which were flatteringly
received. Great men who followed the profession of letters, having
nothing to fear from me, belauded me, not so much on account of my
merits as to cast a slur on those of their rivals.

"I became a 'free-liver,' to make use of the picturesque expression
appropriated by the language of excess. I made it a point of honor not
to be long about dying, and that my zeal and prowess should eclipse
those displayed by all others in the jolliest company. I was always
spruce and carefully dressed. I had some reputation for cleverness.
There was no sign about me of the fearful way of living which makes a
man into a mere disgusting apparatus, a funnel, a pampered beast.

"Very soon Debauch rose before me in all the majesty of its horror, and
I grasped all that it meant. Those prudent, steady-going characters who
are laying down wine in bottles for their heirs, can barely conceive,
it is true, of so wide a theory of life, nor appreciate its normal
condition; but when will you instill poetry into the provincial
intellect? Opium and tea, with all their delights, are merely drugs to
folk of that calibre.

"Is not the imperfect sybarite to be met with even in Paris itself, that
intellectual metropolis? Unfit to endure the fatigues of pleasure, this
sort of person, after a drinking bout, is very much like those worthy
bourgeois who fall foul of music after hearing a new opera by Rossini.
Does he not renounce these courses in the same frame of mind that leads
an abstemious man to forswear Ruffec pates, because the first one,
forsooth, gave him the indigestion?

"Debauch is as surely an art as poetry, and is not for craven spirits.
To penetrate its mysteries and appreciate its charms, conscientious
application is required; and as with every path of knowledge, the way is
thorny and forbidding at the outset. The great pleasures of humanity are
hedged about with formidable obstacles; not its single enjoyments, but
enjoyment as a system, a system which establishes seldom experienced
sensations and makes them habitual, which concentrates and multiplies
them for us, creating a dramatic life within our life, and imperatively
demanding a prompt and enormous expenditure of vitality. War, Power,
Art, like Debauch, are all forms of demoralization, equally remote from
the faculties of humanity, equally profound, and all are alike difficult
of access. But when man has once stormed the heights of these grand
mysteries, does he