Moonlit Nights on the Rue La Boetie

At first, it is like entering an aquarium. Along the wall of the huge darkened
hall, you see what appears to be a strip of illuminated water behind glass,
broken at intervals by narrow joints. The play of colors in deep-sea fauna
could not be more fiery. But what we see here are supraterrestrial, atmo-
spheric miracles. Seraglios are mirrored in moonlit waters; nights in aban-
doned parks expose themselves to your gaze. In the moonlight you can
recognize the chateau of Saint Leu, where a hundred years ago the body of
the last Conde was discovered hanged in a window frame.
1
Somewhere a
light is burning behind the curtains. A few shafts of sunlight fall at intervals.
In the purer rays of a summer morning, you can peer into the stanze of the
Vatican; they look just as they must have appeared to the Nazarenes.
2
Not
far off, you can see the whole of Baden-Baden; and if the sun were not
dazzling, you might be able to pick out Dostoevsky on the casino terrace
from among the doll-like figures on a scale of 1:10,000. But even candlelight
comes into its own. In the twilit cathedral, wax candles form a sort of
chapelle ardente surrounding the murdered due de Berry;
3
and the lamps in
the silken skies of an island of love almost put chubby Luna to shame.
This is a unique experiment in what the Romantics called the "moonlit
night of magic." It emerges triumphantly in its noble essence from every
conceivable test to which its specific form of poetry has been subjected to
here. It is almost frightening to think of the impact it must have had in its
cruder, more massive state-in the magic pictures of the annual fairs and in
dioramas. Or was this watercolor painting never popular because the tech-
nique was always too expensive? (It was done on paper that was scraped
108 . \ ~ \ 2
and rubbed, cut out in different places, given an underlay, and finally
covered with wax in order to achieve the desired transparency.) We do not
know the answer. For these forty transparencies are unique. We know of
nothing like them and knew nothing even of these until recently, when they
were discovered in someone's estate. They belonged to a collection assem-
bled by a wealthy connoisseur, the great-grandfather of their present owner.
Every piece was made for him individually. Great artists like Gericault,
David, and Boilly are said to have been involved to a greater or lesser degree.
Other experts believe that Daguerre worked on these plates before he created
his famous diorama (which burned down in 1839, after seventeen years).
Whether the greatest artists really were involved or not is important only
for the American who sooner or later will cough up the one and a half
million francs that will be needed to buy the collection. For this technique
has nothing to do with "art" in the strict sense-it belongs to all the arts.
Its place is alongside that group of arts which is reckoned inferior at the
moment but will not necessarily remain so, and which ranges from early
techniques of the observer right down to the electronic television of our own
day. In the nineteenth century, when children constituted the last audience
for magic, these practical arts all converged in the dimension of play. Their
intensity was not thereby diminished. Anyone who takes the time to dwell
upon the transparency of the old spa of Contrexeville soon feels as if he had
often strolled along this sunny path between the poplars, and as if he had
brushed up against that very stone wall: modest magical effects for domestic
use, of a sort only rarely seen-in Chinese soapstone groups, for example,
or Russian lacquer paintings.
Published in Die literarische Welt, March 1928. Gesammelte Schriften, IV, 509-511.
Translated by Rodney Livingstone.
Notes
1. "The last Conde" is the traditional name for Louis Henri-Joseph, due de Bourbon
(1756-1830). Having played a minor role on the side of the aristocracy in the
French Revolution, he led a dissolute life in England and returned to France with
his mistress, Sophie Dawes, in 1814. After he was found hanged in his chateau,
Dawes was suspected of the murder; she was, however, released by order of
Louis-Philippe, and the crime remained unsolved.
2. The Nazarenes were a group of painters roughly contemporary with the late
Romantic movement who produced a body of spiritualizing work, comparable
to that of the Pre-Raphaelites, though with a more explicitly religious content.
The best-known artist of the group was Peter Cornelius.
3. In Catholicism, a chapelle ardente is a darkened room, illuminated with candles,
Moonlit Nights on the Rue la Boetie 109
in which the body of a deceased person lies until placed in a casket. Charles
Ferdinand de Bourbon, due de Berry (1778-1820), served in the prince de
Conde's army against the French Revolution, was exiled to England, and, after
his return to France in 1815, was assassinated by Louis-Pierre Louvel, a worker
obsessed with, in his own words, "exterminating the Bourbons."