Calvary quotes

… child, in a smock frock of lustring, running across this gloom of forsaken things, lacerating myself in the blackberry bush, torturing the animals in the backyard or for entire days sitting in the kitchen and watching Felix who served as our gardener, valet, and coachman.

Years and years have passed. Everything that I loved is now dead.

Everything that I knew has taken on a new appearance. The church has been rebuilt. It now has an embellished doorway, arched windows, fancy gutter-spouts representing flaming mouths of demons; its new brick belfry laughs gaily into the blue;

… Saint-Michel, member of the general council, acting justice of the peace, vice president of the agricultural commission, member of numerous agronomic and forestry societies, he did not overlook any of the petty or ambitious honors which carry with them a sort of prestige and influence.

He was an excellent man, very honest and very gentle⁠—with a mania for killing.

He could not see a bird, a cat, an insect—anything at all that was alive—without being seized with a strange desire to kill it. He waged a relentless trapper’s war on blackbirds, goldfinches, chaffinches and bullfinches.

… rarely, avoiding my father whom I did not love at all, living almost in seclusion, a miserable orphan between old Marie and Felix in this grand lugubrious house, the silence and neglect of which weighed down upon me like a night of death—I was bored.

Yes, I was that rare and wretched specimen of a child who is bored.

Always sad and grave, hardly speaking at all, I had none of the inquisitiveness and mischievousness of my age, one might have said that my intellect had been slumbering forever in the numbness of maternal gestation.

Without being endowed with that terrible gift which certain natures have of analyzing themselves, questioning themselves, searching without end for the reason of their actions, I often asked myself who I was and what I wanted. Alas! I was nobody and did not want anything.

My childhood had been spent in darkness, my adolescence was passed in a void; not having been a child I could no more be a young man.

I lived in a sort of fog. A thousand thoughts were agitating me, but they were so confused that I could not seize upon their form; none of them detached itself clearly from this depth of opaque mist. I had some aspirations;

… I was hungry and I was cold, my bowels rumbled, my fingers became numb. I ventured out on the road a little; having walked a few steps I shouted. … Not a being answered my call, not a thing stirred. …

I was alone, utterly alone, alone in this deserted, empty field.⁠ ⁠…

A shudder passed through my frame, and tears came into my eyes. … I shouted again. … No answer.

… the desires and passions which agitated us from the small group of errant men that we were to society as a whole, recalling the impressions so fleeting and wholly external which I had received in Paris, the rude crowds, the pushing and jostling of pedestrians,

I understood that the law of the world was strife; an inexorable, murderous law

, which was not content with arming nation against nation but which hurled against one another the children of the same race, the same family, the same womb.

… And I was astounded, when for the first time it dawned upon me that only those were the most glorious, the most acclaimed heroes of mankind who had pillaged the most, killed the most, burned the most.

They condemn to death the stealthy murderer who kills the passerby with a knife, on the corner of the street at night, and they throw his beheaded body into a grave of infamy.

But the conqueror who has burned cities and decimated human beings, all the folly and human cowardice unite in raising to the throne of the most marvelous;

… resembled the little soldier of the reserves at Saint-Michel, whose eyes were running, who was coughing and spitting blood, and as I knew nothing of the necessity of higher laws of nature, a feeling of compassion rose within me, clogging my throat with suppressed sobs.

I have noticed that a man has no real compassion for anyone except when he himself is unhappy.

Was this not, after all, but a form of self-pity?

… I recalled the poor cat that my father had killed, when with fascinated eyes she had been following the flight of a butterfly. …

Stupidly, unconsciously, I had killed a man whom I loved, a man with whom my soul had just identified itself, a man who in the dazzling splendor of the rising sun was retracing the purest dreams of his life!⁠ ⁠…

Perhaps I had killed him at the very moment that that man had said to himself: “And when I shall see her again at home. …” Why? For what reason? Since I loved him, since, if soldiers had menaced him, I would have defended him!

Nay, he even wanted it to be still less attractive, he wanted its floor to be the bare ground.

“It is in my studio that I learn who my best friends are,” he would often say, “they always come again, the others stay away. That’s very convenient.” Very few came more than once.

The young woman was attractively seated in her chair, her bust slightly bent forward, her hands buried in her muff;

Lirat!” For a few years poor Lirat really enjoyed an uproarious popularity. … But one gets tired of everything, even of abusing a person.

Paris abandons its puppets which it raises to the throne as quickly as it does its martyrs whom it hoists on the gibbet

; in its perpetual hunger for new playthings, it never gets itself excited overly much before the statues of its heroes or at the sight of the blood of its victims.

He ended by giving himself over entirely to decrying everybody and everything, the excess of which threatened to render him odious; at times it bore evidence of nothing but a childishness which made him ridiculous.

Great souls nearly always have petty weaknesses⁠—that is a mysterious law of nature, and Lirat did not escape the effects of this law.

Above everything else, he held fast to his well-established reputation of an ill-natured man.

And never, never will I be able to say that to myself! …

Ah how I envied the eternal self-contentment of the mediocre!⁠ ⁠…

Now I again felt a passionate desire to return to Saint-Michel.

