the tone of
those about him are so many incitements to evil. Do not the best of men
and the most devout women there look upon continence as ridiculous? The
great city, in fact, seems to have set herself to give encouragement to
vice and to this alone; for a young man finds that the entrance to
every honorable career in which he might look for success is barred by
hindrances even more numerous than the snares that are continually set
for him, so that through his weaknesses he may be robbed of his money.

"For a long while I went every evening to some theatre, and little by
little I fell into idle ways. I grew more and more slack over my work;
even my most pressing tasks were apt to be put off till the morrow, and
before very long there was an end of my search after knowledge for its
own sake; I did nothing more than the work which was absolutely required
to enable me to get through the examinations that must be passed before
I could become a doctor. I attended the public lectures, but I no longer
paid any attention to the professors, who, in my opinion, were a set of
dotards. I had already broken my idols--I became a Parisian.

"To be brief, I led the aimless drifting life of a young, provincial
thrown into the heart of a great city; still retaining some good and
true feeling, still clinging more or less to the observance of certain
rules of conduct, still fighting in vain against the debasing
influence of evil examples, though I offered but a feeble, half-hearted
resistance, for the enemy had accomplices within me. Yes, sir, my face
is not misleading; past storms have plainly left their traces there.
Yet, since I had drunk so deeply of the pure fountain of religion in
my early youth, I was haunted in the depths of my soul, through all my
wanderings, by an ideal of moral perfection which could not fail one day
to bring me back to God by the paths of weariness and remorse. Is not he
who feels the pleasures of earth most keenly, sure to be attracted, soon
or late, by the fruits of heaven?

"At first I went through the experience, more or less vivid, that always
comes with youth--the countless moments of exultation, the unnumbered
transports of despair. Sometimes I took my vehement energy of feeling
for a resolute will, and over-estimated my powers; sometimes, at the
mere sight of some trifling obstacle with which I was about to come into
collision, I was far more cast down than I ought to have been. Then
I would devise v