The Immoralist — Chapter 9

Chapter 10 of 14 · Review of The Immoralist

The few days we lived at Sorrento were smiling days, and very calm. Had I ever tasted such rest, such happiness? Should I ever taste the like again?... I was beside Marceline without cease; occupying myself less with myself, I occupied myself more with her, and found in talking with her the joy I had taken, the days before, in keeping silent.

I might well have been astonished at first to feel that our wandering life, in which I claimed to be fully satisfied, pleased her only as a provisional state; but at once the idleness of that life became plain to me; I accepted that it should last only a while, and for the first time, a desire to work being born again out of the very unoccupancy in which my restored health at last left me — I spoke seriously of going back. From the joy Marceline showed at this, I understood that she had been thinking of it for a long time.

Yet the few historical labours I was beginning to think of again no longer had the same savour for me. I have told you: since my illness, an abstract and neutral knowledge of the past seemed to me an empty thing, and if not long since I had been able to busy myself with philological research, applying myself for instance to establishing exactly the share of Gothic influence in the deformation of the Latin tongue, and neglecting, failing to see the figures of Theodoric, of Cassiodorus, of Amalasuntha and their admirable passions, so as to grow exalted over nothing but signs and over the residue of their lives — now those same signs, and philology entire, were no more to me than a means of entering further into that whose savage grandeur and nobility had appeared to me. I resolved to occupy myself more with that period, to limit myself for a time to the last years of the empire of the Goths, and to turn to account our coming passage through Ravenna, the theatre of its death-agony.

But, shall I admit it, the figure of the young king Athalaric was what drew me there most. I imagined that boy of fifteen, secretly worked upon by the Goths, revolting against his mother Amalasuntha, balking at his Latin education, throwing off culture as an unbroken stallion throws off a galling harness, and, preferring the society of the unpolished Goths to that of the too-wise old Cassiodorus, tasting for a few years, with rough favourites of his own age, a violent, voluptuous, unbridled life, only to die at eighteen, wholly spoiled, sodden with debauchery. In that tragic surge towards a wilder and more intact state I found again something of what Marceline, smiling, called "my crisis." I sought some contentment in applying at least my mind to it, since I no longer employed my body there; and in Athalaric's frightful death I persuaded myself as best I could that a lesson was to be read.

Before Ravenna, then, where we should linger a fortnight, we would see Rome and Florence quickly, and then, leaving aside Venice and Verona, hurry through the end of the journey and stop nowhere until Paris. I found an altogether new pleasure in talking of the future with Marceline; a certain indecision still remained as to how the summer should be spent; weary of travelling, both of us, we had no wish to set out again; I desired the greatest tranquillity for my studies; and we thought of a rent-yielding property between Lisieux and Pont-l'Évêque, in the greenest Normandy — a property my mother had owned in former days, where I had spent with her a few summers of my childhood, but where I had not returned since her death. My father had entrusted its upkeep and oversight to a keeper, an old man now, who collected the farm rents on his behalf and then sent them to us regularly. A large and very agreeable house, in a garden threaded with running water, had left me enchanted memories; it was called La Morinière; it seemed to me that it would be good to live there.

The coming winter I spoke of spending in Rome — as a worker, no longer as a traveller this time... But this last plan was soon reversed: in the great mass of mail that had long been waiting for us at Naples, a letter abruptly informed me that, a chair having fallen vacant at the Collège de France, my name had been pronounced several times; it was only a substitute post, but one which, precisely for that reason, would leave me a greater freedom for the future; the friend who informed me of this indicated, should I be willing to accept, a few easy steps to take — and pressed me strongly to accept. I hesitated, seeing in it at first above all a bondage; then reflected that it might be interesting to set out, in a course of lectures, my work on Cassiodorus... the pleasure I should be giving Marceline decided me in the end. And, as soon as my decision was taken, I saw nothing in it but the advantage.

In the learned world of Rome and of Florence my father kept up various connections with whom I had myself entered into correspondence. They gave me every means of making such researches as I might wish, at Ravenna and elsewhere; I thought now of nothing but work. Marceline used all her ingenuity to further it by a thousand charming attentions and a thousand kindnesses.

Our happiness, during that last part of the journey, was so even, so calm, that I can tell nothing of it. The finest works of men are obstinately sorrowful. What would the story of happiness be? Nothing can be told but what prepares it, and then what destroys it. — And I have now told you all that had prepared it.