Laura (2 page)

Was I in love? I did not know, and even today I am still not certain. My self-esteem had been cruelly wounded for the first time. Until then impervious to my uncle’s silent disdain and my fellow-disciples’ teasing, I had blushed at Laura’s pity. All the others were drivellers as far as I was concerned, she alone had seemed to exercise a right in criticising me.

One year later, I was completely transformed. Was it to my advantage? Those around me said so, and—aided by
my vanity—I had a very good opinion of myself. There was not one word of my uncle’s lesson that I could not have slotted into its place in the sentence it belonged to, not one sample in the lithological collection which I could not have designated by its name, along with that of its group, its variety, and the whole analysis of its
composition
, the entire history of its formation and its deposit. I even knew the name of the donor of each precious item, and the date when that item had entered the gallery.

Among these latter names was one that appeared many times in our catalogues, and particularly with regard to the most beautiful gemstones. It was that of Nasias, a name unknown in the field of study, and which rather intrigued me on account of its mysterious strangeness. My comrades knew no more on the subject than I.
According
to some, this man Nasias was an Armenian Jew who had formerly made exchanges between our exhibition hall and other collections of the same type. Others said it was the pseudonym of a disinterested donor. My uncle did not seem to know any more about him than we did. The date of his dispatches went back around a hundred years.

Laura came back with her governess for the holidays. I was once again presented to her with glowing
compliments
on my account from my uncle. I held myself straight as a stone pillar, and looked at Laura confidently. I was expecting to see her a little confused at the sight of my merit. Alas! she was nothing of the kind. The little imp began to laugh, took my hand and, holding on to it, looked me up and down with an air of teasing admiration; after which, she declared to our uncle that she found me much uglier.

However, I did not become disconcerted and,
thinking
that she still doubted my abilities, I set to questioning my uncle on a point which I felt he had neglected in his last lecture, an ingenious pretext for treating the ladies to a display of technical words and theories I had learned by heart. My uncle lent himself with an obliging lack of pretentiousness to this stratagem, which lasted some
considerable
time and showed off all my talents.

Laura did not appear to pay it any attention, and at the far end of the table she began a hushed conversation in Italian with her governess. I had studied this language a little in my brief leisure moments; I lent an ear several times, and recognised that they were having a discussion on the way to preserve green peas then, in my own eyes I regained the upper hand. Although Laura had grown yet more beautiful, I felt indifferent to her charms, and I left her saying to myself: “If I had known that you were only a silly little middle-class girl, I would not have taken so much trouble to show you of what I am capable.”

Despite this reaction on the part of my self-pride, after an hour had passed I felt very sad, and as though I were being crushed by the weight of an immense
disappointment
. My immediate superior, the deputy assistant curator, saw me sitting in the corner of the gallery, looking shattered and with the gloomy expression I had habitually worn the previous year.

What is wrong? he asked me. Anyone would think that today you are remembering having been the greatest slowcoach in all creation.

Walter was an excellent young man: twenty-four years old, with an amiable face, a serious mind and a cheerful
demeanour. His eyes and voice were imbued with the serenity of a clear conscience. He had always shown indulgence and affection towards me. I could not open my heart to him, for I could not see clearly into it myself; but I let him see the preoccupations which were rising up vaguely within me, and in the end I asked him what he thought of our arid studies, which had value only in the eyes of a few scientific adepts and remained a closed book to common mortals.

My dear boy, he replied, there are three ways of viewing our studies’ goal. Your uncle, who is a
respectable
scholar, sits astride just one of these ways, and the pony he is riding with such panache, the one he spurs on furiously, and which often carries him away beyond all certainty, is called hypothesis. The rough, ardent
horseman
wishes, like Curtius, to plunge into the abysses of the earth, but there to discover the beginning of things and the successive and regular development of those first things. I believe he is seeking the impossible: chaos will not let go of its prey, and the word mystery is written on the cradle of earthly life. It matters not, your uncle’s works have great value, because in the midst of many errors, he unearths many truths. Without the hypothesis which fascinates him and which has fascinated so many others, we would still find ourselves limited to the inexact symbolism of Genesis.

“But,” Walter continued, “there is a second way of viewing science, and this is the one that has won me over. It consists of applying to industry the riches which
slumber
between the leaves of the earth’s bark and which, every day, thanks to the progress of physics and chemistry,
reveal to us new peculiarities and elements of well-being, sources of infinite power for the future of human societies.

“As for the third way, it is interesting but puerile. It consists of knowing the detail of the innumerable events and minute modifications that the mineralogical
elements
present. This is the science of details, which lovers of collections possess and which also interests lapidaries, jewellers …”

And women! I cried out with an accent of disdainful pity as I saw my cousin, who had just entered the gallery, walking slowly along the glass cabinet that contained the gemstones.

She heard my exclamation, turned round, threw me a look that embodied the most complete indifference, and calmly continued her examination without paying me any further attention.

I was going to continue the conversation with Walter, when he enquired if I was not going to offer my arm to my cousin and give her the explanations she might desire.

No, I replied, loudly enough to be heard. My cousin has seen her uncle’s collection many times before, and the only thing that might interest her here, is precisely the one that interests us very little.

I confess, Walter went on, lowering his voice and
showing
me the side of the gallery which Laura was walking along, that I would give all the precious, priceless stones heaped up in those glass cases for the beautiful specimens of iron and coal which lie here, close to us. The miner’s pick, my friend, there you have the symbol of the world’s future, and as for these glittering trifles that decorate the heads of queens or the arms of courtesans, I care as much
about them as about a wisp of straw. The work on a grand scale, my dear Alexis, the work which benefits everyone and which projects the rays of civilisation far into the
distance
, that is what dominates my thoughts and directs my studies. As for hypothesis …

What are you saying about hypo … po … pothesis? the annoyed voice of my Uncle Tungstenius stammered behind us. Hypo … po … pothesis is a term of derision used by l … l … lazy people who receive their opinions ready-made and dismiss the investigations of great minds as if they were chimeras.

