She looked at him fixedly, with that steady inquiring gaze with which
she sought to read his thoughts.

"Very well, let us work. If you have papers to examine, or notes to
copy, give them to me."

And from this day forth he affected to give himself up entirely to work.
Besides, it was one of his theories that absolute rest was unprofitable,
that it should never be prescribed, even to the overworked. As the fish
lives in the water, so a man lives only in the external medium which
surrounds him, the sensations which he receives from it transforming
themselves in him into impulses, thoughts, and acts; so that if there
were absolute rest, if he continued to receive sensations without giving
them out again, digested and transformed, an engorgement would result, a
_malaise_, an inevitable loss of equilibrium. For himself he had always
found work to be the best regulator of his existence. Even on the
mornings when he felt ill, if he set to work he recovered his equipoise.
He never felt better than when he was engaged on some long work,
methodically planned out beforehand, so many pages to so many hours
every morning, and he compared this work to a balancing-pole, which
enabled him to maintain his equilibrium in the midst of daily miseries,
weaknesses, and mistakes. So that he attributed entirely to the idleness
in which he had been living for some weeks past, the palpitation which
at times made him feel as if he were going to suffocate. If he wished to
recover his health he had only to take up again his great work.

And Pascal spent hours developing and explaining these theories to
Clotilde, with a feverish and exaggerated enthusiasm. He seemed to be
once more possessed by the love of knowledge and study in which, up
to the time of his sudden passion for her, he had spent his life
exclusively. He repeated to her that he could not leave his work
unfinished, that he had still a great deal to do, if he desired to leave
a lasting monument behind him. His anxiety about the envelopes seemed
to have taken possession of him again; he opened the large press twenty
times a day, taking them down from the upper shelf and enriching them
by new notes. His ideas on heredity were already undergoing a
transformation; he would have liked to review the whole, to recast the
whole, to deduce from the family history, natural and social, a vast
synthesis, a resume, in broad strokes, of all humanity. Then, besides,
he reviewed his method of tre