“What is there in that word?  A word that is merited, positive, withering, at will.  But why?  It is still but a word.  Can you kill a body with a word?

“And if you love that body?  Some one pours a glass of wine and says to you:  ‘Do not love that, for you can get four for six francs.’  And it may intoxicate you!

“But Desgenais loves his mistress, since he keeps her; he must, therefore, have a peculiar fashion of loving?  No, he has not; his fashion of loving is not love, and he cares no more for the woman who merits affection than for her who is unworthy.  He loves no one, simply and truly.

“What has led him to this?  Was he born thus?  To love is as natural as to eat and to drink.  He is not a man.  Is he a dwarf or a giant?  Is he always so impassive?  Upon what does he feed, what beverage does he drink?  Behold him at thirty like old Mithridates; poisons are his familiar friends.

“There is the great secret, my child, the key you must grasp.  By whatever process of reasoning debauchery may be defended, it will be proven that it is natural at a given day, hour, or night, but not to-morrow nor every day.  There is not a nation on earth which has not considered woman either the companion and consolation of man or the sacred instrument of life, and has not under either of these two forms honored her.  And yet here is an armed warrior who leaps into the abyss that God has dug with His own hands between man and brute; as well might he deny that fact.  What mute Titan is this who dares repress under the kisses of the body the love of the soul, and place on human lips the stigma of the brute, the seal of eternal silence?

“There is a word that should be studied.  In it you hear the faint moan of those dismal labyrinths we know as secret societies, mysteries that the angels of destruction whisper in the ear of night as it descends upon the earth.  That man is better or worse than God has made him.  He is like a sterile woman, in whom nature has not completed her work, or there is distilled in the shadow of his life some venomous poison.

“Ah! yes, neither occupation nor study has been able to cure you, my friend.  To forget and to learn, that is your device.  You turn the leaves of dead books; you are too young for antiquities.  Look about you, the pale throng of men surrounds you.  The eyes of life’s sphynx glitter in the midst of divine hieroglyphics; decipher the book of life!  Courage, scholar, launch out on the Styx, the deathless flood, and let the waves of sorrow waft you to oblivion or to God.”

CHAPTER IV

MARCO

“All the good there was in it, supposing there was some good in it, was that false pleasures were the seeds of sorrow and of bitterness which fatigued me to the point of exhaustion.”  Such are the simple words spoken with reference to his youth by a man who was the most manly of any who have lived—­St. Augustine.  Of those who have done as I, few would say those words; all have them in their hearts; I have found no others in mine.