NAUSEA

Jean-Paul Sartre's

NAUSEA

Translated from the French by Robert Baldick

�

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�� 'He is a fellow without any collective significance, barely an individual.'

�� L.F. C�line, The Church

Editor's Note

THESE notebooks were found among Antoine Roquentin's papers.� We are publishing them without any alteration.

�� The first page is undated, but we have good reason to believe that it was written a few weeks before the diary itself was started.�� In that case it would have been written about the beginning of� January 1932, at the latest.

�� At that time, Antoine Roquentin, after travelling in central Europe,� North Africa, and the Far East, had been living for three years at Bouville, where he was completing his historical research on the Marquis de Rollebon.

�� THE EDITORS

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Undated Sheet

THE best thing would be to write down everything that happens from day to day.� To keep a diary in order to understand.� To neglect no nuances or little details, even if they seem unimportant, and above all to classify them.� I must say how I see this table, the street, people, my packet of tobacco, since these are the things which have changed.� I must fix the exact extent and nature of this change.

�� For example, there is a cardboard box which contains my bottle of ink.� I ought to try to say how I saw it before and how I - [A word is missing here.] it now.� Well, it's a parallelepiped rectangle standing out against - that's silly, there's nothing I can say about it.� That's what I must avoid: I mustn't put strangeness where there's nothing.� I think that is the danger of keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything, you are on the look-out, and you continually stretch the truth.� On the other hand, it is certain that from one moment to the next - and precisely in connexion with this box or any other object - I may recapture the impression of the day before yesterday.� I must always be prepared, or else it might slip through my fingers again.� I must never - [A word has been crossed out here (possibly 'force' or 'forge'), and another word has been written above it which is illegible.] anything but note down carefully and in the greatest detail everything that happens.

�� Naturally, I can no longer write anything definite about that business on Saturday and the day before yesterday - I am already too far away from it; all that I can say is that in neither case was there anything people would ordinarily call an event.� On Saturday the children were playing ducks and drakes, and I wanted to throw a pebble into the sea like them.� At that moment I stopped, dropped the pebble and walked away.� I imagine I must have looked rather bewildered, because the children laughed behind my back.

�� So much for the exterior.� What happened inside me didn't leave any clear traces.� There was something which I saw and which disgusted me, but I no longer know whether I was looking at the sea or at the pebble.� It was a flat pebble, completely dry on one side, wet and muddy on the other.�� I held it by the edges, with my fingers wide apart to avoid getting them dirty.

�� The day before yesterday, it was much more complicated.� There was also that series of coincidences and misunderstandings which I can't explain to myself.� But I'm not going to amuse myself by putting all that down on paper.� Anyhow, it's certain I was frightened or experienced some other feeling of that sort.� If only I knew what I was frightened of, I should already have made considerable progress.

�� The odd thing is that I am not at all prepared to consider myself� insane, and indeed I can see quite clearly that I am not: all these changes concern objects.� At least, that is what I'd like to be sure about.

10.30

�[Obviously in the evening.� The following paragraph is much later than the preceding ones.� We are inclined to think that it was written the following day at the earliest.]

Perhaps it was a slight attack of insanity after all.� There is no longer any trace of it left.� The peculiar feelings I had the other week strike me as quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.� This evening I am quite at ease, with my feet firmly on the ground.� This is my room, which faces north-east.� Down below is the rue des Mutil�s and the shunting yard of the new station.� From my window I can see the red and white flame of the Rendez-vous des Cheminots at the corner of the boulevard Victor-Noir.� The Paris train has just come in.� People are coming out of the old station and dispersing in the streets.� I can hear footsteps and voices.� A lot of people are waiting for the last tram.� They must make a sad little group around the gas lamp just under my window.� Well, they will have to wait a few minutes more: the tram won't come before a quarter to eleven.� I only hope no commercial travellers are going to come tonight: I do so want to sleep and have so much sleep to catch up on.� One good night, just one, and all this business would be swept away.

�� A quarter to eleven: there's nothing more to fear - if they were coming, they would be here already.� Unless it's the day for the gentleman from Rouen.� He comes every week, and they keep No.2 for him, the first-floor room with a bidet.� He may still turn up; he often drinks a beer at the Rendez-vous des Cheminots before going to bed.� He doesn't make too much noise.� He is quite short and very neat, with a waxed black moustache and a wig.� Here he is now.

�� Well, when I heard him coming upstairs, it gave me quite a thrill, it was so reassuring: what is there to fear from such a regular world?� I think I am cured.

�� And here comes tram No.7, Abattoirs - Grands Bassins.� It arrives with a great clanking noise.� It moves off again.� Now, loaded with suitcases and sleeping children, it's heading towards the Grand Bassins, towards the factories in the black east.� It's the last tram but one; the last one will go by in an hour.

�� I'm going to bed.� I'm cured, and I'm going to give up writing down my impressions, like a little girl, in a nice new notebook.

�� There's only one case in which it might be interesting to keep a diary: that would be if [The text of the undated sheet ends here.]

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DIARY

Monday, 29 January 1932

SOMETHING has happened to me: I can't doubt that anymore.� It came as an illness does, not like an ordinary certainty, not like anything obvious.� It installed itself cunningly, little by little; I felt a little strange, a little awkward, and that was all.� Once it was established, it didn't move anymore, it lay low and I was able to persuade myself that there was nothing wrong with me, that it was a false alarm.� And now it has started blossoming.

�� I don't think the profession of historian fits a man for psychological analysis.� In our work, we have to deal only with simple feelings to which we give generic names such as Ambition and Interest.� Yet if I had an iota of self-knowledge, now is the time when I ought to use it.

�� There is something new, for example, about my hands, a certain way of picking up my pipe or my fork.� Or else it is the fork which now has a certain way of getting itself picked up, I don't know.� Just now, when I was on the point of coming into my room, I stopped short because I felt in my hand a cold object which attracted my attention by means of a sort of personality.� I opened my hand and looked: I was simply holding the doorknob.� This morning, at the library, when the Autodidact [Ogier P--, who will often be mentioned in this diary. He was a bailiff's clerk.� Roquentin had made his acquaintance in 1930 at the Bouville library.] came to say good-morning to me, it took me ten seconds to recognize him.� I saw an unknown face which was barely a face.� And then there was his hand, like a fat maggot in my hand.� I let go of it straightaway and the arm fell back limply.

�� In the streets too there are a great many suspicious noises to be heard.

�� So a change has taken place in the course of these last few weeks.� But where?� It's an abstract change which settles on nothing.� Is it I who has changed?� If it isn't I, then it's this room, this town, this nature; I must choose.

�� I think it's I who has changed: that's the simplest solution, also the most unpleasant.� But I have to admit that I am subject to these sudden transformations.� The thing is that I very rarely think; consequently a host of little metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a positive revolution takes place.� That is what has given my life this halting, incoherent aspect.� When I left France, for example, there were a lot of people who said I had gone off on a sudden impulse.� And when I returned unexpectedly after six years of travelling, they might well have spoken of a sudden impulse once more.� I can see myself again with Mercier in the office of that French official who resigned last year after the P�trou business.� Mercier was going to Bengal with an archaeological expedition.� I had always wanted to go to Bengal, and he urged me to go with him.� At present, I wonder why.� I imagine that he didn't feel too sure of Portal and that he was counting on me to keep an eye on him.� I could see no reason to refuse.� And even if, at the time, I had guessed at that little scheme with regard to Portal, that would have been another reason for accepting enthusiastically.� Well, I was paralysed, I couldn't say a word.� I was staring at a little Khmer statuette on a card-table next to a telephone.� I felt as if I were full of lymph or warm milk.� With an angelic patience which concealed a slight irritation, Mercier was saying to me:

�� "You see, I have to be certain from the official point of view.� I know that you'll end up by saying yes, so you might as well accept straightaway."

�� He has a reddish-black beard, heavily scented.� At every movement of his head I got a whiff of perfume.� And then, all of a sudden, I awoke from a sleep which had lasted six years.

�� The statue struck me as stupid and unattractive and I felt that I was terribly bored.� I couldn't understand why I was in Indo-China.� What was I doing there?� Why was I talking to those people?� Why was I dressed so oddly?� My passion was dead.� For years it had submerged me and swept me along; now I felt empty.� But that wasn't the worst of it: installed in front of me with a sort of indolence there was a voluminous, insipid idea.� I don't know exactly what it was, but it sickened me so much that I couldn't look at it.� All that was mixed up for me with the perfume of Mercier's beard.

�� I pulled myself together, convulsed with anger against him, and answered curtly:

�� "Thank you, but I think I've done enough travelling: I must go back to France now."

�� Two days later I took a boat for Marseille.

�� If I am not mistaken, and if all the signs which are piling up are indications of a fresh upheaval in my life, well then, I am frightened.� It isn't that my life is rich or weighty or precious, but I'm afraid of what is going to be born and take hold of me and carry me off - I wonder where?� Shall I have to go away again, leaving everything behind - my research, my book?� Shall I awake in a few months, a few years, exhausted, disappointed, in the midst of fresh ruins?� I should like to understand myself properly before it is too late.

Tuesday, 30 January

Nothing new.

�� I worked from nine till one in the library.� I organized Chapter XII and everything concerning Rollebon's stay in Russia up to the death of Paul I.� That is all finished now.� I shan't touch it again until the final revision.

�� It is half past one.� I am at the Caf� Mably, eating a sandwich, and everything is more or less normal.� In any case, everything is always normal in cafes and especially in the Caf� Mably, because of the manager, Monsieur Fasquelle, who has a vulgar expression in his eyes which is very straightforward and reassuring.� It will soon be time for his afternoon nap and his eyes are already pink, but his manner is still lively and decisive.� He is walking around among the tables and speaking confidentially to the customers:

�� "Is everything all right, Monsieur?"

�� I smile at seeing him so lively: when his establishment empties, his head empties too.� Between two and four the cafe is deserted, and then Monsieur Fasquelle takes a few dazed steps, the waiters turn out the lights, and he slips into unconsciousness: when this man is alone, he falls asleep.

�� There are still about a score of customers left, bachelors, small-time engineers, and office workers.� They lunch hurriedly in boarding houses which they call their 'messes', and, since they need a little luxury, they come here after their meal, to drink a cup of coffee and play poker dice; they make a little noise, but a vague noise which doesn't bother me. �In order to exist, they too have to join with others.

�� I for my part live alone, entirely alone.� I never speak to anybody, I receive nothing, I give nothing.� The Autodidact doesn't count.� Admittedly there is Francoise, the woman who runs the Rendez-vous des Cheminots.� But do I speak to her?� Sometimes, after dinner, when she brings me a beer, I ask her:

�� "Have you got time this evening?"

�� She never says no and I follow her into one of the big bedrooms on the first floor, which she rents by the hour or by the day.� I don't pay her: we make love on an au pair basis.� She enjoys it (she has to have a man a day and she has many more besides me) and I purge myself in this way of a certain melancholy whose cause I know only too well.� But we barely exchange a few words.� What would be the use?� Every man for himself; besides, as far as she's concerned, I remain first and foremost a customer in her caf�.� Taking off her dress, she says to me:

�� "I say, have you ever heard of an ap�ritif called Bricot?� Because there are two customers who've asked for it this week.� The girl didn't know it and she came to ask me.� They were commercial travellers, and they must have drunk it in Paris.� But I don't like to buy anything without knowing it.� If you don't mind, I'll keep my stockings on."

�� In the past - even long after she had left me - I used to think about Anny.� Now I don't think about anybody anymore; I don't even bother to look for words.� It flows through me, more or less quickly, and I don't fix anything, I just let it go.� Most of the time, because of their failure to fasten on to words, my thoughts remain misty and nebulous.� They assume vague, amusing shapes and are then swallowed up: I promptly forget them.

�� These young people amaze me; drinking their coffee, they tell clear, plausible stories.� If you ask them what they did yesterday, they don't get flustered; they tell you all about it in a few words.� If I were in their place, I'd start stammering.� It's true that for a long time now nobody has bothered how I spend my time.� When you live alone, you even forget what it is to tell a story: plausibility disappears at the same time as friends.� You let events flow by too: you suddenly see people appear who speak and then go away; you plunge into stories of which you can't make head or tail: you'd make a terrible witness.� But on the other hand, everything improbable, everything which nobody would ever believe in a caf�, comes your way.� For example, on Saturday, about four in the afternoon, on the short wooden pavement of the station yard, a little woman in sky-blue was running backwards, laughing and waving a handkerchief.� At the same time, a negro in a cream-coloured raincoat, with yellow shoes and a green hat, was turning the corner of the street, whistling.� Still going backwards, the woman bumped into him, underneath a lantern which hangs from the fence and which is lit at night.� So there, at one and the same time, you had that fence which smells so strongly of wet wood, that lantern, and that little blonde in a negro's arms, under a fiery-coloured sky.� If there had been four or five of us, I suppose we would have noticed the collision, all those soft colours, the beautiful blue coat which looked like an eiderdown, the light-coloured raincoat, and the red panes of the lantern; we would have laughed at the stupefaction which appeared on those two childlike faces.

�� It is unusual for a man on his own to feel like laughing: the whole scene came alive for me with a significance which was strong and even fierce, but pure.� Then it broke up, and nothing remained but the lantern, the fence, and the sky: it was still quite beautiful.� An hour later, the lantern was lit, the wind was blowing, the sky was dark: nothing at all was left.

�� There is nothing very new about all that; I have never rejected these harmless emotions; far from it.� In order to feel them, it is sufficient to be a little isolated, just enough to get rid of plausibility at the right moment.� But I remained close to people, on the surface of solitude, quite determined, in case of emergency, to take refuge in their midst: so far I was an amateur at heart.

�� Now, there are objects everywhere like this glass of beer, here on the table.� When I see it, I feel like saying: "Pax, I'm not playing anymore."� I realize perfectly well that I have gone too far.� I don't suppose you can 'make allowances' for solitude.� That doesn't mean that I look under my bed before going to sleep or that I'm afraid of seeing the door of my room open suddenly in the middle of the night.� All the same, I am ill at ease: for half an hour I have been avoiding looking at this glass of beer.� I look above, below, right and left: but the glass itself I don't want to see.� And I know very well that all the bachelors around me can't help me in any way: it is too late, and I can no longer take refuge among them.� They would come and slap me on the back and say to me: "Well, what's special about that glass of beer?� It's just like all the others.� It's bevelled, and it has a handle and a little coat of arms with a spade on it, and on the coat of arms is written Spatenbr�u."� I know all that, but I know that there's something else.� Almost nothing.� But I can no longer explain what I see.� To anybody.� There it is: I am gently slipping into the water's depths, towards fear.

�� I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices.� All these characters spend their time explaining themselves, and happily recognizing that they hold the same opinions.� Good God, how important they consider it to think the same things all together.� It's enough to see their expressions when one of those fishy-eyed men who look as if they are turned in upon themselves and with whom no agreement is possible passes among them.� When I was eight years old and used to play in the Luxembourg Gardens, there was one who came and sat in a sentry-box, against the railing which runs along the rue Auguste-Comte.� He didn't speak, but every now and then he would stretch his leg out and look at his foot with a terrified expression.� This foot wore a boot, but the other foot was in a slipper.� The keeper told my uncle that the man was a former schoolmaster.� He had been retired because he had turned up to read out the marks at the end of term dressed as an academician.� We were terribly afraid of him because we sensed that he was alone.� One day he smiled at Robert, holding his arms out to him from a distance: Robert nearly fainted.� It wasn't the fellow's poverty-stricken appearance which frightened us, nor the tumour he had on his neck which rubbed against the edge of his collar: but we felt that he was shaping crab-like or lobster-like thoughts in his head.� And it terrified us to think that somebody could have lobster-like thoughts about the sentry-box, about our hoops, about the bushes.

�� Is it that which awaits me then?� For the first time it disturbs me to be alone.� I should like to talk to somebody about what is happening to me before it is too late, before I start frightening little boys.� I wish Anny were here.

�� It's odd: I have just filled up tend pages and I haven't told the truth, at least, not the whole truth.� When I wrote under the date: 'Nothing new', it was with a bad conscience: as a matter of fact there was a little incident, with nothing shameful or extraordinary about it, which refused to come out.� 'Nothing new'.� I admire the way we can lie, putting reason on our side.� Obviously, nothing new has happened in a manner of speaking.� This morning, at a quarter past eight, as I was leaving the H�tel Printania to go to the library, I tried to pick up a piece of paper lying on the ground and didn't succeed.� That's all, and it isn't even an event.� Yes, but, to tell the whole truth, it made a profound impression on me: it occurred to me that I was no longer free.� At the library, I tried unsuccessfully to get rid of that idea.� I attempted to escape from it at the Caf� Mably.� I hoped that it would disappear in the bright light.� But it stayed there inside me, heavy and painful.� It is that idea which has dictated the preceding pages to me.

�� Why didn't I mention it?� It must have been out of pride, and then, too, a little out of awkwardness.� I am not accustomed to telling myself what happens to me, so I find it hard to remember the exact succession of events, and I can't make out what is important.� But now that's over and done with: I have re-read what I wrote in the Caf� Mably and it made me feel ashamed; I want no secrets, no spiritual condition, nothing ineffable; I am neither a virgin nor a priest, to play at having an inner life.

�� There's nothing much to say: I couldn't manage to pick up the piece of paper, that's all.

�� I am very fond of picking up chestnuts, old rags, and especially pieces of paper.� I find it pleasant to pick them up, to close my hand over them; for two pins I would put them to my mouth as children do.� Anny used to fly into a rage when I picked up by one corner pieces of paper which were heavy and rich-looking but probably soiled with excrement.� In summer or early autumn, you can find in gardens pieces of newspapers baked by the sun, as dry and brittle as dead leaves, and so yellow you might think they had been dipped in picric acid.� Other pieces of paper, in winter, are pulped, crumpled, stained; they return to the earth.� Others which are new and even shiny, white and palpitating, are as sedate as swans, but the earth has already ensnared them from below.� They twist and tear themselves away from the mud, but only to fall a little farther on, this time for good.� All these pieces of paper are worth picking up.� Sometimes I simply feel them, looking at them closely; at other times I tear them to hear the long crackling noise they make, or else, if they are very wet, I set fire to them, something which is not easy to do; then I wipe the muddy palms of my hands on a wall or a tree trunk.

�� So, today, I was looking at the fawn-coloured boots of a cavalry officer who was coming out of the barracks.� As I followed them with my eyes, I saw a piece of paper lying beside a puddle.� I though that the officer was going to crush the paper into the mud with his heel, but no: with a single step he strode over paper and puddle.� I went up to it: it was a lined page, probably torn out of a school notebook.� The rain had drenched and twisted it, and it was covered with blisters and swellings, like a burnt hand.� The red line of the margin had blurred into a pink smear; the ink had run in places.� The bottom of the page was hidden by a crust of mud.� I bent down, already looking forward to touching this fresh and tender pulp which would roll into grey balls in my fingers ... I couldn't do it.

�� I stayed in a bent position for a moment, I read: 'Dictation: The White Owl', then I straightened up, empty-handed.� I am no longer free, I can no longer do what I want.

�� Object ought not to touch, since they are not alive.� You use them, you put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more.� But they touch me, it's unbearable.� I am afraid of entering into contact with them, just as if they were living animals.

�� Now I see; I remember better what I felt the other day on the sea-shore when I was holding that pebble.� It was a sort of sweet disgust.� How unpleasant it was!� And it came from the pebble, I'm sure of that, it passed from the pebble into my hands.� Yes, that's it, that's exactly it: a sort of nausea in the hands.

Thursday morning, at the library

��

Earlier this morning, coming down the hotel stairs, I heard Lucie complaining for the hundredth time to the patronne, while polishing the steps.� The patronne was speaking with difficulty and in short sentences, because she hadn't put her false teeth in yet; she was almost naked, in a pink dressing-gown with Turkish slippers.� Lucie was dirty as usual; every now and then she stopped rubbing and sat back on her heels to look at the patronne.� She spoke without pausing, with a serious expression.

�� "I'd be much happier if he went with other women," she said; "it wouldn't make any difference to me, so long as it didn't do him any harm."

