She believed in kisses, thought that he would press the object to his heart, ejaculating some words of tenderness, as in the romances and chromos, which are painted romances. With a "thank you!" he placed the letter in his pocket and, pushing a door open, entered the little room in whose corners his dying illusions still played, like ironic dryads, careless of the approaching agony. "_Moriuntur ridendo._" A light voiceless laugh came from him: "These are the ruins of Carthage. They are well preserved and yet how many centuries is it since we left them, already in the state of ruins. Within me generations have succeeded; the same essence of humanity reigns, the man is another man. Ah! how far away all this is! "These objects were once familiar to me: I knew them. I was a little their master. They have escaped my hands. Well! I abandon the rest. Let all things be transitory. How this breathes of death! It is my heart that is becoming decomposed.... "Why read the letter? She laughs at me or pities me, and never have I tolerated the one or the other." He carried it through the streets. "I believe myself," he thought, "stronger and more logical. Have I denied my old philosophy to such a point? The punishment for laughing at the external world is to fall in the first snare laid by the innocent Maia, as the theosophist expresses it. Could there be, then, an invincible human nature more stable in its versatility than the architecture of thought? Invincible, no, since haughty contemptuous things have conquered it. It is because I lack method. Spiritual training is required. As an elementary precaution, it will first be necessary to place attentive sentinels at the door of the senses, ready to halt every suspected sensation, to admit no one unless stripped of its cloak of deceit.... "Ah! I have no lucidity and I am bored. No remedy, the nervous crisis will accomplish its cycle. It would be somewhat diverting to go to Nice and pierce them with my ironies, but afterwards? Then, the vulgarity of this conduct would be repugnant and hardly fit for a fourth act: then, the case of pistols, the denouement which death hardly saves from a ridiculousness which is bourgeois as well as theatrical.... "Shall I read this letter? I am sure it is full of things which will no longer interest me...." He stopped and struck the ground with a savage thump of his heel.