They brought wine. He now gave his friend an account of his life,--his faults, among which he adduced the very one in which he was just persisting, namely, drinking; his self-reproducing vanity, even with its self-acknowledgment; his conquests of women, which made him a magnetic mountain, full of the attracted nails from ships that had thereby fallen to pieces; his propensity, like Cardan, to offend his friends, to break in upon his own or another's good fortune, as, even when a child, he longed to interrupt the preacher,[128] or in the midst of the finest tune to smash the harpsichord, and in a fit of enthusiasm to think the most licentious thoughts. "Once I had still, after all, two distinct and different selves,--one that promised and lied, and one that believed the other; now they both lie to each other, and neither believes." Carlos answered, "Horrible! But thy sorrow is verily itself a help and a gift." "Ah, what!" he replied. "Man condemns less his iniquity than the past situation wherein he committed it, while, in a fresh situation, he finds it new and sweet again, and loves it as much as ever. What lies cold yonder, that is my image [pointing to the Sphinx], that stirs itself, living, in my bloody breast. Help me! draw out the rending monster!" Albano fired with rage in his innermost soul at the guilty repetition of that tender confessional night with him.[129] "He is bold enough," said Gaspard, in a whisper to Albano, "because, as I hear, he is really to personate himself; but when he sees himself so, he is surely better than he sees himself." "O," said Albano, "so I thought once! But is, then, the contemplation of a bad condition itself a good condition? Is he not so much the worse that he bears this consciousness, and so much the weaker that he sees an incurable cancer-sore growing upon him? The highest thing he has, at all events, lost,--innocence." "A fleeting cradle virtue! He has, after all, a bright, bold, reflecting faculty," said Gaspard. "Only effeminate, shameless, double-meaning, many-sided debility of heart he has; talks of power, and cannot tear through the thinnest mesh of pleasure," said Albano.