With these words I sat down, marvelling 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 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 CHOSEN WAY The first steps in debauchery resemble vertigo, for one feels a sort of terror mingled with sensuous delight, as if peering downward from some giddy--height. While shameful, secret dissipation ruins the noblest of men, in the frank and open defiance of conventionality there is something that compels respect even in the most depraved. He who goes at nightfall, muffled in his cloak, to sully his life in secret, and clandestinely to 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 remember, I hang not by a 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; some laugh, some sing. Among them you see what appear to be women; they are in fact what once were women, with human semblance. They are caressed and insulted; no one knows who they are or what their names. They float and stagger under the flaming torches in an intoxication that thinks of nothing, and over which, it is said, a pitying God watches. But if the first impression be astonishment, the second is horror, and the third pity. There is evident so much force, or rather such an abuse of force, that often the noblest characters and the strongest constitutions are ruined. The life appears hardy and dangerous to these; they would make prodigies of themselves; bound to debauchery as Mazeppa to his horse, they gallop, making Centaurs of themselves and seeing 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.