The child who went about hand in hand with the white-haired lady (whose
hair was only powdered) and fed the pigeons was my grandmother, Jeanne
de Boismorinel (who married Francois Pasquier de la Mariere). It was her
father who wore red heels to his shoes, and made her believe she could
manufacture little cocked-hats in colored glass; she had lived again in
me whenever, as a child, I had dreamed that exquisite dream.
I could now evoke her at will; and, with her, many buried memories were
called out of nothingness into life.
Among other wonderful things, I heard the red-heeled gentleman, M. de
Boismorinel (my great-grandfather), sing beautiful old songs by Lulli
and others to the spinet, which he played charmingly a rare
accomplishment in those days. And lo! these tunes were tunes that had
risen oft and unbidden in my consciousness, and I had fondly imagined
that I had composed them myself--little impromptus of my own. And lo,
again! His voice, thin, high, nasal, but very sympathetic and musical,
was that never still small voice that has been singing unremittingly for
more than half a century in the unswept, ungarnished corner of my brain
where all the cobwebs are.
[Illustration: "THAT NEVER STILL SMALL VOICE."]
And these cobwebs?
Well, I soon became aware, by deeply diving into my inner consciousness
when awake and at my daily prison toil (which left the mind singularly
clear and free), that I was full, quite full, of slight elusive
reminiscences which were neither of my waking life nor of my dream-life
with Mary: reminiscences of sub-dreams during sleep, and belonging to
the period of my childhood and early youth; sub-dreams which no doubt
had been forgotten when I woke, at which time I could only remember the
surface dreams that had just preceded my waking.
Ponds, rivers, bridges, roads, and streams, avenues of trees, arbors,
windmills and water-mills, corridors and rooms, church functions,
village fairs, festivities, men and women and animals, all of another
time and of a country where I had never set my foot, were familiar to my
remembrance. I had but to dive deep enough into myself, and there they
were; and when night came, and sleep, and "Magna sed Apta," I could
re-evoke them all, and make them real and complete for Mary and myself.
That these subtle reminiscences were true antenatal memories was soon
proved by my excursions with Mary into the past; and her experience of
such reminiscences, and their corroboration, were just as my own. We
have heard and seen her grandfather play the "Chant du Triste Commensal"
to crowded concert-rooms, applauded to the echo by men and women long
dead and buried and forgotten!
Now, I believe such reminiscences to form part of the sub-consciousness
of others, as well as Mary's and mine, and that by perseverance in
self-research many will succeed in reaching them--perhaps even more
easily and completely than we have done.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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