Then, commanding a view of green mountain-side where you could see, at an equal distance, like innumerable eggs laid on the edge of the shore the long chaplet of villas and white villages built among the trees rose the Alps, whose summits are still shrouded in a hood of snow.

I murmured: 

“Good heavens, this is beautiful!”

The man raised his head, and said: 

“Yes, but when you see it every day, it is monstrous.”

Then he spoke, he chatted, and tired himself with talking—­my solitary, I detained him.

I did not tarry long that day, and only endeavored to ascertain the color of misanthropy.  He created on me especially the impression of being bored with other people, weary of everything, hopelessly disillusioned and disgusted with himself as well as the rest.

I left him after a half-hour’s conversation.  But I came back, eight hours later, and once again in the following week, then every week, so that before two months we were friends.

Now, one evening at the close of May, I decided that the moment had arrived, and I brought provisions in order to dine with him on Snake Mountain.

It was one of those evenings of the South so odorous in that country where flowers are cultivated just as wheat is in the North, in that country where every essence that perfumes the flesh and the dress of women is manufactured, one of those evenings when the breath of the innumerable orange-trees with which the gardens and all the recesses of the dales are planted, excite and cause languor so that old men have dreams of love.

My solitary received me with manifest pleasure.  He willingly consented to share in my dinner.

I made him drink a little wine, to which he had ceased to be accustomed.  He brightened up and began to talk about his past life.  He had always resided in Paris, and had, it seemed to me, lived a gay bachelor’s life.

I asked him abruptly: 

“What put into your head this funny notion of going to live on the top of a mountain?”

He answered immediately: 

“Her! it was because I got the most painful shock that a man can experience.  But why hide from you this misfortune of mine?  It will make you pity me, perhaps!  And then—­I have never told anyone—­never—­and I would like to know, for once, what another thinks of it, and how he judges it.”

“Born in Paris, brought up in Paris, I grew to manhood and spent my life in that city.  My parents had left me an income of some thousands of francs a year, and I procured as a shelter, a modest and tranquil place which enabled me to pass as wealthy for a bachelor.

“I had, since my youth, led a bachelor’s life.  You know what that is.  Free and without family, resolved not to take a legitimate wife, I passed at one time three months with one, at another time six months with another, then a year without a companion, taking as my prey the mass of women who are either to be had for the asking or bought.