How beautiful this morning has been!
Towards eleven o’clock a long convoy of boats followed each other past my gate, behind a squat tug looking like a fly, and wheezing painfully as it vomited thick clouds of smoke.
After two English yachts whose crimson awnings rose and fell against the sky, came a splendid three-masted Brazilian, all white, gloriously clean and glittering. The sight of this ship filled me with such joy that I saluted her, I don’t know why.
May 11. I have had a slight fever for the last few days; I feel ill or rather unhappy.
Whence come these mysterious influences that change our happiness to dejection and our self-confidence to discouragement? It is as if the air, the unseen air, were full of unknowable powers whose mysterious nearness we endure. I wake full of joy, my throat swelling with a longing to sing. Why? I go down to the waterside; and suddenly, after a short walk, I come back home wretched, as if some misfortune were waiting me there. Why? Has a chill shudder, passing lightly over my skin, shaken my nerves and darkened my spirit? Have the shapes of the clouds, or the colour of the day, the ever-changing colour of the visible world, troubled my mind as they slipped past my eyes? Does anyone know? Everything that surrounds us, everything that we see unseeing, everything that we brush past unknowing, everything that we touch impalpably, everything that we meet unnoticing, has on us, on the organs of our bodies, and through them on our thoughts, on our very hearts, swift, surprising and inexplicable effects.
How deep it is, this mystery of the Invisible! We cannot fathom it with our miserable senses, with our eyes that perceive neither the too small, nor the too great, nor the too near, nor the too distant, nor the inhabitants of a star, nor the inhabitants of a drop of water … with our ears that deceive us, transmitting the vibrations of the air to us as sonorous sounds. They are fairies who by a miracle transmute movement into sound, from which metamorphosis music is born, and make audible in song the mute quivering of nature … with our smell, feebler than a dog’s … with our taste, that can only just detect the age of a wine.
If only we had other organs to work other miracles on our behalf, what things we could discover round us!
May 16. I am certainly ill, I have been so well since last month. I have a fever, a rotten fever, or rather a feverish weakness that oppresses my mind as wearily as my body. All day and every day I suffer this frightful sense of threatened danger, this apprehension of coming ill or approaching death, this presentiment which is doubtless the warning signal of a lurking disease germinating in my blood and my flesh.
May 18. I have just consulted my doctor, for I was not getting any sleep. He found that my pulse is rapid, my eyes dilated, my nerves on edge, but no alarming symptom of any kind. I am to take douches and drink bromide of potassium.
May 25. No change. My case is truly strange. As night falls, an incomprehensible uneasiness fills me, as if the night concealed a frightful menace directed at me. I dine in haste, then I try to read; but I don’t understand the words: I can hardly make out the letters. So I walk backwards and forwards in my drawing room, oppressed by a vague fear that I cannot throw off, fear of sleeping and fear of my bed.
About ten o’clock I go up to my room. The instant I am inside the room I double-lock the door and shut the windows; I am afraid … of what? I never dreaded anything before. … I open my cupboards, I look under my bed; I listen … listen … to what? It’s a queer thing that a mere physical ailment, some disorder in the blood perhaps, the jangling of a nerve thread, a slight congestion, the least disturbance in the functioning of this living machine of ours, so imperfect and so frail, can make a melancholic of the happiest of men and a coward of the bravest. Then I lie down, and wait for sleep as if I were waiting to be executed. I wait for it, dreading its approach; my heart beats, my legs tremble; my whole body shivers in the warmth of the bedclothes, until the moment I fall suddenly on sleep, like a man falling into deep and stagnant waters, there to drown. Nowadays I never feel the approach of this perfidious sleep, that lurks near me, spying on me, ready to take me by the hand, shut my eyes, steal my strength.
I sleep—for a long time—two or three hours—then a dream—no—a nightmare seizes me. I feel that I am lying down and that I am asleep … I feel it and I know it … and I feel too that someone approaches me, looks at me, touches me, climbs on my bed, kneels on my chest, takes my neck between his hands and squeezes … squeezes … with all his might, strangling me.
I struggle madly, in the grip of the frightful impotence that paralyses us in dreams; I try to cry out—I can’t; I try to move—I can’t; panting, with the most frightful efforts, I try to turn round, to fling off this creature who is crushing and choking me—I can’t do it.
And suddenly I wake up, terrified, covered with sweat. I light a candle. I am alone.
The crisis over—a crisis that happens every night—I fall at last into a quiet sleep, until daybreak.
June 2. My case has grown worse. What can be the matter with me? Bromide is useless; douches are useless. Lately, by way of wearying a body already quite exhausted, I went for a tramp in the forest of Roumare. At
