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I intended to suggest for our future conduct. The governor
informed Tiberge of my wish to see him. This ever-faithful
friend had not so entirely lost sight of me as to be ignorant of
my present abode, and it is probable that, in his heart, he did
not regret the circumstance, from an idea that it might furnish
the means of my moral regeneration. He lost no time in paying me
the desired visit.



VI


It is a strange thing to note the excess of this passion;
and how it braves the nature and value of things, by this--
that the speaking in a perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing
but in love.--BACON.


"My interview with Tiberge was of the most friendly description.
I saw that his object was to discover the present temper of my
mind. I opened my heart to him without any reserve, except as to
the mere point of my intention of escaping. `It is not from such
a friend as you,' said I, `that I can ever wish to dissemble my
real feelings. If you flattered yourself with a hope that you
were at last about to find me grown prudent and regular in my
conduct, a libertine reclaimed by the chastisements of fortune,
released alike from the trammels of love, and the dominion that
Manon wields over me, I must in candour say, that you deceive
yourself. You still behold me, as you left me four months ago,
the slave--if you will, the unhappy slave--of a passion, from
which I now hope, as fervently and as confidently as I ever did,
to derive eventually solid comfort.'

"He answered, that such an acknowledgment rendered me utterly
inexcusable; that it was no uncommon case to meet sinners who
allowed themselves to be so dazzled with the glare of vice as to
prefer it openly to the true splendour of virtue; they were at
least deluded by the false image of happiness, the poor dupes of
an empty shadow; but to know and feel as I did, that the object
of my attachment was only calculated to render me culpable and
unhappy, and to continue thus voluntarily in a career of misery
and crime, involved a contradiction of ideas and of conduct
little creditable to my reason.

"`Tiberge,' replied I, `it is easy to triumph when your
arguments are unopposed. Allow me to reason for a few moments in
my turn. Can you pretend that what you call the happiness of
virtue is exempt from troubles, and crosses, and cares? By what
name will you designate the dungeon, the rack, the inflections
and tortures of tyrants? Will you say with the Mystics[1] that
the soul derives pleasure from the torments of the body? You are
not bold enough to hold such a doctrine--a paradox not to be
maintained. This happiness, then, that you prize so much, has a
thousand drawbacks, or is, more properly speaking, but a tissue
of sufferings through which one hopes to attain felicity. If by
the power of imagination one can even derive pleasure from these
sufferings, hoping that they may lead to a happy end, why, let me
ask, do you deem my conduct senseless, when it is directed by

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