Such was the state of my mind; I had read much; moreover I had learned to
paint. I knew by heart a great many things, but nothing in order, so
that my head was like a sponge, swollen but empty. I fell in love with
all the poets one after another; but being of an impressionable nature
the last acquaintance disgusted me with the rest. I had made of myself a
great warehouse of odds and ends, so that having no more thirst after
drinking of the novel and the unknown, I became an oddity myself.

Nevertheless, about me there was still something of youth: it was the
hope of my heart, which was still childlike.

That hope, which nothing had withered or corrupted and which love had
exalted to excess, had now received a mortal wound. The perfidy of my
mistress had struck deep, and when I thought of it, I felt in my soul a
swooning away, the convulsive flutter of a wounded bird in agony.

Society, which works so much evil, is like that serpent of the Indies
whose habitat is under a shrub, the leaves of which afford the antidote
to its venom; in nearly every case it brings the remedy with the wound it
causes. For example, the man whose life is one of routine, who has his
business cares to claim his attention upon rising, visits at one hour,
loves at another, can lose his mistress and suffer no evil effects. His
occupations and his thoughts are like impassive soldiers ranged in line
of battle; a single shot strikes one down, his neighbors close the gap
and the line is intact.

I had not that resource, since I was alone: nature, the kind mother,
seemed, on the contrary, vaster and more empty than before. Had I been
able to forget my mistress, I should have been saved. How many there are
who can be cured with even less than that. Such men are incapable of