Autumn Plaint

Ever since Maria quitted me to go to another star—which one, Orion, Altair, and you, green Venus?—I have always prized solitude. What long days I have passed alone with my cat. By alone, I mean without a material being and my cat is a mystical companion, a spirit. I can thus say that I have passed long days alone with my cat and, alone, with one of the last authors of the Latin decadence; for since the pale creature is no more, strangely and singularly I have loved all that is summed up in this word: falling. And so, in the year, my favorite season, that is the last languid days of summer, which immediately precede autumn and, in the day, the hour wherein I take a walk is when the sun reposes before vanishing, with rays of brass on the gray walls and of copper on the windows. Just so, the literature of which my spirit asks a pleasure will be the agonizing poetry of the last moments of Rome, as long, nevertheless, as it does not breathe at all the rejuvenating approach of the Barbarians, and does not ever stammer the childish Latin of the first Christian proses.

I was reading then one of those dear poems (whose blotches of fard have more of charm upon me than the rosiness of youth) and plunging one hand into the fur of the pure animal, when a Barbary organ sang languidly and melancholically under my window. It played in the broad lane of poplars whose leaves seemed dismal to me even in spring, ever since Maria passed there with candles, one last time. The instrument of the sad, yes, truly: the piano scintillates, the violin gives light to the rent fibers, but the Barbary organ, in the dusk of memory, made me despairingly dream. Now that it murmured a joyously vulgar tune and which put gaiety in the heart of the locality, a tune outdated, banal: whence comes it that its ritornello went to me in my soul and made me weep like a romantic ballad? I savored it slowly and did not throw a sou out the window for fear of disturbing myself and of perceiving that the instrument was not singing alone.

Stéphane Mallarmé