rip.

After this introduction by the express, we have the miseries of the
hotel; of some great hotel full of people, and yet so empty; the strange
room, and the dubious bed! I am most particular about my bed; it is the
sanctuary of life. We intrust our almost naked and fatigued bodies to it
so that they may be reanimated by reposing between soft sheets and
feathers.

There we find the most delightful hours of 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 an hotel bed without a shiver of disgust.
What have its occupants been doing in 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
purulent, of the perspiration emanating from the sick, and of everything
that is ugly and filthy in man.

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

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 up by
a wretched composite candle under a shade.

Again, those terribly dull evenings in some unknown town! Do you know
anything more wretched than when it is getting dark on such an occasion?
One goes about as if almost in a dream, looking at faces which one has
never seen before and will never 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 fall into a chair of some well-lit cafe, whose gilding and
lights overwhelm 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_,[5] that a kind of madness se