felt appeared now in a strangely new light. All the virtues that had
been preached to me in my childhood seemed poor and mean and humble,
and meaner beside the opulence and the frenzy of certain vices. The
devotees who were my mother’s friends, sadly old and shriveled,
represented faith. Impiety was a handsome young man who awakes and
looks at the crimson aurora, and in a glance discovers the whole
horizon of history and legends, and then again lays his head on the
bosom of a girl as beautiful as his most beautiful dream. Chastity
and marriage were the _bourgeois_ whom I knew who went to hear
the music in the Jardin des Plantes, every Thursday and Sunday, and
who said the same things in the same way. My imagination painted, in
the chimerical colors of the most burning poetry, the faces of the
libertines of the Contes d’Espagne and of the fragments which follow.
There was Dalti murdering the husband of Portia, then wandering with
his mistress over the dark waters of the lagoon among the stairways
of the antique palaces. There were Don Paez assassinating Juana after
folding her to himself in a fond embrace; Frank and his Belcolore,
Hassan and his Namouna, l’Abbé Cassio and his Luzon.
I was not competent to criticize the romantic falsity of all this fine
setting, nor to separate the sincere from the literary portion of these
poems. The complete profligacy of soul appeared to me through these
lines, and it tempted me; it excited in my mind, already eager for new
sensations, the faculty of analysis already too much aroused.
The other works which I have cited were the pretext for a temptation
which was similar but not so strong.
In the contemplation of the sores of the human heart which they exposed
with so much complaisance, I was like those saints of the middle ages
who were hypnotized by contemplation of the wounds of the Saviour.
The strength of their piety caused the miraculous stigmata to appear
on their hands and the ardor of my imagination, at the age of holy
ignorances and immaculate purities, opened in my soul the stigmata of
moral ulcers which are draining the life blood of all the great modern
invalids.
Yes, in the years when I was only the collegian, the friend of little
Emile, I assimilated in thought the emotions which the timid teachings
of my masters indicated as the most criminal. My mind was tainted with
the most dangerous poisons, while, thanks to my power of duplication, I
continued to play the part of a very good child, very assiduous at my
tasks, very submissive to my mother, and very pious. But no. However
strange this must appear to you, I did not play that rôle. I was
pious, with a spontaneous contradiction which, perhaps, has directed
my thought to the psychological work to which I consecrated my first
efforts.
When I read in your work on the will those suggestive indications on
the theory of the multiplicity of self, I seized upon them immediately,
after having passed through such epochs as I am describing to you
to-day and in which I have really been several distinct beings.
This crisis of imaginative sensibility had continued the attack upon
my religious faith by offering the temptation of subtile sin and also
that of painful scepticism. The sensuality crisis which resulted from
it failed to revive this faith in my heart. I ceased to be pure when
I was seventeen years old, and this happened as usual, in very dull
and prosaic circumstances. From that time, beside the two persons
who already existed in me, between the youth who was still fervent,
regular, pious, and the youth romantically imaginative, a third
individual was born and grew, a sensual being, tormented by the basest
desires. However, the taste for the intellectual life was so strong, so
definite, that although suffering from this singular condition, I felt
a sensation of superiority in recognizing and studying it.
What was more strange, I did not yield to this last disposition more
than I did to the others, with a clear and lucid consciousness. I
remained a youth through all these troubles, that is to say a being
still uncertain and incomplete, a being in whom could be discerned the
lineaments of the soul to come.
I did not assert my mysticism, for at bottom I was ashamed to
believe, as if to believe were something inferior; nor my sentimental
imaginations, for I considered them as simple sports of literature; nor
my sensuality for I was disgusted with it. And beside, I had neither
the theory nor the audacity of my curiosity in regard to my faults.
Emile, who died the following winter, of disease of the lungs, was
very ill at this time and did not go out of the house. He listened to
my confidences with a frightened interest which flattered my self-love
by making me think that I was different from others. This did not
prevent my being afraid, as on the evening before my first communion,
at the look which l’Abbé Martel gave me when he met me. He had without
doubt spoken to my mother-so far as the secrecy of the confessional
permitted, for she watched my goings out but without the power to
hinder them entirely, and above all without suspecting any other than
the possible causes of temptation, so well did I envelop myself in
hypocrisy.
