A Soul Clad in Air.
SHE was standing, all alone at her bath, her arms raised, twisting the silky and luxuriant masses of her hair into a knot, which she was fastening on the top of her head. She was a youthful beauty, who had not yet reached her full development, but who was approaching it, radiant in the glow of her seventeenth year.
A daughter of Venice, the blue veins where ran the ardent current of her life, showed beneath her rose-tinted transparent skin; her eyes shone with a mysterious and captivating brilliancy, and the velvety redness of her lips, slightly parted, already gave promise of the fruit as well as the flower.
She looked marvelously beautiful, and if some modern Paris had to decide as to her charms, I do not know whether he would have placed at her feet the palm of grace, elegance or beauty, so equally did she unite in herself the animated charm of modern grace and the calm perfections of classic beauty.
A most fortunate and unexpected chance had conducted the painter Falero and myself to her presence. One bright afternoon last spring we happened to be walking on the sea-shore; we had crossed one of those olive plantations, with melancholy foliage, which are to be seen between Nice and Monaco, and without being aware of it we had entered the grounds of an estate opening on the sea-shore. A picturesque path wound through it down the hill; we had left behind us a grove of oranges, whose golden fruit recalled the garden of the Hesperides. The air was balmy, the sky of a deep blue, and we were discussing the comparative merits of Art and Science, when my companion stopped suddenly, as if arrested by a spell, and making a sign to me to be silent, pointed before him. Behind a clump of cacti and Barbary fig-trees, a few steps distant from us, we could see through the open window of a luxurious bathing-house, near a marble basin into which the water fell with a melodious sound, a young girl standing before a long Psyche mirror, which reflected back her full-length figure. Doubtless the noise made by the falling water had prevented her hearing our approach. Discreetly, or rather, indiscreetly, we remained behind the cacti, motionless, mute, spellbound.
Beautiful as she was, she herself seemed to be unconscious of her beauty. Her feet rested on a tiger-skin rug, and all her movements were leisurely. Finding that her long hair was still damp, she allowed it to fall again over her shoulders, and, turning around, came toward us to take a rose from the table near the window; then, going back to the mirror, she tranquilly completed the arrangement of her hair, placed the rose between its braids, and turning her back to the sun, leaned down, doubtless with the purpose of beginning to dress. But all at once she started up, gave a piercing cry, and burying her face in her hands, ran to hide herself in the darkest corner of the room.
Whether some unguarded movement had betrayed our presence, or she had caught the reflection of our figures in the mirror, we could not tell. Be that as it may, however, we thought it prudent to retrace our steps, and returned to the shore by the same path by which we had come.
“Never have I seen — not in any one of my models,” said my companion, “not even in the model who stood for my painting of the ‘Twin Stars,’ and of ‘Celia,’ a more perfect form. What do you say? Does not this apparition come just in time to prove me in the right? It is in vain that you describe in eloquent words the delights of Science. Confess that Art too has her charms. Are not the stars of the earth worthy rivals of the stars of heaven? Do you not admire with me the elegance of that figure? What outlines! What ravishing tones!”
“I would not have the bad taste not to admire what is really beautiful,” I answered; “and I admit that human beauty (and I acknowledge without hesitation female beauty in particular), is the most perfect work of Nature on our planet. But do you know what I most admire in that young creature? It is not her artistic or ?sthetic aspect, it is the scientific proof she affords, of a fact which is simply marvelous. In that enchanting form I behold a soul clothed in air.”
“Oh, you delight in paradox, I know. A soul clothed in air! For so real a form the expression is somewhat idealistic. That that enchanting creature has a soul I do not doubt, but permit me, as an artist, to admire her form, her animation, her flesh, her color. I would willingly say with the poet of the Orientales:
Car c’est un astre qui brille
Qu’une fille,
Qui sort d’ur bain au flot clair
Cherche s’il ne vient personne,
Et frissonne
Toute mouillée, au grand air.”
“I do not want to prevent you doing so. But it is precisely this physical beauty which makes me admire in her the soul, the invisible force that has formed it.”
“What do you mean? There can be no doubt that we have a body. The existence of the soul is less evident.”
“To the senses, yes. To the spirit, no. But our senses deceive us in regard to everything; to the movement of the Earth, the nature of the heavens, the apparent solidity of bodies, to beings and to things. Will you, for a moment, follow me in my reasoning?”
