“Who could hinder God,” said the priest, “since he is all-powerful, from forcing the soul of the man who has committed murder to remain near the body from which it is separated? The soul would be there, in the mortuary chamber, hearing the sobs, seeing the tears of the friends, and yet forbidden to console them. It would be imprisoned in the winding-sheet, and there during days and days and nights and nights it would be present at the corruption of the flesh, which was once its own, there among the worms and the rot.”
Such images and such ferocity of invention abounded in his bitter mouth; they followed me into my sleep; the fear of hell was excited in me almost to madness. The Abbé Martel employed the same eloquence in presenting the decisive importance to our salvation which the approach to the communion table would have, and so my fear of eternal punishment led to a scrupulous examination of my conscience.
Soon these close meditations, this looking as through a magnifying glass at my slightest deviations, this continuous scrutiny of my inmost self, interested me to such a degree that no sport had any attraction for me in comparison. I had found, for the first time since the death of my father, an employment for this power of analysis which was already definitive and almost constitutive in me.
The development thus given to my acute sense of the inner life ought to have produced an amelioration of my moral being. On the contrary, it resulted in a subtility which, in itself alone, was a corruption, at least from the point of view of strict Catholic discipline. I became, in the course of these examinations of conscience, into which entered more of pleasure than of repentance, extremely ingenious, and discovering peculiar motives behind my most simple actions. The Abbé Martel was not a psychologist sufficiently acute to discern this shadow and to comprehend that to cut the soul to pieces in this way would lead me to prefer the fleeting complexities of sin to the simplicity of virtue. He recognized only the zeal of a very fervent child. For example, on the morning of my first communion I went in tears to confess to him once more.
In turning over and over again the soil and the subsoil of my memory, I had discovered a singular sin, the fear of man. Six weeks before, I had heard two boys, my comrades, at the door of the Lyceum, mocking an old lady who was entering the church Des Carmes, just opposite. I had laughed at their words instead of reproving them.
The old lady was going to mass; to ridicule her was to ridicule a pious action. I had laughed, why? from false shame. Then I had participated in it. Was it not my duty to find the two mockers and to show them their impiety, and make them promise repent? I had not done so. Why? From false shame; from respect for man, according to the definition of the catechism. I passed the whole night preceding the great day of the first communion in wondering if I could see the Abbé Martel early enough the next day to confess this sin. I recall the smile with which he tapped my cheek after having given me absolution in order to quiet me. I hear the tone of his voice which had grown very sweet as he said to me:
“May you always be what you are now.”
He did not suspect that this puerile scruple was the sign of an exaggeratedly unhealthy reflection, nor that this reflection would poison the delights of the Eucharist for which I had so ardently wished. I had not been satisfied, in the course of the preceding weeks, to analyze the conscience to its most delicate fibres, I had abandoned myself to the imagination of sentiment which is the forced consequence of this spirit of analysis. I had anticipated with extreme precision the sentiments which I should experience in receiving the host upon my lips. In my imagination I advanced toward the rail of the altar which was draped in a white cloth, with a tension of my whole being which I have never since experienced, and I felt, in communing, a kind of chilling deception, an ecstatic exhaustion of which I cannot describe the discomfort. I have since spoken of this impression to a friend who was still a Christian and he said: “You were not simple enough.” His piety had given to him the insight of a professional observer. It was too true. But what could I do?
The great event of my youth, which was the loss of my faith, did not, however, date from this deception. The causes which determined this loss were very numerous, and I have never clearly comprehended them until now. They were slow and progressive at first, and acted upon my mind as the worm upon the fruit, devouring the interior without any other sign of this ravage than a small speck, almost invisible, on the beautiful purple rind. The first was, it seems to me, the application to my confessor of this terrible critical spirit, a faculty destructive of all confidence, which, from my infancy, had so separated me from my mother.
I pushed my examinations of conscience to the most subtle delicacy and still the Abbé Martel did not perceive this work of secret torture which completely anatomatized my soul. My scruples appeared to him, as they were, childish; but they were the childishness of a very complex boy, and one who could not be directed unless he might feel that he was understood.