our existence, the hours of
love and of sleep. The bed is sacred, and should be respected,
venerated and loved by us as the best and most delightful of our earthly
possessions.

I cannot lift up the sheets of a hotel bed without a shudder of disgust.
Who has occupied it the night before? Perhaps dirty, revolting people
have slept in it. I begin, then, to think of all the horrible people
with whom one rubs shoulders every day, people with suspicious-looking
skin which makes one think of the feet and all the rest! I call to mind
those who carry about with them the sickening smell of garlic or of
humanity. I think of those who are deformed and unhealthy, of the
perspiration emanating from the sick, of everything that is ugly and
filthy in man.

And all this, perhaps, in the bed in which I am about to sleep! The mere
idea of it makes me feel ill as I get into it.

And then the hotel dinners--those dreary table d'hote dinners in the
midst of all sorts of extraordinary people, or else those terrible
solitary dinners at a small table in a restaurant, feebly lighted by a
wretched composite candle under a shade.

Again, those terribly dull evenings in some unknown town! Do you know
anything more wretched than the approach of dusk on such an occasion?
One goes about as if almost in a dream, looking at faces that one never
has seen before and never will see again; listening to people talking
about matters which are quite indifferent to you in a language that
perhaps you do not understand. You have a terrible feeling, almost as
if you were lost, and you continue to walk on so as not to be obliged
to return to the hotel, where you would feel more lost still because you
are at home, in a home which belongs to anyone who can pay for it; and
at last you sink into a chair of some well-lighted cafe, whose gilding
and lights oppress you a thousand times more than the shadows in the
streets. Then you feel so abominably lonely sitting in front of the
glass of flat bock beer that a kind of madness seizes you, the longing
to go somewhere or other, no matter where, as long as you need not
remain in front of that marble table amid those dazzling lights.

And then, suddenly, you are aware that you are really alone in the
world, always and everywhere, and that in places which we know, the
familiar jostlings give us the illusion only of human fraternity. At
such moments of self-abandonment and sombre isolation in distant cities
one thinks br