"Believest thou that the romancers and tragedians, that is, the men of genius among them, who have a thousand times aped, and aped their own apings of everything, divine and human, are other than I? What keeps them and the world's people still real is the hunger after money and praise; this eating gastric-juice is the animal glue, the salient point in the soft floating and fleeting world. The apes are geniuses among beasts; and the geniuses are--not merely before higher beings, as Pope says of Newton, but even here below--apes, in aesthetic imitation, in heartlessness, malignity, malicious pleasure, sensuality, and--merriment. "The last and last but one I reserve for myself. Against the _longueurs_ (lengthy passages) in life's book,--a book which no man understands,--there is no remedy except some merry passages, of which I think no more so soon as I have read them. In order only to get over this cold, hobbly life, I will surely sooner scatter below me rose-cups than thistles. Joy is of itself worth something, if only that it crowds out something worse before one lays down his heavy head and sinks into nothingness. "Such am I; such was I; then I saw thee, and would be thy _Thou_--but it serves not, for I cannot go back; thou, however, goest forward, thou becomest my very self one day,--and then I _would_ have loved thy sister! May she forgive me for it! Here drink pure wine! I know best how one fares with the women,--how their love blesses and robs,--how all love, like other fire, _kindles_ itself with much better wood than that which _feeds_ it,-and how, universally, the Devil gets all he brings. "O, why then can no woman love but just so far as one will have her, and no further,--absolutely none? Hear me now: everywhere lazy preachers would fain hold us back from all transitory pleasure by telling us of the discomfort that comes after. Is not then the discomfort transitory too? Rabette meant well with me, on the same ground of desire upon which I meant well with her and myself. But does any one know, then, what purgatorial hours one wades through with a strange heart, which is full, without making full, and whose love one at last hates,--_before_ which, but not _with_ which, one weeps, and never about the same thing, and to which one dreads to unveil any emotion, for fear of seeing it transmuted into nourishment of love,--from whose anger one imbibes the greater wrath, and from its love the lesser! And now to have absolutely the more joyous relations screwed down forever to this state of torment, when they ought rather to exalt us above the tormenting ones, the long wished for gods'-bliss of life perverted forever into a flat show and copper-plate engraving,--the heart into a breast and mask,--the marrow of existence into sharp bones,--and yet, as to all reproaches of coldness, chained only to silence, bound innocent and dumb to the rack,--and that, too, without end!