there was not a trace of envy or maliciousness in me. I looked at the
marquis as he slept, wrapped, on this cool November afternoon, in a
furred coat whose turned-up collar half-concealed his face. A robe of
dark soft wool covered his legs. Dark embroidered skin gloves protected
his hands. His hat of felt as fine as silk was pulled down over his
eyes. I only felt that these details represented a kind of existence
very different from ours with the poor and petty economy of our home
which only my mother’s scrupulous neatness saved from meanness.
I rejoiced that I did not feel any envy, not the least atom, at
the sight of these signs of prosperous fortune, neither envy nor
embarrassment. I had myself completely under control, and was steeled
against all vulgar prejudice by my doctrine, your doctrine, and by
the sovereign superiority of my ideas. I will have traced a perfect
portrait of my mind at this time if I add that I had resolved to erase
love from the programme of my life. I had had, since my adventure with
Marianne, another little experience, with the wife of a professor at
the Lyceum, so absolutely silly and withal so ridiculously pretentious
that I came out of it strengthened in my contempt for the “Dame,”
speaking after Schopenhauer, and also in my disgust for sensuality.
I attribute to the profound influences of Catholic discipline this
repulsion from the flesh which has survived the dogmas of spirituality.
I know very well, from an experience too often repeated, that this
repulsion was insufficient to hinder profound relapses, but I depended
upon the silence of the château to free me from all temptation and to
practice in its full rigor the great maxim of the ancient sage: “Force
all your sex to mount to the brain.” Ah! this idolatry of the brain,
of my thinking Self, it has been so strong in me that I have thought
seriously of studying the monastic rules that I might apply them to
the culture of my mind. Yes, I have contemplated making my meditations
every day, like the monks, upon the articles of my philosophic
_credo_, of celebrating every day, like the monks, the _fête_
of one of my saints, of Spinoza, of Hobbes, of Stendhal, of Stuart
Mill, of you, my dear master, in evoking the image and the doctrines of
the initiative thus chosen, and impregnating myself with his example.
I know that all this was very youthful and very naïve, but, you see, I
was not such a man as this family stigmatizes to-day, the intriguing
plebeian who was dreaming of a fine marriage, and the idea connecting
my life with that of Mlle, de Jussat was implanted, inspired, so to
speak, by circumstances.
I do not write to you to paint myself in a romantic light, and I do
not know why I should conceal from you that, among the circumstances
which urged me toward this enterprise so far from my thought on my
arrival, the first was the impression produced on me by Count André
the brother of the poor dead girl, whose remembrance, now that I am
approaching the drama, becomes almost a torture; but let us go back to
this arrival.
It is almost five o’clock. The landau moves rapidly along. The marquis
is awake. He points out the frozen bosom of the little lake, all
rosy under a setting sun, which empurples the dried foliage of the
beeches and oaks; and, beyond the château, a large building of modern
construction, white, with its slender towers and its pepper-box roof,
grows nearer at every turn of the gray road.
The steeple of a village, rather of a hamlet, raises its slates above
some houses with thatched roofs. It is passed. We are now in the avenue
of trees which leads to the château, then before the _perron_ and
immediately in the vestibule.
We entered the salon. How peaceful it was, lighted by lamps with large
shades, with the fire burning gayly in the chimney. The Marquise de
Jussat with her daughter, was working at some knitting for the poor; my
future pupil was looking over a book of engravings, as he stood against
the open piano; Mlle. Charlotte’s governess and a _religieuse_
were seated, farther off, sewing. Count André was reading a paper,
which he put down at the moment of our arrival.
Yes, this was a peaceful place, and who could have told that my
entrance would be the end of all peace for these persons who in an
instant were impressed on my memory with the distinctness of portraits?
I noticed first the face of the marquise, a tall and strong woman with
features slightly gross, so different from what my imagination had
conceived of a great lady. She was truly the model housekeeper whom the
marquis had described, but a housekeeper with a finished education, and
who put me at once at my ease simply by speaking of the beautiful day
that we had had for our journey.
