Chapter I: DEDICATE this book to you, my young countryman, with whom I am so (7)

The marquis appeared, then Charlotte. Under the veil and from such a height, I could not distinguish her features, and when she raised the veil to dry her eyes, I could not have told whether it were the last kisses of her mother and her brother which caused this access of nervous emotion or despair at a too painful resolution. But, when the carriage turned away toward the gate, I saw her turn her head; and as the family had already gone in what could she be looking at so long, if not at the window from whose shelter I was regarding her? Then a clump of trees hid the carriage, which reappeared at the border of the lake to disappear again and plunge into the road which crosses the wood of Pradat--that road where a souvenir awaited her, which I was certain would make her heart beat more quickly--that troubled, conquered heart.

This sentiment of pride satisfied me for an entire month, without a minute’s interruption, and--proof that I was still entirely intellectual and psychological in my relations with this young girl, my mind was never more clear, more supple, more skillful in the handling of ideas than at this period.

I wrote then my best pages, a treatise on the working of the will during sleep. I put into it, with the delight of a savant which you will understand, all the details which I had noted, for some months, on the goings and comings, the heights and depths of my resolutions. I had kept, as I have told you, a most precise journal, analyzing, in the evening before going to sleep, and in the morning, as soon as I was awake, the least shades of every state of mind.

Yes, these were days of a singular fullness. I was very free. Mlle. Largeyx and Sister Anaclet kept the marquise company. My pupil and I took advantage of the beautiful and mild days for walking. Under the pretext of teaching I had cultivated in him a love of butterflies. Armed with a long cane and a net of green gauze, he constantly ran after the Auroras with wings bordered with orange, the blue Arguses, the brown Morio’s, the mottled Vulcans and the gold-colored Citrons. He left me alone with my thoughts.

Sometimes we took the Pradat road which was now adorned with all the verdure of spring, sometimes we went toward Verneuge, toward the valley of Saint-Genès-Champanelle, which is as gracefully pretty as its name. I would seat myself upon a block of lava, some small fragment of the enormous stream poured out by the Puy de la Vache, and there, without troubling my head about Lucien, I abandoned myself to this strange disposition which has always appeared to me in the midst of this savage nature, as a striking symbol of my doctrines, a type of implacable fatality, a council of absolute indifference to good or ill.

I looked at the leaves of the trees as they unfolded in the sunlight, and I recalled the known laws of vegetable respiration, and how, by a simple modification of light, the life of the plant can be changed. In the same way, one ought to be able at will to direct the life of the soul, if he could exactly know its laws.

I had already succeeded in creating the commencement of a passion in the soul of a young girl, separated from me by an abyss. What new procedures applied with rigor would permit me to increase the intensity of this passion?

I forgot the magnificence of the heavens, the freshness of the wood, the majesty of the volcanoes, the vast landscape spread out before me, in seeing only the formulas of moral algebra. I hesitated between diverse solutions for the next day on which I should have Mlle. de Jussat face to face with me in the solitude of the château.

Ought I on her return to feign indifference, to disconcert her, to subdue her, first by astonishment and then by self-love and grief? Should I pique her jealousy by insinuating that the foreigner of my _soi-disant_ romance had returned to Clermont and had written to me? Should I, on the contrary, continue the burning declarations, the audacities which surround, the follies which intoxicate?

I replaced these hypotheses successively by still others. I pleased myself by saying that I was not in love, that the philosopher ruled the lover, that myself, this dear self of whom I had constituted myself the priest, remained superior and lucid. I branded as unworthy weaknesses the reveries which at other times replaced these subtle calculations.

It was in the house that these reveries took hold upon me, when I looked at the portraits of Charlotte which were scattered about everywhere on the walls of the salon, on the tables and in Lucien’s room. Photographs of all sizes represented her at six years, at ten years, at fifteen, and I could trace the growth of her beauty from the _mignonne_ grace of her first years to the delicate charm of to-day.

The features of these photographs changed, but the expression never. It was the same in the eyes of the child and in those of the young girl, with something of seriousness, of tenderness and of fixedness which revealed profound sensibility. It was impressed upon me, and the remembrance of it agitates me with a confused emotion. Ah! Why did I not give myself up to it entirely.

But why was Charlotte, in so many of these portraits by the side of her brother André? What secret fibre of hate had this man, by his existence alone, touched in my heart, that simply to see his image near that of his sister dried up my tenderness and left in me only one wish?

I dared to formulate it, now that I believed I had taken this heart in my snare. Yes, I wished to be Charlotte’s lover. And after? After? I forced myself not to think of that, as I forced myself to destroy the instinctive scruples of violated hospitality. I collected the most masculine energies of my mind and I plunged more deeply into my theories upon the cultivation of self.

I would go out of this experience enriched by emotions and remembrances. Such would be the moral issue of the adventure. The material issue would be the return to my mother’s house when my preceptorate was ended.

When scruples became aroused, and a voice said: “And Charlotte? Have you the right to treat her as a simple object of experience?” I took my Spinoza, and I read there the theorem in which it is written that our right is only limited by our power.

I took your “Theory of the Passions” and I studied there your phrases on the duel between the sexes in love.

“It is the law of the world,” I reasoned, “that all existence should be a conquest, executed and maintained by the strongest at the expense of the feeblest. That is as true of the moral universe as of the physical. There are some souls of prey as there are wolves, tigers and hawks.”

This formula seemed to me strong, new and just. I applied it to myself, and I repeated:

“I am a soul of prey, a soul of prey,” with a furious attack of what the mystics call the pride of life, among the fresh verdure, under the blue sky, on the bank of the clear river which flows from the mountains to the lake. This exhilaration at my victorious pride was dissipated by a very simple fact. The marquis wrote that he would return, but alone. Mlle. de Jussat, who was still unwell, would remain with a sister of her mother. When the marquise communicated this news to us we were at table. I felt a spasm of anger so violent that it astonished myself, and on the plea of sudden indisposition I left the dinner table.

I should like to have cried out, broken something or manifested in some foolish way the rage which shook my soul. In the fever of vanity which had exalted me since the departure of Charlotte, I had foreseen everything, except that this girl would have character enough not to return to Aydat. The way which she had found to escape from her sentiment was so simple, but so sovereign, so complete.

The marvelous tactics of my psychology became as vain as the mechanism of the best cannon against an enemy out of reach of its shot.

What could I do if she were not there? The vision of my weakness rose up so strong, so painful, that it excited my nervous system so profoundly that I neither ate nor slept until the arrival of the marquis. I should then learn if this resolution excluded all hope of a counter order--if there were any chance that the young girl would return by the end of July, or in August, or in September. My engagement would last until the middle of October.

My heart beat, my throat was choked while we walked, Lucien and I, in the railroad station of Clermont, waiting for the train from Paris. In the excess of my impatience I had obtained permission to come to meet the father. The locomotive entered the station. M. de Jussat put his head through a doorway. I said at the risk of revealing my feelings:

“And Mlle. Charlotte?”

“Thank you, thank you,” he answered, pressing my hand with feeling, “the physician says that she has a very serious nervous trouble. It seems that the mountains are not good for her. And I am well only high up! Ah! This is painful, very painful. We shall try for a time, the cold-water cure at Paris, and then at Néris perhaps.”

She would not return!

If ever I have regretted, my dear master, the notebook which I burned, it is assuredly now, and this daily record of my thoughts from the evening on which the marquis thus announced the definite absence of his daughter. This record continued until October, when a circumstance brusquely changed the probable course of things.

You would have found there, as in an atlas of moral anatomy, an illustration of your beautiful analysis of love, desire, regret, jealousy, and hate. Yes, during those four months I went through all these phases. It was an insane attempt, but quite natural, persuaded as I was that Charlotte’s absence only proved her passion.

I wrote to her. In that letter, deliberately composed, I began by asking her pardon for my audacity in the Pradat wood, and I renewed this audacity in a worse manner, by drawing a burning picture of my despair away from her.

This letter was a wilder declaration than the other, and so bold that once the envelope had disappeared in the box at the village post-office whither I had carried it myself, my fears were renewed. Two days, three days, and there was no reply. The letter at least was not returned, as I had feared, without even being opened.

At this time the marquise had finished her preparations to join her daughter. Her sister occupied at Paris in the Rue de Chanaleilles, a house large enough to give to these ladies all the rooms they needed. Hôtel de Sermoises, Rue de Chanaleilles, Paris, what emotions I have had in writing this address, not only once, but five or six times.

I calculated that the aunt would not watch the correspondence of the young girl very strictly, while the mother would watch her. It was necessary to take advantage of the time the latter still remained at Aydat, to strengthen the impression certainly produced by my letter. I wrote every day, until the departure of the marquise, letters like the first, and I found no trouble in playing the lover.

My passionate desire to have Charlotte return was sincere--as sincere as unreasonable. I have known since that, at every arrival of these dangerous missives, she struggled for hours against the temptation to open the envelope. At last she opened it. She read and reread the pages and their poison acted surely. As she was ignorant of the discovery I had made of her secret, she did not think to defend herself against the opinion that I could have conceived of her.

These letters affected her so much that she preserved them. The ashes were found in the chimney of her room where she had burned them the night of her death. I much suspected the troubling effect of these pages which I scratched off in the night, excited by the thought that I was firing my last cartridges, which resembled shots in a fog, since no sign gave notice that every time I aimed I struck right into her heart.

This absolute uncertainty I at first interpreted to my advantage; then, when the mother had left the château and I saw the impossibility of writing, I found in Charlotte’s silence the most evident proof, not that she loved me, but that she was using her whole will to conquer this love and that she would succeed.

“Ah, well!” I thought, “I shall have to give her up, since I cannot reach her, and all is over.” I pronounced these words aloud alone in my room as I heard the carriage which took the marquise roll away. M. de Jussat and Lucien accompanied her as far as Martris-de-Veyre, where she went to take the train. “Yes,” I repeated, “all is ended. What difference does it make since I do not love her?”

At the moment this thought left me relatively tranquil and with no other trouble than a vague feeling of uneasiness in the chest, as happens when we are annoyed. I went out for the purpose of shaking off even this uneasiness, and, in one of those fits of bravado, by which I was pleased to prove my strength, I went to the place in which I had dared to speak to Charlotte of my love.

In order the better to attest my liberty of soul, I had taken under my arm a new book which I had just received, a translation of Darwin’s letters.

The day was misty, but almost scorching. A kind of simoon of wind from the south parched the branches of the trees with its breath. As I went on this wind affected my nerves. I desired to attribute to its influence the increase of my uneasiness. After some fruitless search in the wood of Pradat, I at last found the clearing where we had been--the stone--the birch.

It trembled constantly in the breath of the wind, with its dentated foliage which was now much thicker. I had intended to read my book here. I sat down and opened the book. I could not get beyond a half page. The memories overcame me, took possession of me, showing me this girl upon this same stone, arranging the sprays of her lilies, then standing, leaning against this tree, then frightened and fleeing over the grass of the path.

An indefinable grief took possession of me, oppressing my heart, stifling my respiration, filling my eyes with scalding tears, and I felt, with terror, that through so any complications of analysis and of subtleties, I was desperately in love with the child who was not there, who would never be there again.

This discovery, so strangely unexpected, and of a sentiment so contrary to the programme I had arranged, was accompanied almost immediately by a revulsion against this sentiment and against the image of her who had caused me this pain. There was not a day during the long weeks that followed that I did not struggle against the shame of having been taken in my own snare and without feeling a bitter spite against the absent one.

I recognized the depth of his spite at the infamous joy which filled my heart when the marquis received a letter from Paris, which he read with a frown and sighed as he said: “Charlotte is still unwell.” I felt a consolation, a miserable one, but a consolation all the same, in saying to myself that I had wounded her with a poisonous wound and one which would be slow to heal. It seemed to me that this would be my true revenge, if she should continue to suffer, and I should be the first to cure her.

I appealed to the philosopher that I was so proud of being to drive out the lover. I resumed my old reasoning. “There are laws of life and of mind and I know them. I cannot apply them to Charlotte, since she has fled from me. Shall I be incapable of applying them to myself?” And I meditated on this new question: “Are there remedies against love? Yes, there are, and I have found them.”

My quasi-mathematical habits of analysis were at my service in my project of healing, and I resolved the problem into its elements, after the manner of geometricians.

I reduced this question to this other: “What is love?” to which I answered brutally by your definition: “Love is the obsession of sex.” Now, how is this combated? By physical fatigue, which suspends, or at least lessens, the action of the mind.

I compelled myself and I compelled my pupil to take long walks. The days on which he had no lessons, Sundays and Thursdays, I went out alone at the break of day, after having arranged the hour and the place in which Lucien should join me with the carriage. I awoke at two o’clock. I went out from the château, in the cold of the half-twilight which precedes the dawn.

I went straight before me, frantically, choosing the worst paths, ascending the nearest peaks by the most abrupt and almost inaccessible sides. I risked breaking my limbs in descending the yielding sand of the craters, or upon the crests of basalt. No matter.

The orange line of the aurora gained the border of the sky. The wind of the new day beat against my face. The stars like precious stones melted away, drowned in the flood of azure, now pale, now darker. The sun lighted up, on the flowers, the trees and the grass a flashing of sparkling dew.

Persuaded as I am, of the laws of prehistoric atavism, I aroused in myself, by the sensation of the forced march and of the heights, the rudimentary mind of the ancestral brute, of the man of the caves from whom I, as well as the rest of mankind, am descended.

I attained in this way a sort of savage delirium, but it was neither the dreamed-of joy nor peace, and it was interrupted by the smallest reminiscence of my relations with Charlotte. The turn of a road which we had followed together, the blue bosom of the lake seen from some height, the outline of the slated roofs of the château, less than that, even the trembling foliage of a birch and its silvery trunk, the name of a village of which she had spoken, on an advertisement, was sufficient, and this factitious frenzy gave place to the keen regret that she was not near me.

I heard her say in her finely-toned voice: “Look then--” as she would say when we wandered together, through this same region, which was then covered with ice and snow--but the flower of her beauty was then in bloom, now it was adorned with verdure, but the living flower was gone.

And this sensation became more intolerable still when I met Lucien, who never failed to talk of her. He loved her, he admired her so lovingly, and in his ingenuousness he gave me so many proofs that she was worthy of being loved and admired. Then physical weariness resolved itself into a worse enervation, and nights followed in which I suffered from an excited insomnia, in which I would weep aloud, calling her name like one deranged.

