The Chateau d'Argol
JULIEN GRACQ
Château d'Argol
Translated from the French by Louise Varèse
Copyright © Librairie José Corti, 1945
This edition first published in 1999 by Pushkin Press
ISBN 1 901285 14 6
All rights reserved.
Cover illustration: Five Orsina Sforza
Table Of Contents
ARGOL
THE GRAVEYARD
HEIDE
HERMINIEN
THE SWIM
THE CHAPEL OF THE ABYSS
THE FOREST
THE AVENUE
THE ROOM
DEATH
Château d'Argol
ARGOL
ALTHOUGH THE COUNTRYSIDE was still hot with all the sun of the afternoon, Albert braved the long road that led to Argol. Taking shelter in the already lengthened shadows of the hawthorns, he started on his way.
He was giving himself one more hour to relish the throes of chance. A month ago he had bought the domain of Argol—its woods, its fields, its dependencies—unseen, on the enthusiastic—or rather mysterious—recommendations (Albert recalled that unwonted gutteral accent of the voice that had decided him) of a very dear friend, but a rather more than seemly fanatic of Balzac, of stories of the chouannerie, and of Gothic romances as well. And without further deliberation he had signed this mad petition to chance for clemency.
He was the last scion of a rich and noble family, little worldly however, who jealously and long had kept him within the lonely walls of an isolated provincial manor. At the age of fifteen all the gifts of mind and physical beauty were seen to flower in him, but he turned from the triumphs which everyone, with singular assurance, predicted for him in Paris. Already the demon of knowledge had taken possession of all his mental powers. He visited the universities of Europe and preferably the most ancient ones, those in which the masters of the Middle Ages had left traces of a philosophical learning rarely surpassed in modern times. He was seen at Halle, Heidelberg, Padua, Bologna. Everywhere he went he was conspicuous for the extent of his knowledge, the brilliant originality of his views, and, while he made few friends, what was matter for even greater astonishment was his unalterable disdain for women. Not that he fled from them, but without ever deviating from a calm and constantly restrained demeanour, he knew the art, once he had entered into intimate relations with them, of defying them with such abnormal and coldly extravagant challenges that even the bravest in the end would pale, vexed at having displayed what he was quick to stigmatize as fear, and would, although regretfully, leave him to pursue elsewhere his consistently nomadic and nonchalant career. Sometimes an essay, rich in particularly valuable subject-matter, an article testifying to a unique and masterly documentation, would appear delighting and, at the same time, troubling, because of all it revealed of fantasy in the tastes and in the soul of its author, the few loyal friends he still possessed in the Parisian world of letters.
In these last few years the beauty of his countenance, with its ever-increasing pallor, had assumed an almost fatal character. The firm lines of the forehead, formed of two prominent lobes, were lost in the gossamer blond hair, of so tenuous a texture that the wind playing through it would untwine and stretch out each dry, divided curl—an extremely rare phenomenon peculiar to certain physiognomies consecrated to the always wearing pursuit of abstract speculation. The delicate straight nose was made of a velvety, matt substance with mobile and extremely contractile nostrils. In his eyes nature had set an insidious snare: their axes not having been made rigorously parallel, they fascinated by their air of looking behind the person at whom he was looking, and seemed to convey, as though physically, the burden of an illimitable inner reverie—and in his sidelong glances, the pure white then showing, would disconcert like the sudden and inhuman sign of a demigod. A peculiar propensity to swelling was noticeable in his full lips.
The set of his neck was graceful, and the broad deep chest seemed made to sink emotions to the bottom. The long thin fingers of the ardent and unquiet hands appeared endowed each with a separate life and, with every slightest movement, marvellously expressive, graceful and infinitely flexible. Such was this angelic and meditative visage: an air from loftier regions, volatile and keen, wreathed the forehead where light had its abode, but at every instant the spirituality of this countenance was exorcised by the carnal, the mortal elegance of the body and the long well-knit limbs; there, too, snares were set; an importunate elasticity, a slumbering heat, the mysteries and magic of too rich a blood invested his arteries: a woman would have longed to fall helpless into those arms as into a sanctuary, a prison. Such was this magnetic figure qualified to penetrate life's subtlest arcanas, to embrace its most exhilarating realities.
