L'ANGE

THEANGEL

A kind of an angel was sitting on the edge of a fountain. He gazed down at himself, and he saw Man, and in tears, and he was astonished in the extreme at the appearance in the bare waters of this prey to an infinite sorrow.

(Or as it were, there was a Sorrow in the shape of Man who could not find a cause in the clear sky.)

The figure that was his own, the sadness written there, seemed to him totally foreign. An appearance so miserable interested, exercised, questioned in vain his marvellously pure spiritual substance.

- «O my Evil, said he, what are you to me?»

He attempted to smile: but he cried. This disloyalty of his face confounded his perfect intelligence; and this so unusual look that he observed, an affection so accidental in his features, their expression so much at odds with the universality of his limpid knowledge, as mysteriously offending the unity.

- «I am not prone to tears, said he, nor likewise, have I ever been.»

The Movement of his Reason in the light of eternal readiness found an unknown question suspended his infallible operation, for the cause of sadness in our inexact natures does not arise as a question among absolute essences; - while, for us, every question is or will become sadness.

- «Who then is this one who loves so much that he is tormented? said he. I understand everything; and therefore, I can well see that I suffer. This face is truly my face; these tears, my tears... But nevertheless, I am not that power who sees through this face and these tears, and their cause, and who dissipates that cause, nor am I able to remit an imperceptible part of their duration?»

But these thoughts had beauty enough to produce and propagate in all the fullness of the sphere of thought, the similarities to respond, the contrasts to declare and to resound, and the miracle of the clarity incessantly to accomplish, and all the Ideas sparkling in the glow of each one amid the others, like the joy of those that are united in the crown of all knowledge, with nothing however that could be construed as a species of evil nor appeared thus to his flawless regard, nothing that could explain this distressed face and these tears that he saw through tears.

- «So then I am of such purity, said he, an Intelligence that can take in without effort all created things, without any of those returns which affect or distort them, that I may recognise nothing in this face bearing tears, in these eyes wherein the light with which they are composed seems to be waiting for the imminent moisture of their tears.»

- «And how may it be that I suffer in the process of this beautiful exploration that is by me, and that is of me, that in the end I see all that is, when I have knowledge of every thing, and that I may not suffer but from ignorance of any one of them?

«O my astonishment, said he, Countenance charming and sad, is there then something other than the light?»

And he questioned himself in the universe of his marvellously pure spiritual substance, where all the ideas lived equally distant between themselves and himself, and in such a perfection of their harmony and promptitude of their correspondence, that it could be said that he might vanish, and the system, glittering like a diadem, of their simultaneous necessity live on by itself alone in its sublime plenitude.

And during an eternity, he has not ceased from knowing and not understanding.

May 1945.