he universal
room. You think it is closed. No, it is open to the four winds of
heaven. It is lost amid a host of similar rooms, like the light in the
sky, like one day amid the host of all other days, like my "I" amid a
host of other I's.

I, I! I saw nothing more now than the pallor of my face, with deep
orbits, buried in the twilight, and my mouth filled with a silence
which gently but surely stifles and destroys.

I raised myself on my elbow as on a clipped wing. I wished that
something partaking of the infinite would happen to me.

I had no genius, no mission to fulfil, no great heart to bestow. I had
nothing and I deserved nothing. But all the same I desired some sort
of reward.

Love. I dreamed of a unique, an unheard-of idyll with a woman far from
the one with whom I had hitherto lost all my time, a woman whose
features I did not see, but whose shadow I imagined beside my own as we
walked along the road together.

Something infinite, something new! A journey, an extraordinary journey
into which to throw myself headlong and bring variety into my life.
Luxurious, bustling departures surrounded by solicitous inferiors, a
lazy leaning back in railway trains that thunder along through wild
landscapes and past cities rising up and growing as if blown by the
wind.

Steamers, masts, orders given in barbarous tongues, landings on golden
quays, then strange, exotic faces in the sunlight, puzzlingly alike,
and monuments, familiar from pictures, which, in my tourist's pride,
seem to have come close to me.

My brain was empty, my heart arid. I had never found anything, not
even a friend. I was a poor man stranded for a day in a boarding-house
room where everybody comes and everybody goes. And yet I longed for
glory! For glory bound to me like a miraculous wound that I should
feel and everybody would talk about. I longed for a following of which
I should be the leader, my name acclaimed under the heavens like a new
clarion call.

But I felt my grandeur slip away. My childish imagination played in
vain with those boundless fancies. There was nothing more for me to
expect from life. There was only I, who, stripped by the night, rose
upward like a cry.

I could hardly see any more in the dark. I guessed at, rather than
saw, myself in the mirror. I had a realising sense of my weakness and
captivity. I held my hands out toward the window, my outstretched
fingers making them look like something torn.