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 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, 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.