To My Friend Willie
Heath
Died in Paris 3rd October 1893
"From the bosom of God where you rest....
show me the truths
that rule death
that banish its fear
and bring me nearer to loving it."
The ancient Greeks brought
cakes, milk and wine to their dead. Under the illusion of being
more refined, if not wiser, we offer them flowers and books. If I
give you this it is first and foremost because it is a picture
book. Despite the "inscriptions", even if it is not
read it will at least be seen by all the admirers of the great
artist, who has given me this magnificent gift with such
naturalness, about whom it could be said, in the words of Dumas,
"that she has created more roses than anyone except
God". M. Robert de Montesquiou has also celebrated her, in
one of his as yet unpublished verses, with such ingenious
gravity, such sententious and subtle eloquence, such rigorous
discipline that he sometimes evokes the XVIIth century.
He told her, speaking of flowers:
"To pose for your brushes urges them to blossom,
You are their Vigée and you are the Flora
Who makes them immortal when the other makes them die!"
Her admirers are an elite, and
they are a throng. I wished them to see on the very first page
the name of one whom they did not have time to know but who they
would have admired. As for me, dear friend, I only knew you for a
very short time. I would often meet you in the Bois in the
morning and as you saw me coming, waiting for me under the trees,
standing erect yet reposing, you gave the appearance of one of
those noblemen painted by Van Dyck and whose pensive elegance you
shared. Their elegance, indeed, like your own, comes less from
their dress than from the body, and their bodies themselves
seemed to have received it and continue still to receive it from
their soul: it is a moral elegance. Everything incidentally
contributed to accentuate this melancholy resemblance, from the
leafy backgrounds to the shadows in which Van Dyck often captured
a king's stroll; like so many of those who were his models you
were soon to die, and in your eyes just as in theirs, we saw
alternately the shadows of presentiment and the gentle light of
resignation. But if the grace of your pride belongs by rights to
Van Dyck's art, rather you call to mind da Vinci in the
mysterious intensity of your spiritual life. Oft times with
finger raised, your eyes impenetrable and smiling, before the
enigma which you contemplated in silence, you appeared to me like
Leonardo's Saint John the Baptist. At that time we formed a
dream, almost a plan, to live more and more together, among a
select circle of noble-hearted men and women, sufficiently
removed from stupidity, vice and wickedness, to be able to feel
ourselves sheltered from their vulgar arrows. Your life, as we
wished it to be, was one of those works from which great
inspiration must come. Just as from faith and from genius, we
wish to receive it from love.
But it had to be death which gave you that. In
death too, and even in its approach, lay hidden strengths, secret
assistance, a "grace" which is not present in life.
Just like lovers when they fall in love, like poets when they
sing, invalids too feel themselves closer to their souls. Life is
a harsh thing which presses too close, constantly making us
spiritually impoverished. Upon feeling its grip loosen for a
moment, one can experience clear-sighted comforts.
When I was a small child, the fate of no other
character from the scriptures seemed to me to be quite so
miserable as that of Noah, because of the flood which kept him
trapped in the ark for forty days. Later on I was frequently ill,
and for days on end I also had to remain in my "ark".
It was then that I understood that nowhere could Noah have had a
better view of the world than from the ark, despite the fact that
it was closed up and that night ruled over the earth. When I began
to get better, my mother, who had never left my side and even
stayed with me through the night "opened the door of the
ark" and left. Yet just like the dove "she returned
that evening". Then when I was completely cured, like the
dove, "she did not come back again". It was necessary
to start to live again, to turn away from oneself, to listen to
words which were harsher than my mother's; worse still, the words
she used, always so gentle up till then, were no longer the same,
but were marked with the severity of life and its duties which I
was to learn from her.
Sweet dove of the Flood, how can we not think
that the patriarch, as he watched you leave, did not feel some
sadness mingled with his joy at the new born world?
Gentleness of the cessation of living, of the
true "Truce of God" that interrupts the toils, the base
desires, the "Mercy" of the illness which reconciles us
to realities beyond death - and its mercies too, mercies of
"these vain ornaments and these heavy veils", of the
hair that an importunate hand "has taken care to
arrange", the gentle loyalty of a mother or of a friend who
has so often appeared before us like the very face of our sadness
or like the protective gesture craved by our weakness, and which
will be brought to an end on the threshold of our convalescence,
often I have suffered in knowing that you are far away from me,
all of you, the exiled descendants of the dove from the ark. And
who has not known moments, dear Willie, when we wanted to be
where you are. One makes so many commitments in life that there
comes a time when, disappointed at never being able to keep them
all, one turns towards the grave, one summons death, "death
which comes to the aid of destinies that are having difficulty
fulfilling themselves".
But if it releases us from the promises we have
made to life, it cannot release us from those we have made to
ourselves, first and foremost of which is to live in worth and
merit.
More serious than any of us, you were also more
childlike than any other, not only in your purity of heart but in
your candid and delightful good humour. Charles de Gancey
possessed the gift, an ability that I envied, of suddenly
reawakening that laugh with some memories from school days, that
laugh which was never far from the surface and which we shall
never hear again. If some of these pages were written when I was
twenty three, many others (Violante, Fragments from Italian
Comedy etc.) date from my twentieth year. They are nothing more
than the frivolous froth of an agitated life, now calm. One day
may it be sufficiently limpid that the Muses consent to look at
themselves in it and that we see running over its surface the
reflections of their smiles and their dances. I give you this
book. Alas you are the only one of my friends from whom there is
no fear of criticism. I at least have the confidence that none of
its freedom of tone can shock you. I have never portrayed
immorality other than in those creatures with delicate
consciences. Also, too weak to wish for goodness, too noble to
participate fully in wickedness, only knowing suffering, I was
unable to speak of them other than with an over sincere pity that
could not but purify these little experiments. I hope that the
true friend, and the illustrious and beloved Master who gave
them, one the poetry of his music, the other the music of his
incomparable poetry, M. Darlu too, the great philosopher whose
inspired words, more sure to last than any written word, has, in
me as in so many others, strengthened our minds, can excuse me
for having reserved for you this last token of affection, by
appreciating that no living person, however great or however
dear, should be honoured before one who is dead.
July 1894.