The disciple

by Paul Bourget

Be neither of these young men, my young friend! Be neither the brutal positivist who abuses the world of sense, nor the disdainful and precocious sophist who abuses the world of thought and feeling. Let neither the pride of life nor that of intellect make of you a cynic and a juggler of ideas! In such times of troubled conscience and conflicting doctrines cling as you would to a safe support to Christ’s words: “The tree is known by its fruit.” There is one reality which you cannot doubt, for you possess it, you feel it, you see it every moment, it is your own soul. Among the thoughts which assail you, are those which render your soul less capable of loving, less capable of desire. Be sure that these ideas are false to a degree, however subtle they seem, adorned as they are with the finest names and sustained by the magic of the most splendid talents. Exalt and cultivate these two great virtues, these two energies, without which only blight and final agony ensue—Love and Will. The sincere and modest Science of to-day recognizes that the realm of the Unknowable extends beyond the limit of its analysis. The venerable Littré, who was a saint, has magnificently spoken of this ocean of mystery which beats against our shore, which we see stretching before us, and for which we have neither bark nor sail. Have the courage to respond to those who will tell you that beyond this ocean is emptiness, an abyss of darkness and death; “You do not know that.” And since you know, since you feel that there is a soul within you, labor to keep it alive lest it die before you. I assure you, my boy, France has need that you should think thus, and may this book help you so to think. Do not look here for allusions to recent events, for you will not find them. The plan was marked out and a part of the book written before two tragedies, the one French, the other European, occurred, to attest that the same trouble of ideas and of sentiments agitates both high and humble destinies at the present time. Do me the honor to believe that I have not speculated on the dramas in which too many persons have suffered, and still suffer. The moralist, whose business it is to seek for causes, sometimes encounters analogies of situation which attest that they have seen correctly. They would rather have been deceived. I, myself, for example, would wish that there never had been in real life a person like the unfortunate Disciple who gives name to this romance! But if there had not been, if none existed, I should not have said what I am going to say to you, my young countryman, you to whom I wish to be a benefactor, you by whom I so earnestly wish to be loved—and to be worthy of your love.

PAUL BOURGET.

Paris, June 5, 1889.

THE DISCIPLE

I.
A MODERN PHILOSOPHER.

THERE is a story that has never been denied to the effect that the bourgeois of the city of Königsberg supposed that some prodigious event was disturbing the civilized world simply because the philosopher Emanuel Kant changed the direction of his daily walk. The celebrated author of the “Critique of Pure Reason” had that day learned of the breaking out of the French Revolution. Although Paris, may not be very favorable to such naïve wonders, a number of the inhabitants of the Rue Guy de la Brosse experienced an astonishment almost as great one afternoon in January, 1887, when they saw go out, toward one o’clock, a philosopher, who if less illustrious than the venerable Kant, was as regular and as peculiar in his habits, not to mention that he was even more destructive in his analysis. It was M. Adrien Sixte, whom the English call the French Spencer.

This Rue Guy de la Brosse, which leads from the Rue de Jussieu to the Rue Linné, forms part of a veritable little province bounded by the Jardin des Plantes, the Hopital de la Pitié, the wine warehouse and the first rise of Sainte-Geneviève. That is to say, that it permits those familiar inquisitions of glance impossible in the larger districts where the come-and-go of existence ceaselessly renews the tide of carriages and of people. Only persons of small incomes live here, modest professors, employees of the museum, students who wish to study, all young literary people who dread the temptations of the Latin Quarter. The shops are patronized by this clientele, which is as regular as that of a suburb. The butcher, the baker, the grocer, the washerwoman, the apothecary, are all spoken of in the singular by the domestics who make the purchases.

There is little room for competition in this square, which is ornamented by a fountain capriciously encumbered with figures of animals in honor of the Jardin des Plantes. Visitors to the garden seldom enter by the gate, which is opposite the hospital; so that even on fine spring days when crowds of people gather under the trees of the park, which is a favorite resort of the military and of nursemaids, the Rue Linné is as quiet as usual, and so also are the adjacent streets. If occasionally there is an unusual flow of people into this corner of Paris, it is when the doors of the hospital are opened to visitors, and then a line of sad and humble figures stretches along the sidewalks. These pilgrims of poverty come furnished with dainties for their friends who are suffering behind the gray old walls of the hospital, and the inhabitants of ground-floors, lodges, and shops are not interested in them. They hardly notice these sporadic promenaders, and their entire attention is reserved for the persons who go by every day at the same hour. There are for shopkeepers and concierges, as for sportsmen in the country, unfailing indications of the time and of the weather, that there will be in this quarter, where resound the savage calls of some beast in the neighboring menagerie; of an ara that cries, and elephant that trumpets, an eagle that screams, or a tiger that mews. When they see the free professor jogging along with his old green leather case under his arm, nibbling at a penny bun which he has bought on his way, these spies know that it is about to strike eight. When the restaurant boy passes with his covered dishes they know that it is eleven o’clock, that the retired captain of battalion is soon to have his breakfast, and thus in succession for every hour of the day. A change in the toilette of the women who here display their finery, is noted and critically interpreted by twenty babbling and not overindulgent tongues. In fine, to use a very picturesque expression common in central France, the most trifling movements of the frequenters of these four or five streets are at the end of the tongues, and those of M. Adrien Sixte even more than those of many others. This will be readily understood by a simple sketch of the person. And beside, the details of the life led by this man will furnish to students of human nature an authentic document upon a rare species—that of philosopher by profession. Some examples have been given to us by the ancients, and more recently by Colerus, in reference to Spinoza, and by Darwin and John Stuart Mill in reference to themselves. But Spinoza was a Hollander of the eighteenth century, Darwin and Mill grew up among the wealthy and active English middle class, whereas M. Sixte lived in the heart of Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. In my youth, when studies of this kind interested me, I knew several individuals just as entirely given up to abstract speculations. I have, however, never met one who has made me comprehend so well the existence of a Descartes—in his little room in the depth of the Netherlands, or that of the thinker of the Ethics, who, as we know, had no other distraction from his reveries than smoking a pipe and fighting spiders.

