Everything is finished for me on this earth. Neither good nor ill can now be done to me. There is nothing left for me to hope for or fear in this world, and so I am at peace in the depths of the chasm, a poor, unfortunate mortal, but as impassive as God himself.
Everything outside of me is from this day on foreign to me. I no longer have any neighbours, fellow men or brothers in this world. Being on this earth is like being on another planet onto which I have fallen from the one on which I used to live. If I recognize anything at all around me, it is only objects which distress and rend my heart, and I cannot even look at what touches me and what surrounds me without forever seeing something contemptible which angers me or something painful which wounds me. So let me put far from my mind all those vexatious objects which it would be just as painful as it would be pointless for me to grieve over. Alone for the rest of my life, since it is only in myself that I find solace, hope, and peace, it is now my duty and my desire to be concerned solely with myself. It is in this state of mind that I resume the painstaking and sincere self-examination that I formerly called my Confessions.* I am devoting my last days to studying myself and to preparing the account of myself which I shall soon have to render.* Let me give myself over entirely to the pleasure of conversing with my soul, for this is the only pleasure that my fellow men cannot take away from me. If by dint of reflecting on my inner feelings I am able to order them better and put right the wrongs that may remain, my meditations will not be entirely in vain, and while I am now good for nothing on this earth, I shall not have entirely wasted my last days. The leisure of my daily walks has often been filled with delightful thoughts which I am sorry to have forgotten. I shall preserve in writing those which come to me in the future: every time I reread them I shall experience the pleasure of them again. I shall forget my misfortunes, my persecutors, and my shame by thinking of the honour my heart had deserved.
These pages will in fact be merely a shapeless account of my reveries. They will often be about me, because a reflective solitary man necessarily thinks about himself a lot. What is more, all the strange ideas which come into my head as I walk will also find their place here. I shall say what I have thought just as it came to me and with as little connection as yesterday’s ideas have with those of tomorrow. But a new awareness of my character and my temperament will nevertheless result from an awareness of the feelings and thoughts which feed my mind day by day in the strange state in which I find myself. So these pages may be considered as an appendix to my Confessions, but that is not the title I give them, for I no longer feel I have anything to say which is worthy of it. My heart has been purified in the crucible of adversity, and when I examine it carefully I can find hardly a trace of any guilty inclinations. What could I possibly have left to confess now that my heart has been stripped of all worldly affections? I need no more praise myself than blame myself: I am from now on as nothing amongst men, and that is inevitable, for I no longer have any real relationship or keep any kind of company with them. Unable now to do any good which does not turn to ill, or do anything without harming others or myself, abstaining has become my one and only duty, and I fulfil this duty as much as I possibly can. But whereas my body has nothing to do, my soul remains active, still producing feelings and thoughts, and its inner moral life seems even to have increased with the death of all earthly and temporal interests. My body is now nothing more to me than an irritation, an obstacle, and I am already cutting myself free of it as much as I can.
Such an extraordinary situation surely deserves to be examined and described, and it is to this examination that I devote my final days of leisure. To do this successfully I would need to proceed in an ordered and methodical way, but this task is beyond me, and indeed it would distract from my aim, which is to come to an understanding of the sequence of change and effect that has occurred in my soul. I shall in a sense perform on myself the sort of experiments that physicists perform on air to analyse its composition day by day. I shall apply the barometer to my soul, and these experiments, conducted well and repeated time and time again, might yield results as reliable as theirs. But I am not going that far. I shall simply keep a record of the experiments without trying to reduce them to a system. My task is the same as that of Montaigne, but my aim is the exact opposite of his: for he wrote his essays entirely for others, whereas I am writing my reveries entirely for myself.* If, as I hope, I have the same cast of mind when I am very old and as the moment of my departure approaches, reading them will remind me of the pleasure I have in writing them and, by thus reviving the past for me, will double my existence, so to speak. In spite of men I shall still be able to enjoy the delights of company, and, grown decrepit, I shall live with myself in another age, as if living with a younger friend.
When I wrote my earliest Confessions and my Dialogues, I was constantly concerned with finding ways of keeping them out of the clutches of my persecutors, so that I might be able to pass them on to later generations. That same concern no longer troubles me for this work, for I know it would be in vain, and the desire to be better known by people has died in my heart, leaving me profoundly indifferent to the fate both of my actual writings and of the accounts of my innocence, all of which have perhaps already been destroyed for ever. Let people spy on what I do, let them be alarmed by these pages, seize them, suppress them, falsify them, from now on it is all the same to me. I neither hide them nor show them off. If they are taken away from me during my lifetime, I shall not be deprived of the pleasure of having written them, nor of the memory of what they contain, nor of the solitary meditations which inspired them, the source of which can be extinguished only with my soul. If I had known from the time of my earliest misfortunes not to kick against my fate and to follow the course of action that I am following today, all the efforts of men and all their dreadful machinations would have had no effect on me, and they would have been no more able to trouble my peace of mind with all their plotting than they are able to trouble it from now on with all their triumphs; let them enjoy my humiliation as much as they want, they will not stop me from enjoying my innocence and living the rest of my days in peace in spite of them.
