One's interlocutor was listening avidly to steal one's ideas, and behind one's back one was being vituperated.

And the women were always intruding.
In this indiscriminate world there was no illuminating criticism, nothing but small talk, elegant or inelegant.
Then Durtal learned, also by experience, that one cannot associate with thieves without becoming either a thief or a dupe, and finally he broke off relations with his confreres.
He not only had no sympathy but no common topic of conversation with them.

Formerly when he accepted naturalism--airtight and unsatisfactory as it was--he had been able to argue esthetics with them, but now! "The point is," Des Hermies was always telling him, "that there is a basic difference between you and the other realists, and no patched-up alliance could possibly be of long duration.

You execrate the age and they worship it.

There is the whole matter.