Like the rest! He felt a desire to convince himself that it had always been so with him. He went and opened a box, in which were piled six or seven note-books of different sizes. Some were made of sheets of school paper. There were two of Japanese paper. These note-books were journals of his life taken up repeatedly at unequal periods. In them he came upon pages scrawled on the desk of the study-room at school, pages blackened on the sides of boats, in hotel rooms, in this very drawing-room. He took up these note-books, and began to turn over the leaves, finding in them a former ego perfectly similar to the present ego in premature misanthropy, sudden and fleeting ardours of sensuality, murderous analysis, impotent hankering after unattainable delight, indolent languor and incapacity ever fully to feel anything, whether real or ideal.
The whole had combined to make of him a sort of child of the century, of the year 1883, but without elegy, a Nihilist of gallantry and without declamation.
The following is one of the pieces which his eyes, now gloomy and dull, dwelt upon, and which would have broken Helen's heart if, gifted with the magic faculty of second sight, she had discovered the melancholy torpor which even the gift of her person, following upon the gift of her entire soul, was inadequate to disturb.
"PARIS, May 1871.
"Terrible days. Vanaboste comes and tells us yesterday, at one o'clock, that we must get ready to leave, and that the pupils at Sainte Barbe have gone already with their head. The Panthéon is full of powder, and will soon blow up. Since morning the firing had been slowly, slowly drawing nearer—a strange noise! It was as though some one had shaken millions of nuts over the town in a gigantic cloth. Alfred and I spent the morning in the attic watching the flames of the conflagrations writhing against the sky. He was quite depressed, and I fiercely gay, with a nervous gaiety that forced me to the utterance of outrageous paradoxes—but were they paradoxes?—concerning the fine theories of our professor of philosophy last week. O vision of fate! His last lesson turned upon progress!
"We are packing up hastily in order to leave, when one of the masters comes in a state of terror through the little door opening upon the Rue Tournefort, which he bolts behind him. He tells us that the federates would not allow anyone to pass their barricades. It was with great difficulty that he himself has been able to return. We were a long way from the good-natured National Guardsman who said to us on Monday, at the doors of the Lycée: Shout "Long live the Commune!" boys, and you are free." Vanaboste was as white as my paper when he heard this news. The usher hit on the plan of having mattresses spread over the middle of the courtyard, so that if the Panthéon blew up we should fall with less violence. We remained for about two hours in this distress, we pupils fourteen in number, the two assistant masters, and the head master. Alfred and I, who, by an odd contradiction, were almost calm, talking together in a corner.
"In spite of the firing, which was constantly drawing nearer, and the bullets cracking against the walls, perhaps a hundred paces off, we had neither of us a perception of reality; the danger appeared to us to be something distant, dim, almost abstract. And we were talking—of what? Of our childhood. 'It has been a happy one,' he said to me, 'even here.' For once I emptied my heart to him, and let him see what I thought of the scholastic lupanar in which, owing to my guardian's selfishness, I have been obliged to grow up. After all, I prefer even this bagnio to his house.
"Through this useless talking the firing can be heard coming nearer. The Panthéon does not blow up. Suddenly a loud shout comes down from one of ourselves in the upper story, where, at the risk of receiving a bullet, he had stationed himself at the window. 'The Chasseurs are at the end of the street.' That was the most trying moment. My heart beat as though it would burst, my throat was choking in the expectation of what was going to happen. Undefined danger had left me calm. Exact, brutal, and present fact affected me unpleasantly. Some shots are fired quite close, then furious summonses with the butt-ends of guns shake the gate. The same usher who had shown his coolness in conceiving the precautionary measure of the mattresses, rushes forward in time to strike up the levelled guns of two chasseurs, who, blackened with powder, and with eyes gleaming in frenzy, would have fired at random into the crowd of us if the other had not been there. A lieutenant comes up, a little man in yellow boots, with strap on chin and pistol in fist. Vanaboste speaks to him, and we are saved.
"All this was yesterday. To-day we are again at our studies, a symbol of our childish life in the midst of this tumult of action. I turn over the leaves of an old book of spiritual philosophy with the pleasure of contempt, and after reading official phrases about God, the immortal soul, refinement of manners, moral liberty and innate reason, I close my eyes and see the Square of the Panthéon as it was last night: the dead lying with naked feet, because their shoes have been stolen; and with battered skulls, because their deaths have just been made sure, of by blows from butt-ends of guns; the splashes of blood, that feel sticky beneath the soles of our boots; the flames of the conflagrations in the distant sky; and on the footpath, lying on the same straw, and sleeping like wearied brutes, the little chasseurs who have taken the quarter. Homo homini lupior lupis."
"DIEPPE, July 1874.