is still but a word. Can you kill a body
with a word?

"And if you love that body? Some one pours a glass of wine and says to
you: 'Do not love that, for you can get four for six francs.' And it may
intoxicate you!

"But Desgenais loves his mistress, since he keeps her; he must,
therefore, have a peculiar fashion of loving? No, he has not; his
fashion of loving is not love, and he cares no more for the woman who
merits affection than for her who is unworthy. He loves no one, simply
and truly.

"What has led him to this? Was he born thus? To love is as natural as
to eat and to drink. He is not a man. Is he a dwarf or a giant? Is
he always so impassive? Upon what does he feed, what beverage does
he drink? Behold him at thirty like old Mithridates; poisons are his
familiar friends.

"There is the great secret, my child, the key you must grasp. By
whatever process of reasoning debauchery may be defended, it will
be proven that it is natural at a given day, hour, or night, but not
to-morrow nor every day. There is not a nation on earth which has not
considered woman either the companion and consolation of man or the
sacred instrument of life, and has not under either of these two forms
honored her. And yet here is an armed warrior who leaps into the abyss
that God has dug with His own hands between man and brute; as well might
he deny that fact. What mute Titan is this who dares repress under the
kisses of the body the love of the soul, and place on human lips the
stigma of the brute, the seal of eternal silence?

"There is a word that should be studied. In it you hear the faint moan
of those dismal labyrinths we know as secret societies, mysteries that
the angels of destruction whisper in the ear of night as it descends
upon the earth. That man is better or worse than God has made him. He
is like a sterile woman, in whom nature has not completed her work, or
there is distilled in the shadow of his life some venomous poison.

"Ah! yes, neither occupation nor study has been able to cure you, my
friend. To forget and to learn, that is your device. You turn the leaves
of dead books; you are too young for antiquities. Look about you, the
pale throng of men surrounds you. The eyes of life's sphynx glitter in
the midst of divine hieroglyphics; decipher the book of life! Courage,
scholar, launch out on the Styx, the deathless flood, and let the waves
of sorrow waft you to oblivion or to God."

CHAPTER IV. MARCO

"A