Paul Bourget

“ 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. ”

“ At the foot of the bed on which lay the dead man, with his brow bandaged, knelt the mother of Robert Greslon.
The great negator, seated on a chair, looked at this woman praying, and at the dead man who had been his disciple, sleeping the sleep which Charlotte de Jussat was also sleeping; and, for the first time, feeling his mind powerless to sustain him, this analyst, almost inhuman by force of logic, bowed before the impenetrable mystery of destiny. The words of the only prayer he remembered: “Our Father who art in heaven,” came to his mind. ”

“ But no, these ideas, this science, the accused claimed them as the excuse, as the cause of the most monstrous, the most complaisant depravity! As he advanced into the manuscript he felt that a little of his inmost person became soiled, corrupted, gangrened; he found so much of himself in this young man, but a “himself” made up of sentiments which he detested the most in the world. For in this illustrious philosopher the holy virginities of conscience remained intact, and, behind the bold nihilism of mind, the noble heart of an ingenuous man was hidden. ”

“ A sentiment is born, grows, expands, withers like a plant, by an evolution sometimes retarded, sometimes rapid, but always unconscious. The germ of pity, of jealousy, and of dangerous example planted by my ruse in the soul of Charlotte must develop its action, but only after days and days, and this action would be the more irresistible as she believed me to be in love with another and that in consequence she would not think to defend herself against me. ”

“ I do not know. I was afraid, afraid of feeling to grow numb in my most secret being, the soul of my soul, the indefinable center of all our energy. And suddenly by a sudden facing about of ideas like to that of the dying who throw a last look upon their existence, and who perceive, in the mirage of a secret regret, the joys known or coveted, the vision was evoked of that life, all thought of [Pg 276] which I had turn by turn desired and abjured.
I saw you in your little cell, my dear master, in meditation, and the universe of intelligence developed before me the splendor of its horizons. ”

“ When you recall 1830, and the glorious struggles of Romanticism, do you experience nostalgia at not having, like those of Hernani, a great literary standard to defend? Do you feel, when you meet one of the masters of to-day—a Dumas, a Taine, a Leconte de Lisle—that you are in the presence of one of the depositaries of the genius of your race? When you read such books as must be written when it is necessary to depict the criminal passions and their martyrdom, do you wish to love more wisely than the authors of these books have loved? ”

“ At present, for a man of our name, there is in France only one profession, that of a soldier. So long as our country is in the hands of the canaille and so long as we have the Germans to fight, our duty is in the only place that remains to us—the army. Thank God my father and my mother share these opinions. Lucien will be a soldier, and a soldier has no need of knowing all that the people prate about to-day. Having honor, sangfroid, muscles and loving France, everything is right. ”

“ As far back as I can remember, I find that my dominant faculty, the one that has been present in every crisis of my life, great or small, and which is present to-day, has been the faculty, I mean the power and the need of duplication. There have always been in me, as it were, two distinct persons; one who went, came, acted, felt, and another who looked at the first go, come, act, and feel with an impassable curiosity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The good and the bad, beauty and deformity, vices and virtues are to him simply objects of curiosity. The human soul so far as he is concerned is a skillful piece of mechanism in the dissection of which he is interested as a matter of experience. To him nothing is true, nothing is false, nothing is moral, nothing is immoral. He is a subtle and refined egotist whose whole ambition, as that remarkable analyst, Maurice Barrès, has said in his beautiful romance of “L’Homme Libre”—that chef-d’œuvre of irony which lacks only conclusion—consists “in adoring himself,” and to acquire new sensations. ”

“ At meeting the phrase in which Robert Greslon had declared himself united to him by a cord as close as it was unbreakable, the great psychologist had trembled, and he had trembled at every repetition of his name in this singular analysis, at every citation of one of his works, which proved the right of this abominable libertine to call himself his pupil.
A fascination made up of horror and curiosity had constrained him to go straight through to the end of this fragment of biography in which his ideas, his cherished ideas, his science, his beloved science, appeared united with acts so shameful. ”

“ Everything was prepared to receive this impression, from her feelings already stirred to her nerves strained by an influence of a physical kind. One cannot live with impunity for weeks in such an atmosphere as that of the château, always warm, nearly stifling.
From that evening, this child hung on my lips as the ingenuous loves of Eugénie and her cousin Charles disclosed their touching episodes. The same instinct of comedy which had guided me in my false confidence made me throw into every phrase the intonation which I thought would please her most. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I arrived at this conclusion, that the essential trait of my nature, the characteristic of my inmost being, had always been the faculty of duplication. That means that I had always felt a tendency to be at once passionate and reflective, to live and to see myself live. But by imprisoning myself, as I wished, in pure reflection, by neglecting to live and to have only one eye open upon life, did I not risk resembling that Amiel whose dolorous journal appeared at that time, and sterilizing myself by the abuse of analysis to emptiness? ”

