gs thee on to thy doom, every step breaks the round on which
thou hast just rested; thou art nourished by the dead; the air of heaven
weighs upon and crushes thee, the earth on which thou treadest attracts
thee by the soles of thy feet.

"Down with thee! Why art thou affrighted? Dost thou tremble at a word?
Merely say: 'We will not live.' Is not life a burden that we long to lay
down? Why hesitate when it is merely a question of a little sooner or a
little later? Matter is indestructible, and the physicists, we are
told, grind to infinity the smallest speck of dust without being able to
annihilate it. If matter is the property of chance, what harm can it do
to change its form since it can not cease to be matter? Why should God
care what form I have received and with what livery I invest my grief?
Suffering lives in my brain; it belongs to me, I kill it; but my bones
do not belong to me and I return them to Him who lent them to me: may
some poet make a cup of my skull from which to drink his new wine!

"What reproach can I incur and what harm can that reproach do me? What
stern judge will tell me that I have done wrong? What does he know about
it?

"Was he such as I? If every creature has his task to perform, and if
it is a crime to shirk it, what culprits are the babes who die on the
nurse's breast! Why should they be spared? Who will be instructed by the
lessons which are taught after death? Must heaven be a desert in order
that man may be punished for having lived? Is it not enough to have
lived? I do not know who asked that question, unless it were Voltaire
on his death-bed; it is a cry of despair worthy of the helpless old
atheist.

"But to what purpose? Why so many struggles? Who is there above us who
delights in so much agony? Who amuses himself and wiles away an idle
hour watching this spectacle of creation, always renewed and always
dying, seeing the work of man's hands rising, the grass growing; looking
upon the planting of the seed and the fall of the thunderbolt; beholding
man walking about upon his earth until he meets the beckoning finger
of death; counting tears and watching them dry upon the cheek of pain;
noting the pure profile of love and the wrinkled face of age; seeing
hands stretched up to him in supplication, bodies prostrate before him,
and not a blade of wheat more in the harvest!

"Who is it, then, that has made so much for the pleasure of knowing that
it all amounts to nothing! The earth i