III Our Studies at Fontainebleau
I feel no surprise that our great initiator into the Insect World, Swammerdam, recoiled in affright when the microscope first afforded him a glimpse of it.
For the name of its inhabitants is, the Living Infinite.
Upwards of two hundred years men have laboured, simplifying in one direction, and complicating in another. The excellent treatises written upon this subject leave, among a multitude of partial illuminations, a certain feeling of being dazzled. Such is the impression which their study for some time produced upon us.
Ought I to flatter myself that I can render it clearer than my masters have done? By no means. But I discovered, through the incident which took place at Lucerne, and others of later date, that our enthusiastic and sympathetic ignorance could penetrate further, perhaps, into the meaning of the insect life than has been the lot of many scientific classificators.
The thought pursued me during the winter, but I could not verify any experiment at Paris; it was only at Fontainebleau that I worked out the truly simple formula about to be submitted to the reader, and obtained some tranquillity of mind, so far as this subject was concerned.
The place admirably favoured the then condition of my soul. All the painful circumstances of the time, by driving me back upon myself, increased my concentration. We constituted for ourselves a perfect solitude. Our chamber became for us an entire city. And outside there was nothing but a ring of wood, then tolerably small, which we traversed on foot.
This ring oppressed me a little in the great heats, when the sun shone reflected on the sandstone. But in these dry hot days the thought does not grow enfeebled. I could follow up and investigate mine with sequence and perseverance, enjoying—what is rare enough in life—a grand harmonious unity of ideas and sentiments, which I was by no means anxious to vary, but rather to deepen.
I went forth alone at noonday, and walked some distance into the dull, dumb, and sandy forest, which was without whisper and without voice. I carried thither my theme, and trusted to attain its meaning in that infinite of sand overlaid by an infinite of leaves. But how much vaster that infinite of animated life, the abyss of imperceptible organisms into which I was fain to descend!
All that Sénancour says of Fontainebleau is true so far as relates to the vague dreamer who brings with him no prevailing thought. Yes; the landscape “is generally on a small scale, dull, low, and solitary without being wild.” Animals are seldom met with, except in a few kids whose number is easily counted. Birds are not numerous. Few or no springs are visible; and the apparent absence of water has a specially depressing effect on the Alpine traveller, who still recalls the freshness of the innumerable fountains of the Alps, and still has before his eyes the radiance of those delightful and sublime mirrors—their lakes. There, all is clear and luminous in the waters and the snows. Here, all is obscure. This small angle, sequestered as it were from the rest of France, is an enigma. It shows you the dead sandstones without a trace of life; it shows you, particularly to-day, the newly-planted pines, which suffer nothing living under their shade. To discover what lies concealed beneath this outer mask, you must have recourse to the divining-rod, the hazel-wand. Revolve it, and you shall find. But what is this divining-rod? A study or a love; any passion which lights up the inner world.
The power of this locality does not lie in its historical, any more than in its artistic associations.C
The chateau distracts one’s attention from the forest by its abundant variety of memories and epochs; but it fails to increase the impression. Nature is the true fairy in this strange, sombre, fantastic, and sterile region.
Observe that wherever the forest assumes an aspect of grandeur, either through the extent of its vista or the loftiness of its trees, it resembles all other forests. The truly magnificent towering beeches of Bas-Bréau seem to me, in spite of their stately bearing and smooth shining bark, a thing I have seen elsewhere. The place is original only where it is low, gloomy rock; where it bears evidence of the struggle of the sandstone, the twisted tree, the perseverance of the elm, or the courageous effort of the oak.
Many persons have remained here fascinated and enthralled. Coming only for a month, they have lingered until death. To the enchanting scene they have addressed the lover’s speech to his beloved:—“Let me live, let me die with thee!”—Tecum vivere amem, tecum obeam libens.
It is a curious fact that every individual finds here what he most delights in: Saint Louis, the Thébaïd of which he dreamed; while Henry IV., who cared for nothing but pleasure, exclaimed, “My delicious deserts!” The poor mystical exile, Kosciusko,D felt the attraction of his Lithuanian forests, and here took root. A man of stone, of flint,—the Breton Maud’huys,—saw here the image of his native Brittany, and built up, stone upon stone, the most original book written upon Fontainebleau.
It is a region of power, which you cannot enter with impunity. Some persons lose in it their wits, undergo a strange metamorphosis, and like Bottom, in Windsor Forest, see themselves adorned with ass’s ears. For the forest is a person: has its lovers and its detractors—some curse it, others bless it. A foolish dreamer wrote of it, on a rock near Nemours, “I will possess thee, cruel stepmother!” And her lover, the old soldier Denecourt, who bestowed on her all that he had in the world, called her “My adored!”E
Some one has said to me: “Is she not the Viola of Shakespeare, with her dubious but always charming aspect; now a maiden, and now a cavalier? Or his young page, Rosalind, after she appears as a laughing damsel?” No: the contrasts are much greater.
