Visit https://ebooknice.

com to download the full version and

explore more ebooks

(Ebook) The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of

Things by George Kubler ISBN 9780300100617,
0300100612

_____ Click the link below to download _____

https://ebooknice.com/product/the-shape-of-time-
remarks-on-the-history-of-things-4948592

Explore and download more ebooks at ebooknice.com

Here are some recommended products that might interest you.
You can download now and explore!

(Ebook) The Ancients and Shakespeare on Time : Some Remarks on the War
of Generations by Nowak, Piotr; Shakespeare, William ISBN
9789042038202, 9789401210676, 9042038209, 9401210675

https://ebooknice.com/product/the-ancients-and-shakespeare-on-time-
some-remarks-on-the-war-of-generations-5282150

ebooknice.com

(Ebook) A History of Fake Things on the Internet by Walter Scheirer

ISBN 9781503632882, 1503632881

https://ebooknice.com/product/a-history-of-fake-things-on-the-
internet-57328232

ebooknice.com

(Ebook) Remarks on the Biology, Psychology and Politics of Religion by

Michael Starks ISBN 9781691873128, 1691873128

https://ebooknice.com/product/remarks-on-the-biology-psychology-and-
politics-of-religion-10496422

ebooknice.com

(Ebook) Things We Like: Things We Like Bk. 3a by Susan St. Louis, W.

Murray ISBN 9781844223640, 1844223647

https://ebooknice.com/product/things-we-like-things-we-like-
bk-3a-4566368

ebooknice.com
(Ebook) Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past
by Eviatar Zerubavel ISBN 9780226981529, 0226981525

https://ebooknice.com/product/time-maps-collective-memory-and-the-
social-shape-of-the-past-5559418

ebooknice.com

(Ebook) The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man: With Remarks

on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation by Charles Lyell
ISBN 9780511693847, 9781108003971, 0511693842, 1108003974

https://ebooknice.com/product/the-geological-evidences-of-the-
antiquity-of-man-with-remarks-on-theories-of-the-origin-of-species-by-
variation-2536578
ebooknice.com

(Ebook) The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Essays on Desire and

Consumption by Katy Kelleher ISBN 9781982179359, 198217935X

https://ebooknice.com/product/the-ugly-history-of-beautiful-things-
essays-on-desire-and-consumption-49590224

ebooknice.com

(Ebook) A History of Greece: From the Time of Solon to 403 BC by

George Grote, M.O.B. Caspari, J.M. Mitchell ISBN 9780415223690,
0415223695

https://ebooknice.com/product/a-history-of-greece-from-the-time-of-
solon-to-403-bc-1397796

ebooknice.com

(Ebook) The Ordering of Time by George Lucas ISBN 9781474478557,

1474478557

https://ebooknice.com/product/the-ordering-of-time-37630458

ebooknice.com
The Shape of Time
This page intentionally left blank
The Shape of Time
Remarks on the History of Things
George Kubler
Yale University Press | New Haven and London
Originally published with assistance from the foundation
established in memory of Rutherford Trowbridge.
First published in 1962. This paperback edition designed in 2008.
Copyright © 1962 by Yale University.
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or
in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107
and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the
public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kubler, George, 1912-1996.
The shape of time : remarks on the history of things / George
Kubler. —[New ed.].
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-300-10061-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Art—Philosophy. 2. Art—Historiography. I. Title.
n66.k8 2008
701'.17—dc22 2007035548

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and
durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book
Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
To Martin Heinemann
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Preamble: Symbol, Form, and Duration – ix

one. The History of Things – 1
The Limitations of Biography: Individual Entrances – Talent and
Genius – Biological and Physical Metaphors – Scientists
and Artists – 4
The Historian’s Commitment: The Divisions of the Arts – 11
The Nature of Actuality: Of Arts and Stars – Signals – Relays – 14
Self-Signals and Adherent Signals: Iconographic Studies –
Configurational Analysis – The Taxonomy of
Meaning – 21

two. The Classing of Things – 28

Formal Sequences: Linked Solutions – Open and Closed Sequences
– Fashions – 30
Prime Objects and Replications: Mutants – Diagnostic Difficulties
– Serial Appreciation – Technical Renewals – The Invisible
Chain – Solitary and Gregarious Artists – 35
Serial Position, Age, and Change: The Rule of Series – Systematic
Age – A Mexican Paradigm – Linguistic Change – 48

three. The Propagation of Things – 56

Invention and Variation: Artistic Invention – Convention and
Invention – 57
Replication: Permanence and Change – The Anatomy of Routine
– Historical Drift – 64
Discard and Retention: Obsolescence and Ritual – Aesthetic
Fatigue – 70
four. Some Kinds of Duration – 76
Fast and Slow Happening: The Typology of Artists’ Lives – Tribes,
Courts, and Cities – 77
The Shapes of Time: Positional Values – Periods and Their
Lengths – The Indiction as Module – Intermittent Classes
– Arrested Classes – Extended Series – Wandering Series
– Simultaneous Series – Lenses vs. Fibers of Duration – 88

Conclusion – 112
Finite Invention: The Purist Reduction of Knowledge – Widening
the Gate – The Finite World – 112
The Equivalence of Form and Expression: Iconological Diminutions
– The Deficiencies of Style – The Plural Present – 115

notes – 121
Index – 129

viii contents
 Preamble

symbol, form, and duration

Cassirer’s partial definition of art as symbolic language has
dominated art studies in our century. A new history of culture an-
chored upon the work of art as a symbolic expression thus came
into being. By these means art has been made to connect with the
rest of history.
But the price has been high, for while studies of meaning re-
ceived all our attention, another definition of art, as a system of
formal relations, thereby suffered neglect. This other definition
matters more than meaning. In the same sense speech matters
more than writing, because speech precedes writing, and because
writing is but a special case of speech.
The other definition of art as form remains unfashionable, al-
though every thinking person will accept it as a truism that no
meaning can be conveyed without form. Every meaning requires a
support, or a vehicle, or a holder. These are the bearers of meaning,
and without them no meaning would cross from me to you, or from
you to me, or indeed from any part of nature to any other part.
The forms of communication are easily separable from any
meaningful transmission. In linguistics the forms are speech
sounds (phonemes) and grammatical units (morphemes). In
music they are notes and intervals; in architecture and sculpture
they are solids and voids; in painting they are tones and areas.
The structural forms can be sensed independently of meaning.
We know from linguistics in particular that the structural ele-
ments undergo more or less regular evolutions in time without
relation to meaning, as when certain phonetic shifts in the his-
tory of cognate languages can be explained only by a hypothesis

ix
of regular change. Thus phoneme a, occurring in an early stage of
a language, becomes phoneme b at a later stage, independently of
meaning, and only under the rules governing the phonetic struc-
ture of the language. The regularity of these changes is such that
the phonemic changes can even be used to measure durations
between recorded but undated examples of speech.
Similar regularities probably govern the formal infrastructure
of every art. Whenever symbolic clusters appear, however, we see
interferences that may disrupt the regular evolution of the formal
system. An interference from visual images is present in almost all
art. Even architecture, which is commonly thought to lack figural
intention, is guided from one utterance to the next by the images
of the admired buildings of the past, both far and near in time.
The purpose of these pages is to draw attention to some of
the morphological problems of duration in series and sequence.
These problems arise independently of meaning and image. They
are problems that have gone unworked for more than forty years,
since the time when students turned away from “mere formalism”
to the historical reconstruction of symbolic complexes.

The main framework of these ideas was set down at Gaylord

Farm in Wallingford during November and December in 1959. I
am grateful to my family and friends, and to the staff at Gaylord,
and to my associates at Yale University, for their many thoughtful
attentions to the demands of a restless patient. I wrote most of
the text early in 1960 in Naples, and the finished manuscript was
submitted to Yale University Press in November of that year. For
their perceptive readings and valuable suggestions on its improve-
ment I am indebted to my colleagues at Yale, Professors Charles
Seymour, Jr., George H. Hamilton, Sumner McK. Crosby, G. E.
Hutchinson, Margaret Collier, George Hersey, and to Professor
James Ackerman of Harvard, whom I taught twenty years ago
at Yale. For aid toward publication I am grateful to the Mature
Scholars Fund of Yale University.
G. K.
New Haven
15 May 1961
x pr e a m ble
 One. The History of Things

Let us suppose that the idea of art can be expanded to embrace

the whole range of man-made things, including all tools and writ-
ing in addition to the useless, beautiful, and poetic things of the
world. By this view the universe of man-made things simply co-
incides with the history of art. It then becomes an urgent require-
ment to devise better ways of considering everything men have
made. This we may achieve sooner by proceeding from art rather
than from use, for if we depart from use alone, all useless things
are overlooked, but if we take the desirableness of things as our
point of departure, then useful objects are properly seen as things
we value more or less dearly.
In effect, the only tokens of history continually available to our
senses are the desirable things made by men. Of course, to say
that man-made things are desirable is redundant, because man’s
native inertia is overcome only by desire, and nothing gets made
unless it is desirable.
Such things mark the passage of time with far greater accuracy
than we know, and they fill time with shapes of a limited variety.
Like crustaceans we depend for survival upon an outer skeleton,
upon a shell of historic cities and houses filled with things be-
longing to definable portions of the past. Our ways of describing
this visible past are still most awkward. The systematic study of
things is less than five hundred years old, beginning with the de-
scription of works of art in the artists’ biographies of the Italian
Renaissance. The method was extended to the description of all
kinds of things only after 1750. Today archaeology and ethnology

1
treat of material culture in general. The history of art treats of the
least useful and most expressive products of human industry. The
family of things begins to look like a smaller family than people
once thought.
The oldest surviving things made by men are stone tools. A
continuous series runs from them to the things of today. The se-
ries has branched many times, and it has often run out into dead
ends. Whole sequences of course ceased when families of arti-
sans died out or when civilizations collapsed, but the stream of
things never was completely stilled. Everything made now is ei-
ther a replica or a variant of something made a little time ago and
so on back without break to the first morning of human time. This
continuous connection in time must contain lesser divisions.
The narrative historian always has the privilege of deciding
that continuity cuts better into certain lengths than into others.
He never is required to defend his cut, because history cuts any-
where with equal ease, and a good story can begin anywhere the
teller chooses.
For others who aim beyond narration the question is to find
cleavages in history where a cut will separate different types of
happening.1 Many have thought that to make the inventory would
lead toward such an enlarged understanding. The archaeologists
and anthropologists classify things by their uses, having first sepa-
rated material and mental culture, or things and ideas. The histo-
rians of art, who separate useful and aesthetic products, classify
these latter by types, by schools, and by styles.
Schools and styles are the products of the long stock-taking of
the nineteenth-century historians of art. This stock-taking, how-
ever, cannot go on endlessly; in theory it comes to an end with ir-
reproachable and irrefutable lists and tables.
In practice certain words, when they are abused by too com-
mon use, suffer in their meaning as if with cancer or inflation.
Style is one of these. Its innumerable shades of meaning seem to
span all experience. At one extreme is the sense defined by Henri
Focillon, of style as the ligne des hauteurs, the Himalayan range
composed of the greatest monuments of all time, the touchstone
and standard of artistic value. At the other extreme is the commer-

2 th e history of things
cial jungle of advertising copy, where gasolines and toilet papers
have “style,” and another zone where annual fashions in clothes
are purveyed as “styles.” In between lies the familiar terrain of
“historic” styles: cultures, nations, dynasties, reigns, regions, pe-
riods, crafts, persons, and objects all have styles. An unsystematic
naming on binomial principles (Middle Minoan style, style Fran-
çois Ier) allows an illusion of classed order.
But the whole arrangement is unstable: the key word has dif-
ferent meanings even in our limited binomial context, signifying
at times the common denominator among a group of objects, and
at others the impress of an individual ruler or artist. In the first
of these senses style is chronologically unrestricted: the common
denominator may appear at widely separated places and times,
leading to “Gothic Mannerist” and “Hellenistic Baroque.” In the
second sense style is restricted in time but not in content. Since
the lifetime of one artist often embraces many “styles,” the in-
dividual and “style” are by no means coterminous entities. The
“style Louis XVI” embraces the decades before 1789, but the term
fails to specify the variety and the transformations of artistic prac-
tice under that monarch’s rule.
The immense literature of art is rooted in the labyrinthine net-
work of the notion of style: its ambiguities and its inconsistencies
mirror aesthetic activity as a whole. Style describes a specific fig-
ure in space better than a type of existence in time.2
In the twentieth century, under the impulse of the symbolic
interpretation of experience, another direction of study has taken
form. It is the study of iconographical types as symbolic expres-
sions of historical change, appearing under a revived seventeenth-
century rubric as “iconology.” More recently still, the historians
of science have conjoined ideas and things in an inquest upon the
conditions of discovery. Their method is to reconstruct the heu-
ristic moments of the history of science, and thus to describe hap-
pening at its point of inception.
The moment of discovery and its successive transformations
as traditional behavior are recovered as a matter of program by
the history of science and by iconological studies. But these steps
only outline the beginnings and the main articulations of histori-

The History of Things 3

cal substance. Many other possible topics crowd upon the atten-
tion as soon as we admit the idea that this substance possesses a
structure of which the divisions are not merely the inventions of
the narrator.
Although inanimate things remain our most tangible evidence
that the old human past really existed, the conventional meta-
phors used to describe this visible past are mainly biological. We
speak without hesitation of the “birth of an art,” of the “life of a
style,” and the “death of a school,” of “flowering,” “maturity,” and
“fading” when we describe the powers of an artist. The custom-
ary mode of arranging the evidence is biographical, as if the single
biographical unit were the true unit of study. The assembled biog-
raphies then are grouped regionally (e.g. “Umbrian School”) or
by style and place (“Roman Baroque”), in a manner vaguely pat-
terned upon biological classifications by typology, morphology,
and distribution.

