The road was verdant with euphorbias in bloom, whose stems I broke to see the milk-white poison exuding from them. But these poisonousplants nourished the beautiful tithymal caterpillar, green with dark spots, from which a butterfly would be born, a sphinx with colored wings of the finest tint.
Sometimes a viper glided among the stones of these dusty roads, which I watched as it moved away, gray against the puzzuolana red, with his flat head and the suppleness of his spotted body. The dangerous reptile appeared to me a proof of the indifference of nature whose only care is to multiply life, beneficent or murderous, with the same inexhaustible prodigality.
I learned then, with inexpressible force, the same lesson which I learned from your works, to know that we have nothing for our own but ourselves, that the “I” alone is real, that nature ignores us, as do men, that from her as from them we have nothing to ask if not some pretexts for feeling or for thinking. My old beliefs, in a God, the father and judge, seemed like the dreams of a sick child, and I expanded to the extreme limits of the vast landscape, to the depths of the immense void heaven, in thinking that as a youth I had already reflected enough to understand of this world what none of the countrymen whom I saw pass could ever comprehend.
They came from the mountains, leading their oxen harnessed to their large carts, and saluted the cross devoutly. With what delight I scorned their gross superstition, theirs and the Abbé Martel’s and my mother’s, though I had not decided to declare my atheism, foreseeing too plainly what scenes this declaration would provoke! But these scenes are of no more importance, and I come now to theexposéof a drama which would have had no meaning if I had not first admitted you into the intimacy of my mind and its formation.
§ III. TRANSPLANTATION.
By too close attention to study during this year, I brought on quite a serious illness, which forced me to interrupt my preparation for the Normal School. When I had recovered I doubled my lessons in philosophy, at the same time following a part of the rhetorical course.
I presented myself at the school about the time in which I had the honor of being received by you. You are acquainted with the events which followed. I failed at the examination. My compositions lacked that literary brilliancy which is acquired only at the Lyceums of Paris.
In November, 1885, I accepted the position of preceptor in the Jussat-Randon family. I wrote to you then that I renounced my independence in order that I might not be any further expense to my mother. Joined with this reason there was the secret hope that thesavings realized in this preceptorate would permit me, my licentiate once passed, to prepare for my fellowship examination in Paris. A residence in that city attracted me, my dear master, by the prospect of living near the Rue Guy de la Brosse.
My visit to your hermitage had made a profound impression. You appeared to me as a kind of modern Spinoza, so completely identical with your books by the nobility of a life entirely consecrated to thought. I created beforehand a romance of felicity at the idea that I should know the hours of your walks, that I should form the habit of meeting you in the old Jardin des Plantes, which undulates under your windows, that you would consent to direct me, that aided and sustained by you, I could also make my place in science; in fine you were for me the living certainty, the master, what Faust is for Wagner in the psychologic symphony of Goethe. Beside, the conditions which this preceptorate offered were particularly easy. I was above all to be the companion of a child twelve years of age, the second son of the Marquis de Jussat.
I learned afterward why this family had retired for the whole winter to this château, near Lake Aydat, where they usually passed the autumn months only. M. de Jussat, who is originally from Auvergne, and whohas held the office of minister plenipotentiary under the emperor, had just lost a large sum on the Bourse. His property being hypothecated, and his income greatly diminished, he had let his house on the Champs-Elysées furnished at a very high rent.
He had arrived at his Jussat estate a little earlier, expecting to go directly to his villa at Cannes. An advantageous chance to let this villa also offered. The desire to free his property had tempted him, the more as an increasing hypochondria made it easier to face the prospect of an entire year passed in solitude. He had been surprised by the sudden departure of his son Lucien’s preceptor, who without doubt did not care to bury himself in the country for so many months, and so he had come to Clermont. He had studied his mathematics there thirty-five years before, under M. Limasset, the old professor who was my father’s friend. The idea had come to him to ask his old master to recommend an intelligent young man, capable of taking charge of Lucien’s studies for the whole year. M. Limasset naturally thought of me, and I consented, for the reasons which I have given, to be presented to the marquis as a candidate for the place.
In the parlor of one of the hotels on the Place de Jande, I found a man quite tall, very bald, with clear gray eyes in a very red face, who did not even take the trouble to examine me. He begun at once to talk, andhe talked all the time, intermingling the details of his health—he was one of the imaginary invalids—with the most lively criticisms on modern education. I can hear him now using pellmell phrases which revealed in a way the different phases of his character.
“Well, my poor Limasset, when are you coming down to see us? The air is excellent down there. That is what I need. I cannot breathe in Paris. We never breathe enough. I hope, monsieur,” and he turned to me, “that you are not an advocate of these new methods of teaching. Science, nothing but science; and my God, gentlemen scholars, what do you make of it?” Then returning to M. Limasset: “In my day, in our day, I may say, everybody had a respect for authority and for duty. Education was not absolutely neglected for instruction. You remember our chaplain, the Abbé Habert, and how he could talk? What health he had! How he could walk in all sorts of weather without an overcoat! But you, Limasset, how old are you? Sixty-five, hey? Sixty-five, and not an ache! not one? Do you not think I am better since I have lived among the mountains? I am never very ill, but there is always some little thing the matter with me. Indeed, I would rather be really ill. At least I should get well then.”
If I repeat these incoherent words, as they come back to my memory, my dear master, it is first, that you may know the value of the intellect of this man who, as my mother has told me, has brought your venerated name into my case; it is also that you understand with what feelings I arrived, four days after, at the château when I ran into so terrible dangers.
The marquis had accepted me at the first visit, and insisted upon taking me with him in his landau. During the journey from Clermont to Aydat, he had leisure to tell me about his family. He explained with his invincible garrulity, constantly interrupted by some remarks about his person, that his wife and daughter did not care much for society, and that they were excellent housekeepers; that his oldest son Count André, was home for a fortnight and that I must not be annoyed at his brusqueness, for it covered the best of hearts, that his other son, Lucien, had been ailing and that his restoration to health was the most important thing of all. Then at the word health he started, and, after an hour of confidences regarding his headaches, his digestion, his sleep, his ailments past, present, and future, being fatigued no doubt by the keen air and the flux of words, he fell asleep in a corner of the carriage.
I recall the plans which I formed when, freed from this tormentor, who was already the object of my contempt, I looked at the beautifulcountry through which we were passing between mountain ravines and woods, now turning yellow in the autumn, with the Puy de la Vache at the horizon, with the hollow of its crater all plowed up, and quite red with volcanic dust.
What I had already seen of the marquis, and what he had told me of his family, had convinced me that I was about to be exiled among people whom I called barbarians. I had given this name to those persons whom I judge to be irreparable strangers to the intellectual life.
