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Spring Thing 2024: Doctor Jeangille's Letters, April 21, 2024What a wondrous, sappy tradition, the breathless letter. The rawly overworked declarations, with their extraexclamatory raptures of emotion which the voice could not carry so ostentatiously: “No words could ever express how deeply I miss your presence!! / No words could ever express how grand is my anger!!” An operatic tenor that confettis its cliches: “Memories of that morning still haunt me — seeing you, standing on the other side of that damned glass, your emeralds glazed by your sobs, your lips quivering, bidding me farewells. The breeze danced with your chestnut curls, untangling and entangling your so lovely locks. Your flushed cheeks, on which I had laid my kisses only moments earlier, were now beaded with tears … What torture it was to hear the whistle announcing the train’s departure, and to see you disappear in a cloud of smoke!”
With each curl of that smoke cursives new lines in the fine tradition of George Sand, fiery testaments to eternity that are undone with each tempestuous new whim, where sudden breaks of recrimination revel in the unbridling joy of a bridge burning to replace the yearning to cross it: “Viper’s tongue, insidious hatred, I despise you! I curse your name! You, who have given me so much pain… you have found the demise of my heart! Your words have trampled my whole being to dust. I wish you all the Evils of the Earth!” The finality feels good, until, a night sobbing into the pillow later, the throat throbs with the aches that there might be more to say: “I lay my broken quill at your feel, bowing until my witch’s nose reaches your unsullied slippers. My body, my heart, my soul… all my being at your disposal, for eternity. Make me your puppet, your doll, your slave!” Rather than stumble seasick from the waves’ violent rocking, we’re meant to enjoy the conflictions as Proustian pleasures, lavish each lurch of the ship, savor in each totalizing emotion the intoxications of love, flaring them to hyperbole so that they might still be felt over the uncrossable distance.
The game, alas, follows our lovers’ affectuations, which gesture more than they commit. The tropes which pulse the narrative are left unexpounded, fashionably prima facie. Nods of Parisienne glamor ghost the fallenness into provincial mundanity, but the decadent sensibilities are left offscreen, the province of the unheard interlocutor. Indeed, much of the relationship to which the entirety of our text is addressed responds only between the lines, a sense of a depth that rarely bubbles up to the surface to edify the reader. The absence at the heart of the story tautologizes. Similarly, there is a feint to Rousseauvian picturesque as a potential counterbalance against the complications of city life as our narrator makes peace with the slower pace of life, with “all these good people, with rolled up sleeves, working hard, coming and going all day long to bring equipment”, and slowly, rather than wistfully recollect capital absorptions, our narrator relates obsessively the small town small talk of lost sheep and a mother’s difficult birth as if they were fresh from the gossip sheets. In this could burgeon a character arc, but the hyphae never enmeshes with any concept more than the conjuration, merely a series of asides to render the setting less abstract.
A setting for what, we wonder, until aha a mysterious Comtesse moves in, “Pale as snow, with bloody lips, and eyes shining like polished gold.” If your eyebrow raised, congratulations M. Maigret, you’ve intuited the remainder of the plot, which dutifully marches through missing children called out upon the moors and a strange plague of itchy necks. If perhaps we’re meant to indulge in the thrilling dangers of supernatural romance, sadly we also find this relationship more implied than experienced, merely a series of foreshadowy nudges to drumbeat the compiling of tropes with the same listless sense of self evidence as they lead into a dramatic confrontation that makes you rather wish you weren’t being told second hand: “At the eleventh hour, Mlle Bouchon called me in her apartments (at the Marquis’s, hence), so to confess her scheming and plots during this dreadful affair. Oh, my beautiful Olympia, what else can I say except that you were entirely scrupulous about her! And of the villagers’ suspicions, too! Alice was not only in the throes of this mystery… she was the entire mystery herself!” With the requisite revelation out of the way, nothing is left to drive the text onto new incidents, so though “There are still a few knots in this affair to untangle, and documents to fill, before finally closing this chapter forever”, we exeunt upon the declarative: “a great void has been felt throughout the village.”
If the epistolary exuberances lose their pleasurably pulp sentimentalism along the way, so that we must simply take the idea of the story at its word, sometimes it’s the thought that counts. With a little whimsy, we may as well enjoy ourselves, for who can argue with such summery sentiments: “I wish for you a wonderful life, filled with new loves, joy, and health. Pray to remember spending as much time as humanly possible in the sun and eating lots of garlic!” If in some perfumes there is more delight, still all love is a rarity to be cherished beyond comparison.