�� She was talking about her husband: at the age of about forty this swarthy little woman had bought herself, with her savings, a good-looking young man, a fitter at the Lecointe works.� Her married life is anything but happy.� Her husband doesn't beat her, isn't unfaithful to her: he drinks, he comes home drunk every night.� He's in a bad way; in three months I have seen him turn yellow and melt away.� Lucie thinks it's the drink.� My opinion is that he's got tuberculosis.

�� "You've got to get on top of it," said Lucie.

�� It's gnawing away at her, I'm sure of that, but slowly, patiently: she gets on top of it, incapable either of consoling herself or of abandoning herself to her unhappiness.� She thinks about it a little bit, a very little bit, now and then; she cadges a scrap of it.� Especially when she is with people, because they console her and also because it comforts her a little to talk about it in a calm voice, as if she were giving advice.� When she is alone in the rooms, I hear her humming to prevent herself from thinking.� She is morose all day long, suddenly weary and sullen.

�� "It's there," she says, touching her throat, "it won't go down."

�� She suffers like a miser.� She must be miserly too with her pleasures.� I wonder if sometimes she doesn't wish she could be free of this monotonous suffering, of these grumblings which start up as soon as she stops singing, if she doesn't long to suffer once for all, to drown herself in despair.� But in any case, that would be impossible for her: she is too set in her ways.

Thursday afternoon

Monsieur de Rollebon was extremely ugly.� Queen Marie Antoinette was fond of calling him her 'dear monkey'.� Yet he had all the women of the Court, not by clowning like Voisenon the baboon, but by a magnetism which drove his beautiful victims to the worst excesses of passion.� He schemed and plotted, played a somewhat suspicious part in the affair of the Necklace, and disappeared in 1790, after being in close connection with Mirabeau-Tonneau and Nerciat.� He turned up again in Russia, where he helped to assassinate Paul I, and from there he travelled to the most distant lands, to the Indies, China, Turkestan.� He smuggled, plotted, spied.� In 1813 he returned to Paris.� By 1816 he had become all-powerful: he was the sole confidant of the Duchesse D'Angoul�me.� This capricious old woman, obsessed by horrible childhood memories, used to calm down and smile when she saw him.� Through her, he ruled the roost at Court.� In March 1820 he married Mademoiselle de Roquelaure, a very beautiful girl of eighteen.� Monsieur de Rollebon was seventy; he enjoyed the supreme honours, was at the zenith of his life.� Seven months later, accused of treason, he was arrested and thrown into a dungeon where he died after five years of imprisonment, without ever having been brought to trial.

�� It is with a certain melancholy that I have re-read this note by Germain Berger [Mirabeau-Tonneau et ses amis, page 406, note 2, Champion, 1906 (Editors' footnote)].� It was through these few lines that I first came to know Monsieur de Rollebon.� How attractive he seemed to me, and how I loved him straightaway, on the basis of these few words!� It is for his sake, for the sake of that little fellow, that I am here.� When I returned from my travels, I could just as well have settled in Paris or in Marseille.� But most of the documents concerning the Marquis's long stays in France are in the Municipal Library of Bouville.� Rollebon was the squire of Marommes.� Before the war, you could still find one of his descendants in that little town, an architect called Rollebon-Campouyr�, who, on his death in 1912, left an important legacy to the Bouville library: some letters of the Marquis, a fragment of a diary, and papers of all sorts.� I haven't gone through it all yet.

�� I am happy to have found these notes again.� It is ten years since I last read them.� My writing has changed, or so it seems to me: I used to write in a smaller hand.� How I loved Monsieur de Rollebon that year!� I remember one evening - a Tuesday evening: I had worked all day long in the Mazarine; I had just realized, from his correspondence of 1789-90, the masterly way in which he duped Nerciat.� It was dark, I was going down the avenue du Maine, and on the corner of the rue de la Ga�t� I bought some chestnuts.� How happy I was!� I laughed all by myself at the thought of the face Nerciat must have made when he came back from Germany.� The Marquis's face is like this ink: it has grown much paler since I started taking an interest in him.

�� In the first place, as from 1801, I can't understand his behaviour anymore.� This isn't for lack of documents: letters, fragments of memoirs, secret reports, police records.� On the contrary, I have almost too many of these.� What is lacking in all this testimony is firmness and consistency.� True, they don't contradict one another, but they don't agree with one another either; they don't seem to concern the same person.� And yet other historians are working on documents of the same sort.� How do they do it?� Is it that I am more scrupulous or less intelligent?� In any case, put like that, the question leaves me completely cold.� At bottom, what am I looking for?� I don't know.� For a long time, Rollebon the man has interested me more than the book to be written.� But now, the man ... the man is beginning to bore me.� It is the book to which I am growing attached, and I feel an every-increasing compulsion to write it - the older I get, you might say.

�� Obviously it is possible to agree that Rollebon took an active part in the assassination of Paul I, and that he then accepted an important espionage mission to the Orient on behalf of the Czar and consistently betrayed Alexander for Napoleon's benefit.� At the same time he may have carried on an active correspondence with the Comte d'Artois and sent him unimportant information in order to convince him of his loyalty: none of all that is improbable, and Fouch�, at the same period, was playing a much more complex and dangerous game.� Possibly the Marquis also trafficked in rifles with the Asiatic principalities for his own profit.

�� Well, yes: he may have done all that, but there's no proof that he did: I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved.� These are reasonable hypotheses which take the facts into account: but I am only too well aware that they come from me, that they are simply a way of unifying my own knowledge.� Not a single glimmer comes from Rollebon's direction.� Slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves at a pinch to the order I wish to give them, but it remains outside of them.� I have the impression of doing a work of pure imagination.� And even so, I am certain that characters in a novel would appear more realistic, or in any case would be more amusing.

Friday

Three o'clock.� Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.� A peculiar moment in the afternoon.� Today is intolerable.

�� A cold sunshine is whitening the dust on the windowpanes.� A pale sky, mottled with white.� The gutters were frozen this morning.� I am digesting dully near the stove; I know in advance that this is a wasted day.� I shan't do anything good, except, perhaps, after nightfall.� It's on account of the sun; it vaguely gilds dirty white wisps of mist hanging in the air above the yard, it flows into my room, all fair and pale, and it spreads four dull, false patches of light on my table.

�� My pipe is daubed with a golden varnish which at first catches the eye by means of its appearance of gaiety: you look at it, and the varnish melts, nothing is left but a big pale streak on a piece of wood.� And everything is like that, everything, even my hands.� When the sun begins shining like that, the best thing to do would be to go to bed.� Only, I slept like a log last night, and I don't feel sleepy.

�� I liked yesterday's sky so much, a narrow sky, dark with rain, pressing against the windowpanes like a ridiculous, touching face.� This sun isn't ridiculous, quite the contrary.� On everything I love, on the rust in the yards, on the rotten planks of the fence, a miserly, sensible light is falling, like the look you give, after a sleepless night, at the decisions you made enthusiastically the day before, at the pages you wrote straight off without a single correction.� The four caf�s on the boulevard Victor-Noir, which shine brightly at night, side by side, and which are much more than caf�s - aquariums, ships, stars, or big wide eyes - have lost their ambiguous charm.

�� A perfect day to turn in upon oneself: these cold rays which the sun projects like a pitiless judgement on all creatures enter into me through my eyes; I am illuminated within by an impoverishing light.� A quarter of an hour would be enough, I feel sure, for me to attain a feeling of supreme self-contempt.� No, thank you very much, I can do without that.� Nor shall I re-read what I wrote yesterday about Rollebon's stay in St Petersburg.� I remain seated, my arms dangling, or else I write a few words, rather dispiritedly; I yawn, I wait for night to fall.� When it is dark, the objects and I will come out of limbo.

�� Did Rollebon take part in the assassination of Paul I or didn't he?� That is the question of the day: I have got as far as that and I can't go any further without deciding.

�� According to Tcherkov, he was paid by Count Pahlen.� Most of the conspirators, says Tcherkov, would have been content with deposing and imprisoning the Czar.� (Alexander indeed seems to have been in favour of that solution.)� But Pahlen allegedly wanted to get rid of Paul completely, and Monsieur de Rollebon is said to have been given the task of converting each conspirator individually to the plan for assassination.

�� 'He visited each of them and, with incomparable power, mimed the scene which was to take place.� Like that he introduced or developed in them the lust to kill.'� But I distrust Tcherkov.� He isn't a reasonable witness, but a half-mad, sadistic magus: he gives a demoniacal twist to everything.� I simply cannot see Monsieur de Rollebon in this melodramatic role.� Would he have mimed the assassination scene?� Not on your life!� He was a cold man, who didn't usually sweep other people off their feet: he didn't show things, he insinuated, and his pale, colourless method could succeed only with men of his kind, intriguers accessible to reason, politicians.

�� Adh�mar de Rollebon [writes Madame de Charri�res] did not paint pictures with his words, made no gestures, never changed the tone of his voice.� He kept his eyes half-closed, and one could barely distinguish, between his lashes, the outer edges of his grey pupils.� It has only been within the last few years that I have dared to admit to myself that he bored me more than I can say.� He spoke rather in the way that the Abb� Mably used to write.

�� And this is the man who, by his gift for miming ...But then how did he manage to captivate women?� And then there is this curious story which S�gur tells me and which strikes me as plausible:

�� In 1787, at an inn near Moulins, an old man was dying - a friend of Diderot's, whose ideas had been moulded by the philosophes.� The local priests were baffled: they had tried everything in vain; the good man refused the last sacraments, saying he was a pantheist.� Monsieur de Rollebon, who was passing by and who believed in nothing, bet the Cur� of Moulins that he would take less than two hours to bring the sick man back to Christian sentiments.� The Cur� took the bet and lost: taken in hand at three in the morning, the sick man confessed at five and died at seven.� "You must be very good at arguing," said the Cur�, "to beat our own people!"� "I didn't argue," replied Monsieur de Rollebon, "I made him frightened of Hell."

�� Now, did he take an effective part in the assassination?� That evening, about eight o'clock, one of his officer friends accompanied him as far as his door.� If he went out again, how did he manage to cross St Petersburg without being stopped?� Paul, who was half-insane, had given orders that after nine o'clock at night all passers-by except midwives and doctors were to be arrested.� Are we to believe the absurd legend that Rollebon disguised himself as a midwife in order to get to the palace?� After all, he was quite capable of a think like that.� In any case, it seems proved that he was not at home on the night of the assassination.� Alexander must have been deeply suspicious of him, since one of the first official acts of his reign was to send the Marquis away under the vague pretext of a mission to the Far East.

�� Monsieur de Rollebon bores me to tears.� I get up.� I move about in this pale light; I see it change on my hands and on the sleeves of my jacket: I cannot say how much it disgusts me.� I yawn.� I light the lamp on the table: perhaps its light will be able to fight the light of day.� But no: the lamp does nothing more than spread a pitiful pool around its base.� I turn it out; I get up.� On the wall there is a white hole, the mirror.� It is a trap.� I know that I am going to let myself be caught in it.� I have.� The grey thing has just appeared in the mirror.� I go over and look at it, I can no longer move away.

�� It is the reflection of my face.� Often, during these wasted days, I stay here contemplating it.� I can understand nothing about this face.� Other people's faces have some significance.� Not mine.� I cannot even decide whether it is handsome or ugly.� I think it is ugly, because I have been told so.� But that doesn't strike me.� At heart, I am indeed shocked that qualities of this sort can be applied to it, as if you called a piece of earth or a lump of rock beautiful or ugly.

�� All the same there is one thing which is a pleasure to see, above the flabby regions of the cheeks, above the forehead: it is that beautiful red flame which gilds my skull, it is my hair.� That is something pleasant to see.� At least it's a definite colour: I am glad I have red hair.� It's there in the mirror, it catches the eye, it shines out.� I'm still lucky: if my forehead was adorned with one of those dull heads of hair which can't make up their mind whether to be chestnut or fair, my face would be lost in a vague expanse, it would make me feel giddy.

�� My gaze travels slowly and wearily down over this forehead, these cheeks: it meets nothing firm, and sinks into the sand.� Admittedly there is a nose there, two eyes and a mouth, but none of that has any significance, nor even a human expression.� Yet Anny and V�lines thought I looked alive; it may be that I am too accustomed to my face.� When I was small, my Aunt Bigeois used to tell me: "If you look at yourself too long in the mirror, you'll see a monkey there."� I must have looked at myself even longer than that: what I can see is far below the monkey, on the edge of the vegetable world, at the polyp level.� It's alive, I can't deny that; but this isn't the life that Anny was thinking of: I can see some slight tremors, I can see an insipid flesh blossoming and palpitating with abandon.� The eyes in particular, seen at such close quarters, are horrible.� They are glassy, soft, blind, and red-rimmed; anyone would think they were fish-scales.� I lean my whole weight on the porcelain edge, I push my face forward until it touches the mirror.� The eyes, the nose, the mouth disappear: nothing human is left.� Brown wrinkles on each side of the feverish swelling of the lips, crevices, molehills.� A silky white down runs along the wide slopes of the cheeks, two hairs protrude from the nostrils: it's a geological relief map.� And, in spite of everything, this lunar world is familiar to me.� I can't say that I recognize the details.� But the whole thing gives me an impression of something seen before which numbs me: I slip gently into sleep.

�� I should like to pull myself together: a sharp, abrupt sensation would release me.� I slap my left hand against my cheek, I pull the skin; I grimace at myself.� An entire half of my face gives way, the left half of the mouth twists and swells, uncovering a tooth, the eye-socket opens on a white globe, on pink, bleeding flesh.� That isn't what I was looking for: nothing strong, nothing new; soft, vague, familiar stuff!� I'm going to sleep with my eyes open; already the face is growing larger, growing in the mirror; it is an immense, pale halo slipping in the light ...

�� I lose my balance and that wakes me up with a start.� I find myself sitting astride a chair, still quite dazed.� Do other men find as much difficulty in appraising their face?� It seems to me that I see my own as I feel my body, through a dull, organic sensation.� But the others?� Rollebon, for example?� Did it send him to sleep as well to look in a mirror at what Madame de Genlis calls

his little wrinkled face, clean and sharp-featured, all pitted with smallpox, in which there was a remarkable mischievousness which caught the eye at once, however much he tried to disguise it.� He took [she adds] great care with his coiffure and I never saw him without a wig.� But his cheeks were a blue verging on black, because he had a heavy growth and insisted on shaving himself, which he did extremely badly.� It was his custom to daub his face with ceruse, as Grimm did.� Monsieur de Dangeville used to say that with all that blue and white he looked like a Roquefort cheese.

�� It seems to me that he must have been very amusing.� But that, after all, isn't the way he looked to Madame de Chari�res.� She, I believe, found him rather dull and quiet.� Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face.� Or perhaps it is because I am a solitary?� People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends.� I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?� You might say - yes, you might say nature without mankind.

�� I no longer feel any inclination to work, I can do nothing more except wait for night to fall.

5.30

Things are bad!� Things are very bad: I've got it, that filthy thing, the Nausea.� And this time it's new: it caught me in a caf�.� Until now caf�s were my only refuge because they are full of people and well lighted: from now on I shan't even have that; when I am run to earth in my room, I shall no longer know where to go.

�� I had come along for a fuck, but I had scarcely opened the door before Madeleine, the waitress, called out to me: "The patronne isn't here, she's gone shopping in town."

�� I felt a sharp disappointment in my prick, a long disagreeable tickling.� At the same time I felt my shirt rubbing against my nipples and I was surrounded, seized by a slow, coloured whirlpool, a whirlpool of fog, of lights in the smoke, in the mirrors, with the benches shining at the back, and I couldn't see why it was there or why it was like that.� I was on the doorstep, I was hesitating, and then there was a sudden eddy, a shadow passed across the ceiling, and I felt myself being pushed forward.� I floated along, dazed by the luminous mists which were entering me from all directions at once.� Madeleine came floating up to me to take off my overcoat and I noticed that she had drawn her hair back and put on earrings: I didn't recognize her.� I looked at her big cheeks which stretched endlessly away towards her ears.� In the hollow of the cheeks, under the cheek-bones, there were two isolated pink patches which looked as if they were feeling bored on that poor flesh.� The cheeks stretched away, away towards the ears and Madeleine smiled:

�� "What will you have, Monsieur Antoine?"

�� Then the Nausea seized me, I dropped onto the bench, I no longer even knew where I was; I saw the colours slowly spinning around me, I wanted to vomit.� And there it is: since then, the Nausea hasn't left me, it holds me in its grip.

�� I paid.� Madeleine took away my saucer.� My glass crushes a puddle of yellow beer, with a bubble floating in it, against the marble table top.� The bench is broken just where I am sitting, and to avoid slipping I am forced to press the soles of my shoes hard against the floor; it is cold.� On the right, they are playing cards on a woollen cloth.� I didn't see them when I came in; I simply sensed that there was a warm packet, half on the bench, half on the table at the back, with some pairs of arms waving about.� Since then, Madeleine has brought them cards, the cloth, and the chips in a wooden bowl.� There are three or five of them, I don't know how many, I haven't the courage to look at them.� There's a spring inside me that's broken: I can move my eyes but not my head.� The head is all soft and elastic, as if it had just been balanced on my neck; if I turn it, it will fall off.� All the same, I can hear a short breath and now and then, out of the corner of my eye, I can see a reddish flash covered with white hairs.� It is a hand.

�� When the patronne goes shopping it's her cousin who takes her place at the bar.� His name is Adolphe.� I began looking at him while I was sitting down and I went on because I couldn't turn my head.� He is in shirt-sleeves with mauve braces; he has rolled the sleeves of his shirt above his elbows.� The braces can scarcely be seen against the blue shirt; they are completely obliterated, buried in the blue, but this is false modesty; in point of fact they won't allow themselves to be forgotten, they annoy me with their sheep-like stubbornness, as if, setting out to become purple, they had stopped somewhere on the way without giving up their pretensions.� You feel like telling them: "Go on, become purple and let's hear no more about it."� But no, they remain in suspense, fixed in their unfinished effort.� Sometimes the blue which surrounds them slips over them and covers them completely: for a moment I can't see them.� But it is just a passing wave, and soon the blue goes pale in places and I see patches of hesitant mauve reappear, widen, join together, and reconstitute the braces.� Cousin Adolphe has no eyes: his swollen, turned-up eyelids reveal just a little white.� He smiles sleepily; now and then he snorts, yelps, and writhes feebly, like a dog having a dream.

�� His blue cotton shirt stands out cheerfully against a chocolate-coloured wall.� That too brings on the Nausea.� Or rather it is the Nausea.� The Nausea isn't inside me: I can feel it over there on the wall, on the braces, everywhere around me.� It is one with the caf�, it is I who am inside it.

�� On my right, the warm packet starts rustling, it waves its pairs of arms.� "Look, there's your trump."� "What are trumps?"� Long black spine bent over the game: "Hahaha!"� "What?� There's the trump, he's just played it."� "I don't know, I didn't see..."� "Yes, I've just played trumps."� "Ah, so hearts are trumps, hea-arts are trumps."� Spoken: "What is it, Monsieur?� What is it, Monsieur?� I'll take it!"

�� Silence once more - the sugary taste of the air at the back of my throat.� The smells, the braces.

�� The cousin has got up, taken a few steps, put his hands behind his back.� He smiles, raises his head and leans back on his heels.� In this position he goes to sleep.� He is there, swaying, still smiling, with his cheeks trembling.� He is going to fall.� He bends backwards, bends, bends, his face turned completely up towards the ceiling, then, just as he is about to fall, he steadies himself adroitly on the edge of the bar and regains his balance.� After which, he starts again.� I have had enough, I call the waitress.

�� "Madeleine, please play me something on the gramophone.� The one I like, you know: Some of These Days."

�� "Yes, but it might bother these gentlemen; these gentlemen don't like music when they're playing.� But I'll ask them."

�� I make a great effort to turn my head.� There are four of them.� She bends over a red-faced old man with a pair of black-rimmed pince-nez on the end of his nose.� He hides his cards against his chest and glances at me from under his glasses.

�� "Go ahead, Monsieur."

�� Smiles.� His teeth are rotten.� The red hand doesn't belong to him, it belongs to his neighbour, a fellow with a black moustache.� This fellow with the moustache has huge nostrils which could pump air for a whole family and which eat up half his face, but in spite of that he breathes through his mouth, panting slightly.� With them there is also a young man with a face like a dog.� I can't make out the fourth player.

