Monsieur Teste

Stupidity is not his strong suit. The narrator has seen many individuals, visited a few nations, touched women, retained the substance of twenty books—and of all that, there remained whatever could. He has rarely lost sight of himself, has hated himself, adored himself, and they have grown old together, he and himself. From this inner arithmetic a conviction was born: the strongest minds, the most sagacious inventors must be unknown men, misers, men who die without confessing. Every great man is stained by a flaw—that of showing himself. The true masters of thought would refuse to consider themselves as anything other than things.

It is in this state of mind, during October of '93, that the narrator makes the acquaintance of Monsieur Teste. He observes him first at the café, studies his eyes, his clothes, his restrained gestures, notes that no one pays him any mind. Monsieur Teste is perhaps forty years old; his speech is extraordinarily rapid and his voice muffled. Everything in him fades away—the eyes, the hands. He has killed the puppet: when he speaks, he never raises an arm or a finger, does not smile, says neither hello nor good evening. He lives on mediocre weekly operations at the Stock Exchange, eats in a small restaurant on the rue Vivienne as one takes a purgative, and lives in a furnished apartment without a single book—he burned them twenty years ago, along with all his papers. He crosses out the living, retains what he wants, but the difficulty for him does not lie there: it is to retain what he will want tomorrow.

His memory is not an excessive faculty but an educated, transformed one. He has devoted years to discovering laws of the mind of which we are ignorant, then more years still to maturing his inventions and turning them into his instincts, for finding is nothing—the difficulty is to add to oneself what one finds. The delicate art of duration, time, its distribution and regimen, its expenditure on well-chosen things to nourish them specifically—these are his great researches. He oversees the repetition of certain ideas, waters them with number. He has no opinions. He becomes passionate at will, to achieve a definite goal. He hates melancholy. When he speaks, one feels pushed back into his idea, merged with things, mingled with the houses, the magnitudes of space, the stirred coloring of the street. A great number of words are banished from his discourse; those he uses have an altered weight, a new value.

One evening, the narrator accompanies him to the theater, in a borrowed box at the Opéra. Teste stands upright against the gold column, flushed, breathing in the great burning gust at the edge of the pit. He looks only at the audience—never at the stage. He observes the crowd as a mechanism, murmurs that one is only beautiful, only extraordinary for others, that they are eaten by others. He bets that all these spectators are thinking more and more toward the same thing, that they will be equal before a common crisis or limit. The law is not so simple, he adds, since it neglects him—and he is there. The lighting holds them, he says. The narrator laughs: you too? And Teste replies: you too.

After the performance, they walk through streets softened by the night. Teste's military step subdues the narrator's. Almost incoherent sentences escape him, but the incoherence of a discourse depends upon the one who listens. Teste declares he hates extraordinary things—they are the need of weak minds. Genius is easy, divinity is easy; he knows how that is conceived. Formerly, anything above the ordinary accomplished by another was for him a personal defeat. He coughs, wonders aloud what a man is capable of, then invites the narrator to smoke a cigar at his place.

They climb to the top of the house. The greenish apartment smells of mint. Around the candle there is only dismal, abstract furniture—the bed, the clock, the mirrored wardrobe, two armchairs—like beings of reason. On the mantelpiece, a few newspapers, visiting cards covered with numbers, a pharmaceutical vial. It is the arbitrary dwelling, analogous to the arbitrary point in theorems. Teste speaks of money, cites very large numbers with weariness—eight hundred and ten million, seventy-five thousand, five hundred and fifty—and the narrator listens to this unheard-of music without following the calculation. Gold is like the mind of society, Teste says. Then he falls silent, suffers, drinks from his vial, undresses quietly, slips into the sheets, and plays dead.

Lying down, he floats, feels an imperceptible rolling beneath him—an immense movement. He adores the navigation of the night. He evokes childhood, when one slowly discovers the space of one's body, touches one's heel, grasps one's right foot with one's left hand, receives the cold foot in the warm palm. Now, he knows himself by heart. Then the pain seizes him—a tenth of a second that reveals itself. His body illuminates, he distinguishes the depths of the layers of his flesh, feels zones of pain, rings, poles, plumes of pain. This geometry of suffering bears a striking resemblance to ideas. He fights everything, except the suffering of his body beyond a certain magnitude. To suffer is to give something supreme attention, and he is somewhat the man of attention.

His voice is now but a murmur in the pillow. He is thinking, and that hinders nothing. He is alone. Solitude is comfortable. Nothing sweet weighs upon him. He is being, and seeing himself, seeing himself see himself, and so forth. One falls asleep on any subject; sleep continues any idea. He snores softly. Even more softly, the narrator takes the candle and slips out on tiptoe.

Around this foundational evening gravitate other voices. Madame Émilie Teste writes to her husband's friend a long letter in which she describes her life beside this strange man. Her own life is null and useful; his, all habits and absence. Sometimes he possesses the hardness of an angel, shatters the mind with a word just as a potter throws a flawed vase into the shards. Sometimes he returns from his depths with the softness of a winter rose, capturing her blindly in his arms as if she were a rock of life and real presence. She never knows if he loves her or if he is studying her, or if he is studying himself by means of her. He names her according to what he wants from her—Being, Thing, or sometimes Oasis. She feels she is living in the cage of his superior mind, free but classified, a fly fluttering in the universe of an unshakable gaze. Her confessor, Abbé Mosson, finds him a monster of isolation and singular knowledge, a desert island whose heart perhaps awaits a footprint in the sand to reveal that his island is mysteriously inhabited. Émilie sums him up in a word: a godless mystic.

The Log-book of Monsieur Teste gathers fragments of pure thought, thrown like splinters onto the page. A prayer to the Lord who disturbed him from nothingness, infinitely null and tranquil, to cast him into the strange carnival. The confession of having made an idol of his mind, for want of finding another. The conviction that what he bears that is unknown to himself is what makes him him. The lacunae are his starting point; his impotence is his origin. A man always standing upon Cape Thought, straining his eyes at the limits of things or of sight. He wishes to be made of glass—so straight his vision, so pure his sensation, that he penetrates himself from the ends of the world to his silent word, follows himself, answers himself, reflects and reverberates, shivering in the infinity of mirrors.

A writer friend, in a letter that may have been addressed to Teste, recounts his train journey back to Paris. The inert and living body abandons itself to the dead and moving bodies that transport it. The brain, overexcited, generates of its own accord a whole modern literature. This friend sees in Paris the kingdom of delirious professions, those trades whose principal instrument is the opinion one has of oneself and whose raw material is the opinion others have of you. Everyone carries within them a large positive electron that rumbles endlessly "there is only me," and a small negative electron that pierces this theme with its sharp point: "yes, but there is so-and-so." The train speeds on, dismissing poplars and cows as if racing toward pure thought, and the word "intellectual" brings the whole train of visions to a dead halt. A funny thing, the collision of a word in a head—the entire mass of falsehood at full speed derails violently from the track of truth. A harsh Englishman crushes his foot, the black and sweating train stops, and that is all.