IIITHE POSSESSION OF OTHERS
In the exile of the war I have fifteen comrades, and we live side by side like seamen on the deck of a ship. Everything brings us together: work, sleep, play, food and danger. Even our quarrels reunite us, for, in order to quarrel well, you have to know your man: between strangers disputes have little savor.
I never chose these men for my companions, as I once thought I had a right to do. They have been given to me like a handful of fruit of which some is juicy and some green. They have been taken at random, as if by a drag of that net which respects nothing, from the swarming species of man. Thanks, therefore, to the blind and divine world which has thrown the net into the flood!
They are my treasure, my study, and my daily task. They are my purpose, my horizon, my torment, and my recompense.
Although far from my own people, far from thosewith whom I have carried on my life, I could not feel myself destitute, abandoned; the world is not empty for me since I have these fifteen men to manage, this cherished problem to ponder, this soil to work over, this vintage for the winepress.
I accept the gift, the restless opulence, the fifteen glances that open on fifteen different heavens where there shine neither the same seasons nor the same stars, those fifteen proud, vindictive souls whom I must win over and subdue like wild horses.
To be sure, a few of these men are frank, level in temperament, as plain to the eye as a smooth pebble on the beach; one touches them, holds them, grasps them in a moment like a big piece of silver in the hollow of the hand. But so many others are changeable, furtive, so many others are rough like ore in which only the fissures glisten and betray the inner nobility.
The more unresponsive and secretive they seem, without any obvious beauty, the more resolved I find I am to look upon them as a treasure, to search through them as if they were a soil that is full of wealth.
There are some of them that I love, there are some whom I think that I do not love. What does it matter! The interest I devote to them is not in the least dependent on the throbs of my heart. That one who never speaks and conceals, under his obstinateforehead, two little eyes of green glass,—certainly he does not naturally arouse my affection. Nevertheless, how different is the attention with which I regard him from the curiosity of a scientist watching the stirrings of fish in an aquarium! It makes me think, that attention, rather of the dizzy joy of the miser who weighs a gold-piece, the effigy on which doesn’t please him. Gold, nevertheless!
True! How could I feel bored with these faces turned toward me, with this choir of human voices singing, each in its own familiar key, yet blending into the masculine clamor of an orchestra?
Everything they say is precious; less so, however, than what they keep to themselves. The reasons they give for their actions astonish me at times; those they do not confess, especially those of which they themselves are ignorant, always fill me with passionate interest. A word, fallen from their lips like a piece of paper from an unknown pocket, arrests me and sets me dreaming for long days. About them I build up daring and yet fragile hypotheses which they either obligingly support or destroy with a careless gesture. I always begin again, delighting in it; it is my recreation. I enjoy finding that my hypotheses are right, for that satisfies my pride; I enjoy finding I am wrong, for that reveals to me leafy depths in my park that are still unexplored.
And then I know that only a small part of theirnature is involved in our intercourse. The rest branches off, ramifies out into the perspectives of the world. I think of it as of that side of the moon which men will never see. I reconstruct with a pious, a burning patience that life of theirs which is outside this, their true life, endlessly complicated, linked by a thousand tentacles with a thousand other unknown lives. So must Cuvier’s mind have wandered as he turned and returned a fossil tooth, the only vestige of some vast, unknown organism.
There is all this in people, and then there is the past that each one has, his own past, his ancestors, the prodigious combination of actions and of souls of which he is the result. And there is his future, the unexplored desert toward which he stretches out anxious tentacles, and into which I dare to venture, I, the stranger, with trembling heart, the tiny lantern in my hand.
These are my riches today. They are inalienable: a man may flee from an indiscretion, he cannot escape the grip of contemplation and love. Even if he desired it, his very struggles would reveal his movements, betray the deepest secrets of his being, deliver him over bound hand and foot.
As for myself, eager to hoard up my treasure, I give myself up without a struggle. Rich in others, I yield myself into their hands. And if, in spite of myself, I attempt some evasion, am I not sure torender the prey all the more desirable, all the more beautiful?
They say of curiosity that it was the beginning of science. That is not praise enough, it sounds rather like an excuse.
What is more human, more touching than this religious reaching out toward the unknown, this sort of instinct which makes us divine and attack the mystery?
To take pride in not being curious! One might as well take pride in some ridiculous infirmity. It is true that even that is in the order of things normal, and that vanity finds its nourishment where it can.
Doubtless there is a sort of curiosity which is both weak and cowardly. It is that of men who dare not remain alone a moment face to face with themselves; they take refuge in loquacity and in reading the daily newspapers. Their fashion of interesting themselves in everything that goes on is a confession that they are unable to become interested in anything eternal. They depend as if for nourishment on that noise which those who have nothing to say are always making. They are like children who cannot amuse themselves alone, or like stupid monarchs who fear nothing so much as silence and their own thoughts, the emptiness of their own thoughts!
And then there are the easy-going people. They want to know everything, the number of your maternal aunt’s children, the price of the furniture and the wages of the servants. They want to know everything and they will never know anything. Their life is spent in forced smiles and in gracefully holding a cup of tea.
Their souls contain vast lists of names, dates and other miserable things. They go through life like beasts of burden, weighed down under loads that have no value.
There are maniacs, too, perverts, freaks, people that are full of curiosity about a postage stamp, the handle of an umbrella; but of these I dare not say anything, for I remember an old and very wise master who used to say to us with a smile: “You who are entering upon scientific careers must begin right away to think about collections, even if you have to collect boxes of matches.”
To tell the truth, is it our business to be wise, to be learned? Hardly! It is our business to be rich.
Well, then, there are not two kinds of curiosity. Let us leave out of the question all those dull stupidities we dare to call by this name.
The curious man seems strangely uninterested in that which excites the loquacity of trivial souls. He does not trouble himself to find out the year in which a house was built, or the honors accorded to the architect;he dreams in secret of the tastes, the passions of the man who had that little, low window pierced on the north side and that black tree with its twisted branches planted at the edge of the pond. He does not ask a young woman the name of her dressmaker, but trembles at the thought of understanding what made her choose that disturbing dress to wear this particular day. He does not question his mistress about her opinion of him, but seeks passionately to understand the opinion he has at this moment of her. He does not hasten to ask his travelling companions about their professions and the political opinions they uphold, because, as he watches their faces, he is studying discreetly and sympathetically the meaning of the little wrinkle that moves between their brows, or the significance of a glance, its source and its object. He does not solicit confidences, he receives them almost without wishing to; they come naturally to him; he is their sure and deep receptacle.
Curious about all this vast world, he seems especially concerned with its image in himself. He bears his curiosity like a sacred gift and exercises it, or rather honors it, as one would perform the rites of a cult.
Do not say you would not wish to be that man. You who feel pride in possessing yourself of a secret, in drawing out a confession, in meriting the confidence of another man, must realize that it is a marvelousfortune to be thus the tenderly imperious confidant who cannot be denied, though often the rest of the world knows nothing of it. And it is possible for you, even if you cannot become such a man at once, at least to labor to become one. Begin, with this in view, to deliver yourself from your little servile curiosities. Let us work together for this future. Let us enter so deeply into ourselves that people will say of us, “That man is not curious about anything.” From that moment we shall have begun to chant the hymn of the great, the divine curiosity.
The possession of others is a passion, that is to say, it is an ordeal, a painful effort. This supreme joy, like all the joys to which we attach value, is born out of suffering.
We must experience men in order to know them, and our neighbor for whom, or through whom, we have never had to endure any anguish, has surprises in store for us, or else escapes us altogether: that is almost a truism.
Like all others, this treasure cannot be acquired without effort, without bitterness; but it knows no decay, it never ceases to grow through the mere play of the forces of our life and seems as if sheltered from the blows of fate. It does not, like money, depreciatein value or serve ignoble ends. It only returns to oblivion.
It is not strictly personal. It can be shared and bequeathed. Since it escapes destruction and death, it can become the most precious of heritages; it has this superiority over money, that its transmission is really valid only after it has been in some sort of way reconquered. It must fall into worthy hands that will know how to work to preserve, cultivate and build it up again. In certain points it resembles what we call experience.
To suffer, first of all! That is surely one of the grandeurs of our race, and we truly love our blessings for what they have cost us in tears, in sweat, in blood.
It is repugnant to the spirit to admit that anything can be a blessing which the war has given. The desperate folly of the Western world has engendered and still holds in reserve such great misfortunes that we cannot ransack all these ruins, these heaps of bones, with any hope of extracting from them, as rag pickers do with their hooks, some fragment that is good, some useful bit of waste. No! There is no excuse for this ferocious, immeasurable stupidity. And yet, men have suffered so terribly from one another that they have learned to know one another, that is to say, to possess one another mutually. Inspite of my own denials, let me save this bit of wreckage from the general disaster. That is indeed one blessing so dearly bought that we shall not willingly give it up. And I do not speak here only of those who have fought against each other; I speak also of those who have fought side by side, who have shed their blood for the same cause and under the same standards.
