André Gide

“ Suddenly the lid slips from his hand and falls with a terrific din. (The mere recollection of it made Lafcadio jump again.) Wladi makes a dash at the lantern, muffles it and then crumples up into an arm-chair; Cadio slips under the table; they stay endless minutes, waiting motionless, listening in the dark ... but no—nothing stirs in the house; in the distance a dog bays the moon. Then gently, slowly, Wladi uncovers the lantern.
In the dining-room, with what an air he unlocks the sideboard! The boy knows well enough it is nothing but a game, but his uncle seems actually taken in by it himself. ”

“ With his new tie round his neck, Anthime engrossed himself in his work. No voice was raised; there was silence round him—silence in his heart. He had already weighed the blind rats. But what was this? The one-eyed rats were stationary. He went on to weigh the sound pair. Suddenly he started with such violence that his crutch rolled on the ground. Stupefaction! The sound rats ... he weighed them over again—there was no denying it—since yesterday, the sound rats had gained in weight! A ray of light flashed into his mind.
“Veronica!” ”

“ I never drink anything but water.... The slightest drop invariably goes to my head.... Good heavens! Good heavens! What’ll happen to me? Perhaps it would be more prudent to go back at once to my compartment. I expect I had better lie down.”
He made as though to get up.
“Stop! Stop! my dear sir,” said Lafcadio, who was beginning to be amused. “You’d better eat your dinner, on the contrary, and not trouble about the glass of wine. I will take you back myself later on, if you’re in need of help; but don’t be alarmed; you haven’t taken enough to turn the head of a baby.” ”

“ He forces himself to go on eating, but his teeth clench with vexation. Unhappy young man! it is not his abominable crime that he regrets, but this ill-starred impulse.... What has come over the professor now? Why is he smiling at him?
Defouqueblize had finished eating. He wiped his lips; then with both elbows on the table, fiddling nervously with his napkin, he began to look at Lafcadio; his lips worked in an odd sort of grin; at last, as though unable to contain himself any longer:
“Might I venture to ask for just a little more?”
He pushed his glass timidly towards the almost empty bottle. ”

“ Wilde was vastly amused at what he was saying, and laughed—he was happy telling stories. 'And, of course,' he continued, 'after the fifteen days we were much more anxious to speak to one another than before. You do not know how sweet that is, to feel that one is suffering for another. Gradually, as we did not go in the same order each day, I was able to talk to each of the others, to all of them, every one of them. I knew each one's name and each one's history, and when each was due to be released. ”

“ The whole house is fast asleep. When they reach the landing they hear the snoring of a footman whose room is in the attics. They go downstairs. Wladi’s stockinged feet drop on the steps as softly as cotton-wool; at the slightest creak he turns round, looking so furious that Cadio can hardly keep from laughing. He points out one particular step and signs to him not to tread on it, with as much seriousness as if they were really in danger. Cadio takes care not to spoil his pleasure by asking himself whether these precautions are necessary, nor what can be the meaning of it all ”

“ On one of those last evenings in Algiers, Wilde seemed to have made up his mind not to say a single serious word. At last I became somewhat annoyed at the exaggerated wit of his paradoxes, and I said to him, 'You have got something better to talk about than this nonsense; you are talking to me as if I were the public. You ought rather to talk to the public as you know so well how to talk to your friends. Why is it your plays are not better? The best that is in you, you talk ”

“ I remember saying once to André Gide, as we sat together in some Paris café, that while meta-physics had but little real interest for me, and morality absolutely none, there was nothing that either Plato or Christ had said that could not be transferred immediately into the sphere of Art and there find its complete fulfilment. ”

“ Assunta!{176}”
A young maidservant came running up, plump and debonair; she took up the tub and emptied it over a flower-bed; her breasts were bursting out of her stays and all a-quiver beneath the muslin of her bodice; she stayed laughing and lingering beside Protos, and the gleam of her bare arms made Fleurissoire uncomfortable. Dorino put the fiaschi down on the table, which had no cloth on it; and the sun, streaming joyously through the wreaths of vine, set its frolic touch of light and shade on the dishes.
“We don’t stand upon ceremony here,” said Bardolotti, and he put on the paper hat. ”

