New Year’s Day is a melancholy and a tedious one for everybody whose public or private relations do not make it an exceptionally interesting one. There is the alteration in the date, for one thing, which is provocative of thought, and there is the enforced idleness for another, coming upon energetic folk like temporary paralysis and leaving them nothing but meditation wherewith to employ themselves.
“I fail to understand your attitude, young man. You appear to be hypnotised, fascinated. You speak of Fantômas as if he were something interesting. It is out of place, to put it mildly,” and he turned to the Abbé Sicot. “There, sir, that is the result of this modern education and the state of mind produced in the younger generation by the newspaper press and even by literature. Criminals are given haloes and proclaimed from the housetops. It is astounding!”
It seems to be a real established fact that the inventive faculties, even of men of inferior mental quality, are sharpened when they are engaged in mischief.
When one gets to my age, little Thérèse, one always does remember the happy days of one’s youth; one remembers recent events much less distinctly. Most likely that means, my dear, that the human heart declines to grow old and refuses to preserve any but pictures of childhood.


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