“It is through the mind that I suffer,” I said after having in vain sought the remedy in great fatigue. “I will attack mind through mind.”

I undertook that study the most completely opposed to all feminine preoccupation. I despoiled in less than a fortnight, pen in hand, two hundred pages of that “Physiology” of Beaunis which I had brought in my trunk and the hardest for me, those which treat of the chemistry of living bodies.

My efforts to understand and to sum up these analyses which demand the laboratory, were supremely in vain. I only succeeded in stupefying my intellect and in making myself less capable of resisting a fixed idea.

I saw that I had again taken the wrong road. Was not the true method rather that which Goethe professed--to apply the mind to that from which we wish to be delivered? This great mind, who knew how to live, thus put in practice the theory set up in the fifth book of Spinoza, and which consists in evolving from the accidents of our personal life the law which unites us to the great life of the universe.

M. Taine, in his eloquent pages on Byron, advises the same, “the light of the mind produces in us serenity of the heart.” And you, my dear master, what else say you in the preface to your “Theory of the Passions.” “To consider one’s own destiny as a corollary in this living geometry of nature, and as an inevitable consequence of this eternal axiom whose infinite development is prolonged through time and space, is the only principle of enfranchisement.”

And what else am I doing, at this hour, in writing out this memoir, but conforming to these maxims? Can they serve me now any better than they did then? I tried at that time to resume in a kind of new autobiography the history of my feelings for Charlotte. I supposed--see how chance sometimes strangely realizes our dreams--a great psychologist to be consulted by a young man; and, toward the last, the psychologist wrote out for the use of the moral invalid a passional diagnosis with indication of causes.

I wrote this piece during the month of August and under the exhausting influence of the most torrid heat. I devoted to it about fifteen séances, lasting from ten o’clock in the evening to one o’clock in the morning, all the windows open, with the space around my lamp brightened by large night-moths, by these large velvet butterflies which bear on their bodies the imprint of a death’s head.

The moon rose, inundating with its bluish light the lake over which ran the pearly reflections; the woods whose mystery grew more profound, and the line of the extinct volcanoes. I put down my pen to lose myself, in presence of this mute landscape, in one of those cosmogonic reveries to which I was accustomed. As at the time in which the words of my poor father revealed to me the history of the world, I saw again the primitive nebulousness, then the earth detached from it, and the moon thrown off from the earth.

That moon was dead, and the earth would die also. She was becoming chilled second by second; and the imperceptible consequence of these seconds, added together during millions of years, had already extinguished the fire of the volcanoes from which formerly flowed the burning and devastating lava on which the château now stood.

In cooling this lava had raised a barrier to the course of the water which spread into a lake, and the water of this lake was being evaporated as the atmosphere diminished--these forty poor kilometers of respirable air which surround the planet.

I closed my eyes, and I felt this mortal globe roll through the infinite space, unconscious of the little worlds that come and go upon it, as the immensity of space is unconscious of the suns, the moons and the earths. The planet will roll on when it will be only a ball without air and without water, from which man has disappeared, as well as animals and plants.

Instead of bringing to me the serenity of contemplation, this vision threw me back upon myself and made me feel with terror the consciousness of my own person, the only reality that I could possess, and for how long? Scarcely a point and a moment!

Then, in this irreparable flight of things, this point and this moment of our consciousness remains our only good, we must exalt it by increasing its intensity. I felt, with a frightful force, that this sovereign intensity of emotion Charlotte alone could give me if she were in this room, seated in this chair, uniting her condemned soul to my condemned soul, her fleeting youth to my fleeting youth, and as all the instruments of an orchestra harmonize to produce a single tone, all the separate forces of my being, the intellectual, the sentimental, the sensual united in a yearning for Charlotte.

Alas! The vision of the universe heightened the frenzy of the personal life instead of calming it. I said to myself that without doubt I had been deceived in believing myself a purely abstract and intellectual being. During the months in which I had been entirely chaste had I not lived contrary to my nature?

Under pretext of some family business to regulate I obtained of the marquis a vacation of eight days. I went to Clermont and sought for Marianne. I soon found her. She was no longer the simple working-woman. A country proprietor had settled her, dressed her in fine clothes, and coming to the city only one day in eight, left her a sort of liberty. This re-entrance into the world affected me as a renewal of initiation. I was desirous of knowing to what degree the memory of Charlotte gangrened my soul. Ah! how the image of Mlle. de Jussat presented itself at that moment with her Madonna-like profile and the delicacy of her whole being. It was impossible for me to return to these base idols. I passed the days which remained to me in walking with my mother, who seeing me so melancholy became uneasy and increased my sadness by her questions.

I saw the time of my return to the château approach with pleasure. At least I could live there among my memories. But a terrible blow awaited me, which was given me by the marquis on my arrival.

“Good news,” said he as soon as he saw me. “Charlotte is better. And there is more just as good. She is going to be married. Yes, she accepts M. de Plane. It is true, you do not know him, a friend of André whom she refused once, and now she is willing.” And he continued, going back to himself as usual: “Yes, it is very good news, for, you see, I have not much longer to live. I am broken, very much broken.”

