CHAPTER ONE

The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.

Lord Byron

“Michel! Michel!”

A loud voice resounded in the silence of the provincial dawn. Michel Bedée, who was coming from the railway station with a valise in his hand, raised his head and recognized the face of his old professor in the frame of a high window.

“Oh! Bonjour, Master!”

The other continued: “Is it really you? But what are you doing here, man of genius? Maman isn’t ill?”

Michel shivered. “I hope not...I don’t think so....”

“But no, no...I’d know that. Come in for a while, so that we can chat.”

“Later, Master. I’ve just arrived—I haven’t been to the house yet.”

“To the house! You said that like little Michel Bedée, who was so sweet, gentle and namby-pamby. But it’s not yet five o’clock. Are they expecting you? No? Maman’s asleep—don’t wake her. Come in here, until a reasonable hour.”

Michel hesitated. He looked at his mother’s house the end of the avenue: an old, quiet house with its shutters closed; a house asleep.

“That’s true,” he said. “I’ll come in.”

“Good—I’ll open the door. Wait two minutes for me—I have to get dressed.”

The other disappeared. Michel examined the window from which the cry of “Michel! Michel!” had come—and he remembered having heard, a second before that, without paying any heed to it, the sound of a window-catch grating, a sash opening, and two shutters, briskly pushed, clicking against a wall. He imagined the cheerful awakening of his master, greeting the dawn and the day that was recommencing with the quotidian cock-crow.

Five o’clock chimed at the cathedral. The first stroke caught Michel unawares, scaring him. Then he was astonished by the strangeness that the most familiar impressions of his childhood had for him. The five strokes succeeded one another at such long intervals, and such was their beautiful gravity, that one might have thought that the clock was bringing a certain emphasis to marking the phases of time. A sudden din; then a vibration that diminished toward silence; but then the din burst forth again. In the depths of his memory, Michel rediscovered the sounds and their rhythm. After the fifth stroke of the hour, he waited for another: the silence spread and flourished, an invisible marvel that reached the entire extent and tried to fill it.

The old man’s house and its neighbors extended the top of the fortified bank of the old town, a sort of acropolis around which life had spread over the ages. For its lower story it utilized an old rampart that emerged from the ground like a natural rock. That centuries-old architecture was surmounted by walls that were not much younger, and just as solid, pierced by narrow windows; they did not stand entirely straight, but were slightly slanted back, forming a large truncated pyramid.

By virtue of that fact, the buildings of the avenue gave the impression of resting on naked foundations. Their irregular file, viewed from a distance, resembled a gigantic jaw whose incomplete dentition had bare roots.

On the other sides of the avenue, at a lower level, there were the gardens of the bishop’s palace, the foliage of their beautiful trees shining with cheerful morning light.

While Michel waited, in front of a wooden door fortified with iron, as low as an entrance to catacombs, and contemplated the deserted avenue and locked houses, he thought that sleep, in which the misfortunes of life are eased, had its most tranquil refuge in this part of the world.

The old man arrived.

“One second! One second!” he announced through the door.

The key turned in the lock, awkwardly—and then the loud voice cried: “Come in, Michel, man of genius!”

* * * *

The old man whom Michel Bedée called his mater was known in the little Breton town as the Alchemist. That nickname summarized the displeasure and alarm that his person inspired.

He was a man of seventy, tall, thin and vigorous, his bushy white hair cut short, his white beard sharply pointed, with small restless eyes and remarkably delicate features—save for the nose, which had once been damaged by an exploding retort. Swollen, scarred and pimply, that nose gave the face a comical aspect. One imagined that the local children would have made fun of it, multiplying facile gibes, if the habit of seeing it had not long abolished, in successive generations, the aptitude of noticing it. It was like the gargoyles on the buttresses of the cathedral, ridiculous and grimacing, which one went past without noticing, and which did not prevent the monument from being consecrated to a sublime fervor. If one observed the Alchemist’s face in the right way, that nose no longer seemed to be the result of an accident; on the contrary, it became indispensable, adding a character of disdainful bonhomie and deliberate wit to the physiognomy. The soul that reigned in the little eyes reigned over heavy and ugly matter.

The old man had been the professor of chemistry at the college, but he had soon given up teaching. Devoid of all ambition, refusing the positions that were offered to him to, as he put it “perform his tricks,” he dreamed of nothing but a quiet life and perpetual work. A small income permitted him to realize his ideal of solitary existence.

One day, he had been formally accused of atheism. That was nothing: he was suspected of devoted himself to diabolical works. Was he not trying to create life chemically? Had he not shown his pupils test-tubes in which bizarre arborescences were ramifying in a pale gelatin, born at his behest from as sulfate of calcium, like that plant that climbed from the loins of Jesse on church windows bearing saintly genealogies? From then on, he had been viewed with a suspicious eye. Devotees made the sign of the cross when he went past. The parents of pupils would not allow their sons to be exposed for a minute longer to the contagion of his skepticism. Pusillanimous and judicious, the principal had asked his colleague to deny the nasty rumors that were circulating: no, he was not trying to create life; no, he did not desire to rival God....

“The question can’t be put in those terms,” the Alchemist had replied, simply, and added: “Besides, I have better things to do than argue with such blockheads.” And he had handed in his resignation.

Then he had lived in seclusion at home. From time to time, he went for walks—but not, like the philosopher Kant of Koeningsberg, at regular hours; docile to his experiments, he awaited their pleasure, and did not want any other liberty than they would grant him. As he no longer had the college laboratory at his disposal, he transformed his kitchen for that purpose, and sent his old housekeeper elsewhere, even though she protested against that invasion of diabolical cookery.

* * * *

“Come in, my boy, come in,” said the Alchemist to his former pupil.

He had taken him by the hand like a child, and led him along dark and winding corridors; then he took him into the laboratory.

It was a large room, poorly lit, which resembled the guard-room of an ancient castle or, even more so, the crypt of a church. Hollowed out in the bank against which its back wall rested, it only had one window looking out on to the avenue, barred with iron. The ceiling, with arched cavities, descended at regular intervals on to strong, stout pillars, crushing with motionless effort the sculpted capitals on which could be seen, among the faces of angels, a preacher with a fox’s head throwing little women into his hood, and Aristotle on all fours with a prostitute astride him. All of that was covered and plastered by a thick layer of paint, worn away in places, allowing the sight of sharp corners of smoke-blacked stone.

In dark corners, furniture could be seen: a credenza, a sideboard and tables laden with books, flasks, mugs and pans. The floor was formed by granite slabs. An immense fireplace took up almost all of one wall and seemed capable of sheltering a shivering family under its mantel, like Saint Ursula in the most ample folds of her robe.

The Alchemist no longer made use of the fireplace; he threw old utensils and debris into it. He had installed a beautiful modern stove for coal, gas and electricity under the window; it was there that he worked; and, substituting his scientific labors for the alimentary labors of his housekeeper, it was there that he did all his conclusive or chimerical chemical cookery.

He led Michel Bedée into the light that entered through the green-tinted windows; he put his hands on his shoulders, looked into his eyes and said, gravely: “Greetings, Michel, man of genius!”

“No,” Michel stammered. “Don’t say that, I beg you, Master.”

“And you, don’t call me Master any longer. You seem to be mocking me. I known full well that I’m not...but after all, you are a man of genius, and I’m an old fool.”

“Is that so?” said Michel, forcing himself to laugh for want of a better reply.

“Don’t laugh. It’s the exact truth!” replied the old man. Then he went on: “Now let’s sit down, and you can tell me a little about your discovery.”

There was an expression of lassitude on Michel’s face, as if he were having difficulty searching his memory for the tedious details of an old adventure that no longer interested him.

The old man noticed that. “I’m annoying you—but that doesn’t matter. Come on, tell me: your sirium, you first found it in Sirius?”3

“Yes, in sum, yes...or rather, in Sirius, but it wasn’t me who found it. It was known that among the substances making up Sirius, revealed by the prism, there was one that was unknown, and singular, whose spectrum could not be confused with any other. Then, while studying the rare earths, I found a substance that had exactly the same spectrum. It was the same substance. I called it sirium. It’s infinitely less abundant here than in the star. I only have small quantities of it, but it exhibits strange properties.”

“Which will revolutionize chemistry?”

“Possibly.”

“Which is to say...?”

The old man pressed Michel with urgent questions, and so keen was his curiosity that Michel could no longer think of putting him off.

“Well, this is it: sirium emits heat, light and electricity. It’s a source of perpetual energy. It never ceases to be active, and without any loss of substance—without any diminution of its volume or its mass.”

“Sacré bleu!” murmured the Alchemist.

“At least, I believe so,” Michel added. “I’m not certain....”

The Alchemist, however, neglected that final weakening of an affirmation that he found overwhelming.

“So?” he said, bluntly. When Michel did not reply, he continued: “So, the law of conservation of energy, the unique and absolute dogma on which, since antiquity, we’ve based all our hypotheses and directed all our research...?”

Michel Bedée raised his arms and let them fall back again. He opened his eyes wide, pursed his lips and said nothing. There were a few seconds of silence between the two scientists. Immobile, they looked at one another, not seeing one another, each lost in his own dream.

“That’s stupid!” said the Alchemist, finally, standing up—and he burst out laughing, but without gaiety, with a kind of sarcastic wonder. Then he started pacing back and forth in his laboratory, meditatively, while Michel did not budge from his stool. Again, he exclaimed: “That’s tragic—and magnificent!”

