 Friends, friends, friends, welcome back. So as a continuation on the last video I did, which was a preface for reading this book, I'm going to start right in on reading this most brilliant book by Salvador Dali called Hidden Faces. It's a World War II period novel. And this was my pick for the best novel in the world, The Illuminated Plane, part one, The Friends of Count Hervé de Grandsai. For a long time the Count of Grandsai had been sitting with his head resting on his hand under the spell of an obsessive reverie. He looked up and let his gaze roam over the plain of Croix de Libreau. This plain meant more to him than anything in the world. There was beauty in its landscape, prosperity in its tilled fields, and of these fields the best was the earth. Of this earth the most precious was the humidity, and of this humidity the rarest product was a certain mud. His notary and most devoted friend, Maitre Pierre Herardine, who had a weakness for literary language, liked to say of Grandsai, the Count is the living incarnation of one of those rare phenomenon of the soil that eludes the skill and the resources of agronomy, a soil molded of earth and blood of an untraceable source, a magic clay of which the spirit of our native land is formed. When the Count went down toward the sluice gates with a new visitor on a tour of the property, he would invariably stoop to the ground to pick up a muddy clod and as he shoved it, as he showed it, modeling it with his aristocratic fingers, he would repeat for the hundredth time in a tone of sudden improvisation. My dear fellow, it is undoubtedly the somewhat rough ductility of our soil that accounts for this miracle of this region. For not only is our wine unique, but also and above all we possess the truffle, the mystery and treasure of this earth on whose surface glide the largest of snails in the whole of France, vying with that other oddity, the crayfish, and all this framed by the most noble and generous vegetation, the cork oak which treats us to its own skin. And in passing, he would tear off a handful of cork oak leaves from a low branch, squeezing them tightly and roll them in the hollow of his hand, enjoying the sensation against his fine skin of the prickly resistance of their spiny contact, whose touch alone sufficed to isolate the count from the rest of the world. For of all the continents, of all the globe, Grand Sy esteemed only Europe. Of all Europe, he loved only France. Of France, he worshipped only Vaucluse. And of Vaucluse, the chosen spot of the gods was precisely the one where he was located, the Château de Lamont, where he was born. In the Château de Lamont, the best situation was that of his room. And in this room, there was a spot from which the view was unique. This spot was exactly limited by four great rectangular lozenges in the black and white tiled floor on whose four outer angles were exactly placed, the four slightly contracted paws of a svelte Louis XVI work desk signed by Jacob, the cabinet maker. It was at this desk that the Count of Grand Sy was seated, looking through the great Regency balcony at the plain of Croix de Libreau, illuminated by the already setting sun. There was nothing that could so lyrically arouse the fervor of Grand Sy's patriotic feelings as the unwearing sight constantly offered him by the changing aspect of this fertile plain of Croix de Libreau. Nevertheless, one thing egregiously marred for him the perennial harmony of its landscape. This was a section about 300 meters square where the trees had been cut away, leaving a peeled and earthen baldness which disagreeably broke the melodic and flowing line of a great wood of dark cork oaks. Up to the time of the death of Grand Sy's father, this wood had remained intact, affording to the vast panorama, a homogenous foreground composed of the dark undulating and horizontal line of oaks, setting off the luminous distances of the valley, likewise horizontal and gently modulated. But since the death of the elder Grand Sy, the property, burdened with heavy debts and mortgages, had had to be subdivided in three sections. Two of these had fallen into the hands of a great landed proprietor of Breton origin, Rachefort, who immediately became one of the Count's bitterest political enemies. One of the first things Rachefort did on entering into possession of his new property was to cut down 300 square meters of cork oaks which fell to his title and which had lost their productive value by being separated from the rest of the great wood. They had been replaced by a planting of vines which grew poorly in the exhausted and excessively stony soil. These 300 square meters of uprooted cork oaks in the very heart of the family wood of Grand Sy, not only bore witness to the dismemberment of the Count's domains, but also to this gap had brought completely into view, but also this gap had brought completely into view the Moulin des Saucers, now inhabited by Rachefort, a place keenly missed for it was the key to irrigation and the fertility of the