CHAPTER XV
PROJECTS
After M. de Cernay had gone, I felt grieved to think of his friendly advances and how I had repulsed them. But what he said about my great attractiveness seemed a ridiculous untruth, and made me distrust him. Then the bitter hatred with which he pursued Madame de Pënâfiel gave me but a poor idea of the kind of a friend he would make.
Perhaps I was mistaken, for women, in men's eyes, are outside of the law, if that can be; and the unkind things they say about women to each other, and which they say with a certain self-glorification, in no way injure their reputation as men of honour. M. de Cernay might then have possessed all the good qualities of a warm and steadfast friend; but it was impossible for me to receive him as such, or to behave to him in any other way.
I took great satisfaction, too, in having been able to conceal my real nature from him, and to have given him an absolutely false idea, or a singularly indefinite one, of myself.
It was always hateful to me to be understood or divined by people I cared nothing about; and for an enemy to do so was dangerous. Indeed, I liked to have even a friend kept out of my secret thoughts.
If there is in our moral organisation a culminating point, the source and termination of all our thoughts, our longings, our desires, if we are conscious that any one idea, whether good or evil, is steadily throbbing with every beat of our heart, this palpitating spot is the one that must be most sedulously hidden, most carefully defended from sudden attack, for there is the weak, the sore place, the infallibly vulnerable spot in our nature.
If envy, pride, or covetousness are your predominating characteristics, you should attempt to appear modest, kind, and disinterested, as compassionate and generous persons sometimes hide their kindliness under a rough exterior; for through education we instinctively conceal our vices and our virtues, as nature gives to certain animals the means of protecting themselves when attacked in their weakest place.
I had therefore pretended to the count that I was a terrible egotist and cynic, simply because I still felt an unconquerable yearning towards virtue and generosity. But, alas! it was only a yearning. The terrible lessons my father had taught me, besides filling my mind with distrust of all good motives, had developed to the highest degree my vanity and susceptibility. In fact, what I most dreaded, was to be taken for a fool, should I follow the enthusiastic instincts of my nature.
But though day by day suspicion and vanity were drying up the germs of these noble instincts, their souvenir still remained with me, and, like fallen man, I remembered the lost Eden. I could understand, though I felt it not, all the divine ravishment there must be in self-sacrifice and confidence.
On my part there was a continual aspiration towards an ethereal, radiant sphere, from the midst of which the most devoted friendships, the most passionate loves, smiled on me.