The prospect of this exile did not alarm me. The doctrine by which I should regulate my existence was so clear to my mind! I was so resolved to live only in myself, to defend myself against all intrusion from without. The château to which I was going, and the people who inhabited it would be only subjects for the most profitable study.
My programme was made out: during the twelve or fourteen months that I should live there I would employ my leisure in studying German, and in mastering the contents of “Beaunais’ Physiology,” which was in my small trunk, bound behind the carriage, together with your works, my dear master, my “Ethics,” several volumes of M. Ribot, of M. Taine, of Herbert Spencer, some analytical romances and the books necessary tothe preparation for my licentiate. I intended to pass this examination in July.
A new notebook awaited the notes which I proposed to make upon the character of my hosts. I had promised myself to take them to pieces, wheel by wheel, and I had bought for this purpose a book, closed by a lock and key, upon the fly-leaf of which I had written this sentence from the “Anatomy of the Will.”
“Spinoza boasts of having studied human sentiments as the mathematician studies his geometric figures; modern psychology must study them as chemical combinations elaborated in a retort, while regretting that this retort may not be as transparent and as manageable as those of the laboratory.”
I tell you this childishness to prove the degree of my sincerity, and to show how little I resemble the poor and ambitious young man that so many romances have described.
With my taste for duplication, I remember to have remarked this difference with pleasure. I recalled Julien Sorel of “Rouge et Noir,” arriving at the house of M. de Rênal, the temptations of Rubempré, in Balzac, in front of the house of the Bargetons, some pages also of the “Vingtras de Vallés.” I analyzed the sensations which were concealed behind the lusts and the revolts of these different heroes.
There is always a surprise in passing from one society to another, but there was not a trace of envy or maliciousness in me. I looked at the marquis as he slept, wrapped, on this cool November afternoon, in a furred coat whose turned-up collar half-concealed his face. A robe of dark soft wool covered his legs. Dark embroidered skin gloves protected his hands. His hat of felt as fine as silk was pulled down over his eyes. I only felt that these details represented a kind of existence very different from ours with the poor and petty economy of our home which only my mother’s scrupulous neatness saved from meanness.
I rejoiced that I did not feel any envy, not the least atom, at the sight of these signs of prosperous fortune, neither envy nor embarrassment. I had myself completely under control, and was steeled against all vulgar prejudice by my doctrine, your doctrine, and by the sovereign superiority of my ideas. I will have traced a perfect portrait of my mind at this time if I add that I had resolved to erase love from the programme of my life. I had had, since my adventure with Marianne, another little experience, with the wife of a professor at the Lyceum, so absolutely silly and withal so ridiculously pretentious that I came out of it strengthened in my contempt for the “Dame,” speaking after Schopenhauer, and also in my disgust for sensuality.
I attribute to the profound influences of Catholic discipline this repulsion from the flesh which has survived the dogmas of spirituality. I know very well, from an experience too often repeated, that this repulsion was insufficient to hinder profound relapses, but I depended upon the silence of the château to free me from all temptation and to practice in its full rigor the great maxim of the ancient sage: “Force all your sex to mount to the brain.” Ah! this idolatry of the brain, of my thinking Self, it has been so strong in me that I have thought seriously of studying the monastic rules that I might apply them to the culture of my mind. Yes, I have contemplated making my meditations every day, like the monks, upon the articles of my philosophiccredo, of celebrating every day, like the monks, thefêteof one of my saints, of Spinoza, of Hobbes, of Stendhal, of Stuart Mill, of you, my dear master, in evoking the image and the doctrines of the initiative thus chosen, and impregnating myself with his example.
I know that all this was very youthful and very naïve, but, you see, I was not such a man as this family stigmatizes to-day, the intriguing plebeian who was dreaming of a fine marriage, and the idea connecting my life with that of Mlle, de Jussat was implanted, inspired, so to speak, by circumstances.
I do not write to you to paint myself in a romantic light, and I donot know why I should conceal from you that, among the circumstances which urged me toward this enterprise so far from my thought on my arrival, the first was the impression produced on me by Count André the brother of the poor dead girl, whose remembrance, now that I am approaching the drama, becomes almost a torture; but let us go back to this arrival.
It is almost five o’clock. The landau moves rapidly along. The marquis is awake. He points out the frozen bosom of the little lake, all rosy under a setting sun, which empurples the dried foliage of the beeches and oaks; and, beyond the château, a large building of modern construction, white, with its slender towers and its pepper-box roof, grows nearer at every turn of the gray road.
The steeple of a village, rather of a hamlet, raises its slates above some houses with thatched roofs. It is passed. We are now in the avenue of trees which leads to the château, then before theperronand immediately in the vestibule.
We entered the salon. How peaceful it was, lighted by lamps with large shades, with the fire burning gayly in the chimney. The Marquise de Jussat with her daughter, was working at some knitting for the poor; my future pupil was looking over a book of engravings, as he stood against the open piano; Mlle. Charlotte’s governess and areligieusewere seated, farther off, sewing. Count André was reading a paper, which he put down at the moment of our arrival.
Yes, this was a peaceful place, and who could have told that my entrance would be the end of all peace for these persons who in an instant were impressed on my memory with the distinctness of portraits?
I noticed first the face of the marquise, a tall and strong woman with features slightly gross, so different from what my imagination had conceived of a great lady. She was truly the model housekeeper whom the marquis had described, but a housekeeper with a finished education, and who put me at once at my ease simply by speaking of the beautiful day that we had had for our journey.
I perceived the inexpressive face of Mlle. Eliza Largeyx, the governess, with its ever-approving smile; she was the innocent type of happy servility, of a life all complaisance and of material happiness.
There was sister Anaclet with her peasant’s eyes and her thin mouth. She lived permanently at the château that she might serve as nurse for the marquis who was always apprehensive of a possible attack.
There was little Lucien with the fat cheeks of the idle child. There, too, was the young girl, who is no more, with her beautiful form inits light dress, her gentle gray eyes, her chestnut hair, and the delicate outline of her oval face. I can still see the gesture with which she offered her hand to her father and a cup of tea to me. I hear her voice saying to the marquis:
“Father, did you see how rosy the little lake was this evening?”
And the voice of M. de Jussat responding between two swallows of his grog:
“I saw that there was some fog in the meadows and some rheumatism in the air.”
And the voice of Count André:
“Yes, but what fine shooting to-morrow!” then turning to me: “Do you shoot, Monsieur Greslon?”
“No, monsieur,” I answered.
“Do you ride?” he asked again.
“I do not.”
“I pity you,” said he, laughing; “after war, these are the two greatest pleasures that I know of.”
This is nothing, this bit of dialogue, and, thus transcribed, it will not explain why these simple phrases were the cause of my regarding André de Jussat as a being apart from any I had known until then; why, when I had gone to my room, where a servant commenced to unpack my trunk, I thought more of him than of his fragile and graceful sister:nor why, at dinner and all the evening, I had eyes only for him.