Companions have been given us, imposed upon us, association with whom, even when casual and transitory, would once have seemed impossible to us. Living as free men, we sought to control the inevitable as far as possible, to choose our own road and avoid those whose opinions or points of view about the universe were likely to offend our own. We thus made use of that liberty for the most part in order to humor our irritable feelings, to lull our souls to sleep in a precarious security, and restrict the area of our inward activity.
Then came the war and we had not only to suffer from the enemy, to endure unforeseen attacks in regions of ourselves that we considered invulnerable, but to suffer still more from our own messmates, from those who commanded us and especially those whom we commanded.
Could it have been otherwise? No! No! If that suffering had been spared us, we should not have been men, we should not have gone to war, weshould not have been those divine animals whom it is so beautiful and so shameful to be and whom we cannot help being.
We have been told that all suffering is sterile, hopeless and without redemptive power. That it only serves to nourish hatred. But how marvelous it is when it engenders understanding, that is to say, possession, that is to say, love!
I have observed that for many men, except in actual bodily encounter, combat face to face, the enemy has lost all individual or specific character and has become almost confounded with the great hostile forces of nature: lightning, fire, tidal waves. The bullet coming from so far away, the shell hurled from beyond the horizon, all these mortal powers are simply like a form of blind destiny. In spite of daily lessons in hatred, in spite of vociferations, these men die courageously, with a resigned despair, without hatred.
But with other, less noble souls, the tendency to aversion and quarreling, thus turned back from the enemy, seeks its objects in their immediate surroundings and finds them, creates them, alas!
My comrades, my comrades, if the uncertainty of your spirit, your agony, the rebelliousness of your afflicted flesh urges you to seek those who are responsible, do not look too angrily upon those who are about you, do not, in your aberration, accuse Houtelettebecause he is a chatterbox, Exmelin because he is an egoist, or Blèche because he is a rude, morose commander. Do not place your misery to the account of Méry, who is so slow in obeying, and be willing to admit that Maurin is not to blame for everything because his opinions are not the same as yours. At least, if you must draw your circle of animosity, make it so close about you that it contains only yourselves, and seek first of all in yourselves the causes of your unhappiness.
Better still, apply yourselves to looking your suffering in the face, putting it, with insight and precision, to the proof.
You know that a loathsome drink almost ceases to be loathsome when you drink it without haste but with a desire to appreciate the precise quality of its bitterness. Exactly in this same manner you should endeavor to measure, to study your suffering. Instead of abhorring it, try in a way to understand it; it will become interesting, curious, I dare not say lovable.
If Méry carries out your orders badly, consider systematically how he can be made to become, in spite of himself, a really good servant. If Blèche exercises his authority in a way that incessantly wounds you, interest yourself in his brutality, try to analyze his movements, his expressions, his familiar habits, and you will then be in a better position, not toescape from him indeed, but to avoid at times the sting, the cut of his peremptoriness. You will make him restless by doing this, and you will set him thinking. It is not necessary for him to fear you, it is enough for him to recognize in you a free force with which he has to reckon, a force it is wise to propitiate. Meanwhile, to use a colloquialism, “you’ve got him.” Every time you have obliged him to be less arrogant, more just with you, you can say that you have “had” him, as the soldiers so admirably put it.
This possession costs a certain amount of work. But you are willing to toil eight hours in order to earn ten francs that do not remain for a single day between your fingers; you can certainly afford a few minutes of your effort and your soul to acquire a treasure of which nothing will ever be able to deprive you.
The very rich man owns several estates. There is always one that he prefers, that he frequents and cultivates by choice. There are others where he goes only from time to time, at the solicitation of some state of his soul which inclines him to seek, for a period, the mountains, or the ocean, or the open country. There are some, finally, which he does not love at all but of which, nevertheless, he will notdispossess himself because they are part of his fortune.
It is so with you who possess a family, friends, comrades, and adversaries. It is so with you who are able to draw, without let or hindrance, from the immense well of humankind. You must refuse nothing; you must accept everything, find out the value of everything, store everything away. The world of men is a rich patrimony, the exploitation of which is expressly confided to you. You must not be a bad administrator, you must make all your land bring forth its fruit.
