At first he had attributed this strange phenomenon alternately to physical timidity, to remorse at his own unworthiness of the feelings that he might inspire, and to hankerings after purity. Now he knew the true explanation of these momentary sorrows, these keener crises of the great sorrow which formed the gloomy background of his life. It was, alas! the more present and palpable certainty of his impotence to love. At this very moment he was asking himself: "Am I really in love with Helen?" He gathered and heaped together the whole of his inmost sensibility, like a physician seeking with his fingers for the painful spot of a diseased limb. But the spot of love, which it would have given him such sweet pain to meet with, Armand could not discover. "No," he answered himself with terrible sadness, yet courageously--for, with all his failings, he had energy enough to venture upon self-knowledge--"no, I am not in love with Helen. I desire her because she is beautiful; I have paid my addresses to her because I feel bored; I have grown obstinate about it because she denied me. Pride, sensuality, and romantic twaddle--that's the top and bottom of the whole affair. Then what is the good of it? What is the good? Why renew such an intrigue as that with Madame de Rugle?" And all the amours into which his depraved liking for seduction--the fatal vice of his youth--had impelled him, came back into his memory, with the monotony of their pleasures, the bitterness of their ruptures, the sickening void of their duration. What was the good of this one or of that? What was the good a year or two ago of amusing himself by winning the love of Juliet, governess to the children of a house at which he was received? What was the good of that comedy played to little Maud, the pretty Englishwoman whom he had met at a watering-place? "I dreamed of being a man of gallantry--a Don Juan. It looks as though fate punishes us for the evil dreams of our youth by bringing them to pass. I have had intrigues that might flatter my foolish vanity--and what wretchedness!" Among all the women whose faces and kisses he distinguished in his thought, there was not one who had made him happy, even for a single day, and--strange anomaly of a distempered heart--there was not one who had not in some sort made him suffer. Through what moral disorder did it come to pass that he was devoted to this continual inward calamity--to the endurance of all the tortures of love: the jealousy of the present, the intolerable loathing for the past, the bitter vision of the treacheries of the future, and never, never, aught but physical intoxication, without that ecstacy of soul which, notwithstanding, existed, for he had seen with envy the heavenly expression due to it on the countenances of a few of his mistresses?