IV.CONFESSION OF A YOUNG MAN OF THE PERIOD.
“THE JAIL AT RIOM, January, 1887.
“I WRITE to you, monsieur, this memoir of myself which I have refused to the counsel in spite of my mother’s entreaties. I write it to you, who in reality know so little of me, and at what a moment of my life! for the same reason that led me to bring my first work to you. There is my illustrious master, between you and myself, your pupil accused of a most infamous crime, a bond which men could not understand, and of which you yourself are ignorant, but which I feel to be as close as it is indissoluble. I have lived with your thought, and by your thought so passionately, so entirely at the most decisive period of my life! Now in the distress of my mental agony, I turn to the only being of whom I can expect hope, implore aid.
“Ah! do not misunderstand me, venerated master, and believe that the terrible trouble with which I am struggling is caused by the vain forms of justice which surround me. I should not be worthy the name of philosopher if I had not, long ago, learned to consider my thought as the only reality, and the external world an indifferent and fatal succession of appearances. From my seventeenth year, I have adoptedas a rule to be repeated in the hours of small or great annoyances, the formula of our dear Spinoza: ‘The force by which man perseveres in existence is limited, and that of external causes infinitely surpass it.’
“I shall be condemned to death in six weeks, for a crime of which I am innocent, and from which I can not clear myself, you will understand why, after having read these pages—and I shall go to the scaffold without trembling. I shall support this event with the same effort at composure as if a physician, after having auscultated me, should diagnose an advanced disease of the heart. Condemned, I shall have to conquer first the revolt of the animal nature and then to support myself against the despair of my mother.
“I have learned from your works the remedy for such feelings, and in opposing to the image of approaching death the sentiment of inevitable necessity, and in diminishing the vision of my mother’s grief by the recollection of the psychological laws which govern consolations, I shall arrive at a relatively calm state of mind. Certain sentences of yours will suffice for this, that, for example, in the fifth chapter of the second volume of your “Anatomy of the Will,” which I know by heart:
“‘The universal interweaving of phenomena causes each to bear the weight of all the others, in the same way that each portion of the universe, and at each moment, may be considered as arésuméof all that has been, of all that is, and of all that will be. It is in this sense that it is permissible to say that the world is eternal in its detail as well as in its whole.’
“What a sentence, and how it envelops, as well as affirms and demonstrates the idea that everything is necessary in and around us since we too are a parcel and a moment of this eternal world! Alas! why is it that this idea which is so lucid when I reason, as one ought to reason, with my mind, and in which I acquiesce with all the strength of my being, cannot overcome in me a species of suffering so peculiar, which invades my heart when I recall certain actions which I have willed, and others of which I am the author, although indirectly, in the drama through which I have passed?
“To tell you all in a few words, my dear master, though once more I say that I did not kill Mlle. de Jussat, I have been connected in the closest manner with the drama of her poisoning, and I feel remorse, although the doctrines in which I believe, the truths which I know, and the convictions which form the essence of my intellect, make me consider remorse the most silly of human illusions.
“These convictions are powerless to procure me the peace of certainty, which once was mine. I doubt with my heart that which my mind recognizes as truth. I do not think that for a man whose youth was consumed by intellectual passions, there can be a worse punishment than this. But why try to interpret by literary phrases a mental condition which I wish to expose to you in detail—to you the great connoisseur in maladies of the mind—in order that you may give me the only aid which can do me any good; some word which shall explain me to myself, which shall attest to me that I am not a monster, which shall sustainme in the disorder of my beliefs, which shall prove to me that I have not been deceived all these years, in adhering to the new faith with all the energy of a sincere being.
“Indeed, my dear master, I am very miserable, and I must speak out all my misery. To whom shall I address myself, if not to you, since I should have no hope of being intelligible to any one not familiar with the psychology in which I have been educated.
“Since coming to this prison, two months ago, the moment I resolved to write to you has been the only one in which I have been what I was before these terrible events occurred. I had tried to become absorbed in some work of an entirely abstract order, but found myself unable to master it.
“I have considered only this for four days, and, thanks to you, the power of thought has returned. I have found something of the pleasure which was mine when I wrote my first essays, in resuming, for this work, the cold severity of my method—your method. I wrote out yesterday a plan of this monograph of my actual self, in practising the division by paragraphs which you have adopted in your works. I have proved the persistent vigor of my reflection in reconstructing my life from its origin, as I would resolve a problem of geometry by synthesis.
“I see distinctly at the present time that the crisis from which I suffer has for its factors, first my heredities, then the medium of ideas in which I was educated, finally the medium of facts into which I was transplanted by my introduction among the Jussat-Randons. The crisis itself and the questions which it raises in my mind shall be the last fragments of a study which I shall strip of insignificant recollections, to reduce it to what a master of our time calls generatrices. At least I shall have furnished you an exact document upon the modes of feeling which I formerly believed to be very precious and very rare, and I shall have proved to you in two ways, first by my confidence in your absolute discretion, and second by my appeal for your philosophical support, what you have been to him who writes these lines, and who asks your pardon for this long preamble and begins at once his dissection.”
§ I. MY HEREDITIES.
As far back as I can remember, I find that my dominant faculty, the one that has been present in every crisis of my life, great or small, and which is present to-day, has been the faculty, I mean the power and the need of duplication. There have always been in me, as it were, two distinct persons; one who went, came, acted, felt, and another who looked at the first go, come, act, and feel with an impassable curiosity.
At this very hour and knowing that I am in prison, accused of a capital crime, blasted in honor, and overwhelmed in sadness, knowing that it is this very I, Robert Greslon, born at Clermont the 5th of September, 1865, and not another, I think of this situation as a spectacle at which I am a stranger. Is it even exact to say I? Evidently not. For my true self is, properly speaking, neither the one who suffers notthe one who looks on. It is made up of both, and I have had a very clear perception of this duality, although I was not then capable of comprehending this psychological disposition exaggerated to an anomaly, from my childhood, the childhood which I wish to recall with the impartiality of a disinterested historian.
My first recollections are of the city of Clermont-Ferrand, and of a house which stood on a promenade now very much changed by the recent construction of the artillery school. The house, like all the houses in this city, was built of Volvic stone, a gray stone which darkens with age, and which gives to the tortuous streets the appearance of a city of the middle ages.
My father, who died when I was very young, was of Lorraine extraction. He held at Clermont the position of engineer of roads and bridges. He was a slender man of feeble health, with a face almost beardless, and marked with a melancholy serenity which touched me, when I think of him, after all these years. I see him again in his study, through whose windows may be viewed the immense plain of the Limagne, with the graceful eminence of the Puy de Crouël quite near, and in the distance the dark line of the mountains of Forez.
The railway station was near our house, and the whistling of thetrains was constantly heard in this quiet study. I used to sit on the carpet in the corner by the fire, playing without making any noise, and this strident call produced on my mind a strange impression of mystery, of distance, of the flight of time, and of life which endures to the present.
My father traced with his chalk upon a blackboard enigmatic signs, geometric figures or algebraic formulas, with that clearness of the curves, or the letters which revealed the habitual method of his being. At other times he wrote, standing at an architect’s table which he preferred to his desk, a table consisting simply of a white wood board placed on trestles. The large books on mathematics arranged with the most minute care in the bookcase, and the cold faces of savants, engraved in copperplate and framed under glass, were the only objects of art with which the walls were decorated.
The clock which represented the globe of the world, two astronomical maps which hung above the desk, and upon this desk the calculating ruler with its figures and its copper slide, the square, the compass, the T rule. I recall them all, at will, the smallest details of this room whose whole atmosphere was thought, and these images aid me to comprehend how from my infancy the dream of a purely ideal and contemplative existence became elaborated in me, favored by heredity.
My later reflections have shown me, in several traits of my character, the result transmitted under form of instinct of the life of abstract study that my father led. I have, for example, always felt a singular horror of action, so much so that, making a simple visit caused my heart to pant and the slightest physical exercise was intolerable to me, such as wrestling with another person; even to discuss my most cherished ideas appeared to me, and still appears, almost impossible.
This dread of action is explained by the excess of brainwork which, pushed too far, isolates man in the midst of the realities which he hardly endures, because he is not habitually in contact with them. I feel that this difficulty of adapting myself to facts comes to me from this poor father; from him also comes this faculty of generalization, which is the power, but at the same time the mania of my mind; and it is also his work that a morbid predominance of the nervous system has rendered my will so wild at certain times.
My father, who was still young when he died, had never been robust. He was obliged at the growing age to undergo the trial of preparation for the Polytechnic School which is ruinous to the soundest health. With narrow shoulders and with limbs weakened by long sittings at sedentary meditations, this savant with transparent hands seemed to have in hisveins, instead of red globules of generous blood, a little of the dust of the chalk which he handled so much.
He did not transmit to me muscles capable of counterbalancing the excitability of my nerves, so that with this faculty of abstraction, I owe to him a kind of ungovernable intemperance of desire. Every time that I have ardently wished for anything it has been impossible to repress this covetousness. This is a hypothesis which has often come to me when I have been analyzing myself, that abstract natures are more incapable than others of resisting passion, when passion is aroused, perhaps because the daily relation between action and thought is broken in them.
Fanatics would be the most signal proofs of this. I have seen my father, usually so patient and gentle, so overcome by the violence of anger as almost to faint. In this I am also his son, and through him the descendant of a grandfather as ill-balanced, a sort of primitive genius, who, half-peasant, had risen by force of mechanical inventions to be a civil engineer, and was then ruined by lawsuits.
On this side of my race there has always been a dangerous element, something wild, at times, by the side of constant intellectuality. I formerly considered this double nature a superior condition; the possible ardor of passion joined with this continuous energy ofabstract thought. It was my dream to be at the same time frenzied and lucid, the subject and the object, as the Germans say, of my analysis; the subject who studies himself and finds in this study a means of exaltation and of scientific development. Alas! Whither has thy chimera led me? But it is not the time to speak of effects, we are still with the causes.
Among the circumstances which affected me during my childhood, I believe the following to be one of the most important: Every Sunday morning, and as soon as I could read, my mother took me with her to mass. This mass was celebrated at eight o’clock in the Church of the Capuchins recently built on a boulevard shaded by Plantanes which led from Sablon Court to Laureau Square, along the Jardin des Plantes.
At the door of the church, there used to sit, in front of a portable shop, a cake seller called Mother Girard, with whom I was well acquainted, for I had bought of her little bunches of cherries in the spring. This was the first fruit of the season that I might eat. This dainty, acid and fresh, was one of the sensualities of these days of childhood, and any one who had observed me, might have seen this frenzy of desire of which I have spoken. I was almost in a fever when on my way to this shop.
This was not the only reason why I preferred the Church of theCapuchins with its extremely plain architecture, to the subterranean crypts of Notre-Dame-du-Port and to the vaults of the cathedral upheld by it elegant clustered columns. At the Capuchins the choir was closed. During the offices, invisible mouths behind the grating chanted the canticles, which strangely effected my childish imagination; they seemed to me to come from so far off, an abyss or a tomb. I looked at my mother praying beside me with the fervor which was shown in her smallest actions, and I thought that my father was not there, that he never came to church. My child’s brain was so puzzled by this absence, that, one day, I asked:
“Why does not papa come to mass with us?”
My inquiring child’s eyes had no trouble to see the embarrassment into which this question threw my mother. She withdrew from it, however, by an answer analogous to hundreds of others which a woman so essentially enamored of fixed principles and of obedience has since given me.
“He goes to another mass, at an hour which suits him better, and then I have already told you that children ought never to ask why their parents do this or that.”
All the difference of mind which separated my mother and myself is found in this sentence, uttered one cold morning in winter, whilewalking under the trees of Sablon Court. I can see her now in her pelerine, her hands in her muff lined with brown silk from which her book came halfway out, and the sincerity of her face even in her pious falsehood. I can see her eyes, which so many times since have regarded me with a look which did not comprehend me, and at this period she did not suspect that for my meditative childish nature to think, was already to ask, always and in relation to everything; why? Yes, why had my mother deceived me? For I knew that my father went to no kind of office. And why did he not go?
While the grave and sad voices of the concealed monks were intoning the responses of the mass, I was absorbed in this question. I knew without being able to appreciate the reasons of the superiority that my father was accounted among the first of the city. How many times in walking were we stopped by some friend, who tapping me on the cheek would say: “Well, will we get to be a great savant like the father some day?”
When my mother took his advice, she listened with the greatest respect. She thought it natural that he did not perform certain duties which, for us, were obligatory. We had not the same duties. This idea was not formulated then in my childish brain with this positive distinctness,but it developed there the germ of that which later became one of the convictions of my youth—to know that the same rules do not govern intellectual minds that control other men.
It was there in that little church, quietly bending over my prayer book, that the great principle of my life had birth, not to consider as a law for thinking men that which is and ought to be a law for others—just as I received from the conversations with my father, during our excursions, the first germs of my scientific view of the world.
The country around Clermont is marvelous, and although I am the reverse of poetical, a man for whom the external world means very little, I have always retained in my memory the pictures of the landscapes which surrounded these walks. While the city on one side looks toward the plain of the Limagne, on the other it stands on the foothills of the Dôme Mountains. The slope of the extinct craters, the undulations caused by old eruptions and the streams of hardened lava give to the outlines of these volcanic mountains a resemblance to the landscapes in the moon as discovered by the telescope in that dead planet.
