e. Go, go, leave me in peace."

CHAPTER V

A PHILOSOPHER'S ADVICE

Desgenais saw that my despair was incurable, that I would neither listen
to any advice nor leave my room, he took the thing seriously. I saw him
enter one evening with an expression of gravity on his face; he spoke of
my mistress and continued in his tone of persiflage, saying all manner of
evil of women. While he was speaking I was leaning on my elbow, and,
rising in my bed, I listened attentively.

It was one of those sombre evenings when the sighing of the wind recalls
the moaning of a dying man. A fitful storm was brewing, and between the
plashes of rain on the windows there was the silence of death. All nature
suffers in such moments, the trees writhe in pain and hide their heads;
the birds of the fields cower under the bushes; the streets of cities are
deserted. I was suffering from my wound. But a short time before I had a
mistress and a friend. The mistress had deceived me and the friend had
stretched me on a bed of pain. I could not clearly distinguish what was
passing in my head; it seemed to me that I was under the influence of a
horrible dream and that I had but to awake to find myself cured; at times
it seemed that my entire life had been a dream, ridiculous and puerile,
the falseness of which had just been disclosed. Desgenais was seated near
the lamp at my side; he was firm and serious, although a smile hovered
about his lips. He was a man of heart, but as dry as a pumice-stone. An
early experience had made him bald before his time; he knew life and had
suffered; but his grief was a cuirass; he was a materialist and he waited
for death.

"Octave," he said, "after what has happened to you, I see that you
believe in love such as the poets and romancers have represented; in a
word, you believe in what is said here below and not in what is done.
That is because you do not reason soundly, and it may lead you into great
misfortune.

"Poets represent love as sculptors design beauty, as musicians create
melody; that is to say, endowed with an exquisite nervous organization,
they gather up with discerning ardor the purest elements of life, the
most beautiful lines of matter, and the most harmonious voices of nature.
There lived, it is said, at Athens a great number of beautiful girls;
Praxiteles drew them all one after another; then from these diverse types
of beauty, each one of which had its defects, he formed a single
faultless beau