a Faust. I had not, like the old doctor, drained the cup of Science;
and yet, I must believe that my studies of these last years, by
overexciting me in one direction, had left in me unemployed powers,
which trembled with emulation at the approach of this representative of
another race of men.
While admiring him, envying and despising him at the same time, during
the days which followed, I could not prevent my mind from thinking.
And I thought: “That man who would value him for his activity and me
for my thought, would truly be the superior man that I have desired to
become.”
But do not action and thought exclude one another? They were not
incompatible at the Renaissance and later, Goethe has incarnated in
himself the double destiny of Faust, by turns philosopher and courtier,
poet and minister; Stendhal was romancer and lieutenant of dragoons;
Constant was the author of “Adolphe” and a fiery orator, as well as
duelist, actor and libertine.
This finished culture of the “I,” which I had made the final result,
the supreme end of my doctrines, was it without this double play of the
faculties, this parallelism of the life lived and the life thought?
Probably my first regret at feeling myself thus dispossessed of a
whole world, that of fact, was only pride. But with me, and by the
essentially philosophic nature of my being, sensations are immediately
transformed into ideas.
The smallest accidents appear in my mind to state general problems.
Every event of my destiny leads me to some theory on the destiny of
all. Here, where another man would have said: “It is a pity that fate
should have permitted a single kind of development,” I took it on
myself to ask if I were not deceived in the law of all development.
Since I had, thanks to your admirable books, freed my soul and cast
to earth my vain religious terrors, I had retained only one of my old,
pious practices, the habit of daily examining my conscience, under
the form of a journal, and from time to time I made what I called an
orison. I transported, with a singular enjoyment, the terms of religion
into the realm of my personal sensibility. I called that again the
liturgy of the “I.”
One evening of the second week of my stay at the château, I employed
several hours in writing out a general confession, that is to say, in
drawing a picture of my diverse instincts since the first awakening
of my consciousness. I arrived at this conclusion, that the essential
trait of my nature, the characteristic of my inmost being, had always
been the faculty of duplication. That means that I had always felt
a tendency to be at once passionate and reflective, to live and to
see myself live. But by imprisoning myself, as I wished, in pure
reflection, by neglecting to live and to have only one eye open upon
life, did I not risk resembling that Amiel whose dolorous journal
appeared at that time, and sterilizing myself by the abuse of analysis
to emptiness?
In vain did your image return to me to reinforce me in my resolution to
live an abstract existence. I recall the phrases on love in the “Theory
of the Passion,” and I saw you, at my age, abandoning yourself to the
culpable experiences which already obscurely tempted me. I do not know
if this chemistry of soul, so very complex and very sincere, will seem
sufficiently lucid. The work by which an emotion is elaborated in us,
and ends by resolving itself into an idea, remains so obscure that the
idea is, sometimes, exactly contrary to that which simple reason could
have foreseen!
Would it not have been natural, for example, that the kind of admiring
antipathy roused in me by my encounter with Count André should have
ended either in a declared repulsion, or in a definite admiration? In
the first case, I should have thrown myself more into science, and
in the other, have desired a more active morality, a more practical
virility in my actions. But the natural for each one, is his own
nature. Mine willed that the admiring antipathy for the count should
become a principle of criticism, in regard to myself, that this
criticism should produce a new theory of life, that this theory should
reveal my native disposition for passional curiosity, that the whole
should dissolve itself into a nostalgia of sentimental experiences and
that, just at this moment, a young girl should enter into my life whose
presence alone would have sufficed to provoke the desire to please in
any young man of my age.
But I was too intellectual for this desire to be born in my heart
without passing through my head. At least, if I felt the charm of grace
and delicacy which emanated from this child of twenty years, I felt it
while believing that I reasoned about it. There are times when I ask
myself if it was so, times when all my history appears more simple, and
I say:
“I was honestly in love with Charlotte, because she was pretty, refined
and tender, and I was young; then I gave some pretexts of the brain
because I was a man proud of ideas and did not wish to love like other
men.”
