All else was forgotten, so lofty were our thoughts.
In the evening you put your hand in mine to pray; then you forgot and removed it as you watched my dear moribund mother fall into peaceful sleep. We remained beside her for a long time.
Both of us kept watch that night in the room where the dying woman slept. Though near, we did not see each other. That was the supreme moment; our souls evolved. Without speaking, as if in a trance, we thought — what thoughts!
Virtue, which first I had sought for you, now dazzled me and exerted on me its pull.…
The boundaries of reality were blotted out; I was living a dream.
The next day my mother spoke to me. I have already repeated her words … but the sacrifice had already been made in my heart.…
Then my mother set their engagement. I know that I saw both of them, Emmanuèle and T***, at the foot of the bed, their hands clasped, and that my mother was giving them her benediction. But all the rest is forgotten — my overwhelming grief seemed unreal and I thought that I was dreaming — there was no longer even a trace of bitterness in my grief.
And what remains now is joy.…
(June 28)
Some evening I shall recall the past and repeat my words of mourning.… Today, however, the sky is too bright, too many birds are singing. I am inebriated by spring and my mind is filled with new lyrics in which our name delicately rimes and alliterates with the names of flowers. It is a sweet melody: an air played on a flute — almost like the warbling of birds — and the sound of wings beneath leaves in visible shadows — O flutes, soaring oboes!..
Love transcends mourning and death.
And the alleluias of victory will drown out the song of the willows.
Bless you, beloved mother! Above your bed of suffering our souls found each other again.
You could separate only our bodies, enabling all three of us to find comfort in the serenity of studied virtue; but through a higher, inscrutable will stern virtue, which seemed at first to separate us, became glorious and consummated the chaste desire in our souls.
It is through obedience that I have found her again — in spite of ourselves and because it had to be that way.
Then I departed.
As soon as the period of mourning had ended, they celebrated their marriage … their marriage …?
And I departed.
I departed, and took refuge in this solitude, for I no longer knew anyone … after the flesh, as the apostle says.
And I am going to write my book.
How changed, my soul! how changed!
You once wept but now you smile.
Do not study yourself — explain nothing — let sentiment rule; and then — forge ahead.… All things have been renewed.…
I said to my souclass="underline"
“Why are you smiling? You are hopeless in your solitude. It is as if your erstwhile friend no longer existed. You will have to cease your adulterous dreams.
“Weep. They are gone, all your loved ones, and have left you alone. Weep. Your loves have ended. The time for love is over.…”
“Do you believe this?” my soul replied, still smiling and repeating to itself:
Love transcends mourning and death. Acute sorrows have been blotted out and the willows are silent.
Sing, my soul, to new dawns.
All hopes have blossomed anew.
1 Gide rightly emphasized in many of his writings the influence of his early puritanical training on his art. According to him, two-thirds of the biblical quotations set down in the first draft of the Notebooks were eliminated before publication at the suggestion of his friend, Albert Demarest. (Notes not numbered are supplied by the translator.)
2 The primary vision (la vision commencée) appears in Urien’s Voy age as the idea or principle which each of us is to manifest in his own life. This section reflects the influence of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea on the young writer.
3 In a later preface to the Notebooks (1930), the author expressed regret over its defects, holding that the writer should always exercise absolute control over his medium.
4 Gide later condemned the pride that resulted from such a victory. He insisted that he had at first thought it good to struggle, that true wisdom consisted in accepting defeat, in not opposing oneself.
5 Jean Delay in his monumental work on the early life of Gide (La Jeunesse d’André Gide, Gallimard, 1956) maintains that in the foregoing passage the writer reveals for the first time one of the deepest secrets of his psychology: the influence of his mother in preventing his physical union with Madeleine Rondeaux.
6 Publication of the Notebooks did mark a turning point in the life of the author. It marked the end of his sheltered life of mystic revery and passive introspection and the beginning of an active life of exploration and conquest. Schopenhauer’s visionary became the romantic disciple of Goethe.
7 Setting the pattern that was to serve for a lifetime of creative effort, the author abstracts from reality and freely changes details. His mother’s words might well have been spoken after the death of Emile Rondeaux, the father of Madeleine (Emmanuèle).
8 It is significant that the book originally envisioned as Allain was finally published as The Notebooks of André Walter. The German name suggests of course Goethe’s Werther, which has a similar theme and which Gide was reading during the period of the composition of the Notebooks.
9 And therefore raise thee up, o’ercome thy panting
With spirit that o’ercometh every battle,
If with its heavy body it sink not.…
And said: “Go on, for I am strong and bold.”
(Longfellow’s translation.)
10 The tumultuous inner life with its conflicting passions and ideals is an appropriate theme for Gide’s first published work. During the period of its composition he expressed the opinion that the crisis depicted in it was of such general interest that others might use it before he completed his work. Later, in his autobiographical If It Die (1926), he wrote, “It was not only my first book, it was my summation.”
11 It has been said that Gide’s art is a sustained attempt to understand and explain himself. Perhaps The White Notebook is a symbolic account of his struggle to free himself from carnal temptations through the mystic, idealized love first experienced in his youth. Delay sees the perfect image which he creates here (an Echo for Narcissus) as the projection of his superego: the embodiment in his love of all those qualities which he holds in high esteem. Jean-Paul Sartre’s handling of a similar theme in Saint-Genêt (1952) suggests the connection between André Walter’s search for a kindred soul and André Gide’s predicament.
12 Name crossed out. (Gide’s note.)
13 The notebooks in which Gide recorded his readings show that he read the writers mentioned here during the period of the composition of The White Notebook. Gustave Flaubert deserves special mention since he influenced Gide’s aesthetics and caused him to consider titling his first book The New Sentimental Education. (Flaubert’s Sentimental Education was inspired in part by personal reminiscences, notably those of his unhappy love affair, at sixteen, with an older woman who later lost her mind.)