no more about it today than I did yesterday. I had the conviction that I could not be a writer, because all the effort of which I was capable had been spent in writing that miserable and incoherent book. Had I had a more humble and compromising ambition, were I only prompted by desires less noble, by those which never cause remorse—such as love of money, official titles, dissoluteness! . . . But, no! Only one thing which I could never attain lured me, and that was talent . . . To be able to say to myself, yes . . . to say to myself: "This book, this sonnet, this phrase is yours, you wrung it from your brains swollen with passion; it is your thought that quivers here; it is pieces of your flesh and drops of your blood, that it scatters over the sorrowful pages; it is your nerves that vibrate in it like the strings of a violin under the bow of a divine musician. What you have accomplished here is beautiful and grand!" For this moment of supreme joy I would be willing to sacrifice my future, my wealth, my life; I would be willing even to kill! . . .
And never, never will I be able to say that to myself! . . . Ah how I envied the eternal self-contentment of the mediocre! . . . Now I again felt a passionate desire to return to Saint-Michel. I wished I could drive the plough in the brown furrow, roll in the fields of yellow clover, smell the wholesome odor of the stables, and, above all, lose myself in the thick of the coppice wood, penetrating into it farther and farther. . . .
The light went out and my lamp was smoking. A cold like a gentle caress filled my legs and sent a current of pleasurable chills through my back. Outside not a sound was heard; the street grew silent. It had been long since I heard the dull trundle of the omnibus rolling on the causeway. The clock struck
