SBChristine FiszerEng
JEAN FRANÇOIS RAUZIER

Sleeping Beauties
I am unable to look at the sleeping young woman. The thought of old age and depression is overcoming. These sleeping beauties… their perfection is too much, their sleeping grace and unimaginable innocence kill me. They bring me as close to death as would a corps. I could lie next to them, feel their breathing against my mouth, observe the perfection of their face, the roots of their hair on their forehead. Their chest rising regularly. All have tortured me. My spirit is only a mass of confused and cloudy impressions. Time has passed, time is lost, I would have thought I could capture a few seconds of a violent and delicious present, instead of which I hide, I cover my face from these too beautiful sleeping beauties. How would I dare touch them when I can’t even look at them: my face falls into my hands. No, I turn away after lengthy whispered negotiations with the castle matron with the long dark-red dress. Speaking with Macha reassures me, she controls my encounter with the beauties, this old woman who understands me and organizes the girls naps with the art of a practiced director. Each time she found - is it really her? – clothes for which the material, whether white and flouncy or with profound color accents, accord with the sumptuousness of the surroundings – or the modesty of the maids’ rooms. I am grateful for her taste since only the beautiful calms me. I believe that if beauty in all forms, women and landscape, gardens or fabrics and interiors didn’t exists or disappeared, I would disappear with them.
The sleeping beauties, the nonchalant beauties, the innocent beauties offered to my desire stab and console me at once. Their sleep suspends time without erasing my pain of being only a voyeur that doesn’t even allow himself to look. At each encounter I believe the spell is broken, hoping to approach them, touch them lightly… but I become paralyzed again. Once I see them the magnificence of the image they create in the different rooms of the castle, force me to turn away. I only have the right to one look, like a photographer would have the right to one take. After having escaped them, I can think of them deep in my pain, imagine them, see them again. How can one not guess, I ask you, that beneath the flesh, young and fresh of this pure femininity, death is at work more than the soft flow of the sap of life?
Christine Fiszer