PARTISAN REVIEW
shock of my father's death. One must always hope.... I do not know
what the year 1907 holds for me, but let us pray that it may bring some
improvement to us both, and that in several months we shall be able to
see each other.
Please accept, I beg you, my deepest sympathy.
H.
VAN BLARENBERGHE
Five or six days after getting this letter, I recalled, on waking up
in the morning, that I had meant to answer it. The day had brought
one of those unexpected cold spells which, like high tides of the air,
wash over the dykes raised between ourselves and nature by great
towns, and battering our closed windows, reaching into our very
rooms, make our chilly shoulders feel, through a quickening touch,
the furious return of the elements. Days troubled by brusque baromet–
ric changes, by shocks even more grave. No. joy, after all, in so much
violence. We weep for the snow which is about to fall and, as in the
lovely verse of Andre Rivoire, things have the air of "waiting for
the snow." Scarcely does "a depression move towards the Balearics,"
as the newspapers say, or Jamaica begin to quake, when at the same
instant in Paris the sufferers from migraine, rheumatism, asthma, no
doubt the insane too, reach their crises; the nerves ·of so many people
are united with the farthest points of the universe by bonds which the
victims often wish less tight.
If
the influence of the stars on at least
some of them shall one day be recognized ( Framery, Pelletan, quoted
by M. Brissaud ), to whom does the poet's line apply better than to
such nervous ones?-
Et de longs fils soyeux l'unissent aux etoiles.
On getting up I prepared to answer Henri van Blarenberghe.
But before writing him I wanted to glance at
Figaro,
to proceed to
that abominable and voluptuous act called "reading the newspapers,"
thanks to which all the world's misfortunes and cataclysms of the
last twenty-four hours, the battles costing fifty thousand lives, the
crimes, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the
suicides, the divorces, the crude emotions of statesman and actor,
transmuted for our personal consumption, make for us, who are not
involved, a fine little morning treat, an exciting and tonic accompani–
ment to the sipping of
ca{e au lait.
The fragile thread of
Figaro,
soon
enough broken by an indolent gesture, alone divides us from all the
94
