O conoscenza-t non è senna il suo perché
ché il fedel prête ti chiamo: il più gran dei mali.
Egli era tutto disturbato, e pero non dubi-tava ancora,
al più al più, dubitava di esser presto sul punto
di dubitare. O conoscenza! tu sei fatale a quelli, nei quali
l’oprar segue da vicino il credo .
IL CARDINAL GERDIL.
Need it be said that Octave was faithful to his promise? He abandoned the pleasures proscribed by Armance.
The need for action and the desire to acquire novel experiences had driven him to frequent bad company, often less tedious than good. Now that he was happy, a sort of instinct led him to mix with men; he wished to dominate them.
For the first time, Octave had caught a glimpse of the tedium of too perfect manners and of the excess of cold politeness: bad tone allows a man to talk about himself, in and out of season, and he feels less isolated. After punch had been served in those brilliant saloons at the end of the Rue de Richelieu, which foreigners mistake for good company, one no longer has the sensation: “I am alone in a wilderness of people.” On the contrary, he can imagine that he has a score of intimate friends, whose names are unknown to him. May we venture to say, at the risk of compromising at one and the same time both our hero and ourself: Octave thought with regret of several of his supper companions.
The part of his life that had elapsed before his intimacy with the inhabitants of the H?tel de Bonnivet was beginning to strike him as foolish and marred by misunderstanding. “It rained,” he would say to himself in his original and vivid manner; “instead of taking an umbrella, I used foolishly to lose my temper with the state of the sky, and in moments of enthusiasm for what was beautiful and right, which were after all nothing but fits of madness, I used to imagine that the rain was falling on purpose to do me an ill turn.”
Charmed with the possibility of talking to Mademoiselle de Zohiloff of the observations he had made, like a second Philibert, in certain highly elegant ballrooms: “I found it a little unexpected,” he would say to her. “I no longer find such pleasure in that preeminently good society, of which I was once so fond. It seems to me that beneath a cloak of clever talk it proscribes all energy, all originality. If you are not a copy, people accuse you of being ill-mannered. And besides, good society usurps its privileges. It had in the past the privilege of judging what was proper, but now that it supposes itself to be attacked, it condemns not what is coarse and disagreeable without compensation, but what it thinks harmful to its interests.”
Armance listened coldly to her cousin, and said to him finally: “From what you think today, it is only a step to Jacobinism.” “I should be in despair,” Octave sharply retorted. “In despair at what? At knowing the truth,” said Armance. “For obviously you would not l............