Recollections of My Youth Part 10

I was a Christian, however; for all the papers of that date which I have preserved give clear expression to the feeling which I have since endeavoured to portray in the _Vie de Jesus_, I mean a keen regard for the evangelic ideal and for the character of the Founder of Christianity. The idea that in abandoning the Church I should remain faithful to Jesus got hold upon me, and if I could have brought myself to believe in apparitions I should certainly have seen Jesus saying to me: "Abandon Me to become My disciple." This thought sustained and emboldened me. I may say that from that moment my _Vie de Jesus_ was mentally written. Belief in the eminent personality of Jesus--which is the spirit of that book--had been my mainstay in my struggle against theology. Jesus has in reality ever been my master. In following out the truth at the cost of any sacrifice I was convinced that I was following Him and obeying the most imperative of His precepts.

I was at this time so far removed from my old Brittany masters in respect to disposition, intellectual culture and study that conversation between us had become almost impossible. One of them suspected something, and said to me: "I have always thought that you were being overdone in the way of study." A habit which I had acquired of reciting the psalms in Hebrew from a small ma.n.u.script of my own which I used as a breviary, surprised them very much. They were half inclined to ask me if I was a Jew. My mother guessed all that was taking place without quite understanding it. I continued, as in my childhood, to take long walks into the country with her. One day, we sat down in the valley of Guindy, near the Chapelle des Cinq Plaies, by the side of the spring. For hours I read by her side, without raising my eyes from the book, which was a very harmless one--M. de Bonald's _Recherches Philosophiques._ Nevertheless the book displeased her, and she s.n.a.t.c.hed it away from me, feeling that books of the same description, if not this particular one, were what she had to dread.

Upon the 6th of September, 1845, I wrote to M. ----, my director, the following letter, a copy of which I have found among my papers, and which I reproduce without in any way attenuating its somewhat inconsistent and feverish tone:--

"SIR,--Having had to make two or three journeys at the beginning of the vacation, I have been unable to correspond with you as early as I could have wished. I was none the less urgently in need of unbosoming myself to you with regard to pangs which increase in intensity each day, and which I feel all the keener because there is no one here to whom I can confide them. What ought to make for my happiness causes me the deepest sorrow. An imperious sense of duty compels me to concentrate my thoughts upon myself, in order to spare pain to those who surround me with their affection, and who would moreover be quite incapable of understanding my perplexity. Their kindness and soothing words cut me to the quick. Oh, if they only knew what was going on in the recesses of my heart! Since my stay here I have acquired some important data towards the solution of the great problem which is preoccupying my mind. Several circ.u.mstances have, to begin with, made me realise the greatness of the sacrifice which G.o.d required of me, and into what an abyss the course which my conscience prescribes must plunge me. It is useless to describe them to you in detail, as, after all, considerations of this kind can be of no weight in the resolution which has to be taken. To have abandoned a path which I had selected from my childhood, and which led without danger to the pure and n.o.ble aims which I had set before myself, in order to tread another along which I could discern nothing but uncertainty and disappointment; to have disregarded the opinion which will have only blame in store for what is really an honest act on my part, would have been a small thing, if I had not at the same time been compelled to tear out part of my heart, or, to speak more accurately, to pierce another to which my own was so deeply attached. Filial love had grown in proportion as so many other affections were crushed out. Well, it is in this part of my being that duty exacts from me the most painful sacrifice. My leaving the seminary will be an inexplicable enigma to my mother; she will believe that I have killed her out of sheer caprice.

"Truly may I say that when I envisage the inextricable mesh in which G.o.d has ensnared me while my reason and freedom were asleep, while I was following with docile steps the path He had Himself traced out for me, distracting thoughts crowd themselves upon me. G.o.d knows that I was simple-minded and pure; I took nothing upon myself; I walked with free and unflagging steps in the path which He disclosed before me, and behold this path has led me to the brink of a precipice! G.o.d has betrayed me! I never doubted but that a wise and merciful Providence governed the universe and governed me in the course which I was to take. It is not, however, without considerable effort that I have been able to apply so formal a contradiction to apparent facts. I often say to myself that vulgar common sense is little capable of appreciating the providential government whether of humanity, of the universe, or of the individual. The isolated consideration of facts would scarcely tend to optimism. It requires a strong dose of optimism to credit G.o.d with this generosity in spite of experience. I hope that I shall never feel any hesitation upon this point, and that whatever may be the ills which Providence yet has in store for me I shall ever believe that it is guiding me to the highest possible good through the least possible evil.

"According to what I hear from Germany, the situation which was offered me there is still open;[1] only I cannot enter upon it before the spring. This makes my journey thither very doubtful, and throws me back into fresh perplexities. I am also advised to go through a year of free study in Paris, during which time I should be able to reflect upon my future career, and also take my university degrees. I am very much inclined to adopt this last-named course, for though I have made up my mind to come back to the seminary and confer with you and the superiors, I should nevertheless be very reluctant to make a long stay there in my present condition of mind. It is with the utmost apprehension that I mark the near approach of the time when my inward irresolution must find expression in a most decided course of action.

Hard it is to have thus to reascend the stream down which one has for so long been gently floated! If only I could be sure of the future, and of being one day able to secure for my ideas their due place, and follow up at my ease and free from all external preoccupations the work of my intellectual and moral improvement! But even could I be sure of myself, how could I be of the circ.u.mstances which force themselves so pitilessly upon us? In truth, I am driven to regret the paltry store of liberty which G.o.d has given us; we have enough to make us struggle; not enough to master destiny, just enough to insure suffering.

"Happy are the children who only sleep and dream, and who never have a thought of entering upon this struggle with G.o.d Himself! I see around me men of pure and simple mind, whom Christianity suffices to render virtuous and happy. G.o.d grant that they may never develop the miserable faculty of criticism which so imperiously demands satisfaction, and which, when once satisfied, leaves such little happiness in the soul!

Would to G.o.d that it were in my power to suppress it. I would not hesitate at amputation if it were lawful and possible. Christianity satisfies all my faculties except one, which is the most exacting of them all, because it is by right judge over all the others. Would it not be a contradiction in terms to impose conviction upon the faculty which creates conviction? I am well aware that the orthodox will tell me that it is my own fault if I have fallen into this condition. I will not argue the point; no man knows whether he is worthy of love or hatred. I am quite willing, therefore, to say that it is my fault, provided those who love me promise to pity me and continue me their friendship.

"A result which now seems beyond all doubt is that I shall not revert to orthodoxy by continuing to follow the same line,--I mean that of rational and critical self-examination. Up till now, I hoped that after having travelled over the circle of doubt I should come back to the starting-point. I have quite lost this hope, and a return to Catholicism no longer seems possible to me, except by a receding movement, by stopping short in the path which I have entered, by stigmatising reason, by declaring it for once and all null and void, and by condemning it to respectful silence. Each step in my career of criticism takes me further away from the starting-point. Have I, then, lost all hope of coming back to Catholicism? That would be too bitter a thought. No, sir, I have no hopes of reverting to it by rational progress; but I have often been on the point of repudiating for once and all the guide whom at times I mistrust. What would then be the motive of my life? I cannot tell; but activity will ever find scope.

You may be sure that I must have been sorely forced to have dwelt for one instant upon a thought which seems more cruel to me than death.

And yet, if my conscience represented it to me as lawful, I should eagerly avail myself of it, if only out of common decency.

"I hope at all events that those who know me will admit that interested motives have not estranged me from Christianity. Have not all my material interests tempted me to find it true? The temporal considerations against which I have had to struggle would have sufficed to persuade many others; my heart has need of Christianity; the Gospel will ever be my moral law; the church has given me my education, and I love her. Could I but continue to style myself her son! I pa.s.s from her in spite of myself; I abhor the dishonest attacks levelled at her; I frankly confess that I have no complete subst.i.tute for her teaching; but I cannot disguise from myself the weak points which I believe that I have found in it and with regard to which it is impossible to effect a compromise, because we have to do with a doctrine in which all the component parts hold together and cannot be detached.

"I sometimes regret that I was not born in a land where the bonds of orthodoxy are less tightly drawn than in Catholic countries. For, at whatever cost, I am resolved to be a Christian; but I cannot be an orthodox Catholic. When I find such independent and bold thinkers as Herder, Kant, and Fichte, calling themselves Christians, I should like to be so too. But can I be so in the Catholic faith, which is like a bar of iron? and you cannot reason with a bar of iron. Will not some one found amongst us a rational and critical Christianity? I will confess to you that I believe that I have discovered in some German writers the true kind of Christianity which is adapted to us. May I live to see this Christianity a.s.suming a form capable of fully satisfying all the requirements of our age! May I myself cooperate in the great work! What so grieves me is the thought that perhaps it will be needful to be a priest in order to accomplish that; and I could not become a priest without being guilty of hypocrisy.

"Forgive me, sir, these thoughts, which must seem very reprehensible to you. You are aware that all this has not as yet any dogmatic consistence in me; I still cling to the Church, my venerable mother; I recite the Psalms with heartfelt accents; I should, if I followed the bent of my inclination, pa.s.s hours at a time in church; gentle, plain, and pure piety touches me to the very heart; and I even have sharp relapses of devotional feeling. All this cannot coexist without contradiction with my general condition. But I have once for all made up my mind on the subject; I have cast off the inconvenient yoke of consistency, at all events for the time. Will G.o.d condemn me for having simultaneously admitted that which my different faculties simultaneously exact, although I am unable to reconcile their contradictory demands? Are there not periods in the history of the human mind when contradiction is necessary? When the moral verities are under examination, doubt is unavoidable; and yet during this period of transition the pure and n.o.ble mind must still be moral, thanks to a contradiction. Thus it is that I am at times both Catholic and Rationalist; but holy orders I can never take, for 'once a priest, always a priest.'

"In order to keep my letter within due limits, I must bring the long story of my inward struggles to a close. I thank G.o.d, who has seen fit to put me through so severe a trial, for having brought me into contact with a mind such as yours, which is so well able to understand this trial, and to whom I can confide it without reserve."

M---- wrote me a very kind-hearted reply, offering a merely formal opposition to my project of following my own course of study. My sister, whose high intelligence had for years been like the pillar of fire which lighted my path, wrote from Poland to encourage me in my resolution, which was finally taken at the end of September. It was a very honest and straightforward act; and it is one which I now look back upon with the greatest satisfaction. But what a cruel severance.

It was upon my mother's account that I suffered the most. I was compelled to inflict a deep wound upon her without being able to give the slightest explanation. Although gifted with much native intelligence, she was not sufficiently educated to understand that a person's religious faith can be affected because he has discovered that the Messianic explanations of the Psalms are erroneous, and that Gesenius, in his commentary upon Isaiah, is in nearly every point right when combating the arguments of the orthodox. It grieved me much, also, to give pain to my old Brittany masters, who retained such kindly feelings towards me. The critical question, as it represented itself to my mind, would have seemed absolutely unintelligible to them, so plain and unquestioning was their faith. I went back to Paris therefore without letting them know anything more than that I was likely to travel, and that my ecclesiastical studies might possibly be suspended.

The masters of St. Sulpice, accustomed to take a broader view of things, were not very much surprised. M. Le Hir, who placed an unlimited confidence in study, and who also knew how steady my conduct was, did not dissuade me from devoting a few years to free study in Paris, and sketched out the course which I was to follow at the College de France and at the School of Eastern Languages. M. Carbon was grieved; he saw how different my position must become, and he promised to try and find me a quiet and honourable position. M.

Dupanloup[2] displayed in this matter the high and hearty appreciation of spiritual things which const.i.tuted his superiority. I spoke very frankly to him. The critical side of the question did not in any way impress him, and my allusion to German criticism took him by surprise.

The labours of M. Le Hir were almost unknown to him. Scripture in his eyes was only useful in supplying preachers with eloquent pa.s.sages, and Hebrew was of no use for that purpose. But how kind and generous-hearted he was! I have now before me a short note from him, in which he says: "Do you want any money? This would be natural enough in your position. My humble purse is at your service. I should like to be able to offer you more precious gifts. I hope that my plain and simple offer will not offend you." I declined his kind offer with thanks, but there was no merit in my refusal, for my sister Henriette had sent me twelve hundred francs to tide over this crisis. I scarcely touched this sum, but nevertheless, by relieving me of any immediate apprehension for the morrow, it was the foundation of the independence and of the dignity of my whole life.

Thus, on the 6th of October, 1845, I went down, never again to remount them in priestly dress, the steps of the St. Sulpice seminary. I crossed the courtyard as quickly as I could, and went to the hotel which then stood at the north-west corner of the esplanade, not at that time thrown open, as it is now.

