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    Bruges-la-morte
    Bruges-la-morte
    Bruges-la-morte
    Ebook117 pages1 hour

    Bruges-la-morte

    By Georges Rodenbach

    4/5

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    LanguageFrançais
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJan 1, 1986
    Author

    Georges Rodenbach

    Georges Rodenbach, né le 16 juillet 1855 à Tournai et mort le 25 décembre 1898 à Paris, est un poète symboliste et un romancier belge de la fin du XIXe siècle.

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    Reviews for Bruges-la-morte

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    • 4/5
      Set in the author's native Bruges, Belgium, this 1890 novel follows lonely widower Hugues. Bereft of his beloved, near perfect wife, he chooses to settle in this melancholy city and dwell on his memories. In the house, his late wife's possessions and hair are quasi-religious relics to him.And then he chances on a lookalike in the street and, in a kind of madness, takes up with her in an effort to "resurrect" the deceased. Yet while Jane may resemble "Madame", her attitude and behaviour is a world apart..But the important thing in this work is not the characters, but the city itself. Rodenbach saw Bruges as grey, dying, solitary, religious, historic; "the peace of a cemetery reigns in those deserted districts and along the taciturn quais....the eternal weeping, the streaming and dripping of the gutters, the drains and the sporadic springs, the overflow from the roofs, the seepage from the tunnels of the bridges, like a great euphony of sobbing and inexhaustible tears."It's a VERY strange book; the delusions of our hero don't entirely convince us, and yet....how much of a role does Bruges itself have in events? Although "it was for its melancholy that he had chosen it", nonetheless, Hugues' increasing dependence on Jane is partly due to his feeling "a horror at the idea of being left alone, face to face with this town, without anyone between him and it any more."With atmospheric B/W shots of Bruges throughout...
    • 4/5
      I sometimes get the worrying feeling that nineteenth-century men preferred their women to be dead than alive. There is something archetypal about the repeated vision of the pale, beautiful, fragile, utterly feminine corpse. Beyond corruption, a woman who's died is a woman you can safely worship without any danger that she'll ruin the image by doing something vulgar like using the wrong form of address to a bishop, or blowing your best friend. It's a vision that crops up everywhere in the works of these fin-de-siècle writers, who were unhealthily obsessed with Edgar Allen Poe and with the figure of drowned Ophelia (for them, more Millais than Shakespeare).Bruges-la-Morte (1892) is the apotheosis of this kind of preoccupation. As my introductory para suggests, I find the general mindset a little problematic, but this is certainly a beautifully-written distillation of the theme. Hugues Viane, our melancholy hero, settles in Bruges after the death of his wife, and prepares to live out the rest of his days nursing his memories of her: he dedicates a room of his house to her portraits, and preserves a lock of her hair in a glass cabinet.When he's not staring at her pictures, he's out taking moody walks along the canals.Where, one day, he sees a woman in the street who looks identical, in every detail, to his dead wife. Is it a ghost? An appalling coincidence? His mind playing tricks on him?And might it be somehow possible to recreate his lost love…?Viane is the main character; but drizzly, grey Bruges is the real hero of the book. The city is portrayed as the necessary complement to Viane's feelings of loneliness:Une équation mystérieuse s'établissait. À l'épouse morte devait correspondre une ville morte.