But while my vanity was thus occupied, my heart was suffering, so that ever within me were a man who laughed and a man who wept. It was a perpetual struggle between my head and my heart. My own mockeries frequently caused me great pain and my deepest sorrows aroused a desire to burst into laughter. One day a man boasted of being proof against superstitious fears, in fact, fear of every kind. His friends put a human skeleton in his bed and then concealed themselves in an adjoining room to wait for his return. They did not hear any noise, but in the morning they found him dressed and sitting on the bed playing with the bones; he had lost his reason. I might be that man but for the fact that my favorite bones are those of a well-beloved skeleton; they are the debris of my first love, all that remains of the past. But it must not be supposed that there were no joyous moments in all this maddened whirl. Among Desgenais's companions were several young men of distinction and a number of artists. We sometimes passed together delightful evenings imagining ourselves libertines. One of them was infatuated with a beautiful singer, who charmed us with her fresh and expressive voice. How many times we sat listening to her while supper was waiting! How many times, when the flagons had been emptied, one of us held a volume of Lamartine and read aloud in a voice choked by emotion! Every other thought disappeared. The hours passed by unheeded. What strange "libertines" we were! We did not speak a word and there were tears in our eyes. Desgenais especially, habitually the coldest and dryest of men, was inexplicable on such occasions; he delivered himself of such extraordinary sentiments that he might have been a poet in delirium. But after these effusions he would be seized with furious joy. When warmed by wine he would break everything within reach; the genius of destruction stalked forth in him armed to the teeth. I have seen him pickup a chair and hurl it through a closed window. I could not help making a study of this singular man. He appeared to me the exact type of a class which ought to exist somewhere but which was unknown to me. One could never tell whether his outbursts were the despair of a man sick of life, or the whim of a spoiled child.