have set in you!"

And then, seeing that Leo XIII still remained silent and still left him
standing there, he sank down upon his knees, as if felled by the growing
emotion which rendered his heart so heavy. And within him there was a
sort of _debacle_; all his doubts, all his anguish and sadness burst
forth in an irresistible stream. There was the memory of the frightful
day that he had just spent, the tragic death of Dario and Benedetta,
which weighed on him like lead; there were all the sufferings that he had
experienced since his arrival in Rome, the destruction of his illusions,
the wounds dealt to his delicacy, the buffets with which men and things
had responded to his young enthusiasm; and, lying yet more deeply within
his heart, there was the sum total of human wretchedness, the thought of
famished ones howling for food, of mothers whose breasts were drained and
who sobbed whilst kissing their hungry babes, of fathers without work,
who clenched their fists and revolted--indeed, the whole of that hateful
misery which is as old as mankind itself, which has preyed upon mankind
since its earliest hour, and which he now had everywhere found increasing
in horror and havoc, without a gleam of hope that it would ever be
healed. And withal, yet more immense and more incurable, he felt within
him a nameless sorrow to which he could assign no precise cause or
name--an universal, an illimitable sorrow with which he melted
despairingly, and which was perhaps the very sorrow of life.

"O Holy Father!" he exclaimed, "I myself have no existence and my book
has no existence. I desired, passionately desired to see your Holiness
that I might explain and defend myself. But I no longer know, I can no
longer recall a single one of the things that I wished to say, I can only
weep, weep the tears which are stifling me. Yes, I am but a poor man, and
the only need I feel is to speak to you of the poor. Oh! the poor ones,
oh! the lowly ones, whom for two years past I have seen in our faubourgs
of Paris, so wretched and so full of pain; the poor little children that
I have picked out of the snow, the poor little angels who had eaten
nothing for two days; the women too, consumed by consumption, without
bread or fire, shivering in filthy hovels; and the men thrown on the
street by slackness of trade, weary of begging for work as one begs for
alms, sinking back into night, drunken with rage and harbouring the sole
avenging thought of setting