With these words I sat down, marveling how indignation can solace grief and restore happiness. Whoever is astonished to learn that from that day I completely changed my course of life does not know the heart of man, and he does not understand that a young man of twenty may hesitate before taking a step, but does not retreat when he has once taken it. CHAPTER II THE apprenticeship to debauchery resembles vertigo, for one feels at first a sort of terror mingled with sensuous delight as though peering down from some dizzy height. While shameful secret dissipation ruins the noblest of men, in frank and open irregularities there is some palliation even for the most depraved. He who goes at nightfall, muffled in his cloak, to sully his life incognito, and to clandestinely shake off the hypocrisy of the day, resembles an Italian who strikes his enemy from behind, not daring to provoke him to open quarrel. There are assassinations in the dark corners of the city under shelter of the night. He who goes his way without concealment says: "Every one does it and conceals it; I do it and do not conceal it." Thus speaks pride, and once that cuirass has been buckled on, it glitters with the refulgent light of day. It is said that Damocles saw a sword suspended over his head. Thus libertines seem to have something over their heads which says "Go on, but I hold the thread." Those masked carriages that are seen during carnival are the faithful images of their life. A dilapidated open wagon, flaming torches lighting up painted faces; such laugh and sing. Among them you see what appears to be women; they are in fact the remains of women, with human semblance. They are caressed and insulted; no one knows who they are or what their names. All that floats and staggers under the flaming torch in an intoxication that thinks of nothing, and over which, it is said, a god watches. But if the first impression is astonishment, the second is horror, and the third pity. There is displayed there so much force, or rather such an abuse of force, that it often happens that the noblest characters and the strongest constitutions are ruined. It appears hardy and dangerous to these; they would make prodigies of themselves; they bind themselves to debauchery as did Mazeppa to his horse; they gallop, they make Centaurs of themselves, and they see neither the bloody trail that the shreds of their flesh leave, nor the eyes of the wolves that gleam in hungry pursuit, nor the desert, nor the vultures. Launched into that life by the circumstances that I have recounted, I must now describe what I saw there.