He might detail to me his imaginary ills, analyze his stomach as much as he wished, his gout, his intestines, his heart, his head--I listened no more than a condemned man to whom his sentence has been announced listens to the words of his jailer. I saw only the fact so painful to me. You who have written some admirable pages upon jealousy, my dear master, and upon the ravages which the thought alone of the caress of a rival produces in the imagination of a lover, can divine what smarting poison this news poured into my wound.

May, June, July, August, September--nearly five months since Charlotte had gone, and this wound instead of healing had become enlarged, poisoned until this last stroke which finished me. This time I did not have the cruel consolation that my suffering was shared. This marriage proved to me that she was cured of her sentiment for me, while I was agonized by mine for her.

My fury was exasperated at the thought that this love had been snatched from me just at the moment I was about to be able to develop it in its fullness, at the very time of decisive action. I saw Charlotte in Paris, where M. de Plane was passing his leave of absence, receiving her _fiancé_ in the partial _tête-à-tête_ with a familiarity permitted under the indulgent eyes of the marquise. They were for this man now, these smiles at once proud and timid, these tender and anxious looks, these passages of paleness and modest red over her delicate face, these gestures of a grace always a little wild.

Finally she loved him, since she was willing to marry him. And he seemed to me like Count André whose detestable influence I found even here, and whom I again hated in the _fiancé_ of his sister confounding these two gentlemen, these two elders, these two officers, in the same furious antipathy. Vain and puerile anger which I took with me into the wood already reclothed with those vague tints which would soon change to russet.

The swallows were assembling for their departure. As the hunting season had begun there was firing all around them, and frightened, they rose in a flight such as that by which the wild bird had escaped which I had thought to bring down some day.

Toward Saint-Saturnin, the hills were planted with vines whose grapes would soon be ripe for the vintage. I saw the stocks widowed of fruit, those which the hailstorms of the spring had destroyed in their flower. Thus had died on the spot, before being ripe, my vintage, vintage of intoxicating emotions, of sweet felicities, of burning ecstasies.

I felt a gloomy and indefinable pleasure in seeking everywhere in the country some symbol of my sentiment, since I was, for a short time, purified from all calculation by the alchemy of grief.

If I was ever a true lover and given up to regrets, memories and despairs, it was in those days which must be the last of my stay at Aydat. In fact, the marquis announced his intention to hasten his departure. He had abdicated his hypochondria, and he cheerfully said to me:

“I adore my future son-in-law. I wish that you could know him. He is loyal, he is brave, he is good, he is proud. True gentlemanly blood in his veins. Do you understand the women? Here is one who is no sillier than the rest, is it not so? Two years ago he offered himself to her. She said no. Then my boy goes away to come back half-dead. And then it is yes. Do you know, I have always thought that there was some love-affair in her nervous malady. I knew it. I said to myself: she is in love with some one. It was he. And what if he had not wanted her, all the same?”

No, it was not M. de Plane whom Charlotte had loved that winter; but she had loved, that was certain. Our existences had crossed at one point, like the two roads which I saw from my window, the one which descends the mountains and goes toward the fatal wood of Pradat, the other which leads toward the Puy de la Rodde.

I happened to see, at the close of the day the carriages following these two roads. After almost grazing each other, they were lost in opposite directions. Thus were our destinies separated forever. The Baroness de la Plane would live in the world, at Paris, and that represented to me a whirlpool of unknown and fascinating sensations.

I knew too well my future life. In thought, I awoke again in the little room of the Rue du Billard. In thought I followed the three streets which it is necessary to take to go from there to the Faculty. I entered the palace of the Academy, built in red brick, and I reached the _salle des conférences_ with its bare walls garnished with blackboards. I listened to the professor analyzing some author on license or admission. That lasted an hour and a half, then I returned, my serviette under my arm, through the cold streets of the old town, for it was necessary for me to pass still another year, as I had not studied hard enough to submit to my examination with success.

I should continue to go and come among these dark houses, with this horizon of snowy mountains, to see the father and mother of Emile sitting at their window and playing at cards, the old Limasset reading his paper in the corner of the Café de Paris, the omnibuses of Royat at the corner of Jande.

Yes, I come down to that, my dear master, to this misery of minds without psychology which attach themselves to the external form of life without penetrating its essence. I disregarded my old faith in the superiority of science, to which only three square metres of room are necessary in order that a Spinoza or an Adrien Sixte may there possess the immense universe.

Ah! I was very mediocre in that period of powerless desires and conquered love! I detested, and with what injustice, that life of abstract study which I was about to resume! And how I wish to-day that this might be my fate, and that I might awake a poor student near the Faculty of Clermont, tenant of the father of Emile, pupil of old Limasset, the morose traveler through those black streets--but an innocent man! an innocent man! And not the man who has gone through what I have gone through, and which he finds it a necessity to tell.