Choose every day what is necessary to you, for you are the master.
You must know, besides, how to accept the inevitable and take chances, for you are nothing but a man.
Construct a scale, a clear, harmonious keyboard. Like an organist you must know the right moment to pull the stop of the oboe and unloose the thunder of the bass. The pipes are not at fault: it is for you to become a good musician. The face of Guillaumin suits you in the morning, and his ideas rejuvenate you like fresh water. The eloquence of Maurin is like a tonic in your hours of recreation. But there are desolate evenings when what you undoubtedly need is the deep voice of Cauchois and his affectionate silence.
In spite of the legendary ages, in spite of the religions, in spite of the poets, in spite of the marvelous traditions and, above all, in spite of our own deepest aspirations, we must unquestionably abandon the hope of an occult correspondence between souls.
It is a renunciation that it is hard to admit. Every day events envelop us that seem to revive the vanished perfume of mystery. Our reason is in no haste to dissipate these clouds, to pierce these appearances: too well they soothe the irritating need of not being quite solitary in the interior of ourselves, of not being quite exiles in an inaccessible desert.
That nothing outside our senses can reveal to us the proximity of a beloved person, the danger that is approaching him, the death that is coming to clasp him, is an extremity to which we find ourselves reduced without ever submissively making up our minds to it.
A few courageous men have halted before this mountain and undertaken to lift it. Let us leave them toiling in the shadow; let us aid them, if not by our effort, at least by our silence, and wait.
Let us wait, but let us not cease to go forth to other battles. The unknown never fails us. And as for what we shall choose, there is so much in the unknown to allure us, to enchant us! If we give upsurmounting one obstacle another will always rise before our feet. From obstacle to obstacle we shall always be led to the foot of the same wall. We shall consume our whole life in the struggle, knowing that the very interest of life lies in that struggle and in those obstacles.
Now and then, detached by great efforts of the pickaxe and the mattock, a fragment of the somber mountain rolls at our feet. We stop it with rapture, we examine it, we lift it with a sort of sadness, in order to try its weight. There is no victory that demands so great a price or seems to us more desolate. It is as if we roused ourselves to a frenzy to destroy the unknown in order that our success might fill us with bitterness. Happily, the unknown is always there.
I find myself alone with the person who of all the world is the closest to me, the best loved, the most perfectly chosen. The silence exhales a light perfume, a unique perfume that seems that of our kindred souls. Oh! how we should like to believe that the essences of our beings, delivered at last, might communicate and unite with each other in the intermediate space, in the impassable abyss!
At this very moment we surprise in one another’s eyes a common thought. Simultaneously, it escapes our lips with a sort of rapturous precipitancy, as if we were afraid of not arriving at exactly the samemoment at therendez-vous, as if we wished, with the harmonious precision of a well-rehearsed duet, to confess together some matchless certainty.
We are happy, filled with astonishment.... But I am not deceived.
I do not yet hold it, palpitating, for good and all, between my fingers, the proof that has been so long sought for. Not yet, this day, have I met face to face either God or the immortal soul.
Only too well I know that some slight sound, some rhythm outside us, the beating of a bird’s wing, the boring of an insect in the old wood of the furniture, the sigh of the wind under the door,—that it is one of these things which has suddenly set our souls in tune, awakened the echoes of affinity in the abysses of our two separate selves. We have so many memories in common, we have so carefully matched our tastes, we have so well unified our material world and tried to blend even our futures together that the very touch of the violinist’s bow suffices to make us vibrate in harmony.
But there must be the touch of the bow, there must be the perfume, so faint that one experiences its suggestions without being sure of its presence; perhaps there is necessary only one of those obscure phenomena which pass the limit of our senses in the twilight where our inadequate organs can only gropingly divine the world.
This is our meager certainty. Very well! Let us not reject it in our spite; for it has its depth, its beauty. We must make it our own, force it to enrich us.
Where the exercise of the intelligence seems to result in the fatal imprisonment of the soul within itself, love enables us to see how the soul can reach beyond its own limits into time and space. In vain does the intelligence prove to us that all this is only an illusion. That illusion is beautiful; let us make up our minds to give it shape. Through its very longings to escape from its confines, the soul may perhaps succeed in breaking them, and it is to love without a doubt that it will owe the miracle of its deliverance.