greater part of Grand Sy's cultivated lands. The Moulin des Saucers had formerly been completely hidden by the wood and only the weather veins of the mill tower emerging between two low oaks had been visible from the Count's room. Next to his devotion to the land, his sense of beauty was certainly one of the most exclusive passions that dominated Grand Sy. He knew himself to have little imagination, but he had a deeply rooted consciousness of his own good taste, and it was thus a fact that the mutilation of his wood was extremely offensive to his aesthetic sense. Indeed, since his last electoral defeat five years previously, the Count of Grand Sy, with the intransigence that characterized all his decisions, had abandoned politics to await the moment when events would take a critical turn. This did not imply a disgust with politics. The Count, like every true Frenchman, was a born politician. He was fond of repeating Klausowitz's maxim, war is only the continuation of politics by other means. He was sure that the approaching war with Germany was inevitable and that its coming was mathematically demonstrable. Grand Sy was waiting for this moment to enter into politics again, sincerely wishing that it might come as quickly as possible, for he felt his country day by day growing weaker and more corrupt. What then could the anecdotic incidents of the local politics of the plain matter to him? And while he was impatiently waiting for war to break out, the Count of Grand Sy was thinking of giving a grand ball. And while he was, and no, it was not only the proximity of his political enemy that oppressed him at the site of the Malum des Sorcelles. In the course of these five years, during which the heroic and unswerving devotion of Maitre Herodine had succeeded in stabilizing his fortune and in organizing the productivity of his lands, the last wounds that the division of his property had inflicted upon his pride and his interests seemed slowly and definitely to have healed. It should be added that if Grand Sy had been relatively indifferent to the dwindling of his former domains, he had never despaired of buying back the properties that had been taken from him and this idea, dimly nursed in the depths of his plans, helped provisionally to make him feel even more detached from his ancestral estates. On the other hand, he could never become accustomed to the mutilation of his forest. And each new day he suffered more acutely at the site of that desolate square on which the wind-broken grapevines of a moribund vineyard pitifully rung their twisted arms at geometrically distributed intervals, an irreparable profanation on the horizon of his first memories, the horizon and stability of his childhood with its three superimposed fringes so lovingly blended by the light, the dark forest of the foreground, the illuminated plain, and the sky. Only a detailed study of the very special topography of this region, however, could satisfactorily make clear why these three elements of the landscape, so linked and constant, achieved such a poignant emotional and elegic effect of luminous contrast in this plain of Libro. From early afternoon, the descending shadows of the mountains behind the chateau would begin progressively to invade the wood of cork oaks, plunging it suddenly into a kind of premature and pre-twilight darkness. And while the very foreground of the landscape lay obscured by a velvet and uniform shadow, the sun beginning to set in the center of a deep depression in the terrain would pour its fire across the plain, its slanting rays giving an increasing objectivity to the tiniest geological details and accidents, an objectivity which was heightened even more paroxysmally by the proverbial impidity of the atmosphere, it was as though one could have taken the entire plain of Libro in the hollow of one's hand, as though one might have distinguished a slumbering lizard in the old wall of a house situated several miles away. It was only at the very end of twilight and almost on the threshold of night that the last residues of the reflections of the setting sun regretfully relaxed their grip on the ultimate in purple heights, thus seeming to attempt, in defiance of the laws of nature, to perpetuate a chimerical survival of day. When it was almost nightfall, the plain of Croix de Libro still appeared illuminated. And it was perhaps because of this exceptional receptivity to light that each time the count of Grand Sly experienced one of his painful lapses of depression, when his soul darkened with the moral shadows of melancholy, he would see the ancestral hope of perennial and fertile life rising from the deep black forest of the spiny cork oaks of his grief. The plain of Croix de Libro bathed in warm sunlight, the illuminated plain. How many times, after long periods spent in Paris, when Grand Sly's spirit would sink into the idle skepticism of his emotional life, the mere memory of a fugitive glimpse of his plain would revive in him a new and sparkling love of life. This time