But it was a part of the new creed that enjoyment was to be had for the asking, and the _propaganda_ already existed. "There was a little society of devotees, if I may call them so--Michel Chevalier, Olinde, Enfantin, and others--who were zealously preaching the rehabilitation of the flesh"; and Heine devoted himself with assiduity to the pleasing cultus--with all the more assiduity, we may fairly suppose, as being a stranger in Paris. I fear that his labors were in the main of a carnal and unscientific sort; certainly they never won him any reputation for religious zeal. Nor was Paris the field before all others where laborers of this sort were needed. In Paris, indeed, the doctrine and practice of pleasure had been attended to, with no lack of zeal, for at least three centuries before the time of Heine's arrival there. Would that Heine had taken up his creed with somewhat more of reserve; that he had been content with a less many-sided experience of pleasure! For he surfeited himself somewhat with this experience; he knew its dangers perfectly well, but what ardent young man is deterred by knowing the danger? We bite at the hook just the same, as M. Renan says: _L'hameçon est évident, et néanmoins on y a mordu, on y mordra toujours_. And with all his love of delicacy, with all his distinction of spirit, he also relished harsh things. Sharp aliments, rank flavors, draining ecstasies that mingle the last drop of pleasure with pain and faintness, seemed necessary to complete the round of this man's life--of Heine the singer, Heine the man of all his time in whom the delicate blossoms of poetry were most fragrant. No poet could better deal than he with the exquisite joyances of the heart and soul; and he well knew that this bloom does not gather upon the fruit of coarse experience. He knew that the most delicate vintage is yielded to the gentle pressure. But with this he was not content. He crushed the grape harshly; he made it yield up its harsher juices; the flavors of rind and seed are expressed in the wine of his life, and mingle with the cup that he pours out.
And his life was spent as wine is poured upon the ground. Heine ended where the ascetics began, in pain, privation, mortification of the flesh; and it was a mortification that had not even the consolation of being the sufferer's own choice, for it was involuntary. Better for him would it have been had he gone out to dwell in the wilderness, as St. Jerome left the Paris of his day, and retired into the desert of Chalcis. For a strange penalty was to be his--one of which the joyous apostle of pleasure could hardly have dreamed before the blow fell. A paralytic touch converted the man of pleasure into a man of pain, his bed a living tomb. No more for ever, for Heine, was there to be any reinstatement of the flesh.