IV. CONFESSION OF A YOUNG MAN OF THE PERIOD. (continued 3)

“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 table and pressing my hands against my forehead to repress the throbbing of my temples I put this question without finding any other answer than that I could not go away; that absence and silence could not end all between Charlotte and myself; finally that we were approaching an hour in which so many reciprocal efforts, hidden struggles, combated desires on the part of both, was precipitating us toward a supreme scene, and this, I could feel was near, tragic, decisive, inevitable.

At first Charlotte was constrained to submit to my presence. We must meet at the bedside of her brother, and the very morning of her arrival, when it was my turn to keep the invalid company, toward eleven o’clock, I found her there talking with him, while the marquise questioned Sister Anaclet, both speaking in low tones and standing near the window.

Lucien, from whom the coming of his mother and sister had been concealed, showed in his face and in his gestures the excited and almost feverish joy which is seen in convalescents; he saluted me with his gayest smile, and taking my hand said to his sister:

“If you only knew how good M. Greslon has been to me all these days!”

She did not reply, but I saw that her hand, which lay on the pillow near her brother’s cheek, shook as with a chill. She made an effort to look at me without betraying herself. Without doubt my face expressed an emotion that touched her. She felt that to leave unnoticed the innocent remark of her brother would make me feel badly, and, in the voice of past days, her sweet and living voice, she said, without addressing me directly:

“Yes, I know it and I thank him for it. We all thank him very much.”

She did not add another word. I am sure that if I had taken her hand at that moment she would have fainted before me, she was so moved by this simple conversation.

I stammered a vague response: “It is quite natural,” or something similar. I was not very collected myself. Lucien, however, who had noticed neither the altered tone of his sister, nor my embarrassment, continued:

“And isn’t André coming to see me?”

“You know he has gone back to his regiment,” said she.

“And Maxime?” insisted the child. I knew that this was the name of the fiancé of Mlle. de Jussat. These two syllables had no sooner left the lips of her brother than the paleness of her face gave way to a sudden wave of blood. There was an interval of silence during which I could hear the murmuring of Sister Anaclet, the crackling of the fire in the chimney, the swinging of the pendulum, and the child himself astonished at this silence.

“Yes, Maxime, is not he coming either?”

“M. de Plane has also gone back to his regiment,” said Charlotte.

“Are you going away already, M. Greslon?” asked Lucien as I rose brusquely.

“I am coming back,” I replied; “I have forgotten a letter on my table.” And I went out, leaving Lucien with a smile on his face, and Charlotte with her eyes cast down.

Ah! my dear master, you must believe what I am telling you; in spite of the incoherencies of a heart almost unintelligible to itself, you must not doubt my sincerity in that moment. I have so great need not to doubt it myself; need to say to myself that I was not lying then.

There was not an atom of voluntary comedy in the sudden movement by which I rose at the simple mention of the name of the man to whom Charlotte ought to belong, to whom she did belong. There was no comedy in the tears which burst from my eyes, as soon as I passed the threshold of the door, nor in those which I wept during the night which followed, in despair at this double and frightful certainty that we loved one another, and that never, never, could we be anything one to the other; no comedy in the starts of pain which her presence inflicted on me during the days which followed. Her pale face, her emaciated profile, her suffering eyes were there to disturb me, and this pallor rent my soul, and this spare outline of her body made me love her more, and those eyes besought me.

“Do not speak. I know that you are unhappy too. It would be cruel to reproach me, to complain, to show your hurt.”

Tell me, if I had not been sincere in those days, would I have let them pass without acting, when their hours were counted? But I do not recall a single reflection, a single combination. I do recall confusing sensations, something burning, frantic, intolerable, a prostrating neuralgia of my inmost being, a lancination continuous, and growing, growing always, the dream of putting an end to it, a project of suicide.

You see that I truly loved, since all my subtleties were melted in the flame of this passion, as lead in a furnace; since I did not find material for analysis in what was a real alienation, an abdication of my old self in this martyrdom. This thought of death came from the inmost depths of my being, this obscure appetite for the grave of which I was possessed as of physical thirst and hunger, in which, my dear master, you will recognize a necessary consequence of this disease of love, so admirably studied by you.

