Filled with astonishment, horror and pity, I stammered
out:
“But—that tress—did it
really exist?”
The doctor rose, opened a cabinet full of phials and
instruments and tossed over a long tress of fair hair
which flew toward me like a golden bird.
I shivered at feeling its soft, light touch on my
hands. And I sat there, my heart beating with
disgust and desire, disgust as at the contact of anything
accessory to a crime and desire as at the temptation
of some infamous and mysterious thing.
The doctor said as he shrugged his shoulders:
“The mind of man is capable of anything.”
I rented a little country house last summer on the
banks of the Seine, several leagues from Paris, and
went out there to sleep every evening. After
a few days I made the acquaintance of one of my neighbors,
a man between thirty and forty, who certainly was
the most curious specimen I ever met. He was
an old boating man, and crazy about boating. He
was always beside the water, on the water, or in the
water. He must have been born in a boat, and
he will certainly die in a boat at the last.
One evening as we were walking along the banks of
the Seine I asked him to tell me some stories about
his life on the water. The good man at once became
animated, his whole expression changed, he became eloquent,
almost poetical. There was in his heart one great
passion, an absorbing, irresistible passion-the river.
Ah, he said to me, how many memories I have, connected
with that river that you see flowing beside us!
You people who live in streets know nothing about
the river. But listen to a fisherman as he mentions
the word. To him it is a mysterious thing, profound,
unknown, a land of mirages and phantasmagoria, where
one sees by night things that do not exist, hears
sounds that one does not recognize, trembles without
knowing why, as in passing through a cemetery—and
it is, in fact, the most sinister of cemeteries, one
in which one has no tomb.
The land seems limited to the river boatman, and on
dark nights, when there is no moon, the river seems
limitless. A sailor has not the same feeling
for the sea. It is often remorseless and cruel,
it is true; but it shrieks, it roars, it is honest,
the great sea; while the river is silent and perfidious.
It does not speak, it flows along without a sound;
and this eternal motion of flowing water is more terrible
to me than the high waves of the ocean.
Dreamers maintain that the sea hides in its bosom
vast tracts of blue where those who are drowned roam
among the big fishes, amid strange forests and crystal
grottoes. The river has only black depths where
one rots in the slime. It is beautiful, however,
when it sparkles in the light of the rising sun and
gently laps its banks covered with whispering reeds.
The poet says, speaking of the ocean,
