He had done his military service in a provincial garrison and returned to Paris to follow his trade.  It was a well-paid one.  He told me with some pride that in a short time he was earning no less than ten francs a day.  He was thinking of setting up for himself by and by and of getting married.

Here he sighed deeply and paused.  Then with a return to his stoical note: 

“It seems I did not know enough about myself.”

On his twenty-fifth birthday two of his friends in the repairing shop where he worked proposed to stand him a dinner.  He was immensely touched by this attention.

“I was a steady man,” he remarked, “but I am not less sociable than any other body.”

The entertainment came off in a little cafe on the Boulevard de la Chapelle.  At dinner they drank some special wine.  It was excellent.  Everything was excellent; and the world—­in his own words—­seemed a very good place to live in.  He had good prospects, some little money laid by, and the affection of two excellent friends.  He offered to pay for all the drinks after dinner, which was only proper on his part.

They drank more wine; they drank liqueurs, cognac, beer, then more liqueurs and more cognac.  Two strangers sitting at the next table looked at him, he said, with so much friendliness, that he invited them to join the party.

He had never drunk so much in his life.  His elation was extreme, and so pleasurable that whenever it flagged he hastened to order more drinks.

“It seemed to me,” he said, in his quiet tone and looking on the ground in the gloomy shed full of shadows, “that I was on the point of just attaining a great and wonderful felicity.  Another drink, I felt, would do it.  The others were holding out well with me, glass for glass.”

But an extraordinary thing happened.  At something the strangers said his elation fell.  Gloomy ideas—­des idees noires—­rushed into his head.  All the world outside the cafe; appeared to him as a dismal evil place where a multitude of poor wretches had to work and slave to the sole end that a few individuals should ride in carriages and live riotously in palaces.  He became ashamed of his happiness.  The pity of mankind’s cruel lot wrung his heart.  In a voice choked with sorrow he tried to express these sentiments.  He thinks he wept and swore in turns.

The two new acquaintances hastened to applaud his humane indignation.  Yes.  The amount of injustice in the world was indeed scandalous.  There was only one way of dealing with the rotten state of society.  Demolish the whole sacree boutique.  Blow up the whole iniquitous show.

Their heads hovered over the table.  They whispered to him eloquently; I don’t think they quite expected the result.  He was extremely drunk—­mad drunk.  With a howl of rage he leaped suddenly upon the table.  Kicking over the bottles and glasses, he yelled:  “Vive l’anarchie!  Death to the capitalists!” He yelled this again and again.  All round him broken glass was falling, chairs were being swung in the air, people were taking each other by the throat.  The police dashed in.  He hit, bit, scratched and struggled, till something crashed down upon his head. . . .