s set when they bragged
about their conquests, and never suspected them of lying. No doubt it
was a mistake to wish for a love that springs for a word's sake; to
expect to find in the heart of a vain, frivolous woman, greedy for
luxury and intoxicated with vanity, the great sea of passion that surged
tempestuously in my own breast. Oh! to feel that you were born to love,
to make some woman's happiness, and yet to find not one, not even a
noble and courageous Marceline, not so much as an old Marquise! Oh!
to carry a treasure in your wallet, and not find even some child, or
inquisitive young girl, to admire it! In my despair I often wished to
kill myself."

"Finely tragical to-night!" cried Emile.

"Let me pass sentence on my life," Raphael answered. "If your friendship
is not strong enough to bear with my elegy, if you cannot put up with
half an hour's tedium for my sake, go to sleep! But, then, never ask
again for the reason of suicide that hangs over me, that comes nearer
and calls to me, that I bow myself before. If you are to judge a man,
you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know
merely the outward events of a man's life would only serve to make a
chronological table--a fool's notion of history."

Emile was so much struck with the bitter tones in which these words were
spoken, that he began to pay close attention to Raphael, whom he watched
with a bewildered expression.

"Now," continued the speaker, "all these things that befell me appear in
a new light. The sequence of events that I once thought so unfortunate
created the splendid powers of which, later, I became so proud. If I may
believe you, I possess the power of readily expressing my thoughts, and
I could take a forward place in the great field of knowledge; and is not
this the result of scientific curiosity, of excessive application, and
a love of reading which possessed me from the age of seven till my entry
on life? The very neglect in which I was left, and the consequent habits
of self-repression and self-concentration; did not these things teach me
how to consider and reflect? Nothing in me was squandered in obedience
to the exactions of the world, which humble the proudest soul and
reduce it to a mere husk; and was it not this very fact that refined the
emotional part of my nature till it became the perfected instrument of
a loftier purpose than passionate desires? I remember watching the women
who mistook me with all the insi