wear is a terrible symbol; before coming to this, the armor must have
fallen piece by piece and the embroidery flower by flower. Human reason
has overthrown all illusions; but it bears in itself sorrow, in order
that it may be consoled.

The customs of students and artists, those customs so free, so beautiful,
so full of youth, began to experience the universal change. Men in
taking leave of women whispered the word which wounds to the death:
contempt. They plunged into the dissipation of wine and courtesans.
Students and artists did the same; love was treated as were glory and
religion: it was an old illusion. The grisette, that woman so dreamy,
so romantic, so tender, and so sweet in love, abandoned herself to the
counting-house and to the shop. She was poor and no one loved her; she
needed gowns and hats and she sold herself. Oh! misery! the young man
who ought to love her, whom she loved, who used to take her to the woods
of Verrieres and Romainville, to the dances on the lawn, to the suppers
under the trees; he who used to talk with her as she sat near the lamp in
the rear of the shop on the long winter evenings; he who shared her crust
of bread moistened with the sweat of her brow, and her love at once
sublime and poor; he, that same man, after abandoning her, finds her
after a night of orgy, pale and leaden, forever lost, with hunger on her
lips and prostitution in her heart.

About this time two poets, whose genius was second only to that of
Napoleon, consecrated their lives to the work of collecting the elements
of anguish and of grief scattered over the universe. Goethe, the
patriarch of a new literature, after painting in his Weyther the passion
which leads to suicide, traced in his Faust the most sombre human
character which has ever represented evil and unhappiness. His writings
began to pass from Germany into France. From his studio, surrounded by