The Limitations of Biography

The lives of the artists have been a genre in the literature of art
ever since Filippo Villani collected anecdotes in 1381–2. Artistic
biography was expanded in this century with documents and texts
to gigantic proportions as a necessary stage in the preparation of
the grand catalogue of persons and works. People writing the his-
tory of art as biography assume that the final aims of the historian
are to reconstruct the evolution of the person of the artist, to au-
thenticate attributed works, and to discuss their meaning. Bruno
Zevi, for instance, praises artistic biography as an indispensable
instrument in the training of young artists.3
The history of an artistic problem, and the history of the indi-
vidual artist’s resolution of such a problem, thus find a practical
justification, which, however, confines the value of the history of
art to matters of mere pedagogical utility. In the long view, biogra-
phies and catalogues are only way stations where it is easy to over-
look the continuous nature of artistic traditions. These traditions
cannot be treated properly in biographical segments. Biography
is a provisional way of scanning artistic substance but it does not

4 th e history of things
alone treat the historical question in artists’ lives, which is always
the question of their relation to what has preceded to what will
follow them.

Individual Entrances
The life of an artist is rightly a unit of study in any biographical
series. But to make it the main unit of study in the history of art
is like discussing the railroads of a country in terms of the experi-
ences of a single traveler on several of them. To describe railroads
accurately, we are obliged to disregard persons and states, for the
railroads themselves are the elements of continuity, and not the
travelers or the functionaries thereon.
The analogy of the track yields a useful formulation in the dis-
cussion of artists. Each man’s lifework is also a work in a series
extending beyond him in either or both directions, depending
upon his position in the track he occupies. To the usual coordi-
nates fixing the individual’s position—his temperament and his
training—there is also the moment of his entrance, this being the
moment in the tradition—early, middle, or late—with which his
biological opportunity coincides. Of course, one person can and
does shift traditions, especially in the modern world, in order to
find a better entrance. Without a good entrance, he is in danger
of wasting his time as a copyist regardless of temperament and
training. From this point of view we can see the “universal ge-
nius” of the Renaissance more simply as a qualified individual be-
striding many new tracks of development at a fortunate moment
in that great renovation of Western civilization, and traveling his
distance in several systems without the burdens of rigorous proof
or extensive demonstration required in later periods.
“Good” or “bad” entrances are more than matters of position in
the sequence. They also depend upon the union of temperamen-
tal endowments with specific positions. Every position is keyed,
as it were, to the action of a certain range of temperaments. When
a specific temperament interlocks with a favorable position, the
fortunate individual can extract from the situation a wealth of
previously unimagined consequences. This achievement may be
denied to other persons, as well as to the same person at a differ-

Limitations of Biography 5
ent time. Thus every birth can be imagined as set into play on two
wheels of fortune, one governing the allotment of its tempera-
ment, and the other ruling its entrance into a sequence.

Talent and Genius

By this view, the great differences between artists are not so
much those of talent as of entrance and position in sequence. Tal-
ent is a predisposition: a talented pupil begins younger; he mas-
ters the tradition more quickly; his inventions come more fluently
than those of his untalented fellows. But undiscovered talents
abound as well among people whose schooling failed to gear with
their abilities, as among people whose abilities were unrequited
in spite of their talent. Predispositions are probably much more
numerous than actual vocations allow us to suppose. The quality
talented people share is a matter of kind more than degree, be-
cause the gradations of talent signify less than its presence.
It is meaningless to debate whether Leonardo was more tal-
ented than Raphael. Both were talented. Bernardino Luini and
Giulio Romano also were talented. But the followers had bad
luck. They came late when the feast was over through no fault of
their own. The mechanics of fame are such that their predeces-
sors’ talent is magnified, and their own is diminished, when talent
itself is only a relatively common predisposition for visual order,
without a wide range of differentiation. Times and opportunities
differ more than the degree of talent.
Of course many other conditions must reinforce talent: physi-
cal energy, durable health, powers of concentration, are a few of
the gifts of fortune with which the artist is best endowed. But our
conceptions of artistic genius underwent such fantastic transfor-
mations in the romantic agony of the nineteenth century that we
still today unthinkingly identify “genius” as a congenital disposi-
tion and as an inborn difference of kind among men, instead of
as a fortuitous keying together of disposition and situation into
an exceptionally efficient entity. There is no clear evidence that
“genius” is inheritable. Its incidence under nurture, in situations
favorable to craft learning, as with adopted children reared in the

6 th e history of things
families of professional musicians, marks “genius” as a phenom-
enon of learning rather than of genetics.
Purpose has no place in biology, but history has no meaning
without it. In that earlier transfer of biological ideas to historical
events, of which so many traces survive in the historian’s diction,
both typology (which is the study of kinds and varieties) and
morphology (the study of forms) were misunderstood. Because
these modes of biological description cannot be made to account
for purpose, the historian working with biological ideas avoided
the principal aim of history, which usually has been to identify
and reconstruct the particular problem to which any action or
thing must correspond as a solution. Sometimes the problem is
a rational one, and sometimes it is an artistic one: we always may
be sure that every man-made thing arises from a problem as a pur-
poseful solution.

Biological and Physical Metaphors

However useful it is for pedagogical purposes, the biological
metaphor of style as a sequence of life-stages was historically mis-
leading, for it bestowed upon the flux of events the shapes and
the behavior of organisms. By the metaphor of the life-cycle a
style behaves like a plant. Its first leaves are small and tentatively
shaped; the leaves of its middle life are fully formed; and the last
leaves it puts forth are small again but intricately shaped. All are
sustained by one unchanging principle of organization common
to all members of that species, with variants of race occurring in
different environments. By the biological metaphor of art and
history, style is the species, and historical styles are its taxonomic
varieties. As an approximation, nevertheless, this metaphor rec-
ognized the recurrence of certain kinds of events, and it offered
at least a provisional explanation of them, instead of treating each
event as an unprecedented, never-to-be-repeated unicum.
The biological model was not the most appropriate one for
a history of things. Perhaps a system of metaphors drawn from
physical science would have clothed the situation of art more ade-
quately than the prevailing biological metaphors: especially if we

Limitations of Biography 7
are dealing in art with the transmission of some kind of energy;
with impulses, generating centers, and relay points; with incre-
ments and losses in transit; with resistances and transformers in
the circuit. In short, the language of electrodynamics might have
suited us better than the language of botany; and Michael Faraday
might have been a better mentor than Linnaeus for the study of
material culture.
Our choice of the “history of things” is more than a euphe-
mism to replace the bristling ugliness of “material culture.” This
term is used by anthropologists to distinguish ideas, or “mental
culture,” from artifacts. But the “history of things” is intended to
reunite ideas and objects under the rubric of visual forms: the
term includes both artifacts and works of art, both replicas and
unique examples, both tools and expressions—in short all mate-
rials worked by human hands under the guidance of connected
ideas developed in temporal sequence. From all these things a
shape in time emerges. A visible portrait of the collective iden-
tity, whether tribe, class, or nation, comes into being. This self-
image reflected in things is a guide and a point of reference to the
group for the future, and it eventually becomes the portrait given
to posterity.
Although both the history of art and the history of science
have the same recent origins in the eighteenth-century learning
of the European Enlightenment, our inherited habit of separating
art from science goes back to the ancient division between lib-
eral and mechanical arts. The separation has had most regrettable
consequences. A principal one is our long reluctance to view the
processes common to both art and science in the same historical
perspective.

Scientists and Artists

Today it is often remarked that two painters who belong to dif-
ferent schools not only have nothing to learn from each other but
are incapable of any generous communication with one another
about their work. The same thing is said to be true of chemists
or biologists with different specialties. If such a measure of re-
ciprocal occlusion prevails between members of the same profes-

8 th e history of things
sion, how shall we conceive of communication between a painter
and a physicist? Of course very little occurs. The value of any rap-
prochement between the history of art and the history of science
is to display the common traits of invention, change, and obsoles-
cence that the material works of artists and scientists both share
in time. The most obvious examples in the history of energy, such
as steam, electricity, and internal combustion engines, point to
rhythms of production and desuetude with which students of
the history of art also are familiar. Science and art both deal with
needs satisfied by the mind and the hands in the manufacture of
things. Tools and instruments, symbols and expressions all corre-
spond to needs, and all must pass through design into matter.
Early experimental science had intimate connections with the
studios and workshops of the Renaissance, although artists then
aspired to equal status with the princes and prelates whose tastes
they shaped. Today it is again apparent that the artist is an arti-
san, that he belongs to a distinct human grouping as homo faber,
whose calling is to evoke a perpetual renewal of form in matter,
and that scientists and artists are more like one another as arti-
sans than they are like anyone else. For our purposes of discussing
the nature of happening in the world of things, the differences be-
tween science and art are nevertheless irreducible, quite as much
so as the differences between reason and feeling, between neces-
sity and freedom. Although a common gradient connects use and
beauty, the two are irreducibly different: no tool can be fully ex-
plained as a work of art, nor vice versa. A tool is always intrin-
sically simple, however elaborate its mechanisms may be, but a
work of art, which is a complex of many stages and levels of criss-
crossed intentions, is always intrinsically complicated, however
simple its effect may seem.
A recent phenomenon in Europe and America, perhaps not
antedating 1950, is the approaching exhaustion of the possibility
of new discoveries of major types in the history of art. Each gen-
eration since Winckelmann was able to mark out its own preserve
in the history of art. Today there are no such restricted preserves
left. First it was classic art that commanded all admiration at the
expense of other expressions. The romantic generation again ele-

Limitations of Biography 9
vated Gothic art to the pedestal. Some fin de siècle architects and
decorators reinstated Roman Imperial art. Others generated the
languors and the botanical elaborations of art nouveau on the one
hand, or the rebels among them turned to primitivism and archaic
art. By a kind of rule of the alternation of generations between
tutelary styles of civilized and rude aspect, the next generation
adverted to baroque and rococo—the generation that was deci-
mated by the First World War. The revival of interest in sixteenth-
century Mannerism which flared during the 1930’s not only
coincided with great social disorders but it indicated a historical
resonance between the men of the Reformation and those of a
time of depression and demagogy.4 After that, nothing was left to
discover unless it was contemporary art. The last cupboards and
closets of the history of art have now been turned out and cata-
logued by government ministries of Education and Tourism.
Seen in this perspective of approaching completion, the an-
nals of the craft of the history of art, though brief, contain recur-
rent situations. At one extreme the practitioners feel oppressed
by the fullness of the record. At the other extreme we have works
of rhapsodical expression like those dissected by Plato in the So-
cratic dialogue with Ion. When Ion, the vain rhapsodist, parades
his boredom with all poets other than Homer, Socrates says, “. . .
your auditor is the last link of that chain which I have described
as held together by the power of the magnet. You rhapsodists and
actors are the middle links, of which the poet is the first.”5
If the fullness of history is forever indigestible, the beauty of
art is ordinarily incommunicable. The rhapsodist can suggest a
few clues to the experience of a work of art, if he himself has in-
deed experienced it. He may hope that these hints will assist the
hearer to reproduce his own sensations and mental processes. He
can communicate nothing to persons not ready to travel the same
path with him, nor can he obey any field of attraction beyond his
own direct experience. But historians are not middle links, and
their mission lies in another quarter.

10 th e history of things
The Historian’s Commitment
The historian’s special contribution is the discovery of the
manifold shapes of time. The aim of the historian, regardless of
his specialty in erudition, is to portray time. He is committed
to the detection and description of the shape of time. He trans-
poses, reduces, composes, and colors a facsimile, like a painter,
who in his search for the identity of the subject, must discover
a patterned set of properties that will elicit recognition all while
conveying a new perception of the subject. He differs from the
antiquarian and the curious searcher much as the composer of
new music differs from the concert performer. The historian com-
poses a meaning from a tradition, while the antiquarian only re-
creates, performs, or re-enacts an obscure portion of past time in
already familiar shapes. Unless he is an annalist or a chronicler the
historian communicates a pattern which was invisible to his sub-
jects when they lived it, and unknown to his contemporaries be-
fore he detected it.
For the shapes of time, we need a criterion that is not a mere
transfer by analogy from biological science. Biological time con-
sists of uninterrupted durations of statistically predictable lengths:
each organism exists from birth to death upon an “expected” life-
span. Historical time, however, is intermittent and variable. Every
action is more intermittent than it is continuous, and the inter-
vals between actions are infinitely variable in duration and con-
tent. The end of an action and its beginning are indeterminate.
Clusters of actions here and there thin out or thicken sufficiently
to allow us with some objectivity to mark beginnings and end-
ings. Events and the intervals between them are the elements of
the patterning of historical time. Biological time contains the un-
broken events called lives; it also contains social organizations by
species and groups of species, but in biology the intervals of time
between events are disregarded, while in historical time the web
of happening that laces throughout the intervals between exis-
tences attracts our interest.
Time, like mind, is not knowable as such. We know time only
indirectly by what happens in it: by observing change and perma-

The Historian’s Commitment 11

nence; by marking the succession of events among stable settings;
and by noting the contrast of varying rates of change. Written
documents give us a thin recent record for only a few parts of the
world. In the main our knowledge of older times is based upon vi-
sual evidence of physical and biological duration. Technological
seriations of all sorts and sequences of works of art in every grade
of distinction yield a finer time scale overlapping with the written
record.
Now that absolute confirmations by tree-rings and earth-clocks
are at hand, it is astonishing in retrospect to discover how very
accurate were the older guesses of relative age based upon seria-
tions and their comparisons. The cultural clock preceded all the
physical methods. It is nearly as exact, and it is a more searching
method of measurement than the new absolute clocks, which of-
ten still require confirmation by cultural means, especially when
the evidence itself is of mixed sorts.
The cultural clock, however, runs mainly upon ruined frag-
ments of matter recovered from refuse heaps and graveyards,
from abandoned cities and buried villages. Only the arts of ma-
terial nature have survived: of music and dance, of talk and rit-
ual, of all the arts of temporal expression practically nothing is
known elsewhere than in the Mediterranean world, save through
traditional survivals among remote groups. Hence our working
proof of the existence of nearly all older peoples is in the visual
order, and it exists in matter and space rather than in time and
sound.
We depend for our extended knowledge of the human past
mainly upon the visible products of man’s industry. Let us sup-
pose a gradient between absolute utility and absolute art: the
pure extremes are only in our imagination; human products al-
ways incorporate both utility and art in varying mixtures, and no
object is conceivable without the admixture of both. Archaeo-
logical studies generally extract utility for the sake of information
about the civilization: art studies stress qualitative matters for the
sake of the intrinsic meaning of the generic human experience.

