fever pervades me, a fever of impatience and of fear, and the
silence of the walls terrifies me. The silence of a room where one
lives alone is so intense and so melancholy It is not only a silence
of the mind; when a piece of furniture cracks a shudder goes through
you for you expect no noise in this melancholy abode.

How many times, nervous and timid from this motionless silence, I
have begun to talk, to repeat words without rhyme or reason, only to
make some sound. My voice at those times sounds so strange that I
am afraid of that, too. Is there anything more dreadful than
talking to one's self in an empty house? One's voice sounds like
that of another, an unknown voice talking aimlessly, to no one, into
the empty air, with no ear to listen to it, for one knows before
they escape into the solitude of the room exactly what words will be
uttered. And when they resound lugubriously in the silence, they
seem no more than an echo, the peculiar echo of words whispered by
ones thought.

My sweetheart was a young girl like other young girls who live in
Paris on wages that are insufficient to keep them. She was gentle,
good, simple. Her parents lived at Poissy. She went to spend
several days with them from time to time.

For a year I lived quietly with her, fully decided to leave her when
I should find some one whom I liked well enough to marry. I would
make a little provision for this one, for it is an understood thing
in our social set that a woman's love should be paid for, in money
if she is poor, in presents if she is rich.

But one day she told me she was enceinte. I was thunderstruck, and
saw in a second that my life would be ruined. I saw the fetter that
I should wear until my death, everywhere, in my future family life,
in my old age, forever; the fetter of a woman bound to my life
through a child; the fetter of the child whom I must bring up, watch
over, protect, while keeping myself unknown to him, and keeping him
hidden from the world.

I was greatly disturbed at this news, and a confused longing, a
criminal desire, surged through my mind; I did not formulate it, but
I felt it in my heart, ready to come to the surface, as if some one
hidden behind a portiere should await the signal to come out. If
some accident might only happen! So many of these little beings die
before they are born!

Oh! I d