On returning home, I spent a portion of the night with my head bowed over my fire, which told me nothing: I had not, like the Persians, an imagination rich enough to persuade me that the flame resembled the anemone, the cinders the pomegranate. I listened to the carriages coming, going, crossing each other; their distant rolling imitated the murmur of the sea upon the shores of my Brittany or of the wind in the Combourg woods. These worldly sounds which reminded me of those of solitude aroused my regrets; I conjured up my old trouble, or else my imagination would invent the story of the persons whom those chariots were bearing away: I saw radiant drawing-rooms, balls, loves, conquests. Soon, relapsing into myself, I saw myself as I was, alone in an inn, seeing the world through the window and hearing it by the echoes of my fireside. Rousseau considers that he owes it to his sincerity, and to the instruction of mankind, to confess the covert pleasures of his life; he even supposes that he is being seriously questioned and asked for an account of his sins with the _donne pericolante_ of Venice. Had I prostituted myself to the courtesans of Paris, I should not have thought myself obliged to inform posterity of the fact; but I was too shy on the one hand, too much exalted on the other, to allow myself to be seduced by women of the town. When I passed through groups of these unfortunates falling upon the passers-by in order to drag them up to their rooms, like the Saint-Cloud cabmen trying to induce travellers to enter their flies, I was seized with horror and disgust. The pleasures of adventure would have suited me only in the days of old. In the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, our imperfect civilization, our superstitious beliefs, our strange and half-barbarous customs mingled romance with everything: characters were strongly marked, imagination was powerful, existence mysterious and concealed. At night, around the high walls of the graveyards and convents, beneath the deserted ramparts of the town, along the chains and ditches of the market-places, on the skirts of enclosures in narrow, lampless streets, where robbers and murderers lay in ambush, where meetings took place sometimes by torchlight, sometimes in the thick of darkness, it was at the risk of his head that one sought the trysting-place granted by some Héloïse. To abandon himself to disorder, one had really to love; to violate public morals, one had to make great sacrifices. Not only was it a matter of confronting fortuitous dangers and defying the sword of the law, but one was obliged to overcome the empire of regular habits, the authority of the family, the tyranny of domestic customs, the opposition of conscience, the terrors and duties of the Christian. All these obstacles doubled the energy of the passions.