The disciple

THE DISCIPLE
PAUL BOURGET
NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1901
COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS Norwood Press: Berwick & Smith, Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
I DEDICATE this book to you, my young countryman, with whom I am so well acquainted, although I may not know your place of birth, your name, your parents, your fortune or your ambitions—nothing but that you are over eighteen and under twenty-five years of age, and that you will search in our books for the answers to the questions which are troubling you. And the answers which you will find depend a little upon your moral life, a little upon your own soul, for your moral life is the moral life of France itself—your soul is her soul. In twenty years from now you and your brothers will hold in your hands the destiny of this ancient country, which is our common mother—you will be the nation itself. What will you have learned from our teachings? No man of letters, however insignificant he may be, but should tremble at the responsibility.
You will find in “The Disciple” the study of one of these responsibilities. May you find here a proof that the friend who writes these lines has the merit, if he possesses no other, of believing profoundly in the seriousness of his art. May you also find that he thinks of you with great concern. Yes, he has thought of you ever since the days when you were learning to read, when we who are now approaching our fortieth year were scribbling our first verses to the noise of the cannon which roared over Paris. We, in our study chambers, were not gay at that period. The oldest of us had just gone to the war, and those of us who were obliged to remain at college already felt the duty of our country’s rehabilitation press heavily upon us. We often thought of you in that fatal year, 1871. O! young Frenchmen of to-day—all of us who were intending to devote ourselves to literature, my friends and I, repeated the beautiful verses of Theodore de Banville:
Ye in whom I hail the light.