On the Discovery of Rilke

Neuchâtel, 1915. How can so many days of such clarity and depth melt away without leaving the slightest trace? All then seemed new to our eyes. Events proceeded with a spirited and perilous mobility. Things owed their meaning not to themselves but to the scent of the season, the colour of the air, the suggestion of a lake, to a thought from the sky. In a headlong rush we devoured Taine, Renan, Barrès, and the news of a certain war which was already making itself heard across the world. But of what importance Taine or Renan, what of Verdun or the Marne against the contented crackling of a fire of pine logs in the hearth of a chalet lost in the combes of Chaumont, or beside the puerile pleasure taken by a few friends in ransacking the liqueur trove of some resigned parent, or beside a nocturnal walk at the close of afternoon beneath the trees lining the quay, between the lake of silver and the old château shaken by a passing tram crammed with schoolchildren and young girls?

To be frank, we were seventeen. To us Rousseau seemed an older brother whom we addressed on first-name terms and to whom we were now making a pilgrimage, crossing over to St Peter's Island1 upon a flower-bedecked boat filled with young girls and students in velvet berets. We set out in the depths of night on the most marvellous and surreal walks, searching out a reflection of ourselves, in the damp orchards of Saint-Blaise, in the gorges of the Areuse or on some lane winding through the vineyards.

Some mornings our youth weighed less than a desire. In the evening, on occasion, Marcel Hofer-who was yet to be named Lucien Marsaux and had not then written either the Prodigues or Le Carnaval des vendanges2-drew me into his room, whose windows, open to the breath of the Föhn, looked over the port, to read me lines such as these:

Oh hazy weather, sky of grey,

tree that a breath has barely disturbed, 

innocent sweetness where time invites you, 

oh hazy weather, sky of grey.

Quiet afternoon,

the schoolchildren's song, oh lost steps 

below the paths where coming joyfulness 

gleams in the meek branches.

Unless it was this little poem to which a part of our youth clung:

To the festival clear and pure 

Where no women appeared, 

The white clouds alone were

(carried on a weak wind),

invited by spring.

It was on an afternoon in that ageless season, perhaps a rainy day, certainly a spring day, that I was paying a visit to an old Alsatian friend, indulgent to our youth to the extent of fostering our vague literary curiosities: Professor Schneegans. The library of this scholarly specialist in literature of the Middle Ages included not only the classic texts of the Bibliotheca Romanica,3 to which he guides us with such intelligence, but still the best authors of the Mercure de France4 and La Nouvelle Revue française.5 Taking advantage of the permission he had granted, I would go over from time to time and draw from its shelves a Claudel, a Francis Jammes, an André Gide or a Remy de Gourmont.

By what stroke of fate could it be that a slight cardboard chapbook, its German title printed in gothic script, found itself that day squeezed between two volumes which carried as watermark the Symbolist caduceus? As if the significance of that discovery I was about to make, without realizing it, had gifted me in that moment with the power to record more clearly, I see with utmost precision the study lined with books, the shelf I explored that day, the reflection that emanated from the glass door of the corridor, and even now I can sense at my fingertips how the rib felt protruding from the solid spine of that little volume.

Then I remember nothing, except that, beneath the green and white cover, flowering like a design from a tapestry, this little book bore a strange title: Chant de l'amour et de la mort du Cornette Christoph Rilke.6 I took it, along with a Laforgue or a Suarès, only opening it a few weeks later.

In which of the furnished apartments which we had successively occupied in this Swiss city (moving on to a more stable set-up, awaiting the end of the war which we persisted in believing was imminent) did I read this poem by Rainer Maria Rilke for the first time? Was it avenue du Premier-Mars, where our neighbour was an elderly, virtually deaf German professor who introduced his students to Sophocles and Euripides, raising his voice (which he himself barely heard any more) to declaim these verses from Sophocles' Antigone-'Shaft of the sun, fairest light of all that have dawned on Thebes of the seven gates, you have shone forth at last, eye of golden day, advancing over Dirce's streams!' Or perhaps it was at the corner of rue du Musée, where from my window I would sometimes spy J.-H. Rosny aîné7 strolling along the lake with his distracted faun-like face shaded by a beard? I no longer remember. But I know that when finally, one evening, I opened this little book, the distant ride of Cornet Christoph Rilke across the plains of Hungary suddenly seemed more real to me than the war which shook Europe to its core:

Riding, riding, riding, through the day, through the night, through the day.

Ride, ride, ride.

And courage is so wearied and the longing remains so great. There are no mountains now, barely even a tree. Nothing dares to stand up. Strange huts squat thirstily near marshy wells. Not a tower anywhere. Always the same view. You have two eyes too many. Only at night sometimes you imagine you know the way. Perhaps at night we always return to the piece of land we laboriously won under a foreign sun? That may be. The sun is heavy here, as at home in mid-summer. But it was summertime when we said our farewells. The dresses of the women shone for a long while out of the green. And it's so long we have been riding. It must be autumn. At least yonder the sorrowful women know us.

So there was this strange country where young soldiers withered like flowers on their velvet saddles, then came to life breathing a rose or recollecting a song. Between the fires of the bivouacs beat the heart of a world that we had always sensed and whose existence was finally revealed to us. Horses were carried away, music was lost in a park, there was wine, there was blood. There were also clouds, as in the sky of our own springtime, and the night sometimes leant over these images, fresh as a woman. Yes it was a dream, but it was more: life, more real, more disturbing than we could have ever imagined. And someone had seen these shimmering figures pass over clouds, one evening, in his room, someone, a poet, perhaps a young man, who had that somewhat strange name which we heard for the first time: Rainer Maria Rilke.

I read this book in one sitting and Marcel Hofer read it after me. Then, very rapidly, other works by Rilke began to surround it on my desk. These were The...