paid any price for a weapon
that could be used against her. But I had none, not even the one she had
employed; I could not pay her in her own coin.

Suddenly I noticed a shadow moving behind the curtain before the closet.
I had forgotten my prisoner.

"Listen to me!" I cried, rising, "I have loved, I have loved like a
fool. I deserve all the ridicule you have subjected me to. But, by
Heaven! I will show you something that will prove to you that I am not
such a fool as you think."

With these words I pulled aside the curtain and exposed the interior of
the closet. The girl was trying to conceal herself in a corner.

"Go in, if you choose," I said to Desgenais; "you who call me a fool for
loving a woman, see how your teaching has affected me. Do you think I
passed last night under the windows of--? But that is not all," I added,
"that is not all I have to say. You give a supper to-night and to-morrow
go to the country; I am with you, and shall not leave you from now on.
We will not separate, but will pass the entire day together. Are you
with me? Agreed! I have tried to make of my heart the mausoleum of my
love, but I will bury my love in another tomb."

With these words I sat down, marvelling how indignation can solace grief
and restore happiness. Whoever is astonished to learn that, from that
day, I completely changed my course of life does not know the heart of
man, and does not understand that a young man of twenty may hesitate
before taking a step, but does not retreat when he has once taken it.

CHAPTER II. THE CHOSEN WAY

The first steps in debauchery resemble vertigo, for one feels a sort of
terror mingled with sensuous delight, as if peering downward from some
giddy--height. While shameful, secret dissipation ruins the noblest
of men, in the frank and open defiance of conventionality there is
something that compels respect even in the most depraved. He who goes
at nightfall, muffled in his cloak, to sully his life in secret, and
clandestinely to shake off the hypocrisy of the day, resembles an
Italian who strikes his enemy from behind, not daring to provoke him to
open quarrel. There are assassinations in the dark corners of the city
under shelter of the night. He who goes his way without concealment
says: "Every one does it and conceals it; I do it and do not conceal
it." Thus speaks pride, and once that cuirass has been buckled on, it
glitters with the refulgent light of day.

It is said that Dam