On one side is the savage and sublime memorial of the most terrible convulsions of the globe, and on the other the prettiest rusticity of stony roads among the vineyards, of murmuring brooks under thewillows and chestnuts. The great pleasures of my childhood were the interminable wanderings with my father in all the paths which lead from the Puy de Crouël to Gergovie, from Royat to Durtol, from Beaumont to Gravenoire.
Simply in writing these names, my memory rejuvenates my heart. I see myself again the little boy, whom a portrait represents with long hair, with his legs in cloth leggings, who walks along holding his father’s hand. Whence came this love for the fields to him, the learned mathematician, the man of study and of reflection? I have often thought of it since, and I believe I have discovered a law of the development of mind;—our youthful tastes persist even when we are developed in a sense contrary to them, and we continue to exercise these tastes while justifying them by intellectual reasons which would exclude such things.
I will explain. My father naturally loved the country because he was brought up in a village, and when he was small had passed whole days on the banks of the brooks among the insects and the flowers. Instead of yielding to these tastes in a simple manner, he mingled them with his present occupations. He would not have pardoned himself for going to the mountains without studying there the formation of the land; forlooking at a flower without determining its character and discovering its name; for taking up an insect without recalling its family and its habits.
Thanks to the rigor of his method in all work he arrived at a very complete knowledge of the country; and, when we walked together, this knowledge was the sole subject of our conversation. The landscape of the mountains became a pretext for explaining to me the revolutions of the earth; he passed from that with a clearness of speech which made such ideas intelligible to me, to the hypothesis of Laplace upon nebula, and I saw distinctly in my imagination the planetary protuberances flying off from the burning nucleus, from this torrid sun in rotation.
The heavens at night in the beautiful summer months became a kind of map which he deciphered for me, and on which I distinguished the Pole Star, the seven stars of the Chariot, Vega of the Lyre, Sirius, all those inaccessible and formidable worlds of which science knows the volume, the position and almost the very metals of which they are composed.
It was the same with the flowers which he taught me to arrange in an herbarium, with the stones which I broke with a little iron hammer, with the insects which I fed or pinned up, as the case might be. Long before object lessons were practiced in the college my father applied to my education first this great maxim: “Give a scientific account ofanything we may encounter.”
Thus reconciling the pleasantry of his first impressions with the precision acquired in his mathematical studies. I attribute to this teaching the precocious spirit of analysis which was developed in me during my early youth, and which, without doubt, would have turned toward the positive studies if my father had lived. But he could not complete this education, undertaken after a prepared plan of which I have since found trace among his papers.
In the course of one of our walks, and on one of the warmest days of summer, in my tenth year, we were overtaken by a storm which wet us to the bones. During the time that it required to reach home in our soaked clothes my father took cold. In the evening he complained of a chill. Two days after an inflammation of the lungs declared itself, and the week following he died.
As I wish, in this summary indication of diverse causes which formed my mind, to avoid at any cost that which I hate most of anything in the world, the display of subjective sentimentality, I will not recount to you, my dear master, any further details of this death. They were heartrending, but I felt their sadness only in a far-off way, and that later.
I recollect, though I was a large and remarkably developed boy, tohave felt more wonder than sorrow. It is now that I truly regret my father—that I comprehend what I lost in losing him. I believe you have seen exactly what I owe to him; the taste and the facility for abstraction, the love of the intellectual life, faith in science and the precocious management of method—these for the mind; for the character, the first divination of the pride of intellect, and also an element slightly morbid, this difficulty of action which has as its consequence the difficulty in resisting the passions when one is tempted.
I wish also to mark distinctly what I owe to my mother. And from the first I perceive this fact that this second influence acts upon me by reaction, while the first had acted directly. To speak truly, this reaction only began when she became a widow and wished to direct my education. Until then she had entirely given me up to my father.
It may seem strange that, alone in the world, she and I, she so energetic, so devoted, and I so young, we did not live, at least during those years, in perfect communion of heart. There exists in fact, a rudimentary psychology for which these words—mother and son—are synonyms of absolute tenderness, of perfect agreement of soul. Perhaps it is so in the families of ancient tradition, although in human nature I believe very little in the existence of entire sympathy betweenpersons of different ages and sexes.
In any case, modern families present under conventional etiquette the most cruel phenomena of secret divorce, of complete misunderstanding, sometimes of hate, which are too well understood when we think of their origin. They come from the mixture for a hundred years of province with province, race with race, which has charged the blood of nearly all of us with hereditary opposites. So people find themselves nominally of the same family who have not a common trait either in their moral or mental structures; consequently the daily intimacy between persons becomes a cause of daily conflicts or of constant dissimulation. My mother and I are an example of it which I would qualify as excellent, if the pleasure of finding very clear proof of a psychologic law was not accompanied by keen regret at having been its victims.
My father, I have told you, was an old pupil of the Polytechnic School and the son of a civil engineer. I have also said he was of Lorraine race. There is a proverb which says: “Lorraine traitor to its king and even to God.” This epigram expresses in a unique form the idea that there is something complex in the mind of this frontier population.
The people of Lorraine have always lived on the border of two races and of two existences, the German and the French. What is this dispositionto treachery if not the depravity of another taste, admirable from the intellectual point of view, that of sentimental complication? For my part, I attribute to this atavism the power of doubling of which I spoke at the beginning of this analysis. I ought to add that, when I was a child, I often felt a strange pleasure in disinterested simulation which proceeded from the same principle. I recounted to my comrades all sorts of inexact details concerning myself, about my place of birth, my father’s birthplace, about a walk which I was intending to take, and this not to boast, but simply to be some one else.
I found singular pleasure later in advancing opinions the most opposed to those which I considered the true ones from the samebizarremotive. To play a rôle different from my true nature appeared to me an enrichment of my person, so strong was the instinct to resolve myself into a character, a belief, a passion.
My mother is a woman of the South, absolutely rebellious against all complexity, to whom ideas of things alone are intelligible. In her imagination the forms of life are reproduced concrete, precise and simple. When she thinks of religion, she sees her church, her confessional, the communion cloth, the few priests whom she has known, the catechism in which she studied. When she thinks of a career, shesees positive activity and benefits. The professorate, for example, which she desired me to enter, was for her M. Limasset, the professor of mathematics, the friend of my father, and she saw me, like him, going across the city twice a day in an alpaca coat and Panama hat in summer, and my feet protected in winter by clogs, and my body in a furred overcoat, with a fixed salary, the perquisites of private tuition and the sweet assurance of a pension.
I have been able by studying her to learn how completely this order of imagination renders those whom it governs incapable of comprehending other souls. It is often said of such people that they are despotic and personal, or that they have bad characters. In reality, they are before those with whom they associate like a child before a watch. He sees the hands move, he knows nothing of the wheels which make them move. So when these hands do not go to suit his fancy there is the stupidity of impatience to force them and to warp the springs.
