pronounces himself wholly incapable of learning anything from masters.
Madame de Warens tried to have him taught both dancing and fencing; he
could never achieve a minuet, and after three months of instruction he
was as clumsy and helpless with his foil as he had been on the first
day. He resolved to become a master at the chessboard; he shut himself
up in his room, and worked night and day over the books with
indescribable efforts which covered many weeks. On proceeding to the
café to manifest his powers, he found that all the moves and
combinations had got mixed up in his head, he saw nothing but clouds on
the board, and as often as he repeated the experiment he only found
himself weaker than before. Even in music, for which he had a genuine
passion and at which he worked hard, he never could acquire any facility
at sight, and he was an inaccurate scorer, even when only copying the
score of others.[89]

Two things nearly incompatible, he writes in an important passage, are
united in me without my being able to think how; an extremely ardent
temperament, lively and impetuous passions, along with ideas that are
very slow in coming to birth, very embarrassed, and which never arise
until after the event. "One would say that my heart and my intelligence
do not belong to the same individual.... I feel all, and see nothing; I
am carried away, but I am stupid.... This slowness of thinking, united
with such vivacity of feeling, possesses me not only in conversation,
but when I am alone and working. My ideas arrange themselves in my head
with incredible difficulty; they circulate there in a dull way and
ferment until they agitate me, fill me with heat, and give me
palpitations; in the midst of this stir I see nothing clearly, I could
not write a single word. Insensibly the violent emotion grows still, the
chaos is disentangled, everything falls into its place, but very slowly
and after long and confused agitation."[90]