The disciple

by Paul Bourget

Ah! I was very mediocre in that period of powerless desires and conquered love! I detested, and with what injustice, that life of abstract study which I was about to resume! And how I wish to-day that this might be my fate, and that I might awake a poor student near the Faculty of Clermont, tenant of the father of Emile, pupil of old Limasset, the morose traveler through those black streets—but an innocent man! an innocent man! And not the man who has gone through what I have gone through, and which he finds it a necessity to tell.

§ VI. THIRD CRISIS.

Toward the end of this severe month of September, Lucien complained of not being quite well, which the doctor attributed at first to a simple cold. Two days after the symptoms became aggravated. Two physicians of Clermont, called in haste, diagnosed scarlet fever, but of a mild character.

If my mind had not been entirely absorbed by the fixed idea which made of me at this period a veritable monomaniac, I should have found material enough to fill my notebook. I had only to follow the evolutions of the mind of the marquis and the struggle in his heart between hypochondria and paternal love.

Sometimes, in spite of the reassuring words of the doctors, he became so uneasy about his son that he passed the night in watching him. Sometimes he was seized with the fear of contagion; he went to bed, complained of imaginary pains, and counted the hours until the visit of the physician. Sometimes, so grave did his symptoms seem to himself, that the marquis must have the first visit. Then he would be ashamed of his panic. He arose, he chastised himself for his terrors with bitter phrases on the feebleness which age brings, and returned to the bedside of his son. His first intention was to conceal from the marquise and Charlotte and André the illness of the child; but after two weeks, these alternations of zeal and of terror having exhausted his energy, he felt the need of having his wife with him to sustain him, and the incoherence of his ideas was so great that he consulted me:

“Do you not think it is my duty?”

There are some lying souls, my dear master, who excel in excusing by fine motives their most villainous actions. If I were of this number I could make a merit of having insisted that the marquis should not recall his wife. Surely I knew the full import of my response and of the resolution that M. de Jussat was about to take. I knew that, if he informed the marquise, she would arrive by the first train, and I also knew Charlotte well enough to be assured that she would come with her mother. I should see her again, I should have a supreme opportunity to reawaken in her the love of which I had surprised the proof. I could say that it was loyalty on my part, the advice to leave Mme. de Jussat in Paris. I should have the appearance of loyalty. Why? If I were not convinced that there is no effect without a cause and no loyalty without a secret egoism, I should recognize a horror in using to the profit of a culpable passion the noblest of sentiments, that of a sister for a brother.

Here is the naked truth: in trying to dissuade M. de Jussat, I was convinced that all effort to regain the heart of Charlotte would be useless. I foresaw in this return only certain humiliation. Worn out by these long months of internal struggle, I no longer felt the strength to maneuver. There was then no virtue in representing to the marquis the inconveniences, the dangers even, of the stay of these two women in the château, near an invalid who might communicate to them his disease.

“And how about me?” responded he ingenuously, “am I not exposed every day? But you are right for Charlotte; I will write that I do not want her.”

“Ah! Greslon,” said he two days after, on the receipt of a telegram, “see what they do—read.” He handed me the dispatch which announced the arrival of Mlle. de Jussat and her mother. “Naturally,” moaned the hypochondriac, “she wanted to come, without thinking that I should be spared such emotions.”