[Footnote 1: This has reference to a post of private tutor which was at my disposal for a time.]

[Footnote 2: M. Dupanloup was no longer superior of the Petty Seminary of Saint Nicholas du Chardonnet.]

FIRST STEPS OUTSIDE ST. SULPICE.

PART I.

The name of this hotel I do not remember; it was always spoken of as "Mademoiselle Celeste's," this being the name of the worthy person who managed or owned it.

There was certainly no other hotel like it in Paris, for it was a kind of annex to the seminary, the rules of which were to a great extent in force there. Lodgers were not admitted without a letter of introduction from one of the directors of the seminary or some other notability in the religious world. It was here that students who wished for a few days to themselves before entering or leaving the seminary used to stay, while priests and superiors of convents whom business brought to Paris found it comfortable and inexpensive. The transition from the priestly to the ordinary dress is like the change which occurs in a chrysalis; it needs a little shade. a.s.suredly, if any one could narrate all the silent and un.o.btrusive romances a.s.sociated with this ancient hotel, now pulled down, we should hear some very interesting stories. I must not, however, let my meaning be mistaken, for, like many ecclesiastics still alive, I can testify to the blameless course of life in Mlle. Celeste's hotel.

While I was awaiting here the completion of my metamorphosis, M.

Carbon's good offices were being busily employed upon my behalf.

He had written to Abbe Gratry, at that time director of the College Stanislas, and the latter offered me a place as usher in the upper division. M. Dupanloup advised me to accept it, remarking: "You may rest a.s.sured that M. Gratry is a priest of the highest distinction."

I accepted, and was very kindly treated by every one, but I did not retain the place more than a fortnight. I found that my new situation involved my making the outward profession of clericalism, the avoidance of which was my reason for leaving the seminary. Thus my relations with M. Gratry were but fleeting. He was a kindhearted man, and a rather clever writer, but there was nothing in him. His indecision of mind did not suit me at all, M. Carbon and M. Dupanloup had told him why I had left St. Sulpice. We had two or three conversations, in the course of which I explained to him my doubts, based upon an examination of the texts. He did not in the least understand me, and with his transcendentalism he must have looked upon my rigid attention to details as very commonplace. He knew nothing of ecclesiastical science, whether exegesis or theology; his capabilities not extending beyond hollow phrases, trifling applications of mathematics, and the region of "matter of fact." I was not slow to perceive how immensely superior the theology of St. Sulpice was to these hollow combinations which would fain pa.s.s muster as scientific.

St. Sulpice has a knowledge at first hand of what Christianity is; the Polytechnic School has not. But I repeat, there could be no two opinions as to the uprightness of M. Gratry, who was a very taking and highminded man.

I was sorry to part company with him; but there was no help for it.

I had left the first seminary in the world for one in every respect inferior to it. The leg had been badly set; I had the courage to break it a second time. On the 2nd or 3rd of November, I pa.s.sed from out the last threshold appertaining to the Church, and I obtained a place as "a.s.sistant master _au pair_"--to employ the phrase used in the Quartier Latin of those days--without salary, in a school of the St. Jacques district attached to the Lycee Henri IV. I had a small bedroom, and took my meals with the scholars, and as my time was not occupied for more than two hours a day, I was able to do a good deal of work upon my own account. This was just what I wanted.

FIRST STEPS OUTSIDE ST. SULPICE.

PART II.

Const.i.tuted as I am to find my own company quite sufficient, the humble dwelling in the Rue des Deux Eglises (now the Rue de l'Abbe de l'epee) would have been a paradise for me had it not been for the terrible crisis which my conscience was pa.s.sing through, and the altered direction which I was compelled to give to my existence. The fish in Lake Bakal have, it is said, taken thousands of years in their transformation from salt to fresh water fish. I had to effect my transition in a few weeks. Catholicism, like a fairy circle, casts such a powerful spell upon one's whole life, that when one is deprived of it everything seems aimless and gloomy. I felt terribly out of my element. The whole universe seemed to me like an arid and chilly desert. With Christianity untrue, everything else appeared to me indifferent, frivolous, and undeserving of interest. The shattering of my career left me with a sense of aching void, like what may be felt by one who has had an attack of fever or a blighted affection. The struggle which had engrossed my whole soul had been so ardent that all the rest appeared to me petty and frivolous. The world discovered itself to me as mean and deficient in virtue. I seemed to have lost caste, and to have fallen upon a nest of pigmies.

