Berlin, 5 September.

I am at Berlin, because escaping from Vienna I had to go somewhere.  I could not go to Ploszow, because she will be there.  I was so convinced that no human power could tear me from her that the very idea of separation seemed to me a wild impossibility.  But no!  It is always the unexpected that happens, for I have gone away, and everything is at an end.  I am at Berlin.  I feel as if I had an engine in my head, the wheels of which keep whirring incessantly.  This hurts me; but I am not mad.  I know everything and remember everything.  My physician was right; it is only weak heads that come to grief.  Besides, it could not happen to me, because insanity sometimes means happiness.

6 September.

Yet at times I fancy that my brain is bursting bounds.  What is there more natural than that a married woman should have children?  But to me that natural order seems so monstrous that it well-nigh maddens me.  Yet a thing cannot be at the same time in the order of nature and a monstrosity.  No brain can withstand that.  What does it mean?  I understand that those whom fate means to crush are crushed by some great, overwhelming calamity.  With me it is different.  I am rent asunder by an ordinary, natural event,—­and the more natural, the more terrible it is.  One contradicts the other.  She is not responsible,—­I understand that because I am not mad.  She is still virtuous, and yet I could have sooner forgiven her any other crime.  And I cannot, God knows I cannot forgive you, because I loved you so much.  And believe me, there is not another woman in the whole world I scorn so much as I scorn you.  For, after all, it comes to this:  you had two lovers, one for Platonic love and the other for matrimonial love.  There is in me a wild desire to laugh, and at the same time to dash my head against the wall.  I had not foreseen that a way could be found to tear me from you; and yet there is one, and it has proved effective.

8 September

When I come to think that all is at an end between us, and that I have left her forever, I can scarcely believe it.  There is no Aniela for me any more.  Then what is there?  Nothing.  Then why do I live?  I do not know.  It is not out of curiosity to know whether a son or a daughter will be born to Pan Kromitzki.  I always think of it as the most natural thing in the world, and my head seems nigh to bursting.  It is very strange!  I ought to have been prepared for that, and yet the thought never entered my head.  I should have sooner expected a stroke of lightning to fell me down.  Yet Kromitzki was with her at Ploszow; they were together in Vienna, and afterward in Gastein.

And I put it all down to her nerves, to her deep feelings!  What egregious foolishness!  Since I could bear to see the two together, I ought to be able to put up with the consequences.  Alas, it is not my reason that revolts, it is my nerves that quiver under these consequences.  There are people in whom these two forces dwell in harmony; within me they worry each other like dogs.  That is another of my misfortunes.  How is it I never thought of it?  It ought to have struck me that if there were any terrible coincidence, any blow more painful than another, it would be reserved for me.