for it; and these are the virtues you prescribe to woman. And that is

not enough. By way of requiting her self-denial, you must come and add
to her sorrows by trying to lead her astray; and though you are

rebuffed, she is compromised. A nice life! How far better to keep
one's freedom, to follow one's inclinations in love, and die young!"

"Have you no fear of the price to be paid some day for all this?"
"Even then," she said, "instead of mingling pleasures and troubles, my

life will consist of two separate parts--a youth of happiness is
secure, and there may come a hazy, uncertain old age, during which I

can suffer at my leisure."
"She has never loved," came in the deep tones of Aquilina's voice.

"She never went a hundred leagues to drink in one look and a denial
with untold raptures. She has not hung her own life on a thread, nor

tried to stab more than one man to save her sovereign lord, her king,
her divinity. . . . Love, for her, meant a fascinating colonel."

"Here she is with her La Rochelle," Euphrasia made answer. "Love comes
like the wind, no one knows whence. And, for that matter, if one of

those brutes had once fallen in love with you, you would hold sensible
men in horror."

"Brutes are put out of the question by the Code," said the tall,
sarcastic Aquilina.

"I thought you had more kindness for the army," laughed Euphrasia.
"How happy they are in their power of dethroning their reason in this

way," Raphael exclaimed.
"Happy?" asked Aquilina, with dreadful look, and a smile full of pity

and terror. "Ah, you do not know what it is to be condemned to a life
of pleasure, with your dead hidden in your heart. . . ."

A moment's consideration of the rooms was like a foretaste of Milton's
Pandemonium. The faces of those still capable of drinking wore a

hideous blue tint, from burning draughts of punch. Mad dances were
kept up with wild energy; excited laughter and outcries broke out like

the explosion of fireworks. The boudoir and a small adjoining room
were strewn like a battlefield with the insensible and incapable.

Wine, pleasure, and dispute had heated the atmosphere. Wine and love,
delirium and unconsciousness possessed them, and were written upon all

faces, upon the furniture; were expressed by the surrounding disorder,
and brought light films over the vision of those assembled, so that

the air seemed full of intoxicating vapor. A glittering dust arose, as
in the luminous paths made by a ray of sunlight, the most bizarre

forms flitted through it, grotesque struggles were seen athwart it.
Groups of interlaced figures blended with the white marbles, the noble

masterpieces of sculpture that adorned the rooms.
Though the two friends yet preserved a sort of fallacious clearness in

their ideas and voices, a feeble appearance and faint thrill of
animation, it was yet almost impossible to distinguish what was real

among the fantastic absurdities before them, or what foundation there
was for the impossible pictures that passed unceasingly before their

weary eyes. The strangest phenomena of dreams beset them, the lowering
heavens, the fervid sweetness caught by faces in our visions, and

unheard-of agility under a load of chains,--all these so vividly, that
they took the pranks of the orgy about them for the freaks of some

nightmare in which all movement is silent, and cries never reach the
ear. The valet de chambre succeeded just then, after some little

difficulty, in drawing his master into the ante-chamber to whisper to
him:

"The neighbors are all at their windows, complaining of the racket,
sir."

"If noise alarms them, why don't they lay down straw before their
doors?" was Taillefer's rejoinder.

Raphael's sudden burst of laughter was so unseasonable and abrupt,
that his friend demanded the reason of his unseemly hilarity.

"You will hardly understand me," he replied. "In the first place, I
must admit that you stopped me on the Quai Voltaire just as I was

about to throw myself into the Seine, and you would like to know, no
doubt, my motives for dying. And when I proceed to tell you that by an

almost miraculous chance the most poetic memorials of the material
world had but just then been summed up for me as a symbolical

interpretation of human wisdom; whilst at this minute the remains of
all the intellectual" target="_blank" title="n.知识分子">intellectual treasures ravaged by us at table are comprised in

these two women, the living and authentic types of folly, would you be
any the wiser? Our profoundapathy towards men and things supplied the

