"In any case they are brave as well as worthy peasants!"
But Villiers was no longer listening: his imagination had followed the warriors of the Ogowe and was wandering far away, and the part of the man that was left with us expressed itself in a confused monotone, mingled with laughter. He toyed with his ideas, as one amuses oneself at the seashore, by letting the sand fall in cascades between the fingers. But I well knew that there were some precious stones in the sand that Villiers sifted, and I lay in wait for these.
When we were finally seated on grassy hillocks in the shadows of the great trees of the English Garden, where we could look out over the fresh meadows starred with saffron blossoms like thousands of goblin fires, and the nearer willows, of a vivid green, with long strands trailing in the Isar, then at last I began to distinguish some light amid the obscurities of the discourse of Villiers.
"I have a glimpse of a misty sea, a dreamlike twilight around an unknown isle, then, in a luminous eddy, a great sphinx emerges from the waves and swims toward the bank. Across her back a violet banner is floating, and on the banner in letters of gold gleams the word: Inviolata!"
"And that is all," said Villiers; "it will never connect itself with anything and will never be explained. The intense impression, the charm, the mystery, the disquieting strangeness, are all in the picture itself, seen through an opening in the clouds, and never more to be forgotten."
"And there are some poems," added he, "which should have but a single stanza: this one for example:--
'La lourde clé du rêve à ma ceinture sonne....[1]
Isn't that complete enough? Isn't that magnificent? What could one add to that? In my foolishness and desire to make a poem I once tried--impossible! There is nothing to add. Nor is there to this other line:--
'O pasteur, Hespérus à l'occident s'allume!'[2]
The melancholy of the hour, the clear evening, the shining star and the pastoral life, it is all there; why seek for anything further?"
"It is true," said I, "that that kind of stanza, the single stanza in which a whole poem seems to be condensed, is sufficient unto itself and disdains rhyme. I have composed one myself, very absurd, but who could find a rhyme to add to it?