A Christmas Tale (Un Conte de Noël)
The Little Shoes
by M. Louis Ganderax.
(Revue des Deux-Mondes 1st January 1892)
Perhaps the sweetest of those
flowers of love which reflection 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
enchantment, 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 sky, all those people place an almost
mystical hope in the future, in the sense that it is the product
of their sole desire which cannot be justified by any act of
reason. Alas! the day comes when we no longer wait every moment
for a passionate letter from a lover, 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, so long as they have something behind them which
impels them and against which they are unable to resist; the day
comes when we understand that tomorrow can be no different from
yesterday, since it is composed of it.
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 fragrance of hope lifts our souls towards God, souls
that want to be finally improved, which want to be finally loved.
Just as this fragrance 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 to open
up. He justifies before the eyes of reason the daring
affirmations of the sentiments with a sort of tale at the same
time both plausible and mysterious, where some good fortune, only
dreamed of up till then, is realized on Christmas night. This
year we have had no Christmas tale. We could not apply this
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 1st 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 we could not read without a feeling of tenderness
and admiration. The way in which compassion is blended with
voluptuousness makes it sweeter still. At the end of that
Christmas night invisible censers diffuse incense and myrrh in
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. What tears must have moistened these
exquisite pages which will make them dream for such a long time
hence of reconciliations until then 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 has presented. 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 born thus to show us
truth. In this way the most beautiful flowers of our dreams have
our blood for their strength 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 effect 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 general truth of
sentiment, the manners and tastes of a period or a class may
often play a large part, and may, in a very different fashion,
add greatly to the pleasure it can give us. 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,
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 consoler. 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 in order that our soul might grow
enabling us to convert sadness into beauty. Therein lies goodness
and true freedom.
Article appeared in Le Banquet,
March 1892 and reprinted in Chroniques (Libraire
Gallimard, 1927).