The Immoralist/Part 1, 9

The few days we stayed at Sorrento were smiling days and very calm. Had I ever enjoyed before such rest, such happiness? Should I ever enjoy them again?… I spent almost all my time with Marceline; thinking less of myself, I was able to think more of her, and now took as much pleasure in talking to her as I had before taken in being silent.

I was at first astonished to feel that she looked upon our wandering life, with which I professed myself perfectly satisfied, only as something temporary: but its idleness soon became obvious to me; I agreed it must not last; for the first time, thanks to the leisure left me by my recovered health, there awoke in me a desire for work, and I began to speak seriously of going home; from Marceline's joy, I realized she herself had long been thinking of it.

Meanwhile, when I again began to turn my attention to some of my old historical studies, I found I ​no longer took the same pleasure in them. As I have already told you, since my illness, I had come to consider this abstract and neutral acquaintance with the past as mere vanity. In other days I had worked at philological research, studying more especially, for instance, the influence of the Goths on the corruption of the Latin language, and had passed over and misunderstood the figures of Theodoric, Cassiodorus and Amalasontha, and their admirable and astonishing passions, in order to concentrate all my enthusiasm on mere signs—the waste product of their lives.

At present, however, these same signs, and indeed philology as a whole, were nothing more to me than a means of penetrating further into things whose savage grandeur and nobility had begun to dawn on me. I resolved to study this period further, to limit myself for a time to the last years of the empire of the Goths, and to turn to account our coming stay at Ravenna, the scene of its closing agonies.

But shall I confess that the figure of the young king Athalaric was what attracted me most? I pictured to myself this fifteen-year-old boy, worked on in secret by the Goths, in revolt against his mother Amalasontha, rebelling against his Latin education and flinging aside his culture, as a restive horse shakes ​off a troublesome harness; I saw him preferring the society of the untutored Goths to that of Cassiodorus—too old and too wise—plunging for a few years into a life of violent and unbridled pleasures with rude companions of his own age, and dying at eighteen, rotten and sodden with debauchery. I recognized in this tragic impulse towards a wilder, more natural state, something of what Marceline used to call my 'crisis.' I tried to find some satisfaction in applying my mind to it, since it no longer occupied my body; and in Athalaric's horrible death, I did my best to read a lesson.

So we settled to spend a fortnight at Ravenna, visit Rome and Florence rapidly, then, giving up Venice and Verona, hurry over the end of our journey and not stop again before reaching Paris. I found a pleasure I had never felt before in talking to Marceline about the future; we were still a little undecided as to how we should spend the summer; we were both tired of travelling and I was in need of absolute quiet for my work; then we thought of a place of mine, situated between Lisieux and Pont-L'Évêque, in the greenest of green Normandy; it had formerly belonged to my mother, and I had passed several summers there with her in my childhood, ​though I had never gone back to it since her death. My father had left it in charge of a bailiff, an old man by now, who collected the rents and sent them to us regularly. I had kept enchanting memories of a large and very pleasant house standing in a garden watered by running streams; it was called La Morinière; I thought it would be good to live there.

I spoke of spending the following winter in Rome, but as a worker this time, not a tourist.… But this last plan was soon upset. Amongst the number of letters we found waiting for us at Naples, was one containing an unexpected piece of information—a chair at the Collège de France had fallen vacant and my name had been several times mentioned in connection with it; it was only a temporary post which would leave me free in the future; the friend who wrote advised me of the few steps to be taken in case I should accept, which he strongly advised me to do. I hesitated to bind myself to what at first seemed to me slavery; but then I reflected that it might be interesting to put forward my ideas on Cassiodorus in a course of lectures.… The pleasure I should be giving Marceline finally decided me, and once my decision taken, I saw only its advantages.

My father had several connections in the learned ​world of Rome and Florence, with whom I had myself been in correspondence. They gave me every facility for making the necessary researches in Ravenna and elsewhere; I had no thoughts now but for my work. Marceline, by her constant consideration and in a thousand charming ways, did all she could to help me.

Our happiness during those last days of travel was so equable, so calm, that there is nothing to say about it. Men's finest works bear the persistent marks of pain. What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told. I have now told you what prepared it.