Soon he viewed this passion under a new aspect, and he asked himself why he had not the right to love.  Had not all the saints loved?  Had not St. Jerome loved St. Paula?  Had not Francis de Sales loved Madame de Chantal?  Had not Fenelon loved Madame Guyon?  St. Theresa, her spiritual director, and Venillot, his cook?

Were there not two kinds of love?  The ethereal, ideal, chaste, seraphic love, the love of the creature grateful for the perfect work of the creator; platonic love, free from all impurity, allowed to the virtuous confessor for his virtuous penitent, the love of the wise man in fact; or—­the other.  Then with that art of the rhetorician which sacred scholasticism teaches to every Levite, he said to himself, “Yes, I can love, for it is the spotless love of the angels.”

But his conscience protested and cried to him:  “It is the other!”

XXXI.

THE VIRGIN.

“In whatever place I was, whatever occupation I imposed on myself, I could not think of women, the sight of a woman made me tremble.  How many times have I risen at night, bathed in sweat, to fasten my mouth on our ramparts, feeling myself ready to suffocate.”

  A. DE MUSSET (Confession d’un enfant du Siecle).

It was the other.  He was soon obliged to confess this to himself; for slumber abandoned his couch.

In vain in the day-time he wearied his body under the labour which kills thought.  He sought to fly from the seductive image.  He did not go out, for fear of seeing her.  He rushed upon every hard and unfruitful labour that he could find.  He rooted up his trees in order to re-plant them elsewhere; dug useless banks in his garden; changed his library from its place, and carried one after another his enormous folios to the upper story.  He would have liked to go upon the road, sit at the bottom of some ditch, and take the stone-breaker’s hammer.

But the thought which he silenced by day, took its revenge by night.  How many times, during the long silent hours, his servant heard him get up all at once and march with long steps in his room, as if he had to accomplish some terrible vow.

It was the devil, whispering low mysterious words in his ear, while his impetuous desires constrained him with all the power of his vitality.  He walked like a madman from his bed to his window, which he dared not open.  He had often formerly, leant his elbows there during the hours of sleeplessness, and breathed with delight the keen freshness of the valley.  But now he dared no longer; warm vapours rose up to him and completed the conflagration of his senses.  Nature was re-awakening from the long slumber of winter, and already setting to work, was accomplishing from every quarter the mysterious work of love.  And within and without he felt its formidable power growing and enveloping him.

Nameless thoughts tumultuously invaded his sick brain and ruled there as despots.  They attached themselves to him like an implacable furious old woman, who attaches herself the more closely to her young lover, the more she feels he is going to escape her.