The hours passed by unheeded. What strange
libertines we were! We did not speak a word and there were tears in our
eyes.
Desgenais especially, habitually the coldest and driest of men, was
inexplicable on such occasions; he delivered himself of such
extraordinary sentiments that he might have been considered a poet in
delirium. But after these effusions he would be seized with furious joy.
He would break everything within reach when warmed by wine; the genius of
destruction stalked forth armed to the teeth. I have seen him pick up a
chair and hurl it through a closed window.
I could not help making a study of that singular man. He appeared to me
the marked type of a class which ought to exist somewhere but which was
unknown to me. One could never tell whether his outbursts were the
despair of a man sick of life, or the whim of a spoiled child.
During the fete, in particular, he was in such a state of nervous
excitation that he acted like a schoolboy. He persuaded me to go out on
foot with him one day, muffled in grotesque costumes, with masks and
instruments of music. We promenaded gravely all night, in the midst of a
most frightful din of horrible sounds. We found a driver asleep on his
box and unhitched his horses; then pretending we had just come from the
ball, set up a great cry. The coachman started up, cracked his whip and
his horses started off on a trot, leaving him seated on the box.
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