We read together what concerned me, to which we added a hundred foolish comments, after which I began to turn the leaves in a mechanical way. A phrase written in capital letters caught my eye on one of the pages I was turning; I distinctly saw some words that were insignificant enough, and I was about to read the rest when Brigitte stopped me and said: “Do not read that.” I threw the book on the table. “Why, certainly not,” I said, “I did not think what I was doing.” “Do you still take things seriously?” she asked, smiling, doubtless seeing my malady coming on again; “take the book, I want you to read it.” The book lay on the table within easy reach and I did not take my eyes from it. I seemed to hear a voice whispering in my ear, and I thought I saw, grimacing before me, with his glacial smile and dry face, Desgenais. “What are you doing here, Desgenais?” I asked as if I really saw him. He looked as he did that evening, when he leaned over my table and unfolded to me his catechism of vice. I kept my eyes on the book and I felt vaguely stirring in my memory some forgotten words of the past. The spirit of doubt hanging over my head had injected into my veins a drop of poison; the vapor mounted to my head and I staggered like a drunken man. What secret was Brigitte concealing from me? I knew very well that I had only to bend over and open the book; but at what place? How could I recognize the leaf on which my eye had chanced to fall? My pride, moreover, would not permit me to take the book; was it indeed pride? “O God!” I said to myself with a frightful sense of sadness, “is the past a spectre? and can it come out of its tomb? Ah! wretch that I am, can I never love?” All my ideas of contempt for women, all the phrases of mocking fatuity which I had repeated as a schoolboy his lesson, suddenly came to my mind; and strange to say, while formerly I did not believe in making a parade of them, now it seemed that they were real, or at least that they had been.