My naïve astonishment in the presence of this proud and manly fellow was derived, however, from a very simple fact; I had grown up in a purely intellectual medium in which the only estimable forms of life were the intellectual. I had had for comrades the first of my class, all as delicate and frail as I was myself, without condescending ever to notice those who excelled in the exercises of the body, and who beside only found in these exercises an excuse for brutality.
All my masters whom I liked best, and the few old friends of my father, were also able men. When I had pictured the heroes of romance, they were always mental machines more or less complicated; but I had never imagined their physical condition.
If I had ever thought of the superiority which the beautiful and firm animal energy of man represents, it was in an abstract manner, but I had never felt it. Count André, who was thirty years old, presented an admirable example of this superiority. Figure to yourself a man of medium size, but lusty as an athlete, with broad shoulders and a slender waist, gestures which betrayed strength and suppleness—gestures in which one felt that the movement was distributed with that perfection which gives adroit and preciseagility—hands and feet nervous, showing race, with a martial countenance, one of thosebistrecomplexions behind which the blood flows, rich in iron and in globules; a square forehead under bushy black hair, a mustache of the same color over a firm and tightly closed mouth, brown eyes, very near to a nose which was slightly arched, which gives to the profile a vague suggestion of a bird of prey. Last a bold chin, squarely cut, completed the physiognomy of a character of invincible will. And the will is the whole person; action made man.
It seemed as if there were in this officer, broken to all bodily exercises, ready for all exploits, no rupture of equilibrium between thought and action, and that his whole being passed entire into his smallest gestures.
I have seen him mount a horse so as to realize the ancient fable of the Centaur, put ten balls in succession at thirty paces into a playing card, leap ditches with the lightness of a professional gymnast, and sometimes, to amuse his young brother, leap over a table, only touching it with his hands.
I knew that, during the war and though only sixteen years old, he had enlisted and made the campaign of the Loire, bearing all fatigues and inspiring even the veterans with courage. As I saw him at dinner this first evening, eating steadily, with that fine humor of appetite whichreveals the fall life; speaking little, but with a commanding voice, I felt in a surprising degree the impression that I was in the presence of a creature different from myself, but finished and complete of his kind.
It seems to me as though this scene dates from yesterday, and that I am there, while the marquis plays bezique with his daughter, talking with the marquise, and stealthily watching Count André play at billiards alone. I saw him through the open door, supple and robust in his evening dress of some light material, a cigar in the corner of his mouth, pushing the balls about with a precision so perfect that it was beautiful; and I, your pupil, I, so proud of the amplitude of my mind, followed with open mouth the slightest gestures of this young man who was absorbed in a sport so vulgar, with the kind of envious admiration which a learned monk of the middle ages, unskillful in all muscular games, must have felt in presence of a knight in armor.
When I use the word envy I beg you to understand me, and not to attribute to me a baseness which was never mine. Neither this evening nor during the days which followed was I ever jealous of the name of Count André, nor of his fortune, nor of any of the social advantages which he possessed, and of which I was so deprived. Neither have I felt that strange hate of the male for the male, very finely noted by youin your pages on love.
My mother had had the weakness to tell me often in my childhood that I was a pretty boy. Without being a coxcomb, I may say that there was nothing displeasing in me, neither in my face nor in my figure. I say this to you, not from vanity, but to prove that there was not an atom of vanity in the sort of sudden rivalry which made me an adversary, almost an enemy, of Count André from this first evening. There was as much admiration as envy in this antipathy. Upon reflection, I find in the sentiment which I have tried to define the probable trace of an unconscious atavism.
I questioned the marquis later, whose aristocratic pride I thus flattered, upon the genealogy of the Jussat-Randons, and I believe that they are of a pure and conquering race, while in the veins of the descendant of the Lorraine farmers who writes these lines to you flows the blood of ancestors who had been slaves of the soil for centuries. Certainly, between my brain and that of Count André there is the same difference as there is between mine and yours, greater, since I can comprehend you and I defy him to follow my reasonings, even that which I am pursuing now, upon our relations.
To speak frankly, I am a civilized being, he is only a barbarian.But I felt immediately the sensation that my refinement was less aristocratic than his barbarism. I felt there, at once, and in the depths of this instinct of life, into which the mind descends with much difficulty, the revelation of this precedence of race which modern science affirms of all nature and which, by consequence, must be true also of man.
Why even use this word envy, which serves as the label of irrational hostilities like those with which the count immediately inspired me? Why should not this hostility be inherited like the rest? Any human acquisition whatever, that for example of character and of active energy, implies that, during centuries and centuries, files of individuals of which one is the supreme addition, have acted and willed. During this long succession of years, an antipathy, sometimes clear and sometimes obscure, has rendered the individuals of the first group odious to individuals of the second, and when two representatives of this sovereign labor of ages, also typical each in his kind as were the count and myself, meet, why not stand up the one in face of the other, like two beasts of different species?
The horse that has never been near a lion trembles with fright when his bed is made of the straw upon which one of these creatures has slept. Then fear is inherited, and is not fear one form of hate? Whyis not all hate inherited? And in hundreds of cases envy would be, as it surely was in mine, only the echo of hates formerly felt by those whose sons we are, and who continue to pursue, through us, the combats of heart begun centuries ago.
There is a current proverb that antipathies are mutual, and if it is admitted my hypothesis upon the secular origin of antipathies becomes very simple. It happens, however, that this antipathy does not manifest itself in the two beings at once. This is the case when one of the two does not deign to notice the other, and also when the other dissimulates.
I do not believe that Count André experienced at first the aversion that he would have felt if he had read to the bottom of my soul. In the beginning he paid very little attention to a young man of Clermont who had come to the château to be tutor; then I had decided on a constant dissimulation of my real Self, imprisoned among strangers. I felt no more repugnance for this defensive hypocrisy than the gardener would have had in putting straw around the currant bushes to preserve their fruit against snows and frosts. The falseness of attitude corresponded too well with my intellectual pride to prevent me from giving myself up to it with delight.
On the other hand Count André had no motive for concealing his character from me, and on this same evening, at the hour of retiring,he asked me to come into his study to talk a little. He had hardly looked at me, and I understood plainly that his intention was not to put any more familiarity between us, but to give me his opinions on my rôle as preceptor.
He occupied a suite of three rooms in a wing of the château, a bedroom, a dressing-room and the smoking-room in which we now found ourselves. A large upholstered divan, several armchairs and a massive desk, constituted the furniture of this room.