“ This old parliamentary city, with its large hotels with the high windows, built in black Volvic stone, seemed more empty, more silent, more dead than usual as the brother of Charlotte walked toward the court.
Near the approaches to Palais there was a dense crowd which filled the narrow Rue Saint-Louis by which one reaches the hall of assize. The Greslon case had attracted all who had an hour to spare. André could scarcely force his way through the mass of people, composed of countrymen and small shopkeepers who were conversing with passionate animation. ”

“ Ah! we know this young man too well; we have all wished to be in his place, for we have been so charmed by the paradoxes of too eloquent teachers; we all have been like him at some time. And so I have written this book to show you, who are not yet like him, you child of twenty years, whose soul is in process of formation, what villainy this egoism may conceal.
Be neither of these young men, my young friend! Be neither the brutal positivist who abuses the world of sense, nor the disdainful and precocious sophist who abuses the world of thought and feeling. ”

“ How tranquil he had gone out of the Palais de Justice! And now there was no more contempt in him; that serenity was conquered, and he, the negator of all liberty, he the fatalist who decomposed virtue and vice with the brutality of a chemist studying a gas, he the bold prophet of universal mechanism, and who until then had always experienced the perfect harmony of mind and heart, suffered with a suffering in contradiction to all his doctrines—he felt remorse, he felt himself responsible! ”

“ 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. ”

“ I responded: “Let us die together,” with the most perfect good faith. It had appeared so simple, so natural, so easy for us to go away together. You, who have written some strong pages upon the vapor of illusion created in us by physical causes, which is like that intoxication produced by wine, you will not judge me a monster for having felt this vapor dissipate, this intoxication disappear with possession.
Charlotte had placed her head on my breast and she fell asleep, exhausted by the excess of her emotions. ”

“ In the name of what principle had he done it, after having professed that virtue and vice are additions, good and evil, social labels without value; finally that everything is of necessity in each detail of our being as well as in the whole of the universe.
What counsel could he give him for the future? By what counsel prevent this brain of twenty-two years from being ravaged by pride and sensuality, by unhealthy curiosity and depraving paradoxes? Would one prove to a viper, if it could comprehend reasoning, that it ought not to secrete venom? “Why am I a viper?” ”

“ To tell you all in a few words, my dear master, though once more I say that I did not kill Mlle. de Jussat, I have been connected in the closest manner with the drama of her poisoning, and I feel remorse, although the doctrines in which I believe, the truths which I know, and the convictions which form the essence of my intellect, make me consider remorse the most silly of human illusions. ”

“ 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 [Pg 252] 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. ”

“ Here was a second crisis, more cruel perhaps than the first. When he had been fully impressed by the ravages produced by his works, the savant became [Pg 311] panic-stricken. Now that he was calm, he measured, with frightful precision the powerlessness of his psychology, however learned it might be, to handle the strange mechanism of the human soul.
How many times he began letters to Robert Greslon which he was unable to finish! What could he say to this miserable child? Must he accept the inevitable in the internal as well as in the external world—accept his mind as one accepts his body? ”

“ No, you are right, it is not possible. I cannot let you die before me, for I should be your assassin. I pray you, Charlotte, do not ask me to realize this fatal project. When I bought the poison I was mad, [Pg 279] I thought that you did not love me. I wished to kill myself. Oh! how sincerely! But now that you do love me, that I know it, that you have given yourself to me, no I cannot, I will not. Let us live, my love, let us live, consent to live. We will go away together, if you will. And if you will not, if you repent of this confession of your regard, well! I will suffer the martyrdom ”

“ She was as ignorant of herself as of others. She languished, unknown to herself, for the society of some one who should have sentiments in harmony with her own. For example, I observed in the first walks that we took together, that she was the only one who could really feel the beauty of the landscape formed by the lake, the woods that surround it, the distant volcanoes and the autumn sky, often more blue than the sky of summer because of the contrast of its azure with the gold of the leaves, and which was sometimes so veiled, so sadly vaporous and distant. ”

“ At twenty-five he has run the gamut of all ideas. His critical mind, precociously awake, has comprehended the final results of the most subtle philosophies of the age. Do not speak to him of impiety or of materialism. He knows that the word “matter” has no precise meaning, and beside he is too intelligent not to admit that all religions have been legitimate in their time. Only, he has never believed, and he never will believe in them, any more than he will ever believe in anything whatever, except in the amusing play of his mind which he has transformed into a tool of elegant perversity. ”

“ The work by which an emotion is elaborated in us, and ends by resolving itself into an idea, remains so obscure that the idea is, sometimes, exactly contrary to that which simple reason could have foreseen!
Would it not have been natural, for example, that the kind of admiring antipathy roused in me by my encounter with Count André should have ended either in a declared repulsion, or in a definite admiration? In the first case, I should have thrown myself more into science, and in the other, have desired a more active morality, a more practical virility in my actions. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To play a rôle different from my true nature appeared to me an enrichment of my person, so strong was the instinct to resolve myself into a character, a belief, a passion.
My mother is a woman of the South, absolutely rebellious against all complexity, to whom ideas of things alone are intelligible. In her imagination the forms of life are reproduced concrete, precise and simple. When she thinks of religion, she sees her church, her confessional, the communion cloth, the few priests whom she has known, the catechism in which she studied. ”