The disciple

by Paul Bourget

The impression received was so strong that I recall it as if it had happened yesterday. We had changed apartments, and had rented the third floor of a house in the Rue Billard, a narrow lane which distorts the shadows of Des Petits-Abres, in front of the palace of the Prefecture. My mother had chosen it because there was a balcony in which I was playing on this beautiful afternoon. My play—you will here recognize the scientific turn given by my father to my imagination—consisted in taking a pebble, which represented a great explorer, from one end of the balcony to the other, and among other stones which I had taken from the flower pots.

Some of these stones represented cities, others curious animals of which I had read descriptions. One of the parlor windows opened on the balcony. It was partly open, and my play having led me thither I heard my mother talking to a visitor. I could not help listening with that beating of the heart which the hearing my personality discussed has always produced. I learned afterward that between our real nature and the impression produced on our relations, and even on our friends, there is no more similarity than there is between the exact color of the face and its reflection in a blue, green, or yellow glass.

“Perhaps,” said the visitor, “you are mistaken in regard to poor Robert, at ten years the character is not at all formed.”

“God grant that it may be so,” replied my mother, “but I am afraid he has no heart. You cannot imagine how hard he has been since his father’s death. The next day even he seemed to have forgotten all about it. And he has never said a word since—such a word as makes you feel that one is thinking of another you now. When I speak to him of his father, he hardly answers me. You would think he had never known the man who was so good to him.”

I have read somewhere that when Merimée was quite a child he was one day scolded by his mother and then sent out of the room. He was scarcely gone when his mother burst out laughing. The child heard the laugh which showed him that the irritation had been feigned, and he felt a feeling of distrust rise in his heart which always remained. This anecdote impressed me very strongly.

The impression of the celebrated writer offered a startling analogy with the effect which this fragment of conversation produced upon me. It was very true that I never spoke of my father, but how false that I had forgotten him! On the contrary, I thought of him constantly. I never walked along the street, I could not look at any piece of our furniture without the remembrance of his death taking such possession of me that I was almost ill. But with this was mingled a fearful astonishment that he had gone forever, and it was all confounded in a kind of anxious apprehension, which closed my mouth when any one talked with me about him.

I know now that my mother could have known nothing of the workings of my mind. But, at that time, as I heard her thus condemn my heart, I experienced a profound humiliation. It seemed to me that she was not acting toward me as it should be her duty to act. I felt that she was unjust, and because I was timid, being still a young boy and shy, I became irritated at her injustice, instead of trying to tell her how I felt.

From that moment it became impossible for me to show myself to her as I was. And whenever her eyes sought mine to learn my emotions I felt an irresistible desire to conceal from her my inmost being.

That was the first scene—if anything so insignificant can be dignified by so big a name—followed by a second which I will notice in spite of its apparent unimportance. Children would not be children if the events important to their sensibility were not puerile.

I was, at this period, already passionately fond of reading, and chance had put into my hands a very different kind of books from those which are given as prizes at school. It was this way: although my father as a mathematician knew little of general literature, he loved a few authors whom he understood in his way; and when afterward I found some of his notes on these authors, I learned to appreciate the degree to which the feeling for literature is a personal, irreducible, incommensurable thing to borrow a word from his favorite science there is no common measure between the reasons for which two minds like or dislike the same writer.