My sorrow was much increased by the grief which I had been compelled to inflict upon my mother. I resorted, perhaps wrongly, to certain artifices with the view, as I hoped, of sparing her pain. Her letters went to my heart. She supposed my position to be even more painful than it was in reality, and as she had, despite our poverty, rather spoilt me, she thought that I should never be able to withstand any hardship. "When I remember how a poor little mouse kept you from sleeping, I am at a loss to know how you will get on," she wrote to me. She pa.s.sed her time singing the Ma.r.s.eilles hymns,[1] of which she was so fond, especially the hymn of Joseph, beginning--

"O Joseph, o mon aimable Fils affable."

When she wrote to me in this strain, my heart was fit to break. As a child, I was in the habit of asking her ten times over in the course of the day--"Mother, have I been good?" The idea of a rupture between us was most cruel. I accordingly resorted to various devices in order to prove to her that I was still the same tender son that I had been in the past. In time the wound healed, and when she saw that I was as tender and loving towards her as ever, she readily agreed that there might be more than one way of being a priest, and that nothing was changed in me except the dress, which was the literal truth.

My ignorance of the world was thorough-paced. I knew nothing except of literary matters, and as my only real knowledge was that which I gained at St. Sulpice, I have always been like a child in all worldly matters. I did not therefore make any effort to render my material position as good as the circ.u.mstances admitted. The one object of life seemed to me to be thought. The educational profession being the one which comes nearest to the clerical one, I selected it almost without reflection. It was hard, no doubt, after having reached the maximum of intellectual culture, and having held a post of some honour, to descend to the lowest rank. I was better versed than any living Frenchman, with the exception of M. Le Hir, in the comparative theory of the Semitic languages, and my position was no better than that of an under-master; I was a savant, and I had not taken a degree. But the inward contentment of my own conscience was enough for me. I never felt a shadow of regret at the decision which I had come to in October, 1845.

I had my reward, moreover, the day after I entered the humble school in which I was to occupy for three years and a-half such a lowly position. Among the pupils was one who, owing to his successes and rapid progress, held a place of his own in the school. He was eighteen years old, and even at that early age the philosophical spirit, the concentrated ardour, the pa.s.sionate love of truth, and the inventive sagacity which have since made his name celebrated were apparent to those who knew him. I refer to M. Berthelot, whose room was next to mine. From the day that we knew each other, we became fast friends.

Our eagerness to learn was equally great, and we had both had very different kinds of culture. We accordingly threw all that we knew into the same seething cauldron which served to boil joints of very different kinds. Berthelot taught me what was not to be learnt in the seminary, while I taught him theology and Hebrew. Berthelot purchased a Hebrew Bible, which, I believe, is still in his library with its leaves uncut. He did not get much beyond the _Shevas_, the counter attractions of the laboratory being too great. Our mutual honesty and straightforwardness brought us closer together. Berthelot introduced me to his father, one of those gifted doctors such as may be found in Paris. The father was a Galilean of the old school, and very advanced in his political views. He was the first Republican I had ever seen, and it took me some time to familiarize myself with the idea. But he was something more than that: he was a model of charity and self-devotion. He a.s.sured the scientific career of his son by enabling him to devote himself up to the age of thirty to his speculative researches without having to obtain any remunerative post which would have interfered with his studies. In politics, Berthelot remained true to the principles of his father. This is the only point upon which we have not always been agreed. For my part I should willingly resign myself, if the opportunity arose (I must say that it seems to grow more distant every day), to serve, for the greater good of humanity now so sadly out of gear, a tyrant who was philanthropic, well-instructed, intelligent, and liberal.

Our discussions were interminable, and we were always resuming the same subject. We pa.s.sed part of the night in searching out together the topics upon which we were engaged. After some little time, M.