Folding his arms, he came to stand in front of his pupil, and said: “I’ve been laboring at my stove for half a century now, Michel, as if the conservation of energy were the primary truth—and I might as well, fool that I am, have spent the time playing marbles, like a child, or having a life, taking advantage of the beauty of women and chasing after them. Anyway, I have no regrets....”

He emphasized the last words with a kind of stoic violence. Then he went on: “It’s ridiculous, ridiculous. Anyway, what does it matter to me? I’m only one worker among thousands in the laboratory of science. But think of the great scientists there have been in the last three thousand years! It’s them, the sublime and efficacious portion of humankind, that you have to see leaning over the stoves where they were cooking nothing but error, with a glorious zeal. What an adventure, Michel, my boy! You, you arrive, you’re young; we took you for a child last year. And you discover that we’ve been saying nothing but stupidities from the very start! I repeat that it’s tragic and magnificent.”

Michel Bedée wanted to put things in perspective. “Wait, Master. It’s not yet proven. I’ve only formulated hypotheses....”

The old man continued to stride back and forth. From time to time he asked Michel a question, paused momentarily to listen to the reply, and set off again. And he was thinking, with a stubborn ardor. When he had come to a conclusion, he came back to Michel and said, softly: “My boy, you have work to do. And in order that we, the old, can get back to work, you have to demonstrate our error to us, once and for all, and give us another doctrine—or else you have to be mistaken. Until then, we’re in a state of stagnation.” Laughing, he added: “You’re a redoubtable lad, you know? When I think that my imbecile neighbors are afraid of me! It’s you who are the Devil, Michel. It’s you!”

A little later, he perceived that Michel was not following him, remaining apart from his excitement and occupied with other ideas. He asked: “But given all that, what are you doing here, instead of working and making haste, while we’re hanging on your research? What are you doing here, in this stupid little town?”

To that question, so squarely posed, Michel sensed that he would not be able to reply in a sentence, and that he might not be able to reply at all. He remained silent.

The old man was peering at him like a doctor at his patient. He sat down beside him and said, softly: “You have troubles, Michel?”

Michel would have like to run away, without saying a word, without saying a single one of the countless words that would be required to indicate the extravagant misery of his heart and mind. Amid all those words, he went astray, and was only able to murmur: “Yes, troubles...big troubles....”

He hoped, for a moment, that that might suffice—but the old man seized him by the wrist. “What?” he said.

Michel tried to evade the question again: “Oh, nothing...it’s nothing....”

But the old man shook him, sternly. “I asked you: what?”

Michel was confused.

“Come on, what?” repeated the old man.

“If I told you, it would take forever....”

“Ah! And you’ve come here, Michel, to sort it all out?”

“Sort it out? Oh, no—I don’t expect to do that.”

“So?”

“So, I’ve come...I don’t know really why. I haven’t come; I’ve run away. And since I was running away, where could I go, except here—home, to my childhood?”

“Eh?”

“What do you expect? It’s instinctive. Little children in distress take refuge with their mother.”

“Yes, but you’re no longer a child....”

“Yes I am!”

The old man became annoyed. “You’re mad, Michel. How long are you going to stay here?”

“I don’t know. All my life, perhaps....”

These fragments of sentences made a discordant noise in the Alchemist’s head. It was as if, in the idle of a smoothly-running experiment, an absurdity had become manifest. He did not admit absurdity; it shocked and frightened him. Hurriedly, he resolved to get rid of it.

“Come on, Michel, this won’t do. You have to tell me what’s wrong, and right away. I’ve had enough. What is it?”

“Well, my wife...but it isn’t only my wife, it’s...everything!”

“Your wife is being unfaithful to you?”

Michel went pale, and he exclaimed: “No, no, no...what are you thinking?” And he shivered.

“So?”

“So, no, she hasn’t been unfaithful to me. But she’s bored....”

The Alchemist nearly burst out laughing, but he was furious as well, and, in a tone of mocking commiseration, he growled: “She’s bored? What a shame!”

Such was the misunderstanding, which lent itself to joking, that Michel could not longer stand it. Crestfallen and discontented, he explained, and the words did not come quickly enough for his liking.

“Yes, yes, she’s bored. It’s my fault; I don’t pay any attention to her. The days weigh upon her, and I sense that she no longer loves me....”

The Alchemist interrupted him.

“What do you mean, she no longer loves you?”

“You know full well what it means,” Michel replied, impatiently, “to love a woman who loved you, and is beginning not to love you any more....”

“No, I don’t know. And you ought not to know either, since you’ve devoted yourself to science.”

Michel only shook his head.

“Come on, my lad, come and see.” He took Michel Bedée by the arm and led him to the capital of Aristotle.

“You see? That humiliated blockhead is Aristotle our forefather: the greatest mind of old. Look at him. On all fours! Look—a naked woman is riding on his back. Its sensuality that has brought him low, has degraded him. This old emblem is rich in significance.... You’re not saying anything?”

Michel was, indeed, not saying a word. The Alchemist, by way of conclusion, demanded a confession.

“You’re in love with your wife, Michel?”

“Yes.” Michel felt his heart swell, and he also felt a tremulous memory of sensuality run through him.

“Oh, Michel, my little Michel, the old story! When you came to tell me, two years ago, that you were getting married, I foresaw it all, divined it all. I said to you: ‘Michel, don’t get married!’ You were caught, I could see. You were in love....”

“I still am!” Michel declared.

The Alchemist looked him up and down. “Shut up, Michel—you disgust me. Once one has consecrated oneself to science, one has obligations to science; and when one is a man of genius, one has more imperious duties. A scientist is a chaste man; that is the first duty of a scientist. Chaste in mind, I mean! The rest is a matter of physiology, and lust only shocks me when it undermines the intelligence. One makes arrangements, damn it! One adopts regular habits, in order...do you understand?...in order not to think about it in the meantime. But it’s necessary for the mind—or the heart, or the soul, as you wish—to be above such things. The mind of a scientist is a place where facts and ideas come together and combine logically. Catholics who go to communion fast, in order to receive the body of their God appropriately at the tabernacle. It’s necessary that the mind of a scientist should be clear and pure, in order that ideas and facts aren’t polluted there, and can operate here by themselves, all alone, in accordance with unblemished logic. A scientist, Michel, is a kind of monk, who imposes a severe rule upon himself. He renounces being himself in order to be the sanctuary of science. You’re a monk who has sinned...you’re a bad monk!”

Michael groaned. “I can’t do anything about it. Too bad!”

“You can’t do anything about it? Oh, two years ago, I didn’t know that you were a man of genius. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have let you do what you did. I would have begged you to do better! I would have nipped your sin in the bud! I would have cured you...or I would have had you locked up.”

“I’m not a man of genius!” Michel murmured. “I’m only a poor creature who asks to be permitted to live, in his own way, as best he can—yes, in his own way, as maladroit as all the ways of life that find creatures down here for their particular usage, one after another....”

The Alchemist cut him off. “Shut up! You’re not a poor creature. Science needs you. You’ve taken it to a critical point at which it can’t languish, and you don’t have the right to leave it there, if you’re...if you’re simply an honest man.”

Michel jibbed. “Well, I am leaving it there! Too bad!”

Michel and the Alchemist were both standing, face to face—and Michel, for the moment, had the upper hand. He surrendered to his excitement, and spoke loudly. “Oh, it’s too demanding, at the end of the day! I’ve given it too much, sacrificed too much. I’ve had enough! I’m rebelling!”

“Michel!”

“Now I’m reclaiming the happiness that it stole from me—or, rather, that I surrendered to it, foolishly. You’re looking at me angrily, Master, and are scornful of me? All the same, it’s because of science that I lost the affection of a woman I adored. I’ve neglected that woman, in order to work. If you knew! That work doesn’t only take over the mind, but the body, the senses...oh, how can I put it? One is possessed, one no longer exists....

“So I made life impossible for that woman. Between her and me, even by night, there was an intruder: science. I didn’t understand that until now, and it’s too late! When one takes a woman for one’s wife, one has to enable her to flourish. Science put an unbreathable atmosphere around us, an atmosphere in which I gradually allowed myself to asphyxiate, without perceiving it. Abruptly brought into that atmosphere, she perceived the peril she was in, and she protested. She opened the windows wide to let in light and air, and while I remained stupidly at work, I thought she was getting drunk on the effluvia that arrived from outside with marvelous abundance....”

Michel was getting carried away and taking advantage of the facility of metaphors. The Alchemist summoned him back to concrete realities.

“So?”

“So, she’ll leave....”

“Through the windows? Yes! Close the windows!”

That brutality of expression did not trouble Michel. He replied, softly “No, I don’t want to kill her; I won’t oblige her, or invite her, to die with me.”

“Let her go, then. And you, work.”

“No, no. She’ll leave, I can tell. She’s already left me, in imagination. Except that I won’t work any more....”

There was a moment’s silence. The Alchemist seemed to be contemplating a disaster, and he said nothing.

Michel continued, vehemently: “Before sacrificing my wife to science, I sacrificed my mother to it. Perhaps you haven’t forgotten that? Perhaps you haven’t forgotten the frightful days when my mother wept all the tears that an already long life had left her, because I, the child she had pampered, left the house of my birth, the shadow of the church and the faith that she had given me.”

