L'ordination

The Ordination — II: The Fall

Julien Benda

As long as you do not die to all created love, you will not know me.

(Imitation, III, XLII)

I

“Monsieur does not even look at what a fine tunnel Suzanne has made,” said the nurse, indignant.

“Oh! very fine,” said Félix, turning round… “But we are going to make another one finer still.”

He drew two armchairs back to back, then over the space that separated them he laid a great atlas.

The child clapped her hands:

“Attention!” she cried. “Everyone stand clear! The train is coming through…”

She ran to take her run-up at the far end of the corridor. Then, launching herself, making cranking motions with her arms, whistling, puffing, running harder, she passed under the improvised tunnel and fell into the arms of her parents.

“Now,” she said, “I am going to fetch my biplane.”

But Clémence intervened:

“No, no. You are quite out of breath… And besides, you know that Papa does not want his study turned into a circus… We are going to look at pictures, and then you will go to bed.”

“Look here!” said Félix, “Suzanne shall look at the last postcards that Mamma put in the album.”

“Oh! yes,” said the little girl.

Félix went to fetch the album. He took the child on his knees and Clémence came to sit on the arm of the chair. They turned the pages: the child gladdened every heart by the freshness of her questions, by her joy at being the center of things, by the assurance of her royalty, between her two parents… Soon the questions slowed, her little hand gripped less tightly, her head drooped, she fell asleep on her father’s shoulder… He was afraid of waking her by passing her to the women, while they, standing, smiled at his awkwardness… Gently they took her from him; Clémence, a little tired, offered her cheek to her husband and the two women went out slowly with the child between their arms.

Félix remained in his armchair, before the fire. It was too early for him to set to work… In the street, all was silent… Around him was the dying sound of the house preparing itself for sleep: some door closing, the last comings and goings of the servants finishing their work… His chin in his hand, his gaze lost in the flames, he mused… He mused on this strange thing, this child, this young woman, who came there every evening, who were his daughter, his wife; this family he had founded… He looked at this study where he passed his life, this tea that was prepared for him there for the night during which he would keep watch alone; he noted this ease, this kind of return to his true element which he felt each evening when they left him alone, when they were in bed: did not all this signify to him plainly enough his nature as an old solitary student, a bachelor philosopher?… And he had founded a family!… And it was going very well… He was very happy… He could no longer do without them… Was it not droll!…

He mused on how it had come about… It would soon be ten years ago… It was at the close of a violent sentimental crisis (how far off it was, that crisis! could one put oneself into such states over a woman’s whimpering!): he had just discovered the intellectual life — the true intellectual life — no longer the caressing of ideas that he had known, like all those of his class, on leaving school, no longer the brushing against doctrines between a visit and a dinner, but the passionate, permanent, exclusive embrace, whole weeks spent in burrowing into a concept without thinking of anything else, the feverish action of that burrowing, and the throes of failure, and the joys of triumph, and the panting fecundation of idea by idea, and the whole being strained like a strain of love to know whether such an idea descends from such another or whether it is the contrary; — and he had just discovered that this life was his law, his order, his true adherence to himself, his full realization, that all his other strivings were lie, imitation, boredom… But at the same time he discovered that, in order to have it fully, this intellectual life, he must settle the question of love; he must have done with the affair which, however little sentimental it was, took up his time, disturbed him, above all obliged him to conscious love… The mind required the inattention of the flesh: marriage imposed itself… And he felt it to be impossible…

Certainly he could find them, he did find them, women who would let him work, who would respect his independence, who would not desire to have “all his thoughts”… But what were they? Little provincial girls, well drilled into nothingness by family or by priests, who would not be in the way because they would be nothing. Or dry women. Or “intellectuals,” with theories about mutual independence. Or else some mystic, drunk with abnegation, who would impose on him the monstrous spectacle of a creature taking pleasure in her own mutilation… As for the woman he wanted, who would leave him in peace and who, for being such, would be neither nothingness nor inhumanity — if that woman existed, he had no reason to think he would find her…

And behold, he had found her… On a journey with friends, deep in an old Breton domain, between her father and her young brother, behold, he had found her, the woman at once human, desirous of association, of love, and visibly tolerant of a man’s liberty, and that not by reason of a “principle” (he was still to hear Clémence enunciate a “principle”), still less of a religious commandment (she was scarcely a believer), but by a kind of native indifference toward descending into the secret of beings, of a native and patrician moderation in the desire to taste the human soul… He remembered what a strange impression of rational tenderness she had made on him from the moment he had known her, this tall young girl with the loving and clear gaze, the sensitive and mocking mouth, the rich and tempered forms: gentle to those around her, a stranger to the furies of giving; happy in her gardens, in no way avid to “embrace nature”; in love with art and with the expression of the soul, but with measured expression, playing Mozart rather than Schumann… Everywhere measure in the grasp, reason in the feeling: she seemed to him, strayed into the plebeian ages, one of those Greek figures who know how, love in the heart, calmly to weave the cloth with a golden shuttle…

He had wished to test her, had made her acquainted with the furies of the modern soul, the literature of “total” loves (she knew how to bear the idea of the fact of love, like the pagan virgins bathing the young warriors), the music of mad communions, of the “union of souls,” “indiscernible”… He watched her: what if she should take pleasure in these things, should betray her true nature!… But no: she did not even finish those books; she closed those copybooks, played again from memory some “moment” of Schubert’s…

Then one evening he had spoken of a friend who had met the woman he wished for; but who wanted to live far from the age, to be absorbed in an abstract work, and who hesitated to offer to a young being a life so severe… And, simply, she had said that she would accept such a life.

And he had married her… And marriage had not changed her soul: she had been the wife he had thought she would be: loving, not intrusive, gathered together in love… And then, delivered from the affair, in the calm of the flesh, he had attained to the high life of the mind; and he had begun a great work.

