FILIAL SENTIMENTS OF A PARRICIDE
have life, and thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more, never,
never, never, never, never! Look on her, look, her lips, look there,
look there !"
In spite of his horrible wounds, Henri van Blarenbergh did not
die at once. And I cannot help finding very harsh (although perhaps
necessary; can one be sure what really constituted the drama? Re–
member the brothers Karamazov) the act of the superintendent of
police. "The unfortunate man was not dead. The superintendent took
him by the shoulders and said: 'Do you hear me? Answer.' The mur–
derer opened his one eye, blinked for an instant and fell back in a
coma." To this cruel superintendent I want to speak the words used
by Kent in the scene from
King
Lean
which I quoted just now to
stop Edgar from arousing the already fainting Lear: "Vex not his
ghost: 0 ! let him pass; he hates him that would upon the rack of
this tough world stretch him out longer.''
If
I have insisted on repeating these great tragic names, especially
those of Ajax and Oedipus, the reader should understand why, and
also why I have published these letters and written this page. I wished
to show in what a pure and religious atmosphere of moral beauty,
bespattered but not defiled, occurred this explosion of madness and
blood. I wished to open the room of crime to the air of heaven, to
show that this commonplace event was exactly one of those Greek
dramas, the presentation of which was almost a religious ceremony
and that the poor parricide was not a criminal brute, a being outside
humanity, but a noble example of humanity, a man of enlightened
soul, a tender and dutiful son whom the most ineluctable fatality–
let us say pathological fatality, as the world would say-has thrown,
most unfortunate of mortals, into a crime and an expiation worthy
of fame.
"I do not easily believe in death," says Michelet in an admirable
passage. It is true that he says it of a sea nettle, whose death, so
little different from its life, is scarcely notable; and one might also
wonder whether Michelet's phrase may not be simply one of those
"basic recipes" which great writers soon acquire, thanks to which
they are sure of being able to serve up to their clientele at a moment's
notice the particular feast which it demands of them. Although I
believe without difficulty in the death of a sea nettle, I cannot easily
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