I never encountered Jacques Lefelde again after I left the Pont des
Arts, where he still lives, for Passy. At the end of last August as I was
crossing through the Bois de Boulogne at about nine o'clock in the evening
on my way home I noticed Jacques Lefelde walking towards the Grand Lac. He
caught sight of me and immediately turned his head away and quickened his
steps. Before long I saw him again. Anybody who has read his "essays" will
be acquainted with the profound intellect and unique imagination of
Jacques Lefelde. But if you are not familiar with the affectionate
sweetness of his character you will not understand why I immediately
dispelled from my mind any idea that he could be displeased with me and I
merely assumed that he was on his way to some rendezvous. The days that
followed were fine, and I continued to return home on foot. Every day I
saw Jacques Lefelde, every day he avoided me. At the opening to the Allée
Reine Marguerite I spotted him again walking slowly up and down, looking
from side to side as if he were waiting for someone, sometimes lifting his
head to the heavens like a man in love. On the fourth day I was lunching
at Foyat's with a friend of Jacques who told me that ever since he had
broken off with the young dancer Gygi, when he had attempted to kill
himself, Jacques had renounced women for ever. I smiled at this as you can
imagine. I did not see him again on the days that followed. One morning
soon afterwards I read in the Gaulois: "Our young and celebrated
writer M. Jacques Lefelde will be leaving tomorrow for Brittany where he
is to spend several months." That day I chanced upon him close to the Gare
Saint-Lazare. No doubt I would not have the opportunity to see him again
before October so I stopped him. "Please excuse me", he said, "but I am
going away at nine o'clock this evening and before I go back for dinner I
want to go to the Bois de Boulogne and I am just about to take the
circular train..." I was not put off my guard but said to him:
"You could get there quicker by cab."
"Alas," he replied, "I've only got twenty sous on me." I had no wish to
be indiscreet but I said:
"I could take you in my carriage and drop you off wherever you want."
"Well then, I accept," he said with an expression of pleasure and
embarrassment. "But will you drop me off at the entrance to the lake,
because I need to be alone." At the entrance to the lake he got down and I
went off in the carriage; but I could not resist the desire to try and see
from a parallel alleyway the woman he had come to say goodbye to. Time
passed. I did not see her come. Jacques was walking the length of the
lake, his head bowed over the water, sometimes raising his eyes up towards
the trees then bringing them back down again over the water. At times he
walked quickly, then slowed his steps, and after half an hour I saw him
come back, but not looking at all disappointed like a lover who had been
waiting in vain, rather with his head held high, with a swift step and a
triumphant expression. I could not understand any of it, pondered over it
all, and then did not think about it again. Last year my friend L., who
had been appointed [conjectural] as the minister to XXX, had come
to spend a month in Paris in the large house on the corner of the Jardin
du Luxembourg, where I went to see him every day, when upon leaving I
encountered Jacques Lefelde who I had not seen since and who did not seem
pleased to see me. He soon left me. I went home dissatisfied. The next day
at the same time I saw him again. He wanted to avoid me. I stopped him.
The rain that had been threatening for some time began to fall quite
heavily, we went into the Musée du Luxembourg to take shelter. "I haven't
seen you again", I said, "since the day I had the pleasure of going with
you to the Bois. Would it be indiscreet of me to ask what you were doing
there?" Jacques is very timid. He blushed slightly.
"I am going to look stupid," he said with a meek smile. "But I might as
tell you how I was dining for the second time at the Chalet des Îles and I
was very wretched, when the lake in the Bois, which had never struck me
before, seemed so beautiful to me that the next day I couldn't resist the
wish to come back and see it again. For two weeks I was really in love
with it. I didn't know which paths to take to avoid meeting anyone of my
acquaintance, because when I was not alone with it it didn't say anything
to me. And the day you gave me a lift was the day of my departure. I
didn't want to leave without seeing it again. And before leaving Paris I
wanted to draw my conclusions about the last year. And to give me the
strength to recover possession of it, to understand it, to judge it,
nothing could equal the melancholy exaltation that I experienced on the
banks of those beautiful waters that I was smitten with and where, on that
evening, the light of the sky was setting so sadly among the swans and the
boats that passed by as did my mind, detached from the earth between the
lawns and the flowered borders, more intense still at that moment that
follows the sunset, violently real. As the young ferryman who, letting the
other one do the rowing, was stretched out in the bottom of the boat, my
mind was enjoying at the same time the pleasure of speed and of repose and
glided with agility over the surface as agreeable and glorious as those
enchanted waters, already cooled by the night and burnished still with
light. The air that hovered over the waters was so sweet. And is the mind
not a little like the air? Whatever immense space you place before it it
fills it up. And a mind which suffers by being curbed by an interlocutor,
a concern, or a high wall that is too close, stretches out joyously,
regally, without restraint into infinite perspectives and reascends
effortlessly with intoxicating and melancholic speed the course of the
waters and the years."
"Could I take you there once more," I asked him, "I [interrupted]
Created 23.10.19