Story of the Month — A Masterpiece by André Gide (La Symphonie Pastorale)

“Nothing holds true but the true” is an old proverb that will stay forever new and in force in politics, economics, morals, art, and literature. People do not call a man a “world author” unless he has fed everyone who hungers for literature and quenched everyone who thirsts for truth, under every sun and at every moment.

Among these is André Gide. On the morrow of his death people set about revisiting his masterpieces, and I set about choosing, for my readers, men and women, of “The Woman's Voice,” a masterpiece in which he reached the very edge of the miraculous when, with the simplicity of children, he portrayed the most violent tragedy that can be cast upon some of those who have been denied the blessing of sight.

I could go far in describing the masterpiece LA SYMPHONIE PASTORALE, but I will not draw out the introduction.

The hero of the novel is the spiritual pastor of one of the mountain parishes of Switzerland, called one day to a wretched hut in a spot untrodden by men, to pray before the bed of a dying woman. In the room there were only a kindhearted neighbor and a little servant girl. After performing his religious duty he took up his civil duty concerning the burial, the family, and the effects...

The whole legacy was a blind girl, who had grown up in the house of her aunt; and the aunt, being deaf, had never troubled to speak with her. The two lived in an unbroken silence, and that upbringing amounted to setting food before the blind girl at its appointed hours, leading her from her filthy bed to the stove in the season of snow and bitter cold, or pushing her toward the door of the hut, when the snows melted, to warm herself in the heat of the sun—

And without a thought for the practical consequences — his wife's anger, the expenses of his house and his five children, the smallness of his salary — he wrapped the girl in a blanket, set her in his one-horse carriage, and turned back home. Beside him she was a mass of flesh without a soul, and he kept saying to himself: Is she asleep? What difference is there, for her, between sleeping and waking? My Lord! Surely within this mute body there is a soul waiting for a ray of Thy mercy to touch it! My Lord! Wilt Thou grant my love to drive from her the darkness of this night?

When he reached the house his wife cried out:

What have you taken upon yourself now? Are the cares and the costs of five children not enough for us?

He lifts the blind girl down from the carriage and leads her into the house; and no sooner does he let go of her hand for a minute than he hears her screaming. There was no human note in her voice; she made mutterings like the whining of newborn dogs. He tries to seat her on a chair and she drops to the floor, all in a heap; he walks her over beside the stove, and only when she huddles down next to it, as she used to do in the hut, does her calm come back.

His wife obeys the call of goodness, the call of the heart, and hastens to help him; then she obeys the call of reason and says:

“And what are you going to do” with this? The contempt of it wounds him; he lays his hand on the blind girl's forehead and says to his wife and children, who had formed a circle around him:

“I have brought home the lost sheep.”

The storm breaks. He orders the children out; the wife returns to laying out her troubles, and he replies, acknowledging the weight of the burdens on her shoulders and quickening the sense of goodness in her heart, until she relents and sets about washing the girl and cutting her hair, which was alive with vermin; then she takes her to the bath, cleans her body, and dresses her in clothes of her eldest daughter's.

In the days that followed, the good pastor fell into deep despair. He had dreamed of bringing a little light into the blind girl's heart — but how could he, when she was blind and dumb in heart and body and mind? The only answer to kindness

and tenderness was the muttering of a savage animal that grew quiet only at mealtimes, falling upon its food with the greed of famished wolves.

*

A doctor visits the pastor, takes an interest in the case of the girl, Gertrude, and marvels at her mental backwardness, blindness being her only infirmity. His wonder ceases when he learns that no one had ever spoken to the girl in all her life, and he shows the pastor a method for waking her mental powers: first letting her touch the things that bear names, then repeating the names over and over in her hearing; or feeding her something whose name is repeated again and again until she grows familiar with it — and so on...

With the patience of Job the pastor gives himself over to teaching the blind girl — and to the unending reproaches of his wife for spending on what is useless the time set apart for useful work. Nothing pained him more than her insistence that his efforts were like clutching at the wind, and that he had never taken such care of any of his children as he took of this blind girl.

