him fast!
And kiss him till
I’ve no more breath,
And kissing brings
A blissful death.
And what does the Watercarrier do, moved by the desperate cry of the wounded Virgin? What does a mature woman (in the person of Franz Schubert) do when she hears the lament of a young man (the eternally young Goethe)? She goes towards him; she stretches out her hand to him. She swallows her ambition and pride, forgets her fear of humiliation and speaks to him. She lends him her voice: she composes music and transforms words into song. She turns the savage cry into sweet melody.
For song brings harmony and reconciliation. It is through song that opposites are united and dissonances resolved; it is through song that the ultimate synthesis is reached, and the spirit reconciled with the flesh.
In the song of Virgo and Aquarius, the Stellar Victoria is realised.
I long for that victory with my Aquarius!
It was well after midnight when I put down my pen. I had written almost twenty pages. Feeling strangely dazed, I closed my notebook and went to bed.
The next day I paid another visit to the university, this time to the departmental library, to find a French translation of the passages I had quoted from Faust and look up a few words and phrases I wasn’t sure of in Larousse, Robert and various other dictionaries. This done, I made the appropriate corrections and then read the essay through from the beginning, marking all the liaisons with a pencil and underlining the words to stress when reading it out loud.
As soon as I got home, I took advantage of my parents’ absence to have a sort of dress rehearsal: I read the whole thing out loud. And while up to that point I’d been rather pleased with it, I now began to have serious misgivings. It wasn’t that I read badly; I stumbled over the occasional word, but not so often, and this could easily be corrected with practice. The problem lay elsewhere: the thing was just too long. I couldn’t possibly hope to get through it all in one lesson. Knowing Madame, I could be sure she would stop me after the first few minutes, whether or not I had made any mistakes. If she didn’t find anything wrong with it, she might let me read on for about six paragraphs, say, before cutting me off with that soulless ‘bien’ and entering the mark in her book; and if my art d’écrire turned out to be less than sound, she would interrupt with constant corrections, thus distracting from the content, and finally say that was fine, I needn’t go on, and tell me to sit down. And then there was her suspicion of people who volunteered; that, too, had to be taken into account.
Leaving all that aside, and assuming that by some miracle Madame let me read on to the end, uninterrupted, I still had serious reservations. The rest of the class was bound to realise that something was up: over half an hour! Twenty pages instead of the usual three or four! An essay of that length couldn’t fail to arouse suspicion. And the content! All those fantastic stories, connected loosely at best with the subject; all that suspect erudition; all those transparent allusions and obvious hidden meanings – ‘young man’, ‘mature woman’, ‘virginity’, ‘initiation’; even an outsider would smell something fishy, and it certainly wouldn’t take the class long to figure out where the author was headed and what his true purpose was. Even the ones at the bottom of the class in French and the ones who never paid attention would rouse themselves from their lethargy and prick up their ears, intrigued by this reading that went on and on. And they’d probably wake up just when I got to the second half, where the layer of hints and allusions was thickest.
It was absurd to imagine that anyone would interpret this extravagant linguistic performance as an effort to improve my marks in French. Nor would it be dismissed as some bizarre flight of fancy, a laboured whim meant to dazzle the teacher and earn the gratitude of the class for taking up most of the lesson. It would be taken solely as proof that despite my ostentatious displays of indifference I, too, was in thrall to Madame; that I, too, like dozens of others, was utterly, helplessly smitten.
‘It’s not just Ashes under the desk any longer,’ they’d say. ‘Now he’s volunteering to read! Look at him, fawning on her, insinuating himself into her good graces, stooping to anything for a bit of attention!’
Awakened to this prospect, imagining the sniggers and jeers, I relinquished all thoughts of volunteering to read. Now I wouldn’t read even if I was called. I would simply refuse, explaining enigmatically that I had allowed myself to get carried away and wouldn’t like to take up the class’s precious time with my scribblings, but, of course, she could see my essay any time she liked, here it was, voilà, regardez mon cahier, j’ai écrit presque vingt pages – I’ve written almost twenty pages; but if for some reason she didn’t want my notebook, if it was too heavy, for instance, then – and here an entirely new idea came to me – then she could have a copy, a clean copy that I’d made, on just a few pages of foolscap.
Yes, that wasn’t a bad idea at all: copying it out so that I could hand the copy to Madame if need be. Suddenly it seemed the best solution; none of the others was quite so satisfactory. I abandoned my attempts to perfect my recitation, took up my pen and carefully copied the whole thing onto several sheets of cross-ruled writing paper.
But on the day of the lesson new doubts assailed me. Even if everything goes as planned, I reflected as I left the house that morning, going over it all for the hundredth time, even if I give her the copy and manage to make it look casual, almost as an afterthought, is this a good move? What will it achieve? I’ll only be revealing myself, exposing my position. It’s far too early for that – it’s the last thing I need. It’s a gambit that might cost me a great deal.
By the time I got to school the thought of any ploys with the copy could not have been further from my mind, and when the lesson began I was praying I wouldn’t be called.
Per Aspera ad Astra
Madame was in a remarkably good mood that day. She was cheerful and relaxed, and more talkative than usual; she spoke more freely, less formally. During the conversation period she strolled about among the desks, which she rarely did, stopping here and there to strike up a conversation. At one point she even permitted herself a little joke: when someone was describing how, during a terribly hot summer in the country, he’d cooled off with a plunge into a clay-pit, she observed with a smile, ‘On peut dire que tu as joui de la vie comme un loup dans un puits: one might say you had as much fun as a wolf in a well.’ Her interlocutor seemed to have missed some of the implications of this remark, for he appeared enchanted with it, agreeing happily and vigorously nodding his head.
‘And how did your essay about the stars go?’ she asked finally, proceeding to the next stage of the lesson. ‘All done? Would someone like to read theirs?’
This was unheard of. Never before had she asked for volunteers. The class was stunned, and Madame continued in a teasing tone: ‘Quoi donc? Il n’y a personne? No one wants a good mark? What’s the matter with you today?’
I felt my pulse quicken. Perhaps I should volunteer after all? In the circumstances . . . She did ask for volunteers, and no one seems very eager . . . No, definitely not. It’s out of the question.
‘Bon, alors, since there don’t seem to be any volunteers, I’ll have to pick on someone. Mademoiselle Swat, then, please.’
The plump, tapir-like Adrienne Swat heaved herself to her feet and launched, crimson-faced, into her essay. It wasn’t exactly thrilling. Indeed, it didn’t even meet the criteria for a composition; it was more of a collection of sentences strung together, like a definition, or something out of a children’s book:
‘Quand il n’y a pas de nuages, nous voyons le ciel, le soleil et la lune . . . Le ciel est bleu ou bleu pâle . . . Les étoiles sont loin . . . des millions de kilomètres d’ici.’ And so on in the same vein. Luckily it didn’t last long.
Madame did not interrupt the reading at any point, but she was displeased, and said so. ‘Je ne peux pas dire that I’m dazzled by your originality.