The Inferno | Page 2

occupies less than a month of time, it is focussed intensely upon reality.
Everything that the author permits us to see and understand is seen
through a single point of life--a hole pierced in the wall between two
rooms of a grey Paris boarding house. The time is most often twilight,
with its romantic penumbra, darkening into the obscurity of night by
imperceptible degrees.

M. Barbusse has conceived the idea of making a man perceive the
whole spiritual tragedy of life through a cranny in the wall, and there is
a fine symbolism in this, as if he were vouchsafing us the opportunity
to perceive eternal things through the tiny crack which is all that is
revealed to us of infinity, so that the gates of Horn, darkened by our
human blindness, scarcely swing open before they close again.
The hero of this story has been dazzled by the flaming ramparts of the
world, so that eternity is only revealed to him in fiery glimpses that
shrivel him, and he is left in the dark void of time, clinging to a dream
which already begins to fail him.
And the significant thing about this book is that the final revelation
comes to him through the human voices of those who have suffered
much, because they have loved much, after his own daring intellectual
flights have failed him.
So this man who has confronted the greatest realities of life, enabled to
view them with the same objective detachment with which God sees
them, though without the divine knowledge which transmutes their
darkness, comes to learn that we carry all heaven and hell within
ourselves, and with a relentless insight, almost Lucretian in its
desperate intensity, he cries: "We are divinely alone, the heavens have
fallen on our heads." And he adds: "Here they will pass again, day after
day, year after year, all the prisoners of rooms will pass in their kind of
eternity. In the twilight when everything fades, they will sit down near
the light, in the room full of haloes; they will drag themselves to the
window's void. Their mouths will join and they will grow tender. They
will exchange a first or a last useless glance. They will open their arms,
they will caress each other. They will love life and be afraid to
disappear....
"I have heard the annunciation of whatever finer things are to come.
Through me has passed, without staying me in my course, the Word
which does not lie, and which said over again, will satisfy."
Truly a great and pitiless book, but there is a cleansing wind running
through it, which sweeps away life's illusions, and leaves a new hope

for the future in our hearts.
EDWARD J. O'BRIEN.
BASS RIVER, MASS., July, 10, 1918.


CHAPTER I
The landlady, Madame Lemercier, left me alone in my room, after a
short speech impressing upon me all the material and moral advantages
of the Lemercier boarding-house.
I stopped in front of the glass, in the middle of the room in which I was
going to live for a while. I looked round the room and then at myself.
The room was grey and had a dusty smell. I saw two chairs, one of
which held my valise, two narrow-backed armchairs with smeary
upholstery, a table with a piece of green felt set into the top, and an
oriental carpet with an arabesque pattern that fairly leaped to the eye.
This particular room I had never seen before, but, oh, how familiar it all
was--that bed of imitation mahogany, that frigid toilet table, that
inevitable arrangement of the furniture, that emptiness within those
four walls.
The room was worn with use, as if an infinite number of people had
occupied it. The carpet was frayed from the door to the window--a path
trodden by a host of feet from day to day. The moulding, which I could
reach with my hands, was out of line and cracked, and the marble
mantelpiece had lost its sharp edges. Human contact wears things out
with disheartening slowness.
Things tarnish, too. Little by little, the ceiling had darkened like a
stormy sky. The places on the whitish woodwork and the pink
wallpaper that had been touched oftenest had become smudgy--the

edge of the door, the paint around the lock of the closet and the wall
alongside the window where one pulls the curtain cords. A whole world
of human beings had passed here like smoke, leaving nothing white but
the window.
And I? I am a man like every other man, just as that evening was like
every other evening.
. . . . .
I had been travelling since morning. Hurry, formalities, baggage, the
train, the whiff of different towns.
I fell into one of the armchairs. Everything became