A dull noise was heard which resounded in the air like a thunderbolt. It was the door shut after Lirat. The houses, the sky, the lights of the street were in a whirl. And I no longer saw anything. I stretched out my arms in front of me and fell on the sidewalk. Then in the midst of peaceful cornfields I saw a road, a white road upon which a man, seemingly tired, was walking. The man never stopped looking at the beautiful corn which ripened in the sun, and at the broad meadows where flocks of gamboling sheep grazed, their snouts buried in the grass. Apple-trees stretched out to him their branches weighted down with the purple fruit, and the springs purled at the bottom of their moss-covered recesses in the ground. He seated himself upon the bank of a river covered at this spot with little fragrant flowers, and listened rapturously to the music of nature. . . From everywhere voices which rose up from the earth, voices which came down from heaven, soft voices were murmuring: "Come to me all ye who suffer, all ye who have sinned. We are the comforters who will restore to wretched people their repose of life and their peace of conscience. Come to us all ye who wish to live!" And the man with arms uplifted to heaven prayed: "Yes, I wish to live! What must I do in order not to suffer? What must I do in order not to sin?" The trees shook their crowns, the corn field moved its sea of stubble, a buzzing arose from every grass blade, the flowers swayed their little corollas on top of their stems, and from all this a unique voice was heard: "Love us!" said the voice. The man resumed his walk, birds were fluttering all around him.
The next day I bought a suit of working clothes.
"And so Monsieur is going away!" asked the errand boy of the premises to whom I had just given my old clothes.
