An
experienced
eye is never deceived.
Baudelaire - Poems and Prose Poems
You dare to walk in mean streets when you have no glasses that
would make one see beauty in life? " And I hurried him briskly to the
staircase, which he staggered down, grumbling.
I went on to the balcony and caught up a little flower-pot, and when the
man appeared in the door-way beneath I let fall my engine of war
perpendicularly upon the edge of his pack, so that it was upset by the
shock and all his poor walking fortune broken to bits. It made a noise
like a palace of crystal shattered by lightning. Mad with my folly, I
cried furiously after him: "The life beautiful! the life beautiful! "
Such nervous pleasantries are not without peril; often enough one pays
dearly for them. But what matters an eternity of damnation to him who
has found in one second an eternity of enjoyment?
THE WIDOWS.
Vauvenargues says that in public gardens there are alleys haunted
principally by thwarted ambition, by unfortunate inventors, by aborted
glories and broken hearts, and by all those tumultuous and contracted
souls in whom the last sighs of the storm mutter yet again, and who thus
betake themselves far from the insolent and joyous eyes of the
well-to-do. These shadowy retreats are the rendezvous of life's
cripples.
To such places above all others do the poet and philosopher direct their
avid conjectures. They find there an unfailing pasturage, for if there
is one place they disdain to visit it is, as I have already hinted, the
place of the joy of the rich. A turmoil in the void has no attractions
for them. On the contrary they feel themselves irresistibly drawn
towards all that is feeble, ruined, sorrowing, and bereft.
An experienced eye is never deceived. In these rigid and dejected
lineaments; in these eyes, wan and hollow, or bright with the last
fading gleams of the combat against fate; in these numerous profound
wrinkles and in the slow and troubled gait, the eye of experience
deciphers unnumbered legends of mistaken devotion, of unrewarded
effort, of hunger and cold humbly and silently supported.
Have you not at times seen widows sitting on the deserted benches? Poor
widows, I mean. Whether in mourning or not they are easily recognised.
Moreover, there is always something wanting in the mourning of the poor;
a lack of harmony which but renders it the more heart-breaking. It is
forced to be niggardly in its show of grief. They are the rich who
exhibit a full complement of sorrow.
Who is the saddest and most saddening of widows: she who leads by the
hand a child who cannot share her reveries, or she who is quite alone? I
do not know. . . . It happened that I once followed for several long hours
an aged and afflicted woman of this kind: rigid and erect, wrapped in a
little worn shawl, she carried in all her being the pride of stoicism.
She was evidently condemned by her absolute loneliness to the habits of
an ancient celibacy; and the masculine characters of her habits added to
their austerity a piquant mysteriousness. In what miserable cafe she
dines I know not, nor in what manner.
would make one see beauty in life? " And I hurried him briskly to the
staircase, which he staggered down, grumbling.
I went on to the balcony and caught up a little flower-pot, and when the
man appeared in the door-way beneath I let fall my engine of war
perpendicularly upon the edge of his pack, so that it was upset by the
shock and all his poor walking fortune broken to bits. It made a noise
like a palace of crystal shattered by lightning. Mad with my folly, I
cried furiously after him: "The life beautiful! the life beautiful! "
Such nervous pleasantries are not without peril; often enough one pays
dearly for them. But what matters an eternity of damnation to him who
has found in one second an eternity of enjoyment?
THE WIDOWS.
Vauvenargues says that in public gardens there are alleys haunted
principally by thwarted ambition, by unfortunate inventors, by aborted
glories and broken hearts, and by all those tumultuous and contracted
souls in whom the last sighs of the storm mutter yet again, and who thus
betake themselves far from the insolent and joyous eyes of the
well-to-do. These shadowy retreats are the rendezvous of life's
cripples.
To such places above all others do the poet and philosopher direct their
avid conjectures. They find there an unfailing pasturage, for if there
is one place they disdain to visit it is, as I have already hinted, the
place of the joy of the rich. A turmoil in the void has no attractions
for them. On the contrary they feel themselves irresistibly drawn
towards all that is feeble, ruined, sorrowing, and bereft.
An experienced eye is never deceived. In these rigid and dejected
lineaments; in these eyes, wan and hollow, or bright with the last
fading gleams of the combat against fate; in these numerous profound
wrinkles and in the slow and troubled gait, the eye of experience
deciphers unnumbered legends of mistaken devotion, of unrewarded
effort, of hunger and cold humbly and silently supported.
Have you not at times seen widows sitting on the deserted benches? Poor
widows, I mean. Whether in mourning or not they are easily recognised.
Moreover, there is always something wanting in the mourning of the poor;
a lack of harmony which but renders it the more heart-breaking. It is
forced to be niggardly in its show of grief. They are the rich who
exhibit a full complement of sorrow.
Who is the saddest and most saddening of widows: she who leads by the
hand a child who cannot share her reveries, or she who is quite alone? I
do not know. . . . It happened that I once followed for several long hours
an aged and afflicted woman of this kind: rigid and erect, wrapped in a
little worn shawl, she carried in all her being the pride of stoicism.
She was evidently condemned by her absolute loneliness to the habits of
an ancient celibacy; and the masculine characters of her habits added to
their austerity a piquant mysteriousness. In what miserable cafe she
dines I know not, nor in what manner.
