My dear friend, you cannot understand it by any possible means, you say,
and I perfectly believe you. You think I am going mad? It may be so, but
not for the reasons which you suppose.
Yes, I am going to get married, and I will give you what has led me to
take that step.
My ideas and my convictions have not changed at all. I look upon all
legalized cohabitation as utterly stupid, for I am certain that nine
husbands out of ten are cuckolds; and they get no more than their
deserts for having been idiotic enough to fetter their lives, and
renounce their freedom in love, the only happy and good thing in the
world, and for having clipped the wings of fancy, which continually
drives us on towards all women, &c., &c., &c. You know what I mean. More
than ever I feel that I am incapable of loving one woman alone, because
I shall always adore all the others too much. I should like to have a
thousand arms, a thousand mouths, and a thousand--_temperaments_, to be
able to strain an army of these charming creatures in my embrace at the
same moment.
And yet I am going to get married!
I may add that I know very little of the girl who is going to become my
wife to-morrow; I have only seen her four or five times. I know that
there is nothing unpleasing about her, and that is enough for my
purpose. She is small, fair, and stout; so of course the day after
to-morrow I shall ardently wish for a tall, dark, thin woman.
She is not rich, and belongs to the middle-classes. She is a girl such
as you may find by the gross, well adapted for matrimony, without any
apparent faults, and with no particularly striking qualities. People say
of her:
"Mlle. Lajolle is a very nice girl," and to-morrow they will say: "What
a very nice woman Madame Raymon is." She belongs, in a word, to that
immense number of girls whom one is glad to have for one's wife till the
moment comes, when one discovers that one happens to prefer all the
other women to that particular woman whom one has married.
"Well," you will say to me, "what on earth did you get married for?"
I hardly like to tell you the strange and seemingly improbable reason
that urged me on to this senseless act; the fact, however, is that I am
frightened of being alone!
I don't know how to tell you or to make you understand me, but my state
of mind is so wretched that you will pity me and despise me.
I do not want to be alone any longer at night; I want to feel that there
is someone close to me, touching me, a being who can speak and say
something, no matter what it be.
I wish to be able to awaken somebody by my side, so that I may be able
to ask some sudden question, a stupid question even if I feel inclined,
so that I may hear a human voice, and feel that there is some waking
soul close to me, someone whose reason is at work; so that when I
hastily light the candle I may see some human face by my
side--because--because--I am ashamed to confess it--because I am afraid
of being alone.
Oh! you don't understand me yet.
I am not afraid of any danger; if a man were to come into the room I
should kill him without trembling. I am not afraid of ghosts, nor do I
believe in the supernatural. I am not afraid of dead people, for I
believe in the total annihilation of every being that disappears from
the face of this earth.
Well,--yes, well, it must be told; I am afraid of myself, afraid of that
horrible sensation of incomprehensible fear.
You may laugh, if you like. It is terrible, and I cannot get over it. I
am afraid of the walls, of the furniture, of the familiar objects, which
are animated, as far as I am concerned, by a kind of animal life. Above
all, I am afraid of my own dreadful thoughts, of my reason, which seems
as if it were about to leave me, driven away by a mysterious and
invisible agony.
At first I feel a vague uneasiness in my mind which causes a cold shiver
to run all over me. I look round, and of course nothing is to be seen,
and I wish there were something there, no matter what, as long as it
were something tangible: I am frightened, merely because I cannot
understand my own terror.
If I speak, I am afraid of my own voice. If I walk, I am afraid of I
know not what, behind the door, behind the curtains, in the cupboard, or
under my bed, and yet all the time I know there is nothing anywhere, and
I turn round suddenly because I am afraid of what is behind me, although
there is nothing there, and I know it.
I get agitated; I feel that my fear increases, and so I shut myself up
in my own room, get into bed, and hide under the clothes, and there,
cowering down rolled into a ball, I close my eyes in despair, and remain
thus for an indefinite time, remembering that my candle is alight on the
table by my bedside, and that I ought to put it out, and yet--I dare not
do it!
It is very terrible, is it not, to be like that?
