Hubert and Calixte left together and walked at random through the streets, continuing, almost always in agreement, the conversation begun in the Revue. This time, again, they did not separate until the hour of sleep; they were happy in enjoying each other, with the certainty of likewise delighting each other, of expressing concordant thoughts, of offering nothing that would be a blasphemy to the other. As they were noting the parallelism of these two evenings which chance meetings had given them, at a short interval, Hubert remarked the duality in the development of events. "When an act is produced, it is always produced a second time. This is an axiom. It is evident that, to demonstrate it, one would have to be fortified with a multiplicity of historic anecdotes, and I do not know if this is possible. As far as I and my past life are concerned, there is such a surprising and frightful exactitude in the axiom that I believe I could predict nearly half the things which will happen to me from to-day until the last sleep. Besides, this axiom, perhaps, is quite personal to me, special to my organism. Such a tendency to repetition is not the source of any joy. I wish that pleasures could be doubled like pains and that the proportion, in short, could remain the same, but consider the infirmity of mathematics applied to the human soul: it is assuredly less painful to me to have seven griefs for one felicity than to bear a double weight counterbalanced by such a weak duplication as that of one to two. Prolonged to infinity, the two proportions would go on eternally equipoised, but the scale of pains breaks with its chains and crushes our hearts."