Where could one look without meeting victims of self-renunciation? There sits a girl opposite me, who perhaps has been making bloody sacrifices to her soul for ten years already. Over the buxom form droops a deathly-tired head, and pale cheeks betray the slow bleeding away of her youth. Poor child, how often the passions may have beaten at your heart, and the rich powers of youth have demanded their right! When your head rolled in the soft pillow, how awakening nature quivered through your limbs, the blood swelled your veins, and fiery fancies poured the gleam of voluptuousness into your eyes! Then appeared the ghost of the soul and its eternal bliss. You were terrified, your hands folded themselves, your tormented eye turned its look upward, you--prayed. The storms of nature were hushed, a calm glided over the ocean of your appetites. Slowly the weary eyelids sank over the life extinguished under them, the tension crept out unperceived from the rounded limbs, the boisterous waves dried up in the heart, the folded hands themselves rested a powerless weight on the unresisting bosom, one last faint "Oh dear!" moaned itself away, and--_the soul was at rest_. You fell asleep, to awake in the morning to a new combat and a new--prayer. Now the habit of renunciation cools the heat of your desire, and the roses of your youth are growing pale in the--chlorosis of your heavenliness. The soul is saved, the body may perish! O Lais, O Ninon, how well you did to scorn this pale virtue! One free _grisette_ against a thousand virgins grown gray in virtue! The fixed idea may also be perceived as "maxim," "principle," "standpoint," and the like. Archimedes, to move the earth, asked for a standpoint _outside_ it. Men sought continually for this standpoint, and every one seized upon it as well as he was able. This foreign standpoint is the _world of mind_, of ideas, thoughts, concepts, essences, etc.; it is _heaven_. Heaven is the "standpoint" from which the earth is moved, earthly doings surveyed and--despised. To assure to themselves heaven, to occupy the heavenly standpoint firmly and for ever,--how painfully and tirelessly humanity struggled for this!