ds on a government circular. Come
now, we must get on with it: _government servants and to transform
them--transform them_ . . . How is it I simply cannot write a single
word after that? How is it I am here dreaming still, as I have been ever
since I rediscovered my _ego_ on the Pont de la Concorde that evening
of the lovely sunset? Transform, did I say? O God of mystery, nature,
truth, if she whose name even now after four years I dare not utter, if
she died in giving life to Marguerite, I should believe, I should know
with the certainty of instinct, that the soul of the mother had passed
into the daughter and that they are one and the same being.

[Illustration: 040]

[Illustration: 042]

1st November

All's well. I have lost my _ego_ again. It has gone back into the green
filing cases. Number 117 contains a good part of it. I have finished my
circular. It is drawn up in good official style. We have a fine piece of
legislation to get off before the holidays. My Chief speaks every day in
the House. Every night I correct the proofs of his speeches. If the
Blue Bird comes to see me now and again in the small hall of the Palais
Bourbon, it is merely to advise me to tone down some rather too forcible
expression and he never addresses himself to my imagination. I don't
know whether I am living happily or unhappily since I don't know that
I am living at all. I do not even recognize my own clothes. I picked up
the hat of the Comte de Merodac a little while ago and wore it for three
days without knowing it, yet it is a romantic sombrero-like
sort of thing worn nowadays by no one save this elderly nobleman. I cut
an astounding figure they told me, but I never noticed myself, and,
if by chance I had, I should not have heeded what I saw since it had
nothing to do with politics. I am no longer a person; I am a piece of
the official machine. To-night I have neither proofs to correct nor
official reception to attend. I have put on my slippers. There is always
a tiny bit of my _ego_ hidden away in these slippers. I am in my room
seated by the fire and I am conscious of being there. By heaven I wonder
whether I should know myself in the glass. Let's have a look. Hum! not
so very ... I didn't think I was so grave and respectable looking. I
quite see that I shall have to take myself seriously. I have been a long
time about it, but then it wasn't for me to begin.

I am a man of weight and I account myself such. But, alas, I