Chapter IV: Cogolin, September 30

Realize that I myself write to you. Cydalise has achieved this miracle. My divinity, which was already old six thousand years ago, now knows almost as much as those little lads coming out from school. I will not say that it has revealed the world to me. It has veiled it, on the contrary, and I have seen the world diminish, just as the pines on the hillsides lessen in size as one moves away. But in shrinking in stature, the world becomes sharper, its outlines grow more fixed, its light stronger. My brain is quite changed. It is no longer that of a god. The vision, vast but confused, and almost unconscious, has suddenly assumed form. Little by little I have detached myself from nature, where I was at home. She lived within me and I felt her like the beating of my heart. It is now I who live in her and in vain do I seek to touch her hands: no longer is she only air, light, odors and nourishment. I felt her breathing with the same breath as my own and now I must drink her essence: it intoxicates me.

Cydalise is amused at my astonishment:

“I see,” she says, “the birth of a man. That is finer than a god. I was curious about you. Now I love you, for I read a fraternity in your eyes. One can only love one’s equals or those who have been fashioned in one’s image. When the gods begin to love, they become men.”

This strange language delights me, for it is the truth: I have begun to love Cydalise. I know it by the fact that I now view the loveliest creatures almost indifferently, by the fact that the image of Cydalise immediately is interposed between them and me, if by chance they please and attract me. There were many of them under our pines, this summer. They used to lie on the lavender, their large hats shading their eyes; and they would pretend to sleep in the warm peacefulness of nature, beneath the sun’s last rays. Oh! the sudden emotion, the thrill that instantly seizes you, when the slowly lifted robe reveals a beautiful body! This is not an old recollection. There are still such refinements which were once common. Those bare feet in sandals, those hoods, those robes of a nun I once had seen in Florence, upright and modest in wool—the color of time and innocence—I beheld again, one evening, under the Cogolin pines.

How good and beautiful and gentle she was,—the little nun of Cogolin! It was my last adventure. Its memory is dear to me and I have not sacrificed it for Cydalise’s love; but since then I have sought nothing, accepted nothing. When I learned my alphabet, I wanted to carve these words on the bark of a plane-tree:

THE SATYR ANTIPHILOS
IS FAITHFUL TO
CYDALISE.

Re-reading this inscription, I could not believe it to be the truth, could not believe that I myself had written it. I was about to burst into laughter, when I beheld a happy expression in Cydalise’s eyes. I understood that I had not been lying.

We are living golden days. My sweetheart gives me almost all her time. When she leaves for the town, she returns a trifle fatigued, with pieces of gold which she smilingly shows, cakes, milk and honey. We share the food by the banks of a pure stream where doves come to drink.

Then she gives me a lesson. I think the gold she brings back with her comes from the lessons she gives men, down there. When I ask if her pupils are progressing, her only reply is to play with my curls and kiss me. I am acquiescent. Then we traverse our domain, that is to say the pine wood, the carpet of heather and lavender, the arid hillside where a stream, near which several plane-trees have sprung up, pauses beside a grotto and brambles.

Cydalise thinks it odd and amusing to dwell in a grotto. I have never slept anywhere but in the open or in grottos, and what astonishes me in our haven is not that it is a grotto, but that Cydalise has transformed it into a palace worthy of Olympus. In a chariot drawn by a swift-footed steed she brought a large sack of wool, skilfully sewed, on which we rest, much more at our ease than on the dead leaves which, notwithstanding, are comfortable; she also brought skins of beasts, and material richly woven and painted with liveliest colors. For her toilette she has collected a thousand objects which would make goddesses envious and, placed in elegant little boards are—and I have never seen the like of this—books and sketches. With her aid,—she is so frank, so refined, divine one might say—I live in a state of enchantment. I have leisure. My prepared repasts await me and the time I once spent in gathering fruits and roots is now passed with a book in which I discover life.

What surprises me, even more than the wonders created by Cydalise, is that life can be contained in the pages of a book. Yes, I have noticed that a sheet of paper on which one would say that a bug has taken a deliberate stroll with its dirty legs,—that such a rag of paper holds in itself more things than do the valleys and hillsides, the trees and horizons which stand or spread out in front of me. My long and divine experience is confounded. I believed I knew things because I had seen them; but men have regarded them, and that is not the same thing. I can only faintly express my joys, those of a budding, young, civilized creature. Into me have entered ideas of whose existence I never had the slightest suspicion, and as a result I am quite perturbed. It is in vain that I would attempt to explain them to you. Then, it would be like explaining flying to one who is at home in the air. But I need a confidant, a man to whom I can confess my new state of mind, without being laughed at. Cydalise intimidates me too much: near her I am like a big child trying to read thoughts in eyes and finding only itself reflected therein.

Ah! divine nature, thou art the agent, nevertheless, and it is thee I must thank. It is my noble nudity and the wild boldness of my carriage that have attracted this woman to me. The antennæ of pleasure have slowly changed to those of intelligence. When Cydalise, under my attentive eyes, disrobes and stands radiant, it seems to me that it is Isis herself; my brain is awhirl and no longer my senses alone, and my mind expands and blossoms with the same movement as my flesh.

Well! Not so bad for a satyr, eh? I re-read what I have written with a sense of pleasure, change a few commas and amuse myself hugely.

V

METAMORPHOSIS