"Look at all great men; nature made them pleasure-loving or base,
every one. Some mocking or jealous power corrupted them in either soul

or body, so as to make all their powers futile, and their efforts of
no avail.

"All men and all things appear before you in the guise you choose, in
those hours when wine has sway. You are lord of all creation; you

transform it at your pleasure. And throughout this unceasing delirium,
Play may pour, at your will, its molten lead into your veins.

"Some day you will fall into the monster's power. Then you will have,
as I had, a frenzied awakening, with impotence sitting by your pillow.

Are you an old soldier? Phthisis attacks you. A diplomatist? An
aneurism hangs death in your heart by a thread. It will perhaps be

consumption that will cry out to me, 'Let us be going!' as to Raphael
of Urbino, in old time, killed by an excess of love.

"In this way I have existed. I was launched into the world too early
or too late. My energy would have been dangerous there, no doubt, if I

had not have squandered it in such ways as these. Was not the world
rid of an Alexander, by the cup of Hercules, at the close of a

drinking bout?
"There are some, the sport of Destiny, who must either have heaven or

hell, the hospice of St. Bernard or riotous excess. Only just now I
lacked the heart to moralize about those two," and he pointed to

Euphrasia and Aquilina. "They are types of my own personal history,
images of my life! I could scarcely reproach them; they stood before

me like judges.
"In the midst of this drama that I was enacting, and while my

distracting disorder was at its height, two crises supervened; each
brought me keen and abundant pangs. The first came a few days after I

had flung myself, like Sardanapalus, on my pyre. I met Foedora under
the peristyle of the Bouffons. We both were waiting for our carriages.

" 'Ah! so you are living yet?'
"That was the meaning of her smile, and probably of the spiteful words

she murmured in the ear of her cicisbeo, telling him my history no
doubt, rating mine as a common love affair. She was deceived, yet she

was applauding her perspicacity. Oh, that I should be dying for her,
must still adore her, always see her through my potations, see her

still when I was overcome with wine, or in the arms of courtesans; and
know that I was a target for her scornful jests! Oh, that I should be

unable to tear the love of her out of my breast and to fling it at her
feet!

"Well, I quickly exhausted my funds, but owing to those three years of
discipline, I enjoyed the most robust health, and on the day that I

found myself without a penny I felt remarkably well. In order to carry
on the process of dying, I signed bills at short dates, and the day

came when they must be met. Painful excitements! but how they quicken
the pulses of youth! I was not prematurely aged; I was young yet, and

full of vigor and life.
"At my first debt all my virtues came to life; slowly and despairingly

they seemed to pace towards me; but I could compound with them--they
were like aged aunts that begin with a scolding and end by bestowing

tears and money upon you.
"Imagination was less yielding; I saw my name bandied about through

every city in Europe. 'One's name is oneself' says Eusebe Salverte.
After these excursions I returned to the room I had never quitted,

like a doppelganger in a German tale, and came to myself with a start.
"I used to see with indifference a banker's messenger going on his

errands through the streets of Paris, like a commercial Nemesis,
wearing his master's livery--a gray coat and a silver badge; but now I

hated the species in advance. One of them came one morning to ask me
to meet some eleven bills that I had scrawled my name upon. My

signature was worth three thousand francs! Taking me altogether, I
myself was not worth that amount. Sheriff's deputies rose up before

me, turning their callous faces upon my despair, as the hangman
regards the criminal to whom he says, 'It has just struck half-past

three.' I was in the power of their clerks; they could scribble my
name, drag it through the mire, and jeer at it. I was a defaulter. Has

a debtor any right to himself? Could not other men call me to account
for my way of living? Why had I eaten puddings a la chipolata? Why had

I iced my wine? Why had I slept, or walked, or thought, or amused
myself when I had not paid them?

"At any moment, in the middle of a poem, during some train of thought,
or while I was gaily breakfasting in the pleasant company of my

friends, I might look to see a gentleman enter in a coat of chestnut-
brown, with a shabby hat in his hand. This gentleman's appearance

would signify my debt, the bill I had drawn; the spectre would compel
me to leave the table to speak to him, blight my spirits, despoil me

of my cheerfulness, of my mistress, of all I possessed, down to my
very bedstead.

"Remorse itself is more easily endured. Remorse does not drive us into
the street nor into the prison of Sainte-Pelagie; it does not force us

into the detestable sink of vice. Remorse only brings us to the
scaffold, where the executioner invests us with a certain dignity; as

we pay the extremepenalty, everybody believes in our innocence; but
people will not credit a penniless prodigal with a single virtue.

"My debts had other incarnations. There is the kind that goes about on
two feet, in a green cloth coat, and blue spectacles, carrying

umbrellas of various hues; you come face to face with him at the
corner of some street, in the midst of your mirth. These have the

detestable prerogative of saying, 'M. de Valentin owes me something,
and does not pay. I have a hold on him. He had better not show me any

offensive airs!' You must bow to your creditors, and moreover bow
politely. 'When are you going to pay me?' say they. And you must lie,

and beg money of another man, and cringe to a fool seated on his
strong-box, and receive sour looks in return from these horse-leeches;

a blow would be less hateful; you must put up with their crass
ignorance and calculating morality. A debt is a feat of the

imaginative that they cannot appreciate. A borrower is often carried
away and over-mastered by generous impulses; nothing great, nothing

magnanimous can move or dominate those who live for money, and
recognize nothing but money. I myself held money in abhorrence.

"Or a bill may undergo a final transformation into some meritorious
old man with a family dependent upon him. My creditor might be a

living picture for Greuze, a paralytic with his children round him, a
soldier's widow, holding out beseeching hands to me. Terrible

creditors are these with whom we are forced to sympathize, and when
their claims are satisfied we owe them a further debt of assistance.

"The night before the bills fell due, I lay down with the false calm
of those who sleep before their approaching execution, or with a duel

in prospect, rocked as they are by delusive hopes. But when I woke,
when I was cool and collected, when I found myself imprisoned in a

banker's portfolio, and floundering in statements covered with red ink
--then my debts sprang up everywhere, like grasshoppers, before my

eyes. There were my debts, my clock, my armchairs; my debts were
inlaid in the very furniture which I liked best to use. These gentle

inanimate slaves were to fall prey to the harpies of the Chatelet,
were to be carried off by the broker's men, and brutally thrown on the

market. Ah, my property was a part of myself!
"The sound of the door-bell rang through my heart; while it seemed to

strike at me, where kings should be struck at--in the head. Mine was a
martyrdom, without heaven for its reward. For a magnanimous nature,

debt is a hell, and a hell, moreover, with sheriff's officers and
brokers in it. An undischarged debt is something mean and sordid; it

is a beginning of knavery; it is something worse, it is a lie; it
prepares the way for crime, and brings together the planks for the

scaffold. My bills were protested. Three days afterwards I met them,
and this is how it happened.

"A speculator came, offering to buy the island in the Loire belonging
to me, where my mother lay buried. I closed with him. When I went to

his solicitor to sign the deeds, I felt a cavern-like chill in the
dark office that made me shudder; it was the same cold dampness that

had laid hold upon me at the brink of my father's grave. I looked upon
this as an evil omen. I seemed to see the shade of my mother, and to

hear her voice. What power was it that made my own name ring vaguely
in my ears, in spite of the clamor of bells?

"The money paid down for my island, when all my debts were discharged,
left me in possession of two thousand francs. I could now have

returned to the scholar's tranquil life, it is true; I could have gone
back to my garret after having gained an experience of life, with my

head filled with the results of extensiveobservation, and with a