One could pass on a little note to the eminent professors who lecture on dramatic history (that vast science in three hundred thousand _feuilletons_): Note.--Cf.: _Plato com. Frag. ed. Brulend._ §3;--_Andron. ap. Taschend._ t. XXXVII; etc. In the matter of books, criticism buries you, in the matter of the theater, it overwhelms you. To write for one's sole pleasure, with an absolute disdain for present opinions. Yes, but if they are just, that is to say favorable, one glories in it. Isolation is difficult, vanity ceaselessly and indefatigably solders the cable one has cut. Vanity! Fatuity! And in everything. Thus this monologue lends itself to Sixtine. I reason like a male; and she feels like a female and I shall never know what she felt at a certain moment, because, even taking for granted a confession and the wish to be sincere, she would lie by nature. The truth is what one thinks it; when one no longer thinks of anything--all is reduced to nothing! There remains sensation, but analyzed sensation--diamond dust! He went to bed feeling miserable, and as he was dozing off with the consciousness of his moral powerlessness he was seized with a fit of despondency comparable to that of impotent men when in the presence of the desired woman. Incapable of loving, incapable of tearing from his heart the parasitic science whose tentacles strangled him, it seemed to him as if he had swallowed plaster, as if muddy blood stagnated in his veins; or rather as if his arteries slowly carried a curare which gradually benumbed his muscles. His mind obstructed with the most contradictory metaphors, he tried them one after the other, vaguely disgusted with their absurdity. Finally, with a rush of vitality, he somewhat reconquered his logic and ceased to hold himself in contempt: "I suffer, hence I love!" This thought, though he ironically perceived its mild naïveté, comforted him, a very long and decisive breathing reëstablished the haematosis, and he was able to sleep peacefully. Painful doubts of this sort came to torture him on more than one evening. He was only delivered from them by anger--the first time that he knocked at Sixtine's door without getting a response. Certain deceptions on certain days determined this action, when strong desire had a precise end. At this moment it was to see Sixtine, merely to see her, merely the pleasure of the eyes. The effect was the same after the second check, but accentuated to a sort of rage, a hardly dangerous crisis whose very lashes were salutary. The last mockery of fortune, on the other hand, threw him into a resigned dejection. "She does not want to see me; I have displeased her, but how? Yet I love her." Thus displaced from the subject to the object, doubt was supportable as an imposed pain which one accepts without having any responsibility: "It is not my fault."