At last the happy hour strikes... That mind asleep in darkness awakens, and the first glimmerings of morning show. Here is the look of understanding, expressing itself in a sweet smile floating for the first time over that face rigid as the faces of statues — is it a smile, or something like a transfiguration? The features of the face stirred like that sudden light which runs before the dawn on the heights of the Alps and sets the snowy summit trembling, drawing it out of the belly of night! And here is the pastor, standing astounded before an angelic face on which, even before the radiance of intelligence, are traced the signs of love and gratitude.

*

After the slowness that went before the awakening, the girl's intelligence devours the course at a gallop. She learns to read by the method of the blind and studies the Gospels and the life of Jesus. Winter ends, and the pastor takes her out to the fields, where she comes to know the worlds of plants and flowers, of birds and animals. In that old hut she had been shut within four walls, and rarely did she step even toward the door, and then only to look out from it upon the world of lights. She used to believe that the singing of the birds was the child of light, like this warmth — the sun's warmth tickling her hands and cheeks. She used to think that the warm air sang as the water sings in the kettle before the fire. In truth she had never taken notice of anything; she had lived as if in a deep daze and torpor until the pastor laid his hand upon her forehead. And when the pastor told her that these songs come from the throats of living creatures whose only work is to give voice to the joys of nature, she stood as one bewitched, and from that day she took to saying, in her hours of gladness:

“I am as merry as a bird.”

She would ask:

— Is it true that nature is as beautiful as the birds tell us? Why do you not speak of its beauty — and why do you not speak, my lord pastor? Are you afraid of grieving me because I cannot see it? Do not be afraid! I listen to the birds, and I believe I understand everything they say!

The pastor answers her:

— Those who see do not understand the songs of the birds as you do, my little one.

— And why should singing belong only to the birds? Why do the animals not sing?

Before questions like these, perplexity would overcome the pastor...

Then she asks again: are the birds the only animals that fly?

— The butterflies fly too, my child.

— And does the butterfly sing?

— The butterfly tells its joy in another way; its songs are painted in colors on its two wings...

*

And between a good man wholly given to bringing light into a darkened heart and mind, and a jealous woman, and a girl denied everything and then blessed with knowledge, tenderness, and love, a silent, violent tragedy takes form.

*

The pastor takes his ward to a concert to hear the famous piece, La Symphonie pastorale, played by the orchestra of the town of Neuchâtel. There her artistic taste shows itself, and she swims in a world of heavenly, enchanted bliss. On the way home a deep silence takes hold of her, which she breaks by asking:

The blind girl — Is it true that everything you behold is as beautiful as that?

The pastor — As beautiful as what, my dear?

The blind girl — As beautiful as that scene in the symphony, “On the Banks of the Brook”?

The pastor — Those who see do not know their own happiness.

The blind girl — But I, blind as I am, know the happiness of hearing! My lord! Do you feel how happy I am? Look at me! Does not false speech show upon the face? I can feel lying speech in the voice! Do you remember the day my aunt — so she used to call the pastor's wife — scolded you because you are no good at doing her any service? I asked you then whether you were crying, and you denied it, and I cried out: my lord pastor, you are lying! I felt from the ring of your voice that you were not telling the truth! Do not try to hide anything from me — first because I am blind, and second because I would not believe you. Tell me, my lord, are you not unhappy?

— No, I am not unhappy.

— But you cry sometimes!

— I have cried at times.

— Have you cried since that day?

— No. I have not cried.

— And have you not felt, since then, the need to cry?

— No, Gertrude.

— And since that lie to me, have you felt the need to lie?

— No, my dear child.

— Will you promise me never again to deceive me, and to tell the truth?

— I promise.

— Then tell me at once: am I beautiful?

— And what does it matter to you to know?

— It weighs on my mind! I want to know that I am not a false note in the symphony of the universe!

— My child, a clergyman does not concern himself with the beauty of faces.

