At last came the day when everything slipped out of my grasp. The
little vessel, broken and gone like the only toy of a lonely child,
the sea itself, which had swallowed it, throwing me on shore after
a shipwreck that instead of a fair fight left in me the memory of a
suicide. It took away all that there was in me of independent
life, but just failed to take me out of the world, which looked
then indeed like Another World fit for no one else but unrepentant
sinners. Even Dominic failed me, his moral entity destroyed by
what to him was a most tragic ending of our common enterprise. The
lurid swiftness of it all was like a stunning thunder-clap--and,
one evening, I found myself weary, heartsore, my brain still dazed
and with awe in my heart entering Marseilles by way of the railway
station, after many adventures, one more disagreeable than another,
involving privations, great exertions, a lot of difficulties with
all sorts of people who looked upon me evidently more as a
discreditable vagabond deserving the attentions of gendarmes than a
respectable (if crazy) young gentleman attended by a guardian angel
of his own. I must confess that I slunk out of the railway station
shunning its many lights as if, invariably, failure made an outcast
of a man. I hadn't any money in my pocket. I hadn't even the
bundle and the stick of a destitute wayfarer. I was unshaven and
unwashed, and my heart was faint within me. My attire was such
that I daren't approach the rank of fiacres, where indeed I could
perceive only two pairs of lamps, of which one suddenly drove away
while I looked. The other I gave up to the fortunate of this
earth. I didn't believe in my power of persuasion. I had no
powers. I slunk on and on, shivering with cold, through the
uproarious streets. Bedlam was loose in them. It was the time of
Carnival.
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