Added to all this, he had an appointment for the following day with a charming woman whom he desired, and the fire of sense had not been slackened within him by the excesses of his life. Why, then, was it inevitable that the perception of an indefinable insufficiency in his life should make him so melancholy just at this moment? He put on a lounging jacket, dismissed his servant, and settled himself beside the fire in his drawing-room. He again evoked Helen with an exactitude of recollection which made her present to him from her mauve stockings to that little mark which she had there at the right corner of her mouth. Well! he did not love her, and he would never love her. If he had hoped to experience at last, through her, that supreme surprise of the heart which continually eluded him, he might tell himself that this hope was abortive like the rest. Like the rest! He felt a desire to convince himself that it had always been so with him. He went and opened a box, in which were piled six or seven note-books of different sizes. Some were made of sheets of school paper. There were two of Japanese paper. These note-books were journals of his life taken up repeatedly at unequal periods. In them he came upon pages scrawled on the desk of the study-room at school, pages blackened on the sides of boats, in hotel rooms, in this very drawing-room. He took up these note-books, and began to turn over the leaves, finding in them a former ego perfectly similar to the present ego in premature misanthropy, sudden and fleeting ardours of sensuality, murderous analysis, impotent hankering after unattainable delight, indolent languor and incapacity ever fully to feel anything, whether real or ideal. The whole had combined to make of him a sort of child of the century, of the year 1883, but without elegy, a Nihilist of gallantry and without declamation. The following is one of the pieces which his eyes, now gloomy and dull, dwelt upon, and which would have broken Helen's heart if, gifted with the magic faculty of second sight, she had discovered the melancholy torpor which even the gift of her person, following upon the gift of her entire soul, was inadequate to disturb. "PARIS, _May_ 1871.