[A mysterious equation established itself. To the dead wife there must correspond a dead town.]The point is underlined by the inclusion of a number of black-and-white photographs of the city, looking still and silent, and often including unidentified figures. A modern reader can't help seeing the effect as Sebaldian.But anyway, however interesting this early use of photography may be, the real star is Rodenbach's prose. He finds a thickly atrabilious style to fit his story, rich in imagery, full of strikingly depressive turns of phrase. The city's canals are ‘cold arteries’ where ‘the great pulse of the sea has stopped beating’; the famous Tour des Halles ‘defends itself against the invading night with the gold shield of its sundial’; down below there are streetlamps ‘whose wounds bleed into the darkness’.This must be what people mean when they talk about ‘prose-poetry’. There are some paragraphs here that seem to be made up entirely of alexandrines. And then just look at a phrase like this:Les hautes tours dans leurs frocs de pierre partout allongent leur ombre.There is a progression of vowels here that slides forward through the mouth beautifully, ending with the wonderful dirge-like assonance of allongent and ombre; and the consonants travel too, from the silent h of haut, back in the throat, forward to the t of tours, on to one lip with the f of frocs, then both lips for the two ps, and finally the lips are pushed right out for the last two nasal vowels. Wowzer! (Translation: something like: ‘Everywhere the high towers in their stony habits stretch forth their shadow.’)Earlier this year I read Nerval's Les Filles du feu, and I kept being reminded of it while I was reading Bruges-la-Morte. There is exactly the same fascination with the ‘doubling’ of a love interest: one woman becomes two (or more), each taking on different attributes – one is blonde, the other dark, one is pure, the other degraded, one is a virgin the other is a whore, and so on. Some scenes, some lines, are almost identical: Rodenbach must surely have been a Nerval fan. He sums up the poetic essence of this tradition perfectly – indeed so perfectly that I found the formalities of plot resolution at the end of the book to be irritatingly drab and melodramatic by contrast. I guess that's the problem with turning poetry into a novel.Nevertheless, Bruges-la-Morte is obviously a high point of Symbolist writing, a book that's obsessed with death and always alert to new ways to externalise deep emotions. There is a brooding openness to the supernatural, and a looming architectural presence, which also has clear links with the Gothic. But more importantly it's just beautifully-written: every sentence drops balanced and gorgeous into your head.For best results, it should be read at dusk, preferably when it's raining outside. Just make sure you have a brisk walk afterwards.
    • 5/5
      ‘The faces of the dead, which are preserved in our memory for a while, gradually deteriorate there, fading like a pastel drawing that has not been kept under glass, allowing the chalk to disperse. Thus, within us, our dead die a second time.’Bruges-La-Morte is the cardinal work of Symbolist literature: a haunted, profoundly intimate novel that explores the sacred obligations of grief, sorrow, and sin—and the way that a place, here the decaying city of Bruges, can inform the rhythm of life (as well as life-in-death) of the scattered, ruined souls that comprise its inhabitants. Written by a Belgian, Georges Rodenbach, in 1892, Bruges-La-Morte is a key component of the literature of the Decadence—as well as, perhaps, the most moving and acutely poignant work in its canon. Rodenbach’s prose, orphic and sensuous, could be labeled a sort of exercise in hypnotism, the spell achieving its greatest successes when, after coming up from the depths of an opium-dream, we are startled with the occasional interruption of painfully raw, near-caustic laconicism; these short, beautifully-woven sentences linger in the brain like a fever, inducing a