A single evening — it was two years after their marriage; she was reading there, near him, while he worked — she had laid down her book and, putting her arm round his neck: “Why,” she had said, “do you not try to initiate me into what you do?” He had stammered: “It is very arid… I am hardly an educator.” She had gone back to sit down… That was seven years ago… She had never spoken of it again.

And she had desired a child… They had had this child… And it was an exquisite little being, finely shaded, intelligent, who came to put a young and flowering note into his somewhat somber life…

Thus he had these two beings. And, between the two of them, in no way hindered by them, he pursued his work. Gently melted into them a few hours a day, he found himself again in crossing that threshold, and took flight into his thought…

Thus he had realized that unheard-of dream: the integrity of his personality between a woman and a child, the high life of the mind in the state of marriage…

At times, however, fears came to him…

It seemed to him that there was a sleight of hand in his life. It must surely have to be paid for, the having made a family… One day they would call him back to themselves, those two beings sleeping yonder while he worked… Bah! tales of a mathematician, who wants life to be an exact equation!…

And now, standing before his fireplace, running his gaze over these books, these papers, these drawers, these shelves, he mused on this work, on this strange intellectual action which he was carrying out there, all alone within these walls, for nearly ten years: the penetration into his own thought, the recognition of what he really thought on the greatest problems, the determination of his philosophical person; and at the same time — since at every step he noted that what he believed to be thought was not thought, that the terms he united in his mind (those “simple” terms, which are not defined, because everyone agrees about them) had at bottom for him no truly clear sense — at the same time the analysis of the most “simple,” the most fundamental ideas of philosophical thinking… Work of his flesh and of his blood: nights and nights of fever to render such a thought clear, to obtain such a distinction… And they say that analysis is a dead thing!… Unique work: which no one had done, resolutely at least; which no one would do henceforth, with their contempt for the clear idea and their pathetic philosophy, which will only grow under the democratic sky… And he mused now on what he had already done, on the parts of his thought which he had already disentangled: his thought on the origin of the world, and that his infinitism was only the effect of a taste — the seductions of infinitism —; his thought on that Being who would be thought only insofar as a quality, the impossibility for a finite being to think such a thing… Now he had reached the idea of movement: he was soon to establish the two profoundly distinct ideas — of dynamism and of continuity — which are confounded under that name. Then he would elucidate his thought on the appearance of life, whether or not he believed it a discontinuity; that discontinuity does not signify miracle; his thought on the appearance of the concept; on the appearance of social sentiments, of sympathy between humans, that it has nothing to do with the return to God… He would say all these things. He was still young… He saw his work accomplished… He evoked the day when, on each of these great problems, while men tear one another apart because at bottom none of them really knows what he thinks, he would say to himself, tranquil: “On that point I know clearly what I think; and if I think it by reason of a preference, I know that too.” And with all his strength of love and of pride, as others embrace their child or as founders embrace the idea of their empire, he embraced the idea of this work which he was in the act of doing, and which would say to men to what furious desire to ascend from his being to the idea of his being, to what thirst for consciousness, to what morality, a man had raised himself.

He threw a log on the fire and flung himself at his work… And they hardly disquieted him, those who were sleeping yonder.

II

It was a Sunday morning, on coming back from the Bois, that Suzanne complained for the first time of a little pain in the hip: it hurt her a little when she ran too hard, when she climbed too quickly, when she stayed standing too long. Oh! not very much… She complained again the next day… A little weakness in the knee. To set their minds at rest, they had a doctor come. He examined, palpated, questioned…, then said that it was nothing, a fatigue of growth very frequent at that age, advised that she should nevertheless refrain from running too much for the present, that she should remain lying down a few hours a day, for a few days…

She lay down two hours after lunch. Then toward the end of the day. Very good, very reasonable, she left her games… They read her fine stories, they looked at pictures… Little friends came to see her…

Félix came toward five o’clock to take tea with them. Then he went back into his study, not without relishing that less noise was being made in the corridors.

* * *

… Félix had at last rendered clearly distinct those two ideas of movement which he saw everywhere confounded. Now he applied himself to the history of this confusion, to showing the various forms it had taken in the principal thinkers…

That night he had just finished a memoir of Descartes and written several pages to make precise what form this confusion took here…

Now, at the bottom of an armchair, in a dark corner of his study, he let himself drift into musing apropos of his reading… He mused on this Descartes, on the moment of his life when he wrote that reply… It was the moment when he had quarreled with the Fathers of Clermont. He recalled, in the biographer, the pages about that quarrel: the philosopher’s great anger because the Fathers were deforming his thought in order to get the better of it: as if one ought not to remember, said good Baillet, that masters are obliged to forge chimeras for their pupils to accustom them to combat… It was the moment when he was preparing the publication of his Philosophy… It was the year too when he had lost his little girl, “his dear Francine”… She had left him by her death “the greatest regret he had felt in his life… He wrote the history of his Francine on the first leaf of a book… He weeps for her with tenderness…” He evoked the image of the great thinker, bent, already old, over his dying child… He took pleasure — why? — in this image of an ailing child, lulled by the verses of a gentle poet on the death of a very gentle child… And he mused, not without some pride, on his own child, the charm of his life and of his work, smiling and welcome, a little ailing for the moment, lying down, with a passing fatigue… which will soon pass… He lingered in this image …

All at once an idea reared up, confiscating all the others: Suzanne was stricken: these pains in the hip, these weaknesses of the knee, it was coxalgia… Those “fatigues of growth,” tales of doctors sparing the parents!