— Why?

— Because the beauty of souls is enough for him!

— You would rather I believed myself ugly.

Gertrude! You know that you are beautiful!!

When they reached the house his wife gave him to understand that she did not approve of his going to concerts, and that he did for Gertrude what he did not do for his own children — and it pained him that she said this for the blind girl to hear. When the two of them were alone in the room he drew near her, raised her small hand to his face, and said:

— Do you see? I did not cry this time.

— No! This time you did not cry; it was my turn.

And he looked at her face and saw it drowned in tears...

The days pass; the blind girl grows, and the pastor's children grow. The eldest of them, Jacques, goes off to Lausanne to pursue his theological studies, and when he comes home one day to spend the summer holiday in his father's house, he gives himself to helping his father in teaching Gertrude. She had gone a long way by then in the study of music and had begun to accompany the church choir on Sundays and feast days. And the blind girl moves to the house of a charitable lady who opened for her, in her own house, a little school for the blind, bringing her at first two small young ladies for her to teach reading and some handwork.

And “love and youth and the longed-for hope” go seeking to join two limpid souls...

And the pastor moves to cut off their road to happiness, and sent the young lover away before the school holiday was over.

A famous doctor hears of Gertrude and volunteers to perform a surgical operation, having satisfied himself of its success after examining her eyes minutely. Gertrude goes to the hospital and comes back with her sight restored. The pastor's family made ready to receive her; the children decked the house for her with all the flowers of the hillside... And the pastor waits...

The carriage arrived, and from it stepped the doctor, and Gertrude, and the pastor's wife, and the children...

And here I had best take the last chapter from the memoirs of the hero of the novel, written on the evening of that day:

“... Into what an abyss I have sunk! Thy mercy, O my Lord! I will cease to love her — but do not suffer her to die. I was right to be afraid! What has she done? What did she mean to do? My wife and my daughter said they went with her to her house and delivered her to Madame M... After that came the reports, all of them strange and contradictory. The gardener says he saw her walking along the bank of the little river, then crossing the bridge, then bending down and disappearing into the water, the current carrying her to near the weir. The doctor is still here, and he does not know how to explain the accident. She is still out of her senses — or else she does not wish to speak.

She breathes with great labor, and the doctor fears pneumonia. When they drew her out of the water they neglected to take off her clothes, and they were soaked with water icy as frost.

Madame M explains the accident thus: she wanted to pick the flowers that grow in abundance on the bank, and, not yet being accustomed to seeing things, she took the carpet of flowers growing beside the water for dry ground; her foot slipped in the mud and she fell, and the current dragged her away!

Ah, my God, how I wish their account were true, that this weight might be lifted from my conscience! Her strange smile at luncheon kept troubling my mind, and I strained to persuade myself that this smile of hers was in keeping with her new gaze — a smile that seemed to me to run down her cheeks like tears. Before that strange smile I suffered at the shallowness of the company's gaiety... a gaiety in which she took no part, as though she had suddenly discovered some deep secret.

O my God! Have mercy! Grant that she may speak to me! Else how am I to live on? Did she wish for death because she had learned something? And what is it she saw, once she beheld the light? My friend! What is the tremendous thing that was kept hidden from you and that you discovered all at once?

I spent two hours beside her bed, my eyes on her hair, her forehead, her sallow cheeks, her thin eyelids closed upon a sorrow past all description, and on her hair, wet with water, thrown across the pillow. I stayed so, listening to her choked and troubled breathing.”

And in the diary, under the date of the following day:

“Miss M called me to her this morning and said that Gertrude had come back to her senses. When I entered her room she smiled at me and motioned me to sit beside her bed. I dared not put a question, and no doubt she in her turn feared that I would ask; so she said, to ward off every question:

— What do you call those little flowers, blue as the color of the sky, that grow beside the river? Will you bring me a bunch of them to have here by my bed?

Her forced playfulness hurt me; she understood, and said gravely:

— I cannot talk now. I am perishing of weariness. Go and pick me the flowers, and come back quickly.

