The disciple

by Paul Bourget

It is one of those submarine chains of which you speak, and which I find to-day when I throw the sound to the very bottom of my heart. Under the influence of your books, and of your example, I became more and more intellectualized, and I believed that I had definitely renounced the morbid curiosity of the passions which had made me find exquisite pleasure in my guilty readings. Thus we retain portions of the soul which were very much alive, and which we believe to be dead, but which are only drowsing.

And so little by little, after an acquaintance of only fifteen days with this man, my elder by nine or ten years, and who was, all reality, all energy, this purely speculative existence of which I had so sincerely dreamed, began to seem—how shall I express it? Inferior? Oh, no, for I would not have consented, at the price of an empire, to become Count André, even with his name, his fortune, his physical superiority, and his ideas. Discolored? Not even that. The word incomplete appears to me the only one which expresses the singular disfavor which the sudden comparison between the count and myself diffused over my own convictions.

It is in this feeling of incompleteness that the principal temptation of which I was the victim resides. There is nothing very original, I believe, in the state of mind of a man who, having cultivated to excess the faculty of thought, meets another man having cultivated to the same degree the faculty of action and who feels himself tormented with nostalgia in presence of this action, however despised.

Goethe has drawn the whole of his Faust from this nostalgia. I was not a Faust. I had not, like the old doctor, drained the cup of Science; and yet, I must believe that my studies of these last years, by overexciting me in one direction, had left in me unemployed powers, which trembled with emulation at the approach of this representative of another race of men.

While admiring him, envying and despising him at the same time, during the days which followed, I could not prevent my mind from thinking. And I thought: “That man who would value him for his activity and me for my thought, would truly be the superior man that I have desired to become.”

But do not action and thought exclude one another? They were not incompatible at the Renaissance and later, Goethe has incarnated in himself the double destiny of Faust, by turns philosopher and courtier, poet and minister; Stendhal was romancer and lieutenant of dragoons; Constant was the author of “Adolphe” and a fiery orator, as well as duelist, actor and libertine.

This finished culture of the “I,” which I had made the final result, the supreme end of my doctrines, was it without this double play of the faculties, this parallelism of the life lived and the life thought?

Probably my first regret at feeling myself thus dispossessed of a whole world, that of fact, was only pride. But with me, and by the essentially philosophic nature of my being, sensations are immediately transformed into ideas.

The smallest accidents appear in my mind to state general problems. Every event of my destiny leads me to some theory on the destiny of all. Here, where another man would have said: “It is a pity that fate should have permitted a single kind of development,” I took it on myself to ask if I were not deceived in the law of all development.

Since I had, thanks to your admirable books, freed my soul and cast to earth my vain religious terrors, I had retained only one of my old, pious practices, the habit of daily examining my conscience, under the form of a journal, and from time to time I made what I called an orison. I transported, with a singular enjoyment, the terms of religion into the realm of my personal sensibility. I called that again the liturgy of the “I.”