One day a man boasted of being proof against superstitious fears, in fact, fear of every kind.  His friends put a human skeleton in his bed and then concealed themselves in an adjoining room to wait for his return.  They did not hear any noise, but in the morning they found him dressed and sitting on the bed playing with the bones; he had lost his reason.

I might be that man but for the fact that my favorite bones are those of a well-beloved skeleton; they are the debris of my first love, all that remains of the past.

But it must not be supposed that there were no joyous moments in all this maddened whirl.  Among Desgenais’s companions were several young men of distinction and a number of artists.  We sometimes passed together delightful evenings imagining ourselves libertines.  One of them was infatuated with a beautiful singer, who charmed us with her fresh and expressive voice.  How many times we sat listening to her while supper was waiting!  How many times, when the flagons had been emptied, one of us held a volume of Lamartine and read aloud in a voice choked by emotion!  Every other thought disappeared.  The hours passed by unheeded.  What strange “libertines” we were!  We did not speak a word and there were tears in our eyes.

Desgenais especially, habitually the coldest and dryest of men, was inexplicable on such occasions; he delivered himself of such extraordinary sentiments that he might have been a poet in delirium.  But after these effusions he would be seized with furious joy.  When warmed by wine he would break everything within reach; the genius of destruction stalked forth in him armed to the teeth.  I have seen him pickup a chair and hurl it through a closed window.

I could not help making a study of this singular man.  He appeared to me the exact type of a class which ought to exist somewhere but which was unknown to me.  One could never tell whether his outbursts were the despair of a man sick of life, or the whim of a spoiled child.

During the fete, in particular, he was in such a state of nervous excitement that he acted like a schoolboy.  Once he persuaded me to go out on foot with him, muffled in grotesque costumes, with masks and instruments of music.  We promenaded all night, in the midst of the most frightful din of horrible sounds.  We found a driver asleep on his box and unhitched his horses; then, pretending we had just come from the ball, set up a great cry.  The coachman started up, cracked his whip, and his horses started off on a trot, leaving him seated on the box.  That same evening we had passed through the Champs Elysees; Desgenais, seeing another carriage passing, stopped it after the manner of a highwayman; he intimidated the coachman by threats and forced him to climb down and lie flat on his stomach.  He opened the carriage door and found within a young man and a lady motionless with fright.  He whispered to me to imitate him, and we began to enter one door and go out by the other, so that in the obscurity the poor young people thought they saw a procession of bandits going through their carriage.