Annette and Sylvie: Being Volume One of The Soul Enchanted by Romain Rolland - HTML preview

XVII

Annette returned home to the Boulogne house, and there she shut herself up. When the letter to the Brissots had gone off, she severed all connections with the outside world. None of her friends knew that she had returned. She opened no letters. For days she never left the floor on which she lived. Her old aunt, accustomed not to understand her and not to worry about it, respected her isolation. Her external life seemed suspended. Her other, secret life was only the more intense. Her silence was swept by storms of wounded passion. She had to be alone so that she might abandon herself to them to the point of exhaustion. She emerged from them broken, her blood drained, her mouth parched, with burning brow, and hands and feet like ice. There followed torpid periods given over to deep dreams. For days she dreamed; and she made no effort to direct her thoughts. She was invaded by a confused mass of mingled emotions. . . . A somber melancholy, a bitter sweetness, a taste of ashes in the mouth, disappointed hopes, sudden flashes of memory that made her heart leap, fits of embittered despair, pride and passion, and a sense of ruin, of the irremediable, of a Fate against which all efforts are vain,—at first a crushing feeling, then mournful, then dissolving into a drowsiness whose distant sorrow was marked by a strange pleasure. . . . She did not understand. . . .

One night, in a dream, she saw herself in a bourgeoning forest. She was alone. She was running through the thickets. Tree branches laid hold of her dress, damp bushes clutched her; she freed herself, but tore her clothes in doing so, and saw with shame that she was half naked. She bent to cover herself with the tatters of her skirt. And then before her, on the ground, she saw a small oval basket, beneath a pile of sun-drenched leaves,—not yellow and gold, but white as silver, like the trunk of a birch, white with the finest linen. Deeply moved, she looked at it, she knelt beside it. She saw the linen begin to stir. With beating heart, she stretched out her hand. . . . Her emotion persisted. . . . She did not understand. . . .

There came a day—when she understood. . . . She was alone no longer. . . . In her a life was arising, a new life. . . .

And the weeks passed, while she brooded over her hidden universe. . . .

"Love, is it really thou? Love, thou who hast fled me when I sought to seize thee, hast thou entered into me? I hold thee, I hold thee, thou shalt not escape me; oh, my little prisoner, I hold thee in my body. Revenge thyself! Devour me! Little consuming creature, devour my vitals! Nourish thyself on my blood! Thou art myself. Thou art my dream. Since I could not find thee in this world, I have made thee with my flesh. . . . And now, Love, I have thee! I am he whom I love! . . ."

THE END