“For when you are with reporters, you’ll certainly feel yourself the soul of a poet.”
“Oh! don’t laugh at me. I know I’m ridiculous. Don’t rub it in too much.”
“Stay with Edouard; you’ll help him; and let him help you. He is very good.”
The luncheon bell rang. Bernard rose. Laura took his hand:
“Just one thing—that little coin you showed us yesterday … in remembrance of you, when I go away”—she pulled herself together and this time was able to finish her sentence—“would you give it me?”
“Here it is,” said Bernard, “take it.”
V
Edouard’s Journal: Conversation with Sophroniska
C’est ce qui arrive de presque toutes les maladies de l’esprit humain qu’on se flatte d’avoir guéries. On les répercute seulement, comme on dit en médecine, et on leur en substitue d’autres.
Sainte-Beuve (Lundis, I, p. 19)
I am beginning to catch sight of what I might call the “deep-lying subject” of my book. It is—it will be—no doubt, the rivalry between the real world and the representation of it which we make to ourselves. The manner in which the world of appearances imposes itself upon us, and the manner in which we try to impose on the outside world our own interpretation—this is the drama of our lives. The resistance of facts invites us to transport our ideal construction into the realm of dreams, of hope, of belief in a future life, which is fed by all the disappointments and disillusions of our present one. Realists start from facts—fit their ideas to suit the facts. Bernard is a realist. I am afraid we shall never understand each other.
How could I agree when Sophroniska told me I had nothing of the mystic in me? I am quite ready to recognize, as she does, that without mysticism man can achieve nothing great. But is it not precisely my mysticism which Laura incriminates when I speak of my book? … Well, let them settle the argument as they please.
Sophroniska has been speaking to me again about Boris, from whom she thinks she has succeeded in obtaining a full confession. The poor child has not got the smallest covert, the smallest tuft left in him, where he can take shelter from the doctor’s scrutiny. He has been driven into the open. Sophroniska takes to bits the innermost wheels of his mental organism and spreads them out in the broad daylight, like a watchmaker cleaning the works of a clock. If after that he does not keep good time, it’s a hopeless job. This is what Sophroniska told me:
When Boris was about nine years old, he was sent to school at Warsaw. He there made friends with a schoolfellow one or two years older than himself—one Baptistin Kraft, who initiated him into certain clandestine practices, which the children in their ignorance and astonishment believed to be “magic.” This is the name they bestowed upon their vice, from having heard or read that magic enables one in some mysterious way to gain possession of what one wishes for, that it gives unlimited powers and so forth. … They believed in all good faith that they had discovered a secret which made up for real absence by illusory presence, and they freely put themselves in a state of hallucination and ecstasy, gloating over an empty void, which their heated imagination, stimulated by their desire for pleasure, filled to overflowing with marvels. Needless to say, Sophroniska did not make use of these terms; I should have liked her to repeat exactly what Boris said, but she declares she only succeeded in making out the above—though she certified its accuracy—through a tangle of pretences, reticence and vagueness.
“I have at last found out the explanation of something I have been trying to discover for a long time past,” she added, “—of a bit of parchment which Boris used always to wear hanging round his neck in a little sachet, along with the religious medallions his mother forces him to wear. There were six words on it, written in capital letters in a childish, painstaking hand—six words whose meaning he never would tell me.
“Gas … telephone … one hundred thousand roubles.”
“ ‘But it means nothing—it’s magic,’ he used always to answer whenever I pressed him. That was all I could get out of him. I know now that these enigmatic words are in young Baptistin’s handwriting—the grand master and professor of magic—and that these six words were the boys’ formula of incantation—the ‘Open Sesame’ of the shameful Paradise, into which their pleasure plunged them. Boris called this bit of parchment, his talisman. I had great difficulty in persuading him to let me see it and still greater in persuading him to give it up (it was at the beginning of our stay here); for I wanted him to give it up, as I know now that he had already given up his bad habits. I had hopes that the tics and manias from which he suffers would disappear with the talisman. But he clung to it and his illness clung to it as to a last refuge.”
“But you said he had already given up his bad habits. …”
“His nervous illness only began after that. It arose no doubt from the constraint Boris was obliged to exercise in order to get free from them. I have just learnt from him that his mother caught him one day in the act of ‘doing magic,’ as he says. Why did she never tell me? … out of false shame? …”
“And no doubt because she knew he was cured.”
“Absurd! … And that is why I have been in the dark so long. I told you that I thought Boris was perfectly pure.”
“You even told me that you were embarrassed by it.”
“You see how right I was! … The mother ought to have warned me. Boris would be cured already if I had known this from the beginning.”
“You said these troubles only