He sprang up, ran to a dictionary, feverishly turned the pages. He read panting, devoured the sentences… Everything confirmed his fear. It seemed to him that the article had been written about his Suzanne herself… He did not finish. He was certain… Yes, it is understood: one always believes one has all the diseases one reads about. But sometimes one believes rightly… How had he been able to admit for an instant those doctor’s tales!… And besides, it had to be that she was stricken, that he should have a great misfortune. It was the chastisement of his egoism, of his monstrous life of the mind. His life for ten years had been a defiance of the human law. God was punishing him. It seemed to him that the chain of human couples, of those who united and lived for one another, rose up around him, crying out to him the shame of his life and that he was going to expiate it… He stumbled within his certainty… He no longer knew what he was doing…

He was lighting a lamp… Why?… Yes, he wanted to go and look at his child, to look at her with all his strength: he would see, he would know…

He went along the corridor, on tiptoe, moved by the image of this man walking in the night, trembling for his own who slept, and by the silence of this house that reposed upon him, and by the dreadful peace of those who do not yet know…

He entered the room. On a chair, little garments well folded; in an armchair, the toys she liked best… He approached the bed and, making a screen of his hand, bent trembling over the child. She slept at the bottom of that little bed as at the bottom of a sanctuary, her mouth a little open, her breath abandoned, her fists closed, as if intent on abandonment, as if gathering up all her little strength into trust… He thought he would faint… He pulled himself together, however; and with his whole will to see and to understand, as if he suddenly believed that willing makes knowing, he fastened his eyes on that sleeping form… He remained there, bent…

Then little by little, and for the first time, the feeling invaded him that this flesh which throbbed there was his power of being become flesh and consciousness, was his strain of being, was his will… it was himself beneath his own eyes… Then love worked its miracle: slowly, gently, surely, this little sleeping thing which he felt to be himself ravished him away from himself… Slowly, deliciously, he felt all clear distinction from her abolish itself within him… All that in him was properly himself, was uniquely himself, was going out, going out… His will to know, which had bent him over that bed, his preoccupation for that child, his suffering on account of her but exterior to her, all that had left him… He was becoming that little sleeping thing, weak, trustful, wounded… It was she now that suffered in him, that complained in him: he felt with her and no longer because of her: interest was foundering into love… Now it was done: he was wholly within her… At the same time, strange thing! it seemed to him that he increased in ceasing to be himself: one would have said that his consciousness extended, extended, by a delicious extension, and at the same time negated itself by that very extension: the more amply he felt himself, the more it was in her that he felt himself… And he could not weary of melting into that soul… He blessed that she slept, so as to melt into her at his ease, without reason, without measure… He remained there, bent, drinking in the indistinction…

He straightened up, troubled like a drunken man. What was happening within him?… What! he had come for a quite definite thing… What was it, this kind of intoxication that had seized him, that still held him… He looked about him, to recognize himself, to get his bearings… Yes, there was the door… the corridor… … yonder slept his wife… His wife! the being in whom he had made his child!… whom he had altered with his being!… who was himself too!… And the intoxication came back to him that he was himself in another than himself…

Then he understood: the family was taking him: the being who was his being was tearing from him the identity of his being: his flesh was robbing him of his mind… Then in a flash he caught a glimpse of the whole collapse of his life, his entire being confiscated by love, the action of his thought become impossible, all those ideas that throbbed in him left there, forever, his dear work crushed in the egg… No, that should not be…

That was not what was being asked of him… If the child was ill, she would be cared for, he would do what was needed… His life, his happiness, were not being asked of him… He did not want to love them. He did not want to. He did not want to… Then, in a movement of frantic defense which already horrified him, he ran toward his study, toward his writings, toward his thought. It was there that his life was, his passion, his will. They would surely know how to defend him. And with a fierceness that terrified him, in which he recognized the one he had once had for a passion that was escaping him, he plunged into his papers…

But he did not read… But he thought nothing… And all those written things seemed to him dead things. The only reality was yonder… And already the limitation of himself to himself, which he had just experienced in order to read those few lines, was heavy for him to bear…

Then a vertigo seized him: it was certain: it was the ruin of his mind, the collapse of his dream, the fall into the most violent love, the richest, the most painful… Then, as in former times, he had the desire to wear out by movement his force of agitation, to go out, to run, to walk straight ahead of him… But this time he had to stay: to stay near those he had made, of whom he had the charge… And, at bottom, he wanted to stay. He wanted to suffer with them: to stay, wounded by them, near them wounded by him. And, collapsing into his armchair, he murmured with the Master: “I am crucified to the world, as the world is crucified to me”…

And he remained there, awaiting the day, trying to think that it was a bad dream, that tomorrow they would tell him all was well, that he would find himself again; feeling well that, even then, he would not find himself again, that he would love them, that he wanted to love them, that he would never again find the distinction from them which he had had there, at that table, a few hours ago… And he looked at those papers — that adored effort toward the clear idea of his being — become in one night inert things… What then was his passion of the Idea? What was that “passion” for which the mouth of a sleeping child had sufficed to make it vanish?… And yet he had it, that passion, it was indeed the condition of his order; he felt the truth of his distress at the thought of losing it…

And he remained there, his head bowed, trembling in his powerlessness to understand who he was… He understood those who, on such nights, fall to their knees at the feet of Him who knows…

* * *

The day broke. He ran to the doctors… Coxalgia! He was mad to believe that… It is a very simple diagnosis… They would have told him at once… But no, it was the fatigue of a child who grows fast…

He went back home. They were at table… He explained as best he could his lateness, why he had gone out so early, sat down between the two of them…

… What a profoundly new feeling for those two beings seized him! This little thing eating there beside him, drinking, speaking, thinking, willing — how strangely he felt that it was himself who lived there, beside him… Ah! very often, to amuse his mind, he had said to himself at meals, looking at her: “This life then is my life.” But today he felt it! And it seemed to him that no father felt it as he did. It is for other fathers that this is only an idea… And this woman, there, opposite him! What a deep feeling this morning — which he had never had (once, however, when she was pregnant) — that she was a child whom he had torn from her own people, from her house, from her consciousness, and that he had mingled himself with that consciousness, and that at the same time he was mingled of her… Oh! he had not been mistaken that night: no, never would he find again the distinction from those two beings which he had had only yesterday, never would he find again the independence of consciousness, that purity of heart, that clarity of heart necessary to the mind…

He stayed all the afternoon beside Suzanne, making her play, telling her stories… Clémence watched him, stupefied.

