YET I was not willing to yield. Before taking life on its pleasant side
after having seen its evil side so dearly, I resolved to test everything.
I remained thus for some time a prey to countless sorrows, tormented by
terrible dreams.
The great obstacle to my cure was my youth. Wherever I happened to be,
whatever my occupation, I could think of nothing but women; the sight of
a woman made me tremble.
I had been so fortunate as to give to love my virginity. But the result
of this was that all my senses were united in the idea of love; there was
the cause of my unhappiness. For not being able to think of anything but
women, I could not help turning over in my head, day and night, all the
ideas of debauchery, of false love and of feminine treason with which my
mind was filled. To possess a woman was for me to love her; for I thought
of nothing but women and I did not believe in the possibility of true
love.
All this suffering inspired me with a sort of rage, and at times I was
tempted to imitate the monks and murder myself in order to conquer my
senses; at times I felt like going out into the street and throwing
myself at the feet of the first woman I met and vowing eternal love.
God is my witness that I did all in my power to cure myself. Preoccupied
from the first with the idea that the society of men was the haunt of
vice and hypocrisy, where all were like my mistress, I resolved to
separate myself from them and live in complete isolation. I resumed my
neglected studies, I plunged into history, poetry, and anatomy. There
happened to be on the fourth floor of the same house an old German who
was well versed in lore. I determined to learn his tongue; the German was
poor and friendless and willingly accepted the task of instructing me. My
perpetual state of distraction worried him. How many times seated near
him with a smoking lamp between us, he waited in patient astonishment
while I sat with my arms crossed on my book, lost in reverie, oblivious
of his presence and of his pity.
"My dear sir," said I to him one day, "all this is useless, but you are
the best of men. What a task you have undertaken! You must leave me to my
fate; we can do nothing, neither you nor I."
I do not know that he understood my meaning, but he grasped my hand and
there was no more talk of German.
I soon realized that solitude instead of curing me was doing me harm, and
so completely changed my system. I went to the country and galloped
through the woods with the huntsmen; I rode until I was out of breath, I
tried to break myself with fatigue, and when after a day of sweat in the
fields, I reached my bed in the evening smelling of powder and the
stable, I buried my head in the pillow, I rolled about under the covers
and I cried: "Fantom, fantom! are you not tired? Will you leave me for
one night?"
But why these vain efforts? Solitude sent me to nature, and nature to
love. When I stood in the street of Observation I saw myself surrounded
by corpses, and, drying my hands on my bloody apron, stifled by the odor
of putrefaction, I turned my head in spite of myself, and I saw floating
before my eyes green harvests, balmy fields and the pensive harmony of
the evening. "No," I said, "science can not console me; I can not plunge
into dead nature, I would die there myself and float about like a livid
corpse amidst the debris of shattered hopes. I would not cure myself of
my youth; I will live where there is life, or I will at least die in the
sun." I began to mingle with the throngs at Sevres and Chaville; I lay
down in the midst of a flowery dale, in a secluded part of Chaville.
Alas! all these forests and prairies cried to me:
"What do you seek here? We are green, poor child, we wear the colors of
hope."
Then I returned to the city; I lost myself in its obscure streets; I
looked up at the lights in all its windows, all those mysterious family
nests; I watched the passing carriages; I saw man jostling against man.
Oh! what solitude! How sad the smoke on those roofs! What sorrow in those
tortuous streets where all are hurrying hither and thither, working and
sweating, where thousands of strangers rub against your elbows; a cloaca
where there is only society of bodies, while souls are solitary and
alone, where all who hold out a hand to you are prostitutes! "Become
corrupt, corrupt, and you will cease to suffer!" This has been the cry of
all cities to man; it is written with charcoal on city walls, on its
streets with mud, on its faces with extravasated blood.
And at times, when seated in the corner of some salon I watched the women
as they danced, some rosy, some blue, and others white, their arms bare
and hair clustered gracefully about their shapely heads, looking like
cherubim drunk with light, floating in their spheres of harmony and
beauty, I would think: "Ah, what a garden, what flowers to gather, to
breathe! Ah! Marguerites, Marguerites! What will your last petal say to
him who plucks it? A little, a little, but not all. That is the moral of
the world, that is the end of your smiles. It is over this terrible abyss
that you are walking in your flower-strewn gauze; it is on this hideous
truth you run like gazelles on the tips of your little toes!"
"But why take things so seriously?" said Desgenais. "That is something
that is never seen. You complain because bottles become empty? There are
many casks in the vaults, and many vaults in the hills. Make me a good
fish-hook gilded with sweet words, with a drop of honey for bait, and
quick! catch for me in the stream of oblivion a pretty consoler, as fresh
and slippery as an eel; you will still have the hook when the fish shall
have glided from your hands. Youth must pass away, and if I were you I
would carry off the queen of Portugal rather than study anatomy."
Such was the advice of Desgenais. I made my way home with swollen heart,
my face concealed under my cloak. I kneeled at the side of my bed and my
poor heart dissolved in tears. What vows! what prayers! Galileo struck
the earth, crying: "Nevertheless it moves!" Thus I struck my heart.