When M. van Blarenberghe the elder died several months ago, I remembered that my mother had known his wife very well. Since the death of my parents I am (in a sense which it would be irrelevant to describe here) less myself, more their son. Without giving up my own friends, I turn more readily to theirs. And the letters I write now are for the most part ones I think they would have written, ones they can write no longer, letters of congratulation or condolence to friends of theirs whom I often scarcely know. So when Mme. van Blarenberghe lost her husband, I wished to tell her of the grief my parents would have felt. I recalled that some years earlier I had occasionally dined with her son at the houses of mutual friends. To him I wrote, speaking more for my late parents than for myself. I got in reply the following beautiful letter, conspicuous for great filial love. I think that this document should be made public because of the meaning given it by the drama that followed so shortly, especially the meaning it gives to the drama. Here is the letter:

LES TIMBRIEUX, PAR JOSSELIN (MORBIHAN)

September 24, 1906

I deeply regret, dear sir, that I was unable to thank you sooner for the sympathy you showed me in my sorrow. But my grief has been so great that on the advice of doctors I have been traveling for the past four months. I am only now, and with painful effort, beginning to take up my regular life again. Surely you will forgive me.

I wish to tell you, however belatedly, that I was much moved by your remembering our old and excellent relations and profoundly touched by the sentiment that inspired you to write me and my mother in the name of your parents, who left us so prematurely. I did not have the honor of knowing them well, but I remember how much my father appreciated your father and what a pleasure it was for my mother to see Mme. Proust. It was most considerate of you to send us their message from beyond the grave. I will soon return to Paris and if I succeed at all in overcoming the need for isolation which I have felt since the death of him who absorbed my every interest and inspired my every joy, I would be very happy to meet you and talk with you of the past.

Very affectionately,

H. VAN BLARENBERGHE

This letter touched me very much. I pitied one who suffered so, I pitied him, yet I envied him: he still had his mother. In consoling her he would console himself. I could not agree to his suggestion of a meeting, only because I was prevented by practical details. But above all the letter wrought a favorable change in my memory of him. The good relations to which he alluded were really of the most banal social kind. At the tables where we sometimes dined, I had scarcely had a chance to talk with him, but the great intellectual distinction of our hosts on those occasions remained for me, and still remains, a guaranty that Henri van Blarenberghe, under his rather conventional exterior—the index, perhaps, of his surroundings rather than of his real personality—hid an original and lively nature. Besides, among those strange flashes of the memory which our brain, so small and yet so vast, stores in prodigious number, if I seek those which represent Henri van Blarenberghe, the flash which always remains most vivid to me is of a face smiling in a way that was particularly fine, the lips still parted after having thrown off some witty remark. Pleasant and rather distinguished, so I “resaw” him, as one might say. Our eyes have more part than we can believe in this active exploration of the past which we call memory. If you look at someone while his mind is intent upon bringing back something from the past, restoring it to life for an instant, you will see that his eyes go suddenly blind to the surrounding objects which they reflected an instant before. “Your eyes are blank, you are somewhere else,” we say; however, we see only the external signs of the phenomenon that takes place in the mind. At such a moment the most beautiful eyes in the world no longer touch us with their beauty; they are, to change the meaning of a phrase of Wells’s, no more than “machines to explore time,” the telescopes of the invisible, which become at best measures to gauge one’s advancing age. One feels indeed, when one sees the unsteady gaze of old men, the gaze worn out with endless adaptation to a time so different, often so distant from their own, blindfold itself in order to recall the past, one feels indeed that the curve of their gaze, crossing “the shadow of the days” they have lived, comes to rest several feet before them, so it seems, but in reality fifty or sixty years behind. I remember how the enchanting eyes of Princess Mathilde were transformed when they fixed themselves on images of the great men and magnificent scenes of the beginning of the century. Such images, emanating from her memories, she saw and we shall never see. At the moments when my eyes met hers, I had a sense of the supernatural; her gaze, by some feat of resurrection, firmly and mysteriously joined the present to the past.

