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comprehended the birth of this poetic conceit of Catholicism.
Reduced to reality by analysis, this phenomenon simply proves
that in the relations between two beings, there is a reciprocity of
action of one upon the other unknown to either. If by calculation I
forced myself to resemble this girl in order to tame her, I
experienced without calculation the species of moral suggestion
which all true character imposes upon us. The extreme simplicity of
her mind triumphed at times over my ideas, my remembrances, and
my desires.
Finally, although judging this weakness to be unworthy of a brain
like mine, I respected her, as if I had not known the value of this
word respect, and that it represents the most stupid of all our
ignorances. Do we respect the player who ten times in succession
strikes the rouge or the noir? Well, in this hazardous lottery of the
universe, virtue and vice are the rouge and noir. An honest woman
and a lucky player have equal merit.
The spring arrived in the midst of these agitating alternations of
audacious projects, stupid timidity, contradictory reasonings, wise
combinations and ingenuous ardors. And such a spring! One must
have experienced the severity of winter among these mountains,
then the sudden sweetness of the renewal of nature, to appreciate
the charm of life which floats in this atmosphere when April and May
bring back the sacred season.
It comes first across the meadows in an awaking of the water
which shudders under the thin ice; it bursts through and then runs
singing on, light, transparent and free.
It comes through the woods in a continuous murmur of snow
which detaches itself piece by piece and falls upon the evergreen
branches of the pines and the yellow and dried leaves of the oaks.
The lake freed from its ice takes to shivering under the wind which
sweeps away the clouds, and the azure appears, the azure of a
mountain sky, clearer, deeper than that of the plain; and in some
days the uniform color of the landscape is tinted with colors tender
and young.
The delicate buds begin to appear on the naked branches. The
greenish aments of hazels alternate with the yellowish catkins of the
willows. Even the black lava of the Cheyre appears to be animated.
The velvety fructifications of the mosses mingle with the whitening
spots of the lichens. The craters of the Puy de la Vache and of the
Puy de Lassolas disclose little by little the splendor of their red
gravel. The silvery trunks of the birches and the changeable trunks
of the beeches shine in the sun with a lively splendor.
In the thickets, the beautiful flowers which I had formerly picked
with my father, and whose corollas looked at me as if they were
eyes, and whose aroma followed me like a breath, began to bloom.
The periwinkle, the primrose, and the violet appeared first, then in
succession the cuckoo-flower with its shade of lilac, the daphne
which bears its pink flowers before it has any leaves, the white
anemone, the two-leaved harebell, with its odor of hyacinth,
Solomon’s seal with its white bells and its mysterious root which
walks under the ground, the lily-of-the-valley in the hollows, and the
eglantine along the hedges.
The breeze which came from the white domes of the mountain
passed over these flowers. It brought with it perfumes something of
the sun and the snow, so caressing and so fresh, that only to
breathe was to be intoxicated with youth, was to participate in the
renewal of the vast world; and I, fixed as I was in my doctrines and
my theories, felt the puberty of all nature. The ice of abstract ideas
in which my soul was imprisoned melted.
When I read over the pages of my journal, now destroyed, in
which I had noted my sensations, I am astonished to see with what
force the sources of ingenuousness were reopened in me under this
influence, and with what a rushing flood they inundated my heart. I
am vexed with myself for thinking of it in this cowardly spirit.
However, I experience a pleasure in remembering that at this period
I sincerely loved her who is now no more. I repeat it with a real
relief, that at least on the day that I dared to tell her of my love—
fatal day which marked the beginning of our separation—I was the
sincere dupe of my own words.
The declaration on which I had deliberated so much was,
however, simply the effect of chance. It was the 12th of May. Ah! it
is less than a year ago! In the morning the weather had been even
more than usually fine, and in the afternoon Mlle. Largeyx, Lucien,
Charlotte and I started to go to the village of Saint-Saturnin through
a wood of oaks, of birches and hazels which separated this village
from the ruined château of Montredon, and which is called the
Pradat wood. We had taken the little English cart which could hold
four if necessary.
Never was a day more warm, a sky more blue, never was the
odor of spring borne by the wind more exhilarating.
We had not walked a league when Mlle. Largeyx, fatigued by the
sun, took her seat in the cart which was driven by the second
coachman. The rogue has sworn cruelly against me, and has
recalled all that he knew or guessed of what I myself am going to
relate to you. Lucien also soon declared himself tired, and joined the
governess, so that I was left to walk alone with Mlle. de Jussat.
She had taken it into her head to make a bouquet of lilies-of-the-
valley, and I helped her in this work. We were busy under the
branches, which were covered with a sort of delicate green cloud of
the scarcely opened foliage. She walked ahead, drawn far from the
edge of the wood in her search for the flowers. We found ourselves
at last in a clearing, and so far away that we could not see the group
made by the cart and the three persons. Charlotte first perceived our
solitude. She listened, and not hearing the noise of the horse’s feet
on the road, she cried out with the laughter of a child:
“We are lost. Fortunately the road is not hard to rembourser, as
poor Sister Anaclet says. Will you wait until I arrange my bouquet? It
would be a pity to have these beautiful flowers spoil.”
 She sat down on a rock which was bathed in sunlight, and spread
the flowers on her lap, taking up the sprays of lilies one by one. I
inhaled the musky perfume of these pale racemes, seated on the
other extremity of the stone. Never had this creature, toward whom
all my thoughts had tended for months, appeared so adorably
delicate and refined as at this moment with her face daintily colored
by the fresh air, with the deep red of her lips which were bent in a
half-smile, with the clear limpidity of her gray eyes, with the
symmetry of her entire being.
She harmonized in a manner almost supernatural with the
country about us by the charm of youth which emanated from her
person. The longer I looked at her the more I was convinced that if I
did not seize this occasion to tell her what I had wished to declare
for so long a time, I should never again find another opportunity so
propitious.
This idea grew in my mind, mingled with the remorse of seeing
her, so confident, so unsuspicious of the patient work by which,
abusing our daily intimacy, I had brought her to treat me with a
gentleness almost fraternal.