It was fourteen years after the war when M. Sixte came to live in the Rue Guy de la Brosse, where every denizen knows him to-day. He was at that time a man thirty-four years of age, in whom all physiognomy of youth had been destroyed by the absorption of his mind in ideas, so that his smoothly-shaven face indicated neither age nor profession. Some physicians, some priests, and some actors offer to our regard, for different reasons, faces at once cold, smooth, intent and inexpressive. A forehead high and tapering, a mouth prominent and obstinate, with thin lips, a bilious complexion, eyes affected by too much reading and hidden behind dark spectacles, a slim, big boned body, always clothed in a shaggy cloth overcoat in winter, and in some thin material in summer. His shoes tied with strings, his hair long and prematurely gray and very fine, under one of those hats called gibus, which fold up mechanically—such was the appearance presented by this savant, whose every action was as scrupulously regulated as those of an ecclesiastic. He occupied an apartment at a rent of seven hundred francs on the fourth floor, which consisted of a bedroom, a study, a dining-room about as large as the cabin of a wherry, a kitchen and a servant’s room, the whole commanding a very extensive view. The philosopher could see from his windows the Jardin des Plantes with the hills of Père-la-Chaise in the distance; beyond, to the left, a kind of hollow which marked the course of the Seine. The Orléans station and the dome of La Salpêtrière rose directly in front; and, to the right, the mass of cedars looked black against the green or bare trees of the labyrinth. The smoke of factories wreathed upward on a clear or gray sky from every corner of the wide landscape, from which arose a sound like the roar of a distant ocean, broken by the whistlings of steam engines. In choosing this Thebais, M. Sixte had no doubt yielded to a general though inexplicable law of meditative nature. Are not nearly all cloisters built in places which permit an extended view? Perhaps these unlimited and confused prospects favor concentration of the mind, which might otherwise be distracted by details too near and circumstantial? Perhaps recluses find the pleasure of contrast between their dreamy inaction and the breadth of the field in which the activity of other men is developed? Whatever may be the solution of this little problem so closely related to another which is too little studied, namely, the animal sensibility of intellectual men—it is certain that the melancholy landscape had, for fifteen years, been the companion with whom the quiet worker had most frequently conversed. His house was kept by one of those servants who are the ideals of all old bachelors, who never suspect that the perfection of certain services implies a corresponding regularity of existence on the part of the master. On his arrival, the philosopher had simply asked the concierge to find some one to keep his rooms in order, and to recommend a restaurant from which he could order his meals. By this request he risked obtaining a service decidedly bad and a very uncertain sort of nourishment. It resulted, however, in unexpectedly introducing into the home of Adrien Sixte precisely the person who realized his most chimerical wishes, if an extractor of quintessences, as Rabelais calls this sort of dreamer, still preserves the leisure to form wishes.

This concierge—according to the use and custom of all such functionaries in small apartment houses—increased the revenue of his lodgings by working at a trade. He was a shoemaker, “in new and old,” as a placard read which was pasted on a window toward the street. Among his customers, old man Carbonnet—this was his name—counted a priest who lived in the Rue Cuvier. This aged priest had a servant, Mlle. Mariette Trapenard, a woman nearly forty years old, who had been accustomed for some years to rule in her master’s house while still remaining a true peasant woman, with no ambition to play the lady, faithful in her work, but unwilling to enter at any price a house where she would be subject to feminine authority. The old priest died quite suddenly the week preceding the installation of the philosopher in the Rue Guy de la Brosse. Old Carbonnet, in whose register the newcomer had simply signed himself rentier, had no trouble in recognizing the class to which this M. Sixte belonged, first from the number of books which composed his library, and also through the account of a servant belonging to a professor of the College of France, who lived on the first floor.