head of their armies, who lost or gained battles in a few minutes, I
enjoyed this slaughter accompanied by a flourish of trumpets behind
the scenes, the rapid passages from one country to another, and the
chimerical geography. In brief, whatever there is in these dramas
and especially in the chronicles that is very much abridged, almost
rudimentary, so charmed me, that when I was alone I played with the
chairs, imagining them to be Lancaster, Warwick, or Gloucester.
My father, who had an extreme repugnance to the troublesome realities
of life, relished in Shakespeare that which is simple and touching, the
profiles of women so delicately drawn; Imogene and Desdemona, Cordelia
and Rosalind pleased him, though the comparison may seem strange, for
the same reason that he enjoyed the romances of Dickens, Topffer and
even the child’s play of Florian and Berquin.
Here we may see the contrasts which prove the incoherence of artistic
judgments which are founded upon sentimental impression. I also read
all these books, and those of Walter Scott, as well as the rural tales
of George Sand, in an illustrated edition. It would certainly have
been better for me not to have nourished my imagination on elements
so incongruous and sometimes dangerous. But at my age I could not
understand more than a quarter of the sentences, and while my father
was toiling at his blackboard, combining his formulas, I believe that
the lightning might have struck the house without his knowing it,
carried away as he was by the all-powerful demon of abstraction.
My mother, to whom this demon is as much a stranger as the beast of the
Apocalypse, did not wait long, after the first hours of our trouble had
passed, before she rummaged the room in which I studied; and, under an
exercise, she discovered a large, open book--Scott’s “Ivanhoe.”
“What book is this?” she asked, “who permitted you to take it?”
“But I have read it once already,” I replied.
“And these?” she continued, in looking over the little library where by
the side of schoolbooks, were, beside the Shakespeare, the “Nouvelles
Génevoises” and “Nicholas Nickleby,” “Rob Boy” and “La Mare au Diable.”
“These are not suitable for a person of your age,” she insisted, “and
you may help me carry all these books into the parlor, and put them in
your father’s library.”
So I carried them, three at a time, some almost too heavy for my small
arms, into the cool room furnished in haircloth. With her white hands
in their black mitts, she took the books and arranged them alongside
of the big treatises on mathematics. She closed the glass door of the
bookcase, locked it, and put the key on the ring with others, which she
always carried with her. Then she added severely:
“When you wish a book you may ask me for it.”
I ask her for one of those books, but which one? I knew so well that
she would refuse me all those which I had any desire to read! I have
already shown too plainly that we did not think alike on any point.
I complain of her having put a stop to my liveliest pleasure, less
perhaps because of the prohibition than for the reason she gave. For
she believed it to be her duty to repeat the phrases on the danger of
romances, no doubt borrowed from some manual of piety, which appeared
to me to express exactly the contrary to that which I had experienced.
She made the danger I had run in this indiscriminate reading the
pretext for occupying herself more closely with my studies and
directing my education. This was her duty, but the contrast was too
great between the ideas into which my father had precociously initiated
me and the poverty of her mind, which was furnished with impressions
positive, mean, and almost vulgar.
I went to walk with her now, and she talked with me. Her conversation
was confined to my bearing, my manners, my little comrades, and their
parents. My intellect, which had been too early trained in the pleasure
of thought, felt stifled and oppressed.
The motionless landscape of extinct volcanoes recalled to me the grand
convulsions of the terrestrial drama which my father formerly traced.
The flowers which I plucked my mother would hold for a few minutes,
and then let fall almost without looking at them. She was ignorant of
their names, as she was of those of the insects which she compelled me
to throw down as soon as I had picked them up, saying they were unclean
and venomous.
The roads among the vines no longer led to the discovery of the vast
world to which the genial word of the dead had invited me. They were
simply a continuation of the streets of the city and the misery of
daily cares. I seek in vain for suitable words to express the vague
and singular ennui of a mutilated mind, of a rarefied atmosphere which
these walks inflicted on me.
Language was created by men to express the ideas of men. The terms are
lacking which correspond to the incomplete perceptions of children, to
their penumbra of soul. How can I tell the suffering, which I did not
myself comprehend, of a mind in which were fermenting high and broad
conceptions, of a brain upon the border of the great intellectual
horizon, and which had to submit to the unconscious tyranny of another
brain, narrow and weak, a stranger to all general ideas, to every view
either ample or profound?
Now that I have passed through this period of repressed and thwarted
youth, I interpret the smallest episodes by the laws of the
constitution of mind, and I take into account that fate, in confiding
the education of such a child as I was to the woman who was my mother,
had associated two forms of thought as irreducible the one to the other
as two different species.
These details, in which I find the proof of this constitutive
antithesis between our two natures, come to me by thousands. I have
said enough on this point so that I may content myself by noting with
precision the result of this silent collision of our minds, and to
borrow formulas in the philosophic style, I believe, that by this wrong
education, two germs were prepared in me: the germ of a sentiment and
the germ of a faculty; the sentiment was that of the solitude of the
individual, the faculty that of internal analysis.
I have said that in the order of sensibility as in that of thought,
I had almost immediately felt that I could not show myself to my
mother as I was. I thus learned, though I was scarcely born into the
intellectual life that there is in us an obscure incommunicable
element. This was in my case a timidity at first--then it grew into a
pride. But have not all forms of pride a common origin?
Not to dare to show ourselves is to become isolated; and to become
isolated is very soon to prefer one’s self. I have since found, in
some recent philosophers, M. Renan, for example, this sentiment of
the solitude of the soul, but it was transformed into a triumphant
and transcendental disdain; I have found it changed into disease and
barrenness in the Adolphe of Benjamin Constant, aggressive and ironical
in Beyle.
In the poor little collegian of a provincial lyceum, who trotted
through the slippery streets of his mountain town in winter, with his
cartable under his arm and his feet in galoshes, it was only an obscure
and painful instinct; but this instinct, after being applied to my
mother, grew more and more applying itself to my comrades and to my
masters. I felt that I was different from them with this difference:
I believed that I understood them perfectly and that they did not
understand me. Reflection has taught me that I did not understand them
any better than they understood me; but I also see now that there was
really this difference between us, that they accepted their person and
mine simply, purely, bravely, while I had already begun to complicate
myself by thinking too much of myself. If I had very early felt that,
contrary to the word of Christ, I had no neighbor, it was because I had
begun very early to exasperate the consciousness of my own soul, and
consequently to mate of myself an _exemplaire_, without analogy,
of excessive individual sensibility.
My father had endowed me with a premature curiosity of mind. As he was
not there to direct me toward the world of positive knowledge, this
curiosity fell back upon myself. The mind is a living creature, and
as with all other creatures, every power is accompanied by a want. It
would be necessary to reverse the old proverb and say: To be able is to
wish. A faculty in us always leads to the wish to exercise it.
Mental hereditary and my early education made an intellectual being of
me before my time. I continued to be such a being, but all my intellect
was applied to my own emotions. I became an absolute egoist with an
extraordinary energy of disdain with regard to everyone else. These
traits of my character appeared later under the influence of the crises
of ideas though which I have passed and of which I owe you the history.
§ II. THE MEDIUM OF IDEAS.
The diverse influences which I have just rather abstractly summarized,
but in terms which you will understand, my dear master, had first
this unexpected result, to make of me a very pious child, between my
eleventh and my fifteenth year. If I had been placed in the college
as a boarder, I should have grown like my comrades whom I have since
studied and for whom there has never been a religious crisis.
At the period of which I am writing, and which marked the definite
advent of the democratic party in France, a great wave of free thought
rolled from Paris into all the provinces; but I was the son of a very
devout woman, and I was subjected to all the observances of religion.
I find a proof of what I have told you of my precocious taste for
analysis in the fact that unlike all my young companions, I was
delighted with the confessional. I can say that, during the four years
of the mystic crisis of youth, from 1876 to 1880, the great events of
my life were these long séances in the narrow wooden box in the church
Des Minimes, which was our parish church, where I went every fortnight
to kneel down and speak in a low voice, with a beating heart, of what
was passing within me.
The approach of my first communion marked the birth of this feeling
for the confessional, mixed with contradictory elements. I believed,
consequently, my little sins appeared to me to be veritable crimes, and
to confess them made me ashamed. I repented, and I had the certainty
that I rose pardoned, with the delight of a conscience washed from
every stain. 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. He was a small, short man, with an apoplectic
face, and a grave, hard blue eye, a man who had been educated in a
provincial seminary still penetrated with Jansenism. His eyes, when
from the pulpit of Des Minimes he was talking to us of hell, saw
visions of terror, and this sensation he communicated to us.
I rejoice that he is dead, for if he were living I might see him enter
my prison, and who knows what might happen then? Perhaps I should
suffer a recurrence of those emotions of terror which his presence used
to inflict. The constant themes of his discourse were the small number
of the elect and the divine vengeance.
“Who could hinder God,” said the priest, “since he is all-powerful,
from forcing the soul of the man who has committed murder to remain
near the body from which it is separated? The soul would be there,
in the mortuary chamber, hearing the sobs, seeing the tears of the
friends, and yet forbidden to console them. It would be imprisoned in
the winding-sheet, and there during days and days and nights and nights
it would be present at the corruption of the flesh, which was once its
own, there among the worms and the rot.”
Such images and such ferocity of invention abounded in his bitter
mouth; they followed me into my sleep; the fear of hell was excited in
me almost to madness. The Abbé Martel employed the same eloquence in
presenting the decisive importance to our salvation which the approach
to the communion table would have, and so my fear of eternal punishment
led to a scrupulous examination of my conscience.
Soon these close meditations, this looking as through a magnifying
glass at my slightest deviations, this continuous scrutiny of my inmost
self, interested me to such a degree that no sport had any attraction
for me in comparison. I had found, for the first time since the death
of my father, an employment for this power of analysis which was
already definitive and almost constitutive in me.
The development thus given to my acute sense of the inner life ought
to have produced an amelioration of my moral being. On the contrary,
it resulted in a subtility which, in itself alone, was a corruption,
at least from the point of view of strict Catholic discipline. I
became, in the course of these examinations of conscience, into which
entered more of pleasure than of repentance, extremely ingenious, and
discovering peculiar motives behind my most simple actions. The Abbé
Martel was not a psychologist sufficiently acute to discern this shadow
and to comprehend that to cut the soul to pieces in this way would
lead me to prefer the fleeting complexities of sin to the simplicity
of virtue. He recognized only the zeal of a very fervent child. For
example, on the morning of my first communion I went in tears to
confess to him once more.
In turning over and over again the soil and the subsoil of my memory,
I had discovered a singular sin, the fear of man. Six weeks before, I
had heard two boys, my comrades, at the door of the Lyceum, mocking an
old lady who was entering the church Des Carmes, just opposite. I had
laughed at their words instead of reproving them.
The old lady was going to mass; to ridicule her was to ridicule a pious
action. I had laughed, why? from false shame. Then I had participated
in it. Was it not my duty to find the two mockers and to show them
their impiety, and make them promise repent? I had not done so. Why?
From false shame; from respect for man, according to the definition
of the catechism. I passed the whole night preceding the great day of
the first communion in wondering if I could see the Abbé Martel early
enough the next day to confess this sin. I recall the smile with which
he tapped my cheek after having given me absolution in order to quiet
me. I hear the tone of his voice which had grown very sweet as he said
to me:
“May you always be what you are now.”
He did not suspect that this puerile scruple was the sign of an
exaggeratedly unhealthy reflection, nor that this reflection would
poison the delights of the Eucharist for which I had so ardently
wished. I had not been satisfied, in the course of the preceding weeks,
to analyze the conscience to its most delicate fibres, I had abandoned
myself to the imagination of sentiment which is the forced consequence
of this spirit of analysis. I had anticipated with extreme precision
the sentiments which I should experience in receiving the host upon my
lips. In my imagination I advanced toward the rail of the altar which
was draped in a white cloth, with a tension of my whole being which
I have never since experienced, and I felt, in communing, a kind of
chilling deception, an ecstatic exhaustion of which I cannot describe
the discomfort. I have since spoken of this impression to a friend who
was still a Christian and he said: “You were not simple enough.” His
piety had given to him the insight of a professional observer. It was
too true. But what could I do?
The great event of my youth, which was the loss of my faith, did not,
however, date from this deception. The causes which determined this
loss were very numerous, and I have never clearly comprehended them
until now. They were slow and progressive at first, and acted upon my
mind as the worm upon the fruit, devouring the interior without any
other sign of this ravage than a small speck, almost invisible, on the
beautiful purple rind. The first was, it seems to me, the application
to my confessor of this terrible critical spirit, a faculty destructive
of all confidence, which, from my infancy, had so separated me from my
mother.
I pushed my examinations of conscience to the most subtle delicacy and
still the Abbé Martel did not perceive this work of secret torture
which completely anatomatized my soul. My scruples appeared to him, as
they were, childish; but they were the childishness of a very complex
boy, and one who could not be directed unless he might feel that he was
understood.
In my conversations with this rude and primitive priest I soon
experienced the contrary feeling. This was enough to deprive this
director of my youth of all authority over my mind. At the same time,
and this is the second of the causes which detached me from the church,
I found among men whom I then considered superior the same indifference
to religious observances that I had observed in my father. I knew
that the young professors, those who had come from Paris with the
prestige of having gone through the Normal School, were all atheists
and skeptics. I heard the abbé pronounce these words with concentrated
indignation, in the visits which he made to my mother. When I
accompanied her to the offices of Des Minimes as I had formerly to
those of the Capuchins, I reflected on the poverty of intellect of the
devotees who crowd to mass on Sunday mornings and mutter their prayers
in the silence of the ceremony, broken only by the noise of displaced
chairs. 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.
