These are some natures purely contemplative and antipathetic to action,
who nevertheless, under a mysterious and inexplicable impulse, sometimes
act with a rapidity of which they would have believed themselves
incapable. Such a one is he who, fearing to find some new vexation
awaiting him at his lodgings, prowls about in a cowardly fashion before
the door without daring to enter; such a one is he who keeps a letter
fifteen days without opening it, or only makes up his mind at the end of
six months to undertake a journey that has been a necessity for a year
past. Such beings sometimes feel themselves precipitately thrust towards
action, like an arrow from a bow.
The novelist and the physician, who profess to know all things, yet
cannot explain whence comes this sudden and delirious energy to indolent
and voluptuous souls; nor how, incapable of accomplishing the simplest
and most necessary things, they are at some certain moment of time
possessed by a superabundant hardihood which enables them to execute the
most absurd and even the most dangerous acts.
One of my friends, the most harmless dreamer that ever lived, at one
time set fire to a forest, in order to ascertain, as he said, whether
the flames take hold with the easiness that is commonly affirmed. His
experiment failed ten times running, on the eleventh it succeeded only
too well.
Another lit a cigar by the side of a powder barrel, _in order to see, to
know, to tempt Destiny_, for a jest, to have the pleasure of suspense,
for no reason at all, out of caprice, out of idleness. This is a kind of
energy that springs from weariness and reverie; and those in whom it
manifests so stubbornly are in general, as I have said, the most
indolent and dreamy beings.
Another so timid that he must cast down his eyes before the gaze of any
man, and summon all his poor will before he dare enter a café or pass
the pay-box of a theatre, where the ticket-seller seems, in his eyes,
invested with all the majesty of Minos, Æcus, and Rhadamanthus, will at
times throw himself upon the neck of some old man whom he sees in the
street, and embrace him with enthusiasm in sight of an astonished crowd.
Why? Because--because this countenance is irresistibly attractive to
him? Perhaps; but it is more legitimate to suppose that he himself does
not know why.
I have been more than once a victim to these crises and outbreaks which
give us cause to believe that evil-meaning demons slip into us, to make
us the ignorant accomplices of their most absurd desires. One morning I
arose in a sullen mood, very sad, and tired of idleness, and thrust as
it seemed to me to the doing of some great thing, some brilliant
act--and then, alas, I opened the window.
(I beg you to observe that in some people the spirit of mystification is
not the result of labour or combination, but rather of a fortuitous
inspiration which would partake, were it not for the strength of the
feeling, of the mood called hysterical by the physician and satanic by
those who think a little more profoundly than the physician; the mood
which thrusts us unresisting to a multitude of dangerous and
inconvenient acts.)
The first person I noticed in the street was a glass-vendor whose shrill
and discordant cry mounted up to me through the heavy, dull atmosphere
of Paris. It would have been else impossible to account for the sudden
and despotic hatred of this poor man that came upon me.
"Hello, there!" I cried, and bade him ascend. Meanwhile I reflected, not
without gaiety, that as my room was on the sixth landing, and the
stairway very narrow, the man would have some difficulty in ascending,
and in many a place would break off the corners of his fragile
merchandise.
At length he appeared. I examined all his glasses with curiosity, and
then said to him: "What, have you no coloured glasses? Glasses of rose
and crimson and blue, magical glasses, glasses of Paradise? You are
insolent. You dare to walk in mean streets when you have no glasses that
would make one see beauty in life?" And I hurried him briskly to the
staircase, which he staggered down, grumbling.
I went on to the balcony and caught up a little flower-pot, and when the
man appeared in the door-way beneath I let fall my engine of war
perpendicularly upon the edge of his pack, so that it was upset by the
shock and all his poor walking fortune broken to bits. It made a noise
like a palace of crystal shattered by lightning. Mad with my folly, I
cried furiously after him: "The life beautiful! the life beautiful!"
Such nervous pleasantries are not without peril; often enough one pays
dearly for them. But what matters an eternity of damnation to him who
has found in one second an eternity of enjoyment?