Olivier could bear it no longer:
“Oh! do shut up, old boy. Stop playing the ass. If you imagine I think it’s funny. …”
“And what about me?” cried Armand. “No, my dear fellow, no; all the same I’m not so stupid as all that. I’ve still intelligence enough to understand that everything I’ve been saying is idiotic.”
“Can’t you ever talk seriously?”
“Very well; we’ll talk seriously, since seriousness is the style you favour. Rachel, my eldest sister, is going blind. Her sight has been getting very bad lately. For the last two years, she hasn’t been able to read without glasses. I thought at first it would be all right if she were to change them. But it wasn’t. At my request, she went to see an oculist. It seems the sensitiveness of the retina is failing. You understand there are two very different things—on the one hand, a defective power of accommodation of the crystalline, which can be remedied by glasses. But even after they have brought the visual image to the proper focus, that image may make an insufficient impression on the retina and be only dimly transmitted to the brain. Do I make myself clear? You hardly know Rachel, so don’t imagine that I am trying to arouse your pity for her. Then why am I telling you all this? … Because, reflecting on my own case, I became aware that not only images but ideas may strike the brain with more or less clearness. A person with a dull mind receives only confused perceptions; but for that very reason he cannot realize clearly that he is dull. He would only begin to suffer from his stupidity if he were conscious of it; and in order to be conscious of it, he would have to become intelligent. Now imagine for a moment such a monster—an imbecile who is intelligent enough to understand that he is stupid.”
“Why, he would cease to be an imbecile.”
“No, my dear fellow; you may believe me, because as a matter of fact, I am that very imbecile.”
Olivier shrugged his shoulders. Armand went on:
“A real imbecile has no consciousness of any idea beyond his own. I am conscious of the beyond. But all the same I’m an imbecile, because I know that I shall never be able to attain that ‘beyond’! …”
“But, old fellow,” said Olivier, in a burst of sympathy, “we are all made so that we might be better, and I think the greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers most from its own limitations.”
Armand shook off the hand that Olivier had placed affectionately on his arm.
“Others,” said he, “have the feeling of what they possess; I have only the feeling of what I lack. Lack of money, lack of strength, lack of intelligence, lack of love—an everlasting deficit. I shall never be anything but below the mark.”
He went up to the toilette table, dipped a hairbrush in the dirty water in the basin and plastered his hair down in hideous fashion over his forehead.
“I told you I hadn’t written anything; but a few days ago, I did have an idea for an essay, which I should have called: ‘On Incapacity.’ But of course I was incapable of writing it. I should have said. … But I’m boring you.”
“No; go on; you bore me when you make jokes; you’re interesting me very much now.”
“I should have tried to find throughout nature the dividing line, below which nothing exists. An example will show you what I mean. The newspapers the other day had an account of a workman who was electrocuted. He was handling some live wires carelessly; the voltage was not very high; but it seems his body was in a state of perspiration. His death is attributed to the layer of humidity which enabled the current to envelop his body. If his body had been drier, the accident wouldn’t have taken place. But now let’s imagine the perspiration added drop by drop. … One more drop—there you are!”
“I don’t understand,” said Olivier.
“Because my example is badly chosen. I always choose my examples badly. Here’s another: Six shipwrecked persons are picked up in a boat. They have been adrift for ten days in the storm. Three are dead; two are saved. The sixth is expiring. It was hoped he might be restored to life; but his organism had reached the extreme limit.”
“Yes, I understand,” said Olivier. “An hour sooner and he might have been saved.”
“An hour! How you go it! I am calculating the extremest point. It is possible. It is still possible. … It is no longer possible! My mind walks along that narrow ridge. That dividing line between existence and nonexistence is the one I keep trying to trace everywhere. The limit of resistance to—well, for instance, to what my father would call temptation. One holds out; the cord on which the devil pulls is stretched to breaking. … A tiny bit more, the cord snaps—one is damned. Do you understand now? A tiny bit less—nonexistence. God would not have created the world. Nothing would have been. ‘The face of the world would have been changed,’ says Pascal. But it’s not enough for me to think—‘if Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter.’ I insist. I ask: shorter, by how much? For it might have been a tiny bit shorter, mightn’t it? … Gradation; gradation; and then a sudden leap. … Natura non fecit saltus. What absurd rubbish! As for me, I am like the Arab in the desert who is dying of thirst. I am at that precise point, you see, when a drop of water might still save him … or a tear. …”
His voice trailed away; there had come into it a note of pathos
