The Naiad: A ghost story

by George Sand

But I took good care not to do so; I watched over my physical and moral welfare like a youth bent upon the preservation of his existence. I worked, but not too much; I took walks regularly, I dwelt upon no mournful ideas, I abstained from all reading of an exciting nature. The reason for all this had its source in an obstinate but tranquil mania and, so to speak, ’twas mistress of itself. I wanted to prove to my own judgment that I neither had been nor now was out of my mind, and that there was nothing more certain, in my opinion, than the existence of the green ladies. I also wished to restore my mind to that state of clearness necessary to conceal my secret and to nourish it internally as the source of my intellectual life and the criterion of my moral existence.

Every trace of the crisis then rapidly disappeared, and seeing me studious, reasonable and moderate in all things, it would have been impossible to guess that I was under the dominion of a fixed idea, of a well regulated monomania.

Three days after my return to Angers, my father sent me to Tours on some other business. I spent twenty-four hours there, and when I returned home, I learned that Madame d’Ionis had been there to have an understanding with my father about the consequences of her law suit. She had appeared to yield to positive reason; she had consented to gain it.

I was glad that I had not met her. It would be impossible to say that so charming a woman had become repugnant to me, but it is certain that I feared more than I desired her presence. Her scepticism, which she appeared to have renounced one day only to overwhelm me with it on the next, had produced an injurious effect upon me, and had caused me inexpressible suffering.

At the end of two months, notwithstanding all the efforts I made to appear happy, my mother discovered the terrible sadness that permeated my mind. Everyone observed a great change for the better in me, and at first she was pleased with it. My manner of life was altogether austere, and my language as grave and sensible as that of an old magistrate. Without being devout, I professed to be religious. I no longer scandalized simple people by my voltairianism. I judged everything impartially and criticised without bitterness those of whom I did not approve. All this was edifying, excellent; but I had no taste for anything, and I bore my life as if it were a burden. I was no longer young, I experienced no more the ecstasy of enthusiasm or the allurements of gayety.

I had time then, notwithstanding my important occupations to write verses, and I would have made time in any case, even had none been allowed me, for I hardly slept any more and I sought none of those amusements that absorb three quarters of a young man’s life. I no longer thought of love, I fled from the world, I ceased to parade myself with men of my age before the eyes of the beautiful ladies of the land. I was retiring, meditative, austere, very gentle with my own people, very modest with everybody, very ardent in legal discussions. Thus I was esteemed an accomplished young man, but I was thoroughly unhappy.

And it was because I nourished with a strange stoicism, an insane passion without its parallel. I was in love with a ghost, I could not even say with a dead woman. All my historical researches resolved themselves into this. The three demoiselles d’Ionis had possibly never existed save in legend. Their history, fixed by the latest chroniclers at the period of Henri II, was already old and uncertain, even at that date. No evidence of them remained: no title, name or crest among the d’Ionis family papers that my father happened to have in his possession on account of the suit, not even a tombstone in any part of the country.

I was thus worshipping a pure fiction, engendered, to all appearance in the vapors of my brain. But this was precisely what I failed to be convinced of. I had seen and heard this marvel of beauty; she existed in a region that it was impossible for me to attain, but from which it was possible for her to descend to me. To solve the problem of this indefinable existence, and the mystery of the tie that bound us would have rendered me insane. I was conscious of the fact, I wished to explain nothing, to fathom nothing; I lived upon faith, which is “the evidence of things not seen,” a sublime madness, if reason is only to be proved by the evidence of the senses.

My madness was not so puerile as might have been feared. I nursed it as a superior faculty and did not allow it to descend from the heights upon which I had enthroned it. Thus I abstained from another evocation, lest I should lose myself in the cabalistic pursuit of some chimera unworthy of me. The immortal maiden had said that “I must become worthy, if she were to live in my thoughts.” She had not promised to reappear in the same form as I had seen her. She had said that this form did not exist and was but the product of my imagination caused by the elevation of my feelings towards her. I ought not then to torment my brain to reproduce her, for it might misrepresent her and cause some other image to obliterate her own. I wished to purify my life and cultivate the treasure of conscience, in the hope, that at some given time, this celestial figure would come to me of her own accord and talk to me in those cherished tones that through my unworthiness had been vouchsafed me for so short a time.

Under the influence of this mania, I was in the way of becoming a good man, and it was rather odd that I should be led to wisdom through madness. But all this was too subtle and too tense for human nature. This rupture of my soul with the rest of my being, and of my life with the temptations of youth, was gradually leading me on to despair, perhaps even to insanity.