My heart beat violently. The magic of her presence excited my
entire being. Unfortunately she turned toward me for a moment, to
show me the bouquet which was nearly finished. No doubt she saw
in my face the trace of the emotion which my pride of thought raised
in me, for her face which had been so joyous, so frank, suddenly
grew anxious. I ought to say that during our conversations of these
two months we had avoided, she from delicacy, I from shrewdness,
any allusion to the romance of deception by which I had tried to
excite her pity. I understood how thoroughly she had believed in this
romance and that she had not ceased to think of it, when she said
with an involuntary melancholy in her eyes:
“Why do you spoil this beautiful day by sad remembrances? I
thought you had become more reasonable.”
 “No!” I responded; “you do not know what makes me sad. Ah! it
is not remembrances. You refer to my former griefs. You are
mistaken. There is no more place in my mind for memories than
there is on these branches for last year’s leaves.”
I heard my voice as if it had been that of some one else, at the
same time I read in her eyes that, in spite of the poetical
comparison by which I had concealed the direct meaning of this
phrase, she understood me.
How was it that what had been so impossible now seemed easy?
How was it that I dared to do what I had believed I should never
dare to do? I took her hand which trembled in mine as if the child
were seized with a frightful terror. She rose to go away, but her
knees trembled so that I had no difficulty in constraining her to sit
down again. I was so overcome by my own audacity that I could not
control myself, and I began to tell her my feelings for her in words
which I cannot recall now.
All the emotions through which I had passed, since my arrival at
the château, yes all, even from the most detestable, those of my
envy of Count André, to the best, my remorse at abusing the
confidence of a young girl, were dissolved in an adoration almost
mystical, and half-mad, for this trembling, agitated, and beautiful
creature. I saw her while I was speaking grow as pale as the flowers
which were scattered in her lap. I remember that words came to me
which were excited to madness, wild to imprudence, and that I
ended by repeating:
“How I love you! Ah! How I love you!”
Clasping her hand in mine and drawing her nearer and nearer to
me. I passed my free arm around her waist without even thinking, in
my own agitation, of kissing her. This gesture, by alarming her, gave
her the energy to rise and disengage herself. She moaned rather
than said:
“Leave me, leave me.”
 And stepping backward, her hands held out in front of her as if to
defend herself, she went to the trunk of a birch tree. There she
leaned, panting with emotion, while the big tears rolled down her
cheeks. There was so much of wounded modesty in these tears, so
painful a revulsion, in the tremulousness of her half-open lips, that I
remained where I was muttering:
“Pardon.”
“Be still,” said she, making a motion with her hand.
We remained thus opposite one another and silent for a time
which must have been very short, but which seemed an eternity to
me. All at once a cry crossed the wood, at first distant, then nearer,
that of a voice imitating the cry of the cuckoo. They had grown
uneasy at our absence, and it was Lucien who gave the usual signal
for rallying.
At this simple reminder of reality Charlotte shivered. The blood
came back to her cheeks. She looked at me with eyes in which pride
had driven away fear. She looked like one who had just awaked from
a horrible sleep. She looked at her hands, which still shook, and,
without another word, she took up her gloves and her flowers, and
began to run, yes, to run like a pursued animal, in the direction of
the voice. Ten minutes after we were again on the road.
“I do not feel very well,” she said to her governess, as if to
anticipate the question which her disturbed face would provoke; “will
you give me a place in the carriage? We are going home.”
“It is the heat which has made you feel badly,” replied the old
demoiselle.
“And M. Greslon?” asked Lucien when his sister had taken her
seat and he was in behind.
“I will walk,” I answered.
The cart moved lightly on, in spite of its quadruple burden, while
Lucien waved me an adieu. I could see the hat of Mlle. de Jussat
immovable by the side of the shoulder of the coachman, who gave a
“pull up” to his horse, then the carriage disappeared and I walked
along alone, under the same blue sky, and between the same trees
covered with an impalpable verdure. But an extraordinary anguish
had replaced the cheerfulness and the happy ardor of the beginning
of the walk.
This time the die had been thrown. I had given battle, I had lost;
I should be sent away from the château ignobly. It was less this
prospect which overcame me than a strange mingling of regret and
of shame.
Behold whither my learned psychology had led me! Behold the
result of this siege en règle undertaken against the heart of this
young girl! Not a word on her part in response to the most
impassioned declaration, and I, at the moment for action, what had
I found to do but recite some romantic phrases? And she, by a
simple gesture, had fixed me to my place!
I saw in imagination the face of Count André. I saw in a flash the
expression of contempt when they should tell him of this scene.
Finally, I was no longer the subtle psychologist or the excited young
man, I was a self-love humiliated to the dust by the time I reached
the gate of the château.
In recognizing the lake, the line of the mountains, the front of
the house, pride gave place to a frightful apprehension of what I
was going to suffer, and the project crossed my mind to flee, to go
back directly to Clermont, rather than experience anew the disdain
of Mlle. de Jussat, and the affront which her father would inflict
upon me. It was too late, the marquis himself came to meet me, in
the principal avenue, accompanied by Lucien who called me. This
cry of the child had the customary intonation of familiarity, and the
reception of the father proved that I had been wrong to feel myself
lost so soon.
“They abandoned you,” said he, “and did not even think of
sending the carriage back for you. You must have walked a good
stretch!” He consulted his watch. “I am afraid that Charlotte has
taken cold,” he added, “she went to bed as soon as she came in.
These spring suns are so treacherous.”
“So Charlotte had said nothing yet. She is suffering this evening.
That will be for to-morrow,” thought I, and I began that evening to
pack my papers. I held to them with so ingenuous a confidence in
my talent as a philosopher!
The next day arrived. Nothing vet. I was again with Charlotte at
the breakfast table; she was pale, as if she had passed through a
crisis of violent pain. I saw that the sound of my voice made her
tremble slightly. Then this was all. Ah! what a strange week I
passed, expecting each morning that she had spoken, crucified by
this expectation and incapable of taking the first step myself or of
going away from the château! This was not alone for want of a
pretext to give. A burning curiosity held me there. I had wished to
live as much as to think. Well! I was living, and in what a fever!
