laim to cure anything, and he offered no alleviation to
the sick. But his theory of pessimism was, in the end, the great
consoler of choice intellects and lofty souls. He revealed society as
it is, asserted woman's inherent stupidity, indicated the safest
course, preserved you from disillusionment by warning you to restrain
hopes as much as possible, to refuse to yield to their allurement, to
deem yourself fortunate, finally, if they did not come toppling about
your ears at some unexpected moment.

Traversing the same path as the _Imitation_, this theory, too, ended
in similar highways of resignation and indifference, but without going
astray in mysterious labyrinths and remote roads.

But if this resignation, which was obviously the only outcome of the
deplorable condition of things and their irremediability, was open to
the spiritually rich, it was all the more difficult of approach to the
poor whose passions and cravings were more easily satisfied by the
benefits of religion.

These reflections relieved Des Esseintes of a heavy burden. The
aphorisms of the great German calmed his excited thoughts, and the
points of contact in these two doctrines helped him to correlate them;
and he could never forget that poignant and poetic Catholicism in
which he had bathed, and whose essence he had long ago absorbed.

These reversions to religion, these intimations of faith tormented him
particularly since the changes that had lately taken place in his
health. Their progress coincided with that of his recent nervous
disorders.

He had been tortured since his youth by inexplicable aversions, by
shudderings which chilled his spine and made him grit his teeth, as,
for example, when he saw a girl wringing wet linen. These reactions
had long persisted. Even now he suffered poignantly when he heard the
tearing of cloth, the rubbing of a finger against a piece of chalk, or
a hand touching a bit of moire.

The excesses of his youthful life, the exaggerated tension of his mind
had strangely aggravated his earliest nervous disorder, and had
thinned the already impoverished blood of his race. In Paris, he had
been compelled to submit to hydrotherapic treatments for his trembling
fingers, frightful pains, neuralgic strokes which cut his face in two,
drummed maddeningly against his temples, pricked his eyelids
agonizingly and induced a nausea which could be dispelled only by
lying flat on his back in the dark.

These afflictions had g