trains was constantly heard in this quiet study. I used to sit on the
carpet in the corner by the fire, playing without making any noise, and
this strident call produced on my mind a strange impression of mystery,
of distance, of the flight of time, and of life which endures to the
present.
My father traced with his chalk upon a blackboard enigmatic signs,
geometric figures or algebraic formulas, with that clearness of the
curves, or the letters which revealed the habitual method of his
being. At other times he wrote, standing at an architect’s table which
he preferred to his desk, a table consisting simply of a white wood
board placed on trestles. The large books on mathematics arranged with
the most minute care in the bookcase, and the cold faces of savants,
engraved in copperplate and framed under glass, were the only objects
of art with which the walls were decorated.
The clock which represented the globe of the world, two astronomical
maps which hung above the desk, and upon this desk the calculating
ruler with its figures and its copper slide, the square, the compass,
the T rule. I recall them all, at will, the smallest details of this
room whose whole atmosphere was thought, and these images aid me
to comprehend how from my infancy the dream of a purely ideal and
contemplative existence became elaborated in me, favored by heredity.
My later reflections have shown me, in several traits of my character,
the result transmitted under form of instinct of the life of abstract
study that my father led. I have, for example, always felt a singular
horror of action, so much so that, making a simple visit caused my
heart to pant and the slightest physical exercise was intolerable to
me, such as wrestling with another person; even to discuss my most
cherished ideas appeared to me, and still appears, almost impossible.
This dread of action is explained by the excess of brainwork which,
pushed too far, isolates man in the midst of the realities which he
hardly endures, because he is not habitually in contact with them. I
feel that this difficulty of adapting myself to facts comes to me from
this poor father; from him also comes this faculty of generalization,
which is the power, but at the same time the mania of my mind; and it
is also his work that a morbid predominance of the nervous system has
rendered my will so wild at certain times.
My father, who was still young when he died, had never been robust. He
was obliged at the growing age to undergo the trial of preparation for
the Polytechnic School which is ruinous to the soundest health. With
narrow shoulders and with limbs weakened by long sittings at sedentary
meditations, this savant with transparent hands seemed to have in his
veins, instead of red globules of generous blood, a little of the dust
of the chalk which he handled so much.
He did not transmit to me muscles capable of counterbalancing the
excitability of my nerves, so that with this faculty of abstraction, I
owe to him a kind of ungovernable intemperance of desire. Every time
that I have ardently wished for anything it has been impossible to
repress this covetousness. This is a hypothesis which has often come to
me when I have been analyzing myself, that abstract natures are more
incapable than others of resisting passion, when passion is aroused,
perhaps because the daily relation between action and thought is broken
in them.
Fanatics would be the most signal proofs of this. I have seen my
father, usually so patient and gentle, so overcome by the violence of
anger as almost to faint. In this I am also his son, and through him
the descendant of a grandfather as ill-balanced, a sort of primitive
genius, who, half-peasant, had risen by force of mechanical inventions
to be a civil engineer, and was then ruined by lawsuits.
On this side of my race there has always been a dangerous element,
something wild, at times, by the side of constant intellectuality.
I formerly considered this double nature a superior condition; the
possible ardor of passion joined with this continuous energy of
abstract thought. It was my dream to be at the same time frenzied and
lucid, the subject and the object, as the Germans say, of my analysis;
the subject who studies himself and finds in this study a means of
exaltation and of scientific development. Alas! Whither has thy chimera
led me? But it is not the time to speak of effects, we are still with
the causes.
Among the circumstances which affected me during my childhood, I
believe the following to be one of the most important: Every Sunday
morning, and as soon as I could read, my mother took me with her to
mass. This mass was celebrated at eight o’clock in the Church of the
Capuchins recently built on a boulevard shaded by Plantanes which led
from Sablon Court to Laureau Square, along the Jardin des Plantes.
At the door of the church, there used to sit, in front of a portable
shop, a cake seller called Mother Girard, with whom I was well
acquainted, for I had bought of her little bunches of cherries in the
spring. This was the first fruit of the season that I might eat. This
dainty, acid and fresh, was one of the sensualities of these days of
childhood, and any one who had observed me, might have seen this frenzy
of desire of which I have spoken. I was almost in a fever when on my
way to this shop.
This was not the only reason why I preferred the Church of the
Capuchins with its extremely plain architecture, to the subterranean
crypts of Notre-Dame-du-Port and to the vaults of the cathedral upheld
by it elegant clustered columns. At the Capuchins the choir was closed.