12 th e history of things
The Divisions of the Arts
The seventeenth-century academic separation between fine
and useful arts first fell out of fashion nearly a century ago. From
about 1880 the conception of “fine art” was called a bourgeois la-
bel. After 1900 folk arts, provincial styles, and rustic crafts were
thought to deserve equal ranking with court styles and metropoli-
tan schools under the democratic valuation of twentieth-century
political thought. By another line of attack, “fine art” was driven
out of use about 1920 by the exponents of industrial design, who
preached the requirement of universal good design, and who op-
posed a double standard of judgment for works of art and for use-
ful objects. Thus an idea of aesthetic unity came to embrace all
artifacts, instead of ennobling some at the expense of others.
This egalitarian doctrine of the arts nevertheless erases many
important differences of substance. Architecture and packaging
tend in the modern school of design to gravitate together under
the rubric of envelopes; sculpture absorbs the design of all sorts
of small solids and containers; painting extends to include flat
shapes and planes of all sorts, like those of weaving and print-
ing. By this geometric system, all visible art can be classed as en-
velopes, solids, and planes, regardless of any relation to use, in
a classing which ignores the traditional distinction by “fine” and
“minor,” or “useless” and “useful” arts.
For our purposes two urgent distinctions should be added. In
the first place a great difference separates traditional craft educa-
tion from the work of artistic invention. The former requires only
repetitious actions, but the latter depends upon departures from
all routine. Craft education is the activity of groups of learners
performing identical actions, but artistic invention requires the
solitary efforts of individual persons. The distinction is worth re-
taining because artists working in different crafts cannot commu-
nicate with one another in technical matters but only in matters
of design. A weaver learns nothing about his loom and threads
from study of the potter’s wheel and kiln; his education in a craft
must be upon the instruments of that craft. Only when he pos-
sesses technical control of his instruments can the qualities and

The Historian’s Commitment 13

effects of design in other crafts stimulate him to new solutions in
his own.
The second, related distinction touches the utilitarian and the
aesthetic nature of each of the branches of artistic practice. In ar-
chitecture and the allied crafts, structure pertains to traditional
technical training and it is inherently rational and utilitarian,
however daringly its devices may be applied to expressive ends.
In sculpture and painting likewise, every work has its technical
cookery of formulas and craft practices upon which the expres-
sive and formal combinations are carried. In addition, sculpture
and painting convey distinct messages more clearly than archi-
tecture. These communications or iconographic themes make
the utilitarian and rational substructure of any aesthetic achieve-
ment. Thus structure, technique, and iconography all belong to
the non-artistic underpinning of the “fine” arts.
The main point is that works of art are not tools, although many
tools may share qualities of fine design with works of art. We are
in the presence of a work of art only when it has no preponderant
instrumental use, and when its technical and rational foundations
are not pre-eminent. When the technical organization or the ra-
tional order of a thing overwhelms our attention, it is an object
of use. On this point Lodoli anticipated the doctrinaire function-
alists of our century when he declared in the eighteenth century
that only the necessary is beautiful.6 Kant, however, more cor-
rectly said on the same point that the necessary cannot be judged
beautiful, but only right or consistent.7 In short, a work of art is as
useless as a tool is useful. Works of art are as unique and irreplace-
able as tools are common and expendable.

The Nature of Actuality

“Le passé ne sert qu’à connaître l’actualité. Mais l’actualité
m’échappe. Qu’est-ce que c’est donc que l’actualité?” For years this
question—the final and capital question of his life—obsessed
my teacher Henri Focillon, especially during the black days from
1940 to 1943 when he died in New Haven. The question has been

14 th e history of things
with me ever since, and I am now no closer to the solution of the
riddle, unless it be to suggest that the answer is a negation.
Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is
the instant between the ticks of the watch: it is a void interval slip-
ping forever through time: the rupture between past and future:
the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally
small but ultimately real. It is the interchronic pause when noth-
ing is happening. It is the void between events.
Yet the instant of actuality is all we ever can know directly. The
rest of time emerges only in signals relayed to us at this instant by
innumerable stages and by unexpected bearers. These signals are
like kinetic energy stored until the moment of notice when the
mass descends along some portion of its path to the center of the
gravitational system. One may ask why these old signals are not
actual. The nature of a signal is that its message is neither here nor
now, but there and then. If it is a signal it is a past action, no longer
embraced by the “now” of present being. The perception of a sig-
nal happens “now,” but its impulse and its transmission happened
“then.” In any event, the present instant is the plane upon which
the signals of all being are projected. No other plane of duration
gathers us up universally into the same instant of becoming.
Our signals from the past are very weak, and our means for re-
covering their meaning still are most imperfect. Weakest and least
clear of all are those signals coming from the initial and terminal
moments of any sequence in happening, for we are unsure about
our ideas of a coherent portion of time. The beginnings are much
hazier than the endings, where at least the catastrophic action of
external events can be determined. The segmentation of history
is still an arbitrary and conventional matter, governed by no veri-
fiable conception of historical entities and their durations. Now
and in the past, most of the time the majority of people live by
borrowed ideas and upon traditional accumulations, yet at every
moment the fabric is being undone and a new one is woven to re-
place the old, while from time to time the whole pattern shakes
and quivers, settling into new shapes and figures. These processes
of change are all mysterious uncharted regions where the traveler

The Nature of Actuality 15

soon loses direction and stumbles in darkness. The clues to guide
us are very few indeed: perhaps the jottings and sketches of archi-
tects and artists, put down in the heat of imagining a form, or the
manuscript brouillons of poets and musicians, crisscrossed with
erasures and corrections, are the hazy coast lines of this dark con-
tinent of the “now,” where the impress of the future is received by
the past.
To other animals who live more by instinct than do humans,
the instant of actuality must seem far less brief. The rule of in-
stinct is automatic, offering fewer choices than intelligence, with
circuits that close and open unselectively. In this duration choice
is so rarely present that the trajectory from past to future de-
scribes a straight line rather than the infinitely bifurcating system
of human experience. The ruminant or the insect must live time
more as an extended present which endures as long as the indi-
vidual life, while for us, the single life contains an infinity of pres-
ent instants, each with its innumerable open choices in volition
and in action.
Why should actuality forever escape our grasp? The universe
has a finite velocity which limits not only the spread of its events,
but also the speed of our perceptions. The moment of actual-
ity slips too fast by the slow, coarse net of our senses. The galaxy
whose light I see now may have ceased to exist millennia ago, and
by the same token men cannot fully sense any event until after it
has happened, until it is history, until it is the dust and ash of that
cosmic storm which we call the present, and which perpetually
rages throughout creation.
In my own present, a thousand concerns of active business lie
unattended while I write these words. The instant admits only
one action while the rest of possibility lies unrealized. Actuality
is the eye of the storm: it is a diamond with an infinitesimal per-
foration through which the ingots and billets of present possibil-
ity are drawn into past events. The emptiness of actuality can be
estimated by the possibilities that fail to attain realization in any
instant: only when they are few can actuality seem full.

16 th e history of things
Of Arts and Stars
Knowing the past is as astonishing a performance as knowing
the stars. Astronomers look only at old light. There is no other
light for them to look at. This old light of dead or distant stars
was emitted long ago and it reaches us only in the present. Many
historical events, like astronomical bodies, also occur long before
they appear, such as secret treaties; aide-mémoires, or important
works of art made for ruling personages. The physical substance
of these documents often reaches qualified observers only centu-
ries or millennia after the event. Hence astronomers and histori-
ans have this in common: both are concerned with appearances
noted in the present but occurring in the past.
The analogies between stars and works of art can profitably be
pursued. However fragmentary its condition, any work of art is
actually a portion of arrested happening, or an emanation of past
time. It is a graph of an activity now stilled, but a graph made visi-
ble like an astronomical body, by a light that originated with the
activity. When an important work of art has utterly disappeared
by demolition and dispersal, we still can detect its perturbations
upon other bodies in the field of influence. By the same token
works of art resemble gravitational fields in their clustering by
“schools.” And if we admit that works of art can be arranged in a
temporal series as connected expressions, their sequence will re-
semble an orbit in the fewness, the regularity, and the necessity of
the “motions” involved.
Like the astronomer, the historian is engaged upon the por-
trayal of time. The scales are different: historic time is very short,
but the historian and the astronomer both transpose, reduce,
compose, and color a facsimile which describes the shape of time.
Historical time indeed may occupy a situation near the center of
the proportional scale of the possible magnitudes of time, just as
man himself is a physical magnitude midway between the sun and
the atom at the proportional center of the solar system, both in
grams of mass and in centimeters of diameter.8
Both astronomers and historians collect ancient signals into
compelling theories about distance and composition. The as-
tronomer’s position is the historian’s date; his velocity is our se-

The Nature of Actuality 17

quence; orbits are like durations; perturbations are analogous to
causality. The astronomer and the historian both deal with past
events perceived in the present. Here the parallels diverge, for the
astronomer’s future events are physical and recurrent ones, while
the historian’s are human and unpredictable ones. The foregoing
analogies are nevertheless useful in prompting us to look again at
the nature of historical evidence, so that we may be sure of our
ground when considering various ways of classing it.

Signals
Past events may be regarded as categorical commotions of
varying magnitudes of which the occurrence is declared by inbuilt
signals analogous to those kinetic energies impounded in masses
prevented from falling. These energies undergo various transfor-
mations between the original event and the present. The present
interpretation of any past event is of course only another stage in
the perpetuation of the original impulse. Our particular interest is
in the category of substantial events: events of which the signal is
carried by matter arranged in a pattern still sensible today. In this
category we are interested less in the natural signals of physical
and biological science, than in the artifact signals of history, and
among artifact signals we are concerned less with documents and
instruments than with the least useful of artifacts—works of art.
All substantial signals can be regarded both as transmissions
and as initial commotions. For instance, a work of art transmits
a kind of behavior by the artist, and it also serves, like a relay,
as the point of departure for impulses that often attain extraordi-
nary magnitudes in later transmission. Our lines of communica-
tion with the past therefore originated as signals which become
commotions emitting further signals in an unbroken alternating
sequence of event, signal, recreated event, renewed signal, etc.
Celebrated events have undergone the cycle millions of times
each instant throughout their history, as when the life of Jesus is
commemorated in the unnumbered daily prayers of Christians.
To reach us, the original event must undergo the cycle at least
once, in the original event, its signal, and our consequent agita-
tion. The irreducible minimum of historical happening thus re-

18 th e history of things
quires only an event together with its signals and a person capable
of reproducing the signals.
Reconstituted initial events extracted from the signals are the
principal product of historical research. It is the scholar’s task to
verify and test all the evidence. He is not concerned primarily
with the signals other than as evidences, or with the commotions
they produce. The different commotions in turn are the proper
territory of psychology and aesthetics. Here we are interested
mainly in the signals and their transformations, for it is in this do-
main that the traditional problems arise which lace together the
history of things. For instance, a work of art is not only the resi-
due of an event but it is its own signal, directly moving other mak-
ers to repeat or to improve its solution. In visual art, the entire
historical series is conveyed by such tangible things, unlike writ-
ten history, which concerns irretrievable events beyond physical
recovery and signaled only indirectly by texts.

Relays
Historical knowledge consists of transmissions in which the
sender, the signal, and the receiver all are variable elements affect-
ing the stability of the message. Since the receiver of a signal be-
comes its sender in the normal course of historical transmission
(e.g. the discoverer of a document usually is its editor), we may
treat receivers and senders together under the heading of relays.
Each relay is the occasion of some deformation in the original sig-
nal. Certain details seem insignificant and they are dropped in the
relay; others have an importance conferred by their relationship
to events occurring in the moment of the relay, and so they are
exaggerated. One relay may wish for reasons of temperament to
stress the traditional aspects of the signal; another will emphasize
their novelty. Even the historian subjects his evidence to these
strains, although he strives to recover the pristine signal.
Each relay willingly or unwittingly deforms the signal accord-
ing to his own historical position. The relay transmits a compos-
ite signal, composed only in part of the message as it was received,
and in part of impulses contributed by the relay itself. Historical
recall never can be complete nor can it be even entirely correct,

The Nature of Actuality 19

because of the successive relays that deform the message. The
conditions of transmission nevertheless are not so defective that
historical knowledge is impossible. Actual events always excite
strong feelings, which the initial message usually records. A series
of relays may result in the gradual disappearance of the animus
excited by the event. The most hated despot is the live despot: the
ancient despot is only a case history. In addition, many objective
residues or tools of the historian’s activity, such as chronological
tables of events, cannot easily be deformed. Other examples are
the persistence of certain religious expressions through long pe-
riods and under great deforming pressures. The rejuvenation of
myths is a case in point: when an ancient version becomes unin-
telligibly obsolete a new version, recast in contemporary terms,
performs the same old explanatory purposes.9
The essential condition of historical knowledge is that the
event should be within range, that some signal should prove past
existence. Ancient time contains vast durations without signals
of any kind that we can now receive. Even the events of the past
few hours are sparsely documented, when we consider the ratio
of events to their documentation. Prior to 3000 B.C. the texture
of transmitted duration disintegrates more and more the farther
we go back. Though finite, the total number of historical signals
greatly exceeds the capacity of any individual or group to inter-
pret all the signals in all their meaning. A principal aim of the
historian therefore is to condense the multiplicity and the redun-
dancy of his signals by using various schemes of classification that
will spare us the tedium of reliving the sequence in all its instan-
taneous confusion.
Of course, the writing of history has many extremely practical
uses, each of which imposes upon the historian a viewing range
suited to the purpose in hand. For example, the judges and coun-
sel in a law court may expend upon the determination of the se-
quence of events leading to a murder, an amount of effort vastly
greater than the events themselves required for their happening.
At the other extreme, when I wish to mention Columbus’ first
voyage to America, I do not need to collect all the signals, such
as documents, archaeological indications, earth-clock measure-

20 th e history of things
ments, etc., to prove the date 1492: I can refer to credible sec-
ondary signals derived from firsthand sources. In between these
extremes, an archaeologist tracing a buried floor level with his
assistants spends about the same energy upon reading the signal
as the original builders put into the floor in the first instance.
Hence a primary signal—meaning the evidence closest to the
event itself—may require a great expense of energy for its detec-
tion and interpretation, but once the signal has been brought in it
can be repeated at a fraction of the cost of the original detection.
In this way the fundamental determinations of history relate to
detecting and receiving primary signals from the past, and they
usually concern simple matters of date, place, and agent.
For the most part the craft of history is concerned with the
elaboration of credible messages upon the simple foundations af-
forded by primary signals. More complex messages have widely
varying degrees of credibility. Some are fantasies existing in the
minds of the interpreters alone. Others are rough approximations
to historical truth, such as those reasonable explanations of myths
called euhemerist.10
Still other complex messages are probably stimulated by spe-
cial primary signals of which our understanding is incomplete.
These arise from extended durations and from the larger units of
geography and population; they are complex, dimly perceived
signals which have little to do with historical narrative. Only cer-
tain new statistical methods come near to their detection, such as
the remarkable lexicostatistical discoveries made in glottochro-
nology, the study of the rate of change of languages (pp. 54–55).

Self-Signals and Adherent Signals

These remarks so far pertain mainly to one class of historical
signals, to distinguish them from the more obvious messages of
another kind which we have not yet discussed. These other sig-
nals, including writing, are added to the self-signal, and they are
quite different from it, being adherent rather than autogenous.
The self-signal can be paraphrased as the mute existential decla-
ration of things. For example, the hammer upon the workbench

Self-Signals and Adherent Signals 21

signals that its handle is for grasping and that the peen is an ex-
tension of the user’s fist ready to drive the nail between the fi-
bers of the plank to a firm and durable seat. The adherent signal,
die-stamped on the hammer, says only that the design is patented
under a protected trade-mark and manufactured at a commercial
address.
A fine painting also issues a self-signal. Its colors and their
distribution on the plane of the framed canvas signal that by
making certain optical concessions the viewer will enjoy the si-
multaneous experience of real surfaces blended with illusions of
deep space occupied by solid shapes. This reciprocal relation of
real surface and deep illusion is apparently inexhaustible. Part
of the self-signal is that thousands of years of painting still have
not exhausted the possibilities of such an apparently simple cate-
gory of sensation. Yet this self-signal is the least honored and the
most overlooked of the dense stream of signals issuing from the
picture.
In the consideration of painting, architecture, sculpture, and
all their allied arts, the adherent signals crowd in upon most per-
sons’ attention at the expense of the autogenous ones. In a paint-
ing, for example, the dark foreground figures resemble persons
and animals; a light is depicted as if emanating from the body of
an infant in a ruined shelter; the narrative bond connecting all
these shapes must be the Nativity according to St. Luke; and a
painted scrap of paper in one corner of the picture bears the name
of the painter and the year of the work. All these are adherent sig-
nals composing an intricate message in the symbolic order rather
than in an existential dimension. Adherent signals of course are
essential to our study, but their relations with one another and
with the self-signals make up part, and only part of the game, or
the scheme, or the problem that confronted the painter, to which
the picture is the resolution in actual experience.
The existential value of the work of art, as a declaration about
being, cannot be extracted from the adherent signals alone, nor
from the self-signals alone. The self-signals taken alone prove
only existence; adherent signals taken in isolation prove only
the presence of meaning. But existence without meaning seems

22 th e history of things
terrible in the same degree as meaning without existence seems
trivial.
Recent movements in artistic practice stress self-signals alone,
as in abstract expressionism; conversely, recent art scholarship
has stressed adherent signals alone, as in the study of iconogra-
phy. The result is a reciprocal misunderstanding between histo-
rians and artists: the unprepared historian regards progressive
contemporary painting as a terrifying and senseless adventure;
and the painter regards most art scholarship as a vacant ritual
exercise. This type of divergence is as old as art and history. It
recurs in every generation, with the artist demanding from the
scholar the approval of history for his work before the pattern is
complete, and the scholar mistaking his position as an observer
and historian for that of a critic, by pronouncing upon matters
of contemporary significance when his perceptive skill and his
equipment are less suited to that task than to the study of whole
past configurations which are no longer in the condition of active
change. To be sure, certain historians possess the sensibility and
the precision that characterize the best critics, but their number
is small, and it is not as historians but as critics that they manifest
these qualities.
The most valuable critic of contemporary work is another art-
ist engaged in the same game. Yet few misunderstandings ex-
ceed those between two painters engaged upon different kinds of
things. Only long after can an observer resolve the differences be-
tween such painters, when their games are all out, and fully avail-
able for comparison.
Tools and instruments are recognized by the operational char-
acter of their self-signal. It is usually a single signal rather than a
multiple one, saying that a specific act is to be performed in an
indicated way. Works of art are distinguished from tools and in-
struments by richly clustered adherent meanings. Works of art
specify no immediate action or limited use. They are like gate-
ways, where the visitor can enter the space of the painter, or the
time of the poet, to experience whatever rich domain the artist
has fashioned. But the visitor must come prepared: if he brings a
vacant mind or a deficient sensibility, he will see nothing. Adher-

Self-Signals and Adherent Signals 23

ent meaning is therefore largely a matter of conventional shared
experience, which it is the artist’s privilege to rearrange and en-
rich under certain limitations.

Iconographic Studies
Iconography is the study of the forms assumed by adherent
meaning on three levels, natural, conventional, and instrinsic.
Natural meaning concerns primary identification of things and
persons. Conventional meanings occur when actions or allego-
ries are depicted which can be explained by reference to literary
sources. Intrinsic meanings constitute the study called iconology,
and they pertain to the explanation of cultural symbols.11 Iconol-
ogy is a variety of cultural history, in which the study of works of
art is devoted to the extraction of conclusions concerning culture.
Because of its dependence upon long-lived literary traditions,
iconology so far has been restricted to the study of the Greco-
Roman tradition and its survivals. Continuities of theme are its
principal substance: the breaks and ruptures of the tradition lie
beyond the iconologist’s scope, like all the expressions of civiliza-
tions without abundant literary documentation.

Configurational Analysis
Certain classical archaeologists in turn also have been much
concerned with similar questions about meaning, especially in
respect to the relations between poetry and visual art. The late
Guido v. Kaschnitz-Weinberg and Friedrich Matz 12 are the prin-
cipal representatives of this group, who engage in the study of
meaning by the method of Strukturanalyse, or configurational
analysis, in an effort to determine the premises underlying the lit-
erature and art of the same generation in one place, as for exam-
ple, in the case of Homeric poetry and the coeval geometric vase
painting of the eighth century B.C. Thus Strukturforschung pre-
supposes that the poets and artists of one place and time are the
joint bearers of a central pattern of sensibility from which their
various efforts all flow like radial expressions. This position agrees
with the iconologist’s, to whom literature and art seem approxi-
mately interchangeable. But the archaeologists are more per-

24 th e history of things
plexed by the discontinuities between painting and poetry than
the iconologists are: they still find it difficult to equate the Ho-
meric epic with Dipylon vases. This perplexity reappears among
students of modern art, to whom literature and painting appear
sharply divergent in content and technique. Erudition and por-
nography are exalted and conjoined in present-day literature,
but they are both avoided in painting, where the quest for non-
representational form has been the principal aim in our century.
The difficulty can be removed by modifying the postulate of
a central pattern of sensibility among poets and artists of the
same place and time. It is unnecessary to reject the idea of central
pattern altogether, because the quest for erudite expression, for
instance, was shared by poets and painters alike in seventeenth-
century Europe. It is enough to temper the conception of the gov-
erning configuration (Gestalt) with the conception of the formal
sequence set forth here on pp. 30 f. Formal sequences presup-
pose independent systems of expression that may occasionally
converge. Their survival and convergence correspond to a shared
purpose which alone defines the field of force. By this view the
cross-section of the instant, taken across the full face of the mo-
ment in a given place, resembles a mosaic of pieces in different
developmental states, and of different ages, rather than a radial
design conferring its meaning upon all the pieces.

The Taxonomy of Meaning

Adherent meanings vary categorically according to the entities
they clothe. The messages that can be conveyed in Meissen por-
celain differ from those of large bronze sculpture. Architectural
messages are unlike those of painting. The discussion of iconogra-
phy or iconology immediately raises taxonomic questions, analo-
gous to those of distinguishing the fur, feather, hair, and scales
of the biological orders: all are integuments, but they differ from
one another in function, in structure, and in composition. Mean-
ings undergo transformations by mere transfer, which are mis-
taken for changes in content.
Another difficulty arising from the treatment of iconography
as a homogeneous and uniform entity is the presence of large his-

Self-Signals and Adherent Signals 25

torical groupings within the body of adherent meaning. These are
related more to the mental habits of different periods than to in-
corporation as architecture, sculpture, or painting. Our historical
discriminations still are too imprecise to document these mental
changes generation by generation, but the outlines of large, coarse
changes are clearly evident, such as the differences of icono-
graphic system before and after A.D. 1400 in Western civilization.
In the middle ages or during antiquity, all experience found
its visual forms in a single metaphorical system. In antiquity the
gesta deorum enveloped the representation of present happen-
ing. The Greeks preferred to discuss contemporary events under
a mythological metaphor, like that of the labors of Hercules, or in
terms of the epic situations of Homeric poetry. The Roman em-
perors adopted biographical archetypes among the gods, assum-
ing the names, the attributes, and the cults of the deities. In the
middle ages the lives of the saints fulfilled the same function, as
when the regional histories of Reims or Amiens found their ex-
pression in the statues of local saints standing in the cathedral
embrasures. Other variations on the principal narratives of Scrip-
ture conveyed further details of local history and sentiment. This
preference for reducing all experience to the template set by a few
master themes resembles a funnel. It channels experience into a
more powerful flow; the themes and patterns are few in number
but their intensity of meaning is thereby increased.
About A.D. 1400 many technical discoveries in the pictorial
representation of optical space allowed, or more probably, ac-
companied, the appearance of a different scheme of stating ex-
perience. This new scheme was more like a cornucopia than a
funnel, and from it tumbled an immense new variety of types and
themes, more directly related to daily sensation than the preced-
ing modes of representation. The classical tradition and its re-
awakening formed only one current in the torrent of new forms
embracing all experience. It has been at flood height and steadily
rising ever since the fifteenth century.
The survival of antiquity has perhaps commanded the atten-
tion of historians mainly because the classical tradition has been
superseded; because it is no longer a live water; because we are

26 th e history of things
now outside it, and not inside it.13 We are no longer borne by it as
in a current upon the sea: it is visible to us from a distance and in
perspective only as a major part of the topography of history. By
the same token we cannot clearly descry the contours of the great
currents of our own time: we are too much inside the streams of
contemporary happening to chart their flow and volume. We are
confronted with inner and outer historical surfaces (p. 48). Of
these only the outer surfaces of the completed past are accessible
to historical knowledge.

