My quasi-mathematical habits of analysis were at my service in my project of healing, and I resolved the problem into its elements, after the manner of geometricians.
I reduced this question to this other: “What is love?” to which I answered brutally by your definition: “Love is the obsession of sex.” Now, how is this combated? By physical fatigue, which suspends, or at least lessens, the action of the mind.
I compelled myself and I compelled my pupil to take long walks. The days on which he had no lessons, Sundays and Thursdays, I went out alone at the break of day, after having arranged the hour and the place in which Lucien should join me with the carriage. I awoke at two o’clock. I went out from the château, in the cold of the half-twilight which precedes the dawn.
I went straight before me, frantically, choosing the worst paths, ascending the nearest peaks by the most abrupt and almost inaccessible sides. I risked breaking my limbs in descending the yielding sand of the craters, or upon the crests of basalt. No matter.
The orange line of the aurora gained the border of the sky. The wind of the new day beat against my face. The stars like precious stones melted away, drowned in the flood of azure, now pale, now darker. The sun lighted up, on the flowers, the trees and the grass a flashing of sparkling dew.
Persuaded as I am, of the laws of prehistoric atavism, I aroused in myself, by the sensation of the forced march and of the heights, the rudimentary mind of the ancestral brute, of the man of the caves from whom I, as well as the rest of mankind, am descended.
I attained in this way a sort of savage delirium, but it was neither the dreamed-of joy nor peace, and it was interrupted by the smallest reminiscence of my relations with Charlotte. The turn of a road which we had followed together, the blue bosom of the lake seen from some height, the outline of the slated roofs of the château, less than that, even the trembling foliage of a birch and its silvery trunk, the name of a village of which she had spoken, on an advertisement, was sufficient, and this factitious frenzy gave place to the keen regret that she was not near me.
I heard her say in her finely-toned voice: “Look then—” as she would say when we wandered together, through this same region, which was then covered with ice and snow—but the flower of her beauty was then in bloom, now it was adorned with verdure, but the living flower was gone.
And this sensation became more intolerable still when I met Lucien, who never failed to talk of her. He loved her, he admired her so lovingly, and in his ingenuousness he gave me so many proofs that she was worthy of being loved and admired. Then physical weariness resolved itself into a worse enervation, and nights followed in which I suffered from an excited insomnia, in which I would weep aloud, calling her name like one deranged.
“It is through the mind that I suffer,” I said after having in vain sought the remedy in great fatigue. “I will attack mind through mind.”