“Your mother wanted to keep you tied to her apron strings. I’m the one who rescued you from a puerile servitude.”

“I don’t hold it against you, Master, you did it for my own good.”

“Not at all! No, I didn’t do it for your good, I did it for the good of science. I did it because I saw that you had a curious, intelligent mind...and in that, I wasn’t mistaken...and because I thought that you would be a good servant of science...in which, it appears, I was mistaken.”

“You were mistaken,” Michel retorted, resolutely. “Since then I’ve distanced myself from the existence that my antecedents had prepared for me here, and since then, the gentlest, most attentive and most affectionate of them all, my mother, has almost ceased living. She prays for me. She associates my sister with her prayers and her continual grief. I’ve come to ask forgiveness, from both of them.”

“You’re mad.”

“I’ll ask forgiveness for an escapade that took me away from them, and from which I’ve come back, but of which they’ll die all the same.”

Michel fell silent. The Alchemist looked at him in amazement. Suddenly, as if he were concluding rapid and urgent meditations he said: “Listen, Michel. If you go to your mother’s house in your current state of mind, you’re doomed. She’s the one who has rendered you as sentimental as you are—she and your sister! Both of them have alarmed you, day after day, by means of affection, Catholicism and tearful caresses. They want to get you back, I tell you. Listen: it’s them or science. Choose!”

“The choice is made.”

“Michel, you’re a coward!”

Several seconds went by, in a silence like a sea, a silence that seemed agitated by profound and violent undercurrents. The Alchemist, sitting on a stool with his elbows on his knees, his cheeks applied to his palms and his eyes lowered toward the floor, pronounced his words slowly.

“When I think, Michel, that it’s you who have genius, and not me! More than forty years I’ve been working, without interruption. At dawn, or even before dawn, I get up, go into my laboratory and get to work. That lasts until dusk. I have experiments in progress that I began five years ago. I’m old. One day, I’ll be picked up, dead, from beside my stoves, like an imbecile and like a brave man. I haven’t made one significant discovery, and I won’t...but I stay, and I shall continue to stay at my post, beside my stoves. It’s necessary to have a moral impetus in life. Well, personally, all my moral impetus is in a phrase of Claude Bernard’s, a simple phrase that exhorts people ‘to experiment, in order to see.’ Yes, multiply experiments; there are hundreds of thousands of them to do, in order to see whether something unexpected might suddenly be revealed.

“So, there it is. I do experiments, and I look—except that I’ve seen nothing, or almost nothing. However, it isn’t possible that, in the number of my experiments, no admirable phenomena have been produced. I must have had all their mystery before my eyes, in the depths of my pans...except that I’ve looked hard, but haven’t seen, because I don’t have genius. That’s a pity—oh, not for me, but for science. Yes, Michel, it’s a pity that it’s you, and not me, who has genius, because I have the character of a scientist, while you....”

He abandoned himself momentarily to his melancholy. Then, as if he did not want to participate in a frightful disaster, he got up, and said to Michel, imploringly: “There’s still time, my boy. Pick up your valise. Go back to Paris, right away, without going to your mother’s house. Explain to your wife....” He warmed up as he spoke. “Explain to you that you’re setting her free. If she hesitates, send her away. Yes, throw her out. It’s not possible, otherwise. It has to be done! And then, as soon as she’s gone, Michel, get back to work. You’ve wasted too much time already. To work—good God, to work!”

Michel said nothing.

“Well? Don’t you have anything to say?”

Michel replied: “I’m sorry to have troubled you..”

“Get out! You’re a coward!”

Michel left, valise in hand. The old man listened to him walking along the corridor, the door to the avenue opening, and then closing again. Then, by way of a chair, he climbed up on to his stove, and through the window he shouted: “Michel! Michel! Not that way! No, no...do as I said.... Michel!”

Michel did not turn back.

And the old Alchemist, in a dull voice, moaned: “Adieu, Michel!”

The he got down again, passed his hand over his forehead, struck a match on the wall, lit the gas of his stove and started work, as he did every morning.

* * * *

When Michel Bedée found himself on the avenue again, he did not hesitate and headed for his mother’s house. He did not raise his head to look at the Alchemist, but he marched swiftly, like a man tormented by a singular confusion of ideas but guided by a firm resolution.

In spite of the Alchemist, the railway station and an immediate return to Paris did not represent duty to him; it was, on the contrary, temptation; he wanted to see his wife again. Internally, he appealed to her: “Geneviève! Darling Geneviève!” But he continued on his way.

The sight of the family home at the end of the avenue saddened him and drew him on reluctantly. He went forward, his eyes fixed on the brown-painted door, the wrought iron bell-pull that was hanging down and which, when he seized it, would activate a complex system of quivering iron wires before resounding the grave ring that he was already imagining.

He trembled as he drew nearer.

He feared the affection that was about to greet him with a melancholy urgency. He divined the joy that the two sad women, his mother and sister, would feel on seeing him again: a very gentle and subtle joy; a joy that would immediately ask how long it would be granted to them; a joy afraid of departure that would be spoiled by the thought of its brevity.

And he arrived with a mortal chagrin in his heart, afraid of having to hide a secret, of having to deceive, with difficulty, the demanding intimacy of amicable souls; perceived, his dolor would be further intensified.

As he pulled the bell-cord, he no longer knew why he had come; he regretted the absurd and imprudent journey. At the same time, he felt that he could not elude the peril—and when the familiar racket that he had anticipated resounded in the corridor, he was invaded by a flood of tenderness.

Here I am, Maman! he thought.

The word Maman echoed in his mind in a seductive, dolorous and delightful fashion. It seemed to him that he had just awakened the sleeping soul of the old dwelling. The ringing of the bell became more frantic; now it was stammering like a senile plaint. From outside, Michel heard doors opening along the corridor: that of the kitchen and that of the small drawing-room. Footsteps sounded.

Finally, Michel saw, on the shade, limned in shadow against the light, that came in through the glazed garden door, his sister and the faithful maidservant Melanie coming into the corridor.

“Oh! Bonjour, Michel!”

“Bonjour, Monsieur Michel!”

“Bonjour.”

And from the drawing-room, weak and glad, urgent with difficulty, another voice called: “Oh! Michel , Michel...is it you? Kiss me first!”

She insisted: “Michel, Michel, your Maman first!”

Marie had already placed her hands on her brother’s shoulders and was offering her lips to him; she moved aside, obedient and scrupulous, and let her arms hang down—and Michel saw a confused resignation in the young woman’s eyes. He seized her fingers and led her away; he smiled nervously.

“Dear Maman!”

From her impotent armchair, Madame Bedée stretched out her arms, waving them. She took possession of the beloved head that leaned toward her and covered it with kisses and tears. Michel, his eyelids closed, abandoned himself; and thought he had become a child again, but with a terrible anguish.

“How long are you staying?”

Michel no longer knew. At hazard, he replied “One day.”

“Is that all?”

“For now, yes.”

And all three of them had said it all, the essence of their common adoration, in the first kiss. They fell silent, all sitting close together, involuntarily, and looked at one another. Michel saw his mother, a few months older—but for the first time, he perceived that his sister was aging. His noticed her finer lips, her thinner nose and her paler cheeks, the skin of which was less glossy. He kissed her eyes. For a second, he thought that the silence would be rent by a triple sob.

“Where’s your luggage?” asked Madame Bedée.

It was not ambiguously that Michel replied: “There’s only a valise. I put it down in the hall.”

Madame Bedée was not asking for information; she was simply interrupting the excessively poignant silence. The futile question, asked in time, affected the rescue of one of those helpless souls about to drown in silence. A vain chatter commenced: Michel detested luggage; he had never been able to tolerate dragging trunks after him, waiting for them when the train arrived, negotiating with porters. A constrained laughter was born of that poor conversation, which was merely an alibi for alarmed affection.

Melanie brought a cup of hot chocolate, roast meat and a glass of fresh water on a tray. Michel ate breakfast. He recognized the dented silver spoon, the cup with gold thread and pink flowers. All that, all the details of the past, moved him; he experienced a sentiment mingling painful nostalgia and quiet joy.

Suddenly, Madame Bedée asked: “And your wife? Is she well?”

“Very well.”

They were both content that the question had been asked and the answer given. Madame Bedée did not know Michel’s wife very well and did not like her at all. To begin with, she was displeased that her son had married a Parisienne, who was doubtless frivolous; and secondly, she was jealous of this Geneviève, whom Michel adored and who had him all the time—as jealous as mothers are, who are also women.

Then Marie asked her brother: “By which train did you arrive?”

Michel confessed that he had arrived on the five o’clock train and that, in order not to wake his mother, he had gone into the Alchemist’s house.

Madame Bedée was discontented. “Oh, you’ve seen him? Already?” She added: “I detest him.”

Michel was well aware of that. The quarrel went back several years, but he knew that his mother’s rancor was long-lasting.

“He’s the Devil, that man!” she said.

“No,” said Michel, “he’s a simple and innocent man who works hard; he’s a kind of lay saint, almost sublime....”

“They are no lay saints!” declared Madame Bedéee.

