Original subtitles

And because Sebastian once reported to me

that he'd seen a linnet at a Cantor's house in Halle which,

through the skilled instruction of its teacher, did particularly well in singing,

our cousin had written to Halle to beg this Cantor

to let us have his singer for a cheap payment.

And once, since I suddenly felt very unwell

while Sebastian was in Berlin visiting Emanuel,

and it was not known whether the violent agitation of his blood

would give rise to an insidious fever or some other evil consequence,

our cousin had to write to Sebastian several times,

and disturb him in his peace and contentment,

so that he might hasten his journey.

Bach. Cantata 140. When are you coming, my salvation?

I come, your portion.

I wait with burning oil.

Dialogue of Shadows by Georges Bernanos, 1928.

Francoise, I believe in you, as I have never believed in anyone in the world.

I believe you.

I believe in you even more than I love you,

out of a kind of necessity,

a movement of my being as strong, as spontaneous as the survival instinct.

I depend on you, I belong to you.

Either my life means nothing, or it has its sense in you.

Supposing the soul exists and He gave me one,

if I lose you, I'd then have carried it in vain, through so many empty years.

Who knows? Who can know?

I'll know it.

Me too, I depend on you! I depend on you entirely. Yes, Jacques,

you hope for something you'll never get from me or anyone else,

and yet you hope for it.

For myself, I don't hope for anything.

O my darling, don't be in a hurry to pity me.

One can do without hope if one has a heart strong enough

and quick enough to grab one's happiness

on the wing,

and exhaust it in a single stroke.

Don't spare me. Don't ever spare me. You love me, everything's fine,

everything's beautiful, everything's sacred, nothing's in vain -- no, nothing's in vain!

Nothing can be torn from a heart like yours. But I'll soothe it, I swear,

I'll give it rest. Have confidence in me.

"Rest." O Jacques, don't speak to me of rest. I know what it is.

Love doesn't console, my friend, it's incapable of consoling;

one should demand of it only what's extreme,

because it's without rule and without measure,

like you.

So don't try. Don't pain yourself further.

If it gives you anything, it'll give you what you ask for,

everything. That's what's our concern.

I have no idea of God, I don't want to have one.

If I find Him ever,

it would be in destitution so absolute, in a depth of despair so perfect,

that I dare not even imagine it,

and I think I'd detest Him.

I'm not this person you imagine, I'm not this romantic girl,

a heroine from your novels. Your novels! I can't read them anymore.

I've already had enough of your future lies.

And you know what else makes me proud?

It's that I'm sure, I absolutely can't doubt, that happy or unhappy,

whatever happens, you'll not be able to put our love in a book,

ever.

You'll have the right to despise me, once you no longer love me.

How dare you even pronounce the word "despise"?

"Despise” you? Who am I to despise you?

Ah, my opinion of my books is the same as yours,

I can't re-read them without shame.

I'm free, Francoise. We'll be free tomorrow.

I'll marry you. I want to.

No. If you insist on this promise, I'll not go with you.

It's beyond my power to accept from you more than I can give.

You speak from pride, Frangoise.

Yes, I spoke from pride, I think.

And also because I can't stop challenging things,

because I'm crazy, because I love you...

You'll see me in your arms, against your heart, all yours,

to do with as you like, body and soul.

This is pride too, Francoise.

Don't persecute me.

It's useless to tear oneself apart! How I pity your soul!

Let me, let me! I think I'll so exhaust misfortune this way,

that I'll be reborn from it.

Why when I was four did they bring me here,

- four years old, poor little girl! Far from my country, far my people,

far from the past of our entire race,

like a foundling, like a slave?

I have down there in the Veneto an uncle still, it appears,

some cousins, old friends, what do I know?

There's not a history of our republic where I don't read our name almost on every page.

Yet never would my father say a word in front me

that'd let me break the silence, so much more awful than exile!

Because he disowned all his people.

He think himself quits with them, with me, with everyone. He owes nothing.

One doesn't exhaust misfortune, my love, one forgets it. You don't want to forget it.

This evening less than ever!

The past can corrupt everything. It corrupts everything.

And I'm being reborn. I tell you, Jacques, my love, you don't understand.

The stories of persecuted daughters, ferocious fathers and domestic tyranny

have the smell of a bad novel, it's very stupid.

Yes, it's stupid.

And I'm also ridiculed for being foreign, noble, an orphan,

for living in a chateau lost in the country,

and I'm in the hands of a great hypocondriac lord who looks like Chateaubriand's father.

What do you want me to do about it? Have I chosen this decor? I hate it.

Don't take pains to hate what you'll leave tomorrow.

I hate it, I've hated it in silence.

No one suspects.

I've suffered here without tears, simply, as simply as I could,

and God know what this simplicity has cost me!

Jacques, if you hadn't come,

I think it would have devoured, one by one, all my heart's forces.

To whom would you have made this sacrifice?

Ah, Francoise, I'm quite right to say you're a religious soul.

Nothing attracts you. Nothing tempts you.

You have to have possessed before desiring.

Yes, in the desire people sadly live and die in, you'll never find any relief, any peace.

If there's one chance in a thousand that God exists,

that's enough: one shouldn't tempt God.

There's not one chance in a thousand. It's me I'm tempting, Jacques,

not God.

It comes to the same thing.

I'll not lie, Francoise: I understand perfectly

how childish such a challenge is, just a childish dream,

when it's cruel, it isn't cruel halfway. It you, it's you you detest, my darling!

