esh.

For some years past he had felt weighing down on him that load of
solitude which sometimes crushes old bachelors. Formerly, he had been
strong, lively, and gay, giving all his days to sport and all his nights
to festive gatherings. Now, he had grown dull, and no longer took
pleasure in anything. Exercise fatigued him; suppers and even dinners
made him ill; women annoyed him as much as they had formerly amused him.

The monotony of evenings all like each other, of the same friends met
again in the same place, at the club, of the same game with a good hand
and a run of luck, of the same talk on the same topics, of the same witty
remarks by the same lips, of the same jokes on the same themes, of the
same scandals about the same women, disgusted him so much as to make him
feel at times a veritable inclination to commit suicide. He could no
longer lead this life regular and inane, so commonplace, so frivolous and
so dull at the same time, and he felt a longing for something tranquil,
restful, comfortable, without knowing what.

He certainly did not think of getting married, for he did not feel in
himself sufficient fortitude to submit to the melancholy, the conjugal
servitude, to that hateful existence of two beings, who, always together,
knew one another so well that one could not utter a word which the other
would not anticipate, could not make a single movement which would not be
foreseen, could not have any thought or desire or opinion which would not
be divined. He considered that a woman could only be agreeable to see
again when you know her but slightly, when there is something mysterious
and unexplored attached to her, when she remains disquieting, hidden
behind a veil. Therefore, what he would require was a family without
family-life, wherein he might spend only a portion of his existence; and,
again, he was haunted by the recollection of his son.

For the past year he had been constantly thinking of this, feeling
an irritating desire springing up within him to see him, to renew
acquaintance with him. He had become the father of this child, while
still a young man, in the midst of dramatic and touching incidents. The
boy dispatched to the South, had been brought up near Marseilles without
ever hearing his father's name.

The latter had at first paid from month to month for the nurture, then
for the education and the expense of holidays for the lad, and finally
had provided an allowance for him on making a