verything that touched it produced in it
twitchings of pain, frightful vibrations, and consequently true
ravages. Happy are the men whom nature has buttressed with
indifference and armed with stoicism.

"I reached my sixteenth year. An excessive timidity had come to me
from this aptitude to suffer on account of everything. Feeling myself
unprotected against all the attacks of chance or fate, I feared every
contact, every approach, every event. I lived on the watch as if under
the constant threat of an unknown and always expected misfortune. I
did not feel enough of boldness either to speak or to act publicly. I
had, indeed, the sensation that life is a battle, a dreadful conflict
in which one receives terrible blows, grievous, mortal wounds. In
place of cherishing, like all men, the hope of good-fortune on the
morrow, I only kept a confused fear of it, and I felt in my own mind a
desire to conceal myself to avoid that combat in which I would be
vanquished and slain.

"As soon as my studies were finished, they gave me six months' time
to choose a career. A very simple event made me see clearly all of a
sudden into myself, showed me the diseased condition of my mind, made
me understand the danger, and caused me to make up my mind to fly from
it.

"Verdiers is a little town surrounded with plains and woods. In the
central streets stands my parents' house. I now passed my days far
from this dwelling which I had so much regretted, so much desired.
Dreams were awakened in me, and I walked all alone in the fields in
order to let them escape and fly away. My father and my mother, quite
occupied with business, and anxious about my future, talked to me only
about their profits or about my possible plans. They were fond of me
in the way that hard-headed, practical people are; they had more
reason than heart in their affection for me. I lived imprisoned in my
thoughts, and trembling with my eternal uneasiness.

"Now, one evening, after a long walk, I saw, as I was making my way
home with great strides so as not to be late, a dog trotting towards
me. He was a species of red spaniel, very lean, with long curly ears.

"When he was ten paces away from me he stopped. I did the same. Then
he began wagging his tail, and came over to me with short steps and
nervous movements of his whole body, going down on his paws as if
appealing to me, and softly shaking his head. He then made a show of
crawling with an air so humble, so sad, so s