It's against what you have that's most precious, most painful, most vulnerable too

-- your pride.

It's against your pride that you're taking your horrible revenge.

You're a little saint, Francoise, that's the word. You're a little saint,

except your sanctity has no object. It's without knowledge and without object,

like my sadness which matches so closely your own,

though its source is so impure that I'm ashamed to name it in front of you

and the most mediocre of all,

the debauchery of the man of letters,

of a dealer in imaginary stories.

Debauchery!

Don't seek an excuse for me. I have none but boredom.

No one, I think, has been as bored as I;

it's through boredom that I know I have a soul.

At least I've done each time what I had to

to put it back to sleep as soon as boredom awoke it.

Whereas you, dear little fool,

you provoke your soul ceaselessly, you allow it no rest,

like a lion tamer with his forks and his whip,

and your soul will end up eating you.

What an idea you have there!

Listen to me! Listen to me a minute more.

We're crazy. We're two crazy people.

You're in the shadow of an immense wing which is going to close over us.

We admit the role of boredom, vice, even despair: we don't admit pride's role.

Pride?

Nasty, how nasty you are.

Don't despise me too quickly, Francoise!

I came to you like a man who's lost his life,

who feels only boredom without remorse, who lost life without knowing where.

But I met you. Do you think I could believe,

a single instant, that you were a young girl like the others?

Had I the right to ask of you what a lover who's 20 asks?

Had I the right to ask anything?

I saw only my sadness, my own sadness, which lifted in your calm eyes.

I expected from you only pity, lucid, divining,

which in you takes the place of experience,

that presentment of another's pain so fatal, so tearing, that it surpasses all poetry.

Accept now to be my wife. Promise me at least that you'll accept one day.

Don't demand impossible things.

0, this isn't a caprice, cruel or not.

I'll be your mistress, Jacques my dear, I'll be only your mistress,

I'll be yours at a word, at a sign, I belong only to you.

What more is needed?

But I shall not be your wife. I shall not bear your name.

Saints, have nothing but day by day,

but they hope for eternal goods, their account is in order on the books of Paradise.

May I be poorer than the poverty of the saints!

I'll receive from you, from your good will, from your dear pity,

each year, each month, each weel, each morning of my humble life.

Ah, each night passed in time, oblivion, satiety,

the opinion of the world, all the forces that oppress me and that I hate.

You were saying it, you said it, I confess it:

alas! where does this pride come from that I can't tear out?

I shall tear it out!

Where does this hideous taste come from for a perfection impossible, inhuman,

for renunciation, for martyrdom? I shall smother it.

If it's in my soul, angel or beast, I can't put up with it much longer.

Angel or beast, believe me, Francoise, it always gets the better of us.

It's not as true as you say.

Surely, I've no idea of God, nor the least curiosity about Him.

I suppose they've deified their fear of death,

or whatever.

What's that matter to us? We don't fear death.

I fear it, I fear only it.

Then you fear nothing.

What will you ever know about it, my dear?

A minute of anguish, very alive...

No, I can't believe in God, or in souls,

but I do believe in a certain principle in me

that wounds me, that usurps my will or seeks to suborn me by ruse.

Ah, when you accuse me of contradicting myself and tearing myself apart in vain,

it's against it that I'm struggling,

if I often look reckless or crazy to you,

it's because I struggle blindly,

for I only discover this enemy little by little, from its attacks on me.

Yes, I discover little by little

its strength, and the duplicity of its strength.

Even so, I can call it by its name:

it's pride, Jacques. Pride, but not mine.

Is it only pride, Francoise, so lucid an anger?

O you don't know what it's like to be oppressed one's race,

enslaved, crushed!

You've occasionally seen my father, for two months now.

It's quite enough to see and hear him one moment -

that look of us, an inexplicable contradiction both dreamy and hard,

marked with perpendicular wrinkles,

impassive even when he laughs,

that haughty chin,

that way of turning his shoulders a little while raising his brow,

just like a man who refuses to choose sides

who runs away,

who feels in advance he owes nothing for the mishaps and idiocies of his kind,

with compassion that's insolent, more insolent than contempt.

Never have I had an opinion, advice or order from him that wasn't given grudgingly.

Some politeness is glacial:

his hasn't even the coldness that hurts.

I swear everything's labeled, everything's in place in his life, though solitary

and so secret: the worst malice can't bite into it.

My mother died six months after my birth, in full youth,

in full beauty, and he told me one day she was simple and perfect...

Well, you can't find a single portrait of her in his apartment,

nor - I'm sure - in the bottom of his drawers.

But you'll go so far away with me, you'll never encounter him again.

My God! May you be speaking truly, Jacques.

You desire so much I speak truly, my poor friend?

There're other poor girls like me, all over the world,

who feel on their backs a weight just as heavy,

although they're not titled or noble:

there's the scruples, the integrity, the virtue stiff and domestic

of grandmothers and great-grandmothers,

of a line of women irreproachable, obscure, tenaciously good,

both wise and ingenuous,

always ready to forget themselves, to renounce, to sacrifice,

raging to sacrifice themselves.

Sacrifice myself to what, say I.

They were pious, no doubt, feared God, hell, sin,

believed in angels,

resisted temptation, overcame them.

They've carried away their piety, left me only their wisdom.

What can I do with their wisdom?

It's not me, it's you who'll get the better of my soul...

A soul, you see, is a big word. It's not so terrible as one supposes.

Subtitles: Tag Gallagher