I who hold in equal abhorrence insipid or hypo-critical goody-goodies and brazen coquettes, had been attracted by this frank ingenuity, this assurance which was quite innocent of all effrontery. Our friendship had been formed on the tennis court. Jeannine, who was nimble and skilful and keen, was delighted to find a worthy opponent. She challenged me anew every morning. She fought obstinately and was annoyed if I paid her compliments. In the afternoon we went for walks, chaperoned by Madame Landry, or the little brother, and in the evening we both enjoyed our interminable discussions on the terrace where sweet-scented breezes blew.
The grandmother only put in an occasional word from her arm-chair, a little way off. Jeannine willingly avoided topical futilities. Literature, painting, music, or even politics—why not?—the occult sciences—a fruitful subject of conversation when the mysterious night is falling—she broached them all quite fearlessly. I have always had a taste for riding headlong through these preserves of metaphysics or ethics. Philosophers only venture there too gingerly, unravelling the thread of a theory. The most delightful recreation is to disport oneself there as if in conquered territory, to breast at a gallop some hilltop or other, where one breathes in draughts of pure air, whence one may cast a bold eye on life.
Jeannine was not at all apprehensive of these giddy escapades. It was an intellectual gymnastic, satisfying apparently the same taste for action and expansion which she showed in the physical sphere. And yet after one of these flights she used to feel the necessity of drawing breath and retiring upon some graceful standpoint, in the same way in which she would make a point of doing her hair and dressing for dinner, on her return from an expedition. If I tried to lure her on again, she resisted with a smile.
"No, now let's talk seriously."
Then I would see her withdraw into a fortress built of all she definitely believed and knew, opinions, reveries, and prejudices which, though she was charmingly logical, she owed to her race and education. The best of it was that once in refuge there, in full possession of her truths, the last thing she aimed at was to convert me. I, in my turn, was obliged to shut myself up behind ramparts; I had some all ready-made from whence I braved the world.
Oh! there was nothing very new in it, in this doctrine I had drawn from my reading and reflections, but I flattered myself that by having thought it over, I had made it my own private property. It was the eternal ego. Jeannine protested against it. She claimed that she was not at all a rebel to the requirements of logic, indeed I recognised her intellectual courage, her taste for sincerity. She had no religion to embarrass her, no faith with which she might be tempted to oppose the claims of her reason. Was she even a Catholic? No, simply a free-thinker, though she did not boast about it in order not to grieve her grandmother, who was, by the way, but a lukewarm dévote. She dreamt, however, that pure self-love was not the highest end, that there were great souls, and lesser ones, that from time to time, a little of the divine might inspire our dust....
Moonshine! I chaffed her: I made fun of all her would-be noble feelings; I discovered gnawing egoism in them; I raised this dreary God to a pinnacle. I went further; I was not afraid to unveil for her sometimes the depths of my nihilism. Dried up and incapable of experiencing the least emotion, I had adopted the standpoint, I told her, of considering the universe as a scene, life as a vulgar farce, denuded of rhythm and spaciousness, where each of us played a part. I did not envy that of any one else, and mine did not interest me in the least.
When I made such confessions Jeannine looked at me in silence; then she began to laugh:
"You're making fun of me!"