VARIETY
627
There are countries which enjoy a kind of benedictio , a kind of
grace: everything succeeds for them, even their misfortunes, even their
catastrophes; and there are others which cannot carry it off, whose very
triumphs are equivalent to failures. When they seek to assert themselves,
to leap forward, an external fatality intervenes to break their spring
and bring them back to their point of departure. All occasions are taken
from them, even that of ridicule.
To
be
French is obvious enough: one neither suffers from it, nor
does one rejoice over it; one possesses a certainty which justifies the old
interrogation: "How can one be a Persian?"
The paradox of being a Persian (or as the case would have it, a
Rumanian) is a torment one must know how to exploit, a defect by
which one must profit. I confess I once regarded it as a disgrace to be–
long to an ordinary nation, to a collectivity of victims about whose origin
no illusion was permitted. I believed, and I was perhaps not mistaken,
that we had sprung from the lees of the Barbarians, from the scum of
the great Invasions, from those hordes which, unable to pursue their
march West, collapsed along the Carpathians and the Danube, som–
nolently squatting there, a mass of deserters on the Empire's confines,
daubed with a touch of Latinity. With that past, this present. And this
future. What an ordeal for my young arrogance! "How can one be a
Rumanian?" was a question I could answer only by a constant mortifica–
tion. Hating my people, my country, its timeless peasants enamored of
their own torpor and almost bursting with hebetude, I blushed to
be
descended from them, repudiated them, rejected their sub-eternity, their
larval certainties, their geologic reverie. No use scanning their features
for the fidgets, the smirks of revolt: the monkey, alas! was dying in
them. In truth, did they not sprout from the very rock? Unable to shove
them aside, or to animate them, I came to the point of dreaming of an
extermination. One does not massacre stones. The spectacle they offered
me justified and baffled, nourished and disgusted my hysteria. And I
never stopped cursing the accident that caused me to be born among
them.
One great idea possessed them: the idea of destiny. I repudiated it
with all my strength, saw in it nothing but the subterfuge of poltroons,
an excuse for every abdication, an expression of common sense and its
funereal philosophy. What could I cling to? My country whose existence,
obviously, made no sense seemed to me a resume of nothingness or a
materialization of the inconceivable, a sort of Spain without its
Siglo de
Oro,
without conquests or madness, and without a Don Quixote of our
