His mother called him to breakfast. He went down: he was giddy and lightheaded as though he had spent a day in the open air: but there was such a radiance of joy in him that Louisa asked what was the matter. He made no reply: he seized her by the waist and forced her to dance with him round the table on which the tureen was steaming. Out of breath Louisa cried that he was mad: then she clasped her hands.
“Dear God!” she said anxiously. “Sure, he is in love again!”
Christophe roared with laughter. He hurled his napkin into the air.
“In love? …” he cried. “Oh! Lord! … but no! I’ve had enough! You can be easy on that score. That is done, done, forever! … Ouf!”
He drank a glassful of water.
Louisa looked at him, reassured, wagged her head, and smiled.
“That’s a drunkard’s pledge,” she said. “It won’t last until tonight.”
“Then the day is clear gain,” he replied good-humoredly.
“Oh, yes!” she said. “But what has made you so happy?”
“I am happy. That is all.”
Sitting opposite her with his elbows on the table he tried to tell her all that he was going to do. She listened with kindly skepticism and gently pointed out that his soup was going cold. He knew that she did not hear what he was saying: but he did not care: he was talking for his own satisfaction.
They looked at each other smiling: he talking: she hardly listening. Although she was proud of her son she attached no great importance to his artistic projects: she was thinking: “He is happy: that matters most.”—While he was growing more and more excited with his discourse he watched his mother’s dear face, with her black shawl tightly tied round her head, her white hair, her young eyes that devoured him lovingly, her sweet and tranquil kindliness. He knew exactly what she was thinking. He said to her jokingly:
“It is all one to you, eh? You don’t care about what I’m telling you?”
She protested weakly:
“Oh, no! Oh, no!”
He kissed her.
“Oh, yes! Oh, yes! You need not defend yourself. You are right. Only love me. There is no need to understand me—either for you or for anybody else. I do not need anybody or anything now: I have everything in myself. …”
“Oh!” said Louisa. “Another maggot in his brain! … But if he must have one I prefer this to the other.”
What sweet happiness to float on the surface of the lake of his thoughts! … Lying in the bottom of a boat with his body bathed in sun, his face kissed by the light fresh wind that skims over the face of the waters, he goes to sleep: he is swung by threads from the sky. Under his body lying at full length, under the rocking boat he feels the deep, swelling water: his hand dips into it. He rises: and with his chin on the edge of the boat he watches the water flowing by as he did when he was a child. He sees the reflection of strange creatures darting by like lightning. … More, and yet more. … They are never the same. He laughs at the fantastic spectacle that is unfolded within him: he laughs at his own thoughts: he has no need to catch and hold them. Select? Why select among so many thousands of dreams? There is plenty of time! … Later on! … He has only to throw out a line at will to draw in the monsters whom he sees gleaming in the water. He lets them pass. … Later on! …
The boat floats on at the whim of the warm wind and the insentient stream. All is soft, sun, and silence.
At last languidly he throws out his line. Leaning out over the lapping water he follows it with his eyes until it disappears. After a few moments of torpor he draws it in slowly: as he draws it in it becomes heavier: just as he is about to fish it out of the water he stops to take breath. He knows that he has his prey: he does not know what it is: he prolongs the pleasure of expectancy.
At last he makes up his mind: fish with gleaming, many-colored scales appear from the water: they writhe like a nest of snakes. He looks at them curiously, he stirs them with his finger: but hardly has he drawn them from the water than their colors fade and they slip between his fingers. He throws them back into the water and begins to fish for others. He is more eager to see one after another all the dreams stirring in him than to catch at any one of them: they all seem more beautiful to him when they are freely swimming in the transparent lake. …
He caught all kinds of them, each more extravagant than the last. Ideas
