He continued thus for a long time, stretched back on his armchair, smoking cigarettes, wearied from his night and still enfeebled by a protracted bath. At bottom, he was deeply ashamed of himself, as after every similar defilement, and not at all reassured as to the metaphysical consequences of this sin. No reasoning, brutal though his unbelief might be, could efface such an impression. The being endowed with human intelligence and will always regulates himself by some rule, a mental guide that is often unconscious, but whose existence is immediately and with certitude revealed by the transgression. There is no common moral conscience outside of a religion that is strict and observed in all its commandments, the laws of society, and the special regulations belonging to a certain group: morality is a personal talent. Thus, Entragues felt himself soiled by an immersion in pleasure where others would still have enjoyed, even repletion, the gratification of a ruminant. Moreover, he was not impious: having seen remorse rear its head before him, now that the hour of the bravado had passed, he trembled at the memory of the reproachful phantom. That night cut a phase of his life in two, and he saw himself equal to those whom physical existence confines beneath its claws: brother of the first comer and thrown back among the vulgar elements, he ceased to be himself. Ah! he had judged! Now he could be judged. In this state of mind, nothing could interest him; since the principle of all interest vanished. Opium-like dreams benumbed him and all the texts on the vanity of things which he had gathered here and there in his readings, played under his skull, like the bell of a rattle. Love, strangled by his hand, barred his path: to advance, it was necessary to leap over the dead thing: no! he would remain on this side, unless a miraculous and quite questionable resurrection occurred. Glory! the bell has been melted so that little bells could be made. And as for the brass of the bells, does one ever know the right of the metal to the claim? One dies and the cracked sounds make the bell-ringers laugh. He recited the proud and yet disheartening verses of old Dante: La mondaine rumeur n'est rien qu'un souffle De vent qui vient d'ici, qui vient de là, Et, changeant d'aire, change aussi de nom. Having put these three lines in French syllables, Hubert observed how difficult it was to clothe Dante in a fitting foreign garb. He pardoned the well-intentioned persons who had attempted it in scandalous translations: one could do no better than to adopt an exact, if disfiguring, metaphor: the precision of the original becomes loose, its clearness shadowy, for it is necessary to employ certain short words whose true sense is lost, and others which are no longer read except in glossaries. Finally, he laid down this aphorism: it is impossible to translate into an old and refined language a work belonging to the youth of a kindred language.