Chapter III: Cogolin, June 3

At last I have the leisure to write and give you another chapter of my adventures, since I know that you have communicated them to other men. Like nature, the gods exist only at the instant you speak and think of them, and as soon as your attention is distracted from divine things, they fall again into the dim, pantheistic immensity where their lives glide by, mute, deep and plant-like. I partake of the gods, I have lived that life. I partake of men, and I know what human joys are. Alas! destiny has meted them out to me so miserly, in these days, that I hardly feel my humanity any longer. That is why I am sad, yes, sad, despite the restless eyes which reproachfully gaze at me this very moment, despite cheeks made slightly rosy by paint and now somewhat pale, rubbing against my old, immortal, shaggy skin. For the past three years I have tasted more bitterness than I experienced in my life heretofore. Solitude has poisoned my heart and if such times, or worse,—who knows?—were to return, I would be reduced to imploring the gods to recall me to Olympus, to the parental habitation. Ah! to renounce women! The gods no longer descend to the earth and I fear the goddesses. What a sorry figure this poor goat-footed satyr would make among them!

But was I not born to be happy? When I say this, Cydalise treats me as a romantic satyr, and though I do not very well understand, I feel it means that such a dream is considered chimerical. I and your philosophers do not understand happiness in the same way. I will die only when nature dies, and it is with her alone that I should take my stand. The seasons mean more to me than does metaphysics. Why should there not be a return to the old, faun liberties? The gates of sheepfolds will not always be so firmly shut and Venus, who seems to have forgotten herself in particular loves, will yet again remember her universal mission. It is a fact that the nymphs no longer inhabit the woods and that for three years I have not been able to capture any maiden, but Cydalise has comforted the old solitary faun and the hope of vintage time returns to my heart. Do not believe the things I told you at the beginning of this letter. They were the remains of melancholy moods I have not been able to share with anyone. Now that you have felt them with me, I no longer feel them. What matters the past to him who holds the present?

Cydalise descended from the Thespian chariot to come to me. Her profession is to recite verses of the poets to the people. She was seeking me, which means that she had already found me, according to some verses she recited and which evidently apply to my divinity, ever present and ever active. Cydalise has not invoked me in vain. The hoary, old god has always the youth of his desires and the desires of his youth. Weak men disappoint women, many women have told me, but satyrs never; others say they have known, trembling and blushing, men too late for happiness. Dreamy and wanton, Cydalise loves to recite poems in the interval of two frenzies. She begins with a voice a little out of breath because of the divine inspiration; then she slowly grows elated and falls into a sort of sudden trembling which ends still more rapidly in my arms. So, I know the first stanzas better than I do the last, which die in vague murmurs. I remember a similar adventure in Campania. I was enamoured of a Greek slave of marvelous beauty who used to come to visit me each evening, and who always wished to sing the first idyll of Theocritus for me, to show that her voice was as pure as her body anointed with oil of lavender. She never had the strength to begin the third verse: “Sweet is the murmuring of the pine near the fountains, O goatherd, sweet is the sound of thy flute....” Her voice stopped at [Greek: Tyrisdes]. Perhaps she did not wish, as Aesop says, to lose the prey for the shadow. The gods be praised! Gaiety returns to me with these distant memories which are so delicately woven into the present, across the centuries. This one knows better how to resist the violence of desire: She prepares with more skill the denouement whose plaintive syllables she knows how to prolong. She has not received a bad education: perhaps I shall be attached to her more than to all the others, though my nature always drives me to new discoveries. Such women are so rare!

But love knows a forced repose, and honest satyrs themselves respect this state, for they hold blood in as much horror as tears. One of these days of languor, she came to me with a book and, still smiling through her resigned sadness, began to read aloud, without any explanation: _The Afternoon of a Faun_. What a miracle! Lulled by these rhythms that were as irregular as a stream running down woody hillsides, I had almost as much pleasure in watching her moving lips as in holding them sealed to mine. Then she explained the poem to me, as the philosophers formerly did in the academies.

And I saw myself rising from between the willows of the bank, my ear intent for hint of pastimes which I desired and which was lacking. I remember it was one of those exciting and warm days, the like of which I have not experienced for a long time; I had heard the river lightly plash, as though on some plunging body, and I was about to run away, for I fear the hostility of mankind, when I fancied I saw floating hair on the water’s edge, some hemp held by a rush. I watched. If it was a woman, come from a garden of roses, she would return; the hedge was translucent and the house quite high, up towards the hill. Long I waited. Tired, I went in quest of her. I saw nothing. Now I heard laughter. I imagined many things, the very things this poet has described. Oh! to seize them! They are at least two, since there is so much laughter. Laughter, games, delicate caresses. It is yonder. Now silence reigns. Could they have guessed? No. Pleasure meditates before bursting forth. And I? But if you know the poem, you also know my agitation, my exasperated restlessness, panting, atremble, made dizzy. A man stood up among the trees, far above me.

“It was he,” said Cydalise.

“Who is ‘he’?”

“The poet.”

And she kissed his name on the title page of the book.

“So it was really he?”

“Certainly.”

“I took to flight!”

“To run away! But he saw you, he would have liked to approach. Just fancy! he resembled you, as much as any man can resemble a god, and no one was ever nearer the gods by spirit. To run away from him. Your brother in candor!”

This is the adventure such as I have been able to learn it. Cydalise says I should be very proud because of it. She has made me memorize three lines of this divine poem, so that I shall never have the air of being ignorant of my past:

Alors m’éveillerais-je à la ferveur première,
Droit et seul, sous le flot antique de lumière,
Lys! et l’un de vous tous pour l’ingénuité.

Candor, again! But nothing suits me any longer.

I have made a bargain with Cydalise. I permit her to send you kisses: accept them. She permits me to make, to renew rather, an entreaty to you. Do not allow those rascals who disembowel girls to be called satyrs. A satyr is incapable of such crimes. The lasses I have met have been highly satisfied with me and their kisses, innocent like nature, have thanked me fervently with a thousand little tricks I taught them.

ANTIPHILOS,
_Satyr._

IV

CYDALISE