There was such an air of simple conviction about my friend's words, such a despairing certainty based on experience, that I shuddered as I listened. While he was speaking I felt a strong desire to go to my mistress, or to write to her to come to me. I was so weak that I could not leave my bed and that saved me from the shame of finding her waiting for my rival or perhaps in his company. But I could write to her; in spite of myself I doubted whether she would come if I should write.
When Desgenais left me I became so desperate that I resolved to put an end to my trouble. After a terrible struggle horror got the better of love. I wrote my mistress that I would never see her again and begged her not to try to see me unless she wished to be exposed to the shame of being refused admittance. I called a servant and ordered him to deliver the letter at once. He had hardly closed the door when I called him back. He did not hear me; I did not dare call again; covering my face with my hands I yielded to an overwhelming sense of despair.
CHAPTER IV
THE following morning the first question that occurred to my mind was:
"What shall I do?"
I had no occupation. I had studied medicine and law without being able to decide on either of the two professions; I had worked for a banker for six months and my services were so unsatisfactory that I was obliged to resign to avoid being discharged. My studies had been varied but superficial; my memory was active but not retentive.
My only treasure after love, was independence. In my childhood I had devoted myself to a morose cult, and had, so to speak, consecrated my heart to it. One day my father, solicitous about my future, spoke to me of several careers between which he allowed me to choose. I was leaning on the window-sill, looking at a solitary poplar-tree that was swaying in the breeze down in the garden. I thought over all the various occupations and wondered which one I should choose. I turned them all over, one after another, in my mind, and then not feeling inclined to any of them I allowed my thoughts to wander. Suddenly it seemed to me that I felt the earth move and that a secret invisible force was slowly dragging me into space and becoming tangible to my senses; I saw it mount into the sky; I seemed to be on a ship; the poplar near my window resembled a mast; I arose, stretched out my arms, and cried:
"It is little enough to be a passenger for one day on this ship floating through space; it is little enough to be a man, a black point on that ship; I will be a man but not any particular kind of man."
Such was the first vow that, at the age of fourteen, I pronounced in the face of nature, and since then I have tried to do nothing except in obedience to my father, never being able to overcome my repugnance.
I was therefore free, not through indolence but by choice; loving, moreover, all that God had made and very little that man had made. Of life I knew nothing but love, of the world only my mistress, and I did not care to know anything more. So falling in love upon leaving college I sincerely believed that it was for life and every other thought disappeared.
My life was sedentary. I was accustomed to pass the day with my mistress; my greatest pleasure was to lead her through the fields on beautiful summer days, the sight of nature in her splendor having ever been for me the most powerful incentive to love. In winter, as she enjoyed society, we attended numerous balls and masquerades, and because I thought of no one but her I fondly imagined her equally true to me.
To give you an idea of my state of mind I can not do better than compare it to one of those rooms such as we see in these days where are collected and confounded all the furniture of all times and all countries. Our age has no form of its own. We have impressed the seal of our time on neither our houses nor our gardens nor anything that is ours. On the street may be seen men who have their beards cut as in the time of Henry III, others who are clean shaven, others who have their hair arranged as in the time of Raphael, others as in the time of Christ. So the homes of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: the antique, the Gothic, the taste of the Renaissance, that of Louis XIII, all pell-mell. In short, we have every century except our own—a thing which has never been seen at any other epoch: eclecticism is our taste; we take everything we find, this for beauty, that for utility, this other for antiquity, such another for its ugliness even, so that we live surrounded by debris as though the end of the world were at hand.
Such was the state of my mind; I had read much; moreover I had learned to paint. I knew by heart a great many things, but nothing in order, so that my head was like a sponge, swollen but empty. I fell in love with all the poets one after another; but being of an impressionable nature the last comer always disgusted me with the rest. I had made of myself a great warehouse of ruins, so that having no more thirst after drinking of the novel and the unknown, I became a ruin myself.
Nevertheless, about that ruin there was still something of youth: it was the hope of my heart which was still childlike.
That hope, which nothing had withered or corrupted and that love had exalted to excess, had now received a mortal wound. The perfidy of my mistress had struck deep, and when I thought of it, I felt in my soul a swooning away, a convulsive flutter as of a wounded bird in agony.
Society which works so much evil is like that serpent of the Indies whose dwelling is the leaf of a plant which cures its sting; it presents, in nearly every case, the remedy by the side of the suffering it has caused. For example, the man whose life is one of routine, who has his business cares to claim his attention upon rising, visits at such an hour, loves at another, can lose his mistress and suffer no evil effects. His occupations and his thoughts are like impassive soldiers ranged in line of battle; a single shot strikes one down, his neighbors fill up the gap and the line is intact.
I had not that resource since I was alone: nature, the kind mother, seemed, on the contrary, more vast and more empty than ever. If I had been able to forget my mistress I would have been saved. How many there are who can be cured with even less than that. Such men are incapable of loving a faithless woman and their conduct, under the circumstances, is admirable in its firmness. But is it thus that one loves at nineteen when, knowing nothing of the world, desiring everything, the young man feels within him the germ of all the passions? On the right, on the left, below, on the horizon, everywhere some voice which calls him. All is desire, all is reverie. There is no reality which holds him when the heart is young; there is no oak so gnarled that it may not give birth to a dryad; and if one had a hundred arms one need not fear to open them; one has but to clasp his mistress and all is well.
As for me I did not understand what else there was to do besides love, and when any one spoke to me of another occupation I did not reply. My passion for my mistress had something fierce about it, as all my life had been severely monachal. I wish to cite a single example. She gave me her portrait in miniature in a medallion; I wore it over my heart, a practise much affected by men; but one day while idly rummaging about a shop filled with curiosities I found an iron "discipline whip," such as was used by the mediaeval flagellants; at the end of this whip was a metal plate bristling with sharp iron points; I had the medallion riveted to this plate and then returned it to its place over my heart. The sharp points pierced my bosom with every movement and caused such a strange voluptuous anguish that I sometimes pressed it down with my hand in order to intensify the sensation. I knew very well that I was committing folly; love is responsible for many others.
When that woman deceived me I removed the cruel medallion. I can not tell with what sadness I detached that iron girdle and what a sigh escaped me when it was gone.
"Ah! poor wounds!" I said, "you will soon heal, but what balm is there for that other deeper wound?"
I had reason to hate that woman, she was, so to speak, mingled with the blood of my veins; I cursed her but I dreamed of her. What could I do with a dream? By what effort of the will could I drown memory of flesh and blood? Macbeth having killed Duncan saw that the ocean would not wash his hands clean again; it would not have washed away my wounds. I said to Desgenais: "When I sleep, her head is on my pillow."
My