The next day, after the meal, he went back into his study. He was going to take up his work again… Nothing prevented him from it… Come now! what was the deep sense of that page of Descartes? The relation of that page to the master’s thought at that moment of his life?… He searched… Yes, he searched… Yes, he really searched… As before… He found; and he embraced his idea… But he felt well that his true power of embracing was no longer where his thought was, but, in the room next door, on that chaise longue where lay the flesh of his flesh… And he walked feverishly up and down: and he felt well that his fever was not the fever of the idea; but the fever of fear; that he was clinging to the love of his work, that he wanted to will it, that he was forcing himself to find important this thought that he was forming, that a mere nothing now would tear him away from all that… And yet something deep, deep, otherwise deep than judgment, hooked him to that work. Ah! the atrocious thing, he wept in his heart, the atrocious thing to be there, all living, dispossessed of his faith…

… He was reading the poem of an ancient: how, according to that school, the world had been formed, the birth of the earth, the greatness of the sun, the movement of the stars, the plants, the animals… He came to the picture of the sufferings of childhood. And, trembling, he felt that there had just sprung up his true force of interest…

… That day, little friends had come to play and everyone was running. Then it had been the hour for Suzanne to lie down. They had stopped her at the most joyous moment of her run; and they went on running, the others, the little cruel ones. And she watched them, sad and good… Oh! what love penetrated him, what fury of communion, what immense increase of being torn away from himself, of powerlessness of the mind!…

* * *

The illness increased. The doctors assembled… Men came with bandages, cords, and plaster, who imprisoned the child’s limbs in a dreadful casing, while, torn apart, horribly light, her parents amused her, deceived her — “it is only for a few days, on Sunday Suzanne will run” — and she raised toward them great astonished and trustful eyes… And the men departed. And she remained there, crucified, resigned, dreadfully human…

Then, furiously torn from his thought, the unhappy man felt himself flung into the most distracted love, into the richest devotion, into the most total debauchery of the heart he had ever known. What was the confusion with a suffering being which he had known formerly and had believed violent, beside his confusion of today with this being who was his being, his blood, his will become flesh and suffering! It was from within this time, by the prolongation of his own nature, and not by a cause arisen from without, that his soul became the soul of another; it was the deepest part of him, the most properly himself, that this time threw him out of himself, attached him to another — and with what perfection of adjustment, what power of adhesion, what fullness of alienation. Ah! he knew now what it is to adhere to a soul, to the most secret part of that soul, where one would never have believed that another could reach, to no longer know a single point of consciousness that is yourself, you alone, you and not another… And now everything foundered, everything foundered: all action of the mind, all power of grasping, of understanding. And he struggled: he tried to lift himself above this ocean of love, to embrace once more his dear thought: twenty times a day he went back into his room, fought fiercely at the idea — he had the right to want his own life too, his own happiness! he did not have to give everything! —, twenty times the idea escaped him, like a slippery wreckage between clenched fingers. And, with all the violence of his resistance, in the despair of his powerlessness, he fell back into full love.

And he detested his love. He found again in it what he detested most: the love of “human suffering,” the love of “sensibility,” the love of the flesh that suffers… And it was the love of his flesh… And all the love of man, and all his “charity,” and all that he sanctifies, is the love of his flesh… the love of “his fellow”… Ah! the clever religion, and how eternal it is, which invites man — and which divinizes him for it — to cherish on a cross his own suffering flesh.

For that is it, their religion of Christ: it is the religion of Man for his own suffering flesh… It is insofar as it is that, that it has conquered the world, that it is universal… And certainly there are those who have proclaimed Christ the greatest of “thinkers,” (1) and that without his torture he was just as great, and that he must be loved neither on Gerizim nor on Golgotha, but in spirit and in truth. Who are those? Philosophers, scholars, “half-Christians,” unpopular or unknown… But “Pascal ailing, who shows himself sensitive to the physical sufferings of Jesus,” there is the true Christian, and all cross themselves in him.

And it was the love of his bruised flesh… Oh! that love of the only bruised, of the only suffering — did he not hate it enough! Does not to suffer mean to feel? And to compassionate, to feel with another? Why always “to feel pain”? By what blasphemy, by what base reduction of Being to your miseries, have you decided that human means suffering? And you who “compassionate,” who “commune” with your god, why always with his pain? Why never with his smile, when he is at Magdala, happy and simple between the two

(1) “Christum ait fuisse summum philosophum.” (Tschirnhaus, on Spinoza.)

young girls? Why, by what sadism — and I do not say only you others, dreadful modern mountebanks, exploiters of the panting, exhibitors of Sebastian or of Amfortas, but you, severe doctors of decent ages: “O blood that flow either from the pierced head, or from the bruised eyes, or from the whole torn body! O precious blood, let me gather you up…” (1) — by what sadism do you commune with the only bruised one?… And he had it, like the others, that sadism. Had he communed with his child when she ran in the gardens, when she was happy? Had he felt himself like her, then? Was it not, he too, with suffering humanity that he had compassionated?… His head low, he thought: “Who will be human enough to compassionate with happiness!”

(1) Bossuet.

And it was the love of a flesh bruised by him. For he discovered in himself hideous feelings: an attachment for that suffering because it was his work, because it was the proof of his power to create suffering… The dreadful love of man for his power of cruelty… And suddenly there appeared to him the sense of Christianity: the love of men for Him who has suffered not for them but by them, who would not have suffered if they had not sinned…

And love embraced him on every side: sometimes, beneath states of his soul that he believed “reasonable,” all at once he recognized it; sometimes, at the most unforeseen turnings, new forms of love sprang up, which clasped him like furies.