Pleasant and rather distinguished, I said, and it is thus that, in one of the more vivid images my memory had stored of him, I resaw Henri van Blarenberghe. But after receiving this letter, I retouched the image in the depths of my memory by interpreting, in terms of a profounder sensibility, a mind less mundane, certain details of his glance and bearing which could, indeed, permit of a more sympathetic and arresting meaning than I had at first allowed. Then, recently, at the request of a friend, I asked him for information concerning an employee of the Chemins de fer de l’Est (M. van Blarenberghe was president of the Board of Directors). Because he had ignored my change of address, his reply, written on the twelfth of last January, did not reach me until the seventeenth, not fifteen days ago, less than eight days before the drama.

48, RUE DE LA BIENFAISANCE

January 12, 1907        

DEAR SIR,

I have asked the Compagnie de l’Est for the whereabouts of X, but they have no record of him. Are you right about the name?—if so, the man has disappeared from the company without a trace; he must have had a very provisional and minor connection.

I am distressed at the news of your health since the sad and untimely death of your parents. If it is any consolation to you, I have suffered many physical and moral ailments in attempting to recover from the shock of my father’s death. One must always hope. . . . I do not know what the year 1907 holds for me, but let us pray that it may bring some improvement to us both, and that in several months we shall be able to see each other.

Please accept, I beg you, my deepest sympathy.

H. VAN BLARENBERGHE

Five or six days after getting this letter, I recalled, on waking up in the morning, that I had meant to answer it. The day had brought one of those unexpected cold spells which, like high tides of the air, wash over the dykes raised between ourselves and nature by great towns, and battering our closed windows, reaching into our very rooms, make our chilly shoulders feel, through a quickening touch, the furious return of the elements. Days troubled by brusque barometric changes, by shocks even more grave. No joy, after all, in so much violence. We weep for the snow which is about to fall and, as in the lovely verse of André Rivoire, things have the air of “waiting for the snow.” Scarcely does “a depression move towards the Balearics,” as the newspapers say, or Jamaica begin to quake, when at the same instant in Paris the sufferers from migraine, rheumatism, asthma, no doubt the insane too, reach their crises; the nerves of so many people are united with the farthest points of the universe by bonds which the victims often wish less tight. If the influence of the stars on at least some of them shall one day be recognized (Framery, Pelletan, quoted by M. Brissaud), to whom does the poet’s line apply better than to such nervous ones?—

Et de longs fils soyeux l’unissent aux étoiles.

