“Just think, I asked your father only ten days ago if he had ever tried to give up smoking. I thought I was smoking a good deal too much myself and … Anyway, do you know what he answered? First of all he said that the evil effects of tobacco were very much exaggerated, and that as far as he was concerned he had never felt any; and as I insisted: ‘Yes,’ said he, at last. ‘I have made up my mind once or twice to give it up for a time.’ ‘And did you succeed?’ ‘Naturally,’ he answered, as if it followed as a matter of course—‘since I made up my mind to.’—It’s extraordinary! Perhaps, after all, he didn’t remember,” I added, not wishing to let Sarah see the depths of hypocrisy I suspected.

“Or perhaps,” rejoined Sarah, “it proves that ‘smoking’ stood for something else.”

Was it really Sarah who spoke in this way? I was struck dumb. I looked at her, hardly daring to understand.… At that moment Olivier came out of the room. He had combed his hair, arranged his collar and seemed calmer.

“Suppose we go,” he said, paying no attention to Sarah, “it’s late.”

“I am afraid you may mistake me,” he said, as soon as we were in the street. “You might think that I’m in love with Sarah. But I’m not.… Oh! I don’t detest her … only I don’t love her.”

I had taken his arm and pressed it without speaking.

“You mustn’t judge Armand either from what he said today,” he went on. “It’s a kind of part he acts … in spite of himself. In reality he’s not in the least like that.… I can’t explain. He has a kind of desire to spoil everything he most cares for. He hasn’t been like that long. I think he’s very unhappy and that he jokes in order to hide it. He’s very proud. His parents don’t understand him at all. They wanted to make a pastor of him.”

Memo.—Motto for a chapter of The Counterfeiters:

“La famille … cette cellule sociale.”

PAUL BOURGET (passim).

Title of the chapter: THE CELLULAR SYSTEM.

True, there exists no prison (intellectual, that is) from which a vigorous mind cannot escape; and nothing that incites to rebellion is definitively dangerous—although rebellion may in certain cases distort a character—driving it in upon itself, turning it to contradiction and stubbornness, and impiously prompting it to deceit; moreover the child who resists the influence of his family, wears out the first freshness of his energy in the attempt to free himself. But also the education which thwarts a child strengthens him by the very fact of hampering. The most lamentable victims of all are the victims of adulation. What force of character is needed to detest the things that flatter us! How many parents I have seen (the mother in especial) who delight in encouraging their children’s silliest repugnances, their most unjust prejudices, their failures to understand, their unreasonable antipathies.… At table: “You’d better leave that; can’t you see, it’s a bit of fat? Don’t eat that skin. That’s not cooked enough.… ” Out of doors, at night: “Oh, a bat!… Cover your head quickly; it’ll get into your hair.” Etc., etc.… According to them, beetles bite, grasshoppers sting, earthworms give spots … and such-like absurdities in every domain, intellectual, moral, etc.

In the suburban train the day before yesterday, as I was coming back from Auteuil, I heard a young mother whispering to a little girl of ten, whom she was petting:

“You and me, darling, me and you—the others may go hang!”

(Oh, yes! I knew they were working people, but the people too have a right to our indignation. The husband was sitting in the corner of the carriage reading the paper—quiet, resigned, not even a cuckold, I dare say.)

Is it possible to conceive a more insidious poison?

It is to bastards that the future belongs. How full of meaning is the expression “a natural child”! The bastard alone has the right to be natural.

Family egoism … hardly less hideous than personal egoism.

Nov. 6th.—I have never been able to invent anything. But I set myself in front of reality like a painter, who should say to his model: “Take up such and such an attitude; put on such and such an expression.” I can make the models which society furnishes me act as I please, if I am acquainted with their springs; or at any rate I can put such and such problems before them to solve in their own way, so that I learn my lesson from their reactions. It is my novelist’s instinct that is constantly pricking me on to intervene—to influence the course of their destiny. If I had more imagination, I should be able to spin invention intrigues; as it is, I provoke them, observe the actors, and then work at their dictation.

Nov. 7th.—Nothing that I wrote yesterday is true. Only this remains—that reality interests me inasmuch as it is plastic, and that I care more—infinitely more—for what may be than for what has been. I lean with a fearful attraction over the depths of each creature’s possibilities and weep for all that lies atrophied under the heavy lid of custom and morality.

Here Bernard was obliged to pause. His eyes were blurred. He was gasping as if the eagerness with which he read had made him forget to breathe.