In the violence of that assertion, Michel recognized the character of every kind of dogmatism. He had found the Alchemist no less impetuous. And he reflected, silently: Every kind of dogmatism expresses itself and acts as if it were the only one in the world—but there are several; all the misunderstanding stems from that. They remain, therefore, marvelously irreconcilable. What a joke it would be if all of them are wrong!

Madame Bedée went on: “God will judge him, and I don’t want to commit in his regard the sin of the Pharisees who, proud of their piety, conclude too quickly the imperfections of their neighbors. I forgive him, since it’s written: ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them who trespass against us.’ Except, Michel, that what I have to forgive him is having deprived me of your daily company. He has taken you away from me. He has put his scandalous mania for science into your head. It’s his fault that you haven’t remained my pious little Michel, submissive to God and faithful to the teachings of the Church. He’s the one who launched you into an imprudent research, by which you were dragged away from belief in the verities of Scripture. Oh, Michel, if I did not command myself to forgive him, I would hate him—and my most frequent sin, the most difficult temptation for me to avoid, is that of hatred.

When she yielded like that to the vehemence of her faith, Madame Bedée’s face lost its maternal softness. Anger marked her features rudely; her wrinkles seemed to freeze, to harden, to compose a primitive physiognomy of marble sculpted long ago and captive of its form forever.

“Are you scolding me?” asked Michel, in a tone of childish timidity.

“No, no, I’m not scolding you, Michel; even when you were small, I never scolded you—remember that! It’s no time to start, now that I no longer have, before God, the burden and responsibility of your soul, and now that I’m old...old....Do you see how much older I am than last time you came?”

“No!” replied Michel, anguished.

Madame Bedée smiled sadly, and in a surge of tenderness that rejuvenated her, she cried: “Come and kiss me again. You’ve hardly kissed me at all. Come!”

Michel drew closer to her, and she coaxed him, petted him, playing with his head as she had once, when he was a baby almost devoid of weight, played with his entire being. As she cradled that dear head against her cheek, she even started singing to him:

Knock, knock! Who’s there?

It’s Polchinelle, Mam’selle.

Knock knock! Who’s there?

Oh look, it’s Polchinelle!

Then Michel hid his eyes against his mother’s shoulder, in order that the tears rising to his eyes would not be visible—warm and abundant tears that were multiplied, note after note, by the nursery rhyme and his despair.

The song, which he had forgotten, he suddenly remembered, with such exactitude that his memory anticipated the words and the tune, every detail of the inflection into which the rhythm drew the quavering voice, which was trying to be sprightly and light. Between the voice of yesteryear, still intact in his memory, and the voice of today, however, he perceived a difference in every line of the song: the poignant measure of the years gone by, evidence of fatigue and debility.

That song, which he had forgotten, which had been dead and was reborn all-but-dying again, awoke with it a variously distant past. Michel’s thoughts went back through the years, one after another, until they were lost in the mystery of original consciousness. It seemed to him that he remembered, obscurely, facts that he had not known and sensations that he had scarcely felt. He recognized them and believed, in spite of the vague shadow in which the new apparition was manifest, that he had never known them as clearly as he did now. His early infancy was there, and surrounded him, a soft, soothing and harmonious singer of dormant and seductive refrains, intent on holding him in a state of ignorant bliss.

For a few seconds, Michel savored that forgetfulness—but suddenly, the excessively beautiful fiction fell apart, and the more the dream had enchanted him, the more the reality would now torture him.

He dared not straighten up. He divined that his mother, like him, was docile to the prestige of the renascent past, and he was afraid of showing her a consternated face.

Gradually the song about Polchinelle became less lively, and softer. The voice became weary, the intakes for breath more frequent, interrupting the monotonous flow of the words. The song was no more than an idle babble; the cradling arms relaxed. The song and the cradling ceased at the same time.

Michel felt a tear fall on to his ear.

He straightened up. He gave his mother a long kiss, and, to excuse both their tears, he laughed, saying: “Your baby is no longer small enough.”

“Your Maman is no longer young enough!” retorted Madame Bedée.

They both fell silent, grave and emotional.

Michel observed that Marie was moving back and forth, pretending to rearrange, here and there, various trivial objects on a shelf or reels of threat in a sewing-basket. She was trying to distract herself from the melancholy that was taking hold of her.

“Shall we go for a little walk soon, Marinette?” Michel asked her, with a false cheerfulness.

“Oh, how nice!” she replied. And she clapped her hands, momentarily younger. “How nice!” she repeated.

“The word “nice” echoed strangely in the midst of the sadness that had taken up residence in the room so many years before that it seemed impossible to get rid of it. And Michel reflected silently on the misery supposed by the joy that welcomes a little charity. Marie, at the offer of a walk, had had the expression of gratitude one sees on the faces of genuinely poor beggars when one gives them a sou.

Involuntarily led to make himself suffer, Michel persisted in such images, which dressed the soulful distress in which he had left his mother and his sister. He pitied them, and he repented bitterly of not having devoted all the fervor of his life to them.

Marie and Michel sat down by their mother’s armchair, facing one another, a little in advance of her, and she extended a hand to each of them. Michel and Marie, similarly, held hands, all three of them thus forming a closed circle. There was an old game, which they all remembered, and they said “Friends! Friends! Friends!” while waving the chain of their arms. Then they fell silent again; every memory they revived afflicted them.

As they were still emotional, Madame Bedée looked Michel in the eyes and said to him: “Today’s Sunday—will you go to mass with your sister?”

“Yes,” said Michel. “I’d like that.”

He had recognized, in his mother’s voice, the tone of imperious supplication that she had always put into her requests, and which rendered them, for him, more compelling than orders. Her words, softly spoken, and their tone of tremulous anxiety, already contained the threat of the grief that Michel would be bound to see in his mother if he neglected to say yes. That affectionate strategy had ruled, enslaved and oppressed his adolescence and then his early adulthood. Michel rediscovered it, docile as of old, with impatience.

Madame Bedée went on: “It’s sad, for me, no longer to be able to go to Church with you.”

They said nothing; Michael knew full well where his mother was trying to go. Indeed, she said: “It would be kind of you, then, to recite with your old mother, who no longer has her legs, a dozen rosary-beads before mass. Would that upset you, Michel? No? I see that it doesn’t. You’re very kind. Thank you. Kiss me.”

Marie knelt down, and swiftly took a shiny steel rosary from her pocket, made the sign of the cross and began to recite the prayers in Latin. Michel had stood up. He observed that his mother had closed her eyes, pretending not to watch whether he made the sign of the cross. He stood there, his arms extended and his hands together. Then it seemed to him that that attitude of deferential protest was futile and stupid, and he knelt down.

The Aves succeeded one another, one by one, and Michel, with his mother, punctuated them with the mysterious amen, which has come from the Orient to the souls and lips of all Christian countries, and which devotedly repeats the quiet ignorance faithful to those two unintelligible syllables.

In principio erat verbum, Michel said to himself. In the beginning was the word; and significance is no longer necessary, once the word is charged with hazardous and touching memories....

“....Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.” Marie concluded her recitation.

“Amen,” replied Madame Bedée and Michel.

As he got to his feet, Michel made the sign of the cross.

“You’re good children,” murmured Madame Bedée.

The cathedral bells began to ring. Their magnificent sound spread out in long and quivering waves.

“There are the first chimes of high mass,” said Madame Bedée. “Get ready—it’s time.”

Michel had heard that phrase every Sunday in days gone by. He looked out of the window at the garden full of sunlight and the beautiful tumult of flowers. Roses and geraniums were in bloom there, in regular beds bordered by round bricks, and a virgin vine was climbing the back wall, mingled with ivy. Michael remembered Easter mornings, when he had thought he saw miraculous bells pass by in the splendid sky, which dropped divine and prodigious gifts of sugar eggs among the flowers of the family garden.

* * * *

To go to the cathedral, Marie and Michel followed the avenue bordered and shaded by old trees. The ground was worn; the pebbles comprising it seemed sharp and worn themselves.

Afterwards they went into a back-street so tightly contained between the hunchbacked and unequal houses that carriages could not get through it. In any case, it was blocked by two boundary-markers that ought to have been attached by a chain; the first links could still be seen, sealed into the stone, rusty and polished at the same time, the stone having become as shiny as marble by virtue of the friction of passers-by.

The brother and sister walked at the same slow and distracted pace. Occupied with parallel thoughts, which variously tinted their reveries, they said nothing, as if they were afraid of the words that might escape them.

Finally, Marie asked: “Do you find Maman much changed?”

“Yes,” Michel replied, in a tone of painful confession. “Yes, even more nervous and anxious.” After a pause, he added: “You have such a sad existence!”

Marie raised astonished eyes to look at her brother, and said, with a despairing smile: “No; I’m used to living like this. I don’t think about any other existence. I’m neither happy nor unhappy.”

When they went into the cathedral, Michel initially had a sensation of soft and moist coolness. The immense nave, where immense pillars surged forth like stalagmites, put him in mind of a marine grotto, where the same atmosphere persists in spite of the changing of the seasons and the warmth of the sun. The half-light was ornamented at intervals by lamps, but they did not spread their light very far; their gleam only served to render the diurnal gloom enclosed there more sensible and agreeable to the eye.

And the silence!

