This promiscuity in admiration, furthermore, was one of the greatest sources of regret in his life.  Incomprehensible successes had forever spoiled for him many pictures and books once cherished and dear.  Approved by the mob, they began to reveal imperceptible defects to him, and he rejected them, wondering meanwhile if his perceptions were not growing blunted.

He closed his portfolios and, completely disconcerted, again plunged into melancholy.  To divert the current of his thoughts and cool his brain, he sought books that would soothe him and turned to the romances of Dickens, those charming novels which are so satisfying to invalids and convalescents who might grow fatigued by works of a more profound and vigorous nature.

But they produced an effect contrary to his expectations.  These chaste lovers, these protesting heroines garbed to the neck, loved among the stars, confined themselves to lowered eyes and blushes, wept tears of joy and clasped hands—­an exaggeration of purity which threw him into an opposite excess.  By the law of contrast, he leaped from one extreme to the other, let his imagination dwell on vibrant scenes between human lovers, and mused on their sensual kisses and passionate embraces.

His mind wandered off from his book to worlds far removed from the English prude:  to wanton peccadilloes and salacious practices condemned by the Church.  He grew excited.  The impotence of his mind and body which he had supposed final, vanished.  Solitude again acted on his disordered nerves; he was once more obsessed, not by religion itself, but by the acts and sins it forbids, by the subject of all its obsecrations and threats.  The carnal side, atrophied for months, which had been stirred by the enervation of his pious readings, then brought to a crisis by the English cant, came to the surface.  His stimulated senses carried him back to the past and he wallowed in memories of his old sin.

He rose and pensively opened a little box of vermeil with a lid of aventurine.

It was filled with violet bonbons.  He took one up and pressed it between his fingers, thinking of the strange properties of this sugary, frosted sweetmeat.  When his virility had been impaired, when the thought of woman had roused in him no sharp regret or desire, he had only to put one in his mouth, let it melt, and almost at once it induced misty, languishing memories, infinitely tender.

These bonbons invented by Siraudin and bearing the ridiculous name of “Perles des Pyrenees” were each a drop of sarcanthus perfume, a drop of feminine essence crystallized in a morsel of sugar.  They penetrated the papillae of the tongue, recalling the very savor of voluptuous kisses.

Usually he smiled as he inhaled this love aroma, this shadow of a caress which for a moment restored the delights of women he had once adored.  Today they were not merely suggestive, they no longer served as a delicate hint of his distant riotous past.  They were become powerful, thrusting aside the veils, exposing before his eyes the importunate, corporeal and brutal reality.