He proposed we should go for a walk, and we talked of secondary matters, not of the past. I remembered that I had written to him several times, without having received an answer. I hoped he had forgotten this as well, those silly, silly letters. He made no mention of them.
At that time there was no Beatrice and no picture, I was still in the period of my dissipation. Outside the town I invited him to come with me into an inn. He came. With much ostentation I ordered a bottle of wine and filled a couple of glasses. I clinked glasses with him, showing him how conversant I was with student drinking customs, and I emptied my first glass at a gulp.
“Do you frequent public houses often?” he asked me.
“Oh yes,” I said with a drawl, “what else is there to do? It’s certainly more amusing than anything else; after all.”
“You think so? Perhaps. It may be so. There’s certainly something very pleasing about it—intoxication, bacchanalian orgies! But I find, with most people who frequent public houses, this sense of abandon is lost. It seems to me there is something typically Philistine, bourgeois, in the public house habit. Of course, for just one night, with burning torches, to have a proper orgy and drunken revel. But to do the same thing over and over again, drinking one glass after another—that’s hardly the real thing. Can you imagine Faust sitting evening after evening drinking at the same table?”
I drank, and looked at him with some enmity.
“Yes, but everyone isn’t a Faust,” I said curtly.
He looked at me with a somewhat surprised air.
Then he laughed, in his old superior way. “What’s the good of quarreling about it? In any case the life of a toper, of a libertine, is, I imagine, more exciting than that of a blameless citizen. And then—I have read it somewhere—the life of a profligate is one of the best preparations for a mystic. There are always such people as Saint Augustine, who become seers. Before, he was a sort of rake and profligate.”
I was distrustful and wished by no means to let him take a superior attitude towards me. So I said, with a blasé air: “Well, everyone according to his taste! I haven’t the slightest intention of doing that, becoming a seer or anything.”