Without Dogma | Page 9

who cannot shine with the steady light of a sun might at least dazzle as a meteor. But oh! that nothingness of the past,--the most probable nothingness of the future! I am growing peevish--and tired; and will leave off writing for to-day.
ROME, 10 January.
Last night, at Count Malatesta's reception, I heard by chance these two words: "l'improductivit�� Slave." I experienced the same relief as does a nervous patient when the physician tells him that his symptoms are common enough, and that many others suffer from the same disease. I have many fellow-sufferers, not only among other Slavs, a race which I know but imperfectly, but in my own country. I thought about that "improductivit�� Slave" all night. He had his wits about him who summed the thing up in two words. There is something in us,--an incapacity to give forth all that is in us. One might say, God has given us bow and arrow, but refused us the power to string the bow and send the arrow straight to its aim. I should like to discuss it with my father, but am afraid to touch a sore point. Instead of this, I will discuss it with my diary. Perhaps it will be just the thing to give it any value. Besides, what can be more natural than to write about what interests me? Everybody carries within him his tragedy. Mine is this same "improductivit�� slave" of the Ploszowskis. Not long ago, when romanticism flourished in hearts and poetry, everybody carried his tragedy draped around him as a picturesque cloak; now it is carried still, but as a jaegervest next to the skin. But with a diary it is different; with a diary one may be sincere.
ROME, 11 January.
The few days which remain to me before my departure I will use in retrospects of the past, until I come to note down day after day the events of my present life. As I said before, I do not intend to write an autobiography; who and what I am, my future life will show sufficiently. I should not like to enter into minute details of the past,--it is a kind of adding number to number, and a summing up. I always hated the four rules of arithmetic, and especially the first. But I want to have a general idea of the total, so as to have a clearer view of myself. Therefore I go on with the mere outline.
After having finished my studies at the university I went to an agricultural school in France. The work there was easy enough, but it had no special attraction for me. I did it as one who knows that this special branch of knowledge will be useful to him, but at the same time feels that he lowers himself to it and that it does not respond either to his ambition or his faculties. I derived a twofold gain from my sojourn there. Agriculture became to me familiar enough to protect me from being cheated by any agents or bailiffs, and it strengthened my frame so that it could withstand the life I later on led in Paris.
The years following I spent either in Koine or in Paris, not to mention short stays at Warsaw, where my aunt summoned me now and then in order to introduce me to some special favorite of hers with a view to matrimony.
Paris and its life attracted me greatly. With the truly excellent opinion I had then of myself, with more confidence in my intelligence and the self-possession an independent position gives, I still played a very unsophisticated part on this scene of the world. I began by falling desperately in love with Mademoiselle Richemberg of the Com��die Fran?aise, and absolutely insisted upon marrying her. I will not dwell now upon the many tragicomic imbroglios, as I am partly ashamed of those times, and partly inclined to laugh at them. Still later on it happened that I took counterfeits for pure gold. The French women, and for the matter of that, my own countrywomen, of whatever class and in spite of all their virtues when young, remind me of my fencing lessons. As the fencer has his hour of practice with the foils so as to keep his hand in, so women practise with sentimental foils. As a mere youth, fairly good looking, I was sometimes invited to a passage of arms, and as I took the matter seriously, received many a scratch. They were not mortal wounds and healed quickly. Besides, everybody has to pay for his apprenticeship in this world, especially in a world like that. My time of probation was, comparatively speaking, a short one. Then came a period one might call "la revanche." I paid back in the same coin, and if now and