“ One feels in them, and one cannot help feeling in them, the three periods of their generation. The first idea contained in them is very beautiful, simple, profound, and certain to make itself heard; a kind of latent necessity holds the parts firmly together, but from that point the gift stops. The development of the parts is done in an artificial manner; there is a lack of arrangement about them, and when Wilde elaborates his sentences and endeavours to give them their full value, he does so by overloading them prodigiously with tiny conceits and quaint and trifling fancies. ”

“ I work a bit for the police myself. I’ve a way with me. I help to keep order. I don’t act on my own—I cause others to act.
“Come, come, Cadio, stop champing at the bit. There’s nothing very dreadful about my law. You exaggerate these things; so ingenuous—so impulsive! Do you think it wasn’t out of obedience and just because I willed it, that you picked up Mademoiselle Venitequa’s sleeve-link off your plate at dinner? Ah! how thoughtless—how idyllic an action! My poor Lafcadio, how you cursed yourself for that little action, eh? ”

“ I?”
“Yes; when you told my brother-in-law to be careful, I want to know whether you had any reason to suppose.... Speak openly; no one comes in here in the mornings and we can’t be overheard. Do you suspect anyone?”
Carola’s head sank.
“It’s of particular interest to me, you see,” went on Julius with volubility. “Put yourself in my place. Last night, when I came back from the Questura, where I had been giving evidence, I found lying on the table in my room—on the very middle of my table—the railway ticket with which poor Fleurissoire had travelled. ”

“ Carola blushed. She was anxious now to take her friend off as quickly as possible.
“Will you please excuse me, Sir?” she said. “Lafcadio will be back in a moment.”
The two women as they went out left the door open behind them. Every sound in the uncarpeted passage was audible; a person coming from the stairs would not be seen because of the turning, but he would certainly be heard.
“After all,” thought Julius, “I shall find out even more from the room than from the woman.” He set quietly to work to examine it.
In these commonplace lodgings there was hardly anything, alas! ”

“ He will never find them by himself. His back is turned to them; in another minute he will smash them. Just then a violent jerk flung the unhappy man head foremost against the door of the water-closet; the shock was broken by his top-hat, which was caved in by the force of the impact and jammed tightly down over his ears. Monsieur Defouqueblize moaned; rose to his feet; took off his hat. Lafcadio, meanwhile, having come to the conclusion that the joke had lasted long enough, picked up the eye-glasses, dropped them like an alms into the hat, and then fled so as to escape being thanked. ”

“ What makes would they show him? He would not settle on anything without having seen the principal shirt-makers in the Corso and the Via dei Condotti. For a man of fifty, loose ends were not staid enough; yes, a plain bow made of dull black silk was the thing....
Lunch was not before one o’clock. Anthime came in about twelve with his parcel, in time to weigh his animals.
Though he was not vain, Anthime felt he must try on his tie before starting work. There was a broken bit of looking-glass lying on the table, which he had used on occasion for the purpose of provoking tropisms. ”

“ Sadly I reminded him of the promise he had made not to show himself in Paris without having finished one book. 'Ah!' I began, 'why did you leave Berneval so soon, when you ought to have stayed there so long? I cannot say that I am angry with you, but—'
He interrupted me, laid his hand on mine, looked at me with his most sorrowful look, and [Pg 88] said, 'You must not be angry with one who has been crushed [5] .'
Oscar Wilde died in a shabby little hotel in the Rue des Beaux Arts. ”

“ When they reach the ground floor, they both sit down on the bottom step for a moment’s breathing-space; Wladi nods his head and gives vent to a little sigh through his nose, as much as to say: ‘My word! we’ve had a narrow squeak!’ They start off again. At the drawing-room door, what redoubled precautions! The lantern, which it is now Cadio’s turn to hold, lights up the room so queerly that the boy hardly recognises it; it seems to him fantastically big; a ray of light steals through a chink in the shutters; everything is plunged in a supernatural calm ”