§ VI. THIRD CRISIS.

Toward the end of this severe month of September, Lucien complained of not being quite well, which the doctor attributed at first to a simple cold. Two days after the symptoms became aggravated. Two physicians of Clermont, called in haste, diagnosed scarlet fever, but of a mild character.

If my mind had not been entirely absorbed by the fixed idea which made of me at this period a veritable monomaniac, I should have found material enough to fill my notebook. I had only to follow the evolutions of the mind of the marquis and the struggle in his heart between hypochondria and paternal love.

Sometimes, in spite of the reassuring words of the doctors, he became so uneasy about his son that he passed the night in watching him. Sometimes he was seized with the fear of contagion; he went to bed, complained of imaginary pains, and counted the hours until the visit of the physician. Sometimes, so grave did his symptoms seem to himself, that the marquis must have the first visit. Then he would be ashamed of his panic. He arose, he chastised himself for his terrors with bitter phrases on the feebleness which age brings, and returned to the bedside of his son. His first intention was to conceal from the marquise and Charlotte and André the illness of the child; but after two weeks, these alternations of zeal and of terror having exhausted his energy, he felt the need of having his wife with him to sustain him, and the incoherence of his ideas was so great that he consulted me:

“Do you not think it is my duty?”

There are some lying souls, my dear master, who excel in excusing by fine motives their most villainous actions. If I were of this number I could make a merit of having insisted that the marquis should not recall his wife. Surely I knew the full import of my response and of the resolution that M. de Jussat was about to take. I knew that, if he informed the marquise, she would arrive by the first train, and I also knew Charlotte well enough to be assured that she would come with her mother. I should see her again, I should have a supreme opportunity to reawaken in her the love of which I had surprised the proof. I could say that it was loyalty on my part, the advice to leave Mme. de Jussat in Paris. I should have the appearance of loyalty. Why? If I were not convinced that there is no effect without a cause and no loyalty without a secret egoism, I should recognize a horror in using to the profit of a culpable passion the noblest of sentiments, that of a sister for a brother.

Here is the naked truth: in trying to dissuade M. de Jussat, I was convinced that all effort to regain the heart of Charlotte would be useless. I foresaw in this return only certain humiliation. Worn out by these long months of internal struggle, I no longer felt the strength to maneuver. There was then no virtue in representing to the marquis the inconveniences, the dangers even, of the stay of these two women in the château, near an invalid who might communicate to them his disease.

“And how about me?” responded he ingenuously, “am I not exposed every day? But you are right for Charlotte; I will write that I do not want her.”

“Ah! Greslon,” said he two days after, on the receipt of a telegram, “see what they do--read.” He handed me the dispatch which announced the arrival of Mlle. de Jussat and her mother. “Naturally,” moaned the hypochondriac, “she wanted to come, without thinking that I should be spared such emotions.”

The marquis spoke to me in this way at two o’clock in the afternoon. I knew that the train left Paris at nine o’clock in the evening and arrived at Clermont toward five in the morning. Mme. de Jussat and Charlotte would be at the château before ten o’clock. I passed a fearful evening and night, deprived now of that philosophic tension, outside of which I float, a creature without energy, the sport of nervous and irresistible impressions.

Good sense, however, indicated a very simple solution. My engagement would end the 15th of October. It was now the 5th. The child was convalescent. He had his mother and his sister with him. I could return home without any scruple and under any pretext. I could do it and I must--for the sake of my dignity as well as for my repose.

In the morning, I had taken this resolution and I was going to speak about it to the marquis immediately; he did not let me say a word, he was so agitated by the arrival of his daughter: “Very well,” said he, “by and by, I have no head for anything now. This willfulness! That is why I have grown old so fast. Always new shocks!”

Who knows? my destiny may have entirely depended on the humor by which this old fool refused to hear me. If I had spoken to him at that moment, and if we had fixed my departure, I should have been obliged to have gone; instead, the sole presence of Charlotte changed the project of going into a project of remaining, as a lamp carried into a room immediately changes this darkness into light. I repeat it, I was convinced that she had absolutely ceased to be interested in me on the one hand, and, on the other, that I was passing through a crisis, not of genuine love, but of wounded vanity, and of morbid brooding.

Ah, well! To see her descend from the carriage before the _perron_, to see that my presence overcame her, as hers affected me, I understood two things: first, that it would be physically impossible for me to leave the château while she should be there; then that she had passed through trouble similar to mine, if not worse. She must have fled from me with the most sincere courage, not to have replied to my letters, not to have read them, to have become betrothed in order to place an insurmountable barrier between us, to have believed even that she no longer loved me, and to have returned to the château with this persuasion.

She loved me!

I had no need of a detailed analysis like those in which I was too complaisant and in which I was so much deceived, to recognize this fact. It was an intuition, sudden, unreasoning, invincible, one to make me believe that the theories on the double life, so much discussed by Science, are absolutely true.

