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 Mérodac 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 do not know
myself. And I am not anxious to acquire the knowledge; it would be a
tedious business. No, I haven’t the smallest desire to hold converse
with the grave and frigid gentleman who mimics all my movements. On the
other hand, did I but dare, what a happy time I should have with that
little fellow whose miniature I see there in that locket hanging against
the frame of the mirror. He is building a house with dominoes. What a
nice little chap. I feel like calling him and saying “Let’s go and have
a game together shall we?” But, alas, he is far away, very far away. That
little boy is myself as I was forty years ago. He is dead, just as dead
as if I were lying beneath the sod, sealed up in a leaden coffin. For
what have we in common, he and I? In what respect does he survive in me
to-day? In what do my castles of cards resemble his tower of dominoes?
We say that we live, we miserable beings, because we keep dying over and
over again.
[Illustration: 046]
I remember, it is true, how I used to play my games of an evening what
time my mother sat sewing at the table and gazed at me, now and again,
with a look full of that beautiful and simple tenderness that makes one
adore life, bless God and gives one courage enough to fight a score of
battles. Ah yes, hallowed memories, I shall treasure you in my heart
like a precious balm which, till my days are done, will have power to
soothe all bitterness and soften the very agony of death. But does the
child that I then was survive in me today? No. He is a stranger to me;
I feel that I can love him without selfishness and weep for him without
unmanliness. He is dead and gone, and has taken away with him my
innocent simplicities and my boundless hopes. We all of us die in
swaddling clothes. Little Marguerite, that delightful image of unfolding
life, how many times has she not died and what profound depths of
irrevocable memories, what a grave of dead thoughts and emotions has not
already been delved within her, though she is but five years old. I,
a stranger, a passer-by, know more of her life than she does and, in
consequence, I am more truly she than she herself. After that let him
who will prate of the feeling of identity and the consciousness of self.
Oh, gracious Heaven, what things we mortals be and into what an abyss
of terrors we should be for ever plunging if we had but time to think,
instead of making laws or planting cabbages. I feel like pulling my
slippers off my feet and pitching them out of the window, since they
have called me back to the consciousness of my existence. Our lives are
only bearable provided we do not think about them.
[Illustration: 049]
[Illustration: 050]