For the fairy here has countless faces. She has the cold Alpine plants, and yet she shelters the most delicate flora. Austere in winter and spring, she terrifies you with the rugged rocks which, in autumn, she conceals under a crimson mantle of foliage. She has at her disposal, for a daily change, the delicate tissue of floating gauze which Lantara never fails to spread over it in all his pictures. With her belt of forest she arrests on every side the light mists, and gaily weaves them into veils, and scarfs, and girdles; into all kinds of delicate disguises. You would think the heavy masses of sandstone invariable; yet they change their aspects, their colours—I was going to say their form—every hour. The little chain, for example, known as the Rock of Avon, had saluted us in the morning with the breath of the heather, the cheeriest ray of the dawn, an enchanting aurora which tinted with rose hues the sandstone; all nature seemed to smile, and to harmonize with the innocent studies of a devout and poetic soul. When we returned there in the evening, the capricious fairy had changed everything. Those pines, which had welcomed us under their airy canopy, had suddenly grown wild and fierce, and resounded with strange noises, with lamentations of sinister augury. Those shrubs, which in the morning had graciously invited the white robe to pause beside them and gather their berries or flowers, now seemed to conceal in their copses an undefinable something of ill omen—robbers, it might be, or sorcerers! But greater still the transformation in those rocks, which had courteously received us, and bidden us be seated. Is it the evening, or is it a coming storm, which has changed them? I know not; but there they are, metamorphosed into gloomy sphinxes, into elephants prostrate on the earth, into mammoths, and other monsters of the old worlds which have ceased to exist. They are now at rest, it is true; but are they not about to rise? However this may be, the evening comes on apace; let us advance. My wife presses close to my arm.
Does not our forest deserve the name of the Shakespearian comedy, “As You Like It”?
No; to deal justly with it, we must own that its entertaining metamorphosis, and all its changes to the eye, are absolutely external. Movable in its leaves and mists, fugitive in its shifting sands, it has a firmer foundation than perhaps any other forest, and a power of fixity which communicates itself to the soul, and invites it to grow strong; to search out and seek within its own nature whatever it possesses of the inscrutable. Do not linger too long over its fantastic accidents. Without it says, “As You Like It;” within, “Ever and for ever.”
Its beauty is that of the profound, faithful, and tender heart, which does not the less vary its exquisite grace, though it may daily repeat the words of Charles d’Orléans:
“Who can ever weary of her?
Still her beauty she renews.”
These ideas occurred to me one day as, seated upon Mont Ussy, I looked across Fontainebleau. I comprehended how, in this confined and ordinary region—in this apparent chaos of rocks, and trees, and sandstone—prevailed a tolerable degree of order, which necessarily concealed within it a mystery not obvious at the first glance.
As a whole, it is almost a circle of hills and forests, all dry on the surface; but the sandstone is very pervious, and the sand filtrates with great facility. And the unseen waters, descend in all directions to a great reservoir which occupies the depths.
Storms are frequent here, but do not spread very far. We may nearly always expect them, for the forest detains and arrests them, preserves for itself the wealth of suspended waters, transmitting them to the lower grounds after they have been sifted through the leaves, the woods, and the sands. All this occurs below, without the process ever becoming visible.
Dig, and you shall find.
There lies the charm, the vitality of the genius loci.
The word “genius” conveys too great an idea of fixity, and that of “fairy” is more appropriate. Who shall describe the mystery of this profound hidden basin? this simple and attractive delusion, which, while promising only dryness, faithfully stores up underneath the treasure of its waters?
An eminent Italian artist has given expression to it in the paintings which adorn the Hall of Henry II. It is the Nemorosa, the Wood-Nymph, with hands full of wild-flowers, hiding beneath a rugged rock, but subdued and dreamy, and with eyes swimming tearfully.
In the course of our labours, and especially on days when fell a fine soft rain, we frequently appreciated this sentiment. It prevailed around us like a concentration of nature. In the deep silence we could hear only our beating hearts, the pendulum of the clock, or the occasional cry of the swallow passing above our heads.
Calmed, but not lulled asleep, with clearer brain and keener eye than before, we penetrated further into the shadowy world of the atom, to discover its actual nature; the light, and especially the love, which is the true legitimate sovereign of this lower world; the tongue, the eloquent voice, by which it appeals to the upper world.
Notes
C It contains, however, three notable things: one magnificent, the Hall of Henry II.; one marvellous, the Little Gallery of Francis I.; and one sublime, the four colossi, the incomparable relics of a lost art, that of sculpture in sandstone.
D The Polish hero who unavailingly struggled to secure his country’s freedom, but was crushed by the power of Russia:—
“And Freedom shrieked when Kosciusko fell!”
E It is impossible to be grateful enough for all that M. Denecourt has done; he has rendered the place accessible by everybody, even the poorest, who are no longer in need of guides.—Author.