Sometimes, in his desire to feel himself alone, himself only, he dared to make the child herself responsible for her illness. It was madness, this belief that he had done everything: the creation of the being by itself, apart from its ascendants — “autogenesis” — that existed! So much the worse for her if she had made herself badly… And at once — besides the horror of that solitude in which he abandoned that little being — he felt that he regretted it, that part of self-creation which he had just yielded to her, that he begrudged her the slightest independence, that he wanted her to be himself alone, entirely himself… And, appalled, he saw that his “responsibility” did not come from his “reason” or his “morality,” but from the most organic part of his being, from the will to be author, from an unknown need of carnal authority… And the consciousness of an utterly deep bond embraced him.

And, in those instants, he did not want to share that authority even with Clémence. It was the father, the only parent. It was the man, the only one responsible… Ah! they had seen far into the entrails of man, those doctors who pronounced that, if Eve alone had sinned, the human race would not have fallen.

And he understood now what it is, the will to be responsible: that it is the will to feel oneself afar, to feel oneself farther than oneself; that the great responsible ones are the great proud ones, the great willful ones, the great powerful ones… Those who exist feebly, women, children, do not will themselves responsible.

Other times, having become “reasonable” again, he accused Clémence. The nature of the mother, she too, fashioned the child! (And who knows whether among her own people, whatever they say, there was not some taint)… And it was she who had made this child: he remembered: it was her passion of a woman, it was she… But no, it was he, it was he…

And all at once, looking at the child: it was neither she nor he, it was their indivisible couple, mysterious unity in which their individuals, their distinct wills, foundered… He understood suddenly why this mystery is sanctified; why marriage is a sacrament; he understood what there is of monstrous in the fact that two wills which have created a being, the living symbol of their indistinction, should then dare to declare themselves distinct, ignorant of one another, divorced from one another… And it seemed to him that one more confusion, grown with the greatness that men confer upon it and which he had just felt, was installing itself in his heart…

He mused on those millions of humans who recite these dogmas… Their life would no longer be possible if they began to feel them…

Other times he sank fully, resolutely, into the feeling of the harm he had done, as if to exhaust its bitterness. He drove this truth into himself like a stiletto: “I willed this suffering being… And it is not: I willed it and then it became suffering, it is: In the instant when I willed it, insofar as I willed it, it was suffering… My will, which is this little being, was a suffering thing… I was, I am suffering in it…” Thus, by a roundabout way, communion returned: responsibility once more turned into love… And he regretted his first feeling, which made him believe at least in some liberty…

He looked at this being who revealed to him his suffering… It seemed to him that the Father adored the Son who had revealed to him his own humanity…

Yet with what pain, behind this communion, he felt the implacable independence of beings: that this being who is you, you can do nothing for it; that it must save itself!… What harm those doctors did him with that simple word: “She will get through it.”

And other times it is his “good sense” that rose up in revolt: it was literature, metaphors, this story of a consciousness that is confounded with another: “I have a pain in your chest”!… What is more personal than a consciousness? He was himself, himself only. A being had come from him, who was another being, distinct from him… But a single glance at his child sufficed for him to find again in his heart that he was both her and himself… He contemplated at length this state of his heart: to be self and not-self!…

Then, in full light, he recognized the dreadful law of love: the dreadful contradiction. The dreadful contradiction — the worst enemy of the idea — which he detested; in which they all wallow, with their pathos, with their effusiveness, with their “musicality”; which was there, installed in him; and which he experienced, he, while they declaimed about it, those others, professors of Pascalian ecstasy, horrible pen-pushers, attached to their table, strained toward their sole glory, perfectly identical to themselves, who have never loved anyone… And he mused on the “Effect which is only a form of the Cause,” and he mused on the Father “consubstantial” with the Son, on the three Persons who are only one, on all those things that are themselves and something other than themselves, and which have troubled men. And all those “stupidities” seemed to him grave things. And those councils that disputed over them appeared to him sublime… And, swollen with his past and with the religion he drew from it, the contradiction inundated him entirely…

And then, in this total contradiction, in this perfection of maladjustment to himself, his power of thinking escaped him totally… Yes, notes, readings, deductions, approaches to the idea, touchings of its external form, all those wretched things — which they name Intelligence! the better to bludgeon it — all that was still possible for him… But the true power of thinking: the possession of the idea, the installation within it, the invention inside it; that erethism of the mind, which they pretend to confound with the emotion of the heart; and the idea rendered alive, the abstract rendered carnal (they believe that the abstract is a dead thing!); and that “holding,” of which he was so proud, that violence of the mind in holding its idea, in keeping it against the hundred ideas that press around it and want to lead it astray — all those cherished powers foundered forever in the action of his heart… And he saw them founder… And he knew to what basenesses he was rolling down. Oh! that powerlessness to hold his idea, that smearing of the mind, that cowardice of the mind — had he not lashed it enough in others (perhaps they too have a child whom they love)! it was his now!… And that “liberal” style, as he said in his contempt, that style which leaves room for what it does not want to say, that style which does not impose its thought — it would be his now if he were not ashamed to write…

And in his growing powerlessness, before the more and more certain collapse of his work, inundated with grief like one who believed himself abandoned by his god — as he would have been if he had truly believed —, he too groaned toward the god he loved: “Why hast thou forsaken me!” …

But he knew well that he had deserved it, that abandonment. That he had committed a crime. That he was condemned. And, quivering under the chastisement, he drove into his heart these words of Knowledge to the condemned one who weeps: “You ought, from the first arrow, to have lifted your eyes toward me, and not, lowering your wings, to have sought the blows of that little girl or of some other inanity.” (1)

And before this Eden which he was losing through his heart, he sighed: “Who will redeem us from charity!”

