stion, and he is still more dissatisfied. He realises his
singularity, and it draws him out of his objective attitude into that
incomprehensible existence, the very conception of which he himself
denies.

The real tragedy of his position lies in the fact that he is alone in
the midst of a strange and unknown world. And little by little his
despair reaches its utmost limits: "Whenever I am without a book in my
hand, or whenever I am not writing, such anguish seizes on me that I
simply find myself on the verge of tears." So he writes in a letter to
Georges Sand. "It seems to me that I have literally turned into a
fossil, and that I am deprived of all connection with the universe
around me." "A feeling of universal destruction and agony possesses me,
and I am deathly sad." "When I am tired out from my work, I grow anxious
about myself. No one remembers me, I belong to another sphere. My
professional friends are so little friendly to me." "I pass whole weeks
without exchanging a word with a single human creature, and at the end
of the week I find it hard to recall any special day or any particular
event during the course of that time. On Sundays I see my mother and
niece, and that is all. A gathering of rats in the attic, that is my
whole society. They make an infernal noise over my head, when the rain
is not roaring, and the wind is not howling. The nights are blacker than
coal, and a silence is all around me, infinite as in the desert. One's
senses are terribly sharpened in such surroundings, and my heart starts
beating at the slightest sound." "I am losing myself in the
reminiscences of my youth, like an old man. Of life I ask nothing more,
save a few sheets of paper that I may scratch ink upon. I feel as though
I were wandering through an endless desert, wandering, not knowing
whither; and that at one and the same time, I am the wanderer, and the
camel, and the desert." "One hope alone sustains me, that soon I shall
be parted from life, and that I shall surely find no other existence
that might be still more painful.... No, no! Enough of misery!"

All his letters to Georges Sand are one weary restless martyr's
confession of the "disease of genius." Sometimes a simple plaint bursts
from him, and in it, through the impenetrable pride of the fighter, can
be detected something soft and broken, as in the voice of a man who is
over-tired. The fury of his enemies, the calumnies of his friends, the
lack of understanding of his