The illness of my best friend, the surveillance of my mother, the
apprehension of the priest’s eyes enervated me, and perhaps the more
that it seemed in this volcanic country as if the summer’s heat drew
from the sun a more ardent and intoxicating vapor. I knew at that
time, days literally maddening, so made up were they of contradictory
hours, days in which I arose a more fervent Christian than ever. I
read a little in the “Imitation,” I prayed, I went to my class with
the firm determination to be perfectly regular and good. As soon as I
returned I prepared my lessons, then I went down to Emile’s room. We
gave ourselves up to the reading of some exciting book. His father and
mother, who knew that he could not live, humored him in everything and
allowed him to take from the library any work that he pleased.
We now had in hand the most modern writers, whose books having recently
come from Paris, exhaled an odor of new paper and fresh ink. In this
way we brought upon ourselves a chill of the brain which accompanied
me all the afternoon after I returned to my classroom. There, in the
stifling heat of the day, I could see through the open door, the short
shadows of the trees in the yard, and hear the far-off voices of some
professor dictating the lessons; I could see the figure of Marianne,
and then began a temptation which at first was vague and remote, but
which grew and continued to grow. I resisted it, while knowing that I
should succumb, as if the struggle against my obscure desire made me
the more feel its strength and acuteness.
I went home. I hurried through my duties with a kind of diabolical
verve, finding some power in the disorder of my too susceptible nerves.
After dinner I went downstairs under pretext of seeing Emile and
hastened toward Marianne’s. On my return I passed some hours at my
window, looking at the stars of the vast sky of summer, recalling my
dead father, and what he had said to me of these far-off worlds. Then
an extraordinary impression of the mystery of nature would seize me, of
the mystery of my own soul, living in the midst of nature, and I do not
know which I admired more, the depths of the taciturn heavens, or the
abysses which a day thus employed revealed in my heart.
Such were the habits of my inner life, my dear master, when I entered
the class which would decide my development--the class of philosophy.
My enchantment began in the first week of the course. What a course,
however, and how crammed with the rubbish of the classic psychology!
No matter, inexact and incomplete official and conventional as it
was, this psychology enamored me. The method employed, the personal
reflection and the minute analysis: the object to be studied, the human
“I,” considered in his faculties and passions; the result sought, a
system of general ideas capable of summing up in brief formulas a
vast pile of phenomena; all in this new science, harmonized too well
with the species of mind which my heredity, my education, and my own
tendencies had fashioned in me.
I forgot even my favorite reading and plunged into these works of an
order until now unknown with the more frenzy that the death of my
only friend which occurred at this time imposed on my mind, which was
naturally so meditative, this problem of destiny which I already felt
myself powerless to solve by my early faith.
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.
In order to explain to you in a very clear manner how your thought
penetrated mine, permit me to pass immediately to the result of this
reading, and the meditations which followed. You will see how I was
able to draw from your works a complete system of ethics, and which
properly arranged in a marvelous manner the scattered elements which
were floating about within me.
I found in the first of these three works, the “Psychology of God,” a
definite alleviation of the religious anguish in which I had continued
to live, in spite of temptation and of doubts. Certainly, objections
to the dogmas had not been lacking, as I had read so many books which
manifested the most audacious irreligion, and I had been drawn toward
skepticism, as I have told you, because I found in it the double
character of intellectual superiority and of sentimental novelty.
I had felt, among other influences, that of the author of the “Life
of Jesus.” The exquisite magic of his style, the sovereign grace of
his dilettanteism, the languorous poetry of his pious impiety had
affected me deeply, but it was not for nothing that I was the son of
a geometrician, and I had not been satisfied with what there was of
uncertainty, of shadow in this incomparable artist.