* * *

… He mused on her whom he had made to suffer in his youth, who had loved him so much… He dared to write to her. Several evenings he wandered around her house…:

“Madeleine… Forgive me!… I wished to see you again… A single instant… I am very unhappy… I have a sick child… I have understood now all the harm I did you…”

She listened to him, silent and closed… She remembered the collapse of the dream she had made near him, and in the bitterness of her heart there was no room to

(1) Dante, Purgatorio, XXXI, 55.

pity others… She said a few banal words and, breaking off the interview, walked toward her house, which at least had not betrayed her…

They went to Berck. He saw the child’s distress when she learned that there existed a world of little beings nailed down like herself in carriages; the dreadful solemnity her illness suddenly took on from it; the dreadful consciousness she took of being stricken with a well-classified illness, the object of so many words, of so many consultations, so frequent that an entire region had been consecrated to that illness, so grave that because of it so many parents left all their affairs for a long time…; the dreadful consciousness she took of being far more solidly attached to her bed, the more inward gaze that she raised toward them… And before this redoubling of crucifixion it was a mad redoubling of love, of extradition of himself, an orgy of communion…

And in this perfection of union, by this very perfection, he tried to free himself… He had the right to despise what he felt to be himself, his flesh, his bruise! He had the right to dispose of himself!… But at once the child reared up, distinct, with a soul of her own, torn that she should be abandoned… Ah yes! she ceases to be herself so that I may think her in me, but she becomes herself again when I want to dispose of myself… We are one, but we are two…

And once more the unhappy man, who wanted only the clear idea, foundered into the full contradictory, of which he had the most dreadfully clear idea.

And how many other wounds for him! The ease of these people in those things he detested, in which he foundered… Their ease amid the bruised… Those stretchers drawn close together — those little fallen ones who play among themselves, who laugh — and those parents who read alongside, who sew, who take tea or who “make up their game”… That acceptance of misfortune… That ease in degradation… What am I saying, that ease? That pride… That feeling they have of being a corporation, that they are humanity, “moral” humanity, the only one that deserves interest! Their dull contempt for healthy humanity, for those whose children are well, who go to the happy beaches!… The arrogance of misfortune… And their ease in living only by the heart; their hatred for those who keep themselves to themselves, their hatred for those who think… Their pretension that the highest thoughts are not worth that love which they give there, to their flesh… And their familiarity with him, their belief that he was like them. They symbolized for him the modern world, what it has been for two thousand years… The religion of the heart, of feeling, of tears… The pyre for the Idea… Naturally! A moral climate made entirely by women! Ah! the great antique agony: “Send the women out,” he said to his disciples. And afterward, when they burst into sobs: “It was not worth my while to send away the women in order to avoid these unseemly things…” And the modern agony: women at the foot of a cross!… Women… Everywhere women… All the directions of the soul abandoned to women. And then the heart, the heart, everywhere the heart. Art that becomes “feeling.” Justice that becomes “love.” Morality that becomes “kindness”… So much so that a man who were all alone in the world could not be moral… Even God, who is a heart: For it is from the heart of God, it is from the love of his Father that their Jesus Christ comes forth; it is among those great pagans that the children of the gods come forth from the brain of their father!…

And now, in this redoubling of love, in these new exactions of his heart, all grasp — even superficial — of the idea became impossible for him, and the last powers gave way that had been his mind. Like a distracted father who clasps in his arms and covers with mad kisses a cherished life that goes out little by little, for hours he roamed those dunes, furiously attached to the idea of that life which had been his joy and his pride, which was vanishing forever… Oh! those whole days spent in increase: that joy of feeling that one sees clearly, that one sees more and more clearly, that everything becomes distinct, that everything orders itself, that one draws, like a god, light from the night and order from chaos; and that one sees clearly within oneself, that one discovers one’s order, that one discovers one’s law; and that those movements of the heart, which they content themselves with feeling, one understands them — their anger that they should be understood, and their denials: “the heart has its reasons”…, as if one could not know them! —; and that, by this consciousness, one differs from hour to hour from other men, one creates another species… All that lost forever!… And, in place of that, love, the adoration of his flesh, the debauchery of his heart… Love, for which anyone is fit… For which the basest are the most apt… And their dreadful sophisms to tell us that it is love that is the light, that it is love that is the increase… It is love that has made the great works! As if those who made them had not made them when they emerged from it, when they pulled themselves together to reflect on their love… As if love all alone had ever found anything! And love purifies! love elevates! As if it did not elevate in the exact measure in which it ceases to be love, in which it takes on the tinge of an idea… Love by which I live without understanding my life… Which ceases to be love if it knows itself and if it judges itself… Which brings us back to “tendency,” to blind willing, to the “vital thrust”… Love that brings us back to the beasts… Love that degrades us… And I can surely insult love, since at the moment that I insult it I founder into it more than ever. Since, knowing that my child wakes, I have not enough breath to run to her bed, to drink in her first thought… Are you content, affectionate brutes? For I know it, your wicked joy, I know it, your dreadful sniggering — “he is not so clever as all that…, he is not different from the others…, at bottom he is a sentimental man…” — each time that Intelligence collapses into your mire…

And he ran toward his house, drunk with love, with hatred, with degradation…

* * *

And surcharges of love awaited him which he had not foreseen, which were only to grow: the child from day to day became more human, more properly a soul, escaping from simple feeling, rising to moral suffering; and the more this little thing became a human thing, the more deeply she touched his heart, the more powerfully she drew him to herself… while he wept over this precocious humanity…

… They were in the garden. The sun was setting over the motionless sea and the night little by little enveloped the earth as with a great shroud of shadow. One heard in the distance the pale sound of the waves that came gently to die at the foot of the dune, as if wearied by the fires of the day. On the road the flocks were coming home, weary from a long heat, inclined to shade and to rest… Everything bowed down, vanquished: the sounds, the perfumes, the colors… Oh! how she associated herself with this death of the day, with this abjuration of things… How she felt it, this languishing nature, which at least did not humiliate her… With what evidence her great eyes fixed in space ignored the amusement of forms, went straight and deep to unite themselves with the soul of things… And he, near her, in the shadow, with what power of soul he espoused this soul, so gravely a soul, in what plenary oblation, in what votive purity…