My poor mother was like this with me, and that from the week which followed our trouble. I felt almost immediately an indefinable discomfort in her presence. The first circumstance which enlightened me in regard to this separation which had begun between us, so far as my childish mind could be enlightened, dates from an afternoon of autumn,nearly four months after my father’s death.
The impression received was so strong that I recall it as if it had happened yesterday. We had changed apartments, and had rented the third floor of a house in the Rue Billard, a narrow lane which distorts the shadows of Des Petits-Abres, in front of the palace of the Prefecture. My mother had chosen it because there was a balcony in which I was playing on this beautiful afternoon. My play—you will here recognize the scientific turn given by my father to my imagination—consisted in taking a pebble, which represented a great explorer, from one end of the balcony to the other, and among other stones which I had taken from the flower pots.
Some of these stones represented cities, others curious animals of which I had read descriptions. One of the parlor windows opened on the balcony. It was partly open, and my play having led me thither I heard my mother talking to a visitor. I could not help listening with that beating of the heart which the hearing my personality discussed has always produced. I learned afterward that between our real nature and the impression produced on our relations, and even on our friends, there is no more similarity than there is between the exact color of the face and its reflection in a blue, green, or yellow glass.
“Perhaps,” said the visitor, “you are mistaken in regard to poor Robert, at ten years the character is not at all formed.”
“God grant that it may be so,” replied my mother, “but I am afraid he has no heart. You cannot imagine how hard he has been since his father’s death. The next day even he seemed to have forgotten all about it. And he has never said a word since—such a word as makes you feel that one is thinking of another you now. When I speak to him of his father, he hardly answers me. You would think he had never known the man who was so good to him.”
I have read somewhere that when Merimée was quite a child he was one day scolded by his mother and then sent out of the room. He was scarcely gone when his mother burst out laughing. The child heard the laugh which showed him that the irritation had been feigned, and he felt a feeling of distrust rise in his heart which always remained. This anecdote impressed me very strongly.
The impression of the celebrated writer offered a startling analogy with the effect which this fragment of conversation produced upon me. It was very true that I never spoke of my father, but how false that I had forgotten him! On the contrary, I thought of him constantly. I never walked along the street, I could not look at any piece of our furniture without the remembrance of his death taking such possessionof me that I was almost ill. But with this was mingled a fearful astonishment that he had gone forever, and it was all confounded in a kind of anxious apprehension, which closed my mouth when any one talked with me about him.
I know now that my mother could have known nothing of the workings of my mind. But, at that time, as I heard her thus condemn my heart, I experienced a profound humiliation. It seemed to me that she was not acting toward me as it should be her duty to act. I felt that she was unjust, and because I was timid, being still a young boy and shy, I became irritated at her injustice, instead of trying to tell her how I felt.
From that moment it became impossible for me to show myself to her as I was. And whenever her eyes sought mine to learn my emotions I felt an irresistible desire to conceal from her my inmost being.
That was the first scene—if anything so insignificant can be dignified by so big a name—followed by a second which I will notice in spite of its apparent unimportance. Children would not be children if the events important to their sensibility were not puerile.
I was, at this period, already passionately fond of reading, and chance had put into my hands a very different kind of books from those which are given as prizes at school. It was this way: although myfather as a mathematician knew little of general literature, he loved a few authors whom he understood in his way; and when afterward I found some of his notes on these authors, I learned to appreciate the degree to which the feeling for literature is a personal, irreducible, incommensurable thing to borrow a word from his favorite science there is no common measure between the reasons for which two minds like or dislike the same writer.
Among other works my father owned a translation of Shakespeare in two volumes, which they put on my chair to raise my seat at table. They left me without thinking how these volumes illustrated by engravings would very soon incite my curiosity to read the text. There was a Lady Macbeth rubbing her hands in presence of a frightened physician and a servant, and Othello entering Desdemona’s chamber with a poniard in his hand, and bending his black face toward the white, sleeping form, a King Lear tearing his clothing under the zigzags of the lightning, a Richard III. asleep in his tent and surrounded by specters.
From the accompanying text I read, before my tenth year, fragments which made me familiar with all these dramas which exalted my imagination, in so far as I could seize the meaning of them, without doubt because they were written for popular audiences, and admit anelement of primitive poetry, and an infantine exaggeration.
I loved these kings, who, joyous or despairing, defiled past at the head of their armies, who lost or gained battles in a few minutes, I enjoyed this slaughter accompanied by a flourish of trumpets behind the scenes, the rapid passages from one country to another, and the chimerical geography. In brief, whatever there is in these dramas and especially in the chronicles that is very much abridged, almost rudimentary, so charmed me, that when I was alone I played with the chairs, imagining them to be Lancaster, Warwick, or Gloucester.
My father, who had an extreme repugnance to the troublesome realities of life, relished in Shakespeare that which is simple and touching, the profiles of women so delicately drawn; Imogene and Desdemona, Cordelia and Rosalind pleased him, though the comparison may seem strange, for the same reason that he enjoyed the romances of Dickens, Topffer and even the child’s play of Florian and Berquin.
Here we may see the contrasts which prove the incoherence of artistic judgments which are founded upon sentimental impression. I also read all these books, and those of Walter Scott, as well as the rural tales of George Sand, in an illustrated edition. It would certainly have been better for me not to have nourished my imagination on elementsso incongruous and sometimes dangerous. But at my age I could not understand more than a quarter of the sentences, and while my father was toiling at his blackboard, combining his formulas, I believe that the lightning might have struck the house without his knowing it, carried away as he was by the all-powerful demon of abstraction.
My mother, to whom this demon is as much a stranger as the beast of the Apocalypse, did not wait long, after the first hours of our trouble had passed, before she rummaged the room in which I studied; and, under an exercise, she discovered a large, open book—Scott’s “Ivanhoe.”
“What book is this?” she asked, “who permitted you to take it?”
“But I have read it once already,” I replied.
“And these?” she continued, in looking over the little library where by the side of schoolbooks, were, beside the Shakespeare, the “Nouvelles Génevoises” and “Nicholas Nickleby,” “Rob Boy” and “La Mare au Diable.” “These are not suitable for a person of your age,” she insisted, “and you may help me carry all these books into the parlor, and put them in your father’s library.”
So I carried them, three at a time, some almost too heavy for my small arms, into the cool room furnished in haircloth. With her white handsin their black mitts, she took the books and arranged them alongside of the big treatises on mathematics. She closed the glass door of the bookcase, locked it, and put the key on the ring with others, which she always carried with her. Then she added severely:
“When you wish a book you may ask me for it.”
I ask her for one of those books, but which one? I knew so well that she would refuse me all those which I had any desire to read! I have already shown too plainly that we did not think alike on any point. I complain of her having put a stop to my liveliest pleasure, less perhaps because of the prohibition than for the reason she gave. For she believed it to be her duty to repeat the phrases on the danger of romances, no doubt borrowed from some manual of piety, which appeared to me to express exactly the contrary to that which I had experienced.