�� The cards fall onto the woollen cloth, spinning through the air.� Then hands with ringed fingers come and pick them up, scratching the cloth with their nails.� The hands make white patches on the cloth, they look puffy and dusty.� More cards fall all the time, the hands come and go.� What a peculiar occupation: it doesn't look like a game, or a rite, or a habit.� I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more.� But time is too large, it refuses to let itself be filled up.� Everything you plunge into it goes soft and slack.� That gesture, for example, of the red hand falteringly picking up the cards: it's all flabby.� It ought to be unstitched and cut down.

�� Madeleine turns the handle of the gramophone.� I only hope she hasn't made a mistake and put on the principal theme from Cavalleria Rusticana, as she did the other day.� But no, that's it, I recognize the tune from the very first bars.� It's an old rag-time tune with a vocal refrain.� I head some American soldiers whistle it in 1917 in the streets of La Rochelle.� It must date from before the War.� But the recording is much more recent.� All the same, it's the oldest record in the collection.� A Path� record for a sapphire needle.

�� The refrain will be coming soon: that's the part I like best and the abrupt way in which it flings itself forward, like a cliff against the sea.� For the moment it's the jazz that's playing; there's no melody, only notes, a host of little jolts.� They know no rest, an unchanging order gives birth to them and destroys them, without ever giving them time to recover, to exist for themselves.� They run, they hurry, they strike me with a sharp blow in passing and are obliterated.� I should quite like to hold them back, but I know that if I managed to stop one, nothing would remain between my fingers but a vulgar, doleful sound.� I must accept their death; I must even will it; I know few harsher or stronger impressions.

�� I am beginning to warm up again, to feel happy.� This is nothing out of the ordinary as yet, just a little Nausea happiness; it spreads out at the bottom of the slimy puddle, at the bottom of our time - the time of mauve braces and broken benches - it's made of wide, soft moments, which grow outwards at the edges like an oil stain.� It's no sooner born than it's already old, it seems as if I had known it for twenty years.

�� There's another happiness: outside, there's that band of steel, the narrow duration of the music, which crosses our time through and through, and rejects it and tears it with its dry little points; here's another time.

�� "Monsieur Randu plays hearts, you put down the ace."

�� The voice slithers and disappears.� Nothing bites on the ribbon of steel, neither the opening door, nor the gust of cold air flowing over my knees, nor the arrival of the vet with his little girl: the music pierces these vague shapes and passes beyond them.� The little girl has scarcely sat down before she is seized: she holds herself rigid, her eyes wide open: she listens, rubbing the table with her fist.

�� Another few seconds and the Negress will sing.� It seems inevitable, the necessity of this music is

so strong: nothing can interrupt it, nothing which comes from this time in which the world is slumped; it will stop of its own accord, on orders.� If I love that beautiful voice, it is above all because of that: it is neither for its fullness nor its sadness, but because it is the event which so many notes have prepared so far in advance, dying so that it might be born.� And yet I feel anxious; it would take so little to make the record stop: a broken spring, a whim on the part of Cousin Adolphe.� How strange it is, how moving, that this hardness should be so fragile.� Nothing can interrupt it but anything can break it.

�� The last chord has died away.� In the brief silence which follows, I feel strongly that this is it, that something has happened.

�� Silence.

�� Some of these days

�� You'll miss me honey!

�� What has just happened is that the Nausea has disappeared.� When the voice sounded in the silence, I felt my body harden and the Nausea vanished.� All of a sudden: it was almost painful to become so hard, so bright.� At the same time the duration of the music dilated, swelled like a waterspout.� It filled the room with its metallic transparency, crushing our wretched time against the walls.� I am in the music.� Globes of fire revolve in the mirror; rings of smoke encircle them and spin around, veiling and unveiling the hard smile of the light.� My glass of beer has shrunk, it huddles up on the table: it looks dense and indispensable.� I want to pick it up and weigh it, I stretch out my hand ...� Good Lord!� It's that which has changed most of all, it's my gestures.� That movement of my arm unfolded like a majestic theme, it glided along the song of the Negress; it seemed to me that I was dancing.

�� Adolphe's face is there, set against the chocolate-coloured wall; he seems quite close.� Just as my hand was closing, I saw his face; it had the obvious, necessary look of a conclusion.� I press my fingers against the glass, I look at Adolphe: I am happy.

�� "There!"

�� A voice rises above the general noise.� It's my neighbour who is speaking, the drunken old man.� His cheeks make a purple patch against the brown leather of the bench.� He slaps a card down on the table.� The queen of diamonds.

�� But the young man who looks like a dog smiles.� The red-faced player, bent over the table, looks up at him, ready to spring.

�� "And there!"

�� The young man's hand emerges from the shadows, hovers for a moment, white, indolent, then suddenly drops like a kite and presses a card against the cloth.� The fat red-faced man jumps into the air:

�� "Hell!� He's trumped."

�� The outline of the king of hearts appears between clenched fingers, then it is turned on its face and the game goes on.� Handsome king, come from so far away, prepared for by so many combinations, by so many vanished gestures.� Now he disappears in his turn, so that other combinations may be born, other gestures, attacks, counter-attacks, changes of fortune, a host of little adventures.

�� I am moved, I feel my body like a precision tool at rest.� I for my part have had some real adventures.� I can't remember a single detail, but I can see the rigorous succession of circumstances.� I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me, and I have followed the course of rivers towards their source or else plunged into forests, always making for other cities.� I have had women, I have fought with men; and I could never turn back, anymore than a record can spin in reverse.� And all that was leading me where?� To this very moment, to this bench, in this bubble of light humming with music.

�� And when you leave me.

�� Yes, I who was so fond of sitting on the banks of the Tiber in Rome, or in the evening, in Barcelona, of walking a hundred times up and down the Ramblas, I who near Angkor, on the island of the Baray of Prah-Kan, saw a banyan tree knotting its roots around the chapel of the Nagas, I am here, I am living in the same second as these card players, I am listening to a Negress singing while the feeble night prowls outside.

�� The record has stopped.

�� Night has entered, smooth, hesitant.� No one sees her, but she is there, veiling the lamps; you can breathe something thick in the air: it is she.� It is cold.� One of the players pushes the cards in an untidy heap towards another who picks them up.� One card has been left behind.� Can't they see it?� It's the nine of hearts.� Someone picks it up at last, and gives it to the dog-faced young man.

�� "Ah!� It's the nine of hearts!"

�� Good, I'm off.� The purple-faced old man bends over a sheet of paper, sucking the point of a pencil.� Madeleine watches him with bright, empty eyes.� The young man turns the nine of hearts over and over between his fingers.� Good God!...

�� I get laboriously to my feet; in the mirror, above the vet's head, I see an inhuman face gliding along.

�� In a little while I'll go to the cinema.

�� The air does me good: it hasn't got the taste of sugar nor the winey smell of vermouth.� But God, how cold it is.

�� It's half-past seven, I'm not hungry and the cinema doesn't start till nine o'clock; what am I going to do?� I have to walk quickly to keep warm.� I hesitate: behind me the boulevard leads to the heart of the town, to the big fiery jewels of the central streets, to the Palais Paramount, the Imperial, the Grands Magasins Jahan.� That doesn't tempt me at all; it's ap�ritif time: for the time being I've seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of all the flabby masses which move about spontaneously.

�� I turn left, I'm going to plunge into that hole over there, at the end of the row of gas lamps: I'm going to follow the boulevard Noir as far as the avenue Galvani.� Any icy wind is blowing from the hole: yonder there is nothing but stones and earth.� Stones are hard and don't move.

�� There is a tedious stretch at first: on the right-hand pavement, a gaseous mass, grey with streaks of fire, is making a noise like rattling shells: this is the old station.� It's presence has fertilized the first hundred yards of the boulevard Noir - from the boulevard de la Redoute to the rue Paradis - has spawned a dozen street lamps there and, side by side, four caf�s, the Rendez-vous des Cheminots and three others, which languish all day long but light up in the evening and cast luminous rectangles on the roadway.� I take another three baths of yellow light, and see an old woman come out of the Rabache general stores who pulls her shawl over her head and starts running.� Now it's finished.� I'm on the curb of the rue Paradis, next to the last lamp-post.� The asphalt ribbon breaks off sharply.� On the other side of the street there is darkness and mud.� I cross the rue Paradis.� I put my right foot in a puddle of water, my sock is soaked through; the walk begins.

�� Nobody lives in this part of the boulevard Noir.� The climate is too harsh here, the soil too barren for life to settle here and grow.� The three saw-works of the Soleil Brothers (the Soleil Brothers provided the panelled arch of the church of Sainte-C�cile-de-la-Mer, which cost a hundred thousand francs) open on the west, with all their doors and windows, on to the quiet rue Jeanne-Berthe-Coeuroy, which they fill with purring sounds.� On the boulevard Victor-Noir they turn their three backs, joined by walls.� These buildings border the left-hand pavement for four hundred yards: there isn't the smallest window, not even a skylight.

�� This time I've put both feet in the gutter.� I cross the street; on the opposite pavement a solitary gas lamp, like a lighthouse at the far end of the earth, lights up a broken-down fence, which has been dismantled here and there.

�� Scraps of old posters are still sticking to the planks.� A handsome face full of hatred grimaces against a green background, torn into the shape of a star; under the nose somebody has pencilled a curled-up moustache.� On another scrap you can still make out the word pur�tre in white letters from which red drops are falling, possibly drops of blood.� It may be that the face and the word formed part of the same poster.� Now the poster is torn, the simple, deliberate links which joined them have disappeared, but another unity has established itself of its own accord between the twisted mouth, the drops of blood, the white letters, and the terminations �tre: it is as if a restless criminal passion were trying to express itself through these mysterious signs.� Between the planks you can see the lights from the railway shining.� The fence is followed by a long wall: a wall without any openings, without any doors, without any windows, a wall which stops two hundred yards farther on, against a house.� I have gone out of range of the street lamp; I enter the black hole.� Seeing my shadow at my feet melt into the darkness, I have the impression of plunging into icy water.� In front of me, far ahead, through layers of black, I can make out a pale patch of pink: it is the avenue Galvani.� I turn round: behind the gas lamp, far away, there is a hint of light: that is the station with the four caf�s.� Behind me, in front of me, there are people drinking and playing cards in pubs.� Here there is nothing but darkness.� Intermittently the wind carries a lonely, distant ringing to my ears.� Familiar noises, the roar of motorcars, shouts, and the barking of dogs scarcely stir from the lighted streets, they stay where it is warm.� But this ringing sound pierces the darkness and reaches as far as here: it is harder, less human than the other noises.

�� I stop to listen to it.� I am cold, my ears hurt; they must be all red.� But I can't feel myself any longer; I am won over by the purity of my surroundings; nothing is alive; the wind whistles, straight lines flee into the darkness.� The boulevard Noir doesn't have the indecent look of bourgeois streets, which try to charm the passers-by: it is simply a reverse side.� The reverse side of the rue Jeanne-Berthe Coeuroy, of the avenue Galvani.� In the vicinity of the station, the people of Bouville still look after it a little: they clean it now and then because of the travellers.� But, immediately afterwards, they abandon it and it rushes straight on, in total darkness, finally bumping into the avenue Galvani.� The town has forgotten it.� Sometimes a big mud-coloured lorry thunders across it at top speed.� Nobody even commits any murders on it, for want of murderers and victims.� The boulevard Noir is inhuman.� Like a mineral.� Like a triangle.� We are lucky to have a boulevard like that at Bouville.� Usually you find them only in capitals - in Berlin near Neuk�lln or again towards Friedrichshain; in London behind Greenwich.� Straight, dirty corridors, with a howling draught and wide, treeless pavements.� They are nearly always on the outskirts in those strange districts where cities are manufactured, near goods stations, tram depots, slaughterhouses, and gasometers.� Two days after a downpour, when the whole city is moist in the sunshine and radiates damp heat, they are still cold, they keep their mud and puddles.� They even have puddles of water which never dry up, except one month in the year, August.

�� The Nausea has stayed over there, in the yellow light.� I am happy: this cold is so pure, this darkness is so puree; am I myself not a wave of icy air?� To have neither blood, nor lymph, nor flesh.� To flow along this canal towards that pallor over there.� To be nothing but coldness.

�� Here are some people.� Two shadows.� What did they have to come here for?

�� It's a little woman pulling a man by his sleeve.� She is talking in a small quick voice.� On account of the wind I can't understand what she is saying.

�� "Are you going to shut your trap or aren't you?" says the man.

�� She goes on talking.� Suddenly he pushes her away.� They look at each other, hesitant, then the man thrusts his hand into his pockets and goes off without looking around.

�� The man has disappeared.� Barely three yards separate me now from the woman.� All of a sudden, deep, hoarse sounds rend her, tear themselves away from her and fill the whole street with extraordinary violence:

�� "Charles, please, you know what I told you?� Charles, come back, I've had enough, I'm too miserable!"

�� I pass so close to her that I could touch her.� It's ... but how can I believe that this burning flesh, this face radiant with sorrow?... yet I recognize the headscarf, the coat, and the big wine-coloured birthmark on her right hand; it's she, it's Lucie, the charwoman.� I dare not offer her my support, but she must be able to demand it if need be: I pass slowly in front of her, looking at her.� Her eyes stare at me, but she doesn't seem to see me; she looks quite helpless in her suffering.� I take a few steps.� I turn round....

�� Yes, it's she, it's Lucie.� But transfigured, beside herself, suffering with an insane generosity.� I envy her.� She stands there, absolutely erect, holding her arms out as if she were waiting for the stigmata; she opens her mouth, she is choking.� I have the impression that the walls have grown higher on each side of the street, that they have come closer together, that she is at the bottom of a well.� I wait a few moments: I am afraid she is going to collapse: she is too sickly to endure this unexpected sorrow.� But she doesn't move, she looks petrified like everything around her.� For a moment I wonder if I haven't been mistaken about her, if this isn't her real nature which has suddenly been revealed to me....

�� Lucie gives a little groan.� She puts her hand to her throat, opening wide, astonished eyes.� No, it isn't from herself that she is drawing the strength to suffer so much.� It is coming to her from outside ... from this boulevard.� She needs to be taken by the shoulders and led to the lights, among people, into the pink, gentle streets: over there you can't suffer so acutely; she would soften up, she would recover her positive look and return to the ordinary level of her sufferings.

�� I turn my back on her.� After all, she is lucky.� I for my part have been much too calm these last three years.� I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes, except a little empty purity.� I walk away.

�

Thursday, 11.30

I have spent two hours working in the reading room.� I have come down into the cour des Hypoth�ques to smoke a pipe.� A square paved with pink bricks.� The people of Bouville are proud of it because it dates from the eighteenth century.� At the entrance to the rue Chamade and the rue Susp�dard, some old chains bar the way to vehicles.� These ladies in black, taking their dogs for a walk, glide beneath the arcade, hugging the walls.� They rarely come right out into the daylight but they cast furtive, satisfied, girlish glances at the statue of Gustave Imp�traz.� They can't know the name of that bronze giant, but they can see from his frock coat and top hat that he was somebody in high society.� He holds his hat in his left hand and rests his right hand on a pile of folio volumes: it is rather as if their grandfather were there on that pedestal, cast in bronze.� They don't need to look at him for long to understand that he thought as they do, exactly as they do, on all subjects.� At the service of their narrow, firm little ideas he has placed his authority and the immense erudition drawn from the folio volumes crushed under his heavy hand.� The ladies in black feel relieved, they can attend peacefully to their household tasks, take their dogs out: they no longer have the responsibility of defending the sacred ideas, the worthy concepts which they derive from their fathers; a man of bronze has made himself their guardian.

�� The encyclopedia devotes a few lines to this personage; I read them last year.� I had placed the volume on the windowsill; through the pane I could see Imp�traz's green skull.� I discovered that he was in his prime about 1890.� He was a school inspector.� He painted charming trifles and wrote three books: Popularity among the Ancient Greeks (1887), Rollin's Pedagogy (1891), and a poetic testament in 1899.� He died in 1902, deeply mourned by his dependants and people of good taste.

�� I lean against the front of the library.� I draw on my pipe, which is threatening to go out.� I see an old lady timidly emerge from the arcade and look at Imp�traz with a shrewd, stubborn expression.� She suddenly plucks up her courage, crosses the courtyard as fast as her legs can carry her, and stops for a moment in front of the statue with her jaws working.� Then she runs away again, black against the pink pavement, and disappears through a crack in the wall.

�� This square may have been a cheerful place about 1800, with its pink bricks and its houses.� Now there is something dry and evil about it, a delicate touch of horror.� This is due to that fellow up there on his pedestal.� When they cast that scholar in bronze, they turned him into a sorcerer.

�� I look Imp�traz full in the face.� He has no eyes, scarcely any nose, a beard eaten away by that strange leprosy which sometimes descends, like an epidemic, on all the statues in a particular district.� He bows; his waistcoat has a big bright-green stain over his heart.� He looks sickly and evil.� He isn't alive, true, but he isn't inanimate either.� A vague power emanates from him, like a wind pushing me away.� Imp�traz would like to drive me out of the cour des Hypoth�ques.� I shan't go before I have finished this pipe.

�� A tall, thin shadow suddenly springs up behind me.� I give a start.

�� "Excuse me, Monsieur, I didn't mean to disturb you.� I saw your lips moving.� You were probably repeating phrases from your book."� He laughs.� "You were hunting Alexandrines."

�� I look at the Autodidact in amazement.� But he seems surprised at my surprise.

�� "Shouldn't we take great care, Monsieur, to avoid Alexandrines in prose?"

�� I have gone down slightly in his estimation.� I ask him what he is doing here at this time of day.� He explains that his boss has given him the day off and he has come straight to the library; that he is not going to have any lunch, that he is going to read until closing time.� I have stopped listening to him, but he must have strayed from his original subject, for I suddenly hear:

�� "... to have, like you, the good fortune of writing a book."

�� I have to say something.

�� "Good fortune ..." I say with a dubious look.

�� He mistakes the meaning of my reply and rapidly corrects himself:

�� "Monsieur, I should have said: 'merit'."

�� We go up the staircase.� I don't feel like working.� Somebody has left Eug�nie Grandet on the table, the book is open at page 27.� I pick it up automatically and start reading page 27, then page 28: I haven't the courage to begin at the beginning.� The Autodidact has gone swiftly over to the shelves along the wall; he brings back two books which he places on the table, looking like a dog which has found a bone.

�� "What are you reading?"

�� He seems reluctant to tell me: he hesitates a little, rolls his big wild eyes, then stiffly holds the books out to me.� They are Peat and Peateries by Larbal�trier, and Hitopadesa or Useful Education by Lastex.� Well?� I can't see what's bothering him: these books strike me as perfectly respectable.� As a matter of form I glance through Hitopadesa and see nothing in it that isn't very high-minded.

3 p.m.

I have given up Eug�nie Grandet.� I have started work, but without any enthusiasm.� The Autodidact, seeing that I am writing, watches me with a respectful concupiscence.� Now and then I raise my head a little and see the huge stiff collar with his chicken-like neck coming out of it.� His clothes are threadbare, but his shirt is dazzling white.� From the same shelf he has just taken down another book, whose title I can make out upside down: The Spire of Caudebec, Norman chronicle, by Mademoiselle Julie Lavergne.� The Autodidact's reading-matter always disconcerts me.

�� All of a sudden the names of the last authors whose works he has consulted come back to my mind: Lambert, Langlois, Larbal�trier, Lastex, Lavergne.� It is a revelation; I have understood the Autodidact's method: he is teaching himself in alphabetical order.

�� I contemplate him with a sort of admiration.� What willpower he must have to carry out, slowly, stubbornly, a plan on such a vast scale!� One day, seven years ago (he told me once that he has been studying for seven years) he came ceremoniously into this reading room.� He looked round at the countless books lining the walls, and he must have said, rather like Rastignac: "It is between the two of us, Human Knowledge."� Then he went and took the first book from the first shelf on the far right; he opened it at the first page, with a feeling of respect and fear combined with unshakeable determination.� Today he has reached 'L'.� 'K' after 'J', 'L' after 'K'.� He has passed abruptly from the study of coleopterae to that of the quantum theory, from a work on Tamerlane to a Catholic pamphlet against Darwinism: not for a moment has he been put off his stride.� He has read everything; he has stored away in his head half of what is known about parthenogenesis, half the arguments against vivisection.� Behind him, before him, there is a universe.� And the day approaches when, closing the last book on the last shelf on the far left, he will say to himself: "And now what?"

