Part 3

There are some of them that I love, there are some whom I think that I do not love. What does it matter! The interest I devote to them is not in the least dependent on the throbs of my heart. That one who never speaks and conceals, under his obstinate forehead, two little eyes of green glass,--certainly he does not naturally arouse my affection. Nevertheless, how different is the attention with which I regard him from the curiosity of a scientist watching the stirrings of fish in an aquarium! It makes me think, that attention, rather of the dizzy joy of the miser who weighs a gold-piece, the effigy on which doesn’t please him. Gold, nevertheless!

True! How could I feel bored with these faces turned toward me, with this choir of human voices singing, each in its own familiar key, yet blending into the masculine clamor of an orchestra?

Everything they say is precious; less so, however, than what they keep to themselves. The reasons they give for their actions astonish me at times; those they do not confess, especially those of which they themselves are ignorant, always fill me with passionate interest. A word, fallen from their lips like a piece of paper from an unknown pocket, arrests me and sets me dreaming for long days. About them I build up daring and yet fragile hypotheses which they either obligingly support or destroy with a careless gesture. I always begin again, delighting in it; it is my recreation. I enjoy finding that my hypotheses are right, for that satisfies my pride; I enjoy finding I am wrong, for that reveals to me leafy depths in my park that are still unexplored.

And then I know that only a small part of their nature is involved in our intercourse. The rest branches off, ramifies out into the perspectives of the world. I think of it as of that side of the moon which men will never see. I reconstruct with a pious, a burning patience that life of theirs which is outside this, their true life, endlessly complicated, linked by a thousand tentacles with a thousand other unknown lives. So must Cuvier’s mind have wandered as he turned and returned a fossil tooth, the only vestige of some vast, unknown organism.

There is all this in people, and then there is the past that each one has, his own past, his ancestors, the prodigious combination of actions and of souls of which he is the result. And there is his future, the unexplored desert toward which he stretches out anxious tentacles, and into which I dare to venture, I, the stranger, with trembling heart, the tiny lantern in my hand.

These are my riches today. They are inalienable: a man may flee from an indiscretion, he cannot escape the grip of contemplation and love. Even if he desired it, his very struggles would reveal his movements, betray the deepest secrets of his being, deliver him over bound hand and foot.

As for myself, eager to hoard up my treasure, I give myself up without a struggle. Rich in others, I yield myself into their hands. And if, in spite of myself, I attempt some evasion, am I not sure to render the prey all the more desirable, all the more beautiful?

II

They say of curiosity that it was the beginning of science. That is not praise enough, it sounds rather like an excuse.

What is more human, more touching than this religious reaching out toward the unknown, this sort of instinct which makes us divine and attack the mystery?

To take pride in not being curious! One might as well take pride in some ridiculous infirmity. It is true that even that is in the order of things normal, and that vanity finds its nourishment where it can.

Doubtless there is a sort of curiosity which is both weak and cowardly. It is that of men who dare not remain alone a moment face to face with themselves; they take refuge in loquacity and in reading the daily newspapers. Their fashion of interesting themselves in everything that goes on is a confession that they are unable to become interested in anything eternal. They depend as if for nourishment on that noise which those who have nothing to say are always making. They are like children who cannot amuse themselves alone, or like stupid monarchs who fear nothing so much as silence and their own thoughts, the emptiness of their own thoughts!

And then there are the easy-going people. They want to know everything, the number of your maternal aunt’s children, the price of the furniture and the wages of the servants. They want to know everything and they will never know anything. Their life is spent in forced smiles and in gracefully holding a cup of tea.

Their souls contain vast lists of names, dates and other miserable things. They go through life like beasts of burden, weighed down under loads that have no value.

There are maniacs, too, perverts, freaks, people that are full of curiosity about a postage stamp, the handle of an umbrella; but of these I dare not say anything, for I remember an old and very wise master who used to say to us with a smile: “You who are entering upon scientific careers must begin right away to think about collections, even if you have to collect boxes of matches.”

To tell the truth, is it our business to be wise, to be learned? Hardly! It is our business to be rich.

Well, then, there are not two kinds of curiosity. Let us leave out of the question all those dull stupidities we dare to call by this name.