She made the danger I had run in this indiscriminate reading the pretext for occupying herself more closely with my studies and directing my education. This was her duty, but the contrast was too great between the ideas into which my father had precociously initiated me and the poverty of her mind, which was furnished with impressions positive, mean, and almost vulgar.
I went to walk with her now, and she talked with me. Her conversationwas confined to my bearing, my manners, my little comrades, and their parents. My intellect, which had been too early trained in the pleasure of thought, felt stifled and oppressed.
The motionless landscape of extinct volcanoes recalled to me the grand convulsions of the terrestrial drama which my father formerly traced. The flowers which I plucked my mother would hold for a few minutes, and then let fall almost without looking at them. She was ignorant of their names, as she was of those of the insects which she compelled me to throw down as soon as I had picked them up, saying they were unclean and venomous.
The roads among the vines no longer led to the discovery of the vast world to which the genial word of the dead had invited me. They were simply a continuation of the streets of the city and the misery of daily cares. I seek in vain for suitable words to express the vague and singular ennui of a mutilated mind, of a rarefied atmosphere which these walks inflicted on me.
Language was created by men to express the ideas of men. The terms are lacking which correspond to the incomplete perceptions of children, to their penumbra of soul. How can I tell the suffering, which I did not myself comprehend, of a mind in which were fermenting high and broad conceptions, of a brain upon the border of the great intellectualhorizon, and which had to submit to the unconscious tyranny of another brain, narrow and weak, a stranger to all general ideas, to every view either ample or profound?
Now that I have passed through this period of repressed and thwarted youth, I interpret the smallest episodes by the laws of the constitution of mind, and I take into account that fate, in confiding the education of such a child as I was to the woman who was my mother, had associated two forms of thought as irreducible the one to the other as two different species.
These details, in which I find the proof of this constitutive antithesis between our two natures, come to me by thousands. I have said enough on this point so that I may content myself by noting with precision the result of this silent collision of our minds, and to borrow formulas in the philosophic style, I believe, that by this wrong education, two germs were prepared in me: the germ of a sentiment and the germ of a faculty; the sentiment was that of the solitude of the individual, the faculty that of internal analysis.
I have said that in the order of sensibility as in that of thought, I had almost immediately felt that I could not show myself to my mother as I was. I thus learned, though I was scarcely born into the intellectual life that there is in us an obscure incommunicableelement. This was in my case a timidity at first—then it grew into a pride. But have not all forms of pride a common origin?
Not to dare to show ourselves is to become isolated; and to become isolated is very soon to prefer one’s self. I have since found, in some recent philosophers, M. Renan, for example, this sentiment of the solitude of the soul, but it was transformed into a triumphant and transcendental disdain; I have found it changed into disease and barrenness in the Adolphe of Benjamin Constant, aggressive and ironical in Beyle.
In the poor little collegian of a provincial lyceum, who trotted through the slippery streets of his mountain town in winter, with his cartable under his arm and his feet in galoshes, it was only an obscure and painful instinct; but this instinct, after being applied to my mother, grew more and more applying itself to my comrades and to my masters. I felt that I was different from them with this difference: I believed that I understood them perfectly and that they did not understand me. Reflection has taught me that I did not understand them any better than they understood me; but I also see now that there was really this difference between us, that they accepted their person and mine simply, purely, bravely, while I had already begun to complicate myself by thinking too much of myself. If I had very early felt that, contrary to the word of Christ, I had no neighbor, it was because I had begun very early to exasperate the consciousness of my own soul, and consequently to mate of myself anexemplaire, without analogy, of excessive individual sensibility.
My father had endowed me with a premature curiosity of mind. As he was not there to direct me toward the world of positive knowledge, this curiosity fell back upon myself. The mind is a living creature, and as with all other creatures, every power is accompanied by a want. It would be necessary to reverse the old proverb and say: To be able is to wish. A faculty in us always leads to the wish to exercise it.
Mental hereditary and my early education made an intellectual being of me before my time. I continued to be such a being, but all my intellect was applied to my own emotions. I became an absolute egoist with an extraordinary energy of disdain with regard to everyone else. These traits of my character appeared later under the influence of the crises of ideas though which I have passed and of which I owe you the history.
§ II. THE MEDIUM OF IDEAS.
The diverse influences which I have just rather abstractly summarized, but in terms which you will understand, my dear master, had first this unexpected result, to make of me a very pious child, between myeleventh and my fifteenth year. If I had been placed in the college as a boarder, I should have grown like my comrades whom I have since studied and for whom there has never been a religious crisis.
At the period of which I am writing, and which marked the definite advent of the democratic party in France, a great wave of free thought rolled from Paris into all the provinces; but I was the son of a very devout woman, and I was subjected to all the observances of religion. I find a proof of what I have told you of my precocious taste for analysis in the fact that unlike all my young companions, I was delighted with the confessional. I can say that, during the four years of the mystic crisis of youth, from 1876 to 1880, the great events of my life were these long séances in the narrow wooden box in the church Des Minimes, which was our parish church, where I went every fortnight to kneel down and speak in a low voice, with a beating heart, of what was passing within me.
The approach of my first communion marked the birth of this feeling for the confessional, mixed with contradictory elements. I believed, consequently, my little sins appeared to me to be veritable crimes, and to confess them made me ashamed. I repented, and I had the certainty that I rose pardoned, with the delight of a conscience washed fromevery stain. I was an imaginative and nervous child, and there was for me in the scenery of the sacrament, in the cold silence of the church, in the odor of vault and incense which filled it, in the stammering of my own voice saying, “My father,” and in the whispering of the priest responding, “my son,” from behind the grating, a poetry of mystery which I felt without understanding.
United with this, there was a singular impression of fear, which was derived from the teaching of Abbé Martel, the priest who prepared us for our first communion. He was a small, short man, with an apoplectic face, and a grave, hard blue eye, a man who had been educated in a provincial seminary still penetrated with Jansenism. His eyes, when from the pulpit of Des Minimes he was talking to us of hell, saw visions of terror, and this sensation he communicated to us.
I rejoice that he is dead, for if he were living I might see him enter my prison, and who knows what might happen then? Perhaps I should suffer a recurrence of those emotions of terror which his presence used to inflict. The constant themes of his discourse were the small number of the elect and the divine vengeance.
“Who could hinder God,” said the priest, “since he is all-powerful, from forcing the soul of the man who has committed murder to remainnear the body from which it is separated? The soul would be there, in the mortuary chamber, hearing the sobs, seeing the tears of the friends, and yet forbidden to console them. It would be imprisoned in the winding-sheet, and there during days and days and nights and nights it would be present at the corruption of the flesh, which was once its own, there among the worms and the rot.”