This instinct of destruction, of which you point out the mysterious awaking at the same time as that of sex, was turned against myself. This was shown first by an infinite lassitude, the lassitude of feeling much but never expressing anything. For the anguish in Charlotte’s eyes, when they met mine, defended her better than all words could have done.

Beside, we were never alone, except sometimes for a few minutes in the salon, by chance, and these minutes passed in a silence which we could not break. To speak at such times is as impossible as for a paralytic to move his feet. A superhuman effort would not suffice. One experiences how emotion, to a certain degree of intensity, becomes incommunicable. One feels himself imprisoned, walled up in his self, and he would like to get away from this unhappy self, to plunge, to lose himself in the coldness of death is where all ended.

That continued with a kind of delirious desire to make on the heart of Charlotte an imprint which could not be effaced, with an insane desire to give her some proof of love, against which neither the tenderness of her future husband nor the magnificence of her social surroundings, could ever prevail.

“If I die of despair at being separated from her forever, she must remember the simple preceptor, the poor provincial, capable of sentiments so powerful!”

It seems to me that I formulated these reflections. You notice that I say: “It seems to me.” For in truth, I did not comprehend myself at that period. I did not recognize myself in the fever of violence and of tragedy by which I was consumed. Scarcely do I discern in this ungovernable come-and-go of my thoughts a kind of auto-suggestion, as you say. I was hypnotized, and it was as a somnambulist that I determined to kill myself at such a day, at such an hour, as I was going to the druggist to procure the fatal bottle of nux vomica.

During all these preparations and under the influence of this resolution, I hoped for nothing, I calculated nothing. A force entirely foreign to my own consciousness was acting on me. At no time was I the spectator of my gestures, my thoughts and my actions, with an exterior of the acting “I” in relation to the thinking “I.” But I have written a note upon this point, which you will find on the fly leaf, in my exemplaire of the book of Brière de Boismont on suicide.

I experienced in these preparations an indefinable sensation of a waking dream, of lucid automatism. I attribute these strange phenomena to a nervous disorder, almost a madness, caused by the ravages of a fixed idea. It was only on the morning of the day chosen for the execution of my project that I thought of making a last attempt to win Charlotte.

I sat down at my table to write her a letter of farewell. I saw her reading this letter, and this question suddenly presented itself to me: “What would she do?” Was it possible that she might not be moved by this announcement of my intended suicide? Would she hasten to prevent it? Yes, she would run to my room and find me dead. At least, should I not wait for the effect of this last proof?

Here I am very sure that I saw myself clearly. I know that hope was born in me exactly in this way and precisely at this point of my project. “Ah, well!” said I, “I will try.”

I resolved that if, at midnight, she had not come, I would drink the poison. I had studied the effects of it, and hoped I should not suffer very long.

It is strange that all that day was passed in a singular serenity. I was as if relieved of a weight, as if really detached from myself, and my anxiety commenced only toward ten o’clock, when, having retired first, I had placed the letter on the table in the room of the young girl.

At half-past ten I heard through my partly-open door the marquis, the marquise and Charlotte ascending the stairs. They stopped to talk a few minutes in the passage, then there were the customary good-nights, and each entered a separate chamber.

Eleven o’clock—a quarter-past eleven.

Still nothing.

I looked at my watch, placed in front of me, near three letters prepared for M. de Jussat, for my mother, and for you, my dear master.

My heart beat as if it would burst; but I wish you to note that my will was firm and cool. I had told Mlle. de Jussat that she would not see me the next day. I was sure of not failing my word if—I did not dare to strengthen what hope this “if” contained.

I watched the second-hand go round and I made a mechanical calculation, an exact multiplication: “at sixty seconds a minute, I shall see the hand go round so many times, for at midnight I shall kill myself.”