On the walls glittered arms of all kinds, guns of Tangiers, sabres and muskets of the first empire, and a Prussian helmet, which the count pointed out to me almost as soon as we had entered. He had lighted a short brierwood pipe, prepared two glasses of brandy mixed with seltzer water, and lamp in hand, he showed me the helmet saying:
“I am very sure that I knocked that fellow over. You do not know anything about the sensation of holding an enemy at the point of your gun, of taking aim, of seeing him fall, and thinking: Another one gone? It happened in a village not far from Orléans. I was on guard at daybreak, in a corner of the cemetery. I saw a head above the wall, it looked over, then the shoulders followed. It was this inquisitive fellow who wanted to see what we were doing. He did not go back to tell.”
He put down the lamp, and, after laughing a little at this remembrance, he became serious. I had felt obliged, for the sake of politeness, to moisten my lips in the mixture of gaseous water and alcohol, and the count continued:
“I wished to talk with you about Lucien, monsieur, to explain his character and in what way he is to be directed. His old tutor was an excellent man, but very weak, very indolent. I have encouraged your coming because you are a young man, and a young man is more suitable for Lucien. Teaching, monsieur, is worse than nothing, sometimes, when it falsifies ideas. The great thing in this life, I ought almost say the only thing, is character.”
He made a pause as if to ask my opinion, I answered with somebanalphrase which supported his view.
“Very well,” he continued, “we understand one another. At present, for a man of our name, there is in France only one profession, that of a soldier. So long as our country is in the hands of thecanailleand so long as we have the Germans to fight, our duty is in the only place that remains to us—the army. Thank God my father and my mother share these opinions. Lucien will be a soldier, and a soldier has no need of knowing all that the people prate about to-day. Having honor, sangfroid, muscles and loving France, everything is right. I hadall the trouble in the world to take my degree. This year must be for Lucien, above everything else, a year of outdoor life; and, for studies, these must be conversations only. It is to your talks with him that I wish to call your attention. You must insist on the practical, on the positive, and on principles. He has some faults which must be corrected. You will find him very good, but very soft; he must learn to endure.”
“Insist, for example, upon his going out in all sorts of weather, that he walk two or three hours every day. He is very inexact, and I insist that he shall become as punctual as a chronometer. He also is untruthful. I think this the most horrible of vices. I can pardon everything, yes, many, many follies. I never forgive a falsehood. We have had, from my father’s old master, such good recommendation of you, of your life with your mother, of your dignity, of your strictness, that we depend very much on your influence. Your age permits you to be as much a companion as a preceptor for Lucien. Example, you see, is the best kind of teaching. Tell a conscript that it is a noble and fine thing to march up to the fire, and he will listen to you without understanding you. March in front of him, swaggering, and he becomes more of a blusterer than you are.
“As for me, I rejoin my regiment in a few days, but absent or present,you can depend on my support; if it should ever be a question what to do, that this child become what he ought to become, a man who can serve his country bravely, and, if God permit, his king.”
This discourse, which I believe I have faithfully reproduced, did not at all astonish me. It was quite natural in a house in which the father was an old monomaniac, the mother a simple housekeeper, the sister young and timid, that the oldest brother should hold a directing place, and talk with the new preceptor. It was also quite natural that a soldier and a gentleman educated in the ideas of his class and of his profession should speak as a soldier and a gentleman.
You, my dear master, with your universal comprehension of natures, with your facility in disentangling the line which unites the temperament and the medium of ideas, you would have seen in Count André a very definite and significant case. And for what had I prepared my locked notebook if not to collect documents of this kind upon human nature? And was there not here everything new in the person of this officer, so single and so simple, who manifested a mode of thought evidently identical with his mode of being, breathing, moving, smoking and eating?
Ah! I see too well that my philosophy was not as blood in my veins,as marrow in my bones, for this discourse and the convictions it expressed, instead of pleasing me by this rare encounter of logic, only enlarged the wound of antipathy which had been already opened, I knew not where, in my self-love perhaps, for I was weak and frail in the presence of the strong—surely in my inmost sensibility.
None of the count’s ideas had the least value in my eyes. They were for me pure foolishness, and instead of despising this foolishness, as I should have despised it in any other case, I began to hate it in his mouth.
A soldier’s profession? I considered it so wretched, because of its brutal associations and the time lost, that I was glad that I was the son of a widow that I might escape the barbarity of the barracks and the miseries of its discipline.
The hatred of Germany? I had tried to destroy it in myself, as the worst of prejudices, from disgust of the imbecile comrades whom I saw exalt it into an ignorant patriotism, and also from admiration for the people to whom psychology owes Kant and Schopenhauer, Lotze and Fechner, Helmholz and Wundt.
Political faith? I professed an equal disdain for the gross hypotheses which, under the name of legitism, republicanism, Cæsarism, pretended to govern a countrya priori. I dreamed with the author of the“Dialogues Philosophiques,” of an oligarchy of savants, a despotism of psychologists and economists, of physiologists and historians.
Practical life? This was a diminished life for me, who saw in the external world only a field of experiences in which an enfranchised soul ventures with prudence, just far enough to collect emotions. Finally this contempt for falsehood which the count professed struck me as an affront, at the same time that his absolute confidence in my morality, based upon a false impression of me, embarrassed me, chilled me, hurt me.
Certainly the contradiction was piquant; I considered the portrait which my father’s old friend had drawn; it pleased me in a certain way that they should believe it like me, and I felt irritated that he, Count André, did not distrust me. But what does that prove, if not that we never thoroughly know ourselves? You have magnificently said, my dear master: “Our states of consciousness are like islands upon an ocean of darkness whose foundations are forever being removed. It is the work of the psychologist to divine by soundings the ground which makes of these isles the visible summits of a mountain chain, invisible and immovable under the moving mass of waters.”
I have not described this first evening at the château because it had any immediate consequences, for I retired after assuring Count André that I was entirely of his opinion in regard to his young brother, and, having reached my room, I confined myself to consigning these words to my notebook, with comments more or less disdainful; but these first impressions will help you to understand some analogous impressions which followed, and the unexpected crisis which resulted from them.
It is one of those submarine chains of which you speak, and which I find to-day when I throw the sound to the very bottom of my heart. Under the influence of your books, and of your example, I became more and more intellectualized, and I believed that I had definitely renounced the morbid curiosity of the passions which had made me find exquisite pleasure in my guilty readings. Thus we retain portions of the soul which were very much alive, and which we believe to be dead, but which are only drowsing.
And so little by little, after an acquaintance of only fifteen days with this man, my elder by nine or ten years, and who was, all reality, all energy, this purely speculative existence of which I had so sincerely dreamed, began to seem—how shall I express it? Inferior? Oh, no, for I would not have consented, at the price of an empire,to become Count André, even with his name, his fortune, his physical superiority, and his ideas. Discolored? Not even that. The word incomplete appears to me the only one which expresses the singular disfavor which the sudden comparison between the count and myself diffused over my own convictions.
It is in this feeling of incompleteness that the principal temptation of which I was the victim resides. There is nothing very original, I believe, in the state of mind of a man who, having cultivated to excess the faculty of thought, meets another man having cultivated to the same degree the faculty of action and who feels himself tormented with nostalgia in presence of this action, however despised.
