Reasons of State Read Online Free PDF Page B

exclaims the Distinguished Academician with a gesture of condemnation. I point out to him that this fragment figures in many manuals of literature for students of French.
    “An abomination, due to secular education,” says our visitor, qualifying the prose as amphigoric—pretentious, vocative, blown up with erudition and pedantic hellenisms. No. The people of our countries ought to look for the genius of the French language in other books, in other texts. Then they would discover the elegance of style, the distinction, the sovereign intelligence with which in
L’ennemi des lois
Maurice Barrès can show us in three lucid pages the fallacies and errors of Marxism—which are centred in the cult of the stomach—or give us a marvellous picture of Ludwig of Bavaria’s castles, in the phraseology of a true artist, very different from the professorial logomachy of a Renan. Or if we want to go back to the past century, let us read and reread Gobineau, that aristocrat of expression, master of the carefully constructed and unique phrase, who had exalted in his work the Super-Man, the Men of the Pléiade, sovereign spirits (according to him there were about three thousand in all Europe), proclaiming his inability to be interested in “the mass of those who are called men,” whom he saw as a swarm of despicable, irresponsible, and destructive insects, without Souls.
    At this point I decide to remain silent and not join in the discussion, because the question would bring to light an explanation that would be better avoided: during the fiestas for the Centenary of Mexican Independence, the authorities made arrangements for the wearers of sandals and shawls (
rebozos
), native musicians and cripples, to be kept away from the places where the main ceremonies took place, because itwas better that foreign tourists and guests of the government shouldn’t see the individuals our friend Yves Limantour called “the Kaffirs.” But in my country, where there are many—too many!—Indians, negroes, half-breeds, and mulattos, it would be difficult to hide away our “Kaffirs.” And I couldn’t see the Kaffirs belonging to our intelligentsia—who are extremely numerous—being exactly pleased by reading the
Essay on the Inequality of Human Races
by Count Gobineau. It would be a good moment to change the conversation.
    Luckily, “Für Elise” starts up again upstairs. And the Academician pounces on this fact to deplore the extravagances of modern music—or what is called “modern”—a cerebral, dehumanised art, an algebra of notes, alien to any form of feeling (just listen to the Schola Cantorum group in the Rue Saint-Jacques), which betrays the eternal principles of
melos
. There are exceptions, however: Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Vintemil, and above all our beloved Reynaldo Hahn—born in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, which is not unlike Surgidero de la Verónica. I know that my “
paisano
” (he always calls me “
paisano
” in his smooth creole Spanish when we meet anywhere), before writing his sublime choruses for Racine’s
Esther
, had begun work many years ago on a very beautiful opera full of nostalgia for his native tropics, the action taking place in picturesque surroundings in every way reminiscent of the Venezuelan coast he knew as a child, although the programme described it as a “Polynesian idyll”:
L’ile du rêve
, inspired by
Le mariage de Loti
—and “
Loti, Loti, voici ton nom
,” sang Rarahú in this history of an exotic love affair, whose plot, according to certain mischievous critics fond of demolishing everything, was too much like that of
Lakmé
. But, come to that, one could say the same of
Madame Butterfly
, a later work then Reynaldo’s. And just as in the old days his
Chansons Grises
were heard at one of the regular musicalevenings of the Quai Conti, we used to talk about people like the Belgian Chargé d’Affaires, the Comte d’Argencourt, who surrounded himself with sodomites although he wasn’t