For a few sous he had just bought a treatise on simony and haggled eagerly with a rogue of a vendor for some Neo-Parnassian collections--recently received and already depreciated by the universal indifference--when a familiar hand was placed on his shoulder. With a twisting movement, with a natural but sure insolence, he freed himself, then turned his head. It was Marguerin, the theosophist, whose friends excused his licentious folly as a malady of the cerebellum. His play of features, strangely promising, seduced women in search of debasement: he was rich and subsidized an angelical review. This day, a fixed idea, which he confided to Entragues, gave his face an imbecile appearance. "Dead! Perhaps you remember that blond girl, Maia!" "His present phantasy," thought Hubert, "does not incite any repugnance. Have I not had the madness of eyes, and am I cured of it? Has not the vision of two large eyes ever been necessary to complete my happiness? It is strange that there should be this constant union of two sensations so different in kind, namely, visual sensation and spasm. Sick, ah! an innate and uncurable sickness!" (_While sipping absinthe_:) "Intoxication is a very noble passion, and I would like to acquire it.... Intoxication, one should rather say drunkenness, but philanthropists, have brought the word down to the humanitarian mud of their Anglican dissertations.... Alcoholism has been contaminated, no less.... Intoxication suffices. This absinthe is comforting. The blond Maia was perhaps loved by that wretch. She was lovely and here is what is left of it: a pathological regret. Why disdain intoxication? It is the most intellectual of passions; it does not depress like gambling; it does not weaken like love. Ah! what a godsend! Absinthe is not at all hurtful; it is green and concentrated wine. Is it not ideal to be able to arrive at intoxication with a single glass of liquid? The Orientals have opium, but for that is needed the Oriental sky. And then, to each one his own system. The important thing is that it remove you far from the world: everything that draws us away from ourselves is divine. How many times nevertheless, have I been drunk with pure contemplation! yes, that too is a method. All are salutary. I hate myself, I wish to live another life, I wish to correct ideally the infirmities inherent in my carnal state, I wish to deliver my soul from the miseries of my body ... I should love her from afar, as Guido loves his madonna. Contact is a destroyer of dreams. You will not know the book of love where I have beatified you, for it will disappear with desire, burned by the flames of your first kiss. The pyre that will open heaven for you will consume my forces: you will ascend upward through space and I will fall like Satan, I will fall into the infernal hells for eternity.... A singular declamation and quite difficult to justify! All this for some pleasure mutually shared by two beings who adore each other.