“What does that recall to you? What does that make you think of?”—and amused us by the most unexpected analogies, most surprisingly exact, but of which none of the rest of us would have thought.
We lingered only a few more days at Biskra, then left for Touggourt, where we were to separate, for, aided by fatigue, the misunderstanding between Jammes and Rouart soon became intolerable. Jammes left us there. He left all alone, and his departure was pathetic. He was to return at once to Orthez and was persuaded he was decidedly not made to leave home. However, he readily consented to come to La Roque, and I have very pleasant memories of his stay with us.
Ghéon was our guest when Jammes came to join us. To tease him a little about his knowledge of natural history, that he liked to advance, and which did not appear to me very exact, we had agreed, Ghéon and I, to call the wasps “scorpion-fish.” There was a great abundance of them at that season: they entered by the open window of the dining-room, where, as soon as Jammes was seated, Ghéon exclaimed:
“Another scorpion-fish!”
Jammes, who saw nothing more than a wasp, surprised and disturbed, confessed his ignorance. “Scorpion-fish and wasp! Can they be confused? There is no relationship between them!” But soon Jammes. joined our game, to find that the name scorpion-fish indeed fitted them very much better; then, starting off, he proposed rebaptising many things, and finding for each object a name unexpectedly adequate. Thus we framed an extraordinary lexicon that entertained us all through his stay; eye-glasses became cavalry; a watch-key, a time-jack; some rather mediocre bordeau that my wife was serving at table was called outsider; but a rather remarkable burgundy was baptised by Jammes “nipon.” For this little game, the names found by him always seemed to us the best.
Jammes showed himself extremely attentive to my Aunt Demarest; rather flattered, moreover, I think, by the success he had with her; entertaining himself by making her laugh and sometimes shocking her a little.
“Madame Demarest, what does this remind you of?” he asked her at table, pointing out with his finger a peach, in a fruit dish, that a slug had spoiled considerably; it was a sort of peculiar cavity, yellowish and very ugly looking. My aunt fixed her “cavalry” on her nose, leaned over, examined a little, then declared simply that it didn’t remind her of anything. So Jammes, in his ringing voice, declared:
“The foramen of the priest’s ear.”
“Ah, Monsieur Jammes …”
And the servant who was serving us, bent double, stifled her laughter in a napkin.
After supper we organized a little game of squails around the big table in the reception room. They were little quoits of black and white box-wood that had to be thrown with a flip as near as possible to a metal jack, standing in the middle of the table, dislocating the opponents as much as possible, and playing the game with partners. Jammes called my aunt “the Talleyrand of the blacks,” which flattered her a great deal, for she played skillfully.
My aunt did not get up early, but when we took a walk in front of the house after breakfast, she could sometimes be seen at her bedroom window. She was a little near-sighted, and didn’t even see the deep bow Ghéon made to her. So Jammes said to him:
“Useless, dear friend.… Madame Demarest doesn’t recognize anybody before ten o’clock in the morning.”
That was the time she came down. But before that we had already left for our walk.
One day when Ghéon, Jammes and I had driven to Trouville, and were walking rapidly on the beach, Jammes, particularly excited, became suddenly worried; his face darkened; his eyes filled with tears. His silence bothered us, for until then he had not stopped talking.…
“No, there is nothing the matter with me.… But suddenly, I surprised a heliotrope scent.… And that scent awakens memories in me.…”
Then silence again; a silence we respected, and the walk ended without any one of us three saying a word. On our return, Jammes shut himself up in his room. And it was that night he composed one of his most beautiful Elegies (“In the abandoned domain where the great wind …”).
That elegy referred to another walk we had taken the evening before, in an “abandoned domain,” which served later as the scene for my Isabelle. Almost everything I relate in that book is authentic, and, when I was younger, I might have known the remarkable inhabitants of that chateau which I called “la Quartfourche,” and that, in reality, is called Formentin.
The next morning, when Jammes read me the lines he had composed during the night, as great as might be my admiration, I could not refrain from pointing out to him some imperfections that seemed to me to detract a little from his poem. He retired to fix it up; came back at the end of an hour:
“Dear friend,” he said to me, “I wanted to correct it but … I don’t know whether I have the right.”
I remained for a few moments without understanding. However, the sense of the words was clear: this poem having been written under the dictation of inspiration, every touching-up should be considered impious. Indeed, one can not imagine a mind more incapable of criticism, of himself as well as of others. And even the word “incapable” seems to me inexact. The spirit of criticism, according to Jammes, was always an attack on liberty, and immediately blanched love, religion and poetry.
I again encountered this self-sufficiency, later, under particularly painful circumstances. Charles-Louis Philippe had just died. The N. R. F. immediately prepared a special number for the man who had been one of its most important collaborators. Each one of Charles-Louis Philippe’s friends, themselves collaborators on our magazine, had it in his heart to render homage to the deceased, whom we admired and loved above everyone. Jammes, who made a profession of particular liking for Philippe, into which there entered too a little of his cult for the poor and unfortunate, was one of the first notified. His homage was to appear at the head of the number and soon he sent it to me. I was staggered. A painfully scornful condescension was spread all over the first lines. The article itself was proper; but that insulting preamble formed a sort of head-piece, that appeared to be unpublishable. I wanted to ask Jammes to remove it, as one does before a tomb. Distrustful, however, of my own feelings, and fearing to bring in an exaggerated touchiness of friendship, I ran to find Arthur Fontaine, to show him Jammes’ manuscript, ask his advice and counsel, knowing his close connection with Jammes, and that Jammes would be ready to listen to him. But Fontaine knew Jammes even better than I. And although he was just as affected as I by that incongruous manifestation, he communicated to me his fears that Jammes would refuse to change anything in his text. As a matter of fact, I received from Jammes, shortly afterwards, a telegram withdrawing his contribution, rather than change a single word of it. Jammes’ prose was replaced to advantage by an admirable poem of Claudel’s that we received at the last minute.
Jammes’ attitude was very painful to me, to such a degree that my friendship for him was cooled off considerably by it. It was very lively at that time, although I have never been able to take him entirely seriously; and I knew how wounding and cruel certain uncompromising manifestations of his humor could be. I was not the only one of his friends to suffer from it. “I have just received a letter from Jammes,” Raymond Bonheur wrote me one day, “which will be one of the sorrows of my life.”