Part 6
“I see distinctly at the present time that the crisis from which I suffer has for its factors, first my heredities, then the medium of ideas in which I was educated, finally the medium of facts into which I was transplanted by my introduction among the Jussat-Randons. The crisis itself and the questions which it raises in my mind shall be the last fragments of a study which I shall strip of insignificant recollections, to reduce it to what a master of our time calls generatrices. At least I shall have furnished you an exact document upon the modes of feeling which I formerly believed to be very precious and very rare, and I shall have proved to you in two ways, first by my confidence in your absolute discretion, and second by my appeal for your philosophical support, what you have been to him who writes these lines, and who asks your pardon for this long preamble and begins at once his dissection.”
§ I. MY HEREDITIES.
As far back as I can remember, I find that my dominant faculty, the one that has been present in every crisis of my life, great or small, and which is present to-day, has been the faculty, I mean the power and the need of duplication. There have always been in me, as it were, two distinct persons; one who went, came, acted, felt, and another who looked at the first go, come, act, and feel with an impassable curiosity.
At this very hour and knowing that I am in prison, accused of a capital crime, blasted in honor, and overwhelmed in sadness, knowing that it is this very I, Robert Greslon, born at Clermont the 5th of September, 1865, and not another, I think of this situation as a spectacle at which I am a stranger. Is it even exact to say I? Evidently not. For my true self is, properly speaking, neither the one who suffers not the one who looks on. It is made up of both, and I have had a very clear perception of this duality, although I was not then capable of comprehending this psychological disposition exaggerated to an anomaly, from my childhood, the childhood which I wish to recall with the impartiality of a disinterested historian.
My first recollections are of the city of Clermont-Ferrand, and of a house which stood on a promenade now very much changed by the recent construction of the artillery school. The house, like all the houses in this city, was built of Volvic stone, a gray stone which darkens with age, and which gives to the tortuous streets the appearance of a city of the middle ages.
My father, who died when I was very young, was of Lorraine extraction. He held at Clermont the position of engineer of roads and bridges. He was a slender man of feeble health, with a face almost beardless, and marked with a melancholy serenity which touched me, when I think of him, after all these years. I see him again in his study, through whose windows may be viewed the immense plain of the Limagne, with the graceful eminence of the Puy de Crouël quite near, and in the distance the dark line of the mountains of Forez.
The railway station was near our house, and the whistling of the trains was constantly heard in this quiet study. I used to sit on the carpet in the corner by the fire, playing without making any noise, and this strident call produced on my mind a strange impression of mystery, of distance, of the flight of time, and of life which endures to the present.
My father traced with his chalk upon a blackboard enigmatic signs, geometric figures or algebraic formulas, with that clearness of the curves, or the letters which revealed the habitual method of his being. At other times he wrote, standing at an architect’s table which he preferred to his desk, a table consisting simply of a white wood board placed on trestles. The large books on mathematics arranged with the most minute care in the bookcase, and the cold faces of savants, engraved in copperplate and framed under glass, were the only objects of art with which the walls were decorated.
The clock which represented the globe of the world, two astronomical maps which hung above the desk, and upon this desk the calculating ruler with its figures and its copper slide, the square, the compass, the T rule. I recall them all, at will, the smallest details of this room whose whole atmosphere was thought, and these images aid me to comprehend how from my infancy the dream of a purely ideal and contemplative existence became elaborated in me, favored by heredity.
My later reflections have shown me, in several traits of my character, the result transmitted under form of instinct of the life of abstract study that my father led. I have, for example, always felt a singular horror of action, so much so that, making a simple visit caused my heart to pant and the slightest physical exercise was intolerable to me, such as wrestling with another person; even to discuss my most cherished ideas appeared to me, and still appears, almost impossible.
This dread of action is explained by the excess of brainwork which, pushed too far, isolates man in the midst of the realities which he hardly endures, because he is not habitually in contact with them. I feel that this difficulty of adapting myself to facts comes to me from this poor father; from him also comes this faculty of generalization, which is the power, but at the same time the mania of my mind; and it is also his work that a morbid predominance of the nervous system has rendered my will so wild at certain times.
My father, who was still young when he died, had never been robust. He was obliged at the growing age to undergo the trial of preparation for the Polytechnic School which is ruinous to the soundest health. With narrow shoulders and with limbs weakened by long sittings at sedentary meditations, this savant with transparent hands seemed to have in his veins, instead of red globules of generous blood, a little of the dust of the chalk which he handled so much.
