Paris somehow is not a city: it is an area in oneself, a Concorde in one’s being, where the river flows by you with an intimacy that seems to say the divine is not in the visible architecture of the Orangerie or the presence of the Pont des Arts, but where the trees would end; and even when the lorries have trundled over the cobbled streets — with potato and onion, geese, lard, margarine and cows’ flesh; oranges, birds, Roquefort; poireaux de St Germain, carottes de Crécy, petit pois de Clamart; bottes de persil, romarin d’Antibes; sugar, mint, and pepper — there opposite, begirt in her isle of existence, is the Mother of God, to whom man has built a sanctuary, a convocation of stone, uttered truly as never before. For it was the Word of God made actual, in prayer and fast, in dedication and in pain, that raised layer after layer of that white intimacy of thought, and this once made high and solid and pointed at space, man wanted to withdraw, to gaze inwards through tower and arc-boutant to see how the Virgin sat the Son of God on her lap. I might have led a cow to her altar had I been in Benares.
Dawn was already breaking over the city, and from bridge to bridge one could see the awareness of oneself made more acute, and that the day would soon hide from our own immaculateness. Paris is a sort of Benares turned outward, and where but in Benares would Baudelaire be more real, more understandable, more perfect, and in every dimension.
Insouciants et taciturnes,
Des Ganges, dans le firmament,
Versaient les trésors de leurs urnes
Dans des gouffres de diamant.
I sat among workmen in some bistrot, drank hot, steaming coffee, stood up and walked again. Where was I? Once at Le Bourget and in the plane I was happy again. France seemed such a rolling garden of carrots and turnips, of plane trees that made diagonal approaches to river and castle, and of long, white roads that went to the infinity of the three seas. For all roads in France, I remembered, started from Notre Dame.
Beyond Lyon the weather was rough, but at Marignane it seemed as though I was returning home from one of my usual trips to Paris. Henri the taxi-driver recognized me, and remarked, ‘Monsieur has a lot of luggage.’ I told him I had been to my country. ‘It must be a beautiful country,’ he said, with the same feeling as once before, when seeing a bunch of flowers at some tram station he had stopped the car, bought them for fifteen or twenty francs, and offered them to Madeleine saying, ‘These azaleas will go with Madame’s grey-green suit. We call them the flowers of the queen, for they say Azalais des Baux wore one on the day she saw Gui Guerjerat.’ Everywhere in the south you meet with this civilized attention, which shows how man has been informed of the sainthood of natural living. Those who live truly are the pure of heart.
Strange, I thought to myself, as the car twisted and roared through the hills of the Alpilles, that I seem to be returning not to my home, some spot of earth known and felt with limb and breath, but to some quarter in myself that, as in a psychoanalyst’s chamber, shows itself with such foreknown unfamiliarity. It is as though somewhere I had stored away impressions of a possible becoming, and that on finding this the day had changed its dimensions — the sun had hidden himself and let shadow play on the hills, or the mistral bent the cypress so, and a curve of pain had managed to steal itself into my being. Yet there was in me the awareness of a new continuity, as though now that I had seen India and had told her of Madeleine, and now that Little Mother had given me, as her parting gift and as her blessing to her daughter-in-law, two little toe-rings of my own mother’s—’From mother to daughter-in-law, as from father to son, is the race created,’ she had said, quoting some verse — I felt at last I was going to make Madeleine mine.
Jewels bear a lore of one’s genealogy, and you know when the gold and diamond mango-garland is hung round the neck, or the ruby ring has been passed on to her finger, how you have invaded a new area of her presence; and how, like some old eunuchs in the palace, the ruby and the moonstone looked after your beloved, and gave her sweet thoughts and obedience to her Lord, once the right jewel shone at the parting of her breasts. Thus the king gave jewels to his vassals, and the kingdom was run on the power of the seal.
The toe-rings, I thought; what a sweet thought of Little Mother’s! My mother had them from my grandmother, and when my father married Saroja’s mother the toe-rings went to her. They had to be enlarged, for she was a big woman. When Little Mother was brought to the house they were naturally given to her, and now they would go to her who bore Krishna to me. Would not Pierre have loved the bells that sounded with each footstep, and would he not have known they spoke of things his own and so old?
All these thoughts I knew were only subterfuges for some other predicament. I thought of Ville Ste-Anne with the spreading pine tree, under which opened like two frank eyes the two rooms of Madeleine and myself. Behind the house beside the high pinewood was a grove of mirabelles, and beyond, against the blue sky, Mont Ste-Victoire itself. There was a sainthood about that elevation of the mountain, not for any sanctuary of saint or martyr but because the good Cézanne saw it day after day; and it carried such a message of strength, and of the possible, that it was something of a Kailas for us. Often on walks when the air was very still and not a leaf moved, and a strange note of music seemed to fill the valley, I would say, ‘Madeleine, there, there! Parvathi is singing to Shiva.’ And Madeleine would burst out laughing, as if her unbelief itself was the proof of my truth.
Madeleine had never participated at first in my superstitions, though I had in hers. We used to go up the Hautes-Alpes, and would lie in the sun amidst the pines somewhere on the Durance. One day I started building a miniature temple, stone laid beside stone in respectful uniformity, and when the three outer walls had been built and the inner sanctuary made I said, ‘And now I must find a statue of Shiva, a linga.’ I told her how in the city of Belur, when the god’s image comes floating down the river, the whole town hears the OM as though sounded on a conch, and men and priests go with fife and drum and palanquin to get him to his sanctuary — and of course he is there, the Channaa Keshava, the god of Beautiful Hair. So would the Durance, I said, give me my linga. And one morning as we wandered on her banks in search of gems for the temple — jaspar and agate and marmoreal stone — there he was, our round and oval linga, on the bed of the river, and though I could not give him moon — flower and tulsi I gathered marguerites and harebells and installed him with Madeleine pouring holy water on Shiva’s head. ‘Here is your Ganges,’ she said, ‘Shiva, Shiva, Hara, Hara,’ and she trembled as she had that day on the Seine at Rouen, saying she loved me. On the way home that evening through the Gorges du Loup, with the swish of the river, she said, ‘You would make me a Hindu would you, my Love? I tell you that if marriage to you meant only the wearing of a sari I would still have married you.’ I told her the gods were neither Hindu nor Greek; being creations of your own mind they behaved as you made them — if Shiva was what I wanted, Shiva himself would come to the Durance. After all, I said, the Greek gods were made by the Greeks, but when the Romans and the Christians came they often metamorphosed into Saints of Christ. The world, I told her, was as you made it. She was lost in thought; she could not understand this anthropocentricity.