Chapter I: DEDICATE this book to you, my young countryman, with whom I am so (4)

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 incommunicable element. 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 an _exemplaire_, 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 my eleventh 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 from every 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 remain near 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 who was 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 these masters 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 a _café_ and 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 of Musset 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 had been 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 the _bourgeois_ whom 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 these lines, 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 directed my 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. I remained 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 more that 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 me the 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, a system 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 was able 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 and this 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 conditions of 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.

The road was verdant with euphorbias in bloom, whose stems I broke to see the milk-white poison exuding from them. But these poisonous plants 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 the _exposé_ of 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 the savings 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 who has 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, and he 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 beautiful country 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 to the 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 philosophic _credo_, of celebrating every day, like the monks, the _fête_ of 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 do not 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 the _perron_ and 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 a _religieuse_ were 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 in its 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.