One might have thought that all the silence of the ages and all the silence of the earth, expelled from everywhere, had taken refuge between the walls of the cathedral, filling it with its sovereign presence. It reigned there, incontestable and intangible, in such a way that the usual noises of the comings and goings of people, did not offend it. If the scrape of a prie-dieu on the flagstones or the hacking cough of a devotee sometimes scratched it, the scar was soon formed. In the same way, the fall of a leaf does not long disturb the water of a pool; the ripples draw away gradually, and disappear; the depths have not been reached and the surface, momentarily tremulous, resumes its eternal immobility.

Michel and Marie went along the central aisle and then through the narrow pathways between seats to reach their places beside the bench, facing the pulpit. On copper plates nailed to the supports of the prie-dieus names were engraved in black: Madame Bedée, Mademoiselle Marie Bedée, Monsieur Michel Bedée. Michel verified that his place was waiting for him, as of old. Year after year, Madame Bedée continued to pay for that triple location. Only Marie took advantage of it; but while the impotent mother and the prodigal son did not come to pray before the sanctuary, their faithful names subsisted, to attest that they were still counted among the parochial community.

Marie knelt down and covered her eyes and ears with her ungloved hands, blocking the senses through which the superfluity of the external world penetrates the soul, gathering herself in divine contemplation. One of her hands was only liberated for the time require to beat on her breast the mea culpa of scrupulous sinners; the eye it uncovered remained closed, the ear evidently deaf.

Michel, standing up, gazed at the rose-window flowering at the end of the transept, where the morning light of the sun was broken into shafts of light. Angels whose wings were red shone there, the petals of the blooming rose—and those angels held lyres, viols, trumpets and cymbals, in such a way that it seemed that their concert was that of the beautiful radiant colors, and that supernatural music emanated from the mystic flower instead of a perfume.

The mass began. Michel hardly noticed it—as if, in spite of the time passed, habit had suddenly gripped him and he was continuing an uninterrupted practice, he witnessed without surprise, and without his attention being solicited, the various episodes of the office. The Oriental emphasis of the worship that made such a striking contrast with the habits and customs of the little town did not strike him with wonder; nor did the simple familiarity of those good folk who were at home in God’s house as in their own astonish him. Nor, finally, did the discipline that required him to get up and sit down again at fixed points importune him. He was tired; the nocturnal hours spent on the train and the confused emotions to which he had been subject since his early morning arrival left him in a state of bleak numbness. The calm of the place and the compassed slowness of the divine protocols drew him into a kind of torpor. He was no longer gazing at the faithful who surrounded him, and who were watching him; it was as if he saw them every day; besides, he knew them, as they knew themselves, fixed in the habits of a morose and docile life.

He did not even hear the organ, at first—but he suddenly did, and was carried away by its imperious violence.

There was a sudden release, a tempest of exasperated forces. Michel thought that a terrible wind was rushing past, destroying everything, and with its continuous whistling was mingled the din of collapses and ruinations. Such was its vehemence that its haste sometimes relented and, sure of its calamitous effects, it became playful, affecting a false nonchalance; then, over the universal disaster, with a sovereign ferocity, it scattered the persiflage of its irony. Michel approved. His despair, which the racket had stirred up, loved that nihilism.

He looked around at the devotees of both sexes, the worthy people of the town and the surrounding countryside, and young boys and girls, their placid faces certifying that the tempest was passing over them without affecting them.

The organ relented and fell silent. The officiating priest proceeded with the divine sacrifice. A bell signaled the poignant moment when the host and wine became the flesh and blood of the redemption. All those in attendance bowed. Michel, who had omitted to lower his eyes, and who was following the symbolic gestures of the priest distractedly, was frightened by feeling that he alone was indemnified of the prestige, exempted from the grace offered to everyone else.

Longer than anyone else, Marie remained confined within herself, entirely given to her God—and Michel, next to her, was as distant from her as if they had been separated by the entire diameter of the earth.

The organ multiplied its beautiful tumults again. Michel, who was not following the stages of the mass, abandoned himself to the tormented will of the symphony. It no longer suggested to him, as it once had, the religious sentiments that were supposed to accompany the course of the liturgy, but it still uplifted him, exciting within him, instead of the pieties of old, an ideological fervor. Involuntarily, he turned it away from its real significance; he accorded it an alternative metaphysics and put it in the service of a scientific dream....

Was not that voice, as powerful as a natural energy, which seemed disordered but was nevertheless obedient to a profound rhythm—which had its ebbs and its flows, unequal waves, some rising high, others round and turbulent, others delicate and fragile, bearers of fine and crystalline droplets, similar to the sea, shaken in its heavy masses and free in its superficial fantasies—the very voice of the subconscious, the fertile matter of souls, the secret substance of our thoughts, of our contradictory, crazy and countless impulses?

Michel meditated on that, and thought, led by the indefinite caprices of the organ:

Subconscious, prodigious reserve, ocean full of elementary life, primary swarming of all ulterior spirituality! To go from the darkness of absolute unconsciousness to the light of clear consciousness, is a long and perilous journey. Our souls, our souls, many of you get lost in the course of that journey—and how poor you are, on arrival, indigent and yet so vain! You attract pity, like ladies who were once rich but, having experienced reversals of fortune, still wear the last jewels and baubles that remain to them, and simper!

About the unconscious, we have nothing to say; silence, which is no more nothing than everything, is its formidable and mysterious symbol. For consciousness, the paradoxical masterpiece of human individuality, there are words, beacons, and one can arrange them as one wishes—but for the subconscious, the only language is music, and, marvelously, that of the organ.

O music, indeterminate and, for that reason, chaste speech, you do not pretend to recount the vain anecdotes of our life, but you are a poignant allusion to the profound verity of ours souls!

The sonorities of the organ filled the nave and collided with the walls of the chapels. Sometimes, a melody was detached from its hectic multiplicities, and, timid at first, anxious in its audacity, frail in the disorder of the accompaniment, was like a flower growing on a slender stem amid the frenzy of a storm. Michel sympathized with it, was afraid for it, and thought:

Thus is born a thought in the troubled depths of the subconscious; it rises above the redoubtable turbulence to which it owes its origin; against so many threats, it has nothing but its virgin pride. There it is; it emerges and, the higher it rises, the more fragile it becomes. Often, it is broken before coming entirely into bloom, and then it falls back into the abyss in which it germinated; it is caught and drowned, annihilated....

The melody played, as if disdainful or unaware of the din; it played, and amused itself, as if divinely distracted and a trifle puerile. Sometimes it became more cheerful, without knowing whence its pleasure came; sometimes it had a charming grace, laughter that it rendered melancholy with a languorous coquetry; sometimes it saddened, requesting and soliciting pity; and, mournful, was very artful in awakening a chagrin similar to the one of which it complained. Swoons and jeremiads alternated, while the surroundings thundered, amid the squalls and the gusts, with victorious fatality.

It was deployed with so much impetuosity that no obstacle could have stopped it; it broke everything in its passage; whatever subsisted in its surroundings it had disdained. When the tempest blows over the forest, the trees are destroyed, but after their fall, blades of grass and flowers survive. In the same way, the furies of the subconscious spare small ideas, which dart their uncertain stems high enough to blossom in the regions of clear consciousness.

It was as if, in the extravagant torment that whistled through trees, raced over mountains and reverberated in echoes, oboes and flutes were obstinate in singing and threading their tenuous, pretty, delightful sounds beneath the menace of natural clamors. Sometimes their delicate music was impossible to hear; one thought that it was lost; one regretted it—and then, at the first favorable occasion, it returned, subtly; it took advantage of the slightest space in which to insinuate itself, like a vivacious plant growing in a fissure in rocks; and then one was glad that it was not dead.

By the end of the office, Michel had built a system of ideas on which the religious influence of the place imposed a theological form.

“Yes,” he said to himself, internally, “there are three hypostases, in accordance with the wish of ancient dreamers. The unconscious is the Father, the subconscious is the Son and the conscious is the Spirit.

“Spiritus domini ferebatur super aquas...the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. That means that clear ideas float upon the profound ocean of the subconscious, which is the first realization of total unconsciousness.

“The Spirit is only the third hypostasis. Like the first two, from which it results, it merits the name of God, thanks to their efficacy. But the Father is only God, the Son is made human, the Spirit is human: the hypostasis the most distant from God and the closest to us, it is us divinely. Divine power is weakened in passing from the Father to the Son. God diminishes all the way to the human mind, which is his ultimate reality. The prodigious abundance of the unconscious is impoverished in the subconscious, and it is impoverished further in order to conclude with clear and distinct ideas.

“And we, the earthly reasoners, who try to put those ideas in a logical and necessary order, are committing the same methodological sin as if, neglecting the roots of a tree and only looking at the flowers, we tried to explain the flowers by means of one another. The work of our dialectics is like a bouquet of wallflowers, lilies and daisies. Their stems having been cut, one can arrange them as one wishes, but it is only an artificial assemblage.

“Just as all truth is in silence, all error is in the dialectical speech. But that is all we have! Lord, since, by the fact of our individual birth, we are expelled forever from the paradise of your silence, where all truth is, permit us sometimes to avoid the cruel suffering of the Spirit. Individuality is the original sin. All the redemption of which we are capable is in the subconscious, where much truth still subsists. Yes, the Son is the sole redeemer offered to humankind.

“Lord, since your silence is unreachable for us, preserve us from the words of the Spirit, and give us, if not magnificent peace, at least repose and release in music!

