sink deep into his mind. If it does not, if he does not by
decisive action succeed in limiting his needs, he risks a descent,
insensible and beyond retreat, along the declivity of desire.

He who lives to eat, drink, sleep, dress, take his walk,--in short,
pamper himself all that he can--be it the courtier basking in the sun,
the drunken laborer, the commoner serving his belly, the woman absorbed
in her toilettes, the profligate of low estate or high, or simply the
ordinary pleasure-lover, a "good fellow," but too obedient to material
needs--that man or woman is on the downward way of desire, and the
descent is fatal. Those who follow it obey the same laws as a body on an
inclined plane. Dupes of an illusion forever repeated, they think: "Just
a few steps more, the last, toward the thing down there that we covet;
then we will halt." But the velocity they gain sweeps them on, and the
further they go the less able they are to resist it.

Here is the secret of the unrest, the madness, of many of our
contemporaries. Having condemned their will to the service of their
appetites, they suffer the penalty. They are delivered up to violent
passions which devour their flesh, crush their bones, suck their blood,
and cannot be sated. This is not a lofty moral denunciation. I have
been listening to what life says, and have recorded, as I heard them,
some of the truths that resound in every square.

Has drunkenness, inventive as it is of new drinks, found the means of
quenching thirst? Not at all. It might rather be called the art of
making thirst inextinguishable. Frank libertinage, does it deaden the
sting of the senses? No; it envenoms it, converts natural desire into a
morbid obsession and makes it the dominant passion. Let your needs rule
you, pamper them--you will see them multiply like insects in the sun.
The more you give them, the more they demand. He is senseless who seeks
for happiness in material prosperity alone. As well undertake to fill
the cask of the Danaides. To those who have millions, millions are
wanting; to those who have thousands, thousands. Others lack a
twenty-franc piece or a hundred sous. When they have a chicken in the
pot, they ask for a goose; when they have the goose, they wish it were a
turkey, and so on. We shall never learn how fatal this tendency is.
There are too many humble people who wish to imitate the great, too many
poor working-men who ape the well-to-do middle classes, too many
shop-girl