To give you an idea of my state of mind I can not do better than compare it to one of those rooms such as we see in these days where are collected and confounded all the furniture of all times and all countries. Our age has no form of its own. We have impressed the seal of our time on neither our houses nor our gardens nor anything that is ours. On the street may be seen men who have their beards cut as in the time of Henry III, others who are clean shaven, others who have their hair arranged as in the time of Raphael, others as in the time of Christ. So the homes of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: the antique, the Gothic, the taste of the Renaissance, that of Louis XIII, all pell-mell. In short, we have every century except our own--a thing which has never been seen at any other epoch: eclecticism is our taste; we take everything we find, this for beauty, that for utility, this other for antiquity, such another for its ugliness even, so that we live surrounded by debris as though the end of the world were at hand. Such was the state of my mind; I had read much; moreover I had learned to paint. I knew by heart a great many things, but nothing in order, so that my head was like a sponge, swollen but empty. I fell in love with all the poets one after another; but being of an impressionable nature the last comer always disgusted me with the rest. I had made of myself a great warehouse of ruins, so that having no more thirst after drinking of the novel and the unknown, I became a ruin myself. Nevertheless, about that ruin there was still something of youth: it was the hope of my heart which was still childlike. That hope, which nothing had withered or corrupted and that love had exalted to excess, had now received a mortal wound. The perfidy of my mistress had struck deep, and when I thought of it, I felt in my soul a swooning away, a convulsive flutter as of a wounded bird in agony. Society which works so much evil is like that serpent of the Indies whose dwelling is the leaf of a plant which cures its sting; it presents, in nearly every case, the remedy by the side of the suffering it has caused. For example, the man whose life is one of routine, who has his business cares to claim his attention upon rising, visits at such an hour, loves at another, can lose his mistress and suffer no evil effects. His occupations and his thoughts are like impassive soldiers ranged in line of battle; a single shot strikes one down, his neighbors fill up the gap and the line is intact.