It was the mathematical rigor of your book which at once took
possession of my mind. You demonstrated with irresistible dialectics,
that any hypothesis upon the first cause is nonsense, even the idea
of this first cause is an absurdity, nevertheless this nonsense and
this absurdity are as necessary to our mind as is the illusion to our
eyes of a sun turning around the earth, although we know that the sun
is immovable and that the earth itself is in motion. The all-powerful
ingenuity of this reasoning charmed my intellect, which docilely
yielded to your vision of the lucid and rational world. I perceived the
universe as it is, pouring out without beginning, and without end, the
tide of inexhaustible phenomena. The care which you have taken to found
all your arguments upon facts taken from science corresponded too well
with the teaching of my father not to have subdued me.
I read your pages over and over again, summarized them, commented upon
them, applied them with the ardor of a neophyte, in order to assimilate
all the substance. The intellectual pride which I had felt from my
childhood became exalted in the young man who learned from you the
renunciations of the sweetest, of the most comforting topics.
Ah! how shall I tell you of the fervor of an initiation which was like
a first love in the delights of its enthusiasm? I felt it a physical
joy to overthrow, with your books in my hand, the entire edifice of
beliefs in which I had grown up. Yes, this was the masculine felicity
which Lucretius has celebrated, that of the liberating negation, and
not the cowardly melancholy of a Jouffroy.
This hymn to science, of which each of your pages is a strophe, I
listened to with a delight as much more intense as the faculty of
analysis, the principal reason of my piety, had found, thanks to you,
another way to exercise itself than at the confessional, and that your
two great treatises had enlightened me as to my inner being, at the
same time that your “Psychology of God” enlightened me in regard to
the external universe, with a light which, even to-day, is my last, my
inextinguishable beacon in the midst of the tempest.
How you explained to me all the incoherences of my youth! This moral
solitude in which I had suffered so much with my mother, with the Abbé
Martel, with my comrades, with everyone, even Emile--I now understood.
Have you not demonstrated, in your “Theory of the Passions,” that we
are powerless to get away from Self, and that all relation between two
beings reposes, like everything else, upon illusion?
Tour “Anatomy of the Will” revealed to me the necessary motives, the
inevitable logic of the yielding to the temptations of the senses for
which I had suffered remorse so severe. The complications with which I
reproached myself as a lack of frankness, you showed to be the very law
of existence imposed by heredity. I found also, that, in searching the
romancers and poets of the century for culpable and morbid conditions
of soul, I had, without suspecting it, followed the inborn vocation of
psychologist. Have you not written:
“All souls must be considered by the psychologist as experiences
instituted by nature. Among these experiences, some are useful to
society and are called virtues; others are injurious and are called
vices or crimes. These last are however, the more significant, and
there would lack an essential element to the science of the mind, if
Nero, for example, or some Italian tyrant of the fifteenth century had
not existed?”
On those warm summer days, I walked out, with one of these books in my
pocket, and, when alone in the country, I read some of these sentences
and became absorbed in meditation on their meaning. I applied to the
country which surrounded me the philosophical interpretation of what
we agree to call evil. Without doubt the eruptions which had raised
the chain of the Domes, at whose feet I wandered, had devastated with
burning lava the neighboring plain and destroyed living beings, but
they had produced this magnificence of scenery which charmed me, when
my eyes contemplated the graceful group of the Pariou, the Puy de Dôme
and all the line of these noble mountains.
The road was verdant with euphorbias in bloom, whose stems I broke
to see the milk-white poison exuding from them. But these poisonous
plants nourished the beautiful tithymal caterpillar, green with dark
spots, from which a butterfly would be born, a sphinx with colored
wings of the finest tint.
Sometimes a viper glided among the stones of these dusty roads, which
I watched as it moved away, gray against the puzzuolana red, with his
flat head and the suppleness of his spotted body. The dangerous reptile
appeared to me a proof of the indifference of nature whose only care is
to multiply life, beneficent or murderous, with the same inexhaustible
prodigality.
