myself in conflict with so many personages
called up from nothingness, and joining so many battles, I feel an
intellectual lassitude, which makes me see everything in life hang, as
it were, in mournful crape. I seem to have a catarrh, to look at
everything through green spectacles, I feel as if my hands trembled,
as if I must needs employ the second half of my existence and of my
book in apologizing for the follies of the first half.

I see myself surrounded by tall children of whom I am not the father,
and seated beside a wife I never married. I think I can feel wrinkles
furrowing my brow. The fire before which I am placed crackles, as if
in derision, the room is ancient in its furniture; I shudder with
sudden fright as I lay my hand upon my heart, and ask myself: "Is
that, too, withered?"

I am like an old attorney, unswayed by any sentiment whatever. I never
accept any statement unless it be confirmed, according to the poetic
maxim of Lord Byron, by the testimony of at least two false witnesses.
No face can delude me. I am melancholy and overcast with gloom. I know
the world and it has no more illusions for me. My closest friends have
proved traitors. My wife and myself exchange glances of profound
meaning and the slightest word either of us utters is a dagger which
pierces the heart of the other through and through. I stagnate in a
dreary calm. This then is the tranquillity of old age! The old man
possesses in himself the cemetery which shall soon possess him. He is
growing accustomed to the chill of the tomb. Man, according to
philosophers, dies in detail; at the same time he may be said even to
cheat death; for that which his withered hand has laid hold upon, can
it be called life?

Oh, to die young and throbbing with life! 'Tis a destiny enviable
indeed! For is not this, as a delightful poet has said, "to take away
with one all one's illusions, to be buried like an Eastern king, with
all one's jewels and treasures, with all that makes the fortune of
humanity!"

How many thank-offerings ought we to make to the kind and beneficent
spirit that breathes in all things here below! Indeed, the care which
nature takes to strip us piece by piece of our raiment, to unclothe
the soul by enfeebling gradually our hearing, sight, and sense of
touch, in making slower the circulation of our blood, and congealing
our humors so as to make us as insensible to the approach of death as
we were to the beginnings of life, this ma