"'But I--I have nothing; I have not even to face ridicule, I who live
solely on a love which is starving! I who can never find a word to say
to a woman of the world! I who loathe prostitution! I who am faithful
under a spell!--But for my religious faith, I should have killed
myself. I have defied the gulf of hard work; I have thrown myself into
it, and come out again alive, fevered, burning, bereft of sleep!----'

"I cannot remember all the words of this eloquent man, to whom passion
gave an eloquence indeed so far above that of the pleader that, as I
listened to him, I, like him, felt my cheeks wet with tears. You may
conceive of my feelings when, after a pause, during which we dried
them away, he finished his story with this revelation:--

"'This is the drama of my soul, but it is not the actual living drama
which is at this moment being acted in Paris! The interior drama
interests nobody. I know it; and you will one day admit that it is so,
you, who at this moment shed tears with me; no one can burden his
heart or his skin with another's pain. The measure of our sufferings
is in ourselves.--You even understand my sorrows only by very vague
analogy. Could you see me calming the most violent frenzy of despair
by the contemplation of a miniature in which I can see and kiss her
brow, the smile on her lips, the shape of her face, can breathe the
whiteness of her skin; which enables me almost to feel, to play with
the black masses of her curling hair?--Could you see me when I leap
with hope--when I writhe under the myriad darts of despair--when I
tramp through the mire of Paris to quell my irritation by fatigue? I
have fits of collapse comparable to those of a consumptive patient,
moods of wild hilarity, terrors as of a murderer who meets a sergeant
of police. In short, my life is a continual paroxysm of fears, joy,