No one has been so tried by fate as the doctor of whom I spoke in the first chapter under the sobriquet of leader of the youthful revolters. After countless changes of opinion he has become sober and almost morbidly scrupulous. He regards himself as bankrupt in everything, and distrusts everyone. Deprived of the faculties which render us capable of enjoyment and of suffering, he is indifferent to everything. He began his career as an enthusiast for the freedom of the individual, for the democracy, and for the liberation of women, and has seen his hopes completely disappointed. He who was an ardent champion of free love has seen the woman of his choice, for whom he himself had great respect, sink in the deepest infamy. He is now thirty years old. During some years' residence abroad he has lived a painful life as a lonely wanderer; he has worn threadbare clothing and endured poverty, hunger, and cold, and all the humiliations of a man laden with debt. He has slept at night in woods and open parks for want of a dwelling; and has nourished himself with the gelatine and starch which were used in the laboratory where he was an assistant. As a result of his privations he had less power to resist alcohol, and although lie was not a drunkard, the effect of the small quantity of drink which he could procure was too much for him. Abandoned to the mercy of fortune by his relatives, he was helped by a Swedenborgian, whom he hardly knew, to enter an institution for the cure of nervous diseases. After some months he was healed, and returned to the university in Sweden. He was told, however, that he would have to practise total abstinence. It was he who lent me Swedenborg's _Arcana Coelestia_, and later on his _Apocalypsis Revelata_. He had not read them himself, but had found them in the library of his mother, who was a Swedenborgian. One thing surprises me, that although up to my forty-ninth year I have never come across the works of Swedenborg, whom the cultivated classes in Sweden openly despise, yet now he turns up everywhere--in Paris, on the Danube, in Sweden, and that in the course of a single half year. Meanwhile my friend, with his destroyed illusions, remains indifferent in spite of the blows which fate has repeatedly dealt him. He cannot stoop, and thinks it unworthy of a man to kneel to unknown powers who might some day reveal themselves as tempters, whose temptations or tests one should have resisted to the uttermost. I do not conceal from him my new religious views without, however, wishing to influence him. "You see," I say to him, "religion is a thing which one must appropriate for oneself; it is no use preaching it."