.
Cathédrale Sainte-Croix, Orléans: photo by Kamel15, August 2008
August 12, 1927. I shall confine myself to notes. The familiar torment of loneliness that afflicts me particularly when traveling has for the first time assumed the features of growing old. L. has not come with me. The likelihood that this is because of a misunderstanding is no greater than 10 percent. The likelihood that I have been deceived in the ordinary way is about 90 percent. Admittedly, I myself have created this possibility. This now turns out to be a mistake. If she had come, that would have been the basis for enjoying this trip.
I can be certain that I shall now, alone, find all the places that would have been sheer delight with her. Here I am, for example, sitting in a very quiet and very good restaurant, the Hôtel St. Cathérine in Orléans. The table is precisely the right width for sitting opposite someone. The electric lights are so faint I can barely see to write.
Until midday I was uncertain whether I should travel on my own. If Scholem hadn't been arriving, I probably would not have done so. I simply did not think I could bear his sometimes ostentatious self-assurance.
This afternoon I saw Orléans Cathedral: modern colored-glass windows that mean nothing. Yet above, in the choir, plain glass. The rose window above the entrance, too, is plain: a polar sun. Behind the plain glass of the aisle windows the buttresses can be seen in the half-light, like a shoreline in banks of mist. In the transept the rose windows are in the harsh, barbaric yellows and reds. --- The exterior is incredibly beautiful. Outside, the chancel has a stone foundation from which the shafts and pilasters rise up. It is as if they are rooted in the stone walls.
Cathédrale Sainte-Croix, Orléans: photo by Narisa, 26 April 2011
While I was walking through the cathedral, the organist was practicing.
Everything, especially every trivial thing on this journey, makes me want to burst into tears. For example, the fact that on this trip I do not speak French. (At all!) I weep when I think about the rue de Reuilly, a magic name for me, one that I can no longer use.
Cathédrale Sainte-Croix, Orléans: photo by Kamel15, August 2008
August 13. I slept better than I had expected. From the hotel I went back to the cathedral again. This time I approached it from the Hotel de Ville, which is faced by some older houses rising up on a beautiful slope.
Hôtel Groslot, siège de l'Hôtel de ville d'Orléans, et statue de Jeanne d'Arc, Loiret, Centre, France: photo by Tieum, 28 October 2004
In the cathedral I heard the story of the red hat that hangs from the ceiling.
In the cathedral I heard the story of the red hat that hangs from the ceiling.
Maison de Jeanne d'Arc, Orléans: photo by Vermessen, 25 August 2008
It belonged to a cardinal (probably Cardinal Touchet, who is seated at the feet of the statue of Joan of Arc), and will hang there until it falls of its own accord.
It belonged to a cardinal (probably Cardinal Touchet, who is seated at the feet of the statue of Joan of Arc), and will hang there until it falls of its own accord.
-- From a distance, from the boulevard St. Vincent, the buttresses look like fragments of Christ's crown of thorns. Never have I seen such a thorny cathedral as this one, with its icy cold rose window.
Street, Orléans: photo by Kamel15, August 2008
While I was walking through the town and visiting all the churches listed in the guidebook, it occurred to me that it is quite possible L. really had gone away; in other words, that she may well have gone on a trip with him. Considered perhaps calling at her apartment again shortly before leaving for Berlin, or at the hotel in the rue de la la Chapelle, and observing her if possible.
View from the north bank of the River Loire, Blois: photo by Stevage, 8 May 2006
In Blois. Here you have to sit on the terrace behind the Cathédrale St. Louis if you want to see the famous French clarté, the French limpidité, total harmony of landscape, architecture and the art of gardening.
Cathédrale Saint-Louis, Blois, East End: photo by TTaylor, 2005
Thank God the sky is heavily overcast; the sun has disappeared. I still feel bitterness within me, churned up emotions that refuse to settle down. It was an infallible instinct that bid me make precisely this journey with L., a Parisian. The absent one retreats from me for a second time -- like a landscape, at every moment drawing further away. I place landscapes, courtyards, around her as frames, all of which remain empty. And the whole situation is made worse by my vanity's whispered insistence that all this happened by accident, not design. Even so, when I return to Paris, I will not let my efforts to find her again go too far. In Paris I can survive without her, and indeed cannot really make use of her, as matters stand. It was during the guided tour through the castle of Blois that I suffered most.
Château de Blois, Loir-et-Cher, Centre, France. Panorama of the interior façades. From right to left: the Louis XII flamboyant wing, the medieval Gothic castle, the François I Renaissance wing, and the Gaston d'Orléans classic wing: photo by Tango7174, 24 September 2008
This was where her astonishment would have made everything bearable, if not agreeable.
As it was, as I gazed around the empty rooms whose walls are painted in imitation of the Gobelins tapestries or Cordoba leather that used to hang there, I could see that I was almost the only person who was alone.
Salle des Etats Généraux, Château de Blois: photo by Manfred Heyde, 10 May 2009
As it was, as I gazed around the empty rooms whose walls are painted in imitation of the Gobelins tapestries or Cordoba leather that used to hang there, I could see that I was almost the only person who was alone.
Chambre du Roi ([king's bedchamber], Château de Blois, with Henry IV's initial H in the floor tiles: photo by MFSG, 13 June 2007
I am not far from tears.
"Chambre de secrets" in the Château de Blois, rumoured (probably apocryphally) to have been used as a hiding place for poisons by Marie de Medici, widow of Henry IV: photo by Stevage, 2 May 2006
What was the point of it all -- not just of all these preparations, but of having made this huge change in my life -- if I cannot contrive to carry out the simplest little planned journey that any traveling salesman could manage? Am I never again to travel anywhere with a woman I desire?
