"Oh! I am not thirsty for vengeance and I do not desire to quench my thirst in the blood which will flow from your severed veins: I do not even wish to see you and I shut you out from my imagination.
"Only.... Ah! the wretch! She does not seem to suspect that I loved her! Everything, under the shelter of passional metaphysics, amounted to a question of adroit and decisive shrewdness. Yes, love is joiner's work.
"And I go into the great absence, but with no mental reservations. I shall not conjure the superficial magics of Claudius Mamertinus; I have perfected them, but I shall use neither those nor my own. The great absence, as one speaks of the great desert, without water and without love! But the Egyptian woman lived there forty years with four tiny loaves of bread which she had bought at Jerusalem; she nibbled at them, when she was very hungry. I, too, shall gnaw at my memories, but not to excess, and without straining for grievous corporeal images. I wish to meditate in peace. Mark you, Sixtine, this is because of my greatness of soul, for I could have carried you off on my shoulders and thrown you into my cavern, where the bones of hyenas, dead of hunger, can be seen. You see that it is not cheerful. So I spare you this exile. Nevertheless, 'you should know what corporeal vision is and you will refrain, when you think of your absent friend, from thinking him really absent. You think of him, and he appears before you corporeally, since you are thinking of his body (and how think of him otherwise, since the body is the sign of his existence and humanity?) And he will rise up before you, and likewise, across all obstacles, you will go into his presence, and he will see you.' And the author of De Statu Animae (he also wrote the Pange, lingua: he was not a fool), after reflecting, adds: 'Vision is the true function of the intelligent'; and 'the image of things is their true reality.'
"No, I shall, indeed, content myself with little loaves of bread; you will not suffer from my familiarities. In his 'Monitories,' Thomas Aquinas says that too great familiarity begets scorn at the same time that it turns one aside from contemplation and fixes the mind on external things.
"He gives the example of Saint Dominic who, having too affectionate friends at Toulouse, went to live at Carcassonne.
"Well, I do not wish to scorn you under the vain pretext that you have fulfilled your womanly calling, and I wish to meditate in peace, for there remains nothing else for me to do. So, I leave you to your loves and I go to the great desert. Adieu."
Hubert, in turning over his theological books, was already capturing a little of the peace he desired. As long as Sixtine had remained, he had forgotten them for readings more in accord with his perturbations and desires. While putting the two tomes back in their place, he paused in front of this shelf of his library, spelling out the faded letters of gold, surprised at not always being able to guess them correctly. His Origen tempted him: he promised himself to commence the long deferred study of it. Under his fingers, the volume opened on the "Commentary on the Song of Songs," irony of Virgilian fortunes. "His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me." But Origen, who remarks that there is everything in this movement of the right hand, "omnia sunt," warns against stopping at sensual interpretations. "It is just as well, I am not in the mood for it."
He closed the book and returned to his chair. He re-read the fourth chapter of "The Adorer," congratulating himself on having resolved the supreme fate of Guido according to necessary consequences:
"At least my dream will be logical, as she desires. If life eludes me, transcendency belongs to me. I have paid very dearly for it, I have paid for it with the price of all terrestrial joys. The fruits I bite into are bubbles that soon vanish, but the bubbles which issue from my lips take flight, soar and endure: refracted through them, my ideas, like sun-beams become prismatic, and, with them plays the eternal wind which levels the world.
"In losing you, Sixtine, I have found myself again. But I confess, Madame, that it is not a compensation worth considering. Although you judged me an egoist and although I admit this charge, I bear myself no love. A little hate, rather, when I surmount indifference, for I feel that I am only a bad instrument in the hands of an unknown and transcendental Master,—a Master who laughs so apropos when I abuse my soul.... Destined to what labor? Ah! he knows!...