I learned then, with inexpressible force, the same lesson which I
learned from your works, to know that we have nothing for our own
but ourselves, that the “I” alone is real, that nature ignores us,
as do men, that from her as from them we have nothing to ask if not
some pretexts for feeling or for thinking. My old beliefs, in a
God, the father and judge, seemed like the dreams of a sick child,
and I expanded to the extreme limits of the vast landscape, to the
depths of the immense void heaven, in thinking that as a youth I had
already reflected enough to understand of this world what none of the
countrymen whom I saw pass could ever comprehend.
They came from the mountains, leading their oxen harnessed to their
large carts, and saluted the cross devoutly. With what delight I
scorned their gross superstition, theirs and the Abbé Martel’s and my
mother’s, though I had not decided to declare my atheism, foreseeing
too plainly what scenes this declaration would provoke! But these
scenes are of no more importance, and I come now to the _exposé_
of a drama which would have had no meaning if I had not first admitted
you into the intimacy of my mind and its formation.
§ III. TRANSPLANTATION.
By too close attention to study during this year, I brought on quite a
serious illness, which forced me to interrupt my preparation for the
Normal School. When I had recovered I doubled my lessons in philosophy,
at the same time following a part of the rhetorical course.
I presented myself at the school about the time in which I had the
honor of being received by you. You are acquainted with the events
which followed. I failed at the examination. My compositions lacked
that literary brilliancy which is acquired only at the Lyceums of Paris.
In November, 1885, I accepted the position of preceptor in the
Jussat-Randon family. I wrote to you then that I renounced my
independence in order that I might not be any further expense to my
mother. Joined with this reason there was the secret hope that the
savings realized in this preceptorate would permit me, my licentiate
once passed, to prepare for my fellowship examination in Paris. A
residence in that city attracted me, my dear master, by the prospect of
living near the Rue Guy de la Brosse.
My visit to your hermitage had made a profound impression. You appeared
to me as a kind of modern Spinoza, so completely identical with your
books by the nobility of a life entirely consecrated to thought. I
created beforehand a romance of felicity at the idea that I should
know the hours of your walks, that I should form the habit of meeting
you in the old Jardin des Plantes, which undulates under your windows,
that you would consent to direct me, that aided and sustained by you, I
could also make my place in science; in fine you were for me the living
certainty, the master, what Faust is for Wagner in the psychologic
symphony of Goethe. Beside, the conditions which this preceptorate
offered were particularly easy. I was above all to be the companion of
a child twelve years of age, the second son of the Marquis de Jussat.
I learned afterward why this family had retired for the whole winter
to this château, near Lake Aydat, where they usually passed the autumn
months only. M. de Jussat, who is originally from Auvergne, and who
has held the office of minister plenipotentiary under the emperor, had
just lost a large sum on the Bourse. His property being hypothecated,
and his income greatly diminished, he had let his house on the
Champs-Elysées furnished at a very high rent.
He had arrived at his Jussat estate a little earlier, expecting to go
directly to his villa at Cannes. An advantageous chance to let this
villa also offered. The desire to free his property had tempted him,
the more as an increasing hypochondria made it easier to face the
prospect of an entire year passed in solitude. He had been surprised
by the sudden departure of his son Lucien’s preceptor, who without
doubt did not care to bury himself in the country for so many months,
and so he had come to Clermont. He had studied his mathematics there
thirty-five years before, under M. Limasset, the old professor who was
my father’s friend. The idea had come to him to ask his old master
to recommend an intelligent young man, capable of taking charge of
Lucien’s studies for the whole year. M. Limasset naturally thought
of me, and I consented, for the reasons which I have given, to be
presented to the marquis as a candidate for the place.
In the parlor of one of the hotels on the Place de Jande, I found a man
quite tall, very bald, with clear gray eyes in a very red face, who did
not even take the trouble to examine me. He begun at once to talk, and
he talked all the time, intermingling the details of his health--he
was one of the imaginary invalids--with the most lively criticisms
on modern education. I can hear him now using pellmell phrases which
revealed in a way the different phases of his character.
