Indifference comes; she stretches herself on the divan, taking no care
to draw down the skirts of her robe which Desire but now lifted so
chastely and so eagerly. She casts a glance upon the nuptial bed, with
modesty and without shamelessness; and, if she longs for anything, it
is for the green fruit that calls up again to life the dulled papillae
with which her blase palate is bestrewn. Finally the philosophical
Experience of Life presents herself, with careworn and disdainful
brow, pointing with her finger to the results, and not the causes of
life's incidents; to the tranquil victory, not to the tempestuous
combat. She reckons up the arrearages, with farmers, and calculates
the dowry of a child. She materializes everything. By a touch of her
wand, life becomes solid and springless; of yore, all was fluid, now
it is crystallized into rock. Delight no longer exists for our hearts,
it has received its sentence, 'twas but mere sensation, a passing
paroxysm. What the soul desires to-day is a condition of fixity; and
happiness alone is permanent, and consists in absolute tranquillity,
in the regularity with which eating and sleeping succeed each other,
and the sluggish organs perform their functions.

"This is horrible!" I cried; "I am young and full of life! Perish all
the books in the world rather than my illusions should perish!"

I left my laboratory and plunged into the whirl of Paris. As I saw the
fairest faces glide by before me, I felt that I was not old. The first
young woman who appeared before me, lovely in face and form and
dressed to perfection, with one glance of fire made all the sorcery
whose spells I had voluntarily submitted to vanish into thin air.
Scarcely had I walked three steps in the Tuileries gardens, the place
which I had chosen as my destination, before I saw the prototype of
the matrimonial situation which has last been described in this book.