Self-Signals and Adherent Signals 27

 Two. The Classing of Things

Only a few art historians have sought to discover valid ways

to generalize upon the immense domain of the experience of
art. These few have tried to establish principles for architecture,
sculpture, and painting upon an intermediate ground partly in the
objects and partly in our experience of them, by categorizing the
types of organization we perceive in all works of art.
One strategy requires enlarging the unit of historical happen-
ing. At the beginning of the century F. Wickhoff and A. Riegl
moved in this direction when they replaced the earlier moraliz-
ing judgment of “degeneracy” that had been passed upon Late
Roman art, with the hypothesis that one system or organization
was being replaced by a new and different system of equal value.
In Riegl’s terms, one “will-to-form” gave way to another.1 Such
a division of history, along the structural lines marked by the
frontiers between types of formal organization, has had reserved
approval from almost all twentieth-century students of art and
archaeology.
These proposals differed altogether from the notions of neces-
sary sequence first advanced by the Swiss historian of art, Heinrich
Wölfflin, whose work was classed with the “theory of pure visibil-
ity” by Benedetto Croce.2 Wölfflin compared fifteenth-century
and seventeenth-century Italian art. By pointing out five polar op-
posites in the realization of form (linear-painterly; surface-depth;
closed-open; multiplicity-unity; absolute-relative clarity) he use-
fully characterized some fundamental differences of morphology
in the two periods. Other writers soon extended the conception

28
to both Greco-Roman and medieval art, in a three-part division of
each by archaic, classic, and baroque stages. A fourth stage called
mannerism (the sixteenth century) was inserted about 1930 be-
tween classic and baroque. Occasionally writers even have pro-
moted the rococo and neo-classic styles to the dignity of stages
in the life-cycle. Wölfflin’s categories had great influence in affect-
ing the historical scholarship both of music and literature, with-
out ever reaching unquestioned acceptance among art historians
themselves.
There, the archive-minded specialists naturally found new doc-
uments more useful than stylistic opinions spun from Wölfflin’s
Grundbegriffe, and at the other extreme, the rigorous historians
condemned Wölfflin because he neglected the individual quali-
ties of things and artists in trying to frame general observations
concerning their classes. The boldest and most poetic affirmation
of a biological conception of the nature of the history of art was
Henri Focillon’s Vie des Formes (1934). The biological metaphor
was of course only one among many pedagogical devices used by
that marvelous teacher who turned everything to good account
in firing the common clay of his hearers. Uninformed critics have
misunderstood his extraordinary inventiveness of mind as rhetor-
ical display, while the more ponderous ones have dismissed him
as another formalist.
The shapes of time are the prey we want to capture. The time
of history is too coarse and brief to be an evenly granular dura-
tion such as the physicists suppose for natural time; it is more like
a sea occupied by innumerable forms of a finite number of types.
A net of another mesh is required, different from any now in use.
The notion of style has no more mesh than wrapping paper or
storage boxes. Biography cuts and shreds a frozen historic sub-
stance. Conventional histories of architecture, sculpture, paint-
ing, and the cognate crafts miss both the minute and main details
of artistic activity. The monograph upon a single work of art is
like a shaped stone ready for position in a masonry wall, but that
wall itself is built without purpose or plan.

The Classing of Things 29

Formal Sequences
Every important work of art can be regarded both as a historical
event and as a hard-won solution to some problem. It is irrelevant
now whether the event was original or conventional, accidental
or willed, awkward or skillful. The important clue is that any solu-
tion points to the existence of some problem to which there have
been other solutions, and that other solutions to this same prob-
lem will most likely be invented to follow the one now in view. As
the solutions accumulate, the problem alters. The chain of solu-
tions nevertheless discloses the problem.

Linked Solutions
The problem disclosed by any sequence of artifacts may be re-
garded as its mental form, and the linked solutions as its class of
being. The entity composed by the problem and its solutions con-
stitutes a form-class. Historically only these solutions related to
one another by the bonds of tradition and influence are linked as
a sequence.
Linked solutions occupy time in a great variety of ways, dis-
cussed in the remainder of this book. They disclose a finite yet
uncharted domain of mental forms. Most of these are still open
to further elaboration by new solutions. Some are closed, com-
pleted series belonging to the past.
In mathematical usage a series is the indicated sum of a set
of terms, but a sequence is any ordered set of quantities like the
positive integers.3 A series therefore implies a closed grouping,
and a sequence suggests an open-ended, expanding class. The
mathematical distinction is worth keeping in this discussion.
In general, formal sequences exceed the ability of any indi-
vidual to exhaust their possibilities. An occasional person, born
by chance into a favoring time, may contribute beyond the usual
measure of a single life-span, but he cannot alone simulate in his
life the corporate activity of a whole artistic tradition.
The mathematical analogy for our study is topology, the geom-
etry of relationships without magnitudes or dimensions, having
only surfaces and directions. The biological analogy is speciation,

30 the cl assing of things

where form is manifested by a large number of individuals under-
going genetic changes.
Where are the boundaries of a formal sequence? Because his-
tory is unfinished business, the boundaries of its divisions con-
tinually move, and will continue to move for as long as men make
history. T. S. Eliot was perhaps the first to note this relationship
when he observed that every major work of art forces upon us a
reassessment of all previous works.4 Thus the advent of Rodin al-
ters the transmitted identity of Michelangelo by enlarging our un-
derstanding of sculpture and permitting us a new objective vision
of his work.5
For our purposes here, the boundaries of a sequence are marked
out by the linked solutions describing early and late stages of ef-
fort upon a problem. With a sequence having many stages, there
was a time when it had fewer. More new ones may be added in
the future. The sequence can continue only when the problem is
given greater scope by new needs. As the problem expands, both
the sequence and its early portions lengthen.

Open and Closed Sequences

When problems cease to command active attention as deserv-
ing of new solutions, the sequence of solutions is stable during
the period of inaction. But any past problem is capable of reacti-
vation under new conditions. Aboriginal Australian bark-painting
is an open sequence in the twentieth century, because its possi-
bilities are still being expanded by living artists, but Greek vase-
painting is an arrested sequence (p. 99) because the modern
painter needed to renew his art at “primitive” sources rather than
among the images of the Hellenic world. The transparent animals
and humans of Australian painting, and the rhythmic figures of
African tribal sculpture correspond more closely to contempo-
rary theories of reality than to the opaque and unequivocal body
forms of Greek art.
The method imposed by such considerations is analytical and
divisive rather than synthetic. It discards any idea of regular cycli-
cal happening on the pattern of “necessary” stylistic series by the
biological metaphor of archaic, classic, and baroque stages. Se-

Formal Sequences 31
quence classing stresses the internal coherence of events, all while
it shows the sporadic, unpredictable, and irregular nature of their
occurrence. The field of history contains many circuits which
never close. The presence of the conditions for an event does not
guarantee the occurrence of that event in a domain where man
can contemplate an action without committing it.
Simple biographical narration in the history of art tends to dis-
play the entire historical situation in terms of an individual’s de-
velopment. Such biography is a necessary stage of reconstruction,
but a formal sequence designates chains of linked events by an
analysis which requires us to do the opposite: to perceive the in-
dividual in terms of his situation.
Sequence classing allows us to bridge the gap between biogra-
phy and the history of style with a conception less protean than
biological or dialectic theories of the dynamics of style, and more
powerfully descriptive than biography. Its dangers and its limita-
tions will be readily apparent. In the long run, the conception of
a sequence may serve as a scaffolding which it may be convenient
to discard later on, after it has given access to previously invisible
portions of the historical edifice.
It is disturbing to those who value the individuality of a thing
to have that individuality diminished by classifications and gen-
eralizations. We are caught between difficulties: single things are
extremely complicated entities, so complicated that we can pre-
tend to understand them only by generalizing about them (p. 96).
One way out is frankly to accept the complexity of single things.
Once their difficulty is conceded, it is possible to find aspects that
can be used in comparisons. No such trait now known is unitary
or fundamental: every trait of a thing is both a cluster of subordi-
nate traits as well as a subordinate part of another cluster.
An example from French Gothic cathedral architecture: sev-
eral generations of architects struggled to coordinate the regular
sequence of the vaulted nave bays with the great weights of the fa-
çade towers. These had to rest in part upon nave supports ideally
no thicker one than any other. A solution gradually was perfected,
by thickening the bearing walls beneath the tower periphery, by

32 the cl assing of things

augmenting the buttressing, and by sacrificing excessive slender-
ness in the proportioning of the nave supports.6
At Mantes Cathedral the west façade was among the earliest
to show this perfected solution by compromise. The architect
wanted a uniform rhythm of equivalent supports under evenly
distributed light. He wanted a formal value toward which techni-
cal solutions could help him. The volume of the interior is unin-
terrupted, yet the mass of the façade is immense. Both objectives
have been brought to a close fit, however inconsistent they may
have seemed in the first place. This solution in Gothic cathedral
architecture implicated a cluster of subordinate traits such as col-
umns, buttresses, and windows, whose further alteration was
governed by the façade solution. The façade solution was itself
subordinate to another system of changes respecting the compo-
sition of the towers.
Hence “cathedrals” are not a true form-class but an ecclesi-
astical category and an administrative conception in canon law.
Among the edifices thus designated, there is a handful of closely
related designs built in northern Europe between 1140 and 1350.
These are part of a sequence of forms that also includes some ab-
beys and some parish churches. The formal sequence is not “ca-
thedrals.” It is more like “segmented structures with rib vaults,”
and it excludes barrel-vaulted cathedrals.
The closest definition of a formal sequence that we now can
venture is to affirm it as a historical network of gradually altered
repetitions of the same trait. The sequence might therefore be de-
scribed as having an armature. In cross section let us say that it
shows a network, a mesh, or a cluster of subordinate traits; and in
long section that it has a fiber-like structure of temporal stages, all
recognizably similar, yet altering in their mesh from beginning to
end.
Two questions immediately arise: in the first place, are formal
sequences not indefinitely numerous? No, because each corre-
sponds to a conscious problem requiring the serious attention of
many persons for its successful resolution. There are no linked
solutions without there having been a corresponding problem.

Formal Sequences 33
There is no problem where there is no awareness. The contours
of human activity as a whole are therefore congruent with those
of the totality of formal sequences. Each class of forms consists of
a real difficulty and of real solutions. In the course of time, most
of these solutions may have been destroyed, but that difficulty is
only an apparent one, for our determinations of sequence can if
necessary be founded upon only one surviving solution or exam-
ple. Such determinations are of course provisional and incom-
plete. Yet every object attests to the existence of a requirement for
which it is the solution, even when that object is only a late copy
in a long series of coarsened products far removed from the clar-
ity and sharpness of an original.
In the second place, are we going to consider all man-made ob-
jects or only a selection of them? Where is the minimal bound-
ary? We are concerned mainly with works of art rather than with
tools, and we are interested more in long durations than in brief
ones, which tell us less about our subject. Tools and instruments
commonly have extremely long durations. Upon occasion these
extend so far that it is difficult to note great changes, as, for ex-
ample, in the minor inflections that record the passage of civili-
zations in the cooking pots of a deep refuse midden. A working
rule is that the simpler tools record very large durations, and that
the more complicated tools record brief episodes of special needs
and inventions.

Fashions
The minimal boundary perhaps lies near the limits of fashion.
Fashions in dress are among our briefest durations. A fashion
obeys special demands to which the longer evolutions are imper-
vious. A fashion is the projection of a single image of outward
being, resistant to change during its brief life, ephemeral, expend-
able, receptive only to copying but not to fundamental variation.
Fashions touch the limit of credibility by violating the precedent
and by grazing the edge of the ridiculous. They belong not to a
connected chain of solutions, but they constitute, each fashion
in turn, classes of only one member each. A fashion is a duration
without substantial change: an apparition, a flicker, forgotten

34 the cl assing of things

Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Élise
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Élise

Author: René Boylesve

Release date: March 22, 2021 [eBook #64902]

Most recently updated: October 15, 2024

Language: French

Credits: Laurent Vogel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
images generously made available by The Internet
Archive/Canadian Libraries)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ÉLISE ***

 RENÉ BOYLESVE
DE L'ACADÉMIE FRANÇAISE

ÉLISE
« Qui a la priorité : l'homme ou les
hommes? »

(Emerson, Société et
Solitude.)

PARIS
CALMANN-LÉVY, ÉDITEURS
3, RUE AUBER, 3

1921

DU MÊME AUTEUR

CONTES

LES BAINS DE BADE 1 vol.

LE BONHEUR A CINQ SOUS 1 —
LE DANGEREUX JEUNE HOMME 1 —
LA LEÇON D'AMOUR DANS UN PARC 1 —
 LA MARCHANDE DE PETITS PAINS POUR LES CANARDS 1—
NYMPHES DANSANT AVEC DES SATYRES 1—

ROMANS

LE MÉDECIN DES DAMES DE NÉANS 1 vol.

SAINTE-MARIE-DES-FLEURS 1 —
LE PARFUM DES ILES BORROMÉES 1 —
MADEMOISELLE CLOQUE 1 —
LA BECQUÉE 1 —
L'ENFANT A LA BALUSTRADE 1 —
LE BEL AVENIR 1 —
MON AMOUR 1 —
LE MEILLEUR AMI 1 —
LA JEUNE FILLE BIEN ÉLEVÉE 1 —
MADELEINE JEUNE FEMME 1 —

E. GREVIN — IMPRIMERIE DE LAGNY

Il a été tiré de cet ouvrage

CENT SOIXANTE-QUINZE EXEMPLAIRES SUR PAPIER DE HOLLANDE,
tous numérotés.

Droits de traduction et de reproduction réservés pour tous les pays.

Copyright, 1921, by CALMANN-LÉVY.

 A
ANDRÉ CHAUMEIX
ÉLISE
 PROLOGUE-ÉPILOGUE

D'un carnet de notes qui date d'une vingtaine d'années, j'extrais

les quelques pages suivantes où je ne modifierai que les noms de
personnes.
« Granville, 17 août 189…

» Je suis assis, à table d'hôte, en face d'un couple dont je

redoute les avances. Pour avoir entendu l'homme et la femme
échanger entre eux quelques mots, j'ai l'appréhension d'être amené
à « faire connaissance ». Pourquoi cette crainte? Ces gens sont
simplement ordinaires. La femme n'a guère plus de trente ans et
n'est pas laide. L'homme a la quarantaine ; il est décoré ; il est
quelconque ; il n'a pas l'air d'un sot. Mais quelle façon de parler à sa
femme! Et ils s'entretiennent d'une « madame de Vamiraud », d'un
« monsieur » et d'une « madame de La Hotte-Saint-Pair ». Seraient-
ils les domestiques endimanchés ou les régisseurs de quelque
hobereau?
» Et pourquoi aussi me donné-je la peine, moi, de griffonner ces
notes à leur propos? Je le sais bien! C'est parce que je les ai vus,
tantôt, adresser un salut, très bref, à cette jeune femme à l'air triste
et singulier, que j'ai tant regardée sur la terrasse du Casino. Ils la
connaissent. Par eux je pourrais savoir qui elle est. Et cependant je
me refuse à « faire connaissance ».
 » Ce n'est pas vilain du tout, cette plage de Granville. Elle
s'arrondit en hémicycle. Trop de galets ; mais de beaux rochers ; et
puis, là-haut, sur la gauche, la vieille ville bien perchée. Des
remparts, et un bon clocher de granit qui a dû essuyer des
tempêtes. Comme de juste, on a gâché la vue en construisant un
Casino en planches, affreux, et qui a l'air d'une gare provisoire de
chemin de fer départemental. Mais, pour que les hommes se plaisent
en un endroit, il faut qu'ils y abîment quelque chose.
» Si l'on a les chevilles solides, on peut faire une jolie promenade
sur les rochers au pied des remparts de la vieille ville. Les baigneurs
ne s'y hasardent guère ; on y touche la mer brutale et sa côte
rugueuse ; on y perd de vue tout ouvrage rappelant une station
d'été ; et les filles du port qu'on y surprend parfois, à leur bain, sans
les troubler le moins du monde, nues comme Ève, ou se dévêtant
dans une crique, me font, au soleil couchant, plutôt penser à des
René Ménard ou à la simplicité des temps primitifs.
» On m'a dit que, tout près d'ici, les îles Chausey, minuscule
archipel de rocs arides ou couverts de goémons, vous laissent
imaginer que vous êtes à mille lieues du monde habité. »
« 18 août.

