THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

than ever to study alone, to resist his Jesuitical leanings, to
be independent.
He returned from Russia by way of Berlin where he
stopped to see Fernande for whom he had brought a present.
After he had given it to her, she played the piano and sang
for him. «Her eyes shone with happiness when she thanked
me ... That she loves me I no longer have the least doubt, and
for myself, I love her with all my heart».
He did not see her again for more than seven long
months. At Easter-time in 1888 his father asked him to
accompany him to Spain but Otlet refused and went with his
step-mother to Berlin instead. His parents understood. «Oh
well!», his father said upon hearing his answer, «Go to Berlin,
then», but he said it without any sign of annoyance. He
even seemed to approve the idea. In Berlin, Otlet, now nearly
twenty, screwed up his courage one evening to declare his
love for Fernande. She, though no doubt not taken by surprise,
made no immediate reply. That night Otlet slept fitfully,
filled with anxiety, an agonising doubt about the wisdom, thetiming
of what he had done. The next morning, as he waited
to see her, he feared that he might not be able to look at her
without blushing. She descended to breakfast but still with
no sign. «Joy ineffable!*, he wrote later, «she has written me
the words I so much desired to hear». Saying nothing she
had demurely eaten her breakfast, but just before slipping
from the room, she had handed him a small envelope of the
size used for acceptance cards. Folded tightly in one corner
of it was a scrap of paper just large enough for the three
words minutely printed on it: «I love you».
Otlet was a passionate, earnest young man, caught up in
an absorbing struggle to reduce his feelings, his ideas, his
perceptions of the world to some satisfactory order. Fernande
was a minx. Certainly she was no student and she absolutely
refused to regard Otlet with the same gravity with which,,
contemplating his intellectual problems, he contemplated himself.
In Brussels early in June 1888 a few months after his
visit to her in Berlin, Otlet wrote ecstatically in his diary:
«She is coming,, tomorrow, another 24 hours; my dreams, my
thoughts, my desires, all turn towards her; she is coming.»
But suddenly, after the rapture of their initial meeting, she
became reserved and aloof. He could not understand her behaviour.
She would not speak of what had made her angry.
She merely suggested that they should take up their relationship
in three years' time when both their parents might
more actively approve it, although there seems to be no evidence
that they then disapproved. Bewildered and hurt,
Otlet struggled through his examinations at the University
and went off, desolate, to Ostend to wander alone and unhap-
14