rapture of agonized comprehension. This novel, curiously, is utterly empathic to the concerns of even the most jaded and stoic of readers: because it is a work dedicated to the study of human ‘analogies’—the strange, surreal comparisons drawn in the minds of all and torn to pieces within the obsessions, and eager fervor, of an unfortunate few. The plot is merely a gauze upon which to hang the ghosts of observation: it details the dream-like, funereal existence of a widower who, after ten years of mourning his dead wife—worshiping her possessions, photographs, and physical memories like the reliquaries of a saint—chances to meet a woman who, in outward appearance, is the very mirror-image of his lost love. They begin an affair: one in which our protagonist sees not the intimations of sin and betrayal against the dead so often experienced by the bereaved, but, instead, the literal continuation of his wife’s actuality: he is trying to recreate her existence, as if a thread had never been cut—as if it had only been interrupted. Obviously we can expect little but disappointment and tragedy from so misguided a notion; but the climax of this novel is triply-tragic, because three lives are shattered by the highest intentions of one.Bruges-La-Morte, as I said, is a novel of analogies; and the highest analogy is between the insistent sentience of the city and the way it mirrors—as a dead wife is mirrored by a stranger—the psyche of a citizen. Rodenbach, of course, illustrates this phenomenon best: ‘Towns above all have a personality, a spirit of their own, an almost externalized character which corresponds to joy, new love, renunciation, widowhood. Every town is a state of mind, a mood which, after only a short stay, communicates itself, spreads to us in an effluvium which impregnates us, which we absorb with the very air.’ And the ‘effluvium’ of dead, gloom-haunted, and weeping Bruges (which, arguably, remains the most important character in this novel) is rich with a paradoxical aura of contagion, comfort, and doom. Bruges-La-Morte is one of the dozen or so pieces of literature that have been instrumental in defining, refining, and directing my sensibilities as an intellectual and an artist; but it has also served to reflect my perception of the nature of love, sorrow, and decay, by crystallizing my notions of the ‘sacred sin’ that, ultimately, intimates salvation. The protagonist of Bruges-La-Morte is left to his own sins before we can glimpse his absolution: but if the trajectory of my philosophy, that we must rot before we ripen, is accepted as truth, Bruges-La-Morte, with its jarring tragedy and startling pessimism, casts a light upon one of the more troubling intimations of this school of thought: that salvation is relative: that sometimes decay is, in and of itself, the only salvation at all.
    • 3/5
      Georges Rodenbach's Foreword to Bruges-la-Morte makes clear his intent to have the setting of Bruges be a character in its own right, casting the city as a guide and shaper of the events of this story. It's a fine goal, one shared by Joyce with Dubliners and Ulysses, not to mention a plethora of films (from Lost in Translation, to Midnight in Paris, to Ghostbusters), but Rodenbach goes a little overboard with it here. Instead of an organic development of the setting, Rodenbach explicitly states what the city means to the main character, and has whole pages in this short work dedicated to describing the city and the psychological effect it's having. If Rodenbach had some great insight into the whole "city-as-character" idea then this would be fine, but his thesis seems to be little more than that cities "have a personality, an autonomous spirit, an almost externalized character...[e]very city is a state of mind." It's not very insightful, and moreover I think it's an overly-simplistic understanding as well- Calvino's take on this idea in Invisible Cities resonated with me much more deeply.

