He retraced the course of his youth. He saw himself young and incapable of devoting his activity to an ideal faith, a libertine incapable of steadying his heart upon a passion—powerless for self-surrender, belief, love! He went over the fatal list which had been drawn up certainly no less by his vanity as a seducer than by his curiosity as a debauchee. He sought again the names and countenances of the women who had given themselves to him, from those who had been his in rooms of infamy, where the mirrors of alcove and ceiling multiply the whiteness of naked charms, to those whom he had possessed in modesty and who required that endearments should be shrouded in the shadow of lowered curtains. What had he made of the first and of the second, of the impassioned and of the venal, of the romantic and of the depraved, of little Aline and of Juliette, of Madame de Rugle and of Helen? Instruments of sensation and nothing more. Could he remember a single one to whom he had been good and helpful, and who was the better for having known him? The prostitutes he had caused to commit an act of prostitution among a thousand others. The adulteresses had lied once more for him. His soul had not only been dead; it had spread around it the infection of its own essential death. With his keen intellect, his rare imagination, and all the implements of superiority that fortune had placed in his hands, what work had he been accomplishing since his youth? And all was to end in the moral assassination of a woman who had believed in him!
Then the weight increased in heaviness and he strove anew.
"Life and death of the soul! Words! Words! A trifling cerebral alteration and the soul is changed. The microscope would reveal the slight disposition of cells which has it that I have never loved. But why," he added "does this soul live by means of certain ideas and die through others? Why? I do not know, and there are many other things that I do not know. I talk of the brain. What is the brain? It is matter. And what is matter? No one knows, no one understands. What is the use of asking: Why this or why that? There is but one question: Why anything? And the only thing we really know is that we shall never be able to answer that question."
He perceived the gulf of mystery, the abyss of the unknowable which science shows to be at the basis of all thought and of all existence. Beneath the problem of his own particular destiny, he touched upon the problem of all destiny, and his moral pain was so intense that he felt a temptation to interpret, in a consolatory sense, the mystery wherein he felt drowned. Why should not the key to this enigma of life, undecipherable by reason according to reason's own avowal, be one of salvation, a key that should redeem the universal distress here below, that should restore life to dead souls such as his own soul, and deep peace to tortured consciences such as his own conscience? Why should there not be a heart like to our own hearts and capable of pitying us at the centre of that nature which has nevertheless produced us, us with our bitter or tender manner of feeling, with our appetite for the ideal and our infirmities, with our greatness and our depravity?
"But then," he reflected, "God would exist. I might throw myself upon my knees now in this hour of suffering, and say, 'Our Father, which art in heaven.' Our Father!"
When the young man had reached this stage in his reasonings, tears rose to his eyes. He who had known neither father nor mother was caused unspeakable emotion by this single phrase of the sublime prayer.
Then he immediately grew steady again. Thoughts came to him that were stronger than such mystic effusion. He was disputing with his intellect against his heart, and his intellect was always victorious. The objections to a belief in God, drawn from the existence of evil, took shape before him. How reconcile a Father's goodness with that law of reversion which wills it that the sins of some shall fall ceaselessly upon others? Of Helen and himself, which was guilty? Himself. Which of the two had committed a crime in love? Himself, by seducing this woman without loving her, solely to satisfy a whim of pride, weariness, and sensuality. Who was punished? Helen. Of the latter and Alfred, who was guilty? Helen. Who suffered? Alfred. Thus the sin of each, if there be sin, bears its poisonous fruit in the soul of another, and the same solidarity governs all the relations of men among themselves. The sons atone for the fathers, the just for the wicked, the innocent for the guilty! Ah! how is it possible, in presence of this uninterrupted transmission of misery, to believe in the existence of a principle of justice and goodness in that obscurity beyond the day?
"No," said Armand to himself, "just as errors are produced by the combined necessities of circumstances and temperaments, so are the consequences of these acts distributed at random—at least on earth."
The mystic effusion then returned: "On earth? Can there be then another world whereof this is but the symbol or the preparation? But how can any link subsist between this and that? How can any help come in hours of distress? Ah! if He were a heavenly Father, would not all suffering be in his sight a prayer?"
Through the tumult of all these contradictory thoughts, the unhappy man perceived that grand, unique problem of human life which religion alone can solve, that of knowing whether beyond our limited days, our brief sensations, our fleeting actions, there be something which does not pass away, and which can satisfy our hunger and thirst for the infinite. Armand was perhaps to become religious again some day; at the present moment he was not so, and he answered himself: