- end_line
- 13207
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.924Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 13153
- text
- insist upon keeping her connecting door open while Pierre was employed
at his desk, that so the heat of her room might bodily go into his; but
Pierre would not listen to such a thing: because he must be religiously
locked up while at work; outer love and hate must alike be excluded
then. In vain Isabel said she would make not the slightest noise, and
muffle the point of the very needle she used. All in vain. Pierre was
inflexible here.
Yes, he was resolved to battle it out in his own solitary closet; though
a strange, transcendental conceit of one of the more erratic and
non-conforming Apostles,--who was also at this time engaged upon a
profound work above stairs, and who denied himself his full sufficiency
of food, in order to insure an abundant fire;--the strange conceit of
this Apostle, I say,--accidentally communicated to Pierre,--that,
through all the kingdoms of Nature, caloric was the great universal
producer and vivifyer, and could not be prudently excluded from the spot
where great books were in the act of creation; and therefore, he (the
Apostle) for one, was resolved to plant his head in a hot-bed of
stove-warmed air, and so force his brain to germinate and blossom, and
bud, and put forth the eventual, crowning, victorious flower;--though
indeed this conceit rather staggered Pierre--for in truth, there was no
small smack of plausible analogy in it--yet one thought of his purse
would wholly expel the unwelcome intrusion, and reinforce his own
previous resolve.
However lofty and magnificent the movements of the stars; whatever
celestial melodies they may thereby beget; yet the astronomers assure us
that they are the most rigidly methodical of all the things that exist.
No old housewife goes her daily domestic round with one millionth part
the precision of the great planet Jupiter in his stated and unalterable
revolutions. He has found his orbit, and stays in it; he has timed
himself, and adheres to his periods. So, in some degree with Pierre, now
revolving in the troubled orbit of his book.
Pierre rose moderately early; and the better to inure himself to the
permanent chill of his room, and to defy and beard to its face, the
cruelest cold of the outer air; he would--behind the curtain--throw down
the upper sash of his window; and on a square of old painted canvas,
formerly wrapping some bale of goods in the neighborhood, treat his
limbs, of those early December mornings, to a copious ablution, in water
thickened with incipient ice. Nor, in this stoic performance, was he at
all without company,--not present, but adjoiningly sympathetic; for
scarce an Apostle in all those scores and scores of chambers, but
undeviatingly took his daily December bath. Pierre had only to peep out
of his pane and glance round the multi-windowed, inclosing walls of the
quadrangle, to catch plentiful half-glimpses, all round him, of many a
lean, philosophical nudity, refreshing his meager bones with crash-towel
and cold water. "Quick be the play," was their motto: "Lively our
elbows, and nimble all our tenuities." Oh, the dismal echoings of the
raspings of flesh-brushes, perverted to the filing and polishing of the
merest ribs! Oh, the shuddersome splashings of pails of ice-water over
feverish heads, not unfamiliar with aches! Oh, the rheumatical
cracklings of rusted joints, in that defied air of December! for every
thick-frosted sash was down, and every lean nudity courted the zephyr!
- title
- Chunk 3