Letters to an Unknown. Prosper Merimee

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СКАЧАТЬ It is difficult for me to decide which colour I prefer. Only, I advise you not to powder your hair. There is a terrible Greek word which signifies black hair. Melanchaites (Μελαγχαἱτης); this χα has a diabolical sound.

      I shall remain in Paris all the fall, I fancy, hard at work on a moral book, which will be about as amusing as the social war in which you will engage in Naples. Good-bye. You promised me some words of affection, and while I am still waiting for them, I am not very sanguine of receiving them.

      You used to admire my wealth of antique gems. Alas! the other day I lost my most beautiful one, a magnificent Juno, while doing a kind act; that is, while carrying home a drunken man who had fractured his thigh. And that stone was an Etruscan. Juno held a scythe, and there is no other monument where she is so represented. Do sympathise with me!

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      You write charmingly in Greek, and much more legibly than you write in French. But who is your Greek teacher? You can not make me believe that you have learned to write that running hand from a book only. Who is the professor of rhetoric at D.?

      Your letter is very gracious. I say this because I know that you enjoy compliments, and also because it is true. As I shall never learn, however, to correct my unfortunate habit of saying what I think to people who are not all the world to me, you may as well know that I see you are making rapid progress in wickedness, and that I am grieved thereby. You are becoming ironical, sarcastic, and even diabolical. All these words are, as you know, taken from the Greek, and your professor will explain to you what I mean by diabolical; διἁβλος, that is, calumniator. You ridicule my best qualities, and even when you praise me you do so with reservations and hesitations which rob the praise of all its worth.

      It is a fact that at one time in my life I frequented bad society, but I was attracted to it through curiosity only, and I was always there as a stranger in a strange country. As for good society, I have found it often enough deadly tiresome. There are two places where I am at ease, at least, where I flatter myself I am in my proper element: first, among unpretentious people whom I have known for a long time; secondly, in a Spanish venta, with mule-drivers and Andalusian peasants. Write this in my funeral oration, and you will have told the truth.

      If I mention my funeral oration, it is because I believe it is time for you to compose it. I have been seriously ill for a long time, and especially for the last two weeks. I have attacks of dizziness, spasms of pain, and frightful headaches. Something terrible must have happened to my brain, and I fancy that before long I may become, as Homer says, a companion of the shadowy Proserpine. I should like to know what you would say then. I should be charmed if you were to grieve for two weeks. Do you think this is too much to ask?

      I am spending part of the night writing, or else in tearing up what I wrote the night before, consequently I make slow progress. What I am writing interests me, but the question is, Will it interest the public? I consider the ancients far more interesting than ourselves; they had no such paltry aims, nor were they so engrossed as we are in a multitude of silly trifles. I find that my hero, Julius Caesar, at the age of fifty-three, committed all sorts of follies for the sake of Cleopatra, forgetting all else for her; this is why he came so near drowning, both literally and figuratively. What man of our century, among our statesmen, I mean, who is not completely callous, completely heartless, by the time he aspires to a seat in the Senate? I should like to explain the difference between that age and our own, but how shall I do it?

      Have you come to a passage in the Odyssey that I consider wonderful? It is where Ulysses is living with Alcinoüs, still unknown, and after dinner a poet comes before him and sings of the war of Troy. The little that I have seen of Greece gives me a clearer understanding of Homer. Everywhere throughout the Odyssey is seen that amazing love cherished by the Greeks for their native land. There is in modern Greek a charming word: it is ξενιτεἱα, an alien. To be in a strange land is for a Greek the greatest of misfortunes, but to die there is the most terrible calamity of which they can conceive.

      You scoff at my epicureanism. Have you ever tried to imagine the nature of the entrails which the Greek heroes ate with such relish? The modern philosophers still eat them: they are called κονκονρἑτζι, and are simply delicious. There are little wooden skewers made of the fragrant wood of the mastic tree, with something crisp and spicy around them, which makes one readily understand why the priests used to reserve for themselves this dainty morsel from their victims.

      Good-bye. If I were to pursue this subject, you would think me more of a glutton than I am. I have no appetite at all, and nothing in the way of little delicacies can any longer tempt me. This means that I am only fit to throw to the crows. There will be deuced weather all through October, and that will finish me!

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      Paris, October 24, 1842.

      You are exceedingly kind to leave me in ignorance of that part of the globe which is so fortunate as to possess you. Shall I address this letter to Naples, or to ..., or even to Paris? In your last letter you say that you are about to start for Paris, perhaps for Italy, and since then not a single word of news. I have a suspicion that you are here, and that you will inform me of the fact after you have left; this will be highly in character.

      Since writing to you I went away for several days, when, upon my return, I found your letter, dated so long ago that I thought it useless to send an answer to.... I marvel greatly that you have learned without assistance to write the Greek characters, as you say you have. If you will only be a little patient, with such talent as yours you will become a second Madame Dacier. For my own part, I no longer take any interest either in Greek or in French; I have fallen into a fossil state, and whether I read or write, the letters dance up and down before my eyes in a most disagreeable way.

      You ask if there are any Greek romances. Certainly there are, but in my opinion they are very tiresome. You might procure a translation of Theagenia and Charicleia, which the late Racine liked so well. Try to swallow it, if you can. There is also Daphnis and Chloe, translated by Courier. The latter is affectedly artless, and none too meritorious. Finally, there is an admirable story, but it is very, very immoral. I refer to The Ass, by Lucian, also translated by Courier. No one ever admits that he has read it, but it is his masterpiece. About that you must decide for yourself. I wash my hands of the responsibility.

      The trouble with the Greeks is that their ideas of decency, and even of morality, were very different from ours. There are many things in their literature which might shock, nay, even disgust you if you understood them. After reading Homer, you can take up confidently the tragedy writers, who will amuse you, and whom you will enjoy because you have a taste for the beautiful, a sentiment which the Greeks possessed in the highest degree, and which a happy few of us inherit from them.

      If you have the courage to undertake history, you will be charmed with Herodotus, Polybdus, and Xenophon. I find Herodotus enchanting, and know of nothing more entertaining. Begin with The Anabasis, or with the Retreat of the Ten Thousand. Take a map of Asia, and follow the course of these ten thousand rascals in their journey. It is a gigantic Froissard. Then read Herodotus, and finally Polybdus and Thucydides. The last two are very serious. Procure also a copy of Theocritus, and read The Syracusans. I would recommend also Lucian, who is the wittiest of all the Greek writers, according to our standards of wit, but he is very wicked, and so I dare not.

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