f I needed to send you to sleep, I would
tell you about one of the most frightful pleasures of my life, one of
those pleasures with fangs that bury themselves in the heart as the
branding-iron enters the convict's shoulder. I was at a ball at the
house of the Duc de Navarreins, my father's cousin. But to make
my position the more perfectly clear, you must know that I wore a
threadbare coat, ill-fitting shoes, a tie fit for a stableman, and a
soiled pair of gloves. I shrank into a corner to eat ices and watch
the pretty faces at my leisure. My father noticed me. Actuated by
some motive that I did not fathom, so dumfounded was I by this act of
confidence, he handed me his keys and purse to keep. Ten paces away some
men were gambling. I heard the rattling of gold; I was twenty years old;
I longed to be steeped for one whole day in the follies of my time of
life. It was a license of the imagination that would find a parallel
neither in the freaks of courtesans, nor in the dreams of young girls.
For a year past I had beheld myself well dressed, in a carriage, with
a pretty woman by my side, playing the great lord, dining at Very's,
deciding not to go back home till the morrow; but was prepared for my
father with a plot more intricate than the Marriage of Figaro, which
he could not possibly have unraveled. All this bliss would cost, I
estimated, fifty crowns. Was it not the artless idea of playing truant
that still had charms for me?

"I went into a small adjoining room, and when alone counted my father's
money with smarting eyes and trembling fingers--a hundred crowns! The
joys of my escapade rose before me at the thought of the amount; joys
that flitted about me like Macbeth's witches round their caldron;
joys how alluring! how thrilling! how delicious! I became a deliberate
rascal. I heeded neither my tingling ears nor the violent beating of my
heart, but took out two twenty-franc pieces that I seem to see yet. The
dates had been erased, and Bonaparte's head simpered upon them. After I
had put back the purse in my pocket, I returned to the gaming-table with
the two pieces of gold in the palms of my damp hands, prowling about
the players like a sparrow-hawk round a coop of chickens. Tormented by
inexpressible terror, I flung a sudden clairvoyant glance round me, and
feeling quite sure that I was seen by none of my acquaintance, betted on
a stout, jovial little man, heaping upon his head more prayers and
vows than are put up