ged? I
do not know what passion possessed me. What I do know is that an
inordinate desire for vengeance entered into my soul. How could I revenge
myself on a woman? I would have paid any price for a weapon that could be
used against her. But I had none, not even the one she had employed; I
could not pay her in her own coin.

Suddenly I noticed a shadow moving behind the curtain before the closet.
I had forgotten my prisoner.

"Listen to me!" I cried, rising, "I have loved, I have loved like a fool.
I deserve all the ridicule you have subjected me to. But, by Heaven! I
will show you something that will prove to you that I am not such a fool
as you think."

With these words I pulled aside the curtain and exposed the interior of
the closet. The girl was trying to conceal herself in a corner.

"Go in, if you choose," I said to Desgenais; "you who call me a fool for
loving a woman, see how your teaching has affected me. Do you think I
passed last night under the windows of--? But that is not all," I added,
"that is not all I have to say. You give a supper to-night and to-morrow
go to the country; I am with you, and shall not leave you from now on. We
will not separate, but will pass the entire day together. Are you with
me? Agreed! I have tried to make of my heart the mausoleum of my love,
but I will bury my love in another tomb."

With these words I sat down, marvelling how indignation can solace grief
and restore happiness. Whoever is astonished to learn that, from that
day, I completely changed my course of life does not know the heart of
man, and does not understand that a young man of twenty may hesitate
before taking a step, but does not retreat when he has once taken it.

CHAPTER II

THE CHOSEN WAY

The first steps in debauchery resemble vertigo, for one feels a sort of
terror mingled with sensuous delight, as if peering downward from some
giddy--height. While shameful, secret dissipation ruins the noblest of
men, in the frank and open defiance of conventionality there is something
that compels respect even in the most depraved. He who goes at nightfall,
muffled in his cloak, to sully his life in secret, and clandestinely to
shake off the hypocrisy of the day, resembles an Italian who strikes his
enemy from behind, not daring to provoke him to open quarrel. There are
assassinations in the dark corners of the city under shelter of the
night. He who goes his way without concealment says: "Every one does i