A noise of furtive and light steps on the stairs, which I perceived with supreme emotion, interrupted my calculation. These steps approached. They stopped before my door. Suddenly the door was opened. Charlotte was before me. I arose.

We rested thus face to face, both standing. Her face was distorted by the shock of her own action, very pale, and her eyes shone with an extraordinary brilliancy, nearly black, so dilated was the pupil by emotion, almost covering the iris.

I noticed this detail because it transformed her physiognomy. Ordinarily so reserved, her face betrayed the wildness of a being ruled by a passion stronger than her will. She must have lain down, then arose again, for her hair was braided in a large plait instead of being knotted on her head. A white robe-de-chambre, fastened by a cord and tassel was folded around her form, and in her haste she had slipped her bare feet into her slippers without thinking.

Evidently an insupportable anguish had precipitated her from her chamber into my room. She did not care what I might think of her nor what I might be tempted to say. She had read my letter, and she came, a prey to an excitement so intense that she did not tremble.

“Ah!” said she in a broken voice after the silence of the first minute. “God be praised, I am not too late. Dead! I believed you were dead! Ah! that is horrible! But that is all over, is it not? Say that you will obey me, say that you will not kill yourself. Ah! swear, swear it to me.”

She took my hand in hers with a supplicating gesture. Her fingers were like ice. There was something so decisive in this entrance, such a proof of love in a moment in which I was so excited that I did not reflect, and, without replying to her, I took her in my arms, weeping, my lips sought her lips, and through the most scalding tears I gave her the most loving, the most sincere kisses; that was a moment of infinite ecstasy, of supreme felicity, and as she drew away from me, with the shame at what she had permitted depicted on her face, always wild.

“Wretched creature that I am!” said she, “Ah! I must go away! Let me go away! Do not come near me.”

“You see that I must die,” I responded, “for you do not love me, you are going to be the wife of another, we shall be separated, and forever.”

I took the dark vial from the table and showed it to her by the light of the lamp.

“Only a fourth of this flask,” I continued, and it is the remedy for much suffering. “In five minutes it will be ended,” and gently and without making a single gesture that would force her to defend herself: “Go away now, and I thank you for having come. Before a quarter of an hour I shall have ceased to feel what I am feeling now, this intolerable privation of you for so many months. Come, adieu, do not take away my courage.”

She had trembled when the flame had lighted up the black liquid. She extended her hand and snatched the flask away, saying: “No! No!” She looked at it, read the inscription on the red label and trembled. Her countenance became still more changed. A wrinkle hollowed itself between her eyebrows. Her lips trembled. Her eyes expressed the agony of a last anxiety, then, in a voice almost harsh, jerking her words as if they were drawn from her by a torturing and irresistible power.

“I, too,” said she, “I have suffered much, I have struggled hard. No,” she continued, advancing toward me and taking me by the arm, “you must not go alone, not alone. We will die together. After what I have done, it is all that is left.” She put the vial to her lips, but I took it away from her, and with a smile almost insane she continued: “To die, yes, to die here, near you, with you,” and she approached again, laying her head on my shoulder, so that I felt her soft hair against my cheek. “So! Ah! it is a long time that I have loved you, so long I can tell you the truth now, since I shall pay for it with my life. You will take me with you, we will go away together, both of us.”

“Yes! yes,” I answered, “we will die together. I swear it to you. But not immediately. Ah! leave me time to feel that you love me.” Our lips were again united, but this time she returned my kisses. Ah! Those were kisses in which the ecstasy of the senses and of the soul were deliciously confounded, in which the past, the present, the future were abolished to give place to love alone, to the painful, the intoxicating madness of love. This frail body, this living statuette of Tanagra was mine in its grace and innocence, and it seemed to me that this hour was not real, it so far surpassed my hopes, almost my desire.

In the softened light of the lamp and of the half-extinguished fire, the delicacy of her features, her consummate pallor, her disordered hair, made her seem an apparition, and it was with a phantom’s voice, a voice beyond life, that she spoke to me, relating the long history of her sentiments for me.