At last, the eighth day, the marquis asked me to come into his
study.
“This time,” said I to myself, “the hour has struck. I like this
better.”
I expected to see a terrible countenance, and to hear some
almost insulting words. I found, on the contrary, the hypochondriac
smiling, his eyes bright, his manner young again.
“My daughter,” said he, “continues to be very unwell. Nothing
very serious, but some odd nervous symptoms. She wishes positively
to consult a Paris physician. You know she has been very ill and was
cured by a physician in whom she has confidence. I shall not be
sorry to consult him also for myself. I am going with her the day
after to-morrow. It is possible that we shall take a little journey to
amuse her. I desired to give you some particular directions in regard
to Lucien during my absence, though I am very well pleased with
you, my dear Monsieur Greslon, very well pleased. I wrote so to
Limasset yesterday. It is a good thing for me that you are here.”
 You will judge my dear master, by what I have shown you of my
character, that these compliments must have flattered me as
evidence of the perfection with which I had filled my rôle, and by
reassuring me after my fears of the last days. I saw this very clear
and positive fact: Charlotte had not wished to tell of my declaration,
and I asked at once: Why? Instead of interpreting this silence in a
sense favorable to me, I saw in it this idea: she did not wish through
pity to take away my means of making a living, but it was not the
kind of pity which I had wished to provoke.
I had no sooner imagined this explanation than it became
evident and insupportable.
“No,” said I, “that shall not be, I will not accept the alms of this
outraging indulgence. When Mlle. de Jussat returns, she will not find
me here. She shows me what I ought to do, what I will do. I have
desired to interest her, I have not even excited her anger. I will leave
at least some other remembrance than that of a vulgar pedant who
keeps his place in spite of the worst affronts.”
I was so baffled in my projects; the hope which had sustained
me all winter was so dead that I wrote out, on the night following
this conversation, a letter in the place of the one in which I had
thought to make her love me, again asking for pardon.
I comprehend, said I, that any relation is impossible between us,
and I added that on her return she would not have to endure the
odiousness of my presence. The next morning in the confusion of
departure, I found a moment when her mother having called her, I
could slip into her room. I hastened to put my letter on her bureau.
There, among the books ready to be put into her trunk, was her
blotting case. I opened it and found an envelope upon which were
the words: May 12, 1886. This was the day of the fatal declaration. I
opened this envelope. It contained some sprigs of dried lilies-of-the-
valley, and I remember to have given her, in this last walk, some
sprigs more beautiful than the others and she had put them in her
corsage. She had preserved them then. She had kept them in spite
of what I had said to her—because of what I had said to her.
 I do not believe that I ever experienced an emotion comparable
to that which seized me there, before this simple envelope, to the
flood of pride which suddenly inundated my heart. Yes. Charlotte
had repulsed me. Yes, she had fled from me. But she loved me! I
closed the case, I went up to my room in haste, for fear that she
would surprise me, without leaving my letter, which I instantly
destroyed. Ah! there was no question of my going away now.
I must wait until she should return, and, this time, I would act, I
would conquer. She loved me!

§ V. THE SECOND CRISIS.

She loved me. The experience instituted by my pride and my

curiosity had succeeded. This evidence—for I did not for a moment
doubt the proof, rendered the departure of the young girl not only
supportable, but almost sweet. Her flight was explained by a fear of
her own emotions which proved to me their depth. And then, by
going away for a few weeks, she relieved me from a cruel
embarrassment.
How should I act? By what politic safeguard should I push on to
success from this unhoped-for point? I was about to have leisure to
think of this during her absence, which could not last long, since the
Jussats had now no house except in Auvergne.
Deferring then until later the formation of a new plan, I gave
myself up to the intoxication of triumphant self-love which I
witnessed in the departure of Charlotte and of her father. I had
taken leave of them in the drawing-room in order not to embarrass
the final adieus, and returned to my room. The warm, cordial hand-
shake of the marquis, proved once more how strongly I was
anchored in the house, and I had divined behind the cool farewell of
the girl the palpitation of a heart which did not wish to yield.
 I inhabited in the second story a corner room with a window on
the front of the château I placed myself behind the curtain so that I
could see them as they entered the carriage. It was a victoria
encumbered with wraps and drawn by the same light bay horse that
had drawn the English cart. There was also the same coachman on
the seat, whip in hand, and with the same immobility of
countenance.
The marquis appeared, then Charlotte. Under the veil and from
such a height, I could not distinguish her features, and when she
raised the veil to dry her eyes, I could not have told whether it were
the last kisses of her mother and her brother which caused this
access of nervous emotion or despair at a too painful resolution. But,
when the carriage turned away toward the gate, I saw her turn her
head; and as the family had already gone in what could she be
looking at so long, if not at the window from whose shelter I was
regarding her? Then a clump of trees hid the carriage, which
reappeared at the border of the lake to disappear again and plunge
into the road which crosses the wood of Pradat—that road where a
souvenir awaited her, which I was certain would make her heart beat
more quickly—that troubled, conquered heart.
This sentiment of pride satisfied me for an entire month, without
a minute’s interruption, and—proof that I was still entirely
intellectual and psychological in my relations with this young girl, my
mind was never more clear, more supple, more skillful in the
handling of ideas than at this period.
I wrote then my best pages, a treatise on the working of the will
during sleep. I put into it, with the delight of a savant which you will
understand, all the details which I had noted, for some months, on
the goings and comings, the heights and depths of my resolutions. I
had kept, as I have told you, a most precise journal, analyzing, in
the evening before going to sleep, and in the morning, as soon as I
was awake, the least shades of every state of mind.
Yes, these were days of a singular fullness. I was very free. Mlle.
Largeyx and Sister Anaclet kept the marquise company. My pupil and
I took advantage of the beautiful and mild days for walking. Under
the pretext of teaching I had cultivated in him a love of butterflies.
