'Years of gladness,
Days of joy,
Like the torrents of spring
They hurried away.'

--_From an Old Ballad_.


... At two o'clock in the night he had gone back to his study. He had
dismissed the servant after the candles were lighted, and throwing
himself into a low chair by the hearth, he hid his face in both hands.

Never had he felt such weariness of body and of spirit. He had passed
the whole evening in the company of charming ladies and cultivated
men; some of the ladies were beautiful, almost all the men were
distinguished by intellect or talent; he himself had talked with great
success, even with brilliance ... and, for all that, never yet had
the _taedium vitae_ of which the Romans talked of old, the 'disgust
for life,' taken hold of him with such irresistible, such suffocating
force. Had he been a little younger, he would have cried with misery,
weariness, and exasperation: a biting, burning bitterness, like
the bitter of wormwood, filled his whole soul. A sort of clinging
repugnance, a weight of loathing closed in upon him on all sides like
a dark night of autumn; and he did not know how to get free from this
darkness, this bitterness. Sleep it was useless to reckon upon; he
knew he should not sleep.

He fell to thinking ... slowly, listlessly, wrathfully. He thought of
the vanity, the uselessness, the vulgar falsity of all things human.