She said that she had loved at the first look and without suspecting it; then how she had suffered at my sadness and at my confidence; how she had dreamed of being my friend, a friend who would gently console me; then the fearful light which my declaration in the forest had suddenly thrown upon her heart, and that she had sworn to put an abyss between us.

She recounted her struggles when she received my letters, and her vain resolutions not to read them, and the folly of her engagement in order that all might be irremediable, and her return, and the rest. She found, to reveal to me the secret and cruel romance of her tenderness, phrases modest and impassioned, which fell from the mysterious brim of the soul as tears fall from the brim of the eyes. She said: “I could not if I wished efface these griefs, so much do I need to feel that I have lived for you.” She said: “You will let me die first, that I may not see you suffer.” And she wrapped me in her hair, and upon her face which I had known so controlled was a kind of ecstasy of martyrdom, a supernatural joy mingled with a profound grief, an exaltation mingled with remorse.

When she was silent, clasped in my arms, absorbed in me, we could hear the wind which moaned outside the closed windows, and this sleeping château, in its peaceful silence, was already the tomb, the tomb toward which we were going, drawn out of life by the ardor of love which had thus thrown us heart to heart.

It is here, my dear master, where comes the most singular episode of this adventure, the one which men will call the most shameful; but for you and me these words have no meaning, and I will have the courage to tell you all.

I had been sincere, and sincere without the shadow of calculation, in the resolution of suicide which caused me to buy the nux vomica, and then to write to Charlotte. When she had come, when she had fallen into my arms and cried: “Let us die together!” I responded: “Let us die together,” with the most perfect good faith. It had appeared so simple, so natural, so easy for us to go away together. You, who have written some strong pages upon the vapor of illusion created in us by physical causes, which is like that intoxication produced by wine, you will not judge me a monster for having felt this vapor dissipate, this intoxication disappear with possession.

Charlotte had placed her head on my breast and she fell asleep, exhausted by the excess of her emotions. I looked at her and I felt, without knowing how, that I fell back from my state before this happiness, to the reflective, philosophic, and lucid one which had been mine, and which a sorcery had metamorphosed into another.

I looked at Charlotte, and thought that in a few hours this adorable body, animated at this moment by all the ardors of life, would be immovable, cold, dead—dead this mouth which trembled still with my kiss, dead these beautiful eyes shaded under their trembling lids, dead this mind filled with me, intoxicated of me!

I repeated mentally several times this word: “Dead, dead, dead,” and what it represents of a sudden falling into the night, of an irreparable fall into the darkness, the cold, the emptiness, oppressed my heart.

This entrance into the gulf without bottom of annihilation which had seemed, not only easy, but profoundly desirable when the fury of unfortunate love dominated me—suddenly, and this fury once appeased, appeared to me the most formidable of actions, the most foolish, the most impossible of execution. Charlotte continued to keep her eyes closed. The emaciation of her poor face, rendered more perceptible by the way in which the softened light revealed her features, told too plainly what she had felt for days. And I was going to kill her, or at least, to assist her to destroy herself. We were about to kill ourselves.

A shudder ran through me at the thought, and I was afraid. For her? For myself? For both? I do not know. I was afraid, afraid of feeling to grow numb in my most secret being, the soul of my soul, the indefinable center of all our energy. And suddenly by a sudden facing about of ideas like to that of the dying who throw a last look upon their existence, and who perceive, in the mirage of a secret regret, the joys known or coveted, the vision was evoked of that life, all thought of which I had turn by turn desired and abjured.

I saw you in your little cell, my dear master, in meditation, and the universe of intelligence developed before me the splendor of its horizons. My personal works, this brain of which I had been so proud, this Self cultivated so complaisantly, I was about to sacrifice all these treasures.

“To your pledged word,” ought I to have responded? “To a caprice of excitement,” I did respond. Strictly, this suicide had a signification, when to be forever separated from Charlotte filled me with despair. But now? We love each other, we belong to each other. Who can prevent us, young and free, from fleeing together, if on the next day we cannot endure separation? This hypothesis of an elopement brought before my mind the image of Count André. Why not make a note of this also? An exhilarating titillation of self-love ran through my heart at this souvenir.

