perfectly all that I had done and seen done. The most trivial gestures and attitudes, all the most petty details, were very clearly delineated in my memory; I recalled everything, to the lightest inflections of voice and the most fleeting shades of enjoyment; and yet I did not seem to realize that all these things had happened to myself rather than to another. I was not sure that it was not an illusion, a phantasmagoria, a dream, or that I had not read it somewhere, or even that it was not a tale composed by myself just as similar ones had often been made by me. I was afraid of being the dupe of my own credulity and the butt of some hoax; and in spite of the witness borne by my lassitude, and the material proofs that I had slept elsewhere, I would have been ready to believe that I had put myself under my bedclothes at my usual time, and had slept till morning.
“I am very unfortunate in not having the capacity to acquire the moral certainty of a thing, the physical certainty of which I possess. Generally the reverse happens, and it is the fact that proves the idea. I would fain prove the fact to myself by the idea; I cannot do so; though this is singular enough, it is the case. The possession of a mistress depends upon myself up to a certain point, but I cannot bring myself to believe that I have one while having her all the time. If I have not the necessary faith within me, even for something so evident as this, it is as impossible for me to believe in so simple a fact as it is for another to believe in the Trinity. Faith has not acquired it; it is purely a gift, a special grace from Heaven.
“Never has any one desired so strongly as myself to live the life of others, and to assimilate another nature; never has any one succeeded less in doing so. Whatever I may do, other men are to me scarcely anything but phantoms, and I have no sense of their existence; yet it is not the desire to recognize their life and to participate in it that is wanting in me. It is the power, or the lack of real sympathy for anything. The existence or non-existence of a thing or person does not interest me sufficiently to affect me in a sensible and convincing manner.
“The sight of a woman or a man who appears to me in real life leaves no stronger traces upon my soul than the fantastic vision of a dream. About me there moves, with dull humming sound, a pale world of shadows and semblances false or true, in the midst of which I am as isolated as possible, for none of them acts on me for good or evil, and they seem to me to be of quite a different nature. If I speak to them, and they reply to me with something like common-sense, I am as much surprised as if my dog or my cat were suddenly to begin to speak and mingle in the conversation. The sound of their voice always astonishes me, and I would be very ready to believe that they are merely fleeting appearances whose objective mirror I am. Inferior or superior, I am certainly not of their kind.
“There are moments when I recognize none save God above me, and others, when I judge myself scarcely the equal of the wood-louse beneath its stone, or the mollusc on its sand-bank; but in whatever state of mind I may be, whether lofty or depressed, I have never been able to persuade myself that men were really my fellows. When people call me 'Sir,' or in speaking about me, say 'this man,' it appears very singular to me. Even my name seems to me but an empty one, and not in reality mine, yet no matter in how low a tone it be pronounced amidst the loudest noise, I turn suddenly with a convulsive and feverish eagerness for which I have never been able to account to myself. Can it be the dread of finding in this man who knows my name, and to whom I am no longer one of the crowd, an antagonist or an enemy?
“It is especially when I have been living with a woman that I have most felt the invincible repugnance of my nature to any alliance or mixture. I am like a drop of oil in a glass of water. It is in vain that you turn and move the latter; the oil can never unite with it. It will divide itself into a hundred thousand little globules which will' reunite and mount again to the surface as soon as there is a moment's calm. The drop of oil and the glass of water — such is my history. Even voluptuousness, that diamond chain which binds all creatures together, that devouring fire which melts the rocks and metals of the soul, and makes them fall in tears, as material fire causes iron and granite to melt, has never, all powerful as it is, succeeded in taming and affecting me. Yet my senses are very keen, but my soul is to my body a hostile sister, and the happy couple, lawful or unlawful, live in a state of perpetual war. A woman's arms, the closest bonds on earth, so people say, are the very feeblest ties, so far as I am concerned, and I have never been further removed from my mistress than when she was pressing me to her heart. I was stifled, that was all.
