but finally I found Sylvie. Her face was weary, yet her black eye still shone with the Athenian smile of old. A young man stood beside her; she signaled to him that she was sitting out the next contredanse. Day was breaking. We left the ball holding hands, the flowers in her hair drooping in her unbound tresses, and the plains were covered with sheaves of wheat whose scent rushed to my head. I told her she no longer loved me. She sighed: one must be sensible, things do not go as we wish in life. She spoke to me of La Nouvelle Héloïse, which she had read because I had recommended it to her, and of the day we had donned the aunt's wedding clothes—for her I was Saint-Preux, and she saw herself in Julie. Why had I not returned then? I threw myself at her feet, tearfully confessing my irresolutions, my whims, I evoked the fatal specter that haunted my life. But our conversation was interrupted by violent bursts of laughter—it was her brother joining us with the gallant from the ball, a candid lad with a round face. She offered me her cheek, saying: see you later.

I went to Ermenonville, through the forest, and found again the unfinished Temple of Philosophy, already overgrown with ivy and brambles, bearing its great names of thought beginning with Montaigne and Descartes and ending with Rousseau. I saw the poplars of the island, and Rousseau's tomb, emptied of its ashes. Then I returned to see Sylvie, and everything had changed. Her room was decorated with modern furniture, a gold-rimmed mirror had replaced the antique trumeau depicting an idyllic shepherd, the four-poster bed had given way to a walnut cot, and in the cage where the warblers once were, there were canaries. She no longer made lace—the Chantilly factory was closed—she stitched gloves for Dammartin. The old aunt was no more. I took her to Châalis, and along the way we rediscovered childhood memories, and she used the familiar 'tu' with me again, and we laughed about the tall curly-haired fellow, her foster brother who had once pulled me from the water. But when I tried to tell her what was in my heart, I found only vulgar expressions, or some pompous phrase from a novel. I asked her what had become of the nun. She refused to say another word to me about it.

Before the ruins of Châalis, I had made her sing an air from the mystery play of old, and her voice had echoed beneath the vaults, but she had said it was quite sad. And I was thinking of the theater, of Aurélie, of the princess's role she was to play that evening. Sylvie sang an old local tune as she walked, and when I exclaimed that she still knew the old songs, she replied that one had to think of practical matters, that she had her work and I had my business in Paris. I was about to fall at her feet, I was about to offer my uncle's house, but we were arriving at Loisy, and supper awaited us. Père Dodu was telling his stories, and my foster brother was there, the tall curly-haired fellow, with his round face and tousled hair, and Père Dodu informed me that there was much talk of his marriage to Sylvie—he wanted to set up as a pastry chef in Dammartin. The coach from Nanteuil-le-Haudoin brought me back to Paris the next day.

In Paris, I hurried to the theater. Aurélie poured out her inspiration over the feebly inspired verses of Schiller. I bought a bouquet at Madame Prévost's, I inserted a highly tender letter signed by an unknown admirer, and the next day I was on the road to Germany. There, I undertook to set down in a poetic drama the loves of a painter for a beauty whose parents forced her to become a nun—something in this subject related to my constant preoccupations. I returned to France, I passed through all the circles of those testing grounds known as theaters. Aurélie accepted the lead role in my drama, and the day I read it to her, I revealed myself as the unknown author of the two letters. She told me I was quite mad, but that she had never found anyone who knew how to love her. Over the following days I wrote the most tender letters, and received from her replies full of reason. For a moment she was touched, then confessed to me that it was difficult for her to break off an older attachment.

The following summer, Aurélie's troupe was performing in Chantilly, and I persuaded the manager to give performances in Senlis and Dammartin. I took Aurélie to the castle, near Orry, to the same green square where I had first seen Adrienne. No emotion appeared in her. Then I told her everything—the source of this love glimpsed in the night, dreamt of later, realized in her. She listened seriously and said to me: you do not love me, you expect me to say that the actress is the same as the nun, you are looking for a drama, that is all, and the denouement eludes you. This word was a flash of lightning. These bizarre enthusiasms, these dreams, these tears, these despairs and these tendernesses—was it therefore not love? But where then is it? Aurélie performed that evening in Senlis, and I thought I noticed she had a weakness for the manager, a wrinkled but still lean former leading man, who had fire. She said to me one day: the one who loves me, there he is.

Such are the chimeras that charm and beguile in the morning of life. Illusions fall one after the other, like the husks of a fruit, and the fruit is experience, whose flavor is bitter. Ermenonville has lost its star, which shimmered with a double brilliance—alternately blue and pink, it was Adrienne or Sylvie, the two halves of a single love, one the sublime ideal, the other the sweet reality. Sometimes I return to these places of solitude and reverie. At Dammartin, I sleep at the Image Saint-Jean, and in the morning I go down to the pastry chef's. The tall curly-haired fellow welcomes me, I climb the stairs where the joyous cries of two children greet my arrival, and Sylvie's Athenian smile illuminates her charmed features. She calls me Lolotte, and I say to myself: there, perhaps, lay happiness. While the tall curly-haired fellow busies himself with breakfast, we take the children for a walk in the linden avenues, and we read some poetry or a few pages of those very short books that are hardly made anymore. And one day, in Dammartin, when Aurélie's troupe gave a performance, I took Sylvie to the play and asked her if the actress did not resemble someone she had known. She laughed, then, as if reproaching herself for it, she resumed with a sigh: poor Adrienne, she died at the convent of Saint-S…, around 1832.