SECOND WALK
HAVING therefore decided that I would describe the habitual state of my soul in this, the strangest position in which any mortal can ever find himself, I could conceive of no simpler or surer way of carrying out my plan than by keeping a faithful record of my solitary walks and the reveries that fill them when I let my mind wander quite freely and my ideas follow their own course unhindered and untroubled. These hours of solitude and meditation are the only time of the day when I am completely myself, without distraction or hindrance, and when I can truly say that I am what nature intended me to be.
I soon felt that I had waited too long to carry out this plan. My imagination, already less vigorous than it once was, no longer bursts into flame in the way it used to upon contemplating the object that inspires it, and I become less intoxicated by the delirium of reverie; now there is more recollection than creation in what my imagination produces, an apathetic listlessness saps all my faculties, and the spirit of life is gradually dying within me; my soul now struggles to spring forward from its decrepit frame, and were it not for the hope I have of the state to which I aspire because I feel entitled to it, I would now exist only through memories. So, if I am to contemplate myself before my decline, I must go back at least a few years to the time when, losing all hope here on earth and finding no more sustenance left on earth for my heart, I gradually became used to feeding it with its own substance and seeking out its nourishment within me.
This practice, which I became aware of all too late, proved so fruitful that it was soon enough to compensate me for everything. The habit of turning in on myself eventually made me insensible to my suffering, and almost made me forget it altogether, and so I learnt through my own experience that the source of true happiness is within us and that it is not within men’s ability to make anyone truly wretched who is determin
ed to be happy. For four or five years I had regularly enjoyed the inner delights that loving and gentle souls find in contemplation. These transports of delight and ecstasy which I sometimes experienced when walking on my own were pleasures which I owed to my persecutors: without them, I would never have discovered or known the treasures that I bore within me. Surrounded by such riches, how could one possibly keep a faithful record of them? I wanted to remember so many sweet reveries, but instead of describing them, I relived them. Remembering this state recreates it, and one would soon lose all knowledge of it if one were to cease feeling it altogether.
I experienced this during the walks I went on following my decision to write the sequel to my Confessions, in particular during the walk I am about to talk about, in the course of which an unexpected accident interrupted the flow of my ideas and sent them off, for a time, in a quite different direction.
After lunch on Thursday 24 October 1776, I went along the boulevards as far as the rue du Chemin vert,* which I followed up to the heights of Ménilmontant, and from there, taking the paths across the vineyards and meadows, I crossed the delightful countryside that separates Ménilmontant from Charonne, and then I made a detour and came back across the same meadows but by a different path. I enjoyed walking through them, feeling the same pleasure and interest that agreeable landscapes have always given me, and stopping from time to time to look closely at some plants amidst the greenery. I noticed two which I saw quite rarely around Paris but which in this area I found to be growing very abundantly. The first is the picris hieracioides of the Compositae family,* and the other the bupleurum falcatum of the Umbelliferae family.* This discovery delighted and distracted me for a very long time, until I discovered a plant that is rarer still, particularly on high ground, called the cerastium aquaticum,* which, in spite of the accident that happened to me later that day, I later found in a book I had been carrying with me and which I placed in my collection.*
Finally, having examined in detail several other plants I saw which were still in flower and which, in spite of their familiarity, I still enjoyed looking at and cataloguing, I gradually gave up these minute observations in favour of the no less agreeable but more affecting impressions that the scene as a whole made upon me. A few days earlier the last grapes had been harvested; the walkers from the city had already left; the peasants, too, were leaving the fields, not to return until their winter work began. The countryside, still green and radiant, though some of the leaves had fallen and it was already almost deserted, was the very image of solitude and the onset of winter. Its appearance stirred in me mixed emotions of pleasure and sadness which were too similar to my age and my fate for me not to make the comparison. I saw myself in the declining years of an innocent and hapless life, my soul still full of intense feelings and my mind still adorned with a few flowers, though these were already withered by sadness and dried out by care. Alone and abandoned, I could feel the coming chill of the first frosts, and my exhausted imagination no longer peopled my solitude with beings formed after my heart’s desires. Sighing, I said to myself: What have I done in this world? I was made to live, and I am dying without having lived. At least I am not to blame, and I shall offer up to the author of my being, if not the good works that I have not been allowed to perform, then at least my tribute of frustrated good intentions, of fine feelings rendered ineffectual, and of a patience that withstood men’s scorn. Touched by these reflections, I retraced the different movements of my soul during my youth, during my maturity, since I had been cut off from human society, and during the long isolation in which I am to end my days. I recalled with some fondness all my heart’s affections, its attachments which had been so tender and yet so blind, and the ideas—more comforting than they were sad—which had nourished my mind for a number of years, and I prepared myself to remember them clearly enough to be able to describe them with a pleasure that was almost equal to the pleasure of experiencing them in the first place. My afternoon was spent in these untroubled meditations, and I was on my way home, very happy with my day, when in the midst of my reverie I was pulled up short by the event which I shall now recount.
