I had been introduced by the old master who recommended me, as a person of irreproachable nobility of ideas and character. This was enough to cause a very sensitive young girl to become interested in me in a very particular manner. Ah, well! I had no sooner recognized this interest than I thought how to abuse it instead of being touched by it.
Any one who had seen me in my room on the evening which followed this afternoon, seated at my table and writing, with a big book of analysis near me, would never have believed that this was a young man of scarcely twenty-two years, meditating on the sentiments which he inspired or wished to inspire in a young girl of twenty.
The château was asleep. I could hear only the steps of the footman as he extinguished the lamps on the staircase and in the corridors. The wind enveloped the vast building in its groanings, now plaintive, now soothing. The west wind is terrible on these heights, where, sometimes, it carries away in a single breath all the slates of a roof.
This lamentation of the wind has always increased in me the feeling of internal solitude. My fire burned gently, and I scribbled in my notebook, which I burned before my arrest, the occurrences of the day and the programme of the experience which I proposed to attempt upon the mind of Mlle. de Jussat. I had copied the passage on pity which is found in your “Theory of the Passions;” you remember it, my dear master, it begins:
“There is in the phenomenon of pity a physical element, and which, especially in women, is confined to the sexual emotion.”
It was through pity then, that I proposed to act first upon Charlotte. I would profit by the first falsehood by which I had already moved her, combining with it a succession of others, and thus make her love me by making her pity me. There was, in this use of the most respected of human sentiments for the profit of my curious fancy, something particularly contrary to the general prejudice, which flattered my pride most exquisitely.
While I wrote out this plan with philosophical text to support it, I imagined what Count André would think, if he could, as in the old legends, from the depths of his garrison town decipher the words which I had traced with my pen.
At the same time, the idea alone of directing at will the subtle movements of a woman’s brain, all this sentimental and intellectual clockwork so complicated and so tenuous, made me compare myself to Claude Bernard, to Pasteur and to their pupils. These savants vivisected animals. Was not I going to vivisect at length, a human soul?
In order to draw from this pity which had been surprised rather than provoked, all the result demanded, it must first be prolonged. To this end, I resolved to keep up the comedy of sadness by preparing for the day of an explanatory conversation, more or less distant, a long, touching romance of false confidences.
I devoted myself, during the week following our walk, to feigning a melancholy more or less absorbing, and to feigning it, not only in the presence of Charlotte, but also during the hours in which I was alone with my pupil, sure that the child would report to his sister the impressions of our tête-à-tête.