Berthelot, having completed his special mathematical studies at the Lycee Henri IV., went back to his father, who lived at the foot of the Tour Saint Jacques de la Boucherie. When he came to see me in the evening at the Rue de l'Abbe de l'epee, we used to converse for hours, and then I used to walk back with him to the Tour Saint Jacques. But as our conversation was rarely concluded when we got back to his door, he returned with me, and then I went back with him, this game of battledore and shuttlec.o.c.k being renewed several times. Social and philosophical questions must be very hard to solve, seeing that we could not with all our energy settle them. The crisis of 1848 had a very great effect upon us. This fateful year was not more successful than we had been in solving the problems which it had set itself, but it demonstrated the fragility of many things which were supposed to be solid, and to young and active minds it seemed like the lowering of a curtain of clouds upon the horizon.

The profound affection which thus bound M. Berthelot and myself together was unquestionably of a very rare and singular kind. It so happened that we were both of an essentially objective nature; a nature, that is to say, perfectly free from the narrow whirlwind which converts most consciences into an egotistical gulf like the conical cavity of the formica-leo. Accustomed each to pay very little attention to himself, we paid very little attention to one another.

Our friendship consisted in what we mutually learnt, in a sort of common fermentation which a remarkable conformity of intellectual organization produced in us in regard to the same objects. Anything which we had both seen in the same light seemed to us a certainty.

When we first became acquainted, I still retained a tender attachment for Christianity. Berthelot also inherited from his father a remnant of Christian belief. A few months sufficed to relegate these vestiges of faith to that part of our souls reserved for memory. The statement that everything in the world is of the same colour, that there is no special supernatural or momentary revelation, impressed itself upon our minds as unanswerable. The scientific purview of a universe in which there is no appreciable trace of any free will superior to that of man became, from the first months of 1846, the immovable anchor from which we never shifted. We shall never move from this position until we shall have encountered in nature some one specially intentional fact having its cause outside the free will of man or the spontaneous action of the animal.

Thus our friendship was somewhat a.n.a.logous to that of two eyes when they look steadily at the same object, and when from two images the brain receives one and the same perception. Our intellectual growth was like the phenomenon which occurs through a sort of action due to close contact and to pa.s.sive complicity. M. Berthelot looked as favourably upon what I did as myself; I liked his ways as much as he could have done himself. There was never so much as a trivial vulgarity--I will not say a moral slackening of affection--between us.

We were invariably upon the same terms with each other that people are with a woman for whom they feel respect. When I want to typify what an unexampled pair of friends we were, I always represent two priests in their surplices walking arm in arm. This dress does not debar them from discussing elevated subjects; but it would never occur to them in such a dress to smoke a cigar, to talk about trifles, or to satisfy the most legitimate requirements of the body. Flaubert, the novelist, could never understand that, as Sainte-Beuve relates, the recluses of Port Royal lived for years in the same house and addressed each other as Monsieur to the day of their death. The fact of the matter is that Flaubert had no sort of idea as to what abstract natures are. Not only did nothing approaching to a familiarity ever pa.s.s between us, but we should have hesitated to ask each other for help, or almost for advice. To ask a service would, in our view, be an act of corruption, an injustice towards the rest of the human race; it would, at all events, be tantamount to acknowledging that there was something to which we attached a value. But we are so well aware that the temporal order of things is vain, empty, hollow, and frivolous, that we hesitate at giving a tangible shape even to friendship. We have too much regard for each other to be guilty of a weakness towards each other. Both alike convinced of the insignificance of human affairs, and possessed of the same aspirations for what is eternal, we could not bring ourselves to admit having of a set purpose concentrated our thoughts upon what is casual and accidental. For there can be no doubt that ordinary friendship presupposes the conviction that all things are not vain and empty.

Later in life an intimacy of this kind may at times cease to be felt as a necessity. It recovers all its force whenever the globe of this world, which is ever changing, brings round some new aspect with regard to which we want to consult each other. Whichever of us dies first will leave a great void in the existence of the other. Our friendship reminds me of that of Francois de Sales and President Favre: "They pa.s.s away these years of time, my brother, their months are reduced to weeks, their weeks to days, their days to hours, and their hours to moments, which latter alone we possess, and these only as they fleet." The conviction of the existence of an eternal object embraced in youth, gives a peculiar stability to life. All this is anything but human or natural, you may say! No doubt, but strength is only manifested by running counter to nature. The natural tree does not bear good fruit. The fruit is not good until the tree is trained; that is to say, until it has ceased to be a tree.

[Footnote 1: A collection of hymns of the sixteenth century, touching in their simplicity. I have my mother's old copy; I may perhaps write something about them hereafter.]