Slate roofs, Tours: photo by Erin Silversmith, June 2005
August 15 [Tours]. To my surprise, I see that comfort is having an effect on my gloomy mood. Since I...
The same day, evening. In short, I have an excellent, luxurious room that will have to make up for L.'s absence as far as possible. I shall presumably not see her again, and I shall make only modest attempts to do so. But I have caught myself trying to conjure up her face, specifically to recall that expression (that coldness, that refusal to make contact with me) which is no doubt the source of my present situation. I made this effort this afternoon beneath the trees in front of the Cafe Universel, behind the big statue of Balzac which shows the master in his dressing gown.
Cathédrale de Saint-Gatien, Tours: photo by Parsifall, 2009
Only the sight of the buildings gives me the feeling of having arrived here in Tours, or wherever it may be, and nowhere else. I stood behind the chancel of St. Gatien. My gaze turned to the dead, gray, nondescript exterior view of the famous stained-glass windows. A moment before, I had been sitting on a bench, looking at the façade; now I was looking at the back of the church, leaning against a wall. It gave me a shock. Compared to this peace, this immediate sense of presence that comes from gazing at great works of architecture, all our ordinary activity is like traveling on a train that suddenly stops with a jerk. Here we are; nothing will take us any further.
Cathédrale de Saint-Gatien, Tours : photo by Parsifall, 2009
Cathédrale de Saint-Gatien, Tours : photo by Parsifall, 2009
Tours has the most cheerful, most childlike rose windows I have ever seen, especially the one over the main portal.
Old houses in the Place Plumereau, Tours: photo by Parsifall, 2009
After that I took a walk behind the cathedral through little streets with low squat buildings. But with what names! Rue Racine, rue Montaigne. And this square is the place St. Gregoire de Tours. A woman was delivering newspapers, and she blew a horn -- a last vestige of the medieval town crier, probably. The houses have two stories, but much lower still are the courtyard walls with the doors in them.
In the cathedral I suddenly cheered up, It occurred to me that a month previously I had been in Chartres -- it was not yet a month since I had met L. -- and she had been marvelously planted (this Parisian rose) between those two cathedrals. And that was as it should be. She had her place.
Nave of the Cathédrale de Saint-Gatien, Tours: photo by Guillaume Piolle, 4 July 2009
August 16. I went back to St. Gatien. The stained glass must have had this appearance of faded velvet cloth right from the start.
In the cathedral I suddenly cheered up, It occurred to me that a month previously I had been in Chartres -- it was not yet a month since I had met L. -- and she had been marvelously planted (this Parisian rose) between those two cathedrals. And that was as it should be. She had her place.
Nave of the Cathédrale de Saint-Gatien, Tours: photo by Guillaume Piolle, 4 July 2009
August 16. I went back to St. Gatien. The stained glass must have had this appearance of faded velvet cloth right from the start.
Main altar and choir, Cathédrale de Saint-Gatien, Tours: photo by Tango 7174, 22 September 2008
Incidentally, this rose window is an unsurpassable symbol of the Church's way of thinking: from the outside, all slaty, scaly, almost leprous; from the inside, blossoming, intoxicating and golden.
Northern rose window and main organ of the Cathédrale de Saint-Gatien, Tours: photo by Guillaume Piolle, 6 July 2009
When you walk over to the other side of the Loire, St. Gatien does not stand out, as it should, in Gothic splendor above many gables, but rises above the leaves of the trees on the Loire islands and the riverbank promenade. -- Yesterday I saw two chimney stacks on a roof high above the town: a new paradise that Virgil shows with a dramatic gesture to a Dante who recoils with a shiver. -- From the front the cathedral looks out onto the place Quatorze Juillet, and from behind on to the place St. Grégoire de Tours. It looks as if its is resting its head on a cushion and has its feet in the water. Concerning street names: on the sign for the rue August Comte, together with his dates, appears the word Positiviste. What must the good townsfolk think that means? -- (Behind the cathedral: rue du Petit Cupidon.)
I would have had a photograph of L. made on this trip. Apart from that, I find I have to restore my equanimity by imagining that her failure to come was the result of the influence of someone else. For my vanity, and the probabilities of the situation, do not allow me to consider the possibility that she deceived me from start to finish. And to contemplate the thought that we may have missed each other as a result of a misunderstanding would drive me mad.
I would have had a photograph of L. made on this trip. Apart from that, I find I have to restore my equanimity by imagining that her failure to come was the result of the influence of someone else. For my vanity, and the probabilities of the situation, do not allow me to consider the possibility that she deceived me from start to finish. And to contemplate the thought that we may have missed each other as a result of a misunderstanding would drive me mad.
Cathédrale de Saint-Gatien, Tours, seen from rear: photo by Touffi, 1 May 2006
Before coming to Tours I had never seen a town (other than Heidelberg) that allows the landscape to come so much into its own. There is scarcely more than a ribbon of gray along the banks of the Loire as they pass through the town. And the boulevard Grammont passes into the countryside as if through festively built-up, uninhabited meadows. The great stone bridge is suspended shallowly above the river, like a hand stroking it. Everything is low, apart from a few lofty towers.
Pont Wilson over the River Loire at Tours, with Cathédrale de Saint-Gatien in distance: photo by Guil37, 3 April 2007
It is a town à la portée des enfants; it gives me pleasure to reflect the great Catholic children's-book publisher Mame is based in Tours.
Looking back towards central Tours from the north bank of the River Loire, adjacent to the Pont Mirabeau: photo by Ozeye, 13 September 2007
Walter Benjamin: from Diary of My Journey to the Loire, August 1927, unpublished in the author's lifetime, trans. by Rodney Livingstone in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927-1934, 1999
No comments:
Post a Comment