Armed with a long cane and a net of green gauze, he constantly ran
after the Auroras with wings bordered with orange, the blue
Arguses, the brown Morio’s, the mottled Vulcans and the gold-
colored Citrons. He left me alone with my thoughts.
Sometimes we took the Pradat road which was now adorned with
all the verdure of spring, sometimes we went toward Verneuge,
toward the valley of Saint-Genès-Champanelle, which is as gracefully
pretty as its name. I would seat myself upon a block of lava, some
small fragment of the enormous stream poured out by the Puy de la
Vache, and there, without troubling my head about Lucien, I
abandoned myself to this strange disposition which has always
appeared to me in the midst of this savage nature, as a striking
symbol of my doctrines, a type of implacable fatality, a council of
absolute indifference to good or ill.
I looked at the leaves of the trees as they unfolded in the
sunlight, and I recalled the known laws of vegetable respiration, and
how, by a simple modification of light, the life of the plant can be
changed. In the same way, one ought to be able at will to direct the
life of the soul, if he could exactly know its laws.
I had already succeeded in creating the commencement of a
passion in the soul of a young girl, separated from me by an abyss.
What new procedures applied with rigor would permit me to
increase the intensity of this passion?
I forgot the magnificence of the heavens, the freshness of the
wood, the majesty of the volcanoes, the vast landscape spread out
before me, in seeing only the formulas of moral algebra. I hesitated
between diverse solutions for the next day on which I should have
Mlle. de Jussat face to face with me in the solitude of the château.
Ought I on her return to feign indifference, to disconcert her, to
subdue her, first by astonishment and then by self-love and grief?
Should I pique her jealousy by insinuating that the foreigner of my
soi-disant romance had returned to Clermont and had written to me?
Should I, on the contrary, continue the burning declarations, the
audacities which surround, the follies which intoxicate?
I replaced these hypotheses successively by still others. I pleased
myself by saying that I was not in love, that the philosopher ruled
the lover, that myself, this dear self of whom I had constituted
myself the priest, remained superior and lucid. I branded as
unworthy weaknesses the reveries which at other times replaced
these subtle calculations.
It was in the house that these reveries took hold upon me, when
I looked at the portraits of Charlotte which were scattered about
everywhere on the walls of the salon, on the tables and in Lucien’s
room. Photographs of all sizes represented her at six years, at ten
years, at fifteen, and I could trace the growth of her beauty from the
mignonne grace of her first years to the delicate charm of to-day.
The features of these photographs changed, but the expression
never. It was the same in the eyes of the child and in those of the
young girl, with something of seriousness, of tenderness and of
fixedness which revealed profound sensibility. It was impressed upon
me, and the remembrance of it agitates me with a confused
emotion. Ah! Why did I not give myself up to it entirely.
But why was Charlotte, in so many of these portraits by the side
of her brother André? What secret fibre of hate had this man, by his
existence alone, touched in my heart, that simply to see his image
near that of his sister dried up my tenderness and left in me only
one wish?
I dared to formulate it, now that I believed I had taken this heart
in my snare. Yes, I wished to be Charlotte’s lover. And after? After? I
forced myself not to think of that, as I forced myself to destroy the
instinctive scruples of violated hospitality. I collected the most
masculine energies of my mind and I plunged more deeply into my
theories upon the cultivation of self.
 I would go out of this experience enriched by emotions and
remembrances. Such would be the moral issue of the adventure.
The material issue would be the return to my mother’s house when
my preceptorate was ended.
When scruples became aroused, and a voice said: “And
Charlotte? Have you the right to treat her as a simple object of
experience?” I took my Spinoza, and I read there the theorem in
which it is written that our right is only limited by our power.
I took your “Theory of the Passions” and I studied there your
phrases on the duel between the sexes in love.
“It is the law of the world,” I reasoned, “that all existence should
be a conquest, executed and maintained by the strongest at the
expense of the feeblest. That is as true of the moral universe as of
the physical. There are some souls of prey as there are wolves,
tigers and hawks.”
This formula seemed to me strong, new and just. I applied it to
myself, and I repeated:
“I am a soul of prey, a soul of prey,” with a furious attack of what
the mystics call the pride of life, among the fresh verdure, under the
blue sky, on the bank of the clear river which flows from the
mountains to the lake. This exhilaration at my victorious pride was
dissipated by a very simple fact. The marquis wrote that he would
return, but alone. Mlle. de Jussat, who was still unwell, would
remain with a sister of her mother. When the marquise
communicated this news to us we were at table. I felt a spasm of
anger so violent that it astonished myself, and on the plea of sudden
indisposition I left the dinner table.
I should like to have cried out, broken something or manifested
in some foolish way the rage which shook my soul. In the fever of
vanity which had exalted me since the departure of Charlotte, I had
foreseen everything, except that this girl would have character
enough not to return to Aydat. The way which she had found to
escape from her sentiment was so simple, but so sovereign, so
complete.
The marvelous tactics of my psychology became as vain as the
mechanism of the best cannon against an enemy out of reach of its
shot.
What could I do if she were not there? The vision of my
weakness rose up so strong, so painful, that it excited my nervous
system so profoundly that I neither ate nor slept until the arrival of
the marquis. I should then learn if this resolution excluded all hope
of a counter order—if there were any chance that the young girl
would return by the end of July, or in August, or in September. My
engagement would last until the middle of October.
My heart beat, my throat was choked while we walked, Lucien
and I, in the railroad station of Clermont, waiting for the train from
Paris. In the excess of my impatience I had obtained permission to
come to meet the father. The locomotive entered the station. M. de
Jussat put his head through a doorway. I said at the risk of revealing
my feelings:
“And Mlle. Charlotte?”
“Thank you, thank you,” he answered, pressing my hand with
feeling, “the physician says that she has a very serious nervous
trouble. It seems that the mountains are not good for her. And I am
well only high up! Ah! This is painful, very painful. We shall try for a
time, the cold-water cure at Paris, and then at Néris perhaps.”
She would not return!
