The Confession of a Child of the Century

by Alfred de Musset

CHAPTER VIII

YET I was not willing to yield. Before taking life on its pleasant side after having seen its evil side so dearly, I resolved to test everything. I remained thus for some time a prey to countless sorrows, tormented by terrible dreams.

The great obstacle to my cure was my youth. Wherever I happened to be, whatever my occupation, I could think of nothing but women; the sight of a woman made me tremble.

I had been so fortunate as to give to love my virginity. But the result of this was that all my senses were united in the idea of love; there was the cause of my unhappiness. For not being able to think of anything but women, I could not help turning over in my head, day and night, all the ideas of debauchery, of false love and of feminine treason with which my mind was filled. To possess a woman was for me to love her; for I thought of nothing but women and I did not believe in the possibility of true love.

All this suffering inspired me with a sort of rage, and at times I was tempted to imitate the monks and murder myself in order to conquer my senses; at times I felt like going out into the street and throwing myself at the feet of the first woman I met and vowing eternal love.

God is my witness that I did all in my power to cure myself. Preoccupied from the first with the idea that the society of men was the haunt of vice and hypocrisy, where all were like my mistress, I resolved to separate myself from them and live in complete isolation. I resumed my neglected studies, I plunged into history, poetry, and anatomy. There happened to be on the fourth floor of the same house an old German who was well versed in lore. I determined to learn his tongue; the German was poor and friendless and willingly accepted the task of instructing me. My perpetual state of distraction worried him. How many times seated near him with a smoking lamp between us, he waited in patient astonishment while I sat with my arms crossed on my book, lost in reverie, oblivious of his presence and of his pity.

"My dear sir," said I to him one day, "all this is useless, but you are the best of men. What a task you have undertaken! You must leave me to my fate; we can do nothing, neither you nor I."

I do not know that he understood my meaning, but he grasped my hand and there was no more talk of German.

I soon realized that solitude instead of curing me was doing me harm, and so completely changed my system. I went to the country and galloped through the woods with the huntsmen; I rode until I was out of breath, I tried to break myself with fatigue, and when after a day of sweat in the fields, I reached my bed in the evening smelling of powder and the stable, I buried my head in the pillow, I rolled about under the covers and I cried: "Fantom, fantom! are you not tired? Will you leave me for one night?"

But why these vain efforts? Solitude sent me to nature, and nature to love. When I stood in the street of Observation I saw myself surrounded by corpses, and, drying my hands on my bloody apron, stifled by the odor of putrefaction, I turned my head in spite of myself, and I saw floating before my eyes green harvests, balmy fields and the pensive harmony of the evening. "No," I said, "science can not console me; I can not plunge into dead nature, I would die there myself and float about like a livid corpse amidst the debris of shattered hopes. I would not cure myself of my youth; I will live where there is life, or I will at least die in the sun." I began to mingle with the throngs at Sevres and Chaville; I lay down in the midst of a flowery dale, in a secluded part of Chaville. Alas! all these forests and prairies cried to me: