Free Remember Me by David Stacton

sitting in the grotto when a footman announced Paul’s arrival. He did not stir. He wanted to hear those footsteps come eagerly over the rustic bridge. He shifted enough to have a view of the path. Paul would only come in expectation of patronage, but to be able to dispense patronage was better than to have no attractions at all.
    From a distance, for Ludwig was short sighted, it was clearly Lohengrin who approached him. He rose to meet him. He had decided to take him back into favour.
    Like so many dandies, Paul had always the air of having a permanent nose cold. At a distance of ten paces, obscured by rustling ferns, this did not show. At a distance of ten paces the face of Lohengrin dissolved into the wheaten face of the woodsman they had seen together , the face Ludwig had always sought and would always seek, open, affectionate, yet abstracted, the eternal face of the sleeping, who are more innocent and vulnerable and wiser than we are, and yet who have no faces of their own.
    Ludwig stopped, not wanting to be disillusioned. But Paul went on advancing, smiling sycophantically. For an instant Ludwig felt a pang of disappointment. The idealface faded. The face that remained, however, was at least familiar and affectionate, even kindly, and it was good to meet someone again. He had, besides, only to remove him in order to make him ideal again. Lohengrin lived always at the misty limits of the eye.
    For a moment he thrilled to the beauty of an actual face, before he pushed reality away.
    Spiritually the elegant are all of the same period. Paul’s was the face of 1824, that last year inthe modern world when beauty in a man was not culpable, but the goal of a society. In those days to possess the face of an ephebe was in itself an act of character, in the years before the rise of the cravat divorced the head from the body utterly, in the years before morals rose up and smote ethics dead. In those days the face was not a public mask, but the highest form of self-expression of which the body was capable, so that the beauty of the head was the epitome of the beauty of the body, not something alien to it. There is something elegiac about the faces of the 1820’s, something withdrawn and sad, like the best parts of the Greek Anthology. Ludwig often read the Greek Anthology, but the year had changed, 1866 was no time for dandies. The world was a little ashamed of itself by then.
    Ludwig and Paul had this in common, that they were both beautiful, and beautiful people share a vocabulary of gesture no one else may know. Within this vocabulary, understanding is possible. Love is not. So long as they remain strangers, they may know each other well enough.
    So for an instant there was understanding between them. Wagner was right. Paul had the head and manner of a painting by Phillip Otto Rünge, that sweet, troubled, rueful face. The mouth, too, trembled with a sensitivitypossible only to art, and the neck supported pride like a pedestal. About the skin of such people there is always a faintly floured quality, like that of sweet cake dough, perfumed and naked on a baker’s tray, the translucent quality of a glowing lamp. Ludwig gave in to desire, and stepped on to the familiar treadmill again. Sycophants have always the power to gratify our desires, and Ludwig had the power to have them gratified. But for our emotions sycophants can do nothing. You need two mirrors before you can see your own back. A sycophant offers us but one.
    Perhaps a mania for the stage can be infectious. Like Wagner, Paul had learned to act, and since the perimeter of his accomplishment was slight enough to fit a stage, he acted, on the whole, quite well. His true ambition was to marry an actress and manage a theatre. He responded to Ludwig well enough. Not even Schiller in the midst of an enthusiasm could have done so well with the material given him. Love, to Paul, was pure, altruistic gratitude for being admired. It was not his fault that he had reached that