Ah! reason, it was through her that he had
suffered, through her alone that he was happy. As he had told Doctor
Chassaigne, his one consuming longing was to satisfy reason ever more and
more, although it might cost him happiness to do so. It was reason, he
now well understood it, whose continual revolt at the Grotto, at the
Basilica, throughout entire Lourdes, had prevented him from believing.
Unlike his old friend--that stricken old man, who was afflicted with such
dolorous senility, who had fallen into second childhood since the
shipwreck of his affections,--he had been unable to kill reason and
humiliate and annihilate himself. Reason remained his sovereign mistress,
and she it was who buoyed him up even amidst the obscurities and failures
of science. Whenever he met with a thing which he could not understand,
it was she who whispered to him, "There is certainly a natural
explanation which escapes me." He repeated that there could be no healthy
ideal outside the march towards the discovery of the unknown, the slow
victory of reason amidst all the wretchedness of body and mind. In the
clashing of the twofold heredity which he had derived from his father,
all brain, and his mother, all faith, he, a priest, found it possible to
ravage his life in order that he might keep his vows.
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