He did not transmit to me muscles capable of counterbalancing the excitability of my nerves, so that with this faculty of abstraction, I owe to him a kind of ungovernable intemperance of desire. Every time that I have ardently wished for anything it has been impossible to repress this covetousness. This is a hypothesis which has often come to me when I have been analyzing myself, that abstract natures are more incapable than others of resisting passion, when passion is aroused, perhaps because the daily relation between action and thought is broken in them.
Fanatics would be the most signal proofs of this. I have seen my father, usually so patient and gentle, so overcome by the violence of anger as almost to faint. In this I am also his son, and through him the descendant of a grandfather as ill-balanced, a sort of primitive genius, who, half-peasant, had risen by force of mechanical inventions to be a civil engineer, and was then ruined by lawsuits.
On this side of my race there has always been a dangerous element, something wild, at times, by the side of constant intellectuality. I formerly considered this double nature a superior condition; the possible ardor of passion joined with this continuous energy of abstract thought. It was my dream to be at the same time frenzied and lucid, the subject and the object, as the Germans say, of my analysis; the subject who studies himself and finds in this study a means of exaltation and of scientific development. Alas! Whither has thy chimera led me? But it is not the time to speak of effects, we are still with the causes.
Among the circumstances which affected me during my childhood, I believe the following to be one of the most important: Every Sunday morning, and as soon as I could read, my mother took me with her to mass. This mass was celebrated at eight o’clock in the Church of the Capuchins recently built on a boulevard shaded by Plantanes which led from Sablon Court to Laureau Square, along the Jardin des Plantes.
At the door of the church, there used to sit, in front of a portable shop, a cake seller called Mother Girard, with whom I was well acquainted, for I had bought of her little bunches of cherries in the spring. This was the first fruit of the season that I might eat. This dainty, acid and fresh, was one of the sensualities of these days of childhood, and any one who had observed me, might have seen this frenzy of desire of which I have spoken. I was almost in a fever when on my way to this shop.
This was not the only reason why I preferred the Church of the Capuchins with its extremely plain architecture, to the subterranean crypts of Notre-Dame-du-Port and to the vaults of the cathedral upheld by it elegant clustered columns. At the Capuchins the choir was closed. During the offices, invisible mouths behind the grating chanted the canticles, which strangely effected my childish imagination; they seemed to me to come from so far off, an abyss or a tomb. I looked at my mother praying beside me with the fervor which was shown in her smallest actions, and I thought that my father was not there, that he never came to church. My child’s brain was so puzzled by this absence, that, one day, I asked:
“Why does not papa come to mass with us?”
My inquiring child’s eyes had no trouble to see the embarrassment into which this question threw my mother. She withdrew from it, however, by an answer analogous to hundreds of others which a woman so essentially enamored of fixed principles and of obedience has since given me.
“He goes to another mass, at an hour which suits him better, and then I have already told you that children ought never to ask why their parents do this or that.”
All the difference of mind which separated my mother and myself is found in this sentence, uttered one cold morning in winter, while walking under the trees of Sablon Court. I can see her now in her pelerine, her hands in her muff lined with brown silk from which her book came halfway out, and the sincerity of her face even in her pious falsehood. I can see her eyes, which so many times since have regarded me with a look which did not comprehend me, and at this period she did not suspect that for my meditative childish nature to think, was already to ask, always and in relation to everything; why? Yes, why had my mother deceived me? For I knew that my father went to no kind of office. And why did he not go?
While the grave and sad voices of the concealed monks were intoning the responses of the mass, I was absorbed in this question. I knew without being able to appreciate the reasons of the superiority that my father was accounted among the first of the city. How many times in walking were we stopped by some friend, who tapping me on the cheek would say: “Well, will we get to be a great savant like the father some day?”
When my mother took his advice, she listened with the greatest respect. She thought it natural that he did not perform certain duties which, for us, were obligatory. We had not the same duties. This idea was not formulated then in my childish brain with this positive distinctness, but it developed there the germ of that which later became one of the convictions of my youth--to know that the same rules do not govern intellectual minds that control other men.
It was there in that little church, quietly bending over my prayer book, that the great principle of my life had birth, not to consider as a law for thinking men that which is and ought to be a law for others--just as I received from the conversations with my father, during our excursions, the first germs of my scientific view of the world.
The country around Clermont is marvelous, and although I am the reverse of poetical, a man for whom the external world means very little, I have always retained in my memory the pictures of the landscapes which surrounded these walks. While the city on one side looks toward the plain of the Limagne, on the other it stands on the foothills of the Dôme Mountains. The slope of the extinct craters, the undulations caused by old eruptions and the streams of hardened lava give to the outlines of these volcanic mountains a resemblance to the landscapes in the moon as discovered by the telescope in that dead planet.
