Returning to Paris in the month of December, I passed the winter attending pleasure parties, masquerades, suppers, rarely leaving Desgenais, who was delighted with me:  not so was I with him.  The more I went about, the more unhappy I became.  It seemed to me after a short time that the world which had at first appeared so strange would hamper me, so to speak, at every step; yet where I had expected to see a spectre, I discovered, upon closer inspection, a shadow.

Desgenais asked what ailed me.

“And you?” I asked.  “What is the matter with you?  Have you lost some relative?  Or do you suffer from some wound?”

At times he seemed to understand and did not question me.  Occasionally we sat down at a cafe table and drank until our heads swam; or in the middle of the night took horses and rode ten or twelve leagues into the country; returning to the bath, then to table, then to gambling, then to bed; and on reaching mine, I fell on my knees and wept.  That was my evening prayer.

Strange to say, I took pride in passing for what I was not, I boasted of being worse than I really was, and experienced a sort of melancholy pleasure in doing so.  When I had actually done what I claimed, I felt nothing but ennui, but when I invented an account of some folly, some story of debauchery, or a recital of an orgy with which I had nothing to do, it seemed to me that my heart was better satisfied, although I know not why.

Whenever I joined a party of pleasure-seekers and visited some spot made sacred by tender associations I became stupid, went off by myself, looked gloomily at the trees and bushes as if I would like to trample them under my feet.  Upon my return I would remain silent for hours.

The baleful idea that truth is nudity beset me on every occasion.

“The world,” I said to myself, “is accustomed to call its disguise virtue, its chaplet religion, its flowing mantle convenience.  Honor and Morality are man’s chambermaids; he drinks in his wine the tears of the poor in spirit who believe in him; while the sun is high in the heavens he walks about with downcast eye; he goes to church, to the ball, to the assembly, and when evening has come he removes his mantle and there appears a naked bacchante with the hoofs of a goat.”

But such thoughts aroused a feeling of horror, for I felt that if the body was under the clothing, the skeleton was under the body.  “Is it possible that that is all?” I asked in spite of myself.  Then I returned to the city, I saw a little girl take her mother’s arm, and I became like a child.

Although I had followed my friends into all manner of dissipation, I had no desire to resume my place in the world of society.  The sight of women caused me intolerable pain; I could not touch a woman’s hand without trembling.  I had decided never to love again.