Then he perceived life as the work of blind and destructive necessity, of an evil force impelling creatures to ruin one another. Prostitution below, adultery above, such are the products of the noblest of human feelings--love. Civilisation appeared to him as a huge orgie where the dishes are more numerous, the wines more heating, the guests a larger crowd; but on what mystic plate will the bread of ransom be found by those hungering for forgiveness? Meanwhile the orgie hums and roars, the women offer the fruit of their red lips, a colossal hymn of mirth encompasses the intoxication, every moment one of those present rolls beneath the table, thunder-smitten by death who takes his victims at random; he is so quickly replaced by another that his disappearance is not even noticed, and joy plays on every brow and laughs in every eye. Joy? Yes, provided that no thought be given to one's own distress, and further that one's own misery be endured with courage; but the misery of another--when can we find courage to endure that when we are ourselves its cause? And suddenly his visions would fade away, and his theories and dreamings, to give place to the sole image of Helen in agony, or else of Helen depraved, and of these two images Armand could not have told which tortured his thought the most. "Can I be in love with her?" he asked himself one morning as he was rising, "and is what I am taking for remorse simply love?" He found it impossible to answer this question. When a man loves, he conceives happiness as coming from the woman he loves, and how could he imagine a single minute of happiness as coming from Helen now? He might return to Paris, try to renew relations with her, carry her off, take her to a land where everything should be strange to them, and where they might forget! He felt that the worst follies committed for her would remove nothing of his present anguish. Therefore he did not love her. But then, why this cruel throbbing of the heart at the mere thought of the act to which despair had led her? Why this continual anxiety which caused him at the sight of Chazel's letters to pause with trembling hand before opening them, as though he were about to read some fresh intrigue that had been at last discovered by the unhappy man? Why was he unable to take a book, or sit down to table, or go out, or come in, without having the spectre of this woman beside him. Yet he had not killed her, he had not shed her blood with his hands. Why this unwearied recurrence to their mutual relations with the everlasting reflection as a despairing background: "If I had known?" If he had known the worth of what she gave him when she was giving it to him, if he had felt as he was feeling now when she used to come and rest so tenderly, so sincerely, upon his heart, if he had had that in his heart towards her which was in it now, then--then he would have loved her--he would have loved her!