Listen, brothers: should a Magdalen crawl at your feet, cursing her past errors, promising you a new youth of love, do not believe her. Heaven is not lavish of prodigies. Providence rarely shackles human misfortunes. Say to yourselves that evil is powerful, and that in this world of ours falsehood is not changed into truth even to give relief to a poor, suffering soul. Repulse the Magdalen, spurn her, laugh at her tears and the pleading of her heart; rail against all redemption. Such is the advice of what men call wisdom.
I feel that I am gaining experience in worldly matters.
Laurence is a soul forever lost, a stupefied intelligence, a creature so hardened that nothing can awaken her from her sleep in the mud. I might bruise her flesh, I might break her bones with a club, or I might lift her drowsy eyelids with kisses, but she would still squat at my feet, without a quiver, without a cry either of pain or joy. Sometimes, I am tempted to cry out to her:
"Get up and let us fight; awake, shout, swear, and show me that you are yet alive by making me suffer!"
She looks at me with her dull eyes; I recoil affrighted, not daring to speak. Laurence is dead, dead in heart and in thought. I can do nothing with such a corpse.
Brothers, I have no longer the slightest hope; I no longer wish to trouble myself about this girl. She has refused my life of toil and I cannot accept her life of dissipation. The dream was too lofty; the reality seems to me like a bottomless pit. I have paused and am waiting. For what? I do not know!
I have only to justify myself in your eyes. I know that you see clearly into my soul, that you explain my acts to yourselves by thoughts of justice and duty. You have more confidence in me than I myself dare to have. At times I question myself, I judge myself as I am, no doubt, judged by the passers whom I elbow in this life; I am afraid of the vice which surrounds without corrupting me, of the woman who remains in my presence without being my companion. Then, in utter despair, I am tempted to do what others would do, to take Laurence by the shoulders and push her back into the street from whence she came. Should I do this, she would resume her old career as madly, as recklessly, as ever, bearing upon her forehead the stamp of the same wretchedness and infamy as before. And I would calmly close my door, having stolen nothing from her, owing her nothing. Men's consciences are very elastic; there are people who possess the science of remaining honest by becoming cowardly and cruel.
Laurence has thrust herself upon my protection with all the strength of her abandonment. She remains with me, tranquil and passive. I cannot, however, drive her away. My poverty prevents me from paying her to go. We are fatally bound one to the other by misfortune. As long as she shall feel inclined to stay, I shall believe it my duty to accept her presence.
Hence I am waiting, and, I repeat, I know not for what I am waiting. Like Laurence, I am weighed down, I live in a sort of somnolence at once mild and sad, without suffering too greatly, feeling in my heart only a colossal fatigue. After all, I am not irritated against this girl; I feel more pity than anger, more sadness than hatred.
I no longer struggle, I abandon myself; I find in the certainty of evil a strange repose, a pacification of my entire being.