Therefore, they are either so nonchalant that
they stop their ears, or the noise of the rest of the world suddenly
startles them from sleep. The father allows his son to go where so many
others go, where Cato himself went; he says that youth is but a stage.
But when he returns, the youth looks upon his sister; and sees what has
taken place in him during an hour passed in the society of brutal
reality! He says to himself: "My sister is not like that creature I have
just left!" And from that day he is disturbed and uneasy.
Sinful curiosity is a vile malady born of all impure contact. It is the
prowling instinct of fantoms who raise the lids of tombs; it is an
inexplicable torture with which God punishes those who have sinned; they
wish to believe that all sin as they have done, and would be disappointed
perhaps to find that it was not so. But they inquire, they search, they
dispute; they hang their heads on one side, as does an architect who
adjusts a pillar, and thus strive to find what they desire to know. Given
proof of evil, they laugh at it; doubtful of evil, they swear that it
exists; the good, they refuse to recognize. "Who knows?" Behold the grand
formula, the first words that Satan spoke when he saw heaven closing
against him. Alas! how many evils are those words responsible for! How
many disasters and deaths, how many strokes of terrible scythes in the
ripening harvest of humanity! How many hearts, how many families where
there is naught but ruin, since that word was first heard! "Who knows!
Who knows!" Loathsome words! Rather than pronounce them, one should do as
the sheep who graze about the slaughter-house and know it not.
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