On getting up I prepared to answer Henri van Blarenberghe. But before writing him I wanted to glance at Figaro, to proceed to that abominable and voluptuous act called “reading the newspapers,” thanks to which all the world’s misfortunes and cataclysms of the last twenty-four hours, the battles costing fifty thousand lives, the crimes, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the crude emotions of statesman and actor, transmuted for our personal consumption, make for us, who are not involved, a fine little morning treat, an exciting and tonic accompaniment to the sipping of café au lait. The fragile thread of Figaro, soon enough broken by an indolent gesture, alone divides us from all the world’s misery. From the first sensational news of so many people’s grief, news we shall soon enjoy relating to friends who have not yet read the paper, we are brought briskly back to the existence which, at the first moment of waking, we had felt it futile to recapture. And if at moments we melt into tears, it is at a phrase like this one: “An impressive silence gripped all hearts, drums sounded on the field, the troops presented arms, a tremendous cry rose up: Three cheers for Fallières!’ ” For this we weep, as we refuse to weep for misfortunes closer to our hearts. Base hypocrites who weep only for the anguish of Hercules or the travels of a President of the Republic! Nevertheless, that morning I did not enjoy reading Figaro. I had just skimmed with delight through the volcanic eruptions, the ministerial crises, the duels of apaches, and I was calmly beginning to read a column whose title, “A Drama of Madness,” was peculiarly adapted to quicken my morning energies, when suddenly I saw that the victim was Mme. van Blarenberghe; that the murderer, who had presently killed himself, was her son, Henri van Blarenberghe, whose letter lay near me waiting to be answered: “One must always hope. . . . I do not know what 1907 holds for me, but let us pray it will bring improvement,” etc. One must always hope! I do not know what 1907 holds for me! Life had not been long in answering him. 1907 had not cast off her first month before she brought him her present: musket, revolver, and dagger, and a veil for his mind such as Athena fitted on that of Ajax so that he would slaughter the shepherds and flocks in the Greek camp without knowing what he did. “I it was who put the false images in his eyes. And he rushed upon them, striking here and there, thinking that with his own hand he killed the Atrides, hurling himself now on the sheep, now on the shepherds. I made him the prey of raging madness; I forced him into the snares. He came back, his head dripping with sweat and his hands red with blood.” As long as the mad strike they know nothing; then, the fit having passed, what anguish! Tekmessa, Ajax’s wife, described it: “His madness is over, his frenzy has fallen like the breath of Motos. But, having recovered his wits, he is now tormented by a new affliction; for to contemplate his own evil deeds when he alone has caused them bitterly increases his anguish. Once he knows what has happened, he cries out in lamentation, he who used to say that a man was ignoble to weep. He sits immobile, shrieking, plotting, no doubt, some dark design against himself.” But when the madness is over for Henri van Blarenberghe, it is not butchered sheep and shepherds he has before him. The anguish does not die at once since he himself is not yet dead when he sees his murdered mother before him; since he himself is not yet dead when he hears his dying mother say to him, like Prince Audrey’s wife in Tolstoy: “Henri, what have you done to me! What have you done to me!” “When they reached the landing between the first and second floors,” says Le Matin, “the servants saw Mme. van Blarenberghe, her face distorted by terror, descend two or three steps, crying: ‘Henri! Henri! what have you done!’ Then the poor woman, covered with blood, threw her arms in the air and fell on her face. . . . The horrified servants went out to get help. A little later, four policemen whom one of them had found forced open the murderer’s door. Besides slashing himself with a dagger, he had ripped open the whole left side of his face with a bullet. His eye lay on the pillow.” Here I no longer think of Ajax. In that eye “which lay on the pillow” I recognize the eye of the miserable Oedipus, torn out in the most terrible act in the history of human suffering! “Oedipus bursts in with loud cries, goes, comes, demands a sword. . . . With a dread shriek he throws himself against the double doors, pulls the boards from the hinges, rushes into the room where he sees Jocasta hanging by the cord which had strangled her. Seeing her thus, the wretch trembles with horror, looses the cord; his mother’s body falls to the ground. He rips the gold brooches from Jocasta’s garments, with them he tears his wide-open eyes, saying that they shall no longer see the evil he has suffered and the disaster he had caused, and, shouting curses, again he strikes his eyes, the lids open, and from his bloody eyeballs a rain, a hail of black blood flows down his cheeks. He cries that the parricide must be shown to all the Cadmeans. He wants to be driven from the land. Ah, their old felicity was a true felicity; but from this day on they shall know all the evils that have a name. Lamentations, ruin, death, disgrace.” And in thinking of Henri van Blarenberghe’s pain when he saw his dead mother, I think of another mad man, of Lear clasping the body of his daughter Cordelia. “Oh! she’s gone forever! She’s as dead as earth. No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, and thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more, never, never, never, never, never! Look on her, look, her lips, look there, look there!”

In spite of his horrible wounds Henri van Blarenberghe did not die at once. And I cannot help finding very harsh (although perhaps necessary; can one be sure what really constituted the drama? Remember the brothers Karamazov) the act of the superintendent of police. “The unfortunate man was not dead. The superintendent took him by the shoulders and said: ‘Do you hear me? Answer.’ The murderer opened his one eye, blinked for an instant and fell back in a coma.” To this cruel superintendent I want to speak the words used by Kent in the scene from King Lear which I quoted just now to stop Edgar from arousing the already fainting Lear: “Vex not his ghost: O! let him pass; he hates him that would upon the rack of this tough world stretch him out longer.”

If I have insisted on repeating these great tragic names, especially those of Ajax and Oedipus, the reader should understand why, and also why I have published these letters and written this page. I wished to show in what a pure and religious atmosphere of moral beauty, bespattered but not defiled, occurred this explosion of madness and blood. I wished to open the room of crime to the air of heaven, to show that this commonplace event was exactly one of those Greek dramas, the presentation of which was almost a religious ceremony and that the poor parricide was not a criminal brute, a being outside humanity, but a noble example of humanity, a man of enlightened soul, a tender and dutiful son whom the most ineluctable fatality—let us say pathological fatality, as the world would say—has thrown, most unfortunate of mortals, into a crime and an expiation worthy of fame.

“I do not easily believe in death,” says Michelet in an admirable passage. It is true that he says it of a sea nettle, whose death, so little different from its life, is scarcely notable; and one might also wonder whether Michelet’s phrase may not be simply one of those “basic recipes” which great writers soon acquire, thanks to which they are sure of being able to serve up to their clientele at a moment’s notice the particular feast which it demands of them. Although I believe without difficulty in the death of a sea nettle, I cannot easily believe in the death of a person, even in the simple eclipse, the simple decay of his reason. Our sense of the soul’s continuity is very strong. What! this spirit which, a moment ago, controlled life by its views, controlled death, inspired in us so much respect, there it is, controlled by life, by death, weaker than our own spirit which, however much it may desire, can no longer bow before what has so quickly become little more than a nonentity! It is with madness as with the impairment of faculties in the old, as with death. What? The man who yesterday wrote the letter quoted above, so noble, so intelligent, this man today. . . . ? And also, for the smallest details are important here, the man who was attached so wisely to the small things of life, who answered a letter so elegantly, who met an overture so correctly, who respected the opinion of others, who desired to appear to them, if not influential, at least amiable, who conducted his game on the social exchequer with such finesse and integrity! . . . I say that all this is very important, and if I have quoted the whole first part of the second letter which, to tell the truth, may seem interesting to no one but myself, it is because that practical good sense seems still more remote from what has happened than the beautiful and profound sadness of the last lines. Often, in a ravaged spirit, it is the main branches, the crown, which survive the longest, after disease has already cleared away all the lower branches. Here, the spiritual plant is intact. And just now, as I was copying these letters, I would have liked to be able to communicate the extreme delicacy, and more, the incredible preciseness of the hand which had written so clearly and neatly.

“What have you done to me! What have you done to me!” If we think of it, perhaps there is no truly loving mother who would not be able, on her last day and often long before, to reproach her son with these words. At bottom, we make old, we kill all those who love us, by the anxiety we cause them, by that kind of uneasy tenderness we inspire and ceaselessly put in a state of alarm. If we can see in a beloved body the slow work of destruction side by side with the painful fondness which rouses it, see the faded eyes, the hair long rebelliously black at last vanquished like the rest and growing white, the arteries hardened, the kidneys choked up, the heart strained, courage gone before life, the walk slackened and heavy, the spirit knowing it can hope for nothing yet unwearingly rebounding with invincible hopes, the gaiety even, innate and seemingly immortal, which made such a pleasant companion for sadness, now finally exhausted, perhaps the one who can see this, in that tardy moment of lucidity which even lives most bewitched by idle fancies may have, for even Don Quixote had such a moment, perhaps that one, like Henri van Blarenberghe when he had dispatched his mother with a blow of the dagger, would shrink from the horror of his life and rush for a revolver so that he might die at once. In most men a vision so painful (supposing that they are able to rise to it) blots out immediately the slightest rays of the joy of living. But what joy, what reason for living, what life can withstand this vision? Which, the vision or the joy of living, is true, which is “the Truth”?