�� It is time for his afternoon snack; with an innocent air he eats a piece of bread and a bar of Gala Peter.� His eyelids are lowered and I can study at leisure his beautiful curved lashes - a woman's eyelashes.� He gives off a smell of old tobacco, mingled, when he breathes out, with the sweet scent of chocolate.

Friday, 3 p.m.

A little more and I would have fallen into the mirror trap.� I avoided it, but only to fall into the window trap: with nothing to do, my arms dangling, I go over to the window.� The Yard, the Fence, the Old Station - the Old Station, the Fence, the Yard.� I give such a big yawn that tears come into my eyes.� I am holding my pipe in my right hand and my packet of tobacco in my left.� I ought to fill this pipe.� But I haven't the heart to do it.� My arms dangle, I press my forehead against the windowpane.� That old woman annoys me.� She trots stubbornly along, with unseeing eyes.� Sometimes she stops with a frightened expression, as if an invisible danger had brushed against her.� Here she is under my window, the wind blows her skirts against her knees.� She stops, she straightens her shawl.� Her hands are trembling.� She goes off again: now I see her from behind.� The old woodlouse!� I suppose she's going to turn right, into the boulevard Noir.� That gives her a hundred yards to cover: at the rate she's going it will take her a good ten minutes, ten minutes during which I shall stay like this, watching her, more forehead glued to the windowpane.� She's going to stop twenty times, start again, stop again ...

�� I can see the future.� It is there, stationed in the street, hardly any paler than the present.� Why does it have to be fulfilled?� What advantage will that give it?� The old woman hobbles away, she stops, she tugs at a lock of grey hair escaping from her shawl.� She walks on, she was there, now she is here ... I don't know where I am anymore: am I seeing her movements, or am I foreseeing them?� I can no longer distinguish the present from the future and yet it is lasting, it is gradually fulfilling itself; the old woman advances along the empty street; she moves her heavy mannish shoes.� This is time, naked time, it comes slowly into existence, it keeps you waiting, and when it comes you are disgusted because you realize that it's been there already for a long time.� The old woman nears the corner of the street, she's nothing more now than a little bundle of black clothes.� All right then, that's new, she wasn't there a moment ago.� But that's a tarnished, deflowered newness, which can never take you by surprise.� She is going to turn the corner of the street, she turns it - during an eternity of time.

�� I tear myself away from the window and stumble across the room; I am ensnared by the mirror, I look at myself, I disgust myself: another eternity.� Finally I escape from my image and I go and throw myself on the bed.� I look at the ceiling, I should like to sleep.

�� Calm.� Calm.� I can no longer feel the gliding movement, the slight touch of time.� I see pictures on the ceiling.� Rings of light at first, then crosses.� They flutter about.� And now another picture is forming; this time in the depths of my eyes.� It is a big animal on its knees.� I can see its front legs and its pack-saddle.� The rest is in a haze.� All the same I can recognize it: it's a camel I saw at Marrakesh, tethered to a rock.� It knelt down and stood up six times running; some street urchins were laughing and exciting it with their shouts.

�� Two years ago, it was wonderful: I only had to close my eyes and straightaway my head would start buzzing like a beehive: I could conjure up faces, trees, houses, a Japanese girl in Kamaishi bathing naked in a barrel, a dead Russian emptied by a great gaping wound, with all his blood in a pool beside him.� I could recapture the taste of couscous, the smell of olive oil which fills the streets of Burgos at midday, the smell of fennel which floats through those of Tetuan, the piping of Greek shepherds; I was moved.� This joy was worn out a long time ago, is it going to be reborn today?

�� A torrid sun glides stiffly through my head like a magic-lantern slide.� It is followed by a patch of blue sky; after a few jolts it becomes motionless, I am all gilded by it inside.� From what Moroccan (or Algerian or Syrian) day has this brilliance suddenly detached itself?� I let myself flow into the past.

�� Mekn�s.� What was that man from the hills like who frightened us in a narrow street between the Berdaine mosque and that charming square shaded by a mulberry tree?� He bore down upon us, Anny was on my right.� Or on my left?� That sun and that blue sky were only an illusion.� This is the hundredth time I've let myself be caught.� My memories are like the coins in the devil's purse: when it was opened, nothing was found in it but dead leaves.

�� Of the man from the hills, I can now see only a big dead eye, a milky-white colour.� Is even this eye really his?� The doctor at Baku who explained the principle of the state abortion-houses was also blind in one eye, and, whenever I try to remember his face, it is that same whitish globe which appears.�� Like the Norns, these two men have only one eye between them which they use in turn.

�� As for that square at Mekn�s, although I used to go there every day, it's even simpler: I can't see it at all now.� All that remains is the vague feeling that it was charming, and these five words indissolubly linked together: a charming square at Mekn�s.� No doubt, if I close my eyes or stare vaguely at the ceiling I can reconstruct the scene: a tree in the distance, a short dark figure running towards me.� But I am inventing all that for the sake of the thing.� That Moroccan was tall and lean, besides I only saw him when he touched me.� So I still know that he was tall and lean: certain abbreviated details remain in my memory.� But I can't see anything anymore: however much I search the past I can only retrieve scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, nor whether they are remembered or invented.

�� Moreover there are many cases where even these scraps have disappeared: nothing is left but words: I could still tell the stories, tell them only too well (where anecdotes are concerned I can stand up to anybody except ships' officers and professionals), but they are only skeletons.� They tell about a fellow who does this or that, but it isn't I, I have nothing in common with him.� He travels through countries I know no more about than if I had never been in them.� Sometimes, in my story, I happen to pronounce some of those beautiful names you read in atlases, Aranjuez or Canterbury.� They engender brand-new pictures in me, like the pictures which people who have never travelled create on the basis of their reading: I dream about words, that's all.

�� All the same, for a hundred dead stories there remain one or two living ones.� These I evoke cautiously, occasionally, not too often, for fear of wearing them out.� I fish one out, I see once more the setting, the characters, the attitudes.� All of a sudden I stop: I have felt a worn patch, I have seen a word poking through the web of sensations.� I sense that before long that word is going to take the place of several pictures I love.� Straightaway I stop and quickly think of something else; I don't want to tire my memories.� In vain; the next time I evoke them, a good part will have congealed.

�� I make a vague movement as if to get up, and go and look for my photos of Mekn�s in the box I have pushed under my table.� What's the use?� These aphrodisiacs have scarcely any effect on my memory nowadays.� The other day I found a faded little photo under my blotter.� A woman was smiling, near a fountain.� I looked at this person for a moment without recognizing her.� Then on the back I read: 'Anny.� Portsmouth, 7 April 27.'

�� Never have I felt as strongly as today that I was devoid of secret dimensions, limited to my body, to the airy thoughts which float up from it like bubbles.� I build my memories with my present.� I am rejected, abandoned in the present.� I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape from myself.

�� There's a knock on the door.� It's the Autodidact.� I had forgotten him.� I had promised to show him the photos of my travels.� Damn him.

�� He sits down on a chair; his buttocks spread out and touch the back of it while his stiff torso leans forward.� I jump off my bed and turn on the light.

�� "Do we need that, Monsieur?� We were all right as we were."

�� "Not for looking at photographs...."

�� I relieve him of his hat which he doesn't know where to put.

�� "Really, Monsieur?� You are going to show them to me?"

�� "Of course."

�� It is a calculated risk: I hope he will keep quiet while he looks at them.� I dive under the table, I push the box against his patent-leather shoes, I deposit an armful of postcards and photos in his lap: Spain and Spanish Morocco.

�� But I can see from his frank, laughing expression that I was singularly mistaken in hoping to reduce him to silence.� He glances at a view of San Sabastian taken from Monte Igueldo, places it cautiously on the table and remains silent for a moment.� Then he sighs:

�� "Ah, Monsieur.� You are lucky.� If what they say is true, travel is the best school.� Is that your opinion, Monsieur?"

�� I make a vague gesture.� Luckily he hasn't finished.

�� "It must be such an upheaval.� If I were to go on a voyage, I think I should like to make written notes of every aspect of my character before leaving, so that on my return I could compare what I used to be and what I have become.� I've read that there are travellers who have changed physically and mentally to such an extent that their closest relatives didn't recognize them when they came back."

�� He handles a thick packet of photographs absentmindedly.� He takes one and puts it on the table without looking at it; then he stares intently at the next photo, which shows a carving of St Jerome on a pulpit in Burgos Cathedral.

�� "Have you seen that Christ made of animal skin at Burgos?� There's a very curious book, Monsieur, about those statues made of animal skin and even human skin.� And the Black Virgin?� She isn't at Burgos, but at Saragossa, isn't she?� But perhaps there's one at Burgos?� The pilgrims kiss her, don't they?� The one at Saragossa, I mean.� And isn't there a print of her foot on a flagstone?� A flagstone in a hole, where mothers push their children?"

�� He stiffly pushes an imaginary child with both hands.� You would think he was refusing the gifts of Artaxerxes.

�� "Ah, customs, Monsieur, they are ... they are curious."

�� A little out of breath, he juts his great ass's jawbone towards me.� He smells of tobacco and stagnant water.� His beautiful wild eyes shine like globes of fire and his spare hair rings his skull with a halo of mist.� Under this skull, Samoyeds, Nyam-Nyams, Madagascans, and Fuegians are celebrating the strangest solemnities, eating their aged fathers and their children, spinning to the sound of tom-toms until they faint, giving themselves up to the frenzy of the amuck, burning their dead, exposing them on the rooftops, abandoning them to the river current in a boat lighted by a torch, copulating at random, mother with son, father with daughter, distending their lips with plates and having monstrous animals carved on their backs.

�� "Can on say, with Pascal, that custom is second nature?"

�� He has fixed his dark eyes on mine, he is begging for an answer.

�� "That depends," I say.

�� He draws a deep breath.

�� "That's just what I told myself, Monsieur.� But I distrust myself so much; one ought to have read everything."

�� But at the next photograph he goes quite mad.� He utters a cry of joy.

�� "Segovia!� Segovia!� But I've read a book about Segovia!"

�� He adds with a certain dignity:

�� "Monsieur, I can't remember the author's name anymore.� I sometimes have these lapses of memory.� N ...� No ...� Nod ..."

�� "Impossible," I tell him quickly, "you've only got up to Lavergne...."

�� I immediately regret my words: after all, he has never spoken to me about this reading method of his, it must be a secret madness.� Sure enough, his face falls and thick lips jut out as if he were going to cry.� Then he lowers his head and looks at a dozen postcards without a word.

�� But after half a minute I can see that he is swelling with a powerful enthusiasm and that he will burst if he doesn't speak.

�� "When I've finished my education (I'm allowing myself another six years for that), I shall, if I'm allowed, join the students and professors who go on an annual cruise to the Middle East.� I should like to extend my knowledge on certain points," he says unctuously, "and I should also like something unexpected, something new to happen to me - adventures in fact."

�� He has lowered his voice and assumed a roguish expression.

�� "What sort of adventures?" I ask him in surprise.

�� "Why, all sorts, Monsieur.� Getting on the wrong train.� Stopping in an unknown town.� Losing your wallet, being arrested by mistake, spending the night in prison.� Monsieur, it seems to me that you could define adventure as an event which is out of the ordinary without being necessarily extraordinary.� People talk of the magic of adventures.� Does that expression strike you as accurate?� I should like to ask you a question, Monsieur."

�� "What is it?"

�� He blushes and smiles.

�� "Perhaps it's indiscreet...."

�� "Ask me anyway."

�� He leans towards me, his eyes half-closed, and asks:

�� "Have you had many adventures, Monsieur?"

�� "A few," I reply automatically, drawing back to avoid his foul breath.� Yes.� I said that automatically, without thinking.� Usually, in fact, I am rather proud of having had so many adventures.� But today, I have no sooner uttered those words than I am filled with indignation against myself: it seems to me that I am lying, that I have never had the slightest adventure in the whole of my life, or rather that I don't even know what the word means anymore.� At the same time my shoulders feel weighed down by the same discouragement which affected me in Hanoi nearly four years ago when Mercier was urging me to join him and I was staring at a Khmer statuette without answering.� And the IDEA is there, that big white mass which so disgusted me then: I hadn't seen it again for four years.

�� "Might I ask you ..." says the Autodidact.

�� Good God!� To tell him the story of one of those famous adventures.� But I refuse to say another word on the subject.

�� "There," I say, bending over his narrow shoulders and putting my finger on a photo, "there, that's Santillana, the prettiest village in Spain."

�� "The Santillana of Gil Blas?� I didn't think it existed.� Ah, Monsieur, how instructive your conversation is.� Anybody can see you have travelled."

�� I got rid of the Autodidact after stuffing his pockets with postcards, prints, and photos.� He went off enchanted and I switched off the light.� Now I am alone.� Not quite alone.� There is still that idea, waiting in front of me.� It has rolled itself into a ball, it remains there like a big cat; it explains nothing, it doesn't move, it simply says no.� No, I haven't had any adventures.

�� I fill my pipe, I light it, I stretch out on my bed, putting a coat over my legs.� What astonishes me is to feel so sad and weary.� Even if it were true that I had never had any adventures, what difference would that make to me?� To begin with, it seems to me that it is simply a matter of words.� That business at Mekn�s, for example, that I was thinking about a little while ago: a Moroccan jumped on me and tried to stab me with a big knife.� But I lashed out at him and hit him just below the temple....Then he started shouting in Arabic and a swarm of verminous characters appeared and chased us all the way to the Attarin souk.� Well, you can call that whatever you like, but in any case it was an event which happened to ME.

�� It is completely dark and I'm not sure if my pipe is lit.� A tram goes past: a red flash on the ceiling.� Then a heavy lorry which makes the house tremble.� It must be six o'clock.

�� I haven't had any adventures.� Things have happened to me, events, incidents, anything you like.� But not adventures.� It isn't a matter of words; I am beginning to understand.� There is something I longed for more than all the rest - without realizing it properly.� It wasn't love, heaven forbid, nor glory, nor wealth.� It was ... anyway, I had imagined that at certain moments my life could take on a rare and precious quality.� There was no need for extraordinary circumstances: all I asked for was a little order.� There is nothing very splendid about my life at present: but now and then, for example when they played music in the caf�s, I would look back and say to myself: in the old days, in London, Mekn�s, Tokyo, I have known wonderful moments, I have had adventures.� It is that which has been taken away from me now.� I have just learnt, all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, that I have been lying to myself for ten years.� Adventures are in books.� And naturally, everything they tell you about in books can happen in real life, but not in the same way.� It was to this way of happening that I attached so much importance.

�� First of all the beginning would have to be real beginnings.� Alas!� Now I can see so clearly what I wanted.� Real beginnings, appearing like a fanfare of trumpets, like the first note of a jazz tune, abruptly, cutting boredom short, strengthening duration; evenings among those evenings of which you later say: "I was out walking, it was an evening in May."� You are walking along, the moon has just risen, you feel idle, vacant, a little empty.� And then all of a sudden you think: "Something has happened."� It might be anything: a slight crackling sound in the shadows, a fleeting silhouette crossing the street.� But this slight event isn't like the others: straightaway you see that it is the predecessor of a great form whose outlines are lost in the mist and you tell yourself too: "Something is beginning."

�� Something begins in order to end: an adventure doesn't let itself be extended; it achieves significance only through its death.� To each moment I cling with all my heart: I know that it is unique, irreplaceable - and yet I would not lift a finger to prevent it from being annihilated.� This last minute I am spending - in Berlin, in London - in the arms of this woman whom I met two days ago - a minute I love passionately, a woman I am close to loving - it is going to come to an end, I know that.� In a little while I shall leave for another country.� I shall never find this woman again or this night.� I study each second, I try to suck it dry; nothing passes which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever within me, nothing, neither the ephemeral tenderness of those lovely eyes, nor the noise in the street, nor the false light of dawn: and yet the minute goes by and I do not hold it back, I am glad to see it pass.

�� And then all of a sudden something breaks off sharply.� The adventure is over, times resumes its everyday slackness.� I turn round; behind me, that beautiful melodious form plunges completely into the past.� It grows smaller, shrinking as it sinks, and now the end is simply one with the beginning.� Following that golden spot with my eyes, I think that I would agree - even if I had nearly died, lost a fortune, a friend - to live it all over again, in the same circumstances, from beginning to end.� But an adventure never begins again, is never prolonged.

�� Yes, it's what I wanted - alas!� What I still want.� I am so happy when a Negress sings: what summits would I not reach if my own life were the subject of the melody.

�� The Idea is still there, the unnameable Idea.� It is waiting, peacefully.� At the moment it seems to be saying:

�� "Yes?� Is that what you wanted?� Well, that's exactly what you've never had (remember that you fooled yourself with words, you called the tinsel of travel, love affairs with whores, brawls, and trinkets adventure) and that is what you will never have - nor anyone but yourself."

�� But why?� WHY?

Saturday, noon

The Autodidact didn't see me come into the reading room.� He was sitting right at the end of the table at the back; he had put a book in front of him, but he wasn't reading.� He was looking with a smile at his neighbour on the right, a filthy-looking schoolboy who often comes to the library.� The schoolboy allowed himself to be looked at for a while, then suddenly put his tongue out at him and pulled a horrible face.� The Autodidact blushed, hurriedly plunged his nose back into his book, and became engrossed by his reading.

�� I have reconsidered my thoughts of yesterday.� I was completely dried up: I didn't care if there were no adventures.� I was simply curious to know whether there could not be any.

�� This is what I have been thinking: for the most commonplace event to become an adventure, you must - and this is all that is necessary - start recounting it.� This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.

�� But you have to choose: to live or to recount.� For example, when I was in Hamburg, with that Erna girl whom I didn't trust and who was afraid of me, I led a peculiar sort of life.� But I was inside it, I didn't think about it.� And then one evening, in a little caf� at St Pauli, she left me to go to the lavatory.� I was left on my own, there was a gramophone playing Blue Skies.� I started telling myself what had happened since I had landed.� I said to myself: "On the third evening, as I was coming into a dance hall called the Blue Grotto, I noticed a tall woman who was half-seas over.� And that woman is the one I am waiting for at this moment, listening to Blue Skies, and who is going to come back and sit down on my right and put her arms around my neck."� Then I had a violent feeling that I was having an adventure.� But Erna came back, she sat down beside me, she put her arms around my neck, and I hated her without knowing why.� I understand now: it was because I had to begin living again that the impression of having an adventure had just vanished.

�� When you are living, nothing happens.� The settings change, people come in and go out, that's all.� There are never any beginnings.� Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, it is an endless, monotonous addition.� Now and then you do a partial sum: you say: I've been travelling for three years, I've been at Bouville for three years.� There isn't any end either: you never leave a woman, a friend, a town in one go.� And then everything is like everything else: Shanghai, Moscow, Algiers, are all the same after a couple of weeks.� Occasionally - not very often - you take your bearings, you realize that you're living with a woman, mixed up in some dirty business.� Just for an instant.� After that, the procession starts again, you begin adding up the hours and days once more.� Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.� April, May, June.� 1924, 1925, 1926.

�� That's living.� But when you tell about life, everything changes; only it's a change nobody notices: the proof of that is that people talk about true stories.� As if there could possibly be such things as true stories; events take place one way and we recount them the opposite way.� You appear to begin at the beginning: "It was a fine autumn evening in 1922.� I was a solicitor's clerk at Marommes."� And in fact you have begun at the end.� It is there, invisible and present, and it is the end which gives these few words the pomp and value of a beginning.� "I was out walking, I had left the village without noticing.� I was thinking about my money troubles."� This sentence, taken simply for what it is, means that the fellow was absorbed, morose, miles away from an adventure, in exactly the sort of mood in which you let events go by without seeing them.� But the end is there, transforming everything.� For us, the fellow is already the hero of the story.� His morose mood, his money troubles are much more precious than ours, they are all gilded by the light of future passions.� And the story goes on in reverse: the moments have stopped piling up on one another in a happy-go-lucky manner, they are caught by the end of the story which attracts them and each of them in turn attracts the preceding moment: "It was dark, the street was empty."� The sentence is tossed off casually, it seems superfluous; but we refuse to be taken in and we put it aside: it is a piece of information whose value we shall understand later on.� And we have the impression that the hero lived all the details of that night like annunciations, promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to everything that did not herald adventure.� We forget that the future was not yet there; the fellow was walking in a darkness devoid of portents, a night which offered him its monotonous riches pell-mell, and he made no choice.