We possess only an imperfect means of communion. So be it! Let us labor tenderly to perfect that means. It is thus that the creators of science and industry labor, and we must admit that their stubbornness has succeeded in making a very great evil out of a small one. Let us not be less ingenious! This sinister progress ought to give us encouragement: moral civilization deserves as much care as the other sort.
With our brothers, our wives, our friends, let us freely seek to have so many things in common, let us strive so passionately to understand one another, that our thoughts, ceaselessly pressing toward thisgoal, may continually experience the sense of infinity and eternity.
There lies our path; if it urges us to possess the largest portion we can of the human world, let us first begin by intimately possessing what we love. This possession I am sure is the only real one. They knew it very well, those desperate men who have loved fiercely the mere bodies of women without ever receiving the real gift that can be yielded in a glance, from a distance, with the swiftness of lightning.
There are men who set out from their homes in the morning in the pursuit of wealth. They walk with their eyes on the pavement, they fling themselves furiously into all sorts of petty labors. They dream of lost money, princely gifts, scandalous inheritances, lotteries. They think of gold as of an inaccessible woman whom they can strike down and ravish in a corner. They return home in the evening worn out, exasperated, famished, as poor as ever. They have not even seen the face of the man who sat next them in the subway. That face itself was a fortune.
Do you seek out your friend because, on occasion, he can lend you the sum you foresee you are going to need, because he can speak to some cabinet officialon your behalf, because he is a jovial host? If that is the case, you are a slave, you possess nothing. Do you, on the contrary, love him for that way of smiling he has that so delights you, for the candor and tenderness his hesitating voice betrays, his gift of tears and his stormy repentances? If this is so, you are very rich: that man is yours and he is a treasure worth having.
Can you recall the use you made of your first five-franc piece? Most assuredly not! But you will never forget a certain expression which, in your eyes, distorted or made more beautiful some well-loved face when you were a little child. That has, and always will have, a place among your treasures: that day you really learned something of importance, and you have never ceased since to recall the victory and turn it to account.
If you have little inclination to squander your fortune, what is to prevent you from assembling it under one title-deed? A single face, a single soul, is yet an inestimable estate. One may believe one has exhausted all one’s resources, but one is always deceived, for like the earth, the human landscape is always perpetually laboring and bears fruit every season.
The peasant who possesses only an acre is full of pride nevertheless, for he knows that his possession goes down to the very center of the earth.
For many years I have watched the same face, like the faithful horizon stretched across the aperture of a window. It contrives, that face, a thousand things, it expresses and reflects a thousand things, I alone know its touching beauty, since I alone am able to reap all its harvests, since I alone cannot, without a glance, allow the tiniest flower of every day to die.
It is not wholly within your power to be without enemies; it behooves you, indeed, not to lack adversaries. Above all, it behooves you to know your adversaries. From that to conquering them is but a short step. From that to loving them is no step at all.
Do not dread an experience too much; consider your adversary attentively and try to imagine his motives, those that he declares as well as those that he conceals, those that he invents as well as those of which he is ignorant. Think long enough and with enough intensity to understand these reasons, and even to discover new ones of which your adversary has not thought; this will not be difficult for you if you have any knowledge of yourself.
Then make a strong effort to put yourself, in spirit, in the place of him you are combatting. Do not go so far as to detest yourself, but do not refusethis opportunity of judging yourself severely. For a test: perhaps you have entered upon this experience with your teeth and fists clenched; stop when you find that you are smiling and that your hands are relaxed.
One has no idea how much this exercise inclines one to justice, how profitable it is and how destructive of hatred. Too much imagination would perhaps lead you to neglect your own cause; stop in time, therefore, unless you wish to become, as the spectators may decide, either a fool or a hero.
For my part, I have no hesitation in counselling such a practice: it teaches one to conquer, to conquer smilingly. It teaches one to know one’s adversary. And then, too, it is good as everything is good that forestalls and destroys hatred.
There is only one single thing in the world that is, perhaps, really hateful, stupidity. But even that is disputable, and moreover it is always a presumptuous assertion.
Happy is the man who has no enemies. But, I repeat, he who has no adversaries, he who has not accepted those that life offers him, or has not been able to procure any of his own will, is ignorant of a great source of wealth.
There is but small merit in understanding those whom we love; there is a great, a crowningly bitter pleasure, in penetrating a soul that is hostile to us,in making it our own by main force, in colonizing it.
Not to choose our friends, that is to be too self-denying, too modest. Not to choose our adversaries, that is altogether too stupid; it is inexcusable.
