"You are not following the proper rule. You spend in one week six months' energy; then you let yourself fall back into indolence; then, without moderation, you recommence to exhaust yourself with fatigue. That is not what health demands. To be effective, your work must be calm, concordant, harmonic. Do you understand? We must prescribe a method for you. But you have the fault of all novices—excessive ardor. Later on you will be calmer."
My brother said:
"You have not yet found your equilibrium. You do not yet feel terra firma beneath your feet. But have no fear. Sooner or later, you will succeed in grasping the law. That will come to you unexpectedly, when you least expect it."
He said also:
"This time, Juliana will surely give you an heir—Raymond. I have already thought of the godfather. Giovanni di Scordio will hold your son at the baptismal font. He is the worthiest godfather you could possibly find for him. Giovanni will inspire him with goodness and strength. When Raymond is old enough to understand, we will speak to him of this noble old man. And your son will be what we could not have been, what we have not been able to be."
He often returned to this subject, he often pronounced the name of Raymond, he prayed for the child to be born his incarnate ideal of the human type—the Model. He did not know that every one of his words was for me like the thrust of a poniard which exasperated my hate, and rendered my despair more violent.
Everyone conspired against me unknowingly, everyone was constantly distressing me. When I approached one of my family, I felt anxious and fearful, as if I were compelled to remain near a person who, holding some terrible weapon, knew neither how to use it nor its danger. I was in continual expectation of being wounded. To enjoy a short truce, I was compelled to seek solitude and flee far from my own; but in solitude I found myself face to face with my worst enemy, myself.
I felt that I was secretly going into a decline; it seemed to me that my life was ebbing away through every pore. At times there were reproduced in me conditions of soul that had belonged to the most obscure period of my past, henceforth so distant. At times I preserved only the intimate feeling of my own isolation amidst the inert phantoms of all things. For long hours, I had no other sensation but that of the continuous and crushing weight of life and of that of the slight throbbing of an artery in my head.
Then survened ironies, sarcasms against myself, sudden furious desires to rend and destroy, pitiless derisions, ferocious wickedness, an acute fermentation of the most abject dregs. It seemed to me that I no longer knew what indulgence, pity, tenderness, goodness meant. Every inner source of good was obstructed, dried up like fountains stricken by a malediction. And then I no longer saw in Juliana anything but the brutal fact, the pregnancy; I no longer saw in myself anything but the ridiculed person, the satirized husband, the stupid hero of the classic farce. The inner sarcasm spared none of my actions, none of Juliana's actions. The drama became metamorphosed for me into a bitter and farcical comedy. Nothing restrained me longer; every bond broke; a violent rupture took place. And I said to myself: "Why should I rest here and play this odious rôle? I will go away, go back into society, back to my early life, back to libertinism. I will close my eyes to everything. I will lose myself. What does it matter? I do not wish to be what I am, mire within mire. Phew!"
XXIII.