“ Instead of trying to shelter the man behind his work, it was necessary to show forth first the man as an object of admiration—as I am going to try to do now—and then the work itself illuminated by his personality. 'I have put all my genius into my life; I have put only my talent into my works,' said Wilde once. Great writer, no, but great viveur, yes, if one may use the word in the fullest sense of the French term. ”

“ Just think! a being whose very existence is owing to an erratic impulse—to a crook in the straight line!...”
The professor’s voice had again grown loud; the eyes he now fixed on Lafcadio were peculiar; their glance, which was at times vague and at times piercing, began to alarm him. Lafcadio wondered now whether the man’s short sight were not feigned, and that peculiar glance seemed to him almost familiar. At last, more embarrassed than he cared to own, he got up and said abruptly:
“Come, Monsieur Defouqueblize, take my arm. Get up. ”

“ To acquire the full consciousness of self is to know oneself so different from others that one no longer feels allied with men except by purely animal contacts: nevertheless, among souls of this degree, there is an ideal fraternity based on differences,—while social fraternity is based on resemblances.
The full consciousness of self can be called originality of soul,—and all this is said only to point out the group of rare beings to which André Gide belongs.
The misfortune of these beings, when they wish to express themselves, is that they do it with such odd gestures that men fear to approach them; ”

“ He always lived in the day and rather heedlessly.
As soon as he left prison he crossed with some friends to France, and went to stay at the Hotel de la Plage at Berneval, a quiet little village near Dieppe. M. André Gide, who called on him there almost as soon as he arrived, gives a fair mental picture of him at this time. He tells how delighted he was to find in him the "Oscar Wilde of old," no longer the sensualist puffed out with pride and good living, but "the sweet Wilde" of the days before 1891. ”

“ And a short time afterwards, Wilde went back to Paris. [1]
His play was not written—it will never be written now. Society well knows what steps to take when it wants to crush a man, and it has means more subtle than death. Wilde had suffered too grievously for the last two years, and in too submissive a manner, and his will had been broken. ”

“ How shall I put it, Lafcadio? For the first time I see before me a free field.... Can you understand what that means? A free field!... I say to myself that it always has been, always will be free, and that up till now the only things to hinder me have been impure considerations—questions of a successful career, of public opinion—the poet’s continual vain hope of reward at the hands of ungrateful judges. Henceforth I hope for nothing—except from myself—henceforth I hope for everything from myself—I hope for everything from the man who is sincere—everything and anything! ”

“ You have no idea what a crafty set they are. Those people know everything, I tell you. It’s more important than ever that you should go and fetch the body instead of me. Now that {235}I’m being watched as I am, there’s no knowing what mightn’t happen to me. Lafcadio, my dear fellow”—he clasped his hands imploringly—“I’ve no head at this moment, but I’ll make enquiries at the Questura as to how to get a proper authorisation. Where shall I send it to you?”
“I’ll take a room in this hotel. It’ll be more convenient. Good-bye, till to-morrow. Make haste! Make haste!”
He let Julius go. ”

“ In the presence of others, as I have mentioned, Wilde would put on an air of showing off in order to astonish, or amuse, or even exasperate people. [Pg 27] He never listened to, and scarcely took any notice of an idea from the moment it was no longer purely his own. When he was no longer the only one to shine, he would shut himself up, and emerge again only when one found oneself alone with him once more. ”

“ Protos went on, with a shrug of his shoulders:
“Rum chap!... and in reality so easy-going!... But perhaps you would have consented already if I had told you what I expect of you. Lafcadio, my friend, enlighten my perplexity. How is it that you, whom I left in such poverty, refrained from picking up a windfall of six thousand francs dropped at your feet? Does that seem to you natural? Old Monsieur{258} de Baraglioul, Mademoiselle Venitequa told me, happened to die the day after Count Julius, his worthy son, came to pay you a visit ”