"O Christ! je ne suis pas de ceux que la prière Dans tes temples muets amène à pas tremblants; Je ne suis pas de ceux qui vont à ton Calvaire, En se frappant le cœur, baiser tes pieds sanglants; Et je reste debout sous tes sacrés portiques, Quand ton peuple fidèle, autour des noirs arceaux, Se courbe en murmurant sous le vent des cantiques, Comme au souffle du nord un peuple de roseaux. Je ne crois pas, ô Christ! à ta parole sainte: Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux. D'un siècle sans espoir naît un siècle sans crainte. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Les clous du Golgotha te soutiennent à peine; Sous ton divin tombeau le sol s'est dérobé: Ta gloire est morte, ô Christ! et sur nos croix d'ébène Ton cadavre céleste en poussière est tombée! Eh bien! qu'il soit permis d'en baiser la poussière Au moins crédule enfant de ce siècle sans foi, Et de pleurer, ô Christ! sur cette froide terre Qui vivait de ta mort, et qui mourra sans toi!' Then comes the story.--Jacques Rolla is the most dissipated youth in the dissipated city of Paris. He sneers at everything and every one. "No son of Adam ever had a more supreme contempt for people and for king." His means are small, but his love of luxury and voluptuousness is great. Custom, which constitutes half the life of other men, is utterly obnoxious to him. Therefore he divides the small fortune left him by his father into three parts, three purses of money, each to last a year. He spends them in the company of bad women upon all manner of foolishness, making no secret of his intention to shoot himself at the end of the third year. And De Musset, aged 22, calls Rolla great, intrepid, honourable, and proud. His love of liberty--and by liberty is understood freedom from every kind of activity, from every calling, every duty--ennobles him in the poet's eyes. We have the description of the night of Rolla's suicide in the house of ill-fame, of the preparations for the orgy, of the girl of sixteen who is brought by her own mother; and then the poet begins his affecting lament over the terrible depravity of society--the mother who sells her child, the poverty which drives her to the trade of procuress, the cheap chastity and hypocritical virtue of fortunately situated women. And now comes the most famous passage of the poem, the apostrophe to Voltaire: