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"SOUVENIRS : My Life with Maeterlinck", Volume I, by Georgette Leblanc.

Chapter Five

Throughout my operatic and theatrical career I managed to keep myself free of the personal intrigues that are an inevitable part of life behind the scenes. Only once was I involved in such an experience, and the result was a tragedy for me.

The ... private life of a prima donna is often at the mercy of an unscrupulous director or impressarrio who makes the acceptance of his advances the price of her career. It was during the run of "Carmen" that such a situation arose. I was warned that if I did not yield, or if I decided to leave, I could never again appear at the Comique. There was nothing to do but to resign.

The consequences of my resignation fell upon me three years later, and in a cruel form.

The first part of the story began in 1893, before I knew Maeterlinck, with a letter he had received from the poet, Henri de Régnier

My friend, Achille Debussy, who is a musician of the most clever and delicate talent, has begun some charming music for "Pelléas and Melisande", which deliciously garlands the text while scrupulously respecting it. Before going further with this work which is considered, he would like authorization to continue.

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Maeterlinck gave his consent and Debussy completed the score.

In 1901 when we were living in the rue Raynouard in Passy, Debussy came late one afternoon to play his score to us. I watched him as he walked into the salon. His extraordinary head was already known from photographs, but his presence revealed a special quality. By small details of colour, manner, gesture, one guessed much of his hidden personality. His toneless skin was as white as wax, his fine crinkly hair misted the massive outline of his formidable skull. Beneath the bulging brow his sheltered glance shone dimly. His gestures were rare and he seldom smiled. His body seemed built for strength, yet uninhabited by it. It was as if all his strength had gone into his genius.

While he talked with Maeterlinck I observed the difference between their two natures, both equally on the defensive. Debussy's reserve was physical. In him one felt a painful sensitivity and even something morbid which was biding its time. In Maeterlinck the physical and moral balance made itself felt at once. His timidity was the result of his nature and character. The musician suffered from the little things of life, the poet refused to endure them. With him the "Do not enter" sign meant "Do not disturb me"; with Debussy it seemed to mean "Do not make me suffer". Each had an unquiet look in his eyes in Maeterlinck's it was clear and swiftly questioning; in Debussy's it was a fixed intensity that awaited no answer.

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back

The position of the piano forced Debussy to turn his
to us as he played his score. Maeterlinck began to make
desperate signs to me. I knew how badly he wanted to es-
cape, but my answering gestures implored him to be patient.
Resigned, he lit his pipe.

It grew late. Two candles on the piano outlined
Debussy's silhouette. Maeterlinck was half asleep in
his armchair. Before my eyes the high windows framed the
soft blue of growing night.

At this first hearing of "Pelléas" many of its beauties escaped me, but with the prelude for the death of Mélisande I felt that special, that unique, emotion which we undergo in the presence of a masterpiece. Our life seems to part from us - words, tears, everything within us which is at the service of our great moments suddenly becomes insufficient. We are suspended in an unknown world where our human manifestations no longer have any meaning.

Just before Debussy left we discussed the rôle of
Mélisande. Maeterlinck wanted to sing it, Debussy said he would
be delighted, and I could think of nothing I would rather
do. It was decided that I should begin to study the rôle
immediately and we arranged that the first rehearsals would
take place at his house in the rue Cardinet, where
he was living at that time with his first wife.

After having heard me in "Carmen" Debussy was surprised
to find that I had in my vocal range a light high soprano

97

which he found peculiarly suited to his music and the
diaphanous quality of Mélisande; he also commented con-
stantly on the pleasure my diction gave him. In all our
subsequent rehearsals - either at his house or mine - our
understanding was perfect while we worked; but when we
stopped to rest we found it difficult to talk - no easy
communication flowed between us.

would

If I could begin my life over again I train myself to support certain human manifestations which have the power of silencing me completely. Three classes of people can paralyze me: those who barricade themselves, whose look, words, gestures are so many stones fortifying the ramparts; those whose light wit feeds on any material, turning it into firecrackers; those whose tem- peraments seek only a jumping-off place and who are at ease only with people who serve as a parapet. Debussy belonged to the first category. We were like two wary animals, each one drawing back from the other's presence. I thought him walled in by his pride. I was to know what kind of man he really was only a short time before his death, in reading the letters he had written to his inti- mate friend, André Caplet.

Our rehearsals were in full swing when one day Maeterlinck read in a newspaper that Mary Garden had been engaged to create Mélisande and that she was already rehearsing with the composer. We were astounded, but at once that this was the revenge of the director of the Opéra Comique,

probably

98

tracing back to my disagreeable experience after "Carmen".
Debussy's *fourberie* in concealing the Comique's refusal to
allow me to create the rôle could only be explained, to us,
by his lack of moral courage. How differently Paul Dukas
behaved in a similir situation several years later. When the
Comique refused his request that I create Ariane in his "Ariane
et Barbe Bleu", his energetic and loyal nature won his case -
he threatened the management with the withdrawal of his work
unless the rôle *was* given to me.

Since Debussy refused to act, Maeterlinck appealed to the
Society of Authors, convinced that "Pelléas" was his property
and not the composer's. He was mistaken, first because the
law gives preference to the musician rather than to the author,
and furthermore because in his preliminary authorization to
Debussy he had added this gracious clause : "The piece may
be played where, how and when you like".

Justly annoyed to find himself stripped before the law,
Maeterlinck brandished his cane and announced to me that he
was going to "give Debussy a drubbing to teach him what was
what".

My love had none of the stoic quality of the heroines
of antiquity. This threat of *~~rêve~~* a beating terrified
me and I clung to Maeterlinck who jumped briskly out of the
*~~où~~* window. (Our ground-floor flat in the Rue
Raynouard was half-way up the slope of the street. We had
to go *~~dormi~~* through the garden in order to reach the porte-
cochère, and then climb the hill. *~~Ou~~* instead, went
*~~we often~~*

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out through the window).

In agont I waited for Maurice to come back. I was convinced
of disaster - surely Debussy, with his tragic mask of a face,
wouldn't take kindly to a "drubbing".

Watching the deserted street for Maeterlinck's return, I
finally saw him appear at the top of the hill, brandishing his
cane to heaven with comic gestures. The story was pitiable. As
soon as he entered the Debussy salon he threatened the musician,
who dropped into a chair while Debussy distractedly ran
toward him with a bottle of smelling-salts. She begged the poet
to go away and, my word, there was nothing else to do.

Maeterlinck, who didn't like musicians any more than he liked
music, kept repeating, "They're all crazy, all off their heads,
these musicians!" This scarcely reassured me. I thought that,
as soon as Maeterlinck
had left, Debussy would rise from his armchair in terrible wrath.
Perhaps his seconds would call on us the next day.

As for Maeterlinck, he found it only just right to attack the
management of the Opéra-Comique. Consequently he wrote a letter
to the Figaro in which he accused the Comique of trickery and
hoped for the "resounding failure of a play which was no longer
his".

Maeterlinck's letter left in spite of my pleading, and
this time I expected the manager's seconds with such desperate
certitude that the next evening at the sound of the doorbell I
fainted.

space

14

A day or two later he and Read came together to persuade me. What they called the "sensationalism indispensable to the American ~~reader~~ reader" I called the most outrageous vulgarity. There remained for me only the right to refuse. It was my only weapon but I would use it to the end, whatever the cost.

"Do you realize", they pleaded, "that you are throwing away thousands of dollars? This isn't a question of literature, this is a business affair".

"It would be too sad", I said, "if a sublime human experience should become only a business affair".

They finally left, defeated. In our little salon, dark at three o'clock, Monique held my hands and leaned on my shoulder.

"What will become of us, chérie?"

...

In New York artists without money are like whirling dervishes, who turn forever in a frenzy of hopeless plans. I was asked to do "Pelléas and Mélisande" in English and I worked night and day to master the text; but when I was ready there wasn't enough money for the production. A Frenchwoman wanted to arrange a series of French concerts - she knew of a millionaire who might be interested in such a venture; but after all the details had been arranged she arrived at our door one morning, breathless, to tell me that the "millionaire" was surrounded by police - he was a common crook. A Hollywood film company telephoned me a dazzling offer to star in a picture. "What kind of picture?" I asked. "Your life with Maeterlinck."

15

Everything for you, everything against Maeterlinck¹ I hung up.

Véral tried in vain to find financial backing for a concert or a play. He took me to see theatrical managers, expecting me to convince and conquer. Not speaking English and having no conquering clothes, I was not equipped for such a rôle. During this time my manuscript was still being discussed. The editors refused to show me their alterations and suggested that I myself add new material. I feverishly produced stories of the theatre and amusing personal anecdotes but the editors rejected them - only a sensational version of my life with Maeterlinck would satisfy them.

Véral thought of a new idea. "You can make a thousand dollars a week in vaudeville", he said. "I know a real poet who will write you a sketch". When the masterpiece was finished Véral brought it to me in all confidence and sat before me as I read it. It was called "The Golden Bird" and the setting was a study in an abbey.

A poet, made up to resemble Maeterlinck, meditates at his desk. He invokes the ceiling for inspiration which does not come. The door opens and I appear, dressed in gold. To encourage genius, I go into plastic poses. The poet poises his pen but writes nothing. I disappear. A young serving-maid enters. She is called Cerisette, name of a wine supposed to excite inspiration. She runs to a cupboard, brings forth a bottle and gives the poet a drink. He begins to write, one eye on his work, the other on the friskings of the maid. Genius is resurrected. At this point I return, still a gold statue, and symbolize renouncement by carrying a gravelling-bag. We exchange dramatic gestures. The action grows swifter. Another bottle, and the poet reels. A shining stairway is lowered. The Golden Bird climbs upward, singing a hymn of peace, while the other two move

16

toward an alcove in which can be seen a couch and a bar. The curtain falls.

Startled by my anger, Véral began to believe that he had exhausted his possibilities.

"Monna Vanna"

We didn't go out any more - fresh air sharpens the appetite.
I noticed signs of depletion in Monique that filled me with anxiety.
One night when we were dining as usual on milk and apples, I suddenly thought of a solution for our desperate situation. I put on
an evening dress and asked Monique to bring me my chinchilla cape.
"I have a plan", I said, "I'm going to the Chicago Opera".

"Mon dieu!" she cried, "you're not going to hear 'Monna Vanna?'"
"Yes", I said, "tonight 'Monna Vanna' doesn't matter".

At the opera I went directly to the box of Madame Oscar Hammerstein who had invited me to come whenever I liked ⬒ - she was managing the Manhattan Opera Company since the death of her husband.
As I was knocking at the door, a young man came out of the adjoining box and bowed to me. I didn't recognize him but returned his greeting. Madame Hammerstein drew me in, presented her guests and seated me beside her. The opera had begun and Mary Garden was already on the stage.

As soon as the curtain fell, the young man who had bowed to me came to introduce himself. His name was Allen Tanner. He spoke a French of his own invention, but I was able to understand that he had met me when I was playing "Monna Vanna" in Boston, MA in 1912. He had a

17

sensitive nervous face and long slender hands of which he seemed
perpetually conscious. He told me that he was a pianist and that he
lived only "dans le piano".

The curtain rose on the tent scene, with Muratore singing
Prinzivalle. Feeling less sad, I closed my eyes and rested in the
vibrations of the music - Garden, enveloped in cool veils, didn't
evoke Vanna for me. But the end of the act roused me - the clamour
of bells, the shouting, the triumphant cries, all the excitement
of sound which I myself had directed so many times in so many
theatres. I sat tranxfixed by the pain of the past until the
voice of Madame Hammerstein recalled me. "Will you come backstage
and speak to Garden?" I powdered my face and rose automatically.

Garden's dressing-room was crowded. Over the massed shoulders
and heads I caught sight of the turban which framed her strong and
beautiful face. Suddenly the crowd parted and she cried, "Georgette
Leblanc!" Before I could speak she hurried on, "How did you like
the orchestra, and the sets? And the singing? This isn't the first
time you've been in New York? I'm singing "Thais" next week, you
must come . . . "

I forced my way out against a stream of new arrivals. As I
walked through the lobby a tall pier-glass reflected my approach
in an image larger than myself. It seemed to be holding my dead
life in its arms.

I went to Muratore's dressing-room. He saw me in the crowd
and with a sweeping gesture cried, "Make room for Monna Vanna!"
Then, "Why haven't we heard you yet in New York? Who is your man-
ager?" I explained my difficulties with the Sunday American and

18

he shook his head. "Alas, if I weren't leaving how I would love to help you!"

The third act ended, the audience left, Madame Hammerstein and I stayed behind in the darkened theatre at the foot of the grand staircase. Her face was gentle, her eyes soft. I told her of my difficulties and she pressed my hands in sympathy. Then I asked the question that I had come to ask - would she buy my chin-chilla cape?

She sank down on the stairs and began to weep. She had no money, only overfining debts - her jewels were sold, her theatre mortaged and the box-office receipts seized every night. Facing dire poverty, she thought only of suicide. It was I who consoled her.

space

The next day I received a bouquet of Japanese lillies and a letter from Allen Tanner. I copy the letter textually :

Chère Madame,

A coups de dictionnaire, je m'assis vous écrire. A dire la verité, j'en ai jamais été présenté à vous. Je me suis présenter au grand besoin me contenter à cause d'une admiration profonde, laquelle a exister toute ma vie. Pardonnez-moi. Ne croyez pas que je suis présomptueux : il fallait vous addresser parce que c'est un visage telement me connaître, telement admiré et telement sympathique.

Je suis musicien, dévoué à Debussy, Ravel, Scriabin et tous les vrais magiciens. Voulez-vous être gentil, me permetter vous voir, chère Madame? Peut-être nous pouvons faire la musique.

A bientôt, j'espère,
Allen Tanner

I thanked him by telephone. His comic French gave me a <u>fou rire.</u>
"Aoh! You will teach me?" "Never, your language is too amusing!"
We arranged that he should come to tea that afternoon.

19

He came, bringing touching little presents wrapped in gold
paper - maple sugar, sweet biscuits and cocoa. "They are Amer-
ican specialities", he said. His voice was low and sounded like
a bell softly rung. "You sing, of course?" I asked. "Oh yes",
he said, like a child, "you will see".

It was a lovely day and we went up to the roof. Life was sud-
denly so changed that I took the three flights at a run. For nearly
four months I had been associating with business-men, all of them
stamped with that heavy puerility which anchors life to the ground.
Now for the first time I had met a young American, an artist, in-
telligent, enthusiastic, articulate. Allen talked of music, books
and painting, of his long admiration for me, of the photographs he
had collected of St. Wandrille, "Pelléas" and "Macbeth". And then
he told me a little story. On Christmas day while walking along
Sixth Avenue, profiting from the roar of the elevated trains to
sing "Pelléas" in full voice, he had seen a woman wrapped in a
leopard coat and veils coming out of a Child's restaurant. He
even knew it was without seeing my features. He was too shy to speak
to me but he rushed to his friends in Eighth Street crying, "Geor-
gette Leblanc is in New York, I have seen her!" They had been
waiting to see me ever since.

I well remembered that Christmas day. Monique and I had
stopped before a sparkling white restautant to read the sign in
the window - "Ladies Invited". What an extraordinary country,
I thought, and hurried Monique in for a free Christmas feast. We
ordered everything on the menu and ate for an hour. Finally a
waiter approached, beaming with Christmas cheer but presenting a
lill I explained our mistake to the manager who, fortunately,

20

had no doubts of our naiveté. He told us the sign only meant
that ladies were welcome. We gave him the few pennies we had
and he accepted our promise to return and pay the rest as soon
as possible.

In his fantastic French Allen told me of his friends in
Eighth Street, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap. In the summer,
he said, they lived in a wild place, near the sea, where there
were no roads, nothing but trees; they had built their house
themselves and even made their own furniture. Listening to his
extraordinary descriptions, I pictured two prehistoric crea-
tures brandishing axes in the woods, building their hut, sleep-
ing on planks, living on roots and leaves. "But what do they
do in winter?" I asked. "Oh, in winter they come to New York".
They were two intellectuals and published an art magazine!

Allen lived with a musician friend in a studio apartment
of the "Beaux Arts". His mother lived in the middle West. He
loved and admired her because she was brave. During thunder
storms she always stood on a balcony, with lightning all around
her. I was almost ill from laughter.

But in a few days he left for Chicago, to be gone a
month, and another interlude of solitude and poverty lay before
us. Monique was able to obtain milk and fruit, sometimes two
little rolls, on credit from the friendly grocer's around the
corner. Our daily life was hidden from the world. I was de-
termined that my family in France should know nothing of my
situation. They would urge me to return and that was a solu-
tion I would not admit, knowing that if I left

5

21

the country my manuscript would be published in scandalous form
and content.

Monique, wiser than I, occupied herself with sewing while I
walked the floor, searching for a solution in a brain that rocked
like a boat. Time was passing and I had the sensation that every-
thing was falling away from me. It was really my life that was
falling. I saw everything through a haze, I didn't under-
stand what was said to me, I could not think. Something was pulling
me down and I could no longer struggle against it. That something
was hunger.

I went to consult a lawyer, a friend of Madame Hammerstein.
He was very busy and as he didn't want to keep me waiting asked if
he might lunch while we talked. The tray was on his desk, I sat
close to the smell of toast, coffee, eggs, bacon. I told my story
automatically, going into great detail, concentrating on my choice
of words as if I no longer knew my own language. My hand was lying
on the corner of the desk and I noticed that it was touching the
corner of the tray as if about to take something. I stared at it
as if it were a hand that didn't belong to me; it belonged only
to a body that was hungry. Blushing, I replaced it in my lap.

The lawyer advised me to submit my memoirs to Dodd, Mead and Com-
pany, who had already published three of my books. I went to see
Mr. Dodd and in my memory he is rose-coloured; not only because I
identify him with a special felicity, but because he was made of
the colours of dawn - a young girl's complexion, corn-coloured
hair, yellow tortoise glasses and the vibrations of a spring
morning. He quickly agreed to publish my book after its appear-

22

ance in the Sunday American, but on one condition : he had been Maeterlinck's publisher for many years and could not risk displeas- ing him; therefore his decision must wait until after he had read the manuscript.

When I saw him the next day his glasses grew misty and he stammered out that I had written a "pious book". And when I told him of my struggles with the newspaper editors he eyes overflowed and he blew his nose with abandon. His partner came in and gravely shook my hand. Deeply affected by so much sympathy, I was seized with a great pity for myself.

Mr. Dodd gave me a check for a thousand dollars and pronounced a few solemn words which lent a sacred quality to the transaction. It was agreed that the shocking translation made by the Sunday American would be destroyed and a new one made by Véral. As soon as we left the Dodd Mead office Véral said, "Since I am to do the translation, may I have my five hundred in advance? My wife and children are in terrible distress and this will save their lives." Like all emotional people, my judgment is unbalanced. I gave him the five hundred, but he never did the translation and, as I learned later, his wife never received any of the money.

Dazed by riches, we moved to a new setting - the Commodore Hotel. We took a sitting-room on the twenty-first floor, with two narrow beds hidden in alcoves. Our immense window enchanted my lungs - nothing limited the view over a field of roofs and chimneys. But such brightness required flowers. I went out and

23

brought back, pressed to my heart, three little pots of red tulips.

A woman was waiting to see me. She looked like a provincial spinster of the 1890's. Her hair was arranged in neat sausages which served as a pedestal for a perky little hat, aggressively green, with an aigrette in front and a rose at the side. Beneath a chocolate-coloured suit trimmed with braid, a merciless corset bound an allegorical bosom. This abundant person who should have presented me with a horn of plenty, held a small roll of paper which she twisted nervously under the sheltering balcony of her opulence.

In an ingenious voice and in perfect French she said, "I am from the Evening World and I've come to interview you. I chiefly do interviews on love". She paused to blush. "You see, that's my specialty". She gave a jubilant little laugh, put on her glasses and read aloud her questionnaire :)

1. How does one distinguish between true and false love?

2. Should a man have two loves in his life to acquire experience?
3. What should one do if one loves without being loved?

3. What

4. What should the abandoned victim of love do?

5. Why doesn't love last forever?

6. Can a woman love after forty?

7. What is a great love?

8. What makes a great lover?

As I sat watching this exhibition of incredible naïveté I did not even feel an impulse to laugh.

I soon learned that my interviewer did not have, as she claimed, a monopoly on the subject of love. Other reporters besieged me with the same questions in the belief that a Frenchwoman has conclusive verdicts on all love's problems.

Love in America is a sort of clandestine mystery. One woman

24

said to me, "Before my marriage I knew nothing, but afterward ...!"
and her eyes closed in gratitude to the universe. A young bride, a
musician, told me that she had married for the sake of her art.

"Ah?" I said.

"Yes, I play the violin. My teacher said, 'You can't make any
further progress as long as you don't know life. You must marry!'
So I did. Now my playing is all changed because I know life".

I looked at her - short hair, flat chest, a face like an apple,
a little shiny nose, the astringent voice of an adolescent, an ardour
like that of a child before a candy-shop. Evidently this young per-
son had been the object of a revelation.

Then the young husband appeared. "Hello! Hello!" he called,
and with a heavy hand patted his wife's shoulder. He was a handsome
boy, made for sports, too tall, too wide, with arms so long that they
didn't know what to do when they had nothing to do. So this was the
magician-hero. A night in his arms and the cosmos held no further
secrets.

Space

By now I had discarded the order to remain in child-
ing and was seeing the friends from whom I had hidden my arrival.
They understood my scruples about the *Sunday American* but saw no
solution. Their advice was: "You are involved with a formidable
power, you won't be able to extricate yourself. Just make money and
don't worry about anything else". And they added, "Four months of
doing nothing in New York - you are already lost".

25

## Chapter Two
# Defeat in Victory

It was spring. Monique and I had walked in the new sun to Central Park to be close to the earth. I breathed it in, closing my eyes. Spring is the same everywhere.

We sat on the grass to eat our lunch - bread and a bar of chocolate. The air was still, the sky without a flaw; not far away in their iron cages the wild beasts slept, innocent and rich. The angelus is not rung in America, but by the expression of the earth knew that it was midday. Birds were singing faintly in the quiet trees.

I threw myself back on the grass. "How happy we are, Monique, how happy we are!"

## space

On the evening of that first spring day, Allen asked me to come down to the lobby of the Commodore where Margaret Anderson was waiting to meet me. As I stepped out of the elevator I saw a sky-blue silhouette, a white glove waving and a lovely smile of welcome beneath a fur toque. Two sky-blue arms and we embraced, each leaving on the cheek of the other a tiny red spot. It was as if we had always known each other.

As we started out for the Park I began to laugh so breathlessly that we had to stop walking. The extreme chic of Margaret's suit, her beauty and elegance . . . and the prehistoric woman of Allen's stories! Without understanding why, they laughed with me. Margaret

26

had bursts of clear silver laughter, but she spoke in a contralto
voice of throaty notes. What interested me above all was the way
she looked out from her eyes, set in orbits of perfect design;
when she was silent their colour deepened and they became ingen-
ously meditative like those of a baby. Her light way of walking
made her seem propelled by emotion. Her gestures were original
she had an amusing way of thrusting out her left elbow and holding
it high, her hand against her breast, the fingers widely separated.

She spoke no French and I no English, but there was no barrier
between us. The intensity which characterized her needed no words
to find and join my own. When she argued, her eyes were no longer
ingenuous but filled with convictions which transported her. Elan,
intensity, conviction are the words which describe my first impress-
ion of her. Also a total simplicity.

There are few words more abused in their meaning that the word
"simplicity". A woman is called simple if she is without make-up
or jewels. A body without grace, a clumsy mind, a boor - these are
"simple"; while he who presents himself well, who is aware of him-
self in all realms, is never called simple. Simplicity is a supreme
refinement, a supreme choice, a supreme distinction. It is a result,
a consequence - a rejection of the cliché for the expression that is
art. It is a proof of awareness, it is an inner ease. Simplicity
means to be concerned with what one is and what one hopes to become.
It is a proof of the soul's beginning.

space

In 1914 Margaret Anderson had founded the *Little Review*, a

27

revolutionary magazine of the arts "making no compromise with the public taste". It was the most interesting art publication in America and was the first to print, in serial form, the masterpiece which changed the trend of contemporary English literature - James Joyce's "Ulysses".

I had imagined that the young generation of American artists were still at the "intellectual" stage and that they would not interest me. I was mistaken. They were young but not unripe; emotional, romantic of temperament but not of mind; eager and dedicated. With Margaret and her collaborator, Jane Heap, I began to participate in the absorbing art life of New York.

But the value of these new friendships was not in the realm of art, it was rather in the life of ideas to which Margaret and Jane were so invincibly dedicated. For the first time in many years - ever since the disintegration of the great motives upon which Maeterlinck and I had built our existence - I found myself again living for the life of the mind. Margaret, Jane and I began to talk, with Monique as interpreter. Within a month Margaret could manage a rudimentary French in which, strangely enough, she could convey only important ideas, and our talk was that infinite talk of infinite things which alone gives life vitality. This, at last, was my justification for coming to a new world; this was what I had tried to invoke, for my brother, when I cried out that my life was not finished but only beginning; this was the resumption and development of my aspirations, of my faith in that "impulse to being" which is the raison d'être of living.

In all our talk we were not surprised to discover in each other

28

an identic striving and research; no barrier of geography, na-
tionality, generation or language divided us, and we were able to
produce a miracle of communication on an eternal subject-matter -
that of man's struggle to understand the mysteries within himself and
the universe.

One night we went to hear a lecture on Ouspensky and his "Ter-
tium Organum". Although I did not know it then, this event was to
mark all my future. It was on that night that I heard for the first
time the ideas of a man called Gurdjieff. He had lived for many
years in the monasteries of Thibet, he had lately been teaching in
England and
Russia, Germany, France, and was soon coming to America. The trans-
cendant ideas of this man fell like the rays of a summer sun on my
winter field, and I knew that at last I had found a direction for
my future.

In my wanderings about New York I had discovered, in West 73rd
Street, the narrow white tower of the Nobleton Hotel and had often
wished I could live there. When we found that we could rent two
small rooms at a very modest price on the fifteenth floor, with a
fire-escape leading to a roof which would be ours alone, we left the
Commodore and went to live in the tower as if in an observatory. Our
piano was too large for the elevator and had to be dismembered, like
a chicken. Margaret and Allen brought gifts collected by their friends,
and flowers and flowers.

The very first night we climbed the fire-escape, clinging to
the railing. Every step, made of narrow iron bars, traced a noteless

29

staff of music in space. The activity that belonged to the sky
was reversed and, by the million, stars appeared on the earth. I
loved being there, suspended in space, as in the basket of a balloon,

space

NOTES FROM A DIARY, April. Sometimes curiosity keeps me on my tower until dawn, looking down on the fantastic aspects of the city. A certain vapour is in the air - a young fresh smell. It comes from the sea, it is the smell of a New York morning. I watch again and again the belated awakening of the city as it comes to life at eight-thirty. How different from the gradual awakening of Paris - at four o'clock a few footsteps, at five the big trucks, at six the whole city in vibration, at six-thirty the full momentum of the day.

I feel that I love this city. It is logical, like
a spinal column. Buildings in the sky - why not? There is
always room above, and the sap of the race pushes strongly
upward.

The rhythm of New York is that of a fair. Roller-coasters rush me up into the sky, hurl me down again, and at the bottom of the abyss I rebound in the air. In no country, in no milieu, Of Europe, is such a life imaginable. Is it the influence of the air, so volatile, so electrified? Nothing is heavy and nothing is serious. Americans do not think in the same way as we do: they think of how to become more free, they never hesitate or retrace their steps, they are never resigned to anything. They are sustained, bouyed up, pushed forward.

Is it charm, intelligence, or kindness that I love

30

In most of the American character? I often analyze my contentment at being among these people. What I love is their way of living with temperament. In my country it is different - temperament only serves work or action, like a mechanism. In America it is in evidence everywhere, it is the daily bread, the indispensable. Even practical people have temperament here. I have seen businessmen effervesce, become intoxicated with life like artists. I watch the way two American men greet each other - they are two children, two minds colliding gaily, like racket and ball.

From the point of view of traditional European hypocrisy, the American character is as extraordinary as the country itself. I was astounded the first time I saw Margaret open the door to a caller and say to her simply, "I'm sorry, but I'm not at home today". I found this device both comic and commendable. In this country one breathes in freedom with the air of the race - a feminine air, of an exciting honesty.

When a Frenchwoman receives a compliment she murmurs a protest; an American replies with an energetic "Thank you". She cannot doubt a truth that is agreeable because disagreeable truths are spoken so frankly. To be outspoken is an innate American virtue, found especially in the women, since timidity silences nearly all the men- at least in the presence of a European woman.

**End of April.** Always the struggle, always the vicious circle from which I cannot escape. I don't recognize myself in all this chaos, but I am not troubled by it.

Why does Elizabeth Marbury, who knows the French spirit, advise me to abandon the struggle with the **Sunday American**? Is she so sure of my defeat? Even so, I have answered that I will fight just the same. She said, "Luck is the art of seizing fortune as it passes". Yes, but to

31

Independent

do that one has to be attentive to outside things,
and they are the things I do not understand. We don't
get on well together.

To the artist, any material tragedy is like an iron
cage. His real life slips out between the bars.

I have seen the house of Edgar Allen Poe - so
touching. An adorable old cottage in a garden, a little
corner of peace and poetry respected among the modern
buildings that rise all around it. An old woman showed
us the little rooms. On a high mantlepiece in the din-
ingroom was a stuffed blackbird. "It was his raven",
she said.

I have been ill. Through the mists of fever I saw
Margaret and Monique - two faces, one anguish. In
brief moments of lucidity I had a vision of what life
would be like with these two cherished friends, so
different, and yet so alike in the love they accord
me. I said nothing, however, being accustomed to allow
great things to shape themselves, according to the laws
that are within them. Between us a unity has been es-
tablished which will give us an adorable and spacious
existence.

Going to the summit of our tower was like going to a mountain
retreat; at dawn there was a freshness like a wind from a
lake. When I was well again I descended from these heights each
day to go to Wall Street, in search of a new lawyer.

Although it was only May, a ceiling of fire hung low over the
streets. The sun's rays machined-gunned pedestrians; people fell

32

dead. In such heat my costume was a source of curiosity and
solicitude. Our five hundred dollars was exhausted and I hadn't
been able to buy any summer clothes. I wore a long cape to hide
my dark winter dress, and a big white felt hat undulated heavily
on my head. As it couldn't withstand another cleaning, Monique
had thought of powdering it with flour. At the slightest breeze
a powdery cloud floated down around me. Whenever I went everyone
was determined to relieve me of my cape and I had to insist that
I was not too warm. How kind everyone was in those New York off-
ices! A chain of smiles accompanied me from door to door. I
knew that each lawyer would put my *dossier* in a drawer where it
would suffer the fate of problems better left unsolved, yet after
each interview I walked forth with a new courage, comforted by
friendly words. I took them all home to Monique who was always
waiting for me anxiously. When was she not anxious? - this gentle
friend who shared my troubles with such quietness. Those who know
her call her *Sainte Monique*. But there is nothing rigorous or
petty in her saintliness. She is a character met only in books
with coloured illustrations, a being whose words and steps make no
sound, and who always offers to agree with me.

I went through the business-filled days automatically, my
thoughts always concentrated on the night I would spend on my tower
Those were sovereign nights in spite of the exiled stars. I con-
trasted them with other, so different, nights when the
skies of France outlined the arches of the cloister I loved; or
extended, bare, black and infinite, over the fields.

Sometimes as the sun rose I watched skyscrapers emerge slowly
from the mist, like a flotilla of icebergs. Standing there,

33

could laugh a little at my futile war with a newspaper - the
struggle of an ant with a giant straw. In spite of it, in spite
of everything, I felt essentially free. I knew that a new life,
made of what I had lived, learned and longed for, was forming
within me. I knew that when this senseless adventure was ended
I would be ready for that life in which the false reality ex-
tolled by the world would disappear before a true reality. This
would not come to pass all at once, but each month, each year,
would bring me closer to the essential question: **the** reason for
**my** existence.

NOTES FROM A DIARY, May 16. I have three reasons for not leaving America: I must stay for my projects; I must stay for my new life; and I must stay in order not to go back into darkness.

The thoughts of my present life run through my head like a refrain. I came here to live a different life from the one I lived in France, a life of the work I love, a life in which I could watch the past fading away and the future emerging; but now I struggle only to keep alive. Yet who knows whether struggle is not a way to wisdom, who knows whether I am not perhaps fortunate to live through so many misfortunes for the sake of my own truth. The important thing is to feel one's existence, and hunger makes me feel my existence day and night.

We conceal our worst difficulties from Margaret - she herself hasn't enough to eat. Although people

34

often help her magazine with donations, she has nothing for herself. Allen also lives without money. They are both courage-machines.

Sometimes we have moments of relaxation. When artists receive even a little money they share it and celebrate. We assemble around a table where a single flower reigns, little gifts are exchanged which are touching in their simplicity but always wrapped with great forethought, for the real present is the surprise of its presentation.

I begin to understand the nature of what I experience continually in this country - generosity and its special psychology. It doesn't consist merely of admiration for and lionization of the artist. It is deeper - it is organic. Americans have so genuine a need to be generous that the gratitude one feels toward them becomes reciprocal - they almost thank the person who allows them to exercise their generosity. They have a pre-generosity that doesn't consider whether or not it is desired. In other races there is something umbilical between the giver and the gift.

It doesn't displease me to be completely poor. What angers me is that the need to eat not only drains my vitality but attacks my mind, my imagination. It becomes a mental obsession. I live all this in the strange half-sleep that is the result of hunger. I have become accustomed to that heaviness at the back of the neck, that pain over the eyes, the strain of muscles holding up a head suddenly too heavy.

space

35

space

Just as I was beginning to think that these dark days would never end, Véral, embarrassed and apologetic, came to ask me to release him from our contract. He had decided to abandon all his great projects and leave for Europe. "I am sorry", he said, "but events are stronger than I am". What was not stronger than he? I consented at once and we formally tore up the paper which would have bound me to him for four more years. In spite of this he dared to say as he left, "I am certain that you will have the success you deserve, and while I am away I count on you to send me my thirty per cent on whatever you make". Thus ended our burlesque partnership, and when the door closed behind him I was filled with a sense of freedom.

Later in the day there was more good news. Margaret was to be alone for the summer and invited Monique and me to live in her apartment. Although it meant exchanging a tower for a street, I was overjoyed at the thought of sharing the inspired daily life of the *Little Review*.

Monique proceeded to the apartment in Eighth Street and had just time, before our arrival, to tack up on the wall as a greeting one of my favorite axioms : Cagthe's "Tout est bien, il suffit d'être maître de soi". We agreed, helpless with laughter.

space

As I watched Margaret day by day in Eighth Street, I often thought of Montaigne's words : "An absolute perfection, resembling divinity - to know how to enjoy one's own being".

Margaret is more instantaneous than other people. For her

36

there is no journey to be made from seeing to speaking or acting.
She "arrives" immediately, as if all the minutes of her life had
served as an exercise in the promptness and accuracy of her re-
flexes.

I know of no one more free, more frank, more exposed and at
the same time more natively mysterious. She who is so civilized
has retained certain primitive reactions. She has only active

gestures. She doesn't wander about a room, she walks into it and
chooses her place; she doesn't fall into a chair, she sits down;
she doesn't chatter, she talks. When she talks about the weather
it is only to praise it - rain or sunshine, heat or cold, are
received by
her health. Never a coat over her arm, always both hands free. To
carry an object is a crime.

Her apartment is like a still-life which cannot move from its
imaginary frame. She has a tape-measure in her eye. Her own room
is like a chord of music, each object a note that plays its part.
Close to her bed are her mules, standing side by side like two
steeds, harnessed and ready to go.

Margaret paints life as one paints a canvas. She not only
arranges the apartment, she prepares the days. Each one must fit
into the week like an object in its box. When all is in order,
she is one with her surroundings. From her window, even the
branches of the trees in the garden look as if they had passed
through her hands to decorate the sky.

When I first met her she possessed only one suit, a thousand
times mended and cleaned, like her gloves and stockings. In an

37

kind of weather she did her errands on foot, in patent leather pumps, but she always looked as if she had just stepped out of a limousine. I loved her airy walk, her light vibrations; I loved her hard perseverance, her intransigent mind; and I loved the inner beauty which always adorned her beauty. Her spirit is both eager and essentially grave; suffering frightens her, but she doesn't know what it is to complain. She is cowardly and brave at the same time, and without effort she always seems happy even when she is sad.

My latest lawyer had finally come to an agreement with the Sunday American. I would consent to the publication, in order to reimburse the money I had received in advance, but on two conditions: that Margaret should correct certain vulgarities in the translation and that "no injurious epithet" no hurtful word, would be attached to the name of Maeterlinck". When Margaret corrected the proofs she left my text intact.

After a year of battles I seemed to have emerged victorious. On the day before the publication, happy and unsuspecting, I decided to go to the offices of the Sunday American and bring home the first copies to come off the press.

As I approached the entrance of the newspaper building I noticed long strips of red paper lying in the street. Men were tossing bundles of posters into trucks and driving off with them. At the entrance door I saw posters pasted on the walls - two enormous scarlet hearts pierced by a black arrow. Red ink like spattered blood was spread over two names - Maeterlinck's name

38

and mine. Above them was the title of my memoirs, and below
in flaming letters was printed : "Twenty Years of Love without
Marriage". My lawyer had neglected to supervise the publicity
...

Unable to move, I stood in the street a long time, suffocated by the sight before my eyes. This, then, was the result of my victory. I imagined the red tide rushing everywhere, through all the streets of the city - our unearthly love transported from the ~~Abbey~~ of St. Wandrille to the gutters of New York. I clenched my hands together, as if they could hold back the tide.

39

Chapter 3 Three

Victory in Defeat

After all that I had lived through in New York I needed
trees, air, grass - all the health of the earth to regain my
own.

We had been told of houses to rent in Bernardsville, New
Jersey, for the end of the summer. Margaret borrowed our rail-
road fare and we set out to inspect them. A real estate agent
was waiting for us, but he showed us only great estates, renting
for hundreds of dollars a month. Finally he turned his car into
a long avenue of cypress trees. At the far end was a large grey
house, gay and rambling, with a rose garden, an old park and
wooded hills that blended with the sky. "One hundred and fifty
dollars a month", said the agent, "but it's not much of a place
- there are only four servants' rooms".

The next day Dodd Mead advanced me a hundred dollars and a
pawnshop furnished the remainder of the first month's rent. We
were again penniless when we moved into the house in Bernards-
ville, but as we entered the sun was shining on the Victory of
Samothrace in the hall and we hailed it as a good omen. The prin-
cipal grocery store in the village telephoned for our patronage
and Allen gave a colossal order. Immediately everything in the
town was at our disposal, including a Steinway piano.

The first evening in Bernardsville we gathered on the main
terrace. Vistas had been cut in the woods around the estate to
make horizons and I could see distant blue hills which lay like

40

smoke across the valley, with a rising red moon at the end of the
cypress avenue. The silhouette of the trees, reaching into dis-
tance, seemed to touch the moon.

space

Allen had heard of a young ______ composer, George Antheil, the favorite pupil of Ernest Bloch. We invited him to spend a day with us and he answered, "I will come with pleasure since you are interested in modern musics". His plural intrigued us.

An astonishing young person arrived, short, square-shouldered and with the spotty complexion of adolescence. But he carried within him that silent assurance which is the mark of a precocious self-awareness. The disproportion of his body and head, the fixed intense expression of his eyes, his fierce preoccupation with his own thought gave me an impression of genius.

He shook hands with each of us without curiosity, as if he had left us the day before. Then, seeing the piano across the room, he rushed at it. For two long hours we listened to him, mesmerized. In his music was his explanation and his reason for being. When he played his face changed completely, he was no longer red and ugly; an even pallor spread over his features and they became almost classic. Later he told us the tragedy of his existence - the tragedy of those who live in a family which has either finished living or has never lived at all. He said with simplicity that when he received our letter he told his parents he was coming to live with us. He had brought all his possessions in a cardboard valise - manuscripts, music paper, pencils,

india

41

ink and rulers. In the midst of these treasures were one shirt
and two pairs of socks. Since he had neither pajamas nor robe
de chambre, he accepted one of our bathrobes and a pair of sandals.

He worked almost all day and half the night, stopping only
when fatigue or sleep overwhelmed him. He never seemed to eat.
This upset us until Allen discovered that a sack of green apples
was almost empty and cans of baked beans were missing from the
pantry. Evidently George was simplifying his life and we no
longer worried about his immateriality. But we suffered
under his manner of composing. He would choose a theme of five
or six notes and repeat it insatiably for hours on end. He
seemed to hypnotize himself with certain vibrations; then he
would rush to his room and write until the following morning.

Each of us worked alone during the day, not meeting (except
for lunch) until tea-time. We dined at nine and then our great
hours began. I sang Melisande with Allen, whose fluid voice
created a Pelléas that surpassed any I ever heard in a theatre.
George played his "Ballet Mechanique" which had the honour of
being hissed in Paris three years later. Allen, who lived more
at the piano than he did in life, played Debussy and Ravel, Cho-
pin, Schumann, Bach, and his piano transcription of Scribín's
"Poème de l'Extase". Margaret listened in her own lyrical man-
ner, Sometimes, worn-out by vibrations, she rested her beautiful
head on the window-sill, and, capped with moonlight, slumbered
in a halo.

When I think of those rare moments, two memories outshine

42

the others : an early dawn when Bach's deepest pages became for
me almost a discovery; and a hot heavy night, filled with the
life of flowers, which we dedicated to Strauss's "Rosenkavalier".

I remember the adorable waltz as a pool of light where lovely
dancers turned and turned, exhausted with dizziness and grace.

Two o'clock in the morning was supper time, and the hour of
stories and laughter. Sometimes we had guests - a young poet,
Mark Turbyfill, read his latest poem, "Conversation is is Heaven";
a young lawyer played a flute to satisfy his poetic dreams, scat-
tering little sounds of rapture pitifully into the great night.
Then Allen would intone a hymn of parting and we separated. In
the rising dawn there remained only the soft and muffled cry
of an owl.

space

The seasons pass quickly in America. The month of October
had already given us a beautiful autumn, and we knew that winter
would soon overtake us, for America is a country of sudden
changes where nature moves quickly. The trees still held their
coloured leaves when the cold arrived one day with a thin, hard
snow.

The tradespeople had by now caseed their attentions and we
found ourselves beset by impossibilities - impossible to leave
without paying our bills, impossible to live in New York without
money, impossible to buy coal, impossible to stay on without
heat. An inspiration was needed and it was Monique who sup-
plied it by discovering a wood-burning stove in one of the

43

cellars. Although the room was dark, a big electric light bulb hung over an iron-table and a ray of daylight entered from a row of casement windows. Through them we could see a rim of earth and a few tree-trunks. I guessed Monique's idea at once - why not live in this ~~cellar~~ while awaiting events? We would sleep upstairs in the cold and descend in the morning to a warm life around the wood stove.

We installed ourselves at once, carrying down chairs and a chaise-longue, rugs, writing-table, bookcase, firewood, some china and the last of our provisions - cereals and a few tins of food - which we hid behind a screen. We even found two men to carry down the piano. Allen placed candlesticks on the table, a flowered scarf around the light-bulb and some branches in a vase. The stove roared, the canary sang and we gaily drank the last of our Russian tea.

George left for Philadelphia, where he hoped to give recitals, and Margaret and Allen went to New York to see the concert managers for me. I was to remain in the country with Monique, connected with the outside world only by the telephone.

space

Weeks went by, unmarked by any event. I was happy in our cellar and I lived intensely in a strong inner world of silence. Our solitude was total. Snow protected the winter stillness, muting even the sounds of animal life which reached us but faintly; no birds, no bells, no movement but that of the soft snowflakes which seemed to die of their silent fall, yet hour by

44

hour widened the white band at the windows. I watched them with
upturned face, as I sat at the table reading or writing; and I
waited without impatience for the sound of the telephone which
would ring in the great empty house above us, to bring news of
the outside world.

Every morning at nine o'clock I found Monique kneeling before
the cellar stove in her brown dress, a shawl around her shoulders,
her black braids arranged like two little curtains drawn
back to show her face, radiating peace and goodness.

At this hour a little sunlight slipped down our walls. We
missed seeing the sky and we would go out to look at it whenever
the snow stopped falling, but it was always hidden in a frosty
mist. Space had neither form nor colour, and we would return
quickly to our cell. My day began. I knew it would be intact
and that was enough to feel it within me like a flow of beatitude.

It was while watching the snow fall against the black frame
of the window that, for the first time, I began to write poetry.
As sat enclosed within the four walls of grey stone, some lines
in praise of green came from the end of my pencil, like a primary
colour all fresh from the palette, and I wrote a poem to spring.
A new gift of feeling had come to me. A poem, for a poet, is
not merely a literary impulsion but an urgent and veritable nec-
essity. A poet lives, enclosed, in the silent events of his
clamorous world. Poetry is the event which takes place between
himself and language.

45

Early in December I sang at a private soirée in New York and thus was able to pay our debts and leave Bernardsville. In Washington Place, Greenwich Village, I discovered a studio apartment, in old Norman style, with a terrace surrounded by trees.

But again mishaps began to follow like a procession of caterpillars - if the chain is broken for a moment it forms again at once. A potential manager fractured his skull in an automobile accident; another went bankrupt; and a generous woman who wanted to help her found a French Conservatory in New York suddenly died.

We just managed to live. Some new friends organized a series of subscription matinées and I sold some articles and drawings to a newspaper. In June Olga Samaroff Stokowski, the pianist, invited me to visit her in Bar Harbour and give a concert in the Temple of Art, built on a hill overlooking the sea. Walter Damrosch, conductor of the New York Symphony, accompanied the classical part of the program, while Samaroff accompanied the Ravel, Milhaud, Poulenc and Stravinsky songs. This was one of the beautiful concerts of my life. The doors of the Temple were open and as I sang I looked out over bright lawns and black pines to the rhythms of the silent sea.

I met Leopold Stokowski and at once we began to talk of organizing a great manifestation of art. He suggested a grandiose setting for such a project - George Grey Barnard's gothic cloister on upper Riverside Drive, filled with treasures of the Middle Ages brought from France. We would begin with the choir music of Palestrina and I would sing rare pages of Bach, Gluck, Monteverdi, which Stokowski would orchestra. The acoustics were perfect, an

46

orchestra of forty musicians would be hidden in an upper gal-
lery, the proceeds would be given to French and Belgian orphans.
In this presentation I would recapture something of the grandeur
and unique beauty of the "Macbeth" and "Pelléas" productions in
St. Wandrille. The prospect of such a debut in New York exceeded
anything I had dreamed of.

When Stokowski went back to his country house near Philadel-
phia I went there to rehearse with him. He played his superb
orchestrations on the piano, filling the studio with sound. He
himself interested me - his precision of movement, his sharp
glance and accelerated rhythms, his childlike outbursts of en-
thusiastic.

Our matinée was fixed for the thirtieth of October. On the nine-
teenth, in a despairing telegram, Stokowski announced a catas-
trophe. His letter followed:

Dear Georgette Leblanc,

The directors of the Philadelphia
Orchestra will not consent to my giving a concert in New
York without the full orchestra of a hundred and fifty
musicians. They introduced this rule into the status
about two years ago, and I must confess that I had
completely forgotten it. Yesterday I insisted
again to the management. They are absolutely opposed
to the idea that the Orchestra play in New York beyond
the series of its established programs and with a reduce
number of musicians. I feel that I should not attempt
this matinée by gathering together musicians I could find
in New York. I know that you understand the immense
work I have done with my orchestra for the past ten year
rehearsing every morning for seven months of the year to
obtain the quality of tone, flexibility of
ensemble of phrasing which is my ideal. To a certain
I have attained all that; but in two or three rehearsal
it would be impossible for me even to approach the result
which took me so many years to achieve here. My only
thought in arranging this matinée was to collaborate with
you in a manifestation of art of the highest quality. I
cannot forgive myself for having forgotten the practical
side. I am truly desolate.
Leopold Stokowski.

47

There was nothing to do but destroy the programs and posters, and return to subscribers the $2,000 already received from the advance sale of tickets.

I gave a new series of subscription concerts, made three hundred dollars a matinée and many enthusiastic new friends. I see their faces still, I remember what each one did for me, but there were so many of them that I no longer know their names. I am grateful to them as one is grateful to nature or to a tree that one cherishes, without loving separately each of its leaves.

## The Saviours

Each morning for a week Monique had noticed a large dark woman standing behind our windows. One day she stopped Monique in the street and gave her an article she had written about me in a Brooklyn newspaper, but which she had been too shy to send. It was signed "J.Parelli" and in the margin the author had added : "She who passes religiously before your door". Monique was sympathetic to such piety. Madame Parelli said that her admiration for me dated from a recent concert in which I had sung some modern French songs. But it was not the modern that had most captivated her and her husband - it was a famous page of Reynaldo Hahn's that I had sung as an encore. "Never, never, signora", she said, "have I heard Infidelité sung as by Georgette Leblanc".

Monique brought her in to see me. She told me that she and her husband were in the concert business and had been

48

eagerly waiting to hear me sing again. In her extreme ardour she
could scarcely believe that I had no future engagements, that I was
not besieged by managers.

The next day Madame Barelli and her husband came together to
Washington Place. They stood before me, their strongly Italianized
faces glowing with emotion. She was enormous and resembled a
churchbell with a Roman profile at the top. The husband, very thin,
feverishly agitated, always half hidden in his wives great bulk,
made me think of the clapper of the bell. She was the music critic
of an Italian newspaper in Brooklyn, where they lived; he claimed
long experience in the concert field. They had come to implore
me to let them be my managers; they were ready to back me with their
life savings and assured me that my success would be overwhelming,
given the opportunity of a concert in Town Hall under their auspices.
I accepted their offer, convinced that such enthusiasm could only
lead to great things.

I felt less certain of my judgment in the days that followed.
After the Town Hall had been engaged, the Barellis began to reveal
extraordinary ideas of management: they refused to advertise the
concert in the usual way, hinting that they had original methods of
their own. As the weeks went by, these mysterious methods worried
us more and more, but Barelli was beyond all control and would only
repeat like a magician, "You will see, watch closely. Wait for my
surprise".

Three days before the concert Barelli telephoned that his sur-
prise was ready - we were to go and see it at the corner of Broadway
and Forty-second Street. He was waiting for us and pointed at the

49

sky. There, above the signs that advertised Chewing-gums, Soaps,
Vacuum Cleaners and Floor Polish, I saw a poster-portrait of my-
self, enormous in reality but from the street a miniature. The
boundless enthusiasm of the Barellis had exalted me toward the
infinite, convinced that such an ascension into the ether, so saint-
ly a place among the stars, would be irresistible to the public.
Allen tried to explain that New York concert managers never used
the heavens for musical advertisements, nor did concert-goers look
for them there. But Barelli, drunk with importance, was incapable
of listening. He could only stare at the sky, unaware that the
success of the concert, together with his money, had disappeared
into the clouds.

On the night of the concert, at the entrance to Town Hall,
the Barellis stationed themselves on either side of the box-office.
In a loud voice he proclaimed to the public that he was about
to impose a new law in the concert world : none of the usual
free tickets would be available and even the critics could not
enter without paying for their seats. In approval Madame Barelli
thumped the floor with her umbrella, occasionally shouting the
incredible words, "No dead heads for Georgette Leblanc". In de-
fiance, one of the critics managed to slip into the hall - Barelli
pounced upon him, took him by the collar and threw him out. There-
upon most of my potential audience left in disgust, though many
of the critics paid for their tickets and remained.
Facing an almost empty house, I invited the scattered few into
the front rows and sang to them. (Incidentally, the reviews in
the next morning's papers were most kind).

50

Washington Square South

For the past year my friends had watched the rise and fall
of my fortunes like the line of a temperature chart. They had
done their best to help me and now they were tired; they thought
I should return to France. I understood their discouragement,
but I was not tired. Already I had a new plan.

Margaret and I began to search Greenwich Village for a place
where I could give small concerts - a studio, a basement, a vacant
shop. We found something better - the ground floor of an old
house, destined for demolition, at 47 Washington Square South.

We entered a hall, pushed open a door and stood speʃʃbound,
for at the end of the long room we saw a stage . . . Beyond were
two bedrooms, a studio, kitchen, bath. Everything was falling
apart - ceilings were cracked, radiators broken, electric wires
torn out. Each sign of disaster made my hopes rise - who but
myself would want to rent such a place? The astonished landlord
let us have it for thirty dollars a month.

As soon as we moved to Washington Square a deluge of gifts
arrived from the friends who, having advised me to give up hope,
were now sure of my success. They sent furniture, rugs, lamps,
and a blue velvet curtain which we hung across the stage. Allen
arranged the footlights and Margaret hypnotized the Mason and
Hamlin Company into lending us a grand piano.

We sent out invitations for a tea and so many people accept-
ed that my small theatre was filled. I made a little speech from
the stage, saying that I was going to give a concert in this room
every night, that I had prepared ten programs for ten consecutive

51

weeks, and that I would continue to sing here until a backer or
manager appeared. After my speech everyone bought subscription
tickets from Monique who sat beaming at a little table by the door.

I opened my theatre that same week. Each day there were tel-
ephone calls for seats and nearly every evening people were turned
away, owing to lack of space. The concerts began at nine and were
supposed to finish at eleven, but rarely did the audience let me
stop before midnight. Several times I sang until two in the morning.

Thus I launched myself in immense New York, without either
money or a manager.

I have given hundreds of concerts in my life, but the formal
concert with its ceremonial is a torture to me. To cut one's
emotion into a thousand crumbs, bow after each crumb, leave the
stage, come on again, bow again, throw a discreet glance toward
the accompanist to signal "Begin", look serene while one's arteries
beat furiously; then if there is a moment of internal distraction,
the slightest disruption of "the state", all is lost.

*(The formal concert, to me, is anti-natural and its form has always disturbed me even when I am in the audience. In the old days when the singer appeared on the platform, bust extended, white gloves clenched around her sheet of music, oval mouth sending out the sound to right and left like an automatic distributor, I always wanted to flee.)*

I enjoy giving concerts when I can create an atmosphere that is simple and vital. I love to bring the public into close relation to my thought, in an intimacy without ornament or vanity.

This was possible on my little stage in Washington Square, where I often spoke as much as I sang. Sometimes I sat near the edge

52

of the stage and began the evening by talking of my songs and their composers. In this way I could be my real self - I hate everything that does not stem from reality. The night Sarah Bernhardt died I did not sing at all, I could only talk of her - of her courageous life and her magical art. The audience asked torrents of questions and although our evening was without song, the room was filled with the music of her memory.

On the night of the sixty-third concert Monique came running backstage in a flurry of excitement to tell me that a group of eight people had come to hear me for the third time. Peeping through the curtain, I found them at once. They were all in evening dress - three white-haired men and a woman with beautiful jewels, accompanied by four younger people. When the concert was over they sent me their cards and asked if they might stay and talk with me. Monique brought them into the studio and we all sat down around the fire. One of the men, Mr. D., began by saying, in French, that an artist like myself should be heard all over America; and that, if I would accept their help, they would like to make this possible.

How brightly the details of that hour still live in me - the blue sofa on which I sat, the long shadows stretching on the walls, the leaping flames that illumined with a floating light those faces I had never seen until tonight. The sympathetic strangers were offering me the life and work I so longed for. While they outlined their plans for me my mind whirled like a merry-go-round. I kept repeating to myself, "It's a fairy-tale, how can they know everything I desire? Is this really happening to me?" I listened as in a trance while they

53

planned how they would organize an art corporation which would feature all my talents - singing, acting, writing, lecturing. These people considered me a business and I was almost dead of happiness. I had always dreamed of being exploited like an object - "Will you do this or that, and on what date?"; to be free of all business talk; to have just enough to live on, leaving the rest of the profits to the company, but in heaven's name not to participate in the life of the box-office. When I said goodnight to them I felt something of the awe one always feels when the impossible has been made to happen because of one's indomitable belief in it.

During the next week we discussed plans almost daily. After everything had been settled, Mr. D. came to Washington Square to say that it would be simpler if he alone assumed the direction of the corporation, suggesting that I be president, Margaret vice-president, and he himself business manager and general director. I accepted and the next day we signed the formal papers.

## The Tragedy of the Excessive

I had already experienced American generosity, but now I was to know super-generosity. I had wanted necessities, now I was surfeited with luxuries. A chauffeur was always stationed at the door, I was submerged with prima-donna gifts. Of all these the only offerings I really enjoyed were the enormous boxes of bon-bons and the great baskets of hot-house fruits from which Monique made that American ambrosia - grape-juice filled with

54

peaches, oranges, grape-fruit, pineapples, cherries and bananas, sparkling through a crystal pitcher like a jeweller's window.

When an office was rented in my name in one of the tallest buildings in the city, my state bordered on ecstacy. This high heaven consisted of two rooms - one for me and one for my personal manager, Louise Davidson, with her secretary. Type-writers stood ready for action under their oil-cloth covers, and on the shelves were stacks of stationary engraved with the words, "Art Direction Georgette Leblanc, Inc." With such an organization I would be able to help other artists arriving in America as I had, with nothing but dreams. This idea still shines in my memory as the gold letters of my name shone on that door on the (twenty-) third floor of the Fisk Building.

The fairytale continued through the spring and I never suspected that it might come to an end. But unfortunately I have never lived wisely in relation to great happiness - I consume it with all my strength. Instead of fore-seeing possible pitfalls in this unprecedented utopia, I treated it as if it were inexhaustible. Blissful and imprudent, I decided to go to Paris and bring back to America all the interesting new music of the modern French composers. During my absence a coast-to-coast concert tour would be prepared for the autumn, Mr. D. having decided that it would be easier to launch me as an arrival from the French capital than as an artist who had been stranded in New York for two years. Margaret, Monique and I sailed for France at the end of May.

In Paris, at the suggestion of my corporation, I rented

55

a beautiful old house in a beautiful old garden in the rue Vaneau. Then from New York I began to receive letters from the head of the corporation, practical, full of business advice. Gradually their tone changed and they became personal. I was urged to buy a château, jewels, furs. I could only pretend not to understand, confident that my seeming blindness would be enough to prevent the customary - and classic - debacle. That confidence was abruptly shattered by a letter - an all-too-human letter, as desolating as it was precise. (* over).

I did not hesitate a second ... The fairytale had lasted four months.

space

I returned immediately to New York to salvage what I could of the situation. My office in the Fisk Building was closed and the gold letters on the door no longer shone. The corporation had been dissolved, but a sum of money had been set aside to meet the expenses of the coast-to-coast concert tour. Although I knew the perils of such an undertaking, I started out with victorious conviction.

The tour was all I had hoped for - indeed I can almost call it a miracle, since I owed no money at the end. My greatest reward from it was the appreciation I found everywhere, even in the smaller cities, for the exquisite music of France.

56

Back in New York, many of my friends insisted that I should
take legal action against my corporation. No, a thousand times
no. There are beautiful seasons in human lives; one must learn
that they pass quickly. I have nothing but infinite gratitude
toward those people who wanted to give me what they judged to
be more than _________ that which I wanted.

And, besides, my attention was already elsewhere. I have
spoken of an event which was to change the course of my life.
It now took place. The man named Gurdjieff, whose "unknown
doctrine" had so impressed me a year before at the Ouspensky
lecture, gave his first talk in America. As I listened to him
speak of God, universe and man, I realized that for the first
time I had come upon a cosmology that gave promise of not ending
in an impasse.

I resolved that nothing would prevent me from hearing more
of this man's vast knowledge. My corporation had guaranteed our
return passage to Europe and I began to put my affairs in order.
A few months later, when Gurdjieff announced his return to France,
we were ready to follow.

57

Chapter 4 The Flowering of a Field

Le Château du Prieuré

Fontainebleau-Avon, France

in Fontainebleau-Avon,

And so it was that in June, 1924, Margaret, Jane, Mon-ique and I went to stay at the Château du Prieuré, for it was there that Gurdjieff lived and received people who sought him out from all over the world.

My impression of Gurdjieff was that he resided on the earth as on a planet too limited for his own needs and function. Where did he manifest his real existence? In his teaching, in his writings, not at all in ordinary life which he seemed to regard as a vast blague and manipulated with resignation or impatience.

I was not at all astonished that he was little known, that he was not surrounded by thousands of followers. Neither money nor influence could open the doors of the Prieuré - Gurdjieff created all possible obstacles to discourage any idler-spirits who might push their way into a world where they did not belong.

I have never been able to acclimatize myself to esoteric cults and doctrines with their vague followers - instinctively I turn away. On the contrary, the sharp climate of Gurdjieff's mentation held me. It was a difficult climate; to live in it one had to possess an invincible need.

To know something of the stature of the man one had to listen to the reading of his manuscript - an enormous work in nine parts. My silent listening disappointed many in the audience

58

who expected some audible sign of my interest; but I was
entirely preoccupied in the process of absorbing, like
a plant that has waited for water all its life.

"I cannot develop you", Gurdjieff told me, "I can create conditions in which you can develop yourselves".

Those conditions were hard, yet my greatest distress was
not to have known earlier this hard instruction. In the begin-
ning it seemed heartbreaking to approach such truths at last and
to have so few years left to give to them. But soon the fact
that I was working within myself, with an unawakened part of my
nature, supplied me with a new strange energy. From now on I
would know how to use the time remaining to me - I pictured my-
self as a honeycomb with each cell waiting to be filled.

I followed avidly the daily manastic life of the Prieuré -
the conversations, the readings, the communal work in the garden.
Each day I tried to foresee the stage through which I would pass
and I laughed at myself, at this poor human being who dared to
say: "I want to be", I dedicate my life to this end". It was
like saying "I shall work to fly like a bird". A scale ran from
tadpole to bird, and I did not know the number of notes. I knew
only that each note led to the next and that nothing in the world
- book, word or prophesy - would help me to know in advance what
the next one would be. It would depend essentially on my
organism.

What astonished me was not to understand a little, but to
see that some people - newcomers to the Prieuré - did not under-
stand at all. I sometimes had flashes of "consciousness" so

59

strong that a heat invaded me. Every hour I became aware of a
"soul" I had not nurtured.

Two stories for each individual . . . himself and his shade
(that is, his "soul"). His appearance comes and goes with a name,
a situation; his shadow - a reality which exists only by virtue of
light - awaits its hour and enters _en scène_ only at the end. I saw
myself, like all human beings, as a repetition-machine; and I had
always aspired to a different state. Too long now I had rested in
that illusory "I" that is like a Chinese _magot_ whose head nods "yes"
perpetually to all our blindnesses, perpetually approves all our ⌄
acts. Now I wanted to finish with all that old automatic life, so
pleasant but so null - human life which leads to nothing unless it
leads to everything. I began to work to change, and I felt as if
I were being torn from my roots. Why should I cling so hard to that
which I no longer clung to, which I had never really clung to? Did
I underestimate the power of the bonds which attached me to . . .
nothing? Yes. I had thought myself different from my parents ⌄
because I had lived my life differently. But what essential diff-
erence is there in that? It is only the menu of days, like the menu
of meals.

space

I am always asked, in respect of this cosmogony which has now
held my attention for so many years, "Is your source the same as
Katherine Mansfield's?" I answer, "Yes, in fact; no, in essence"

In her _Journal_ Katherine Mansfield wrote of the last months
of her life at the Prieuré. It is not known that Gurdjieff had

60

admitted her to his Institute with a reservation (to his inti-
mates) : that it was too late to help her physically, but
possible to help her in other ways.

It is of these "other ways" that her *Journal* and Letters record less than she was able to express in her conversations with Orage. The greatness of Katherine was her sincerity. She was not pious, yet she felt the need of a redemption, of a system of "purity". She wanted a spiritual life stripped of the clichés of religion. This spirituality of which she had such a magnificent need can be had without recourse to Gurdjieff - it already exists in the best of religion. It can be had without great effort. Gurdjieff offers much more. He is not consoling; he is better than that. What he offers is hard, like the teaching of Jesus - if one gets to its source. There is no Truth that is *complaisante*. I think that the first requisite for an approach to Gurdjieff is a condition of health; one must be in full force to support the first shocks. There is, to begin with, the inconceivable torment of feeling oneself a ground that is being ploughed up. All at once our forces are solicitated for an unknown labour. It is impossible. The more one sees and understands the more one thinks "I cannot". But is it our forces that are solicited? No. It is a question of forces that we have never used, that we are ignorant of. . . new energies awakened by a new need, towards a new goal.

This awakening was what Katherine experienced with Gurdjieff's teaching at the Prieuré.

space

Although at the Prieuré I experienced a happiness beyond
any I had ever known, I also fell from despair to despair.

Alfred A. Orange, one-time editor of the English *New Age*, and known to some in America as the 

Hedley's

61

[My anxiety was total, I live the meaning of the word "boul-
versée". At each instant I touched the depths of my distress -
a vague distress in which I did not entirely participate. Even
when a new flash of understanding came to me I felt more lost
than ever. The essential that I was seeking remained hidden from
my sight. My only hope of finding it lay in my capacity for
effort.

"But why do you want this knowledge?" my old friends asked.
Strange question. No one asks "Why do you want happiness?" To
me knowledge - or rather, understanding - is a perfect synonym for
happiness. Others said, "Never look inside yourself, it is fatal
; or, "What can one do with one's life when one has lost all il-
lusions?" I answered, "That's as if a farmer said, ✓ All the
weeds in my fields have been pulled up, what can I do with the
ground now?"

Years and years ago I used to think ◐ "Our natures should
be ploughed up as the ground is ploughed". But where was the
plough, and who would guide it? Alone we could do nothing. The
plough and the planter were as necessary as the seed.

Gurdjieff's "method" indicated the instrument and the guide.
They were ready and waiting; it was for me to be ready and willing.
Wish, need, effort - it was with these requirements that one ap-
proached that "other life" with its special efforts, its new laws,
its different evolution which tended to change even the chemistry
of one's organism. It was to be a difficult life. At the Prieuré
I watched certain people stop half-way, renounce or branch off,
become enemies and enroll themselves in some promising system

62

which guatanteed paradise at the end of their days. Sometimes they returned to religion and declared themselves "touched by grace" - a grace which usually corresponded to their most material needs and in which they installed themselves comfortably, with all their luggage, as if for a voyage. They took a one-way ticket to paradise, but I noticed that more often than not they changed it for a round-trip.

What an error it is to believe that suffering alone is enough for self-development. If it were, our planet would already be covered with saints and angels. Suffering kills some people; others are deformed by it; some become mad; only a few improve or progress. One must have more knowledge to benefit by suffering.

All my life I had instinctively been a believer, but I could not accept the God proposed by religion . . . a God conceived merely as a refuge or a hope, when He should be the divine progression of the soul which contains Him. But every human being is the mirror of the God he conceives, and most are pocket-mirrors.

During all my first months at the Prieuré my ground was being ploughed. For a long time I thought I had recognized my nonentity; for a long time I thought I had known my vanity. Now I saw that this judgment was still a kind of vanity. So I watched myself, I began to know myself a little.

Space

63

Chapter Five

A Lighthouse and a Hunting-Lodge

For two years we live at intervals at the Prieuré. From
then until 1935 we encountered Gurdjieff more rarely but we con-
tinued to live, as far as we could, according to his principles,
incorporating his doctrine more and more deeply.

To solve the problem of material living we searched every-
where for a background of peace where we could work quietly and
alone, finding it at last in an old Normandy village called Tancar-
ville. We were living in the château, and, strolling one morning on a white road beside the Seine, we looked up to the top of
a cliff and saw a turret, like a great tulip emerging from the
woods on a grey sky. It was the belvedere of an abandoned light-
house, suspended between heaven and earth. The peasants told us
it had not been used for many years, that no one could live in it
"on account of the boredom", that it couldn't even be approached
because brambles had overgrown the path. Nevertheless we scaled
the heights, rented it for fifty francs a month and installed
ourselves as in the stratosphere. Every year, for thirteen years,
at the green season, it has offered us its divine expanse of sky,
fields and river.

Living in it, one fancies one's self en voyage. Its beauty
is transfigured at every moment of the day and night. Beacon light
pass softly across the water at evening, the silence is broken
only by the metallic cry of gulls or the singsong murmur of night

64

birds. The fog bell has a voice of transition and departure -
clear with good weather, sad and breathless when the mist envel-
opes us. Here everything is excessive - the cold, the sun, the =
luxury of the stars. On nights of tempest one is shipwrecked and
the dawn that returns to earth comes like a benediction.

space

For the winters, near Paris, I found something else - the
Château de la Muette, in the depths of the forest of St. Germain.
We came upon it by chance and stopped at the gates, under the
chestnut trees. To the right was an old well, to the left an
iron gate - open. We went in. The dull sound of footsteps on
the moss-covered stones instantly filled me with emotion. At the
first turning I saw the semicircle formed by the great trees
that surround the château. By the outline of these masses
against the sky I knew this was the étoile I had been told about
- a star of avenues, all leading to this old hunting-lodge of
Louis XV.

Walking on, I stood before the curved façade with steps
that descended into a circular court. I saw the grace of the
diminutive paving stones, laid out in careful circles that ex-
tended as far as the abandoned garden. This garden had retained
its old design, made by borders of box that enclosed the once-
flowering beds, now filled with a wild sea-green plant. In the
heights of the forest trees I heard the airy conversation of
spring, and deeper in the shadows shimmered the silver trunks of
birch trees. The noble semi-circle that had so immediately

65

moved me was composed of chestnut trees. They had not yet put
forth the thousands of white bells that announce the arrival of
summer, but their thick leaves were massed on the boughs.

I stepped into the garden. The grass bore the imprint of a
horse's hooves, a child's ball lay under a bush, a handkerchief
of transparent mauve was caught on a bramble. The last light of
the sun was coming through the trees in 🌒 pale slanting rays, a
bird's fragile call crystallized the silence, and everything gave
off a perfume of antiquity. I felt that a future of enchanted
moments was waiting me here in this hushed and fragrant forest.

The Château de la Muette, classed as an historic monument,
belonged to the Ministry of the Beaux Arts. No one had lived in
it for a long time. The Marquise de la Pompadour, one of its
ancient inhabitants, wrote to Voltaire : "The salons are splendid,
but the rest is peu de chose". I admired indeed the three great
salons on the ground floor - the rotonde, lofty as the nave of a
church, adorned with exquisite boiseries, its windows arched in
that full curve that I love to the point of constructing it where-
ver I live; but "the rest" didn't disappoint me - on the contrary.
I cannot live daily life with ease in great spaces, therefore the
"peu de chose" of la Pompadour had everything to charm me - low
rooms, uneven ceilings, deep fireplaces, worn mirrors and closed
alcoves that seemed made to hold dreams. The third floor, where
it is said the Abbé Provost wrote "Manon", pleased me still more -
amusing mansard ceilings, walls formed by the exterior architecture,
and on the roof a wide terrace that advanced like a ship's prow
over an ocean of trees. All the windows and doors, wide or
narrow, disclosed sumptuous masses of 🌒 forest.

66

space

The Muette was uninhabitable, therefore habitable for us. We rented it.

There was no gas, no electricity, no heating. An ancient stove refused to burn, a luxurious bathroom was without water. The cracked faucets, the wall-paper peeling like eucilyptus trees, the holes in the roof showing the sky - all demanded enormous repairs. The Beaux Arts promised to undertake them. They deliberated the matter for two years.

Without waiting for repairs we moved in. We had the fundamentals - a well, candles and firewood. The doors and windows of the old château couldn't be tightly closed, so at night we felt unsafe. We needed a gardian.

On Christmas Eve, a night of snow and moonlight, a German police dog slipped into our kitchen. The colour of over-done bread, and as ferocious as a wild beast, he had an incomprehensible charm. He understood that he must please us and he succeeded. I named him Thomas-the-Imposter.

Thomas had an exaggerated conception of his duty - in eighteen months he attempted to devour nine people. He retained from his former unknown life a hatred of man, a love of automobiles, a horror of cities and an adoration of women. Often he was only a dog, but at other times he disconcerted us with a certain expression, a human way of demanding attention and holding it. Then his bright nervous eyes became insistent and filled with melancholy. He begged for affection and clung to it with real distress.

67

The situation became acute. It was impossible to chain
up such a creature and it was impossible to expose visitors to
him any longer. I began to search for a comfortable home for my
dear friend. What he needed was a widow with a large walled-in
property. After weeks of vain inquiries, Thomas's death became
imperative. A few hours before the time set for execution a pre-
monition made me return to the veterinary's. There I found a
woman who was demanding for that very night a watchdog that had
bitten at least several people. Her husband had just died and she herself was dying of fright in her château - a property
comprising four acres surrounded by walls. Evidently Thomas had
been born under a lucky star . . .

space

The nights in the forest of the Muette were of a complex
magnificence. We could not resist exploring their secret shad-
ows - we needed to share the solitude of the earth, listen to
the breathing of the sleeping trees, distinguish little by little
the furtive forms of rabbits or squirrels, terrified at our ap-
proach. Nights of fog were still more secret. The shrouded for-
est was visible only where an impetuous branch had torn aside the
mist. Its smell stung our throats, its vapours drenched
our hair, we brought it home clinging to our clothes. On such
nights the forest held a treachery that made one think of the sea.

Sometimes, protected by the shadows, deer came out to play
around the pavillon. We heard their trotting steps approach,
breaking the little branches in their path. The youngest hind

68

came bounding, as if late for a rendez-vous. On moonlight nights they played and danced, animating this abandoned place with scenes of grace; then all at once they were seized with panic and took flight, darting away together. The shadows absorbed them, nothing remained but the moon and its serenity.

They we would go indoors, guided by a lamp in a window. We crossed the rotonde where my big crystal ball monopolized the light. It has been with me always and has defied the destiny of fragile things. Shining and flawless, I see it in my memory as it reflected each year the multicoloured light of a Christmas tree.

## Dreams and their Language

It was at the Muette and the lighthouse that I wrote "Souvenirs" (Volume I: My Life with Maeterlinck).

During the years since my return from America, I had felt like an automobile with its motor racing at a hundred miles an hour in a closed garage. I began slowly to realize that I was not yet in a proper state to begin a new life. I was running away from something, I was still fleeing from a suffering which I couldn't cure because I didn't yet understand it. One day a friend said to me, "You'll never recover your equilibrium until you've ruthlessly analyzed your past, and the best way to do that is to write about it". I agreed, but I knew that it would be profoundly painful and I waited five years before beginning my book How could I have written it sooner? For years I had felt that I

This book bore no relation to the memoirs that had appeared in the "Sunday American". And the Dodd Mead edition was never published.

69

was dragging after me a corpse larger than myself - the corpse of
my dead life, a life I had given away and that had returned to me
after twenty years. How long and difficult they were, those after-
years in which I had to create a perspective in the center of an
endless tragedy - a tragedy of astonishment. Oh, to live on was
simple - implacable Nature takes care of that. But to live a new
life was not simple. As in a film one has seen many times, I saw
myself making the same mistakes, adopting the same "ideals", begin-
ning the same cycles. Every day I forced myself to revise and dis-
card. Suspended between my dead past and my unconceived future, I
fell between the two. I knew the special agony of a being lost in
time who could no longer accept herself. It was then that I went
to America, where I began to speak, to think, in two mingled lan-
guages. Emerging from my native speech, I moved in a new space. I
breathed again.

It was now ten years since my separation from Maeterlinck. I
have a slow-motion heart, I do not know what it is to forget, nor
do I believe it possible. The four-footed animal doesn't forget,
nor does the human animal; only the latter doesn't like to admit
it. Some people wish to bury the past, but it haunts them; some
vilify it; some ridicule it. Some people drag their pasts behind
them without knowing it; others nourish the disarray of their
sorrow and cling to it because they have natures that have stopped
like clockwork - they are the false consolables, greatly admired by
the world. None of this is real. In every case the ability to
forget seems to me an invention.

space

70

space

I finished "Souvenirs" in Paris, in 1932, and it was published by Bernard Grasset. Unfortunately Grasset chose to launch it with an introduction by himself into which he inserted the idea that the book was a revindication on my part. "Revindication" is one of those words to which calumny rushes and clings. This deforming preface, concealed from me until the day of publication, was also built on the idea that the love story revealed in "Souvenirs" was not a great love but merely littérature - "amour en papier".

A literary love? Mon dieu, if I had really been able to bridge the hiatus that exists between life and poetry, to love as in a poem, without allowing the corrosion of life to tarnish the conception of the poet . . . this is indeed what I had wanted, what I had tried to do.

space

Each life begins with the same choice before it - to follow one's parents or one's dreams. Like all artists, I was born closer to my dreams than to the world. The destiny of dreams includes every catastrophe. But the world does not tell us what we will gain by dreaming. It doesn't know. That remains our sumptuous secret - a secret that depends on the stakes for which we play and the totality of the risks we take.

In spite of the vagueness of dreams and the grace which they bestow, I had needed to give a certain form to my secret life. I loved it too much to limit it to my personality and its

71

turmoils; I tried to construct it, chisel it like an object,
to conform to my idea. Formed by dreams and their language,
the artist creates in the material world the super-normal life
which is his oxygen. He does not live by illusion or delusion,
as is believed, but by the affirmations of the sun
within him.

All poets have expressed their love. Veiled or not, it is
visible. One may dislike the manner or form of its revealment,
but who would dare to disfigure its emotion even if it seemed
impossible or absurd? Even at the infamous trial of Wilde, when
the stolid British jury was judging "the love which dares not
speak its name", they dared not say "the love which did not
exist".

It was this criterion that defined the exact nature of the
shock I received on reading Grasset's preface. It was the curious
case of a publisher interpreting an author according to his own
private psychology. The act, though not grave in itself, attacked
me gravely. I knew that a sacrilege had been committed. I forced
myself to reread Grasset's words. I read them with the tips of
my eyes, and my revolt rose to a point that made my life tremble.
Why should I suffer so because a Grasset had misinterpreted me?
Was it my vanity that was wounded? No, my vanity is greater than
that.

But the fact that my life's story should be associated with
the vulgarity of soul that emanated from Grasset's pages embarrass
ed me to the point of repugnance. To stop the sale of the book
I consulted Moro-Giafferi, the celebrated lawyer. To my stup-

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73

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efaction he tried to convince me that I was wrong. "But you haven't read the book", I said, "I have no bitterness; it's idiotic". His taut face crinkled into a cabbage, he held out the palms of his hands; his long practice of manipulating in the void helped him to find arguments for Grasset's defense. I listened to his voice, an instrument on which he played like a virtuoso; I watched his mouth with its Louis XVI curves, and I understood that he could scarcely see me through the fog of his own importance. Of course he and Grasset were of the same opinion - for them there could be no love where there was neither possessiveness nor scenes of jealousy. With this bourgeois preface they could raise their arms high en comarade, they could "come down to earth", "be themselves" again, resume the familiar sniffings of a dog-to-dog humanity.

In any case my position was hopeless as I had not stipulated, in writing, that the preface should be submitted to me before publication. I decided that I would trust my book to the understanding of the public, knowing that human instinct always understands three elementals that have an unchanging greatness - life, love, death. So I accepted the publication and wrote in all the copies sent to the press : "Please judge this book on what it contains, not on the preface".

I learned later that the copies thus signed had been deby Grasset's order.

stroyed

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Four Days of Snow

It was arranged that I should drive to Paris every day, to Grasset's offices in the rue des St. Pères, to sign all press copies. Since I had accepted the situation, there was nothing to do but follow its mechanism.

The first morning as I left the Muette it was snowing. The forest was a scene of marble and the trees of the bridlepaths formed solid porticos against the sky. The car advanced over a crust of ice that crackled like mica. For once the forest and the snow were only an empty landscape to me - the partitions of my being were emptied of everything but sound, like the feeling that comes after a fall.

Once again, in a time of sorrow, the pale snow was falling and I remembered another day of snow... in a Paris street four years ago. I was stepping from a taxi to the curb when there passed, close to me, almost touching my cape, a person I had not seen for the centuries that follow a final separation. Standing motionless, without breathing, I felt all my blood flowing away at my feet. Maeterlinck stopped farther on before the window of a bookshop. I overtook him. Against the dark bindings of the books the glass reflected his face, I saw him as in still water. I wanted to say "Comment vas-tu?" - meaning for him to hear, "What has become of your life, the life one does not see?" But we stood side by side in silence - he not seeing, I seeing too much; seeing so well that I let him go his way, fearing he might reply, "Très bien, et vous?"

space

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Space

As I entered the Grasset offices, columns of packages of "Souvenirs" greeted me. On a table beside them were stacked the wrappers in which each book was to be enclosed : "Une femme donna sa vie et se pris à le regretter".

Snow was falling in the narrow court, in front of the glass-enclosed office where I sat writing my dedications. Grasset stood in the corridor, a dead cigarette extending beyond his profile. He is supposed to have an intimidating back; it is merely a back full of assurance, like that of a sergeant snapping out commands. Finally he came in to say, "Listen, Georgette Leblanc, I didn't think you would be so angry. You certainly haven't waited all your life to be tricked by me. You must be used to it by now".

People can be divided into those who trick and those who are tricked. To trick eats up all one's time, and besides one must keep one's eyes eternally fixed on the ground, like a chicken. I could have protected myself against Grasset's trickery by carrying my vanity before me as a shield, like the people who cry, "You can do these things to other people but you can't do them to me!" Such people are respected, like the walls on which it is forbidden to paste advertisements. But I too have a protection - it is my lightning-rod destiny. Those who sympathize with my misadventures would be consoled if they realized that the lightning-rod, not myself, receives the full shock of my life's disasters.

See
back of page

....

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Two years had scarcely passed when we had to give up the Muette. As soon as the first repairs were finished the rent was raised. Moreover, the Beaux Arts planned to arrange the château for the Président du Conseil's week-ends, thus making it and its haunting charm an accessory of the République.

space

A year ago, in the late autumn, I returned to the Muette one day. A whirl of dead leaves welcomed me. I saw again the young wistaria, but the sound of bees no longer came from its clusters. Farther along, on the north wall, I could almost see the invisible flowers which, in summer, colour the old stones as they did in the cloister I loved. As I stood on the perron the memory of an evening's fête came back to me : darkness had taken possession of skies and forms; on a table pink roses lay in a bowl; candle flames, blown by a breeze, formed chains of wax tears that clung to the candleabras, diffusing an odour of tapers and oblivion.

For the last time I looked down the long avenue of chestnut trees towering above me like high walls of gold. From time to time a golden leaf floated down in a slow spiral, returning gently to the earth.

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# Chapter six

## Letters to a Young Student

The years passed quickly . . . In 1935 circumstances permitted me to see Gurdjieff constantly, often daily.

As time went on, the material of my former life had begun to recede. It was my first life, the life none of us knows how to live except in disorder and bewilderment. I was now ready to give all my energy to those conditions which Gurdjieff had named as the terms of development. It was not easy. I felt like a bird tapping to get out of its shell. What lay beyond, for me, would be as different as the world outside the shell would be for the bird.

I was slowly changing, and sometimes I was afraid of no longer recognizing myself. Between the non-existent image which had been my companion and this new image that I barely saw, a fog was rising. In it both images were obliterated and I pursued them blindly, afraid of finding neither.

Often I wanted to escape, to turn away from this super-science which demanded too much of me. Yet escape seemed criminal, as well as impossible. A truth once perceived, even for a second, is never lost; it comes to light again in spite of everything. And if one wants to live this truth, one realizes that one has been promised to it, that all the events of a lifetime have been converging toward it.

1936 arrived. . . The writing of "Souvenirs" and the continuous effort demanded in working with Gurdjieff had helped me to emerge from my tragedy of astonishment.

To clarify myself further, I tried again to write. I wanted my new book to be a simplification of life and its

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motivations, not a literary book made with words considered
appropriate to such material. After months of effort, of daily
rejection of phrases that recurred in a sickening pattern of
<u>littérature</u>, I stopped. To cure this <u>maladie de métier</u> I began
to write a series of letters to a young friend who had
always enjoyed asking me questions on these subjects I most liked
to talk about.

Writing

I shall try to talk to you in letters as I do when I am with
you. When I talk with you I am aided by your attention - you
know how to listen. Though it is always easy for me to talk, a
terrible anguish seizes me when I try to write - at least to
write for the public. How can I destroy this anguish? I want
to write as I write letters, as I talk with one person, not with
people. Writing to a friend is a liberation for me, I see the
<u>chose de vie</u> coming to life on paper. It is this"thing of life"
that I desire above and beyond everything. It is the blood of
words. To transfuse it with paper is the most difficult problem
of my present life, even more difficult than living without
anything to live on.

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I must try to express myself once and for all as if, should I fail, the penalty would be electrocution. I must at last express myself without using a single inflated word. Ah! those words like balloons, they are at the root of my suffering. I have come to realize their emptiness and that is the reason I have fallen into this strangling, speechless state. To have become mute, I, who breathe only through exultation! That is why this morning I threw myself upon this sheet of paper, to talk to you. I will not leave this letter until I have said all I must say.

Always, from all the people who have lived close to me, I have heard the same plea: "Write as you talk". What prevents me from doing it? The effort I am now making is so torturing to me that my heart pounds, my throat is closed, my hands burn like white coals. Why, why all this? Because the moment To finish this book has come, because I must give out the too-much that is in me - that too-much which I used to send out over the footlights. But now I must give more than in any theatre, because there is at stake my soul itself, made of all I have lived felt, understood, loved and hated. All this is fermenting in my mind, you see, and I can no longer endure it.

Most writers have one personality on paper and another in life. I discovered this when I was very young. Later, when I began to labour over the craft of writing, Maeterlinck told me that I would never develop a technique unless I gave up my insistence on being real, exactly myself. "You must create a double for yourself, it is more urgent than a style. You are as serious as a donkey, and you have the obsession of authenticity. Make your

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‘double’ insoujant and superficial, then he will help you".
He called words the "cement". "One small idea should suffice
for an article", he used to say; "on this idea you build a
scaffold of hypotheses and cement them with words a l'infini.
That is the way to work". I didn't try. To me an article should
be like a foot-bridge - a solid plank for each step. It preferred
to follow the advice of Anatole France : "Live, love as much
as possible, then you will write". "But it may be too late", I
said. "There is plenty of time to bore oneself", he said, his
black silk cap quivering on his skull. Madame de Caillavet
came in - she had heard the last words. Her eye, that of a hen
of the <u>grand siècle</u>, flayed the pitiful Anatole who quickly
ran down like a top. "Don't listen to him, he's only a lazy-
bones", she said, dropping her words as if they were red-hot.
Then she left the room, delighted to have spoiled Anatole's
pleasure. He murmured, embarrassed, "She's right, without her
I wouldn't work at all".

Writers of novels disguise their true selves, yet it is
easy to recognize them under their make-up. But the minds of
essayists, moralists and philosophers, when they write, seem to
look through a pane of coloured glass which fades when their
work is done. In my youth the letters of Flaubert meant more
to me than his books. I was advised to read the letters of
Madame de Sevigné and I detested them. Later on I could analyze
the process of this fabricated naturalness. It is simian - or
would be if a monkey could write with talent in imitation of
man and the nature of man. The letters of Madame de Sevigné are

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but an excuse to play to the gallery - pirouettes, ronde de jambes, garlands of the epoch, verve, sparkle, cleverness. That is why they could not satisfy me. Always, in all things and at all ages, I have been impressed only by life - simple and all-powerful life.

In 1908 Colette wrote me, propos my first book, "The Choice of Life" : "But I won't dare talk with you any more. You say 'We lose nothing when a desolating truth takes the place of a beautiful illusion'. Will I ever be able to think so nobly? No, I even believe I would be sad. You must forgive me but I lack, among so many other things, the 'need for knowledge'. To be half ignorant, to fear, to disdain, to desire passionately (but without perseverance), to detest and to curse (to the point of blows) - this is the fate to which I must be left. I have been astonished - forgive me, yes, astonished - by the inexhaustible force one feels in you. I wish you were queen of something or somewhere - people would be astounded".

AS for Colette's writing, the technical schooling that Willy imposed on her was simple and objective, with vacuous metaphors forbidden. Also, Colette is essentially a conformist. When she is not writing divinely about nature and animals, her pattern holds her close to social life, the life that is lived by everyone. It is here that her great talent lies, in a world that bores me but to which she gives of her energy as in a blood transfusion. Her characters are more alive in her pages than in life, where they think of nothing but their own petty affairs.

Colette is not separated from her talent. That is her force, and it is characteristic of the greatest women writers.

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My sole ambition is to identify myself as closely as possible with
my material. Am I doing it in this letter? I don't know. I have
left off and taken it up again twice, without rereading. I suppose
there is wastage in it, as in talk, but does it matter? I want to
look further than that.

I want to write as I see, as I speak. I see before I think.
It is this function that suggests poems to me. When I draw, the
first line expresses the salient characteristic - a living person is
there on the paper. The line shows the person as a word should re-
present a thought - no artificial form encloses the idea, only the
one created by the material itself, its size and its structure.

Mon dieu! if I should count the hours, the days, the years, I
have spent sitting before a blank page of paper, they would add up
to a lifetime. It is like having lived in a glass bowl, revolving,
without being able to break through the crystal globe. Even when
I ceased my whirling struggles I remained a prisoner of them. Don't
think I am exaggerating. My efforts to write were in proportion
to my need; without that need to express myself I would have long
ago given up the struggle. I have trunks of manuscripts and have
published only five books. You may wonder how I was able to finish
"Souvenirs". The answer is simple - I had signed a contract,
agreed to a publication date. All that is worth anything in the
book welled up in me at rare moments, due no doubt to some uncon-
scious pressure of nature; the rest was achieved with difficulty,
slowly, as if it were being torn from me. Either I advanced or
I was blocked. When I advanced the writing was immediate, content
and form were one, there was nothing that I could arrange afterward.

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When I was blocked, it was the terrifying glass bowl again, and
the frantic whirling.

Am I suddenly liberated, or shall I discover in these pages
the restriction I hate and that I never feel when a poem comes to
me, forms in me, and goes out from me quite simply? A poem to
me, is a sorrow that rises and descends. It depends on a vision,
in which I see the sorrow like a picture drawn by my nerves. Why
not write prose with the same simplicity? I do not know.

Margaret often says, "Write what you have just said to me,
it is full of personal information."

Since my nature has not diminished, since time has slowed
down nothing in me, I should, I must, be able to express myself
as I wish. I must find a way to write simply and easily
about the subject-matter which passionately interests me - personal information.

## Singing

Today I should like to talk about the mysterious substance
that is called Art.

You tell me that Madame B., the singer, is an artist. I am
shocked, as I used to be before I knew why I suffered when I
listening to good singers who lacked all sense of art. To be a
good singer or a good musician is not necessarily a more subtle
matter than to be a good cook.

You add that Madame B. lives like an artist. But appearances
have nothing to do with it; and what does that mean - to "live
like an artist"? Think of Mallarmé - outwardly a man like any

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other, a modest professor of English whom no one would have noticed in a crowd. But the hours I spent with him, in the little room where he worked, are unique in my memory. Seated at a fragile writing-table, a Scotch shawl over his shoulders, he explained to me his theory of the written language. I only half understood; at twenty it was difficult and I was too dazzled by his mind. But I was conscious of being in the presence of one of the rarest artists who ever lived.

I know nothing of the life of Madame B. and have no desire to know more. It is enough to hear her sing the first measures of a song to know that she will go as on wheels to the end and that nothing will "arrive". You understand me? With the born artist something always arrives. A world of new emotion knocks you breathless and leaves you unconscious of everything except it.

space

When I was twelve, in Rouen, I had a little pianist friend, [signature] slightly younger than I, who was a "prodigy". She played the most complicated Beethoven sonatas, and all Chopin without blinking. Her dimpled hands had to cheat in order to hurdle the arpeggios. Small and round, she was hoisted on to a pile of piano scores and immediately began to play, her fingers scratching the keys in a frenzy. Crouched over the keyboard of an immense [signature] concert piano, curved far forward and dressed in pink silk, she made me think of a shrimp. All her family, clothed in black, sat very straight on the Louis Philippe chairs that were grouped

83

around the Pleyel. The "connoisseurs" in the audience exchanged glances when the child's virtuosity carried her over perilous passages. These people were what are called *braves gens*; they helped the poor and praised themselves for their charitable deeds. I found them hard and redoubtable, like all the people in the city of my birth.

Nelly Rose and I were the little phénomènes of Rouen. Our parents even wanted us to give a public concert - "At that age an exhibition carries no consequences". Unfortunately I showed no enthusiasm. They could not see why and were annoyed with me.

I waited my turn to sing, my anguish increasing as I listened to Nelly Rose's playing. These moments for me were filled with a painful mystery. Suddenly she stopped. The parents applauded, then turned their eyes on me. I placed my music in front of Nelly Rose and at once her fingers went to work. This haste upset me, I wanted her to look at me and wait. To my plea she always replied, "Mamma says that looks affected", and played even faster. Our first song was Mozart's "Mon Coeur Soupire", which I adored. I slipped into the delicate melody as if it were a crystal sphere, and here was the piano smashing everything. I tried to continue, I controlled my tears. My despair increased until the moment when the grandmother - it was always she who spoke first because she had sung in her youth - rose and declared in a crisp voice, "Mes enfants, it is not good. You must practise, we will leave you".

I knew that no amount of practising would be of any use. Immediately Nelly-Rose began to justify herself - "But I played

84

what was written". She repeated the first measures, but never
as I wanted; and what I wanted I could not express. I stopped
singing. Nelly-Rose became exasperated. "I who play the most
difficult pieces! You don't know what you want, it's your fault,
always your fault!" She ran away in one direction, I in the other.
I hid in the somber park, so thick with trees that spring could
never penetrate it. The young green leaves looked grey, all the
paths descended to the Seine, there was a very old <del>small</del> <ins>and</ins> old mould
and water. I had the double sorrow of not knowing exactly what
my sorrow was. I wanted to find the necessary words to explain
this "other thing" that for me was everything, but I could find
no words. I felt that I was alone in the world. I wept.

For months I suffered from this mystery. One day Nelly-
Rose's father told me that his family found me too <ins>artiste</ins> <del>and</del> <ins>and</ins> <ins>and</ins> <ins>and</ins> would not allow her to see me any more. I was stricken. My
first feeling of tenderness had been for her, my grief demanded
a farewell. Nelly-Rose knew my despair. I sent word to her
that I would pass twice, three times, each day before her win-
dow, that she should lift the curtain if she was a little sad.
But the curtain never moved. Thus I understood that she was not
like me, and that we could not understand each other in life any
more than in music.

The great difference between the mechanism of art and art
itself was soon to be revealed to me. It was Isabel, my second
friend, who with her sumptuous nature brought me the living

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revelation of "the artist" - the revelation for which I had been
waiting.

She was a little girl-Rimbaud who died in her youth, killed
by the excess that was in her. Dazzled by her own knowledge and
knowing nothing that can be taught, she arrived on earth with an
innocence which her later anger and disdain intensified. Born an
artist, with extraordinary and multiple gifts, she lived without
expressing them, seeming to understand that her time would be too
brief. She was a true phenomenon who shunned the métier of
phenomenon.

She would be seen on her balcony, in her garden, as tra-
gically idle as a prisoner. In the street she seemed not to walk
but rather to bound into the wind like an archangel, hair stream-
ing, hands empty. She was the evocation of an element, an un-
leashed spirit, yet she was a frail child who was soon to die.

I had not imagined that one could distinguish so clearly the
brief passage of a spirit among humans. Her world was not here.
She came only to leave again, like a traveller who has arrived
in the wrong country. She was born divinely lost and with a
heart suffocated by love. She gave me that magnificent heart
and disappeared. All my life I was to feel upon me the guardian
light of this prodigious child.

The establishment of Klein, the well-known music publisher
of Rouen, was in the rue Gantré, one of the oldest and darkest
streets of the town. The walls were discoloured and the pavement

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muddy, as if it were always raining there. This street was only a short distance from the Solferino Gardens where my governess took me every day to play with a swarm of adolescents of my own age who raced about noisily, raising clouds of dust. I was fifteen and it was April. Gardeners were setting out tulips, new leaves smelled like flowers, the trees were filled with birds and covered with sunlight. But I ran away, leaving the light of the garden for the darkness of the rue Gantré. Here I entered an old shop. Its broken bell tinkled a single note, there was a smell of dust and shadow, and the two old clerks sitting by the door did not lift their faces from their ledgers. I went directly to the rear of the shop and into a little green velvet salon where my old friend, the père Klein, had his office.

He looked like Verlaine except for a covering of thick white hair. His little eyes were buried in a nest of wrinkles, he wore a quilted jacket and large felt slippers. He had surrounded himself with portraits of contemporary celebrities - photographs signed with flourishes and explosive dedications, for his music-shop was the meeting-place of the artists of all countries. He himself was an artist and gave me lessons on the organ, having conquered my father's opposition by talking of mystical vibrations which would develop my religious feelings. All the hours I could steal from the Solferino Gardens I spent in the good père Klein's shop. How he laughed, seeing me arrive breathless, radiant, clutching my music to my heart. I went up the great staircase leading to the music room, which smelled of furniture polish, and passed between two hedges of glistening

87

pianos that led to the concert-hall. There I jumped upon the
stage and accompanied myself for hours, in a frenzy at hearing
my voice ring out in its full strength.

One day - it was the thirteenth of April - Klein announced
that he had a surprise for me. He led me upstairs and told me
to sing and keep on singing, even if someone should come into
the room. Before long a man appeared in the doorway. He was
rather small, with a grey moustache, a soft hat set on the back
of his head and a travelling coat thrown over his shoulders. He
was clapping his hands and I recognized him from my postcard
collection of musicians - it was Massenet! Père Klein stood
beaming behind him. Massenet immediately sat down at the piano
and began playing "Manon". I sang "N'est-ce ma main?" ... and
it was as if I were outside myself, as if I were singing in a
dream. Massenet gave me the cues as we sang together. At the
end he rushed into the arms of the père Klein shouting, "It is
Vaillant-Couturier I find again! The same passion, the
same diction!" And the père Klein exulted, "I told you so! I
knew! I knew!" Massenet began another scene and I sang again -
I knew all the roles of the opera. I sang as if I had come alive
for the first time. Massenet kept repeating, "Why do I find in
this child all the passion of Vaillant-Couturier?" I said, "Why
do you find that strange? I suppose that when she was fifteen
Mme. Vaillant-Couturier already had what she had later". "Ah!"
Massenet cried, embracing père Klein again, she has a brain
too, cette petite!"

Hours passed, the windows turned deep blue and the light

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of a street lamp entered the room. I had a moment of panic, for I had to be at home before my father arrived. We found my coat and hat and I ran down the stairs. Massenet called after me, "A demain! Tomorrow we will continue. You are a great artist!"

I ran through the streets, intoxicated and delirious, my knees trembling. The guardian of the Solferino gate was ringing the evening bell for closing time. I found my governess who was flirting in the kiosque des plaisirs and we ran home together. Five minutes later I was dining opposite my father. Under the light of the hanging-lamp I lowered my eyes, half dead, strangled with happiness.

My life had begun. Massenet had given me the certainty of possessing a treasure which would last as long as my life itself.

## Accompanying

Years afterward I remember Massenet telling me, "In Paris you will find many pianists to accompany you as I do". He was mistaken. I found stupid "followers" who called themselves "supreme", or impetuous martinets who called themselves "leaders". I met hundreds of Nelly-Roses, but in a whole lifetime only six or seven artist-musicians who possessed the inexplicable science of accompaniment. One must be more than a musician, more than a virtuoso. Whether an accompanist considers himself a follower or a leader, no communication is possible if he lacks the very essence of life - electricity. Massenet's personal electricity was overwhelming. It constituted both his charm and the great youthfulness which outrode his age for long years.

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To be an accompanist like Massenet, it is not enough to have long experience or even the most perfect talent. One must be in electrical correspondence with the singer and control or submit to the slightest change in the ebb and flow of the two interacting currents. I do not imagine that Massenet - in life as at the piano - met many currents that remained hostile to his. But he was an extremely modest man. When I cried, entranced, "Oh, maître, your accompaniment is unique, unique!", he replied gently, "My child, it is you and I together - I do not accompany everyone in the same way".

space

Walter Straram, another musician-accompanist I found later, played in frescoes. With him, Debussy's "Le Balcon" and "La Mort des Amants" unfurled in enormous waves. Straram conceived and played on the grand scale. One saw as much as one heard, even details took on horizons. This man looked like a gruesome marionette a burned man; he seemed to crackle in flames. His refusal to compromise was royal. If he heard people exchanging ideas which did not please him, he cut them with his wit as a diamond cuts glass. A certain twist of his mouth revealed his contempt for the whole earth. One day I said to him, "Scorn people, yes, but things . . . " He closed his teeth. "People! That is not enough, my friend, not enough. Things - they are already half people".

I knew him when he was poor and obscure, known only to a few musicians who believed in him. We left together for Boston - he wanted to go, and I wanted only him for accompanist. When I

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returned to Europe he stayed on in America. Ten years later I
found him again in Paris, known everywhere and living luxuriously.
I went to two of the concerts he conducted in the Salle Gaveau. They were academic - and I had expected him to be a
clairvoyant on the platform. Later I met him in a salon and
found no resemblance to the man who, ten years before, was often
called mad. We saw each other several times but always in
"society", which deforms everything that has a real existence.
That certain twist of the mouth was still there, but his magnificent intransigence was frozen.

space

André Caplet, another great musician, was also a great
accompanist. When he touched the piano there was magic around
him. People had always described him as the ugliest
man in the world and when I met him for the first time I was
amazed that a man could have features without line or colour
and still be so charming. It is said that to be **sympathique**
is the secret of charm. That is not true; one can be sympathetic without being hypnotic. It is the presence of charm
that produces magic. André Caplet's playing was permeated with
his surprising charm. He played as the cat walks, with a padded
technique, the musical design very precise and indicated through
detail. Debussy always said, "Caplet, he is my music".

space

Octave Maus accompanied beautifully in spite of his
perfect musicianship. You are shocked by that "in spite of"?

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I have no respect for musicianship for its own sake - it can be bought, while art is always given. But Octave Maus was not limited by his knowledge, because he was a master-colourist. He played as Van Gogh painted. His active eyes saved him from a virtuosity which might have outshone the colour at the tips of his fingers.

space

I really remember only those people who have touched me either emotionally or aesthetically. When they have done both, as Charles Bordes did, the images that remain in my memory are like bright paintings.

How I loved Bordes! He was a god at the piano - a god with unknitted cravat, shiny coat and a useless arm, for he was paralyzed on the right side.

I can still see him the first time he came to the lane of yellow roses leading to our villa in Grasse, falling from one leg to the other, his left hand waving to me as if we already knew each other. No two temperaments could have been more alike than ours - I knew it as soon as he sat at the piano, accomplishing marvels with his one hand. He had come to coach me in the opera "Castor and Pullux", which we were to produce ourselves in Montpellier. I can still feel our transports as we filled with an identical rhythm the silent spaces that Rameau's music allowed us. There were no dead silences in our conception, any more than in the composer's. Bordes would say, "You are right, there is no explanation for these things no/ any school for teaching the essential. Either you live Rameau or you do not". We believed

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that there are no plural laws for the classic, but a single law which is : rectitude . . . the arrangement of Greek columns on the sky of Athens, all life contained in a frame of perfection.

Bordes was always in a state of exaltation which made this half a man more complete than others; but he always looked as if he were in mourning - head shaved and covered with a black shadow, eyes superb and black, a suit of black cloth and a narrow black tie. How clearly I remember him at the concert of his songs we gave together in Montpellier, as he limped across the stage, his shyness vanquished by love of music. The first time he accompanied me in his "Gigue", the Verlaine poem he had set to music, tears rolled down his cheeks. "I thought I would die", he wept, "without ever hearing my 'Gigue' as I hear it inside myself".

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Reynaldo Hahn captivates his audience as soon as he sits down at the piano. His accompaniment is an atmosphere, an envelopment. And it is not only his charm that operates, it is also his musical science which he never displays. He wraps his power in ninchalance, and he can sing like a nightingale while smoking cigarettes.

Once when he was accompanying me in public I leaned toward him, beginning his "Infidelité" and said, "I usually make some slight changes in this song, but tonight . . ." He stopped me. "It will be very amusing on the contrary. Let us see". Not many composers have so little *amout-propre*.

I have often wondered whether the exasperations of daily

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life ever shattered Reynaldo's perfect self-control. I don't
believe so. One day I watched him in a struggle with an orchestra
from which he could extract nothing. Returning to the wings, he
mopped his forehead with a calm hand and smiled. But his eyes were
darker in his pale face and when he said in a quiet voice, "I
shall be obliged to change the program", I was interested to see
that nothing betrayed the exasperation he was feeling.

space

Paul Dukas, whose energy at the piano was of the highest vol-
tage, was concentrated and in focus. Nothing in him overflowed,
nothing reached out, even his features were withdrawn. But it is
the mystery of rare people that what they conceal, rather than what
they show, reveals them. I must have annoyed him sometimes with my
enthusiasm, yet our accord was basically perfect. I remember a
pause I asked him for, in the "Ariane" music, which would give me
time to clarify the enigmatic character of Ariane for the public.
At first he was puzzled - the precision of his writing left nothing
to chance; but when I explained my reasons he accepted them, sur-
prised not to have thought of them himself.

Once I asked him what enjoyment he found in certain sonatas
which are to me like congealed life. He answered, "One is inter-
ested in following the construction, in hearing the same theme
turned and twisted in a dozen ways".

"But is the interest of that?" I asked. "If an artist turned
his model in every direction I would see it lengthwise, sidewise,
head down, feet in air, and so? . . . I don't call that creation.

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Such variations only make me feel that I am listening to a
gossip of vibrations".

Teaching

I love to teach singing - you have the impression of creating even the pupil himself. Singing is the expression of a nature; it contains the soul, its quality, its audible unfolding. This is why singing is unsupportable unless there is "someone" within the singer. Often than not there is no one; sometimes there is someone who is inhibited or imprisoned. In such a case the task goes beyond teaching and becomes creation. The teaching of singing is in reality a school of "being". But the element of divinity in the human voice is seldom the preoccupation of singing teachers. Many beautiful voices are ruined after a few years of use. Born in space and made for it, they are slowly suffocated by a life lived for material things alone. Knowing this, one understands why certain voices remain young in a body that grows old. Voices that are destroyed by time are "matter". The ones that are spirit remain as long as life itself.

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Singing for singing's sake has never stirred me. It is the
person I look for behind the voice that preoccupies me. A voice
in a concert-hall, a bell in the sky are beautiful, but that is
not what I mean. Nor do I mean the miracle of 🎤 vocalizations
in a throat - I prefer the nightingale. And yet if he were iso-
lated from his season, his trees and moons, his first flutings
in cold twilights, I think I would no longer love him.

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What moves me is not singing, but music; not the instru-
ment but the art. Ah, the rapture of what I have known as art!
From the day when I first thought of my voice as a medium for
this rapture, my life turned and followed after it. In America,
when I had nothing to live on, it fed my life and its own.

Drawing

My eyes forget nothing that they have loved. They are
museums. I visit them when I am tired or ill and they are a
guarantee of felicity. Because of them I have never been
bored by waiting for a person or a train - I can always go
wherever I like without moving. I do not have to read mag-
azines at the dentist's, for my museum is with me—more crowded
each minute. I see a smile, the nape of a neck, a glance, a
walk, and I see hands - hands full of fear, hands that are
modest, hands that ≡ destroy.

In my museum I love to visit an animal gallery which hon-
ours it. A certain little cat is there. She has nothing of
what is called remarkable. Dressed in a little grey and white
suit, trimmed in black, her appearance is unassuming. She
does not attract attention in the street, but she fills our
rooms with charm. We never tire of her attraction or her eyes,
which are sad at this moment because she has just come to know
love. When she is at peace they are yellow or green. Now they
have a troubled concentration and a too-beAUTIFUL distress.
Questions without answers.

space

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My eyes love to look. People who please me have only to
sit down before me in silence - just to look at them overcomes
me with delight. Conversely, it is natural that my eyes should
suffer. They would like to discover in faces a little modesty, a
little restraint, or at least an uneasiness. Why are so many peo-
people pleased with their defects? Why do they not try to correct
them, or at least to keep them in the background?

When I was a child my parents forced me to go out on Satur-
days in curl-papers so that on Sunday I would have two
frizzy rolls on either side of my head. For my birthday present
I chose an umbrella with an enormous ugly handle. I held it in
front of me on Saturdays and it was a shield - people looked at
the ugliness of the umbrella and didn't see mine.

My eyes anger me by seeing everything, and I should like to
stop them up like ears. It is difficult to prevent them from re-
cording every detail without discrimination. Therefore when I
draw I see my model better if he is not present. The perfect con-
ditions for me to make a good caricature are to be alone, to be
tired, to feel like laughing and to draw in a dim light. If in
addition the pencil needs sharpening, then everything is favorable
and I put on paper a portrait so amazingly lifelike that I am the
first to be struck by it. Whatever it is - caricature, sketch or
portrait - I cannot say that I think, plan or imagine. I only see.
But I see with all my strength.

I can draw any face except a beloved face. There, something
restrains me. I think the obstacle is in my brain, for the
act seems a little sacrilegious to me. What I love cannot be put

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on paper, nor can my reason for loving. I cannot create with a line what is to me a world.

## Acting

What, exactly, is acting? To enter into a state of excitement, to release all one's nature, to let oneself go.

All my life, whenever I have walked on to a stage, I have thought, "What happiness, I am going to let myself go". I have never seen an engine letting off steam without thinking, "That is just what I do in the theatre - I make it loud or soft and that's all there is to it". For this reason I have been happier acting than singing.

To me schools of acting, rules of acting, all methods of teaching acting, are unimportant.

Art is a state. As the state of grace makes saints, so the state of art makes the artist - a soil which produces what other soils will never produce. The act of art is only a consequence - an infinite consequence if its source is authentic, nothing if it comes only from *a métier* or an ambition.

I used to believe that the drama was the greatest of the arts. It seemed to contain all the others - prose, poetry, painting, sculpture. I think now that the art of the actor is the most inferior, the vainest and most obvious form of exhibitionism. And it is because the springs of this passion have always been in my cells that I am able to examine them. It is the violence of this appetite that pulls an actor from his bed in spite of suffering. Physically I have very little endurance, yet I have endured any torture on

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on the stage. The worst toothache has been abolished by the
anesthesia of the footlights. Once I sang a whole act of an opera
with a tack in my foot. The tack went in deeper with each step
but I never dreamed of limping. The intolerable pain was toler-
able until the moment when I fainted in the wings. This was not
courage or will-power - it would have been an act of courage to
leave the stage and have the curtain rung down.

If the actor when acting is like a drunkard when intoxicated,
how does he regulate his frenzy? His automatism does this for him.
We are perpetually automatic in our lives, and naturally no less
so in the theatre. An actress like Duse understood this and told
me that she came on the stage only at the last rehearsal in order
not to lose her spontaneity. She knew the force of automatism
and so feared its dangers that she constructed her rôles entirely
in her bed, thus saving her strength and keeping her impressions
and reflexes intact.

The sincerity of the actor is a subject of eternal discussion. Since sincerity can only be relative, why talk of sincere at all? Talma, in order to arrive on the stage in a state of fury, would first throw himself upon anyone who happened to be standing in the wings. He raged, roared and reddened, then ran on to the stage like a madman. The public exulted in such a perfect, such an authentic, sincerity.