Lirat, who seemed lost in painful meditation, was silent. Suddenly he stopped, crossed his arms and, swaying his head with an irresistibly comical air because it was intended to be grave, exclaimed: “

But why did that fellow D⁠⸺ interfere, tell me?

” And he was right. Why did he interfere, really?

“Listen to me!

Painting is humbug, my little Mintié.

”

“That seems to me a little bit too symbolic,” I ventured.

“Symbolic!” interrupted Lirat. “You are talking nonsense, my little Mintié! Symbolic! Why that’s life itself! Let’s go out and eat.”

Our dinner was a very gay affair; Lirat displayed a charming disposition; he was full of original ideas, without extremes or paradoxes, on art. He had again found his normal self, as in the better days of his life.

“Work, work, my little Mintié,” he said to me, when we were parting.

“To create, always to create, to draw from one’s sinews or from one’s brains no matter what⁠ ⁠… be it only a pair of rubbers. There is nothing outside of that!”

Six days later I went again to Juliette and gradually I formed the habit of calling regularly and spending an hour before dinner. The disagreeable impression left on me at the time of my first visit had vanished.

“The corner-buffet, my dear! … The corner-buffet for the parlor which we have entirely forgotten.”

She quickly passed from laughter, from kisses to sudden gravity, mingled words of endearment with ceiling measurements, confused love with tapestry.⁠ ⁠… It was delightful.

In our room, in the evening, all this pretty childishness disappeared. Love stamped upon the face of Juliette something austere, deliberate and ferocious which I could not explain; it changed her entirely. She was not depraved;

My happiness lasted but a short time. … My happiness! … It is really remarkable that never, never have I been permitted to enjoy anything fully, and that invariably anxiety came to disturb the brief periods of my happiness.

Defenseless and powerless against suffering, not sure of myself and timid in the hours of happiness⁠—such I have been all my life.

Is it a tendency peculiar to my nature? A strange perversion of my sensibilities?

… I would say to myself: “all right, tomorrow I am going to see Lirat” … I would make up my mind firmly. … And the next day: “Not now … there is nothing pressing … tomorrow! …”

Tomorrow, always tomorrow!⁠ ⁠… And days, weeks, months passed.⁠ ⁠… Tomorrow!

Now that he had been told all about these things by Malterre, who even before my departure used to come and make his sofa groan, how could I broach the subject to him? … What could I say to him?

…

Just as a drunkard clutches and turns his empty bottle to get the last drop of liquor out of it, so I searched my brains in the hope of squeezing the least bit of an idea out of it.

… Alas! My head was empty!

… I loved her with all her qualities which made me suffer, I loved her in spite of all her lack of understanding, I loved her with all her frivolity, with all her suspected perversions;

I loved her with that tormenting love which a mother has for her afflicted child.

Have you ever met a poor creature huddled up behind the door on some wintry day, a wretched human being with chapped lips and chattering teeth, shivering in his tattered rags?

In a crowd, in the tumult, in this feverish haste of a pleasure-hunting life I hoped to find forgetfulness, to be able to dull my feeling, to subdue my rebellious spirit, to suppress the voice of my past which I heard grumbling within me.

And since I could not raise Juliette to my level I lowered myself down to her own.

Ah, those serene heights where the sun was reigning and toward which I had been climbing slowly with such terrific effort!

Very clearly, with perfect understanding, with cruel indifference, with a startling conciseness of judgment I put the following question to myself: “

Juliette and dishonor; Juliette and prison?

” I did not hesitate.

… In the churches, believers kneel down and pray for those who have suffered, for those who have sinned. … At the cemeteries reverence watches over the graves and the cross protects them. …

To die is to be forgiven!

… Yes, death is beautiful, holy, noble! … Death is the beginning of the great eternal light. … Ah, to die! … to stretch oneself out on a mattress softer than the softest moss in birds’ nests. … To think no more.

… It is not, however, because the sight impresses and moves me or that the terrible or charming aspect of nature consoles me.

I hate this nature; I hate the sea, I hate the sky, the cloud that passes, the wind that blows, the birds that circle in the air; I hate everything that surrounds me, everything that I see, everything that I hear.

I come here by force of habit, impelled by an animal instinct which calls animals back to the place that is familiar to them. Like the hare, I have dug my seat in the sand and I always come back to it.

“

Whatever the good Lord wishes, we must wish also. To cry over it all the time won’t help matters a bit.

”

“

Hasn’t she got a mother?

”

“No, no!

Is it possible for the lark to love the owl?

Is it possible for the dove that flies in heaven to love the toad which hides itself in the mud of stagnant waters?”

And the violins emitted inaudible plaints, the wind instruments moaned, while the double basses and the dulcimers rumbled like tempest and peals of thunder.

Oh, the tragicomedy of sorrow!

A curious thing! Demoiselle Landudec and Juliette became one; I no longer separated them, I confused them in my dreams, extravagant and melodramatic. Both were too pure for me.

a letter in which I spoke of killing her, of forgiving her, in which I begged her to come to see me before I died, describing to her in tragic detail the cliff from which I was going to throw myself into the sea.

I compared her to the lowest women in the brothel and two lines further I compared her to the Holy Virgin.

More than twenty times I started this letter over again, excited, weeping, in turn delirious with rage and swooning with tenderness. Presently I heard a noise behind the door like the scratching of a mouse. I opened it.