A book to read:
Le Nez de Cléopâtre by Henri de Saussine
If the new generation differs
from the preceding one and in one sense overtakes it, it is assuredly
through the instinct for reflection, its soaring vision, the
high ideal of restoring thought to its rightful place which the
materialists had banished from the universe and naturalists from
art. Its vague perhaps, but assuredly energetic aspirations, strain to
provide life with a background, to give a sense to
our destiny, a sanction to our actions. But if our young people
have, up until now, often run aground in
their generous endeavours, the fault may lie perhaps in that we lose the
gift of life when we try to study it too
closely: the over reflective
work is seldom alive, and its colour loses in intensity as its analysis
gains in depth. Hence the adverse fate cast upon so many modern works,
which are doomed to immediate death the moment they are
born.
Le
Nez de Cléopâtre might make us think that the wicked spell been
conjured up. Under this title Henri de Saussine has just published a
lively and profound book, in which abstraction is realized
and, so to speak, becomes incarnate in the most dazzling relief. The
characters
come to life as if described by Balzac, are
explained as if by Stendhal, and judged as if by Tolstoy,
without prejudice to the originality of the author in which the
rhythm and the individual refrain of his language sing to us
across all moods, so as to fill us with delight. Like bees this
language has a sting that pierces through into
the daylight, the sweet taste of honey... and wings!
In Le
Nez de Cléopâtre the characters affect the generality of type,
whilst remaining individual,
socially situated, actors in the dramas of love and death, which
are played out in every family, subjects
who are responsible for their own destiny which the less they submit to it
the more still they create it. From thence descriptions of
painting, poetic intuition, extremely fine moral studies, and great
melancholic insights into the
deepest causes of our joys and sorrows, which sometimes feels
like the protractions of Hamlet (the death of Mme de l'Oseraie) and
at other times like the critique of
Romeo (love scenes between Jean and Christine). Here and
there, without slowing down the exceptional animation of the dialogue,
thoughts such as: "For beauty, as is often the case for talent
too, celebrity begins at the very time that the cause that gave
it birth ceases, justifying the eternal law which states that
reputation follows enlightenment rather than accompanying
it", or this: "The cult of snobs classes a woman in the
same way that a barrel-organ consecrates the air"; or even: "It is the
inferior seeds that are carried by the wind and whose dryness causes them
to remain unripened: the seed of the oak or the spruce, wherever it falls,
pushes forth its roots, and gripped by the rocks, still throws out its
shoots of foliage towards the sky."
But it is difficult to separate out anything from the
beautiful unity of the book. The reader will have to approach it in its
entirety to fully understand the kind of transposition into writing of
Wagnerian leitmotivs, which constitutes the most striking
novelty.*
* For example the rhythmical summoning up of Bassompierre's ancestor who brings together in such a philosophical and strangely poetic fashion, the present to the past, the type to the individual, the particular to the general.
This article
appeared, unsigned, in July 1893, in Gratis-Journal. But
the text in Gratis-Journal was in effect unfaithful.
Proust had submitted his article to Count Henri de Saussine who
modified it.