courage to sit down alone in my
own dining-room. The Boulevard Malesherbes seems like a forest path
imprisoned in a dead city. All the houses smell empty. On the street the
sprinklers throw showers of white rain, splashing the wooden pavement
whence rises the vapor of damp tar and stable refuse; and from one
end to the other of the long descent from the Parc Monceau to Saint
Augustin, one sees five or six black forms, unimportant passers,
tradesmen or domestics. The shade of the plane-trees spreads over the
burning sidewalks, making a curious spot, looking almost like liquid, as
if water spilled there were drying. The stillness of the leaves on the
branches, and of their gray silhouettes on the asphalt, expresses the
fatigue of the roasted city, slumbering and perspiring like a workman
asleep on a bench in the sun. Yes, she perspires, the beggar, and she
smells frightfully through her sewer mouths, the vent-holes of sinks and
kitchens, the streams through which the filth of her streets is running.
Then I think of those summer mornings in your orchard full of little
wild-flowers that flavor the air with a suggestion of honey. Then I
enter, sickened already, the restaurant where bald, fat, tired-looking
men are eating, with half-opened waistcoats and moist, shining
foreheads. The food shows the effect of heat--the melon growing soft
under the ice, the soft bread, the flabby filet, the warmed-over
vegetables, the purulent cheese, the fruits ripened on the premises. I
go out, nauseated, and go home to try to sleep a little until the hour
for dinner, which I take at the club.

"There I always find Adelmans, Maldant, Rocdiane, Landa, and many
others, who bore and weary me as much as hand-organs. Each one has his
own little tune, or tunes, which I have heard for fifteen years,
and they play them all together every evening in that club, which is
apparently a place where one goes to be entertained. Someone should
change my own generation for my benefit, for my eyes, my ears, and my
mind have had enough of it. They still make conquests, however, they
boast of them and congratulate one another on them!

"After yawning as many times as there are minutes between eight o'clock
and midnight, I go home and go to bed, and while I undress I think that
the same thing will begin over again the next day.

"Yes, my dear friend, I am at the age when a bachelor's life becomes
intolerable, because there is nothing new for me under the sun. An