Ah! what a comfort when I persuade myself to speak in this way! I can
pity myself instead of being a horror to myself, as happens when I
recall the cold resolution, which I cherished in my mind, consigned to
my notebook, and verified alas! by the event, the resolution, to injure
this girl without loving her, from motives of purely psychological
curiosity, from the pleasure of acting, of governing a living soul, of
contemplating at will and directly this mechanism of passion which I
had until then only studied in books, from the vanity of enriching my
mind by a new experience.
But it is well, I could not have wished otherwise, impelled as I was
by my heredities and my education, removed into the new medium where I
was thrown by chance, and bitten, as I was by this ferocious spirit of
rivalry against the insolent young man who was my opposite?
But this pure and tender girl was worthy of meeting a man who was not a
cold and murderous calculating machine. Only to think of her melts and
rends my heart.
I did not notice at first sight that perfection of the lines of the
face, that brilliance of complexion, that royalty of bearing which
distinguishes the very beautiful woman. Everything in her physiognomy
was a delicate demi-tint, from the shade of her chestnut hair to the
misty gray of her eyes and to her complexion which was neither pale
nor rosy. One thought of modesty when studying her expression, and of
fragility when remarking her feet, and hands, and the almost too minute
grace of her movements.
Although she was rather short, she appeared tall because of the noble
way in which her head was set on her slender neck. If Count André
reproduced one of their common ancestors by an evident atavism, she
resembled her father, but with so charming an ideality of lines that
one could not admit the resemblance unless they were side by side. It
was easy, however, to recognize in her the nervous disposition which
produced hypochondria in her father.
Charlotte had a sensibility which was almost morbid, which was revealed
at times by a slight tremulousness of hands and lips, those beautiful
sinuous lips where dwelt a goodness almost divine. Her firm chin showed
a rare strength of will in so frail an envelope, and I now understand
that the depth of her eyes, sometimes motionless as if fixed on some
object visible to herself alone, betrayed a fatal tendency to a fixed
idea.
The first trait that I specially observed was her extreme kindness, and
this was brought to my notice by little Lucien. The child told me that
his sister had several times wished him to ask me if there was anything
lacking in my room.
This is a very puerile detail, but it touched me because I felt very
lonely in this great house where no person, since my arrival, had
seemed to pay the least attention to me. The marquis appeared only
at dinner, wrapped in a _robe-de-chambre_ and groaning over his
health or politics. The marquise was occupied in making the château
comfortable, and held long conferences with an upholsterer from
Clermont. Count André rode in the morning, hunted in the afternoon,
and, in the evening, smoked his cigars without ever addressing a word
to me. The governess and the _religieuse_ looked at one another
and looked at me with a discretion which froze me.
My pupil was an idle and dull boy, who had the redeeming quality of
being very simple, very confiding, and of telling me all that I wished
to know of himself and the rest of his family. I learned in this way
that their stay in the country this year was the work of Count André,
which did not astonish me in the least, for I felt more and more that
he was the real head of the family; I learned that the year preceding
he had wished to marry his sister to one of his comrades, a M. de
Plane, whom Charlotte had refused, and who had gone to Tonquin.
In our two daily classes, one in the morning from eight o’clock to
half-past nine, the other in the afternoon from three o’clock until
half-past four, I had a great deal of trouble to fix the attention of
the little idler. Seated on his chair, opposite me on the other side of
the table, and rolling his tongue against his cheek, while he covered
the paper with his big awkward writing, he would now and then glance up
at me.
He noticed on my face the least sign of abstraction. With the animal
and sure instinct of children, he soon saw that I would make him go on
with his lessons less quickly when he talked to me of his brother or
sister, and so this innocent mouth revealed to me that there was, in
this cold, strange house, some one who thought of me and of my comfort.
My mother had failed so much in this regard, although I might not wish
to confess it! And it was this act of simple politeness which made me
regard Mlle. de Jussat with more attention.
The second trait that I discovered in her was a taste for the romantic,
not that she had read many romances, but as I have already told you,
her sensibility was extreme, and this had given her an apprehension of
the real.
