was comprised in this 'account rendered,' my future lay in a linen bag

with eleven hundred and twelve francs in it, human society stood
before me in the person of an auctioneer's clerk, who kept his hat on

while he spoke. Jonathan, an old servant who was much attached to me,
and whom my mother had formerly pensioned with an annuity of four

hundred francs, spoke to me as I was leaving the house that I had so
often gaily left for a drive in my childhood.

" 'Be very economical, Monsieur Raphael!'
"The good fellow was crying.

"Such were the events, dear Emile, that ruled my destinies, moulded my
character, and set me, while still young, in an utterly false social

position," said Raphael after a pause. "Family ties, weak ones, it is
true, bound me to a few wealthy" target="_blank" title="a.富有的；丰富的">wealthy houses, but my own pride would have

kept me aloof from them if contempt and indifference had not shut
their doors on me in the first place. I was related to people who were

very influential, and who lavished their patronage on strangers; but I
found neither relations nor patrons in them. Continually circumscribed

in my affections, they recoiled upon me. Unreserved and simple by
nature, I must have appeared frigid and sophisticated. My father's

discipline had destroyed all confidence in myself. I was shy and
awkward; I could not believe that my opinion carried any weight

whatever; I took no pleasure in myself; I thought myself ugly, and was
ashamed to meet my own eyes. In spite of the inward voice that must be

the stay of a man with anything in him, in all his struggles, the
voice that cries, 'Courage! Go forward!' in spite of sudden

revelations of my own strength in my solitude; in spite of the hopes
that thrilled me as I compared new works, that the public admired so

much, with the schemes that hovered in my brain,--in spite of all
this, I had a childishmistrust of myself.

"An overweening ambition preyed upon me; I believed that I was meant
for great things, and yet I felt myself to be nothing. I had need of

other men, and I was friendless. I found I must make my way in the
world, where I was quite alone, and bashful, rather than afraid.

"All through the year in which, by my father's wish, I threw myself
into the whirlpool of fashionable society, I came away with an

inexperienced heart, and fresh in mind. Like every grown child, I
sighed in secret for a love affair. I met, among young men of my own

age, a set of swaggerers who held their heads high, and talked about
trifles as they seated themselves without a tremor beside women who

inspired awe in me. They chattered nonsense, sucked the heads of their
canes, gave themselves affected airs, appropriated the fairest women,

and laid, or pretended that they had laid their heads on every pillow.
Pleasure, seemingly, was at their beck and call; they looked on the

most virtuous and prudish as an easy prey, ready to surrender at a
word, at the slightest impudent gesture or insolent look. I declare,

on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great
name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with

some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.
"So I found the tumult of my heart, my feelings, and my creeds all at

variance with the axioms of society. I had plenty of audacity in my
character, but none in my manner. Later, I found out that women did

not like to be implored. I have from afar adored many a one to whom I
devoted a soul proof against all tests, a heart to break, energy that

shrank from no sacrifice and from no torture; THEY accepted fools whom
I would not have engaged as hall porters. How often, mute and

motionless, have I not admired the lady of my dreams, swaying in the
dance; given up my life in thought to one eternalcaress, expressed

all my hopes in a look, and laid before her, in my rapture, a young
man's love, which should outstrip all fables. At some moments I was

ready to barter my whole life for one single night. Well, as I could
never find a listener for my impassioned proposals, eyes to rest my

own upon, a heart made for my heart, I lived on in all the sufferings
of impotent force that consumes itself; lacking either opportunity or

courage or experience. I despaired, maybe, of making myself
understood, or I feared to be understood but too well; and yet the

storm within me was ready to burst at every chance courteous look. In
spite of my readiness to take the semblance of interest in look or

word for a tenderer solicitude, I dared neither to speak nor to be
silent seasonably. My words grew insignificant, and my silence stupid,

by sheer stress of emotion. I was too ingenuous, no doubt, for that
artificial life, led by candle-light, where every thought is expressed

in conventional phrases, or by words that fashion dictates; and not
only so, I had not learned how to employ speech that says nothing, and

silence that says a great deal. In short, I concealed the fires that
consumed me, and with such a soul as women wish to find, with all the

elevation of soul that they long for, and a mettle that fools plume
themselves upon, all women have been cruellytreacherous to me.

"So in my simplicity I admired the heroes of this 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 scientificcuriosity, 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 insight of contemned love.
"I can see now that my natural sincerity must have been displeasing to

them; women, perhaps, even require a little hypocrisy. And I, who in
the same hour's space am alternately a man and a child, frivolous and

thoughtful, free from bias and brimful of superstition, and oftentimes
myself as much a woman as any of them; how should they do otherwise

than take my simplicity for cynicism, my innocent candor for
impudence? They found my knowledge tiresome; my feminine languor,

weakness. I was held to be listless and incapable of love or of steady
purpose; a too active imagination, that curse of poets, was no doubt

the cause. My silence was idiotic; and as I daresay I alarmed them by
my efforts to please, women one and all have condemned me. With tears

and mortification, I bowed before the decision of the world; but my
distress was not barren. I determined to revenge myself on society; I

would dominate the feminineintellect, and so have the feminine soul
at my mercy; all eyes should be fixed upon me, when the servant at the

door announced my name. I had determined from my childhood that I
would be a great man; I said with Andre Chenier, as I struck my

forehead, 'There is something underneath that!' I felt, I believed,
the thought within me that I must express, the system I must

establish, the knowledge I must interpret.
"Let me pour out my follies, dear Emile; to-day I am barely twenty-six

years old, certain of dying unrecognized, and I have never been the
lover of the woman I dreamed of possessing. Have we not all of us,

more or less, believed in the reality of a thing because we wished it?
I would never have a young man for my friend who did not place himself

in dreams upon a pedestal, weave crowns for his head, and have
complaisant mistresses. I myself would often be a general, nay,

emperor; I have been a Byron, and then a nobody. After this sport on
these pinnacles of human achievement, I became aware that all the

difficulties and steeps of life were yet to face. My exuberant self-