I perceived the inexpressive face of Mlle. Eliza Largeyx, the
governess, with its ever-approving smile; she was the innocent type of
happy servility, of a life all complaisance and of material happiness.
There was sister Anaclet with her peasant’s eyes and her thin mouth.
She lived permanently at the château that she might serve as nurse for
the marquis who was always apprehensive of a possible attack.
There was little Lucien with the fat cheeks of the idle child. There,
too, was the young girl, who is no more, with her beautiful form in
its light dress, her gentle gray eyes, her chestnut hair, and the
delicate outline of her oval face. I can still see the gesture with
which she offered her hand to her father and a cup of tea to me. I hear
her voice saying to the marquis:
“Father, did you see how rosy the little lake was this evening?”
And the voice of M. de Jussat responding between two swallows of his
grog:
“I saw that there was some fog in the meadows and some rheumatism in
the air.”
And the voice of Count André:
“Yes, but what fine shooting to-morrow!” then turning to me: “Do you
shoot, Monsieur Greslon?”
“No, monsieur,” I answered.
“Do you ride?” he asked again.
“I do not.”
“I pity you,” said he, laughing; “after war, these are the two greatest
pleasures that I know of.”
This is nothing, this bit of dialogue, and, thus transcribed, it will
not explain why these simple phrases were the cause of my regarding
André de Jussat as a being apart from any I had known until then; why,
when I had gone to my room, where a servant commenced to unpack my
trunk, I thought more of him than of his fragile and graceful sister:
nor why, at dinner and all the evening, I had eyes only for him.
My naïve astonishment in the presence of this proud and manly fellow
was derived, however, from a very simple fact; I had grown up in a
purely intellectual medium in which the only estimable forms of life
were the intellectual. I had had for comrades the first of my class,
all as delicate and frail as I was myself, without condescending ever
to notice those who excelled in the exercises of the body, and who
beside only found in these exercises an excuse for brutality.
All my masters whom I liked best, and the few old friends of my father,
were also able men. When I had pictured the heroes of romance, they
were always mental machines more or less complicated; but I had never
imagined their physical condition.
If I had ever thought of the superiority which the beautiful and
firm animal energy of man represents, it was in an abstract manner,
but I had never felt it. Count André, who was thirty years old,
presented an admirable example of this superiority. Figure to
yourself a man of medium size, but lusty as an athlete, with broad
shoulders and a slender waist, gestures which betrayed strength
and suppleness--gestures in which one felt that the movement was
distributed with that perfection which gives adroit and precise
agility--hands and feet nervous, showing race, with a martial
countenance, one of those _bistre_ complexions behind which the
blood flows, rich in iron and in globules; a square forehead under
bushy black hair, a mustache of the same color over a firm and tightly
closed mouth, brown eyes, very near to a nose which was slightly
arched, which gives to the profile a vague suggestion of a bird of
prey. Last a bold chin, squarely cut, completed the physiognomy of a
character of invincible will. And the will is the whole person; action
made man.
It seemed as if there were in this officer, broken to all bodily
exercises, ready for all exploits, no rupture of equilibrium between
thought and action, and that his whole being passed entire into his
smallest gestures.
I have seen him mount a horse so as to realize the ancient fable of the
Centaur, put ten balls in succession at thirty paces into a playing
card, leap ditches with the lightness of a professional gymnast, and
sometimes, to amuse his young brother, leap over a table, only touching
it with his hands.
I knew that, during the war and though only sixteen years old, he had
enlisted and made the campaign of the Loire, bearing all fatigues and
inspiring even the veterans with courage. As I saw him at dinner this
first evening, eating steadily, with that fine humor of appetite which
reveals the fall life; speaking little, but with a commanding voice, I
felt in a surprising degree the impression that I was in the presence
of a creature different from myself, but finished and complete of his
kind.
