832
PARTISAN REVIEW
minots
for his wife- "Madame Homais was very fond of these small,
heavy turban-shaped loaves, that are eaten in Lent with salt but–
ter . . . ," etc. (Each notation plays insistently on the same incom–
mensurables: Homais and Emma have met at the
«Croix-Rouge";
he
has bought the bread of a baker in the
Rue Massacre,'
the bread is
a
Lenten
loaf.) They meet the blind man on the road-one of Breu–
ghel's blind men, a mediaeval moral emblem:
The blind man sank down on his haunches, with his head thrown
back, whilst he rolled his greenish eyes, lolled out his tongue, and
rubbed his stomach with both hands, as he uttered a kind of hollow
yell like a famished dog.
And then again almost instantly, beside the blind man's howl, back to
Binet and another kind of frenzy, not the frenzy of the death-bound
flesh
but that of the abstraction-intoxicated mind:
He was alone in his garret, busy imitating in wood one of those in–
describable bits of ivory, composed of crescents, of spheres hollowed
out one within the other, the whole as straight as an obelisk, and of
no use whatever....
When Emma dies, she too lolls out her tongue like the blind
man: "The whole of her tongue protruded from her mouth." But
she laughs when he sings at the window:
Pour amasser diLigemment.
Les epis que La faux moissonne,
Ma Nannette va s'inclinant
Vers Le sillon qui nous Les donne.
For it is of Emma herself that he sings, May-queen, Kore, earth–
daughter, who goes bending toward the furrow, who is, like the corn,
harvested by the scythe. Her changes in death are gruesome, for
the same reason the blind man is gruesome: she is "the horror." Be–
side the horror, perfectly external to it and complacent, sit the Church
and Science, the one degenerated into cliches, the other generating
cliches. "We shall end," they say, "by understanding one another."
Strangely, it is only Charles who recognizes the horror: Charles, the
vegetative "there" and "that," the poor rudimentary potential of
