That man who can easily wed the crowd knows a feverish enjoyment which will be eternally denied to the egoist, shut up like a trunk, and to the lazy man, imprisoned like a mollusk. The poet adopts as his own all the professions, all the joys and all the miseries with which circumstance confronts him. What men call love is very meager, very restricted and very feeble, compared to this ineffable orgy, to this holy prostitution of the soul that abandons itself entirely, poetry and charity included, to the unexpected arrival, to the passing stranger.

It is good occasionally to bring home to the happy people of this world, were it only in order to humiliate for a moment their inane pride, that there is a happiness superior to theirs, vaster and more refined. The founders of colonies, the pastors of peoples, missionary priests exiled to the ends of the earth, doubtless know something of this mysterious drunkenness; and, in the heart of the vast family which their genius has created for itself, they must laugh sometimes at those who pity them for their destiny that is so unquiet and for their life that is so chaste.

A HEMISPHERE IN A HEAD OF HAIR

Long let me inhale, deeply, the odor of your hair, into it plunge the whole of my face, like a thirsty man into the water of a spring, and wave it in my fingers like a scented handkerchief, to shake memories into the air.

If you could know all that I see! all that I feel! all that I hear in your hair! My soul floats upon perfumes as the souls of other men upon music.

Your hair contains an entire dream, full of sails and masts; it contains vast seas whose soft monsoons bear me to delightful climates where space is deeper and bluer, where the atmosphere is perfumed with fruit, with foliage and with human skin.

In the ocean of your hair I am shown brief visions of a port resounding with melancholy songs, of vigorous men of all nations and ships of all shapes outlining their fine and complicated architectures against an immense sky where eternal heat languidly quivers.

In the caresses of your hair I recover the languor of long hours passed on a divan, in the cabin of a fine ship, rocked by the imperceptible surge of the port, between the flower-pots and the refreshing water-jugs.

In the glowing fire-grate of your hair I inhale the odor of tobacco mingled with opium and sugar; in the night of your hair I see the infinity of tropical azure resplendent; on the downed banks of your hair I inebriate myself with the mingled odors of tar, of musk and of coconut oil.

Long let me bite your heavy, black tresses. When I gnaw your elastic and rebellious hair, it seems to me that I am eating memories.

INVITATION TO THE VOYAGE

There is a majestic country, a Land of Cockaigne, they say, which I dream of visiting with an old friend; a unique country, drowned in the mists of our North, and which one might call the Orient of the Occident, the China of Europe, so greatly has fervent and capricious phantasy indulged itself there, so patiently and so obstinately has it illustrated the land with its learned and delicate vegetations.

A true Land of Cockaigne, where all is beautiful, rich, restful, decorous; where Luxury takes pleasure in seeing itself mirrored in Order; where life is heavy and sweet on the senses; whence disorder, turbulence and the unforeseen are banned; where happiness is wedded to silence; where even the fare is poetic, stimulating and rich at the same time; where all resembles you, my dear angel.

Do you know the febrile malady that possesses us in our cold wretchedness, that nostalgia for the country which we do not know, that anguish of curiosity? There is a land that resembles you, where all is beautiful, rich restful and decorous, where phantasy has built and furnished a China of the West, where life is sweet to the senses, where happiness is wedded to silence. It is there that we must go to live, it is there that we must go to die.

Yes, this is the place where we must breathe, dream and lengthen the hours through an infinity of sensations. A musician has written the Invitation to the Waltz; where is he that shall compose the Invitation to the Voyage, which one may offer to the woman he loves, to the sister of his choice?

Yes, in this atmosphere it would be good to live, over there, where the slower hours contain more thoughts, where the clocks toll of happiness with a deeper and more meaningful solemnity.

On shining panels, or on leather gilt and somberly rich, sacred paintings live discreetly, calm and profound as the souls of the artists who created them. The setting suns which give such rich colors to the dining-room or to the drawing-room are filtered through fine materials or through those high and elaborate windows which leaden bars divide into many compartments. The furniture is vast, curious, bizarre, equipped with locks and with secrets like a subtle mind. There the mirrors, the metals, the upholstery, the jewelry and the crockery play for the eyes a silent and mysterious symphony; and from all things, from all the corners, from the clefts in the chests of drawers and from the folds of the cloth materials, a peculiar perfume exudes, a return to me! of Sumatra, which is, as it were, the soul of the apartment.

A true Land of Cockaigne, I tell you, where all is rich, clean and shining, like a clear conscience, like a magnificent kitchen display, like a splendid piece of wrought gold, like jewels of many colors. The treasures of the world abound there, as in the house of an industrious man who has deserved well of everyone. Unique land, superior to all others, as Art is to Nature, where Nature is reformed by the dream, where it is corrected, embellished, remodeled.

Let them search, let them search still, let them incessantly defer the entry into their happiness, those alchemists of horticulture! Let them offer a prize of sixty and a hundred thousand florins to the man who shall solve their ambitious problems! As for me, I have found my black tulip and my blue dahlia.

Incomparable flower, tulip lost and found again, allegorical dahlia, it is there, is it not, in this country so calm and dreamy, that we must live and blossom? Shall you not be framed in the analogy of yourself, and can you not be mirrored, to speak like the mystics, in your own correspondence?