It seems to me as though this scene dates from yesterday, and that I am
there, while the marquis plays bezique with his daughter, talking with
the marquise, and stealthily watching Count André play at billiards
alone. I saw him through the open door, supple and robust in his
evening dress of some light material, a cigar in the corner of his
mouth, pushing the balls about with a precision so perfect that it was
beautiful; and I, your pupil, I, so proud of the amplitude of my mind,
followed with open mouth the slightest gestures of this young man who
was absorbed in a sport so vulgar, with the kind of envious admiration
which a learned monk of the middle ages, unskillful in all muscular
games, must have felt in presence of a knight in armor.
When I use the word envy I beg you to understand me, and not to
attribute to me a baseness which was never mine. Neither this evening
nor during the days which followed was I ever jealous of the name of
Count André, nor of his fortune, nor of any of the social advantages
which he possessed, and of which I was so deprived. Neither have I felt
that strange hate of the male for the male, very finely noted by you
in your pages on love.
My mother had had the weakness to tell me often in my childhood that
I was a pretty boy. Without being a coxcomb, I may say that there was
nothing displeasing in me, neither in my face nor in my figure. I say
this to you, not from vanity, but to prove that there was not an atom
of vanity in the sort of sudden rivalry which made me an adversary,
almost an enemy, of Count André from this first evening. There was as
much admiration as envy in this antipathy. Upon reflection, I find in
the sentiment which I have tried to define the probable trace of an
unconscious atavism.
I questioned the marquis later, whose aristocratic pride I thus
flattered, upon the genealogy of the Jussat-Randons, and I believe
that they are of a pure and conquering race, while in the veins of the
descendant of the Lorraine farmers who writes these lines to you flows
the blood of ancestors who had been slaves of the soil for centuries.
Certainly, between my brain and that of Count André there is the same
difference as there is between mine and yours, greater, since I can
comprehend you and I defy him to follow my reasonings, even that which
I am pursuing now, upon our relations.
To speak frankly, I am a civilized being, he is only a barbarian.
But I felt immediately the sensation that my refinement was less
aristocratic than his barbarism. I felt there, at once, and in the
depths of this instinct of life, into which the mind descends with much
difficulty, the revelation of this precedence of race which modern
science affirms of all nature and which, by consequence, must be true
also of man.
Why even use this word envy, which serves as the label of irrational
hostilities like those with which the count immediately inspired
me? Why should not this hostility be inherited like the rest? Any
human acquisition whatever, that for example of character and of
active energy, implies that, during centuries and centuries, files
of individuals of which one is the supreme addition, have acted and
willed. During this long succession of years, an antipathy, sometimes
clear and sometimes obscure, has rendered the individuals of the first
group odious to individuals of the second, and when two representatives
of this sovereign labor of ages, also typical each in his kind as were
the count and myself, meet, why not stand up the one in face of the
other, like two beasts of different species?
The horse that has never been near a lion trembles with fright when
his bed is made of the straw upon which one of these creatures has
slept. Then fear is inherited, and is not fear one form of hate? Why
is not all hate inherited? And in hundreds of cases envy would be, as
it surely was in mine, only the echo of hates formerly felt by those
whose sons we are, and who continue to pursue, through us, the combats
of heart begun centuries ago.
There is a current proverb that antipathies are mutual, and if it
is admitted my hypothesis upon the secular origin of antipathies
becomes very simple. It happens, however, that this antipathy does not
manifest itself in the two beings at once. This is the case when one
of the two does not deign to notice the other, and also when the other
dissimulates.
I do not believe that Count André experienced at first the aversion
that he would have felt if he had read to the bottom of my soul. In the
beginning he paid very little attention to a young man of Clermont who
had come to the château to be tutor; then I had decided on a constant
dissimulation of my real Self, imprisoned among strangers. I felt no
more repugnance for this defensive hypocrisy than the gardener would
have had in putting straw around the currant bushes to preserve their
fruit against snows and frosts. The falseness of attitude corresponded
too well with my intellectual pride to prevent me from giving myself up
to it with delight.