If ever I have regretted, my dear master, the notebook which I
burned, it is assuredly now, and this daily record of my thoughts
from the evening on which the marquis thus announced the definite
absence of his daughter. This record continued until October, when a
circumstance brusquely changed the probable course of things.
You would have found there, as in an atlas of moral anatomy, an
illustration of your beautiful analysis of love, desire, regret, jealousy,
and hate. Yes, during those four months I went through all these
phases. It was an insane attempt, but quite natural, persuaded as I
was that Charlotte’s absence only proved her passion.
I wrote to her. In that letter, deliberately composed, I began by
asking her pardon for my audacity in the Pradat wood, and I
renewed this audacity in a worse manner, by drawing a burning
picture of my despair away from her.
This letter was a wilder declaration than the other, and so bold
that once the envelope had disappeared in the box at the village
post-office whither I had carried it myself, my fears were renewed.
Two days, three days, and there was no reply. The letter at least was
not returned, as I had feared, without even being opened.
At this time the marquise had finished her preparations to join
her daughter. Her sister occupied at Paris in the Rue de Chanaleilles,
a house large enough to give to these ladies all the rooms they
needed. Hôtel de Sermoises, Rue de Chanaleilles, Paris, what
emotions I have had in writing this address, not only once, but five
or six times.
I calculated that the aunt would not watch the correspondence of
the young girl very strictly, while the mother would watch her. It was
necessary to take advantage of the time the latter still remained at
Aydat, to strengthen the impression certainly produced by my letter.
I wrote every day, until the departure of the marquise, letters like
the first, and I found no trouble in playing the lover.
My passionate desire to have Charlotte return was sincere—as
sincere as unreasonable. I have known since that, at every arrival of
these dangerous missives, she struggled for hours against the
temptation to open the envelope. At last she opened it. She read
and reread the pages and their poison acted surely. As she was
ignorant of the discovery I had made of her secret, she did not think
to defend herself against the opinion that I could have conceived of
her.
 These letters affected her so much that she preserved them. The
ashes were found in the chimney of her room where she had burned
them the night of her death. I much suspected the troubling effect
of these pages which I scratched off in the night, excited by the
thought that I was firing my last cartridges, which resembled shots
in a fog, since no sign gave notice that every time I aimed I struck
right into her heart.
This absolute uncertainty I at first interpreted to my advantage;
then, when the mother had left the château and I saw the
impossibility of writing, I found in Charlotte’s silence the most
evident proof, not that she loved me, but that she was using her
whole will to conquer this love and that she would succeed.
“Ah, well!” I thought, “I shall have to give her up, since I cannot
reach her, and all is over.” I pronounced these words aloud alone in
my room as I heard the carriage which took the marquise roll away.
M. de Jussat and Lucien accompanied her as far as Martris-de-Veyre,
where she went to take the train. “Yes,” I repeated, “all is ended.
What difference does it make since I do not love her?”
At the moment this thought left me relatively tranquil and with
no other trouble than a vague feeling of uneasiness in the chest, as
happens when we are annoyed. I went out for the purpose of
shaking off even this uneasiness, and, in one of those fits of
bravado, by which I was pleased to prove my strength, I went to the
place in which I had dared to speak to Charlotte of my love.
In order the better to attest my liberty of soul, I had taken under
my arm a new book which I had just received, a translation of
Darwin’s letters.
The day was misty, but almost scorching. A kind of simoon of
wind from the south parched the branches of the trees with its
breath. As I went on this wind affected my nerves. I desired to
attribute to its influence the increase of my uneasiness. After some
fruitless search in the wood of Pradat, I at last found the clearing
where we had been—the stone—the birch.
 It trembled constantly in the breath of the wind, with its
dentated foliage which was now much thicker. I had intended to
read my book here. I sat down and opened the book. I could not get
beyond a half page. The memories overcame me, took possession of
me, showing me this girl upon this same stone, arranging the sprays
of her lilies, then standing, leaning against this tree, then frightened
and fleeing over the grass of the path.
An indefinable grief took possession of me, oppressing my heart,
stifling my respiration, filling my eyes with scalding tears, and I felt,
with terror, that through so any complications of analysis and of
subtleties, I was desperately in love with the child who was not
there, who would never be there again.
This discovery, so strangely unexpected, and of a sentiment so
contrary to the programme I had arranged, was accompanied almost
immediately by a revulsion against this sentiment and against the
image of her who had caused me this pain. There was not a day
during the long weeks that followed that I did not struggle against
the shame of having been taken in my own snare and without
feeling a bitter spite against the absent one.
I recognized the depth of his spite at the infamous joy which
filled my heart when the marquis received a letter from Paris, which
he read with a frown and sighed as he said: “Charlotte is still
unwell.” I felt a consolation, a miserable one, but a consolation all
the same, in saying to myself that I had wounded her with a
poisonous wound and one which would be slow to heal. It seemed
to me that this would be my true revenge, if she should continue to
suffer, and I should be the first to cure her.
I appealed to the philosopher that I was so proud of being to
drive out the lover. I resumed my old reasoning. “There are laws of
life and of mind and I know them. I cannot apply them to Charlotte,
since she has fled from me. Shall I be incapable of applying them to
myself?” And I meditated on this new question: “Are there remedies
against love? Yes, there are, and I have found them.”
 My quasi-mathematical habits of analysis were at my service in
my project of healing, and I resolved the problem into its elements,
after the manner of geometricians.
I reduced this question to this other: “What is love?” to which I
answered brutally by your definition: “Love is the obsession of sex.”
Now, how is this combated? By physical fatigue, which suspends, or
at least lessens, the action of the mind.
I compelled myself and I compelled my pupil to take long walks.
The days on which he had no lessons, Sundays and Thursdays, I
went out alone at the break of day, after having arranged the hour
and the place in which Lucien should join me with the carriage. I
awoke at two o’clock. I went out from the château, in the cold of the
half-twilight which precedes the dawn.
I went straight before me, frantically, choosing the worst paths,
ascending the nearest peaks by the most abrupt and almost
inaccessible sides. I risked breaking my limbs in descending the
yielding sand of the craters, or upon the crests of basalt. No matter.
