tion in his offices, or a place with Daelmans-Deynze.
Paridael refused point blank. The slightest dependence, the least control was as repugnant to him as a chain.
Sometimes, affected by a friendly word, he promised to take to regular habits; he would make an effort to content himself with the commonplace existence of sedate and more sober people; but these good resolutions left him at the first vexation which bourgeois platitudes and self-sufficiency caused him.
The prognostications of Cousin Dobouziez weighed upon him like a malediction; that positive and clear-sighted man had fathomed the future of his exceptional relative.
Laurent began to wish himself irresponsible, to envy the shut-away, criminal or insane, who were not tormented with the worry about daily bread and the struggle for existence. His almost saintly goodness of heart, an hysterical excellence like that of the Franciscans of Assisi, unbridled him and pushed him to the ultimate consequences of fatalism. He believed himself predestined; without will, without faith, without object, he wished to die and sink himself again into the great all, like a defaced coin which the minter puts back into the crucible. After his atoms had been scattered and his elements dispersed, the eternal chemist would again combine them with more profit to creation.
The visit which Laurent paid, at the height of this crisis, to a penitentiary, aggravated his deleterious desires.
"Sick, irresponsible, unfortunate people!" he pleaded, on his return from this excursion, before the politician, the painter and the musician. "People who
