To be sure, a few of these men are frank, level in temperament, as plain to the eye as a smooth pebble on the beach; one touches them, holds them, grasps them in a moment like a big piece of silver in the hollow of the hand. But so many others are changeable, furtive, so many others are rough like ore in which only the fissures glisten and betray the inner nobility.
The more unresponsive and secretive they seem, without any obvious beauty, the more resolved I find I am to look upon them as a treasure, to search through them as if they were a soil that is full of wealth.
There are some of them that I love, there are some whom I think that I do not love. What does it matter! The interest I devote to them is not in the least dependent on the throbs of my heart. That one who never speaks and conceals, under his obstinate forehead, two little eyes of green glass,—certainly he does not naturally arouse my affection. Nevertheless, how different is the attention with which I regard him from the curiosity of a scientist watching the stirrings of fish in an aquarium! It makes me think, that attention, rather of the dizzy joy of the miser who weighs a gold-piece, the effigy on which doesn’t please him. Gold, nevertheless!
True! How could I feel bored with these faces turned toward me, with this choir of human voices singing, each in its own familiar key, yet blending into the masculine clamor of an orchestra?
Everything they say is precious; less so, however, than what they keep to themselves. The reasons they give for their actions astonish me at times; those they do not confess, especially those of which they themselves are ignorant, always fill me with passionate interest. A word, fallen from their lips like a piece of paper from an unknown pocket, arrests me and sets me dreaming for long days. About them I build up daring and yet fragile hypotheses which they either obligingly support or destroy with a careless gesture. I always begin again, delighting in it; it is my recreation. I enjoy finding that my hypotheses are right, for that satisfies my pride; I enjoy finding I am wrong, for that reveals to me leafy depths in my park that are still unexplored.
And then I know that only a small part of their nature is involved in our intercourse. The rest branches off, ramifies out into the perspectives of the world. I think of it as of that side of the moon which men will never see. I reconstruct with a pious, a burning patience that life of theirs which is outside this, their true life, endlessly complicated, linked by a thousand tentacles with a thousand other unknown lives. So must Cuvier’s mind have wandered as he turned and returned a fossil tooth, the only vestige of some vast, unknown organism.
There is all this in people, and then there is the past that each one has, his own past, his ancestors, the prodigious combination of actions and of souls of which he is the result. And there is his future, the unexplored desert toward which he stretches out anxious tentacles, and into which I dare to venture, I, the stranger, with trembling heart, the tiny lantern in my hand.
These are my riches today. They are inalienable: a man may flee from an indiscretion, he cannot escape the grip of contemplation and love. Even if he desired it, his very struggles would reveal his movements, betray the deepest secrets of his being, deliver him over bound hand and foot.
As for myself, eager to hoard up my treasure, I give myself up without a struggle. Rich in others, I yield myself into their hands. And if, in spite of myself, I attempt some evasion, am I not sure to render the prey all the more desirable, all the more beautiful?