During the offices, invisible mouths behind the grating chanted the
canticles, which strangely effected my childish imagination; they
seemed to me to come from so far off, an abyss or a tomb. I looked at
my mother praying beside me with the fervor which was shown in her
smallest actions, and I thought that my father was not there, that he
never came to church. My child’s brain was so puzzled by this absence,
that, one day, I asked:
“Why does not papa come to mass with us?”
My inquiring child’s eyes had no trouble to see the embarrassment into
which this question threw my mother. She withdrew from it, however, by
an answer analogous to hundreds of others which a woman so essentially
enamored of fixed principles and of obedience has since given me.
“He goes to another mass, at an hour which suits him better, and then
I have already told you that children ought never to ask why their
parents do this or that.”
All the difference of mind which separated my mother and myself is
found in this sentence, uttered one cold morning in winter, while
walking under the trees of Sablon Court. I can see her now in her
pelerine, her hands in her muff lined with brown silk from which her
book came halfway out, and the sincerity of her face even in her pious
falsehood. I can see her eyes, which so many times since have regarded
me with a look which did not comprehend me, and at this period she
did not suspect that for my meditative childish nature to think, was
already to ask, always and in relation to everything; why? Yes, why had
my mother deceived me? For I knew that my father went to no kind of
office. And why did he not go?
While the grave and sad voices of the concealed monks were intoning the
responses of the mass, I was absorbed in this question. I knew without
being able to appreciate the reasons of the superiority that my father
was accounted among the first of the city. How many times in walking
were we stopped by some friend, who tapping me on the cheek would say:
“Well, will we get to be a great savant like the father some day?”
When my mother took his advice, she listened with the greatest respect.
She thought it natural that he did not perform certain duties which,
for us, were obligatory. We had not the same duties. This idea was not
formulated then in my childish brain with this positive distinctness,
but it developed there the germ of that which later became one of the
convictions of my youth--to know that the same rules do not govern
intellectual minds that control other men.
It was there in that little church, quietly bending over my prayer
book, that the great principle of my life had birth, not to consider
as a law for thinking men that which is and ought to be a law for
others--just as I received from the conversations with my father,
during our excursions, the first germs of my scientific view of the
world.
The country around Clermont is marvelous, and although I am the reverse
of poetical, a man for whom the external world means very little, I
have always retained in my memory the pictures of the landscapes which
surrounded these walks. While the city on one side looks toward the
plain of the Limagne, on the other it stands on the foothills of the
Dôme Mountains. The slope of the extinct craters, the undulations
caused by old eruptions and the streams of hardened lava give to the
outlines of these volcanic mountains a resemblance to the landscapes in
the moon as discovered by the telescope in that dead planet.
On one side is the savage and sublime memorial of the most terrible
convulsions of the globe, and on the other the prettiest rusticity
of stony roads among the vineyards, of murmuring brooks under the
willows and chestnuts. The great pleasures of my childhood were the
interminable wanderings with my father in all the paths which lead from
the Puy de Crouël to Gergovie, from Royat to Durtol, from Beaumont to
Gravenoire.
Simply in writing these names, my memory rejuvenates my heart. I see
myself again the little boy, whom a portrait represents with long
hair, with his legs in cloth leggings, who walks along holding his
father’s hand. Whence came this love for the fields to him, the learned
mathematician, the man of study and of reflection? I have often thought
of it since, and I believe I have discovered a law of the development
of mind;--our youthful tastes persist even when we are developed in a
sense contrary to them, and we continue to exercise these tastes while
justifying them by intellectual reasons which would exclude such things.
I will explain. My father naturally loved the country because he was
brought up in a village, and when he was small had passed whole days on
the banks of the brooks among the insects and the flowers. Instead of
yielding to these tastes in a simple manner, he mingled them with his
present occupations. He would not have pardoned himself for going to
the mountains without studying there the formation of the land; for
looking at a flower without determining its character and discovering
its name; for taking up an insect without recalling its family and its
habits.
Thanks to the rigor of his method in all work he arrived at a very
complete knowledge of the country; and, when we walked together, this
knowledge was the sole subject of our conversation. The landscape of
the mountains became a pretext for explaining to me the revolutions
of the earth; he passed from that with a clearness of speech which
made such ideas intelligible to me, to the hypothesis of Laplace
upon nebula, and I saw distinctly in my imagination the planetary
protuberances flying off from the burning nucleus, from this torrid sun
in rotation.
The heavens at night in the beautiful summer months became a kind of
map which he deciphered for me, and on which I distinguished the Pole
Star, the seven stars of the Chariot, Vega of the Lyre, Sirius, all
those inaccessible and formidable worlds of which science knows the
volume, the position and almost the very metals of which they are
composed.
