And as he stepped out into the darkness the bitter cold gripped him by the throat and cut into his lungs. He drew his collar about his neck, thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and tramped down dingy streets that echoed his footfall along their haunted ways--he thought with a pang of the threadbare coats of these pallid revellers in the beautiful. It was the black hour that goes before the coming of the daybreak; and blacker than the blackness of the night loomed the great bulk of the cathedral of Notre Dame, its towers lost in the reek of the bleak heavens above--there were lights that showed low down and beyond--the lights of the Morgue were not yet burnt out. The youth stood on the bridge and peered at the sighing sound that told of the river below; but his brows were knit upon the destiny of these kindly gentle people he had left behind him. Where was this sorry tragedy of art for art’s sake hurrying these sinking wits? Those dark shadows that slept under the bridges, were they the husks of such human things? Was that the end? To share the dank shelter with the rats that made their litter there! Or perhaps in the black waters icy oblivion would solve their sorry problem of evading the tragedy of living! The Morgue. Nay, how they clung to this despised life, for all its sordidness, for all its misery--even the Failures! CHAPTER LXXVI _Wherein our Hero sets Foot upon the Road to Rome_ Midnight did not see Noll at the tavern of _The Golden Sun_. He had failed to find deliverance from the tyranny of living in the contemplation of the Beautiful--in Art for Art’s sake. Still obsessed with the misery and cruelty of the world, he sat beside his lamp and opened the fourth book of the wisdom of Schopenhauer, whose fearless brain had compelled upon him the tragedy of existence; had promised to show him the way out--two ways. One had failed. He now turned eagerly to the other and the steeper road. He climbed the rugged path of Asceticism. The will urged always to Life, but---- Life was a sordid tragedy. Why consent to take part in it? Why indeed? asked scowling Schopenhauer. No man who has seen through the torment of existence, who has grasped the fact of the eternal unsatisfied Want, who has realized the brutalities and the cruelties that are the very conditions of Life, can desire anything but Quiescence--and complete quiescence only comes with Death. The Buddhist and the primitive Christian had done right--both of them. The Buddhist had looked to Nirvana, a state of Nothingness, of eternal calm--the primitive Christian, with the lure of a vague future bliss before his eyes, finding life on earth a designed brutality, had looked on the life of this world as a pitiful thing, and fixed his hopes on the gateway of Death to bring him into the garden of eternal peace. The pessimism of the East had had the seeing eye.