his deception, and drove away the devilish
creature."

Marcel shrugged his shoulders and closed the book. How many times already
he had tried all those means without success.

He leant his burning forehead on his hands and, in self-contemplation,
tried to see to the bottom of his soul.

Chaste! always chaste! What! Was the flower of his youth wasted away thus,
in incessant, barren struggles? If only peace of heart, and a quiet
conscience remained to him; if quietude sat by his hearth, as his masters
many a time had promised him! But no, alone with himself, he felt himself
to be with an enemy.

For many years, it had been so, and a lying voice had cried to him without
ceasing: "Wait for happiness, for sweet pure joys, wait for it till
to-morrow: to-morrow all this fury will have passed away, these raging
blasts which rise to thy brain will have vanished; thy vanquished senses
will leave thee in peace, and calm and strong, thou shalt rejoice over an
untroubled conscience and over the satisfaction of duty fulfilled."

And he had waited in vain. Now he had reached ripe age, and the future is
visible ever more gloomy; to-morrow has come, as sad, as empty, and as
desolate as yesterday.

He was tired at last of waiting, patiently, humbly, resigned like the beast
of burden which awaits the slaughterhouse. Beasts of burden! Are we not
that, all we who with brow bent under humiliation, injustice, thankless
toil; with the heart embittered by tedious deception and tedious despair,
miseries of heart and miseries of body, wait, wait ever, wait vainly for a
more brilliant sun to shine at last, until at the end of the day there
rises before us the only guest we have never expected, on whom we counted
not,--the solution of the great problem, the radical cure for all our
ills--DEATH.

Death, which with its brutal hand, seizes us at the moment when perhaps at
last we are going to rest ourselves and rejoice.

No, that shall not be. He will not continue to vegetate without happiness
in these dull, common-place surroundings; to walk at random in this road
bristling with thorns; to pursue his disheartening career, enclosed by
miserable vices.

Nothing around him but stupid, vulgar prosiness, foolish moral
annihilation. No poetry, no golden ray, no rainbow! Everything most low,
unsightly, pitiful. Such was his lot as priest.

Complaints of the soul, wandering flashes of the imagination, criminal
aspirations of the heart, sinful des