Free The Chateau d'Argol by Julien Gracq Page A

seemed to transport the senses into an unknown region, and, by means of an incredible perversion, to endow the ear with all the graces of touch and sight. Meanwhile, although the artist had already given full rein to a tremulous and incoercible passion, it seemed to Albert apparent from now on, that even in the full plenitude of his improvisation, whose curious arabesques still kept something of the tentative character of an experiment, Herminien was searching for the key to an even loftier soaring, the necessary support for a final leap whose completely decisive consequences were at once both forecast and unpredictable, and that he was hesitating on the very brink of that abyss whose glorious approaches he described with such wild enveloping grace.
    Clearly now—and with every moment it became more apparent to Albert—he was looking for the unique angle of incidence at which the eardrum, deprived of its power of interception and of diffusion, would become permeable like pure crystal, and would change this thing of flesh and blood into a sort of prism of total reflection , where sound would be accumulated instead of passing through, and would irrigate the heart with the same freedom as the sanguine medium, thus restoring to the desecrated word ecstasy its true significance. A sonorous vibration, growing ever more concentrated, seemed the exterior sign of the sombre fever of his quest, and settled everywhere swarmingly like bees out of a suddenly shattered hive. Finally a note, held with marvellous steadiness, shrilled in incredible splendour, and taking off as from a beach of sound, rose a phrase of ineffable beauty. And still higher, in a mellow golden light which seemed to accompany the descent into the chapel of a sublime grace as an answer to his prayer, Herminien's fingers resounded, as if a light and consuming warmth ran through them, the song of virile fraternity. And the final breath that gradually left the lungs as it soared to unbelievable heights, let the salutary tide of a sea, as light and free as the night, rise into the completely vacant body.
     
     

THE FOREST
    D URING THE DAYS that followed, endless rains descended upon Argol. Night and day, with unrelenting persistence, through all the echoing rooms could be heard the hammering of their myriad drops, and, in a slower rhythm, against the background of the shower that furiously lashed the ground, the fantastic dripping of the thick globules falling from the branches, one by one, like sterile, liquid fruit, and prolonging their measured strokes with the particular savagery, the inexplicable meticulousness of a torture. A heavy idleness took possession of the inmates of the castle, and with rare and insignificant words they appeared persistently to avoid each other, to such an extent that even their chance meetings in the mazes of the winding corridors, filled with a faltering white light which seeped through the curtains of the rain as though diffused by the moisture ceaselessly streaming down the walls, engendered a visible malaise. Even their protracted and assiduous meditations borrowed from the hypnotic monotony of the rain a strange and persistent perspicacity that passed into and continued without any apparent diminution through their dreams even in the midst of their quiet slumber, which now, in the heart of the dim twilight reigning throughout the castle, had become their most natural and, without restriction, their fullest mode of existence—and from which each morning they were awakened not so much by the imperfect daylight as by a gradual and singular clairvoyance.
    And so, in the midst of an indefinable anxiety in which the lucid conscience scrutinized, one by one, the most secret recesses of the heart, unfolded another wholly imaginary day which, throughout its entire lugubrious duration, wore the blank, wan look attributed in most descriptions to the dawn. It seemed as though the different scattered members of the day, unable to reassemble so