ent, not to be able to cherish the compensation or
possess the impregnable asylum, the inexhaustible resource that grief
always is. It was when I touched my cheek which did not hurt that I
threw myself on my bed crying, alone, yes really alone for the first
time. And to-night it is just the same way.

I have run away from home. Here I am cast out on the street in the
night. There is a fine blinding sleet; I do not know as yet where I am
going to spend the night, but that doesn't hurt any more than the slap
on my cheek hurt. Am I unfeeling? I push on straight ahead, the houses
follow one another, the streets meet and cross, the separate shadows are
only one and the same shadow. I stop now and then arrested by the
consciousness of having forgotten to suffer.

I have been walking a good hour.

How penetrating the night is. An hour of utter aloneness, an hour empty
and bare. Ah, that it may be so until the end. Let misery come, the
unknown, humiliations, but let the truth come also. You perish trying to
do without the truth....

That scene.... Can the memory of it be annihilated, so that nothing
remains, not even the grotesque memory of a memory?

He blazed with fury, he lashed the air first with one arm then the
other; his features swelled with rage and suddenly looked youthful....
Now that I come to think of it, he looked exactly the same as on the day
of the blue vase, only this time he did not dare to slap me. That's why
he gesticulated so wildly. I listened to him at first with an
indifferent air; I was accustomed to his storms--well, the thing would
soon blow over. And before my eyes the familiar scene, which the
lighting up of the chandelier always placidly ushered in, was being set
according to the daily ritual--the smoking tureen, which Leontine, who
had entered with her padded tread, was placing on the table (she removed
her red hands, finger by finger, and stole her sidewise glance at me),
and the transparent play of the glasses, with iridescent stems giving
back the glitter of the silver and the white sheen of the tablecloth.

Although my eyes were occupied in following intently the details of the
dinner-table, a heavy travail was going on within me. A legion of
slumbering desires, halting impulses, dead aspirations were rousing
themselves noiselessly, almost without my consciousness. Thoughts that
come in the morning when one's eyes open, "To-day! to-day," hopes dashed
to the ground, deceptions, sighs--th