What distressed my mother was my lack of will. I always acted on the impulse of the moment. So long as the impulse came from my mind or my heart, my life, though not perfect, was not truly bad.
My mother and I were preoccupied chiefly with the realization of all my fine projects for work, calm, and reflection, because we felt—she more distinctly, I confusedly but intensely—that this realization would only be an image projected into my life, the image of the creation, by me and in me, of the willpower that she had conceived and nurtured. However, I always kept putting it off until tomorrow. I gave myself time, I occasionally grieved at watching time pass, but so much time still lay before me!
Yet I was a bit scared, and I obscurely felt that my habit of doing without willpower was starting to weigh down on me more and more strongly as the years accumulated; and I sadly suspected that there would be no sudden change, and that I could scarcely count on an utterly effortless miracle to transform my life and create my will. Desiring a will was not enough. I would have needed precisely what I could not have without willpower: a will.
And the furious wind of concupiscence
Makes your flesh flap like an old flag.
—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
During my sixteenth year I suffered a crisis that left me sickly. To divert me, my family had me debut in society. Young men got into the habit of calling on me. One of them was perverse and wicked. His manners were both gentle and brash. He was the one I fell in love with. My parents found out, but to keep me from suffering all too much, they did not force his hand.
Spending all my time thinking about him when I did not see him, I finally lowered myself by imitating him as much as was possible for me. He beguiled me almost by surprise into doing wrong, then he got me accustomed to having bad thoughts which I had no will to resist—willpower being the only force capable of driving them back to the infernal darkness from which they emerged.
When love was gone, habit took its place, and there was no lack of immoral young men to exploit it. As accessories to my sins, they also justified them to my conscience. Initially I felt atrocious remorse; I made confessions that were not understood.
My friends talked me out of dwelling on the matter with my father. They gradually persuaded me that all girls were doing the same and that parents were simply feigning ignorance. As for the lies I was incessantly obliged to tell, my imagination soon embellished them as silences that I had to maintain about an ineluctable necessity. At this time, I no longer really lived; I still dreamed, still thought, still felt.
To divert and expel all those evil desires, I began socializing rather intensely. The dessicating pleasure of high society accustomed me to living in perpetual company, and, together with my taste for solitude, I lost the secret of the joys that I had previously been given by nature and art. Never have I attended so many concerts as during those years.
Never have I felt music less profoundly, engrossed as I was in my desire to be admired in an elegant box. I listened and I heard nothing. If I did happen to hear something, I no longer saw everything that music can unveil. My outings were likewise virtually stricken with sterility.
The things that had once sufficed to make me happy all day long—a bit of sunshine yellowing the grass, the fragrance that wet leaves emit with the final drops of rain—all these things had, like myself, lost their sweetness and gaiety. Woods, skies, water seemed to turn away from me, and if, alone with them and face to face, I questioned them uneasily; they no longer murmured those vague responses that had once delighted me. The divine guests announced by the voices of water, foliage, and sky deign to visit only those hearts that are purified by living in themselves.
Because I was seeking an inverse remedy and because I did not have the courage to want the real remedy, which was so close and, alas, so far from me, inside me, I again yielded to sinful pleasures, believing that I could thereby rekindle the flame that had been extinguished by society. My efforts were useless.
Held back by the pleasure of pleasing, I kept putting off, from day to day, the final decision, the choice, the truly free act, the option for solitude. I did not renounce either of those two vices in favor of the other. I combined them. What am I saying? Intent on smashing through all the barriers of thinking and feeling that would have stopped the next vice, each vice also appeared to summon it. I would go into society to calm down after committing a sin, and I sinned again the instant I was calm.
It was at that terrible moment, after my loss of innocence and before my remorse of today, at that moment, when I was less worthy than at any other moment of my life, that I was most appreciated by everybody. I had been shrugged off as a silly, pretentious girl; now, on the contrary, the ashes of my imagination were fancied by society, which reveled in them.
While I kept committing the worst crime against my mother, people viewed me as a model daughter because of my tender and respectful conduct with her. After the suicide of my thoughts, they admired my intelligence; they doted on my mind.
My parched imagination, my dried-up sensitivity were enough for the people who were the thirstiest for an intellectual life—their thirst being as artificial and mendacious as the source from which they believed they were quenching it! Yet no one suspected the secret crime of my life, and everyone regarded me as an ideal girl.
How many parents told my mother that if I had had a lesser standing, and if they could have dared to consider me, they would have desired no other wife for their sons! Nonetheless, in the depths of my obliterated conscience, I felt desperately ashamed of those undeserved praises; but my shame never reached the surface, and I had fallen so low that I was indecent enough to repeat them to and laugh at them with the accomplices of my crimes.
To anyone who has lost what he will regain
Never . . . Never!
—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: “THE SWAN” (THE FLOWERS OF EVIL)
In the winter of my twentieth year, my mother’s health, which had never been vigorous, was deeply shaken. I learned that she had a weak heart, and while her condition was not serious, she had to avoid any excitement. One of my uncles told me that my mother wanted to see me get married.
I was thus presented with a clear and important task. Now I could show my mother how much I loved her. I accepted the first proposal that she transmitted to me with her approval, so that my life would be changed by necessity rather than by will.
My fiancé was precisely the kind of young man who, by his extreme intelligence, his gentleness and energy, could exert the finest influence on me. Furthermore he was determined that we would live with my mother. I would not be separated from her, which would have been the cruelest pain for me.
Now I had the courage to admit all my sins to my father confessor. I asked him if I owed the same avowal to my fiancé. My confessor was compassionate enough to talk me out of it, but he made me swear to turn over a new leaf and he gave me absolution. The late blossoms that joy opened in my heart, which I thought forever sterile, bore fruits.
I was cured by the grace of God, the grace of youth—an age that heals so many wounds with its vitality. If, as Saint Augustine says, it is more difficult to regain chastity than to have been chaste, I got to know a difficult virtue.
No one suspected that I was infinitely worthier than before, and my mother kissed my forehead every day, having never stopped believing it was pure and not realizing it was regenerated. Moreover I was unjustly rebuked for my absent-mindedness, my silence, and my melancholy in society. But I was not angry: I drew enough pleasure from the secret that existed between me and my satisfied conscience.
The convalescence of my soul (which now smiled endlessly at me with a face like my mother’s and gazed at me with an air of tender reproach through my drying tears) was infinitely appealing and languorous. Yes, my soul was reborn to life. I myself failed to understand how I could have maltreated my soul, made it suffer, nearly killed it. And I effusively
