I rapidly became confused about the sequence of dates and days. I remember only that one afternoon I finally felt a little better. Walking slowly, screwing up my eyes in the returning sunlight, I was going back… home. Home! Yes, that was my thought: I surprised myself thinking it, and started to laugh, choking in a fit of coughing that made the passersby turn. This family tomb more than a century old, in the least-visited part of the cemetery, where there were no famous tombs to honor – my "home." With amazement I told myself I had not used the word since my childhood…
It was during that afternoon, by the light of the autumn sun shining into my vault, that I read the inscriptions on the marble tablets fixed to its walls. It was, in fact, a little chapel belonging to the Belval and Castelot families. And the laconic epitaphs on the tablets retraced their history in outline.
I was still too weak. I read one or two inscriptions and then sat down on the paving stones, breathing as if after a great effort, my head buzzing with giddiness. Born September 27, 1837, at Bordeaux. Died June 4, 1888, in Paris. Perhaps it was the dates that made me giddy. I took note of their time as acutely as if I were hallucinating. Born the 6th March 1849. Recalled to God the 12th December 1901. The intervals between these dates became filled with sounds, with silhouettes, mixing history and literature. There was a flow of images, the vivid and very concrete sharpness of which was almost painful. I thought I could hear the rustling of a lady's long dress as she stepped into a cab. In this simple action of times past she embodied all those anonymous women who had lived, loved, and suffered; who had seen this sky, breathed this air… Now I felt physically the cramped stiffness of a dignitary in his black suit: the sun, the great square of a provincial town, the speeches, the brand new republican emblems… Now the wars, the revolutions, the swarming crowds, the great holidays, all fused for a second into one character, one explosion, one voice, one song, one salvo, one poem, one sensation – and the flow of time resumed its course between the date of birth and the date of death. She was born August 26, 1861, at Biarritz. Deceased February 11, 1922, at Vincennes.
I progressed slowly from one epitaph to the next: Captain of the Empress's Dragoons. Divisional General. Painter of History, attached to the French armies: Africa, Italy, Syria, Mexico. Intendant General. Section President of the Conseil d'Etat. Woman of letters. Former Public Auditor to the Senate. Lieutenant in the 224th Infantry Regiment. Croix de Guerre with palms. Died for France… They were the shades of an empire once resplendent at all four corners of the world… The most recent inscription was also the shortest: Françoise, November 2, 1952-May 10, 1969. Sixteen years old; any other words would have been excessive.
I sat down on the paving stones and closed my eyes. I sensed the vibrant density of all those lives in myself. And without trying to formulate my thoughts, I murmured, "I feel the climate of their days and of their deaths. And the mystery of that birth at Biarritz on August 26, 1861. The inconceivable individuality of that birth, precisely at Biarritz, that day, more than a century ago. And I feel the fragility of that face that disappeared on May 10, 1969, I feel it like an emotion that I myself have lived through intensely… These unknown lives are close to me."
I left in the middle of the night. The stone wall was not high at that point. But the hem of my coat caught on one of the iron spikes set in the top of the wall. I almost fell head first. In the darkness the blue eye of a street lamp described a question mark. I fell on a thick layer of dead leaves. My descent seemed to take a very long time; I had the impression of landing in an unknown town. Its houses at this night hour resembled the monuments of an abandoned city. Its air smelled of wet forest.
I began to walk down an empty avenue. All the streets I followed went downhill, as if to keep thrusting me farther toward the heart of this opaque megalopolis. The few cars that passed me looked as if they were fleeing from it at top speed, driving straight ahead. As I walked past him, a tramp stirred in his carapace of cardboard boxes. He put his head out; it was lit by the shop window across the street. He was an African, his eyes heavy with a kind of resigned, calm madness. He spoke. I leaned toward him, but I understood nothing. It was doubtless the language of his country… The cardboard boxes of his shelter were covered in hieroglyphs.
When I crossed the Seine, the sky began to grow pale. For a while I had been walking with a sleepwalker's tread. The joyful fever of convalescence had disappeared. I felt as if I were wading through the still-deep shadows of the houses. My giddiness curved the perspectives inward, rolled them around me. The accumulation of apartment blocks along the quays and on the island looked like a gigantic film set in darkness when the arc lights have been switched off. I could no longer remember why I had left the cemetery.
On the wooden footbridge I looked back several times. I thought I could hear the sound of footsteps behind me. Or the throbbing of the blood in my temples. The echo became more resonant in a winding street that drew me along like a toboggan. I made an about-face. I thought I saw the outline of a woman in a long coat slipping under an archway. I remained standing, without strength, leaning against a wall. The world disintegrated, the wall gave way under my palm, the windows trickled down the pale fronts of the houses…
It was as if by magic that those few words appeared, outlined on a blackened metal plaque. I clung to their message, as a man on the brink of sinking into drunkenness or madness may cling to a maxim that has a banal but flawless logic that saves him from tipping over the edge… The little plaque was fixed a meter from the ground. I read its inscription three or four times:
Flood level. January 1910
… It was not a memory, but life itself. I was not reliving; I was living. Sensations that seemed very humble sensations. The warmth of the wooden handrail of a balcony hanging in the air on a summer's evening. The dry, piquant scents of plants. The distant and melancholy call of a locomotive. The soft rustling of pages on the knees of a woman seated amid flowers. Her gray hair. Her voice… And now the rustling and the voice are mingled with the whispering of the long boughs of willows – I was already living on the bank of that stream, lost in the sun-drenched immensity of the steppe. I saw that woman with gray hair, sunk in a clear reverie, slowly walking in the water and looking so young. And these youthful looks transported me onto the deck of a flatcar hurtling across a plain that sparkled with rain and light. The woman facing me smiled, tossing back the wet locks from her brow. Her eyelashes were iridescent in the rays of the setting sun…
Flood level. January 1910. I heard the misty silence, the lapping of the water when a boat passed. A little girl, her forehead pressed against the windowpane, was looking at the pale mirror of a flooded avenue. I lived that silent morning in a great Parisian apartment early in the century so intensely… And that morning led in sequence to another, with the crunching of gravel in an avenue gilded with autumn foliage. Three women in long black silk dresses, their broad hats trimmed with veils and feathers, were walking away, as if carrying the moment with them, its sunlight and the air of a fleeting era… Yet another morning: Charlotte (I recognized her now) accompanied by a man in the resonant streets of the Neuilly of her childhood. Charlotte, happy in a slightly confused 'way, is acting as guide. I felt I could distinguish the clarity of the morning light on each paving stone, see the trembling of each leaf, picture this unknown town in the man's gaze and the view of the streets, so familiar to Charlotte's eyes.