On the other hand Count André had no motive for concealing his
character from me, and on this same evening, at the hour of retiring,
he asked me to come into his study to talk a little. He had hardly
looked at me, and I understood plainly that his intention was not to
put any more familiarity between us, but to give me his opinions on my
rôle as preceptor.
He occupied a suite of three rooms in a wing of the château, a bedroom,
a dressing-room and the smoking-room in which we now found ourselves.
A large upholstered divan, several armchairs and a massive desk,
constituted the furniture of this room.
On the walls glittered arms of all kinds, guns of Tangiers, sabres and
muskets of the first empire, and a Prussian helmet, which the count
pointed out to me almost as soon as we had entered. He had lighted a
short brierwood pipe, prepared two glasses of brandy mixed with seltzer
water, and lamp in hand, he showed me the helmet saying:
“I am very sure that I knocked that fellow over. You do not know
anything about the sensation of holding an enemy at the point of your
gun, of taking aim, of seeing him fall, and thinking: Another one
gone? It happened in a village not far from Orléans. I was on guard at
daybreak, in a corner of the cemetery. I saw a head above the wall,
it looked over, then the shoulders followed. It was this inquisitive
fellow who wanted to see what we were doing. He did not go back to
tell.”
He put down the lamp, and, after laughing a little at this remembrance,
he became serious. I had felt obliged, for the sake of politeness, to
moisten my lips in the mixture of gaseous water and alcohol, and the
count continued:
“I wished to talk with you about Lucien, monsieur, to explain his
character and in what way he is to be directed. His old tutor was an
excellent man, but very weak, very indolent. I have encouraged your
coming because you are a young man, and a young man is more suitable
for Lucien. Teaching, monsieur, is worse than nothing, sometimes, when
it falsifies ideas. The great thing in this life, I ought almost say
the only thing, is character.”
He made a pause as if to ask my opinion, I answered with some
_banal_ phrase which supported his view.
“Very well,” he continued, “we understand one another. At present, for
a man of our name, there is in France only one profession, that of a
soldier. So long as our country is in the hands of the _canaille_
and so long as we have the Germans to fight, our duty is in the only
place that remains to us--the army. Thank God my father and my mother
share these opinions. Lucien will be a soldier, and a soldier has no
need of knowing all that the people prate about to-day. Having honor,
sangfroid, muscles and loving France, everything is right. I had
all the trouble in the world to take my degree. This year must be
for Lucien, above everything else, a year of outdoor life; and, for
studies, these must be conversations only. It is to your talks with him
that I wish to call your attention. You must insist on the practical,
on the positive, and on principles. He has some faults which must be
corrected. You will find him very good, but very soft; he must learn to
endure.”
“Insist, for example, upon his going out in all sorts of weather,
that he walk two or three hours every day. He is very inexact, and
I insist that he shall become as punctual as a chronometer. He also
is untruthful. I think this the most horrible of vices. I can pardon
everything, yes, many, many follies. I never forgive a falsehood. We
have had, from my father’s old master, such good recommendation of you,
of your life with your mother, of your dignity, of your strictness,
that we depend very much on your influence. Your age permits you to
be as much a companion as a preceptor for Lucien. Example, you see,
is the best kind of teaching. Tell a conscript that it is a noble and
fine thing to march up to the fire, and he will listen to you without
understanding you. March in front of him, swaggering, and he becomes
more of a blusterer than you are.
“As for me, I rejoin my regiment in a few days, but absent or present,
you can depend on my support; if it should ever be a question what to
do, that this child become what he ought to become, a man who can serve
his country bravely, and, if God permit, his king.”
This discourse, which I believe I have faithfully reproduced, did not
at all astonish me. It was quite natural in a house in which the father
was an old monomaniac, the mother a simple housekeeper, the sister
young and timid, that the oldest brother should hold a directing place,
and talk with the new preceptor. It was also quite natural that a
soldier and a gentleman educated in the ideas of his class and of his
profession should speak as a soldier and a gentleman.
You, my dear master, with your universal comprehension of natures, with
your facility in disentangling the line which unites the temperament
and the medium of ideas, you would have seen in Count André a very
definite and significant case. And for what had I prepared my locked
notebook if not to collect documents of this kind upon human nature?