Grand Sly had found Paris so absorbed by political problems that his stay in town had been extremely brief. He had returned to his château de la mort without even having had time to be affected by the progressive disenchantment, eventually produced by two continual indulgence in relationships based exclusively on the tense drama of social prestige. This time on the contrary, the Count had come back to his domains with an unquenched craving for sociability, which induced him to invite his closest friend, as he once used to, to come and spend weekends with him. It was two weeks now since Grand Sly had been back and dined as usual on snails or crayfish in the company of his notary, Pierre Herardine. These were meals over which they held interminable low-voiced conversations, served on tiptoe by Prince, the old family servant. Mitre Herardine, as has been noted, concealed turbulent literary leanings beneath the strict and modest severity of his profession, just as his everyday laconic and objective phraseology concealed a succulent, metaphoric and grandiloquent verve, a modest expansiveness to which he gave free reign only in the presence of intimate and trusted friends, among whom the Count of Grand Sly was the first to be privileged. Grand Sly took a voluptuous delight in his notary's long tirades, full of images and often touched with grandeur, and not only did he savor them, but he also put them to good use for if it is true that the Count possessed a remarkably eloquent style and spoke the French language with a wholly personal elegance, it was no less true that he was capable of inventing those unexpected images that came so naturally to Herardine, images of a slightly acid and cynical fancifulness that had the peculiar faculty of effectively penetrating the vulnerable zone of seduction and of dream in the suggestible and chimerical minds of women of refinement. Grand Sly would note Herardine's lyrical inventions and bizarre ideas in his memory and often, not trusting his memory, would jot them down in a tiny social engagement book and handwriting fine as a gold thread. On such occasions, Grand Sly would often beg Metra Herardine to repeat the end of a sentence and the latter then experienced the moments of his greatest pride and was forced in spite of himself to display the double row of very white teeth in an almost painful smile wrenched from the severe contraction of modesty. Metra Herardine would lower his head, respectfully waiting for the Count to finish his fine scrawl and on his bowed forehead, blue-tinged veins, normally quite visible and prominent, would swell even more and reach that swollen and shiny hardness characteristic of arteriosclerosis. In Pierre Herardine's set and embarrassed expression, there was not only pride compressed by the humble willingness to keep his distance, but also there was a shade of uneasiness, barely perceptible yet impossible to dissimulate. Yes, Metra Herardine was embarrassed. He was ashamed of Grand Sly for he knew exactly the use the latter made of his notations, which was simply to enable him to shine in society, and it was in truth thanks to the occult inspiration of his notary that the Count had acquired his unique reputation as an original conversationalist. He availed himself of these jotted notes also and more especially to seduce women and above all to keep alive that latent and consuming passion composed of idle talk and artificiality, which may be the growing addiction which by the growing addiction to its slow and fatal power linked him to Madame Solange de Cléda. In fact, Grand Sly, who had a poor memory, would go so far as to study the course of his meetings with Madame de Cléda in advance, and his conversations were always woven around three or four lyrical and flashing themes that had usually developed in the course of the long evenings spent in the company of his notary. It is true, to do justice to the Count, that with his natural gift of speech and his mastery of the art of social intercourse, he would often achieved real gems of style, while with the restraint of his rare good taste, he developed and polished the excessive succulent and picturesque elements which had sprung from his notaries somewhat plebeian lips, but which, if he had presented them without modification in an ultra Parisian salon, might have seemed pretentious, ridiculous, or out of place, if not all three at once. Grand Sly, who had had Pierre Herodine as a playmate at the Chateau during his whole boyhood, had also gained from his notary an immediate, trenchant, and elementary understanding of human relationships, which only a person sprung from the most authentic stock of the common people, like Herodine, could have given him. Thus each time it was said of the Count that he was a great realist in spirit, it was in large part to the logical virtues of his notary that people unwittingly alluded. The Count of Grand Sly not only usurped his poetic images, his profound remarks, and his almost brutal sense of reality from Maitre