�� I wanted the moments of my life to follow one another in an orderly fashion like those of a life remembered.� You might as well try to catch time by the tail.

Sunday

I had forgotten, this morning, that it was Sunday.� I went out and walked along the streets as usual.� I had taken Eug�nie Grandet with me.� And then, all of a sudden, as I was pushing open the gate of the municipal park, I had the impression that something was signalling me.� The park was bare and empty.� But ... how shall I put it?� It didn't have its usual look, it was smiling at me.� I stayed for a moment leaning against the gate, and then, suddenly, I realized it was Sunday.� It was there in the trees, on the lawns, like a faint smile.� It was impossible to describe, you would have had to say very quickly: "This is a municipal park, this is winter, this is a Sunday morning."

�� I let go of the gate, I turned around towards the houses and the staid streets and I murmured: "It's Sunday."

�� It's Sunday: behind the docks, along the coast, near the goods station, all around the town there are empty warehouses and machines standing motionless in the darkness.� In all the houses, men are shaving behind their windows: their heads are thrown back, they stare alternately at their mirror and at the cold sky to see whether it's going to be a fine day.� The brothels are opening their doors to their first customers, peasants and soldiers.� In the churches, in the light of the candles, a man is drinking wine in front of kneeling women.� In all the suburbs, between the interminable walls of the factories, long black processions have set off, they are slowly advancing on the centre of the town.� To receive them, the streets have assumed the appearance they have when there is rioting: all the shops, except for those in the rue Tournebride, have lowered their iron shutters.� Soon, in complete silence, the black columns are going to invade these streets which are shamming death: the first to arrive will be the railway workers from Tourville and their wives who work in the Saint-Symphorin soap factories, then the small shopkeepers from Jouxtebouville, then the workers from the Pinot spinning-mills, then all the odd-job men from the Saint-Maxence district: the men from Thi�rache will arrive last on the eleven o'clock tram.� Soon the Sunday crowd will be born, between bolted shops and closed doors.

�� A clock strikes half-past ten and I set off: on Sunday, at this hour, you can see a wonderful show at Bouville, but you mustn't arrive too late after the end of High Mass.

�� The little rue Jos�phin-Soulary is dead, it smells like a cellar.� But, as on every Sunday, it is full of a rich noise, a noise like a tide.� I turn into the rue due Pr�sident-Chamart, where the houses have four stories, with long white venetian blinds.� This street of notaries is entirely filled with the voluminous din of Sunday.� In the passage Gillet, the noise is even greater and I recognize it; it is a noise made by men.� Then suddenly, on the left, there is a sort of explosion of light and sound.� I have arrived: this is the rue Tournebride, and all I have to do is take my place among my fellows and I shall see the gentlemen of substance raising their hats to one another.

�� Only sixty years ago nobody would have dared to foresee the miraculous destiny of the rue Tournebride, which the inhabitants of Bouville today call the Little Prado.� I have seen a map dated 1847 on which the street didn't even figure.� At that time it must have been a dark, stinking alley, with a gutter along which fishes' heads and entrails floated between the paving-stones.� But, at the end of 1873, the National Assembly declared the construction of a church on the Montmartre hill to be of public utility.� A few months later, the wife of the Mayor of Bouville had a vision: St C�cile, her patron saint, came and remonstrated with her.� Was it tolerable that the cream of Bouville society should muddy themselves every Sunday going to Saint-Ren� or Saint-Claudien to hear Mass with shopkeepers?� Hadn't the National Assembly set an example?� Bouville, thanks to the patronage of Heaven, now had a first-class economic position; wouldn't it be fitting to build a church in which to give thanks to the Lord?

�� These visions were approved: the municipal council held an historic meeting and the Bishop agreed to organize a subscription.� All that remained to be done was to choose the site.� The old families of businessmen and ship-owners were of the opinion that the building should be erected on the summit of the Coteau Vert, where they lived, 'so that Saint C�cile could watch over Bouville like the Sacr�-Coeur de J�sus over Paris.'� The new gentlemen of the boulevard Maritime, who were few as yet but extremely rich, objected: they would give what was needed, but the church would have to be built on the place Marignan; if they were going to pay for a church, they intended to be able to use it; they were not reluctant to give a taste of their power to that haughty bourgeoisie which treated them like parvenus.� The Bishop hit on a compromise: the church was built half-way between the Couteau Vert and the boulevard Maritime, on the place de la Halle-aux-Morues, which was baptized place Sainte-C�cile-de-la-Mer.� This monstrous edifice, which was completed in 1887, cost no less than fourteen million francs.

�� The rue Tournebride, which was wide but dirty and ill-famed, had to be entirely rebuilt and its inhabitants were firmly driven back behind the place Sainte-C�cile; the Little Prado became - especially on Sunday mornings - the meeting-place of fashionable and distinguished people.� One by one, fine shops opened upon the passage of the �lite.� They stay open on Easter Monday, all Christmas Eve, and every Sunday until noon.� Next to Julien, the pork-butcher, who is renowned for his hot pies, Foulon the pastry-cook exhibits his famous specialities, wonderful cone-shaped petits-fours made of mauve butter, topped with a sugar violet.� In the window of Dupaty's bookshop you can see the latest books published by Plon, a few technical works such as a theory of navigation or a treatise on sails, a large illustrated history of Bouville, and elegantly produced de luxe editions: Koenigsmark, bound in blue leather, The Book of my Sons, by Paul Doumer, bound in beige leather with crimson flowers. �Ghislaine (Haute Couture, Paris Models) separates Pi�geois the florist from Paquin the antique dealer.� The hairdresser Gustave, who employs four manicurists, occupies the first floor of a brand-new yellow-painted building.

�� Two years ago, at the corner of the impasse des Moulins-G�meaux and the rue Turnebride, an impudent little shop still displayed an advertisement for the Tu-pu-nez insecticide.� It had flourished at the time when codfish were hawked on the place Sainte-C�cile, it was a hundred years old.� The display windows were rarely washed: you had to make an effort in order to distinguish, through the dust and mist, a crowd of little wax figures dressed in flame-coloured doublets, representing rats and mice.� These animals were disembarking from a rated ship, leaning on sticks; they had scarcely touched the ground before a peasant girl, smartly dressed but ghastly pale and black with dirt put them to flight by sprinkling them with Tu-pu-nez.� I was very fond of this shop, it had a cynical, obstinate look, it insolently recalled the rights of vermin and dirt a stone's throw from the most costly church in France.

�� The herborist died last year and her nephew sold the house.� It was enough to knock down a few walls: it is now a small lecture hall, 'La Bonbonni�re'.� Last year Henry Bordeaux gave a talk on mountaineering there.

�� In the rue Tournebride you mustn't be in a hurry: the families walk slowly.� Sometimes you move up one place because a whole family has gone into Foulon's or Pi�geois'.� But at other times you have to stop and mark time because two families, one belonging to the column going up the street and the other to the column coming down, have met and clasped each other firmly by the hands.� I advance slowly.� I stand a whole head higher than both columns and I see hats, a sea of hats.� Most of them are black and hard.� Now and then you see one fly off at the end of an arm, revealing the soft gleam of a skull; then, after a few moments of clumsy flight, it settles again.� At No. 16 rue Tournebride, the hatter Urbain, who specializes in army caps, has hung up as a symbol a huge red archbishop's hat whose gold tassels hang six feet from the ground.

�� Everybody comes to a halt: a group has just formed right under the tassels.� My neighbour waits without any sign of impatience, his arms dangling: I do believe that this pale little old man, as fragile as porcelain, is Coffier, the president of the Chamber of Trade.� It seems that he is so intimidating because he never says anything.� He lives at the top of the Coteau Vert, in a big brick house whose windows are always wide open.� It's over now: the group has broken up, we start moving again.� Another group has just collected, but it takes up less space: it has no sooner been formed than it presses against Ghislaine's window.� The column doesn't even stop: it barely moves a little to one side; we walk past six people who are holding hands: "Good morning, Monsieur.� Good morning, my dear sir, how are you keeping?� Do put your hat on again, Monsieur, you'll catch cold.� Thank you, Madame, it isn't very warm, is it?� Darling, allow me to introduce Doctor Lefran�ois.� Doctor, I am delighted to make your acquaintance, my husband is always talking to me about Doctor Lefran�ois who took such good care of him, but do put your hat on, Doctor, in this cold weather you'll catch a chill.� But the Doctor would cure himself quickly.� Alas, Madame, it's doctors who are looked after worst of all.� The Doctor is a remarkable musician.� Heavens, Doctor, I didn't know, do you play the violin?� The Doctor is very gifted."

�� The little old man next to me must be Coffier; there's one of the women in the group, the brunette, who is eating him up with her eyes, while smiling at the same time at the doctor.� She seems to be thinking: "There's Monsieur Coffier, the president of the Chamber of Trade; how intimidating he looks, they say he's so cold."� But Monsieur Coffier hasn't deigned to see anything: these people are from the boulevard Maritime, they don't belong to society.� Since I started coming to this street to see the Sunday hat-raising, I have learnt to distinguish between the people from the boulevard and those from the Coteau.� When a fellow is dressed in a new overcoat, a soft felt hat, and a dazzling shirt, when he displaces air in passing, there's no possibility of a mistake: he is somebody from the boulevard Maritime.� The people from the Coteau Vert can be recognized by an indefinable, shabby,�� sunken look.� They have narrow shoulders and an insolent expression on worn faces.� This fat gentleman holding a child by the hand - I'd swear he comes from the Coteau: his face is all grey and his tie is knotted like a piece of string.

�� The fat gentleman comes towards us: he is staring hard at Monsieur Coffier.� But, just before passing him, he turns his head away and starts joking in a fatherly way with his little boy.� He takes a few more steps, bending over his son, his eyes gazing into the boy's eyes, nothing but a father; then, all of a sudden, turning quickly towards us, he darts a sharp glance at a little old man and gives a dry, ample salute with a sweep of his arm.� Startled, the little boy hasn't taken off his cap: this is an affair between grown-ups.

�� At the corner of the rue Basse-de-Vieille, our column runs into a column of the faithful coming out of Mass: a dozen people bump into one another and greet one another, whirling round and round, but the hat-raising happens too quickly for me to spot the details; above this fat, pale crowd the church of Sainte-C�cile raises its monstrous white mass, chalk-white against a dark sky; behind these dazzling walls it retains within its flanks a little of the darkness of night.� We move off again, in a slightly modified order.� Monsieur Coffier has been pushed back behind me.� A lady in navy blue has glued herself to my left side.� She has come from Mass.� She blinks her eyes, a little dazzled at coming back into the morning light.� That gentleman who is walking in front of her and who has such a thin neck is her husband.

�� On the opposite pavement, a gentleman who is holding his wife by the arm has just whispered a few words in her ear and has started smiling.� She promptly and carefully wipes all expression from her cream-coloured face and takes a few steps blindly.� These signs are unmistakable: they are going to greet somebody.� Sure enough, a moment later, the gentleman shoots his hand into the air.� When his fingers are close to his felt hat, they hesitate for a second before settling delicately on the crown.� While he is gently raising his hat, bowing his head a little to help the operation, his wife gives a little start and fixes a young smile on her face.� A shadow passes them, bowing as it does so: but their twin smiles do not disappear straightaway: they remain for a few moments on their lips, by a sort of residual magnetism.� By the time the lady and gentleman pass me, they have regained their impassivity, but a gay expression still lingers around their mouths.

�� It's over: the crowd is thinner, the hat-raising less frequent, the shop windows less exquisite in character: I am at the end of the rue Tournebride.� Shall I cross the street and go back up the opposite pavement?� I think I have had enough, I have seen enough of these pink skulls, of these thin, distinguished, insipid faces.� I am going to cross the place Marignan.� As I am cautiously extricating myself from the column, a real gentleman's head springs out of a black hat close to me.� It's the husband of the lady in navy blue.� Ah, what a fine, long dolichocephalic skull, planted with thick, short hairs!� What a handsome American moustache, scattered with silver threads!� And above all what a smile, what an admirable cultured smile!� There is also a pince-nez, somewhere on a nose.

�� Turning to his wife, he says:

�� "He's a new draughtsman at the factory.� I wonder what he can be doing here.� He's a nice young fellow, he's shy and he amuses me."

�� Standing beside the window of Julien's, the pork-butcher's shop, the young draughtsman, who has just put his hat on again, still all pink, his eyes lowered, a stubborn look on his face, retains an appearance of intense pleasure.� This is undoubtedly the first Sunday he has ventured to cross the rue Tournebride.� He looks like a boy who has just had his First Communion.� He has clasped his hands behind his back and turned his face towards the window with an air of positively exciting modesty; he is gazing unseeingly at four sausages shining with jelly, spread out on a bed of parsley.

�� A woman comes out of the shop and takes his arm.� This is his wife, who is quite young, despite her wrinkled skin.� She can roam about the rue Tournebride as much as she likes, nobody will take her for a lady; she is betrayed by the cynical sparkle of her eyes, by her intelligent, knowing look.� Real ladies don't know the price of things, they like mad, extravagant gestures; their eyes are beautiful innocent flowers, hothouse flowers.

�� I reach the Brasserie V�zelize on the stroke of one o'clock.� The old men are there as usual.� Two of them have already started to eat.� There are four who are playing cards and drinking aperitifs.� The others are standing watching them play while their tables are being laid.� The tallest, who has a flowing beard, is a stockbroker.� Another is a retired commissioner from the Naval Conscription Board.� They eat and drink like men of twenty.� On Sunday they eat sauerkraut.� The late arrivals call out to the others, who are already eating:

�� "What, the usual Sunday sauerkraut?"

�� They sit down and sigh happily:

�� "Mariette, my dear, a beer without a head on it and a sauerkraut."

�� This Mariette is a strapping wench.� As I am sitting down at a table at the back, a red-faced old man starts coughing furiously while she is pouring him a vermouth.

�� "Come on, pour me more than that," he says, coughing.

�� But she gets angry herself: she hasn't finished pouring.

�� "Let me pour, will you?� Anyway, what's the matter with you?� You're like somebody who screams before he's hurt."

�� The others start laughing.

�� "She's got you there!"

�� The stockbroker, on his way to his table, takes Mariette by the shoulders:

�� "It's Sunday, Mariette.� Are you going to the cinema this afternoon with your boyfriend?"

�� "Oh, sure!� This is Antoinette's day off.� As far as boyfriends are concerned, I haven't a hope."

�� The stockbroker has sat down opposite a clean-shaven old man with an unhappy face.� The clean-shaven old man promptly launches out on an animated story.� The stockbroker doesn't listen to him: he pulls faces and tugs at his beard.� They never listen to each other.

�� I recognize my neighbours: they are small local shopkeepers.� Sunday is their maid's day off.� So they come here, always sitting at the same table.� The husband eats a fine rib of under-done beef.� He examines it closely and sniffs it now and then.� The wife picks at her food.� She is a heavy blonde of forty with red, downy cheeks.� She has a pair of fine, hard breasts under her satin blouse.� Like a man, she empties a bottle of claret at every meal.

�� I am going to read Eug�nie Grandet.� It isn't that I am enjoying it tremendously, but I have to do something.� I open the book at random; the mother and daughter are talking about Eug�nie's growing love:

�� Eug�nie kissed her hand, saying:

�� 'How kind you are dear Mama!'

�� At these words, the motherly old face, withered by protracted suffering, lit up.

�� 'Do you like him?' asked Eug�nie.

�� Madame Grandet's only reply was a smile; then, after a moment's silence, she murmured:

�� 'Are you already in love with him?� That would be wrong.'

�� 'Wrong?' Eug�nie went on.� 'Why?� You like him, Nanon likes him, why shouldn't I like him?

�Come along, Mama, let's set the table for his luncheon.'

�� She put her needlework down, and her mother did likewise, saying:

�� 'You are mad.'

�� But she took pleasure in justifying her daughter's madness by sharing it.� Eug�nie called Nanon.

�� 'What do you want now, Mamselle?'

�� 'Nanon, you will have some cream for midday, won't you?'

�� 'Ah, for midday, yes,' replied the old servant.

�� 'Well, serve him some very strong coffee.� I have heard Monsieur de Grassins say that they made

coffee very strong in Paris.� Put in a lot.'

�� 'And where do you expect me to get it?'

�� 'Buy some.'

�� 'And what if Monsieur sees me?'

�� 'He's out in the fields.'

�� My neighbours had remained silent since my arrival, but all of a sudden the husband's voice distracted me from my reading.

�� The husband, with an amused, mysterious air:

�� "I say, did you see that?"

�� The woman gives a start and, coming out of a dream, looks at him.� He eats and drinks, and then goes on, with the same mischievous air:

�� "Ha, ha!"

�� A moment's silence, the woman has returned to her dream.

�� Suddenly she shivers and asks:

�� "What's that you were saying?"

�� "Suzanne yesterday."

�� "Ah, yes," the woman says, "she had been to see Victor."

�� "What did I tell you?"

�� The woman pushes her plate away impatiently.

�� "It's no good."

�� The edge of her plate is decorated with lumps of gristle she has spat out. �The husband continues his train of thought:

�� "That little old woman ..."

�� He stops and smiles vaguely.� Opposite us the old stockbroker is stroking Mariette's arm and panting slightly.� After a moment:

�� "I told you so, the other day."

�� "What did you tell me?"

�� "Victor - that she'd go and see him.� What's the matter?" he asks abruptly with a startled expression, "don't you like it?"

�� "It's no good."

�� "It isn't the same," he says pompously, "it isn't like it was when H�cart was here.� Do you know where he is now, H�cart?"

�� "He's at Domr�my, isn't he?"

�� "Yes, that's right, who told you?"

�� "You did.� You told me on Sunday."

�� She eats a crumb of bread lying on the paper tablecloth.� Then, smoothing the paper on the edge of the table with her hand, she says hesitatingly:

�� "You know, you're wrong, Suzanne is more ..."

�� "That may be, my dear, that may well be," he replies absentmindedly.� He looks around for Mariette and beckons her.

�� "It's hot."

�� Mariette leans familiarly on the edge of the table.

�� "Oh, yes, it is hot," says the woman with a groan, "it's stifling here and what's more the beef's no good, I'm going to tell the patron, it isn't like it used to be, do open the window a bit, Mariette dear."

�� The husband assumes his amused expression again:

�� "I say, didn't you see her eyes?"

�� "When, pet?"

�� He apes her impatiently:

�� "When, pet?� That's you all over: in summer when it's snowing."

�� "Oh, you mean yesterday?� I see."

�� He laughs, he looks into the distance, he recites very quickly, with a certain application:

�� "The eyes of a cat on hot bricks."

�� He is so pleased with himself that he seems to have forgotten what he wanted to say.� She laughs in her turn, without malice.

�� "Ha, ha, you old rogue."

�� She slaps him on the back.

�� "You old rogue, you old rogue."

�� He repeats with more assurance:

�� "A cat on hot bricks."

�� But she stops laughing:

�� "No, seriously, you know, she isn't like that."

�� He leans forward, he whispers a long story in her ear.� She listens for a moment with her mouth open, her face a little drawn and hilarious, like someone who is going to burst out laughing, then suddenly she throws herself back and scratches his hand.

�� "That isn't true, that isn't true."

�� He says in a slow, reasonable voice:

�� "Listen, dear, he said so himself: if it wasn't true why would he have said so?"

�� "No, no."

�� "But he said so: listen, suppose ..."

�� She starts laughing:

�� "I'm laughing because I'm thinking about Ren�."

�� "Yes."

�� He laughs too.� She goes on in a low, earnest voice:

�� "So that means he noticed on Tuesday."

�� "Thursday."

�� "No, Tuesday, you know because of the ..."

�� She sketches a sort of curve in the air.

�� A long silence.� The husband dips a piece of bread in his sauce.� Mariette changes the plates and brings them a couple of tarts.� Later on I shall have a tart too.� Suddenly the woman, a little dreamy with a proud and slightly shocked smile on her lips, says in a drawling voice:

�� "Oh no, really!"

�� There is so much sensuality in her voice that it stirs him, and he strokes the back of her neck with his fat hand.

