lunted.

He closed his portfolios and, completely disconcerted, again plunged
into melancholy. To divert the current of his thoughts and cool his
brain, he sought books that would soothe him and turned to the
romances of Dickens, those charming novels which are so satisfying to
invalids and convalescents who might grow fatigued by works of a more
profound and vigorous nature.

But they produced an effect contrary to his expectations. These chaste
lovers, these protesting heroines garbed to the neck, loved among the
stars, confined themselves to lowered eyes and blushes, wept tears of
joy and clasped hands--an exaggeration of purity which threw him into
an opposite excess. By the law of contrast, he leaped from one extreme
to the other, let his imagination dwell on vibrant scenes between
human lovers, and mused on their sensual kisses and passionate
embraces.

His mind wandered off from his book to worlds far removed from the
English prude: to wanton peccadilloes and salacious practices
condemned by the Church. He grew excited. The impotence of his mind
and body which he had supposed final, vanished. Solitude again acted
on his disordered nerves; he was once more obsessed, not by religion
itself, but by the acts and sins it forbids, by the subject of all its
obsecrations and threats. The carnal side, atrophied for months, which
had been stirred by the enervation of his pious readings, then brought
to a crisis by the English cant, came to the surface. His stimulated
senses carried him back to the past and he wallowed in memories of his
old sin.

He rose and pensively opened a little box of vermeil with a lid of
aventurine.

It was filled with violet bonbons. He took one up and pressed it
between his fingers, thinking of the strange properties of this
sugary, frosted sweetmeat. When his virility had been impaired, when
the thought of woman had roused in him no sharp regret or desire, he
had only to put one in his mouth, let it melt, and almost at once it
induced misty, languishing memories, infinitely tender.

These bonbons invented by Siraudin and bearing the ridiculous name of
"Perles des Pyrenees" were each a drop of sarcanthus perfume, a drop
of feminine essence crystallized in a morsel of sugar. They penetrated
the papillae of the tongue, recalling the very savor of voluptuous
kisses.

Usually he smiled as he inhaled this love aroma, this shadow of a
caress which for a moment restored the delights of women h