Can There Be Joy without Love?

Abraham Catulle Mendès, Thomas Seltzer (T) · Living the Life Series · 8 pages

An allegorical story by Abraham Catulle Mendès, 1841–1909, French poet and man of letters, written as “Les Mots Perdus” in 1885. Thomas Seltzer's translation appeared as “The Lost Words of Love” in Willard Huntington Wright's The Great Modern French Stories, New York: Boni and Liveright, 1917, pages 309–13, and was reprinted in The World's Great Romances, New York: Black's Readers Service Co., 1929, pages 223–26. The frontispiece is by Robert Papp. The running head gives the theme: how lovers found the words they had lost.

The tale opens in the manner of a fairy story and keeps its own machinery deliberately vague, which is part of its charm and its point. A very cruel fairy — pretty as the flowers but wicked as the serpents that hide in the grass — resolves to avenge herself on all the people of a great country. Where the country was, the story does not tell: on the mountain or the plain, by the river or the sea, perhaps near the kingdom whose dressmakers were skilled at adorning princesses' robes with moons and stars. What the offence was, the story is equally silent about; perhaps they had omitted to pray to her at the baptism of the king's daughter. She considers her options — sending out the thousands of spirits that serve her to burn every palace and cottage, or causing all the lilacs and roses to fade, or turning all the young girls into ugly old women — and settles instead on taking away the words by which love is spoken. What the people do without them, and how they recover them, is the substance of the story, and the reason a piece of French fiction sits among the study notes.

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