One day a word, a flush, a glance, made me shudder; another day, another glance, another word, threw me into uncertainty.  Why were they both so sad?  Why was I as motionless as a statue where I had formerly been violent?  Every evening in bed I said to myself:  “Let me see; let me think that over.”  Then I would spring up, crying:  “Impossible!” The next day I did the same thing.

In Smith’s presence, Brigitte treated me with more tenderness than when we were alone.  It happened one evening that some hard words escaped us; when she heard his voice in the hall she came and sat on my knees.  As for him, it seemed to me he was always making an effort to control himself.  His gestures were carefully regulated; he spoke slowly and prudently, so that his occasional moments of forgetfulness seemed all the more striking.

Was it curiosity that tormented me?  I remember that one day I saw a man drowning near the Pont Royal.  It was midsummer and we were rowing on the river; some thirty boats were crowded together under the bridge, when suddenly one of the occupants of a boat near mine threw up his hands and fell overboard.  We immediately began diving for him, but in vain; some hours later the body was found under a raft.

I shall never forget my experience as I was diving for that man.  I opened my eyes under the water and searched painfully here and there in the dark corners about the pier; then I returned to the surface for breath, then resumed my horrible search.  I was filled with hope and terror; the thought that I might feel myself seized by convulsive arms allured me, and at the same time thrilled me with horror; when I was exhausted with fatigue, I climbed back into my boat.

Unless a man is brutalized by debauchery, eager curiosity is one of his marked traits.  I have already remarked that I felt it on the occasion of my first visit to Desgenais.  I will explain my meaning.

The truth, that skeleton of appearances, ordains that every man, whatsoever he be, shall come, in his day and hour, to touch the bones that lie forever at the bottom of some chance experience.  It is called “knowing the world,” and experience is purchased at that price.  Some recoil in terror before that test; others, feeble and affrighted, vacillate like shadows.  Some, the best perhaps, die at once.  The large number forget, and thus all float on to death.

But there are some men, who, at the fell stroke of chance, neither die nor forget; when it comes their turn to touch misfortune, otherwise called truth, they approach it with a firm step and outstretched hand, and, horrible to say! they mistake love for the livid corpse they have found at the bottom of the river.  They seize it, feel it, clasp it in their arms; they are drunk with the desire to know; they no longer look with interest upon things, except to see them pass; they do nothing except doubt and test; they ransack the world as though they were God’s spies; they sharpen their thoughts into arrows, and give birth to a monster.