�� "Charles, stop it, you're exciting me, darling," she murmurs with a smile, her mouth full.

�� I try to go back to my reading:

�� 'And where do you expect me to get it?'

�� 'Buy some.'

�� 'And what if Monsieur sees me?'

�� But I can still hear the woman, who is saying:

�� "I say, I'm going to make Marthe laugh, I'm going to tell her ..."

�� My neighbours have fallen silent.� After the tarts, Mariette has served them with prunes and the woman is busy gracefully laying the stones in her spoon.� The husband, staring at the ceiling, taps out a military march on the table.� You get the impression that their normal condition is silence and that speech is a slight fever which attacks them now and then.

�� 'And where do you expect me to get it?'

�� 'Buy some.'

�� I close the book, I'm going out for a walk.

�� When I left the Brasserie V�zelize, it was nearly three o'clock; I could feel the afternoon all through my heavy body.� Not my afternoon, but theirs, the one a hundred thousand citizens of Bouville were going to live in common.� At this same moment, after their long and copious Sunday dinner, they were getting up from table and for them something had died.� Sunday had spent its light-hearted youth.� Now it was a matter of digesting the chicken and the tart, and getting dressed to go out.

�� The bell at the Cin�-Eldorado rang out in the clear air.� This is a familiar Sunday sound, the ringing in broad daylight.� Over a hundred people were queuing up alongside the green wall.� They were eagerly awaiting the hour of soft shadows, of relaxation, of abandon, the hour when the screen, shining like a white pebble under water, would speak and dream for them.� A vain longing: something in them would remain tense; they were too frightened of their lovely Sunday being spoilt.� Before long, as on every Sunday, they would be disappointed: the film would be stupid, their neighbour would smoke a pipe or spit between his knees, or else Lucien would be unpleasant, he wouldn't have anything nice to say, or else, as if on purpose, today of all days, when for once they went to the cinema, the pain in their side would start up again.� Soon, as on every Sunday, small, hidden rages would grow in a dark hall.

�� I walked along the quiet rue Bressan.� The sun had scattered the clouds and it was fine.� A family had just come out of a villa called 'The Wave'.� The daughter was buttoning her gloves out on the pavement.� She could have been about thirty.� The mother, planted on the first of the flight of steps, was looking straight ahead with an assured expression, and breathing hard.� Of the father I could see only the huge back.� Bent over the keyhole, he was locking the door.� The house would remain dark and empty until they got back.� In the neighbouring houses, which were already bolted and deserted, the floors and furniture were creaking gently.� Before going out they had put out the fire in the dining-room fireplace.� The father joined the two women, and the family set off without a word.� Where were they going?� On Sunday you go to the cemetery, or else you visit relatives, or else, if you are completely free, you go for a walk along the Jetty.� I was free; I walked along the rue Bressan which comes out on the Jetty Promenade.

�� The sky was pale blue with a few wisps of smoke; now and then a drifting cloud passed in front of the sun.� In the distance I could see the white cement balustrade which runs along the Jetty Promenade; the sea was shining through the openings.� The family turned right, up the rue de l'Aum�nier-Hilaire, which climbs up to the Coteau Vert.� I saw them walking slowly upwards, they made three black patches on the glittering asphalt.� I turned left and joined the crowd filing along the sea-shore.

�� It was more of a mixture than in the morning.� It seemed as if all these men no longer had the strength to uphold that magnificent social hierarchy they were so proud of before lunch.� Businessmen and civil servants walked side by side; they let themselves be elbowed, jostled, and even pushed to one side by shabby-looking clerks.� Aristocracies, �lites, and professional groups had melted away in this warm crowd.� There remained men who were almost alone and no longer representative.

�� There was a puddle of light in the distance, the sea at low tide.� A few reefs awash with water pierced that bright surface with their heads.� On the sand there lay some fishingboats, not far from the sticky stone cubes which have been thrown pell-mell at the foot of the jetty, to protect it from the waves, with gaps between them through which the sea rumbles.� At the entrance to the outer harbour, the silhouette of a dredger stood out against the sun-bleached sky.� Every evening until midnight it howls and groans and kicks up an infernal row.� But on Sunday the workers stroll about on land, there is only a watchman on board: the boat is silent.

�� The sun was bright and diaphanous: a thin white wine.� It's light barely touched people's bodies, gave them no shadows, no relief: faces and hands formed patches of pale gold.� All these men in overcoats seemed to float gently along a few inches above the ground.� Now and then the wind pushed shadows over us which trembled like water; faces lost their colour for a moment, turned chalky-white.

�� It was Sunday; boxed in between the balustrade and the gates of the villas, the crowd flowed away in little waves, to disappear in a thousand rivulets behind the Grand H�tel de la Compagnie Transatlantique.� And how many children there were!� Children in prams, in arms, held by the hand or walking stiffly in twos or threes in front of their parents.� I had seen all these faces a few hours before, almost triumphant in the youth of a Sunday morning.� Now, dripping with sunlight, they no longer expressed anything but calm, relaxation, and a sort of obstinacy.

�� Few movements: admittedly there was a little hat-raising here and there, but without the grandiloquence, the nervous gaiety of the morning.� The people all allowed themselves to lean back a little, their heads high, their eyes gazing into the distance, abandoned to the wind which pushed them along and puffed out their coats.� Now and then a dry laugh, quickly stifled; the call of a mother, Jeannot, Jeannot, will you come here.� And then silence.� A faint aroma of mild tobacco: it's the shop assistants who are smoking.� Salammb�, A�cha, Sunday cigarettes.� On a few faces, which were more relaxed, I thought I could detect a little sadness: but no, these people were neither sad nor gay: they were resting.� Their wide-open, staring eyes passively reflected the sea and the sky.� Soon they would go back home and drink a cup of tea all together around the dining-room table.� For the moment they wanted to live as cheaply as possible, to economize on gestures, words, thoughts, to float along: they had only one day in which to smooth away their wrinkles, their crow's-feet, the bitter lines made by their work during the week.� Only one day.� They could feel the minutes flowing between their fingers; would they have time to stock up enough youth to start afresh on Monday morning?� They filled their lungs because sea air is invigorating: only their breathing, as regular and deep as that of sleepers, still testified that they were alive.� I walked along steathily, I didn't know what to do with my hard, fresh body, in the midst of this tragic crowd taking its rest.

�� The sea was now the colour of slate; it was rising slowly.� It would be high tide at nightfall: tonight the Jetty Promenade would be more deserted than the boulevard Victor Noir.� In front and on the left a red light would shine in the channel.

�� The sun went down slowly over the sea.� On its way it lit up the window of a Norman chalet.� A woman, dazzled by the light, wearily put her hand over her eyes and shook her head.

�� "Gaston, it's blinding me," she said with a faltering laugh.

�� "Get along with you," said her husband, "that sun's all right, it doesn't warm you but it's very pleasant all the same."

�� Turning towards the sea, she said:

�� "I thought we would have seen it."

�� "Not a hope," said the man, "it's in the sun."

�� They must have been talking about the Ile Caillebotte, whose southern tip ought to have been visible between the dredger and the quay of the outer harbour.

�� The light grew softer.� At this uncertain hour, something indicated the approach of evening.� Already this Sunday had a past.� The villas and the grey balustrade seemed like recent memories.� One by one the faces lost their leisured look, several became almost tender.

�� A pregnant woman was leaning on a fair, rough-looking young man.

�� "There, there, there, look," she said.

�� "Look at what?"

�� "There, there, the seagulls."

�� He shrugged his shoulders: there were no seagulls.� The sky had become almost pure, a little pink on the horizon.

�� "I heard them.� Listen, they're crying."

�� He replied:

�� "It was something creaking."

�� A gas lamp shone suddenly.� I thought it was the lamp-lighter who had gone past.� The children watch for him because he gives the signal for them to go home.� But it was only a last ray of the setting sun.� The sky was still bright, but the earth was bathed in shadow.� The crowd was getting thinner, you could distinctly hear the death-rattle of the sea.� A young woman, leaning with both hands on the balustrade, lifted up towards the sky her blue face, barred in black by her lipstick.� I wondered for a moment if I were not going to love mankind.� But, after all, it was their Sunday and not mine.

�� The first light to come on was that of the Caillebotte lighthouse; a little boy stopped near me and murmured ecstatically: "Oh, the lighthouse!"

�� Then I felt my heart swell with a great feeling of adventure.

�� I turn left and, by way of the rue des Voiliers, I return to the Little Prado.� The iron shutters have been lowered over the shop windows.� The rue Tournebride is bright but empty, it has lost its brief morning glory; at this time nothing distinguishes it anymore from the neighbouring streets.� A fairly strong wind has come up.� I can hear the archbishop's metal hat creaking.

�� I am alone, most people have gone home, they are reading the evening paper and listening to the wireless.� This Sunday which is drawing to a close has left them with a taste of ashes and already their thoughts are turning towards Monday.� But for me there is neither Monday nor Sunday: there are days which push one another along in disorder, and then, all of a sudden, revelations like this.

�� Nothing has changed and yet everything exists in a different way.� I can't describe it; it's like the Nausea and yet it's just the opposite: at last an adventure is happening to me and when I question myself I see that it happens that I am myself and that I am here: it is I who am piercing the darkness, I am as happy as the hero of a novel.

�� Something is going to happen: in the shadows of the rue Basse-de-Vieille there is something waiting for me, it is over there, just at the corner of that quiet street that my life is going to begin.� I see myself advancing with a sense of fate.� At the corner of the street there is a sort of white stone.� From a distance it seemed black, and at each step I take it turns a little whiter.� That dark body getting gradually lighter makes an extraordinary impression on me: when it is completely white, I shall stop just beside it and then the adventure will begin.� It is so close now, that white beacon emerging from the shadows, that I am almost afraid: for a moment I think of turning back.� But it is impossible to break the spell.� I go forward, I stretch out my hand, I touch the stone.

�� Here is the rue Basse-de-Vieille and the huge mass of Sainte-C�cile crouching in the shadows, its stained-glass windows glowing.� The metal hat creaks.� I don't know whether the world has suddenly shrunk or whether it is I who am establishing such a powerful unity between sounds and shapes: I cannot even imagine anything around me being other than it is.

�� I stop for a moment, I wait, I can feel my heart beating; my eyes search the empty square.� I see nothing.� A fairly strong wind has come up.� I was mistaken, the rue Basse-de-Vieille was only a stage; the thing is waiting for me at the far side of the place Ducoton.

�� I am in no hurry to start walking again.� It seems to me that I have reached the summit of my happiness.� In Marseille, in Shanghai, at Mekn�s, what haven't I done to obtain a feeling of such satisfaction?� Today I expect nothing more, I am going home at the end of an empty Sunday: it is there.

�� I set off again.� The wind carries the wail of a siren to my ears.� I am all alone, but I walk like a band of soldiers descending on a town.� At this very moment there are ships echoing with music on the sea; lights are going on in all the cities of Europe;� Communists and Nazis are shooting it out in the streets of Berlin, unemployed are pounding the pavements of New York, women at their dressing-tables, in warm rooms, are putting mascara on their eyelashes.� And I am here, in this empty street, and every shot fired from a window in Neuk�lln, every bloody hiccough of the wounded men being carried away, every precise, tiny gesture of the women making up answers my every footstep, my every heartbeat.

�� Standing in front of the passage Gillet, I no longer know what to do.� Isn't something waiting for me at the end of the passage?� But in the place Ducoton, at the end of the rue Tournebride, there is also a certain thing which needs me in order to come to life.� I am full of anguish: the slightest gesture engages me.� I can't imagine what is required of me.� Yet I must choose: I sacrifice the passage Gillet, I shall never know what it held for me.

�� The place Ducoton is empty.� Was I mistaken?� I don't think I could bear it if I was.� Will nothing really happen?� I go towards the lights in the Caf� Mably.� I am bewildered, I don't know whether to go in; I glance through the big, misted-up windows.

�� The place is packed.� The air is blue with cigarette smoke and the steam rising from damp clothes.� The cashier is at her counter.� I know her well: she is red-haired like myself; she has some sort of stomach disease.� She is rotting quietly under her skirts with a melancholy smile, like the smell of violets which is sometimes given off by decomposing bodies.� I shudder from head to foot.� It is ... it is she who is waiting for me.� She was there, holding her bust erect above the counter: she was smiling.� From the far end of this cafe something goes back over the scattered moments of this Sunday and solders them together, gives them a meaning: I have gone through the whole of this day to end up here, with my forehead pressed against the window, to gaze at this delicate face blossoming against a red curtain.� Everything has come to a stop; my life has come to a stop: this big window, this heavy air, as blue as water, this thick-leaved white plant at the bottom of the water, and I myself, we form a complete and motionless whole: I am happy.

�� When I found myself on this boulevard de la Redoute again, nothing remained but bitter regret.� I said to myself: "Perhaps there is nothing in the world I value more than this feeling of adventure.� But it comes when it pleases; it goes away so quickly and how dry I feel when it has gone!� Does it pay me these brief, ironical visits in order to show me that my life is a failure?"

�� Behind me, in the town, in the big straight streets lit by the cold light of the street lamps, a tremendous social event was dying: it was the end of Sunday.

��

Monday

How could I have written this absurd, pompous sentence yesterday:

�� 'I was alone, but I walked like a band of soldiers descending on a town.'

�� I have no need to speak in flowery language.� I am writing to understand certain circumstances.� I must beware of literature.� I must let my pen run on, without searching for words.

�� What really disgusts me is having been sublime yesterday evening.� When I was twenty I used to get drunk and then explain that I was a fellow in the style of Descartes.� I knew very well that I was puffing myself up with heroism, but I let myself go, I enjoyed it.� After that, the next day I felt as disgusted as if I had awoken in a bed full of vomit.� I don't vomit when I'm drunk, but it would be better if I did.� Yesterday I didn't even have the excuse of drunkenness.� I got worked up like a fool.� I need to clean myself up with abstract thoughts, as transparent as water.

�� This feeling of adventure definitely doesn't come from events: I have proved that.� It's rather the way in which moments are linked together.� This, I think, is what happens: all of a sudden you feel that time is passing, that each moment leads to another moment, this one to yet another and so on; that each moment destroys itself and that it's no use trying to hold back, etc., etc., and then you attribute this property to the events which appear to you in the moments; you extend to the contents what appertains to the form.� In point of fact, people talk a lot about this famous passing of time, but you scarcely see it.� You see a woman, you think that one day she will be old, only you don't see her grow old.� But there are moments when you think you see her growing old and you feel yourself growing old with her: that is the feeling of adventure.

�� If I remember rightly, they call that the irreversibility of time.� The feeling of adventure would simply be that of the irreversibility of time.� But why don't we always have it?� Is it because time isn't always irreversible?� There are moments when you get the impression that you can do what you want, go forward or back, that it has no importance; and then other moments when you feel that the mesh has tightened, and in these cases it's not a question of failing in your attempt because you could never start again.

�� Anny used to get the most out of time.� When she was at Djibouti and I was at Aden, and I used to go and see her for twenty-four hours, she contrived to multiply the misunderstandings between us until there were only sixty minutes, exactly sixty minutes, before I had to leave; sixty minutes, just long enough to make you feel the seconds passing one by one.� I remember one of those terrible evenings.� I had to leave at midnight.� We had gone to an open-air cinema; we were desperately unhappy, she as much as I.� Only she led the dance.� At eleven o'clock, at the beginning of the main picture, she took my hand and pressed it between her hands without a word.� I felt myself flooded with a bitter joy and I understood, without needing to look at my watch, that it was eleven o'clock.� From that moment on we began to feel the minutes passing.� That time we were leaving each other for three months.� At one moment they projected a completely white picture on the screen, the darkness lifted, and I saw that Anny was crying.� Then, at midnight, she let go of my hand, after pressing it violently; I got up and left without saying a single word to her.� That was a job well done.

Seven o'clock in the evening

A working day.� It didn't go too badly; I wrote six pages, with a certain pleasure.� The more so in that they were six pages of abstract considerations on the reign of Paul I.� After yesterday's orgy, I stayed tightly buttoned up all day.� It would have been absolutely useless to appeal to my heart!� But I felt quite at ease taking the Russian aristocracy to pieces.

�� But this Rollebon irritates me.� He makes a great mystery of the smallest things.� What could he have been doing in the Ukraine in August 1804?� He speaks of his trip in veiled terms:

�� Posterity will judge whether the efforts, which success was unable to reward, did not deserve something better than a brutal rejection and humiliations which I have had to bear in silence, when I carried in my breast the wherewithal to silence the scoffers and fill them with fear.

�� I let myself be caught once, when he was very reticent in a pompous way about a little trip he made to Bouville in 1790.� I wasted a month checking up on all his movements.� Finally it turned out that he had made the daughter of one of his tenant farmers pregnant.� Can it be that he is nothing more than a hoaxer?

�� I feel full of ill-will towards that lying little fop.� Perhaps this is out of injured vanity: I was delighted to find him lying to others, but I would have liked him to make an exception of me; I thought that we were as thick as thieves and that he would be sure to end up by telling me the truth.� He has told me nothing, nothing at all; nothing more than he told Alexander or Louis XVIII whom he fooled to the top of their bent.� It matters a great deal to me that Rollebon should have been a decent fellow.� A rogue of course; who isn't?� But a big rogue or a little one?� I don't have a high enough regard for historical research to waste my time over a dead man whose hand, if he were alive, I wouldn't deign to touch.� What do I know about him?� You couldn't dream of a finer life than his: but did he live it?� If only his letters weren't so formal.... Ah, I wish I had known the look in his eyes, perhaps he had a charming way of cocking his head to one side, or of shrewdly placing his long index finger against his nose, or else, sometimes, between two polite lies, flying into a sudden temper which he could promptly stifle.� But he is dead: all that remains of him is a Treatise on Strategy and some Reflections on Virtue.

�� If I let myself go, I should imagine him so well: beneath his brilliant irony which has made so many victims, he is a simple man, almost innocent.� He thinks little, but at all times, thanks to a profound intuition, he does exactly what should be done.� His rascality is frank, spontaneous, generous, as sincere as his love of virtue.� And when he has thoroughly betrayed his benefactor and friends, he looks gravely back over the events, to draw a moral from them.� He has never imagined that he had the slightest right over other people, any more than other people over him: he regards the gifts life has given him as unjustified and gratuitous.� He attaches himself passionately to everything but detaches himself easily.� And he has never written his letters or his works himself: he has always had them composed by the public letter-writer.

�� But if this is where all my work has led me, I would have been better of writing a novel about the Marquis de Rollebon.

Eleven o'clock in the evening

I had dinner at the Rendez-vous des Cheminots.� Since the patronne was there, I had to fuck her, but it was really out of politeness.� She disgusts me slightly, she is too white and, besides, she smells like a new-born baby.� She pressed my head against her breast in a burst of passion: she thinks this is the right thing to do.� As for me, I toyed absentmindedly with her sex under the bedclothes; then my arm went to sleep.� I was thinking about Monsieur de Rollebon: after all, why shouldn't I write a novel on his life?� I let my arm move along the woman's side and suddenly I saw a little garden with low, wide-spreading trees from which huge hairy leaves were hanging.� Ants were running about everywhere, centipedes and moths.� There were some even more horrible animals: their bodies were made of slices of toast such as you put under roast pigeon; they were walking sideways with crab-like legs.� The broad leaves were black with animals.� Behind the cacti and the Barbary fig trees, the Velleda of the municipal park was pointing to her sex.� "This park smells of vomit," I shouted.

�� "I didn't want to wake you up," said the patronne, "but the sheet got rucked up under my backside and, besides, I have to go down to attend to the customers from the Paris train."

Shrove Tuesday

I gave Maurice Barr�s a spanking.� We were three soldiers and one of us had a hole in the middle of his face.� Maurice Barr�s came up and said to us: "That's fine!"� And he gave each of us a bunch of violets.� "I don't know where to put it," said the soldier with the hole in his head.� Then Maurice Barr�s said: "You must put it in the middle of the hole you've got in your head."� The soldier replied: "I'm going to stick it up your arse."� And we turned Maurice Barr�s over and took off his trousers.� Under his trousers he was wearing a cardinal's red robe.� We pulled the robe up and Maurice Barr�s started shouting: "Mind out, I'm wearing trousers with shoe straps."� But we spanked him until he bled, and then we drew D�roul�de's head on his backside with the petals of the violets.

