Laura (13 page)

What is this? he said.

And, as he opened his hands, I blushed crimson,
realising
that it was the ball of cut crystal placed as an ornament at the end of the banisters on the stairs in my house.

Do not think him mad, said Laura to her father. This is a symbolic and solemn abjuration of certain fantasies he dearly wishes to sacrifice for me.

So saying, generous Laura took the crystal and
shattered
it into a thousand pieces against the external support of the casement window. I watched her, and I saw that she was examining me with a certain anxiety.

Laura! I cried, clasping her to my heart, the fateful spell has been destroyed; there is no crystal between us any more, and the true attraction begins. I see you as more beautiful than I ever saw you in dreams, and I sense that henceforth I shall love you with all my being.

My Uncle Tungstenius and Walter soon came to
congratulate
me on being chosen by Laura, even though she was at that moment engaged to another.

I learned from them that, the previous evening, my sadness had decided my cousin to declare herself, and that, from the first words, she had told her father of her preference for me. Scarcely after his arrival, the good fellow Christophe, actually encountered by me in the
mineralogical
gallery but so strangely disguised as a Persian in my imagination, had been made aware of the secrets of our hearts. Unaware of what was passing between Laura and him, I had withdrawn, deeply troubled, into my
bedroom
, where, after vainly trying to calm myself by reading alternately a tale from the Thousand and One Nights and the account of Kane’s voyage in the polar seas, I had
written
under the influence of delirium for several hours. In the morning, Walter and Laura, anxious at the way I had left them the previous evening and about my light which was still burning, had come both alternately and together to call to me and look at me through the glazed panel in my door, which they had finally decided to break in at the moment I heard Nasias falling through the lake of
volcanic
glass with such a strange and real sound. Walter, who was not at all jealous of Laura’s affection for me, had left me alone with her and she had succeeded in gently tearing me away from the hallucination.

On returning to my room, I indeed saw a mass of loose papers on my desk, scrawled on in all directions and scarcely readable at all. I succeeded in putting them in order, and, forcing myself as much as my memory
permitted
to fill or explain the gaps, I gave them in homage to my dear wife, who sometimes read them with pleasure, excusing my past extravagances in favour of my
faithfulness
to her image, which I had kept serene and pure right into my dreams.

Married now for two years, I have continued to learn, and I have learned to speak. I am a geology teacher, replacing my Uncle Tungstenius, whose stammer is so much worse that he gave up oral teaching and arranged for me to have his post. In the holidays, we never fail to go, along with him and Walter, to join Uncle Christophe in the country. There, amid the flowers she loves
passionately
, Laura, who has become a botanist, sometimes asks me with a laugh for details about the flora of the polar island; but she no longer makes war on me over my love for the crystal, since I have learned to see her in it as she is, as henceforth I shall always see her.

Here, M. Hartz closed his manuscript and commented to me:

You will perhaps ask me how, from being a geology teacher, I became a seller of pebbles. That can be summed up in a few words. The reigning Duke of Fischausen, who loved and protected science, found out one fine
morning
that the most beautiful science was the art of killing animals. His favourites persuaded him that, to be a great prince, a true sovereign, he must spend the greater part of
his revenues in feats of hunting. From that moment on, geology, comparative anatomy, physics and chemistry were relegated to the background, and the poor scholars had such slender stipends and such discouraging incentives that it became impossible for us to feed our families. Since my dear Laura, to whom I am planning to introduce you directly, had given me several children, and my father-
in-law
had made me promise not to let them die of hunger, I had to leave the learned town of Fischausen, which
henceforth
resounded to the instructive fanfares of the hunt and the salutary clamour of running hounds. I came and set myself up here, where thanks to good Papa Christophe, I was able to acquire the necessary funds and devote myself to a quite lucrative trade, without giving up my studies and the preoccupations that are still dear to me.

So you see in me a man who has happily rounded the cape of illusions and who will no longer allow himself to be caught in the luxuries of his fantasy, but who is not too angry to have been through that delirious phase where imagination knows no hindrances, and where the poetic sense warms in us the aridity of calculations and the icy terror of vain hypotheses …

I had the pleasure of dining with good M. Hartz’s divine Laura. There was no longer anything transparent about her: she was a round matron surrounded by very fine children, who had become her only coquetry; but she was extremely intelligent: she had wanted to become
educated
so as not to be brought down too far from the crystal where her husband had placed her, and, when she spoke, there was a certain sapphire flash in her blue eyes that possessed a great deal of charm and even a little magic.

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