At about six o’clock in the evening, I was walking down from Ménilmontant and was almost opposite the Galant Jardinier* when the people walking ahead of me suddenly stepped aside and I saw a huge Great Dane hurtling towards me, who was bounding along at full speed in front of a carriage* and who did not even have the time, once he had seen me, to slow his pace or change direction. I realized that the only way I could avoid being knocked to the ground was to leap up high enough in the air at just the right moment to let the dog pass beneath me. This idea, which came to me as quick as a flash and which I had no time to reflect on nor to put into action, was my last thought before my accident. I did not feel the impact nor my fall, nor indeed anything else of what happened thereafter until I finally came to.
It was almost night when I regained consciousness. I found myself in the arms of three or four young men who told me what had just happened. The Great Dane, unable to slow down, had run straight into my legs and, overpowering me with his weight and speed, had knocked me over head first: my top jaw, taking the full weight of my body, had struck against a very rough cobblestone, and my fall had been made all the more violent by the fact that, since I was walking downhill, my head ended up lower than my feet.
The carriage to which the dog belonged followed immediately behind him and would have run right over my body had the driver not quickly stopped his horses. This is the account I learned from those who had picked me up and who were still holding me when I came to. The state in which I found myself at that moment is too extraordinary not to be described here.
Night was falling. I saw the sky, a few stars, and a little greenery. This first sensation was a moment of delight. It alone gave me some feeling of myself. In that instant I was born into life, and it seemed to me as if I was filling all the things I saw with my frail existence. Entirely taken up by that moment, I could not remember anything else; I had no clear sense of myself as an individual, nor the slightest idea of what had just happened to me; I did not know who I was nor where I was; I felt neither pain nor fear nor anxiety. I watched my blood flowing as if I were watching a stream, without even thinking that this blood was in any way part of me. Throughout my whole being I felt a wonderful calm with which, whenever I think of it, I can find nothing to compare in the whole realm of known pleasures.
I was asked where I lived; it was impossible for me to say. I asked where I was, and I was told: ‘At the Haute Borne’;* the answer could just as well have been: ‘On Mount Atlas’. I had to ask which country, which town, and which district I was in. But even that was not enough to make me aware of who I was; it took me the entire journey from there to the boulevard to remember where I lived and what my name was. A man whom I had never met before and who was kind enough to walk with me some of the way, on learning that I lived so far away, advised me to take a cab home from the Temple.* I was walking very well, very nimbly, feeling no pain or injury, though I was still spitting lots of blood. But I was shivering with the cold which made my shattered teeth chatter very uncomfortably. When I reached the Temple I thought that, since I was walking without difficulty, I may as well continue on foot rather than run the risk of dying of cold in a cab. Thus I covered the half-league* from the Temple to the rue Plâtrière,* walking without difficulty, avoiding obstacles and vehicles, and choosing which way to go just as I would have done, had I been in perfect health. I arrived home, opened the hidden lock that had been fitted to the street door, climbed the stairs in the dark, and finally reached home, suffering no accident other than my fall and its consequences, of which I was still not even aware.
My wife’s cries* when she saw me made me realize that I was more injured than I had thought. I spent the night still not knowing or feeling the full extent of my injuries. This is what I felt and discovered the next day. My top lip was split open on the inside right up to my nose, while the skin on the
outside had protected it more and had stopped it from tearing apart completely; four teeth had been knocked in on my top jaw; all the part of my face around my top jaw was extremely swollen and bruised; my right thumb was sprained and very swollen; my left thumb was badly injured; my left arm was sprained; and my left knee was also very swollen, and I was unable to bend it properly because of a big and painful bruise. But in spite of the great knock I had taken, there was nothing broken, not even a tooth: such good fortune was almost a miracle given the fall I had suffered.
This is a very faithful account of my accident. In just a few days the story spread across Paris, but it was changed and disfigured so much that it became quite unrecognizable. I should have known that this would happen; but to it were added so many bizarre circumstances, it was accompanied by so many vague remarks and omissions, and people spoke to me about it in such a ridiculously discreet manner that all these mysteries unnerved me. I have always hated shadows:* they naturally inspire in me a horror that has been in no way diminished by the shadows by which I have been surrounded for so many years. Of all the extraordinary events of this period I will mention only one, but one typical enough to give a sense of the others.
Monsieur Lenoir, the police lieutenant general,* with whom I had never had any dealings, sent his secretary to find out how I was and urgently to offer me favours which, in the circumstances, did not seem to me particularly helpful as I recovered. His secretary did not fail to urge me very insistently to take up these offers, even going so far as to tell me that if I did not trust him, I could write directly to Monsieur Lenoir. His great eagerness and the air of secrecy that he created convinced me that there was, hidden beneath it all, some mystery which I sought in vain to make sense of. This was more than enough to scare me off, especially given the state of agitation which my mind was in on account of my accident and the ensuing fever. I became preoccupied with a thousand worrying and sad conjectures, and I analysed everything that was going on around me in a way which smacked more of the delirium brought on by a fever than of the self-possession of a man who is no longer interested in anything.
Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Oxford World's Classics) Page 5