It was especially, as we have seen, toward philosophical studies that his mind first turned. At twenty, abandoning all thoughts of success or a career, he had set himself the task of solving the enigmas both of the sentient world and of the world of thought. He read Kant, Leibnitz, Plato, Descartes, but the natural bent of his mind drew him to the more concrete, the more courageous, as some have dared to affirm, philosophies that, seizing the world bodily, as it were, and generously, and not satisfied with illuminating it with any one particular ray of light, but taking into account all its component parts, exact of it its total truth and explanation, like Aristotle, like Plotinus, like Spinoza. But above all his passionate curiosity had been stimulated by that prince of philosophical geniuses, Hegel; for that king of the architecture and the science of wholes, for the philosopher who has uncrowned, and divested of its glory, all abstract learning, and for whom the most brilliant philosophical systems are only nebulae out of which he composes his gigantic milky way, he had recently conceived an energetic predilection: he looked upon dialectic as that lever which Archimedes had derisively called for which would enable him to lift the earth, and he took Hegel with him to his lonely manor in Brittany, superabundantly to fill his days which he foresaw dull and arid in a melancholy region.
The wild and desolate character of the country, to which chance had so strangely banished him for several months, was not long in impressing itself upon his mind, now calmed by the monotonous rhythm of his walk. To his right stretched flat moorlands filling the eye with the dull besetting yellow of the gorse. Here and there stagnant water lay in grassy bogs where uneven stones offered the surest footing in the midst of a perfidious soil. Toward the horizon, the land seemed to be raised in a fold of ground forming a low chain which had been carved by erosion into three or four higher pyramids. The declining sun was now painting the short grass of the mountains a magnificent yellow: on their summits, jagged sandstone teeth and rude columns of crumbling stone blocks stood out sharply against the sky; a keen air, a luminous sky, silvered as though by the reflection of the ocean close at hand, gave a sort of majesty to the clean-cut profiles of the mountains. To the left rose dark and gloomy woods, dominated by oaks with, here and there, a few gaunt pines; invisible brooks could be heard, but Albert was struck by the rarity of bird songs and by their sad monotony.
Not far off, an elevation running parallel to the road cut off the view on that side; along its crest parasol pines against the setting sun seemed to accentuate with their elegant horizontal branches the outline of the ridge, and for an instant gave to the landscape the unexpected delicacy of a Japanese print. The western breeze fiercely tossed the tangled branches of this sequestered forest, hurtled the great grey clouds, and man seemed absent from these solitary regions. This sensation of solitude began at length to weigh on Albert's spirits, so that when, through an opening in the branches, he glimpsed and thought to identify by a hitherto unfamiliar beating of his heart, the towers of the manor of Argol, he felt a singula
r sensation of relief and, in every sense of the word, of recognition.
The castle rose at the extreme end of the rocky spur Albert had been following. Branching off from the road at the left, a tortuous path led up to it—impracticable for any vehicle. For some distance it serpentined through a narrow strip of marshland where Albert could hear the plunging of frogs as he passed. Then the path started steeply up the mountainside. The silence of the landscape now became complete. Masses of enormous ferns, shoulder-high, bordered the path; on either side brooks of an amazing limpidity ran silently over their stony beds, and dense woods hugged the path jealously in all its windings up the mountain. During the entire climb the highest tower of the castle, overlooking the gorges up which the traveller painfully made his way, shocked the eye by its almost formless mass composed of brown and grey schist roughly cemented and pierced by rare openings, and ended by engendering a sensation of uneasiness that was almost intolerable. From the top of this mute sentinel of the sylvan solitudes, the eye of a watcher following the traveller's steps could not for an instant lose sight of him throughout all the twisting arabesques of the path, and if hate should be waiting ambushed in this tower, a furtive visitor would run the most imminent danger! The merlons of this powerful round tower, made of granite slabs, were silhouetted always directly over the head of the traveller toiling up the path, and rendered even more startling the flight of the heavy grey clouds as they rushed past with ever-increasing velocity.
