To-day you stand
before the first ruin you are going to leave on your route. If Brigitte
dies to-morrow you will weep on her tomb; where will you go when you
leave her? You will go away for three months perhaps, and you will travel
in Italy; you will wrap your cloak about you, like a splenetic
Englishman, and you will say some beautiful morning, sitting in your inn
with your glasses before you, that it is time to forget in order to live
again. You who weep too late, take care lest you weep more than one day.
Who knows? When the present, which makes you shudder, shall have become
the past, an old story, a confused memory, may it not happen some night
of debauchery that you will overturn your chair and recount, with a smile
on your lips, what you witnessed with tears in your eyes? It is thus that
one drinks away shame. You have begun by being good, you will become
weak, and you will become a monster.
"My poor friend," said I, from the bottom of my heart, "I have a word of
advice for you, and it is this: I believe that you must die. While there
is still some virtue left, profit by it in order that you may not become
altogether bad; while a woman you love lies there dying on that bed, and
while you have a horror of yourself, strike the decisive blow; she still
lives; that is enough; do not attend her funeral obsequies for fear that
on the morrow you will not be consoled; turn the poignard against your
own heart while that heart yet loves the God who made it.
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