�� For some time now I have been remembering my dreams much too often.� Besides, I must toss about a great deal in my sleep, because every morning I find my bedclothes on the floor.� Today is Shrove Tuesday, but that doesn't mean that much at Bouville; in the whole town there are scarcely a hundred people who dress up for it.

�� As I was coming downstairs, the patronne called me.

�� "There's a letter for you."

�� A letter: the last one I got was from the curator of Rouen Library last May.� The patronne takes me into her office; she holds out a long, thick yellow envelope: Anny has written to me.� I hadn't heard from her for five years.� The letter had been sent to my old Paris address, it is postmarked the first of February.

�� I go out; I hold the envelope between my fingers, I don't dare to open it; Anny hasn't changed her writing paper, I wonder if she still buys it at the little stationer's in Piccadilly.� I imagine she has also kept her hair style, her heavy blonde locks she didn't want to cut.� She must struggle patiently in front of mirrors to save her face: this isn't vanity or fear of growing old; she wants to stay as she is, exactly as she is.� Perhaps that is what I liked best in her, that austere, steadfast loyalty to the slightest feature of her appearance.

�� The firm letters of the address, written in purple ink (she hasn't changed her ink either) still shine a little.

�� 'Monsieur Antoine Roquentin.'

�� How I love to read my name on these envelopes.� In a sort of mist I have recaptured one of her smiles, I have evoked her eyes, her head to one side: when I was sitting in a chair, she used to come and plant herself in front of me, smiling.� Standing a head and shoulders higher than me, she would take me by the shoulders and shake me with outstretched arms.

�� The envelope is heavy, it must contain at least six pages.� My former concierge has scrawled over this lovely writing of hers:

�� 'H�tel Printania - Bouville.'

�� These small letters don't shine.

�� When I open the letter, my disappointment makes me six years younger.

�� "I don't know how Anny manages to fill up her envelopes like this: there's never anything inside."

�� I must have said that sentence a hundred times during the spring of 1924, struggling, as today, to extract a sheet of squared paper from the lining.� The lining is a marvel in dark green with gold stars; you would think it was a piece of heavy, starched cloth.� By itself it makes three-quarters of the envelope's weight.

�� Anny has written in pencil:

�� I am passing through Paris in a few days.� Come and see me at the H�tel d'Espagne on 20 February.

�Please [she has added 'Please' above the line and joined it to 'see me' with a curious spiral].� I must see you.� Anny.

�� At Mekn�s, in Tangier, when I came home in the evening, I sometimes found a note on my bed: 'I want to see you straightaway.'� I would hurry round, Anny would open the door to me, her eyebrows raised, a surprised expression on her face: she no longer had anything to say to me; she was rather cross with me for coming.� I'll go; she may refuse to see me.� Or else they may tell me at the reception desk: "Nobody of that name is staying here."� I don't think she'd do that.� Only she may write to me, a week from now, to say that she's changed her mind and to make it some other time.

�� People are at work.� This promises to be a very flat Shrove Tuesday.� The rue des Mutil�s smells strongly of damp wood, as it does every time it's going to rain.� I don't like these peculiar days: the cinemas put on matinees, the schoolchildren have the day off; there is a vague holiday feeling in the streets which never stops appealing for your attention but disappears as soon as you take any notice of it.

�� I am probably going to see Anny again, but I can't say that the idea exactly fills me with joy.� I have felt at a loose end ever since I got her letter.� Luckily it is noon; I'm not hungry, but I'm going to eat to pass the time.� I go into Camille's, in the rue des Horlogers.

�� It's a very quiet place; they serve sauerkraut or cassoulet all night.� People come here for supper after the theatre; the police send travellers here who arrive during the night and are hungry.� Eight marble-topped tables.� A bench upholstered in leather runs along the walls.� Two mirrors speckled with reddish stains.� The panes of the two windows and of the door are of frosted glass.� The bar is in an alcove.� There is also a room at one side.� But I have never been in it; it is reserved for couples.

�� "Give me a ham omelette."

�� The waitress, a huge girl with red cheeks, can never prevent herself from laughing when she talks to a man.

�� "I can't.� Would you like a potato omelette?� The ham's locked up: the patron is the only one who cuts it."

�� I order a cassoulet.� The patron is called Camille and he's a tough character.

�� The waitress goes off.� I am alone in this dark old room.� In my wallet there is a letter from Anny.� A feeling of false shame prevents me from reading it again.� I try to remember the sentences one by one.

�� 'My dear Antoine'.

�� I smile: it is certain, absolutely certain, that Anny didn't write 'My dear Antoine'.

�� Six years ago - we had just separated by mutual agreement - I decided to leave for Tokyo.� I wrote her a brief note.� I could no longer call her 'My dear love'; in all innocence I began: 'My dear Anny'.

�� 'I like your nerve,' she replied.� 'I have never been and I am not your dear Anny.� And I must ask you to believe that you are not my dear Antoine.� If you don't know what to call me, the best thing would be not to call me anything.'

�� I take her letter out of my wallet.� She didn't write 'My dear Antoine'.� Nor was there any conventional formula at the end of the letter: 'I must see you.� Anny.'� Nothing which could give me any indication of her feelings.� I can't complain: I recognize here her love of perfection.� She always wanted to enjoy 'perfect moments'.� If the time was not convenient, she took no more interest in anything, the life went out of her eyes, and she trailed around lazily like a gawky schoolgirl at the awkward age.� Or else she would pick a quarrel with me.

�� "You blow your nose solemnly like a bourgeois, and you cough into your handkerchief as if you were terribly pleased with yourself."

�� The best thing was not to reply but just to wait: suddenly, at some signal which I could never recognize, she started, her beautiful languid features hardened, and she began her ant-like task.� She has a magical quality which was imperious and charming; she hummed between her teeth, looking all around her, then she straightened up with a smile, came and shook me by the shoulders, and for a few moments seemed to give orders to the objects surrounding her.� She explained to me, in a low rapid voice, what she expected of me.

�� "Listen, you will make an effort, won't you?� You were so stupid last time.� You do see how beautiful this moment could be?� Look at the sky, look at the colour of the sunshine on the carpet.� And I've put my green dress on and my face isn't made up, I'm quite pale.� Go back, go and sit in the shadow; you understand what you have to do?� Oh, come now!� How stupid you are!� Speak to me."

�� I could feel that the success of the enterprise was in my hands: the moment had an obscure significance which had to be trimmed and perfected; certain gestures had to be made, certain words spoken: I was bowed down under the weight of my responsibility, I opened my eyes wide and saw nothing, I struggled in the midst of rites which Anny invented on the spur of the moment and I tore them with my long arms as if they had been spiders' webs.� At those times she hated me.

�� I shall certainly go and see her.� I still respect and love her with all my heart.� I hope that somebody else has had better luck and has shown greater skill in the game of perfect moments.

�� "Your damned hair spoils everything," she used to say.� "What can you do with a man with red hair?"

�� She would smile.� To begin with, I lost the memory of her eyes, then the memory of her long body.� I kept her smile as long as I could, and then, three years ago, I lost that too.� Just now, all of a sudden, as I was taking the letter from the hands of the patronne, it came back to me; I thought I could see Anny smiling.� I try to remember it again: I need to feel all the tenderness that Anny inspires in me; it is there, that tenderness, it is close to me, only asking to be born.� But the smile does not return: it is finished.� I remain empty and dry.

�� A man has come in, shivering.

�� "Evening everybody."

�� He sits down without taking off his greenish overcoat.� He rubs his long hands together, clasping and unclasping his fingers.

�� "What are you going to have?"

�� He gives a start, a worried look in his eyes:

�� "Eh?� Give me a Byrrh and water."

�� The waitress doesn't move.� In the mirror her face looks as if it were sleeping.� In fact her eyes are open, but they are merely slits.� She's like that, she's never in a hurry to serve customers, she always takes a moment to ponder over their orders.� She must be thinking about the bottle she's going to take from above the bar, the white label with the red letters, the thick black syrup she's going to pour out: it's rather as if she were drinking it herself.

�� I slip Anny's letter into my wallet: it has given me all it could; I can't go back to the woman who took it in her hands, folded it, and put it in its envelope.� Is it even possible to think of somebody in the past?� As long as we were in love with each other we didn't allow the tiniest of our moments, the smallest of our sorrows to be detached from us and left behind.� Sounds, smells, degrees of light, even the thoughts we had not told each other - we took all this with us and it all remained alive: we never stopped enjoying it and suffering from it in the present.� Not a single memory; an implacable, torrid love, without a shadow, without a withdrawal, without an evasion.� Three years present at one and the same time.� That is why we separated: we no longer had enough strength to bear the burden.� And then, when Anny left me, all at once, all together, the three years collapsed into the past.� I didn't even suffer, I felt empty.� Then time started flowing again and the emptiness grew larger.� Then, in Saigon, when I decided to come back to France, all that was still left - foreign faces, squares, quays beside long rivers - all that was wiped out.� And now my past is nothing but a huge hole.� My present: this waitress in the black blouse dreaming near the bar, this little fellow.� It seems to me as if everything I know about life I have learnt from books.� The palaces of Banares, the terrace of the Leper King, the temples of Java with their great broken staircases, have been reflected for a moment in my eyes, but they have remained yonder, on the spot.� The tram which passes the H�tel Printania in the evening doesn't take away the reflection of the neon sign in its window panes; it flares up for a moment and moves away with dark windows.

�� That man doesn't take his eyes off me: he annoys me.� He gives himself airs for a fellow of his size.� The waitress finally makes up her mind to serve him.� She lazily raises her long black arm, takes hold of the bottle and brings it to him with a glass.

�� "Here you are, Monsieur."

�� "Monsieur Achille," he says urbanely.

�� She pours without answering; all of a sudden he swiftly removes his finger from his nose and places both hands flat on the table.� He has thrown his head back and his eyes are shining.� He says in a

cold voice:

�� "Poor girl."

�� The waitress gives a start and I start too: he has an indefinable expression on his face, of astonishment perhaps, as if it had been somebody else who had just spoken.� All three of us feel embarrassed.

�� The fat waitress is the first to recover: she has no imagination.� She looks Monsieur Achille up and down in a dignified way: she knows perfectly well that she could jerk him out of his seat and throw him out with one hand.

�� "And what makes you think I'm a poor girl?"

�� He hesitates.� He looks at her, rather taken aback, then he laughs.� His face creases up into a thousand wrinkles, he makes vague gestures with his wrist:

�� "That's annoyed her: it's the sort of thing you say without thinking.� You say: poor girl.� It doesn't mean anything."

�� But she turns her back on him and goes off behind the counter: she is really offended.� He laughs again:

�� "Ha, ha!� It just slipped out, you know.� Are you cross?� She's cross," he says, speaking vaguely to me.

�� I turn my head away.� He raises his glass a little, but he isn't thinking about drinking: he blinks his eyes, looking surprised and intimidated; you would think he was trying to remember something.� The waitress has sat down at the cash desk; she picks up some sewing.� Everything has returned to silence, but it isn't the same silence.� The rain Has started: it's tapping lightly against the frosted glass panes; if there are still any children in fancy dress in the streets, it's going to spoil their cardboard masks and make the colour run.

�� The waitress turns on the lights: it is barely two o'clock, but the sky is black, she no longer has enough light to sew by.� A soft glow; people are in their houses, they have probably turned on their lights too.� They read, they look out of the window at the sky.� For them ... it's different.� They have grown older in another way.� They live in the midst of legacies and presents, and each piece of furniture is a souvenir.� Clocks, medallions, portraits, shells, paperweights, screens, shawls.� They have cupboards full of bottles, material, old clothes, newspapers; they have kept everything.� The past is a property-owner's luxury.

�� Where should I keep mine?� You can't put your past in your pocket; you have to have a house in which to store it.� I possess nothing but my body; a man on his own, with nothing but his body, can't stop memories; they pass through him.� I shouldn't complain: all I have ever wanted was to be free.

�� The little man stirs and sighs.� He has huddled up in his overcoat, but now and then he straightens up and takes on a human appearance.� He has no past either.� If you looked hard, you would probably find, in the house of some cousins of his who no longer have anything to do with him, a photograph showing him at a wedding, with a wing-collar, a stiff shirt, and a young man's prickly moustache.� I don't think that even that much remains of me.

�� Here he is looking at me again.� This time he's going to speak to me, I feel all stiff.� It isn't a feeling of instinctive attraction which exists between us: we are alike, that's all.� He is alone like me, but sunk deeper than I am in solitude.� He must be waiting for his Nausea or something of that sort.�� So now there are people who recognize me, who after looking hard at me think: "He's one of us."� Well?� What does he want?� He must know that we can't do anything for one another.� The families are in their houses, in the midst of their memories.� And here we are, two pieces of flotsam, neither of us with a memory.� If he suddenly stood up and spoke to me, I should jump into the air.

�� The door opens noisily: it is Doctor Rog�.

�� 'Afternoon everybody.'

�� He comes in, grim-faced and suspicious, swaying slightly on his long legs which can barely carry his torso.� I often see him on Sundays in the Brasserie V�zelize, but he doesn't know me.� He is built like the old gym instructors at Joinville: arms like thighs, a chest measuring forty-three inches, and all this unsteady on its pins.

�� "Jeanne, my little Jeanne."

�� He trots over to the coat rack to hang his wide-brimmed felt hat on the peg.� The waitress has put her sewing on one side and comes across unhurriedly, almost sleepwalking, to help the doctor out of his raincoat.

�� "What will you have, Doctor?"

�� He studies her gravely.� That's what I call a handsome face.� Worn and furrowed by life and passions.� But the doctor has understood life, mastered his passions.

�� "I really don't know what I want," he says in a deep voice.

�� He has dropped onto the bench opposite me; he mops his forehead.� As soon as he has taken his weight off his feet he feels at ease.� His big eyes, black and imperious, are intimidating.

�� "I'll have ... I'll have, I'll have - an old calva, my dear."

�� The waitress, without moving a muscle, studied that huge furrowed face.� She is pensive.� The little fellow has raised his head with a smile of relief.� And it is true: this colossus has freed us.� There was something horrible here which was going to take hold of us.� I heave a sigh: we are among men now.

�� "Well, is that calvados coming?"

�� The waitress gives a start and goes off.� He has stretched out his stout arms and grasped the table at both ends.� Monsieur Achille is in high spirits; he would like to attract the doctor's attention.� But he swings his legs and jumps about on the bench in vain, he is so tiny that he makes no noise.

�� The waitress brings the calvados.� With a nod of her head she points out the little man to the doctor.� Doctor Rog� slowly pivots his head and shoulders: he can't move his neck.

�� "Well, so it's you, you old swine," he exclaims.� "So you aren't dead yet?"

�� He addresses the waitress:

�� "You let a fellow like that in here?"

�� He looks at the little man with his fierce eyes.� A direct gaze which puts everything in its place.� He explains:

�� "He's an old crackpot, that's what he is."

�� He doesn't even take the trouble to show that he's joking.� He knows that the old crackpot won't take offence, that he's going to smile.� And sure enough, the other man smiles humbly.� An old crackpot: he relaxes, he feels protected against himself; nothing will happen to him today.� The queer thing is that I feel reassured too.� An old crackpot: so that was it, that was all.

�� The doctor laughs, he darts an engaging, conspiratorial glance at me: because of my size, I suppose - and besides, I'm wearing a clean shirt - he is willing to let me in on his joke.

�� I don't laugh, I don't respond to his advances: so, without stopping laughing, he tries the terrible fire of his eyes on me.� We consider each other in silence for a few seconds; he looks me up and down with half-closed eyes, he classifies me.� In the crackpot category?� Or in the scoundrel category?

�� All the same, he is the one who turns his head away: a tiny defeat at the hands of a fellow on his own, with no social importance, isn't worth talking about - it's the sort of thing you can forget straightaway.� He rolls a cigarette and lights it, then he stays motionless with his eyes hard and staring like an old man's.

�� He has all the best wrinkles: horizontal bars across the forehead, crow's feet, bitter creases at both corners of the mouth, not to mention the yellow cords hanging under his chin.� There's a lucky man for you: as soon as you see him, you say to yourself that he must have suffered, that he is a man who has lived.� Moreover, he deserves his face, for never, not even for a moment, has he misjudged the way to keep and use his past: he has quite simply stuffed it, he has turned it into experience to be used on women and young men.

�� Monsieur Achille is probably happier than he has been for a long time.� He is agape with admiration; he drinks his Byrrh in little sips, puffing out his cheeks.� The doctor certainly knew how to tackle him!� The doctor isn't the man to let himself be fascinated by an old crackpot on the verge of having an attack; a good tongue-lashing, a few brusque, cutting words, that's what they need.� The doctor has experience: doctors, priests, magistrates, and officers know men as thoroughly as if they had made them.

�� I feel ashamed for Monsieur Achille.� We are of the same sort, we ought to make common cause against them.� But he has left me, he has gone over to their side: he honestly believes in Experience.� Not in his, nor in mine.� In Doctor Rog�'s.� A little while ago Monsieur Achille felt peculiar, he had the impression of being all alone; now he knows that there have been others like him, a great many others: Doctor Rog� has met them, he could tell Monsieur Achille the story of each one of them and say how in ended.� Monsieur Achille is simply a case, and a case which allows itself to be easily reduced to a few commonplace ideas.

�� How I should like to tell him that he's being duped, that he's playing into the hands of self-important people.� Professionals in experience?� They have dragged out their lives in stupor and somnolence, they have married in a hurry, out of impatience, and they have made children at random.�� They have met other men in caf�s, at weddings, at funerals.� Now and then, caught in a current, they have struggled without understanding what was happening to them.� Everything that has happened around them has begun and ended out of their sight; long obscure shapes, events from afar, have brushed rapidly past them, and when they have tried to look at them, everything was already over.� And then, about forty, they baptize their stubborn little ideas and a few proverbs with the name of Experience, they begin to imitate slot machines; put a coin in the slot on the left and out come anecdotes wrapped in silver paper; put a coin in the slot on the right and you get precious pieces of advice which stick to your teeth like soft caramels.� At this rate, I could get myself invited to people's houses and they would tell one another that I was a great traveller in the sight of Eternity.� Yes: the Moslems squat to pass water; instead of ergotine, Hindu midwives use ground glass in cow dung; in Borneo, when a girl has a period, she spends three days and nights on the roof of her house.� I have seen burials in gondolas in Venice, the Holy Week festivities in Seville, the Passion play at Oberammergau.� Naturally, that's just a tiny sample of my experience: I could lean back in a chair and begin with a smile:

�� "Do you know Jihlava, Madame?� It's a curious little town in Moravia where I stayed in 1924 ..."

�� And the magistrate who has seen so many cases would add at the end of my story:

�� "How true that is, Monsieur, how human.� I had a similar case at the beginning of my career.� It was in 1902.� I was deputy magistrate at Limoges ..."

�� The trouble is that I had too much of all that when I was young.� I didn't belong to a family of professionals, but there are amateurs too.� These are the secretaries, the office workers, the shopkeepers, the people who listen to others in cafes: about the age of forty they feel swollen with an experience which they can't get rid of.� Luckily they've made children and they force them to swallow it on the spot.� They would like to make us believe that their past isn't wasted, that their memories have been condensed and gently transformed into Wisdom.� Convenient past!� Pocket-size past, little gilt-edged book full of fine maxims.� "Believe me, I'm talking from experience, I've learnt everything I know from life."� Are we to understand that Life has undertaken to think for them?� They explain the new by the old - and the old they have explained by the older still, like those historians who describe Lenin as a Russian Robespierre and Robespierre as a French Cromwell: when all is said and done, they have never understood anything at all ... behind their self-importance you can distinguish a morose laziness: they see a process of semblances pass by, they yawn, they think that there's nothing new under the sun.� "An old crackpot" - and Doctor Rog� thought vaguely of other old crackpots, without being able to remember any one of them clearly.� Now nothing Monsieur Achille can do will surprise us: because he's an old crackpot!

�� He isn't an old crackpot: he is frightened.� What is he frightened of?� When you want to understand something, you stand in front of it, all by yourself, without any help; all the past history of the world is of no use to you.� And then it disappears and what you have understood disappears with it.