This copy of emotion which I find repellant, is the exact
type of sincerity possible to the theatre. It is this false
sincerity that Stanislasky cultivated in his Moscow Art Theatre.
He would ask an actor to come on the stage under the shock of

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some terrible ⌄ news and to translate this state into any
words at all, simply to make the springs of his emotion function.
The actor had to do this over and over, arrive at the paroxysm
of his emotion without thinking of his words. Stanisłaski made
a human being a dynamo charged and obedient to the slightest com-
mand. At that time I admired this method of work. I see today
that it represents precisely the harm done to the actor by his
*métier*. He emerges ⌄ psychically attacked, his ⌄ sympathetic nervous system exhausted. The actor is always un-
balanced in life, crippled from not being himself and yet not
quite someone else.

Chaliapine died saying, "In what theatre am I?" Such a pre-
occupation at the moment of leaving life has something sorrow-
fully tragic. I can conceive of nothing more terrifying than that
fantasy of being on a stage at the moment of dying, as if he
were still to play another part, as if even his own death did not
belong to him.

Explorations into Suffering

Of all forms of human suffering, there is one that seems
never to end. It is the agony of finishing with what is finished.

You tell me that E. surmounted his grief in a few months.
I do not believe it. It takes years to finish with what is fin-
ished. One passes through all the stages of shock and stupor;
then comes the recoil and one's astonishment - the refusal to
believe, the revolt, the contradictions of flesh and spirit. The

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body wants to fight, to defend itself; the mind orders silence
and the elevation of the problem to a higher level.

In my own case, it was two years after my separation from
Maeterlinck before I wakened from my silence and perceived here and
there areas of indifference. I could discern in my thought the
presence of the irrevocable. I was at last facing the *fact* and I
could not stop looking at it. Even at night, in deepest sleep, it
remained before me.

Time passes. The next state is long, for it focuses the
suffering of deprivation. I began to know which of my amputated
habits I was missing most : "I did this, he did that" . . . "This
is the way I used to speak to him, he would answer me like this"...
Each habit in its turn is a new suffering which informs you of the
drama, memory by memory, word by word. In the pain of torn-up roots
there is something so strongly terrestial that suddenly you can no
longer look at a flower or a tree. Yet there is an elemental power
in this torture that draws you closer to the natural forces; you
feel small, yet touched by divinity through the surpassing fact of
death - the death of what used to be, what no longer is . . . Years
pass between the final states of this lethal suffering.

## Jealousy

You want me to talk about jealousy? I know only animal jealousy - the kind that is mute. Its manifestations are absurd and insane, but not without a certain grandeur.

Crimes of passion? How absurd juries are with their debates
about premeditation. The agony is swift or slow, that is all.
When you can speak of it you are not really jealous, when you

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can weep you are saved. Animal jealousy is stronger than we are.
There is no time for a flash of reason. One kills to breathe.

Yesterday I was haunted all day by memories of jealousy. I was in a salon, my hand sealed to the back of a chair. I was looking to the right. . . the thing was happening to the left. He was talking to his mistress - only words, but I was pulled so violently toward them that I no longer felt the hand that was supporting me. My body turned to iron and no longer knew how to walk. I had to move one foot after the other - one, two - walk. A bright stairway, a white marble balustrade, a landing with a chandelier, then steps again. People spoke to me, my lips replied. He had stayed behind with her. All my cells were listening, I could hear what no one else could hear. I was suspended in the realm that separates one from the earth.

## Passion

And you want me to talk of passion? Passion which sweeps along in its current so much that is vile, also holds the delinquencies of genius. It is the only manifestation of innocence in mankind. What is revolting is the condemnation of passion. We are told to be tolerant of it - what presumption! We are asked to pity, to try to understand. The beauty of passion is that there is nothing to understand, only something to look at and envy. I would be in despair if I had to die without having known this cyclone. I respect it. Passion is the force of acquired speed - an insane race in which you pursue yourself,

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believing that you are pursuing another. The magnificence of
passion is that no human force can stop it.

Ascetics, missionaries, Christian martyrs have all known
passion. The world idealizes them without understanding that
here is the same force which operates in all people capable of
passion, whatever their aim or object. Passion is always immolation; he who kills and he who is killed are equally victims.

The anguish of passion is different from that of jealousy,
less intense because more conscious. It is like being burned
by a slow fire instead of in a flame. It is a ferocious hunger
for the food of happiness, as if one had never eaten. The
physical life of the imagination lies herein. If the longed-for delight is distant, it is inaccessible, one is almost at peace; but to be deprived of it when it is near is to die of hunger before a sumptuous table.

I had not known that I could be so physical . . . I was
deprived, and the full moon had come; it hung over its image
in the Seine. From the deck of a passing boat came the sound
of a waltz. Falling stars slid suddenly across the sky in a
rain of light. I wanted to turn away from this insolence of
splendours, but I could only lie facing the sky and hold myself
rigid, like an animal that is to be operated on.

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The Paul Valéry quotation you sent on la volupté revolts
me! I can't imagine this man in love. His mind pleases me
and I greatly enjoy his speculations, but how frigid he is!

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I imagine that he gives even his friendship with a medicine-dropper. Volupté is beautiful only if the human animal is beautiful and if he knows how to use his animality beautifully. I dislike the frenzy known as volupté - it is always full of false notes, while real passion, when it has measure, is admirable. These two words - passion and measure - seem a contradiction to you? Nevertheless it is from this antithesis that all great things are made. Overflow is never anything but waste. Directed passion is a great orchestral symphony - this is the substance from which a perfect thought of Pascal is moulded, as well as every other masterpiece of genius. It is in creative genius that the grandeur of passion can be seen; in life most human beings are too frail to cope with it; this gift of flames from which they should arise, purified, generally leaves them diminished. This fiery gift is greater than the human being who carries it, and whatever is greater than man must be regarded objectively in order not to shrink the materials nature has given him. Objectively I have rarely seen anything as intense as the passion in the film "Karamazoff". It is the story of a cyclone in which man is swept clean, carried out of himself; there remains on the screen only an agony and an indescribable innocence.

Understanding (L'entente)

To understand and to be understood - this was my first great longing. I knew I would never live completely unless it was fulfilled.

Understanding is not the product of dreams. It does not

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accompany young love with its roses, its frailty, its empty
spaces, its ends and its end. My search for it was long and
tireless. I began, like everyone else, by believing that I had
found it. Like everyone else I saw that I was mistaken and, per-
haps not like everyone else, I revised my idea of understanding.
After I saw why it is not easy to come upon. I had hoped to match
myself with another's existence when I, myself, did not yet exist.

At twenty I confused understanding with love. I imagined
that nothing could unite two people more closely than to share
the same ideas, love the same poets, painters, landscapes. I
had not yet discovered that, for understanding, it is not necessary
to be in love. The understanding that comes from being in love is
only a chemical understanding. When it ends, it leaves behind it
only sweetness or pain.

Understanding is a sort of love that does not end, because
it desires the existence of the loved one as much as its own. I
believe it is the only human bond that is not content simply upon
its own emotion. It rejects all that can be accepted only if
one's eyes are closed, and all that is "impure". In Understanding,
to lie would be senseless; there are no permissions to be ac-
corded, no commandments to be imposed. Understanding is above
tolerance and tests. It is a bond which would not be if it were
not perfect.

To feed
one cannot have real understanding without a double knowledge - one must know one's self and the other person, one must know the types, categories and

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tendencies of human beings. I know, for example, that I will never be understood by the "material-world" category. I have nothing in common with those solid friendships which maintain themselves on the every-day plane I abhor. They have something a little con-cierge about them. Such friends become like two business associates - their strength is doubled but they are not concerned with the quality of their relationship. Of what value is a friendship which does not help you to understand more of yourself, of the other, and of all others?

I look with dismay at people who live together without understanding each other. Everyone says, "But that is natural, life is like that". To me it is as anti-natural as the freaks in the circus.

space

My first perfect understanding - a pure rapture - was with a poet. A poet never says "It is impossible" or "It is incredible" - he carries within himself a belief in stars, he turns his imagination upon all the earth, the dark of his night is as clear as the light of his day. I never tired of watching Maeterlinck *look* in order to see, *listen* in order to hear. Above all, I lived in the ecstasy of being understood. For the first time someone believed in the fervent substance of my own created world.

On the contrary, I could never have shared my world with a poet like D'Annunzio. His emotional exuberance was such that he fell from a window one day from sheer excitement. I am sur-

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prised that his companions didn't jump from their windows in sheer
boredom. When we talked in Gardone it was he alone who talked; I
was silenced by the knowledge that in the next room, as on a stage-
set, there stood waiting a mahogany coffin studded with gold. Lack
of real life (what I call non-life) consternates me as much in
one extreme as in the other - in an ebullition of words or in the
ice of silence. D'Annunzio's exuberance, his cries and gesticu-
lations, made me want to flee; but there was something moving in
the silence of Maeterlinck, walking in his garden, his face as
closed as the book under his arm.

space

Often I thought I had found understanding, only to realize
that the person opposite me was far away - I had been talking all
alone. I know now that one cannot create understanding with some-
one who does not desire it, and a thousand barriers can prevent it
even between two people who desire it. A vice can prevent it -
especially a vice like avarice or indelicacy. A too-spherical
egoism can prevent it, a slackening of <u>élan</u>, an ageing of the
cells, a lack of good faith, a lack of distinction or a lack of
that serious lightness which is so rewarding in human relationships

I can name any number of tendencies which preclude a rela-
tionship of understanding : = heavy human vibrations; an
empty agitated mind; a ponderous frivolity; people who splash
on entering a room as if they were diving; people of sonorous
authority whose words clatter like hail against a window; in-
telligent people whose vibrations are impressive but who never

Italic

Lemanations

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speak a word of truth - they approach everything so indirectly
that one wonders how they manage to get through a doorway;
those talkers with impetuous emanations who push aside everything
in their path to make way for their monologues; those people
who have no presence at all - their emanations have been clipped
off close to their bodies, like shorn sheep; the chronometer
people who regulate everything and everyone; and those who
strike, who bite, who scratch, who sting, who lie, who eject
their venom wherever their anger falls, while their emanations
claw and their mouths are pulled into a bitter twist like that
of Lugné³ of συγκριτική Poe.

space

When I was very young I wrote in my diary : "Great
ideas are treated like <u>objets d'étagère</u> - they are not used.
I shall use them". I have kept my word. The great concept
contained in "understanding" is what I have always sought,
what I have tried to be worthy of, what I have finally found -
in the benediction of a true communication with another human
being. Ah, if we could only continue to live it for a thousand
years!

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Chapter Seven - A Struggle with Death

Pneumonia

evening, on the eighth
It was five o'clock in the morning of January, when I was
carried away in blankets. The stairway of the Hotel Jacob was
old and steep, there was a wide railing, abrupt turnings, sharp
corners. I felt very vertical. I was not afraid, I was entering
that state of illness which is a state of confident fatalism.

In the ambulance the storm clattered against the window-
panes. I repeated to myself that pneumonia was a great illness,
that I was being taken to a hospital, that perhaps . . . A nurse
waited for me on the steps in the light. I was a bundle that slid
about on the stretcher. One flight up, and there was the room -
a large room painted grey, with a table, an armchair, two windows -
one above the mantlepiece; a long narrow bed without a crease,
like polished stone.

It was late when I realized that I was in bed and that Marg-
aret was holding my hands. I suppose I had been talking to myself.
Thus I entered into a time which was no longer of the measurement
of man. It was reduced to brief instants of lucidity and fantasy
in which I heard by chance that I had been in the hospital since
the day before. For me barely an hour had passed. I knew that
the doctor was standing at the foot of my bed, but I saw no dis-
tance between myself and him. I had the feeling that I could take
everything into my hands. Life was flat, like a picture.

During the night all things became immense and capital. My

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body's unused energy - that of all partial deaths - multiplied itself a hundred times. I travelled at top speed through new worlds, my superheated imagination rushed between zero and mad numbers. At zero, it seemed that I was sighing, "I can't go on". But at other moments I dreamed violently that illness is a strange phenomenon - a gaze without distance, a head without size.

Someone was brought in, a voice said, "Here is your nurse, madame". A person dressed in blue linen was there, her red hands holding an ampule and a syringe. One of her fingers, swathed in white, became as big as a policeman's club. Her eyes aimed at each other and came together to form a single orb; her long donkey teeth bared themselves in a stupid smile, her slow hypodermic tortured me. I had the strength to protest furiously. "A Danish girl", stammered the head nurse, attracted by my cries, "she is very capable". "No, no, she is a Batignolles donkey". But no other nurse could be found - it was a winter of illness.

My doctor, Maurice Delort - that intrepid man who deals with death as if he didn't believe in it - said to me, "I can do nothing without your help. I need you. Don't let yourself go". At this command I emerged from the fatalism of the first hour. A passionate interest can hold life in the plexus of the nerves, like something caught in a net.

From those hours close to death I retain a memory of extreme energy. I felt myself in full action - an activity driven by the will of a body determined to live. The body played the principal part, the great, the only one; and I, spellbound, followed this essential drama without losing a second or a chance.

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shadow. Cells were fighting. I did not know that the body
could be so intelligent.

space

I think it was the second night. A little black man came
running through the window, leaping into the room in the rhythm
of a dancing flower. He offered me his services. On other eve-
nings he went quickly from one window to another with a mocking
air. Now that I was living in the special region of illness, I
understood that he was a ballet master. He was directing a dance
of fresh new cells against the deadly movement of microbes.

Standing at the foot of my bed were Doctor Delort and his
two consultants. I could actually see the dynamism of those
three men working upon mine, to recall it to life.

I felt a surprising silence, as if life itself were covered
with snow. The silence of health is noisy in comparison with
this silence which is lined with all that we do not hear. This
snowy stillness covered me. I knew it was made of all the dead
seconds of my time. They had fallen on me for days.

Sometimes when my hearing returned for a moment, the
silence slid from me like an avalanche. I rose and went every
where, through an understanding so lucid that it was television.
I "saw" the old woman of eighty who was in the room above mine,
Small and grey, she told her beads softly when they put her in
an armchair. And I "saw" a woman in labour in the annex, her
black hair in thin strands tossing to her cries and falling
about her pallid face.

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space

All my life I have felt the horror of being in a body - a
body which will leave me at its hour. Often I have thought :
my body will betray me; when my mind perceives the truth for
which it longs, it will recognize it, want to capture it, but all
in vain - the vision will fade away, my human intelligence will
be powerless to follow me into another world. . . I shall depart,
abandoning all that was lent to me - a face that will remain on a
photograph, a body that contained me, feet that walked the lovely
earth. My spirit will go away alone, without belongings, to begin
with the seasons its human season. I shall try to be lucid,
to take myself up again at the exact point where I shall lose
myself today, in order to leave the least possible space between
myself and myself. I shall try to follow that impossible
following of one's mysterious passage. My nucleus will envelop
itself in a new form and take on an appearance which I cannot
imagine . . . This idea frightens me, accelerates my blood. I
feel it running in my veins at the speed of fountain water.

space

It is said that at the moment of dying one sees one's
whole existence. Memories passed before my eyes as on a cinema
screen of which the lower half was completely covered. I saw
only the top of events. I would have liked to see some people
too, but this was impossible; they were hidden in the shadow.
A single face rose above the darkness. It was the face of Gurdjieff. His mind has marked my own so deeply that there are now

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only two epochs in my life - the one before, and the one after,
him.

What is the phenomenon, Life, which none of us knows?
Only the prophets knew what it was. They knew life, their life,
and living. We would be perfect, like trees, if this knowledge
reached to the end of our branches. As it is, the tree in its
sphere manages better than we do.

space

If I am to live, I swear to myself to go further than
before. This oath seems childish, but I do not give myself the
right to come out of danger in the same state in which I entered
it. I have had the gift of life without understanding its po-
tentialities, and now it is as if a higher justice had taken
everything from me in order to force me to understand more.
Will I? I believe I shall. The happiness that one sought and
found is nothing. One was happy to live it, yet it effaced life.
Nothing remains of it. It is a geographical story - a river lost
in the sea.

space

This dying is not terrifying, as one has imagined. It
is something new that one does not suspect in the state of
living. I know that all the time I made a great effort to
understand. The idea of understanding absorbed me, drew me
all of me into myself.

With all the strength of my being I set myself to watch