and read aloud in a voice choked by emotion!
Every other thought disappeared. The hours passed by unheeded. What
strange "libertines" we were! We did not speak a word and there were
tears in our eyes.

Desgenais especially, habitually the coldest and dryest of men, was
inexplicable on such occasions; he delivered himself of such
extraordinary sentiments that he might have been a poet in delirium. But
after these effusions he would be seized with furious joy. When warmed by
wine he would break everything within reach; the genius of destruction
stalked forth in him armed to the teeth. I have seen him pickup a chair
and hurl it through a closed window.

I could not help making a study of this singular man. He appeared to me
the exact type of a class which ought to exist somewhere but which was
unknown to me. One could never tell whether his outbursts were the
despair of a man sick of life, or the whim of a spoiled child.

During the fete, in particular, he was in such a state of nervous
excitement that he acted like a schoolboy. Once he persuaded me to go out
on foot with him, muffled in grotesque costumes, with masks and
instruments of music. We promenaded all night, in the midst of the most
frightful din of horrible sounds. We found a driver asleep on his box and
unhitched his horses; then, pretending we had just come from the ball,
set up a great cry. The coachman started up, cracked his whip, and his
horses started off on a trot, leaving him seated on the box. That same
evening we had passed through the Champs Elysees; Desgenais, seeing
another carriage passing, stopped it after the manner of a highwayman; he
intimidated the coachman by threats and forced him to climb down and lie
flat on his stomach. He opened the carriage door and found within a young
man and a lady motionless with fright. He whispered to me to imitate him,
and we began to enter one door and go out by the other, so that in the
obscurity the poor young people thought they saw a procession of bandits
going through their carriage.

As I understand it, the men who say that the world gives experience ought
to be astonished if they are believed. The world is merely a number of
whirlpools, each one independent of the others; they circle in groups
like flocks of birds. There is no resemblance between the different
quarters of the same city, and the denizen of the Chaussee d'Antin has as
much to learn at Marais as at Lisbon. It is true that these various