But when he found himself in the world again--in his class at school, among his comrades--he was intimidated, weighed down by his secret, suspicious that they might guess it. His strange ways, his fated look, the thin voice that was beginning to break, his pretty girlishness, blushing, yet insolent as a young cock, excited the attention and the ill-will of his companions and even exposed him to the shameful advances of one of those little scamps who persecuted him with his half-comic, half-serious, proposals. He was completely upset by this; that night he was sick with revolt and disgust. He did not want to go back to school again, and he could not tell his mother the reasons; he had to win respect for himself unaided. He said to himself, "I shall kill him." His riotous mind was excited by a deep ground-swell. He had reached the time when the reproductive forces awaken. They fascinated him and terrified him. The strange innocence of his mother existed there beside him without seeing or suspecting anything. He would have died of shame if she had seen or suspected. And alone, despising himself, he surrendered frantically to the terrible solicitations of the degrading instinct. . . . But what could the child do, a poor child delivered over to these mad forces? This monstrous nature puts into a thirteen-year-old body the brutal fire which for want of nourishment devours it. There are natures which find salvation in throwing themselves wholly, through a contrary excess, into an ascetic exaltation of the spirit which often entails physical ruin. The young people of our time, more fortunate than their elders, have begun to practise the virile discipline of athletics. Marc would have asked nothing better than this, but there again nature was against him. He was not strong enough. Ah, how he envied the strong! How jealously he loved their beauty! . . . So much that he hated it. . . . He would never be like them. Desires, all the desires, pure, impure, a chaos! . . . All the hostile demons! He would have been the plaything of chance--nothing could have helped him--had it not been for a basis of moral health and decency--rather, the grandeur that is unaware of its own capabilities, that divine something, the result of the sufferings, the valor, and the long patience of the best of the race, which will not endure the shame of defilement, the disgrace of falling, which has an anxious instinct for what is vile and cowardly, which follows its trail inward, into all the sinuosities of one's thought, which does not always escape stains, but never fails to condemn them, to condemn oneself, to brand oneself and punish oneself.