e, even the most intimate of them, they bore me,
fatigue me, enervate me, and I experience an overwhelming, torturing
desire to see them get up and go, to take themselves away, and to leave
me by myself.

That desire is more than a craving; it is an irresistible necessity.
And if the presence of people with whom I find myself were to be
continued; if I were compelled, not only to listen, but also to follow,
for any length of time, their conversation, a serious accident would
assuredly take place. What kind of accident? Ah! who knows? Perhaps a
slight paralytic stroke? Probably!

I like solitude so much that I cannot even endure the vicinage of other
beings sleeping under the same roof. I cannot live in Paris, because
there I suffer the most acute agony. I lead a moral life, and am
therefore tortured in body and in nerves by that immense crowd which
swarms and lives even when it sleeps. Ah! the sleeping of others is
more painful still than their conversation. And I can never find repose
when I know and feel that on the other side of a wall several
existences are undergoing these regular eclipses of reason.

Why am I thus? Who knows? The cause of it is very simple perhaps. I get
tired very soon of everything that does not emanate from me. And there
are many people in similar case.

We are, on earth, two distinct races. Those who have need of others,
whom others amuse, engage soothe, whom solitude harasses, pains,
stupefies, like the movement of a terrible glacier or the traversing of
the desert; and those, on the contrary, whom others weary, tire, bore,
silently torture, whom isolation calms and bathes in the repose of
independency, and plunges into the humors of their own thoughts. In
fine, there is here a normal, physical phenomenon. Some are constituted
to live a life outside of themselves, others, to live a life within
themselves. As for me, my exterior associations are abruptly and
painfully short-lived, and, as they reach their limits, I experience in
my whole body and in my whole intelligence an intolerable uneasiness.

As a result of this, I became attached, or rather had become much
attached, to inanimate objects, which have for me the importance of
beings, and my house has or had become a world in which I lived an
active and solitary life, surrounded by all manner of things,
furniture, familiar knickknacks, as sympathetic in my eyes as the
visages of human beings. I had filled my mansion with them; little b