MISANTHROPY AND REPENTANCE

August 3d, Nine O'clock P.M.

There are days when everything appears gloomy to us; the world, like the
sky, is covered by a dark fog. Nothing seems in its place; we see only
misery, improvidence, and cruelty; the world seems without God, and given
up to all the evils of chance.

Yesterday I was in this unhappy humor. After a long walk in the
faubourgs, I returned home, sad and dispirited.

Everything I had seen seemed to accuse the civilization of which we are
so proud! I had wandered into a little by-street, with which I was not
acquainted, and I found myself suddenly in the middle of those dreadful
abodes where the poor are born, to languish and die. I looked at those
decaying walls, which time has covered with a foul leprosy; those
windows, from which dirty rags hang out to dry; those fetid gutters,
which coil along the fronts of the houses like venomous reptiles!
I felt oppressed with grief, and hastened on.

A little farther on I was stopped by the hearse of a hospital; a dead
man, nailed down in his deal coffin, was going to his last abode, without
funeral pomp or ceremony, and without followers. There was not here even
that last friend of the outcast--the dog, which a painter has introduced
as the sole attendant at the pauper's burial! He whom they were
preparing to commit to the earth was going to the tomb, as he had lived,
alone; doubtless no one would be aware of his end. In this battle of
society, what signifies a soldier the less?