, to see them get up
to depart, or 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? Yes, probably!

I like so much to be alone that I cannot even endure the vicinage of
other beings sleeping under the same roof. I cannot live in Paris,
because when there I suffer the most acute agony. I lead a moral life,
and am therefore tortured in my body and in my nerves by that immense
crowd which swarms, which lives around 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, when I feel, that on the other side of
a wall, several existences are interrupted by these regular eclipses of
reason.

Why am I thus? Who knows? The cause of it is perhaps very simple. I get
tired very soon with 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 distract, engage, soothe, whom solitude harasses, pains,
stupefies, like the forward movement of a terrible glacier, or the
traversing of the desert; and those, on the contrary, whom others weary,
tire, bore, silently torture, while isolation calms them, bathes them in
the repose of independency, and plunges them into the humors of their own
thoughts. In fine, there is here a normal, physical phenomenon. Some are
constituted to live a life without 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, I had become much
attached to inanimate objects, which have for me the importance of
beings, and my house has become, had become, a world in which I lived an
active and solitary life, surrounded by all manner of things, furniture,
familiar knick-knacks, as sympathetic in my eyes as the visages of human
beings. I had filled my mansion with them, little by little, I had
adorned it with them, and