Without herself suspecting it she was very different from her father,
her mother and her brothers; and she could neither show herself to them
in the truth of her nature, nor see them in the truth of theirs without
suffering. So she did show herself, and she forced herself not to see
them. She formed, spontaneously and ingenuously, opinions of those she
loved which were in harmony with her own heart and so directly contrary
to the evidence that they would have seemed false or flattering in
the eyes of a malevolent observer. She would say to her mother, who
was so ordinary and material: “Mamma, you are so quick to see;” to
her father so cruelly egotistical: “You are so kind, papa,” and to
her brother who was so positive, so self-sufficient: “You understand
everything,” and she believed it. But the delusion in which this gentle
creature imprisoned herself, left her a prey to the most complete moral
solitude, and deprived her, to a very dangerous degree, of all judgment
of character.
She was as ignorant of herself as of others. She languished, unknown
to herself, for the society of some one who should have sentiments in
harmony with her own. For example, I observed in the first walks that
we took together, that she was the only one who could really feel the
beauty of the landscape formed by the lake, the woods that surround
it, the distant volcanoes and the autumn sky, often more blue than the
sky of summer because of the contrast of its azure with the gold of
the leaves, and which was sometimes so veiled, so sadly vaporous and
distant.
She would fall into silence without any apparent reason, but really
because her whole being became dissolved into the charm of things
about her. She possessed in the state of pure instinct and unconscious
sensation the faculty which makes the great poets and the great lovers,
namely, the faculty of forgetting oneself, of dispelling oneself, of
losing oneself entirely in whatever touches the heart, whether it be a
veiled horizon, a silent and yellow-tinted forest, a piece of music or
a touching story.
I did not, at the beginning of our acquaintance, formulate the contrast
between that combative animal her brother and this creature of
sweetness and grace who ran up the stone staircases of the château with
a step so light that it seemed scarcely poised, and whose smile was so
welcoming and yet so timid.
I will dare to tell all, since I repeat it, I am not writing in order
to paint myself in beautiful colors, but to show myself as I am. I will
not say that the desire to make myself beloved by this adorable child,
in whose atmosphere I began to feel so much pleasure, was not caused by
this contrast between her and her brother.
Perhaps the soul of this young girl became as a field of battle for
the secret, the obscure antipathy which two weeks had transformed into
hate? Perhaps there was concealed the cruel pleasure of humiliating
the soldier, the gentleman, by outraging him in what he held most
precious? I know that this is horrible, but I should not be worthy of
being your pupil if I did not disclose the lowest depth of my heart.
And, after all, this odious cloud of sensations may be only a necessary
phenomenon, like the others, like the romantic grace of Charlotte, like
the simple energy of her brother, and like my own complexities--so
obscure even to myself.
§ IV. THE FIRST CRISIS.
I remember very distinctly the day on which the project of winning the
love of the sister of Count André presented itself to me, no longer
as a romantically visionary idea, but as a precise possibility, near,
almost immediate.
After I had been at the château two months I went to Clermont to pass
the New-Year holidays with my mother, and I had been back a week.
The snow had been falling for forty-eight hours. The winters in our
mountains are so severe that nothing but the marquis’ monomania can
explain his obstinacy in remaining in this savage lone waste, which is
indefinitely swept by sudden and violent gusts of wind.
It is proper to state that the marquise watched over the comfort of the
household with a marvelous adjustment of daily resources, and although
Aydat is considered isolated by the inhabitants of Saint-Saturnin and
Saint-Amand-Tallende, the communication with Clermont remains open even
in the worst rigor of the season. Then the season offers sudden and
radiant changes, mornings of storm are suddenly succeeded by evenings
of incomparable azure in which the country beams as if transformed by
the enchantment of light.
This was the case on the day my fatal resolution became fixed and took
form. I can see the lake now, covered with a thin sheet of ice, under
which the supple shivering of the water could be discerned. I see the
vast slope of the Cheyre, white with snow, its whiteness broken by dark
spots of lava; and perfectly white, without a spot, rises the circle
of mountains, the Puy de Dôme, the Puy de la Vache, that of Vichatel,
that of De la Rodde, that of Mont Redon, while the forest of Rouillet
stands out against the background of snow and azure.
