During that period of ardent, laborious youth, he faithfully shut himself
up in libraries, attended public lectures, and gave himself a solid
foundation of learning, which sometimes awakened surprise when discovered
under the elegant frivolity of the gay turfman. But while arming himself
for the battle of life, he lost, little by little, what was more
essential than the best weapons-true courage.

In proportion as he followed Truth day by day, she flew before and eluded
him, taking, like an unpleasant vision, the form of the thousand-headed
Chimera.

About the middle of the last century, Paris was so covered with political
and religious ruins, that the most piercing vision could scarcely
distinguish the outlines of the fresh structures of the future.
One could, see that everything was overthrown; but one could not see any
power that was to raise the ruins. Over the confused wrecks and remains
of the Past, the powerful intellectual life of the Present-Progress--the
collision of ideas--the flame of French wit, criticism and the sciences--
threw a brilliant light, which, like the sun of earlier ages, illuminated
the chaos without making it productive. The phenomena of Life and of
Death were commingled in one huge fermentation, in which everything
decomposed and whence nothing seemed to spring up again.

At no period of history, perhaps, has Truth been less simple, more
enveloped in complications; for it seemed that all essential notions of
humanity had been fused in a great furnace, and none had come out whole.

The spectacle is grand; but it troubles profoundly all souls--or at least
those that interest and curiosity do not suffice to fill; which is to
say, nearly all. To disengage from this bubbling chaos one pure