“News from home — news from home — must go — Rouen lovely. Yes, we love your city. And couldn’t you, please, please, please garçon get us some hot milk and coffee, O please, please. I’m too tired to explain. No my friends aren’t ill simply — well to tell you the truth — we were kept awake — all night. Yes simply eaten.” “But who Mademoiselle could eat you?” “It was them simply. You know. The things we were rowing you about two days ago was it (when was it?) again. Have you got a dictionary? Creatures.” “Impossible. We have none in Rouen.” “Yes but do understand.” O how fish-like his face was but back of it something. He was understanding the whole time and the whole time making a careful calculation, was it worth his while to risk Hell getting them extra rations and what was Mademoiselle likely to tip him. Was the older lady her mother or was she a rather subtle entrepreneuse. He didn’t say, “Is Madame really your mother?” but it was written in every line of his face. What did he mean standing so thin and somehow right in his dirty apron. The garçon had stopped flicking glasses like a very fine actor in some very subtle play. The dawn rode in at the window fine and thin and outside in the narrow patch of garden Rouen lilies raised etherialized delft-blue cups to an invisible aurora. Aurora. Light lay like a crown on Rouen, light suspended in an invisible breath. Light that strode blatant from the sea-edge paused here subtly before embracing day. Light behind Rouen hill, cut off from Rouen. So dawn rose on Agincourt. . where was it? Where was she? This was a play subtle and so exquisite that a breath might blow it away. A play yet back of the dreariest of sordid horrors. “Don’t you see. I really am serious.” “Mademoiselle, could one mistake you?” “I mean seriously. Will you get us something to eat. I know its only half past five. Can’t you see what I tell you is the truth.” “Yes. Creatures do eat you ladies. And leave them very thin, fresh at five in the morning. The thing to do is to order the — well — coffee de consolation — the night before. Say let me have my petit déjeuner at five or six simply. It must be forthcoming. I am taking a train to visit my poor old grandmother in the country and so on. I will try a little to instruct this so serious Miss.” “Wh-aat?” “I mean. Things in beds. Certainly. They do eat—” “O please. Eat. Me. Hungry. Dying. Café au lait. Lots of café. Lots of au lait. No. It doesn’t matter that the little breads aren’t fresh. O please—” Did one offer it francs and how many? One, two or three? Great Milords in novels produced five franc pieces. Clara always did this part of it. One, two or three. She felt cold horror, then hot horror rising to embrace the back of her neck. The shame seemed to reside at the back of her neck and the pit of her stomach. Some symbol. Money was some symbol. French money was more than ever a symbol. “My — my — aunt—” O then one could see the look in his eyes, it wasn’t the mother. “My aunt is waiting. Really will — pay—” How did one say it? “O please, please, here’s two francs. Do bring the coffee quickly.”
Two francs on the edge of the table. A shaft of light on the floor like light falling on an Easter morning altar. The sudden brilliance that was like the falling (oddly not the rising) of a golden curtain. Cloth of gold was suspended for a moment and then rolled a suitable background. A thin face was poised against that background. It might have risen from a pleated ruff. It might have kissed a sword hilt, a sword hilt set with brilliants, and knelt and laid the sword at her feet. A flower. Dawn. Rouen. This would never happen again. It would be always happening. This had never happened. When was it? Yesterday. “Yesterday is to-morrow.” “Mademoiselle’s French is charming (I will bring the small breads) but not always quite fresh.”
2
“She’s like a great yellow rose though I don’t believe I am in love with her—” “Wh-aat?” “I mean the Correggio there is like a — like a — I mean I don’t think if I were the faun I would be in love with — in love with—” “What’s all this talk of being in love with, silly?” “I was talking to Clara. She has the Baedeker. Go look it out for yourself. It’s written anyhow on the bottom. Of the picture. Zeus and Antiope. I said I didn’t think I would be in love with the sleeping lady. She’s too fat yet there is something adorable (one feels there might be) in the soles of her feet and the underside of her elbow that doesn’t show. But she doesn’t look like—” “Don’t talk about pictures this way. Showing off. What’s the matter with you? Do you want lunch? Are you drunk simply? Why can’t you take things peaceably? This is only the Louvre.” “Fayne. . go away. Leave me alone to find it—” “Find what, impressionable?” “Its — whatever it — is—”
O let me alone. God. God. This is worse than Cathedrals. Let me alone. Let me find for myself. Get away. Get lost. People going away and the Louvre getting empty. Cool. Long cold galleries and downstairs the marbles like ice, cut like ice, holding something in their shapes that people didn’t see, couldn’t see or they would go mad with it. Not always the most beautiful things, slid thus through the breasts of the Venus de Milo from the bench in the corner (the red plush bench, shabby against the wall) showed like two thin knife edges, edges of the crescent moon. The Venus de Milo was a little heavy but if you prowled and prowled and waited for different days, little effects of shadow and light and half light caught you; depending on how empty or how full the room was, you got caught by something. That was the answer to prayer. Prayer was asking, asking. Prayer was asking for something that was so terrible and so necessary that you had no words to ask for it. When you found the words, the prayer was already a faded thing. A prayer with words was like a plucked flower. Prayer without words was growing deep, deep in the ground, in the heart of everything. If you found words for your prayer, you had already separated your prayer from the thing you prayed to. Prayer, sitting on the shabby little bench in the corner listening to the guide explaining to the party from Kansas, wasn’t in words. The guide was saying “and here ladies and gentlemen in the glass case at the left” (he never varied his formula) “you have the authentic fragment of the foot, the bit of the hand and the arm and the lost apple.” How do you know it is an apple, how can you tell it is her hand or her foot? You can’t but nobody ever asked such simple questions. They accepted the dogma as good presbyterians, good methodists, good nonconformists or even good catholics have a way of doing without question, without grace or without bickering. How did they come to do it? Religion of love-of-beauty wasn’t this thing. But still they wanted something, looked for something. O God don’t let me pity them, looking all lost towards a Cook’s Guide for beauty. Let me not despise or pity nor patronize them for your ways are inscrutable and when you led the fingers of Phidias along those two crescents, you already had my hands in yours. I can’t put it into words. You know what I’m saying. Before Phidias was, I am. Long ago when you struck white lightning from marble you had some of us already with you. No. I didn’t ever forget. Don’t let me go mad with this my first discovery. But I will — I will — I will go mad unless I go upstairs and look at Leonardo, look at Correggio, look at Fra Angelico. They are the most blatant shams. They are a curtain hiding reality.