I thought over all the various occupations and wondered which one I should choose.  I turned them all over, one after another, in my mind, and then, not feeling inclined to any of them, I allowed my thoughts to wander.  Suddenly it seemed to me that I felt the earth move, and that a secret, invisible force was slowly dragging me into space and becoming tangible to my senses.  I saw it mount into the sky; I seemed to be on a ship; the poplar near my window resembled a mast; I arose, stretched out my arms, and cried: 

“It is little enough to be a passenger for one day on this ship floating through space; it is little enough to be a man, a black point on that ship; I will be a man, but not any particular kind of man.”

Such was the first vow that, at the age of fourteen, I pronounced in the face of nature, and since then I have done nothing, except in obedience to my father, never being able to overcome my repugnance.

I was therefore free, not through indolence but by choice; loving, moreover, all that God had made and very little that man had made.  Of life I knew nothing but love, of the world only my mistress, and I did not care to know anything more.  So, falling in love upon leaving college, I sincerely believed that it was for life, and every other thought disappeared.

My life was indolent.  I was accustomed to pass the day with my mistress; my greatest pleasure was to take her through the fields on beautiful summer days, the sight of nature in her splendor having ever been for me the most powerful incentive to love.  In winter, as she enjoyed society, we attended numerous balls and masquerades, and because I thought of no one but her I fondly imagined her equally true to me.

To give you an idea of my state of mind I can not do better than compare it to one of those rooms we see nowadays in which are collected and mingled the furniture of all times and countries.  Our age has no impress of its own.  We have impressed the seal of our time neither on our houses nor our gardens, nor on anything that is ours.  On the street may be seen men who have their beards trimmed as in the time of Henry III, others who are clean-shaven, others who have their hair arranged as in the time of Raphael, others as in the time of Christ.  So the homes of the rich are cabinets of curiosities:  the antique, the gothic, the style of the Renaissance, that of Louis XIII, all pell-mell.  In short, we have every century except our own—­a thing which has never been seen at any other epoch:  eclecticism is our taste; we take everything we find, this for beauty, that for utility, another for antiquity, still another for its ugliness even, so that we live surrounded by debris, as if the end of the world were at hand.

Such was the state of my mind; I had read much; moreover I had learned to paint.  I knew by heart a great many things, but nothing in order, so that my head was like a sponge, swollen but empty.  I fell in love with all the poets one after another; but being of an impressionable nature the last acquaintance disgusted me with the rest.  I had made of myself a great warehouse of odds and ends, so that having no more thirst after drinking of the novel and the unknown, I became an oddity myself.