The doctor remained a long while motionless. The horizon opened before his eyes. His science sought new depths. He did not precisely reflect, but he remembered, and, perhaps for the first time in his life, passed an hour in profound contemplation.
“So you know him?” said he at last to Paul.
“Whom do you mean?”
“Why, my patient!”
“I don't know any of your patients.”
Professional discretion arrested the name before it passed the doctor's lips.
“But, really,” said he, “this head is a portrait. You could not have drawn it by chance.”
“Neither one nor the other,” replied Paul. “No one sat for me, and I did not draw it by chance. It appears to me, when I work, certain faces are offered to me without forcing themselves upon me. I perceive them interiorly; for my eyes are closed and I see nothing. Perceive is not the proper word, for the sense of sight is not needed. If I perceive them, it is with an unknown sense which is not that of sight, and in a peculiar condition, in comparison with which wakefulness is profound sleep. I think these perceptions correspond with some reality, either distant or future, whose photographic likeness at that moment passes before the eyes of the mind.
“This faculty, which may be called natural inspiration, has never abandoned me. The aptitude to surmise what I do not know is the highest form of the activity of my mind, and not only do I surmise what I do not know, but very often I do it, I realize it, without intention and without knowledge. It is as though I were an actor in a drama of which I was ignorant. I recite a part in a play that I do not know, and whose title and plot are equally unknown.
“Yet I feel myself free, and the profound sentiment of my liberty bursts forth, above all, in the remembrance of my faults. I wished to die, but death did not want me. I have sometimes asked myself if, having wished to lose my life, I might not lose inspiration, which would be for me a subtle and cruel manner of death. It has seemed to me that the question has been agitated somewhere, and that inspiration, which has compassion on the weak, came back to me gratuitously. If I had been criminal from malice, it would have abandoned me, perhaps, or have become in me the auxiliary of a future crime. It might have refused to help me, or have assisted me in doing wrong.”