The Chateau d'Argol by Julien Gracq

Author:Julien Gracq [Gracq, Julien]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

THE FOREST

DURING THE DAYS that followed, endless rains descended upon Argol. Night and day, with unrelenting persistence, through all the echoing rooms could be heard the hammering of their myriad drops, and, in a slower rhythm, against the background of the shower that furiously lashed the ground, the fantastic dripping of the thick globules falling from the branches, one by one, like sterile, liquid fruit, and prolonging their measured strokes with the particular savagery, the inexplicable meticulousness of a torture. A heavy idleness took possession of the inmates of the castle, and with rare and insignificant words they appeared persistently to avoid each other, to such an extent that even their chance meetings in the mazes of the winding corridors, filled with a faltering white light which seeped through the curtains of the rain as though diffused by the moisture ceaselessly streaming down the walls, engendered a visible malaise. Even their protracted and assiduous meditations borrowed from the hypnotic monotony of the rain a strange and persistent perspicacity that passed into and continued without any apparent diminution through their dreams even in the midst of their quiet slumber, which now, in the heart of the dim twilight reigning throughout the castle, had become their most natural and, without restriction, their fullest mode of existence—and from which each morning they were awakened not so much by the imperfect daylight as by a gradual and singular clairvoyance.

And so, in the midst of an indefinable anxiety in which the lucid conscience scrutinized, one by one, the most secret recesses of the heart, unfolded another wholly imaginary day which, throughout its entire lugubrious duration, wore the blank, wan look attributed in most descriptions to the dawn. It seemed as though the different scattered members of the day, unable to reassemble so far from the heat of the sun, wandered desperately under the grey cope of the sky, and, here and there, one could see in their own hideous shred of light, as in the faint light of a beacon, the icy glint of the waters of a spring, the greyish mud of an inexplicable path that could only lead to the horrible and vacuous waste-countries of the rain.

It now seemed ever more certain to Albert that the improvisation which Herminien had given voice to in the chapel and whose echoes kept ceaselessly resounding in his memory, had less the value of a caprice of his sensibility troubled by that strange pilgrimage, than of an act and an appeal—and that Herminien had sought in the soothing balm of music, not so much an appeasement of his sufferings, as a protection against an ineluctable temptation. Albert found in his own heart the proof that interests other than those of a passing and purely aesthetic emotion had been weighing in the balance, when he remembered the anxiety which had gripped it in the chapel, that anxiety whose indefinite nature, whose surprising character of a warning, could only be ascribed to some precarious struggle in which the forces of life and death themselves were at stake.

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