A voice whispers in my ear: “We do not choose our vermin, we do not choose our mad dogs....” Alas, no! but that is quite another matter.
Every time I hear someone use the word “promiscuity,” I recall an experience I once had. An experience,—that is a great deal to say, it was such a slight affair after all.
It was in the days when there still used to be in Paris those omnibuses with upper stories. I was returning home quite late, on one of those fresh, airy nights when one suddenly draws in, through the fetid breath of the streets, a gust that comes from afar and seems unwilling to let itself be defiled, obliterated. I was dreaming all alone, quite to myself, about things of no interest to anyone but myself, but that happily filled the infinite space of the world.
Through the depths of this reverie I became aware of a slight, muffled blow against my right shoulder. This did not rouse me from my own absorption. A second time the blow came, followedby a soft, continuous contact. It gave me a disagreeable sensation.
By my side there was a young boy of sixteen or seventeen, dressed like an apprentice. The uncertain glimmer of the street-lamps lighted up his pale, weary face. His eyes were closed and he seemed overwhelmed with sleep. I noticed that every few moments his head, swaying with the jolts of the vehicle, would strike against my shoulder. He would raise it up with an instinctive movement, only to let it fall back the more heavily the next moment. Once he let it lie there. At the time I was so lost in my dreams that the animal in me alone rose to its defense: I pushed the young lad gently back into his place. It was trouble lost; the next second he abandoned himself anew against my shoulder with a sort of desperate ingenuousness. I pushed him back two or three times, then I gave it up and tried, in spite of this slight burden, to continue my glorious excursion in the interior of my own self.
But I did not succeed. An extraordinary, unforeseen, unknown sensation was sweeping over me. It was a penetrating animal warmth. It came from that head propped against my shoulder, and also from a certain frail, bent arm which I felt slowly digging into my side. The little apprentice was sound asleep.
I bent down my face and felt his breath like thatof a child passing in little puffs over my cheek and my chin. From that moment on, I ceased completely to think of my important personal affairs and I had only one anxiety: to see to it that the boy did not awaken.
I do not know how long this sleep lasted: I was warm with a strange, delicate warmth; I had a sense of well-being, I was absorbed, I was penetrating into an unknown universe, as vast, as starry as my own. I could not understand how this contact could have offended me at first, even disgusted me. I had torn off the prickly shell and was tasting, like a nourishing kernel, that human presence and companionship. I was happy and interested.
We reached a place where there were shouts and lights. The little fellow sat up with a start, rubbed his eyes and ran stumbling towards the stairway and disappeared; he had not even seen me.
He did not know what I owed him and that he would never be forgotten.
One must not, at first sight, say that a man is uninteresting and that his face is expressionless. One might as well say that the water of a river is empty when it swarms with vegetable and animal life.
In one’s manner of listening to a man there may be prejudice and suspicion, there must not be indifferenceor indolence. The soul has, in its arsenal, lenses, microscopes, and powerful sources of light for exploring objects to their depths, through their transparencies, into the innermost recesses of their organs.
At the beginning of the war I lived for two years with a comrade who was invariably silent and indolent; his handsome face remained always so gloomy, his actions remained so devoid of purpose and significance, that I despaired of ever making him my prey; I was simply never touched with a desire to get hold of him.
Then a day came when I heard him greet some happening with a word, pronounced in such a challenging tone that I decided to undertake the expedition. I spent days and days at it, with the pickaxe, mattock, and little lantern of the miner. I have thought of him ever since with stupefaction, as of those subterranean, half-explored chasms where one finds rivers, colonnades, domes, blind animals and terrible shapes of stone.
The nature of the object should not discourage one’s interest. The viper is a dangerous and vindictive creature. The naturalists who have been able to study it have only been able to do so because they have studied with passion, that is to say, with love.
So much to tell you that that sort of zoological curiosity you may bring to the study of your neighborno more authorizes cruelty than it allows you to dispense with affection.
Extreme attention resembles affection. Contemplation is pure love.
It is after my own taste that I mean to enjoy my possessions.
First, I wish to have part possession of my companions. There is no question of my being the only one to possess them, or of my limiting my empire to one or two of them. What I plan is to undertake each conquest separately. This word, we shall see, does not signify seduction, but a knowledge that is full of respect, a profound, lasting interest, an enthusiasm, a passionate contemplation.
Observe them, your comrades: say you have twenty-three of them; you will find through them twenty-three distinct representations of yourself, and that in spite of yourself, through the mere play of everyday life. One of them knows chiefly your tireless patience; another, who works beside you all day, knows that you are painstaking and irritable; he is, however, ignorant of what a third, the friend of your fireside, knows,—that you are a careful and anxious father. There are others for whom you are, above all, a soul torn by religion or a mind familiar with everything thatconcerns social questions, or a great lover of reading. Others, finally, see in you only a good billiard-player, or a crack shot, or a courteous companion.
You are, of course, all these things. The totality of these various aspects is, indeed, you, provided that we add also many other qualities that no one suspects. But each one of your comrades sees an aspect of you that is different from what his neighbor sees. For this reason, avoid confusion, avoid mixing things. Be lavish of yourself in every sense, but begin by being prudent, careful of your resources and skilful in the art of grouping them.
One day you were having an affectionate conversation with Maurin. You were delighted with one another, delighted to be together, satisfied with your fellowship, your mutual possession. You were not talking of anything very private. But then Blèche came up, Blèche with whom you have such profitable, such intimate talks, and all the charm of Maurin’s company disappeared without your being able to compensate yourself with the usual pleasure you take in the society of Blèche. This was because, in the presence of both, you could not give each one what you are accustomed to give him, nor could you ask from him what he gives only to you.
These combinations, like those of the chemists, demand much care and judgment. Don’t protest!Don’t exclaim that such notions are too subtle, too complex: you do not receive all your friends pell-mell. However much of an epicure you may be, you still give more attention to the selection of your guests than to the composition of the menu. Of what importance is the most delicate fare in comparison with the delight the conversation of carefully chosen human beings gives us?
That is why, when you are sure of two persons for whom you feel an interest that borders on passion, you experience such a delicious anxiety at the moment of presenting them to one another, of bringing them together in your presence.
You are like the maker of fireworks who is about to mix changeable substances with explosive properties in his mortar. You weigh them carefully and combine them in well-defined proportions. You take time preparing each of the spiritual elements of this mixture.
And when the union is accomplished, you seem to be saying to each of them: “I have prepared a magnificent gift for you. Come, now, and know one another.”
Your heart throbs, because each of them is not only going to know the other but is going to learn to know you through the eyes of the other.
Could there be a better reason for living?
However brief may be the intercourse we have with a man, we always come away from it somewhat modified: we find we are a little greater than we were before, or a little less great, better or worse, exalted or diminished.
I have learned this from having, in the course of my life, approached many men, both famous and obscure, who do not dream what I owe them or the harm they have been able to do me.
We instinctively recognize and classify individuals according to this faculty they have, some of drawing us out, others of crushing us. It is a faculty they usually exert without knowing it, even against their will: they are tonic or depressing just as one is short or tall, just as one has black eyes or green. But the comparison breaks down in this respect, that it is always possible to modify the reaction we produce on others.
In this matter we exhibit a special sensibility that may be compared to the tropisms which push plants up toward the light or make them struggle against gravitation. We go toward some and flee from others, regardless of our interests or our prejudices.
The man whose companionship we seek because it stimulates us is not necessarily he who strives to giveus a good opinion of ourselves. Often he is taciturn, sometimes surly, occasionally ironical and cutting. Nevertheless, there emanates from his whole person something like approbation, a confession of confidence. Even if he insists, harshly, noisily, upon calling attention to our faults, he does not make us despair of ourselves and our future. And if he never speaks to us about ourselves we yet know, by some imperceptible gesture, by some tone in his voice, by a gleam in his eye, that he is interested in us.
Every time we leave him we like him better, we like ourselves better, we like all humanity better, we look at everything with a smile, we are as full of plans as a tree in April.
The other sort of man, on the contrary, is forever deluding himself. He pursues before our very eyes an end which we see, with grief and bitterness, he regularly fails to attain. Whatever he does, whatever he says, he always shows us that he is a stranger to us, that he is superior and that we do not interest him. Even in his manner of wishing to give us his attention, he exhibits a certain difficulty in seeing us at all. If he tries to seem talkative, important, majestic, his natural gifts turn against him; his cordiality disgusts us, his bearing irritates us, his self-importance makes us want to laugh. We cannot forgive him anything, and especially the factthat we always leave him with the same vague depression, the same disgust of life, and the same distrust of our own undertakings. What we are always escapes him, and although what he is does not escape us, we are discouraged by him all the same.
