sandbanks of the river; saying only, "Night is beautiful!"

"Night is woman, madame."

"What tranquillity!"

"Yes, no one can be absolutely wretched here."

Then she would return to her embroidery frame. I came at last to hear
the inward beatings of an affection which sought its object. But the
fact remained--without money, farewell to these evenings. I wrote to
my mother to send me some. She scolded me and sent only enough to last
a week. Where could I get more? My life depended on it. Thus it
happened that in the dawn of my first great happiness I found the same
sufferings that assailed me elsewhere; but in Paris, at college, at
school I evaded them by abstinence; there my privations were negative,
at Frapesle they were active; so active that I was possessed by the
impulse to theft, by visions of crime, furious desperations which rend
the soul and must be subdued under pain of losing our self-respect.
The memory of what I suffered through my mother's parsimony taught me
that indulgence for young men which one who has stood upon the brink
of the abyss and measured its depths, without falling into them, must
inevitably feel. Though my own rectitude was strengthened by those
moments when life opened and let me see the rocks and quicksands
beneath the surface, I have never known that terrible thing called
human justice draw its blade through the throat of a criminal without
saying to myself: "Penal laws are made by men who have never known
misery."

At this crisis I happened to find a treatise on backgammon in Monsieur