tears in our eyes.

Desgenais especially, habitually the coldest and dryest of men,
was inexplicable on such occasions; he delivered himself of such
extraordinary sentiments that he might have been a poet in delirium. But
after these effusions he would be seized with furious joy. When
warmed by wine he would break everything within reach; the genius of
destruction stalked forth in him armed to the teeth. I have seen him
pickup a chair and hurl it through a closed window.

I could not help making a study of this singular man. He appeared to me
the exact type of a class which ought to exist somewhere but which
was unknown to me. One could never tell whether his outbursts were the
despair of a man sick of life, or the whim of a spoiled child.

During the fete, in particular, he was in such a state of nervous
excitement that he acted like a schoolboy. Once he persuaded me to go
out on foot with him, muffled in grotesque costumes, with masks and
instruments of music. We promenaded all night, in the midst of the most
frightful din of horrible sounds. We found a driver asleep on his box
and unhitched his horses; then, pretending we had just come from the
ball, set up a great cry. The coachman started up, cracked his whip, and
his horses started off on a trot, leaving him seated on the box. That
same evening we had passed through the Champs Elysees; Desgenais, seeing
another carriage passing, stopped it after the manner of a highwayman;
he intimidated the coachman by threats and forced him to climb down and
lie flat on his stomach. He opened the carriage door and found within
a young man and a lady motionless with fright. He whispered to me to
imitate him, and we began to enter one door and go out by the other,
so that in the obscurity the poor young people thought they saw a
procession of bandits going through their carriage.

As I understand it, the men who say that the world gives experience
ought to be astonished if they are believed. The world is merely a
number of whirlpools, each one independent of the others; they circle
in groups like flocks of birds. There is no resemblance between the
different quarters of the same city, and the denizen of the Chaussee
d'Antin has as much to learn at Marais as at Lisbon. It is true
that these various whirlpools are traversed, and have been since the
beginning of the world, by seven personages who are always the same: the
first is called hope; the second, conscience; the third, op