      Still, Bruges makes a good setting for what is a dark and melancholy tale of a man who has voluntarily trapped himself in the past, chaining himself with memories of his deceased wife. He has dedicated his life to worshipping his widowhood, to the extent that when he finds someone who looks identical to his deceased wife, he sees her more as a conduit of further worship for his deceased wife's memory than someone to rekindle his affections. At first, anyway- later Rodenbach inexplicably has him fall in love with this doppelgänger without a buildup that made it feel organic. Read Swann's Way, particularly the section concerning Swann and Odette, to see this type of development done masterfully. The main character's housekeeper is a devout Christian (along with nearly everyone else in the city), and she must react to her employer's scandalous behavior. It briefly seemed as though Rodenbach was drawing parallels between the housekeeper's religious devotion and the unnatural devotion of the main character to his deceased wife, but I don't think Rodenbach meant to suggest that religious faith is warped in the same way. Even if he did, that thread of the narrative never came to fruition.

      Overall, and perhaps not surprisingly given how slim this book is, there's not too much going on in this story. If you want a tale that's a bit doleful, or one set in Bruges, look no further, but Bruges-la-Morte didn't develop the setting or story organically enough and didn't delve deeply enough into the psychological morass of the main character or his city to impress me.
    • 4/5
      This is a Symbolist classic, a portrait of a man in mourning who sees himself in the "dead" city of Bruges, tied to it by "an extra sense, frail and sickly," which links moods to buildings and images, "creating a spiritual telegraphy" between the soul "and the grief-stricken towers of Bruges." (p. 60.) There is interesting literature on this book--the art historian Georges Didi-Huberman has written on it--but that it not my interest. I read it because it has illustrations, photographs of the city. (So it is part of my project to read novels with images in them.)All of the following comments are provisional because I have not had a chance to look at the original French edition.1. The influence of the non-fictional character of the photographs on the degree of reality of the fictional characters. What's interesting here is the juxtaposition of fiction with non-fiction in the form of photography. The narrative describes real places in Bruges, including the names of artworks, churches, and streets, so the setting (as it is presented in prose) is different from the setting of, say, "Madame Bovary," where the provincial town could be anywhere in France. Strangely, the narrative is more specific about real places than the images, because they are not captioned (so people unfamiliar with the city would not know where they were taken). It is not at all clear to me how to characterize the slightly greater degree of veracity this gives to the fictional characters, especially because the plot is mainly an interior monologue (told in third person) with a sensational murder at the end.2. The reason the photographs have no people in them.Almost all the images are empty streets. I think only one image has a person in it; one image is a sculpted tomb; one has swans. As Sebald also saw, it is crucial not to have people in photographs that are set in novels, because then the reader will try to identify the characters with figures in the photographs. The one figure I can see in these reproductions is far enough back so that it isn't clear whether he, or she, is the woman who is being described in the accompanying narrative. On the facing page (p. 82) is the line: "she made her way back along the dead streets..." so (if the photograph is opposite that line in the original French edition) the parallel is irresistible. Because no figures appear elsewhere--or at least most streets are clearly deserted--a read can conclude that Rodenbach did not think about this issue: otherwise the anomaly of this one figure would have struck him, and he would have seen how it disrupts the way both streets and figures are described elsewhere. And because he did not think about, it, it's also clear that photographs, for him, worked in series or signified as a single overlapping evocation rather than a series of discrete scenes (which is what they obviously are: they are all very carefully framed).3. The relation between the narrator and the person who must have taken the photographs.The author makes no mention of who took them: they are presented as the actual town itself, through which the fictional characters move. It's the same gambit as in Sebald and others: if, as a narrator, you develop a character who is a photographer, then it is that person who must have been holding the camera, adjusting the focus, managing the flash, and so forth, and that awareness is intrusive. By avoiding all mention of photographic equipment in the narrative, the authors manage, provisionally--and, for me, unconvincingly--to present images as if they were partly the projections of the character's mind or mood, or as if they were simply there, un-authored, without agency or context. Surely this strategy excludes a tremendous richness of meaning.4. The coordination between images and text varies without any clear pattern.On p. 89 in the English edition, the narrator is speaking about how he feels guilty whenever he sees one of Bruges's main spires. The page turn to 90 includes the phrase "the towers mocked his wretched [sinful] love." Opposite is a photograph of one of them. It's a striking correspondence. On p. 96, the narrator is describing the inside of a church, but the image opposite is an unusually uninteresting view of the back of the outside of that church, implying the narrator spent time outside, or perhaps implying that the art in the church couldn't be adequately photographed? On p. 124, a procession involving hundreds of people passes by in front of the narrator's house. On the bottom of p. 124, the streets "had quickly emptied." The image opposite is another empty street. Again the correspondence seems intentional. But most photographs in the book do not correspond to the text, so these few examples would seem to indicate that Rodenbach had not completely worked out how to integrate photographs into his novel: or, to put it differently, he felt that such integration or correspondences were unimportant in relation to the overall purpose of evoking the "dead" city. But what a simple idea that is regarding photography, and images in general--that they work en masse, while narrative moves in discrete passages, and even through discrete ekphrases.
    • 5/5
      Hugues Viane has retired to Bruges after the death of his wife of ten years; five years later, he is still unable to put her memory to rest. Indeed, he has sequestered himself in his home, erecting a shrine to his wife; in this room are gathered her portraits and various objects and trinkets, along with a tress of her hair which Viane has placed inside a glass box. Each day he caresses and kisses each item, and by night he takes to the meandering the streets of Bruges whose grey melancholy he feels in tune with, a kind of “spiritual telegraphy between his soul and the grief-stricken towers of Bruges.”

