It would be useless to tell of all my remorse and regret after the departure of Madame de Pënâfiel. I went over again (only on another theme) all the tortures which followed my rupture with Hélène. Only, before I finally renounced for ever that noble girl, there remained to me the hope of at some time obtaining her hand; while now I knew I should never see Marguerite again. As it always happens, the affection she had shown me appeared in all its intoxicating sweetness when I had lost it for ever, and by a fatal contradiction I knew that I loved her more passionately than ever.

I dwelt with a sort of cruel enjoyment on all I had so unworthily sacrificed, not to distrust, but to a species of monomania as wicked as it was stupid; to be sure, it had brought terrible suffering on me, but what of that? A crazy man suffers, too; but is the harm he does any the less harmful?

What more can I say? The vision of that seductive woman appeared more beautiful, more voluptuous, than ever before. The saddening vulgarity of the saying that we only know the worth of happiness when we have lost it, was the dolorous theme upon which my despair played every sort of variation.

Overcome by such crushing regrets, what could I do?

Alas! when a man is of such an unfortunate disposition that neither love, ambition, study, nor social obligations suffice to occupy his mind and his heart, above all, when he despises or misunderstands that beneficent spiritual nourishment which religion offers him as a salutary and never failing aliment, his soul, thus deprived of all life-giving principles, reacts upon itself. Then nameless chagrins, mournful and pale ennui, gnawing doubts, phantoms of despair, are almost always born of these gloomy, solitary, and sickly nocturnal meditations.

If, on the contrary, man applies that self-destroying energy to the rigorous observance of the laws imposed on him by God and humanity, if he succeeds in thus limiting his career to the fulfilling of his duties, in tracing out for himself a definite and straight road which ends in a hope of immortality, his life becomes logical, and is the natural consequence of the principles which govern him and the goal towards which he aspires. Then all becomes an admirable sequence, each deed has its cause and its effects. Instead of wandering miserably, with neither interest, hope, nor restraint, he advances towards a definite object. False or true, at least he is travelling along a road, and if the magnificent perspectives in which it ends, and on which he gazes so eagerly, are only a dazzling mirage, what does it matter, since this divine and consoling mirage has led him on to the end of his existence, his heart filled with joy, with hope, and with love?

Alas! these noble thoughts vainly filled my mind; I felt neither the desire nor the energy to follow them.

So that I fell again with all the weight of my dejection into the void. I understood my disease, but had not the courage to try to cure it. I acted with the weakness of those sick people who, stubborn in their sufferings, obstinately prefer a constant pain to the heroic but beneficent action of the knife or the fire.

I led a miserable life; in the daytime I closed my door to the few visitors that my reserve and selfish happiness had not alienated. Sometimes I would give myself up to violent exercise, I would ride on horseback, I would have a furious bout at fencing, so as to tire myself out, thinking thus to dull the mind by fatiguing the body.

Then when night came, I felt a strange and melancholy pleasure in enveloping myself in a cloak, and thus wandering alone about Paris, especially when the weather was cloudy or stormy.