“Well, my poor Limasset, when are you coming down to see us? The air
is excellent down there. That is what I need. I cannot breathe in
Paris. We never breathe enough. I hope, monsieur,” and he turned to
me, “that you are not an advocate of these new methods of teaching.
Science, nothing but science; and my God, gentlemen scholars, what do
you make of it?” Then returning to M. Limasset: “In my day, in our
day, I may say, everybody had a respect for authority and for duty.
Education was not absolutely neglected for instruction. You remember
our chaplain, the Abbé Habert, and how he could talk? What health he
had! How he could walk in all sorts of weather without an overcoat! But
you, Limasset, how old are you? Sixty-five, hey? Sixty-five, and not an
ache! not one? Do you not think I am better since I have lived among
the mountains? I am never very ill, but there is always some little
thing the matter with me. Indeed, I would rather be really ill. At
least I should get well then.”
If I repeat these incoherent words, as they come back to my memory, my
dear master, it is first, that you may know the value of the intellect
of this man who, as my mother has told me, has brought your venerated
name into my case; it is also that you understand with what feelings I
arrived, four days after, at the château when I ran into so terrible
dangers.
The marquis had accepted me at the first visit, and insisted upon
taking me with him in his landau. During the journey from Clermont to
Aydat, he had leisure to tell me about his family. He explained with
his invincible garrulity, constantly interrupted by some remarks about
his person, that his wife and daughter did not care much for society,
and that they were excellent housekeepers; that his oldest son Count
André, was home for a fortnight and that I must not be annoyed at his
brusqueness, for it covered the best of hearts, that his other son,
Lucien, had been ailing and that his restoration to health was the most
important thing of all. Then at the word health he started, and, after
an hour of confidences regarding his headaches, his digestion, his
sleep, his ailments past, present, and future, being fatigued no doubt
by the keen air and the flux of words, he fell asleep in a corner of
the carriage.
I recall the plans which I formed when, freed from this tormentor,
who was already the object of my contempt, I looked at the beautiful
country through which we were passing between mountain ravines and
woods, now turning yellow in the autumn, with the Puy de la Vache at
the horizon, with the hollow of its crater all plowed up, and quite red
with volcanic dust.
What I had already seen of the marquis, and what he had told me of his
family, had convinced me that I was about to be exiled among people
whom I called barbarians. I had given this name to those persons whom I
judge to be irreparable strangers to the intellectual life.
The prospect of this exile did not alarm me. The doctrine by which I
should regulate my existence was so clear to my mind! I was so resolved
to live only in myself, to defend myself against all intrusion from
without. The château to which I was going, and the people who inhabited
it would be only subjects for the most profitable study.
My programme was made out: during the twelve or fourteen months that
I should live there I would employ my leisure in studying German, and
in mastering the contents of “Beaunais’ Physiology,” which was in my
small trunk, bound behind the carriage, together with your works, my
dear master, my “Ethics,” several volumes of M. Ribot, of M. Taine, of
Herbert Spencer, some analytical romances and the books necessary to
the preparation for my licentiate. I intended to pass this examination
in July.
A new notebook awaited the notes which I proposed to make upon the
character of my hosts. I had promised myself to take them to pieces,
wheel by wheel, and I had bought for this purpose a book, closed by a
lock and key, upon the fly-leaf of which I had written this sentence
from the “Anatomy of the Will.”
“Spinoza boasts of having studied human sentiments as the mathematician
studies his geometric figures; modern psychology must study them as
chemical combinations elaborated in a retort, while regretting that
this retort may not be as transparent and as manageable as those of the
laboratory.”
I tell you this childishness to prove the degree of my sincerity, and
to show how little I resemble the poor and ambitious young man that so
many romances have described.
With my taste for duplication, I remember to have remarked this
difference with pleasure. I recalled Julien Sorel of “Rouge et Noir,”
arriving at the house of M. de Rênal, the temptations of Rubempré, in
Balzac, in front of the house of the Bargetons, some pages also of the
“Vingtras de Vallés.” I analyzed the sensations which were concealed
behind the lusts and the revolts of these different heroes.