Some minute details rise again before my eyes which were then scarcely
noticed and have remained concealed, one knows not in what hiding-place
of the memory. I see a cluster of birches whose despoiled branches are
tinted with rose. I see the crystals which sparkle at the end of a
tuft of broom which, thin and still green, marks the tracks of a fox
on the immaculate carpet, and the flight of a magpie which cries out
in the middle of the road, and this sharp cry renders the silence of
this immense horizon almost perceptible. I see some yellow and brown
sheep which are driven by a shepherd clothed in a blue blouse, wearing
a large, low, round hat, and accompanied by a red and shaggy dog with
shining yellow eyes, very near together.
Yes, I can see all this landscape, and the four persons who are
walking on the road which leads toward Fontfrède: Mlle. Largeyx, Mlle.
de Jussat, my pupil and myself. Charlotte wore an Astrakhan jacket;
a fur boa was wrapped around her neck making her head appear still
more petite and graceful under its Astrakhan toque. After the long
imprisonment in the château the keen air seemed to intoxicate her. Her
cheeks were red, her small feet plunged radiantly into the snow, where
they left their slight trace, and her eyes sparkled with delight at
the beauty of nature--a privilege of simple hearts which is never felt
when the soul has become desiccated by force of reasoning, abstract
theories and certain kinds of reading.
I walked beside her and so rapidly that we were soon far ahead of
Mlle. Largeyx, whose clogs slipped on the road. The child, sometimes
in front, sometimes behind, stopped or ran on with the vivacity of a
young animal. In the company of these two gay creatures I grew gloomy
and taciturn. Was this the nervous irritation which makes us at certain
times antipathetic to the joy which we see around us without sharing
it? Was it the half-unconscious outline of my future plan, and did
I wish to force the young girl to notice me by a kind of hostility
against her pleasure?
During the whole of this walk, I, who had formed the habit of talking
a great deal with her, scarcely responded by monosyllables to the
admiring remarks which she addressed to me, as if she wished me to
share in the pleasure of her emotions.
By brusque replies, and by silence, my bad humor became so evident that
Mlle. de Jussat, in spite of her enthusiasm, could not fail to notice
it. She glanced at me two or three times, with a question on her lips
which she did not dare to formulate, then her face became sad. Her
gayety fell little by little at contact with my sulkiness, and I could
trace upon her transparent face the passage, by which she ceased to be
sensible to the beauty of things and was conscious only of my sadness.
The moment came when she could no longer control the impression which
this sadness made upon her, and, in a voice which timidity rendered a
little stifled, she asked:
“Are you suffering. Monsieur Greslon?”
“No, mademoiselle,” I replied with a _brusquerie_ which must have
wounded her, for her voice trembled as she said:
“Then some one has done something to you? You are not as you usually
are.”
“No one has done anything to me,” I answered, shaking my head; “but
it is true,” I added, “that I have reasons for being sad, very sad,
to-day. It is the anniversary of a great grief, which I cannot tell
you.”
She looked at me again, and I could follow in her eyes the movements
which agitated her, as one follows the movements of a watch through a
glass case. I had seen her so uneasy at my attitude that she lost her
feeling for the divine landscape. I saw her now, comforted that I had
no cause for grief against her, but touched by my melancholy, curious
to know the cause, and not daring to ask me. She only said:
“Pardon me for questioning you.” Then she was silent.
These few minutes sufficed to show me the place which I already
occupied in her thoughts. Ah! before the proof of this delicate and
noble interest, I should have been ashamed of my falsehood, for so it
was, this _soi-disant_ recollection of a great grief--a gratuitous
and instantaneous falsehood whose sudden invention has often astonished
myself.
