It was now late; the two friends then separated, and, without doubt, the count that night in his prayers demanded with more than usual fervor the conversion of the man he so warmly loved. Ordinarily, on gaining his room, the baron was accustomed to install himself as comfortably as possible in an immense old leathern arm-chair, whose age dated back for two or three centuries, which he placed in front of the wood fire that burnt noisily on the hearth; and after having again lit his pipe, that inseparable friend, he used to take a book, and, stretching out his feet upon the copper fire-dogs, wait until he felt sleepy, which invariably occurred as soon as there remained no more tobacco in the sculptured wooden bowl of his pipe.
But on that night he cast around him many a curious look, and examined with as great an attention, one after the other, the several pieces of antique furniture with which his room was furnished, as though it had been the first time that he had seen them; then, in place of sitting down in that ancient arm-chair, which he preferred to all the others on account of its large dimensions, he placed it in front of him, and, sitting down on the most modern of his chairs, he regarded with a questioning curiosity and certain respect that mute witness of an adventure, the mere recital of which had caused so great a trouble in his mind; seeming to ask of it a solution to his doubts and fears. After a long and silent contemplation, he let fall his forehead on his hands, and, plunging his fingers among his hair, whitened rather by sorrow than by age, began to meditate profoundly. The agitation of his mind was so great, and the flow of his thoughts so rapid, that, without knowing it, he began to think aloud. "If what he said were true, if there were something within us that outlived our bodies, I could see thee again, my dearest and best-beloved Gertrude; and I could again find the joys of our too short union, and this time for always, unchanging and eternal! And ought I to repulse that thought through the childish fear of abandoning myself to a false hope? Of these two ideas were it not better to follow that which gives us consolation and causes us to live, rather than that which thickens around us the already too profound shades of life, and changes our grief into despair? What consolation have I ever found in the reason of which I am so proud? None! If pride has withheld my tears before men, yet since twenty years they have flowed on in silence without their source being yet dry. If I have blushed to let my weakness be seen by men, have I not felt it a thousand times within me, implacable, and terrible, before my vain revolts against a destiny that broke my heart and that I was forced to submit to? When beside her death-bed I felt but a sterile despair, when my will, my love, were powerless to retain for a single moment the last sigh of that life that I would have been willing to prolong at the expense of my own days, what have I been able to do? Nothing! not even to die! Since twenty years I implore the oblivion which flies before me! Since twenty years, I recoil before the thought to precipitate myself therein! Is it fear that hinders me? No! I have faced the peril when my duty demanded it, and I would do it again: I have too often seen Death to fear him. The reason is that a secret voice speaks within me higher than all the sophisms of my grief, and tells me that I have not the right to destroy the life which I did not give myself. Yet if there is nothing beyond the tomb, why should I fear it, and what have I to dread from oblivion? Have I not the most absolute right on myself, since all ends but in a dreamless sleep? Is it really a sleep? Ah! there is the truth, both for me and for all others; it is that in secret I doubt as often of that oblivion that I so loudly affirm, as I do whether that God does not exist whose existence I so deny. Yet again, if God is but an imaginary being, and if immortality is but a dream, what does one risk to have thought the contrary? One would have lived fortified against the ills and crosses of this life by a thought that sweetens, even the terrors of death. One would not even feel the loss of that hope, since the hour of our disenchantment would be the one which should plunge us into the deep repose of oblivion! The lie, then, would have done that which the truth could not do; it would have given us happiness. If, on the contrary, immortality is not a vain chimera, but a reality, is it not a terrible responsibility to have shut one's heart to its evidence and to have misunderstood the sublime Author of all things? { 86} Yes! in truth terrible; for in that momentous question, doubt is not to be permitted.