“While waiting to reenter your silence, when the crime of our individuality is suppressed by expiatory death, allow us to enjoy the subconscious, which is like a purgatory between your paradise and our inferno.

“The organ sings the glory of the Son!”

The mass had finished. The prie-dieus and the chairs pushed back over the tiles grated. After long constraint, the crowd stirred gladly. On arriving at the axis of the nave, the women bowed toward the tabernacle, and then went to join one or other of the groups that were already forming in order to go out and go home together, chatting dominically.

Marie was still praying, indifferent to those departures. Michel waited for her. When she took her fervent hands away from her face, she seemed to be waking up with difficulty from a dream; and one might have thought that earthly light offended her eyes.

She got up. Politely, as if she were coming back from a long way away, she said to her brother: “Bonjour, Michel. It’s nice that you’re here!” And she added: “Would you like to go to the Chapel of Dolors?”

It was, in fact, a custom to go after mass on Sunday to that chapel, which nestled between two of the cathedral’s buttresses behind the choir. Innumerable candles burned in that mystic corner and filed it with an acrid odor.

At the back, amid that swarm of smoky yellow glimmers, between paper flowers framed by golden foliage, upright on a stone pillar, stood the statue of the suffering Virgin: a bizarre, semi-barbaric statue which dated from problematic eras and must, in the course of centuries, have changed its significance. The town’s archeologists affirmed that, before having been installed in that Catholic shrine, a very long time ago, it had belonged to a Druidic temple, where it depicted some divinity the memory of whom was lost. Her face was grim, with terrible eyes and thick, grave lips, its dark coloration intermediate between red and ocher. She was not smiling; she did not have the ineffable expression of more recent madonnas; she was not carrying the divine Child in her arms; she was not holding out to the world the redeemer that her maternity sacrificed. Devoid of gentleness, she was nothing but a heavy stone, crudely carved in human form.

The new piety that had fallen to her accorded her moving virtues and the renown of the Virgin Mother and dressed her in golden garments. That small robe, of thick rich cloth, did not suit her, fitting her badly and not finding any means to grip her arms, scarcely sketched in the stone and engaged in the opulent block of the body. The head bore, awkwardly, a diadem of gems. At the height of her left breast, a large metal heart had been attached, in which seven blades were stuck.

Michel recognized it, such as he had always seen it, without surprise, and he followed his sister meekly, to the extent of placing his lips on the pillar of the statue, in a place which a cleric wiped with a cloth as soon as a devotee appeared. He recognized the chill that the stone imparted to his mouth.

Then both of them, the brother and the sister, among the other people accustomed to that devotion, settled down a short distance from the Virgin. Marie began to pray again; Michel gazed at the narrow and pathetic sanctuary.

He thought about the tribulations to which the statue had been subjected before being immobilized there, and he thought about the tribulations that awaited it when its worship had fallen into the neglect into which the fervors of human anxiety inevitably fall. He gazed at the unequal candles, which were consuming themselves patiently before the beautiful idol, and he thought about the last candle that would eventually—a long time hence—be lit for her. Would it be left there, to burn down the last fragment of its wick, its soul, and its tallow, its body—or would some fanatic, hasty to conclude, snatch it from its herse, scintillating today like a morsel of nocturnal sky fallen to earth with its stars, and extinguish it beneath a republican heel? Michel imagined, in the former hypothesis, the ultimate ardor of the candle, its final gleam, decreasing, hesitant and moribund, reanimating momentarily, but ever more feeble—and suddenly dead.

He looked at the gilded copper hearts suspended from the ceiling of the chapel, forming a triumphal arch over the statue, over which dozens of little gleams were reflected. He look at the ex-votos that rendered thanks for temporal benefits, perils avoided, cures obtained; he noticed, ranged on the wall, crutches that attested to the medical efficacy of the Virgin. And, as before, he loved that so-human sanctuary, which, not far from the choir where divine metaphysics were exalted, lent itself better to the quotidian and humble pleas of a suffering clientele.

He said to himself: “The three hypostases, by means of which I was about, just now, to constitute a heresy, are insufficient. Souls need chapels that resemble hospital rooms. What they require is not a mystical certainty, but the sticking-plaster of good consolation. All souls are like that, not only those of poor people, but also mine, which is not content with science. I have locked myself in a laboratory where the crutches of miracle cures have been hung up in the guise of incontestable evidence. Inhuman science is nothing to me. O third hypostasis, O Spirit, I would abandon you for the Virgin of the Seven Dolors, if your audacious follies had not distanced me from the meek chapel where a human dream coddles human suffering and puts it to sleep!”

In being there in the credulous company of his sister, Michel savored a kind of appeasement. It seemed to him that things around him were disposed as he wished, and were inviting him to the life for which his mother had brought him into the world and educated him.

When Marie got up, having finished her prayers, he regretted going away. Neither the sign of the cross nor the genuflection was an effort of voluntary submission. He felt habit reborn within him; the gestures came to him first, and perhaps the prayer would come later.

* * * *

When they emerged from the cathedral, still pained by penetrating religion, Michel and Marie saw the Alchemist from the portal, walking at a rapid pace toward the post office. He was holding his letters in one hand and his hat in the other. He was well-known for that mania of going bare-headed; he loved to feel the freshness of the air on his brow. He saw them, but pretended not to have seen them. Michel was bewildered: science was passing by, calling to him, scornful of him, reclaiming him.

As she did every Sunday, Marie acknowledged friends and greeted them. Michel had to endure a certain amount of chatter, and maneuvered in order to avoid more.

On the parvis, groups had formed, which were looking at the brother and the sister, waiting for them, watching out for their passage.

“Let’s go home,” said Michel.

Marie knew full well that he did not have provincial patience or politeness.

“You’re always so savage!” she said, laughing. And she hastened her pace to match his, guiding him, a skillful pilot, through the dangers of ready conversations, avoiding the alluring gossips and accepting her share of the susceptibilities excited by that evident refusal of affability.

The mass had lasted a long time. The little town had been transformed during that hour and a half; its matinal appearance of hasty and incomplete awakening had been replaced by the true Sunday, idle and flirtatious. Townspeople and tradesmen, petty rentiers and soldiers, had put on their best clothes. Bright ribbons and flowers decorated the women’s hats. And the people who had to devote themselves to leisure that day were moving at a slow, weary pace under the burden of ennui. On seeing them, Michel remembered Sundays of old, dragged through the streets in summer with new shoes that the pavements scuffed, or in the silence, traversed by the hum of bees, of enclosed gardens, a book of tempting voyages on his knees.

Behind his window, beside giant yellow, red and green bottles that reflected the sunlight, the stupid pharmacist, who had been a classmate of Michel’s, was doing nothing. In his Sunday best, he remained faithful to his post, because pharmacists do not take days off, any more than disease does; he was, however, idle without wanting to be, beside his languishing remedies. At the sight of Michel, he became animated.

“Let’s run!” said Michel.

Marie, amused, related: “He’s a municipal councilor, you know—and a rabid radical socialist.

“That’s natural,” Michel remarked. “If a pharmacist weren’t a radical socialist, who would be?”

They both laughed.

Afterwards they went past an open window through which emerged, like effluvia of exalted torpor, the repetitive strains of a piano. Michel recognized the house, and immediately imagined a childhood friend, clad in silk, who, that Sunday, as before, and interminably, was carrying out with a ridiculous zeal her vain exercises. playing her scales, her “Prayer to a Vigin” and all of her repertoire. Alas, alas she was still there, the demoiselle de Trémément, so distinguished, upright and faithful to her imperious ancestors! She had not finished unwinding the series of her similar days, and even the piano, jerky and chirping, had not cheered up!

“She’s only thirty-two!” Marie objected.

“But every one of her years,” Michel replied, “is exactly the same as all the rest!” And it seemed to him, quite sincerely, that Mademoiselle de Trémément might have done better to save herself the bother of such futile repetition.

The thin melody, scattered in the already-warm air, had an infantile or senile gentility. Sometimes it hurried on in vertiginous trills; sometimes it languished—and that alternation of anticipated effects, always the same, was so poor in invention, so naively pretentious and nonsensical, that Michel pitied both the artiste and the melody. But the music made such an effort, in the silence of the street where the shops were closed and the passers-by were morose, that it conquered all of the space. It was the very voice of a soul that that inhabited that almost deserted place: a soul of melancholy and ennui; a semi-resigned soul that still had febrile, ardent, slightly crazed moments; a captive soul, not yet entirely in despair; a soul of dolor and indolence.

“Do you remember our Sundays of old, Marie?” asked Michel.

Marie replied affirmatively, but so evasively that Michel could not tell whether the Sundays had left her a pleasant or a bitter memory.

“They were long days!” he added.

“They were good days,” she replied. And when he fell silent in his turn she went on: “I remember that I liked them for their monotony and their slowness—and you couldn’t bear them, for the same reason. How different we are from one another! Personally, I liked that kind of ennui that gripped us in the morning and lasted until evening, but it exasperated you. I would have liked the time to drag more, but you were in great haste...haste for what, Michel? I often wonder. Did you foresee that you would be a famous scientist? Was that what you were waiting for with such impatience?”

“I don’t know,” Michel replied. And he interrogated himself about that haste, which had never abandoned him. Today, again, what did he want? Nothing—and yet he was suffering, as before, from the duration.

