She fell into a sort of metaphysical reverie. It had always seemed to her that reason was an assemblage of ideas, and not a single detail; that all the faculties of a perfectly constituted being borrowed something from it and supplied something to it in turn; that it was at once the means and the end; that no masterpiece could evade its law, and that no man could have any real value after he had resolutely trampled reason under foot. She reviewed in her mind her memories of the great artists of all time, and also of contemporary artists. Everywhere she saw the rigid rules of the true associated with the dream of the beautiful, and yet everywhere there were exceptions, terrifying anomalies, radiant yet blighted faces like Laurent's. Aspiration to the sublime was a disease of Thérèse's epoch and environment. It was a touch of fever which took possession of youth and caused it to despise the normal conditions of happiness as well as the ordinary duties of life. By the force of events, Thérèse was hurled, without desiring or anticipating it, into that awful circle of the human hell. She had become the companion, the intellectual half, of one of those sublime madmen, one of those unreasoning geniuses; she was a witness of the endless agony of Prometheus, of the recurrent frenzies of Orestes; she felt the recoil of those indescribable sufferings, with no comprehension of their cause, and with no power to find a remedy for them. And yet God still dwelt in those rebellious, tormented souls, for Laurent became enthusiastic and kindly once more at certain hours, and the pure well-spring of sacred inspiration was not dried up; his talent was not exhausted, perhaps he still had a glorious future before him. Should such a man be abandoned to the assaults of delirium or to the stupor of fatigue? Thérèse, we say, had skirted that abyss too often not to have been made giddy by it more than once. Her own talent as well as her own character had well-nigh become involved, without her knowledge, in that desperate path. She had known that exaltation of suffering which shows one the miseries of life on a large scale, and which hovers on the boundaries between the real and the imaginary; but, by virtue of a natural reaction, her mind aspired henceforth to the _true_, which is neither one nor the other, neither prosaic fact nor the uncurbed ideal. She felt that there the beautiful was to be found, and that, in order to resume the logical life of the soul, she must seek to live a simple and dignified material life. She reproached herself sternly for having been false to herself so long; and a moment later she reproached herself as sternly for thinking too much of her own lot, in face of the extreme peril by which Laurent was still threatened.