ucceeded in doing.

You don't understand me, so I will explain: In the spring of 1874 I was
seized with an irresistible desire to see Venice, Florence, Rome and
Naples. I am, as you know, not a great traveller; it appears to me a
useless and fatiguing business. Nights spent in a train, the disturbed
slumbers of the railway carriage, with the attendant headache, and
stiffness in every limb, the sudden waking in that rolling box, the
unwashed feeling, with your eyes and hair full of dust, the smell of the
coal on which one's lungs feed, those bad dinners in the draughty
refreshment rooms are, according to my ideas, a horrible way of beginning
a pleasure trip.

After this introduction, we have the miseries of the hotel; of some great
hotel full of people, and yet so empty; the strange room and the doubtful
bed!

I am most particular about my bed; it is the sanctuary of life. We
entrust our almost naked and fatigued bodies to it so that they may be
reanimated by reposing between soft sheets and feathers.

There we find the most delightful hours of our existence, the hours of
love and of sleep. The bed is sacred, and should be respected, venerated
and loved by us as the best and most delightful of our earthly
possessions.

I cannot lift up the sheets of a hotel bed without a shudder of disgust.
Who has occupied it the night before? Perhaps dirty, revolting people
have slept in it. I begin, then, to think of all the horrible people with
whom one rubs shoulders every day, people with suspicious-looking skin
which makes one think of the feet and all the rest! I call to mind those
who carry about with them the sickening smell of garlic or of humanity. I
think of those who are deformed and unhealthy, of the perspiration
emanating from the sick, of everything that is ugly and filthy in man.

And all this, perhaps, in the bed in which I am about to sleep! The mere
idea of it makes me feel ill as I get into it.

And then the hotel dinners--those dreary table d'hote dinners in the
midst of all sorts of extraordinary people, or else those terrible
solitary dinners at a small table in a restaurant, feebly lighted by a
wretched composite candle under a shade.

Again, those terribly dull evenings in some unknown town! Do you know
anything more wretched than the approach of dusk on such an occasion?
One goes about as if almost in a dream, looking at faces that one never
has seen before and never will see again; listening to peopl