Human reason
has overthrown all illusions; but it bears in itself sorrow, in order
that it may be consoled.
The customs of students and artists, those customs so free, so beautiful,
so full of youth, began to experience the universal change. Men in taking
leave of women whispered the word which wounds to the death: contempt.
They plunged into the dissipation of wine and courtesans. Students and
artists did the same; love was treated as glory and religion: it was an
old illusion. The grisette, that class so dreamy, so romantic, so tender,
and so sweet in love, abandoned herself to the counting-house and to the
shop. She was poor and no one loved her; she wanted dresses and hats and
she sold herself. O, misery! the young man who ought to love her, whom
she loved, who used to take her to the woods of Verrieres and
Romainville, to the dances on the lawn, to the suppers under the trees;
he who used to talk with her as she sat near the lamp in the rear of the
shop on the long winter evenings; he who shared her crust of bread
moistened with the sweat of her brow, and her love at once sublime and
poor; he, that same man, after having abandoned her, finds her after a
night of orgie, pale and leaden, forever lost, with hunger on her lips
and prostitution in her heart.
About this time two poets, whose genius was second only to that of
Napoleon, consecrated their lives to the work of collecting all the
elements of anguish and of grief scattered over the universe.
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