had fallen victim to a sluggishness which annihilated his plans,
broke his will power and invoked a cortege of vague reveries to which
he passively submitted.

The confused medley of meditations on art and literature in which he
had indulged since his isolation, as a dam to bar the current of old
memories, had been rudely swept away, and the onrushing, irresistible
wave crashed into the present and future, submerging everything
beneath the blanket of the past, filling his mind with an immensity of
sorrow, on whose surface floated, like futile wreckage, absurd trifles
and dull episodes of his life.

The book he held in his hands fell to his knees. He abandoned himself
to the mood which dominated him, watching the dead years of his life
filled with so many disgusts and fears, move past. What a life he had
lived! He thought of the evenings spent in society, the horse races,
card parties, love affairs ordered in advance and served at the stroke
of midnight, in his rose-colored boudoir! He recalled faces,
expressions, vain words which obsessed him with the stubbornness of
popular melodies which one cannot help humming, but which suddenly and
inexplicably end by boring one.

This phase had not lasted long. His memory gave him respite and he
plunged again into his Latin studies, so as to efface the impressions
of such recollections.

But almost instantly the rushing force of his memories swept him into
a second phase, that of his childhood, especially of the years spent
at the school of the Fathers.

Although more remote, they were more positive and more indelibly
stamped on his brain. The leafy park, the long walks, the flower beds,
the benches--all the actual details of the monastery rose before him,
here in his room.

The gardens filled and he heard the ringing cries of the students,
mingling with the laughter of the professors as they played tennis,
with their cassocks tucked up between their knees, or perhaps chatted
under the trees with the youngsters, without any posturing or hauteur,
as though they were companions of the same age.

He recalled the easy yoke of the monks who declined to administer
punishment by inflicting the committment of five hundred or a thousand
lines while the others were at play, being satisfied with making those
delinquents prepare the lesson that had not been mastered, and most
often simply having recourse to a gentle admonition. They surrounded
the children with an active but gentle w