Such images and such ferocity of invention abounded in his bitter mouth; they followed me into my sleep; the fear of hell was excited in me almost to madness. The Abbé Martel employed the same eloquence in presenting the decisive importance to our salvation which the approach to the communion table would have, and so my fear of eternal punishment led to a scrupulous examination of my conscience.
Soon these close meditations, this looking as through a magnifying glass at my slightest deviations, this continuous scrutiny of my inmost self, interested me to such a degree that no sport had any attraction for me in comparison. I had found, for the first time since the death of my father, an employment for this power of analysis which was already definitive and almost constitutive in me.
The development thus given to my acute sense of the inner life ought to have produced an amelioration of my moral being. On the contrary,it resulted in a subtility which, in itself alone, was a corruption, at least from the point of view of strict Catholic discipline. I became, in the course of these examinations of conscience, into which entered more of pleasure than of repentance, extremely ingenious, and discovering peculiar motives behind my most simple actions. The Abbé Martel was not a psychologist sufficiently acute to discern this shadow and to comprehend that to cut the soul to pieces in this way would lead me to prefer the fleeting complexities of sin to the simplicity of virtue. He recognized only the zeal of a very fervent child. For example, on the morning of my first communion I went in tears to confess to him once more.
In turning over and over again the soil and the subsoil of my memory, I had discovered a singular sin, the fear of man. Six weeks before, I had heard two boys, my comrades, at the door of the Lyceum, mocking an old lady who was entering the church Des Carmes, just opposite. I had laughed at their words instead of reproving them.
The old lady was going to mass; to ridicule her was to ridicule a pious action. I had laughed, why? from false shame. Then I had participated in it. Was it not my duty to find the two mockers and to show them their impiety, and make them promise repent? I had not done so. Why?From false shame; from respect for man, according to the definition of the catechism. I passed the whole night preceding the great day of the first communion in wondering if I could see the Abbé Martel early enough the next day to confess this sin. I recall the smile with which he tapped my cheek after having given me absolution in order to quiet me. I hear the tone of his voice which had grown very sweet as he said to me:
“May you always be what you are now.”
He did not suspect that this puerile scruple was the sign of an exaggeratedly unhealthy reflection, nor that this reflection would poison the delights of the Eucharist for which I had so ardently wished. I had not been satisfied, in the course of the preceding weeks, to analyze the conscience to its most delicate fibres, I had abandoned myself to the imagination of sentiment which is the forced consequence of this spirit of analysis. I had anticipated with extreme precision the sentiments which I should experience in receiving the host upon my lips. In my imagination I advanced toward the rail of the altar which was draped in a white cloth, with a tension of my whole being which I have never since experienced, and I felt, in communing, a kind of chilling deception, an ecstatic exhaustion of which I cannot describe the discomfort. I have since spoken of this impression to a friend whowas still a Christian and he said: “You were not simple enough.” His piety had given to him the insight of a professional observer. It was too true. But what could I do?
The great event of my youth, which was the loss of my faith, did not, however, date from this deception. The causes which determined this loss were very numerous, and I have never clearly comprehended them until now. They were slow and progressive at first, and acted upon my mind as the worm upon the fruit, devouring the interior without any other sign of this ravage than a small speck, almost invisible, on the beautiful purple rind. The first was, it seems to me, the application to my confessor of this terrible critical spirit, a faculty destructive of all confidence, which, from my infancy, had so separated me from my mother.
I pushed my examinations of conscience to the most subtle delicacy and still the Abbé Martel did not perceive this work of secret torture which completely anatomatized my soul. My scruples appeared to him, as they were, childish; but they were the childishness of a very complex boy, and one who could not be directed unless he might feel that he was understood.
In my conversations with this rude and primitive priest I soon experienced the contrary feeling. This was enough to deprive this director of my youth of all authority over my mind. At the same time,and this is the second of the causes which detached me from the church, I found among men whom I then considered superior the same indifference to religious observances that I had observed in my father. I knew that the young professors, those who had come from Paris with the prestige of having gone through the Normal School, were all atheists and skeptics. I heard the abbé pronounce these words with concentrated indignation, in the visits which he made to my mother. When I accompanied her to the offices of Des Minimes as I had formerly to those of the Capuchins, I reflected on the poverty of intellect of the devotees who crowd to mass on Sunday mornings and mutter their prayers in the silence of the ceremony, broken only by the noise of displaced chairs. The flame of a clear and living thought had never been lighted in the heads that bowed with so submissive a fervor at the elevation of the host.
I did not at that time formulate this contrast with this distinctness, but I recalled the picture of those young masters as they emerged from the Lyceum, talking with each other in conversations which I imagined were like those of my father, where the smallest sentence was charged with science; and a spirit of doubt arose in my mind as to the intellectual value of Catholic beliefs.
This distrust was fed by a kind of naïve ambition which made me desire with an incredible ardor to be as intelligent as the most intelligent and not to vegetate among those of second rank. I confess that a good deal of pride was mingled with this desire, but I do not blush at this avowal. It was a purely intellectual pride, completely foreign to any desire for outward success. And, if I hold myself erect at this moment, and in this fearful drama, I owe it first of all to this pride—it is this which permits me to describe my past with this cold lucidity, instead of running away like an ordinary suspect, from the noisy events of this drama. I can see so clearly that the first scenes of this tragedy began with the college youth in whom was acting the young man of to-day.
The third of the causes which concurred in this slow disintegration of my Christian faith was the discovery of contemporaneous literature, which dates from my fourteenth year. I have told you that my mother, shortly after my father’s death, suppressed certain books. This severity had not relaxed with time, and the key of the paternal bookcase continued to click on the steel ring between that of the pantry and of the cellar. The most evident result of this prohibition was, to heighten the charm of the remembrance which these books had left of the half-comprehended pieces from Shakespeare, and the half-forgotten romances of George Sand.
Chance willed that, at the commencement of my thirteenth year, I should come across some examples of modern poetry in the book of French authors which served for the year’s recitations. There were fragments of Lamartine, a dozen of Hugo’s pieces, the “Stances à la Malibran” of Alfred de Musset, some bits of Sainte-Beuve, and of Leconte de Lisle.
These pages were sufficient to make me appreciate the absolute difference of inspiration between the modern and the ancient masters, as one can appreciate the difference of aroma between a bouquet of roses and a bouquet of lilacs, with his eyes shut. This difference, which I divine by an unreasoning instinct, resides in the fact that, until the Revolution, writers had never taken sensibility as the subject and the only rule of their works. It has been the contrary since eighty-nine. From this there results among the new writers a certain painful, ungovernable something, a search after moral and physical emotion which has become almost morbid, and which attracted me immediately.
