To-day these remembrances are harsh and implacable towards me. At certain hours, in my idleness, a remembrance of that age will suddenly come to me, sharp and dolorous, with the violence of a blow from a club. I feel a burning sensation running across my breast. It is my youth which is awakening in me, desolate and dying. I take my head in my hands, restraining my sobs; I plunge with a bitter delight into the history of those vanished days and take pleasure in enlarging the wound, the while repeating to myself that all this is no more and will never be again. Then, the recollection vanishes; the lightning has passed over me; I am overwhelmed with grief, recalling nothing. Later still, at the age when the man awakens in the child, our life changed. I prefer the first hours to those hours of passion and budding virility; the recollections of our hunting excursions, of our vagabond existence, are more agreeable to me than the far off vision of young girls, whose visages remain imprinted on my heart. I see them, pale and indistinct, in their coldness, their virgin indifference; they passed by, knowing me not, and, to-day, when I dream of them again, I say to myself that they cannot dream of me. I know not how it is, but this thought makes them strangers to me; there is no exchange of recollections, and I regard them in the light of thoughts alone, in the light of visions which I have cherished and which have vanished. Let me also recall the society which surrounded us: those professors, excellent men, who would have been better had they possessed more youth and more love; those comrades of ours, the wicked and the good, who were without pity and without soul like all children. I must be a strange creature, fit only to love and weep, for I was softened and suffered from the time I first walked. My college years were years of weeping. I had in me the pride of loving natures. I was not loved, for I was not understood and I refused to make myself known. To-day, I no longer have any hatred; I see clearly that I was born to tear myself with my own hands. I have pardoned my former comrades who ruffled me, wounded me in my pride and in my tenderness; they were the first to teach me the rude lessons of the world, and I almost thank them for their harshness. Among them were sorry, foolish and envious lads, who must now be perfect imbeciles and wicked men. I have forgotten even their names.