I became an enthusiastic lover of the theatre; and with my craze for actors and the play, the work of my demoralization began.  The stage, in a great metropolis, exerts a very deadly influence over the young; they never quit the theatre save in a state of emotional excitement almost always beyond their power to control; society and the law seem to me to be accessories to the irregularities brought about in this way.  Our legislation has shut its eyes, so to speak, to the passions that torment a young man between twenty and five-and-twenty years of age.  In Paris he is assailed by temptations of every kind.  Religion may preach and Law may demand that he should walk uprightly, but all his surroundings and the tone of those about him are so many incitements to evil.  Do not the best of men and the most devout women there look upon continence as ridiculous?  The great city, in fact, seems to have set herself to give encouragement to vice and to this alone; for a young man finds that the entrance to every honorable career in which he might look for success is barred by hindrances even more numerous than the snares that are continually set for him, so that through his weaknesses he may be robbed of his money.

“For a long while I went every evening to some theatre, and little by little I fell into idle ways.  I grew more and more slack over my work; even my most pressing tasks were apt to be put off till the morrow, and before very long there was an end of my search after knowledge for its own sake; I did nothing more than the work which was absolutely required to enable me to get through the examinations that must be passed before I could become a doctor.  I attended the public lectures, but I no longer paid any attention to the professors, who, in my opinion, were a set of dotards.  I had already broken my idols—­I became a Parisian.

“To be brief, I led the aimless drifting life of a young, provincial thrown into the heart of a great city; still retaining some good and true feeling, still clinging more or less to the observance of certain rules of conduct, still fighting in vain against the debasing influence of evil examples, though I offered but a feeble, half-hearted resistance, for the enemy had accomplices within me.  Yes, sir, my face is not misleading; past storms have plainly left their traces there.  Yet, since I had drunk so deeply of the pure fountain of religion in my early youth, I was haunted in the depths of my soul, through all my wanderings, by an ideal of moral perfection which could not fail one day to bring me back to God by the paths of weariness and remorse.  Is not he who feels the pleasures of earth most keenly, sure to be attracted, soon or late, by the fruits of heaven?