I saw nobody worth looking at--except a few grisettes;--but they have more cotton than silk to rumple, and they don't interest me.--In very truth, I believe that man, and when I say man I include woman, is the vilest animal on the face of the earth. That quadruped who walks on his hind feet seems to me extraordinarily presumptuous to claim the first place in creation as his undoubted right. A lion, a tiger, are finer animals than men, and in their species many individuals attain all the beauty that belongs to it. But such a thing rarely happens among human beings.--How many abortions for one Antinous! how many Goths for one Phyllis! I am very much afraid, my dear friend, that I shall never be able to embrace my ideal, and yet there is nothing extraordinary or unnatural about it.--It is not the ideal of a third-form school-boy. I do not ask for ivory globes or alabaster pillars, or azure veins; I have not used in its composition either lilies, or snow, or roses, or jet, or ebony, or coral, or ambrosia, or pearls or diamonds; I have left the stars of heaven at rest, and I have not unhung the sun unseasonably. It is almost a bourgeois ideal, it is so simple, and it seems to me that with a bag or two of piastres I could find it all ready-made and realized in the first bazaar I might happen upon at Constantinople or Smyrna; it would probably cost me less than a blooded horse or dog; and to think that I shall not get what I want, for I have a feeling that I shall not! It is enough to drive a man mad, and I fly into the hottest sort of a rage against fate. You are not such a mad fool as I, you are fortunate;--you have simply taken your life as it came, without tormenting yourself trying to shape it, and you have dealt with things as they turned up. You haven't sought for happiness, it has come in search of you; you love and are loved.--I don't envy you;--for Heaven's sake, don't think that! but I am not so happy as I ought to be when I think of your felicity, and I say to myself, with a sigh, that I would like to enjoy felicity of the same sort. Perhaps my happiness passed by my side and I did not see it, blind that I was; perhaps a voice spoke, and the uproar of my internal tempests prevented me from hearing it.