The disciple

by Paul Bourget

The next day after that on which the marquis had issued the decree of proscription against analytical romances, Mlle. de Jussat entered the library at the hour I was there with her brother. She came to replace the volume of the Encyclopedia; and with a half-embarrassed smile:

“I would like to ask a favor of you,” she said timidly. “I have a great deal of time here, with which I do not know very well what to do. I would like to have your advice in regard to my reading. The book which you chose the other day gave me a great deal of pleasure.” She added: “Ordinarily romances weary me, but that one was very interesting.”

I felt, at hearing her speak in that way, the joy which Count André must have tasted when he saw the enemy whom he killed during the war put his inquisitive head above the wall. It seemed to me as if I, too, held my human game at the end of my gun.

The response to this request appeared to me so important that I feigned to be very much embarrassed. In thanking her for her confidence I said to her that she had charged me with a very delicate mission for which I felt myself incapable. In brief, I made believe to decline a favor, which I was charmed to intoxication to have obtained. She insisted, and I promised to give her the next day a list of books.

I passed the evening and a part of the night in taking and rejecting in my mind hundreds of volumes. At last I repeated aloud my father’s favorite formula: “Let us proceed methodically,” and I asked myself how books had acted on my imagination, in my adolescence, and what books?

I stated that I had been attracted most of all toward literature by the unknown of sentimental experience. It was the desire to assimilate unexperienced emotions which had bewitched me. I concluded that this was the general law of literary intoxication. I must then choose for this girl some books which should awake in her the same ideas while taking into account the difference of our characters.

Charlotte was refined, pure and tender. She must be led into the dangerous road of romantic curiosity by descriptions of sentiments analogous to her own heart. I judged that the “Dominique” of Fromentin, the “Princesse de Clèves,” “Valérie,” “Julia de Trécœur,” the “Lys dans la vallée,” the “Reisebilder” of Heine, certain comedies of Musset, in particular “On ne badine pas avec l’amour,” the first poetry of Sully Prudhomme and that of Vigny, would best serve my purpose.

I took the trouble to write out this list, accompanying it with a tempting commentary, in which I indicated in my best manner the shade of delicacy proper to each of these writers. That is the letter which the poor child had kept, and of which the magistrates said it seemed like the beginning of courtship. Ah! the strange courtship, and so different from the vulgar ambition of the marriage with which these gross minds have stupidly reproached me! If I had not a reason of pride for refusing to defend myself which I will give you at the end of this memoir, I would be silent from disgust of these low intelligences, of which not one would be able to comprehend an action dictated by pure reason. If they had only made you, my dear master, and the other princes of modern thought, my judges! Then I would speak, as I am speaking now to you.

The works thus designated arrived from Clermont. They were the object of no remark on the part of the marquis. It is necessary to have another reach of mind than that of this poor man to comprehend that there are no bad books. There are bad moments in which to read the best of books. You have a comparison so just in your chapter on “L’âme littéraire,” when you liken the sore opened in certain imaginations by certain readings to the well-known phenomenon produced on the body poisoned by diabetes. The most inoffensive prick becomes envenomed with gangrene.

If there were need of a proof of this theory of “the preliminary state,” as you say again, I should find it in the fact that Mlle. de Jussat sought in these books for things so diverse, for information about me, my manner of feeling, of thinking, of understanding life and character.