A Christmas Tale
The Little Shoes
by M. Louis Ganderax.
(Revue des Deux-Mondes 1st January 1892)
Perhaps the sweetest of those flowers of
love which deliberation blights so very quickly is what one might call a
mystical faith in the future. The unhappy lover, rejected today as he was
the day before, hopes that tomorrow the one he loves, and who does not
love him, will suddenly begin to love him; - he, whose strength in not
equal to the task necessary to fulfil it, tells himself: "Tomorrow, as if
by some spell, I shall find the willpower that I lack" ; - all those who
in the end, with eyes raised to the East, wait for a blinding light, in
which they have complete faith, to appear and light up their melancholy
firmament, all those people place an almost mystical hope in the future,
in the sense that it is the product of their one and only desire which
cannot be justified by any realistic estimate. Alas! the day comes when we
no longer wait every moment for a passionate letter from a lover who has
been indifferent up till now, when we understand that people's nature does
not change overnight, that our desires cannot mould the wishes of others
to our whims, however many circumstances there might be in the background
to impel them and against which they are unable to resist; the day comes
when we understand that tomorrow can be no different from yesterday,
because that is where it comes from.
Nevertheless, in certain souls which are not so withered
by excessive reasoning, these mystical hopes blossom once more at certain
propitious moments. On Christmas night, for example, a scent of hope lifts
up our souls towards God, souls that in the end want to be better, which
in the end just want to be loved. Just as this scent must be agreeable to
God, sometimes on the evening of Christmas a great artist, a true gardener
of our hearts, delights in watering our hopes which are ready and waiting
to open up. He justifies before the eyes of reason the daring affirmation
of the feelings in a sort of tale that is at the same time both plausible
and mysterious, where some good fortune, only dreamed of up until then, is
realized on Christmas night. This year we have had no Christmas tale. We
could not apply such a description, in the otherwise totally arbitrary
sense that we have taken it, to the admirable Procurator of Judea
by M. Anatole France. - But on the first of January the Revue des
Deux-Mondes has brought us a late but authentic and delightful
Christmas tale, The Little Shoes by M. Louis Ganderax, which you
could not read without a feeling of tenderness and admiration. The way in
which compassion is blended with pleasure makes it sweeter still. At the
end of that particular Christmas night invisible censers diffuse incense
and myrrh into the heart of M. de Nieulles and the final part of the tale
is perfumed with a divine fragrance. The words of a small child touch him
so much that he changes his life and returns to the side of the wife he
has abandoned. Noble abandoned women who have read the Revue des
Deux-Mondes, those who have been betrayed by a husband or a lover
must have taken divine comfort from this little tale. With what tears must
they have moistened these exquisite pages which will make them dream for
such a long time hence of the reconciliation that until then they thought
to be impossible and will unceasingly inflame their dearest, but their
most timid hopes. - Before presenting him to us in such a touching way M.
Ganderax gives us an ironical portrait of M. de Nieulles, which shows a
marvellous clear-sightedness of characterization by the author. Poor M. de
Nieulles! During the course of his worldly life, which is no doubt quite
worthless, almost unreal beside that in which his poet brings him to life,
he often encounters M. de Ganderax "in society". Beneath his shirt-front
lies a flawless breast-plate, behind the monocle with which he covers his
eye, the only aperture to his heart by which we could penetrate into this
closely guarded place, behind his carefully composed defensive attitude,
he thought himself impenetrable; but the mind of M. Ganderax, incorporeal
enchanter "which passes through locked doors", like Athena, has already
vaulted into M. de Nieulles's heart, stripped it down to its fundamental
spark, the tiny flame which gleams in the darkest of souls, allowing him
to recreate it so vividly before us. M. de Ganderax respects this life
that he presents. One could also say that he is a true realist. He does
not suppress beauty in the man any more than he does ugliness; he shows
both the soul and the body and at the end of the tale a poetry is thus
born to present us with truth. In this way the most beautiful flowers of
our dreams have our blood for their sap and for their roots the little
white threads which are our nerves. If he has held back for us and thus
concentrated all the poetry which is liberated from the story of The
Little Shoes, he has made no attempt (and in this he is a poet) to
"poeticize" or "idealize" his characters. If the charming miracle of love
takes place at the house of a courtesan, it is not in fact because M.
Ganderax is yielding to the audacious psychology of the Romantics, and the
Naturalists who endow a Marion Delorme, then a Boule de Suif with virtues
which they would deny to a "bourgeois". Pâquerette Vernen is perhaps a
loving mother. She is presented to us above all as a practical mother,
eager for her daughter to be "smart" and to "behave correctly".
But the one whom I cannot prevent myself from thinking
about is the one who is absent, Mme de Nieulles, who projects across this
tale in which she does not appear the shadow of her sad and charming
person. Anyhow is it not a little for her that this tale was written? And
is it not to affect her more that the characters are placed "in her
world", a world moreover where husbands abandon their wives more than in
others? Art sends its roots so deep into our social life that, in the
particular fiction that serves to clothe a very general sentimental truth,
the manners and tastes of a period or a class may often play a large part,
and may even significantly enhance our pleasure. Was it not, to some
extent, because of the female audiences at court, voluptuously tortured by
passion, that Racine, when, in his plays that combined pleasures and
crimes, he wanted to portray the fulfilment of tragic destinies, preferred
to evoke the ghosts of dead princesses and kings. Alas it is quite
probable that she, poor Mme de Nieulles, will wait in vain for the miracle
that M. Ganderax seems to announce to her by recounting it to us. But what
does it matter, her deception will not be too cruel; she will not be able
to reproach art for having lied to her, because by removing from her
unhappiness its egotistical character, by transposing it, if we may put it
like that, it has fully realized the role of an ingenious comforter. Its
lies are the only realities, and if one loves them in the least out of
true love, the existence of the things around us that subjugate us,
diminishes little by little. The power to make us happy or unhappy
withdraws from them to grow in our soul where we convert sadness into
beauty. Therein lies goodness and true freedom.
Article appeared in Le Banquet, March 1892
and reprinted in Chroniques (Libraire Gallimard, 1927).