I read it, this unhoped for love, in the troubled eyes of this child, as your read the words by which I am trying to reproduce here the lightning and the thunderbolt of this evidence.

She was before me in her traveling costume, and white, white as this sheet of paper. I should have explained this pallor by the fatigue of the night passed in the carriage, and by her uneasiness at her brother’s illness. Her eyes, in meeting mine, trembled with emotion. That might be offended modesty? She had fallen away, and when she took off her cloak I saw that her dress, a dress which I recognized, was wrinkled around the shoulders.

Ah! I, who had believed so strongly in the method, the inductions, and the complications of reasoning, how I felt the omnipotence of instinct against which nothing could provide.

She had loved me all the time. She loved me more than ever. What matter that she had not given me her hand at our first meeting; that she had scarcely spoken to me in the vestibule; that she went up the grand staircase with her mother without turning her head?

She loved me. This certainty, after so long a period of doubt and anxiety, inundated my heart with a flood of joy, so that I was almost overcome, there, on the carpet of the staircase which I must also climb to go to my room. What was I to do? With my elbows on the table and pressing my hands against my forehead to repress the throbbing of my temples I put this question without finding any other answer than that I could not go away; that absence and silence could not end all between Charlotte and myself; finally that we were approaching an hour in which so many reciprocal efforts, hidden struggles, combated desires on the part of both, was precipitating us toward a supreme scene, and this, I could feel was near, tragic, decisive, inevitable.

At first Charlotte was constrained to submit to my presence. We must meet at the bedside of her brother, and the very morning of her arrival, when it was my turn to keep the invalid company, toward eleven o’clock, I found her there talking with him, while the marquise questioned Sister Anaclet, both speaking in low tones and standing near the window.

Lucien, from whom the coming of his mother and sister had been concealed, showed in his face and in his gestures the excited and almost feverish joy which is seen in convalescents; he saluted me with his gayest smile, and taking my hand said to his sister:

“If you only knew how good M. Greslon has been to me all these days!”

She did not reply, but I saw that her hand, which lay on the pillow near her brother’s cheek, shook as with a chill. She made an effort to look at me without betraying herself. Without doubt my face expressed an emotion that touched her. She felt that to leave unnoticed the innocent remark of her brother would make me feel badly, and, in the voice of past days, her sweet and living voice, she said, without addressing me directly:

“Yes, I know it and I thank him for it. We all thank him very much.”

She did not add another word. I am sure that if I had taken her hand at that moment she would have fainted before me, she was so moved by this simple conversation.

I stammered a vague response: “It is quite natural,” or something similar. I was not very collected myself. Lucien, however, who had noticed neither the altered tone of his sister, nor my embarrassment, continued:

“And isn’t André coming to see me?”

“You know he has gone back to his regiment,” said she.

“And Maxime?” insisted the child. I knew that this was the name of the _fiancé_ of Mlle. de Jussat. These two syllables had no sooner left the lips of her brother than the paleness of her face gave way to a sudden wave of blood. There was an interval of silence during which I could hear the murmuring of Sister Anaclet, the crackling of the fire in the chimney, the swinging of the pendulum, and the child himself astonished at this silence.

“Yes, Maxime, is not he coming either?”

“M. de Plane has also gone back to his regiment,” said Charlotte.

“Are you going away already, M. Greslon?” asked Lucien as I rose brusquely.

“I am coming back,” I replied; “I have forgotten a letter on my table.” And I went out, leaving Lucien with a smile on his face, and Charlotte with her eyes cast down.

Ah! my dear master, you must believe what I am telling you; in spite of the incoherencies of a heart almost unintelligible to itself, you must not doubt my sincerity in that moment. I have so great need not to doubt it myself; need to say to myself that I was not lying then.

There was not an atom of voluntary comedy in the sudden movement by which I rose at the simple mention of the name of the man to whom Charlotte ought to belong, to whom she did belong. There was no comedy in the tears which burst from my eyes, as soon as I passed the threshold of the door, nor in those which I wept during the night which followed, in despair at this double and frightful certainty that we loved one another, and that never, never, could we be anything one to the other; no comedy in the starts of pain which her presence inflicted on me during the days which followed. Her pale face, her emaciated profile, her suffering eyes were there to disturb me, and this pallor rent my soul, and this spare outline of her body made me love her more, and those eyes besought me.

“Do not speak. I know that you are unhappy too. It would be cruel to reproach me, to complain, to show your hurt.”

Tell me, if I had not been sincere in those days, would I have let them pass without acting, when their hours were counted? But I do not recall a single reflection, a single combination. I do recall confusing sensations, something burning, frantic, intolerable, a prostrating neuralgia of my inmost being, a lancination continuous, and growing, growing always, the dream of putting an end to it, a project of suicide.

