He reached the gate; a carriage, detaching itself from the file, departed: "Perhaps it was she? No, she must be far away, by now. The air is very pleasant, the sky clear, it would have been nice to return on foot, chatting. This pleasure was not made for me, and it is ridiculous even to dream of it. Yet, would she have refused me, if I had asked? Eh! there I reason as if this woman had the slightest liking for me. Shall I, then, never cure myself of the stupid presumption with which I so grievously delude myself? What is the good of my philosophy? Everything is useless. Ah! I suffer less! The futility of my life is not unique; it is confounded with the universal nothingness. Yes, but all the same I can only consider myself, only myself, since I know nothing outside of my consciousness. Well, then! I remain alone, indemnified and invulnerable. What is that cloud, called Sixtine, which comes to trouble my royal indifference and to conceal my sun--death? I do not want to go to sleep in the shadow of her beauty. What is the good of loving, when the awakening is certain. Ah! if eternity were given me! Indispensable eternity, without you life is only a quite despicable thoroughfare. Does the present hour exist for the condemned person who knows that the next hour will not belong to him? And this life is less than an hour for whomsoever knows the worth of what he has been deprived of in being robbed of eternity." How he would have sacrificed his genius to be a Christian and no longer a dilettante of Christianity, believing, not in the unique beauty, but in the truth of religion, assured not alone of his social necessity, but of his immutable, absolute and solar truth!
He issued from his metaphysical cloud near the Pont-Royal, and fell back into his actual misery. The woman he loved did not love him and would never love him. In vain he scorned himself, in vain he accused himself of emotional impotence, the man deep in him protested and repeated: "I must love, since I suffer."
But, with Entragues, the man never pronounced the final aphorism. After the troubled divagations of the lover came the romancer, an artist or ditch-digger who gathered impressions together, clothed them in words as with a shroud of chatoyant folds, and laid them to rest, with care, respect and tenderness, in the vault whose portal bears the words written in letters of gold: LITERATURE.