1932

Morning... a lone star still  visible in the west, it was bitter cold.  Gradually the rolling desert cast off its robe of deep purple, turned mauve, pink, golden brown, and soon, all  too soon, the plain became a shimmering sea of heat dancing on the horizon.  Shivers turned to sweat, the dust caked, the motor seemed to glow white hot, slowly an hour, about ten miles, labored by.  Dust a foot deep, churned by the wheels  into billowing, choking, clouds, lapped at each side like lazy waves thrown clear by the blunt prow of  a wallowing  freighter.  Dust a foot deep on which there was never an atom of dew, never a weed, no cactus, no drop of water. Surely no living thing could be found in such a land.  Yet finally  a little village rose on the skyline.

      As always the  native women rushed to hide while the boys and men came running to form a circle around the stranger astride his strange contrivance.  The sign language was of course  the only form of communication in  such a place.  My entire Turkish vocabulary consisted of terms  meaning "straight ahead," to the  right " and "to the left"  But the sign language was easy since gesticulations, a few drawings in sand, and some names read from a map usually sufficed to tell the story.  The  little  boys of the village were always the first to catch on to what it was all about.

      The natives had all the time in he world. They were in no hurry.  And they were curious.  Damned curious...always.

      In the flickering  lamplight they made an unforgettable sight, crowded into the little room, a rising wall of heads to the very roof corners .   Here and there the smooth skin of youth shone in sharp contrast to the weather-beaten grooved face of age.  A dozen pairs of curious eyes, softened by the glaring sun and flying dirt, peered from twelve ragged caps and unruly hair.  Bare legs and feet hard as leather protruded  from tattered cloth.  They were poor all right--poor in money, poor in material, but far from poor in heart.  There  was a kindliness and understanding about them which never comes with  fighting for money but which comes only in living with the elements, the sun, sky and earth, adapting ones philosophy to the elemental, unaccountable ways.

The court below was full of lamp-light activity.  A thousand shadows of man and beast danced wildly up and down the walls.  Little did those gray haired patriarchs and small boys even consider sleeping under any roof but of the stars.  They are the roving Arabs, members of that great human clan that devotes its life to transportation whether via ships  of the land or sea.  These men are but a cut above the nomad and  they bring with them their age old horror of any roof but the heavens. To this day their motto is "Only cowards live in towers!" and they have nought but disdain for all who dwell in town or city.  To the Arab who has turned to the soil for a livelihood, these men of the caravans have the same disdain.  In him the one who tills the soil and hides his head in the night in a mud hut, they see not a man but an animal, fit only to be a beast of burden lashed to the wheel of things. Strong proud and scornful are these men of the  caravans.  They are anxious when they enter a town only to find another cargo which will take them again over the hills and deserts, far from the filth,which surrounds the city  dweller,far from those weaklings who dwell beneath a roof .  Was not their leader a camel boy, a nomad, a dweller under the stars?

            robert edison fulton jr

1837

The vine-stems were changing color with the spring; covering the rifted, battered walls of the old house where squalid cracks were spreading in every direction, with fluted columns and knots and bas-reliefs and uncounted masterpieces of I know not what order of architecture, erected by fairy hands.

Fancy had scattered flowers and crimson gems over the gloomy little yard. Five o'clock struck, but the friends felt neither hunger nor thirst; life had turned to a golden dream, and all the treasures of the world lay at their feet.

Far away on the horizon lay the blue streak, to which Hope points a finger in storm and stress, and a siren voice sounded in their ears calling:

Come, spread your wings; through that streak of gold or silver or azure lies the sure way of escape from evil fortune!

The sunbeams playing among the trellised vine-shoots, hovered over the two poets, making. as it were, an aureole about their heads, bringing the contrast between their faces and their characters into a vigorous relief that would have tempted the brush of some great painter.

David's physique was of the kind that Nature gives to the fighter, the man born to struggle in obscurity, or with the eyes of all men turned upon him. The strong shoulders, rising above the broad chest, were in keeping with the full development of his whole frame. With his thick crop of black hair, his fleshy, high-colored, swarthy face, supported by a thick neck, he looked at first sight like one of Boileau's canons:

but on a second glance there was that in the lines about the thick lips, in the dimple of the chin, in the turn of the square nostrils, with the broad irregular line of central cleavage, and, above all, in the eyes, with the steady light of an all-absorbing love that burned in them which revealed the real character of the man--the wisdom of the thinker, the strenuous melancholy of a spirit that discerns the horizon on either side, and sees clearly to the end of winding ways, turning the clear light of analysis upon the joys of fruition, known as yet in idea alone, and quick to turn from them in disgust.

You might look for the flash of genius from such a face; you could not miss the ashes of the volcano; hopes extinguished beneath a profound sense of the social annihilation to which lowly birth and lack of fortune condemns so many a loftier mind.

And by the side of this poor printer, who loathed a handicraft so closely allied to intellectual work, close to this Silenus, joyless, self-sustained, drinking deep draughts from the cup of knowledge and of poetry that he might forget the cares of his narrow lot in the intoxication of soul and brain stood, Lucien, graceful as some sculptured Indian Bacchus.

For in Lucien's face there was the distinction of line which stamps the beauty of the antique; the Greek profile, with the velvet whiteness of women's faces, and eyes full of love, eyes so blue that they looked dark against a pearly setting, and dewy and fresh as those of a child. Those beautiful eyes looked out from under their long chestnut lashes, beneath eyebrows that might have been traced by a Chinese pencil.