Formerly I felt nothing of all that; I came home quite comfortably, and
went up and down in my rooms without anything disturbing my calmness of
mind. Had anyone told me that I should be attacked by a malady--for I
can call it nothing else--of most improbable fear, such a stupid and
terrible malady as it is, I should have laughed outright. I was
certainly never afraid of opening the door in the dark; I went to bed
slowly without locking it, and never got up in the middle of the night
to make sure that everything was firmly closed.
It began last year in a very strange manner, on a damp autumn evening.
When my servant had left the room, after I had dined, I asked myself
what I was going to do. I walked up and down my room for some time,
feeling tired without any reason for it, unable to work, and even
without energy to read. A fine rain was falling, and I felt unhappy, a
prey to one of those fits of despondency, without any apparent cause
which makes us feel inclined to cry, or to talk, no matter to whom, so
as to shake off our depressing thoughts.
I felt that I was alone, and my rooms seemed to me to be more empty than
they had ever done before, while I was surrounded by a sensation of
infinite and overwhelming solitude. What was I to do? I sat down, but
then a kind of nervous impatience agitated my legs, so I got up and
began to walk about again. I was rather feverish, for my hands, which I
had clasped behind me, as one often does when walking slowly, almost
seemed to burn one another. Then suddenly a cold shiver ran down my
back, and I thought the damp air might have penetrated into my room, so
I lit the fire for the first time that year, and sat down again and
looked at the flames. But soon I felt that I could not possibly remain
quiet, and so I got up again and determined to go out, to pull myself
together, and to find a friend to bear me company.
I could not find anyone, so I went on to the boulevards to try and meet
some acquaintance or other there.
It was wretched everywhere, and the wet pavement glistened in the
gaslight, while the oppressive warmth of the almost impalpable rain lay
heavily over the streets and seemed to obscure the light from the lamps.
I went on slowly, saying to myself, "I shall not find a soul to talk
to."
I glanced into several cafés, from the Madeleine as far as the Faubourg
Poissonière, and saw many unhappy-looking individuals sitting at the
tables, who did not seem even to have enough energy left to finish the
refreshments they had ordered.
For a long time I wandered aimlessly up and down, and about midnight I
started off for home; I was very calm and very tired. My concierge[9]
opened the door at once, which was quite unusual for him, and I thought
that another lodger had no doubt just come in.
When I go out I always double-lock the door of my room, and I found it
merely closed, which surprised me; but I supposed that some letters had
been brought up for me in the course of the evening.
I went in, and found my fire still burning, so that it lighted up the
room a little, and, in the act of taking up a candle, I noticed somebody
sitting in my armchair by the fire, warming his feet, with his back
towards me.
I was not in the slightest degree frightened. I thought very naturally
that some friend or other had come to see me. No doubt the porter, whom
I had told when I went out, had lent him his own key. In a moment I
remembered all the circumstances of my return, how the street door had
been opened immediately, and that my own door was only latched, and not
locked.
I could see nothing of my friend but his head, and he had evidently gone
to sleep while waiting for me, so I went up to him to rouse him. I saw
him quite clearly; his right arm was hanging down and his legs were
crossed, while his head, which was somewhat inclined to the left of the
armchair, seemed to indicate that he was asleep. "Who can it be?" I
asked myself. I could not see clearly, as the room was rather dark, so I
put out my hand to touch him on the shoulder, and it came in contact
with the back of the chair. There was nobody there; the seat was empty.
I fairly jumped with fright. For a moment I drew back as if some
terrible danger had suddenly appeared in my way; then I turned round
again, impelled by some imperious desire of looking at the armchair
again, and I remained standing upright, panting with fear, so upset that
I could not collect my thoughts, and ready to drop.
But I am a cool man, and soon recovered myself. I thought: "It is a mere
hallucination, that is all," and I immediately began to reflect about
this phenomenon. Thoughts fly very quickly at such moments.
I had been suffering from a hallucination, that was an incontestable
fact. My mind had been perfectly lucid and had acted regularly and
logically, so there was nothing the matter with the brain. It was only
my eyes that had been deceived; they had had a vision, one of those
visions which lead simple folk to believe in miracles. It was a nervous
accident to the optical apparatus, nothing more; the eyes were rather
congested, perhaps.
I lit my candle, and when I stooped down to the fire in so doing, I
noticed that I was trembling, and I raised myself up with a jump, as if
somebody had touched me from behind.