That evening, Clémence had sat down at the piano. They had drawn the stretcher near and the child listened, in her father’s arm… Clémence ran through a few romantic pieces, then she opened a copybook of Beethoven and began the largo of the Fourth Sonata… Félix watched the child. How gravely she listened! How indifferent she was to the movements of the fingers, to the shifting of the hands, to the things that are seen, and to the sudden bursts, and to the notes of ornament. How indifferent she was to the sounds, wholly given to the soul that they express! And those great periods, whose amplitude exceeds the attention of so many adults — how her heart followed them, how it desired their entire accomplishment, their deep development, their calm subsiding… Now Clémence reached a kind of elevation; she played from memory, in full expression… The child no longer looked at anything, did not hear those dissonances, dreadfully inward, as if poured out into the soul that had found those sounds, that had told the pain of mutilations… Then he saw her, through those ruptures of rhythm, those pantings, those interrogations, those changes of register that ought to have distracted her — he saw her follow the soul of those pages, and unite herself in a tear with the supreme feeling: consolation by the inner life… Then, bent over her, he melted into that soul, so tragically human, in a thirst to negate himself which he had not yet known…

* * *

It had been nearly a year that the child lay in that fetter… That day the doctors were to come, to see if they could deliver her… They unbound her, they set her on her feet, they made her walk. Very close to one another, the two parents fastened their eyes on the eyes of the doctors. The servants did not withdraw… The doctors examined, very serious, and everyone trembled that they had not already said yes… They exchanged a few words in a low voice… Félix understood: the cause was lost… “A little more patience”… Dreadful encouragements… They put the child back in place… Everyone was silent…

They dined… They strove to be as on other evenings…

He let Clémence go to bed, passed into his study… For some time he contained himself: he read, he wrote… He walked about the room, clinging to semblances of hope…

Then he reflected that he was alone, that everything slept, that he was free…: then, falling into his armchair, leaning his two hands on his table and hiding his head there, he gave free course to his immense grief… He wept, distracted with love, and in his weeping he stammered: “Poor little Suzanne, poor little Suzanne…” And his grief doubled with the course he gave it… He wept… He wept…

All at once he started: a hand was laid on his shoulder. He raised his head. It was Clémence… She was standing before him, in her great white peignoir, plunging into the depths of his eyes a long, suppliant gaze, infinitely deep, heavy with reproach and with love, with consoling will…

“Félix,” she said gently, containing her emotion, “why do you not tell me your sorrow?… Your grief tears me apart… I feel that I could soften it…”

He bowed his head, panting, fleeing her gaze, like a hunted beast… He was overwhelmed that she should be there: in the eleven years they had lived under the same roof, not once had she violated that nocturnal retreat where she knew that he kept himself to himself. Not one night had she come. And she was there!… And she — she whom for eleven years he had held at a distance, whom he had harshly checked one day in an impulse of confidence — she surely remembered it — it was she who came to offer him communion!… How sure she must have been to have dared that, sure that he was weak, ripe for the fall… He felt on his shoulder that loving and firm hand, resolved upon tenderness… She had been watching for him… And the worst of it was that she was right to be sure; it was that this communion which she came to wrest from him, he wanted it; it was that his father’s grief, he wanted to let it open out in the arms of his accomplice; to weep over his child in the very arms in which he had made her; to perfect, in the arms of the Mother, the alienation of his being into those who were his being. She had done well to come. He was waiting for her… And, distracted, he felt at once that it was the last rampart of his identity that was collapsing by this coming and that he rejoiced in it…

He stammered, in a first movement of withdrawal, wiping his tears:

“It is a moment of weakness… I let myself go…, there…, like a coward… It will pass… I shall be strong…”

She had the courage to persist. Trembling, leaning affectionately toward him:

“You know, you often say that I am strong, I am…, the ‘child of the country districts’… That I have not your nerves… Do you believe that I could not bear your sorrow too?…”

“Yes…, you are courageous, you are,” he said, passing his arm around her waist…, “you have self-command, you do… But, if you know how to contain your sorrow…, you have it none the less… I see it well, you know… And it is shameful of me to come and soften your heart still more…”

She said, closer:

“And you also often say that I see more justly than you…, that I see things as they are… I am sure that you see still more harm than there is… Why! you believed she was going to get up today… Well, yes, it is very sad to wait another six months…”

“Six months!” — all his grief came back to him now, he no longer held it in, and, pouring it out where it should go, he poured it out in full violence — “six months! Do you think I am the dupe of what they say? Do you think I did not see how they looked at one another? their worried air? that there is no improvement at all? Will you make me believe that you did not see it too?… And she, the little darling, who already has the dreadful delicacy to hide her sorrow from us — did you see this evening how she wanted to be gay? — because she sees that it does us too much harm, because we are not strong enough, we, to hide ours from her… A humanity like that, at her age, is it not horrible?… Six months!… It is for years that she is in that gutter-splint… For years… And when she comes out of it, she will be lame… And then, in vain shall we watch over her, foresee, ward off everything that can wound her, her life will be only a grief at every instant… It will be in the gardens… Yes, I know: one is humane, one lectures the children: ‘You must not refuse to play with little Suzanne because she is lame.’ And they will take her into their games, kindly, ‘like any other’… They are like us, the children: it flatters them for a moment, not to be brutes… Then all at once they will play at running — it is always at that they play, children! — at ‘who will arrive first’… And she will be in the way… And they will make her feel it… And she will weep… And then it will be the ‘matinées,’ the children’s balls… Oh! she will dance too!… Tall young girls will come to make her turn, and she will be taken into the round-dances… But when the round-dance grows lively, becomes wild and truly joyous, when there begins for those little beings the sensation that they are part of a wild circle, and more and more wild, which they create and which creates them, and they laugh, and they shout, that they are the great victors, then she will leave the round-dance, and she will come near us, to watch it from afar, and she will say nothing so as not to grieve us, and we too shall speak of something else…”