The orange line of the aurora gained the border of the sky. The
wind of the new day beat against my face. The stars like precious
stones melted away, drowned in the flood of azure, now pale, now
darker. The sun lighted up, on the flowers, the trees and the grass a
flashing of sparkling dew.
Persuaded as I am, of the laws of prehistoric atavism, I aroused
in myself, by the sensation of the forced march and of the heights,
the rudimentary mind of the ancestral brute, of the man of the caves
from whom I, as well as the rest of mankind, am descended.
I attained in this way a sort of savage delirium, but it was neither
the dreamed-of joy nor peace, and it was interrupted by the smallest
reminiscence of my relations with Charlotte. The turn of a road
which we had followed together, the blue bosom of the lake seen
from some height, the outline of the slated roofs of the château, less
than that, even the trembling foliage of a birch and its silvery trunk,
the name of a village of which she had spoken, on an advertisement,
was sufficient, and this factitious frenzy gave place to the keen
regret that she was not near me.
I heard her say in her finely-toned voice: “Look then—” as she
would say when we wandered together, through this same region,
which was then covered with ice and snow—but the flower of her
beauty was then in bloom, now it was adorned with verdure, but the
living flower was gone.
And this sensation became more intolerable still when I met
Lucien, who never failed to talk of her. He loved her, he admired her
so lovingly, and in his ingenuousness he gave me so many proofs
that she was worthy of being loved and admired. Then physical
weariness resolved itself into a worse enervation, and nights
followed in which I suffered from an excited insomnia, in which I
would weep aloud, calling her name like one deranged.
“It is through the mind that I suffer,” I said after having in vain
sought the remedy in great fatigue. “I will attack mind through
mind.”
I undertook that study the most completely opposed to all
feminine preoccupation. I despoiled in less than a fortnight, pen in
hand, two hundred pages of that “Physiology” of Beaunis which I
had brought in my trunk and the hardest for me, those which treat
of the chemistry of living bodies.
My efforts to understand and to sum up these analyses which
demand the laboratory, were supremely in vain. I only succeeded in
stupefying my intellect and in making myself less capable of resisting
a fixed idea.
I saw that I had again taken the wrong road. Was not the true
method rather that which Goethe professed—to apply the mind to
that from which we wish to be delivered? This great mind, who knew
how to live, thus put in practice the theory set up in the fifth book of
Spinoza, and which consists in evolving from the accidents of our
personal life the law which unites us to the great life of the universe.
 M. Taine, in his eloquent pages on Byron, advises the same, “the
light of the mind produces in us serenity of the heart.” And you, my
dear master, what else say you in the preface to your “Theory of the
Passions.” “To consider one’s own destiny as a corollary in this living
geometry of nature, and as an inevitable consequence of this eternal
axiom whose infinite development is prolonged through time and
space, is the only principle of enfranchisement.”
And what else am I doing, at this hour, in writing out this
memoir, but conforming to these maxims? Can they serve me now
any better than they did then? I tried at that time to resume in a
kind of new autobiography the history of my feelings for Charlotte. I
supposed—see how chance sometimes strangely realizes our dreams
—a great psychologist to be consulted by a young man; and, toward
the last, the psychologist wrote out for the use of the moral invalid a
passional diagnosis with indication of causes.
 I wrote this piece during the month of August and under the
exhausting influence of the most torrid heat. I devoted to it about
fifteen séances, lasting from ten o’clock in the evening to one o’clock
in the morning, all the windows open, with the space around my
lamp brightened by large night-moths, by these large velvet
butterflies which bear on their bodies the imprint of a death’s head.
The moon rose, inundating with its bluish light the lake over
which ran the pearly reflections; the woods whose mystery grew
more profound, and the line of the extinct volcanoes. I put down my
pen to lose myself, in presence of this mute landscape, in one of
those cosmogonic reveries to which I was accustomed. As at the
time in which the words of my poor father revealed to me the
history of the world, I saw again the primitive nebulousness, then
the earth detached from it, and the moon thrown off from the earth.
That moon was dead, and the earth would die also. She was
becoming chilled second by second; and the imperceptible
consequence of these seconds, added together during millions of
years, had already extinguished the fire of the volcanoes from which
formerly flowed the burning and devastating lava on which the
château now stood.
In cooling this lava had raised a barrier to the course of the
water which spread into a lake, and the water of this lake was being
evaporated as the atmosphere diminished—these forty poor
kilometers of respirable air which surround the planet.
I closed my eyes, and I felt this mortal globe roll through the
infinite space, unconscious of the little worlds that come and go
upon it, as the immensity of space is unconscious of the suns, the
moons and the earths. The planet will roll on when it will be only a
ball without air and without water, from which man has disappeared,
as well as animals and plants.
Instead of bringing to me the serenity of contemplation, this
vision threw me back upon myself and made me feel with terror the
consciousness of my own person, the only reality that I could
possess, and for how long? Scarcely a point and a moment!
Then, in this irreparable flight of things, this point and this
moment of our consciousness remains our only good, we must exalt
it by increasing its intensity. I felt, with a frightful force, that this
sovereign intensity of emotion Charlotte alone could give me if she
were in this room, seated in this chair, uniting her condemned soul
to my condemned soul, her fleeting youth to my fleeting youth, and
as all the instruments of an orchestra harmonize to produce a single
tone, all the separate forces of my being, the intellectual, the
sentimental, the sensual united in a yearning for Charlotte.
Alas! The vision of the universe heightened the frenzy of the
personal life instead of calming it. I said to myself that without doubt
I had been deceived in believing myself a purely abstract and
intellectual being. During the months in which I had been entirely
chaste had I not lived contrary to my nature?
