Briefly, in this man of culture and refinement, in whose own mysterious
life one might perhaps have found various crimes but not a single act of
base improbity, one could divine an implacable, obstinate theoretician,
who was resolved to set the world ablaze for the triumph of his ideas.
On certain evenings when a visit from Theophile Morin coincided with one
from Bache and Janzen, and they and Guillaume lingered chatting until far
into the night, Pierre would listen to them in despair from the shadowy
corner where he remained motionless, never once joining in the
discussions. Distracted, by his own unbelief and thirst for truth, he had
at the outset taken a passionate interest in these debates, desirous as
he was of drawing up a balance-sheet of the century's ideas, so as to
form some notion of the distance that had been travelled, and the profits
that had accrued. But he recoiled from all this in fresh despair, on
hearing the others argue, each from his own standpoint and without
possibility of concession and agreement. After the repulses he had
encountered at Lourdes and Rome, he well realised that in this fresh
experiment which he was making with Paris, the whole brain of the century
was in question, the new truths, the expected gospel which was to change
the face of the world. And, burning with inconsiderate zeal, he went from
one belief to another, which other he soon rejected in order to adopt a
third.
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