We must be the first of these two men, he who is, amid all things, in spite of all things, a rich man, he whom the poet of theLivre d’amourjustly called “a conqueror.”
You must not violate your gifts, you must simply study their possibilities. It is what we do with trees and animals in which we are able to instil virtues they do not seem to possess at all naturally.
However humble your position in society may be, however great your poverty, in the crude sense men give to this word, you may none the less become rich and successful without so much as leaving the room where you are in conversation with your comrade, your wife or your favorite adversary. Find your study there. You have observed that when two men meet they begin by sacrificing to the old custom of enquiring briefly about one another’s health and affairs, after which, without waiting for the other’s reply, each one begins to speak of himself. This is such an old usage that they do not even know they are doing it. Each one speaks of himself for a fewmoments, then allows the other to talk about himself for about the same length of time. When this has gone on long enough they separate, and each preserves for his partner a vague feeling of gratitude, not so much because he has listened as because he has made a pretense of listening to matters that were of no concern to him.
This fact suggests a great lesson. The majority of men suffer from a sort of neglect, they suffer from not being possessed by anyone, from offering themselves in vain. Stretch out your hand and seize them. Learn to say the word that will assure you the mastery, the domination.
It is inconceivable that so many spirits, tormented by the need for power, by the passion for authority, should waste and sterilize themselves in order to hoard money, win rank, obtain a title. They gain nothing from it but a pride that withers them; they clasp only the shadow of what they pursue.
Seek a little and you will soon find that they are legion who ask nothing better than to cast themselves into your nets. Do not believe that they are always the mediocre victims. It is not only the wretched who wish to be understood and consoled. There are many sceptics who await with anguish the touch of a hand to deliver them from their scepticism. There are many happy men, too, who cannot bear to be alone with their happiness, for manhas even more need of help in joy than in sorrow.
It has often happened, while walking with a comrade, a stranger or an adversary, that I would find him hard, defiant, rebellious at every touch. Thereupon, I would set out openly, under his very eye, to capture him. I would begin to speak to him about himself. I would say to him: “The unique things about you are....” And I would confide to him everything I thought about him, being particularly careful to say nothing more about myself. I would interest myself in him, not fictitiously—that is a barren and a perilous game—but with all my heart, with all my intelligence. I would tell him what I knew, what I already possessed of him, his virtues and his faults. Confused or irritated, he would come to my feet, he would appear as if before a bar to give thanks or to plead, to show his claws or to purr. The things I had said to him might be very severe; I still felt that he was grateful to me for having cared about him, even in order to attack him. No longer was he in any haste to leave me. Often he would come back on the days that followed and make me unexpected visits; though I could see that he was provoked, I knew nevertheless that he had come to pay homage, to attest that he was a faithful subject.
“The unique things about you are”.... That is a chance phrase. There are others, there are athousand of them. When you are ready, a grip of the hand or some other human sign may take its place. I remember the story of a certain prefect who, having no worse enemy than a traitor in his department, had the happy thought one day of asking him to have a drink and going away without paying for it. This extraordinary proof of confidence attached the man to him forever.
Not that all your victims will be so tremblingly easy. There are proud souls who set a high price on their conquest, fantastic and sick souls whom one has to seize suddenly and overthrow almost before they are aware of it.
You must set the time and choose the hour of the attack.
Do not accost the business man in the roar of the Exchange; attempt the field rather at the hour when, wearied, he is counting over and reckoning his disillusionments. Do not seize the man of action on the battlefield, but in the moment of leisure when he does not know what to do with his solitude.
What marvelous opportunities must the shy Las Casas have glimpsed at Saint Helena, even though he was pursuing other aims!
I once saw a simple soul publicly congratulate a master surgeon whose skill had for long years placed him above all felicitations. And the celebrated man blushed, bowed, gave in.
A successful lawyer said to me one day: “Each one of my clients imagines that I think only of him, that I occupy myself exclusively with him.”
Remember, too, that certain women never capitulate twice: they never forgive themselves for having yielded completely even for a moment. The same thing is true with others who are offended with you because you have “taken” them by force. Do not regret this sacrifice too much: it leaves a beautiful jewel in your casket.
Truly the whole vast race of men belongs to you.
Take and eat, you cannot find more noble food.
See, there is the world you must conquer. It is not that for whose possession proud peoples are driven to declare war; it is indeed quite another world than that which Satan showed Jesus from the summit of the mountain.