One evening of the second week of my stay at the château, I employed several hours in writing out a general confession, that is to say, in drawing a picture of my diverse instincts since the first awakening of my consciousness. I arrived at this conclusion, that the essential trait of my nature, the characteristic of my inmost being, had always been the faculty of duplication. That means that I had always felt a tendency to be at once passionate and reflective, to live and to see myself live. But by imprisoning myself, as I wished, in pure reflection, by neglecting to live and to have only one eye open upon life, did I not risk resembling that Amiel whose dolorous journal appeared at that time, and sterilizing myself by the abuse of analysis to emptiness? In vain did your image return to me to reinforce me in my resolution to live an abstract existence. I recall the phrases on love in the “Theory of the Passion,” and I saw you, at my age, abandoning yourself to the culpable experiences which already obscurely tempted me. I do not know if this chemistry of soul, so very complex and very sincere, will seem sufficiently lucid. The work by which an emotion is elaborated in us, and ends by resolving itself into an idea, remains so obscure that the idea is, sometimes, exactly contrary to that which simple reason could have foreseen! Would it not have been natural, for example, that the kind of admiring antipathy roused in me by my encounter with Count André should have ended either in a declared repulsion, or in a definite admiration? In the first case, I should have thrown myself more into science, and in the other, have desired a more active morality, a more practical virility in my actions. But the natural for each one, is his own nature. Mine willed that the admiring antipathy for the count should become a principle of criticism, in regard to myself, that this criticism should produce a new theory of life, that this theory should reveal my native disposition for passional curiosity, that the whole should dissolve itself into a nostalgia of sentimental experiences and that, just at this moment, a young girl should enter into my life whose presence alone would have sufficed to provoke the desire to please in any young man of my age. But I was too intellectual for this desire to be born in my heart without passing through my head. At least, if I felt the charm of grace and delicacy which emanated from this child of twenty years, I felt it while believing that I reasoned about it. There are times when I ask myself if it was so, times when all my history appears more simple, and I say: “I was honestly in love with Charlotte, because she was pretty, refined and tender, and I was young; then I gave some pretexts of the brain because I was a man proud of ideas and did not wish to love like other men.”