general course of the world and, letting
it follow its own way, associate with the
minority."
Goethe: Testament.

Dreux.—To see trains pass by—to see life pass by—never to go within save to strike cushions.

A little farther.—Trains have a destination; life has none. But life's originality lies precisely in having no destination. I occasionally find in it, as in old lace, the same charm of uselessness.

A little farther.—I viewed the landscape as far as Dreux. The unconsciousness of the vegetable kingdom is a decidedly too melancholy void. To become interested in it, one must make it live by incorporating oneself with the trees and grass, transferring the sentient soul of a man into the oak's trunk. I am an oak, I am a holly-tree, I am a wild poppy, but I realize it, while the oak, the holly-tree, the wild poppy do not: for this reason they do not exist. Pantheists are very fine fellows.

Nonancourt.—These syllables shouted through the train evoke a pretty convent of nuns, rather dissolute before the reform of Borromée; afterwards, it was devoted to God until the revolutionary dispersal. Now the house, henceforth plebeian, serves as a barn, stable and pigsty. As the notary who last sold it said: "It will serve as a farm." Cows now ruminate where women once prayed—a notable advance.

Tillières.—A ravine cuts this plain in two, a dastardly act, life.

Verneuil.—I was alone since leaving Paris. A man enters, opens his newspaper and expands into a gauloiserie. If it were evening, near his better half, or if, in my place, some obliging girl revealed a part of her foot! These flights of animalism are truly painful to a calm man. The flower-like opening contracts; the joyous flame of eyes brightens into a waxing ferocity; cruel lust opens its mouth and shows its teeth. Awaking: a searching glance: the mimicry by degrees is extinguished and there remains the disappointed ennui of a vain excitement. No, I do not care to serve as an aphrodisiac to citizens. To think of this would compel you towards a monachal literature, hard and contemptuous of vile lust.

Bourth or nearby.—The man speaks. It was inevitable. He speaks of himself, full of a need of making himself known, of introducing the passerby into his little universe. He travels for a bookseller of religious books. He goes from parsonage to parsonage, well received by the curés, who ask him to dinner. A good clientele and good payers. His center is Verneuil; thence he radiates, like an apostle. Usually a horse and carriage, rented for the season, conducts him from church to church; having some business to transact at Laigle, he took a train to amuse himself; to amuse himself he climbed into a first-class apartment with a second-class ticket. (There is no inspection at such hours.) "Verneuil's a fine town. A rare thing for the province (isn't it so, between ourselves), that this big borough has a well-kept inn, quite renovated." He is a free-thinker, but tolerant, enveloping with the same sympathetic pity, children, women, priests, devout souls—more stupid than ill-meaning, he assures you. As for himself, if a God exists he will go straight to Heaven, never having hurt a fly. Sound instruction will gradually cure us of religion. He has no fear on this score and, his conscience quite tranquil, places his Corneille de la Pierre for the best. Unmarried, but desiring a marriage so as to have sturdy little republicans, strong defenders of la Patrie: Alsace and Lorraine, Gambetta, and so forth.

Laigle.—He offers me something. I politely decline, he withdraws. Throughout the world, this matter interests the millions of similarly constituted minds: for whom do you work, poor unconscious bees? The species? But does the intelligence of a few balance the universal stupidity?

Rai-Aube.—A village I never again shall see, a village with such a pretty name, with such a fine combination of radiant words—aurora and ray—an alliance of syllables married by a morning smile; grasses watered by the freshness of dew, transparent springs, murmuring fluidity of waters flowing under the abundant rushes: all this, Rai-Aube, and oblivion, and the ineffable, palpitates in the white letters of your name, alluring and fugitive rebus hung on the gable of the station! Remembrance rather than vision: in my youth I lived among these vernal delights and steeped myself in them. I do not belong to towns and a built-up plot of ground does not incite me to excessive joys. All that was created by youthful eyes remains young, and for me the country-side often has the sex of its spelling, even under the surplice of snow. That alone remains of my earliest years: all is dead, whether by real death or the death of memory. The tenderness of vague figures bending towards my precocious orphanhood, is the farthest removed; of school, the horror is still painful to remember; a Dantesque and futile horror inflicted upon my pitiful childhood. But already, due a little to my will, the world retreated from me and by a slow or sudden recreation, I reformed for myself a life more harmonious with my intimate sense. But already, in arrogant moments, I scorned everything external to me, everything that had not been reformed and reground by the machine ceaselessly in motion in my head. Excepting the unknowable principle, I have fashioned everything anew; at least, for scepticism even gnaws at one's personality, such is the allusion in which I have confined myself.

With such a fixed determination, with this Kantian system which can be called transcendental egoism, my life has marched with a relatively light pace. Of all the griefs which my will has not succeeded in putting aside, the heaviest to bear is my very solitude. Never having surrendered to its deceits, I know not if hope be aught but a bleeding spur, driving man towards a future nothingness. I know not if the wound opened without respite and the sight of the spilled blood be not powerful stimulants necessary for the functioning of the human mechanism. I have never experienced them. I only believe in the final charnel-house, but without coveting it. Life does not yet displease me sufficiently. Without this, having no philosophical principles to converge with a possible practice, I would be consistent with my disgust and would give it my sanction. Like Crantor, I will die "without being astonished;" if my organs are still sound when death comes, perhaps regretfully. As for survival, on this point I have no such tranquilizing ideas as has the traveling salesman of Dreux. Perhaps the delightful Unconscious reserves some of its good tricks for the truly supreme, last moment of corporeal decomposition! This relative fear doubtless comes to me from my Christian youth, and I repudiate neither the one nor the other; Catholicism is an aristocracy. I do not know how this positive religion can come to be allied in me with subjective idealism; it is an obscure amalgam, like all heresies. Theology always procured me the most agreeable reading; from Augustine I can go to Claudius Mamertinus; there the joys are not less because of the curiosity. How I would have loved to be a bishop in some less modern Rome, or a cardinal! If I dwelt on this rather sterile desire, a sensation of a deficient life would clutch my throat, a vulgar sensation that my pride contemptuously repels. And then, have I not of my own accord tasted the mystic happiness and the celestial anguishes of episcopacy? Have I not clothed myself with the violet robe lifted at the bottom, or trailing up the stairs of the altar? Have I not ascended, mitre on head, the steps of the presidial chair? What then would reality serve me, when I have the dream and the faculty of changing myself like Proteus, the faculty of successively possessing all forms of life, all states of soul which man diversifies himself.

Surdon.—Curled feathers bob up and plunge into the window. Seeing me