I looked at Charlotte again, and I felt filled with the most ferocious pride. The rivalry instituted by my secret envy between her brother and myself awoke again in a start of triumph. There is a celebrated proverb which says that all animals are sad after pleasure: “Omne animal.” It was not sadness that I felt then, but an absolute drying up of my tenderness, a rapid return—rapid as the action of a chemical precipitation—to a state of mind anterior.

I do not believe that this displacement of sensibility could have taken more than half an hour. I continued to regard Charlotte, while abandoning myself to these passage of ideas, with the delight of a reconquered liberty.

The fullness of the voluntary and reflective life flowed in me now, as the water of a river whose dam has been raised. The passion for this absent child had raised up a barrier against which the flood of my old sentiment was dammed up. This barrier thrown down, I became myself again. She was sleeping. I heard her light, equal breath, then suddenly a great sob, and she awoke:

“Ah!” said she, pressing me to her in a convulsive fashion, “you are here, you are here. I had lost consciousness. I dreamed. Ah! what a dream! I saw my brother come toward you. Oh! the horrible dream!”

She kissed me again, and, as her mouth was pressed to mine, the clock struck. She listened and counted the strokes.

“Four o’clock,” said she, “it is time—farewell, my love, farewell.”

She embraced me again. Her face had become calm in her exaltation, almost smiling.

“Give me the poison,” said she in a firm voice.

I remained immovable without answering.

“You are afraid for me,” she resumed; “I shall know how to die. Give it to me.” I rose, still without replying. She sat up and clasped her hands without looking at me. Was she praying? Was this the last effort of this soul to extract the love of life which pushes its roots so deeply in a creature of twenty years?

My resolution to prevent this double suicide was now absolute. I had the coolness to seize the brown vial from the table and carry it to a wardrobe and lock it. These preparations of which she took no notice no doubt seemed long to Charlotte, for she turned toward me:

“I am ready,” said she.

She saw my empty hands. The ecstatic expression changed to one of extreme anguish, and her voice grew harsh as she said:

“The poison! Give me the poison!” Then as if responding to a thought which suddenly came to her mind, she added feverishly: “No, it is not possible.”

“No,” cried I, falling on my knees before her, and seizing her hands. “No, you are right, it is not possible. I cannot let you die before me, for I should be your assassin. I pray you, Charlotte, do not ask me to realize this fatal project. When I bought the poison I was mad, I thought that you did not love me. I wished to kill myself. Oh! how sincerely! But now that you do love me, that I know it, that you have given yourself to me, no I cannot, I will not. Let us live, my love, let us live, consent to live. We will go away together, if you will. And if you will not, if you repent of this confession of your regard, well! I will suffer the martyrdom; but, I swear to you, this shall be as if it had never been—I will not trouble your life. But to help you to die, to kill yourself, you so young, so fair, oh no, no, do not ask me to do it.”

How many times I spoke thus to her, I do not know. I saw on her face a sweet emotion, a woman’s feebleness, the “yes” of the look which gives the lie to the “no” of the mouth. She was silent, then she fixed her eyes on me, and now they were bright with a tragic fire. She had withdrawn her hands from mine, crossed her arms upon her breast, and with her hair falling all around her, as if withdrawn from me by an invincible horror, she said, when I had ceased to supplicate her:

“So you will not keep your word?”

“No,” I stammered, “I cannot. I cannot. I did not know what I said.”

“Ah!” said she with a cruel disdain on her beautiful lips, “but tell me then that you are afraid! Give me the poison. I will give you back your word. I will die alone. But to have drawn me thus into the snare, you coward! coward! coward!”

Why did I not spring up under this outrage, why did I not take the bottle of poison, why did I not put it to my lips there before her and say: “See if I am a coward?” I do not understand why I did not when I think of it, when I remember the implacable contempt printed on her face. It must be that I was afraid, I who would now go to the scaffold without trembling, I who have had the courage to be silent for three months, thus risking my life. But now an idea sustains me, coldly, intellectually conceived while during that frightful scene there was a confusion of all the forces of my mind, between my surcharged sensations of the last months and those of the present hour, and, sitting down on the carpet, as if I had no longer energy enough to hold myself up, I shook my head, and said: “No, no.”