      

As in many symbolist texts, doubling is apparent here: not only is Viane’s mood that of the city, and therefore emphasized, but his grief is so obsessive that he chances upon a woman whom he believes to be the striking image of his dead wife. This act of doubling is one in which Georges Rodenbach is extremely interested in that it proves how the dead die twice, the first death being their physical death and the second being when our memories of them begin to fade, causing those mental images to which we cling to no longer be sources of recollection and comfort:



      But the faces of the dead, which are preserved in our memory for a while, gradually deteriorate there, fading like a pastel drawing that has not been kept under glass, allowing the chalk to disperse. Thus, within us, our dead die a second time.
      Bruges-la-Morte is very much concerned with the vacillation between states of intense joy and utter anguish. In his obsession over Jane, the woman who resembles his dead wife, Viane is embodying this idea of the dead dying twice. While there are moments of some melodramatic intensity characteristic of symbolist work, Rodenbach is also keen on exploring how the life of a small city reacts to a scandal, and it is both the solitary city scenes that drive home the despair of the protagonist and the scenes of townspeople gossiping in the city that demonstrate how the city works in different ways for its inhabitants.

      

Although he is under “the spell” of this double, and even though he hopes that the likeness “would allow him the infinite luxury of forgetting,” Viane can do no such thing, and soon finds himself at an erotic and psychological crossroads at which the “distressing masquerade” he enacts to quell his grief is not enough to sustain the memory of the dead.

      Bruges is very much the main character in the novel: “He was already starting to resemble the town. Once more he was the brother in silence and in melancholy of this sorrowful Bruges, his soror dolorosa.” The novel is accompanied by photographs of the city to underscore the central role it plays in Viane’s state of mourning. Rodenbach is adamant about how living spaces breathe and affect those living there:



      Towns above all have a personality, a spirit of their own, an almost externalised character which corresponds to joy, new love, renunciation, widowhood. Each town is a state of mind, a mood which, after only a short stay, communicates itself, spreads to us in an effluvium which impregnates us, which we absorb with the very air.
      This idea of the city having an emotional and psychological state of its own is also something Rodenbach explores in the short essay included in the Dedalus edition, “The Death Throes of Towns.”

Bruges-la-Morte is a symbolist masterpiece; more than that, it is powerful novel about grief and mourning, as well as a treatise on how one’s city can reflect one’s emotional state, and vice versa.
    • 3/5
      A novella, published in 1892, dripping in symbolism and highly atmospheric. Hughes Viane, spend his days in mourning for his dead wife, living amoungst her things, venerating her dead hair, leaving his house to walk amongst the deathly, well preserved, religious city: Bruges. That is until he spots her likeness wandering the streets and becomes tragically obsessed. It's a short, very readable book full of heavy handed symbolism (to modern eyes) It doesn't bring the city alive but takes its parts (the constant bells, the silent canals etc..) to underline his grief. Interesting but not something I recommend until I realised that it was 1st published illustrated by many haunting photographs. Now that would be an edition to seek out, the images and text feeding off each other a joy to behold.So I recommend that edition unless you a lover of symbolism or the opera Die tote Stadt which is based on the book.
    • 4/5
      This novella tells a simple story: when Hugues Viane loses his young, beautiful wife, he decides to settle in Bruges because the town mirrored his own inconsolable grief. The city is gray and moribund, ideal for feeding his melancholy (this was set in the late 1900s; today, the town is lively, charming, and bustling with tourists reverting to what it was in the Middle Ages -- a prosperous trading town). In his morbid obsession to keep the memory of his wife alive, he turns his home into a "temple" to his wife. One day in the streets, he sees a woman who is the exact double of the dead wife. He pursues her, starts an affair, but is crushed to realise that she is not the reincarnation of his wife. It just goes more dark from there...Rodenbach writes very beautifully, one gets inside the isolation, the loneliness and the grief of Viane, and all this is heightened by Rodenbach's description of the town. In such a poetic way, he presents to us a tableau in black and white which are the colors of the clergy, in harmony with the dark waters of the canals, the white of the swans, and the gray skies. The contrast of black and white is a many-layered theme in the novella and symbolizes many things. It is most evident in the contrasting emotions in Viane's soul where he fights to preserve the "sanctity" of his wife's memory against the "blackness" he begins to see in his new lover. A beautiful novella, simple yet profound as it portrays the psychology of grief and pain toward a rather haunting end.
    • 4/5
      Rodenbach's languid prose matches the melancholic landscape of Bruges. The main character, widower Viane, meanders among the quais and deserted streets, around the old houses and churches, through the bereft town; mourning his wife's death. The decayed city becomes his psychology. Although cliche now in subject: the narrator's descent into debased and perverse morbidity, the novel is still am enchanting gem of th genre.

