The Inferno | Page 3

quieter and more
peaceful.
My coming from the country to stay in Paris for good marked an epoch
in my life. I had found a situation here in a bank. My days were to
change. It was because of this change that I got away from my usual
thoughts and turned to thoughts of myself.
I was thirty years old. I had lost my father and mother eighteen or
twenty years before, so long ago that the event was now insignificant. I
was unmarried. I had no children and shall have none. There are
moments when this troubles me, when I reflect that with me a line will
end which has lasted since the beginning of humanity.
Was I happy? Yes, I had nothing to mourn or regret, I had no
complicated desires. Therefore, I was happy. I remembered that since
my childhood I had had spiritual illuminations, mystical emotions, a
morbid fondness for shutting myself up face to face with my past. I had
attributed exceptional importance to myself and had come to think that
I was more than other people. But this had gradually become
submerged in the positive nothingness of every day.
. . . . .
There I was now in that room.

I leaned forward in my armchair to be nearer the glass, and I examined
myself carefully.
Rather short, with an air of reserve (although there are times when I let
myself go); quite correctly dressed; nothing to criticise and nothing
striking about my appearance.
I looked close at my eyes. They are green, though, oddly enough,
people usually take them for black.
I believed in many things in a confused sort of way, above all, in the
existence of God, if not in the dogmas of religion. However, I thought,
these last had advantages for poor people and for women, who have
less intellect than men.
As for philosophical discussions, I thought they are absolutely useless.
You cannot demonstrate or verify anything. What was truth, anyway?
I had a sense of good and evil. I would not have committed an
indelicacy, even if certain of impunity. I would not have permitted
myself the slightest overstatement.
If everyone were like me, all would be well.
. . . . .
It was already late. I was not going to do anything. I remained seated
there, at the end of the day, opposite the looking-glass. In the setting of
the room that the twilight began to invade, I saw the outline of my
forehead, the oval of my face, and, under my blinking eyelids, the gaze
by which I enter into myself as into a tomb.
My tiredness, the gloominess (I heard rain outside), the darkness that
intensified my solitude and made me look larger, and then something
else, I knew not what, made me sad. It bored me to be sad. I shook
myself. What was the matter? Nothing. Only myself.
I have not always been alone in life as I was that evening. Love for me

had taken on the form and the being of my little Josette. We had met
long before, in the rear of the millinery shop in which she worked at
Tours. She had smiled at me with singular persistence, and I caught her
head in my hands, kissed her on the lips--and found out suddenly that I
loved her.
I no longer recall the strange bliss we felt when, we first embraced. It is
true, there are moments when I still desire her as madly as the first time.
This is so especially when she is away. When she is with me, there are
moments when she repels me.
We discovered each other in the holidays. The days when we shall see
each other again before we die--we could count them--if we dared.
To die! The idea of death is decidedly the most important of all ideas. I
should die some day. Had I ever thought of it? I reflected. No, I had
never thought of it. I could not. You can no more look destiny in the
face than you can look at the sun, and yet destiny is grey.
And night came, as every night will come, until the last one, which will
be too vast.
But all at once I jumped up and stood on my feet, reeling, my heart
throbbing like the fluttering of wings.
What was it? In the street a horn resounded, playing a hunting song.
Apparently some groom of a rich family, standing near the bar of a
tavern, with cheeks puffed out, mouth squeezed tight, and an air of
ferocity, astonishing and silencing his audience.
But the thing that so stirred me was not the mere blowing of a horn in
the city streets. I had been brought up in the country,