The Symbolist Movement in LiteratureSymons, Arthur
History
The Symbolist Movement in Literature
Symons, Arthur
French literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Symbolism (Literary movement) -- France
whom he calls Adrienne, and whom, under many names, he loved to the
end of his life. One evening she had come from the château to dance
with the young peasant girls on the grass. She had danced with Gérard,
he had kissed her cheek, he had crowned her hair with laurels, he had
heard her sing an old song telling of the sorrows of a princess whom
her father had shut in a tower because she had loved. To Gérard it
seemed that already he remembered her, and certainly he was never to
forget her. After-wards, he heard that Adrienne had taken the veil;
then, that she was dead. To one who had realised that it is "we, the
living, who walk in a world of phantoms," death could not exclude hope;
and when, many years later, he fell seriously and fantastically in love
with a little actress called Jenny Colon, it was because he seemed to
have found, in that blonde and very human person, the re-incarnation of
the blonde Adrienne.
Meanwhile Gérard was living in Paris, among his friends the Romantics,
writing and living in an equally desultory fashion. _Le bon Gérard_
was the best loved, and, in his time, not the least famous, of the
company. He led, by choice, now in Paris, now across Europe, the life
of a vagabond, and more persistently than others of his friends who
were driven to it by need. At that time, when it was the aim of every
one to be as eccentric as possible, the eccentricities of Gérard's life
and thought seemed, on the whole, less noticeable than those of many
really quite normal persons. But with Gérard there was no pose; and
when, one day, he was found in the Palais-Royal, leading a lobster
at the end of a blue ribbon (because, he said, it does not bark, and
knows the secrets of the sea), the visionary had simply lost control of
his visions, and had to be sent to Dr. Blanche's asylum at Montmartre.
He entered March 21, 1841, and came out, apparently well again, on
the 21st of November. It would seem that this first access of madness
was, to some extent, the consequence of the final rupture with Jenny
Colon; on June 5, 1842, she died and it was partly in order to put as
many leagues of the earth as possible between him and that memory that
Gérard set out, at the end of 1842, for the East. It was also in order
to prove to the world, by his consciousness of external things, that
he had recovered his reason. While he was in Syria, he once more fell
in love with a new incarnation of Adrienne, a young Druse, Saléma, the
daughter of a Sheikh of Lebanon; and it seems to have been almost by
accident that he did not marry her. He returned to Paris at the end
of 1843 or the beginning of 1844, and for the next few years he lived
mostly in Paris, writing charming, graceful, remarkably sane articles
and books and wandering about the streets, by day and night, in a
perpetual dream from which, now and again, he was somewhat rudely
awakened. When, in the spring of 1853, he went to see Heine, for whom
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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