The silken down on his cheeks, like his bright curling hair, shone golden in the sunlight. A divine graciousness transfused the white temples that caught that golden gleam; a matchless nobleness had set its seal in the short chin raised, but not abruptly. The smile that hovered about the coral lips, yet redder as they seemed by force of contrast with the even teeth, was the smile of some sorrowing angel.

Lucien's hands denoted race; they were shapely hands; hands that men obey at a sign, and women love to kiss. Lucien was slender and of middle height. From a glance at his feet, he might have been taken for a girl in disguise, and this so much the more easily from the feminine contour of the hips, a characteristic of keen-witted, not to say, astute, men.

This is a trait which seldom misleads, and in Lucien it was a true indication of character; for when he analyzed the society of today, his restless mind was apt to take its stand on the lower ground of those diplomatists who hold that success justifies the use of any means however base. It is one of the misfortunes attendant upon great intellects that perforce they comprehend all things, both good and evil.

David, with his well-balanced mind and timid nature at variance with a strong constitution, was by no means wanting in the persistence of the Northern temper; and if he saw all the difficulties before him, none the less he vowed to himself to conquer, never to give way. In him the unswerving virtue of an apostle was softened by pity that sprang from inexhaustible indulgence.

In the friendship grown old already, one was the worshiper, and that one was David; Lucien ruled him like a woman sure of love, and David loved to give way. He felt that his friend's physical beauty implied a real superiority, which he accepted, looking upon himself as one made of coarser and commoner human clay.

Fate's injustice was a strong bond between them. And then, by different ways, following each his own bent of mind, they had attained to poesy. Lucien, destined for the highest speculative fields of natural science, was aiming with hot enthusiasm at fame through literature; while David, with that meditative temperament which inclines to poetry, was drawn by his tastes towards natural science.

The exchange of roles was the beginning of an intellectual comradeship. Before long, Lucien told David of his own father's farsighted views of the application of science to manufacture, while David pointed out the new ways in literature that Lucien must follow if he meant to succeed. Not many days had passed before the young men's friendship became a passion such as is only known in early manhood.

Circumstances unusual enough in out-of-the-way places in the country had inspired Mme. de Bargeton with a taste for music and reading. During the Revolution one Abbe Niollant, the Abbe Roze's best pupil, found a hiding-place in the old manor-house of Escarbas, and brought with him his baggage of musical compositions. The old country gentleman's hospitality was handsomely repaid, for the Abbe undertook his daughter's education. Anais, or Nais, as she was called.   Otherwise she would have been left to herself, or, worse still, to some coarse-minded servant-maid.

The Abbe was not only a musician, he was well and widely read, and knew both Italian and German; so Mlle. de Negrepelise received instruction in those tongues, as well as in counterpoint. He explained the great masterpieces of the French, German, and Italian literatures, and deciphered with her the music of the great composers. Finally, as time hung heavy on his hands in the seclusion enforced by political storms, he taught his pupil Latin and Greek and some smatterings of natural science.

A mother might have modified the effects of a man's education upon a young girl, whose independent spirit had been fostered in the first place by a country life. The Abbe Niollant, an enthusiast and a poet, possessed the artistic temperament in a peculiarly high degree, a temperament compatible with many estimable qualities, but prone to raise itself above bourgeois prejudices by the liberty of its judgments and breadth of view.

In society an intellect of this order wins pardon for its boldness by its depth and originality; but in private life it would seem to do positive mischief, by suggesting wanderings from the beaten track. The Abbe was by no means wanting in goodness of heart, and his ideas were therefore the more contagious for this high-spirited girl, in whom they were confirmed by a lonely life.

The Abbe Niollant's pupil learned to be fearless in criticism and ready in judgment; it never occurred to her tutor that qualities so necessary in a man are disadvantages in a woman destined for the homely life of a house-mother. And though the Abbe constantly impressed it upon his pupil that it behoved her to be the more modest and gracious with the extent of her attainments, Mlle. de Negrepelisse conceived an excellent opinion of herself and a robust contempt for ordinary humanity.

All those about her were her inferiors, or persons who hastened to do her bidding, till she grew to be as haughty as a great lady, with none of the charming blandness and urbanity of a great lady. The instincts of vanity were flattered by the pride that the poor Abbe took in his pupil, the pride of an author who sees himself in his work, and for her misfortune she met no one with whom she could measure herself.

Isolation is one of the greatest drawbacks of a country life. We lose the habit of putting ourselves to any inconvenience for the sake of others when there is no one for whom to make the trifling sacrifices of personal effort required by dress and manner. And everything in us shares in the change for the worse; the form and the spirit deteriorate together.  

For Lucien those three hours spent in her presence went by like a dream that he would fain had last forever. She was not thin, he thought; she was slender; in love with love, and loverless; and delicate in spite of her strength.

Her foibles, exaggerated by her manner, took his fancy; for youth sets out with a love of hyperbole, that infirmity of noble souls.

He did not so much as see that her cheeks were faded, that the patches of color on the cheek-bone were faded and hardened to a brick-red by listless days and a certain amount of ailing health. His imagination fastened at once on the glowing eyes, on the dainty curls rippling with light, on the dazzling fairness of her skin, and hovered about those bright points as the moth hovers about the candle flame.

For her spirit made such appeal to his that he could no longer see the woman as she was.

Her feminine exaltation had carried him away, the energy of her expressions, a little staled in truth by pretty hard and constant wear, but new to Lucien, fascinated him so much the more easily because he was determined to be pleased. He had brought none of his own verses to read, but nothing was said of them;

He had purposely left them behind because he meant to return; and Mme. de Bargeton did not ask for them, because she meant that he should come back some future day to read them to her.

Was not this a beginning of an understanding?

                      DE BALZAC