The disciple

by Paul Bourget

My father, who died when I was very young, was of Lorraine extraction. He held at Clermont the position of engineer of roads and bridges. He was a slender man of feeble health, with a face almost beardless, and marked with a melancholy serenity which touched me, when I think of him, after all these years. I see him again in his study, through whose windows may be viewed the immense plain of the Limagne, with the graceful eminence of the Puy de Crouël quite near, and in the distance the dark line of the mountains of Forez.

The railway station was near our house, and the whistling of the trains was constantly heard in this quiet study. I used to sit on the carpet in the corner by the fire, playing without making any noise, and this strident call produced on my mind a strange impression of mystery, of distance, of the flight of time, and of life which endures to the present.

My father traced with his chalk upon a blackboard enigmatic signs, geometric figures or algebraic formulas, with that clearness of the curves, or the letters which revealed the habitual method of his being. At other times he wrote, standing at an architect’s table which he preferred to his desk, a table consisting simply of a white wood board placed on trestles. The large books on mathematics arranged with the most minute care in the bookcase, and the cold faces of savants, engraved in copperplate and framed under glass, were the only objects of art with which the walls were decorated.

The clock which represented the globe of the world, two astronomical maps which hung above the desk, and upon this desk the calculating ruler with its figures and its copper slide, the square, the compass, the T rule. I recall them all, at will, the smallest details of this room whose whole atmosphere was thought, and these images aid me to comprehend how from my infancy the dream of a purely ideal and contemplative existence became elaborated in me, favored by heredity.

My later reflections have shown me, in several traits of my character, the result transmitted under form of instinct of the life of abstract study that my father led. I have, for example, always felt a singular horror of action, so much so that, making a simple visit caused my heart to pant and the slightest physical exercise was intolerable to me, such as wrestling with another person; even to discuss my most cherished ideas appeared to me, and still appears, almost impossible.

This dread of action is explained by the excess of brainwork which, pushed too far, isolates man in the midst of the realities which he hardly endures, because he is not habitually in contact with them. I feel that this difficulty of adapting myself to facts comes to me from this poor father; from him also comes this faculty of generalization, which is the power, but at the same time the mania of my mind; and it is also his work that a morbid predominance of the nervous system has rendered my will so wild at certain times.

My father, who was still young when he died, had never been robust. He was obliged at the growing age to undergo the trial of preparation for the Polytechnic School which is ruinous to the soundest health. With narrow shoulders and with limbs weakened by long sittings at sedentary meditations, this savant with transparent hands seemed to have in his veins, instead of red globules of generous blood, a little of the dust of the chalk which he handled so much.

He did not transmit to me muscles capable of counterbalancing the excitability of my nerves, so that with this faculty of abstraction, I owe to him a kind of ungovernable intemperance of desire. Every time that I have ardently wished for anything it has been impossible to repress this covetousness. This is a hypothesis which has often come to me when I have been analyzing myself, that abstract natures are more incapable than others of resisting passion, when passion is aroused, perhaps because the daily relation between action and thought is broken in them.

Fanatics would be the most signal proofs of this. I have seen my father, usually so patient and gentle, so overcome by the violence of anger as almost to faint. In this I am also his son, and through him the descendant of a grandfather as ill-balanced, a sort of primitive genius, who, half-peasant, had risen by force of mechanical inventions to be a civil engineer, and was then ruined by lawsuits.

On this side of my race there has always been a dangerous element, something wild, at times, by the side of constant intellectuality. I formerly considered this double nature a superior condition; the possible ardor of passion joined with this continuous energy of abstract thought. It was my dream to be at the same time frenzied and lucid, the subject and the object, as the Germans say, of my analysis; the subject who studies himself and finds in this study a means of exaltation and of scientific development. Alas! Whither has thy chimera led me? But it is not the time to speak of effects, we are still with the causes.