Then, little by little growing calmer in the face of
Walter’s
apologies and denials, the fellow went on without stuttering too much:

You will do well, children, never to abandon the
governing
thread of logic. There are no effects without a cause. The earth, the sky, the universe, and we ourselves, are only effects, the results of a sublime or fatal cause. Study the effects, by all means, but not without seeking the essential reason why nature itself exists.

“You are right, Walter, not to absorb yourself in the minutiae of purely mineralogical classifications and denominations; but you seek the useful with as much
narrowness
of thought as the mineralogists seek the rare. I care no more than you for diamonds and emeralds, which are the pride and amusement of a small number of
people
who are privileged to be wealthy; but, when you lock your entire soul away within the walls of some middlingly rich mine, you bring to my mind the mole who flees from the sun’s rays.

“The sun of intelligence, my child, is reasoning.
Induction and deduction, there is no way out of that, and it matters little to me that you take me round the whole world in a steamship, if you never teach me why the earth is a globe and why this globe has evolutions and revolutions. Learn to strike iron, to convert it into cast iron or steel, I consent to that; but, if your whole life is nothing but an application to material things, you might just as well be iron yourself, in other words an inert
substance
deprived of reasoning. Man does not live by bread alone, my friend; he does not live completely except by the development of his faculties of examination and comprehension.”

My uncle went on in this vein for some time, and,
without
allowing himself to contradict him, Walter defended as best he could the theory of the direct utility of the
treasures
of science. According to him, man could not arrive at the illumination of the mind until he had conquered the joys of the positive life.

I listened to this interesting discussion, whose scope struck me for the first time. I had got to my feet and,
leaning
on a copper rail which protects the glass cases from the outside, I gazed mechanically towards the mineralogical collection which Laura had examined a moment before, and which had been disdained in unison by my uncle, by Walter and by myself. I had moved to stand there without quite knowing why, for my uncle and Walter had turned towards the rocks, that is the purely geological collection. Perhaps, without my realising it, I was dominated by the vague pleasure of breathing in the scent of a white rose that Laura had placed and forgotten on the edge of the glass case.

Whatever the reason, my eyes were fixed on the series of quartz hyalines, also called rock crystals, before which Laura had appeared to halt for a moment with a certain pleasure, and, whilst listening to my uncle’s reasoning, and wishing to forget Laura, who had disappeared, I contemplated a magnificent geode of amethyst quartz, completely filled with crystals which were truly
remarkable
, transparent and had the freshness of prisms.

However, my thoughts were not as fixed as my gaze; they floated at random, and the scent of the little musk rose brought my being back under the control of instinct. I loved that rose, and yet I believed I hated the one who had plucked it. I breathed in its scent with aspirations that translated themselves into kisses, I pressed it to my lips with a disdain that translated itself into bites. Suddenly I felt a light hand upon my shoulder, and a delicious voice, the voice of Laura, spoke in my ear.

Do not turn round, do not look at me, she said; leave that poor rose alone, and come with me to gather the flowers of stone that do not wither. Come, follow me. Do not listen to my uncle’s cold reasoning and Walter’s
blasphemies
. Quickly, quickly, friend, let us leave for the fairy regions of the crystal. I am running towards them, follow me, if you love me!

I felt so surprised and troubled, that I had the strength neither to look at Laura, nor to answer her. Moreover, she was already no longer at my side; she was in front of me, as if she had passed through the glass case, or the case had become an open door. She was fleeing or rather flying in a luminous space, and I followed her, not knowing where I was, nor by what fantastical brightness I was dazzled.

Fatigue halted me and overcame me after a period of time whose length I could not calculate. Discouraged, I let myself fall. My cousin had disappeared.

Laura! dear Laura! I cried out in despair, where have you led me, and why have you abandoned me?

I then sensed Laura’s hand upon my shoulder once more, and her voice speaking in my ear again. At the same time, far away Uncle Tungstenius’s piercing voice was saying:

No, there is no hypo … po … pothesis in all of that!

However Laura was speaking to me as well, and I could not understand her. I thought at first that it was in Italian, then in Greek, and finally I recognised that it was in a completely new language, which little by little was
revealing
itself to me like the memory of another life. I grasped the meaning of the last sentence very clearly.

So, see where I have brought you, she was saying, and understand that I have opened your eyes to the sky’s light.

I then began to see and understand in what surprising place I found myself. I was with Laura in the centre of the amethyst geode which graced the glass case in the
mineralogical
gallery; but what up to then I had taken blindly and on the faith of others for a block of hollow flint, the size of a melon cut in half and lined inside with prismatic crystals of irregular size and groupings, was in reality a ring of tall mountains enclosing an immense basin filled with steep hills bristling with needles of violet quartz, the smallest of which might have exceeded the dome of St Peter’s in Rome both in volume and in height.

From that moment on I was no longer astonished by the tiredness I had experienced while running up one of
these rocky needles, and I felt a great surge of fear as I saw that I was on the slope of a sparkling precipice, at the bottom of which mysterious shimmers were calling to me with a vertiginous fascination.

Stand up and fear nothing, Laura told me; in this land, thoughts walk and the feet follow. Those who understand cannot fall.

Tranquil, Laura was indeed walking on these steep slopes, which plunged down in all directions towards the abyss, and whose polished surface received the full
brilliance
of the sun and reflected it back in iridescent sprays. The place was admirable, and I soon saw that I could walk there as safely as Laura. Finally she sat down on the edge of a small crack and asked me with a childish laugh if I recognised the place.