sufferings during the rest of my life, had rendered me specially
sensitive to impressions from without; and this quickness to feel the
effect of external things was helped by an organic vigour such as is
only found among animals or savages. I was astounded at the decay of
the faculties in other people. These men in spectacles, these women with
their sense of smell deadened by snuff, these premature graybeards,
deaf and gouty before their time, were painful to behold. To me society
seemed like a vast hospital; and when with my robust constitution I
found myself in the midst of these weaklings, it seemed to me that with
a puff of my breath I could have blown them into the air as if they had
been so much thistle-down.

This unfortunately led me into the error of yielding to that rather
stupid kind of pride which makes a man presume upon his natural gifts.
For a long time it induced me to neglect their real improvement, as if
this were a work of supererogation. The idea that gradually grew up in
me of the worthlessness of my fellows prevented me from rising above
those whom I henceforth looked upon as my inferiors. I did not
realize that society is made up of so many elements of little value in
themselves, but so skilfully and solidly put together that before adding
the least extraneous particle a man must be a qualified artificer. I did
not know that in this society there is no resting-place between the role
of the great artist and that of the good workman. Now, I was neither one
nor the other, and, if the truth must be told, all my ideas have never
succeeded in lifting me out of the ordinary ruck; all my strength has
only enabled me with much difficulty to do as others do.

In a few weeks, then, I passed from an excess of admiration to an excess
of contempt for society. As soon as I understood the workings of its
springs they seemed to me so miserably regulated by a feeble generation