» On est informé de tout malgré soi, et jusque même des choses

que l'on ne désire pas connaître.
» Tantôt, j'apprends le nom du couple qui me fait vis-à-vis, par
un grand et fort homme qui vient demander « monsieur et madame
Saulieu » et à qui l'on répond : « Les voici, monsieur Le Coûtre. » Je
sais donc le nom d'un Le Coûtre, par-dessus le marché.
» Dès lors, mon attention se porte sur les enveloppes, assez
nombreuses, déposées dans le casier de « M. Saulieu ». Ce M.
Saulieu est joaillier, je ne sais quel numéro, rue Daunou.
» Tout cela ne m'intéresse absolument pas. Mais ce joaillier, du
nom de Saulieu, donne des coups de chapeau à la jeune femme
triste et singulière. Et le nommé Le Coûtre en fait autant.
» L'un et l'autre saluent cette jeune femme et ne lui parlent pas.
 » L'un, Saulieu, a parlé tantôt à une jeune femme qui
accompagne celle à qui il ne parle pas, et, pendant le colloque, cette
dernière a ostensiblement affecté de s'écarter… Quant à l'homme,
grand et fort, qui salue aussi, il n'accomplit cet acte de politesse que
dans la rue ou sur le cours ; je ne l'ai jamais vu au Casino ni sur la
plage.
» Encore une fois, qu'est-ce que cela peut me faire? Mais je suis
seul ; je ne m'amuse guère ; et j'aime à regarder, à deviner. »
« Iles Chausey, 19 août.

» Ça y est. J'ai fait la connaissance du joaillier Saulieu, de son

épouse et de l'homme grand et fort dont j'avais oublié le nom : Le
Coûtre. Ce qui est étonnant est que j'ai fait leur connaissance parce
que je l'ai voulu! Ce qui est stupéfiant est que je l'ai voulu dans le
moment où ces gens-là m'agaçaient le plus. A seulement les
entendre parler, je m'irrite ; et leurs sujets d'entretien, qui sont
d'assez ordinaires commis voyageurs, étaient particulièrement
désobligeants cette après-midi aux îles Chausey, poétique désert au
parfum de varechs. Oui ; mais ils mêlaient à leurs propos vulgaires le
nom cent fois répété de madame de Vamiraud, et ils avaient ajouté
à ce nom, — mais avec quels airs! et de quel ton tout à coup
abaissé! — le modeste nom d'« Élise », qui ne saurait, à cause de ce
ton et de ces airs, appartenir à madame de Vamiraud, ni cependant
à la femme de chambre de celle-ci, mais vraisemblablement à
quelqu'un qui, pour un motif que je n'ai pu démêler, n'est jamais ni
nommé à haute voix ni appelé de son nom de famille. J'ai été
démangé tout à coup d'une curiosité exaspérée ; je me suis
rapproché un peu d'eux à la table d'auberge où nous étions seuls.
J'en ai été d'ailleurs pour mon geste inconsidéré : ma présence les a
fait taire.
» Nous avons échangé des banalités. Tout le reste de l'après-
midi, en les rencontrant dans l'île, qui n'est pas très grande, j'ai dû
croiser mes mots stupides avec ceux de mes nouvelles
connaissances, ce qui, pour moi, a rompu en petits morceaux le
plaisir, que je m'étais promis, de rêvasser solitairement dans ce
désert marin. »
« 20 août.

» Une journée torride. Je cherche de l'ombre. Je me réfugie sous

les vieux ormes du cours Jonville, qui répandent une nuit assez
épaisse. Un ruisseau, canalisé, court près de là ; on entend le bruit
des laveuses, et cela vous confirme la proximité de l'eau et vous
donne l'illusion d'un peu de fraîcheur.
» Mais je m'ennuie presque aussitôt, et alors me voilà échoué à
la salle de lecture du Casino. Un soleil implacable incendie la faible
toiture. Comment ces baraques ne prennent-elles pas feu! Je me
balance dans un rocking pour me laisser croire que l'air s'agite, et je
m'évente à l'aide d'un journal que je ne lirai pas.
» Peu de monde ; mais, parmi les oisifs désemparés, je vois
entrer la jeune femme triste et singulière. Pourquoi me plaît-elle?
Est-ce à cause de la façon dont j'ai entendu que l'on parlait d'elle?
Est-ce qu'elle excite ma compassion par son visage malheureux? Est-
ce parce que, simplement, elle me plaît?
» Elle a été s'asseoir à table ; elle a écrit, longtemps. Elle ne lève
les yeux sur personne. Se réfugier, comme un étranger, comme moi-
même, sous les planches brûlantes d'un lieu public quand on a sa
famille et sa maison de famille dans la ville! Car, aux bribes de
conversation saisies par moi hier à Chausey, j'ai compris ce détail.
Elle est bien de Granville ; elle est parente de madame de Vamiraud
et des La Hotte-Saint-Pair. Saint-Pair est le nom d'une commune des
environs.
» Je suis resté là longtemps, parce qu'elle a écrit longtemps.
Quand elle s'est levée, elle tenait à la main deux enveloppes
fermées ; elle a passé tout près de moi. J'ai aspiré son parfum. Je
l'ai suivie! Mon désœuvrement a quelque chose de pitoyable.
» Elle n'a pas fait timbrer ses lettres ; elle ne les a pas jetées à la
boîte ; elle les a conservées à la main. Elle est descendue sur la
plage et s'est dirigée tout droit vers une cabine. Il n'y avait pas
encore trois personnes à l'eau. Elle se baigne seule et de bonne
heure. Je l'ai regardée, ensuite, de loin. Elle nage bien ; je me suis
fatigué les yeux à ne pas perdre de vue son bonnet de bain, bleu
clair. »

Le carnet de poche d'où sont extraites les notes précédentes en

contient beaucoup d'autres, dont je fais grâce au lecteur, parce
qu'elles s'éloignent de l'unique sujet que j'ai dessein de traiter ici. Je
tourne quatre pages en tête desquelles on lit : « Il pleut » ; « Il
pleut toujours » ; « Pluie diluvienne ». J'ai dû passer ces mornes
journées à me morfondre dans une chambre d'hôtel et à jeter
rageusement sur mon calepin des projets de romans, de nouvelles,
de réflexions professionnelles comme celle-ci, par exemple, qui
m'était sans doute inspirée par la lecture d'un livre alors à la mode ;
« La description oiseuse : grande erreur du temps… Avant tout, ne
jamais décrire un objet, qu'il ne soit traversé d'un rayon de lumière
spirituelle, etc. » Il faut arriver au 25 août pour trouver une page,
mais il est vrai, capitale, sur notre sujet.
« 25 août.

» J'essaie d'écrire comme si je n'étais pas ému. Mais ma main

tremble. Allons, je veux rapporter fidèlement, posément, en témoin
étranger, ce que j'ai vu.
» Le beau temps revenu, la température était délicieuse. On
pouvait se promener au soleil. J'ai fait les cent pas sur la plage,
aussitôt après le déjeuner. J'ai été m'asseoir sur les rochers. L'heure
du bain m'a ramené vers la plage. Comme je posais le pied sur les
premiers galets, j'ai vu sortir d'une cabine et puis descendre en
courant vers la mer le bonnet de soie bleue. C'est évidemment lui
que je cherchais, mais, l'ayant vu, je suis ainsi fait que je n'ai pas
voulu avoir l'air de m'intéresser à lui outre mesure et qu'au lieu de le
regarder approcher de la mer, j'ai poursuivi ma marche jusqu'à
l'autre extrémité de la plage, sans presser aucunement le pas. Je ne
me suis donc retourné qu'après avoir heurté les autres rochers, ceux
qui sont hérissés au pied du bloc où s'assoit la vieille ville.
» Mais, à peine avais-je fait demi-tour, que je fus frappé par un
mouvement inusité parmi les baigneurs : ils s'aggloméraient en un
point ; d'autres, au contraire, quittaient rapidement la mer,
empoignaient leur peignoir, remontaient la plage, s'arrêtaient tout à
coup, et quelques-uns redescendaient, presque aussitôt, pendant
que la terrasse du Casino se garnissait ; une quantité de gens
apparaissaient sur la plage. « Un accident! » pensai-je. Et
simultanément, j'avais la conviction qu'une seule personne pouvait
avoir été victime d'un accident : celle qui portait le bonnet bleu. La
troisième idée et les suivantes qui m'ont frappé ont été celles-ci :
« Je n'y peux rien!… Il est trop tard!… C'est affreux!… »
» A peine accélérai-je mon pas, en m'approchant de la foule à
présent compacte. J'avais vu, du canot où pagaye continuellement
un maître-nageur, deux hommes plonger sur le probable « lieu du
sinistre ».
» Mais, ayant, je ne sais vraiment pas pourquoi, la conviction que
l'accident était arrivé au « bonnet bleu », comme, d'autre part, je
savais que le « bonnet bleu » était excellent nageur, l'accident ne
devait être causé ni par la fatigue, ni par une imprudence ou une
maladresse, ni vraisemblablement par la crampe d'un membre, mais
par l'asphyxie. Je déclarai le cas désespéré, apportant à cette
conclusion pessimiste la conviction que nous inspire tout malheur qui
semble dirigé contre nous, personnellement.
» Les plongeurs remontaient, soufflaient, s'agrippaient au canot
et replongeaient ; un maître-baigneur avançait avec peine, à la
nage, gêné par son lourd pantalon. Hélas! bientôt dix minutes
allaient être écoulées depuis le moment où j'étais revenu sur mes
pas, et l'« accident » avait dû se produire bien auparavant, c'est-à-
dire au moment que tout doucement je m'éloignais après avoir vu
courir le « bonnet bleu ».
» Car la victime était bien la jeune femme au bonnet bleu ; je le
sus, sans étonnement, mais non pas sans pâlir, dès que je me mêlai
aux groupes. Je sus même aussitôt son nom : on l'appelait madame
Destroyer.
» Les recherches durèrent encore un grand quart d'heure ; mais
elles devaient être vaines. Je m'indignai que le bain ne fût pas
manqué pour tous. Peu de temps après ces quelques minutes
dramatiques, le public habituel s'agitait dans l'eau indifférente ; le
canot contenant le maître-baigneur se balançait et semblait danser
parmi des vivants, au-dessus d'un cadavre. Et un soleil, d'une
splendide magnificence, s'abaissait sur une mer parfaitement
calme. »
« 26 août.

