with his sweetheart.  And he would set himself in the narrative as well.  If he were reading a love story, it was he who married Miette at the end, or died with her.  If, on the contrary, he were perusing some political pamphlet, some grave dissertation on social economy, works which he preferred to romances, for he had that singular partiality for difficult subjects which characterises persons of imperfect scholarship, he still found some means of associating her with the tedious themes which frequently he could not even understand.  For instance, he tried to persuade himself that he was learning how to be good and kind to her when they were married.  He thus associated her with all his visionary dreamings.  Protected by the purity of his affection against the obscenity of certain eighteenth-century tales which fell into his hands, he found particular pleasure in shutting himself up with her in those humanitarian Utopias which some great minds of our own time, infatuated by visions of universal happiness have imagined.  Miette, in his mind, became quite essential to the abolition of pauperism and the definitive triumph of the principles of the Revolution.  There were nights of feverish reading, when his mind could not tear itself from his book, which he would lay down and take up at least a score of times, nights of voluptuous weariness which he enjoyed till daybreak like some secret orgie, cramped up in that tiny room, his eyes troubled by the flickering yellow light, while he yielded to the fever of insomnia and schemed out new social schemes of the most absurdly ingenuous nature, in which woman, always personified by Miette, was worshipped by the nations on their knees.

He was predisposed to Utopian ideas by certain hereditary influences; his grandmother’s nervous disorders became in him so much chronic enthusiasm, striving after everything that was grandiose and impossible.  His lonely childhood, his imperfect education, had developed his natural tendencies in a singular manner.  However, he had not yet reached the age when the fixed idea plants itself in a man’s mind.  In the morning, after he had dipped his head in a bucket of water, he remembered his thoughts and visions of the night but vaguely; nothing remained of his dreams save a childlike innocence, full of trustful confidence and yearning tenderness.  He felt like a child again.  He ran to the well, solely desirous of meeting his sweetheart’s smile, and tasting the delights of the radiant morning.  And during the day, when thoughts of the future sometimes made him silent and dreamy, he would often, prompted by some sudden impulse, spring up and kiss aunt Dide on both cheeks, whereat the old woman would gaze at him anxiously, perturbed at seeing his eyes so bright, and gleaming with a joy which she thought she could divine.