The mystical sensuality of the “Stances du Lac” and of the “Crucifix,” the changing splendors of several “Orientales,” fascinated me; but above all I was charmed at something culpable which breathes in the eloquence of “L’Espoir en Dieu” and in some fragments of the “Consolations.” I began to feel for the rest of the works of thesemasters that strong and almost insane curiosity which marks the middle period of adolescence. One is then on the border of life, and he hears without seeing, as it were, the murmur of a waterfall through a cluster of trees, and how this sound intoxicates him with expectation! A friendship with a comrade who lived on the first floor of our house exasperated this curiosity still more.
This friend, who died young, and who was named Emile, was also an inveterate reader, but more fortunate than I, he suffered from no surveillance. His father and mother, who were already old, lived on a small income and passed the long hours of the day in playing, in front of the window which opened on the Rue de Billard, interminable games of bezique, with cards bought in acaféand still smelling of tobacco. Emile alone in his room, could abandon himself to all his fancies in reading.
As we were in the same class, and as we went to and from the Lyceum together, my mother willingly permitted me to pass whole hours with this charming lad, who soon shared my taste for the verses which I so much admired, and my desire to know more of their authors.
On our way to the college, we took the narrow streets of the old town and passed the stall of an old bookseller of whom we had bought some second-hand classics. We discovered here a copy of the poetry ofMusset in rather a bad condition, which would cost forty sous. At first we contented ourselves with occasional readings at the stall, but soon we felt that it was impossible to do without it. By putting together our spending money for two weeks, we were able to buy it, and then, in Emile’s little room, he on his bed and I on a chair, we read Don Paez, the Marrons du feu, Portia, Mardoche and Rolla. I trembled as if I were committing a great fault, and we imbibed this poetry as if it had been wine, slowly, sweetly, passionately.
I read afterward in this same room, and also in my own, thanks to the ruses of a lover in danger, many clandestine volumes which I very much enjoyed, from the “Peau de chagrin,” of Balzac, to the “Fleurs du mal,” of Baudelaire, not to mention the poems of Heinrich Heine and the romances of Stendhal.
I have never felt an emotion comparable to that of my first encounter with the genius of the author of “Rolla.” I was neither an artist nor a historian. Was I therefore indifferent to their value more or less real or their meaning more or less actual? Not at all. This was an elder brother who had come to reveal to me the dangerous world of sentimental experience.
The intellectual inferiority of piety to impiety which I had obscurely felt appeared now in a strangely new light. All the virtues that hadbeen preached to me in my childhood seemed poor and mean and humble, and meaner beside the opulence and the frenzy of certain vices. The devotees who were my mother’s friends, sadly old and shriveled, represented faith. Impiety was a handsome young man who awakes and looks at the crimson aurora, and in a glance discovers the whole horizon of history and legends, and then again lays his head on the bosom of a girl as beautiful as his most beautiful dream. Chastity and marriage were thebourgeoiswhom I knew who went to hear the music in the Jardin des Plantes, every Thursday and Sunday, and who said the same things in the same way. My imagination painted, in the chimerical colors of the most burning poetry, the faces of the libertines of the Contes d’Espagne and of the fragments which follow. There was Dalti murdering the husband of Portia, then wandering with his mistress over the dark waters of the lagoon among the stairways of the antique palaces. There were Don Paez assassinating Juana after folding her to himself in a fond embrace; Frank and his Belcolore, Hassan and his Namouna, l’Abbé Cassio and his Luzon.
I was not competent to criticize the romantic falsity of all this fine setting, nor to separate the sincere from the literary portion of these poems. The complete profligacy of soul appeared to me through theselines, and it tempted me; it excited in my mind, already eager for new sensations, the faculty of analysis already too much aroused.
The other works which I have cited were the pretext for a temptation which was similar but not so strong.
In the contemplation of the sores of the human heart which they exposed with so much complaisance, I was like those saints of the middle ages who were hypnotized by contemplation of the wounds of the Saviour. The strength of their piety caused the miraculous stigmata to appear on their hands and the ardor of my imagination, at the age of holy ignorances and immaculate purities, opened in my soul the stigmata of moral ulcers which are draining the life blood of all the great modern invalids.
Yes, in the years when I was only the collegian, the friend of little Emile, I assimilated in thought the emotions which the timid teachings of my masters indicated as the most criminal. My mind was tainted with the most dangerous poisons, while, thanks to my power of duplication, I continued to play the part of a very good child, very assiduous at my tasks, very submissive to my mother, and very pious. But no. However strange this must appear to you, I did not play that rôle. I was pious, with a spontaneous contradiction which, perhaps, has directedmy thought to the psychological work to which I consecrated my first efforts.
When I read in your work on the will those suggestive indications on the theory of the multiplicity of self, I seized upon them immediately, after having passed through such epochs as I am describing to you to-day and in which I have really been several distinct beings.
This crisis of imaginative sensibility had continued the attack upon my religious faith by offering the temptation of subtile sin and also that of painful scepticism. The sensuality crisis which resulted from it failed to revive this faith in my heart. I ceased to be pure when I was seventeen years old, and this happened as usual, in very dull and prosaic circumstances. From that time, beside the two persons who already existed in me, between the youth who was still fervent, regular, pious, and the youth romantically imaginative, a third individual was born and grew, a sensual being, tormented by the basest desires. However, the taste for the intellectual life was so strong, so definite, that although suffering from this singular condition, I felt a sensation of superiority in recognizing and studying it.
What was more strange, I did not yield to this last disposition more than I did to the others, with a clear and lucid consciousness. Iremained a youth through all these troubles, that is to say a being still uncertain and incomplete, a being in whom could be discerned the lineaments of the soul to come.
I did not assert my mysticism, for at bottom I was ashamed to believe, as if to believe were something inferior; nor my sentimental imaginations, for I considered them as simple sports of literature; nor my sensuality for I was disgusted with it. And beside, I had neither the theory nor the audacity of my curiosity in regard to my faults.
Emile, who died the following winter, of disease of the lungs, was very ill at this time and did not go out of the house. He listened to my confidences with a frightened interest which flattered my self-love by making me think that I was different from others. This did not prevent my being afraid, as on the evening before my first communion, at the look which l’Abbé Martel gave me when he met me. He had without doubt spoken to my mother-so far as the secrecy of the confessional permitted, for she watched my goings out but without the power to hinder them entirely, and above all without suspecting any other than the possible causes of temptation, so well did I envelop myself in hypocrisy.
The illness of my best friend, the surveillance of my mother, the apprehension of the priest’s eyes enervated me, and perhaps the morethat it seemed in this volcanic country as if the summer’s heat drew from the sun a more ardent and intoxicating vapor. I knew at that time, days literally maddening, so made up were they of contradictory hours, days in which I arose a more fervent Christian than ever. I read a little in the “Imitation,” I prayed, I went to my class with the firm determination to be perfectly regular and good. As soon as I returned I prepared my lessons, then I went down to Emile’s room. We gave ourselves up to the reading of some exciting book. His father and mother, who knew that he could not live, humored him in everything and allowed him to take from the library any work that he pleased.