Why had I suddenly thought to clothe myself in the poetry of a great
grief, I whose life, since the death of my father, had been so quiet,
so free from any sacrifices? Had I yielded to the innate taste for
duplicating myself always so strong? This romantic affectation, did it
show the hysteria of vanity which urges some children to lie, without
reason and with so much unexpectedness? Did a vague intuition cause me
to see in this play of deception and melancholy the surest means of
interesting the Count’s sister?
I cannot tell the precise motives which governed me at that moment.
Assuredly I did not foresee either the effect of my assumed sadness
or of my falsehood, but I remember that as soon as the effect was
known a resolution was formed in my mind to go on to the end and
see what impression I could produce on the soul of this young girl,
by continuing, with consciousness and calculation, the comedy
half-instinctively begun in this luminous afternoon of January in
presence of a magnificent landscape, which should have served as a
frame for other dreams.
Now that the irreparable is accomplished, and by a retrospective
penetration, horribly painful--for it convicts me of ignorance and of
cruelty--I understand that I had already inspired Charlotte with the
truest and the tenderest feelings. All the diplomatic psychology which
I employed was only the odious and ridiculous work of a scholar in the
science of the heart. I understand that I did not know how to inhale
the flowers which bloomed naturally for me in this soul. I had only to
let myself know and enjoy the emotions which presented themselves, to
live a sentimental life as exalted and extended as that of my intellect.
Instead, I paralyzed my heart by ideas. I wished to conquer a soul
already conquered, to play a game of chess, where I needed only to be
simple, and I have not even the proud consolation of saying to myself
that I have, at least, directed the drama of my destiny as I pleased,
that I have combined the scenes, provoked the episodes, conducted the
intrigue.
It was played entirely in her, and without my comprehending it in the
least, this drama in which Death and Love, the two faithful workers
of implacable nature, acted without my order while mocking at the
complications of my analysis.
Charlotte loved me for reasons quite different from those which my
ingenious psychology had arranged. She died in despair, when by the
light of a tragic explanation she saw me in my true nature. Then I was
so horrible to her that she thus gave me irrefutable proof that my
subtle reflections were nothing to her.
I believed I could solve in this amour a problem of mental mechanism.
Alas! I had simply met, without feeling its charm, a sincere and
profound tenderness. Why did I not then divine what I see to-day with
the clearness of the most cruel evidence?
Misled by the romantic side of her character, it was natural that
this child should be deceived in me. My long studies had given me the
appearance of not being quite well, which always interests a woman who
is truly feminine. Having been brought up by my mother, my manners were
gentle, my voice and gestures refined, and I was scrupulously careful
of my person.
I had been introduced by the old master who recommended me, as a person
of irreproachable nobility of ideas and character. This was enough to
cause a very sensitive young girl to become interested in me in a very
particular manner. Ah, well! I had no sooner recognized this interest
than I thought how to abuse it instead of being touched by it.
Any one who had seen me in my room on the evening which followed
this afternoon, seated at my table and writing, with a big book of
analysis near me, would never have believed that this was a young man
of scarcely twenty-two years, meditating on the sentiments which he
inspired or wished to inspire in a young girl of twenty.
The château was asleep. I could hear only the steps of the footman as
he extinguished the lamps on the staircase and in the corridors. The
wind enveloped the vast building in its groanings, now plaintive, now
soothing. The west wind is terrible on these heights, where, sometimes,
it carries away in a single breath all the slates of a roof.
This lamentation of the wind has always increased in me the feeling
of internal solitude. My fire burned gently, and I scribbled in my
notebook, which I burned before my arrest, the occurrences of the day
and the programme of the experience which I proposed to attempt upon
the mind of Mlle. de Jussat. I had copied the passage on pity which
is found in your “Theory of the Passions;” you remember it, my dear
master, it begins:
“There is in the phenomenon of pity a physical element, and which,
especially in women, is confined to the sexual emotion.”
It was through pity then, that I proposed to act first upon Charlotte.
I would profit by the first falsehood by which I had already moved
her, combining with it a succession of others, and thus make her love
me by making her pity me. There was, in this use of the most respected
of human sentiments for the profit of my curious fancy, something
particularly contrary to the general prejudice, which flattered my
pride most exquisitely.