Under pretext of some family business to regulate I obtained of
the marquis a vacation of eight days. I went to Clermont and sought
for Marianne. I soon found her. She was no longer the simple
working-woman. A country proprietor had settled her, dressed her in
fine clothes, and coming to the city only one day in eight, left her a
sort of liberty. This re-entrance into the world affected me as a
renewal of initiation. I was desirous of knowing to what degree the
memory of Charlotte gangrened my soul. Ah! how the image of Mlle.
de Jussat presented itself at that moment with her Madonna-like
profile and the delicacy of her whole being. It was impossible for me
to return to these base idols. I passed the days which remained to
me in walking with my mother, who seeing me so melancholy
became uneasy and increased my sadness by her questions.
I saw the time of my return to the château approach with
pleasure. At least I could live there among my memories. But a
terrible blow awaited me, which was given me by the marquis on my
arrival.
 “Good news,” said he as soon as he saw me. “Charlotte is better.
And there is more just as good. She is going to be married. Yes, she
accepts M. de Plane. It is true, you do not know him, a friend of
André whom she refused once, and now she is willing.” And he
continued, going back to himself as usual: “Yes, it is very good
news, for, you see, I have not much longer to live. I am broken, very
much broken.”
He might detail to me his imaginary ills, analyze his stomach as
much as he wished, his gout, his intestines, his heart, his head—I
listened no more than a condemned man to whom his sentence has
been announced listens to the words of his jailer. I saw only the fact
so painful to me. You who have written some admirable pages upon
jealousy, my dear master, and upon the ravages which the thought
alone of the caress of a rival produces in the imagination of a lover,
can divine what smarting poison this news poured into my wound.
May, June, July, August, September—nearly five months since
Charlotte had gone, and this wound instead of healing had become
enlarged, poisoned until this last stroke which finished me. This time
I did not have the cruel consolation that my suffering was shared.
This marriage proved to me that she was cured of her sentiment for
me, while I was agonized by mine for her.
My fury was exasperated at the thought that this love had been
snatched from me just at the moment I was about to be able to
develop it in its fullness, at the very time of decisive action. I saw
Charlotte in Paris, where M. de Plane was passing his leave of
absence, receiving her fiancé in the partial tête-à-tête with a
familiarity permitted under the indulgent eyes of the marquise. They
were for this man now, these smiles at once proud and timid, these
tender and anxious looks, these passages of paleness and modest
red over her delicate face, these gestures of a grace always a little
wild.
Finally she loved him, since she was willing to marry him. And he
seemed to me like Count André whose detestable influence I found
even here, and whom I again hated in the fiancé of his sister
confounding these two gentlemen, these two elders, these two
officers, in the same furious antipathy. Vain and puerile anger which
I took with me into the wood already reclothed with those vague
tints which would soon change to russet.
The swallows were assembling for their departure. As the
hunting season had begun there was firing all around them, and
frightened, they rose in a flight such as that by which the wild bird
had escaped which I had thought to bring down some day.
Toward Saint-Saturnin, the hills were planted with vines whose
grapes would soon be ripe for the vintage. I saw the stocks widowed
of fruit, those which the hailstorms of the spring had destroyed in
their flower. Thus had died on the spot, before being ripe, my
vintage, vintage of intoxicating emotions, of sweet felicities, of
burning ecstasies.
I felt a gloomy and indefinable pleasure in seeking everywhere in
the country some symbol of my sentiment, since I was, for a short
time, purified from all calculation by the alchemy of grief.
If I was ever a true lover and given up to regrets, memories and
despairs, it was in those days which must be the last of my stay at
Aydat. In fact, the marquis announced his intention to hasten his
departure. He had abdicated his hypochondria, and he cheerfully
said to me:
“I adore my future son-in-law. I wish that you could know him.
He is loyal, he is brave, he is good, he is proud. True gentlemanly
blood in his veins. Do you understand the women? Here is one who
is no sillier than the rest, is it not so? Two years ago he offered
himself to her. She said no. Then my boy goes away to come back
half-dead. And then it is yes. Do you know, I have always thought
that there was some love-affair in her nervous malady. I knew it. I
said to myself: she is in love with some one. It was he. And what if
he had not wanted her, all the same?”
No, it was not M. de Plane whom Charlotte had loved that winter;
but she had loved, that was certain. Our existences had crossed at
one point, like the two roads which I saw from my window, the one
which descends the mountains and goes toward the fatal wood of
Pradat, the other which leads toward the Puy de la Rodde.
I happened to see, at the close of the day the carriages following
these two roads. After almost grazing each other, they were lost in
opposite directions. Thus were our destinies separated forever. The
Baroness de la Plane would live in the world, at Paris, and that
represented to me a whirlpool of unknown and fascinating
sensations.
I knew too well my future life. In thought, I awoke again in the
little room of the Rue du Billard. In thought I followed the three
streets which it is necessary to take to go from there to the Faculty. I
entered the palace of the Academy, built in red brick, and I reached
the salle des conférences with its bare walls garnished with
blackboards. I listened to the professor analyzing some author on
license or admission. That lasted an hour and a half, then I returned,
my serviette under my arm, through the cold streets of the old town,
for it was necessary for me to pass still another year, as I had not
studied hard enough to submit to my examination with success.
I should continue to go and come among these dark houses, with
this horizon of snowy mountains, to see the father and mother of
Emile sitting at their window and playing at cards, the old Limasset
reading his paper in the corner of the Café de Paris, the omnibuses
of Royat at the corner of Jande.
Yes, I come down to that, my dear master, to this misery of
minds without psychology which attach themselves to the external
form of life without penetrating its essence. I disregarded my old
faith in the superiority of science, to which only three square metres
of room are necessary in order that a Spinoza or an Adrien Sixte
may there possess the immense universe.
Ah! I was very mediocre in that period of powerless desires and
conquered love! I detested, and with what injustice, that life of
abstract study which I was about to resume! And how I wish to-day
that this might be my fate, and that I might awake a poor student
near the Faculty of Clermont, tenant of the father of Emile, pupil of
old Limasset, the morose traveler through those black streets—but
an innocent man! an innocent man! And not the man who has gone
through what I have gone through, and which he finds it a necessity
to tell.

§ VI. THIRD CRISIS.

