‘Krowtosky looked much older than his age. He was, in fact, very young, Pessimism being one of the most pronounced symptoms of the malady of youth. He is still young, and the malady has yet some years to run. He came here with a letter to me from an old friend in Moscow, and a very big bundle of hopes.
‘I hardly know what he expected to make of Paris, but Paris, I imagine, made nothing of him. I did what I could for him, which was not much, and from the first I had no illusions whatever upon the nature of his probable success. I found a lady ambitious to read Turgenieff and Tolstoï in Russian. I sent Krowtosky to her; but after the second lesson she dismissed him on the plea of his unearthly ugliness; his heavy Calmuck face diverted her attention from Turgenieff’s charming women and Tolstoï’s philosophy, and gave her nightmares. I encouraged the poor fellow to come here, which he did, and most of you met him frequently. He was interesting in his way, very, but crude and boundlessly innocent. He had the queerest notions upon all things, and having sounded the Décadents, he professed to find them hollow. I think he suspected those gentlemen of an unreasonable sanity and an underhand enjoyment of life. The French Realists he dismissed as caricaturists; he said they were reading for the devil when he was drunk and in a merry mood. I daresay he meant the Czar.
‘He railed at the mock decay of modern civilised life, and imagined that a glimpse of Pessimism beyond the Pyrenees would prove instructive. He was convinced that he would find it there of less noxious quality, exhibiting the sombre melancholy and dignity of a great race fallen into poetic decay and unvexed by the wearisome febrile conditions of its development here. “You understand nothing of the spirit of calm fatality,” he would say, apostrophising the nation in my humble person for lack of a more enlightened audience. “You are everlastingly in strife with your own emotions and despairs; and these you decorate, as you idly decorate your persons, with persistent vanity and with wasteful care.” I deprecated the charge upon my own account, and assured him that it took me exactly four minutes to decorate my person each morning. Four minutes, I claimed, cannot be described as an exorbitant charge upon Time for the placing and adjusting of eighteen articles, and as he seemed to doubt the number, I told them off, including my hat and pince-nez. I mentioned a few Frenchmen who I thought accepted the luxury of unemotional despair calmly enough, and were as incapable of strife as a tortoise. He shook his head; he was not easily to be convinced. His Pessimism was so black that our sombre Maupassant was a captivating Optimist beside him. And provided with this meagre intellectual baggage, he set out for half-forgotten and ruined lands, beginning with Spain.’
‘He fell in for a fortune, I suppose,’ Gaston interrupted.
‘He had not a sou, which is the best explanation of an expensive voyage. Remark, my friends, that a man only becomes really extravagant and reckless upon an empty purse. An empty purse and an empty stomach are equally effectual in producing light-headedness, and vest us in the cloak of illusion. Illusion I opine to be one of the things that look best in rags. Krowtosky travelled third class, and was prodigiously uncomfortable, which, after all, is another method of enjoying life upon his theory. He ate Bologna sausages, and refreshed himself with grapes upon the wayside.
‘His first letter was dated from Bayonne. It was a long and a curious letter, and so interested me that I resolved to follow up the correspondence with vigorous encouragement, for it was not an occasion to be missed by a student of mankind. I will read you some extracts from these letters, which I have here in a drawer of my writing-table.’
The packet of letters found, Rameau went on reading, with the perfect and polished irony and charm of enunciation that could cast an intellectual glamour over an auctioneer’s inventory. ‘“I have chosen you as the recipient of the impressions and incidents of my voyage,—why, I hardly know; I am not inspired by any strong sympathy for you. My esteem and my liking are very moderate indeed; you have a face that rather repels than invites confidence, and I ought to be discouraged by the fact that I have no faith in your sympathy for me, and have every conviction that you are the last person likely to understand me. The friend who would understand me, and for whom I should enjoy writing these impressions and the adventures that may lie ahead, is at present voyaging in far-off waters; I think he is somewhere about the Black Sea, but I don’t know his address, or when or where communication might chance to reach him. So, having cast about me for a confidant, choice alighted upon you; but you need not read my letters if they bore you. They are written rather for my own gratification than for yours. If I possessed literary talent, the public would be my natural victim....”
‘This was a flattering beginning, you will admit, but it sharpened my curiosity. After that I began to look forward to Krowtosky’s post-day, as some people look forward to the feuilleton of the morning paper. His queer minute handwriting never found me indifferent or unexpectant of diversion.
‘At Toulouse he wrote again: “A young girl got into the carriage with me. We were alone, and she soon gave me a visible demonstration of the strange eccentricities oddly explained by the single word love. Why love? It is simply a malady more or less innocuous and only sometimes deadly; but love, no! I was not flattered; I am above that weakness, because nothing pleases me. I was interested, however, and investigated the case with scientific calm. So might any physician have diagnosed a disease. It struck me for the first time as a form of mild insanity. I asked myself why the poets and romancers amuse themselves in writing of it rather than of the other fevers and bodily illnesses that overcome us. For everything about this young girl convinced me that love is but a sickness. I studied her gestures, her expression, her tones of voice and her attitudes; all served to prove my theory. One minute I offered to open the window, and the next I suggested that perhaps it would be better to close it. She assented. Though curious, it was rather monotonous, but she assented to everything I proposed. If I looked at her, she looked at me; if I looked away, she continued to look at me. After a couple of hours’ study, I felt that I quite understood love and all its phases. I found it in the main a silly game, and an excitement only fit for brainless boys and girls in their first youth. But the most remarkable feature of humanity is its crass stupidity; it is a monstrously shabby and feeble institution, male and female. This young girl, now; I daresay you and others would call her pretty. Bah! I can see but the ugliness of women. Behind their forehead thought does not work; their eyes only express the meanest and most personal sentiments. Big black empty eyes and sensual red lips; a round lazy figure and nerveless hands! I protest there is more intelligence and matter for study in a dog than in these insipid creatures, all curves and no muscles. Men, say they, don’t understand them. Are dolls worth understanding? They are actuated solely by impulse and personal claims. What is there in this worth understanding? I escaped from my conquest, now grown irksome, upon the frontier, and I am resolved never to give evidence of a similar weakness. It is degrading folly. What, for instance, can women see in us to inspire this most infelicitously-called tender passion, and, in the name of all that is eternal, what are we supposed to see in them to justify it?...”’
‘A sympathetic dog, to go snarling in that cantankerous way through life because the Almighty has seen fit to cast a flower or two across his path,’ growled the indignant Petit Saint Thomas, to whom love was the main object of existence.