The people who had lost all their importance, whom we scattered with our breath like soap-bubbles, will tomorrow resume their density; we shall have to try afresh to settle down to work which this evening had ceased to have any significance. A more serious matter still, these mathematics of the morrow, the same as those of yesterday, in whose problems we shall find ourselves inexorably involved, it is they that govern us even in these hours, and we alone are unconscious of their rule. If there should happen to be, near us, a woman, virtuous or inimical, that question so difficult an hour ago⁠—to know whether we should succeed in finding favour with her⁠—seems to us now a million times easier of solution without having become easier in any respect, for it is only in our own sight, in our own inward sight that we have altered. And she is as much annoyed with us at this moment as we shall be next day at the thought of our having given a hundred francs to the messenger, and for the same reason which in our case has merely been delayed in its operation, namely the absence of intoxication.