It had often happened to him that his revery intervened in the active series and broke its determination; such a result, certainly, no longer filled him with childish astonishments, but this time there was a truly marvelous subordination of the fact to the idea. This was the theme: faithless to a beloved Dead, A desires another woman, who yields and gives herself to him; but, at the moment of possession, the beloved Dead woman appears to him, in certain conditions to be developed, and the old love vanquishes the new. This outline, with some linear modifications, could symbolically have characterized the unexpected events of his night with Valentine. Presentiment and coincidence did not explain such an occurrence and, moreover, such an occurrence was the hundredth he had observed. Hence the conception of a possible event had brought it into his life, conditioned by the intervention of an external will, adapted to the vital limits of time and space, but recognizable in its constituent and original elements. It was worth reflecting upon: it was a whole corner of the yet unknown psychology, a whole order of phenomena as curious, for example, as the fact of suggestion so bungled by official hypnotizers, who lack philosophic understanding. This could even be classed under the chapter of suggestions; but if, in things of this kind, one knew the suggester, the person to whom a thing was suggested would escape. Nor was it a matter of a will dimly or even unconsciously domineered by another will; there was rather, as a point of departure, a will seeking to bring about the wholly ideal and wholly subjective accomplishment of a thing. But how could this will act upon the immutable order of things? Since the suggester found himself, in the case of the person subject to his will, in the second state, was it not merely a case of auto-suggestion? Then, too, it was necessary to explain how the subjected person could bring over, into his orb, wills and facts external to himself and how, in sustaining an order suggested by his mental activity, he could make it submit to all its relationships of things and beings. Idealism unveiled these dim arcana for him. Assuredly the thinking person dominates those who do not think, and the man who wills, though unwittingly, the realization, though ideal, of a group of facts, dominates all wills which, unwarned, are not on guard, finding themselves unprepared to oppose will with will. The material and unconscious world lives and moves only in the intelligence which perceives and recreates it anew according to personal forms; there is as much of the thinking world as a superior intelligence unites and fashions to his wish. The conflict is only among superiorities, and the rest, the herd, follows the masters, willy-nilly: ah! revolt is quite useless.
Entragues consequently found himself arrived at that point of intellectuality where one commences to make himself obeyed: order, apparently incoercible, yielded to his dream. It was now a question of mastering the dream and will. This was quite different: never having cultivated that faculty, he only possessed it to a rudimentary degree. The method was clear, he should have known how to make use of it; he could not and the world, without a doubt, would escape him. His regret was moderate: his desires did not exceed potentiality. The ideal world, as he held it, sufficed for his activity which was entirely mental and too unarmed for the struggle.
He had chosen the best part: should he be mad enough to consent to a disastrous exchange? Everything belonged to him in the sphere where he revolved: under logic's eye, he was the absolute master of a transcendent reality whose joyous domination did not give him leisure for a vulgar life and human preoccupations. To will? To will what? Ah! how much more interesting it is to watch oneself think: what spectacle equals that of the human brain, that marvelous hive where the ideal bees, in their nest of cells, distil thought: a fleeting activity, but which at least gives the illusion of duration. Ah! merely illusion, for only the eternal exists.
At this point in his revery Entragues was bitten by a serpent: the external, disdained and almost disowned world was evoked in the image of Sixtine. It was necessary to admit it: he had interests in this part of the perceptible world.
Then returned the same lamentations: fear, hope, doubt: love, composed of these three terms, ever arose, leading the trinity to unity and it was a circle, imperious as a circle. He lived a whole day in this prison, then towards evening a quite sharp sensation of indignity struck his heart and this obsession, poisoned by the arrow, inflamed the wound: "I am going to see Sixtine, I want to see her, but if she yields to my entreaty, the idea that she surprised me with another woman will make me fancy that only jealousy inclines her to unshared desires, and I will be paralyzed. I should do better to return to my home." But the image was stronger: he obeyed the suggestion.
"Ah!" he told himself, always capable of strict reasoning, "I am afraid I looked at the work of the ideal bees from too near a view, I well know that I think, but I no longer know what I think."