‘But if you wish me to stay, you must send the other guests away.’
Dominique could hear them knocking on the door. The candles were not yet lighted, the room was in total darkness.
‘I cannot send them away,’ replied Dominique. ‘I cannot bear to be alone.’
‘It is true,’ said the stranger sadly, ‘with me you would be alone. Yet, for all that, you should let me stay with you. There are old wrongs you have done me, wrongs you should repair. I love you more than they do, those others who, when you are old, will come to you no longer.’
‘I cannot,’ said Dominique.
And at the same moment he felt that he had sacrificed a noble happiness for a tyrannical and vulgar habit and one, besides, which, in return for his obedience, had no more pleasures to offer him.
‘Choose quickly,’ said the stranger beseechingly, proudly.
Dominique went to open the door for his guests, at the same time asking the stranger, without daring to turn his head, ‘But who are you?’
And the stranger—the stranger who had already disappeared—replied, ‘Habit, to which you sacrifice me this evening, tomorrow, nourished by the blood of the wounds you have inflicted on me, will be stronger than ever. Each day more exigent for having been obeyed again, it will lead you a little farther from me, force you to make me suffer even more. Soon you will have killed me. You will never see me again. Yet you owe more to me than to the others, who will soon desert you. I am within you, yet I am now very far away; I hardly exist any longer. I am your soul, I am yourself.’

[…] Girolomo, observing the general boredom of the guests and his host’s difficult in recalling an almost forgotten dream, to the great satisfaction of everybody including Dominique himself interrupted him, drawing the following conclusion: ‘One should never remain alone. Solitude begets melancholy.’
Then they all began drinking again. Dominique chatted gaily but without joy, flattered by the brilliance of the company.