Michael Peverett: to its deep and lovely azure gives / The life of motion

Monday, February 15, 2021

to its deep and lovely azure gives / The life of motion

Ille-sur-Têt

[Image source: https://www.thehotelguru.com/best-hotels-in/france/ille-sur-tet . Photo by Thierry Llansades.]

I've been reading Mérimée again, something I find myself doing every decade or so.

Specifically "The Venus of Ille" ("La Vénus d'Ille", 1837) -- Surely, I thought, this story must have greatly influenced Daudet's Lettres de mon moulin (1869-79). Its opening very carefully establishes the location in Catalan Roussillon.

I was descending the final slope of Mount Canigou, and although the sun had already set, on the plain I could make out the houses of the little town of Ille, which was my destination.
"I don't suppose you know where Monsieur de Peyrehorade lives?" I asked the Catalan who had been acting as my guide since the previous day.
"Why, of course I do!" he exclaimed. "I know his house as well as I know my own. If it weren't so dark I'd point it out to you. It's the finest house in Ille ..."

Perhaps this coming off the mountain was autobiographical. Mérimée travelled all over France, it was his job as Inspector-General of Historic Monuments, and he was in this area in 1834, a year before he wrote the story. You can pretty much identify the exact point on the map where the narrator and the guide are standing, looking down on Ille-sur-Têt.

After a long dinner with his hosts, the narrator retires to his bedroom. It must be very late, but he can see the view.

The windows were shut. Before undressing I opened one of them so as to breathe in the fresh night air which, after that long supper, seemed delicious. Opposite lay Mount Canigou, a magnificent sight in any weather, but which that evening, by the light of a resplendent moon, seemed to me the most beautiful mountain in the world.

It's interesting to compare the pictures in our minds, reading this concise scene-setting, with actual photos.

Le Canigou in the distance, from the railway station at Ille-sur-Têt.

[Image source: Wikipédia .]

The landscape presented to this reader's mind was radically simplified compared with the photo. The Canigou, I see now, is not a single up-and-down mountain but a large massif surrounded by a corrugation of snaking ridges running down to foothills. One of the longest ridges comes down here at Ille (that's where the reported conversation must be taking place). Ille-sur-Têt is on a tongue of the Roussillon plain, just where it narrows into a river valley. On one side the valley is bordered by the Canigou, and on the other side, unmentioned by Mérimée, are other lower hills; that's where people go to visit the Orgues d'Ille-sur-Têt, a dramatic rock formation resembling the pipes of a church organ.

And yet, though the landscape we readers imagine is so uncluttered compared to the real physical geography, it does express a kind of truth. The Canigou does stand out. It's the easternmost part of the high Pyrenees, so it can be seen from a great distance and from everywhere on the Roussillon plain. It's a mountain that's also a landmark. We don't just see such mountains, we keep an eye on them. We accord them a significance, we feel their vastness. Located in the centre of the Catalan-speaking world, the Canigou has also become a cultural symbol.

The simplified terrain of fiction is, I think, one of its attractions for me. I love feeling so free of logistics and so privileged to be in on all the conversations. I can whistle around Paris in "The Etruscan Vase" ("Le Vase étrusque") so effortlessly, passing between crowded salon and boudoir and garden and luncheon party. I gain access to all these inner circles, I stand on the field with the duellists but with no risk of being shot.

In "The Venus of Ille" we feel doubly insulated from the catastrophe because the story is mediated through a narrator who feels little emotional connection with the victims, son and father. Layers of irony and flippancy give the story its original flavour. We keep turning it round in our minds, uncertain what to focus on and how we should take it. The text is both concise and wandering. There seems to be a parable about the destructiveness of love, and yet there's not much real love in evidence. There's a credible sense of provincial life in the story, but this is combined with a sensational tale and a cosmopolitan shrug. Perhaps its clearest message is that life resists interpretation.

Le Canigou, from Orgues d'Ille-sur-Têt.

[Image source: Wikipedia . Photo by Babsy.]

While reading about Le Canigou, I came across a poem by Sir Humphry Davy.

The orb of light its flood of lustre pours
From the mid-heavens upon the tranquil sea
Without a tide, whose silver mirror spreads,
Reflecting forms of mountain-majesty
Along the Iberian coast; and, more remote,
In gentle agitation feels the breeze,
That to its deep and lovely azure gives
The life of motion. All the morning mists
Have vanished, and the mid-day sunbeams sleep
Upon thy snows, or glitter where the streams
They feed with crystal waters pour in foam
Amidst thy dark deep glens and shaggy woods,
Where the bright pine and darker cork trees blend:
Their varied foliage forms a boundary
Where winter seems to mingle with the spring.
And lower still, the olive tree appears —
The work of culture, and the leafless vine,
And the green meadows, where the torrents sleep,
Or move obedient to the wants of man.

(Excerpt from "The Canigou", written by Sir Humphry Davy on 26 January 1814. Poem source . The poem is quoted in his brother John Davy's Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphry Davy (1839).)

Humphry Davy (1778 -1829), the son of a Cornish woodcarver, was one of those geniuses who could do anything. He wrote quite a lot of poetry, though that's lost amid his scientific triumphs. He discovered seven elements and discovered the elemental nature of two others. He created the first incandescent light. We use his words every day: sodium, calcium, chlorine ...

But I won't praise him for the Davy Lamp. That's the kind of technological advance, badged with the magical word "safety", that licenses small-scale exploitation to go large.

Coleridge was a keen participant in Davy's larking about with nitrous oxide (laughing gas). Their high jinks would lead, in the 1840s, to the first use of general anaesthetic in the west (the Japanese surgeon Hanaoka Seishū used a general anaesthetic from 1804).

Davy knew Coleridge and Wordsworth when they lived near Bristol and once they'd moved away they asked him to oversee the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge asked him to proofread and Wordsworth asked him to fix the punctuation. (The evidence suggests that he skimped on this.)

But if "The Canigou" is any indication then he certainly caught the music of "Tintern Abbey". Davy's restless mind is thinking about the tideless sea, the reflections, the "gentle agitation" further out and what causes it.

At this point the poet notices a British fleet standing out to sea, and the poem becomes patriotic. In January 1814 Napoleon's fall could be foreseen, Wellington was already in SW France.

Albion, thee I hail! —

Mother of heroes! mighty in thy strength!

Deliverer! from thee the fire proceeds

Withering the tyrant; not a fire alone

Of war destructive, but a living light

Of honour, glory, and security, —

A light of science, liberty, and peace!

(You would not suppose, reading these lines, that the reason Davy was in France was because he had just accepted Napoleon's Prix du galvanisme in recognition of his electro-chemical work.)

According to Dr Paris' Life of Sir Humphry Davy (1831), "A great poetic Genius has said, 'If Davy had not been the first Chemist, he would have been the first Poet of his age.'" (Paris mentions this in the context of criticizing the frivolity of those who lamented Davy's devotion to science.) I don't know if we should take this remark too seriously, or indeed if anyone really said it. It's usually attributed to Coleridge or Southey.