She had not the strength to receive me during the day, so great was her exhaustion...

I saw her this evening, pillows all about her, propping her on every side so that she seemed to be sitting up. Her hair was plaited and gathered above her forehead, and woven into it were the blue spring flowers I had picked in the morning.

I laid my hand in hers, burning with fever; she kept hold of it, and then said:

— I must make a confession to you, pastor. I am afraid I shall die tonight. I lied to you this morning. No — what happened did not happen because I wanted to pick flowers! Will you forgive me if I say that I wanted to die?

At that I fell on my knees beside her bed, her thin hand in mine; she drew it away and began to stroke my forehead, and I buried my head in the bedclothes to smother my sobbing. She said tenderly:

— Do you find such great evil in what I did?

And when I did not answer, she went on:

— You see, my friend, that I fill a large place in your life and in your heart... and this became clear to me at once, the moment I returned. Or at least it appeared to me that the place I fill belongs

to another — and that “she” grieves because of it. My crime is that I did not feel this before today, and that I let you love me... But when her face suddenly appeared to me, when I saw on that poor face all the sorrow I saw, I could not bear that all of it should be of my own making... No. No. Do not blame me... Let me go, and give “her” back her happiness... But that is not all I wanted to say!

And I saw drops of sweat wetting her forehead. Then she shut her eyes, as though she wished to go back into blindness! And in a sad, mournful voice she began to speak, her voice rising little by little to the pitch of fervor:

— When I received my sight, my eyes opened upon a world more beautiful than I had ever dreamed. Never had I imagined the daylight so clear, the air so brilliant, the sky so vast. But neither had I imagined the brows of men so careworn. And when I entered your house, do you know what I saw? I saw — the first thing I saw — a sin, our sin. No — do not protest! Remember the words of the Lord Christ: “If ye were blind, ye should have no sin!” And now rise, pastor. Do not interrupt me; let me finish:

— When I was in the hospital I asked to have read to me, from the Holy Book, passages I did not know. I spent a whole day repeating the saying of Paul the Apostle:

“For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died!!”

She was speaking with the utmost fervor and in a loud voice, and when she came to these last words she repeated:

“Sin revived, and I died”

— and I shuddered from head to foot, and asked her:

— Who read you the epistle of Saint Paul?

— It was Jacques, your son; I sent for him to come to the hospital. Do you know that he has been converted?

This was more than I could bear, and I was on the point of begging her to be silent, but she went on:

— My friend, I shall bring you much grief, but it is better that no lie remain between us... When I saw Jacques, I knew for certain that it was he whom I loved, and not you! He had your face — I mean, your face as I used to imagine it while I was blind... Ah, why did you decree that he should be kept from me? I could have married him!

I cried out in despair:

— And you still can, Gertrude!

She said gravely:

He has entered the religious life. Then the tears choked her, and she was in a state of rapture of soul when she said:

— Ah, I want to confess to Jacques. You see that nothing is left me but to die. I am thirsty! Please call someone to me. I am suffocating! Leave me alone. I had hoped I should find rest after saying what I have said. Leave me! Let us part — I can no longer bear to see you!!!

So I left her, and called Miss M to take my place. I feared for her life, and was certain that my nearness made her condition more dangerous.”

*

From the pastor's diary on the third day:

“It was decreed that I should never see her again except in her last sleep. She died today at dawn, after a night of exhaustion and crisis.

Jacques arrived some hours after her death. And so at a single stroke I lost my son and Gertrude; it is as though, having been parted from each other, they resolved to flee from me together and be united in God.

When we parted, Jacques said to me:

— Father, it is not for me to reproach you; but it was your error that guided me.

In the evening I went down on my knees and asked my wife to pray for me, so sorely did I stand in need of help. With surpassing simplicity she recited the Lord's Prayer, keeping between verse and verse long silences, which the supplications of our two souls filled.

And I begged for tears. But how could I? My heart was drier than the desert!!!”

(Abridged from the French)