Goethe has drawn the whole of his Faust from this nostalgia. I was not a Faust. I had not, like the old doctor, drained the cup of Science; and yet, I must believe that my studies of these last years, by overexciting me in one direction, had left in me unemployed powers, which trembled with emulation at the approach of this representative of another race of men.
While admiring him, envying and despising him at the same time, during the days which followed, I could not prevent my mind from thinking. And I thought: “That man who would value him for his activity and mefor my thought, would truly be the superior man that I have desired to become.”
But do not action and thought exclude one another? They were not incompatible at the Renaissance and later, Goethe has incarnated in himself the double destiny of Faust, by turns philosopher and courtier, poet and minister; Stendhal was romancer and lieutenant of dragoons; Constant was the author of “Adolphe” and a fiery orator, as well as duelist, actor and libertine.
This finished culture of the “I,” which I had made the final result, the supreme end of my doctrines, was it without this double play of the faculties, this parallelism of the life lived and the life thought?
Probably my first regret at feeling myself thus dispossessed of a whole world, that of fact, was only pride. But with me, and by the essentially philosophic nature of my being, sensations are immediately transformed into ideas.
The smallest accidents appear in my mind to state general problems. Every event of my destiny leads me to some theory on the destiny of all. Here, where another man would have said: “It is a pity that fate should have permitted a single kind of development,” I took it on myself to ask if I were not deceived in the law of all development.
Since I had, thanks to your admirable books, freed my soul and castto earth my vain religious terrors, I had retained only one of my old, pious practices, the habit of daily examining my conscience, under the form of a journal, and from time to time I made what I called an orison. I transported, with a singular enjoyment, the terms of religion into the realm of my personal sensibility. I called that again the liturgy of the “I.”
One evening of the second week of my stay at the château, I employed several hours in writing out a general confession, that is to say, in drawing a picture of my diverse instincts since the first awakening of my consciousness. I arrived at this conclusion, that the essential trait of my nature, the characteristic of my inmost being, had always been the faculty of duplication. That means that I had always felt a tendency to be at once passionate and reflective, to live and to see myself live. But by imprisoning myself, as I wished, in pure reflection, by neglecting to live and to have only one eye open upon life, did I not risk resembling that Amiel whose dolorous journal appeared at that time, and sterilizing myself by the abuse of analysis to emptiness?
In vain did your image return to me to reinforce me in my resolution to live an abstract existence. I recall the phrases on love in the “Theory of the Passion,” and I saw you, at my age, abandoning yourself to theculpable experiences which already obscurely tempted me. I do not know if this chemistry of soul, so very complex and very sincere, will seem sufficiently lucid. The work by which an emotion is elaborated in us, and ends by resolving itself into an idea, remains so obscure that the idea is, sometimes, exactly contrary to that which simple reason could have foreseen!
Would it not have been natural, for example, that the kind of admiring antipathy roused in me by my encounter with Count André should have ended either in a declared repulsion, or in a definite admiration? In the first case, I should have thrown myself more into science, and in the other, have desired a more active morality, a more practical virility in my actions. But the natural for each one, is his own nature. Mine willed that the admiring antipathy for the count should become a principle of criticism, in regard to myself, that this criticism should produce a new theory of life, that this theory should reveal my native disposition for passional curiosity, that the whole should dissolve itself into a nostalgia of sentimental experiences and that, just at this moment, a young girl should enter into my life whose presence alone would have sufficed to provoke the desire to please in any young man of my age.
But I was too intellectual for this desire to be born in my heartwithout passing through my head. At least, if I felt the charm of grace and delicacy which emanated from this child of twenty years, I felt it while believing that I reasoned about it. There are times when I ask myself if it was so, times when all my history appears more simple, and I say:
“I was honestly in love with Charlotte, because she was pretty, refined and tender, and I was young; then I gave some pretexts of the brain because I was a man proud of ideas and did not wish to love like other men.”
Ah! what a comfort when I persuade myself to speak in this way! I can pity myself instead of being a horror to myself, as happens when I recall the cold resolution, which I cherished in my mind, consigned to my notebook, and verified alas! by the event, the resolution, to injure this girl without loving her, from motives of purely psychological curiosity, from the pleasure of acting, of governing a living soul, of contemplating at will and directly this mechanism of passion which I had until then only studied in books, from the vanity of enriching my mind by a new experience.
But it is well, I could not have wished otherwise, impelled as I was by my heredities and my education, removed into the new medium where I was thrown by chance, and bitten, as I was by this ferocious spirit ofrivalry against the insolent young man who was my opposite?
But this pure and tender girl was worthy of meeting a man who was not a cold and murderous calculating machine. Only to think of her melts and rends my heart.
I did not notice at first sight that perfection of the lines of the face, that brilliance of complexion, that royalty of bearing which distinguishes the very beautiful woman. Everything in her physiognomy was a delicate demi-tint, from the shade of her chestnut hair to the misty gray of her eyes and to her complexion which was neither pale nor rosy. One thought of modesty when studying her expression, and of fragility when remarking her feet, and hands, and the almost too minute grace of her movements.
Although she was rather short, she appeared tall because of the noble way in which her head was set on her slender neck. If Count André reproduced one of their common ancestors by an evident atavism, she resembled her father, but with so charming an ideality of lines that one could not admit the resemblance unless they were side by side. It was easy, however, to recognize in her the nervous disposition which produced hypochondria in her father.
Charlotte had a sensibility which was almost morbid, which was revealed at times by a slight tremulousness of hands and lips, those beautifulsinuous lips where dwelt a goodness almost divine. Her firm chin showed a rare strength of will in so frail an envelope, and I now understand that the depth of her eyes, sometimes motionless as if fixed on some object visible to herself alone, betrayed a fatal tendency to a fixed idea.
The first trait that I specially observed was her extreme kindness, and this was brought to my notice by little Lucien. The child told me that his sister had several times wished him to ask me if there was anything lacking in my room.
This is a very puerile detail, but it touched me because I felt very lonely in this great house where no person, since my arrival, had seemed to pay the least attention to me. The marquis appeared only at dinner, wrapped in arobe-de-chambreand groaning over his health or politics. The marquise was occupied in making the château comfortable, and held long conferences with an upholsterer from Clermont. Count André rode in the morning, hunted in the afternoon, and, in the evening, smoked his cigars without ever addressing a word to me. The governess and thereligieuselooked at one another and looked at me with a discretion which froze me.
My pupil was an idle and dull boy, who had the redeeming quality of being very simple, very confiding, and of telling me all that I wishedto know of himself and the rest of his family. I learned in this way that their stay in the country this year was the work of Count André, which did not astonish me in the least, for I felt more and more that he was the real head of the family; I learned that the year preceding he had wished to marry his sister to one of his comrades, a M. de Plane, whom Charlotte had refused, and who had gone to Tonquin.