The curious man seems strangely uninterested in that which excites the loquacity of trivial souls. He does not trouble himself to find out the year in which a house was built, or the honors accorded to the architect; he dreams in secret of the tastes, the passions of the man who had that little, low window pierced on the north side and that black tree with its twisted branches planted at the edge of the pond. He does not ask a young woman the name of her dressmaker, but trembles at the thought of understanding what made her choose that disturbing dress to wear this particular day. He does not question his mistress about her opinion of him, but seeks passionately to understand the opinion he has at this moment of her. He does not hasten to ask his travelling companions about their professions and the political opinions they uphold, because, as he watches their faces, he is studying discreetly and sympathetically the meaning of the little wrinkle that moves between their brows, or the significance of a glance, its source and its object. He does not solicit confidences, he receives them almost without wishing to; they come naturally to him; he is their sure and deep receptacle.

Curious about all this vast world, he seems especially concerned with its image in himself. He bears his curiosity like a sacred gift and exercises it, or rather honors it, as one would perform the rites of a cult.

Do not say you would not wish to be that man. You who feel pride in possessing yourself of a secret, in drawing out a confession, in meriting the confidence of another man, must realize that it is a marvelous fortune to be thus the tenderly imperious confidant who cannot be denied, though often the rest of the world knows nothing of it. And it is possible for you, even if you cannot become such a man at once, at least to labor to become one. Begin, with this in view, to deliver yourself from your little servile curiosities. Let us work together for this future. Let us enter so deeply into ourselves that people will say of us, “That man is not curious about anything.” From that moment we shall have begun to chant the hymn of the great, the divine curiosity.

III

The possession of others is a passion, that is to say, it is an ordeal, a painful effort. This supreme joy, like all the joys to which we attach value, is born out of suffering.

We must experience men in order to know them, and our neighbor for whom, or through whom, we have never had to endure any anguish, has surprises in store for us, or else escapes us altogether: that is almost a truism.

Like all others, this treasure cannot be acquired without effort, without bitterness; but it knows no decay, it never ceases to grow through the mere play of the forces of our life and seems as if sheltered from the blows of fate. It does not, like money, depreciate in value or serve ignoble ends. It only returns to oblivion.

It is not strictly personal. It can be shared and bequeathed. Since it escapes destruction and death, it can become the most precious of heritages; it has this superiority over money, that its transmission is really valid only after it has been in some sort of way reconquered. It must fall into worthy hands that will know how to work to preserve, cultivate and build it up again. In certain points it resembles what we call experience.

To suffer, first of all! That is surely one of the grandeurs of our race, and we truly love our blessings for what they have cost us in tears, in sweat, in blood.

It is repugnant to the spirit to admit that anything can be a blessing which the war has given. The desperate folly of the Western world has engendered and still holds in reserve such great misfortunes that we cannot ransack all these ruins, these heaps of bones, with any hope of extracting from them, as rag pickers do with their hooks, some fragment that is good, some useful bit of waste. No! There is no excuse for this ferocious, immeasurable stupidity. And yet, men have suffered so terribly from one another that they have learned to know one another, that is to say, to possess one another mutually. In spite of my own denials, let me save this bit of wreckage from the general disaster. That is indeed one blessing so dearly bought that we shall not willingly give it up. And I do not speak here only of those who have fought against each other; I speak also of those who have fought side by side, who have shed their blood for the same cause and under the same standards.

Companions have been given us, imposed upon us, association with whom, even when casual and transitory, would once have seemed impossible to us. Living as free men, we sought to control the inevitable as far as possible, to choose our own road and avoid those whose opinions or points of view about the universe were likely to offend our own. We thus made use of that liberty for the most part in order to humor our irritable feelings, to lull our souls to sleep in a precarious security, and restrict the area of our inward activity.

Then came the war and we had not only to suffer from the enemy, to endure unforeseen attacks in regions of ourselves that we considered invulnerable, but to suffer still more from our own messmates, from those who commanded us and especially those whom we commanded.

Could it have been otherwise? No! No! If that suffering had been spared us, we should not have been men, we should not have gone to war, we should not have been those divine animals whom it is so beautiful and so shameful to be and whom we cannot help being.

We have been told that all suffering is sterile, hopeless and without redemptive power. That it only serves to nourish hatred. But how marvelous it is when it engenders understanding, that is to say, possession, that is to say, love!

I have observed that for many men, except in actual bodily encounter, combat face to face, the enemy has lost all individual or specific character and has become almost confounded with the great hostile forces of nature: lightning, fire, tidal waves. The bullet coming from so far away, the shell hurled from beyond the horizon, all these mortal powers are simply like a form of blind destiny. In spite of daily lessons in hatred, in spite of vociferations, these men die courageously, with a resigned despair, without hatred.

But with other, less noble souls, the tendency to aversion and quarreling, thus turned back from the enemy, seeks its objects in their immediate surroundings and finds them, creates them, alas!

My comrades, my comrades, if the uncertainty of your spirit, your agony, the rebelliousness of your afflicted flesh urges you to seek those who are responsible, do not look too angrily upon those who are about you, do not, in your aberration, accuse Houtelette because he is a chatterbox, Exmelin because he is an egoist, or Blèche because he is a rude, morose commander. Do not place your misery to the account of Méry, who is so slow in obeying, and be willing to admit that Maurin is not to blame for everything because his opinions are not the same as yours. At least, if you must draw your circle of animosity, make it so close about you that it contains only yourselves, and seek first of all in yourselves the causes of your unhappiness.

Better still, apply yourselves to looking your suffering in the face, putting it, with insight and precision, to the proof.

You know that a loathsome drink almost ceases to be loathsome when you drink it without haste but with a desire to appreciate the precise quality of its bitterness. Exactly in this same manner you should endeavor to measure, to study your suffering. Instead of abhorring it, try in a way to understand it; it will become interesting, curious, I dare not say lovable.

If Méry carries out your orders badly, consider systematically how he can be made to become, in spite of himself, a really good servant. If Blèche exercises his authority in a way that incessantly wounds you, interest yourself in his brutality, try to analyze his movements, his expressions, his familiar habits, and you will then be in a better position, not to escape from him indeed, but to avoid at times the sting, the cut of his peremptoriness. You will make him restless by doing this, and you will set him thinking. It is not necessary for him to fear you, it is enough for him to recognize in you a free force with which he has to reckon, a force it is wise to propitiate. Meanwhile, to use a colloquialism, “you’ve got him.” Every time you have obliged him to be less arrogant, more just with you, you can say that you have “had” him, as the soldiers so admirably put it.

This possession costs a certain amount of work. But you are willing to toil eight hours in order to earn ten francs that do not remain for a single day between your fingers; you can certainly afford a few minutes of your effort and your soul to acquire a treasure of which nothing will ever be able to deprive you.

IV

The very rich man owns several estates. There is always one that he prefers, that he frequents and cultivates by choice. There are others where he goes only from time to time, at the solicitation of some state of his soul which inclines him to seek, for a period, the mountains, or the ocean, or the open country. There are some, finally, which he does not love at all but of which, nevertheless, he will not dispossess himself because they are part of his fortune.

It is so with you who possess a family, friends, comrades, and adversaries. It is so with you who are able to draw, without let or hindrance, from the immense well of humankind. You must refuse nothing; you must accept everything, find out the value of everything, store everything away. The world of men is a rich patrimony, the exploitation of which is expressly confided to you. You must not be a bad administrator, you must make all your land bring forth its fruit.

Choose every day what is necessary to you, for you are the master.

You must know, besides, how to accept the inevitable and take chances, for you are nothing but a man.

Construct a scale, a clear, harmonious keyboard. Like an organist you must know the right moment to pull the stop of the oboe and unloose the thunder of the bass. The pipes are not at fault: it is for you to become a good musician. The face of Guillaumin suits you in the morning, and his ideas rejuvenate you like fresh water. The eloquence of Maurin is like a tonic in your hours of recreation. But there are desolate evenings when what you undoubtedly need is the deep voice of Cauchois and his affectionate silence.

V

In spite of the legendary ages, in spite of the religions, in spite of the poets, in spite of the marvelous traditions and, above all, in spite of our own deepest aspirations, we must unquestionably abandon the hope of an occult correspondence between souls.

It is a renunciation that it is hard to admit. Every day events envelop us that seem to revive the vanished perfume of mystery. Our reason is in no haste to dissipate these clouds, to pierce these appearances: too well they soothe the irritating need of not being quite solitary in the interior of ourselves, of not being quite exiles in an inaccessible desert.

That nothing outside our senses can reveal to us the proximity of a beloved person, the danger that is approaching him, the death that is coming to clasp him, is an extremity to which we find ourselves reduced without ever submissively making up our minds to it.

A few courageous men have halted before this mountain and undertaken to lift it. Let us leave them toiling in the shadow; let us aid them, if not by our effort, at least by our silence, and wait.

Let us wait, but let us not cease to go forth to other battles. The unknown never fails us. And as for what we shall choose, there is so much in the unknown to allure us, to enchant us! If we give up surmounting one obstacle another will always rise before our feet. From obstacle to obstacle we shall always be led to the foot of the same wall. We shall consume our whole life in the struggle, knowing that the very interest of life lies in that struggle and in those obstacles.

Now and then, detached by great efforts of the pickaxe and the mattock, a fragment of the somber mountain rolls at our feet. We stop it with rapture, we examine it, we lift it with a sort of sadness, in order to try its weight. There is no victory that demands so great a price or seems to us more desolate. It is as if we roused ourselves to a frenzy to destroy the unknown in order that our success might fill us with bitterness. Happily, the unknown is always there.

