CHAPTER V.A PHILOSOPHER'S ADVICE.
Desgenais saw that my despair was incurable, that I would neither listen to any advice nor leave my room, he took the thing seriously.

I saw him enter one evening with an expression of gravity on his face; he spoke of my mistress and continued in his tone of persiflage, saying all manner of evil of women.

While he was speaking I was leaning on my elbow, and, rising in my bed, I listened attentively.
It was one of those sombre evenings when the sighing of the wind recalls the moaning of a dying man.

A fitful storm was brewing, and between the plashes of rain on the windows there was the silence of death.

All nature suffers in such moments, the trees writhe in pain and hide their heads; the birds of the fields cower under the bushes; the streets of cities are deserted.