The Bridge Crossed, by Jean Paulhan

Books are precious that can be read in an hour and even in several years. Interior spectacle of which we say "it's nothing", because it's a lot. Ideal canvas where the imagination will embroider without reason or necessity, on its own... or with the help of doctors. Thoughts, smiles. The poet is there watching in silence. Had we forgotten it? It is him we salute here.
Jean Paulhan offers us the dreams of three nights. Dreams? They are not for Doctor Freud, they are for us. Doctor Freud is a happy man, you see, but his comments on the occasion of "Crossed Bridge" would be something sad. And who will cure Pascal? That said, for people who are too well-intentioned, there is this fine and harsh observation of the poet in front of his own image: three nights to embrace the mystery, three days to conquer it. This is mercilessly severe in its French elegance: Perfect dreams, fights in solitude, where only the clearest, most beautiful weapons are admitted.
The subject of this book? A story to tell? It is not quite a duel, where the lover, perhaps, would like to know what speaking means; where the poet, "if words are signs", knows the full price of silence... Yes, it's a story with a single character; it is therefore not one, someone will observe. And the dream of intelligence is not without a lot of irony.
Obviously, here are desolate people, who sigh, preferring daydreaming to dreams, "we don't quite understand", and return to the editorial office where the masters of sentiment reign. Jean Paulhan writes: "A characteristic of this village was that the houses had their lights set back. I mean that they remained dark as long as one advanced towards them or walked up to them: but the next moment, one surprised when turning around, at some of their windows, a red glow, no wider than a thread. (The discovery came too late, since I had passed them at that moment.) — My skin, if I touched it with my hands, and especially my face, was hot and tense. I then heard the noise made by the matches of a box being shaken. Two men: "And the women? said one. — Old man, it's the belt." The first lit his cigarette, the ball of his fingers was transparent for an instant."
This poetry in the analysis, this sensitivity in the entirely intellectual observation, belongs to the author of "Jacob Cow" and "The Crossed Bridge", as also this lovely discretion in the success: a smile to Madame de Genlis... We do not cross life, she observes. — You don't "cross" a bridge. — And we don't quite get through this little book, in our opinion. We don't want to leave.

(Text published in Le Disque Vert, 2nd year, n° 1, May 1922.)