stranger's gaze.

Let my serious reader consider what would have become of life if man
were robbed of his right, of his duty to be alone. In the gathering of
idle chatterers, amid the dull collection of transparent glass dolls,
that kill each other with their sameness; in the wild city where all
doors are open, and all windows are open--passers-by look wearily
through the glass walls and observe the same evidences of the hearth and
the alcove. Only the creatures that can be alone possess a face; while
those that know no solitude--the great, blissful, sacred solitude of the
soul--have snouts instead of faces.

And in calling my friends "perfidious traitors" I, poor youth that
I was, could not understand the wise law of life, according to which
neither friendship, nor love, nor even the tenderest attachment of
sister and mother, is eternal. Deceived by the lies of the poets, who
proclaimed eternal friendship and love, I did not want to see that
which my indulgent reader observes from the windows of his dwelling--how
friends, relatives, mother and wife, in apparent despair and in tears,
follow their dead to the cemetery, and after a lapse of some time return
from there. No one buries himself together with the dead, no one asks
the dead to make room in the coffin, and if the grief-stricken wife
exclaims, in an outburst of tears, "Oh, bury me together with him!" she
is merely expressing symbolically the extreme degree of her despair--one
could easily convince himself of this by trying, in jest, to push her
down into the grave. And those who restrain her are merely expressing
symbolically their sympathy and understanding, thus lending the
necessary aspect of solemn grief to the funeral custom.

Man must subject himself to the laws of life, not of death, nor to
the fiction of the poets, however beautiful it may be. But can the
fictitious be beautiful? Is there no beauty in the stern truth of life,
in the mighty work of its wise laws, which subjects to itself with great
disinterestedness the movements of the heavenly luminaries, as well as
the restless linking of the tiny creatures called human beings?

CHAPTER III

Thus I lived sadly in my prison for five or six years.

The first redeeming ray flashed upon me when I least expected it.

Endowed with the gift of imagination, I made my former fiancee the
object of all my thoughts. She became my love and my dream.

Another circumstance which suddenly revealed to me