"Then what? Nothing. I have not even grown old of heart; I am abortive. My sentimental adventures, which have been pursued in spite of everything, for women are even yet what is least indifferent to me, have, alas, convinced me that there are no kisses that do not resemble those already given and received. It is all so short, and superficial, and vain. How desperate I should be rendered by the thoughts of myself--of that self which I shall never be able completely to renounce--did I often indulge in them! What else but the damnation of the mystics is _non-love_?" Such were a few of the pages among many others, and the abominable monograph of a secret disease of soul was continued in hundreds of similar confidences. Often simply the date was written, together with two or three facts: Rode, paid visits, went to the club, the theatre in the evening, or a party, or ball, and then came a single word like a refrain--_Spleen._ At the beginning of the last of these note-books, Armand, when he had closed it, could read a list of all the years of his life since 1860, and after each date he had scrawled--_Torture_, and at the end, these words: "I did not ask for life. If I have committed faults, frightful ones, too, I have also known sufferings such as, set over against the others, might say to the inconceivable Power that has created and that sustains me, if such a Power possess a heart: 'Have pity upon me!'" The young man thrust away with his hand the heap of papers wherein he encountered so faithful an image of his present moral aridity. Slowly he began to walk about the room. Everywhere in it he recognised the same tokens of his inward nihilism. The low bookcase contained but those few books which he still liked: novels of withering analysis--"Dangerous Liaisons," "Adolphus," "Affinities"--moralists of keen and self-centred misanthropy, and memoirs. The photographs scattered over the walls reminded him of his travels--those useless travels during which he had failed to beguile his weariness. On the chimney-piece, between the likenesses of two dead friends, he kept an enigmatic portrait, representing two women, with the head of the one resting upon the shoulder of the other. It was the present, life-like remembrance of a terrible story--the story of the bitterest faithlessness he had ever endured. He had been cynical or artificial enough to laugh over it formerly with the two heroines, but he had laughed with death in his heart.