The disciple

by Paul Bourget

I undertook that study the most completely opposed to all feminine preoccupation. I despoiled in less than a fortnight, pen in hand, two hundred pages of that “Physiology” of Beaunis which I had brought in my trunk and the hardest for me, those which treat of the chemistry of living bodies.

My efforts to understand and to sum up these analyses which demand the laboratory, were supremely in vain. I only succeeded in stupefying my intellect and in making myself less capable of resisting a fixed idea.

I saw that I had again taken the wrong road. Was not the true method rather that which Goethe professed—to apply the mind to that from which we wish to be delivered? This great mind, who knew how to live, thus put in practice the theory set up in the fifth book of Spinoza, and which consists in evolving from the accidents of our personal life the law which unites us to the great life of the universe.

M. Taine, in his eloquent pages on Byron, advises the same, “the light of the mind produces in us serenity of the heart.” And you, my dear master, what else say you in the preface to your “Theory of the Passions.” “To consider one’s own destiny as a corollary in this living geometry of nature, and as an inevitable consequence of this eternal axiom whose infinite development is prolonged through time and space, is the only principle of enfranchisement.”

And what else am I doing, at this hour, in writing out this memoir, but conforming to these maxims? Can they serve me now any better than they did then? I tried at that time to resume in a kind of new autobiography the history of my feelings for Charlotte. I supposed—see how chance sometimes strangely realizes our dreams—a great psychologist to be consulted by a young man; and, toward the last, the psychologist wrote out for the use of the moral invalid a passional diagnosis with indication of causes.

I wrote this piece during the month of August and under the exhausting influence of the most torrid heat. I devoted to it about fifteen séances, lasting from ten o’clock in the evening to one o’clock in the morning, all the windows open, with the space around my lamp brightened by large night-moths, by these large velvet butterflies which bear on their bodies the imprint of a death’s head.

The moon rose, inundating with its bluish light the lake over which ran the pearly reflections; the woods whose mystery grew more profound, and the line of the extinct volcanoes. I put down my pen to lose myself, in presence of this mute landscape, in one of those cosmogonic reveries to which I was accustomed. As at the time in which the words of my poor father revealed to me the history of the world, I saw again the primitive nebulousness, then the earth detached from it, and the moon thrown off from the earth.

That moon was dead, and the earth would die also. She was becoming chilled second by second; and the imperceptible consequence of these seconds, added together during millions of years, had already extinguished the fire of the volcanoes from which formerly flowed the burning and devastating lava on which the château now stood.

In cooling this lava had raised a barrier to the course of the water which spread into a lake, and the water of this lake was being evaporated as the atmosphere diminished—these forty poor kilometers of respirable air which surround the planet.

I closed my eyes, and I felt this mortal globe roll through the infinite space, unconscious of the little worlds that come and go upon it, as the immensity of space is unconscious of the suns, the moons and the earths. The planet will roll on when it will be only a ball without air and without water, from which man has disappeared, as well as animals and plants.