    Book preview

    Bruges-la-morte - Georges Rodenbach

    The Project Gutenberg EBook of Bruges-la-morte, by Georges Rodenbach

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

    Title: Bruges-la-morte

    Author: Georges Rodenbach

    Release Date: February 5, 2005 [EBook #14911]

    Language: French

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BRUGES-LA-MORTE ***

    This Etext was prepared by Ebooks libres et gratuits and is available at http://www.ebooksgratuits.com in Word format, Mobipocket Reader format, eReader format and Acrobat Reader format.

    Georges Rodenbach

    BRUGES-LA-MORTE

    (1892)

    Table des matières

    AVERTISSEMENT I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV

    _AVERTISSEMENT__

    Dans cette étude passionnelle, nous avons voulu aussi et principalement évoquer une Ville, la Ville comme un personnage essentiel, associé aux états d'âme, qui conseille, dissuade, détermine à agir.

    Ainsi, dans la réalité, cette Bruges, qu'il nous a plu d'élire, apparaît presque humaine… Un ascendant s'établit d'elle sur ceux qui y séjournent.

    Elle les façonne selon ses sites et ses cloches.

    Voilà ce que nous avons souhaité de suggérer: la Ville orientant une action; ses paysages urbains, non plus seulement comme des toiles de fond, comme des thèmes descriptifs un peu arbitrairement choisis, mais liés à l'événement même du livre.

    C'est pourquoi il importe, puisque ces décors de Bruges collaborent aux péripéties, de les reproduire également ici, intercalés entre les pages: quais, rues désertes, vieilles demeures, canaux, béguinage, églises, orfèvrerie du culte, beffroi, afin que ceux qui nous liront subissent aussi la présence et l'influence de la Ville, éprouvent la contagion des eaux mieux voisines, sentent à leur tour l'ombre des hautes tours allongée sur le texte.

    I

    Le jour déclinait, assombrissant les corridors de la grande demeure silencieuse, mettant des écrans de crêpe aux vitres.

    Hugues Viane se disposa à sortir, comme il en avait l'habitude quotidienne à la fin des après-midi. Inoccupé, solitaire, il passait toute la journée dans sa chambre, une vaste pièce au premier étage, dont les fenêtres donnaient sur le quai du Rosaire, au long duquel s'alignait sa maison, mirée dans l'eau.

    Il lisait un peu: des revues, de vieux livres; fumait beaucoup; rêvassait à la croisée ouverte par les temps gris, perdu dans ses souvenirs.

    Voilà cinq ans qu'il vivait ainsi, depuis qu'il était venu se fixer à Bruges, au lendemain de la mort de sa femme. Cinq ans déjà! Et il se répétait à lui-même: «Veuf! Être veuf! Je suis le veuf!» Mot irrémédiable et bref! d'une seule syllabe, sans écho. Mot impair et qui désigne bien l'être dépareillé.

    Pour lui, la séparation avait été terrible: il avait connu l'amour dans le luxe, les loisirs, le voyage, les pays neufs renouvelant l'idylle. Non seulement le délice paisible d'une vie conjugale exemplaire, mais la passion intacte, la fièvre continuée, le baiser à peine assagi, l'accord des âmes, distantes et jointes pourtant, comme les quais parallèles d'un canal qui mêle leurs deux reflets.

    Dix années de ce bonheur, à peine senties, tant elles avaient passé vite!

    Puis, la jeune femme était morte, au seuil de la trentaine, seulement alitée quelques semaines, vite étendue sur ce lit du dernier jour, où il la revoyait à jamais: fanée et blanche comme la cire l'éclairant, celle qu'il avait adorée si belle avec son teint de fleur, ses yeux de prunelle dilatée et noire dans de la nacre, dont l'obscurité contrastait avec ses cheveux, d'un jaune d'ambre, des cheveux qui, déployés, lui couvraient tout le dos, longs et ondulés. Les Vierges des Primitifs ont des toisons pareilles, qui descendent en frissons calmes.

    Sur le cadavre gisant, Hugues avait coupé cette gerbe, tressée en longue natte dans les derniers jours de la maladie. N'est-ce pas comme une pitié de la mort? Elle ruine tout, mais laisse intactes les chevelures. Les yeux, les lèvres, tout se brouille et s'effondre. Les cheveux ne se décolorent même pas. C'est en eux seuls qu'on se survit! Et maintenant, depuis les cinq années déjà, la tresse conservée de la morte n'avait guère pâli, malgré le sel de tant de larmes.

    Le veuf, ce jour-là, revécut plus douloureusement tout son passé, à cause de ces temps gris de novembre où les cloches, dirait-on, sèment dans l'air des poussières de sons, la cendre morte des années.

    Il se décida pourtant à sortir, non pour chercher au dehors quelque distraction obligée ou quelque remède à son mal. Il n'en voulait point essayer. Mais il aimait cheminer aux approches du soir et chercher des analogies à son deuil dans de solitaires canaux et d'ecclésiastiques quartiers.

    En descendant au rez-de-chaussée de sa demeure, il aperçut, toutes ouvertes sur le grand corridor blanc, les portes d'ordinaire closes.

    Il appela dans le silence sa vieille servante: «Barbe!…

    Barbe!…»

    Aussitôt la femme apparut dans l'embrasure de la première porte, et devinant pourquoi son maître l'avait hélée:

    —Monsieur, fît-elle, j'ai dû m'occuper des salons aujourd'hui, parce que demain c'est fête.

    —Quelle fête? demanda Hugues, l'air contrarié.

    —Comment! monsieur ne sait pas? Mais la fête de la Présentation de la Vierge. Il faut que j'aille à la messe et au salut du Béguinage. C'est un jour comme un dimanche. Et puisque je ne peux pas travailler demain, j'ai rangé les salons aujourd'hui.»

    Hugues Viane ne cacha pas son mécontentement. Elle savait bien qu'il voulait assister à ce travail-là. Il y avait, dans ces deux pièces, trop de trésors, trop de souvenirs d'Elle et de l'autrefois pour laisser la servante y circuler seule. Il désirait pouvoir la surveiller, suivre ses gestes, contrôler sa prudence, épier son respect. Il voulait manier lui-même, quand il les fallait déranger pour l'enlèvement des poussières, tel bibelot précieux, tels objets de la morte, un coussin, un écran qu'elle avait fait elle-même. Il semblait que ses doigts fussent partout dans ce mobilier intact et toujours pareil, sofas, divans, fauteuils où elle s'était assise, et qui conservaient pour ainsi dire la forme de son corps. Les rideaux gardaient les plis éternisés qu'elle leur avait donnés. Et dans les miroirs, il semblait qu'avec prudence il fallût en frôler d'éponges et de linges la surface claire pour ne pas effacer son visage dormant au fond. Mais ce que Hugues voulait aussi surveiller et garder de tout heurt, ce sont les portraits de la pauvre morte, des portraits à ses différents âges, éparpillés un peu partout, sur la cheminée, les guéridons, les murs; et puis surtout—un accident à cela lui aurait brisé toute l'âme—le trésor conservé de cette chevelure intégrale qu'il n'avait point voulu enfermer dans quelque tiroir de commode ou quelque coffret obscur—c'aurait été comme mettre la chevelure dans un tombeau!—aimant mieux, puisqu'elle était toujours vivante, elle, et d'un or sans âge, la laisser étalée et visible comme la portion d'immortalité de son amour!

    Pour la voir sans cesse, dans le grand salon toujours le même, cette chevelure qui était encore Elle, il l'avait posée là sur

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