This distrust was fed by a kind of naïve ambition which made me desire
with an incredible ardor to be as intelligent as the most intelligent
and not to vegetate among those of second rank. I confess that a good
deal of pride was mingled with this desire, but I do not blush at this
avowal. It was a purely intellectual pride, completely foreign to any
desire for outward success. And, if I hold myself erect at this moment,
and in this fearful drama, I owe it first of all to this pride--it is
this which permits me to describe my past with this cold lucidity,
instead of running away like an ordinary suspect, from the noisy events
of this drama. I can see so clearly that the first scenes of this
tragedy began with the college youth in whom was acting the young man
of to-day.
The third of the causes which concurred in this slow disintegration of
my Christian faith was the discovery of contemporaneous literature,
which dates from my fourteenth year. I have told you that my mother,
shortly after my father’s death, suppressed certain books. This
severity had not relaxed with time, and the key of the paternal
bookcase continued to click on the steel ring between that of the
pantry and of the cellar. The most evident result of this prohibition
was, to heighten the charm of the remembrance which these books
had left of the half-comprehended pieces from Shakespeare, and the
half-forgotten romances of George Sand.
Chance willed that, at the commencement of my thirteenth year, I should
come across some examples of modern poetry in the book of French
authors which served for the year’s recitations. There were fragments
of Lamartine, a dozen of Hugo’s pieces, the “Stances à la Malibran” of
Alfred de Musset, some bits of Sainte-Beuve, and of Leconte de Lisle.
These pages were sufficient to make me appreciate the absolute
difference of inspiration between the modern and the ancient masters,
as one can appreciate the difference of aroma between a bouquet of
roses and a bouquet of lilacs, with his eyes shut. This difference,
which I divine by an unreasoning instinct, resides in the fact that,
until the Revolution, writers had never taken sensibility as the
subject and the only rule of their works. It has been the contrary
since eighty-nine. From this there results among the new writers a
certain painful, ungovernable something, a search after moral and
physical emotion which has become almost morbid, and which attracted me
immediately.
The mystical sensuality of the “Stances du Lac” and of the “Crucifix,”
the changing splendors of several “Orientales,” fascinated me; but
above all I was charmed at something culpable which breathes in
the eloquence of “L’Espoir en Dieu” and in some fragments of the
“Consolations.” I began to feel for the rest of the works of these
masters that strong and almost insane curiosity which marks the middle
period of adolescence. One is then on the border of life, and he
hears without seeing, as it were, the murmur of a waterfall through a
cluster of trees, and how this sound intoxicates him with expectation!
A friendship with a comrade who lived on the first floor of our house
exasperated this curiosity still more.
This friend, who died young, and who was named Emile, was also an
inveterate reader, but more fortunate than I, he suffered from no
surveillance. His father and mother, who were already old, lived on a
small income and passed the long hours of the day in playing, in front
of the window which opened on the Rue de Billard, interminable games
of bezique, with cards bought in a _café_ and still smelling of
tobacco. Emile alone in his room, could abandon himself to all his
fancies in reading.
As we were in the same class, and as we went to and from the Lyceum
together, my mother willingly permitted me to pass whole hours with
this charming lad, who soon shared my taste for the verses which I so
much admired, and my desire to know more of their authors.
On our way to the college, we took the narrow streets of the old town
and passed the stall of an old bookseller of whom we had bought some
second-hand classics. We discovered here a copy of the poetry of
Musset in rather a bad condition, which would cost forty sous. At first
we contented ourselves with occasional readings at the stall, but soon
we felt that it was impossible to do without it. By putting together
our spending money for two weeks, we were able to buy it, and then, in
Emile’s little room, he on his bed and I on a chair, we read Don Paez,
the Marrons du feu, Portia, Mardoche and Rolla. I trembled as if I were
committing a great fault, and we imbibed this poetry as if it had been
wine, slowly, sweetly, passionately.
I read afterward in this same room, and also in my own, thanks to the
ruses of a lover in danger, many clandestine volumes which I very much
enjoyed, from the “Peau de chagrin,” of Balzac, to the “Fleurs du mal,”
of Baudelaire, not to mention the poems of Heinrich Heine and the
romances of Stendhal.
I have never felt an emotion comparable to that of my first encounter
with the genius of the author of “Rolla.” I was neither an artist nor a
historian. Was I therefore indifferent to their value more or less real
or their meaning more or less actual? Not at all. This was an elder
brother who had come to reveal to me the dangerous world of sentimental
experience.