Chapter 16: The Ideal Bees

“Afin de réduire le Ternaire, par le moyen
du Quaternaire, à la simplicité de l’unité.”
Le R. P. Esprit Sabathier,
l’Ombre idéale de la sagesse universelle.

“Ah! yes,” mused Hubert, as he replaced the book in the corner restricted to philosophers, “the pages of Ribot’s positive and disenchanting psychology make good reading at a moment, not of spleen, but of stark boredom. This penetrating dialectician clearly proves to me that my personality is a fragile chord which a single false note in the keyboard can destroy. It is all the same to me: a madness caused by a fixed idea must greatly assist in supporting life. Thus, collectors are to be envied, those who gather and classify old copper buttons, or old secret locks, or all that has been written against women, or the figurines of Sèvres porcelain, or the articles of M. Lemaître, or the slippers of historic balls. One need not be fastidious in choosing a mania: to be good it has only to be inexhaustible. As for the more distinguished follies, many excellent ones can be noted and, in general, none of those which are termed mild manias should be scorned: the people once knew this well, for they respected, in the persons of fools, the state of mind never attained by men of sense: happiness.”

He continued thus for a long time, stretched back on his armchair, smoking cigarettes, wearied from his night and still enfeebled by a protracted bath. At bottom, he was deeply ashamed of himself, as after every similar defilement, and not at all reassured as to the metaphysical consequences of this sin. No reasoning, brutal though his unbelief might be, could efface such an impression. The being endowed with human intelligence and will always regulates himself by some rule, a mental guide that is often unconscious, but whose existence is immediately and with certitude revealed by the transgression. There is no common moral conscience outside of a religion that is strict and observed in all its commandments, the laws of society, and the special regulations belonging to a certain group: morality is a personal talent. Thus, Entragues felt himself soiled by an immersion in pleasure where others would still have enjoyed, even repletion, the gratification of a ruminant.

Moreover, he was not impious: having seen remorse rear its head before him, now that the hour of the bravado had passed, he trembled at the memory of the reproachful phantom. That night cut a phase of his life in two, and he saw himself equal to those whom physical existence confines beneath its claws: brother of the first comer and thrown back among the vulgar elements, he ceased to be himself. Ah! he had judged! Now he could be judged.

In this state of mind, nothing could interest him; since the principle of all interest vanished. Opium-like dreams benumbed him and all the texts on the vanity of things which he had gathered here and there in his readings, played under his skull, like the bell of a rattle.

Love, strangled by his hand, barred his path: to advance, it was necessary to leap over the dead thing: no! he would remain on this side, unless a miraculous and quite questionable resurrection occurred.