Amen." Five days later he again gives the reins to his melancholy.

"Always alone, though in the midst of men," he faces the thought of suicide.
With an innate power of summarizing and balancing thoughts and sensations, he draws up arguments for and against this act.

He is in the dawn of his days and in four months' time he will see "la patrie," which he has not seen since childhood.

What joy! And yet--how men have fallen away from nature: how cringing are his compatriots to their conquerors: they are no longer the enemies of tyrants, of luxury, of vile courtiers: the French have corrupted their morals, and when "la patrie" no longer survives, a good patriot ought to die.

Life among the French is odious: their modes of life differ from his as much as the light of the moon differs from that of the sun .-- A strange effusion this for a youth of seventeen living amidst the full glories of the spring in Dauphine.