At the moment Albert reached the summit of this steep ascent, the castle's entire bulk rose abruptly out of the last concealing foliage. It then became apparent that the façade completely barred the narrow tongue of land forming the plateau. Built onto the high round tower on the left, it consisted entirely of a thick wall of blue sandstone set flat in greyish cement. The most striking characteristic of the edifice was the flat roof fashioned into a terrace, a very unusual feature in so rainy a climate. The top of this high façade drew a hard horizontal line across the sky, like the walls of a palace gutted by fire, and because, like the tower, it could only be viewed from the foot of the wall, it produced an indefinable impression of altitude.
The form and the disposition of the rare openings were no less striking. All notion of stories, so inseparably connected today with the idea of harmonious construction, seemed totally lacking. The few windows cut into the walls were almost all at varying heights suggesting an amazing arrangement within. The low windows were in the form of narrow rectangles, and it was evident that the architect had been inspired by the design of loopholes often cut through the merlons for the firing of culverins. No coloured stones ornamented the borders of these narrow fissures that opened in the naked wall like disquieting vent holes. The high windows, ogival in form, were astonishingly lofty and narrow, and the direction of the long, slim, almost writhing lines stood out in overwhelming contrast to the heavy horizontal top of the granite parapets of the high terrace. The leaded panes of the windows were all of angular and irregular shapes. The low narrow entrance door, made of panels of carved oak studded with shining copper nails, opened at the foot of the watch tower to the left of the façade.
A square tower was built at the right corner of the façade. Less high than the watch tower, its roof of slate was in the form of a slender pyramid. It was striped with long vertical ribs, made of granite blocks roughly joined, that could have served as sufficient footing for an agile climber to clamber to the top. Beyond this tower began the steep slopes of the other side of the mountain that plunged into a second valley where, under the monotonous frothing of the trees, the murmuring of water could be heard. Behind this tower and parallel to the valley was a second wing, forming a regular square with the façade. Built in the Italian style like the palaces Claude Gelée loved to scatter over his landscapes, it made a perfect contrast to the gloomy face of the manor. Here could be seen elegant triangular pediments, balustrades of white stone, and windows of noble proportion that seemed to be illuminating gay apartments within; the plain surfaces of the walls were covered with a light stucco that glittered through the leaves, and at the top of a tall staff two pennons of red and violet silk clacked in the breeze. The narrow tongue of land that lay between the great mass of the castle and the gorges up which the path serpentined, was covered with a short springy grass of a brilliant green that enchanted the eye. It was unmarred by any path: the door of the castle opened directly on to the soft carpet of the greensward, and this curious anomaly, considered in relation to the primitive and difficult character of the approach, did not fail to astonish Albert.
He had hardly taken a step across the grass when one of the servants of the castle came forward silently to meet him. The face of this Breton, whose step on the close-cropped lawn unconsciously took on an air of majesty, seemed stamped with a feral immobility. He bowed respectfully and preceded Albert into the castle.
Albert now perceived that the abnormal disposition of the interior, which the appearance of the façade had suggested to his imagination, was not belied. The visitor first entered a lofty vaulted hall with Romanesque arches, and divided by three rows of pillars. The slanting rays of the sun coming through the low horizontal loopholes seen in the façade, and that the setting sun now lighted with long streaks of dancing golden dust, formed with the white pillars a luminous pattern separating the entire upper part of the vaulted ceiling, and their ever-changing and fantastic fluctuations prevented the eye from measuring its true height. No furniture was to be seen in this hall, but here and there piles of deep furred skins; and cushions, covered with Asiatic silken fabrics of an extravagant luxury, were piled against the naked walls and pillars with an air of negligent profusion, making one think of a night encampment of the Golden Horde in a white Byzantine cathedral. Out of this great entrance hall opened low and endlessly winding corridors interrupted by stairways and steep descents full of recesses and corners, which seemed to run like veins through the vast structure of the castle, presenting the appearance of a three-dimensional labyrinth.