Herodine, but he had even imitated the latter's way of limping. Five years previously in an automobile collision during the tragicomic events of the Electoral Campaign, Count and his notary had both suffered a similar injury in one leg. Maitre Herodine was completely cured in three weeks, but the Count, whose leg was badly set, retained a limp. He had nevertheless time to observe the way his notary walked during his convalescence, and immediately took to imitating his limp, which struck him as having an impressive dignity. Indeed, by giving a slower and more serene inflection to the rhythm of his defective walk, Grand Sly only added to his perfectly proportioned and manly physique, a note of melancholy and refined distinction. The Count also kept from this accident a long and very thin scar, which extended in a straight vertical line from the left temple to the middle of the cheek. Now this cut, which was very deep, was barely visible, but like a barometer it would appear sharp and purplish on days of storm, and at such times it would itch violently, forcing the Count, who did not want to scratch himself, to bring his hand sharply to his cheeks, to which he would hold it pressed with all his might. This was the only incomprehensible tick among all his gestures and movements, which were so deliberate as to touch the fringe of affection. The Count of Grand Sly was giving that evening a dinner by candlelight to 25 of his closest friends, who, having all arrived in the course of the afternoon, were now in the midst of primping before going down into the reception room at half past eight. Grand Sly was all dressed an hour ahead of time, and as in the case of his love trists, his evenings in society, or even a meeting with an intimate friend, he liked to slip without haste along slightly and delightful anguishing weight, during which he had time to prepare himself for the kind of effect and the situations he would like to bring about. He had a horror of anything that betrayed the barbarous love of improvisation, and on this particular evening, ready even earlier than usual for the reception, the Count set down to wait at the desk in his room. Pulling his little engagement book out of the drawer, he began to consult the notes taken in the course of these last two weeks by means of which he expected to give brilliancy to his talk. He neglected the first three pages, written confusedly and with little conviction, and containing phrases and themes intended for general conversation. Then smiled as he came upon a page full of surprises, exemplifying clever ways of breaking into a discussion, and finally stopped at a page on which was written only the phrase notes for tête-à-tête with selange. He remained for a long time absorbed in the contemplation of this page, and a kind of invincible indolence prevented him from proceeding, at the same time urging him irresistibly to follow the confused and agreeable course of a seductive reverie. It was a bizarre passion that united Hervé de Grandsay and Selange de Cléda. For five years, they had played at a merciless war of mutual seduction, more and more anxious and irritating, having as yet crystallized only to the point of exacerbating a growing impulse of rivalry and self-assertion, which the slightest sentimental avowal or weakness would seriously have threatened with disillusionment. Each time the Count had felt Selange's passion yield to calms of tenderness, he had come forward eagerly with new pretexts to wound her vanity and re-establish the wild and rearing aggressive attitude, which is that of unsatisfied desire, when whip in hand, one obliges it to overcome more and more insurmountable obstacles of pride. It is for these reasons that after their long sessions carried on in the semi-langerous tone of a light idol sprinkled with feigned indifference and delicate play of wit, while both of them were in reality stubbornly hiding from themselves the frenzied gallop of their passions, Grandsay was always tempted to tap Selange on the buttocks and give her a piece of sugar as one does to a thoroughbred horse, prancing up with the supple elegance of his movements to place his boundless energy at your disposal. For the Count regarded all this with the same good nature as a horseman covered with dust and bruised who has been thrown several times during a spirited ride. Nothing is more fatiguing than a passion of this kind based on an integral coca tree on both sides. Grandsay was telling himself this when he heard the clock in the drawing room strike half past eight. He raised his head, which he had held for a long time, bowed, leaning on his hand and looked for a few moments at the plain of Croix de Libreau, which because of its special topographical configuration still held the reflections of the last gleams of day in spite of the raining semi-darkness. Casting a glance at the plain, the Count of Grandsay promptly got up from his desk and, limping in his characteristic fashion, crossed the corridor that led to the reception room.