Widows

Vauvenargues tells us that public parks have paths haunted mainly by failed ambition, unlucky inventors, aborted glories, broken hearts, all those souls tumultuous and sealed, where a storm’s last sighs still groan, recoiling far from the insolent stare of the fortunate and lazy. These shady retreats are where life’s lamed collect.

It’s especially toward these places that the poet and the philosopher love to lead their keen conjecturings. There one finds sure grazing. For if there’s one place they care not to visit, as I’ve just insinuated, it’s especially the happiness of the rich. To the contrary, they feel irresistibly drawn toward all that’s helpless, ruined, grieving, left orphan.

An experienced eye is never fooled. In those stiff or downcast features, in those dull and hollow eyes, or shining with the last gleams of the fight, in those deep and many wrinkles, in those slow or jerky steps, they immediately discern the invisible tales of deceived love, unrecognized devotion, unrecompensed labor, hunger and cold humbly, silently borne.

Have you ever noticed widows on those lonely benches, poor widows? Whether they’re wearing mourning clothes or not, it’s not hard to recognize them. Moreover, there’s something in the mourning clothes of a poor man that’s always missing, a lack of harmony that makes them more heartrending. He’s forced to skimp on his grief. The rich man wears his in a complete suit.

Which is the most sad and saddening widow, she who drags in her hand a kid she can’t share her reverie with, or she who’s completely alone? I don’t know... One time I followed for many hours an old aggrieved widow of this kind; rigid, erect, under a small faded shawl, she bore in all her being the pride of a stoic.

She was obviously condemned, by a perfect solitude, to an old bachelor’s habits, and the masculine character of her manners added a mysterious piquancy to their austerity. I don’t know in what wretched café and in what manner she ate lunch. I followed her to the reading room; and I spied on her a long time as she searched out in the gazettes, with active eyes, long since burned by tears, some news of a powerful and personal interest.

At last, in the afternoon, under a charming autumn sky, one of those skies a crowd of regrets and memories descends from, she sat apart in a public park, to hear, far from the crowd, one of those concerts with which regimental bands gratify the Parisian populace.

There doubtless was the little revelry of that innocent (or purified) old woman, the well-earned consolation of one of those burdensome days without friend, chitchat, joy, or confidant, which God let down upon her, for how many years who knows? three hundred sixty-five times a year.

And another:

I can’t keep myself from casting a look, if not universally sympathetic, at least curious, on the crowd of pariahs who press around the outside of a public concert. The orchestra hurls into the night tunes of holiday, triumph or pleasure. Dresses trail sparkling; glances cross; the lazy, weary of doing nothing, rock from side to side, feign to indolently delectate the music. Here nothing but the rich, the happy; nothing but respires and inspires the carelessness and pleasure of letting yourself live; nothing, except the sight of that bog squeezing over there on the outer fence, picking up, as the wind will, some scraps of music, and looking at the sparkling furnace inside.

It’s always an interesting thing, the reflection of a rich man’s happiness deep in the eyes of a poor man. But on this day, amidst these people clad in shirts and calico, I noticed a person whose nobility made a dazzling contrast with all the surrounding triviality.

It was a woman tall, regal, and so noble in all her being, that I had no recollection of having seen her like in the collections of the aristocratic beauties in the past. A perfume of high virtue emanated from all her person. Her face, sad and thin, was in perfect accordance with the full mourning she still was wearing. She also, like the plebs with whom she mingled and who didn’t see her, looked at the luminous world with deep eyes, and listened while gently nodding her head.

Rare sight! “No doubt,” I said to myself, “this poverty, if poverty it be, cannot admit sordid economy; so noble a face speaks to me. Why then does she voluntarily stay in a situation where she sticks out so dazzlingly?”

But while passing out of curiosity close to her, I thought I divined the reason. The tall widow was holding the hand of a child clothed in black like her; as modest as the price of admission was, that price was perhaps enough to pay for one of the little one’s needs, better still, a superfluity, a toy.

And she will have arrived home on foot, meditating and dreaming, alone, alone as always; for the child is turbulent, egotistic, neither sweet nor patient; and he can’t even, like the purely animal, like dogs and cats, serve as a confidant to lonely pains.

Charles Baudelaire