ificant.
I was unmarried. I had no children and shall have none. There are
moments when this troubles me, when I reflect that with me a line will
end which has lasted since the beginning of humanity.

Was I happy? Yes, I had nothing to mourn or regret, I had no
complicated desires. Therefore, I was happy. I remembered that since
my childhood I had had spiritual illuminations, mystical emotions, a
morbid fondness for shutting myself up face to face with my past. I
had attributed exceptional importance to myself and had come to think
that I was more than other people. But this had gradually become
submerged in the positive nothingness of every day.

. . . . .

There I was now in that room.

I leaned forward in my armchair to be nearer the glass, and I examined
myself carefully.

Rather short, with an air of reserve (although there are times when I
let myself go); quite correctly dressed; nothing to criticise and
nothing striking about my appearance.

I looked close at my eyes. They are green, though, oddly enough,
people usually take them for black.

I believed in many things in a confused sort of way, above all, in the
existence of God, if not in the dogmas of religion. However, I
thought, these last had advantages for poor people and for women, who
have less intellect than men.

As for philosophical discussions, I thought they are absolutely
useless. You cannot demonstrate or verify anything. What was truth,
anyway?

I had a sense of good and evil. I would not have committed an
indelicacy, even if certain of impunity. I would not have permitted
myself the slightest overstatement.

If everyone were like me, all would be well.

. . . . .

It was already late. I was not going to do anything. I remained
seated there, at the end of the day, opposite the looking-glass. In
the setting of the room that the twilight began to invade, I saw the
outline of my forehead, the oval of my face, and, under my blinking
eyelids, the gaze by which I enter into myself as into a tomb.

My tiredness, the gloominess (I heard rain outside), the darkness that
intensified my solitude and made me look larger, and then something
else, I knew not what, made me sad. It bored me to be sad. I shook
myself. What was the matter? Nothing. Only myself.

I have not always been alone in life as I was that evening. Love for
me had taken on the form and the being of my little Josette. We had
met long before, in the rea