Roues, more than all others, are exposed to that fury, and the reason is very simple:  ordinary life is the limpid surface, that of the roue is the rapid current swirling over and over, and at times touching the bottom.  Coming from a ball, for instance, where they have danced with a modest girl, they seek the company of bad characters, and spend the night in riotous feasting.  The last words they addressed to a beautiful and virtuous woman are still on their lips; they repeat them and burst into laughter.  Shall I say it?  Do they not raise, for some pieces of silver, the vesture of chastity, that robe so full of mystery, which respects the being it embellishes and engirds her without touching?  What idea can they have of the world?  They are like comedians in the greenroom.  Who, more than they, is skilled in that delving to the bottom of things, in that groping at once profound and impious?  See how they speak of everything; always in terms the most barren, crude, and abject; such words appear true to them; the rest is only parade, convention, prejudice.  Let them tell a story, let them recount some experience, they will always use the same dirty and material expressions.  They do not say “That woman loved me;” they say:  “I betrayed that woman;” they do not say:  “I love;” they say, “I desire;” they never say:  “If God wills;” they say:  “If I will.”  I do not know what they think of themselves and of such monologues as these.

Hence, of a necessity, either from idleness or curiosity, while they strive to find evil in everything, they do not comprehend that others still believe in the good.  Therefore they have to be so nonchalant as to stop their ears, lest the hum of the busy world should suddenly startle them from sleep.  The father allows his son to go where so many others go, where Cato himself went; he says that youth is but fleeting.  But when he returns, the youth looks upon his sister; and see what has taken place in him during an hour passed in the society of brutal reality!  He says to himself:  “My sister is not like that creature I have just left!” And from that day he is disturbed and uneasy.

Sinful curiosity is a vile malady born of impure contact.  It is the prowling instinct of phantoms who raise the lids of tombs; it is an inexplicable torture with which God punishes those who have sinned; they wish to believe that all sin as they have done, and would be disappointed perhaps to find that it was not so.  But they inquire, they search, they dispute; they wag their heads from side to side as does an architect who adjusts a column, and thus strive to find what they desire to find.  Given proof of evil, they laugh at it; doubtful of evil, they swear that it exists; the good they refuse to recognize.  “Who knows?” Behold the grand formula, the first words that Satan spoke when he saw heaven closing against him.  Alas! for how many evils are those words responsible?  How many disasters and deaths, how many strokes of fateful scythes in the ripening harvest of humanity!  How many hearts, how many families where there is naught but ruin, since that word was first heard!  “Who knows!  Who knows!” Loathsome words!  Rather than pronounce them one should be as sheep who graze about the slaughter-house and know it not.  That is better than to be called a strong spirit, and to read La Rochefoucauld.