Most of the rooms seemed destined for no definite purpose: tables of ebony, divans of sombre leathers, sumptuous draperies seemed to be distributed without the least idea of order. And what was most astonishing about all the furniture was its air of constant readiness. The long, low dining-room was lined with sheets of copper set with quadrilateral crystal mirrors; one massive piece of solid copper formed the table, and against its smooth and shining surface burst the dull red of great tufts of flowers. The yellow beams of the setting sun now shone full on this cuirass of incarnadined metal and called forth rich and potent harmonies: the dull red of the massed flowers appeared almost as blocks of darkness—emblems of a solemn and noble melancholy. But as clouds passed by, cruel flashes glided over the walls, pools of unctuous light, viscous and dubious, fell on the table and on the delicate bezels of the mirrors; and the hard brilliance of the metal, of these hostile walls, forced the soul to take refuge in its own centre and seemed to concentrate all thought in a point of flame, sharp and penetrating as a steel blade. Next, Albert passed into the main drawing-room of the castle and could scarcely suppress an exclamation of surprise. The drawing-room was considerably larger than any of the other rooms of the manor. But its height, in particular, was at least triple: the ceiling was apparently formed by the upper terrace of the castle and the apartment suggested the proportions of a vast covered well perforating the edifice from top to bottom. The furniture of the room, as though crushed by the enormous height, seemed to be squatting on the ground, and consisted of piles of white and grey furs forming low couches, tables of ebony and mother-of-pearl, gracefully carved pieces of Breton oak, deep and low tapestried armchairs loaded with cushions of a sulphuric yellow, so brilliant that a sort of phosphorescence seemed to emanate from it, and which can only be compared with a certain yellow to be seen in some of Gauguin's paintings. Rectangular tapestries of faded hues only partially concealed the white stone walls. But above all, the unique, the wonder-working effect of the room came
from the disposition of the lighting. Through horizontal loopholes surged continuous sheets of light that divided the apartment in height by immaterial pulsating partitions almost entirely concealing the ceiling, which was made of a scaffolding of rough beams and gables through whose interstices the sun, coming through a skylight, fell in long streamers to the floor. The ogival windows, piercing the thick walls, separated the room, in their turn, into clean-cut vertical panels of raw light, leaving zones of rigid shadow between them where the eye came to rest on lustreless surfaces. In the lower portion of the hall, the tall pointed windows were hung with a light silk fabric intricately patterned in leaves and flowers; this filtered light, glaucous and softly yellow, seemed to be coming from some marine depth, and bathed the entire lower regions of the room in a uniformly warm glow like a luminous sediment, transparent and compact, while a few feet above, throughout the entire upper plane, the fierce rays of the sun ran riot. This stratification made each plane immediately apparent to the eye, and the contrast between the extravagant luxury displayed in the soft light of the ground level and the rough ceiling where the magic of sunlight in all its power alone held sway overwhelmed the soul with a sort of delirious bliss, warming Albert's heart, as he started up the turret stairs of varnished wood that creaked with every step and were as sonorous as a ship's hull.
As he emerged from the stairway out onto the castle terrace like the bridge of a tall ship riding the waves, the full splendour of the sunlight, until now merely interpreted by the copper plates, the slender ogives, the thick and silken walls, burst upon him in all its unbridled freedom. The fresh and powerful breeze that swept the terrace and bowed down the ocean of trees two hundred feet below, fairly took his breath away. The dishevelled folds of the silk pennons, that could be heard clacking now close at hand, like a ship's sails, sent dancing shadows flowing everywhere, and the eye was dazzled by the billowing light on the white stones. Meanwhile this feast of sunlight seemed to spread over utterly solitary wastes. Toward the north where the rocky spur ended in abrupt precipices, the high moors, yellow and smooth, were cut by the capricious wanderings of a deep valley filled with trees that appeared to stop abruptly, as though the rude breath of the ocean had sheared off every branch and twig rising above the level surface of the plateau. At a distance that to the eye seemed infinite, the valley, as it spread out, cut the line of cliffs marking the horizon, and through this triangular notch a small bay could be seen edged with foam and bordered by white, deserted beaches. This little inlet, where not a sail was to be seen, startled the eye by its perfect immobility: it looked like a smear of deep blue paint. Beyond this notch, the low chain that Albert had noticed from the road hid the cliffs from view, and here undulating country began, a stark bold landscape without a tree to be seen anywhere. Great greyish marshes extended along the foot of the last slopes as far as the eastern horizon.