“How many times have I been angered with myself! How many efforts have I made not to be as I am! How have I exhorted myself to be tender, amorous, impassioned! How often have I taken my soul by the hair, and dragged her to my lips in the midst of a beautiful kiss! Whatever I did she always retreated as soon as I released her. What torture for this poor soul to be exposed to these mad caprices of mine, and to sit everlastingly at banquets where she has nothing to eat!
“It was with Rosette that I resolved, once for all, to try whether I was not decidedly unsociable, and whether I could take sufficient interest in the existence of another to believe in it. I pushed my experiments to the point of exhaustion, and I did not become much clearer amid my doubts. With her, pleasure is so keen that often enough the soul is, if not moved, at least diverted, and this somewhat prejudices the exactness of my observations. But after all I came to see that it did not pass beyond the skin, and that I had only an epidermic enjoyment in which the soul took no part save from curiosity. I have pleasure, because I am young and ardent; but this pleasure comes to me from myself and not from another. The cause of it is in myself rather than in Rosette.
“My efforts are in vain, I cannot come out of myself. I am still what I was, something, that is to say, very wearied and very wearisome, and this displeases me greatly. I have not succeeded in getting into my brain the idea of another, into my soul the feeling of another, into my body the pain or joy of another. I am a prisoner within myself, and all invasion is impossible. The prisoner wishes to escape, the walls would most gladly fall in, and the gates open up to let him through, but some fatality or other invincibly keeps each stone in its place, and each bolt in its socket. It is as impossible for me to admit any one to see me as ill is for me to go to see others, I can neither pay visits nor receive them, and I live in the most mournful isolation in the midst of the crowd. My bed perhaps is not widowed, but my heart is so always.
“Ah! to be unable to increase one's self by a single particle, a single atom; to be unable to make the blood of others flow in one's veins; to see over with one's own eyes, and not more clearly, nor further, nor differently; to hear sounds with the same ears and the same emotion; to touch with the same fingers; to perceive things that are varied with an organ that is invariable; to be condemned to the same quality of voice, to the return of the same tones, the same phrases, and the same words, and to be unable to go away, to avoid one's self, to take refuge in some corner where there is no self-pursuit; to be obliged to keep one's self always, to dine with it, and go to bed with it; to be the same man for twenty new women; to drag into the midst of the strangest situations in the drama of our life a reluctant character whose role you know by heart; to think the same things, and to have the same dreams: what torment, what weariness!
“I have longed for the horn of the brothers Tangut, the cap of Fortunatus, the staff of Abaris, the ring of Gyges; I would have sold my soul to snatch the magic wand from the hand of a fairy; but I have never wished so much for anything as, like Tiresias the soothsayer, to meet on the mountains the serpents which cause a change of sex: and what I envy most in the monstrous and whimsical gods of India are their perpetual avatars and their countless transformations.
“I began by desiring to be another man; then, on reflecting that I might by analogy nearly foresee what I should feel, and thus not experience the surprise and the change that I had looked for, I would have preferred to be a woman. This idea has always come to me when I had a mistress who was not ugly-for to me an ugly woman is simply a man-and at particular moments I would willingly have changed my part, for it is very provoking to be unaware of the effect that one produces, and to judge of the enjoyment of others only by one's own. These thoughts, and many others, have often given me, at times when it was most out of place, a meditative and dreamy air, which has led to my being accused, really most undeservedly, of coldness and infidelity.
“Rosette, who very happily does not know all this, believes me the most amorous man on earth; she takes this impotent transport for a transport of passion; and to the best of her ability she lends herself to all the experimental caprices that enter my head.
“I have done all that I could to convince myself that I possess her. I have tried to descend into her heart, but I have always stopped at the first step of the staircase, at her skin or on her mouth. In spite of the particular intimacy of our relations, I am very sensible that there is nothing in common between us. Never has an idea similar to mine spread its wings in that young and smiling head; never has that heart, full of life and fire, that heaves with its throbbing so firm and pure a breast, beaten in unison with my heart. My soul has never united with that soul. Cupid, the god with hawk's wings, has not kissed Psyche on her beautiful ivory brow. No! this woman does not belong to me.
“If you knew all that I have done to compel my soul to share in the love of my body, the frenzy with which I
