510 THE WORLD AS WILL. BK. IV.
great misfortune and pain, force an entrance, and the vanity of all striving become recognised. Hence it has often happened that men who have led a very restless life in the full strain of the passions, kings, heroes, and adventurers suddenly change, betake themselves to resignation and penance, become hermits or monks. To this class belong all true accounts of conversions; for example, that of Raymond Lully, who had long wooed a fair lady, and was at last admitted to her chamber, anticipating the fulfilment of all his wishes, when she, opening her bodice, showed him her bosom frightfully eaten with cancer From that moment, as if he had looked into hell, he was changed; he forsook the court of the king of Majorca and went into the desert to do penance.[1] This conversion is very like that of the Abbé Rancé, which I have briefly related in the 48th chapter of the Supplement. If we consider how in both cases the transition from the pleasure to the horror of life was the occasion of it, this throws some light upon the remarkable fact that it is among the French, the most cheerful, gay, sensuous, and frivolous nation in Europe, that by far the strictest of all monastic orders, the Trappists, arose, was re-established by Rancé after its fall, and has maintained itself to the present day in all its purity and strictness, in spite of revolutions, Church reformations, and encroachments of infidelity.
But a knowledge such as that referred to above of the nature of this existence may leave us again along with the occasion of it and the will to live, and with it the previous character may reappear. Thus we see that the passionate Benvenuto Cellini was changed in this way once when he was in prison, and again when very ill; but when the suffering passed over, he fell back again into his old state. In general, the denial of the will to live by no means proceeds from suffering with the necessity of an effect from its cause, but the will remains free;
- ↑ Bruckeri Hist. Philos., tomi iv. pars. i. p. 10.
