A LOVE CRIME. Paul Bourget
Читать онлайн книгу.
like the rest.
Like the rest! He felt a desire to convince himself that it had always
been so with him. He went and opened a box, in which were piled six or
seven note-books of different sizes. Some were made of sheets of school
paper. There were two of Japanese paper. These note-books were journals
of his life taken up repeatedly at unequal periods. In them he came upon
pages scrawled on the desk of the study-room at school, pages blackened
on the sides of boats, in hotel rooms, in this very drawing-room. He
took up these note-books, and began to turn over the leaves, finding in
them a former ego perfectly similar to the present ego in premature
misanthropy, sudden and fleeting ardours of sensuality, murderous
analysis, impotent hankering after unattainable delight, indolent
languor and incapacity ever fully to feel anything, whether real or
ideal.
The whole had combined to make of him a sort of child of the century, of
the year 1883, but without elegy, a Nihilist of gallantry and without
declamation.
The following is one of the pieces which his eyes, now gloomy and dull,
dwelt upon, and which would have broken Helen's heart if, gifted with
the magic faculty of second sight, she had discovered the melancholy
torpor which even the gift of her person, following upon the gift of her
entire soul, was inadequate to disturb.
"PARIS, _May_ 1871.
"Terrible days. Vanaboste comes and tells us yesterday, at one o'clock,
that we must get ready to leave, and that the pupils at Sainte Barbe
have gone already with their head. The Panthéon is full of powder, and
will soon blow up. Since morning the firing had been slowly, slowly
drawing nearer--a strange noise! It was as though some one had shaken
millions of nuts over the town in a gigantic cloth. Alfred and I spent
the morning in the attic watching the flames of the conflagrations
writhing against the sky. He was quite depressed, and I fiercely gay,
with a nervous gaiety that forced me to the utterance of outrageous
paradoxes--but were they paradoxes?--concerning the fine theories of our
professor of philosophy last week. O vision of fate! His last lesson
turned upon progress!
"We are packing up hastily in order to leave, when one of the masters
comes in a state of terror through the little door opening upon the
Rue Tournefort, which he bolts behind him. He tells us that the
federates would not allow anyone to pass their barricades. It was with
great difficulty that he himself has been able to return. We were a long
way from the good-natured National Guardsman who said to us on Monday,
at the doors of the Lycée: Shout "Long live the Commune!" boys, and you
are free." Vanaboste was as white as my paper when he heard this news.
The usher hit on the plan of having mattresses spread over the middle of
the courtyard, so that if the Panthéon blew up we should fall with less
violence. We remained for about two hours in this distress, we pupils
fourteen in number, the two assistant masters, and the head master.
Alfred and I, who, by an odd contradiction, were almost calm, talking
together in a corner.
"In spite of the firing, which was constantly drawing nearer, and the
bullets cracking against the walls, perhaps a hundred paces off, we had
neither of us a perception of reality; the danger appeared to us to be
something distant, dim, almost abstract. And we were talking--of what?
Of our childhood. 'It has been a happy one,' he said to me, 'even here.'
For once I emptied my heart to him, and let him see what I thought of
the scholastic lupanar in which, owing to my guardian's selfishness, I
have been obliged to grow up. After all, I prefer even this bagnio to
his house.
"Through this useless talking the firing can be heard coming nearer. The
Panthéon does not blow up. Suddenly a loud shout comes down from one of
ourselves in the upper story, where, at the risk of receiving a bullet,
he had stationed himself at the window. 'The Chasseurs are at the end of
the street.' That was the most trying moment. My heart beat as though it
would burst, my throat was choking in the expectation of what was going
to happen. Undefined danger had left me calm. Exact, brutal, and present
fact affected me unpleasantly. Some shots are fired quite close, then
furious summonses with the butt-ends of guns shake the gate. The same
usher who had shown his coolness in conceiving the precautionary measure
of the mattresses, rushes forward in time to strike up the levelled guns
of two chasseurs, who, blackened with powder, and with eyes gleaming in
frenzy, would have fired at random into the crowd of us if the other had
not been there. A lieutenant comes up, a little man in yellow boots,
with strap on chin and pistol in fist. Vanaboste speaks to him, and we
are saved.
"All this was yesterday. To-day we are again at our studies, a symbol of
our childish life in the midst of this tumult of action. I turn over the
leaves of an old book of spiritual philosophy with the pleasure of
contempt, and after reading official phrases about God, the immortal
soul, refinement of manners, moral liberty and innate reason, I close my
eyes and see the Square of the Panthéon as it was last night: the dead
lying with naked feet, because their shoes have been stolen; and with
battered skulls, because their deaths have just been made sure, of by
blows from butt-ends of guns; the splashes of blood, that feel sticky
beneath the soles of our boots; the flames of the conflagrations in the
distant sky; and on the footpath, lying on the same straw, and sleeping
like wearied brutes, the little chasseurs who have taken the quarter.
_Homo homini lupior lupis._"
"DIEPPE, _July_ 1874.
"The daughter resembles the mother. She is only twelve years old, and
already