His old Sundays occupied his mind. He detested them too. Was it not them, with their insistent languor, the excess of their leisure, their enervating softness, that had made his soul avid and nostalgic?—his unhappy soul, his vaguely dreamy soul, like a pond incessantly overflowing its flat banks. Was it not them that had alarmed him once and for all, and which, with their frenetic ennui, had given him the perpetual desire that he could not define?

A little later, he said to Marie: “One summer evening, Papa took us for a walk out there, in the country, beyond the toll-house. It was a Sunday. We had our hoops, we were running, chasing one another, climbing banks. When we came back, a little weary, I took my father’s hand and let myself be drawn along. I was sleepy. In the outskirts of town, a veritable sadness overcame me, at the sight of the little dark and shoddy houses of the workers. There were flowerpots on the window-sills, and bindweed climbing in strings. It was dismal, those poor houses under the mauve evening sky: those poor houses imprisoning lamentable existences, which were entirely accomplished there. I shivered with sorrow. Do you remember that walk?

“No,” replied Marie, astonished.

“I wouldn’t want to repeat that walk; I don’t want, this evening, to go through that poignant part of town. I’d be afraid of recapturing that old sadness, which is doubtless still there, like a miasma....”

When Michel and Marie reached the house, Madame Bedée was waiting for them with an impatience that she did not try to hide. Tenderly, she asked: “Are you going out again soon?”

“If Marie wants to,” Michel replied.

Marie resigned herself immediately, albeit bitterly. “No,” she said, “I don’t want to.”

“Then we’ll spend the day together, all three of us?” concluded Madame Bedée. “How nice that will be!”

She was radiant with anxious joy.

* * * *

After lunch, Madame Bedée, because it was Sunday, did not do her knitting, nor Marie her embroidery. Michel, between the two women, on whom their idleness weighed, sensed the conversation languishing. He was fearful of the interminable afternoon.

Madame Bedée perceived that. She put on her spectacles, picked up a prayer-book, and read. Michel got up and went to look on his father’s bookshelves for the first volume of Mémoires d’outre-tombe.4 When he came back, Marie had discreetly started reading a life of Saint Chantal. Sitting on a chair, she was holding the book in one hand and a bookmark in the other, maintaining a rigid, austere attitude, as if obliged to do so by some rule or ritual.

Michel pushed a large Voltaire armchair upholstered in red with a white floral pattern over to the window, sat down in it and put his book on his knees. His reading was not very active, but it served as a pretext for the inevitable silence; it concealed a slow and perpetual reverie.

It was raining.

“You did well not to go out,” remarked Madame Bedée.

They all looked through the widow. The rainstorm crashed down and rebounded from the hard ground of the avenue; streams swelled and joined up.

Michel experienced a kind of wellbeing; he savored the tranquility of the house he was in, and said to himself: Isn’t it here, the haven of desirable peace? Why did I leave the everyday happiness of good children who never stray far from their other’s skirts? But it’s too late now. The good child was foolish enough to run away; he’s gone elsewhere, to labor and sow foreign fields, bad fields, stony and sterile. Don’t ask him to stay any longer; he needs to go and watch the paltry crop that he has sown grow....

Soon, Michel was no longer reading at all. His gaze fixed itself on the wallpaper, yellow with green foliage; on the copper clock in the style of Louis XVI; he was attentive to his swift and staccato heartbeat. All that seemed to him to be pretty, charming, lachrymosely sad. He looked at his mother and his sister, dear loved ones, both growing older—the aging of his sister, still young, being sadder: it would put an end to her grace and beauty, which would have passed without making any noise.

He leaned over his book. He experienced a great desire to make the two women he loved happy, but he sensed the impossibility of changing anything in the life into which they had settled in definitive renunciation. Then, such was his pity and despair, that it seemed to him that the surrounding universe of reality and dream was devastated—but he did not budge.

Several times, he remembered Geneviève; he started thinking about her—but he set her aside, without roughness, a one pushes away a child that might trouble a meditation with a gentle hand. He even asked her pardon for moving her away. But in the intimacy of the afternoon, the souls of Michel, his mother and his sister had come so close together that the ideas of each were touching the others, and, instinctively, Michel feared that his mother, thus alerted, might suddenly interrogate him. Then, he would have too many things to say: dolorous things, impossible to say and difficulty even to think. He pushed away the memory of Geneviève, and shivered.

And the day passed like that, only varied by episodes of tea, a visit that was received, vespers and the benediction ringing, and intermittent chat.

In the evening, Marie played the piano. After the storm, the evening was soft and pure. The sky was a greenish blue when the stars began to come out. In the garden, the clumps of trees darkened; the chestnuts captured and imprisoned more light than the others. The odor of plane-trees spread. Flocks of house-martins screeched in the firmament. Michel went to lean on the window-sill....

Then, suddenly, the memory of Geneviève presented itself, so clear and so ardent, that Michel could not escape it. He imagined her so young, so pretty and, in her bright summer dress, so enticing! But she drew away....

Marie sang a ballad. Her high-pitched voice vibrated in the evening air, and dared not expand. The ballad was seductive, almost voluptuous; it invited a chimerical lover to a voyage; it involved stars and the lake. Michel sensed the surrounding sadness more painfully, by virtue of contrast, and when Marie closed the piano, he knew that she had no wish to continue that tormenting music any longer. An overly strong odor was rising from the damp grass and flowers, an overly acute emotion emanating from that enraptured ballad. The distress that was beating down on Michel’s thoughts left him miserable.

Melanie brought the lamp and put it on the sideboard. Marie blew out the candles on the piano, went to her mother’s armchair, and sat down in such a way that Michel understood that he too had to come into the lamplight.

He wanted to read, or put on a semblance of it, but he saw that neither Madame Bedée nor Marie had picked up a book; unoccupied, they were expecting conversation. Michel offered to read aloud; it was the last alibi to which his dolor might have recourse. The offer was welcomed with excessive delight.

For the tenth time, he read his mother and sister the childhood of Chateaubriand in the wild Château de Combourg, in the midst of the rosy heather of the heath. He read, and he felt, fixed upon him, the dear, soft, sad eyes. Then his thoughts abandoned Combourg, Brittany and the heath. Melancholy ideas arrived, touched his soul, and awoke resonances therein, as the light evening wind was causing the leaves of the trees to rustle.

Then he divined that his mother and sister were content, and he thought that a fragile flower of happiness was blossoming, slowly, like a pellitory growing between the cracked mossy stones of an old house...a pale, slightly dewy flower, very tiny...flowering unperceived, timidly...so fragile that in looking at it one inevitably thinks of the inevitable end of all things....

Abruptly, Michel remembered his mother’s old age. Inwardly, he made the pathetic calculation of possible years to come; the numbers played in his mind, haunting him; he compared them to the duration of the life already lived. He became frightened. He continued reading, but while he read, cascades of words passed through his head, saying: “Yes, everything is there...nothing moves...this is happiness, like those little villages that are half asleep in the warm autumn sun...everything is calm, tranquil, at rest....”

Michel was increasingly inattentive to his reading. He stopped in mid-sentence. A few seconds went by, infinitely gentle for him, deliciously slow, casting a benevolent spell....

“What’s the matter, Michel?”

Madame Bedée and Marie were looking at him, astonished; their anguish was manifest.

“What are you thinking about?”

Making no reply, Michel lowered his eyes and resumed reading. His cheeks were burning, his eyelids swollen. He read quickly, in a curt voice, uncomprehendingly. Suddenly, one sentence from the book, detached from all the rest, entered his ears and sounded a knell within his head: “Oh, let it not be too dear, the hand that will give us fresh water, in the fever of the throes of death....”

Michel closed the book on that, decisively. It seemed to him that a flash of lightning had lit up the darkness in which he had been groping for days on end. It seemed to him that, at the extreme limit of alarmed sensibility, he had found the indispensable remedy.

He rose to his feet and declared, firmly: “It’s late; I need to go to bed.”

Tender goodnights, thanks and cajoleries did not move him; nor, the following morning, could desolate goodbyes and tears persuade him to prolong his stay. He had made his resolution. Science, to which he was returning, appeared to him to be the rigorous convent in which he had to immure himself, where he had to flee forever the intoxicating martyrdom of sensibility, where he had to annihilate his unfortunate individuality. A rigorous convent and refuge of despair: who enters here renounces everything; who enters here dies within himself. But Michel, at the limit of individual suffering, no longer desired anything but to die within himself, voluntarily.

* * * *

When Michel left his mother’s house to go to the station, at nine o’clock in the morning, he saw the Alchemist, pulling his door shut behind him rudely, going out for a walk, his hands behind his back and his cane beating his heels. Before turning left, as was his habit, the old man had glanced at Madame Bedée’s house; he had seen Michel and swiftly turned away.

Michel wanted to run after him, but he thought about his mother behind the widow, lifting the curtain, accompanying him with her gaze and watching over him. Then, pretending that he was not in any hurry, he drew away. Once, he waved goodbye toward his mother’s window, and was filled with sorrow. Then he continued on his way The old man did not slow down, and Michel dared not hurry; they each mastered themselves, both having to struggle to resist their equal desire to come together and chat.

As soon as they were out of range of the sentinel window, Michel ran.

“Bonjour, Master.”

“Bonjour,” the old man growled, and he put on a semblance of hating that encounter—but he stopped, noticed the valise that Michel was carrying, and asked, in a surly tone: “Where are you going?”