We now had in hand the most modern writers, whose books having recently come from Paris, exhaled an odor of new paper and fresh ink. In this way we brought upon ourselves a chill of the brain which accompanied me all the afternoon after I returned to my classroom. There, in the stifling heat of the day, I could see through the open door, the short shadows of the trees in the yard, and hear the far-off voices of some professor dictating the lessons; I could see the figure of Marianne, and then began a temptation which at first was vague and remote, but which grew and continued to grow. I resisted it, while knowing that I should succumb, as if the struggle against my obscure desire made methe more feel its strength and acuteness.
I went home. I hurried through my duties with a kind of diabolical verve, finding some power in the disorder of my too susceptible nerves. After dinner I went downstairs under pretext of seeing Emile and hastened toward Marianne’s. On my return I passed some hours at my window, looking at the stars of the vast sky of summer, recalling my dead father, and what he had said to me of these far-off worlds. Then an extraordinary impression of the mystery of nature would seize me, of the mystery of my own soul, living in the midst of nature, and I do not know which I admired more, the depths of the taciturn heavens, or the abysses which a day thus employed revealed in my heart.
Such were the habits of my inner life, my dear master, when I entered the class which would decide my development—the class of philosophy. My enchantment began in the first week of the course. What a course, however, and how crammed with the rubbish of the classic psychology! No matter, inexact and incomplete official and conventional as it was, this psychology enamored me. The method employed, the personal reflection and the minute analysis: the object to be studied, the human “I,” considered in his faculties and passions; the result sought, asystem of general ideas capable of summing up in brief formulas a vast pile of phenomena; all in this new science, harmonized too well with the species of mind which my heredity, my education, and my own tendencies had fashioned in me.
I forgot even my favorite reading and plunged into these works of an order until now unknown with the more frenzy that the death of my only friend which occurred at this time imposed on my mind, which was naturally so meditative, this problem of destiny which I already felt myself powerless to solve by my early faith.
My ardor was so lively that soon I was no longer satisfied to follow the course. I sought other books which would complete the teaching of the masters, and in this way, I one day came upon the “Psychology de Dieu.” It impressed me so profoundly that I immediately obtained the “Theory of the Passions” and the “Anatomy of the Will.” These were in the realm of pure thought, the same thunderbolt as were the works of De Musset in the realm of delirious sensations. The veil fell. The darkness of the external and of the internal world became light. I had found my way. I was your pupil.
In order to explain to you in a very clear manner how your thought penetrated mine, permit me to pass immediately to the result of this reading, and the meditations which followed. You will see how I wasable to draw from your works a complete system of ethics, and which properly arranged in a marvelous manner the scattered elements which were floating about within me.
I found in the first of these three works, the “Psychology of God,” a definite alleviation of the religious anguish in which I had continued to live, in spite of temptation and of doubts. Certainly, objections to the dogmas had not been lacking, as I had read so many books which manifested the most audacious irreligion, and I had been drawn toward skepticism, as I have told you, because I found in it the double character of intellectual superiority and of sentimental novelty.
I had felt, among other influences, that of the author of the “Life of Jesus.” The exquisite magic of his style, the sovereign grace of his dilettanteism, the languorous poetry of his pious impiety had affected me deeply, but it was not for nothing that I was the son of a geometrician, and I had not been satisfied with what there was of uncertainty, of shadow in this incomparable artist.
It was the mathematical rigor of your book which at once took possession of my mind. You demonstrated with irresistible dialectics, that any hypothesis upon the first cause is nonsense, even the idea of this first cause is an absurdity, nevertheless this nonsense andthis absurdity are as necessary to our mind as is the illusion to our eyes of a sun turning around the earth, although we know that the sun is immovable and that the earth itself is in motion. The all-powerful ingenuity of this reasoning charmed my intellect, which docilely yielded to your vision of the lucid and rational world. I perceived the universe as it is, pouring out without beginning, and without end, the tide of inexhaustible phenomena. The care which you have taken to found all your arguments upon facts taken from science corresponded too well with the teaching of my father not to have subdued me.
I read your pages over and over again, summarized them, commented upon them, applied them with the ardor of a neophyte, in order to assimilate all the substance. The intellectual pride which I had felt from my childhood became exalted in the young man who learned from you the renunciations of the sweetest, of the most comforting topics.
Ah! how shall I tell you of the fervor of an initiation which was like a first love in the delights of its enthusiasm? I felt it a physical joy to overthrow, with your books in my hand, the entire edifice of beliefs in which I had grown up. Yes, this was the masculine felicity which Lucretius has celebrated, that of the liberating negation, and not the cowardly melancholy of a Jouffroy.
This hymn to science, of which each of your pages is a strophe, I listened to with a delight as much more intense as the faculty of analysis, the principal reason of my piety, had found, thanks to you, another way to exercise itself than at the confessional, and that your two great treatises had enlightened me as to my inner being, at the same time that your “Psychology of God” enlightened me in regard to the external universe, with a light which, even to-day, is my last, my inextinguishable beacon in the midst of the tempest.
How you explained to me all the incoherences of my youth! This moral solitude in which I had suffered so much with my mother, with the Abbé Martel, with my comrades, with everyone, even Emile—I now understood. Have you not demonstrated, in your “Theory of the Passions,” that we are powerless to get away from Self, and that all relation between two beings reposes, like everything else, upon illusion?
Tour “Anatomy of the Will” revealed to me the necessary motives, the inevitable logic of the yielding to the temptations of the senses for which I had suffered remorse so severe. The complications with which I reproached myself as a lack of frankness, you showed to be the very law of existence imposed by heredity. I found also, that, in searching the romancers and poets of the century for culpable and morbid conditionsof soul, I had, without suspecting it, followed the inborn vocation of psychologist. Have you not written:
“All souls must be considered by the psychologist as experiences instituted by nature. Among these experiences, some are useful to society and are called virtues; others are injurious and are called vices or crimes. These last are however, the more significant, and there would lack an essential element to the science of the mind, if Nero, for example, or some Italian tyrant of the fifteenth century had not existed?”
On those warm summer days, I walked out, with one of these books in my pocket, and, when alone in the country, I read some of these sentences and became absorbed in meditation on their meaning. I applied to the country which surrounded me the philosophical interpretation of what we agree to call evil. Without doubt the eruptions which had raised the chain of the Domes, at whose feet I wandered, had devastated with burning lava the neighboring plain and destroyed living beings, but they had produced this magnificence of scenery which charmed me, when my eyes contemplated the graceful group of the Pariou, the Puy de Dôme and all the line of these noble mountains.