There are some natures purely contemplative and antipathetic to
action, who nevertheless, under a mysterious and inexplicable impulse,
sometimes act with a rapidity of which they would have believed
themselves incapable. Such a one is he who, fearing to find some new
vexation awaiting him at his lodgings, prowls about in a cowardly
fashion before the door without daring to enter; such a one is he who
keeps a letter fifteen days without opening it, or only makes up his
mind at the end of six months to undertake a journey that has been
a necessity for a year past. Such beings sometimes feel themselves
precipitately thrust towards action, like an arrow from a bow.
The novelist and the physician, who profess to know all things, yet
cannot explain whence comes this sudden and delirious energy to
indolent and voluptuous souls; nor how, incapable of accomplishing the
simplest and most necessary things, they are at some certain moment
of time possessed by a superabundant hardihood which enables them to
execute the most absurd and even the most dangerous acts.
One of my friends, the most harmless dreamer that ever lived, at one
time set fire to a forest, in order to ascertain, as he said, whether
the flames take hold with the easiness that is commonly affirmed. His
experiment failed ten times running, on the eleventh it succeeded only
too well.
Another lit a cigar by the side of a powder barrel, _in order to
see, to know, to tempt Destiny_, for a jest, to have the pleasure of
suspense, for no reason at all, out of caprice, out of idleness. This
is a kind of energy that springs from weariness and reverie; and those
in whom it manifests so stubbornly are in general, as I have said, the
most indolent and dreamy beings.
Another so timid that he must cast down his eyes before the gaze of any
man, and summon all his poor will before he dare enter a café or pass
the pay-box of a theatre, where the ticket-seller seems, in his eyes,
invested with all the majesty of Minos, Æcus, and Rhadamanthus, will
at times throw himself upon the neck of some old man whom he sees in
the street, and embrace him with enthusiasm in sight of an astonished
crowd. Why? Because--because this countenance is irresistibly
attractive to him? Perhaps; but it is more legitimate to suppose that
he himself does not know why.
I have been more than once a victim to these crises and outbreaks which
give us cause to believe that evil-meaning demons slip into us, to make
us the ignorant accomplices of their most absurd desires. One morning
I arose in a sullen mood, very sad, and tired of idleness, and thrust
as it seemed to me to the doing of some great thing, some brilliant
act--and then, alas, I opened the window.
(I beg you to observe that in some people the spirit of mystification
is not the result of labour or combination, but rather of a fortuitous
inspiration which would partake, were it not for the strength of the
feeling, of the mood called hysterical by the physician and satanic
by those who think a little more profoundly than the physician; the
mood which thrusts us unresisting to a multitude of dangerous and
inconvenient acts.)
The first person I noticed in the street was a glass-vendor whose
shrill and discordant cry mounted up to me through the heavy, dull
atmosphere of Paris. It would have been else impossible to account for
the sudden and despotic hatred of this poor man that came upon me.
"Hello, there!" I cried, and bade him ascend. Meanwhile I reflected,
not without gaiety, that as my room was on the sixth landing, and the
stairway very narrow, the man would have some difficulty in ascending,
and in many a place would break off the corners of his fragile
merchandise.
At length he appeared. I examined all his glasses with curiosity, and
then said to him: "What, have you no coloured glasses? Glasses of rose
and crimson and blue, magical glasses, glasses of Paradise? You are
insolent. You dare to walk in mean streets when you have no glasses
that would make one see beauty in life?" And I hurried him briskly to
the staircase, which he staggered down, grumbling.
I went on to the balcony and caught up a little flower-pot, and when
the man appeared in the doorway beneath I let fall my engine of war
perpendicularly upon the edge of his pack, so that it was upset by the
shock and all his poor walking fortune broken to bits. It made a noise
like a palace of crystal shattered by lightning. Mad with my folly, I
cried furiously after him: "The life beautiful! the life beautiful!"
Such nervous pleasantries are not without peril; often enough one pays
dearly for them. But what matters an eternity of damnation to him who
has found in one second an eternity of enjoyment?