Short Fiction by Xavier de Maistre (digital e reader txt) 📕

Whilst I was gazing at her in a delicious ecstasy, I saw the pole star shining between her dark curls, through which the north wind was playing, and at the same moment I heard these comforting words, nay they were not words, it was the mysterious expression of heavenly thought revealing the future to my soul, whilst my senses were wrapped in slumber; it was a prophetic message from that friendly star which I had lately invoked, and the meaning of which I shall now essay to embody in human language.

“Your confidence in me is not misplaced,” exclaimed a voice in tones like those of an Aolian Harp. “Behold the country I have kept for you; behold the blessings for which those aspire in vain who imagine happiness to be a matter of calculation, and who ask on Earth for things only attainable in Heaven.” At these words the meteor melted away in the darkness of the heavens, and the fair divinity was lost to sight in the mists of the far distance; but as she departed she gave me a look which filled my heart with confidence and hope.

Immediately, burning to follow her, I dug both heels into my horse, and as I had forgotten to put on my spurs, I struck my right heel against the corner of a tile with such violence that the pain woke me up with a start.

This accident was after all a great benefit to the geological department of my journey, because it taught me the exact height of my room above the alluvial deposits on which the City of Turin is built. My heart beat violently, and I counted quite three beats and a half from the moment when I spurred my horse till I heard the noise made by my slipper, which had fallen into the street, and having calculated the time which heavy bodies take to fall, and that which the waves of sound required in coming from the street to my ear, I fixed the height of my window at eighty-four feet three inches and nine-tenths of an inch above the pavement of Turin, on the supposition that my heart, excited by the dream, beat 120 times in a minute, which cannot be far out. It is only as a pure matter of science, after having dilated so much on my fair neighbour’s interesting slipper, that I could venture to speak of my own also, and I foresee that this chapter will after all please none but philosophers.

The splendid vision I had just enjoyed made me feel all the more acutely on awaking, all the horror of my isolated situation. I looked all round and saw nothing but the roofs and the chimneys. Alas! suspended on the fifth story, between heaven and earth, surrounded by a sea of troubles, aspirations, and anxieties, I was attached to life solely by a faint glimmer of hope, a treacherous support, whose fragility I had often experienced. Doubt soon returned to my desolate heart, in which the wounds caused by the troubles of life were still far from healed, and I quite believed that the pole star had been mocking me. Unjust and wicked suspicion! for which she has punished me with ten years of waiting. Oh! if I could then have foreseen that all these promises would be fulfilled, and that one day I should find on earth the adorable being whose image I had seen in the heavens.

Dear Sophie, if I had known that my good fortunes would even surpass all my hopes! But I must not anticipate events. I return to my subject, unwilling to depart from the severe and methodical order to which I have bound myself in the compilation of my travels.

The clock of St. Philip’s Church slowly struck twelve. I counted, one after another, every stroke of the bell, and at the last one I heaved a sigh. “There,” said I, “is another day of my life gone, and while the dying tones of the brazen bell are still vibrating in my ears, that part of my journey which preceded midnight is already quite as far from me as the voyages of Ulysses or Jason. In that abyss of the past, moments and ages are of the same duration, and even the future is no less unreal and inconceivable.” Between these two states of nonexistence I stand in equilibrium, as it were, on the edge of a blade.

In truth, Time seems to me something so inconceivable that I should be inclined to believe that it has no existence at all, and that what we call Time is nought but a fiction which we have invented to punish us. I was rejoicing at having found this definition of Time, though obscure as even Time itself, when another clock struck twelve, and this caused me an unpleasant sensation.

I am always rather irritable when engaged in an insoluble problem, and this second warning of the clock was very discomposing to a philosopher like myself, but I was plunged into the depths of despair a few seconds afterwards, when I heard, far away, a third clock, that of the Convent of the Capuchins, on the other side of the river, also strike twelve, as if to spite me.

When my aunt used, somewhat roughly, to summon an ancient retainer, of whom, however, she was very fond, in her impatience she was not content with ringing once, but kept on pulling the bell without stopping till the servant came. “Come at once, Mlle. Branchet,” and the latter, annoyed at being thus hurried, used to come very leisurely, and answer very sarcastically, before she got into the room, “Coming, Madame, coming.” Such also was my frame of mind when I heard that inane clock of the Capuchins strike twelve, for the third time. “I am quite aware of it,” I exclaimed, stretching out my hands