half-tones in a crudely contrasted picture of two theories of life so
diametrically opposed. If you were not drunk, you might perhaps catch

a gleam of philosophy in this."
"And if you had not both feet on that fascinating Aquilina, whose

heavy breathing suggests an analogy with the sounds of a storm about
to burst," replied Emile, absently engaged in the harmless amusement

of winding and unwinding Euphrasia's hair, "you would be ashamed of
your inebriated garrulity. Both your systems can be packed in a

phrase, and reduced to a single idea. The mere routine of living
brings a stupid kind of wisdom with it, by blunting our intelligence

with work; and on the other hand, a life passed in the limbo of the
abstract or in the abysses of the moral world, produces a sort of

wisdom run mad. The conditions may be summed up in brief; we may
extinguish emotion, and so live to old age, or we may choose to die

young as martyrs to contending passions. And yet this decree is at
variance with the temperaments with which we were endowed by the

bitter jester who modeled all creatures."
"Idiot!" Raphael burst in. "Go on epitomizing yourself after that

fashion, and you will fill volumes. If I attempted to formulate those
two ideas clearly, I might as well say that man is corrupted by the

exercise of his wits, and purified by ignorance. You are calling the
whole fabric of society to account. But whether we live with the wise

or perish with the fool, isn't the result the same sooner or later?
And have not the prime constituents of the quintessence of both

systems been before expressed in a couple of words--Carymary,
Carymara."

"You make me doubt the existence of a God, for your stupidity is
greater than His power," said Emile. "Our beloved Rabelais summed it

all up in a shorter word than your 'Carymary, Carymara'; from his
Peut-etre Montaigne derived his own Que sais-je? After all, this last

word of moral science is scarcely more than the cry of Pyrrhus set
betwixt good and evil, or Buridan's ass between the two measures of

oats. But let this everlasting question alone, resolved to-day by a
'Yes' and a 'No.' What experience did you look to find by a jump into

the Seine? Were you jealous of the hydraulic machine on the Pont Notre
Dame?"

"Ah, if you but knew my history!"
"Pooh," said Emile; "I did not think you could be so commonplace; that

remark is hackneyed. Don't you know that every one of us claims to
have suffered as no other ever did?"

"Ah!" Raphael sighed.
"What a mountebank art thou with thy 'Ah'! Look here, now. Does some

disease of the mind or body, by contracting your muscles, bring back
of a morning the wild horses that tear you in pieces at night, as with

Damiens once upon a time? Were you driven to sup off your own dog in a
garret, uncooked and without salt? Have your children ever cried, 'I

am hungry'? Have you sold your mistress' hair to hazard the money at
play? Have you ever drawn a sham bill of exchange on a fictitious

uncle at a sham address, and feared lest you should not be in time to
take it up? Come now, I am attending! If you were going to drown

yourself for some woman, or by way of a protest, or out of sheer
dulness, I disown you. Make your confession, and no lies! I don't at

all want a historicalmemoir. And, above all things, be as concise as
your clouded intellect permits; I am as critical as a professor, and

as sleepy as a woman at her vespers."
"You silly fool!" said Raphael. "When has not suffering been keener

for a more susceptible nature? Some day when science has attained to a
pitch that enables us to study the natural history of hearts, when

they are named and classified in genera, sub-genera, and families;
into crustaceae, fossils, saurians, infusoria, or whatever it is,--

then, my dear fellow, it will be ascertained that there are natures as
tender and fragile as flowers, that are broken by the slight bruises

that some stony hearts do not even feel----"
"For pity's sake, spare me thy exordium," said Emile, as, half

plaintive, half amused, he took Raphael's hand.
II

A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART
After a moment's silence, Raphael said with a carelessgesture:

"Perhaps it is an effect of the fumes of punch--I really cannot tell--
this clearness of mind that enables me to comprise my whole life in a

single picture, where figures and hues, lights, shades, and half-tones
are faithfully rendered. I should not have been so surprised at this