But in the midst of my fated and inevitable need, Providence sends in my way a man, whose father I had in former times despised, both on account of his defective education as of his radical views, which had shut him out from the best social circles. Now came the recompense; I had rejected the father, although he was a rich man, and I was simply compelled to put up with the son. It must be added that the young man had as bad a name in the town as myself, and was doomed to equal isolation as a "seducer of youth." Our common misfortune causes us to form a real friendship. He invites me to share his house, he provides me with means of living, he watches over me as over a patient, and, as a matter of fact, the persecution to which I have been subjected has made me cause a scandal in my hotel, where I tried to get into a room near my own, convinced that I would find the disturbers of my peace there. If I had stayed another day in that hotel the police would certainly have interfered, and I should have spent the rest of my days in a madhouse.
At the same time the appearance of another young man convinces me that the gods do not cherish an irreconcilable grudge against me. He was a real youthful prodigy, with a precocious insight into all branches of human knowledge. His father, a learned man of high moral character, had brought him up well, but two years ago the young man was seized with a mysterious illness, the details of which he told me, with a view of learning my opinion, or rather of confirming his own suspicions.
The young man, who had led a pure life and imbibed the strictest moral principles, entered the world with favourable auspices, admired by his contemporaries and popular wherever he came. But one day he committed an act directly forbidden by his conscience. Since then nothing could give him peace. After a long period of mental torture his body also succumbed, while his spiritual crisis was intensified. Every day he realised the fresh advance of an imaginary disease, and at last he seemed to undergo death agonies. Then he thought he really was dead, and heard in all corners of the house the hammering of coffins. When he read the paper, for his mind remained clear, he expected to see the report of his own burial. At the same time his body seemed to suffer dissolution and exhaled a corpse-like odour, which frightened the attendants away from his bed, and alarmed him himself. Moreover a change seemed to take place even in his personality, for though he was formerly religiously minded in his way he was now attacked by doubts. One of his illusions, which he remembered afterwards, was that his attendants had wax-like or blue faces. And even when he rose from his bed to watch the people in the street all the passers-by seemed to him to have blue faces. What still further alarmed him was that, in the street below, there seemed to be passing an endless procession of beggars, ragged vagabonds, decrepit, limping, legless cripples on crutches, as though they had been summoned to pass in review before him. During the whole time the sick man had the impression that what he saw was, beyond all doubt, real, and yet he was obliged to attribute a symbolical meaning to it. Every book which he opened seemed to contain direct intimations for him. After he had ended his narrative he asked what I thought of the matter.
"Something half real," I answered, "a series of visions conjured up by someone with a special object. A living charade, from which it is for you to draw the lesson. How were you cured?"
"It is comical, but I will confess it to you. Formerly I had stood in opposition against my parents, who had surrounded me with unwearied care for soul and body, but now at last I brought my neck under the yoke, which had become pleasant and beneficial to me, since it had been imposed in pure love, and so I was healed."
"And have you had no relapse?"
"Yes, once, but of a very mild kind. A period of insignificant nervousness and sleeplessness, which yielded to the simplest medical instructions. But this time I had nothing to reproach myself with."
"And what were your doctor's orders?"
"To live regularly, to sleep at night, and to keep free of excesses."
"Why, that is the way of the Cross."