On one side is the savage and sublime memorial of the most terrible convulsions of the globe, and on the other the prettiest rusticity of stony roads among the vineyards, of murmuring brooks under the willows and chestnuts. The great pleasures of my childhood were the interminable wanderings with my father in all the paths which lead from the Puy de Crouël to Gergovie, from Royat to Durtol, from Beaumont to Gravenoire.
Simply in writing these names, my memory rejuvenates my heart. I see myself again the little boy, whom a portrait represents with long hair, with his legs in cloth leggings, who walks along holding his father’s hand. Whence came this love for the fields to him, the learned mathematician, the man of study and of reflection? I have often thought of it since, and I believe I have discovered a law of the development of mind;--our youthful tastes persist even when we are developed in a sense contrary to them, and we continue to exercise these tastes while justifying them by intellectual reasons which would exclude such things.
I will explain. My father naturally loved the country because he was brought up in a village, and when he was small had passed whole days on the banks of the brooks among the insects and the flowers. Instead of yielding to these tastes in a simple manner, he mingled them with his present occupations. He would not have pardoned himself for going to the mountains without studying there the formation of the land; for looking at a flower without determining its character and discovering its name; for taking up an insect without recalling its family and its habits.
Thanks to the rigor of his method in all work he arrived at a very complete knowledge of the country; and, when we walked together, this knowledge was the sole subject of our conversation. The landscape of the mountains became a pretext for explaining to me the revolutions of the earth; he passed from that with a clearness of speech which made such ideas intelligible to me, to the hypothesis of Laplace upon nebula, and I saw distinctly in my imagination the planetary protuberances flying off from the burning nucleus, from this torrid sun in rotation.
The heavens at night in the beautiful summer months became a kind of map which he deciphered for me, and on which I distinguished the Pole Star, the seven stars of the Chariot, Vega of the Lyre, Sirius, all those inaccessible and formidable worlds of which science knows the volume, the position and almost the very metals of which they are composed.
It was the same with the flowers which he taught me to arrange in an herbarium, with the stones which I broke with a little iron hammer, with the insects which I fed or pinned up, as the case might be. Long before object lessons were practiced in the college my father applied to my education first this great maxim: “Give a scientific account of anything we may encounter.”
Thus reconciling the pleasantry of his first impressions with the precision acquired in his mathematical studies. I attribute to this teaching the precocious spirit of analysis which was developed in me during my early youth, and which, without doubt, would have turned toward the positive studies if my father had lived. But he could not complete this education, undertaken after a prepared plan of which I have since found trace among his papers.
In the course of one of our walks, and on one of the warmest days of summer, in my tenth year, we were overtaken by a storm which wet us to the bones. During the time that it required to reach home in our soaked clothes my father took cold. In the evening he complained of a chill. Two days after an inflammation of the lungs declared itself, and the week following he died.
As I wish, in this summary indication of diverse causes which formed my mind, to avoid at any cost that which I hate most of anything in the world, the display of subjective sentimentality, I will not recount to you, my dear master, any further details of this death. They were heartrending, but I felt their sadness only in a far-off way, and that later.
I recollect, though I was a large and remarkably developed boy, to have felt more wonder than sorrow. It is now that I truly regret my father--that I comprehend what I lost in losing him. I believe you have seen exactly what I owe to him; the taste and the facility for abstraction, the love of the intellectual life, faith in science and the precocious management of method--these for the mind; for the character, the first divination of the pride of intellect, and also an element slightly morbid, this difficulty of action which has as its consequence the difficulty in resisting the passions when one is tempted.
I wish also to mark distinctly what I owe to my mother. And from the first I perceive this fact that this second influence acts upon me by reaction, while the first had acted directly. To speak truly, this reaction only began when she became a widow and wished to direct my education. Until then she had entirely given me up to my father.
It may seem strange that, alone in the world, she and I, she so energetic, so devoted, and I so young, we did not live, at least during those years, in perfect communion of heart. There exists in fact, a rudimentary psychology for which these words--mother and son--are synonyms of absolute tenderness, of perfect agreement of soul. Perhaps it is so in the families of ancient tradition, although in human nature I believe very little in the existence of entire sympathy between persons of different ages and sexes.
In any case, modern families present under conventional etiquette the most cruel phenomena of secret divorce, of complete misunderstanding, sometimes of hate, which are too well understood when we think of their origin. They come from the mixture for a hundred years of province with province, race with race, which has charged the blood of nearly all of us with hereditary opposites. So people find themselves nominally of the same family who have not a common trait either in their moral or mental structures; consequently the daily intimacy between persons becomes a cause of daily conflicts or of constant dissimulation. My mother and I are an example of it which I would qualify as excellent, if the pleasure of finding very clear proof of a psychologic law was not accompanied by keen regret at having been its victims.
My father, I have told you, was an old pupil of the Polytechnic School and the son of a civil engineer. I have also said he was of Lorraine race. There is a proverb which says: “Lorraine traitor to its king and even to God.” This epigram expresses in a unique form the idea that there is something complex in the mind of this frontier population.
The people of Lorraine have always lived on the border of two races and of two existences, the German and the French. What is this disposition to treachery if not the depravity of another taste, admirable from the intellectual point of view, that of sentimental complication? For my part, I attribute to this atavism the power of doubling of which I spoke at the beginning of this analysis. I ought to add that, when I was a child, I often felt a strange pleasure in disinterested simulation which proceeded from the same principle. I recounted to my comrades all sorts of inexact details concerning myself, about my place of birth, my father’s birthplace, about a walk which I was intending to take, and this not to boast, but simply to be some one else.
I found singular pleasure later in advancing opinions the most opposed to those which I considered the true ones from the same _bizarre_ motive. To play a rôle different from my true nature appeared to me an enrichment of my person, so strong was the instinct to resolve myself into a character, a belief, a passion.
My mother is a woman of the South, absolutely rebellious against all complexity, to whom ideas of things alone are intelligible. In her imagination the forms of life are reproduced concrete, precise and simple. When she thinks of religion, she sees her church, her confessional, the communion cloth, the few priests whom she has known, the catechism in which she studied. When she thinks of a career, she sees positive activity and benefits. The professorate, for example, which she desired me to enter, was for her M. Limasset, the professor of mathematics, the friend of my father, and she saw me, like him, going across the city twice a day in an alpaca coat and Panama hat in summer, and my feet protected in winter by clogs, and my body in a furred overcoat, with a fixed salary, the perquisites of private tuition and the sweet assurance of a pension.
I have been able by studying her to learn how completely this order of imagination renders those whom it governs incapable of comprehending other souls. It is often said of such people that they are despotic and personal, or that they have bad characters. In reality, they are before those with whom they associate like a child before a watch. He sees the hands move, he knows nothing of the wheels which make them move. So when these hands do not go to suit his fancy there is the stupidity of impatience to force them and to warp the springs.
My poor mother was like this with me, and that from the week which followed our trouble. I felt almost immediately an indefinable discomfort in her presence. The first circumstance which enlightened me in regard to this separation which had begun between us, so far as my childish mind could be enlightened, dates from an afternoon of autumn, nearly four months after my father’s death.
The impression received was so strong that I recall it as if it had happened yesterday. We had changed apartments, and had rented the third floor of a house in the Rue Billard, a narrow lane which distorts the shadows of Des Petits-Abres, in front of the palace of the Prefecture. My mother had chosen it because there was a balcony in which I was playing on this beautiful afternoon. My play--you will here recognize the scientific turn given by my father to my imagination--consisted in taking a pebble, which represented a great explorer, from one end of the balcony to the other, and among other stones which I had taken from the flower pots.
Some of these stones represented cities, others curious animals of which I had read descriptions. One of the parlor windows opened on the balcony. It was partly open, and my play having led me thither I heard my mother talking to a visitor. I could not help listening with that beating of the heart which the hearing my personality discussed has always produced. I learned afterward that between our real nature and the impression produced on our relations, and even on our friends, there is no more similarity than there is between the exact color of the face and its reflection in a blue, green, or yellow glass.
“Perhaps,” said the visitor, “you are mistaken in regard to poor Robert, at ten years the character is not at all formed.”
“God grant that it may be so,” replied my mother, “but I am afraid he has no heart. You cannot imagine how hard he has been since his father’s death. The next day even he seemed to have forgotten all about it. And he has never said a word since--such a word as makes you feel that one is thinking of another you now. When I speak to him of his father, he hardly answers me. You would think he had never known the man who was so good to him.”
I have read somewhere that when Merimée was quite a child he was one day scolded by his mother and then sent out of the room. He was scarcely gone when his mother burst out laughing. The child heard the laugh which showed him that the irritation had been feigned, and he felt a feeling of distrust rise in his heart which always remained. This anecdote impressed me very strongly.