In our two daily classes, one in the morning from eight o’clock to half-past nine, the other in the afternoon from three o’clock until half-past four, I had a great deal of trouble to fix the attention of the little idler. Seated on his chair, opposite me on the other side of the table, and rolling his tongue against his cheek, while he covered the paper with his big awkward writing, he would now and then glance up at me.
He noticed on my face the least sign of abstraction. With the animal and sure instinct of children, he soon saw that I would make him go on with his lessons less quickly when he talked to me of his brother or sister, and so this innocent mouth revealed to me that there was, in this cold, strange house, some one who thought of me and of my comfort.
My mother had failed so much in this regard, although I might not wish to confess it! And it was this act of simple politeness which made meregard Mlle. de Jussat with more attention.
The second trait that I discovered in her was a taste for the romantic, not that she had read many romances, but as I have already told you, her sensibility was extreme, and this had given her an apprehension of the real.
Without herself suspecting it she was very different from her father, her mother and her brothers; and she could neither show herself to them in the truth of her nature, nor see them in the truth of theirs without suffering. So she did show herself, and she forced herself not to see them. She formed, spontaneously and ingenuously, opinions of those she loved which were in harmony with her own heart and so directly contrary to the evidence that they would have seemed false or flattering in the eyes of a malevolent observer. She would say to her mother, who was so ordinary and material: “Mamma, you are so quick to see;” to her father so cruelly egotistical: “You are so kind, papa,” and to her brother who was so positive, so self-sufficient: “You understand everything,” and she believed it. But the delusion in which this gentle creature imprisoned herself, left her a prey to the most complete moral solitude, and deprived her, to a very dangerous degree, of all judgment of character.
She was as ignorant of herself as of others. She languished, unknown to herself, for the society of some one who should have sentiments in harmony with her own. For example, I observed in the first walks that we took together, that she was the only one who could really feel the beauty of the landscape formed by the lake, the woods that surround it, the distant volcanoes and the autumn sky, often more blue than the sky of summer because of the contrast of its azure with the gold of the leaves, and which was sometimes so veiled, so sadly vaporous and distant.
She would fall into silence without any apparent reason, but really because her whole being became dissolved into the charm of things about her. She possessed in the state of pure instinct and unconscious sensation the faculty which makes the great poets and the great lovers, namely, the faculty of forgetting oneself, of dispelling oneself, of losing oneself entirely in whatever touches the heart, whether it be a veiled horizon, a silent and yellow-tinted forest, a piece of music or a touching story.
I did not, at the beginning of our acquaintance, formulate the contrast between that combative animal her brother and this creature of sweetness and grace who ran up the stone staircases of the château with a step so light that it seemed scarcely poised, and whose smile was so welcoming and yet so timid.
I will dare to tell all, since I repeat it, I am not writing in order to paint myself in beautiful colors, but to show myself as I am. I will not say that the desire to make myself beloved by this adorable child, in whose atmosphere I began to feel so much pleasure, was not caused by this contrast between her and her brother.
Perhaps the soul of this young girl became as a field of battle for the secret, the obscure antipathy which two weeks had transformed into hate? Perhaps there was concealed the cruel pleasure of humiliating the soldier, the gentleman, by outraging him in what he held most precious? I know that this is horrible, but I should not be worthy of being your pupil if I did not disclose the lowest depth of my heart. And, after all, this odious cloud of sensations may be only a necessary phenomenon, like the others, like the romantic grace of Charlotte, like the simple energy of her brother, and like my own complexities—so obscure even to myself.
§ IV. THE FIRST CRISIS.
I remember very distinctly the day on which the project of winning the love of the sister of Count André presented itself to me, no longer as a romantically visionary idea, but as a precise possibility, near, almost immediate.
After I had been at the château two months I went to Clermont to pass the New-Year holidays with my mother, and I had been back a week. The snow had been falling for forty-eight hours. The winters in our mountains are so severe that nothing but the marquis’ monomania can explain his obstinacy in remaining in this savage lone waste, which is indefinitely swept by sudden and violent gusts of wind.
It is proper to state that the marquise watched over the comfort of the household with a marvelous adjustment of daily resources, and although Aydat is considered isolated by the inhabitants of Saint-Saturnin and Saint-Amand-Tallende, the communication with Clermont remains open even in the worst rigor of the season. Then the season offers sudden and radiant changes, mornings of storm are suddenly succeeded by evenings of incomparable azure in which the country beams as if transformed by the enchantment of light.
This was the case on the day my fatal resolution became fixed and took form. I can see the lake now, covered with a thin sheet of ice, under which the supple shivering of the water could be discerned. I see the vast slope of the Cheyre, white with snow, its whiteness broken by dark spots of lava; and perfectly white, without a spot, rises the circle of mountains, the Puy de Dôme, the Puy de la Vache, that of Vichatel, that of De la Rodde, that of Mont Redon, while the forest of Rouilletstands out against the background of snow and azure.
Some minute details rise again before my eyes which were then scarcely noticed and have remained concealed, one knows not in what hiding-place of the memory. I see a cluster of birches whose despoiled branches are tinted with rose. I see the crystals which sparkle at the end of a tuft of broom which, thin and still green, marks the tracks of a fox on the immaculate carpet, and the flight of a magpie which cries out in the middle of the road, and this sharp cry renders the silence of this immense horizon almost perceptible. I see some yellow and brown sheep which are driven by a shepherd clothed in a blue blouse, wearing a large, low, round hat, and accompanied by a red and shaggy dog with shining yellow eyes, very near together.
Yes, I can see all this landscape, and the four persons who are walking on the road which leads toward Fontfrède: Mlle. Largeyx, Mlle. de Jussat, my pupil and myself. Charlotte wore an Astrakhan jacket; a fur boa was wrapped around her neck making her head appear still more petite and graceful under its Astrakhan toque. After the long imprisonment in the château the keen air seemed to intoxicate her. Her cheeks were red, her small feet plunged radiantly into the snow, where they left their slight trace, and her eyes sparkled with delight atthe beauty of nature—a privilege of simple hearts which is never felt when the soul has become desiccated by force of reasoning, abstract theories and certain kinds of reading.
I walked beside her and so rapidly that we were soon far ahead of Mlle. Largeyx, whose clogs slipped on the road. The child, sometimes in front, sometimes behind, stopped or ran on with the vivacity of a young animal. In the company of these two gay creatures I grew gloomy and taciturn. Was this the nervous irritation which makes us at certain times antipathetic to the joy which we see around us without sharing it? Was it the half-unconscious outline of my future plan, and did I wish to force the young girl to notice me by a kind of hostility against her pleasure?
During the whole of this walk, I, who had formed the habit of talking a great deal with her, scarcely responded by monosyllables to the admiring remarks which she addressed to me, as if she wished me to share in the pleasure of her emotions.
By brusque replies, and by silence, my bad humor became so evident that Mlle. de Jussat, in spite of her enthusiasm, could not fail to notice it. She glanced at me two or three times, with a question on her lips which she did not dare to formulate, then her face became sad. Her gayety fell little by little at contact with my sulkiness, and I couldtrace upon her transparent face the passage, by which she ceased to be sensible to the beauty of things and was conscious only of my sadness.
The moment came when she could no longer control the impression which this sadness made upon her, and, in a voice which timidity rendered a little stifled, she asked:
“Are you suffering. Monsieur Greslon?”
“No, mademoiselle,” I replied with abrusqueriewhich must have wounded her, for her voice trembled as she said:
“Then some one has done something to you? You are not as you usually are.”
“No one has done anything to me,” I answered, shaking my head; “but it is true,” I added, “that I have reasons for being sad, very sad, to-day. It is the anniversary of a great grief, which I cannot tell you.”
She looked at me again, and I could follow in her eyes the movements which agitated her, as one follows the movements of a watch through a glass case. I had seen her so uneasy at my attitude that she lost her feeling for the divine landscape. I saw her now, comforted that I had no cause for grief against her, but touched by my melancholy, curious to know the cause, and not daring to ask me. She only said:
“Pardon me for questioning you.” Then she was silent.
These few minutes sufficed to show me the place which I already occupied in her thoughts. Ah! before the proof of this delicate and noble interest, I should have been ashamed of my falsehood, for so it was, thissoi-disantrecollection of a great grief—a gratuitous and instantaneous falsehood whose sudden invention has often astonished myself.
Why had I suddenly thought to clothe myself in the poetry of a great grief, I whose life, since the death of my father, had been so quiet, so free from any sacrifices? Had I yielded to the innate taste for duplicating myself always so strong? This romantic affectation, did it show the hysteria of vanity which urges some children to lie, without reason and with so much unexpectedness? Did a vague intuition cause me to see in this play of deception and melancholy the surest means of interesting the Count’s sister?
I cannot tell the precise motives which governed me at that moment. Assuredly I did not foresee either the effect of my assumed sadness or of my falsehood, but I remember that as soon as the effect was known a resolution was formed in my mind to go on to the end and see what impression I could produce on the soul of this young girl, by continuing, with consciousness and calculation, the comedyhalf-instinctively begun in this luminous afternoon of January in presence of a magnificent landscape, which should have served as a frame for other dreams.
Now that the irreparable is accomplished, and by a retrospective penetration, horribly painful—for it convicts me of ignorance and of cruelty—I understand that I had already inspired Charlotte with the truest and the tenderest feelings. All the diplomatic psychology which I employed was only the odious and ridiculous work of a scholar in the science of the heart. I understand that I did not know how to inhale the flowers which bloomed naturally for me in this soul. I had only to let myself know and enjoy the emotions which presented themselves, to live a sentimental life as exalted and extended as that of my intellect.
Instead, I paralyzed my heart by ideas. I wished to conquer a soul already conquered, to play a game of chess, where I needed only to be simple, and I have not even the proud consolation of saying to myself that I have, at least, directed the drama of my destiny as I pleased, that I have combined the scenes, provoked the episodes, conducted the intrigue.
It was played entirely in her, and without my comprehending it in the least, this drama in which Death and Love, the two faithful workers of implacable nature, acted without my order while mocking at thecomplications of my analysis.
Charlotte loved me for reasons quite different from those which my ingenious psychology had arranged. She died in despair, when by the light of a tragic explanation she saw me in my true nature. Then I was so horrible to her that she thus gave me irrefutable proof that my subtle reflections were nothing to her.
I believed I could solve in this amour a problem of mental mechanism. Alas! I had simply met, without feeling its charm, a sincere and profound tenderness. Why did I not then divine what I see to-day with the clearness of the most cruel evidence?
Misled by the romantic side of her character, it was natural that this child should be deceived in me. My long studies had given me the appearance of not being quite well, which always interests a woman who is truly feminine. Having been brought up by my mother, my manners were gentle, my voice and gestures refined, and I was scrupulously careful of my person.
I had been introduced by the old master who recommended me, as a person of irreproachable nobility of ideas and character. This was enough to cause a very sensitive young girl to become interested in me in a very particular manner. Ah, well! I had no sooner recognized this interestthan I thought how to abuse it instead of being touched by it.
Any one who had seen me in my room on the evening which followed this afternoon, seated at my table and writing, with a big book of analysis near me, would never have believed that this was a young man of scarcely twenty-two years, meditating on the sentiments which he inspired or wished to inspire in a young girl of twenty.
The château was asleep. I could hear only the steps of the footman as he extinguished the lamps on the staircase and in the corridors. The wind enveloped the vast building in its groanings, now plaintive, now soothing. The west wind is terrible on these heights, where, sometimes, it carries away in a single breath all the slates of a roof.
This lamentation of the wind has always increased in me the feeling of internal solitude. My fire burned gently, and I scribbled in my notebook, which I burned before my arrest, the occurrences of the day and the programme of the experience which I proposed to attempt upon the mind of Mlle. de Jussat. I had copied the passage on pity which is found in your “Theory of the Passions;” you remember it, my dear master, it begins:
“There is in the phenomenon of pity a physical element, and which, especially in women, is confined to the sexual emotion.”
It was through pity then, that I proposed to act first upon Charlotte. I would profit by the first falsehood by which I had already moved her, combining with it a succession of others, and thus make her love me by making her pity me. There was, in this use of the most respected of human sentiments for the profit of my curious fancy, something particularly contrary to the general prejudice, which flattered my pride most exquisitely.
While I wrote out this plan with philosophical text to support it, I imagined what Count André would think, if he could, as in the old legends, from the depths of his garrison town decipher the words which I had traced with my pen.
At the same time, the idea alone of directing at will the subtle movements of a woman’s brain, all this sentimental and intellectual clockwork so complicated and so tenuous, made me compare myself to Claude Bernard, to Pasteur and to their pupils. These savants vivisected animals. Was not I going to vivisect at length, a human soul?
In order to draw from this pity which had been surprised rather than provoked, all the result demanded, it must first be prolonged. To this end, I resolved to keep up the comedy of sadness by preparing for the day of an explanatory conversation, more or less distant, a long, touching romance of false confidences.
I devoted myself, during the week following our walk, to feigning a melancholy more or less absorbing, and to feigning it, not only in the presence of Charlotte, but also during the hours in which I was alone with my pupil, sure that the child would report to his sister the impressions of ourtête-à-tête.