“Be quiet,” wept Clémence, clasping him against her, “be quiet, you are tearing me apart…”

But he continued, implacable, torturing her, making her his own, as if he were sowing her with his father’s grief:

“And that is nothing, that… It is later. When she will see, one by one, her friends disappear at the turnings of the walks, hand in hand with the beloved, confiding themselves, becoming engaged… Oh! the dreadful precautions they will take, the last ones, to announce that to her… And they will not be able to hide their joy… And she will have to rejoice at it… And she too, she would have wished to confide her life; she too, she would have known how to keep the faith of another, to leave her parents’ house, to commit herself and to found a home… But one does not marry a cripple… And she will go to those young women. She will be intimate there. She will be the friend, the true friend, the one of whom one is not afraid, the one to whom one tells everything — except what is truly of woman, is it not? except what belongs to the wedded one… And she will see cradles, in which beautiful children will sleep… She will think of those she would have had, how she would have loved them… She will be the one who rocks the children of others…”

“Be quiet, be quiet…”

“And even then we shall be there, the two of us, to dress her wounds, to give her the illusion of love… But when we are no longer there, she will be all alone, in a chimney corner, with some old servant, with nothing, with no interest in the world… It will have been a whole life of misery, of humiliation, of nothingness… And it is we who will have done that…”

Then, bursting into sobs, he let his head fall between Clémence’s arms: he pressed himself against her, melting into that flesh which had made with him this misery, which wept over it with him; and he felt that in this embrace, and by the clasp he received from her, everything foundered of what remained in him of distinct and clear, his last liberty, his last intellect; he pressed himself to her with the frenzy of the supreme fall, glutted himself with confusion. And she, while weeping over the picture he had just painted, pressed against her heart that dear head, which she held for the first time, which was hers now; distracted and broken, she no longer knew whether her tears came from her grief as a mother or from her happiness as a wife; through her sobs, she mused on the lost days, and like another bride who finds her bridegroom again on the evening of her youth, she groaned in the depths of her heart: “God has refused us the enjoyment together of our young years”… They remained there a long while, embraced and weeping, feeling their impiety in embracing so hard within their bruised child…

Their emotion subsided… Keeping one arm round her husband’s neck, slipping gently between his hands, she sat down on the arm of the chair. She took the handkerchief he had on his table and, carrying it to her eyes, she said amid her last tears:

“How cruel you are… And how you exaggerate… One would say that you take pleasure in hurting us… What makes you sure that she will be lame?… And were it so…, it would be very little… Very little… She will have humiliations!… The others have theirs…, because they are ugly…, because they are poor…, which are perhaps worse… She will have a delightful face…, she will be a charming child… See how she is loved: strangers…, servants…, everyone… Where have you seen that a charming creature, because she limped a little, cannot be loved?… You are always lost in theories…”

He listened to her, melted into her… What she said was the ruin of all that he respected: it was the acceptance of being happy in the misshapen, the acceptance of the relative… He let her speak, he no longer resisted… She continued, drying her last tears:

“And besides… I do not understand you… You are there, you look at the life of this child, and you give it names…, and names that tear you apart: humiliation, nothingness…! Why do you always want to name? Why do you always want to judge?…”

“It is true,” he murmured, “it is our mania, we others, ‘thinkers’…” It was also his greatness, this perpetual substitution of the idea for the real. He knew it… He renounced that greatness.

“As for me, I am not like that… I take her life all humbly, without asking myself what it is… I try each day to bring her a little happiness, the dear little one… And the next day, if I can, I begin again… Believe me, let us help her instead of judging her… See, yesterday I saw that there was a toy that would please her… I went into Paris and I bought it… Come, we are going to put it on her bed, so that she will smile on waking… Tomorrow, we shall find something else…”

She drew him toward her room. He followed her like a drunken man, feeling confusedly the immensity of his fall, that he was foundering into the real…, into the narrowness of the familial… She took from a box a great teddy bear of plush… They went along the corridor now…, drew near the bed… She held him by the hand, as if to support him in this confrontation with simple love, unprotected by pride… They remained there, bent over… The child opened her eyes, perceived the toy, and the two of them before her, pressed one against the other, who looked at her, suppliant, imploring… She smiled at them, she forgave them…

* * *

From that day on, he ceased to struggle. He became all love, abandoned all thinking, all action of the mind…

He neither blighted that abandonment nor honored it, fallen to that degree which he would once have sworn he should never know: to live his life without judging it.

Sometimes, in a newspaper, in conversation, he met the words “evolution,” God, liberty… He mused: I had ideas on these things, on the ideas of these things… Let us think of them no more!…

Often, looking at Suzanne, he mused on that “desire” of his which had become a “thing,” on that “tendency” which had become “flesh”… He caught the taste his mind now had for those “mysterious” things, in which one can only marvel, in which the mind by its essence cannot advance. He accepted this fall.

Sometimes, observing Clémence — enigmatic with the raised corners of her mouth, so serene now between Suzanne and himself — he came to think that she secretly cherished the child’s misfortune, which had drawn the husband near, had taken his mind from him… He did not hold it against her.

They went back to Berck… He bore with those people… He surprised himself understanding that the bruised one was all of humanity; how

From the cry of Golgotha the infinite sadness Had been able alone to contain agony enough To express humanity!…

… There was talk of a discovery that might transform all the ideas of men on the nature of matter.

“All that, monsieur,” said a father to Félix, “is not worth the caress of one of these little beings here!…”

“No doubt,” he said, “no doubt…”