PARTISAN REVIEW
was ignoble to weep. He sits immobile, shrieking, plotting, no doubt,
some dark design against himself." But when the madness is over
for Henri van Blarenberghe, it is not butchered sheep and shepherds
he has before
him.
The anguish does not die at once since he himself
is not yet dead when he sees
his
murdered mother before him; since
he himself is not yet dead when he hears his dying mother say to him,
like Prince Andrey's wife in Tolstoy: "Henri, what have you done
to me! What have you done to me!" "When they reached the landing
between the first and second floors," says
Le M atin,
"the servants
saw Mme. van Blarenberghe, her face distorted by terror, descend
two or three steps, crying: 'Henri! Henri! what have you done!'
Then the poor woman, covered with blood, threw her arms in the
air
and fell on her face.... The horrified servants went out to get
help. A little later, four policemen whom one of them had found
forced open the murderer's door. Besides slashing himself with a
dagger, he had rippen open the whole left side of his face with a
bullet.
His eye lay on the pillow."
Here I no longer think of Ajax.
In that eye "which lay on the pillow" I recognize the eye of the
miserable Oedipus, tom out in the most terrible act in the history of
human suffering! "Oedipus bursts in with loud cries, goes, comes,
demands a sword. . . . With a dread shriek he throws himself against
the double doors, pulls the boards from the hinges, rushes into the
room where he sees Jocasta hanging by the cord which had strangled
her. Seeing her thus, the wretch trembles with horror, looses the cord;
his
mother's body falls to the ground. He rips the gold brooches
from Jocasta's garments, with them he tears his wide-open eyes,
saying that they shall no longer see the evil he has suffered and the
disaster he has caused, and, shouting curses, again he strikf'..s his
eyes, the lids open, and from his bloody eyeballs a rain, a hail of
black blood flows down his cheeks. He cries that the parricide must
be shown to
all
the Cadmeans. He wants to be driven from the land.
Ah, their old felicity was a true felicity; but from this day on they shall
know all the evils that have a name. Lamentations, ruin, death, dis–
grace." And in thinking of Henri van Blarenberghe's pain when he
saw his dead mother, I think of another mad man, of Lear clasping
the body of
his
daughter Cordelia. "Oh! she's gone forever!
She'~
as
dead as earth. No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat,
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