The disciple

by Paul Bourget

In my conversations with this rude and primitive priest I soon experienced the contrary feeling. This was enough to deprive this director of my youth of all authority over my mind. At the same time, and this is the second of the causes which detached me from the church, I found among men whom I then considered superior the same indifference to religious observances that I had observed in my father. I knew that the young professors, those who had come from Paris with the prestige of having gone through the Normal School, were all atheists and skeptics. I heard the abbé pronounce these words with concentrated indignation, in the visits which he made to my mother. When I accompanied her to the offices of Des Minimes as I had formerly to those of the Capuchins, I reflected on the poverty of intellect of the devotees who crowd to mass on Sunday mornings and mutter their prayers in the silence of the ceremony, broken only by the noise of displaced chairs. The flame of a clear and living thought had never been lighted in the heads that bowed with so submissive a fervor at the elevation of the host.

I did not at that time formulate this contrast with this distinctness, but I recalled the picture of those young masters as they emerged from the Lyceum, talking with each other in conversations which I imagined were like those of my father, where the smallest sentence was charged with science; and a spirit of doubt arose in my mind as to the intellectual value of Catholic beliefs.

This distrust was fed by a kind of naïve ambition which made me desire with an incredible ardor to be as intelligent as the most intelligent and not to vegetate among those of second rank. I confess that a good deal of pride was mingled with this desire, but I do not blush at this avowal. It was a purely intellectual pride, completely foreign to any desire for outward success. And, if I hold myself erect at this moment, and in this fearful drama, I owe it first of all to this pride—it is this which permits me to describe my past with this cold lucidity, instead of running away like an ordinary suspect, from the noisy events of this drama. I can see so clearly that the first scenes of this tragedy began with the college youth in whom was acting the young man of to-day.

The third of the causes which concurred in this slow disintegration of my Christian faith was the discovery of contemporaneous literature, which dates from my fourteenth year. I have told you that my mother, shortly after my father’s death, suppressed certain books. This severity had not relaxed with time, and the key of the paternal bookcase continued to click on the steel ring between that of the pantry and of the cellar. The most evident result of this prohibition was, to heighten the charm of the remembrance which these books had left of the half-comprehended pieces from Shakespeare, and the half-forgotten romances of George Sand.

Chance willed that, at the commencement of my thirteenth year, I should come across some examples of modern poetry in the book of French authors which served for the year’s recitations. There were fragments of Lamartine, a dozen of Hugo’s pieces, the “Stances à la Malibran” of Alfred de Musset, some bits of Sainte-Beuve, and of Leconte de Lisle.

These pages were sufficient to make me appreciate the absolute difference of inspiration between the modern and the ancient masters, as one can appreciate the difference of aroma between a bouquet of roses and a bouquet of lilacs, with his eyes shut. This difference, which I divine by an unreasoning instinct, resides in the fact that, until the Revolution, writers had never taken sensibility as the subject and the only rule of their works. It has been the contrary since eighty-nine. From this there results among the new writers a certain painful, ungovernable something, a search after moral and physical emotion which has become almost morbid, and which attracted me immediately.

The mystical sensuality of the “Stances du Lac” and of the “Crucifix,” the changing splendors of several “Orientales,” fascinated me; but above all I was charmed at something culpable which breathes in the eloquence of “L’Espoir en Dieu” and in some fragments of the “Consolations.” I began to feel for the rest of the works of these masters that strong and almost insane curiosity which marks the middle period of adolescence. One is then on the border of life, and he hears without seeing, as it were, the murmur of a waterfall through a cluster of trees, and how this sound intoxicates him with expectation! A friendship with a comrade who lived on the first floor of our house exasperated this curiosity still more.

This friend, who died young, and who was named Emile, was also an inveterate reader, but more fortunate than I, he suffered from no surveillance. His father and mother, who were already old, lived on a small income and passed the long hours of the day in playing, in front of the window which opened on the Rue de Billard, interminable games of bezique, with cards bought in a café and still smelling of tobacco. Emile alone in his room, could abandon himself to all his fancies in reading.

As we were in the same class, and as we went to and from the Lyceum together, my mother willingly permitted me to pass whole hours with this charming lad, who soon shared my taste for the verses which I so much admired, and my desire to know more of their authors.

On our way to the college, we took the narrow streets of the old town and passed the stall of an old bookseller of whom we had bought some second-hand classics. We discovered here a copy of the poetry of Musset in rather a bad condition, which would cost forty sous. At first we contented ourselves with occasional readings at the stall, but soon we felt that it was impossible to do without it. By putting together our spending money for two weeks, we were able to buy it, and then, in Emile’s little room, he on his bed and I on a chair, we read Don Paez, the Marrons du feu, Portia, Mardoche and Rolla. I trembled as if I were committing a great fault, and we imbibed this poetry as if it had been wine, slowly, sweetly, passionately.