This time it was she who did not respond. I saw her mass her beautiful hair and twist it into a knot; put her feet into her slippers, and wrap her white robe around her. She sought with her eyes for the dark flask with the red label, and, seeing it no longer on the table, she walked toward the door, then, without even turning her head, she disappeared after darting at me the terrible word:

“Coward! coward!”

I remained there a long time. Suddenly a frightful uneasiness seized my heart. If Charlotte, exasperated as she was, should attempt her life! A prey to the terrors of this new anguish, I dared to cross the corridors and go down the stairs to her room, and then, putting my ear against the door, I heard a noise, a moaning, a sign of what drama was being acted behind this thin rampart of wood which I could have burst open with my shoulder quickly enough to bring help.

The first noises of the château were rising from the basement. The servants were getting up. I must go back to my room. At six o’clock I was in the garden under the young girl’s window.

My imagination had shown me Charlotte, throwing herself from the window, and lying dead on the ground with her limbs broken. I saw her shutters closed, and below, the plat-band in order with its line of rose bushes on which bloomed the last roses of the autumn.

She had told me, this night, of the charm which she tasted, in her hours of distress, when she loved me in silence, in leaning above this bed of roses and inhaling the aroma of these sweet flowers, spread on the breeze.

I picked one, and its perfume almost made me faint.

To deceive an anxiety which each moment made more intense, I walked straight on, into the country bathed in vapor, in this gray morning of November. I went very far, since I passed the village of Saulzet-le-Froid, and yet, at eight o’clock, I was back taking my breakfast, or seeming to do so, in the dining-room of the château.

This was the time, I knew, for the maid to go into Mlle. de Jussat’s room. If anything had happened this girl would call out immediately. With what inexpressible comfort I saw her come down and go toward the kitchen with the salver prepared for the tea!

Charlotte had not taken her life.

Hope returned to me then. Upon reflection, and her first feeling of anger passed, perhaps she would interpret as a proof of love my refusal to die and to let her die. I should know that also. It would be sufficient to wait for her in her brother’s room. The little invalid was at the end of his convalescence, and, though deprived of walks, he displayed the gayety of a child about to be born again into life.

He received me with all sorts of pretty ways, and his gracious humor redoubled my hope. He would break the ice between his sister and me. The hands of a young man and of a young girl join so easily when they touch around an innocent and curly head. But when Charlotte appeared, so white in a dress which brought out her paleness still more, pretending a headache to avoid the pranks of Lucien, the eyes burning with fever, I understood that I had believed too readily in a possible reconciliation.

I saluted her. She found a way to not even respond to my salutation. I had known three persons in her already; the creature tender, delicate, compassionate, the young girl easily startled, the lover impassioned almost to ecstasy. I saw now upon this noble visage the coldest, the most impenetrable mark of contempt.

Ah! the old and banal formula: the patrician pride—I was able to account for it and that certain silences kill as surely as the headman’s ax. This impression was so bitter that I could not resign myself to it. This very day I watched to have a word with her, and, at the moment when she was going to her room toward the close of the afternoon, to dress herself for dinner, I went to her on the stairs. She put me by with a gesture so haughty, with so cruel a “Monsieur, I do not know you any longer!” upon her trembling lips, a look so indignant in her eyes that I could not find a word to say to her.

She had judged me and I was condemned. Yes, condemned. She despised me for my fear of death; and it was true, I had felt that cowardly chill before the black hole, while she dared face the worst. I certainly had the right to say to myself that this alone would not have arrested me before the suicide of both, if pity for her had not been joined with it and my ambition as a thinker. No matter. She had given herself to me under one condition, and to this tragic condition I had responded “yes” before, and “no” after. Ah, well. She scorned me, but she had been mine. I had held her in my arms, these arms, and I was the first to kiss those lips.