You see here, my dear master, the proof of the useless machinery I was preparing to employ. Was there any need of involving this boy, who had been confided to me, in this sad intrigue, and why should I join this ruse with the others, when Mlle. de Jussat did not for a moment doubt my sincerity?
We had our lessons, Lucien and I, in a large room dignified by the name of library, because of the shelves which furnished one side of the wall. There, behind the gratings lined with green linen, were innumerable volumes bound in sheepskin, notably all the volumes of the Encyclopedia. This was a legacy from the founder of the château, a great philosopher, who had built this habitation among the mountains for the purpose of bringing up his children in the midst of nature and after the precepts of Emile.
The portrait of this gentleman free-thinker, a mediocre painting in the taste of the period, with its powder, and a smile both sceptical and sensible, adorned one side of the door; on the other side was that of his wife, quite coquettish under a high coiffure and with patches on her cheeks.
In looking at these two paintings, while Lucien translated a bit from Ovid or from Titus Livius, I asked myself what my ancestors were doing for me during the century in which these two persons lived who were represented in these portraits. I imagined, these rustics from whom I am descended pushing the plow, pruning the vine, harrowing the ground in the foggy plains of Lorraine, like the peasants who passed on the road in front of the château, in all weathers, and who with boots to their knees, dragged a metal-tipped stick fastened to the wrist by a strap.
This mental picture gave the charm of a kind of lawful vengeance to the care I took to compose my physiognomy. It is a singular thing, that although I might detest in theory the doctrines of the Revolution and the mediocre spiritualism which they conceal, I became again a plebeian in my profound joy in thinking that I, the great-grandson of these farmers, should perhaps by the force of my mind alone bring to disgrace the great-granddaughter of this great lord and this great lady.
I leaned my chin upon my hand, I forced my brow and my eyes to look sad, knowing that Lucien was watching the expression of my face, in the hope of interrupting his task by a talk. When he had several times observed that he did not see the welcoming smile, nor the indulgent look, he himself became very anxious. As is natural, the poor boy tookmy sadness for severity, my silence for displeasure One morning he ventured to ask:
“Are you angry with me, monsieur?”
“No, my child,” I replied, patting his fresh cheek with my hand; and I continued to preserve my troubled look, while contemplating the snow which beat against the panes. It fell now from morning till evening in large whirling stars, covering and putting to sleep the whole country, and in the warm rooms of the château there was the silent charm of intimacy, a distant death of all the noises of the mountains; while through the window panes, covered with frost on the outside and a vapor within, the light sifted languorously.
This gave a background of mystery to the figure of melancholy which I made, and which I imposed on the observation of Charlotte whenever we met. When the breakfast bell reunited us in the dining-room, I surprised in the eyes with which she received me the same timid and compassionate curiosity which I had noticed during our walk, whence dated what I called in my journal my entrance into my laboratory.
She regarded me with the same look when we were all again together, in the salon at tea, under the light of the early lamps, then at the dinner table and again in the long solitude of the evening, unless, under pretext of having work to finish, I retired to my room.
The monotony of life and of conversation was so complete that there was nothing to help her to shake off the impression of mournful mystery which I had inflicted upon her.
The marquis, a prey to the contrasts of his character, cursed his fatal resolution to remain in this isolation. He announced for the next clear day a departure which he knew would be impossible. It would cost too much now, and beside, where could he go? He calculated the chances of seeing his Clermont friends who had several times breakfasted with him, but it was before the four hours between Aydat and the city had been doubled by the bad weather.
Then he installed himself at the card table, while the marquise, the governess and thereligieuseapplied themselves to their unending work.
It was my duty to look after Lucien who turned the leaves of a book of engravings or played at patience. I placed myself so that when she raised her eyes from the cards which she held in her hands while playing with her father, the young girl was obliged to see me. I had been interested in hypnotism, and I had in particular studied in all its details, in your “Anatomy of the Will,” the chapter devoted to the singular phenomena of certain moral denominations, which you haveentitled: “Some demi-suggestions.” I depended on taking possession of this unoccupied mind, until the propitious moment in which, to complete this work of daily intercourse, I should decide to relate to her my story which, justifying my sadness, should end by engrossing her imagination.
This story I had manufactured upon two principles which you lay down, my dear master, in your beautiful chapter on Love. This chapter, the theories of the Ethics on the passions, and M. Ribot’s book on the “Maladies of the Will,” had become my breviaries. Permit me to recall these two principles, at least in their essence.
The first is that the majority of beings have sentiment only by imitation; abandoned to simple nature, love, for example, would be for them as for the animals, only a sensual instinct, dissipated as soon as satiated.
The second is that jealously may exist before love; consequently it may sometimes create it, and may often survive it. Much struck by the justness of this double remark, I argued that the romance which I should relate to Mlle. de Jussat ought to excite her imagination and irritate her vanity. I had succeeded in touching the cord of pity, I wished to touch that of sentimental emulation and that of self-love.
I had then, founded my story on this idea, that every woman interestedin a man, is wounded in her vanity if this man shows that he is thinking of another woman. But twenty pages would be necessary to show you how I studied over the problem of the invention of this fable.
The occasion to relate it to her was furnished by the victim herself, fifteen days after I had begun to put at work what I proudly called my experience. The marquis had been told that one volume of the Encyclopedia was devoted to cards. He wished to find there how to play some old games such as Imperiale, Ombre, and Manilla. This brilliant idea had come to him after breakfast, on seeing in a journal a report of a new game called Poker, apropos of which the journalist gave a list of old-fashioned games.
When this maniac had conceived a fancy he could not wait, and his daughter was obliged to go at once to the library, where I was occupied in taking notes. I laid aside Helvétius upon the “Mind,” which I had discovered among some other books of the eighteenth century. I placed myself at the disposition of Mlle. de Jussat to take down the volume which she desired, and, when she took it from my hands, she said with her habitual grace:
“I hope that we shall find here some game in which you can take a hand with us. We are so afraid that you do not feel at home here, you are always so sad.”
She said these words as if asking pardon for an indelicacy, which had impressed me before, and escaping the familiarity of her remark by a “we” which I too well knew to be untruthful. Her voice was so gentle, we were so alone that the time seemed to have come to explain my feigned sadness.
“Ah! mademoiselle,” I answered, “if you only knew my history.”
If Charlotte had not been the credulous creature, the romantic child that she was, in spite of her two or three seasons in Paris, she would have seen that I was beginning a tale prepared beforehand, by this introduction, by the turn of the sentences with which I continued. I was too clumsy, too awkwardly affected.
I told her then that I had been betrothed at Clermont to a young girl, but secretly. I thought to make this adventure more poetical in her eyes by insinuating that this girl was a foreigner, a Russian visiting one of her relations. I added that this girl had allowed me to tell her that I loved her, and she had also told me that she loved me. We had exchanged vows, then she had gone away. A rich marriage offered, and she had betrayed me for money.