It was the same with the flowers which he taught me to arrange in an
herbarium, with the stones which I broke with a little iron hammer,
with the insects which I fed or pinned up, as the case might be. Long
before object lessons were practiced in the college my father applied
to my education first this great maxim: “Give a scientific account of
anything we may encounter.”
Thus reconciling the pleasantry of his first impressions with the
precision acquired in his mathematical studies. I attribute to this
teaching the precocious spirit of analysis which was developed in me
during my early youth, and which, without doubt, would have turned
toward the positive studies if my father had lived. But he could not
complete this education, undertaken after a prepared plan of which I
have since found trace among his papers.
In the course of one of our walks, and on one of the warmest days of
summer, in my tenth year, we were overtaken by a storm which wet us to
the bones. During the time that it required to reach home in our soaked
clothes my father took cold. In the evening he complained of a chill.
Two days after an inflammation of the lungs declared itself, and the
week following he died.
As I wish, in this summary indication of diverse causes which formed my
mind, to avoid at any cost that which I hate most of anything in the
world, the display of subjective sentimentality, I will not recount
to you, my dear master, any further details of this death. They were
heartrending, but I felt their sadness only in a far-off way, and that
later.
I recollect, though I was a large and remarkably developed boy, to
have felt more wonder than sorrow. It is now that I truly regret my
father--that I comprehend what I lost in losing him. I believe you
have seen exactly what I owe to him; the taste and the facility for
abstraction, the love of the intellectual life, faith in science and
the precocious management of method--these for the mind; for the
character, the first divination of the pride of intellect, and also
an element slightly morbid, this difficulty of action which has as
its consequence the difficulty in resisting the passions when one is
tempted.
I wish also to mark distinctly what I owe to my mother. And from the
first I perceive this fact that this second influence acts upon me by
reaction, while the first had acted directly. To speak truly, this
reaction only began when she became a widow and wished to direct my
education. Until then she had entirely given me up to my father.
It may seem strange that, alone in the world, she and I, she so
energetic, so devoted, and I so young, we did not live, at least during
those years, in perfect communion of heart. There exists in fact, a
rudimentary psychology for which these words--mother and son--are
synonyms of absolute tenderness, of perfect agreement of soul. Perhaps
it is so in the families of ancient tradition, although in human nature
I believe very little in the existence of entire sympathy between
persons of different ages and sexes.
In any case, modern families present under conventional etiquette the
most cruel phenomena of secret divorce, of complete misunderstanding,
sometimes of hate, which are too well understood when we think of their
origin. They come from the mixture for a hundred years of province with
province, race with race, which has charged the blood of nearly all
of us with hereditary opposites. So people find themselves nominally
of the same family who have not a common trait either in their moral
or mental structures; consequently the daily intimacy between persons
becomes a cause of daily conflicts or of constant dissimulation. My
mother and I are an example of it which I would qualify as excellent,
if the pleasure of finding very clear proof of a psychologic law was
not accompanied by keen regret at having been its victims.
My father, I have told you, was an old pupil of the Polytechnic School
and the son of a civil engineer. I have also said he was of Lorraine
race. There is a proverb which says: “Lorraine traitor to its king and
even to God.” This epigram expresses in a unique form the idea that
there is something complex in the mind of this frontier population.
The people of Lorraine have always lived on the border of two races and
of two existences, the German and the French. What is this disposition
to treachery if not the depravity of another taste, admirable from
the intellectual point of view, that of sentimental complication?
For my part, I attribute to this atavism the power of doubling of
which I spoke at the beginning of this analysis. I ought to add that,
when I was a child, I often felt a strange pleasure in disinterested
simulation which proceeded from the same principle. I recounted to my
comrades all sorts of inexact details concerning myself, about my place
of birth, my father’s birthplace, about a walk which I was intending to
take, and this not to boast, but simply to be some one else.
I found singular pleasure later in advancing opinions the most opposed
to those which I considered the true ones from the same _bizarre_
motive. 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. When she thinks of a career, she
sees positive activity and benefits. The professorate, for example,
which she desired me to enter, was for her M. Limasset, the professor
of mathematics, the friend of my father, and she saw me, like him,
going across the city twice a day in an alpaca coat and Panama hat
in summer, and my feet protected in winter by clogs, and my body in
a furred overcoat, with a fixed salary, the perquisites of private
tuition and the sweet assurance of a pension.
I have been able by studying her to learn how completely this order of
imagination renders those whom it governs incapable of comprehending
other souls. It is often said of such people that they are despotic and
personal, or that they have bad characters. In reality, they are before
those with whom they associate like a child before a watch. He sees the
hands move, he knows nothing of the wheels which make them move. So
when these hands do not go to suit his fancy there is the stupidity of
impatience to force them and to warp the springs.
