"It is strange," Olivier began musingly, "how complete a presentiment of life we have while still very young! I remember, as clearly as though it were this very moment, a walk we took together in Auvergne.--I am sure you do not recall it. We had returned to Chaméane from La Varenne, during the vacation after our third year. I had spent a fortnight with your mother, and upon the morrow I was to return to that abominable rascal, my guardian. It was in September. The sky was as soft as it is to-day, and the atmosphere was as transparent. We sat down at the foot of a larch for a few minutes' rest. I could see you before me. I saw the sturdy tree, the lovely forest, the glorious sky. All at once I felt a nameless languor, a sickly yearning for death. The idea suddenly came over me that life held nothing better for me, that I need expect nothing.--What caused such an idea? Whence did it come, for I was only sixteen then?--Even now I cannot explain it. But I shall never forget the intense suffering that wrung my soul that mild afternoon under the branches of the huge tree, with you by my side. It was as though I felt in advance all the misery, all the vanity, all the disasters of my life." "You have no right to speak in that way," said Hautefeuille. "What miseries have you? What failures? What disasters?--You are thirty-two. You are young. You are strong. Everything has smiled upon you. You have been lucky in fortune, in your career,--in your marriage. You have an income of eighty thousand a year. You are going to be First Secretary. You have a charming wife--and a friend from Monomotapa," he added laughingly. Olivier's deep sigh pained him keenly. He felt all the melancholy that had prompted his outbreak, which to others would have seemed singularly exaggerated! And, as he had often done before, he combated it with a little commonplace raillery. It was rare that Du Prat, with his delicate, critical turn of mind, sensitive to the least lack of good taste, did not also change his mood when his friend spoke in such a way. But this time the weight upon his heart was too heavy. He continued in a duller, more hopeless tone:-- "Everything has smiled upon me?" and he shrugged his shoulders. "And yet it seems so when one makes up the account with words.--But in reality, at thirty-two youth is over, the real, the only youth is finished.--Health and good fortune still preserve you from a few worries, but for how long?--They are not additional happinesses.--As to my career.--Don't let us speak on that idiotic subject.--And my marriage?" He paused for a second as though he recoiled from the confidence he had been about to make. Then with a bitterness in his voice that made Pierre shudder, for it revealed an interior abscess that was full to bursting with an evil, malignant substance:-- "My marriage? Well, it is a failure like all the rest, a frightful, sinister failure.--But," he added, shaking his head, "what does it matter, either that or anything else?"