Then Sandoz spoke in his turn, his hands also crossed behind his head, and his back resting against one of the cushions of the couch.

’Does one ever know?  Would it not be better, perhaps, to live and die unknown?  What a sell it would be if artistic glory existed no more than the Paradise which is talked about in catechisms and which even children nowadays make fun of!  We, who no longer believe in the Divinity, still believe in our own immortality.  What a farce it all is!’

Then, affected to melancholy himself by the mournfulness of the twilight, and stirred by all the human suffering he beheld around him, he began to speak of his own torments.

’Look here, old man, I, whom you envy, perhaps—­yes, I, who am beginning to get on in the world, as middle-class people say—­I, who publish books and earn a little money—­well, I am being killed by it all.  I have often already told you this, but you don’t believe me, because, as you only turn out work with a deal of trouble and cannot bring yourself to public notice, happiness in your eyes could naturally consist in producing a great deal, in being seen, and praised or slated.  Well, get admitted to the next Salon, get into the thick of the battle, paint other pictures, and then tell me whether that suffices, and whether you are happy at last.  Listen; work has taken up the whole of my existence.  Little by little, it has robbed me of my mother, of my wife, of everything I love.  It is like a germ thrown into the cranium, which feeds on the brain, finds its way into the trunk and limbs, and gnaws up the whole of the body.  The moment I jump out of bed of a morning, work clutches hold of me, rivets me to my desk without leaving me time to get a breath of fresh air; then it pursues me at luncheon—­I audibly chew my sentences with my bread.  Next it accompanies me when I go out, comes back with me and dines off the same plate as myself; lies down with me on my pillow, so utterly pitiless that I am never able to set the book in hand on one side; indeed, its growth continues even in the depth of my sleep.  And nothing outside of it exists for me.  True, I go upstairs to embrace my mother, but in so absent-minded a way, that ten minutes after leaving her I ask myself whether I have really been to wish her good-morning.  My poor wife has no husband; I am not with her even when our hands touch.  Sometimes I have an acute feeling that I am making their lives very sad, and I feel very remorseful, for happiness is solely composed of kindness, frankness and gaiety in one’s home; but how can I escape from the claws of the monster?  I at once relapse into the somnambulism of my working hours, into the indifference and moroseness of my fixed idea.  If the pages I have written during the morning have been worked off all right, so much the better; if one of them has remained in distress, so much the worse.  The household will laugh or cry according to the whim of that all-devouring monster—­Work.