My poor mother was like this with me, and that from the week which
followed our trouble. I felt almost immediately an indefinable
discomfort in her presence. The first circumstance which enlightened me
in regard to this separation which had begun between us, so far as my
childish mind could be enlightened, dates from an afternoon of autumn,
nearly four months after my father’s death.
The impression received was so strong that I recall it as if it had
happened yesterday. We had changed apartments, and had rented the third
floor of a house in the Rue Billard, a narrow lane which distorts the
shadows of Des Petits-Abres, in front of the palace of the Prefecture.
My mother had chosen it because there was a balcony in which I was
playing on this beautiful afternoon. My play--you will here recognize
the scientific turn given by my father to my imagination--consisted in
taking a pebble, which represented a great explorer, from one end of
the balcony to the other, and among other stones which I had taken from
the flower pots.
Some of these stones represented cities, others curious animals of
which I had read descriptions. One of the parlor windows opened on
the balcony. It was partly open, and my play having led me thither I
heard my mother talking to a visitor. I could not help listening with
that beating of the heart which the hearing my personality discussed
has always produced. I learned afterward that between our real nature
and the impression produced on our relations, and even on our friends,
there is no more similarity than there is between the exact color of
the face and its reflection in a blue, green, or yellow glass.
“Perhaps,” said the visitor, “you are mistaken in regard to poor
Robert, at ten years the character is not at all formed.”
“God grant that it may be so,” replied my mother, “but I am afraid
he has no heart. You cannot imagine how hard he has been since his
father’s death. The next day even he seemed to have forgotten all about
it. And he has never said a word since--such a word as makes you feel
that one is thinking of another you now. When I speak to him of his
father, he hardly answers me. You would think he had never known the
man who was so good to him.”
I have read somewhere that when Merimée was quite a child he was
one day scolded by his mother and then sent out of the room. He was
scarcely gone when his mother burst out laughing. The child heard the
laugh which showed him that the irritation had been feigned, and he
felt a feeling of distrust rise in his heart which always remained.
This anecdote impressed me very strongly.
The impression of the celebrated writer offered a startling analogy
with the effect which this fragment of conversation produced upon me.
It was very true that I never spoke of my father, but how false that
I had forgotten him! On the contrary, I thought of him constantly. I
never walked along the street, I could not look at any piece of our
furniture without the remembrance of his death taking such possession
of me that I was almost ill. But with this was mingled a fearful
astonishment that he had gone forever, and it was all confounded in a
kind of anxious apprehension, which closed my mouth when any one talked
with me about him.
I know now that my mother could have known nothing of the workings of
my mind. But, at that time, as I heard her thus condemn my heart, I
experienced a profound humiliation. It seemed to me that she was not
acting toward me as it should be her duty to act. I felt that she was
unjust, and because I was timid, being still a young boy and shy, I
became irritated at her injustice, instead of trying to tell her how I
felt.
From that moment it became impossible for me to show myself to her as I
was. And whenever her eyes sought mine to learn my emotions I felt an
irresistible desire to conceal from her my inmost being.
That was the first scene--if anything so insignificant can be dignified
by so big a name--followed by a second which I will notice in spite of
its apparent unimportance. Children would not be children if the events
important to their sensibility were not puerile.
I was, at this period, already passionately fond of reading, and
chance had put into my hands a very different kind of books from those
which are given as prizes at school. It was this way: although my
father as a mathematician knew little of general literature, he loved
a few authors whom he understood in his way; and when afterward I
found some of his notes on these authors, I learned to appreciate the
degree to which the feeling for literature is a personal, irreducible,
incommensurable thing to borrow a word from his favorite science there
is no common measure between the reasons for which two minds like or
dislike the same writer.
Among other works my father owned a translation of Shakespeare in two
volumes, which they put on my chair to raise my seat at table. They
left me without thinking how these volumes illustrated by engravings
would very soon incite my curiosity to read the text. There was a Lady
Macbeth rubbing her hands in presence of a frightened physician and a
servant, and Othello entering Desdemona’s chamber with a poniard in
his hand, and bending his black face toward the white, sleeping form,
a King Lear tearing his clothing under the zigzags of the lightning, a
Richard III. asleep in his tent and surrounded by specters.
From the accompanying text I read, before my tenth year, fragments
which made me familiar with all these dramas which exalted my
imagination, in so far as I could seize the meaning of them, without
doubt because they were written for popular audiences, and admit an
element of primitive poetry, and an infantine exaggeration.