More capable of pity or of compassion, if you wish, than of real sympathy, Jammes was too full of his own importance to be able to understand anyone else. And I am not sure he understood himself very well, or that he did not invent himself a little; the most evident impulse of his heart, I mean the one that brought him out the most, was not always the most natural, or at least the most spontaneous. One day when we were taking a walk together, we surprised a little hare down in a ditch. At first Jammes, instinctively, raised his cane to kill it; but almost at once, collecting himself, composing himself:
“Oh, the poor little thing. He’ll have to be taken off the road; he might get hurt.”
For the great love he professed for animals often gave way to the instinct of the huntsman; that was one of the contradictions of his nature, which, without his suspecting it, made his richness, and fed his poetry. (Like the secret debate between piety and sensuality.) In the little garden of his first house at Orthez, where I had been to pass a few days with him, a puff of wind brought to us the odor of burned powder, like what one smells after fireworks or shots. Anybody else would have thought, doubtless: “Why, that smells like powder.” Jammes exclaimed:
“That smells like game.”
I remember that remark was later the joy of Jacques Rivière. He saw in it one of those subconscious leaps of the mind, the most character-revealing, and I think he was right.
Jammes readily confused with kindness, a sort of nervous sensibility, which certainly disposes one toward it, but does not necessarily lead one to abnegation.
At Biskra, on a certain evening when we had been visiting the Negro village, we were attracted by the cries and laughter of a group of children who were frisking about on the square. Having approached, we saw they were amusing themselves with the vain efforts to fly that an unfortunate sparrow, held back by a string on its foot, was making. We wanted to free the bird at once, and bought it from the children. Jammes, standing a little apart, pretended, in order to reassure my wife, to give the bird its liberty; but coming up to me, he whispered:
“I have him in my pocket. He can not fly. Don’t tell Madame Gide. I am trying to strangle him.… I feel him struggling. Ah! How it hurts me! It is horrible!”
That trip in Algeria had taken Jammes as far as Touggourt and it was there he left us to go back to Orthez as quickly as possible. We had made the long trip from Biskra to Touggourt in the stage. We were accompanied by Athman, from whom Jammes had just composed this short fragment that, moreover, I have quoted elsewhere:
My dear friend Athman
the trees that bear almonds
the fig-trees and black currants
are to be seated
under when fatigue is great.
One remains without moving at all
on closing one’s eyes.
One is lazily happy.
The garden, one hears below
limpid water that sings
like an Arab woman.
One is so comfortable lazy
on closing one’s eyes
as if one were asleep,
one is so comfortable, Athman,
that one thinks he is dead.
Jammes made fun of him; he explained our proverbs to him, and what the following meant: “Un bon tiens vaut mieux que deux tu l’auras.”1
“The tulores,” he told him, “are a sort of fat trombone from which can be gotten only frightful sounds. The tiens is a kind of little flute.…”
Athman couldn’t stop laughing and lent himself to the game.
It was in memory of this trip that Jammes later made me a present of an extraordinary cane. He had gotten it himself, I believe, from an old shepherd in the Pyrenean foot-hills. Cut from an extremely hard wood, it ended in a dog’s head, roughly carved. Jammes had carved on it with a knife, in capital letters, the following lines:
A bee sleeps
On the heather of my heart.
A squirrel had a
Rose in its mouth. A donkey
Treated him like a fool.
A nightingale loved a wasp
He ate her with a kiss.
The first two lines appear as an epigraph printed at the head of his letters of 1894.
I have guarded the cane preciously. It is there in the corner of my room. I can not see it without reliving the past. It helps me bring back to life a figure who was dear to me, a friend whom I have never entirely lost.
1 The poor, gentle dominie, so dirty, said to me: “My eyes hurt so much, and my right arm is paralysed.” He economises to have himself treated.… Translator’s note.
1 “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” Literal translation: “One good thing you have is worth more than two things you will have.” Translator’s note.
9 THE RADIANCE OF PAUL VALÉRY
PAUL VALÉRY’s death does not grieve France alone; from the entire world goes up the lamentation of all those whom his voice could reach. The work remains, it is true, as immortal as a human work can claim to be, and one whose radiance will continue to spread out across space and time. I leave to others the care of eulogizing this imposing work, capable of instructing and fertilizing the most distant minds and the most diverse; that prose and verse of a severity, plenitude and beauty so perfect that they force admiration and can be compared only to the purest jewels of our literature. It is of the man himself I would speak; of what Paul Valéry was. In him I am losing my oldest friend. A friendship of more than fifty years, without lapses, clashes or breaks and, such, in a word, as doubtless we deserved, different as we were from each other. Even though confessions were distasteful to him and he held the particular and individual in considerable scorn, without doubt he would pardon me for permitting to-day the expression of my personal grief. Since he considered that, as a general thing, he should reveal only his thought to the world, many people found it possible to misunderstand him, and see in him only a prodigious intelligence, bringing everything and everybody into action without committing or permitting himself to be moved or touched by anything.… His reticence in regard to his sentiments was extreme, and his reserve; to such an extent that he himself scarcely seemed to suspect what his exquisite sensibility, what the qualities of his heart contributed in the way of secret quivering even in his most noble lines. And it was also those qualities of heart, that affectionate attention, even at times that tenderness, which made Valéry’s friendship so precious. As for the rest, that intellectual treasure, I shall find all that again in his books; but his smile, so affectionate as soon as he had ceased to be ironical, his look, certain inflections of his voice, almost caressing, well, all that is nothing more now than a memory.