To speak frankly, I am a civilized being, he is only a barbarian. But I felt immediately the sensation that my refinement was less aristocratic than his barbarism. I felt there, at once, and in the depths of this instinct of life, into which the mind descends with much difficulty, the revelation of this precedence of race which modern science affirms of all nature and which, by consequence, must be true also of man. Why even use this word envy, which serves as the label of irrational hostilities like those with which the count immediately inspired me? Why should not this hostility be inherited like the rest? Any human acquisition whatever, that for example of character and of active energy, implies that, during centuries and centuries, files of individuals of which one is the supreme addition, have acted and willed. During this long succession of years, an antipathy, sometimes clear and sometimes obscure, has rendered the individuals of the first group odious to individuals of the second, and when two representatives of this sovereign labor of ages, also typical each in his kind as were the count and myself, meet, why not stand up the one in face of the other, like two beasts of different species? The horse that has never been near a lion trembles with fright when his bed is made of the straw upon which one of these creatures has slept. Then fear is inherited, and is not fear one form of hate? Why is not all hate inherited? And in hundreds of cases envy would be, as it surely was in mine, only the echo of hates formerly felt by those whose sons we are, and who continue to pursue, through us, the combats of heart begun centuries ago. There is a current proverb that antipathies are mutual, and if it is admitted my hypothesis upon the secular origin of antipathies becomes very simple. It happens, however, that this antipathy does not manifest itself in the two beings at once. This is the case when one of the two does not deign to notice the other, and also when the other dissimulates. I do not believe that Count André experienced at first the aversion that he would have felt if he had read to the bottom of my soul. In the beginning he paid very little attention to a young man of Clermont who had come to the château to be tutor; then I had decided on a constant dissimulation of my real Self, imprisoned among strangers. I felt no more repugnance for this defensive hypocrisy than the gardener would have had in putting straw around the currant bushes to preserve their fruit against snows and frosts. The falseness of attitude corresponded too well with my intellectual pride to prevent me from giving myself up to it with delight.