"It was not only a fashion [he says], as might be believed; it was a kind of general prostration which made our hearts sad, darkened our thoughts, and caused us to see a deliverance in the glimpse of death. You would have thought that life held in chains souls that had caught sight of something superior to terrestrial existence. We did not aspire to the felicities of paradise: we dreamed of taking possession of the infinite, and we were tortured by a vague pantheism of which the formula was never found.... The artistic and literary generation which preceded me and that to which I belonged had a youth of lamentable sadness, sadness without cause and without object, abstract sadness, inherent in the individual or in the period.... "Nobody was allowed to be without an _âme incomprise_; it was the custom and we conformed to it. We were 'fatal' and 'accursed'; without even having tasted life, we tumbled to the bottom of the abyss of disillusionment. Children of eighteen years, repeating phrases gathered from some novel or other, would say: 'J'ai le cœur usé comme l'escalier d'une fille de joie,' and one of Pétrus Borel's heroes went to the executioner to say to him: 'I should like you to guillotine me!' This did not prevent us from laughing, singing, or committing the honest follies of youth; that was also a way of being desperate; we imagined that we had a satanic laugh, while we really possessed the fair joy of spring."