Paris Spleen: little poems in prose

XIII: Widows

24 xiii Widows In public gardens, Vauvenargues5 writes, there are lanes haunted mainly by disappointed ambition, by unlucky inventors, by fame come to nothing, by broken hearts, by all those tumultuous and deadended souls in which the last gasp of a storm still growls, and who shun insolent stares from the merry and idle. Such shady retreats are rendez-vous for those whom life has crippled. These are the places towards which poets and philosophers prefer to aim their bold conjectures. There they find pasture. For if there is one place they disdain to visit, it is, as I have suggested elsewhere, the high glee of the rich. Its hollow turbulence does not attract them. They feel irresistibly drawn towards things feeble, ruined, depressed, orphaned. An experienced eye never errs. In these rigid or dejected features, these sunken eyes lackluster or agleam with the latest sparks from the fray, in many deep creases, movements slow or spasmodic, it immediately deciphers unnumbered legends of love deceived, of unacknowledged devotion, of efforts unrewarded, of hunger and cold lived through humbly and in silence. Have you not noticed widows on solitary benches, poor widows? In weeds or not, they are easy to recognize. There is always, for that matter, in the mourning of the poor some lack, some absence of harmony that makes it more heart-rending. They must skimp over their sorrows. The rich promote theirs in high style. Which is the sadder widow, the more touching, the one with her arm around a child who cannot share her reverie or one alone? I am not sure . . . I happened once to follow for hours an old and afflicted 5. Short-lived eighteenth-century author from Provence, famous for his Maxims and Reflections. 25 woman, stiff, straight, under a threadbare shawl, her whole carriage indicating stoic pride. She was evidently condemned by her absolute solitude to habits of an elderly celibate; the masculine cast of her manners added a mysterious piquancy to the austerity. I do not know in what miserable café and in what manner she breakfasted. I followed her to a reading room and watched a long time while she went through the newspapers, her eyes, already scorched with tears, searching for something of intense and personal interest. Finally, in the afternoon, under a fine autumn sky, one of those skies from which masses of regrets and memories sift down, she sat apart in a park, to listen, off from the crowd, to the kind of concert army bands provide for the people of Paris. That was undoubtedly the meagre debauch of the old innocent (or the purified old woman), the well-deserved consolation for one of those dull days, friendless, talkless, joyless, without crony, that God had let fall on her, perhaps for years now! three hundred sixty-five days each year. Another: I can never stop myself, curious if not always sympathetic, from taking in the horde of outcasts who mill about on the fringes of a concert in the park. The orchestra sends out across the night songs of celebration, of triumph, of voluptuousness. Dresses trail shimmering; glances cross; the idle, wearied from doing nothing, dawdle, feigning indolently to savor the music. Nothing here but riches, fortune; nothing but what breathes out or breathes in unconcern and the pleasure of taking life easy; nothing—except that rabble pressing up against the outside barrier, receiving gratis, at the wind’s pleasure, fragments of music, gawking at the glittering furnace within. Always of interest: joys of the rich reflected in the eyes of the poor. But this particular day, among the people clad in cheap smocks or chintz, I noticed a figure whose nobility made a striking contrast with the surrounding triviality. It was a woman tall, majestic, with an air so noble I could not remember having seen her equal in portraits of past aristocratic beau- 26 ties. Her whole person emanated an aura of haughty quality. Her face, sad and emaciated, was in perfect accord with the deep mourning of her dress. She too, like the common crowd around her, to which she gave no heed, fixed her eye on the luminous world with a steady gaze, and she listened with a gently nodding head. Singular vision! “Certainly,” I said to myself, “her poverty, if poverty it is, can be from no mean stinginess; her noble face assures it. Why then remain voluntarily in a crowd...