And was there not here everything new in the person of this officer,
so single and so simple, who manifested a mode of thought evidently
identical with his mode of being, breathing, moving, smoking and eating?
Ah! I see too well that my philosophy was not as blood in my veins,
as marrow in my bones, for this discourse and the convictions it
expressed, instead of pleasing me by this rare encounter of logic, only
enlarged the wound of antipathy which had been already opened, I knew
not where, in my self-love perhaps, for I was weak and frail in the
presence of the strong--surely in my inmost sensibility.
None of the count’s ideas had the least value in my eyes. They were for
me pure foolishness, and instead of despising this foolishness, as I
should have despised it in any other case, I began to hate it in his
mouth.
A soldier’s profession? I considered it so wretched, because of its
brutal associations and the time lost, that I was glad that I was the
son of a widow that I might escape the barbarity of the barracks and
the miseries of its discipline.
The hatred of Germany? I had tried to destroy it in myself, as the
worst of prejudices, from disgust of the imbecile comrades whom I saw
exalt it into an ignorant patriotism, and also from admiration for
the people to whom psychology owes Kant and Schopenhauer, Lotze and
Fechner, Helmholz and Wundt.
Political faith? I professed an equal disdain for the gross hypotheses
which, under the name of legitism, republicanism, Cæsarism, pretended
to govern a country _a priori_. I dreamed with the author of the
“Dialogues Philosophiques,” of an oligarchy of savants, a despotism of
psychologists and economists, of physiologists and historians.
Practical life? This was a diminished life for me, who saw in the
external world only a field of experiences in which an enfranchised
soul ventures with prudence, just far enough to collect emotions.
Finally this contempt for falsehood which the count professed struck
me as an affront, at the same time that his absolute confidence in my
morality, based upon a false impression of me, embarrassed me, chilled
me, hurt me.
Certainly the contradiction was piquant; I considered the portrait
which my father’s old friend had drawn; it pleased me in a certain way
that they should believe it like me, and I felt irritated that he,
Count André, did not distrust me. But what does that prove, if not
that we never thoroughly know ourselves? You have magnificently said,
my dear master: “Our states of consciousness are like islands upon an
ocean of darkness whose foundations are forever being removed. It is
the work of the psychologist to divine by soundings the ground which
makes of these isles the visible summits of a mountain chain, invisible
and immovable under the moving mass of waters.”
I have not described this first evening at the château because it had
any immediate consequences, for I retired after assuring Count André
that I was entirely of his opinion in regard to his young brother, and,
having reached my room, I confined myself to consigning these words to
my notebook, with comments more or less disdainful; but these first
impressions will help you to understand some analogous impressions
which followed, and the unexpected crisis which resulted from them.
It is one of those submarine chains of which you speak, and which I
find to-day when I throw the sound to the very bottom of my heart.
Under the influence of your books, and of your example, I became
more and more intellectualized, and I believed that I had definitely
renounced the morbid curiosity of the passions which had made me find
exquisite pleasure in my guilty readings. Thus we retain portions of
the soul which were very much alive, and which we believe to be dead,
but which are only drowsing.
And so little by little, after an acquaintance of only fifteen days
with this man, my elder by nine or ten years, and who was, all reality,
all energy, this purely speculative existence of which I had so
sincerely dreamed, began to seem--how shall I express it? Inferior?
Oh, no, for I would not have consented, at the price of an empire,
to become Count André, even with his name, his fortune, his physical
superiority, and his ideas. Discolored? Not even that. The word
incomplete appears to me the only one which expresses the singular
disfavor which the sudden comparison between the count and myself
diffused over my own convictions.
It is in this feeling of incompleteness that the principal temptation
of which I was the victim resides. There is nothing very original, I
believe, in the state of mind of a man who, having cultivated to excess
the faculty of thought, meets another man having cultivated to the
same degree the faculty of action and who feels himself tormented with
nostalgia in presence of this action, however despised.