Yes, I suffered cruelly between this night and my definite departure from the house. However, it was not the arid and conquered despair of the summer, the total abdication in distress.

I retained at the bottom of my heart, I cannot say a happiness, but a something of satisfaction which sustained me in this crisis. When Charlotte passed me without noticing me any more than some object forgotten there by a servant, I contemplated her response to my declaration of love. For another experience of that happiness, perhaps, I would have accepted anew the fatal compact, with the cold resolve to keep it. But this happiness had none the less been true.

And was this love really, irremediably ended? In doing as she had done Mlle, de Jussat had proved a very deep passion. Was it possible that nothing remained of it in this romantic heart?

To-day and in the light of the tragedy which ended this lamentable adventure, I comprehend that it was precisely this romantic character which prevented any return of love into this heart. She had loved in me a mirage, a being absolutely different from myself, and the sudden vision of my true nature having at a blow dispelled her illusions, she hated me with all the power of her old love.

Alas! with all my pretensions to the learned psychologist, I did not see the evolution of this mind, then! I did not even suspect that she would seek at any price the means of knowing me better, and that she would go, in the distraction of her actual disgust, so far as to treat me as judges treat the accused; in fine that she would read my papers and would not recoil before any scruple.

I did not even know enough to guess that she was not the girl to survive such a shock as the revelation of my cold-blooded resolutions written in my notebook brought upon her, and I did not think to destroy the bottle of poison which I had refused to give her.

I believed myself to be a great observer because I reflected a great deal. The quibbles of my analysis concealed from me its falsity. It was not necessary to reflect at this period, but to observe. Instead, deceived by this reasoning which I have just gone over to you, and persuaded that Charlotte loved me still in spite of her contempt, I tried to recall this love by the most simple means, the most ineffective at that moment.

I wrote to her.

I found my letter on my bureau the same day, unopened. I went to her door at night and called to her. This door was locked and no one replied. I tried to stop her again. She waved me off with more authority than the first time, without looking at me.

Finally, the heartbreak of this continuous insult was stronger than the ardors of passion which had begun to kindle in me. On the evening of the day in which she had thus repulsed me, I wept much, then I resolved upon a definite course. A little of my old energy had returned, for it was needed for this part which I had undertaken.

The next week M. de Plane and Count André were coming. This would have decided me if I had still hesitated. Their presence, in this double and sinister disaster of my love and of my pride, no, I would not, I could not endure it.

This, then, is what I had decided: The marquis had asked me to prolong my stay until the 15th of November. It was now the 3d. I announced, on the morning of this fatal 3d of November, that I had just received from my mother a letter which made me a little uneasy; then in the forenoon, I said that a dispatch had still further increased my anxiety. I asked then of M. de Jussat permission to go to Clermont early the next day, adding that if I did not return, would he be so good as to box the articles I had left and send them to me. I held this conversation in the presence of Charlotte, assured that she would interpret it in its true significance: “He is going away not to return.” I expected that the news of this separation would move her, and, wishing to profit by this emotion, I had the audacity to write to her another note, these two lines only:

“On the point of leaving you forever, I have the right to ask a last interview. I will come to you at eleven o’clock.”

It was necessary that she should not return this note without reading it. I placed it open upon her table, at the risk of losing all if the chambermaid should see it. Ah! how my heart beat, when at five minutes to eleven o’clock, I took my way to her room and tried the door.

It was not bolted. She was waiting for me. I saw at the first glance that the struggle would be hard. Her somber countenance showed too plainly that she had not permitted me to come that she might forgive me. She wore a dark silk dress, and never had her eyes been more fixed, more implacably fixed and cold.

“Monsieur,” said she as soon as I had shut the door, “I am ignorant of what you intend to say to me—I am ignorant of it and I do not wish to know. It is not to listen to you that I have allowed you to come. I swear to you, and I know how to keep my word—if you take a step toward me and if you try to speak to me without my permission, I will call and you shall be thrown from the window like a thief.”

While speaking she had put her finger on the button of the electric bell. Her brow, her mouth, her gestures, her voice showed such resolution that I did not dare to speak. She continued: “You have, monsieur, caused me to commit very unworthy actions. The first has for excuse that I did not believe you capable of the infamy you have employed. Beside I should have known how to expiate it,” she added, as if speaking to herself. “The second. I do not look for any excuse.” And her face became purple with shame. “It was too insupportable to think that you had acted thus. I wished to be sure of what you are. I wished to know. You had told me that you kept a journal. I desired to read it and I have done so. I went into your room when you were not there, and forced the lock of your notebook. Yes, yes, I did that! I have been punished, since I have read your infamous plans. The third. In telling you I acquit the debt which I have contracted with you by the second. The third,” and she hesitated, in my indignation, “I wrote to my brother. He knows everything!”

“Ah!” cried I, “then you are lost.”

“You know what I have sworn,” she interrupted; and she put her finger again on the bell. “Be quiet. Nothing worse can befall me than has already happened,” she continued, “and no one will do anything more for or against me. My brother will know that also, and what I have resolved. The letter will reach him to-morrow morning. I ought to warn you since you hold your life so dear. And now, go away.”

“Charlotte,” I implored.

“If in one minute you have not gone out,” said she, looking at the clock, “I will call.”

§ VII. CONCLUSION.

And I obeyed!

The next day, at six o’clock I left the château, a prey to the most sinister presentiments, trying in vain to persuade myself that this scene would not be followed by some terrible effect; that Count André would arrive soon enough to save her from a desperate resolution; that she would hesitate at the last moment; that some unexpected thing would happen.

As to fleeing from the possible vengeance of the brother, I did not for a moment think of it. This time, I had resumed my character because I had an idea to sustain me, that of allowing no person to humiliate me any further. Yes, although I had faltered before a loving girl and in the weakness of happy love, I would not do so before the threat of a man.

I arrived at Clermont, devoured by an anxiety which did not last very long, for I learned of the suicide of Mlle. de Jussat and was arrested at the same moment.

From the first words of the Judge of Instruction I reconstructed all the details of the suicide: Charlotte had taken from the flask which I had bought as much as she thought sufficient to cause her death. She had done that on the very day she had read my journal, whose lock I found had been forced. I had not noticed it because my mind was so filled with other things than these sterile notes.

She had been careful, in order to turn away my suspicions, to replace with water the quantity of nux vomica thus taken. She had thrown the flask out of the window because she did not wish her father and mother to learn of her suicide excepting through her brother. And I, who know the whole truth of this horrible drama, who could at least give my journal as a presumption of my innocence, destroyed this journal after my first examination; I have refused to speak, to defend myself—because of this brother! I have told you, I have drained to the bottom the cup of humiliation and I will do no more.

This man whom I so much envied from the first day, this man who represents death to me now, and who, knowing the whole truth, must consider me the lowest of the low. I do not wish that he should have the right to quite despise me, and he has not the right. He does not because we both are silent. But this for me, is to risk my life in order to save the honor of the dead, and for him to sacrifice an innocent person to this honor.

Of us two, of me who will not defend myself by taking shelter behind the dead body of Charlotte, and of him who, having the letter which proves her suicide, keeps it, to avenge himself on the lover of his sister by allowing him to be condemned as an assassin, which is the brave man? Which is the gentleman? All the shame of my weakness—if there be any shame, I wipe out by not defending myself, and I feel a proud pleasure, as a revenge for those terrible last days, at not having killed myself, at not asking of death the oblivion of so many tortures.

Count André must also reach the bottom of his infamy. If I am condemned, he knowing me to be innocent, he having the proof of it, he keeping silent, ah well! the Jussat-Randons will have nothing with which to reproach me—we will be quits.

However, I have told all to you, my venerated, my dear master; I have opened my soul to you, and in confiding this secret to your honor, I know too well whom I am addressing even to insist upon the promise I have taken the liberty to exact on the first page of this memoir.