How depressingly, tiresomely and ridiculously sensible everything that I have hitherto written seems to be today!
Nov. 5th.—The wedding ceremony is over. It took place in the little chapel in Rue Madame, to which I have not been for a long time past. The whole of the Vedel-Azaïs families were present.—Laura’s grandfather, father and mother, her two sisters, her young brother, besides quantities of uncles, aunts and cousins. The Douviers family was represented by three aunts in deep mourning (they would have certainly been nuns if they had been Catholics). They all three live together, and Douviers, since his parents’ death, has lived with them. Azaïs’s pupils sat in the gallery. The rest of the chapel was filled with the friends of the family. From my place near the door I saw my sister with Olivier. George, I suppose, was in the gallery with his schoolfellows. Old La Pérouse was at the harmonium. His face has aged, but finer, nobler than ever—though his eye had lost that admirable fire and spirit I found so infectious in the days when he used to give me piano lessons. Our eyes met and there was so much sadness in the smile he gave me that I determined not to let him leave without speaking to him. Some persons moved and left an empty place beside Pauline. Olivier at once beckoned to me, and pushed his mother aside so that I might sit next him; then he took my hand and held it for a long time in his. It is the first time he has been so friendly with me. He kept his eyes shut during the whole of the minister’s interminable address, so that I was able to take a long look at him; he is like the sleeping shepherd in a bas-relief in the Naples Museum, of which I have a photograph on my writing desk. I should have thought he was asleep himself, if it hadn’t been for the quivering of his fingers. His hand fluttered in mine like a captured bird.
The old pastor thought it his duty to retrace the whole of the Azaïs family history, beginning with the grandfather, with whom he had been at school in Strasburg before the war, and who had also been a fellow-student of his later on at the faculty of theology. I thought he would never get to the end of a complicated sentence in which he tried to explain that in becoming the head of a school and devoting himself to the education of young children, his friend had, so to speak, never left the ministry. Then the next generation had its turn. He went on to speak with equal edification of the Douviers family, though he didn’t seem to know much about them. The excellence of his sentiments palliated the deficiency of his oratory and I heard several members of the congregation blowing their noses. I should have liked to know what Olivier was thinking; I reflected that as he had been brought up a Catholic, the Protestant service must be new to him and that this was probably his first visit to the chapel. The singular faculty of depersonalization which I possess and which enables me to feel other people’s emotions as if they were my own, compelled me, as it were, to enter into Olivier’s feelings—those that I imagined him to be experiencing; and though he kept his eyes shut, or perhaps for that very reason, I felt as if, like him, I were seeing for the first time the bare walls, the abstract and chilly light which fell upon the congregation, the relentless outline of the pulpit on the background of the white wall, the straightness of the lines, the rigidity of the columns which support the gallery, the whole spirit of this angular and colourless architecture and its repellent want of grace, its uncompromising inflexibility, its parsimony. It can only be because I have been accustomed to it since childhood, that I have not felt all this sooner. … I suddenly found myself thinking of my religious awakening and my first fervours; of Laura and the Sunday school where we used to meet and of which we were both monitors, of our zeal and our inability, in the ardour which consumed all that was impure in us, to distinguish the part which belonged to the other and the part that was God’s. And then I fell to regretting that Olivier had never known this early starvation of the senses which drives the soul so perilously far beyond appearances—that his memories were not like mine; but to feel him so distant from the whole thing, helped me to escape from it myself. I passionately pressed the hand which he had left in mine, but which just then he withdrew abruptly. He opened his eyes to look at me, and then, with a boyish smile of roguish playfulness, which mitigated the extraordinary gravity of his brow, he leant towards me and whispered—while just at that moment the minister was reminding all Christians of their duties, and lavishing advice, precepts and pious exhortations upon the newly married couple:
“I don’t care a damn about any of it. I’m a Catholic.”
Everything about him is attractive to me—and mysterious.
At the sacristy door, I came across old La Pérouse. He said, a little sadly but without any trace of reproach: “You’ve almost forgotten me, I think.”
I mentioned some kind of occupation or other as an excuse for having been so long without going to see him and promised to go the day after tomorrow. I tried to persuade him