Toward the end of this severe month of September, Lucien

complained of not being quite well, which the doctor attributed at
first to a simple cold. Two days after the symptoms became
aggravated. Two physicians of Clermont, called in haste, diagnosed
scarlet fever, but of a mild character.
If my mind had not been entirely absorbed by the fixed idea
which made of me at this period a veritable monomaniac, I should
have found material enough to fill my notebook. I had only to follow
the evolutions of the mind of the marquis and the struggle in his
heart between hypochondria and paternal love.
Sometimes, in spite of the reassuring words of the doctors, he
became so uneasy about his son that he passed the night in
watching him. Sometimes he was seized with the fear of contagion;
he went to bed, complained of imaginary pains, and counted the
hours until the visit of the physician. Sometimes, so grave did his
symptoms seem to himself, that the marquis must have the first
visit. Then he would be ashamed of his panic. He arose, he
chastised himself for his terrors with bitter phrases on the feebleness
which age brings, and returned to the bedside of his son. His first
intention was to conceal from the marquise and Charlotte and André
the illness of the child; but after two weeks, these alternations of
zeal and of terror having exhausted his energy, he felt the need of
having his wife with him to sustain him, and the incoherence of his
ideas was so great that he consulted me:
 “Do you not think it is my duty?”
There are some lying souls, my dear master, who excel in
excusing by fine motives their most villainous actions. If I were of
this number I could make a merit of having insisted that the marquis
should not recall his wife. Surely I knew the full import of my
response and of the resolution that M. de Jussat was about to take. I
knew that, if he informed the marquise, she would arrive by the first
train, and I also knew Charlotte well enough to be assured that she
would come with her mother. I should see her again, I should have a
supreme opportunity to reawaken in her the love of which I had
surprised the proof. I could say that it was loyalty on my part, the
advice to leave Mme. de Jussat in Paris. I should have the
appearance of loyalty. Why? If I were not convinced that there is no
effect without a cause and no loyalty without a secret egoism, I
should recognize a horror in using to the profit of a culpable passion
the noblest of sentiments, that of a sister for a brother.
Here is the naked truth: in trying to dissuade M. de Jussat, I was
convinced that all effort to regain the heart of Charlotte would be
useless. I foresaw in this return only certain humiliation. Worn out
by these long months of internal struggle, I no longer felt the
strength to maneuver. There was then no virtue in representing to
the marquis the inconveniences, the dangers even, of the stay of
these two women in the château, near an invalid who might
communicate to them his disease.
“And how about me?” responded he ingenuously, “am I not
exposed every day? But you are right for Charlotte; I will write that I
do not want her.”
“Ah! Greslon,” said he two days after, on the receipt of a
telegram, “see what they do—read.” He handed me the dispatch
which announced the arrival of Mlle. de Jussat and her mother.
“Naturally,” moaned the hypochondriac, “she wanted to come,
without thinking that I should be spared such emotions.”
 The marquis spoke to me in this way at two o’clock in the
afternoon. I knew that the train left Paris at nine o’clock in the
evening and arrived at Clermont toward five in the morning. Mme.
de Jussat and Charlotte would be at the château before ten o’clock. I
passed a fearful evening and night, deprived now of that philosophic
tension, outside of which I float, a creature without energy, the sport
of nervous and irresistible impressions.
Good sense, however, indicated a very simple solution. My
engagement would end the 15th of October. It was now the 5th. The
child was convalescent. He had his mother and his sister with him. I
could return home without any scruple and under any pretext. I
could do it and I must—for the sake of my dignity as well as for my
repose.
In the morning, I had taken this resolution and I was going to
speak about it to the marquis immediately; he did not let me say a
word, he was so agitated by the arrival of his daughter: “Very well,”
said he, “by and by, I have no head for anything now. This
willfulness! That is why I have grown old so fast. Always new
shocks!”
Who knows? my destiny may have entirely depended on the
humor by which this old fool refused to hear me. If I had spoken to
him at that moment, and if we had fixed my departure, I should
have been obliged to have gone; instead, the sole presence of
Charlotte changed the project of going into a project of remaining,
as a lamp carried into a room immediately changes this darkness
into light. I repeat it, I was convinced that she had absolutely ceased
to be interested in me on the one hand, and, on the other, that I
was passing through a crisis, not of genuine love, but of wounded
vanity, and of morbid brooding.
Ah, well! To see her descend from the carriage before the perron,
to see that my presence overcame her, as hers affected me, I
understood two things: first, that it would be physically impossible
for me to leave the château while she should be there; then that she
had passed through trouble similar to mine, if not worse. She must
have fled from me with the most sincere courage, not to have
replied to my letters, not to have read them, to have become
betrothed in order to place an insurmountable barrier between us, to
have believed even that she no longer loved me, and to have
returned to the château with this persuasion.
She loved me!
I had no need of a detailed analysis like those in which I was too
complaisant and in which I was so much deceived, to recognize this
fact. It was an intuition, sudden, unreasoning, invincible, one to
make me believe that the theories on the double life, so much
discussed by Science, are absolutely true.
I read it, this unhoped for love, in the troubled eyes of this child,
as your read the words by which I am trying to reproduce here the
lightning and the thunderbolt of this evidence.
She was before me in her traveling costume, and white, white as
this sheet of paper. I should have explained this pallor by the fatigue
of the night passed in the carriage, and by her uneasiness at her
brother’s illness. Her eyes, in meeting mine, trembled with emotion.
That might be offended modesty? She had fallen away, and when
she took off her cloak I saw that her dress, a dress which I
recognized, was wrinkled around the shoulders.
Ah! I, who had believed so strongly in the method, the
inductions, and the complications of reasoning, how I felt the
omnipotence of instinct against which nothing could provide.
She had loved me all the time. She loved me more than ever.
What matter that she had not given me her hand at our first
meeting; that she had scarcely spoken to me in the vestibule; that
she went up the grand staircase with her mother without turning her
head?
She loved me. This certainty, after so long a period of doubt and
anxiety, inundated my heart with a flood of joy, so that I was almost
overcome, there, on the carpet of the staircase which I must also
climb to go to my room. What was I to do? With my elbows on the