"'I am mad,' I cried; 'I can feel the madness raging at times in my
brain. My ideas are like shadows; they flit before me, and I cannot
grasp them. Death would be preferable to this life, and I have
carefully considered the best way of putting an end to the struggle. I
am not thinking of the living Foedora in the Faubourg Saint Honore,
but of my Foedora here,' and I tapped my forehead. 'What to you say to
opium?'
"'Pshaw! horrid agonies,' said Rastignac.
"'Or charcoal fumes?'
"'A low dodge.'
"'Or the Seine?'
"'The drag-nets, and the Morgue too, are filthy.'
"'A pistol-shot?'
"'And if you miscalculate, you disfigure yourself for life. Listen to
me,' he went on, 'like all young men, I have pondered over suicide.
Which of us hasn't killed himself two or three times before he is
thirty? I find there is no better course than to use existence as a
means of pleasure. Go in for thorough dissipation, and your passion or
you will perish in it. Intemperance, my dear fellow, commands all
forms of death. Does she not wield the thunderbolt of apoplexy?
Apoplexy is a pistol-shot that does not miscalculate. Orgies are
lavish in all physical pleasures; is not that the small change for
opium? And the riot that makes us drink to excess bears a challenge to
mortal combat with wine.
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