Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again.
Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all.

But in traversing the world, which he made his cloister, Wilfrid had found no balm for his wounds; he saw nothing in nature to which he could attach himself.

In him, despair had dried the sources of desire.

He was one of those beings who, having gone through all passions and come out victorious, have nothing more to raise in their hot-beds, and who, lacking opportunity to put themselves at the head of their fellow-men to trample under iron heel entire populations, buy, at the price of a horrible martyrdom, the faculty of ruining themselves in some belief,--rocks sublime, which await the touch of a wand that comes not to bring the waters gushing from their far-off spring.
Led by a scheme of his restless, inquiring life to the shores of Norway, the sudden arrival of winter had detained the wanderer at Jarvis.

The day on which, for the first time, he saw Seraphita, the whole past of his life faded from his mind.