Dreams! always dreams! and the more ambitious and delicate the soul, the farther dreams remove it from what is possible. Every man carries within him his dose of natural opium, incessantly secreted and renewed, and, from birth until death, how many hours can we count that are filled with positive joy, with successful and decisive action? Shall we ever live, shall we ever pass into that picture painted by my soul, the picture that resembles you?

Those treasures, that furniture, that luxury, that order, those perfumes, those miraculous flowers, they are yourself. So also are those wide rivers and those calm canals. Those enormous ships which they carry, loaded up with wealth, and from which rises the monotonous singing of the crew, these are my thoughts which sleep or which roll on your breast. You guide them softly to the ocean that is Infinity, while reflecting the depth of the sky in the limpidity of your pure soul; and when, wearied by the surge and gorged with products of the Orient, they return to their native port, these are still my thoughts, enriched, returning from the Infinite toward you.

SOLITUDE

A philanthropic journalist tells me that solitude is bad for mankind, and, to support his thesis, he quotes, like all unbelievers, the Fathers of the Church.

I know that willingly and often the Fiend haunts arid land, and that the spirit of murder and of lechery flares up marvelously in deserted places. But it is not impossible that this solitude is dangerous only to the idle and wandering soul, which peoples it with its passions and its chimeras.

Undoubtedly a garrulous fellow, whose only desire is to speak from the heights of a platform or of a tribune, would run considerable risk of becoming a raving madman on Robinson’s island. I do not demand of my journalist the courageous virtues of Crusoe, but I do demand that he refrain from making an accusation against the lovers of solitude and of mystery.

There are, amongst our nations of chatterboxes, individuals whose repugnance to the supreme torment would be less intense if they were permitted to harangue copiously from the heights of the scaffold, without fearing that the drums of Santerre* might unduly shorten their discourse.

I do not pity them, because I suspect that their oratorical effusions procure them delights equal to those which others derive from silence and contemplation; but I despise them.

I wish, above all, that my cursed journalist would allow me to amuse myself in my fashion. ‘Can it be’, he says to me with a most apostolic nasal intonation, ‘that you never feel the need to share your enjoyments with others?’ Just look at the subtlety of this envious fellow! He knows that I despise his joys, and he would like to insinuate himself into mine, the hideous spoil-sport!

‘Oh the great misfortune of those who cannot be alone!’ La Bruyère says somewhere, as though to shame all those who rush away to forget themselves in the crowd, afraid, no doubt, that they cannot support themselves without help.

‘The cause of almost all our misfortunes is our inability to sit still in our room,’ says another sage, Pascal, I believe, thus recalling to the cell of contemplation all those deluded creatures who seek happiness in movement and in a prostitution which I should call fraternistic if I wished to speak the beautiful language of my century.

* Antoine Joseph Santerre (1752–1809), a brewer by trade, was C-in-C of the National Guard when Louis XVI was executed; he ordered the drummers to drown the King’s voice when the latter attempted to address the crowd.

GET DRUNK!

One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters; that’s our one imperative need. So as not to feel Time’s horrible burden that breaks your shoulders and bows you down, you must get drunk without ceasing.

But what with? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose. But get drunk.

And if, at some time, on the steps of a palace, in the green grass of a ditch, in the bleak solitude of your room, you are waking up when drunkenness has already abated, ask the wind, the wave, a star, the clock, all that which flees, all that which groans, all that which rolls, all that which sings, all that which speaks, ask them what time it is; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock will reply: ‘It is time to get drunk! So that you may not be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk, and never pause for rest! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose!’

THE FAVORS OF THE MOON

The moon, who is caprice itself, looked through the window while you were sleeping in your cradle, and said to herself: ‘I like this child.’

And softly she descended her staircase of clouds and, noiselessly, passed through the window-panes. Then she stretched herself out over you with the supple tenderness of a mother, and laid down her colors on your face. Ever since, the pupils of your eyes have remained green and your cheeks unusually pale. It was while contemplating this visitor that your eyes became so strangely enlarged; and she clasped your neck so tenderly that you have retained for ever the desire to weep.

However, in the expansion of her joy, the Moon filled the whole room like a phosphorescent vapor, like a luminous poison; and all the living light thought and said: ‘You shall suffer for ever the influence of my kiss. You shall be beautiful in my fashion. You shall love that which I love and that which loves me: water, clouds, silence and the night; the immense green sea; the formless and multiform streams; the place where you shall not be; the lover whom you shall not know; flowers of monstrous shape; perfumes that cause delirium; cats that shudder, swoon and curl up on pianos and groan like women, with a voice that is hoarse and gentle!

‘And you shall be loved by my lovers, courted by my courtiers. You shall be the queen of all men that have green eyes, whose necks also I have clasped in my nocturnal caresses; of those who love the sea, the sea that is immense, tumultuous and green, the formless and multiform streams, the place where they are not, the woman whom they do not know, sinister flowers that resemble the censers of a strange religion, perfumes that confound the will; and the savage and voluptuous animals which are the emblems of their dementia.’

And that, my dear, cursed, spoiled child, is why I am now lying at your feet, seeking in all your person the reflection of the formidable divinity, of the foreknowing godmother, the poisoning wet-nurse of all the lunatics.