or a fool. How do I know what he is thinking? How do I know whether he loves me as I love him? And what is passing through that small round head? What a mysterious thing are the secret thoughts of a human being, these thoughts that are at once hidden and free, that we can neither know, nor direct, nor rule, nor vanquish.
“And I, even I, who have all the will in the world to give my whole being, to fling open all the doors of my soul, cannot surrender myself. In the deepest recesses of my being, I guard the secret hiding-place of this I where no man can enter in. No man can discover it, nor enter therein, because no other man is made in my likeness, because no man understands any other.
“Even now, as I speak, do you at least understand me? No, you think me mad! You watch me curiously, you guard yourself from me! You say to yourself: ‘What is the matter with him this evening?’ but if ever there comes to you a moment of insight, and you feel in all its horror the subtle and unbearable suffering I endure, come to me and say only, ‘I understand you,’ and you will give me perhaps one second of happiness.
“There are women who make me realise my solitude even more vividly.
“Wretched! Most wretched! How I have suffered through them, because more often than men do, they have deluded me into thinking that I do not live alone.
“When we enter the dominion of Love we feel a sudden sense of freedom. An unearthly happiness pervades us. Do you know why? Do you know whence comes this sense of profound well-being? It is born of nothing more than a dream that we are no longer solitary. The isolation, the forsaken loneliness of the human spirit seems ended. What folly!
“Even more cruelly driven are we by the undying craving for love which gnaws at our lonely hearts; woman is the dream’s supremest cheat.
“You know those glorious hours spent in the company of this long-haired creature whose form enchants us and whose glance inflames us. What ecstasy it is that confounds our minds! What false dream that sweeps us away!
“Can it be that any moment now she and I will be one, one whole? But this ‘any moment now’ never comes, and after weeks of waiting, of hope and deceitful joy, one day I find myself suddenly more alone than I have ever been before.
“After each kiss, after each embrace, the isolation grows. And how overwhelming, how monstrous it is!
“Sully-Prudhomme, the poet, wrote:
“Les caresses ne sont que d’inquiets transports,
Infructueux essais du pauvre amour qui tente
L’impossible union des âmes par les corps. …17
And then, goodbye. It is the end. You hardly recognise this woman who for an instant of time has been everything to you, and whose inmost—and probably quite commonplace—soul has remained a mystery to you.
“In the very hours when it seemed that, in a mysterious harmony of spirit, a perfect mingling of your desires and all your longings, you had reached down to the very depths of her soul, a word, sometimes only one word, reveals your error and, like a bright light in darkness, shows you the black pit opened between you.
“Nevertheless, the dearest thing in the world still is to spend an evening in the presence of a beloved woman, without words, almost entirely content in the mere sense of her nearness. Ask for nothing more, for never will your soul meet another’s.
“As for me, I have shut up the gates of my spirit. I no longer talk to anyone of what I believe, what I think, and what I love. Knowing myself condemned to a frightful solitude, I look out on life as a spectator, and make no comments. Of what account are opinions, quarrels, pleasures, beliefs? Unable to share my life with any other creature, I stand apart from all. My spirit, unseen, keeps its undiscovered house. I have conventional phrases with which to reply to the day’s questions, and a smile that signifies ‘Yes’ when I do not want even to take the trouble to speak.
“Do you understand?”
We had walked up the long avenue as far as the Arc de Triomphe at the Étoile end, and now come back to the Place de la Concorde, for he had delivered himself of all this without haste and added to it a great deal more that now I do not remember.
He halted; and flinging out his arm in an abrupt gesture towards the tall granite obelisk that rears itself from the stones of Paris and loses its lofty Egyptian profile in the stars, an exiled monument bearing the history of its country written in strange signs on its flank, my friend cried: “Look, we are all as that stone!” and left me on the instant without another word.
Was he drunk? Was he mad? Was he inspired? Even now I do not know. Sometimes I think that he was right; sometimes I think that he had lost his mind.
My Landlady
“At that time,” said George Kervelen, “I was living in furnished lodgings in the Rue des Saints-Pères. When my parents decided that I should go to Paris to continue my law studies, there had been a long discussion about settling everything. My allowance had been fixed at first at two thousand five hundred francs, but my poor mother was so anxious, that she said to my father that if I spent my money rashly I might not have enough to eat, and then my health would suffer, and so it was settled that a comfortable boardinghouse should be found for me, and that the amount should be paid to the proprietor himself, or herself, every month.
“I had never left Quimper. I wanted everything that one desires at that age and I was prepared to have a good time in every way.
“Some of our neighbours told
