Читать книгу Letters to an Unknown - Prosper Merimee - Страница 26

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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!