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But the idea was one which he entertained merely as
an indefinite possibility upon which he felt no real impulse to act.
Meanwhile he chuckled at the thought of Fresnel as he had last seen
him, with his muffled face and glaring eyeballs. "For one who was
anything but a man of action," he writes, "I felt that I had
acquitted myself none so badly." It is a phrase that recurs at
intervals in his sketchy "Confessions." Constantly is he reminding
you that he is a man of mental and not physical activities, and
apologizing when dire necessity drives him into acts of violence.
I suspect this insistence upon his philosophic detachment - for
which I confess he had justification enough - to betray his
besetting vanity.
With increasing fatigue came depression and self-criticism. He
had stupidly overshot his mark in insultingly denouncing M. de
Lesdiguieres. "It is much better," he says somewhere, "to be
wicked than to be stupid. Most of this world's misery is the fruit
not as priests tell us of wickedness, but of stupidity.


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