» Je ne veux pas rester ici. Je m'en vais. J'ai retenu ma place au

bateau de Jersey.
» La mer n'a rien rapporté… Cela « s'explique, paraît-il »?
» Voici la version que l'on donne. Madame Destroyer était en
effet une bonne nageuse ; née à Granville, elle avait une complète
expérience de la mer. Elle aurait pris tout simplement son bain trop
tôt après le repas. Cependant, je l'ai vue entrer à l'eau, alors que de
nombreuses personnes y étaient déjà, et certainement après quatre
heures et demie. Oui ; mais elle appartenait à une famille soumise
aux anciennes mœurs, qui a coutume de faire venir chaque année
ses membres jusque du fond des plus lointaines provinces et qui les
réunissait, le jour fatal, en un déjeuner plantureux, lequel s'est
prolongé plus que de coutume.
» On dit, depuis, que ce déjeuner était une sorte de fête de
famille dans le genre de celle qui fut donnée, selon l'Écriture, pour le
retour de l'enfant prodigue. Tels sont les termes qu'ont employés les
Saulieu, sans vouloir dire davantage. Ces termes ne font qu'accroître
l'intensité du brouillard qui plane sur l'aventure, mais, précisément à
cause de cela, ils s'harmonisent avec ce qu'il y avait d'incertain,
d'embarrassé et, ma foi, disons : de mystérieux, dans l'attitude de
madame Destroyer au milieu des siens, et dans l'attitude vis-à-vis
d'elle de plusieurs personnes amies de sa famille. Enfin, je
n'oublierai pas que les Saulieu disaient : « madame de Vamiraud »
pour désigner cette jeune femme, compagne ordinaire de madame
Destroyer, et à qui ils parlaient, tandis qu'ils disaient : « Élise » pour
désigner madame Destroyer, à qui ils ne parlaient pas.
» On jase. Toute la ville parle de l'événement et ne parle que de
cela. Que n'ai-je pas entendu dire?
» Le curieux est que les Saulieu, qui la connaissaient, puisqu'ils
avaient prononcé son petit nom, et qui naturellement sont interrogés
par tout l'hôtel, se tiennent sur une réserve presque exagérée. Je
sais qu'ils ont été faire visite à la famille, à madame de Vamiraud
notamment, qui est bien la propre sœur de celle qu'on nommait
Élise. Et ils sont muets comme des tombeaux, comme cette mer qui
a englouti Élise et ne la rend pas.
» Je les ai interrogés moi-même. A la suite d'un événement
pareil, jusqu'à des étrangers s'informent, que diable! Ils m'ont dit,
l'un et l'autre séparément, ces rustres :
— C'est très délicat.
» Ce qui n'est pas délicat, c'est de dire cela d'une jeune femme
morte. Cela laisse supposer… Au fait, laisse supposer quoi?
» Je ne sais en vérité que penser, mais ma curiosité touchant
cette jeune morte est piquée au vif.
» Un fait à retenir : j'ai croisé, ce soir, dans l'ombre, sur la jetée,
le couple Saulieu accompagné du grand homme robuste dont j'ai
encore une fois oublié le nom. A mon approche, ils se sont tus. Je ne
les ai pas abordés. Mais, en les croisant de nouveau plus près des
lumières du port, j'ai distingué nettement que le grand homme
robuste pleurait!… il pleurait : je l'ai vu s'éponger les yeux avec son
mouchoir, pendant qu'il marchait à côté de ses amis ; et, tout à
coup, je l'ai vu s'asseoir sur une borne. Il s'est pris la tête à deux
mains. Il a une chevelure épaisse et grisonnante qu'il secouait en
désespéré. Il pleurait comme un enfant.
» J'ai entendu madame Saulieu lui dire à demi-voix :
— Allons, allons, Jean-Marie!…
 » Je me souviens que l'homme grand et fort, Jean-Marie, causait
aux îles Chausey, familièrement, avec les Saulieu, quand ceux-ci ont
prononcé le nom d'Élise. Lui ne l'avait pas nommée.
» Un roman entre la jeune femme trop charmante qui répondait
au nom d'Élise et l'homme que j'ai vu secouer ses cheveux poivre et
sel, après s'être affalé, comme un matelot du port, sur une borne!
Non, voyons…
» Ma remarque ne vaut absolument rien : je le sais, car les
grandes amours sont extraordinaires en tout. »
« 27 août.

» Le plus curieux est que je ne pars pas pour Jersey. J'apprends

trop de choses. Je suis trop homme de lettres : un événement qui a
failli me toucher le cœur s'enrichit de détails innombrables qui
m'atteignent l'esprit ; et me voilà accaparé par un « sujet ». Je n'ai
plus besoin de m'informer : on me renseigne. Les langues ne se
tiennent plus ; elles se délient outre mesure. L'inconvénient est
qu'on dit trop ; il faut mettre de l'ordre, trier, user plus que jamais de
ce sixième sens, qui consiste à percevoir le « vraisemblable ».
» Un hasard précieux me sert. Il se trouve qu'un des hommes en
qui j'ai le plus de confiance, un vieil écrivain de valeur et méconnu,
s'est trouvé mêlé de la façon la plus baroque au mystère que je
cherche à éclaircir. Il est discret, mais ne me refusera rien de ce que
sa conscience l'autorisera à m'apprendre. Du diable si, avec le goût
que je me suis senti pour mon héroïne, je ne tire pas de là
quelqu'une de ces histoires, comme je les aime, c'est-à-dire qui ne
ressemblent que le moins possible à ce qu'on appelle « un
roman »! »
 I

Élise de La Hotte-Saint-Pair naquit en 1872, à Granville, d'une

très ancienne famille de la région. On voit encore, sur la route de
Saint-Pair, les restes d'un vieux château bâti en granit, dont le vent
de mer a décoiffé un pignon et tordu la girouette rouillée ; c'est de
là qu'ont essaimé jadis tous les La Hotte, de mémoire d'homme,
officiers de marine, magistrats ou prêtres. Mais ce manoir était
abandonné et déjà dans un grand délabrement quand Élise était une
petite fille, et il ne servait plus que de grange. On allait le visiter, à
intervalles presque réguliers, pour enseigner aux enfants leurs
origines, ce dont ceux-ci profitaient surtout pour jouer à saute-
mouton sur un foin sec contenant toujours quelques chardons des
dunes, qui leur piquaient les mollets.
Les parents d'Élise habitaient alors, au centre de Granville même,
une maison d'aspect modeste, mais largement étendue sur un des
côtés du triangle de la place dite « cours Jonville ». Cette place, au
sol non pavé, était plantée d'ormes très vieux, en quinconces, qui
assombrissaient beaucoup les pièces, mais dont l'ombrage touffu ne
laissait pas d'être agréable en été. Sous ces beaux arbres se tenait le
marché deux fois la semaine. On voyait ces jours-là, le matin,
madame de La Hotte, qui connaissait par leur nom toutes les bonnes
femmes, les appeler de sa fenêtre et faire ainsi ses provisions sans
sortir de chez soi, et en papillotes.
 Toute la journée, c'était alors, sous les grands ormes, un
bavardage frénétique, qui ne saurait être comparé qu'à la piaillerie
des moineaux à leur coucher. Élise, sa sœur aînée, nommée Marie,
et ses deux frères, à l'époque des vacances, se tenaient aux appuie-
mains du rez-de-chaussée, criant plus fort que les maraîchères et
jouant à vendre ou à acheter des denrées fictives, à moins que l'un
des garçons, suspendu par les poignets, ne dégringolât, en
écorchant le crépi de chaux grisâtre et ses propres genoux, pour
aller chiper en bas ou se faire offrir pour sa bonne mine quelque
poireau, un trognon de chou, une laitue piétinée, des cosses de
petits pois verts dont il logeait jusqu'à trois à califourchon sur son
nez, ou bien des cerises en pendants d'oreilles.
L'odeur des légumes et des fruits montait et se répandait dans la
maison, vers le soir, en même temps que s'apaisait la rumeur et que
baissaient les prix. M. de La Hotte-Saint-Pair, gourmand de sa nature
et en même temps un peu serré, descendait de sa bibliothèque,
invariablement, à cette heure. Il aimait à faire les cent pas sur le
cours, entre chien et loup, humant les parfums agrestes, sa canne
normande à la main, sans avoir l'air de rien, sinon de songer aux
paperasses qu'il avait remuées ; et, tout à coup, on le voyait aviser
un panier de fraises ou un melon, qu'il rapportait, l'un assis sur son
bras replié et l'autre suspendu par l'anse à son petit doigt.
Ex-capitaine de mobiles, blessé grièvement, M. de La Hotte-
Saint-Pair vivait enfermé chez lui, depuis 1870. Il avait le goût de la
généalogie et de l'histoire ; il s'occupait à classer d'innombrables
papiers de famille ou à s'essayer en des biographies ancestrales. A
des dates régulières, sa documentation s'enrichissait, grâce à des
réunions auxquelles, lui comme sa femme, tenaient, semblait-il, plus
qu'à tout. Très bien apparentés l'un et l'autre, ils demeuraient ainsi
en contact avec le moindre membre des deux lignées, et leurs
déplacements n'avaient jamais pour but que d'assister à des
baptêmes, à des mariages ou à des obsèques, parfois fort éloignés
de Granville, mais pour lesquels on ne lésinait ni sur l'argent ni sur la
peine. Pendant toute leur jeunesse, Élise, sa sœur et ses frères,
furent à peu près toujours en deuil. Et il venait à Granville des
tantes, des oncles, des cousines, des cousins, d'Avranches, de Saint-
Malo, de Coutances, de Cherbourg, de Rennes, de Saint-Brieuc, et
jusque de Nantes et d'Angers, voire de Paris. En ces réunions,
espacées tout au long de l'année, et ménagées adroitement selon
les affinités et même selon les besoins d'apaiser des dissensions ou
d'éclaircir des malentendus, on se perdait en souvenirs, en exercices
de mémoire, en rappels pénibles et interminables de dates, en
escalades hardies de telle branche minuscule ou de tel rameau de
l'arbre généalogique, qui n'amusaient certes pas tout le monde, mais
créaient cependant une atmosphère, indéfinissable, une sorte
d'élément que chacun sentait propre à soi-même, autant qu'au
groupe tout entier, où chacun, plus ou moins consciemment, se
complaisait.
Après la famille, il y avait les relations, qui ne comptaient pas
peu. Elles grevaient le budget par les cadeaux, les transports, les
dîners, sans compter les écritures innombrables, mais étaient tenues
comme essentielles à la vie, au premier chef, et les personnes qui en
faisaient partie constituaient une petite humanité à part, contre quoi
ne s'exerçait pas, du moins ne devait pas s'exercer, la critique,
humanité qu'on admettait pour bonne et impeccable, une fois pour
toutes, qu'on soutenait en cas de malheur, et défendait au besoin
généreusement, sauf le cas de manquement grave aux règles
imposées par l'honneur, le savoir-vivre, l'usage.
Élise, de qui la tête était très bonne, semblait avoir hérité du
goût de son père pour ce que les garçons appelaient
irrévérencieusement « l'art de grimper à l'arbre » ; elle connaissait
sur le bout du doigt plus d'un siècle de générations non seulement
de la famille, mais de mainte famille amie, et, avant qu'elle eût
atteint ses dix ans, elle se montrait extrêmement comique,
lorsqu'elle accompagnait sa mère, car on l'interrogeait à perte
d'haleine, — et c'était devenu un jeu commun par la ville, — sur des
faits datant de quatre-vingts ans, comme si elle eût été une vieille
dame. Ce n'étaient pas évidemment ces embranchements, ces
ramifications, ces cousinages, ces noms et ces dates qui l'excitaient
beaucoup, mais bien le succès qu'elle obtenait en se montrant si
savante.
Et cela lui fut une excellente préparation pour ses études qu'elle
alla faire pendant cinq ou six ans au couvent des religieuses de
l'Assomption d'Avranches. Quand elle venait à Granville, au jour de
l'an, à Pâques, aux vacances, elle poussait bel et bien des « colles »
d'histoire à son papa, qui demeurait à la fois ravi et un peu vexé de
l'érudition de sa fille souvent supérieure à la sienne propre. Avec ses
connaissances, toutes locales, il avait l'air bien provincial, avouait-il,
vis-à-vis de mademoiselle de La Hotte, qui vous parlait de l'histoire
universelle comme il parlait, lui, de celle de sa grand'mère.
Au temps où Élise eut une quinzaine d'années, les choses
commencèrent à se modifier beaucoup à Granville. La saison des
bains de mer amenait de Paris, notamment, une quantité de gens
que l'on n'avait jusque-là jamais vus ; les trains fonctionnaient un
peu plus rapidement, et la mode était lancée de se déplacer, d'aller
au loin à chaque période de vacances ; les médecins aussi tenaient
la mer pour indispensable aux enfants. Cela créa une animation
inusitée sur la plage ; on fabriqua des cabines ; on édifia une sorte
de baraquement de bois qui fut baptisé Casino, devant quoi fut
cimentée une terrasse assez spacieuse, garnie d'une balustrade de
poutres croisées, d'où l'on dominait la mer, la petite plage arrondie,
semée de galets, et, sur la gauche, le rocher pittoresque qui porte la
vieille ville et son clocher. Un orchestre fut attaché à l'établissement ;
il y eut des concerts, et le soir, dans une assez vaste salle, bien
parquetée, on dansait. Les « petits chevaux » ne devaient apparaître
que plus tard. Autour des Parisiens, nouvellement débarqués, cela
ramassait chaque jour les officiers du 11e régiment d'infanterie.
Pour les enfants, pour les jeunes gens et jeunes filles, comme
pour la plupart des parents, cette animation, avec ce qu'elle
apportait de nouveau et d'imprévu, devait être extrêmement
goûtée ; et les réunions de famille, un peu mornes, ne pouvaient pas
tenir longtemps contre l'agréable vibration que causaient les gens de
Paris, les plaisirs de la plage et du Casino, les jeux, les papotages,
l'élégance, les aventures, la musique, le flirt et la danse. Au lieu de
se contenter des figures éternellement identiques ou
progressivement ridées et jaunies de l'oncle et de la tante de Saint-
Malo et des chers cousins de Carentec, on s'exaltait sur les charmes
des figures nouvelles, toujours exquises durant un mois ou six
semaines, disparues après cela, il est vrai, et à jamais, pour la
plupart, mais remplacées l'année suivante par des figures nouvelles
encore auxquelles l'imagination prête si aisément toutes les qualités
qu'elle a le désir d'apprécier.
Pour le coup, adieu les généalogies et l'historique des familles
amies! Car il va sans dire qu'au bout d'une semaine les « figures
nouvelles » étaient liées et formaient corbeille non seulement entre
elles, mais avec les plantes indigènes, comme si elles se fussent
développées et eussent fleuri côte à côte depuis vingt ans. De ces
amis de fraîche date, on savait ce qu'il plaisait à ceux-ci de vouloir
bien dire d'eux-mêmes. Les renseignements, d'ailleurs, reconnus
bientôt controuvés, on devait, en conscience, les déclarer
négligeables. Et madame de La Hotte elle-même, jadis si farouche, si
difficile en ses liaisons, en arrivait à dire à propos de personnes avec
qui ses filles passaient la journée : « Que voulez-vous? Elles sont
agréables ; elles ont l'air comme il faut… Pour le reste, l'un sur elles
dit blanc, l'autre dit noir. C'est à donner sa langue au chat. »
Que la résignation est vite venue, même aux parents les plus
sages, quand le plaisir des enfants s'en mêle et quand on est
entraîné par l'exemple universel et contagieux! Madame de La Hotte,
qui avait opposé une des résistances les plus énergiques à ces
liaisons faciles et promptes, s'y était faite au bout de peu d'années,
d'une part dans la crainte de demeurer isolée, — en toutes matières,
une de ses plus grandes terreurs, — et, d'autre part, entraînée
qu'elle était par les propres cousines et cousins, venus de loin
jusqu'à Granville, et qui prétendaient ne pas s'y morfondre à l'écart,
alors qu'on s'y pouvait amuser.
Un fait, d'ailleurs, ne sembla-t-il pas donner raison à l'opportunité
de cette mêlée d'éléments neufs, venus des quatre points de
l'horizon? Marie, la fille aînée des La Hotte, épousa un jeune homme
de Paris, le vicomte de Vamiraud, venu là, simplement, par hasard,
en attendant le bateau de Jersey, et de qui tout le monde ignorait
complètement les origines. Il avait eu, en apercevant mademoiselle
de La Hotte, l'aînée, le coup de foudre ; il était demeuré quinze
jours, le temps de se faire aimer d'elle, quinze autres jours pour
séduire la famille ; il avait épousé, deux mois après ; et voilà que ce
monsieur s'était trouvé le mari rêvé, irréprochable, muni de tous les
dons et appartenant à une famille d'autant plus ignorée qu'elle était
plus honorable. Une rencontre de hasard avait formé un excellent
ménage.
— Il est bien difficile, opinait depuis lors madame de La Hotte, de
dire de prime abord ce qui est bon et ce qui est mauvais ; il y a tant
d'exceptions à la règle!… Dans nos familles, jusqu'au mariage de
Marie, exclusivement, on ne s'est jamais marié sans connaître l'un de
l'autre tous les tenants et aboutissants, et encore faisait-on remonter
son enquête jusqu'aux temps immémoriaux. Or, voilà un mariage
d'amour bâclé en quatre semaines, qui réussit à merveille et qui est
tel qu'on n'en eût point pu souhaiter de plus satisfaisant. Je m'en
suis rendu compte d'ailleurs, maintes fois, au cours de ma vie : bien
des choses sont déconcertantes…
Il résulta de cette aventure qu'on lâcha un peu la bride à la sœur
cadette, Élise, durant les vacances à Granville, qui devenaient
franchement divertissantes.
Élise, à peine au sortir du couvent, eut une toquade pour un
sous-lieutenant, du nom de Piédoie, le boute-en-train de toute cette
jeunesse, quoiqu'il ne fût pas, loin de là, le plus jeune de son grade.
Et c'était une chose comique, de voir avec quel calme madame de La
Hotte, quelques années auparavant si intransigeante et hautaine,
acceptait ces amours naissantes. Dieu sait jusqu'où elle les eût
laissées croître, si l'on n'eût appris, tout à coup, que le lieutenant
Piédoie était fils d'un aubergiste du Mans, était sans fortune, sorti du
rang, et obligé pour vivre de contracter des dettes. Ah! ce fut une
alarme chaude. Comment ne s'était-on pas avisé que ce garçon
n'avait pas plus d'éducation première?
— Mais aussi, disait la pauvre madame de La Hotte, je le
connaissais encore si peu! Lui ai-je parlé seulement deux fois?… Il
É
venait prendre Élise à côté de moi, me saluait très poliment en
souriant… Il avait, il faut le reconnaître, un charmant sourire, et de
fort belles dents… Sous cet uniforme, que l'on se laisse aisément
prendre!
— Mais toi! s'écria-t-elle, tout à coup, s'adressant à sa fille, toi
qui dansais avec lui, comment, mon enfant, n'as-tu pas remarqué
que ce n'était pas un homme distingué?
— Mais je le trouvais, moi, beaucoup mieux que les autres!
— C'est impossible! C'est insensé! Ma pauvre fille, tu manques
complètement de finesse. Qu'as-tu donc appris? A quoi la science te
sert-elle?…
— Mais, maman, tu le regardais plus que moi ; tu avais sans
cesse les yeux braqués sur nous, quand nous dansions…
— Ah! en dansant tu regardais ta mère? Voilà où nous en
sommes! Ces demoiselles dédaignent d'examiner celui qui peut
devenir leur mari, mais elles épient leur mère qui les gêne dans leurs
tournoiements!…
— Voyons! maman, qu'aurais-tu dit si tu m'avais vue le regarder
dans les yeux?… Et papa, lui, qui avait causé avec ce jeune homme
et à qui j'ai entendu dire : « C'est un garçon très intelligent! »
— Ton père, ton père!…
— Alors, et moi?…
Madame de La Hotte faisait en outre la remarque que,
dorénavant, les enfants, sans en savoir plus long qu'autrefois, ont
cependant réponse à tout. Et elle laissait tomber les deux bras, en
signe d'impuissance.
Fallait-il donc que sa fille vécût calfeutrée en compagnie de sa
seule cousinerie? Mais, cousins et cousines, on ne les tenait plus à
l'attache, eux non plus ; ils voulaient sortir et prendre du large. Et
elle-même enfin reconnaissait, en son for intérieur, qu'elle se
priverait aujourd'hui difficilement de passer une partie de l'après-
midi et la soirée au Casino, d'où la vie avait décidément un autre
aspect que de la fenêtre donnant sur le marché du cours Jonville.
 Elle pensait : « La vie a un autre aspect. »
Fidèle à la tradition, elle avait consacré, de tout temps, sa vie aux
« relations » ; mais les relations d'à présent, sans cesse
changeantes, renouvelées, illimitées, prenaient à ses yeux un
charme insoupçonné. Ces relations nouvelles étaient quelconques à
la vérité ; par elles, elle se sentait heurtée, choquée même
quelquefois. Cependant, ces chocs et ces heurts, sans qu'elle y prît
garde, ne lui devenaient-ils pas agréables, comme certains coups,
douloureux d'abord, amusent petit à petit le boxeur qui s'y
accoutume? Le seul mouvement, l'agitation pour elle-même en
arrivaient à l'étourdir et à la fasciner. Elle s'encanaillait, un tout petit
peu, elle aussi, comme allait le faire toute la société contemporaine.
Et elle demeurait stupéfaite que sa fille, âgée de seize ans,
s'amourachât d'un officier non tombé d'un arbre généalogique, d'un
homme non « distingué », selon la formule!
L'incident, grâce à Dieu, fut dépourvu de suites fâcheuses ; mais
Élise n'en demeura pas moins dolente et meurtrie tout l'hiver, et il
fallut recourir à mille stratagèmes pour réduire autant que faire se
pouvait les risques de rencontres entre le sous-lieutenant et la jeune
fille. Une année entière, la famille n'eut pas d'autre souci. On
regrettait que la petite folle n'eût pas fixé son caprice sur quelque
baigneur étranger, qui, du moins, eût disparu dès septembre. Et,
lorsque la saison se rouvrit, puisque aussi bien il ne fallait pas
songer à boycotter le Casino ni la plage, on appliqua tout un
programme longuement et minutieusement élaboré par M. de La
Hotte en sa chambre aux paperasses.
Il consistait à couper, par des excursions, voire par un voyage, la
période d'inévitables contacts avec la compagnie hétéroclite du
Casino, avec cette turbulente société où l'on attendait pourtant que
l'idéal fiancé se révélât!
Dès le commencement de la saison, on remarqua, parmi les
baigneurs et les danseurs, un très beau garçon nommé M. Destroyer.
C'était un ingénieur des arts et manufactures ; il dirigeait une usine
dans le département de la Loire.
 Il parut immédiatement dangereux, soit à cause de sa beauté
physique, soit parce qu'on l'avait vu, pendant la première semaine,
rejoindre sur la plage une femme aux cheveux teints et qui ne se
mêlait à aucun groupe.
Madame de La Hotte avait une si vive crainte que sa fille ne
tombât amoureuse de ce bellâtre qu'elle s'en ouvrait à tout venant.
— Voyons, chère madame, ou chère cousine, lui répliquait-on,
pourquoi si tôt vous alarmer? Élise semble-t-elle avoir remarqué ce
monsieur?
— Non.
— Eh bien?
— Justement! C'est un très beau garçon. Elle ne lève pas les
yeux sur lui ; du moins je ne l'ai pas vue le regarder une seule fois ;
ne cacherait-elle pas son jeu?
— Oh! Madame, qu'allez-vous chercher là? Élise n'est pas
dissimulée…
— Non! mais il y a eu l'expérience de l'année dernière ; nous
avons dû nous montrer extrêmement sévères pour la malheureuse
enfant, et elle s'en souvient. Si son cœur parlait cette année, elle le
serrerait dans un étau!…
— Voilà le résultat de l'expérience!…
Élise ne levait pas les yeux sur le bel étranger qui, cependant,
dansait le soir avec plusieurs jeunes filles. Madame de La Hotte
faisait tous ses efforts pour éloigner le cœur inflammable d'Élise
jusque même des jeunes filles avec qui dansait le bel étranger. Et le
mot d'ordre était donné, dans la famille, de ne jamais parler de ce
monsieur en présence d'Élise.
Il y avait alors, dans la maison du cours Jonville, la tante de
Saint-Brieuc et sa fille, celle-ci du même âge à peu près qu'Élise,
nommée Anne, assez disgraciée de nature et qui, à cause de cela,
ne causait point les mêmes alarmes que sa cousine. Anne répéta,
sans retard, à Élise le mot d'ordre qu'elle avait reçu. Élise s'exclama :
 — On peut bien parler de lui en ma présence, dit-elle : je ne suis
pas près de m'emballer pour sa figure. Je le trouve ridicule.
— Je pensais bien, dit la cousine Anne, que tu n'avais pas
manqué de le regarder…
— Bien sûr, que je l'ai regardé. Il est grotesque avec sa raie
jusqu'au milieu du dos et ses moustaches deux fois trop longues : il
me fait l'effet d'une réclame pour cosmétique, ou d'un tzigane.
Anne répéta les propos d'Élise. Madame de la Hotte fut
enchantée, parut rassurée ; puis tout à coup :
— De deux choses l'une, dit-elle : ou bien c'est Élise qui a parlé
spontanément à sa cousine de ce monsieur, et c'est donc qu'elle
pense à lui ; ou bien c'est Anne qui a pris les devants en
transgressant la défense de parler…
Anne évidemment n'en mena pas large lorsqu'il fut avéré que
c'était elle qui avait parlé. Il n'en demeura pas moins qu'elle avait
ramené la sécurité dans l'esprit des parents. Élise était raisonnable ;
même en présence d'un si beau garçon, elle demeurait impassible ;
elle n'avait donc pas ce cœur d'étoupe tant redouté. D'ailleurs,
faisait-on observer, de l'aventure de l'année précédente il ne
demeurait en elle aucune trace. Elle avait recouvré son entrain, sa
belle humeur, et tout le monde avait pu remarquer que de
fréquentes rencontres avec le sous-lieutenant Piédoie la laissaient
très indifférente. Allons! Allons! Élise était une jeune fille avec qui
l'on ne désespérait pas de pouvoir parler raison lorsqu'il s'agirait de
la marier.
Quelle imprudence de s'être tant échauffés! Ne se donnant pas
trois semaines pour que s'imposât quelque dérivatif aux plaisirs de la
plage, les parents n'avaient-ils pas fixé la date d'une excursion à
Jersey! Cette excursion était devenue inutile. Eh bien, cette
excursion, ce fut Élise qui la réclama.
Ah! par exemple, on ne s'était pas attendu à cela.
Cette excursion coûteuse et superflue, il fallut ruser pour en
détourner la jeunesse, affirmer que les matelots pronostiquaient une
mer démontée pour la semaine suivante, et se prêter plus que
jamais aux divertissements du Casino, afin que tout le petit monde
eût au moins une compensation.
Une fête, au profit des « Terres-Neuviens », devait précisément
avoir lieu dans la huitaine. Après le feu d'artifice, serait donnée une
grande soirée dansante. La jeunesse se résigna, non sans maugréer,
disant que ces saisons de bains de mer, « c'était toujours la même
chose ». Les fameux plaisirs du Casino, qui avaient tout bouleversé
peu d'années auparavant, cette génération trépidante les avait déjà
épuisés.
La fête eut lieu, qui fut déclarée insipide, et la soirée, d'un mortel
ennui. Le baromètre, entre parenthèses, s'était maintenu au beau
fixe.
Il se trouva que madame de La Hotte eut un motif de partager
l'humeur bougonne des jeunes gens.
Madame de La Hotte jugea, et elle en avait fait la remarque
notamment à la grande soirée, qu'on faisait peu danser sa fille. Non
qu'Élise s'en plaignît! De la danse, mon Dieu, elle n'était pas folle, et
elle prétendait même que rien ne lui répugnait davantage que de
passer des bras d'un monsieur en ceux d'un autre. Élise était très
droite, très sincère ; il fallait la croire. Mais sa mère fut un peu
froissée dans son amour-propre.
Toutes les jeunes filles s'arrachaient M. Destroyer, le si beau
garçon, malgré les insuffisantes références et malgré la femme aux
cheveux teints. M. Destroyer avait pénétré dans plusieurs familles
des plus honorables.
Il n'avait pas même cherché à se faire présenter Élise! Madame
de La Hotte, sans souffler mot de l'impression qu'elle en ressentait,
avait des suffocations. C'était elle, non sa fille, qui désormais suivait
de l'œil, à la dérobée, le jeune homme à la « raie jusqu'au milieu du
dos » et à la moustache victorieuse, et elle blêmissait de voir telle et
telle des amies d'Élise paraître charmées en valsant entre ses bras.
Élise, non pas jolie précisément, était grande, souple, et fine ;
elle avait des cheveux blonds, abondants, une bouche un peu large
sur des dents moins régulières que pures ; et elle avait aussi ces
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

ebooknice.com