I find myself alone with the person who of all the world is the closest to me, the best loved, the most perfectly chosen. The silence exhales a light perfume, a unique perfume that seems that of our kindred souls. Oh! how we should like to believe that the essences of our beings, delivered at last, might communicate and unite with each other in the intermediate space, in the impassable abyss!

At this very moment we surprise in one another’s eyes a common thought. Simultaneously, it escapes our lips with a sort of rapturous precipitancy, as if we were afraid of not arriving at exactly the same moment at the _rendez-vous_, as if we wished, with the harmonious precision of a well-rehearsed duet, to confess together some matchless certainty.

We are happy, filled with astonishment.... But I am not deceived.

I do not yet hold it, palpitating, for good and all, between my fingers, the proof that has been so long sought for. Not yet, this day, have I met face to face either God or the immortal soul.

Only too well I know that some slight sound, some rhythm outside us, the beating of a bird’s wing, the boring of an insect in the old wood of the furniture, the sigh of the wind under the door,--that it is one of these things which has suddenly set our souls in tune, awakened the echoes of affinity in the abysses of our two separate selves. We have so many memories in common, we have so carefully matched our tastes, we have so well unified our material world and tried to blend even our futures together that the very touch of the violinist’s bow suffices to make us vibrate in harmony.

But there must be the touch of the bow, there must be the perfume, so faint that one experiences its suggestions without being sure of its presence; perhaps there is necessary only one of those obscure phenomena which pass the limit of our senses in the twilight where our inadequate organs can only gropingly divine the world.

This is our meager certainty. Very well! Let us not reject it in our spite; for it has its depth, its beauty. We must make it our own, force it to enrich us.

Where the exercise of the intelligence seems to result in the fatal imprisonment of the soul within itself, love enables us to see how the soul can reach beyond its own limits into time and space. In vain does the intelligence prove to us that all this is only an illusion. That illusion is beautiful; let us make up our minds to give it shape. Through its very longings to escape from its confines, the soul may perhaps succeed in breaking them, and it is to love without a doubt that it will owe the miracle of its deliverance.

We possess only an imperfect means of communion. So be it! Let us labor tenderly to perfect that means. It is thus that the creators of science and industry labor, and we must admit that their stubbornness has succeeded in making a very great evil out of a small one. Let us not be less ingenious! This sinister progress ought to give us encouragement: moral civilization deserves as much care as the other sort.

With our brothers, our wives, our friends, let us freely seek to have so many things in common, let us strive so passionately to understand one another, that our thoughts, ceaselessly pressing toward this goal, may continually experience the sense of infinity and eternity.

There lies our path; if it urges us to possess the largest portion we can of the human world, let us first begin by intimately possessing what we love. This possession I am sure is the only real one. They knew it very well, those desperate men who have loved fiercely the mere bodies of women without ever receiving the real gift that can be yielded in a glance, from a distance, with the swiftness of lightning.

VI

There are men who set out from their homes in the morning in the pursuit of wealth. They walk with their eyes on the pavement, they fling themselves furiously into all sorts of petty labors. They dream of lost money, princely gifts, scandalous inheritances, lotteries. They think of gold as of an inaccessible woman whom they can strike down and ravish in a corner. They return home in the evening worn out, exasperated, famished, as poor as ever. They have not even seen the face of the man who sat next them in the subway. That face itself was a fortune.

Do you seek out your friend because, on occasion, he can lend you the sum you foresee you are going to need, because he can speak to some cabinet official on your behalf, because he is a jovial host? If that is the case, you are a slave, you possess nothing. Do you, on the contrary, love him for that way of smiling he has that so delights you, for the candor and tenderness his hesitating voice betrays, his gift of tears and his stormy repentances? If this is so, you are very rich: that man is yours and he is a treasure worth having.

Can you recall the use you made of your first five-franc piece? Most assuredly not! But you will never forget a certain expression which, in your eyes, distorted or made more beautiful some well-loved face when you were a little child. That has, and always will have, a place among your treasures: that day you really learned something of importance, and you have never ceased since to recall the victory and turn it to account.

If you have little inclination to squander your fortune, what is to prevent you from assembling it under one title-deed? A single face, a single soul, is yet an inestimable estate. One may believe one has exhausted all one’s resources, but one is always deceived, for like the earth, the human landscape is always perpetually laboring and bears fruit every season.

The peasant who possesses only an acre is full of pride nevertheless, for he knows that his possession goes down to the very center of the earth.