“When I inhale the perfume of a rose, when I admire the beauty of form, the delicacy of coloring, the grace of the flower in its first bloom, that which strikes me most is the work of the hidden, mysterious, unknown force which governs the life of the plant, which maintains it in existence, which selects the molecules of air, of water, of earth, adapted for its sustenance, and, above all, which unites those molecules and groups them delicately together, so as to form the graceful stem, those small, fine green leaves, those petals of so tender a rose color, those exquisite shades, that delicious perfume. This mysterious force is the principle of life of the plant. Place together in the earth the seed of a lily, an acorn, a grain of wheat, and a peach stone, and each will reconstruct its own particular being.
“I once saw a maple that was dying amid the débris of a ruined wall, a few yards distant from the rich soil of a furrow, and which, in despair, adventurously threw out a root, reached the soil it had longed for, struck into it and rooted itself there so effectually that insensibly the tree itself became loosened from its place, and letting its old roots wither, quitted the stones and lived, resuscitated and transformed, on the roots which had been the means of preserving its life. I have known elm trees flourishing in the soil of a fertile field, from which sustenance had been cut off by the opening of a deep ditch, to send out boldly those roots which had not been cut, under the bottom of the ditch, to look for nutriment, and to succeed in their purpose, to the great astonishment of the gardener. I saw a heroic jasmine that sent its roots eight times through the holes of a plank that kept the light from it, and which a malicious observer turned back again, each time it did so, to the darkness, in the hope of wearying at last, the energy of the plant; he did not succeed in doing so.
“Plants breathe, drink, eat, select, reject or seek their nourishment, work, live, act according to their instincts; that one thrives admirably; that one pines away; this other is nervous and agitated. The sensitive plant trembles and shrinks at the slightest touch; in certain hours of well-being the wake-robin is warm, the carnation is phosphorescent, the valisnérie descends to the bottom of the waters, to propagate its kind. In all these manifestations of an unknown life, the philosopher cannot but recognize in the vegetable world, a strain of the universal harmony.
“I do not, at present, go further than this with regard to the soul, superior in its nature though it be to the soul of the plant; and although it has created an intellectual world as far above all other forms of terrestrial life as the stars are above the Earth — it is not in regard to its spiritual faculties that I consider it now, but only as the animating force of the human being.
“Well, it awakens my admiration that this force should group together the atoms we breathe, or that we assimilate by nutrition so as to make of them a beautiful and charming being. Look back at this young girl from the day of her birth, and follow with your thought the gradual development of that slender form, through the years of awkward girlhood up to the budding grace of youth and early womanhood. How does the human organism maintain itself, develop itself, form itself? You know the answer: by respiration and nutrition.
“The air itself supplies three-fourths of our nutrition. The oxygen of the air keeps alive the fire of life, and the body may be compared to a flame being fed unceasingly, according to the laws of combustion. A want of oxygen extinguishes the flame of life as it extinguishes the flame of a lamp. Through respiration the dark veinous blood is transformed into red arterial blood, and thus purified. The lungs are a delicate tissue, pierced with from forty to fifty millions of little cells small enough to allow the blood to filtrate through them, and large enough to allow the air to penetrate them. A perpetual exchange goes on between the air and the blood, the former furnishing the latter with oxygen, the latter eliminating the carbonic acid. On the one side the oxygen of the air consumes the carbon of the blood; on the other, the lungs exhale carbonic acid, azote and watery vapor. The plants breathe (during the day) by a process the reverse of this. Absorbing carbon and exhaling carbonic acid, helping to maintain in this way the general equilibrium of terrestrial life.
“Of what is the humall body composed? The adult man weighs on an average 154 pounds. Of this, 113 pounds are water which is in the blood and the tissues. Analyzing the substance of our bodies you will find in it albumen, fibrine, caseine and gelatine, that is to say organic substances composed originally of the four essential gases: oxygen, azote, hydrogen, and carbonic acid. There are also substances in it devoid of azote, such as gum, sugar, starch, fat; these substances pass equally through our organism, their carbon and hydrogen are consumed by the oxygen inhaled during respiration and afterwards exhaled under the form of carbonic acid and of water.
“Water, as you know, is a combination of two gases, oxygen and hydrogen; air, a mixture of two gases, oxygen and azote, to which are added, in lesser proportions, water under the form of vapor, carbonic acid, ammonia and ozone, this latter being only condensed oxygen, etc.
“Thus our body is composed only of gases under different forms.”
“But,” interrupted my companion, “we do not live only on air, We need besides that, at intervals more or less far apart, as the stomach may indicate, certain supplementary additions, such as the wing of a pheasant, a slice of sole, a glass of Chateau-Lafitte or of champagne; or, if you will, some asparagus, a bunch of grapes or a few peaches.”
“Yes, all these are assimilated by our organism, renewing its tissues, and this with rapidity, for in a few months (not in seven years as was formerly supposed to be the case) our body is entirely renewed. Let us return to that charming cr............