You see that I truly loved, since all my subtleties were melted in the flame of this passion, as lead in a furnace; since I did not find material for analysis in what was a real alienation, an abdication of my old self in this martyrdom. This thought of death came from the inmost depths of my being, this obscure appetite for the grave of which I was possessed as of physical thirst and hunger, in which, my dear master, you will recognize a necessary consequence of this disease of love, so admirably studied by you.

This instinct of destruction, of which you point out the mysterious awaking at the same time as that of sex, was turned against myself. This was shown first by an infinite lassitude, the lassitude of feeling much but never expressing anything. For the anguish in Charlotte’s eyes, when they met mine, defended her better than all words could have done.

Beside, we were never alone, except sometimes for a few minutes in the salon, by chance, and these minutes passed in a silence which we could not break. To speak at such times is as impossible as for a paralytic to move his feet. A superhuman effort would not suffice. One experiences how emotion, to a certain degree of intensity, becomes incommunicable. One feels himself imprisoned, walled up in his self, and he would like to get away from this unhappy self, to plunge, to lose himself in the coldness of death is where all ended.

That continued with a kind of delirious desire to make on the heart of Charlotte an imprint which could not be effaced, with an insane desire to give her some proof of love, against which neither the tenderness of her future husband nor the magnificence of her social surroundings, could ever prevail.

“If I die of despair at being separated from her forever, she must remember the simple preceptor, the poor provincial, capable of sentiments so powerful!”

It seems to me that I formulated these reflections. You notice that I say: “It seems to me.” For in truth, I did not comprehend myself at that period. I did not recognize myself in the fever of violence and of tragedy by which I was consumed. Scarcely do I discern in this ungovernable come-and-go of my thoughts a kind of auto-suggestion, as you say. I was hypnotized, and it was as a somnambulist that I determined to kill myself at such a day, at such an hour, as I was going to the druggist to procure the fatal bottle of nux vomica.

During all these preparations and under the influence of this resolution, I hoped for nothing, I calculated nothing. A force entirely foreign to my own consciousness was acting on me. At no time was I the spectator of my gestures, my thoughts and my actions, with an exterior of the acting “I” in relation to the thinking “I.” But I have written a note upon this point, which you will find on the fly leaf, in my _exemplaire_ of the book of Brière de Boismont on suicide.

I experienced in these preparations an indefinable sensation of a waking dream, of lucid automatism. I attribute these strange phenomena to a nervous disorder, almost a madness, caused by the ravages of a fixed idea. It was only on the morning of the day chosen for the execution of my project that I thought of making a last attempt to win Charlotte.

I sat down at my table to write her a letter of farewell. I saw her reading this letter, and this question suddenly presented itself to me: “What would she do?” Was it possible that she might not be moved by this announcement of my intended suicide? Would she hasten to prevent it? Yes, she would run to my room and find me dead. At least, should I not wait for the effect of this last proof?

Here I am very sure that I saw myself clearly. I know that hope was born in me exactly in this way and precisely at this point of my project. “Ah, well!” said I, “I will try.”

I resolved that if, at midnight, she had not come, I would drink the poison. I had studied the effects of it, and hoped I should not suffer very long.

It is strange that all that day was passed in a singular serenity. I was as if relieved of a weight, as if really detached from myself, and my anxiety commenced only toward ten o’clock, when, having retired first, I had placed the letter on the table in the room of the young girl.

At half-past ten I heard through my partly-open door the marquis, the marquise and Charlotte ascending the stairs. They stopped to talk a few minutes in the passage, then there were the customary good-nights, and each entered a separate chamber.

Eleven o’clock--a quarter-past eleven.

Still nothing.

I looked at my watch, placed in front of me, near three letters prepared for M. de Jussat, for my mother, and for you, my dear master.

My heart beat as if it would burst; but I wish you to note that my will was firm and cool. I had told Mlle. de Jussat that she would not see me the next day. I was sure of not failing my word if--I did not dare to strengthen what hope this “if” contained.

I watched the second-hand go round and I made a mechanical calculation, an exact multiplication: “at sixty seconds a minute, I shall see the hand go round so many times, for at midnight I shall kill myself.”

A noise of furtive and light steps on the stairs, which I perceived with supreme emotion, interrupted my calculation. These steps approached. They stopped before my door. Suddenly the door was opened. Charlotte was before me. I arose.

We rested thus face to face, both standing. Her face was distorted by the shock of her own action, very pale, and her eyes shone with an extraordinary brilliancy, nearly black, so dilated was the pupil by emotion, almost covering the iris.

I noticed this detail because it transformed her physiognomy. Ordinarily so reserved, her face betrayed the wildness of a being ruled by a passion stronger than her will. She must have lain down, then arose again, for her hair was braided in a large plait instead of being knotted on her head. A white _robe-de-chambre_, fastened by a cord and tassel was folded around her form, and in her haste she had slipped her bare feet into her slippers without thinking.

Evidently an insupportable anguish had precipitated her from her chamber into my room. She did not care what I might think of her nor what I might be tempted to say. She had read my letter, and she came, a prey to an excitement so intense that she did not tremble.