“And besides?” I repeated in my bewilderment. “I am like my father—I prefer the Sleeping Woods.”
The enormity of my aberration caused me at that moment one of the keenest disappointments of my life. How could I even have thought of the possibility of realising such a preposterous scheme! So keen was my discomfort that I must have looked like a fool. But later, I detected with delight a feeling of shame that was quite new to me. When one has misused his all, such a discovery is full of enchantment. One perceives, beyond the dull fields he has travelled all too often, a shining country which draws him on, toward which he gazes as Moses must have gazed upon the Promised Land. I tried to regain my composure.
“Why?” I said at random.
“I do not know. Paris frightens me.”
Then she added gaily: “No doubt I shall never go there. So much the worse for me.”
We turned toward home. Except for a few insignificant words she said nothing more to me, as if a belated intuition had warned her not to prolong the conversation. During the following days, and up to the time of my departure, she carefully avoided a tête-à-tête. Or perhaps she did not even think of one. I too did not desire to meet her. It seemed to me that I had insulted her, and the cowardice of my intentions, if not of my acts, wounded my pride. This feeling was stronger even than her attraction for me. Her presence threw me into a state of extreme confusion which I bore with impatience. I was relieved to get away. At the Sleeping Woods I felt lowered and shrunken in my own esteem. And nothing is more unnerving.
I returned to my former life, but with this difference, that, disgusted with the gross cynicism cultivated by my free set, I went more into formal society. This was the worse for me, however, for I lost thereby that mental independence which some day might have been guided into more natural channels.
I frequented several salons, and was led to reflect bitterly not only upon the frailty of women, though I took advantage of it, but also upon their ability to forget, a frailty and an ability possessed in equal parts by those women whose broadly scattered amorous favours encourage young people in the delusion that such as they represent all womankind.
But this harmful and commonplace pessimism was of little account compared with another and much more dangerous habit of mind which I began to form. To it I attribute my unhappiness. The spectacle of society had infected me with the craze for scheming and success. I considered nothing comparable to the momentary triumphs achieved by a costume, a clever word or conversation. In things like these I saw the quintessence of glory. Should not a man seize his share of it? In my world it blazed in kohl-widened eyes, in rouged cheeks, in cunningly suggestive words and bared flesh. Like the trees of the forest, this mass of men and women flung themselves up to the light that glittered on them, and trampled down the weakest. Did not the desire to please, to prove themselves superior to each other, induce them to surpass themselves and put forth their greatest powers of seduction? And had I not recognized that I belonged to the trees of light? What did I care for closet scholars, for those creative minds whom their own thought satisfies, for lovers imprisoned by their love, for all humanity at labor? The obvious triumphs of society furnished me with sufficient excitement. Thus I began a course of frittering away a life which excessive prosperity and a lack of discipline had already marred, but which, thanks to a new emotion, I was on the point of being able to redeem, when of my own accord I threw away the opportunity.
In this way two years rolled by. They were two years of intoxication and poison. Pierre Ducal, one of those false friends whom public opinion rather than our own taste thrusts upon us, handed me the poison. His reputation he had built with a smile upon devastation and ruin, as well as upon frivolity, in which he quite understood his power, and he took pains equally with his liaisons and with his waistcoats. His assurance in the most delicate situations, that social dexterity which is often the possession of those who live only for the moment, I regarded as the refinement of intellect. He played with passions which he did not really feel. I too indulged in this dangerous game which wears away and withers the heart, and my emotions became mere vanities. By a miracle, it is true, I was going to recover my health, but in the moral as in the physical world one cannot inhale with impunity deadly germs. Their evil effects endure.