“Paris,” Michel replied.

“To do what?”

“To work.”

The Alchemist’s face lit up with joy—and, extending a shaky hand toward Michel, he hid his emotion behind a laugh. “It’s none too soon!”

He took his pupil’s arm, and accompanied him toward the station; he walked quickly, buoyantly, and said: “So you’ve changed your mind? So much the better—oh, so much the better, my little Michel. Thank you!

Michel was silent.

The old man began rambling.

“Has it been hard? You’ve suffered, I understand that. Yes, one suffers; I know that. No matter! Thank you for science. And thank you for me, Michel, even though I’m not important. All the same, you’ve put me in a bad way since yesterday. I said to myself: ‘Well, if the best, the only ones, are cowards, deserting, science is done for. It’s not me, or fellows like me, who are sufficient for that task!’ And, as you see, I no longer had any momentum or zeal. I got up this morning like any other day; I lit my fire—but I wasn’t able to work. Impossible! If the generals go over to the enemy, the soldiers can only throw their guns into the nettles. That’s why I came out for a walk. Oh, Michel, you did well to change your mind. Thank you my boy, that’s good!”

The old man rambled on:

“It disgusted me, you see, to think that you might desert—you, Michel. It disgusted me too much. I said to myself: ‘The whole history of humankind is there. If humans, since they’ve been provided with intelligence, had worked hard, science would be complete. But no! Sentimentality has always doomed them! Sentimentality, egotism, the senses!’ No matter. It’s good, it’s famously good, if you’ve broken those carnal ties—because, you know, one can only be an ascetic or...a pig. There’s no middle way.”

The old man added: “You’re going to tell your wife?”

Michel was on the rack; he replied through clenched teeth: “Yes.”

The old man burst out laughing, so forceful as his joy. He took Michel to the train—and when he left him, as the train moved off, he cried: “Adieu, Michel! I’m going to work!”

“Me too,” Michel replied, making a great effort to prevent his face shuddering.

* * * *

When Michel got home, after hours on the train—after hours of methodical and stubborn reflection—he had everything organized, in theory, in the neatest possible fashion. He had fixed the program of his intentions rigorously; he had the arguments and the conclusion: the entire theorem of his renunciation.

And he thought: I shall say....

But the image of Geneviève immediately appeared; and the words that he had to say vanished, unraveled, lost. He recaptured them, put them back in logical order, in the order of battle. He fought against himself, and defeated himself.

His theorem was designed to convince Geneviève and himself—especially himself! With her, he thought the task would be easy; and as for himself, less comfortably, he told himself that, in truth, this life could not go on much longer, this life of anxiety, multiplied suffering, jealousy—was it jealousy?—in sum, sterile and vague mental susceptibility. No, it was necessary to end it. He would never be able to be happy, nor make anyone else happy. “Work, work!” he said to himself, again. “There’s no more appropriate suicide, for a wretch of your sort!”

And he cursed himself.

To give himself courage, he also tried to abuse Geneviève as well as himself, but, although he could not find many reasons for rancor, he detested them more than the rest. Ingeniously, he assumed all the responsibilities—they were, to his tenderness and vanity, less harsh than Geneviève’s responsibilities.

I’ll tell her....

He had even prepared the words.

He saw Geneviève again. She was waiting for him. He saw her again, exactly as he had imagined her, with the dress that he had supposed, at the place in the antechamber where she would come to meet him; but he was astonished by her strange expression, her vivacity, her feverish manner.

She came toward him to kiss him, but she did not kiss him. She offered her cheek for a kiss, after having offered her lips momentarily.

She was charming, with a color more animated than usual, her hair a trifle untidy; a blonde curl striped her forehead delicately. And when he kissed her cheeks, he felt the little bosom that he pressed against his own, with a voluptuous gesture. Then he feared that all his resolutions would weaken.

He was stilted; he was gauche. He hurried more than was reasonable, because he was afraid of weakening.

Soon, he said to Geneviève: “Listen. I need to talk to you. What I have to say is serious, almost terrible—but it’s inevitable. You need to help me, in all sincerity. Otherwise, it seems to me that I’ll forget all the promises I’ve made myself.”

“Geneviève looked at him with her beautiful periwinkle-blue eyes. She trembled and murmured: “What’s the matter?”

Michel took her hand, sat her down, remained standing in front of her and began, in spite of the anguish that was suffocating him: “Don’t tremble. I don’t mean to do you any harm; I’m only thinking of your own good. I love you very much. You have to answer me two questions, in all frankness. First of all, tell me: you’re not happy, are you?”

“No,” she replied, simply.

“I knew that.”

He thought he might sob. He mastered himself and went on: “Secondly, yes, this is my second question....is Pierre Dauzanne in love with you?”

She went pale; her face contracted. She stood up an, her lips taut, replied: “You have no right to ask me that question.”

Michel was bewildered. The entire series of decided sentences escaped him. He reacted, and, with a reflective stubbornness, went on: “That’s true. Except that I have to. I demand that you answer me...or, rather, I beg you to answer me.”

She remained silent and motionless for a few seconds. Then she said, very calmly and forcefully: “If I answer you, Michel, if you demand it, that’s all right. But know that from that moment on, when I shall have submitted you to that humiliating torture, I’ll be detached from you forever; I’ll be a stranger to you. That, I sense with certainty. Do you want that, Michel?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, Pierre Dauzanne is in love with me.” And she went as white as a corpse.

With a stern passion, Michel went on: “He’s told you that—that he’s in love with you?”

“Ah! But whether he has or not, what does it matter? He had no need to tell me, if he has told me. A woman knows when someone is in love with her.”

“Are you in love with him?”

The interrogation was, by dint of its rapidity, brutal. Geneviève rebelled. “Well, what if I were in love with him?”

“If you were in love with him, I would say this, which I’m ready to say to you: ‘I renounce you, Geneviève. I’ve loved you a great deal; and if I love you still, my sacrifice, more cruel, is nonetheless absolute, sincere and complete. I have not known how, I have not been able, to make you happy. That’s not my fault. I work hard. I have to work hard. It’s impossible for me not to work hard. I don’t belong to myself, any more than I belong to you. I’m a man who is bound to a task. It takes you, takes possession of you; one is no longer oneself; a monk, submissive to the rule of his order, is better than a man, and the kind of man that I’m not. So, here: I give you back your liberty. We’ll divorce. You can go to Pierre Dauzanne, who loves you and whom you love...’ I would say to you: ‘Adieu, Geneviève; forget me and be happy.’”

“I refuse!” cried Geneviève.

Michel persisted: “But if....”

“I refuse!”

An immense joy suddenly exalted Michel. He groaned rather than pronounced: “So you don’t love him?” He was begging.

Geneviève merely repeated: “I refuse.”

They were both dumbfounded.

Timidly, Michel asked: “Why?”

“I don’t know,” she replied.

A little later, Michel kissed Geneviève’s hands, wept, and asked for forgiveness. He said: “If you want, we can go away. We can go far away. You’ll make me forget science and all that. Soon, I won’t think about it any more. It’s an old alchemist who has intoxicated me with his mania, as it’s said that monks indoctrinate their pupils and make them enter the convent. But you’ll save me. Do you want us to go?”

“No,” she declared. “We’ll stay.”

“You don’t want to?”

“No, I don’t want to.”

“I’ll be recaptured, then!”

“You’ll work.”

“You’ll be unhappy?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go, then—I beg you!”

“No!”

And Michel savored the delights of love, the restful pleasure of being a coward, of abandoning himself to life, of feeling that it was stronger than he was, and letting it do what it would.”

Then, he said to Geneviève: “I pity you.”

Geneviève replied: “Michel, I pity both of us.”

3. Author’s Note: “It is obvious that I have invented sirium on the model of radium. Today, it is no longer believed that radium emits electricity or transmits motion without any diminution of its own volume and substance. It is probable that the diminution is extremely slow and almost imperceptible, but nevertheless real. Thus disappeared the strangest characteristic of radioactive substances. However, on 17 December 1906 at the annual session of the Académie des Sciences, Henri Poincaré said with regard to radium: ‘The more one studies the new substance, the more unexpected facts one finds, which seem to give the lie to everything we thought we knew about matter. Mysterious emanations have been observed whose successive transformations appear to be the cause of the heat produced and which, ultimately, conclude with helium, a very light gas found in the sun well before being encountered on earth. Was the dream of the old alchemists thus realized? Were we in the presence of the transmutation of elements? Those who are frightened by novelties are wrong to be alarmed so rapidly. It is probable that chemists will succeed in bringing these strange phenomena into the frames that are familiar to them. Everything is always settled, in fact; and if an element is, by definition, that which remains constant in all transformations, it is necessary that it be immutable. Even so, these are reactions very different from those we know, and bring into play extraordinary quantities of energy. Perhaps we have been too hasty, but of that which has been dreamed, enough still remains for the entirety of physics to have been subject to an upheaval’.”

Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium with the aid of a spectroscope in 1898, but it was not isolated as a pure metal until 1910.

4. Chateaubriand’s autobiography, begun in 1809 and finished in 1841, published in 12 volumes in 1849-50. Beaunier became something of an expert on Chateaubriand’s life, works and circle of acquaintances, and edited several volumes of the memoirs and thoughts left for posthumous publication by his friend Joseph Joubert.