�� General ideas are more flattering.� Besides, the professionals and even the amateurs always end up by being right.� Their wisdom recommends you to make as little noise as possible, to allow yourself to be forgotten.� Their best stories are about headstrong characters and eccentrics who have been punished.� Why yes, that's how it happens and nobody will say anything to the contrary.� Perhaps Monsieur Achille's conscience is a trifle uneasy.� Perhaps he is telling himself that he wouldn't be like he is if he had listened to his father's advice or his elder sister's.� The doctor is entitled to speak: he hasn't made a failure of his life: he has known how to make himself useful.� He rises calm and powerful above this piece of flotsam; he is a rock.

�� Doctor Rog� has finished his calvados.� His great body relaxes and his eyelids droop heavily.� For the first time I see his face without the eyes: you might take it for a cardboard mask, like those they're selling in the shops today.� His cheeks are a horrible pink colour.... The truth suddenly dawns upon me: this man is going to die before long.� He must know it; he has only to look in a mirror: every day he looks a little more like the corpse he is going to become.� That's what their experience amounts to, that's why I have told myself so often that it smells of death: it is their last defence.� The doctor would like to believe in it, he would like to shut his eyes to the unbearable reality: that he is alone, without any attainments, without any past, with a mind which is growing duller, a body which is disintegrating.� So he has carefully constructed, carefully furnished, and carefully padded his little compensatory fantasy: he tells himself that he is making progress.� He has gaps in his thinking, moments when his head seems quite empty?� That's because his judgement is no longer as impulsive as it was in his youth.� He no longer understands what he reads in books?� That's because he has left books so far behind.� He can't make love anymore?� But he has made love in the past.� To have made love is much better than to go on making it: looking back, you can judge, compare, and reflect.� And to be able to bear the sight of this terrible corpse's face in mirrors, he tries to convince himself that the lessons of experience are engraved on it.

�� The doctor turns his head a little.� His eyelids open slightly and he looks at me with eyes pink with sleep.� I smile at him.� I should like this smile to reveal to him all that he is trying to conceal from himself.� That would wake him up, if he could say to himself: "There's somebody who knows I'm going to die!"� But his eyelids droop again: he falls asleep.� I go off, leaving Monsieur Achille to watch over his slumber.

�� The rain has stopped, the air is mild, the sky is slowly rolling along beautiful black pictures: this is more than enough to make a frame for a perfect moment; to reflect these pictures, Anny would cause dark little tides to be born in our hearts.� But I don't know how to take advantage of the opportunity:� I wander along at random, calm and empty, under this wasted sky.

Wednesday

I must not be frightened.

Thursday

I have written four pages.� Then a long moment of happiness.� Must not think too much about the value of History.� You run the risk of getting disgusted with it.� Must not make public the fact that Monsieur de Rollebon now represents the only justification for my existence.

�� A week from today I am going to see Anny.

Friday

The fog was so thick on the boulevard de Redoute that I thought it wise to keep close to the walls of the Barracks; on my right, the headlamps of the motorcars were driving a misty light along in front of them and it was impossible to tell where the pavement came to an end.� There were people around me; I could hear the sound of their footsteps or, occasionally, the slight hum of their words: but I couldn't see anybody.� Once a woman's face took shape on a level with my shoulder, but the mist promptly swallowed it up; another time somebody brushed past me, breathing hard.� I didn't know where I was going, I was too absorbed: you had to move forward cautiously, feel the ground with the toe of your shoe, and even stretch your hands out in front of you.� I wasn't enjoying this exercise.� All the same, I didn't think of going back, I was caught.� Finally, after half an hour, I caught sight of a bluish mist in the distance.� Using it as a guide, I soon reached the edge of a big glow; in the middle, piercing the fog with its lights, I recognized the Caf� Mably.

�� The Caf� Mably has twelve electric lamps; but only two of them were on, one above the cash-desk, the other on the ceiling.� The only waiter there pushed me forcibly into a dark corner.

�� "Not here, Monsieur, I'm cleaning up."

�� He was wearing a jacket, without a waistcoat or a collar, and a white shirt with purple stripes.� He kept yawning and looked at me sullenly, running his fingers through his hair.

�� "A black coffee and some croissants."

�� He rubbed his eyes without answering and walked away.� I was up to my eyes in shadow, an icy, dirty shadow.� It was obvious that the radiator was not working.

�� I was not alone.� A woman with a waxy complexion was sitting opposite me and her hands were moving all the time, sometimes smoothing her blouse, sometimes straightening her black hat.� She was with a tall fair-haired man who was eating a brioche without saying a word.� The silence struck me as oppressive.� I wanted to light my pipe, but I would have felt uncomfortable attracting their attention by striking a match.

�� The telephone rang.� The hands stopped: they remained pressed against the blouse.� The waiter took his time.� He calmly finished sweeping before going to unhook the receiver.� "Hullo, is that Monsieur Georges?� Good morning, Monsieur Georges.... Yes, Monsieur Georges.... The patron isn't here.... Yes, he ought to be down.... Ah, with a fog like this.... He usually comes down about eight.... Yes, Monsieur Georges, I'll tell him.� Goodbye, Monsieur Georges."

�� The fog was weighing on the windows like a heavy curtain of grey velvet.� A face pressed against the pane for a moment and disappeared.

�� The woman said plaintively:

�� "Do my shoe up for me."

�� "It isn't undone," the man said without looking.� She became agitated.� Her hands ran up her blouse and over her neck like big spiders.

�� "Yes, yes, do my shoe up."

�� He bent down, looking peeved, and lightly touched her foot under the table:

�� "It's done."

�� She gave a satisfied smile.� The man called the waiter.

�� "How much do I owe you?"

�� "How many brioches have you had?" asked the waiter.

�� I lowered my eyes so as not to seem to be staring at them.� After a few moments I heard a creaking noise and I saw the hem of a skirt and two boots stained with dry mud appear.� The man's shoes followed, polished and pointed.� They came towards me, stopped and turned round: he was putting on his coat.� At that moment a hand started moving down the skirt at the end of a stiff arm; it hesitated slightly, and then scratched the skirt.

�� "Are you ready?" asked the man.

�� The hand opened and touched a large splash of mud on the right boot, then disappeared.

�� "Whew!" said the man.

�� He had picked up a suitcase near the coat rack.� They went out, I saw them plunge into the fog.

�� "They're on the stage," the waiter told me when he brought me my coffee.� "They've been doing the act in the interval at the Cin�-Palace.� The woman blindfolds her eyes and reads out the name and age of people in the audience.� They're leaving today because it's Friday and the programme changes."

�� He went to get a plate of croissants from the table the couple had just left.

�� "Don't bother."

�� I didn't feel like eating those particular croissants.

�� "I'll have to turn out the light.� The patron would give me hell if he found two lamps on for a single customer at nine o'clock in the morning."

�� The caf� was plunged into semi-darkness.� A feeble light streaked with grey and brown was falling now from the tall windows.

�� "I'd like to see Monsieur Fasquelle."

�� I hadn't seen the old woman come in.� A gust of icy air made me shiver.

�� "Monsieur Fasquelle hasn't come down yet."

�� "Madame Florent sent me," she went on.� "She isn't well.� She won't be coming today."

�� Madame Florent is the cashier, the red-head.

�� "This weather," said the old woman, "is bad for her stomach."

�� The waiter put on an important air:

�� "It's the fog," he answered, "it's the same with Monsieur Fasquelle; I'm surprised he isn't down yet.� Somebody wanted him on the telephone.� Usually he comes down at eight."

�� The old woman looked automatically at the ceiling.

�� "He's up there, is he?"

�� "Yes, that's his room."

�� In a drawling voice, as if she were talking to herself, the old woman said:

�� "Suppose he's dead...."

�� "Well I never!"� The waiter's face showed the liveliest indignation.� "What an idea!"

�� Suppose he were dead ... this thought had occurred to me.� It was just the sort of idea you get in foggy weather.

�� The old woman went off.� I should have followed her example: it was cold and dark.� The fog was filtering in under the door, it was going to rise slowly and envelop everything.� At the municipal library I should have found light and warmth.

�� Once again a face came and pressed against the window; it made grimaces.

�� "Just you wait," the waiter said angrily, and he ran out.

�� The face disappeared, I remained alone.� I reproached myself bitterly for having left my room.� By this time the fog would have invaded it; I would have been afraid to go back into it.

�� Behind the cash-desk, in the shadows, something creaked.� The noise came from the private staircase: was the manager coming down at last?� No: nobody appeared; the stairs were creaking by themselves.� Monsieur Fasquelle was still asleep.� Or else he was dead up there above my head.� Found dead in his bed, one foggy morning.� Sub-heading: in the cafe, customers were drinking unsuspectingly ...

�� But was he still in his bed?� Hadn't he fallen out, dragging the sheets with him and bumping his head on the floor?

�� I know Monsieur Fasquelle very well; now and then he has asked after my health.� He's a fat jolly fellow, with a carefully trimmed beard: if he is dead it must be from a stroke.� He will be an aubergine colour, with his tongue hanging out of his mouth.� His beard in the air; his neck purple under the curling hairs.

�� The private staircase disappeared into the dark.� I could scarcely make out the knob of the banister post.� I would have to cross those shadows.� The staircase would creak.� Upstairs, I would find the door of the room....

�� The body is there, above my head.� I would turn the switch: I would touch the warm skin to see. - I can't stand it any longer, I get up.� If the waiter catches me on the stairs, I'll tell him that I heard a noise.

�� The waiter came in suddenly, out of breath.

�� "Yes, Monsieur!" he cried.

�� The fool!� He came towards me.

�� "That's two francs."

�� "I heard a noise up there," I told him.

�� "About time too!"

�� "Yes, but I think there's something wrong: it sounded like a death-rattle and then there was a thud."

�� In that dark cafe, with that fog behind the windowpanes, this sounded perfectly natural.� I shall never forget the look in his eyes.

�� "You ought to go up and see," I said maliciously.

�� "Oh, no!" he said; then: "I'd be afraid of him catching me.� What time is it?"

�� "Ten o'clock."

�� "I'll go up at half-past ten, if he isn't down by then."

�� I took one step towards the door.

�� "You're going?� You aren't staying?"

�� "No."

�� "It sounded like a real death-rattle?"

�� "I don't know," I told him as I went out.� "Perhaps it was just because I was thinking about things like that."

�� The fog had lifted a little.� I hurried towards the rue Tournebride: I longed for its lights.� It was a disappointment: true, there was plenty of light, it was streaming down the shop windows.� But it wasn't a gay light: it was all white because of the fog and it fell on your shoulders like a shower.

�� A lot of people, especially women: maids, charwomen, ladies too - the sort who say: "I do the shopping myself, it's safer."� They would have a look at the window displays and finally go in.

�� I stopped in front of Julien's, the pork-butcher's shop.� Through the glass I could see now and then a hand pointing to the truffled pigs' feet and the sausages.� Then a fat blonde bent forward, showing her bosom, and picked up the piece of dead flesh between her fingers.� In his room, five minutes' walk from there, Monsieur Fasquelle was dead.

�� I looked around me for a support, for a defence against my thoughts.� There was none: little by little the fog had broken up, but something disquieting still lingered in the street.� Perhaps not a real menace: it was pale, transparent.� But it was precisely that which ended up by frightening me.� I pressed my forehead against the window.� On the mayonnaise of a stuffed egg, I noticed a dark red drop: it was blood.� This red on that yellow made me feel sick.

�� Suddenly I had a vision: somebody had fallen face forward and was bleeding in the dishes.� The egg had rolled in the blood; the slice of tomato which crowned it had come off and fallen flat, red on red.� The mayonnaise had run a little: a pool of yellow cream which divided the trickle of blood into two streams.

�� "This is really too silly, I must pull myself together.� I'll go and work in the library."

�� Work?� I knew perfectly well that I shouldn't write a single line.� Another day wasted.� Crossing the municipal park, I saw a big blue cape, motionless on the bench where I usually sit.� There's somebody who isn't cold.

�� When I entered the reading-room, the Autodidact was just coming out.� He rushed at me:

�� "I really must thank you, Monsieur.� Your photographs have given me some unforgettable hours."

�� Seeing him, I had a moment's hope: perhaps it would be easier to get through the day if there were two of us.� But with the Autodidact, you are never two in anything but appearance.

�� He tapped a quarto volume.� It was a history of religion.

�� "Monsieur, nobody was better qualified than Nou�api� to attempt this vast synthesis.� Is that true?"

�� He looked weary and his hands were trembling.

�� "You look ill," I told him.

�� "Ah, Monsieur, I can well believe it!� Something abominable has happened to me."

�� The attendant was coming towards us: he is a bad-tempered little Corsican with mustachios like a drum major's.� He walks for hours at a time between the tables, clicking his heels.� In winter he spits into handkerchiefs which he dries out afterwards on the stove.

�� The Autodidact came close enough to breathe into my face:

�� "I shan't say anything to you in front of this man," he said with a confidential air.� "Monsieur, if you would ..."

�� "Would what?"

�� He blushed and his hips swayed gracefully:

�� "Monsieur, I'm going to take the plunge.� Would you do me the honour of lunching with me on Wednesday?"

�� "With pleasure."

�� I had as much desire to lunch with him as to hang myself.

�� "How happy you have made me," said the Autodidact.� He added rapidly: "I'll come and pick you up at your hotel, if you like," and disappeared, probably for fear that I would change my mind if he gave me time.

�� It was half-past eleven.� I worked until a quarter to two.� Poor work: I had a book in front of me, but my thoughts were constantly returning to the Caf� Mably.� Had Monsieur Fasquelle come down by now?� At heart, I didn't really believe he was dead and it was precisely that which irritated me: it was a floating idea of which I could neither convince myself nor rid myself.� The Corsican's shoes creaked on the floor.� Several times he came and planted himself in front of me, as if he wanted to speak to me.� But he changed his mind and walked away.

�� About one o'clock, the last readers went off.� I wasn't hungry; above all I didn't want to leave.� I worked a little longer, then I gave a start: I felt buried in silence.

�� I raised my head: I was alone.� The Corsican must have gone down to his wife who is the concierge of the library; I wanted to hear the sound of his footsteps.� The most I could hear was that of a little coal falling inside the stove.� The fog had invaded the room: not a real fog, which had gone a long time before, but the other fog, the one the streets were still full of, which was coming out of the walls and pavements.� A sort of insubstantiality of things.� The books were still there of course, arranged in alphabetical order on the shelves, with their black or brown backs and their labels PU fl. 7.996 (Public Use - French Literature) or PU ns (Public Use - Natural Sciences).� But ... how can I put it?� Usually, strong and stocky, together with the stove, the green lamps, the big windows, the ladders, they dam up the future.� As long as you stay between these walls, whatever comes along must come along to the right or the left of the stove.� If St Denis himself were to come in carrying his head in his hands, he would have to enter on the right, and walk between the shelves devoted to French Literature and the table reserved for women readers.� And if he doesn't touch the ground, if he floats a foot above the floor, his bleeding neck will be exactly at the level of the third shelf of books.� Thus these objects serve at least to fix the limits of probability.� Well, today they no longer fixed anything at all: it seemed that their very existence was being called into question, that they were having the greatest difficulty in passing from one moment to the next.� I gripped the volume I was reading tightly in my hands, but the strongest sensations were blunted.� Nothing looked real; I felt surrounded by cardboard scenery which could suddenly be removed.� The world was waiting, holding its breath, making itself small - it was waiting for its attack, its Nausea, like Monsieur Achille the other day.

�� I got up.� I could no longer stay where I was in the midst of these enfeebled objects.� I went to the window and glanced out at the skull of Imp�traz.� I murmured: "Anything can occur, anything can happen."� Obviously not the sort of horrible thing that men have invented; Impetraz wasn't going to start dancing on his pedestal: it would be something else.

�� I looked in alarm at these unstable creatures which, in another hour, in another minute, were perhaps going to collapse: yes, I was there, I was living in the midst of these books crammed full of knowledge, some of the describing the immutable forms of animal species, and others explaining that the quantity of energy in the world remained unchanged; I was there, standing in front of a window whose panes had an established index of refraction.� But what weak barriers!� It is out of laziness, I suppose, that the world looks the same day after day.� Today it seemed to want to change.� And in that case anything, anything could happen.

�� I had no time to lose: at the root of this uneasiness there was the Caf� Mably affair.� I had to go back there, I had to see Monsieur Fasquelle alive, I had to touch his beard or his hands if need be.� Then, perhaps, I would be free.

�� I grabbed my overcoat and threw it round my shoulders; I fled.� Crossing the municipal park, I saw the fellow in the blue cape sitting in the same place; he had a huge pale face between two ears which were scarlet with cold.

�� The Caf� Mably was sparkling in the distance: this time the twelve lamps must be on.� I hurried along: I had to get it over.� First of all I glanced in through the big bay window; the place was empty.� The cashier wasn't there, nor the waiter - nor Monsieur Fasquelle.

�� I had to make a great effort to go in; I didn't sit down.� I shouted: "Waiter!"� Nobody answered.� An empty cup on a table.� A lump of sugar in the saucer.

�� "Is there anybody here?"

�� An overcoat was hanging on a peg.� Some magazines were piled in black cardboard boxes on a small table.� I listened intently for the slightest sound, holding my breath.� The private staircase creaked slightly.� Outside, a boat's hooter.� I walked out backwards, keeping my eyes fixed on the staircase.

�� I know: at two in the afternoon customers are few and far between.� Monsieur Fasquelle had influenza; he must have sent the waiter out on an errand - possibly to fetch a doctor.� Yes, but I needed to see Monsieur Fasquelle.� At the entrance to the rue Tournebride I turned round, I gazed in disgust at the bright, empty caf�.� The venetian blinds on the first floor were closed.

�� An absolute panic took hold of me.� I no longer knew where I was going.� I ran along the docks, I turned into the deserted streets of the Beauvoisis district: the houses watched my flight with their mournful eyes.� I kept saying to myself in anguish: "Where shall I go?� Where shall I go?� Anything can happen."� Every now and then, with my heart pounding wildly, I would suddenly swing round: what was happening behind my back?� Perhaps it would start behind me, and when I suddenly turned round it would be too late.� As long as I could fix objects nothing would happen: I looked at as many as I could, pavements, houses, gas lamps; my eyes went rapidly from one to the other to catch them out and stop them in the middle of their metamorphosis.� They didn't look any too natural, but I told myself insistently: "This is a gas-lamp, that is a drinking fountain," and I tried to reduce them to their everyday appearance by the power of my gaze.� Several times I came across bars on my way: the Caf� des Bretons, the Bar de la Marine.� I stopped, I hesitated in front of their pink net curtains: perhaps these cosy places had been spared, perhaps they still contained a bit of yesterday's world, isolated, forgotten.� But I would have had to push open the door and go in.� I didn't dare; I went on.� The doors of the houses frightened me most of all.� I was afraid that they might open by themselves.� I ended up by walking in the middle of the street.

�� I suddenly came out on the quai des Bassins du Nord.� Fishing boats, small yachts.� I put my foot on a ring set in the stone.� Here, far from the houses, far from the doors, I was going to know a moment's respite.� On the calm water, speckled with black spots, a cork was floating.

�� "And under the water?� Haven't you thought about what there may be under the water?"

�� A monster?� A huge carapace, half embedded in the mud?� A dozen pairs of claws slowly furrow the slime.� The monster raises itself a little, every now and then.� At the bottom of the water.� I went nearer, watching for an eddy, a tiny ripple.� The cork remained motionless among the black spots.

�� At that moment I heard some voices.� It was time.� I turned round and started running again.

�� I caught up with the two men who were talking in the rue de Castiglione.� At the sounds of my footsteps they gave a violent start and turned round together.� I saw their anxious eyes look at me, then behind me to see if something else was coming.� So they were like me, they were frightened too?� When I passed them we looked at one another: we very nearly spoke.� But our glances suddenly expressed mistrust: on a day like this you don't speak to just anybody.

�� I found myself back in the rue Boulibet, out of breath.� Well, the die was cast: I was going to return to the library, take a novel and try to read.� Walking by the railing of the municipal park, I caught sight of the man in the cape.� He was still in the deserted park; his nose had become as red as his ears.

�� I was going to push open the gate, but the expression on his face stopped me: he was wrinkling up his eyes and half-grinning, in a stupid, simpering way.� But at the same time he was staring straight ahead at something I couldn't see, with a look so concentrated and intense than I suddenly swung round.