The Inferno | Page 4

and as a child I
used to hear that blast far in the distance, along the road to the woods
and the castle. The same air, the same thing exactly. How could the two
be so precisely alike?
And involuntarily my hand wavered to my heart.

Formerly--to-day--my life--my heart--myself! I thought of all this
suddenly, for no reason, as if I had gone mad.
. . . . .
My past--what had I ever made of myself? Nothing, and I was already
on the decline. Ah, because the refrain recalled the past, it seemed to
me as if it were all over with me, and I had not lived. And I had a
longing for a sort of lost paradise.
But of what avail to pray or rebel? I felt I had nothing more to expect
from life. Thenceforth, I should be neither happy nor unhappy. I could
not rise from the dead. I would grow old quietly, as quiet as I was that
day in the room where so many people had left their traces, and yet no
one had left his own traces.
This room--anywhere you turn, you find this room. It is the universal
room. You think it is closed. No, it is open to the four winds of heaven.
It is lost amid a host of similar rooms, like the light in the sky, like one
day amid the host of all other days, like my "I" amid a host of other I's.
I, I! I saw nothing more now than the pallor of my face, with deep
orbits, buried in the twilight, and my mouth filled with a silence which
gently but surely stifles and destroys.
I raised myself on my elbow as on a clipped wing. I wished that
something partaking of the infinite would happen to me.
I had no genius, no mission to fulfil, no great heart to bestow. I had
nothing and I deserved nothing. But all the same I desired some sort of
reward.
Love. I dreamed of a unique, an unheard-of idyll with a woman far
from the one with whom I had hitherto lost all my time, a woman
whose features I did not see, but whose shadow I imagined beside my
own as we walked along the road together.
Something infinite, something new! A journey, an extraordinary

journey into which to throw myself headlong and bring variety into my
life. Luxurious, bustling departures surrounded by solicitous inferiors, a
lazy leaning back in railway trains that thunder along through wild
landscapes and past cities rising up and growing as if blown by the
wind.
Steamers, masts, orders given in barbarous tongues, landings on golden
quays, then strange, exotic faces in the sunlight, puzzlingly alike, and
monuments, familiar from pictures, which, in my tourist's pride, seem
to have come close to me.
My brain was empty, my heart arid. I had never found anything, not
even a friend. I was a poor man stranded for a day in a boarding-house
room where everybody comes and everybody goes. And yet I longed
for glory! For glory bound to me like a miraculous wound that I should
feel and everybody would talk about. I longed for a following of which
I should be the leader, my name acclaimed under the heavens like a
new clarion call.
But I felt my grandeur slip away. My childish imagination played in
vain with those boundless fancies. There was nothing more for me to
expect from life. There was only I, who, stripped by the night, rose
upward like a cry.
I could hardly see any more in the dark. I guessed at, rather than saw,
myself in the mirror. I had a realising sense of my weakness and
captivity. I held my hands out toward the window, my outstretched
fingers making them look like something torn. I lifted my face up to the
sky. I sank back and leaned on the bed, a huge object with a vague
human shape, like a corpse. God, I was lost! I prayed to Him to have
pity on me. I thought that I was wise and content with my lot. I had said
to myself that I was free from the instinct of theft. Alas, alas, it was not
true, since I longed to take everything that was not mine.

CHAPTER II
The sound of the horn had ceased for some time. The street and the
houses had quieted down. Silence. I passed my hand over my forehead.
My fit of emotion was over. So much the better. I recovered my
balance by an effort of will-power.
I sat down at the table and took some papers out of my bag that I had to
look over and arrange.
Something spurred me on. I wanted to earn a little money.