esired and have possessed your desire, you have not
thought of God! You play with happiness as a child plays with a rattle,
and you do not reflect how rare and fragile a thing you hold in your
hands; you treat it with disdain, you smile at it and you continue to
amuse yourself with it, forgetting how many prayers it has cost your
good angel to preserve for you that shadow of daylight! Ah! if there is
in heaven one who watches over you, what is he doing at this moment? He
is seated before an organ; his wings are half-folded, his hands extended
over the ivory keys; he begins an eternal hymn; the hymn of love and
immortal rest, but his wings droop, his head falls over the keys; the
angel of death has touched him on the shoulder, he disappears into the
Nirvana.

"And you, at the age of twenty-two, when a noble and exalted passion,
when the strength of youth might perhaps have made something of you when
after so many sorrows and bitter disappointments, a youth so dissipated,
you saw a better time shining in the future; when your life, consecrated
to the object of your adoration, gave promise of new strength, at
that moment the abyss yawns before you! You no longer experience vague
desires, but real regrets; your heart is no longer hungry, it is broken!
And you hesitate? What do you expect? Since she no longer cares for your
life, it counts for nothing! Since she abandons you, abandon yourself!

"Let those who have loved you in your youth weep for you! They are not
many. If you would live, you must not only forget love, but you must
deny that it exists; not only deny what there has been of good in you,
but kill all that may be good in the future; for what will you do if you
remember? Life for you would be one ceaseless regret. No, no, you must
choose between your soul and your body; you must kill one or the other.
The memory of the good drives you to the evil, make a corpse of yourself
unless you wish to become your own spectre. O child, child! die while
you can! May tears be shed over your grave!"

I threw myself on the foot of the bed in such a frightful state of
despair that my reason fled and I no longer knew where I was or what I
was doing. Brigitte sighed.

My senses stirred within me. Was it grief or despair? I do not know.
Suddenly a horrible idea occurred to me.

"What!" I muttered, "leave that for another! Die, descend into the
ground, while that bosom heaves with the air of heaven? Just God!
another hand than