But if the first impression be astonishment, the second is horror, and the third pity.  There is evident so much force, or rather such an abuse of force, that often the noblest characters and the strongest constitutions are ruined.  The life appears hardy and dangerous to these; they would make prodigies of themselves; bound to debauchery as Mazeppa to his horse, they gallop, making Centaurs of themselves and seeing neither the bloody trail that the shreds of their flesh leave, nor the eyes of the wolves that gleam in hungry pursuit, nor the desert, nor the vultures.

Launched into that life by the circumstances that I have recounted, I must now describe what I saw there.

Before I had a close view of one of those famous gatherings called theatrical masked balls, I had heard the debauchery of the Regency spoken of, and a reference to the time when a queen of France appeared disguised as a violet-seller.  I found there flower-merchants disguised as vivandieres.  I expected to find libertinism there, but in fact I found none at all.  One sees only the scum of libertinism, some blows, and drunken women lying in deathlike stupor on broken bottles.

Ere I saw debauchery at table I had heard of the suppers of Heliogabolus and of the philosophy of Greece, which made the pleasures of the senses a kind of natural religion.  I expected to find oblivion or something like joy; I found there the worst thing in the world:  ennui trying to live, and some Englishmen who said:  “I do this or that, and so I amuse myself.  I have spent so many sovereigns, and have procured so much pleasure.”  And thus they wear out their life on that grindstone.

I had known nothing of courtesans when I heard of Aspasia, who sat on the knees of Alcibiades while discussing philosophy with Socrates.  I expected to find something bold and insolent, but gay, free, and vivacious, something with the sparkle of champagne; I found a yawning mouth, a fixed eye, and light fingers.

Before I saw titled courtesans I had read Boccaccio and Bandello; above all, I had read Shakespeare.  I had dreamed of those beautiful triflers; of those cherubim of hell.  A thousand times I had drawn those heads so poetically foolish, so enterprising in audacity, heads of harebrained mistresses who wreck a romance with a glance, and who pass through life by waves and by pulsations, like the sirens of the tides.  I thought of the fairies of the modern tales, who are always drunk with love if not with wine.  I found, instead, writers of letters, exact arrangers of assignations, who practised lying as an art and cloaked their baseness under hypocrisy, whose only thought was to give themselves for profit and to forget.

Ere first I looked on the gaming-table I had heard of floods of gold, of fortunes made in a quarter of an hour, and of a lord of the court of Henry IV, who won on one card a hundred thousand louis.  I found a narrow room where workmen who had but one shirt rented a suit for the evening for twenty sous, police stationed at the door, and starving wretches staking a crust of bread against a pistol-shot.