A tradition encourages you to honour the martyr for his faith. The martyr is only an obstinate man. He is in the wrong, since he is conquered. The death that menaces him should have enlightened his understanding. The wise man has but one belief: himself; the wise man has but one fatherland: life. Do not imagine that I am teaching you the vulgar selfishness of the comedies and the drinking songs. Oneself may cover a world. The brutes are the only solitaries. A man's sensibility is a surface whose extent he alone is capable of measuring. One being often includes many beings. If it does not include at least two, it is not human, perhaps not animal; it is one of the stones in the road under the feet of other men. True selfishness is a harmony. But this harmony must be composed by oneself, and woven with one's own hands. To receive happiness ready-made would be offering one's neck to the rope. Christianity found a very beautiful formula:--to work out one's salvation. Now that is a personal work. If some one should propose a method to you, examine it. If you are being offered salvation already prepared, turn away your head: the food is poisoned. Also, I bring you no commandment. I submit a system to you: the living of one's life. What do those movements of the world matter to you that do not touch your sensibility? Keep your tears for your own pains, and for those that scratch you like brambles as you pass. There is no other ethic than this: the conquest of pain. If it wounds you, be silent, and think of your revenge. Words are snares. Joint responsibility? Have you felt the prick? No? Then you have no share in the responsibility. Do not judge by the intellect the affairs of sensibility, and, when your business is to understand, be insensible to all that is not reason. I But how conquer pain? HE Physical pain is the business of your doctors.... The remedy for moral pain is confidence in oneself. To yield to pain is to accept the worst of humiliations. To suffer because of a woman is to make oneself the slave of a woman. But there are moments when it must be pleasant not to deny one's pain. One makes a pleasure of it. 1 I have known such moments. HE There are unconquerable evils. Then the idea that life has an end will help to support the weight of it. Finally, my friend, there is the supreme act that your resigned morality blames, the act the vision of which gave so much energy to the careless life of the ancients: there is suicide. Suicide is a monster that one would have to train oneself to observe with calm. Compared to certain physical evils, to certain pains, to certain forfeitures, it would soon appear as a friend, very ugly, but cordial. Does it not deserve the gentlest names? Is it not the consoler? Is it not deliverance?